Top Hook (27 page)

“Last reports show them on track for Sri Lanka. Indians are protesting like mad, but it's international waters, and India is still at peace with China. Hell, aside from the fact that they're shooting at each other, India is still technically at peace with Pakistan. And maybe
the Chinese are counting on India to be smart enough not to shoot.”

Alan had stopped writing. He leafed back through the reports under his elbow, found the one he wanted, and read it carefully, drinking the last of his cold coffee. Stevens touched him on the shoulder.

“We'd have to tank twice. No way around it.”

“Tell Rafe.”

“Roger.” Interesting. Stevens had pitched into the plan and started working. Stevens was often the naysayer in group activities, and Alan had thought that this tendency had probably kept him from promotion. But today he had been one of the first to arrive, and he had started off simply fetching materials until Rafe gave him a job. Alan went back to his report, took a few notes, and looked around. “Sanchez?” He only knew her name from the number of times he'd seen her with Soleck.
Where
was
Soleck, anyway?

“Sir?”

“I don't know how you'll do this, but I want to know if either of the planned Chinese Jiangwei II frigates ever got delivered to Pakistan. Says here they were completed last March.”

“Spell that for me, sir?”

“Here, just take the report. Call Office of Naval Intelligence, get them on it.”

Rafe had looked up from his own work. “I miss smoking, sometimes.” Others laughed. Rafe bent over to Alan. “Give.”

“Just a thought.”

“Spill it.”

“I'm wondering if the Chinese aren't going round to Pakistan to deliver some ships. Like maybe the whole damn flotilla.”

“
What?
”

“It's been done before. The Russians used to do it with submarines. At the opportune moment, the Chinese become advisors, they run up the flag of Pakistan, surprise!”

“Christ!”

“Well, yes and no. A few modern warships would change the balance in the AOR, yeah. But the Indians still have the upper hand in training and material. And they'll be watching that Chinese group like hawks. But if it coincided with something else, hell, it could work. It'd be a coup for both China and Pakistan.”

“I buy it.”

“Don't buy it yet, Rafe. I've sent Ms Sanchez out to get some facts. Hey, Campbell! Where's Soleck?”

“Ready room.”

“Call him and tell him to start putting together a simulator on Chinese hulls.” Alan leafed through a
Jane's
. “Sovremenny's already there. Luha class, Luda class, Luhai and Jiangwei, Jianghu FFGs. That'll keep him busy. Damn it. Look how many new-design hulls the Chinese have built in the last three years, Rafe. Mister Stevens, what's Soleck doing?”

“Writing a standard mission overlay for the AOR.”

“Whatever.”

Sanchez was back. She grinned in triumph. “Two Jiangwei II frigates have been paid for but not delivered. They're both missing from imagery at their South Fleet anchorage.”

“Nice job, Ms Sanchez. Thanks.” Rafe smiled at her. “Now I
really
buy it.”

“We'll know for sure when MARI images their flotilla. Sanchez? Ask DNI if anyone has a composition on that Chinese group. Maybe the Australians? Or the
Malaysians? Anyway, Brian—” this to the CAG AI—“put that on the ‘intel' slide and in ‘objectives,' too.”

“Roger.” His fingers raced across the laptop in front of him. “Voilà;. Ready to brief.”

There was a flight out of Dulles to London at eight-thirty. Shreed made the reservation at a pay phone, using the old Agency passport name. They wouldn't ping on it for days, he knew, and all he needed was twenty-four hours. Everything he was doing was designed to give him twenty-four hours—get out of the US, find a protector, then get the memo to Chen—and then if things went right, he'd have disappeared into a black hole. If things didn't go right, well—what would he care?

His neighbors, if they had even noticed, would say that he had left in his car; the Agency would believe that he had left for his doctor's and then disappeared.

Then they would find the car.

He drove west to a strip mall and dropped parts of the destroyed hard drives into a dumpster, then a little north to another and then west again to a third, where the last of the hard drives went into the trash. Detecting no surveillance, he went south to a small park and put on his traveling clothes in a men's room. He made a face at himself in the mirror. In London, he would darken his hair, but he didn't want to leave any possibility here that somebody would remember his buying the retoucher. With the baseball cap and the jacket on, he looked like an engineer on vacation. Or maybe a low-level entrepreneur getting ready to coach the Little League team.

Or a spy getting ready to bolt.

He took the vial of his own blood and poured most of
it in a single small puddle into the trunk. The rest went on the rear bumper, where he smeared it with his hand, and—only a drop—on the right rear fender.

In the thickening dusk, he drove north to the Beltway and then around Washington on the west and north and then north again to White Flint Mall, and there he parked the car, locked it, like Everyman going shopping, and walked away.

