Target Lock

Flag Quarters, USS Evans F. Carlson 0921 Hours, Zone Time: August 16, 2008

Sitting on the edge of her bunk, Amanda studied the two holstered pistols lying atop the taut blanket: the big Marine-issue MEU Model .45 that Stone Quillain had issued her from the landing-force arsenal and her personally owned Ruger SP-101 revolver. Glancing over at the shoulder bag hanging from a hook on the opposite bulkhead, she considered.

Amanda was equally proficient with both handguns; Stone saw to that in his odd moments. The massive Marine captain hated the thought of being around anyone not weapons-capable. And the weight of either pistol in her bag might be of comfort in the day ahead. Maybe….

Amanda gave a derisive snort. If she thought she might need a gun on Harconan’s island, she shouldn’t go in the first place. And if she had miscalculated and this was a trap, a pistol wasn’t going to get her out of it. On the other hand, packing iron wasn’t the act of a woman setting out for a pleasant rendezvous with a handsome gentleman. It could ruin her chance of getting close enough to Harconan to actually learn something useful.

Her decision made, she knelt and stacked the automatic and revolver back into the cabin safe under the head of her bunk, giving the combination dial a scrambling spin. Standing, she gave her tropic-weight uniform slacks a careful straightening tug.

Damn, damn, damn, this was a deadly serious business. So why did she keep getting flashbacks of pacing around her bedroom in high school, waiting for her date to show up?

Maybe because, black-hearted pirate or not, Makara Harconan was an extremely attractive and dynamic man. And for Amanda Garrett, there had always been something about the legend of the buccaneer.

Amanda sat on the edge of the bunk and reached across to the built in bookcase for an old and treasured friend, Lowell Thomas’s Count Luckner, the Sea Devil, the biography of Count Hugo von Luckner. The tale of the dashing Imperial German Navy sea raider and his epic voyage in command of the last sail-powered man-of-war had always fascinated her, especially when she had been on the cusp of adolescence, providing her with her first romantic fantasies.

Perhaps they were right when they said that you always stayed just a little bit in love with the first one to touch your heart. Maybe that explained the tug she’d felt when she’d set eyes on Makara Harconan….

Amanda snorted again, at herself. Fantasies were all well and good for a fourteen-year-old, but she was a grown woman living in the all-too-real world. The buccaneers of legend and the pirates of reality were two very different breeds. Even her beloved count had in actuality been a naval officer of a proper and chivalrous age, and not a true sea marauder.

Glancing down at the worn volume in her lap, Amanda noticed a bookmark she didn’t recognize. Admiral MacIntyre must have started reading about the count when he’d occupied her quarters. For some reason that pleased her, rather like the thought of two old friends hitting it off.

In the real world, a man like Elliot MacIntyre would be a far more sensible and worthy subject for a romantic fantasy: a solid and honorable man of proven courage, intelligence, and humanity. But what would a fourteen-year-old girl know?

The corner of Amanda’s mouth quirked up. Or, for that matter, a thirty-eight-year-old woman?

Someone knocked on the outer cabin door. Amanda tossed the book onto the bunk and stood up. Taking her shoulder bag and Sea Fighter beret from their respective hooks, she stepped out into the office space.

“Come in.”

Christine entered the office, a file folder of hard copy tucked under one arm. “Hi, Boss Ma’am. I have the latest situation reports assembled. I’ll be going over them with Admiral MacIntyre while you’re off ship.”

“Good. Anything I need to know before I take off?”

The intel hesitated and then shook her head. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Leave them on my desk, then. I’ll play catch up… probably tomorrow morning, it looks like now. Any change in the situation with the microforce?”

“Negative.” The intel set the file on the desktop and sank into one of the office chairs. “They’re in the pre-mission hide. They’re secure, and no situational changes are reported in the zone of interest. They’ll start moving at 2300 and should be launching the op by 0100 as per the mission profile.”

“I’ll be back well before then,” Amanda mused, “although it might be interesting to be on Palau Piri when we start putting some moves on one of our pirate king’s bases.”

The small khaki-clad figure in the office chair strangled something down under her breath, and Amanda noted the intel’s exceptionally broody expression.

“All right, Chris,” she said, parking her hip against the edge of the desk. “What’s going on?”

“Request permission to speak freely to the Captain?”

Amanda sighed. She was in for it now. Military formality was dangerous, coming from Christine Rendino. “You’ve always had it, Chris. You know that.”

Christine looked up, eyes glinting angrily. “Then may I remind the Captain that she is merely a line officer in the United States Navy, not frickin’ Modesty Blaise!”

