Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Instead of increasing his tension, the movement of the stern focused him. Soleck didn’t watch the stern. He flew the plane. A half-mile out he was good for lineup, his wings solid, as if the plane were riding tracks into the landing.

  The first crosswind gust hit him ten seconds from the deck. It challenged him, because it pushed his plane down twenty feet and moved him well off the lineup for his landing. He made two minute course corrections, one to get back toward lineup and another to reclaim the attitude needed to land after the gust pushed his nose down.

  Now Soleck was three seconds from the deck. The giant, deep-ocean roller that the carrier was riding was rolling just under the stern, and the carrier was at the apex of her pitch. As Soleck pressed his final descent, the whole deck began to drop out from under him and he chased it, suddenly lost in a landing he had flown with perfect competence, and the attitude of his airplane slipped away. The nose came down too far, the wheels just touched the deck, and the hook slapped the deck hard just aft of the three wire and bounced right over, so that as Soleck slammed his throttle to full power, he felt the plane bounce past the point where he should have felt the comfort of the wire dragging her to a stop.

  His plane shot down the deck, her tailhook blazing sparks as he fought for airspeed. The “tower flower,” a fellow pilot who often provided advice (needed or not) to pilots, waited until he was clear of the deck before commenting.

  “Not your fault, Soleck,” said the voice. “The boat just dropped away. LSO saw it.”

  The man might as well have said, Don’t lose your nerve. Soleck shook his head, bitter that he had to be coached through a landing. Behind him, the carrier turned to get a better attitude to the wind and waves. Another gust shook the plane.

  “Fly for the middle of the deck. Leave the rest to the ship,” said a new voice.

  Soleck didn’t stow his gear and he didn’t return to the stack. Gritting his teeth, he went around immediately to try again. There didn’t seem to be any other planes, anyway. The sea was now too rough to make landing a safe activity. He flew down the length of the ship off the port side, counting his numbers again, and started his final turn. A gust threw the plane across the sky, and suddenly his numbers were out the window again; he was well up on the starboard wing and looking down at the sea, which was right there, and he got the nose up and added power and got back some altitude, but now he was far off lineup, way too high and ten knots too fast, and he had about seventeen seconds to correct. The stern was moving everywhere and he vowed not to chase it, just put his nose at the center of the deck, a few meters beyond the three wire. The middle of the deck moved less, he saw now. But his lineup was still late and he was chasing the deck.

  Less than a mile away, the LSO began to curse. He knew who was in the plane, and he could feel the gusts that were wrecking every attempt Soleck made to land. Even the LSO felt the unfairness of it.

  “Wave him off before he makes a mistake,” came a voice in the LSO’s ear. That was the CAG.

  Late, high, too fast, Soleck struggled to catch a landing that he would have let go by in a simulator. The cut lights and the LSO’s voice saved him from the struggle.

  “Wave off,” said the LSO, who had never called a correction. The landing had been too bad to correct.

  “Fuck,” said Soleck, quietly, but the cockpit was so still that his one curse caused Craw to twitch in the backseat.

  “How bad are those gusts, Mister Soleck?”

  Soleck was crossing the stern of the carrier, a hundred feet up and climbing.

  “Bad,” he said tersely. That was Captain Rafehausen he was speaking to. The CAG. He felt humiliated all over again.

  “Need to go to the beach?” Rafehausen’s voice said.

  Soleck wanted to cry. He was not given to self-pity, but he was sure that the first landing would have been an okay on any reasonable day. The second landing had been screwed by the gust of wind.

  “I want to keep trying until I get it,” he blurted out.

  “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear, Mister Soleck. Because Kenya isn’t being too friendly to us right now, and putting you on the beach would be a little international incident of its own. So I need you to fight the gusts, pick your moment, and get that plane on the deck.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “How’s your gas?” Rafe knew that launching another tanker would be trouble. Recovering it would be worse.

  “Seven thousand pounds.” Two more looks at the deck and he’d start to be in trouble.

