Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

They held each other, both made numb by the strange intensity of the moment. Only slowly did Dukas come to realize that he’d proposed and been accepted.

  Patiala Airfield

  The air was heavy and hot and smelled of something bitter, refinery gases or agricultural chemicals. Harry, standing next to the Lear jet, inhaled it and didn’t like it and told himself that that was just too bad. In the east, the sky gave no sign yet that morning might be on the way.

  “When are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Mary Totten said. She had slept for most of the flight and she seemed to be less cranky than she had been.

  “Now, if you like.”

  “I like.”

  Harry leaned his buttocks back into the hatchway of the jet and folded his arms. The only illumination came from blue taxiway lights and from inside the plane itself, where Bill was still snoring. “Take a seat,” Harry said to her.

  She shrugged and sat on the second step. “So—?”

  “This is Patiala. The main SOE router hub is here someplace. Doesn’t matter where; we’re not going there. So I figure that the SOE biggies are nearby—according to Bill, the IP is local, no matter what. Someplace within, say, a fifty-mile radius.”

  “Funny, I had that figured out myself.”

  “When that cute little jg briefed us on the SOE, she said that the head guy’s name is Mohenjo Daro. That rang a bell, but I couldn’t say for what. I checked on the web yesterday while we were being entertained by our Indian allies, and I found that Mohenjo-Daro is in fact the name of an ancient city. Across the border in Pakistan, actually. The name is also given to the culture that archaeologists associate with the city—the kind of potsherds and—”

  “Come on, move it along!”

  Harry smiled. “We’re not going anywhere until we find transportation, which isn’t going to happen until there’s a little life around here.”

  She told him quickly, a little acidly, of how she had got her rent-a-plane at Trincomalee. “You go on the web for phone numbers, you wake people up!”

  “We’ll see.” In fact, Djalik was on a cell phone in the plane at that moment, calling business contacts of Harry’s to get a line on executive—for which, read “armored and protected”—auto rentals. “Okay, I’ll skip the fascinating archaeology bits. Heart of the matter is that Mohenjo-Daro was a damned early site of Hinduism—sort of the Hindu Ur.”

  Mary didn’t respond. Maybe she didn’t know Ur.

  “So it appears that the head of our cult or terrorist group or whatever the hell they are took a name that has associations with archaic, aka fundamental, Hinduism. So there’s an interest in religion and an interest in the past there. Am I boring you?”

  “Oh, no, my eyes always cross at this time of night.”

  “A couple dozen or so Ks from Patiala, there’s a site that’s never been dug but is believed to be the only other example of the Mohenjo-Daro culture. I picked it off the India Survey map.” When she said nothing, he said, a little irritated, “Well, it’s a start.”

  “We’re going to an archaeological site?”

  “It would be an archeological site if anybody started digging, but you can’t. It’s privately owned.” Harry grinned down at her. “By SOE.”

  “How come if you’re so smart, the Indians didn’t do this days ago, being as they’re smart people, too?”

  “My guess is the SOE has people whose job is to block exactly that kind of smart—screwing up intelligence, dicking with communications between departments, telling people with good ideas that their ideas stink. SOE is into chaos—they’re really good at it.”

  Later, Djalik came to the hatch and handed out cups of hot chowder from the minuscule galley, and he said, “DelArmCo’s got a Humvee they’ll let us have with a driver for seven-fifty a day US. They take plastic.”

  “How quick?”

  “They gotta wake up the driver and get him to come in from someplace, plus he’s gotta drive here from Delhi.”

  Harry looked at Mary. She shrugged and muttered something about Harry’s having the only idea in town.

  “Get on it.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Hawkins completed his turnover with Madje. The remnants of the Indian loyalists had ceased attempting to fight and were now too far north to offer any more resistance to the SOE ships, which were standing in with the coast.

  “I heard the admiral order us to use the full resources of the battle group,” Hawkins said.

