Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

Fidelio waved a med kit at Alan. “I want to change that dressing and get a look at that wound, sir.”

  Alan winced. “Okay.” He was almost asleep in the sun, and he stretched painfully. On the far side of the car, Rao sat sideways on the driver’s seat and questioned a small crowd of power-facility workers.

  “Whoa, skipper. Mister O’Neill looks pissed.” Fidel leaned forward.

  Alan saw Harry in the rear-view mirror and turned his head. Harry looked grim. He had an armload of paper packages wrapped in string, a heavy plastic shopping bag, and Djalik, at his shoulder, had more.

  “Got you some clean clothes, bud. You still a thirty-two waist?” Harry was holding the packages out to him. “The bush jacket’s great. Look at it.”

  “Close enough,” Alan said, and tossed the clothes on the seat.

  “Look at it,” Harry said again, with more emphasis.

  Alan reached for the largest package. He flipped open his folding knife, cut the string and unfolded the paper. It was a khaki jacket.

  “Come on, man! Look at it.”

  Alan looked at it. It was very well made, with cloth tape sewn in minute hand stitches down every interior seam, and a broad arrow stamped on the inside pocket.

  “I need to get my dressing changed.”

  Harry nodded, already impatient. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Alan had endured the police office again long enough for Fidel to change the dressing on his wound. When Fidel, with a surprisingly gentle touch, was done, Alan changed into a pair of cheap green shorts, the boots, cotton socks, and a T-shirt, with the bush jacket on top.

  Outside, Djalik was wolfing down a plate of biryani from a stall. He waved at two more plates on the hood. The smell stirred Alan’s hunger, and he used his fingers to shovel the rice in. Rao was talking to Harry.

  “Major’s going to run us back to the airfield.” Harry smiled at Rao, but the smile was thin.

  Alan thought that Harry was as keyed up as he’d ever seen.

  Rao excused himself. “I need to piss like a racehorse,” he said and headed down into the police office.

  Harry scooped the last of his rice with a piece of naan. “He’s a spook.”

  “No shit,” Alan said. “I like the jacket.”

  “He’s offered us a place to stay. The bunch of us, even the plane. Thirty miles, over in the hills to the south.”

  “Wants to keep an eye on us.”

  “Just so. But I want to keep an eye on him, too.”

  Harry leaned over and spoke quietly. “I have a lot of stuff we need to go over. A lot. We need a place to stay. Let’s do it.”

  “Get anything?”

  “Yeah. I met my guy. He handed over a disk. I won’t know, and I won’t know what they prove till I can go through it. It’s killing me.”

  Alan smiled for the first time in hours. “Buddy, four hours ago we were all going to die on the road trying to get here.”

  “Good point.” Harry leaned closer to whisper. “My guy says that somebody took the nukes. In a chopper. Says it’s on the disk.”

  Rao came up, looking cleaner. “In two hours, you will be enjoying the best food in Tamil Nadu.”

  “We will?” Alan asked. His appetite had just deserted him.

  Bahrain

  Henry, aka Enrique, Valdez, also called Bobby by a few people who had known him in the Navy, was a slightly plump Latino with a build like a fireplug, a ready grin, and a genius for computers. Harry O’Neill had hired him away from another company when he had needed somebody to set up a computer-security wing, with the result that Valdez now made more money than many corporate executives. Now, he was sitting in front of a computer, but he was looking sideways at a woman named Mavis.

  “Whaddya think, Mave?” She was on a computer networked to his, and they both had up on the screen some stuff sent them from India by some Navy jg named Ong.

  “I think it looks like an all-nighter.” Mavis had auburn hair and green eyes and freckles the color of the palest autumn leaves, plus an Irish accent that came and went with her own self-mockery. Being Irish was, for her, a joke. Harry had got Mavis away from the National Security Agency because Valdez was nuts about her and had said he wouldn’t come to Bahrain if Mavis didn’t come, too.

  “Encrypted,” Valdez said.

  “No shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue?”

  The screen was filled with rows of numbers, letters, and symbols. None of it fell together to mean anything.

