Top Hook (23 page)

There were voices above him, where sailors were moving about.

“…so the CAG accuses him to his face of being a spy. I heard it.”

“Fuck that noise. He told the CAG he needed to catch the spy. I was there, too.”

“You got shit for brains, you know that?”

“Hey, Coloredo, shove it. I know what I heard. Rafehausen's his bud. You know it. Skipper ain't no spy.”

“You'll see. They'll arrest his ass and drag him off. None of us will ever see the other side of E-4. Watch.”

“You'll never make E-4 anyway, lardass.”

Spy
.
Top Hook
. Alan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, his eyes snake-like in the gloom, focused on a point halfway to the invisible horizon.

And what had been nagging at him for a day, the little fact that wouldn't come and wouldn't go away, came clear: a picture on the mantelpiece of his boyhood home. In his memory, it still sat there. Not his father winning the award. His father handing it to the next guy with a big smile.

Alan bolted through the watertight door and down the passageway on the O-3 level, headed for the secure phones in the intel center. He didn't pause to ask permission, moving an officer out of a phone cubicle with his glare. Then he sat and dialed, waited, dialed. No answer at Mike's office
. What the hell time was it there, anyway
? He dialed Mike's apartment. The moment the phone was picked up, he shouted, “I've got it, Mike! It's been bugging me since she said the words and I've got it. Top Hook!”

A woman's voice said, “Just a minute, okay?” The phone rattled, and he heard her say, her voice muffled, “It's for you.”

Mike took the telephone from Emma.

“Dukas.”

“Mike, it's Alan, Jesus, I'm sorry, but—”

“What's up?” He waved Emma away.

Emma was naked. She flipped herself off the bed and pulled on one of his shirts. Dukas was clearly waiting for her to go before he started talking. Why? Emma knew that information was power. What kind of information was Dukas getting that he didn't want her to know?

She scurried to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, and, as she did so, she shouted, “Mike? What? What did you say?”

As she expected, he couldn't hear her clearly, and he came as far toward the bedroom door as the telephone cord would allow and said, “What?”

By then, she had her hand on the bathroom telephone.

“What?” she shouted.

“I didn't say anything, for Christ's sake!”

She picked up the extension, covered the mouthpiece. “I thought you did!”

“Jesus—”

His phone had been held at arm's length, away from his ear, and he hadn't heard her pick up. As she intended.

Dukas put the telephone back to his ear and said, “What have you got, Al?”

“Top Hook! It
is
George Shreed, Mike. He was Top Hook on the
Midway
, right after Dad.” He sounded impatient, as if he wanted some immediate, big-bang response. Alan burst out again, “Don't you get it? Shreed is Top Hook! Top Hook is the code name of the mole inside the Agency! Jesus, Mike—”

“This is an open line, Commander.”

Alan was silent. “Oh, shit—”

In the bathroom, Emma was staring at the back of the closed door, the extension phone at her ear
. They really thought George Shreed was a mole?
Now, there was information that was power!

Next morning, George Shreed was sitting in a briefing about the bombing campaign in “Yugoslavia,” and he was so bored with pictures of bridges and electricalswitching stations that he wanted to throw up. It would serve all these jerks right, he thought, if he did: here they were, dicking around with a bunch of third-world Europeans who couldn't even put an aircraft in the air, and the Chinese were moving troops to the Indian border on one frontier and massing missile launchers opposite Taiwan on the other.
It's the Chinese, stupid!
he wanted to shout.

But he didn't. He was being extra-good, keeping a low profile, making no waves. He'd got the information he wanted from his contact in Internals that “a female voice,” probably from the Agency, was, indeed, in touch with the NCIS people investigating the Siciliano thing. The woman had to be Sally Baranowski. Whom he would take care of in his own way.

Which was all right as a delaying tactic, but overnight he'd faced the truth that killing Chen in Belgrade wouldn't work. Was, in fact, counter-productive. Not that he couldn't handle the practical details. He had set up a cover story with the Agency, made reservations to Budapest to check some ops-readiness stuff there; from there he'd do an overnight in-and-out to Belgrade, using the passport that Chen had sent him.

He'd have to do without his canes (too recognizable) on the Hungarian flight, probably have to use the morphine. Then wait around in Belgrade for a contact, a lot of stupid tradecraft, then sit with Chen and hand over the forged memo so that the Chinese would do something really stupid. But it was all tricky, and he didn't want to do it; he needed to get Chen somewhere else, somewhere more on his own terms.

Half-listening to the briefing, he was thinking about the memo and the fact that of course he couldn't kill Chen in Belgrade, because Chen was the one who would have to carry the memo back to Beijing for authentication. If he killed Chen in Belgrade, the memo would be instantly suspect. No, he'd have to hand it over and smile and let Chen go. Thinking about killing Chen that way was simply happy bullshit—day-dreaming.

What he needed was a plan, not a fantasy.

Shreed sighed. He started to plan it all over again.