  “Better bring her aboard this pass, then.”

  Just like that. Rafe sounded positive that Soleck would do it, almost as if he had been messing around up until now and it was time to get serious.

  Soleck ground his teeth, felt the bile at the back of his throat and the weight in his gut. Then he was back on his routine, flying down the port side. He wasn’t even mouthing the numbers now, because it was automatic, and the gust that caught him three-quarters of the way through his downwind leg was less of a surprise. He beat it to the corner, already back on his game.

  He came upwind, right on the money, attitude and altitude, and ready to correct if the crosswind hit him. He was counting down in his mind, mentally trying to keep one of the big storm gusts at bay as he did his cockpit scan, felt his angle of attack, rode his plane at the pitching three wire. He felt a kind of calm, as if the odds were now stacked so high that he couldn’t be blamed for anything and could only do his best, fly his landing, and hope for luck. He didn’t actually have any part of his mind thinking these thoughts, because his whole attention was on the plane, wrapped up in it like a trained rider on a mettlesome horse.

  Later, he would realize that he wasn’t really thinking about the landing.

  The plane came down. The LSO was silent. The stern of the Jefferson started to rise.

  Soleck saw the movement of the deck and didn’t even twitch. He was committed.

  The LSO started to crouch, willing the plane into the wire.

  The stern rose. The plane dropped. The tailhook touched the deck inches aft of the three wire.

  Soleck felt the harness grab at his chest and rocked forward. He had forgotten to lock it. He didn’t care. They were down.

  Fifty feet away, on the LSO platform, the LSO took off his helmet and wiped the sweat off his face. “Three wire and okay,” he muttered. “If at first you don’t succeed—”

  Up in the tower, Captain Rafehausen breathed again. He thought that Soleck might make a good pilot, but the boy was losing his nerve. If it got any worse, he was going to have to go.

  Dar es Salaam.

  “Craik has a new set of airline reservations, sir.”

  “Oh, well done, Jiang.”

  The rare note of praise caused Jiang to smile broadly. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well? And the airline reservation?”

  “Tajikistan, Colonel.”

  Colonel Lao looked at Jiang for a moment and rubbed his chin. He was thinking that if Craik was really going to meet Chen, and he could capture both Chen and Craik, then there would be no reason at all to go to Nairobi. “Now, I can believe that Chen would be in Tajikistan. What do we have there?”

  “Nothing. Too close to both the Russians and the Islamics.”

  “Send a foreign team. Any foreign team. No, send Russians. If this goes bad, I don’t want it coming back on us. Use the Russians you picked up on the drug matter. Get permission from Beijing if you have to. We have to beat Craik there and pick him up at the airport. Our people will have to stay close.”

  “He’ll see them.”

  “Perhaps. If he takes them to Chen, grab Chen. If Craik goes down, so be it. Tajikistan is what Americans call the Wild West.”

  Jiang looked at his boss with renewed enthusiasm.

  “We’re going to get him, aren’t we?”

  “It seems possible, Captain. When that team is in-country, I want them to call. I want to brief their leader in person. I do not want another epi
sode like Jakarta.”

  “Where Craik killed one of ours.”

  “Possibly. Either way, he’s about to pay the price for playing.”

  In the Virginia Horse Country.

  Jerry Piat came to the boundary of the safe-house property where they had stashed Suter and stopped in the woods across the road. He had walked down from Warrenton, where a bus had left him two days before, cutting cross-country and moving along back roads and farm fields by night. He had a small backpack, hardly more than a book bag, and he was rumpled and soiled and looked like somebody who had had the bottom drop out of life.

  He waited until there was nobody on the road and then crossed quickly and slipped under the wire fence. Six weeks ago, when he had still been in the Agency and he had come out here to help interrogate Ray Suter, he had asked for a tour of the place out of boredom because nothing else had been happening. Suter wouldn’t talk then; it was only when they were alone a couple of days later, and Piat could see the handwriting on the wall and knew that he was going to get the ax, that he and Suter had found a common interest despite disliking each other. The tour of the safe-house property had shown Piat how porous the place was. He had even written a memo on it, but nobody had cared.