  Madje pointed at the screen. “I’m going to be selling used cars for the rest of my life,” he said.

  “Only if we fail,” Hawkins said. There was something scary about Hawkins now, too.

  It was all scary. Madje had never imagined that he would be in a battle, or that he would have to choose between loyalties to do his job. But he was committed. He wrote out a message for the comm shack to encrypt.

  Hawkins took it out into the corridor and walked to sick bay. He walked past the nurse’s station and straight to the admiral’s side.

  “I want to send this,” he said.

  Rafehausen read it. He smiled, or at least Hawkins read that fractional movement as a smile.

  “That’s—what—put—him—there—for.” Rafe nodded. “You’re—my—TAO.” He closed his eyes.

  Hawkins watched him trying not to notice that one of the alarms on the admiral’s instruments had just gone off, hoping the man was only asleep. As a corpsman rushed past him, Hawkins turned and walked back aft to the comm shack.

  Captain Fraser of the Picton read the message with a mix of alarm and elation. He swung his feet off his rack and slugged back the coffee his steward offered him, pulled a jersey over his head and walked out on the bridge. Dawn was still a few minutes away, but the sky to the east was a pale gray with some pink in it. The sea was almost dead calm.

  Fraser grabbed his chart table with both hands and leaned over it; the officer of the deck, who had already read the message, had a grease pencil in his hand.

  “We can be on station in an hour, sir,” he said, pointing at a location on the chart.

  “I want to come up from the south. Make revolutions for thirty knots and come to 000.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Have the tail cleared away and all the sonars manned when the watch changes. Send the watch to breakfast now, Mister Jeffries. We’ll be at battle stations again in an hour.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Fraser met the eye of his executive officer as he came on the bridge and gave him the message. His exec read it over the brim of his coffee mug. He looked up at Fraser. “We don’t have to—”

  “Belay that,” Fraser said. “We’ll comply.”

  The ship began to heel and spray came over the bow.

  “Prime Minister might feel differently,” his exec said, bracing.

  “He’s not here. Rafehausen is.” He turned to the officer of the deck. “Once we’re on station, get me one of those fog banks right in with the coast. See ‘em? If you can.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Fraser started to pack his pipe. “I want the helo in the air in thirty minutes, with a full chaff load.”

  His exec started to take notes.

  Radio India

  “Confusing reports from both Delhi and Calcutta have been coming in since last night. Multiple suicides, perhaps in the hundreds, appear to have taken place at several locations. No details are available of the method of suicide, but the victims are believed to be members of the Servants of the Earth cult. Police are speculating that the cult are giving up their effort to take over India and are killing themselves in despair. However, an academic expert on the cult has suggested that to the contrary the cult may have completed a master plan and believe its work is finished. Mohan Katragadda, Mumbai.”

  34

  Quilon, India

  The submarine Nehru didn’t have a tugboat to drag it clear of the pier. The sub was short-handed, too, and simply conning the ship to their first launch
datum would be difficult and fatiguing. They had missed the first of the ebb dealing with two last-minute desertions, and two men from engineering, fanatics, were dead by their own hands. He wondered what his men would do after they launched their last missile.

  Out over the horizon to the north, his little battle group waited, ready to fight the remaining loyalists while he got into deep water and headed west. He leaned his elbows on the curved coaming atop the weather bridge, already feeling the motion of the estuary in his hips. The Kilo-class rolled like a pig, but there wasn’t enough water to submerge for another mile. He turned and threw up over the side with the ease of many repetitions. He raised his binoculars again, scanned the air. Nothing.

  They really were going to pull it off, the whole absurd plan. He winced as the coaming rose again in the swell and banged his elbows. He tried again to focus on the horizon, lost in the haze.

  Two hours, perhaps three, and he’d be over the hundred-fathom line.

  And then, chaos. Chaos to the end.

