A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  “Remember when I taught you the word ‘shimmering‘?“ his father said the last time they were up there. “Look, Jack. The leaves are shimmering.“

  As Jack’s father lay dying of cancer, he had a request for his son. They were the last words he ever spoke. He wanted to go back to that spot on that mountain and look down upon the lake where he had first taught Jack the word “shimmering.” Against the advice of his doctors, Jack took him from the bed in his home and drove him to the spot that meant so much to them both.

  A few days later Jack’s father left the earth.

  Jack felt the anxiety ease. Sometimes a little independent action, a little quiet reflection, was all it took. Remembering his friends, his mentors, his heroes. Thinking of them, and turning his attention to the job at hand. He had to start doing his job.

  Jack returned to Martina’s side.

  “Is it everything you expected?” she asked.

  “It’s not Abe Cohen’s homemade kettle corn, but it’s not bad. You sure you don’t want any?” He inclined the bag toward her.

  “Completely,” she replied with a patient smile. “Are you ready now, Mr. Hatfield? We do have a schedule.”

  “Yes, sorry.” They resumed walking. “I was just thinking—Almas caviar. That’s Iranian, isn’t it?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “Pretty expensive,” Jack said.

  “I would imagine.”

  “Why would you ‘imagine’ that?” Jack asked.

  “Because everything Mr. Hawke does is first class.”

  Jack didn’t have to imagine the cost: he knew. He had seen the caviar offered in a catalogue from a London dealer at $25,000 a tin.

  “Have you worked for Mr. Hawke for very long?”

  “We work with him,” she corrected him. “And yes—nearly three years.”

  Jack had to admire the “coworker” ideology that seemed to permeate the Hawke staff. It was a smart way to empower employees and generate loyalty.

  They went outside, Jack letting Martina walk ahead. In addition to her other qualities she had a nice sway. That little distraction also helped him to relax.

  A slight wind kicked up dust from the field, causing Jack to shield his eyes with the popcorn bag. Fueling was just being completed. The white skin of the jet looked like orange Mylar in the setting sun. It resembled one of those helium balloons Jack saw on party boats, only in the exact shape of a swan. The jet had a long, arched neck, big swept-back wings with a gentle upward bend in the center, and two cylindrical engines tucked underneath like legs. The tail feathers were smaller wings in the rear.

  “Supersonic?” Jack asked as they reached the ladder.

  “The Quiet Supersonic Transport flies at Mach 2 with a range of four thousand miles,” she said, and gestured for him to ascend first.

  Jack obliged. His first thought was, Four thousand miles. They could be going halfway around the earth in any direction. His second thought was that private plane pilot Doc Matson would be seriously envious when Jack told him he’d flown on this aircraft. Assuming you ever see Doc again.

  Passing through the oblong door, Jack had to remain bowed slightly because of the low ceiling. The first thing that struck him as he entered the jet was the smell of leather. It was like new car smell, only deeper. The seats were thick and white, with a dull orange cast from the sunset. The cabin seated twelve and was neither very high nor very long. To travel as high and fast as the jet did required certain sacrifices to size and weight. But the trappings were clean and elegant. There were four seats in the forward section, two on either side facing one another. An open door led to an area in which there were two facing pairs of seats on the starboard side, a sofa across from them, and two more sets of two seats beyond. A small wet bar, white with a black burl top, was tucked in the back by the rear emergency exit. The carpet was black with a charcoal-gray zigzag pattern that made the cabin seem wider. The lines were repeated in embossed white up the center of the chairs and also across the sofa. Handmade pillows made of black leather added decorative interest if not practicality. The seat belts were black with white plastic fasteners. There were small HD monitors in the front of the cabin and across from the lavatory in the front was a closet for bags. The low, sloping ceiling did not allow for overhead storage.

  Neither the pilot nor the copilot emerged from the closed-door cockpit. Jack placed his bag in the closet—along with the popcorn; he would feel uncouth putting salty fingers on the leather—and was instructed to sit wherever he liked. He chose the seat nearest the door, even though it was facing back. He had once flown backward in a C-130 Hercules in Saudi Arabia. It was an interesting experience, feeling the force of takeoff from behind. It was a memorable flight for another reason; he happened to be sitting next to then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, whom he was interviewing for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “Have you ever gone backward?” Cheney asked Jack.

  “No, sir, it’s against my nature,” Jack replied. “That’s one reason I’d never go into politics.”

  Cheney chuckled. It was not an amused laugh, but a knowing one.

  Martina shut the door, notified the flight crew that they were ready, then selected the seat opposite Jack. Her smile was professional rather than warm; her eyes turned out to the large, square window. The sun was nearly down and her face was in shadow. Yet at that moment he thought he saw the real woman: relaxed, briefly off duty, reflective.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jack asked.

  She regarded him, surprised by the question. “That I have never been to this city.”

