Damage Control (8 page)

Alan watched. And waited. Nothing happened—and then the officer’s cell phone must have rung, because he took a device from a pocket and put it against his ear. An alarm went off in Alan’s head: these guys somehow had a cellphone net that was still functioning. And then the officer reached inside his shirt and withdrew something, the gesture alone telling Alan that it was on a chain or lanyard. The thing gleamed in the sunlight. Then the officer took it in his fingers and connected it to the cell phone.

“Bingo,” Alan said. Fidel pulled his brows together. Alan felt for the thing he had taken from the Indian commodore and put, yes, right there in his left-hand pants pocket. He had pretty much forgotten it in everything that had happened; now, he took it out. It lay, golden, shell-like, in his palm, the USB-port connection a small extrusion at one end.

“What the hell’s that?”

“Something that tells me those aren’t the good guys. Come on.”

Admiral Pilchard banged his secure phone into its cradle and opened a desk drawer and then slammed it shut with all the force he could muster. He buzzed. “Get the flag captain in here!” he shouted.

He tried to do paperwork while he waited, but he couldn’t, and she was there in thirty seconds, anyway. When she came in, he stood up and put his fists on the desk and said, “Washington knows! I just got my ass chewed by the President’s personal political cocksucker because I didn’t inform them
first
about the
Jefferson!”
He banged a fist on the desk and took two strides away. “Not a word about the danger to the fleet—not a word about the kids who may be dead or dying—!” He swung into a vicious parody of Southern smarm. “‘Don’t you ri-uh-lahze the po-li-ti-cal potenshee-al foah damage heah?’ He’s reading
me
out because I didn’t call him personally so he can do political damage control!” He stared at her. “Well?”

“Well, sir—” She spread her hands. “I think we’ve got somebody who’s leaking top secret information.”

The hole under the fence was big enough for Fidel to wriggle through on his back. Clavers followed, then Ong, pulled through by the two inside. Benvenuto went in on his belly, jumped up and brushed himself off with a surprising burst of vigor.

“Save it; you’ll need it,” Alan said. He wriggled through, face up.

They crouched between two cars in the row nearest the fence. He looked at Ong. “Lieutenant? Can you make it to our vehicle?”

She nodded. Tears were running down her cheeks. She looked like a very dirty Oriental doll that would cry if you put it on its back.

“Okay.” He motioned Clavers and Benvenuto in closer, put a hand on Fidel’s back to get his attention. “There are four guys at the gate, plus the guy walking the perimeter. Maybe more, but we didn’t see them. We’re going to try to take them without shooting. Hear me, Fidel?”

He saw the back of Fidel’s head move in a nod.

“We’re going to get as close as we can—the front row of cars, with the cars as cover—I’ll already have stood up and said something. Okay? The signal is ‘friends.’ You hear me say ‘friends,’ you’re behind cover, weapon cocked and locked and ready to shoot.”

“You don’t want us to shoot, you said.” Fidel’s voice was like rocks rattling together.

“I don’t, but I don’t want us to get killed, either. If they shoot, then we shoot.”

Fidel turned his head. “You gonna let them shoot first?”

“If they
try
to shoot, we shoot.”

Fidel grunted. “You stand up, you say, ‘Friends,’ they shoot you, we shoot them. Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” He shrugged—quite an elaborate shrug.

“It’s a matter of timing.”

“Sure is.”

If they’d been alone, he would have read Fidel out. He took a breath, exhaled, said, “You got a better plan?”

“Yeah—waste ‘em.”

Alan looked at Clavers and Benvenuto. “The goal is to take the gate with minimum damage on either side. Clear?”

Both nodded.

“Fidel?”

Fidel nodded as they had. “When I see your head blown apart, I can feel free to waste them.”

Alan looked at him. Hard. “If you don’t like my way of doing things, give me the gun and I’ll do it alone.”

“A-a-a-h—shit, I’m just mouthing off, Commander. I’ll do it your way. But it’s going to be a split-second thing. If our
guys were trained snipers, it would be one thing—” He turned on Benvenuto. “How good are you with that rifle?”

“If it shoots okay, I can hit a paper plate at a hunnerd and fifty yards.” He swallowed. “I hunted a lot of deer. With my dad.” He looked from one to the other.
“Honest!”

Fidel looked back at Alan, raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “He’ll be a lot closer than a hundred and fifty yards. Maybe a hundred and fifty
feet.
My idea is, Benvenuto aims at the officer. He makes any move when you pop up, he shoots him. The officer’s down, the other guys may fold.”

