Target Lock

Benoa Port, Bali 1859 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008

It started with a breakdown on the causeway road. A heavily loaded tractor trailer truck swung across both traffic lanes and stalled, blocking all passage. The driver dismounted and tilted the truck cab forward, as if seeking for some mechanical fault.

“As if” because there was nothing wrong with the truck — at least, there hadn’t been until he had completed his tampering. Seeing headlights approaching from landward, the driver ran a short distance farther dawn the causeway. Vaulting over the roadside rail, he scrambled down over the slimy breakwater boulders to where a fast outboard launch awaited him.

The launch carried three Bugis seamen, automatic weapons, and a pair of crude but effective magnetic limpet mines built around fifty-pound charges of industrial dynamite.

Backing away from the causeway, the launch turned and started to move toward the harbor island, one of half a dozen such craft on the same mission.

On the artificial island itself, other men, men who had been trickling out to the island all day long in one, twos and threes, rendezvoused in the shadows of the warehouses and collected weapons from a previously positioned cargo container.

The roving polisi patrols that should have spotted the growing accumulation of armed men had been called elsewhere. Likewise the sole Indonesian warship in port, the frigate Sutanto, had been ordered to haul off and anchor in the harbor away from the port facility, well away.

Stealthily, by land and water, the net began to close around the Sea Fighter Task Force.