Damage Control (12 page)

“Yes, sir.” Dukas had a half-grin on his face. What Pilchard had said would take care of any ambitions the Agency might have with this one, no matter how much of a gunner Mary Totten was.

“203 is on the tarmac,” Donitz said. “All the Hornets are in the nest.”

Soleck was grimy and sweaty and the taste in his mouth said he’d been in an ejection seat for way too long. He hit his “push to talk” key. “Mozart, you good to go?”

“Roger, sir.” Scarlatti sounded scared.

The two S-3s had probably given too much gas to get the hornets down, and now 706 had less than a thousand pounds and a nugget pilot to get her down. Soleck tried not to think about his own plane; he figured they had less than six hundred pounds. The gauge had stopped reading while 203 was on final. “Don’t get fancy, Scarlatti. Just put all three wheels on the ground.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Soleck started a slow turn to starboard, keeping the field’s lights in sight all the way through his turn, losing altitude slowly to save fuel. He touched the throttle again, taking it down further, his speed the absolute minimum to keep his plane in the air. But he was determined to be the last plane down.

The last light of the equatorial day was passing quickly, but the field was still rose-colored from its rammed-earth berms to the old concrete aprons, studded with tropical trees and brilliant flowers that were like splashes of paint in the last light. The danger of the landings seemed less real with safety so close.

Off to starboard and well beneath him, Scarlatti’s navigation lights flashed as he turned on final. His wings were steady, and then his nose gave a little shake and he was down.

“706 on the tarmac.”

Next to Soleck, Guppy passed their landing information to the tower. Soleck cut right across the stack and made a tight turn, trading altitude for speed. He wasn’t sure he had the fuel to go around the field again, and since Trincomalee had been kind to them and cleared the pattern, he didn’t have to worry about accidents.

It was a dead easy landing, the kind of landing through which a veteran pilot would continue to make small talk. Soleck was a veteran, but he was silent. The last four hours made even the simplest decisions seem immense.

His attention slipped for a few seconds as he listened to the tower confirm their status as the last US plane to land. They were the last refugees from the
Jefferson.
He glanced once more at the fuel gauge. It continued to read “zero.” He concentrated on his landing and found that during his moment of inattention, his hands had put the plane on speed and altitude, the nose lined up with the runway.
Good to go.

The starboard turbine coughed.

The plane shook.

“Fuck,” said Soleck. They were a half-mile shy of the runway and six hundred feet high.

The starboard engine coughed again, and then the port engine joined in. The nose came down. Soleck pushed it further down to gain a little more speed. He could
see the runway,
for God’s sake, a wide pink ribbon stretching away to a distant huddle of white hangars. Four hundred feet of altitude, still too far from the runway.

“Ejection positions,” he said, and flipped his ejection lever from all seats to front. He took a deep breath, reviewed everything he could remember about fuel flow in the S-3 and put his hand on the throttle. The engines coughed together, and he rammed the throttle forward.

The response was immediate; a burst of power. He raised the nose and got back a hundred feet of altitude in a second before the two engines went silent. Then he let the nose sink again. Twelve hundred feet to go.

He lost the altitude he’d picked up with the last fuel in the line. His airspeed was good.

“We’re going to ride her down. Stay ready. This could be rough.”

Guppy was silent.
He’s okay,
Soleck thought.

The ground rose to meet him, the tarmac almost filling his viewscreen it was so close. Soleck raised the nose a fraction, touched his flaps. At some point, it became clear to him that he had the altitude to get the wheels on to pavement.

His gear touched, all together, a three-point landing from a glide.

He breathed again, and then he was using the sixty knots he’d landed with to try and roll them out to the other end of the field. They were only moving about ten knots when they rolled abreast of the other planes and turned to fill the last spot in the line. Soleck’s parking wasn’t great. They stopped. He and Guppy looked at each other.

“Least you don’t have to shut anything down,” Guppy said, the quaver almost gone from his voice.

Donitz was waiting out on the apron. The small man shocked him by giving him a bear hug. The other pilots were standing in a loose huddle, and then they all picked up their helmet bags and started to walk down the apron, past the last eleven planes from the air wing of the USS
Thomas Jefferson.

At the far end of the line, Guppy looked back at the planes and slapped Soleck on the back. “We made it!” he said, as if it had just occurred to him that he was going to live.

After a phone call from Mike Dukas gave Mary Totten the bad news that if she wanted to play, she was going to have play by the Navy’s rules—meaning that she was under operational command of some admiral—and after she’d got mad and got over it, and when she was ready to go home and find somebody to take care of her cat while she was gone, the duty officer told her she had an encrypted e-mail.

She had been half out the door, but back she went, because it was from the deep-cover asset, Persian Rug. And it made her furious because it was one more goddam thing she couldn’t control:

Shit!

