The sun came up green, then a blazing gold that burned into amber on the undersides of the scattered clouds. Alan saw it all, waking at the first paling of the starry sky. He needed sleep, wanted sleep, but his brain wanted daylight and activity and distraction from chewing over the violence of the day before. His brain wanted to get on with the burden of getting his people out.
Green. It was a green land, in a place of some of the heaviest rainfall in the world. Lush grass grew around the van and lay like a carpet between them and the scattered buildings of the airfield, the single runway a dark stripe on it, half a dozen light aircraft tied down where the grass ended and two rusty metal hangars leaned. Surrounding the airfield were green trees, then green fields, then the bluer green of hills behind them to the east. Silhouetted now against the brightness, distant mountains.
They had found the place in darkness, their lights rousing a guard in a dhoti and a low-collared old shirt who had waved a cudgel at them as he stood in the headlight glare behind a gate that was nothing but a sagging metal pole between two posts. He was an old man, red-eyed; later they decided he was drunk. Alan had got out and kept saying “American Navy” and waving a piece of paper, which was actually a letter from a Navy reserve association but it did have an embossed letterhead with a gold eagle. Still talking, he had pulled the metal pole aside and got back in and they had driven through, the old man shouting at them, and he had run after them as they drove to the only taxiway and across the runway and over the grass, and back there somewhere he had given up. It was just as well that the telephone system was down, or he might have called somebody.
Standing now, Alan looked south, the way they had come, and could see the curving glitter of a small river. Beyond, drainage ditches shimmered, full of water, and egrets dotted the green between the silver lines. The air smelled like flowers.
He wished he had a toothbrush. And coffee. They had stopped at a duka out in the country and found a couple of cans of vegetarian curry and a plastic pack of Jamun’s Best Chappatis and some bottled water. That had been dinner, eaten sitting in the dark by the van, using their fingers and the spoon on Benvenuto’s knife.
He heard Fidel growl, “Shit—”, and saw his legs and feet disappear under the far side of the van. When the rain had started, the three men had rolled under the vehicle; the two women had slept inside.
“Morning,” Alan said. Fidel may have grunted, maybe not; anyway, he kept on going away from the van, and Alan saw that he wasn’t the only one who had a hangover from the firefights. Fidel was looking out over the flat, green landscape, and Alan saw that he was watching a white cow that was eating somebody’s bean crop. “Sacred animal,” he muttered.
Fidel grunted again. “Kind of nice, having a sacred animal.”
“You’re full of surprises.”
Fidel looked at him. “I’m not just a guy who kills people, Commander.” He wandered away toward some low bush.
Dee Clavers slid the van door open on Alan’s side and crawled out, butt first, and then closed the door as if she was running away from home and whispered, “I’m getting too old for this. What d’you see, Commander?”
“I see a bunch of people without toothbrushes.”
“That’s life in the nav.” Clavers ran her tongue over her front teeth. “You got a point, though. I’d kill for some coffee.”
A female voice murmured behind them. “If you have a way to heat water, I have coffee.” It was Lieutenant jg Ong. She had opened a sliding window and was looking out at the morning. She smiled at them. “You two look terrible.” She looked, well, cute, a little puffy-eyed, her lips swollen as if she had been necking.
“What coffee?” Clavers demanded.
“Packets—you know? French roast. We need hot water.” It was hard to believe—Ong the Unprepared, with coffee! That she was offering to other people! And then she said, “I guess after what we’ve all been through, you can share my toothbrush, too.”
Alan ticked off on his fingers the other things they didn’t have. “Pot, cups, fire—”
“I have a French press and one cup.” Ong’s small face frowned. “But I don’t have fire.”
“Let’s ask the guard guy,” Clavers said. “Worst he can do is beat us to death with his stick.”
“We’ll breathe on him and kill him first.”
