Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “You won’t have the ordeal of a military trial with the severe punishments that might lie at the end of it. No hard time, no dishonorable discharge—none of that.”

  “Hey—” Spinner stood. “All r-i-i-ght.” He put out his hand. “Sorry I got a little over-wrought there. I’m sure you can understand, Mike, this has been kind of trying for me. Bygones be bygones?”

  Dukas ignored the hand. “However—”

  The grin faded. Their eyes locked, and when Dukas bobbed his head again, Spinner sat.

  “However, as I’m sure you remember from a course somewhere, Commander, a captain’s mast is not a legal proceeding. It’s an administrative proceeding. People appearing at captain’s masts have no right of counsel, and the commanding officer is judge and jury. Of course there’s a right of appeal, but then everything becomes public, and the appellate officers can in fact then look into all kinds of stuff.

  “On lesser included offenses, you can be brought before a captain’s mast on altogether—let’s see—eighty-one things. Staff security officer wants to proceed on sixteen of those having to do with security violations; the others can be explained to you if you really want to go that way.” He held up a hand. “Not my doing—NCIS would be out of it if there’s a captain’s mast. Only one thing we’d add, and that would be, because it’s on the tape, conduct unbecoming an officer.” Dukas smiled. “What you said to me a couple of minutes ago—very unbecoming. And the remark about Captain Lurgwitz—you’d be dead on that one, and the security stuff is open and shut, I think. The others—who knows?” Dukas stared at him. “So you can have the captain’s mast.” A long pause. “Or you can resign.”

  “Why would I do that?” Spinner’s voice was breathy, whiney.

  Dukas sat back, the swivel chair squawking under his weight. “Captain’s mast can’t do much in the way of punishment—few days in the brig at worst, stuff like forfeiture of pay for a month, loss of liberty. You can take all that. Problem comes with the nonjudicial results. At the very least, I’d say, a letter in your file. In this case—you know what you’ve done, Commander—the kind of letter that means no more promotions. End of career. You’re a smart guy; you’ve been around; you know what one letter like that can do. And then there are the fitness reports—well, you can imagine the fitness report that’ll come after all this.”

  Spinner stared at him, then looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it before. “That isn’t fair,” he said.

  Dukas mumbled something into the telephone and Captain Lurgwitz, the flag captain, came in. She was forty, smart, political; she had big hips and narrow shoulders and she looked as if she fought a battle with weight, but her face was engaging in its cheerful intelligence. She pulled a chair up to the end of the desk and sat down. Dukas leaned over toward her and said, “I’ve been explaining to LieutenantCommander Spinner that NCIS will not prosecute but that I thought there was the possibility of a captain’s mast here.”

  “It’s more than a possibility. Ray, you’ve really screwed up. I can convene a captain’s mast on this stuff in a heartbeat.”

  “You’ve had it in for me ever since I reported here!”

  “Has Special Agent Dukas explained the outcomes? You know there’ll be a letter of severe reprimand, come what may, Ray. Come what may! Plus, I’m now ready to say on your fitrep that you’re the worst officer I’ve ever served with.” She sounded almost sad. “You’re never going to make full commander, Ray.” She put her arm on the back of the chair, turned toward him with her fingers joined just below her right breast. “I heard you make a joke once about somebody who’d been passed over. ‘Like a castrated dog with a hard-on,’ was I think the way you put it.”

  Spinner tried to study Dukas’s face through the glare from the lamp. He seemed to refuse to look at Captain Lurgwitz. Finally, he said to Dukas, “What’s this about resigning?”

  Lurgwitz opened the clipboard she’d carried in and detached several pages from it. “You resign from the Navy, effective immediately. I can tell you that the resignation will be accepted—usual separation allowance, airfare to CONUS; you keep points toward your pension. However, the fitrep will be the same.” She didn’t say that such a fitrep might affect any notions he might have about blessing the Naval Reserve with his abilities. “Sign where the check marks are.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “The mast, and whatever comes out of that. The letter of reprimand. And immediate transfer as assistant fuels officer to the gator freighter that’s now in the Indian Ocean. It’s normally a jg’s billet, but we’ll make an exception for you. You’ll love it at sea.”

