by Gordon Kent
But was it genuine?
Colonel Chen had a big office with a lacquered desk that faced the door and two severe chairs with inquisitional formality. When he spoke to his subordinates, he sat straight behind the desk, his face immobile, but when he read agent reports, he tended to turn himself away from the door, his body hunched, his whole demeanor suggesting a furtive search for privacy. Today he was hunched almost into a ball, huddled over flimsy sheets of paper in a corner of his desk, so that his secretary thought for a moment that the office was empty.
“Comrade Colonel?” she murmured, her eyes downcast.
“I’m busy.”
“I have the Lucky Star reports and estimates you ordered.”
He turned toward her, his back straightening like a whip released from tension, and he held out his right hand imperiously even as his left flipped the two sheets on the desk upside down, hiding their contents.
“Anything else?”
“Marshal Jiang’s staff called and expressed the hope that you would visit this afternoon.”
Chen rubbed a hand over his bald head and then down his chin. He thought that he gave off an air of bland imperturbability; those who knew him recognized this gesture as a serious sign of stress.
“Tell the Marshal I will be at his service.”
Their wives had gone to the same school. That’s how it had all started. Chen had married above himself, into the ranks of the senior officers and Party officials. He had been an intelligence officer on his first assignment, learning how to coopt ethnic Chinese who were living overseas. She had been an intern at the embassy. She had schemed relentlessly at his promotion, playing the Party game at his back. Now he was bound hand and foot to the Cabal, as he thought of it, a group of senior officers who sought to make a big strike on the world stage and move China into the tiny club of military superpowers. Her uncles, her cousins, her friends. Now his allies.
Lucky Star was a listing of the financial assets that he controlled for the group; billions of dollars invested in Hong Kong and across the west—the secret funds of the armed forces and sectors of the Party, taken by fair means or foul and hidden away against the day when they were needed. On good days, Chen believed that those funds would never buy anything but expensive retirements for the Cabal’s senior executives. On bad days like today, he worried that the old men meant business, that they really would provoke war to achieve their aims. His last meeting with the marshal had led to the expenditure of several billion dollars to move material to Pakistan—aircraft, missiles, tanks. That was the plan—to use Pakistan and India to humiliate the US while they were busy in Yugoslavia. Next would be naval vessels.
He did not control jet bombers or thousands of soldiers or silent nuclear submarines like the other members, but the report in his hands and the two overturned sheets contained his real power—Lucky Star and Top Hook. The money and the information.
Chen’s status as the man with secrets depended largely on this one agent, China’s highest penetration into the corridors of power in Washington. It had taken a long time, entrapping Top Hook and then putting the screws to him. Now, he produced the best intelligence that had ever come out of the United States.
Top Hook had never seemed frightened before; certainly, when they had known each other in Jakarta, he had been a lion, despite his handicap. Now he seemed scared—the business of posting the fake intercept to implicate some female officer of whom Chen had never heard, for example.
He waved the woman out of his office and hunched over his reports, a pencil tracing characters on a pad, his left hand rubbing the top of his head. He would have to have the original of this memorandum, and the only way to make sure it went directly from Top Hook to the Cabal was to get it himself.
He and Top Hook would have to meet—the first time in years. Chen almost groaned aloud at the idea.
But it was essential, not only to authenticate the document, but also to reappraise Top Hook. Was he really what he seemed?
Oak Grove, West Virginia.
Rose had decided to pull up her socks and face reality. The day after the meeting in her motel room, she reported (early) to the Inter-Service Word Processing Training Center as its new executive officer. She had expected Appalachia and gloom; instead, what she found in West Virginia went into the subject line of her e-mail to Alan:
Subject: DISNEYLAND, WEST VIRGINIA
Arrived this pm, everybody so goddam nice i cant stand it. No shit, nice nice nice I may be sick. The town is nice the scenery is nice the job is nice my boss is nice the eighteen hole championship golf course is nice the town looks like they make movies on it and you expect Opie and Aunt Bea to come around every corner. The kids are going to be ecstatic! I’m in hell but the punishment is being niced to death not the opposite Im not sure which is worse. Mike says for me to get to work and forget the case and let him handle it/thats what I’m doing. Oh shit I miss you. Off to get the kids. Your nice wife.
USS Thomas Jefferson.
Alan took the catwalk without looking to the right or left and strode down into the ship, looking for Rafe. He found him in CIC. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
His face told Rafe everything. He didn’t quibble. “My office, ten minutes.”
Rafe was waiting for him there on time, and Alan closed the door, still in flight clothes, and stood facing Rafe across his desk. “I want real-world tasking for the MARI system. The thing works and I need to prove it!”
“You heard the admiral.”
“The thing didn’t work when he talked to me. Now it works—our baby-faced newbie had an inspiration and the goddam thing works.” He leaned forward, knuckles on the desk. “Rafe—please. Give us something to do!”
Rafe shook his head. “He won’t buy you guys in a combat situation, Al! He’s not gonna let you go snooping for radars and SAM sites.”
