Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Suddenly, the aircraft rolled sharply to starboard and Alan could see waves, close waves, off the starboard wing.

  “Va bene,” said the Italian, as though making an enormous concession.

  “Soleck, get me Jaeger Two.”

  Craw looked up. “Should be visual any second.”

  “Got him!” yelled Soleck from in front.

  “Don’t close yet. Soleck?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He punched the comms console. Alan switched his comms.

  “Jaeger Two, this is Jaeger One, we have visual on the contact, over.”

  “Roger, copy. In position.”

  “Jaeger Two, hold your position.”

  “Roger, copy.”

  Alan’s hands were tight, his adrenaline running. He slammed the comms switch to bring up the guard frequency and said in Italian, “Twin-engined boat with blue hull, this is AH 901, over.” Alan cycled through three Italian guard frequencies and got no response.

  “Buzz him.”

  Again, the furies screamed. AH 902 turned her aging bulk on a dime and seemed to ride the tops of the waves. Alan leaned forward to peer out of the windscreen and saw the contact, a low, powerful boat that was leaping along the waves. Campbell took them just astern of it.

  “He’s up to sixty knots,” Craw said.

  “Stern reads Sierra Oscar Papa Hotel India Alpha!” Soleck said. Soleck seemed to be having the time of his life. “Sophia—it’s named the Sophia.”

  “Sophia, this is AH 901, over. Cut your engines and stand by to be boarded.”

  Sophia continued to race for the Yugoslav coast, now only twenty miles away. The Italian ship was still nine miles to the south.

  “Make the next pass up his stern. Jaeger Two, engage!”

  “Roger.” Cohen had a little color in his voice. Good.

  “Right down his throat.”

  “Watch for 901, we’re on the opposing radial.”

  “I copy, Jaeger One.”

  And there they were. As Campbell lined 901 up on the wake of the Sophia, they saw Jaeger Two fall from the skies ahead of the contact and all but disappear.

  “Fuck,” muttered Soleck, in front. “Fuck, he’s low.”

  Alan couldn’t see Jaeger Two over the console from his seat in back.

  “Contact’s turning,” said Craw.

  The Sophia, apparently terrified by the sudden appearance of the big gray plane, turned sharply south, her turn giving them a view of the boat’s cockpit as she banked hard. There were four men aboard.

  “Circle to port and get in behind them again!” said Alan, willing himself to sound as calm as the pilots. “Nice pass, Jaeger Two!”

  “Saw a yellow puddle, there, Jaeger One. Want me to do it again?”

  “Negative, Jaeger Two. We want him to stay south. Get back east.”

  “Roger.”

  “He’s turning. Oh, shit. We’ve dropped link.”

  “Too many fast turns. Screw it. Soleck, have you got him?”

  Soleck’s head whipped back and forth.

  “Yeah, two o’clock. Headed east. He’s got rooster tails! Man, is he moving.”

  “Got him on ISAR.” Craw had withdrawn to an early technology, one that didn’t require two aircraft to work. “Seventy knots.”

  Alan looked at the positions. The Italians were on the southern horizon, six miles away. Not close enough. Jaeger Two was circling north and east to get ahead. Too far away.

  “Campbell, how good are you with rockets?”

  “I thought you said we couldn’t shoot him?” Soleck was beside himself.

  “I want to scare him. If we hit him, we’ve broken the law.” Even if we don’t hit him, we’re probably breaking the law. The admiral will have my head.

  “Oh, I think I’m good enough to hit the water,” said Campbell, in the best traditions of naval aviation. “I was afraid you wanted me to hit the boat.”

  “Do it.” Campbell lined up the plane with the new course of the Sophia and throttled down, riding well above the waves and moving slowly up from behind.

  “Jaeger Two, this is Jaeger One, over.”

  “Roger?”

  “Jaeger Two, Jaeger One is firing a rocket over contact’s bow. Stand clear.”

  “Ballsy move, Jaeger One.”

  “Break, break. Small boat Sophia, this is AH 901. Heave to or we will be forced to fire. You have five seconds. Four, three, two, one—”

  “Shoot!”

