Sixty miles east of Delhi, Harry was sitting in the copilot’s seat of the Lear jet; Djalik had taken his place in the double seat at the rear.
“You’re taking a pretty wide swing around Delhi,” Harry said.
“SOP until the emergency’s over. Indian Air Force has made it a no-fly zone.” Moad gave him a sideways grin. “Wouldn’t want to be shot down.”
“Nasty, nasty.” Harry tried to look out, saw nothing. “How long?”
“We swing around Delhi, and we’re about eighty miles out.”
Harry had on a headset. “Awful quiet,” he said.
“Delhi traffic control is shut down. Mumbai’s open. Lahore’s open, naturally—Pakistan—and they’re actually doing some long-range control over on this side. Truth is, I think they don’t want anybody making a mistake and starting a war.”
“Maharajah’s guy filed us for Patiala. That really where we’re going?”
Moad grinned again. “The field is closed, but the maharajah’s name opened it for us. A little error in communications—they think this is his plane.”
“My, my—I don’t think I could pass for the maharajah. We going to get anything helpful like lights? Burning oil drums? Guys with noses that glow in the dark?”
“They said lights. If they don’t show lights, we’re screwed. I’ll have to divert—first choice is Amritsar.”
“Oh, good, I like places famous for massacres. What if Amritsar’s dark?”
“Lahore.”
“Shit, then we’re in Pakistan!”
“Only if they don’t shoot us down when we turn toward the border.” Moad shrugged. “It’ll be fine. What do you want to do, Harry, live forever?” He checked his GPS and kneepad notes and, eight minutes later, turned to 295 and switched on his headset. Harry listened in. “Lahore Control, this is civilian Lear jet AN 5796 from Chittoor, filed for Patiala. Lahore Control, do you have me on your screen, over?” Moad was craning his neck to look down for the Patiala lights.
The answer came in musically accented English. “5796, this is Lahore Control. Patiala is closed. Over.”
“Lahore, Patiala will be illuminated for this aircraft. Over.” He put the plane into a descent.
“Wait one, 5796—we are checking that.” Crackling silence for half a minute. “Okay, 5796, we have a notice to expect one VIP aircraft for Patiala. You are ahead of schedule. 5796, do not turn toward the border. You copy, is it? Pakistan Air Force are very airborne.”
“Lahore, I read, do not turn toward border.” He put the nose down still farther. “Lahore, I am going through five thousand and I have Patiala in visual. The lights are on.” Harry, following Moad’s eyes, saw blackness and then found a slender, faraway rectangle.
There was an audible chuckle. “Lucky chap. Okay, 5796, suggesting here you descend to three thousand, turning to 020 eleven miles, then descending to two thousand and turning to 195. On your own then, man—runway is 260–080, suggesting land 080, we have wind here southwest 8, okay?”
“Heard and understood, Lahore. Descending to three thousand and turning to 020. You have me?”
“Oh, we have you okay, man! Don’t do nothing crazy!” And then laughter.
Moad gave Harry a look. “Slow night at Lahore Control,” he said and put the jet into its turn.
Dukas took the long way home. He drove slowly through the darkness, rubbing his upper lip with his left forefinger, his left elbow on the window ledge. At Manama Mall, he pulled into the empty parking lot and sat there for twenty minutes and thought about a pregnant Leslie. It didn’t occur to him that Leslie could be pregnant by somebody else; if she was pregnant, it was his. It didn’t occur to him simply to let it go, to let her maybe deal with it herself or, worst case, get so pregnant she’d have to say something about it in two or three or six months. It didn’t occur to him to postpone facing it.
What did occur to him was that he had a big problem of his own making, and that you clean up your own messes.
He put the car in gear again and drove home. His face looked angry, although he didn’t know it, and in fact he wasn’t angry. Not at Leslie, at any rate. At himself, maybe—for not ending things when they had been in Washington, for not sending her back when she had shown up in Bahrain. For not liking to have her around.
Alan wasn’t angry, although anger lurked there. He couldn’t get Rafe out of his mind. White as paper. Almost a corpse.
