Payback

8

Harry Towner sat in his eighth-floor office and watched his secretary come in, close the door, and snap on the lock. She had on a tight sweater and a short skirt, and had put her hair high on her head the way he liked it. She was twenty-three. He was thirty-seven and feeling it.

“You said you had some dictation, Mr. Towner?” she asked, walking toward him, swaying her hips, and smiling. She had neither pen nor pad.

Harry grinned. “We’ve got to stop doing this, kitten,” he said, rolling out his executive chair so she could sit in his lap. She did, and turned her face to be kissed. Harry kissed her. She reached out and turned over the framed picture of Harry’s wife and three kids that stood on his desk.

She slipped out of the sweater, and Harry grinned seeing that she wore nothing under it. He reached out and kissed her firm young breasts and licked the nipples. Then Harry’s head snapped up. He thought he saw a flash somewhere out in the bay. A few seconds later the sound of an explosion pounded through the windows. He frowned.

Harry never saw what killed him. The missile came almost straight down, and its 434 pounds of high explosives hit the roof of his building just over his head. It penetrated through two stories before it detonated, turning the eight-story Towner Building into a one-story pile of rubble and killing twenty-seven people.

Jonas Sanchez had sat in his twelve-foot boat all morning on San Francisco Bay near a shoal where he had caught fish before. It was ten A.M., and so far he hadn’t even had a nibble. He was seventy-three, on Social Security, and had enough cash in the bank so he could do just about what he wanted to. This morning it was fishing. Fridays and Tuesdays it was bowling in a seniors’ league. He watched the line closely. The fish here were tricky. They might be any kind that came in with the morning tide.

He was about to lift his line, with seven hooks on it baited with dead anchovies, when he heard something to the north. A second later a tremendous roar shattered the peaceful morning and a quarter of a mile away a huge geyser of water jolted upward where some kind of a bomb must have exploded. Jonas forgot his line, dropped his pole in the bottom of the boat, and jerked the starter on his motor. Five seconds later he was churning across the bay toward the landing ramp on the western bank where he had left his car and boat trailer. As he raced across the water, he saw more explosions in San Francisco just to the north. What in hell was going on? Somebody starting another war? He’d had his fill of wars and killing. He just wanted to fish and bowl.

Dorothy Johnson had just strapped her one-year-old daughter Marci in the rear seat of her car, and took the purse off her shoulder as she opened the driver’s-side door ready to get into her two-year-old Volvo sedan. She was late for a dental appointment, but she would tell them that she was the customer, they were the sellers. She’d spent enough hours waiting in that same dentist’s office. Let them wait ten minutes, wouldn’t hurt them. She’d still probably have to wait when she got there, and then one of the nurses would complain about having to watch Marci while Dorothy had her crown fitted.

Dorothy heard nothing as the pavement in front of her car shattered into a million pieces and a thundering explosion ripped through the quiet street. Hundreds of the shards of rock and blacktop slammed toward her with tornadolike force as a missile struck ten feet ahead of her car on Filbert Street. The blast shattered twelve cars, blew out windows for ten blocks around, and killed Dorothy and Marci Johnson outright, along with ten more people.

From 0814 to 0822, nine missiles fell on San Francisco or in the bay. Those in the bay caused no damage. Six struck various parts of the city, and the death toll would not be known for several days as rubble and debris would have to be cleared away.

In City Hall, the mayor screamed at his police chief. The chief was trying to get the Presidio. The few military at the Presidio were calling Washington.

The news wire services and TV networks had the story at 0829. One of TV-8’s crews was on a story when a missile hit less than half a mile away. The station sent the network a warning, and had a special report on the air seven minutes after the last missile hit.

The news alerted the military. The closest military airfield to San Francisco is Lemoore Naval Air Station south of Fresno. The large Alameda Naval Air Station across the bay from San Francisco had been closed for some time.

Military telephone and radio messages slashed back and forth, and twelve minutes after the first news report on national TV, six F-18 fighter/bombers lifted off the long runway at Lemoore Naval Air Station. They angled for San Francisco with orders to hunt for any invaders, any submarines prowling coastal waters, and any platforms that could fire the relatively small missiles. The F-18’s blasted up to Mach 1.8, and were traveling at a little better than 1,200 mph at twenty thousand feet. It took them only fifteen minutes to drop down and flash over San Francisco. They were combat-loaded with 570 20mm rounds for their Vulcan six-barrel rotary cannon, along with seventeen thousand pounds of missiles, free-fall bombs, and cluster bombs.

