Damage Control (25 page)

“How was it for you?” she said sleepily.

“Fan-fucking-tastic!” Lying was easy, also cheaper than cabernet. Maybe he’d want her again sometime. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

“I’ve been lying here. Thinking.”

In Spinner’s view, “thinking” was something he didn’t want women to do, so he didn’t ask her what she was thinking about.

“Want to know about what?” she said.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I was thinking I’m starved.” She sat up. Light from the window shone on her. She had a really great body. Really great. But she didn’t do much with it. “Let’s eat.”

Well, there went his chance to sneak out while she was still asleep and finesse all the morning-after crap.
Was I really good? Was it really good for you? Was it really,
really
good? On a scale of one to ten—

She pulled on a robe that had seen better days—another thing about her, she wasn’t what he’d call fastidious—and headed into the kitchen. Spinner, in pants and shirt, no socks or shoes, followed, kissed the back of her neck as if he was still turned on, and sat down when he got about the response
he expected—on a scale of one to ten, something with a decimal point. She was already throwing eggs into a bowl. Going to wow him with her ability to cook. If she thought he was cruising for a wife, she was crazy.

“—so what could I do but stand there, this guy’s kidney in my hand—” she was saying. Her idea of conversation had a lot to do with talking about her work. So did her idea of simile. At one point she had said, “I was about as welcome as a colostomy bag.” Really, she had no taste, along with everything else.

She scrambled the eggs and made ranch toast and put out three kinds of jam, and when he asked her if she always ate a breakfast like that, she looked hurt.
Time to go,
Spinner thought, but then she was talking again, on and on, and he munched his way through the food and pretended to be interested and said Mmm and No Kidding and Wow.

And then she said something interesting.

“Who?” Spinner said.

“I’m not supposed to tell, really. The new head of the NCIS office. No kidding.”

Spinner’s ears were like a computer program that pinged on certain search terms. They had pinged on “NCIS.” He didn’t give a shit really about NCIS or what it did, but he knew that it was on the fringe of intelligence, and getting inside gossip about it just might be useful to a man with his connections.

“His girlfriend’s pregnant?”

“Mm-mm, tested positive and then she comes back and asks about an abortion, and we had to tell her that armed-services personnel no longer get abortions paid for since the new administration, and she goes, ‘I’m not armed-services personnel, I just live with somebody.’”

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” Spinner said, “but I think that the taking of innocent life is disgusting and immoral.” He really meant that, as a matter of fact. And he
meant it even more now that there was a conservative in the White House, where his father had said it might do him good to think the right things.

She looked at him and then at the forkful of egg she had been about to put into her mouth, and then she shrugged and said, “Don’t become a nurse, okay?”

Spinner had the feeling that she was belittling him.
She
was belittling
him.
“Life begins at conception,” he said.

She did an odd thing: she raised an eyebrow—one, not both, something he hadn’t seen her do before—and said in a voice he’d never heard from her, “Majored in science, did we?”

Spinner wasn’t going to sit there and be belittled by a fucking
nurse,
for God’s sake, by a fucking
log
who lay there and didn’t have any more wiggle in her ass than a fucking concrete
block.
On the other hand, he didn’t want to lose the story about the NCIS, so he bit back the lecture on the sanctity of life and said, as if she hadn’t shown him what a dork she really was, “So, the head of the local NCIS office knocked up his sweetie?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.” She gathered up the plates. “More coffee?”

“I really ought to go.” He meant it as a punishment.

She didn’t object as much as he thought she should.

Mary Totten had stormed back through the dark hangar, barking her shins on hard, invisible objects. She’d have missed Bill Caddis if she hadn’t fallen over him and his baggage, which formed a round, soft pile directly in her path. She dropped her bags on top of him, ripped a pair of running shoes out of it and jammed her feet into them. “You stay here!” He grunted and didn’t wake up.

She jogged back up the access road she’d just walked down from the terminal. It was a little spooky, running over uneven
asphalt in the dark in a country where they might have God-knew-what wildlife running around a deserted airport. Once, something went scurrying away ahead of her, but aside from boosting her heartbeat into near-max, the incident was harmless.

There were no, count them,
no
air charter companies along the road at Trincomalee airport. None on the side of the terminal she’d first gone down, none on the other side. And no lights. And the bus was long gone.

