Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “When was that sub coming out?” he asked, his hand selecting “Front Seat Only.”

  “Yeah, man, I hear you. She should be leaving port right now, and that means my supposed spy should have sent his transmission an hour ago. Longer. Three hours ago would have been nice.”

  “We’re going to need gas soon, buddy.”

  Alan was used to carrier ops, where gas was available in the air. Whidbey Island didn’t offer much in the way of airborne refueling, and what it did have was beyond his capability to pry loose in the three-hour telephone spree he had logged as soon as Triffler had dropped him back at the base. He had had to cut several details because they were not doable. Fuel was one.

  “We’ve got gas for another hour and a half.”

  “I don’t mean to burst your bubble, buddy, and you know I’ll go to the mat for you. But this is my Optar we’re burning.” “Optar” was a Navy unit’s monthly allocation of things like fuel and spare parts. In a peacetime training cycle, a small, two-plane detachment had very limited amounts of Optar and had to choose its flights well. So far, Alan’s plan had both planes and a borrowed P-3 aloft for five hours without any use of the MARI or any other system. It wouldn’t look good on a monthly report, and both Alan and Surfer knew that, while it could be covered, it could also be used by the Fleet Imaging Command as a further argument for their superior management skills to be placed in operational control of the MARI detachment. Alan felt the pressure like a knot of rubber bands in his stomach. Sometimes he’d think about the tactical details for a moment and the knot would squirm a little and loosen, and then he’d think about Surfer’s det, or his responsibility to Captain Manley, and the knot would tighten.

  “Damn it, Surfer, I can’t make the spy transmit.”

  “Whoa, man, I—”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I know. But, damn it!” Alan pounded his open hand on the canopy support. “I still think I’m right. Maybe the spy is so far up in SubPac that he’s already on to our little operation and he won’t transmit. What do I know?”

  “I was just venting. I’m here with you on this. And my det is fried unless we get a miracle, anyway, so I’d rather burn my Optar trying this harebrained stunt than logging training hours that won’t mean much.” Surfer sounded tired. Alan turned and looked at him, really looked past the stylish wraparound shades and the suntan. Command was taking its toll on Surfer, even now as they flew. Just as it was on Alan. The lines around Surfer’s mouth weren’t all laugh lines anymore.

  “Can we send oh-three back to the beach for gas?” Alan felt a little guilty asking for Surfer’s supply of Optar, but he couldn’t see any help for it.

  Surfer gave him a look. It was lost in the helmet and the sunglasses, but Alan suspected that Surfer was adding up his dwindling resources and his trust in Alan. They both thought about tired crews and no replacements, and lost training, and the odds.

  “In for a penny,” Surfer said, and called the other plane.

  NCIS HQ.

  Dukas was in his office at seven, telling himself after a night’s sleep that they’d survive Piat’s flight—it wasn’t the end of the world, although it was going to cost him an ass-raking by Kasser, his boss’s boss. He was riding on two intel coups, however, the ID and capture of the fake “agent” in Seattle, and the acquisition of the Chinese double, Bobby Li. Piat must have decided to run when he told Dukas he’d turn over the Chinese Checkers disk. Well, that wasn’t such a bad trade.

  Leslie came in half an hour early. She seemed to have decided that “appropriate” meant looking like an overweight nun in casuals, but she was so eager that Dukas felt he shouldn’t tell her that drab and appropriate didn’t have to be the same thing. As it turned out, she was way ahead of him.

  “Claire’s taking me shopping Thursday after work.”

  Dukas had to think who Claire was, then got it—Claire Sandow, the best-dressed woman. “Good,” he said.

  “My boyfriend’s pissed.” Leslie made a face. “I’d been saving this money for, you know, special clothes, and he goes, ‘What about us?’ and I tried to tell him some things were more important than other things—you know, appropriate—and so we had this big fight, and—” She shrugged, but Dukas knew she was hurt. He was thinking about what “special clothes” could mean, and then he had a vision of Leslie and her boyfriend shopping at Victoria’s Secret, picking out “special clothes” to satisfy his fantasies—maybe hers, too, but on her nickel—

  “You’ll make up,” Dukas said. He found himself hoping they didn’t.

