by David Poyer
The lieutenant pointed to Swager, who turned the screen off. “Give me the stick back. Okay, that’s the plan. Maximum diversion. Minimum exposure. A lot of enemy, yeah, but if we do it right, nobody’ll notice us. They’ll be watching the fireworks down by the harbor. Both teams leapfrog back and retract from the north beach. Drägers and scooters. If we get contact, hose ’em down and withdraw. We’ll have the F470s standing by, in case we need to take off wounded.” The F470s were rigid-hulled inflatables, with inflation tanks and submersible outboards.
Teddy couldn’t help shaking his head. Only slightly, but Harch caught it and frowned. “Obie? Are we not happy?”
“I’d rather not say, sir.”
“Go ahead, Master Chief. If you have a better plan, I’m all ears.”
Teddy considered not saying anything. Then thought: Fuck that. “Well, sir, this might work against untrained troops. Militia. Draftees. But the first thing a sharp security force will do is look in the opposite direction from the first assault. Bomb the south coast, they’ll look north. I’ll also goddamn betcha that overhead doesn’t show mines, wire, and listening devices on that northern beach, considering how golden an asset this is supposed to be.”
He gave it a beat, then added, “Sir.”
Harch’s face hardened. “We discussed that at length, when we were going through the COAs. The first ordnance laid down on the south island will take out the marine barracks. In the middle of the night, that will cut down the number of effectives. The blocking force on the causeway will confine the remainder to the main island. Team Two should have a clear run.”
Teddy found himself on his feet. He nodded toward the screen. “Granted, the strike will take out some of them, but how about the rest? They can flank the causeway. It looks shallow in there. Are we going in at low tide? Do they actually need the causeway? Are there boats?”
Swager nudged him. Mud Cat was shaking his head too. What the fuck? But he wasn’t done. “And, what about our QRF? It’s gonna be, what, two hundred miles away? And how’s E&E going to work, on an atoll that small? It just seems like—”
Harch held up a palm. “All we have to do is block, insert, and activate. A good mission doesn’t make a ripple. If there should be trouble with elements on the north island, we cause maximum damage and extract. You’re right, there’s not much escape and evasion possible on an island that size. We’ll have a Predator on call, and RHIBs holding five miles offshore. If we have wounded, need boats, the backup team inflates ’em, starts the motors, and runs in to the beach. Better?”
Teddy understood he’d been dismissed. He started to protest, then caught the glares of the younger men. Was he getting antsy? They were fucking SEALs, after all. The force ratios would always be against them. The QRFs were always going to be remote, the E&E plan hinky. What was the SEAL Creed … I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards of my profession.
“Any other questions, comments? All right then.” Harch nodded curtly. “Dismissed.”
“Attention on deck,” Swager yelled. The men got to their feet again. Teddy turned away, headed back for the chief’s quarters, where he was hot-bunked with a machinist’s mate.
But Harch turned back, at the door. “Master Chief?”
Teddy wheeled round. “Sir?”
Harch jerked his head. “My stateroom. Now.”
* * *
THE junior officer staterooms were the size of porta-potties. When Harch slammed the door and pointed to a bunk, Teddy had a moment of claustrophobia. The lieutenant took the single chair. Air-conditioning whooshed from a diffuser. Something whined on the far side of the bulkhead, stopped, whined again. “We got a problem, Master Chief?” the lieutenant opened. “You need to torque your shit together. Especially in front of the team.”
Teddy grinned. “My shit’s torqued tight, L-T. No problems on my end.”
“You got a great record, Obie. A top-drawer operator. But sometimes I feel this pushback. Like maybe you resent I made it, and you didn’t.”
Actually, they’d offered him a commission after the White Mountains, but Teddy had turned it down. He decided to play it conciliatory. “Sorry if I give that impression, sir. I just want to make sure we’re not sticking our dicks in any blenders. Which it sounds like we’re getting ready to do.”
“Well … maybe.” Harch stared at his desk safe for a second, then coughed into his fist. “This is my first mission as a zero. Maybe I should confide in you more. And, I guess, you need to know this. In case I take a hit, or whatever … But nobody else does. Hoo-ah?”
