Authors: Gordon Kent
“Yessir.”
“Marley, print a screen from the JOTS and give it to Mister Madje.” Captain Hawkins swiveled to face the glowing blue screen that filled the after bulkhead. The screen was filled with symbols denoting ships as hostile, neutral, and friendly; symbols that also indicated whether the unit they represented was a ship, a submarine, or an aircraft. Madje knew enough about the JOTS system to know that the white numbers next to each symbol represented the age of the information that fixed its location. Up to the north, the ages of most of the Indian symbols went back hours, in some cases back to the start of the exercise.
Captain Hawkins was a New Englander and sounded it. “We’re nearly blind,” he said quietly. “I’ve got Supplot working flat out and I’m using every ELINT tool in the book, but the Indians have pretty good transmission discipline.” He rubbed his eyes, passed a hand over his face as if washing it. “Can you get the admiral to override Captain Lash and get one of the S-3’s in Trincomalee to go up on a recce flight?”
Madje was used to staff politics, but this was a new level—operational politics. Politics in the face of the
enemy—whoever the enemy was.
Why am I surprised?
He asked himself. All he said was “Sorry, sir?” with a look of incomprehension.
“Captain Lash has decided not to fly any planes where they could quote provoke end quote the mutineers.” Hawkins swiveled to face Madje, held up his hands as if to prevent argument. “Hear me out. I think this boat is under threat, first, from a possible submarine attack, second, from mainland air strikes, third, from surface action. I don’t even know which of the exercise ships is friendly and which is enemy. There were some attempts to communicate, early on; we know their carrier was friendly and is now heavily damaged. If they targeted us and fired a missile salvo, we wouldn’t even be able to strike back over the horizon. Captain Lash is aware of all this but sees it as his duty to make the best speed for Sri Lanka and avoid further contact.”
“You think he’s wrong.” And O’Leary didn’t like Lash, either.
Madje felt as if he were sinking in mud. He’d experienced this sort of thing before, bad enough when the admiral was an active player and he had a flag captain and a chief of staff to fall back on to filter the politics for him. Now, he alone had the access to the admiral. And Hawkins knew it. Madje admired Hawkins, a former surface-warfare officer with real decorations and an admirable record, but he was known to be
very
political. “You think we need to know what’s over the horizon.”
“Damn straight.”
The trouble was, it made too much sense. Hawkins was
right,
as far as Madje could see. One of the S-3s out of Sri Lanka could stay fifty miles to the south of them, giving gas, and still get them some kind of radar picture of the forces to the north. Madje knew how it could be done. He couldn’t see any risk. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he said cautiously. “The admiral isn’t in really good shape.”
Understatement of the year.
“Rafehausen would
never
let this happen if he were aware,” Hawkins said with conviction. He raised an eyebrow.
Madje got the clear impression that Hawkins was asking him to lie—to call Lash and claim the admiral had given him an order.
“I’ll put it to him, sir,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”
Hawkins swiveled back to his screen, wiped his face again, and ran his hand through his hair. “Good. Then get your ass back here and take a watch.”
After his phone calls, Alan gathered his troops in the shade of Harry’s jet. They had put on clean clothes, those who had them, and Alan was in some of Harry’s. All the men but Alan had shaved. They had a new energy and a new eagerness because they thought they were getting out.
“There’s been a change,” Alan said. The faces closed, and Fidel started nodding. “We’ve had new orders.” And he told them.
Fidel looked at him with disgust. “I knew it.”
Alan pulled him aside while the others cleaned out the van. “Fidel, you’re a great man to have around when there’s real trouble, but I sure don’t need you making wiseass comments when I’m trying to talk to the troops.”
Fidel’s face got red, less with embarrassment than anger, Alan thought. “I apologize,” Fidel said.
“That isn’t good enough.
Don’t do it again.
You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what morale means, Fidel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what one bad mouth can do to morale?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, help me out, can’t you?” Alan grabbed his arm. “It’s no secret, I need you. Without you yesterday, we’d be dead.
I want to go home, too. But I have orders and I’m going to do what I’ve been told to do, without any remarks and without any bitching. I’m only asking you to do the same.”