Alan cocked his lower jaw forward, thinking about it. “Can you do it, Benvenuto? Shoot a man, not a deer?” He tried to make it as brutal as he could, so the kid would get it. “A man’s head is about the size of a paper plate.”

Benvenuto swallowed again. “Yes, sir. If that’s the plan, sir.”

“Okay, that’s the plan. But—” How to make it clear to a twenty-year-old who wasn’t really a warrior? “You’ve got to watch him. If he doesn’t make a hostile move, don’t shoot. But Fidel’s right—if he goes for a gun or orders the others to shoot me or—anything, then you shoot. Okay?”

“And don’t
think,”
Fidel said. “You think, you’re too late. Just
do
it.”

Alan thought it was a big order for a kid who had been told all his life to think.

Alan’s mixed bag of troops—a former SEAL, a boy, a woman, an officer who didn’t like shooting people—trickled down the parking lot between the cars, moving so that they couldn’t be seen from the gate. They had left Ong hunkered down beside their van, halfway down the lot.

The gate was off-center toward the end of the lot, so that Alan was the only one to its right; the others were staggered up the line of cars on the other side. Alan lost them after they crossed the last roadway, and he pulled up in the lee of a Honda sedan and waited, using the front wheel to mask himself from the gate. He had said he would count to sixty to give them time to get into position. Now that he was there, he saw how difficult it was going to be for Benvenuto, who would have to aim—and shoot, if he made that judg-ment—in a split second. Maybe it would have been better if Fidel had taken Benvenuto’s role, using the AK, but then they’d have no automatic fire ready if the others opened up. Well, Fidel was right—if you were going to do this in a combat situation, you’d give no warning and you’d want only to kill.

As if this wasn’t a combat situation. No, the trouble here was that Alan was trying to apply an ethic that came from a place outside combat and that was, unless you were an idealist, irrelevant.

So he was an idealist.

He watched the last seconds tick down and checked the CZ. He put his index finger along the frame and hooked his third finger into the trigger guard.
Well, the second time today. If I’ve been stupid, Rose, forgive me—

“Friends!”

He was standing. He had the CZ in his right hand, raised to shoulder height but not pointed at them, the barrel up and the side of the pistol toward them. The hood of the Honda protected his gut and legs, but he was exposed from his belt up. In his peripheral vision he saw Fidel rise on his right, a silhouette in the violent sunlight.

All five of the Indians were near the gate, three of them focused on the street. One of the others saw him even before he spoke; the man hesitated, then reacted, reaching for the weapon he had leaned against the gatehouse. Reacting to him, the officer turned to follow the man’s eyes, then Alan’s voice, and his eyes widened.

For a microsecond, Alan’s and the officer’s eyes met. And in the officer’s face was unmistakable recognition.
Of him.

The officer shouted and scrabbled at his side for his pistol, and a rifle shot banged and echoed and the officer whirled and went down and lay on the ground, legs flailing. At the same time, the man who had reached for his AK heard the shot and saw Fidel and again hesitated; the other three turned, and Fidel fired a burst just over their heads, and the first man dropped his weapon, and then it was too late for the others to respond, three of them looking at four armed men behind cover. One of them held his weapon in hip-firing position while the other two lowered theirs. He swung the weapon toward Alan, and Alan pointed his index finger and fired and the shot ricocheted off the gatehouse wall and Fidel hollered at the three, his voice hoarse, eyes bulging, bellowing like a bull because he wanted to gun them down and instead he was doing what his commanding officer had told him to do.

And the guns went down.

Benvenuto was pumping his fist in the air; Fidel was red-faced, breathing hard; Clavers was blowing out her cheeks and muttering, “Holy God, Holy God—”

Alan touched Fidel’s shoulder. “Beautiful.” Fidel shot him a look, went back to communicating to the four men with the barrel of his AK: lie down, don’t move, shut up or I’ll blow your fucking guts out. The international language.

“You okay?” Alan said to Benvenuto. “You were great.” The boy hardly heard him, riding an adrenaline high. Alan made a mental note to keep an eye on him, because he was likely to crash. He sent Clavers to get Ong and the van, and then he and Fidel organized the captured four into a team to move the cars apart while Benvenuto held one of their own AKs on them.

The officer was still on the ground, blood vivid and hot around him on the yellow earth. Alan bent over him, saw that the man was still alive, looked away; he wanted the golden thing inside the man’s shirt. He had to go through blood to get it, found it on a fine gold chain. Then the officer was dead.

Alan held the thing up. “See who else has one of these,” he said to Fidel. “Maybe on a chain around their necks.”

