Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “I think we ought to meet to discuss this.”

  “I think you ought to apologize and get the officer’s orders changed back the way they were.”

  He laughed—nice laugh, but not convincing. “You really think you’re something, don’t you?” he said.

  “Get stuffed, Menzes.”

  “Goddamit, I’m being nice, but I’m not going to let some high-priced legal tart push me and the Agency around.”

  “‘High-priced legal tart,’ I like that. Did you know that’s actionable? I may sue you myself, Mister Menzes.” She actually seemed to be enjoying herself. “Okay, let’s get serious here. I want everything you have on my client, and I want it tomorrow in your office, ten o’clock.”

  “You get stuffed.”

  “If I don’t have access, the piece will run in the Post and I’ll be talking to the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee personally before lunch.”

  “This is a highly classified—”

  “Now listen to me, Menzes! You’re not listening! I’m making you an offer, and it’s one you dare not refuse, you hear me? Get the fucking wax out of your ears! You give me access and you clear this officer’s record, or by Christ your agency is going to be in deep shit, and I know for a fact they don’t want to be in deep shit because recruitment is down and you stink because of your record in Bosnia and Kosovo, and you’re all running scared because the word around town is you’ve got a mole and you can’t find him! Get me?”

  The silence on the other end, in Rose’s altered perceptions, seemed to go on for minutes.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Menzes said.

  “Ten tomorrow morning, your office—access!”

  Another silence on his end, and then, almost meekly, “I may not be able to make that determination.”

  “When?”

  The wind had gone out of him, Rose knew.

  “I’ll have an answer for you by six.” He hung up.

  Rose looked at Emma. “Wow,” she said.

  Emma ran a hand through her hair, making it look even worse. “They haven’t got anything, that’s why he caved.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m guessing. I think we’re going to close out Phase One tomorrow, that’s the feeling I get, but, just in case, I’m going to hire an investigator.” She gave Rose that long, flat stare again. “They aren’t cheap, either.”

  “I already had that figured out.” She didn’t want some hired investigator; she wanted her friend, Mike Dukas. But he was in Holland. “Whatever,” she said. The word seemed to sum up her feeling of helplessness.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  At the moment, it looked as if the maintenance was so screwed up that 902 wouldn’t make its launch, and he hadn’t heard one word from Rafe about finding Mike Dukas. Trying to distract himself with a different problem, he worked at analyzing the det’s officers, most of whom he had now met for the second time. Aside from Stevens, there were only five. LT Mark Cohen, a pilot, was a difficult, pale man whose resentment and suspicion had seemed palpable, not least because he was the maintenance officer. LT George Reilley, the second pilot, red-headed and always laughing, seemed popular with the men; Campbell, an NFO, was in his first tour, had no reputation of any kind, but had a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering and seemed to have Craw’s confidence because of it; LTjg Derek Lang, also a backseater, had hardly registered on him but for that reason seemed unfriendly. The fifth officer was—or would be when he got there—LTjg Soleck. Soleck looked like a disaster, except that he had finished first in his class at Pensacola.

  But he needed Soleck. Because Alan had the liberty of putting senior enlisted men in one or both seats in the back end to fly the special equipment, he could theoretically make four crews, once Soleck was aboard. The Navy had intended that the det have only two crews for its two planes, but four would give them flexibility. If they ever got the planes to fly.

  Chief Navarro came and sat next to him, his glance asking for attention but not demanding it. Alan finished a message, signed off two equipment requests, and

  turned to face him.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Did you get the simulator CD from Lockheed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Chief, as of now, you’re the MARI training officer. Find a laptop, or better yet, a desktop, and put it in the back of the ready room near the coffee-maker. Strip everything off it except the simulator, okay? So we don’t have Duke Nukem running in the ready room?”

  “Got you in one, sir.”

  “Good. Then talk to all the flight crews. Everybody uses the sim, even pilots. But concentrate on the NFOs and the AWs.”