In India, it was already night. Alan Craik was asleep under the van, a gentle rain falling only inches from his right hand. A hundred yards away, a leopard coughed, but he didn’t wake.

Five hundred miles south in Sri Lanka, Evan Soleck looked at the starry sky and wondered how the hell they were going to get out of Trincomalee now they were there. The Sri Lankans were unhappy and the airfield was miserly with gas. At least everybody had got there.

It was night now in Bahrain, too. Rose Siciliano Craik was at her office in the American embassy, trying to cope with the problem of having armed Navy aircraft on the ground in a country that had no US naval attaché and no liking for armed intrusion. Mike Dukas was only a few hundred yards away, sitting in a conference room trying to keep his head down while angry, confused naval officers tried to predict what an attack on a nuclear-weapons site might mean for their next twelve hours.

Leslie Kultzke lay awake in the bed she shared most nights with Dukas. She was thinking about love and pregnancy and the risks of betting everything on one throw of the dice. She was thinking about what it would mean to lose.

Harry O’Neill was on his way to Manama Airport with Dave Djalik, two crates of bootlegged MREs (“Meals Ready to Eat,” the twenty-first century’s K-rations) bought in the Bahrain souk, and an assortment of weapons that wouldn’t have disgraced a SWAT team.

The moon rose. It was brilliant in the desert air, a huge, illuminated pearl in the black sky. In the Craiks’ shadowy garden, it lighted a white-painted piece of one-by-two that stood up from the soil. On it, Alan Craik had printed with a Magic Marker “Bloofer.” At the top, a hand that could be recognized as Rose Craik’s had written with a ball-point pen,
“Bye, Bloofer,” and, near the bottom, a child’s printing said, “Come back I miss you.” Bloofer had lived in Florida, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Bahrain, and now his ashes settled into the sand under this bright Arabian moon. Such it is to be a Navy family’s dog.

The sun came up green, then a blazing gold that burned into amber on the undersides of the scattered clouds. Alan saw it all, waking at the first paling of the starry sky. He needed sleep, wanted sleep, but his brain wanted daylight and activity and distraction from chewing over the violence of the day before. His brain wanted to get on with the burden of getting his people out.

Green.
It was a green land, in a place of some of the heaviest rainfall in the world. Lush grass grew around the van and lay like a carpet between them and the scattered buildings of the airfield, the single runway a dark stripe on it, half a dozen light aircraft tied down where the grass ended and two rusty metal hangars leaned. Surrounding the airfield were green trees, then green fields, then the bluer green of hills behind them to the east. Silhouetted now against the brightness, distant mountains.

They had found the place in darkness, their lights rousing a guard in a dhoti and a low-collared old shirt who had waved a cudgel at them as he stood in the headlight glare behind a gate that was nothing but a sagging metal pole between two posts. He was an old man, red-eyed; later they decided he was drunk. Alan had got out and kept saying “American Navy” and waving a piece of paper, which was actually a letter from a Navy reserve association but it did
have an embossed letterhead with a gold eagle. Still talking, he had pulled the metal pole aside and got back in and they had driven through, the old man shouting at them, and he had run after them as they drove to the only taxiway and across the runway and over the grass, and back there somewhere he had given up. It was just as well that the telephone system was down, or he might have called somebody.

Standing now, Alan looked south, the way they had come, and could see the curving glitter of a small river. Beyond, drainage ditches shimmered, full of water, and egrets dotted the green between the silver lines. The air smelled like flowers.

He wished he had a toothbrush. And coffee. They had stopped at a duka out in the country and found a couple of cans of vegetarian curry and a plastic pack of Jamun’s Best Chappatis and some bottled water. That had been dinner, eaten sitting in the dark by the van, using their fingers and the spoon on Benvenuto’s knife.

He heard Fidel growl, “Shit—”, and saw his legs and feet disappear under the far side of the van. When the rain had started, the three men had rolled under the vehicle; the two women had slept inside.

“Morning,” Alan said. Fidel may have grunted, maybe not; anyway, he kept on going away from the van, and Alan saw that he wasn’t the only one who had a hangover from the firefights. Fidel was looking out over the flat, green landscape, and Alan saw that he was watching a white cow that was eating somebody’s bean crop. “Sacred animal,” he muttered.

Fidel grunted again. “Kind of nice, having a sacred animal.”

“You’re full of surprises.”

Fidel looked at him. “I’m not just a guy who kills people, Commander.” He wandered away toward some low bush.

Dee Clavers slid the van door open on Alan’s side and crawled out, butt first, and then closed the door as if she
was running away from home and whispered, “I’m getting too old for this. What d’you see, Commander?”

“I see a bunch of people without toothbrushes.”

“That’s life in the nav.” Clavers ran her tongue over her front teeth. “You got a point, though. I’d kill for some coffee.”

