Target Lock

Joint Intelligence Center, USS Carlson 1732 Hours, Zone Time: August 23, 2008

“Commander Rendino”—the systems operator at the drone control station lifted his YR-helmeted head, his voice sharp—“Curtin Base just tried to override me on G-Hawk Teal Deuce.”

“Did you lose it?” Christine demanded, hurrying across the darkened center to lean down at the SO’s shoulder.

“Nah, I got the signal strength on ’em. I jumped ops frequencies and regathered the aircraft. If those Air Force clowns keep screwing with us this way, they’re going to dump us a bird.”

“Is Teal Deuce still good with fuel?”

“I’m projecting we still have a good fifteen minutes to absolute bingo, ma’am.”

“Then use all fifteen of them. I’ll take care of the Air Force.” She mashed her thumb down on the Transmit key of her headset belt unit. “Communications, patch me into the hot link to Curtin drone control! Expedite!”

From his seat across the compartment, Inspector Tran watched the fierce little blonde press the earphone tightly against the side of her head. It was interesting to see his irreverent and playful lover so transformed into the steel-willed warrior. A Hindu would say the shade of some past incarnation had come forward at need to guide her through her current crisis.

“Curtin, this is Carlson JIC. What in the hell are you guys playing at, aborting our search ops?… Screw the fuel reserves! We need every second of coverage we can pull with the Global Hawks…. Screw your standard operating procedure while you’re about it! We’ll cut your birds loose at absolute bingo and not one second before. Got that?…Glide ’em home if you have to!.. Go ahead and call your squadron commander, Lieutenant. I’ll see your lieutenant colonel and raise you a three star admiral!”

She broke the connection. Noting Tran’s level gaze, she grinned sheepishly. Brushing back her tousled bangs with her hand, she crossed to the inspector.

“God,” she murmured, “you’d think I was some kind of a Navy puke or something.”

“Easy, little one,” he replied even more softly. “There is actually no real difficulty in, as you say, finding a needle in a haystack. Once you have ascertained the needle is there, everything else is merely a matter of patience.”

“That’s just it,” Christine whispered back. “I’m beginning to wonder if the needle is in the haystack. All the evidence indicates Amanda is somewhere on the southern coast of New Guinea. That’s where she pointed us to, but we still don’t know for sure.”

“Then work the possibility until you do know. Then, if required, move on to the next. That is the way of the investigator.”

“I know, I know. ” She put her back to the same bulkhead Tran had leaned against. “This should be like any other problem I’ve ever worked. It’s only that…” Her words trailed off.

He rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “It’s only that this time it involves someone who matters greatly to you. Thus, you must still do your job, but with a dagger driven into your heart.”

Christine took an unsteady breath. “I wish it was appropriate to kiss you just now.”

Tran smiled soberly. “In due course.”

“Commander Rendino!” The call came from one of the real-time analysis tables. “We might have something here.”

Christine and Tran were both across the center in an instant.

The analysis table was a horizontally mounted flatscreen display currently accessing the download being transmitted from one of the Global Hawk drones. The HDTV imaging was as clear and razor-sharp as a view downward through a window from five thousand feet.

A glance at the status hacks in the corner of the screen indicated the Remotely Piloted Vehicle was actually flying at eight times that altitude. Invisible from the earth’s surface, it currently was cruising slowly south eastward along the New Guinea coast.

Approaching now along the RPV’s track, a narrow peninsula jutted out from the New Guinea mainland. Perhaps a mile and a quarter in length, the tip of the peninsula was bifurcated by a narrow, curving inlet. Nguyen Tran thought it rather resembled the partially opened claw of a crab or lobster. The rampant greenness of the tropical forest covered the full length of the peninsula, while the surrounding waters were a deep and vivid blue, with little of the azure paleness that might denote shallows, even between the parting of the crab’s claw.

“What do we have, Chief?” Christine demanded.

The female chief petty officer looked up from the screen. “A possible abnormality, ma’am. This imaging is from Teal Niner, currently between Jantan and Aiduna in that broken stretch of coast under the Bomberai Penninsula. In standard spectrum all you see are the treetops, but check out the thermographic scan.”

The reconnaissance analyst tapped a sequence into the keyboard on the edge of the display table. The image of the little cape went to an inverted black and white, like a photographic negative. Now an entire constellation was revealed, glittering sparks of white light, dozens of them, scattered down the lengths of the crab’s claw like a diamond incrustation.

“Open surface fires,” Christine noted. “About the right size for cooking or mosquito smudges.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the analyst replied. “Enough for a good-sized village. But this isn’t like any of the other coastal plain villages we’ve been seeing. Way too dispersed. More like a whole lot of independent camps in one general area.”

