Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “I have it,” said the comms officer.

  “Dive. Take us down to 250 meters. XO, you have the con. Give me the message.”

  Ten minutes of laborious decoding later, the short message was clear; the location and course of a nuclear carrier across the world. It made no sense. It was a waste of his effort and the risk to his crew. Jewel did occasionally put them on a U.S. carrier leaving Puget Sound, but carriers, despite their huge crews and vast conventional power, were not Admiral Po’s legitimate prey. Admiral Po was here to catch their boomers and to keep China safe from the huge intercontinental nuclear missiles that American boomers carried.

  He growled, “Waste! We have twenty more days on station. Waste!”

  He said this to his cabin bulkhead, of course.

  Then he went back to the bridge and put his ship through the laborious process of surfacing to retransmit.

  People’s Navy Intelligence Headquarters, Beijing, noted the code on the incoming transmission and sent it through proper channels. In seconds it was decrypted, read at a junior level, noted as being important to a program called Jade Talon and needed for retransmission to a deployed submarine in the Indian Ocean, Chairman Mao. A mid-level officer placed it in the daily transmission file for the Mao. Then he gave a hard copy to a courier to take across town to the bastards in the old Imperial Palace. It occurred to him that no good could come of State Security’s knowing the location of a U.S. carrier, but, as always, he kept his thoughts to himself.

  Six hours later, when Chairman Mao surfaced to receive transmissions, Jewel’s data was in the first burst. The watch officer read it with the surrounding message and woke his captain, who came immediately to the bridge. There, he gave orders for a significant course change that would take them well down the east coast of Africa. Then he addressed his bridge crew.

  “We are going in harm’s way. We will be tracking an American carrier battle group. There is no harder target. It will be our duty to get in close to them and provide detailed reporting. I expect every man to do his duty and more.”

  He said things about home, and wives, and how the republic depended on them. Their faces hardened with determination. They were good men. The captain suspected they were all about to be sacrificed, but he was happy that his ship had been chosen. He began to plot tactics to approach the carrier.

  A day later, Captain Tsung was standing on a pier in Karachi, holding a briefcase full of money for a greedy aristocrat. He hated Pakistan and cursed his fate that he had learned Arabic and Farsi. Most Pakistanis had little Arabic. Few Chinese had any Urdu. It put him in Pakistan far too often. And his Farsi and Persian features made him perfect to play the part of an Iranian.

  Colonel Namjee was the highest-level officer Tsung had ever recruited. He was smart and venal, both virtues in an agent. He was well-placed with the “Islamic hardliners” that U.S. news so often mentioned. Namjee was tall and elegant, fastidious in his dress. He looked like a Mogul prince, and his taste in horses and Patek Philippe watches had led him to this moment.

  “You have the men?” Tsung liked things to be clear.

  “Yes. Somalis. The best. Well, the best of a bad lot, anyway.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “I thought you wanted to stay clear of this?”

  “I don’t intend to wander up and exchange names. I want to see them.”

  “They will complete their training in the next few days. Then they will collect their boats from another source. Not your business, although I have to pay for the boats and the GPS systems, eh?”

  “Yes. I’m prepared to pay.”

  “Good. Then they have to transit the boats to the African coast. It is the worst part of the operation, if I may intrude my experience here. If we had boats in Somalia already, we’d be safer.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Exactly. We could send them by ship.”

  “Too easy to catch, not enough time. Just have your crews wait for clear weather and go. Surely a cigarette boat is safer than a dhow.”

  “Not necessarily. You are not a nautical man, I take it?”

  Tsung shook his head impatiently.

  “They cannot just drive as if they were cars. They need fuel. In fact, they will go with the smuggler traffic to Oman, and then hug the coast. I will have to pay for a local smuggler to guide them and open the way. Yes?”

  Tsung nodded. Namjee had a way of getting the most possible cash out of every operation. Tsung wondered if the “local smuggler” even existed.

  “I want to see them.”

  “In Mogadishu.” Namjee made it clear from his intonation that he did not relish being in Mogadishu.

