Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Commercial,” Alan said. “It’s a commercial for Servants of the Earth, whatever that is.”

  “It’s so cute,” Ong purred.

  The screen turned golden, and letters in bright blue wrote themselves across it: Do a random act of service for the earth each day.

  “Sounds like a bunch of tree-huggers,” Clavers said. “Who’s for more coffee? Everybody? Benvenuto—more firewood.”

  Benvenuto wanted to stay, because it was his laptop that was being used, but he was the lowest rank, so off he went. By the time he had come back, they had tried all six of the golden keys, and they all had the same logo and message and animated story. And they all urged random acts of service. Then Ong tapped on her own computer and plugged the commodore’s key in and said, “There’s lots more on it. It’s huge for storage, that little thing.”

  “Any idea what it is?”

  She tapped the keys, shook her head. “I’m afraid to let it in until I like know what it is. You saw Benny’s computer—it just seized the whole thing so it could get its message in.” Benvenuto’s computer was on the grass. It still showed the Servants of the Earth message. Benvenuto looked at it sadly. “It’s okay, Benny,” she said. “We’ll de-bug it later, right? Trust me.”

  Alan squatted, looking over her shoulder. “Can you get it off your own computer?”

  She turned her head. Her hair brushed his chin. She smelled good. “Watch.” She hit a key and the Servants of the Earth vanished. She swung around, the computer still on her crossed legs. He was aware that they were too close together and he sat back on his heels. “It’s basically a worm, which my axe is prepped to deal with. I tried to get into it, but it’s pretty resistant, but like I know there’s a lot of data in there.”

  “The guy plugged it into the JOTS. The JOTS sort of blinked, but that was all—no message, no animation. What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know until I get into it. But it probably means it’s preprogrammed for the JOTS—like if it was going to do the worm thing, it didn’t want to be seen on the screen.”

  “So it left the JOTS image up there?”

  “Well—” She sniffed. She was really pretty in the morning, he was thinking. “Well, you know, like if I was going to do that, I mean plant a worm, the worm would probably have to do with what came up on the JOTS screen, wouldn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t that be the point?” Her eyes held his. He wasn’t sure that either of them was concentrating on computers.

  “And?”

  “Well—Maybe it was going to plant data in the JOTS. To screw up the exercise? Or maybe it was going to suck data out of the JOTS? I mean, there had to be a reason he put it into the JOTS, okay?”

  Alan remembered thinking at the time that the commodore was somehow going to help the Indian side cheat. Could you do that by somehow screwing up the data in the JOTS? By, let’s say, changing the screen so that—

  “Aircraft,” Fidel said.

  Alan looked where Fidel was pointing. Silver flashed in the sky. Alan stood, working the stiffness out of his knees, found he was glad to have an excuse to get away from Miss Ong, whose effect on him close up was a lot stronger than he would have guessed. He had more sympathy for Benvenuto.

  Fidel was getting weapons from the van; he handed an AK to Alan, held another out to Benvenuto. He began to dole out clips. Overhead, the flash of silver became a distant aircraft dropping down toward the green fields.

  “Did you see it first or hear it first?” Alan said. He couldn’t hear it yet.

  “Both.”

  The plane leveled and came toward them, and then he could hear it, the thin roar of the jets and the scream of air over the flaps and spoilers. It passed over the field at several hundred feet and turned north and dwindled to a speck. Alan looked along the valley and saw smoke rising from a house—straight up. No wind. The pilot would have seen that, too.

  By the time the Lear jet was identifiable again it was on its final for the runway. The old man was running out to the taxiway, waving his cudgel at it and shouting. The plane dropped and skimmed the green fields that ran right up to the runway and touched down not more than twenty feet from the end. The engines screamed as the pilot fought to hold his rollout to the small field, and then he was speeding past them, the plane dazzling in the early morning sunlight. When it had passed, Alan saw the old man sitting in the long grass like a bundle of sticks, staring after it.

  “Our ride,” Alan said to Fidel.

  “Hey, I’m not complaining.”

