Hostile Contact

To those who tell the truth

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One Targeting

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Part Two Seattle

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Part Three Nairobi

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

Coda

About the author

Praise for the Alan Craik novels

The Alan Craik Novels

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

“This adventure appears to have got us nothing, Mister Craik!” Admiral Pilchard’s face was grim. “You get shot up, Special Agent Dukas takes a bullet, we engage two Chinese aircraft and shoot them down for you—and you bring back nothing! Do you know what the Director of Naval Intelligence has to say about that?”

His voice faded in Alan Craik’s head as it all came back: Pakistan, night, blood…

When a shot from the darkness severed the sniper’s spine, they were sprayed with blood. Mike Dukas crouched next to Alan and then moved a step, and the Chinese officer spun and fired his pistol into Dukas’s chest from five meters away, knocking him back. Alan raised his good arm and brought the sight down one-handed, leaning forward as Dukas recoiled. He shot once and the officer stumbled back and caught himself against the ruined Islamic prayer screen; he raised his own gun again and then flew forward as a rifle shot from the darkness hit him.

Dukas staggered up and forward. He fell to his knees beside George Shreed, the traitor they had chased all this way…

The admiral’s voice stabbed through the memory: “Mister Craik, I’m sorry for your injury, but what in the name of God did you think you were doing?”

Alan grunted, more an acknowledgment that the admiral had been speaking than a reply. He sat there like a whipped dog, his uniform rumpled, his head down, his injured left hand a white mitten of bandage—two fingers gone. And, as the admiral said, for what?

“We caught a spy, sir. A damned important spy. A traitor.” Alan’s tone was flat.

“Yes, and I understand he’s been comatose since you brought him back and he’s going to die within twenty-four hours, and he hasn’t said a word! Craik, you can break the rules when you bring back the gold ring, but when you come back empty—!” When Alan didn’t respond, Pilchard looked at a stone-faced officer who had come over from ONI to sit in on this chewing-out, then back at Alan, and he said almost kindly, “Didn’t this guy Shreed say anything while you had him, Commander? Nothing?”

Had Shreed said anything? Alan had desperately wanted Shreed to say things. He had felt his head reeling as his hand had bled, but he had leaned over Shreed and tried to get him to explain…

“Why?” Alan had gasped. “I want to know why. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” A smile in Shreed’s voice, as if he was saying, What, this little thing, these deaths, this meeting a thousand miles from nowhere? “This op? Because I could. None of those other dickheads had—intestinal—” Shreed rolled a little as if to rise on his elbow and gasped, falling back so hard his head hit the paving. He wasn’t smiling now. He had at least three bullets in him, and Alan was trying to get answers from him before he died.

“You weren’t running an op. You betrayed people.”

“China—won’t trouble—us—”

“China—!”

“Dickheads. Idiots…” The voice trailed off.

Alan was aware that Pilchard had been talking again, had stopped. Alan said, “No, he didn’t say anything, sir. Not anything that made any sense.”

Pilchard looked at him hard, and Alan realized that he’d lost track and that now he was responding to something already past. Pilchard had the furious look of a senior officer who wasn’t being listened to. “Maybe you need to take six months off,” Pilchard growled. “You’re not what I’d call rational.”

“Sir, once I’m back on the boat—”

“You’re not going back to the boat! Goddamit, Craik, look at yourself! Your uniform’s a mess, you look like an old man, you can’t concentrate—! Get a grip on yourself!”

Alan touched his bandages. They were really there so he couldn’t see the hand. As if not seeing it denied its reality. “I need work, sir, not six months off.” Pilchard looked aside at the man from ONI, and Alan got the message: ONI wanted to see a flogging. “We went to get Shreed, and we got him,” he said stubbornly.

The ONI man said, “And he hasn’t said zip. You got nothing.”

“What did you bring the Chinese?” Alan had said then to the dying Shreed. There were a dozen dead Chinese soldiers around the old mosque, and the Chinese officer who had shot Dukas was lying with his head a foot from Shreed’s. Alan thought that Shreed had brought Navy secret codes to give to the Chinese. “What did you bring them?”

Shreed gurgled, turned his head and spat blood against the wall. “Poison. Brought Chen—poison—” Shreed’s head turned, seemed to merge with the Chinese officer’s in the darkness, their faces as close as two lovers’.

“He’s your control? He’s running you?” Alan leaned within inches of Shreed’s ear, trying to force the answers from him.

“Chen?” Shreed snarled. He made the name sound like a dirty word. “Never—never—! The money—!” Shreed closed his eyes. His chest heaved, and Alan thought he was laughing. He wheezed and coughed, then quieted, and there was a silence. “You taking me home?” Shreed whispered.

“If we make it.”

