Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Alan glanced over his notes and realized that they were all written as questions. He shook his head.

  The STU made reassuring encryption noises. Alan’s digital readout said “Carrier Intelligence Center, USS Thomas Jefferson.” He wondered what Rafe’s said at the other end.

  “Rafe?”

  “Glad to know you’re alive.”

  “I’m trying to get to the boat. James Bond has shanghaied me.”

  “Don’t disappoint me, Spy. I thought you were James Bond.”

  “Not this time. Are you up to speed on why we’re here?”

  “I know that I’m supposed to send a plane to an unspecified location at an unspecified time.”

  “The location will be a small roadside landing strip on the Kenyan Coast Highway. The time will be 1600 local, day after tomorrow.”

  “Well, at least the worst of our storm will be past. I hope I have some aircrew left.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We’ve got a flu bug knocking aircrew down like something from outer space. Right now I have two S-3 crews flying, if I pilot one. You get me?”

  “Loud and clear. I’d like to have that plane wait at a rally point from 1530 local to 1930 local.”

  “Got you. Where’s the rally point?”

  “You fix it. Somewhere no more than thirty minutes out from the landing field, well out of Kenyan airspace and low.”

  “Roger that. You know we’ve been racking up airspace violations with the Kenyans. They aren’t too happy with us.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Bad enough that they might turn down an overflight request. Bad enough that we’re going to hear about this for a long time if we get caught.”

  Alan nodded to himself. “So that’s why Mike isn’t just doing this at Moi International at Mombasa.”

  “You got it. We talked about it. I don’t even want to ask.”

  “Who’s going to fly the plane?”

  “Me.”

  “Sounds good. What’s happening with the cigarette boats?”

  “They’re still out there, Spy. Somewhere between Mombasa and Mogadishu. I can’t put guys in the air in this weather, but the bright side is they can’t go to sea, either.”

  “How’s the det?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Sorry, sir. I want to know.” I ought to be there.

  “Most of the aircrew are sick. Soleck is the only pilot fit to fly, and he’s—he’s having some real landing problems.”

  “Still?”

  “Serious as a heart attack. I may have to pull him. He took three passes to get aboard the other night. Not all his fault, but his confidence is shot.”

  Alan felt very far away. He wanted to be there on the boat, talking to his det, talking to Soleck. Pull him was the kiss of death, the end of Soleck’s career. It meant that Rafe couldn’t trust him to land, or that Soleck couldn’t trust himself.

  “Jesus, Rafe.”

  “Sorry, Al. I’ve got cigarette boats and flu, a no-fly storm, and an unlocated submarine. I don’t have time to fix Soleck.”

  Alan had forgotten the submarine. “Tell me about the sub.”

  “It’s out there, somewhere. If I had six S-3s and enough A-6s to tank, we’d go find it and maybe ping it until it went away. I don’t. Not much we can do till the weather changes, anyway.”

  “Is it passing targeting to your cigarette boats?”

  “Damn it, you’re asking me? Aren’t you the spy?”

  “But it might be. Thirdhand, or firsthand, it might be.”

  “Who sent the cigarette boats, Alan?”

  “No idea. Pakistan, maybe. Damn, Rafe, that’s not even my job right now.”

  “Are they to do with what you’re doing?”

  “I can’t see how.” Alan tried to grapple with it all, Lao and Seattle and Shreed and cigarette boats and a possible submarine. Too many layers. The Gordian knot.

  “Have you guys tried looking for his uplink?”

  “His what?” Rafe sounded uninterested, like he was at the end of his rope and just wanted to be done.

  “Do you have the files from our prosecution off Seattle?” Even as he said the words, Alan realized that no one had them, because they’d never been sent. They were material to an ongoing espionage investigation. Alan shook his head.

  “What prosecution?”

  Alan held the phone against his chest and looked at Dukas, who was awake, sitting up on his elbow. “You following this?”

  “You think Rafe needs to know about the cell phone signal to find his sub?”

