Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Vicinity of Bela, Pakistan 0255 GMT (0555L).

  They were below one thousand feet, with enormous ridges rising well above them on either side. Alan had the ESM gear up in the back, and, although his stomach lurched every time he got a hit, none of them had proven to be radars. Perhaps the unknown signals were radio-repeating towers or cellphones or microwave dishes; none met the computer’s parameters for an air search radar.

  The GPS unit had sounded several alarms, and Harry was now unstrapped, leaning forward between Stevens and Soleck and peering out into the pre-dawn gloom. Somewhere off to the east, beyond the ridge, the sun was rising on Karachi. They were in the foothills of the Pab, according to Harry.

  “Khyber Pass up north another three hundred miles. We’re on the edge of the hill country. The Brits fought here, Alexander fought here, and the CIA fought the Russians here.”

  Stevens snorted. “Thanks for the history lesson. I’d rather have an airfield.”

  “Airfield’s about twenty-five miles. Keep following the valley over that range of hills. I have to call ahead.”

  “Harry, how well do you know these guys?”

  “Well enough.”

  He took his helmet off and tucked his head against his neck, covering his right ear with one hand while his outstretched elbows kept him wedged in the doorway between the cockpit and the after cabin. He kept pulling the cellphone from his ear and staring at the screen, clearly trying to wish a connection into being.

  When he got through, he spoke in Arabic for several minutes. Alan had no idea that Harry spoke Arabic—not the touristic mangle that Alan managed in the souk, but real Arabic—although it made sense for a man whose business was in the Middle East. Again, he was reminded how Harry had changed, and how little he really knew him.

  “Do we have twenty thousand in cash?” Harry said now.

  “Yes.” In fact, Alan had several hundred thousand; he had deposited only half the money with the NCIS in Bahrain.

  Harry went back to the phone.

  “You landed here before?” Stevens wasn’t taking his eyes off the ground, but his voice was level.

  “Twice,” Harry said.

  “What’s the approach?”

  “Come in from the west and fly down the runway. They’ll set fires to mark the approach.”

  “That’s a mighty big chunk of rock for a blown approach.” Stevens sounded almost happy.

  The airstrip was a tiny ribbon of gravel under a mountain, the first true mountain of the central Makhan. It took up the full length of a valley, with a cluster of huts and a single hangar at the far end. The vegetation was sparse at this altitude, and the first kiss of the sun revealed a Martian landscape of jagged red rock. Terraced fields showed as wide green steps climbing the shoulders of the ridges, and dots of dark green in the red-gray indicated where trees grew among the rocks.

  “Get in your seat and strap in.” The cliff had grown to fill the whole windscreen.

  Harry tumbled back into the after compartment and fumbled with the toggles until Alan forced them into the seat’s harness. They began a sharp turn.

  “It’s going to be a bumpy night?” Harry’s gentle sarcasm stayed with them through a turn as tight as the break on approach to a carrier. The nose lifted and dropped like a bucking horse. The cliff face generated serious wind-shear effects.

  “Any problem if I just land now?”

  “They won’t have the lights on.”

  “Screw that. I’m here and I don’t want to play games with that cliff again. There’s enough light to land.”

  Alan heard the engine noise drop away and felt the loss of altitude. They seemed to be gliding down and down and down. Alan’s window showed the first glimmer of sunrise over the eastern ridges, Harry’s the blur of the cliff face passing them. From Alan’s seat, the cliff seemed to be a few feet beyond the wingtip. That had to be an illusion.

  Soleck and Stevens had begun to exchange landing checks. It sounded so normal that for a fraction of time Alan imagined they were landing on a carrier. Still the feeling of weightless descent. Each buffet of wind threatened to push them into the cliff, but Stevens’s compensations were precise. Alan wondered what their angle of attack would be after such a steep descent, and then he thought of the landing in Sigonella and tried not to worry. Stevens knew what he was doing.

