Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  Off the Indian Coast

  Captain Alex Fraser of the Canadian corvette HMCS Picton stood in the darkness of his blacked-out bridge wing and sucked on his unlit pipe. His ship had been at action stations for thirty-six hours. So far the men were holding up well. The sea was relatively calm, with the monsoon blowing gently over his shoulder and frustrating his occasional attempts to relight the pipe.

  A sailor leaned out of the hatch. “Sir? Plot would like a word. Launches in southern India.”

  Fraser gave up on his attempt to smoke, tucked the pipe in his breast pocket and went in to the bridge, dogging the hatch behind him. He picked up a phone.

  “Captain,” he said. He listened for a few seconds and said, “Got it. You’re sure? Very well. Thanks, Doug.” He hung up. “Petty Officer Lawrence? Get me Captain Lash.”

  Over the Indian Ocean

  “—two pos bandits launching southern India pos intercept of Oats ETA seven minutes, do you copy, Oats? Third pos bandit course un-ID.” Even through the digital encryption and the static, Alpha Whiskey sounded nervous.

  Soleck noted the two new symbols on the link. “I copy, Alpha Whiskey. Break, break. Racehorse One, you copy?”

  “Roger, Oats. Three pos bandits heading our way.” Commander Siciliano sounded bored. Soleck couldn’t help thinking that she was really a helo pilot with a couple of hundred hours in F-18s, all with NASA, and none of it combat training.

  As he watched, the screen’s air symbol on the lead pair of bandits pulsed and moved suddenly, indicating that one or both of the planes had radiated a radar and been caught, and the information in the link had updated their position from predicted to real. Soleck put his cursor on the symbol. The last time he had looked at it, it had said, “UNID.” Now it said “MiG-29.”

  Rose watched the three bandits on her screen while she turned her plane to the east. They were below her by several thousand feet and hadn’t climbed since the last update. It was probable that they knew she was there, knew where her wingman was. She flicked her eyes over her instruments, noted that her fuel state was not great, looked at the indicators for her missiles, which showed that she had nothing aboard but a pair of Sidewinders. Sparrowhawk mediumrange missiles would have given her a head-on superiority that no Indian plane could match, but the only two Sparrows were on Donuts’s plane, and Bahrain hadn’t sent any more out yet.

  On another level, she confronted the notion that she was about to engage in air-to-air combat. She wasn’t afraid. She was flooded with adrenaline, and that made her remember that she was three months pregnant and thirty-eight years old. She wondered what effect a load of adrenaline and some high-g turns would have on a fetus. On her daughter.

  Win first, she told herself. Live. Then worry about the baby.

  The bogeys were two hundred miles away and now it would all happen very fast. And she had to let them make the first move—not a winning strategy in jet combat. She called her wingman. “Racehorse Two, ready?”

  “Roger.”

  She put her nose on her possible adversaries, activated her radar. Here I am. Want to dance?

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Sitting in the TAO chair, alone with a crisis, Madje didn’t hesitate to order a runner to get Captain Hawkins, even while his gut told him that this would be over before anyone could come through the hatch and rescue him from the decisions he was about to make. He felt tempted to shout, I’m a fucking two-bar!

  Only fifty miles to the north, the ocean was crawling with Indian ships, and it was clear that they were still fighting with each other. He thought that the new action had been provoked by the appearance of the S-3’s radar and the subsequent mass illumination of air-search and surface-search radars, as if someone had shown a light in a dark basement and the cockroaches had gone to war.

  “Racehorse One has her radar on.”

  “Bogey One turning to 040.”

  Madje thought, If one of those planes fires a missile, we’re at war. Jesus, we’re probably already at war.

  “Tell Oats to get down on the deck and get out of there,” Madje shouted at his AW officer.

  “That’s Alpha Whiskey’s call—”

  “Do it.”

