by Gordon Kent
Fidel held up the CZ. “With one handgun? Any kid with a weapon could waste the lot of us.” He shook his head. “Lead us to the wasteland, Commander.”
AG 703
A voice in Soleck’s headset said, “This is AG 101, two hundred miles north of your position, will rendezvous en route; I’m good for fuel and can probably make Trincomalee from here, over.” 101 was a Tomcat up north, which rang a bell in Soleck’s head. Two bells, in fact.
“Where’s Stevens?” he said aloud. And he remembered the ESM cut on the rescue frequency. He pressed buttons on his armrest, minimizing the display of the Indian airfields and going back to his ESM screen, where the computer had taken enough cuts on the transmission to locate the original transmission to a point. He overlaid 101’s position and grunted.
“101, this is 703, I have you in the link. Can you turn east to my mark in the link and investigate a transmission on search and rescue, over? We’ve got a plane missing.”
“Roger, 703, I see your mark. I’ll be there in two. Stand by.”
Soleck switched freqs to Alpha Whiskey. “AW, this is 703, over.”
“Go ahead.”
“AW, I’ve conferred with Strike Lead in 203 and we’re taking the stack east toward India with hopes of making Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. Hope you’ll get us permission to land there or another field in the area.”
“703, this is Captain Lash. Make it so, 703.” Lash was decisive, which helped. It was going to be close. Worse than close, if Soleck’s fears for his squadron commander were proven correct.
“Roger. Out.”
“203’s six minutes to empty, two minutes out from us.” Guppy was trying to do three things at once and having some success.
“Get the drogue out, deploy the FLIR camera. We’ll watch them come in, save time and gas.”
“Roger.” The sound of the fuel line deploying was audible even through his helmet.
“203, you’re first at the basket. Drogue should be out and deployed.”
“Copy. I see it. On the way.”
“Roger.”
Strike common was blinking. Soleck dialed it up. “Go ahead?”
“703, this is 101. I have eyeballs on a man in the water, no response on the radio, over.”
“One of ours?” Soleck knew it was. It had to be somebody from Stevens’s plane; there was no use pretending otherwise. Even strict emissions-control procedures wouldn’t have kept Stevens from hearing what was going on on virtually every frequency.
“I’m turning again. Yeah. He’s not waving. Not moving much—shit!”
The last was in a different tone of voice. Soleck listened for a moment and called, “101? This is 703, please respond, over.”
Silence. Not static, but silence. Soleck switched to cockpit-only. “Sorry, Gup. Recalculate your fuel assuming no give from Commander Stevens. Get Air Ops to do it, too. Tell me how it comes out.”
He already had a figure in his head, and it wasn’t good. He looked down, flipped his screen image to FLIR and rotated the FLIR pod to look back and down at the refueling drogue. Almost immediately, he saw Donitz’s plane climbing toward them.
“203, I see you.”
“I’m coming in, 703.”
Donitz’s approach was smooth and even. His probe was out and he rode a spot of turbulence that threw his nose off-center and then put the probe in the drogue with a little flip that was so fast it was hard to follow in the glowing green image on the FLIR.
“How much are we giving 203?” Soleck asked.
Guppy looked up from pencil and paper calculations. “Uh, well. Three thousand pounds?”
“Donuts, will three thousand pounds get you into Trincomalee?”
“Not with any margin.”
“We’ll talk about margin in a minute. Wait one. Break, break. 207, you’re next for Texaco on 706.”
“Roger, 703.”
“706, give 207 three thousand pounds.”
“Roger, copy.”
Not for the last time, Soleck wished for a break, for the control of an E-2, for the steadying voices from the tower and the air boss. He had no idea whether three thousand pounds would get an F-18 across 575 miles of ocean. He wanted to know what was happening in the north, and he took his screen off FLIR and back to the datalink. He had to cycle past the ESM screen and he saw that the display was now littered with cuts from radars, lines of bright green radiating from two points just north and west of the datum he had assigned to the man in the water, and an obvious radar cut from one of the Tomcats.
“101, this is 703, please respond, over.”
