Damage Control (9 page)

The woman on the other end was good. She knew within half a minute that Commander Craik wasn’t there. Had he tried the naval base? Then Dukas and Leslie came in, and Rose stood in the kitchen doorway with the telephone still in her hand, and the three-year-old, Bobby, woke from his nap and wandered in with the nanny from the bedroom wing. And then Mike—the other Mike, named after Mike Dukas—Alan’s and Rose’s nine-year-old son, came in from outside, looking at all the adults with the wisdom born of years among such people, and said, “What’s wrong now?” Then, with the condescension that only a child can show to his mother, he said, “Mom, you’re burning the tomato sauce again.”

A continent away from Rose’s burned sauce, the sharp smell of rancid ghee carried over the industrial antiseptic and mold to burn in Daro’s throat. He coughed, his hand automatically rubbing his abdomen. Despite the discomfort, he savored the anonymity of his new headquarters.

They now occupied a former telemarketing center over a
restaurant. The walls were gray-green, the carpet dull and moldy. There were no posters, no personal photographs, no cartoons, no graffiti. Three cheap digital clocks provided the only relief for the eye. On the floor, desks formed a long curve with a bank of small flat-screen displays against the far wall.

Mohenjo Daro paced the floor in front of the screens, often pausing opposite the desk of one of his operators to hear a report, curled into himself by pain despite his discipline.

Vashni, on the other hand, sat to one side with three laptops open in front of her, collating data. She raised her head from her screen. “The Americans have cancelled the exercise. We have a report that their carrier is on fire.”

Daro nodded. He was leaning over another operator, reading her screen.

Vashni raised her voice, unsure whether her news had been heard. “Shiva’s Spear was a success.”

“Hundreds of men and women are dead, Vash. Try not to sound so pleased.”

She swung her hair. “We can move to phase two. Americans are the greatest offenders against this planet—”

Daro was shaking his head even as she started to speak. “I wish we could have recruited there more effectively.”

“In America? All they care about is money and primitive religion.” Vash’s facade of civility cracked and her voice grew shriller. “No one would have joined.”

He ignored her, placed a hand on his stomach, shrugged. “So—let us move on to phase two, then.”

Daro clapped his hands. The operators looked up.

“Phase two, my friends.”

Conversation stilled. The gentle tapping of fingers on keyboards became the only sound, intense concentration the only expression. Phase two would turn India into chaos.

An hour passed. Two men in white lab coats served food, which was eaten automatically.

Daro moved around the room, scanning screens, making suggestions and responses, praising much and reproving little. Three times in the hour he stopped, hands at his waist, head down. After the hour’s walking, he was visibly weaker.

Despite her own tasks, Vashni watched him from the cover of her computer screens. She was sure that the bouts were coming quicker and hitting him harder.

One of the men at the left of the room punched a fist in the air, and Daro walked over to look at his screen, where a data stream was made visible as a digital waterfall. “I’m in,” the man said, indicating his screen. Then his fingers flew over the keyboard. As he typed, flat screens on the front wall lit up and provided images, all black and white. Nine of them showed corridors, one showed a desk with a guard; a few showed outside views of a low concrete building, and three showed the top of a dam. One showed a low concrete building with a heavy blast door marked “Bldg. 37.” Altogether, there were twenty-seven screens, and, even as Daro watched, they changed to a new set of views: more landscapes, a helipad, more security stations. Distant mountains showed in some views, and a dam, and the lake behind it, and twelve huge turbines; factories, power storage, power transmission, a nuclear reactor. The whole of the Ambur Regional Electrical Power Facility, the most extensive in India, unfolded across the wall in the frames of the flat paneled screens.

Daro reached out a hand toward Ali, his assistant, and snapped his fingers, and Ali unwrapped a new cell phone from its plastic and handed it to Daro, who opened it and dialed a long number. The crackling of the discarded plastic was the loudest sound in the room.

“Ready?” he asked. Something about the reply amused him, and he smiled. “You should have the feed now. Three minutes? I think we can wait that long. Very good.” He pressed a button to end the call, and handed the phone to
Ali while he watched the screens, leaning the weight of his torso on one arm on the back of a chair.

“Station Two will insert loops as soon as they have sufficient footage for each camera. Our views will continue to be live,” he said.

