Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Which was the last thing he wanted.

  He put the car in the attached garage rather than leaving it in the driveway. Entering the house through the kitchen, he went at once to the freezer and took out the morphine, the syringes, and the vial of blood, which he fanned on the countertop as if making a display. He was thinking that he would have to go to the bank where he had the safety-deposit box with the old passport and the money. No point in taking the gun. He did, however, add a folding Spyderco police knife with which you could rip open a can or a car seat or a human being.

  He would have to call his doctor and make an appointment for late in the day. He would need time to sew the Chinese-furnished passport and his legitimate passport into whatever clothes he wore—blue jeans and a T-shirt and another shirt over it, he was thinking, and a jacket and a baseball cap—and he would need time in an airport toilet to stick on the false mustache. No, better do that at a gas station. He was thinking that he had to ditch his canes and put the blood in the car and—

  He went to his computers. He had to do this part exactly right. If he didn’t, he’d lose the years of preparation and the triumph he had prepared. His moment. His justification, when they’d all see at last how right he was and what he had achieved.

  He began to download files to disk. He’d have preferred making a single CD-ROM, but his laptop didn’t have the capability. He should have prepared for that, he thought. Bad planning. Thought I was planning and I was just dicking around. Now I’m behind the curve. He checked his watch. He hated the fact that he was sweating and his heart was beating too fast and he felt lightheaded. Downloading files from the second computer, he double-checked his mental list and saw nothing that he’d missed. Everything would go on two disks; the rest was dross now. He moved to the third computer and downloaded the algorithmic password file and the ultimate-go file, which would trigger the program in the University of California mainframe and start the money pouring out of the Chinese intelligence and party accounts.

  “And that’s all I really need,” he said aloud.

  He began to dismantle the computers. What he wanted was the three hard drives; when each one was out, he reassembled the computer so that it would look quite normal. Should have had substitutes to put in, he told himself. Stupid. Should have had drives full of innocuous shit to smack in there. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t really planned it well enough.

  Because he hadn’t believed.

  He straightened with a screwdriver in his hand. It occurred to him that he hadn’t believed he’d have to flee because he hadn’t thought anybody was smart enough to catch him.

  “Jesus, a beginner’s mistake,” he said. He shook his head. But how did that bitch know?

  He stopped and booted up the laptop and embedded a message in a pixel and sent it to the porn site. It read: “Laundryman: Cannot make meeting Belgrade. Conflicts here. Will reschedule soonest. Top Hook.”

  He took the three hard drives to the garage and stacked them on and around a big transformer that they had had in Jakarta and never got rid of. Dusty now, looking more nineteenth-century than twentieth, it had adapted the local electricity to their American appliances. It had ruined several computer disks for him until he had understood what a powerful magnetic field it created. He plugged it in and let it fry the hard drives.

  He cut his hair short.

  He drove to the bank.

  He turned off the transformer and smashed the hard drives with a hammer, then swept every scrap into a trash bag and put it in the car.

  He roamed the house. The house must look as if he intended to live there forever. And as if he had come home for the reason he had given, that he had felt sick: he opened the medicine cabinet, got out some Pepto-Bismol and Imodium tablets and put them on the top of the toilet tank.

  He put a Patsy Kline CD on and sat in the empty house, listening to it until she sang “Crazy,” and then he listened to that again. He couldn’t go out to Janey’s grave to say goodbye. He thought of the mound of new earth with bitterness, the raw dirt covered with some stupid blanket of green plastic to look like grass. No flowers, no goodbyes. The song ended and he turned the player off.

  “Crazy,” he said. The song had already been a classic when they had met. He astonished himself by his sentimental attachment to it. Tears were in his eyes.

  With distaste, he injected himself with the morphine.

  When it had settled in and the first hot glow was over, he went once more through the house and checked again that everything looked normal, so normal that the house could have been used as a setting in a Disney film. The American Home, he thought. His legs pained him less, and he was even able to clump downstairs without his canes, holding the rail and teetering on legs no longer used to supporting him.

