Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  A Land Rover Defender crested the rise in the road and halted in line with the helmets in the grass. Two men started forward, clearly officers, one wearing riding boots. The helmets in the grass rose to become distant faces, shoulders, visible rifles, a whole line of them, and they began to move forward. One of the officers asked something in an interrogative shout; one of the Gurkhas on the road pointed toward where Alan was lying.

  Alan squinted at Fidel, who managed to give the impression of a shrug without moving the muzzle of his rifle by a hair, and got to his feet.

  “We’re friends,” Alan called.

  One of the pair by the corpse acknowledged him, pointed north toward the advancing officers. Both Gurkhas moved into the tall grass on the other side of the road, working toward the prone figure. Alan could see Djalik now that he was on his feet, and Djalik was aiming at something with intense concentration.

  After a hesitation, the Gurkhas vanished behind the clump of brush where Djalik had fired. By the time the officers came even with them, they were leading the wounded prisoner out of the grass. One of the officers stopped. The other came on fearlessly.

  “Hello!” Alan called.

  “Good day,” the booted figure replied, still coming forward, tall, upright. He didn’t stop until he was extending his hand to be shaken. “Major Rao, Indian Army. Anyone hurt?”

  “Commander Alan Craik, United States Navy,” Alan replied automatically, clasping the offered hand. “I won’t know until I see the rest of my men.”

  “Spot of trouble?” Rao said. He had a heavy black moustache and tanned skin over eyes so dark they might have been black, and his smile was grim. He had dust all over a very smart uniform, and, up close, Alan could smell his sweat and see that the holster of his pistol on its shining Sam Browne belt was unlatched and ready for use, the magazine pouch empty.

  Dignity required Alan to keep his shoulders just as square, meet the dark eyes, and smile back, although his immediate desire was to sit in the road and slump, or maybe simply sleep. “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” he said, trying to match the tone of “spot of trouble.” But that seemed ungracious, inaccurate as well, and he added quickly, “We are grateful for your help.”

  The dark eyes were studying him carefully, perhaps too carefully. Alan shifted under their regard. He had to resist the urge to step away. But suddenly the major smiled, his whole face lighting up. “Ahh. You are the man in the picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “I’ll show you. Do you want to gather your men?” Rao looked past Alan, saw Chief Fidelio for the first time only a yard away with his rifle pointed full at the major’s chest, and gave a slight start that made him seem more human. He stepped back, nodded at Fidel, and looked at Alan. “I fancy we’re on the same side.”

  Alan watched the Gurkhas with the prisoner; saw them dragging bodies out to the road. Djalik was still watching them.

  “I think we can at least say we have the same enemies, Major. Show me this picture, and I’ll call the rest of my men.”

  Major Rao took a laptop from the back of the jeep. When he switched it on, the Windows start screen was immediately replaced by the Servants of the Earth animation.

  “I found this when we took their checkpoint up the road,” he said, pointing north. Then he moved his finger around the pad, clicked, and held the open screen toward Alan—it displayed a crisp photograph of Alan Craik with “Kill on sight” in English and a writing that Alan couldn’t decipher.

  “It says ‘shoot on sight,’” Rao said at his shoulder. “In Urdu and Hindi.”

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  “Any idea why they want you, Commander?”

  “Yes.”

  Rao studied him, and then nodded. “And it’s not my business. Very well. Want to tell me why you’re here? I’d be willing to help, up to a point.”

  “We were headed south, to the housing complex up the valley.”

  Rao lit a small cigar, took a drag, and then looked at Alan. “Hmm?” he said.

  Alan didn’t want to play games, and answering questions wasn’t going to get him anywhere. “Mohir,” he said.

  “I can get you there,” Rao said. He took another drag on his cigar, looked at Alan again. “Very well, Commander. We’ll go together.” His attention drifted away at the sound of a choked scream over Alan’s shoulder.

  Alan turned to see that all of the dead had been gathered on the road. Thirteen corpses were lying neatly in a row, already covered in flies. Two short corporals were beating a wounded prisoner.

