Damage Control. Gordon Kent

at Alan. “I cannot get through!” Whatever was happening was choking the cell-phone net.

      “Very bad here, sir,” the sergeant said. “I take you and these personnel to some safe place, then report to my barracks.” He shook his head. “Very bad mess, sir.”

      Alan hesitated. “I can’t just leave one of my people,” he said.

      “She is dead, sir.”

      Alan walked across to Borgman’s body. Somewhere outside, another explosion erupted and was answered by more small-arms fire. He knelt. Borgman’s face was partly gone, blood and tissue sprayed over the communications panels. Alan put his fingers where a pulse would have been in her throat, waited while twenty seconds ticked away on his Breitling.

      Bahrain

      They were all waiting for something, but nobody would say what it was, even though all four knew—Rose Siciliano Craik, assistant naval attaché, Bahrain; Harry O’Neill, big-bucks American convert to Islam; Mike Dukas, head of Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Bahrain; Leslie Kultzke, live-in interloper on Dukas’s life after following him all the way from Washington. What they were waiting for was Alan Craik, but he wouldn’t be home for more than three days.

      When they had planned this gathering, he was supposed to be home, and then he had been made fleet-exercise umpire, and there went the notion that they would all be together for Rose’s birthday. Alan was the glue that held them, and, without him, there was this strange sense of waiting for somebody who wouldn’t show up.

      The three old friends sat with their knees almost touching, laughing and mopping at spilled drops of coffee and licking fingers that had become coated with powdered sugar from Rose’s biscotti. Leslie sat a little apart, like a good child allowed to sit with the grown-ups. She smiled when they laughed, otherwise sat with a pretty good imitation of interest on her round face. She was twenty-two. They were nearing forty, in Dukas’s case more like forty-five.

      Then the conversation ran down, and Harry said, “Shall we play a round of whatever-happened-to-old-so-and-so now?”

      “We’re going to play let’s-help-Michael-lose-weight.” Leslie smiled at him as she said it, pulling the plate of biscotti away from Dukas’s hand. Quite opposite expressions flitted across their faces, his chastened, then irritated, hers mature and maternal. The change made Harry raise his eyebrows at Rose, who drew her own dark, thick brows together and gave him what her husband called “the look that kills.” Then she turned away and said in that voice that announces clearly that the speaker is trying to change the subject, “What do you think Alan’s doing right now? Mike—Harry—? What does the umpire do at the start of an exercise?”

      Harry, who had been a junior intel officer ten years before, smiled and shrugged. “Stand around and try not to look bored, I suppose.”

      Northern India

      A closed car speeds along a highway. Vashni, Mohenjo Daro’s right hand, misses the comfort of their corporate headquarters, but she never questions Daro’s impulse to leave it and become anonymous. The lack of an office does not separate her from her networks: she has her headset on, watching the markets and her e-mails on VR glasses while Daro chats with the driver, a Tamil who joined the movement years ago.

      As they make the turn from the main highway to the permanent traffic jam around the airport, she sees a flood of e-mails hitting her server. She reads. She touches Daro’s arm, her face averted, less because she continues to watch the screens in the VR goggles than because she doesn’t want to see his face and know again that she sees a dying man. “The Nehru has shot down an American plane.” She flips up her glasses. “Those idiots.” She looks at him.

      One of the virtues that Mohenjo Daro possessed as a leader was that he never wasted time on recrimination, although he would certainly have been justified now. He had spent three years putting his own crew on the submarine and getting it into a situation where it could disappear. The Nehru should have been invisible to the joint exercise. It should have had the additional invisibility of their carefully laid misdirection of the American JOTS system. And now it had shot down an American aircraft!

      “So much for stealth,” he said. He had rather liked stealth, she knew. He had hoped to avoid the messiness that came with open conflict. He smiled now as he saw the irony of it, close to religious revelation. Of course, the path to anarchy and healing lay through conflict, as he often told her. It was more ironic that he had tried to avoid it. She knew that his mind would now start wandering down corridors of paradox; she put her hand on his arm to remind him that she was waiting for his order.

      “Implement Shiva’s Spear,” he said. “Better look at the next two layers and have those brought up to readiness.” He thought. “Assemble an operator team at one of our office locations.”

      “Which one?”

      “Choose one at random.”

      Ahead, his gleaming helicopter waited on its pad. Mohenjo Daro sat back and contemplated the end of the world of men.

      Mahe Naval Base, India

      Running feet sounded outside in the corridor, then shouts and shots.

      Alan had made his decision. “We have a vehicle in the fleet-exercise car park. I have to get to it.”

      “I will try, sir.”

      “Plus I got three more people downstairs.” And he wasn’t leaving without them, for sure.

      The sergeant licked his lips, chewed on the upper one as if trying to bite the small moustache there. “Okay, we try.”

      “Benvenuto, you okay?”

      The young man was rubbing his throat. “Little hoarse, sir.”

      “We have to disable the JOTS.” Alan jerked his head. The terminal was critical hardware, its innards as highly classified as anything the Navy had. “Out the window. It’s two floors down to asphalt.”

      Benvenuto’s mouth opened. He was being asked to go from being the JOTS’ mother hen to its terminator in one breath. “Ok-a-a-a-y, sir—”

      They got two of the Indian EMs to help while one of the Marines broke the unopenable window, and without ceremony they toppled the device over the sill. Alan leaned at the corner of the window and watched it smash on the pavement below. There was more shooting out there now, and when he raised his head he could see smoke billowing above a row of trees.

      The sergeant was instructing the other Marines and the Indian personnel. Alan looked for the pistol he had tossed away but didn’t see it; he supposed that one of the Marines had kicked it out of the way. The sergeant was already by the door, bouncing up and down on his toes from tension. Alan got down low, spotted the pistol under a computer table, grabbed it, then looked around the ruined room, pausing for a bitter moment at Borgman.

      “All right, let’s go.”

       3

      USS Thomas Jefferson

      “Admiral on the bridge!” The sailor braced.

      “Stand easy.” Rafe came off the starboard ladder and waved at the bridge crew. “You guys have coffee for an old man?” He turned to Rick Madje, his flag lieutenant, who was holding a phone out to him. Rafe raised his eyebrows.

      “Captain Fraser on the Picton.” HMCS Picton was a Canadian frigate attached to his battle group, the ship Alan had complained about because Rafe had put it way down south as a radar picket with orders to stay in Emissions Control, or EMCON—the regulation of outgoing EM transmissions across the spectrum—until she had a chance to shoot.