Damage Control (24 page)

Valdez made nice-to-meet-you sounds, but his attention was on the JOTS. “You think Commander Craik ‘intercepted’ some Indian who all he was going to do was bring up the startex configuration?”

“No Indian personnel were supposed to, like, touch the JOTS,” Markey said. “I was there when we did the rules. Very big on ‘You touch, you lose your fingers.’”

“We gotta see if this thing is real-time or what,” Valdez said. “There’s a ton of data in there—more than you’d need for this image. Maybe it’s got the whole exercise on it.” He picked up his laptop. “Can I have an office where I can be secure? I need an internet connection and a STU. I gotta talk to my boss.”

Lapierre hesitated only a fraction of a second. “My office is down the passageway. Uhh—”

“I know, I know, you gotta hang around because I might steal the silver.” A couple of steps along the way, Valdez turned back. “I need for somebody to watch that thing and see what changes. Anybody?”

Both Pulanski’s and Markey’s hand went up.

“Call me pronto if it explodes or anything.”

As Captain Hawkins read the P-4 from Pilchard, his face went through several changes; first extreme concern as he accepted the message from a runner; then pleasure as he read the first few words, relief as he read the next sentence, and a return to concern, all in a few seconds like an actor practicing expressions.

He turned the command chair through ninety degrees, crumpled the P-4 in his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his khaki trousers. “AsuW? You got a picture?” He waved at the F-18 pilot manning the anti-surface warfare module.

“Yessir. With Supplot and the ASW module, I’ve tracked and mapped every contact raised by 703; and I’ve correlated to data from Supplot and our own ESM folks. I’ll have it on hardcopy in a minute.”

“I want an e-copy I can pass to Fifth Fleet. You ready?”

The F-18 pilot went back around the corner. Hawkins tried to remember his name—Miller? Schiller? He was missing the name tag on his flight suit. He came back with a floppy. “It’s all there, sir.”

O’Leary emerged from the ASW module with another floppy. “You know about the sub?”

Hawkins looked back and forth between them. “Mister Madje put it in the log. Anything new?”

“No, sir. But everything we do know is here for Fifth Fleet.” O’Leary gave Hawkins a second floppy.

Hawkins turned his chair and put both in the hands of his message geek. “Get those out to Pilchard, red hot.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Valdez called the satphone in Harry’s aircraft and got the pilot, Moad, who said he’d have to get Harry, who had to be waked from a deep sleep and wasn’t happy.

“You need to talk to Al Craik,” Harry said. “You could have asked for him in the first place.”

“I work for you.”

“Worse luck for me.”

Craik sounded even worse than Harry did, his voice a dry croak. Still, he was there. Valdez told him about the stuff from Ong and plugging it into the JOTS, asked if it meant anything to Craik.

“You downloaded the stuff, you got the
startex
picture?”

“So they tell me.” Valdez waited for enlightenment; nothing came. “What happened when whoever it was plugged his thing into the JOTS where you were, Commander?”

“The JOTS blinked. Then I had a wrestling match with him; that’s all I saw.”

“And it just blinked? The picture didn’t change?”

“It was only a second, because then we had a fight and then another guy started shooting.”

“We’re letting it run, see what happens.” Valdez waited for some comment from the clearly exhausted man on the other end. “See, I’d like to know at least if this is a picture of the actual start of the exercise, or is it a picture of the Indian
idea
of the start of the exercise—you follow me? What I mean is, did this guy mean to insert their idea of the exercise into the JOTS, or did he steal what was already on there?”

“Well, hmm—Listen, look at it again and see if it’s got a Canadian frigate over against the Indian coast—about, um, 070 from the carrier, as I remember. If it’s there, then that’s not an Indian image, it’s what we had up on our screen, because that frigate was hidden, and I don’t think the Indians were on to it. If the frigate’s there, I don’t know what to say—maybe they wanted to steal our data so they could win the exercise?” He added, as if to himself, “You don’t shoot people over an exercise.”

“I’ll check for the frigate.”

Valdez went back and checked the JOTS and had himself
double-checked by Markey and Pulanski. There was no Canadian frigate.

“Okay, it’s Indian and it’s their idea of startex, then,” Craik said. “I don’t get it.”

