The haze-gray helicopter appeared black in the hot, rainy night, moving only a few feet off the water toward the darkened aircraft carrier ahead. Despite the heat and the oppressive humidity, the heavy noise of the blades and the vibration of the fuselage lulled Alan to a semi-sleep that was shot through with brief, fleeting dreams. It seemed the same as the last flight in Christine; no wonder he kept seeing his father’s gesture as his A-6 began the short plunge to this same ocean. Again and again, in fragmented dreams, Alan relived that moment. Then, as his father’s plane hit the water for another nightmare repetition, his own body felt impact, and he snapped awake. The chopper was on the deck; he could feel the change in the pitch of the engines. He looked out the small porthole and saw the folded wings of an S-3 in the dim, red light.
The aircrewman came over to help him out of the rig that took the place of a crash seat. No luxury for military passengers, not even for the sake of safety. Alan fumbled with the seatbelt and the aircrewman tugged it free; Alan stood, tried to straighten, felt his body as a clumsy machine, heavy with fatigue. Groggily, he noted the pilot coming back into the main cabin: a woman. She glanced at him with unconcealed interest. He picked up his sea bag and a helmet bag: his father’s helmet. She nodded to him as he passed.
“Nice landing,” he said.
“Heard you slept through it.” She had night-vision goggles flipped up on her helmet, only the mouth and the swell of hips suggesting a woman. Her voice, however, was distinctly female despite a huskiness that should have made it seem masculine but certainly didn’t.
“That’s a nice landing in my book,” he shouted, although he trailed away at the end, failing to reach her over the flight-deck noise.
A petty officer from Air Ops poked his head into the fuselage.
“Lieutenant Craik?”
“That’s me.”
“Follow me, sir.”
What was the protocol for saying goodbye to a female COD pilot? No matter; she was already gone. Alan stepped from the chopper and became any new arrival; he needed help to cross the deck at night. He followed around the S-3, waited in a rush of heat as an F-18 powered toward the waiting catapult, and followed his guide briskly down a catwalk to a hatch in the 0–3 level, where he could see nothing in the darkness until the petty officer opened the inner hatch.
He could smell JP-5, and unwashed bodies, and fresh food. Back to his father’s world. Back to work. Home.
And to a war, it seemed.
Ouspenskaya liked the room. She liked quality; she liked luxury. She had been raised in luxury, a child of the nomenklatura, and she in fact felt that luxury was her due. This sitting-room in a hotel suite whose windows looked over the Place Vendôme was precisely what her sense of worth required.
“I am so pleased,” she said to the man who stood waiting for her. She crossed a figured carpet of admirable thickness to take his outstretched hand, her eyes carefully avoiding the steel canes on which he supported himself. “Mister Shreed. Such a vast pleasure.”
She wished she hadn’t said “vast.” Her English was rusty; the proper word was “great,” of course. On the other hand, a little comic opera “Russianness” tended to disarm Americans, as if anyone who spoke poor English couldn’t really be a threat. Shreed made no sign; he smiled, made proper sounds about sitting and all that, and she had time to think he was a good-looking man and it was unfortunate about the canes, and then to think that perhaps the misfortune was in her own head because he was said to be successfully married with several children, so the accident hadn’t affected his sexuality. Not that she was interested in that; anything with Shreed would be counter-productive for both of them. Perhaps the woman with him was his mistress, although there was nothing about such a relationship in the file. She was his deputy, a rather formidable intelligence professional (although no more formidable than Ouspenskaya herself, she thought with some satisfaction).
“May I introduce Mrs Baranowski,” Shreed said. The woman leaned forward and they smiled at each other. Each probably had the same thought: they looked as if they had been turned out by the same fashion house, both in rather severe, skirted suits, both with a silk scarf adorning neck and one shoulder. (Indeed, Sally Baranowski was thinking, Frick and Frack.)
There was some casual talk, coffee, a few informal remarks about the arrangement that was to be made. Sally Baranowski talked about what a “virtual thinktank” was; she was careful never to make the Russian feel that she was nyetkulturnyi for not understanding the Internet. “We will be funding an office here with an executive director and a facilitator—actually an expert in computer communications—and when it’s useful, maybe once a year or so, we’ll actually gather here face-to-face. Paris is such a swell place for that! But mostly, we’ll be meeting in a place that doesn’t exist.” She smiled.
Shreed leaned toward her. “We’ll supply the hardware and the expertise. We laid the figures out in the contract.” He waved a hand. He was like many Americans, she thought, as arrogant as a stage magician: wave a hand, and things appeared—rabbits, colored scarves, computer networks. “Now—as for the classified protocol.”
There was a little silence. They had finally got down to business. Ouspenskaya could not restrain a smile; seeing it, Sally Baranowski smiled, too. Ouspenskaya thought, No, my dear, you are wrong; I am not tipping my hand. I want you to know how this pleases me. I have nothing to hide, in fact.
“It’s understood,” Shreed said, “that one of our people is to dismantle—’rebuild’—Efremov’s computer and bring the drive and some other parts back to Langley. Our technicians are also to have access to your mainframe dump under what I think are stupidly narrow limitations, but your boss won’t budge. Am I right, he won’t budge?”
She nodded. Actually, it wasn’t the poor Director, it was Internal Affairs.
“That almost certainly means we won’t find anything. Your people will purge the mainframe before we ever see it. That’s really stupid. Tell your boss I used that word—’stupid.’ He can pass it along to Internal Affairs.” They smiled at each other.
“We want you to find everything,” Ouspenskaya said. “We want Efremov.”
“So do we. Let’s talk about that. The thinktank business is okay, is it—do we agree how that works? No problem with the protocol?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Okay. So, Efremov—that’s why we’re here. Let me tell you what we’ve got; then you tell me what you’ve got. Okay?”
“Okay.” She giggled. She had never used the word before.
Shreed went through it very quickly because in fact the Americans knew very little. It went without saying that they knew who and what Efremov was; what they didn’t know was what he had been doing over the last year, or where he had disappeared to, or where he was now. “But we wonder if he had a connection with the Stitkin Building massacre a couple of months ago.” He looked a question at her.
“No question of it,” Ouspenskaya said. “But we don’t know what the connection was.”
Shreed’s eyes narrowed. He was ready to suspect her. Well, of course, they would always be ready to suspect each other.
Ouspenskaya told them of Efremov’s false agents (a slightly edited version; there were real agents to be protected), the dummy corporation, the four real agents run from the office in the Stitkin Building. “The attack was very professional and very thorough. We still entertain the idea that it was aimed at Efremov by an enemy.” She told them about Malenkov, the gangster father of his mistress. “We pulled him in and put the screws to him.”
Sally Baranowski smiled. “The car bomb in Platinka? We thought that might be government work.”
“It was excessive; truly, we didn’t intend all that. But you put out a request, it gets misinterpreted—” They all agreed that they knew how those things happened. “At any rate, Papa Malenkov was suitfully—suitably, forgive me—suitably impressed. He insisted the massacre was not his work. Gave us some proofs. Fairly persuasive. We’re keeping him on the ice, still.”
Shreed held out a plate of wickedly delicious chocolates and said, “How deep is your so-called mafia into intelligence matters, anyway? I’ll be blunt; we had a feeler from Malenkov about the time the massacre happened. Is he into SVRR?”
