Top Hook (26 page)

Anna logged off the young medical student's computer. Harun had been delighted to find a woman who spoke Persian in the youth hostel, devastated when she wouldn't sleep with him. Women who wore blue jeans and lived in youth hostels were supposed to be loose. Western decadence was the lure that had brought him to study in Turkey, after all.

By not sleeping with him, she had evaded all of his Iranian male contempt. He wanted her. She led him by the prick. They sat in a café and sipped thick coffee and she used his ancient laptop to log in through a Turkish university net.

She thought of Alan Craik. A boy, like the boy beside her. Boys could be led. Shreed was not a boy, but an old, bitter spy. A professional manipulator. He would be dead to most of her wiles, and that made him impossible to manage. On the other hand, he had the knowledge to survive and prosper that she needed. Craik didn't. She couldn't see Craik leaving his life to follow her, but even if she managed it, what sort of partner would he be? Perhaps more biddable than Shreed, but hard?

He pursued Bonner like a thing from beyond the grave.
Efremov had said that with respect. Craik was at least handsome, even winning in a quiet way. She could lie down next to Craik without a qualm, perhaps even look forward to it. His eyes were powerful, as Efremov's had
been. There was something in Craik that drew her, and she fought it as she had since she had first seen him shouting for his wife in the café in Trieste. No one on earth would wear that look and shout for her, but he had responded to her when she had let him know a little of the truth of her life. He was a man who felt things. Shreed would use her like a towel. She was tired of old men.

She was tired of boys, too.

She stretched, absently displaying her perfect midriff below her sleeveless top to the boy seated opposite. He pawed her with his eyes. She smiled a little vacantly and typed a series of keys.

“I have to use the washroom, Harun.”

He smiled wolfishly at her. An hour later, he found that his laptop had been slicked down to core memory. In the hostel, two young Arab women discovered that their passports had been stolen. None of them ever saw her again.

Alan's solution to inaction was work. He sat in his stateroom, grinding away at a stack of first-class-petty-officer evaluations that were ready for signature, then reviewing his jg fitrep drafts, but his mind was on the map of the Indian Ocean pasted over his desk. Three feet above him, the distorted voice of Céline Dion pounded through the deck. A steel-beach picnic was in full swing on the flight deck, and Alan needed to get some air. He changed into running clothes and headed for the party.

He ran into his own people as soon as he emerged on the blast furnace of the deck. It was a hundred and eight degrees in the shade, and it would get hotter as they
entered the Red Sea. He got a burger and the allowed beer from one of the stalls set up at the deck edge and moved to where most of his officers were lounging in deck chairs. Reilley and Cohen were tossing a Nerf football. Stevens was describing a flight to Campbell, his hands flat in the universal aviator symbolism representing aircraft. Soleck was lying back and fondling a female helicopter pilot with his eyes while she played volleyball on a net stretched between two F-18s.

“Hey, Soleck, keep your eyes in your head.”

“Oh, yeah, hi, skipper. She's real cute. Kinda flatchested, but—”

“Soleck! She's an officer in the US Navy, for Christ's sake.”

“Sure is a great Navy!”

He thought he was funny. He was twenty-two years old.

“Soleck, I'm serious as a heart attack. If you can't learn to treat women like fellow professionals—”

“Whoa! Attention on deck, it's the CAG!”

Rafe looked like a poster for the Navy in a clean haze-gray T-shirt and faded USNA shorts.

“I'll just go play volleyball.” Soleck grabbed his shirt and vanished.

“He as sharp as he looks?” Rafe said.

“Soleck? Sometimes I think he's hopeless. Sometimes I think he's a genius. I was just starting to give him the ‘don't drool on the female cadre' lecture. Same one as had so much effect on you, as I recall.”

Rafe put his arm around Alan's shoulder, a gesture that did not pass unremarked on the flight deck. Alan squeezed his arm and turned to face him. “I have an idea I need to turn into a plan.”

“Talk to me, Al.”

“I want to put recon way ahead into the IO as soon as we get to the bottom of the Red Sea. I'm thinking a big chainsaw right out over the IO.”

“And you're thinking that the MARI system might just win its spurs.”

“Right.”

Alan had the map of the vast reaches of the Indian Ocean in his mind. The Gulf of Aden opened like a mouth into the scene of action, the Arabian Sea. From Socotra Island at the eastern end of the Gulf of Aden, it was less than two thousand miles to Karachi, Pakistan, or to Goa, India, the two antagonists' major naval bases. By the time the
Jefferson
reached Socotra, now fourteen hundred miles away, the Chinese surface-action group could be near Sri Lanka. All the players would be on the board.