“Hoo-ah, sir.” Teddy sat straighter.
“What I just briefed is not the actual mission.”
What the hell? “Not the actual mission, sir?”
Harch spun the dial. He unlocked the safe and took out an op plan.
Teddy looked it over. Destroying the sigint site was only the secondary objective. The primary … He looked up, frowning. “Want to give me the short squirt, sir? Or am I supposed to read this encyclopedia?”
“In words of one syllable, the true objective of Operation Watchtower is to plant an intel asset. Taking the site off-line temporarily is nice, it provides diversion for an invasion elsewhere, but more important, it gives us the excuse to get in and plant something for another government agency.”
Teddy said, “I’m not sure I follow. Lieutenant.”
“Think about it this way. Gear’s easy to replace. Radars. Signal processors. Basically, computers and software. We could fry everything on the island and they’d be back online in a week.
“But if the mission looks like it’s for something else, even if it seems like a failure, it can still accomplish the primary objective.”
“So the Package isn’t an EMP, uh, device? Like you said?”
“It is an EMP device,” Harch said. “But it isn’t going to work.”
Teddy blinked. “Isn’t going to—”
“Work.”
Suddenly the already too-small room shrank even more. He half rose, wishing there was just a little more air. “We’re putting the Team, all our guys, at risk for a dud?”
Harch waved him down. “Not a ‘dud,’ Master Chief. The first package will detonate. Sort of. Scatter pieces around. About the same order explosion as a mortar round. But the pulse will short-circuit. They put the fragments back together, they’ll get an EMP bomb, all right. But an American round-eye foreign-devil fuckup.
“They’ll snort and go back to operating. But now we’re looking over their shoulder. We have our own eavesdropping capability, on their eavesdropping capability. They operate, but we see every keystroke. Know everything they know. Read their traffic. Messages. Data. Voice. Even video. See exactly what they see, on their radars. Total access, like we’re inside their heads.”
Teddy sat back, turning it over, trying to shake the feeling of being boxed in. “So where is this gizmo? Oh. That’s Package number two.”
“Correct. It’s not a backup; it’s the eavesdropping device. They call it a QM-10, for whatever that’s worth. Picks up anything, and I mean anything, on a radio frequency. We dig that in, and it self-activates. Transmits via a secure, highly directional uplink called ‘ultrawideband.’ Impossible to overhear. Or so they tell me.”
Teddy rubbed his face. Swager might understand all this better, having been an electron pusher in a previous life. Pick up all this digital stuff, then send it someplace where they could study it, decode it, turn it into useful intel? Some arcane, supersecret CIA technology. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to bomb the shit out of everything, then send in the Marines? But somebody upstairs had decided this was smarter. It was sure as hell more complicated. “Can I share this with my Team leaders?”
Harch grimaced. “No! Pass this to no one, Master Chief. I wouldn’t have told you, except I had to. For the mission.”
Mission first, last, and always. The Team credo. But none of this lessened his misgivings. If anything, they made them worse. He saw now why command wasn’t obses
sing about extract, or force ratios, or whether the QRF could get in fast enough to rescue the platoon. Total access to the enemy’s secrets, day in and day out? Yeah. That was worth fifteen lives. As long as they planted this gizmo, maybe it didn’t really matter, to whoever had designed the mission, if any of them made it out.
“Any more questions, Master Chief?” Harch said as Teddy stood. “Hoo-ah, right?”
But all he could do was shrug.
9
THE next day Savo Island was still at Condition Three, wartime steaming. That made it hard to get around, even with Ryan’s help undogging door after door, and dogging each again after them. The hatches that led from one deck to the next had also been secured; to climb up or down, Aisha had to wriggle through narrow scuttles. Sometimes the corpsman had to phone to get permission to open an access, and they had to wait in the stale hot air until a reluctant voice granted them passage.
But she persisted. After talking with the chief master-at-arms, the command master chief, and the exec, Staurulakis, she had a few possibilities.
The first was a damage controlman, one Petty Officer Third Class Benyamin. He was tall. He knew the lighting systems. The exec had earmarked him because of his attitude toward the females aboard, and his participation in some kind of computer game that involved rape. Aisha wanted to know more about this so-called game.