  “This is the Navy, Mike. The same one that you need to get your guy. If that sub out there is providing real-time information to those cigarette boats, this is a force-protection issue.”

  Dukas threw off his covers and swung his feet to the floor with a snort.

  “If your friend Rafe uses the uplink to catch that sub and drives it off with an active sonar—that is what we’re talking about, right? Okay. I do read messages. If he does that, you’re jeopardizing Sleeping Dog. The spy you proved to exist. The Chinese will know we’re on to the uplink and change the comm plan.”

  “Or not. They might not. We’re a long way from Seattle, and the carrier might just find the sub anyway.”

  Alan put the phone back to his ear. “Stay with me, Rafe.”

  “I could be in my rack.”

  “One minute, okay?” He put the phone against his chest again. “That carrier should be running at thirty-five knots right now. She should be out to sea, well out from the coast, safe from the storm, beyond reach of the boats, too fast for the sub. Instead, she’s tied here by us, Mike. She’s waiting to do this thing for us. She’s a sitting duck. I insist we pass the uplink information. Is that clear enough?”

  “Or what?”

  Alan took a deep breath. “Who’s flying your plane tomorrow?”

  “Fuck you.”

  They glared at each other. Then Mike shrugged. “Sorry. No, you’re right. It’s a force-protection issue. That comes first. Don’t get your back up. I’ll call and get the uplink data sent out right now.”

  Alan put the phone back to his face.

  “Okay, Rafe, let’s start solving your problems. There’s an uplink code that a Chinese sub used off Seattle—”

  Five minutes later, the air-wing commander was banging on the door of the electronics warfare shack.

  In the Virginia Horse Country.

  Jerry Piat had been watching the routine of Suter’s safe house for two days. The stubble on his cheeks was long now, and he smelled pretty bad. He rather enjoyed that part of it. Like Afghanistan in the eighties. It had rained yesterday; he had got chilled and thought maybe he was sick, but today he was okay. He ate an MRE for breakfast and told himself that today was the day if everybody kept to his routine. Anyway, he was running out of food. He finished the MRE and put the empty can into the backpack with all the others. Pack it in, pack it out.

  At noon, satisfied that things were normal, he went through the high grass in a duckwalk until he reached the fence between his pasture and that of the two horses. He crawled through and started to duckwalk across it, but the horses trotted up and stood close to him, watching.

  “Hi, boys.” They merely looked at him.

  Piat duckwalked some more. The grass got thinner because the horses had eaten it. They followed, swishing their tails. They thought he was the most interesting thing they’d seen in months. Piat duckwalked to the length of fence closest to the horse barns. The horses followed. When he crossed the few feet of lawn to the barns, they put their heads over and watched him go, like people waving good-bye to the pier in an old movie.

  Piat had made a note of a door that the maintenance man used. It was unlocked, and he went in, then stood still until his eyes were accustomed to the gloom and he knew that everything was silent. The maintenance man would be in here somewhere, eating his lunch. Piat had seen him carry his lunch in each day and spend an hour or more at noon. Where? />
  Piat found him in the tack room. There was a desk in there and a chair. The man was using the telephone to complain in a nasal voice that somebody—the person on the other end—never did anything for him. The conversation went around and around, the subject always the not doing by the somebody on the other end. “Talk to you tomorrow,” the man said, and hung up. Talk to you tomorrow about the same subject? Talk every day on this subject? Piat waited until the man came out of the office and got him in a choke hold and squeezed until he passed out. He could have died; Piat knew that—he’d killed a Russian that way on a bet with the mujahedin—and he didn’t really want the man to die, but if it had happened, he wouldn’t have changed anything. As it was, he stripped the man and tied him securely, then blindfolded and gagged him with duct tape and dragged him to an unused stall, where he tied his ropes to the saddling rings.

  Piat checked the house, first from the window of the tack room and then from a window of a stable fifty feet along. Nothing. He checked his watch. He was ahead of schedule. Suter wouldn’t be out for at least twenty minutes.