If the
Jefferson
and her escorts pressed hard, they could be at Socotra in three days. If they raced and left the escorts, sooner. Rafe looked at him, considering. “It's one hell of a long way.”

“Doable, Rafe. With even a modest tanker plan, we could get a good look at the Ceylon Channel. And we'd be south of the action, if they're sparring.”

“They're already sparring. An Indian frigate sank a Pakistani missile boat about an hour ago.”

“It's a lot like a war, isn't it?”

“Looks like shit, and it tastes like it, too.”

“Rafe, getting a scout would serve a lot of purposes. It ought to scare the piss out of the Chinese; they'll have no idea where we came from. If we show our hand, I mean. And it might just help convince them we mean business. But I have to say it: they might shoot.”

“Yeah.”

“So we can't just have the MARI birds. We'd need at least one or two shooters. That's a lot more gas.”

“We plan it both ways. F-18s would go a long way to convince them we were close. On the other hand, they can't have any serious air cover.”

“Maybe not. Also, remember that the Indians will be all over them. We can't be the trigger that starts everybody shooting.”

“Yeah. Okay, Al. You have ideas, I have ideas. Let's get some pens and start planning. I'll get everybody together when we have a draft. We plan it both ways; a strike package and just the two MARI birds and their gas. I expect it will have to be approved all the way up the chain to CNO.”

“Higher than that, Rafe.”

“And then, if we haven't started WWIII with China, maybe you can slip off to Bahrain, okay?”

The words marked a change in Rafe—conciliation, or new information?

Alone in her office in the early morning, Emma Pasternak reviewed her e-mails and her voice mail and her paperwork, keeping her investigator's file on George Shreed open in front of her. She knew what she was going to do, but it was too early yet. She worked on, glancing at her watch every half-hour. Finally, the watch told her that it was after nine-thirty and time to act.

She reached for the telephone.

George Shreed picked up the telephone without looking at it. He was pretending to listen to a former congressman orate on the subject of a missile defense system while, in his own head, he was concentrating on the problem of revenging himself on Chen. Giving an apologetic cock of the head as he touched his telephone, Shreed held up a hand.

“Sir, I'm sorry—” It was his receptionist, who had the fear of being fired in his voice. “The caller said it was urgent. Priority Star—”

“Put him on.” He gave the ex-congressman a fleeting smile.

“Am I speaking to George Shreed?” It was a woman's voice.

“Speaking.”

“Mister Shreed, this is Emma Pasternak of Barnard,
Kootz, Bingham. I represent Lieutenant-Commander Rose Siciliano in an ongoing national security case.”

Shreed felt the hair at the base of his skull rise. “Yes?”

“Mister Shreed, is it true that you're a Chinese agent who uses the code name Top Hook?”

His mouth went dry and his gut dropped. He stared at the ex-congressman, who was cleaning the fingernails of one hand with a fingernail of the other. “Is this a joke?” he managed to say.

“No joke, no kidding, no bullshit. I'm going to court today to request a subpoena to depose you under oath, hopefully tomorrow, about your role in the scapegoating of my client. Any comment?”

“I think that if you have such an absurd action in mind, the place to go is the Agency Security Office. They pass on requests for interviews. Goodbye.”

He tried to hang up, but her voice froze his hand.

“Listen, Shreed, I'll have that subpoena by three and I'm coming after you tomorrow! Under oath! I'll bring a court steno and you by all means have somebody there from your Security office! I'll want two hours, because I've got
lots
of questions about a Chinese agent named Top Hook who uses the Internet to pass US secrets! Get me?”

He lowered the telephone into the cradle. He managed to smile at the former congressman. “Somebody who wants to subpoena me,” he said, as if it were a joke. His knees were trembling, but he kept his face pleasant and his hands steady. After a glance at his watch, he said, “I'm sorry to cut you short, Congressman, but the people upstairs have me down for a meeting in ten minutes.”

The ex-congressman went right back to his spiel, which really had to do with his allegiance to the defense
contractor who now paid his salary. Shreed pretended to listen while his heart pounded and his mind kept snarling at him,
It's over, it's over, it's over—

He told his receptionist he was feeling sick and was taking the rest of the day off, and he hobbled down to his car in its privileged parking space and drove himself slowly out of the Agency lot and made the turn toward his home. Checking ahead and behind for surveillance, he detoured to a major artery and drove for ten minutes toward the district, then took the turnoff for Tyson's Corner and its traffic and its upscale high-rises. He had actually visited a doctor out here sometimes, so the route might make some sort of sense.

