Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Dukas was, in fact, very angry, but containing it. “What did he say?” he growled.

  “We had a nice talk. He said I sounded, well, I won’t say what he said I sounded like, but it was a compliment. He said he’d do it right away for me.” She laughed.

  Dukas frowned, thinking of all the interview requests that piled up on NCIS desks all over the world. Well, whatever works is good. But aloud, he said, “Leslie, we have forms and protocols and ways of doing things and whole books about how they have to be done. Don’t-you-ever-again-do-something-without-my-permission!” He tried to smile. “See?”

  She burst into tears.

  Maybe, Dukas thought, he should get Triffler back to Washington and he would go to Seattle.

  He supplied Kleenex, told her to go to the ladies’ room, got himself more coffee, and felt terrible. When she came back, however, Leslie had bounced back with the resiliency of a late adolescent, and she smiled and said she’d never do that again. Dukas saw that it was a good time to make a point. “Leslie,” he said in what he hoped was an avuncular tone, “um, uh, doing all the filing and, um, carrying and lifting and, um, so on—I’d want to be wearing sort of old clothes, um—”

  “My boyfriend and I are going to this new bar after work, sort of like in Friends?” This was meant to explain the clothes and the hair.

  “You’re dressed for your date.”

  “Ri-e-e-e-ght!”

  It irritated him. It irritated him that he’d got that stupid E-mail and it irritated him that she didn’t know any better than to dress like a goddam hooker to work in his office. “Leslie, how much time will you spend at this bar?”

  “Oh—couple hours, max—I don’t drink too much, really!”

  “And how much time will you spend here?”

  “Nine hours, honest to God—I won’t leave early, Mister Dukas—”

  “And who pays your salary, us or the bar?”

  Leslie looked at him, looked away. She looked down at herself. “Oh,” she said. Dukas grabbed a folder from his desk and said, “Take this up to the third office on the right and give it to Mrs. Sandow. While you’re in there, have a good look at Mrs. Sandow, okay? A good look.” Claire Sandow was the best-dressed woman in the building, at least by the dress-for-success standards of Washington offices.

  Whidbey Island.

  Alan stood under a large pine tree on a corner in the officers’ housing area and yawned. He felt silly, when everyone was either getting up or moving off to work, and he was standing on someone’s lawn in the early sun, holding two cups of coffee. He worried that the base police would hassle him. He didn’t look like a runner, because he wasn’t running. He looked like a guy waiting for someone.

  He saw the car turn on his street from a block down and approach him. The passenger-side visor was down and had a Seattle Mariners ball cap hung from it, the agreed safe signal. He walked out to the street just as the car stopped, and he hopped inside. The car was rolling again before he reached for his seat belt. Alan reached into the back and tossed a folder containing all the info he had obtained in Olympia.

  “That’s all there is to it,” said Dick Triffler. “It’s all about being on time and in the right place and knowing the signals.”

  Alan held out a cup of coffee.

  “I thought you might want this.”

  Dick sniffed the coffee through the plastic lid with visible apprehension and a smile lit him up.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Starbucks?”

  “On this base?” Alan chuckled. “This is the Navy, Mister Triffler. No, I bought it in Seattle and made it in our room coffeemaker at the BOQ.”

  Triffler eased them into a parking lot for a ball field, empty except for two men and a woman running the circuit in the distance.

  “That’s what we call a drive-by,” he said. “It allows me to pick you up and talk face-to-face without drawing unnecessary attention.” He drank some coffee and made an appreciative grunt. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Okay, I get the drive-by, except that I was standing on somebody’s lawn at 0704 local time, that is.”

  “If this were real, I’d be picking you up on your normal route. While you were out running, for instance.”

  Alan nodded.

  “Wouldn’t somebody think it odd if a runner got into a car? Shouldn’t it be done at a supermarket or something?”