  The place had been used by the Agency off and on for thirteen years. It may once have been secure enough to hold defectors or important acquisitions, but now it was a place where they mostly held low-level retreats and the odd farewell party. They’d stuck Suter here because Suter wasn’t quite a prisoner, more an in-house embarrassment, and they were fighting over what to do with him. The security was good enough, they said.

  Piat knew that there was a zone of motion sensors in the woods where he had entered. On the side farthest from him, there were also a stone wall and the gate through which visitors came. The motion sensors were post-Vietnam but not by much; they were monitored from the basement of the house by a security guard who had half a dozen other duties. Most of the sensors had been set to minimum because there were so many deer.

  Piat waited inside the fence, screened from the road by leaves and high grass. Cars passed with hissing sounds. When he felt secure, he moved into the woods. He moved slowly, the way deer do—a few steps, look around; a few more steps, look around. He would freeze in place for a minute at a time, like a deer. Or, for a few paces, he brought his feet down harder to mimic the mincing, stamping gait of a suspicious buck.

  He gave himself an hour to get through the woods. He had lots of time.

  A security man patrolled the grounds every three hours. The original directive had specified two men on foot; now there was one in a golf cart. He stayed out in the meadows, where the cart had worn itself a more or less smooth track. In his memo, Piat had recommended that the guard go back to foot patrol and that he get a dog. Now he waited in the fringe of trees before the woods gave way to fallow ground, to see if that part of his memo had been adopted.

  Half an hour later, a golf cart came over the rise to his left and started toward him. No dog.

  Wooden fence surrounded the meadows, board X’s between upright posts, everything needing paint. The golf cart came along on the other side of the fence, passed him, went on another hundred yards, and then turned up an internal fence to get to the gate that was two hundred yards into the meadowland, toward the house. Piat waited until it was gone, then slipped through one of the peeling X’s.

  He set himself up in a clump of trees that grew out of an old sinkhole, a geological oddity twenty feet deep, bowl-shaped, some of the trees eighteen inches around. Nobody had ever wanted to plow down there. From the sinkhole, he could watch the house and the horse barns and the tennis courts and the place where he and Suter had sat on the grass and made the plans to screw Dukas and Craik.

  Dumb, he told himself. He’d been drinking heavily in those days. He wasn’t quite rational, he decided. My own dumb fault.

  He had MREs from a surplus store, a sheet of plastic to sleep under, a pair of plastic gloves from a roll he’d bought at a Safeway. A roll of duct tape. A pair of binoculars. A knife with a can-opener. His gun. He didn’t need much.

  Piat watched the buildings through the binoculars. He ate an MRE. Cold. He saw the maintenance man come and go around the horse barns. Later the man got out a riding mower and dicked around some flower beds with it. A couple of horses, alone in the next meadow, came up to their fence and looked over toward Piat’s hideaway. He figured they had smelled him. Nobody paid much mind to those horses, he knew.

  At about two o’clock, Suter came out the back door of the house and lay down on the lawn with a book. Piat’s pulse picked up, then settled down. The maintenance man was mowing along the far side of the house now. Piat watched Suter pull a bag from the grass and get a cellphone from it and talk. Some security, he thought. Suter was like somebody who runs a drug operation from prison. Safest place in the world. Much later, when Suter was gone and long shadows were painted along the lawns from the buildings, he saw the maintenance man drive his riding mower near the place where Suter had lain and, parking the mower so it screened him from the house, retrieve the bag with the cellphone from the grass.

  Not bad. Suter must have been paying out a lot of money. His savings? His retirement? Maybe he thought he was going to make a big score somehow.

  After dark, Piat made himself a bed in the leaves in the bottom of the sinkhole. He pulled the plastic dropcloth over himself and went to sleep.

  27

  Tajikistan.