  “Well—I say let’s run Edgar on it.” Edgar was Valdez’s own decryption program, named for the author of The Gold Bug.

  “Rickie, that’s just your ego!” “Rickie” was her corruption of Enrique. “You’ve got an ego bigger than your ding-dong, man.”

  “Impossible. Anyway, if I don’t run Edgar now, I’ll just have to run it later, right?”

  “To satisfy your ego, exactly. Okay.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll run Edgar, you run something else.”

  “Is this a test? Are we having a race here?”

  “We’re trying to save time, Mave. Harry thinks maybe this’ll tell us what’s going down in India.”

  She was punching keys. “Harry in India?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask that.”

  “Oh, sweet Christ, you and compartmentalization—!”

  “It’s all because you’re a woman. Women blab.”

  “Ha-ha. I can always go back to Dublin, you know. Did I tell you I got an offer from one of the German companies?”

  They were both booting up decryption programs while they talked. Valdez finished first and sat there, pinching his plump upper lip between thumb and forefinger. “We’re not going to crack this in one night. Whoever did this is good.”

  “We’re also good—better than good.” She sat on his lap. “What are we going to do about dinner?”

  “Anomalies, that’s the best we can hope for. Maybe as a way in.”

  “Anomalies have too many calories. How about we take off for the Tamarind and eat while this shit runs?”

  “How about we do that.” He put her off his lap and got up. From the door he looked back at his computer screen, which was dark red except for a yellow rectangle in the middle on which, he knew, were the words “Edgar Is Working” and, below them, a bar graph of Edgar’s progress in green, on which the thinnest possible slice showed at the far left.

  A long night.

  South of Chittoor

  From the air, the Serene Highness Palace Hotel looked like a pink fantasy rising out of a brown plain, its air of unreality reinforced by the blue of water and a fringe of brilliant green, as if it were an oasis. Behind the big pink building, a swimming pool was a blue-green sliver, and next to it a green one was a tennis court. A few hundred feet away, a single tarmac airstrip ran like a piece of black tape stuck to the flat land.

  “No road,” Djalik muttered.

  “Dirt road,” Fidel said. They were sitting together, both trying to see out the same window. “See, behind Disneyland there?”

  Indeed, a dirt road curved from the towers at one end of the pink pile around the green trees and then off to the west.

  “What kinda classy hotel gets reached by a dirt road?” Djalik growled.

  “We’re not coming by dirt road.” Both looked down as the plane tipped and Moad took them along the airstrip on his way to turning back for an approach. “What kinda hotel is only reachable by air?”

  Fidel sat back and snapped his seatbelt together. “We spent more fucking time going up and coming back down than we did getting from point A to point B.”

  “Yeah, but point B looks kind of interesting.”

  Moad banked again and turned, banked and turned in a longer arc and then they heard the wheels come down, and the brown landscape was fleeting by under them, marked now by green-brown scrub, a field of just-harvested sugarcane, and a village seemingly made out of the earth it stood on. And then they were down.

  20

  Ove
r the Indian Ocean

  Fourteen thousand feet over the Indian Ocean, six hours after taking off from Trincomalee and lighter by sixteen thousand pounds of fuel, Evan Soleck knew the names of his crew and felt he had lucked out in the lottery of random assignment. He’d never flown with two women in his crew, but in addition to Garcia, he had LTjg Dothan, a nugget TACCO fresh from the RAG in Jacksonville, who had a degree in aeronautical engineering and a mile of enthusiasm. Her lack of experience was balanced by Master Chief AW Simcoe, who had been the work-center supervisor for the ASW shop at Fifth Fleet and had twenty years in S-3s. By the time they’d made their last scheduled tanking run, they had the computer singing along in the back, with Garcia’s additions in an overlay and a working datalink with fixes on every ship in the US battle group. Now it was time to have a look at the Indians.

  “Okay, folks. I’m going for altitude; I’ll try and get up around thirty-two thousand before we turn north. You can start the radar anytime you like. Don’t be shy about asking me to maneuver for a duct or whatever. We’ve got plenty of gas and all the time in the world. Master Chief, have you got AsuW on the Jefferson?”

