Dover followed his thoughts. “The globalization of his interests? The fact that he sold weapons to China that could be used against us?”
“That’s just a part of it,” Jack said. “I believe him when he says he didn’t expect the EMP to be used. No, the game changer is that an important threshold has been reached. The Chinese have achieved a level of technological advancement that has caused us to target their satellites and for them to retaliate, decisively, with wide-scale carnage on the ground. The China-America dynamic is no longer one of forbearance or diplomatic finger-wagging or sanctions the way it is with other wacko regimes like North Korea and Iran. Beijing and Washington are in a slow-motion, low-impact shooting war.”
“You really think it’s gone that far?”
“Yes, and I think it’s going to get ratcheted up,” Jack said.
“That much I got. Did you ever hear of that space plane he was talking about?”
Jack nodded. “It turned up when I was preparing a show, ‘NASA After Obama.’ Roger Boisjoly was going to be a guest, the whistleblower who’d been arguing for NASA to be shut down ever since the Challenger exploded. It would have been a great show but then the network yanked the plug on Truth Tellers. Anyway, during our research Boisjoly made a suggestion, we followed up on it and found the predecessor of the space plane, the X-37B. It was built by Boeing Phantom Works, basically a robotic space shuttle about thirty feet long.”
Dover shook her head. “That’s the new China for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a time when they would have struck back with a kind of austere patience. They would have backed an enemy regime, the way they did in Vietnam—perhaps built up Al Qaeda in Yemen and applied pressure on us that way. Beijing doesn’t have the time for that now. They have set grand goals in commerce, in science. They must meet them quickly and at any cost.”
“Is it a question of face?” Jack asked.
“Very much so,” Dover said. “They have reached a level of expectation both domestically and internationally that will not tolerate standstill and certainly not reversal.
“There’s something strange about all this,” Dover continued. “I don’t mean about the politics but about the zen of it. I’m looking out at the setting sun, at that burning candlewick on the ocean horizon, and I’m thinking how alive it seems because of the impermanence of everything. What happened outside the air force base, what Doc is concerned about, everything with Hawke—it makes the beauty of the sunset, of this moment, seem much more special.”
Jack understood that intellectually. But he was too angry at most of the Asian continent right now to share her carpe diem joy.
They reached the wharf precisely at seven. Sea Wrighter was waiting. Its big Caterpillar diesels were already warm for the trip.
“It’s like I never left home,” Jack said as he and Dover came aboard. “Where’s Eddie?”
“Shower stall,” Doc said.
It was dark but the winds were at their calmest as Doc steered them out into the Bay, the three of them clustered on the bridge. Eddie came topside and hugged their ankles.
“Something’s sour out there,” Doc said. He explained what he had seen while Jack and Dover pulled on Berkeley sweatshirts he had brought. Abe had given three of them to Doc as a gag Christmas present one year. Doc wasn’t wearing his; he had cut it into a little jacket for Eddie.
Jack agreed that the disappearance of Abe’s boat merited investigation. Dover wasn’t clear why Doc hadn’t called the Coast Guard.
“I didn’t see any trace of the boat or Abe over twenty-four miles of ocean,” Doc said, handing the helm over to Jack. “There was no distress signal. That would have generated a search and the marina would have known about it. That tells me he probably went down, and went down fast.
If he’d gone aground on the islands, there would be some trace of the boat—the hull or at least wreckage. There’s nada. Except someone hiding out. And I don’t think it’s Abe. He would have heard my plane.”
“So what do you think?” Dover asked.
“I don’t know,” Doc said. “That’s why we’re going out there.”
Doc was old school. When he went into the field on a mission he always had paper maps and charts with him. He kept GPS devices as a backup but he preferred to operate with a document in his hands lit by a penlight in his teeth.
He had spent the afternoon picking up a few supplies and studying nautical charts of the Farallons, and he mapped a course that would have them moving against the wind. As he explained to Dover, if there was someone out there he wanted the sound of the wind rushing against them rather than with them.
“Are we going into Fisherman’s Cove?” Jack asked Doc.
“No, what I saw was on Noonday Island.”
“Somebody really didn’t want to be found.”
“Exactly. There’s a tiny temporary beach on Noonday right now,” Doc said. “You’re going to keep the Sea Wrighter about a mile off the island, lights out, while I go in on the Novurania.” Jack had added a twelve-foot Novurania launch to the Sea Wrighter a few years ago, outfitted with a 40 HP Yamaha motor.
“While we go in on the Novurania,” Jack corrected him. Doc eyed him, but what he saw there kept him from contradicting. Jack turned to Dover. “Will you be all right minding the Sea Wrighter while we’re gone?”
“As long as I’ve got Eddie,” she smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve steered a few boats around the Chesapeake.”
