Damage Control (14 page)

“You’re telling me this for a reason, right?”

Harry nodded. “I’ve been given an assignment in India. A big layout at a place called Ambur. It got hit by part of what-ever’s going on here, and it’s a secret nuke storage site. That’s why I was with Pilchard.”

Alan looked at him. “You mean you’re not flying back to Bahrain.”

Harry nodded.

“So none of us is flying back to Bahrain.”

“You’re to call Admiral Pilchard when we’re through talking.”

Alan stared at him. He frowned. “You mean, you’ve been given an assignment by the Agency, and I’m going to be given an assignment by Pilchard.”

“I don’t know what you’re going to be given.”

Neither of them was smiling now.

Alan said, “You should have told me.”

“Is that the way you’d want your assets to behave—they out themselves to their friends?” Harry’s voice rose. “Is that the code now, you only blow your cover to your best friends and family members and the people you sleep with?”

Alan slumped down beside him. “I’m sorry, man. Shit, of course.” Alan laughed. “‘I thought an exception would be made in my case.’ You know that joke? Jesus, I’m sorry.”

“Hurt your feelings, huh?”

“Yes, if you have to ask.” Both men laughed. Alan clapped his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Okay, your secret’s safe with me, Sidney. How do I call Pilchard?”

Harry pointed at his plane. “He’ll want everything you know. I don’t think he’s made a decision about what you do next.”

They stood up, pulling their grass-wetted clothes away from their skin. Harry said, “Sidney?”

“Riley.” He laughed and put his arm over Harry’s shoulders, and they walked toward the jet.

Harry’s airplane was equipped as a traveling office and communications center—secure sat phone, radio, computer connections. Alan put Lieutenant jg Ong in a forward seat to send the contents of the six gold USB devices to Fifth Fleet while he and Harry sat in the rear.

“Once you’re on, I’ll move up and do some work,” Harry said. “You want privacy, and I don’t want your jg up there knowing too much about my connections.”

“Look out, or she’ll have you working for her. She has a way with men.”

“I have a way with women.”

“You’re married.”

“Yeah?” Harry grinned and showed him how to work the equipment, until he was through to Fifth Fleet and the screen said secure, and then Harry moved away. He was put through straight to Admiral Pilchard.

“Al!’

“Yes, sir.”

“My God, it’s good to hear that voice. We were worried about you. Listen, I’m having people paged, and I’m going to put this on a speaker-phone as soon as they’re here. In the meantime, tell me what happened yesterday.” The voice was weary.

Alan ran through it as succinctly as he could; he’d spent
part of the night getting it straight. Pilchard didn’t interrupt, but when Alan was done, he said, “This device the Indian commodore put into the JOTS—it had computer graphics on it?”

“Animation, sir. Really a little commercial—maybe a recruiting message. I’ve got somebody checking into the Servants of the Earth right now.”

“They wanted to do something to the JOTS, that fails because you catch him at it, they go right to violence?”

“He shot Borgman because I’d told her to get in touch with you, urgent.”

Pilchard was silent. Alan could picture him, knowing his office—the thin, balding man sitting in short-sleeved khakis behind the big desk, phone caught between his head and his shoulder, playing with a paper clip, as he did when he was troubled. “You think there’s a connection with the
Jefferson?”
the admiral said.

“I don’t know enough about the
Jefferson
to say anything, sir.”

“You hear that we also lost an S-3?” Pilchard told him about Stevens’s plane, said it could have been an act of war.

“Where I was, it looked more like a mutiny, sir—Indians fighting Indians—”

“Yeah, well, we had a report of one Indian destroyer taking out another. Mass confusion.” Pilchard said that they knew now that the Indian Jaguar had been on a missile profile as if it was flying an exercise missile strike and should have pulled up, but eyewitnesses from the
Fort Klock
and in the air said there had been no attempt to pull up: the plane had gone into the deck exactly as if aiming at it.

“How’s Admiral Rafehausen, sir?”

“Lost a leg. Burns. He’ll probably recover.”

Not his career.
Inwardly, Alan winced.

Pilchard gave him the
Jefferson
‘s stats: two hundred and
twenty-seven dead, almost four hundred injured, most with burns; sixty percent of the air wing destroyed on the deck, the rest trapped on the hangar deck with no functioning elevator. Eleven planes had been in the air and had bingoed to Trincomalee. “Now—as for you and your friend O’Neill. He tell you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve had confirmation from the Agency. Remind him that this is a Navy operation, and he and his folks work for me, not the other way around, okay?”

“Yes, sir, and, uh—‘operation?’”

“Yeah, that’s what I was coming to.” Pilchard’s volume changed. “Hey, Jack, how you doing—” Pilchard talked to somebody and then came back. “Al, you still there?”

