Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “He’s coming out,” Rattner said after they had been there for an hour. He was in the passenger seat, wearing a headset. He pressed a throat mike. “Two, you get that?”

  “Got it.” Dukas was in his own car near the base gate.

  “Three?”

  Leslie’s voice sounded thin and far away, but Rattner heard her well enough. “Yeah.” She was in a borrowed SUV about a hundred yards beyond the gate.

  “He’s been sitting on this hot piece of news for a fucking hour,” Greenbaum said.

  “Forty minutes.”

  “You’d think he’d be hot to pass it to Daddy.” Greenbaum was nervous. Rattner chuckled, because Greenbaum had said he had done lots of stakeouts in his cop days and now he was as nervous as a rookie. “Well, what the hell,” Greenbaum said when he heard Rattner laugh, “I want this to go down smooth—I’d like Dukas to think I can do my job, okay?”

  “You pee?” Rattner said.

  “Yeah, yeah. I told you, I’ve done lots of stakeouts. Anyway, I got an iron bladder.”

  “Wait until you’re fifty.” Greenbaum had an empty gallon jug in the back seat. He started to explain the strategies of over-fifty urination when a voice in his ear squawked, “He’s coming out into the parking lot.”

  “He’s coming out.”

  “I awready got him—see him, the tall guy, carries his head funny? I was in there this aft, got a look at him. Boy, do people hate his guts! We nail him, they’re gonna take up a collection to buy us a medal.”

  “What’d they hate him for?” Rattner was watching Spinner pick his way among the cars as he headed for his BMW.

  “He’s a politician. Also sort of a far-right hard-on. Also makes remarks about the admiral, and Pilchard’s a popular guy. Plus he can’t stop telling them how important his old man is.”

  Greenbaum touched his throat switch. “Two, Three, he’s at his car. He’s getting in.”

  They watched Spinner settle behind the wheel. They waited for him to take out his cell phone.

  “Make the call, you prick,” Greenbaum muttered. “Make it—”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Spinner’s car backed out of its parking space and whipped past them.

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  The trucks came back after darkness fell. The maharajah was waiting outside in the warm, scented dark, his hands joined in front of him as if he were a host waiting for some late but much-loved guest. Khan waited with him. The secretary came out several times, murmured, went back. Alan, busy now with his plans, had only glimpsed the silent, waiting figures.

  Now, feet pounded down the corridors, then a gurney, three servants running with it and men in loosened body armor running ahead and behind.

  Alan got up and went out. The doctor who had tended his back was walking in the path of the gurney, but more slowly. He was wearing bloody hospital greens, tying a mask as if preparing for surgery. Seeing Alan, he stepped a little aside; their eyes met, and the doctor shook his head and went on. Preparing to operate, even though it was too late. Alan remembered the image on the computer screen. Like Kennedy in Dallas. It was too late even while you were looking at it.

  The maharajah came last, alone. Alan stood back against the wall to let him pass, but the maharajah stopped and folded his hands together and remained there. Alan, embarrassed, moved, said, “I’m very sorry about your nephew, sir.”

  The maharajah inhaled deeply, exhaled. “He isn’t my nephew, actually. He’s my son.” A smile flitted over the lower part of his face. “What the English used to call a ‘by-blow.’ But still—my son.” He stared into the billiard room. “You will be leaving tonight, Commander?”

  “If you’ll allow a Navy plane to land here.”

  “Of course. But your friend with the aircraft—?”

  “Has gone. Separately.” Alan felt the need to say something that didn’t sound as if they were abandoning him. “We’re going after the Servants of the Earth in different ways.”

  The maharajah nodded. “They are appalling people. I don’t even understand what they want.” He paused, looked at the lights in the billiard room. “You and your people have behaved well. I want to thank you.”

  “I think we have to thank you, sir. For trying.”

  The older man said nothing. He was shorter than Alan by several inches, so he had to reach up to rest a hand on his shoulder. “Good luck.” He walked away.

  Bahrain

  Rattner and Greenbaum were in the Bahrain mini-mall parking lot.

