For a week, a sleek and deadly predator stalked the sea-lanes of the Indonesian archipelago. From Great Channel in the Andaman group, south along Kepulauan Mentawai and east past Christmas Island to the mouth of the Timor Sea, the huntress hunted in the night, using the merchant shipping of the world as her stalking goat.
Electronically silent and stealthed against radar detection, she trailed the lumbering container ships into the Straits of Malacca and invisibly intercepted the break-bulks as they came through the Selat Sunda. She lurked to seaward of the interisland ferries as they shuttled between Bali and Sumatra, and the coaster skippers hauling sandalwood and vanilla into Jakarta and Telukbetung never knew they were being watched from darkness.
With the coming of the dawn, she would withdraw into the open ocean, hiding from patrol aircraft and passing sea traffic in the misty lair of a squall line or thunderhead, drifting with the movements of sea and storm.
But come the night, she would emerge to hunt again.