Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Nice job, Soleck,” she said, and punched him in the arm. “Tell your crew that was shit-hot.”

  “Thanks, ma’am.” Soleck could tell she was happy, assumed it was just the same feeling he had magnified by more responsibility.

  “You tag all those contacts?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We passed them on link to Fort Klock and over the radio to the Jeff.” He found himself walking next to her, headed for the hangar. “Were they, uh—going to shoot?”

  “Yeah, Soleck, I think they were. But they didn’t, and we’re all home again.”

  Soleck turned for the van that would take him back to the hotel.

  Rose walked across the apron to the hangar, resisting the urge to pat her stomach. All home again. So far, so good.

  Bahrain

  Dukas didn’t get home until half-past nine, but Leslie had the pizza assembled and waiting to go into the oven, just as she’d said. Dukas had lived with other women for various lengths of time, never very successfully; Leslie certainly was the best of the lot—better than he deserved, he thought sometimes.

  He kissed her, taking that tenth of a second too long to get to it that meant he was debating whether or not he should. She kissed him back with a lot of enthusiasm, although he knew she must have got the hesitation, knew what it meant. Uncommitted Dukas, going once again through the question of what this woman is doing here.

  “Hard day?” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, sort of. You were there, what the hell.” They had a house in the international section of Manama, in a development put up in the seventies by some hot-to-trot Saudi with Palestinian workers who had done all the work while he’d taken all the money. Leslie had moved into it and changed nothing, living, he thought, on the surface of his taste, his life.

  She’d put the pizza in the oven when she’d heard his car. Now, the rich smell of tomatoes and cheese spread through the kitchen. They looked at each other, two people with nothing to do for nine minutes. Dukas sat on a tubular-steel chair and patted his knee, and she sat on his lap.

  “Wanna neck?” she said.

  “Not if it means burning the pizza.”

  “I was hoping you’d tear off my clothes in a fit of passion and we’d fuck while the oven caught fire.”

  “Food first.”

  The trouble was, he liked Leslie. The trouble was, he didn’t love Leslie. Or he didn’t know what loving somebody meant, and so he didn’t know whether he loved her or not. The trouble was, she loved him and knew it and said it. The trouble was, being loved was for him a weight she had hung around his neck like the young arms that now encircled it, like the weight of her body on his middle-aged legs, on his irrepressible erection, which didn’t share his doubts about her.

  “You glad to see me, or that a flashlight in your pocket?”

  “I teach you these jokes, they keep coming back to haunt me.” He had his right hand on her left breast, more than a little interested. “It’s actually a Louisville Slugger, the Mickey Mantle model.”

  “Dream on.” She kissed him; the kiss went on; he got more and more interested. “Food first,” she said and slipped off his lap.

  Housing for somebody at his level in Bahrain was luxurious by the standards of what he could afford in Washington. They had everything that most people in the Middle East didn’t have—air-conditioning, refrigerator, electric stove, terrazzo floors, a Filipino maid who came in by the day, two cars.

  “Know why they hate us?” He said it often. By “they,” he meant the four-fifths of the world that was neither American nor affluent. Tomato sauce ran down his chin; he gulped wine and touched her upper lip to remove a speck of cheese.

  “Because we’re us.” She had heard it often, too.

  “Because we’re fucking conquerors. Everywhere we go, we set up these compounds and live in them and don’t mix and flaunt what we are in front of people who could live for a year on what I make in a day.”

  She poured them both more wine and smiled at him. She had lost twenty pounds since he had first seen her in Washington; she still wasn’t really pretty, but she had good eyes and a look of intelligence and humor and enthusiasm for being alive. “What are we supposed to do—give our money away and live in a tent?”

  “Don’t be a smartass!”

  She picked up both glasses of wine and headed for the bedroom. “Just kidding.”

  He was thinking about chocolate ice cream, and then he saw her buttocks disappear behind the archway, and he decided that he could get the ice cream later. And here I go again.

  The trouble was, he liked having Leslie around.