  At the door to the garage, he turned and looked back into the kitchen and to the breakfast room beyond, scenes of seven thousand mornings, kisses, fights, shared lives.

  “Crazy,” he said.

  He didn’t pack a suitcase.

  He didn’t take a raincoat.

  He didn’t say goodbye.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Mission planning used to be done anywhere that there was a flat space for charts, a handful of pencils, and room for the planners. The computer has changed all that. The interlocking circles of missile ranges, fueled radii, and threat-radar coverage can all be displayed on a screen at the flick of a button. Guesswork as to the possible course and location of enemy units can be done scientifically, with vectors on colored graphics and far-on circles indicating maximum possible movement. The danger for the computer generation is that the graphics look so finished that they threaten to become reality, rather than remaining an assembly of hypothesis and WAGs—wild-ass guesses.

  Rafe belonged to the generation that still preferred paper charts. Rafe still hand-copied his own strip-charts for low-level cross-country flights, because the time it took him to calculate the fuel and draw the lines helped him to understand the terrain and the hazards. Alan had reached seniority with the computer, but his professional conscience agreed; a hand-done chart full of SAM sites and missile coverage rings served to teach the maker to know his enemy’s air defense intimately.

  So the first draft of the reconnaissance mission, already codenamed Opera (for the famous Beijing Opera) Glass (for looking at things far away), was done on paper charts with grease pencils, the way missions had been planned since the Second World War.

  The word spread. The intelligence specialists began to pile pertinent message traffic under Alan’s elbow, and somebody else brought them coffee. An hour after they began, Chris Donitz strolled in and began to work fuel figures for the F-14 Tomcats, which they would have to use for long-range air cover. Alan sent for Stevens and Campbell and assigned them to do the same for the MARI planes, and DaSilva from the S-3 squadron came in with two pilots and an NFO and started to work the tanking numbers. Alan and Rafe explained the mission in snatches and let the chart on the table do most of the talking.

  Alan slipped comfortably back into the role of intel officer. He read quickly, took cryptic notes and shot off sentences to clarify intelligence points. Rafe tried to plan both package options, but when he took charge of the large package and put the F-14 skipper in charge of planning the smaller, Alan was pretty sure that Rafe had made his decision.

  Alan sharpened a pencil and started to draft a message to Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Behind him, Brian Ho, the air wing intelligence officer, took in as much of both plans as possible and started to draft a brief to go in front of the admiral ASAP, because, without the admiral’s approval, there would be no request to Fifth Fleet, much less to the Joint Chiefs.

  “Threat,” murmured Rafe. “It all comes down to the threat. If they have air cover, we have to have fighters.”

  Alan tossed a three-page report on the chart and took a slug of coffee.

  “Su-27 Flankers at Bussein. They moved there two days ago. They might be sending more right into Pakistan.”r />
  “Where the fuck is Bussein?”

  One of the hovering ensigns reached over and pointed to a town noted as “Bassein” on the coast of Burma.

  Rafe glanced up. “Do you know that, or are you guessing?”

  “Um, guessing, sir.”

  “Glad you have the balls to say so. Find out.” He turned to Alan. “Can they refuel in the air?”

  “Probably. They were practicing it last year. No point in putting those Flankers there if they can’t reach their ships.” Alan was immersed in an old FOSIF WestPac report on Chinese tanker training.

  “Flankers got some long legs, too,” Ho interjected. “Maybe twelve hundred miles? Combat load? Someone look that up.”

  “Fuck. We don’t know much, do we?” Rafe took a swig from his coffee.

  “Rafe, I think it’s possible, but not probable, that the Chinese have air.”

  “What are they doing so far out? I mean, let’s just think this through. Will they even come around Sri Lanka? Why would they? India has carriers, a real navy. Hell, their submarines are damned good, too. Chinese are taking a huge chance if they come this far. What if they plan to stay over in the Bay of Bengal?”

