by Gordon Kent
“Yeah,” drawled Campbell from the front seat. “Yeah, okay. I’ve flown in exercises like that. Hey, Mrs. Luce, I am the Pope, okay? Bears do shit in the woods, I’m convinced of it. But Cohen’s point, and my point, is that if you don’t get the picture and keep it twenty-four hours a day, then there ain’t no point, right? Because as soon as you don’t look for an hour, anyone could be anyone. They could all be anywhere.”
On the other side of the globe, Alan was flying with an unfamiliar crew, just out into the operations area well off the coast to turn the MARI on and calibrate the system. The other plane flew with Cunnard and a newbie Tacco. Surfer was mixing crews to cross-train.
He sat in back, in the Senso seat, so that he could talk to two MARI operators: Bubba Paleologus in the copilot seat and LTjg Lisa Stern, another newbie, in the Tacco seat. They both exclaimed over the sharpness of the image and how much easier it was to use for real than on the simulator. They imaged a frigate coming into port from duty with Seventh Fleet, and it looked like a photograph in Jane’s, the very archetype of the Oliver Hazard Perry class. Then Alan had the pilot turn inland and they imaged some ground facilities, hitting the corporate headquarters of the world’s largest software manufacturer again. Alan held up a postcard from the same facility, so that the distinctive architecture was plain to see.
“Not everything comes from a classified pub,” he said. “If you had to target that facility overseas, the postcard could make all the difference.”
They played with the system, experimented with resolution by imaging fishing boats and pleasure boats. The system lost resolution at about one meter, so that a little wooden dory was just a blob until they flew over it and saw it by eye, where a ten-meter cabin cruiser was easy to identify. Alan found that he could get to all the buttons with his bad hand, using the three remaining digits slowly. He could get there. He could still operate the system faster than the newbies. That, and their attentiveness to his lessons, made him happy.
“See those spikes at the stern?”
“Are those engine mounts, sir?” Paleologus asked.
“Yes, and no, Lieutenant. Remember that MARI is, at its roots, just a radar. You aren’t really looking at a photographic image. It’s a set of radar returns that a computer enhances to look like an image. So the big metal parts, like the engines, with lots of convoluted metal surfaces to cause a big radar return, those will always appear larger than life.”
“I can see that now.”
“In the Med we were chasing smugglers in the Adriatic. They were in cigarette boats, and the only real return we’d get, even on MARI, was a pair of big spikes from the engines. The rest was fiberglass and spit and didn’t give much of a return. They’re in the library you guys have.”
“The controls are sure simpler than the old ISAR,” said Bubba.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Lisa, who was in her first operational command, on her first real flight with her det, and didn’t want to do anything wrong, especially in front of Craik.
“You never used ISAR? What did they teach you at the RAG?”
“Navigation, sir.”
“Nobody says ‘sir’ in the plane, Lisa,” said Alan.
“Bubba called you sir.”
“Bubba was temporarily awed by my natural authority. Do you have a nickname, Lisa?”
“No,” she said, too quickly.
“Me, either,” he said, with a bit of a laugh. He’d had quite a number, and none of them very pretty. “Ready to call it a day? Home, Dice.”
The pilot grunted, and they turned toward home.
“Hey, look at those, Master Chief,” said Cohen, now deep in the job. He passed his contacts electronically to Craw’s station. There were five of them, all in a neat row, well out in the Indian Ocean toward Karachi far to the north. “Remember that pair of spikes?”
“Cigarette boat, for sure,” said Craw. “Moving right along, too. Just like we saw off Italy.” Craw said “Italy” in two syllables. It-ly.
“Smugglers, I’ll bet,” said Cohen.
“They’re headed for Mogadishu. What the hell would you smuggle into Mogadishu?”
“Or out of it,” said Campbell. “Biggest shithole I’ve ever seen. They have nothin’.”
