Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Does the Navy know what’s at stake here?” She cast her eyes desperately over the papers on her desk, a jumble of top-secret trash, before she found what she wanted; the Director, Naval Intelligence Daily Intelligence Summary. “The Navy’s got a huge fucking exercise with the Indian Navy, Lord of Light, starting today!”

  “Mary, this is a need-to-know issue, but I’ll tell you this much—it was something to do with the Navy and the exercise that got to the President an hour ago. The exercise has been canceled—that’s classified, not to be repeated; they’re keeping it close to the vest so far. There’s been an incident, okay? They’re trying to keep it off the evening news until they can spin it. We’re talking dead American military—next to that, Ambur doesn’t loom very large with this bunch.”

  “But if there are Indian nukes—!”

  “Indian nukes don’t vote; dead sailors’ families do. They’re focused on damage control.”

  “But—the Navy must have people on the ground there.” She thought fast. “Look, cut me orders to go to Bahrain and support Fifth Fleet, sir. Screw the plane. Give me a country team for India and a couple of jocks from Special Operations Group and let me go to Bahrain to support the Navy. They’ll love it, we’ll look cooperative as hell, and the moment the NSC realizes what’s really at stake, we’ll be twelve hours ahead.” She wanted to say Please. As in I beg you. On my knees.

  “Well,” he said, “I dunno—” But the tone was right, as if he was saying, Well, maybe, just this once, we could have Christmas—

  10

  Mahe, India

  In the bullet-scarred hotel lobby, Alan became aware of a whimpering from behind the pocked marble counter, and he looked over and saw the lovely, still fetal Miss Chitrakar. He tried to mumble something comforting, and she moaned, and a round, brown, big-eyed young man with oiled hair staggered out of the office behind the reception counter and stared around the lobby. He put his hand over his mouth. He was the assistant manager, and he was going to be sick.

  Having somebody else’s problem to solve made Alan feel temporarily better. “Generator,” Alan said.

  The young man stared at him.

  “Generator. For electricity!”

  “Automatic.”

  Alan pointed at the dead TV. “I don’t think the automatic part worked.”

  “Oh. Oh—oh—” He vanished.

  Alan’s attention was taken by the telephone, which still lay on the high counter, untouched and emitting rather high-pitched squawks that resolved into a voice calling, “Al—Al—” He leaned on the counter, glad for its support, unconsciously listening to a distant siren.

  Harry was still on the line.

  “Harry, hold for a sec—” He forced himself to focus, pulling himself back together. Get people out. He had to force himself through it a step at a time. Get them downstairs. Get them into the van. He told Fidel to get on a house phone and get everybody downstairs and into the car. He tried to make himself sound brisk, confident. “We pull out in three minutes, no ifs, ands, or buts. No showers, no sacktime, no nothing! Go.”

  “No electricity, no elevators.” Fidel grinned, again a scary sight. “Nine flights, Commander.”

  “Tell them to jump. We’re getting out of here.” Before the cops arrive, he was thinking. He didn’t mind cops, in fact normally would have welcomed them—Oh, boy, to just sink into the back of a cop car and let somebody else do all the organ-izing—but what was happening was now so unpredictable that he wanted only to get them all to a safe place.

  “Harry?”

  “What the hell’s goin’ on, champ?”

  “People with guns.”

  “You don’t sound too good, bud.”

  “Look, the shit’s hit the fan here. The base was chaos—like a mutiny. I don’t know what’s happening now; all I know is, people are shooting at us and for some reason they’ve put out a bulletin with my photo and ‘shoot to kill’ on it.”

  “Bulletin! What kind of bulletin?”

  “Like a, like a Palm Pilot with a cell phone—little screen—” He was listening to the distant siren, now closer. Out in the street, a few civilians with shocked, silent faces were looking at the hotel, then at the bodies in the street.

  “Who’s shooting at you?”

  “Harry, if I knew, things would be a hell of a lot better.”

  The siren seemed to be closer, and then there was an explosion, and then there was no siren.

