Damage Control (32 page)

As weak and trembling as if he had the flu, Spinner stumbled down to his car and went looking for a telephone.

The back end was up and running, and Alan ignored the good-natured prattle about the maharajah’s hotel and dug up the datalink. Before Soleck had made his clearing turn to the north, Alan’s plan was in trouble because he was tired and he hadn’t seen a chart recently.

“Soleck?”

“Skipper?”

Alan was looking at the projected positions of the five probable SOE vessels en route to Quilon. His intended course, it now turned out, ran right through the center of their projected radar horizon. “You got a route to the boat?”

“Yessir, you passed it to Commander Siciliano.”

“Soleck, I did that track before I could see the far-on circles on these hostile contacts. Look at the link.”

“Holy shit,” Garcia said.

“Whoa,” Simcoe whistled.

“We’ve got to go all the way south until we’re clear of
their envelope and any possible ground radar around Quilon and then head west to the boat. Do we have the fuel?”

“Give me a minute,” Garcia said.

Alan was looking at his new route, which added an hour to their flight time. Nothing to be done about it now. “How low did you come in?”

“Pretty fucking low,” Simcoe growled.

“Low-ish.” Soleck sounded pleased with himself.

“Fuel to spare if you go high once we’re feet-wet.” Garcia yawned. “Tight if we’re low all the way.”

“I want to go high once we’re clear of the coast, anyway.” Alan looked at the link again. “I want to update these locations before we get to the boat. This is going to be tight all the way.”
And I just lost an hour.

“They’ve got a pretty tight EMCON going, sir,” Garcia said. “We won’t get a sniff of ‘em unless something else stirs them up.”

“We’ll just have to radiate,” Alan said, his mind already on other things.

“That’s a non-starter, sir,” Simcoe said beside him. He reached over and deposited a kneeboard card on Alan’s working tray.

Alan read it in a second; a total prohibition on active forms of emission or any action that might provoke a hostile reaction. He flipped it over to see if there might be more. “This from Captain Lash?”

“Yessir.” Simcoe again, his voice carefully neutral.

The front seats were silent; Alan wondered if Simcoe had cut them out of the conversation. He glanced under his elbow. Yep. Simcoe was smooth. Alan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This was the moment, the first of a hundred moments he knew would come and yet wanted to shrug off for as long as he could—where his plans conflicted with other people’s orders and he was placing his career and other people’s careers on the line for a big risk with a lot of guesswork.

“I have orders from over Captain Lash.” There. The first half-truth.

Simcoe’s grin was visible even in the dark of the back end of an S-3. “Shit-hot.”

No question whose side Simcoe was on.

They flew low over Tamil Nadu for an hour, the ground as dark as the sea, bereft of city lights or even the clustered glow of villages. As far as Alan could determine, Tamil Nadu was blacked out from north to south. The only exception had been a glow over the horizon to the west early in their flight.

“Lights are on at Quilon,” Soleck said.

Circumstantial evidence. But it made Alan smile, nonetheless

Mike Dukas and Leslie were sitting in Dukas’s leased Toyota when Spinner came out of his apartment. “He doesn’t look so good,” Dukas said. He didn’t sound sympathetic.

“Won’t he see us?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

They knew about Spinner’s attempt to call his father, and, as they drove, Leslie was on their cell phone to an FBI agent about the call that Spinner had got from his father. “So he’s going to a public phone now, right?” she said to Dukas.

“Good luck finding one in Manama.”

“There’s three in the souk,” she said.

“Somehow I don’t think Spinner will go into the souk. Especially at night.”

They followed the tail-lights of Spinner’s car for fifteen minutes, in and out of the business streets of Manama, silent until Leslie said, “His father said to call him at ‘Effie’s.’ Who’s Effie?”

“Somebody they both know. Maybe a sister, girlfriend, somebody they’d have to know pretty well. Dumb, to drag
somebody else into it. But, like all smart people, they’re pretty dumb.”

It was another fifteen minutes before Spinner found a pay phone he liked outside a twenty-four-hour gas station. Dukas told Leslie to tell the FBI exactly where they were, and he pulled the Toyota right behind Spinner’s car and got out. Spinner was trying to work something out with coins and the telephone and getting no satisfaction, and at last he stomped into the gas station and did some shouting and came out with what proved to be a phone card. By then Dukas was leaning on the phone’s plastic enclosure.

“Do you mind?” Spinner snarled.

“Nope.”

“I want some privacy, asshole.”

“Hard to find these days.”

“What the fuck?” He put his face close to Dukas’s and tried to look terrifying. Dukas smiled in a way that
was
terrifying, so Spinner took a step back and shifted himself from Spinner the Dangerous to Spinner the Lofty. “Have you been following me?” he demanded.