“She’s right,” Tran commented. “There are no central village clearings and no outlying cleared areas for crop-raising. Also there is no easy access to the sea, no decent beaches, and there are cliffs all along the sides of the peninsula. They can’t be fishermen or boatmen.”

“Hunting parties?” Christine inquired.

“Not with that density,” Tran replied. “The lowland jungles on Irian Jaya are very thick and lush, but they generally don’t provide large amounts of food without cultivation. True hunter-gatherers would have to disperse more widely to survive. This concentration must be drawing on some other supply source than the local environment.”

“If we have the average of eight to twelve people per fire, ma’am, we’re looking at between three and four hundred people on that peninsula.”

Christine lifted an eyebrow. “Nguyen, any suggestions about who these guys might be?”

Tran nodded. “My first thought would be we have stumbled upon a major staging base for the Morning Star separatist army. But why they’d be massing out here in the middle of nowhere is an open question.”

Christine nodded. “Maybe. Chief, take us up to magnification ten.”

A segment of the central peninsula windowed up to fill the display. Now each fire was a dancing crystalline dot surrounded by a hazy nimbus of radiant heat.

“Small cooking fires, ma’am, with the smoke dispersing under the tree cover,” the recon analyst commented. “There are a couple of abnormalities here… here… and here.”

Christine nodded. “Thermal plumes without a central flame node. The fires there must be inside of buildings, with the heat escaping through a vent or a chimney.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I thought,” the analyst concurred. “And they must be pretty substantial buildings to damp the node that thoroughly. We’re not talking about thatch-roofed huts here.”

“This one appears different as well,” Tran commented, pointing to a thermal trace at the bottom of the screen.

“It is,” replied Christine. “Chief, window in on that and bring us up max mag.”

Again the image expanded, the sensor turret on the distant drone swinging on the designated target.

“It seems to pulse regularly,” Tran observed.

“Yeah,” Christine agreed. “A definite thermal modulation. That’s a diesel exhaust, and from a pretty big plant. There’s no sign of anything like a road. It can’t be a truck engine.”

“No building or structure outline, either,” the intelligence CPO commented. “More like its venting right out of the ground.”

“Ain’t that the truth, Chief. Shoot a thermocouple reading. What’s the temperature of those exhaust gases at the emission point?”

A numeric data hack rezzed into existence beside the thermal trace. “One-forty-five Fahrenheit, ma’am. Cool.”

“Which means a long exhaust pipe. Any sign of radar emissions in this sector? Any air traffic?”

“Negative, ma’am. Clean boards.”

Christine hesitated for a moment, thinking. “All right. I want another run made over this peninsula, east to west this time, down the full length of it. It’ll be active scan; we’ll risk using the synthetic aperture radar. We’ll also risk bringing the Hawk down to just above contrail height. Let’s make it fast: We’re coming up on sundown and I don’t want to risk that drone being spotted because of underlighting.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am! We’re on it.”

Christine looked into Tran’s face, a hot glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Keep reminding me about patience and the haystack.”

Beyond the crab-claw-shaped cape, which had no name recognized by civilization, the sun touched the brooding bulk of the Jayawijaya range, the arched and buckled spine of New Guinea. Soon would come the night and the minute lessening of the day’s smothering heat.

Around the perimeter of the peninsula, two-score pairs of eyes swept the jungle and the sea. The vision of some of these lookouts was augmented with powerful binoculars. With others, the only augmentation came from a hunter’s instincts honed from a lifetime lived in this verdant and deadly environment.

Among this latter group, a few, like Amanda Garrett, felt a faint, passing uneasiness, a sourceless sensation of being intently studied by an unseen presence.

Like a hunting eagle, the Global Hawk drone transited the cape a second time. Its fan-jet was throttled back to the barest idling whisper, inaudible from the ground, and its nonreflective gray stealth paint melded with the sky.

As it ghosted down the length of the crab’s claw, “smart skin” panels on the belly and underwings of the big RPV energized, becoming emitting and receptor arrays for its synthetic aperture radar system.

This was much the same kind of technology used by NASA geophysicists to survey and map ancient riverbeds, lakes, and trade routes long buried beneath the desert sands of the Sahara. It gave both the scientific researcher and the suspicious warfighter the ability to see things otherwise unrevealed.

Four hundred miles to the west, in the Carlson’s joint intelligence center, the task force’s senior command staff crowded in behind Eddie Mac MacIntyre and Christine Rendino. All watched the radar imaging crawl past on the main bulkhead flatscreen. They had more than a professional interest. The Lady, their Lady, might be out there.

“See the swirl pattern of the bedrock,” Christine commented. “Pahoehoe lava. You find this kind of image pattern all over around the Hawaiian Islands. A series of lava flows must have dumped into the sea at this point, building an extrusion outward from the coastline. This accounts for the steep dropoff and deep water on all sides. Bet you’re going to have a lot of pillar basalt along those cliff edges.”

