by Gordon Kent
The CNO spread his fingers on his desk and stared at them. His head jerked toward the lawyers. “The Shreed case and everything about it is important to the Navy. However, I don’t want to send anybody on a suicide mission. If you tell me you can’t file ASAP, I’ll accept it—but I won’t like it.”
The two JAG officers looked at each other and the older one said, “Tomorrow?” He smiled, as if he was aware he’d just lost his head over something wild and uninhibited.
Dukas smiled for the first time in two days.
Jakarta.
They had gone around and around it, and it was after midnight. Piat had put away the syringe. He had known the first time through that Bobby Li had at last told him the truth; the blow he had given Bobby was only a reaction to that truth, a blow aimed really at George Shreed and perhaps at himself. He so wanted it not to be true that he raged at the little agent; he walked up and down the empty room, shouting at him; he threatened, cursed, begged. But the story had always come out the same: George Shreed had been a double agent, working with a Chinese officer, Chen. When his tour in Jakarta was over, he had handed Bobby Li over to Piat without telling him of his and the boy’s other loyalty, and for more than twenty years, Piat had been using Bobby Li without knowing. Suspecting, maybe—you never really trust an agent—but Christ, not knowing!
At twenty minutes of one, Piat gave it up. He was bathed in sweat; mentally, he was whipped, as if it were he who had been the subject of the interrogation. He woke Bill and told him to get them some food; he gave Bobby a cigarette and lit one himself and fell into the hard chair opposite the little man. They smoked together silently. At last, the cigarette almost gone, Bobby said, “We done?”
“Yeah.” Piat’s voice was gone. He coughed.
“I’m sorry, man. I know he was your frand, too.”
“I’ll live.” Piat wiped a hand over his face and tried to wake himself up. “You’re okay, Bobby. This’ll be okay. You’ve got to go someplace now, that’s the only thing. We have to get you out of town.” He looked up at the small man’s eyes. “Your ‘top guy,’ Loyalty Man’s boss—he’s going to try to do the same thing I did. He’s got to be asking himself what really happened in the Orchid House, and he’s got to be thinking that pulling you in for an interrogation is the right way to go. I don’t want him to do that—for your sake and mine, both.”
Bobby was crying again. “You going to proteck me, Andy?”
“Who’s your American case officer now?”
“Some young guy, not worth shit. He comes to see me every couple months. I don’ think he’s even here—he flies in and out.” Bobby put out his hand for another cigarette. “You gonna take care of me, Andy? My wife and kids, too. I been your man a long time, Andy.”
“You got some money?”
“You need some?”
It made Piat smile, despite everything. “No, I thought you might. You got a place to go?”
“A place out beside Tangerang. My wife there now. No way they track me there.”
Piat studied his face to see if this was mere optimistic bullshit. The Chinese owned Indonesia; Bobby knew that as well as he did. They’d find him in four or five days, a week at the outside, wherever he went. “Can you go through an interrogation with them?” Piat said.
Bobby curled into himself and moaned. He had an unlit cigarette in his fingers, and it bent, the part between his fingers squeezed flat and the paper soaking from Bobby’s sweat. “No, man,” Bobby moaned, “no, please—you gotta proteck me—”
Piat stood. He flexed his knees, rubbed one calf. When Piat passed his chair, Bobby grabbed his arm. “We still frands, okay?”
“You bet.” The little man’s face made Piat hate what he’d done; at the same time, he felt satisfaction—a job well done, knowledge gained—then a pang as he saw again what the new knowledge meant: George Shreed had been a Chinese agent.
Piat shouted at Bill to bring in the food.
Whidbey Island.
“Agenda for today. Contact of Mercer Island police officer. Review High Threat meeting plan.”
Alan nodded and sipped the coffee that Triffler had handed him. “Hello to you, too.”
“I had a little traffic and ran late. I’m very sorry to have missed the first contact.” Triffler sounded prim, but Alan already knew him well enough to know that he was angry—with himself. Triffler was not a man to run late.