  Garcia cut in. “I’ve got the freq in radio two, ready to rock.”

  “Want to leave me some work, ma’am?” Simcoe said with a deep chuckle. And after Soleck had climbed another thousand feet, he said, “I got LT Madje, the TAO.”

  “Just keep him informed as we put stuff in the link. Garcia, put the CAP freq in one. I’d hate to find an Indian fighter up here all alone.”

  “Roger that.” She played with the radio and then gave him a nod.

  He cycled his comms to the radio. “Racehorse One, this is Oats, over?”

  “Roger Oats. Got you.” That was Rose Siciliano, flying CAP. Small world, Soleck thought—she was already back from Colombo, hot to trot. “Racehorse One, I’m climbing to Angels 32 for a look around as briefed. Copy?”

  “Roger, Oats. I’m going up high to cover you. Racehorse Two will stay low. I’ll need to hit you again before I head for the barn, over.”

  “Roger, Racehorse One. I have three thousand in reserve to give. Out here.”

  “Racehorse One out.”

  They continued to climb into the night.

  The Serene Highness Palace Hotel

  The runway was as black as if it had never been used; near its eastern end, it had a taxiway that led to three parking pads, the most easterly of which put the aircraft’s stairs practically in the shade of the ring of trees.

  “Wow!” Benvenuto said when he came out of the plane’s doorway. “Wow!” For a kid from the edge of the Adirondack State Park, the former palace of His Serene Highness, the Maharajah of Baipurjat, was a lot to take in. Its towers rose four storeys against an evening sky that was itself turning from lavender to cobalt; the towers, caught by the setting sun, were magenta. Lower down, the stone was paler but still pink. Arches and pierced screens and balconies marked its façade, with carvings so intricate they couldn’t be taken in from that distance.

  “Nice,” Harry said as he stepped out, gently shoving Benvenuto along.

  Alan, caught by a back spasm, was helped down by Fidel and Djalik and didn’t pay much attention.

  By the time they were down the steps, an ancient stretch limo had pulled up, behind it an even more ancient Land Rover. Indian servants in white turbans, orange shirts, and red pants piled out until they outnumbered the people from the airplane, and at once luggage began to disappear into the Rover. A tall, bearded man in a uniform that could once have belonged to the dressier formations of the Raj held open the limo door.

  “Hey, we can walk,” Djalik said, “it’s only—” It didn’t matter what it was only. They were going to be driven to the hotel door whether they liked it or not.

  In fact, it was a hundred and sixty feet away.

  “Wow,” Benvenuto whispered when they were inside.

  The entrance foyer was thirty feet high and at least a hundred feet long; one-storey red pillars surrounded it at ten-foot intervals, creating the effect of a kind of cloister with, in its center, a pool of blue water among living trees inside a golden cage, within which parrots flew from tree to tree and croaked.

  Standing with his hands folded in front of the cage was a small, brown, white-haired man in a blue business suit. He was smiling, and the smile lit up his face with what seemed to be real pleasure. Next to the newcomers, a larger, younger man, also in a suit, said, “If you will, please? His Serene Highness has made an especial effort to greet with you.”

  The rest let Ong and Harry go first. The others formed a kind of human herd behind them, as if for defense. Alan brought up the rear, carried on their cross-gripped hands by two turbaned men who refused to put him down.

  “His Serene Highness, the Maharajah of Baipurjat.”

  He greeted them as, for example, the prime minister of a country only slightly less important than, let’s say, Sweden might expect to be greeted. He gave a little speech about the palace (never called by him “the hotel”) and about Baipurjat, which until independence had been one of those separate principalities that the British had made theirs in exchange for a large annual stipend, and which was now absorbed into the state of Pondicherry. “We are no longer a principality,” he closed, “but we wish to entertain you with what we hope you will find a princely hospitality. What you do not see, demand; what you do see, command.” He smiled and looked over the others’ shoulders at Alan. “My personal physician is waiting for you in his office, Commander Craik.” He turned to the younger man who had brought them forward. “Adeeb, if you will show him the way—”

  And Alan was carted off while the others were shown to their rooms.

