by Gordon Kent
“Because the launch officer cut the countdown, without authorization, and fucked the pre-programmed data. In the rush to get the missile off the deck, she entered the ship’s location in the target window.”
“Jesus Christ,” Touhey breathed.
“It would show in the tapes,” Shreed said.
Sixteen minutes thirty.
Suter wiped sweat from his right eye. “I can rewrite the tapes. There might have to be a gap of a few seconds.”
Touhey growled, “Boys, we’re talking about killing Americans, here. Listen up, now—”
“Awkward if they hit the cruiser,” Shreed said. He was simply thinking aloud. “Russian sub was around somewhere, but he won’t be on the surface. Too bad. Or maybe not—complicated, if we hit a Russian sub. There’s a Chinese spy ship hanging back by the Libyan coast; that would be—”
“Guys,” Touhey said warningly, “I don’t like what I’m hearing.”
“So the rods come down,” Shreed said, going on exactly as if Touhey hadn’t spoken, “and they take out the ship and the computers and the witnesses. That is what you mean, isn’t it, Suter—that we’re going to take out the witnesses?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“Because, if the witnesses survive, we’re in deep shit—is that right?”
“That’s right.”
Fifteen minutes, nineteen seconds.
“Well.” Shreed’s voice sounded full of admiration. “You’re one nasty piece of work. Nastier than I ever figured for.” He changed to a harsher, almost nagging tone. “Touhey!” Shreed waited. “You there, Touhey?”
“Yeah, I’m here. And I ain’t playing.”
“Yes, you are. If I play, you play. Let me put it this way, General. If you don’t play, I’ll kill you in the Senate. I’ll have the intel committees into IVI like the Ebola virus. You’ll be lucky to get out without a prison term. I’m not going to repeat myself, because there’s no time. Yes or no?”
Suter watched the clock tick and hated Touhey now, too, for holding them up.
“Shreed,” he heard Touhey say, his voice now rough with some powerful emotion that made it like the rumble of a bad muffler. “Eat shit. That clear enough for you? You just take me to the committees, just go ahead! I don’t give a rat’s ass what you try to do to me. And you, Suter—you’re fired. You go crawl back to the C-fucking-I-A and tell them that out here in the real world there’s one general don’t think much of killing Americans just because it’d help his fucking career. You got me? Goddamit, Suter, answer me! You get me?”
“But—”
“Then abort! Pull that fucking Abort switch in the next three seconds or I’ll have Security in there to arrest you for treason. One! Two!—”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Touhey!”
“Three!”
Suter reached up, flipped the red Lucite cover, and pulled the switch.
Nearing the Antarctic ice pack, Peacemaker erupted in flame, soundless in space, and the deadly rods, shattered, blew out in a cloud like sticks scattered by wind, and began their long, erratic, meaningless, harmless fall to burn, unexpended, in the atmosphere.
The Med.
Rafe turned toward Lampedusa Island. The S-3 rocked its wings as he drew abreast of the Philadelphia, a greeting and a salute to a gallant ship. The Libyan Nanuchka was just slipping under the surface a quarter-mile away, her narrow stern going last, and Alan lifted his right hand to his forehead—a salute to another gallant ship, one that had done its best in a cause that had been different from his. He looked down at the Philly as they passed their closest. A small figure was standing on the Philly’s stern, waving. Alan deployed the infrared pod and moved it up and down as they passed overhead.
On the Philadelphia, Rose was up on the main deck, watching as Alan’s S-3 became a dot in the north and then part of the sky. She was alive; he was alive. Alive!
A helicopter was just taking off with the wounded marine and one of the surviving crewmen from the battle at the stern. She held her hair as the wind gusted from the rotors. A chopper pilot herself, she saw it as if she was inside the aircraft, driving it up, turning, moving away toward the north where the cruiser and its hospital were waiting.
“We’re okay, Gunny,” she said, when she could be heard over the rotor noise. “We did it and we’re okay!”
