Damage Control (2 page)

“Startex in one minute,” Goldy said. “I think we may be the first casualties in this thing.”

“Not if I can help it. Whitehorse, put a long pattern down here.”

Collins cut in. “We’re still seven miles from the drop—”

“Let’s put the first line in here and we’ll sneak up the coast low, drop a few more, and see what we get.”

Collins mumbled something about how far the Indian sub would have to be from her start position to be caught this far west.

“You got something to say, Mister Collins?”

“No, sir.”

Clunk.
Each sonobuoy had the passive systems to listen for an enemy sub within a thousand yards or so, and a tiny radio transceiver to broadcast the digital data back to the plane. When the sonobuoy survived the drop to the water and the transceivers worked, it was a great system.

“Number one in the water and I have a signal.” Whitehorse had a flat, nasal voice.

Stevens thought it might have been the longest sentence he’d heard out of the boy.

Clunk.

“Number two in the water and—live. She’s good.”

Collins came in again. “Look at the salinity, Whitehorse. Where’s the layer?”

Stevens cut the nerd babble from the rear seats. He didn’t expect they’d find the sub, but it was an exercise and he didn’t want to be remembered as the first casualty.

Clunk.

“Startex,” Goldy said. The game was live; if anyone had seen them, they’d be called with an imaginary missile shot over the radio. Stevens looked at the digital readout on the encrypted comms without thinking, fearing the worst. Nothing came, and he smiled. He looked down where the live buoys from Whitehorse’s drops were matched up with the projected pattern and prepared to turn west toward the island after the next drop. At this altitude, even at low speed, every turn was exciting.

Clunk.

“I—uh, skipper? We—shit, there it is again. Maybe a sub?” Collins, from the back seat, with nerves making him sound like a girl.

Stevens made the turn to put the next buoy in the pattern.

“Whitehorse? You concur?”

“It’s a sub,” Whitehorse said. Flat and confident. “Diesel running about five knots.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to know they’re cheating harder than we are,” Goldy said. “He’s at least a few miles off his start line.”

“I got him on two buoys. I got a fix.” Collins’s voice rose an octave. “Hey! There he is!”

Goldy tapped her helmet and cut out the back seats. “Want me to call him in to the boat?”

“No. Let’s drop an active on him so he’s dead and
then
call him in. Those pickets are right over there; we may be under their radar horizon but they’ll be on a broadcast like white on rice.”

“Roger that.”

“Whitehorse, you ready with an active drop?”

“Roger.” Whitehorse sounded interested.

“Collins, you ready? You going to fuck this up?”

“No—ah, yes. Sir. No.”

Goldy reached over and slapped Stevens on the helmet. Stevens gave her a smile that said,
Yeah, I’m an asshole.
Then he got the plane right down on the wave tops at the lowest speed he could manage and aimed for the datum, the little mark on his computer screen that told him where the sub was, one hundred and fifty meters down.

“Ready to drop,” Whitehorse said.

The high-bypass turbofans screamed like asthmatic banshees as he aimed for the datum.

Clunk.

“In the water. Ready for active.”

“Go,” said Collins.

Breeeet!

Every man on the submarine’s bridge heard the screech as the buoy went active. The former navigator froze, his mind blank.

“There is
not
another sub out here.” The second engineer sounded less positive than his words implied.

“Whoever that is knows where we are and that we’re leaving the exercise area. Battle stations!” the navigator said.

“It must be Americans from the exercise.”

“What are they doing over here?”

“Cheating. They’re famous for it.” The second engineer got down on the chart table.

Breeeet!

“It has to be an aircraft.”

Around them, sailors tumbled into their action stations, many of them looking sick and gray. The navigator still couldn’t focus his mind on the problem. No one had planned for detection this early.

“We have to shoot it down,” the second engineer said.

“What?”

“We have to shoot the American down.”

“What if he’s already passed on our location?”

“What if he has? It will be an hour before they can have another plane here. We’ll be long gone.”

The navigator hesitated and saw something he didn’t like in the second engineer.