  Most of the time.

  Bahrain

  Enrique, aka Henry, aka Bobby, aka Ricky Valdez was again slumped in front of his computer. Edgar was still running, and Edgar was still getting mostly nowhere. Whatever was encrypted in the stuff they had, it was like rock.

  And Edgar was also unhappy because something kept nibbling at Edgar’s pants. Every time Edgar found that his pants were being nibbled at, he swatted the nibbler and went back to work, and then the nibbling would start again.

  “Hey, Mave.”

  “Yeah, what?” She sounded truly pissed, truly premenstrual-tension, get-out-of-my-face, I-hate-you pissed. Except that she wasn’t premenstrual and she loved Valdez. What she hated was computer shit that didn’t go her way.

  “Bad, huh, Mave?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “What I’m going to do, I want you to shut down what you’re working on, and I’m going to send you a page. Okay?”

  “Why should I be the one to shut down?”

  “Mave, this isn’t a fucking contest!”

  “You just want to show me what wonderful Edgar has accomplished and I haven’t.”

  “Will you please shut down your—”

  “Oh, shut down this!” She hit some keys. “What I think, Rickie, if you turn your back on this shit, it’s not going to kiss your arse.” She put a CD in the drive and hit keys and waited and then said, “Okay, send.”

  Thirty seconds later, he said, “What you see?”

  “I see that, contrary to me expectations, dearie—” she fell into her stage Irish when she was sarcastic—“Edgar’s got no more sense of what’s happening than Finn MacCoul had tits.”

  Valdez leaned over her chair. With the tip of a pencil, he pointed to a set of three characters. “What you think of that?”

  “I think it’s the initials of a heavy metal group. Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, Rickie, I don’t think anything! It’s noise!”

  Valdez reached over her and punched a key. The characters he had pointed at turned red, along with a dozen other clusters on the screen.

  “Oh, me beating heart!” she cried. “It’s magic. What has Edgar done?”

  “Edgar’s isolated an embedded program that’s differently encrypted. It’s scattered through the rest of the crap, but I guess it comes together when it gets the right order. Plus, Edgar’s giving off signs that part of it’s a worm.”

  She hit keys and the screen disappeared; in its place, a deep blue screen carried a box with the message “Your computer is under attack and recommends immediate quarantine of the program that is running.”

  She looked up at Valdez. “It didn’t do that to me before.”

  “Edgar triggered something. I keep getting the same message, over and over.”

  She looked at the screen, tapping the knuckle of her right index finger on her lips. “I tell you what let’s do, Mister Babbage. Let’s put it on some spare piece of hardware and let it go berserk.”

  Valdez raised his eyebrows. “Might ace the drives.”

  “Well, it’s Harry’s money.” She took the CD she’d stored the material on and took it into the next room, Valdez following her; there, they isolated a desktop that had been the sensation of the world two years before and was now semi-obsolete and booted it up.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Do it, do it.”

  She put the CD
into the B drive. The computer whirred; the screen filled with the same indecipherable symbols, and then the screen turned orange. Only orange.

  Mavis hit a key, then three keys together. She typed in an order. Nothing happened.

  “Fried,” Valdez said.

  “Holy Jesus, that was fast.”

  Valdez tried Edgar on it The computer whirred, and the screen turned red, and the message “Edgar is working” appeared.

  For three seconds.

  And then the screen turned orange.

  “It ate Edgar!” Valdez cried.

  “If I was still a Catholic, I’d cross myself.”

  Valdez, who was still a Catholic, crossed himself and said, “That’s for both of us.” He typed instructions into the computer and got nothing. Whatever they’d put in there had gone through Edgar’s defenses like spit through a screen.

  “Okay, so now we know that if it can take over the operating program, it owns the box. Okay.” He looked at the screen for several seconds and then muttered, “Okay,” again.

  “It’s about as okay as having the thing from Alien living in the cellar.”

  Back in their own room, he said, “I’m going to keep running Edgar for a little while; you run the other disks to see if they’re any different.”

