Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  She glanced across the room at Major Rao and whispered back, “The maharajah was a major general in the Indian Army before he retired six years ago.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “I couldn’t find anything about that. In fact, I couldn’t find anything about his service after 1973 at all. It’s like—”

  “I know what it’s like.” Alan patted her table, because he didn’t want to pat her shoulder or her knee. “Good job.” He walked across to where Rao was watching a laptop, and, as he came up, Rao turned to him, pointing at the screen, and said, “You say this is a Navy project? My Navy?”

  “The Indian Navy and the Servants of the Earth seem to have a cozy relationship.” Alan shrugged. “Some of the Indian Navy, anyway.”

  Rao began taking notes. On the screen, a camera in a garage came to life. He could make out two heavy forklifts and an enormous dolly. “Mary!” Alan called.

  “Son of a bitch,” Mary said. She reached over Alan and started to type.

  “This is live,” Alan said.

  “Yeah. We should be saving all the live feed.”

  The shot changed; the new place appeared to be entirely white—walls, floor, ceiling, the camera looking into it from a corner. The lights were bright and reflected off polished metal surfaces. Alan heard Rao take in breath, and he felt Mary stiffen. She had already seen it on the old coverage and knew what it was, he realized. “That’s a clean room, isn’t it?” he said. There was no point in trying to hide it.

  “I suppose.”

  No supposing about it. It was a clean room, the indispensably antiseptic and dustless space you needed for high-tech work. People were working in it, silent, oddly inhuman. They wore white coveralls with hoods and gloves and respirators. What they moved among were indecipherable shapes, mostly cylindrical, all gleaming.

  And, as abruptly as it had come, the picture disappeared, to be replaced by one of a warehouse or garage, because part of a truck was visible.

  And so was part of something else.

  Rao touched the screen. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “That’s a missile, isn’t it?” The angle made it difficult, but the long, brilliantly reflective tube did, indeed, look like a missile.

  Mary leaned in until her nose was almost touching the flat screen. “It could be a missile.” She sighed again. “Those are slings. It’s hard to see, but that thing right there could be for moving it around. I don’t know—” She paused and pulled at a length of hair that had fallen over her eyes. They all stared at the screen, Alan thinking what it would mean if the things were missiles, and if the three nuclear devices had come to rest in a place where there were a clean room and missiles.

  The picture changed to a hallway with two empty office cubicles.

  “Shitsky!” Still leaning over Alan, she began to click through options, opening up another video display and replaying the feed she had saved. Alan was conscious that one of her breasts was brushing his shoulder

  The image of the garage returned. Now it was frozen and had the slight distortion of video frames, but the truck and the missile, if it was a missile, were identifiable, so they had both been there more than an hour before.

  Mary began humming to herself. She had seen the image before, then, when she was going through the saved data. “You should have told me when you first saw it,” he whispered to her. He felt her shrug as she stretched across him. He pushed back and extricated himself; she slid in without comment. She laid a grid over the frozen frame and did something that brightened the image.

  “Major? How long is an Indian license plate?”

  Rao held his hands up and looked at them. “About fourteen inches.”

  “I need to know exactly.”

  “I’ll go and measure one.”

  Alan heard the billiard room’s door open. She reached for the satellite phone she had brought from the aircraft, another of Harry’s useful toys in a country where the networks were down. “Before Rao comes back,” she muttered. “Alan, this is a Tomahawk cruise missile clone. The Indians are building a cruise missile, and it looks like they stole the tech from us.” She began to tap computer keys. “This is going to get sticky, Alan. Rao’s not going to be very happy about our uncovering a secret missile program.”

  “I think it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to us.”

  “And I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.”

  “What if it’s an SOE project?”

