by Gordon Kent
“Wait. Three years ago, the Agency was running some of its ops wannabees from the Ranch through an exercise and they sent eleven students to Seattle to do interviews. Grunge work, real-world slogging stuff. And they used Sleeping Dog as the exercise subject because it was inactive. Now, what the students were supposed to do was make up a plan for interviewing ‘appropriate’ subjects—that is, ham operators, ships’ radiomen, et cetera, et cetera—just what the Bureau had already done. But here’s the fascinating part—this is really interesting, really—this one guy, a maverick, he demanded that they be given all the data on every intercept NSA had made, and then he makes out this chart. It’s huge; it’s got a folder to itself—and lists and time lines. And then, instead of interviewing like everybody else, he finds where there’s a radio telescope at the University of Washington and he goes and he says, ‘Give me your records for the last nine years, with every instance of radio interference you’ve experienced.’ ” Dukas looked at Rose to make sure she was following. “Eighty-seven percent correlation,” Dukas said.
“Wow,” she said. She smiled at him.
“Wow, my ass. It means he proved the transmissions originated in Seattle. But the Agency doesn’t like guys who don’t do things their way, so they bounced him from the program and sent Sleeping Dog right back to the cellar. Now it comes to me. Why?”
Rose crossed her eyes and let her mouth hang open. “Why, Professor?”
“Because somebody wants me—or me and Al—to go to Seattle.” He waited. “Well? Get it?”
“Well, I get it,” Alan said. “I’ll go to Seattle.” His jaw was set in what both Rose and Dukas called “the look”—impenetrable stubbornness.
“You’re going to Miramar to set up a new west coast MARI detachment,” Rose told him.
“Which I can do just as well at Whidbey Island. Look, Mike, you get DNI to sign off on it, and I go to Admiral Pilchard; Rose pulls her strings in CNO’s office—”
Dukas glanced at Rose, who was frowning and shaking her head. Dukas started frowning and shaking his head, too.
But Alan went right on. “You could send Triffler to Seattle undercover to be my case officer. He and I get along. This time I’ll do it right—eyes wide open, people at my back all the time— Come on, Mike! It’ll be great!”
“Over my dead body,” Rose said.
“No, with your gorgeous, sexy body. You come with me.”
“I’ve got T-84 hours to fly at Pax River!”
“They’ve got T-84s at Whidbey, and, anyway, you’re due to move on to F-18s.”
“Alan! The Navy doesn’t run to accommodate you and me!”
He grinned. “What d’you want to bet?”
9
Over the Indian Ocean.
Paul Stevens knew he was the best pilot on the Jefferson, and he thought that he deserved to be Top Hook if there was any justice in the Navy. The trouble was, he wasn’t in a squadron, and so he didn’t have a squadron CO kissing the CAG’s ass to get one of his own pilots named as Top Hook; no, Paul Stevens was acting CO of a rinky-dink, two-plane detachment with no clout and no access to the people who made the decisions, and so he, Paul Stevens, would go on making great landings, landing after landing, and everybody on the boat would watch him on the Plat camera and say, “That guy sure can land an airplane,” and then somebody else would get the glory. The story of his life.
Stevens made a minuscule adjustment in his heading and brought the S-3 up a hundred feet or so because it wasn’t exactly on eighteen thousand feet where he wanted it, and he looked over at LTjg Soleck in the other front seat and wondered why he couldn’t make contact. That shit Craik was fucking worshiped by the kid, and he barely gave Stevens the time of day. And Stevens had been nice to him, he swore he had.
“Want to land her on the boat?” he said now.
“Yes, sir!” Eager kid. Stevens liked that, or at least liked an eagerness to learn to fly as well as he did.
“We’re going to have to go in the stack, so don’t get too anxious.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And watch her when you go dirty; the flaps are cranky. Hydraulics, maybe. Just feel them, see what you think. I don’t want to ground the goddam aircraft for nothing.”
