Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “Hey, I’m not worried, the pilot said he had a plan.” The amusement in Alan’s voice was genuine, but Stevens didn’t rise to it.

  “I’m going to cut Donitz loose,” Stevens said. “He can hit the tanker and head home.”

  “Keep him for five more minutes, so we can cycle the gear one more time.”

  “Sorry, I’d rather not.”

  Alan thought over various replies, but his status as mission commander was not the issue here. Stevens needed his support landing the plane, not a pointless argument. Besides, despite Alan’s expertise, Stevens was the pilot.

  “Why?”

  “What if the starboard gear reads a ‘retract’?”

  Alan couldn’t imagine such a thing, but the S-3 was a cranky beast at the best of times, and with no hydraulic fluid, who knew what mechanical miscues could happen?

  “And you think you can land this bird as is.”

  “I know I can.”

  “How much damage?”

  “I’m doing the best I can!”

  Alan looked out the window. It was an emergency where there was too much time to think. What he thought about was this sorry detachment he had been given, and Stevens, the most difficult man in it. He and Stevens were as close to enemies as people who worked together could be. Alan thought about the man, his insecurity, his perpetual scowl. At least nobody had ever said that Stevens couldn’t fly.

  Alan watched the sea go past his window, then watched the volcano. Nelson had operated here and chased Emma Hamilton. He watched the first hedgerows of Sicily, saw a vineyard and sheep, and wondered if he would get to see them from the ground. It looked pastoral, safe, and close enough to touch. Then the runway filled the viewscreen and the landing was on them, and, despite a temptation to keep his eyes on the sheep, Alan snapped around to the business of the landing. The plane was at treetop height, moving at one hundred and twenty knots, just above stall speed, and descending so gently as to make the motion imperceptible. He glanced back at the fields, warm and totally separate from the freezing sweat and old electric smell of a damaged plane seconds from touchdown.

  “Ejection positions,” Stevens said. They all pulled their knees together. Alan and Craw crossed their hands over their chests and nodded their heads forward. Alan glanced one more time around his space—yes, the FLIR was retracted, the landing gear handle stowed, everything as secure as possible. He looked out the window one more time at the other, sunlit world.

  Stevens set them down on the starboard gear with the softest possible touch, and it held. By constantly manipulating a combination of power settings and flaps he kept the plane rolling on its one solid strut for hundreds of yards, until the plane was simply too slow to stay up; then it collapsed slowly on the half-deployed starboard wing, like an elephant kneeling. The port gear collapsed then against the remaining pressure of the hydraulic fluid, and the plane’s weight came to rest on the buddy store under the port wing. The plane slewed wildly, the drag on the port side exceeding the braking of the starboard gear, then turned hard to port, tipped—

  And stopped. Stevens cut the engines; the turbofans wound down, but in the cockpit there was no sound.

  Then Soleck whooped like a Hollywood Apache. They piled out the crew hatch to the tarmac as fire trucks came screaming up. Alan ran around the plane looking for flames.

  “No foam! Don’t let them use foam!”

  The crash crew was already pulling at hoses. Stevens took his meaning immediately, as did Craw: fire-retardant foam was highly corrosive. The fire crew could yet destroy the aircraft that Stevens had landed so well. The three of them ran toward the trucks, standing between the wounded plane and the crash crew.

  “No foam!”

  “You sure?” The crew chief. He was trying to hustle them away from the plane.

  “My authority!” Alan wasn’t sure he had any authority over a crash crew at NAS Sigonella, but they backed away. Crewmen took smaller extinguishers and walked around the plane. In minutes, they reported it safe.

  Then he watched with Stevens as the plane was dragged a few feet to clear the runway. Right now, with the fuselage resting on the wreck of the buddy store and the collapsed gear, the plane looked pretty bad, but Alan knew that it was better than it looked.

  “Now I see why you wanted to land empty.”

  “If the buddy store had too much gas, and the friction cracked it, we’d’ve fireballed.” Stevens was shaking a little—now. Now was fine.