Valdez thanked him for his help and apologized for waking him up.

When he went back to the JOTS, three of the Indian ships had moved.

“Gonna be a long night,” Markey said.

The chartered 747 rolled to a stop two hundred feet from the darkened terminal, and the engines whined down, and, in the silence, men coughed and shuffled their feet, and overhead doors banged as weary sailors pulled down bags. Mary Totten was the only civilian female; she thought there were five or six other women among the couple of dozen people headed for the Navy’s makeshift det in Sri Lanka.

“Wait, Bill,” she said. Caddis was trying to climb over her. “Just sit down.”

One good thing about Caddis—the only good thing so far—was that he did as he was told. When, six minutes later, she said “Now” and stood, he dutifully pulled himself up and helped her get their luggage out of the plane.

By the time they got out—the last ones off the aircraft—everybody else was lined up in front of a bus parked just beyond a chain-link fence. The bus’s headlights and a sickly glow from its interior provided the only light. Hot, sticky blackness folded around them.

“City center?” she said to the last man in the line.

“I guess. I just go where I’m pointed.”

She went along the line, asking where the bus was going. At the head, the bus driver, a small man with glasses that flashed in the light from inside, was flinging luggage into the well.

“Trincomalee?” she said.

“US Navy, Cosmopolitan Hotel.”

“Is anybody here from the Navy?”

“Cosmopolitan Hotel, everybody Cosmopolitan Hotel.”

“Duty officer?”

He said the name of the hotel a couple more times, and she turned away.

Bill had a huge rolling duffel, a shoulder bag, an overnighter, and a plastic shopping bag from the Bahrain duty-free shop.

“You carry yours, I’ll carry mine,” she said. She had the smallest size of rolling suitcase and a folding suit bag.
When in doubt, buy it when you get there.
“Let’s go, Bill.”

“We’re not going on the bus?”

“We are not going on the bus.”

She headed off into the darkness on a tarmacked road that paralleled the taxiway. She could hear Bill stumbling along behind her, his duffel rumbling over the rough pavement, his breathing labored. She wondered why she had brought him and reminded herself it was because of his brilliance and technical knowledge.

All that man Dukas had been able to tell her about Trincomalee was that they’d managed to rent an old hangar, and that the hangar was the last one in a row “beyond the terminal.”

She kept on walking.

It was dark. As in
dark.

The Navy det hangar was indeed the last one, and the only way she knew she was there was that she could see the silhouette of palm trees where any building beyond it should have been. Sweat was pouring down her sides and running into her eyes by then, and she was mad as hell.

Striding toward the black maw of the hangar, she recognized a couple of airplanes as being unquestionably military.
She was not big on aircraft ID, but she satisfied herself that they had some long skinny ones and some two-engined fat ones.

Somebody was snoring inside the hangar. She shouted and the snoring went right on. Moving into the darkness of the hangar itself, she tripped over something hard and fell on one knee. “Oh, godammit!” she cried.

Bill’s voice piped from far behind her. “You okay?”

“Oh, shut up.” She pushed herself up, sure that she’d torn her chinos and was bleeding. She probed the thing on the floor with her toe, found something about three feet long, round, and hard. She made her way along it and only just in time saw a flicker of light to her right: she was about to walk into an airplane that, except at that one spot, was blocking some feeble light source within the hangar. She worked her way out along the wing, then ducked under it and saw a small, bare bulb ahead of her.

The bare bulb stuck out of the wall next to a pay telephone. Taped to it was a hand-written sign: “To call duty officer dial 647-898. Coins in slot.”

Well, that was thoughtful of them. She didn’t have Sri Lankan coins, of course. She felt in the slot where coins should go. No coins. They didn’t mean that slot; they meant the slot where the change came out. Lots of coins down there.

She tried one, got nothing; tried another and then another and suddenly had a dial tone, which took her to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, which took her to a sleepy young man named Soleck.

“Duty officer Lieutenant Soleck speaking, sir.”

“Lieutenant, I need to talk to your CO.”

“Commander Siciliano’s sleeping ma’am. Can I help you?”

“I need transport to India.”

There was a pause, in which she thought she might have
heard a muffled, perhaps ironic, laugh. She ID’d herself, and he seemed to expect her; he asked where she was.