  CIA HQ

  Mary Totten was holding the telephone as if she wanted to crush it in her fist. She could hear the DDI talking to somebody on the other end, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. On and on. Discussing her future, her chance to get out of this fucking place! And he couldn’t simply say “Go!”, no, he had to mumble and mumble and—Bill Caddis passed her, watching her, and she waved him in, thinking momentarily that she would tell him that it was off, then deciding it was bad luck to say such a thing.

  Then the DDI was on again. His voice was doubtful. “Well—okay.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe a word he was saying. “I’ll cut you orders for Bahrain. But no team. No shooters, nothing like that—”

  She looked at Bill. “One analyst? He’s a specialist, sir, the best—”

  “One, okay, one analyst. But I want you to notify Fifth Fleet yourself. Keep this as low-key as you can—really low-key. I’m out on a limb here, Mary.”

  “Yes, sir.” She cleared her throat, trying to hide her excitement. “And, sir, uh—one more thing?” She bit her lip and tugged at the earring again, took the plunge. “I’d like to activate Persian Rug.”

  Persian Rug was a deep-cover asset in Bahrain with Indian contacts.

  The DDI sounded shocked. “He’s not a WMD asset!”

  “Sure, sir. But he’s submitted all the reports we have on Ambur and he clearly has contacts we can use. I can send you his last report—”

  “Mary, now you’re putting me out on two limbs. I’m sorry, I have to ask DDO. Give me another ten minutes.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She reckoned it a done deal; the current DDI was actually close to the DDO, unlike past administrations. But she had also just placed herself in a must-win position; she’d have to produce something to justify the effort. No problem! She smiled and ended the connection, turning to beam the smile at Bill Caddis, who had slumped into a chair.

  “Bill? Move your ass. We’re going.”

  She made a couple of telephone calls and stared at the wall and thought about things like communications and guns, and she went through her classified Rolodex until she found the number she wanted at Fifth Fleet intelligence, Bahrain—a very attractive commander named Alan Craik.

  Bahrain

  Outside the Craiks’ house in Bahrain, Harry O’Neill was sitting in a white plastic lounge chair beside the blue swimming pool, a laptop open on his long legs, and pressing the phone against his ear. He heard in it a distant siren and a muffled explosion, and then some sound as Alan lost the telephone and recovered it. Now, in the silence that followed, he could hear Alan’s breathing.

  What Alan had said about a mutiny didn’t make much sense, but combat never made sense when you were in it. What worried Harry, however, was the feeling that Alan’s entire environment, even India itself, might be going mad. The accident on the Jefferson triggered his security-officer response; it was unimaginable that what had happened to the carrier and what was happening to Alan could be only coincidence. Except that in an environment gone mad, coincidence became a kind of logic. He began to tap queries into his laptop as he spoke to Alan on the cell phone, his head slightly cocked so he could watch the screen with his good eye.

  “Al, listen up. I’m going to put you on hold for no more than one minute, I swear to God. Then I’m going to get back to you, and hopefully by then I’ll have some information. You’ll hold?”

  Alan sounded dubious. “I’ve got to get my people out of here, Harry.”

  “It’s for you and your people, dumbfuck
!”

  “Okay, one minute, one minute—”

  Harry cut the voice off and hit 11 on his phone and went direct to his office and his VP there, Dave Djalik, a former Navy SEAL.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dave, Harry. Two things, most urgent: I want to know in the next fifty seconds what you’re getting on India, southwestern India particularly. Get on that while you listen to me. Two, I want to know what flights there are out of Mahe, M-A-H-E, India and where they go—any flights to friendly countries, sooner the better. Get on it.”

  “Hold.”

  Harry looked around the oasis of the Craiks’ garden. A desert garden, to be sure, but beautifully tended, beautiful to look at. As Harry sat admiring a desert rose, Mike Dukas came out of the house and stood next to him, his eyebrows raised in a question. Harry shook his head.

