Target Lock

Flag Quarters, USS Evans F. Carlson 1233 Hours, Zone Time: August 17, 2008

“Understood, Frank. I agree with Admiral Sonderburg that getting a sound profile on the new Indian nuclear attack sub is important. I just disagree about how important.”

The distant voice of Maclntyre’s chief of staff sounded in his ear. The admiral’s chair creaked as he tilted it back to stare at the cable clusters overhead. Beyond the Sea Fighter task force and its current mission, he still had the remainder of Naval Special Forces to run. Today, with the Lady away, he made use of Amanda’s office and workstation for his daily bout of teleconferencing with NAVSPECFORCE headquarters.

“You can point out to the admiral that currently I have two — count them, two — dedicated Raven subs in the Pacific,” he replied into the phone. “If COMSUBPAC wants to park one of his own attack boats off Madras for the next six months, fine, I wish him luck. I’ve got too many other missions for my hulls to leave them loitering around in the Bay of Bengal, waiting for New Delhi to run trials with their new nuke. Hell, Frank, we can track this guy down and lift a sound profile on him after he’s operational and at sea…. I’ll do better than that, Frank, I’ll say I’m sure Admiral Sonderburg isn’t going to like it, but that’s my call.”

A knock at the door straightened him up behind the desk. “Enter.”

Christine Rendino hesitated in the entryway, a file folder of hard copy under one arm. MacIntyre gestured her into the chair across the desk from him as he finished his call “Right… that should just about do it. Forward me the after action report on the last SEAL ops cycle in northern China and lean on the yard problems with the PC rebuilds. I’ll catch you tomorrow at oh-eight for the morning sitrep. Later, Frank.”

He returned the phone to the desk communications deck and swiveled the chair around to face the intel. “What do you have for me, Chris?”

She held up the hard-copy file. “Latest operational intelligence updates. Would you like the file or would you prefer a fast verbal?”

“Both. Let’s start with the latest from the dungeons below. What’s the status on our prisoners, and have you gotten anything more out of them on the location of the INDASAT?”

“They’re doing fine, sir. We’ve got them out of isolation and time disorientation. They’re eating like horses and watching Baywatch reruns in six different languages. When they go back to their village, they aren’t going to be able to live without satellite television. As for intel, we’re getting all sorts of casual stuff on routine raider operations. I can already give you the names of half a dozen other major base villages on Sulawesi and Ambon and maybe twice that many raider schooners and their captains. Apparently Sulawesi is a hotbed of both piracy and Raja Samudra nationalism. No surprises there. But so far we’ve picked up nothing on the upper cartel echelons or the INDASAT.”

“Any explanation for that?” MacIntyre grunted.

“Supercompartmentalization. Harconan understands his people and the tribal culture form. He knows the propensity for gossip to disseminate rapidly within a fluid, mobile culture like the Bugis.

“If the INDASAT were being held at one of the Bugis colonies on Sulawesi, our prisoners probably would have at least a hint of something especially big going on. As we aren’t seeing this, it suggests that Harconan’s probably keeping our satellite in the hands of a special team of somewhat more sophisticated personnel at a location outside of the usual Bugis operating areas.”

“In other words, the damn thing could be anywhere.”

Christine perked up. “No, sir, the satellite is still somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago. It is in Harconan’s hands and he is in the process of selling it off to the highest international bidder.”

MacIntyre brought his chair upright. “What have you got?”

“We scored on our systems invasion of Makara Limited, sir. Just a little bitty bit of a score, but it’s given us six critical names.”

She opened a hard-copy file and selected a sheet from it, passing it across the desk to MacIntyre. “Dr. Chong Rei,” he read aloud. “Mr. Hiung Wa, Mr. Jamal Kalil, Mr. Hamad Hammik, Professor Namgay Sonoo, and Dr. Joseph Valdechesfsky.

“Who are these gentlemen when they’re up and dressed?” MacIntyre inquired, looking up from the paper.

“Aerospace specialists, sir, satellite operations, cybernetics, space industrialization, the best their respective corporate entities can field. Rei and Wa are with the Yan Song combine out of Korea. Hammik and Kalil are with the new Falaud Industrial Development Group based in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Sonoo and Valdechesfsky, an expat Russian, are with India’s Marutt-Goa. All of these guys have enough of a reputation in their technologies to be worth the NSA keeping an eye on them. All six of them have arrived in Singapore within the last seventy-two hours.”

“What’s the tie-in with Harconan?” MacIntyre demanded.