They logged the boats, tagged them in the system, and tracked them for the rest of their flight, watching as they moved at sixty knots over the flat, silver sea and close to the port of Mogadishu.
Five hundred and forty miles behind them, the ASuW watch officer received the information over the datalink, and, because the cigarette boats were still listed in his threat log from months before off the Adriatic coast, he placed all five of them into the carrier’s tactical picture and then fed their course and speed into his JOTS terminal and linked that picture to the live feed from the S-3.
Twelve thousand miles away, Alan had finished his flight, landed, showered, and gone to the intel center to work. He leaned on the JOTS repeater terminal and watched as the five cigarette boats merged into the coast of Africa. Then he walked across to the commander’s office and asked to use his message center. In ten minutes, he had requested reports from all major agencies on the movement of small craft in the Indian Ocean. He knew that he was trying to maintain some contact with the ship he loved, with Rafe and his own det. But another part of him saw the cigarette boats and the three-day-old pos contact on the unknown submarine, and worried.
Sixty feet above the deck and a few hundred feet from the stern, Soleck doubted himself and attempted a minute correction. He began to yaw and overcorrected and his right wheel slammed on the deck alone, taking the whole weight of the plane. There was a spray of hydraulic fluid as the left wheel touched, and the hook caught the two wire, and the whole messy landing became the charge of a chained lion as the plane surged forward against the last full-power thrust from her engine and then quieted.
A disgusted LSO shook his head.
“What a dickhead. He was steady as a rock right into the wake. You have to work to lose a landing that late.” Sigh. “No grade.”
Twenty minutes later, Soleck hurt his hand slamming it into a locker in the ready room.
20
Mogadishu, Somalia.
Tsung often wondered what it would be like to be stationed in Saigon or Paris. Someplace civilized. Instead, he got to visit Mogadishu, a town so poor that most of the metal roofs of the shacks that passed for houses had been sold to Kenya for scrap. Landing, he saw that there were only four dhows and a Yemeni tramp freighter in the main harbor. Mogadishu had very little to offer.
Namjee was waiting amid the broken glass of the airport terminal. He looked dapper in a light wool suit, utterly out of place with his surroundings. He had three thugs attending him. They wore headscarves and were smoking American cigarettes and the oldest of them looked to be fifteen. Namjee spoke to him in Farsi, as Tsung was supposed to be Persian.
“Are you ready to see the products of our labors?”
“Tell me what the cover is?” Tsung wanted to see the operation in its final stage, but he worried about betraying his actions to a third party. Mostly, he worried about the Americans. If their carrier was off the coast, they’d have spies operating here.
“No cover. I tell them nothing. In a few days, they will be dead. They know me as a Saudi businessman. If you like, I’ll tell them you’re a Saudi. Saudis finance most of this anyway.”
“No. Tell them nothing. Just let me see them.”
Namjee led the way to an Indian-made jeep, a Mahindi, parked at the end of the runway. “Terrible car, but all I could get here. Not one of India’s better products.”
Tsung tried not to turn an ankle getting across the rubble.
The boats were gleaming and new, utterly foreign in a small harbor that hadn’t had a new building since 1990. There were twenty men with AK-47s guarding the boats, mostly teenagers lying in the warm sun on the stones of the pier. A few older men sat in buggies with heavier weapons. The “technicals.” None of them spared
Tsung a glance. They were high on khat.
Tsung never got out of the Indian jeep. Namjee waved from the pier and the five boats roared into life and drove around the harbor and then out to sea, their powerful engines churning the brackish water and adding a tang of salt mud to the rotting smell of the port.
“They look fast,” Tsung admitted, more impressed than he had expected to be. He raised Namjee’s binoculars again to watch them.
“They might actually do the trick,” Namjee said with grudging admiration. “Now we just put in the C-4 and go.”
“You sound as if you are going yourself.”
“Perish the thought, old chap.” Namjee smiled. “Leave that for Allah’s foot soldiers.”
Suburban Virginia.