“I’m at your goddam hangar, where do you think I am?”

“You come in on the flight from Bahrain? Weren’t you supposed to come to the hotel?”

“I don’t want a hotel, Lieutenant, I want a flight to India!”

He sighed. “Ma’am, with all respect, this det isn’t here to provide transportation for
anybody.
We got a bunch of really tired pilots who’re trying to keep enough aircraft airborne to give CAP cover to a very important ship. Anything else, I’m really sorry. You’ll have to talk to Commander Siciliano.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Who’s second in command?”

“He’s in the air right now, ma’am.”

“Lieutenant, you get your ass out here
now
and arrange transport for me, or heads are going to roll!”

Was he thinking that over? Was he going to dig his heels in? He sounded as reasonable as could be when he spoke. “Well, say twenty minutes to get dressed and get downstairs, half an hour to find a taxi—it’s about an hour out to the field—well, I suppose maybe in a couple of hours, ma’am. I hate to think of you out there all alone while—”

“Oh, fuck off!”

Sri Lanka was connected to the Indian mainland by a bridge, but she knew the bridge was currently closed at both ends. No point in looking for the local rent-a-car.

Fucking Navy,
she thought. She plunged into the darkness of the hangar.

At two in the morning, Valdez was dozing in an armchair when Lapierre shook his shoulder. Valdez came to with a crick in his neck and a pain in his lower back. “What’d it do?” he said. He thought there had been a major change in the JOTS.

“I just got a message from the
Fort Klock.
May mean nothing, but—” Lapierre sat down next to him, leaned forward as if he wanted to tell a secret. “A guy they picked out of the water yesterday said his plane was shot down by a
submarine.
This was right about startex. TAO on the
Klock
had a report at the time from somebody in the air that he thought he saw enemy activity and a weak signal that could have been this guy in the water, plus an F-14 got fired at in the same area. Somebody with a brain in intel plotted that and put it together with the guy’s story, and they think there was a sub there.”

Valdez leaned over the JOTS. Markey was sleeping on a chart table across the room; Pulanski had disappeared.

“This sub,” Valdez said. It was still on the screen in, if he remembered correctly, its same location. “Sub shoots down a US aircraft, no way it’s gonna be in the same location—” he looked at his watch—“nearly two hours later. This thing’s been running; it’s got changes, but the sub hasn’t moved. I don’t get it.” He put the cursor on the submarine and got the message
Last known location.

“The JOTS doesn’t show you where things are,” Lapierre said. “It shows you where people
report
things are. You with me here? And you have to understand, what Commander Craik had was the
referee’s
JOTS. That means that his was the only one that would have shown everything—including that sub. The Indians’ repeater showed only the Indian ships at startex, and then, if the exercise had gone forward, they’d have added the US ships and aircraft as they located them. Same with the US side—the US admiral’s JOTS would have shown the US side only.”

“But Commander Craik could see both sides.”

“If the sub moved during the exercise and reported its position, his JOTS would show it.”

“But—if our ASW didn’t find the sub, and it didn’t report a new position, it would still be there on the referee’s JOTS
in the same place as, just like it says, ‘last known location.’” Valdez squinted at the screen. “What if the sub moved but we didn’t find it and it didn’t report its new position?”

“Then it would show in its original position.”

“But Jeez, wouldn’t the BG have run ASW to locate it as soon as they knew their plane was shot at?”

“But the
Jefferson
had the accident. Their ASW effort never got underway.” Lapierre slouched back in the chair, neck on the chairback, long legs stuck out. “I need to talk to the TAO.” He was staring at the ceiling, obviously still working it out. “What it looks like is, there’s an Indian submarine running around on the loose out there.”

Valdez looked at the JOTS. “I don’t get it.” He straightened, made a face as he ran his tongue over his front teeth. They tasted like something that had been in the fridge too long. “I gotta call Commander Craik again. He’ll love it.”

He started for Lapierre’s office and turned around. “Hey!”

Lapierre raised an eyebrow as the least energetic way of asking what “hey” meant.

“What if the stuff the guy plugged into the JOTS changes the positions when you put in data from the links? I mean—what do I mean?—I mean, what if that program was meant to seize the JOTS and
change
the data from the links? So that no matter what people reported and no matter what, let’s say, our ASW found, the JOTS showed something else?”

