Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  C.L. Brevard was Cindy Lee Brevard—one of her cover names.

  As she got ready to send the message, a new summary came up on her main screen. India was now having an epidemic of small-scale terrorist acts.

  Fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll worry about that tomorrow out in Bahrain.

  11

  Bahrain

  When the message came in on Harry O’Neill’s cell phone, he was in the Craiks’ kitchen, helping Rose to put away the half-prepared, now-cancelled dinner. Rose was in office clothes now; she, too, had been called in and was on her way to the embassy because of a diplomatic wrangle over aircraft from the Jefferson needing to land in Sri Lanka. She was rushing, telling the nanny what to do for the kids’ breakfasts if she didn’t get home, banging things into cupboards as she talked. The nanny, an un-pretty, cheerful Bosnian girl, kept nodding.

  Harry ignored the cell phone’s tone, but it nagged on, and, thinking it was Djalik from his office, he leaned against the kitchen counter and put the device to his ear.

  “O’Neill.”

  He heard the sounds of electronic space, then a computerized female voice. “Please call Jan at home. She is waiting for your call.”

  He shut the cell phone and gave Rose a smile, just as if he hadn’t just received a coded message that told him to check his encrypted e-mail.

  “Bad news for me, too, Rose. Crisis at the office.” He kissed her and went out.

  In his Hummer, he opened his laptop, brought up the message. C.L. Brevard. Where the fuck do they get these code names? He pictured Brevard, some self-styled tough guy with a balding head and a cover-your-ass approach to everything. He looked over the text, noted the authenticator, saw the “activate” and winced, saw the code word that meant a meeting, but he couldn’t remember the comm plan and so didn’t know where or when. As he drove away, he was planning how he would cover the moves he knew he would have to make to maintain his real self as a Muslim, black, foreign entrepreneur in an Arab country.

  He also went over again the years-old adjustment to being known by the ridiculous code name “Persian Rug.”

  North of Mahe, India

  The countryside was black, with only the flares of a distant refinery visible where the coast must have been. The beach-resort area had been madness as darkness fell—electricity gone, people frightened, cars blaring their horns and flashing their lights in their rush to get home and off the streets. Now, as the houses thinned on the dark road, the soft glow of kerosene lamps marked windows. Once, they saw the redness of an outdoor cooking fire.

  Fidel was driving, trying to find his way down the strange road in what had become a blackout. Everybody in the van had offered advice, none of it useful; finally, Alan had had to shut them all up and move to the front seat to try to puzzle it out for him. Then Benvenuto had said from the back, “Excuse me—Commander—can I talk?”

  “What?” The tone meant “No!”

  “Yes, sir, only, I’m not trying to interfere, only—can you give me the name where we’re headed, sir?”

  Alan gritted his teeth. “Prenningerash.”

  “Can you spell that, sir?”

  “Benvenuto, not now!”

  He was surprised to hear Ong’s small, liquid voice. “He’s only trying to help, Alan. We have a GPS program going back here.”

  Alan turned hard around in the seat. The interior was dark; Clavers was half-asleep in the second seat. Behind her, Benvenuto and Ong were silhouettes against the dimness of the rear window, their faces visible in the glow of their laptops. Alan looked at where he thought Ong’s eyes must be. He spelled Prenningerash—or tried to anyway.

  Fingers tapped lightly on computer keys.

  “Northeast of Mahe—that one, sir?”

  “Benvenuto, you mean you have a map of this place?”

  “Oh, it’s Lieutenant Ong’s map, sir—”

  Ong overlapped. “We’re using my laptop for the GPS plugin. Benny’s looking for the destination.” Her voice was a reprimand. “I picked up my personal laptop at the hotel, although I hardly had time.”

  Benny?

  Alan wanted to laugh. Or perhaps scream. “Yeah, the Prenningerash northeast of our hotel about thirty miles—bearing 315. That look about right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ong said. She seemed to have made a wonderful recovery. Could one interrupted bath do that? He saw her head move from Benvenuto’s laptop to her own; a hand was silhouetted against the back window as she pointed something out to Benvenuto. “We’re on the same page now, except Benny doesn’t have GPS. Yeah, we’re on the coast highway there—see—?”

  “Yeah, right—” Benvenuto sounded half delirious. What was better, after combat, than sitting in the dark with an older woman and working on your computers together?

  “Can you see an airfield?”

  “Oh, yes.” Ong was twirling her trackball. Keys clacked. “Bhulta Field.”

  “Well, my source said the Bhulta Valley Agricultural Facility.”