“Yep.”

“I am an officer in the United States Navy! Get the fuck out of my face or I’ll call the shore patrol!”

Dukas held up his NCIS ID and badge.

Spinner swallowed. His face was deep red. Dukas had already figured out that he had been crying. “This is harassment,” Spinner said. “I’ll have your ass.”

Dukas folded his arms and leaned against the telephone enclosure. After several seconds, Spinner used some more of his Real Navy vocabulary and jumped into his BMW and slammed the door. Dukas was slower getting into the Toyota, and when he got on the road again, Spinner’s tail-lights were out of sight. Dukas accelerated and got the car up to ninety and held it there until he saw the lights far away in the darkness, and then he and Leslie trailed Spinner until he pulled
into a complex of one-storey apartment buildings near the international hospital. Spinner was already out of the car, and he would have been impossible to follow except that only one apartment had a light on.

“Call the Feebs and give them the address.”

Spinner was in the Canadian nurse’s bedroom after almost having to use physical force to get by the front door. She hadn’t been happy to see him, and she wasn’t happy now, sitting in her kitchen while he locked himself in her bedroom and called the States, but she’d been delighted that he wasn’t making a visit with romance on his mind. Well, fuck her.

“Dad, it’s R—”

“You dimwit! You idiot!”

“Dad—!”

“Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what the fuck you’ve goddam you
done?
Say something!”

“Daddy, Jesus—”

“Ben Weisel may just lose his position at NSC because of you, are you aware of that? Has it crossed your pea brain that a mistake like this could cost a lot of good people, a lot of good work, a lot of—a lot of
important projects
—could cost a lot? You’ve ruined us, sonny boy!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Say, that’s a comfort! Jesus Christ, I’d almost rather you had, then I wouldn’t think I had a fucking moron for a son! You stupid sonofabitch, you fell for some jerk-off trick I wouldn’t expect from a pro bono hack from Cowshit Law College! How could you fall for it? A story that even a goddam
black high-school dropout would see through! Do you know how long it took the National Security Advisor to see through it? I’d barely put the fucking telephone down before Ben Weisel was back on the blower to me saying he was blown sky-high and what the hell did I mean, retailing phoney intelligence to him?”

“Well, you believed it enough to pass it on to him. Didn’t you? I mean—”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that! Don’t you dare drag me down to your level. You set me up. Is that what this was all about—you set up your own father? You sold me out, is that it? Say something!”

“Daddy—Jesus, Daddy—” Spinner was crying again. His father shouted some more and then began to run down, warming up a couple of times as his own rhetoric enraged him all over again, coming to rest at last at a level of cold rage and deep disgust.

“I will never be able to explain to you the depth of my disappointment in you, Ray. You’ve failed as a son and you’ve failed as a man. Failed not only me, but this country. I’ve tried to explain to you how vital it is that our people at the highest level get intelligence that can be relied on—intelli-gence that hasn’t been altered and twisted by a lot of analysts with their closet-liberal mind-set. We thought we had a channel here direct from a source to the highest levels. We thought we’d achieved a breakthrough—intelligence without the interference of the goddam CIA. And you blew it.” He cleared his throat and his voice got weary. “All right, what’s done is done. You’ve failed. Now I suppose I have to save your ass. What’s your status?”

Spinner told him about the seizure of his computers and about Dukas’s appearance at the pay phone. “I think they’re after me, Daddy.”

“You do, do you. Well, Ray, I’d say no, they’re not
after
you; I’d say they’ve
got
you. Do you at least have the brains
to see what they did—get at me through you by sending this phoney message?”

“I got it from the flag captain herself.”

His father’s words became slow and enunciated. “It has in fact been denied in person by Admiral Pilchard himself to the National Security Advisor. And just in case you care about the effects of your stupidity, I’ve been told that there’s a leak up there—people who’ve just been waiting to get at Ben Weisel, I suppose—and there’ll be a piece in the morning’s
Washington Post.”

Long silence. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Not half as sorry as you’d be if I wasn’t here to save your buns, but I am and I’m going to do it if only to prevent an even worse mess. Now you listen to me, and try to focus both brain cells, because this is what’s going to happen: I’ll lean on some people in the Pentagon and I’ll get you off any charge they’re thinking of making. You’re going to hunker down and say nothing and do nothing, and I’ll find you a new duty station as quick as it can be done. In the meantime, take leave or do whatever the military does.”

“I’d like something in California if you can swing it.”