Amanda chuckled softly. “By that, I gather you still disapprove of my excursion to Harconan’s island?”

“That’s right, I do.” Christine aimed an emphatic finger at Amanda. “You are going to be walking into the heart of the goddamn enemy camp alone. There’s not going to be a soul around who can help you or even witness what might happen to you.”

“Very true,” Amanda acknowledged. “But I thought we agreed last night that the probability of Harconan taking any overt action against me was small. It would be too obvious. The death or disappearance of a senior American military officer on his home ground is just the kind of thing he’d want to avoid, especially now.”

Chris lowered her eyes, her lower lip protruding stubbornly. “We might be wrong. It could be made to look like an accident. Maybe his buy-offs extend deeper into the local governments than we know. Maybe… anything. This guy has got to know you’re after him, Boss Ma’am.”

“The Navy is after him, Chris,” Amanda replied quietly. “And I’m a very small and readily replaceable part of that organization. At the moment I’m unique in only one way: I’m the one he’s invited into his home. It’s our chance to get a closer look at how he thinks and operates. It’s my best chance to get inside his head. I need to learn how to read him. That’s going to be important.”

“Well, maybe,” Christine conceded grudgingly. “But maybe some of us feel you aren’t all that replaceable. Maybe some of us, in fact, figure you’re pretty damn unique in a lot of ways, and if anything happened to you, we’d be pretty damn unhappy.”

Amanda tilted her head back and laughed. “I’d miss you, too, Chris. I promise nothing fancy. I’ll just go in, sip tea with the taipan, and then I’m out of there…. But now that I think about it, would there be any kind of bug or hidden microphone or something I could smuggle in there with me…?”

Christine collapsed forward melodramatically, catching her face in her hands. “Aaaaaagh! She watches an old James Bond flick on Site TV and she thinks she’s a superspy.”

“Just kidding, Mother! Just kidding!”

Christine looked up again. “I’m not. If you insist, try this soft probe, okay! Probably — I say again, probably — Harconan will be willing to maintain this polite fiction you two have going for a while longer. He’s probably still as curious about your intentions as you are about his, and he’s likely going to try and pump you just as hard as you are him. Act dumb, but don’t be stupid! They are going to be waiting for you to try something. Disappoint them! Please!”

Her friend’s open distress brought Amanda back from her moment of levity. “I understand, Chris. I’ll be on a knife edge. I know it. I’ll watch myself.”

The desk phone buzzed and Amanda leaned across to scoop the hand set out of its cradle. “Garrett here…. All right. I’ll be right up. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone. “That was our AIRBOSS. It appears my ride is here.”

Permitting a foreign civil aircraft to land on a U.S. naval vessel was strictly non-SOP. Accordingly, the Harconan Limited helicopter flared out and touched down in a corner of the quay parking lot, apparently unconcerned with the views of the harbormaster on the subject.

The quayside had been a busy place before the arrival of the sleek, dark-blue Eurocopter. A double row of buses was parked, both discharging and taking aboard passengers.

The discharging buses carried Balinese civilians, curious townspeople from the capital of Denpasar and the other surrounding communities, taking advantage of the “open house” program being offered aboard the American warships. Ushered aboard in small groups, friendly American sailors would then take each party on a brief tour of certain less critical areas of the cruiser and LPD, all part of the Navy’s “Ambassadors of Goodwill” program.

But being an Ambassador of Goodwill did not mean being a fool As each group climbed the pierced aluminum gangway to board each vessel, the more curious might have noted the soft purr of an electric fan under their feet. Chemical-sensitive bomb-sniffer units were at work, ready to flash a warning to ship’s security.

The second, shorter row of buses loaded sailors and Marines for land side tours and shopping expeditions. It would look strange if none of the task force personnel hit the beach while in Bali. All hands had been given very specific orders, however: Stay in groups. Stay in better-class public areas. No carousing, and all hands back aboard by nightfall.

Standing on the Carlson’s forecastle, waiting for the gangway to clear, Amanda and Christine watched as the copter’s pilot dismounted from the idling aircraft. Both instantly recognized the tall tanned figure in the safari suit and sunglasses. He recognized them as well, throwing a hand up in a casual wave.

“The man himself,” Amanda murmured. “I’m honored.”

“Well,” Christine responded sourly, “at least that eliminates the worry of a suicide pilot or five pounds of plastique under your seat.”

Amanda waved the intel off “I promise I won’t sit in the back row in the movie, and if he claims he’s run out of gas, I’ll remember to hit him where you told me. See you tonight, Chris.”

