Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  The other side of his brain, the side that Triffler and Dukas had spent so much time taming and training, pondered the results if the submarine realized that it had been detected. Detection would lead the adversary, whoever it was, to change his signal system or replace the agent who made the burst transmissions. As of that moment, Alan and the Navy knew there was a spy and how he communicated. If Alan prosecuted the submarine, as instinct demanded, then the spy would almost certainly remain undetected.

  On the other hand, the submarine was there right now. Even with triangulation data and the keys to the agent’s comm plan, Alan knew he might take months or even years to catch.

  But, once warned, he might come up with another system as subtle as this one.

  Alan couldn’t imagine all the potential scenarios for damage, and he suddenly understood in a way that he never had before that some big decisions had no right answers. He could see possible ramifications from either decision that would make him friends and enemies, would satisfy some communities in the Navy and offend others. For a moment, he almost wished that the decision could be taken from him, but there was no one there to take it. He could share it with Surfer and include him in the blame. He could hide behind his status as an intel officer. He thought of many ways that he could weasel on the hardest professional decision of his life, but he didn’t really consider any of them.

  The submarine, or the spy.

  Alan thought of something he had heard in his first tour. You’re an intelligence officer. Be intelligent. The submarine was a fleeting victory. He could prove it existed, and twenty hours of sonograms wouldn’t tell the Navy much more than twenty minutes. The spy was the long-term problem. He thought of Soleck’s ghost sub out in the Indian Ocean. He wondered how many other American ships or subs had a little friend, a silent threat lurking in their wakes like a shark following a passenger ship.

  “All planes, this is Red Jacket, break off. I say again, break off. Cease all prosecution and break off. Exit the datum at your best speed. I repeat, break off. Do you copy?”

  Alan had a fleeting memory of Rafe’s recent decision to break off an action against a Chinese surface-action group in the Indian Ocean. He understood now what that decision must have cost him. He felt that he understood something indefinable about the harshness of the way the world really worked, and he suddenly felt his youth slipping away with the terse confirmations that his order was being obeyed.

  Twelve thousand miles to the east, Rafe stood over a JOTS repeater and watched the S-3s off the U.S. West Coast.

  “That’s Alan Craik?” Rafehausen asked Soleck, who was watching the action.

  “Yes, sir. He’s in oh-two.” Soleck clicked on the little symbol, and it displayed as S-3 (Det 423) 102 Surfer/Craik/Lacey/Lennox.

  “And he’s flying?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rafe smiled, thinking of his workload and the problems the now-sick Stevens had, and had caused, in his det. He turned to his ops officer, who was standing at his elbow with tomorrow’s launch cycles.

  “That’s Al Craik, in an airplane.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get his ass back to the boat.”

  NCIS HQ.

  Dukas got the message from Huang at four-thirty: “Bobby Li gave us enough stuff to ID the Chinese who’s run him since Chen. Details were: age now about 47, one male child born 1987, not now stationed in Beijing, made a 6-mo trip to Canada in 1993. This checks with known details about a lieutenant-colonel in mil intel named Lao tse-Ku. Analysis rates this a 3.7—solid, Mike.”

  Dukas smiled for the first time since he had heard of Sally’s death. Gotcha!

  He sent an E-mail to the other agents on his D.C. team:

  Check with Canadian cops/RCMP re any connection between Sleeping Dog burst transmissions and six-month visit 1993 Lt Col Lao tse-Ku, Chinese mil intel. Dukas.

  Leslie looked around the barrier. “You wanted me to remind you, Mister Dukas. The, uh, funeral is tomorrow.”

  He managed to smile. “Thanks.”

  “I sent some flowers. I hope that was okay.”

  Was she merely dumb, or was she really angelic? How would he ever know?

  Whidbey Island.