“Here, sir.”

“Okay.” He told Alan what Harry had already told him about Ambur and possible nukes. “I have to know what the hell that attack means, Al. If it was just—what the hell, just what? Just another piece of terrorism—by some people who didn’t know there were nukes there and wouldn’t know a nuke if they fell over one, that’s one thing. But if that attack was connected with the nukes—if, worst-case, the attack was to
get
the nukes, we’re in deep shit. I mean, you understand the implications if somebody’s running around India with a couple of nuclear warheads.”

“Especially with an unprotected carrier group sitting only a few hundred miles away.”

“O’Neill is there to get you and your guys out. But his people have told him to find out what the straight story is on Ambur and the nukes. And I want you to support him.”

“Yes, sir.” Alan kept his disappointment out of his voice. “How about my people, sir?”

“Use them. Doesn’t matter for what, Al. That aircraft isn’t coming back to Bahrain until you guys are done. So your
people are there, unless India clears and we get something in sooner.”

And they’re mine to get home. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m sending you into the shit, Al, but I got no other choice.”

“Yes, sir.”
And thank you for giving me the chance to volunteer, sir.
“Who’s in charge, sir? Between me and O’Neill, I mean.”

“You operationally. You all the way, in fact. But O’Neill’s got the contacts there.”

“And the aircraft, sir.” And the MREs and the weapons and the money and the clothes. “Related matter, sir. I want to send the contents of these USB keys for decryption; we can’t decrypt them here. I’d like to use O’Neill’s secure link with his Bahrain office. There’s an ex-Navy man there named Valdez who’s the best computer guy I know. Better than anybody you have. He was my wife’s petty officer before he left the Navy, top secret clearance back then. Can I use him?”

Pilchard said nothing for several seconds. Alan could picture him, rubbing the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. Then he said, “I have a list that clears a Valdez, a Djalik, and a Moad as already approved by the Agency.” That was news to Alan. In other words, Harry had staffed key posts in his security firm with ex-Navy people who also had become Agency NOCs.
What your best friend won’t tell you.

“Okay, you have permission to use O’Neill’s contacts and his computer guy. Get on it. Now—last item, Al: you’re walking into a diplomatic minefield. The White House is not exactly behind us on this. There’s mixed signals, but what I’m getting from the President and the NSC sounds like they’re satisfied if it turns into a regional war that leaves us out of it. Even though we all know that it wouldn’t stay a regional war. I mean, I had one of those assistant-to-the-president phone calls last night kind of probing the edges of ‘What if we brought the
Jefferson
into a friendly
port and just got out of the Indian Ocean until things blow over?’ I hit the ceiling. They won’t quit, though. It’ll get worse.”

Then somebody put the speaker-phone on and Alan went over much of it again. There were questions, many of them unfocused. The disaster on the
Jefferson
had knocked the legs from under all of them, and they sounded stunned, some of them snappish and some dumbfounded. He wondered if he’d sound any better if he was there, starved of information, being badgered for answers.

Still, it would be better than being in a country that was tearing itself apart.

Maybe.

Madje felt better in a clean flight suit, despite a tepid shower and a cheek gouged by his hurried cold-water shave. He went all the way forward to the dirty-shirt wardroom and found the overhead buckled and twisted, the space empty except for a work party cutting at the buckled metal with torches. Then he worked his way aft on the port side, past repair parties cutting away damage and fire parties standing idle or sleeping up against the bulkhead. Twice he crossed knee knockers to find the section beyond the hatch flooded a foot deep with water and foam runoff from operations on the flight deck. He waded through both until he passed the deserted flag spaces and squelched up to the hatch for CIC. It was open, a reassuring change from the night before. He stepped over the knee knocker that kept the hatch well above the level of water runoff and craned his head around a smaller hatch to look into the ASW space to the right. He could
smell
the coffee. Chief Warrant Officer O’Leary was a stickler for coffee, and he was presiding over the ASW watch in person, a parallel ruler in one hand and a grease pencil in the other. Madje caught his eye and O’Leary, a short man with a broad
face and a moustache to match, waved him in. “Looking for coffee, Lieutenant?”

“Dirty shirt’s closed,” Madje muttered as he took a clean cup from the rack by the chart table.

“You’re welcome, boyo,” O’Leary said as Madje took a swig. “How’s the admiral?”

“He’s—uh—better than you’d expect.” Madje took another gulp of coffee, refilled the cup. “He wants to know what’s going on.”

O’Leary pointed to the chart table, where a broad blue stripe showed the carrier’s track. “We’re headed for Sri Lanka. We can only make about five knots.”

“What are you tracking?” Madje asked.