“The water’s a hell of a lot rougher around the Farallons,” Doc said. “If you can’t stay in one place, keep the throttle forward, 1,000 RPMs, and just circle. And watch the radar so you don’t hit anything.”
“I’ll be all right,” Dover said, “but it’s sweet of you to worry about me.”
Jack patted the boat. “She doesn’t understand,” he said to the Sea Wrighter. He grinned at Dover and she winked at him.
Doc handed them two pairs of night-vision glasses, a third for himself.
“Are we going to be commandos, too?” Dover asked jokingly.
“Not unless you have to be,” Jack said. “If somebody gets past Doc and me, you’ll need to know how to use these.” He didn’t mention that if somebody got past Doc and Jack, Dover didn’t stand much of a chance. He didn’t have to. They kept up the pretense. “These binoculars can be disorienting if you’re a novice.”
“When and where did you learn?” she asked.
He answered, “I once spied on my ex. Long story.”
It was a commercially available model, not military, which was the only kind Doc wanted to be caught with abroad. Soldiers might not believe he was owl-watching with these, but he might buy himself a few minutes to get away while they called their base for instructions. In many countries, mercs were shot on sight.
The unit was a pair of binoculars with a large, cyclopean infrared generator in the top, center.
“There are five AA batteries in back. You just slide this switch—” Jack showed her the plastic tab on the side “—and nothing happens ... unless you’re looking through them.”
Jack pointed her away from the shore so the lights of the city didn’t blind her. She switched them on.
“It’s surreal,” she said, gazing across the ocean waves. “Like the surface of another planet.”
Jack made no comment. There were times he felt that way about everything outside of San Francisco. Even Carmel had seemed strangely foreign, made unfamiliar by the hard, unpleasant truths he’d been contemplating there and back.
Dover was about to say something but Jack turned her to look at the Golden Gate Bridge. She fell silent. Jack put on his own binoculars and the world turned into a green nebula. The towers of the bridge he loved, the bridge he had saved, looked like cuts of old camera film in a haze of phosphorescence. Remember, he thought. Remember. He was overwhelmed by emotion for his city, his home. The sight was both beautiful and—because of all his ass
ociations with that color of green, courtesy of Iraq—a threat.
~ * ~
About five miles past the bridge, the lights of San Francisco disappeared. The Sea Wrighter was now in a black ocean, or green for Dover, who was still wearing her night-vision binoculars. The big Grand Banks yacht was as steady as a locomotive. Her deep keel and Naiad stabilizers kept her tracking without much roll. About an hour later they reached the islands.
Doc had gone wide to bring the yacht in so they were blocked from moonlight. With black ink he marked on a shoreline chart the point where he had seen the tarp and where he felt it was best to make landfall with the dinghy. There were two other marks, one in red, one in green.
“There’s about five hundred feet of rock that will be slippery with sea water and guano,” he said. “Slip on the galoshes I brought,” he said, pointing to a locker. “You’ll need them.”
“What’s the drill?” Jack asked as they pulled them on.
“Three minutes after I go ashore you steer the launch here,” he pointed to the green mark.
“What if he’s armed?” Dover asked.
“I will already be here,” he pointed at the red mark. “He shows himself, I take him.”
Jack studied the shoreline chart as Doc and Dover maneuvered the launch into the water. Dover noticed the Walther P99 semiautomatic in Doc’s belt holster on his right and the drop point hunting knife in a sheath on his left side. He winked at her as he took a length of nylon rope from a locker and wound it around his arm. Dover grinned.
“We have a saying in the Spec Ops community,” he told her. “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.”
Eddie knew when Jack was about to climb into the launch. The little guy had read his people and knew something serious was going on so he didn’t protest, just licked Jack’s hand. Dover gave the men a thumbs-up, but Jack saw how tightly she was hugging herself; he knew she wasn’t that cold. He gave her a big smile and she visibly relaxed. Then he climbed aboard the launch.
“Remember,” Jack said to Dover, “if we don’t return within two hours, turn her east and head toward the Bridge. You can call the Coast Guard on Channel 16 with a ‘Mayday’ and they’ll come get you in.”
It was a choppy ride around to the target side of the island. The throaty throb of the yacht’s big diesels drowned out any noise from the launch for quite a distance, and even away from the boat the Yamaha motor was beautifully quiet. But the slap of the waves sounded like ka-chunks, heavy as footsteps in a horror movie. Jack cut the engine as they neared the shore. There were no seals here and it was as desolate a spot as one could find in the Farallons. Slipping on his night-vision glasses, Doc jumped out when they were still a few feet away. He landed panther-like on a small, flat rock and hurried inland. Jack steered away and headed for his own target. He was there in just under three minutes. Sometimes Doc’s sense of time and space bordered on the supernatural.