  Tsung was direct. “Arrange it. Contact me the usual way. We will do an accounting there.”

  “I need fifty thousand now.”

  “I just gave you fifty thousand last time.” Namjee’s venality made him easy to manage, but the money portion of every meeting was a drain on Tsung’s conviviality.

  “I need it. There are expenses, as I said. The smuggler, the boats, the fuel, the extra training. . . .”

  Tsung smiled bitterly and handed Namjee the briefcase he had been holding. Namjee smiled broadly.

  “Nice briefcase.” Then he frowned. “I still don’t see how we’re going to place our Islamics, no matter how dedicated, in proximity to a U.S. carrier at sea. We need the targeting.”

  “We’ll have it. In fact, I know where they are right now.”

  Namjee looked impressed.

  PART

  TWO

  Seattle

  10

  Seattle.

  Alan was reading The Riddle of the Sands, a book about spying on the German Navy in World War I. It wasn’t his normal reading, but Abe Peretz, one of his earliest friends from the Navy, had suggested that depression could be answered by changing life patterns. Alan suspected that his depression would be answered only by getting on a ship and going somewhere, but he was willing to try anything. Abe had asked him if he had ever read Jane Austen or the Iliad, with a look that suggested that these represented basic life skills. Alan chose The Riddle of the Sands because he thought it might be a murder mystery. Now he was lost in it while consuming his fourth packet of airline mixed nuts. He had Rose’s hand wedged under his arm.

  She was watching him from the cover of her own reading, the most recent copy of Aviation Week. He was not recovered, but the ferocity of his attack on Abe’s book brought hope, and his absentminded annihilation of packets of nuts was a sign that his full concentration was at work. It hadn’t been evident much during his recovery from the wound.

  Rose watched the long, slow turn into the military field at Whidbey Island with a critical eye. They were on a Hawaiian Air charter, but the pilot was probably former military. Rose thought that he had made this landing often enough to have his own set of muscle memories for it, because there was no hesitation in his maneuvers. The part of Rose’s mind that was a pilot was never off, not even when she was asleep on a plane.

  The intensity of her glance drew Alan out of his fugue.

  “We there?” he said.

  “Almost.” She smiled. He smiled back and touched her cheek, her neck. . . . She growled and rolled her eyes.

  “Something on your mind, lady?” he said. They both laughed. She pinned his hand, this time, and they both looked out the window while she stroked the top of his good hand.

  He worried about whether she would ever do the same for the other one.

  Then his attention was grabbed by something on the field. He waited a moment to be sure and smiled and squeezed her hand. The plane began its final descent, and in a moment the wheels touched the runway in a gentle three-point landing.

  “See that, honey?”

  A lone F-18 Hornet sat on the tarmac near the terminal. Whidbey was not an F-18 base, so there was only one reason for that plane to be there, and that was for Rose. It gleamed in the damp Pacific light, and it had been carefully painted in the gleaming whi
te and red of NASA, although such a paint job was unprecedented and unnecessary. As they rolled past the terminal, the little jetliner slowing rapidly, Alan and Rose could just see the lettering under the pilot’s canopy: CDR ROSE SICILIANO.

  There was a crowd of people standing around the plane. Alan looked at Rose, his throat full of something heavy. He smiled at her, and she beamed.

  “That’s my plane,” she said.

  He waited for the sag of rejection that had accompanied every triumph he had seen her accomplish since his wound, and there it was. He rode it, fought it like a sickness, and hugged her with his good arm, wondering, When will this end?

  Sea-Tac Airport.

  Jerry Piat watched the Seattle sprawl materialize out of the cloud cover and searched for Lake Washington, which should have been a great spread of water behind the city but which he couldn’t find. It was, unsurprisingly, raining in Seattle, and visibility wasn’t much. Piat was really looking for the places where runners ran, because, along with drinking and smoking, he ran for his health. Or so he said, although he ran for nostalgia as much as anything—the 1964 high school cross-country champion of eastern Montana. He drank too much, he smoked sometimes, but he loved to run. Anyway, Seattle was a running city, and the drizzle would be cool, and the running would be great. He was here for serious business, sure, but he’d see Marvin Helmer and get that crap out of the way, and then he’d hit his hotel and take a little run. And then he’d have a drink. And figure out what to do about Bobby Li.