  Over the Indian Ocean

  The two planes coming at Rose turned back east, declining the engagement. As far as she could tell, they hadn’t launched missiles. She turned with them, the g-force just nipping at her head and hips, keeping her plane’s nose hot and on them. They were less than four miles away; the engagement was moving faster than she could consciously follow, her hands and senses seeming to act of their own volition. No thoughts of a baby now; just the turn, and her ear waiting for the tone that would mean a missile launch.

  “Where’s that third bogey?” she asked.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  “—third bogey?” Racehorse one asked, her voice loud in the silence of CIC.

  If Commander Siciliano didn’t know where the third bogey was, that meant it was very low, lost from her radar in the wave clutter. Madje groaned. Lash was keeping the battle group in EMCON, putting the enemy in the dark but severely limiting their own information.

  “Captain Lash? This is TAO Jefferson.” Madje drove straight on. “The top bogeys are radiating. They know where we are, if it’s us they’re after. Request permission to radiate. We need to locate the low bogey.”

  “Negative, Jefferson.” Lash’s voice was calm and careful.

  Madje heard somebody scrambling over the knee knocker, and then Hawkins’s voice came from behind him. “Screw him. Radiate!”

  The plot on the JOTS showed the far-on ring for the possible location of the third bogey as intersecting the Jefferson.

  The third bogey might be hostile.

  The third bogey might have located the battle group.

  The third bogey might be less than a mile away. Or on top of them.

  “Belay that,” Madje said, struggling to keep his voice even. He thought Lash was wrong, but he was trained to obey. He obeyed. “Captain Hawkins? Do you wish to relieve me?”

  Hawkins put a hand on his shoulder but said nothing.

  The digital engagement clock moved relentlessly forward. The far-on circle swept over the Jefferson.

  Over the Indian Ocean

  “Bogey One broke left. Have you got him?” Rose called to her wingman. Her radar was no longer on Bogey One; she was following Bogey Two.

  “Roger, Racehorse One. Bogey One is headed for the deck and I’m on his six.”

  Rose’s prey began to dive as well. The MiG-29 went to afterburner, the streaks of his engines just visible against the high-altitude star field. Rose flung her head back and forth, looking for the S-3, whose altitude she was going to pass through in seconds. On radar, it looked very close indeed.

  “Break, Oats, this is Racehorse One descending rapidly. Can you see me?”

  “Got you, Racehorse One. I’m turning west.”

  The Indian fighter was turning slightly west, as well. Rose swept her thumb over her missile release, tensing for the moment. She had a tone, steady in her ears, but waiting for the other plane to fire wouldn’t save Soleck if the S-3 was the intended target.

  Where’s Bogey Three? she asked herself again. She pushed her nose down and watched her radar. Who’s the target? Her adversary was powering away from her in his dive, probably too late to launch at the S-3 this pass, and she kicked in her own afterburner, already calculating her fuel consumption and what the S-3 had to give her. She could make one more turn, one more long burn, and then even the gas aboard the S-3 wouldn’t be enough to get her home. Racehorse Two was in the same state.

  Soleck could see the scene on his datalink—five planes descending in the same volume of airspace, with Commander Siciliano at the top of the stack and the lower Bogey at the bottom. As the second Indian plane blew past him and lost the angle to shoot a missile, Garcia leveled off and banked to the east as hard as the plane could stand, a turn as sharp as any break over the island when
she was going for a shit-hot landing. The heavy aircraft stood on one wing, and the fuselage, older than LT Dothan, groaned, and then they were a thousand feet above the action and safer by the second.

  “I think I’ve found Bogey Three,” Dothan said.

  “Bogey One is firing!” Racehorse Two said. Rose’s thumb slid across the missile release switch.

  Bogey Two was right on Racehorse Two’s heels, with Rose just behind.

  “Weapons free,” Alpha Whiskey called. But the Bogeys were past the S-3, and whatever Bogey One had fired at wasn’t a US plane. On her radar, her steep dive gave her a new angle and she saw Bogey Three at last, a new contact at altitude zero, wavetop height, headed north at Mach One.

