Authors: Gordon Kent
Fraser grabbed his chart table with both hands and leaned over it; the officer of the deck, who had already read the message, had a grease pencil in his hand.
“We can be on station in an hour, sir,” he said, pointing at a location on the chart.
“I want to come up from the south. Make revolutions for thirty knots and come to 000.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Have the tail cleared away and all the sonars manned when the watch changes. Send the watch to breakfast now, Mister Jeffries. We’ll be at battle stations again in an hour.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Fraser met the eye of his executive officer as he came on the bridge and gave him the message. His exec read it over the brim of his coffee mug. He looked up at Fraser. “We don’t have to—”
“Belay that,” Fraser said. “We’ll comply.”
The ship began to heel and spray came over the bow.
“Prime Minister might feel differently,” his exec said, bracing.
“He’s not here. Rafehausen is.” He turned to the officer of the deck. “Once we’re on station, get me one of those fog banks right in with the coast. See ‘em? If you can.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Fraser started to pack his pipe. “I want the helo in the air in thirty minutes, with a full chaff load.”
His exec started to take notes.
“Confusing reports from both Delhi and Calcutta have been coming in since last night. Multiple suicides, perhaps in the hundreds, appear to have taken place at several locations. No details are available of the method of suicide, but the victims are believed to be members of the Servants of the Earth cult. Police are speculating that the cult are giving up their effort to take over India and are killing themselves in despair. However, an academic expert on the cult has suggested that to the contrary the cult may have completed a master plan and believe its work is finished. Mohan Katragadda, Mumbai.”
The submarine
Nehru
didn’t have a tugboat to drag it clear of the pier. The sub was short-handed, too, and simply conning the ship to their first launch datum would be difficult and fatiguing. They had missed the first of the ebb dealing with two last-minute desertions, and two men from engineering, fanatics, were dead by their own hands. He wondered what his men would do after they launched their last missile.
Out over the horizon to the north, his little battle group waited, ready to fight the remaining loyalists while he got into deep water and headed west. He leaned his elbows on the curved coaming atop the weather bridge, already feeling the motion of the estuary in his hips. The Kilo-class rolled like a pig, but there wasn’t enough water to submerge for another mile. He turned and threw up over the side with the ease of many repetitions. He raised his binoculars again, scanned the air. Nothing.
They really were going to pull it off, the whole absurd plan. He winced as the coaming rose again in the swell and banged his elbows. He tried again to focus on the horizon, lost in the haze.
Two hours, perhaps three, and he’d be over the hundred-fathom line.
And then, chaos. Chaos to the end.
DelArmCo—the Delhi Armored-car Consortium—had provided a Humvee with impact-resistant windows and indoor gun ports and light armor on the bottom and sides. Intended for nervous executives, it was more than Harry thought they needed, but the driver seemed to think it was the greatest thing since instant idlee. A white-turbaned Sikh who loved his job, or at least found his own self-importance in it, he insisted upon showing Harry and Djalik the details of the vehicle’s magnificence. The firing ports were treated so reverently by him that Harry thought that they might have to kiss them. “Very nice,” Harry said.
“Very
nice! Magnificently nice!”
“Impressive.”
“And safe!”
Harry and Djalik exchanged a look and a smile over that, but Bill seemed relieved; he crawled into the back and deflated into a padded executive seat and stared at nothing with open mouth.
Mary shook her head. “Bill is such an asshole.”
“But an essential asshole! Without him, where would we be?” Harry laughed. “We might be back in Bahrain, that’s where we might be!” He slapped the roof of the Humvee. “Let’s go!”
He had a route already planned on his India Survey map. The driver had objected—No, no, not direct, too long way round—but Harry had insisted. He wanted to avoid towns, although this was the Punjab, and there were villages and small cities everywhere. Nonetheless, the main roads seemed empty, and he questioned his own judgment in seeking back roads until, from an overpass, he saw a military roadblock on the highway they might have taken.
“Roadblock everywhere, everywhere,” the driver said. “Army defending border, not being far away.”
“Avoid the roadblocks.”
“But why, please? DelArmCo very well known—friend to soldiers, police—”
The back roads had more people, but when they saw the Humvee coming, they flinched away, some half-crouching in the ditches, some striding off across the fields. Women in saris pulled children close to them. The driver laughed. “Very afraid, these people.” Their fear seemed to please him. “Ignorant people here.”
The historic site they wanted was in fact almost fifty kilometers from the airfield. Harry sat in front now with the driver, checking his map and passing it back to Djalik and Mary when, after almost an hour’s driving, they seemed to be lost. Bill was mostly asleep.
“Did we pass M’ahra?” Djalik said.
