Damage Control. Gordon Kent

for his pistol, and a rifle shot banged and echoed and the officer whirled and went down and lay on the ground, legs flailing. At the same time, the man who had reached for his AK heard the shot and saw Fidel and again hesitated; the other three turned, and Fidel fired a burst just over their heads, and the first man dropped his weapon, and then it was too late for the others to respond, three of them looking at four armed men behind cover. One of them held his weapon in hip-firing position while the other two lowered theirs. He swung the weapon toward Alan, and Alan pointed his index finger and fired and the shot ricocheted off the gatehouse wall and Fidel hollered at the three, his voice hoarse, eyes bulging, bellowing like a bull because he wanted to gun them down and instead he was doing what his commanding officer had told him to do.

      And the guns went down.

      Benvenuto was pumping his fist in the air; Fidel was red-faced, breathing hard; Clavers was blowing out her cheeks and muttering, “Holy God, Holy God—”

      Alan touched Fidel’s shoulder. “Beautiful.” Fidel shot him a look, went back to communicating to the four men with the barrel of his AK: lie down, don’t move, shut up or I’ll blow your fucking guts out. The international language.

      “You okay?” Alan said to Benvenuto. “You were great.” The boy hardly heard him, riding an adrenaline high. Alan made a mental note to keep an eye on him, because he was likely to crash. He sent Clavers to get Ong and the van, and then he and Fidel organized the captured four into a team to move the cars apart while Benvenuto held one of their own AKs on them.

      The officer was still on the ground, blood vivid and hot around him on the yellow earth. Alan bent over him, saw that the man was still alive, looked away; he wanted the golden thing inside the man’s shirt. He had to go through blood to get it, found it on a fine gold chain. Then the officer was dead.

      Alan held the thing up. “See who else has one of these,” he said to Fidel. “Maybe on a chain around their necks.”

      The cell phone was in the officer’s pants pocket. It was a new Japanese model, expensive, with a small screen that could show pictures as well as text—the best and newest, perhaps unusual for an underpaid Indian officer.

      Alan turned it on. The LCD lit up.

      He was looking at a picture of himself. In full color. With text in English: “Kill on sight.”

      “What the—?” Fidel was looking over his shoulder. “Shit, man, that’s you!”

      “Yeah.”

      “Hey.” Fidel pulled him partway around. “Hey, Commander, what the fuck? These guys had a cell phone that works; they got your picture—this isn’t some fucking two-bit mutiny!”

      The van pulled up. Clavers began picking up guns and throwing them inside. Fidel, after a look at Alan, went into the gatehouse and raised the barrier and then herded the captives inside. Benvenuto, still high and now shaking a little, stood next to Alan. “We’re ready to go, Commander. Commander? Sir?”

      Alan was frowning, thinking that Fidel was right: that it made no sense that this officer had had his picture and an order to kill; thinking that this cell phone could get a signal when the system had been jammed; thinking that this was more than a mutiny—

      “Let’s go.”

      USS Thomas Jefferson

      Rafe came to with the notion that he had overslept. His dreams were colorful, even ornate, and he felt as if he had spent too much time in bed. The feeling of the wrappings and bandages came to him slowly, followed by the claxon of the pain.

      He could get only one eye open, and even that required a struggle. The eye was gummy, and once it was open he could feel his eyelid as a pain separate from all the others, the worst in his left leg. He looked down, but his head wouldn’t move much and the leg was too far away.

      “He’s awake!” someone called in the distance.

      He opened his mouth. It was dry sandpaper, as if he’d gone on a bender and this was the hangover day. That thought crossed his feeling that he’d slept too long and took him down a corridor of waking dream about life in his first squadron, until something else pressed at his abbreviated senses.

      “Sir? Admiral Rafehausen?”

      He opened his eye again, saw a blur. Someone pushed a straw into his mouth, and the rush of water was a pure joy like few things he’d ever felt. He drank greedily.

      “That’s a damn good sign,” said a voice in the background. “Give him all he’ll take. Dempsey, see if you can swab that eye. It looks like it still has some particulate matter in it.”

      “Sure thing, Doc.”

      Rafe felt something on his eye and he blinked. There was a burst of stinging pain more intense than the pain in his leg, but it didn’t last. When he blinked a few more times, the figures around him grew more distinct.

      “Dempsey, get the admiral’s flag lieutenant. I think he’s coming around. Let’s back off that drip a little now that he’s awake. You with us, Admiral?”

      Rafe moved his head a fraction.

      “Good. Lot of folks waiting to talk to you. You’re pretty shot up and the boat ain’t sinking, so don’t waste your energy. Give him more water.”

      “Wathitus?” he croaked.

      “What’s that? Listen to me, Admiral. I’d like to do this differently, but I know you’re waking up. I had to amputate your left leg a little below the knee, and I’m not sure I can save your left eye. You have some burns, none of them really bad, but the aggregate—well, you ought to be in a burn unit, but I have a lot of worse cases.”

      Amputated leg? “Leg hurts!” Rafe said, quite clearly.

      The face by him wandered back and forth. Rafe realized he was shaking his head.

      “That’s just nerve memory. I’m sorry.”

      Rafe gathered himself. It was hard to concentrate, but he had things to do. “What hit us?” he hissed.

      “I’ll let your flag lieutenant fill you in. He’ll be right up.”

      Time passed.

      “Sir?” Madje’s voice.

      God, Rafe was able to think, he sounds like hell. His eye blinked open. “Report!” he croaked. Someone pushed the straw back into his mouth.

      Madje made a short and brutal report and finished by saying, “We’re still picking up aircrew who punched out from the deck.”

      Rafe took a deep breath, which tightened the bandages and hurt him more than he had expected. He coughed water and mucus and his eye blurred.

      “Doc? He’s coughing.”

      “Raise the level on the drip. Sorry, Lieutenant. He’s in rough shape. I’d rather you didn’t use him up.”

      “No!” Rafe tried to shout, coughed again. “Planes aloft? Bingo?”

      Madje’s head moved. “The TAO is trying to get them into Sri Lanka. The Indians aren’t responding, sir.”

      “TAO?” Rafe’s whole body moved. “Who’s—in charge?”

      “There’s an O-5 in reactor who’s the senior man we can find, sir, but he doesn’t feel he can leave the engines.” That was a short form for an argument that had dragged Madje away from a firefighting team and into a labyrinth of the fears and hesitancy of an officer who clearly couldn’t accept the reality that he was in command.

      Rafe snorted. It sounded like an abbreviated cough. “TAO,” he said.

      Madje nodded. “Yes, sir.”

      “Get—planes