  “Belay that!” she called. “Bogey One is shooting at Bogey Three. Racehorse Two, turn west to 270 and look for Oats at Angels one two, over.”

  “Roger, Racehorse One.” Racehorse Two sounded disappointed. Rose had time to wonder if she had made the right decision, and then she started her turn.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Madje watched the two F-18s breaking off to the west. He turned to his comms officer. “Call the beach and get them to launch the alert at Trincomalee. Racehorse has got to be out of gas.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Hawkins gave him a nod. “Where’s Bogey Three headed?”

  Madje was watching the screen, now updated with the data from the S-3. Sixteen Indian ships were within three hundred miles, and eight of them had fire-control radars active. He could imagine the missiles launching from decks and the sound of the guns. And the fires. Ships would be burning.

  “It wasn’t us, anyway,” Madje said, reaching for his coffee. It had been the most fatiguing three minutes of his life.

  “Could have been,” Hawkins said.

  Over the Indian Ocean

  “Holy shit,” Garcia said. “Holy shit.”

  A flash lit the horizon and the interior of the plane, and then a plume of fire climbed out of the sea.

  “What was that?” Simcoe said from the back seat. “Something hit that Delhi Class?

  “There was a big flash,” Soleck said.

  “The Delhi just went off the air. She’s not rotating anything. I’ll look on ISAR.”

  Soleck watched the two F-18s forming up above him. They would both need gas to get home. “Ms Dothan, can you get the FLIR deployed?”

  “Roger that.”

  “Whoa. She’s going. Gone. She sank.” Simcoe sounded shocked.

  “Just like that?” Soleck asked. “Sank?”

  “Gone. Bow first. Not even a return.”

  “Bogey Three flew into her,” Soleck guessed. “Got to be.”

  “Holy shit,” Garcia said again.

  Soleck glanced at her as she completed her turn, and flicked his intercom to front seat only. “You okay?”

  “‘Course I’m okay. Don’t be a dick.”

  Soleck thought she sounded rattled. Her hands were moving around a lot.

  Soleck leaned back and stretched his hands, glancing at her again. Then he started calculating fuel.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  The voice of the TACCO in the S-3 sounded loud as she reported the death of the Delhi-class destroyer. The Combat Information Center was silent.

  “That could have been us,” Hawkins said again. “And if the Canucks miss one, we won’t even know he’s coming.”

  Madje watched the screen, sure that the mutineers had just scored a victory. Only the mutineers used airplanes as guided missiles. And it proved to him that what had happened to the Jefferson was not an accident. But he didn’t have the energy to discuss it with Captain Hawkins or to listen to the older man spin it. He looked at his watch and realized that he still had two hours left before he would be relieved.

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  A modest dinner was available in what was called “the observatory.” There, under a glass canopy—somewhat filmed with time and dust, a few panes cracked, none broken—a table had been laid out with platters of Madras and Bengali foods in quantities that would have better suited a regiment. One of the turbaned servants carried a plate, prepared by Harry, to Alan’s room; the others, newly bathed and changed, bore down on the food. By then, they realized that they were the only guests in the hotel.

  In the middle of the meal, a figure appeared in the arched doorway.

  “Well, well,” Harry murmured. “My favorite soldier.” He got up and crossed the space, his hand out. “Major Rao.”

  “I turn up, you see, like the bad penny.”

  “I thought you might.”

  They sat together and talked about nothing (cricket versus baseball, the decline of the tiger population, Bollywood films) and probed each other’s defenses—and got nothing.

  “Charming man, Major Rao,” Harry muttered to Djalik after dinner. “A real professional.”

  “A real professional what?”

  “Guess.”

  It was dark above the conservatory glass by then, a few stars and a brilliant moon managing to penetrate the film. The party broke up, people wandering away, Ong following her small, quite pretty nose down one corridor and then another until she came to a set of French doors, which she of course opened to find a room lit only by the moon—in its beam, as if it were a spotlight, a grand piano. She sat, struck two chords, and a servant appeared with a hurricane lamp that he put down next to her before he rushed out, to return with another man and, this time, four lamps.