He found himself having to plan an escape too quickly. He thought he had been planning ever since Janey's death—Jesus, only nine days ago—and, now that the moment had come, he wasn't ready. In fact, he realized, he hadn't believed that the moment would come at all. He hadn't believed he would really have to flee.

He turned down toward the doctor's and watched behind himself for a tail.
The call from that woman could have been a fake to flush me. Maybe they've known for months—a couple of years, that's how long it takes them to get their act together—
Seeing nobody, he pulled into the big parking lot that surrounded the doctor's isolated high-rise on three sides, drove up and down two parking lanes as if looking for a space—there were plenty, but he after all was a man with a handicap—and then coasted through an almost hidden gap that took him into the parking lot of the next building. He turned right and exited immediately, went around the block three-quarters of the way, and headed for home.

What he was supposed to do now was notify Chen
and initiate an escape plan. The Chinese would pull him out within six hours, and tomorrow he'd be in Beijing, a hero.

Which was the last thing he wanted.

He put the car in the attached garage rather than leaving it in the driveway. Entering the house through the kitchen, he went at once to the freezer and took out the morphine, the syringes, and the vial of blood, which he fanned on the countertop as if making a display. He was thinking that he would have to go to the bank where he had the safety-deposit box with the old passport and the money. No point in taking the gun. He did, however, add a folding Spyderco police knife with which you could rip open a can or a car seat or a human being.

He would have to call his doctor and make an appointment for late in the day. He would need time to sew the Chinese-furnished passport and his legitimate passport into whatever clothes he wore—blue jeans and a T-shirt and another shirt over it, he was thinking, and a jacket and a baseball cap—and he would need time in an airport toilet to stick on the false mustache. No, better do that at a gas station. He was thinking that he had to ditch his canes and put the blood in the car and—

He went to his computers. He had to do this part exactly right. If he didn't, he'd lose the years of preparation and the triumph he had prepared. His moment. His justification, when they'd all see at last how right he was and what he had achieved.

He began to download files to disk. He'd have preferred making a single CD-ROM, but his laptop didn't have the capability. He should have prepared for that, he thought.
Bad planning. Thought I was planning and I was just dicking around. Now I'm behind the curve.
He checked
his watch. He hated the fact that he was sweating and his heart was beating too fast and he felt lightheaded. Downloading files from the second computer, he double-checked his mental list and saw nothing that he'd missed. Everything would go on two disks; the rest was dross now. He moved to the third computer and downloaded the algorithmic password file and the ultimate-go file, which would trigger the program in the University of California mainframe and start the money pouring out of the Chinese intelligence and party accounts.

“And that's all I really need,” he said aloud.

He began to dismantle the computers. What he wanted was the three hard drives; when each one was out, he reassembled the computer so that it would look quite normal.
Should have had substitutes to put in
, he told himself.
Stupid. Should have had drives full of innocuous shit to smack in there.
But he hadn't. He hadn't really planned it well enough.

Because he hadn't believed.

He straightened with a screwdriver in his hand. It occurred to him that he hadn't believed he'd have to flee because he hadn't thought anybody was smart enough to catch him.

“Jesus, a beginner's mistake,” he said. He shook his head.
But how did that bitch know?

He stopped and booted up the laptop and embedded a message in a pixel and sent it to the porn site. It read: “Laundryman: Cannot make meeting Belgrade. Conflicts here. Will reschedule soonest. Top Hook.”

He took the three hard drives to the garage and stacked them on and around a big transformer that they had had in Jakarta and never got rid of. Dusty now, looking more nineteenth-century than twentieth,
it had adapted the local electricity to their American appliances. It had ruined several computer disks for him until he had understood what a powerful magnetic field it created. He plugged it in and let it fry the hard drives.

He cut his hair short.

He drove to the bank.

He turned off the transformer and smashed the hard drives with a hammer, then swept every scrap into a trash bag and put it in the car.

He roamed the house. The house must look as if he intended to live there forever. And as if he had come home for the reason he had given, that he had felt sick: he opened the medicine cabinet, got out some Pepto-Bismol and Imodium tablets and put them on the top of the toilet tank.