  He got a rental car and drove south on 5, smiling again to remember that there was a place named Des Moines here, a long way from Iowa, then frowning as he returned to the problem of Bobby Li. He was certain now that Bobby was a double. Piat couldn’t let that stand. He was out of the Agency, but he couldn’t let his own prize agent go on as a double, as a mockery of what he, Piat, had done for his whole career.

  He tooled around Tacoma and was in Olympia before the offices broke for lunch. Olympia had the feel of small—small town, small capital. He’d checked out the state police on the Web and noted that most of the senior staff were natives who’d gone to high school here and got such education as they had close by, and most of them had had military experience and come right back home. Small town.

  And it was in this small town that he had to justify the screwup in Jakarta to an asshole who wasn’t half the ops officer that Piat was, but who had the clout to boss him around.

  Seattle.

  Dick Triffler looked around his hotel room and admitted that traveling at the government’s expense had its advantages. He’d miss his wife; he’d miss his kids; but there was always a lift to getting away and being on his own. Admit it, he told himself, nobody can be one hundred percent with somebody else all the time.

  He tried the television.

  He tried the phone.

  He inspected the minibar.

  He admired his French coffee press and the pound of Triffler’s Mix he’d brought from M Street Coffees in D.C.—sixty percent dark-roast Colombia, thirty percent Kenyan, ten percent Arabian Mocha Sanani.

  “Not bad, not bad,” he said aloud. Outside, it was drizzly but bright, and on an impulse he took out running shoes and shorts. He had already unpacked as if he were filing state papers—jackets and suits on hangers; shirts in one drawer, socks in another, underwear in a third—and pulled them on, with a Redskins T-shirt and an L.L. Bean baseball cap. He did some quick stretches, felt wicked and free because he skipped the sit-ups and the push-ups, and almost danced out to the elevator. Oh, Massa Dukas, he sang to himself, if you-all could see me now!

  An hour later, he was in the local NCIS office, getting desk space and a phone and doing some schmoozing with the people who were going to be on his team. Not always easy for a black guy. He scheduled a briefing for after lunch and began to make a list of sites around Seattle that might be the subject of the burst transmissions. His team would have to visit every one.

  NCIS, Washington.

  With Triffler gone to Seattle, Dukas needed a new assistant. He had begged for a special agent. He got instead a twenty-year-old file clerk named Leslie Kultzke—half-time. After the first day, he decided that she was probably a ditz-brain but maybe, just possibly, God help us, not quite as dumb as she seemed. She was cursed with a trailer-park worldview and an American high school education; her idea of office dress apparently derived from Dolly Parton’s idea of swank; her voice was permanently hoarse from trying to shout down all the other girls when she was sixteen; and her idea of culture ended at Britney Spears. She also believed in big hair—dyed the color of borscht at the moment—and very big perfume. As she was a few pounds over the baggage allowance and not what you’d call gorgeous, her short skirts and tight tops seemed a little excessive. Yet she had surprised him by needing to be told things only once.

  “Leslie, what d’you do with your other half time?” he said the second morning, deciding that she was actually better than nothing.

  “I file.” She laughed, also part of her curse—no matter what she said, she laughed. “Sometimes, I do my nails.”

  “How about I get you full-time, you give up on your nails.”

  “They’re sculptured. See?” Laugh. Dukas looked. Her nails looked as if they had termites.

  Leslie wasn’t getting along with her regular supervisor, so the only thing between her and full-time for Dukas was turf rivalry, which Dukas figured wouldn’t be too deadly because the supervisor, also a woman, despised Leslie. Dukas cleared a place at Triffler’s desk, currently loaded with the files from the Sleeping Dog crate, and told her that the desk was hers until his real assistant came back, and she should consider herself full-time there, and they’d wait until her supervisor screamed before they told anybody.