There is a Metro stop at White Flint. It connects with Metro trains to northern Virginia, from which a bus service connects with Dulles International Airport.

The
Jefferson
and its battle group plowed on into the Red Sea. An ASW screen had been thrown out ahead of it. Sonar tails were in the water, and, in the ASW spaces, AIs and helo pilots boned up on Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani submarines.

In West Virginia, Rose slept. One of her children whimpered in a nightmare and she woke, listened, and put her head down. The dog, hearing a dog far away, put his head up to the window and raised his ears and growled. These early warnings could not be taken seriously, however, and she made the dog lie down, and the child was quiet, and Rose slept.

In Washington, Sally Baranowski lay awake in Abe Peretz's guest room, thinking of Ray Suter and the almost pleasant evening she had spent with him. Something was up, she thought; she had thought it a dozen times during their dinner together. Sometimes she thought it was something about Suter, then something about Shreed. Suter, his hands bandaged, had been tense, although not too tense to propose sex, which she had laughed away as “too soon.” But she couldn't escape the thought that something was very wrong with
him. And then, being as near depression as she was, she could not escape thinking,
Maybe there's something very wrong with me.

Mike Dukas slept alone. He hadn't been able to reach Emma. He dreamed about Rose, about a vast hotel, about stairs and doors, all of it somehow a movie in which he was an actor but had no script, and he woke after a scene in which he had walked and walked down a passageway of many doors yet never moved past a single one of them, as if the floor had been a treadmill under his feet. “Going noplace,” he said as he woke, finding the room cold.

Tony Moscowic, dead, swayed just above the bottom of the Anacostia River. The fat on his decaying body almost balanced the concrete chunks in his jacket, and his corpse, neutrally buoyant, neither quite floated nor quite sank. Down at his right ankle, a rusted pipe had snagged his pantleg, and, as the swollen river dropped and the current lessened, he stayed in that place, a dead man waiting.

The brief to the admiral was an anticlimax. He took the brief at speed, grabbed the laptop, scrolled through the slides, and asked if they had a message ready for CNO. Alan handed over his draft message to Fifth Fleet. The admiral changed the “To” line to JCS OPS and made Fifth Fleet a “Via.” Then they waited as he massaged the message. “Send it. Give me the whole brief tonight. Large package all the way; no point in pissing on them when we can kick them. Okay, make it so. Lieutenant-Commander Craik, stick around a minute.”

He waited until they had all filed out except the flag captain and the JAG officer. Then he looked hard at Alan. “Commander, I have a message regarding your support to NCIS on my desk. I'd have liked to have been informed, but I gather this was done on the fly. Some crap has stuck to you because of it and I want that settled, got it?”

“I'd like it settled, too, sir. There are a lot of rumors on the mess decks. It isn't helping me run my det.”

“Concur. I'm going to have the NCIS guy say a few words after your brief. Commander, let me just say this. You seem to be involved in some spy crap that's pretty important in Washington. I got a wrong impression about it, and it looks to me like you were a little outside the box. You have a reputation for going outside that box, and you could do yourself a favor by
keeping your chain of command informed of all of your

activities.”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

“You going to tell me it's too sensitive?”

“No, sir. We may have discovered a senior mole in the CIA. Working for China. It all started with a connection to my dad's death.”

“Well, well. You've about tripled my knowledge of what the hell is going on. Are you still involved?”

“Yes, sir. I'm supposed to meet the, uh, agent, the person who may have the data, in Bahrain in two days.” Alan was sweating again, and he still hadn't had time to change his shirt. None of the three men facing him looked friendly, although Maggiulli looked a lot less accusatory than he had lately.

“We'll see. If it's up to me, you're out of it, but I have a feeling it's not up to me. Now go do your job.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Alan walked out of the admiral's briefing room with Tony Maggiulli on his heels.

“Just understand, okay? You made a mess in Trieste and left us to hold the bag. You looked bad, withholding from the Italian cops and from us. Even a one-liner about the level of the operation would have saved you a lot of crap from our end.”

“I didn't know what it was about, then. Or that my wife had been accused of espionage. It was all over the boat when I got here. I didn't have a clue what was going on.”

“Well, next time, talk to a lawyer, okay?” Maggiulli stuck out his hand, and Alan shook it.

The WAGN line crosses the River Lea a little north of Clapton, a part of metropolitan London that most tourists never see. A path runs along the river, part of the Lea Valley Park system, coming from Limehouse Cut and the Thames on the south and running north to Waltham Abbey and then to Ware. The Lea—the river that Izaak Walton once fished—is not much where Limehouse Cut runs into the Thames, and it remains an urban and industrial waterway for several miles, but then its banks grow greener and the spaces on each side widen, and by the time you reach the railway bridge where the trains cross, it is a pleasant, watery space.