She jogged back down to the Navy hangar and felt her way to Bill, who was still asleep on the pile of bags. Mary wrestled her laptop out of her suitcase and sat down on some of Bill’s luggage and typed in “Trincomalee air charter.”

Fifteen minutes later, on her third try at the phone numbers she’d taken down, she got somebody who spoke English and who thought that for enough money he could come to the airfield and he could perhaps fly her to India, if, perhaps, the money was enough, because India was closed, did she know that, yes?

It took him an hour to get there.

It took them fifteen minutes to negotiate.

It took him two hours to get a single-engine Cessna 180 checked, gassed, and ready to fly.

With Bill sleeping in a rear seat, they took off into a stillblack sky where dawn was only a promise at the eastern edge.

In the light of dawn, a naval battle group is visible from space. It’s not quite visible with the naked eye, but aided by a satellite you can see the black speck of the carrier and the contrasting white V of her wake if the sun is up and the sky is clear. Her immediate escorts with their own white wakes stick to the carrier like a flock of disciplined gulls—the Aegis cruiser and perhaps one of the new Aegis destroyers; the supply ship; the gator freighter carrying a battalion or more of Marines. Farther out, the satellite will show you the radar picket ships and the anti-submarine screen. The first are widening the radar horizon of the group, offering their hulls as a sacrifice to a potential threat in order to protect the carrier from surprises. The second are clearing the path of the carrier so that no hostile submarine can deploy a torpedo.

USS
Thomas Jefferson
is making almost seven knots as she heads SSE. Most of her escorts are drawn tight about her. With the exception of the Canadian frigate HMCS
Picton,
her most distant picket, USS
Lawrence,
is only twenty-five miles north of the carrier.

From space, the
Jefferson
looks as she does every day of her operational cycle.

Distance is deceiving.

North of her and her little flock of white Vs are two different flocks. The nearest white V is only thirty miles north
of the
Lawrence,
but over the horizon and thus invisible to the carrier through most of the electromagnetic spectrum. On the
Jefferson
and the
Fort Klock,
however, they have computers and displays that show the last location of this ship—twelve hours ago. Her loyalty is unknown; her position, based on her last recorded course and speed, is a far-on circle of possibility, like the path of an electron.

She is the southern radar picket for five other Vs.

North and west again, there are only two Vs. A third ship is visible from orbit even without a satellite because of the plume of smoke that rises from her to the heavens. She does not have a wake.

Ong and Benvenuto were in touch with Valdez and Mavis Halloran by e-mail, and the four shot messages back and forth as the dawn came on. The first day-birds stirred—a peep here, a shriek there—and the eastern sky changed from black to deep blue to lavender, turning the landscape from gray to mauve, and its first details appeared—a tree, a building, a moving woman.

As the sun’s rim just touched the horizon, Valdez and Mavis broke the encryption in the USB key and e-mailed it to Ong.

The palace stirred.

Eleven women straggled to a rear door from the houses beyond the runway. Something metallic clanged, and a female voice was sharp against the bird sounds; a brief argument exploded—shouting, sudden silence. Pots and dishware clinked.

Twenty minutes later, three turbaned men carried chairs and tables out to the blacktop near the airplane, then disappeared and returned after another ten minutes with two oversized teacarts that bounced and tipped as they came along the cracked concrete beside the palace. They carried a
coffee urn, covered dishes, cutlery, English jam jars, sugar bowls, milk jugs, plates of cut-up mangoes and papayas and bananas, a silver toast rack configured like a snake whose coils held the slices, breads, freshly baked muffins, and, a jarring note, four kinds of commercial cereals in their unopened boxes.

“What, no porridge?” Harry O’Neill said, having strolled out the front door as the carts came up the walk.

“Coming, sir,” one of the turbaned men said. A silver chafing dish was coming along the walk, a pair of legs below it and a turban showing over the top.

“What you do not see, demand; what you see, command,” Harry murmured. “Coffee!” he snapped. He was wearing white linen shorts and a short-sleeved Madras shirt, well-worn and-bled, his eyes, good and bad, hidden behind sunglasses.

“Sir!” The coffee appeared; cream and sugar appeared, were waved away. Harry carried the cup up the aircraft steps, its aroma turning Ong’s and Benvenuto’s heads from their laptops, and back through the aircraft to the seat where Alan lay curled. Harry passed the coffee under Alan’s nose.

The eyes opened.

“Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops,” Harry said.

Alan groaned. “Where’s your turban?”