  Spinner didn’t say that he knew nothing about fuel; she of course knew that, meant that his ignorance would be part of the hell of being on board ship. For six months.

  “Does my father have to know?” he said, reaching for a pen.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  In CVIC, they gave him a shiny photograph showing the north side of the bay at Quilon. The Kilo-class sub was clear as day, her two white life rings like target circles and her fat bow obvious. On shore, two heavy derricks showed as long dark shadows stretching like grasping hands over the submarine’s hull. One had had a fat white arrow laid over it by an analyst at DNI, and an inset box showed the highest possible resolution, with the derrick arm repeated in grainy black and a white blob like a maggot dangling in the air. The computerized annotation said “Pos Missile.”

  Yeah. Alan’s hands shook as he looked at the picture. He tossed it back on the briefing table in front of Garcia. The closed-circuit television camera was on him, recording him for Donitz in Trin.

  “So,” he said. “We have no time. If they leave on the ebb, we’ll maybe catch them in the estuary. You and Soleck bring us in low.” He tried to ignore the camera. “Donuts stays high, over the radar horizon to the south. The only thing that matters is the sub, but the surface ships have AAA and SAMs that can reach out and get us while we chase the sub. The sub will try to get out by going under the ships. So we come in low from the west, lay a pattern here—” he pointed at the electronic map—“before they see us. And pop. Okay?”

  Off-camera, he placed a dot from a borrowed laser pointer on a spot to the west of Quilon, well off the coast. “We go up and they see us. We’re thirty miles south of them, and maybe they shoot, and maybe they call for air, and maybe they do dick-all.” He found that he was staring at the blank eye of the camera. He went back to looking at Garcia. “We pop. They take an action, we shoot.” He glanced at Simcoe, who was nodding. “My intention is that our harpoon or Donuts’s HARM nails the southern picket ship immediately. If they take no action, we start looking for the sub, laying our second buoy line inshore. If there’s enemy air, Donuts makes the call. Worst case, we’re conducting an inshore ASW exercise under their guns while we wait for them to shoot.”

  Simcoe shrugged. “That would suck pretty hard.”

  “They’ve been fighting Indian Navy loyalists for three days. The moment we radiate a radar, they’ll shoot.” He spoke with an assurance he didn’t have. Too many guesses.

  Garcia raised her hand. “There’s what, five, maybe six SOE ships? And we have one Harpoon and the Hornets have a HARM?”

  “We’ll get support from the battle group,” Alan said. His natural tendency to secrecy was overcome by logic. Whom would they tell? “Admiral Rafehausen had a card up his sleeve from the beginning of the exercise. It’s still there, ready to be played.”

  Soleck got it immediately. He grinned and looked at Garcia the way a smart kid looks at the next smartest kid. “The Canuck, Garcia.”

  She made a V with her fingers and pointed it at her crotch. Universal aviator sign language. Fuck yourself.

  Alan held up a hand. “The Canadian frigate, HMCS Picton. What we have to do, with a little help from our air cover, is take out the southern picket ship; it’ll be the only one able to see the Picton when she radiates. Everything else will be over the horizon; we’ll pass the targets to
Picton, and she’ll take them. Okay?”

  Garcia shook her head.

  Soleck raised his hand. “The kid in Stevens’s plane said the sub got them.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Alan said. “So they have a SAM system on the sub.”

  “Gotta figure.” Soleck shrugged. “Hey, I’m not saying we don’t go. I’m just saying we need to be ready to put out chaff and flares.”

  “Flares. Has to be a MANPAD.”

  Soleck nodded. “Be prepared, that’s my motto.”

  Garcia smiled at him. “Think of that yourself?”

