Damage Control (26 page)

Madje drew a big breath and realized he was grinning. He knew, intellectually, that carriers went to sea loaded with material for self-repair, but it was a stunning thing to see how quickly it was done, or the impact on the damage of hundreds of trained hands. He paused to watch the crew coming up to move the huge deck plate into position and realized that he was in the way; this was no place for an observer.

But before his head hit the pillow in a borrowed rack deep in the bowels of third deck, another team had the plate welded in place, and a third team was grinding it level. The
Jefferson
was not done yet.

Major Rao joined Alan as he was finishing breakfast. He was having tea and the same vegetable dish that Harry had had, plus an array of small metal bowls with which a servant surrounded his plate. Alan saw yogurt, something bright green, two reddish things he supposed were chutneys, three unidentifiables, and a dish of dried fruits and nuts.

Both of them were deliberately cheerful. Rao asked about Alan’s back, professed delight that he was feeling better. Alan admired the food and waited through Rao’s explanation of what was in each of the metal bowls. Then the conversation ran down.

“I wonder if we have something in common,” Alan said. Not one of his best opening lines; he still felt drugged.

Rao, in the midst of putting food into his mouth, looked up.

“A common interest,” Alan said. He took the videocam
out of the bag and handed it over. “Push there to start it. There’s some interesting imagery in it.”

Rao, who ate with a fork rather than his fingers, put his utensils down on his plate, wiped his hands, pressed the switch. He looked at the two-minute segment that showed Building Thirty-seven and the helicopter taking off from it and asked to see it again and then sat there without eating and played the segment not once more, but three times.

“Building Thirty-seven,” Alan said. He waited. “The helicopter is an old but serviceable Soviet Mi-26. Maximum load twenty thousand kilos.”

Rao put the videocam down, raising his eyebrows as if in question. “Where did you get this?”

“How many nuclear devices were stored in Building Thirty-seven?” Alan said. Bang, no subtlety—he wasn’t up to subtlety just yet.

Rao had picked up his fork as if he was going to eat, but he began instead to trace patterns with it in the gravy on his plate. “That is a startling assumption,” he said. “Which I might be more willing to explore if I knew—knew the bona fides of that tape.”

“I’m an intelligence officer.” He told Rao about the exercise and about the violence at startex and the flight through the Mahe naval base. Then he shrugged. “An agent provided the tape.”

Rao nodded.
“That
is why your photo was on the laptop with the message to kill you on sight!” Rao nodded his head. “Rather persuasive bona fides.”

“I was ordered to find out what had happened to the nuclear devices stored in Building Thirty-seven.”

“Very nice to have a friend with a Lear jet.”

“Very nice to have a rich friend, yes.” Alan gestured toward the palace. “Very nice to have a friend with a palace.”

Rao was still making patterns in the gravy. “Not my friend, I’m afraid.”

“With an antenna array on the roof and bugs in the rooms.” Alan put his forearms on the table. “Are all the servants trained intelligence people?” When Rao didn’t answer, Alan said, “Is the maharajah a senior intelligence officer?”

Rao smiled but did not look up. “The maharajah is my uncle.”

Alan waited. Rao picked up a little of the food with the fork and ate it; he seemed to have trouble swallowing this time, and he sipped tea and looked away and didn’t say anything. After a while, he picked up the camera and looked at the video again.

“It’s an original security-camera feed from Ambur. That’s all I’m prepared to say. It’s genuine. Your turn. How many nuclear devices were there in Building Thirty-seven?” Alan leaned forward.

Rao looked across the runway where Harry and Djalik were sitting. A sudden silence fell, as if all the birds and insects had at that moment decided to shut up. In that abrupt quiet, the faint sound of a piston engine reached Alan’s ears. He searched for the airplane in the southern sky. Rao, too, searched and apparently found it, and, as if the coming of the airplane meant the arrival of some weight that changed a balance, he said, “There were three nuclear devices in Building Thirty-seven.” He put his hand on his teacup but didn’t lift it. It was trembling, but his voice was steady. “The question is, how many are there in there now?”

“What’d Rao say?” Harry said.

Alan told him. “He wants to work with us. He’s Indian Army intel—or that’s his story, anyway. I think he’s Research and Analysis Wing, like you said. I think this whole set up has RAW written all over it. He says he’s pretty much on his own because he’s lost touch with New Delhi.”

“Out there on a shoeshine and a smile. Well, well.” Harry’s grin was broad below the sunglasses. “How many nukes?”

“Three.”

Harry made a ticking sound with his tongue. “Make a bit of a mess, three nukes. Warheads?”

“He says not configured. But I’m not sure I believe him. Anyway, the submarine stuff blindsided him. Apparently, what his people were afraid of before he lost touch was that the nukes would either be turned on Pakistan or sold out of the country. Now he can see the headline—‘India Nukes US Battle Group, Massive Retaliation to Follow.’”

“With two nukes left to make more trouble with, right. Well, is he going to play team ball?”

“He says so. How about your Agency control?”

“She’s a handsome bitch on wheels. At least she got on the WMD Center in nothing flat. She says if we don’t start to get data from them in fifteen minutes, she’ll kick ass at the DDI level.”