Stone Quillain grunted. “Ain’t that going to be fun to climb if somebody’s at home and feeling cranky.”

“We don’t know if anybody’s home yet,” MacIntyre replied. “When will we, Commander Rendino?”

“Soon. Coming out over the peninsula now. There’s the narrows at the neck….” Her fingertip stabbed at the screen. “There… we have a geometric!”

A small, neat, glowing rectangle began to crawl up the display.

Far away, over the crab’s claw, the drone’s probing radar was looking down through the trees, through the undergrowth, through the upper few feet of earth itself, to reveal what was hidden underneath. Nothing short of metal, solid rock, or its equivalent could stop and reflect the carefully modulated beam.

“There’s more of them.” Stone’s blunt fingertip joined Christine’s outlining the developments on the display. “An inverted chevron pattern facin’ inland with interlocking fields of fire. Sure as hell, those are block houses. Hardpoints on a defense line.”

“The genuine article too,” Christine exclaimed. “To throw that kind of return, we gotta be talking poured concrete! See those fainter straight line shadows connecting them? Those might be ground displacement effects. Tunnels and entrenchments. Copleigh, are you recording this?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the SO replied decisively. “Double disks!”

A second chevron pattern appeared, then a third, each fortification placed with a mathematical precision.

“What are those smaller blips or whatever they are?” Cobra Richardson inquired, indicating a series of clustered sparks on the display.

“Weapons returns,” Christine replied grimly. “That’s about what you’d get if you bounce an SA beam off an infantryman packing a rifle and a load of ammunition. Copleigh, overlay of the thermal scan on this image.”

The systems operator rattled a command into his keyboard and the thermographic and radar images merged.

“Yeah,” Quillain commented. “Those gun returns are mostly grouped around the fires. Bet you got a series of squad-level camps dispersed all up and down the peninsula. I’d bet these smaller singleton returns along the cliff sides and across the shore-side neck are sentry posts and heavy-weapons emplacements. These old boys are taking care of business.”

“And nothing showed on the visual sweeps?” MacIntyre demanded, his arms crossed.

Christine gave a shake of her head. “No, not a thing. Just what looks like virgin forest. I know what you’re thinking, sir: Poured concrete would mean heavy construction gear, and there isn’t a sign of it from the air.”

“Mr. Tran, do you have any input on what we might be seeing here?”

“I have no idea, Admiral,” the inspector replied. “The Bugis is a shipwright, not an engineer. And the Morning Star separatists are a mobile guerrilla army. They have no use for fortifications, or the means for building them.”

The scan approached the outer third of the peninsula and the joint of the crab’s pincers.

“Somebody’s been doing some heavy work out here,” Christine murmured, perplexed. “If those are bunkers, this peninsula has been converted into a fortress, but what’s being… Oh, my God! Look at that! Look at that thing! Copleigh! Put a scale up beside that!”

To this point, the surface bunkers detected had been comparatively small, possibly the size of a two-car garage. This structure was titanic, a faint but definite outline just at the juncture of the claw at the head of the peninsula inlet. It didn’t show the sharp return of the surface structures concealed only by earth and vegetation: This was deeper, within the living stone itself, its presence revealed by fracturing and subsidence within the geologic structure of the island.

Still, it displayed the unmistakable straight-line signature of a man made artifact.

“That damn bunker or whatever has to be at least four hundred feet long and a quarter of that wide,” Christine said in simple awe. “It’s huge!”

“That’s not all there is to it,” MacIntyre added. “You’ve got more displacement shadows moving deeper inland. There’s a network of lateral tunnels as well. And see those two other surface structures? I’ll bet those are your surface entrances; they have to be a good hundred and fifty yards back from the primary complex and big enough to drive a truck through. Damn it, but I’ve seen something like this before!”

“Me too,” Stone interjected. “When I was in Sweden doing a training exchange with the Swede marines. They’ve moved most of their naval basing underground, tunnelin’ into the sides of those fjords or whatever you call ’em. You got sub pens and fast-attack docks sunk right under their coastal mountains. You couldn’t even scratch ’em with a tac nuke.”

“That’s exactly what this structure is, Stone,” MacIntyre asserted. “This is a sub pen or some other kind of bombproof dock. You can see where it opens into the head of the inlet. If you’re careful with your pilotage, you could run a fair-sized ship in there: You’d have the water depth and the room for passage.”

“You’d have a hell of a time doing it if they didn’t want company, though,” Steamer Lane spoke up. “Check out the cliff edges overlooking the inlet. More gun positions with a larger return. Heavy machine gun or light autocannon, I’ll bet. Maybe even recoilless rifles. Anything coming up that inlet would be nailed by a three-way crossfire from the cliff tops and from the mouth of the pen.”