  When the backslapping and the congratulations were over, the triumph rang hollow for Alan. SubPac acknowledged tersely that the submarine contact had been real. Captain Manley had verged on effusive in her praise for Alan’s efforts, and he understood from her that SubPac had briefed the mission and its results to the CNO. But the result at Whidbey Island was a ream of paperwork and a flurry of NCIS agents demanding their sonograms and the tapes from their aircraft, and a stack of classified papers that looked like contracts and required that the signee keep silent on all matters related to such and such a mission and such and such a disclosure.

  “Till the sun dies,” said Surfer, and threw his across the room. Being paper, it didn’t go very far.

  Alan felt that he had to defend himself. “I never promised you an air medal.”

  “Fuck, I hate this spy shit. We should have gone active on the datum and screamed it out. Then they’d have to make us heroes.”

  “Surfer, I told you what’s at stake—”

  “And I know it. I just hate it. It’s dirty.”

  Alan nodded. He felt curiously distant from Surfer, as if he had seen a vision that Surfer didn’t share. He wondered if this was something that happened to every officer. Beyond glory, was how he described it to himself. Beyond where the medals mattered. “You’ll get a lot of recognition in time, and from pretty high up.” He sounded lame even to himself. Surfer didn’t want recognition. He wanted glory.

  Surfer just looked at him, and Alan gave up. Surfer knew that Alan was right, and Alan knew that Surfer didn’t care. He wanted a different kind of glory, and he seemed to be disappointed in Alan, and that hurt more than anything else.

  “No, you’ll get the recognition from high up. You got a message from the CAG on the Jefferson.” He tossed it to Alan with barely hidden disgust.

  “I do?” Alan tried not to look too eager.

  When he had read it, he called Triffler.

  Then he started to pack.

  Three hours later, he was on the phone to Rose. She had been in Houston overnight and had got back and still had put in her time on the F-18. When she heard he was heading for the boat before she could get up to see him again, she began to cry.

  “I thought you’d be mad,” he said.

  “I’m happy for you! But I’m not very happy for me.”

  “You’ll be left with the kids, everything—”

  “Oh, I can cope with that shit! I got driven around the NASA ghetto in Houston; they showed me houses, malls—it’s like I’m being sucked into this big, happy family. There’ll be so many people to take care of me and the kids, it’ll be a piece of cake.” Her voice got small. “I love you.”

  He said that he loved her, too—that necessary response that, spoken into a telephone, is like kissing a mirror. His orders said he was to report “with all deliberate speed” and gave him three days to wind up his affairs in Seattle, plus one to report in to NCIS in D.C. Wasn’t Rose part of his “affairs”? If they gave him three days, couldn’t he take one of those three days to be a husband? His desire for action said, No, go! His desire to be with her overcame the voice.

  “I’m going to fly down. Can you get the morning off?”

  “Fly here? I thought you were hot to—”

  “Get me a room at the airport motel. Be there!” Then his own voice got small. “I love you, Rose.”

  24

  NCIS HQ.

  Two days later, Mike Dukas had a meeting with his boss and, more importantly, his boss’s boss. He and his boss went together the next step up the chain of command. Dukas, known now to have brought in a probable Chinese double and run the team that had cracked Sleeping Dog, was suddenly a star. It didn’t hurt that the CNO daily intel report had carried a watered-down version of Alan’s Sleeping Dog succe
ss, either. His boss’s boss, Ted Kasser, rubbed the top of his bald head and actually seemed pleased to see him.

  Dukas got right down to it. “I want to make a hostile meet with a Chinese intel officer in Nairobi, Kenya.” Dukas didn’t look at his immediate boss, who, he knew, would be shaking his head and scowling as if group sex had been suggested. “This officer is the one behind the shooting in Jakarta that involved Lieutenant-Commander Craik, you remember—he was there on our nickel. We’re ahead now—we know who the officer is, a lieutenant-colonel named Lao; we know he’s currently stationed in Tanzania; and we’re trying to get something on him that we think is going to nail the coonskin to the wall. I think it’s so important that there’s a hell of a good chance he’ll defect.”