“God forbid he or any like him should be. What did he offer you?”
“He never got a chance; the attack happened, then the car bomb, and we figured you were after him. That’s partly what made us curious about Efremov and the massacre.” He wouldn’t say what else had made them curious. She supposed—as they wanted her to, and as she knew they wanted her to—that they had a mole inside SVRR. She took two chocolates and smiled the plate away. Shreed passed the plate to Mrs Baranowski and said, “Okay. I interrupted you. Efremov—the massacre—?”
“He had disappeared a few days before. You know that? Dropped out of sight—’off the screen,’ as I heard it said. We have procedures, as you well know, to monitor movements—exits from the country, and so on—but they are not what they once were, and Efremov is a master. We have not found him. Most certainly, he was not killed in the massacre; we have identified all those. Nothing of his has been touched—bank accounts, flat, friends, a personal sort of safe house he maintained in London. Nothing. It is as if he is dead.”
“But no body.”
“Exactly.”
“We had a report he was seen in the Sudan,” Sally Baranowski said. It was a probe, less a statement than a question.
“We have that one, too!” Ouspenskaya countered. The two women smiled at each other. Was it never possible, Ouspenskaya wondered, to eradicate this faint whiff of gender—the two women in their identical costumes, the man between them like a judge? “We have also reports from North Korea, Kinshasa, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and God knows where else. None verifiable, none top reliability.”
“The Khartoum sighting was given a B-plus,” Mrs Baranowski said. “We think he’s alive.”
“So do I.” She made a face. “Without evidence, I think he is alive. He is either running from whoever made the massacre, or he made it himself.”
“Okay, let’s talk turkey,” Shreed said. (Ouspenskaya spent some seconds contemplating talk turkey.) “Why would he destroy his own front company?”
“Two possibilities: somebody is on to his fiddle—do you say ‘fiddle’ or is that British?—to his trick, his—”
“Scam,” Sally Baranowski said.
“Scam, thank you. Somebody is on to his scam, and he is destroying the evidence, or—he has some great scheme to be a traitor to his country and go elsewhere. For money. For money and nothing else, because Efremov had no political ideals, I assure you, one of those good communists so long as communism was in power, then not so good. And, after all, we know he was on the scam—a vast number, I insist, of false agents, for whom he had collected money for up to nine years, but mostly since perestroika.”
Shreed looked down at his joined hands; he might have been reading from them. “He sees the end of communism coming; he decides it’s going to be every man for himself—the Soviet idea of capitalism—and he builds an escape mechanism. He needs money to do it; he gets the money by creating fake agents. I suppose you’ve checked his movements over the last five years or so? Okay. Nothing suggestive? No meets with a new nationality or a new kind of person?”
Ouspenskaya spread her hands. “Most of his agents were run at long distance, many through cutouts. Of course he went abroad sometimes, but a senior officer of his kind has great leeway. Even in the old Soviet Union. Well, he was surveilled sometimes, of course. Nothing was reported. Nothing. And you—?”
“He didn’t make contact with us. If it was just money, you’d think he’d come to us. He didn’t. Absolutely. You have to take this one on faith.”
She smiled. “He hated Americans.”
“Oh. Mmp. Well, some people do. Okay, so let’s say he put himself on the market and he found a buyer without you knowing it. Or us, for that matter. Sally, we checked the whole shooting-match, didn’t we? Yeah. Our surveillance gave us nothing; we made him when he was posted in Belgium years ago, if I remember, and a couple of times in France and Italy, but we didn’t get zip.”
Zip, she thought. What is zip?
“So, let’s say he found a buyer. What did the buyer buy? Intelligence? Sure, why not; he must have had stuff he could lay his hands on, either transmit or just carry out. No problem. But he wants to go, really cash in, so what he’s going to take is potential—future intelligence. Am I right? Sally?”
“He’d have to turn his own agents.”
“Hmm. That is not unthinkable,” Ouspenskaya said. “From the beginning, I am struck by the isolation of the four agents—now I will tell you this; this is why we have met, to share this—four agents who were isolated away from all the others. From the other real ones and from the other fakes. He took four agents and ran them through the dummy corporation that was the object of the massacre. And they were the only agents run through this dummy corporation.”
“And so,” Sally Baranowski said, “he could have engineered the massacre himself to hide the four he meant to take with him to his new bosses.”
Shreed threw his head back. “Yeah, but do the agents know? How does he do it? We haven’t made him out of Russia in the last year. Mrs Ouspenskaya—?”
“Darya, please.”
“Had he been out?”
“Only once, and as it happened he was surveilled—a trip to Italy, several cutouts we know about, all authentic and still in place.”
Shreed’s eyes widened. It was like being looked at by a hawk, the effect emphasized by his eyebrows, his raptor’s nose. “In fact, what you describe is a demonstration trip. He knows he’s under surveillance, so he does everything by the book and says, ‘See what a good boy am I!’ In fact—who ordered the surveillance on him?”
“The usual, I suppose.”
“Check it out. I bet he ordered it himself. He’d do it through an office, hide his identity, but it might be in his computer. Sally, note that for the tech people. Okay! Yes, I see it! Out he comes—he’s got a cache somewhere, money and documents; he gets out of Russia without leaving a trail—difficult but not impossible. Bribes, et cetera. Then he’s out and—? And what?”
“He turns his four agents,” Ouspenskaya said.
“Just like that?”
Sally Baranowski turned toward Shreed but leaned a little toward Ouspenskaya; it was the first time that she had hinted that she and Ouspenskaya were allies. “The important thing is he has to try to turn the agents; Darya’s right. Whether he did or not is beside the point. He has to travel and he has to get in touch.”
“No—” Shreed was looking at the ceiling again. “Don’t get ahead of me. I grant you he has to try to turn his agents. But what if they say no?” He looked at her, then at Ouspenskaya. “Huh? What do you do with an agent you’ve been running for years and you want to turn him and he says no?”
Ouspenskaya was shaking her head slowly. “You cannot go back.”
“No, you sure can’t! You can’t just turn around and say, Oh, well, if you won’t change bosses, then I guess this won’t work, so I’m going home. No way. And you can’t say, Oh, well, I’m sorry you won’t join me, but keep this to yourself, will you, please? Uh-uh. If he says no, you go black.”
They all thought about that. Sally Baranowski said, “I suppose we don’t know who the agents were?”
Ouspenskaya made a scandalized sound. “You think we are infants? No. We have a few tantalizing bits. Nothing to identify them.” She took a dramatic pause. “One was an American.”
To her surprise, Shreed only nodded. “You are not surprised,” she said.
“Nothing surprises me. No, I thought it might be the case because you came to us so fast. Well, that’s interesting. See, a thing like this you’d have to do all at once—you say he dropped off the screen four days before the massacre. That says to me that the massacre came at the end, not the beginning—he did it when he was committed. He already knew that he couldn’t go back. So what does that tell us? That his agents would go with him to the new boss. Or some of them would. Sally?”
“It could be that he wasn’t interested in the agents.”
“No, no,” Ouspenskaya cried, “why else set up the false corporation for them?”
“But he had to be willing to go without them—if there was no going back, he had to be ready for all four to turn him down.”