  And then the telephone rang.

  “Dukas,” he said.

  “Carl Menzes. You heard?”

  Dukas didn’t let the possibly threatening question deflate him. “Heard what?”

  “Piat? Woman named Baranowski?”

  Dukas felt himself go still. “What am I supposed to hear?” He tried to think. What did Menzes know—that Piat had called Baranowski from Jakarta? That they had picked Piat up? But he wouldn’t have said “Have you heard?” if he had meant that. Dukas was trying to put Piat and Sally together, trying to get it—

  And Menzes said, “Sally Baranowski, Agency employee. She was found dead in a rental car last night. Professional hit.”

  “Wha— But— Hey, I sort of knew her—” His heart was saying, No, God, he’s lying; these things don’t happen—

  “Yeah, I thought so,” Menzes was saying. “She’d been Shreed’s assistant. Christ, I’m sorry if she was, uh, close—”

  “Oh, no, no—” Why was he denying it? Or was that the truth, that they hadn’t ever been close? “But still, Jeez, she was— I don’t get it, Carl—a professional hit?” Dead is a hard word. A hard concept. Dukas had seen dead a few times, had probably even caused it once or twice, but dead didn’t apply to a woman he liked, had treated badly, wanted, had wanted, what the hell—

  Menzes made it quick and as clean as he could: shotgun through the driver’s-side window, massive damage. “Cops ID’d her from her wallet, but confirmation had to be done from fingerprints. But they called us as soon as they saw her Agency connection. We got to her house about an hour later. Nobody there, but signs, you know. Cups and glasses, couple plates—two people in the bed, we thought. Our guys went through it, looking for anything as to why she’d be hit like that. Lifted some fingerprints from a glass and got them back about an hour ago. Jerry Piat.” Menzes cleared his throat. “You remember I told you about Piat?”

  Dukas was trying to think of what to say. He didn’t want to tell Menzes right then that he had had Piat and had lost him. When had Menzes told him about Piat? When he was talking about who had had contact with the Sleeping Dog file. “Yeah, uh, some Ops guy who, let’s see—signed off on the stuff in Ray Suter’s office, right?” And what Menzes was saying was that Jerry Piat had been in Sally’s bed. And then she had been in his car. So probably they had both been in her bed. Did that make her a slut? A dead slut? Was that what broke his heart, that she had betrayed him?

  “Right. We thought he was in Jakarta. Piat and Baranowski were an old number, long time ago before she got married. I guess they got it going again. Anyway, we goosed the local cops to get active on the prints from the rental car she was killed in; they got at least one print that’s Piat’s. Pretty clear, I think, that it was his car—hers was still in her driveway. The way I reconstruct it, she comes out, it’s night, she takes his car because hers is blocked. Then—boom.”

  Dukas flinched. Boom. “I—” Dukas cleared his throat. “Why’d you call me, Carl?”

  “I know you’re hot to trot on the Sleeping Dog thing; I heard your guys made a good arrest up in Seattle; I thought there might be a connection.”

  “You heard about that.” Dukas was seeing Sally walking into her kitchen in the middle of the night, sipping horrible eggnog, kissing him with the sweet taste of it on her mouth—

  “Yeah, your people are blowing their horn. I thought, if Piat was in on Sleeping Dog early, maybe somebody from up in Seattle th
ought he’d blown the op or something, they’d tried to, you know, get back at him.”

  “Kill him?”

  “Stranger things have happened. You haven’t arrested the top guys up there, have you?”

  “Not yet.” Dukas didn’t say that the FBI wouldn’t let him. His head was still swarming with ideas about Sally and Piat. It astonished him that she had gone from him to Piat in a matter of days. She wasn’t that kind of woman, he’d have said, and then he wondered what he meant by that. She was a vulnerable, lonely woman that I didn’t do enough for, he told himself. Maybe he did.

