Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  What Suter was waiting for now was rain. He intended to shove Tony’s body into a branch of the Anacostia River, but he would have to have a good, heavy rain beforehand so the channel was full and would carry the body away to the Potomac. It would turn up eventually, but so much the worse for wear, nobody would connect it with Suter.

  Most of Tony Moscowic’s records were in the Moscowic head, and if a .22 slug was in there, too, what then of the records? The only item that might give trouble was a notebook that Moscowic always carried. He would have to lift the notebook from Moscowic’s body before he dumped him into the North Branch.

  No problem.

  Washington.

  “Like hell!” Emma Pasternak hissed. She was loud enough so that other people in the restaurant looked toward their table. “Fuck you!”

  “I asked you, Emma—have you got somebody looking at George Shreed?”

  “You suspicious sonofabitch,” she said.

  Dukas couldn’t figure if she was over-doing anger because she was innocent or because she was guilty. “You promised me you’d lay off him until I gave the word,” he said.

  “I didn’t promise you zip.” She sipped her wine. “I don’t owe you anything, Mike.”

  He almost lunged toward her; the silverware jingled. “Have you got somebody surveilling George Shreed?”

  She too leaned forward. She licked her lips, pursed them. “N-O. Get out of my face.”

  Dukas sighed in disgust. “Even if I believed you, I wouldn’t believe you.”

  She laughed at him. He looked angry. Later, they went to his chocolate apartment.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Alan was having no success in trying to explain to Rafe why he was supposed to be in Bahrain in four days.

  “No. That’s final.”

  “Rafe, this isn’t some sort of personal—”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Alan. That’s exactly what it is. Personal.”

  “—favor, it’s a mission, for God’s sake. It’s important! Lives could be at stake!”

  “Whose? More lives than the men and women on this carrier? Maybe this is why we don’t put intel guys in charge of things.”

  “Rafe, it’s one day. In and out. If we’re flying around the clock, of course I don’t go. But Jesus, you know as well as I do that we may just bore holes in the water and wait.”

  “You told me you’d be out of it. You said ‘one last meeting.’ That was you, right?”

  “Yeah, that was me. I also said I’d get my det moving, and I have.”

  “Half of them hate your guts.”

  “Fuck, is this my CAG throwing that shit at me? Why do they hate my guts? ’Cause they think I’m a fucking spy. How can I fix that? I can help catch the spy.” Alan was shouting.

  “Sounds pretty personal to me, mister.”

  They were chest to chest, and their tempers were long lost. Rafe was the larger man, but Alan’s anger outburned his friend’s. Out in the blue-tiled passageway, several sailors had stopped to listen. At some level, despite the roar of engines and the omnipresent vibration of the main shafts, both of them caught the change in movement beyond the door. It reminded them that there was no privacy at sea, that arguments between superiors got around. Alan realized that he was bellowing tidbits about a matter too secret even to be whispered. So he glared. Then he turned on his heel and slammed the door behind him.

  Langley.

  George Shreed had decided that he would have somebody kill Chen with a gun—one of the Serbians he had hired to eliminate the woman in Venice, in fact. They had failed him there, but they could hardly miss a Chinese sitting on a park bench in downtown Belgrade. Could they?

  It would have to look like a routine crime in a city where crime was nothing if not routine. The bombing and the isolation of “Yugoslavia” (he couldn’t think of it any more without the quotation marks) had made times hard, and hard times breed hard crime. So there they would be, Shreed and Chen, sitting on a bench chatting about treason and betrayal and their own kind of crime, and two men who looked like petty thieves would come up and shoot Chen dead and steal Shreed’s money. (It would be a cosmic joke, he thought, if by mistake they shot Shreed and took Chen’s money. Well, God likes to laugh, too.)

  But, ruling out the intervention of divine practical jokes, Chen would be killed as part of a Belgrade crime wave.

  “Not very original,” he said aloud. He and Suter were sitting in Shreed’s office, going over the day’s burden of paperwork. Shreed usually found he could more or less read it and think about other things at the same time. Today, he was thinking about murder, but he hadn’t meant to speak out loud about it.