  “I don’t like that, Major,” Alan said as he walked up to the jeep. He pointed at the beating.

  Behind him, Rao spoke to one of the Gurkhas. Their officer came up at a trot.

  “We could take that prisoner off your hands, Lieutenant.” Rao was clearly speaking English for Alan’s benefit.

  “Of course, Major. I should have known you’d want him.”

  “Can you spare me a vehicle and two guards for him?”

  The lieutenant looked pained, but he nodded. “Yes, sir.” Then he turned to Alan. “You held them with just four men, sir? That must have been wonderful.”

  Alan nodded, his mind already on other things. Wonderful.

  Harry and Djalik tossed their guns into the back of Rao’s vehicle. Fidelio waved at one of the Gurkhas, who waved back.

  Harry climbed into the back, grabbed Alan’s arm. “Bud?” His eyes flicked over to Rao and back. He raised his eyebrows.

  Alan shrugged. “Only game in town,” he said.

  Harry nodded. “If we make it to Mohir—”

  Alan nodded, his hand on the door of the Land Rover’s cab. “Yeah?”

  “Keep the good major busy. Okay?”

  Alan smiled and climbed into the front. Rao fumbled with the clutch before starting the engine. Under the cover of the first roar, he said, “I might have forgotten the prisoner, Commander.”

  “Call me Alan.”

  Harry leaned forward over the seat and shouted over the engine, pointed. “Mohir. Those concrete buildings just up the ridge.”

  Rao nodded and smiled a knowing smile. “Exactly.”

  Then they were rocketing along the tarmac, the grass a blur, headed for the village.

  It wasn’t so much a village as a massive prefab housing complex surrounded by a more traditional, if poorer, set of huts made from packing crates and the refuse of the building project. The prefab housing was neat, clean, and twenty storeys high, and every balcony had plants in profusion, with flowers growing off the roof and around the sheer concrete walls on either side. Four of the towers stood around a central square, contrasting with the squalor of the market in the middle and the rows of huts on either side.

  Rao drove them up the main road, past a modern petrol station and two restaurants and a seemingly endless row of plywood tea shops and into the square. Carpet-roofed booths ran in disorderly lines around the square and across it, with kitchen wares, chickens, baby clothes and detergent, spices, electronics: anything that the householders in the high-rises might need. In the center stood a tea shop with a flowered trellis and some pretensions to gentility.

  Many of the stalls were empty. There were no children and few women. Men stood in clumps, and every eye in the market watched their arrival.

  Rao pulled up opposite the first concrete building. “Police station on the first floor,” he said.

  Two bodies wrapped in PVC tarps lay on the sidewalk outside, guarded by a constable in a chair with an old FN rifle across his lap. The crowd flowing around the stalls didn’t afford them any space at all; a little girl hopped over one of the corpses as Alan watched. The constable didn’t trouble to shoo the little girl away.

  As Rao approached him, he stood to attention. They exchanged greetings, the formalities of rank and service. Alan stayed in the car, glanced back to see that Harry had stepped down, walked back, and was talking to Djalik through the window of the other vehicle.

  “You’re wor
ryin’ too much, skipper,” Fidel said. “If these guys wanted us dead, we’d be dead. And Gurkhas—they’re special. Like Special Ops special. Not the kind to take part in a mutiny.”

  Alan grunted. He was suffering post-combat depression; mostly, he wanted to sleep.

  Rao came back to the jeep. “They had an attack this morning. The head constable shot one man and the terrorists shot a bystander. They have another prisoner, caught attempting to destroy a water tower.”

  Alan nodded. “Can we interview him?”

  “Commander, could you give me some idea of why you and three other Americans are so interested in this?”

  Alan sighed. “I thought we’d get to that eventually.” He turned so that his back was as comfortable as possible and so that he had the powerful sun behind him and in Rao’s eyes. “I’m an intelligence officer.”

  Rao pursed his lips. Later, Alan wondered if he had almost laughed. “Yes?”