  “That was beautiful, Paul.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can have this bird back in the air in twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s all you care about, right? Nice job, Stevens—you saved Craik’s ass.”

  “Paul, it was a great piece of flying!”

  Two seconds of silence gave Alan just time to think he had gotten through.

  “That means a lot, from a guy with your experience as a pilot.”

  Alan stopped as if he’d been hit, but Stevens walked away.

  And that was the end of his attempt to woo Stevens. He looked at the crippled plane, which leaned on its left wing like an image of the crippled detachment. It had been a great job of flying, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Mister Stevens!” he shouted. Soleck and Craw jerked their heads around. Stevens slowed, stopped, turned.

  Alan crossed the space between them with huge strides. He didn’t stop until they were eye-to-eye and he knew his own coffee-soured breath was up Stevens’s nose.

  “You are a hell of a pilot, but you are a lousy officer and a major cause of trouble in this detachment. Morale is shit, maintenance is lousy, and the system doesn’t work right—and those things got that way on your watch! Now.” Alan lowered his head a little but didn’t take his eyes from Stevens’s. “You are going to have this aircraft airworthy and on the deck of the Jefferson by 1600 hours tomorrow or you are through with this detachment. And you are going to get your ass to the communications office of this air base right now and you are going to order the det’s maintenance chief and his two best mechanics and a new landing gear to be flown here ASAP by our other aircraft! And you are going to inform the maintenance chief and the two mechanics that if this plane isn’t on the deck of the Jefferson at 1600 hours tomorrow, they also are through with this det. Do it!”

  Stevens’s mouth was tightened up like a twisted rubber glove. His eyes left Alan’s, came back, left. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and headed for the terminal building.

  “Mister Stevens!”

  Stevens stopped but kept his back turned.

  “Did you hear and understand my orders?”

  “Yeah.” He started off again.

  “Mister Stevens!”

  Stevens whirled. “What the hell?”

  “Did you hear and understand what I said?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Then say ‘Aye Aye, sir.’”

  Stevens paused for a fraction of a moment, but training beat anger.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Carry on, Mister Stevens.”

  Alan turned back to the aircraft. Craw was being busy under the fuselage, but Soleck was staring at Alan, who strode toward the plane without looking back.

  “Soleck!”

  Soleck jumped. “Sir?”

  Alan stopped. “You will make sure you are on the return flight of our aircraft to the Jefferson with Senior Chief Craw. You will work all night there to finalize the new link and installation of the new antenna with the tech reps, now that we know it works. You understand me?”

  Soleck jumped again. “Yes, sir!”

  Alan walked to the aircraft as Craw climbed out from underneath. Their eyes met. “This goddam detachment is going to get its shit together or I’m going to put every goddam man in it on report!” Alan said.

  Craw smiled. “Now you’re talkin’, skipper.”

  10

  Suburban Virginia.

  The Old Commonwealth Tavern was set back from the highway next to a strip
mall. It wasn’t much on the outside, an old brick house that had had a new front unwisely glued on, with an extension out the back that was no better. But inside it was cool and dark, with islands of light from small lamps, and hunt prints and a lot of old fly-fishing tackle that suggested vaguely English, vaguely country associations. Deep within was a small room that Menzes had called “the hole.”

  “Hard spot to find,” Dukas said, sitting down opposite Menzes. The room was only about ten by twelve, unoccupied except for them. They were actually behind the old kitchen fireplace.

  They talked about old houses, and then Menzes said, “I’m sorry about what happened.” He waited until Dukas had ordered a dark beer, and, leaning back in his imitation Windsor chair, murmured, “I did as I was told.”

  Dukas nodded.

  “You running the NCIS investigation?” Menzes said.

  Dukas nodded again.

  “Not my business, but aren’t you a little close to it?”

  Dukas, head lowered, looked up at him. “When we investigate our own, we’re trying as much to save them as convict them. I just got myself an assistant who doesn’t like me at all, so he’ll keep me honest.”