  “That’s a shame. It’s special.”

  “So I have heard. How long have you lived here?”

  “My entire adult life,” Jack said.

  The plane began taxiing almost at once. The engines sounded like a long note played on a bass cello.

  “What about you?” Jack asked.

  “Vienna, Paris, New York,” she replied. “That is where I am based now. I used to think of myself as worldly but, you know, one cannot truly know a country until you are outside the big cities. I so rarely get that chance, either.”

  “No, I’m guessing Mr. Hawke doesn’t stay in one place for long.”

  She only smiled in response. She turned her eyes back out the window. Obviously, in mentioning her boss, Jack had gone where even angels fear to tread. That was telling. It was not a reaction of respect but fear. That actually helped Jack get past his own concerns. A woman in danger—even if it was just a vague, intuited psychological jeopardy—was always a strong motivator for him.

  The plane was on the runway. Jack heard the cello string rise an octave. The jet picked up speed quickly, much faster than a commercial passenger jet and certainly faster than the C-130. Jack was thrust forward more than he had expected. He gripped the calfskin armrests.

  He looked out the window at the city as it dropped away at a sharper angle than he was accustomed to and in a different direction. He fell in love all over again with the familiar sights and the emerging lights and the ribbons of traffic, red moving away, white coming toward him, every driver the center of his or her own cosmos but his people. How much in love he was became clear when the plane banked west past the Golden Gate, Point Diablo and Point Bonito were lost to view, and only then he remembered there was a beautiful woman sitting across from him.

  She rose when they leveled off. They were at roughly ten thousand feet and still climbing.

  “Mr. Hatfield, would you like your carry-on?”

  “Please.” He didn’t offer to get it. He would let her do what she was happily accustomed to doing. Sometimes that, too, was chivalry.

  She brought his bag and set it on the floor. She held the popcorn, unsure what to do with it.

  “You can toss that,” he said. “I only wanted a taste.”

  She did not react with curiosity to what was clearly a lie. The human contact was clearly over.

&nbs
p; “Would you care for anything to eat or drink, perhaps some of that caviar I mentioned?”

  “I’ll take a Glenrothes single malt if you’ve got it.”

  “Would a Jameson eighteen-year-old Limited Reserve be acceptable?”

  “That would have been my very strong second choice,” he smiled.

  She walked past him and Jack turned his head slightly to watch her go. Martina fit perfectly under the low ceiling. In the muted white light of the cabin he realized that her uniform had been color-coordinated with the interior of the jet. There was even a faint zigzag pattern up the back of her jacket. A design element, perhaps. It struck him more as a subtle brand, a sign of ownership.

  He booted his computer and looked up the stored files on Hawke. He still had a lot of reading to do before he got to wherever he was going. He had read about the man’s background, about how the company was started. He already knew about the Squarebeam debacle. He started in on the company’s current assets.

  Martina returned with his drink. He didn’t bother folding down the computer screen. No need to insult her intelligence. She could have guessed what he was doing. He sampled the whiskey. Martina hadn’t even waited for him to acknowledge it so; she had gone on to the cockpit. The drink was warm, spicy, nutty, rich. He savored it as it warmed his throat and chest, then put the glass back on the table. He was going to nurse this one for a while. Otherwise, he’d be drinking more of it than he should.

  Reviewing the material, Hawke was global in every sense of the word. He had offices in twenty-eight nations and homes in many of those same places, according to a People magazine profile from two years earlier. Jack narrowed his examination to the man’s American holdings. He wanted to get some idea which lab—domestically or internationally—might have the capability of designing or producing an advanced EMP device.

  His eyes locked on one name in the list of Hawke laboratories.

  “Aw, Christ.”

  One facility jumped out like a coiled snake:

  HITV Labs. Hawke Industries Temecula Valley. It was a large industrial complex located on Nutmeg Street, just north of the intersection of Interstate 15 and Interstate 215.

  The address was in Murrieta. The town Dover had said she wanted to visit.

  She wouldn’t go there alone and start asking questions, Jack told himself. She couldn’t be that naive.

  But a desk jockey could be exactly that green, he decided. And that curious. And that eager to redeem herself.

  His damsel-in-distress glands were pumping out large doses of adrenaline. He was on a jet heading at just under Mach 2 in what he had determined to be a southeasterly direction, while his nominal partner in this was headed for potential trouble back in California.

  He logged onto the jet’s wireless system. Hawke might well be eavesdropping on all communications as a matter of course but that couldn’t be helped. Jack sent Dover an innocuous e-mail. He got an away-message that said she was taking a few days off with limited Internet availability. He tried to call on her cell phone. The ONI would definitely be listening and wouldn’t appreciate that, but he was the one placing the call, not her. It would not add an extra black mark to her record. Not that it mattered: he got voice mail. She was probably on her way. He left a message for her to call, though if he were leaving the country there was no way of knowing when he might get it.