“You tell her she’s under my command?”

Harry nodded.

“What’d she say?”

“Nothing to what she’ll say when she hears that Major Rao is part of the package, too.”

Showered, shaved, and dressed in a crisp shirt and shorts that had appeared on his bed, Alan sat at the now cleared breakfast table with a cup of coffee. The truth was—the physical discomforts aside—he felt drained. He was still finding it hard to concentrate. Maybe it was the muscle relaxants. Or the heat. Or—wasn’t depression like this? He tried to focus on a specific question to force his mind to work. For example—why, why,
why
had the Indians tried to do something to the JOTS? What had they been after?

He raised his cup to drink, and over the rim he saw a woman striding along the patio. Not Indian, therefore Harry’s “handsome bitch on wheels.” Alan watched her give a turbaned man a big smile and speak a word and then come striding toward him. “I’m Mary Brevard.” She held out a hand. “I know who you are.”

He smiled. “Always pleased to meet a friend of Harry’s.”

She grunted at the idea that she and Harry were friends. She said, “I guess you guys really got the goods. I’ve sent the video and everything I thought mattered back to my office.”

He glanced around, but the patio was empty, the only motion the gentle swaying of the fronds of a banyan tree. “You’re with the WMD Center?”

“I’m the
head
of WMD, Commander.”

He stared at her, unable to say anything bright. “So—on paper, you’re senior to me, Mary.”

Behind her, a hundred feet away, he saw Fidel amble into sight and stand looking at the flat land, his hands on his hips.

She leaned forward. “I promised your admiral I’d take orders from you. That was the price of coming out here. But if there are nukes, they’re mine. If there’s intel on WMD, it’s mine.”

“If there are nukes, I think they belong to Major Rao.”

“Who’s Major Rao?”

“I think he’s a senior officer in the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian military. He’s inside someplace.”

“What the fuck is he doing here?”

“The hotel seems to be an RAW safe house. The maharajah who owns it is his uncle, he says.”

“This could be a serious CI issue!”

He beckoned to one of the turbaned men. “Would you find Major Rao, please?” He waited until the man was gone. “Can your cover handle meeting him?”

“What the hell. I’m here ‘declared,’ which means that somewhere in Delhi a fax machine with no power should have received my passport and the Indians should accept my status and diplomatic credentials.”

“What’s your story?”

“I’m a diplomatic security officer come out from Bahrain to support you. I have a passport and creds to prove it.” She shrugged. “If he’s really RAW, he’ll see through me in a second.” She shrugged.

Major Rao came through a pair of French doors behind them. He smiled at Alan and gave Mary a long look, not all of it professional. She returned it with interest.

“Major Rao, Mary Brevard from the State Department.” Alan saw Moad waving to him from the plane.

“Harry wants you!” Moad called.

It seemed a good cue to leave. “Would you two excuse me for a moment?”

He passed Fidel, who was putting together a breakfast, on the way to the plane.

Fidel glanced up, then away. “You okay?” Alan said.

Fidel dipped into a bowl of cut-up fruit. “I’ll be okay.” Putting it in the future.

“I guess I’ll be okay, too.”

Fidel looked at him then, a full, long look, studying his eyes. “You sleep okay?”

“They gave me pills.”

Fidel let out a long breath. “I didn’t sleep so good.” He shut his lips together tight. He looked away from Alan toward the flat, alien landscape. He turned away. “Maybe I’m getting old.”

Alan thought maybe they both were.

The incoming TAO took a slug of espresso from his thermos and, face grim, cycled through the screens of data that Madje had passed down to him to show the night’s activity.

“God damn it, the mutineers got the
Betwa,”
he growled to no one in particular. The
Betwa
was a well-handled frigate that had held its own since the first mutiny, repeatedly covering the withdrawal of other damaged ships with skill and daring. He flicked to the next screen.

An ensign assigned from the navigation department flipped through the message board beside him. “She hasn’t sunk and we think a message that went out an hour back might mean she has her fires out.” He handed the new TAO a message on yellow paper. He glanced at it. The ensign took a chance and said, “Maybe she’ll make it.”

The TAO looked at the kid next to him. He swallowed his first temptation to savage the boy. “Yeah, Ensign, maybe she will.” He looked back at the screen where the JOTS was
replaying the ESM cuts that showed the coordinated attack on the
Betwa.
“No thanks to us.”

In the aircraft, Ong and Benvenuto looked exhausted, heavy circles under their eyes, sagging shoulders, but they were hard at it, their heads down over one computer. They didn’t even look up as Alan brushed past, but continued a jargon-filled muttering about data streams. Behind them, a heavy man with pale eyes looked at Alan without interest and said in a voice too loud for the space, “You guys got anything out of the Delhi mainframes?”

Alan went on through to join Harry. “Who’s the fat nerd?” he said.

“Mary’s geek. All the social skills of a slug. You got a phone call from Lapierre—if he’s still on.” He got up and handed Alan a headset.

“You could have told me she was the
head
of WMD,” Alan said.