LaFond had his M-16 slung over his left shoulder, and a bandage on his cheek where something had hit him during the gun battle, probably metal or encrusted paint from the deck. The bandage was big and made him look swollen. When he grinned, it rode up on his face. “Kinda hairy there, once or twice.” He spat a brown stream on the deck, stepped on the splatter and moved his foot around. He was chewing tobacco.
“What’s happening with that third boarder?” The truth was, she couldn’t have cared less about the third boarder; she was too happy. But she was being a good CO, doing it on automatic. Running down.
“Ship’s company found him in a p’way. Bled to death.” LaFond spat again. “You okay, Commander?”
“Never better!” In fact, she felt weak in the knees, silly in the head—happy and coming down all at once. A little like birth. It was over, and there was a letdown. But this birth worked. I did this one right.
LaFond touched her arm, pointed. Somebody was waving at her from the bridge—the woman engineering officer. Rose waved back. The woman waved more vigorously and beckoned her closer.
“Aw, Christ, what now?” she muttered. She felt it as a huge imposition, then remembered that this weight was the weight of command. She turned back to LaFond. “Get our weapons together, Gunny. Get them below decks someplace before the cruiser gets here, okay? Let’s look a little shipshape.”
The deck felt as big as a football field as she crossed it. Her thighs were stiff, her left calf so knotted that she hobbled. Where had she hurt herself? Seeing the engineering officer waving harder, she tried to run. Belay that. She hobbled up the ladder and to the bridge.
“Somebody wants you!” The woman pointed at the sound-powered phone.
“Yeah, Siciliano here.”
“Hey, Commander, Jeez!” It was Valdez.
“Aw, Valdez, what now—!”
“I thought you’d want to know. Peacemaker aborted. Ka-boom! Gone.”
She didn’t get it. It made no sense. She was dizzy with fatigue, mild shock—what the hell?
“Hey, Commander, you there?”
“I—yeah. What?”
“They aborted Peacemaker. From IVI. White House order. I got it on the dedicated link, so I bring it up on the screen and one of the scientists, he goes ballistic. His career is in ruins, he says, which don’t mean squat to me one way or the other, but I can tell you something that does mean squat to me: He goes, ‘This was the greatest weapon in the world and they aborted it.’ You like that—weapon, h’mm? Weapon?” He paused. “Weapon, as in that’s the missing data?”
She thought of Abe Peretz. She thought about her own refusal to see what perhaps should have been obvious. What did that make her—a dedicated officer, or a fool?
“Come out on deck and tell me about it,” she said. She stared down at the rolling gray water. The feeling of triumph had slipped from her like a coat that didn’t fit. “Come talk to me, Valdez.” She handed the sound-powered phone back and went out into the air, feeling it rouse her, pull her into the world, when all she wanted to do was sleep. She saw Valdez’s small figure emerge from the module and start toward the bridge, and she went down the ladder that only an hour before they had been fighting over, and she turned toward the bow and went toward him, both slanted a little to one side to counter the list of the ship. New figures were moving around the decks, damage-control specialists flown in from the Klock, marines to back up LaFond’s weary crew, more IVI technicians. She and Valdez ignored them, headed for each other.
Valdez stopped a few feet away from her. “You did your goddam best! I don’t want you to worry about this now, you hear me? Commander?”
<
br /> She began to grin. “Oh, Valdez—!” Then she was laughing, and tears were running down her face. “Oh, Valdez—you’re the best!”
40
In the S-3, the flight to Lampedusa was anti-climax and torture. Even moving around the tiny cabin didn’t help after nine hours strapped into the ejection seat, and every man had experienced so many surges of fear and adrenaline that their suits stank, and the cabin stank with them. And the coffee was gone. Rafe announced that he suddenly wanted to smoke, a reaction he had not experienced in years. Cutter shared a bottle of water with everybody. Alan dozed, more like passed out. McAllen woke him a minute out from the landing.