The knee-high grass swished against their legs and left their dirty khakis drenched after twenty steps. At the runway, they stamped their feet to shake the water off, then plunged into the grass on the other side and were drenched again. At the house by the hangar, the guard woke up and grabbed his cudgel, his turban unclean and half-unwound. He shouted at them in Malayalam, and when Alan held up money he shouted louder. Clavers made drinking motions; finally, she got through, and the frightened old man pointed at a bucket by the foundation of the house. He smelled of beer.
The bottom was covered with an organic mat that could have been rotting leaves or could have been animal, even human, shit. Alan smelled it. “We boil it a long time,” he said. He pulled the loose matter out and swabbed the inside with grass and then filled the bucket from a tap, and they took turns carrying it across the airfield as the old man capered behind them, waving his stick and shouting, until his dhoti got wet and his bare feet seemed to hurt, and then he gave up for the second time and went back to his plastic lawn chair.
“Benny is gathering wood for a fire,” Ong said. Her smile dazzled. “Fidelio is gathering paper and a lighter.”
Alan grinned at her. “You have organizational skills I never guessed at, Miss Ong.”
“Oh, I always get what I want.” She said it without any suggestion of boasting, more as if she were giving the facts of geology. “I’ve also pulled together our food supply.” She pointed at the front passenger seat, on which were laid out two Snickers bars, a half-eaten Toblerone, and three Indian sweets. “Anything to add?”
Alan had nothing. Fidel, to his surprise, had a granola bar.
“Sir?”
Madje tried to cling to sleep, so far down that his hand’s pushing the voice away was unconscious.
“Sir?” from a hesitant voice and a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Again. In the background, another voice insisted that he be waked. His conscious mind got the name Admiral Rafehausen out of the conversations around him.
He stirred, his legs kicking, and his eyes opened to light, movement all around him. He wasn’t in his rack in a stateroom, and this disoriented him so that he couldn’t place where he was or how he had come here. Something about Admiral Rafehausen.
“Sir! The admiral wants you.” A petty officer in a rumpled flight suit was kneeling next to him.
Madje’s eyes caught the chalkboard a few feet away on the wall, the colorful linoleum tiles laid into the floor under him representing the squadron crest of VFA-139, and he was awake, aware that he was lying curled up on the floor of one of the forward ready rooms, his breathing apparatus still strapped to his chest and a poncho liner wrapped around his legs. He felt like hell.
“You’re the flag lieutenant, right, sir?” the petty officer asked.
“Yeah,” Madje groaned, rubbing his eyes. He caught sight of his hands, streaks of black over bright red skin, filthy nails. “How’s the admiral?”
“Doc says he’s better. He’s awake again and he wants you. You been out for hours. Skipper said to let you sleep, but—” The man trailed off. He was young, maybe twenty-one, but dark circles under puffy eyes made him look older. “I got to get back to the desk.”
Madje got to his feet and steadied himself on the rail of the chalkboard and a wave of vertigo hit him. He felt as if he could go back to sleep standing up. He stretched, pulled the poncho liner off his legs and threw it on top of a pile in a corner of the ready room and pushed out into the passageway, headed aft.
Donitz found that his ear was stuck to the receiver of the phone. He’d been sitting on his bed, a bed that wouldn’t have passed muster in a highway motel in the States, trying to use a rotary phone from colonial times.
“Fuck,” he said. And then, “Jesus fuck.”
Too loud. Soleck rolled over in his bed, the mattress sounding tinny.
“What’s the problem, Donuts?”
“I can’t get this fucking thing to—go to sleep, Soleck.”
Soleck sat up and stretched. He’d got two hours of sleep after bedding down the birds and the scramble to find lodging, talk to the airfield, talk to Sri Lankan customs. The struggle that Donitz was still in.
“Sir, with all due respect—”
“Say it.” Donuts was looking for something to lash out at. And mature enough to keep himself in check, but Soleck had some irritating habits at the best of times.
“You don’t delegate well, sir. You’re the det commander. Why don’t you get some sleep and I’ll sort out the phones?”