“Willing, yes—but what he desired was to have them all turn. Absolutely, I think this.” She reached for her coffee cup, saw that it was empty. “But perhaps it is not so certain that the massacre waited for the agents’ response. Maybe it was all beforehand.”
“We’ll pretend it wasn’t.” Shreed grinned; the effect was somehow wolfish. “The massacre gives us a date certain for the approach to the agents—assuming he waited for their response, anyway. Sally, we want to put AB on deaths in the days before the massacre. How many days had he been missing? Six. Okay. In his area of operations, which we take to be the old Western Europe—a hell of a big area, I must say.” He looked at Ouspenskaya.
“He had several reassignments but kept some, um, contacts. He became quite a powerful man, quite a selfish one, too, always. Vain, you would say.”
“Okay, so we scan for deaths with any sort of security or intelligence connection—any rumor, any liaison, anything. What we’re looking for are possible agents who said no to him and got eliminated. If nothing reads, expand the search. If we get a hit, I want air passenger manifests and immigration databases scanned for names he’s known to have used—Darya, you’ll supply those?—plus scan for all incoming traffic from the Soviet Union. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Efremov never let luck happen.”
Shreed grinned again. “We’re all trained that way. But resources are finite—even his. What’s on our side is that he was probably acting alone. That’s awful hard to do. Awful hard.”
Ouspenskaya repressed a happy shiver. Not because of Efremov—to hell with Efremov, she thought. She was happy because for once she was on the side of luxury—endless computer networks, databases of unimaginable complexity, Paris hotel suites with deep carpets. She wondered if she should get herself a Paris flat.
“Will you lunch with us?” Shreed was saying. “The hotel brasserie is really quite good.”
“I should be enchanted.” And she was.
Alan made himself busy, sought work to make himself busy; when he wasn’t busy, he brooded, and the depression scared him, like standing in a doorway that opened on an abyss. He had become, he discovered, silent, even in this closed world of five thousand men, and only work would fill the silence. The silence hid a secret, however—depression—and it made him unwelcome: a silent man is a trouble to his shipmates.
There is no sorrow at sea; only work, or light conversation, or sleep. First encounters with Rafe and the rest of the squadron had shocked him because they had no place for his grief or his silence. Indeed, Rafe went right at him at the beginning of the first tanker flight after he got back. Rafe’s approach was direct and crude—vintage Rafe: “Don’t start bawling about your father, Spy; we need our oxygen.” Alan spent the rest of the flight stewing over it, appalled by the brutality. But his silences were resented even among his friends, he found; even the skipper took him aside to say something. “Everybody knows what happened, Craik. Everybody feels for you. But you can’t show it—know what I mean? It’s sand in the gears, you follow me? Lighten up. Give them a break—give yourself a break.”
Lighten up. Humor is the oil of civilization in a closed world like a ship at sea. Grief is self-indulgence; self-indulgence is grit in the machine. Alan tried to help the machine go. Mostly, he worked.
Around him, the imminence of war was palpable, a new tension in the ship its harbinger. The battle group sailed back and forth between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, transiting the Strait of Hormuz, with the Iranians and their Silkworm missile launchers thirteen nautical miles away. Then they bored holes in the Indian Ocean. Alan had to limit his air time; not really a conscious decision, but he was now too busy to fly while the strike-planning teams, of which he was now by definition a part, sweated in the mission-planning area, often laboring all night on a target that the Pentagon would take off the official target list the next morning. The skipper had asked the ops officer to put him in a tanker any night he asked, but the fact was that now his job was in the intel center, not the air; if he was not in mission planning, he was making another intel officer lose sleep. Better that Alan lose the sleep; his dreams were bad, anyway. Not that he remembered them: only the bitterness they left behind, a waking sadness to greet another day. It had to be his father’s death, he knew, yet he could pull no details from the dreams, no explanations from his depression; even most of that mission in Christine was blank now, gone from his memory. He remembered the enemy aircraft, the attack on Christine and the triumph as Rafe caused the bandit to splash. Then there was nothing, until he was on the FLIR, watching his father’s last salute. Was this healing? Or was it withdrawal? Was something hiding from him in those missing minutes?
The life of the ship became familiar again, its size and its intricate complex of spaces so normal he might have been walking the streets of a hometown. He found himself eating more often in the wardroom—the Clean Shirt, as it was called, because khakis were required there, as compared to the Dirty Shirt, where a flight suit was acceptable—and spending more time with the nona viators, even making some friends in the ship’s company. To his surprise, he found that he could eat at the Captain’s table, although the Captain himself was rarely there; more surprisingly, there were always spaces at the Captain’s because of some misplaced awe. (To be sure, he was the only j.g. who chose it; that kind of awe no longer scared him.)
Mission planning became a welcome change. Lives depended on what was done there. As a squadron intel officer, his role was often limited to sharpening pencils and making coffee, because, although he had ideas about tactics, he had enough sense to realize that he did not have the experience to give the ideas credibility. Still, after a couple of weeks, he began to see that even some of the most senior officers believed too easily the information that splashy, graphics-heavy computers gave them about threat envelopes and enemy SAM site locations. Yet, he knew, some of the information in the computers had to be months, even years out of date. He began to check this flashy information, not from any need to push himself forward, but to fill the silences of his waking mind: the dread of time to think pushed him to work when there seemed no more work to do. Now and then, he flew.
He read and read; old pubs on Iraq, put together back when the Iraqis were allies, not enemies; every message that he could find, even releases on how intelligence databases had been generated. It was dull work, but it required concentration, and Alan poured that concentration over his grief the way another man might pour alcohol. He slept little, moved in a fog of fatigue.
He never found any shortage of data; pages and pages of new SAM sites discovered or deleted by various means; estimates of enemy strength at airfields; changes to the target list: it went on and on. He began to listen to other Als and to his seniors, to note that some data was held in higher esteem than other; some information was discounted; some went unread from day to day. Why? Time, he found, and laziness and ignorance. And excess itself—too much data, so that you had to look for reasons to deep-six some of it. Some data conflicted with other data; shit-can it. Some data explained its own derivation and so was more suspect or more solid; ignore the suspect. Some simply appeared like the voice of God, and so was taken on faith or heard as mere noise. Some Als, he found, read all the traffic and tried to make sense of it, while others simply adopted a single source—usually CIA or CNO—and used it as their bible and convenient filter.
Alan spent weeks, after hours, comparing these externally produced bits of data with his own “ground truth,” which he extracted from those systems within the battle group that had the capability to sense enemy radars and installations without aid from outside intelligence. If, for example, a SAM site in southern Iraq lit up an EA-6B Prowler, the Prowler would fly along the border, attempting to take as many cuts off the enemy radar as possible. With a little work, and a bit of computer support, the intelligence officer for the Prowler squadron would reconstruct the site’s location within a few hundred meters. That was ground truth—not last year’s truth; not Washington’s truth; the truth, now—ground truth.
Alan made himself a big chart. He listed, in erasable marker, every SAM site. He color-coded them by source of information: red was a site identified by units of the battle group itself, like the Prowlers; CIA information was black; DIA blue. Every agency and producer of intelligence received a color, so many sources that Alan ran out of markers. Then he noted which producers tallied with the ground truth of the red marker. He kept score.
