by Gordon Kent
Before the Land Rover had stopped, Rao was out, crouched behind his door with a machine pistol ready. The driver was leaning over the hood from the other side, aiming past him, a heavy automatic rifle firing right across Rao’s line of vision. In the silence, cartridge casings spit out of the weapon; Alan imagined their clatter as they hit the vehicle. The other pair from the Land Rover were running for a concrete wall to the right. Soundlessly, the vehicle’s windshield dissolved inward. Rao looked up and to his right and aimed; his weapon bucked but there was of course no sound; casings scattered. Rao threw himself flat, shot one-handed, and began crawling backward under the Land Rover.
Alan jumped to Mary’s computer. “What’s going on in the clean room?”
“Nothing—goddam nothing.”
He glanced at Ong’s and Benvenuto’s screens. Five men were trotting down the building’s outside wall, weapons at port; Alan shouted for the maharajah and said, “Are these yours?”
The maharajah stared at the battle dress, the body armor, the helmets, and nodded with enormous vigor. “Ours, oh, yes—ours!”
They hadn’t enough screens to know where all of Rao’s people were or what was happening to them, and the lack of sound made it impossible to tell how much of a fight was going on. The modern battlefield, he thought. The same old fog. At the billiard-room door, Khan was on a headset with somebody, probably not Rao, because he was shouting at him. Alan went to him, put a hand on one arm; Khan held up his hand, listened, barked something, then barked something else at the maharajah in Hindi. To Alan, he said, “Truck three setting up perimeter to defend exit strategy. Truck two in support. Truck one and Land Rover in hot zone!”
Rao rolled to his knees, pushed himself erect and up the two steps to the shed. His driver’s fire was pinning the shooters in the factory. Rao tried to elbow the double doors open, felt some give, threw his weight against them and then reached out to turn the knob, losing control of his weapon in the same motion.
The driver stopped firing, his clip exhausted.
The knob turned and Rao went through, off-balance and with his machine pistol hanging by its sling from his wrist. The interior was bright, and a man was standing a meter away. He had an assault rifle but seemed frozen. Rao swung his left arm and the pistol struck the man full across the face, snapping his head back and tearing a dingy handkerchief from his head. He grunted and fired into the floor reflex-ively, the rounds whining around the space like angry bees. Rao got control of the machine pistol and shot him.
Alan cycled Bill’s screen-views to find the garage and got the right one just in time to see Rao, bent over, rotating with the machine pistol held ready to fire. Seen from above and at an angle, he was foreshortened and almost dwarfish. Alan in fact didn’t recognize him but thought he recognized the weapon. A man lay twitching at Rao’s feet.
Another figure in body armor and helmet came through the door behind Rao.
“They’re securing the garage door,” Alan called to the rest of the room.
The maharajah was standing behind him. “Is that my nephew?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He is all right so far, then.”
Other armed men joined Rao and he motioned them forward, and they disappeared from the bottom of the screen, seen almost from directly above as they flowed down it. Alan found another camera that showed the garage and the inside of the loading dock from the far end so that it looked up the interior and just caught a door, through which Rao and his men were coming. They came up the long garage by files, leapfrogging and covering each other, and Alan saw no sign that any of them fired a shot. The lead men came right down to disappear again at the screen’s bottom, merely by then tops of heads with feet appearing and disappearing fore and aft.
Behind them, Rao came slowly, looking around, slowing, stopping. When he had looked back up the garage and seen, apparently, that it was empty, he looked up directly into the security camera and shook his head.
* * *
“Okay, you were absolutely right; the trucks are gone,” Alan said to Ong. “Good job.”
“Bad for our side, though.”
“You could say that.”
The maharajah was still watching Bill’s computer. Alan joined him. Very little resistance had appeared after the first flurry of shooting; they had watched Rao and his men move back up through the garage, then suddenly appear on a camera covering one corridor of the main factory building, from which they had made their way up to the second storey.
“Khan says we have three injured so far,” the maharajah murmured.
“It could be a lot worse.”
He was switching cameras, trying to find Rao. He had last been seen crossing a factory floor toward a set of double doors.
“They’re in the clean room!” Mary shouted. “I’ve got them—”
Alan cycled, cursing silently, and got it. They had four camera angles in the clean room, only one of them with a broad enough view to get most of the space. He found that one at last and saw that the double doors Rao had been heading for led to the clean room, for he was just coming in now. His outriders had already come through and were darting down the room, covering themselves behind big pieces of equipment.
“Like watching a bank robbery,” Alan muttered.
They swept the room. They apparently found nobody.
It’s over. He didn’t want to say it aloud to the maharajah. They were too late and it’s over.
Then Mary said, “Paydirt,” and he looked at the screen again. Rao was standing on a table, directing two men to move something that the table was blocking from the security camera. Alan recognized it as the dolly Mary had pointed out earlier—a dolly holding a matte-black cradle two feet long.
“That thing’s a warhead cradle,” she said. “That sucker’s small. We’re underestimating these bastards.”
And then things speeded up. Ong shouted, “Bad guys at the back!” and Alan raced to her and saw the grainy black-and-white of the factory exterior, men running forward toward an open door. They wore black body armor and French-style kevlar helmets.