  Was that why Piat ran away? To be with Sally? And was that why she hadn’t called him? Oh, shit—

  “So where’s Piat now?” Dukas said.

  “No idea. Rental car’s not in his name. Apartment’s empty. He’s got to be on the run.”

  Dukas waited for Menzes to say that they’d found bugs in Piat’s apartment, some sign of entry, but there was nothing. Was Menzes holding back? Well, there was no point in letting his own people try for a FISA warrant to go in anymore. The silence got too long, and Dukas said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything, Carl. Piat was just a name to me. I heard it from you.”

  “Yeah. I thought you might have made some kind of connection.”

  “No, sorry.” Dukas scowled at a new idea. “Any chance Piat killed Baranowski?”

  “Local cops like that, but I don’t. Full of holes.” Menzes hesitated. “You’ll tell me if you learn anything, won’t you?” He sounded doubtful, as if he already suspected something. Dukas told him he would, absolutely, and hung up. He sat there, staring at his desk, then put his face in his hands, and he was silent so long that Leslie came to the plastic barrier and peered through and then came around it and said, “Mister Dukas? Mister Dukas, you okay?”

  Dukas sat up. He tried to smile at her. She told him that he was working too hard, and he, thinking of Sally Baranowski in the night, sitting safe and isolated behind the window of a car, and then the gunshots blasting the window and her head, blowing out the far window and the windshield and spattering her over the grass and the trees and the pavement outside, decided to tough it out. He opened his mouth to say something like, Little setback in a case, nothing, and he said instead, “My girl was murdered last night.”

  He said it because he knew that he could say that to Leslie and she’d get it. “Oh, you poor guy,” she said in her little-girl voice, and he cracked. She kept her emotions so accessible that they jumped the distance between them like a spark, a permission to feel, and he felt his face crumple.

  Seattle.

  Marvin Helmer had holed up for a day and a night at a cottage in the Olympics. His bowels were bad; his hands trembled; he had three too many drinks. He thought he was going to be busted. But, then, nothing happened.

  Federal agents—his lawyer said “Navy cops,” which made no sense, but Helmer thought of Alan Craik and saw where there might be a connection—had arrested two of his undercover officers as material witnesses. And they’d got poor old Tashimaya, who had to be the most harmless illegal in Seattle, plus a department photographer who was so out of it he might as well have been dead. But they hadn’t come after Helmer.

  What did it mean? It meant either, A, they had more on him and were waiting to lower the boom; or, B, they had nothing and were waiting to sweat the material witnesses. Who knew nothing: Tashimaya thought he was working out a debt to the cops; the two material witnesses believed they were on a legitimate stakeout; the photographer didn’t know zip and thought he was simply recording a crime for use in court.

  “They haven’t got anything,” Helmer said to his lawyer. “They can’t have anything.”

  “I’ll check.”

  So, after twenty-four hours, he told Helmer that it would be better if he came back to Seattle and went to his office and did his work just as if nothing had happened and he was the most innocent man in the world. “Which of course you are, of course you are—!” the lawyer said. He made a lot of money by never really asking his clients if they’d done the things that prosecutors said they had.

  “It was all part of a legitimate investigation,” Helmer said.

  “Of course.”

  “A naval officer we had reason to believe was conspiring with a foreign power.”

  “Of course.”

  “Which is why I can’t talk about it. National security.”

  “Of course.”

  So Helmer kept saying “legitimate investigation” and “national security,” and finally he really did come to believe that, Goddamit, it had all blown over, and he was home free. He was sheathed in Teflon. The Teflon cop.

  Which would have been news to the FBI, who had a tap on his phone at the cabin, at his office, and at his home.

  Off Seattle.

  The other det plane, oh-three, landed first, got gas, and the crew stretched their legs. The tower at Whidbey gave them a priority channel to stay in touch. As the day got brighter, the possibility of a transmission seemed to wane. Alan checked his signal library for the seventieth time, checking yet again to be sure that he had not dropped a zero on the signal’s frequency or made another attention-to-detail error, but the ESM equipment was old hat to the Taccos and most of the Sensos, and he had lots of backup. The library was correct. The equipment was working. The enemy was just not cooperating.