They were in the Ditch now, moving as fast as safety would allow through the dirty water, with the Sinai on their left and Egypt on the right. The uncertainty of the situation had communicated by some invisible mechanism from the admiral all the way down to the deckplates.

“We don't have a target list. We don't have any tanker support. We don't have any friendly bingo fields. We don't know who we're supposed to fight. We're just supposed to
get there
.” Rafe was bitter. “Nobody seems to have any hard data on the new Pakistani stuff. We don't have a reliable air order-of-battle for either side. My intel folks are reading
Jane's
, for Christ's sake.”

“Rafe—”

“We're in the Suez Canal. CNN is having a field day. Our battle group is spread across the Med behind us. What are we supposed to do?”

“We're sending a message, Rafe.” Alan had now said this three times. “Air Force is moving units in the Persian Gulf. I'd guess that we're trying to get the Gulf States to allow us to base tankers and what not. What about Diego Garcia?”

“It's a rock in the middle of a war zone. They're flying twenty-four-hour combat air patrol.”

“They'll have tankers soon, if not already.”

“Al, I can't count on that.” Rafe shook his head in disgust. “And Pac Fleet has their hands tied. China has moved fleet units into the Taiwan Straits.
With
Silkworm missiles.”

“So I read.”

“Why? China can't face us, Al. You've said so yourself.”

“Ask the National Security Council.”

“You're not helping.”

“Rafe, I'm as far behind as you are
.
”
I'm not here as your personal intel advisor, Rafe.
Alan had spent the last four hours explaining the situation, as he understood it, to a legion of aviators. The intel folks were frantic, trying to catch up with events in an area that had been assigned to two junior officers a month ago. They had written and briefed every few days as a contingency. The sudden explosion of the situation had caught them all.

“What can China throw at us?”

“They might, and I stress might, be able to forwardstage some air into Burma-Myanmar. They have a surface-action group transiting the Straits of Malacca, about as far from the scene as we are. Realistically, India has more of a blue-water navy than China. India should
be able to wreck the Chinese and fight Pakistan at the same time, at least at sea. In the air and on the ground, it's a different story. But not if we support India. China can't win against the US in the Taiwan Straits, and they can't hope to beat India before we respond.”

“Nukes. They can use nukes.”

“I'll tell you this, Rafe. It's a guess. Somebody in China has fucked up big. Remember how the Gulf War started? Iraq misread the signals from the US. Thought we would play along if they annexed Kuwait.”

“Thought we wouldn't fight, you mean.”

“That's all I can see. Somebody in China is under the dangerous delusion that we won't back India. And we're making a very public dash toward the scene of action to demonstrate that we will back India.” It didn't sound too bad, put that way.

He looked up at Alan and raised an eyebrow. “China's really that weak? That they couldn't match us conventionally in a stand-up fight?”

“China couldn't win a war with France, and a war might just expose the real roots of dissatisfaction in the country. They lack any real trained troops, their air forces are mostly untrained and totally GCI-harnessed, and their navy has no blue-water potential at all. To be honest, Rafe, I'm not sure we're confident that their nuclear deterrent will work. They are not a superpower in a military sense.”

“How did we get here, then?”

“Rhetoric exerts a strange fascination, Rafe. And China is holding some card here that I'm not seeing.”

“So when we show them some muscle, they back down?”

“That's how it's supposed to work.”

Alan wished he had convinced himself.

The carrier would not deviate from her course to launch or recover aircraft, and the air wing was idle. Maintenance continued, but aircrew sat and played cards or ran on the flight deck or sat and complained. Every unit had dropped weeks of work and preparation. Alan's det had lost their new role of catching smugglers, and every unit had forfeited some role in the NATO air effort. The troops had lost their liberty in Naples. They were sailing toward an unknown ocean and a potentially disastrous war. The younger ones were excited, the veterans pensive. Bickering and griping increased. In the det, factions dampened by action and success acquired renewed life and tempers flared.

Alan sensed it all. He forced his aircrews to the simulator, made Soleck and Navarro spend hours getting Chinese, Pakistani, and Indian data into the system, drilled his crews, and ignored the stares and whispered comments from Stevens's group. He had them at the brink of becoming a cohesive unit and he wasn't backing away now.

And in the back of his mind, he thought that what they all needed was to
do
something. To help send the message. He thought about the unrefueled range of the S-3 and started measuring distances in the Indian Ocean. Because China intended to push them to war. In four days.

Dukas had spent most of the night trying to figure out how Al Craik's flimsy identification of Top Hook with George Shreed could be used. The trouble was, it was purely inferential. What he wanted was hard evidence. He put his face in his hands and blew an exasperated sigh through pursed lips.

“It can't be that bad,” a husky voice said right next to him.

Dukas jumped.

It was Rose.

He scrambled up; the crate of files fell over on the floor again. “Ro-Rosie—” he said.

She came to him, put her arms around him and leaned her face on his chest. Triffler stared through a gap between the philodendron and a suction-cupped Garfield.

