Gordon Kent - Top Hook

“Yes, sir.”

“Is this the same crap they do every time?”

“Sir, this is from the hip, but I’d say it looks fucking serious.”

“More serious than Kosovo?”

Stevens cut in.

“You done with me? I’m on the flight sked later today.”

“So am I.” Alan looked him in the eye, enjoying Stevens’s surprise. “Just walk with me a minute.” He shook hands with Navarro and said he’d see him later, then walked Stevens a dozen paces away and turned on him. “You’re the senior pilot in this outfit, right?”

“Yep.”

“Got a problem?”

Stevens hitched up the imaginary belt again. He talked to the air just off Alan’s right shoulder. “This divided command shit. You don’t like my ops plan? Tough. It shouldn’t be two guys, one in the air, one on the ground. I’m just being straight with you.”

“There won’t be any divided command. I’m in charge. I expect the cooperation of my officers. I’m just being straight with you. ”

Stevens kept his voice low, but the tone was bitter. “ Your officers! Some of us have been working on this project for a year. You walk in like we’re all dicked up and you’re gonna save us. Or is it that maybe you didn’t want this job in the first place? Maybe you were going someplace better?”

Alan set his jaw, controlled his hands, his temper. Rafe had been right—there certainly had been talk. “Mister Stevens, I’m your commanding officer—”

“Craik, everybody’s heard of your father. He was a pilot. He might have belonged here. You don’t!”

Alan didn’t blink, and his eyes didn’t move. Stevens couldn’t hold that look for more than two seconds. Alan became very cold and very formal. “Mister Stevens, I don’t have time right now for you to have a tantrum. It looks to me as if we’re way behind and we have to get a plane off the deck in less than four hours. That’s my priority. I haven’t got time to dick around with you.” He leaned a fraction of an inch closer, his eyes still fixed. “If you can’t serve under me, get out. Stay or go, I don’t care; just say which!”

“You know they’ll cream me if I go!”

“You have three minutes to decide whether you’re my senior pilot or a man looking for a new job. If you want to leave, you leave today. I’ll square it with the detailer.”

Stevens, red-faced, tried again to stare him down and lost. “I’ll stay, goddamit—I’ve always wanted to work for a fucking ground-pounding spy!”

Heads turned throughout the hangar bay. Spy came out loaded with connotation, and Alan was briefly back in his first days at the squadron, dealing with the aviators as an outsider, an enemy, where intel guys, “spies,” were second-class citizens. He hadn’t been there in years.

Stevens started to move away under the wing of 902. He followed and grabbed Stevens’s arm.

“Start getting this unfucked. You and I are flying together in four hours.”

It all certainly took his mind off Mike Dukas and the admiral.

The lawyer’s name was Emma Pasternak, and she looked like an under-developed photograph of herself. The dress-for-success clothes did nothing to hide her essential anonymity; she wore no makeup, no jewelry, and her hair was cut so short and so awkwardly that Rose suspected the woman cut it herself.

“We’re expensive,” she said. “We’re worth it—but can you pay?”

Rose hesitated. “How much?”

“A lot.”

“We’re naval officers, for Christ’s sake!”

“So mortgage the house.”

“It is mortgaged! And I’ve never lived in it; it’s in goddam Houston, and I’ve got to find a place in fucking West Virginia; my kids are with my parents; my husband’s at sea—!”

A long stare. Then: “Can you pay for it? Five years’ worth of legal bills?”

“If it’s even a year, my career is finished.”

“That’s what compensatory damages are for.” Her hand went to the telephone. “Can you pay?”

Rose thought of her salary, Alan’s; of the empty house in Houston; of the house Alan had inherited from his father in Jacksonville, a little dump, but in a good market. They had some savings, a few thousand they’d put into tech stocks for the thrill of it—And two kids, and her with no career if it failed. And some friends.

“Yes.”

Emma Pasternak straightened and put the phone to her ear. “Let’s kick ass,” she said. She started to punch in a number.

“What are you going to do?”

“Scare the shit out of the CIA.” She inhaled and drew herself up even straighter. Rose still had the feeling that the woman was an imposter, perhaps a daughter sitting in her mother’s chair for the day. She was simply too improbably wispy—until she opened her mouth.

“Let me speak to Carl Menzes, please—Internal Investigations.” Pause. Rather icily: “This is Emma Pasternak at Barnard, Kootz, Bingham.” She wrote something on a notepad. Billing me for the call, Rose thought. Jesus, I’ll be timing everything that happens to me now .

Suddenly, she heard Emma’s voice in a new key, fingernails on a blackboard. “What meeting is he in, may I ask?” Pause. “If you don’t know, how do you know he’s in a meeting?” Pause. “Is he in the building?”

Pause. “Well, when you see him, you tell him that I am about to sue the Central Intelligence Agency and him personally in civil court for damages compensatory and punitive, and I think it only fair to chat with him before I file. Have you got that? Oh, and tell him that we met at the Liu trial, will you do that? Oh, thank you.” She covered the phone and said to Rose, “The Liu trial, I was on the defense team, we reamed the Agency’s ass.” She held up a finger, and her thin lips gave what might, on a nicer face, have been a sort of smile. She nodded at Rose, indicated another telephone, which Rose picked up to hear a male voice saying, “—remember the Liu trial, but not very pleasantly. What can I do for you?” It was a pretty nice voice, she thought—a lot nicer than Emma Pasternak’s.

“Did you get my message?”

“Yeah, and I don’t believe you’re going to sue me, okay? Now, what’s this about?”

“This is about a Lieutenant-Commander Rose Siciliano, who your office has railroaded, unjustly and illegally, and about who you’re withholding information.”

“Is that the party on the other phone?”

“What other phone?”

“For Christ’s sake, cut the games.”

Emma got a little paler. She leaned forward, seeming to talk to a shelf of books on the opposite wall. “No, you cut the games. We’re not having it, okay? Get real.”

“Or what?”

“Or I go public, right now. I can have a column on the op-ed page of the Post , Wednesday’s edition, with a pickup in the Wall Street Journal . Okay? I can write the head for you, quote, ‘CIA Badgers Woman Officer in New Agency Scandal Colon Where the Power Is.’

Paragraph. ‘Going beyond its mandate and its congressionally authorized powers, the Central Intelligence Agency has destroyed the career of a woman officer with quote the finest record in and out of combat in the US military unquote. Reliable sources within the intelligence community say that the Agency’s Internal Investigations Directorate can have got this fine officer transferred out of the prestigious astronaut program and into a dead-end, career-finishing job in Dog’s Ass, West Virginia, only by working the levers of the National Security Council.’ Paragraph. ‘Agency spokespersons could not account for—’”

“Okay, okay, you do a swell improv. You’ve got nothing.”

“Wrong. I’ve got the balls of two columnists on the oped page. How do you want to see yourself—‘the last gasp of Cold-War hysteria,’ or ‘witch-hunter extraordinaire for the New World Order’?”