Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  The surgeon put his hands on his hips. “You want to kill that boy?”

  “We may be facing a war, sir. I have to talk to him.”

  The surgeon lost it. “He’s sedated!” he screamed.

  “Can he be waked up? Some kind of antidote?”

  The surgeon stared at him. Abruptly, he turned to the nurse. “Take this officer to Doctor Fernando. Tell Fernando to contact me in surgery.” He turned back to the intel officer. “If the boy dies, I’ll report you for manslaughter.” He jerked his head. “This worth your career, Commander?”

  Doctor Fernando was a plump, exhausted man in a surgical gown, booties, and cap, a mask hanging at his throat like a bandana. He had large, almost feminine brown eyes with long lashes, under them the dark circles of extreme fatigue. He heard out the intel officer’s story and then checked the young man’s record. “You got a name for him? We’ve got him as one of our thirty-seven John Does.”

  “Collins, Hampton. LTjg, Squadron VS-46.”

  Fernando was muttering to himself as he read—“concussion, probable cranial swelling, contusions—six broken ribs, broken right leg—”

  “The ID is tentative until you guys check him against the records.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So, what d’you want from us?”

  “I want you to wake him up.”

  Fernando started to say something like “No way!” and then saw the seriousness on the intel officer’s face, and he muttered, “Dangerous.” He tossed Collins’s chart on the hospital desk. He rubbed his forehead. “You want information from him, right?”

  The intel officer nodded. Helpfully, he said, “I’ll ask as little of him as humanly possible.”

  “Well, you may ask his life, is all. See, this man has likely cranial swelling and what laymen call a broken neck; awake, he may be incoherent, and the slightest movement, and he pops the rest of that vertebra, and there goes the spinal cord. You know what happened to Christopher Reeve? The actor? That’s one likely outcome. Worst case, that happens, then he goes into coma, vessel ruptures in the head, and he dies. You wanta risk that?”

  The intel officer hesitated, then nodded. Fernando said to a nurse standing behind the desk, “Get me an anaesthesiol-ogist—McCracken if he’s around. Or wake somebody up—McCracken, if possible.” He turned back. “McCracken’s the best. This is going to be tricky.” He shook his head. “Tricky.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were standing around Collins’s bed. Dr McCracken had in fact been yanked out of his rack but showed no resentment as he immediately went about his business.

  Collins’s neck and head were in a rigid stainless-steel brace that surrounded them like some arcane torture instrument. One leg was in a plastic splint and was slightly elevated. Despite what he’d been through, however, his face had no bandages and looked quite normal, quite peaceful.

  “He’s sedated,” Fernando said. “He was stabilized when he came in and now we’re holding him. Believe it or not, he isn’t one of our most critical cases. It’s the burns are the worst. Anyway, vertebral surgery is tricky, really tricky.” He looked at the anaesthesiologist. “Whatd’you think?”

  “I want to bring him out and be ready to put him under again absolutely as quick as possible. If we hold it to thirty seconds or so—His blood pressure’s elevated because of trauma; we can’t put it up even more.” An IV ran down to a heparin lock in Collins’s arm, with another plastic joint partway up the tube where a syringe could be put in. McCracken already had three syringes laid out on a tray. “We’ll try.” He glanced at the intel officer. “Any time.”

  The intel officer nodded. Fernando nodded. McCracken eased a needle into the IV and injected colorless fluid, his eyes on an electronic monitor by the bed.

  Collins’s eyelids fluttered.

  Fernando nodded to the intel officer.

  “Collins? Lieutenant? Can you hear me?”

  Collins’s eyes were open now. Perhaps he tried to nod, because the eyes suddenly swung around, left, right, up, trying to find why he couldn’t move his head. “Wha-a-a-?”

  “You’re in the hospital, Collins. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. You were in Commander Stevens’s aircraft. The aircraft went down.”

  The eyes widened. “Sub! The sub—shot us down.” The voice became panicky. “Where are the guys?”

  “A submarine fired on you? Collins, is that what happened?”