“703! We are under fire, repeat, under fire; unknown vessel fired two SAMs.”
Soleck stared at the screen, his mind numb. Then he focused and was able to say, “Roger, 101, copy your under fire from unknown vessel.” His voice was shaky. “Can you provide any ID?”
“Mac says it’s some kinda Russian destroyer.”
“101, is that a Kashin-class destroyer?” Soleck forced himself to focus. He was watching his ESM screen, trying to fly the plane and dial up the AW frequency while maintaining a perfectly steady platform for Donitz’s tanking. He still had time to think that Tomcat jocks never bothered to watch their recce slides and learn ship types, and this was going to prove the pudding. But he had cuts from a modified Godavari-class frigate and a modified Kashin up there where 101 was, about nine miles apart and both close enough to the datum to fire SAMs at the northernmost Tomcat. He fed the ships’ locations from his ESM into the datalink, knowing that without an E-2 aloft to transfer the data and without the bandwidth provided by the antenna array on the carrier, it was unlikely that the information would ever appear on the bridge of the Fort Klock.
“Jeez, 703!”
Soleck took a deep breath. “101, please ID your attacker. You can see him. I can’t.” He left strike common up, called Alpha Whiskey. “AW, this is 703, do you copy 101?”
“Roger. 101 is on strike common.”
I know that! “AW, this is 703. 101 is under fire from unknown enemy vessel. 703 has two possible unid Indian vessels in vicinity and placed them in the link. Do you have the link?”
“Negative link. Repeat that, 703?”
Guppy was waving for his attention. “203 has three thousand pounds and a little.”
“Cut him loose, call the next one in.”
“Who?”
“You decide, you did the math.” No time to baby Gup now. He was swimming so far, and Soleck was gaining confidence in him. He leaned back. “Take the plane, Gup.”
“I got her.”
Soleck took his hands off the controls and flexed them, realizing he had been flying like a nugget with a clench. He looked at ESM, saw a targeting radar come up on the Kashin-class destroyer.
“101, prepare for another missile. Get out of there!”
“Roger, evading. Going to burner. Chaff and flares.”
Soleck pulled up a factoid from his remarkable memory. “Missiles will be first-generation radar-homing.”
“Thanks, 703.”
“101, they should suck at look-down.”
“Roger, copy, going on the deck.”
Soleck waited. He was sure the old Russian missiles would be poor at finding targets below them. Almost sure. For a moment, he could see the missiles on ESM as their radar homing warheads flickered. Then they vanished.
Then 101’s voice: “Two missiles past timeout overhead, I can see the exhaust at burnout. Owe you a beer.”
Soleck made himself breathe. He activated his radio. “AW, this is 703. 101 is under fire from an Indian Navy vessel, Kashin class.” And if I had a Harpoon, I could whack him from here.
“Copy, 703.” Captain Lash, again. “Break, break, 101, what’s your status?”
“Peachy, Alpha Whiskey.”
Soleck thought that was just adrenaline talking. In fact, if that Tomcat had just turned low with his burners on, he’d used more fuel than he had to spare, and Soleck didn’t have any extra. He unclip
ped his harness, leaned way out over Gup and plucked the kneeboard off his lap.
“We’re going to need gas, Alpha Whiskey,” 101 said.
Yeah. And without Stevens, he could see they were already short. Somebody wasn’t going to make it. He did the math while 101 reported the incident to AW and repeated that there was a man in the water. Soleck walled off the idea that Stevens and Goldy might be gone. He was walling a lot off. He heard Alpha Whiskey scramble his own helo, already busy doing search and rescue on pilots who had punched off the Jefferson‘s burning deck, to get the man in the water up north.
He went to the Alpha Whiskey freq and requested another line. He wasn’t ready to go public yet. Then he got 203 on Donitz’s squadron freq. “Donuts?”
“Yeah, Soleck?”
“I got a problem. The Tomcat had to burn gas—”
“I heard.”
“And Stevens’s plane is down. Somebody is screwed for Trincomalee. Or anywhere.”
“Relax, Ev. We’re not. I can make it—altitude’s good. And if I can make it, all the Hornets—”
“Not the Hornets, Chris.”
