Authors: Gordon Kent
Harry had exiled himself to his bedroom so that he would at least appear to have no connection with the work. Alan found him there and told him what the computer people had done. “They’ve worked their asses off, and maybe they’ve hit paydirt. If Bill really gets into the security cameras, we’ll know a lot pretty quick.”
Harry murmured that time was a-wasting and said something about not seeing the woods for the trees.
“You want to stop talking in Zen and say what you mean?”
“The nukes are gone, pal. Even if you locate them, you think you’re going to take them back somehow? Do you really think that the people who have India in chaos are going to fall on their backs and wave their legs in the air because you show up with five guys and a rubber-band gun?”
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah—go for the monster’s head.” Harry sat up. “I’ve been lying here thinking about the whole
shmeer.
We should have been going after the people who run SOE from the beginning, not the nukes. I know, I know, I’m the one who pointed us at the nukes in the first place, but that’s because I was being a good NOC. Well, now that I have time to think about it, I believe that was wrong.”
“My orders are to find the nukes, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Harry grinned. “Don Winslow of the Navy, ta-ta!”
Alan stared at him and then said, “You’re not helping,” and he called Fifth Fleet on Harry’s STU and got Lapierre
again. “Dickie, find out if anybody can put a SEAL team in here in twenty-four hours.” He was thinking of how they would get the warheads back if Bill’s wizardry actually located them.
Harry, who had closed his eyes, blinked open the good one at the sound of the word “SEAL.” “Ask for about ten thousand of them,” he murmured.
Lapierre was telling him that the battle group’s SEAL team was ashore somewhere. Alan grunted. “Well, see what you can get me. Even fleet Marines. I may need them soonest.” And he gave Lapierre a barebones account of what was happening. Lapierre said that the admiral had better get that from the horse’s mouth, and in thirty seconds, Admiral Pilchard himself was on.
“What’s going on, Alan?”
“I don’t know yet, sir.”
“You’re paid to speculate, Al. Now, speculate!”
A violation of a basic tenet of Alan’s idea of intelligence—
never speculate.
Except when you’re ordered to.
“If
the nukes have been taken to a big factory or assembly facility, and
if
the place has the equipment and a clean room and the technical know-how—then I think they could be trying to put them into warheads. The Servants of the Earth have the money to afford all that—equipment, technical knowledge—plus, if they’d planned this way ahead, they’d have everything in place. But I don’t
know.”
“If they put one of those nukes on an aircraft and fly it into the
Jefferson,
we’ll lose at least six thousand men and a major part of the fleet.”
“I was told the CAP is flying.”
“Two aircraft. What if they send in a flight of twenty against us? Three nukes on three aircraft—that’s a pretty good chance of one getting through.”
“I don’t think it’d be aircraft, sir. I think that the submarine—”
Harry’s good eye was on the door; Alan looked and saw Benvenuto leaning in, one hand extended as if he’d just flung a pair of dice into the room, and his eyes wide as if he was looking for a seven.
“One moment, Admiral—” Alan looked at Benvenuto with a
This better be important
scowl. “Make it quick!”
“We’re in! You can see right into the—the—!” He waved the hand. “The factory!”
Alan turned back to the STU. “Sir, may I call you back?”
Pilchard was not happy. “You better have a reason.”
“Yes, sir!”
Then he was running down the red-carpeted stairs.
Bill was actually smiling. On his screen was a grainy, gray picture of a big space with pipes and conduits overhead and a vast floor crowded with machines. Even as Alan watched, the picture changed, and it took him several seconds to realize that he was looking at an entirely different space—smaller, uncluttered, brighter. A forklift drove across the line of vision. The pictures were eerily silent.
The feed was running on Ong’s computer, too, so he leaned over and said, “Great job! You’ve all done a great job.” He realized that his heart was pounding, and not just from the run through the palace.
They were looking into one of the Servants of the Earth’s own factories through their own security cameras.
