Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

“US Navy, Cosmopolitan Hotel.”

  “Is anybody here from the Navy?”

  “Cosmopolitan Hotel, everybody Cosmopolitan Hotel.”

  “Duty officer?”

  He said the name of the hotel a couple more times, and she turned away.

  Bill had a huge rolling duffel, a shoulder bag, an overnighter, and a plastic shopping bag from the Bahrain duty-free shop.

  “You carry yours, I’ll carry mine,” she said. She had the smallest size of rolling suitcase and a folding suit bag. When in doubt, buy it when you get there. “Let’s go, Bill.”

  “We’re not going on the bus?”

  “We are not going on the bus.”

  She headed off into the darkness on a tarmacked road that paralleled the taxiway. She could hear Bill stumbling along behind her, his duffel rumbling over the rough pavement, his breathing labored. She wondered why she had brought him and reminded herself it was because of his brilliance and technical knowledge.

  All that man Dukas had been able to tell her about Trincomalee was that they’d managed to rent an old hangar, and that the hangar was the last one in a row “beyond the terminal.”

  She kept on walking.

  It was dark. As in dark.

  The Navy det hangar was indeed the last one, and the only way she knew she was there was that she could see the silhouette of palm trees where any building beyond it should have been. Sweat was pouring down her sides and running into her eyes by then, and she was mad as hell.

  Striding toward the black maw of the hangar, she recognized a couple of airplanes as being unquestionably military. She was not big on aircraft ID, but she satisfied herself that they had some long skinny ones and some two-engined fat ones.

  Somebody was snoring inside the hangar. She shouted and the snoring went right on. Moving into the darkness of the hangar itself, she tripped over something hard and fell on one knee. “Oh, godammit!” she cried.

  Bill’s voice piped from far behind her. “You okay?”

  “Oh, shut up.” She pushed herself up, sure that she’d torn her chinos and was bleeding. She probed the thing on the floor with her toe, found something about three feet long, round, and hard. She made her way along it and only just in time saw a flicker of light to her right: she was about to walk into an airplane that, except at that one spot, was blocking some feeble light source within the hangar. She worked her way out along the wing, then ducked under it and saw a small, bare bulb ahead of her.

  The bare bulb stuck out of the wall next to a pay telephone. Taped to it was a hand-written sign: “To call duty officer dial 647-898. Coins in slot.”

  Well, that was thoughtful of them. She didn’t have Sri Lankan coins, of course. She felt in the slot where coins should go. No coins. They didn’t mean that slot; they meant the slot where the change came out. Lots of coins down there.

  She tried one, got nothing; tried another and then another and suddenly had a dial tone, which took her to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, which took her to a sleepy young man named Soleck.

  “Duty officer Lieutenant Soleck speaking, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, I need to talk to your CO.”

  “Commander Siciliano’s sleeping ma’am. Can I help you?”

  “I need transport to India.”

  There was a pause, in which she thought she might have heard a muffled, perhaps ironic, laugh. She ID’d herself, and he seemed to expect her; he asked where she was.

  “I’m at your goddam hangar, where do you think I am?”

  “You come in on the flight from Bahrain? Weren’t you supposed to come to the hotel?”

  “I don’t want a hotel, Lieutenant, I want a flight to India!”

  He sighed. “Ma’am, with all respect, this det isn’t here to provide transportation for anybody. We got a bunch of really tired pilots who’re trying to keep enough aircraft airborne to give CAP cover to a very important ship. Anything else, I’m really sorry. You’ll have to talk to Commander Siciliano.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Who’s second in command?”

  “He’s in the air right now, ma’am.”

  “Lieutenant, you get your ass out here now and arrange transport for me, or heads are going to roll!”

  Was he thinking that over? Was he going to dig his heels in? He sounded as reasonable as could be when he spoke. “Well, say twenty minutes to get dressed and get downstairs, half an hour to find a taxi—it’s about an hour out to the field—well, I suppose maybe in a couple of hours, ma’am. I hate to think of you out there all alone while—”

  “Oh, fuck off!”

