Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “Oh, George!” Partlow said. This time he was whining.

  NCIS HQ.

  Dukas, back from the meeting with O’Neill and trying to pull together the ideas that had been aired in Rose’s motel room, came down the corridor of NCIS headquarters from an office where he’d borrowed a telephone. He’d made a lot of calls and set a lot of things in motion, but he didn’t feel that he knew a thing. Now, rounding the doorway into the small office where his typing table stood, he went to the prissy black guy’s desk.

  “Phone is not available,” the guy said. He put his hand on the telephone to show it was his.

  “You Triffler?” Dukas said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re my new assistant.” Dukas smiled. “You’re sitting at my new desk. Please take your hand off my new telephone.” He jerked his head toward the typing table. “Move.”

  “My effing A!”

  “Yeah, life is hard.” Dukas dropped a folder in front of the man. “Your first job—a lieutenant-commander named Rose Siciliano. Do the paperwork—make a budget, read my report, do a tentative walk-the-cat-back for a September fifteen Overview Assessment. Get on it, because it needs to be done today.”

  “I don’t take orders from you!”

  “You do now. Go see your former boss, third office on the left. He’ll explain to you what the Director of NCIS just explained to him. Now, please—I need the telephone.” He grinned. The guy bolted from the room, and Dukas sat at his new desk. He took a folder from under his arm and threw it down on the desk, where it fell open to reveal a navy officer’s personnel folder. The cover said “Crystal Insight.” The personnel folder said “Rose Siciliano.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Trying to bring the MARI system up to speed, Alan had got Reilley to find them a dedicated frequency, and it made a difference. Stevens had flown the tech reps from the manufacturer twice, and they swore they could have a patch in a week, which was six days too long for Alan. Several of them were huddled around their own equipment in the back of the ready room at all hours, talking about code and parameters. They didn’t make much sense to Alan, but he noticed that both Campbell and Soleck understood them, and he got one or the other to give him plain-language reports on their progress.

  Whenever Alan looked up, Soleck was there with a question. After one day, Soleck seemed to love everything about the boat, and his puppy-dog curiosity and enthusiasm would have been infectious if Alan had not had so much on his mind. Alan found himself snapping at Soleck because he made such a ready target, but another sleepless night in his stateroom chewing over the problems that surrounded him—his career, Rose, his detachment—suggested to him that Soleck was not the proper target. In fact, Soleck, despite his terrible youthfulness, was something like a genius. By his second flight, he had mastered the multi-function keys that older and wiser men avoided. He could get the constantly dropped link back in seconds. He even knew something about bandwidth and antennas, and the crews were jury-rigging bigger antennas on both planes to meet some new specs that Campbell, Soleck, and the reps had designed.

  Prepping for a flight of his own, Alan was on his way to meteorology, Soleck padding behind, explaining the new idea. Alan bumped into somebody.

  “Buddy, you lost?” Rafe was standing in front of him, holding a kneeboard.

  “You take up a lot of p’way,” said Alan, trying to make a joke of it.

  “You seem pretty far away, Al. That puppy one of yours?”

  “LTjg Soleck, this is Captain Rafehausen, the CAG.”

  “Wow, have I heard of you, sir!”

  “Soleck, I feel like I already know you. Have a nice flight out from Norfolk?”

  “It was great! We had a layover in—”

  Soleck was not getting the message. “I think the CAG is looking for an apology for missing movement, Mister Soleck.”

  “Oh, right, uh, sorry, sir. Yeah, I dicked that up.”

  “Yes, you did. You following Commander Craik to metro?”

  “He said he’d show me where to get the preflight stuff. He said they have a window!”

  The window was a standing joke to aviators. Metro had one of the few portholes on the ship, a large Plexiglas window that looked out over the flight deck and the weather. Because most of the rest of the ship was in a perpetual half-dark, this window gave metro an unbeatable advantage in predicting the weather. Most sailors could tell day from night only by their watches.

