Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “I was ordered to find out what had happened to the nuclear devices stored in Building Thirty-seven.”

  “Very nice to have a friend with a Lear jet.”

  “Very nice to have a rich friend, yes.” Alan gestured toward the palace. “Very nice to have a friend with a palace.”

  Rao was still making patterns in the gravy. “Not my friend, I’m afraid.”

  “With an antenna array on the roof and bugs in the rooms.” Alan put his forearms on the table. “Are all the servants trained intelligence people?” When Rao didn’t answer, Alan said, “Is the maharajah a senior intelligence officer?”

  Rao smiled but did not look up. “The maharajah is my uncle.”

  Alan waited. Rao picked up a little of the food with the fork and ate it; he seemed to have trouble swallowing this time, and he sipped tea and looked away and didn’t say anything. After a while, he picked up the camera and looked at the video again.

  “It’s an original security-camera feed from Ambur. That’s all I’m prepared to say. It’s genuine. Your turn. How many nuclear devices were there in Building Thirty-seven?” Alan leaned forward.

  Rao looked across the runway where Harry and Djalik were sitting. A sudden silence fell, as if all the birds and insects had at that moment decided to shut up. In that abrupt quiet, the faint sound of a piston engine reached Alan’s ears. He searched for the airplane in the southern sky. Rao, too, searched and apparently found it, and, as if the coming of the airplane meant the arrival of some weight that changed a balance, he said, “There were three nuclear devices in Building Thirty-seven.” He put his hand on his teacup but didn’t lift it. It was trembling, but his voice was steady. “The question is, how many are there in there now?”

  “What’d Rao say?” Harry said.

  Alan told him. “He wants to work with us. He’s Indian Army intel—or that’s his story, anyway. I think he’s Research and Analysis Wing, like you said. I think this whole set up has RAW written all over it. He says he’s pretty much on his own because he’s lost touch with New Delhi.”

  “Out there on a shoeshine and a smile. Well, well.” Harry’s grin was broad below the sunglasses. “How many nukes?”

  “Three.”

  Harry made a ticking sound with his tongue. “Make a bit of a mess, three nukes. Warheads?”

  “He says not configured. But I’m not sure I believe him. Anyway, the submarine stuff blindsided him. Apparently, what his people were afraid of before he lost touch was that the nukes would either be turned on Pakistan or sold out of the country. Now he can see the headline—‘India Nukes US Battle Group, Massive Retaliation to Follow.’”

  “With two nukes left to make more trouble with, right. Well, is he going to play team ball?”

  “He says so. How about your Agency control?”

  “She’s a handsome bitch on wheels. At least she got on the WMD Center in nothing flat. She says if we don’t start to get data from them in fifteen minutes, she’ll kick ass at the DDI level.”

  “You tell her she’s under my command?”

  Harry nodded.

  “What’d she say?”

  “Nothing to what she’ll say when she hears that Major Rao is part of the package, too.”

  25

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  Showered, shaved, and dressed in a crisp shirt and shorts that had appeared on his bed, Alan sat at the now cleared breakfast table with a cup of coffee. The truth was—the physical discomforts aside—he felt drained. He was still finding it hard to concentrate. Maybe it was the muscle relaxants. Or the heat. Or—wasn’t depression like this? He tried to focus on a specific question to force his mind to work. For example—why, why, why had the Indians tried to do something to the JOTS? What had they been after?

  He raised his cup to drink, and over the rim he saw a woman striding along the patio. Not Indian, therefore Harry’s “handsome bitch on wheels.” Alan watched her give a turbaned man a big smile and speak a word and then come striding toward him. “I’m Mary Brevard.” She held out a hand. “I know who you are.”

  He smiled. “Always pleased to meet a friend of Harry’s.”

  She grunted at the idea that she and Harry were friends. She said, “I guess you guys really got the goods. I’ve sent the video and everything I thought mattered back to my office.”

  He glanced around, but the patio was empty, the only motion the gentle swaying of the fronds of a banyan tree. “You’re with the WMD Center?”

