Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  She jogged back down to the Navy hangar and felt her way to Bill, who was still asleep on the pile of bags. Mary wrestled her laptop out of her suitcase and sat down on some of Bill’s luggage and typed in “Trincomalee air charter.”

  Fifteen minutes later, on her third try at the phone numbers she’d taken down, she got somebody who spoke English and who thought that for enough money he could come to the airfield and he could perhaps fly her to India, if, perhaps, the money was enough, because India was closed, did she know that, yes?

  It took him an hour to get there.

  It took them fifteen minutes to negotiate.

  It took him two hours to get a single-engine Cessna 180 checked, gassed, and ready to fly.

  With Bill sleeping in a rear seat, they took off into a stillblack sky where dawn was only a promise at the eastern edge.

  Day Three

  24

  The Indian Ocean

  In the light of dawn, a naval battle group is visible from space. It’s not quite visible with the naked eye, but aided by a satellite you can see the black speck of the carrier and the contrasting white V of her wake if the sun is up and the sky is clear. Her immediate escorts with their own white wakes stick to the carrier like a flock of disciplined gulls—the Aegis cruiser and perhaps one of the new Aegis destroyers; the supply ship; the gator freighter carrying a battalion or more of Marines. Farther out, the satellite will show you the radar picket ships and the anti-submarine screen. The first are widening the radar horizon of the group, offering their hulls as a sacrifice to a potential threat in order to protect the carrier from surprises. The second are clearing the path of the carrier so that no hostile submarine can deploy a torpedo.

  USS Thomas Jefferson is making almost seven knots as she heads SSE. Most of her escorts are drawn tight about her. With the exception of the Canadian frigate HMCS Picton, her most distant picket, USS Lawrence, is only twenty-five miles north of the carrier.

  From space, the Jefferson looks as she does every day of her operational cycle.

  Distance is deceiving.

  North of her and her little flock of white Vs are two different flocks. The nearest white V is only thirty miles north of the Lawrence, but over the horizon and thus invisible to the carrier through most of the electromagnetic spectrum. On the Jefferson and the Fort Klock, however, they have computers and displays that show the last location of this ship—twelve hours ago. Her loyalty is unknown; her position, based on her last recorded course and speed, is a far-on circle of possibility, like the path of an electron.

  She is the southern radar picket for five other Vs.

  North and west again, there are only two Vs. A third ship is visible from orbit even without a satellite because of the plume of smoke that rises from her to the heavens. She does not have a wake.

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  Ong and Benvenuto were in touch with Valdez and Mavis Halloran by e-mail, and the four shot messages back and forth as the dawn came on. The first day-birds stirred—a peep here, a shriek there—and the eastern sky changed from black to deep blue to lavender, turning the landscape from gray to mauve, and its first details appeared—a tree, a building, a moving woman.

  As the sun’s rim just touched the horizon, Valdez and Mavis broke the encryption in the USB key and e-mailed it to Ong.

  The palace stirred.

  Eleven women straggled to a rear door from the houses beyond the runway. Something metallic clanged, and a female voice was sharp against the bird sounds; a brief argument exploded—shouting, sudden silence. Pots and dishware clinked.

  Twenty minutes later, three turbaned men carried chairs and tables out to the blacktop near the airplane, then disappeared and returned after another ten minutes with two oversized teacarts that bounced and tipped as they came along the cracked concrete beside the palace. They carried a coffee urn, covered dishes, cutlery, English jam jars, sugar bowls, milk jugs, plates of cut-up mangoes and papayas and bananas, a silver toast rack configured like a snake whose coils held the slices, breads, freshly baked muffins, and, a jarring note, four kinds of commercial cereals in their unopened boxes.

  “What, no porridge?” Harry O’Neill said, having strolled out the front door as the carts came up the walk.

  “Coming, sir,” one of the turbaned men said. A silver chafing dish was coming along the walk, a pair of legs below it and a turban showing over the top.