“Oh, really? You think?”

Feeling exceedingly antsy, Christine looked on as her friend checked off ship with the Carlson’s OOD and descended the gangway. Harconan awaited Amanda at the quayside, and even at a distance he looked hellishly handsome. Beyond listening range, the intel read the exchange of gesture body language that followed. Harconan’s air of flamboyant gallantry, which would have seemed forced in another man, flowed naturally, and Amanda, with the blood of her Virginia belle ancestors, could flirt with the best when she put her mind to it.

“You look worried, Little One.”

Nguyen Tran had come up beside her on the forecastle, keeping his voice low so as to not be overheard by the gangway watch.

On the dock Amanda and Harconan were walking away toward the waiting helo. “I am,” Christine murmured. “Please tell me I am stuffed full of blueberry muffins to think that somehow this is a really bad idea?”

“I’m not sure.” Tran’s eyes narrowed as he followed Amanda and the taipan with his gaze. “I doubt that Harconan would be foolish enough to harm your captain or do anything to draw suspicion onto himself. Still… do you know what the name Makara means?”

“No, what?”

“In Indonesia, the Makara is a legendary sea creature with two facets to its being: It has the beauty and grace of the dolphin, but the teeth… and soul… of the shark.”

The Eurocopter lifted off and cut across the waters of Benoa Harbor and the narrow spit of the Bukit Badung Peninsula before turning north west to parallel the coast. Amanda, who was not a pilot herself but who had spent a great deal of time in the company of aviators, noted the surety of the suntanned hands on the helicopter’s controls and the way Harconan seemed to merge with the aircraft in flight. Again she had to be impressed.

The tangle of cheap surfing resorts and coastal tourist villages thinned out rapidly, the cliffs lifting along the seaside and the great central mountains of the island interior rising as they headed inland. Soon a green and elegant terrain was passing beneath the helo’s pontoons, the valleys and even hillsides sculpted for rice cultivation, the flowing webwork of interlocking terraces seemingly made for aesthetics as well as for practicality. Interspersed among the fields were the farming communities, at the center of each the pura desa, the village temple, the bale agung, the village assembly ground, and the sacred banyan tree.

“This is more like what I thought Bali would be about,” Amanda commented into her interphone head set.

“It is,” Harconan replied. “This is the real Bali. The sprawl on the southern peninsula is someone else’s idea.”

“Whose?”

“Let me give you a hint. One of Bali’s former Javanese governors had the nickname Ida Bagus, or Okay, for his propensity for authorizing any development project that would bring in fast tourist dollars.”

“And the Balinese have nothing to say about it?”

Harconan arched a dark eyebrow behind his sunglasses. “Of course they do. Just as much any other non-Javanese in Indonesia. ‘We are many, but all are one,’ as our national motto says. Only somehow the one from Jakarta always seems to end up giving the orders to the many.”

“And this status quo is accepted?” Amanda probed.

“For the moment. The Balinese are by nature a mystic people, spiritual and artistic, until the gods tell them to be otherwise.”

“The gods?”

“Quite so. Look back over your right shoulder: See that tallest mountain to the northeast?”

Amanda studied the impressive volcano with its snowy cloud cap through the cockpit bubble. “Yes, it’s beautiful. What about it?”

“It’s called Gungung Agung. Back in 1965, during the last days of the Sukarno regime, a great religious ceremony was held here on Bali, the Eka Dasa Rudra, purification and balancing to bring man and nature into harmony. It is only supposed to be held once precisely every one hundred years. However, Sukarno, in order to impress a convention of travel agents, ordered the ritual be held ten years early.

“In the middle of the ceremonies, Gungung Agung over there exploded in its most violent eruption in six hundred years, killing sixteen hundred people and devastating one quarter of the island. The Balinese saw it as a sign that Shiva was displeased with them for allowing outsiders — in this instance, the island’s Communist faction — to come among them and disrupt the ways of the gods.

“In September of that year, when the coup was attempted and the Communist party of Indonesia was outlawed, the Balinese turned on them as well. But here it was unique. Here it wasn’t a political massacre; it was an exorcism of demons as ritualized as any temple ceremony. For the most part there was no rampage, no mass slaughter in the streets, as there was elsewhere in the islands. The Communists were allowed to bathe and don white ceremonial clothing and were led politely and without hate to their execution. Fifty thousand of them out of a population of two million.”

“My God, and you think it could happen again?” Amanda’s own words reminded her of the conversation she had shared with Stone Quillain about Krakatau a few days before.