  But she was talking into her phone. “Yancy, Mary. I’m sending you some pictures. From a factory floor in southern India. Coordinates as marked.” She leaned toward the computer screen. “They’re making a copy of the Tomahawk. Of course I’m not sure. I’m pretty goddam sure, though. Call the DDI.” She became very brisk—Yancy was clearly a subordinate. She demanded immediate specs on the Tomahawk missile, with photos, capabilities, warhead space—the works. When Major Rao came back in, she lowered her voice and talked faster, and by the time he had reached them, she was off the phone.

  “Nine and a half inches,” Rao said, holding his hands about that far apart.

  Mary looked at him, laughed, laughed harder. Rao blushed. “Just my size,” she murmured. Then she turned back to the computer and moved blue lines over the image until she had boxed the truck’s license plate and the diameter of the probable missile. She stared at it and then hit a key, and the image vanished. She gave Rao a bright, perhaps flirtatious smile. “Major, can you start looking at the saved shop-floor footage and see if you find more of these?” She got up and pointed him toward her own computer a dozen feet away. When Rao’s back was turned, she looked straight at Alan and nodded.

  The message was unmistakable: they had been looking at a Tomahawk missile.

  27

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  By noon, Alan was back on Harry’s secure satellite phone, passing the first digitals to Fifth Fleet. When he was done, he asked for Admiral Pilchard again.

  “We think they’re trying to fit their warheads to some kind of missile. It looks to our WMD folks like a Tomahawk—”

  “Wait one.”

  Alan could hear Pilchard talking and a ghostly, digitally encrypted voice reacting. Neither voice could be understood. They went on and on. He began to envision the phone as lying on Pilchard’s desk, Pilchard called away—

  “Sorry, Al. Had to deal with another matter—we think we’ve got that leaker. Okay—a Tomahawk. What’re we talking about?”

  “Twelve-hundred-mile range, sir. I need to have Lapierre find out if they could possibly launch one through the tubes of a diesel sub.”

  “To do what? The BG’s way within that range already.”

  “Well, sir—” He thought of what Harry had said about focusing too much on the Navy. “If they got three nukes, maybe they have three targets.”

  Silence. An odd ticking sound, something Pilchard was doing with his lips or tongue. Thinking. Then: “The battle group’s my first concern. Also yours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’re the chances they’re going to put these things on a ship or a plane instead of a sub?”

  “No idea, sir. There’s no naval base nearby, but, hell—”

  “Okay. I’m going to see who’s around who can take out this place you’ve found. Maybe it’ll have to be the Air Force out of Diego Garcia. Frankly, I don’t think I’ll get the go-ahead to do it—bombing mainland India’s not going be a popular idea in Washington—but we have to try.”

  “Sir, we don’t know—”

  “I know what we don’t know, Commander! So do you! So get us more information and then we’ll know, and then maybe I can move some of these politicians off their dead asses before the whole goddam theater blows up!”

  Alan had never heard him quite like that before. “Yes, sir.”

  Pilchard’s voice got less angry. “Your first priority remains the nukes—nail down where they are. Two, nail down whether they’ve been used to weaponeer those missiles. Thre
e, find out what the hell they’re going to do with them.” He barked out a laugh. “Try to have it by seventeen hundred, could you?” He hung up.

  Harry was standing by the window, hands in pockets. “Don’t try to do it yourself,” he said without turning around.

  “Do what?”

  “You know.” He turned to face Alan. “These are serious folks. You and Fidel aren’t going to take their nukes away all by your lonesomes.”

  “You’re not playing this time?”

  Harry came toward him and put his left hand on Alan’s right shoulder so that they were side by side, as if he were going to walk with Alan’s support. “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em, buddy. I told you before, I think you’re following the wrong trail.”

  Alan went down the red-carpeted stairs, more slowly this time because he was frustrated and angry. The huge reception room was empty, the corridor to the billiard room empty, as well. The emptiness hardly registered on him except as a small anomaly, because always before, a turbaned servant was to be seen. He went silently down the corridor, his feet seeming to sink into the old carpet, and turned into the shadowed coolness of the billiard room.