  “One away.” The contrail appeared to curve, describing a lazy swirl to the right before hitting the water hundreds of meters in front of the contact. The Sophia, still well ahead of them, turned south again, heading for a low fog bank.

  “Italians on two, skipper.”

  Alan looked at the link. The coast guard patrol was close now. He told them of the contact’s position and left out the part about the rockets. They didn’t sound so skeptical now, but they still didn’t have visual contact. Alan thought they were on the other side of the fog bank. And now Sophia was turning back to the east.

  “We have to turn him south again. Jaeger Two, push him again.”

  “Roger, Jaeger One.” Alan switched back to guard, decided not to worry that the Italians were going to hear all this.

  “Sophia, heave to or be sunk. This is your last warning.”

  Campbell lined up and pressed in closer. 902 pounced again, appearing out of a dirty cloudbank right in front of the contact, who turned hard to starboard. For a moment, both of Alan’s planes were on a collision course, with the target fleeing off south, visible to both, and in that moment, the white Italian patrol ship emerged like a specter from the fog bank to the east. Her deck gun stirred, just visible to the aircrew, and a tiny white puff appeared.

  “Put the rockets away, Brian. I think the good guys won.” Alan saw Campbell’s finger come off the pickle switch, but any comments were drowned with whoops from both aircraft.

  The Italians confirmed the illegal nature of the cargo before the two planes were in the stack over the Jefferson. They didn’t mention that any rockets had been fired. Alan was writing his report in his mind when 902 called.

  “Jaeger One, this is Jaeger Two, over.”

  “Go ahead, Jaeger Two.”

  “Hey, have you figured out how you lost that rocket?” Sounds of laughter. A change for the better.

  On the flight deck, Alan waited for the other crew and welcomed them with handshakes. Walking to the lock, he fell in with Cohen. “I’m putting myself down for your plane next launch,” he said.

  Cohen took a moment to digest that, then said, “Whatever,” and opened the hatch. At least he held it for his commanding officer to go through.

  Of course, Alan came clean to Rafe. He told the whole story in a rush, his helmet under his arm, suddenly a young man again. Rafe shook his head at the story and the change in his friend, shut the door, and went back to the stack of fitreps on his desk.

  “Wish I’d been there,” he murmured and turned a page.

  13

  Langley.

  George Shreed was looking at a sheaf of dailies that mostly contained trivia but now and then yielded a nugget. Mostly, the dailies were case-officer-level stuff, the material you grooved on if you were down there in the trenches but found less and less interesting as you moved up the echelons of deskwork. For Shreed, however, things like agent reports were a contact with real intelligence. “They remind me of why I’m here,” he liked to tell people like Partlow.

  Now, his eyes scanned the pages, flicking past this and that detail of contacts and failures and recruitments and information of questionable reliability. He yawned; it was that time after lunch when the body wanted to lie under a tree and digest. “Our animal past,” he said aloud and flicked a page.

  A phrase halfway down caught his eye. He hadn’t really even looked at it, but it jumped at him: firefight, Trieste.

  It was a simple contact report. From NCIS.

  “Naval officer on shore liberty reported co
ntact with foreigner, possibly asset. Lieutenant-commander off USS Jefferson was caught in firefight, Trieste, Italy, later questioned by Italian police and released. (See NCIS Case File DL7/27/94-0734.) Under investigation/NCIS control.”

  Shreed felt his heart stop, then a flush of warmth spread to his face and down his legs. Trieste—where his Serbs had bungled the second attempt on the woman who said she had a file on him. There could be no question it was the same woman; there can’t have been two firefights there on the same day.

  And the naval officer? Why would a naval officer have got involved? Coincidence?

  There are no accidents.

  His mind made a leap, naval officer—Alan Craik, and he felt it in his heart like adrenaline, but then he thought how unlikely it was that Alan Craik could have been the officer in Trieste, and he dismissed the idea. It’s only because I’ve sucker-punched the little shit’s wife. Still, he started to make a note for Ray Suter to check on the ID of the officer, but he stopped himself. He didn’t dare show too much interest, or he might tip Internals to his connection with the woman. Nor could he trust Suter any more.