“No problem,” said Alan.
“I got coffee for us,” said Triffler. He sipped. “News from town: Mistah Dukas, he say that George Shreed was the one who killed Sleeping Dog.”
He leaned into the backseat of the car and took out a plastic bag. “This is a clean, one-use cell phone. I bought it at a 7-Eleven, complete with calling card. I was a little overdressed for a drug dealer, but they let it pass.”
“So? Oh, I see, this is the phone to call Sergeant Kusluski.”
“You ready?”
Alan flourished his notes, written in tiny script on a three-by-five card.
“That’s a bad habit, Al. Taking notes to a clandestine meeting—”
Alan held the card up for Triffler, who read it. It was mostly jargon.
“Notes from a sales pitch. I got it off the Internet. Any small-time salesman would carry a card like this. There’s no name—”
“Okay, already! I stand corrected. You’re the best spy since—”
“Mata Hari?”
“I was going to say James Bond. Ready?”
Alan dialed the number.
“Hello?” It was not a young voice. It was a woman’s voice, and she sounded tired. Unconsciously, Alan looked at his watch, afraid he had called too early.
“Hello? May I speak to Sergeant Kusluski?”
Pause.
“Hello? Hello? I cannot hear so good. Hello?”
Alan raised his voice. “Hello! May I speak to Sergeant Kusluski?”
“That’s what I thought you said. He was my husband. He was killed in the line of duty two years ago.”
Alan hadn’t been prepared for this. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too, but sorry don’t make it no better. You sellin’ somethin’?”
“No, ma’am. I’m investigating.”
“Might be better if you were sellin’ somethin’. I was his wife, not his partner.”
“Ma’am, might I come out and visit you? I’d like to ask you some questions about an arrest your husband made. Just in case you remember it.”
Pause.
“Who do you work for, mister?”
“The U.S. Navy, ma’am.”
Triffler was rolling his eyes, but he hadn’t said anything.
“I suppose.”
“Will you be there today, ma’am? Could I come by this afternoon?”
Pause.
“I’m out this afternoon. My daughter is taking me to Seattle to see a show.”
Alan sensed her resistance building, and he pressed on.
“Maybe I could come by tomorrow?”
“I suppose.”
Triffler was writing on the notepad. Alan looked at the note, thought about his own schedule, nodded.
“We’ll come by at two o’clock.”
“I suppose that’s all right. I don’t really go out much. I really don’t want to cancel with my daughter.”
“That’s fine, ma’am.”
“See that you have your badge, though. Our neighborhood association has a paper out on fake cops and pretend investigations as a means of gaining access to people’s homes. I’m very up on that sort of thing.”
“I’m sure you are, ma’am.”
When he was off the phone, Alan was almost wrung out from fatigue. Just from a single phone call.
Triffler grabbed his arm. “You did good. Here, have some coffee.”
“Why was that such a wipeout, though?”
“Your brain is on overdrive. Say the wrong thing and bang you lose your contact. And she threw you a curve right off. I don’t know why we n
ever thought of Kusluski being dead. If I was planting fake officer’s reports, I’d make damned sure the reporting officer was dead.”
“So we don’t go?”
“Of course we go, amigo. We just don’t expect anything, that’s all.”
“You don’t think this is the trap?”
Triffler shook his head. “Nope. Ready to brief the other part of the agenda?”
“What happened to ‘take a sip of coffee and relax’?”
“You have a flight in two and a half hours. I have to lay out a route for this afternoon.” He was looking out the window. “By the way, the FBI is trying to horn into the investigation.”
“No way!”
“Yeah, they are. Mike’s trying to hold them off.”
“I didn’t come all the way up here to drop something into the FBI’s lap!”
Triffler smiled. “Shout louder. Maybe they’ll hear you.”
Jakarta.
Piat and Fred cleaned the room, trying to eradicate any sign of what had gone on there. Piat smashed the syringe under his heel and carried it over to Jalan Surabaya and dropped it into a sewer. When he got back, Fred, Bill, and Bud were folding up the cots. They’d put Bobby Li into the pantry and given him some of the opium, of which Fred seemed to have a good supply, and he’d fallen into an exhausted sleep.