  “Well, at least we learned that he’s having KFC for dinner.”

  Spinner had parked below Colonel Saunders’s benign smile.

  But he didn’t get out of the car. Then they saw that he had his cell phone held to his ear.

  “The sonofabitch is doing it!” Rattner cried.

  The cell-phone scanner winked and a male voice said, “—please. This is, uh, his son. Urgent, okay?” Rattner hit a key on the scanner to hold the frequency and said into his throat mike, “He’s making a call—”

  “He didn’t want to call from the HQ parking lot!” Greenbaum hissed.

  “You’re smart, that’s why we brought you along.” Rattner turned up the volume. “Now shut up.”

  A female voice had asked the caller to hold, and then there had been crackling, prickly silence. Rattner was noting the frequency and the caller’s cell-phone number; Greenbaum kept saying, “You sure it’s him?” and Rattner nodded and took notes and made sure the tape recorder was turning.

  “John Spinner speaking.”

  Greenbaum punched the air with a fist.

  “Dad!”

  “Hey, boyo. Good to hear your voice. I’ve got a client.”

  “I’ll make it quick. I got something hot for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  They bent over the scanner. The tape recorder turned. Greenbaum shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it—the poison pill was passing from son to father as if it was a Father’s Day gift. The tale that the flag captain had told Spinner, in strictest confidence, was that Pilchard had ordered the Jefferson to change its destination from Colombo to Diego Garcia, another twelve days’ sailing away, there to offload all its aircraft. In Washington, Dad thought that was pretty juicy news.

  Rattner was on the headset again. “Two, Three, acknowledge.” When they had checked in, he said, “Our guy has made his call—repeat, he has made the call. Daddy ID’d himself, and we’ve got it on tape. Over.”

  Dukas’s voice growled in his ear. “Stay on him. I want to know he’s tucked into his little beddy-bye, then we trade off outside his place. Got me?”

  “Yeah, got you, Two.” Rattner looked at Greenbaum, who had his eyes on the KFC restaurant, into which Spinner had now disappeared. Rattner switched channels and checked with somebody at Fifth Fleet HQ and said to Greenbaum, “Security officer’s already grabbed his office computer. Marines have orders to pull him over at the gate and keep him at least ten minutes and secure his laptop; by the time he gets home, they’ll have his home computer. FBI bugged his home phone an hour ago.”

  “So what d’we do?”

  “We sit and watch him scarf down chicken and then we follow him. Might be an interesting night once he realizes what’s going down. Now put the fucking car in gear; our guy is leaving.”

  The Serene Highness Hotel

  By 2130, Alan knew that Soleck was on his way from Trin. He had a route to the boat and a comm plan and some fuel figures that Soleck would have to re-do. By 2300, Soleck was only a few minutes out, and he’d planned what he could do; he’d calculated the enemy’s moves as much as the data allowed; and now he was standing in the situation room, his butt on a billiard table covered in maps, watching other people work. He was done.

  Ong and Clavers were typing away at intelligence reports based on the data they had gleaned from all the sources they had found. Benvenuto and Fidel were choosing still images from the digital video and turning them into useable data files to attach to the
reports. Whether Alan’s next moves succeeded or failed, the reports would matter to the other men and women who would have to deal with the Servants of the Earth.

  “Folks?” Alan said. “Can I have a minute?”

  They all looked up; Ong’s face in the soft light of a desk lamp looked older and harder. Benvenuto rocked back in his seat and stood as if to face a blow, and Fidel’s eyes narrowed as he turned in his chair.

  Alan cleared his throat and stood away from the billiard table. “I’m leaving. You people have behaved in what we call ‘the best traditions of the naval service,’” he said. “I left a quick report on Ms Ong’s computer, in case—in case I don’t have time to write more.” He thought about all the things he couldn’t say, like Some of you grew up a lot, and I underestimated you. Not for the first time, he understood why most command speeches were bland, the real praise almost too harsh to say. Unconsciously, he spread his hands. “You were superb,” he said. He looked at Ong, who smiled back, and then at Benvenuto, who was grinning so hard his ears moved. “We all have to keep going for a bit. Sometimes the end game is the hardest. It’s easy to sag.” Who am I talking to? Me? “LT Ong will be in charge of getting these reports out to the fleet. When you’re done, get some sleep. By the time you wake up, Fifth Fleet should have some transports together to take you home.”

