Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Say it. Come on, let’s get it on the table.”

  “I’ve got five weeks to go. I don’t give a shit what you think of me.”

  “I’m your boss; it matters what I think of you as a matter of principle. You don’t believe in principle, you shouldn’t be in NCIS. Look, Rattner, the shit hit the fan yesterday; I needed an experienced man here, you’re not here! Greenbaum can’t run this office alone. Five weeks, five days, five minutes, you work for me, I expect you to be here.”

  “Forget it.”

  Dukas grunted. “We’ll get along better if you never say to me, ‘Forget it.’ I don’t forget. Will you for Christ’s sake admit that you were out of line not to tell us where you were going yesterday?”

  “How could I know the fleet exercise was going to go to hell?”

  Dukas stared at him. It was a cop look, but Rattner was also a cop, therefore probably immune to the look. Still, he shrugged. Dukas said, “Will you please for Christ’s sake admit you were out of line?”

  “Okay, I was out of line. Now what?”

  “Now let’s have another donut. Don’t do it again, okay? I need you. You may not need me, but I need you.” He looked into the donut box. “What I need you for right now is this new task the admiral just gave me.” There was one donut left. “Somebody took more than his half.”

  “It was you. I counted.”

  Dukas shoved the box over. “Pilchard’s got a leaker who spilled his guts to somebody in Washington about the Jefferson. The White House is on his ass because he didn’t inform them so they could spin it—this in the face of very clear rules about how he’s supposed to report and who to. So he wants the leaker. Big time.”

  “They had a leaker, they thought, a few months ago. Nothing came of it.”

  “This time, something’s going to come of it. You’re going to make something come of it. Pilchard’s flag captain has a list of people who knew early on about the Jefferson. It’s a pretty long list. You get over there and pick it up—no fax, no e-mail on this one. And on your way back pick up some more donuts.” Dukas wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “See why I need you in the office?”

  Bhulta Airfield, India

  The sun was early-morning high and the day was already hot. They sprawled in the shade of the aircraft and ate MREs and made jokes about going home, leaving dear old India, how they’d miss it all! Harry signaled Alan with his eyes and walked him off into the shade of one of the private aircraft, a high-wing monoplane that had come out of the old Soviet Union in the seventies. They sat under it, shading their eyes against the glare. Harry told Alan what he knew about the Jefferson.

  Alan couldn’t bring himself to ask about Rafe. Instead, he said, “Who’s in command?” he said.

  “Last I heard, some captain was commanding the BG from the missile cruiser.”

  That was bad; it meant that Rafe was at least badly injured, maybe dead.

  Harry looked at him, understanding everything. “Your friend Rafehausen’s pretty smashed up, but alive the last I heard. But everything’s fluid—they got no comms; they can’t launch or receive; they’re sitting out in the ocean without the one weapon that makes them worth a shit, aircraft. Pilchard’s shitting bricks trying to figure out whether India’s planning to attack the carrier. Fifth Fleet ASW is going nuts thinking that one sub could take out maybe the CV and the cruiser both. The last I heard, the President was on the phone trying to find somebody in India who’d tell him he could go to bed because India was really a peaceful nation that flew a plane into one of his toys by mistake.”

  “You know a lot, Harry.”

  “Of course I know a lot. This is big-time fuckup time, Charlie. This is the day that the diplomats earn their stripes. People are talking about war. Late news I got in the air had some of the cavemen in the Congress talking about nukes. US Secretary of Defense was waving his dick around and telling everybody to see how big it is. White House was saying just the opposite—make peace, not war. Pilchard just keeps shaking his head and telling people to deal with what they got, not what dicked-up people in Washington are afraid of.”

  “You were with Pilchard?”

  “Oh, yeah. So was Dukas. Just before I left, so was Rose—she’s in the middle of the diplomatic side of it. The Jeff left eleven aircraft airborne and no place to go, and a smart young kid named Soleck got them all to Trincomalee by doling out gas by the teaspoon. Now they’re on the ground, and the Sri Lankans want them out, out, out, and it looks like your wife is going to have to go down there and make some sense out of it.”

