Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (2 page)

‘Got a journalist on hold, Sub,’ he informed him, ‘wanting a statement on the Minnow.  You want I should deal with it?’

Harles attempted a look of cool authority that only succeeded in looking huffily indignant.  He could not object to the CPO addressing him as ‘Sub’, since that was perfectly acceptable courtesy in the Fleet, but he suspected – correctly – that everyone in the office called him that because they really didn’t feel he merited a ‘sir’.  The CPO was also twice his age and had a tendency to be just a little obvious in treating Harles as a dumb kid. 

‘No,
I
will deal with it,’ he said, it being departmental policy that only officers could give official statements to the media.  ‘Put him through.’

If the CPO hesitated, it was only momentarily.  The thought may have passed through his mind that even Hollis couldn’t mess up a totally obvious and straightforward ‘no comment’, but he obeyed anyway, regardless of what he thought.

‘Jer Tandeki, Sub,’ he told him, and added, as an afterthought, ‘ABC news.’

Anyone who had been working in the Admiralty PR department for nine days, let alone nine months, ought to have known that.  The CPO was not surprised to see no look of recognition on Hollis’s face, though.  If you were asked to list five qualities the Sub-Lt had, ‘clued up’ would not be amongst them. 

‘What can I do for you, Mr, uh…?’  Harles consulted the info panel at the bottom of the screen, as he answered the call, ‘Tandeki?’

Jerome gave him a slightly startled look.  He was on such terms with the Fleet’s PR office there that the Lt would call him with a friendly heads up if they were going to be releasing a major statement about something, so it came as quite a shock to find himself not even being recognised.  Then he realised, of course, this had to be the Sub they’d been joking about in the office, hoping he wouldn’t throw up on them. 

‘Is Cant Joplar there?’ he queried, though the CPO had already told him that the Lt was out of the office.  ‘Any chance you can patch me through to him?’  His own attempts to call the Lt had got an ‘unavailable to take calls, please leave a message’ response, but the office, he knew, had a priority number they could use.

‘I’m sorry, no,’ said Harles.  ‘
I
am the officer in charge,’ he stated, with emphasis.  ‘If you have any queries, you can put them to me.’

Jerome contemplated him for a moment, and decided that he might as well ask. 

‘All right,’ he said.  ‘Suppose you tell me what’s going on with the Minnow, then?’

‘I’m sorry?  The Minnow?’  Said Harles, with genuine perplexity, before memory supplied the necessary information, ‘Oh, yes, the corvette,’ he recalled, though still looking puzzled, ‘What about it?’

‘Come off it,’  Jerome said, not buying for a moment that even a dumb rookie Sub could be working in the PR department and not know about something this big.  ‘Word is,’ he informed him, ‘that they’ve been put on some kind of detached service, with prisoners released from Cestus to serve aboard on some kind of scheme, so what gives?’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Harles, cross at being caught out by something he didn’t know anything about, though in truth, this was a very large category.  ‘I’m putting you on hold,’ he told the journalist, and did so, turning to another screen and activating a search for current status on the Minnow.  

Lt Joplar had taught him to do this, spending many patient hours drilling the procedure into him.  The first thing he had to check was the classification of the information being requested, and he got, in fact, no further
than
that, since the first screen on the Minnow came up with the red border of officially classified information, with the code on it ‘Eight ack gamma’. 

Even Harles knew that that made it classified information relating to ship deployment, with the ‘gamma’ tag indicating that it was considered sensitive in PR terms.  Even a few seconds looking at the screen told him why.

The Minnow was being moved onto irregular terms of service.  A whole new division was being created for them, in fact.  The Fleet already had three Irregular divisions.  The First Fleet Irregulars was their Intelligence Division.  The Second was Research and Development.  The Third had been created shortly after the task of running debris-sweep ships through space lanes had been foisted onto the Fleet.  Now they were forming a fourth unit.  It was described on the screen as a rehab unit, which even Harles knew would be in line with what they were doing on the Minnow already.  The level eight code on it, however, indicated that there were classified aspects to that, and the “gamma” indicated that it was not to be discussed outside secure areas.