  “What you do not see, demand; what you see, command,” Harry murmured. “Coffee!” he snapped. He was wearing white linen shorts and a short-sleeved Madras shirt, well-worn and-bled, his eyes, good and bad, hidden behind sunglasses.

  “Sir!” The coffee appeared; cream and sugar appeared, were waved away. Harry carried the cup up the aircraft steps, its aroma turning Ong’s and Benvenuto’s heads from their laptops, and back through the aircraft to the seat where Alan lay curled. Harry passed the coffee under Alan’s nose.

  The eyes opened.

  “Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops,” Harry said.

  Alan groaned. “Where’s your turban?”

  “Drink and awake, effendi. The caravanserai’s a-move.”

  Alan moaned and straightened in the seat. He took the cup and drank and gave a long, pleased sigh.

  “When you’re feeling human, join me under the banyan tree and we’ll talk business.” Harry went back up the aircraft and down the steps.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  “You going off watch, Lieutenant?”

  Madje relinquished the TAO’s chair to his relief. He saw the ASW watch officer leaning through the hatch and dragged himself over. “Yeah.” He stretched as far as the low overhead would allow him. “Need something, Warrant Officer O’Leary?”

  “Want to toss this over the side on the way to your rack?” O’Leary held up a four-foot-long tube.

  Madje wondered if the guy was having him on. “Over the side?” he asked dully. He’d been on for six hours, watching the remnants of the Indian fleet to the north on ESM as they tried to stay alive. He had watched the battle between loyalists and mutineers through passive sensors. That’s us, he thought. Passive. He was almost over his bitterness that they weren’t helping the good Indians.

  He was also wasted with fatigue.

  O’Leary barked a laugh. “Sonobuoy, Lieutenant. I’d go up and toss it in myself, but I’m alone here.”

  Madje took the tube and looked at it without any comprehension.

  “Just open the cap, pull the buoy free and toss it clear of the rail. Think of it as your dues for drinking my coffee.”

  “Roger that,” Madje said. He took the tube carefully. “Damn, Warrant, are we that desperate?”

  O’Leary opened his mouth, thought better of it, and grunted.

  Madje winced. In other words, yes.

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  Five minutes after Harry had left him, Alan came down the Lear jet’s folding steps; by the time he reached the ground, a turbaned man was standing there with fresh coffee. Alan crossed to a table where Harry was sitting alone, noted Ong and Benvenuto at another. Alan could smell steak, eggs, toast. “No bacon?” he said as he eased into a chair.

  “The maharajah is Muslim. No meat of the pig.”

  “Well! There goes one of their five stars.”

  Harry was eating Weetabix. When Alan said something about its being soggy, Harry grinned. “Weetabix is an acquired taste. Soggy is part of its charm.” He wiped his mouth. “Djalik was up on the roof and found an antenna array under a permeable dome.” He pointed up with his spoon. “Invisible to the eyes in the sky.”

  “You’re trying to tell me something, I’ll bet.”

  “I found a bug in my room. Valuable antique—Soviet, circa 1970. Not worth piss-all with the electricity off, but a few deep-cell batteries would keep a whole palaceful of them running for a week. Feed yourself, bud; there’s work to do.”

  Alan filled a plate at the buffet, and one of the turbaned men insisted upon
taking it from him and putting it down on the table with cutlery and a snowy napkin. When the man was gone, Harry said, “Safe house.”

  “You think?”

  “Mmm.” Harry was now eating chappatis and some sort of savory vegetable stuff with rice, using the chappati to pick up the vegetables and carry them to his mouth, licking his fingers after each load. “My guess is it’s some branch of Indian intel, probably mil spec because of the old Soviet stuff. Not the Servants of the Earth, because they’d have the latest and coolest.” He wiped his fingers on his napkin. “I wonder if I could bribe the cook away from the maharajah and take him to Bahrain.” He belched. “If that’s breakfast, when’s lunch?”