He watched the feed again—an external shot now of a metal-sided building with windows high up, nothing moving. Then a shot of a loading dock. A corridor. Another corridor. Exteriors again, weedy spaces next to buildings, hurricane fences with razor-wired tops.
“Count the cameras,” he said.
“We are.”
“Any repeats yet?”
“No, sir.”
On another laptop, Mary was watching the footage whose
digitals Bill had earlier put on disk and now decrypted—in effect, the history of the hour before they had got in. She was taking notes, jumping back and forth, manipulating the shots because they weren’t live and going through them quickly because she was controlling the pace, not the live cameras’ program. “Forty stations,” she said. “About a minute a station, average, but it varies—forty minutes to go through the whole sequence live if somebody there doesn’t override the preprogram.”
The picture quality was poor but clear enough to show a big facility with at least two big buildings and a scattering of offices and support structures—a power plant, a vehicle garage with heavy trucks, and an office complex that might have been a separate building or might have been a top storey above one of the big work floors. And the exterior cameras showed long lines of razor wire coiling away like spiral mirrors in the white of the sun, and an industrial wasteland beyond like the surface of Mars.
And a gate with armed guards.
And no sign of the three nuclear warheads.
“And now to Ben Mackinnon in Mumbai.”
“Thanks, Erin. The situation here remains terribly confused, with rumors everywhere but not much in the way of facts. There were explosions overnight here in Mumbai; I could hear them from my hotel. The concierge told me with some excitement that one of the big film studios had been hit, but I can’t get confirmation of that. I talked last night to one old man who told me as absolute fact that the Americans have invaded along the southeast coast and that the Indian air force has sunk an American aircraft carrier. People on the streets seem to be thoroughly frightened still, and little wonder—the trains have stopped running, the telephone and electrical systems are down, the police can’t control looting,
and the reports of widespread mutiny in the armed forces are simply too many to be laughed away. Under the general nervousness is the real fear of war with Pakistan. This is a modern city accustomed to instant communication and abundant information, and, suddenly lacking both, it’s a very sad, very nervous place. Ben Mackinnon, Mumbai.”
Everybody was watching the live feed from the SOE assembly plant. Alan was leaning over Ong’s table, whispering with her. “So what’d you find about our host?” he said.
She glanced across the room at Major Rao and whispered back, “The maharajah was a major general in the Indian Army before he retired six years ago.”
“Intelligence?”
“I couldn’t find anything about that. In fact, I couldn’t find anything about his service after 1973 at all. It’s like—”
“I know what it’s like.” Alan patted her table, because he didn’t want to pat her shoulder or her knee. “Good job.” He walked across to where Rao was watching a laptop, and, as he came up, Rao turned to him, pointing at the screen, and said, “You say this is a
Navy
project?
My
Navy?”
“The Indian Navy and the Servants of the Earth seem to have a cozy relationship.” Alan shrugged. “Some of the Indian Navy, anyway.”
Rao began taking notes. On the screen, a camera in a garage came to life. He could make out two heavy forklifts and an enormous dolly. “Mary!” Alan called.
“Son of a bitch,” Mary said. She reached over Alan and started to type.
“This is live,” Alan said.
“Yeah. We should be saving all the live feed.”
The shot changed; the new place appeared to be entirely white—walls, floor, ceiling, the camera looking into it from a corner. The lights were bright and reflected off polished
metal surfaces. Alan heard Rao take in breath, and he felt Mary stiffen. She had already seen it on the old coverage and knew what it was, he realized. “That’s a clean room, isn’t it?” he said. There was no point in trying to hide it.
“I suppose.”
No supposing about it. It was a clean room, the indispensably antiseptic and dustless space you needed for high-tech work. People were working in it, silent, oddly inhuman. They wore white coveralls with hoods and gloves and respirators. What they moved among were indecipherable shapes, mostly cylindrical, all gleaming.