  “Submarine! I caught it on the link—we laid down a line—caught it and Skipper said we’d go active t’ scare them—and it surfaced and shot—shot—Where are the guys? Where are the guys?” He started to scream.

  Fernando jerked his head at McCracken, and a second needle went in and instantly, it seemed, Collins’s eyes closed and his screams stopped. “That’s all you get,” Fernando said.

  “I need details! He was talking, godammit—!”

  “His blood pressure’s going up.” Fernando’s voice was level, calm. “We’re all doing our best with what we’re given here, Commander. That’s all you’re gonna be given—do your best with it.” He turned the intel officer away from the bed. “Out, okay?”

  Behind them, McCracken was saying something to a nurse and somebody else was running toward the end of the ward.

  Bahrain

  Late at night, Fifth Fleet headquarters should have been a quiet place. A flag desk would normally have been manned by a duty officer, as would desks in the principal departments, but the place would have lacked the sense of life that marked it by day. Now, however, the times were far from normal, and a tense activity was evident in lighted offices and hurrying figures with permanent frowns; the smell of coffee and a boombox playing somewhere suggested an under-layer of activity. The flag captain had finally persuaded Admiral Pilchard to go home after thirty-two hours without sleep, and he had dragged himself off an hour later, but duty officers were bunked down in the duty room and others had brought in sleeping bags and pads and were sacked out in cubbyholes all over the building. Most of them thought they were waiting for a war to start.

  Six years in the Navy made Valdez sensitive to such activity. He moved through the Fifth Fleet spaces a little warily, nonetheless, because he was a visitor and an outsider now. Seeing people asleep under desks and on tables in the cafeteria told him how tight things were but didn’t change his own status.

  A Marine guard had led him to the intel spaces and hadn’t left until Valdez had been signed in there. Now, Valdez was wearing an ID badge that said visitor not to be left unaccompanied, which he had been enjoined to wear “at all times, by which we mean at all times, sir!” by a Marine sergeant. Valdez had grinned at being called “sir” by a sergeant but hadn’t got a grin back. Now, Valdez was facing a tall, skinny lieutenantcommander with prematurely gray hair who stuck out a hand and gave him a smile of uneven teeth. “LieutenantCommander Lapierre.” Al Craik’s assistant in intel.

  “You’re ex-Navy, I hear.”

  “Only a PO1, sir.”

  “They’re the ones who do all the work, right?” Lapierre was never going to win any beauty contests—in fact, there was something of the central-casting idea of a hayseed about him—but he looked like a guy who was absolutely what you saw—no bullshit.

  “Okay, you know what I got?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “Okay, I got an encrypted mess of doo-doo that was sent to me from India by a Lieutenant jg Ong. You know this guy Ong?”

  “It’s a she, not a he, Mister Valdez.”

  “It makes me nervous, people call me ‘mister.’ Most people just call me Valdez. I got this data from Miss Ong, okay. She said it was on something plugged into the USB port of a JOTS terminal when Mister Craik ‘intercepted’ it, whatever the hell that means. You know anything about that?”

  Lapierre shook his head. “We didn’t discuss that.”

  Valdez nodded gloomily. He realized he was tired, and he was worried about just how angry Mavis was. “Can we move this right along?” he said.

 
“Be my guest. What d’you need? A computer?”

  “I need a JOTS repeater.”

  “That we got.”

  “It’s gotta be isolated from the system—one hundred percent isolated. I don’t know how to do that, not my kind of electronics, and I haven’t got the time to go through the manual and find out. I want somebody really knows what he’s doing to isolate it and then guarantee to me that’s it out of the system.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Maybe I’m going to fry it; we’ll see.” He told Lapierre about what he and Mavis had done with the encrypted data. “My respect for Indian programmers went up about one thousand percent.”

  While they got somebody out of his rack in the enlisted barracks to deal with the JOTS, Valdez talked to Mavis on the telephone, an embarrassed chief leaning in the door because Valdez couldn’t be left alone. She’d already been asleep; contrary to his fears, she was glad he’d called. And so it went: they had a common passion for computers that was stronger than either one’s anger.