  Djalik came back on the phone to say, “Weird things going down in India. CNN reporting terrorist attacks, but we’re getting in-country client reports about mostly small stuff—a cell tower one place, fires another, somewhere somebody poured animal shit all over the floor of a resort hotel—just weird stuff. Got a report of spreading blackouts all over western India—looks like the electricity grid is doing a domino—Mumbai, Pondicherry, Mahe—yeah, that’s the place you asked about—Hold on.”

  He was gone for nine seconds. Dukas started to ask a question, but Harry waved a hand, looked away. Then Djalik was back: “India’s closed.”

  “The whole country?”

  “Just declared. All major airports closed, no penetration of Indian airspace allowed. Forget the flights out of Mahe.”

  Harry pursed his lips, then made a popping sound. “Stay on this, Dave. Put out a company-wide alert, information-only, prep for possible complications in India and up all incoming intel to level three, my eyes personally.”

  “Got it.”

  Harry looked up and met Dukas’s eyes. “Dave, give me ASAP a landing field near Mahe that will take the Lear jet. Can’t be anything big—discreet, easy-on, easy-off—”

  “I’m on it.”

  Harry brought up a mapping program on the laptop and switched back to Alan. “You there?”

  CIA HQ

  Two telephone calls convinced Mary Totten that Alan Craik wasn’t in Bahrain, and there wasn’t anybody else at Fifth Fleet intelligence senior enough to be worth talking to. Fair enough. She left messages to create a clear trail of having tried to do it the right way and then flipped slowly through her list of other Navy numbers in Bahrain until she came to a handwritten note that said Mike Dukas new SAC NCIS Bahrain. She hadn’t met Dukas but she’d heard of him. Tough, smart, dogged. Unmarried. Oh, goody.

  Mahe, India

  Harry was back on the line to Alan.

  “Fifty-seven seconds, not bad,” Alan said. He was wincing because Fidel was standing halfway across the hotel lobby, making urgent Let’s get going signs. All Alan wanted to do was lie down.

  “India’s closed,” Harry said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  Closed? “What the hell?”

  “We’re getting intel of a general breakdown, Al—murmurs so far, I don’t know what they mean, but the country’s closed. I’m coming to get you. Hold on.”

  “Harry—!”

  He watched his people straggle in a door on the far side of the lobby. They looked like walking ragbags, half-dressed, carrying the bundles and plastic shopping bags and anomalous luggage of refugees. Ong came out almost at a trot, trying to tuck a clean blouse into clean slacks, propelled from behind by a push from Clavers, who bustled through the door shouting, “She was taking a fucking bath! A bath!”

  “Al!”

  “Yo.”

  “An airfield thirty miles from you, bearing about 315 from—You’re at the International, right? Yeah, 315 from the hotel. About five miles south of a town called Prenningerash. Got it? Prenningerash! The field is called the Bhulta Valley Agricultural Facility. General av, no commercial air, one tarmac strip. I’ll pick you up there in the morning. Hey, how many people you got?”

  “Five. Including me. But Jesus, Harry—”

  “No prob. Early a.m. tomorrow, friend—be there.”

  “Harry—if the country’s closed—”

  “Get a grip Al, this is me. I’ll pick you up in the morning. You guys just be there. We on the same page?”

  Alan saw things complicating, spiraling up, heading toward utter incoherence. He glanced at his group, saw their tension, their weariness, their confusion, then felt again his own after-shooting depression. He forced himself out of it. “You’re the best, Harry. Tell Rose I’m okay, and pass the word to Fifth Fleet, okay?” He raced through the details—Borgman’s death and the need to get somebody responsible in India to recover the body; his current status; the mutiny. The hell with security—it was all over the TV, what did he care about an open phone?

  Fidel was pushing the others toward the back of the hotel. Ong was hopping on one foot, trying to get a shoe on; Benvenuto was carrying her makeup case and a matching suit-bag and a big red plastic shopping bag with “Lala Land” on it in orange. Clavers was humping a duffel bag and a fishing-rod case.

  Alan trotted after them. He and Fidel hadn’t even got to their rooms. Traveling light.

  “This is a bitched-up can of worms,” Fidel growled when Alan caught up.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Fidel glanced aside at him. “You call Fifth Fleet?”