  His boss now looked pop-eyed. Ted Kasser looked cautious. Dukas took them through it step by step: Shreed, Chen, Sleeping Dog, and the references to money that had convinced him that Colonel Lao thought he was trying to find Chen, but that, in fact, he was being played for a sucker by his own people and was really supposed to learn the truth about the mysterious money.

  “What money?” Kasser said. He had a nasal, upstate-New-York voice. He had pulled a pipe out of his pocket and was sucking on it, unlit.

  “We think it’s Chinese money that Shreed stole somehow. We’re trying to nail it down.” He explained about Nickie Groski.

  Kasser sucked and looked skeptical. “In five days?” He shook his head.

  “We brought in Bobby Li in three.” He didn’t say that Bobby Li had fallen into his lap.

  Kasser leaned his elbows on his desk and hunched his head down between his shoulders. “What do you need?”

  Dukas asked for a contract with the Bahrain security company run by Harry O’Neill, the ex-Navy, ex-CIA man who had been with them at Shreed’s and Chen’s deaths. And the money to back it up. “O’Neill knows East Africa and he’s got great people for a hostile meet. And we owe him a contract.” He didn’t say that O’Neill was the only man who knew what had been done with Chen’s body, and that a contract might make him more amenable to sharing what he knew. He looked from one man to the other. He didn’t trust his immediate boss, who worked entirely on fear—fear of being reprimanded, fear of not being liked, fear of doing something different. The man next up the ladder was a different story, however, a tough but fair old bird. To him, Dukas said, “I need a team.”

  “How many?”

  “At least eight, better if it was twelve and better yet if it was sixteen. I figure three from here, three from Bahrain, six from O’Neill’s outfit because they know Africa—for a start.”

  “It’s a budget-buster,” his boss said.

  “If it works, I’m going to bring Lao’s scalp home.”

  “All pie in the sky,” his boss said.

  “Interesting,” his boss’s boss said. He cocked an eyebrow at Dukas. “But you need to know what happened to this guy Chen before you go into any meet.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You got it on the word of this guy O’Neill that Chen is dead! But you tell me that a lot of money may ride with Chen. What if Chen didn’t die, but paid O’Neill to say so?”

  Dukas groaned and made a face. Kasser wasn’t going to let it go. “All right, Mike—prove to me he’s dead. Find out. What if he’s really alive someplace and has the money?” He made a note. “I’m going to send you a memo telling you that if you don’t know for damned sure that Chen is out of it, the operation is threatened and you should abort. You follow me? What I’m saying is you need to cover our ass.”

  “O’Neill wouldn’t lie about it,” Dukas objected.

  “Oh?”

  “He’s a buddy.”

  Kasser smiled. He wrote another note. “What else do you need?”

  “Country clearances, and a firewall to keep the Agency out.”

  “They have to be told,” his immediate boss said.

  The old bird kept his eyes on Dukas and said, “Why?”

  “This impacts what they’re doing about Shreed, which is nothing. They’re kicking dirt over it. If they hear I’m meeting with somebody, they’ll put two and two together and take it away from us,” Dukas said.

  “They have to be told!” his boss cried.

  Kasser said, “Yes, Don, but they don’t have to be told the truth.” He smiled at Dukas. “Suppose you got country clearance to look into threats to Navy security over there. We are having some trouble, in fact—there’s an alert out on a threat to ships. I don’t suppose it would be entirely out of the ballpark for an NCIS special agent to check with the Chinese, would it?” Dukas said it wouldn’t, and he could live with that. The old man said he’d take it to ONI that afternoon. They shook hands on it. Holding on to Dukas’s hand, Kasser said, “Prepare a briefing on the operation. I want you to be very specific about this Chen and the money—I think that’s key to everything.” He glanced at Dukas’s boss and then smiled at Dukas, who realized that they shared contempt for the third man in the room. “Probably have to brief this to DNI tomorrow. You better be awful, awful good.”

  “I think I can handle that.” Dukas looked at his boss.

  “Any way you can angle this to include the submarine and the west coast spy?”

