Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  The chief was staring at Alan’s chest. “You LCDR Craik?” He gave Alan an odd look, as if he couldn’t decide whether to frown or smile.

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Chief Soames. I was at the RAG with Master Chief Craw.”

  “I’ll send your regards, Chief.”

  “Kinda hoped he might be with ya, sir.”

  “I couldn’t pry him away.”

  “Sure could use his help. We’ve got a steep learning curve on this thing.” Alan nodded and started up the stairs to the second deck. The drab walls and ancient linoleum floors, polished to a fine sheen by generations of junior sailors, could have decorated any set of hangar offices Alan had ever seen. He passed the det admin office and an empty ready room and found himself eye-to-eye with a compact man with the blond hair and pug nose of a California beach bum, wearing a rumpled flight suit.

  “Surfer!” he yelled.

  “Spy!” Surfer responded by grabbing him in a bear hug and immediately going for a hold on Alan’s leg, starting a wrestling match. Suddenly, the two of them were down on the floor of the passageway, wrestling, pawing for holds, gasping, flailing about the corridor and scattering junior officers and enlisted. The violence shocked them until they understood that the squeals were laughter, may even have guessed that the two had been junior officers together. Surfer’s flight suit survived the clash, but Alan’s khaki shirt was pulled out of his trousers, and a button popped off in the struggle. He didn’t even have the consolation of coming out on top.

  “Bastard!” Alan said, smiling like a maniac. “I almost beat you with one hand!”

  “Your fucking little wings gouged my eye!” Surfer threw back.

  “Get off me! Man, have some people put on weight!”

  “Takes one to know one.” Surfer made Alan feel young again, as if he were a newly minted jg on his first flight. “I’m supposed to look neat to meet your boss.”

  Surfer was trying to pull him back into shape. “My boss?”

  Alan got it immediately. “Don’t tell me they trust you with this operation.”

  Surfer whacked him on the back, hard enough to make Alan cough. “Come on into my office. Hey, Petty Officer Flint, see if somebody has a sewing kit, okay?” Surfer pointed Alan into a big armchair that might have started life in a frat house, as he closed the door and winked. “I got sent here to stand this thing up. I don’t know the equipment or the mission, but it’s a command, and I want it. But getting sent up here a week early is not helping morale.”

  “Well, I’m here on orders for a few weeks. Fuck, you hurt my hand.” Alan looked at the scarring and moved the light bandage to hide the stumps of his fingers.

  “If you’re here to help, I could use it, man.” Surfer was grinning ear to ear. “I’m reading my way through all this stuff,” and he whacked a pile of publications. When they had served together in the Gulf War, Surfer had been the most intellectual of the pilots, but he had always hidden it behind his surfer-boy image.

  “I have a few irons in the fire, Surfer,” Alan said. “But I’m here to help.”

  “That’s great, man. Great. I mean it. Fuck, none of these guys has ever done MARI except on a simulator that runs on a laptop. Most of our maintenance guys never saw the equipment before yesterday. We don’t even have an exercise sched yet.”

  “Got a recognition library?”

  “A who?”

  “We made a library of recorded images, land and sea targets. A really sharp guy in my det started it on cruise. It’s all digital. You want?”

  “ASAP, man. ASAP.”

  “Your admin office open for business? I can send a message.”

  “You still smoke?”

  “No. Yeah. Give me one.” He leaned forward.

  “We have to go down the hall to feed my habit. We can catch admin on the way.” Petty Officer Flint returned with the shirt, button replaced, and Alan tucked it in as they walked down the hall.

  “I want to get back in a plane and get an up-check so I can go back to my real job.” Alan tried to keep his tone light. He knew he wasn’t supposed to fly.

  Surfer nodded. “Can do, buddy.”

  Just like that. Alan was worried that his hands were shaking from relief as he drafted the message in admin. He kept it short, provided a secure link for sending the data, with help from the office data processing expert, and saw the message sent. Surfer held up a pack of Marlboros.

  Alan followed him down the passageway to a tiny balcony full of men and women, smoking. The place reeked.