  The plane spun a slow half-circle at the runway’s end and taxied back. Alan and Fidel trotted toward the hangars, the others straggling along. When they caught up with the plane on the taxiway, it had stopped and the pilot was laughing and jabbering out his window with the old man and tossing money down in little bundles. Harry O’Neill got out a couple of minutes later, elegant in a blue silk polo shirt and jeans and a white jacket. Dave Djalik, whom Alan knew, stood in the doorway behind him, scanning everything. O’Neill stretched, looked at the morning, came down the steps toward Alan’s filthy crew as if he was about to give an interview. “Nice place you have here,” he said.

  “We’re kind of glad to see you,” Alan answered.

  “Can’t imagine why.” Harry introduced himself, went around shaking hands. A black man stepping from a silver jet seemed to surprise them. Ong looked bowled over. Alan figured she’d just met the man of her dreams.

  “When do we leave?” Fidel demanded.

  Harry smiled. “No hurry, no hurry. You people had breakfast? We brought a great selection of MREs. Anybody for the Four Fingers of Death? Follow the chuck-wagon to a parking spot.” He led them away from the plane; they all fell in behind as if he was the Pied Piper, until Alan sent Clavers back for the van. When they were all clear, the steps went up and the engine sound rose an octave and the plane taxied off toward the hangars, the old man trotting ahead and trying to fasten up his turban as he went.

  “When do we leave?” Alan muttered to Harry.

  “Some new developments.” Harry put on aviator sunglasses, beneath which his smile was toothy and deliberately false. “Uncle Sam wants you, kid.”

  Alan sighed. Nothing was ever easy.

  They straggled along behind the plane.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  “Madje, you look worse than me.” Admiral Rafehausen was propped on pillows, his head only a little higher than his chest. A metal crane elevated his left knee, and his left arm was clamped into a mechanical device that had a sheen of condensation over it. His eyes were dull, his face as pale as the gray bulkhead behind him.

  Madje looked around for the doctor. He’d been sent in to see the admiral as soon as he’d reported at the entrance to the sick bay; this time, there were no orderlies waiting to put the admiral back under. Madje tried to hide his reaction to Rafehausen’s appearance. “Good to see you, sir.”

  “You get—orders to—TAO?”

  “Yes, sir. Skipper on the Fort Klock has the battle group.”

  “Yeah? Lash?” Rafehausen moved his head and glared, and then his eyes grew duller, and there was a long silence.

  Madje tried not to read too much into the tone with which the admiral said, “Lash.” After a while he thought the admiral was drifting off to sleep. He got up quietly.

  “I’m not—done with you, mister. Go—get a shower, clean up.” Rafe gave an approximation of a smile. “You look like shit.” Long pause. “Need—eyes—ears.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The admiral’s eyes flicked away to the blank wall by his bed, lost focus for a few seconds, and wandered back to Madje. “Where we—headed?”

  His abrupt change left Madje confused. Headed? “Sir?”

  “Where—is—battle group going?” The admiral almost raised his head, his eagerness communicated in fractional movements.

  “Sorry, sir. I was fighting fires—”

  “Yeah.” The energy drained out of his face. “Yeah. Good—you. Get clea
ned up, and—” The admiral’s eyes closed. He muttered, “Lash,” and shook his head.

  Madje bent over him and was reassured by a snore. He got the picture. Get cleaned up and find out for me what’s going on. He rose from the folding chair as quietly as he could and headed toward a shower.

  Bhulta Airfield, India

  Fidel and Djalik had identified each other immediately, Djalik picking up on Fidel’s SEAL patch. They tossed SEAL references back and forth—groups, names, places—and laughed, getting comfortable with each other.

  Djalik said, “How you getting along with Tom Terrific?” He jerked his head at Alan, who was walking twenty feet ahead.

  “Hey, you know him?”

  Djalik held up his left hand, which was a mass of scars and was missing two fingers.

  “He do that?”

  “He was in command.”

  “Shit, man. He’s got a hand like that, himself.” Fidel put his head closer to Djalik’s. “You got a problem with him?”