  “I was involved in a joint exercise with the Indian Army and Navy—”

  “Lord of Light. I know it.”

  “—when a mutiny, a coup, call it what you will, broke out. One of my people was killed. I got in touch with my admiral, who asked me to find out why the lights had gone out and what was happening.”

  Rao nodded as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “And your friend? The black man?” Rao looked around suddenly, stiffened. “Where is he?”

  Alan didn’t need to turn his head to know that Harry had wandered off. “I think he went for tea. And to get me a clean pair of shorts.” Alan pointed at the wreckage of Harry’s spare shorts, which were filthy and still too big. Rao made him feel underdressed.

  “It looks like a good market,” Rao ventured. “When it’s open. These people are frightened.”

  Alan nodded. “So can we see talk to the prisoner? And maybe the one your guys picked up?”

  Rao shrugged. “Of course.”

  Harry worked his way through the market, with Djalik, obviously armed, a few paces behind him. The two of them created a zone of increased tension wherever they went. When Harry stopped at a stall, he was inevitably the only customer. When he moved along the market, other customers fled like shoals of frightened minnows. Short of wearing a sign, he couldn’t have been more conspicuous.

  He bought things mechanically: a canteen, some clothes for Alan, a candy bar. He was trying to cover his presence in the market and it seemed like a waste of time because there was nothing two armed foreigners could do to look safe and natural in the surroundings.

  He abandoned the attempt and made for the tea shop, framing a prayer. His prayer was answered before he had it fully in his mind: a big man in a dirty coverall sitting under the single fan with a book open. He had a broad face and narrow-set eyes and a permanent scowl. Lottery Ticket. His exhaustion showed in deep pouches under his eyes.

  Persian Rug had a number of sub-assets. One was Lottery Ticket, a middle-aged industrial electrician who specialized in the installation of security systems. He was employed at Ambur and had filed good reports, albeit for large payments, and Harry had activated his meeting sequence that morning with his cell phone. When he saw the big man, his fatigue vanished. Yes.

  Harry was in a hurry and he didn’t have time to waste on the endless safety formulas of espionage.

  “You made it,” the big man said. He looked around, shifted, looked around again. “I—uh—we—”

  “No time,” Harry said crisply. “Next meeting will be on the same system.”

  Djalik sat down in the doorway, his rifle obvious. In effect, he closed the tea shop.

  “Do you have something for me?” Harry asked.

  The big man put a cheap plastic shopping bag on the stained Formica table.

  “I have a great deal for you. Here are some photographs. This is a video on a disk you can play on this camera.”

  “We have to hurry, I must be blunt. How did you get this?”

  “I am the contractor for the whole facility, yes? I can go anywhere. I downloaded the feed from the security cameras after I received your call.”

  “You have been to the plant this morning?”

  “I did the download remotely.” The man’s nerves were briefly replaced by smugness. “I installed the system. I left a back door?”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  Harry took off his belt, opened it, and placed on the table five thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills. It wasn’t the time to be careful with money.

  “Listen, there’s more. I can see on the feed that someone else took over the cameras during the attack. They went off, and then came back on focused on different targets. It was as if—” The agent paused, looking at Harry for some reaction, fearing he wouldn’t be believed.

  “Yes?”

  “As if someone else could run all the computers on the site. You’ll see it too; just after the attack starts, lights go out all over the facility. Pumps run, or stop, almost at random.”

  “Is that in a report?”

  “No.” The big man put the money in his pocket with a glance at the tea-shop waiter, who was busy serving Djalik.

  “Who were the attackers?” Harry extracted the first disk and the digital camera from the shopping bag.

  The big man shook his head.

  “Were you on site when the attacks began?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think. Can you tell me anything else? What did they target first?”

  “It’s on the feed. First they hit security stations, then the turbines and an old storage bunker.”

  “What storage bunker?” Harry snapped.

  “The Building Thirty-seven complex,” the big man said.