  She loaded the other materials on a CD and put it into her computer. “What I like about you, Rickie, is you’re masculine without being bossy, you know?”

  “I just meant it as a suggestion, Mave.”

  “Yeah, I have a suggestion for you in return, love—stick it up, will you?”

  He was watching Edgar get his ass nibbled. “What I like about you, Mave, is you’re so meek and mild.”

  “Latino prick.”

  “Irish bitch.”

  They watched their computers for a couple of minutes and then she said, “Come over here. That’s an order.” Valdez scrambled over, stood behind her, and she reached around and grabbed for his crotch, giggling.

  “Mave, be serious! I thought you had something.”

  “I do. Want some of it?”

  “Aw, Mave—”

  She hit a key. “Look.” An animated cartoon ran with promos for something called the Servants of the Earth, followed by a brief speech of welcome and encouragement on video, after which a title appeared, “The Book of Wisdom,” with a menu of choices for every day—personal crises, absent friends, parties, dangers, religious feelings, and sixteen other categories. Mavis highlighted one and brought up a set of pithy paragraphs, full of what apparently was wisdom, on the subject of sex. What is the good of living as if your organs of sex are your enemy? The wise person lives as if sex is another door through which to walk into reality. But it is one door in a room that has many doors, and we must open them all.

  “I think that means that fucking’s okay,” Mavis said, “but don’t make a career of it. Better than what my mother tried to teach me.”

  “What else is on it?”

  “Nothing. Three of the others the same. Not encrypted. Pretty pictures, terminal cuteness, a lot of wisdom and the motivational speechifying.”

  “What about the last one?”

  “Haven’t looked at it yet. I just wanted to get you over here, you gorgeous hunk of virility, you. I thought we might open the door of sex and see what reality looks like.” She hit a key. “Actually, I just wanted a change.” The same animation came up, the same logo. Then there was a picture of a man and the words “Kill American on sight.”

  “Holy shit!” Valdez muttered. “That’s Al Craik.”

  Then the screen went to encrypted data.

  “Do your Edgar bit and see if the worm is here.”

  Valdez put in an Edgar disk, and Edgar went to work and found that nobody was trying to eat his shorts.

  “No worm. Ver-ee in-ter-es-ting!”

  She cycled through the encrypted data and found a few unconnected pieces in clear—a clock, currently running; what seemed to be a weather report; two incomprehensible pages of text, in clear but in a language they couldn’t read.

  “The jg, what’s his name?—Ong—said this crap was on USB keys. He also sent it to NSA for decryption, which means they ought to have it in no more than three years or so. The truth is, you and I aren’t going to break it.”

  “You amaze me. The Great Valdez?”

  “I amaze myself. Trouble is, see, Mave, the clock’s running. That shit about Al Craik is a wakeup call, no kidding. ‘Kill on sight?’” He shook his head.

  She rolled her chair along the table to look at his screen. “What I think is, this mess needs a trigger, and until it has the trigger, it’s going to stay just like that.”

  “Yeah, right, okay. What’s the trigger? Like, how were those USB keys to be used?”

  Valdez typed and brought up Ong’s cover message. He scrolled until he found “… largest program was located on a USB key that was attempted to plug into a JOTS terminal.”

  “A JOTS terminal,” he said.

  “And what might he be when he’s home?”

  “Oh, the JOTS is a system for locating ships and airplanes. Comes up as images on a screen, incorporates data from all sorts of links—you can zoom in and out, see what’s going on pretty much worldwide—who’s where, all that.”

  He was scrolling on, reading scraps, hurrying on. “It would be nice to know what happened when the thing was plugged in.” He glanced at her, put his hand on her leg. “It didn’t come up encrypted code, you can bet your sweet ass.”

  “Flatterer—a body’d think you were Irish.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t—would it?”

  “Not if you meant it to do something. It might not show anything, you know. If the worm that ate Edgar is as tough as it looks, then it might go right to work and do whatever it’s supposed to do.” She put her hand over his. “Like suck the guts out of your JOTS?”

