Damage Control. Gordon Kent

      Daro moved around the room, scanning screens, making suggestions and responses, praising much and reproving little. Three times in the hour he stopped, hands at his waist, head down. After the hour’s walking, he was visibly weaker.

      Despite her own tasks, Vashni watched him from the cover of her computer screens. She was sure that the bouts were coming quicker and hitting him harder.

      One of the men at the left of the room punched a fist in the air, and Daro walked over to look at his screen, where a data stream was made visible as a digital waterfall. “I’m in,” the man said, indicating his screen. Then his fingers flew over the keyboard. As he typed, flat screens on the front wall lit up and provided images, all black and white. Nine of them showed corridors, one showed a desk with a guard; a few showed outside views of a low concrete building, and three showed the top of a dam. One showed a low concrete building with a heavy blast door marked “Bldg. 37.” Altogether, there were twenty-seven screens, and, even as Daro watched, they changed to a new set of views: more landscapes, a helipad, more security stations. Distant mountains showed in some views, and a dam, and the lake behind it, and twelve huge turbines; factories, power storage, power transmission, a nuclear reactor. The whole of the Ambur Regional Electrical Power Facility, the most extensive in India, unfolded across the wall in the frames of the flat paneled screens.

      Daro reached out a hand toward Ali, his assistant, and snapped his fingers, and Ali unwrapped a new cell phone from its plastic and handed it to Daro, who opened it and dialed a long number. The crackling of the discarded plastic was the loudest sound in the room.

      “Ready?” he asked. Something about the reply amused him, and he smiled. “You should have the feed now. Three minutes? I think we can wait that long. Very good.” He pressed a button to end the call, and handed the phone to Ali while he watched the screens, leaning the weight of his torso on one arm on the back of a chair.

      “Station Two will insert loops as soon as they have sufficient footage for each camera. Our views will continue to be live,” he said.

      “I have control of all their SCADA functions,” the man said at the end of the table.

      “Station Two will give you the cue to cut the lights.”

      The man nodded, his head back down on his screen.

      The rest of the center remained quiet. Even Vashni had stopped working to watch the screens that flickered away, changing scenes every five seconds. There were hundreds of views, with guard stations, exteriors, interiors, machinery, more power turbines. The clocks counted down three minutes. Several of the computers gave low chimes, the sound of arriving e-mail.

      “Our troops are going in.” A small woman in the center took a deep breath.

      “Lights out—now,” said one of Daro’s operators.

      Daro caught a movement in one of the scenes because he had been watching for it. A man in black appeared by one of the security stations. Most of the screens went black. The external views of the power facility dimmed as the artificial lights in the compound went out.

      Daro motioned for another cup of tea. “I think it is time to move again, Vash,” he said, his face old now, pinched. He pointed at the operator on the end. “Stay online.”

      Vashni reached in her purse and brought out a hand bell, which she rang sharply. One of the two doors to the room opened and a group of men in white overalls marked “Dow Chem” walked in, pushing industrial carts. The operators began unplugging their laptops and loading them on the carts while the white overalls took down the display monitors and the digital clocks. Several of the monitors were showing bursts of automatic weapons fire as they were unplugged.

      “Leave that one,” Daro said, pointing to a monitor that showed a helipad. The operator nodded.

      Daro exhaled sharply and bent over, his face moon pale.

      Vashni surprised herself by placing a hand under his elbow. He turned his head, locked her eyes with his, gasped. Then he shook her off and tried to stand straight, rubbing his abdomen.

      The room emptied. Daro’s operators left.

      On the screen, a helicopter landed on the pad.

      Daro gave a weak wave and another cell phone was unwrapped and passed to him. He dialed. Listened. “Excellent,” he whispered. Closed the phone and handed it to Ali, who extracted the guts and broke them between his hands.

      “Lights,” he said to the operator.

      The operator pressed a key and squinted at the screen. “Back on,” he said.

      The views of the power plant were illuminated, one showing a body with a surprising pool of dark liquid around it, the others empty corridors, and then back to the helicopter, its blades still rotating.

      Daro took a lemon drop and chewed it. Vashni was working on a tiny palmtop.

      The operator continued to type ferociously. “I have control of the turbines, now. Shall I run them backward?”

      “Not yet,” Daro said. On the screen, dark figures were pushing a heavy metal cart toward the helicopter; another cart followed, then a third. The uncertain light shone on reflective tape outlining the edges of the carts, and the distorted image glowed. The glow framed matte black cradles in each cart.

      It took six men to lift the payload from one cart into the helicopter. By the time they reached the third cart, Daro could sense their fatigue. He watched them lift the last black cradle off the cart and swing it up to reach the open door of the helicopter. Their effort fell short. The cradle swung back and one of the men fell away, clutching his arm.

      Daro looked at his watch. Another man appeared in the frame with a rifle slung over his back, and then another. They helped to lift the last cradle aboard the helicopter.

      Daro watched them as he had watched the lotus, his attention tuned to their actions, his wretched abdomen churning in response to their struggles. Even Vashni watched them, her eyes flicking to her palmtop and then back to the men loading the helicopter.

      Then the copter stirred on the pad. It began to lift, lights blinking. In seconds it vanished from the screen, tail high.

      Daro sighed as if he had been holding his breath. “Let’s go,” he said.

      He was now the possessor of three nuclear warheads

      CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia

      Mary Totten stood looking at a TV screen in the CIA’s Center for Weapons of Mass Destruction and felt an adrenaline rush—the first good feeling since she’d been transferred out of Operations. A map of India was on the screen, and a talking head was telling them about the destruction of a power station at a place called Ambur. That was what had triggered the adrenaline—Ambur! She knew a lot about Ambur. Ambur is more than an electrical power station, sweetie. Ambur is a secret nuclear-storage site.

      She ran for her desk, hungry to be the first. She grabbed her phone, checked on the fly that it was secure, and whammed the top button.

      “This is Mary Totten at WMD,” she said to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. “We have a situation.”

       9

      Mahe, India

      They got to their hotel by back roads and industrial streets; what was normally a ten-mile cruise from their hotel door to the Mahe naval base’s main gate became a hurried, nervous search through a very different, very unfamiliar India. When, at last, they pulled up at the hotel’s glass and marble front, Fidel said, “Amen,” and Clavers, who was driving, screamed, “Hey, whoa—we made it!” Ong burst into tears. Benvenuto, whose high had crashed, looked as if he’d been sandbagged. Fidel told Clavers not