The pilots talked to each other. “This is Hunter Leader. I see five blast points, two fires which are being worked, and a general traffic jam. Hunter Four, Five, and Six, take a south course and check out everything along the coast out twenty miles and down to Los Angeles. The rest of us will patrol to the north same distances. Remember to look for long dark shadows near shore. There could be enemy submarines, so watch for them as well. Go. Over.”

The six planes did graceful banks, and half went in each direction. The aircraft maintained their speed and worked the area at twenty miles a minute, or a mile every three seconds.

“Hunter Leader, this is Hunter Four. I have a freighter, maybe four hundred feet long, moving north about twenty miles off the coast about opposite Santa Cruz thirty or forty miles south of San Francisco. Nothing on the ship looks unusual. I’ll slow down for another pass and see what else I can see.”

“Roger that, Four. Anybody else have any prospects?”

“Hunter Leader, This is Six. I have a medium-sized oil tanker loading somewhere off Oxnard and Port Hueneme. Not much of a candidate for a shooter. Over.”

“Roger, Three. Copy.”

“Hunter Leader. This is Four. That freighter is flying a Panamanian Flag and there’s some activity on deck, but nothing frantic. My guess she’s making about twenty knots on a generally north course. Over.”

“Hunter Leader. There has to be something out here. From the looks of the blast sites, those had to be fairly small, short-range missiles, say up to three hundred miles. Hunter Leader to Homeplate. Should we extend our search out to three hundred miles? Over.”

“This is Homeplate. If you find nothing more, extend, Hunter Leader. Over.”

“You heard the man, Hunters. Let’s do it. Same pattern, work a hundred miles north, south each half and out to three hundred. Move it. Over.”

In San Francisco veterans of the Gulf War quickly labeled the missile hits as being made by Scuds, the missiles used extensively in the Gulf War by Iraq. They had a payload of 434 pounds of TNT, which would make a nice bang, but nothing like the longer-range missiles with much larger payloads that most nations in the world had available.

San Francisco went into a state of shock. Public services kept working remarkably well. Hospitals and clinics were overloaded with the wounded. Every man in the police force was called to duty, and protection was put around the mayor, City Hall, and all federal buildings in the city. As the day wore on, the first panic passed and the shock began to wear off. In the blast-effect areas, neighbors were helping neighbors who hadn’t even known their names before.

In San Diego, Commander Masciareli received a message directly from the CNO to put Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven on standby alert. They were not to leave the base until released. There would be a CH-46 fully fueled on standby. It would have machine guns mounted in both side doors. The two gunners and pilots would be on standby at North Island Naval Air Station until further notice. Canzoneri was on an emergency leave due to a death in the family in San Diego. He was recalled, and the platoon was at full strength. Murdock and DeWitt continued with their light workouts and training schedule for the platoon.

“This alert could last for days,” DeWitt said. “We can’t just sit around and wait for the phone to ring.”

At six P.M. the President made a statement to the nation and the world, decrying the atrocity of the sneak missile attack and vowing that the perpetrators would be found and severely punished.

The entire West Coast military establishment and all federal offices had gone on stage-three alert an hour after the attack. Navy and Air Force planes flew search missions along the entire coast, interconnecting to be sure every inch of the coastal Pacific was covered. All federal buildings had total security, with armed guards on each door and two photo IDs needed to enter.

Patrol planes out of San Diego reported six freighters en route, some incoming, some outgoing. The Panamanian freighter first sighted had continued its northerly course.

For the first time in memory, the SEALs posted guards along the six-mile strip of the Pacific Ocean connecting Coronado and the base with Imperial Beach to the south. The men walked two-hour tours, were off four hours, and on for another two hours. They would be on duty for twenty-four hours, and then a new guard would take over. The sentries all carried M-4A1 rifles with full magazines of live ammunition.

