Act of War

by Dale Brown

  “C’mon, Special Agent DeLaine, you’re in the FBI, remember?” Jason said. “Use your incredible powers of deductive reasoning, logic, and investigation. All you have to do is put this guy within smelling range of Task Force TALON, and we’ll take him down—hard.”

  San Francisco, California

  Early the next day

  Anyone who commuted regularly to the city of San Francisco knew that if you needed to be in the office by 8 A.M. you had better be actually on the Golden Gate Bridge from the north or on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge from the east, and actually pointed at the city itself, by 7 A.M., or you weren’t going to make it on time. But folks who hadn’t heard about the even more intense security setup on all three approaches to the City by the Bay would still never make it on time even if they allowed the full hour to cross the bridges.

  Army National Guard Specialist Nick Howard walked between two lanes of traffic, not really fearing being struck by oncoming traffic because he was walking far faster than the traffic itself was moving. He was in full combat gear with body armor over his battle dress uniform, Kevlar gloves, and helmet. Clipped onto his body armor was his usual light-patrol field equipment, including radio, flashlight, ammo pouches for his M-16 rifle and Beretta M9 pistol, CamelBak water bottle, and first-aid kit. He also carried some specialized law-enforcement-style equipment such as plastic handcuffs, a can of pepper spray, cellular phone (his own, not government issued), and notepad and pencils.

  The one thing he wished he had was a gas mask to help protect him against the carbon monoxide automobile exhaust fumes he had been sucking on for the past two hours while out here on patrol.

  Howard looked at the faces behind all those windshields and saw nothing but anger and resentment. He couldn’t blame them too much, but this was a national emergency. In civilian life Specialist Howard was a warehouse foreman in Berkeley, formerly a truck driver himself, and he knew that time spent idling was completely wasted. On the other hand, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was certainly a major target for any terrorist. It would not only cripple San Francisco, but jam up most of the cities and freeways in all of Northern California. Certainly that was worth a little patience here.

  “Senegal One to Senegal,” his command radio squawked. “Be advised, CHP advises the wait lines to cross the tollbooths are exceeding ninety minutes, and they’re recommending we speed up inspections. Go to one every twelve trucks. Advise on any other suspicious vehicles. Senegal One out.”

  Howard sent a short “Echo Eight” in response. He knew that had to happen. Their initial instructions that morning were to inspect every fifth multiaxle vehicle or any vehicle that looked suspicious—i.e., ridden in by anyone looking as if they were wearing military gear, who looked nervous, or any vehicle that showed any sign of unusual activity, such as grossly overweight, rocking unsteadily as if lots of persons were moving around inside, or any vehicle suddenly changing lanes to avoid scrutiny. The inspections nabbed several suspicious vehicles, such as a small U-Haul moving truck with at least twenty Hispanic men and women inside the cargo compartment, probably undocumented workers heading off to work. But mostly it only nabbed rolling eyeballs, shaking heads, and a few epithets muttered behind Howard’s back.

  It took a very, very long time to search those vehicles, and the parameters had to change quickly or else they were going to be there all day. It went from one every five vehicles to one every seven and currently one every twelve; now they had to just “report” suspicious vehicles, not search them. And the commute had been going on only for two hours, with at least two more hours to go—it would only get worse. Howard believed they’d have to go to at least one inspection every twenty trucks to get through this mess quickly enough.

  Of course, he thought, these folks could help themselves by carpooling. At least 90 percent of the private vehicles in this huge traffic jam were driver-only. Commuters too stupid to use BART or carpool deserved to sit in line like this.

  The traffic inched forward less than a car-length. The ninety minutes his ops officer mentioned was ninety minutes to go two stinking kilometers—God, getting caught in this mess would drive him absolutely bonkers, as he was sure it was doing to most of the drivers trapped here. The cars he was walking near had already cleared the tollbooths, which made most drivers think that the congestion was over and it was clear sailing from here on out. No such luck.

