Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  He wondered if he was getting old.

  A thousand feet below him, Snot wasn’t watching his altitude and started a gentle descent.

  They were in EMCON, and Donuts couldn’t tell him he was slipping. He scanned his instruments and his heads-up display and started north.

  Snot caught his plane and started climbing to match Donitz.

  One more hour. It was a lonely time, and if he listened too closely, Donitz could hear wild tunes playing in the slipstream outside his canopy. He scanned his instruments again and tried not to think.

  Near Patiala

  Tire tracks led from the chain-link gate into the scrub jungle. Whatever activity there had been here was recent, the tracks laid over now-bent grass and not worn down to bare dirt. Walking slowly, they came on odd stretches of broken asphalt, as if the trail had once been a paved path or driveway. The scrub pressed in, so dusty that its greens were turning to beige; in several places, saplings had been pushed over by a vehicle and sprung partway back. One actual tree, growing in the middle of the narrow lane, had been hacked down with an axe.

  Djalik bent to look at the stump, touched it with his fingertips. “Two-three days at most.”

  “You good guide, Keemo Sabe. Something you learned in Boy Scouts?”

  Djalik unzipped the gym bag and gave Harry a short-barreled riot gun, then two boxes of buckshot. “Tonto think we need to get out of the middle of the road.”

  Mary snorted. “Some road. It’s so narrow, it doesn’t have a middle. Bill, get behind me.” She didn’t offer Bill a weapon—after all, he had his laptop, which he had refused to leave in the car—but she took an H&K prototype machine pistol for herself. “This thing work?”

  “Super-high cyclic rate, little-little bullet. Cut a tree down with that thing. Minimal muzzle rise.” Djalik was assembling an AK, ramming in a banana clip. “Let’s rock.” He slung the gym bag’s strap over his head and pushed the bag itself around to his back.

  They went on, Djalik and Harry in the lead, each on the edge of the narrow road and almost in the scrub, Mary and Bill behind them. They passed, on their right, an overgrown stone shrine, then the remains of a wooden building, maybe a guard’s shack or an equipment shed. Then Harry saw more light ahead, a thinning of the scrub and a widening of the road. They spread out, and then they were standing among the trees, looking out into an irregular, open field of several acres, its surface strangely lumpy, with a low mound off to the left. On their right and fifty yards away was a backhoe, pulled back into the trees; opposite it in the field, and stretching away for more than a hundred feet, was what appeared to be a ditch, all but the first couple of feet covered with canvas or tarpaulin.

  “The site,” Harry said. “The lumps in the grass are probably old foundations or stones.” He gestured toward the backhoe. “And they’ve started to dig.”

  “With a backhoe?”

  “That’s the way thieves do it. Not very nuanced.” Harry took out the Steiners and glassed the site and the woods around it. “Nobody,” he breathed. He trained the binoculars on the backhoe and then on the scrub beyond. “I can see some sort of roof up there.” He handed the binoculars to Djalik. Mary had been reaching for them; when she didn’t get them, she said, “Thanks a lot.”

  “He’s a better shot.”

  “How the fuck would you know?”

  Harry and Djalik agreed that they could use the ditch if it wasn’t too deep, putting somebody there to cover while somebody else went to have a look at the roof he’d glimpsed—and what was under it. But Harry said that he didn’t believe that anybody was there. “Quiet,” he said. “Eerie.”

  “Nice birds,” Bill surprised them by saying. Everybody looked startled.

  Djalik crept out into the field and used the uneven terrain to make his way toward the ditch while Harry led the rest along the edge of the scrub. Between them and Djalik, the tire tracks were still visible, overlaid in places by the deep imprint of the backhoe’s tracks. When they got close, Harry motioned Mary back and went on; he had the shotgun ready as he circled the machine and, finding nothing, waved her and Bill on.

  The backhoe had cut a sloping approach to the covered trench so that it could go in and out, the trench surprisingly deep—deep enough, Harry thought, for him to stand in it and still be below ground level.