And, as abruptly as it had come, the picture disappeared, to be replaced by one of a warehouse or garage, because part of a truck was visible.
And so was part of something else.
Rao touched the screen. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “That’s a missile, isn’t it?” The angle made it difficult, but the long, brilliantly reflective tube did, indeed, look like a missile.
Mary leaned in until her nose was almost touching the flat screen. “It could be a missile.” She sighed again. “Those are slings. It’s hard to see, but that thing right there could be for moving it around. I don’t know—” She paused and pulled at a length of hair that had fallen over her eyes. They all stared at the screen, Alan thinking what it would mean if the things were missiles, and if the three nuclear devices had come to rest in a place where there were a clean room and missiles.
The picture changed to a hallway with two empty office cubicles.
“Shitsky!” Still leaning over Alan, she began to click through options, opening up another video display and replaying the feed she had saved. Alan was conscious that one of her breasts was brushing his shoulder
The image of the garage returned. Now it was frozen and
had the slight distortion of video frames, but the truck and the missile, if it was a missile, were identifiable, so they had both been there more than an hour before.
Mary began humming to herself. She had seen the image before, then, when she was going through the saved data. “You should have told me when you first saw it,” he whispered to her. He felt her shrug as she stretched across him. He pushed back and extricated himself; she slid in without comment. She laid a grid over the frozen frame and did something that brightened the image.
“Major? How long is an Indian license plate?”
Rao held his hands up and looked at them. “About fourteen inches.”
“I need to know
exactly.”
“I’ll go and measure one.”
Alan heard the billiard room’s door open. She reached for the satellite phone she had brought from the aircraft, another of Harry’s useful toys in a country where the networks were down. “Before Rao comes back,” she muttered. “Alan, this is a Tomahawk cruise missile clone. The Indians are building a
cruise missile,
and it looks like they stole the tech from us.” She began to tap computer keys. “This is going to get sticky, Alan. Rao’s not going to be very happy about our uncovering a secret missile program.”
“I think it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to us.”
“And I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.”
“What if it’s an SOE project?”
But she was talking into her phone. “Yancy, Mary. I’m sending you some pictures. From a factory floor in southern India. Coordinates as marked.” She leaned toward the computer screen. “They’re making a copy of the Tomahawk. Of course I’m not
sure.
I’m pretty goddam sure, though. Call the DDI.” She became very brisk—Yancy was clearly a subordinate. She demanded immediate specs on the Tomahawk missile, with photos, capabilities, warhead space—the works.
When Major Rao came back in, she lowered her voice and talked faster, and by the time he had reached them, she was off the phone.
“Nine and a half inches,” Rao said, holding his hands about that far apart.
Mary looked at him, laughed, laughed harder. Rao blushed. “Just my size,” she murmured. Then she turned back to the computer and moved blue lines over the image until she had boxed the truck’s license plate and the diameter of the probable missile. She stared at it and then hit a key, and the image vanished. She gave Rao a bright, perhaps flirtatious smile. “Major, can you start looking at the saved shop-floor footage and see if you find more of these?” She got up and pointed him toward her own computer a dozen feet away. When Rao’s back was turned, she looked straight at Alan and nodded.
The message was unmistakable: they had been looking at a Tomahawk missile.
By noon, Alan was back on Harry’s secure satellite phone, passing the first digitals to Fifth Fleet. When he was done, he asked for Admiral Pilchard again.
“We think they’re trying to fit their warheads to some kind of missile. It looks to our WMD folks like a Tomahawk—”
“Wait one.”
Alan could hear Pilchard talking and a ghostly, digitally encrypted voice reacting. Neither voice could be understood. They went on and on. He began to envision the phone as lying on Pilchard’s desk, Pilchard called away—
“Sorry, Al. Had to deal with another matter—we think we’ve got that leaker. Okay—a Tomahawk. What’re we talking about?”
