Damage Control (36 page)

The backhoe had cut a sloping approach to the covered trench so that it could go in and out, the trench surprisingly deep—deep enough, Harry thought, for him to stand in it and still be below ground level.

“Looks like they’ve been going at this pretty hard.
Very
hard, in fact. That’s a lot of digging if they’ve only been at it two or three days.”

“Like they’re on a schedule?”

“Like they’re in a hurry.” From the backhoe’s position, he could see the beginning of a grid laid out with string, one line running right along the edge of the trench, others running at right angles. “Somebody sort of knew what he was doing, but that’s lousy archaeology—the backhoe.”

Then Djalik was waving from the edge of the trench.

“I’ll go,” Harry said.

“We’ll both go.”

“Me, too,” Bill muttered.

Harry thought that the best cover was the trench itself, and he slid down the incline as fast as he could, glad for the deepening sides to give cover and protection. Bill almost rolled down, then Mary, and they trotted forward in the shadowed, narrow cut, the smell damp and moldy, the dirt underfoot uneven, the light dim. Then they stopped.

“Oh, my God!”

Djalik was looking in under the covering, which was not tarpaulin but shade cloth, the dark mesh that is used to protect plants from tropical sun. “That’s why I waved,” he said.

Directly in front of Harry was the body of a man, feet toward him. Beyond him was another body; beyond that another. And another. And others, as far as he could see in the trench.

“You’re sitting ducks in there if anybody starts shooting from the end,” Djalik said. “Perfect enfilade.”

Harry was bending over the first body. “Mary, make Bill lie down. You cover the end we came in. Dave, cover the far end.”

“Look out for booby traps,” Djalik called.

Harry squeezed against the dirt wall to get up by the man’s head. The face was contorted, the eyes open, bloodshot. Harry went on to the next one, a woman, then the next. He looked in all at six bodies, thought he could count eleven more pairs of feet sticking up.

“They’re cold, but not a mark on them,” he said when he got back to Mary. “Jonestown.”

“What, suicide?”

“I don’t see any sign of dragging, no sign of struggle, no marks. These folks lay down in here and died. Yeah, suicide. Maybe poison.”

“Could of been gas,” Djalik said from above. “These guys pretty big on gas.”

“The point is, they’re very dead. Let’s get out of here.” He shivered. It was like standing in a grave, waiting for the dirt to come down.

When they were gathered again at the backhoe, Djalik kneeling with his weapon ready, Mary said, “With that covering and a fan at the far end, you could move something like Sarin down that trench pretty well.”

“With them all lying head to toe like that?”

“If the discipline was good enough.”

Harry stared into the dark trench, thinking of that level of dehumanization. “I’d expect to see contortions.” He knelt beside Djalik. “I saw at least seventeen in there. You got any sense there were more people than that here?”

“I don’t think there was more than two cars came in, maybe three at the most. There’s one big tire track, a small one or maybe two small ones. But you know, you put bodies in a trench and you keep a backhoe handy, I expect you to fill in the trench on top of them.” He looked toward the place where Harry had seen the roof. “You want to go up there?”

“No. But we have to.”

His stomach rumbled, and the backs of his arms prickled with tension. Now was the time when Alan would be right, or wrong; when they would find the sub, or not find it. Donuts and Snot were on station, flying combat air patrol circles in the sky to the south; and his S-3 had gone low an hour before, ruffling the wave tops as it drove west towards their first waypoint, where Alan intended to place a line of sonobuoys as a backstop in his sub hunt.

Soleck had them so tight to the sea that spray dotted Alan’s window. Outside, the hard morning light filled the sky. His maps and his digital models said that they were safe—over the radar horizon and invisible. At night Alan would have
believed it. In the morning sun, with only wavetop haze and some clouds along the coast ahead, he felt that anyone could see them. He felt naked.

“Mister Soleck? Got the pattern laid in. I’ve marked us for nine buoys; save the rest for the real pattern.”

“Roger that. Mind if I do it north to south?”

Alan looked at the Master Chief’s pattern. It was a long L, with the buoys spaced too widely apart; merely a safety net in case the sub was not where they expected it. Alan was sure that the sub would try to get under the SOE-controlled surface ships to the north. But he and the Master Chief agreed that it would only cost them some buoys and five minutes to make sure.

North to south meant that the pattern would start closest to the SOE ships. Alan thought he had them located about forty miles to the north. Too close for comfort, but far enough. “Go ahead,” he told Soleck.

The plane stood on its port wingtip, five meters off the tops of the swell. Then they were back level.

“No wind at all out here,” Soleck commented.