The drone completed its transit of the peninsula, pulling out over the Banda Sea.

Christine turned to one of the other drone systems stations. “ELINT Monitor, did you get anything on that pass?”

“There’s somebody in there all right, Miss Rendino,” the SO replied, looking up from his console. “The iron in that black rock lava makes for a good natural Faraday screen, but we caught a couple of spikes just as we crossed over the inlet. Generator static and leakage off a small power grid.”

“Understood. Drone Control, take her back up. Establish a sentry circuit and keep these coordinates under continuous surveillance.” She turned back to the others. “Fa’ sure, I think we’ve just zeroed Harconan’s prime base.”

Stone snorted. “Boy howdy, I’ll call that a base. It’s the Rock of Gibraltar West.”

Tran shook his head, awed. “I knew Harconan had resources, but I never imagined he had enough to build an underground facility like this.”

MacIntyre shook his head. “Harconan didn’t build it, Inspector. At best, he’s established squatter’s rights in something that’s been here for a long time.”

Christine’s eyebrows lifted. “The Second World War?”

An immediate operations group had been called, dedicated to assessing the discoveries made on what had been dubbed Crab’s Claw Peninsula. MacIntyre, the intel, and the other element commanders had withdrawn from the cramped confines of the joint intelligence center to the relative comfort of the Carlson’s wardroom.

Christine’s activated and interlinked laptop computer stood by, ready to grant access to the onboard intelligence files, while meter-size hard copy images of the cape taken from both radar and visible spectrum covered the tables.

No one even made a pass at the coffee urn.

“That’s where I’ve seen structures like this before,” MacIntyre replied, tapping one of the radar prints. “Maps of the old underground fortifications at Corregidor and the Bonin Islands. I’ll lay you odds this is an installation left over from the Japanese occupation.”

“But there’s nothing in the records about any facility like this along this stretch of coast,” Christine objected. “There’s nothing about it in the Admiralty Pilot for the New Guinea Coast or in any of the war records. We checked the Navy archives when we were assembling this database!”

“Then we may presume, Miss Rendino, that the Navy never knew it was there. And as for the Admiralty Pilot, I suspect the last time the Royal Navy’s hydrographers ever really had a look at this coastline was well before World War Two. This site’s natural isolation and security were why it was constructed in the first place. That and the fact that the underground structures here are probably not entirely man-made.”

He tapped the radar print once more. “As you pointed out, this little cape is of volcanic origin, an outflow point for a series of lava flows. Well, one of them probably created a lava tube down the center of the peninsula, a natural cavern of considerable size that opened into the sea.

“During the Second World War, the Japanese were very much into building fortifications. Likely they stumbled across Crab’s Claw and its lava tube and recognized its potential as a superb hardened basing site for submarines and small naval craft within strike range of the Australian coast. When they invaded the East Indies, a Japanese army or navy construction unit was landed on Crab’s Claw to enlarge the natural core cavern and fortify the peninsula.”

“Like they did up at Biak off the north coast of New Guinea,” Stone grunted. I remember studyin’ about a big old tunnel complex they had up that way.”

“They called it the Sponge,” MacIntyre acknowledged, “so named because of its ability to soak up Japanese troops and American blood. An entire six-thousand-man Japanese infantry brigade simply disappeared underground. Like Crab’s Claw, here, it was a combination of man-made and natural tunnels. We were never able to learn just how extensive it was because it was invulnerable to any kind of conventional attack.”

“Just out of curiosity, how’d we ever take that place out?” Labelle Nichols asked from her position astride a wardroom chair.

Stone Quillain shrugged. “In the end, MacArthur’s boys ran a pipeline up into the mountains and pumped a couple of tankerloads of diesel and aviation gasoline into the tunnel air vents. Then somebody fired a flare gun into the main entrance. Blooie!”

The SB officer cocked a well-formed eyebrow. “That would have been something to see.”

“Back then, we were lucky,” MacIntyre continued. “Probably before Crab’s Claw became fully operational, we counterattacked and retook New Guinea. The Japanese abandoned the facility.”

“But you still would have found the base when you reoccupied the island, wouldn’t you?” Nguyen Tran asked.

“Not necessarily, Mr. Tran,” Stone Quillain said. “Because we never did occupy New Guinea in the way you’re thinking. MacArthur was in charge of the showdown here during the war, and one of the notions old Dugout Doug came up with during one of his smart spells was island hopping. He figured you don’t have to dig out every little garrison and resistance point in an island archipelago, like you would block-clearing in a city. You just land and secure the main bases and you use air and sea power to isolate and starve out the smaller ones.