  Which were about the size of basketball courts.

  The bathrooms were about the size of squash courts.

  Room phones and televisions were unknown.

  If they had recognized the signs, they would have understood that the palace’s life had been arrested at about 1939, but only Harry knew what the porcelain faucets in the baths, the toilets shaped like swans, the brass lamps, meant. No matter: they were giddy with the charm of the place.

  Alan had a brisk examination from the maharajah’s medical man, who was short, plump, oily, and efficient. “Nothing serious. Bed rest will have you tippy-top in three or four days.” He held up a plump hand. “You are about to tell me you do not have three or four days. Of course not! Not only the times we live in, but also this wretched disturbance that has left us without electricity. Therefore, half an hour in a piping hot bath, followed by a good night’s sleep and a touch of medication, and you’ll be ambulatory.” He shook out pills from an old-fashioned bottle. “Muscle relaxants. Take one with water now, one every four hours thereafter, never more than one, and stop taking them three or four hours before you plan to drive an automobile.” He poured a glass of water from a pitcher. “As for the gash on your back—a bullet? challenging life you lead, I shan’t ask why, although I shall have to file a report with the local police, but you’ll be long gone before they get it—it’s been well tended to and I don’t intend to meddle with success, other than what I’ve already done with topical antibacterials. You take aspirin? Of course you do! Two every four hours; don’t take them with the muscle relaxant if you can help it, but alternate.”

  “I need to keep my wits about me,” Alan said.

  “You need to sleep. The bath and a bed will do that. As for the medication, nothing there will affect your mind.”

  Alan started to ask about payment, and a raised hand stopped him. Minutes later, he was lying back in a bathtub that represented the very best of 1930s technology.

  Over the Indian Ocean

  At twenty-four thousand feet, the plane moved sluggishly, the rate of climb down to a crawl, and Soleck had to watch his speed. He had spiraled up through the night air, describing an ever more gradual clockwise corkscrew as his turbofans had less air to bite. Somewhere above him and a little to the east was Commander Siciliano in
her F-18, her position noted on his datalink.

  “Back seat’s got something,” Garcia said over the intercom.

  “Want to take the plane?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  There was just a hint of the acerbic to her response, and Soleck realized he’d had the controls for two hours. Oops, I’m the mission commander. Time to command. “You got her.”

  “I have the plane,” she said formally.

  Soleck eased back in his seat, stretched, and switched his comms from front-seat-only to cockpit. “You guys have hits?”

  “Just putting the first one in the link.” Master Chief Simcoe grunted, cleared his throat noisily. “Probable Delhi-class destroyer, course SSE, speed nine knots, radiating Top Plate. Probably has us on his radar and on ESM.”

  “You going to image him, Master Chief?” Soleck was looking at his own screen.

  “Ms Dothan’s got the ISAR warm.”

  “Go ahead. Anybody know what a Delhi-class looks like?” Soleck asked. For once, he didn’t know himself.

  Simcoe grunted again. “I’ve got a length and a radar set. Both match. Best I can do.”

  “Holy shit,” Dothan said. “Look at the ESM.”

  Soleck switched screens. The ESM was lit up like LA viewed from Hollywood, hits spread across the screen, representing eighty miles of ocean. Soleck could just see Dothan, her head down over her console, her fingers flying on the keyboard. The two backseaters were silent except for muttered words.

  “Kashin.” The Kashin-class was a slightly dated Russian destroyer design with a Big Net air-search radar easily identified by the S-3’s system.

  “Another Kashin.” Dothan murmured seconds later.

  “Godavari!” Simcoe said with triumph. “Don’t see that every day.”

  “They weren’t up a minute ago. What got ‘em stirred?” Simcoe asked.

  “We did,” Soleck muttered. “Picket ship rotated once, saw us, and told somebody.”

  “Wow,” Garcia said. “This is real.”