  Harry covered his alarm by looking at the controls on the camera. There were dozens of streams of video, more than he could run in the time he was allowing himself. He had almost lost his breath when the agent mentioned Building Thirty-seven. Building Thirty-seven, he thought. Potential nuclear weapons storage.

  The agent shook his head. “I don’t know who they were. No idea. Never saw them myself; as soon as the shooting began, I ran. By midnight, there were Indian Army units all over the facility, fighting other units outside. No one wanted to deal with the workers, so I just joined them and we all walked through the lines. It was chaotic. Indeed, it is still chaotic.”

  “Is Building Thirty-seven on the feed?”

  “Of course,” the big man said. He pointed at the video camera. “Do I have the contract for that building? No. But twice last year you ask me about it, yes? So I placed a new camera on Building Forty-four that covers the entrance, yes? And just happens to show the entire Thirty-seven complex, as well.”

  Harry nodded, smiled. Lottery Ticket was venal, even mercenary, but he knew his stuff.

  “They took something out of that building; it’s on the feed.” The man twitched. “In a helicopter.”

  Harry’s smile froze. Harry forced himself to exhale. “Has anyone ever mentioned what goes on in Building Thirty-seven?”

  “Never. But it is all military. I’m no fool.” The man made a motion with his hands, a mushroom cloud. “Yes?”

  Harry shrugged. “Can’t say.”

  Lottery Ticket shrugged, too tired to argue the point. “You are pleased?”

  “Very.”

  “Bonus?”

  Harry reached back into his belt. His hands were shaking.

  Alan drank bad coffee from a paper cup, hunched on a stool, unable to understand a word of the interrogation in front of him. The surroundings were oppressive: a dirty basement office that smelled of mold and sweat and human fear, with two filthy cells and an overflowing toilet. His back ached, and the stool ensured that he couldn’t make it comfortable. The coffee was thin and bitter, and he was deep in reaction to combat. His body was tired, empty of the surges of adrenaline that sustained him, and his mind refused to leave alone the fragmented images of the fight.

  “He will tell us nothing b
eyond the name of his unit,” Rao said. “I can’t even make out whether he was a member of the cult or simply obeyed orders.” Rao sighed, shook his head. “This is a rotten business.”

  “What about the other guy?” Alan nodded toward the man captured that morning by the police. “He was trying to blow the water tower, right? He has to be a member.”

  “He’s a local worker, a migrant from the north who cuts cane. He brags that he is a member, but I cannot get out of him who ordered him to attack the tower. He says it was the earth herself, or Shiva, or the like; a senseless mix of Hindu and politics.”

  The head constable stood by with a tea tray, watching Rao for any sign of approval.

  “Is the tea any good? The coffee is awful.”

  “Try it. Not bad at all. Tea plantations all over the hills, quite close.”

  “Yeah?” Alan slid off the stool, poured the rest of his coffee into the toilet, and held the cup out to the head constable, who poured him some from a chipped brown pot. Just the smell helped, and Alan took a deep waft before a sip. Better than the coffee, at any rate. The smell of tea cut through the oppressive reek of the cells and the toilet. “Think any of the locals would know anything? Somebody who was at work yesterday and made it home?”

  Rao spoke rapidly to the policeman, who put the tray down, saluted, and went up the concrete steps to the market. “Not a bad thought. I was too focused on the prisoners.”

  The head constable returned, saluted, spoke. Rao heard him out. “Quite a few workers came back last night. They were released by the gate guards and passed through our lines, apparently.” He sounded as tired as Alan felt. “If I had only been here.”

  “Can we interview them?”

  “There might be a hundred of them.” But Rao was already getting up. “It will get us out of this stinking basement, anyway.” He gave orders, a long, steady flow, and took Alan by the elbow as if Alan was old or infirm. “This is a grave matter, Commander. But the boy knows nothing. I think he was obeying orders.” Rao looked at him, less assured than a moment before, almost haggard. “To be honest, it frightens me. Civil war, perhaps. I feel so blind.”