  His view of the sunrise was gone, now, blotted out by the last ridge that defined the edge of the valley. They had descended from early morning into the end of night. Alan risked a peek at the windscreen, but all he could see was the ridge at the end of the airstrip. And then he saw Stevens’s hand on the throttle, and he snapped upright and into his ejection position. The throttle went forward. The plane roared with life. The rapid descent slowed, slowed, and they met the ground with a hard thump.

  The gravel was uneven, and the plane vibrated for several seconds. It’s like landing in Africa, thought Alan. Then they began to slow, and, well before they ran out of gravel strip, they had made the invisible transition from dumping speed to rolling taxi. They were down.

  “Hey, civilian guy, what kind of plane did you bring in here?”

  “Call me Harry.”

  “Okay, Harry. What kind of plane did you bring in here?”

  “A Cessna 184.”

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t list this as a bingo field for S-3s, okay?” Stevens was high on life, happy in a way that Alan had never seen. Soleck was silent.

  “Where do I park?”

  “Roll it right into the hangar. We don’t want to be seen, and it’s paid for.”

  “Gas?”

  “They’re looking into it.”

  “Hotels?”

  “The best that money can buy. A little above per diem. Alan, we have a four-by-four waiting to take us north. We’ll take turns sleeping in the truck.”

  “How far?”

  “Five hundred miles. Maybe twenty hours. Could be more.”

  Alan unstrapped, found his bag, and started stripping his flight gear.

  “Money?”

  “Leave some for the pilots. We may need the rest.”

  Alan had changed before the auxiliary power was cut and the pilots had finished their checklists. He took his time, methodically cutting labels from every item of clothing. He made up a packet with one hundred thousand dollars and handed it to Soleck.

  “You still got a gun?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “You’re responsible for that money. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Roger that.”

  “If Pakistani brass come, you had an emergency declared and you landed at the first field you could find.”

  Stevens laughed.

  “Hell, we only glided three hundred miles.”

  “Let them worry about that. Don’t mention us. Here’s my cellphone. If you can charge it, do so. If not, only turn it on every hour on the hour.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Thanks for getting us here, Paul.”

  “No problem. Just don’t get your ass shot off. If you guys die, I’ll never get out of here.”

  “Paul, I may have to ask you to fly farther into Pakistan and land at another unknown field. Maybe at night.”

  Stevens smiled, a slow, wicked smile that transformed his face from that of a dopey, overweight jet jock to a Basil Rathbone villain.

  “I heard you.”

  “No argument?”

  “Cowboy, I’m in for the whole ride now. Getting this far was worth an Air Medal. Getting you out, if you make it, will be worth a Silver Star. Full commander. Another look at command. Right?”

  “Yeah, I expect so.” It seemed crass to Alan. But maybe one man’s crass was another man’s heroic.

  Stevens must have seen his expression. “Fuck you, Craik. You think I’m blind to what we’re doing?” Stevens shook his head, as if disappointed in Alan again. “We’re saving the world. I’m almost happy to be here. Get your ass in the truck before I sing the ‘Star-Spangled Bann
er.’”

  Alan stuffed the rest of the cash into his sleeping bag sack and pushed the bag in on top.

  “Guns?”

  Harry patted his shoulder bag.

  “A shotgun for me and an Uzi for you. And some other precautions. Give me some of your cash. I’ll need to pay the landing fee up front.”

  Alan handed him a bundle of bills.

  “Get a receipt.”

  Harry rolled his eye, but when he came back he had a scrap of envelope with writing in Arabic. Alan scrawled the amount, the date, and a counter-signature at the top and handed it to Soleck. Ten minutes later, buried in the back of a large, military-looking Toyota truck driven by a hillman named Kamil, they were bouncing into the sunrise on a dirt road headed east.

  Karachi, Pakistan 0730 GMT (1130L).

  The villages along the track were cubist dreams, long strips of brightly colored boxes set against a landscape of sand and blowing trash. Children stood and watched the trains go by, even the youngest girls swathed from head to toe in printed muslin. They showed only enough interest to raise their heads, their eyes devoid of curiosity, their faces blank.

  When he saw that the ticket collector was checking identity cards, Shreed had a moment of panic—which passport was safe here?