“Yeah?” Donuts balanced between anger and admission. “Yeah?” He shrugged, felt the tension in his shoulders and the emptiness behind his eyes. When he shut them, he could see his instrument panel and the heads-up display in his cockpit. “Okay, Mister Soleck. Have a ball. We need to get a clearance, we need to inform Fifth Fleet of our status, and we need gas. Here’s my list. And I don’t have a fucking phone number for any of them.” He waited for Soleck to do the junior officer shuffle and dump it all back on him, which would give him the excuse to launch a salvo. “And we need a way to talk to the boat.”
“Got it.” Soleck smiled at him, a reassuring smile that robbed Donitz of his anger. “Get some sleep. I’ll do this from the desk.” He looked at his watch. “You got to fly in two hours.”
“No shit. Wake me if—” Donitz began, but the room door closed with a bang, and Soleck was gone.
Alan took over the organizing of the coffee. He got a fire built, sent for more water. They boiled the water for twelve minutes and let the coffee steep for five in the French press. By then, Alan had told them about the photograph and the “Kill on sight” message, and he had passed around the palm device he had taken from the officer in the parking lot. He felt efficient, up, able to do several things at once and really get stuff done. He was surprised, therefore, when Fidel tapped his arm and said, “Could you slow down a little, Commander? You’re making people nervous.” Perhaps because Alan looked astonished, Fidel said, “It hits some people like that—like popcorn in a hot pan. Me, I get real quiet.” And, to prove it, he turned away and got real quiet again.
Then the coffee was done and they passed the cup around, a sip for each, until the press was empty, and then they made another. And another. Ong’s stock, until then somewhere below zero, went way up.
And Alan, having made himself neither say nor do anything for at least three minutes, handed Ong the golden object he had wrestled from the commodore in the first moments of disaster. It seemed a hundred years ago.
“Why, it’s a USB key,” Ong said. Benvenuto nodded.
“What does it do?”
“Oh, it can do lots of things. You plug it into your USB port and—Benny, reach down your laptop.” She held the thing up. “It’s wicked cute.”
“The officer in the parking lot had one, too”
“So did the guys with him,” Fidel said. “I put them under my seat inside.” The words came out as if he had had to pay a lot for each of them.
“On chains around their necks,” Alan said, “like—medallions?” He had almost said “amulets,” but he didn’t like the implication of magic.
“Like a club key,” Benvenuto said. “Maybe they belong to the Calcutta Playboy Club.”
Clavers groaned and rolled her eyes.
Benvenuto handed Ong his laptop, and she plugged the key into its USB port. The screen, which had been showing Benvenuto’s hard-rock screen-saver, went black.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”
“Shi-i-i-t!” Benvenuto roared. “It ate my screen-saver.”
The blank screen was replaced by bright colors and some sort of logo that moved around the screen like a fly in a room, never settling. There was music, neither quite Indian nor quite Western. The logo danced across words: Servants of the Earth. Then that screen vanished and was replaced by animated figures and more music and voices.
“Oh, cute!” Ong said.
“What the hell’s that?” Clavers said.
The figures were engaged in a balletic fight with a three-headed dragon.
“Kiddie cartoons,” Fidel growled.
“That’s anime!” Ong howled. “It’s cutting-edge animation!”
“Like I said, kiddie cartoons.”
The figures looked like Ong, big-eyed and black-haired and slender. Their fight turned into a conversation into a flirtation into a journey, all in about forty seconds.
“Commercial,” Alan said. “It’s a commercial for Servants of the Earth, whatever that is.”
“It’s so cute,” Ong purred.
The screen turned golden, and letters in bright blue wrote themselves across it: Do a random act of service for the earth each day.
“Sounds like a bunch of tree-huggers,” Clavers said. “Who’s for more coffee? Everybody? Benvenuto—more firewood.”
Benvenuto wanted to stay, because it was his laptop that was being used, but he was the lowest rank, so off he went. By the time he had come back, they had tried all six of the golden keys, and they all had the same logo and message and animated story. And they all urged random acts of service. Then Ong tapped on her own computer and plugged the commodore’s key in and said, “There’s lots more on it. It’s huge for storage, that little thing.”