The five-seventeen to Cambridge crosses the river here. Marcus Huckabee rides the five-seventeen every weekday of his life. He always sits in the same seat, the third from the end on the downstream side, just as, on the trip into London in the morning, he sits in the fourth seat, downstream side. Every day, on both trips, he looks aside as the train crosses the Lea and takes a moment to study a row of posts along the western bank of the river by the path.

Marcus Huckabee has seen something on one of the posts only three times in seven years. Each time, he did what he was paid twenty pounds a month to do: he telephoned a number in Fulham and said, “There's a package for Hannah at the shop.” That was all. That was the entirety of Marcus Huckabee's part in espionage.

Two of those times, the thing on the post—once a Coke bottle, once a glove—had been left by a walker who had found it on the path. The third time, the thing (a lager can) had been put there by Marcus Huckabee's handler, who was testing him.

Today, lowering his newspaper, Huckabee looked aside and was pleased and, as with the other times, excited to see a red cap on one of the posts. Third from the end, exactly where it should be, although he reported anything on any of the posts.
Red cap, third from the end,
he told himself. It was important to remember the details, because his handler would contact him later and ask.

As soon as he got home, right after kissing his wife, Huckabee called the number in Fulham.

Within two hours, the Mossad office in Tel Aviv knew that a foreign friend, not yet an asset, wanted to make contact.

At ten o'clock London time, George Shreed checked a mark on the wall of the cinema in Brunswick Center and walked to a bench at the far end of the shopping mall, where a middle-aged woman was waiting for him.

He had been gone for twenty-one hours.

“Suter hasn't seen him since yesterday. I think he's worried, but he says he isn't.”

Mike Dukas didn't see much in Sally Baranowski's call. Still, you had to encourage your agent, even when the agent was as informal an acquisition as Sally. “But you said he went home sick.”

“His receptionist says he went home sick yesterday morning. The DO logged a call from him yesterday afternoon saying he was heading to the doctor's but he was sure he wouldn't be in today.”

“Well, there's some bug going around.”

“But he didn't call in this morning. We're supposed to call in daily if we're taking sick leave.”

“Thanks for keeping on top of it. I really appreciate it. Check on him tomorrow, will you?”

“Mister Dukas, I get really bad vibes about this. George isn't the kind of guy who stays home sick. I used to work for him, remember—you could have terminal flu, he still expected you to be there.”

“Well, thanks. You're doing real good. How's life at the Peretzes?”

She laughed, the first time he had heard her laugh. The night that Rose had brought her to his place after the tire-slashings, she had seemed a basket case to him. “It's pretty noisy,” she said.

He laughed, too. Bea Peretz and her daughters were high-decibel arguers. “You take care.”

He was going to dismiss what she had said, but he remembered the warning he had given Menzes: his rabbit was getting ready to run. Could George Shreed have run? But why? Nothing had changed.

Still, what she had told him nagged.

He called across to Triffler. “Hey, Dick—play telemarketer for me, will you?”

“Oh, shit!”

“Yeah, go on, you told me you moonlighted at it once—I bet you're dynamite.” He had been asking Triffler more personal questions. “Just get on the phone and make one call for me, okay?”

“Who to?”

“George Shreed. I just want to know if he's home, okay?”

Triffler walked around the wall of crates to Dukas's desk. He looked disgusted. “Why me?”

“Because I can't do that shit and you can! Will you call him?”

Triffler looked at the wall. His lips moved. He nodded.

“I'll do the prescription-drug spiel. His phone listed?”

“One is, one isn't. Listing is G. Shreed.” Dukas pushed a paper with the number across the desk.

“Okay, so I can say ‘Mister Shreed.' Okay—” He did a quick rehearsal for Dukas's benefit. “'May I speak to Mister Shreed, please? Mister Shreed, this is Thad Blaine calling from the Vital Health Foundation, how are you this afternoon, sir? Do you realize that the cost of prescription drugs—' Okay!” He picked up Dukas's phone. “My wife may call on my line; the dog was sick—Here we go—”

Triffler dialed. He waited. He listened. He hung up. “Answering machine.”

“Shit.”

“Could mean nothing.”

“I know, I know. Anyway, thanks, Dick.” He looked at Triffler. “Baranowski thinks he's been out of sight too long—since yesterday some time.”

“Melodramatic. She's unstable.”

“I know, I know. Still—” He put his hand on the phone. “If I tell Menzes, he's going to cream me for withholding information. If I don't tell him, Shreed could be in Tehran.”

