A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  “I hope I have the right Jack Hatfield,” the caller said. “I, uh—I work for the government and I’m looking into something you reported about on Truth Tellers a few years back. If you could call me, I’d like to tell you a little more and get your thoughts. Thank you. ‘Bye.”

  Jack sat at the table with his breakfast, scrolled to the number, and pushed the call button. Griffith picked up on the second ring.

  “Mr. Hatfield—thanks so much for calling back! Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No,” Jack said. “I was up. Who are you and what can I do for you?”

  “Off the record?”

  “OK.” It was amazing to Jack that a reporter’s “OK” in that regard was taken as an oath. He didn’t know any other profession outside of being a mobster where the handshake rule applied.

  “I’m an analyst with the Office of Naval Intelligence,” Griffith said, “and I want to talk about Squarebeam technology.”

  Jack didn’t know if she had paused for dramatic effect, but the result was the same: letting the words hang there brought back all kinds of unpleasant thoughts for Jack. There were smugly reassuring sound bites from that patronizing autocrat Richard Hawke, interviews with fighter pilots whose controls went AWOL when they passed through the unfriendly Squarebeam skies, and scientists who warned that the technology was cutting edge of the wrong kind: one had described it as a technological headsman’s axe.

  “There’s a subject that doesn’t send a thrill up my leg,” Jack said.

  “I know and I’m sorry, but it may be like one of those mutant cockroaches that adapts to the latest formula of bug killer.”

  Jack liked the metaphor. Griffith had bought herself some more time. “Go ahead,” Jack said.

  “Two complete, apparently targeted electronic system collapses on different days, different parts of the globe,” Griffith said.

  “What’s the second?” Jack asked. He didn’t have to ask about one of them. The woman was ONI. It was probably the SEALs Chinook in Afghanistan.

  “An FBI vehicle in your backyard, off the 101.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Routine tail to the Chinese consulate.”

  China. Again, Jack thought. “I can find out about that,” he said. “What makes you think this is Squarebeam-related?”

  “Nothing,” Griffith admitted. “Except that it’s the only technology I’ve come across that can do anything like this. I guess I want to rule it out.”

  “So you’ve got a hunch, is what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know,” Griffith said. “What’s a notch or two below that? An apprehension?”

  Jack spread the tuna on his bagel and took a bite. He liked Griffith. It was a rare intelligence analyst who could maintain a sense of humor in the face of the awful potentialities that crossed her desk every day.

  “Let me make a call and I’ll get back to you,” Jack said. “You civilian or military, Miss Griffith?”

  “Civvie.”

  That explained it. Jack had been a bit of a kidder, too, in Iraq. It just came out, in response to the stoicism of the military personnel around you. Maybe you went in the opposite direction to maintain your identity.

  Griffith thanked him, gave him her private number, and hung up quickly, like she had been embarrassed to go outside the ONI for help—or was afraid of being overheard. That kind of fear, at least, was something Jack had never experienced.

  He finished his tuna sandwich and gave Eddie the last of the bagel. Max arrived then, having slept a little better than Jack. She reminded him that she spent her early childhood in Mogadishu, where bombings were a daily occurrence, as government and anti-government forces all but destroyed the nation in general and the capital in particular.

  After calling Johnny Yu and making sure that there had been no further disturbance at the grocery, Jack went up on deck to phone his semi-buddy Carl Forsyth at the FBI field office.

  ~ * ~

  San Francisco, California

  The FBI’s San Francisco field office is located on the thirteenth floor of a blocky white tower on Golden Gate Avenue. Forsyth was not superstitious. FBI agents dealt with facts, not fantasy. But the brawny six-foot former USC linebacker—who joined the FBI after being passed over in the 1988 NFL draft—couldn’t help but wonder if maybe one of his former wives was jamming pins into a Carl Forsyth voodoo doll. Last month there was the car bomb they failed to intercept. The assassination gambit involving the President. And finally Jack Hatfield, of all people, saving him along with the city of San Francisco from an Islamic bomb plot. Jack Hatfield. The guy who the Washington Post once described as “the most incendiary man on television.” Forsyth couldn’t confirm or deny that; he’d never seen the man’s show. It used to be on at ten P.M. He was asleep by then. But Hatfield had an annoying habit of showing up at crime scenes before anyone else, asking questions no one had the guts to ask. Most reporters knew that if they annoyed the cops, annoyed the FBI, they lost access to sites, personnel, and press conferences. So they lobbed softballs. Not Hatfield. He was never put on “access” lists and he still showed up and got inside, still asked questions that he knew officials couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Because to someone with Hatfield’s experience the truth was apparent in any response, even “No comment.”

  The thing of it was, after sparring with Hatfield for the nineteen months he’d had this job, Forsyth admired the way the man ran over or around him. The man was free to follow a hunch to his target. He wasn’t bound by policy and protocol the way Forsyth was.

