Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Triffler picked him up right on the dot.

  “Now we call Mister Tashimaya?”

  “Yes.” Triffler took them out of the parking lot, out of the mall area, and up the ramp to the highway.

  “Why exactly couldn’t we have done this before?”

  “I’ve been waiting to get all the ducks in a row, Alan. Once we call him, the whole thing starts moving to the end. I needed a bigger team, certain arrest authorities. As it turns out, I needed the cooperation of the FBI. That all took time.”

  Alan nodded. “I’ve presented my theory on the submarine to SubPac. If they bite, it could go anytime.”

  Triffler didn’t take his eyes from the road. “One step at a time. I’ve got the team. We’re going to do this today, before people get pulled.”

  Alan reached for the cell phone clipped to the dash.

  “Unh-unh,” Triffler said. “We’re doing this from the NCIS office so we can run a trace and do it right.”

  Special Agent Nagel met them in the lobby of the Federal Building. Triffler introduced them without comment. Nagel then guided them to a guard desk where Alan drew a big red badge labeled VISITOR and Triffler showed his badge with casual authority. The elevators were huge and covered in some kind of blast-resistant mesh. A computer-generated voice counted off the floors and neither of the two NCIS agents spoke at all.

  The squad room of the NCIS office in Seattle reminded Alan of the set of a cop show. There was a map of Seattle and Puget Sound, with inset street maps of Navy facilities. There was a corkboard at the end of the room, with all the local players in the Sleeping Dog case pasted to it, including a photo of Alan himself. There were fuzzy surveillance photos of most of the people who had followed Alan around since he arrived. They had license tags pasted over them and, in some cases, names or ID numbers. Lines had been drawn in red to connect some of the players. Alan went up close and saw a photograph of a man in a dark suit. There was no name, just an FBI case number. Most of the red lines started with him.

  “That’s Helmer,” Triffler said. Nagel grunted. There were other men filing into the room, most dressed in short-sleeved shirts and ties with slacks. There was one woman. One man wore a three-piece suit and flashy shoes. Another wore shorts and a T-shirt and carried an open wallet of electronics tools. Triffler introduced them all quickly, and Alan knew he wouldn’t remember their names. They all looked like cops. One was from the FBI, but they all had a certain sameness to them.

  The guy with the tools set up a telephone with some electronic equipment attached.

  “Okay,” Triffler said. “This should be it. Alan will make the call and get us a site, and then we’re a go.”

  “What if they set the meet for next week?” The guy in the flashy shoes. He seemed to want to say more. Triffler cut him off with a wave.

  “Let’s deal with that when it happens. Everybody ready? Trace on? Let’s go.” He motioned Alan to the telephone.

  Alan had been scribbling a phone script at a desk. He sat, reviewed the script one more time, and was handed a folder.

  “Meeting site,” said one of the guys. “If he doesn’t have his own picked out.” Alan riffled through it, saw it was a park in downtown Seattle. He reached for the phone.

  “It’ll dial itself. Just let it do its thing,” said the tech guy.

  Alan picked up and listened to the phone dialing. It rang three times and there was a distinct click, as if it were going to an answering machine, and then it rang again.

  “Changed lines. Fancy,” said the tech guy, doing something on a laptop.

  “Hello,” said a strong male voice. It echoed a little in the squad room, broadcast on speakers.

  “Hello? May I speak to Mister Tashimaya?”

  A slight hesitation. “Speaking. May I help you?” The voice was strong, just barely accented. Educated.

  “Mister Tashimaya, I’m investigating a series of incidents regarding radio transmissions in the Seattle area. I understand you had a problem with your ham radio license that might have a bearing on my study. Could we get together?”

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Alan Craik. I’m an officer in the Navy.”

  “Yes, Mister Craik. Am I under investigation?”

  “No, sir. I’m just interested in hearing about your ham radio problems.” Alan didn’t like this part, because if it were all for real, they’d have another level of cover to keep Mister Tashimaya from knowing why they wanted to talk to him. After all, they were supposed to believe he might be a foreign agent. But the wheels within wheels meant that it shouldn’t matter. Mister Tashimaya should want the meeting.