Fidel grinned. “You’ve just begun to fight, right?”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“John Paul Jones.”
Alan didn’t get it, gave up trying to figure it out. “We on the same page now?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry I mouthed off.”
“Okay. What I want you to do is make sure all the weapons are out of the van and in the aircraft. Police it for cartridges, casings, anything. When all this is over, the Indians will start accounting for some of their deaths. I don’t want them finding a rifle that killed one of their people in a car that we rented—
capisce?”
“What about the van?”
It was on Alan’s credit card. He’d already decided he had to take the hit. “Lock it and leave it. I told Bahrain to tell the company to pick it up.”
Fidel laughed. “By the time they get here, we’ll be lucky if it’s got doors on it.”
“The Servants of the Earth are a philanthropic environmental society. That’s what their website says, anyway.”
Ong was briefing Alan and Harry as the plane flew across southern India. Ong had gone to Google and got more than twenty good hits before they began to scatter off into irrelevance.
“Their aims are to bring the earth back from environmental catastrophe. They don’t say right out how they’re going to do this, but ‘random acts of service’ is a phrase that crops up a lot.” She looked at her notes. “They have a surprising amount of money. That’s not on their website, except by implication, but they have several ‘projects’ that have to cost a bundle.
“They also have some interesting people. The website is a recruiting tool—by the way, the same animation is on the website as on the USB keys, but it’s tied specifically to recruiting. In fact there are several animated sections, really cute, very professional—speaks to technical know-how.
“They’re very up-front about recruiting. They say they want ‘India’s best’—by the way, this is a specifically Indian thing; you can access the website in English and eleven Indian languages but no others, which says to me they don’t want Europeans or Chinese or whatever. Anyway—” She looked at her notes again. “Oh, yeah, ‘India’s best.’ They
give the specs for the ideal member: twenty-two to fifty-two, at least a college degree, makes eighteen thousand US or more a year, and in India, that’s pretty good, is in the sciences, technology, the military, or local or national government.”
Ong scratched in her black hair with the end of a pencil. She frowned. “They make themselves sound squeaky-clean, but some other websites say they’re real bad news. I dunno—not enough sources and no criteria to judge, you know? I do think they’re connected with Hindu nationalism, maybe pretty far right. The leader is somebody named Mohenjo Daro, who’s a businessman, but there’s one source that says he was connected with the destruction of a Sikh thing called the Golden Temple. Before my time.” She smirked. “Couple of newspaper pieces about them that really sensationalize them. Called a cult. But another calls them ‘the cutting-edge business conglomerate.’ I have yet to research that part, the businesses, I mean. What I could deduce, they seem to own stuff—a dairy company, big deal, but a petrochemical plant, an outfit that’s into genetic engineering, a smalltime pharmaceuticals company—I don’t know, I don’t have details and these things don’t hang together very well.”
Alan said, “Sounds like real money. How’d they get it?”
Alan and Harry were sitting in the seats farthest back toward the tail; Harry had showed her how to reverse the seatback of the next row, so she was facing them with a pulldown table and her laptop between them.
“We-e-e-ll—” Ong had learned a lot of her gestures and expressions from TV. “Most of the stuff on the net is positive, I mean, it’s PR stuff. Maybe put out by members? But the negative stuff is some of it really rough. One website, this is a fringe thing, I admit, is named ‘Servants of the Worst’ and is a kind of riff on the Servants’ own site—animations, that logo that buzzes around like a bee, a parody of their
tone. What it says is that these folks are bad, they’re violent, they’ve got big plans and they’re out to destroy India. It’s pretty melodramatic.”
“Whose site?”
“One of the SOE sites says it was put together by a patient in a mental institution. The site itself says he or she was a novice member and got fed up—‘nauseated’ is the word—and tried to leave and was threatened, then got beat up, finally changed his or her name and left the country. Which brings me to the kicker, because I’m almost done.”
“And—?”