A female voice murmured behind them. “If you have a way to heat water, I have coffee.” It was Lieutenant jg Ong. She had opened a sliding window and was looking out at the morning. She smiled at them. “You two look terrible.” She looked, well, cute, a little puffy-eyed, her lips swollen as if she had been necking.

“What coffee?” Clavers demanded.

“Packets—you know? French roast. We need hot water.” It was hard to believe—Ong the Unprepared, with coffee! That she was offering to other people! And then she said, “I guess after what we’ve all been through, you can share my toothbrush, too.”

Alan ticked off on his fingers the other things they didn’t have. “Pot, cups, fire—”

“I have a French press and one cup.” Ong’s small face frowned. “But I don’t have fire.”

“Let’s ask the guard guy,” Clavers said. “Worst he can do is beat us to death with his stick.”

“We’ll breathe on him and kill him first.”

The knee-high grass swished against their legs and left their dirty khakis drenched after twenty steps. At the runway, they stamped their feet to shake the water off, then plunged into the grass on the other side and were drenched again. At the house by the hangar, the guard woke up and grabbed his cudgel, his turban unclean and half-unwound. He shouted at them in Malayalam, and when Alan held up money he shouted louder. Clavers made drinking motions; finally, she got through, and the frightened old man pointed at a bucket by the foundation of the house. He smelled of beer.

The bottom was covered with an organic mat that could have been rotting leaves or could have been animal, even human, shit. Alan smelled it. “We boil it a
long
time,” he said. He pulled the loose matter out and swabbed the inside with grass and then filled the bucket from a tap, and they took turns carrying it across the airfield as the old man capered behind them, waving his stick and shouting, until his dhoti got wet and his bare feet seemed to hurt, and then he gave up for the second time and went back to his plastic lawn chair.

“Benny is gathering wood for a fire,” Ong said. Her smile dazzled. “Fidelio is gathering paper and a lighter.”

Alan grinned at her. “You have organizational skills I never guessed at, Miss Ong.”

“Oh, I always get what I want.” She said it without any suggestion of boasting, more as if she were giving the facts of geology. “I’ve also pulled together our food supply.” She pointed at the front passenger seat, on which were laid out two Snickers bars, a half-eaten Toblerone, and three Indian sweets. “Anything to add?”

Alan had nothing. Fidel, to his surprise, had a granola bar.

“Sir?”

Madje tried to cling to sleep, so far down that his hand’s pushing the voice away was unconscious.

“Sir?” from a hesitant voice and a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Again. In the background, another voice insisted that he be waked. His conscious mind got the name
Admiral Rafehausen
out of the conversations around him.

He stirred, his legs kicking, and his eyes opened to light, movement all around him. He wasn’t in his rack in a stateroom, and this disoriented him so that he couldn’t place where he was or how he had come here. Something about
Admiral Rafehausen.

“Sir! The admiral wants you.” A petty officer in a rumpled flight suit was kneeling next to him.

Madje’s eyes caught the chalkboard a few feet away on the wall, the colorful linoleum tiles laid into the floor under him representing the squadron crest of VFA-139, and he was awake, aware that he was lying curled up on the floor of one of the forward ready rooms, his breathing apparatus still strapped to his chest and a poncho liner wrapped around his legs. He felt like hell.

“You’re the flag lieutenant, right, sir?” the petty officer asked.

“Yeah,” Madje groaned, rubbing his eyes. He caught sight of his hands, streaks of black over bright red skin, filthy nails. “How’s the admiral?”

“Doc says he’s better. He’s awake again and he wants you. You been out for hours. Skipper said to let you sleep, but—” The man trailed off. He was young, maybe twenty-one, but dark circles under puffy eyes made him look older. “I got to get back to the desk.”

Madje got to his feet and steadied himself on the rail of the chalkboard and a wave of vertigo hit him. He felt as if he could go back to sleep standing up. He stretched, pulled the poncho liner off his legs and threw it on top of a pile in a corner of the ready room and pushed out into the passageway, headed aft.

Donitz found that his ear was stuck to the receiver of the phone. He’d been sitting on his bed, a bed that wouldn’t have passed muster in a highway motel in the States, trying to use a rotary phone from colonial times.

“Fuck,” he said. And then, “Jesus fuck.”

Too loud. Soleck rolled over in his bed, the mattress sounding tinny.

“What’s the problem, Donuts?”

“I can’t get this fucking thing to—go to sleep, Soleck.”

Soleck sat up and stretched. He’d got two hours of sleep after bedding down the birds and the scramble to find lodging, talk to the airfield, talk to Sri Lankan customs. The struggle that Donitz was still in.

“Sir, with all due respect—”

“Say it.” Donuts was looking for something to lash out at. And mature enough to keep himself in check, but Soleck had some irritating habits at the best of times.