  Sri Lanka was connected to the Indian mainland by a bridge, but she knew the bridge was currently closed at both ends. No point in looking for the local rent-a-car.

  Fucking Navy, she thought. She plunged into the darkness of the hangar.

  Bahrain

  At two in the morning, Valdez was dozing in an armchair when Lapierre shook his shoulder. Valdez came to with a crick in his neck and a pain in his lower back. “What’d it do?” he said. He thought there had been a major change in the JOTS.

  “I just got a message from the Fort Klock. May mean nothing, but—” Lapierre sat down next to him, leaned forward as if he wanted to tell a secret. “A guy they picked out of the water yesterday said his plane was shot down by a submarine. This was right about startex. TAO on the Klock had a report at the time from somebody in the air that he thought he saw enemy activity and a weak signal that could have been this guy in the water, plus an F-14 got fired at in the same area. Somebody with a brain in intel plotted that and put it together with the guy’s story, and they think there was a sub there.”

  Valdez leaned over the JOTS. Markey was sleeping on a chart table across the room; Pulanski had disappeared.

  “This sub,” Valdez said. It was still on the screen in, if he remembered correctly, its same location. “Sub shoots down a US aircraft, no way it’s gonna be in the same location—” he looked at his watch—“nearly two hours later. This thing’s been running; it’s got changes, but the sub hasn’t moved. I don’t get it.” He put the cursor on the submarine and got the message Last known location.

  “The JOTS doesn’t show you where things are,” Lapierre said. “It shows you where people report things are. You with me here? And you have to understand, what Commander Craik had was the referee’s JOTS. That means that his was the only one that would have shown everything—including that sub. The Indians’ repeater showed only the Indian ships at startex, and then, if the exercise had gone forward, they’d have added the US ships and aircraft as they located them. Same with the US side—the US admiral’s JOTS would have shown the US side only.”

  “But Commander Craik could see both sides.”

  “If the sub moved during the exercise and reported its position, his JOTS would show it.”

  “But—if our ASW didn’t find the sub, and it didn’t report a new position, it would still be there on the referee’s JOTS in the same place as, just like it says, ‘last known location.’” Valdez squinted at the screen. “What if the sub moved but we didn’t find it and it didn’t report its new position?”

  “Then it would show in its original position.”

  “But Jeez, wouldn’t the BG have run ASW to locate it as soon as they knew their plane was shot at?”

  “But the Jefferson had the accident. Their ASW effort never got underway.” Lapierre slouched back in the chair, neck on the chairback, long legs stuck out. “I need to talk to the TAO.” He was staring at the ceiling, obviously still working it out. “What it looks like is, there’s an Indian submarine running around on the loose out there.”

  Valdez looked at the JOTS. “I don’t get it.” He straightened, made a face as he ran his tongue over his front teeth. They tasted like something that had been in the fridge too long. “I gotta call Commander Craik again. He’ll love it.”

  He started for Lapierre’s office and turned around. “Hey!”

&nb
sp; Lapierre raised an eyebrow as the least energetic way of asking what “hey” meant.

  “What if the stuff the guy plugged into the JOTS changes the positions when you put in data from the links? I mean—what do I mean?—I mean, what if that program was meant to seize the JOTS and change the data from the links? So that no matter what people reported and no matter what, let’s say, our ASW found, the JOTS showed something else?”

  Lapierre stared at him, then unfolded his long body. “Well, let me try to input some data.”

  Valdez started out again. “I’ll call Commander Craik.”

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  Alan made his way through the shabby, beautiful corridors of the palace, his left hand on the small of his back, wondering if he dared take another muscle relaxant now. Moad padded along ahead of him, his feet covered in soft-soled moccasins.

  Outdoors, the night was wetly warm, sweet with the scent of something in flower, under that an odor of something spoiled, acidic. A bird screamed distantly; another, softer, trilled nearby.