  “What?” Suter jerked as if he’d been goosed. He’d been thinking about shooting Tony Moscowic behind the ear, and he thought Shreed knew.

  “Oh—mm—this goddam position paper on Kashmir. Not very original.” Why did he sound apologetic, Shreed wondered.

  “Kashmir’s getting dangerous,” Suter said now. He’d put the bullet behind the mastoid, he was thinking, not in the mastoid—too much bone for a .22.

  “What’s that?” Now Shreed sounded irritated. He had been watching Chen get gunned down.

  “I said, Kashmir’s getting dangerous.” One shot, pfft—no more Tony.

  “It isn’t Kashmir; it’s China,” Shreed muttered. They should shoot Chen in the back of the head, he thought.

  “The Secretary’s flying over tomorrow to ask them to stay out. Didn’t you read the brief?” Have to aim up a little to put the bullet in the brain.

  Suter’s tone brought Shreed out of his reverie, which had just put Chen on the pavement, bleeding and dying. Suter was talking too fast; what was the matter with him these days?

  Shreed thought again how much he really disliked his assistant, and that thought gave way to one of replacing him. Dangerous just now, though—Suter knew too much about him. First things first—Chen and his Chinese plan. He began to think about Chen again, and the bullet in the back of the head, and Belgrade, letting his eyes scan the paperwork and his hand almost automatically make notes.

  Across the desk from him, Suter was staring out the window at the corpse of Tony Moscowic.

  USS Thomas Jefferson, off Alexandria, Egypt.

  The massive engines were silent. Alan stood on the catwalk on the starboard side, already regretting the impulse that had brought him topside and looking absently into the haze to the south, where Alexandria’s port smudged the horizon. Ahead, merchant traffic scurried to clear the area because the carrier needed the whole width of the Suez to move. Their Aegis cruiser, the Fort Klock, had just caught up to the halted Jefferson and anchored alongside. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that had been visiting Piraeus, Greece, was coming fast, just visible on the distorted horizon to the north. The delay while the canal was cleared raised the level of frustration aboard, but it was allowing the battle group to gather.

  Somewhere, Rose was waking to a new day. A picture of her, face contorted with anger and hurt, had been with him since he woke. He didn’t know where it had come from, but its intensity scared him. He couldn’t recall when he had seen that particular look or whether it was a creation of his unconscious mind. Rose was still under threat. He wasn’t doing enough to help her. He hadn’t called her again from Naples because of his preoccupation with the meetings and his hurried departure.

  Alan had been through the Ditch in ’90. Rafe had been a hotshot lieutenant then, a tough bastard who thought intel guys were wimps. Perhaps he still did.

  Alan’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. Rafe was right and wrong about Bahrain. It was personal. He’d been an idiot to deny it. But his personal quest happened to have national security overtones, and he’d been too angry to explain. Too conscious of security. And Rafe had a certain air about him of being right. It could help with command, but it could also stick in your gut. Too damned right.

  Alan remembered the first time he had realized that Rafe, then his nemesis, was not always right. R
afe had landed on the wrong carrier during an exercise. Suddenly he had been vulnerable. Later, Alan had seen him lose an okay grade in a landing when he was in the race for the coveted Top Hook slot. Again, vulnerable. Not blaming others, not denying his fault. Simply less armored, less perfect. Less right. As if he might have moments of self-doubt like other mortals.

  Rafe was showing the same signs as CAG. Everything was not perfect, and Rafe was showing the strain. The self-doubt. And it surfaced in spats over issues like letting Alan go ashore in Bahrain. Is Rafe taking a beating from the admiral over his loyalty to me? That could be behind the anger. Or does Rafe suspect me a little? Is he a little unsure?

  Alan remembered Rafe, later that first cruise, getting the Top Hook award. By then, Rafe was his friend, and he had been amazed to see Rafe accept the award without arrogance, wearing an uncertain smile, as if surprised that he had won after all.