  He checked the maintenance man and changed into his clothes. The man was a little taller and had a gut, but Piat stuck his own clothes down there and thought they’d suffice. He pulled the tractor-driver cap down. He tried the maintenance man’s glasses, found he couldn’t see anything with them, and smashed the lenses out with his heel. The frames would have to do. Then he checked out the riding mower and saw how it worked. Then he waited.

  Suter would come out and lie down, and after fifteen minutes to half an hour, he’d look for the cell phone. Piat didn’t know whether it was out there or not: once, he’d seen the maintenance man plant it in the morning, but once he’d actually done it as Suter came down the lawn. No matter; he’d do his business before Suter went looking for it.

  Today, of course, Suter was late. Piat couldn’t go through this again; the maintenance man couldn’t be revved up for a second try. Piat had a fallback, which he’d execute if Suter wasn’t out here by seven, but it was crude and he didn’t like it. He waited. And waited.

  At a little after three, he heard a car. The engine started, and then it faded away. Somebody visiting Suter? Piat had a vision of that shit Partlow. Here to try to find what the hell went on with Baranowski? Or had they figured that out yet?

  Suter came down the lawn at three-twenty. He looked drawn, perhaps angry. He flopped down on the grass, and Piat couldn’t see if he felt for the cell phone because his body was in the way.

  Better move a little fast here. Man could do anything if he’s upset.

  Piat put on the gloves and started the riding mower and steered it out of the barn into the full glare of the afternoon sun. He had to cross two hundred feet of lawn in full view of the house. He tried to sit the way he had seen the maintenance man sit. The mower moved as slowly as an invalid. The yards between the barn and Suter decreased, decreased, but he was still far away. The sound of the motor was loud. He jolted on the hard seat. The machine clanked and coughed.

  Twenty feet from Suter, he thought the man was going to turn around, but Suter was simply shifting his weight. He was lying, as he always did, on his side with his back to the house, a book open on the other side of him. If he turns and recognizes me, I’ll have to—

  The front wheels came even with Suter’s feet. His knees. His buttocks. Piat shifted out of drive and the machine stopped, no coasting. A beast.

  Piat got down. Suter was six feet in front of him, head to the right, feet to the left. Now was when he would turn around if he was going to. One stride—two strides—squat—

  Piat pulled Suter’s head back by the hair, whispering, “This is from Sally,” and he drew the razor-sharp knife across Suter’s throat and threw him forward across his book. Before the jet of blood hit the white pages, Piat saw “You and Your Money” at the top of a page.

  He got back on the mower and drove across the lawn and around the flower beds, where he turned the machine off.

  A security guard went out to Ray Suter at five-thirty because he’d been out there longer than usual and it was time to wake him up for supper. He thought Suter was asleep. Then he saw the flies and the drying blood.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  In the Navy, there is always the sea.

  By four in the morning, heavy rain had calmed the wind. This wasn’t a true typhoon, but only the hint of one, out of season and off its track. Metro blamed global warming. Heavy seas rose under the stern of the ship and raced down her sides, raised the bow through fifteen degrees, and then ran ahead. Visibility was near zero. It wasn’t even cold.

  Rafe had a float coat on over his flight gear, drenched to the skin from the moment he came on deck. He walked around his plane slowly, trying to see potential problems through the rain and spray. He had a catch in his throat and the sniffles, and he worried that he was finally losing his immunity to the crud, whatever it was. He ran his hand down a landing-gear strut, trying to detect the slick feel of leaking hydraulic fluid by touch. He shone his flashlight into an engine intake. He felt like crap. Lightning flickered off to the east, farther out at sea, briefly illuminating the whole deck and the silent figures moving purposefully to a one-plane launch. His plane.

  Satisfied and soaked, he crawled up the ladder into the cockpit and checked his seat. Campbell was already there. Craw was belted in the back, and Ms. Hetzer, a jg from VS-34, was trying to keep up with the master chief.

  The inside of the plane was quiet. The wind gusts were gone, and the noise of the rain on the canopy was almost pleasant. Campbell had started the auxiliaries the moment he came into the hatch, and a dim red illumination filled the plane.

