A Time for War (16 page)

The second search was for structural integrity, specifically looking for rooms in the remains of the clinic that were safe to send team members into. To conduct this search, one of the Eastern Rim workers was using his laptop to maneuver a robotic crawler through the half-collapsed shell of the clinic. The crawler had been purchased with Department of Emergency Management funds and was usually used after earthquakes. It was the size of a red wagon and had four wheels, as well as a 360-degree omnidirectional radar system that would pick up hidden structural flaws.

That's what the crawler and its human handler should have been searching for. In actuality, the operator was using the crawler's video and radar images not to look up or around the rooms of the clinic, but to look down. He was studying the floor for something that blueprints of the clinic had revealed.

He was searching for a section of the building that would be the key to the next phase of the cell's operation.

Sausalito, California

“It's not only freakin' crazy, it's disgusting, man. You're what Nixon was to Cambodia. You're creating the carbon footprint of a small army!”

Abe Cohen was responding, with eyes wide and mouth even wider, to the news that Jack would be taking not just a gas-guzzler jet to see Richard Hawke, but a supersonic gas-guzzler jet. Jack was sitting on a deck chair, waiting for the text from Phil Webb and drinking a Beck's. He had been reading about Hawke on his iPad and enjoying the tranquility before Abe and Doc popped over separately. Abe had motored in on his own boat, a Defever forty-nine-foot pilothouse, which he used for getaways when the stress of the city got to be too much.

“You should talk,” Doc Matson said as he pulled over a chair and flopped down. Doc had been at the marina having lunch with an old friend, Lieutenant Commander Ben Mabry, Chief of Waterways for the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic Service, Sector San Francisco. He happened to come by just as Jack was telling Abe about his upcoming trip.

“What do you mean?” Abe asked.

“Even your softened hippie brain should realize you're not doing the environment any good with your weekly trips halfway to Japan in that diesel-burning monstrosity you sail,” Doc said.

“Which I had refurbished, at great personal expense, to burn ultra-low-sulfur diesel,” Abe fired back. “My boat has literally been blessed by a priest who works with the EPA. Plus, diesel engines get better fuel economy than gas. The Farallons are less than a fifty-mile round trip, which means I'm probably producing less CO
2
than either of you two clowns.”

“Not me,” Jack said. “I mostly keep the
Sea Wrighter
where she is and I bike wherever I can.”

“Except every time you drive your Mercedes to the city.”

Doc cut in. “What Jack has is called a ‘job,' Abe.”

Abe grimaced at Doc. “And I guess your ‘job' requires a vintage Mustang and your Piper whatever-it-is?”

“Piper Cherokee,” Doc said. “Like your hybrid car is helping the world.”

“What's wrong with
that
?”

“You run it on electricity generated by a nuclear power plant—which you've picketed, I'd like to remind you.”

“I use about one electron of power,” Abe protested.

“You shouldn't be using any,” Doc said. “It's hypocritical.”

“You're insane, Doc,” said Abe.

“I would describe him as ‘prone to charming filibuster,'” Jack grinned.

“You're
both
being idiotic. I'm a visionary and you just can't accept that.”

“Yeah. I wish to hell I was a visionary like you,” Doc said. “A product of what your generation did to our universities. You started calling yourselves visionaries to justify how you hounded out your legitimate professors, the older ones, the ones who deserved to be authorities because they had the sense and the knowledge to teach, as opposed to the airheads you replaced them with who think that knowledge of a subject consists of how they
feel
about it. That's who's running the universities now. They hardly deserve the term ‘universities.' They've become plunder of graduate students' labor. The plunder of all lost ideals everywhere and in all time since Abraham tried to slay Isaac but was saved by a counter-hallucination. The administrations sought out for admission, scholarships, hiring, promotions, those who are anything but white males. Liberalism is the stereoisomer of Nazism and its obsession with racial purity. The universities prove that. They stopped gauging skill, talent, even work ethic. They fostered a generation of incompetents not seen in the history of the Republic, incompetents who created their own fields of study to justify their lack of productive scholarship in the real fields of learning. Those fertile fields which once blossomed with a flora so vibrant and diverse, reduced in size and offering to ‘women's studies,' ‘black studies,' ‘Chicano studies,' ‘lesbian studies,' ‘gay studies,' all non-sciences created by jingoists with tenure desperate for attention and respect and as much getting laid as they can get along the way.”