  “Soleck, go up one ladder and take a look out the window. Get the preflight and meet Commander Craik in the ready room, okay?”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Alan, with me.” Alan followed Rafe back down the flag passageway, down a ladder, and into the familiar country around the ready rooms where the CAG had his office. Rafe led the way in, handed Alan a cup of coffee from a thermos, and shut the door. Seconds later there was knocking. Rafe shouted “Later!” and sat down facing Alan. “The admiral’s cooled down some; the flag captain’s more or less on your side. I’ve kept my mouth shut because I knew you were under a lot of stress, but now I want to know what’s going on with you and NCIS and this shit in Trieste. Okay, give.”

  Alan thought through his responses. “Not mine to give.”

  “Who was the guy you shot in Trieste?”

  “Rafe—”

  “Nope, I’m not playing. I know that you and Rose aren’t fucking spies, Al. I know it. I’m trying to make sure other people know it. You are not helping, walking around with your head in the fucking clouds. Granted, your det begins to look better, although it couldn’t have looked worse. I want your whole focus on that det, Al.”

  Alan met Rafe’s eye and took the plunge. Rafe was a friend. He was not part of an investigation.

  “Okay, I’ll do this the best I can, Rafe.” He summarized what he knew about Rose’s trials. Then he jumped to Trieste. “Some woman walked up to shore patrol, claimed to be Rose, and said she’d wait for me in a café. I followed and walked in on a hit. Four guys shooting the place up. I thought Rose was inside and took action. The woman made the time to make contact with me and took off.”

  “She was waitin’ for you?”

  “Yeah. She’s supposed to meet me in Naples. That’s strictly between us. I have NCIS clearance to meet her, okay?”

  Rafe slumped a little in his chair, his lanky frame bent at an unnatural angle and one of his legs thrown over the arm.

  “And you’re all hot to meet her in Naples.”

  “I am not all hot to—”

  “Buddy, listen to me real close. This is your job, right here. This det. Tell NCIS to chase this chick on their own. Dealing with her is not your job, hear me?”

  “Rafe—” Alan found his throat closing.

  “No.”

  “I have to meet her this time. I’ll tell Mike I’m out of it after that.”

  “And then I’ll have one hundred per cent of Al Craik?”

  “Yes!”

  “Come tell me when you’ve told NCIS to do their own work.” He scowled. “Better yet, tell me when this MARI system is up and working and you can join the rest of the Navy.”

  9

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Alan was in the back end, in the TACCO seat, where his flying days had started. Stevens was the pilot, with the nugget, Soleck, as copilot. Master Chief Craw was in the SENSO seat, and he and Alan were busy working the MARI gear at every target that offered. Off the port wing about seven miles, 902 was also airborne, her port engine restored.

  The image of an Italian cruise liner was clean on their screens, with the central superstructure crisply edged and a small glow of radar haze amidships at the swimming pool. The sharp sweep of the bow was perfectly delineated; the radar mast on the superstructure projected so clearly that each of the ship’s surface-search radars could be located. It was the sort of shot that technology firms put in advertisements in Jane’s Defense Weekly.

  “AH 902, come to 180. Keep it slow.”

  �
��Roger.” Seven miles to the west, the other MARI plane made a slow turn to the south. The aspect of the cruise liner changed slowly, from a beam-on shot to a stern-quarter one.

  “Stevens, turn east. Turn easy.”

  “Roger.” The S-3 made a gradual course correction. Stevens added power fractionally to maintain altitude. Alan watched the image. It continued to rotate very slowly.

  “AH 902, climb one thousand.”

  “Roger.”

  The image changed only fractionally; the cruise ship was so far away that a thousand feet of altitude didn’t change the attitude of the image by much. Alan watched it. The image remained steady.

  “Stevens, take us through a harder turn to the north.”

  “Roger.” The engine whine increased as the pilot added power, and the g-force of the turn pushed Alan back into his seat. It wasn’t the hardest turn the S-3 could make, but it was fast enough. The image disappeared. Alan watched the screen. Seconds after Stevens leveled them off, the link was back, and the image floated there again, as perfect as before.