“He used the same tactic on New Guinea. He’d amphib his troops along the coast to take out the main Japanese installations, bypassing the smaller outposts. With their supply lines cut, and with the sea on one side and an impenetrable jungle on the other, the little guys were just left to die of disease or starvation.”

Stone squinted at one of the high-altitude photoprints. “From the look of it, that’s a mighty mean stretch of coast. If we didn’t think there was a reason for it, we’d likely never land troops along it.”

“I see,” Tran agreed. “Much the same would apply after the war. The southwestern coast of Irian Jaya has its own special name, the Land of Lapping Death. If not from the saltwater crocodiles and the endemic diseases, then from the headhunters who contentedly followed their old tribal ways well into the twentieth century. A scion of one of your notable American families, Michael Rockefeller, disappeared along this coast not far from this location in the 1960’s. It’s widely suspected that his well shrunken head still graces a native rooftree somewhere in the vicinity.”

Tran joined Quillain in studying the visual spectrum prints. “During the conflict, the Japanese would no doubt have kept their base carefully camouflaged from air and sea observation. And afterwards, the jungle would have rapidly reclaimed it, erasing all overt trace of its existence. The only ones likely to stumble across it would be either the local natives or—”

“Or Bugis sea traders looking for safe anchorage along this coast,” MacIntyre finished.

Tran nodded. “Precisely. Neither group being outgoing with their secrets.”

Captain Carberry rose from one of the chairs he had claimed at the wardroom perimeter and leaned in over the table, studying one of the SA radar images. “Commander Rendino, I believe you mentioned that the primary chamber was some four hundred feet in length by one hundred wide?”

“Yes. sir. That’s our best guess.”

“Interesting.” the stubby amphib commander mused. “I recall that an East German Frosch 1-class LSM has a length of three hundred twenty-one point five feet and a beam of thirty-six point four feet.”

Christine frowned. “That’s right, sir…. Oh, jeez! I get it. The Indonesian navy surplus amphib that’s part of the Makara Limited coaster fleet. The one we lost track of!”

Carberry nodded. “Precisely. Given the bulk of the industrial satellite that was pirated, a Landing Ship Medium would be the perfect mode of transport. The satellite would be completely concealed belowdecks and cranes and other such port facilities wouldn’t be required. You could beach and off-load in a multitude of places well away from inquiring customs officials.”

“By God, Lucas, you’re right!” MacIntyre exclaimed. “This would be the logical holding site for the INDASAT. Harconan must be gearing up to move it out of the archipelago. An LSM could shift it anywhere between the Philippines and Aden.”

“Very easily, sir,” Carberry agreed.

A sudden, startling voice issued from the wardroom’s overhead speaker: “Commander Rendino, please contact the joint information center immediately.”

Christine keyed the JIC address on her command headset. “Rendino ’by. What’s happening, JIC?”

She listened intently to the response. “We’ve got something going down,” she repeated. “The Global Hawk’s just detected an encrypted satphone going active on Crab’s Claw.”

Two hundred and twenty miles overhead, an Iridium II communications satellite intercepted an aimed beam from the coast of southwestern New Guinea. Recognizing the phone of a listed subscriber, it accepted reception, relaying the transmission earthward to a point fifteen hundred miles distant in the central Indonesian archipelago.

At this point another spacecraft became involved, a United States Air Force space maneuver vehicle arcing in a ball-of-yarn orbit above the western Pacific. The robotic mini-shuttle carried a Defense Intelligence Agency “Black Ferret” electronic-intelligence-gathering module in its cargo bay, the spidery antenna arrays deployed through the SMVs open back hatch.

One of a squadron of half a dozen such vehicles, the primary focus of its six-month-long ELINT mission was the monitoring of events in the United Republics of China in the volatile aftermath of that nation’s civil war. However, a sliver of the multithousand-channel monitoring capacity of the Ferret Fleet had been retasked in flight for NAVSPECFORCE’s use and targeted upon the communications flow in and out of Makara Harconan’s headquarters complex on Palau Piri Island.

Fortune smiled upon the Sea Fighter Task Force. One of the Black Ferrets was coming above the right horizon at just the right time.

A minute and twenty seven seconds after the initial private satphone call was received on Palau Piri, a cellular link activated, relaying the transmission across to the Makara Limited corporate headquarters at Nusa Dua. From there, the message stream was beamed back into space and to the big Pacificom Starlink satellite in synchronous orbit 24,000 miles above the Philippines, and from there to a destination only four hundred miles away from the message’s point of origin.

Obedient to its programming, the SMV-mounted Ferret module sorted this single electronic thread out of the multimillion-message tapestry of transpacific communications and reported the event in real time to its interested masters.

