Damage Control (22 page)

“Tell Oats to get down on the deck and get out of there,” Madje shouted at his AW officer.

“That’s Alpha Whiskey’s call—”

“Do it.”

The two planes coming at Rose turned back east, declining the engagement. As far as she could tell, they hadn’t launched missiles. She turned with them, the g-force just nipping at her head and hips, keeping her plane’s nose hot and on them. They were less than four miles away; the engagement was moving faster than she could consciously follow, her hands and senses seeming to act of their own volition. No thoughts of a baby now; just the turn, and her ear waiting for the tone that would mean a missile launch.

“Where’s that third bogey?” she asked.

“—third bogey?” Racehorse one asked, her voice loud in the silence of CIC.

If Commander Siciliano didn’t know where the third bogey was, that meant it was
very
low, lost from her radar in the wave clutter. Madje groaned. Lash was keeping the battle group in EMCON, putting the enemy in the dark but severely limiting their own information.

“Captain Lash? This is TAO
Jefferson.”
Madje drove straight on. “The top bogeys are radiating. They know where we are,
if it’s us they’re after. Request permission to radiate. We need to locate the low bogey.”

“Negative,
Jefferson.”
Lash’s voice was calm and careful.

Madje heard somebody scrambling over the knee knocker, and then Hawkins’s voice came from behind him. “Screw him. Radiate!”

The plot on the JOTS showed the far-on ring for the possible location of the third bogey as intersecting the
Jefferson.

The third bogey
might
be hostile.

The third bogey
might
have located the battle group.

The third bogey
might
be less than a mile away. Or on top of them.

“Belay that,” Madje said, struggling to keep his voice even. He thought Lash was wrong, but he was trained to obey. He obeyed. “Captain Hawkins? Do you wish to relieve me?”

Hawkins put a hand on his shoulder but said nothing.

The digital engagement clock moved relentlessly forward. The far-on circle swept over the
Jefferson.

“Bogey One broke left. Have you got him?” Rose called to her wingman. Her radar was no longer on Bogey One; she was following Bogey Two.

“Roger, Racehorse One. Bogey One is headed for the deck and I’m on his six.”

Rose’s prey began to dive as well. The MiG-29 went to afterburner, the streaks of his engines just visible against the high-altitude star field. Rose flung her head back and forth, looking for the S-3, whose altitude she was going to pass through in seconds. On radar, it looked very close indeed.

“Break, Oats, this is Racehorse One descending rapidly. Can you see me?”

“Got you, Racehorse One. I’m turning west.”

The Indian fighter was turning slightly west, as well. Rose
swept her thumb over her missile release, tensing for the moment. She had a tone, steady in her ears, but waiting for the other plane to fire wouldn’t save Soleck if the S-3 was the intended target.

Where’s Bogey Three?
she asked herself again. She pushed her nose down and watched her radar.
Who’s the target?
Her adversary was powering away from her in his dive, probably too late to launch at the S-3 this pass, and she kicked in her own afterburner, already calculating her fuel consumption and what the S-3 had to give her. She could make one more turn, one more long burn, and then even the gas aboard the S-3 wouldn’t be enough to get her home. Racehorse Two was in the same state.

Soleck could see the scene on his datalink—five planes descending in the same volume of airspace, with Commander Siciliano at the top of the stack and the lower Bogey at the bottom. As the second Indian plane blew past him and lost the angle to shoot a missile, Garcia leveled off and banked to the east as hard as the plane could stand, a turn as sharp as any break over the island when she was going for a shit-hot landing. The heavy aircraft stood on one wing, and the fuselage, older than LT Dothan, groaned, and then they were a thousand feet above the action and safer by the second.

“I think I’ve found Bogey Three,” Dothan said.

“Bogey One is firing!” Racehorse Two said. Rose’s thumb slid across the missile release switch.

Bogey Two was right on Racehorse Two’s heels, with Rose just behind.

“Weapons free,” Alpha Whiskey called. But the Bogeys were past the S-3, and whatever Bogey One had fired at wasn’t a US plane. On her radar, her steep dive gave her a new angle and she saw Bogey Three at last, a new contact at altitude zero, wavetop height, headed north at Mach One.

“Belay that!” she called. “Bogey One is shooting at Bogey Three. Racehorse Two, turn west to 270 and look for Oats at Angels one two, over.”