“Twelve-hundred-mile range, sir. I need to have Lapierre find out if they could possibly launch one through the tubes of a diesel sub.”
“To do what? The BG’s way within that range already.”
“Well, sir—” He thought of what Harry had said about focusing too much on the Navy. “If they got three nukes, maybe they have three targets.”
Silence. An odd ticking sound, something Pilchard was doing with his lips or tongue. Thinking. Then: “The battle group’s my first concern. Also yours.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’re the chances they’re going to put these things on a ship or a plane instead of a sub?”
“No idea, sir. There’s no naval base nearby, but, hell—”
“Okay. I’m going to see who’s around who can take out this place you’ve found. Maybe it’ll have to be the Air Force out of Diego Garcia. Frankly, I don’t think I’ll get the go-ahead to do it—bombing mainland India’s not going be a popular idea in Washington—but we have to try.”
“Sir, we don’t know—”
“I know what we don’t know, Commander! So do you! So get us more information and then we’ll know, and then maybe I can move some of these politicians off their dead asses before the whole goddam theater blows up!”
Alan had never heard him quite like that before. “Yes, sir.”
Pilchard’s voice got less angry. “Your first priority remains the nukes—nail down where they are. Two, nail down whether they’ve been used to weaponeer those missiles. Three, find out what the hell they’re going to do with them.” He barked out a laugh. “Try to have it by seventeen hundred, could you?” He hung up.
Harry was standing by the window, hands in pockets. “Don’t try to do it yourself,” he said without turning around.
“Do what?”
“You know.” He turned to face Alan. “These are serious folks. You and Fidel aren’t going to take their nukes away all by your lonesomes.”
“You’re not playing this time?”
Harry came toward him and put his left hand on Alan’s right shoulder so that they were side by side, as if he were going to walk with Alan’s support. “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em, buddy. I told you before, I think you’re following the wrong trail.”
Alan went down the red-carpeted stairs, more slowly this time because he was frustrated and angry. The huge reception room was empty, the corridor to the billiard room empty,
as well. The emptiness hardly registered on him except as a small anomaly, because always before, a turbaned servant was to be seen. He went silently down the corridor, his feet seeming to sink into the old carpet, and turned into the shadowed coolness of the billiard room.
Bill, Ong, and Benvenuto were at their computers, each with an electric desk lamp that made a little island of light. Clavers was in a corner working with paper that was spitting out of a portable bubble-jet printer. Separate from them in her own light was Mary. The only sounds were the soft fluttering of computer keys.
“Where’s Rao?”
“Stepped out, thank God. Look here—” She had two different views of the missile on split screen. “I’ve ID’d three, possibly four of them in the old data, and we know for certain that one of them has been moved between the old stuff and the new. Plus—and this is exciting, Alan, but bad—I see something in the clean room that looks to me like part of a cradle for a nuclear device. I can’t make out enough of it to be sure, but—” She ran her hand through her hair. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “I think they’re putting the nukes into the warheads.” She made a sudden movement to silence the objection she could apparently see coming. “No, no, don’t say they can’t have done it that fast. They’ve had at least twenty-four hours.
Listen
to me! If they’ve been planning this for months or years, then they had already engineered the warhead to fit the nukes ages ago! It’s like this was simply the last stage of the manufacturing process. They aren’t some ragtag terrorists stealing a nuke and then trying to find a way to jury-rig it into something; this was high-tech all the way. They can do it!”
But Alan was listening to a sound that was out of place. He couldn’t identify it for several seconds and then he got it—a truck. A heavy truck. Moving away, and then another and another.
Trucks?
And he turned to start out the door and found that he wouldn’t be going that way. The door was blocked by a large man and two smaller ones. With guns.
The billiard room broke into annoyed voices—not because of the men with the guns, but because the internet connection abruptly disappeared from every computer screen.