  Alan laughed and wondered if he was cracking up.

  Bahrain

  When Dukas saw Harry close the little phone, he said, “You’re flying to India to get Al?”

  “Country’s closed. Al’s a little rattled, but he said something about a mutiny.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Dukas sat on a plastic chair next to Harry’s. “I hate to tell Rose.”

  “Rose is tough. Look, she has to be told. And Fifth Fleet has to be called to tell them about Al. Which do you want?”

  Dukas stood. “I want to go home.” He headed into the house.

  Leslie met him at the door. “Where were you?”

  “Out.” He pulled her aside. “Look, there’s some sort of massive problem in India, and the country’s—”

  “Closed, I know. I called downtown.”

  Dukas stared at her, a slow grin changing his face. “You tell Rose?”

  Leslie made a face. “Yeah. She’s bummed.”

  “Okay, go tell her Harry was just on the phone with Al. He’s okay, but the environment is unstable. Harry’s going to fly in and get him tomorrow a.m. Make it sound like a good idea.”

  “It is a good idea.” She kissed him. The kiss made him smile, then blush, then look around to see who was looking. Dukas wasn’t accustomed to being loved by somebody young enough to be his daughter. “Go tell Rose,” he said. He patted her ass as she turned, and she chuckled; then a look of pain shadowed her face, and he knew she didn’t believe it, didn’t believe him, thought he was indulging her. Dukas turned away.

  In the den, he called his office again. He got the special agent, a man he hardly knew, somebody who’d come out from the States only the week before. “NCIS, Special Agent Greenbaum.”

  “It’s Dukas. Give me Rattner,” he growled.

  “Rattner’s in transit.”

  “In transit where?”

  “He said he had business.”

  “I bet.” Dukas reflected that this was what he got for sending all his good agents off on jobs. “Okay. I want you to try to get in touch with the agents on the Jefferson.” Every carrier had two NCIS special agents on board; those on the Jefferson weren’t under Dukas’s command, but they could give him immediate and reliable information.

  “I tried.”

  “Try again. And keep trying. I want to be ready to start an investigation the moment we can get aboard the Jeff.”

  “Investigation of what?”

  Dukas thought there was the possibility that he would be going in to investigate the crash on the Jeffer
son as a terrorist act. He wasn’t, however, going to say that over the phone to a newbie agent whose previous experience of investigations had been confined to six years on the Racine, Wisconsin, police department.

  When he turned from the telephone, Leslie was in the doorway. “I gotta go to the office,” he said. “I’ll tell Rose.”

  “Rose is talking to an Indian admiral.” She giggled. “He’s the Indian naval attaché. I think he’s coming on to her. I think he’s trying to pump her about the exercise being cancelled. He knows about it, anyway.”

  “Rose is a big girl.” He turned to go.

  “Can I come?” She looked determined to be cheerful. “I’m a pretty good office assistant—remember?”

  He thought of the danger of bringing a woman he was living with into the office, and then he thought of Special Agent Greenbaum. “Come on,” he said.

  CIA HQ, Virginia

  While she waited to get a call back from the man named Mike Dukas, who was “out of the office” in Bahrain—and Mary Totten disapproved of people who were out of the office when all hell was breaking loose—she made lists and drafted a message for the agent code-named Persian Rug:

  To: CEO, Ethos Security, Bahrain

  From: Coven-Tope Venture Investments, DpiU

  We would like to get together with you to enumerate details of the security contract already discussed (see e-mails copied below) and activate it at your earliest convenience. We want to move quickly on this and we believe that our entry into the Gulf market can be enhanced by your participation.

  (signed) C. L. Brevard

  The message would go out as an encrypted e-mail. Nonetheless, because no encryption was entirely secure, only three terms in it were in fact significant: “DPiU,” (lowercase is essential), which authenticated the sender; “activate,” which meant that the covert operator who was the recipient should activate at once; and the not-quite-correctly used “enumerate,” which referred to a communications plan for a meeting twenty-four hours later at the Benetton shop on the second level of the Manama Mall.