“Roger, Racehorse One.” Racehorse Two sounded disappointed. Rose had time to wonder if she had made the right decision, and then she started her turn.

Madje watched the two F-18s breaking off to the west. He turned to his comms officer. “Call the beach and get them to launch the alert at Trincomalee. Racehorse has got to be out of gas.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Hawkins gave him a nod. “Where’s Bogey Three headed?”

Madje was watching the screen, now updated with the data from the S-3. Sixteen Indian ships were within three hundred miles, and eight of them had fire-control radars active. He could imagine the missiles launching from decks and the sound of the guns. And the fires. Ships would be burning.

“It wasn’t us, anyway,” Madje said, reaching for his coffee. It had been the most fatiguing three minutes of his life.

“Could have been,” Hawkins said.

“Holy shit,” Garcia said. “Holy shit.”

A flash lit the horizon and the interior of the plane, and then a plume of fire climbed out of the sea.

“What was that?” Simcoe said from the back seat. “Something hit that Delhi Class?

“There was a big flash,” Soleck said.

“The Delhi just went off the air. She’s not rotating anything. I’ll look on ISAR.”

Soleck watched the two F-18s forming up above him. They would both need gas to get home. “Ms Dothan, can you get the FLIR deployed?”

“Roger that.”

“Whoa. She’s going. Gone. She sank.” Simcoe sounded shocked.

“Just like that?” Soleck asked. “Sank?”

“Gone. Bow first. Not even a return.”

“Bogey Three flew into her,” Soleck guessed. “Got to be.”

“Holy shit,” Garcia said again.

Soleck glanced at her as she completed her turn, and flicked his intercom to front seat only. “You okay?”

“‘Course I’m okay. Don’t be a dick.”

Soleck thought she sounded rattled. Her hands were moving around a lot.

Soleck leaned back and stretched his hands, glancing at her again. Then he started calculating fuel.

The voice of the TACCO in the S-3 sounded loud as she reported the death of the Delhi-class destroyer. The Combat Information Center was silent.

“That could have been us,” Hawkins said again. “And if the Canucks miss one, we won’t even know he’s coming.”

Madje watched the screen, sure that the mutineers had just scored a victory. Only the mutineers used airplanes as guided missiles. And it proved to him that what had happened to the
Jefferson
was not an accident. But he didn’t have the energy to discuss it with Captain Hawkins or to listen to the older man spin it. He looked at his watch and realized that he still had two hours left before he would be relieved.

A modest dinner was available in what was called “the observatory.” There, under a glass canopy—somewhat filmed with time and dust, a few panes cracked, none broken—a table had been laid out with platters of Madras and Bengali foods
in quantities that would have better suited a regiment. One of the turbaned servants carried a plate, prepared by Harry, to Alan’s room; the others, newly bathed and changed, bore down on the food. By then, they realized that they were the only guests in the hotel.

In the middle of the meal, a figure appeared in the arched doorway.

“Well, well,” Harry murmured. “My favorite soldier.” He got up and crossed the space, his hand out. “Major Rao.”

“I turn up, you see, like the bad penny.”

“I thought you might.”

They sat together and talked about nothing (cricket versus baseball, the decline of the tiger population, Bollywood films) and probed each other’s defenses—and got nothing.

“Charming man, Major Rao,” Harry muttered to Djalik after dinner. “A real professional.”

“A real professional what?”

“Guess.”

It was dark above the conservatory glass by then, a few stars and a brilliant moon managing to penetrate the film. The party broke up, people wandering away, Ong following her small, quite pretty nose down one corridor and then another until she came to a set of French doors, which she of course opened to find a room lit only by the moon—in its beam, as if it were a spotlight, a grand piano. She sat, struck two chords, and a servant appeared with a hurricane lamp that he put down next to her before he rushed out, to return with another man and, this time, four lamps.

Ong revealed to the night that she could play jazz piano. Her hands were too small for stride, but she could play a wicked Fats Waller bass, and she launched into “Sweet Georgia Brown” as if she was going to knock the walls down. When she stopped and looked around, the Maharajah was standing there.

He grinned. He was holding a clarinet. “’Sweet Georgia
Brown’ again,” he said. “And-uh one, and-uh, two, and-uh—”

He could wail. He was an old-fashioned jazz fan, more Preservation Hall than Plugged Nickel, but he could wail! Panting slightly between sets, he said to her, “You are quite excellent! You are professional?”