“I have control of all their SCADA functions,” the man said at the end of the table.

“Station Two will give you the cue to cut the lights.”

The man nodded, his head back down on his screen.

The rest of the center remained quiet. Even Vashni had stopped working to watch the screens that flickered away, changing scenes every five seconds. There were hundreds of views, with guard stations, exteriors, interiors, machinery, more power turbines. The clocks counted down three minutes. Several of the computers gave low chimes, the sound of arriving e-mail.

“Our troops are going in.” A small woman in the center took a deep breath.

“Lights out—now,” said one of Daro’s operators.

Daro caught a movement in one of the scenes because he had been watching for it. A man in black appeared by one of the security stations. Most of the screens went black. The external views of the power facility dimmed as the artificial lights in the compound went out.

Daro motioned for another cup of tea. “I think it is time to move again, Vash,” he said, his face old now, pinched. He pointed at the operator on the end. “Stay online.”

Vashni reached in her purse and brought out a hand bell, which she rang sharply. One of the two doors to the room opened and a group of men in white overalls marked “Dow Chem” walked in, pushing industrial carts. The operators began unplugging their laptops and loading them on the carts while the white overalls took down the display monitors and the digital clocks. Several of the monitors were showing bursts of automatic weapons fire as they were unplugged.

“Leave that one,” Daro said, pointing to a monitor that showed a helipad. The operator nodded.

Daro exhaled sharply and bent over, his face moon pale.

Vashni surprised herself by placing a hand under his elbow. He turned his head, locked her eyes with his, gasped. Then he shook her off and tried to stand straight, rubbing his abdomen.

The room emptied. Daro’s operators left.

On the screen, a helicopter landed on the pad.

Daro gave a weak wave and another cell phone was unwrapped and passed to him. He dialed. Listened. “Excellent,” he whispered. Closed the phone and handed it to Ali, who extracted the guts and broke them between his hands.

“Lights,” he said to the operator.

The operator pressed a key and squinted at the screen. “Back on,” he said.

The views of the power plant were illuminated, one showing a body with a surprising pool of dark liquid around it, the others empty corridors, and then back to the helicopter, its blades still rotating.

Daro took a lemon drop and chewed it. Vashni was working on a tiny palmtop.

The operator continued to type ferociously. “I have control of the turbines, now. Shall I run them backward?”

“Not yet,” Daro said. On the screen, dark figures were pushing a heavy metal cart toward the helicopter; another cart followed, then a third. The uncertain light shone on reflective tape outlining the edges of the carts, and the distorted image glowed. The glow framed matte black cradles in each cart.

It took six men to lift the payload from one cart into the helicopter. By the time they reached the third cart, Daro could sense their fatigue. He watched them lift the last black cradle off the cart and swing it up to reach the open door
of the helicopter. Their effort fell short. The cradle swung back and one of the men fell away, clutching his arm.

Daro looked at his watch. Another man appeared in the frame with a rifle slung over his back, and then another. They helped to lift the last cradle aboard the helicopter.

Daro watched them as he had watched the lotus, his attention tuned to their actions, his wretched abdomen churning in response to their struggles. Even Vashni watched them, her eyes flicking to her palmtop and then back to the men loading the helicopter.

Then the copter stirred on the pad. It began to lift, lights blinking. In seconds it vanished from the screen, tail high.

Daro sighed as if he had been holding his breath. “Let’s go,” he said.

He was now the possessor of three nuclear warheads

Mary Totten stood looking at a TV screen in the CIA’s Center for Weapons of Mass Destruction and felt an adrenaline rush—the first good feeling since she’d been transferred out of Operations. A map of India was on the screen, and a talking head was telling them about the destruction of a power station at a place called Ambur. That was what had triggered the adrenaline—Ambur! She knew a lot about Ambur.
Ambur is more than an electrical power station, sweetie. Ambur is a secret nuclear-storage site.

She ran for her desk, hungry to be the first. She grabbed her phone, checked on the fly that it was secure, and whammed the top button.

“This is Mary Totten at WMD,” she said to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. “We have a situation.”