  The JOTS specialist was an African-American PO1 named Markey who spent about forty seconds at the device and said it was okay, good to go, he was outa there.

  “Guarantee?” Valdez said.

  “Hundred percent, m’man—do your thing.”

  Lapierre leaned in between them. “What’s the worst could happen if it isn’t isolated, Valdez?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t have to be here, but what I think is, it could maybe seize or destroy the entire JOTS system worldwide.”

  PO1 Markey looked at the commander, then at Valdez. “I think I’ll just have another look at my machine here,” he said. This time, he took five minutes and turned to them, shaking his head, less cocksure, but saying that he’d checked every goddam thing he knew, and unless he cut off the electrical supply, he didn’t know how he could isolate it any better. “What you got on that disk, anyway?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Valdez had to download the disk to his own laptop, which was already as well protected as the computers back at the office had been, and then download from there via the USB port to the JOTS. When he was ready, he said, “Okay, this is apparently what somebody was about to do when he was ‘intercepted’ by Commander Craik. You guys ready?”

  Markey had stuck around, for all that he, like everybody else, was dying for sleep. He looked at the laptop and winced. Lapierre gave a toothy grin. “Shoot.”

  Valdez hit a key.

  “Holy shit!” Markey, who had been leaning on the JOTS, swayed away from it as a complex image came on the screen. “Well, it didn’t eat our lunch, anyway.”

  “What’ve we got?” Lapierre said.

  Valdez was peering at the screen. “You guys tell me—what have we got?”

  A voice behind them said, “It’s the fleet exercise startex configuration.” The speaker was a female chief, intel. Not cute, Valdez thought, but a really bright lady. Nice legs. Big headlights.

  Lapierre was looking at the JOTS. “Yeah, it is the startex layout. There’s the Jefferson—the Klock—these are Indian ships over here, right. Pulanski, you’re good.”

  The female chief said, “We worked on the thing long enough, we oughta recognize it.” She turned to Valdez. “Heather Pulanski, I worked for Lieutenant jg Ong. We did a lot of the preplanning.”

  Valdez made nice-to-meet-you sounds, but his attention was on the JOTS. “You think Commander Craik ‘intercepted’ some Indian who all he was going to do was bring up the startex configuration?”

  “No Indian personnel were supposed to, like, touch the JOTS,” Markey said. “I was there when we did the rules. Very big on ‘You touch, you lose your fingers.’”

  “We gotta see if this thing is real-time or what,” Valdez said. “There’s a ton of data in there—more than you’d need for this image. Maybe it’s got the whole exercise on it.” He picked up his laptop. “Can I have an office where I can be secure? I need an internet connection and a STU. I gotta talk to my boss.”

  Lapierre hesitated only a fraction of a second. “My office is down the passageway. Uhh—”

  “I know, I know, you gotta hang around because I might steal the silver.” A couple of steps along the way, Valdez turned back. “I need for somebody to watch that thing and see what changes. Anybody?”

  Both Pulanski’s and Markey’s hand went up.

  “Call me pronto if it explodes or anything.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  As Captain Hawkins read the P-4 from Pilchard, his face went through several changes; first extreme concern as he accepted the message from a runner; then pleasure as he read the first few words, relief as he read the next sentence, and a return to concern, all in a few seconds like an actor practicing expressions.

  HAWKINS—APPROVED RECCE FLIGHT DESPITE PROTEST FROM LASH. EXPECT TO SEE RESULTS ASAP. UNDERSTAND RAFEHAUSEN STILL CAPABLE OF CALLING THE BIG SHOTS. BETTER BE RAFEHAUSEN NOT YOU. REPEAT, BETTER BE RAFEHAUSEN NOT YOU. PILCHARD SENDS.

  He turned the command chair through ninety degrees, crumpled the P-4 in his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his khaki trousers. “AsuW? You got a picture?” He waved at the F-18 pilot manning the anti-surface warfare module.

