Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

him?”

      Alan shouted from the kitchen, “You talking about me out there?” He appeared in the doorway, grinning. “Speak up, or I’ll think you’re analyzing me.” They stared at him a little guiltily, and the dog got up and sat there looking at him, too, and they all began to laugh.

      

      Jakarta.

      “Hey, Meester?” the voice said. Jerry whirled; that hand was awfully close to his pistol.

      “Back off, bud.” Jerry glared at the boy, but the boy, half Jerry’s size and weight, held his ground.

      “You memba?” He pointed up at a large sign in Dutch and English, Dutch still first, because this place went way back. ANHANGER ENKEL, MEMBERS ONLY.

      “I was a member here when your mom still worked here, bud.” Jerry leaned forward. “Asrama pekerja?”

      Malay was clearly not his mother tongue, but the boy smiled and nodded.

      “Go get the missus, then, bud.” Jerry waved his hand, palm down, the fingers snapping open, like the locals—dismissed, the gesture meant. Then he turned and walked to the huge teak bar, forty-five feet long and carved from a single tree. He waved to the bartender, a slight youth in a clean white shirt. There weren’t many customers, at least in the bar; the rooms upstairs could be full to bursting and you’d never know. George Shreed had waited for him in the spy’s seat, there next to the alcove, a private booth invisible from the door.

      “Meester?” It was the boy from the alcove.

      “Hey, bud, we’re done, you and me.”

      “You memba?” The boy was insistent, and it reminded Jerry of all the time and money he had spent here. He deserved better.

      “Go get the missus. You hear me, sport? The missus? Before I bop you one, okay?” He wondered if they had gone to membership cards. Had it really been so long since he was here? Maybe they had fucking plastic IDs with your photo. He felt someone enter silently behind him, back by the alcove, and he turned to see Hilda, the handsomest of the western blondes of his own day, coming through the door in sensible business attire—not what she’d worn back then, but still attractive.

      “Jerry, darling.”

      “Hilda. Aren’t you still too young to be trusted with the keys?”

      She laughed; she had natural lines at her eyes and mouth that meant she’d disdained surgery, but she looked good. Really good. “This man is a member. An old member who gets anything he wants, mengerti?”

      “Yaas, majikan.”

      “Drink with me?”

      “I can’t—I’m working.”

      He looked at her and winked. “You were too good for that sort of thing when we were twenty years younger. The missus never made you oblige the customers.”

      “But I’m the missus, now, and I have books to do. Come back—come back tomorrow and I’ll drink with you.”

      “I might have to do that, Hilda.” He smiled, gulped the rest of his gin and tonic, disappointed at one level, happy to be on with the job at another.

      Jerry gave her something like a salute. She had poise, like a runway model; maybe she had been a runway model before she crashed in Jakarta. He didn’t really know her, but he liked that she remembered him. Whores and spies; the oldest profession and the next oldest, or so the joke ran. He stopped in the alcove, still smiling because she had remembered him.

      

      Aboard USS Thomas Jefferson.

      Rafe Rafehausen pulled a stack of paper toward him, read again the paper on top, and then said, “Get me Admiral Pilchard at LantFleet. What the hell time is it there—? Yeah, you might catch him—try, try.” He took the next paper off the stack and started to read, rubbing his eyes and wondering if they’d last through the reams of reading on this cruise, thinking, Jesus, next I’ll need glasses, acutely aware again that his squadron years were over. He tried to concentrate on VF-105’s morale self-study and was relieved when a phone was shoved toward him and the lieutenant-commander said, “Admiral Pilchard.”

      Rafehausen threw himself back in the chair. “Sir! Captain Rafehausen, CAG on the—Yes, sir.” He grinned. “Nice of you to remember. Unh, kind of a personal matter, sir. If I say the name ‘Al Craik,’ will you—? Yes, sir, that’s the one.” He nodded his head as he listened. Pilchard was Craik’s self-appointed “sea daddy,” a kind of naval mentor and enabler. He swung, Rafe knew, between thinking that Craik was God’s little crackerjack prize and that he was a dangerously loose cannon, but he’d concern himself with Craik’s welfare if it was threatened. Right now, he was in the loose-cannon phase, and Rafehausen winced at the admiral’s sour tone. When the admiral had finished reviewing Craik’s recent performance, Rafehausen said, “He’s going nuts onshore and he needs something. I can’t take him back here yet—med officers won’t allow it. If there’s something he could do—”

      He looked up at the lieutenant-commander, winked as the admiral did some more talking about times in the past he’d gone out on a limb for Craik, and how sick he was of having Craik blue-sky things and act as if rules didn’t exist. When the admiral stopped talking, Rafehausen said, “Absolutely, sir!” He grinned again. “What I was thinking, I just received some correspondence about this experimental MARI det that was set up—that’s the det that Craik was commanding, sir, when—good, yes, sir, you remember all that. Well, it’s gone so well that there’s a request about setting up a second MARI det on the west coast; I was wondering if maybe that could be moved up some, then Craik could go out there now instead of at the end of this cruise—Yes, sir, to advise and—No, sir, not as det CO, and not to fly because—Yes, sir. No, sir. Purely advisory, yes, sir, of course they’d pull personnel from the west coast squadrons, and Craik would—Yeah, Miramar, I’m sure that Miramar—Uh—”

      Rafehausen signaled to the lieutenant-commander to close the door. Swiveling around, he bent forward as if he had to talk to the floor. “It’s a matter of helping a good man, sir. I know Craik—I think we could lose him if he doesn’t get something to do. Between you and me, Admiral, I think he got hit harder than we thought on that recent mission. I don’t normally put much stock in ‘trauma’ and all that psychobabble, but he’s been sending me p-comms that, well, I think maybe he’s lost some faith in himself.” Again, he listened, slowly leaning back, and when there was silence on the other end, he said, “Yes, sir. That’d be great. That’d really be great. And absolutely, yes, I’ll put the fear of God in him to do it by the book. And if they can see their way to setting up a west coast det with him on board, it would—Of course, of course, these things take time—Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

      A minute later, he had hung up and turned back to the pile of paper, Al Craik now only one of many worries nibbling at the edges of his consciousness.

      

      Jakarta.

      He gave terse orders to the third cab of the night, cutting across the city, going twice down gangs rinsed clean by the heavy rain, until he was tired of the game. Clean as clean could be. Then he led them back south away from the sea by the toll road, off the Semaggi Interchange and into the gleaming modernity at the heart of Westernized Jakarta. It wasn’t his favorite part of the city; he liked the Japanese in Japan but hated them when they were abroad. It never occurred to him that they acted just like him.

      “Wat ingang?” asked the driver in Dutch. Jerry was white and coming from Emmy-Lu’s, hence Dutch, as far as the driver could tell.

      “Hotel Mulia Senayan, danke. Simpruk.” The Mulia was the newest, flashiest hotel in Jakarta, with over a thousand rooms and the largest ballroom in Asia. It was the multiple entrances and table phones that drew Jerry—a postman’s paradise. Simpruk was a broad and well-traveled avenue full of business traffic; he’d leave by the main entrance and go to the cabstand, and