“All six of their names were pulled out of a Makara Limited data file. Not out of one of the primary business or accounting blocks: There’s no mention of them or of their parent firms in any of the Makara primary files. We lifted these names out of the day work log of Makara Limited’s director of public relations. She hard-linked her palm pad computer into her workstation terminal at just the right time, for us anyway. We have a list of flight arrivals, hotel reservations, limo service, meal and entertainment expenses, all the nickel-and-dime stuff that goes along with wining and dining a body of valued corporate clients.”

Christine held up a finger. “Here is where it gets interesting. Inspector Tran has confirmed the arrival of these men through Singapore customs. We have also verified that rooms are being held in their names at various four- and five-star hotels across the island. But the listing of entertainment and support expenses cuts off abruptly about twenty-four hours ago.”

“Have they left the island?”

“Not according to Singapore customs, but the expense trail ends cold. Harconan Limited has stopped spending money on them, at least in Singapore.”

Christine produced a second sheet of hard copy. “I had cyberwar service the problem from an Indonesian angle. Their government systems are steam-age stuff, a walk in the park to hack.”

“And?”

“And yesterday the Indonesian customs station at Pekanbaru in the Rau Island group listed two Koreans, two UAE nationals, one Indian, and a Russian coming in from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on a passenger hydrofoil. The names are different, but the racial grouping and the physical descriptions match.

“The Indonesian polisi at Pekanbaru also issued these individuals with extensive surat jalan letters of passage, a kind of an internal Indonesian visa granting them free passage to just about anywhere in the archipelago.”

MacIntyre scowled. “Any chance we could be looking at a coincidence?”

Christine shook her head decisively. “Uh-uh, not when you consider that a quick dip into the Malaysian customs-control database indicates that they’ve never heard of any of these guys, at least as listed. It’s questionable if they were even on that hydrofoil. They just needed some kind of official entry mode to list on the paperwork.

“To me, Admiral, sir, it’s apparent these three major international industrial combines, Yan Song, Falaud, and Marutt-Goa, have taken Harconan up on the INDASAT offer and he’s ghosting their inspection teams into Indonesia to look over the merchandise.”

“ls there any way for us to track them?”

The intel shook her head. “I’d doubt it. I suspect they’re already long gone en route to the location of the satellite base. Harconan is probably moving the inspection teams covertly via his own ships and aircraft. They probably won’t be a blip on anybody’s scope until they magically reappear in Singapore, ready for extraction.”

MacIntyre studied the hard-copy sheets, finding no point of disagreement with the intel’s assessment. “Well, this was something, at any rate. It’s a hint we aren’t barking up the wrong tree, but it’s also not a smoking gun. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a justification for those expense accounts. What else do you have?”

“Two other factors, sir,” Christine replied, “both of which are really interesting.”

“Explain.”

“For one, we’ve completed the analysis on the weapons we captured from the Piskov boarding party. The report has a disturbing bottom line — to me, anyway.”

“Disturb me, Commander.”

Christine took a deep breath. “Okay, sir, but this is sort of complex. I have to walk you through it. First, there was no big surprise with the Uzi machine pistols we captured. They were license-produced Uzi clones manufactured here in Singapore, part of a two-hundred-gun shipment to the Philippine government taken by pirates about two years ago.

“The automatic pistol we took from the prizemaster was a different matter. It was an inexpensive Beretta 92-F knockoff produced by Helwan of Egypt. The serial number indicates it was one of a five-hundred-unit shipment supposedly bought and paid for by the government of Vietnam for their national police. However, the Vietnamese claim to know nothing about buying or paying for such a shipment of handguns.”

“Go on.”

“The medium machine guns mounted on the Bugis Boghammers were South African MG-4s, an unlicensed 7.62 NATO variant of the old American Browning M 1919. We have no idea where they came from, except they all have similar series ID numbers, and one of our specialists thinks he recognizes Israeli-style refurbishment work.

“Things really get interesting with the assault rifles. They were a short-barreled folding-stock variant of the AK-47, ex-Hungarian army issue. A few years back, when Hungary went to NATO standard with their small arms, they took all of their old 7.62mm Warsaw Pact stuff, refurbished it, and put it on the international arms market for resale. Last year a Thai arms dealer purchased a block of six thousand rifles, theoretically on speculation. The paper trail on that arms shipment leads from Budapest to Bangkok, where the weapons are supposedly sitting in a locked warehouse, gathering dust.”

“And the reality?”