The individual SEALs reacted to the full alert in various fashions. Ed DeWitt and Paul Jefferson held a marathon chess series. At the end of the first day, Jefferson was ahead five games to three. Jaybird and Howard went to work on sit-ups and pull-ups, challenging each other who could do the most. Howard won, and they moved on to push-ups. Jaybird won with 214.

Murdock kept in close touch with Commander Masciareli, his boss, but no request had come for their services.

The day after the bombing, San Francisco settled down and continued to clean up the debris and repair the damage. The final death count was 132. No nation or organization had claimed responsibility for the missile attack.

Military specialists were searching for pieces of the missiles. They already had several hundred fragments that would be analyzed to find out exactly what type they were, the source, the type and make, and who those particular missiles had been sold to.

United World Flight 434 rolled along the taxi strip, waited its turn, then swung onto the main runway and gunned the big jet engines. The three-jet aircraft leaped ahead, rapidly gaining speed, and lifted off on schedule heading toward the end of the runway with the waters of the Columbia River just ahead.

Before he was fifty feet off the ground and well before the end of the runway, Pilot Jan Jenkins saw a curious trail of smoke come from below and ahead of the big jet. The former F-14 Navy combat pilot had seen them before, and it made him scream. “Missile incoming,” he bellowed, and the copilot snapped her head around just as the smoke trail and the aircraft met. The explosion ripped into the left wing, igniting the full fuel tank in a huge ball of fire as the big jet slowly slewed to the left and dove into the Columbia River before the pilot could pull the throttles back. The furious splash the jet created sprayed water two hundred feet in every direction. The silver bird hung on the slowly flowing Columbia for a moment, then slid beneath the water before anyone could escape. Moments later there was only a roiling splotch on the serene Columbia’s surface before that faded and there was no sign of United World Flight 434 out of Portland, bound for San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Portland broke the news first with a network bulletin about a plane crash. The network didn’t interrupt normal programming, but put it on their sheets, and it would play on the first network newscast.

An hour after the crash, TV-7 in Portland received an envelope with a videotape. It came by a bicycle messenger who vanished quickly. It went to the desk of Rolland Hemphil, the news editor, who let it sit on his desk for twenty minutes before he screened it. Then he pushed it into his player and sat in front of his monitor. Less than a minute into the tape he began screaming for a reporter.

He played the short tape, rewound it, and had twenty curious staffers watching as he played it again.

The tape started with a shot over the shoulder of a man in a baseball cap. Then it went in close on a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade. It showed the man lifting the weapon to his shoulder. The camera panned up and it viewed an airliner starting its takeoff on the familiar Portland Airport runway. The camera followed the plane, then pulled back to include both the plane and the gunman. When the plane was a hundred feet away and not fifty feet off the concrete, the gunman fired.

The video plainly showed the shot and the smoke trail as the rocket jolted upward directly into the path of the jetliner and exploded on the left wing. The resulting blast ignited the jet fuel in the left wing tank and a huge ball of fire blossomed. The jet screamed overhead.

The camera panned with it. The plane gained altitude for another ten seconds, then turned to the left, where the burning wing couldn’t provide lift, and then the jet passenger liner quickly crashed into the Columbia River.

Hemphil pulled the tape out and gave it to an editor. “Get this ready to broadcast. I’m calling the network right now.” Two minutes later Hemphil had the go-ahead and a local announcer broke into network broadcasting.

“This is a special news bulletin. A terrorist has just shot down a scheduled airliner taking off from the Portland, Oregon, International Airport. The terrorists took this unedited tape and sent it to our office. There is no indication who these men are, or even their nationality. We warn you that this is graphic and young children shouldn’t be allowed to view it. Here is the videotape just as we received it.”

The network ran the tape exactly as it had come into the station. When it was over, the announcer went back on. “We repeat, the jetliner went down into the Columbia River and it is doubtful if there are any survivors. We have learned from the airport that the plane was United World Flight 434 bound for San Francisco and Los Angeles. We will have a list of the passengers, but the names will not be made public. The airport reports that there were one hundred forty-eight passengers on the plane and a crew of nine. There has been no indication who the gunmen were who shot down the plane. Nothing on the videotape indicated this. There has been no public notice claiming the terrorist act. We return you now to your regularly scheduled programming.”