Against All Enemies

To the 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron,
The Wolfhounds, The Queen’s Own,
Who served at Camp New Amsterdam,
the Netherlands,
1954–1994

11:45
A.M.
, Thursday, March 4,
San Francisco

The hostess for the rooftop café at the San Francisco Shopping Emporium made her decision the moment Hank Sutherland got off the elevator. She would jump him to the head of the waiting list. There was something about Sutherland’s boyish face, barely controlled sandy brown hair, and friendly hazel eyes that appealed to her. It was a simple decision made for the most human of reasons. Yet, it was to mean so much.

At forty years of age and five-feet-ten-inches tall, Henry Michael Sutherland was not an imposing man. Nor was he considered handsome. But women found him extremely attractive and men trusted him. He cultivated a slightly hunched-shouldered stance to enhance his image as a deputy district attorney and let an impeccably tailored dark suit hide his paunchy body.

“I’m waiting for a reporter,” Sutherland told her. “Marcy Bangor from the
Sacramento Union
, short dark hair.” He almost added “young, pretty, and ditzy” but thought better of it.

“I’ll tell her you’re here,” the hostess said, pleased to be of a little more help. She led Sutherland to a corner niche against a side wall. He had barely sat down when Marcy Bangor joined him. She gave him a warm smile and pulled out a microcassette tape recorder and her digital camera.

“How is the case going?”

Sutherland considered his answer. Interviews with the press were always tricky. “I’ve never seen anything like it in an appeals court. It was crazy in there.”

“The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,” Marcy said, “is crazy by definition.”

Sutherland nodded. He had appeared before the Ninth three times in the past defending cases he had successfully prosecuted. “Jonathan Meredith was there.”

Jonathan Meredith was always news and Marcy became very interested. “Did he say anything? What was he doing? Any idea why he was there?”

Rather than talk about his suspicions, he shook his head. “The judges were afraid of him, the audience was packed, there were five bailiffs there, a lot of noise. It was weird and I kept wondering who was running the show.” Their waitress, a pretty young college student from the University of California across the bay at Berkeley, came over and took their orders. She called him “sir” and, suddenly, he felt old.

Sutherland recounted his day in court. But Marcy wanted to hear about Meredith, not an appeals case involving a questionable roving telephone intercept that could get the conviction of four terrorist bombers overturned. “What do you make of Meredith?” she asked.

“Off the record,” he said. Marcy gave an audible sigh and turned off her microcassette tape recorder. “He’s a demagogue in the making, complete with a fanatical band of followers.”

“You mean his First Brigade.”

“And his Neighborhood Brigades,” he replied, thinking of the next case on his docket. “Meredith already sees himself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue on inauguration day.” He fell silent when the waitress returned, carrying a tray with their food.

What happened next would puzzle Sutherland for the rest of his life. The waitress just seemed to rise in the air and fly across the patio, two or three feet off the floor. The tray moved beside her as if it were in free fall. He wanted to say something witty or make a telling comment or tell Marcy to take a picture. But he sat there, dumb-founded by the sight. It seemed to take forever for the girl to blow up against the far wall.

Then the blast hit.

The sound roared over him and pounded him against the wall. He felt his back grind into the bricks as his feet came up over his head. He watched Marcy’s miniskirt being blown off as he slipped down the wall into a sitting position. Another part of his mind told him it was all happening very quickly but that he was registering it in slow motion.

Then he tried to breathe. He couldn’t.

The blast had knocked all breath out of him, and for a moment, he was on the edge of total panic. With a calm that surprised him, he placed a fist against his chest and performed a Heimlich maneuver. He sucked in the dust and soot that had saturated the air. He coughed out and breathed in. Marcy was slipping away from him as if she were on a slide. He reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling her to him as the floor fell away. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs that were enfolding him in a gossamer haze. His vision cleared.

“Whaa,” Marcy moaned. He quickly checked her for bleeding, and other than a few scratches and cuts from flying debris, she was fine. He tasted blood but an inner voice told him he was okay. He looked at his feet. They were hanging over the edge of a precipice, six stories down to the street. What had been the front half of the building had simply disappeared. He could feel the floor shake as it started to collapse underneath his weight. Without thinking, he scooped Marcy up in a fireman’s carry and moved against the back wall. Marcy’s camera was still clenched in her hand and one shoe was gone.

Now he was standing over the semiconscious waitress. “I’m okay,” Marcy said. He bent over and lowered her to her feet. Smoke billowed up from the street below and washed back toward them. Marcy stood there, one shoe missing and her skirt gone, and snapped a picture. That simple act brought Sutherland into full consciousness.

The San Francisco Shopping Emporium had been bombed and the three of them were trapped on the slowly collapsing roof. He looked around. What had been a lovely rooftop café was now a grotesque slaughterhouse littered with shattered, twisted bodies. It was a scene from Hell, worse than any nightmare his subconscious could conjure from the depths of his primeval fears and obsessions. And he knew. They were alive only because the hostess had seated him in a sheltered table in a corner niche.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. The waitress groaned and he bent down. She had a heavy gash across her cheek and her right shoulder was pushed back and her arm twisted at an obscene angle. She had taken the blast full on and was lucky to be alive. He gently picked her up in his arms and she screamed in agony. “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. “Where are the stairs?” The girl’s good hand pointed to the left before she passed out from the pain. Marcy pulled off the girl’s shoes and slipped them on. She led the way and stepped carefully over the debris that littered what was left of the floor. He was vaguely aware of a misshapen ball painted with a man’s features. He fought the bile that threatened to choke him when he realized it was a man’s head.

Marcy led the way through an opening and found the stairwell. It was earthquake proof and still structurally intact. She opened the door and smoke billowed out. The blast had turned it into a chimney. She let the door slam shut. The sound of the floor giving way echoed over them. He kicked the door open. “Go!” he shouted. He held his breath and plunged into the smoke. Badly disoriented, he moved in a sideways motion, feeling his way down the stairs with his left foot. His lungs were bursting. Suddenly, he was clear of the smoke. When he turned and looked back, all he could see were Marcy’s bare legs hanging from smoke. Again, he shook his head. He wasn’t crazy. The blast had blown the stairs into a steep angle and she was climbing down after him, coughing and sputtering.

The sound of the collapsing roof drove them down the stairwell. The steps were increasingly twisted into bizarre shapes as they descended, and finally, they could go no further. They were standing on the edge of a pit. “Where are we?” Marcy asked.

“On the first floor, I think.” He ducked as debris fell on him. The girl moaned. He gently laid her down and looked over the edge. “Yeah, I think that’s the bottom. About fifteen feet below us.”

Marcy did the sensible thing and screamed for help.

A teenage boy appeared out of the gloom and directed the beam of his flashlight upward. “I’ve got an injured woman here,” Sutherland shouted. The boy yelled back acknowledgment and disappeared. After what seemed an eternity, he was back with two other men. More debris fell down the stairwell.

“We’ll get you out of here,” one of the newcomers shouted. Something about his voice was vaguely familiar. He held up his arms to take the girl. Sutherland told Marcy to grab the girl’s feet while he lowered her over the edge. He used her clothes as handholds as he lowered her head first into the rescuer’s waiting arms. Then he lowered Marcy over the edge by her hands. “We got her,” the man yelled. Chunks of concrete started to fall and Sutherland jumped, slamming his head against the floor and knocking himself out.