James Huston - Fallout

“Is he okay?”

“Yes. He’s fine. He landed a couple miles north on the beach.”

“Vlad, you said?” Helen asked, acutely interested in this piece of information she hadn’t previously heard. “How well did you know this Vlad? He’s Russian?”

“Yes. He’s with MAPS. The company that did our maintenance.”

Helen considered the events from a new perspective. “How do you know he wasn’t involved?”

Luke frowned. “Other than the fact that he got shot down?”

“Yes,” Li replied. “Other than that.”

“I guess by the same way I know you weren’t involved. It’s a ridiculous thought.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he had no idea the Pakistanis were even coming. My hooking up with him was my doing. I’m the one who called MAPS to ask them to work on our airplanes and help us with the upgrades. You’re right, maybe he was involved with the Trilateral Commission, or maybe he was on the grassy knoll when Kennedy—”

“You don’t have to get sarcastic.”

“Well, it’s insulting when you ask questions like that.”

“Why did they do it?”

Luke sat back and breathed in loudly, then exhaled equally loudly. “I have no idea. He clearly had—”

“Khan?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded.

Luke continued. “He clearly had an attitude toward India—that’s understandable—and he had some negative things to say about the U.S. But nothing that rose to the level where I thought he would do something like this.”

“Did he ever talk about the nuclear testing that Pakistan did?”

“Sure. He thought there was an anti-Muslim bias in U.S. foreign policy.”

“Did he ever get more specific than that?”

“No.” Luke waited for Helen to ask him another question. She was obviously thinking. Something he’d said had stimulated an idea in her mind. Luke asked, “What about the trucks? And the men who killed the security guards?”

“The trucks were parked inside large hangars at an airfield nearby.”

“What airfield?” Luke asked.

“The one at Tonopah.”

“Ours?”

“No, no, the one—nearer the town, an old one…”

“Right off Route 6?”

“Yes.”

Luke shook his head. Of course. They had other planes waiting for them. “Any radar tracks flying out of there?”

“They’re checking all the FAA tapes now, but no one remembers seeing anything in that area.”

“So you have no idea where they’ve gone?”

“We’ll find them, but we don’t have anything yet.” Helen sat down at the desk. “There is one thing you may know…”

Luke nodded.

“What kind of submarine was it?”

He sat in the chair, his elbows resting on the beat-up table, embarrassed at what his answer had to be. “I’m not sure.”

Helen Li glanced at one of the men behind her, who handed her a large folder. “What kind of submarine do you think it was?”

“It wasn’t a Boomer.”

“It wasn’t a ballistic missile submarine? You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Was it nuclear?”

Luke closed his eyes and tried to regenerate the image in his mind, but all he could see was Khan swimming toward a black structure. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m no submarine expert.”

“You were in the Navy.”

“I was never in submarines.”

Helen spoke softly. “I’m told that all Navy pilots are trained to recognize submarines.” She was looking at him as if he were lying, as if his inability to be clear about the submarine might in fact be evidence that he was more deeply involved than she had originally thought. “Isn’t that right?”

He bit his tongue. “It’s been a while.”

“So was the submarine you saw nuclear?”

“I don’t think so,” Luke said, his frustration building.

“Why not?”

“Nuclear submarines have a certain shape. A teardrop, rounded-bow sort of shape. At least I think so. I’m really not sure, but if there are nuclear submarines that don’t have that shape, I don’t know about them.”

“This one didn’t have that teardrop shape?”

“No.”

“It was a diesel boat?” One of the men suddenly interjected, sitting down next to her.

Luke stared at the man, who was intense and angry. “Who are you?”

“It was a diesel boat? You sure?”

“What’s your name?”

“George Lane. Look, we don’t have much time. Are you sure it was a diesel boat?”

“I believe so.”

“You said you knew Russian submarines. Was it—”

“I said the submarines that we studied were mostly Russian submarines.”

“You used to be able to recognize Russian submarines. Right?”

“Mostly nukes.”

Lane riffled through a large stack of photographs and handed Luke one. “What is this?”

Luke studied the photograph. He didn’t want to get it wrong. “I’m not sure,” Luke said. “Maybe a Kilo.”

“Exactly,” Lane said. “Is that it?”

Luke recalled the image of the submarine again, as he looked down on it from his MiG over the Pacific Ocean. “It might have been. It was just sort of… nondescript. Black, the usual diesel look…”

Lane put another photograph in front of him. “What about this?”

“Whiskey class? Aren’t those things about fifty years old?”

Lane glanced at Helen. “Yes. They are old. But some of them have fallen into hands outside of the control of governments. One of these could be owned by people who don’t like the United States.”

“Definitely not.”

Lane thought for a minute. “What about this?” he said, putting another photograph in front of Luke, a large black-and-white glossy of a submarine on the surface. Luke stared at the photograph. “I don’t know. What is this?”

“French. Daphne class.”

“Let me see that.” Luke held up the photograph and examined it carefully. His eyes raced from one side to the other, the top to bottom. He drank in the entire shape, tried to envision the shape in the ocean behind a swimming Riaz Khan. “I just can’t tell. This doesn’t look quite right, but I can’t say for sure it isn’t either. Whose is it?”

“This particular one is French. But the Pakistanis have four of them.”

Luke looked at the picture again, harder, longer. He still didn’t know. “I’m just not sure.”

Lane frowned and gave Luke another photo. “How about this one?”

Luke studied it and shook his head. “What is it?”

“Type 209. German-made.”

“Did you ask the Air Force guys? They saw it, too.”

“They said it’s a sub, and we should ask you ’cause you’re a former squid.”

“Nice,” Luke said, handing the photo back to him. “Sorry.”

Lane was growing frustrated. Like Helen, he was beginning to doubt. “How can you not recognize submarines?”

“We never studied French submarines.”

He put three photographs next to each other on the table in front of Luke. “What about these? Last chance,” Lane said.

Luke studied the photos. “I don’t think it’s this one… What’s that?”

“That’s the Hashmat, a Pakistani Agosta-class sub.”

“Definitely not that one.”

“What about the other one?”

“The Khalid. New Agosta 90Bclass Pakistani sub. If you can’t tell us what it is, nobody will know what to be looking for. Even if we find a diesel boat in the Pacific now, we have no grounds to stop it. Without a positive ID from you, they have every right to be there and not respond to our request to surface, let alone allow us to search them. They’ll just politely say no. We’re at a dead end here, Mr. Henry. If you could give us some distinguishing features of this submarine, we might be able to make some progress.”