Sally Baranowski was waked by the ringing of the telephone. She came awake easily, aware of where she was and who she was; she even had time to glance at the orange numbers of the bedside clock and see that it was after four. In the morning. Sometimes, in her drinking days, she would wake and see the clock and not know whether it was day or night—she had time to remember that, too, as she lifted the phone—and put it to her ear and was glad that Dukas wasn’t there in her bed, because she had a feeling that Dukas was too much for her; he took up too much space, too much energy. She liked him, but he overpowered her. Putting the phone to her ear, she thought that the call might be from him and hoped not, as it would be exactly the kind of crowding that she was beginning to recoil from, and she said, “Yes?” in a voice made husky by sleep.
A pause followed and she knew it was coming to her from a satellite and so it wasn’t Dukas. “Old friend here,” a male voice said.
She knew the voice at once. “Jerry?”
The pause again, and then his laugh, seeming a little forced so that she knew he’d been drinking—probably was drinking at that moment, the phone in one hand and a glass in the other. “You got me in one, sweetie. I’m kind of flattered. How are you?”
She sat up in the bed, pulling the covers over her bare shoulders and pushing the pillow behind her with a fist. “What’re you doing, calling me in the middle of the night—after ten years?” She was laughing, but the sound was half like sobbing.
“Looking for a friend, Sal.”
“Who?”
“You. A friend, I need a friend. A ‘frand,’ as my friend here calls it.”
“Jerry, where are you?”
“In a faraway place, love. Very faraway. Exotic. We don’t mention it on the phone, okay?”
“You’re drinking.”
“I’m feeling creative. Trying to get my shit together, and having a little trouble.” Now he sounded as if he were half-sobbing. She knew the phases of his drinking, or had known them ten years before; maybe his had got worse, or better, or at least different. When he started to mix laughter with sobs, he was pretty well along but still articulate, often funny, sometimes near craziness. She heard a sound from his end, some sort of horn. Jerry laughed. “Bit of a prang here. Bang. Guy in a Toyota took the side off a—what the hell is that, a Hyundai?”
“Are you on the street?”
“You could say that. Yes, you could say that.” Using a public telephone because it was safer—she knew that tactic of his, always cautious, sure that private telephones in foreign places were monitored. “I need a friend, love,” he said.
“You in trouble?”
“You could say that. But—” He might have been taking a drink then; she heard some indecipherable noise. “Had some bad news,” he said. His voice broke. He would be on the edge of self-pity now, she thought. “Some lousy, lousy news.” The sound again, and he said, “I couldn’t think of anybody who would understand except you. You always understand.”
“Jerry, it’s been ten years.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well.”
“I’m sorry if you had bad news.”
“Yeah. Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “Somebody died.” She heard him sniffle. He was actually weeping. Standing there, she thought, on a busy street in some Oriental city, an almost-empty glass in his hand, tears running down his cheeks.
“Can I do anything?”
“You! You already did something. Because you were right, right? You knew what he was, but I didn’t believe—I thought he was a fucking god, and now god is dead, right? You knew god was dead. I hated your guts for it; if we’d still been together, I’d have whacked you one for it. But you were right. God was dead all along. You heard I got the ax, right? I got it for believing that god was alive. Well, now I know you and the rest were right—god was dead the whole time. Life’s a fucking farce.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jer.”
“Oh, ’course you do!” His voice got loud and it began to swoop, the vowels extending into long, honking sounds. “I’m talking about my i-i-i-i-dol, about my little tin g-o-o-o-d, about you-know-who-o-o-o—don’t you, love? No names, please, we’re skittish. No names. No fuck-ing names.”
George Shreed. He meant George Shreed. She was slow to get it, but she got it. “What changed your mind?” She still thought then that he had called her for sympathy, nothing more. She was simply talking him along at that point because he was drunk and an old lover.
After the satellite delay, he said more quietly, “A little man. He had privileged information. In a word, he had the goods. He convinced me, see?”