  Alan was frowning. “Back up a sec—you were with Pilchard?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Harry—you’re a civilian. What the hell were you doing with the CO of Fifth Fleet?”

  Harry took off his sunglasses and looked at Alan and puffed his cheeks and blew out the air in little puffing pops. “I knew we’d get to this point. This is the hard part.” He put the sunglasses back on and tipped his head back. “I have to make a confession, Father. You do absolutions?”

  “Friendship means never having to say ‘You’re absolved.’ Confess, already.”

  Harry, the coolest man Alan knew, was actually embarrassed. “I’m an Agency NOC,” he said. He waited. “You know what a NOC is, don’t you?”

  “You?”

  Harry shrugged. “Deep cover the last eight years.”

  “Jesus Christ, Harry, I knew you had contacts at the Agency, but—Kind of risky, living in Bahrain and being in your business, isn’t it?” What he meant was, You never told me, your best friend, and I’m in the business, and Harry knew of course that that was what he meant.

  Harry shrugged again. “Somebody tried to blow me up once. Djalik had to shoot a guy another time. No, my cover works, Al—I confuse them, big entrepreneur, honcho of a heavy security operation, but I’m a Muslim and I’m to them an African. Plus I pass on some decent stuff to a guy in Saudi and a guy in Pakistan, which the Agency has already vetted for me, so the word in some circles is that O’Neill is a spy for Islam, and the word generally is that he isn’t one of them and he isn’t one of us, he’s just O’Neill—big, money-grubbing Muslim nigger.” He plucked a stem of grass, bit it. “Okay, am I absolved?”

  “You’re telling me this for a reason, right?”

  Harry nodded. “I’ve been given an assignment in India. A big layout at a place called Ambur. It got hit by part of what-ever’s going on here, and it’s a secret nuke storage site. That’s why I was with Pilchard.”

  Alan looked at him. “You mean you’re not flying back to Bahrain.”

  Harry nodded.

  “So none of us is flying back to Bahrain.”

  “You’re to call Admiral Pilchard when we’re through talking.”

  Alan stared at him. He frowned. “You mean, you’ve been given an assignment by the Agency, and I’m going to be given an assignment by Pilchard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to be given.”

  Neither of them was smiling now.

  Alan said, “You should have told me.”

  “Is that the way you’d want your assets to behave—they out themselves to their friends?” Harry’s voice rose. “Is that the code now, you only blow your cover to your best friends and family members and the people you sleep with?”

  Alan slumped down beside him. “I’m sorry, man. Shit, of course.” Alan laughed. “‘I thought an exception would be made in my case.’ You know that joke? Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  “Hurt your feelings, huh?”

  “Yes, if you have to ask.” Both men laughed. Alan clapped his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Okay, your secret’s safe with me, Sidney. How do I call Pilchard?”

  Harry pointed at his plane. “He’ll want everything you know. I don’t think he’s made a decision about what you do next.”

  They stood up, pulling their grass-wetted clothes away from their skin. Harry said, “Sidney?”

  “Riley.” He laughed and put his arm over Ha
rry’s shoulders, and they walked toward the jet.

  14

  Bhulta Airfield, India

  Harry’s airplane was equipped as a traveling office and communications center—secure sat phone, radio, computer connections. Alan put Lieutenant jg Ong in a forward seat to send the contents of the six gold USB devices to Fifth Fleet while he and Harry sat in the rear.

  “Once you’re on, I’ll move up and do some work,” Harry said. “You want privacy, and I don’t want your jg up there knowing too much about my connections.”

  “Look out, or she’ll have you working for her. She has a way with men.”

  “I have a way with women.”

  “You’re married.”

  “Yeah?” Harry grinned and showed him how to work the equipment, until he was through to Fifth Fleet and the screen said secure, and then Harry moved away. He was put through straight to Admiral Pilchard.

  “Al!’