“You think you’re heroes, but you don’t—understand—” Shreed’s voice faded. Alan heard the rasping breath in the darkness. Abruptly, the voice came back, loud now. “I’ll have a monument—like—Bill Casey. You’ll see—who the hero—is—”

The wheezing cough came again as if he was laughing, but he wasn’t laughing.

The admiral was looking at a photograph of the President on his wall and talking again. “Your ‘traitor’ was an important man with important friends at the CIA. They deny that he was a spy, and they’re saying that the Navy made a huge mistake. And you broke a lot of rules in doing it.”

“Shreed said he’d be a hero.”

“And to them he is! He’s got a big cheering section over there.” Pilchard glanced at the ONI man, who nodded gloomily. “Alan, you and this man Dukas broke a lot of rules. When you break the rules, you better come back with a diamond in your hand, or you’re in the deepest shit in the world.”

But Alan went on, like a drunk who doesn’t hear what’s said to him. “Shreed said he’d be a hero! What the hell, he was a traitor. Why would he be a hero?”

“You’re not listening, Commander—!”

“They’ll come back at us,” Alan said. He sat up a little straighter.

“What?”

“The Chinese. They have to come back at us.”

“Come back how?”

“Revenge. Like street gangs. They’ll take a shot at us.”

Pilchard wasn’t interested in street gangs. He nodded at the ONI officer; clearly, it was his time to talk, and it had all been arranged before the chewing-out had started. The ONI man said, “Our office would be happier if Shreed had lived to talk. Or if you’d got the Chinese officer—Shreed’s control. Chou?”

“Chen.”

Shreed saying, contempt in his voice, when Alan had asked if the Chinese officer was his control, “Chen?” as if Chen was a word for shit.

“Yeah. We think that if we could get this Chen, we could salvage something here. What happened to him?”

“I was pretty much out of it by then.” Meaning that his civilian friend Harry and Harry’s assassin girlfriend had had another agenda, and they had been the only good guys left standing at the end of the fight, so they had got whatever was left of Chen.

“If we had him, we’d bury Shreed’s buddies over at the Agency.” The ONI man, a full captain, shook his head. “Is Chou alive, do you think?”

“Chen. It’s Chen.”

“Okay, whatever! If there’s a chance that sonofabitch is still alive, we want to know. That would be something, if we could bring him in. Commander, you hearing me?”

Alan was hearing a sound and couldn’t place it, a distant drone. He was trying to say something to Dukas but he couldn’t hear, and then it was too late to ask anything, and the blood was draining out of him and he wondered if the sound was the aircraft that was supposed to lift them out.

“Money,” Alan said now to Admiral Pilchard. “Shreed said something about money. When he was talking about Chen and poison. I wanted to ask him about it, but then the aircraft came and—”

Alan stared at the wall of the Pentagon office, still hearing the S-3 that had come to take them out of Pakistan, still smelling the blood and feeling the wound in his hand. He’d thought that he had done some of the best work of his life, and now he was being read out for it. He wanted Pilchard, who was a damned good officer and a “sea daddy” to him sometimes, to say that he and Dukas had done a hell of a job and it wasn’t their fault that Shreed hadn’t talked. He wanted him to say that Alan should go back to sea and take over command of his detachment again. But what the admiral was dealing with was not Alan Craik, but a turf war between ONI and the CIA, with the Navy looking bad because one of its officers had broken a lot of rules to capture a man who could, in death, be made to wear a hero’s halo.

“If you know anything about what happened to this Chen, Commander, you better come out with it—quick.” The ONI captain leaned in on Alan, and Pilchard waved him off with a shake of the head.

“Maybe I can find out,” Alan said. Maybe. Maybe Harry and Anna had nursed Chen back to life and were having picnics with him in Bahrain. Maybe Alan’s lost fingers would grow back, too.

“Don’t maybe me. Find out.” The captain leaned away from him out of deference to the admiral, but he sounded threatening.

Admiral Pilchard stood to show the meeting was over. Alan looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I did what I thought was right.”

The admiral gave him a bleak little smile. “The Navy goes by results, Commander.”

Out in the corridor, the captain grabbed his arm. He was a big man who used his size to awe people. “Come up with a diamond, Mister Craik,” he snarled. “Come up with a diamond, or you’re going to be one early-out lieutenant-commander.”

1

400 NM east of Socotra, Indian Ocean.

Captain Rafe Rafehausen slammed his S-3B into the break and thought that he’d done it badly, out of practice, the move both too sudden and too harsh, and beside him he heard Lieutenant jg Soleck give a grunt. Rafehausen had an impulse to snarl and overcame it; he was the CAG and he didn’t fly enough and the kid was right—he should have done it better. Although, as he knew from the weekly reports, the kid’s landing scores were the worst on the boat.

