A Time for War (27 page)

Hu felt a profound sorrow for the men, women, and children who had perished in this clinic—seventeen in all. But they were the first victims of a toxic social system that had to be destroyed. And they would not be the last.

Because the surviving structure was so fragile, the team did not employ jackhammers to break through the floor. They employed chisels and hammers, working precisely where the enhanced radar image told them. Hu could watch their progress in real time on the laptop, the chisels showing up as solid black silhouettes against the white background. He redirected anyone who started to move away from the trapdoor.

As they were working, Hu received a call on his radio.

“This is Hu.”

“This is Officer Valigorsky,” said the caller. “There is a Mr. Tang to see you?”

“I will be right out,” Hu replied.

He motioned to one of the men with the chisels to replace him while the others continued working. Dusting off his coveralls, he walked toward the exit. There had been little cleanup, only whatever was necessary to get through the broken walls and ceilings, crushed furniture, and smashed equipment.

Hu smiled as he saw the short, slender man standing outside the blue sedan. The car was parked on the other side of the yellow police tape. Liu Tang stood beside the passenger's side door, smoking a cigarette.

Hu ducked under the tape and bowed. “It is an honor,” he said in Chinese.

The other man crushed his cigarette as he bowed a little more formally. “We have a delivery. We went to your office but I have been instructed to give it to no one but you.”

“I understand,” Hu said quickly. “We had to change our own plan. Except for a secretary, we have all been here.”

“Is everything all right?” Liu asked.

“Very much so. We have located what we were seeking.”

Liu bowed again slightly, but for a longer time, acknowledging the other man's resourcefulness and expressing joy for his good fortune. It was a more respectful gesture than the previous bow.

“I suggest we go back to the office where a secure system has been prepared to your specifications,” Hu said.

Liu Tang agreed. Hu radioed his associates in the clinic and told them he would be back later. The men in the backseat of the sedan made room for Hu and he instructed the driver how to get to Humboldt Avenue.

Knowing that he was just a few feet from the package gave Hu a feeling of profound humility. That such power was being entrusted to him reinforced his resolve to succeed. He could not wait to get back to the clinic, to resume his work there.

*   *   *

Of all the things Dover Griffith had never done, riding in a small plane and leaving the airport on the back of a Harley could now be checked off the list. As she headed into San Francisco, clutching Doc's leather jacket, she wasn't sure which was the bigger shock to her normally deskbound system.

The flight was like riding an airboat—which she
had
done, once, during a family vacation in the Everglades. Instead of a big fan behind her, on this flight there was a big propeller in front. Instead of a wool cap to keep her hair from blowing, she was wearing headphones so she could communicate with Doc. Instead of racing across murky waters that caused the boat to bump and sway, she rode a deceptively solid ocean of air that sent every current and eddy up the mainframe, through the seat, and up along her spine.

“It's not as bad as sailplaning,” Doc assured her with a little laugh.

“You mean hang gliding?” Dover asked, trying to appear at least peripherally knowledgeable.

Doc shook his head. “A glider aircraft,” he said. “Pull you up with a towline from a motored plane, cut you loose, then you ride the thermals as long as you can. Once the heat stops rising, it becomes more difficult to stay aloft. Until you can't and then you plunge. Hopefully you've picked your landing spot before that. Otherwise—” He made a downward motion with his hand. “That's real flying,” he went on. “Used it to sneak into Chávez-country once.”

“Where?”

“Venezuela,” he said. “We were running a merc operation to recruit anti–Pink Boots on the ground in his hometown of Sabaneta, Barinas. The previous administration was channeling money to us through the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our motto was ‘Let no natural disaster go uninfiltrated.'”

Griffith didn't need that explained. When she first came to ONI, undermining the so-called “Pink Tide” was one of the greatest concerns of American intelligence. It was a growing movement in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to form governments—and alliances—based on the model of Fidel Castro's Cuba. Some of Dover's coworkers believed that the United States should be included in that list, given the Marxist philosophies of its president. Dover had always thought they were overreacting until she started getting smaller paychecks while her unemployed journalist friends got larger ones.