“This person who says he/she was a novice member says that when there are ‘in-gatherings,’ which are like weekly meetings, every member carries a key, which he plugs into ‘the yoni of the earth’ as they enter the meeting. I had to look up ‘yoni.’” She smiled and may have tried to blush. “It means ‘vagina.’ Call it what you will, it’s a computer port, because ‘on the screen,’ the novice says, quote, ‘we were told that every day we should look around us and choose for destruction the greatest insult we could find to earth and nature.’ Then you were supposed to keep a list and prioritize it so that, quote, ‘you as servant of the earth can focus the forces of Shiva when the moment comes.’”
“The forces of Shiva,” Harry said. He looked at Alan. “Shiva’s a destroyer; that’s all we know and all we need to know. Make a list of local-level targets and go after them when the day comes.”
“Like cell-phone towers, high-rises, strip malls—”
“Power plants, untreated sewage, chicken factories—in fact, most of exactly what’s been hit all over India.”
Alan looked at Ong. “How many people in this outfit?”
“Nobody knows. Estimates run from ten thousand to a hundred thousand.”
Harry shook his head. “Not important; question is, what people? If they really have technocrats, scientists, government
workers, the military—and we know they’ve got some of the military—that’s news.”
“But they’d have to be fanatics.”
“Oh, really? What kind of guy you think power-dives a jet into an aircraft carrier?”
Mike Dukas was at Manama’s airport only ten minutes before Mary Totten’s flight was scheduled to land. The way he was running behind, he figured he should be grateful he wasn’t half an hour late. He had meant to send Greenbaum, but it had made more sense to leave Greenbaum in the office with Leslie, who was giving him a crash course in Not Pissing Off Mike Dukas.
He went straight to the VIP office and pulled into his wake the greeter and the two security men who were waiting for him. They made it to the top of the ramp in the arrival lounge with two minutes to spare, which Dukas spent on a cell phone checking out Rattner’s progress on the terrorist-attack prep. Then the aircraft whined up to the gate and the door opened and they walked down, and the VIP greeter was in the door as soon as it opened, contacting the CIA woman by seat number—to him, she was Ms Brevard—and bringing her out before anybody else could embark.
Dukas introduced himself, looked over her shoulder, saw a sad-sack guy who looked like something from a Dilbert cartoon.
“My special assistant,” Mary Totten said.
Nerd city.
In Customs and Immigration, the nerd caused a small flurry because he didn’t respond to the name on his passport and had to be reminded that he was using the name Bill Grayling. Smiles all around.
“Early in the day,” Dukas said, although it was noon. When they were getting into his car, he said to the nerd, “You new at this?”
“No. Yes. Well, no—I’m really an analyst—”
“I could have guessed.” Dukas put him in the back and had Mary Totten sit in front next to him. “Well, if you never leave Bahrain, you’ll be okay.”
“Never leave Bahrain, my ass! I’m outa here on the first plane I can get.”
“If you mean India, there are no planes. India’s closed.”
“The Navy can lay on a clandestine flight for us.”
Dukas grinned. This woman was going to be fun. “Miz Totten—Mary—Miz Brevard—there’s something you need to understand.” He risked a look away from the traffic and grinned at her. “The Navy isn’t laying on anything for anybody.”
She was a very good-looking woman, he decided, even after a night and part of a day on an airplane. A few lines to give her face character, a few gray hairs, a good body—heavy-boned, fit, tall—and eyes that didn’t take any shit from anybody.
Hottin’ Totten.
“I can either take you straight to your hotel, or we can stop at my office, you can look at some recent message traffic”
“What I want to do, Mike, is get the hell out of Bahrain.”
“Gee, Mary,” Bill said from the back, “we lost a lot of sleep. Let’s go to the—”
“Let’s go to your office,” she said. “Then I want to see Admiral Pilchard.”
Dukas laughed. “I think if you’re real lucky, the assistant intel officer might have time for you.” She wasn’t amused.
Harry O’Neill was sitting in the righthand seat of the Lear jet with earphones on his head and one hand on a radio dial. His pilot, Luis Moad, was beside him. “Keep trying,” Moad said. He was Goan-American, a former Navy pilot with a multi-engine qualification.
