Gordon Kent - Night Trap

Fred rubbed his fat chin. Both men looked around. Fred looked up at the glowing sky, said something, laughed. Nervous laughter.

The smaller man leaned in again. He repeated the question. Well? Yes or no?

Whatever Fred said, it was barely muttered, certainly not emphatic; but it was enough, and the smaller man smiled, nodded, took Fred’s upper arm and squeezed the muscle, then patted it. Good dog . Fred grinned.

They spoke for another two minutes. Mostly, the small man explained. Fred nodded or muttered understanding. Then abruptly, the smaller man hit Fred on the arm again and walked off.

Eight minutes later, he was standing beside a telephone in the shadow of a closed pub. He lit his tiny flashlight. He took out the white card. He passed over the first name with its minus sign. His pen touched Fred’s name. He made a small plus.

The pen passed down to the third name: Clanwaert .

He checked his watch. Then he dialed a number in Moscow and waited while the long, clumsy connection was made, all that antiquated technology, and a man’s voice answered, and he said, “Tell them, ‘Get ready.’”

Six thousand feet above the water, buffeting at four hundred and thirty knots, alpha golf seven zero seven was flying search patterns. An aged S-3B hardly younger than her crew, she was getting tired. The men inside were getting bored.

Below, the black Atlantic roiled in a March squall, unseen, silent to the four men in the darkened old aircraft.

The S-3B was searching the mid-Atlantic for a home-bound US battle group. Running opposing-force exercises on the carrier you relieve is an old tradition in the fleet, and no outbound battle group CO wants to be found by the smart-assed flyers of the carrier he is replacing. So AG 707 was the forward scout, trying to find a battle group hidden somewhere between Gibraltar and Cape Hatteras.

“I think you got us way too far south, Spy,” the pilot said now. “Where you think these fuckers are hiding, the South Pole?”

The squadron intelligence officer is often called “Spy”—if he isn’t called worse. Alan Craik was a new Spy—a very junior grade lieutenant, his ensign’s wetness hardly dried behind his ears. The pilot, Rafehausen, didn’t much like him. But he called him “Spy” and not something worse because Craik was the only IO he’d ever known who was willing to crawl into a tired old beast like AG 707 and put in his hours with the grownups.

As the old line went, How is an intel officer like Mister Ed? He can talk but he can’t fly .

But this kid did.

Seven hours in an ejection seat was still torment to him. But there were rewards for Alan Craik, not least the discovery that he was good at the “back end” craft—reading the screens, coaxing discoveries from radar and computer. And there was the reward, to be earned slowly, of being accepted by the flyers.

And by his father.

“Come on, Spy, give us a break.”

Before he could answer, Senior Chief Craw broke in. “He’s doin’ just fine, sir; give him some slack. He’s tryin’ to find the ass on the gnat that lives on a gnat’s ass.”

Rafe groaned. The old aircraft shook itself like a dog and plowed on through the night.

Nikkie Geblev the go-getter punched his touchtone phone and cursed Gorbachev the president and Yeltsin the mayor and anybody else responsible for his not living in New York, or maybe LA, and tried for the third time to beat the phone into submission: Get through, you fucker! he wanted to shout at it. Make connections! Be a winner!

Nikkie Geblev was surrounded with electronic gadgets that had begun their existences in Japan and Taiwan and Italy and then had had the luck to be on a truck that had been hijacked in Finland. Nikkie was an entrepreneur. A New Soviet Man. A Eurocapitalist. A crook.

“At last,” he said aloud. He was making money, relaying this call.

He heard it ring at the other end, then be picked up.

“What?” a man’s voice said.

“I’m looking for Peter from Pravda.”

Pause. Resignedly: “Peter went to Intertel.”

Nikkie didn’t want to know anything about who the man was or what was going to happen next, but he couldn’t help the images that rose in his mind—a tough man, unshaven, cruel—ex-military, hungry, impatient—Nikkie had dodged the draft because of Afghanistan and he didn’t like to think of the way ex-military would treat him if they knew. They had grenades—guns—

Nikkie cut off the images by saying, “Peter says ‘Get ready.’”

He broke the connection. He was sweating and his knees felt weak.

Everybody in the squadron called the plane Christine, after Stephen King’s killer car. And Christine was a killer. Her nose had taken the head off a sailor during a cat shot; squadron myth said bits of him were still embedded in her radome. Long ago, in her first life as an S-3A, she had fired the rear ejection seats without human help, sending the back-end aircrew into ESCAPAC and smashing their legs on their keypads. Now, rekitted as an S-3B, she was like an aging queen with a facelift—older than she looked, and nasty .

She expressed herself tonight in vibrations and the unpredictable. Odd vacillations in a gauge. False readings from a fuel tank. A nut that could be seen slowly unscrewing itself just beyond the copilot’s window. Nothing serious, because Christine was not in one of her killer moods; only minor, constant, nerve-picking trivia. A mean old aircraft for a long, dull mission.

Boredom and discomfort. Old aircraft smells, engine noise, the abrasion of personality on personality. Four hours down; three to go , Alan thought. He yawned. Where was the battle group? Why did he care?

Christine shivered and gave him a temporary blip and made his heart lurch, and then he saw it was nothing.

What was in his lunch box? Should he drink some coffee?

How come Craw had stood up for him like that?

Would any of these guys ever begin to like him?

How many hours to go?

“Hey, Spy, what’s the word? I’m not going all the way to fucking Ascension Island! What’s the program, man?”

Bicker, bicker. Rafehausen would never like him, he supposed. What you might call a difference in culture.

Still. “I want to get where I can catch it in a wide sweep, Rafe.”

“They won’t go that far out of their way! These bastards have been one hundred and ninety days at sea. Which you haven’t!” Rafe wanted to stay closer to the carrier. He wanted to show that he thought that this was Mickey-Mouse fun and games. He wanted to scream that this was bullshit.

The copilot, a nervous j.g. everybody called Narc, sucked up to Rafe. “Yeah, wait till you’ve been out for your one-ninety, Spy. Nobody wants to make it one ninety-one.” Then, purely for Rafehausen’s benefit, “Only the fuckin’ Spy—” They laughed, the sounds tinny in his intercom.

Alan felt himself blush. He tried to see if Senior Chief Craw was grinning, but he could make out only helmet and mask in the green light of the screens. But it wouldn’t have mattered if the man’s head had been bobbing with laughter. He knew people thought he was funny. Because he was serious, he was funny. There was something peculiar in that. Well, it was true: nothing was Mickey Mouse to Alan. He took even games very seriously.

Alan tried to think of something to say, something that would be funny and cool and would make them like him, but by then Rafe and Narc had forgotten him and his grids and his plots; they were bickering about fuel and the readings Christine was giving them.