“This is my decision.”

“Not if you endanger the mission.”

The navigator saw the gulf yawning at his feet. They were no longer part of a service with a hundred years of tradition. His whole view of himself and his place in the ordered universe shredded. He was alone, the captain of a ship of mutineers. And the second engineer was prepared to walk over his corpse if he didn’t act immediately.

“Surface!” he shouted. “Khuri, man the launcher. I want to hit him the moment the tower clears the water.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Petty Officer Khuri was one of the few men qualified to fire the rotary missile launcher in the conning tower, and it could be fired only when they were surfaced.

“Satisfied?” he snarled to the second engineer.

The younger man nodded and shrugged, as if to say that events were his masters, not his servants. It was a popular saying among the faithful.

The navigator wondered how they would maintain discipline.

He felt the bow incline sharply.

“They’re coming up!” Collins said.

“Jeez! Well, that’s sporting. Goldy, snap a photo for the cruise book. Hey, Collins, you don’t suck as much as I thought. Whitehorse, that was sweet.”

“Can I call the boat?”

“Get the photo first.”

Stevens took his time, banked the plane and climbed a little to get Goldy a better camera angle and pointed the nose back at the datum, just a mile ahead. He could see the disturbance in the water where her tower was cutting the surface.
Mighty fast for an exercise,
he thought. Then the tower was clear, a black square against the sun-dazzled sea.

A little click in the brain, as a neuron fired on some half remembered—

“What the fu—”
Not sun dazzle. Missile launch.
“FLARES!” Stevens bellowed.

Collins, busy enjoying his first operational success with a cup of coffee, took a precious second to toss it aside before reaching over his head for the flare toggle which, being a careful young man, he had set to a three-second burst pattern when he entered the plane.

Stevens had no altitude and very little airspeed, but he did what he could. He rammed the throttle past max to military and put the belly of the plane toward the launches. He thought they were real. It made no sense, but he believed it and acted. His response was almost enough.

The flare pods fired continuously as he turned. The first missile chased a flare that burned as hot as the sun and its warhead fired, taking a precious piece out of the vertical stabilizer because the flares hadn’t had time or speed to deploy far from the aircraft. Stevens felt the change in handling and compensated. He was that good.

The second missile followed an earlier flare and detonated just off the port wing, its steel-cable warhead just missing the port engine and slicing through the aft cockpit, beheading Whitehorse in his seat and taking the top off the aft canopy. Wind and sun filled the airplane.

Stevens felt the change and reached down to pull the master eject as two more missiles slammed into his port wing, which separated from the plane as shrapnel shredded
Stevens’s body and tipped his ejection seat as it fired to incinerate LT Goldstein before her seat could compensate.

A piece of the port engine struck Collins a glancing blow that broke most of his ribs. Because the first missile had ripped the canopy off the back seat, and Stevens’s last piloting had oriented the plane at right angles to the water, his own ejection was clean, and his seat shot him sideways, parallel to the sea, unconscious and mutilated. His luck lay in his angle.

The fourth missile hit the tons of fuel in AG 702’s belly and she exploded, but her death hid Collins’s ejection from the shooter on the conning tower of the
Nehru.
By the time his chute deployed, the tower of the sub was clear for diving, and Collins’s limp and bleeding body settled into the warm water more than a mile beyond the quickly sinking wreckage of his plane. His life vest inflated as it felt the salt, and a transceiver in the shoulder began to radiate his distress.

“Sir—!”

The Indian commodore’s eyes, widened with anger, stared at Alan. “Take your hands off me!”

But Alan didn’t let go. The other man’s rank meant less to him right then than his touching the JOTS, which had worldwide connections and was as sacrosanct as any piece of classified hardware the Navy owned—the reason that Benvenuto was posted to ride herd on it. For this exercise, Indian monitoring personnel were allowed to look at it but most definitely not to insert data or play with the controls; when they wanted data or a change of view—there had been a briefing specifically about this—they were supposed to ask Benvenuto or Alan. They did
not
work the JOTS themselves.

