Damage Control. Gordon Kent

      Alan herded the rest of them into the hotel. The airconditioned lobby, not over-large but handsomely done up in shades of red and brown, seemed odd to him, different—and then it struck him: Nobody’s sitting or waiting or checking in. The place is empty.

      “Commander Craik!” The high female voice seemed to echo in the space. “Commander Craik!” A woman was calling, almost screaming, to him from the front desk.

      Alan shouted back at his crew as he crossed the lobby, “Nobody go out! Everybody stay close to a phone!” The woman at the desk was holding up message slips, and he was thinking that there had been a dozen calls for him from Bahrain, angry people wondering why he wasn’t at Mahe, why they couldn’t reach him, what was going on—He turned back to his ragtag army. “And don’t get in the shower!” Looks of shock. “If the phone rings, I want you to pick up!” They were already at the elevators, headed for their rooms.

      “Commander Craik!” The tall young woman coming around the reception counter was Miss Chitrakar. In this hotel, where the reception clerks also functioned as concierges, she had been wonderful all week. Now, she looked terrified.

      “Messages, messages—” She started back for the high marble and almost fell. “People calling and calling—especially—” She handed him a slip of paper.

       The message said, Stay where you are until I get you. Important! Harry.

      Harry? Harry wasn’t Fifth Fleet. Still—

      “The telly said the Pakistanis are preparing to attack!”

      He looked at her, saw her frightened eyes, then realized that a small television set was on behind the counter, images of soldiers filling its screen.

      Then the telephone rang and she flinched and answered and almost at once jerked, her head and looked at him, listened, nodded, tried to speak, listened, held out the phone. “Your friend.”

      Their fingers touched. She flinched as if shocked.

      “Harry?”

      “My God, you’re a hard man to find. Al, what the hell is happening there—? I tried the navy base, the phones are down!”

      “Harry—I can’t talk—I’ve got to call Fifth Fleet—”

      Miss Chitrakar moved away.

      “Al, shut up! Listen—something’s happened to the Jefferson. Some sort of accident. What do you know about it?”

      Alan was watching the mini-TV. The picture was incom-prehensible—a building on fire, a talking head, an air shot of the fire, a flasher in the corner that said “Calcutta”.

      “Harry, what’re you calling me for?”

      “Something’s going down, Al. Rose got a call from her office; the word is that the exercise was canceled—”

      “Yeah, but that’s because—”

      “—and the Jeff‘s not answering any comm link—’

      “Wait a minute, Harry, that can’t be—my comm was down, not—”

      “—plus there’s some weird shit going on where you are. Weird shit—”

      The picture on the mini-TV changed to show a shattered cell-phone tower, the flashing name “Delhi.” The talking head returned.

      “Harry, I’ve been out of touch for a couple of hours. Tell me about the Jefferson.”

      “They think it was a crash on the deck; that’s all they’ll say. Fifth Fleet don’t know whether to shit or go blind. Al—are you guys okay?”

      Alan saw Fidel come into the lobby from a rear door. He was carrying a long bundle wrapped in filthy newspaper.

      “Harry, I can’t talk. Physically, I’m fine. We’re at the hotel and we’re going to hunker down here. But—yeah, something’s going on—I can’t—”

      He was watching a burning gas station on the mini-TV, the title “Mumbai.” And abruptly, the set went black.

      And the hotel lights went out.

      Fidel stopped where he was, shifted his grip on the long bundle, and looked around.

      And Miss Chitrakar screamed as the floor-to-ceiling front window by the hotel door exploded inward.

      “Al—Al—what’s going on—Al—?”

      CIA HQ