  Leave it.

  Or had the woman who was blackmailing him made contact with somebody in the Navy? Or NCIS? But she wouldn’t do such a thing—the Navy wouldn’t have any special interest in what she had for sale. What was she up to?

  He chewed on that all the way home, and he ate that question instead of dinner. It made him sick. Was there a connection there he had missed? Had Navy intelligence got involved somehow? Was the woman in Trieste somehow their agent?

  Or—?

  It was certainly a new factor in his relationship with the woman who called herself Anna. Maybe it was time to change tactics with her.

  He sent her a message via the chat room where she had reached him before: “I like your style. Time we met, don’t you think? Maybe we can make beautiful music together.” And he signed it with the abbreviation she had asked he use: TH, for Top Hook.

  Next day, he had an answer.

  “TH, I’m not an idiot. Money talks.”

  He replied, “Thinking of the future and what we might do as a team—money that would really talk. Will meet your place, your conditions. Hoping to see you soon. TH.”

  NCIS HQ.

  Enrique Valdez had put on weight since he had been Rose Siciliano’s EM computer whiz. Short, broad-shouldered, he now had the genesis of a midriff bulge from the good life in Seattle. He had picked up the casual clothes of that culture, too, and O’Neill had already had a word with him over breakfast about what he expected of his employees in the way of dress.

  The NCIS interrogation room that Dukas had borrowed for the examination of Rose’s computer had the bleak look of an institutional dead end—abandon hope, all ye who have the bad luck to get busted here—with a single table with a dead-gray, rubberized top, on which the computer sat like something washed up on a beach.

  “Mister Valdez and I are lending our expertise to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in this instance,” Harry O’Neill said. He seemed to be speaking to two geeks from Fort Holabird but was in fact speaking for the tape he knew was turning. “Ethos Security are helping because of Mister Valdez’s special knowledge of the particular computer in question.”

  “Okay, lemme look,” Valdez said. He started forward, but one geek put out a hand and the other stepped in front of the computer as if he was trying to hide something indelicate.

  “Hey—” Valdez said.

  “Nobody touches the computer but them.” Dukas made a face. “Evidence trail. Anyway, I got to ID you.” Dukas asked some canned questions about Valdez’s name and job and how well he knew LCDR Rose Siciliano and what work he had done for her.

  “Would you say you would know her computer from the time when you served under her?”

  “What, the outside—the case? No.”

  “The inside?”

  “Unless somebody’s dicked with it, sure.”

  “You programmed her home computer?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Tell me briefly what you did.”

  Valdez knew he was being taped, too. Still, he rolled his eyes, shrugged, sighed. “She bought it off the shelf with all that Windows shit on it, and I cut the redundancies and added some Linux-based stuff to make it coherent.” Valdez looked at the two geeks. “These guys will understand when I say that everything I did on her computer, I used a zip drive and put on disk. I mean, you keep your architecture. It’s ego, right, guys?”

  The geeks nodded.

  Valdez grinned. “So, I got disks of what her computer looked like every time I worked on it. If this machine looks different, it isn’t hers. Okay?” He was impatient. “Can we boot it up now?”

  Valdez seemed inattentive until gray letters began to scroll down the black screen; then he leaned forward. When the Windows logo came up in color, he waved a hand and said, “Shut it down and boot it again, Alphonse.” The geek looked at Dukas, who growled, “Do it,” and he shut it down and then back on, and Valdez watched the whole thing again, told the geek again to shut it down, and then twisted in his chair to look up at Dukas.

  “This isn’t hers,” he said.

  Dukas felt hope bang on his chest, but he fought it with cop skepticism. “How the hell can you tell?”

  “How can I tell? Jesus—Hey, you—” He punched the geek on the shoulder. “You can tell, right?”

  “My name is Patrick,” the geek said.

  “Yeah, well, Patrick, you could tell after what I said I did on her computer, this isn’t Commander Siciliano’s, am I right?”

