Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Ready to pop?”

  “Anytime, skipper,” Soleck said.

  Alan reached up over his head and began to arm the systems, warming the Harpoon on the starboard wing, choosing his chaff/flare selection and moving the counter to his chosen pattern—chaff-chaff-flare. The improved-Krivak-class frigates up north had the best ability to shoot him down, he thought, and their missiles, especially their VLS Gauntlets, would home on radar—hence the chaff. The flare cartridge was really inserted as a spacer, so that pairs of chaff cartridges would make big, attractive blobs with a decision distance between them.

  Simcoe was putting his thermos into his helmet bag, tidying the cockpit around his seat. Alan did the same and stowed every pen and kneeboard card; if they were in action, the plane would dance around and anything left loose would become a high-velocity missile. Simcoe gave him a nod and switched his own data screen to ESM.

  “Get me Donuts,” Alan said. He saw Garcia’s hand hover over the radio, press a button, give him a wave.

  “Cowboy One, this is Chuckwagon, over.”

  One click, then another. Donuts was staying quiet, just toggling his mike on and off.

  “Round up,” Alan said. That meant they were going for it; popping to altitude to provoke a reaction. Then he changed to intercom. “Go,” he said to Soleck.

  At low altitude, every increase in power could be felt across the shoulders as the plane accelerated; the turbofans bit hard on the thick air at sea level and the acceleration was instantaneous. Alan rocked back in his seat and his back muscles burned.

  They climbed.

  “Radar’s warm.”

  Alan fought the mild g-force and his own fatigue to get the radar cursor to line up on the ship they had most positively identified during the long flight from the Jefferson. Before they passed through a thousand feet, he had it. He pushed the radar to on.

  He choked a curse. Five bananas immediately displayed, and the farthest away was the Krivak-class he was looking for—it was the northern picket. The other four ships were spread across twenty miles of sea, the closest less than twenty miles north.

  “Whoa!” Simcoe gasped.

  Nice understatement. Alan got the trackball on the southern Krivak, already in range, for God’s sake. He switched to ISAR. The powerful radar beam swept over the SOE ship, looking like a fire-control radar, and the ship obligingly lit up, first a surface-search radar, then, seconds later, an air-search radar. Somewhere in the night, the bastards had increased speed, and now they were close—too close. In-range close.

  “Got him,” Simcoe said.

  Alan put his data in the link. They were done hiding; in fact, they wanted a reaction. Alan switched to the radio. “HARM priority two.”

  Somewhere to the south, Snot cycled his HARM through programmed parameters until he found two, for fire-control radar parameters.

  “Launch!” Soleck yelled and the plane slammed to port and they were over, upside down and rushing at the deck, and Alan’s arm reached through the pain in his back and toggled the chaff/flare system and they were turning.

  “Two contrails!” Soleck added. The plane jinked again.

  “Engage,” Alan called, his voice a little high. He was holding the chaff toggle down and the sequence was firing, leaving a column of neatly spaced chaff clouds behind them as they fell toward the sea.

  Near Patiala

  “I am Mohenjo Daro.”

  A hospital bed stood against the wall opposite the doorway in which Harry stood. An IV stand was on one side and a medical stand and tray on the other; on the tray, a small clay vessel no bigger than a water-glass stood surrounded by flowers—a complete relic from the excavation, turned into a shrine. On the IV stand were a bottle and a drip that ran down to the arm of an emaciated brown man with a shaved skull and a birthmark right above the bridge of his nose. The bed was raised so he could sit up. Except that he had spoken, he might have been dead.

  “You are too late,” he said.

  “Harry O’Neill.”

  “Not whom I expected.” Daro smiled, or tried to; it was clear that he hardly had the strength to do even that. “I don’t know whom I expected. Shiva, perhaps.” He tried to smile again.

  “You’re under arrest,” Mary said. “I have the power to take you from here to an appropriate authority, and I’m going to do just that.”

  Daro had something in his left hand, Harry saw; he thought it might be some sort of trigger, although he thought that would have been wrong for this man. The fingers moved and he saw that what was in the thin hand was only a plastic control that led to the IV. Morphine, he thought. The man’s dying of cancer.