  The plane was pulled up on a pad near the palace, lights inside making the portholes look like a row of buttons. Alan hauled himself up the ladder, feeling the pain of the bullet crease on his back, the lower, burning sensation of something muscular. Getting too old for this.

  “Yeah, Valdez.”

  Valdez’s voice was tinny over the secure connection, almost a whistle. “Somebody aircrew from a plane yesterday, start of the exercise, was in the water and got picked up and taken to the Jefferson.” He gave Alan the coordinates. “He says his plane was shot down by a sub. Location checks out with an Indian sub on the startex plot in that data your jg Ong sent me. What I need to know is, does it check out with what you remember of startex?”

  Alan could call up the JOTS layout as he had seen it before all hell had broken loose—he had stared at it long enough, waiting for things to start. He knew precisely where the sub had been. Still—

  “A sub shot down an aircraft?”

  “That’s the story.”

  Would have to be something slow and low, maybe an S-3. Christ, Paul Stevens was down there—I had a fight with Rafe about it—then he told me yesterday that Stevens got shot down. “Yeah, it checks. Listen, Valdez, put Lieutenant-Commander Lapierre on.”

  He fired questions at Lapierre, who answered yes to all of them: Had he informed the admiral or the chief of staff? Had he informed the BG? Had he messaged the TAO for any new data on the sub?

  Then Alan told Lapierre exactly what he wanted to know next. Getting answers meant Lapierre’s staying up the rest of the night sending messages to the BG, to NSA’s satellite-photography arm, and to the WMD Center at the CIA. Lapierre was no happier about the idea of staying up than Alan had been about climbing out of a wonderfully comfortable bed, but he merely groaned once and said, “Will do.” Alan could picture that toothy, Mortimer Snerd grin.

  “One more thing,” Lapierre said when they were done. “Valdez suggested inputting new data into the JOTS while that program you guys sent us was in place. News flash, Al: you can input data to reposition the Indian ships and they show the new positions on the screen okay. All but the sub.”

  Alan thought about that. “So even if the Jefferson hadn’t been hit and they’d been able to launch their ASW—” he was thinking it through—“and even if they’d found the sub and put it into the link, it wouldn’t have shown on my JOTS.” He thought some more and then repeated, “On my JOTS. Question is, Dickie, would the new data have shown on everybody else’s JOTS? I mean, was that what the whole thing was about—to hide the sub from everybody?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  He thought about what it meant to have every JOTS screen with a glitch that kept a submarine from showing. “Oh, shit, indeed,” he said. “You better wake the admiral.”

  Then Alan went into the hotel and waked Ong and Benvenuto and told them it was time to go to work, and he walked back through the darkness to the plane. And he decided that, no, he couldn’t take any more muscle relaxants, but, yes, he could risk a couple of aspirins. And then, at last, he did what he’d wanted to do since he’d got out of bed: he curled up in a passenger seat and tried to sleep while he waited for the machines of intelligence to grind.

  Outside, an animal that sounded to him like an African leopard coughed.

  Bahrain

  Ray Spinner had got a Canadian nurse he’d been pursuing for three weeks into the sack, and he was now lying awake wondering how come a really cute woman was a really bad lay. It didn’t occur to him to wonder if he was perhaps a little less stimulating than a good vibrator himself.

  She was lying beside him, exhaling the last fumes of expensive cabernet. He’d had to dine her, wine her, and bullshit her for two hours before he could get her pants off, and, while even bad sex is better than no sex at all, shouldn’t there have been a better payoff for all that time and money? She didn’t even seem to enjoy giving head, which in Spinner’s view was a serious defect in a woman.

  “How was it for you?” she said sleepily.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic!” Lying was easy, also cheaper than cabernet. Maybe he’d want her again sometime. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I’ve been lying here. Thinking.”

  In Spinner’s view, “thinking” was something he didn’t want women to do, so he didn’t ask her what she was thinking about.