He turned it over to Soleck and stared out at the endless blue smudge that was ocean and sky. It was a hazy day, the horizon invisible, so that they seemed to be flying through an undifferentiated brightness. Stevens was not much for scenery, anyway. In fact, and he admitted this to himself, wondering why it was true, he wasn’t much for anything—a beer on the beach, TV on the boat, the odd letter from one of his kids. Divorced, so his wife never wrote unless something was wrong.
Get a hobby, the chaplain had said to him. Get a life. Actually, he could have said, I got a hobby—hating fucking Alan Craik. He thought about Craik so much they should have been married. Craik was the det CO, when Stevens knew he should have been CO himself. Craik kissed the CAG’s ass and said they were “old squadron buddies.” Oh, yeah. Craik got the medals, the commendations, the top fitreps, while Stevens, he thought, did the real work and got nothing. Craik couldn’t have landed a plane on a carrier if he’d had a fucking angel holding up each wingtip. Craik was a ground-pounder!
And here Stevens was, acting CO until Craik got over his injury and came back and took over again.
Stevens winced as Soleck dropped too fast out of the stack and then overcorrected; he almost grabbed the stick but caught himself. “Try not to kill us,” he growled.
They came around into the break a little fast, therefore, with that much more speed to bleed; Stevens heard the flaps complain and felt them respond just a fraction late. “Hear that?” he said. Soleck shot him a scared look, looked back at the panel, dropped the right wing; Stevens shouted, “No—!”
“One, two, three gear down—” the kid was saying, and Stevens knew he hadn’t really looked to see that the gear was down and locked; the kid was doing it by rote, chanting off the landing checklist. That was how you wound up on the deck with no gear. Stevens checked it himself to make sure: down and locked. “Down and locked!” he snarled. “You’re supposed to look.”
The lineup wasn’t good, and then the kid was chasing the ball. Stevens tightened his sphincter and squeezed his thighs around his penis unconsciously. Bad, really bad. “Too far to the left!” Stevens shouted. The kid overcorrected, the LSO saying, “Right—right—” in that bland voice that meant you were about to crash. The kid chased the ball. Lost the ball. Got it again—oh, shit, he’s afraid of the ramp; he’s too high—then dropping like a rock, BANG!, Stevens shouting, “Jesus H.—!”
And abrupt deceleration as they caught the first wire, and Stevens knew they wouldn’t give the kid an okay. He glanced at Soleck, who was sweating and flexing his fingers around the stick. The yellow-shirts were signaling. “Lift the hook, lift the goddam hook,” Stevens was muttering, wanting to scream it, and at last the kid got it and lifted the hook and taxied them forward until they were parked aft of the number two elevator and the engines could whine down to nothing.
Soleck looked at him. “What’d I do wrong?” he said.
Stevens sighed. He was bathed in sweat himself. “Jesus, I’d need a book,” he said. He stared out the windscreen, trying to think of something good to say, the way they taught you to do it. Behind them, the backseaters were cleaning up kneepads and paper cups and grease pencils. The hell with saying something nice! he thought, and he turned to Soleck and said, “You’re afraid of the ramp. You can’t land an aircraft on a deck if you’re afraid. Don’t you get it? Why the fuck can’t you get it? Don’t be afraid of the fucking ramp!”
It seemed so obvious to him. Why didn’t people understand what was so clear to him?
He went down to the ready room, where there was a message to see the CAG. Stevens groaned aloud so that everybody could hear and took off up the p’way. The CAG was an asshole buddy of Craik’s—they’d won the Gulf War together, or something—so anytime that
Stevens had to talk to the CAG, he figured the guy was just waiting to hear something stupid come out of his mouth so he could laugh about it later with Craik. What he really feared this time, however, was that Captain Rafehausen would call him in to announce that Craik was returning to active duty, so he, Stevens, should be ready to hand the det back to him in two or three days.
Stevens liked being acting CO. In fact, he’d been CO before Craik had ever appeared, and even though Craik and some others said he’d done a lousy job and that was why Craik had replaced him, it was Stevens’s view that he’d done the best he could with a lousy lot of castoffs from squadrons that had got rid of their dead wood when they’d been told to staff the det. Anyway, here he was, running the det again and doing a good job, and he didn’t want the CAG calling him in to say it was over. Although he hoped that the man would at least have the consideration to call him in when he knew Craik was coming back—not just all of a sudden have Craik the Fucking Hero step out of a COD and take over the det just like that, no warning.