“Any idea what it is?”
She tapped the keys, shook her head. “I’m afraid to let it in until I like know what it is. You saw Benny’s computer—it just seized the whole thing so it could get its message in.” Benvenuto’s computer was on the grass. It still showed the Servants of the Earth message. Benvenuto looked at it sadly. “It’s okay, Benny,” she said. “We’ll de-bug it later, right? Trust me.”
Alan squatted, looking over her shoulder. “Can you get it off your own computer?”
She turned her head. Her hair brushed his chin. She smelled good. “Watch.” She hit a key and the Servants of the Earth vanished. She swung around, the computer still on her crossed legs. He was aware that they were too close together and he sat back on his heels. “It’s basically a worm, which my axe is prepped to deal with. I tried to get into it, but it’s pretty resistant, but like I know there’s a lot of data in there.”
“The guy plugged it into the JOTS. The JOTS sort of blinked, but that was all—no message, no animation. What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know until I get into it. But it probably means it’s preprogrammed for the JOTS—like if it was going to do the worm thing, it didn’t want to be seen on the screen.”
“So it left the JOTS image up there?”
“Well—” She sniffed. She was really pretty in the morning, he was thinking. “Well, you know, like if I was going to do that, I mean plant a worm, the worm would probably have to do with what came up on the JOTS screen, wouldn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t that be the point?” Her eyes held his. He wasn’t sure that either of them was concentrating on computers.
“And?”
“Well—Maybe it was going to plant data in the JOTS. To screw up the exercise? Or maybe it was going to suck data out of the JOTS? I mean, there had to be a reason he put it into the JOTS, okay?”
Alan remembered thinking at the time that the commodore was somehow going to help the Indian side cheat. Could you do that by somehow screwing up the data in the JOTS? By, let’s say, changing the screen so that—
“Aircraft,” Fidel said.
Alan looked where Fidel was pointing. Silver flashed in the sky. Alan stood, working the stiffness out of his knees, found he was glad to have an excuse to get away from Miss Ong, whose effect on him close up was a lot stronger than he would have guessed. He had more sympathy for Benvenuto.
Fidel was getting weapons from the van; he handed an AK to Alan, held another out to Benvenuto. He began to dole out clips. Overhead, the flash of silver became a distant aircraft dropping down toward the green fields.
“Did you see it first or hear it first?” Alan said. He couldn’t hear it yet.
“Both.”
The plane leveled and came toward them, and then he could hear it, the thin roar of the jets and the scream of air over the flaps and spoilers. It passed over the field at several hundred feet and turned north and dwindled to a speck. Alan looked along the valley and saw smoke rising from a house—straight up. No wind. The pilot would have seen that, too.
By the time the Lear jet was identifiable again it was on its final for the runway. The old man was running out to the taxiway, waving his cudgel at it and shouting. The plane dropped and skimmed the green fields that ran right up to the runway and touched down not more than twenty feet from the end. The engines screamed as the pilot fought to hold his rollout to the small field, and then he was speeding past them, the plane dazzling in the early morning sunlight. When it had passed, Alan saw the old man sitting in the long grass like a bundle of sticks, staring after it.
“Our ride,” Alan said to Fidel.
“Hey, I’m not complaining.”
The plane spun a slow half-circle at the runway’s end and taxied back. Alan and Fidel trotted toward the hangars, the others straggling along. When they caught up with the plane on the taxiway, it had stopped and the pilot was laughing and jabbering out his window with the old man and tossing money down in little bundles. Harry O’Neill got out a couple of minutes later, elegant in a blue silk polo shirt and jeans and a white jacket. Dave Djalik, whom Alan knew, stood in the doorway behind him, scanning everything. O’Neill stretched, looked at the morning, came down the steps toward Alan’s filthy crew as if he was about to give an interview. “Nice place you have here,” he said.
“We’re kind of glad to see you,” Alan answered.
“Can’t imagine why.” Harry introduced himself, went around shaking hands. A black man stepping from a silver jet seemed to surprise them. Ong looked bowled over. Alan figured she’d just met the man of her dreams.