A more experienced or intelligent officer would have been on the ball with that.  They would know the score and use their own discretion when explaining things, strictly off the record, to a journalist of such high standing as Jerome Tandeki.  Harles Hollis, however, was entirely in the dark, and genuinely scandalised by a journalist calling to ask about something that, according to the screen in front of him, was strictly classified.  That outrage was clear in his manner as he went back to the call.

‘What do you think you’re doing trying to get top secret information out of me?’ he demanded.  ‘Do you take me for an idiot or what?’  Before the journalist could answer that, Harles bustled on, attempting stern authority, ‘I demand that you tell me at
once
where you obtained that information!’

Jerome ignored that.  He was staring at Harles incredulously.  ‘You’re serious?  You’re telling me this is
top secret
?’  He had not spent this long reporting on space affairs without becoming familiar with the codes the Fleet used for classified information.  ‘What are we talking, nine ack alpha, here?’  His voice was rising because ‘nine ack alpha’ really was top secret, highest level stuff. 

‘I am not telling you that!’  Said Harles, flustered by a rather belated realisation that this call was on the record, literally, as indicated by the alert on the journalist’s screen notifying that he was recording the call at his end.  ‘And you can’t use this, it’s classified!’

‘All right, all right, we’ll go off the record, then.’  Jerome worked controls at his end, and the ‘call being recorded’ notification turned to ‘call being scrambled.’  ‘All right, we’re strictly off the record,’ he promised, ‘so come on, give!’

If Lt Joplar had been there, he would have just laughed easily, and told the journalist very frankly the truth about what was going on.  Jerome Tandeki was no gutter sleazebag out to give the Fleet a hard time.  If it had been explained to him that this was only classified to level eight because it was a redeployment of a warship, and rated ‘sensitive’ only because of the risk of embarrassment if the details of the case became public, Jerome would have understood that entirely. 

He would too, being the responsible journalist he was, have advised the PR officer that they really would
not
be able to keep this one under wraps.  He would, indeed, have suggested as strongly as he could that the Fleet get proactive with this, involving all interested parties with full information on it before it was announced to the media.  He would have been fishing for an exclusive angle on it one way or another, of course, but he saw the relationship between himself and the PR office as mutually beneficial and would have been very happy to give them the benefit of his advice.

Lt Joplar, however, was currently thirty six klicks away, being persuaded by the outfitter to try on a new and rather daring style of dress shoe, so Jerome was stuck dealing with Harles.  Harles regarded journalists with deep suspicion anyway.  He saw them as a subversive element in society, always trying to dig up things the authorities did not want them to.  That, in Harles’ book, was practically espionage and he bridled with mingled anger and loathing.

‘How dare you?’ he demanded, and tried again more forcefully, ‘I
insist
that you tell me, right
now
, where you obtained that information!’

Jerome gave him a withering look, but he could see that there was no point attempting a dialogue so didn’t waste his time.  Instead, he re-engaged the ‘call being recorded’ notification.

‘All right, let’s go back on the record,’ he said.  ‘I would like an official statement, please, in writing, responding to my request for information on the alleged use of convicted criminals serving aboard the Minnow.’

Harles knew how to do that.  He activated the necessary screens and generated a standard
‘unable to comment due to the nature of the information being classified under military security regulations’
statement, which he signed and mailed to the journalist with a defiant look.

‘I will be telling security that you called asking for classified information!’  He threatened, in a tone which was more like ‘I’m telling the teacher!’ than a formal warning.  Jerome, at any rate, was wholly unimpressed.

‘Son,’ he said, ‘I know more nine ack alpha stuff than you know times tables.’  He gave him a mocking, ironic salute with the card he’d evidently put the statement onto, his end.  ‘Thanks for this!’  he said, and broke off the call, already turning away with a very purposeful manner.