  “Bingo. That’s good, Alan. That’s just the way to think. Think about the logic of your actions as perceived by the bad guys. Are you doing something odd? Do you feel exposed? Agents hate to feel exposed, Alan. It makes them uptight and nervous and uncooperative. After a while, they stop bringing you coffee.”

  “Couldn’t we do it someplace more, well, hidden?” Alan was watching the runners and thinking that he’d like to smoke.

  “Nothing wrong with some concealment, if it’s still natural. Let’s drive. I want to show you a few things I’ve already seen this morning.”

  He pulled out of the parking lot and drove them back to the base exchange, which was just opening. He continued around to the back and drove slowly by the outside garden department.

  “Okay, we’re behind the building in this alley, right? So no one in front of the building can see us. If you just stood there and got into my car, it might look odd, even to some busybody employee who might remember it for later. See what I mean?” he said, as a young sailor peered curiously at their car.

  “Yeah. When did you scope this out?”

  “I got here around five-thirty. So what would make it better?” Triffler took a deep swig of the coffee.

  “What, the coffee? I don’t know, a better filter?”

  “The site. As a place for me to pick you up. How would it look natural?”

  “If I walked over from the BOQ, bought something in the garden shop, and then got in your car.”

  “Exactly. And then it’s all timing. If I pull up just as you emerge, then it just looks like one guy’s helping another guy get his plant home. No big deal. Natural, and somewhat concealed. And what makes it even better is that when I come out of the alley, here, I’m not in the base exchange parking lot, but on Nimitz Road, headed for the gate. Easy access. Anyone behind me is now way behind, unless they followed me right into the alley.”

  “Mike’s talked about all of this before.”

  “Good. You understand why we have to meet like this?”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “In this case, you have a clandestine role. In other words, we’re hiding your part from anybody who might be watching you. So you can’t just come to my office, and I’m not going to come to the BOQ, although it’s unlikely that the bad guys can access this base. Okay?”

  “Got it.”

  “What’s in the folder?” Triffler gestured at the copies of the Olympia information that Alan had tossed in the back.

  “As best I can see, Dick, there’s three action items. There’s a case sheet with the ham radio operator’s name, John Tashimaya, as well as address and telephone number. That was right on top. There’s some sort of action report not related to the arrest but signed by the cop in the wire story, Jim Kusluski, that lists his vital stats. So we could contact the cop. And there’s an FCC report that we could use to chase down the putative FCC connection.”

  “Putative is a very good word, Alan.” Triffler began to look at the three sheets. “It’s incomplete.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Exactly. So if there are three action items, one is the trap, whatever that is, and the other two may be traps, may be real, or may just be dead ends.”

  “My money is on dead ends. The reason the folder is so slim is that they can’t afford to have too much data for us to check on or we’ll get suspicious.”

  “Bingo. Exactly. I’d expect it to be John Tashimaya himself, because they’ve gone to the trouble of providing a name and address.”

  “So I’ll do the other two first?”

  “Slowly. Make the
calls with me here, on my government-issue phone. As every move might be trapped, I’d want you covered for each.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Okay. We’ll do the FCC on Wednesday. That suit you?”

  “I’m on the flight sched tomorrow, but Wednesday the pilots will have all the planes on carrier quals out in the Op Area.”

  “Can we concentrate on some clandestine training now, or would you like to explore Area 51 or something?”

  “Too far to drive. Let’s do some drills.”

  Off Puget Sound.

  Five hours later, a pilot named Cunnard had them straight and level at twelve thousand feet, forty-five miles off the coast. Surfer had another plane twenty miles to the south and higher. Alan switched his intercom so that he was talking on the radio and talking to the other people in his plane.

  “Okay, folks. Check your GPS and put your cursors on the following coordinates.” He read off a series of numbers that caused the Taccos to aim their radar dishes well inland.

  “Roger.”

  “Roger.”

  “Radars on,” he called, and watched the small screen on his right armrest show a hazy swirl of meaningless static. The S-3’s surface-search radar lacked the resolution to do much with land targets. On the other hand, there was a definite spike in the middle of the screen.