The Prowler AI noted that Alan had become his best customer—indeed, virtually his disciple for EA-6B electronic intelligence (ELINT)—and so they became acquaintances, like businessmen in the same trade. Harry O’Neill was a tall, heavily built black intellectual from Massachusetts who spoke like a Kennedy and thought like a Reagan Republican. In the strange, insular logic of shipboard life, he was called “Creole,” a nickname he never commented on, but he had a number of mocking voices and personae, one African, one a ripoff of a Saturday Night Live character (“Isn’t that special!”), that suggested comedy used as a defense. Early on, he said to Alan in the African character, “What you do with all this good data, Bwana?”
“I put it on a chart, Kimo Sabe.”
“Chart? Bwana make chart?”
“Come on.”
Alan led him to the squadron intel space, where he kept his masterwork turned face to the wall. He whipped it around and explained the color coding.
“You mean, old chap,” Creole said, shifting abruptly into 1930s-movie Brit, “all the red ones are mine?”
“Well, they’re based on your Prowler data, yeah.”
“Isn’t that special!” Creole grinned down at him. “Our chart, old chap. My data, your magic markers. Mmmm?”
Creole had the respect of his squadron; his minute and technical knowledge of electronic warfare stood out even in a squadron of EW professionals. He had neither the need nor the urge to fly; he had earned his place, and he knew it. Alan suspected that life would be a living hell for his replacement unless he had the same math and computer science degrees that made Creole so formidable. But Creole also had a surprising grounding in both Alternative (which Alan liked) and Gangsta Rap (which Alan despised) and an extensive collection of CDs that he was quick to lend. Many of them were signed; Creole admitted a little hesitantly that he had a sister in the biz. The New Orleans/Seattle/LA music scene got very real as Creole opened up and began to trust him.
After two weeks, they had plotted the consistency of several sources of information, and at the same time proven the worth of the battle group’s own efforts to collect the locations of enemy radars and SAMs. Alan found himself able to speak with more assurance to his strike team; he explained to them why certain sites were known facts and others merely suspected. Alan took Creole to the CAG AI to explain “their chart.” They hauled the now rainbow-colored chart to the office and, after a brief speech from Creole—no funny voices, no characterizations—announced that they had begun to doubt some of the outside sources of intelligence.
The CAG AI was sitting at his desk with a single light turned up on its gooseneck to illuminate the chart. “You two just decided to do this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because in your many years as strike planners, you had learned how much smarter you are than the Office of Naval Intelligence and CIA?”
Alan looked at Creole, saw that Creole was looking for a way to bail out, and said in a joking voice, “Not much smarter, sir.”
The CAG AI looked at the chart—weeks of ESM cuts, triangulations, message-traffic data comparisons. Now, CAG Als are the senior intel officers in an airwing, and they are therefore busy people. They run the airwing’s mission-planning effort, and they manage the very junior Als and act as staff officers to their airwing COs. They have to review every completed strike package, monitor the performance of eleven young officers and thirty very smart enlisted intelligence troops, and play airwing staff politics, all at the same time. Very little of their time is taken up with the “business” of intelligence—including comparing data flows.
Lars Nordheim was thirty-nine, overweight, and exhausted. He knew he was going to stay exhausted until they turned for home. During this planning phase for a real war, it took most of his day and part of his night just to review and critique the airwing’s intel products; the last thing he needed was to hear from two j.g.s about a huge, man-hour-intensive project that they had created without his permission. But—He looked at their chart. But.
“You guys not have enough to do?” he muttered.
Alan glanced at Creole. Creole made an Ollie face: Look at the fine mess you’ve got us into! “It was—spare time. Sir,” Alan said.
“Spare time!” Nordheim rolled his puffy eyes toward Alan. “You’re the one who flies, am I right?”
“When I can. Not so much now that we’re so, ah, busy.”
Nordheim muttered, as if to himself, “Not so much now we’re so busy, Jesus H. Christ!” He looked up at Creole. “You’re the Prowler AI, right? This is your data. Right? You’re the unimpeachable source?”
Alan was sure Creole was going to bag it then, but Creole surprised him by saying, “That’s good data, sir! My guys get good stuff. I believe in what’s on that chart.”
Nordheim rolled back. The light was on the chart and the two junior officers; only Nordheim’s hands were lighted, the rest of him in shadow. “Boys,” he said quietly, “boys, so do I. This is good. This is really good.” As if for himself, he switched to a Bogart imitation; Alan had the giddy sense that he had caught it somehow from Creole. “Really, really good, Shweetheart.” And then out again into the no-nonsense voice of the CAG AI. “It shows dedication, and it shows a basic understanding of what intelligence is all about. The awful truth is, fellows, I like it so much that I’m going to take the credit for it.” His face was invisible to them, but Alan sensed that the man was grinning. “I’m going to march into CAG with that chart and tell him that I ordered the study done and that all of our strike groups will use these data sets from now on, and that two officers and two enlisted will be assigned to periodically check the data.” He rolled his body forward and his face came into the light—weary, puffy, excited. “See, boys, you don’t need credit with the CAG, and I do. You, on the other hand, need credit with me, and with your skippers, and I’ll see to that. Any problems?”
Something about a man who told you to your face that he was stealing your project made Alan smile. Creole looked more relieved than anything else; he later admitted that he had dreaded the whole thing. They all shook hands. Still, before he left the office, Creole said to Nordheim, “O’Neill, sir. Prowler AI. My skipper is Commander Santana. Credit where credit is due, old chap.” He grinned. Nordheim grinned. Alan was startled by the crassness of it: So that’s how you do that.
POI Sheldon Bonner slouched along the passages to his bunk. Air ops were still going on, so people were awake in many of the spaces, but it wasn’t like daytime; the heads were pretty empty, the snackbar quiet, with the depressed and sour air of a bus station somewhere in the goddam Midwest at about two in the morning. Bonner had been drinking coffee the whole watch; the idea of more of it made him feel as if his bodily fluids had all turned to vinegar. He bought a Coke from a machine and sipped it, leaning against the bulkhead.
“Hey, Bonner,” a chief named Fink grunted.
“Fink.”
“You finish that beach stuff?” Fink was senior to him in the photo lab, always on edge about getting done, having the officers get on him, not having done something just right.
“It’s drying.”
“How’d it look?”
“It looked like a beach. I’m not a fucking PI.”
Fink went away, frowning. Bonner shook his head and drank more Coke. Fink was a perfect example, he thought, of why you didn’t want to make chief. All the problems and none of the excuses of the rest of us.
He lay on his bunk and leafed through a catalog for bass boats. Page after page gleamed at him—boats with metallic flecks in their paint, boats with seats that went up and down, boats with two motors, boats with three. He could picture them all on the St John’s. In his fantasy, he was at the wheel, his son in the other seat. They’d be jump-fishing—hopping from patch to patch of screaming gulls, casting into the roiled water where baitfish were being gobbled by big fish, hooking one or two, then hopping to the next. He smiled. It would be great.
He was spreading the word about the bass boat he was going to buy. He was spreading the word about how hard it would be to make the payments, about maybe having to settle for a second-hand boat, about maybe taking a second job on the beach to pay for it. The word would get around. If NCIS ever checked on Sheldon Bonner, they’d hear that he barely got by, and the boat was a luxury he really had to save for.
