Damage Control. Gordon Kent

planes down. Report.”

      Bahrain

      The tomatoes were simmering in olive oil; their odor, supported by garlic, filled the kitchen. Rose had taken down an already-open bottle of white wine and was wrestling with the cork when the telephone rang.

      “I’ll get it,” Leslie said.

      “Oh, would you? This goddam thing—”

      Leslie was good at answering phones. She had done it for a year for Mike Dukas when she was a ditz-brained newcomer and he was NCIS’s hottest agent, and then she had done it for a year for Dukas’s assistant when she was no longer a ditz-brain and Dukas went off to head NCIS, Bahrain. “Craik-Siciliano,” she said. Her voice was crisp—gone were the thuggish accent of three years before, the tears of half an hour ago. She looked at Rose as she listened to the other end. She gestured, held out the phone. “Your office. Urgent.”

      “Oh, shit—” Rose banged the bottle on the countertop. Her voice switched to professional chill as she spoke into the phone. “Commander Siciliano here.”

      Leslie picked up the wine bottle and, holding the neck in her palms, pushed the recalcitrant cork out with her thumbs. She tried not to listen, but the room was small.

      “My God, when? How bad is it? But it can’t—” Rose caught Leslie’s eye, shook her head. Then, seeing the open bottle, she pointed at the heavy skillet, made a pouring gesture before turning away. “What about the exercise? Is that firm? Do we know who’s in command? I can be there in—” She listened. “Okay, I’ll hang by the phone. Absolutely. Yes. Thanks for keeping me posted.” She hung up, hesitated. Her eyes met Leslie’s again. “There’s a fire on the Jefferson, the BG flagship. All hell’s breaking loose.”

      “How did it—?”

      “Plane crash, that’s all they’re saying. But it’s bad, because Fifth Fleet has tanked the fleet exercise.” She hugged herself as if she was cold. “We’ve got a lot of friends on the Jefferson. Mike has, too.”

      Leslie had never been on an aircraft carrier, thought of one only as a huge and invulnerable ship. “How bad can it be?”

      “If the flight deck’s packed with aircraft, it can be the end of the world. If it was right at the beginning of the exercise, they’d all be full of fuel, packed together. A carrier called the Forrestal went up that way during Nam. More than eight hundred dead.” She looked away. “God.”

      “But—They have sprinklers and firefighting stuff and, and—everything—”

      Rose shook her head. “It could be hell with steel walls.”

      Then there was the sound of the front door opening, and Harry and Dukas came in, talking loud and laughing, and Dukas stopped dead in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two women and said, “What’s happened?”

      “A plane went into the Jefferson. It’s bad.”

      The four shocked faces exchanged looks, searching for comfort, not finding it. “I’ve got to find Alan,” Rose said and turned back to the telephone. Dukas looked at Leslie. “I better call the office.”

      “There’s another line in the den,” Leslie said, leading him out. She didn’t explain how she knew that. Leslie was, as Rose had said, smart.

      Harry patted Rose’s shoulder as she tried to get through to West Fleet HQ, Mahe. Her face went through shades of hope, frustration, anger. Finally, she crashed the telephone back into its cradle. “‘Out of service.’ How can a goddam navy base be out of service? ‘India is out of service.’ It’s fucking India, for Christ’s sake, not some two-bit third-world shithole! How the fuck can they be out of service?”

      “Keep trying.”

      “Keep trying what? I just fucking tried—!” Then she heard herself. She put a hand on her abdomen as if checking the fetus that she hoped still lived. Her jaws clenched; her eyes closed; she inhaled. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m being a hysterical asshole.”

      Harry smiled at her and kissed her cheek. He had a way of looking at people just slightly sideways because he had only one eye; the other, lost to torture in Africa, had been replaced by a beautiful but useless plastic one. “You’re being Rosie Siciliano, the terror of the Sisters of the Annunciation.”

      She pushed him away. “You know too much about my misspent youth.” She started to dial again.

      “What hotel’s Al staying at?”

      “The Mahe International—the number’s on the pad in the den—” She turned away to concentrate on something going on in the telephone. Harry got the number from the den, nodding at Dukas while he was jabbering at somebody at NCIS, smiled at Leslie. Harry wandered into the big living room, tapping numbers into his cell phone. Waited. Waited. Then a British-accented female voice said, “Mahe International Hotel, may I be of service?”

      The woman on the other end was good. She knew within half a minute that Commander Craik wasn’t there. Had he tried the naval base? Then Dukas and Leslie came in, and Rose stood in the kitchen doorway with the telephone still in her hand, and the three-year-old, Bobby, woke from his nap and wandered in with the nanny from the bedroom wing. And then Mike—the other Mike, named after Mike Dukas—Alan’s and Rose’s nine-year-old son, came in from outside, looking at all the adults with the wisdom born of years among such people, and said, “What’s wrong now?” Then, with the condescension that only a child can show to his mother, he said, “Mom, you’re burning the tomato sauce again.”

      Northern India

      A continent away from Rose’s burned sauce, the sharp smell of rancid ghee carried over the industrial antiseptic and mold to burn in Daro’s throat. He coughed, his hand automatically rubbing his abdomen. Despite the discomfort, he savored the anonymity of his new headquarters.

      They now occupied a former telemarketing center over a restaurant. The walls were gray-green, the carpet dull and moldy. There were no posters, no personal photographs, no cartoons, no graffiti. Three cheap digital clocks provided the only relief for the eye. On the floor, desks formed a long curve with a bank of small flat-screen displays against the far wall.

      Mohenjo Daro paced the floor in front of the screens, often pausing opposite the desk of one of his operators to hear a report, curled into himself by pain despite his discipline.

      Vashni, on the other hand, sat to one side with three laptops open in front of her, collating data. She raised her head from her screen. “The Americans have cancelled the exercise. We have a report that their carrier is on fire.”

      Daro nodded. He was leaning over another operator, reading her screen.

      Vashni raised her voice, unsure whether her news had been heard. “Shiva’s Spear was a success.”

      “Hundreds of men and women are dead, Vash. Try not to sound so pleased.”

      She swung her hair. “We can move to phase two. Americans are the greatest offenders against this planet—”

      Daro was shaking his head even as she started to speak. “I wish we could have recruited there more effectively.”

      “In America? All they care about is money and primitive religion.” Vash’s facade of civility cracked and her voice grew shriller. “No one would have joined.”

      He ignored her, placed a hand on his stomach, shrugged. “So—let us move on to phase two, then.”

      Daro clapped his hands. The operators looked up.

      “Phase two, my friends.”

      Conversation stilled. The gentle tapping of fingers on keyboards became the only sound, intense concentration the only expression. Phase two would turn India into chaos.