“Rafe—look. My detachment is a mess; you said it yourself. Morale is shit. I inherited it that way; you told me to make it better. What these guys need to get better is some sense of doing something, some sense of belonging on this fucking boat! You know what I heard somebody say yesterday? I was asking for suggestions for a det nickname, and a voice from the p’way says, ‘How about the Freeloaders?’ How the hell do you think these guys can get better if they hear shit like that? Give them something to do!”
Rafe stroked his chin. He looked tired. He gave Alan a quick look of disgust, but he began to burrow in a stack of pubs. “You sure the system really works?”
“It’s brilliant! We could see the swimming-pool on a cruise ship at thirty miles! I’ve got a report on my laptop; let me print it out and—”
Rafe waved a hand. “Send it to the admiral; I’ll take your word for it.” He pulled out a thin document in a NATO binder. “There’s one low-priority tasking order.” He looked up at Alan. “Cigarette boats smuggling contraband from Italy to the Yugo coast.”
“Speedboats?” It was a far cry from SAM sites and EW radars. And he had a plunge into doubt: Could the MARI system identify something as small as a speedboat?
Rafe held the publication out. “Haven’t read it; haven’t had time. You want something real-world, this is real-world. You can access NATO for more data via—you know all that.” As Alan took the pub, Rafe withdrew his hand and leaned back. “Best I can do, bud.”
“Take it or leave it?”
Rafe nodded.
“I’ll take it.”
Rafe stood up. “What I like about you, Al, you really take time to think things over. Okay, I’ll square it with the flag.” He shrugged. “If it doesn’t work, you can always go back to cruise ships, right?”
He went straight to his stateroom and read the tasking order. It was more interesting than he thought: smugglers were moving significant quantities of arms, ammo, and military gear across the Adriatic in ten-meter boats that could hit eighty knots at the top. Nothing else on the water could touch them, and, in the heavy surface traffic of that sea, they were virtually invisible
.
Could the MARI system find them and, equally important, pass the information to somebody down there who could intercept them?
He stopped to grab Chief Navarro and told him to get everything he could beg, borrow, or look up on ten-meter speedsters, and then he went straight to the ready room, took down the ops board, and read through the flight schedule. Stevens was bringing 902 back to the boat in fifteen hours. Good. One check flight and 902 could be off. Alan grabbed Cohen and laid on a two-plane “test flight” for early the next morning. Then he told the duty officer to grab the crews he had assigned and have them in the ready room that evening.
Although Alan had no way of seeing it, for the first time he appeared utterly in charge of his unit.
Langley, Virginia.
Ray Suter got a message on his beeper to call a number he recognized as Tony Moscowic’s. He left the office and drove to a strip mall where there was a public telephone, wondering how many other CIA people over the years had used the same phone for more or less the same purpose. Everybody said the office telephones weren’t bugged; everybody went outside to make sensitive calls.
“Yeah, this is Tony,” the voice said when he called.
“You called my beeper.”
“Yeah, what it is, I think I got a way into the guy’s house, costs you five thousand.”
“Dream on.”
“You want in or don’t you? I don’t give a shit; the money isn’t for me.”
“Five thousand for a break-in?”
“Did I say that? Mister Suter, I’m not a moron just because I look like one, okay? You’re taking me for granted, you know that?”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m tense.”
“Here’s the deal. The cleaning woman comes on Wednesdays to do Shreed’s house. I saw her. She got a key. I followed her; I id’d her. I got a cop will pick up her kid for possessing a rock of crack, which he will plant on said kid; that’s what the five is for. Mother gets a choice: she lets us in the house, keeps her mouth shut, or her kid does hard time.”
Suter pictured it. He saw a black woman, a black teenager, mean streets. None of that bothered him. “It’s bringing other people in. I don’t like it.”
“What’d I just say? You think this woman is going to let her kid do time? She’d kill first. She’ll do it; she’ll keep her mouth shut. Once I get a hacker, we go in, we do whatever the hacker has to do, it’s over. Yes or no.”
Suter didn’t like it. He didn’t like having other people know; he didn’t like having things spiral out this way. But he had no choice, and he liked having no choice least of all. No, least of all did he like having Tony Moscowic know so much about Shreed and what Suter was trying to do with him. A mental image of Moscowic dead floated across his brain. “Okay, I guess,” he said.
“What you do, put five thou in bills in an envelope, meet me six p.m. on the dot tomorrow, the Safeway on Glebe Road. Push a cart; I’m pushing a cart; you shop a little, pass me, drop the envelope in my cart. I’ll call you in a couple days.”
A week before, Suter wouldn’t have laid out five thousand for anything. Now, he thought of the billion or more waiting for Shreed to release it—could it be two, three?—and five thousand in bills seemed petty.
He hung up and walked to his car. He didn’t like any of it, not at all—all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Letting Moscowic tell him what to do. Having Moscowic know so much. The idea of Moscowic dead, therefore, became more and more attractive, but he had never killed anybody and he didn’t know how you did that sort of thing.
11
USS Thomas Jefferson.
The brief he gave after chow at 2000 was succinct. He didn’t promise the sky. But he held out the possibility of real-world support to the war in Bosnia, something that the aviators took seriously. Alan appointed Campbell mission commander and ticked off a list of preflight responsibilities for him.