  “Last reports show them on track for Sri Lanka. Indians are protesting like mad, but it’s international waters, and India is still at peace with China. Hell, aside from the fact that they’re shooting at each other, India is still technically at peace with Pakistan. And maybe the Chinese are counting on India to be smart enough not to shoot.”

  Alan had stopped writing. He leafed back through the reports under his elbow, found the one he wanted, and read it carefully, drinking the last of his cold coffee. Stevens touched him on the shoulder.

  “We’d have to tank twice. No way around it.”

  “Tell Rafe.”

  “Roger.” Interesting. Stevens had pitched into the plan and started working. Stevens was often the naysayer in group activities, and Alan had thought that this tendency had probably kept him from promotion. But today he had been one of the first to arrive, and he had started off simply fetching materials until Rafe gave him a job. Alan went back to his report, took a few notes, and looked around. “Sanchez?” He only knew her name from the number of times he’d seen her with Soleck. Where was Soleck, anyway?

  “Sir?”

  “I don’t know how you’ll do this, but I want to know if either of the planned Chinese Jiangwei II frigates ever got delivered to Pakistan. Says here they were completed last March.”

  “Spell that for me, sir?”

  “Here, just take the report. Call Office of Naval Intelligence, get them on it.”

  Rafe had looked up from his own work. “I miss smoking, sometimes.” Others laughed. Rafe bent over to Alan. “Give.”

  “Just a thought.”

  “Spill it.”

  “I’m wondering if the Chinese aren’t going round to Pakistan to deliver some ships. Like maybe the whole damn flotilla.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been done before. The Russians used to do it with submarines. At the opportune moment, the Chinese become advisors, they run up the flag of Pakistan, surprise!”

  “Christ!”

  “Well, yes and no. A few modern warships would change the balance in the AOR, yeah. But the Indians still have the upper hand in training and material. And they’ll be watching that Chinese group like hawks. But if it coincided with something else, hell, it could work. It’d be a coup for both China and Pakistan.”

  “I buy it.”

  “Don’t buy it yet, Rafe. I’ve sent Ms Sanchez out to get some facts. Hey, Campbell! Where’s Soleck?”

  “Ready room.”

  “Call him and tell him to start putting together a simulator on Chinese hulls.” Alan leafed through a Jane’s. “Sovremenny’s already there. Luha class, Luda class, Luhai and Jiangwei, Jianghu FFGs. That’ll keep him busy. Damn it. Look how many new-design hulls the Chinese have built in the last three years, Rafe. Mister Stevens, what’s Soleck doing?”

  “Writing a standard mission overlay for the AOR.”

  “Whatever.”

  Sanchez was back. She grinned in triumph. “Two Jiangwei II frigates have been paid for but not delivered. They’re both missing from imagery at their South Fleet anchorage.”

  “Nice job, Ms Sanchez. Thanks.” Rafe smiled at her. “Now I really buy it.”

  “We’ll know for sure when MARI images their flotilla. Sanchez? Ask DNI if anyone has a composition on that Chinese group. Maybe the Australians? Or the Malaysians? Anyway, Brian—” this to the CAG AI—“put that on the ‘intel’ slide and in ‘objectives,’ too.”

  “Roger.” His fingers raced across the laptop in front of him. “Voilà;. Ready to brief.”

  Suburban Virginia.

  There was a flight out of Dulles to London at eight-thirty. Shreed made the reservation at a pay phone, using the old Agency passport name. They wouldn’t ping on it for days, he knew, and all he needed was twenty-four hours. Everything he was doing was designed to give him twenty-four hours—get out of the US, find a protector, then get the memo to Chen—and then if things went right, he’d have disappeared into a black hole. If things didn’t go right, well—what would he care?

  His neighbors, if they had even noticed, would say that he had left in his car; the Agency would believe that he had left for his doctor’s and then disappeared.

  Then they would find the car.

