Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Myeroff started to shout. He must have been in a lot of confrontations; he believed in going directly for the kill. The sense of his shouting was that they had an agreement, which was that Helmer belonged to the FBI no matter what the NCIS had on him.

  “I want him.”

  “You goddam well can’t have him! We agreed!”

  “Things have changed.”

  “Nothing’s changed!”

  “I got a new charge.”

  “Oh, yeah—what?”

  “Murder.” Dukas had worked it out that Helmer had tried to kill Piat and had gotten Sally instead. It was the least he could do, grabbing Helmer.

  “That is new,” Myeroff said more calmly. “But you can’t have him. Two weeks. We need two weeks. Then you can get in line.”

  “He contracted out a murder.”

  “I don’t care if he contracted out World War III. We got an agreement. He’s ours.”

  They both shouted for a while. It made Dukas feel tired. Finally, he said, “Go to hell,” and hung up. So this is grief, he thought. Can’t even manage a little revenge. Made worse by the fact that he knew that Myeroff was right.

  He tried to distract himself by absorbing what was on the Chinese Checkers disk. The three meeting sites were in Jakarta, Pakistan, and Nairobi. Pakistan was out because it was too hard to get in and out of, way over by the Kashmir border. Jakarta was bad because the Chinese were thick on the ground and the other meeting had gone so wrong there. He liked Nairobi, and he guessed that Rathunter might, too. If not Nairobi, then Jakarta, but it was a distant second.

  He would need a countersurveillance team in place, plus the extra eyes and muscle to carry off a hostile meeting. He ran quickly over the possibilities, made a list, the first name Triffler’s, then Huang’s, which he lined through almost as soon as he had made it because Huang was needed with Bobby Li. He put down three special agents he knew could be made available from D.C. and then wrote “three from Naples/Bahrain,” if they met in Nairobi, and “three from Manila” if the meet was Jakarta. He stared at the scanty list and then added Harry O’Neill’s name.

  Could he make it work?

  Under the Pacific.

  It took more than an hour to decrypt Jewel’s transmission. The captain read the message twice and his gut clenched. An unexpected deployment of an American attack boat was relatively unprecedented and had to be relayed to Beijing immediately, which meant surfacing again in broad daylight. He debated holding the message until dark and decided that such an action would be in breach of his orders about the sensitive nature of Jewel’s transmissions.

  He didn’t want to be ordered to follow the attack boat. It was far quieter than he was and would dive better. It would be quiet at speeds where his boat’s cavitation and auxiliaries would give him away like a beacon. Any order to shadow an American hunter-submarine would quickly result in his detection and prosecution. Humiliation. The captain did not think his masters were above such decisions.

  His face was pale from being too long undersea. He was losing his hair. He thought of Jewel, alone among the enemy and living at risk of instant capture and humiliation, if not worse. He bit the nail on his left thumb, chewing it so savagely that his thumb began to bleed again. He had virtually no nails on his left hand.

  He swept the remnants of his decoding into his safe. He spun the lock and walked slowly from his cabin to the bridge. The officer of the watch leaped from his command chair and stood at attention, even as a sonarman called for “attention on deck, captain on the bridge.”

  “Helm, bow up. Bring us to periscope depth.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  NAS Whidbey Island.

  Alan never left the plane while it was on the ground, and he kept the back end live on auxiliaries through the turnaround. The rest of the crew ducked out to refill thermoses. Alan never took his mind off the problem. They were gassed and in the air in less than thirty minutes, one of the acts of efficiency that marked the naval service at its best and never drew rewards or even comment, apart from some mumbled praise from hurrying aviators. Alan swore he’d get the crew chief something if they got the still-uneventuated submarine.

  Other planes were launching now, and they had to wait in line as a series of EA-6B Prowlers launched ahead of them into the morning breeze. The EA-6Bs had the most powerful ESM suites in naval aviation, and Alan wished, again, that he had had the prep time to involve them. They turned out over Puget Sound and hurried west into the bright light of full day.