  “I’m the head of WMD, Commander.”

  He stared at her, unable to say anything bright. “So—on paper, you’re senior to me, Mary.”

  Behind her, a hundred feet away, he saw Fidel amble into sight and stand looking at the flat land, his hands on his hips.

  She leaned forward. “I promised your admiral I’d take orders from you. That was the price of coming out here. But if there are nukes, they’re mine. If there’s intel on WMD, it’s mine.”

  “If there are nukes, I think they belong to Major Rao.”

  “Who’s Major Rao?”

  “I think he’s a senior officer in the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian military. He’s inside someplace.”

  “What the fuck is he doing here?”

  “The hotel seems to be an RAW safe house. The maharajah who owns it is his uncle, he says.”

  “This could be a serious CI issue!”

  He beckoned to one of the turbaned men. “Would you find Major Rao, please?” He waited until the man was gone. “Can your cover handle meeting him?”

  “What the hell. I’m here ‘declared,’ which means that somewhere in Delhi a fax machine with no power should have received my passport and the Indians should accept my status and diplomatic credentials.”

  “What’s your story?”

  “I’m a diplomatic security officer come out from Bahrain to support you. I have a passport and creds to prove it.” She shrugged. “If he’s really RAW, he’ll see through me in a second.” She shrugged.

  Major Rao came through a pair of French doors behind them. He smiled at Alan and gave Mary a long look, not all of it professional. She returned it with interest.

  “Major Rao, Mary Brevard from the State Department.” Alan saw Moad waving to him from the plane.

  “Harry wants you!” Moad called.

  It seemed a good cue to leave. “Would you two excuse me for a moment?”

  He passed Fidel, who was putting together a breakfast, on the way to the plane.

  Fidel glanced up, then away. “You okay?” Alan said.

  Fidel dipped into a bowl of cut-up fruit. “I’ll be okay.” Putting it in the future.

  “I guess I’ll be okay, too.”

  Fidel looked at him then, a full, long look, studying his eyes. “You sleep okay?”

  “They gave me pills.”

  Fidel let out a long breath. “I didn’t sleep so good.” He shut his lips together tight. He looked away from Alan toward the flat, alien landscape. He turned away. “Maybe I’m getting old.”

  Alan thought maybe they both were.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  The incoming TAO took a slug of espresso from his thermos and, face grim, cycled through the screens of data that Madje had passed down to him to show the night’s activity.

  “God damn it, the mutineers got the Betwa,” he growled to no one in particular. The Betwa was a well-handled frigate that had held its own since the first mutiny, repeatedly covering the withdrawal of other damaged ships with skill and daring. He flicked to the next screen.

  An ensign assigned from the navigation department flipped through the message board beside him. “She hasn’t sunk and we think a message that went out an hour back might mean she has her fires out.” He handed the new TAO a message on yellow paper. He glanced at it. The ensign took a chance and said, “Maybe she’ll make it.”

  The TAO looked at the kid next to him. He swallowed his first temptation to savage the boy. “Yeah, Ensign, maybe she will
.” He looked back at the screen where the JOTS was replaying the ESM cuts that showed the coordinated attack on the Betwa. “No thanks to us.”

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  In the aircraft, Ong and Benvenuto looked exhausted, heavy circles under their eyes, sagging shoulders, but they were hard at it, their heads down over one computer. They didn’t even look up as Alan brushed past, but continued a jargon-filled muttering about data streams. Behind them, a heavy man with pale eyes looked at Alan without interest and said in a voice too loud for the space, “You guys got anything out of the Delhi mainframes?”

  Alan went on through to join Harry. “Who’s the fat nerd?” he said.

  “Mary’s geek. All the social skills of a slug. You got a phone call from Lapierre—if he’s still on.” He got up and handed Alan a headset.

  “You could have told me she was the head of WMD,” Alan said.

  “Yeah, I could.” Harry smiled. “But you’re a big boy.” Harry slapped the seatbacks.