They got to their hotel by back roads and industrial streets; what was normally a ten-mile cruise from their hotel door to the Mahe naval base’s main gate became a hurried, nervous search through a very different, very unfamiliar India. When, at last, they pulled up at the hotel’s glass and marble front, Fidel said, “Amen,” and Clavers, who was driving, screamed, “Hey, whoa—we made it!” Ong burst into tears. Benvenuto, whose high had crashed, looked as if he’d been sandbagged. Fidel told Clavers not to turn the engine off and waited for her to get out, then slid behind the wheel and said, “I’ll park it around back.” He glanced at Alan as if expecting an objection. Alan only nodded.

Clavers seemed to take it personally. “What the hell for?”

“Because I don’t want it around front.” He looked at Alan again, then back at Clavers. He put his right hand on the gearshift. “Always find the back way out—right?”

Alan herded the rest of them into the hotel. The airconditioned lobby, not over-large but handsomely done up in shades of red and brown, seemed odd to him, different—and then it struck him:
Nobody’s sitting or waiting or checking in. The place is
empty.

“Commander Craik!” The high female voice seemed to echo in the space. “Commander Craik!” A woman was calling, almost screaming, to him from the front desk.

Alan shouted back at his crew as he crossed the lobby, “Nobody go out! Everybody stay close to a phone!” The woman at the desk was holding up message slips, and he was thinking that there had been a dozen calls for him from Bahrain, angry people wondering why he wasn’t at Mahe, why they couldn’t reach him, what was going on—He turned back to his ragtag army. “And don’t get in the shower!” Looks of shock. “If the phone rings, I want you to pick up!” They were already at the elevators, headed for their rooms.

“Commander Craik!” The tall young woman coming around the reception counter was Miss Chitrakar. In this hotel, where the reception clerks also functioned as concierges, she had been wonderful all week. Now, she looked terrified.

“Messages, messages—” She started back for the high marble and almost fell. “People calling and calling—especially—” She handed him a slip of paper.

The message said, Stay where you are until I get you. Important! Harry.

Harry? Harry wasn’t Fifth Fleet. Still—

“The telly said the Pakistanis are preparing to attack!”

He looked at her, saw her frightened eyes, then realized that a small television set was on behind the counter, images of soldiers filling its screen.

Then the telephone rang and she flinched and answered and almost at once jerked, her head and looked at him, listened, nodded, tried to speak, listened, held out the phone. “Your friend.”

Their fingers touched. She flinched as if shocked.

“Harry?”

“My God, you’re a hard man to find. Al, what the hell is happening there—? I tried the navy base, the phones are down!”

“Harry—I can’t talk—I’ve got to call Fifth Fleet—”

Miss Chitrakar moved away.

“Al, shut up! Listen—something’s happened to the
Jefferson.
Some sort of accident. What do you know about it?”

Alan was watching the mini-TV. The picture was incom-prehensible—a building on fire, a talking head, an air shot of the fire, a flasher in the corner that said “Calcutta”.

“Harry, what’re you calling
me
for?”

“Something’s going down, Al. Rose got a call from her office; the word is that the exercise was canceled—”

“Yeah, but that’s because—”

“—and the
Jeff
‘s not answering any comm link—’

“Wait a minute, Harry, that can’t be
—my
comm was down, not—”

“—plus there’s some weird shit going on where you are.
Weird
shit—”

The picture on the mini-TV changed to show a shattered cell-phone tower, the flashing name “Delhi.” The talking head returned.

“Harry, I’ve been out of touch for a couple of hours. Tell me about the
Jefferson.”

“They think it was a crash on the deck; that’s all they’ll say. Fifth Fleet don’t know whether to shit or go blind. Al—are you guys okay?”

Alan saw Fidel come into the lobby from a rear door. He was carrying a long bundle wrapped in filthy newspaper.

“Harry, I can’t talk. Physically, I’m fine. We’re at the hotel and we’re going to hunker down here. But—yeah, something’s going on—I can’t—”

He was watching a burning gas station on the mini-TV, the title “Mumbai.” And abruptly, the set went black.

And the hotel lights went out.

Fidel stopped where he was, shifted his grip on the long bundle, and looked around.

And Miss Chitrakar screamed as the floor-to-ceiling front window by the hotel door exploded inward.

“Al—Al—what’s going on—Al—?”

