Damage Control. Gordon Kent

fingers and caught on something hard and smooth, and a gold chain attached to the glittering thing snapped and the commodore’s hand pulled free.

      And Alan found himself holding a shell-like, golden object with a protrusion made to fit a USB port.

      The commodore made a grab for it. Alan pulled away. “Benvenuto—!” The JOTS tender, frozen at the sound-powered phone, launched himself at the terminal. At the same time, the commodore, face flushed a muddy red, was bellowing across the space at the Indian lieutenant, the Hindi words lost to Alan. He closed the golden shell inside his hand and rapped out, “Benvenuto, do not let this officer approach the JOTS terminal! That’s an order!”

      The hand came down and hovered near a sidearm. Alan took it in—the distorted face, the weapon, the rage—and wheeled to shout across the space to his communications specialist, “Borgman! Get Fifth Fleet HQ on Priority now! We have a situation here.” He whirled back to confront the Indian commodore. “Sir—please back off! You’re violating the terms of the agreement that set up this exercise. At once, sir!”

      The commodore was shorter than Alan, trim, late forties. He hesitated long enough to meet Alan’s eyes and make some inner calculation, and he shouted again at the lieutenant.

      And the lieutenant unsnapped his own holster with his left hand and drew an automatic pistol with his right and put it almost against Petty Officer Borgman’s head as she tried to raise Bahrain on the radio, and he pulled the trigger.

      “No-o-o—!” Alan screamed. He would have gone after the lieutenant then, but he heard Benvenuto shout, and he turned and saw that the commodore had drawn his own weapon and was aiming it at him. Benvenuto caught the man’s arm and the gun roared, and Alan crossed the space between them in a stride and kicked the commodore in the groin, and then all hell broke loose.

      The lieutenant took two shots at Alan and Benvenuto, and Alan hit the deck, pulling Benvenuto down with him. Somebody was screaming from the other side of the room. The commodore was on his knees, bent forward almost over Benvenuto’s legs; as Alan looked, he vomited.

      “Holy shit—!” Benvenuto groaned. Alan leaned across the sailor to punch the side of the commodore’s head; the man lurched to Alan’s right, revealing the gun he still held in his right hand. Alan hit him again and grabbed the gun.

      The lieutenant’s pistol barked and was met by a scream of pain from the doorway and a rattle of automatic-weapons fire; when Alan rolled back, he saw an Indian Marine sagging down the side of the entrance door, his hands closed over the front of a uniform blouse that was oozing blood. Another Marine, seen only as the forward half of an assault rifle and a pair of hands, was firing into the room, and another arm appeared and the hand grabbed the wounded man and pulled him out the door. Alan could look along the floor and see people lying flat around the room’s periphery, except for the lieutenant, who showed as a pair of legs protected from the doorway by the central console. Then another pistol started to fire, the source hidden from Alan by the console—one of the other Indian ratings, the only people over there. Jesus, they brought weapons and were waiting for their moment. But what the hell was all that with the golden thing and the JOTS? And then, belatedly, You don’t kill people so you can win an exercise—

      He still had the golden device in his left hand, the bad one, the one with only three fingers because two had been blown off in a firefight years before. He wriggled the hand down into the leftside pocket of his khakis and leveled the commodore’s pistol in front of him along the floor and took aim at the lieutenant’s right foot.

      “Sir!”

      Benvenuto’s strangled shout brought him around in time to see the commodore climb over the sailor’s body, his left hand on Benvenuto’s throat, and then the commodore was gone behind the JOTS terminal and Benvenuto was trying to suck air into lungs that had been flattened by the weight of the commodore’s knees. He was a whiz-bang electronics tech but not much of a street fighter.

      Then the automatic firing stopped, and there was a burst of pistol fire and a lot of shouting and the bang of a closing door, and then a sudden babble of voices that was like a kind of silence because there was no shooting under it.

      “Sir, sir!” a voice shouted from the other side of the room. “Do not shoot us, sir! We know nothing about it, sir!”

      Alan looked along the floor and saw Mehta’s face at his level. It was strained but sane, the more remarkable because he was lying in Borgman’s blood. “Sir—they went crazy—they are imposters or something—”

      From habit, Alan glanced at the clock: the exercise had begun thirty-three seconds before.

      Two new voices bellowed from the door, then a third. Alan rolled up and saw three Indian Marines with weapons pointed. He had a microsecond to make a decision, because one of the Marines was already looking at him and swinging his rifle. If they were with the commodore and the lieutenant, he was about to die and he should at least use the pistol in his hand; but if they were not with them—and they had returned the lieutenant’s fire, after all—then the worst thing he could do was fire on them, for they would surely kill him.

      Alan slid the pistol over the floor toward the Marines. “Alan Craik, Commander, United States Navy,” he said. Saying it from a sitting position was not very dignified. Still, it seemed to work. The Marine’s eyes met his, took in his collar and his oak leaves, and the rifle swung away.

      Then there was a lot of shouting in other languages, and Alan crawled on all fours to Benvenuto and made sure he was okay, and then he stood, using the JOTS terminal as cover, and looked around the space. The steel door to the planning room was shut; an Indian enlisted man was collapsed in a far corner, one pant leg soaked with blood. Mehta and another rating were tearing at the pant leg and trying to fashion a tourniquet. On the side near the clock, a rattled Indian EM was trying to explain to the Marines what had happened, while another was bent over a cell phone. The first one pointed at Alan and made a gesture, acting out the shooting of Borgman. The lead Marine, a sergeant, shouted back and at once everybody shut up. As if cued to that silence, an explosion from overhead rocked the building, and trouble lights flashed all over the communications consoles. The rating who had been talking to the sergeant flung himself at a console and began to flip switches.

      The sergeant stood, half-crouched, his head tilted. He turned to look at Alan. Dust filtered from the ceiling. A fluorescent fixture swung down and held on by its wires. In the new silence, a rattle of gunshots sounded somewhere else in the building, and Mehta, his hands bloody, groped his way to a wall box with a red symbol on it and began to pull out first-aid supplies.

      The sergeant duckwalked to Alan, gave a cursory salute, and said, “Sergeant Swaminathan, sir.” His voice had a pronounced lilt, the Indian accent that turns w to v.

      “Is it a mutiny?”

      The sergeant shook his head. “Very bad, sir. I think I have to take my men to barracks.”

      “But the three who were here—they murdered one of my people!—they went through that door—”

      “All very bad, sir. Best return to barracks.”

      Alan wanted to storm the door to the next room to get at the commodore and the lieutenant. A steel door, no explosives, three Indian Marines. He looked them over—they were shiny-bright, spic and span, with knife-edged creases in their khakis and spit-shines on their shoes, dressed for display more than action. The sergeant was right; his best course was to find other Marines and make sense of what was going on. Plus there were four unarmed Indian enlisted personnel to worry about, one of them wounded, and Alan and Benvenuto and three more US personnel downstairs.

      The commodore and the fleet exercise were the least of their worries.

      An Indian communications man was shouting from the console. “All communications lost, sir—everything! I think it is the antenna array on the roof up there, blown all to flinders!”

      “Can you telephone?”

      The sergeant shouted