  “Not bad.” It was a lot better than not bad. They could hold an image for minutes without losing their link, because they had a dedicated channel and a new antenna mounted on the top of the fuselage to carry the link. They had increased bandwidth.

  “The auto-resync works.” Soleck had sat with the tech reps while they wrote the patch. He never claimed to have done it himself, but Alan credited him with making the idea a reality. “We only lose the link in tight turns. I wonder if the antenna would be better off on the bottom of the plane—”

  “Talk it up with the tech reps when we land. Chief—”

  “Fuck!” Stevens bellowed. Alan felt the plane sag.

  “Hydraulics!” Alan could see Stevens fighting the yoke.

  Alan reached in his helmet bag and opened the emergency procedures manual to “Hydraulics Failure.”

  Suburban Virginia.

  George Shreed slept only a few hours a night, those hours often broken by stints at his computers. He had slept even less since Janey’s departure for the hospice. Fear of discovery, which he had never expected in himself, gnawed at him at night, and he wondered at it—why should he be scared, if he didn’t care whether he lived or died? Why, if the thing he had most cared about was dead, should he fear being caught? But there it was, as bone-deep as hunger, the animal in him running from the predator.

  Lying awake in the hours after two a.m., he planned his Chinese operation and used its details to smother his fear: as he’d told Partlow, India and Pakistan were shooting at each other again in Kashmir, close to the Chinese border, with the Pakistanis moving army units up to support the rebels they’d armed in Kashmir itself. The Indians had beefed up their air presence. In Szhinjiang, the westernmost Chinese province and the one closest to the action, two divisions of the People’s Army were coming in by railroad with heavy artillery and armor. Engineers were extending the runway at Yehjeng. Rumors were circulating about nuclear warheads on the missiles in the Taklamakan sites, but there was no confirmation. Shreed was doing what he could to lend credibility to the rumors.

  He needed to have the Chinese at a crisis point before he pulled out their bank accounts.

  And what he needed for a crisis point was American involvement, so that when he emptied the Chinese bank accounts, they’d know the US was behind it.

  To get to that point, however, he had to do more.

  Shreed got out of bed and dragged himself to his study. It was almost four. In a locked drawer of his desk were the two sheets of NSC memo paper he had stolen from Partlow’s desk. One was still blank, his backup; the other had a word-processed memo from the National Security Advisor—forged by Shreed, of course—that needed only the signature. Shreed had even made sure that the printer he had used was the same kind used at NSC, because he knew the Chinese would check—as they would check the paper and even the ink on the embossed letterhead.

  The forged memo was short and simple. It told the Director of National Intelligence that under no circumstances would the United States confront China at this time.

  Shreed took a pen from a box in the same locked drawer. He had pens in there from the desk of the President, from the office of DNI, from the Joint Chiefs. And from the NSC. His Chinese masters would check that, too, he knew.

  He practiced the Advisor’s signature several more times, and then, without hesitation, he scrawled the name at the bottom of the memo. After comparing it with an original, he went to one of his three computers and scanned the forged memo in and added it to an already encrypted message headed “Laundryman—Your Eyes Only.”

  Laundryman was Chen, the control who had started as his partner and who had turned into his evil genius, demanding more and more and more.

  Well, now he would get his fill.

  “The enclosed reached me yesterday. It is of the utmost importance. I urge immediate transmission to the highest levels of government. Acknowledge. Top Hook.”

  He embedded the encrypted message and attachment in a pixel and sent it on its way as part of a pornographic image, as he had been sending his messages for four years.

  And then he went back to bed and slept for almost an hour, temporarily purged of his fear by the knowledge that he had started the movement toward the end.

  Now Chen would report the memo, but he would give it a low reliability until it had been vetted.

  As part of the vetting he would demand to have the original, and he would demand a face-to-face meeting with Shreed, because that was what his masters would demand of him.