  “Looks like they’ve been going at this pretty hard. Very hard, in fact. That’s a lot of digging if they’ve only been at it two or three days.”

  “Like they’re on a schedule?”

  “Like they’re in a hurry.” From the backhoe’s position, he could see the beginning of a grid laid out with string, one line running right along the edge of the trench, others running at right angles. “Somebody sort of knew what he was doing, but that’s lousy archaeology—the backhoe.”

  Then Djalik was waving from the edge of the trench.

  “I’ll go,” Harry said.

  “We’ll both go.”

  “Me, too,” Bill muttered.

  Harry thought that the best cover was the trench itself, and he slid down the incline as fast as he could, glad for the deepening sides to give cover and protection. Bill almost rolled down, then Mary, and they trotted forward in the shadowed, narrow cut, the smell damp and moldy, the dirt underfoot uneven, the light dim. Then they stopped.

  “Oh, my God!”

  Djalik was looking in under the covering, which was not tarpaulin but shade cloth, the dark mesh that is used to protect plants from tropical sun. “That’s why I waved,” he said.

  Directly in front of Harry was the body of a man, feet toward him. Beyond him was another body; beyond that another. And another. And others, as far as he could see in the trench.

  “You’re sitting ducks in there if anybody starts shooting from the end,” Djalik said. “Perfect enfilade.”

  Harry was bending over the first body. “Mary, make Bill lie down. You cover the end we came in. Dave, cover the far end.”

  “Look out for booby traps,” Djalik called.

  Harry squeezed against the dirt wall to get up by the man’s head. The face was contorted, the eyes open, bloodshot. Harry went on to the next one, a woman, then the next. He looked in all at six bodies, thought he could count eleven more pairs of feet sticking up.

  “They’re cold, but not a mark on them,” he said when he got back to Mary. “Jonestown.”

  “What, suicide?”

  “I don’t see any sign of dragging, no sign of struggle, no marks. These folks lay down in here and died. Yeah, suicide. Maybe poison.”

  “Could of been gas,” Djalik said from above. “These guys pretty big on gas.”

  “The point is, they’re very dead. Let’s get out of here.” He shivered. It was like standing in a grave, waiting for the dirt to come down.

  When they were gathered again at the backhoe, Djalik kneeling with his weapon ready, Mary said, “With that covering and a fan at the far end, you could move something like Sarin down that trench pretty well.”

  “With them all lying head to toe like that?”

  “If the discipline was good enough.”

  Harry stared into the dark trench, thinking of that level of dehumanization. “I’d expect to see contortions.” He knelt beside Djalik. “I saw at least seventeen in there. You got any sense there were more people than that here?”

  “I don’t think there was more than two cars came in, maybe three at the most. There’s one big tire track, a small one or maybe two small ones. But you know, you put bodies in a trench and you keep a backhoe handy, I expect you to fill in the trench on top of them.” He looked toward the place where Harry had seen the roof. “You want to go up there?”

  “No. But we have to.”

  Over the Indian Ocean

  His stomach rumbled, and the backs of his arms prickled with tension. Now was the time when Alan would be right, or wrong; when they would find the sub, or not find it. Donuts and Snot were on station, flying combat air patrol circles in the sky to the south;
and his S-3 had gone low an hour before, ruffling the wave tops as it drove west towards their first waypoint, where Alan intended to place a line of sonobuoys as a backstop in his sub hunt.

  Soleck had them so tight to the sea that spray dotted Alan’s window. Outside, the hard morning light filled the sky. His maps and his digital models said that they were safe—over the radar horizon and invisible. At night Alan would have believed it. In the morning sun, with only wavetop haze and some clouds along the coast ahead, he felt that anyone could see them. He felt naked.

  “Mister Soleck? Got the pattern laid in. I’ve marked us for nine buoys; save the rest for the real pattern.”

  “Roger that. Mind if I do it north to south?”