  “Al Craik,” Alan said into the headset.

  Lapierre identified himself and began to brief him. He sounded exhausted. “Aircrew from an S-3 intercepted an anomalous signal last night off the south coast of India. All hell was breaking loose—still is, from what we can tell—but we think it’s the missing sub. I say again, we think it’s the sub.”

  Alan looked up at Harry. “Map?” he said. “Chart? Southwest coast of India?”

  Harry vanished. Alan scrounged a pen and an old receipt from the fold-down desk. “Give me the location.”

  “The footprint is pretty big, Al. Ninety by sixty miles. But it’s centered on 09N 077E.”

  Alan read it back, grabbed a chart that Harry shoved at him. He plotted a rough circle. “I got a town marked Quilon, right on the coast.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Looks like a natural harbor, Dickie.”

  “But a hell of a long way from the battle group.” If it’s intending to attack us, he meant.

  “Huh.” If the sub had kept moving at five knots since it had shot down Stevens’s plane, it could have given off the signal near Quilon. But why go there, as Lapierre said, if it was after the Jefferson? Why wasn’t it shadowing the BG? “Got a theory, Dickie?”

  “Admiral Pilchard is tearing out what hair he has left wondering if the BG needs CAP and round-the-clock ASW. Acting BG CO, on the other hand, wants them to have the lowest possible profile. Skivvy is that Washington is trying to tie Pilchard’s hands on this and hope that the Jefferson makes Colombo without an incident.”

  “Incident” was a nice word for an attack on a crippled aircraft carrier.

  “What’s Washington playing at?”

  “Uh—” Lapierre was one of those old-fashioned officers who believed that you never discussed politics, women, or religion. “I think they’re ‘disengaging’ from what’s going on in India.”

  Alan found himself wishing that he could do the same thing. He rubbed his forehead and forced himself to concentrate. “Okay—is the CAP still flying?”

  Lapierre told him that Rose had got Sri Lankan permission for the CAP to fly armed out of Trincomalee, and that the planes there now had fuel.

  “So the Jefferson has at least some cover. Okay, tell the admiral I said that we don’t know enough yet to call off ASW coverage for the BG. I think he’s gotta overrule the acting CO until we sort this out. Get an ETA Colombo for the Jefferson and plot possibles for that sub—like, it wouldn’t take a genius to guess that the carrier is going to Colombo, so does the sub plan to intercept it someplace? And where would that be and how soon, because you for sure want to tell the flag the BG needs CAP and ASW until at least then. The question right now is, what’s the sub doing down there near Quilon? There any kind of naval facility down there?”

  “Our data says no, but a SIGINT report last year said that some kind of exercise was held there. NSG logged it as a special-forces landing exercise. From a sub.”

  Alan rubbed his nose. “From a sub. Huh.” He tried to think it through, gave up for lack of information. It was all pie in the sky. “Any more good news?”

  Lapierre laughed. Alan told him to get some sleep and ended the call, then sketched the situation in for Harry, who had flung himself into the next seat. Alan showed him the chart and Quilon and a roughly sketched-in track for the Jefferson. He put the pencil on a point several hundred miles off the coast. “BG ought to be here by now. That sub’s a diesel. If it’s really at Quilon, it’s put itself in a worse position to attack with conventional torpedoes than it was three days ago.”

  Harry was lying back in the seat, his head on his left hand with the forefinger running up his cheek. “Maybe it’s not going to use conventional torpedoes. Maybe it’s picking up the nukes.”

  “To do what? You can’t fit nuclear torpedoes into a diesel sub; they’re too big. And it’s not missile-configured, either.”

  “Suicide mission? They’d only need to get within ten miles or so of the carrier.”

  Alan groaned. “Jesus, you have a gloomy mind.” He stood. “I left your boss and Major Rao together.”

  “She’s not my boss.”

  “Well, we’re lucky that Pilchard made sure she’s not my boss.” He stood “You sit here and stay cool.”