“Yes, yes, M’ahra.” The driver pointed back with a whole hand. “Not interesting place.” He was used to driving people who wanted to “see India.”
Mary was shaking the front of her shirt to cool herself, holding it in thumb and forefinger of each hand and letting the fabric rise and fall like a bellows; tantalizing glimpses of cleavage and brassiere were ignored by Harry and Djalik, but the driver gave a lot of attention to the rearview mirror. “Awfully quiet around here for the home place of a bunch of bad guys,” she said.
Harry and Djalik got out and looked around, trying to find landmarks that would agree with the out-of-date map. The entire area was almost semi-suburban, with several factories and scattered office buildings set down in a once rural landscape. They had stopped on the side of a low hill, looking over a shallow valley whose floor rose toward the Himalayan foothills. Close in, there were a couple of small farms and a stream, but the mid-distance was more industrial. Harry put 10x50 Steiners to his eyes and looked. “Cement plant.”
“Not on the map. What the hell, the map was made in 1967.”
“Looks like kilns. They make bricks around here?”
The driver leaned out. “Yes, making bricks. Very dirty work, dirty people. Not interesting.”
Harry handed the binoculars to Djalik, who looked. “It ought to be right there. Right where the cement plant is.” The cement plant jutted up from the edge of a scruffy area of green scrub.
Harry shrugged. “Let’s have a look.” They got back in and he pointed. The driver said again that it wasn’t interesting, but Harry said that that was where he wanted to go, and so the Humvee rolled forward, the driver’s face, or what they could see of it between his aviator sunglasses and his beard, grim.
The road was cracked macadam, probably broken by cement trucks. They reached the corner of a chain-link fence, within which the two gray-beige towers of the cement plant were contained. No sign of life there, either, but beyond it, next to a muddy stream, two men were shoveling clay into molds; they wore only turbans and dhotis, their feet and arms smeared with clay. They looked up, but, perhaps because of the protection of the fence, did not flinch away as everybody else had. Harry signaled the driver to go on; the road turned to gravel, the chain-link fence continuing on their left, the area within it rubble that gave way to scrub, a kind of dry jungle. The shells of two cinderblock houses that had either never been finished or had been long abandoned were visible through the weeds and vines. Then more jungle, and then the ruin of a one-storey brick building that might once have been a small factory. Faded letters were still legible across the front:
Jo-Lalna Motorized Bicycle Works.
“Go back now?” the driver said. The road had turned into two tracks with trash trees closing in on the sides.
“Jo-Lalna Motorized Bicycle is an SOE company,” Bill said. His voice was lackluster. His forehead was pressed against
the armored window. “Wholly owned by the Mumbai Film Entertainment Corporation, LLC.”
“I thought you were asleep!” Mary snapped.
“I have total recall.”
The driver looked at Harry, his hand on the shift lever to put it into reverse.
“Map.”
Djalik handed it forward. Mary pulled herself up and looked at it over Harry’s shoulder. His landmark had been a point on the map that, in 1967, had represented a village named Banasar, near which the symbol for “historical point of interest” and the words
Harapan remains
were marked. Now, Harry tried to look back through the window, as if they might have missed a village somehow; then, not seeing one, he got out and looked over the Humvee’s roof. He grunted.
“Back up,” he said, getting in again.
The driver did so with enthusiasm, which faded when Harry told him to stop opposite the two brickmakers.
“Ask them where Banasar is.”
The driver was embarrassed. Worse than embarrassed. “Very low-grade people—”
Harry jumped out. “Banasar?” he called. “Where is Banasar?”
Both men, who had been squatting over the brick-molds, straightened and nodded vigorously.
“Where is Banasar?”
More nodding. Mary stuck her head out. “I think they’re telling you that
this
is Banasar.”
Harry looked at the stream from which the brick-makers were taking their water.
If that trickle is the “river” on the map, then where the cement plant is now
—He got back in and told the driver to go forward—no, not back,
forward.
They passed the two unfinished cement-block houses again—had they been part of Banasar once?—and then the motorized-bicycle works, and Harry pointed to go on. The
two dirt tracks went straight away through a tunnel of dusty green, the chain-link fence always on the left.
Until, after a couple of hundred yards of bouncing, it turned into a gate.
Harry, Djalik, and Mary got out and looked at recent tire tracks in the dust, and then at an oiled padlock on the gate. Inside the fence were recent marks that showed where the gate had been pulled open, dragging through the dirt in an arc to let vehicles through.
Harry stepped back and looked up and down the fence. It was six feet high, without razor or barbed wire along the top. Not the first line of defense of a major terrorist organization, he thought. On the other hand, there was
The Purloined Letter.