  There were voices above him, where sailors were moving about.

  “…so the CAG accuses him to his face of being a spy. I heard it.”

  “Fuck that noise. He told the CAG he needed to catch the spy. I was there, too.”

  “You got shit for brains, you know that?”

  “Hey, Coloredo, shove it. I know what I heard. Rafehausen’s his bud. You know it. Skipper ain’t no spy.”

  “You’ll see. They’ll arrest his ass and drag him off. None of us will ever see the other side of E-4. Watch.”

  “You’ll never make E-4 anyway, lardass.”

  Spy. Top Hook. Alan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, his eyes snake-like in the gloom, focused on a point halfway to the invisible horizon.

  And what had been nagging at him for a day, the little fact that wouldn’t come and wouldn’t go away, came clear: a picture on the mantelpiece of his boyhood home. In his memory, it still sat there. Not his father winning the award. His father handing it to the next guy with a big smile.

  Alan bolted through the watertight door and down the passageway on the O-3 level, headed for the secure phones in the intel center. He didn’t pause to ask permission, moving an officer out of a phone cubicle with his glare. Then he sat and dialed, waited, dialed. No answer at Mike’s office. What the hell time was it there, anyway? He dialed Mike’s apartment. The moment the phone was picked up, he shouted, “I’ve got it, Mike! It’s been bugging me since she said the words and I’ve got it. Top Hook!”

  A woman’s voice said, “Just a minute, okay?” The phone rattled, and he heard her say, her voice muffled, “It’s for you.”

  Washington.

  Mike took the telephone from Emma.

  “Dukas.”

  “Mike, it’s Alan, Jesus, I’m sorry, but—”

  “What’s up?” He waved Emma away.

  Emma was naked. She flipped herself off the bed and pulled on one of his shirts. Dukas was clearly waiting for her to go before he started talking. Why? Emma knew that information was power. What kind of information was Dukas getting that he didn’t want her to know?

  She scurried to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, and, as she did so, she shouted, “Mike? What? What did you say?”

  As she expected, he couldn’t hear her clearly, and he came as far toward the bedroom door as the telephone cord would allow and said, “What?”

  By then, she had her hand on the bathroom telephone.

  “What?” she shouted.

  “I didn’t say anything, for Christ’s sake!”

  She picked up the extension, covered the mouthpiece. “I thought you did!”

  “Jesus—”

  His phone had been held at arm’s length, away from his ear, and he hadn’t heard her pick up. As she intended.

  Dukas put the telephone back to his ear and said, “What have you got, Al?”

  “Top Hook! It is George Shreed, Mike. He was Top Hook on the Midway, right after Dad.” He sounded impatient, as if he wanted some immediate, big-bang response. Alan burst out again, “Don’t you get it? Shreed is Top Hook! Top Hook is the code name of the mole inside the Agency! Jesus, Mike—”

  “This is an open line, Commander.”

  Alan was silent. “Oh, shit—”

  In the bathroom, Emma was staring at the back of the closed door, the extension phone at her ear. They really thought George Shreed was a mole? Now, there was information that was power!

  17

  The Pentagon.

  Next morning, George Shreed was sitting in a briefing about the bombing campaign in “Yugoslavia,” and he was so bored with pictures of bridges and electricalswitching stations that he wanted to throw up. It would serve all these jerks right, he thought, if he did: here they were, dicking around with a bunch of third-world Europeans who couldn’t even put an aircraft in the air, and the Chinese were moving troops to the Indian border on one frontier and massing missile launchers opposite Taiwan on the other. It’s the Chinese, stupid! he wanted to shout.

  But he didn’t. He was being extra-good, keeping a low profile, making no waves. He’d got the information he wanted from his contact in Internals that “a female voice,” probably from the Agency, was, indeed, in touch with the NCIS people investigating the Siciliano thing. The woman had to be Sally Baranowski. Whom he would take care of in his own way.