“Zip,” Harry said. “Ambur’s off the air, or I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“My guess is you know what you’re doing.” Moad grinned. “You
better
know what you’re doing, Harry—this heap has enough fuel to get to Ambur, and then it’s white-knuckles time.”
Harry changed frequencies, checking against a kneeboard card. Navy habits still ruled—kneeboard cards, comm cards, briefings, however cursory. Harry hadn’t been a flying officer in his tour with the Navy, so sitting up here hadn’t come easily to him at first; now, he was at home with the jargon and the drill.
“Intelligent life!” he muttered as their earphones filled with talk. He clicked his mike to intercom, said, “Chittoor,” aside to Moad. “Fifty K from Ambur.”
Moad glanced at his fuel gauges, nodded.
“Chittoor, this is BN756 registered to Ethos Security of Manama, inbound on heading 040, estimate 150 kilometers. What’s your status, over?”
“756, this is air-traffic control Chittoor, repeat, please.”
“Chittoor, what is the status of your field? Are you receiving aircraft, over?”
“756, Chittoor is open to limited traffic only. Are you an emergency?”
Harry looked at Moad; he nodded.
“Chittoor, this is 756, we filed a flight plan for Ambur but can’t raise them; we have fuel for only—”
Moad held up five fingers, pumped them. Harry made an “I don’t get you” gesture—five minutes? Five hundred kilometers? Miles? Moad switched on his own mike. “Chittoor, this is 756, we have one thousand pounds, estimate Chittoor in two minutes, request clear for immediate landing.”
“756, Ambur is closed because of military activity. Avoid Ambur air space because of known antiaircraft incidents there. Do you have fuel to detour around Ambur and make Chittoor?”
“Can do. Are we cleared?”
There was some garble and then the voice, accented but intelligible, told them they were cleared for immediate landing on 235, and then there was some chat about where they were coming from and did they have papers and did they realize that Chittoor was not an international point of entry.
“Chittoor, this is 756, we filed a flight plan at Bhulta, repeat Bhulta, no immigration necessary.” Harry didn’t say that their flight plan had been left on the plastic lawn chair belonging to the old security guard, or that he and his people were carrying false passports with false immigration stamps. Why make waves?
Dukas sat on the edge of Rattner’s desk, half-smiling at Mary Totten. “Maybe you got lucky. Navy may have a flight
heading for Sri Lanka late today—depends on whether a couple of pilots get here from Naples in time. You want to be on it?”
“I’ve zero interest in going to Sri Lanka.”
Dukas shrugged. “It’s that or Bahrain.”
“What’s in Sri Lanka?”
“Bunch of aircraft from the
Jefferson.”
He’d told her about the accident.
“They
could fly me into India. How far can it be?”
“That would be up to the senior officer on the ground, subject to approval from Fifth Fleet.”
“Who’s the senior officer?”
“Right now, I guess it’s Commander Siciliano.”
“What’s he like?”
Dukas grinned. “Not your type, would be my guess.” He waited for her reaction, which was guarded. “He’s a she.”
“Oh, shit.” She made a face. “I really do relate better to men. Well—can you get me on this plane?”
“I can ask for space for you and your analyst. If you don’t get bumped, and the flight goes, you’ll be okay.”
“Dukas, what I’m doing here is important! A lot more important than anything else that can be going on a goddam airplane!”
Dukas shook his head. “Believe it or not, the Navy believes that protecting its aircraft carrier is more important than providing transport for the CIA. You’d be higher on the list if you were a jet engine mechanic or a hydraulics specialist or an F-18 pilot. Right now, you can get bumped by an E-3 just out of weapons school.”
“You don’t think it’s important to your carrier that there may be nukes floating around loose in India?”
“Yeah, well, ‘may be’ doesn’t cut much ice next to the certainty that the carrier’s got no working deck. If I can get you on the flight, I’ll get you on the flight; if not—you’ve got a room at a good hotel.”
She stood. “What’re you doing this evening, if I don’t get on the flight?”
Dukas glanced at Leslie, who was bending over Greenbaum on the far side of the office. “I’m working. There’s one more thing.”