  Time to do another inspection. Although he had lost count of how many trucks it had been since he last did an inspection, the National Guard specialist eyed his next target: a five-ton plain white local delivery truck, with two guys in the cab, that had just pulled out of the toll plaza and was in the section of the bridge on-ramp where it started to narrow from twelve lanes to four. He liked to pick the trucks without logos or advertisements on them, because that meant the drivers were usually nonunion, and Howard was a die-hard third-generation Teamster. As he approached the truck it seemed to him that the men inside were looking a little nervous—and then he saw one of them, the passenger, reaching down under his seat for something. He was desperately trying to remain upright, not bending over but staying upright, but he was definitely trying to get his hands on…

  “Hey, bub,” he heard a gruff voice beside him yell. The sudden sound startled him, and he jumped. The driver of the red Ford compact car, about three cars ahead of the white truck, seemed to take some delight in seeing the soldier jump like that. “Hey, what’s the problem here?” he asked. “I haven’t moved one freakin’ foot in ten minutes!”

  “Security inspections, sir,” Howard said, keeping his eyes on the men in the white panel truck. Keeping his right hand on the hand grip of his M-16 rifle, he reached up to key the mike button on his headset transceiver. “Senegal, Echo Eight…”

  “Hey, soldier, I’m askin’ you a question,” the driver of the red Ford shouted. “I’m gonna be fuckin’ late for work if we don’t get movin’ here, and I’ve been sittin’ here for thirty minutes already!”

  “Senegal Echo Eight, Senegal, go,” came the reply.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Howard said to the irate driver. “Senegal One, be advised, I’ve got sierra-alpha, two white males in a white GMC five-ton panel truck, license number…”

  “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!” the driver of the Ford shouted. “I paid my damned ten bucks, and I need to get goin’! Why are you on this side of the tollbooths anyway? This is a pretty stupid place to be!”

  “Sir, please lower your voice,” Howard said. “I’ll get to you in a minute. Thank you.” Howard took a few more steps toward the truck. The passenger was scrunched way down in his seat, with only his head and shoulders visible now; the driver was making nervous glances down at the floor between their seats. He keyed the mike again: “Senegal One, Echo Eight, request backup on my pos.” The code phrase “sierra-alpha” meant “suspicious activity” in their parlance, and the phrase certainly fit in this case. He could practically see the sweat pouring out of the guy in that truck.

  “Echo Eight, Senegal, say license plate number for that vehicle.”

  “Senegal One, Echo Eight, target vehicle has California plates, one-six-delta…”

  Suddenly he heard, “Fuck you, asshole!” and he felt a sudden burning sensation on the back of his neck. Howard reached up with his left hand as the burning intensified and started creeping down his back. He looked at his gloved hand and found some sort of dark liquid…coffee! The driver of that red Ford just threw coffee on him!

  Something exploded in Howard’s brain. Without thinking, he whirled and raised his rifle, pointing it at the driver. “You! Let me see your hands!” he shouted.

  “Don’t point that thing at me, asshole!” the driver shouted. “Back off!”

  “I said let me see your hands, now!”

  “Fuck you! You can’t do anything to me!”

  A fuse blew in Howard’s head. He raised the muzzle of his rifle above the roof of the red Ford, flicked the selector switch on his M-16 from Saf
e to Single with his thumb, and fired one round. The driver—and every other driver within twenty meters—jerked in surprise. “One last warning: let me see your hands!”

  “Echo Eight, Echo Eight, this is Senegal One! What’s going on? Report!”

  “Jee-sus!” the driver said. He immediately stuck both hands out the driver’s window of his car, a stainless steel Porsche coffee mug still in his left hand.

  “Senegal One, Echo Eight, request immediate assistance!” Howard radioed.

  But the driver of the red Ford had stopped paying attention to what he was doing when the gunshot rang out, and his car crept forward as he unconsciously took his foot off the brake and hit the car ahead of him. Startled again, Howard lowered the smoking muzzle of his weapon back down to the driver. “Don’t you move!” he shouted, his eyes bugging in surprise. “Stop!” But the red Ford rolled about two meters forward and hit the car in front of him.