“Derek?” Piat said.
Fred laughed. He put his head against his palm-to-palm hands. The other men laughed.
“Sell the cots or do what you want with them,” Piat said. “Get rid of the woman and the kids. I want this place the way we found it.”
Later, they went upstairs and looked at Derek, who was snoring on the last of the cots. Bud and Fred lifted him off and put him on the floor. They folded the cot and carried it out of the house. When they came back, Piat said, “Now him,” and the four of them carried the lanky Russian downstairs and out the front door and laid him down just inside the gate. He went on snoring. Piat tucked his money and an extra hundred dollars in his shirt pocket and went inside and paid off the others. He and Bobby Li were the last to leave, Piat locking the doors, listening, aware that the others had already cleared out. Bats were flying in the garden, chasing down mosquitoes and big moths. Piat stepped over the snoring Derek and went out the rusty gate with an arm around Bobby’s shoulders, holding him up, protecting him, thinking that everything had changed now—everything had changed.
19
USS Thomas Jefferson.
Soleck didn’t quite bounce into the ready room, but the knowledge that he’d be flying without Paul Stevens again was enough to make the whole day lighter. Stevens was still sick—sicker, in fact. A lot of people were sick, they said. He sat in the front of the room, facing the television.
Campbell, slated to be his copilot, gave him a nod. “Surface-search exercise,” he mumbled, his lap full of cards.
Soleck had already visited the surface module, really just a desk in the Combat Information Center where surface contacts were tracked.
“Yeah. We’re picking up the slack for all the guys in VS-34 who’re down sick. That’s okay; our bird is up for its MARI and we can use the practice. We got a big box north of the carrier, right up the coast of Africa to Somalia. Everybody on board for that?”
The other three nodded.
“This is sort of an exercise and sort of a real-world thing, so we’ll track any contact we come up with, even a dhow. I’d like to use the MARI to get right up into the Arabian Sea if the ducts are right. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. ASuW at its butt-asleep best. This is a seven-hour flight, so everybody take a piss tube and a candy bar.”
They moaned on cue.
“Any more word on that sub?” asked Campbell. He’d missed the flight, but wanted, like every subhunter on the boat, to have a real sub out there. “And how can we use the MARI on a one-plane flight?”
“Intel’s still waffling. I’ve heard some hard things said about us. ASW module says the grams we brought back are ‘possible,’ and the staff is still sweating it.” Soleck shook his head. “One-plane MARI means we’ll use it as enhanced ISAR. No problem. Anything else?”
“We ought to be out there dropping buoys,” said Craw.
“As Captain Rafehausen just reminded me, we’re not an ASW det. We’re an ASuW det. And the VS guys have so many down sick—”
Craw merely grunted. Above his head, the closed-circuit television flickered, and they all looked up to get the Metro brief and the intel. A square-faced female ensign rattled through the weather (hot and muggy, with poor visibility at sea level) and the launch cycle. Her voice changed a little at the end, sharper, more resonant, and they all paid closer attention.
“Directive from the CAG. All flights are to scrupulously avoid Kenyan airspace without direct permission from Mombasa Air Traffic Control and the E-2. ‘Scrupulously avoid’ means don’t go there. We’re running up a bill of airspace violations and the Kenyans aren’t happy. Okay, that’s your intel brief. If you have any questions, call me in CVIC. Have a good flight.”
Craw was looking wise when Soleck turned around to complete his own brief.
“What’s the deal?”
“Hornets have been busting airspace all over the map. First it was a navigation exercise gone wrong, and then somebody doing a beyond-visual-range engagement practice took his section right over the coast where the resorts are.”
The aviators shook their heads together.
“Everybody set?” said Soleck, looking over his crew. “Get your cookies and walk. See you in the plane.”
Whidbey Island.