  “Oh—he’s okay. He just wouldn’t know he was dead until they nailed the lid down on him, he’s such a gunner.” Djalik was wearing sunglasses; when he grinned, his face went from threatening to gleeful. “You know the old nav story about John Paul Jones? He’s on the Bonhomme Richard; the fucking rigging’s shot away, the masts are shot away, they got a hole below the waterline, and Jones waves his sword and shouts, ‘I have just begun to fight!’ And down on the gun deck, this old salt, who’s up to his ass in blood and body parts, says, ‘There’s always some sonofabitch doesn’t get the word!’” Djalik tittered, then pointed at Alan. “Him and John Paul, they’d be a pair!”

  Fidel rubbed his unshaven chin. “So far, I’d rather have him on my side than the other side.”

  Djalik stared at Alan’s back. “Well—yeah.”

  13

  In the Air, London-Bahrain

  Mary Totten had slept on the flight from London, after a fashion, or at least rested—after a fashion. Now, three hours from Bahrain, she came to, pushed up the blind on the window next to her, saw endless cloud and a lightening sky.

  “Jeez, you can really sleep on these things! That’s amazing!” Bill Caddis was pushing his face, eyeglasses first, toward hers. She pulled back. He still didn’t smell too good.

  “I didn’t really sleep.”

  “You were snoring! Sure coulda fooled me.” He laughed a stupid, hurtful laugh because he didn’t know that he was being hurtful.

  He had a laptop in front of him, the screen bright with a report on the electrical facility at Ambur, and she said, “Isn’t that classified?”

  “The Tamurlane place.”

  “Ambur?”

  “Ambur, Tamur, whatever. Yeah. Multiple-feed electrical production. Hydro, coal-fired, and a nuclear breeder. All built by ABB, according to this guy.” ABB was a multinational construction firm with a US headquarters.

  She winced. “Which guy is that, Bill?”

  “Closed source. Must be from a NOC. Good writer.” She winced again. A NOC was a Non Official Cover, a covert operator who was off the books—and the only NOC who wrote reports about Ambur was the same Persian Rug who couldn’t meet her in Bahrain. Bill was rattling on. “Anyway, it says that he got all this stuff on the plant from the ABB office in Bahrain. All the SCADA stuff, protocols, programs. I could turn the lights out all over India from here.”

  “Bill, the lights are out all over India. What’s SCADA?”

  “Oh, well, you know.”

  “Pretend I don’t know.” She was watching a flight attendant who might have access to a coffee pot.

  He wrinkled his nose up so far that his glasses moved up. He pushed them into place with a grubby finger. “SCADA stands for—wow, long time since I actually looked that up—there it is: Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. That’s a long way of saying it’s an automated system that allows the operator to control electrical power grids or sewage or water pressure or any systems over distance.”

  “Like the Indian power company?”

  “Like any power company. They got SCADA systems, you bet. Probably hundreds, all wired to even more complex supervisory systems. At the other end of the whole mess are RTUs.” She looked blank. “Remote terminal units. Things like valves and switches that get turned on and off by the SCADA system.”

  Mary was willing the flight attendant to look her way. “Why did you say you could turn the lights out from here?”

  “Oh. Yeah, well, the problem with really sophisticated SCADA systems is that the more sophisticated and digital you build them, the more vulnerable they are. So if I know all the passwords and stuff for a SCADA system, I can hack in and run the thing—literally turn off the lights.”

  “With a computer somewhere else.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But you have to make contact with the other computer.”

  He tittered. Anybody can do that, his tittering said. Hurtful again. Irritated, she said, “Bill, an airplane is a public place, and we don’t put classified stuff on our laptops. Wipe it.”

  He turned his eyeglasses on her. He shrugged. He hit a key. “Satisfied?”

  “I want everything classified on that computer wiped. Now.”

  He shrugged again and hit keys. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I was through with it anyhow.”

  Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

  Chris Donitz could see Soleck waiting for him by the van before his plane rolled out, and he knew the news wouldn’t be good. The Trincomalee tower had been frosty all the way down, asking him his weapons status and advising him that no more flights would be authorized. He taxied to the line of waiting F-18s and S-3s, with one Tomcat at the end of line, and started his post-flight, shutting his engines down after a look at their status, and finding that they were about to go overdue for maintenance. Then he popped the canopy.

  “They won’t let us get any more gas,” Soleck shouted.

  Donitz was still doing his post-flight notes on a kneeboard, his engines still giving off visible waves, even in the steaming heat. He had bags under his eyes and an angry red mark across the bridge of his nose from too many hours in an oxygen mask.

  “What the fuck?” he called down to Soleck.

  “I got on to Fifth Fleet; we’re good there. I cleared us with their customs guys. I got a radio from an expat that can raise the Fort Klock. But the Sri Lankan fuels guy here at the field says we can’t have any more gas unless we pay for it, and the tower says it won’t clear any more planes for flights without orders from Colombo.”

  Donitz shrugged. “Colombo?”

  “The capital of Sri Lanka?” Soleck waved an arm toward the east. “Where these guys get their orders?”

  Donitz shook his head hard, as if to clear it. “Yeah,” he grunted, feeling ignorant. Then he levered himself out of his seat and climbed down from the cockpit to the wing and jumped heavily to the ground. Among the hundreds of things they didn’t have were crew ladders to make getting in and out of their planes less acrobatic. Donitz was short, too short to take the drop from the wing lightly.

  “Tell me some good news.”

  “I got a bunch of stuff from Fifth Fleet. They’re sending a plane out with more pilots and a maintenance section and a bunch of stuff to keep us flying. Rose Craik’s going to talk to the Sri Lankans and get us permission to fly.”

  Donitz brightened for a moment, then frowned. “She coming out?”

  “Yeah.” Soleck sounded happy.

  “She’s an O-5. She’ll take command.” Donitz started for the van they used as an office, a rental that Soleck had arranged on his own credit card. Donitz couldn’t decide whether someone else taking command was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “What do you want to do about the fuel? We’ve got enough in the air to keep 105 and 203 on CAP until Commander Craik gets here, but those guys—”

  Donitz could see them, trapped in their seats for an extra three hours, nowhere to piss. The only other option was to leave the carrier nak
ed. “Tell them to stay on CAP. I’ll try and talk to the guy in charge here.” His next crew rest was getting farther and farther away. So much for getting sleep. He grunted. “Hey, Soleck.”

  “Sir?”

  “Good job.”

  Bahrain

  Mike Dukas had had three hours’ sleep and was in his office early. The night at Fifth Fleet HQ had been gritty insanity, everybody going nuts between lack of information and the urge to action, between go-slow messages from Washington on the one hand and testosterone on the other. The staff had been left to do nothing and go nuts.

  He had called Special Agent Rattner at home at six-thirty and then, leaving Leslie still asleep, he had driven to the office, stopping to pick up a box of a dozen at the Bahrain Dunkin’ Donuts, with two extra-large black coffees. If Rattner didn’t want one, Dukas would drink both. He got to the office first, looked at the night’s message traffic—everything was about India, and the duty officer, Greenbaum, had flagged it all urgent and important. He’d have to have another talk with Greenbaum.

  Rattner was in his late fifties, big, a little paunchy, experienced but therefore sometimes careless. His head was a little down now when he came in, bullish, but he started by trying to be so cheerful that Dukas wanted to hit him. Dukas didn’t like cheerful at best, least of all in the morning.

  Dukas did the amenities with the donuts and the coffee—Rattner took the coffee, as it turned out—and said without introduction, “I couldn’t find you yesterday. All hell broke loose, and I couldn’t find you. No good.”

  “I was on a case.”

  “This case take you to the Jockey Club?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, lunch took me to the Jockey Club. I’m not allowed to eat lunch?”

  Dukas pointed a piece of jelly donut at him. “Don’t be a smartass. I’m new here; you’re a very experienced agent; but you were out of line yesterday. Don’t give me shit.”

  Rattner started to say something, shrugged.