  He drove west to a strip mall and dropped parts of the destroyed hard drives into a dumpster, then a little north to another and then west again to a third, where the last of the hard drives went into the trash. Detecting no surveillance, he went south to a small park and put on his traveling clothes in a men’s room. He made a face at himself in the mirror. In London, he would darken his hair, but he didn’t want to leave any possibility here that somebody would remember his buying the retoucher. With the baseball cap and the jacket on, he looked like an engineer on vacation. Or maybe a low-level entrepreneur getting ready to coach the Little League team.

  Or a spy getting ready to bolt.

  He took the vial of his own blood and poured most of it in a single small puddle into the trunk. The rest went on the rear bumper, where he smeared it with his hand, and—only a drop—on the right rear fender.

  In the thickening dusk, he drove north to the Beltway and then around Washington on the west and north and then north again to White Flint Mall, and there he parked the car, locked it, like Everyman going shopping, and walked away.

  There is a Metro stop at White Flint. It connects with Metro trains to northern Virginia, from which a bus service connects with Dulles International Airport.

  The Jefferson and its battle group plowed on into the Red Sea. An ASW screen had been thrown out ahead of it. Sonar tails were in the water, and, in the ASW spaces, AIs and helo pilots boned up on Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani submarines.

  In West Virginia, Rose slept. One of her children whimpered in a nightmare and she woke, listened, and put her head down. The dog, hearing a dog far away, put his head up to the window and raised his ears and growled. These early warnings could not be taken seriously, however, and she made the dog lie down, and the child was quiet, and Rose slept.

  In Washington, Sally Baranowski lay awake in Abe Peretz’s guest room, thinking of Ray Suter and the almost pleasant evening she had spent with him. Something was up, she thought; she had thought it a dozen times during their dinner together. Sometimes she thought it was something about Suter, then something about Shreed. Suter, his hands bandaged, had been tense, although not too tense to propose sex, which she had laughed away as “too soon.” But she couldn’t escape the thought that something was very wrong with him. And then, being as near depression as she was, she could not escape thinking, Maybe there’s something very wrong with me.

  Mike Dukas slept alone. He hadn’t been able to reach Emma. He dreamed about Rose, about a vast hotel, about stairs and doors, all of it somehow a movie in which he was an
actor but had no script, and he woke after a scene in which he had walked and walked down a passageway of many doors yet never moved past a single one of them, as if the floor had been a treadmill under his feet. “Going noplace,” he said as he woke, finding the room cold.

  Tony Moscowic, dead, swayed just above the bottom of the Anacostia River. The fat on his decaying body almost balanced the concrete chunks in his jacket, and his corpse, neutrally buoyant, neither quite floated nor quite sank. Down at his right ankle, a rusted pipe had snagged his pantleg, and, as the swollen river dropped and the current lessened, he stayed in that place, a dead man waiting.

  22

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  The brief to the admiral was an anticlimax. He took the brief at speed, grabbed the laptop, scrolled through the slides, and asked if they had a message ready for CNO. Alan handed over his draft message to Fifth Fleet. The admiral changed the “To” line to JCS OPS and made Fifth Fleet a “Via.” Then they waited as he massaged the message. “Send it. Give me the whole brief tonight. Large package all the way; no point in pissing on them when we can kick them. Okay, make it so. Lieutenant-Commander Craik, stick around a minute.”

  He waited until they had all filed out except the flag captain and the JAG officer. Then he looked hard at Alan. “Commander, I have a message regarding your support to NCIS on my desk. I’d have liked to have been informed, but I gather this was done on the fly. Some crap has stuck to you because of it and I want that settled, got it?”

  “I’d like it settled, too, sir. There are a lot of rumors on the mess decks. It isn’t helping me run my det.”

  “Concur. I’m going to have the NCIS guy say a few words after your brief. Commander, let me just say this. You seem to be involved in some spy crap that’s pretty important in Washington. I got a wrong impression about it, and it looks to me like you were a little outside the box. You have a reputation for going outside that box, and you could do yourself a favor by keeping your chain of command informed of all of your