  Bill, Ong, and Benvenuto were at their computers, each with an electric desk lamp that made a little island of light. Clavers was in a corner working with paper that was spitting out of a portable bubble-jet printer. Separate from them in her own light was Mary. The only sounds were the soft fluttering of computer keys.

  “Where’s Rao?”

  “Stepped out, thank God. Look here—” She had two different views of the missile on split screen. “I’ve ID’d three, possibly four of them in the old data, and we know for certain that one of them has been moved between the old stuff and the new. Plus—and this is exciting, Alan, but bad—I see something in the clean room that looks to me like part of a cradle for a nuclear device. I can’t make out enough of it to be sure, but—” She ran her hand through her hair. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “I think they’re putting the nukes into the warheads.” She made a sudden movement to silence the objection she could apparently see coming. “No, no, don’t say they can’t have done it that fast. They’ve had at least twenty-four hours. Listen to me! If they’ve been planning this for months or years, then they had already engineered the warhead to fit the nukes ages ago! It’s like this was simply the last stage of the manufacturing process. They aren’t some ragtag terrorists stealing a nuke and then trying to find a way to jury-rig it into something; this was high-tech all the way. They can do it!”

  But Alan was listening to a sound that was out of place. He couldn’t identify it for several seconds and then he got it—a truck. A heavy truck. Moving away, and then another and another.

  Trucks?

  And he turned to start out the door and found that he wouldn’t be going that way. The door was blocked by a large man and two smaller ones. With guns.

  The billiard room broke into annoyed voices—not because of the men with the guns, but because the internet connection abruptly disappeared from every computer screen.

  The lead man in the doorway was big, with a ferocious moustache, perhaps fifty, dark-skinned. His eyes met Alan’s and he saluted and said, “Ex-sergeant major Khan, sir. Please—” The voice was almost pleading; Alan noticed, despite the hubbub, that the guns were pointed away from the people in the room.

  Behind Khan, the maharajah was peering around his shoulder as if too unimportant or too shy to be noticed. Then, almost timidly, he pushed himself between Khan and a younger man and said, “Commander, my apologies, but I am afraid you will be confined to this room and its comfort room—” he meant the toilet, reached by a door near the far corner—“until they are able to release you. I believe it will be only a matter of hours.”

  Alan took in the guns—two of the men had Steyr assault rifles, Khan a machine pistol—and the fact that others were behind the maharajah. He felt instant rage, damped it down as futile, said, “Where are my other people?”

  Khan looked sideways at the maharajah to see if he was going to answer and said, “Two out by swimming pool, no problem. Quite safe.” Fidel and Djalik, lolling in swimming trunks—no place to carry a gun. “One upstairs restricted to his room. Pilot in aircraft. Everybody okay.”

  Alan looked at the maharajah. “Did you think we’d try to fly away?”

  The maharajah looked pained. “I am so very sorry. We are doing this as gently as possible.” And turned on his heel and left them. The two men with the Steyrs backed out, too, aiming the weapons at the floor with great care, and Khan slid out after them, keeping his gun, too, aimed away from the Americans. It was all very civilized.

  The lock clicked over in utter silence.

  “We’ve lost the feed!” Ong cried.

  “They’ve pulled the cable.” They had been using a jury-rigged cable that snaked out a window to the Lear jet. Alan saw the situation at once: Rao had taken a force off to try to retake the nukes; he’d cut them off the internet because he didn’t want them doing something crazy like e-mailing Fifth Fleet for an air strike or a couple of cruise missiles.

  He thought fleetingly of escape and dismissed the thought as foolish. Where to? And how? He looked around at them—Ong and Bill useless in a fight, nobody armed—and at the tall, narrow windows that lined the outside wall, to see, on the verandah outside, four more armed men. If I had Djalik and Fidel and Harry and—and what? A Marine detachment?