So he rehearsed all this in his head as he walked the p’way, sniffling unconsciously and once running the back of his right hand under his nose because it was running. He still had on his flight suit, his helmet under his left arm—a somewhat deliberate move; his way of saying to Rafehausen, I’m a pilot, Goddamit!
“Sir,” he said, and sort of braced when he was in the door.
“Hey, Paul.” Rafehausen sounded perfectly friendly, an attitude that Stevens didn’t trust. “Give me a minute,” Rafehausen said. He was going down a long scroll of computer paper, now and then checking something with a pen. Then he tossed the pen down and leaned back and said, “What’s up?”
“I got a message to see you.”
“Oh, right, right, right—” Rafehausen burrowed under the computer paper. “Got a set of orders—Al Craik—”
Oh, shit, Stevens thought, here it comes.
Rafehausen had to call in a yeoman to find what he was looking for; it was on a side table in another pile.
“Craik’s been ordered TAD to Whidbey Island—something to do with another MARI det.”
Stevens’s heart bumped: Maybe Craik wasn’t coming back!
“He’ll come back to the boat as soon as he’s medically sound. Until then, he’s doing this job at Whidbey.” Rafehausen looked up, eyebrows raised. “You got a problem with that?”
When in doubt, object, was Stevens’s approach to life. “I’m doing a lot of work for him!” He shifted his helmet.
“Craik saved your butt, career-wise. Now it’s your turn to help him.”
“I hear you.”
“Good.” Rafehausen scribbled on the paper. “I’ll tell Al we’re all doing fine.” He called in the yeoman and gave quick instructions, then turned back to Stevens. “How things going otherwise?”
Stevens said they were going fine, fine, except for the parts he’d been chasing for two weeks. Rafehausen made a note. He looked at Stevens with a sour smile. “How’s our Mister Soleck doing?”
Stevens said in effect that Soleck was doing okay, muttering something about his landings. Rafehausen exploded with laughter. “He’s got the worst landing scores on the boat!” His face became serious again. “He needs to shape up, Paul. What’s his problem?”
Stevens temporized, shrugged, muttered, “I guess he’s rattled, is all. He’s ramp-shy.”
“Who’s he flying with?”
“Me, mostly.”
Rafehausen cocked his head. The yeoman appeared in the doorway and started to say something about a meeting, and Rafehausen waved him away; Stevens realized suddenly that Rafehausen was actually concerned about the ensign. “You hauling his ass about the landings?” Rafehausen said.
“No. ’Course not.”
“You letting them slide?”
“No! I try to teach him as we go—hands-on stuff—let him know when he’s wrong.”
Rafehausen slit his eyes. “For example—?”
“Just now, we’re out of the break, going dirty, he goes, ‘One, two, three, gear down.’ He hadn’t even checked. I told him about it.”
“Once he’s on his approach, what d’you say?”
“ ‘Too far right, too low, find the ball—’ Like that.”
“Isn’t that the LSO’s job?”
“You saying I should sit there and keep my mouth shut?”
Rafehausen swiveled sideways. He looked tired, Stevens thought without compassion, even old, his hair thinning a little, his eyes pouchy. He was young for a captain, but the CAG’s job was wearing him down. And he was worried about a jg! “Maybe he’s more afraid of you than he is of the ramp.” Rafehausen smiled. “That possible, Paul?”
“What’re you saying, I’m a goddam bully?”
“If I wanted to say that, I’d say it. No, I just mean—you’re his CO; he’s a jg; you’re a veteran; he’s green as grass. Maybe you make him nervous.”
“Somebody better make him nervous; someday he’ll be coming in on eight hundred pounds and his hydraulics shot, he’ll really have something to be nervous about! What d’you want me to do, tell him he did just swell and forget about almost having to take the net?” Stevens made a face. “Today he put the plane down so goddam hard I thought we were going to lose the hook. He’s not going to learn better if somebody doesn’t put the fear of God into him!”