“Oh, shit.” She sat. “I hate ‘one more thing.’”
“Yeah, don’t we all. Listen, you said you got the okay to come here with a big team and a brass band, and then you got negatived down to just you and your nerd because the White House interfered.” She had told him the story of her calls to and from the DDI. “Why?”
“They don’t want India on their screen, I guess.”
“Fast work, considering everything has to go through about six layers there.”
“They knew what was going on even before I did. I thought I was the first horse out of the gate, you know? I saw it on CNN, I
ran
to the phone and got the DDO, and he said yes. Minutes, I mean
minutes
later, it was no. NSC knew more than I did, he said, knew more than he did, and the word was No.”
“They mention the accident on the
Jefferson?”
“No, just—” She slitted her eyes, looked at him with real interest. “As a matter of fact, the DDI did say something about the Navy. Something about need to know, and I didn’t need to know.”
Dukas was frowning. “What time did you have this conversation?”
“Oh, shit—What difference does it make?”
“Just a thought. Write it out for me while I drive you to your hotel, okay?” He lowered his voice. “And get your analyst to take a bath, will you? Between you and me, he makes the office smell like the zoo.”
Rose had spent the flight from Bahrain making lists. She had wanted to start making them back in Bahrain, but the process
of getting to Sri Lanka had itself proven a major undertaking, and the moment that Fifth Fleet admin was notified by Fifth Fleet ops that she would be the senior officer at Trincomalee, she had become, de facto, the person responsible for anything that could be signed for—aircrew transfers and TDYs, maintenance personnel, spare parts inventories.
Fuel.
Two queries to Chris Donitz had not brought her any information; a junior officer named Soleck had called twice but no one had thought to transfer his calls to her, and that left her too ignorant and too late. So she had signed everything, okayed everything, found a senior chief aviation bosun’s mate to honcho the spare parts, and got herself to the plane.
The first list had to do with her immediate crisis—a diplomatic/military liaison mission to the Sri Lankan government to wrest permission for her planes to fly armed so that they could provide combat air patrol for the
Jefferson.
She continued to hope that the situation would be resolved by the time her flight landed, but the list had to be made. If she had to go, the transport would take her straight on to Colombo.
Contact embassy
Contact Sri L. DoD
Get status agreement
It was a short list, but the difficulties at each stage could be—“Don’t borrow trouble,” she said aloud. And thought about the baby in her belly.
The fetus.
Three months along and worried that she’d miscarry again. She’d
volunteered
for this. What was she thinking of?
“Sorry, ma’am?” The man in the seat next to her was a veteran F-18 pilot whom she knew only as Hawk. He’d come off the command ship at Bahrain, where he had been on the Fifth Fleet staff as the targets officer. He was typical of the pilots she was bringing with her; all well trained, all a
year or more out of the cockpit. She shook her head. “Talking to myself.”
He gave her a quick smile, put his cap over his eyes, and went instantly back to sleep.
She started to tackle the longer second list. She had run a chopper squadron and could do this in her sleep.
Fuel!
Space/habitation
Maintenance inventory
Comms
Planes
Personnel/rotation/flight sched/duty roster
By the time they turned on final for Trincomalee, she had twenty-four pages of written orders and sixteen checklists, and most of them had names already assigned. She looked at Hawk, who had become her maintenance officer because his short dossier said he had been assistant MO in his last squadron and he was unlucky enough to be asleep next to her.
Sleep while you can, buddy,
she thought.
Chris Donitz met her on the tarmac, his flight suit rumpled and stained and suggesting that he hadn’t been out of it in more than a day. He saluted her crisply, his face tired, closed.
“Is this NAS Trincomalee?” she asked, keeping her tone light and willing him to respond in the same vein. All the new people were coming off the plane behind her and she didn’t need a scene on the runway, and it was obvious to her from Donitz’s body language that he wasn’t entirely happy to see her.