Alan’s thermos was full, and he had a bag of cookies from the dirty shirt; the plane had gas, and they were armed to the turbofans. Alan felt none of the elation that made such moments glow for him in memory. Nothing.
He felt the shuttle slide down into tension and then the roar as the turbofans went up to full power, Soleck and Garcia muttering through the ritual in the front seat.
“Everybody ready for a ride?” Soleck intoned.
Alan thought once more of the wraith in sick bay, who would never do this again. He swallowed.
Soleck snapped a salute, and they were gone into the first rays of the sun.
Dukas let himself into the house and was shucking off his jacket even as he closed the door behind him with a foot. Leslie appeared in the vaguely Moorish arch at the room’s end; maybe his lights had waked her. She was still wearing the skimpy pajama top.
“You’re home.” She looked good—rested, relaxed because she had had some sleep—but her face tightened as she got closer and looked at his. “What’s the matter?”
Dukas threw his coat on the sofa. He was standing at right angles to her, slowly loosening his tie. When he spoke, he couldn’t make the words come out nicely or even neutrally. He sounded angry, too. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She didn’t say Tell you what? or How did you find out? or any of the temporizing, stupid things that she might have said. She did give a little gasp, almost a hiccup. He turned to look at her and felt the stab in his chest that he felt whenever he went too deep into her emotions and found again what a feeling creature she was. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he muttered again. “Am I such a bastard you couldn’t even tell me?”
“I thought—I thought you’d think I—” She hugged herself as if she were cold. “Like it was a trap.”
Dukas took her by a wrist and led her to the sofa and sank down, pulling her with him. “Oh, Jesus.” He didn’t mean that to apply to her but to him. He was looking at himself as he supposed she saw him, and then he was wondering how she could think she loved what she saw. “You haven’t—done anything, have you?”
“I talked to somebody about it. I’m thinking it over.”
“No!” He was surprised at how much emotion jumped out of him. “No, we’re not going to do that.”
“We’re not.” She chuckled, not very merrily.
“You know what I mean. You can’t. I can’t—” He had started to say I can’t let you, but he saw that the words would be stupid. “You can if you—if it’s for yourself, not because of what you think I might—” He looked at her. She was twenty-two; he’d be fifty before the baby was in school. His hands came up and cupped her face—an odd gesture for him, not one he’d ever made before. “Let’s get married. I mean, yeah—we should get married.”
She had a surprising toughness to go with her surprising intelligence and her astonishing emotions. She looked steadily into his eyes, no weakening around the mouth, no boo-hoo. “Can’t you say it, Michael?”
“Say—?”
“’Say the magic woid, you get ten dollahs.’”
The magic word was love. Dukas was tough, too—tough on himself, tough on her. He couldn’t say a word that was untrue. She gave an off-center smile and shook her head, then moved in with her arms around his neck. “At least you’re a lousy liar,” she said.
“Les—I try, I will try. We’re good together, aren’t we? We get along; you’ve given me a lot of—fun, what the hell, happiness; I don’t—very well say—I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, no.”
She tilted herself a little away so she could look at his eyes again. “You’re telling me to take the glass that’s half full and not the one that’s half empty, right?” She smiled the crooked smile at him again and pulled herself close. She exhaled, and Dukas could hear the raggedness of the breath. Still, she managed to laugh. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “somebody could wish you’d lie just a little sometimes.”
They held each other, both made numb by the strange intensity of the moment. Only slowly did Dukas come to realize that he’d proposed and been accepted.
The air was heavy and hot and smelled of something bitter, refinery gases or agricultural chemicals. Harry, standing next to the Lear jet, inhaled it and didn’t like it and told himself that that was just too bad. In the east, the sky gave no sign yet that morning might be on the way.
“When are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Mary Totten said. She had slept for most of the flight and she seemed to be less cranky than she had been.
“Now, if you like.”
“I like.”
Harry leaned his buttocks back into the hatchway of the jet and folded his arms. The only illumination came from blue taxiway lights and from inside the plane itself, where Bill was still snoring. “Take a seat,” Harry said to her.
She shrugged and sat on the second step. “So—?”