  Alan began to enjoy the smell, at least the first sweet smoke of the cigarette as it was lit.

  “How bad’s your hand?”

  “It hurts when people twist it in wrestling matches. Otherwise, except that there’s some parts missing, it’s okay.”

  “Want to fly?”

  “Sure!” A little too eager. “But I doubt the flight surgeon will—”

  “Screw that. Short hop, just testing the hydraulics in 702. Maybe forty minutes in the air.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “You got flight gear?”

  “On the Jefferson.”

  “Go down to the rigger, get some stuff. Okay?”

  Alan was out the door and headed for the rigging shack before Surfer had the pack out for his third cigarette. Now this, he was thinking, is what I REALLY came for.

  Olympia, Washington.

  Marv Helmer was an anomaly—not a Seattle-area native, no close connection with the state. Somebody had known somebody, Piat thought as he drove through the city and missed a turn. He was trying to use a GPS with city-map software, and he had to admit he preferred paper. Finally, he pulled over in a park and jabbed the buttons on the device, found the address he’d marked back in D.C., and wrote it down on a torn piece of paper.

  The Enright Center was two blocks from the capitol and appeared to be a commercial building that the state had leased when the bureaucracy got too big. Most of the state cops were located somewhere else, as any fool could see from the absence of cruisers with bubble lights or bars. Piat noted a number of plain, dark vehicles that he guessed were under Helmer’s thumb, because Helmer was honcho of a division called International Relations and Information, which to Piat meant terrorism and intelligence, with perhaps as much domestic surveillance and invasion of privacy as he could get away with. The Seattle area was big and dynamic, and it had a huge international trade and a big foreign, mostly Asian, population, so the state probably had good reason for wanting its own finger in the Pacific wind. Piat simply thought they’d hired the wrong finger. He thought of what he could do in such a job and was swept by envy.

  Helmer had a corner office on the third floor. The suite was surprising after the blankness of the corridors—tile floors, metal doors, plain-Jane signs that said ANALYSIS and FOREIGN ESTIMATE and FILE ROOM RECEIVING with an attached penciled note, “moved to seventh floor,” now curled with age. Helmer’s part of the building also had a sign, also plain, DIRECTOR, and Piat wondered if Helmer had got to create his own title, which sounded enough like J. Edgar Hoover’s to make a skeptic grin. The truth was, he disliked the idea of Helmer, which was really the idea of his own loss of clout, so that he was now answerable to this ambitious jerk who was facing him across a desk that Piat had the smarts to know was a good antique.

  Helmer was a small man, neat, slender, clearly in great shape. His hair had been cut to the FBI standard, his suit expensive, his tie sober. Everything about him, in fact, was sober. It made Piat feel drunk just to look at him.

  “I don’t like you coming to my office,” Helmer said.

  Piat decided to treat it as a joke. “Thanks for the warm welcome,” he said with a smile. He waited. “You messaged me to come here.”

  “Not my idea. Firebird’s idea—safe place, no surveillance.” Firebird was Ray Suter. Helmer was LeMans. Piat was supposed to be Mustang, but he didn’t deign to use it. Who wanted to be a car, for Christ’s sake?

  “Firebi
rd’s an asshole,” Piat said. “He knows about as much about operational intel as a duck. Anyway, as long as this is such a safe spot, let’s cut the code-name crap. Ray Suter is an asshole.” Piat didn’t like Suter any more than he liked Helmer, and he supposed it might be for the same reason: George Shreed had recruited Suter, not Piat, to be his assistant.

  Helmer sat up even straighter. “Watch your mouth,” he said. “Firebird is a fine American.”

  “Marv—!” Piat didn’t like Helmer, but he knew him; they had in common a history in Ops. They had run into each other a lot in the now-defunct West Asia Project, where they had been involved with different groups of mujahedin with different goals. “Suter couldn’t find his way through a countersurveillance route with a map and a guide. He’s a desk jockey and a shit, and the only thing going for him is he’s loyal to George and he’s willing to take on the bastards who hurt him.”