  A seaman he didn’t recognize handed him a message. Alan held him with a wave and read his nametag. Cooley.

  “Where do you work, Seaman Cooley?”

  “Maintenance, sir.”

  “Cooley, please locate Mister Cohen and tell him I want to see him. He was on the hangar deck the last I saw.”

  “Uh, no, sir, he just, uh, left.”

  “Find him.”

  Alan knew he was condemning a brand-new man to a long hunt for staterooms. He consoled himself that Cooley would know the ship better when he was done.

  The message was from NAS Norfolk. LTjg Soleck had been scheduled on a flight and did O-in-C Det have any other instructions? Alan sighed. Maybe to send me a guy who can get places on time?

  By three o’clock, he was drinking his seventh cup of coffee, and his mood was as foul as the acrid, thin stuff in his cup. His first flight was an hour away, and he didn’t think 902 was going to make it. He grabbed Senior Chief Frazer, the maintenance chief, because Cohen hadn’t yet been found.

  “Frazer, 902 is due to launch in one hour.”

  “We’re on it, sir.”

  “Is 901 in better shape?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Frazer, what the fuck, over?”

  “901 is down for hydraulics.”

  “Is this the wrong time to ask why 902 didn’t get a rehab for her port engine back at Pax River?”

  Frazer looked trapped. Alan realized he was boxing the man into a position where he either had to inform on a shipmate—or his department head—or take blame for something he didn’t do. Alan shook his head at his own error. “Never mind. Senior, will I have a bird for the first event or won’t I?”

  “I’m trying. Yes!”

  Alan walked back to the ready room to find Stevens, Craw, and Reilley waiting to brief for the flight that so far had no aircraft. Reilley switched on the closed-circuit TV, and they watched the weather brief and then a quick description of the flight area. The other aircraft in the event were simple carrier quals.

  Stevens briefed the emergency procedures in a singsong voice and looked at a map. “We’re going about forty miles south, taking a look at the Willett, and then flying home. Short event. Any questions?”

  Reilley held up a kneeboard card with the NATO and UN communications data. “All this up-to-date?”

  Alan reached for it and Reilley handed it over with a minute hesitation. Am I making this up, or did he not want to show me his kneeboard card? Alan looked at the card and noted that many of the callsigns were unchanged since his last tour here, almost two years ago.

  He had imagined giving a little speech about their first operational flight, something to mark the occasion, but when he faced them he saw veiled hostility from Stevens and Reilley and concern from Craw. He searched for brilliant words that would make everything right, and he was about to open his mouth and say something about the det’s mission and the need for solidarity when Senior Chief Frazer came in.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I need two more hours. I can get both them planes up for the third event.”

  Stevens smiled without humor. He was relishing the failure, Alan realized, and for a moment he hated the man. He walked from the ready room almost blind, clearing the area before he could say something he would regret.

&nbs
p; He wasn’t used to failure, and it stung. The feeling that he was personally responsible for a major problem compounded the feeling of alienation that had clung to him since his orders had been changed. He was used to stress, and to danger, but he had begun to feel in this situation as if he was an observer of events, not a participant.

  He hadn’t got control.

  Telling Rafe that he didn’t have a bird for the launch was one of the hardest things he had ever done. He had watched the maintenance crisis slide out of his control all day, first the downing of 902, then the problems with 902’s port engine that “everybody knew” except Alan, then scrambles to get work done, and condescension from the VS-53 maintenance shop and the slide to failure. And now it was certain, and he walked into Air Ops ahead of Stevens and canked his unit’s first operational flight.

  Rafe met him going out.

  “Problems?” he asked with a smile.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir? Better walk with me, Alan.”

  Rafe walked down the passageway, slapping the occasional back, looking coldly at a jg running for his brief. Then he pulled Alan into the flag briefing room, empty at this hour.

  “I can count the number of times you’ve called me ‘sir’ on one hand, Spy. So how bad is it?”