  Dukas picked at the label of his beer. “You want to tell me about this case?”

  Menzes gave him a half-grin, neither happy nor amused. He didn’t know what he wanted, he meant, or maybe he knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to get to it.

  Dukas said, “I need this intercept you told me about.”

  “You’ll get it. By the book.”

  “That could be a couple months. How about we go back to your office, you let me look at it there?”

  Menzes shook his head.

  “Jesus Christ, you guys toss us an investigation and then you don’t provide the backup? What the hell, you trying to obstruct?”

  “Don’t talk like an asshole.”

  “Don’t treat me like a dickhead. I need the evidence, or whatever you guys call it.” He peeled some of the label and decided he was going about it wrong. Menzes didn’t want the Agency attacked, even though he was mad at the Agency; he wanted to help—maybe—but not for free. So Dukas jerked his head and smiled, as if to say, Okay, I made a mistake, and he took a drink and said, “Right now, it’d help me if you just summarized the intercept. Anything. Like—intercept of what?”

  “Wireless digital transmission.”

  “NSA?”

  Menzes made a little head bob: Of course.

  “To Siciliano by name?”

  “Unh-unh. No header; it’s only a partial, starts with a sentence doesn’t make sense, then you get from context that it’s a commendation. Code name Top Hook. Magnificent performance previous three years, promotion to rank of Senior Major-Colonel, money, etcetera. Congratulations on graduating Naval War College after outstanding performance as helicopter pilot and participation in Project Peacemaker. Data passed to us on Peacemaker crucial to our understanding of US intentions in first decade of twenty-first century. Congratulations, felicitations, applause, applause, applause.”

  Dukas drank again. “Pretty good fit with Siciliano.”

  “Funny about that.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “We think China.”

  Dukas contemplated the beer bottle. “’Course you know it stinks.”

  Menzes only looked at him. He was wearing a jacket today, still a white shirt and tie. He looked neat and fit and intelligent, like an educated cop who was going to make at least captain.

  “Did this by chance come in clear?” Dukas said.

  “Encrypted.”

  “Which you just by chance were able to bust.”

  “Repeat of an old code.”

  “Jeez, that was lucky for you guys, huh! Wow.” He drank. “Well, you know it stinks.” He drank some more, found the bottle almost empty. He and Menzes exchanged a look; Menzes reached over and pushed a button on the plastered wall; a waitress appeared.

  “Let me tell you what I think is going down,” Dukas said when the waitress had gone. “Here it is: you guys think you got a spy, a mole, a whatever in your own agency. You haven’t flushed him or her, you think you’re getting close, and you don’t want to spook him. You think a nice, noisy investigation of somebody else may give your mole a little sense of security, maybe a year’s peace to let you get close, maybe even get to the point where you put a TV monitor in his or her office and a bug on all his phones and maybe in his house, and shit, then you’re only two to five years from an arrest. Am I right?”

  The beers arrived. Menzes didn’t look at him but growled, “I won’t say you’re wrong.”

  “You’re making a fucking stalking-horse of a fine naval officer!”

  “What’s the loss of the best officer in the Navy compared to what a spy within the Agency can do day after day, year after year, for twenty years?”

  They both drank, and Dukas and Menzes exchanged glances, still trying to know each other, still not there. Finally, Dukas said, “You got a short list for your mole?”

  “No comment.”

  “Is the name George Shreed on your short list?”

  It was a shot in the dark, only because of the Telephone Woman’s call, and Menzes didn’t answer—except that he didn’t answer in a way that was itself an answer. For an instant, his face went rigid; he covered almost at once, but there was the residue of a look almost of panic there, of something as unexpected as a sucker punch. Dukas was set back on his heels; a whole new idea burst open: Holy shit. George Shreed as a spy?

  It didn’t make sense, but it made perfect sense—opportunity, motive: Shreed frames Rose to protect himself. He knows Peacemaker; he has all the data, all the files. He gets a contact in China, maybe his control, to send the phony intercept, which was created only to be intercepted. It made perfect sense—except that Dukas didn’t have a shred of evidence that Shreed was a spy.