“I minored in jazz in college.”

He frowned, perhaps remembering Cambridge. “And uh-one, and uh-two, and uh-three—”

Benvenuto and Clavers came in and began to dance. Three waiters brought in more food and drinks, and Harry wandered by, then Djalik, and they danced together briefly, Harry reminding the other man of a famous general’s line to the then secretary of state under the same circumstances, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as they two-stepped through the moonlight.

Alone in a bed big enough for four, Alan woke. The doctor had been right—hot water and muscle relaxants and a bed, and he was out of it. Now, lying in the warm, scented dark, he heard the distant sounds of music. Jazz. Some bastard on a clarinet.

“Some people have no consideration,” he said, and pulled the pillow over his head and was instantly asleep again.

Soleck was in the pattern for Trincomalee, flying on fumes, when Dothan spoke up from the back.

“I’ve got an interesting signal.”

“We’re going to be on the ground in ten minutes.”

“I got an anomalous radio signal from just off the west coast of India.”

Soleck handed the plane over to Garcia, who was already in contact with the tower. Then he brought up his ESM screen. While he watched, the signal was received again and the location resolved from a vector to an oval area of probability that covered sixty miles of southern India and a stretch of coast.

“Could be a fishing boat.”

Master Chief Simcoe spoke up. “That’s the new Indian comms suite. There aren’t many out there.”

“What has them?” Soleck asked, watching Garcia fly.

“The new Delhi-class, the Krivak refits, and all their new-construction Kilos.”

“You going to make me land this from the right seat?” Garcia asked. Soleck wasn’t sure they were going to be friends, and he couldn’t figure where he’d put a foot wrong. He liked
her.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and took the plane. “Dothan, you’d better call your radio signal in to the boat before I land.”

“Roger.”

He heard her make the call, heard the tired-sounding voice of the TAO on the
Jefferson
respond, but his mind was on the runway, which blurred under his extended landing gear until he had covered half of it. Gently, he touched the plane down, rolled out to the end, and turned straight into the big, white hangar they now called home.

“That was great, everybody. Thanks.” Soleck wanted to recapture the upbeat moment when Garcia had turned away from the descending stack, the excitement of their tracking all the Indian ships. He was full of energy.

Garcia pulled off her helmet and scratched her head. She had a lot of hair, and it went every which way. She turned to Soleck and stretched, smiled broadly, her face alight. “It was excellent.”

Dothan laughed from the back. “That was my first operational flight.”

“Debrief with LT Shawna at the hotel, okay, Garcia? Nelly? Hey!” He tried to shout over the auxiliaries. She had unplugged her helmet cord and was out of the plane before he could grab her.

“I’ll get it, sir,” Simcoe said.

“Thanks, Master Chief. See you at chow.”

He found that he was alone in the plane, a maintenance guy looking up at him curiously from the ground. He gave a wave and started to gather his gear. He knew they had done really well. It had been a big mission for him—his plan, his command. But it was over more suddenly than he had expected.

Soleck climbed down out of his silent plane and stopped to talk to the crew chief who was already under the fuselage. Commander Siciliano appeared under the wing.

“Nice job, Soleck,” she said, and punched him in the arm. “Tell your crew that was shit-hot.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” Soleck could tell she was happy, assumed
it was just the same feeling he had magnified by more responsibility.

“You tag all those contacts?”

“Yes, ma’am. We passed them on link to
Fort Klock
and over the radio to the
Jeff.”
He found himself walking next to her, headed for the hangar. “Were they, uh—going to shoot?”

“Yeah, Soleck, I think they were. But they didn’t, and we’re all home again.”

Soleck turned for the van that would take him back to the hotel.

Rose walked across the apron to the hangar, resisting the urge to pat her stomach.
All home again.
So far, so good.

Dukas didn’t get home until half-past nine, but Leslie had the pizza assembled and waiting to go into the oven, just as she’d said. Dukas had lived with other women for various lengths of time, never very successfully; Leslie certainly was the best of the lot—better than he deserved, he thought sometimes.

He kissed her, taking that tenth of a second too long to get to it that meant he was debating whether or not he should. She kissed him back with a lot of enthusiasm, although he knew she must have got the hesitation, knew what it meant.
Uncommitted Dukas, going once again through the question of what this woman is doing here.