Alan had his hands locked on his keyboard; Soleck’s confidence at this low altitude didn’t make him feel any better. Next to him, Simcoe’s knuckles were white.

The turbofans roared. More spray gathered on Alan’s window. The coast was somewhere off to starboard, invisible because of distance and haze and the curve of the earth, but he could see a heavy cloud line and some reflected color. The coast was there, and the sub was in the estuary, or already under the ships.

Or nowhere at all, and he was dead wrong. But that line of thought didn’t go anywhere useful. The cockpit was hot; the smell of old electrical gear, dust and human occupation was oppressive. For the first time in years, Alan felt like throwing up.

“Coming up on the mark. Hang on, folks.” Soleck’s voice
was happy. Alan thought that he sounded like Rafe in the old days.

It was an old colonial house, one-storeyed, in the bungalow style the British had liked. It might once have been a comfortable place, its long verandah set on a summer night with rattan chairs and tables, plenty of servants who cost almost nothing, whisky and gin in decanters, real ice in a bucket. Now, it was decaying—not yet a ruin but on the way, its roofline swaybacked, its metal roof rust, its verandah’s floor rotting through.

“Should be buildings around the back,” Harry said. “Servants and that shit. I’ll check them out.”

“We will.” They circled the house, found servants’ quarters with small trees growing out the windows, weeds and grass unmarked by anybody’s passing, a van and a sedan parked behind the buildings, unlocked and empty.

“Nothing,” he said to Mary when they came back. “Whatever there is will be inside the house.” He nodded toward the path that many feet had made between the verandah’s steps and the trench in recent days.

“This isn’t the HQ of a major terrorist organization.”

“Kind of counterintuitive.” Harry squinted at the sagging house. “If it’s empty, we’re fucked. I’m out of ideas. You go to the embassy, I go home.” He sighed. “If there’s something in there—” He shrugged. “Either way, when I go through that door, I’m finished with the Agency.” He looked into her eyes. “You’d better believe me.”

“I thought you and I might have some fun in Delhi.”

He started to say that she had thought she might have some fun with Rao at the palace, but he didn’t. She was an attractive woman; she deserved some relaxation when this was over. But not with him. “You believe me?” he said.

She shrugged. “Okay, I believe you. You’ll regret it.”

“Je ne regrette rien.”
He signaled to Djalik to cover him from the front of the house. To Mary, he said, “Anybody moves in there, start stitching the place up with that little gun.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Knock on the door. Got a better idea?”

He moved into the sunlight from the trees, the riot gun pointed down along his right leg. He felt exposed but oddly good, glad of the heat of the sun on his back and his head. He kept his good eye on the door, trusting his peripheral vision to catch any movement. The door was wood, closed; a screen door stood open, jammed by its own warping against the verandah floor, its ancient metal screen rusted and ripped at the bottom as if a foot had gone through it.

The grass flicked against his boots like little whips. Under it, old flagstones were just visible. The steps were concrete. He went up them lightly, as if he were a guest coming to the house for the first time.

Waiting for the blast of a weapon.

And then he was standing by the door.

And he knocked.

Nobody answered. He tried the door, found it locked. He knocked once more and waited and, when nothing happened, stepped back and kicked with the sole of his right foot just beside the knob. Something crunched, but the door stayed shut, and he had to do it again, harder this time and with some urgency because he heard sounds inside the house.

The doorframe splintered near the knob; the door opened six inches and stopped, two long slivers of soft wood still connecting the bolt to the frame. Harry put his shoulder to it and threw himself down, bringing the riot gun up; the door screeched inward and caught on the floor inside, but it was open enough for him to see the length of a corridor that ran all the way from front to back, doorways on both sides, and close to him on the left an arch of dark, once-polished wood. And within, two bare feet sticking up.

He moved into the corridor, sensing Mary and Djalik moving behind him. He merely glanced into the arched opening and saw the body that belonged to the feet, as dead as the ones in the trench, two other bodies beyond it, a woman stretched on a window seat, another on the floor at an angle. He went on past but saw enough to think
Well dressed,
to register Western clothes and bright colors, to know that shopping bags and luggage were jumbled on the floor, to get that one of the shopping bags was from Harrod’s; and then he was past, back against the wall, pushing open a door and thinking
Anything they shoot from inside this room will go right through these walls and me.

Hearing sounds again, bumping, rattling.

Mary was on the other side of the corridor doing the same thing he was: he opened the door and she looked in; she opened a door and Djalik leapfrogged him and looked in; Bill, clutching his computer to his chest, tottered along behind.