  Right now, Hatfield’s beeline involved the dead FBI vehicle.

  “I can’t confirm or deny what happened,” Forsyth said. “You know the drill.”

  “I do,” Jack said. “You just confirmed it by not denying it.”

  Carl Forsyth made a face. He was about to contradict that but realized that anything he said would probably compound the lie.

  The forty year old was sitting behind his small desk in his small, sunny field director’s office. To his right was a cup of strong black coffee, his third of the morning. On his computer was a report from the vehicular forensics engineer whose lab was in a walled-off section of the parking garage. The checklist-style document detailed the condition of the field car that had been following the Chinese consulate van. All that mattered was the final line containing the engineer’s analysis: Complete electronic failure. No internal fault discovered.

  “Where are you getting your information, Jack?” Forsyth asked. It hadn’t been on the news.

  “You tell me who the two agents were, I’ll tell you how I found out.”

  “You know I won’t—”

  “So there were two,” Hatfield said. “That means this was a routine tail, you weren’t expecting trouble, no need to ramp up the complement. One agent stayed behind the wheel trying to get a visual on the dashboard camera— which wasn’t working. The other got out to eyeball. What did he or she see?”

  “Jesus, Jack.”

  “Let me try this another way,” Jack said. “I could go through the morning’s arrivals and figure out who they’d be routinely tailing— Russians, Mexicans, Arabs, Somalis. But that doesn’t matter.”

  Forsyth allowed himself a little smile. At least Hatfield didn’t have that.

  “But let’s say for the sake of argument they were Chinese,” Jack said.

  “Why would you say that?” Forsyth asked. The field director quietly damned Hatfield—and himself for having gotten cocky.

  “Because there were two incidents yesterday, one of which you probably don’t know about,” Jack said. “Both involved Chinese.”

  Forsyth was about to sip his coffee. He stopped. “The clinic and—?”

  “Were your guys following the Chinese?”

  Forsyth caught his sigh before it became audible; he might be about to give in but he sure didn’t need to sound like it. A simple information swap would save time and more aggr
avation from Hatfield. “Off the record?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were,” Forsyth said. “And it was a routine tail.” He swallowed some coffee, set his blue FBI mug down, and opened a window on the computer, preparing to type. “The other incident was?”

  “SFPD has a report,” Jack told him. “Chinatown, Chinese outsider threatened the Yu Market.”

  Forsyth accessed the report. It said little more than what Hatfield had just told him. “Reason?”

  “Not sure,” Jack said.

  “What do you suspect?” Forsyth asked. Two could interpret non-answers.

  “Maggie Yu, the daughter of the owner, thinks they wanted to buy the place. But no one knows why.”

  “They?”

  “One guy inside, two guys in an Escalade. They drove off after the front man ran out of the store.”

  “You know more than the cops seem to.”

  “They deal in facts, Carl. That’s never the whole story.”

  Forsyth’s mouth twisted unhappily. Again. Hatfield hunches, voodoo fears—what was this, a to-hell-with-facts morning? Or was it a trend? What next: would someone in D.C. suggest reviving Project Cassandra, named after the Ancient Greek prophet, the experimental use of psychics?

  “I recall you having some issues with the Chinese,” Forsyth said.

  “What, you mean the way Beijing is full of vampire politicians who act like aristocrats then drain our blood when we’re not looking?”

  “I remember you used a line like that on your show. Drew some angry words from the consulate here.”

  “My neck bleeds. My heart doesn’t. Look,” Jack went on, “the Yu Market and even the clinic may not be the big story here.”

  “What is?”

  “Your car. That the Chinese killed it from the outside.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Forsyth said.

  “But that’s the one that scares me and it should scare you,” Jack said.

  “Why?” Forsyth asked. “Honestly, Jack, I just got the forensics report. We’re not even at that point yet. Do you know something about this?”

  “Honestly; Carl, I don’t,” Jack said, throwing his own “honestly” back at him like a challenge.

  “Right. You just happened to hear about the car?”

  “Actually, I did,” Jack said. “And I’m wondering aloud here if that’s ground zero for these other incidents.”

  “That’s a leap,” Forsyth told him. “You know as well as I do that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians always have a lot of balls in the air.”

  “I do know that,” Jack replied. “But I happened to be next door to the clinic last night when the car bomb went off.”

  Forsyth was very attentive. “And?”

  “Faint smell in the air, like bananas,” Jack said.

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. Not your average kitchen-made terrorist bomb. That’s the stench of nitro. That was TNT— a lot of it. Enough to blow the car, most of the building, and all of its own components to hell. It’s going to take an electron microscope to find traces of high explosives. You got any reports of dynamite being stolen?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Forsyth replied. “But it could have come from anywhere—”

  “I know. Doesn’t matter. Lone wolves wouldn’t risk that kind of theft, wouldn’t have the resources or cash to pull it off. We are dealing with something that has organization.”