The lead man in the doorway was big, with a ferocious moustache, perhaps fifty, dark-skinned. His eyes met Alan’s and he saluted and said, “Ex-sergeant major Khan, sir. Please—” The voice was almost pleading; Alan noticed, despite the hubbub, that the guns were pointed away from the people in the room.
Behind Khan, the maharajah was peering around his shoulder as if too unimportant or too shy to be noticed. Then, almost timidly, he pushed himself between Khan and a younger man and said, “Commander, my apologies, but I am afraid you will be confined to this room and its comfort room—” he meant the toilet, reached by a door near the far corner—“until they are able to release you. I believe it will be only a matter of hours.”
Alan took in the guns—two of the men had Steyr assault rifles, Khan a machine pistol—and the fact that others were behind the maharajah. He felt instant rage, damped it down as futile, said, “Where are my other people?”
Khan looked sideways at the maharajah to see if he was going to answer and said, “Two out by swimming pool, no problem. Quite safe.” Fidel and Djalik, lolling in swimming trunks—no place to carry a gun. “One upstairs restricted to his room. Pilot in aircraft. Everybody okay.”
Alan looked at the maharajah. “Did you think we’d try to fly away?”
The maharajah looked pained. “I am so very sorry. We are doing this as gently as possible.” And turned on his heel and left them. The two men with the Steyrs backed out, too,
aiming the weapons at the floor with great care, and Khan slid out after them, keeping his gun, too, aimed away from the Americans. It was all very civilized.
The lock clicked over in utter silence.
“We’ve lost the feed!” Ong cried.
“They’ve pulled the cable.” They had been using a jury-rigged cable that snaked out a window to the Lear jet. Alan saw the situation at once: Rao had taken a force off to try to retake the nukes; he’d cut them off the internet because he didn’t want them doing something crazy like e-mailing Fifth Fleet for an air strike or a couple of cruise missiles.
He thought fleetingly of escape and dismissed the thought as foolish.
Where to? And how?
He looked around at them—Ong and Bill useless in a fight, nobody armed—and at the tall, narrow windows that lined the outside wall, to see, on the verandah outside, four more armed men.
If I had Djalik and Fidel and Harry and—and what? A Marine detachment?
Benvenuto, standing now by his chair, fists clenched, said, “Why the hell are we prisoners?”
“Petty Officer Benvenuto, sit
down.”
Behind him, Mary had her hands on her hips, face angry. “Start downloading that stuff on the shop floor and the clean room to disk! If they come back to take the computers, I want the data in my pocket!”
“Good thinking.” Actually, he didn’t believe it was such hot thinking, but saving the data would give people something to do. “Lieutenant Ong, Petty Officer Benvenuto—get on it! We want everything showing the clean room, the garage, and the factory floor saved—compress it if you can. Let’s go!”
“But we worked so
hard,”
Ong whined. Her hands were trembling.
“If Rao grabs the nukes, your work will still pay off.”
For India.
The bastards. “This isn’t Stalag Seventeen and we’re not going to start digging a tunnel.”
Bill was grayer than usual, maybe in shock. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Alan caught Mary’s eyes and jerked his head at Bill, and she went to him and started to whisper, patting his shoulder. She came back and leaned her buttocks against the polished wood of the billiard table and muttered. “Man, did I guess that sonofabitch Rao wrong. We were
suckered!”
She shook her head.
“You ID’d the missiles and he figured he didn’t have much time.”
“Rao didn’t take off until I spotted the missiles. I think he had suspicions of his own, and he waited for us to prove them. I know something about India, Al; there just aren’t that many top scientists, and they all go to the same schools and they all marry each other. Rao wasn’t surprised by what we were seeing until he saw the missile. Now, he wants to get the nukes
and
keep us from seeing the missiles up close.”
“Would you do any different in his place?” Alan sat on the edge of the billiard table and crossed his arms. “Maybe we ought to be thanking him, not bitching.”
He looked at his watch. They had been prisoners for thirteen minutes.