  Alan turned to the CVIC guy running the camera. “That’s it. Send it to Trin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bahrain

  It took a lot to shake Dukas, but he was shaken. Ray Spinner had shouted that Leslie was pregnant—“knocked up,” in his words—and Dukas hadn’t reacted. Not on the outside. Inside, part of him cringed. Since he had heard it, he had kept it inside, and he had tried to compartmentalize it but had failed. He had tried to make it unimportant. Why should he believe a creep who’d lie about anything and everything? How could Spinner know such a thing, anyway? Why should Spinner know such a thing when he didn’t?

  But the terrible thing was, he did believe Spinner.

  “I’m knocking off,” he said to Captain Lurgwitz.

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  Lucky me.

  33

  In the Air, Northern India

  Sixty miles east of Delhi, Harry was sitting in the copilot’s seat of the Lear jet; Djalik had taken his place in the double seat at the rear.

  “You’re taking a pretty wide swing around Delhi,” Harry said.

  “SOP until the emergency’s over. Indian Air Force has made it a no-fly zone.” Moad gave him a sideways grin. “Wouldn’t want to be shot down.”

  “Nasty, nasty.” Harry tried to look out, saw nothing. “How long?”

  “We swing around Delhi, and we’re about eighty miles out.”

  Harry had on a headset. “Awful quiet,” he said.

  “Delhi traffic control is shut down. Mumbai’s open. Lahore’s open, naturally—Pakistan—and they’re actually doing some long-range control over on this side. Truth is, I think they don’t want anybody making a mistake and starting a war.”

  “Maharajah’s guy filed us for Patiala. That really where we’re going?”

  Moad grinned again. “The field is closed, but the maharajah’s name opened it for us. A little error in communications—they think this is his plane.”

  “My, my—I don’t think I could pass for the maharajah. We going to get anything helpful like lights? Burning oil drums? Guys with noses that glow in the dark?”

  “They said lights. If they don’t show lights, we’re screwed. I’ll have to divert—first choice is Amritsar.”

  “Oh, good, I like places famous for massacres. What if Amritsar’s dark?”

  “Lahore.”

  “Shit, then we’re in Pakistan!”

  “Only if they don’t shoot us down when we turn toward the border.” Moad shrugged. “It’ll be fine. What do you want to do, Harry, live forever?” He checked his GPS and kneepad notes and, eight minutes later, turned to 295 and switched on his headset. Harry listened in. “Lahore Control, this is civilian Lear jet AN 5796 from Chittoor, filed for Patiala. Lahore Control, do you have me on your screen, over?” Moad was craning his neck to look down for the Patiala lights.

  The answer came in musically accented English. “5796, this is Lahore Control. Patiala is closed. Over.”

  “Lahore, Patiala will be illuminated for this aircraft. Over.” He put the plane into a descent.

  “Wait one, 5796—we are checking that.” Crackling silence for half a minute. “Okay, 5796, we have a notice to expect one VIP aircraft for Patiala. You are ahead of schedule. 5796, do not turn toward the border. You copy, is it? Pakistan Air Force are very airborne.”

  “Lahore, I read, do not turn toward border.” He put the nose down still farther. “Lahore, I am going through five thousand and I have Patiala in visual. The lights are on.” Harry, following Moad’s eyes, saw blackness and then found a slender, faraway rectangle.

  There was an audible chuckle. “Lucky chap. Okay, 5796, suggesting here you descend to three thousand, turning to 020 eleven miles, then descending to two thousand and turning to 195. On your own then, man—runway is 260–080, suggesting land 080, we have wind here southwest 8, okay?”

  “Heard and understood, Lahore. Descending to three thousand and turning to 020. You have me?”

  “Oh, we have you okay, man! Don’t do nothing crazy!” And then laughter.

  Moad gave Harry a look. “Slow night at Lahore Control,” he said and put the jet into its turn.

  Bahrain

  Dukas took the long way home. He drove slowly through the darkness, rubbing his upper lip with his left forefinger, his left elbow on the window ledge. At Manama Mall, he pulled into the empty parking lot and sat there for twenty minutes and thought about a pregnant Leslie. It didn’t occur to him that Leslie could be pregnant by somebody else; if she was pregnant, it was his. It didn’t occur to him simply to let it go, to let her maybe deal with it herself or, worst case, get so pregnant she’d have to say something about it in two or three or six months. It didn’t occur to him to postpone facing it.