He watched the line of people coming down the boarding ramp and gave a half smile. “Looks like it will be, soon enough. Ma’am.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“We’ve got four birds over the
Jeff
right now and two more
on alert. None of them are armed beyond rounds for the 30mm because the authorities here won’t let us take off with missiles. I already have one plane down for maintenance with a landing-gear fluid leak and another coming up on a major engine-maintenance number. We don’t have a hangar and the aircrews are sleeping at a sleezebag hotel in town.” He took a breath. “You’re Al Craik’s wife.”
“Call me Rose. They call you ‘Donuts,’ right?” She turned back to the line. “Hawk!”
He was taller standing up than he had looked on the plane. He had short-cropped blond hair and a flat-top, and his glasses sparkled. When he joined them, he looked about five feet taller than Donitz and twice as clean.
“Ma’am?”
“As of now, you’re the detachment maintenance officer. Get with Donuts here, and find out who needs what. Here’s a list of things I need you to do ASAP. Get Chief Sardo on the inventory. Any news on getting fuel?”
Donitz crossed his arms. He looked defensive, if not downright resentful. “You’re taking command, ma’am?”
No way to sweet-talk around it. Naval tradition required Donitz to accept his loss of status, but long experience had taught Rose that no officer worth a crap ever liked losing a command, however temporary.
“You’ll be my XO. This is, as of now, Det 161, or Det Trincomalee. One of those, whenever Fifth Fleet makes up its mind. Here are my orders.”
Donitz sagged a little, uncrossed his arms. “Shit, ma’am, I didn’t mean you had to give me the paperwork.”
She nodded. “We have a space?” Space was Navy jargon for a hangar, offices, and maintenance area—everything that went with having planes and their impediments.
“Nada. We own the tarmac our planes are on.”
“Okay.” Privately, she thought that Donitz could have got something from the Sri Lankans; she could see an empty
hangar, big, white, and British-built, down at the end of the runway. “Who owns that thing?”
Donitz’s arms were crossed again, and he backed up a step. “Don’t know.” The question seemed to accuse him. “Never thought to ask.”
She could see why Al liked him. He didn’t bother to make an excuse. She gave him her best smile. “You had other shit to do. When did you last sleep?”
“I got a few hours this morning. I’m good to go.”
“Okay. I need you to hold the fort for a while. My first duty here is to get the Sri Lankans off our backs so we can put our birds up armed. I brought an admin guy who can pay for civilian gas—for a while. That’s going to take time. I brought a bunch of people, some good stuff, and some clout. Here’s a list of my priorities for today. If you want to change the order, go ahead; you’re the XO. But getting space is the top, and that hangar looks good to me. And get me a flight sched. Everyone qualed flies. That includes me—put me on the sked for tonight. I gotta go to Colombo first and play diplomat. Figure me back in six hours.”
Before she could decide whether he needed to be handled, he was deep in her stack of lists with Hawk, and the transport pilot was telling her that he was cleared for Colombo if she was ready to ride.
The Lear jet was parked at the end of a row of grounded commercial aircraft, so it was a long walk from the terminal. Alan let Harry and Moad make the walk while he kept his people discreetly near the plane. Shaven and dressed in some of Harry’s clothes, he felt better, if a little unfashionable—Harry was two sizes bigger.
He gathered them inside the plane, handed out assignments: Ong and Benvenuto were to concentrate on the Servants of the Earth, gleaning everything they could from
the Internet. Clavers, housekeeping and security—“That means you keep these two safe, fed, and watered while they work.”
“This is a long way from my designator, sir.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.”
Alan gestured to Fidel. “Let’s talk.” He led the way to the front of the aircraft and sat them both down. Keeping his voice low, he told him what he knew about the Ambur electrical facility, the attack on it, and the likelihood that it was a nuclear storage site. “Harry’s on our side. I don’t want to say any more than that.”
“I kind of figured he was.”
“Air traffic control said there’s military activity around Ambur, including maybe SAMs—antiaircraft, anyway. I’ve been ordered to find out if there were nukes in there and, if so, what happened to them. Mister O’Neill has a source who maybe can tell him, so we’re going there. You’ve already done your part, Fidel—you took a lot of risks, you saved our buns, you got us out of Mahe. You can stay here and run security.”