  He elected to use the one with his own name on it. The power of its American seal should be enough to send the ticket collector on his way. Perhaps an element of unaccustomed fatalism had entered him by osmosis from the country he raced through.

  He took the passport out and held it open to the man when he paused at the seat. The ticket collector glanced at the cover without interest, noted the presence of a US five-dollar bill, and moved on.

  35

  NCIS HQ.

  Information about the hunt for George Shreed reached Washington by trickles and inferences all Sunday night, but it had immediate consequences on Monday morning. Ray Suter was told to stay at his desk and “keep himself available.” At NCIS, the halls were full of rumors that heads were rolling at the Office of Naval Intelligence. Triffler, to his astonishment, was in the midst of everything: he had a face-to-face meeting with the CNO, and he encountered a Rose Siciliano who had gone from accused outcast to CNO staffer and was suddenly a full commander.

  Triffler was summoned early to the CNO’s office to make an unprepared brief, a surprise that didn’t terrify him but one that didn’t impress him with his own worth, either: he knew that he was there as a stand-in for Dukas. The brief—a summary of his and Dukas’s work on the inter-agency balls-up that had ruined Rose’s career—was not done in the Pentagon briefing suite but in the Chief’s office, with nobody else present but Rose and a captain who proved to be the CNO’s intel staffer.

  “So you don’t know precisely how somebody at the Agency got somebody in this office to implicate Commander Siciliano?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And you don’t know who was responsible?”

  “Dukas thought he knew, sir.”

  “Do you know?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  Triffler knew that there was a time to swallow hard and a time to say you’ve been screwed. He took a deep breath. “Agent Dukas got a direct order to concentrate on Commander Siciliano’s case and forget the inter-agency thing.”

  “A direct order from who?”

  Triffler had read it in a file in the twenty minutes he had had in a cab coming over. “It was passed to him by our boss from ONI. The signature was a Captain Veering.”

  The CNO looked at the intel captain, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Triffler could hear Veering’s head start to roll. The CNO’s face was dark with anger, but he kept his voice even as he said to Triffler, “Agent Dukas believed that the source of the lie that implicated Commander Siciliano was this guy Shreed?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Where is this Shreed now?”

  Triffler was not afraid to say he didn’t know.

  The captain spoke up. “Agent Dukas appears to be pursuing him to Pakistan—did you know that?”

  Triffler admitted that he didn’t know that, either. The CNO looked at the captain, who said, “NCIS Bahrain reported him in Bahrain at six-thirty last night our time, and off about eight-thirty, destination Islamabad.”

  Triffler sank deeper into confessions of ignorance. “I don’t know about that, either, I’m afraid. Dukas doesn’t have a secure link with me.”

  “Or with anybody,” the captain growled.

  The CNO turned to Rose. “Your husband’s in on this, too, is he?”

  “He’s a designated agent of Dukas’s in this business with the woman he calls Anna. They were supposed to have a meeting yesterday in Bahrain.”

  The captain smiled. “Her husband put half a million in cash into the NCIS, Bahrain, office safe. She’d turned it down. Then Dukas reported he’d seen her at Manama and she was headed for Tashkent.”

  The CNO’s voice showed his irritation at this complexity. “Tashkent! How the hell does this relate to Shreed?”

  “She and Shreed have been in touch, apparently with an eye to hooking up. We get this from an independent contractor who’s, uh, surveilling Shreed’s Internet use.”

  “That legal?”

  The captain cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m having it looked at.”

  “Make sure the answer is ‘yes.’”

  It was Rose’s turn to smile. “The contractor is a man named Harry O’Neill, sir. Ex-Navy. Maybe you heard of him when my husband flew him out of Uganda and landed a Cessna on the Rangoon.”

  “Another friend?”

  “Close friend, sir.”

  “Where is he now?”

  The captain cleared his throat. He, too, it seemed, was having trouble keeping up with the tangle of Rose’s pals. “He seems to be aboard the S-3 that was pursuing Shreed in the IO, sir. With Lieutenant-Commander Craik—Commander Siciliano’s husband.”