  “I’d rather not talk about this here,” the voice said. “Perhaps we could meet. I have some things that might interest you.”

  Alan wondered if Mister Tashimaya was reading from a script. He looked up at Triffler, who made a motion with his hand that meant go on.

  “That would be fine, sir. Where would be convenient? I could come to your house, if that would be easier.”

  “No, please. I would prefer my part in this was not known at my house.”

  “Would you like to meet at . . .” Alan had looked at the meeting site under his hand. “Do you know Falkland Park?”

  Alan looked at Triffler, who looked at Nagel. Nagel nodded and went to the map. “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll meet you at the fountain there. How will I know you?”

  “I’ll be wearing a blue ball cap. Please, you carry a copy of Time magazine.”

  “Sure.” Alan felt like he was getting instructions from Triffler. He scribbled it on his script, blue ball cap and Time. Around him, ten cops were doing the same.

  “I will identify myself by saying ‘There are rats and alligators in the subway here.’ You will please further identify yourself by saying ‘There are vultures on the high buildings.’ ”

  Something about the diction of the sentence and the use of the word “further” made Alan sure that the voice at the other end was reading from a script.

  “When?” he asked.

  Another hesitation. It occurred to Alan that Tashimaya was in a room like this one, looking at others for confirmation just as he was. “Friday,” said the voice. “I would like to meet you Friday, at one-fifteen.”

  “Friday at one-fifteen,” Alan said, writing on his pad.

  “I’ll have something for you,” the voice said.

  “That’s great,” Alan said. “I’ll be there.” He put the phone back in the cradle and waited.

  “He’s off. Connection cut,” said the tech guy.

  Triffler clapped his hands together. “Okay, folks,” he said. “We have a lot to do.”

  400 NM NNE of Mombasa, Kenya.

  Soleck was afraid to land. He couldn’t get around it. The nearer the landing came, the more he thought about it, and the tension in his gut had gone from a little flutter to a cold knot. Every time he touched the subject in his mind, he felt it in his gut.

  Don’t dwell on it, Rafehausen had said. Don’t think about the landing. Nice. Really helpful.

  His hand still hurt from the last landing.

  It didn’t help that he had six hours to think about it as he bored holes in the sky over the western Indian Ocean. The S-3s were out constantly, flying ASW missions over the open ocean to clear safe boxes ahead of the carrier. When they weren’t searching for the submarine, they were flying surface-search missions, identifying every potential adversary in the sea around them. Lack of aircrew meant a lack of aircraft, and the aviators who weren’t sick were flying nearly around the clock. Soleck tried to believe that his bad landings might have something to do with fatigue. He tried to believe a lot of things, but, inside, he had begun to doubt that he could put the plane on the deck.

  His stomach gave another lurch.

  “I’ve got two of those cigarette boats coming out of Mogadishu,” Craw said.

  Soleck was glad for a moment. The cigarette boats were a hot topic in the intelligenc
e spaces. LCDR Craik had sent them reports on cigarette boats all the way from his temporary duty station in Washington State. Soleck was a reader, and he had read the traffic and the background. He’d tried to dump tension by building computer sims of cigarette boats for the MARI computer. He had wasted a day on it.

  “They’re really goin’,” said “Baldy” Baldwin, a borrowed Tacco from the VS squadron. He wasn’t sick. That made him aircrew. “Hey, this MARI thing is somethin’ else. Hell, you can see the engines clear as day!”

  “How fast are they going?” asked Soleck.

  “Almost sixty knots, due east into the sunrise.”

  “Now they’re turning south.”

  They watched the boats. Craw swept other sectors, but the attention of the crew was on the two cigarette boats. Even Soleck began to watch them as it became clearer where they were headed. They weren’t headed for the carrier.

  But they were headed for where the carrier had been yesterday. Craw saw it first, and put a marker on the screen.

  “How do they know?” Baldwin asked. “Those boats don’t even have a surface-search radar that will reach out fifteen miles. No masts.”

