Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  He still had the golden device in his left hand, the bad one, the one with only three fingers because two had been blown off in a firefight years before. He wriggled the hand down into the leftside pocket of his khakis and leveled the commodore’s pistol in front of him along the floor and took aim at the lieutenant’s right foot.

  “Sir!”

  Benvenuto’s strangled shout brought him around in time to see the commodore climb over the sailor’s body, his left hand on Benvenuto’s throat, and then the commodore was gone behind the JOTS terminal and Benvenuto was trying to suck air into lungs that had been flattened by the weight of the commodore’s knees. He was a whiz-bang electronics tech but not much of a street fighter.

  Then the automatic firing stopped, and there was a burst of pistol fire and a lot of shouting and the bang of a closing door, and then a sudden babble of voices that was like a kind of silence because there was no shooting under it.

  “Sir, sir!” a voice shouted from the other side of the room. “Do not shoot us, sir! We know nothing about it, sir!”

  Alan looked along the floor and saw Mehta’s face at his level. It was strained but sane, the more remarkable because he was lying in Borgman’s blood. “Sir—they went crazy—they are imposters or something—”

  From habit, Alan glanced at the clock: the exercise had begun thirty-three seconds before.

  Two new voices bellowed from the door, then a third. Alan rolled up and saw three Indian Marines with weapons pointed. He had a microsecond to make a decision, because one of the Marines was already looking at him and swinging his rifle. If they were with the commodore and the lieutenant, he was about to die and he should at least use the pistol in his hand; but if they were not with them—and they had returned the lieutenant’s fire, after all—then the worst thing he could do was fire on them, for they would surely kill him.

  Alan slid the pistol over the floor toward the Marines. “Alan Craik, Commander, United States Navy,” he said. Saying it from a sitting position was not very dignified. Still, it seemed to work. The Marine’s eyes met his, took in his collar and his oak leaves, and the rifle swung away.

  Then there was a lot of shouting in other languages, and Alan crawled on all fours to Benvenuto and made sure he was okay, and then he stood, using the JOTS terminal as cover, and looked around the space. The steel door to the planning room was shut; an Indian enlisted man was collapsed in a far corner, one pant leg soaked with blood. Mehta and another rating were tearing at the pant leg and trying to fashion a tourniquet. On the side near the clock, a rattled Indian EM was trying to explain to the Marines what had happened, while another was bent over a cell phone. The first one pointed at Alan and made a gesture, acting out the shooting of Borgman. The lead Marine, a sergeant, shouted back and at once everybody shut up. As if cued to that silence, an explosion from overhead rocked the building, and trouble lights flashed all over the communications consoles. The rating who had been talking to the sergeant flung himself at a console and began to flip switches.

  The sergeant stood, half-crouched, his head tilted. He turned to look at Alan. Dust filtered from the ceiling. A fluorescent fixture swung down and held on by its wires. In the new silence, a rattle of gunshots sounded somewhere else in the building, and Mehta, his hands bloody, groped his way to a wall box with a red symbol on it and began to pull out first-aid supplies.

  The sergeant duckwalked to Alan, gave a cursory salute, and said, “Sergeant Swaminathan, sir.” His voice had a pronounced lilt, the Indian accent that turns w to v.

  “Is it a mutiny?”

  The sergeant shook his head. “Very bad, sir. I think I have to take my men to barracks.”

  “But the three who were here—they murdered one of my people!—they went through that door—”

  “All very bad, sir. Best return to barracks.”

  Alan wanted to storm the door to the next room to get at the commodore and the lieutenant. A steel door, no explosives, three Indian Marines. He looked them over—they were shiny-bright, spic and span, with knife-edged creases in their khakis and spit-shines on their shoes, dressed for display more than action. The sergeant was right; his best course was to find other Marines and make sense of what was going on. Plus there were four unarmed Indian enlisted personnel to worry about, one of them wounded, and Alan and Benvenuto and three more US personnel downstairs.