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My God, it’s good to hear that voice. We were worried about you. Listen, I’m having people paged, and I’m going to put this on a speaker-phone as soon as they’re here. In the meantime, tell me what happened yesterday.” The voice was weary.

  Alan ran through it as succinctly as he could; he’d spent part of the night getting it straight. Pilchard didn’t interrupt, but when Alan was done, he said, “This device the Indian commodore put into the JOTS—it had computer graphics on it?”

  “Animation, sir. Really a little commercial—maybe a recruiting message. I’ve got somebody checking into the Servants of the Earth right now.”

  “They wanted to do something to the JOTS, that fails because you catch him at it, they go right to violence?”

  “He shot Borgman because I’d told her to get in touch with you, urgent.”

  Pilchard was silent. Alan could picture him, knowing his office—the thin, balding man sitting in short-sleeved khakis behind the big desk, phone caught between his head and his shoulder, playing with a paper clip, as he did when he was troubled. “You think there’s a connection with the Jefferson?” the admiral said.

  “I don’t know enough about the Jefferson to say anything, sir.”

  “You hear that we also lost an S-3?” Pilchard told him about Stevens’s plane, said it could have been an act of war.

  “Where I was, it looked more like a mutiny, sir—Indians fighting Indians—”

  “Yeah, well, we had a report of one Indian destroyer taking out another. Mass confusion.” Pilchard said that they knew now that the Indian Jaguar had been on a missile profile as if it was flying an exercise missile strike and should have pulled up, but eyewitnesses from the Fort Klock and in the air said there had been no attempt to pull up: the plane had gone into the deck exactly as if aiming at it.

  “How’s Admiral Rafehausen, sir?”

  “Lost a leg. Burns. He’ll probably recover.”

  Not his career. Inwardly, Alan winced.

  Pilchard gave him the Jefferson‘s stats: two hundred and twenty-seven dead, almost four hundred injured, most with burns; sixty percent of the air wing destroyed on the deck, the rest trapped on the hangar deck with no functioning elevator. Eleven planes had been in the air and had bingoed to Trincomalee. “Now—as for you and your friend O’Neill. He tell you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve had confirmation from the Agency. Remind him that this is a Navy operation, and he and his folks work for me, not the other way around, okay?”

  “Yes, sir, and, uh—‘operation?’”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was coming to.” Pilchard’s volume changed. “Hey, Jack, how you doing—” Pilchard talked to somebody and then came back. “Al, you still there?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Okay.” He told Alan what Harry had already told him about Ambur and possible nukes. “I have to know what the hell that attack means, Al. If it was just—what the hell, just what? Just another piece of terrorism—by some people who didn’t know there were nukes there and wouldn’t know a nuke if they fell over one, that’s one thing. But if that attack was connected with the nukes—if, worst-case, the attack was to get the nukes, we’re in deep shit. I mean, you understand the implications if somebody’s running around India with a couple of nuclear warheads.”

  “Especially with an unprotected carrier group sitting only a few hundred miles away.”

  “O’Neill is there to get you and your guys out. But his people have told him to find out what the straight story is on Ambur and the nukes. And I want you to support him.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alan kept his disappointment out of his voice. “How about my people, sir?”

  “Use them. Doesn’t matter for what, Al. That aircraft isn’t coming back to Bahrain until you guys are done. So your people are there, unless India clears and we get something in sooner.”

  And they’re mine to get home. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m sending you into the shit, Al, but I got no other choice.”

  “Yes, sir.” And thank you for giving me the chance to volunteer, sir. “Who’s in charge, sir? Between me and O’Neill, I mean.”

  “You operationally. You all the way, in fact. But O’Neill’s got the contacts there.”

  “And the aircraft, sir.” And the MREs and the weapons and the money and the clothes. “Related matter, sir. I want to send the contents of these USB keys for decryption; we can’t decrypt them here. I’d like to use O’Neill’s secure link with his Bahrain office. There’s an ex-Navy man there named Valdez who’s the best computer guy I know. Better than anybody you have. He was my wife’s petty officer before he left the Navy, top secret clearance back then. Can I use him?”