Harry ran past them, gestured at the last closed door and turned into an already open one opposite it, where he thought the sounds were coming from, and found himself in a suite of rooms that led away from him, parallel to the front of the house. The room he stood in was full of potsherds and smelled of the earth; paper littered the floor, written over in small handwriting. Some effort to catalogue what they had dug out in the trench?
These people are nuts,
he thought. But pathetic, too—trying to salvage fragments of their ancient past before the world ended.

A door in the wall directly opposite was closed. He went to it and stood aside and opened it with his left hand, lunging around ready to fire, and through the doorway he could see the next room and, on its far side, a closed door. And, on the floor at the bottom of the door, a woman who was dying.

Harry went forward, checking each room as he came toward her, finding nobody else. The woman was Indian for
sure—black-haired, bronze-skinned, a red dot on her forehead. She wore a sari over what looked like a T-shirt. Her heels were thumping on the floor and her face was contorted, and one hand scrabbled at the closed door as if she was trying to get at the doorknob, but she was already slipping away. He smelled excrement, saw her back arch and her legs get rigid, and then she made a sound like a huge groan, and the movements quivered down into tremors, and then nothing.

“Poison, the bitch,” Mary said behind him. “There’s a room full of computers back there. Bill’s ecstatic.”

“Yeah, poison. Not like the others, though. Whatever she took, it hurt.”

Djalik came in. “That the one was going to backhoe the trench?”

Harry stood. “Check the rest of the house.” He put his hand on the doorknob, and it turned. The door swung open. Harry stepped over the dead woman.

This time it was Alan’s wing they stood on to turn. The ocean was right
there,
as close to him as if he were standing on a diving board over it. He forced his abdominal muscles to relax.

Then they were level again, and Simcoe said, “One away.” The sonobuoy punched out of the plane with a noise like a baby’s plate dropping from a high chair. Alan brought up his sonar screen and watched it until SNBY 1 lit up and began to broadcast.

“One’s good,” he said.

“Two away,” Simcoe said.

In five minutes they had a pattern laid with a bend at the north end to cover a turn, because Alan thought that if the sub made it this far, she’d turn north toward Pakistan. All the buoys were alive and alert, passively watching their section of the ocean and broadcasting their findings.

One buoy transmitted data on the salinity and temperature of the water. It showed that there was no layer; the water was too warm, too shallow. Perhaps down around four hundred meters, out past the one-hundred-fathom line, the sub’s might find a layer to hide in.

Alan dismissed that thought. If the sub made it that far, it would have won. Right now, everything depended on the sub having left Quilon on the ebb, headed east-northeast to rendezvous with the mutineer surface ships. That was the
only eventuality that Alan could fully cover. His mind kept wandering off down other possibilities, but he forced it back to this; either the sub was here, within thirty miles of him, or all this was for nothing.

“Ready to pop?”

“Anytime, skipper,” Soleck said.

Alan reached up over his head and began to arm the systems, warming the Harpoon on the starboard wing, choosing his chaff/flare selection and moving the counter to his chosen pattern—chaff-chaff-flare. The improved-Krivak-class frigates up north had the best ability to shoot him down, he thought, and their missiles, especially their VLS Gauntlets, would home on radar—hence the chaff. The flare cartridge was really inserted as a spacer, so that pairs of chaff cartridges would make big, attractive blobs with a decision distance between them.

Simcoe was putting his thermos into his helmet bag, tidying the cockpit around his seat. Alan did the same and stowed every pen and kneeboard card; if they were in action, the plane would dance around and anything left loose would become a high-velocity missile. Simcoe gave him a nod and switched his own data screen to ESM.

“Get me Donuts,” Alan said. He saw Garcia’s hand hover over the radio, press a button, give him a wave.

“Cowboy One, this is Chuckwagon, over.”

One click, then another. Donuts was staying quiet, just toggling his mike on and off.

“Round up,” Alan said. That meant they were going for it; popping to altitude to provoke a reaction. Then he changed to intercom. “Go,” he said to Soleck.

At low altitude, every increase in power could be felt across the shoulders as the plane accelerated; the turbofans bit hard on the thick air at sea level and the acceleration was instantaneous. Alan rocked back in his seat and his back muscles burned.

They climbed.

“Radar’s warm.”

Alan fought the mild g-force and his own fatigue to get the radar cursor to line up on the ship they had most positively identified during the long flight from the
Jefferson.
Before they passed through a thousand feet, he had it. He pushed the radar to on.

He choked a curse. Five bananas immediately displayed, and the farthest away was the Krivak-class he was looking for—it was the northern picket. The other four ships were spread across twenty miles of sea, the closest less than twenty miles north.