  “Lock up the central spike and go to your MARI menu.”

  “Roger,” from Surfer’s plane.

  “Roger,” from six feet behind him.

  “Key image. A free beer to the first ID.” He smiled at what he had given them as their first real-life MARI target. The image came up, so clear that the corporate logo was visible on the front of the building.

  “Hey! Microsoft!” Bubba Paleologus, in Surfer’s plane.

  “Give that man a beer,” said Alan. “Now let’s look at some shipping.”

  Twenty miles apart, the two planes turned away from the coast.

  “Bubba, you locate a contact and then pass it on the link. Then both of you lock it up and see what you get. No comms. Go ahead.”

  “Roger. I’m looking.”

  Alan switched his screen to datalink and shaded it with his left hand. At their new attitude, the sun shone right on it and made reading characters impossible. After a few moments, a white square appeared on the screen. Alan switched his intercom to airplane only.

  “Got that, back there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He watched on screen as his Tacco switched to surface search, matched the contact, and imaged it on ISAR. A fuzzy image appeared, but it was recognizable as a big merchant ship with superstructures both fore and aft. Then the screen twitched and it was replaced by a sharp-edged image of the same ship, but correct down to details of antennas and the shape of the bow. Alan switched back to general communication. “Right. Good work. Now show me his ESM signature.”

  That was not part of the MARI system but used the S-3’s powerful antennas to search passively for emitters from other ships—and submarines. He switched to his emitter’s screen and watched as his Tacco began to correlate signals, first a surface-search radar and then something in a higher frequency, possibly even a ship-to-shore radio.

  “Now you know who he is. You can track him passively with the ESM gear as long as he radiates that surface-search radar, right? And you can pass his location via datalink. You probably won’t have to image him again. This is how you can build a surface picture and maintain it without constantly reimaging. Everybody see that?”

  A chorus of “rogers.” Alan thought for a moment of the problems any navy had in maintaining a picture of the location of ships, their own, their adversaries’, and the neutral shipping in between. And then he thought of the difficulties of submarine detection. Something was ticking over in his mind, but he let it go.

  “Let’s get a few more, folks,” he said.

  NCIS HQ.

  At ten, Dukas was in a tacky office in NCIS Legal, facing a fifty-year-old woman who looked as if she’d heard every hard-luck story ever told and didn’t believe a one. “What can I do for you, Mister Dukas?” she said. She looked at her watch.

  “I want you to file to have a gag order placed by the Fourth Circuit lifted. Today.” He smiled. “National security.”

  She gave him an unbelieving look. It took fifteen minutes of explaining about Nickie Groski’s importance to his case, to convince her that he was so serious he was willing to go to the mat on it. When she said, “O-ka-a-ay,” and put her hand on her telephone, he figured she was persuaded. “Be it on your head,” she said, and he knew she wasn’t persuaded at all—but she’d do it.

  When he got back to his office, Leslie was at her desk. She worked for some minutes without acknowledging him and then looked through the plastic barrier. “You want me to dress like her, don’t you?” she said, meaning that she’d had a good look at Claire Sandow. Her tone meant that she was very, very disappointed in him. “It’s what you said about one thing for the office and another thing for relationships, isn’t it?”

  “Am I the first one who’s ever said it?” Dukas said.

  “My other supervisor’s always on me about it, yatta-yatta-yatta! But I don’t take her seriously.” Leslie looked away. Dukas was afraid she was going to cry, but her voice was quite firm, if a little hollow, as she said, “She’s like all of them. My mother, my teachers, my aunts. Just on you all the time, you know?” She came around the barrier to him, pathetic in her finery, and she said, “You want me to grow up, don’t you?” It was an accusation.

  Dukas couldn’t smile. “I’m afraid so, Leslie.” They looked at each other.

  She sighed. She headed for her desk. He had the sense that he had toppled from some pedestal.

  15

  Whidbey Island.