“Straps and brace, sir. Jeez, what a flight, huh? Sure am sorry we didn’t get to use that torpedo!” Alan, fuzzy from sleep, just looked at him. McAllen burbled on: “Well, we took a buddy store and drained it dry, right? We nailed the Nanuchka with the Harpoon, right? We killed the mini-sub with the depth charge, right? Pretty good mission. Too bad we didn’t get to use the torpedo on that damned Sierra!” McAllen sounded as if he was ready to do it all over again. Cutter laughed. Alan wondered if McAllen really meant it. The torpedo, on the Russian submarine? Was he really that young?
They got a straight in from Lampedusa, and Rafe accepted it for a landing that was dramatic only in its absolute lack of flamboyance. He ran the engines down from full throttle and let Cutter lead him through the checklist as they taxied toward the minuscule Coast Guard tower.
“If the Italians make a stink about us having that torpedo aboard, just keep talking about no gas left. We’re down, and that’s what matters.” Rafe sounded half-asleep. “Unless they won’t let us take off again. Then we’ll ditch the torpedo and pick it up some other time.”
He and Alan were the last out of the plane, and they walked toward the tower together. Rafe was anxious to be in the air again, even though he was exhausted. He was the acting squadron skipper now; he’d have a bunch of things to deal with on the boat. The deaths of four squadron members, for starters. Alan walked silently beside him, his boots scuffing as if he were too tired to lift his feet. He pulled his helmet off and tucked it under his arm, thinking about O’Neill and Djalik and Christy. His shoulder whacked a doorframe as they reached the building, and he leaned against it, one hand on the doorknob. “I know you’re hurting, Rafe.”
Rafe simply looked his numbness: Don’t remind me. No words. His jaws were covered with dark stubble; he had circles under his eyes; he smelled like a locker room.
“Had enough problems for one day.” He started to push past Alan into the flight spaces. Alan held the doorknob and forced Rafe to look at him. “Thanks for saving Rose,” he said.
Rafe met his eyes, only for a moment. “Yeah. No problem.”
“I’m sorry about Christy. They got great doctors; they’ll do everything for her.”
Rafe stood there. He nodded. He didn’t look at Alan, but at the door—at nothing. Then he said something that suggested that he had been thinking, too. “If her plane had made it, we wouldn’t have gone. And they wouldn’t have done it as well as we did. Maybe these things—happen certain ways for certain reasons.” He started to say something, stopped, then looked at Alan’s eyes. His own showed a deep pain, perhaps a kind of pain he had never felt before. “I can’t talk about her yet. If she makes it, I want to—I love her, Al.” Alan put his hand on Rafe’s shoulder. He nodded again. Alan opened the door and Rafe went through.
Coda
The Friends
Norfolk. June 1997.
Mikey Craik woke and felt the dog’s big head on the bed beside him. The dog did that sometimes—just came in and put his head there while Mikey slept. Just checking. The sleepy child moved his hand to touch the wet muzzle, and the huge tail wagged, and the whole dog moved, and Mikey’s bed moved with him. He chuckled.
Downstairs, the grownups were making noise. There hadn’t been much noise like that in his life until his parents came back. Now there was noise, happy noise.
He slipped out of bed and padded to the door, the dog at his shoulder. They went down the hall and reached the top of the stairs, and the little boy went down the stairs step by step, holding on to the spindles of the banister until he was far enough down so that he and the dog could sit on the step and look through the spindles and watch the party.
Harry O’Neill looked wonderful. It was hard to see that he’d lost an eye. They’d made new lids from skin from the inside of one arm, and his artificial eye was a beautiful copy and even moved when the good one did. Of course, being blind on that side, he moved his head more to focus on things on his bad side.
He was wearing a new Oxxford suit and a pair of old Lobb shoes that were so beautiful that every other man in the room wanted to hide his own feet. Harry even smelled rich—some cologne that evoked leather and nutmeg and flowers and—well, sex.
Harry was laughing. He had an arm around Mike Dukas and an arm around Abe Peretz, squeezing them both and pulling them tight until their heads were close to his. He said, “How about it guys? You in?”
Dukas punched him in the ribs to make him let go. “Not me. I’m flattered, but I got a job for two more years.”
“Mike, this is better!”
“I got a commitment. Things are moving now. We’re making arrests.”