“Its name is Gang Bang Molly,” Benyamin said reluctantly. They were sitting in the wardroom, which had been cleared; Ryan stood guard outside. The petty officer had a round, stubbly head. A hawkish nose. A gawky neck. Long fingers twisted as he glanced up at her.
“Tell me more,” she said patiently.
“Well—it’s sort of like Grand Theft Auto. Or DayZ. Or Hitman. Only kind of, you know, backstairs. You can’t buy it at GameStop.”
“I see. And it’s about rape?”
“Hey, that’s not all,” Benyamin said defensively. “Also murder. Looting. Doing hits. Getting wasted.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“You should try it. Get inside the mind of the criminal.”
“I spend enough time there, thanks. You can’t get it at GameStop? So, where did you get it?”
“It was password protected, but you could play it on your workstation.”
Aisha put down her pen, shocked. “It was on the ship’s network?”
“On the LAN, yeah. Everybody played it. They took it down, though, when the brass heard about it. Actually, I think it was the CO figured it out.”
She was still incredulous. “How exactly did you get it on the LAN?”
Benyamin sat up straight. “Huh? Not me. I played it a little, but I didn’t put it up.”
“Who did, then? Do you know?”
“Well, sort of. But, like, it’s all scuttlebutt, what I’m sayin’ here.”
She told him scuttlebutt was worth checking out, but he still seemed reluctant. Until she brought up the possibility of an official charge. He grimaced. “Carpenter. The old guy, who came aboard after the last captain run us aground and got shitcanned.”
“Carpenter. What’s his rate?”
“A ping jockey … sonarman. Stays in his own spaces most of the time, but you see him on the chat boards. Goes by … Poon Pinger, I think.”
“How tall is he?”
“How…? I’m not sure. Like I say, I don’t see him that much. Just on the boards.”
“What else do you know about him?”
The damage controlman said just that he was an older sailor, maybe even retired. Aisha wondered what a retiree was doing deployed, but made the note. She had to get on these boards, and meet this Carpenter. Maybe interview him in his native habitat.
Of course, he’d hear she was asking about him. So it would have to be now, before he had a chance to hide anything incriminating.
* * *
RYAN led her forward and down, cautioning her to hold tight to the handrails. They descended level by level, until the sides of the ship squeezed inward. The normal clanks and whirs grew distant. The air grew stale, uncirculated. They threaded storerooms and damage-control lockers walled with expanded metal in a labyrinthine underworld.
Ryan bent, and hauled up a scuttle. Aisha had to wriggle through feet first, groping with the toes of her Merrells for whatever lay below. Faded paint, a confined passageway.
Finally, so deep Aisha felt entombed, Ryan tapped on a door painted with earphones, a crossed torpedo, a lightning bolt. Beneath it someone had painted in flowing script, Sonarmen do it aurally.
“Yeah?” Whoever was in there sounded surprised. “Whatcha want?”
The door unclunked inward on a cramped wedge of space walled with electronics and piping. A paunchy middle-aged man turned up a startled face, then pushed back from a keyboard. “Hey, girls! Wow, two hotties. You here for the banana-eating contest?”
This had to be the guy. “Carpenter?”
“That’s me.” He patted a chair. “Park it, let’s get acquainted. Nobody visits me down here anymore.”
Close up, she revised her estimate of his age upward. Gray hair, thinning at the back. Sagging jowls. A gut straining the waist of his coveralls. His stubble was gray too. Black-and-white glossy eight-by-tens of old submarines and many-times-xeroxed cartoons were taped to the few open areas of white-insulation-sheathed bulkhead. He waved at them. “Used to have my babes up there. XO made me take ’em down. But hey, a guy can dream.” He leered at Ryan. “I know you, right? You’re one of the pecker-checkers … I mean, corpsmen. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
Aisha plumped down into a chair, which creaked alarmingly and tilted as if to catapult her out backward. A strange smell lingered. Male sweat, ozone, acetone … and something else. “Petty Officer Reginald Carpenter?”
Carpenter winced. “It’s Rit, honey, not ‘Reginald.’” He reached for a thermos. “Want some bug juice? Where you from, brown sugar? That accent says … the Bronx?”
