cases.”
Amputated leg? “Leg hurts!” Rafe said, quite clearly.
The face by him wandered back and forth. Rafe realized he was shaking his head.
“That’s just nerve memory. I’m sorry.”
Rafe gathered himself. It was hard to concentrate, but he had things to do. “What hit us?” he hissed.
“I’ll let your flag lieutenant fill you in. He’ll be right up.”
Time passed.
“Sir?” Madje’s voice.
God, Rafe was able to think, he sounds like hell. His eye blinked open. “Report!” he croaked. Someone pushed the straw back into his mouth.
Madje made a short and brutal report and finished by saying, “We’re still picking up aircrew who punched out from the deck.”
Rafe took a deep breath, which tightened the bandages and hurt him more than he had expected. He coughed water and mucus and his eye blurred.
“Doc? He’s coughing.”
“Raise the level on the drip. Sorry, Lieutenant. He’s in rough shape. I’d rather you didn’t use him up.”
“No!” Rafe tried to shout, coughed again. “Planes aloft? Bingo?”
Madje’s head moved. “The TAO is trying to get them into Sri Lanka. The Indians aren’t responding, sir.”
“TAO?” Rafe’s whole body moved. “Who’s—in charge?”
“There’s an O-5 in reactor who’s the senior man we can find, sir, but he doesn’t feel he can leave the engines.” That was a short form for an argument that had dragged Madje away from a firefighting team and into a labyrinth of the fears and hesitancy of an officer who clearly couldn’t accept the reality that he was in command.
Rafe snorted. It sounded like an abbreviated cough. “TAO,” he said.
Madje nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Get—planes down. Cats working?”
“Cat two’s down but shows green. The fire hasn’t touched it.”
“Madje—have to know!” Rafe was looking down an increasingly colorful tunnel. He hated it. Drugs. “Get planes down. Report.”
Bahrain
The tomatoes were simmering in olive oil; their odor, supported by garlic, filled the kitchen. Rose had taken down an already-open bottle of white wine and was wrestling with the cork when the telephone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Leslie said.
“Oh, would you? This goddam thing—”
Leslie was good at answering phones. She had done it for a year for Mike Dukas when she was a ditz-brained newcomer and he was NCIS’s hottest agent, and then she had done it for a year for Dukas’s assistant when she was no longer a ditz-brain and Dukas went off to head NCIS, Bahrain. “Craik-Siciliano,” she said. Her voice was crisp—gone were the thuggish accent of three years before, the tears of half an hour ago. She looked at Rose as she listened to the other end. She gestured, held out the phone. “Your office. Urgent.”
“Oh, shit—” Rose banged the bottle on the countertop. Her voice switched to professional chill as she spoke into the phone. “Commander Siciliano here.”
Leslie picked up the wine bottle and, holding the neck in her palms, pushed the recalcitrant cork out with her thumbs. She tried not to listen, but the room was small.
“My God, when? How bad is it? But it can’t—” Rose caught Leslie’s eye, shook her head. Then, seeing the open bottle, she pointed at the heavy skillet, made a pouring gesture before turning away. “What about the exercise? Is that firm? Do we know who’s in command? I can be there in—” She listened. “Okay, I’ll hang by the phone. Absolutely. Yes. Thanks for keeping me posted.” She hung up, hesitated. Her eyes met Leslie’s again. “There’s a fire on the Jefferson, the BG flagship. All hell’s breaking loose.”
“How did it—?”
“Plane crash, that’s all they’re saying. But it’s bad, because Fifth Fleet has tanked the fleet exercise.” She hugged herself as if she was cold. “We’ve got a lot of friends on the Jefferson. Mike has, too.”
Leslie had never been on an aircraft carrier, thought of one only as a huge and invulnerable ship. “How bad can it be?”
“If the flight deck’s packed with aircraft, it can be the end of the world. If it was right at the beginning of the exercise, they’d all be full of fuel, packed together. A carrier called the Forrestal went up that way during Nam. More than eight hundred dead.” She looked away. “God.”
“But—They have sprinklers and firefighting stuff and, and—everything—”
Rose shook her head. “It could be hell with steel walls.”
Then there was the sound of the front door opening, and Harry and Dukas came in, talking loud and laughing, and Dukas stopped dead in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two women and said, “What’s happened?”
“A plane went into the Jefferson. It’s bad.”
The four shocked faces exchanged looks, searching for comfort, not finding it. “I’ve got to find Alan,” Rose said and turned back to the telephone. Dukas looked at Leslie. “I better call the office.”
“There’s another line in the den,” Leslie said, leading him out. She didn’t explain how she knew that. Leslie was, as Rose had said, smart.
Harry patted Rose’s shoulder as she tried to get through to West Fleet HQ, Mahe. Her face went through shades of hope, frustration, anger. Finally, she crashed the telephone back into its cradle. “‘Out of service.’ How can a goddam navy base be out of service? ‘India is out of service.’ It’s fucking India, for Christ’s sake, not some two-bit third-world shithole! How the fuck can they be out of service?”
“Keep trying.”
“Keep trying what? I just fucking tried—!” Then she heard herself. She put a hand on her abdomen as if checking the fetus that she hoped still lived. Her jaws clenched; her eyes closed; she inhaled. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m being a hysterical asshole.”
Harry smiled at her and kissed her cheek. He had a way of looking at people just slightly sideways because he had only one eye; the other, lost to torture in Africa, had been replaced by a beautiful but useless plastic one. “You’re being Rosie Siciliano, the terror of the Sisters of the Annunciation.”
She pushed him away. “You know too much about my misspent youth.” She started to dial again.
“What hotel’s Al staying at?”
“The