Abe made a face. “Bea saw you on CNN! She wants to know who the sexy little guy with you was.”
“Sexy? No, that was Pigoreau. He’s just—” He frowned. Pigoreau, sexy? “Your wife’s got lousy taste, Abe.”
“Hey, thanks.”
“Present company excepted! Anyway, Harry—thanks, but no thanks. Sounds interesting, sounds exciting, but—I’m in for the long haul where I am.”
Harry squeezed his shoulder. “Thought I’d try.” He looked at Peretz. “Abe?”
Abe cocked his head, rubbed his upper lip. “Give me your card. Let’s talk about it. Lunch?”
“You bet. We’ll find a place where you can hear me with your good ear, and I can watch the babes with my good eye.” Their injuries had already become a bit of gallows humor between them. Abe had a hearing aid, barely visible, in his right ear, and the pink line of a scar still showed at his hairline, if you knew where to look.
“I heard that crack about babes,” Rose called from across the room.
“This is guy talk.”
“Guy talk is sexist bullshit.”
Dukas detached himself from Harry and headed for Rose. “Let’s talk girl talk,” he was heard to say when he got to her.
Harry had told them at dinner what he was recruiting for. He and the Agency had had an agreeable parting of the ways. “They could live with a black guy, but a one-eyed black guy was a bit much. I tried to tell them it could be worse; I could be Sammy Davis, Junior, but they didn’t get it.” He had looked around the dinner table. Nobody there got it, either. Harry had laughed. “One-eyed black guy who was also a convert to Judaism. If he’d been gay he’d have touched all the bases.” Now he was a budding entrepreneur and was looking for what he called “associates,” meaning employees, but he was looking only for specialized people with special talents.
Alan had smiled across the table at him. This was the new Harry O’Neill—quieter, tougher, elegant. The Agency had flown him from the Rangoon to an Air Force hospital in Germany and then to Washington, where his surgeries had started. When he was up and about, he had gone to his parents, brushed aside their hopes that now he had seen reason, that now he would go to law school, and he had told them that they were rich and he had an idea, and would they please give him a half million dollars; they could take it out of his share of their estate. It took them five days to accommodate their rather false notions of their son to the realities, and then they had begun to come around. Now Harry had his half million as seed money, and, with his father’s and mother’s help, he’d raised three million in venture capital among Washington’s legal elite. Only Alan knew that he was still suffering flashbacks and nightmares, and that he faced an
HIV test every three months for the next two years—or until he tested positive.
“So,” he was saying now to Abe, “you’re interested.”
Abe shushed him with an eyebrow, looking at the kitchen, where Bea was moving back and forth past the doorway. “We’ll talk. Let’s say—the Bureau’s a little staid.”
Harry dropped his voice, turning his back to Rose. “What about what happened to you. You ever—?”
“There’s some unfinished business there. I got some ideas. I assume that this new thing of yours wouldn’t discourage an ‘associate’ from using resources to pursue his own wild hares now and then?”
“Shit, man, we’d—”
Alan joined them. “Talking the new shop?”
“We’re comparing disability checks. Did I tell you I hired Dave Djalik?”
“You did, as a matter of fact, but not why.”
Harry turned his head that fraction of an inch too much that revealed the failure of his left eye. “He has skills I want. And African experience.”
“Djalik hated Africa.”
“We-e-e-llll—It’s a little more complex than that.”
“He still hate my guts?”
“Let’s say you’re not his favorite person. He’s grateful, Al, but—”
“I know. I know.” He smiled. “At least he’s one medal up now.” Alan had made sure that Djalik was one medal up. He had recommended him for another Silver Star, and he had asked Parsills to see that no recommendation was made for Alan himself. Nothing. He had tried to explain: “What I did was for—friendship. What Djalik did was for duty—and then for something above and beyond duty. That’s what they give medals for.” Djalik had got his medal, but he hadn’t forgiven Alan for Africa; he had a prosthesis where his left hand had been. They had seen each other once, but neither had been comfortable.
Abe, sensing the discomfort, said to O’Neill, “Aren’t you going to try to hire the great Craik away from the Navy?”