  Which was all right as a delaying tactic, but overnight he’d faced the truth that killing Chen in Belgrade wouldn’t work. Was, in fact, counter-productive. Not that he couldn’t handle the practical details. He had set up a cover story with the Agency, made reservations to Budapest to check some ops-readiness stuff there; from there he’d do an overnight in-and-out to Belgrade, using the passport that Chen had sent him.

  He’d have to do without his canes (too recognizable) on the Hungarian flight, probably have to use the morphine. Then wait around in Belgrade for a contact, a lot of stupid tradecraft, then sit with Chen and hand over the forged memo so that the Chinese would do something really stupid. But it was all tricky, and he didn’t want to do it; he needed to get Chen somewhere else, somewhere more on his own terms.

  Half-listening to the briefing, he was thinking about the memo and the fact that of course he couldn’t kill Chen in Belgrade, because Chen was the one who would have to carry the memo back to Beijing for authentication. If he killed Chen in Belgrade, the memo would be instantly suspect. No, he’d have to hand it over and smile and let Chen go. Thinking about killing Chen that way was simply happy bullshit—day-dreaming.

  What he needed was a plan, not a fantasy.

  Shreed sighed. He started to plan it all over again.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  They were in the Ditch now, moving as fast as safety would allow through the dirty water, with the Sinai on their left and Egypt on the right. The uncertainty of the situation had communicated by some invisible mechanism from the admiral all the way down to the deckplates.

  “We don’t have a target list. We don’t have any tanker support. We don’t have any friendly bingo fields. We don’t know who we’re supposed to fight. We’re just supposed to get there.” Rafe was bitter. “Nobody seems to have any hard data on the new Pakistani stuff. We don’t have a reliable air order-of-battle for either side. My intel folks are reading Jane’s, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Rafe—”

  “We’re in the Suez Canal. CNN is having a field day. Our battle group is spread across the Med behind us. What are we supposed to do?”

  “We’re sending a message, Rafe.” Alan had now said this three times. “Air Force is moving units in the Persian Gulf. I’d guess that we’re trying to get the Gulf States to allow us to base tankers and what not. What about Diego Garcia?”

  “It’s a rock in the middle of a war zone. They’re flying twenty-four-hour combat air patrol.”

  “They’ll have tankers soon, if not already.”

  “Al, I can’t count on that.” Rafe shook his head in disgust. “And Pac Fleet has their hands tied. China has moved fleet units into the Taiwan Straits. With Silkworm missiles.”

 
“So I read.”

  “Why? China can’t face us, Al. You’ve said so yourself.”

  “Ask the National Security Council.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Rafe, I’m as far behind as you are.” I’m not here as your personal intel advisor, Rafe. Alan had spent the last four hours explaining the situation, as he understood it, to a legion of aviators. The intel folks were frantic, trying to catch up with events in an area that had been assigned to two junior officers a month ago. They had written and briefed every few days as a contingency. The sudden explosion of the situation had caught them all.

  “What can China throw at us?”

  “They might, and I stress might, be able to forwardstage some air into Burma-Myanmar. They have a surface-action group transiting the Straits of Malacca, about as far from the scene as we are. Realistically, India has more of a blue-water navy than China. India should be able to wreck the Chinese and fight Pakistan at the same time, at least at sea. In the air and on the ground, it’s a different story. But not if we support India. China can’t win against the US in the Taiwan Straits, and they can’t hope to beat India before we respond.”

  “Nukes. They can use nukes.”

  “I’ll tell you this, Rafe. It’s a guess. Somebody in China has fucked up big. Remember how the Gulf War started? Iraq misread the signals from the US. Thought we would play along if they annexed Kuwait.”

  “Thought we wouldn’t fight, you mean.”

  “That’s all I can see. Somebody in China is under the dangerous delusion that we won’t back India. And we’re making a very public dash toward the scene of action to demonstrate that we will back India.” It didn’t sound too bad, put that way.

  He looked up at Alan and raised an eyebrow. “China’s really that weak? That they couldn’t match us conventionally in a stand-up fight?”