“All that’s left in the warehouse is the dust. The arms and the arms dealer have both disappeared. Six thousand assault rifles, Admiral. Enough to equip two entire infantry brigades.”

“I know my unit strengths, Commander. What’s your disturbing bottom line?”

Christine passed across the new sheaf of hard copy. “Admiral, the sizes and diverse origins of these arms shipments suggests to me that Harconan is covertly acquiring and moving a lot of firepower from a large number of diverse sources — much more than he’d need to simply supply his pirate fleet.”

“What could he be doing with it?”

She shrugged and sat back. “That’s just it. I don’t know, unless he could be gunrunning for some of the other rebel factions within Indonesia. Fa’ sure, there’s enough of them and he has the transport network for it. The problem is, none of the extremist groups like the Morning Star separatists on New Guinea or the Muslim Aceh separatists on Sumatra have shown any indication of being up-gunned lately. If Harconan is arms trading, who’s getting the stuff and what’s it going to be used for?”

“Think cyberwar will be able to dig up the answers for us?”

He saw the regretful shake of Christine’s head. “Not unless we get another lucky break like that leaky palm pad. That’s the other interesting factor: Harconan Limited has two entirely different levels of communications going.”

“Go on.”

“On one level, there are the day-to-day business transactions. Cyberwar indicates we are in with that data flow. It all seems to be pretty standard corporate stuff: buy, sell, trade, ship routings, etc. It’s commercially encrypted but we can bust it, no problem. The second level is a different story. Not much of it shows up in the Makara Limited corporate net, and when it does, zip, it’s routed straight over to Palau Piri Island. I suspect a lot more is going in direct to Harconan through his satellite links. This is presumably the hot dope on his piracy operations and arms deals. Unfortunately, we can’t read any of it.”

MacIntyre looked perturbed. “With all of the funding we’ve been channeling into cyberwar, we can’t crack a commercial encryption package?”

“It’s not that simple, sir. Contrary to what the Reverend Dr. Gates up in Seattle would have his corporate purchasers think, there isn’t any encryption program you can’t break eventually with a large enough baseline, a fast enough computer, and a degree of time to work the problem. Harconan’s aware of this, so he’s had someone run him up a computerized variant of the old single-use, tear pad cipher.

“He’s not using one code, he’s using thousands of them, all essentially simple word and number substitutions, none of which is ever used more than once. For example, in one message the letter e could be signified by a multidigit number, say five six eight four. In the next, it’s signified with a word set, like ‘cheese,’ ‘basketball,’ ‘Thursday,’ ‘Mormon,’ but no two ever the same.”

“I understand how a tear pad works,” MacIntyre said. “There’s never a large enough baseline to analyze for decryption. You can’t transmit the Encyclopaedia Britannica or a digital breakdown of the roof of the Sistine Chapel using one, but it’s good enough for basic messaging.”

“And good enough for Harconan’s needs,” Christine agreed. “He must have a computer program that generates huge batches of these code sets. Then he distributes a bunch of inexpensive laptops to his key agents, all of them preprogrammed with an individual set of codes for that specific agent. The code sets are likely designed to sequentially roll over after each use, with the previous code being erased.

“The laptops will be stand-alones that probably have been physically modified so they can’t be networked, guaranteeing man-breaks in the system. After encryption, a message has to be downloaded onto a data disk or card and then physically inserted into a second computer for transmission over the Internet.

“To make things even tougher, according to the transmission addresses, none of this second-level stuff ever comes out of a Harconan Limited office or a personal computer. It inevitably dumps and loads through a public Internet access like a library, a post office, or a business services center at a big hotel. Even if we could track down the holder of one of these boxes and pulled the code set, it would only give us the communications string for that specific agent.”

“Presumably when an agent runs low on codes, he gets sent a new laptop.”

“Exactly, sir. There will only be one master program, with all of the code sets assigned to all of the agents. That will be a stand-alone main frame on Palau Piri. You can bet it will be isolated and impossible to hack from any outside access, and it will be physically guarded like Fort Knox.”

“Enigma rides again,” MacIntyre grunted. He swiveled his chair away from the intel for a moment, staring toward the open porthole in the bulkhead, then turned back. “Tell me, Chris. Does Amanda — Captain Garrett — know about this encryption system of Harconan’s? Did you brief her on it before she went out to Palau Piri?”

It was Christine’s turn to look away. “No, sir, I didn’t. I was waiting for confirmation from cyberwar on certain aspects of the system before discussing the matter with Captain Garrett.”

“Translation,” MacIntyre stated flatly. “You didn’t want to risk her poking around after that mainframe.”