“When do we leave?” Fidel demanded.
Harry smiled. “No hurry, no hurry. You people had breakfast? We brought a great selection of MREs. Anybody for the Four Fingers of Death? Follow the chuck-wagon to a parking spot.” He led them away from the plane; they all fell in behind as if he was the Pied Piper, until Alan sent Clavers back for the van. When they were all clear, the steps went up and the engine sound rose an octave and the plane taxied off toward the hangars, the old man trotting ahead and trying to fasten up his turban as he went.
“When do we leave?” Alan muttered to Harry.
“Some new developments.” Harry put on aviator sunglasses, beneath which his smile was toothy and deliberately false. “Uncle Sam wants you, kid.”
Alan sighed. Nothing was ever easy.
They straggled along behind the plane.
“Madje, you look worse than me.” Admiral Rafehausen was propped on pillows, his head only a little higher than his chest. A metal crane elevated his left knee, and his left arm was clamped into a mechanical device that had a sheen of condensation over it. His eyes were dull, his face as pale as the gray bulkhead behind him.
Madje looked around for the doctor. He’d been sent in to see the admiral as soon as he’d reported at the entrance to the sick bay; this time, there were no orderlies waiting to put the admiral back under. Madje tried to hide his reaction to Rafehausen’s appearance. “Good to see you, sir.”
“You get—orders to—TAO?”
“Yes, sir. Skipper on the Fort Klock has the battle group.”
“Yeah? Lash?” Rafehausen moved his head and glared, and then his eyes grew duller, and there was a long silence.
Madje tried not to read too much into the tone with which the admiral said, “Lash.” After a while he thought the admiral was drifting off to sleep. He got up quietly.
“I’m not—done with you, mister. Go—get a shower, clean up.” Rafe gave an approximation of a smile. “You look like shit.” Long pause. “Need—eyes—ears.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” The admiral’s eyes flicked away to the blank wall by his bed, lost focus for a few seconds, and wandered back to Madje. “Where we—headed?”
His abrupt change left Madje confused. Headed? “Sir?”
“Where—is—battle group going?” The admiral almost raised his head, his eagerness communicated in fractional movements.
“Sorry, sir. I was fighting fires—”
“Yeah.” The energy drained out of his face. “Yeah. Good—you. Get cleaned up, and—” The admiral’s eyes closed. He muttered, “Lash,” and shook his head.
Madje bent over him and was reassured by a snore. He got the picture. Get cleaned up and find out for me what’s going on. He rose from the folding chair as quietly as he could and headed toward a shower.
Fidel and Djalik had identified each other immediately, Djalik picking up on Fidel’s SEAL patch. They tossed SEAL references back and forth—groups, names, places—and laughed, getting comfortable with each other.
Djalik said, “How you getting along with Tom Terrific?” He jerked his head at Alan, who was walking twenty feet ahead.
“Hey, you know him?”
Djalik held up his left hand, which was a mass of scars and was missing two fingers.
“He do that?”
“He was in command.”
“Shit, man. He’s got a hand like that, himself.” Fidel put his head closer to Djalik’s. “You got a problem with him?”
“Oh—he’s okay. He just wouldn’t know he was dead until they nailed the lid down on him, he’s such a gunner.” Djalik was wearing sunglasses; when he grinned, his face went from threatening to gleeful. “You know the old nav story about John Paul Jones? He’s on the Bonhomme Richard; the fucking rigging’s shot away, the masts are shot away, they got a hole below the waterline, and Jones waves his sword and shouts, ‘I have just begun to fight!’ And down on the gun deck, this old salt, who’s up to his ass in blood and body parts, says, ‘There’s always some sonofabitch doesn’t get the word!’” Djalik tittered, then pointed at Alan. “Him and John Paul, they’d be a pair!”
Fidel rubbed his unshaven chin. “So far, I’d rather have him on my side than the other side.”
Djalik stared at Alan’s back. “Well—yeah.”