  Pilchard said nothing for several seconds. Alan could picture him, rubbing the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. Then he said, “I have a list that clears a Valdez, a Djalik, and a Moad as already approved by the Agency.” That was news to Alan. In other words, Harry had staffed key posts in his security firm with ex-Navy people who also had become Agency NOCs. What your best friend won’t tell you.

  “Okay, you have permission to use O’Neill’s contacts and his computer guy. Get on it. Now—last item, Al: you’re walking into a diplomatic minefield. The White House is not exactly behind us on this. There’s mixed signals, but what I’m getting from the President and the NSC sounds like they’re satisfied if it turns into a regional war that leaves us out of it. Even though we all know that it wouldn’t stay a regional war. I mean, I had one of those assistant-to-the-president phone calls last night kind of probing the edges of ‘What if we brought the Jefferson into a friendly port and just got out of the Indian Ocean until things blow over?’ I hit the ceiling. They won’t quit, though. It’ll get worse.”

  Then somebody put the speaker-phone on and Alan went over much of it again. There were questions, many of them unfocused. The disaster on the Jefferson had knocked the legs from under all of them, and they sounded stunned, some of them snappish and some dumbfounded. He wondered if he’d sound any better if he was there, starved of information, being badgered for answers.

  Still, it would be better than being in a country that was tearing itself apart.

  Maybe.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Madje felt better in a clean flight suit, despite a tepid shower and a cheek gouged by his hurried cold-water shave. He went all the way forward to the dirty-shirt wardroom and found the overhead buckled and twisted, the space empty except for a work party cutting at the buckled metal with torches. Then he worked his way aft on the port side, past repair parties cutting away damage and fire parties standing idle or sleeping up against the bulkhead. Twice he crossed knee knockers to find the section beyond the hatch flooded a foot deep with water and foam runoff from operations on the flight deck. He waded through both until he passed the deserted flag spaces and squelched up to the hatch for CIC. It was open, a reassuring change from the night before. He stepped over the knee knocker that kept the hatch well above the level of water runof
f and craned his head around a smaller hatch to look into the ASW space to the right. He could smell the coffee. Chief Warrant Officer O’Leary was a stickler for coffee, and he was presiding over the ASW watch in person, a parallel ruler in one hand and a grease pencil in the other. Madje caught his eye and O’Leary, a short man with a broad face and a moustache to match, waved him in. “Looking for coffee, Lieutenant?”

  “Dirty shirt’s closed,” Madje muttered as he took a clean cup from the rack by the chart table.

  “You’re welcome, boyo,” O’Leary said as Madje took a swig. “How’s the admiral?”

  “He’s—uh—better than you’d expect.” Madje took another gulp of coffee, refilled the cup. “He wants to know what’s going on.”

  O’Leary pointed to the chart table, where a broad blue stripe showed the carrier’s track. “We’re headed for Sri Lanka. We can only make about five knots.”

  “What are you tracking?” Madje asked.

  O’Leary shook his head. “I’m dicking around. There’s a sub out there, right? An Indian Kilo-class. I’m keeping a far-on circle updated to show where it might be.” The forward edge of the circle was still fifty miles north of the carrier.

  Madje looked at the penciled lines radiating from a note in the upper right margin of the chart. The note said position at startex? Madje was an A-6 guy; he didn’t know anything about subs, but he wanted another cup of coffee, so he looked interested. “So he could be heading to intercept us. Got anything to look for him?”

  “Nothin’. All the helos are still doing search and rescue or moving casualties. Cat two shows green but the TAO’s not ready to send any planes off until he’s fired a test load; rumour is it has steam problems. They’re replating the deck aft of 133 as soon as they can; then they’ll rig new arresting gear. I’m trying to get the TAO to move a frigate up north with a tail deployed. I think he’ll go for that now the fires are out.”

  “The TAO? Not Captain Lash?”

  O’Leary blinked, swallowed his coffee and looked away. “Not Lash,” he said carefully.