  Benvenuto, standing now by his chair, fists clenched, said, “Why the hell are we prisoners?”

  “Petty Officer Benvenuto, sit down.”

  Behind him, Mary had her hands on her hips, face angry. “Start downloading that stuff on the shop floor and the clean room to disk! If they come back to take the computers, I want the data in my pocket!”

  “Good thinking.” Actually, he didn’t believe it was such hot thinking, but saving the data would give people something to do. “Lieutenant Ong, Petty Officer Benvenuto—get on it! We want everything showing the clean room, the garage, and the factory floor saved—compress it if you can. Let’s go!”

  “But we worked so hard,” Ong whined. Her hands were trembling.

  “If Rao grabs the nukes, your work will still pay off.” For India. The bastards. “This isn’t Stalag Seventeen and we’re not going to start digging a tunnel.”

  Bill was grayer than usual, maybe in shock. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Alan caught Mary’s eyes and jerked his head at Bill, and she went to him and started to whisper, patting his shoulder. She came back and leaned her buttocks against the polished wood of the billiard table and muttered. “Man, did I guess that sonofabitch Rao wrong. We were suckered!” She shook her head.

  “You ID’d the missiles and he figured he didn’t have much time.”

  “Rao didn’t take off until I spotted the missiles. I think he had suspicions of his own, and he waited for us to prove them. I know something about India, Al; there just aren’t that many top scientists, and they all go to the same schools and they all marry each other. Rao wasn’t surprised by what we were seeing until he saw the missile. Now, he wants to get the nukes and keep us from seeing the missiles up close.”

  “Would you do any different in his place?” Alan sat on the edge of the billiard table and crossed his arms. “Maybe we ought to be thanking him, not bitching.”

  He looked at his watch. They had been prisoners for thirteen minutes.

  Mary passed the time by playing billiards. She leaned across the table, the tip of her tongue between her lips and her right leg cocked up over the corner, brought her cue in line with her shot, bridged her left hand, and suddenly looked up at Alan and gave a lopsided, ironic grin. Playing pool while the Titanic sinks.

  Click.

  Alan looked at his watch—eighteen minutes. “I’m a pool player,” she said. “Never played billiards before.”

  Click.

  “If I could see into the clean room for any length of time—” she
said. She glanced up, then down; she had left herself a difficult shot. She slapped her hand on the heavy oak frame. “Fuck, we were that close. Rao could at least have taken us along. You think he’s there yet?”

  Eighteen minutes and twenty seconds. The facility Rao was heading for was sixty miles away.

  Click. “You want to shoot?” He had been holding a cue for no good reason.

  In an hour and a half, Rao and a couple of truckloads of men would try to attack a defended factory to get three nukes that might wind up destroying an entire battle group, and he was being asked to play billiards! He threw his cue on the table. “No, I’m going to stop being a horse’s ass and try to help Rao.”

  “You’d be helping a sonofabitch who—”

  Alan hollered at Clavers, who was closest to the door. “Knock on that door and ask them to get the maharajah!” He turned back to Mary. “There’s no point in standing around hitting little balls together when we could be helping the guy with the only real chance at those nukes.”

  He strode to the computers. Ong was making notes on a pad and Benvenuto was staring at nothing.

  “Petty Officer Benvenuto, pull up the most recent data we have and start checking for security forces or other potential opposition to Major Rao’s operation.”

  “Sir?”

  “Bill!”

  “Uhh?”

  “Can you control the data stream? Is it possible? So we can choose which camera we look through?”

  Bill looked at him. A flicker of interest showed through his daze. “Not without a connection to the net.”

  Alan smiled. “Just start thinking about how to do it—okay?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Okay.” Bill looked around, seemed to notice the other people in the room for the first time. “Sorry, I—Sure.” Then he looked at his screen. “If their system is that way, we’d be screwed. But if it’s controlled by remote—”

  “Then it’s SCADA,” Alan said. “You do SCADA.”