  “Want to know about what?” she said.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “I was thinking I’m starved.” She sat up. Light from the window shone on her. She had a really great body. Really great. But she didn’t do much with it. “Let’s eat.”

  Well, there went his chance to sneak out while she was still asleep and finesse all the morning-after crap. Was I really good? Was it really good for you? Was it really, really good? On a scale of one to ten—

  She pulled on a robe that had seen better days—another thing about her, she wasn’t what he’d call fastidious—and headed into the kitchen. Spinner, in pants and shirt, no socks or shoes, followed, kissed the back of her neck as if he was still turned on, and sat down when he got about the response he expected—on a scale of one to ten, something with a decimal point. She was already throwing eggs into a bowl. Going to wow him with her ability to cook. If she thought he was cruising for a wife, she was crazy.

  “—so what could I do but stand there, this guy’s kidney in my hand—” she was saying. Her idea of conversation had a lot to do with talking about her work. So did her idea of simile. At one point she had said, “I was about as welcome as a colostomy bag.” Really, she had no taste, along with everything else.

  She scrambled the eggs and made ranch toast and put out three kinds of jam, and when he asked her if she always ate a breakfast like that, she looked hurt. Time to go, Spinner thought, but then she was talking again, on and on, and he munched his way through the food and pretended to be interested and said Mmm and No Kidding and Wow.

  And then she said something interesting.

  “Who?” Spinner said.

  “I’m not supposed to tell, really. The new head of the NCIS office. No kidding.”

  Spinner’s ears were like a computer program that pinged on certain search terms. They had pinged on “NCIS.” He didn’t give a shit really about NCIS or what it did, but he knew that it was on the fringe of intelligence, and getting inside gossip about it just might be useful to a man with his connections.

  “His girlfriend’s pregnant?”

  “Mm-mm, tested positive and then she comes back and asks about an abortion, and we had to tell her that armed-services personnel no longer get abortions paid for since the new administration, and she goes, ‘I’m not armed-services personnel, I just live with somebody.’”

  “I don’t know how you feel about it,” Spinner said, “but I think that the taking of innocent life is disgusting and immoral.” He really meant that, as a matter of fact. And he meant it even more now that there was a conservative in the Whi
te House, where his father had said it might do him good to think the right things.

  She looked at him and then at the forkful of egg she had been about to put into her mouth, and then she shrugged and said, “Don’t become a nurse, okay?”

  Spinner had the feeling that she was belittling him. She was belittling him. “Life begins at conception,” he said.

  She did an odd thing: she raised an eyebrow—one, not both, something he hadn’t seen her do before—and said in a voice he’d never heard from her, “Majored in science, did we?”

  Spinner wasn’t going to sit there and be belittled by a fucking nurse, for God’s sake, by a fucking log who lay there and didn’t have any more wiggle in her ass than a fucking concrete block. On the other hand, he didn’t want to lose the story about the NCIS, so he bit back the lecture on the sanctity of life and said, as if she hadn’t shown him what a dork she really was, “So, the head of the local NCIS office knocked up his sweetie?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me.” She gathered up the plates. “More coffee?”

  “I really ought to go.” He meant it as a punishment.

  She didn’t object as much as he thought she should.

  Trincomalee

  Mary Totten had stormed back through the dark hangar, barking her shins on hard, invisible objects. She’d have missed Bill Caddis if she hadn’t fallen over him and his baggage, which formed a round, soft pile directly in her path. She dropped her bags on top of him, ripped a pair of running shoes out of it and jammed her feet into them. “You stay here!” He grunted and didn’t wake up.

  She jogged back up the access road she’d just walked down from the terminal. It was a little spooky, running over uneven asphalt in the dark in a country where they might have God-knew-what wildlife running around a deserted airport. Once, something went scurrying away ahead of her, but aside from boosting her heartbeat into near-max, the incident was harmless.

  There were no, count them, no air charter companies along the road at Trincomalee airport. None on the side of the terminal she’d first gone down, none on the other side. And no lights. And the bus was long gone.