Doc laughed. “Four of us, in two planes, glided into a field of sugar cane. That stuff is high, twice as tall as any of us. Swallowed the gliders completely, hid them long enough for us to make our way into the village.”

“How did you get out when you were finished?”

“Took a fishing boat across Lago de Maracaibo to a sub in the Gulf of Venezuela. I was there four months. That was six or seven years ago. Last I heard, the twenty or so guys we recruited were still working for us and had brought in another half dozen. It's slow work but effective.”

“Did they believe in your cause? Is that why they stayed with it?”

“I couldn't tell you,” Doc replied. “All I know is that the solution to stopping socialism is cash. Not handouts, like we've been doing more and more in the States, but payment for services rendered. I don't care whether it's lawn mowing or car repair or running a small business. Make a person feel useful, instead of like a beaten dog who can't or won't come out from under the bed, and you've got a prosperous nation of eager, happy capitalists. The other way? The Pink way? That's not for the people. That's for the megalomania of the puppet masters who are running the show, the Stalins and Mao Zedongs and Barack Obamas. Did you ever think we'd have a power-mad Leninist in the White House?”

Doc Matson was different from anything on Dover's Everglades vacation as well. He was different from anyone she had ever met. He piloted the plane with a casual strength, like a cowboy who had long ago broken a wild horse. The controls were in his muscle memory. His attention seemed to be on the mission: the rescue of Dover Griffith and her integration with the world of Jack Hatfield.

During the course of the two-and-a-half hour flight, she heard about Jack and Abe Cohen, Jack and his “home boat,” and perhaps the most important member of Jack's entourage, his gray poodle.

“Only a handful of us are allowed to dogsit Eddie,” Doc laughed. “Actually, let me put that another way: there's a handful of us that Eddie will condescend to stay with.”

It wasn't the veteran merc talking now, with scars in his memory and a world-weariness in his voice, but a man who was proud of, amused with, and challenged by a dear friend. A friend for whom he would do anything—witness dropping everything to fly to the Inland Empire and bail her out.

Through it all, Dover saw California pass twelve thousand feet below her. That was much closer to the ground than she had ever flown and it gave her a new appreciation for the glorious patchwork that was this state—and, by extension, all of America. They flew over multicolored deserts where she could pick out cotton-puff sandstorms like the one she had driven through. There were lakes, foothills, bursts of life in isolated villages, larger towns, small cities, and then stirring metropolises. The snow-capped peaks of the Sierra range to their east lifted her spirits. Imagining the pioneers, the early ranchers, she could see the faces on the old daguerreotypes she had pored over in books about the Old West. She felt a sudden burst of affection for the two oceans that had helped to keep her country safe from serious physical invasion. At the same time she felt a raw anger at the people who took that safety for granted, who used it as a foundation for nothing but rapacious self-interest—the Richard Hawkes of America.

Despite the risks, she felt prouder, happier, more alive, more heroic, being allied with Jack Hatfield, a scrappy provocateur, rather than serving an arrogant dictator comfortably but helplessly—like the people she'd met at HITV.

The plane ride ended with a lumpy touchdown. Even as Doc was putting the wheels on the ground he had warned her that the Cherokee wasn't a 737 and she was going to feel the landing.

“It'll feel like your car hit a pothole,” he smiled.

He was right.

They landed at Hayward Executive Airport, which was twenty-six miles from San Francisco. While Doc secured the plane, Dover walked off the flight. She still felt as though she were swaying, just as she had the few times she went out sailing.

“It'll take time to get your land legs back,” Doc told her as he grabbed her suitcases from the cockpit. “Weird how the muscles take time to readjust to ‘normal.' Makes you realize how adaptable humans really are.”