  Alan had switched himself into the backseat, trading the place of honor for a full screen and control of his own ESM gear. He checked the library and then set his screen to show every contact, no matter what frequency it represented, within the parameters identifiable by his plane. Instantly the space around Seattle began to fill with hits representing cellular phone users. He thought he saw a millimeter-wave police radar away toward the Olympic Mountains before their altitude cut those signals off, and he began to sort generic surface-search radars out to sea. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he wanted to see everything in his search box.

  Then he ran his radar and compared. The computer in his back end compared the data and began to match emitters and radar blips, automatically sorting merchant ships. Alan killed the automatic sorting and did it himself. There weren’t so many emitters and radar returns that he couldn’t do it himself, and he wanted an anomaly. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew he wanted something out of the ordinary.

  AW3 Lennox fought the urge to pick his nose and watched LCDR Craik as he raced from screen to screen, picking up data and depositing it on classification pages, locating radar bananas and comparing them, imaging blips with the MARI gear and then adding emitters. He classified twenty-two surface contacts in less than ten minutes. Lennox couldn’t even follow his fingers. “Awesome,” he muttered, and then looked panic-stricken when he realized he had spoken into a live mike.

  “Know what I’m doing, Mister Lennox?” Craik sounded happy. Lennox couldn’t remember if anyone had ever called him “mister” before.

  “Classifying surface contacts.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Not that fast, sir.”

  “Can you use the imaging function on MARI?”

  “Oh, yeah! Yes, sir.” He mumbled the last.

  “Then start imaging anything I’ve marked, okay? Just get an image and give it a number corresponding to the ID I’ve given it, so I can compare it to my emitters, okay?”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Get the IDs right, mind you, Mister Lennox.”

  “Why—?” Lennox had a question, but the inhuman concentration on the officer next to him reminded him of Mister Data on Star Trek, and it was a little scary when it was for real.

  “Why what, Mister Lennox?”

  “Nothing. Sir.”

  Alan leaned back and stretched his arms over his head.

  “Why what, Mister Lennox? Don’t get shy on me.”

  “Why not let the automated system do it?”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for, Mister Lennox. So I want to see it all for myself, just in case the automated system classifies something in a way I might not agree with.”

  Lennox was already imaging his third blip, working around the screen in the order of LCDR Craik’s ID numbers. He had no idea what Craik was after, but he thought he might learn something, so he put his head down and went to work.

  Pax River.

  Special Agent Huang hid his own frustration at being kept in the States. He wanted to be with his family, but he had to put on a good face with Bobby Li if he was going to get information from him. It pissed Huang off that Li was with his family, but he knew you can’t fight city hall.

  “Hey, Bobby,” he said. It was their second session of the day. Bobby Li looked at him with something like relief because it was Huang and not one of the two other NCIS interrogators, who were both Anglo and playing tough. Huang knew that he wa
s being set up to be Bobby Li’s “frand.” He could be here for months. But he’d damned well get his family there, and good housing, too, if he was going to be the new tin god to this pathetic little jerk.

  “How we doing, Bobby?” He asked some polite questions—were his kids okay? Anything they needed from the PX? His wife happy? Anybody want to see a chaplain or a doctor? Then he got down to work.

  “Your Chinese control, Bobby.”

  “Yeah, Mister Chen.”

  “No, the other one.” Dukas had already given Huang what Piat had told him. “The one who told you to be in the Orchid House.”

  “Loyalty Man.”

  “No, the one above him. Come on, Bobby, I know about him. I want some details, you know?”

  Bobby got the panicky look that Huang knew meant that things were moving too fast. Bobby’s face seemed to get longer, and he wet his lips; his eyes flicked around the room as if looking for something he had misplaced. He said, “Where’s Andy?”

  Andy was Piat—Huang always had to remind himself of this. “Andy’s busy.”

  “I like to see him.”

  “Hey, Bobby, I asked you a question, man. Let’s focus, okay?”

  Bobby had some idea of his value to them. Received wisdom in the spy business said that he should spin out what he knew for as long as he could. Now, he was being asked to give up really good stuff on only the second day. “Not sure what you referring to,” he said.