“Whoa!” Simcoe gasped.

Nice understatement. Alan got the trackball on the southern Krivak, already in range, for God’s sake. He switched to ISAR. The powerful radar beam swept over the SOE ship, looking like a fire-control radar, and the ship obligingly lit up, first a surface-search radar, then, seconds later, an air-search radar.
Somewhere in the night, the bastards had increased speed, and now they were close—too close. In-range close.

“Got him,” Simcoe said.

Alan put his data in the link. They were done hiding; in fact, they wanted a reaction. Alan switched to the radio. “HARM priority two.”

Somewhere to the south, Snot cycled his HARM through programmed parameters until he found two, for fire-control radar parameters.

“Launch!” Soleck yelled and the plane slammed to port and they were over, upside down and rushing at the deck, and Alan’s arm reached through the pain in his back and toggled the chaff/flare system and they were turning.

“Two contrails!” Soleck added. The plane jinked again.

“Engage,” Alan called, his voice a little high. He was holding the chaff toggle down and the sequence was firing,
leaving a column of neatly spaced chaff clouds behind them as they fell toward the sea.

“I am Mohenjo Daro.”

A hospital bed stood against the wall opposite the doorway in which Harry stood. An IV stand was on one side and a medical stand and tray on the other; on the tray, a small clay vessel no bigger than a water-glass stood surrounded by flowers—a complete relic from the excavation, turned into a shrine. On the IV stand were a bottle and a drip that ran down to the arm of an emaciated brown man with a shaved skull and a birthmark right above the bridge of his nose. The bed was raised so he could sit up. Except that he had spoken, he might have been dead.

“You are too late,” he said.

“Harry O’Neill.”

“Not whom I expected.” Daro smiled, or tried to; it was clear that he hardly had the strength to do even that. “I don’t know whom I expected. Shiva, perhaps.” He tried to smile again.

“You’re under arrest,” Mary said. “I have the power to take you from here to an appropriate authority, and I’m going to do just that.”

Daro had something in his left hand, Harry saw; he thought it might be some sort of trigger, although he thought that would have been wrong for this man. The fingers moved and he saw that what was in the thin hand was only a plastic control that led to the IV.
Morphine,
he thought.
The man’s dying of cancer.

“Do as you must,” Daro said. His voice was fading a little. “It makes no difference. I am an agent of chaos. You are agents of chaos. What we do now is a detail.”

Mary was going to say something else, and Harry put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. He said, “Your people stole
three nuclear devices from the government facility at Ambur.”

“Yes.” He tried to smile.

“Where are they?”

Daro moved his head a fraction of an inch and tried to raise it, as if he wanted to look beyond the bottom of the bed. “Is Vashni dead?”

“There’s a dead woman in the doorway. Suicide—poison, I guess.”

“Vashni—” He rolled his head and looked at the IV. “Did she bury the others?”

“I think we came too soon.”

“Well—Burial is a detail. But I had promised them that they would lie in the earth of our home.” He looked at Harry with astonishingly innocent eyes. “We were all born here, you know. When it was a city.”

“Three thousand years ago.”

“That is why I came here to die. To return.” He tried to smile and succeeded this time, a look of radiance, of certainty. “‘When it is done,’ I told them, ‘we will lie in the earth of our beginnings.’” He looked at Mary. “You may arrest me, if you like.”

Harry bent forward. “Where are the nuclear devices?”

“Oh, didn’t you find that out? You did so well even to come this far. You are an African, I think. Yes. The newest people, but with great insight. Never mind. It will all be over soon.” A spasm moved across the ravaged face; his hand moved on the control, allowing more morphine to flow.

“What will you get from destroying the American fleet?”

The face was blank, then clouded as the morphine took hold; then Daro seemed to regain strength. “I am the one who is supposed to talk in mysteries, young man, not you.” He did something like laughing. “That is a guru joke.” He gasped; the hand moved on the control again. “What American fleet?”

“The American battle group that’s heading for Sri Lanka. Where your submarine is going.”

“Oh—” His other hand moved as if he wanted to gesture with it. “I know nothing of battle groups or America. Why would I care? I am bringing an end to the world, young man. Chaos! Chaos, chaos, chaos—first chaos, then destruction, then creation. The world—your world—will end.” He smiled the smile of a rather naughty child. “And good riddance.” He seemed vastly amused. “Oh—what a world—what people—!” His left hand moved over the control and held it. Harry, realizing what was happening, merely swayed forward on the balls of his feet. The radiant smile appeared again as the morphine flowed—and flowed, and flowed. Mohenjo Daro was killing himself.

“Goddamit—!” Mary flung herself at the bed.