“Sir!” Alan still had a grip on the brown hand, his own good hand closed over it just behind the knuckles so that whatever the commodore had inserted into the port was still locked into Alan’s fingers “I’m very sorry, sir, but—”

“Let me go! This is an order! I will protest—”

“Sir, our orders are clear—nobody—”

The hand squirmed within his grip and the arm tried to pull away. “This is an outrage—!” Heads turned toward them. The Indian lieutenant who had been staring at the clock looked shocked now, an expression that Alan caught in a fraction of a second’s glance and registered as fear. The
commodore was pulling harder, putting his considerable weight behind his effort, and his hand backed four inches away from the JOTS and then jerked, and Alan’s fingers, gripping harder still, slid down the long brown fingers and caught on something hard and smooth, and a gold chain attached to the glittering thing snapped and the commodore’s hand pulled free.

And Alan found himself holding a shell-like, golden object with a protrusion made to fit a USB port.

The commodore made a grab for it. Alan pulled away. “Benvenuto—!” The JOTS tender, frozen at the sound-powered phone, launched himself at the terminal. At the same time, the commodore, face flushed a muddy red, was bellowing across the space at the Indian lieutenant, the Hindi words lost to Alan. He closed the golden shell inside his hand and rapped out, “Benvenuto, do not let this officer approach the JOTS terminal! That’s an order!”

The hand came down and hovered near a sidearm. Alan took it in—the distorted face, the weapon, the rage—and wheeled to shout across the space to his communications specialist, “Borgman! Get Fifth Fleet HQ on Priority now! We have a situation here.” He whirled back to confront the Indian commodore. “Sir—please back off! You’re violating the terms of the agreement that set up this exercise. At once, sir!”

The commodore was shorter than Alan, trim, late forties. He hesitated long enough to meet Alan’s eyes and make some inner calculation, and he shouted again at the lieutenant.

And the lieutenant unsnapped his own holster with his left hand and drew an automatic pistol with his right and put it almost against Petty Officer Borgman’s head as she tried to raise Bahrain on the radio, and he pulled the trigger.

“No-o-o—!” Alan screamed. He would have gone after the lieutenant then, but he heard Benvenuto shout, and he turned and saw that the commodore had drawn his own weapon and was aiming it at him. Benvenuto caught the
man’s arm and the gun roared, and Alan crossed the space between them in a stride and kicked the commodore in the groin, and then all hell broke loose.

The lieutenant took two shots at Alan and Benvenuto, and Alan hit the deck, pulling Benvenuto down with him. Somebody was screaming from the other side of the room. The commodore was on his knees, bent forward almost over Benvenuto’s legs; as Alan looked, he vomited.

“Holy shit—!” Benvenuto groaned. Alan leaned across the sailor to punch the side of the commodore’s head; the man lurched to Alan’s right, revealing the gun he still held in his right hand. Alan hit him again and grabbed the gun.

The lieutenant’s pistol barked and was met by a scream of pain from the doorway and a rattle of automatic-weapons fire; when Alan rolled back, he saw an Indian Marine sagging down the side of the entrance door, his hands closed over the front of a uniform blouse that was oozing blood. Another Marine, seen only as the forward half of an assault rifle and a pair of hands, was firing into the room, and another arm appeared and the hand grabbed the wounded man and pulled him out the door. Alan could look along the floor and see people lying flat around the room’s periphery, except for the lieutenant, who showed as a pair of legs protected from the doorway by the central console. Then another pistol started to fire, the source hidden from Alan by the console—one of the other Indian ratings, the only people over there.
Jesus, they brought weapons and were waiting for their moment. But what the hell was all that with the golden thing and the JOTS?
And then, belatedly,
You don’t kill people so you can win an exercise—

He still had the golden device in his left hand, the bad one, the one with only three fingers because two had been blown off in a firefight years before. He wriggled the hand down into the leftside pocket of his khakis and leveled the commodore’s pistol in front of him along the floor and took aim at the lieutenant’s right foot.