  He tried to smile at them all. None of them needed to ask where he was going. So he looked around, making eye contact one more time. “That’s it, folks. I’ll see you in Bahrain in a day or two.” He felt tight with emotion and nerves. “Thanks.” He picked up his helmet bag and pushed through the door, surprised to find his throat closed and his hands a little shaky.

  Somebody came out into the corridor right behind him, and he turned, expecting Ong or Benvenuto. Instead, he found Fidel.

  “I’ll walk you down,” he said.

  “Sure.” Alan didn’t know what to say to Fidel, never did. So he walked along in silence with a fortune in ancient rugs muffling their footsteps and into the lobby.

  “I’m headed to the kitchen,” Alan muttered. “Coffee.”

  “Yeah,” Fidel said.

  Through the process of getting his thermos washed and filled by too-attentive staff, Fidel stood behind him in silence. Alan couldn’t find anything to say, his thoughts either far away or inconsequential. Alan didn’t turn, but the silence got to be too much. “Always hungry in planes, you know? And food is sleep—”

  “Yeah,” Fidel said, nodding hard. “Yeah.”

  Then they were outside, standing in the warm dark listening to the whooost, whooost sounds of Soleck’s engines on final, and they still hadn’t said anything. The S-3 appeared in a burst of light and motion, cleared the jungle at the far end of the runway and was down and taxiing before Alan could think of a way to say goodbye.

  Suddenly Fidel grinned at him as if he’d found the answer to a difficult question. “How’s your back?” he asked, his voice rising against the engine noise.

  Alan nodded back. “It’ll be okay.”

  “Ejection seat’s gonna be a bitch. Eat some more of that ranger candy before you do the deed.”

  Alan nodded along as if receiving wisdom from a guru. In front of him, two more men in turbans used paddles and flashlights to taxi Soleck to the apron, and the sandwich carts began to roll to the plane.

  Fidel reached up, put one hand on Alan’s good shoulder, and took his right hand with the other one—not quite a hug, more than a handshake. “Stay safe, skipper,” he said.

  Bahrain

  Spinner had been in a sweat since he had been stopped at the gate of the naval base after he’d called his father from the Kentucky Fried Chicken place. When two Marines had searched his car, he had warned them that they were in for real trouble, but they had gone on, and, when they said they were done, they had handed him a receipt for his laptop, which they had kept.

  Spinner had made a stink. He had telephoned the three people he thought might help him—the flag captain, Shelley Lurgwitz, who hated his guts but had a responsibility to help him; the flag security officer, who had no reason to love him but had a responsibility to protect him; and a senior commander in the supply office who was impressed by his being his father’s son. But nobody would help him, no way. People seemed, in fact, unaccountably cool.

  Spinner’s hands had trembled as he had driven away from the base, and he had almost had a fender-bender at the first intersection. After years in the Navy, he knew its politics but was ignorant of its ways. Still, he saw that the seizing of a personal laptop had serious implications.

  The implications had got suddenly worse when he got to his apartment and found a warrant officer he’d never seen before waiting at his door with a receipt for his desktop computer. From his apartment! Spinner had come very high over the guy, but the warrant officer, who had been in the Navy longer than Spinner had known where to find his dick, introduced a shore patrolman with a sidearm and a warrant from Fifth Fleet JAG.

  “Suspicion of violation of security,” the warrant officer said, and he’d asked for—and got, because he and the SP both looked as if what they’d really like to do for amusement that evening was use Spinner as a crash dummy—his base pass, his passport, and all the cards that got him into all the places in Bahrain that were classified, restricted, interesting, or important.