“What little man?”
“My god’s first runner, how’s that? His gofer. What you’d call a double gofer, because he was a double. You following me, hon? I just learned all this, got a bit-of-a-shock.” He exhaled noisily. “I gotta go.”
“No, Jerry—!” Because she was getting it by then. “Jerry, you still there?”
Her own echo came back, still there? and then his voice, “Still here.”
“Don’t go away!”
“I need a drink, hon. I’m out.”
“Well, hang on just a sec, okay?”
“I’m staying in this really lovely establishment full of young ladies—ready to wait on me hand and foot. For a price. They have lots to drink. Anyway, I’ve stashed my friend the double gofer with them; I have to check on him. See he’s not up to mischief. Sally, I called you because—oh, shit, old times—I need a friend, hon—”
“Jerry, what do you need? Are you in trouble?”
“Not yet. But my little pal won’t stay stashed with the young ladies forever, you follow me? His pals from the other side, from my god’s other side, will catch up with him, and then, oh, shit— How could he do that, Sal? How could he have worked for them?” His voice broke.
She thought he meant the “little man,” but then she understood he meant Shreed. She revised her picture of the man on the other end of the telephone—Oriental street, glass, telephone, but she added a broken heart.
“Are you trying to find a place to stash your gofer, Jer?”
“Yeah, but it won’t work; they’re all over this place.”
“Jer, where are you?”
“Oh—you know. You know. Where I worked for my god when I was young and handsome.”
So, Jakarta. She thought of who was in Jakarta now and thought that nobody there for the Agency now was a friend of his. “Do you want me to go to the home place, Jerry? Ask around among the guys you used to work for?”
“Christ, no. Not a word. They’re to be told nothing! Why you think I’m calling you? Because you’re not one of them.” She heard another traffic sound, more honking. “I need a drink,” he said.
“Jerry, don’t go. Are you there?”
Silence; then: “I guess I am.”
“I know somebody who can help you. Not at the Crystal Palace, okay?”
“He here where I am?”
“Will you promise to call me back?”
“Isn’t that how I got in trouble before?”
That one hurt. That was, indeed, how they had got in trouble before: He had promised to call her, and he had whisked off somewhere on an operation, forgetting to call, and she had
broken up with him. Then she’d met the man she married, and here she was. “Jerry, I want to help you. I can help you. Promise me you’ll call me back. Promise.”
His silence was so long that she thought she’d lost him, and she said his name a couple of times, and after several more seconds he said, “I’m broke. Cleaned out. I can’t protect my guy. What the hell am I gonna do?”
“Jerry, call me back in three hours. Can you promise me to do that? Please?”
“Three hours. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.”
“Jerry, promise! I can help you. Okay? Jerry—” She was still saying Promise? when he hung up and she was alone with the satellite.
Washington.
Dukas came to from an exhausted sleep, arrested in midsnore with the noise of his own snort in his ears. He grabbed for the telephone and fumbled it, rolling on his side to try to recover the phone and see the clock at the same time. “Dukas,” he said in the whisper of a conspirator.
“Mike, it’s Sally. I’m sorry for waking you up, but this is important.”
“Okay, good—good—” He saw that it was twenty after four.
“Meet me. Now.”
“Hey, wha-a-at—?”
“We need to talk. Not on an open phone. Meet me. You know the IHOP on Gallows Road?”
“No—no, can’t say as I do—”
“Get on Gallows Road like you’re coming to my house; it’ll be on the left.”
Dukas sighed. There was no point in protesting. She said it was important, and if she wouldn’t talk about it on an open phone, then the years-long habits of being in Ops were running things, meaning that she had something good and it had to do with the case.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
The telephone woke the Chief of Naval Operations at five-twenty-five. He had been dreaming about flying and woke feeling happy.
“Sir, Admiral Rankin here, sorry to wake you. Something’s come up.”