“Let’s put it this way, my good Captain,” Harconan replied. “Were I a Javanese official, a Chinese hotel owner, or an Australian tourist, I would look hastily to my plane reservations should old Gungung start rumbling again.”

He banked the helicopter out over the sea. “I’m taking us out over the ocean. We’re coming up on the West Bali National Park, and I don’t like to disturb the bird sanctuaries.”

A few minutes later they rounded Cape Lampumerah, at the north western tip of Bali. Two islands could be seen then off the north coast, emeralds in a sapphire sea. “The one to the east is Menjangan,” Harconan pronounced. “It’s part of the National Park. The one ahead is Palau Piri, and it is my home.”

The Island of Princes was far more impressive in real life than in aerial photography. As the helo angled toward the flashing reception beacons of the island helipad, Amanda could only gaze awestruck as the complex of elegantly modern buildings and golf-course-smooth lawns rose toward her. Ian Fleming should have seen this, she thought wryly.

An elderly yet straight-spined Chinese in a black business suit awaited them in the ivory-tiled entry foyer of the main house. “Welcome home, Mr. Harconan,” he said with a slight inclination of his head in a faultless and accent-free English. “And welcome to you, Captain Garrett. You honor House Harconan with your presence. May your stay with us be a pleasant one.”

“Thank you.” Amanda suddenly wished she were wearing a skirt in stead of slacks: A curtsy seemed the only appropriate response to such a welcome.

“Amanda, I would like you to meet Mr. Lan Lo,” Harconan said with real affection in his voice. “My factotum, main functionary, and the only reason I’m a millionaire.”

The expression of repose on Lo’s face didn’t alter. “That is, of course, a gracious exaggeration, Captain.”

“Never argue with your employer, Lo. I say you are indispensable. Has everything been prepared for our guest?”

“Of course, sir. Luncheon will be ready in forty-five minutes.” Lo turned slightly to face Amanda. “Would you care to bathe first, Captain?”

It would have been a rather startling pronouncement anywhere but in Indonesia. However, Amanda had studied the task force’s cultural database enough to know that the Indonesians were both one of the cleanest of people as well as the best-versed in maintaining comfort in a tropic environment. Offering a visitor a chance to bathe after a journey was a courtesy. And the ride under the Eurocopter’s plastic bubble had been a hot and sticky one.

“Thank you. That would be very nice.”

If Amanda had been expecting one of the traditional Indonesian mandi scoop baths, she would have been disappointed. The sun-gold and ivory European-style bathroom she was shown to was alone larger than her entire flag quarters aboard the Carlson, and it opened off a dressing room and bedroom that were far larger yet. Amanda suspected that the cost of the furnishings and fabrics involved in the elegant guest suite probably could have effortlessly absorbed several years of her salary.

The suite also came complete with two pretty, skilled, and silent Chinese maids. It was the first time in many years that Amanda had allowed anyone to undress her, except for recreational purposes. However, the only way to maintain one’s dignity in such a situation is to flow with it. Amanda relaxed and accepted the pampering.

The bath products were Guerlain, the tub large enough to float in, Appreciative of a good deep soaking, Amanda could have luxuriated for a far longer period, but her maids were standing by with fluffy sheet-size towels, and her host awaited.

At the dressing table she found an array of expensive, tasteful cosmetics matched to her complexion, and she found that one of the maids also doubled as a skilled hairdresser.

She didn’t realize the trap that had been sprung until she returned, towel-wrapped, to the bedroom. Her uniform and every other stitch she had worn had been taken, no doubt for cleaning. Replacing them were a set of ice-blue lounging pajamas, obviously from one of Bali’s finest fashion houses and made of silk so fine that it flowed like water. It made a person feel cool merely to look at them.

Amanda recognized the deft move. She could make a fuss by yelling for her own clothes back or she could wear this elegant, expensive, and exotic outfit, no doubt chosen by Harconan himself, that was simply screaming to be tried on.

Two minutes later she was examining herself in the triangular mirror. The effect worked well with her amber hair and golden eyes. It worked very well indeed. And the incredible feel of the silk… Just wearing these garments was an erotic experience.

There was a discrete knock at the bedroom door, and Amanda nodded to one of the maids. It was amazing how rapidly a person got used to having such handy individuals around.

It was Lo. “Luncheon is ready, Captain.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lo. I think I’m ready as well.” She slipped her feet into the soft golden sandals that had been provided with the outfit, shot a final glance into the mirror, and set forth.