The cell phone was in the officer’s pants pocket. It was a new Japanese model, expensive, with a small screen that could show pictures as well as text—the best and newest, perhaps unusual for an underpaid Indian officer.

Alan turned it on. The LCD lit up.

He was looking at a picture of himself. In full color. With text in English: “Kill on sight.”

“What the—?” Fidel was looking over his shoulder. “Shit, man, that’s you!”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” Fidel pulled him partway around. “Hey, Commander, what the fuck? These guys had a cell phone that
works; they got your picture—this isn’t some fucking two-bit mutiny!”

The van pulled up. Clavers began picking up guns and throwing them inside. Fidel, after a look at Alan, went into the gatehouse and raised the barrier and then herded the captives inside. Benvenuto, still high and now shaking a little, stood next to Alan. “We’re ready to go, Commander. Commander? Sir?”

Alan was frowning, thinking that Fidel was right: that it made no sense that this officer had had his picture and an order to kill; thinking that this cell phone could get a signal when the system had been jammed; thinking that this was more than a mutiny—

“Let’s go.”

Rafe came to with the notion that he had overslept. His dreams were colorful, even ornate, and he felt as if he had spent too much time in bed. The feeling of the wrappings and bandages came to him slowly, followed by the claxon of the pain.

He could get only one eye open, and even that required a struggle. The eye was gummy, and once it was open he could feel his eyelid as a pain separate from all the others, the worst in his left leg. He looked down, but his head wouldn’t move much and the leg was too far away.

“He’s awake!” someone called in the distance.

He opened his mouth. It was dry sandpaper, as if he’d gone on a bender and this was the hangover day. That thought crossed his feeling that he’d slept too long and took him down a corridor of waking dream about life in his first squadron, until something else pressed at his abbreviated senses.

“Sir? Admiral Rafehausen?”

He opened his eye again, saw a blur. Someone pushed a straw into his mouth, and the rush of water was a pure
joy like few things he’d ever felt. He drank greedily.

“That’s a damn good sign,” said a voice in the background. “Give him all he’ll take. Dempsey, see if you can swab that eye. It looks like it still has some particulate matter in it.”

“Sure thing, Doc.”

Rafe felt something on his eye and he blinked. There was a burst of stinging pain more intense than the pain in his leg, but it didn’t last. When he blinked a few more times, the figures around him grew more distinct.

“Dempsey, get the admiral’s flag lieutenant. I think he’s coming around. Let’s back off that drip a little now that he’s awake. You with us, Admiral?”

Rafe moved his head a fraction.

“Good. Lot of folks waiting to talk to you. You’re pretty shot up and the boat ain’t sinking, so don’t waste your energy. Give him more water.”

“Wathitus?”
he croaked.

“What’s that? Listen to me, Admiral. I’d like to do this differently, but I know you’re waking up. I had to amputate your left leg a little below the knee, and I’m not sure I can save your left eye. You have some burns, none of them really bad, but the aggregate—well, you ought to be in a burn unit, but I have a lot of worse cases.”

Amputated leg?
“Leg hurts!” Rafe said, quite clearly.

The face by him wandered back and forth. Rafe realized he was shaking his head.

“That’s just nerve memory. I’m sorry.”

Rafe gathered himself. It was hard to concentrate, but he had things to do.
“What hit us?”
he hissed.

“I’ll let your flag lieutenant fill you in. He’ll be right up.”

Time passed.

“Sir?” Madje’s voice.

God,
Rafe was able to think,
he sounds like hell.
His eye blinked open. “Report!” he croaked. Someone pushed the straw back into his mouth.

Madje made a short and brutal report and finished by saying, “We’re still picking up aircrew who punched out from the deck.”

Rafe took a deep breath, which tightened the bandages and hurt him more than he had expected. He coughed water and mucus and his eye blurred.

“Doc? He’s coughing.”

“Raise the level on the drip. Sorry, Lieutenant. He’s in rough shape. I’d rather you didn’t use him up.”

“No!” Rafe tried to shout, coughed again. “Planes aloft? Bingo?”

Madje’s head moved. “The TAO is trying to get them into Sri Lanka. The Indians aren’t responding, sir.”

“TAO?” Rafe’s whole body moved. “Who’s—in charge?”

“There’s an O-5 in reactor who’s the senior man we can find, sir, but he doesn’t feel he can leave the engines.” That was a short form for an argument that had dragged Madje away from a firefighting team and into a labyrinth of the fears and hesitancy of an officer who clearly couldn’t accept the reality that he was in command.