He put a Patsy Kline CD on and sat in the empty house, listening to it until she sang “Crazy,” and then he listened to that again. He couldn't go out to Janey's grave to say goodbye. He thought of the mound of new earth with bitterness, the raw dirt covered with some stupid blanket of green plastic to look like grass. No flowers, no goodbyes. The song ended and he turned the player off.

“Crazy,” he said. The song had already been a classic when they had met. He astonished himself by his sentimental attachment to it. Tears were in his eyes.

With distaste, he injected himself with the morphine.

When it had settled in and the first hot glow was over, he went once more through the house and checked again that everything looked normal, so normal that the house could have been used as a setting in a Disney film.
The American Home,
he thought. His legs pained him less, and he was even able to clump downstairs without
his canes, holding the rail and teetering on legs no longer used to supporting him.

At the door to the garage, he turned and looked back into the kitchen and to the breakfast room beyond, scenes of seven thousand mornings, kisses, fights, shared lives.

“Crazy,” he said.

He didn't pack a suitcase.

He didn't take a raincoat.

He didn't say goodbye.

Mission planning used to be done anywhere that there was a flat space for charts, a handful of pencils, and room for the planners. The computer has changed all that. The interlocking circles of missile ranges, fueled radii, and threat-radar coverage can all be displayed on a screen at the flick of a button. Guesswork as to the possible course and location of enemy units can be done scientifically, with vectors on colored graphics and far-on circles indicating maximum possible movement. The danger for the computer generation is that the graphics look so finished that they threaten to become reality, rather than remaining an assembly of hypothesis and WAGs—wild-ass guesses.

Rafe belonged to the generation that still preferred paper charts. Rafe still hand-copied his own strip-charts for low-level cross-country flights, because the time it took him to calculate the fuel and draw the lines helped him to understand the terrain and the hazards. Alan had reached seniority with the computer, but his professional conscience agreed; a hand-done chart full of SAM sites and missile coverage rings served to teach the maker to know his enemy's air defense intimately.

So the first draft of the reconnaissance mission, already codenamed Opera (for the famous Beijing Opera) Glass (for looking at things far away), was done on paper charts with grease pencils, the way missions had been planned since the Second World War.

The word spread. The intelligence specialists began to pile pertinent message traffic under Alan's elbow, and somebody else brought them coffee. An hour after they began, Chris Donitz strolled in and began to work fuel figures for the F-14 Tomcats, which they would have to use for long-range air cover. Alan sent for Stevens and Campbell and assigned them to do the same for the MARI planes, and DaSilva from the S-3 squadron came in with two pilots and an NFO and started to work the tanking numbers. Alan and Rafe explained the mission in snatches and let the chart on the table do most of the talking.

Alan slipped comfortably back into the role of intel officer. He read quickly, took cryptic notes and shot off sentences to clarify intelligence points. Rafe tried to plan both package options, but when he took charge of the large package and put the F-14 skipper in charge of planning the smaller, Alan was pretty sure that Rafe had made his decision.

Alan sharpened a pencil and started to draft a message to Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Behind him, Brian Ho, the air wing intelligence officer, took in as much of both plans as possible and started to draft a brief to go in front of the admiral ASAP, because, without the admiral's approval, there would be no request to Fifth Fleet, much less to the Joint Chiefs.

“Threat,” murmured Rafe. “It all comes down to the threat. If they have air cover, we have to have fighters.”

Alan tossed a three-page report on the chart and took a slug of coffee.

“Su-27 Flankers at Bussein. They moved there two days ago. They might be sending more right into Pakistan.”

“Where the fuck is Bussein?”

One of the hovering ensigns reached over and pointed to a town noted as “Bassein” on the coast of Burma.

Rafe glanced up. “Do you know that, or are you guessing?”

“Um, guessing, sir.”

“Glad you have the balls to say so. Find out.” He turned to Alan. “Can they refuel in the air?”

“Probably. They were practicing it last year. No point in putting those Flankers there if they can't reach their ships.” Alan was immersed in an old FOSIF WestPac report on Chinese tanker training.

“Flankers got some long legs, too,” Ho interjected. “Maybe twelve hundred miles? Combat load? Someone look that up.”

“Fuck. We don't know much, do we?” Rafe took a swig from his coffee.

“Rafe, I think it's possible, but not probable, that the Chinese have air.”

“What are they doing so far out? I mean, let's just think this through. Will they even come around Sri Lanka? Why would they? India has carriers, a real navy. Hell, their submarines are damned good, too. Chinese are taking a
huge
chance if they come this far. What if they plan to stay over in the Bay of Bengal?”