  Near Patiala, India

  DelArmCo—the Delhi Armored-car Consortium—had provided a Humvee with impact-resistant windows and indoor gun ports and light armor on the bottom and sides. Intended for nervous executives, it was more than Harry thought they needed, but the driver seemed to think it was the greatest thing since instant idlee. A white-turbaned Sikh who loved his job, or at least found his own self-importance in it, he insisted upon showing Harry and Djalik the details of the vehicle’s magnificence. The firing ports were treated so reverently by him that Harry thought that they might have to kiss them. “Very nice,” Harry said.

  “Very nice! Magnificently nice!”

  “Impressive.”

  “And safe!”

  Harry and Djalik exchanged a look and a smile over that, but Bill seemed relieved; he crawled into the back and deflated into a padded executive seat and stared at nothing with open mouth.

  Mary shook her head. “Bill is such an asshole.”

  “But an essential asshole! Without him, where would we be?” Harry laughed. “We might be back in Bahrain, that’s where we might be!” He slapped the roof of the Humvee. “Let’s go!”

  He had a route already planned on his India Survey map. The driver had objected—No, no, not direct, too long way round—but Harry had insisted. He wanted to avoid towns, although this was the Punjab, and there were villages and small cities everywhere. Nonetheless, the main roads seemed empty, and he questioned his own judgment in seeking back roads until, from an overpass, he saw a military roadblock on the highway they might have taken.

  “Roadblock everywhere, everywhere,” the driver said. “Army defending border, not being far away.”

  “Avoid the roadblocks.”

  “But why, please? DelArmCo very well known—friend to soldiers, police—”

  The back roads had more people, but when they saw the Humvee coming, they flinched away, some half-crouching in the ditches, some striding off across the fields. Women in saris pulled children close to them. The driver laughed. “Very afraid, these people.” Their fear seemed to please him. “Ignorant people here.”

  The historic site they wanted was in fact almost fifty kilometers from the airfield. Harry sat in front now with the driver, checking his map and passing it back to Djalik and Mary when, after almost an hour’s driving, they seemed to be lost. Bill was mostly asleep.

  “Did we pass M’ahra?” Djalik said.

  “Yes, yes, M’ahra.” The driver pointed back with a whole hand. “Not interesting place.” He was used to driving people who wanted to “see India.”

  Mary was shaking the front of her shirt to cool herself, holding it in thumb and forefinger of each hand and letting the fabric rise and fall like a bellows; tantalizing glimpses of cleavage and brassiere were ignored by Harry and Djalik, but the driver gave a lot of attention to the rearview mirror. “Awfully quiet around here for the home place of a bunch of bad guys,” she said.

  Harry and Djalik got out and looked around, trying to find landmarks that would agree with the out-of-date map. The entire area was almost semi-suburban, with several factories and scattered office buildings set down in a once rural landscape. They had stopped on the side of a low hill, looking over a shallow valley whose floor rose toward the Himalayan foothills. Close in, there were a couple of small farms and a stream, but the mid-distance was more industrial. Harry put 10x50 Steiners to his eyes and looked. “Cement plant.”

  “Not on the map. What the hell, the map was made in 1967.”

  “Looks like kilns. They make bricks around here?”

  The driver leaned out. “Yes, making bricks. Very dirty work, dirty people. Not interesting.”

  Harry handed the binoculars to Djalik, who looked. “It ought to be right there. Right where the cement plant is.” The cement plant jutted up from the edge of a scruffy area of green scrub.

  Harry shrugged. “Let’s have a look.” They got back in and he pointed. The driver said again that it wasn’t interesting, but Harry said that that was where he wanted to go, and so the Humvee rolled forward, the driver’s face, or what they could see of it between his aviator sunglasses and his beard, grim.