Rafehausen nodded, smiling a funny smile, and Stevens realized too late that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, and it was only when he was in the p’way again that he knew it was that word “fear.” He shouldn’t have said that. It had confirmed something that Rafehausen had already had in his mind.
Rafehausen’s last words had been “Let’s try flying him with somebody else. Just for a few landings, see how he does.”
Stevens went to his compartment and threw his helmet against the bulkhead and then stood there, feeling the beginnings of a postnasal drip and wiping his nose on his hand and thinking that he couldn’t be getting a cold, not a goddam cold, not now.
Washington.
Jerry Piat checked his apartment to see if his old friends at the Agency had bugged it while he was away, but it was clean. So was the telephone. He’d given up using the remote phone because it was really a radio and could be bugged by remote, no entry, no hardware required. He didn’t know why he expected them to be after him, and he had to admit to himself that he was disappointed that they weren’t. Old habits die hard, but the fact was, he wasn’t important enough for them to care about anymore. He was just one of those old Ops people who had gone quietly into that good night—thanks, Jerry, sorry you got caught in the crossfire; don’t call us, we’ll call you.
He sat at his computer and scanned in the lousy photos that Bobby Li’s people had taken in Jakarta. Really shitty work. As if they were doing it on purpose, the shits. He called up an image-resolution program that George Shreed had told him about—George, who knew everything about computers, always knew the latest and hottest programs. Good old George, he thought. He tried to manipulate the right-hand side of the first photo. Good old George, good old substitute dad. George had been his first boss on his first assignment—Jakarta. George was a born teacher, tough but brilliant, as demanding of Piat as he had been of himself. Hobbling around on two metal canes because he’d crashed a jet in Vietnam. You were the best of us, George, and now they’re saying you were a traitor. He turned to another photo. He couldn’t recover the clarity that the camera lens had bitched, because it was out of focus, but he could coax the computer program to make sense of the blur and try to pull related pixels into something more like what the camera had been aimed at.
He pointed the mouse and clicked and boxed part of an image and clicked and pulled down a menu and clicked, and a kind of sense began to run through the images—a kind of story, in fact.
The Jakarta police report had said that at least thirteen shots were fired within the Orchid House, six exiting through the glass walls. Four had killed a Chinese national named Qiu—a Chi
nese intelligence officer. That was the spine of the story—a Chinese intel officer being shot.
Piat shrank the digitized and doctored photos and lined them up on the computer screen. He tried to read the story.
The first photograph showed what Piat knew was the inside of the Orchid House, lots of dark green and two of the flowers now recognizable by their color and size after his manipulation of them. In the right side of the frame, a human shape seemed to be walking in from offstage; on the left, another seemed to be walking off. Between them, a third. It was these three figures upon which Piat had spent the most time. The faces were unclear, the outlines fuzzy, but Piat remembered Bobby Li’s maroon jacket, so he knew that the shape on the right was Bobby. The shape on the left was unrecognizable, but Piat suspected that this was the now-dead Mister Qiu because he was all in gray, and, even out of focus, the gray looked bureaucratic. In the middle, a blur. Short-sleeved shirt, something blue at the top, white rectangle in the middle, white shape where a hand should have been.
Craik in his baseball cap. The rectangle would be the magazine he was supposed to carry.
The photographer must have been using a motor—stupid, too noisy, he thought—and a telephoto to stay at a distance. In the second shot, Li was well into the frame, and the other figure, instead of having walked all the way out, was just at the left edge, no sign of walking—a gray column with a flesh-colored top and a black crest—hair. The doctored photo was clear enough so that one of Li’s arms could be recognized, swinging out in front of him, at the end of it a single white star of reflection. What the hell? Piat had thought when he played with it, but he was pretty sure what it was. Something bright in Bobby Li’s hand. Not a diamond pinkie ring, oh, no. A fucking gun, in fact.
The man on the left was not quite a vertical column in the third picture. His lines had wavered as if he was making some sort of whole-body movement—something in a dance? There was almost an S-curve from shoulder to foot. And no wonder. The star at the end of Bobby Li’s arm had become an orange pencil line that reached for the man on the far side of the frame.