“Wait a day.”

Dukas and Triffler stared at each other. Triffler was the cautious one, and Dukas reminded himself of that and that sometimes caution is misplaced. “Unh-unh,” he said and started to dial.

“Thanks for your confidence in my judgment.”

“I value your input.” He waited as the telephone rang. So did Triffler, who, despite his advice, wanted to know what was happening. After five rings, however, somebody else picked up and told Dukas that Menzes was in a meeting. Dukas left his name and number
and asked to be called back before the end of the workday.

“What day does that cleaning woman do Shreed's house?”

“Wednesdays.”

“Well, that won't work.” It was Friday. “Let's see what Valdez has got.” He dialed another number.

“
Nada
,” Valdez said. “There was some computer use middle of the day yesterday, then nothing. No traffic last night, which he doesn't usually fail to do, being a night person.”

“What about the other hacker who's on him?”

“He's still there, man, just waiting. Just like me.”

He hung up.

“I don't like this,” he said to Triffler.

The brief ended up in the VS-53 ready room, because it had the most seats, and because Rafe had decided to fly one of the VS-53 birds for Opera Glass. There were sixty aircrew packed into a space meant to seat forty, and the back was crowded with intelligence personnel, alternate crews, and flag staff. The admiral was sitting in the squadron skipper's seat, front row on the aisle, and the embroidered cat symbol on the headrest shone in the reflected light of the projector.

Rafe stood at the front of the ready room, a tall, lanky figure in a rumpled flight suit, and sixty pairs of eyes were glued to him as he slapped the screen with his pointer. The digital image showed the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to Sri Lanka. West of Socotra Island was a carrier shape. That's where the pointer rested.

“Evening, folks. Okay. Opera Glass is a long-range
recon mission with a supporting war-at-sea package and fighter support. Our objectives are to locate and identify the Chinese surface-action group last located off the map in the southern Bay of Bengal. I want this to sink in, folks. We will be carrying war shots, but we're not going to shoot unless we're provoked. More on that in rules of engagement. What we want is to show the flag and convince the Chinese that we can find them and hurt them if we want to. More than that, we want them to know that we're here and we're serious. That's what's going to make it dangerous for us, because the mission is pretty provocative and they may not respond like our old friends the Russians would.” He nodded sharply to the sailor running the machine, and the computer-generated slide changed in a blink.

“Okay. Here's the package. Two MARI-equipped S-3s at the tip of the spear, with two VF-162 Tomcats to keep them company. Six VS-53 tankers with gas at these three points. All of the 53 birds carry a buddy store and a harpoon. That's in case we have to go in shooting. Four F-18s with HARM back here covering the gas. The MARI birds go to Green Bay, here, tank, and start the search pattern here, at Dallas. When they locate the target, we either start bringing assets up the chain or we don't, depending.”

Rafe took a drink of water and looked out into the dark where the aircrews waited.

“That's the basic mission. Twenty-two planes in the chainsaw, then another six on alert five. At launch plus seven hours, we start rotating the chain. That's the tricky part. For about thirty minutes, during this event,” Rafe went to a slide showing the cyclic ops cycle, “we'll have about half the air wing going up the chain and half coming down. It has to be perfect,
and we can't practice. But it allows us to sustain the search at the pointy end for about five more hours and keep support packages ready to respond. With a little luck, and some ducting, we ought to be able to cover the whole area from Sri Lanka south to Point Denver, here, and west to Point Dallas. The devil's in the details, though. Listen up and hold your questions till the end. Write 'em down if you have to.”

Rafe was followed by the JAG with the rules of engagement. The JAG spoke for almost five minutes, but what he said boiled down to “Don't shoot until shot at, and even then don't shoot.” He closed by saying, “Weapons release will be held by the flag throughout,” for the third time. Then Brian Ho, with the intel portion: a lot about Chinese radar parameters, a cheat sheet for LantFleet sailors who had never seen a Chinese system, and another on the Pakistani and Indian navies. Kneeboard card after kneeboard card on missile ranges and reaction times.

“They may have air support, in the form of Su-27 Flanker B's out of Myanmar/Burma. Also watch for the Indian stuff listed on kneeboard three. No one out there will be particularly friendly, so ID everything you can. Everyone remember what a Tu-16 Badger looks like?” Grins. The Badger was an ancient Soviet plane still used by the Chinese. “They have some fitted out for sea-strike. They have long legs and they could be out for support. They may even do some ASW.”

Aviators got up and talked about fuel loads. LTjg Sanchez briefed the comm plan. Her kneeboard cards were simple and accurate, color-coded by role in the mission package; they represented seven hours of work.