  “Sorry?” Dukas was still working through the money angle in his mind.

  “The intel community may be hot about your Chinese double, Mike, but over in CNO-land, the news is all about Sleeping Dog paying off with a real spy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “DNI thinks that there may be other Chinese subs out there, tailing other ships. He thinks this may be part of a Chinese intel program, with port-watchers keying ships like we’d have an agent making calls for a surveillance team. Jefferson had a pos sub hit a day or so ago which they played down, but now they’re not so sure.”

  Dukas nodded. “Chinese?”

  Ted Kasser enjoyed knowing things that other men didn’t know.

  “The DNI put this in the CNO daily report.” The CNO daily report had code words all over it. Only about forty offices received it, which Mike thought was twenty-five offices too many. On the front cover was a picture of two antennas sticking up out of a grainy sea of black. Dukas realized that the image must be Al Craik’s. A computer-generated circle glowed around the two antennas. Next to it was a mensurated satellite photo of a submarine at pierside, with distance notes and measurements listed below. “LI PO CLASS SSN,” the headline said.

  Dukas nodded. “It might relate.”

  “Okay. I’m a little blindsided by this angle on getting a Chinese officer, though. And I want proof Chen is dead. You got that?”

  “Sure.” Dukas felt like a whipped dog.

  “Good. Separate issue. Seattle. Where is Craik now?”

  “He ought to be in the building any minute. We’re having lunch—he’s on his way to sea.”

  “I want to see him.” Kasser called someone, muttered into the phone about sending LCDR Craik on from Dukas’s office here. “What do you see with Sleeping Dog in Seattle?”

  “See?” Dukas felt as if he had some kind of intelligence senility; Kasser jumped subjects and left him behind at every jump.

  “It’s going to be a major case, Mike—CNO loves it. It’ll be tough to make, but it’s a legwork case. We’ll get the guy in time, as long as we stay on top of his transmissions. Are you going to follow it up? Who’s going to run it?”

  Don cut in. “I thought we’d run it from here. It belongs to this office.”

  Kasser shook his head. “Too big, Don. CNO and the sub community want to see a ‘dedicated effort.’ I want to be seen to give it to them. Mike, Crystal Insight is beginning to take this agency over, and I need to see a plan for breaking it up and moving the pieces away. What’s up with this Jerry Piat, by the way?”

  Again, the question came out of the blue. Dukas had been worrying about how to broach it; now it was in his lap. His boss turned away, as if denying he even knew Dukas.

  “We lost him.”

 
; The words just sat there in the air. Kasser sucked at his empty pipe, and, when he spoke, his voice had the flatness of restrained emotion. “That’s not good. How long have you known about this, Don?”

  “We were still—”

  “How bad is it, Mike? Will he run to the Agency? Are we going to jail?”

  “It won’t put us in jail. He came willingly; we haven’t hidden any evidence; he’s a material witness in an ongoing investigation, and frankly, we didn’t have anything legal to hold him on. Suspicion of framing Al Craik? I wouldn’t even want to make that case, at this point. We’d get screwed in court on the classified angle alone.”

  Kasser puffed at Don, as if weighing him for slaughter.

  “So your angle isn’t that he’s escaped, but that we couldn’t hold him.”

  Dukas nodded.

  “But you and I know you fucked up, right?”

  Dukas nodded again.

  “Who lost him?”

  “Not really the issue, sir.” Dukas said sir about ten times a year. “It was my fuck-up. I didn’t give them enough background on him. He slipped them.”

  “And we weren’t really holding him, right? Just watching him.”

  Dukas got the hint—holding Piat would have been illegal. “That’s right.”

  “Any idea where he is?”

  Dukas shook his head. “He knows Asia like a backyard. He probably picked up a passport and money when he got me the Chinese Checkers disk.” He looked Kasser in the eye and waited for the hit. “I screwed up.”

  “Okay, Mike.” Instead of exploding, Kasser made another of his zigzags. “How’s Dick Triffler?”