His father gave that a long silence and then groaned, “Jesus Christ—”

Outside in the parking lot, Dukas said to Leslie, “I’d certainly like to hear what they’re saying.” The FBI had been able to tell them that the telephone belonged to a Canadian citizen and was in use, but of course they couldn’t tap it. On the other hand, they knew what telephone the father was using in Washington, and so in the morning they’d be making a visit to that address as well as to the owner of the phone Spinner was using.

“Would it be important?” Leslie murmured.

“Oh, probably, if we were going to trial. But my guess is we’re not going to trial. That’s probably what Daddy-O is telling Number One Son right now.”

“Mike, you’re so cynical.”

“Stick around. You’ll see.” He got out his cell phone and dialled Admiral Pilchard at home.

“Those were great sandwiches,” Soleck said for the third time. They’d eaten all the cookies and drunk all the coffee, and the engines were straining to lift them to twenty-six thousand feet. The plane’s motion was steady, so that inner ears began to believe that the angle of climb was normal and indeed flat. The darkness outside the plane was total in every direction; sky, sea, horizon, ground all one great void, like space without stars. Pilot hell.

“Skipper Craik showed me how to have a great wetting down,” Soleck said. “Want to hear the story?”

“You ever going to let me fly this plane?” Garcia snapped. “Do I give a shit pardon-my-French about your wetting down?”

They were unaware that the cockpit intercom was still set to all seats. Alan thought they sounded like an old married couple, or like a couple of kids edging toward flirting. Not for the first time, he thought about the change in dynamics and paradigms brought by women at sea. Not worse, and probably better, but different.

“Hey! It was cool. Jeez, Garcia, give me a break, here. I’ve been up with Mister Craik before, and I—that is, he—” Just in time, Alan heard Soleck realize that any way he went with his explanation of why he was still flying the plane, Garcia was going to blow. “Never mind. I’m a jerk. You ready to take it?”

“Born ready,” she shot back.

“All yours.” Soleck met her tone and raised her one, from anger to indifference.

Kids.

“Coffee?” Soleck asked after a while, a clear attempt at a peace offering.

“That’d be nice.” Garcia’s voice was different.

They were silent for a while; next to Alan, Simcoe snored. Time passed as they approached the datum Alan had marked as the point at which he’d turn on their radar and start his conflict with the enemy and Captain Lash.

“Hey, Garcia?” Soleck sounded earnest.

“Yeah?”

“I’m not the enemy. I’m your pilot. Can you shit-can the attitude?”

Garcia laughed, a low, throaty laugh. “We’ll see,” she said.

Alan smiled in the back and turned off the intercom.

Donitz looked at his watch for the hundredth time in an hour and stopped to run his hand over the leading edge of a wing. Siciliano said five a.m., but she wasn’t sure; no one was sure, and he’d already had four hours of sleep. He looked at his Sparrows again, checked the safety pins, ran his fingers over the pistons in the landing gear and checked for hydraulic fluid leakage. He did everything he could think of to make the time pass, and that got him fifteen minutes.

Somebody moved in the lit space of the hangar and he thought it must be Snot, as eager to go as he was. He ducked under the tail of his plane and started toward the hangar, only to realize that it wasn’t Snot. It was Siciliano.

“Rose?”

“I’d say that bird was ready to fly, Donuts.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I can’t sleep either, but I’m going over to the hotel to pretend. There’s a pretty good chair in my office.”

He couldn’t see her face in the dark, but she sounded as if she was smiling.

“Thanks. I—”

“I know. But you’ll be better with some crew rest.”

The computer sounded a shrill alarm as the airplane reached a marked point on her course. Alan blinked, rubbed his eyes, and grunted.

“Back with us, Commander?” Simcoe asked.

“I want to radiate soon.” He sat forward in his harness. “Master Chief? You know how to trigger the ISAR without radiating the surface search first?”

Simcoe’s fingers were flying on his keypad. “Hmmm. Never done it.” He made a little humming noise. “No reason why not, but you wouldn’t get an image unless you hit something by luck. One in a million.”

“I don’t need an image,” Alan said slowly, still looking at his idea from different angles. “ISAR looks like a targeting radar, right? So if we illuminate them with it, it should set off their ESM gear as a targeting radar.”

“Could work,” Simcoe said, grinning. “Worth a try. Way the hell better than just radiating all over the place.”

“Which we can do anyway if it doesn’t work. It worked on Iraqis back in the Gulf.”

“I’m game, Commander. Radar’s warm and on hold.”

Alan looked down at his kneeboard, back at the datalink, calculating on the basis of hours-old data. If the ships were headed from their last location to Quilon and they hadn’t altered speed, they should occupy a volume of sea located—there.

“You got ESM ready?”