“Let him be.”

“He’s mine!” She was wrestling with the hand and the emaciated arm. The IV stand toppled and the needle tore out. She was panting, holding the arm, Daro’s body half out of the bed.

“You’re wrestling with a corpse. He’s dead.”

Mary heaved the body back on the bed and put fingers at Daro’s throat. “The shit, he is!”

Harry was already kneeling over the woman in the doorway. He put a hand inside the neck of the T-shirt, pulling on a thin gold chain, trying to ignore the contorted face. When he found the gold USB key, he tore it loose and walked back through the house.

“Where’s Bill?” he said to Djalik, who jerked his head. Harry followed the direction and found a room that might once have been an office. Now, its two wooden desks were covered with computer equipment; cables writhed everywhere across the bare floor. On a chair by the only window, Bill was staring at the screen of his laptop.

Harry thrust the USB key at him. “Decrypt it.”

Bill stared at him as if they were strangers. “I’d have to use up my battery.”

“Yeah, Bill. Use up your battery.”

Bill began to type, and Harry went out and got Djalik and they went looking for a generator, which they found in one of the outbuildings—a brand-new Honda with five twenty-liter gas cans beside it. The cable was neatly coiled on the gas cans. “They were done with it,” Harry said.

“These folks were done with everything, Harry.”

They carried the generator to the window and ran the cable in and started it up, and by then Bill had opened the files in Vashni’s USB key. Mary was looking over Bill’s shoulder. She looked up when Harry came in. “How’d you know?” she said.

“He valued her.”

Mary pointed at the screen.

Vashni had been organized. Her files were in folders; the folders had a master list and a descriptive index. Harry leaned over Bill’s head and scrolled down until he came to a folder titled “Final Chaos”.

“Open it.”

The file had five parts. One was the plan for the final move to “the birthplace”—the place where they were now. It even included the rental information on the backhoe. One file was about mass suicide and the means that were preferred. One was about disinformation through two SOE-owned public relations company. One was about money.

And one was about the missiles.

The submarine would sail from a small port city called Quilon under the protection of rogue elements of the Indian Navy. Once in open water, it would go deep and proceed to a datum of the captain’s choosing, and there it would launch the missiles at three targets: Karachi, Bahrain, and Mecca.

“Bahrain!” Mary cried. “Jesus!”

“Mecca.”
Harry’s mouth had turned to cotton. The holiest
place in Islam. He had been there. He had been inside the Kaaba. Tears sprang to his eyes.

And then he was in motion, yanking out his cell phone, punching in numbers with shaking fingers, and hearing the sound that meant the phone could not find a signal.

“I have to go to the plane. The satphone.”

“Call WMD.”

“I’m calling Fifth Fleet; they can get the targets to Craik.”

“Fuck Craik—it’ll take that sub days to get where it can hit all three targets. WMD can organize a real response. The Air Force out of Germany—the Saudis have a navy—”

“Mary, once that sub goes deep, they won’t find it. It’s Craik or—” He shrugged.

“Call WMD!”

Harry looked at her. He was about to say
Call them yourself,
but he saw that she meant to stay where she was. She was sitting on an intelligence coup—all those computers. “I’ll send the car back for you.” He turned and started out, shouting for Djalik. He glanced back from the doorway. “Unless you want to come now.”

“Unh-unh, baby, these computers could be huge. I don’t dare miss them.”

“Your call.”

He was through the middle room and almost to the corridor when she shouted, “I’ll give you a rain check.”

But he was gone then, not caring what she’d give him. He grabbed Djalik and started running for the car, explaining as they went.

Captain Fraser on the
Picton
heard the “Engage.” He turned to his helmsman. “Execute,” he said. His orders were already issued and explained.

HMCS
Picton
leaped forward, her gas turbines instantly transferring power to her screws. The pale gray bow slashed
through the low swell and raised a bow wave, and in seconds she was moving at well over twenty knots out of the coastal haze and into the brilliance of the morning sun.

“New contact,” his air-warfare station said. “Four bandits range six zero angels 24, noses hot.”

“Radiate,” Fraser said. The SPS-49 shot out through the morning air, hot for the first time in two days, as
Picton
announced her presence across the EM spectrum. “Watch our friends.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” his AW said.

He turned to his fire-control officer. “As you bear.”

He put his unlit pipe in his mouth and bit down on the stem.

Snot heard “Engage,” but it took a moment to register because he had just watched four new contacts blossom on his heads-up display; all detected passively and fed into the link, and they were sixty miles away and closing and a fist closed on his gut. But not hard enough to keep him from doing his job.