Four of the Hornets had already tanked. They couldn’t give the gas back if they wanted. The Tomcats farther north had limited options and their options were getting smaller by the second.
“Gotcha.” Donuts had thought it through without Soleck’s having to spell it out: one of the Tomcats was going in the drink. Almost certainly the one that had just saved itself from that very fate. And Soleck was telling Donuts that he was going to have to make the call. Welcome to command.
Even while he listened for Donuts, Soleck was back on the ESM, watching the Godavari-class destroyer as she closed with the Kashin-class. She had a number of radars, French, German, and Russian, and while they baffled even Soleck’s knowledge he could see their types. The Modified Godavari, a middle-aged Indian ship with a curious mix of British and Russian technology, was illuminating something with a high PRF radar that almost had to be for gun-control. She was way out of range of the Tomcats.
That meant she was about to shoot the Kashin.
The world was going to hell
Bahrain
Two thousand miles away in Bahrain, there was no thought of guns or of death from the sky. Harry O’Neill had taken Mike Dukas off to show him his new Hummer. Harry ran a security company that had contracts all over the Middle East; an armored Humvee was just the thing for the CEO to drive. Leslie had stayed behind with Rose, ostensibly to help with dinner, really to talk. Or try to talk. Younger by fifteen years, she was shy—a once noisy, overweight, semi-literate young woman who had found her real self in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s bureaucracy—and in Mike Dukas.
“So what do you do with your days?” Rose asked her as they were dipping lush tomatoes into boiling water and then peeling them.
“I take classes. Distance learning, you know. Plus Arabic at U. of Bahrain. Plus I do some temping.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Michael says I’m an over-achiever.” She put a peeled tomato on the cutting board between them, and Rose cut a cross in the bottom and squeezed seeds and pulp into a blue plastic bowl. “I’m going to be an NCIS special agent, just like him.”
“What does he say to that?”
Leslie made an unhappy face. “He says things like, ‘Dream on.’”
“That’s not fair.”
“He doesn’t mean it like that. He means—it’s hard, and there aren’t that many jobs for women. And he means it’s me.” She stopped peeling, looked down at the board, knife in one hand, tomato in the other. “Leslie, the trailer-park-trash queen.”
“Honey.” Rose wiped her hands on a paper towel. “Hey. You’re smarter than he is, that’s the trouble.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Leslie, I know Mike. You’re smarter.”
“He’s in love with you.” Leslie smiled. “It’s okay. But I know he is.” The smile became shaky. “He isn’t in love with me, though.”
“Honey, you two live together!”
“Michael likes sex, right?” Leslie passed the back of the tomato-holding hand under her nose and sniffed. “I chase him across the Atlantic Ocean, I show up at his door, he hasn’t got a woman in Bahrain yet—dah-dah! How nice to see you, Leslie, why don’t you lie down and spread your legs.” Tears welled in her eyes. She sniffed again.
Rose put her arms around her. “Oh, honey, he isn’t like that. He’s, he’s—”
Leslie let her hands hang at her sides, let herself be hugged. She said, “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, Les—!” Rose swayed back, her hands on Leslie’s upper arms. “That’s—” She studied Leslie’s face, thought better of saying it was wonderful. “Does he know?”
Leslie shook her head. “He’ll think I did it on purpose. You know, to—”
“You have to tell him!”
“I’m thinking, maybe—maybe if I, you know, didn’t have it, then he wouldn’t feel—” She shuddered. “Trapped. Whatever.”
Rose held her arms. “I’ve been praying to get pregnant again. I was going to have our last one here, shore tour, it would be easy. Then I had a miscarriage. Les, it’s hell when you want one and you can’t.”
“It’s kind of hell when you got one and you figure he doesn’t want it.” She searched Rose’s face. “I’m sorry I dumped my shit on you, and you’re—you got more reason to—”
“No, no!” Rose laughed a little shakily. “I’m pregnant, too! If I can make it to three months, maybe this time it’ll be okay! Ten more days.”
“Does Alan know?”