  “Do as you must,” Daro said. His voice was fading a little. “It makes no difference. I am an agent of chaos. You are agents of chaos. What we do now is a detail.”

  Mary was going to say something else, and Harry put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. He said, “Your people stole three nuclear devices from the government facility at Ambur.”

  “Yes.” He tried to smile.

  “Where are they?”

  Daro moved his head a fraction of an inch and tried to raise it, as if he wanted to look beyond the bottom of the bed. “Is Vashni dead?”

  “There’s a dead woman in the doorway. Suicide—poison, I guess.”

  “Vashni—” He rolled his head and looked at the IV. “Did she bury the others?”

  “I think we came too soon.”

  “Well—Burial is a detail. But I had promised them that they would lie in the earth of our home.” He looked at Harry with astonishingly innocent eyes. “We were all born here, you know. When it was a city.”

  “Three thousand years ago.”

  “That is why I came here to die. To return.” He tried to smile and succeeded this time, a look of radiance, of certainty. “‘When it is done,’ I told them, ‘we will lie in the earth of our beginnings.’” He looked at Mary. “You may arrest me, if you like.”

  Harry bent forward. “Where are the nuclear devices?”

  “Oh, didn’t you find that out? You did so well even to come this far. You are an African, I think. Yes. The newest people, but with great insight. Never mind. It will all be over soon.” A spasm moved across the ravaged face; his hand moved on the control, allowing more morphine to flow.

  “What will you get from destroying the American fleet?”

  The face was blank, then clouded as the morphine took hold; then Daro seemed to regain strength. “I am the one who is supposed to talk in mysteries, young man, not you.” He did something like laughing. “That is a guru joke.” He gasped; the hand moved on the control again. “What American fleet?”

  “The American battle group that’s heading for Sri Lanka. Where your submarine is going.”

  “Oh—” His other hand moved as if he wanted to gesture with it. “I know nothing of battle groups or America. Why would I care? I am bringing an end to the world, young man. Chaos! Chaos, chaos, chaos—first chaos, then destruction, then creation. The world—your world—will end.” He smiled the smile of a rather naughty child. “And good riddance.” He seemed vastly amused. “Oh—what a world—what people—!” His left hand moved over the control and held it. Harry, realizing what was happening, merely swayed forward on the balls of his feet. The radiant smile appeared again as the morphine flowed—and flowed, and flowed. Mohenjo Daro was killing himself.

  “Goddamit—!” Mary flung herself at the bed.

  “Let him be.”

  “He’s mine!” She was wrestling with the hand and the emaciated arm. The IV stand toppled and the needle tore out. She was panting, holding the arm, Daro’s body half out of the bed.

  “You’re wrestling with a corpse. He’s dead.”

  Mary heaved the body back on the bed and put fingers at Daro’s throat. “The shit, he is!”

  Harry was already kneeling over the woman in the doorway. He put a hand inside the neck of the T-shirt, pulling on a thin gold chain, trying to ignore the contorted fa
ce. When he found the gold USB key, he tore it loose and walked back through the house.

  “Where’s Bill?” he said to Djalik, who jerked his head. Harry followed the direction and found a room that might once have been an office. Now, its two wooden desks were covered with computer equipment; cables writhed everywhere across the bare floor. On a chair by the only window, Bill was staring at the screen of his laptop.

  Harry thrust the USB key at him. “Decrypt it.”

  Bill stared at him as if they were strangers. “I’d have to use up my battery.”

  “Yeah, Bill. Use up your battery.”

  Bill began to type, and Harry went out and got Djalik and they went looking for a generator, which they found in one of the outbuildings—a brand-new Honda with five twenty-liter gas cans beside it. The cable was neatly coiled on the gas cans. “They were done with it,” Harry said.

  “These folks were done with everything, Harry.”

  They carried the generator to the window and ran the cable in and started it up, and by then Bill had opened the files in Vashni’s USB key. Mary was looking over Bill’s shoulder. She looked up when Harry came in. “How’d you know?” she said.