  “Yessir. With Supplot and the ASW module, I’ve tracked and mapped every contact raised by 703; and I’ve correlated to data from Supplot and our own ESM folks. I’ll have it on hardcopy in a minute.”

  “I want an e-copy I can pass to Fifth Fleet. You ready?”

  The F-18 pilot went back around the corner. Hawkins tried to remember his name—Miller? Schiller? He was missing the name tag on his flight suit. He came back with a floppy. “It’s all there, sir.”

  O’Leary emerged from the ASW module with another floppy. “You know about the sub?”

  Hawkins looked back and forth between them. “Mister Madje put it in the log. Anything new?”

  “No, sir. But everything we do know is here for Fifth Fleet.” O’Leary gave Hawkins a second floppy.

  Hawkins turned his chair and put both in the hands of his message geek. “Get those out to Pilchard, red hot.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Bahrain

  Valdez called the satphone in Harry’s aircraft and got the pilot, Moad, who said he’d have to get Harry, who had to be waked from a deep sleep and wasn’t happy.

  “You need to talk to Al Craik,” Harry said. “You could have asked for him in the first place.”

  “I work for you.”

  “Worse luck for me.”

  Craik sounded even worse than Harry did, his voice a dry croak. Still, he was there. Valdez told him about the stuff from Ong and plugging it into the JOTS, asked if it meant anything to Craik.

  “You downloaded the stuff, you got the startex picture?”

  “So they tell me.” Valdez waited for enlightenment; nothing came. “What happened when whoever it was plugged his thing into the JOTS where you were, Commander?”

  “The JOTS blinked. Then I had a wrestling match with him; that’s all I saw.”

  “And it just blinked? The picture didn’t change?”

  “It was only a second, because then we had a fight and then another guy started shooting.”

  “We’re letting it run, see what happens.” Valdez waited for some comment from the clearly exhausted man on the other end. “See, I’d like to know at least if this is a picture of the actual start of the exercise, or is it a picture of the Indian idea of the start of the exercise—you follow me? What I mean is, did this guy mean to insert their idea of the exercise into the JOTS, or did he steal what was already on there?”

  “Well, hmm—Listen, look at it again and see if it’s got a Canadian frigate over against the Indian coast—about, um, 070 from the carrier, as I remember. If it’s there, then that’s not an Indian image, it’s what we had up on our screen, because that frigate was hidden, and I don’t think the Indians were on to it. If the frigate’s there, I don’t know what to say—maybe they wanted to
steal our data so they could win the exercise?” He added, as if to himself, “You don’t shoot people over an exercise.”

  “I’ll check for the frigate.”

  Valdez went back and checked the JOTS and had himself double-checked by Markey and Pulanski. There was no Canadian frigate.

  “Okay, it’s Indian and it’s their idea of startex, then,” Craik said. “I don’t get it.”

  Valdez thanked him for his help and apologized for waking him up.

  When he went back to the JOTS, three of the Indian ships had moved.

  “Gonna be a long night,” Markey said.

  23

  Trincomalee

  The chartered 747 rolled to a stop two hundred feet from the darkened terminal, and the engines whined down, and, in the silence, men coughed and shuffled their feet, and overhead doors banged as weary sailors pulled down bags. Mary Totten was the only civilian female; she thought there were five or six other women among the couple of dozen people headed for the Navy’s makeshift det in Sri Lanka.

  “Wait, Bill,” she said. Caddis was trying to climb over her. “Just sit down.”

  One good thing about Caddis—the only good thing so far—was that he did as he was told. When, six minutes later, she said “Now” and stood, he dutifully pulled himself up and helped her get their luggage out of the plane.

  By the time they got out—the last ones off the aircraft—everybody else was lined up in front of a bus parked just beyond a chain-link fence. The bus’s headlights and a sickly glow from its interior provided the only light. Hot, sticky blackness folded around them.

  “City center?” she said to the last man in the line.

  “I guess. I just go where I’m pointed.”

  She went along the line, asking where the bus was going. At the head, the bus driver, a small man with glasses that flashed in the light from inside, was flinging luggage into the well.

  “Trincomalee?” she said.