Jasmine looked uncertain.
"Look at your watch," he said.
She glanced down at her wrist. "Ten thirty-eight."
"You better get ready to call Talmadge's lawyer."
Still, she hesitated.
"Do it for me," he said. "And for your mother."
"I don't understand."
"This is the most interesting case I have ever seen in my entire career," Myers explained. "If you take me to the hospital now, then the case is out of my hands. And if it's out of my hands, I have a feeling we'll never figure out who killed your mother."
CHAPTER 58
California's central coast snakes northward from the missile gantries of Vandenberg Air Force Base to Big Sur's relentlessly beautiful cliffs and surf south of Monterey. In between lies a vast, sparsely populated landscape wedged in between the Pacific Ocean and the fault-line mountains to the east where people grow grapes, olives, cows, and flowers, make wine and big ideas, dig for pismo clams and occasionally the truth.
Most people either don't know about or studiously ignore the vast tracts of land owned by the U.S. Department of Defense. Some, like the 165,000 acres of Fort Hunter Liggett, appear on maps.
Others, like the scores of secret research, communications, and small-unit operational bases, remain blank spots on maps and aerial photographs, phantom installations tucked into arroyos, perched on remote ridgelines, and separated from the curious by miles of forbidding alkali flats, or sitting right over some forgettable rise in the road ahead.
San Luis Obispo sits near many of these installations, and when their personnel visit town for dinner, shopping, or a concert, there are no uniforms, no extreme haircuts or overtly military behavior to call them out of a crowd.
As Dan Gabriel jogged along Pecho Valley Road, south of Morro Bay and roughly west of San Luis Obispo, he recalled his command of just such a unit, Task Force 86M, a multiservice counterterrorist unit formed years before September 11. The Army had picked him to create this covert security and intelligence unit and concealed it in the remote, rugged hills northeast of the twin containment domes of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
The nuke provided good cover because the locals remembered not to remember it despite the emergency warning and evacuation instructions printed in the front of every phone book in the county and pasted on the backs of motel-room doors next to the regulations no one ever read and the prices no one ever paid.
Gabriel rounded the road's final curve down toward the mouth of Hazard Canyon. The morning's cool breezes hung deep with the unique littoral perfumes distilled from the ageless collision of this land and this ocean. He had dreamed on beaches and bluffs overlooking every ocean in the world, but none owned his heart like this; none resurrected in him such profound regrets.
He extended his stride downhill now to maintain the easy, thoughtful pace where the breaths came so easily. He'd begun two or three miles back where he'd parked his rented Taurus in Cuesta-by-the-Sea. Dan left the road, following a seasonal creek that wept softly into the ocean at Hazard Reef. The breezes stiffened, and by the time he reached the beach the wind stiff-armed him to a momentary standstill.
The Pacific Ocean had always incited Dan Gabriel's sense of wonder. He remembered standing with his father on the cliffs at Vandenberg, back in something like 1955 before it became a missile base and some of it still grew cows. He would stand there and let his imagination play hide-and-seek with the horizon, spawning the most remarkable dreams and desires a young boy's thoughts could possibly create.
But the most compelling of all the fantasies came when he traded the endlessly wide spaces of the horizon for the living, pulsing world of the tide pools and the ocean feeding them.
Climbing down from the table-flat cliff tops to the ocean, Gabriel would lose himself for hours-days if his parents had ever allowed it-to marvel at the life there and how it thrived. He could not remember a time when he had not marveled at how the waves came in with an almost humanlike pulse, carrying food and oxygen in a salty liquid nearly identical to human blood.
Dan wanted to study the sea. But in the mid-1950s few people had heard of marine biology, and even fewer considered the oceans a resource to be studied and preserved.
Gabriel's father was not among the few.
"How can you make a living?" Bill Gabriel asked his son. "You can't afford a wife and a house being a marine biologist. Hell, boy, even the piano player in a whorehouse has got job security and a damn-near guaranteed income."
You had to think about those things, Bill Gabriel told his son over and over. He'd survived both the Great Depression and Japanese war crimes in the Bataan death march. For such a dogmatically prudent man, risk played the same emotional notes as lung cancer.
Gabriel ran faster, harder now, trying to shake the memories grabbing tight against his heart like the coral-colored volcano limpets tiling the rocks below. Regret lingered like a shadow, so he sprinted the dune trail, south toward Spooner's Cove, but the past matched his pace.
Dan's father believed in the Army for security: national and personal. He had reenlisted in the Army after World War II and been assigned to Camp Cooke, an eightysix-thousand-acre former cattle ranch in the Lompoc-Guadalupe-Santa Maria Triangle north of Santa Barbara.
Bill Gabriel rose in the ranks and before retiring made full-bird colonel. Starting in 1957, he played a vital role in Camp Cooke's transition to Vandenberg Air Force Base, the home of ballistic missiles heading to rendezvous in the South Pacific and secret spy satellites.
Against that background, Bill Gabriel would have nothing of his only son's desire to squat with his wet ass in a tide pool watching green sea anemones procreate.
Sweat poured off Dan Gabriel as he made his way down to the small, semicircular beach at Spooner's Cove, now part of the Montana de Oro State Park, which ran from Morro Bay down to the Diablo Canyon exclusion zone. Dan skirted the cove to avoid the early-morning beach-combers, charged up the hill past the small park headquarters, and set off along the rim of the bluffs above the surf.
He had inherited his father's stubbornness. So it came as no surprise to anyone but Bill Gabriel when Dan enlisted in the Navy right out of high school, despite having stellar grades, all-around athletic ability, and a family mailbox filled with offers of scholarships from prestigious universities on both coasts. Dan saw the Navy as his back door to the ocean and the underwater demolition teams as a way to get a face-to-face view.
South of the park's campground, Gabriel veered off the paved road onto a serpentine dirt track paralleling the bluffs rim.
About the time Dan had completed his basic training and had begun the rigorous physical and mental preparation for what was then known as the Underwater Demolition Teams, Bill Gabriel mounted a campaign to reclaim his son for the Army.
Bill secretly used his considerable network of military and political contacts to petition the California congressional delegation for an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
In January 1962, President John E Kennedy created the Navy's unconventionalwarfare unit known as the SEALs. Dan and three of his UDT comrades made the cut for SEAL Team One. Bill Gabriel did not attend the commissioning ceremony.
The ceremony to mark a new beginning for the first SEAL unit brought an ending for Dan instead. After the events, the base commander, and a full-blown captain with more scrambled eggs on his hat than a Grand Slam special at Denny's, approached Dan. A fullbird Army colonel accompanied them.
The base commander introduced Dan to the captain, who presented him with honorable discharge documents. The colonel introduced himself as a friend of his father's and handed him the documents for the U.S. Military Academy.