Another voice issued from the wardroom loudspeaker. “Wardroom, this is communications. We have a call coming in on our civil access satphone from a Makara Harconan. He wishes to speak with Admiral MacIntyre. He says it’s urgent and that it concerns Captain Garrett.”

Glances were exchanged around the wardroom table. Christine Rendino nodded, speaking quietly and urgently to the joint intelligence center through her lip mike. MacIntyre donned and keyed his own head set. “Communications. This is MacIntyre. I’ll take the call. Route my voice through my headset, but put Harconan over the wardroom squawk box. And record everything. Understood?”

“Understood, sir. We’ll have you set up in a second.”

“Keep him talking, Admiral,” Christine said softly. “We’ll know in a minute if this is a coincidence or not.”

“Admiral MacIntyre, are you there?” The questioning voice of Makara Harconan issued from the overhead speaker.

“Right here, Mr. Harconan,” MacIntyre replied. “What can we do for you?”

There wasn’t a sound from anywhere else in the wardroom.

“I hope I can do something for you, Admiral,” Harconan’s filtered voice replied, “and for Captain Garrett. I have word of her.”

“That’s excellent, Mr. Harconan,” MacIntyre said, playing the game, “What can you tell us?”

Every officer in the wardroom stared up at the overhead speaker.

“I can confirm to you that she is alive and well. I have good information on this from a source I trust. Unfortunately, I must also confirm she has been taken and is being held hostage by one of the Bugis pirate factions.”

“That’s what we’ve been afraid of. Can you tell us where, Mr. Harconan? Do you have any idea of her location?”

“None at all, Admiral,” the taipan replied. “She could be anywhere on any one of a thousand islands. You must understand, the situation is very delicate. I have a certain number of contacts within the Indonesian Bugis community. I am trusted to a degree by some of the clan leadership, but only to a degree. They will talk to me, but that doesn’t mean they confide in me. At best, I might be able to serve as a go-between for negotiations, but that is all.”

“Negotiations?” MacIntyre probed. “For Captain Garrett’s release?”

“Maybe eventually, Admiral,” the grim reply came back. “Right now, I fear we’re negotiating simply to keep her alive. The clans are angry, and please believe me, they are quite ready and willing to take their anger out on Captain Garrett.”

Christine scribbled something on her notepad. Ripping the sheet off, she slid it down the wardroom table to MacIntyre.

Get him to say where he is.

MacIntyre glanced at the note and nodded. “I understand the situation, Mr. Harconan. Can you at least tell us how the pirates are contacting you? What is your location?”

“I’m at my home at Palau Piri. The contact is through one of my Bugis trading agents on one of the outer islands. I hope you’ll understand when I say I don’t think saying which one would be either wise or productive.”

“Why not, Mr. Harconan?”

“Because, as I must repeat, the situation is very delicate, and because I feel somewhat responsible for Captain Garrett in this situation. I know and understand the Bugis. Maybe we can talk her out of this situation, but the slightest precipitous action on anyone’s part, your government’s or mine, will get her killed and rather horribly.”

Stone Quillain growled deep in his chest like an angered bear. MacIntyre scowled, made a slashing “Cut it!” gesture across his throat.

Down at the far end of the table, Christine tilted her head, listening to her own earphone, then started to scribble furiously on the notepad again.

“Have Captain Garrett’s captors given you a list of demands?” MacIntyre inquired.

“Yes, they have, a preliminary one at any rate. Firstly, there are certain amounts of ransom being demanded, in both cash and goods. I’m prepared to deal with that and I’m doing so at this time. Maybe I can buy her a degree of protection, at least in the short term.”

Christine passed around her second notepad sheet. The SOB is lying like a Persian rug. This transmission is originating at Crab’s Claw. We have an emission-pattern match through an ELINT satellite. He’s relaying his call through Palau Piri to establish an alibi.

“What else do they want?” MacIntyre inquired, stone-faced.

“The pirates apparently lost some of their people during a recent attack on a Russian freighter south of the Sunda Strait. They want information on their fate, and if any of them are being held by the authorities, they want them released.”

“I have no information on that, Mr. Harconan. All we can do is send inquiries to the Indonesian government and the International Piracy Center.”

“If that’s the case, then please do so. That brings us to their final demand.” Harconan hesitated. “This one I fear could prove more… difficult.”

“How so, Mr. Harconan?”

“The pirates understand about your capacities, Admiral. They want your Sea Fighter Task Force out of Indonesian waters immediately. In fact, they want all United States naval forces out of the archipelago until further notice.”

MacIntyre flipped his lip mike aside, covering the receptor head with a cupped hand. “Damn it, I was expecting this one.”