“Sir!”

Benvenuto’s strangled shout brought him around in time to see the commodore climb over the sailor’s body, his left hand on Benvenuto’s throat, and then the commodore was gone behind the JOTS terminal and Benvenuto was trying to suck air into lungs that had been flattened by the weight of the commodore’s knees. He was a whiz-bang electronics tech but not much of a street fighter.

Then the automatic firing stopped, and there was a burst of pistol fire and a lot of shouting and the bang of a closing door, and then a sudden babble of voices that was like a kind of silence because there was no shooting under it.

“Sir, sir!” a voice shouted from the other side of the room. “Do not shoot us, sir! We know nothing about it, sir!”

Alan looked along the floor and saw Mehta’s face at his level. It was strained but sane, the more remarkable because he was lying in Borgman’s blood. “Sir—they went crazy—they are imposters or something—”

From habit, Alan glanced at the clock: the exercise had begun thirty-three seconds before.

Two new voices bellowed from the door, then a third. Alan rolled up and saw three Indian Marines with weapons pointed. He had a microsecond to make a decision, because one of the Marines was already looking at him and swinging his rifle. If they were with the commodore and the lieutenant, he was about to die and he should at least use the pistol in his hand; but if they were not with them—and they had returned the lieutenant’s fire, after all—then the worst thing he could do was fire on them, for they would surely kill him.

Alan slid the pistol over the floor toward the Marines. “Alan Craik, Commander, United States Navy,” he said. Saying it from a sitting position was not very dignified. Still, it seemed to work. The Marine’s eyes met his, took in his collar and his oak leaves, and the rifle swung away.

Then there was a lot of shouting in other languages, and Alan crawled on all fours to Benvenuto and made sure he was okay, and then he stood, using the JOTS terminal as cover, and looked around the space. The steel door to the planning room was shut; an Indian enlisted man was collapsed in a far corner, one pant leg soaked with blood. Mehta and another rating were tearing at the pant leg and trying to fashion a tourniquet. On the side near the clock, a rattled Indian EM was trying to explain to the Marines what had happened, while another was bent over a cell phone. The first one pointed at Alan and made a gesture, acting out the shooting of Borgman. The lead Marine, a sergeant, shouted back and at once everybody shut up. As if cued to that silence, an explosion from overhead rocked the building, and trouble lights flashed all over the communications consoles. The rating who had been talking to the sergeant flung himself at a console and began to flip switches.

The sergeant stood, half-crouched, his head tilted. He turned to look at Alan. Dust filtered from the ceiling. A fluorescent fixture swung down and held on by its wires. In the new silence, a rattle of gunshots sounded somewhere else in the building, and Mehta, his hands bloody, groped his way to a wall box with a red symbol on it and began to pull out first-aid supplies.

The sergeant duckwalked to Alan, gave a cursory salute, and said, “Sergeant Swaminathan, sir.” His voice had a pronounced lilt, the Indian accent that turns
w
to
v.

“Is it a mutiny?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Very bad, sir. I think I have to take my men to barracks.”

“But the three who were here—they murdered one of my people!—they went through that door—”

“All very bad, sir. Best return to barracks.”

Alan wanted to storm the door to the next room to get at the commodore and the lieutenant. A steel door, no
explosives, three Indian Marines. He looked them over—they were shiny-bright, spic and span, with knife-edged creases in their khakis and spit-shines on their shoes, dressed for display more than action. The sergeant was right; his best course was to find other Marines and make sense of what was going on. Plus there were four unarmed Indian enlisted personnel to worry about, one of them wounded, and Alan and Benvenuto and three more US personnel downstairs.

The commodore and the fleet exercise were the least of their worries.

An Indian communications man was shouting from the console. “All communications lost, sir—everything! I think it is the antenna array on the roof up there, blown all to flinders!”

“Can you telephone?”

The sergeant shouted at the Indian EM, who tried a telephone, shook his head, tried another and then another. The man with the cell phone was waving it. “No good—no good—no cell connection—!” He looked wide-eyed at Alan. “I cannot get through!” Whatever was happening was choking the cell-phone net.

