Damage Control (23 page)

“Do your Edgar bit and see if the worm is here.”

Valdez put in an Edgar disk, and Edgar went to work and found that nobody was trying to eat his shorts.

“No worm. Ver-ee in-ter-es-ting!”

She cycled through the encrypted data and found a few unconnected pieces in clear—a clock, currently running; what seemed to be a weather report; two incomprehensible pages of text, in clear but in a language they couldn’t read.

“The jg, what’s his name?—Ong—said this crap was on USB keys. He also sent it to NSA for decryption, which means they ought to have it in no more than three years or so. The truth is, you and I aren’t going to break it.”

“You amaze me. The Great Valdez?”

“I amaze myself. Trouble is, see, Mave, the clock’s running.
That shit about Al Craik is a wakeup call, no kidding. ‘Kill on sight?’” He shook his head.

She rolled her chair along the table to look at his screen. “What I think is, this mess needs a trigger, and until it has the trigger, it’s going to stay just like that.”

“Yeah, right, okay. What’s the trigger? Like, how were those USB keys to be used?”

Valdez typed and brought up Ong’s cover message. He scrolled until he found “… largest program was located on a USB key that was attempted to plug into a JOTS terminal.”

“A JOTS terminal,” he said.

“And what might he be when he’s home?”

“Oh, the JOTS is a system for locating ships and airplanes. Comes up as images on a screen, incorporates data from all sorts of links—you can zoom in and out, see what’s going on pretty much worldwide—who’s where, all that.”

He was scrolling on, reading scraps, hurrying on. “It would be nice to know what happened when the thing was plugged in.” He glanced at her, put his hand on her leg. “It didn’t come up encrypted code, you can bet your sweet ass.”

“Flatterer—a body’d think you were Irish.”

“Well, it wouldn’t—would it?”

“Not if you meant it to do something. It might not show anything, you know. If the worm that ate Edgar is as tough as it looks, then it might go right to work and do whatever it’s supposed to do.” She put her hand over his. “Like suck the guts out of your JOTS?”

Valdez stared at the screen. “There’s an awful lot of code there, Mave. I say that’s something to be downloaded.”

“Into
the JOTS.”

“Where else?” He thought about it. He turned her hand over and held it, palm to his palm. “Maybe the JOTS itself is the trigger?”

“Oh, clever man! Of course! You put it into the USB port, it looks around, the first string it hits tells it—Go! I mean, it
could be the first string, that isn’t impossible. It could key on the matrix, couldn’t it?”

“It could key on the operating system. JOTS is unique.” He kissed her fingers. “I’m going over to Fifth Fleet.”

“Because they’ve got a JOTS,” she said.

“If they haven’t, the Navy’s in big trouble.”

“And what about me?” she said.

“Can’t get you in over there, Mave.” He smiled, trying to placate her. “You don’t have a clearance.”

“And you do, I suppose.”

“I’m on a list.”

“And I’m not? What list is that, then?”

They had a fight, of sorts. She kept saying, “What list?” and he kept saying, “Ask Harry,” and she finally screamed at him, “Harry isn’t here! I’m asking you!” and Valdez went off to Fifth Fleet feeling worn out before his night had really started.

One patient in the ship’s hospital had been there for more than thirty hours before intel figured out that he was LTjg Collins, the TACCO from the missing S-3 commanded by CDR Paul Stevens. In the chaos after the Indian Jaguar had hit the flight deck, nobody knew for sure how many or which planes were missing, whether they’d burned on the deck, been pushed into the sea, or gone down somewhere. Then they sorted that out, and at some point the TAO and the squadrons knew about Stevens’s plane, but intel didn’t make the connection. And then it had taken a yeoman hours to identify Collins, whose ID had been ripped off in the crash. Because of the deck accident, his squadron-mates were scattered, and something as simple as a flight sked had been impossible to find. Even after they knew that the man found in the water was from Stevens’s aircraft, it took time to find somebody who knew that Stevens himself was too old to be their mystery victim, somebody else who knew that Goldy was a woman. Finally, they had come up with a kid from the squadron who was at that point helping damage control near the number two elevator, and he described Collins for them. That is why, thirty-three hours after the Jaguar had hit the flight deck, intel had finally been able to make the connection.