“I say we go back to Delhi and I’ll touch base with the embassy,” Mary said. “I’ve got to knock some heads in DC and I want to know what the hell SOE’re doing with those nukes.”
“Embarrassing if they’re using them to vaporize Delhi.”
Mary shrugged.
“The Harapan site is supposed to be private; this is private. Bill says the bicycle place is SOE’s; SOE own the archaeological site. I’m going to look inside.” He looked down at Mary. “You can wait in the car.”
She laughed at him. “What are we expecting to find?”
“A needle in a haystack. The meaning of life. Nirvana. How would I know?”
He rapped on Djalik’s window. “Let’s go.”
Djalik got out and looked at the fence and the gate. “Through or over?”
“Over.”
Djalik got out a baseball-bat bag with weapons in it and threw it over the fence. “After you.”
Four hundred miles south and east of the
Jefferson,
Chris Donitz pulled his probe gently free of Soleck’s refueling drogue and dropped into the night, full of gas and ready to play. It was the third time in his career that he’d had to face the animal. He felt more resigned than eager.
He wondered if he was getting old.
A thousand feet below him, Snot wasn’t watching his altitude and started a gentle descent.
They were in EMCON, and Donuts couldn’t tell him he was slipping. He scanned his instruments and his heads-up display and started north.
Snot caught his plane and started climbing to match Donitz.
One more hour. It was a lonely time, and if he listened too closely, Donitz could hear wild tunes playing in the slipstream outside his canopy. He scanned his instruments again and tried not to think.
Tire tracks led from the chain-link gate into the scrub jungle. Whatever activity there had been here was recent, the tracks laid over now-bent grass and not worn down to bare dirt. Walking slowly, they came on odd stretches of broken asphalt, as if the trail had once been a paved path or driveway. The scrub pressed in, so dusty that its greens were turning to beige; in several places, saplings had been pushed over by a vehicle and sprung partway back. One actual tree, growing in the middle of the narrow lane, had been hacked down with an axe.
Djalik bent to look at the stump, touched it with his fingertips. “Two-three days at most.”
“You good guide, Keemo Sabe. Something you learned in Boy Scouts?”
Djalik unzipped the gym bag and gave Harry a short-barreled
riot gun, then two boxes of buckshot. “Tonto think we need to get out of the middle of the road.”
Mary snorted. “Some road. It’s so narrow, it doesn’t
have
a middle. Bill, get behind me.” She didn’t offer Bill a weapon—after all, he had his laptop, which he had refused to leave in the car—but she took an H&K prototype machine pistol for herself. “This thing work?”
“Super-high cyclic rate, little-little bullet. Cut a tree down with that thing. Minimal muzzle rise.” Djalik was assembling an AK, ramming in a banana clip. “Let’s rock.” He slung the gym bag’s strap over his head and pushed the bag itself around to his back.
They went on, Djalik and Harry in the lead, each on the edge of the narrow road and almost in the scrub, Mary and Bill behind them. They passed, on their right, an overgrown stone shrine, then the remains of a wooden building, maybe a guard’s shack or an equipment shed. Then Harry saw more light ahead, a thinning of the scrub and a widening of the road. They spread out, and then they were standing among the trees, looking out into an irregular, open field of several acres, its surface strangely lumpy, with a low mound off to the left. On their right and fifty yards away was a backhoe, pulled back into the trees; opposite it in the field, and stretching away for more than a hundred feet, was what appeared to be a ditch, all but the first couple of feet covered with canvas or tarpaulin.
“The site,” Harry said. “The lumps in the grass are probably old foundations or stones.” He gestured toward the backhoe. “And they’ve started to dig.”
“With a backhoe?”
“That’s the way thieves do it. Not very nuanced.” Harry took out the Steiners and glassed the site and the woods around it. “Nobody,” he breathed. He trained the binoculars on the backhoe and then on the scrub beyond. “I can see some sort of roof up there.” He handed the binoculars to
Djalik. Mary had been reaching for them; when she didn’t get them, she said, “Thanks a lot.”
“He’s a better shot.”
“How the fuck would you know?”
Harry and Djalik agreed that they could use the ditch if it wasn’t too deep, putting somebody there to cover while somebody else went to have a look at the roof he’d glimpsed—and what was under it. But Harry said that he didn’t believe that anybody was there. “Quiet,” he said. “Eerie.”
“Nice birds,” Bill surprised them by saying. Everybody looked startled.
Djalik crept out into the field and used the uneven terrain to make his way toward the ditch while Harry led the rest along the edge of the scrub. Between them and Djalik, the tire tracks were still visible, overlaid in places by the deep imprint of the backhoe’s tracks. When they got close, Harry motioned Mary back and went on; he had the shotgun ready as he circled the machine and, finding nothing, waved her and Bill on.