“The yuppies made those distinctions, not the hippies,” Abe snapped. “My friends and I were products of our own visionary imagination. You should wish you were me! We need soldiers for progress, not soldiers for war.”

“It was three or four subterraneans like you who destroyed all that was decent in America,” Doc said. “Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, William Kunstler, and Bella Abzug.”

“They are my cultural heroes,” said Abe.

“Leary popularized LSD and destroyed the minds of thousands who then destroyed the thinking of millions. Ginsberg pretended to be a Jewish prophet when he was a Communist pervert who preyed on young boys. Kunstler perverted the law and rode the freedom buses south to get laid. While Abzug with her pseudo-liberationist rants against men twisted tens of thousands of young women's minds, making them into man-hating harpies.”

“What we need,” Jack interrupted, “is to ease up a little. The problem is nobody's listening to anyone else.”

“Because they're mostly talking nonsense,” Doc said, thrusting his chin toward Abe.

“I rest Jack's case,” Abe replied. He was pacing, working out his perpetual agitation.

“You once did some fancy math on a cocktail napkin, told me how many future generations I'd destroyed because of all the people I'd killed in my life,” Doc said. “I agreed with you. And for the record, I hated every bullet or blade I put in a man. But you didn't do the math about how many generations I'd saved by getting rid of genocidal lunatics. I'm still waiting for that list.”

“It's impossible to know,” Abe shrugged. “Some of those people you saved may have grown up to be killers.”

Jack looked at him. “Abe, did you really just say that?”

“Statistically, it makes perfect sense,” Abe told him. “Each year, there are nearly nineteen thousand homicides in the United States alone. Surely a few people Doc saved would be responsible for some of those.”

Doc and Jack stared at Abe, then at each other. Jack leaned over, put his hands over Eddie's ears, and said, “Don't listen now, dear. I'll tell you about it afterward.”

Doc laughed. He recognized the reference, the story of how during a screening of
Oliver Twist,
Winston Churchill had put his hands over his poodle Rufus's eyes when Bill Sykes was about to drown his dog.

Abe thought they were laughing at him. “Fine, have more fun at my expense,” he said.

“What other reason is there to keep you around?” Doc asked.

“Apparently none,” Abe said. He stopped at the gangplank. “I will take my leave.”

“That's a military term, you know,” Doc said.

“What about ‘up yours'?” Abe asked.

“Only if you say, ‘Up yours, sir,'” Doc said.

Abe frowned and left. The insults never stuck: whatever the beatnik-hippie-revolutionary's flaws, he did not hold a grudge.

Doc and Jack chatted briefly about Hawke—Doc knew nothing of the man, other than the Squarebeam controversy—after which Doc left.

“I need to go for a long run,” he said. “I love meeting friends when I'm in town, but I always overeat.”

“
Why we fight,
” Jack joked, quoting the title of the famed World War II training films. “So Doc Matson can stay trim.”

“Hey, Abe might argue that obesity is a bigger killer than combat.”

“He might be right,” Jack said. “Certainly the tarts and swells in Hollow-wood would agree with him.”

“Yeah, a man totally unaware of his own hippie food pyramid: the opioids food group, the cannabinoid food group, the alcohol food group, and the deep-fryer food group.”

“He's still sneaking french fries?”

“Can you believe he thinks I can't tell?” Doc smirked and departed.

Jack turned back to his reading. Less than two minutes after he left, Jack received a text from Phil Webb, Hawke's executive assistant:

Fixed Base Operator Terminal, North Access Road, 6 p.m.

Jack texted back:

I will be there.

*   *   *

Abe Cohen was texting while he guided his quarter-century-old boat out into the Bay, headed for the Pacific. He was still arguing with Doc Matson, as they had been for years, via evolving forms of technology—first mail, then phone, e-mail, and now texting—about what Abe saw as the tragedy of America's dilution. Doc, who actually traveled the world and witnessed it firsthand, saw the change as the globalization of American values.

