Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

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.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  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.”

  Bahrain

  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?”

  The woman on the other end was good. She knew within half a minute that Commander Craik wasn’t there. Had he tried the naval base? Then Dukas and Leslie came in, and Rose stood in the kitchen doorway with the telephone still in her hand, and the three-year-old, Bobby, woke from his nap and wandered in with the nanny from the bedroom wing. And then Mike—the other Mike, named after Mike Dukas—Alan’s and Rose’s nine-year-old son, came in from outside, looking at all the adults with the wisdom born of years among such people, and said, “What’s wrong now?” Then, with the condescension that only a child can show to his mother, he said, “Mom, you’re burning the tomato sauce again.”

  Northern India

  A continent away from Rose’s burned sauce, the sharp smell of rancid ghee carried over the industrial antiseptic and mold to burn in Daro’s throat. He coughed, his hand automatically rubbing his abdomen. Despite the discomfort, he savored the anonymity of his new headquarters.

  They now occupied a former telemarketing center over a restaurant. The walls were gray-green, the carpet dull and moldy. There were no posters, no personal photographs, no cartoons, no graffiti. Three cheap digital clocks provided the only relief for the eye. On the floor, desks formed a long curve with a bank of small flat-screen displays against the far wall.

  Mohenjo Daro paced the floor in front of the screens, often pausing opposite the desk of one of his operators to hear a report, curled into himself by pain despite his discipline.

  Vashni, on the other hand, sat to one side with three laptops open in front of her, collating data. She raised her head from her screen. “The Americans have cancelled the exercise. We have a report that their carrier is on fire.”

  Daro nodded. He was leaning over another operator, reading her screen.

  Vashni raised her voice, unsure whether her news had been heard. “Shiva’s Spear was a success.”

  “Hundreds of men and women are dead, Vash. Try not to sound so pleased.”

  She swung her hair. “We can move to phase two. Americans are the greatest offenders against this planet—”

  Daro was shaking his head even as she started to speak. “I wish we could have recruited there more effectively.”

  “In America? All they care about is money and primitive religion.” Vash’s facade of civility cracked and her voice grew shriller. “No one would have joined.”

  He ignored her, placed a hand on his stomach, shrugged. “So—let us move on to phase two, then.”

  Daro clapped his hands. The operators looked up.

  “Phase two, my friends.”

  Conversation stilled. The gentle tapping of fingers on keyboards became the only sound, intense concentration the only expression. Phase two would turn India into chaos.

  An hour passed. Two men in white lab coats s
erved food, which was eaten automatically.

  Daro moved around the room, scanning screens, making suggestions and responses, praising much and reproving little. Three times in the hour he stopped, hands at his waist, head down. After the hour’s walking, he was visibly weaker.

  Despite her own tasks, Vashni watched him from the cover of her computer screens. She was sure that the bouts were coming quicker and hitting him harder.

  One of the men at the left of the room punched a fist in the air, and Daro walked over to look at his screen, where a data stream was made visible as a digital waterfall. “I’m in,” the man said, indicating his screen. Then his fingers flew over the keyboard. As he typed, flat screens on the front wall lit up and provided images, all black and white. Nine of them showed corridors, one showed a desk with a guard; a few showed outside views of a low concrete building, and three showed the top of a dam. One showed a low concrete building with a heavy blast door marked “Bldg. 37.” Altogether, there were twenty-seven screens, and, even as Daro watched, they changed to a new set of views: more landscapes, a helipad, more security stations. Distant mountains showed in some views, and a dam, and the lake behind it, and twelve huge turbines; factories, power storage, power transmission, a nuclear reactor. The whole of the Ambur Regional Electrical Power Facility, the most extensive in India, unfolded across the wall in the frames of the flat paneled screens.

  Daro reached out a hand toward Ali, his assistant, and snapped his fingers, and Ali unwrapped a new cell phone from its plastic and handed it to Daro, who opened it and dialed a long number. The crackling of the discarded plastic was the loudest sound in the room.

  “Ready?” he asked. Something about the reply amused him, and he smiled. “You should have the feed now. Three minutes? I think we can wait that long. Very good.” He pressed a button to end the call, and handed the phone to Ali while he watched the screens, leaning the weight of his torso on one arm on the back of a chair.

  “Station Two will insert loops as soon as they have sufficient footage for each camera. Our views will continue to be live,” he said.