“Hard day?” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, sort of. You were there, what the hell.” They had a house in the international section of Manama, in a development put up in the seventies by some hot-to-trot Saudi with Palestinian workers who had done all the work while he’d taken all the money. Leslie had moved into it and changed nothing, living, he thought, on the surface of his taste, his life.

She’d put the pizza in the oven when she’d heard his car. Now, the rich smell of tomatoes and cheese spread through the kitchen. They looked at each other, two people with nothing to do for nine minutes. Dukas sat on a tubular-steel chair and patted his knee, and she sat on his lap.

“Wanna neck?” she said.

“Not if it means burning the pizza.”

“I was hoping you’d tear off my clothes in a fit of passion and we’d fuck while the oven caught fire.”

“Food first.”

The trouble was, he liked Leslie. The trouble was, he didn’t love Leslie. Or he didn’t know what loving somebody meant, and so he didn’t know whether he loved her or not. The trouble was, she loved him and knew it and said it. The trouble was, being loved was for him a weight she had hung around his neck like the young arms that now encircled it, like the weight of her body on his middle-aged legs, on his irrepressible erection, which didn’t share his doubts about her.

“You glad to see me, or that a flashlight in your pocket?”

“I teach you these jokes, they keep coming back to haunt me.” He had his right hand on her left breast, more than a little interested. “It’s actually a Louisville Slugger, the Mickey Mantle model.”

“Dream on.” She kissed him; the kiss went on; he got more and more interested. “Food first,” she said and slipped off his lap.

Housing for somebody at his level in Bahrain was luxurious by the standards of what he could afford in Washington. They had everything that most people in the Middle East didn’t have—air-conditioning, refrigerator, electric stove, terrazzo floors, a Filipino maid who came in by the day, two cars.

“Know why they hate us?” He said it often. By “they,” he meant the four-fifths of the world that was neither American
nor affluent. Tomato sauce ran down his chin; he gulped wine and touched her upper lip to remove a speck of cheese.

“Because we’re us.” She had heard it often, too.

“Because we’re fucking conquerors. Everywhere we go, we set up these compounds and live in them and don’t mix and flaunt what we are in front of people who could live for a year on what I make in a day.”

She poured them both more wine and smiled at him. She had lost twenty pounds since he had first seen her in Washington; she still wasn’t really pretty, but she had good eyes and a look of intelligence and humor and enthusiasm for being alive. “What are we supposed to do—give our money away and live in a tent?”

“Don’t be a smartass!”

She picked up both glasses of wine and headed for the bedroom. “Just kidding.”

He was thinking about chocolate ice cream, and then he saw her buttocks disappear behind the archway, and he decided that he could get the ice cream later.
And here I go again.

The trouble was, he liked having Leslie around.

Most of the time.

Enrique, aka Henry, aka Bobby, aka Ricky Valdez was again slumped in front of his computer. Edgar was still running, and Edgar was still getting mostly nowhere. Whatever was encrypted in the stuff they had, it was like rock.

And Edgar was also unhappy because something kept nibbling at Edgar’s pants. Every time Edgar found that his pants were being nibbled at, he swatted the nibbler and went back to work, and then the nibbling would start again.

“Hey, Mave.”

“Yeah, what?” She sounded truly pissed, truly premenstrual-tension, get-out-of-my-face, I-hate-you pissed. Except that
she wasn’t premenstrual and she loved Valdez. What she hated was computer shit that didn’t go her way.

“Bad, huh, Mave?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“What I’m going to do, I want you to shut down what you’re working on, and I’m going to send you a page. Okay?”

“Why should I be the one to shut down?”

“Mave, this isn’t a fucking contest!”

“You just want to show me what wonderful Edgar has accomplished and I haven’t.”

“Will you please shut down your—”

“Oh, shut down this!” She hit some keys. “What I think, Rickie, if you turn your back on this shit, it’s not going to kiss your arse.” She put a CD in the drive and hit keys and waited and then said, “Okay, send.”

Thirty seconds later, he said, “What you see?”

“I see that, contrary to me expectations, dearie—” she fell into her stage Irish when she was sarcastic—“Edgar’s got no more sense of what’s happening than Finn MacCoul had tits.”

Valdez leaned over her chair. With the tip of a pencil, he pointed to a set of three characters. “What you think of that?”