The ship’s hospital had pushed out into nearby spaces as
the wounded had come in from the accident. Even then, it was too small, and an auxiliary had been set up on the O-3 level, where they were sending the less seriously injured. As well, choppers were going back and forth among the
Jefferson,
the
Fort Klock,
and the gator freighter
Mindanao,
ferrying wounded who had already been through trauma care and stabilized.

The wounded kid from Stevens’s S-3 was considered too critical to move. He lay in a ward assigned to the most serious cases—the one, in fact, where Admiral Rafehausen also lay.

At 2314 Local, the flag intel officer and a yeoman appeared in the hospital. They sought out the medical captain in charge, a weary, harried-looking man in a surgical gown who was still wearing gloves, and the flag intel officer said that they knew who the wounded boy was and they wanted to talk to him.

The captain muttered to somebody else, stripping off his gloves as he talked. His shoulders sagged. A nurse said they had a burn victim waiting for him in the operating suite. The captain looked at a list, rubbing his eyes. “You can’t see him. He’s critical.” He handed the list back to another nurse and headed out.

“Sir!” The flag intel officer turned back. “This is critical, too, sir. We have to know why that aircraft went down. Another pilot thinks he saw electronic evidence of hostile activity.”

“That man’s sedated. He’s got a nearly severed fourth vertebra; if it goes, he’ll be permanently paralyzed or dead. I’ll call you when he’s out of surgery and we deem him ready to talk to you.”

“Sir!” The intel officer turned again, this time with real anger. “I have orders from the acting commander of the BG. I’m to talk with the man. He’s to be allowed to talk to me.”

The surgeon put his hands on his hips. “You want to kill that boy?”

“We may be facing a war, sir. I
have
to talk to him.”

The surgeon lost it. “He’s sedated!” he screamed.

“Can he be waked up? Some kind of antidote?”

The surgeon stared at him. Abruptly, he turned to the nurse. “Take this officer to Doctor Fernando. Tell Fernando to contact me in surgery.” He turned back to the intel officer. “If the boy dies, I’ll report you for manslaughter.” He jerked his head. “This worth your career, Commander?”

Doctor Fernando was a plump, exhausted man in a surgical gown, booties, and cap, a mask hanging at his throat like a bandana. He had large, almost feminine brown eyes with long lashes, under them the dark circles of extreme fatigue. He heard out the intel officer’s story and then checked the young man’s record. “You got a name for him? We’ve got him as one of our thirty-seven John Does.”

“Collins, Hampton. LTjg, Squadron VS-46.”

Fernando was muttering to himself as he read—“concussion, probable cranial swelling, contusions—six broken ribs, broken right leg—”

“The ID is tentative until you guys check him against the records.”

“Yeah, yeah. So, what d’you want from us?”

“I want you to wake him up.”

Fernando started to say something like “No way!” and then saw the seriousness on the intel officer’s face, and he muttered, “Dangerous.” He tossed Collins’s chart on the hospital desk. He rubbed his forehead. “You want information from him, right?”

The intel officer nodded. Helpfully, he said, “I’ll ask as little of him as humanly possible.”

“Well, you may ask his life, is all. See, this man has likely cranial swelling and what laymen call a broken neck; awake, he may be incoherent, and the slightest movement, and he pops the rest of that vertebra, and there goes the spinal cord. You know what happened to Christopher Reeve? The actor?
That’s one likely outcome. Worst case, that happens, then he goes into coma, vessel ruptures in the head, and he dies. You wanta risk that?”

The intel officer hesitated, then nodded. Fernando said to a nurse standing behind the desk, “Get me an anaesthesiol-ogist—McCracken if he’s around. Or wake somebody up—McCracken, if possible.” He turned back. “McCracken’s the best. This is going to be tricky.” He shook his head. “Tricky.”

