Apparently a lot of other people felt the same way. The place was packed with sailors, marines and civilians, men and women, and they were loading their trays. After putting mine on a table, I went back for two cups of coffee.
Grafton said little, just forked food. The pile on his tray was more modest than mine. Maybe he planned on being alive tomorrow. If he was, I wanted to know how he hoped to pull off that feat.
I asked, but he wasn’t telling. He had a Do Not Disturb look on his face.
I was tired of him and tired of the suspense. “After scattering Anna’s ashes, I have been thinking about cremation, but I was hoping to put it off for a few more years,” I told him.
Grafton was ignoring me. Outside I could see the fog turning gray. Dawn. Oh boy.
I pushed my tray back when I had eaten all the grub I wanted, which was only about half of what I had taken. My stomach didn’t feel right. Maybe I was gonna upchuck.
I was ready for a last cigarette and a blindfold.
I hadn’t had a cigarette since the tenth grade. Didn’t like that one, way back then. However, the world had turned, not for the better, and now I was ready to give cancer a chance.
About that time Grafton’s radio squawked to life. He listened a bit — I couldn’t make sense of the words.
He stood and motioned to me. Outside he said, “They’ve got a dead guy who looks like he’s Chinese over at Little Creek. Woman who looks the same way, alive with a concussion. They drove through the gate and somebody shot the guy and one of the sentries. McKiernan is sending a car. He wants me to go look.”
We certainly weren’t going to fly over there. The fog was so thick you could have sliced it and spread it on toast. I’d never seen anything like it.
With lights and siren going, the driver still took forty-five minutes to make the trip in a gray navy van.
At the Little Creek dispensary, Grafton was taken in to see a woman who said her name was Sally Chan. I trailed along. She spoke English as well as I did. Maybe better. She was distraught over the death of the Chinese man, who she said was named Choy Lee.
The doctor whispered to me that Choy had been shot in the back.
Ms. Chan talked for two or three minutes, then answered a half-dozen questions. Chinese spies, Zhang Ping, a boat.
Grafton got busy talking into his radio.
I went outside. Puked up my breakfast in the grass. I was standing there by the van trying to get my stomach to stop doing flips when the sailor who had driven us, a petty officer, lit a cigarette. I bummed one. He lit it for me.
The sailor wanted to talk. “Boy, these Internet rumors are a real laugh, aren’t they?”
“Oh, you bet,” I agreed, and puffed on my bummed weed.
“A nuke at the naval base! What a fuckin’ crock! I can’t figure out how shit like that gets taken seriously.”
“Oh, you know,” I muttered. The cigarette was making me a little light-headed.
While he yammered on about rumors and crap on the Net, I finished the cigarette right down to the filter and tossed it out onto the asphalt. The fog was the color of wet concrete, and almost the same consistency.
Another car pulled up, and Sal Molina got out. He had a little radio, too. He looked at me and asked, “Where is he?”
“Inside.”
Molina disappeared through the door.
“Ms. Chan, this is Sal Molina. He’s an aide to the president.”
Sally Chan wasn’t impressed. “What president?”
“Of the United States.”
“That plays golf all the time? That asshole?”
“Yep,” Molina said. “That one.”
“Oh.” She looked at Grafton. “And who are you again?”
“I’m Jake Grafton, interim director of the CIA.”
Sally Chan was trying to control her tears. They had told her Choy Lee was dead, and she was trying to handle that and listen to these people, what they had to say.
“You people have been doing a really shitty job,” Sally Chan said, and burst into tears.
My mouth tasted like an ashtray smelled. At least it didn’t taste of vomit.
The sailor was still running his mouth when the admiral and Molina came out of the dispensary ten minutes later. Grafton motioned to us to mount up. I climbed in the back of the van with Molina, and Grafton climbed in beside the sailor.
He was talking on his radio. “Cart, this shootout occurred a little after ten o’clock last night. Eight hours ago. Chinese guy named Zhang, doesn’t speak English. He worked with a guy who was apparently Chinese American, guy named Choy Lee. Choy is dead, shot by Zhang.
“Sally Chan said Zhang bought a boat a while back, four or six weeks ago, a Boston Whaler. Zhang and Choy liked to go fishing. Fished all day, four or five days a week, weather permitting, almost every week.”
Unintelligible babble came from the radio.
Jake Grafton motioned for the sailor to roll the van as he considered.
“I think at this point he’s probably got a clock ticking on the weapon. A shootout, an abandoned vehicle with a body in it, a dead sailor — this Zhang isn’t worried about being caught and prosecuted.”
More babble.
“Soon. Probably when that carrier comes into the bay. Lincoln.”
The sailor was staring at Grafton with his mouth open; the van was sort of on its own. Grafton noticed, let go of the transmit button and said to him, “Drive the van, sailor.”
After a few more back-and-forth transmissions, Grafton put the radio in his lap and turned around to face me. “They’ll get some choppers and jets searching for this boat when the fog lifts in a few hours. I doubt if they’ll find it. He’s long gone. Probably triggered the thing and boogied.”
“Guess we better find the weapon, huh?”
“Yeah,” Grafton said to me. To the driver he said, “Let’s drive on the beach. From the edge of the naval reservation here at Little Creek westward.”
“That’s illegal, sir.” The kid had more juice in him than I thought. Of course, exploding a nuclear weapon was also illegal, but I kept that remark to myself.
“Just do it, son,” Grafton told him.
Grafton got back on the radio, called for a boat to pick us up off the beach. Looking back on it, I think he probably knew then how the bomb had been triggered and where it might be. Of course, he never made a comment to that effect. Not Jake Grafton.
I glanced at Molina to see how he was taking all this. He was looking out the window beside him, apparently paying no attention. That pissed me off a little. He didn’t look to me like he was thinking about all the people who were going to die if the bomb went off; him, me, the winos asleep in the gutters, women, kids, illegals, everyone. All of us. I wanted to slap him. I wanted everyone to get as worried as I was. I wanted to scream.
That’s when Molina told Grafton, “The National Security Council decided to turn the cell phones back on here in southeastern Virginia.”
Grafton turned his head to stare.
“It’s political pressure, Jake,” Molina added. “The governor and Congress people are getting crucified.”
The admiral didn’t say another word to Molina. Got busy telling the sailor driving the van where to go.
I sat there sympathizing with those unhappy voters, who weren’t going to be political problems anymore if they were dead.
The boat that picked us up on the beach was a Coast Guard boat. It loomed out of the fog like a ghost. I didn’t realize it was there; then it materialized. It had a red inflatable rail around it, a little square white cabin in the middle and a machine gun mounted on a swivel on a post on the bow. They put it almost up on the beach, but not quite, so Grafton and I had to wade out to the thing and climb over the rail.