Harles said a word, and then caught himself up a little guiltily in case any of the ratings might have heard him swear.  The thought did occur to him, fleetingly, that this might be something that Lt Joplar might define as a ‘problem’ and want him to call about, but it occurred only to be dismissed.  He did not want Lt Joplar, after all, to think he was an idiot who couldn’t deal with routine matters on his own authority.  He had been told, too, recently, to try to show more initiative instead of just sitting there waiting to be told what to do all the time. 

Right, he thought, and with that called up a comscreen and wrote a detailed report, including a copy of the call, which he mailed to the intelligence division headed ‘Attempt to obtain classified information by J Tandeki, journalist.’

Then he sat back in his chair again, satisfied, and resumed his idle swinging back and forth.

That, he felt, had sorted
that
.

*
*
*

Seventy eight minutes later, Jerome Tandeki was in the office of a senior news editor at ABC.

‘I’m telling you, Mile, it’s
huge
,’ he assured him, earnestly, as the editor skimmed through the clips and statements Jerome had put together for him. 

He had been very active since coming off that call with Harles.  He had called every organisation he could think of with any relevance to issues of law and order and criminal rehab, firstly to ask them if they’d heard anything about the scheme, and secondly, when they’d all said they’d heard nothing about it at all, to ask for their reaction to it.

Only two out of the nineteen organisations he had called had declined to make any comment at all, saying that they could not possibly comment until they had more facts.  Everyone else had been more than willing to give a general positional statement on what their reaction would be if it turned out to be true that the Fleet was employing convicted criminals aboard a corvette.  As those statements had piled up, Jerome Tandeki had been more convinced by the minute that he had dynamite in his hands, quite possibly the biggest story of his career.  

‘But it’s insane.’  Mile Danforthy, the editor, had watched the clip of Sub-Lt Hollis stating angrily that the matter was top secret three times now and still clearly found it hard to believe.  ‘Are you sure they’re not winding us up, here?’

‘It’s the
Fleet
.’  Jerome reminded him.  ‘Yes, I’m sure!  This is
hot
, Mile!  I thought it was just, you know, politics, but the way that guy reacted, it’s obvious we’re really onto something here!  And just
look
at the reaction we’ve got already!’

‘I am looking at it,’ Mile said, with a tone that hovered between awe and hunger as he scanned across the clips.  ‘What did you say to them?’ he asked, seeing the furious ranting that Jerome’s calls had unleashed. 

 ‘Nothing more than was said to me!’  Jerome asserted, definitely, and ticked off the key points on his fingers, ‘One, there’s a feeling in the Fleet that this guy Higgs was shafted.  Two, Skipper von Strada is said to have had the Admiralty by the nuts over it for the last few months and to have forced this scheme from them to get his crewman released.  Three, there is a belief in the Fleet that now he has a free hand von Strada will be pampering his crew with luxuries the regular Fleet is not allowed, even perhaps to allowing drinking on the ship.  And four, whatever it is they are intending to do with this ship, it is top level classified, special
ops
level classified if that Sub’s reaction is anything to go by.’

Mile looked at the reaction footage again.  There were right wing ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’ organisations ranting furiously about the outrage of allowing prisoners out of jail early under any circumstances, still less to allow them to return to service on a warship.  One of the representatives of an extremist group was practically frothing at the mouth.  If this was true, he said, if the Fleet was going to allow dangerous convicted criminals not only to serve aboard a warship but to be going about amongst the public, even potentially carrying guns, then it was the biggest outrage of the century. 

On the next screen along was a victims’ action group, declaring almost as angrily that if it was true that these criminals were going to be treated to a life of pampered luxury aboard that starship, then it was an insult not only to the victims they’d injured but to
all
victims of crime.  Victims had a right to expect society to put their welfare first, they said, and a right to expect that criminals would pay their dues to society.