“I can't stay mad at you, damn it,” she said.

“Rose, Rose—I'm so sorry—”

“You were doing your job.”

“I wanted to kill myself—”

She looked up. “Harry said you got drunk. I hope the hangover was awful.”

“Killer.”

“You've done your penance; you're forgiven.” She kissed him.

“Rose, what are you doing here?”

“Seeing my old pal Mike Dukas.”

“What are you doing in DC?”

“Making the rounds. Alan's idea—see every Navy guy we've ever known, scotch the rumors, press the flesh, try to make something happen. Mike, they're saying terrible things about us!”

“Yeah, I know; I hear things.” He had his arms around her and didn't want to let go. “Jesus, you feel good.”

“You, too. But knock it off, or people'll start talking about
us
.” She pulled away from him. Dukas became at once too buoyant, too active, couldn't help himself. “Hey, Dick,” he called, “come on over here, meet the star of our show!”

Rose turned, stricken. “Star!”

“Joke.”

“Some joke. It's okay—it's okay—but I get pretty sick of being what you call ‘the star,' Mike—”

She shook hands with Triffler, and, in turning, saw the chart on the back of the door. “Wow, you
are
serious about George Shreed.”

“Only kind of testing the waters.”

“Looks like more than that to me. You got something new?”

“Oh—well, Rose—”

“Alan said something, too. We send a lot of e-mails; he said that something had happened in Naples and now he saw why you guys were suspicious of Shreed.”

Dukas and Triffler exchanged a look, and Dukas moved Rose back to his side of the office. “I don't think you should know too much about this, Rose—”

“I'm just the defendant here!”

“No, no, it isn't that. I'm walking this tightrope with the Internals guy at the Agency. If he got even a whiff that we were talking outside the office about Shreed—”

“This isn't outside the office. Emma says you're not very forthcoming with her, either—and by the way, what's going on between you and Emma?”

“Emma? Pasternak, you mean?”

“Mike! Hey—it's me. Are you and Emma—?”

Dukas sighed. He pushed a chair for her next to his desk and called to Triffler for coffee; sitting down, he put his hands on the desk and stared at them and said, “It's just physical.”

She gave a peal of husky laughter. “What does
that
mean?”

“Emma and I have a mutually satisfying physical relationship, how's that?”

Rose stared at the coffee cup that appeared next to her. She shook her head. “And I thought she was maybe gay.” She smiled up at Triffler. “Great coffee. Starbucks?”

Triffler looked hurt. “I grind my own. A shop on M Street mixes it for me; in fact, they sell it as Triffler's Blend. You get the touch of vanilla?”

“Oh, yeah.” She talked coffee for thirty seconds, then decorating and the wall of crates, then clothes and where could she buy her husband a jacket like that one? and in that short time she succeeded in doing what Dukas had not: Triffler became her friend. When they were finished, Triffler looked at Dukas as if to say,
See how it's done?
and walked back to his desk, whistling.

“Nice guy,” she murmured. Dukas rolled his eyes, but she missed it. “So,” she said, “
is
it Shreed?”

“I really don't know, babe. I just don't know.”

She was wearing civilian clothes, a dark dress with a rather full skirt that she pulled up a little to cross her legs. She looked pretty and vulnerable and a little tired. “You going to get me out of this, Mike?”

“You know I am. But—”

“I know. ‘But it takes time.'” She put her hands over both of his. “Harry told me who the Telephone Woman is. I want to talk to her.”

“No, no—”

“Listen to me, Mike. She wants to help but I think she's scared; maybe if I go to her, give her some support—”

“Menzes would crucify me.”

“Maybe if I'm a real person to her, with a face, not just a voice on the phone. Maybe she'll give us more—facts. Something.”

“Have you told Emma?”

“No, have you?”

He shook his head. “I have to compartmentalize. I like Emma; I like what we do together. But she's—”

“On the other side?”

“One of the other sides; there are about six. Yeah, I can't be completely honest with her.”

“Or with me?”

He winced. “Anyway, I don't want you to scare off our Telephone Lady.”

“I won't. Really.”

Dukas pursed his lips, thought hard. “Don't tell me about it, then. And don't tell Emma.”

“You got a lot of compartments, Mike.”

He nodded. “It's a mare's nest of a case.”

“What was Alan up to in Naples?”

He shook his head.

“He said he was doing something for you.” When Dukas shook his head again, she squeezed his hands. “Hey, I'm the good guy, remember? Or—are you still suspicious of me—?”

“No! I swear it, Rose. But what Al's doing is another thing altogether. Honest.”

“He thinks it's Shreed.”

Dukas kept his left hand out so that she'd keep hold of it; with his right, he rubbed his eyes. “Al talks too goddam much. He got a hit on ‘Top Hook.' This is not to get out of this office, okay? I've got to tell Menzes at Internal, but he's the only one who's in on this, so keep your mouth shut. See, ‘Top Hook' was supposed to be
your
code name when you leaked the Peacemaker stuff.”