So they argued, endlessly, neither man giving ground.

Abe felt that Doc was happy because he always had a war to fight, somewhere. But Abe, the old hippie, mourned his long-gone free-love era, when men wore nothing more feminine than beads and women went topless, and they had normal, recreational sex with each other.

How can you say that, you hypocrite?
Doc had texted early that morning.
Freedom is freedom! That's why I fight—to help make people free.

Abe had replied,
True freedom is without structure … it is not organized, state-approved segregation, which is what we have now! The marketers and banks all support it. They carve out ethnic groups, financial groups, sexual orientations. It helps them target their buyers and sell more goods.

That got Doc started on the need for capitalism, investment cash as the engine for economic growth, all the things Jack Hatfield used to promote on his talk show.

So Abe replied with,
You're a tool of the Man, Doc.
Then he was out of cell phone range.

Peace at last.

Doc wasn't wrong about everything, Abe knew that. Abe remembered the end of the free-love era vividly, how freedom and love had mutated into something ugly, how every little need and aberration sought legitimacy, choosing to control and be controlled. It started with the Gay Liberation Front at the tail end of the 1960s, with its promulgation not just of male-male sex but everything that went with it: makeup for men and the “manscaping” of bodily hair, domestic partnerships and the adoption of children, and finally homosexual marriage. That was not the free love he grew up on. It was the institutionalization and proselytizing of a way of life. The kind of thing that gnawed at the foundations of society. As if that wasn't enough, there was the concurrent plague of feminism, which turned so many women into castrating aggressors and then into lesbians. Who, as it turned out, hated the gay male population for introducing AIDS to the world. Then there were minorities fighting for their share of attention, their permissive legislation. Illegal immigrants. African-Americans. Muslim-Americans. Hyphenates of every damn stripe. It had reached the point where an old singer's transgendered offspring had been attacked as being misogynist by another fanatic actor couple's child who had it chopped off—or was it sewn on—to become their new son or new daughter.

Liberalism was no longer a progressive ideal. It had become a mental disorder.

Now, the latest annoyance. They were all banding together to fight a new enemy, capitalism, under yet another banner: the vague, messy, annoying Occupy Wall Street movement that only compounded the noise. More loud, shrill voices demanding immediate action from someone about something.

He missed the days when everyone chilled and went with the flow. That's why these weekly getaways were essential. He loved his store and its ties to the glory days of human freedom, when Haight-Ashbury was literally in flower, and he loved his old-school, radical clients—the true anarchists, the Libertarians. They didn't want to erect new rules to govern new pockets of entitlement. They were all about taking rules down.

Abe typically went out to the Farallon Islands to watch a society that managed to function without rules. He envied the elephant seals. They lived for about twenty years, most of which time they spent eating, swimming, and having sex. It was just like the 1960s. And there was the risk factor that reminded him of the old days. Just as he and his communal friends had to watch out for the cops—
the fuzz
—the elephant seals had to watch out for the sharks.

He throttled down as he neared the southeastern tip of the island group. He looked out the window of the pilothouse, couldn't see clearly because of the spray, and went out to the foredeck. He leaned against the rail, fished a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.

He was about to light one when he saw something drifting in the water. He turned, unlatched a boat hook from the railing. He stretched it forward, snagged the object that was eddying around the prow.

It was a piece of tan blazer; part of a sleeve, it seemed. With blood on the soggy cuff. He started to bring it aboard, at the same time looking around for any other detritus—

Abe felt a punch in his left thigh, just below the hip. He heard a crack in the distance, quickly forgot it as his torso went left, his legs went right, and he literally bent sideways in the middle. He dropped the boat hook in the water and fell on the deck on his right side, his mouth tense and chest heaving. He was distracted by a terrible, pulsing heat where he'd felt the punch. He turned his eyes toward his legs, saw his jeans staining brown with red drops forming quickly and dripping onto the deck. There was a ragged hole in the middle of the stain.