  Shit.

  Jack thought about how he had felt a little helpless contemplating this trip. That was nothing.

  Considering his options, there was only one he could think of. He sent a vague text that he hoped would make sense to the person who received it. Then he sat back with his whiskey and nursed it, waiting for an answer to his message.

  ~ * ~

  PART TWO

  Resistance

  ~ * ~

  1

  Murrieta, California

  Dover Griffith arrived in the middle of a massive dust storm. What bothered her was not that in itself: it was that she had been sure, after the way it began, the trip was only going to get better.

  Dover had an apartment in a three-story brick complex in Suitland, 5601 Regency Park Court, building number seven. She phoned for a cab to take her to the airport then went down to meet it. As she got there—with the number of the taxi on her cell phone—she saw an older man just getting in.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “That’s my taxi!”

  “Sorry!” the passenger waved. “Mine will be along shortly, I hope.”

  “You hope? God dammit, that’s my ride!”

  Dover had enough time to call and complain to the cab company before the man’s taxi arrived. The cab driver gave her a hard time because her name was obviously not Toby Dickies. She wished the other driver had been more thorough.

  She made it to the airport with little time to spare and got through security with even less time to spare. She sat less than five minutes before the plane took off.

  Her seat was right next to Toby Dickies. They did not speak. Except for a moment of alarm on her part and dim, dawning recognition on his, they exchanged no looks, no words. Dover was on the aisle. Every time Mr. Dickies had to use the bathroom—which was every half hour or so—he simply rose, without a “pardon me” or “excuse me,” and she had to get up. The one time she hesitated, he undertook to shimmy around her. When Mr. Dickies finally fell asleep—with the volume on the earphones turned way up, so she could literally sing along with Italian opera—he snored.

  At the car rental facility in California, off Haven Road at the eastern end of the airport, she picked up her car—a Kia Rio, which came fully equipped with a CD player and nothing else— and swung onto 10. She took it a short distance to Highway 15, headed south, and ran right into the storm.

  The dust was like a thick sheet of tawny-gray gauze pulled over the windshield. She could see a few yards in front but nothing else. It stretched up as far as she could see. Dover pulled over, along with most of the sane people on the freeway, turned on the radio, and found a local station that said it would pass through the region in about a half hour.

  “This is part of what comes with living in our big, beautiful Inland Empire,” the newscaster said. “You get the great temps year round, you get the recreation, you get Las Vegas and San Diego and Los Angeles a couple hours in any direction. And sometimes, yeah, Mama Nature reminds us she’s alive and well with a trembler or a wildfire or a wall of desert sand a thousand feet high.”

  Dover turned off the radio. It was more fun listening to the wind bellow, cars poking by with drivers leaning into their horns, and the scratching sound of countless silica bits blasting across the windows and chassis. She didn’t want to waste her cell phone battery so she left her phone in her bag and pulled a map from the glove compartment. The good news was her destination was about forty-five minutes straight ahead, the Clinton Keith exit on 15.

  The cloud passed suddenly. There was no announcement, like the trailing off of a rainstorm or the bowling alley rumble of retreating thunder. The dust storm had rolled through and simply ended.

  Now, of course, there was a careless starting up of traffic, with lurching, uncooperative moves from cars parked two rows deep on the shoulder and dismal bottlenecks where 15 and 60, then 15 and 91, crossed to the south.

  Welcome to California, she thought.

  The last time she was here was before her freshman year at NYU. Her best friend, Christina, wanted to become a movie star so they took a trip to Los Angeles. They stayed at the Sheraton Universal and took the tour, where Christina fell in love with their tram guide. They hooked up, stayed hooked up for nearly a week—while Dover did the tourist sights, including Disneyland, mostly by herself—then broke up. Her friend was devastated and never went back to California. Dover hadn’t been impressed enough with anything, either, especially the traffic. Now it was even worse than she remembered, thanks to a county full of people who required big, brawny trucks to get from place to place instead of little VW Beetl
es.

  Though if there were a Beetle, Toby Dickies would probably be driving it and doing fifty-five in front of me, she reflected. Mercifully, an offspring or nephew had met him at the terminal and hustled him away.

  By the time she reached her exit, Dover wished that she had rented one of those trucks. Some of them literally created a mild shock wave as they passed, causing her to wobble, and all of them were high enough from the road so the drivers could actually see past the truck in front of them. Dover spent more time looking at rear fenders and taillights than she did watching the road. She didn’t realize how tense she was until after she pulled off the freeway and stopped at the light. She was literally squeezing the steering wheel.

  It was after five P.M. when she arrived. She had made a reservation at TemVal Motel on Whitewood Road. It looked nothing like the photographs online, which showed a freshly painted, neat little roadside motel with a kind of cowboy charm. In reality it was the kind of seedy place most people avoided.