  Huang laughed. He had to force the laugh at first, then got it more easily as it went on. Finally, Bobby Li was laughing, too. “You can’t shit a shitter,” Huang said. He whacked Bobby on the shoulder. “You doin’ good, man, and I don’t blame you for not givin’ the store away. But I got a boss wants this stuff today, you know what I’m sayin’?” Huang poured them both tea from a thermos and set out a plate of sweet cakes that he had had sent in from Chinatown. “Give me this stuff today, I’ll lay off. How’s that? Give you a day off tomorrow, you help me out today. How about it?”

  “Andy’s my frand,” Bobby said.

  “Right, Andy’s your friend, but Andy’s got troubles of his own. You got to think of his side of it, Bobby. Andy’s got troubles of his own. Hey, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Kind of.” Bobby’s smooth face creased with unhappiness. He wanted to be back in Jakarta, clearly. “I never going home, right?”

  “I won’t shit you, Bobby. I don’t know. You’re a smart guy, lot of experience. Figure it out. If the Chinese get you, your ass is grass, do I make myself clear? Your balls nailed to the gate of the Summer Palace. On the other hand, times change, people change—maybe down the road you go back to Jakarta and be a double again. But I won’t shit you. It’s likelier you get a new name and a new life in the U S of A.”

  “I don’ want to be an American.” Bobby looked at him with despairing eyes. “My wife, she cries at night. My boy say he kill himself if he have to stay here.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s early yet, you hear what I’m saying? Lotsa water to go over the dam before we start making decisions. Your wife, your kid—” Huang made an impatient gesture. “Bobby, my wife and kids are in Manila. You think I don’t want to see them? You think I don’t want to leave this run-down goddam base? Come on, man, we’re alike. Let’s do this together.”

  Bobby ate one of the cakes. He sipped tea. Huang let him take his time. He could sense an important moment, a decision being made. Then Bobby Li said, “You understand me.” He said it as if it were the wisdom of the ages. “We two Asian guys.”

  “Right.”

  Bobby ate another cake and then told Huang that the top Chinese’s code name was Prayer Wheel.

  “This is Mister Chen?”

  “No, the new guy. Guy who send the word I gotta go in the Orchid House.”

  “Prayer Wheel.”

  “Prayer Wheel, that’s his code name. Funny name, huh? He say, when we meet in eighty-seven, it’s because he go round and round. But he isn’t in Beijing no more, because Loyalty Man gets mad, messages taking so long, and he says to me everything goes long way around getting to him now. That’s a good point, isn’t it? Isn’t that good stuff—this top guy was in Beijing, now he’s not in Beijing—isn’t that good stuff?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Loyalty Man don’t say.”

  Prayer Wheel would be pretty well along in his career, Huang thought, if he’d started running Bobby Li a dozen years before. “When he first took you over, Bobby—”

  “Yeah, eighty-seven.”

  “How old was he when he took you over?”

  “Maybe thirty-five. Chinese look young, you know. But I think, yeah, maybe thirty-five. He married. He show me picture once of baby, say it’s his, new. That helps, don’t it? New baby, twelve years ago?”

  That would help. Yes, that would certainly help. Huang thought there was more. Bobby was risking a throw on him, but he was holding something back, as people always did. Huang led him and coddled him and all but held his hand, and finally Bobby told him that Prayer Wheel had been in Canada for six months in ninety-three. Huang told him he was a great guy and gave him the rest of the day, and the next day, off.

  Under the Pacific.

  The captain watched his command screen as his submarine rose beneath the waves and then leveled, her bow just slightly down to ease his descent when the message was sent. He looked over at the comms officer and wondered if he looked as gray and forlorn.

  “Do we have a satellite?” he asked testily. They had to linger on the surface during those moments when none of the system’s uplink satellites was in view. On a brilliant sunny day like this, the surface was poison.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ready to transmit?” he asked formally.

  “Sir!”

  “Go ahead.”