“Khan!” Alan shouted. “Bogeys on the north side of Building One! Entering the building at the northwest corner! Tell Rao—!” He turned to the maharajah. “Sir, tell them—the building’s being entered at the ground floor at the—”
And then there was shouting in Hindi and in English, and the men in the clean room suddenly burst into movement. They were running for the double doors, firing, crouching behind machines, and then they were coming back down the room as the doors exploded, dust and flash and smoke bursting on the screen; and Rao, who had been standing still on the table bent to get down and then straightened and raised a hand toward his head, but his head had already snapped back and to the side and burst toward the camera in a spray of black pixels.
Washington
An emissary from the Central Intelligence Agency—usually the director—briefs the President every morning. Brief was what he had learned to be, because the President’s attention span was not of the longest. “Just give me the big picture,” the briefer had become accustomed to hearing the man say. This President believed that his job was thinking big, and details were what he had all those other people for.
Now, it was well before the normal briefing hour, and the President was still in pajamas. “Our officer on the spot has reported that the attempt to recover the three nukes has failed,” the director was saying. “There’s now sound evidence that they’ve been loaded into clones of our own Tomahawk cruise missile and are somewhere in southern India.”
“Can they hit America with those things?”
A presidential briefer has to have a poker face and a lot of patience. Now, he made his face expressionless and said, “The range of the Tomahawk is twelve hundred miles, sir.” Would he have to say that Washington was farther than that from southern India? No, apparently not.
The President was scowling. “India isn’t an American concern. And I don’t
appreciate being waked up in the middle of the night to hear about it.”
“Sir, so far as we know, the nukes were taken by a terrorist group. They could pass them on to any of a number of other groups who are our concern.”
“What’d they put them in the Tomahawks for, then? Don’t give me that! When you know some raghead terrorist group that’s got it in for this country has got a nuke, I want to hear about it! Until then—” He looked at his watch. “India’s a State Department issue, right?”
“State’s trying to find enough of the Indian government to intervene, yes, sir. But the government’s fragmented—the president’s in one hideout, half the parliament may be dead, the—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you told me yesterday or sometime. Our position is that India’s internal affairs are India’s business. Have I made myself clear?”
“If they can move the Tomahawks around, they could hit Karachi. Even Islamabad.” He waited, thought he’d better make sure he was understood. “In Pakistan.”
“And?”
“The Pakistanis have nukes of their own; they’d retaliate at once. The Chinese have forces on the Indian border; they might well invade. The whole of Southeast Asia—”
The President threw himself back, banged a forearm on his desk, and rolled his eyes. “I don’t seem to be making myself clear! It’s your job to monitor stuff like that; I don’t want to hear it! We’re not involved!” He shifted his weight and looked again at his watch, laughed suddenly. “Maybe we should ask the guys who stole the nukes to do us a favor and lob one at Saddam Hussein, how about that!”
The briefer didn’t say that Baghdad was at least a thousand miles beyond the missile’s range.
Fifth Fleet HQ, Bahrain
Pilchard kept tapping his pencil on his desk, harder and harder. As he waited on the line, he began to drum the eraser on his mouse pad. Waiting for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to dance with politicians.
“Admiral?” His top boss, the Chief of Naval Operations, sounded hoarse. A really good officer with a long record as a fighter.
“Yessir.”
“Admiral, that’s a big no on deployment of a SEAL team on Indian soil. Don’t even ask me to go back and talk about a B-52 strike.”
Pilchard was still for a few heartbeats, trying to will those words unsaid. “Sir, with all respect, we’re talking nuclear weapons here. Could be my battle group. Could be Pakistan or Iran. We’re talking—”
“Save it, Dick. I know. The White House has something called other concerns.”
“What other concerns? What comes above the deployment of nuclear weapons?”
“You want me to spell it out?” The CNO was talking too fast, his own anger too raw. “The White House says your nukes are all smoke and mirrors. They think the threat to the battle group is negligible and that any other action taken is quote not a matter for US intervention. Okay? I don’t want to spin you up further, Dick; I’m in your corner, but I just got my ass reamed and I can tell you that this bunch has already made up their minds and they are not going to budge one inch.”
“What do you recommend I do, sir?” Pilchard looked down and found that he’d broken the pencil between his fingers.
“Jesus, Dick. What do you want me to say? Obey. Or—” The CNO hesitated. Pilchard could hear him breathing.
“Or walk into disobedience with my eyes open?” Pilchard was mutilating one of the pencil ends.
“I didn’t say that, Dick.” The CNO sounded as if, in fact, he was saying just that. In fact, he sounded as if he was pleading.
29
The Serene Highness Hotel
There had been no question of continuing the Americans’ confinement after the failure of Rao’s mission. The maharajah had called it off the moment he knew that the trucks were out the facility gate and headed home
Harry O’Neill had been praying when the release came. He finished his prayers, rolled up his rug, and strode out of his bedroom the moment Alan appeared and told him about Rao—along the silent corridor, down the stairs, across the huge lobby. He didn’t head for the billiard room but went straight to the airplane, jumping up the stair, stepping over the cable that carried the internet hookup for the computers. He checked with Moad, asked if the plane was ready to fly, amount of fuel.
