A Time for War (36 page)

You've done cartwheels and handstands,
she told herself.
The energy still comes from the ground. It's just entering at a different point.

She took a moment to feel the closet against her upper back. She thought of the good memories represented by the calendar, the positive energy left behind by her father as he looked at that photograph over the years. She let that flow into her shoulders. And then, with a cry to focus that strength, she simultaneously pushed out with her palms and extended her legs.

The dolly leaned outward and the safe went with it. So did Maggie. Even as her back left the side of the closet she was pushing energy into her arms and legs. The roped safe-dolly combination fell over, tipping slowly enough so that Maggie was able to drop her rear onto the top, ride it down, and end up standing, facing away from the closet.

The dolly was bent by the weight of the toppled safe.

So much for returning everything to normal before Dad comes home,
she thought.

Maggie walked around to the other side. She looked down at a piece of plywood that had been pressed so hard by the safe that it split into a series of slats. They weren't level with the concrete floor, flattened by the weight of the safe. She had to pry them up with the crow bar. Underneath were the rotted planks of a trapdoor. There was a large iron ring set in the side away from the wall.

The young woman knelt beside the door; it almost felt as if she were praying. Perhaps she should be. She needed the crowbar to lift the latch out as well. The ring creaked upright, shedding particles of rust; the trapdoor groaned with it.

Keep going,
Maggie told herself.

She reached for the ring, pulled it, and moved her head back as the dust of a century wafted up. It was not quite the dry, musty smell she had been expecting but a smell of putrefaction, like damp soil and rotted leaves.

Water from the bay must have leached its way in,
she realized.

The hammering was clearer, echoing from somewhere to the north. She left the trapdoor resting against the wall and got a flashlight. She squatted by the edge and shined it down. Four steep steps ended on a packed dirt floor.

She rose, took a long drink of water, then wedged one end of the crowbar behind the closet and slipped the other end in the ring. She didn't know where the tunnel would take her but she wanted the light shining in so she could find her way back.

Maggie felt a chill. It was more than the cool air of the tunnel, but a sense that nothing good awaited her down there.

She also knew that growth required challenge, answers demanded effort, and that self-respect came from doing the difficult.

After taking several slow, cleansing breaths, she climbed down the ladder.

*   *   *

Jing Jintao stood alone in the conference room on the forty-eighth floor of the Transamerica Pyramid. Ordinarily the room was restricted to tenants of the building but the consul general had only to mildly suggest that he would like a few minutes of undisturbed time in the room, to receive it.

The 360-degree view of San Francisco, so world-renowned that a trip to this floor was considered a cultural gift to visiting dignitaries, was not his interest. To Jintao, the city resembled sugar cubes stained by tea. He had once witnessed an American ambassador add sugar to his rare, triple-steeped
Anxi Ti Kuan Yin,
an offense so profound Jintao could almost taste it in his own tea. No, he was not here to marvel at the city, but at the sea in the late afternoon light. Soon Jintao would be on that sea, leaving this place at last, looking back only to see it dissolve.

The weaponized pneumonic plague, maximized for toxic potency and extended airborne motility, would be spread through inhalation. The city would send first responders to the bombsite but most of them would take breaks from wearing their cumbersome masks. They would be infected.

Wind would carry the plague to other residents. At first, people would think they had the flu—a fever, a cough. Not nearly enough of them would seek medical treatment. Even if they did, the necessary antibiotics would not be available fast enough or in sufficient quantities. Over the next few hours other people would be wondering why they suddenly couldn't breathe. Doctors would misdiagnose it as asthma, then they, too, would become sick after coughed particles of saliva infiltrated their nasal linings. Everyone the doctors treated after that would become ill. The social and medical infrastructure would quickly collapse.

Within hours, every person infected in the initial wave would start coughing up blood, in some cases vomiting. Septic shock would set in. Some people would wander in anxious confusion, their hearts racing, rasping for breath. Others, their blood pressure plummeting, would collapse where they stood. As airborne bodily fluids were inhaled, spreading the infection further, the panic would be well under way—the military sent in, the quarantine, the armed theft of vehicles to get out, the traffic accidents, the accidental shootings as people sought to protect themselves, the intentional shootings as people
did
protect themselves, the suicides off the bridges.

The death rate would be nearly one hundred percent above the tunnels and seventy to eighty percent in the rest of the city. There would be no escape—and anyone who did would infect more Americans.

Jintao glanced again at the small piece of paper that his deliveryman had brought to him just before he left his office. The source was unidentified but Jintao knew it was from the cell leader. Written upon the paper was only:
m
n yì
.
“Satisfied.”

When he exited the Transamerica Pyramid, Jintao passed the Mark Twain Plaza and smiled. That location had always pleased him, almost more than any other in the city. The bow of the
Niantic,
a triple-masted ship from the mid-nineteenth century, was still buried somewhere beneath the plaza. The
Niantic
had originally transported goods from China, the usual tea, silk, and most likely, opium hidden in the hold. The ship was then converted into a whaling vessel. Jintao considered that singularly appropriate as his harpoon was sharpened for this bloated behemoth that he was about to depart, forever.

*   *   *

When they were still an hour out of San Francisco, Jack got a text from Doc. He gave the phone to Dover to read.

“He says that Abe and his boat are MIA and there's something strange at the Farallon Islands. He did a flyover. He wants you to go out there with him as soon as possible.”

“Tell him we'll take the
Sea Wrighter.
Ask him how fast he can get her to a marina on the San Francisco side to pick us up.”

Dover started texting. Jack felt a twinge of guilt. He hadn't thought about Abe since he left Sausalito on his Defever. Their friend was an adult who was known to go off on mushroom-induced “walkabout” adventures from time to time. Still, the news about the boat was troubling.

Dover read a new text. “He says he can get to the side-tie wharf in the marina by seven.”

Jack looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was six o'clock. They could make it if they went straight there.

“OK, that's good,” Jack said. “Ask him to bring sweaters, since we're not dressed for nighttime boating.”

“Will do. He should probably walk Eddie first,” she said.

“If Doc's worried, we don't have time,” Jack said. “Eddie will use the shower stall. Survival mode.”

“You trained him to do that?”

“It was either that or a scrub brush and Simple Green,” Jack said.

Jack fell silent then. His mind was still on the Chinese situation—more so than it was before. The picture was naggingly incomplete.

He said out loud, “The real story here is not what we've been looking into but something Hawke revealed.”

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.