A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  “I don’t care if he’s the Queen’s own tutor,” the agent replied. “I can’t let this in.”

  The deck boy made a face. “How about the rest of his stuff?”

  The agent put the ivory chess set aside and went through Liu’s bag, examined the lining, smelled his toothpaste, gave a cursory glance at the chess books and videos and plastic chess set, and pronounced the bag fine.

  The line behind Liu was growing longer. There were several unpleasant remarks from the back.

  “We’re going to have to move this along,” the agent said.

  The deck boy nodded and looked at Liu. He pointed to himself. “Listen. I send to your brother.” He pointed at the ivory chess set, then made an arcing gesture with his hand to indicate mailing. He asked the agent, “You’ll keep it here until I come back?”

  “Safe and secure.”

  The deck boy made an OK sign to Liu and gently pushed him forward. “It will be fine. Let’s go.”

  Liu moved forward reluctantly. The deck boy wasn’t carrying any baggage and the agent passed him through quickly. Liu reached back longingly toward the ivory chess set.

  “It’s OK,” the young man assured Liu, moving him along.

  Liu’s passport was still in his hand. With gestures, the deck boy asked to see it. Liu handed it to him. The young man took out his cell phone. “See here?” he said. “I’m going to take your address—” he stopped. “Oh. It’s in Chinese. Right. Never mind. I can take a picture and—”

  Liu snatched back the passport as the young man went to take the picture.

  “No!” Liu said.

  “Hey, I was just trying to—”

  “Thank you,” Liu said, pointing ahead. “Man here.”

  It took a moment for the young man to understand. “Someone is meeting you? Oh. I assumed you were flying down.”

  “No. Friend.”

  “Great,” the deck boy said. “Then he—or she,” he winked, “can deal with it.”

  The young man clapped Liu on the shoulder and then left the small, impersonal shell of a Customs building. Liu waited until he was gone, then stepped into the morning sunlight. The smell of the sea was strong as the harbor winds wrapped around him.

  That could have been a disaster, Liu thought. It would not do to have a record of my fake passport. It would have been ironic after his strategy had worked so well. The inspecting agent had fallen for the distraction completely, stirring up trouble over a relatively harmless ivory chess set when the real threat was hidden inside seemingly innocent plastic chess pieces, which easily passed hand inspection by anyone who was preoccupied.

  That was one reason the team had selected Port Metro after months of dry-run passages along the west coast of the continent. The trips had shown Vancouver to be the most predictable in terms of security: nothing ever happened here so the routine was always the same. In Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and other U.S. ports, occasional efforts to smuggle drugs and guns—as well as use-it-or-lose-it federal anti-terrorist funds—had resulted in an ongoing FBI presence and random, intense security checks. There was also a rising animus between Americans and Chinese to consider. That was based on the resentment of how much American debt was held by Chinese banks.

  We are the new Muslims, Jintao had warned them, speaking of the rise in hate crimes that had come to the attention of the consulate. The cell did not want to risk a vendetta crackdown at a port or air terminal in the United States.

  Liu walked to the parking lot where a blue sedan was waiting for him curbside. There were four men inside. The mission did not require a team of that size except for something that must take place at the Peace Arch border crossing.

  Liu looked back at the harbor as the driver paid the parking fee and headed out the rolling gate. He smiled before settling back into his seat. The smile was partly relief that things had gone as planned, but also because of the irony of what had just transpired. Port Metro was also one of the most environmentally responsible maritime facilities in the Western Hemisphere. Liu could not help but wonder what the board of directors would think if they ever discovered what had just eluded the system and entered the country.

  ~ * ~

  5

  Suitland, Maryland

  At the start of her junior year at NYU, Dover Griffith was an education major. Her interest in teaching was an outgrowth of the dinnertime debates her father and her surviving grandfather had around the dinner table every Sunday in Whitefish, Montana. Her grandfather had served with the U.S. 2nd Battalion of the 119th Regiment during the Battle of the Bulge. Her father had served in Vietnam. In the fall of 1967 when the North Vietnamese shelled the U.S. Marine outpost Con Thien, her father was a spotter that helped to direct the air counterattack during Operation Neutralize.

  Each man had an identical view of war, that it was an unfortunate but necessary way to achieve peace. What they could not agree on was who started them. Her grandfather maintained that it was the military prodding the politicians to get them in the game, while her father believed it was all the work of politicians.

  “If they said the right words to one another, war would never be necessary,” he said.