  What did occur to him was that he had a big problem of his own making, and that you clean up your own messes.

  He put the car in gear again and drove home. His face looked angry, although he didn’t know it, and in fact he wasn’t angry. Not at Leslie, at any rate. At himself, maybe—for not ending things when they had been in Washington, for not sending her back when she had shown up in Bahrain. For not liking to have her around.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Alan wasn’t angry, although anger lurked there. He couldn’t get Rafe out of his mind. White as paper. Almost a corpse.

  Alan’s thermos was full, and he had a bag of cookies from the dirty shirt; the plane had gas, and they were armed to the turbofans. Alan felt none of the elation that made such moments glow for him in memory. Nothing.

  He felt the shuttle slide down into tension and then the roar as the turbofans went up to full power, Soleck and Garcia muttering through the ritual in the front seat.

  “Everybody ready for a ride?” Soleck intoned.

  Alan thought once more of the wraith in sick bay, who would never do this again. He swallowed.

  Soleck snapped a salute, and they were gone into the first rays of the sun.

  Bahrain

  Dukas let himself into the house and was shucking off his jacket even as he closed the door behind him with a foot. Leslie appeared in the vaguely Moorish arch at the room’s end; maybe his lights had waked her. She was still wearing the skimpy pajama top.

  “You’re home.” She looked good—rested, relaxed because she had had some sleep—but her face tightened as she got closer and looked at his. “What’s the matter?”

  Dukas threw his coat on the sofa. He was standing at right angles to her, slowly loosening his tie. When he spoke, he couldn’t make the words come out nicely or even neutrally. He sounded angry, too. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She didn’t say Tell you what? or How did you find out? or any of the temporizing, stupid things that she might have said. She did give a little gasp, almost a hiccup. He turned to look at her and felt the stab in his chest that he felt whenever he went too deep into her emotions and found again what a feeling creature she was. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he muttered again. “Am I such a bastard you couldn’t even tell me?”

  “I thought—I thought you’d think I—” She hugged herself as if she were cold. “Like it was a trap.”

  Dukas took her by a wrist and led her to the sofa and sank down, pulling her with him. “Oh, Jesus.” He didn’t mean that to apply to her but to him. He was looking at himself as he supposed she saw him, and then he was wondering how she could think she loved what she saw.
“You haven’t—done anything, have you?”

  “I talked to somebody about it. I’m thinking it over.”

  “No!” He was surprised at how much emotion jumped out of him. “No, we’re not going to do that.”

  “We’re not.” She chuckled, not very merrily.

  “You know what I mean. You can’t. I can’t—” He had started to say I can’t let you, but he saw that the words would be stupid. “You can if you—if it’s for yourself, not because of what you think I might—” He looked at her. She was twenty-two; he’d be fifty before the baby was in school. His hands came up and cupped her face—an odd gesture for him, not one he’d ever made before. “Let’s get married. I mean, yeah—we should get married.”

  She had a surprising toughness to go with her surprising intelligence and her astonishing emotions. She looked steadily into his eyes, no weakening around the mouth, no boo-hoo. “Can’t you say it, Michael?”

  “Say—?”

  “’Say the magic woid, you get ten dollahs.’”

  The magic word was love. Dukas was tough, too—tough on himself, tough on her. He couldn’t say a word that was untrue. She gave an off-center smile and shook her head, then moved in with her arms around his neck. “At least you’re a lousy liar,” she said.

  “Les—I try, I will try. We’re good together, aren’t we? We get along; you’ve given me a lot of—fun, what the hell, happiness; I don’t—very well say—I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, no.”

  She tilted herself a little away so she could look at his eyes again. “You’re telling me to take the glass that’s half full and not the one that’s half empty, right?” She smiled the crooked smile at him again and pulled herself close. She exhaled, and Dukas could hear the raggedness of the breath. Still, she managed to laugh. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “somebody could wish you’d lie just a little sometimes.”