Gordon Kent - Night Trap

“Why’s he getting out?”

“Passed over for commander. Phil, you guys stank yesterday. This isn’t the Mongolian Navy we ‘re running here. We care, get me? He didn’t make the cut. Bernie’s okay, but—he likes to stay home with the kids and the dog. He’s good at what he does, though—learn what you can from him. Word to the wise: do good on this one, it’s all money in the bank. You do these briefings, your name gets around—it’s all part of the profession.”

“You always used to tell me that doing my best was all that mattered.”

Why had he said that? Already, he had put that prickly hedge between them. Let him say whatever he wants , an inner voice cautioned. But too late.

“Doing your best and having other people know it. You gotta be practical, kiddo. Something you’re not very good at—they don’t teach it in the ivory tower, right?”

Don’t rise to it , the inner voice said. This is as hard for him as for you . It was the old opposition. Style. Culture.

His father said, “Anyway, we’ll have a look at Naples together, okay?”

“Palma.”

“ Your boat’s going to Palma; we’re making liberty at Naples. You’re on this boat, kid.”

“Oh, God! Dad, Kim’s meeting me at Palma!”

“Kim? The redhead with the big gazumbahs I met at Shakey’s with you?”

And he lost it. “Goddamit, Dad—!”

“Oh, sorry—I meant to say, ‘the young lady with the enormous intellect.’ Snake—Jackson, hey— ”

He yanked his arm away. “Dad, Kim and I are practically engaged!”

His father gave him a strange look. His eyes stopped flicking up and down the passage. He took plenty of time, perhaps thinking of something and then deciding to say something else. “Like father, like son, huh?”

“You said it; I didn’t.” His father’s record with women was abysmal: he had been married twice, both failures, the first to Alan’s mother, the second to a fleshy woman named Thelma who had had huge breasts and the brain of an ant, although she had been smart enough to get out after eight months. Alan almost said, When I get married, I mean to stay that way , but he bit the words off. Instead, forcing himself to be calmer, he said, “You’re talking about somebody you don’t know anything about,” and his cheeks flamed.

His father made a face. “Sorry, she looked like Son of Thelma to me. Give me her address, I’ll get a message to her you’ll be in Naples.” Again, he looked at Alan strangely. “I think there’s a lot I don’t know about you all of a sudden.”

George Shreed heaved himself off his metal canes and into his chair, propping the canes against the desk, supported on a decorative turning that was faintly worn from years of such use. His shock of gray hair stood up on his head, rather startling, almost as if he had had it styled that way, looking not unlike the Nobel winner Samuel Beckett. He lit a cigarette and turned to the morning book—pages of already digested and analyzed intelligence, winnowed, prioritized, emphasized, and most of it crap, he thought. He flipped pages. One item caught his eye; unthinkingly, he put a little tick next to it. Moscow. Massacre in office building. At least thirty dead in military-style attack. Probable organized cime but target not clear. Spetsnaz-style execution of aged security guard. Unconfirmed dummy company . He looked back a page, then ahead, jumped to the Russian and area forecast section and again did not find what he wanted. “Sally!” he said harshly, pressing down a button. “We had a Not Seen on Yuri Efremov a couple days ago, Moscow. Get some details.” He returned to his briefing book.

The stink of fire and chemicals lay in the damp air even after the fire was out. A police detective, hands plunged into the pockets of his cheap ski jacket, stared gloomily at the building’s doorway as another body bag came down.

“Thirty-one,” the cop next to him said.

“How do you know it’s thirty-one? You’ve put the pieces together, have you?”

“Thirty-one bags.”

“Imbecile.” He crossed the wet street and pushed through the firemen. As an investigation, this was going to be a joke. What the firemen hadn’t bitched up, the bomb squad had. They’d be a week just working out how many dead they had.

“Hey, sir, that’s where they found the old man.” A plainclothes cop he knew pointed toward the floor near the far wall. “Back of the head, close range—typical stuff.”

Typical, my ass , he thought, it didn’t get to be typical until fucking Gorbachev showed up with his freedom and his shit . Aloud, he said, “Ex-mil.”

“Yes, sir.”

The detective trusted the man, knew him to be more or less honest, perceptive when he wasn’t too lazy to think. “So?” he said, bobbing his head toward the upstairs. Water, he saw, had spilled down the stairs and was leaking through the ceiling. Broken pipes.

“I seen it ten times in the last few years. You know. Ex-mil for hire, they’re fucking good at it, fucking Rambos. It’s mafia.” He had been talking to people in the building and could give a quick summary of what was up there—the big room with thin partitions, computers, lots of telephones, some kind of high-tech business. “So they wouldn’t pay off the gangsters, they got hit,” he said with a shrug.

“Computers? Western money?”

“I dunno. This is just what the people in the building say.”

It didn’t click for him. He was slower to reach conclusions but reached sounder ones when he did; maybe that’s why he was a detective. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

“Fucking mess up there.”

“No kidding.” He started up the stairs, keeping near the wall where there was less water.

Peretz had nothing for him yet, and he wandered down to the JO wardroom for lack of anything to do. Carriers are carriers, your own or somebody else’s: a lot of hours to kill. He wished he had work, or—He thought of Kim.

Narc was sitting alone at a table. Heading for him, Alan remembered Peretz’s fantasy about the girls’ team; he tried it here. Five pilots were laughing too loud a few feet away; another pair were muttering together with their heads close. Raise the pitch of the laughter, blur your eyes and give them longer hair—my god, it might work! He thought of Peretz’s edged description: insecurity, cliquishness, rivalry …

“Hey, Narc.”

“You know we’re gonna be on this boat for five fucking days?”

“I’m fine, thanks; how nice of you to ask. And how are you this morning?”

“I’m pissed off. I don’t have a dad to entertain me while I’m aboard, okay?”

“Okay, okay—sorry. Hey, I haven’t seen Rafe.”

Narc snorted. “Our pilot and senior chief have already left. Nice, huh? Skipper pulled them back the first chopper they could get. Isn’t that swell! They go, I stay.”

Alan, despite himself, tuned out the content, listened only to the tone; was this Peretz’s jealousy, preadolescent gossip? He was wondering if Narc could make it as an eleven-year-old girl when Narc leaned forward and said, “I think I’m a better pilot than Rafe—don’t you?”

“Rafe’s pretty good,” Alan muttered. He was trying to keep from chuckling, and Peretz’s imagery came to him. He let Narc jabber on; inside his own head he was crushing the image of the young girls. Such a petty revenge might be fine for a man who was leaving the Navy; it could only get Alan into trouble. He put the notion aside, thought instead of his father’s comments about his girl.