  Alan looked at the Master Chief’s pattern. It was a long L, with the buoys spaced too widely apart; merely a safety net in case the sub was not where they expected it. Alan was sure that the sub would try to get under the SOE-controlled surface ships to the north. But he and the Master Chief agreed that it would only cost them some buoys and five minutes to make sure.

  North to south meant that the pattern would start closest to the SOE ships. Alan thought he had them located about forty miles to the north. Too close for comfort, but far enough. “Go ahead,” he told Soleck.

  The plane stood on its port wingtip, five meters off the tops of the swell. Then they were back level.

  “No wind at all out here,” Soleck commented.

  Alan had his hands locked on his keyboard; Soleck’s confidence at this low altitude didn’t make him feel any better. Next to him, Simcoe’s knuckles were white.

  The turbofans roared. More spray gathered on Alan’s window. The coast was somewhere off to starboard, invisible because of distance and haze and the curve of the earth, but he could see a heavy cloud line and some reflected color. The coast was there, and the sub was in the estuary, or already under the ships.

  Or nowhere at all, and he was dead wrong. But that line of thought didn’t go anywhere useful. The cockpit was hot; the smell of old electrical gear, dust and human occupation was oppressive. For the first time in years, Alan felt like throwing up.

  “Coming up on the mark. Hang on, folks.” Soleck’s voice was happy. Alan thought that he sounded like Rafe in the old days.

  Near Patiala

  It was an old colonial house, one-storeyed, in the bungalow style the British had liked. It might once have been a comfortable place, its long verandah set on a summer night with rattan chairs and tables, plenty of servants who cost almost nothing, whisky and gin in decanters, real ice in a bucket. Now, it was decaying—not yet a ruin but on the way, its roofline swaybacked, its metal roof rust, its verandah’s floor rotting through.

  “Should be buildings around the back,” Harry said. “Servants and that shit. I’ll check them out.”

  “We will.” They circled the house, found servants’ quarters with small trees growing out the windows, weeds and grass unmarked by anybody’s passing, a van and a sedan parked behind the buildings, unlocked and empty.

  “Nothing,” he said to Mary when they came back. “Whatever there is will be inside the house.” He nodded toward the path that many feet had made between the verandah’s steps and the trench in recent days.

  “This isn’t the HQ of a major terrorist organization.”

  “Kind of counterintuitive.” Harry squinted at the sagging house. “If it’s empty, we’re fucked. I’m out of ideas. You go to the embassy, I go home.” He sighed. “If there’s something in there—” He shrugged. “Either way, when I go through that door, I’m finished with the Agency.” He looked into her eyes. “You’d better believe me.”

  “I thought you and I might have some fun in Delhi.”

  He started to say that she had thought she might have some fun with Rao at the palace, but he didn’t. She was an attractive woman; she deserved some relaxation when this was over. But not with him. “You believe me?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Okay, I believe you. You’ll regret it.”

  “Je ne regrette rien.” He signaled to Djalik to cover him from the front of the house. To Mary, he said, “Anybody moves in there, start stitching the place up with that little gun.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Knock on the door. Got a better idea?”

  He moved into the sunlight from the trees, the riot gun pointed down along his right leg. He felt exposed but oddly good, glad of the heat of the sun on his back and his head. He kept his good eye on the door, trusting his peripheral vision to catch any movement. The door was wood, closed; a screen door stood open, jammed by its own warping against the verandah floor, its ancient metal screen rusted and ripped at the bottom as if a foot had gone through it.

  The grass flicked against his boots like little whips. Under it, old flagstones were just visible. The steps were concrete. He went up them lightly, as if he were a guest coming to the house for the first time.

  Waiting for the blast of a weapon.

  And then he was standing by the door.

  And he knocked.

  Nobody answered. He tried the door, found it locked. He knocked once more and waited and, when nothing happened, stepped back and kicked with the sole of his right foot just beside the knob. Something crunched, but the door stayed shut, and he had to do it again, harder this time and with some urgency because he heard sounds inside the house.