Rafe snorted. It sounded like an abbreviated cough. “TAO,” he said.

Madje nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Get—planes down. Cats working?”

“Cat two’s down but shows green. The fire hasn’t touched it.”

“Madje—have to know!” Rafe was looking down an increasingly colorful tunnel. He hated it.
Drugs.
“Get planes down. Report.”

The tomatoes were simmering in olive oil; their odor, supported by garlic, filled the kitchen. Rose had taken down an already-open bottle of white wine and was wrestling with the cork when the telephone rang.

“I’ll get it,” Leslie said.

“Oh, would you? This goddam thing—”

Leslie was good at answering phones. She had done it for a year for Mike Dukas when she was a ditz-brained newcomer and he was NCIS’s hottest agent, and then she had done it for a year for Dukas’s assistant when she was no longer a ditz-brain and Dukas went off to head NCIS, Bahrain. “Craik-Siciliano,” she said. Her voice was crisp—gone were the thuggish accent of three years before, the tears of half an hour ago. She looked at Rose as she listened to the other end. She gestured, held out the phone. “Your office. Urgent.”

“Oh, shit—” Rose banged the bottle on the countertop. Her voice switched to professional chill as she spoke into the phone. “Commander Siciliano here.”

Leslie picked up the wine bottle and, holding the neck in her palms, pushed the recalcitrant cork out with her thumbs. She tried not to listen, but the room was small.

“My God, when? How bad is it? But it can’t—” Rose caught Leslie’s eye, shook her head. Then, seeing the open bottle, she pointed at the heavy skillet, made a pouring gesture before turning away. “What about the exercise? Is that firm? Do we know who’s in command? I can be there in—” She listened. “Okay, I’ll hang by the phone. Absolutely. Yes. Thanks for keeping me posted.” She hung up, hesitated. Her eyes met Leslie’s again. “There’s a fire on the
Jefferson,
the BG flagship. All hell’s breaking loose.”

“How did it—?”

“Plane crash, that’s all they’re saying. But it’s bad, because Fifth Fleet has tanked the fleet exercise.” She hugged herself as if she was cold. “We’ve got a lot of friends on the
Jefferson.
Mike has, too.”

Leslie had never been on an aircraft carrier, thought of one only as a huge and invulnerable ship. “How bad can it be?”

“If the flight deck’s packed with aircraft, it can be the end of the world. If it was right at the beginning of the exercise, they’d all be full of fuel, packed together. A carrier called the
Forrestal
went up that way during Nam. More than eight hundred dead.” She looked away. “God.”

“But—They have sprinklers and firefighting stuff and, and—everything—”

Rose shook her head. “It could be hell with steel walls.”

Then there was the sound of the front door opening, and Harry and Dukas came in, talking loud and laughing, and Dukas stopped dead in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two women and said, “What’s happened?”

“A plane went into the
Jefferson.
It’s bad.”

The four shocked faces exchanged looks, searching for comfort, not finding it. “I’ve got to find Alan,” Rose said and turned back to the telephone. Dukas looked at Leslie. “I better call the office.”

“There’s another line in the den,” Leslie said, leading him out. She didn’t explain how she knew that. Leslie was, as Rose had said, smart.

Harry patted Rose’s shoulder as she tried to get through to West Fleet HQ, Mahe. Her face went through shades of hope, frustration, anger. Finally, she crashed the telephone back into its cradle. “‘Out of service.’ How can a goddam navy base be out of service? ‘India is out of service.’ It’s fucking
India,
for Christ’s sake, not some two-bit third-world shithole! How the fuck can they be out of service?”

“Keep trying.”

“Keep trying what? I just fucking tried—!” Then she heard herself. She put a hand on her abdomen as if checking the fetus that she hoped still lived. Her jaws clenched; her eyes closed; she inhaled. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m being a hysterical asshole.”

Harry smiled at her and kissed her cheek. He had a way of looking at people just slightly sideways because he had
only one eye; the other, lost to torture in Africa, had been replaced by a beautiful but useless plastic one. “You’re being Rosie Siciliano, the terror of the Sisters of the Annunciation.”

She pushed him away. “You know too much about my misspent youth.” She started to dial again.

“What hotel’s Al staying at?”

“The Mahe International—the number’s on the pad in the den—” She turned away to concentrate on something going on in the telephone. Harry got the number from the den, nodding at Dukas while he was jabbering at somebody at NCIS, smiled at Leslie. Harry wandered into the big living room, tapping numbers into his cell phone. Waited. Waited. Then a British-accented female voice said, “Mahe International Hotel, may I be of service?”