  “Terrific,” Leslie said. More laughter. By then, she was also chewing bubble gum.

  “Here’s what I want you should do,” Dukas said. He was debating whether he could stand Leslie’s perfume full-time, but he needed her maybe even more than he needed a happy nose. “You know the inventory that came with this crate of stuff, right?”

  “Oh, yeah?” Nervous laugh.

  “Yeah.” Dukas in fact had the inventory, which he retrieved from his desk and put in front of her. He tried not to inhale. “This inventory. Remember? You had it yesterday.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, really. We also have an inventory I got from the FBI.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Laughter. Waves of perfume spread from her, hit the walls, and bounced back on Dukas.

  “I want you to compare the two inventories and find any anomalies.”

  “We already done that, Mister Dukas,” she said. He had had to explain the world “anomaly” to her yesterday; today, obviously, he didn’t. Not bad.

  “No, we compared the two to see if the Jakarta file was on both of them. It wasn’t on the old FBI one but it was on the CIA one that came with the crate, which was how I knew the one in the crate had been doctored. Right?”

  “Oh, ri-eeght!” Laugh. She rolled her eyes. “It’s all rock and roll to me!”

  “No, it isn’t, Leslie. It’s what we’re here for. This is serious—okay?”

  “Oka-a-a-ay!” Giggle, giggle.

  He thought of bawling her out, and instead he found himself laughing with her.

  “You’re doing a great job,” he said, sending her into almost hysterical laughter.

  Whidbey Island.

  The sounds of a hangar are always the same, with the high roof and endless space both amplifying and dwarfing them. The hangar held two large P-3 Orion aircraft in various stages of reconstruction, and Alan walked past them with undisguised interest. Both birds were clearly in the latter stages of a major refit, and from the new antenna array, it looked as if at least one was to be equipped with an update of the MARI system, the whiz-bang experimental electronics that Alan’s detachment was testing on the Jefferson. In essence, it was a high-definition, 3-D, side-looking radar system—the proverbial gnat’
s-ass detector. Tucked into the far corner was a single S-3 with all her bottom panels off and her nose cone laid on a skid. She, too, was having a major antenna-array overhaul. Junior enlisted were carrying cruise boxes like ants at a picnic, material coming off pallets in the belly of the hangar. Flatbeds full of more pallets were coming in the wide hangar doors, and forklifts were buzzing around them like tugboats with an ocean liner. Alan worried a little about his reception here, since they would all know that he had been the cause of their rapid redeployment almost a week ahead of schedule. Dates would have been broken and lives replanned to make their schedule match his.

  Alan walked briskly across the hangar, his whole attention fixed on the S-3, ignoring the consternation that his rank caused as he moved through the maintenance space of the VP squadron.

  He approached a young petty officer third class, a woman who was standing with one hand on her hip and checking items off a clipboard. “Where the fuck are the maintenance cruise boxes?” she was shouting. “I have this bird down and my people need to get to work!”

  “Look again.” The maintenance chief was invisible around the other side of the plane but sounded to Alan absurdly young for his rank, for all that his voice carried authority.

  “Chief, this ain’t our fault. What if all our wrenches are sitting on the tarmac out there? Fuck, I hate this rapid-move stuff. What if we can’t get 103 up tomorrow?” she said, oblivious to the lieutenant-commander now parked at her elbow.

  “Petty Officer, can I ask—?”

  “Wait one, will ya?” She turned to say something more and froze at his neat khakis and his gold oak leaf. “Sorry, sir.”

  The chief was coming forward from his position under the extended MAD boom at the rear of the aircraft, warned by her last words that there was an officer present.

  “I’d just like to locate the ready room or the skipper’s office.”

  The female petty officer waved toward a ladder well. “Second deck, sir. Go up the ladder and look to your right. They just flew in, but the skipper will be in his office.”