  “Uh, well—” Patrick got very pink when spoken to, and he looked uncertain. “Well, this one’s all standard Windows and no Linux, I could see that.” The other geek said that his name was Josh, and he could easily see that.

  Dukas, trying not to hope and thinking of the tape, thinking of a Navy court, said slowly, “Explain to me how you know that.”

  So Patrick booted the computer again, and then both he and Valdez pointed out, as the programs scrolled by, how they could tell this computer had not been streamlined by somebody with a dislike for redundancy and a passion for open-source code. Several times, Dukas would say aloud, “Now, Valdez is pointing at—” and he would read the string of letters that was fast vanishing into the tabletop. By the time they were done, Patrick and Valdez were almost buddies, and Josh was leaning in to do his part, too.

  “What d’you think?” Dukas said to Triffler and O’Neill, not giving any sign of his own giddiness. “I need stuff that’ll hold up in court.”

  “You got three guys there will testify.”

  Triffler, it turned out then, was no fool. “I’d accept what’s put in front of you, Dukas, and ask the obvious question: how did the computer get to be different from the way this guy left it?”

  Patrick muttered, “Cherchez le hard drive.”

  “Do what?”

  Valdez was nodding. “Absolutely. You check and see did somebody switch hard drives. Huh, guys?” He looked at the two geeks, who nodded and began to speak at the same time.

  “How long to switch drives?” Triffler said. He was sounding more like a cop with every minute.

  “Two hours? Hour, if you were really good and maybe had some help—?”

  Dukas waved at Triffler. “Then, Dick, what we gotta have is the record of where the computer was from the moment it left her house. Call Siciliano, get the date and time she last saw the computer—when she saw it boxed, if she did. Then I want to know every place that computer was, every second of every day in that time period. Use my phone.”

  “How come you don’t call her, Mike?” They hadn’t used first names before. “You know her.”

  “Not such a good idea just now. Get on it, will you, um, Dick?”

  Later Dukas, alone now, leaned against the wall, his shoulders quivering with relief and guilt, convinced now that Rose was innocent, hating himself for having suspected she was not.

 
Late that afternoon, O’Neill blew into Dukas’s office. “Rose has had another call from the Mystery Woman.”

  Dukas winced. Normally, he would have been the first one to hear this from her.

  “This time, she got part of the call on tape. She was so excited, she drove up to meet me halfway to DC. Good thing she did, too.” He leaned forward, his good eye sparkling. “I know the Mystery Woman, Mike. I know the voice.”

  “You’re kidding!” Dukas’s heart jumped: good news.

  “From the Agency. She was Shreed’s assistant when Alan first got crosswise of him. Nice woman. Alan knows her, too.”

  Dukas waited, because he knew there was more.

  “She’s had a bad patch lately—marriage gone bad; career in the Agency gone nowhere—thanks to Shreed, would be my guess. So maybe she’s cracked up; maybe she’s bitter; maybe she’s—you know.”

  Maybe she’s bullshitting us, he meant. “So what’d she say?”

  “Nothing new. Kind of rambled—Shreed is a badass; he’s after Rose; he’s acting odd all of a sudden. The lady had had a few, I think—a little loose, you know?”

  “Gimme a name.”

  “Sally Baranowski.”

  Dukas thought about it. “Good catch,” he said. “Leave it to me, okay?”

  O’Neill grinned. “Just trying to earn my dollar, Mister Dukas.”

  That evening, after Dukas had introduced Carl Menzes to Dick Triffler at the Old Commonwealth Tavern, and they had all sat down and ordered beers, Dukas said to Menzes without any warning, “Sally Baranowski on your short list, Carl?”

  Again, he thought that Menzes was a terrible liar, but this time it was because Menzes couldn’t keep his face from looking blank. He might as well have handed out cards saying that nobody named Sally Baranowski was suspected of anything.

  “You’re a standup guy, Carl,” Dukas said. “Don’t ever take up poker for a living.”

  Menzes waved the comment away. “Who is Sally Baranowski?”

  “Agency employee. I want Triffler to interview her.”