  Spinner had gone from the warrant officer straight to his bathroom and upchucked his Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then he had lain down, trembling. Then he had tried to call his father and was told that Mr Spinner was in a meeting and was accepting no calls at present.

  So it was a while before he talked to his father, and only then because his father called him. And all his father said was, “Call me at Effie’s on a public phone. Don’t use your cell phone and don’t use your home phone!” And then his father broke the connection.

  By then, Spinner’s eyes were red because he had actually wept. He had also soiled his J. Press boxer shorts, because Spinner had never in his life before been in a spot where he couldn’t get to his father to be saved.

  As weak and trembling as if he had the flu, Spinner stumbled down to his car and went looking for a telephone.

  Over Tamil Nadu, India

  The back end was up and running, and Alan ignored the good-natured prattle about the maharajah’s hotel and dug up the datalink. Before Soleck had made his clearing turn to the north, Alan’s plan was in trouble because he was tired and he hadn’t seen a chart recently.

  “Soleck?”

  “Skipper?”

  Alan was looking at the projected positions of the five probable SOE vessels en route to Quilon. His intended course, it now turned out, ran right through the center of their projected radar horizon. “You got a route to the boat?”

  “Yessir, you passed it to Commander Siciliano.”

  “Soleck, I did that track before I could see the far-on circles on these hostile contacts. Look at the link.”

  “Holy shit,” Garcia said.

  “Whoa,” Simcoe whistled.

  “We’ve got to go all the way south until we’re clear of their envelope and any possible ground radar around Quilon and then head west to the boat. Do we have the fuel?”

  “Give me a minute,” Garcia said.

  Alan was looking at his new route, which added an hour to their flight time. Nothing to be done about it now. “How low did you come in?”

  “Pretty fucking low,” Simcoe growled.

  “Low-ish.” Soleck sounded pleased with himself.

  “Fuel to spare if you go high once we’re feet-wet.” Garcia yawned. “Tight if we’re low all the way.”

  “I want to go high once we’re clear of the coast, anyway.” Alan looked at the link again. “I want to update these locations before we get to the boat. This is going to be tight all the way.” And I just lost an hour.

  “They’ve got a pretty tight EMCON going, sir,” Garcia said. “We won’t get a sniff of ‘em unless something else stirs them up.”

&n
bsp; “We’ll just have to radiate,” Alan said, his mind already on other things.

  “That’s a non-starter, sir,” Simcoe said beside him. He reached over and deposited a kneeboard card on Alan’s working tray.

  Alan read it in a second; a total prohibition on active forms of emission or any action that might provoke a hostile reaction. He flipped it over to see if there might be more. “This from Captain Lash?”

  “Yessir.” Simcoe again, his voice carefully neutral.

  The front seats were silent; Alan wondered if Simcoe had cut them out of the conversation. He glanced under his elbow. Yep. Simcoe was smooth. Alan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This was the moment, the first of a hundred moments he knew would come and yet wanted to shrug off for as long as he could—where his plans conflicted with other people’s orders and he was placing his career and other people’s careers on the line for a big risk with a lot of guesswork.

  “I have orders from over Captain Lash.” There. The first half-truth.

  Simcoe’s grin was visible even in the dark of the back end of an S-3. “Shit-hot.”

  No question whose side Simcoe was on.

  They flew low over Tamil Nadu for an hour, the ground as dark as the sea, bereft of city lights or even the clustered glow of villages. As far as Alan could determine, Tamil Nadu was blacked out from north to south. The only exception had been a glow over the horizon to the west early in their flight.

  “Lights are on at Quilon,” Soleck said.

  Circumstantial evidence. But it made Alan smile, nonetheless

  Bahrain

  Mike Dukas and Leslie were sitting in Dukas’s leased Toyota when Spinner came out of his apartment. “He doesn’t look so good,” Dukas said. He didn’t sound sympathetic.

  “Won’t he see us?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  They knew about Spinner’s attempt to call his father, and, as they drove, Leslie was on their cell phone to an FBI agent about the call that Spinner had got from his father. “So he’s going to a public phone now, right?” she said to Dukas.