  The debate went on for years, like war itself. Ideological ground was taken, surrendered, retaken. It changed with the seasons, was colored by world events, was supported by this history book or that, which the men had read and book-marked and brought to the table. It was fascinating but frustrating. Like religion, there seemed to be no absolute, undeniable truth. Dover wanted to learn more with a vague idea of becoming a teacher. She wanted to be, to a lake of youthful faces, what her father and grandfather were to her: “incoming,” as her grandfather called it with a laugh. An artillery barrage of ideas.

  Dover returned to school her junior year with a suitcase full of new clothes she and her mother had bought at the outlet stores in Clinton, New Jersey. But they hadn’t found any belts she liked, so she took a short subway ride downtown one morning to buy some at the Century 21 clothing store. The doors were locked when she arrived so she went across the street to Burger King to have coffee and read the Village Voice while she waited.

  She was just sitting down when American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. The impact rocked the floor, killed the chatter, and dropped a gray shroud over the sun. The initial, hollow bang— “like someone tossing a firecracker into an empty trash can,” as she later described it—was followed by an odd assortment of clunks, pings, grinding, and then cries.

  Still holding her coffee, she followed the other breakfast patrons outside. The impact zone was on the opposite side of the tower but they could see the smoke rolling skyward, saw the glitter of glass falling in the morning sun, heard shrieks as large shards of the glass façade struck asphalt, concrete, and pedestrians on the corner of Vesey and Church Streets. A man ran toward them with his hand across his face, his eyes wide, blood streaming down his chin onto the topknot of his tie; the rest of his face had been cleanly severed. It appeared as if the man’s nose had been slashed away.

  Dover looked around, saw a newsstand on the corner of Liberty Street, and bought his entire supply of five disposable cameras. She took pictures of people. She stopped when a second, more ferocious explosion followed a roaring directly overhead, as United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the south tower. Dover backed over to Zuccotti Park until she could see the shattered face of the skyscraper. She did not turn her camera up to the ragged scar, to the people standing on jagged girders, to those who could no longer endure the heat and choking black cloud. The sound, the physical impact, the impossibility of the images rolling out in a kind of slow motion had paralyzed her torso. Later, when she had the pictures developed, she saw that she had continued to snap photographs—of her feet, of papers landing on the street, of other people’s legs—everything below knee-level.

  She continued to move backward through the park and reached Broadway, where police officers were
starting to block streets, to push people to the east. Dover moved with them, hearing snippets of people who were talking on cell phones—she did not yet own one—and crackling sounds from radios as she passed police officers and firefighters. She reached the East River, where there were herds of business people incongruously mingled with joggers and merchants from the Fulton Fish Market. The burning towers were visible over the tops of the low-lying structures. The Brooklyn Bridge was behind her.

  And then the north tower fell. The moan from the mass of people was a sound of such pain as she hoped never to hear again. But it brought her back to life. She still had three unused cameras. She resumed taking pictures of faces and the shared horror and the longing to be in contact with their neighbors. She did not see anyone praying, which she thought was strange. Then she realized the conflict: who could believe in God at a moment like this? That would come later, when people sought meaning in the incomprehensible.

  I need to be a part of that process, she remembered thinking then. That was the moment she turned from the idea of educating a classroom to educating the human race.

  With speed born of a strong, sudden epiphany, she literally ran the two miles back to NYU. Before the university offices shut down so out-of-town employees could get home, she gathered up the papers needed to change her major. Then she found a pay phone and called home. Her mother was tearful and relieved to hear from her.

  Her father said quietly, gravely, “Now three generations of Griffiths have been to war.”

  That was a fact. Her legs gave out as she stood at the pay phone on University Place. She fell to her knees, crying hysterically, and had to be helped to her dorm room by an off-duty campus security guard.

  Dover had not regarded the job at the ONI as a logical fit with her experiences on September 11, 2001. It made sense on a certain level: evil men had attacked the nation and she was helping to hunt for other evil men. But it did not satisfy her soul the way taking those photographs had or writing about the experience for her hometown newspaper. The power of journalism was made clear and poignant by the dozens of belts that were sent to her mother’s house with notes thanking Dover for her front-page article. She missed that connection with readers, and in a strange way it had given her conversation with Jack Hatfield an unexpected misting of melancholy: she had to imagine that he missed it, too, more acutely than she had. Protecting a San Francisco landmark and thousands of lives as he had saved his city from Islamic terrorists was not the same thing as digging into minds and sparring with words and testing your belief system against that of another. She saw how lost her father was when her grandfather died. It wasn’t just the end of making memories. It was the end of a certain, very personal kind of sharing. The same kind a passionate man like Jack Hatfield developed with his listeners.

  Dover was not surprised when she received a phone call from administration.

  So Hawke is protected, she thought. Someone inside the government was aware she was investigating and wanted her stopped.