  The road was cracked macadam, probably broken by cement trucks. They reached the corner of a chain-link fence, within which the two gray-beige towers of the cement plant were contained. No sign of life there, either, but beyond it, next to a muddy stream, two men were shoveling clay into molds; they wore only turbans and dhotis, their feet and arms smeared with clay. They looked up, but, perhaps because of the protection of the fence, did not flinch away as everybody else had. Harry signaled the driver to go on; the road turned to gravel, the chain-link fence continuing on their left, the area within it rubble that gave way to scrub, a kind of dry jungle. The shells of two cinderblock houses that had either never been finished or had been long abandoned were visible through the weeds and vines. Then more jungle, and then the ruin of a one-storey brick building that might once have been a small factory. Faded letters were still legible across the front: Jo-Lalna Motorized Bicycle Works.

  “Go back now?” the driver said. The road had turned into two tracks with trash trees closing in on the sides.

  “Jo-Lalna Motorized Bicycle is an SOE company,” Bill said. His voice was lackluster. His forehead was pressed against the armored window. “Wholly owned by the Mumbai Film Entertainment Corporation, LLC.”

  “I thought you were asleep!” Mary snapped.

  “I have total recall.”

  The driver looked at Harry, his hand on the shift lever to put it into reverse.

  “Map.”

  Djalik handed it forward. Mary pulled herself up and looked at it over Harry’s shoulder. His landmark had been a point on the map that, in 1967, had represented a village named Banasar, near which the symbol for “historical point of interest” and the words Harapan remains were marked. Now, Harry tried to look back through the window, as if they might have missed a village somehow; then, not seeing one, he got out and looked over the Humvee’s roof. He grunted.

  “Back up,” he said, getting in again.

  The driver did so with enthusiasm, which faded when Harry told him to stop opposite the two brickmakers.

  “Ask them where Banasar is.”

  The driver was embarrassed. Worse than embarrassed. “Very low-grade people—”

  Harry jumped out. “Banasar?” he called. “Where is Banasar?”

  Both men, who had been squatting over the brick-molds, straightened and nodded vigorously.

  “Where is Banasar?”

  More nodding. Mary stuck her head out. “I think they’re telling you that this is Banasar.”

  Harry looked at the stream from which the brick-makers were taking their water. If that trickle is the “river” on the map, then where the cement plant is now—He got back in and told the driver to go forward—no, not back, forward.

  They passed the two unfinished cement-block houses again—had they been part of Banasar
once?—and then the motorized-bicycle works, and Harry pointed to go on. The two dirt tracks went straight away through a tunnel of dusty green, the chain-link fence always on the left.

  Until, after a couple of hundred yards of bouncing, it turned into a gate.

  Harry, Djalik, and Mary got out and looked at recent tire tracks in the dust, and then at an oiled padlock on the gate. Inside the fence were recent marks that showed where the gate had been pulled open, dragging through the dirt in an arc to let vehicles through.

  Harry stepped back and looked up and down the fence. It was six feet high, without razor or barbed wire along the top. Not the first line of defense of a major terrorist organization, he thought. On the other hand, there was The Purloined Letter.

  “I say we go back to Delhi and I’ll touch base with the embassy,” Mary said. “I’ve got to knock some heads in DC and I want to know what the hell SOE’re doing with those nukes.”

  “Embarrassing if they’re using them to vaporize Delhi.”

  Mary shrugged.

  “The Harapan site is supposed to be private; this is private. Bill says the bicycle place is SOE’s; SOE own the archaeological site. I’m going to look inside.” He looked down at Mary. “You can wait in the car.”

  She laughed at him. “What are we expecting to find?”

  “A needle in a haystack. The meaning of life. Nirvana. How would I know?”

  He rapped on Djalik’s window. “Let’s go.”

  Djalik got out and looked at the fence and the gate. “Through or over?”

  “Over.”

  Djalik got out a baseball-bat bag with weapons in it and threw it over the fence. “After you.”

  Over the Indian Ocean

  Four hundred miles south and east of the Jefferson, Chris Donitz pulled his probe gently free of Soleck’s refueling drogue and dropped into the night, full of gas and ready to play. It was the third time in his career that he’d had to face the animal. He felt more resigned than eager.