Mary Totten hung up the phone after her call to the DDI, the wash of adrenaline fading, leaving her feeling cleansed. She had got the okay to head for India to find out what was going on at the secret nuclear-weapons site at Ambur.
I’m getting out of here!
she screamed inside her head.

She was a graying but still handsome woman, angular and tough and sometimes abrasive. Good at her job but not so good at politics. Made for the field, not a desk.

She burrowed in a drawer for her fly-away kit, which she rifled briefly, checking for the essential items
—flashlight, med kit, knife, toilet paper, birth-control pills, tampons, money, condoms, a good book. Need to draw a pistol from the station when I’m incountry.
The DDI had told her to assemble a team: she was to have the crisis-center plane, support from Special Operations Group, the works.

A team. Might as well start right here. The guy’s a jerk, but he’s brilliant.

She started around the cubicles.

“Bill?”

“Yeah, oh, Mary, hi—” Bill Caddis mumbled with his head down at his screen. He had a can of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi in one hand and a computer mouse in the other.

“Bill, I need you to go to India. Tonight.”

“Sure. Yeah, sure, as soon as I have this thing fixed up. Sorry it’s late, Mary. India? Whoa, as in
go to India?”

“Go home, pack a bag. Get your passport with your cover name, if you ever got one. Expect to be gone a week. Maybe two. And take a shower, Bill.”

“Oh, yeah. Hmmm. Sorry.”

She went back to her desk, and threw herself into the chair so that the wheels screamed. She began to make a list. And the telephone rang. The security window said “DDI.”

She had just talked to him. The DDI never called back with good news.

Oh, shit.

She picked up the phone.

Harry O’Neill was pushing the cell phone against his ear so hard the cartilage hurt. He was hunkered over, not wanting Rose or young Mike to hear him or the sounds coming from the device. In his ear, automatic gunfire popped like corn, and a woman screamed. A heavy clunk-crash meant that Alan had dropped the phone at his end. Or worse.

Harry made his way to the front door and stepped into the late-afternoon heat. “Al? Al, can you hear me?”

Alan glimpsed at least four uniformed men shooting from the street before he dove behind the marble counter, taking Miss Chitrakar with him. She screamed even louder. He had time to realize, as he worked the CZ out of his belt, that the attackers could have recognized him through the big plate-glass windows, meaning that, whatever his picture and the message to kill on sight meant in the long run, right now it meant that their pursuit wasn’t confined to the naval base.

Miss Chitrakar was in a fetal position, elegant, stockinged legs drawn up, screaming into the floor. He envied her; he wanted to curl up and scream, too.

He put his right cheek against the inside edge of the high counter and peered around, protected from the street by the depth of the counter itself—twelve inches of shelves, with an inch of marble on the outside. Chips of stone had spattered over the terrazzo floor immediately in front of him; beyond them and across fifteen feet of open space, Fidel, surrounded by torn newspaper, was crouched behind a pillar with an AK-47.

Good on you,
Alan thought. He admitted to himself that he’d probably have told Fidel not to bring a weapon into the
hotel if he’d known it was what he planned. Fidel fired a three-round burst, and somebody bellowed and then screamed. Behind Alan, Miss Chitrakar screamed in response. Fidel looked his way, saw the CZ, pointed toward the street.

Alan, using the gun left-handed, the butt held clumsily because of his missing fingers, eased the muzzle around the marble facing of the counter and tried to get enough of his left eye out there to see what was going on. As he did, Fidel fired again and full-auto fire responded, walking up the wall beside the reception counter and trying to swing over to Fidel’s pillar.
Piss-poor shooting.
He looked out, one-eyed, saw a figure leaning over the hood of a car parked just beyond the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Alan steadied the big 9mm with his right hand and double-tapped, missing the mostly hidden shooter but sending him ducking behind the car as bullets thunked into the hood.
Deadeye Dick shoots again.

“Just keep that shithead pinned down!” Fidel shouted at him. “There’s two other guys—I got one—!” He disappeared around the far side of the pillar and reappeared as a slithering shape on the glass-littered floor. Alan raked his eyes over the windows, saw movement outside to his left, snapped off a shot, swung back to see his man on this side trying to look around the front bumper of the car he was using as cover. Alan fired at him, missed again but put the fear of God in him.