  “He valued her.”

  Mary pointed at the screen.

  Vashni had been organized. Her files were in folders; the folders had a master list and a descriptive index. Harry leaned over Bill’s head and scrolled down until he came to a folder titled “Final Chaos”.

  “Open it.”

  The file had five parts. One was the plan for the final move to “the birthplace”—the place where they were now. It even included the rental information on the backhoe. One file was about mass suicide and the means that were preferred. One was about disinformation through two SOE-owned public relations company. One was about money.

  And one was about the missiles.

  The submarine would sail from a small port city called Quilon under the protection of rogue elements of the Indian Navy. Once in open water, it would go deep and proceed to a datum of the captain’s choosing, and there it would launch the missiles at three targets: Karachi, Bahrain, and Mecca.

  “Bahrain!” Mary cried. “Jesus!”

  “Mecca.” Harry’s mouth had turned to cotton. The holiest place in Islam. He had been there. He had been inside the Kaaba. Tears sprang to his eyes.

  And then he was in motion, yanking out his cell phone, punching in numbers with shaking fingers, and hearing the sound that meant the phone could not find a signal.

  “I have to go to the plane. The satphone.”

  “Call WMD.”

  “I’m calling Fifth Fleet; they can get the targets to Craik.”

  “Fuck Craik—it’ll take that sub days to get where it can hit all three targets. WMD can organize a real response. The Air Force out of Germany—the Saudis have a navy—”

  “Mary, once that sub goes deep, they won’t find it. It’s Craik or—” He shrugged.

  “Call WMD!”

  Harry looked at her. He was about to say Call them yourself, but he saw that she meant to stay where she was. She was sitting on an intelligence coup—all those computers. “I’ll send the car back for you.” He turned and started out, shouting for Djalik. He glanced back from the doorway. “Unless you want to come now.”

  “Unh-unh, baby, these computers could be huge. I don’t dare miss them.”

  “Your call.”

  He was through the middle room and almost to the corridor when she shouted, “I’ll give you a rain check.”

  But he was gone then, not caring what she’d give him. He grabbed Djalik and started running for the car, explaining as they went.

  The Indian Ocean

  Captain Fraser on the Picton heard the “Engage.” He turned to his helmsman. “Execute,” he said. His orders were already issued and explained.

  HMCS Picton leaped forward, her gas turbines instantly transferring power to her screws. The pale gray bow slashed through the low swell and raised a bow wave, and in seconds she was moving at well over twenty knots out of the coastal haze and into the brilliance of the morning sun.

  “New contact,” his air-warfare station said. “Four bandits range six zero angels 24, noses hot.”

  “Radiate,” Fraser said. The SPS-49 shot out through the morning air, hot for the first time in two days, as Picton announced her presence across the EM spectrum. “Watch our friends.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” his AW said.

  He turned to his fire-control officer. “As you bear.”

  He put his unlit pipe in his mouth and bit down on the stem.

  Snot heard “Engage,” but it took a moment to register because he had just watched four new contacts blossom on his heads-up display; all detected passively and fed into the link, and they were sixty miles away and closing and a fist closed on his gut. But not hard enough to keep him from doing his job.

  He put the seeker head of the HARM squarely on its target and fired. He’d never shot a HARM, and the flash and the change in weight through the plane surprised him; he actually started a sharp left bank before he caught it. The missile climbed away at first and then turned north and he lost it, already getting his nose back on the four bandits.

  “Going hot,” Donuts said.

  His voice made Snot feel better at once. He turned his radar on, too.

  The HARM was a fast missile and it burned through the cool air for several seconds in a shallow climb; the warhead was already comfortable with the location and parameters of the target. After thirty seconds it was much lower, tearing through the haze just above water level.

  *  *  *

  “Missile two’s in the water,” Garcia said. Her voice was tense, the tension of a girl on an amusement ride. “That was fucking beautiful, Soleck.”

  Alan didn’t have to see Soleck to know the quality of the idiot grin on his face.