O’Leary shook his head. “I’m dicking around. There’s a sub out there, right? An Indian Kilo-class. I’m keeping a far-on circle updated to show where it might be.” The forward edge of the circle was still fifty miles north of the carrier.

Madje looked at the penciled lines radiating from a note in the upper right margin of the chart. The note said
position at startex?
Madje was an A-6 guy; he didn’t know anything about subs, but he wanted another cup of coffee, so he looked interested. “So he
could
be heading to intercept us. Got anything to look for him?”

“Nothin’. All the helos are still doing search and rescue or moving casualties. Cat two shows green but the TAO’s not ready to send any planes off until he’s fired a test load; rumour is it has steam problems. They’re replating the deck aft of 133 as soon as they can; then they’ll rig new arresting gear. I’m trying to get the TAO to move a frigate up north with a tail deployed. I think he’ll go for that now the fires are out.”

“The TAO? Not Captain Lash?”

O’Leary blinked, swallowed his coffee and looked away. “Not Lash,” he said carefully.

“Any reason to expect the sub’s hostile?”

“Nope. But I got nothin’ better to do, and frankly I gotta assume he’s hostile until the Indian Navy gets its shit together.”

Madje nodded, finished his second cup of coffee and squeezed around the chart table. “Thanks for the coffee.” He wondered if the sub problem was worth repeating to the admiral. Talking to O’Leary brought home to him how difficult it would be to sort information and pass it without either taxing a wounded man or oversimplifying the tactical situation.

After his telephone call with the admiral, Alan talked to his assistant at Fifth Fleet intel, a lanky lieutenant-commander named Lapierre, whom everybody called “Dickie.” Alan went in detail over everything that had happened, said again that he wanted somebody to recover Borgman’s body.

Finally, he called home, got the nanny, then Mikey. Rose was dressing, he was told, but suddenly she was there, gasping for breath. “I heard the kids,” she said. She sounded raspy. She yawned—she had got in at four, she said. They talked parent talk, then lovers’ talk, then business—the
Jefferson,
the bingoed planes at Trincomalee. She was going there soonest, she said; somebody had to negotiate with the Sri Lankans, and she was it. “De facto, I’ll be taking command of the
Jeff’s
bingoed planes.” She hesitated. “I’m F-18 qualified.”

“Jesus, Rose—you’re not combat qualified!”

“Well, no—but they need everybody they can get. It’s a mess.” She made her voice cheerful. “Chris Donitz is senior officer; he an okay guy?”

“Donuts is great.” Although, he thought, he’d never seen Donuts in a command situation. “I hear Ev Soleck’s down there, too.”

“Yeah, from the sound of it, he should be getting an air medal, at the least. How’re you?”

He gave her a sanitized version of the day before, skating quickly over “Kill on sight,” getting to the gold devices and the Servants of the Earth.

“Hey, that rings a bell,” she said. “Remember Admiral Roopack? From the Indian embassy, he pissed you off at the Indonesians’ party because he—”

“Held your hand for half an hour and kept looking down your dress, yeah.”

“It wasn’t half an hour.” She giggled. “He did sort of have his nose between my boobs, though. Anyway,
he
mentioned Servants of the Earth. He called me last night to tell me that his country was ‘undergoing a small upset,’ blah-blah-blah, and I tried to pick his brains about it, and he said it was under control, blah-blah-blah, and he rattled off a dozen or so groups that might be causing what he called ‘these localized troubles.’ You can maybe talk to him when you get here.”

“Well—uh—Pilchard’s given me another assignment. That’s for your ears only.”

Her voice turned hollow. “How long?”

“Not long.” As in It won’t be long before we either knock this or get killed.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“We obey orders, babe.”

“Yeah.” Long pause. “Trouble is, I love you.”

“Yeah.” Pause. “What a cheerful couple.”

“Yeah.” A sigh. “Talk to Mikey while I cry.”

Mikey wanted to talk about hitting a triple in a pickup softball game. A welcome change.

Madje, trying to be Rafehausen’s eyes and ears, made his way to the Tactical Action Officer’s spaces and found a new TAO in charge—the ship’s intel officer, an aristocratic O-6 from Massachusetts named Hawkins.

“Morning, Mister Madje.”

“Morning, sir. The admiral sent me around to see what was happening. He wants a report.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard this morning.” He swiveled his chair to look down his nose at Madje. “You qualified as a TAO?”

“I’ve done the quals, stood a few watches as flag TAO.”

“I thought you could hack it. We’ve only got four on the watch bill right now. Can you do it?”

Madje couldn’t think of a reason not to do it; he had no duties when the admiral was asleep. “I can help out, sir. But the admiral—”

“Good. When you don’t have other duties, report down here. Want a dump for the admiral?”