  Valdez stared at the screen. “There’s an awful lot of code there, Mave. I say that’s something to be downloaded.”

  “Into the JOTS.”

  “Where else?” He thought about it. He turned her hand over and held it, palm to his palm. “Maybe the JOTS itself is the trigger?”

  “Oh, clever man! Of course! You put it into the USB port, it looks around, the first string it hits tells it—Go! I mean, it could be the first string, that isn’t impossible. It could key on the matrix, couldn’t it?”

  “It could key on the operating system. JOTS is unique.” He kissed her fingers. “I’m going over to Fifth Fleet.”

  “Because they’ve got a JOTS,” she said.

  “If they haven’t, the Navy’s in big trouble.”

  “And what about me?” she said.

  “Can’t get you in over there, Mave.” He smiled, trying to placate her. “You don’t have a clearance.”

  “And you do, I suppose.”

  “I’m on a list.”

  “And I’m not? What list is that, then?”

  They had a fight, of sorts. She kept saying, “What list?” and he kept saying, “Ask Harry,” and she finally screamed at him, “Harry isn’t here! I’m asking you!” and Valdez went off to Fifth Fleet feeling worn out before his night had really started.

  22

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  One patient in the ship’s hospital had been there for more than thirty hours before intel figured out that he was LTjg Collins, the TACCO from the missing S-3 commanded by CDR Paul Stevens. In the chaos after the Indian Jaguar had hit the flight deck, nobody knew for sure how many or which planes were missing, whether they’d burned on the deck, been pushed into the sea, or gone down somewhere. Then they sorted that out, and at some point the TAO and the squadrons knew about Stevens’s plane, but intel didn’t make the connection. And then it had taken a yeoman hours to identify Collins, whose ID had been ripped off in the crash. Because of the deck accident, his squadron-mates were scattered, and something as simple as a flight sked had been impossible to find. Even after they knew that the man found in the water was
from Stevens’s aircraft, it took time to find somebody who knew that Stevens himself was too old to be their mystery victim, somebody else who knew that Goldy was a woman. Finally, they had come up with a kid from the squadron who was at that point helping damage control near the number two elevator, and he described Collins for them. That is why, thirty-three hours after the Jaguar had hit the flight deck, intel had finally been able to make the connection.

  The ship’s hospital had pushed out into nearby spaces as the wounded had come in from the accident. Even then, it was too small, and an auxiliary had been set up on the O-3 level, where they were sending the less seriously injured. As well, choppers were going back and forth among the Jefferson, the Fort Klock, and the gator freighter Mindanao, ferrying wounded who had already been through trauma care and stabilized.

  The wounded kid from Stevens’s S-3 was considered too critical to move. He lay in a ward assigned to the most serious cases—the one, in fact, where Admiral Rafehausen also lay.

  At 2314 Local, the flag intel officer and a yeoman appeared in the hospital. They sought out the medical captain in charge, a weary, harried-looking man in a surgical gown who was still wearing gloves, and the flag intel officer said that they knew who the wounded boy was and they wanted to talk to him.

  The captain muttered to somebody else, stripping off his gloves as he talked. His shoulders sagged. A nurse said they had a burn victim waiting for him in the operating suite. The captain looked at a list, rubbing his eyes. “You can’t see him. He’s critical.” He handed the list back to another nurse and headed out.

  “Sir!” The flag intel officer turned back. “This is critical, too, sir. We have to know why that aircraft went down. Another pilot thinks he saw electronic evidence of hostile activity.”

  “That man’s sedated. He’s got a nearly severed fourth vertebra; if it goes, he’ll be permanently paralyzed or dead. I’ll call you when he’s out of surgery and we deem him ready to talk to you.”

  “Sir!” The intel officer turned again, this time with real anger. “I have orders from the acting commander of the BG. I’m to talk with the man. He’s to be allowed to talk to me.”