  The sudden impact made the stunned driver drop his coffee mug, and it made a loud clattering sound when it hit the pavement. The driver unconsciously leaned out of the car window as if he was going to try to catch the mug in mid-air, arms flailing. Already hot-wired for extreme danger, Howard reacted…by pulling the trigger of his M-16 three times. The driver’s head exploded into a cloud of bloody gore, and the corpse was tossed into the empty passenger side of the car. Howard immediately raised the muzzle and flicked the selector switch to Safe, but of course there was no way to recall the bullets. Pandemonium immediately erupted. Car alarms and horns blared; men and women screamed and started leaving their cars in droves, running in all directions; more cars hit each other as panicked drivers fled, creating even more confusion.

  In the white panel truck not far away, the two men in the cab nearly jumped right out of their seats, watching in horror as the soldier opened fire on the civilian. “Nu ni mudi!” the passenger swore in Russian. “He just shot that guy!” He looked around at the almost instantaneous confusion. “Shit, everybody’s panicking! People are getting out and running across the damned freeway!”

  The driver of the white panel truck looked over and saw something even more horrible—several more soldiers running toward them, rifles at the ready. He made an instant decision. He picked up his walkie-talkie and keyed the mike button: “All units, this is Charlie, baleet zheeyot, repeat, ‘stomachache,’ ‘stomachache.’ Out.” He put the truck in Park, pulled a pistol from under his jacket, hid it in his front pocket, and got out of the truck. The passenger’s face was blank with surprise when he heard the order, but after a moment’s hesitation he too got out, his hands inside his coat pocket.

  Hundreds of frightened people were running hysterically off the Bay Bridge toward the tollbooths—some so scared that they were throwing themselves over the side and plummeting several stories to the pavement below. The police were reacting quickly. “Stay in your vehicles!” they shouted from public-address loudspeakers. “Do not panic! There is no danger! Stay in your vehicles!” But after 9/11, when the rumor that loudspeakers in the World Trade Center towers were telling workers not to panic and to go back to work just before the towers collapsed, nobody listened—in fact, it only seemed to intensify the panic.

  The two Russians walked quickly amid the crowds, walking quickly enough to not get trampled but not too quickly so as to draw attention to themselves. CalTrans officers were emerging from the toll plaza, arms upraised, urging folks to go back to their vehicles so they could be moved. As hard as they tried to avoid them, one CalTrans worker appeared in front of the lead Russian. “Sir, where the hell do you think you’re goin’?” the hefty woman shouted. “Go back to your vehicle, right now! You can’t leave your…”

  “Yop tvayu mat!” the Russian said. He pulled his pistol from his pocket, keeping it low and as out of sight as possible, and put two bullets into the woman from less than a meter away. The new gunshots didn’t just create a new wave of panic—they created a virtual human stampede. Terrified drivers ran in every direction, trampling anyone who was unlucky enough to be trying to head in the opposite direction.

  The two Russians followed the surging human tidal wave past the toll plaza, steering themselves toward the north side of the on-ramp where a new east span of the Bay Bridge was under construction. Stunned construction workers scrambled onto machinery and trucks as the mass of humanity surged closer. The Russians climbed atop an immense dump truck at the base of a concrete support structure. Moments later, several construction workers joined them. “What happened?” one of them asked.

  “We heard gunshots,” one of the Russians replied in a pretty good American accent. “When we saw everyone else running, we ran too.”

  “Shit, man, this is the biggest panic I’ve seen since the eighty-nine earthquake,” another worker said. “What did you see?”

  “A huge explosion,” the Russian replied. “A huge fireball, as big as those suspension towers.”

  “What?” the worker asked. “What are you talking about? I didn’t see no explosion.”

  “Oh. Uyobyvat! Are you kidding!” And at that, he pulled out a small cell phone, hit a speed-dial button, then pressed the green Send key—and the white panel truck, loaded with almost two thousand kilos of high explosives, detonated in a massive fireball. The entire easternmost section of the Bay Bridge blew apart, sending hundreds of vehicles flying through the air and crashing down to the edge of San Francisco Bay. The toll plaza and hundreds more cars were swallowed up by the fireball, with thousands of liters of gasoline adding their fury to the tremendous blast.