  Thirty miles to the west of the western edge of his search box, Alan saw a cell-phone-related signal pop up with a set of vectors and some frequency data on his ESM screen. He put his radar cue on the ESM symbol and turned on his surface-search radar.

  No return.

  Well, not no return. Just less return than an outboard motor. As if someone in a rowboat, forty miles at sea, were using a cell phone.

  “Blue Jacket, this is Red Jacket, over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Blue Jacket, please set radar to periscope and target my ESM cue. Do you copy?”

  “Copy.”

  “Go for MARI and image, over.” His heart began to thud in his chest, and his hand was shaking as he lined the image cue up with the barely existing contact and switched to MARI mode. He already knew what he wanted to see.

  He hit the image button.

  There were two minuscule returns, standing a little above the black static that represented the shifting surface of the water. One was straight, and the other had a bulb at the top. He keyed a switch to save the image and another to pass it to the other planes.

  He was looking at the antenna array of a submarine at periscope depth.

  He started to call it in on the radio while he entered the possible submarine datum into the datalink, and Lennox looked on in awe. Blue Jacket, as the other det plane was called, whooped with glee, any thought of Emcon out the window.

  “We’ve got him!” called Dice, over in oh-three.

  “We don’t have him yet,” said Surfer. But he was turning as if he were headed for the break, and his grin filled all the helmet that his sunglasses didn’t.

  The P-3 was the farthest away, well up to the north, almost in Canadian airspace. Alan had worried from the first that the sub, if it existed, would hide in Canadian water. He could see the P-3 turning toward the datum. It was seventy miles away, twenty minutes at its best speed.

  He flipped back to his emitters page and saved several seconds of emission from the datum, all in a common cell phone frequency, and then imaged it again. The same two antennas stood above the sea. Alan had never used MARI for anything related to submarine detection, and he didn�
��t have a library devoted to antenna placement. It would take research and some of Soleck’s magic to get one together. He made a note on his kneeboard card.

  It said something for Alan’s belief in his own theory that the grainy reality of the two antennas on the MARI display had a dreamlike quality for him. It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe it. It was more that he didn’t really have an endgame plan for a reality in which the sub was located and real.

  “He’s diving,” Bubba Paleologus said from the other plane.

  Alan watched on his MARI as the two antennas slipped into the grainy black of the water.

  “All planes, I want passive contact only,” he said. They rogered up.

  Alan sat back and watched them work the datum. Oh-three was first on station. They had a course and a last location less than three minutes old, and they laid a V-shaped sonobuoy pattern well ahead of the sub’s expected location and fairly deep, on the hunch that any sub so close to a hostile coast would dive as soon as he made his transmission.

  Alan and Red Jacket were next on station, and they stayed to the south, laying a barrier that would catch the sub if she turned away to starboard in her dive. Before they were through their pattern, the P-3 was laying hers to the north, one that would cut both the port axis and a sudden clearing turn, effectively surrounding the datum in sonobuoys.

  Whoever was down there was cunning. They waited in silence long enough for Alan to bring up his twenty-minute-old image of the original antennas and study it to see if he could have been mistaken.

  “Red Jacket, this is Big Orca, over,” called the P-3.

  “Big Orca, this is Red Jacket, go ahead.” Alan perked up again.

  “Red Jacket, this is Big Orca. We have pos contact two, repeat pos contact two. We have contact on two buoys, over. Do you copy?”

  “Copy pos contact two, contact on two buoys.”

  Surfer called him on the intercom. “Are we asking for permission to go active? Can we go in on him?”

  Could they? He hadn’t made a plan to contact SubPac once the event had started, which now looked like a serious oversight. He was left with the hard call to make all by himself. He’d put it off as long as he could. The Navy side of his brain called out for continuing prosecution. He had no idea of the nationality of the submarine below him, although he thought that it was probably Chinese, but the potential in intelligence was vast. He could vector in other planes, perhaps even the attack sub whose morning departure had started the entire process that led to this. They could go active and scare the submarine into leaving the area.