He removed his hand and readjusted the mike. “Mr. Harconan, you have to know that’s a call that can only be made by my nation’s National Command Authority. There are freedom-of-the-seas issues here that involve U.S. global policy. I can’t make any such decision, and I doubt the President would be willing to make such a call even at the cost of a hostage’s life.”

Harconan’s voice was earnest and insistent. “You must try, Admiral. You must convince your authorities to pull back. The Bugis will not yield on this point. If your ships are not headed out of Indonesian waters within twenty-four hours at the most, Amanda Garrett will die, and it will be execution by slow torture. This is not an idle threat. You must make your government understand.”

“I can only take this matter up with my superiors, Mr. Harconan. You have my”—a grimace crossed MacIntyre’s features—“heartfelt thanks for your assistance in this affair. Can you keep the Bugis talking? Can you get them to speak directly with some of our State Department negotiators?”

“I doubt it, Admiral. As I said, it’s a matter of trust. The Bugis will work through me. They aren’t interested in direct talks. I will do what I can for Captain Garrett, but I’m afraid there’s not all that much that can be done unless you clear Indonesian waters. After that, we can only wait and see.”

“I guess so, Mr. Harconan. Will you be available for further contact?”

“I’ll be remaining here at Palau Piri until we get some resolution on this matter. You may contact me at any time, day or night. I am at your disposal.”

“I thank you again, sir. We are most… grateful.” MacIntyre broke the voice link.

The wardroom was dead silent for several seconds, then Stone Quillain spoke.

“Thank you, God, that’s real convenient of you. We got the skipper, the sat, and the son of a bitch all at the same location. We can take the whole pot with one hand. Okay, Admiral, when do we go in?”

MacIntyre removed his command headset and tossed it on the wardroom table. “As soon as we can figure out how to do it without getting Captain Garrett killed. Ladies and gentlemen, here are your mission parameters. We have an assault on one of the most perfect natural fortresses I have ever seen. The garrison stands at between three and four hundred combatants with heavy infantry weapons and with all aspects of the terrain and environment on their side. That’s not counting the base personnel underground and the crew of the LSM. Our Marine contingent will be outnumbered by better than four to one. As for who we may be fighting, Inspector Tran, do you have any input on that question?”

Tran’s face was ominously impassive. “My best estimation would be a mixed force of Bugis pirates and indigenous Morning Star guerrillas in the service of Harconan. You can expect the Morning Stars to be hardened jungle fighters. The Bugis will no doubt be the most trusted and dedicated of Harconan’s pirate cadre. With either group, you may expect resistance that will border on the fanatical.”

“Hell, that’s not all that big of a deal,” Cobra Richardson commented from his end of the table. “Like the man said, volume of fire beats superior numbers. Between my Seawolves, the Little Pigs, and the naval gunfire support from the big ships, we can whittle those numbers down real fast.”

Stone gave a derisive snort. “I wouldn’t know about that. You flyboys and the gundeckers always promise the moon on a silver platter when it comes to gun support, but you generally deliver a horse turd on a paper plate.”

MacIntyre lifted a hand to cut off Richardson’s heated reply. “Stand easy, Cobra. Stone, that isn’t the point. I have no doubt we can effectively scalp that cape with the resources available to us, but it will take time. You know as well as I do that in a hostage op, we have to get a major force in there fast.”

The admiral returned his attention to the Seawolf leader. “Cobra, how does it look for an airmobile insertion — say, at the mouths of the landward entry tunnels?”

The lean, mustached aviator frowned and sat back in his chair. “Frankly, not so hot. You got solid double layer rain forest growth over the peninsula and everywhere else along the coast for a good five miles, palms, ironwood, and casuarina. There’s nothing even close to a good LZ, and you’d be looking at a wicked rappel or fast-rope environment, a hundred-to-a-hundred-and-twenty-foot minimum from the forest roof. The Marines would be sitting ducks dropping down the lines, and it would be even worse for the helos.”

“I got to agree with Cobra on that,” Stone added.

“There’s only one way we might be able to make airmobile work,” the Seawolf leader went on. “We call up the Air Commandos at Curtin and have them lug us in a Daisy Cutter. That would solve a lot of our problems right there.”

The mention of Daisy Cutter invoked a soft chorus of whistles and murmurs.

“What is a Daisy Cutter, Christine?” Tran asked, puzzled.

“A bomb.” she replied. “A very big bomb. As big as it gets this side of Plutonium.”

“Its official nomenclature is the BLU-82,” Cobra added. “It’s a fifteen-thousand-pound fuel-air explosive too big to be carried by any conventional bomber. You have to roll it out of the tail ramp of a C-130. It doesn’t matter what kind of forest you drop it into: when the toothpicks stop raining out of the sky, you’ve got four or five acres of beautiful landing zone, bare naked and flat as a pancake. What’s more, anyone aboveground for a quarter mile in any direction is instantly converted to raspberry jam. But people deep underground in a tunnel complex should survive okay.”