  “Major Rao sends us here; it’s an intel safe house; therefore—”

  “My guess is that Major Rao is not just Army intel, but RAW, right.” RAW—Research and Analysis Wing, the most secret level of Indian intelligence. Harry put his palms on the table as if he planned to push himself away from it. “I think it’s time to put our cards on the table and have Major Rao do the same, We need all the help we can get, and so does he.” Harry pushed himself back. “Fruit—time for fruit—”

  A turbaned man appeared with a bowl of fruit.

  Alan told him what he had learned overnight from Valdez and Lapierre. “I’ve asked for info on nuke delivery systems from the Agency WMD Center, but we haven’t heard zip. ‘Urgent’ is not in their vocabulary.” He spread black currant jam on a triangle of toast. “Valdez broke the decryption on the gold keys and sent what he called ‘protocols’ for the Servants of the Earth sites, which has Ong and Benvenuto all excited. They spent the night looking for data on the Servants technical capabilities. Seems they’re into a lot of stuff.”

  “Like arming submarines?”

  “Like owning companies that bid on military contracts. I told Ong to dig for connections with the Indian Navy and submarines.” He shrugged.

  Harry sucked at something between two front teeth and signaled for more coffee. “I compared the video that my contact got from the Ambur security cameras with the builders’ plans. The helicopter that left the place was heading about one-ninety or two hundred when it left there.”

  Alan shrugged again. “I asked Lapierre to get satellite imagery of both coasts and put a photo analyst on it looking for something that screams ‘submarine.’” He waited while fresh coffee was put in front of him. “When are you going to put the bell on Major Rao?”

  “I’m not—you are.” Harry looked at his watch. “My supposed Agency control is going to bop in here any time—rent-a-plane. My cover is pretty thin, at best, Al, but I’d rather not get naked for Major Rao.” He picked up a tote bag from the ground and handed it across. Inside were the videocam and the disks from Mohir. “Show him the stuff with the chopper. It’s in the mini-cam.”

  “Your cover story’s pretty thin.”

  “You can’t be too thin or too rich.” Harry stood. “I’m going to mosey out on to that runway with Djalik and an umbrella and wait for my control. You got a better idea?”

  “You black guys have all the fun.”

  “We be made fo’ fun.”

  Harry strolled away. A few minutes later, Alan saw him and Djalik as watery miniatures in the heat shimmer already rising from the runway. A golf umbrella rose above their heads, but almost at once two hotel servants trotted out with chairs and a table and a beach umbrella.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Madje stepped through the hatch and blinked at the first rays of the rising sun. The sea showed dark turquoise. The port-side ladder was a twisted wreck, and the stanchions and chains were gone, so he had to pin the cylinder to the buckled catwalk with one hand and climb down while the sea rushed by, forty feet below his legs.

  “Hey! Dickhead!” Someone above him was shouting.

  He pulled the cap off the tube, turned it out over the water and watched the buoy slide free and fall. He didn’t even see the splash, lost in the blue-green turbulence of the hull.

  “You!”

  Madje looked up at the deck. A man in a red turtleneck and a white deck helmet stood over him, hands on his hips. “Get off the fucking catwalk before you get yourself fucking killed!” the man yelled, and added as an afterthought, “Sir!”

  In fact, Madje was feeling the catwalk giving under his weight. He reached up, grabbed the edge of the buckled deck and struggled to pull himself up. Two tattooed arms grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him on to the deck.

  “What the fuck are you doing on my deck without a float coat?” The man pushed his face within inches of Madje’s. “Sir?”

  Excuses bounced around in his head like balls on a handball court. “I wasn’t going on deck, Chief. I’m the flag lieutenant, Chief. I was doing a guy a favor, Chief.” He hadn’t been so rattled by being in the wrong since AOCS. “No excuse, Chief,” came the old answer.

  The Chief smiled. “Can you cross the fucking deck without falling off?” he said, but not unkindly. He pushed Madje toward an access hatch on the starboard side. Then he turned and bellowed at someone else. “You saving some of that fucking nonskid to eat, Glock? Get it all on the deck, you fat fuck.”