  Somehow, it made the boats more ominous, and their presence was like the threat of some little, poisonous insect out on the ocean. The flight back was silent.

  Soleck brought them in to an adequate landing, and Baldwin left them to debrief in the intel center and pass the word. Someone was giving the CV’s location to the boats. Ninety frames farther forward, Soleck got out of his flight harness to find that the LSO thought he had been too slow into the break and too long in the groove and hadn’t given him an okay on the landing. Soleck shook his head, wanting to whine that it wasn’t fair. He wondered what the hell he was doing wrong.

  NAS Whidbey Island.

  Alan watched the JOTS terminal repeater with a cold cup of forgotten coffee in his hand, his eyes tracking the movement of the two cigarette boats identified by his S-3s half a world away. They came out from Mogadishu and then ran down the coast for hundreds of miles before making their dash out into the open sea. It took hours.

  Alan couldn’t figure their role. Either they were trying to locate the carrier for some other attack, or the carrier was already located and they were the attack. The danger of small boats loaded with explosives had been present for the Navy since their first hostile encounters with the Iranian Republican Guard boats in the Persian Gulf way back in the eighties. Most sailors thought of small, fast boats as potential threats. But Alan couldn’t work out how a handful of cigarette boats planned to threaten the battle group in the open ocean.

  He laid a hand on the terminal as if to encourage it, much as he would when he was in a plane with a reluctant back end. He thought of Soleck and Craw and Stevens and the rest of his det. Then he scrolled the roller ball across the Indian Ocean to India and then past Sri Lanka to the Strait of Malacca and so west of Borneo, where he could see a detached circle marking a friendly surface ship. It was so far from the Seventh Fleet exercise area that he clicked on it, and it identified itself as USS Jackson Baldwin.

  And the STU next to him rang. It wasn’t his, so he let it ring twice, and then, when no one else picked up, he answered.

  “Whidbey Island Intel Center, Lieutenant-Commander Craik speaking; this is not a secure line. May I help you?” The spiel reminded him of being a squadron duty officer, back in the day. He hadn’t done the phone routine in months.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Alan Craik, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Going secure.” By now, Alan knew the voice belonged to Captain Manley at Bremerton, and his stomach gave a little flutter.

  “I have you secure.”

  “I have you the same, ma’am.”

  “There’s an attack boat going to sea in two days. It will weigh from Bremerton at 0400. As soon as she’s clear of shipping, she’ll trail a VLF/ULF antenna.”

  “Thanks, ma’am.”

  “You’ll be ready?”

  “Ma’am, this is put together with some spit and some baling wire. But yes, ma’am. We’ll be ready.”

  “Then go get ’em, Commander. I doubt there’s another gold oak leaf in the Navy who could get our sailing schedule changed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This is on my dime, Commander. If you fuck up, the head rolling around on the floor is mine.”

  “Won’t happen, ma’am.”

  “Glad to hear it. Go get ’em.”

  She hung up. Alan felt a surge of loyalty toward her, although he had met her only twice. She had come through. He didn’t need to be told how much she had risked. But he was so sure. His stomach gave a little twinge, and he wondered how sure he was.

  Manila.

  A Navy COD came in over the city as a cluster of moving lights in the darkness, turned into its final approach, and glided down to kiss the concrete far out on the runway. Instead of taxiing toward the terminal, it turned toward the cargo area. Blue lights showed it the way. Again, however, it turned aside and moved carefully toward a charter jet that was waiting by itself.

  Six NCIS and Master-of-Arms Program specialists ringed the aircraft, all armed. When the COD cut its engines and the door opened, two trotted forward to lead the way to the bigger jet. Jerry Piat, the Li family, and Special Agent Ken Huang walked behind them into the darkness.

  Twenty minutes later, the jet was airborne for Washington.

  22

  Patuxent River Naval Air Station.

  Special Agent Ken Huang was big in all directions, maybe part-Polynesian, Dukas thought, like one of those six-by-six tackles who show up in Big Ten starting lineups. They shook hands; Huang punched his shoulder. “Good to go, man!” Dukas thought that Huang wanted to high-five him, and he winced away.

