Top Hook. Gordon Kent

with acid, then stopped. Suter usually didn’t question his orders.

      “She’s proven herself an enemy of the Agency,” Shreed said. “Is that official enough for you?

      “And Suter became Uriah Heep, all but wringing his hands, saying, “Right, right—oh, right—”

      And Shreed thought, Not right, but then he remembered Janey’s death, and Suter became unimportant.

      Washington.

      “It’s you, Rose. Not Al. And it’s the CIA, not the Navy.”

      Abe Peretz looked like a casting director’s idea of a Jewish professor, with a balding head, unfashionable glasses, and eyes that were mostly dreamy but now and then as hard as diamonds. He was deaf in one ear, the result of a mugging two years before, and so he normally talked now with his head slightly turned so that his good right ear was toward other people.

      “What the hell’s the CIA got to do with me?”

      “And not just the Agency—the Agency’s Internal Investigations Directorate.” The innocent eyes became hard. “They’re hard-nosed and they’re ugly—leftovers from Angleton and Kill-a-Commie-for-Christ—and they’d send their own mothers up if she was dicking the Agency. So how come they’re on your case? There can be only one reason—you’ve spun off from an internal investigation.”

      “I’m not even in their chain of command!”

      “Think of it as walking by when somebody pissed out the window. There’s a rumor floating around they’ve got another mole. You don’t understand the relief they’d feel if they got a positive on somebody who isn’t Agency. It means they can say to each other, ‘We dodged the bullet.’ And it means that they can go public, at least within the intelligence community, and say, ‘See, it isn’t us—it’s the Navy.’ And so they went back-channel, probably through the NSC, and sandbagged you.”

      “Abe, what the hell do I do?”

      “You fight.” He pushed a piece of paper across his desk. “You’ve got an appointment at three at Barnard, Kootz, Bingham.” She looked her question with a frown, and he said, “Law firm. Heavy hitters—sixty partners, big-bucks political donors to both parties, lots of media savvy. The woman I’m sending you to is the best they got.” He grinned. “She just beat us in court. That’s how I know how good she is. Unhh—this ain’t pro bono work they do over there, Rose. Justice is blind, but she ain’t cheap. Bea and I’ll help if we can.”

      She had a quick temper, at best; now it gushed out, pushed by the fatigue and a hangover and the hurt, and she cursed; she said they could shove it; she said she didn’t want to be part of a Navy that could treat her like this. And she cursed some more.

      He grinned again. “Stay mad. You’re going to need it.”

       4

      USS Thomas Jefferson.

      USS Thomas Jefferson was an old friend, and Alan walked through the passageways with the familiarity of a man visiting a childhood home. The ship was preparing to get underway, and the noise was oddly calming to his own tension. Maybe, as Rafe seemed to believe, it really would all work out once they were at sea.

      His detachment had its own ready room, the lack of an A-6 squadron in the air wing having left one vacant. Ready Room Nine, all the way aft and almost under the stern, was the noisiest one; landing aircraft hit the deck just a few feet overhead, and, during flight operations, conversation was all but impossible. Heavy iron cruise boxes filled the front of the room below the chalk-board, but at least, he thought, it was theirs.

      He wanted to speak to his division chiefs and the officers acting as department heads, but the ready room was nearly empty. He also wanted to find Stevens, the former acting det commander, who probably believed he should have been given the command, even though it was so screwed up that the CAG had made a special point of it. Getting Stevens on his side was an important priority, if it could be done.

      The det also had a long list of maintenance problems that Alan thought had been gundecked too long, but, stepping in late and starting behind, he had to trust the chiefs to get the planes in the air until he could find what was really wrong and fix it. As it was, his unit had one aircraft scheduled to launch in four hours, and he wanted to prove himself to Rafe by making sure it was airborne on time.

      Alan put his own name on the flight sked for that first event, scratching a jg named Soleck, whom he hadn’t even met.

      “Where’s Mister Soleck?” he said to a chief who was overseeing the unpacking of the maintenance gear.

      “Who’s that, sir? He our missing officer?”

      “Missing?”

      “Last I heard, there was one hadn’t reported aboard, sir.” The chief was very businesslike; if he had heard the talk that Rafe had referred to, or if he had ideas about the new CO who had got involved in a shooting onshore, he said nothing.

      But an officer who hadn’t reported aboard? And where the hell was he? Alan reached for the only solid ground he could in the uncertainty of the det: a senior chief he knew and trusted. “Where’s Senior Chief Craw?”

      “Senior’s gone down to VS-53 admin, sir.”

      Alan ducked out of the ready room and swung down the steel ladder to the S-3 squadron’s admin section, his bad foot giving him a hippity-hop rhythm. Craw was sitting at a computer terminal with another officer hovering by him, but Alan pushed past.

      “Senior Chief?”

      “Commander! I thought I’d wait till we had some privacy, but, damn! it’s good to see you, Mister Craik.”

      Alan tried to smile. “It’s great to see you, Martin.” The use of the senior chief’s first name caused them both to look at the other officer, by some ingrained reflex of training and custom that said that officers should not call enlisted, however senior and however close, by their first names. “Lieutenant-Commander Craik, this is LTjg Campbell. His part of the translant ran like a top.”

      Campbell stammered a greeting and looked embarrassed. They shook hands; Alan had missed meeting him at Pax River. He turned back to Craw. “How bad was the move?”

      “Nothing we couldn’t handle. The planes were flying off empty and we were leaving half of our spare parts on the beach, but I sort of fixed that first.” Martin Craw’s sentences implied volumes. Sort of fixed that first suggested an argument won.

      “What else?” Alan and Craw exchanged a look that meant Tell it like it is.

      “The inventory was crap and the acting CO released the fly-off officers at 1500. Plus a new guy from flight school wasn’t informed that we had an immediate movement and went on leave straight from Pensacola.”

      “Is that LTjg Soleck, by any chance, who’s on the flight schedule in four hours?”

      Craw sighed. “Roger that, skipper. I’m trying to reach him. See, nobody ever sent him an info packet or a schedule or anything, so he has no idea we’re looking for him, either.”

      “Do we still have land lines tied in?”

      Craw glanced at his watch. “About ten minutes longer.”

      “Give me a phone. Then I’ve got to start meeting people.”

      He called the listed number in Pennsylvania twice. It rang through, but no one answered and there was no machine. Then he called the duty desk at NAS Pensacola and asked for a contact number for LTjg Evan Soleck. The petty officer at the other end shuffled papers for a few minutes and asked to call back. Alan hung up,