  “This is the wrong fucking time to call me spy, Rafe.” Alan realized that the storm was still there, and grabbed hold again. “Sorry, Rafe, let me start that again. I just had to cancel my first event. Both my birds are down and I don’t have all the parts to fix them because I apparently left some stuff on the beach. That’s the worst—the rest is just other crap.”

  “How’d you end up here with two down birds?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Better find out. Kick some ass.”

  “Right.”

  “Hey—I know you ain’t the bad guy. But you are responsible.

  ” “I know!”

  “Make it work for you. Sometimes it helps to get mad; you get the assholes’ attention that way. Oh, hey—I forgot. We found your NCIS guy.”

  “You forgot!”

  “Yeah, I forgot. I’m the CAG; I have other duties than carrying messages. In fact, I was just gonna give it to you in Air Ops when we got sidetracked with your other problem.” He pulled a piece of paper from a shirt pocket. “I’ve already run this past the flag captain. Here’s the deal: your guy is arriving at a hotel in DC about five their time—that’s, um, 2300 here—and we’ve left messages there that he’s to call the NCIS office on the ship ASAP. That’s direct from Admiral Kessler, so he knows we’re serious. We also left messages at NCIS HQ in case he goes there. When he calls, you get your ass to the NCIS office and get on their STU and you tell him whatever the big secret is; when you’re done, Maggiulli, the JAG guy, gets on the STU at once and hears from your guy that you’re a patriotic American who did it all to save the world for democracy. You with me?”

  “What the hell is Dukas doing in Washington?”

  Rafe rolled his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, who gives a shit? Did you get all that or didn’t you?”

  Alan grinned. “I got it. Can I kiss you now?”

  5

  Washington.

  Mike Dukas got the message to call the Jefferson in the office of his boss’s boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at the Navy yard. But, because his boss’s boss was flattering him and almost begging him to stay at NCIS and not transfer permanently to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, and because Dukas was trying to parlay that request into a temporary position where he could help Rose, he didn’t make the telephone call right away. In fact, it was another hour before he called the Jefferson, and only then, when he was talking to the NCIS agent on board the carrier, did he understand that he was really calling Alan Craik. It was damned confusing: three days before, he had been in Sarajevo, this morning in Holland, and why was he calling the husband of the woman he had come to Washington to help?

  “Hey—” he started to say.

  “Mike, Al Craik. Jesus, you’re hard to find! I’ve got to talk to you—”

  “And I gotta talk to you! Have you heard—?”

  “Mike, I had to file a—”

  “—about Rose?”

  “—contact report—What about Rose?”

  “What contact report?”

  They shouted at each other for several seconds and then both shut up at the same time, and it was Dukas, wide awake now, who took charge and said, “Rose first,” and told Alan Craik about his wife’s loss of her astronaut’s place. Then he told him about the suspicions that were flooding through the Navy about both of them, and about Peretz’s discovery that CIA Internal Investigations was behind Rose’s fall.

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” Alan shouted.

  “Tell me about it. Don’t bother sputtering, Al; we’ve all said the same thing, and it’s a waste of breath. Get hold of yourself—Rose is in deep shit and so are you, by association.”

  “Jesus, poor Rose! And I’ve been feeling sorry for myself—”

  “This is serious shit, Al. Now what’s this contact report?”

  Alan had to say “Poor Rose” again, and only then did he get to the contact report and the woman in Trieste who had said “Bonner.” He ran through it all quickly—the Serbo-Croat, the shootings, the police, the JAG officer—almost mumbling, as if it had suddenly become almost unimportant.

  But it was not unimportant to Dukas. “And you’re sure she said ‘Bonner’?”

  “Absolutely. Otherwise, I’d have—”

  “Jesus, old investigations never die! Holy shit, Bonner. Bonner works for Efremov out of Iran; we bust him and send him to prison; now some babe has people shooting at her and she says, ‘Bonner,’ and you’re supposed to snap to, right?”