Twenty minutes later, they were standing around Collins’s bed. Dr McCracken had in fact been yanked out of his rack but showed no resentment as he immediately went about his business.

Collins’s neck and head were in a rigid stainless-steel brace that surrounded them like some arcane torture instrument. One leg was in a plastic splint and was slightly elevated. Despite what he’d been through, however, his face had no bandages and looked quite normal, quite peaceful.

“He’s sedated,” Fernando said. “He was stabilized when he came in and now we’re holding him. Believe it or not, he isn’t one of our most critical cases. It’s the burns are the worst. Anyway, vertebral surgery is tricky, really tricky.” He looked at the anaesthesiologist. “Whatd’you think?”

“I want to bring him out and be ready to put him under again absolutely as quick as possible. If we hold it to thirty seconds or so—His blood pressure’s elevated because of trauma; we can’t put it up even more.” An IV ran down to a heparin lock in Collins’s arm, with another plastic joint partway up the tube where a syringe could be put in. McCracken already had three syringes laid out on a tray. “We’ll try.” He glanced at the intel officer. “Any time.”

The intel officer nodded. Fernando nodded. McCracken eased a needle into the IV and injected colorless fluid, his eyes on an electronic monitor by the bed.

Collins’s eyelids fluttered.

Fernando nodded to the intel officer.

“Collins? Lieutenant? Can you hear me?”

Collins’s eyes were open now. Perhaps he tried to nod, because the eyes suddenly swung around, left, right, up, trying to find why he couldn’t move his head. “Wha-a-a-?”

“You’re in the hospital, Collins. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. You were in Commander Stevens’s aircraft. The aircraft went down.”

The eyes widened. “Sub! The sub—shot us down.” The voice became panicky. “Where are the guys?”

“A submarine fired on you? Collins, is that what happened?”

“Submarine! I caught it on the link—we laid down a line—caught it and Skipper said we’d go active t’ scare them—and it surfaced and shot—shot—Where are the guys?
Where are the guys?”
He started to scream.

Fernando jerked his head at McCracken, and a second needle went in and instantly, it seemed, Collins’s eyes closed and his screams stopped. “That’s all you get,” Fernando said.

“I need details! He was talking, godammit—!”

“His blood pressure’s going up.” Fernando’s voice was level, calm. “We’re all doing our best with what we’re given here, Commander. That’s all you’re gonna be given—do your best with it.” He turned the intel officer away from the bed. “Out, okay?”

Behind them, McCracken was saying something to a nurse and somebody else was running toward the end of the ward.

Late at night, Fifth Fleet headquarters should have been a quiet place. A flag desk would normally have been manned by a duty officer, as would desks in the principal departments, but the place would have lacked the sense of life that marked it by day. Now, however, the times were far from normal, and a tense activity was evident in lighted offices and hurrying figures with permanent frowns; the smell of
coffee and a boombox playing somewhere suggested an under-layer of activity. The flag captain had finally persuaded Admiral Pilchard to go home after thirty-two hours without sleep, and he had dragged himself off an hour later, but duty officers were bunked down in the duty room and others had brought in sleeping bags and pads and were sacked out in cubbyholes all over the building. Most of them thought they were waiting for a war to start.

Six years in the Navy made Valdez sensitive to such activity. He moved through the Fifth Fleet spaces a little warily, nonetheless, because he was a visitor and an outsider now. Seeing people asleep under desks and on tables in the cafeteria told him how tight things were but didn’t change his own status.

A Marine guard had led him to the intel spaces and hadn’t left until Valdez had been signed in there. Now, Valdez was wearing an ID badge that said visitor not to be left unaccompanied, which he had been enjoined to wear “at all times, by which we mean
at all times,
sir!” by a Marine sergeant. Valdez had grinned at being called “sir” by a sergeant but hadn’t got a grin back. Now, Valdez was facing a tall, skinny lieutenantcommander with prematurely gray hair who stuck out a hand and gave him a smile of uneven teeth. “LieutenantCommander Lapierre.” Al Craik’s assistant in intel.