Mary passed the time by playing billiards. She leaned across the table, the tip of her tongue between her lips and her right leg cocked up over the corner, brought her cue in line with her shot, bridged her left hand, and suddenly looked up at Alan and gave a lopsided, ironic grin.
Playing pool while the
Titanic
sinks.
Click.
Alan looked at his watch—eighteen minutes. “I’m a pool player,” she said. “Never played billiards before.”
Click.
“If I could see into the clean room for any length of time—” she said. She glanced up, then down; she had left herself a difficult shot. She slapped her hand on the heavy
oak frame. “Fuck, we were
that close.
Rao could at least have taken us along. You think he’s there yet?”
Eighteen minutes and twenty seconds. The facility Rao was heading for was sixty miles away.
Click.
“You want to shoot?” He had been holding a cue for no good reason.
In an hour and a half, Rao and a couple of truckloads of men would try to attack a defended factory to get three nukes that might wind up destroying an entire battle group, and he was being asked to play billiards! He threw his cue on the table. “No, I’m going to stop being a horse’s ass and try to help Rao.”
“You’d be helping a sonofabitch who—”
Alan hollered at Clavers, who was closest to the door. “Knock on that door and ask them to get the maharajah!” He turned back to Mary. “There’s no point in standing around hitting little balls together when we could be helping the guy with the only real chance at those nukes.”
He strode to the computers. Ong was making notes on a pad and Benvenuto was staring at nothing.
“Petty Officer Benvenuto, pull up the most recent data we have and start checking for security forces or other potential opposition to Major Rao’s operation.”
“Sir?”
“Bill!”
“Uhh?”
“Can you control the data stream? Is it possible? So we can choose which camera we look through?”
Bill looked at him. A flicker of interest showed through his daze. “Not without a connection to the net.”
Alan smiled. “Just start thinking about how to do it—okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. Okay.” Bill looked around, seemed to notice the other people in the room for the first time. “Sorry, I—Sure.” Then he looked at his screen. “If their system is that way, we’d be screwed. But if it’s controlled by remote—”
“Then it’s SCADA,” Alan said. “You do SCADA.”
He turned then to see two armed guards and the maharajah, who was already standing, hands folded at his groin, a few feet in front of the others. “I think we should support our allies. Don’t you agree, sir?” Alan said.
“I feared you would think we have not been behaving much like allies,” the maharajah answered.
Alan walked toward him. “Your highness—General.” The maharajah’s right cheek gave a minuscule tic. “Whatever other agenda you have, we both want to neutralize those warheads.” The maharajah’s expression softened, an ironic smile just beginning to form. “I think we can help Major Rao, if you’ll let us have the internet connection back.” Alan pointed at the computers. “If we can take control of the cameras in the facility, we can let the major know what’s happening—give him an eye. Maybe we can even blind the enemy’s security by playing old pictures back to them—make them think nothing is happening.”
“If you could do that, Commander—” The hands came up in a gesture of surrender. “However, I cannot have you communicating with your superiors.”
“I’ll give you my word. And you can remain in the room. Or put people in here to observe.”
The maharajah looked at him, looked around the room, noting with a curious smile the lighted billiard table and Mary’s cue, and then he turned back and called for Khan, and the two men talked in soft, low Hindi. Then he nodded at Alan. “I will take responsibility for the risk.” No attempt now to disguise his being in command.
“Has Major Rao a map of the facility?”
The maharajah hesitated. “He has notes that he made from your computers. This was done so quickly—”
“But you
can
communicate with him?”
The maharajah stirred as if he was uncomfortable. “A somewhat antiquated system—we are not so high-tech as we might like—”
Alan was already with Ong and Benvenuto, explaining how they were going to make a map. “I want the whole layout—size of buildings, as near as you can figure; location of doors; layout of buildings with relation to the others; where the clean room and the garage are—everything. Think assault and defense—understand? As if you’re setting up the attack yourselves and were going to brief it.”