  “I have Bhulta Field. Runway sixteen hundred and forty-one meters. Radio frequency—we don’t care about that—manned one hour before sunrise to one hour after sundown, no radar, landing lights on runway only, hangar space for light aircraft. Sound right?”

  “Get us there!”

  Ong murmured something to Benvenuto, who sniggered, moaned, giggled. Ong said in a louder voice, “Master Chief Fidelio, we’re coming up on an intersection. Take an unpaved road on your right.”

  Fidel looked aside at Alan, his eyes reflections of the dash lights. Alan settled back in the seat. “Do what they say. We’re in the hands of the nerds.”

  NCIS Bahrain

  Dukas had been in his office an hour, disgusted and tense at the same time because he’d taken a day of leave and now he was using it to work, and because the message traffic about India was grim, and because something horrendous had happened to the Jefferson. He had put Greenbaum to sorting incoming traffic and trying to find the missing agent, Rattner, who so far had been tracked to the Jockey Club, where he had managed to disappear.

  “Secure phone call,” Leslie said. She was so much better in the office than anybody else he had that he was tempted to hire her—until he remembered what everybody would say. “Woman. Secure line.”

  Dukas grunted and punched buttons and scribbled a message for Leslie: Ambur—find what we know about Ambur—electrical complex attacked earlier—

  “Yeah, Dukas here.”

  “Mister Dukas, I’m Mary Totten at the WMD Center.” Dukas didn’t get it immediately, then remembered a call slip that Greenbaum had given him, some female at the CIA Weapons of Mass Destruction center. Just what he needed now. She had a good voice, though, maybe a little too self-confident, one of those voices that said that anything it uttered was worth listening to, so pay attention. “Mister Dukas, I realize this isn’t, strictly speaking, your purview, but I’ve tried Fifth Fleet intel and everyone seems to be out. I’d like to come out to Bahrain with a team and provide support to the Navy for the ongoing crisis in India.”

  Purview, Dukas thought, Jesus Christ. The word brought the woman into focus. “Oh, yeah?” he said. He didn’t comment on “ongoing crisis,” which was a term he wasn’t ready to use yet.

  “Are you following what’s on the news?” she asked—impatiently, he thought.

  “Yeah, we get television here.”

  The voice changed. She was quick. “Look, sorry, I’m rushing. Mister Dukas, the electric power facility that the terrorists hit? At Ambur?”

  “Yeah?” He was wondering if a CIA team wasn’t the next best thing to a case of shingles.

  “Mister Dukas, we have reason to believe that Ambur is a nuclear weapons fabrication facility. They build and store warheads there, we think.”

  Dukas thought about that. Maybe he did want a CIA team. “Can I pass that information to Fifth Fleet?” He was temporizing.

  “Absolutely. Look, I know that’s where I should have started—I called everyplace there, tried to get a g
uy I know named Craik—the intel? But I couldn’t, and time is of the essence, and I want to come out there and provide a WMD cell for support.”

  “I don’t have the authority to authorize that,” Dukas said, speaking with perfect truth but knowing that if he told her it was okay, it would be okay. “What kind of support you got in mind?”

  She was ready for that one—boy, was she ready! Probably she even had notes. She went through the spiel in less than a minute—team size (some team, one guy), security levels, special knowledge, direct links to the WMD Center, skills. “We bring very special and very particular capabilities, Mister Dukas. I don’t know a lot about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but I don’t think you have those capabilities ready to hit the ground the way we do—do you?”

  Dukas, thinking of the special capabilities of Greenbaum and Rattner, made a noncommittal sound. What he was in fact hearing from her, he thought, was that she didn’t have shit for support from the Agency, but she wanted a trip to India. “Give me some time to contact Admiral Pilchard and I’ll get back to you.”

  “I’ll be sitting on the phone. Thanks, Mister—is it Mike?”

  Everybody in the Navy called him Mike, but this woman sounded to him like an A-number-one CIA horse’s ass, and it never paid to give them an inch. Still—“Yeah, Mike, of course. Absolutely.”

  But he didn’t call Fifth Fleet HQ immediately. In fact, a minor invasion by the CIA was not to him a top-priority problem—Dukas was a political infighter, but so far he didn’t see that a temporary in-country team could do much more than irritate the shit out of him—and so he checked on Greenbaum, found that Rattner was still invisible; checked with Leslie, found she was on the Internet. She had pulled up stock photos of Ambur when it was brand-new, and had data on something called SCADA, which was complex techno-speak but made him laugh.

  “It’s funny?” Leslie said.

  “SCADA. ‘Skata’ is Greek for shit.”