“Gear one, two, three, down—and locked—flaps, slats out—hook is—down—read airspeed and fuel, Mister Soleck—”

The jg muttered the fuel poundage and airspeed, which Rafehausen could have read perfectly well for himself, of course. He supposed he was trying to communicate with the much younger man, who seemed mostly terrified of him.

“Not one of the great breaks of all time, Mister Soleck.”

“Uh—no, sir—but good, sir—considering—”

Rafehausen lined up dead-on, said, “Ball,” when he caught the green, and took the LSO’s instructions almost unconsciously, now into his groove and operating on long and hard-won experience. He caught the two wire, rolled, lifted the hook and let a yellow-shirt direct him forward.

“Nice landing, sir.”

Rafehausen smiled. “Little rough, Mister Soleck. Practice makes perfect.” He slapped the ensign on the shoulder. “Weeklies tell me you need some practice yourself.” He would have walked away then, but he saw the kid blush and look suddenly stricken, so he put the hand more gently on his shoulder and walked with him over the nonskid that way, shouting over the deck noise, “Don’t take it wrong, Soleck—we all get into slumps! Hey, how about you and me do some practice landings together sometime?”

He debriefed in the Det 424 ready room, which was his for the moment only because he’d borrowed one of their aircraft, and then made his way to the CAG’s office. He wished, often, that he was a squadron officer again—no stacks of paper, no wrangles with personalities and egos. Now that it was too late, he knew that when you were a squadron pilot, you were having the best that naval air offered; Soleck didn’t know how lucky he was. What came later—rank, status, command—were compensation for not being a young warrior with a multi-million-dollar horse and a whole sky to ride it in.

“Another urgent p-comm from Al Craik, Rafe,” a lieutenant-commander said as he sat down. “Same old shit—‘Request immediate orders,’ etcetera, etcetera.”

“What’s the medical officer say?”

“No way.”

“Even in non-flight-crew status?”

“Negative. MO says the man ‘needs to heal and overcome trauma, period, and don’t ask again.’ Another month, maybe.”

Alan Craik was a personal friend, and Rafehausen wished he could help him. Craik had been flown back to the carrier with part of one hand shot off and so much blood gone that the medics thought they’d lose him; now back in the States, he was recovered enough to be itching to return to duty. But not enough to serve.

“Send Craik a message over my name: the answer is no, and don’t ask again for at least two weeks.”

Unimak Canyon, Aleutian Archipelago.

“Depth is two hundred meters and steady.”

“Steady at two hundred.” The Chinese captain, standing by his command chair, turned and looked toward sonar station three, the towed array whose passive equipment had most reliably tracked the American. His crew had scored more contact hours on an American ballistic missile submarine in the last four days than any submarine in the history of the Chinese Navy. No moment of that time had been easy.

Even when he knew where the submarine would be, it was almost invisible.

Even trailing it by a mere four thousand meters, it was almost inaudible.

He dared not close any more. His own boat, the Admiral Po, was a killer, slow but sure—the best his service had to offer, but too loud and too old, and no amount of pious mouthing to the Party would change the fact that she leaked radiation from her reactor compartment. Her condition affected the crew, destroyed morale, made retention of the dedicated specialists vital to the service nearly impossible.

He was going to change that. He was going to follow an American ballistic missile sub, a “boomer,” from her base near Seattle to her patrol area, wherever that was. And he was going to take that information home and shove it down the throat of the Party until they paid the money to make his service the equal of her rivals in Russia, Great Britain, and, most of all, America. Because when he had the patrol area where the most precious eggs in the American nuclear basket rested, he would bury the army and the airforce.

“She’s turning to port.”

“All engines stop!” Drift. Every time the American maneuvered, Admiral Po had to drift. He couldn’t take the risk that the Americans were executing a clearing turn to get their passive sonar on their wake. Twice the boomer had done just that, and he had waited, knuckles white, drenched in sweat as the two submarines passed in silence. He couldn’t risk detection. Detection would imperil not only the operation but also its source, a faceless spy whose radio transmissions told him where to pick up the boomer near the American west coast and when.

Admiral Po’s secret friend. Jewel.

“Passing 340 relative and increasing engine noise.”

“Increasing speed?”

Two men in a darkened ballroom. Each can track the other only when he moves and makes a noise. Where is he? Where is he going? How fast is he moving?

Omnipresent—Is he behind me?

The sonarman, his best, watched his three screens, touching buttons and waiting for the computer to analyze tracking data. Passive sonar was an imperfect sensor that had to detect emanations from the target; only active sonar sent out its own signal and listened for the reflection. Sonarmen on passive looked for certain telltale “lines:” auxiliaries, reactors, propeller wash. They hoped for a specific signature that could be reliably assigned to the target, and not, say, a passing whale or a fishing boat on the surface. When they had a library of such noises, they became better trackers, but this endless game of follow-the-leader required constant analysis and perfect guesswork. The cream of the sonar team had been at their stations since they entered the difficult undersea terrain of the Aleutian chain—three watches. The captain hadn’t left the bridge for more than an hour in four days. Despite air-conditioning and high discipline, the bridge stank of sweat and shorted electrical power, a faint ozone smell that never left the Admiral Po. The captain thought it was the smell of leaking radiation.