“You’re ex-Navy, I hear.”

“Only a PO1, sir.”

“They’re the ones who do all the work, right?” Lapierre was never going to win any beauty contests—in fact, there was something of the central-casting idea of a hayseed about him—but he looked like a guy who was absolutely what you saw—no bullshit.

“Okay, you know what I got?”

“That I
don’t
know.”

“Okay, I got an encrypted mess of doo-doo that was sent to me from India by a Lieutenant jg Ong. You know this guy Ong?”

“It’s a she, not a he, Mister Valdez.”

“It makes me nervous, people call me ‘mister.’ Most people just call me Valdez. I got this data from
Miss
Ong, okay. She said it was on something plugged into the USB port of a JOTS terminal when Mister Craik ‘intercepted’ it, whatever the hell that means. You know anything about that?”

Lapierre shook his head. “We didn’t discuss that.”

Valdez nodded gloomily. He realized he was tired, and he was worried about just how angry Mavis was. “Can we move this right along?” he said.

“Be my guest. What d’you need? A computer?”

“I need a JOTS repeater.”

“That we got.”

“It’s gotta be isolated from the system—one hundred percent isolated. I don’t know how to do that, not my kind of electronics, and I haven’t got the time to go through the manual and find out. I want somebody really knows what he’s doing to isolate it and then guarantee to me that’s it out of the system.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Maybe I’m going to fry it; we’ll see.” He told Lapierre about what he and Mavis had done with the encrypted data. “My respect for Indian programmers went up about one thousand percent.”

While they got somebody out of his rack in the enlisted barracks to deal with the JOTS, Valdez talked to Mavis on the telephone, an embarrassed chief leaning in the door because Valdez couldn’t be left alone. She’d already been asleep; contrary to his fears, she was glad he’d called. And so it went: they had a common passion for computers that was stronger than either one’s anger.

The JOTS specialist was an African-American PO1 named Markey who spent about forty seconds at the device and said it was okay, good to go, he was outa there.

“Guarantee?” Valdez said.

“Hundred percent, m’man—do your thing.”

Lapierre leaned in between them. “What’s the worst could happen if it isn’t isolated, Valdez?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to be here, but what I think is, it could maybe seize or destroy the entire JOTS system worldwide.”

PO1 Markey looked at the commander, then at Valdez. “I think I’ll just have another look at my machine here,” he said. This time, he took five minutes and turned to them, shaking his head, less cocksure, but saying that he’d checked every goddam thing he knew, and unless he cut off the electrical supply, he didn’t know how he could isolate it any better. “What you got on that disk, anyway?”

“I wish I knew.”

Valdez had to download the disk to his own laptop, which was already as well protected as the computers back at the office had been, and then download from there via the USB port to the JOTS. When he was ready, he said, “Okay, this is apparently what somebody was about to do when he was ‘intercepted’ by Commander Craik. You guys ready?”

Markey had stuck around, for all that he, like everybody else, was dying for sleep. He looked at the laptop and winced. Lapierre gave a toothy grin. “Shoot.”

Valdez hit a key.

“Holy shit!” Markey, who had been leaning on the JOTS, swayed away from it as a complex image came on the screen. “Well, it didn’t eat our lunch, anyway.”

“What’ve we got?” Lapierre said.

Valdez was peering at the screen. “You guys tell me—what
have
we got?”

A voice behind them said, “It’s the fleet exercise startex configuration.” The speaker was a female chief, intel. Not cute, Valdez thought, but a really bright lady. Nice legs.
Big
headlights.

Lapierre was looking at the JOTS. “Yeah, it
is
the startex
layout. There’s the
Jefferson
—the
Klock
—these are Indian ships over here, right. Pulanski, you’re good.”

The female chief said, “We worked on the thing long enough, we oughta recognize it.” She turned to Valdez. “Heather Pulanski, I worked for Lieutenant jg Ong. We did a lot of the preplanning.”