  The Best Eastern in Dushanbe was probably below Harry’s standard, but the food was acceptable and the bar well stocked and pleasant. The hotel itself looked like every major concrete structure of its age anywhere in the world: a rectangular box with recessed windows that could have been in Peoria, Illinois. They checked into three adjoining rooms and ate in the restaurant while Dave made calls to secure the Toyota Land Cruiser they had been promised.

  “Dress warmly and leave the rest of your luggage here,” Harry advised Alan. He wouldn’t be more specific, and his vague motions to the east annoyed Alan a little. But they were still moving toward Chen, or his body, and that was enough. He was enjoying himself. It was the longest he had had with Harry in years. Rediscovering at least the possibility of friendship with Dave Djalik was icing on the cake.

  By early afternoon they were on the road. Djalik drove them through the city, past reminders of the country’s recent civil war that were visible on every street, and then to one of the central markets. Dave hopped out, and Alan kept listening to Harry until it struck him that Dave wasn’t just checking a tire.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Buying guns. Sit tight, Alan. He does this easy as breathing.”

  Dave was gone almost an hour. He came back with a satchel that proved to be a Russian rucksack. It held several pistols, a pump shotgun of U.S. manufacture, and a small machine pistol of a type Alan had never seen before.

  “Polish,” said Dave. “I got it for you, Al. Folds up neat as a pin, but you can shoot one-handed. I love ’em. Commies handed ’em out like candy, so you can get one anywhere in the East. See? Push the safety, flick the handle, and, voilà, it’s a gun.”

  “Can’t fold it with a full magazine.”

  “Well, no. But you can shoot one-handed.”

  Harry took the shotgun. Dave probably had a variety of weapons, although none of them showed. Dave taped the extra Tokarov pistols to various positions in the car.

  “Old habit,” he said. “Humor me.”

  Washington, D.C.

  The CNO was looking through the thick folders on his desk. They represented the lives of some of his most senior officers, men who had given their whole careers to the service of the sea. He knew them all as men, and, although there were a few he didn’t like, there were none he couldn’t respect.

  He consulted with the Joint Chiefs when he appointed the numbered fleet commanders, the men at the very top of the operational control of the Navy, the commanders whose powers were often greate
r than that of many nation-states in their areas of operation. Sixth Fleet, in the Mediterranean, controlled more ships than any country in that ocean. Third Fleet, in the Pacific, had a vast array of forces and one of the greatest bases in the world at Pearl Harbor under his authority. Seventh Fleet shared a coast with Russia, China, and North Korea—all potential adversaries. Fifth Fleet, in the Persian Gulf, faced a constant series of crises with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India.

  He didn’t need to look at the folders to know the men, but he riffled through them anyway, his eyes catching on words from old fitness reports written in places like Saigon and Manila, Newport News and Naples, by other officers long-retired or long-dead. Keegan, one of the oldest of the names before him, had got a Silver Star in Vietnam as a lieutenant jg on a riverine patrol. The admiral who had signed his fitness report at Cam Ranh Bay had served under Nimitz on a destroyer in the Pacific. It was like looking at history.

  He already knew whom he wanted. He’d got most of them. Keegan was one he’d lost. The army hated him, and he was not acceptable as a joint force commander. He’d have to retire, because there wasn’t really anywhere else for him to go. The CNO knew he’d gone to the wall for Frederick William Keegan, but it wouldn’t matter soon, despite the man’s bravery, his record, and his spotless honor.

  And he’d lost other battles besides.

  Two of his deputies sat in front of him, their attention on the folders. They weren’t in this hunt, but they were in this peer group, and they were eager to know.

  “Pilchard for Fifth Fleet,” he drawled. His DCNO for Naval Aviation nodded happily. One for the good guys.

  “He already said he wanted Anne Siddons for his Flag Staff and Al Craik for Intel if he got the nod.”

  The CNO nodded. He knew more about both than he usually did about commanders and their ilk.

  “Yeah, I expect he would. Siddons is on track to have her own fleet one of these days. And Pilchard can keep Craik out of trouble. Where is he now?”