Something hot and angry flared in Christine’s eyes as she looked up. “No, sir, I did not. She’s running a big enough risk as is, being out there with Harconan. I didn’t want her stretching the envelope.”

MacIntyre put an edge on his voice. “And you don’t think Captain Garrett is capable of executing her own good judgment in this matter, Commander?”

“No sir! I do not!” The words slipped out without her meaning them to. Christine mentally floundered for a way to recall them. Shit, MacIntyre was the only person who’d ever had the knack of flipping her open like that…

The admiral’s soft chuckle eased her. “Stand easy, Chris. I fully concur with your decision. If you had told her about this damn thing, you, I, and God all know she’d make a try for it.”

Somber-eyed, Christine studied the admiral. At one time she’d thought she had this blocky, plain-spoken man figured. Of late, though, she’d started to sense well-hidden subtleties and a capacity for perception that could be a little unnerving at times.

Such as now.

“You’re worried about her being around Harconan, aren’t you?” he continued.

“Of course, sir. Who wouldn’t be?”

Maclntyre’s eyes narrowed. “But you’re talking about something more than just a tricky tactical situation here, Chris. You’ve assessed something that you don’t like, but you don’t want to speak about it. That suggests to me it’s not professional, it’s personal.”

“Did you ever serve a tour with Intelligence, sir?” Christine asked ruefully.

“No, but I am raising a teenage daughter. The skills required are similar. I’ve found that if something’s making you jumpy, it should be talked about. There are only two of us here. Now, what’s going on?”

Christine sighed and hesitated a final second. Damn, did this have to come out with this man? “I’m afraid Captain Garrett… Amanda… might be getting in over her head in this situation in ways she doesn’t understand herself.”

Christine stalled again, groping to put instincts into words, to give verbalization to deeply personal thoughts.

“Just say it,” MacIntyre said patiently.

“Admiral, Amanda Garrett is a nun!”

Maclntyre’s eyebrows shot up! “What?”

Christine let the words free flow. “I mean, in her way, Amanda has lived a very closed existence. For all of her life she’s been married to the Navy in the same way a nun is married to the Church. It’s her world. Even before she attended Annapolis she was brought up in a Navy environment. As her friend, I can say for a fact that the last time she had a major personal relationship outside of the Navy was in high school.”

“And your point?” MacIntyre asked, puzzled.

Christine took a deep breath. “My point is, she has never had exposure to a man like Makara Harconan or to his ultra-high-roller kind of world. Right now she is way the hell off her playing field, involved in a game she doesn’t really understand, and I’m scared spitless that she won’t realize it until it’s too late.”

MacIntyre stared from across the desk. “You can’t mean… Good God, Chris. Are you seriously proposing that this pirate could… turn Amanda’s head?”

Christine shook her head. “Not to fall in love, sir. Not the genuine article. Not the kind of thing that would ever make her deliberately betray the task force or the Navy. But she might be knocked off her feet enough to be blinded to some personal risks, physical or emotional. We aren’t the ones in danger here, Admiral: Amanda is.”

MacIntyre shot out of his chair and paced off the length of the limited office space. “That’s ridiculous, Commander. That’s just… flatly… ridiculous!”

“Sir, I wish to God it was!” Christine exclaimed, turning in her chair to follow him. “But shit of that nature happens, and with alarming frequency. How many times have you heard of some male officer totally screwing up his life with some chickiepoo not worth the powder to blow her to hell?”

MacIntyre didn’t reply immediately, but the expression on his face indicated he was thinking of any number of prime examples. “But not Amanda,” he said finally. “She has too much common sense to do anything like that.”

“Sir, trust me. When glands override brains, women can be just as gonzo as men.” Christine popped the center of her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Jeez, this is intense woman stuff. How do I say it? Females can be drawn to men of power. Anthropologists say it’s because our instinct is to seek out strong genes and good providers for our children. Be that as it may, certain supermasculine types can sometimes really trip our switches. Makara Harconan is one of those types. He is a total package. He’s highly intelligent, he is highly successful, he is personable, intensely dynamic, and, if you’re a woman, he is drop-dead gorgeous!

“I felt the effect the first time I saw his picture,” Christine concluded. “Just about any conventionally aligned female would. I’d say he’s maybe one in a hundred thousand in that area.”

MacIntyre stared at a pine-paneled bulkhead. “I see. One in a hundred thousand? And how would that apply… tactically?”

“Does the phrase ‘clubbing baby seals’ bring anything to mind, sir?”