The rest of the evening he didn’t watch TV. He kept his pen busy on a pad of paper working on one plan after another to get out from under the Hammer and his damned mule operation. By eleven o’clock he had nothing that would work. He stacked the sheets of paper and saved them. He’d dig into it the next night, and the next, until he figured out a way to turn in the smuggling operation and to nail Harley and the Hammer and not get himself killed, jailed, or thrown out of the SEALs.
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.