She did not have time to appreciate that as they roared along 580 East. Her bags lashed to a chrome-plated luggage rack behind them, her head tucked tightly in a matte-black, three-quarter open-face retro helmet Doc had brought for her, Dover was busy acclimating herself to the new vibrations beneath her, the new instability. He had assured her that the Ultra Classic Electra Glide with its Screamin' Eagle Twin Cam 110 engine would give her the smoothest, most comfortable ride on two wheels.

That may be,
she thought, as they ripped and swayed through the fading daylight. But she found herself wishing, devoutly, that she had not eaten the candy bar he had offered her before they left Hayward. And every time Doc accelerated she thought of a friend of hers, an ER resident doctor, who called these things “donorcycles.”

Her cell phone told her the trip to the marina took just an hour. It felt longer than the plane flight. Then again, with limited peripheral vision and the back of Doc's helmet eating up most of the view, and nothing but the constant slap of the wind in her ears, Dover's brain had had nothing to distract it.

She was relieved to get off the sleek machine, even if it was for yet another unfamiliar environment, Jack's sixty-two-foot yacht.

Doc had a key that let them on board.

“There's food in the—”

“No thanks,” Dover interrupted. She didn't even want to talk about it. She sat on a sofa in a room. She didn't know anything about boats. She didn't know what the room was called or where it was, exactly. All she knew was that while the gentle rocking was different from the jostling of the Piper Cherokee, different from the racing momentum of the Ultra Classic Electra Glide, it was no less foreign to a body which was used to the motion-free ground of Suitland, Maryland.

Doc came over with a landline phone, which he put on speaker. He set it on a small inlaid coffee table. He drank a Diet Coke as he stood beside Dover.

“It's Jack,” Doc told her.

“Hi, Jack,” the young woman said. She looked slightly away from Doc so she couldn't see him drinking.

“I hear you've had an adventure,” said the voice on the other end.

“It has not been the kind of day I was expecting,” she admitted.

“Those are the best kind!” Jack enthused. “Doc's going to be leaving to pick up Eddie—you're not allergic to dogs, are you?”

“Only cats and llamas,” she said.

“Llamas?”

“Petting zoo when I was a kid,” she said. “I had hives for a week.”

“I'm that way with mealworm beetles,” Doc said. “They're all over South America.”

Dover tried hard to focus on the call. “Where are you, Jack?”

“I was in the Caribbean,” he said, “on Hawke's yacht.”

“Blow it up?” Doc asked.

“Sorry, my C-4 was confiscated at Customs. Anyway, I'm somewhere over the Midwest now. You think Bruno will still be up, Doc? I could swing by.”

“Wow, you're ambitious,” Doc said.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm thinking you'll be near burnout by the time you're wheels-down. Why don't I have him send something over?”

“You may be right,” Jack said. “Can you stick around? Join us?”

“I've got a bunch of work to catch up on, fun though the day has been. Want me to see if our other buddy is free?” He said in a stage whisper to Dover, “Abe Cohen. That's someone you definitely want to meet.”

“Go for it,” Jack said.

Dover did not tell either man that the mention of food still put her off.

“More important, how are you two?” Jack asked.

Dover told him about her trip to Murrieta and Jack listened silently. Doc contributed only a few comments, remarking on her courage and resilience and on the impertinence of the Hawke security guards.

“Sounds like you taught them manners, Doc,” Jack said when Dover was done. “And good job, Dover.”

“Doc did all the heavy lifting,” she said. “How did things go with you—or are you not able to talk?”

“I can talk. I wouldn't be telling you anything I didn't say to my host. But I'd just as soon wait until I've had a chance to process all of it. Doc—”

“I'm on my way,” he said. “You know how Eddie loves the Harley.”

“Thanks, buddy. For everything.”

Doc ended the call, finished his soda, and made sure Dover didn't need anything.

“Actually, I'm going to take a nap,” she said.

“Make it a power nap,” he warned. “I'll be back in about forty-five minutes and Eddie is a handful. He's like his boss. Suspicious of men but he instantly loves the ladies.”

“Where will you be if I need more protecting?” she asked.