“Maybe,” MacIntyre replied. “But would this particular tunnel complex survive? The Japanese didn’t know about FAE’s when they built this place. Would the natural cavern roof be stressed to take that kind of shock wave without caving in?”

Richardson could only shrug. “It would depend on how it was reinforced, sir. We’d have to get inside and look the place over to know for sure.”

Maclntyre’s dark eyes shifted to Stone Quillain. “That’s not a valid option at the moment. Chances for amphibious or landside assault?”

Quillain’s usual scowl deepened as he mulled the problem. “Not good. There’s nothing in the way of a decent landing beach anywhere on Crab’s Claw. The lowest cliff side indicated is ninety feet. The shallowest slope gradient is about seventy degrees. All of it mean black-rock lava. Like the Rangers said at Point du Hoc: ‘Three old ladies with brooms could hold us off.’”

The Marine traced a line to the neck of the cape with his fingertip. “We could come in overland and bunker-bust our way up the peninsula. Maybe we could do it with enough gun support. It would be pure hell, though: direct frontal assaults on heavy fixed defenses. It would also be way slow. A day bare minimum to work that half mile to the tunnel entrances, and no sayin’ how many men we’d have left alive to go inside.”

“That’s another nonvalid option,” the admiral said flatly. “How about a small-team SOC infiltration?”

“Like underwater through the sea entrance?” Stone shrugged. “Sir, I honestly can’t say. The success possibility of any kind of Special Forces operation depends on how much intel you have on the target in a direct ratio. The more you know, the better chance you have of pulling it off. We have no idea what our guys will be facing in those tunnels, and Admiral, telling ’em to just go in and wing it likely won’t get the job done!”

“Understood, Stone. Steamer, you and the Three Little Pigs are our last chance. A high-speed assault through the sea entrance. Hey diddle diddle and straight up the middle.”

“It depends, sir,” the ex-surfer replied.

“On what?”

“From what I can see, on dumb-ass luck. Our best bet would be to divvy the assault force up between all of our fast-boat assets, Labelle’s RIBs, my Sea Fighters, and the LCAC. As we do the run in, the helos and the big ships put all the fire onto the clifftops overlooking the inlet and the gun emplacements up there, ceasing bombardment at the last second.

“If enough emplacements get taken out, and if the bad guys don’t have anything too nasty mounted in the mouth of the sub pen itself, and if nobody gets shot up too bad, well, then we’ll be inside fast and kicking butt. If it doesn’t break our way, though, we’ll be trapped outside in a killing ground with no speed and no room to maneuver. We’re pretty much going to be massacred. Roll the dice, sir.”

“So it would appear.”

“Sir,” Christine Rendino said, forcing the words past the dryness in her throat, “there is another factor that must be considered: The task force is being kept under continuous surveillance by an Indonesian war ship. In all probability, every move we make is being relayed directly to Harconan. If we move against the pirate base at Crab’s Claw, or if we so much as start to close the range with the New Guinea coast, he’s going to know about it.”

The members of the operations group awaited the call from their commander. Elliot MacIntyre sat with his eyes closed and his forehead resting against his steepled hands. To Christine Rendino, even though the admiral sat in the very midst of his officers, an aura of isolation, of aloneness, surrounded the man.

She found a tremor threatening to ripple through her. Beneath the shield of the table, Tran’s steadying hand rested lightly on her thigh.

MacIntyre looked up. “All right. Here’s how it stands. Harconan is probably preparing to deliver the captured INDASAT to his buyers, and he wants us out of the way. We have roughly twenty-three hours before we hit the deadline he’s given us. After that, if the task force does not withdraw from the Indonesian archipelago, Captain Garrett, in theory, will be killed.”

MacIntyre lifted his head. Christine found the bleakness on his expression terrifying. “Ladies and gentlemen, when I discuss these developments with our superiors tonight, I intend to state in the strongest possible terms that this task force must not retreat. There will be no precedent set for the United States Navy to yield one inch, one millimeter, of the free oceans of the world to any criminal or tyrant, for any reason. I believe Amanda Garrett would approve of this policy and sentiment.”

MacIntyre came to his feet, his hands braced on the tabletop, “With that policy set, let’s investigate ways to get Captain Garrett back — alive. Return to your respective staff and start working the problem. “Work it until you come up with some answers! There will be another 0 group at oh-six-hundred tomorrow morning. I want an assault plan to crack Crab’s Claw. This is a blank-check operation, ladies and gentleman, no holds barred! Feel free to think and fight as dirty as you please. If you come up with something too outrageous, we’ll do it UNODUR and tell the bean counters in D.C. about it afterwards!”