The back of the ready room was crowded. Alan had made it plain that any member of the det was welcome to the brief. Maintenance guys are not usually invited to share operational details, but Alan had found his platform to effect change. He wanted the message to get out. And it wasn’t only chiefs standing in the murk behind the projector; there were sailors of all ranks. Perhaps some came out of curiosity; certainly more than a few were there because Senior Chief Craw had dragged them.
“Folks, we came out here to test our planes, but NATO is pasting the Serbs every day. We aren’t bombers, and the Air Force has plenty of gas, so we’ve been testing our systems and cutting holes in the sky while the other squadrons support the air war.
“Time to change that. This first slide shows the coast of the former Yugoslavia.” As Alan read the slide, he noted that his intel chief had used the local spellings of all of the towns. Still, it was a good slide, informative and simple.
Alan hit a switch and the slide acquired an overlay. “This shows the principal smuggling corridors between the Serbs and various Italians who provide them with stuff.” Alan had entered the location of the Jefferson. “We’re sitting between the two principal corridors and we’ll continue to do so for two more days before we head for Naples.
“These guys are taking war materials—weapons, ammunition, information, spare parts, you name it, it’s moving out of Italy and into Yugoslavia. The Italians are trying to stop it. Up till now, there hasn’t been a lot of interest in using NATO assets on the problem, because the chance of a plane detecting one of these little bastards at night is like trying to find a guy on the mess decks after lights out.” He looked straight at a maintenance tech’s face at the back. “This detachment has the tool to change that.”
He had them. Even the guys in back, the guys who knew nothing about the MARI system, were interested. He was offering them something tangible—a chance to play in a bigger game than training and testing.
“I’ve talked to Air Ops and got a spot on the air tasking order, so this will count as operational flight time. Our two planes are callsign Jaeger One and Two. Captain Rafehausen has given it the thumbs up. The first flight will go at 0300. All missions will be two planes. Flexing the MARI will be the first priority every flight, but once you have it up, in the link and going, your next priority is to look for east-bound fast movers. Soleck?”
“Sir!”
“You were anxious to modify the simulator parameters. Here are some predictions from Rota on what twin-engined cigarette boats might look like on P-3 ISAR. Get with Navarro and give us a guess what they might look like on MARI. Then put them in the
system.”
“Yes, sir!”
“In time for aircrew to get a look before we walk to the planes. Any questions?”
There was a happy buzz at the back when he was done, and as he shut down the projector and unhooked his laptop, he saw Rafe wink at him.
Washington.
Dukas was by nature messy. He was also active, a fleshy man whose short arms jabbed and swung in constant gestures. A desk was not enough for him, and in the day he had been in the Washington office he had installed a bookcase, buried a chair in files, and piled four plastic crates in a tottering stack within arm’s reach.
Triffler, the prissy agent who was now his assistant, was at the decryption center at Fort Holabird, waiting for the geeks to finish with Rose Siciliano’s home computer, which had been seized as it was unloaded from the moving van at her newly rented house in West Virginia. The computer analysis would come up blank, he knew—he was waiting for Triffler to call him with that non-news—and then there wasn’t much to wait for. O’Neill had given Rose a recorder and told her how to get the Telephone Woman on tape—if she ever called again—but Dukas wasn’t optimistic.
He was doing the plod-work of investigation: paperwork and more paperwork. Making notes. Making lists. Making a budget. Checking e-mail. A tiny moment of relief: an e-mail from O’Neill, who was already in Nairobi, about his attempts to find out something about the incident that had got Alan crosswise of George Shreed. Dukas had forgott
en all about asking Harry to check it when he was in Kenya; now, reviewing his notes from the skull session at Rose’s motel, he remembered. Harry hadn’t found much, as it turned out—only that, contrary to the CIA reports, the foreign national whom Alan had contacted in Mombasa had been shot to death, not a suicide. Nine years ago. Did it mean anything? A naive young naval officer; a murdered Iranian asset; George Shreed taking the thing away from Alan; Alan blowing up at Shreed—what the hell? What could Shreed have had to do with a murder in Mombasa, Kenya?
He opened a computer file on Shreed, George, saved the e-mail to it, went back to work. Better call the Inter-Agency woman at CIA, start to show some muscle—
His phone rang. Dukas located the ring under a pile of papers, pushed the papers aside and hit the stack of crates and grabbed the third one up as it started to go. The top one did go, falling over backward like somebody hammered in the front of the head, while Dukas was scrambling amid the papers with his left hand to grab the phone. The crate hit with a crash; files spilled; Dukas yanked the phone cord, and the bottom half of the instrument, restrained by paper but pulled by the cord, flew from the desk and hit him in the chest.
“Dukas, NCIS,” he said. The crate he had been holding stopped teetering and he let go of it and it, too, went over backward.
“This is Triffler.”
“Hey, how you doing?”
“What’s all that noise?”
“Moving some stuff around.”
“My phone sounds funny.”
“My phone. Sounds fine.” In fact, the phone hadn’t sounded quite right all day—ever since, as he remembered, he’d eaten a jelly doughnut and some of the jelly had squirted on it. “What’s up?”