The truth was, of course, that the boat would be bought with cash from a guy in Delray who handled funny deals for a price and didn’t talk about it. He’d draw up a dummy contract, even give Bonner a dummy coupon book for dummy payments. Dummies for dummies, was Bonner’s way of looking at it.
Life had been quiet since the Iran raid. Bonner had hit the beach in Dubai and Bahrain; there had been no sign for him either place. Lay low, he told himself. A job well done. Carl would have deposited his money in Switzerland, direct; meanwhile, his monthly payments would be piling up in Florida in cash, ready for him when he got home. He dealt strictly in cash at home. He had nearly forty thousand dollars hidden in his house. Nobody would ever find it. Nobody, he was pretty sure, would ever look. Life was good.
Just now, beyond the photographs of gleaming boats throwing rooster-tails of bow wave, he was seeing the words offshore investment. He was a traditionalist, thoroughly locked into an admiration for the Swiss and the secrecy of Swiss banking. Still, he had seen a lot of enthusiastic crap about offshore investment in this English newspaper somebody had. Offshore meant the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, one of those funny-money places where half the government were drug dealers. If they were as good at secrecy as the Swiss; if they’d deal in cash; if they’d deal—He fell asleep.
Lars Nordheim found himself eating a slice of really decent pumpkin pie in the Dirty Shirt with Alan’s skipper.
“Special occasion?” Nordheim said, holding up a forkful of the pie.
“Halloween, Lars,” the skipper said.
“Oh, yeah,” Lars said. “Halloween. I remember Halloween, back on earth.”
“How’s my boy doing?” the skipper asked after two minutes of companionable silence. “Craik.”
“Works like a sonofabitch.”
“He hasn’t had a hop in two weeks.”
“Isn’t his job,” Lars said.
“You tell him to quit?” the skipper asked.
“No, sir. I told him to remember what his designator is.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He’s a smart kid. I think he finds intelligence a little dull.”
“Let him go flying tomorrow?”
“Sure, sure, he’s earned it. Besides, we’re out of range of our targets, right? CAG intends to call off all strike planning at noon and give everybody thirty-six hours.”
“Subplot tells me there’s a Russian Viktor II in the area,” the skipper said.
“Maybe within two hundred miles, maybe on the moon. Sir, you know how that can work.”
“I got a hunch, Lars. I’m going to take my smart boy on a real live submarine hunt. Ain’t that many white whales left since the wall went down. Craik thinks all we do is give gas to F-18s and carry ELENT pods. I want to show him what we really do. He flies tomorrow, okay?”
Nordheim shrugged.
“Thanks, Lars.”
Every morning at seven-thirty, George Shreed had a half-hour meeting with his deputy. It was the best part of his day—coffee, a cigarette, complete mutual trust. Sally Baranowski would undoubtedly be happy to take his job someday, but she was devoted to getting it on her own achievement. He sensed no rivalry; rather, a shared ambition: the tide would raise both boats.
“Whatcha got?” he said.
“You look wrung out,” she said. “You okay?”
“Didn’t sleep very well.” In fact, he hadn’t slept at all, a frequent experience. His legs had been smashed almost thirty years ago; they could still feel great pain. He lit his first cigarette.
“Those things’ll kill you,” she said.
“Let’s hope so.”
She dropped into her chair with papers, appointment book and the morning briefing on her lap. In a field that was not yet really comfortable with women, no matter what the men said, she was a success, he thought. He wondered what it had cost her. Something in the more overt kind of femininity, he supposed. Sometimes she seemed false, too bright, too on, as if she had to show she could take it.
“How’s your little girl?” he said.
“Do I have a little girl? Is that the one whose picture’s on my desk?” She laughed too briskly. “She’s fine. Or so John tells me.” Another laugh. She caught his eye, sobered. “Tell me I’m not a shitty mother.”
“You know you’re not.” They stared at each other. “Anyway. Whatcha got?”
“Efremov. Yuri Efremov, the Russian who—”
“I remember.”
“AB thinks they got a match on his agents. Not one, but two deaths the night before the Moscow massacre. You remember, the Stitkin—?”
“I remember this one pretty well, Sally; just give me the top.”
“Okay. Brussels, the body of Emile Clanwaert turned up in the city trash; he was a facilities maintenance foreman at NATO HQ. Location of the body suggests he had been in a dumpster from the airport. Body probably dead more than twenty-four hours when found.” She shifted her legs, sipped coffee. “Then in Amsterdam, a woman was found in a park, throat slashed. Oh, Clanwaert had been garroted, by the way, professional job. The woman is in our files as probable sexual connection with the naval attaché at the Turkish embassy; I did a check with the Amsterdam resident and in fact she was carrying the Turk’s child, no question. She was a buyer for a textile company, so the intelligence connection has to be the boyfriend. That’s it.”
“Same night?”
“Well, the woman in Amsterdam is certain; she was found about four a.m. but the body had been dead some hours, no question. Clanwaert—Brussels—could have been plus or minus, but if you accept the best guesstimate, he was killed the same night. But plenty sufficient hours apart for somebody to fly from one to the other, probably. Maybe even drive.”
“Okay, good.” He swilled coffee. “That’s good. Scan all incoming flights in both—”
“They’re on it. I expect a report today.”
He smiled, put his hands behind his head. “What can I say? You’re making me superfluous.”
Alan awoke. There was a sense of something wrong. No, not wrong. Different. What? No bad dreams. On the contrary, a good dream. Of what? Nothing left of it now, but a feeling of great pleasure. Yes, a bit—fishing. He had been fishing. And—It was gone. But he had waked up happy!
“Woooo, big Spy!” Somebody was shaking him. “Time to rise and shine, dude. Rise and fly, man!”
He opened one eye. The pilot they called Surfer was leaning over him. Alan growled, “If you kiss me, I’ll scream.”
“Fuck you, Spy man. This is ASW. AY ESS DOUBLE YOU. Real subs for real people, okay? A Russian Viktor II is somewhere to the southeast, and we are going to beat the P-3 pukes on station, drop a million dollars’ worth of sonobuoys in the water, and tag his ass. Me pilot, Skipper copilot, Senior Chief Craw SENSO—you TACCO, dig?”
Alan threw on a flight suit for the first time in two weeks and wandered toward the Dirty Shirt. He ordered a big breakfast, poured a full mug of coffee, and upended a packet of cocoa mix into the coffee. “All the sugar and twice the caffeine,” he murmured happily. I’m happy! Sonofabitch! He was wolfing down pancakes loaded with syrup and part of a runny egg when a shadow fell across his plate, and a voice said, “Hey.”
“Hey, Rafe.” His mood collapsed. He was still pissed at Rafehausen.
“Thanks, yeah, I will sit down next to you.” Rafehausen plunked himself into the chair and banged his coffee cup on the table. “Heard the news?”
“There’s going to be a war, right?”
“The big news, shithead! Flag’s passed on our medals. Air Medal for Narc and me, goodies for you and Craw. For downing the Fantan, asshole!”
“Good. Nice. Congratulations.” He couldn’t make himself sound enthusiastic.