  “We’re too low,” Alan said. Too low to use our Harpoon; too low to keep the rest of the SOE ships in contact.

  Soleck started a slow climb, shallow and headed south, keeping his power in reserve for the next flight of missiles.

  Donuts said, “Fox two.” Then, “Fox three.”

  Snot saw that one of the enemy planes had jinked or declined the engagement or whatever the fuck and turned away long before the merge. The other three came on.

  Donuts had Sparrows, and he shot them both from the middle of the envelope while Snot stayed below and behind him with his nose hot, waiting for someone to blink. He wanted to get one this time; he needed a little bit of tail aspect to make his Sidewinders count. All-aspect was a great phrase, but against a good plane, you wanted a nice quarter shot.

  Then it all happened at once.

  One of the MiGs blew up less than a mile away and one of the others turned south, and Snot went to afterburner on his butt and then realized the other guy now had a look up his tail pipe and Donuts yelled something—

  The HARM popped up to a few hundred feet in its terminal phase and detonated within a few meters of its target emitter, a fire-control radar on a stubby mast just aft of the bridge of the Krivak-class and almost on top of the missile racks. The explosion was small as missiles go, but the shrapnel and the precision of detonation meant that the two remaining SAMs detonated in sympathy, and the bridge was annihilated. Every antenna aft of the bridge was scythed down. Several seconds later, the fireball ignited the fuel for the SS-NX-27 Gadfly on the starboard side and opened a seam.

  “Scratch one Krivak,” Simcoe said. “She’s off the air across the board.”

  Alan’s fingers were flying as he placed each of the other enemy emitters in the link—the second Krivak, far to the north; an improved Godavari just over the horizon; and two unknown hulls that showed as LW-08 radars; his data card said they were Nilgiri-class light frigates. He didn’t think any of them could see the Picton, although it was all much closer than he had expected. A knife fight with missiles, he thought.

  In Alan’s ear, Donuts said, “Stupid fuck!�
� and then, “Eject!”

  Donuts watched Snot’s plane break in half, the rear half a fireball. He thought he might have seen something separate from the front before he had his own hands full again.

  He made a shallow S-turn and put an IR missile into the guy who had popped Snot and then swiveled his head because somewhere there was another plane that had broken off the engagement early, and sure enough, he was high. Snot’s original victim was low and in a turn.

  I’ve lost my wingman and I’m in a sandwich.

  Donuts turned and dove, backed off on the power to let the low guy stay in front of him until he liked the tone, and then he gave him a missile and rolled left, his vertical stabilizers parallel to the ground. The high guy overshot him, and Donuts pushed his throttle to the metal and put the nose up, burning a hundred pounds of fuel a second to get altitude and safety. Behind him, his missile detonated and the coiled wire inside the warhead took a third of the target’s wing.

  The pilot didn’t eject.

  Donuts grayed out starting to turn. He was out of missiles; situational awareness said he’d probably missed one of his targets, and he didn’t have time to look.

  “Leakers,” he croaked.

  “Leakers,” Alan heard Donuts say. Alan guessed that Donuts’s wingman had gone down. “We could have company,” he said to Soleck.

  “Holy fuck,” Simcoe muttered.

  Just to the north, the SOE ships had every radar on, and launch warnings played around the edge of the screens. Missiles, their own warheads broadcasting their radars, jumped into existence from the enemy ships and began to move at supersonic speeds across the digital sea.

  “Oh,” Alan said. He’d never seen a sea battle, hadn’t imagined its intensity. Even the computer couldn’t cope with the signal density.

  “Incoming,” Simcoe warned.

  Soleck started to dive.

  As the cockpit pulled across the horizon, Garcia caught a glimpse of the whole battle spread out in shades of blue and white to the horizon. Uncountable threads of clear white showed, contrails and launch exhaust, some laser-straight and some in mathematical curves, a warp and weft of missiles against the high blue sky and the flat blue sea. Almost at her feet, the first Krivak burned, the smoke black and thick. Three contrails leaped at her like fingers trying to drag her plane into the sea.