  Madje left him and started across the deck and then stopped, still blinking in the morning sun. The deck was covered in work crews, dozens of them, hundreds of men and women working in a melee of shouts and a riot of flight-deck jerseys. Teams in a line across the deck were laying steel plates over the damaged areas and cutting them to shape, welding them down, their arcs clear and blue in the new light and hissing like high-powered static. Behind them waited crews carrying more steel plate, and more. Because the main elevator was wrecked, they were carrying them up through a hatch that had been cut in the deck, with a new ladder well descending into the darkness of the hull.

  Behind the welders were teams with grinding equipment, finishing the edges of the deck plates, and behind them came a phalanx of sailors with long-handled brushes and buckets of the thick black mixture that, when it set, made the flight deck safe to cross. Nonskid. The whole effort was moving from the bow aft, and Madje could see that the bow already had stripes and spot markings laid over the nonskid. From frame 100 forward, Jefferson was operational, except for cat three, which had born the full force of an explosion.

  He walked to the new ladder well and waited for another team to pass him with a deck plate that must have weighed two hundred pounds. Off to his right, two teams of welders were bracing the twisted base of the superstructure with metal beams. The top thirty feet had been cut away, left to sink somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The missing height and the lack of antenna arrays made the carrier look bald, but just forward of the island a swarm of electrician’s mates were installing cable and antenna dishes: one team soldered under the supervision of a warrant officer with a cable chart while another team was installing cable ducts to cover the wires.

  Madje drew a big breath and realized he was grinning. He knew, intellectually, that carriers went to sea loaded with material for self-repair, but it was a stunning thing to see how quickly it was done, or the impact on the damage of hundreds of trained hands. He paused to watch the crew coming up to move the huge deck plate into position and realized that he was in the way; this was no place for an observer.

  But before his head hit the pillow in a borrowed rack deep in the bowels of third deck, another team had the plate welded in place, and a third team was grinding it level. The Jefferson was not done yet.

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  Major Rao joined Alan as he was finishing breakfast. He was having tea and the same vegetable dish that Harry had had, plus an array of small metal bowls with which a servant surrounded his plate. Alan saw yogurt, something bright green, two reddish things he supposed were chutneys, three unidentifiables, and a dish of dried fruits and nuts.

  Both of them were deliberately cheerful. Rao asked about Alan’s back, professed delight that he was feeling better. Alan admired the food and waited through Rao’s explanation of wh
at was in each of the metal bowls. Then the conversation ran down.

  “I wonder if we have something in common,” Alan said. Not one of his best opening lines; he still felt drugged.

  Rao, in the midst of putting food into his mouth, looked up.

  “A common interest,” Alan said. He took the videocam out of the bag and handed it over. “Push there to start it. There’s some interesting imagery in it.”

  Rao, who ate with a fork rather than his fingers, put his utensils down on his plate, wiped his hands, pressed the switch. He looked at the two-minute segment that showed Building Thirty-seven and the helicopter taking off from it and asked to see it again and then sat there without eating and played the segment not once more, but three times.

  “Building Thirty-seven,” Alan said. He waited. “The helicopter is an old but serviceable Soviet Mi-26. Maximum load twenty thousand kilos.”

  Rao put the videocam down, raising his eyebrows as if in question. “Where did you get this?”

  “How many nuclear devices were stored in Building Thirty-seven?” Alan said. Bang, no subtlety—he wasn’t up to subtlety just yet.

  Rao had picked up his fork as if he was going to eat, but he began instead to trace patterns with it in the gravy on his plate. “That is a startling assumption,” he said. “Which I might be more willing to explore if I knew—knew the bona fides of that tape.”

  “I’m an intelligence officer.” He told Rao about the exercise and about the violence at startex and the flight through the Mahe naval base. Then he shrugged. “An agent provided the tape.”

  Rao nodded. “That is why your photo was on the laptop with the message to kill you on sight!” Rao nodded his head. “Rather persuasive bona fides.”