“Where we going?”
“I don’t know yet. Gotta get out of here, for sure.”
He went back into the palace and this time to the billiard room. Only Bill Caddis and the Navy enlisted man were there, the soft clicking of keys the only sound.
“Where’s everybody?”
“Taking a break. We were locked in here. You hear about that, sir?”
Harry nodded. “You’re Benvenuto.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harry sat down next to Bill, who acknowledged him by leaning in the other direction.
“Bill?”
“Huh?”
“I want you to do a traffic-flow analysis to find the SOE router hub.”
Bill’s head turned toward him. Bill didn’t look good, Harry thought—pasty, pale, his muddy eyes like light bulbs without the power. “Been there, done that,” Bill said. “Mary already asked me.” He slammed a disk into its port and waited while a light flashed and something whirred. He handed the floppy to Harry.
“Thanks.”
“Unh.”
Harry then sat next to Benvenuto and asked him to pull up the data from the disk. He studied it, jumping back and forth, and then put the disk in his pocket and went out. By then, the others were drifting back
Harry found Adeeb, the maharajah’s secretary.
“I’d like to see His Serene Highness.”
“It is not, I am sorry, a good time, sir.” The secretary hesitated. “We have had a blow.”
“Is Major Rao dead?”
“It is not known for sure. His Serene Highness’s physician has gone to meet the party on the road.” The man shook his head. “The hospitals are full. Such a very sad time.”
“I want a Survey map of western Uttar Pradesh.”
“Maps, sir—we have driving maps, tourist maps—”
“You have Indian Survey maps. This is a military facility.”
The secretary looked severe, then frightened. “I would have to ask His Serene Highness”
“The general, yes.”
The secretary made a face as if he was about to blow a large bubble. He nodded his head very fast. “Yes, yes.” He blew the bubble. “Please to come with me. He is at prayers. You are a believer, I think?”
Later, coming back with the maps, Harry saw Mary, who signaled to him. He had things to do—most of all, he had places to go—but he went to her.
“We’re getting out of here,” she said.
“Indeed.”
“If we find the router hub for the main SOE IP, I think we can maybe zero in on their headquarters.”
“Good thinking.”
“I’m dealing with the fallout from the mess that Rao made. You heard? They got shot up; everything was already gone. Thanks to God I’d already messaged the office it was a bust. Now we gotta move, man! Craik thinks he’s going to save the world with a Navy plane. Christ. I’ve got to file a report on this fiasco and try to cover my ass with DC. Find out where Bill places the router hub and find a way to get us there—ASAP.”
She started away. He put his hand on her arm. “You messaged the office when?”
“As soon as I figured out they were never going to get those nukes.”
“Al Craik gave his word there’d be no messages sent.”
“Oh, get a life! This is the real world, sweetie—I don’t care if Commander Tightass gave his right ball! I had a job to do and I did it! And because I don’t believe in honor and I don’t believe in some sailor’s word, the President of the United States is state-of-the-art on what’s going down with those nukes. Now get off my ass and do your job!”
Harry smiled. He had a good smile; men and women both loved it. “I don’t have a job, Ma
ry. And as for the volunteer work I’m doing for your bosses—that’s history. I’ll finish this one, and then I’m out.”
“Oh, for God’s sake—! Why?”
Harry looked at her, gave a single, breathy chuckle. He hadn’t told her he’d already seen Bill, had already located the router hub, had already found where they had to go. He’d thought of not taking her at all but decided that to do so would be merely childish. “I don’t like being called ‘Persian Rug,’” he said.
He went out to the plane and handed the maps to Moad. “We’re heading for a place north of Delhi called Patiala. Find us a landing field that’ll have gas. You can file a flight plan through the maharajah’s secretary, and the old man’ll see it’s official.”
“What’d that cost?”
Harry said, “One Muslim prayer. Did you know there’s a little mosque on the far side of the palace? That’s where he is. All by himself.”
Coming out of the aircraft hatch, he met Djalik, who simply shook his head to show his embarrassment at having been detained by a damned swimming pool. Harry laughed. “I was having a nap.” He patted Djalik’s shoulder. “Check the weapons and get ready to roll. Make sure we’ve got food on board for five—twenty-four hours in the galley plus MREs.” He looked at his watch. “Say—twenty-two hundred hours.”
“Home?”
“Eventually.”
Fifth Fleet HQ, Bahrain
From the time he’d hung up with the CNO to the time Al Craik called back for his final orders, Pilchard had gone through the motions of obedience. He’d alerted every ASW asset in his theater, called Sixth Fleet HQ in Naples and asked for the P-3 det in Sigonella to be flown into Bahrain ASAP, sent his own two P-3s to Oman and asked the ambassador to get the Iranians to let his boys fly out over the Indian Ocean without getting harassed.
It was all bullshit. The P-3s from Sig wouldn’t get to him for twenty-four hours; the P-3s in the Indian Ocean wouldn’t find a diesel sub in that vast sheet of water without direct aid from the Almighty.