  “She wants me to meet her in Naples—next liberty port.”

  Dukas could think fast when he had to. He had heard a rumor two days before that Efremov, the Russian/Iranian mercenary, was dead. After only a moment’s silence, he said, “Do it.”

  “Mike, I’m in trouble with my admiral and the JAG guy as it is!”

  “I’ll give you NCIS cover and clear it with both of them; for now, you tell them it’s classified and all will be revealed in the Lord’s good time. Then you go to Naples as my agent; I’m your control. You capisce?”

  “I’m not trained for that stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t trained for half the shit I know you’ve got yourself into, and you came out smelling like a rose. Look, Al, I want you to do it: if she’s got real dope on Bonner, I want it!”

  “She didn’t say she had stuff on Bonner; she just said his name.”

  “Oh, as a way of passing the time? Come on—she sets up a meeting with you by posing as your wife, then she says a notorious spy’s name, and we’re supposed to think she’s just, what? making a pass? selling Mary Kay cosmetics the European way? Get real—she’s got something to sell.”

  Dukas heard Alan sigh. He sympathized. But, as he had told Rose, life wasn’t fair. “You gotta do it, Al.”

  “Okay. But put it in writing, for God’s sake!”

  Dukas explained to him that there would be a case number and a file and a classified memo naming Alan Craik as an agent of the NCIS.

  “Can you talk to the JAG guy here as soon as I’m done? They think I’m a spy or something, Mike—the shooting stuff has really freaked them—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll talk to the guy. Jesus, how do you get into these things? She really pretended to be Rose so she could say ‘Bonner’ to you? Weird, man. Yeah, we gotta go for it.”

  “Mike, I’m up to my ass with this detachment thing. I don’t want to be your agent!”

  “One meeting, Al. I promise you. Meet with her once, find out what she’s got, that’s it.”

  Dukas heard the hissing silence of the STU as Al Craik thought it over. Finally, he said, “Where’s Rose now?”

  “Somewhere here in DC. I’m supposed to hear from Abe Peretz in an
hour or so.”

  “Okay—you give me Rose’s phone number in an hour, I’ll be your agent once.”

  Dukas smiled into the telephone. “That’s my boy. Put on your JAG guy. And stop worrying!”

  Dukas stroked the JAG officer and, after he hung up, sat staring at an unfamiliar wall, concerned now that he had two cases, not one. Just when he had meant for his life to get simpler, it had got all twisted.

  College Park, Maryland.

  Rose came to rest in a motel in College Park, recommended by Peretz because it was cheap and it was handy to the District. The hangover still rumbled; the feeling of helplessness kept her in a rage.

  The telephone rang. She had to search for it, knocked it off its cradle, fumbled, stammered, “Siciliano!”

  “Hey, babe, you sober?” It was Mike Dukas, whom she had last talked to from Utica.

  “Mike! How’d you find me?”

  “Peretz. I’m in Washington.”

  “Your guy in Sarajevo said you were in Holland.”

  “Yeah, well—” He sounded embarrassed. “The deal is I’m coming back to NCIS for six months to a year, then I’ll see.”

  He had been excited about taking over the War Crimes Tribunal’s investigative side, she knew. And now he was coming back to NCIS? “Mike, are you doing this for me?”

  “Nobody else would get me back to this place, babe.”

  “Oh, Mike—” She started to cry.

  “I love to hear women cry. It really cheers me up. How about saying ‘thank you’ and we’ll get on with it. Look, babe, here’s the deal—come on, turn off the hydrant, I need you to listen up—I been here a couple hours, nobody here has a case file on you, but there are these goddam rumors going around!” He was talking too fast to get her out of her crying jag. “Anyway, I am now the official investigator for the matter, which is now a case, with a computer-generated case name and number—I saw to that—but it’s not a case about security, it’s a case about abuse of CIA powers and outside interference, which gives me a very nice bit of leverage. You following me, or you still raining on the carpet there?”