  But that was not the last explosion to occur on the Bay area bridges that morning.

  When the terrorists’ emergency call went out, a second terrorist team already caught in heavy traffic on the westbound span of the bridge west of Yerba Buena Island in a large Chevy panel van also exited their vehicle, ran through traffic toward San Francisco, and detonated the explosives by remote control when they saw police officers up ahead in their path. The terrorists had a brief firefight with police before both terrorists were killed—but not before another section of the Bay Bridge, this time high above San Francisco Bay, collapsed. Another explosion farther east on the eastbound deck of the bridge also created havoc as several dozen vehicles plunged hundreds of feet into the Bay through the decimated bridge.

  The Golden Gate Bridge to the northwest was not spared. Another truck filled with explosives detonated in the northbound lane several meters from the toll plaza, and a second truck bomb exploded almost exactly at mid-span in the southbound lanes. The suspension bridge twisted wildly, several of the cables holding the span snapped, and huge chunks of the roadway fell into the straits, but the bridge somehow held.

  Market Street in the heart of San Francisco came under attack moments later. Huge explosions ripped just two blocks from theU.S. Mint, collapsing part of an old hotel onto the busy street, and another explosion on Market Street east of the U.S. Mint ruptured a natural gas line, sending a column of fire into the early-morning sky. Pedestrians scattered, pushing and shoving others in a frenzied attempt to get off the street before another explosion occurred.

  Through clouds of smoke wafting in all directions, six Humvees and two large sports-utility vehicles made their way through the debris and craters in the street. Each Humvee had a soldier in regular-looking green camouflage fatigues in the gunner’s turret, manning a fifty-caliber machine gun. Two Humvees blocked the intersections of Drumm, California, and Market Streets, deploying two terrorists from each vehicle. The terrorists hid small remote-control explosive devices in trash containers or under parked vehicles, then took up defensive positions on opposite street corners. The four remaining Humvee and the SUVs continued down Drumm Street to a high-rise just west of Justin Herman Plaza, overlooking the San Francisco Ferry Building and World Trade Center on the waterfront.

  “Inner security units, report,” Pavel Khalimov ordered on his secure FM transceiver. One by one, each Humvee and dismounted reconnaissance commando reported in. “Very
good. Keep your eyes open and report any movement. Remember you are U.S. soldiers—tell anyone who approaches, including police, that you are army soldiers and order them away from the area. That should dissuade most of them. Engage only if they’re stupid enough to stay. Strike team one, proceed with insertion.”

  One Humvee and two SUVs proceeded right up to the front of the high-rise building—the Harold Chester Kingman Building, world headquarters of TransGlobal Energy. Two soldiers got out of the vehicle, retrieved TOW antitank missiles, aimed, and opened fire on the front doors of the building. While one soldier provided cover, the second carried two backpack-like satchel charges inside. Gunshots rang out, but otherwise the high-rise was quiet for several moments; then, the two terrorists ran back outside. Moments later the ground shook and thick clouds of smoke blew out the front of the building as the two high-explosive charges detonated.

  “Elevators and main stairways eliminated,” came the report. The terrorists returned to the Humvee to retrieve several remote-control explosive devices, and then planted them around the outside of the building. Meanwhile, the two SUVs drove through the shattered front entryway and into the immense lobby of the Kingman Building.

  “Security two, patrol cars coming,” one terrorist reported on the FM frequency. Seconds later a loud explosion erupted east of their position as the terrorist detonated one of his remote-control roadside bombs, completely obliterating one San Francisco Police Department patrol car and overturning a second.

  “Security Eight, two patrol cars on Market near Beale,” another terrorist reported. “Looks like they’re setting up a perimeter.”

  “Security Ten, another one going up on California near Davis,” another reported. They heard several gunshots, then a loud explosion. “Responders down, huyisos,” the terrorist radioed moments later. “Fucker tried to take a shot at me! More patrol cars setting up on California out to Frost Street now.”