  “This operation is his to run,” Helmer said. “For starters, he’s paying the bills.”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” Piat decided that he had made a wrong move, so he tried to make himself sound cordial. “Remember when we had the food fight about the mujahedin?”

  Helmer made a gesture, like shooing something away.

  Piat smiled even more. He’d said back then that it was a mistake to cut the mujahedin loose, because they’d come back to haunt the U.S.—as in fact they had, so far in Bosnia and Chechnya and Afghanistan itself. “All water over the dam,” he said now, not really meaning it. Nothing was ever water over the dam to Piat. But he knew that he had to make nice to Helmer, because he didn’t want Helmer or Suter finding out about his screwup in Jakarta and bad-mouthing him all over the intelligence community. He’d never get another job if they did. “Old times, right? The good old days.”

  “Sit down, please.” Helmer, his hands clasped in front of his groin, waited until Piat was seated and then lowered himself into his own chair, also a first-rate antique. Windsor, real eighteenth century, Piat thought, although he’d have to see the stretcher to make sure. He’d used antique dealing as cover for quite a few years and learned a lot in the process, enough to think of taking up the trade someday. “Beautiful chair,” he said.

  Helmer was nonplussed, then said, “Oh, right,” and opened a folder on his desk. Piat looked around and figured that Helmer didn’t give two cents, either, for the Rowlandson prints of London criminals or the Piranesi prison scenes.

  “This is outside the province of my work as director of the state external-intelligence fabric,” Helmer said. “I’m really pushing the envelope, meeting on state property for this mission.”

  Pushing the envelope was nice, Piat thought. Breaking several laws was more like it. “I’m comfortable with it,” Piat said.

  “The people pay me to use my office judiciously.”

  “Would you like to adjourn to the parking lot?”

  “I’m just making clear why I’m going to move things along.” Helmer turned a page. “Brief me on the operation to date.”

  Piat ignored Helmer’s implication of superior/inferior and tried to be pleasant. “We’re exactly where we were two weeks ago: I doctored the Sleeping Dog file as specified, and then I left the Agency. The word is that Dukas subpoenaed everything in Suter’s office; at some point, the lawyers apparently gave him Sleeping Dog, because his pal Craik showed up in Jakarta.”

  Helmer’s little eyes glared. “And?”

  “And what? He showed up, my guys there got some pictures, but—” Piat shrugged.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Pictures are NBG, as the Brits say, old sport. My guys apparently missed the lesson where they taught about focusing. Terribly sorry.” Said with a fake-Brit accent. Why had Helmer brought out this Monty Python imitation in him?

  “No pictures?”

  “Absolutely none, old chap. But I’m sure that you’ll get brilliant ones here in Seattle. That was the idea, wasn’t it, to get two sets?” Piat smiled. He had a hangover headache. He wanted a drink.

  “Firebird will be really pissed.”

  “Oh, hey, I’m heartbroken.”

  Helmer looked up. “I don’t like smartass remarks.”

  “I don’t like dumbass ops. The Jakarta idea sucked, as I’ve been saying from the beginning.” Indeed, he had been so sure that it sucked, that he had hoped to kill Dukas in Jakarta, not take his picture but—but, but, but.

  Helmer’s cheeks were pink. “It’s a good plan.”

  “It’s a plan put together by a desk-driver who’s dropped out of sight and is under investigation for everything but buggering altar boys.”

  “All fabrications by George’s enemies. You sound disloyal, Jerry.” Helmer folded his hands on the desk and leaned a little, only a little, forward. Piat had heard some gossip that Helmer wanted to move up to the federal level, the Bureau or ATF or even the Agency—somewhere near or at the top, of course—and he was trying to look the part right then, very directorlike, but Piat thought he was probably too small. His eyes were also set a little close together. He had balls, however. “All we need is a photograph of Dukas meeting with a foreigner. If you’d got it in Jakarta, we could have gone forward! Then we drop the money in Dukas’s bank account, and he’s dead in the intelligence community.”

  “Yeah, and Craik?”

  “Craik goes when Dukas goes. They played into our hands when Dukas sent Craik to Jakarta.”

  Piat snorted. “Marv, have you and Suter ever heard of ‘with severe prejudice’? We should be fucking killing these guys!”