“Two-plane flight. Soon we’re going to do some drills on what you can get out of MARI with just one plane, but this’ll be simple.” He smiled at the two crews, both of which had people on their second or third flight with the gear.
“We’ll just take a turn through the western end of the op area and see what we see. Then turn back toward land and get some images. Maybe take another look at Microsoft. I’ll show you why in the plane. Anybody walk over to the intel center and look at the JOTS terminal?”
Nobody had.
“Okay. MARI is all about surface search, the way sonobuoys are all about submarines. You need to know the surface picture every time you launch. I know this is an exercise area and this is some dumb flight to image helpless merchants, but it’s the helpless merchants that you have to know the whereabouts of if you’re in a hurry. Question?”
“Yes, sir. LTjg Stern. Nobody will have any stuff in the link about white shipping off Seattle, right?”
“That’s more of a statement than a question. Maybe not. We’ll fix that. Here’s a grid system for our search pattern. For a few hours, we’ll locate, tag, and monitor every contact in the western op area. Everybody got it?”
They nodded.
“If you haven’t hit the head, then do it. Let’s walk.”
Off East Africa.
Ducting for radar is related to temperature and humidity and other forces of nature that create a duct that will keep a radar signal bouncing inside it rather than going off over the horizon and disappearing into space. Normally, radar will go only line of sight, so a plane’s radar horizon is limited by its altitude. The circle of sea an S-3 can see is enormous at sixteen thousand feet, but still limited, and the tactical problem remains the same as in the days of sail, when the horizon could be extended only by the sailor in the crow’s nest at the top of your mast.
With a duct, however, that line of sight can go out beyond the curve of the earth, over the horizon and back. A good duct in the Red Sea can allow a strong signal to find a target three hundred miles away. Sometimes, with good meteorology and good people, you can even predict a duct. Mostly, though, the weather two hours’ flight away from the carrier is different enough from the weather back on deck that the predictions are vague. Ducting seems to be mostly luck. Good radarmen hunt that luck, climbing and diving in small increments, looking for the duct that will get them the long look. Good pilots, at lea
st in radar communities, will take the time to fly the difficult patterns to find the duct.
Soleck and his crew found a set of ducts around nine thousand feet early in the flight. Finding them meant that the people in the back end were overworked from the start, able to scan a much broader area of ocean than normal without knowing when they would lose the ducts. Craw worked the MARI while the Tacco, Cohen, ran the surface-search radar. Craw would cycle his screen from time to time to look through his emitters list and see if they had any hits that corresponded to well-known radars of any type. Most of his hit list were old Russian threat radars, with some submarine surface-search radars thrown in for good measure.
Sorting and tagging the contacts took hours for every box in the grid they were forming. Some contacts would prove to be previously identified radar blips, although the MARI’s near-photographic resolution made that less common than had been the case with ISAR. Most of the contacts were dhows and deepwater fishing craft from the African coast, although a handful of big freighters bound for Mombasa or Dar es Salaam provided some practice on the bigger merchant types.
Cohen, hot and overworked in the back, went up on the intercom. “What’s the point? We could do this all day.”
Campbell murmured something about the admiral.
“White shipping, neutral shipping, it’s the clutter on the battle group’s screens,” said Soleck with forced cheer.
“If I wanted a lecture—”
“Hey, you asked. White shipping has to be sorted for both offensive and defensive purposes. You can’t fire any over-the-horizon ordnance without a good knowledge of what radar targets the pea brain of a Harpoon might fix on, right? And if you blow a Kenyan dhow or a Pakistani dhow or whatever out of the water instead of your enemy, you get the weight of the world’s press, right?”
“And you’ve wasted your missile,” said Campbell, cruelly.
“And the enemy can hide in it.” Craw rarely spoke up when the officers were bantering. So they listened.
“Huh? What, hide behind another ship?” said Campbell, but Cohen was right on top of this one.
“No. No, I get what he means. Like when you do a carrier-v-carrier exercise, it can take days to find the enemy carrier because of all the other radar hits.”