“Very bad here, sir,” the sergeant said. “I take you and these personnel to some safe place, then report to my barracks.” He shook his head. “Very bad mess, sir.”

Alan hesitated. “I can’t just leave one of my people,” he said.

“She is dead, sir.”

Alan walked across to Borgman’s body. Somewhere outside, another explosion erupted and was answered by more small-arms fire. He knelt. Borgman’s face was partly gone, blood and tissue sprayed over the communications panels. Alan put his fingers where a pulse would have been in her throat, waited while twenty seconds ticked away on his Breitling.

They were all waiting for something, but nobody would say what it was, even though all four knew—Rose Siciliano Craik, assistant naval attaché, Bahrain; Harry O’Neill, big-bucks American convert to Islam; Mike Dukas, head of Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Bahrain; Leslie Kultzke, live-in interloper on Dukas’s life after following him all the way from Washington. What they were waiting for was Alan Craik, but he wouldn’t be home for more than three days.

When they had planned this gathering, he was supposed to be home, and then he had been made fleet-exercise umpire, and there went the notion that they would all be together for Rose’s birthday. Alan was the glue that held them, and, without him, there was this strange sense of waiting for somebody who wouldn’t show up.

The three old friends sat with their knees almost touching, laughing and mopping at spilled drops of coffee and licking fingers that had become coated with powdered sugar from Rose’s biscotti. Leslie sat a little apart, like a good child allowed to sit with the grown-ups. She smiled when they laughed, otherwise sat with a pretty good imitation of interest on her round face. She was twenty-two. They were nearing forty, in Dukas’s case more like forty-five.

Then the conversation ran down, and Harry said, “Shall we play a round of whatever-happened-to-old-so-and-so now?”

“We’re going to play let’s-help-Michael-lose-weight.” Leslie smiled at him as she said it, pulling the plate of biscotti away from Dukas’s hand. Quite opposite expressions flitted across their faces, his chastened, then irritated, hers mature and maternal. The change made Harry raise his eyebrows at Rose, who drew her own dark, thick brows together and gave him what her husband called “the look that kills.” Then she turned away and said in that voice that announces clearly that the speaker is trying to change the subject, “What do
you think Alan’s doing right now? Mike—Harry—? What does the umpire
do
at the start of an exercise?”

Harry, who had been a junior intel officer ten years before, smiled and shrugged. “Stand around and try not to look bored, I suppose.”

A closed car speeds along a highway. Vashni, Mohenjo Daro’s right hand, misses the comfort of their corporate headquarters, but she never questions Daro’s impulse to leave it and become anonymous. The lack of an office does not separate her from her networks: she has her headset on, watching the markets and her e-mails on VR glasses while Daro chats with the driver, a Tamil who joined the movement years ago.

As they make the turn from the main highway to the permanent traffic jam around the airport, she sees a flood of e-mails hitting her server. She reads. She touches Daro’s arm, her face averted, less because she continues to watch the screens in the VR goggles than because she doesn’t want to see his face and know again that she sees a dying man. “The
Nehru
has shot down an American plane.” She flips up her glasses. “Those idiots.” She looks at him.

One of the virtues that Mohenjo Daro possessed as a leader was that he never wasted time on recrimination, although he would certainly have been justified now. He had spent three years putting his own crew on the submarine and getting it into a situation where it could disappear. The
Nehru
should have been invisible to the joint exercise. It should have had the additional invisibility of their carefully laid misdirection of the American JOTS system. And now it had shot down an American aircraft!

“So much for stealth,” he said. He had rather liked stealth, she knew. He had hoped to avoid the messiness that came with open conflict. He smiled now as he saw the irony of it,
close to religious revelation. Of course, the path to anarchy and healing lay through conflict, as he often told her. It was more ironic that he had tried to avoid it. She knew that his mind would now start wandering down corridors of paradox; she put her hand on his arm to remind him that she was waiting for his order.