“This is Patiala. The main SOE router hub is here someplace. Doesn’t matter where; we’re not going there. So I figure that the SOE biggies are nearby—according to Bill, the IP is local, no matter what. Someplace within, say, a fifty-mile radius.”
“Funny, I had that figured out myself.”
“When that cute little jg briefed us on the SOE, she said that the head guy’s name is Mohenjo Daro. That rang a bell, but I couldn’t say for what. I checked on the web yesterday while we were being entertained by our Indian allies, and I found that Mohenjo-Daro is in fact the name of an ancient city. Across the border in Pakistan, actually. The name is also given to the culture that archaeologists associate with the city—the kind of potsherds and—”
“Come on, move it along!”
Harry smiled. “We’re not going anywhere until we find transportation, which isn’t going to happen until there’s a little life around here.”
She told him quickly, a little acidly, of how she had got her rent-a-plane at Trincomalee. “You go on the web for phone numbers, you wake people up!”
“We’ll see.” In fact, Djalik was on a cell phone in the plane at that moment, calling business contacts of Harry’s to get a line on executive—for which, read “armored and protected”—auto rentals. “Okay, I’ll skip the fascinating archaeology bits. Heart of the matter is that Mohenjo-Daro was a damned early site of Hinduism—sort of the Hindu Ur.”
Mary didn’t respond. Maybe she didn’t know Ur.
“So it appears that the head of our cult or terrorist group or whatever the hell they are took a name that has associations with archaic, aka fundamental, Hinduism. So there’s an interest in religion and an interest in the past there. Am I boring you?”
“Oh, no, my eyes always cross at this time of night.”
“A couple dozen or so Ks from Patiala, there’s a site that’s never been dug but is believed to be the only other example of the Mohenjo-Daro culture. I picked it off the India Survey map.” When she said nothing, he said, a little irritated, “Well, it’s a start.”
“We’re going to an archaeological site?”
“It would be an archeological site if anybody started digging, but you can’t. It’s privately owned.” Harry grinned down at her. “By SOE.”
“How come if you’re so smart, the Indians didn’t do this days ago, being as they’re smart people, too?”
“My guess is the SOE has people whose job is to block exactly that kind of smart—screwing up intelligence, dicking with communications between departments, telling people with good ideas that their ideas stink. SOE is into chaos—they’re really good at it.”
Later, Djalik came to the hatch and handed out cups of hot chowder from the minuscule galley, and he said, “DelArmCo’s got a Humvee they’ll let us have with a driver for seven-fifty a day US. They take plastic.”
“How quick?”
“They gotta wake up the driver and get him to come in from someplace, plus he’s gotta drive here from Delhi.”
Harry looked at Mary. She shrugged and muttered something about Harry’s having the only idea in town.
“Get on it.”
Hawkins completed his turnover with Madje. The remnants of the Indian loyalists had ceased attempting to fight and were now too far north to offer any more resistance to the SOE ships, which were standing in with the coast.
“I heard the admiral order us to use the full resources of the battle group,” Hawkins said.
Madje pointed at the screen. “I’m going to be selling used cars for the rest of my life,” he said.
“Only if we fail,” Hawkins said. There was something scary about Hawkins now, too.
It was all scary. Madje had never imagined that he would be in a battle, or that he would have to choose between loyalties to do his job. But he was committed. He wrote out a message for the comm shack to encrypt.
Hawkins took it out into the corridor and walked to sick bay. He walked past the nurse’s station and straight to the admiral’s side.
“I want to send this,” he said.
Rafehausen read it. He smiled, or at least Hawkins read that fractional movement as a smile.
“That’s—what—put—him—there—for.” Rafe nodded. “You’re—my—TAO.” He closed his eyes.
Hawkins watched him trying not to notice that one of the alarms on the admiral’s instruments had just gone off, hoping the man was only asleep. As a corpsman rushed past him, Hawkins turned and walked back aft to the comm shack.
Captain Fraser of the Picton read the message with a mix of alarm and elation. He swung his feet off his rack and slugged back the coffee his steward offered him, pulled a jersey over his head and walked out on the bridge. Dawn was still a few minutes away, but the sky to the east was a pale gray with some pink in it. The sea was almost dead calm.
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.”