  “I know,” said Forsyth. “We wondered about the neo-Nazis. The system is helping immigrants and leaving red-blooded Americans in the cold, that kind of mentality, they decide to take out a piece of the system.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Jack said.

  “I’m aware,” said Forsyth. “You’d have to be a nut to take out a clinic, but nuts don’t organize well on a large scale.”

  “That’s thinking locally. Globally, you want to go over the list?”

  Forsyth chuckled, the kind of chuckle when it isn’t really funny.

  Jack continued, “I don’t know if Maggie Yu or your dead field car are a part of this but—”

  “But we have to assume they are,” Forsyth said. “Thanks, Jack. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  The field director hung up. For the first time in nineteen months it didn’t hurt to say that. The guy was a pain in the neck but he knew his business. He was also right about one thing. Forsyth had better be concerned about a bigger picture. Not when they had a chance to do more studies of the car; not after they had a meeting about the agent debrief that was done when the agents were picked up after they called from a local restaurant; he had to worry now.

  Forsyth called the dispatch desk.

  “Eva, I want you to pull details from the other consulates. Have them follow every vehicle that leaves the Chinese consulate and stay with them until they return. I’ll get you the order in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And make sure the agents are carrying change,” he added. “In case they need to use a pay phone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eva’s voice had a little laugh in it. She’d obviously heard what happened to the other agents. She probably assumed their cell phones simply died. She also assumed Forsyth was making a joke. He wished he were.

  It had taken the terrorist attacks of September 11 to get the intelligence agencies talking to one another with a real sense of cooperation. The nation had benefited from that. It had taken the Golden Gate incident to get Forsyth to talk to Jack Hatfield. Even if this turned out to be nothing, he had a sense that the nation would gain from that relationship, too.

  It was a shame, he thought, that it took tragedy rather than a sense of the common good to get people—including himself—to cooperate. But it was definitely the right thing to do. He had to acknowledge that he was the one sticking pins in the doll and no one else.

  ~ * ~

  Fairfield, California

  Located nearly 3 miles east of Fairfield, California, 46 miles northeast of San Francisco, Travis Air Force Base encompasses nearly 6,400 acres and is home to the 60th Air Mobility Wing, a major component of the Air Mobility Command. With a workforce of 14,353 military members and civilian employees, it is also home to branch divisions of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies.

  With over 200 surveillance cameras, 30 radiation detectors, and over 1,000 security personnel, Travis is one of the most physically secure facilities in the United States. But like so much of the United States, an assault on the body was not the gravest threat. Chinese agents had been planning, testing, and executing cyber attacks on American systems for nearly a decade, starting in 2004 when hackers in the Guangdong Province codenamed “Titan Rain” by the FBI retrieved sensitive information from military facilities, NASA, the World Bank, and other institutions. Two years later another Chinese team cyber-invaded the U.S. State Department, which enabled them to access computers in American embassies worldwide. That same year the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Commerce Department had to get rid of all its computers when it was learned the Chinese had compromised them. That did more than inconvenience a government agency: it literally shut Commerce down for over a month.

  There were over a dozen other attacks ranging from small targets to large, from the Naval War College in Rhode Island to senatorial offices to the top secret files of Lockheed Martin’s highly advanced F-35 fighter program to the already legendary GhostNet assault in 2009, which compromised over 1,200 systems in more than 100 nations.

  Now the Chinese were launching a new front with Sammo Yang as their trailblazer. There was a message to be sent to Washington, one that they would hopefully begin to receive and understand when he was finished here.

  ~ * ~

  After escaping the tail, Sammo had intended to reconnoiter along the southern perimeter of Travis Air Force Base, confirming the usability of the attack position he had al
ready selected based on satellite photographs. Then he would have returned to the consulate to stay. It would have required a few hours at most. But an environmental reclamation project unknown to Chinese intelligence had changed the flight paths of all the aircraft taking off from or landing at the air base. Now Sammo needed to find a new position. He was going to have to spend more time in Fairfield than he had planned.

  He booked a room near the air base at the Cordelia Respite Inn, using the fake Taiwanese passport he carried. After signing in, he selected a few brochures from a rack, then sat in the lobby and pretended to read them while he assessed whether anyone was likely to pay attention to him, or to anything unusual. There was no doorman. One bellboy was more interested in the girl at the counter than he was in any cars that pulled up outside. Another bellboy stood in a corner chatting with a guest, a soldier. Sammo watched as a car stopped to drop off passengers. The soldier peered out, shook his head, resumed his talk. He was obviously waiting for his family to arrive. Neither bellboy went outside to help the arriving guests.