“Shine the light.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. Alan pushed a switch to ISAR and hit radiate. He counted to three and cut it off. His
screen showed the random reflections of the powerful beam of the ISAR on waves and an empty ocean.

A hundred and ninety miles to the north, just a few miles outside of the narrow beam of Alan’s radar, a passive sensor on a Krivak-class frigate registered the flash of the ISAR. The ESM system on the Indian frigate was simple and robust, and all the operator received was a small beep and an amber warning light. Had there been parameters on the system, the operator might have had a chance to wonder where the signal had originated. As it was, he assumed that loyalist fleet units had radiated a targeting radar, and he called the bridge.

“That’s slick, Commander.” Simcoe’s ESM screen suddenly showed repeated hits on a surface-search radar at the edge of the radar horizon to the north. “Surface search. Krivak-class.”

“Ms Garcia, turn to 270 and increase speed.”

Garcia said, “Roger that.” The plane banked into a turn, and then, “Soleck’s asleep.”

Alan had already switched screens to watch the ESM, where a second radar bloomed as a long green line, and then a third, all evenly spaced-out vectors. “Come on!” he said aloud.

The pitch of the engines increased as Garcia pushed more power through the turbines. At this altitude, there was no immediate tug at the harness, but they were moving off their initial bearing, trying to triangulate on their first burst of hits. Two vectors from identical transmitters gave a possible solution; three or four would give a fix.

“They’ve been fighting for two days. They’ve got to be on edge.” Alan realized that he was talking to convince himself.
I’ve been fighting for two days, and I’m on edge.

Simcoe grunted.

“That good enough, sir?” Garcia was eager—finally the pilot, not just the copilot.

“Excellent.” Alan watched his screen, like a fisherman watching a pool.

“Will ya look at that?” Simcoe jabbed a finger at his screen as Alan saw the green vectors vanish, replaced by hard-edged diamonds.

“Don’t transmit them into the link.”

“Why not?”

“We’ll be on the boat in an hour; we’ll put them in by hand. If we were lucky, and I think we were, they emitted all surface-search radars; they don’t know we’re here. We put stuff in the link, we’re emitting.”

“Roger that.” Simcoe watched his screen. “Got to put that one in the playbook.”

“My skipper did it to Iraqi SAM sites in the Gulf War. They always lit up.” Alan remembered it so well.

“Sweet. And these guys—”

“Are still looking for a surface contact. Whoa. There they go again!” Alan pounded his armrest with his right fist and felt a twinge of pain in his back.

“Course and speed!” Simcoe chortled. “Man, it’s a jackpot!”

“And formation.” Alan looked at the three ships in line astern. “I’ll bet they’ve flank pickets and they couldn’t see the beam. Whatever. That’s where they are.” He sat back, tired again, but a little closer to his goal. “Got a good tape in?”

“Sure.”

“Record all this.”

“Roger that.”

“Garcia, how’s our fuel?”

“We could go back to Trin if we had to.”

“Take us down below the radar horizon, okay? Maybe twelve thousand?” Alan tried to do his equation. He couldn’t. “Get below ten. What’s our ETA?”

“Under an hour, sir.”

An hour until the next bump. Soleck, who on his last cruise had had the lowest landing scores on the boat, would be putting them down on a crippled deck with a three wire and no net.

Dukas and Leslie were getting ready for bed when a phone call came from the Washington JAG headquarters. The watch commander who was calling told Dukas to stand by for an admiral. The self-righteousness of the man’s voice told Dukas all he needed to know about what the admiral was about to say.

“Special Agent Dukas?” The JAG admiral’s voice sounded unhappy. “You are to consider this an order, is that clear? Written confirmation will follow. Don’t give me a lot of noise about chain of command; your people are in the loop. This is a done deal. Understand?”

“Understood, sir.”

“In the matter of a Lieutenant-Commander Raymond L. Spinner. You are
not
to go to legal prosecution. Period, end of story. Any questions?”

Dukas looked at Leslie, raised his eyebrows. “This is an order, is what you’re saying, Admiral, and I am not to proceed to legal prosecution.” He made a horror-movie face at Leslie.

“See that that’s what happens.”

Dukas dropped the telephone into its cradle. “See?” He wagged a finger. “Spinner gets to Daddy, Daddy gets to his pals on NSC, Daddy’s pals get to JAG.” He let the phone sit for five seconds and picked it up again and, satisfied that he had a dial tone, called Pilchard. The admiral, waked from deep sleep, listened to him and then said, “I don’t care about prosecution right now, Mike. Keep Spinner on ice for twenty-four hours so he can’t blab more secrets, and I’m a happy man. You and your guys did well.”