Silence. Rafe hated silence. Alan waited for him to leave. Instead, Rafe said, “Hey.” It was a sound that meant something more, the way other people might say, “May I ask you something?” or “By the way—”
“Hey, Rafe.”
“Uh—Narc says I was too rough on you that first flight when you got back.” This was an apology, remarkable in itself, yet still not enough for Alan; he should have said, “No problem,” and that would have been that; instead, he said, “Yes, you were.” Exactly the wrong thing to say. And when he said it, he turned his head and looked Rafe in the eyes. “Yes, you were.”
“Hey, man—” Rafe winced. “I was trying to pull you out of it.”
“Well—” Alan thought about it. “Well, you didn’t.” Then he laughed. The buoyant mood returned. “But something has. I feel great! The first time in—Forget it, Rafe; no problem. You did the right thing, maybe a little overkill in the frankness department, okay? All is forgiven. Congratulations on the Air Medal.” They shook hands. Rafe should have left then; it was a natural stopping place, a cue for him to leave. He lingered that moment too long that means you’ve lost your opportunity; Alan offered him a cigarette, and both lit up and blew smoke and Rafe, to his surprise, said, “You ever think about that night?”
“Oh, yeah. Except I’ve lost it. I’m blank from the time the Fantan went in until my old man went in.” There. He had said it. The first time. And to Rafehausen, of all people. “You don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t mind. No, no shit, I don’t—so long as there’s no, you know, heavy stuff.”
“It bothers me.”
“Naturally, he was your old man.”
“No, no, no, no, not that part. What happened bothers me. I mean—what happened? What are the chances of an A-6 getting hit with a MANPAD? And don’t tell me ‘shit happens.’ I’ve heard that so many fucking times I think it’s Navy doctrine.”
“Well, I’m not a suspicious type, Spy. But I’ll tell you something.” Rafe blew smoke sideways and turned his head away. “They knew we were coming. That bothers even me. They knew we were coming.” He mashed his cigarette. “You flying today?”
“ASW run.”
He whacked Alan’s shoulder. “Git ’em, tiger.”
Five minutes later, he was poring over the latest ASW data in the tiny, smoky ASW module, a cell ruled by two warrant officers who smoked without pause, drank fifty cups of coffee a day, and had grown so alike, as if they were a long-married couple, that Alan had trouble telling them apart. No AI before Alan had really ever set foot in their space that either could remember; he, however, had found it a quiet haven, was willing to put up with comments about “this kid who bums my smokes.” It was also a good place to pick up the wisdom of ASW work along with the technical skills. Like learning how to fish from two old fishermen.
Now, he looked at the day’s picture until it made sense, then looked at the grams coming in from an S-3 currently on station, until he felt he had the main shaft and auxiliary lines down. Only then did he accept a cigarette. It went very nicely with the end of his coffee.
The watch officer (Erskine? John?), without ever taking his eyes off the displays, growled, “A Russian Viktor II. Screaming loud—bad bearing in his drive shaft I’d say, although some people are coming up with theories about auxiliary power units, pumps, and the Kennedy assassination, I have no doubt. Anyway, the poor bastard should have gone home a long time ago.”
Alan finished the smoke. He didn’t say thanks; that never seemed to get him anywhere. Instead he said he’d get the buoys on datalink once he had contact. The watch officer (John? Erskine?) said he better. “Easiest sub that ever swam, young man. Just get her and send her to me.”
Alan knew damn well that this was aviator-speak; getting submarine contact from a plane was never all that easy—his back end could go down off the cat or his tape could be bad or his datalink could dump and he would have nothing to show. He also knew that (John? no, he thought this one was surely Erskine) probably was telling him that even with all that, this was comparatively easy and there would be no excuses.
“I picked you two tapes from my ‘no fuck-ups’ library,” the warrant said.
“Thanks, um, Erskine.”
“Fuck, you do know my name. I bet John a beer you didn’t!”
“Got a minute?” Sally looked better this morning, not as tense. She was leaning in George Shreed’s doorway with an unusual nonchalance.
“One minute, exactly; I have to go scold an asshole at State. What’s up?”
“We got a hit on the Efremov thing. The passenger manifests, Amsterdam and—”
“I remember; cut the crap.”
Sally said, “A man listed as P. Kazinski flew into Amsterdam two hours before the woman was believed killed. He flew out of Brussels sixteen hours later.”
“Into Amsterdam, out of Brussels. Car between? Let’s hope not. Four agents he had to contact—Amsterdam, Brussels—where did he fly to after Brussels?”
“Naples.”
“Naples! Holy shit. Naples. God, there’s a NATO facility there, too—Christ, all sorts of things—That would be three. There were four. How much time between Amsterdam and Brussels?” Shreed was utterly involved now; State was forgotten.
“We don’t know when Clanwaert was murdered. But if—”
“Find out when the trash was picked up.”
“I have them checking.”
“You’re good, kid, you’re really good!” He struggled toward the door. “Let’s pretend he had some time. Start checking air manifests to see if you can match a name outgoing Amsterdam with somebody incoming Brussels. He can’t have had too many fake passports—right?”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re fucked if he did.”
He was at the top of his game during prebrief; relaxed, prepared, and, thanks to Erskine, ready to talk lines and tapes and convergence zones and isothermic layers. Surfer gave him a little thumbs-up at the end, and he gulped a last cup of coffee, forced a piss, and headed for the flight deck. Only on the ladder to the 0–3 level did his failure hit him—a full bowel. He was going to be in an ejection seat for seven hours. The Aircrew No-Dump Two-Step. Oh, shit.
The flight deck was quiet. Only the Vikings and helos were flying today. And the day was breathtaking. There was the lightest of haze, right out in the comers of the distant horizon; the sea was a rich dark blue with perfect whitecaps, and the sky was a high arch of pale blue more suitable to upstate New York in deer season than the Indian Ocean in autumn. The low humidity, rare as water in the desert, made the day seem a holiday to every man on deck. Alan breathed the pleasant salt air deep and decided, as every sailor does three or four times a year, that life at sea was the only life for him.
Senior Chief Craw was inside the plane, preflighting his seat and making sure that he had a spreader pin and that the seat would function if it was needed as a parachute. Alan leaned in and looked quickly through his seat, stowed his bag and thermos, looked one more time in the bag for his tapes, and showed them to Craw, who nodded amicably. A spare tape almost certainly nestled in the Senior’s bag, too, a pet that never went bad. Alan leaned over and said, “Erskine says they’re both good,” and Craw nodded emphatically.
Alan began to go through checkoff without thinking about it: he taped the day’s frequencies and datalink info above his computer console, went down his mental checklist for the flight, and returned to the glare of the sun outside the plane with relief. It was stifling in the cockpit until the APU came on, and with it the airconditioning. He began to look at the control surfaces, the wings and stabilizers, then looked under the plane for the telltale pink of leaking hydraulic fluid. He checked the alignment of the landing gear piston, where Rafe had shown him; it had something to do with the possibility that the maintenance guys could put the part in backward or upside down, so you always checked to make sure that two black lines and a grease fitting lined up. Alan wasn’t sure that he had the whole story right, but he had a clear idea what it ought to look like, and Christine was up to the mark today. Alan was aware that a real TACCO would be checking about ten times as many things as he knew to check, but he also knew that this was really the pilot’s game and all he could do was contribute a little extra attention.