“He’s been away, so busy, it’s just one more—” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s unlucky to tell him until I’m sure, you know?”
The two women let their eyes meet, then put their arms around each other, laughing that partly mad laughter that is near tears.
In a pool of white sunlight, five red tomatoes gleamed beside the bright blue bowl.
6
Mahe Naval Base, India
They found chain-link fences behind the naval base’s buildings. Fences that had to be climbed. And there were five of them. And one was a woman with the upper-body strength of a child.
Ong had to be helped from behind by Alan or Fidel and pulled to the top by Clavers, who made it in one graceful jump, grab, and swing. Fidel and Alan went over like monkeys. Benvenuto managed to get over by grabs and gasps, but it wasn’t pretty.
“Whadya think?” Fidel said when the little group had made it over their third fence. They were huddling in a dumpster storage yard that smelled mostly of things that had been in the dumpsters too long.
“I think the lieutenant’s about had it.”
Ong was collapsed on a stack of wooden pallets, her head in her hands, saying “I can’t” and weeping.
“We need some fucking guns.” Fidel said it as if guns would get Ong over the fences faster. The words were not quite out when a man with a gun stepped around a dumpster fifty feet away. He was eighteen or nineteen, thin, in Indian naval working dress. He had an AK-47 and there was no way to tell what side of this strange conflict he was on.
Fidel raised his right arm and shot him. Just like that. Alan would have sworn Fidel hadn’t had time to aim.
“Jesus, Fidel—”
“You wait to ask who he is, you die.” Fidel was already over the body, the AK in one hand, the other ripping through pockets for extra clips. He found one, then another. “That shot’ll bring shit down on us, Jesus—” Other gunshots were still popping out on the street, but nothing close by.
He tossed Alan the CZ and bent over the boy’s body again, looking for more ammunition, but his head was up to watch the place where the boy had first appeared. Alan went to the corner of the dumpster and looked around it, finding nothing. Above them, the wall of the building was window-less for four storeys; above that, a single row of floor-to-ceiling windows ran the entire width. VIP country, he thought. He supposed the building had som
ething to do with the dumpsters—maintenance, or facilities and grounds. Would those people be involved in a mutiny? Could the building be a safe haven for Americans?
Fidel backed himself against another dumpster twenty feet away. He pointed at Alan, then at the space that he could see and Alan couldn’t. The finger pointed again at Alan: You—go!
Alan went around the corner of the iron dumpster, the CZ ready, took in at a glance that they were between two rows of dumpsters, five on each side, and he raced to the next one and sheltered there, looked back and nodded at Fidel, who ran forward. So they made their way up the rows, covering each other, until they reached the third pair. Alan was leaning against the sun-warmed metal, Fidel just signaled to come on, when a brown hand splayed itself against the edge of the dumpster opposite. Fidel was already running.
Black hair appeared by the hand, then a face, brown eyes like a deer’s, young and feminine. The boy tried to swing a weapon into position; Alan had time to see that it was a bolt-action rifle, and then he fired the CZ, shooting on instinct as he had been taught—index finger along the side of the pistol, third finger on the trigger.
Point and shoot.
An astonished expression replaced the fear on the young face, and the kid screamed. He had been hit just below the collarbone on the right side. Then Fidel was there blocking Alan’s view, and the AK was hammering, and it was over.
Alan found himself looking at two bodies. The smell of blood was sickening, lush, warm. Twitching, the two boys lay on the violated earth, dirt impregnated with broken glass and bolts and hard plastic knobs that stuck out like bones, blood on them now. “Jesus Christ, Fidel!” Alan said. “They’re kids.”
“You think I’m fucking proud of it?!”
“We don’t have to kill everybody we see!”
Fidel’s face was twisted. “You want to take the fucking gun—sir?” He held out the AK-47.
“You know you’re better with it.”
“Yeah, well just keep that in mind—sir!”
Alan suppressed the angry things that sprang to his tongue. They stared into each other’s eyes, neither flinching. Finally, Alan said, “You’re out of line with that tone, Chief,” and turned away, exposing his back to the other man and his anger and his weapon. But Fidel was better than that.