  Ong revealed to the night that she could play jazz piano. Her hands were too small for stride, but she could play a wicked Fats Waller bass, and she launched into “Sweet Georgia Brown” as if she was going to knock the walls down. When she stopped and looked around, the Maharajah was standing there.

  He grinned. He was holding a clarinet. “’Sweet Georgia Brown’ again,” he said. “And-uh one, and-uh, two, and-uh—”

  He could wail. He was an old-fashioned jazz fan, more Preservation Hall than Plugged Nickel, but he could wail! Panting slightly between sets, he said to her, “You are quite excellent! You are professional?”

  “I minored in jazz in college.”

  He frowned, perhaps remembering Cambridge. “And uh-one, and uh-two, and uh-three—”

  Benvenuto and Clavers came in and began to dance. Three waiters brought in more food and drinks, and Harry wandered by, then Djalik, and they danced together briefly, Harry reminding the other man of a famous general’s line to the then secretary of state under the same circumstances, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as they two-stepped through the moonlight.

  Alone in a bed big enough for four, Alan woke. The doctor had been right—hot water and muscle relaxants and a bed, and he was out of it. Now, lying in the warm, scented dark, he heard the distant sounds of music. Jazz. Some bastard on a clarinet.

  “Some people have no consideration,” he said, and pulled the pillow over his head and was instantly asleep again.

  21

  Approaching Trincomalee

  Soleck was in the pattern for Trincomalee, flying on fumes, when Dothan spoke up from the back.

  “I’ve got an interesting signal.”

  “We’re going to be on the ground in ten minutes.”

  “I got an anomalous radio signal from just off the west coast of India.”

  Soleck handed the plane over to Garcia, who was already in contact with the tower. Then he brought up his ESM screen. While he watched, the signal was received again and the location resolved from a vector to an oval area of probability that covered sixty miles of southern India and a stretch of coast.

  “Could be a fishing boat.”

  Master Chief Simcoe spoke up. “That’s the new Indian comms suite. There aren’t many out there.”

  “What has them?” Soleck asked, watching Garcia fly.

  “The new Delhi-class, the Krivak refits, and all their new-construction Kilos.”

  “You going to make me land this from the right seat?” Garcia asked. Soleck wa
sn’t sure they were going to be friends, and he couldn’t figure where he’d put a foot wrong. He liked her.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, and took the plane. “Dothan, you’d better call your radio signal in to the boat before I land.”

  “Roger.”

  He heard her make the call, heard the tired-sounding voice of the TAO on the Jefferson respond, but his mind was on the runway, which blurred under his extended landing gear until he had covered half of it. Gently, he touched the plane down, rolled out to the end, and turned straight into the big, white hangar they now called home.

  “That was great, everybody. Thanks.” Soleck wanted to recapture the upbeat moment when Garcia had turned away from the descending stack, the excitement of their tracking all the Indian ships. He was full of energy.

  Garcia pulled off her helmet and scratched her head. She had a lot of hair, and it went every which way. She turned to Soleck and stretched, smiled broadly, her face alight. “It was excellent.”

  Dothan laughed from the back. “That was my first operational flight.”

  “Debrief with LT Shawna at the hotel, okay, Garcia? Nelly? Hey!” He tried to shout over the auxiliaries. She had unplugged her helmet cord and was out of the plane before he could grab her.

  “I’ll get it, sir,” Simcoe said.

  “Thanks, Master Chief. See you at chow.”

  He found that he was alone in the plane, a maintenance guy looking up at him curiously from the ground. He gave a wave and started to gather his gear. He knew they had done really well. It had been a big mission for him—his plan, his command. But it was over more suddenly than he had expected.

  Soleck climbed down out of his silent plane and stopped to talk to the crew chief who was already under the fuselage. Commander Siciliano appeared under the wing.