  The doorframe splintered near the knob; the door opened six inches and stopped, two long slivers of soft wood still connecting the bolt to the frame. Harry put his shoulder to it and threw himself down, bringing the riot gun up; the door screeched inward and caught on the floor inside, but it was open enough for him to see the length of a corridor that ran all the way from front to back, doorways on both sides, and close to him on the left an arch of dark, once-polished wood. And within, two bare feet sticking up.

  He moved into the corridor, sensing Mary and Djalik moving behind him. He merely glanced into the arched opening and saw the body that belonged to the feet, as dead as the ones in the trench, two other bodies beyond it, a woman stretched on a window seat, another on the floor at an angle. He went on past but saw enough to think Well dressed, to register Western clothes and bright colors, to know that shopping bags and luggage were jumbled on the floor, to get that one of the shopping bags was from Harrod’s; and then he was past, back against the wall, pushing open a door and thinking Anything they shoot from inside this room will go right through these walls and me.

  Hearing sounds again, bumping, rattling.

  Mary was on the other side of the corridor doing the same thing he was: he opened the door and she looked in; she opened a door and Djalik leapfrogged him and looked in; Bill, clutching his computer to his chest, tottered along behind.

  Harry ran past them, gestured at the last closed door and turned into an already open one opposite it, where he thought the sounds were coming from, and found himself in a suite of rooms that led away from him, parallel to the front of the house. The room he stood in was full of potsherds and smelled of the earth; paper littered the floor, written over in small handwriting. Some effort to catalogue what they had dug out in the trench? These people are nuts, he thought. But pathetic, too—trying to salvage fragments of their ancient past before the world ended.

  A door in the wall directly opposite was closed. He went to it and stood aside and opened it with his left hand, lunging around ready to fire, and through the doorway he could see the next room and, on its far side, a closed door. And, on the floor at the bottom of the door, a woman who was dying.

  Harry went forward, checking each room as he came toward her, finding nobody else. The woman was Indian for sure—black-haired, bronze-skinned, a red dot on her forehead. She wore a sari over what looked like a T-shirt. Her heels were thumping on the floor and her face was contorted, and one hand scrabbled at the closed door as if she was trying to get at the doorknob, but she was already slipping away. He smelled excrement, saw her back arch and her legs get rigid
, and then she made a sound like a huge groan, and the movements quivered down into tremors, and then nothing.

  “Poison, the bitch,” Mary said behind him. “There’s a room full of computers back there. Bill’s ecstatic.”

  “Yeah, poison. Not like the others, though. Whatever she took, it hurt.”

  Djalik came in. “That the one was going to backhoe the trench?”

  Harry stood. “Check the rest of the house.” He put his hand on the doorknob, and it turned. The door swung open. Harry stepped over the dead woman.

  35

  Over the Indian Ocean

  This time it was Alan’s wing they stood on to turn. The ocean was right there, as close to him as if he were standing on a diving board over it. He forced his abdominal muscles to relax.

  Then they were level again, and Simcoe said, “One away.” The sonobuoy punched out of the plane with a noise like a baby’s plate dropping from a high chair. Alan brought up his sonar screen and watched it until SNBY 1 lit up and began to broadcast.

  “One’s good,” he said.

  “Two away,” Simcoe said.

  In five minutes they had a pattern laid with a bend at the north end to cover a turn, because Alan thought that if the sub made it this far, she’d turn north toward Pakistan. All the buoys were alive and alert, passively watching their section of the ocean and broadcasting their findings.

  One buoy transmitted data on the salinity and temperature of the water. It showed that there was no layer; the water was too warm, too shallow. Perhaps down around four hundred meters, out past the one-hundred-fathom line, the sub’s might find a layer to hide in.

  Alan dismissed that thought. If the sub made it that far, it would have won. Right now, everything depended on the sub having left Quilon on the ebb, headed east-northeast to rendezvous with the mutineer surface ships. That was the only eventuality that Alan could fully cover. His mind kept wandering off down other possibilities, but he forced it back to this; either the sub was here, within thirty miles of him, or all this was for nothing.