“Harlem.”
“Uh-huh. Cute outfit. What are you, part of the sultan’s harem?”
“I’m NCIS agent Aisha Ar-Rahim,” she said. “I’m investigating a crime.”
“NCIS. That’s what used to be the NIS, right? They took down a ring of faggots on a boat I was on once. Let me guess, you want the dude who put the blocks to the Terror. Hey. Don’t swing that way, kids.” Carpenter lifted his hands. “Pubic Bay, Bang Cock, I paid for it fair and square. I could tell you some stories. Angles and dangles at the Anchor and Spur? The time I bought a puppy in Olongapo?”
“Let’s stick to OS1 Bethany Terranova.”
“Well, from what I hear, she was asking for it. The radarman, I mean.”
By the door, Ryan huffed. “Really? That’s very interesting.” Aisha shot a glance at her, warning her to keep out of it. “Why do you say that?”
Carpenter nodded and leaned forward, lowering blunt fingertips to the keyboard with a strangely delicate touch. “Want to see some pictures?”
“Photos, you mean?”
“Way I heard it, she was laying it out on the Iron Beach for everybody to see. Topless. Kind of an open invite, don’t you think? Let’s be reasonable. Me, I’m just a dirty old man. But you got young guys here, away from home four, six months, ain’t had a decent liberty since Rota. Ever tried to get laid in Jebel Ali? Ain’t gonna happen, Ahmed. They lock ’em up tight. And you know what else they do to their women? Cut off their—”
“That’s not done anymore,” Aisha said.
“Ain’t what I hear. But don’t blow your shitter, girl. They like boys better anyway.” The sonarman swiveled the monitor toward them. “Grab a gander.”
The color still showed women on blankets and beach towels, in colorful swimsuits, lying on gray nonskid in bright sunlight. Over it, a gunsight reticle. The aiming dot in the center was centered on the crotch of a bikinied woman, chunky pale thighs spread, arm over her eyes. Her top was pulled down to show white skin. At the top of the photo, the sea was a creamy wake stretching out behind the ship.
Carpenter smacked his lips. “Whaddya think? Nice little rack of lamb, or what?”
“Where is this?”
“The Iron Beach, they call it. Top of the hangar. Girls only up there.” Carpenter winked. “Maybe a little blue-on-blue action? Back out of camera range.”
“This photo’s on the ship’s LAN?”
“Just cutie pies on a beach. Harmless fun.”
Aisha said, “I hear something else on the LAN is fun too.”
Carpenter tensed, then chuckled. “Oh—Molly? Shit. Nobody has a sense of fucking humor anymore. It’s a game.”
“That involves rape.”
“Yeah, you ever seen the other shit the guys play? The magazines they pass around? The fucking Navy’s getting as PC as Berkeley. I mean, this used to be a fun organization. You turned to at sea, but when the anchor went down, you cut loose. Now it’s just work, work, work, and when you do pull a little liberty, they expect you to paint an orphanage.”
“I’d like to see this game. Who are your high scorers?”
The sonarman hacked out a smoker’s laugh and rocked back. His duct-taped chair creaked and almost pitched him out, but he rode it down and back up like a mechanical bull. “Let’s make it easy. I’m the high scorer. ‘Thug Numba One.’”
“How about Petty Officer Benyamin?”
“He’s not in my league. And no, you can’t see the game, because the skipper himself shut us down and confiscated my boot copy.”
“Lenson did that?”
Carpenter shrugged, obviously conflicted. “Him and me got history. Some high-pucker-factor situations. Along with Donnie Wenck. Lenson’s solid. But also, like, this uptight Annapolis ring-knocker type. He listened too much in Sunday school, or something. No offense.”
“Wenck.” The name sounded familiar. She made a note, with a question mark. “Who’s he, again?”
“OS chief. The Terror works for him.”
“Oh. Right.” Aisha sighed. Thought of asking if Carpenter owned a knife, but didn’t. This guy wasn’t tall enough, and with his paunch and age, she couldn’t seriously make him for the assault. Just an overage, loudmouthed holdover from the Jurassic. “Are you married, Petty Officer Carpenter?”