The sight of his name, stenciled under the TACCO window on Christine’s starboard side, caused a small response somewhere below his stomach; so did the schematized Fantan up near the nose—Christine’s kill.
It was the TACCO’s job to count the chaff and flare rounds that were loaded like bloated shotgun shells in the belly of the plane. From that perspective he could see that they had a full load of sonobuoys and a torpedo, as well. Craw stuck his head under the plane and yelled against the jet noise of the deck. “Sir? Can you tell me what we have in what hole, since you’re already down there?”
Sonobuoys come in two flavors, passive/active, which actually get down there and find a sub; and environmental, which test salinity and temperature and all of the demons that affect sound in water. Kneeling on the painful nonskid decking, Alan gave Craw a succinct count and saw him tick off his calls on a plastic sheet. Clearly, Craw already knew the answers; that was cool with Alan.
Alan climbed out from under the plane on sore knees. He contorted himself up the ladder and into his seat, then went back in the tunnel and installed a tape in the box, seated it firmly home, and strapped it in. Then he rapped his knuckles sharply against the housing. Luck. Drive the electromagnetic demons away. Whatever. He went back to his seat and wrote two strings of numbers on his screen in grease pencil.
And he was done. Ready to fly.
Craw poked his head up. “All set, sir?” he asked.
“Have we got time to go back down to ASW and get the final picture, Senior?”
Craw smiled. “Ayuh.” The skipper arrived just then and started his walkaround, and they nodded and shouted their errand as they passed. He waved. They ran. Through a hatch, down a ladder; Craw ducked through the ASW door, grabbed a mug of coffee, and lit a cigarette. Alan took one from Craw without a thought. He was on edge with a very pleasurable set of nerves suddenly. He was ready. The coffee was great. He smiled. Warrant Officer Erskine frowned.
“P-3 lost the fucking Viktor II. P-3 won’t take advice or order. P-3 thinks the Viktor’s still on the same course, going flat out at thirty-two knots due west, keeps running ahead and dropping buoys, the stupid shithead. All in the last hour.”
Where had Alan’s easy sub gone? Everyone packed into the little space looked grim. Alan knew Erskine’s rant about “straight-line ASW officers” who always kept looking ahead when subs might have turned. Alan read the status board; the P-3 was using up her gas and buoys fast, for nothing. He peered over Erskine’s shoulder, looked at the red and blue lines drawn on the chart, picked up a compass, ticked off a distance on the chart, put the needle where the carrier’s position had been marked at 0900 and put the other end down on the sub track. It neatly matched the lost contact position.
Alan caught Craw’s eye. Craw had been watching him. Erskine was dealing with the TAO—the Tactical Action Officer—a god who had drifted over to check on the sub and who now went back to his own domain, not a happy man. He wanted the Viktor II caught. Craw had caught Alan’s idea by professional telepathy.
Craw put a hand on Erskine’s shoulder.
“My Spy says Viktor turned when he detected the battle group. My Spy thinks he turned toward us. I say, Viktor’s got a fucking loud shaft, and we’ll get him, and I’ve a bottle of Irish Mist to back my man.” He shifted into a Leslie-Howard-as-Scarlet-Pimpernel voice. Christ, everybody’s doing it! “What say you?”
Erskine looked at Craw. He looked at Alan. “No bet. I already lost a beer on this guy.” He looked back at Alan. “My theory, too. TAO isn’t buying it. You go fly on our theory, and if you find the sub I’ll buy a round at the Highlander.” The Highlander was in Dubai; they were in the Indian Ocean. Well—
Alan felt a sudden urgency in his gut. He smiled. “One stop at the head, and I’m good to go!”
Then he was ready, strapped and plugged and taped and numbered. They were number two to go on cat three, the one over his stateroom. A KA-6 tanker powered up for the roll to the cat, and the cockpit temperature climbed again, going through one hundred and twenty degrees. Alan knew that this affected his chances of getting a good load from the computer, without which their only hope of ASW detection was spotting the Viktor on the surface. The jet blast deflector went up, protecting them from the worst of it, but as the KA-6 went to full power the heat seemed to rock the S-3 right through her skin. Alan was wearing a turtleneck, knowing that it would be cold when the aircon kicked in. Right now he was soaked.
The boat jerked under them; then a noise like a hockey puck on a wooden table, for a three count; then the hockey puck fell on the floor—thud—and the KA-6 was airborne. Alan sat back, watched the interplay between the skipper in the copilot seat and Surfer in the pilot seat. Then they were rolling forward. Punk—they stopped. Clank—the stirrup was linked up. They rolled about an inch and the nose went down. Like a cat, AG 707 prepared to spring, head down and hindquarters high. Surfer turned his head, all business, gave a crisp salute, and the Lady Christine flung herself down the deck and leaped into the air. She sagged off the cat, gave a little growl and stretched herself, then rose heavily, gravid with sonobuoys and torpedoes.
As the auxiliary power unit was shut down, he clicked the keyboard out of its up-and-locked position down across his knees, reached up for the big toggle over his head (right next to the big, lucite-covered red weapons-release switch), cycled it up, and watched the screen. Right on schedule, Christine told him that, like him, she was in a good mood today. He counted to sixty while looking at his watch for time, and just on the last tick of the second hand he brought the toggle sharply down. Counted to five. And up she came. No jilting little alphanumerics, just a solid read and a good system. In two more minutes, he knew he had a good back end.
He heard Surfer check in with the E-2 and get a sweet and sweet on his IFF, and Alan felt a jolt of awareness, a feeling of something uncompleted—Rafe, that morning, his father: what?—and then Craw said over the intercom, “Good to go, sir. Hey, Skipper, Mr Spy has seduced Christine and she’s being a real little lady. Ayuh. Good back end.” The skipper and Craw started a long and fairly technical ASW discussion, and he forgot whatever it was that had jolted him; he was hand-feeding data to Christine so she would show the right symbols, recognize distances, tie up with computers aboard the carrier. Only gradually did he realize that Craw was explaining Alan’s own theory of where the Viktor II had gone.
Skipper gave it a hearing. “This is from John? Or Erskine?”
Craw paused.
“From Mr Craik, sir. But I see it as likely, my own self. Erskine likes it too.”
“Alan?”
“Sir?”
“What’s up?”
“When the P-3 lost contact, the Viktor was at the edge of the battle group’s passive-detection range, sir. Group makes a lot of noise for him to hide in. I think he turned in, not out.”
“And you two believe that this ex-commie is going to head for the BG? Like, swing north and get ahead? What, just to be macho?”
“That’s about it, Skipper. I’ll stake my nonexistent reputation that he turned when he heard the BG. Okay, so he was already headed like, what, 160 relative to the BG. So if he wanted to run, he just keeps going. Plus, the P-3 is passive on him, so maybe he doesn’t even know he’s detected. And even if he does, what’s smarter than heading the other way, real slow? Skipper, I hadn’t thought about getting ahead, but that Viktor’s got to know we’re headed back to Hormuz, right? Predictable. So he heads north at three knots—that would make even his shaft fairly quiet. And he’s 170 off access from the search. That would place him right—here.” Alan keyed a far-on circle, timed it out with a heading, and dropped a puck on the computer for the skipper to read in front. Craw looked over his shoulder and started to set up a V-shaped sonobuoy pattern at a very wide dispersion.