“Yeah, I could.” Harry smiled. “But you’re a big boy.” Harry slapped the seatbacks.

“Al Craik,” Alan said into the headset.

Lapierre identified himself and began to brief him. He sounded exhausted. “Aircrew from an S-3 intercepted an anomalous signal last night off the south coast of India. All hell was breaking loose—still is, from what we can tell—but we think it’s the missing sub. I say again, we
think
it’s the sub.”

Alan looked up at Harry. “Map?” he said. “Chart? Southwest coast of India?”

Harry vanished. Alan scrounged a pen and an old receipt from the fold-down desk. “Give me the location.”

“The footprint is pretty big, Al. Ninety by sixty miles. But it’s centered on 09N 077E.”

Alan read it back, grabbed a chart that Harry shoved at
him. He plotted a rough circle. “I got a town marked
Quilon,
right on the coast.”

“That’s right.”

“Looks like a natural harbor, Dickie.”

“But a hell of a long way from the battle group.”
If it’s intending to attack us,
he meant.

“Huh.” If the sub had kept moving at five knots since it had shot down Stevens’s plane, it could have given off the signal near Quilon. But why go there, as Lapierre said, if it was after the
Jefferson?
Why wasn’t it shadowing the BG? “Got a theory, Dickie?”

“Admiral Pilchard is tearing out what hair he has left wondering if the BG needs CAP
and
round-the-clock ASW. Acting BG CO, on the other hand, wants them to have the lowest possible profile. Skivvy is that Washington is trying to tie Pilchard’s hands on this and hope that the
Jefferson
makes Colombo without an incident.”

“Incident” was a nice word for an attack on a crippled aircraft carrier.

“What’s Washington playing at?”

“Uh—” Lapierre was one of those old-fashioned officers who believed that you never discussed politics, women, or religion. “I think they’re ‘disengaging’ from what’s going on in India.”

Alan found himself wishing that he could do the same thing. He rubbed his forehead and forced himself to concentrate. “Okay—is the CAP still flying?”

Lapierre told him that Rose had got Sri Lankan permission for the CAP to fly armed out of Trincomalee, and that the planes there now had fuel.

“So the
Jefferson
has at least some cover. Okay, tell the admiral I said that we don’t know enough yet to call off ASW coverage for the BG. I think he’s gotta overrule the acting CO until we sort this out. Get an ETA Colombo for the
Jefferson
and plot possibles for that sub—like, it wouldn’t
take a genius to guess that the carrier is going to Colombo, so does the sub plan to intercept it someplace? And where would that be and how soon, because you for sure want to tell the flag the BG needs CAP and ASW until at least then. The question right now is, what’s the sub doing down there near Quilon? There any kind of naval facility down there?”

“Our data says no, but a SIGINT report last year said that some kind of exercise was held there. NSG logged it as a special-forces landing exercise. From a sub.”

Alan rubbed his nose. “From a sub. Huh.” He tried to think it through, gave up for lack of information. It was all pie in the sky. “Any more good news?”

Lapierre laughed. Alan told him to get some sleep and ended the call, then sketched the situation in for Harry, who had flung himself into the next seat. Alan showed him the chart and Quilon and a roughly sketched-in track for the
Jefferson.
He put the pencil on a point several hundred miles off the coast. “BG ought to be here by now. That sub’s a diesel. If it’s really at Quilon, it’s put itself in a worse position to attack with conventional torpedoes than it was three days ago.”

Harry was lying back in the seat, his head on his left hand with the forefinger running up his cheek. “Maybe it’s not going to use conventional torpedoes. Maybe it’s picking up the nukes.”

“To do what? You can’t fit nuclear torpedoes into a diesel sub; they’re too big. And it’s not missile-configured, either.”

“Suicide mission? They’d only need to get within ten miles or so of the carrier.”

Alan groaned. “Jesus, you have a gloomy mind.” He stood. “I left your boss and Major Rao together.”

“She’s
not
my boss.”

“Well, we’re lucky that Pilchard made sure she’s not
my
boss.” He stood “You sit here and stay cool.”

“Not for long. Power’s low.” Harry raised his eyebrows,
pointed a finger. “Time, bud.” The temperature inside the plane, he pointed out, was climbing, and they would have to shut down the air-conditioning altogether or get a land line or more fuel, because the plane’s auxiliary power was heading for zero.

Alan looked at the three working in the front of the aircraft “We’ll have to get these guys indoors.”

“No electricity there, either.”

Alan raised a skeptical eyebrow. “A safe house without a generator? Somehow, I’m not convinced.”

“Are you suggesting that that nice maharajah deliberately denied us electricity? I’m shocked—
shocked!”
Harry raised an eyebrow.

It was nearly midnight in Washington, and the President was in bed. As a result, he wasn’t pleased when the director of the CIA called him to tell him that one of their officers, on the spot in India, had evidence that it was now certain that three nuclear devices had been stolen from a secret Indian government site. The President, who had no more interest in India than he had in girls’ basketball, said that the Agency should pull together any evidence they had to show that the nukes were a threat to the United States and present it at the morning briefing. Then he went back to bed.