  Lieutenant-Commander Craik had laid on a heavy training schedule, with at least a flight a day for all the aircrews and a list of MARI targets to image. Surfer’s aviators were glad to get the flight time, although LT Cunnard’s crew had just been completed with a newbie Senso and, because of his inexperience, they had to fly twice a day. On Monday afternoon, they were the last plane airborne.

  The new guy picked his nose, and that was so disgusting that Cunnard was annoyed from the moment they got in the air. The pilot had majored in coeds at Berkeley before finding solace in Naval Aviation, and he couldn’t imagine an adult picking his nose. His copilot wasn’t happy with the way his wife was behaving at home and her newfound independence since starting university. He ran the checklists on automatic while trying to decide whether a better-informed, better-read Wendy was really an improvement over the original Wendy, a gorgeous high-school dropout who lived for the beach.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Craik’s something, I guess,” said Dice, the copilot, trying to get the subject out of his head.

  “Yeah,” the pilot said, still pressing buttons on the main radio.

  “He seemed okay.”

  “He seemed like a guy who knows a lot about MARI,” said the pilot, who hated gossip in all its forms. “Am I using yesterday’s comm card here, Dice?”

  Dice flipped through his kneeboard and shrugged. “Sorry.”

  They were silent for a while, and then Dice said, “He has a kind of . . . reputation.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cunnard said, discouragingly, and the yoke twisted in his hands. A little kick from an unwilling plane.

  The S-3 was the oldest in their detachment and it lived a charmed life, with more pink slips in maintenance than any other bird in the air wing. Sheila, as Alpha India Seven Zero Three was known to her crew, had a tendency to shed tires on landings and an eternal leakage of fuel somewhere in her belly that had never proved fatal but had tempted many a burger from the stomach of a newbie. The Tacco, Lieutenant Spiro “Bubba” Paleologus, was pretty certain that their newbie Senso would lose his cookies from the smell of JP-5 in the backseat, but he thought that if the newbie Senso picked his nose one more time and ate it, he might decorate the cockpit himself. He dro
pped another sonobuoy. He was an old-time S-3 guy and wanted to keep their antisubmarine skills honed. He could drop sonobuoys and look at MARI at the same time.

  “Don’t pick your nose, Airman Lennox.”

  Lennox looked around, dazed. He looked faintly green at the corners of his nose and mouth.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t pick your fucking nose.” Bubba had done the nice thing, and cut off comms to the front seat so that his pilot and copilot, both officers, wouldn’t hear him correcting the newbie.

  Lennox looked at him, nervous and edgy. His pinched face was haze gray, and Bubba wondered who the hell had decided that this kid was aeronautically adaptable. He’d probably never left cyberspace in his whole childhood.

  “I’ve—” the kid stuttered. “I’ve g-g-got a hit.”

  “Lennox, we are in the western op area and there ain’t nothing but whales out here. We’re imaging MARI targets, for Chrissakes. Okay!” He held up his hands, afraid the kid would cry. “Okay! You might have a whale. Let’s look. It will make a good learning point.”

  Cunnard flung the plane into a tight right turn, still following Bubba’s sonobuoy pattern, inscribed in glowing green on his tiny display. Lennox got whiter, and Bubba assumed that the Technicolor vomit was next on the program, but the kid took a squeeze on his water bottle and punched out another buoy.

  “He’s still th-there—sir.” The “sir” was an afterthought, so late that you’d think the kid hadn’t ever been to boot camp. But Bubba had his own sonar display up now, switching rapidly through analog and digital commands laid out for him in the late 1970s. High tech, he thought bitterly. Bubba whistled softly.

  “Cunner?”

  “Roger, Bubba, how’s the nursery?”

  “Hey, Cunner, we got two possible contacts on an unknown boat, probably a nuke.”

  “Shit hot! Log it. We can use the contact time.”

  “Lennox found it. Is there a boat in the op area?”

  The three officers all tried to remember anything that the intel officer had said before they launched. Surely they’d have noticed if he had mentioned an actual sub.