  The commodore and the fleet exercise were the least of their worries.

  An Indian communications man was shouting from the console. “All communications lost, sir—everything! I think it is the antenna array on the roof up there, blown all to flinders!”

  “Can you telephone?”

  The sergeant shouted at the Indian EM, who tried a telephone, shook his head, tried another and then another. The man with the cell phone was waving it. “No good—no good—no cell connection—!” He looked wide-eyed at Alan. “I cannot get through!” Whatever was happening was choking the cell-phone net.

  “Very bad here, sir,” the sergeant said. “I take you and these personnel to some safe place, then report to my barracks.” He shook his head. “Very bad mess, sir.”

  Alan hesitated. “I can’t just leave one of my people,” he said.

  “She is dead, sir.”

  Alan walked across to Borgman’s body. Somewhere outside, another explosion erupted and was answered by more small-arms fire. He knelt. Borgman’s face was partly gone, blood and tissue sprayed over the communications panels. Alan put his fingers where a pulse would have been in her throat, waited while twenty seconds ticked away on his Breitling.

  Bahrain

  They were all waiting for something, but nobody would say what it was, even though all four knew—Rose Siciliano Craik, assistant naval attaché, Bahrain; Harry O’Neill, big-bucks American convert to Islam; Mike Dukas, head of Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Bahrain; Leslie Kultzke, live-in interloper on Dukas’s life after following him all the way from Washington. What they were waiting for was Alan Craik, but he wouldn’t be home for more than three days.

  When they had planned this gathering, he was supposed to be home, and then he had been made fleet-exercise umpire, and there went the notion that they would all be together for Rose’s birthday. Alan was the glue that held them, and, without him, there was this strange sense of waiting for somebody who wouldn’t show up.

  The three old friends sat with their knees almost touching, laughing and mopping at spilled drops of coffee and licking fingers that had become coated with powdered sugar from Rose’s biscotti. Leslie sat a little apart, like a good child allowed to sit with the grown-ups. She smiled when they laughed, otherwise sat with a pretty good imitation of interest on her round face. She was twenty-two. They were nearing forty, in Dukas’s case more like forty-five.

  Then the conversation ran down, and Harry said, “Shall we play a round of whatever-happened-to-old-so-and-so now?”

  “We’re going to play let’s-help-Michael-lose-weight.” Leslie smiled at him as she said it, pulling the plate of biscotti away from Dukas’s hand. Quite opposite expressions flitted across their faces, his chastened, then irritated, hers mature and maternal. The change made Harry raise his eyebrows at Rose, who drew her own dark, thick brows together and gave him what her husband called “the look that kills.” Then she turned away and said in that voice that announces clearly that the speaker is trying to change the subject, “What do you think Alan’s doing right now? Mike—Harry—? What does the umpire do at the start of an exercise?”

  Harry, who had been a junior intel officer ten years before, smiled and shrugged. “Stand around and try not to look bored, I suppose.”

  Northern India

  A closed car speeds along a highway. Vashni, Mohenjo Daro’s right hand, misses the comfort of their corporate headquarters, but she never questions Daro’s impulse to leave it and become anonymous. The lack of an office does not separate her from her networks: she has her headset on, watching the markets and her e-mails on VR glasses whi
le Daro chats with the driver, a Tamil who joined the movement years ago.

  As they make the turn from the main highway to the permanent traffic jam around the airport, she sees a flood of e-mails hitting her server. She reads. She touches Daro’s arm, her face averted, less because she continues to watch the screens in the VR goggles than because she doesn’t want to see his face and know again that she sees a dying man. “The Nehru has shot down an American plane.” She flips up her glasses. “Those idiots.” She looks at him.

  One of the virtues that Mohenjo Daro possessed as a leader was that he never wasted time on recrimination, although he would certainly have been justified now. He had spent three years putting his own crew on the submarine and getting it into a situation where it could disappear. The Nehru should have been invisible to the joint exercise. It should have had the additional invisibility of their carefully laid misdirection of the American JOTS system. And now it had shot down an American aircraft!