Jack hooked his night-vision binoculars around his neck, stopped the inflatable boat, grabbed a flashlight, and went ashore. Doc had assigned him to a short stretch of what passed for beach, five yards of granite that sloped gently toward the sea. The smell of the seals thrust into his senses but his eyes were on the surrounding slope, watching for any sign of movement.
Then he saw it. A dark shape in motion, fifteen feet up.
It fascinated Jack how everything was relative. San Francisco seemed windy until you were twenty-five miles out into the ocean. The old fish market used to smell until you came to a place like this. And the sky appeared very dark until something darker moved against it. Only one figure, and it wasn’t Doc because Doc would never have let Jack see him.
The fact that that wasn’t Doc meant that whoever was up there would soon be down here. It was all a question of how he’d be coming. Either he was going to investigate the launch or—
The figure fell—sort of. He descended a yard to Jack’s left, gagging into his balaclava mask, clawing at a length of rope around his throat. There had been no drop so his neck hadn’t snapped. Doc must have noosed him from behind, kicked his legs from under him, and lowered him over the side.
As soon as the man touched down, Jack went over and punched him in the face. Then again. Choked and dazed, the man fell in a heap.
“We good?” Doc shouted from above.
“We’re good,” Jack answered.
Doc let the other end of the rope drop. Jack turned the flashlight on. He flipped the man on his belly, checked the man for weapons, found none. Then he picked up the other end of the rope. Without removing the noose, Jack tied the man’s hands behind him—tightly, so there was still a tugging pressure on his throat. Then he removed the mask.
“Why am I not surprised?” he said as he looked down.
The man was Asian. His eyes were narrow and his mouth was taut as he struggled to breathe.
Doc joined him, following a ridge that let him off in a pile of rocks to the west. He was holding his night-vision glasses in one hand and a Remington 700 tactical rifle with a night-vision scope in the other.
“Guess what he planned to do,” Doc said. “I just took a quick run through his tent. He’s got rations, a radio, and other electronics. He’s also got a lunch box full of C-4.”
“Another Chinese,” Jack said. “Our girl talks his lingo.”
Fifteen minutes later they threw the man on the deck of the Sea Wrighter.
“Oh, honey, you brought home a guest!” Dover grinned. “You should have warned me.”
“No friend of mine, honey,” Jack said. “Care to do a little interpreting?” Dover nodded. “Ask him if he’s used the C-4 on any boats in the last twenty-four hours,” Jack said.
Dover look shocked but just turned and spoke to the man. He didn’t answer. Doc dragged the man to the edge of the boat. Keeping the man half on the boat, he kicked the man’s legs out over the edge, took out his knife, and ran it across one of his calves.
“Tell him that any shark within a quarter mile will be having dinner if he doesn’t talk,” Doc said.
The man didn’t need a translation. He started chattering.
“He says he sank a boat on standing orders from his group leader,” Dover said.
“What is the group’s mission?” Jack asked.
Dover asked.
“He says he doesn’t know,” she told them. “He says he is here to arrange a rendezvous.”
“With whom?” Jack asked.
There was motion in the water less than two hundred yards away, and a fin. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a shark could take a leap and catch a leg. The man realized that and talked faster.
“He says he was supposed to coordinate a top-secret emergency departure of a contingent of fifteen people from this spot.”
“Names?”
“He’s just getting to that,” Dover said. “He swears he doesn’t know any names. Only code names. And a company name.”
“What company?”
“Eastern Rim Construction,” she said. “He heard it mentioned. It sounds like a front to me. And he begs you, please, to pull him from the water.”
Doc yanked him up. A few moments later a shark swam by, snapping at blood that had dripped into the waves.
“They’re brave in the collective sense,” Jack said. “Not so spunky flying—or dying— solo.”
Doc raised the rifle and held it to the man’s head. He screamed and gagged simultaneously. Dover gasped and half-turned.
“Find out what he did to Abe,” Doc said.
Dover asked. She moaned as she listened.
“What?” Jack asked.
“He said he found something—he couldn’t let the man leave. He shot him and he went in the water.”
“Eaten?” Jack asked.
She nodded.
“The boat?”
“Sunk with explosives. About fifty yards to the east of here.”
Their pri
soner was writhing, crying, trying to bend his hands in a direction they wouldn’t go to release the pressure on his windpipe. Doc stood where he was, the gun barrel pressed to the man’s skull.
“He still may be able to tell us things,” Jack said.
“I’ll talk to him on the way back,” Dover said. “He may be able to identify other members in his group, or testify against them in a trial.”
Doc remained there a heartbeat longer, then fired into the sea at the shark.
“That’s for Abe, you dead-eyed SOB,” he said as he shouldered the rifle.
A Time for War Page 30