  “What you got, Master Chief?”

  “Captain, the EW guys have two cuts on the uplink. We got a lucky break because the Fort Stanwix was on the ball and got a vector, too. This is ten minutes old.” He held up a damp sheet of paper with a latitude and longitude.

  “Let’s get him.”

  The hardest part of the launch was in the seamanship it took the bridge to get the carrier headed into the wind, a maneuver that required unpleasant moments while the ship was broadside to the huge rollers coming in from the open ocean. In his mind, Rafe could see the formation turning. In his new role as air-wing commander, he had to think about the whole picture. The small boys would be hating the turn.

  Once they were bow on, they taxied to the cat through a haze of rain and spray and waited. The air-conditioning was working far too efficiently, and Rafe was already freezing cold inside his wet flight suit.

  “Ready to go for a ride?” Rafe asked his crew, and waited for the response. Then he snapped a crisp salute.

  The launch officer waited until the bow began to rise for a wave, then fired the cat, and they launched just at the top of the rise, giving them a few feet of extra altitude. Rafe made a mental note about the launch officer, a man on the ball. Then he got his altitude and raised his gear and headed for what he hoped was the location of the sub.

  “You’re going to have to be pretty low to drop buoys,” Rafe called back to Craw. “If we drop them high, the wind might put them anywhere.”

  “You let me worry about that,” said Craw. Rafe had been flying with Craw for ten years. He checked that off as not his problem. If Craw said he could do it, it would be done.

  The wind, though weaker than yesterday’s, was still enough to move the plane around. Rafe didn’t go too high, and he didn’t have to travel far. The sub was right with them, six miles to the south. Even now the Esek Hopkins, an aging Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, was trying to get her tail in the water to join the search. Rafe didn’t envy the men on that tiny ship, tossed by the waves, drenched to the skin, pitching and rolling in a way that a carrier never would. They would have to maneuver, too, to get the best out of their sonar tail, and that might mean endangering the ship. Man had his technology, modern equipment like gas-powered turbines and nuclear engines and jets and radar. And then there was the sea.


  “He’ll be deep,” said Craw.

  Campbell was trying to stifle a sneeze, and Hetzer stayed silent, a very young woman in the company of giants. This would be her first war story. She was a little afraid, mostly of screwing something up. Captain Rafehausen and Master Chief Craw were legends. But Craw had told her to ask questions, and so she did. “Why?”

  “Why deep? Because there’s a storm, young lady.” Hetzer blushed, glad the darkness and the helmet covered her embarrassment.

  “Ever been on a sub, Ms. Hetzer?” asked Rafe.

  “No, sir.”

  “The weather just below the surface is as bad as on the surface. Those rollers will be screwing up the sea for eighty meters down. Think of how much it must have sucked for them just to go to periscope depth and transmit in a storm.”

  Craw laughed his deep New England fisherman’s laugh.

  “What’s so funny, Master Chief?”

  “You people think this is a storm.”

  They dropped a full field of buoys to the west in a wide V. None of them got a hit, which didn’t seem to faze the master chief at all. Rafe just let him run. He was in his element, doing what he knew best, and this was his battle. Craw muttered to the ASW module on the boat and talked to the Esek Hopkins, and all the while he made notes on his kneeboard and dropped more buoys. A second field grew to the north, between the carrier and Craw’s expected position for the sub.

  Usually, there would have been two or three planes on an operation this important. They didn’t have a P-3. S-3 crewmen joke about P-3s, but they carry more fuel and more gear and more sonobuoys. The nearest one was in Bahrain, a little over two thousand miles of mostly unfriendly airspace away. They didn’t have a second S-3.

  Rafe noticed that Craw dropped an active buoy in each field. He thought Craw must be very sure of himself, or pretty desperate. Usually, if they were going active to warn a sub off, they dropped it last, right on the target, like a torpedo. Craw had only one left.

  “Okay, then, sir. I’m ready.”