“Nine knots and still increasing, turning hard to port. I think he’s diving, as well. I’m losing the track in his own wake.” The man sounded exhausted. That was not good; the excitement had kept them going through the first bad moments off Kodiak Island. Now that, too, was gone.

“Come to 270 and make revolutions for three knots.”

“270 and three knots. Aye.”

“Status?”

“He’s gone.”

The captain rolled his head slowly to the right and left, banished all thought of angry response from his mind, and settled slowly into his command chair.

“He’s drifting. He will complete the turn as a clearing turn before running the Unimak channel.” The captain didn’t feel anything like the certainty he projected, but it was a skill that came with command.

“270 and three knots, captain.”

“All engines stop.”

Two of the sonarmen played with the bow sonar, a much weaker engine than the powerful towed array behind them. The tail could be deployed only at low speeds, and certain maneuvers like rapid turns were not possible while it was deployed, but it was their only tool for following the American. The bow sonar had intermittent contact at best. He could hear the two murmuring to each other about the noise that the ocean was making, pounding on the island due north of them. Background noise, a white noise that would cross most of the spectrum, all of the “lines.” They were murmuring because sonarmen had a superstitious respect for their opposite numbers, afraid that loud conversation would be heard by the opposing specialists. No one knew how good the American sonars really were, but four days had taught the captain that they were not as good as his worst fears, and their tactics showed that they were cocky.

That still left a lot of room for them to be very, very good.

“350 relative! Range 3500 meters and closing!”

It was eerie, having his prediction fulfilled like that. He had tossed it off, based, yes, on some experience. But mostly to steady the bridge crew. The bastard was coming around toward them, and quite fast, now that his engines were driving him again.

“Take us down to 255 meters, bow up.”

“255 meters, bow up, aye.” The Admiral Po began a very slow dive, aiming to get her metal bulk through the deep isothermic layer that would reflect most sonar and greatly hamper passive detection. The captain looked down at his knuckles on the collision bar in front of his command seat and gradually willed his hands to relax.

In the darkened ballroom, there are long, velvet curtains that hide sound if you can get behind them.

“000 relative, 3000 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 190.”

The boomer suddenly appeared as a digital symbol on the command screen with her course and speed displayed next to her. The distance between the Admiral Po and her quarry seemed very short, and the captain wondered if they were about to change roles.

“255 meters.”

“Try to put the bow sonar up in the layer.”

“Bow up, aye.”

This was a tricky maneuver and one that couldn’t really be accurately gauged for success. It required that the planesman adjust the pitch of the submarine so that her bow sonar was actually above the acoustic layer, allowing that sonar to listen to the enemy while the rest of the submarine’s metal hide was hidden below the temperature gradient of the layer. The problem was that you never knew for sure that you had it exactly right; the acoustic layer was simply a metaphor for the invisible line where two different layers of water with different temperatures met. It couldn’t be seen, only sensed, and only sensed as a relative gradient. The bow might be in the layer or meters above it, depending on luck and skill and local variations.

He’s bow on to us right now. The American, with his infinitely superior equipment, was in the best position he could ask to detect Admiral Po.

“Nothing on the tail.”

“Bow sonar has contact, 010 relative, 2500 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 180.”

He has us. Or he will turn away.

The captain turned to the planesman.

“Well done. Very well done.” The bow sonar report indicated that the bow was, indeed, above the layer. But how far? And how reflective was the layer?

He watched the symbol on the bridge screen, the only visual input that mattered, willing it to continue its turn to port.

“020 relative, 2700 meters. Speed six knots. Vector 160.”

Deep breath, long exhalation.

“Make revolutions for three knots. Hold us at 255 meters and pitch for normal.”

“Aye, aye.” That pulled the bow back under the layer, making them blind, but he had to move or the American would get too far away. Simply avoiding detection was only half the game.

“Three knots.”

“Helmsman, three knots for the center of the channel.”

“Aye, aye.”

He cast an eye at the chart and decided he had a safe amount of water under his keel, even in these treacherous seas.

“Depthfinder off.”

“Depthfinder off, aye.”

Ahead, perhaps well ahead if he stuck to his six knots, the American would be entering the channel already. The captain calculated quickly; the American would be well over six thousand meters ahead when they were back in the deep water on the other side of the channel, but the captain thought that the risk was worthwhile, and he was a little distracted by the obvious adulation of the bridge crew and his own internal buzz of triumph. He had outguessed an American boomer captain. His crew had reacted well. He was worthy.

“Center of the channel.”