  What surprised her was that she was told to report immediately to Commander Carrie Morgan, Protocol Administrator. She had never met the woman, who was several leaps above the officer she reported to in her chain of command. Either she had hit the research jackpot or stepped in “deep doo-doo,” as her mother put it.

  Dover hurried to the ground floor executive wing, which she had never had cause to visit. She followed the signs, found room 112, and did not have to wait. Her gut burned with anticipation. Not the good kind, like the night before Christmas, but the principal’s office kind. As she walked through the inner door she knew this was going to be a dressing-down. She had seen naval personnel relaxed and she had seen naval personnel in engagement mode. Sitting behind her gunmetal desk, surrounded by three walls of proud citations and photographs with senators, vice presidents, and one president, the fifty-something commander was looking at a brass-framed iPad, a secure unit made especially for the military.

  Dover was not invited to sit. She stood in a civilian imitation of “at ease”—her hands behind her back, her spine as straight as nerves would allow, her lips pressed together.

  “We’re putting you on an open-ended unpaid furlough,” Commander Morgan said, still scanning the tablet.

  “Wow.”

  The commander looked up, her eyebrows arched. “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s—I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s Guantanamo-Bay-speak for ‘You’re fired.’ And for what? For doing my job? For trying to find out if—”

  “Stop!” Commander Morgan said.

  Dover’s mouth clapped shut. That was her dad talking, Master Sergeant Griffith. Her response was reflexive.

  The officer set the tablet aside and folded her hands. It was a classic, formal, military, how-dare-you posture. “You have been in contact, on ONI time, on ONI premises, on ONI business, with a hostile source. As per your employment contract, Human Resources will review the matter with your superiors to determine the correct course of action. However, your file will be amended to include that last comment, which I find personally repugnant.”

  “Wait—what?” Dover said. She was still working on the first part of the commander’s statement. “What ‘hostile’—?” She was utterly confused.

  “Jack Hatfield,” the commander said.

  Dover smirked. She couldn’t help herself. “Do you mean that calling a journalist who has limited media access is more of a threat than finding out if a billionaire international industrialist is playing on an enemy team—a tycoon who has the resources to hire an army to topple a third world government or buy an election?”

  “Your investigation of Richard Hawke is not the matter on the table,” Commander Morgan said.

  “Ma’am, it should be!” Dover said.

  “If taken up at all, the question will be dealt with by appropriate staff in appropriate departments at appropriate levels,” the commander said. Her gaze was fixed on Dover. “You know the protocol for contact with outside sources. You check to see if they are on a no-go list before you send an e-mail, place a call, or have a drink with them.”

  “Right, but I never thought a guy who saved a city would be on that list!”

  “Saved by vigilante, unilateral action, the way he does everything,” the commander replied, rapping a knuckle on her tablet. “Jack Hatfield is an inflammatory, anti-authority voice whose help we do not solicit and whose favor we do not nurture.”

  “Ma’am, if you’d heard the call, you’d know I said some of those same things to Mr. Hatfield—” “We did not listen to what you had to say, nor is the tone of your contact the issue.”

  “I understand, but I’m only trying to explain the reason for my call—and that reason is important—”

  “We’re finished here, Ms. Griffith. You will be contacted within a week as to the final disposition of this matter.”

  “Commander, please let me finish. I’m worried that Hawke technology may have taken out our chopper and an FBI vehicle.”

  Commander Morgan regarded the young woman flatly. “Do you have evidence to support your claim?”

  “Well, no. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. Our files are bare. I contacted Hatfield to see if he had specific information about Squarebeam technology interfering with electronic systems.”

  “Did he?”

  “He did not,” Dover admitted. “He was going to check with FBI contacts.”

  “Did he do so?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Dover said—though she knew she was doomed. “They—they said they were going to look into it.”

  “You’re aware that we have FBI contacts,” Commander Morgan said. “Pretty good ones, in fact. Director Steve Russell. You’ve heard of him?”

  “I have.”

  “You grasped, to some degree, that Mr. Hawke is a person of considerable influence in both governmental and military circles. One who might not
appreciate being investigated.”

  “I did.”

  “You knew something of Mr. Hatfield’s reputation as a loose cannon who has a vendetta against people like Richard Hawke and Lawrence Soren.”

  “Ma’am, I wouldn’t put them quite in the same category—”

  “And that Mr. Hatfield has been banned from travel in Great Britain, one of our closest allied nations, whose Royal Navy Service Police provide us with a substantial flow of useful data.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet in light of all that, it did not occur to you that contacting Hatfield might be reckless and irresponsible, given the fact that your search is not only largely outside your job description but involves a man who has security clearance far in excess of your own.”