  The tower kept them current with oh-three’s progress, without breaking their emissions plan. Oh-three was off the ground again by 0600, and Surfer turned them in toward Whidbey as soon as oh-three had her wheels in the well. The sky was fully lit and there wasn’t a trace of cloud. Alan played with his radio, tempted to broadcast a request to the tower that they call SubPac, but, even encrypted, the message would be long and identifiable. He told himself repeatedly that he had to stay with his plan, and that if SubPac had not sent a boat to sea, they’d have warned him of the fact. The backseat was quiet. The other planes were quiet. Alan Craik was alone with the responsibilities of his decisions, and worry ate at him.

  Ding.

  The tone sounded in his helmet. He looked twice at his tiny front-seat screen to make sure that the vector displayed there was within parameters. He heard a whoop from the backseat. The vector pointed over the ocean toward land, Puget Sound and Seattle.

  Somewhere over toward Seattle, someone had activated the uplink transmissions that were the trademark of Sleeping Dog.

  “Game on, Surfer,” he said, and felt like whooping himself.

  Under the Pacific.

  The Chinese captain kept his boat just above periscope depth, his antenna peeking above the water. He surfaced three times a day to receive transmissions, and the tension of these moments got worse every time he did it. But it was always this third time, when daylight made any surfacing attempt doubly dangerous because of the risk of visual detection, that really preyed on him. The aggregate of tensions from the previous attempts seemed to float in his bloodstream like a toxin that grew stronger with each success. He had started afraid, and now his fear was a choking thing that filled his mind every time he was forced to execute his orders. Sometimes he hated the spy code-named Jewel. And as the days ticked down to the end of his operational time in the danger zone of the American coast, his fear mounted. The odds were rising. He could feel them.

  He had his antennas up less than a minute before the message came. It was a burst transmission that lasted less than two seconds. He would have to wait for some minutes while his technicians turned the burst into a usable code, and then he would have to make sense of it himself, in his cabin, and retransmit if the message justified such an action.

  “Down antennas. Down periscope. Make revolutions for two knots and dive to 250 meters.”

  He had no intention of spending that time biting his nails on the surface, and his boat fled for the safety of the deep.

  There was no repeat of the transmission. Alan looked at the one line on his screen and thought again of the beauty of the system. It was unlikely
that they would ever triangulate the transmission, although the three widely separate aircraft had immediately shared their vectors via datalink.

  Alan switched his radio to the prearranged frequency and clicked his mike.

  “All aircraft, this is Red Jacket. Go. Repeat, go.”

  All three immediately began to sweep their surface-search radars and MARI systems over the ocean. But their target had already gone deep, and there was nothing to see, not even a periscope.

  Alan turned to Surfer. “He’s out there, damn it. He must have been up near the surface to get the transmission.”

  “And he’ll have to come up to retransmit.”

  Alan grunted. “Of course, we’re searching four thousand square miles of surface with three planes. He could be well off to the south of here.” He was going down his own lines of disbelief. He’d set the surface-search boxes based on prior contacts—none of which was a reliable guide.

  “Hey! Relax, Commander. Your guy did his signal. You said the rest was gravy.”

  “I want him.” Alan sounded fierce, predatory.

  “I want some fresh coffee. I’m going to get gas.”

  “We haven’t finished our box!”

  “We need gas. He ain’t right here, and he won’t go anywhere fast. Look, Alan, I believe. He transmitted. There may be a sub out here. If so, we have several chances at him, as you said yourself. Stay the course, man. Let’s get some gas.”

  Alan nodded, silent, as all his doubts came back to plague him.

  NCIS HQ.

  Dukas had talked himself down from his reaction to Sally’s death; he had left the office, driven around, actually gone into a bar—something he had not done in years—and had one drink. He’d made it last an hour, and then, dry-eyed and gloomy, he had driven back to the office. He had a million things to do, and he put them all aside and called Myeroff, the FBI honcho in Seattle.

  “I want Helmer,” he said to Myeroff.