The skipper studied his screen. “Okay, I like it. But it’s your ass if you’re wrong. Both of you.” He turned his head to give Craw a look, then Alan. The skipper had had a little chat from the TAO before he had come to the flight deck.
“TAO wants the sub found. Right now. Thinks the sub just might pass our location to the locals.” If we can find him, and keep him, the skipper thought, we prove ourselves again. If you flew S-3s, you spent a lot of time proving your worth. “And if we can, we’ll ping him. Alan, you’ve never done this. If we go active, we humiliate them, and they’ll go away, for a while. Till the next time.”
Alan thought that this was the longest speech he’d ever heard from the skipper. He finished the datalink setup. Skipper had the link set up in front. Buttons were pushed, data transferred; in five minutes Alan had a picture of every sonobuoy field that the P-3 had dropped. Off by fifteen miles or so, he thought; aloud, he said, “Deep?” and got a big grin from Craw in return. A grin? From Craw? In fact, Craw’s grin was constant now: he was loving it, a game, a sport, like fishing. Like his dream.
In the front, the skipper was whistling.
Surfer turned his head, brilliant Indian Ocean sky repeated in his visor and sunglasses—cyberpunk surfer boy—and raised his chin at Alan. “Hey, Spy?”
“Yeah, Surfer?”
“I hear you dole out decent coffee and cookies when you fly with Rafe.”
So, back to Alan the Stewardess, except nobody made the joke today. Craw took his, gulped coffee, said, “Wicked,” and never took his eyes from the screen. He was getting ready to drop his pattern.
“Beautiful,” the skipper said to Surfer. “Hold it for the drop.”
Craw had it set to manual. Most SENSOs, and almost all TACCOs, would drop a pattern on auto—unless it mattered. This mattered. Craw dropped each buoy as the skipper chanted the litany of time and distance and altitude. Alan, following them, managed to get each buoy up on the link as it dropped. Surfer criss-crossed the ocean as if the waves had lines engraved on them, powering into turns at low altitude so that he left the turn at exactly the same altitude as he entered.
“Gotcha!” Craw muttered, and then he cursed. The module agreed that they had had the sub just as the buoy hit the water. Then gone. Right at the east end of the V, the bearing muddy but looking north. Alan felt a surge of relief and then exhilaration; he laid a far-on circle and a track and shouted, “Go for it!” Craw pumped out more buoys, this time in a line, a straight barrier; and the Viktor, like a trout with the fly in its mouth, sprinted off downstream at high speed, right through the heart of the pattern and—and out of it again.
“Shit!” the skipper muttered. Craw said, “Sonofabitch.”
Ten minutes working. Fast or slow? Did he turn, or didn’t he? Does he want his periscope picture of an American carrier—A Souvenir of My Cruise, komrad. Look how close I got to the great Americans—or doesn’t he?
Alan balanced the probabilities and took his best shot: he tried having Viktor turn in the last stage of his sprint, and he put an L 4000 yards away where the Viktor would turn back toward the battle group—a macho Russian who was going to show these American pricks how vulnerable they really were. Craw accepted this with a nod; the skipper accepted it; John and Erskine back on the carrier, following their moves over the datalink, accepted it. The P-3, still flying and no smarter than before, late on the contour and surly from its lost contact, did not accept it and rained buoys on the 10, on the theory that the sub had gone straight after the sprint.
Craw laid an L-shaped ambush pattern that allowed some margin for error on Alan’s part. The minutes ticked away. Not enough margin if it was a big, big error. Alan chewed on a knuckle. Craw reached across and took the thermos and poured himself coffee without ever taking his eyes from the screen. Eight minutes. Where the fuck was he? Two minutes more, and it was a bath; the Viktor would either hit the line or he was miles away.
Eleven minutes from Craw’s last drop, the Viktor drove right through the middle of the ambush. Craw chuckled; the skipper turned and flashed a thumbs-up; Alan cheered. Surfer rocked to music only he could hear.
Craw kept the contact for five hours, playing his big fish with finesse. The carrier, its driver warned by John and Erskine, sprinted away, denying the Viktor his periscope photo for another thirty minutes.
ASW called them. Erskine (or John—it really ought to be John’s watch by now) said that he had the TAO standing by. The TAO, that god whom Alan had seen pass before him in the ASW office, spoke direct to the skipper, who opened the channel for everybody to hear.
“A-number-one job, 707. Let’s put the icing on the cake. Permission for active prosecution if he comes to periscope depth. We’re going to turn right into him. If he wants to pass underneath, let him go, it’s a free ocean. If he comes up to take pictures, give him a ping.” He meant, They’re not our enemy any longer, so don’t shoot—but remind them that we could if we wanted to.
Alan watched Craw set it up. It was clearly a simulated torpedo run, and the Viktor would know it. As the sub began to rise, Surfer turned cleanly and ran right up the invisible wake at 140 knots. Alan leaned forward, trying to see. Down there the great shape would appear suddenly, as if the water itself were going solid. Then, if they didn’t scare the shit out of the sub’s captain, the periscope would cut a V and the sub would take the photo—and Alan and Craw and the skipper and Surfer would have lost the game. In the last second.
“Right now!” Craw said.
At point-blank range, ten seconds after the Russian sub reached periscope depth, the sonobuoy splashed into the water.
The talk on board the CV later claimed that the sonobuoy actually struck the Viktor, but that was exaggeration. That buoy was at least fifty meters from the sub when it let loose its banshee screech, and seventy-five Russian submariners held their ears and cursed the sky, and the captain shouted, “Dive! Dive!”, or whatever unhappy Russians shout, and the Viktor went down like a rock—without its souvenir.
AG 707 one, Viktor zero.
The sun was setting over the Empty Quarter in a spectacular fireball as Surfer took a three wire and taxied to the edge. Alan cleaned up, a little smile on his face and his fingers no longer trembling (much), wiped the grease pencil off his screen, stowed his junk, found a missing pen, and retrieved a very loyal tape from the tunnel. He shut Christine down, unhooked, stretched and felt again that he was happy. So was the skipper. The squadron had two more planes on the Viktor now, and the squadron’s contact hours were spiraling up.
Surfer shut the plane down and said, loud in the silence, “Sliders for all. Come on, subhunters!”
“Subhunters, hell! Let the P-3 pukes hunt subs. I’ll have a slider with my subfinders,” the skipper barked. He actually said stuff like that. Like a football coach. And they loved it.
Crossing the deck, he put a hand on Alan’s back. “You done good, kiddo. I mean, good. Anything I can do for you?”
Alan stopped at the catwalk. “Give me a day on the Roosevelt before she goes home?” Their carrier had had its tour extended; Roosevelt was going home on schedule.
Alan wanted to talk to Peretz.
The hot wind on the flight deck blew their hair and whipped the fabric of their flight suits. The skipper looked at him for a moment. “Let me talk to Nordheim. We may need to find a cover-your-ass reason.” He started for the ladder, then turned back, put his fingertips against Alan’s chest to stop him. “I want you to think about changing your designator to aircrew. Think about it.” He grinned. “Anyhow—today was great. You seem to have got hold of yourself. Run with it.”
They went down into the ship.