How many shots left? Nine? Eight?

Fidel was behind another pillar on the far side of the lobby now. When one of the shooters over there tried to back into the street so that he could throw something through the smashed-out window, Fidel took him with a burst, then ducked. It didn’t register on Alan, then did, and he got his eye and hand behind the counter as the grenade exploded in the street; something pinged on the marble, and dust swirled where a ceiling tile had been ripped away near the door.

Fidel was already through the empty window, firing; Alan followed, the CZ pushed in front of him in his good hand now, the left hand supporting, third finger on the trigger.
Use it like a knife,
the instructor had said,
it’s a knife
—He reached the window. Fidel was firing on full auto.

The shooter behind the nearest car popped up. He had blood on his shirt. Alan had time to take in the terrified eyes, the half-stagger as the man tried to swing the weapon first toward Fidel, then toward Alan.

He’s trying not to run.

Alan double-tapped, double-tapped; the man exploded backward.

Oh, Christ, I hate this.

The street was silent. Far away, a siren wailed.

“Fucking amateurs.” Fidel came in through the hole where the plate-glass doors had been. “Fucking
amateurs!”
He was in a rage. Alan guessed that he hated it, too. “Don’t even know enough to try to shoot through fucking plate glass!”

“You okay, Fidel?”

“How do I look, dead? We gotta get outa here, Commander! Those weirdos were fucking
after
us—I saw one of them goddam
point
at you before they started shooting! What the hell goes on, here, anyway?”

“Is that all of them?” Alan wanted to sit down.

“Yeah, four. What kind of navy sends four fucking amateurs to get five people?” Fidel frowned even more deeply, a scary sight. “Hey, Commander, level with me—are we at war with India?”

“No. Absolutely not.” He thought that over. “But part of India may be at war with us. With me.” He shook his head. “Look, I’ll tell you about it later, okay? For now, we have to get out of here.” In truth he didn’t want to move. Shock, fatigue, the self-disgust that came after killing swept over him. He wiped his face on his left sleeve. “We have to get out of here,” he said again. He couldn’t think.

Mary Totten put the telephone to her ear.

“Sorry, Mary.” His voice was weary. “It’s off. You don’t go. I’ve been ordered to take no action.”

“Why the
fuck?”
Her voice rose to an unprofessional shriek on the last word. She reached up and tugged at one of her earrings, a bad habit left from adolescence.

“The President told the security advisor an hour ago that India is not a US interest.”

“How the hell was the President making a decision about India an
hour
ago? It just happened!”

“Apparently the White House had another source on a, mmm, related matter.”

She took a breath, tried not to sound like a child who’d just been told that Christmas was off.
“No
action?”

“NSC had an Indian story in front of the President before we did. Not Ambur—something else.”

“Sir, do the President and the National Security Council know that the Indians probably build and store nuclear weapons at Ambur?”

“Mary, I tried. Maybe we can put something together tomorrow.”

“Does the Navy know what’s at stake here?” She cast her eyes desperately over the papers on her desk, a jumble of top-secret trash, before she found what she wanted; the Director, Naval Intelligence Daily Intelligence Summary. “The Navy’s got a huge fucking exercise with the Indian Navy, Lord of Light, starting today!”

“Mary, this is a need-to-know issue, but I’ll tell you this much—it was something to do with the Navy and the exercise that got to the President an hour ago. The exercise has been canceled—that’s classified, not to be repeated; they’re keeping it close to the vest so far. There’s been an incident, okay? They’re trying to keep it off the evening news until they can spin it. We’re talking dead American military—
next to that, Ambur doesn’t loom very large with this bunch.”

“But if there are Indian nukes—!”

“Indian nukes don’t vote; dead sailors’ families do. They’re focused on damage control.”

“But—the Navy must have people on the ground there.” She thought fast. “Look, cut me orders to go to Bahrain and support Fifth Fleet, sir. Screw the plane. Give me a country team for India and a couple of jocks from Special Operations Group and let me go to Bahrain to support the Navy. They’ll love it, we’ll look cooperative as hell, and the moment the NSC realizes what’s really at stake, we’ll be twelve hours ahead.” She wanted to say
Please.
As in
I beg you. On my knees.