  “How do we know that? The Jefferson?”

  “The Jeff, plus this O’Neill seems to have an encrypted link with his office here in DC, so we also got a message that way. Via an ex-Navy man named Valdez who is, uh—” He looked sheepish. “Another friend of Commander Siciliano’s.”

  The CNO looked hard at her. “Trustworthy?”

  “I’d take him anywhere, any task. He was with me on the Peacemaker project as an EM.”

  “Okay.” The CNO rubbed his hands together as he thought. “Nail down some sort of contract with O’Neill and his firm. Use his Internet link as comm when you have to. If this bastard Shreed hasn’t compromised our codes, we’re still safe to communicate with Craik via the Jefferson, but stay alert for a change there if we find that Shreed has bitched us. The real problem is Agent Dukas, who’s out there on a shoeshine and a smile, as far as I can tell. He kind of a loner, Triffler?”

  “Well—he does things his own way, sir.”

  “So he hasn’t got a STU and he hasn’t got codes, and God knows what he’s doing. How’s he going to communicate with Craik and the S-3?”

  “He picked up a satellite cellphone in Bahrain,” the captain said. “We think he’s got e-mail capability that way; otherwise, he’s got to find a place to connect his laptop. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a problem in a big city like Islamabad, but that’s a war zone now.”

  “Do we know what he plans to do in Islamabad?”

  The captain shook his head.

  “And Craik and his crew?”

  The captain’s eyebrows semaphored again. “They gassed outside Pakistani territorial waters eight hours ago and went EMCON. If they headed for Islamabad, they should be there by now—but they didn’t file a flight plan and we haven’t heard zip from the Paks. We’ve got the naval attaché nosing around for word of them.”

  The CNO eyed Rose. “Would your husband take an S-3 into a war zone without a country clearance?”

  “He, uh—It’s my understanding, sir, that his admiral gave him a lot of leeway in, um, pursuing Shreed.” />
  “I like yes or no answers. Would he take his aircraft into a war zone without a country clearance?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The CNO exchanged a look with his intel captain and sat back. “Folks, I’ve got two battle groups cooling their heels because we don’t know how bad Shreed’s spying has been. I want this sonofabitch caught, and I want him caught now.” He looked up at them. “And I want him caught by us. The Agency and the Bureau will take twenty-four to thirty-six hours to gear up, and that’ll be too late; besides, as you said, Gil, it’s a war zone now. So—comm support for everybody, number one; number two, what’s the combat situation up there? Gil, we got anybody over at Combined HUMINT now? If we have, I want them here pronto, and I want to know every agent they can scrape out of the files in Pakistan. And tell them that if they blab, it’s their career. We got anything like marines within striking distance?”

  The captain shook his head.

  The CNO looked grim. He nodded at Triffler. “Thank you.”

  Meaning, Get to work. Except that Triffler didn’t see what he could do.

  After Triffler was gone, the CNO’s face turned grim and he said to the captain, “Get me Admiral Kessler. I want to know what the hell he thinks he’s doing.” His look moved on to Rose, and the scowl he gave her said, And I want to know what the hell your husband thinks he’s doing, too.

  A definite air of us-vs-them prevailed at both NCIS and ONI, with the Navy the us and the CIA them. Nonetheless, Triffler tried to keep a back channel open to the Agency through their Inter-Agency Liaison Office, hoping that Menzes would know of it and would be receptive to any news coming from the police investigation into the murder of Tony Moscowic.

  All morning, no such news came. Triffler almost had to hold back his own hands from picking up the telephone to call Moisher. He was afraid that the young detective would give up on the search for “AMH” too early, that the allure of Monday Night Football or an early visit to his favorite bar would make it easy to give up the boring round of checks against businesses culled from the Yellow Pages. When, at noon on Monday, no news had come, Triffler was tense and angry, telling himself that any rookie cop could have found the Angel of Mercy Hospice by now. He ought to have it! he screamed inwardly. Then he realized that he was starting to act like Dukas.