  “So much for stealth,” he said. He had rather liked stealth, she knew. He had hoped to avoid the messiness that came with open conflict. He smiled now as he saw the irony of it, close to religious revelation. Of course, the path to anarchy and healing lay through conflict, as he often told her. It was more ironic that he had tried to avoid it. She knew that his mind would now start wandering down corridors of paradox; she put her hand on his arm to remind him that she was waiting for his order.

  “Implement Shiva’s Spear,” he said. “Better look at the next two layers and have those brought up to readiness.” He thought. “Assemble an operator team at one of our office locations.”

  “Which one?”

  “Choose one at random.”

  Ahead, his gleaming helicopter waited on its pad. Mohenjo Daro sat back and contemplated the end of the world of men.

  Mahe Naval Base, India

  Running feet sounded outside in the corridor, then shouts and shots.

  Alan had made his decision. “We have a vehicle in the fleet-exercise car park. I have to get to it.”

  “I will try, sir.”

  “Plus I got three more people downstairs.” And he wasn’t leaving without them, for sure.

  The sergeant licked his lips, chewed on the upper one as if trying to bite the small moustache there. “Okay, we try.”

  “Benvenuto, you okay?”

  The young man was rubbing his throat. “Little hoarse, sir.”

  “We have to disable the JOTS.” Alan jerked his head. The terminal was critical hardware, its innards as highly classified as anything the Navy had. “Out the window. It’s two floors down to asphalt.”

  Benvenuto’s mouth opened. He was being asked to go from being the JOTS’ mother hen to its terminator in one breath. “Ok-a-a-a-y, sir—”

  They got two of the Indian EMs to help while one of the Marines broke the unopenable window, and without ceremony they toppled the device over the sill. Alan leaned at the corner of the window and watched it smash on the pavement below. There was more shooting out there now, and when he raised his head he could see smoke billowing above a row of trees.

  The sergeant was instructing the other Marines and the Indian personnel. Alan looked for the pistol he had tossed away but didn’t see it; he supposed that one of the Marines had kicked it out of the way. The sergeant was already by the door, bouncing up and down on his toes from tension. Alan got down low, spotted the pistol under a computer table, grabbed it, then looked around the ruined room, pausing for a bitter moment at Borgman.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  3

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  “Admiral on the bridge!” The sailor braced.

  “Stand easy.” Rafe came off the starboard ladder and waved at the bridge crew. “You guys have coffee for an old man?” He turned to Rick Madje, his flag lieutenant, who was holding a phone out to him. Rafe raised his eyebrows.

  “Captain Fraser on the Picton.” HMCS Picton was a Canadian frigate attached to his battle group, the ship Alan had complained about because Rafe had put it way down south as a radar picket with orders to stay in Emissions Control, or EMCON—the regulation of outgoing EM transmissions across the spectrum—until she had a chance to shoot.

  “Captain Fraser?”

  “Sorry to break EMCON, Admiral, and I’m on satcom to make us harder to track.”

  “Sure, Alex, sure.”

  “Sir, I’m calling to protest two inbound ‘missiles.’ I’ve called Exercise Control four times to note them as intercepted and they don’t respond.” The “missiles” would really be aircraft imitating missiles as part of the exercise.

  “Roger, Alex. I hear you. We haven’t been able to raise ExCon since a few seconds after startex ourselves. Something’s gone down at their end.”

  Rafe could hear the relief in the Canadian’s voice. “That’s okay, then. But be aware that two Indian Air Force Jaguars went over my position about six minutes back and went into a missile profile.”

  “Got it, Alex. I’ll pass that to Air Ops.”

  “Out here, sir.”

  “Stay alive, Alex. Keep up the good work.”