  “How’d it go in Jakarta?” Dukas asked, to distract the huge man.

  “Piece a cake. Little spicy at the end, no problem.” Huang grinned.

  “What’s this guy Piat like?” Dukas said. He had started to sweat; the day was hot, a ferocious sun beating down and the wind like a slap from a hot towel.

  “Better now he’s sober. Okay guy. Bitter about the Agency. Doesn’t trust us much, either.” Huang grabbed Dukas’s elbow as if he were going to pitch him over his shoulder. “The guy he brought in is the real thing, Dukas. Piat’s very protective, plus the guy’s dependent, so I didn’t get much yet.”

  “Where have we got them?”

  “About a mile away. Former officer housing. Kind of run-down, but it’s isolated.”

  “Keep on him.”

  They went inside. They were keeping Piat in a former EM barracks that had been opened for the purpose. He was the only man in it, with four guards, and visitors like Dukas who came and went. The place smelled musty, and their footsteps echoed in the old wooden building. Huang opened a door, and Dukas stepped inside and saw Jerry Piat.

  Dukas felt a pang of jealousy: If looks were what mattered to a woman like Sally Baranowski, Piat swept the board. He had gray-black hair, a chiseled face, knotty arms below a black T-shirt. If he was a regular boozer, he somehow kept in shape. When he looked at Dukas, his face showed a small, fleeting spasm of surprise, like a tic.

  “Mike Dukas, NCIS.” He showed his badge.

  Piat didn’t look at the badge.

  I would have looked at the badge, Dukas thought.

  Piat, a small, confused frown on his face, slowly touched Dukas’s hand, then took it in his and gripped it. “Thanks for getting us out.” He sounded not so much grateful as resigned.

  Well, that was a start.

  There were three straight chairs and a metal Navy table with a gray rubber top that had probably felt the imprint of signatures on orders for the Korean War. Dukas sat on one side and Piat sat on the other, and Dukas made some small talk about the accommodations, the food—was it okay?—the weather—too hot for you? How was the flight? Piat was a pro; he knew what they were there for. He sat in a hard chair, legs crossed, answering
meaningless questions meaninglessly. Then there was a hesitation, and Dukas said, “Okay.”

  Piat grinned. “Okay.”

  “How long did you work for George Shreed?”

  Piat frowned. It was not what he had expected. “Year. Fourteen months. Look, Li—”

  “In Jakarta. You worked for Shreed in Jakarta.”

  “You know all this, right?”

  “That where you met Bobby Li?”

  “Right.”

  “He worked for Shreed.”

  “He was a kid, yeah.” Piat meant that Bobby Li had been only a kid and had been easily influenced. “Bobby lo—” He had started to say “loved” and stopped himself. “George was a father figure to him.”

  “For you, too?”

  Piat shot him a look, the first forthright one he had given. Stay out!

  “What are your plans?” Dukas said.

  “What the hell does that mean? I don’t have any plans! Why the hell do you think I called Baranowski?”

  “You mentioned money to her. Said you were broke.” That was a question, although he didn’t make it sound like one.

  Surprisingly, Piat smiled. “Flat,” he said.

  “We can help.”

  “You’re goddam well going to help.” Piat laughed again—the real thing this time. “Look, Dukas, let’s be clear here: You’re any port in a storm, okay? Baranowski said she knew somebody who could help. I needed help! I didn’t know—” His voice petered out. He looked away.

  “You didn’t know it would be me.” Dukas leaned forward so that his head was only eighteen inches from Piat’s. “So what?”

  “We were talking about money.”

  “No, we’re talking about you and me. You said, ‘I didn’t know it would be you.’ ”

  “I was going to say that I didn’t think it would be the Navy.”

  “So, how much money?” Dukas said. He was thinking that he didn’t want to let Piat know yet that he knew all about Jakarta and Sleeping Dog and Seattle. Everything in good time, and this was not a good time. Huang or somebody else could get all that. What Dukas needed was the comm plans in Chinese Checkers so he could make a date with his Chinese E-mail friend.