“I think it’s the initials of a heavy metal group. Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, Rickie, I don’t think anything! It’s noise!”

Valdez reached over her and punched a key. The characters he had pointed at turned red, along with a dozen other clusters on the screen.

“Oh, me beating heart!” she cried. “It’s magic. What has Edgar done?”

“Edgar’s isolated an embedded program that’s differently encrypted. It’s scattered through the rest of the crap, but I guess it comes together when it gets the right order. Plus, Edgar’s giving off signs that part of it’s a worm.”

She hit keys and the screen disappeared; in its place, a
deep blue screen carried a box with the message “Your computer is under attack and recommends immediate quarantine of the program that is running.”

She looked up at Valdez. “It didn’t do that to me before.”

“Edgar triggered something. I keep getting the same message, over and over.”

She looked at the screen, tapping the knuckle of her right index finger on her lips. “I tell you what let’s do, Mister Babbage. Let’s put it on some spare piece of hardware and let it go berserk.”

Valdez raised his eyebrows. “Might ace the drives.”

“Well, it’s Harry’s money.” She took the CD she’d stored the material on and took it into the next room, Valdez following her; there, they isolated a desktop that had been the sensation of the world two years before and was now semi-obsolete and booted it up.

“Okay?” she said.

“Do it, do it.”

She put the CD into the B drive. The computer whirred; the screen filled with the same indecipherable symbols, and then the screen turned orange.
Only
orange.

Mavis hit a key, then three keys together. She typed in an order. Nothing happened.

“Fried,” Valdez said.

“Holy Jesus, that was
fast.”

Valdez tried Edgar on it The computer whirred, and the screen turned red, and the message “Edgar is working” appeared.

For three seconds.

And then the screen turned orange.

“It ate Edgar!” Valdez cried.

“If I was still a Catholic, I’d cross myself.”

Valdez, who
was
still a Catholic, crossed himself and said, “That’s for both of us.” He typed instructions into the computer and got nothing. Whatever they’d put in there
had gone through Edgar’s defenses like spit through a screen.

“Okay, so now we know that if it can take over the operating program, it owns the box. Okay.” He looked at the screen for several seconds and then muttered, “Okay,” again.

“It’s about as okay as having the thing from
Alien
living in the cellar.”

Back in their own room, he said, “I’m going to keep running Edgar for a little while; you run the other disks to see if they’re any different.”

She loaded the other materials on a CD and put it into her computer. “What I like about you, Rickie, is you’re masculine without being bossy, you know?”

“I just meant it as a suggestion, Mave.”

“Yeah, I have a suggestion for you in return, love—stick it up, will you?”

He was watching Edgar get his ass nibbled. “What I like about you, Mave, is you’re so meek and mild.”

“Latino prick.”

“Irish bitch.”

They watched their computers for a couple of minutes and then she said, “Come over here. That’s an order.” Valdez scrambled over, stood behind her, and she reached around and grabbed for his crotch, giggling.

“Mave, be serious! I thought you had something.”

“I do. Want some of it?”

“Aw, Mave—”

She hit a key. “Look.” An animated cartoon ran with promos for something called the Servants of the Earth, followed by a brief speech of welcome and encouragement on video, after which a title appeared, “The Book of Wisdom,” with a menu of choices for every day—personal crises, absent friends, parties, dangers, religious feelings, and sixteen other categories. Mavis highlighted one and brought up a set of pithy paragraphs, full of what apparently was wisdom, on
the subject of sex. What is the good of living as if your organs of sex are your enemy? The wise person lives as if sex is another door through which to walk into reality. But it is one door in a room that has many doors, and we must open them all.

“I think that means that fucking’s okay,” Mavis said, “but don’t make a career of it. Better than what my mother tried to teach me.”

“What else is on it?”

“Nothing. Three of the others the same.
Not
encrypted. Pretty pictures, terminal cuteness, a lot of wisdom and the motivational speechifying.”

“What about the last one?”

“Haven’t looked at it yet. I just wanted to get you over here, you gorgeous hunk of virility, you. I thought we might open the door of sex and see what reality looks like.” She hit a key. “Actually, I just wanted a change.” The same animation came up, the same logo. Then there was a picture of a man and the words “Kill American on sight.”

“Holy shit!” Valdez muttered. “That’s Al Craik.”

Then the screen went to encrypted data.