  And when they met, Shreed, who never forgot a grievance and who hated Chen for the years of exploitation, would kill him.

  Det Aircraft AH 901.

  By the time the F-14 came under them, they had a good idea of the level of the emergency. The F-14 pilot said that there was a hydraulic fluid leak somewhere in the landing gear strut. Stevens had noted, quite dispassionately, that the controls were sluggish and unresponsive.

  “We’ve got tons of fuel, right?” Alan was leaning forward, already out of his harness.

  “Yep.” Stevens was wound tight. Not panicked, very professional, but tight.

  “Why don’t we try and deploy the gear now?”

  “Three hundred miles from the ship?”

  “And three hundred from Sigonella, Paul. If we can’t get the gear locked—” He meant, if they didn’t get the gear locked and they landed on the boat, they’d go into the net, at best, and ruin the aircraft. If they went to the US Naval Air Station at Sigonella, Sicily, they might bring her back alive.

  “Roger that. You know the drill?”

  Alan didn’t rise to the jab, if it was a jab. Craw had already stripped out the long handle that could be used to hand-crank the landing gear, given time and sweat. Soleck told the F-14 that they were going to try and deploy the gear. Alan had rotated the infrared camera but couldn’t get it to rest on the gear—every time it reached the spot, it rotated past.

  “Soleck, is that Chris Donitz in the Tomcat?” Even through the static of encrypted comms, Donitz’s voice was distinctive.

  “Sorry, sir, I don’t know him.”

  Alan ran his thumb down the comm card, nodded, and clicked through his radio options until he was in the net.

  “Northway One, can you see my FLIR camera?”

  “Wait one. Roger. Fully deployed, but it has some kind of wire wrapped around it.”

  “Copy. Doughnuts, is our gear deploying?”

  “About halfway down. Belay my last—starboard gear is still deploying. Starboard gear appears to be down and locked. Port gear about half deployed.”

  Stevens rocked the wings several times, hard.

  “Any movement?”

  “Negative.”

  Alan switched his comms to “cockpit.” “Paul, I think we should go have a beer in Sigonella, but you’re the pilot.”

  Stevens hesitated, then turned his head.

  “If we go to the boat, we’ll
have to put her in the net. Even if we think the gear is locked. Then we have no det; we can’t do this with one plane.” He seemed to think Alan hadn’t foreseen that.

  Alan ignored the comment and said mildly, trying to make a joke of it, “Great minds…”

  “Whatever. Crank that thing for all you’re worth. I’ll get the tower at Sigonella.”

  Rafe came on and supported their decision to go for NAS Sigonella; he sent the F-14 with them, and had a VS-53 S-3 with more gas head straight for Sicily to tank them again over the field. Stevens turned down that idea.

  “I want to land as near empty as I can.” He sounded tense, almost high. “I got a plan.”

  They took gas from AH 902, increasing their margin of error en route, and turned for Sicily. Donitz’s F-14 was a presence, marginally reassuring, just off their starboard wingtip.

  Alan had never experienced such a slow crisis. They had hours to play with the systems, to try every combination they could imagine to deploy the gear; each raised hopes but nothing worked. The air-conditioning and the altitude couldn’t rid Alan of the sweat he produced, turning the crank. It wasn’t such hard work, but the space was cramped, the crank handle tore his hands, and, when he switched off with Craw, the sweat immediately turned cold. After an hour, it took both of them to turn the crank. When Donitz informed them that he hadn’t seen the port gear budge since his last call, they took a weary break.

  “It’s jammed solid,” Craw said. “I can’t even get the crank to turn. It ought to turn easy—not fast, but easy.”

  “Done this before?” The ghost of a chuckle. In fact, they’d both done it before, together.

  “What’s the deal?” called Stevens from the front.

  “What you see is what you get. We’ll give it another heave, but we think the gear is jammed.”

  “No hydraulic fluid and jammed, too. Fuck.”