  Rafe turned to Madje. “You get all that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get it through to Air Ops and Supplot.” Supplementary Plot was where electronic-warfare-intelligence information and various other sources were cross-indexed to update the carrier’s picture of the ocean around her. Rafe turned to the boat’s captain, a former F-18 pilot. His leather flight jacket’s patch said “Hank Rogers.” Only a score of old buddies like Rafe knew his name was really Reginald.

  “Hank? Launch the alert five, okay? I have to put some teeth down there to cover the Canucks.”

  “On the way,” Hank murmured, already on the phone to the air boss.

  AG 703, in the Stack 2NM NNE of the USS Thomas Jefferson

  Lieutenant Evan Soleck’s had been the fourth plane to launch after the local Combat Air Patrol and he got it into the air without a hitch. He had no back end to worry about, because he was a mission tanker for a sea-strike package that would launch later in the event—twenty thousand pounds of fuel to give while airborne—but intellectual curiosity made him get the back end up from his pilot console so that he could run his passive electronic-surveillance antennas and follow the action.

  His copilot, a nugget from Iowa called “Guppy” because of the facial expressions he generated while concentrating on his instruments, had his hands full merely following the checklists and couldn’t believe his pilot was wasting time on backseater crap. “If the skipper wanted us doing that stuff, he’d have sent us up with guys in the back,” Guppy said in a put-upon tone.

  Soleck watched him flail through the checklist. That was me, last cruise, he thought. And continued the ritualistic pattern of bringing the computers on line. Oh, for the MARI we had at the det. New computers, enhanced antennas, the works. Soleck had flown in a special det under Al Craik and it had spoiled him for these old planes and their antique systems.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  In the windowed bubble below the Jefferson‘s bridge, the air boss was trying to launch forty aircraft for the opening reconnaissance of the exercise. Every F-18, every S-3, all the EA-6B Prowlers—it was a major launch, and it took his full concentration to keep the overcrowded flight deck from becoming a disaster. A sailor pushed a yellow sticky into his line of sight. Launch the alert five AAW.

  The air boss looked at the line waiting to get off cats three and four. The event had started, and he had planes five deep in the queue already.

  “Tell the tower to hold three and four until the alert is launched.” The alert—an aircraft held on the shortest tether, ready to launch in five minutes—was sitting on cat two, with the second plane somewhere toward the stern. He held the note out to a spotter and motioned that they needed to get that second plane through the traffic jam and on the cat.

  “Now launch the alert five AAW,” the air boss said into the ship’s 1MC. He cycled his comm
s from the Guard frequency that he monitored in his headset to the AAW net while trying to read the spidery writing on the launch board behind him. Donitz. AG 203.

  “Alpha Gulf 203, you ready?” he said.

  “Green and green.”

  Lieutenant-Commander Chris Donitz was already in the shuttle. The air boss watched the twin vertical stabilizers tremble in the heat distortion as Donitz moved the plane to full power, and then he was off, rotating just off the cat to clear the hull of the ship.

  Alpha Whiskey, the air warfare commander off to starboard on the missile cruiser Fort Klock, came up before the air boss had toggled back to Guard, giving orders to Donitz as he roared away from the ship in his F-18. “Alpha Gulf 203, intercept two goblins inbound on the 090 radial at 9000.”

  Somewhere above him, Donitz said, “Roger,” before the air boss had switched freqs and noted from his comm card that “goblins” were Indian Air Force Jaguars. He didn’t question why Indian Jaguars had to be intercepted; his job was down here. He watched a sailor put a check next to AG 203 on the launch board, then looked down at the deck and saw that AG 114 was next to launch for the alert five.

  “Spot, you got 114 moving yet?”

  “Trying to get the S-3 off cat three so I can move the E-2 and get him space.”

  The air boss looked down at the deck again and saw the S-3 on cat three as the jet-blast deflector rose out of the deck to protect the planes waiting behind her from the backwash of her engines. “What’s that S-3 doing?” he said into his mike.