“Drink and awake,
effendi.
The caravanserai’s a-move.”

Alan moaned and straightened in the seat. He took the cup and drank and gave a long, pleased sigh.

“When you’re feeling human, join me under the banyan tree and we’ll talk business.” Harry went back up the aircraft and down the steps.

“You going off watch, Lieutenant?”

Madje relinquished the TAO’s chair to his relief. He saw
the ASW watch officer leaning through the hatch and dragged himself over. “Yeah.” He stretched as far as the low overhead would allow him. “Need something, Warrant Officer O’Leary?”

“Want to toss this over the side on the way to your rack?” O’Leary held up a four-foot-long tube.

Madje wondered if the guy was having him on. “Over the side?” he asked dully. He’d been on for six hours, watching the remnants of the Indian fleet to the north on ESM as they tried to stay alive. He had watched the battle between loyalists and mutineers through passive sensors. That’s us, he thought. Passive. He was almost over his bitterness that they weren’t helping the good Indians.

He was also wasted with fatigue.

O’Leary barked a laugh. “Sonobuoy, Lieutenant. I’d go up and toss it in myself, but I’m alone here.”

Madje took the tube and looked at it without any comprehension.

“Just open the cap, pull the buoy free and toss it clear of the rail. Think of it as your dues for drinking my coffee.”

“Roger that,” Madje said. He took the tube carefully. “Damn, Warrant, are we that desperate?”

O’Leary opened his mouth, thought better of it, and grunted.

Madje winced. In other words, yes.

Five minutes after Harry had left him, Alan came down the Lear jet’s folding steps; by the time he reached the ground, a turbaned man was standing there with fresh coffee. Alan crossed to a table where Harry was sitting alone, noted Ong and Benvenuto at another. Alan could smell steak, eggs, toast. “No bacon?” he said as he eased into a chair.

“The maharajah is Muslim. No meat of the pig.”

“Well! There goes one of their five stars.”

Harry was eating Weetabix. When Alan said something about its being soggy, Harry grinned. “Weetabix is an acquired taste. Soggy is part of its charm.” He wiped his mouth. “Djalik was up on the roof and found an antenna array under a permeable dome.” He pointed up with his spoon. “Invisible to the eyes in the sky.”

“You’re trying to tell me something, I’ll bet.”

“I found a bug in my room. Valuable antique—Soviet, circa 1970. Not worth piss-all with the electricity off, but a few deep-cell batteries would keep a whole palaceful of them running for a week. Feed yourself, bud; there’s work to do.”

Alan filled a plate at the buffet, and one of the turbaned men insisted upon taking it from him and putting it down on the table with cutlery and a snowy napkin. When the man was gone, Harry said, “Safe house.”

“You think?”

“Mmm.” Harry was now eating chappatis and some sort of savory vegetable stuff with rice, using the chappati to pick up the vegetables and carry them to his mouth, licking his fingers after each load. “My guess is it’s some branch of Indian intel, probably mil spec because of the old Soviet stuff.
Not
the Servants of the Earth, because they’d have the latest and coolest.” He wiped his fingers on his napkin. “I wonder if I could bribe the cook away from the maharajah and take him to Bahrain.” He belched. “If that’s breakfast, when’s lunch?”

“Major Rao sends us here; it’s an intel safe house; therefore—”

“My guess is that Major Rao is not just Army intel, but RAW, right.” RAW—Research and Analysis Wing, the most secret level of Indian intelligence. Harry put his palms on the table as if he planned to push himself away from it. “I think it’s time to put our cards on the table and have Major Rao do the same, We need all the help we can get, and so does he.” Harry pushed himself back. “Fruit—time for fruit—”

A turbaned man appeared with a bowl of fruit.

Alan told him what he had learned overnight from Valdez and Lapierre. “I’ve asked for info on nuke delivery systems from the Agency WMD Center, but we haven’t heard zip. ‘Urgent’ is not in their vocabulary.” He spread black currant jam on a triangle of toast. “Valdez broke the decryption on the gold keys and sent what he called ‘protocols’ for the Servants of the Earth sites, which has Ong and Benvenuto all excited. They spent the night looking for data on the Servants technical capabilities. Seems they’re into a lot of stuff.”

“Like arming submarines?”

“Like owning companies that bid on military contracts. I told Ong to dig for connections with the Indian Navy and submarines.” He shrugged.