  But Carl Menzes maybe did.

  Dukas tried to step very carefully. “This sort of leaves me with the half-empty glass and you with the half-full one. We pour them together, you know, and—”

  “The word is, ‘No extraordinary help.’ Not even if your lady lawyer there goes ballistic. She wants to make her case in the Post, that’s her call.”

  “In fact,” Dukas said with a grin, “since you guys had this change of heart, you’d prefer she did just that, am I right? More smokescreen to convince your him-or-her that the pressure’s off? But that’s the end of it?—that’s where you come down, ‘No extraordinary help,’ end of conversation?”

  Menzes sighed. “I believe in the Agency, Dukas. With all its faults, and I know what they are, it has a job to do. In a flawed universe, it’s the best we got.”

  Picking up on his tone, Dukas said, “But—?”

  “Something’s not right. It isn’t just the intercept, which I know is cooked, shit, what do you think? It stinks to heaven. Yeah, we got a list, and we’ve had the same list for three years and we’re not cracking it. We can’t move: you know what suspicion does in a closed community. You worry about one officer’s career; my office could end fifty careers tomorrow with one false accusation, one wrong move—it isn’t just the one accused that goes down, it’s everybody around. We have to be right or nothing.”

  Menzes picked at the label of his beer bottle and looked grim.

  Dukas tried again. “A woman called and told us that George Shreed is behind the Siciliano mess.”

  Menzes’s face went through that rigid instant again. Not much of a liar, Dukas thought; a credit to his character but not a useful one in his profession. “What woman?” Menzes said.

  “That’s all she said, but it put the name on the table. I’m not saying it’s the right name. But I’m telling you, if Shreed is your guy and he’s behind this crap about Rose Siciliano and her husband, then he’s a lot closer to the end of the line than you think he is. He’s got to be scared—whoever it is, he’s got to be scared—why else this phony intercept?”

  Menzes put
his head down and rubbed his forehead. “We never had this conversation,” he muttered. He went on rubbing his head. “Jesus, some woman called? Why didn’t she call us?”

  “Maybe she wants it kept outside the Agency.”

  “Because she’s inside?”

  “Time to surveil him?” Dukas said.

  Menzes shook his head. “Not a chance. I take this and what I’ve got to my board, they’d laugh me out of the room. Out of my job, more likely.” He pointed a finger at Dukas. “And don’t you even think of surveilling him! If you guys spook him, I’ll have your balls!”

  Dukas made a face. “You know what kind of budget I got? I couldn’t surveil the Washington Monument.”

  Menzes leaned forward, his tone warmer. “Look, Dukas, I appreciate that you’re concerned about Siciliano. I didn’t entirely mean what I said about only one officer. But look at it from my side: you’re trying to hurry things along to save her career, and I’m trying to work through a mare’s nest that’ll take years.”

  “And meanwhile, your mole is scared and can do God knows what. And that’s another thing.”

  “What?”

  “What’s he scared of? What’s set him going all of a sudden?”

  The two of them sat there, looking at each other and thinking about that question, and Menzes’s face went through its rigid spasm again. “If I knew that, I’d have him. Or her.” He gave Dukas a sick smile.

  Beijing.

  The careful smile marked Chen as a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, a survivor who had learned not to show too much pleasure at anything. Hunched over his daily message traffic, face hidden from the world, Chen allowed himself the hard little smile of triumph. Years of maneuvering and political work had finally sufficed to move his rival, Lao, to “direct operations on the continent of Africa.” Lao was gone, never to trouble him again, and while this did not offer him release from the tension that haunted every minute of his public life, it did mark a triumph.

  And the next message in the stack suggested even greater things to come.

  Top Hook was invaluable. That came through the message with perfect clarity—if it was genuine. A memorandum from the National Security Advisor saying absolutely that the United States would not confront China militarily—it was wonderful!