  “Not for long. Power’s low.” Harry raised his eyebrows, pointed a finger. “Time, bud.” The temperature inside the plane, he pointed out, was climbing, and they would have to shut down the air-conditioning altogether or get a land line or more fuel, because the plane’s auxiliary power was heading for zero.

  Alan looked at the three working in the front of the aircraft “We’ll have to get these guys indoors.”

  “No electricity there, either.”

  Alan raised a skeptical eyebrow. “A safe house without a generator? Somehow, I’m not convinced.”

  “Are you suggesting that that nice maharajah deliberately denied us electricity? I’m shocked—shocked!” Harry raised an eyebrow.

  The White House, Washington

  It was nearly midnight in Washington, and the President was in bed. As a result, he wasn’t pleased when the director of the CIA called him to tell him that one of their officers, on the spot in India, had evidence that it was now certain that three nuclear devices had been stolen from a secret Indian government site. The President, who had no more interest in India than he had in girls’ basketball, said that the Agency should pull together any evidence they had to show that the nukes were a threat to the United States and present it at the morning briefing. Then he went back to bed.

  26

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  The Serene Highness Hotel of course had a generator. The maharajah’s secretary explained that it had regrettably not been working when they had arrived, but, after the hotel mechanics had worked on it all night, it now functioned. Alan heard this speech through without cursing or breaking into derisive laughter, although he didn’t dare look at Major Rao, who was resolutely not looking at him, either.

  Rao had been persuaded that it was better to have Alan’s computer people working on what had become their common problem than having them sitting in an airplane without power. It had taken Alan twenty minutes to convince him, and then Rao had had to go away (not to talk to New Delhi, unless he was lying about having no comm link). He had come back five minutes later to say that, yes, electricity could be provided. (Having been gone long enough only to check with some higher-up close by. Like the Maharajah, perhaps?) It occurred to Alan that Rao saw an advantage to bringing the three computer specialists in where they could be monitored. (Always trust your allies, right?)

  A squad of turbaned servants was soon moving equipment from the Lear jet into a big, gloomy room several doors away from the music room. In the middle sat a full-size billiard table that made it, Alan guessed, the billiard room. The space was dark and ornate—carved, varnished wainscoting, green flocked wallpaper above it, and, over the enormous mahogany table, a lamp with a leaded glass shade wh
ose light, reflected from the green felt of the table, made the room seem like an aquarium.

  Now they were all in there for a briefing on what the geeks had found—a showered Ong, an unwashed Bill, plus Benvenuto, Alan, Mary Totten, aka Cindy Brevard, and Rao. Djalik and Fidel had the morning off to do R&R by the pool. Harry had exiled himself to his room to preserve what little was left of his cover.

  Ong started the briefing. “We—Petty Officer Benvenuto and I—” she made it clear that Bill was not to get credit for this part of the operation—“have followed the money spent by SOE. All over India. We thought that the best strategy was to get a fix on their holdings. Petty Officer Benvenuto followed one of the money trails to Europe and another into an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. Then we tried to focus on SOE holdings in India, and then—” She turned a page of her notes. “There are over seven hundred of them, and that’s not counting front-company sub-holdings. Just for example, they own a cell-phone network, which is how they were able to communicate when everything else went down at Mahe.”

  “How much are they worth?” Mary’s eyes were narrowed.

  “Maybe ten billion. Maybe double that.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Just their Delhi real estate’s worth a quarter of that.”

  Benvenuto jumped in after a glance at Ong. “So when Bill—uh, Mister Caddis—arrived, we were facing this mountain of data and we were just staring at it. And he told us to follow the data stream. We didn’t even know how, and he showed us. It’s like a whole different level of computing. I didn’t even know you could do that.”

  “Anyway,” Alan said. “So you followed data streams from SOE-owned facilities and did a traffic analysis? And?”

  Ong took over again. “The big bandwidth users were eleven IPs, most of them in the south of India. We correlated them to our list of SOE-owned facilities and got six hits. Three of them are located south of the Ambur facility, which was our indicator—that you think the warheads were taken south from Ambur.”