Harry sucked at something between two front teeth and signaled for more coffee. “I compared the video that my contact got from the Ambur security cameras with the builders’ plans. The helicopter that left the place was heading about one-ninety or two hundred when it left there.”

Alan shrugged again. “I asked Lapierre to get satellite imagery of both coasts and put a photo analyst on it looking for something that screams ‘submarine.’” He waited while fresh coffee was put in front of him. “When are you going to put the bell on Major Rao?”

“I’m not—you are.” Harry looked at his watch. “My supposed Agency control is going to bop in here any time—rent-a-plane. My cover is pretty thin, at best, Al, but I’d rather not get naked for Major Rao.” He picked up a tote bag from the ground and handed it across. Inside were the videocam and the disks from Mohir. “Show him the stuff with the chopper. It’s in the mini-cam.”

“Your cover story’s pretty thin.”

“You can’t be too thin or too rich.” Harry stood. “I’m going to mosey out on to that runway with Djalik and an umbrella and wait for my control. You got a better idea?”

“You black guys have all the fun.”

“We be made fo’ fun.”

Harry strolled away. A few minutes later, Alan saw him and Djalik as watery miniatures in the heat shimmer already rising from the runway. A golf umbrella rose above their heads, but almost at once two hotel servants trotted out with chairs and a table and a beach umbrella.

Madje stepped through the hatch and blinked at the first rays of the rising sun. The sea showed dark turquoise. The port-side ladder was a twisted wreck, and the stanchions and chains were gone, so he had to pin the cylinder to the buckled catwalk with one hand and climb down while the sea rushed by, forty feet below his legs.

“Hey! Dickhead!” Someone above him was shouting.

He pulled the cap off the tube, turned it out over the water and watched the buoy slide free and fall. He didn’t even see the splash, lost in the blue-green turbulence of the hull.

“You!”

Madje looked up at the deck. A man in a red turtleneck and a white deck helmet stood over him, hands on his hips. “Get off the fucking catwalk before you get yourself fucking killed!” the man yelled, and added as an afterthought, “Sir!”

In fact, Madje was feeling the catwalk giving under his weight. He reached up, grabbed the edge of the buckled deck and struggled to pull himself up. Two tattooed arms grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him on to the deck.

“What the fuck are you doing on my deck without a float coat?” The man pushed his face within inches of Madje’s. “Sir?”

Excuses bounced around in his head like balls on a handball court. “I wasn’t going on deck, Chief. I’m the flag lieutenant, Chief. I was doing a guy a favor, Chief.” He hadn’t
been so rattled by being in the wrong since AOCS. “No excuse, Chief,” came the old answer.

The Chief smiled. “Can you cross the fucking deck without falling off?” he said, but not unkindly. He pushed Madje toward an access hatch on the starboard side. Then he turned and bellowed at someone else. “You saving some of that fucking nonskid to eat, Glock? Get it all on the deck, you fat fuck.”

Madje left him and started across the deck and then stopped, still blinking in the morning sun. The deck was covered in work crews, dozens of them, hundreds of men and women working in a melee of shouts and a riot of flight-deck jerseys. Teams in a line across the deck were laying steel plates over the damaged areas and cutting them to shape, welding them down, their arcs clear and blue in the new light and hissing like high-powered static. Behind them waited crews carrying more steel plate, and more. Because the main elevator was wrecked, they were carrying them up through a hatch that had been cut in the deck, with a new ladder well descending into the darkness of the hull.

Behind the welders were teams with grinding equipment, finishing the edges of the deck plates, and behind them came a phalanx of sailors with long-handled brushes and buckets of the thick black mixture that, when it set, made the flight deck safe to cross. Nonskid. The whole effort was moving from the bow aft, and Madje could see that the bow already had stripes and spot markings laid over the nonskid. From frame 100 forward,
Jefferson
was operational, except for cat three, which had born the full force of an explosion.

He walked to the new ladder well and waited for another team to pass him with a deck plate that must have weighed two hundred pounds. Off to his right, two teams of welders were bracing the twisted base of the superstructure with metal beams. The top thirty feet had been cut away, left to sink somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The missing height and
the lack of antenna arrays made the carrier look bald, but just forward of the island a swarm of electrician’s mates were installing cable and antenna dishes: one team soldered under the supervision of a warrant officer with a cable chart while another team was installing cable ducts to cover the wires.