“You don’t delegate well, sir. You’re the det commander. Why don’t you get some sleep and I’ll sort out the phones?”

“Yeah?” Donuts balanced between anger and admission. “Yeah?” He shrugged, felt the tension in his shoulders and the emptiness behind his eyes. When he shut them, he could see his instrument panel and the heads-up display in his cockpit. “Okay, Mister Soleck. Have a ball. We need to get a clearance, we need to inform Fifth Fleet of our status, and we need gas. Here’s my list. And I don’t have a fucking phone number for any of them.” He waited for Soleck to do the junior officer shuffle and dump it all back on him, which would give him the excuse to launch a salvo. “And we need a way to talk to the boat.”

“Got it.” Soleck smiled at him, a reassuring smile that robbed Donitz of his anger. “Get some sleep. I’ll do this from the desk.” He looked at his watch. “You got to fly in two hours.”

“No shit. Wake me if—” Donitz began, but the room door closed with a bang, and Soleck was gone.

Alan took over the organizing of the coffee. He got a fire built, sent for more water. They boiled the water for twelve minutes and let the coffee steep for five in the French press. By then, Alan had told them about the photograph and the “Kill on sight” message, and he had passed around the palm
device he had taken from the officer in the parking lot. He felt efficient, up, able to do several things at once and really get stuff done. He was surprised, therefore, when Fidel tapped his arm and said, “Could you slow down a little, Commander? You’re making people nervous.” Perhaps because Alan looked astonished, Fidel said, “It hits some people like that—like popcorn in a hot pan. Me, I get real quiet.” And, to prove it, he turned away and got real quiet again.

Then the coffee was done and they passed the cup around, a sip for each, until the press was empty, and then they made another. And another. Ong’s stock, until then somewhere below zero, went way up.

And Alan, having made himself neither say nor do anything for at least three minutes, handed Ong the golden object he had wrestled from the commodore in the first moments of disaster. It seemed a hundred years ago.

“Why, it’s a USB key,” Ong said. Benvenuto nodded.

“What does it do?”

“Oh, it
can
do lots of things. You plug it into your USB port and—Benny, reach down your laptop.” She held the thing up. “It’s wicked cute.”

“The officer in the parking lot had one, too”

“So did the guys with him,” Fidel said. “I put them under my seat inside.” The words came out as if he had had to pay a lot for each of them.

“On chains around their necks,” Alan said, “like—medallions?” He had almost said “amulets,” but he didn’t like the implication of magic.

“Like a club key,” Benvenuto said. “Maybe they belong to the Calcutta Playboy Club.”

Clavers groaned and rolled her eyes.

Benvenuto handed Ong his laptop, and she plugged the key into its USB port. The screen, which had been showing Benvenuto’s hard-rock screen-saver, went black.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”

“Shi-i-i-t!” Benvenuto roared. “It ate my screen-saver.”

The blank screen was replaced by bright colors and some sort of logo that moved around the screen like a fly in a room, never settling. There was music, neither quite Indian nor quite Western. The logo danced across words:
Servants of the Earth.
Then that screen vanished and was replaced by animated figures and more music and voices.

“Oh, cute!” Ong said.

“What the hell’s that?” Clavers said.

The figures were engaged in a balletic fight with a three-headed dragon.

“Kiddie cartoons,” Fidel growled.

“That’s
anime!”
Ong howled. “It’s cutting-edge animation!”

“Like I said, kiddie cartoons.”

The figures looked like Ong, big-eyed and black-haired and slender. Their fight turned into a conversation into a flirtation into a journey, all in about forty seconds.

“Commercial,” Alan said. “It’s a commercial for Servants of the Earth, whatever that is.”

“It’s so
cute,”
Ong purred.

The screen turned golden, and letters in bright blue wrote themselves across it:
Do a random act of service for the earth each day.

“Sounds like a bunch of tree-huggers,” Clavers said. “Who’s for more coffee? Everybody? Benvenuto—more firewood.”

Benvenuto wanted to stay, because it was his laptop that was being used, but he was the lowest rank, so off he went. By the time he had come back, they had tried all six of the golden keys, and they all had the same logo and message and animated story. And they all urged random acts of service. Then Ong tapped on her own computer and plugged the commodore’s key in and said, “There’s
lots
more on it. It’s huge for storage, that little thing.”

“Any idea what it is?”

She tapped the keys, shook her head. “I’m afraid to let it
in until I like know what it is. You saw Benny’s computer—it just seized the whole thing so it could get its message in.” Benvenuto’s computer was on the grass. It still showed the Servants of the Earth message. Benvenuto looked at it sadly. “It’s okay, Benny,” she said. “We’ll de-bug it later, right? Trust me.”

Alan squatted, looking over her shoulder. “Can you get it off your own computer?”