Gordon Kent - Top Hook

Stevens smiled without humor. He was relishing the failure, Alan realized, and for a moment he hated the man. He walked from the ready room almost blind, clearing the area before he could say something he would regret.

He wasn’t used to failure, and it stung. The feeling that he was personally responsible for a major problem compounded the feeling of alienation that had clung to him since his orders had been changed. He was used to stress, and to danger, but he had begun to feel in this situation as if he was an observer of events, not a participant.

He hadn’t got control.

Telling Rafe that he didn’t have a bird for the launch was one of the hardest things he had ever done. He had watched the maintenance crisis slide out of his control all day, first the downing of 902, then the problems with 902’s port engine that “everybody knew” except Alan, then scrambles to get work done, and condescension from the VS-53 maintenance shop and the slide to failure. And now it was certain, and he walked into Air Ops ahead of Stevens and canked his unit’s first operational flight.

Rafe met him going out.

“Problems?” he asked with a smile.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir? Better walk with me, Alan.”

Rafe walked down the passageway, slapping the occasional back, looking coldly at a jg running for his brief. Then he pulled Alan into the flag briefing room, empty at this hour.

“I can count the number of times you’ve called me ‘sir’ on one hand, Spy. So how bad is it?”

“This is the wrong fucking time to call me spy, Rafe.” Alan realized that the storm was still there, and grabbed hold again. “Sorry, Rafe, let me start that again. I just had to cancel my first event. Both my birds are down and I don’t have all the parts to fix them because I apparently left some stuff on the beach. That’s the worst—the rest is just other crap.”

“How’d you end up here with two down birds?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Better find out. Kick some ass.”

“Right.”

“Hey—I know you ain’t the bad guy. But you are responsible.

” “I know!”

“Make it work for you. Sometimes it helps to get mad; you get the assholes’ attention that way. Oh, hey—I forgot. We found your NCIS guy.”

“You forgot!”

“Yeah, I forgot. I’m the CAG; I have other duties than carrying messages. In fact, I was just gonna give it to you in Air Ops when we got sidetracked with your other problem.” He pulled a piece of paper from a shirt pocket. “I’ve already run this past the flag captain. Here’s the deal: your guy is arriving at a hotel in DC about five their time—that’s, um, 2300 here—and we’ve left messages there that he’s to call the NCIS office on the ship ASAP. That’s direct from Admiral Kessler, so he knows we’re serious. We also left messages at NCIS HQ in case he goes there. When he calls, you get your ass to the NCIS office and get on their STU and you tell him whatever the big secret is; when you’re done, Maggiulli, the JAG guy, gets on the STU at once and hears from your guy that you’re a patriotic American who did it all to save the world for democracy. You with me?”

“What the hell is Dukas doing in Washington?”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, who gives a shit? Did you get all that or didn’t you?”

Alan grinned. “I got it. Can I kiss you now?”

Mike Dukas got the message to call the Jefferson in the office of his boss’s boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at the Navy yard. But, because his boss’s boss was flattering him and almost begging him to stay at NCIS and not transfer permanently to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, and because Dukas was trying to parlay that request into a temporary position where he could help Rose, he didn’t make the telephone call right away. In fact, it was another hour before he called the Jefferson , and only then, when he was talking to the NCIS agent on board the carrier, did he understand that he was really calling Alan Craik. It was damned confusing: three days before, he had been in Sarajevo, this morning in Holland, and why was he calling the husband of the woman he had come to Washington to help?

“Hey—” he started to say.

“Mike, Al Craik. Jesus, you’re hard to find! I’ve got to talk to you—”

“And I gotta talk to you! Have you heard—?”

“Mike, I had to file a—”

“—about Rose?”

“—contact report—What about Rose?”

“What contact report?”

They shouted at each other for several seconds and then both shut up at the same time, and it was Dukas, wide awake now, who took charge and said, “Rose first,” and told Alan Craik about his wife’s loss of her astronaut’s place. Then he told him about the suspicions that were flooding through the Navy about both of them, and about Peretz’s discovery that CIA Internal Investigations was behind Rose’s fall.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Alan shouted.

“Tell me about it. Don’t bother sputtering, Al; we’ve all said the same thing, and it’s a waste of breath. Get hold of yourself—Rose is in deep shit and so are you, by association.”

“Jesus, poor Rose! And I’ve been feeling sorry for myself—”

“This is serious shit, Al. Now what’s this contact report?”

Alan had to say “Poor Rose” again, and only then did he get to the contact report and the woman in Trieste who had said “Bonner.” He ran through it all quickly—the Serbo-Croat, the shootings, the police, the JAG officer—almost mumbling, as if it had suddenly become almost unimportant.

But it was not unimportant to Dukas. “And you’re sure she said ‘Bonner’?”

“Absolutely. Otherwise, I’d have—”

“Jesus, old investigations never die! Holy shit, Bonner. Bonner works for Efremov out of Iran; we bust him and send him to prison; now some babe has people shooting at her and she says, ‘Bonner,’ and you’re supposed to snap to, right?”

“She wants me to meet her in Naples—next liberty port.”

Dukas could think fast when he had to. He had heard a rumor two days before that Efremov, the Russian/Iranian mercenary, was dead. After only a moment’s silence, he said, “Do it.”

“Mike, I’m in trouble with my admiral and the JAG guy as it is!”

“I’ll give you NCIS cover and clear it with both of them; for now, you tell them it’s classified and all will be revealed in the Lord’s good time. Then you go to Naples as my agent; I’m your control. You capisce ?”

“I’m not trained for that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t trained for half the shit I know you’ve got yourself into, and you came out smelling like a rose. Look, Al, I want you to do it: if she’s got real dope on Bonner, I want it!”

“She didn’t say she had stuff on Bonner; she just said his name.”

“Oh, as a way of passing the time? Come on—she sets up a meeting with you by posing as your wife, then she says a notorious spy’s name, and we’re supposed to think she’s just, what? making a pass? selling Mary Kay cosmetics the European way? Get real—she’s got something to sell.”

Dukas heard Alan sigh. He sympathized. But, as he had told Rose, life wasn’t fair. “You gotta do it, Al.”

“Okay. But put it in writing, for God’s sake!”

Dukas explained to him that there would be a case number and a file and a classified memo naming Alan Craik as an agent of the NCIS.

“Can you talk to the JAG guy here as soon as I’m done? They think I’m a spy or something, Mike—the shooting stuff has really freaked them—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll talk to the guy. Jesus, how do you get into these things? She really pretended to be Rose so she could say ‘Bonner’ to you? Weird, man. Yeah, we gotta go for it.”