  “Oh, as in scatology, oh, yeah!” She laughed, too. Dukas didn’t ask her how she had learned a word like “scatology”. Anyway SCADA wasn’t shit but a technology for controlling things like electrical flow with computers.

  Back at his desk, he eyeballed what they had on terrorist groups in India, at the same time dialling a number from his dog-eared private address book. Somebody else picked up, but on one hop he got through to the man he wanted—Carl Menzes, a guy in CIA Internal Affairs who knew everybody in the Agency. He asked for the creds on a woman named Totten.

  Menzes was good at his job because he was cautious. “Mary Totten?”

  “That’s the one. WMD Center.”

  “I know nothing about her.”

  “Hey, Carl—come on! You know everything about everybody!”

  “You’re fishing, Dukas. I’m not biting.”

  Dukas sighed. “Look, Carl, she’s offered help to the Navy, and that’s so unlike anybody there in the crystal palace that I think she’s either a flake or a fake. Help me out here, okay?”

  Menzes hesitated. Then, “We’re not investigating her or anything of that sort. Otherwise—I’m not in the business of repeating gossip.”

  “Well, I am. Give me the gossip. I gotta go to an admiral with something so he can make a decision, for Christ’s sake.”

  Again, Menzes was silent. Dukas remembered how hard it was to drag information out of him—the reason he was so good at his job, in fact. Finally, Menzes said, “She’s got this nickname. Not to her face, but, you know, somebody talking about her. ‘Hottin’ Totten.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means either that she’s a gunner or that her pants are on fire, what d’you think it means? And I heard a woman say it, not a man, otherwise I’d think it was just sexist bullshit. She’s okay, good officer, hard worker, just she’s been in and out of a lot of beds, they say—that’s not to be repeated to your admiral.”

  “But she’s legit? I mean, she wants to come out here, she says ‘support’ us, which would be an Agency first, so I’m a little wary. Wha’d’you think?”

  “If she wants to come out there, I’d say, what I’ve heard about her, it’s because of what’s going down has got her interested. She’s a gunner. She likes action.”

  “Your seal of approval?”

  Menzes was a cynic—he knew it and Dukas knew it. He didn’t give seals of approval. “I’d say she’ll do a job if she says she will.”

  “Okay, good enough. I owe you one.”

  Menzes laughed. “I’ve heard that before. Every time you owe me, Dukas, I find my ass in a meat-grinder. Consider this a freebie.”

  Only then did Dukas call Fifth Fleet, and it was clear at once that he wasn’t getting through to Admiral Pilchard without clout, so he used Al Craik’s name and the words urgent and classified information and finally got through to the flag captain, and he had pretty much to tell her the whole story before she’d break in on whatever Pilchard was doing.

  “Pilchard,” the admiral said by way of greeting. “I can give you two minutes.”

  “Dukas, NCIS, sir. I’ve got a CIA agent who says the Indian electrical-production facility that got attacked a couple of hours ago is a nuclear-weapons site, and she wants to come out here with a team and quote ‘support’ us.”

  Pause. “How sound is that information about nukes?”

  “Pretty sound, I think—she’s a honcho at CIA’s WMD center.”

  “Jesus Christ. You’re Dukas, right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You up to speed on what Al Craik’s doing?” Pilchard didn’t miss much. He knew that Dukas and Craik were good friends.

  “I was up to an hour ago, sir. He’d left the base at Mahe and—”

  “I got all that from another friend of his.”

  “O’Neill.”

  “Yeah. He still under contract to us? He’s trustworthy, anyway, right?”

  “Very.”

  “Jesus, nukes. CIA got any handle on what the hell’s going on over there? We’re up to our ass in alligators over the accident on the Jefferson; we don’t know what’s going on with Craik, this talk of mutiny. Your office getting anything?”

  “Sir, are you sure what happened on the Jefferson was an accident? Officially, I have to suspect it might be—might be—terrorism. A cop’s way of thinking, sir.”

  “You have any evidence of that?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Keep it to yourself, then. But it’s a—” Pilchard hesitated. His voice was tired, no longer brisk. “You better get over here and see what we’ve got. That’s a good idea, anyway—look, come to the flag deck when you get here—I want to see you on another matter. I won’t go into it now, but I’ve got a leaker over here. It’s got to be stopped. We’ll talk.” Dukas heard him sigh. “As for the CIA people, you have my permission to say it’s okay for them to come as far as Bahrain. What happens next depends on what we learn. And Dukas—make it very clear to them that when they get off the plane in Manama, they’re mine to command. We’ve got a military situation here, and I’m the theater commander. Just make that clear to them, or home they go.”

  “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.

  Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

  “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 whee
ls 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.