Gordon Kent - Night Trap

“Absolutely,” he said. That was all Narc demanded of him—sympathetic sounds.

“Right.”

His father had no right to speak to him like that, he thought, then saw that of course he had; what was galling was that it was such a cheap shot, especially from him. Alan had once heard his father referred to as “Mattress Mick,” knew he was a womanizer.

“You bet,” he said to Narc’s vaguely heard complaints.

He felt Narc actually liking him, warming to his support. “I mean,” Narc was saying, “I don’t take anything away from the guy; he put Christine into the net and didn’t total her. Good job. I give the fucker his due. But goddam it, it all started with him trying to land on the wrong boat. Jesus H. Christ! Is that first-class flying? Is it?”

“Well—”

“Right! And what’s his punishment? Do you know what his punishment is? Huh?”

“What?”

“He’s gotta buy a beer for everybody who repaints Christine. Huh? Get it?”

Alan didn’t get it. He supposed somebody would paint out the damage to Christine’s facelift—so what?

“Look, Spy, this is how it goes. When you put a plane on the wrong carrier and it needs work, they repaint it, see, with their logo and their markings. In effect, it’s a plane from this carrier’s S-3 squadron now. Get it? So then it gets sent home to our carrier and it has to be repainted again with our logo and our marks. See? Well, every officer and EM in the squadron will want a hand on a spraygun to say he helped, see, so Rafe has to buy beer for the squadron. Well, what the hell is that? A guy puts a plane down on the wrong boat and we wind up with a fucking beer party. Is that right?”

Narc was outraged. He was not the brightest guy ever to join the Navy, but he was not far from wrong in believing he had been born to fly. He wanted to be an astronaut. He took it all very seriously.

“Maybe we could reintroduce flogging,” Alan made the mistake of saying.

Narc stared at him, finally got it, said, “Your human interaction is piss-poor, did anybody ever tell you that? I’m saying this for your own good. You don’t get along.”

“Jeez, I thought I was loveable.”

“See? Always destructive digs. Now, my guess is you were never on a sports team. Am I right?”

“Actually, I was.”

Narc’s eyes narrowed. “What team?”

“Wrestling.”

“ Wrestling! You wrestled?” Narc looked shocked. “Were you any good?”

Had he been any good? Mostly, he’d been a skinny kid too small for his age who’d spent his adolescence doing the things he most feared because he thought he was a coward—going in the winter without a coat, swimming across a lake at night, wrestling. He’d hated it, and so it had become even more important to do it. Had he been any good? “Nah,” he said.

For three years, he had learned all the holds, the takedowns and the escapes; he got so good at them that the coach had him teaching other wrestlers. But he was physically weak, and he hardly ever won a match. Then, in the summer after his junior year, he put on a spurt of growth and grew right into the weight class of the team’s best wrestler, the state runner-up. He never got into a match again, was a training partner for the good one. At the season’s end, the coach gave him a letter anyway, something he had desperately wanted, and that night he took it down to the Iowa River and dropped it in, because it was part of his code then that real rewards didn’t come for trying hard; they came for succeeding.

“I don’t see you wrestling,” Narc said.

Alan smiled at him. “Ever try it?”

“Jesus, no. The dumbest guys I ever knew were wrestlers.” Clearly, Alan had confused him. “Do it in college?”

Alan shook his head, laughing now. “I made sure I picked a college that didn’t have a wrestling team.” In fact, he’d picked a college that had no teams at all, only intramural sports. He had conducted his life like that in those days, with a rigid adolescent morality, rules, abrupt changes of direction. Ironically, he had put on bulk and muscle his first year in college and would then have been the wrestler he had wanted to be. He hadn’t realized that until, his second week in the squadron, he had been packed off to be the guinea pig for a new self-defense course put on by the Marines at Quantico. He had loved it, learned a lot about street-fighting, and had told the skipper it was great. Later, other officers, coming back limping and bruised, had accused him of being a practical joker.

“I played soccer and baseball,” Narc said, his tone indicating that these were real sports and that they gave him an authority Alan lacked. Narc went on to explain his theory of human interaction based on team experience. He ended by saying, “No offense, Craik, but the way I read it, you’re a loner, do you get my meaning?”

“You mean I’m a loner.”

“That’s right.”

“Wrestlers get like that. Four years in somebody else’s armpit, you want a little space.”

“You need to learn to interact. I bet you weren’t in a fraternity.”

“You’re right.”

“See? That’s where you really learn in college. Human skills. I paid a lot of attention to that side of it. You ever notice how I handle Rafe, for example?”

Alan hadn’t, but he said, “Mmmm,” in an appreciative way.

“That’s my point. You understand what I’m saying? You’re in his face all the time—like that shit with the BG and the radar. You made it sound like he had to do it because it was some big moral thing. I’d have made it a game, a team thing. See, it’s really a kind of management thing. Management skills. That’s what sports are all about. I expect to be an astronaut, right? That’s a team effort all the way. I’ll be way ahead in that department.”

“Afraid I’m a little late for a sports team.”

“Never too late to improve yourself. That’s one of my beliefs. I have a book I’d like you to read. Will you read it?”

Alan was surprised that Narc read any books at all. He said that of course he’d read it.

“It’ll change your life.”

Alan wondered if he wanted his life changed. That brought him somehow back to his father, then to a question as to whether all the changes he had made had simply been tacking back and forth across the unchangeable fact of being Mick Craik’s kid.

A bored clerk watched the low-level traffic feed in, now and then routing a message to file or analysis. Most of it, she knew, ended up somewhere in the attic of a mainframe computer, bytes on a chip that would be dust-covered from neglect if dust were allowed there. She yawned. Her eyes stung with fatigue. She sipped cold coffee.

Somebody had got herself murdered in Amsterdam. Big deal , she thought, you should live in DC . Hey, the somebody was a possible agent. She looked at the clock. Oh, Christ , she thought, four hours to go yet! A woman in Amsterdam. Yuck. Oh, gross . It made her slightly sick—a pregnant woman killed with a knife. Who does these things? “Lover of assistant naval attaché, Turkish mission.” That was it? One murder, one pair of hotpants. Big deal. She routed it toward the back burner.

Peretz was a born teacher. Alan learned more from him in four days, he thought, than he had in months of Navy schools. Peretz was crippled by a cynical wit, a submerged though very real arrogance. Yet he loved intelligence.

Once, in those four days, Alan said to him, “HUMINT’s a dying craft.” He had learned that in intelligence school: HUMINT—human intelligence, “spies,” was history; the future belonged to technology.