Lapierre stared at him, then unfolded his long body. “Well, let me try to input some data.”

Valdez started out again. “I’ll call Commander Craik.”

Alan made his way through the shabby, beautiful corridors of the palace, his left hand on the small of his back, wondering if he dared take another muscle relaxant now. Moad padded along ahead of him, his feet covered in soft-soled moccasins.

Outdoors, the night was wetly warm, sweet with the scent of something in flower, under that an odor of something spoiled, acidic. A bird screamed distantly; another, softer, trilled nearby.

The plane was pulled up on a pad near the palace, lights inside making the portholes look like a row of buttons. Alan hauled himself up the ladder, feeling the pain of the bullet crease on his back, the lower, burning sensation of something muscular.
Getting too old for this.

“Yeah, Valdez.”

Valdez’s voice was tinny over the secure connection, almost a whistle. “Somebody aircrew from a plane yesterday, start of the exercise, was in the water and got picked up and taken to the
Jefferson.”
He gave Alan the coordinates. “He says his plane was shot down by a sub. Location checks out with an Indian sub on the startex plot in that data your jg Ong sent me. What I need to know is, does it check out with what you remember of startex?”

Alan could call up the JOTS layout as he had seen it before all hell had broken loose—he had stared at it long enough, waiting for things to start. He knew precisely where the sub had been. Still—

“A sub shot down an
aircraft?”

“That’s the story.”

Would have to be something slow and low, maybe an
S-3. Christ, Paul Stevens was down there—I had a fight with Rafe about it—then he told me yesterday that Stevens got shot down. “Yeah, it checks. Listen, Valdez, put Lieutenant-Commander Lapierre on.”

He fired questions at Lapierre, who answered yes to all of them: Had he informed the admiral or the chief of staff? Had he informed the BG? Had he messaged the TAO for any new data on the sub?

Then Alan told Lapierre exactly what he wanted to know next. Getting answers meant Lapierre’s staying up the rest
of the night sending messages to the BG, to NSA’s satellite-photography arm, and to the WMD Center at the CIA. Lapierre was no happier about the idea of staying up than Alan had been about climbing out of a wonderfully comfortable bed, but he merely groaned once and said, “Will do.” Alan could picture that toothy, Mortimer Snerd grin.

“One more thing,” Lapierre said when they were done. “Valdez suggested inputting new data into the JOTS while that program you guys sent us was in place. News flash, Al: you can input data to reposition the Indian ships and they show the new positions on the screen okay.
All but the sub.”

Alan thought about that. “So even if the
Jefferson
hadn’t been hit and they’d been able to launch their ASW—” he was thinking it through—“and even if they’d found the sub and put it into the link, it wouldn’t have shown on my JOTS.” He thought some more and then repeated, “On
my
JOTS. Question is, Dickie, would the new data have shown on everybody else’s JOTS? I mean, was that what the whole thing was about—to hide the sub from
everybody?”

“Oh, shit.”

He thought about what it meant to have every JOTS screen with a glitch that kept a submarine from showing. “Oh, shit, indeed,” he said. “You better wake the admiral.”

Then Alan went into the hotel and waked Ong and Benvenuto and told them it was time to go to work, and he walked back through the darkness to the plane. And he decided that, no, he couldn’t take any more muscle relaxants, but, yes, he could risk a couple of aspirins. And then, at last, he did what he’d wanted to do since he’d got out of bed: he curled up in a passenger seat and tried to sleep while he waited for the machines of intelligence to grind.

Outside, an animal that sounded to him like an African leopard coughed.

Ray Spinner had got a Canadian nurse he’d been pursuing for three weeks into the sack, and he was now lying awake wondering how come a really cute woman was a really bad lay. It didn’t occur to him to wonder if he was perhaps a little less stimulating than a good vibrator himself.

She was lying beside him, exhaling the last fumes of expensive cabernet. He’d had to dine her, wine her, and bullshit her for two hours before he could get her pants off, and, while even bad sex is better than no sex at all, shouldn’t there have been a better payoff for all that time and money? She didn’t even seem to enjoy giving head, which in Spinner’s view was a serious defect in a woman.