  Helmer gave him The Directorial Look: two-hundred-yard gaze, dead eyes, furrows of dislike in the small space between them. “Piat, I’m an important public figure. You have nothing to lose and so you make irresponsible comments.” They held the look. Piat thought of trying his dangerous smile, but he was already tired of Helmer and of the whole thing. What he cared about right now was Bobby Li. Without breaking the contact, Helmer said, “It’s my understanding you want to be reinstated at the Agency. If you want my help, and Firebird’s help, you do things our way.” He let that lie between them. Piat got it, as he was supposed to; he sighed and broke the eye contact. Helmer, however, decided that kicking a man while he was down was just the thing that an important public figure should do. “You’re a has-been and a wanna-be,” he said. “You got one thing going for you in this operation—you got canned because you were close to George Shreed. Firebird makes a lot of that. Frankly, I never thought you were that good. However, what’s done is done, and you can be useful within certain parameters. To a degree, I have to hold this thing at arm’s length, so I can use somebody like you as—as—”

  “As the arm?”

  “I want to know what Dukas and Craik are doing. I leave it to you to find out.”

  Piat started to say, You mean wiretaps and surveillance? but never got the words out because Helmer held up a hand. “Your play; keep me out of it.” Helmer looked at his watch. “I have a meeting with the lieutenant-governor about some very important security concerns.” He stood. “We’ll leave it for now that you understand that you work for me. The meeting between Dukas and the ‘foreign agent’ will have to happen here, under my direction. You’re to return to Washington and arrange to keep me informed about Dukas and Craik.” Helmer held out his hand. And he waited while Piat made a clumsy exit, more a retreat than a withdrawal, until Piat found himself in the corridor, shaking with anger and frustration.

  Whidbey Island.

  Alan mixed cocoa into his coffee, a trick he hadn’t done since his squadron days. The mixed flavors took him back, as did the borrowed flight gear and the foreign taste of his oxygen mask. Somebody else’s spit. Alan knew he was going along on the flight as self-loading baggage, but he prepped his seat and walked around the aircraft as if it were a mission. He walked across the tarmac to the base Metro office and got a weather report, a process which seemed to call for some humor from the woman running the office. When he got back to the plane, Surfer la
ughed at him, too. “This is Whidbey, man. It’s going to rain. Later, it will be sunny. Whatever. You probably made Darlene’s day.”

  Alan strapped in and they taxied. He was never as comfortable in the front seat of an S-3 as the back, with the unfamiliar small screen and backward computer controls, but he’d been flying front seat more often in the last few months before his injury and he managed the shortened checklist well enough.

  “What do you guys plan to use as MARI targets?”

  “Lot of freight traffic in and out of Bremerton and Vancouver. We hope we can pick on the big microwave sites along the coast as practice targets, too, because they’re pretty real-world. You can get some microwave cuts on ESM way out at two, three hundred miles and then fix the site, put it on MARI, and send it as a target to a strike package.”

  “Sounds great. You need two planes to get the full effect, especially if conditions are rough. Otherwise all you have is ISAR with a better image quality.” The MARI system had been Alan’s baby for six months. It was a system that used multiple radars at very high frequency to create a digital image of the target, hence MARI, Multiple Axis Radar Imaging. ISAR was an older system that used one axis, one radar, to create a fuzzy image from the radar returns.

  “It ought to be great, except nobody on this coast has done it yet. This bird keeps kicking her antenna, though, and no one knows why. Anyway, MARI is probably on for the budget this year or next, and the P-3 in the hangar is due for the next system. We have to get on top of this ASAP or somebody will take the whole program away.”

  They had rolled to the runway. They exchanged the last litany of checks, and Surfer put the throttle to full power and the engines raged.

  “She looks good to me,” Surfer said. He seemed to be waiting for something, and Alan nodded, which seemed to satisfy Surfer, who moved the plane to the runway as Alan called the tower and got permission to take off.

  “You ever finish your pilot’s license?”

  “Yeah. I even started on twin engines. I’m pretty hot in a Cessna.”