Target Lock

by James H. Cobb

  “We backtracked the oil plume upcurrent to its source, and the Aussie salvage vessel started working the area with a side-scan sonar. After a brief search, they acquired the Starcatcher.”

  Christine turned to her laptop, opening a pair of insert windows in the videophone display. “In the right corner of your screen, gentlemen, you will see a chart of the Arafura Sea with the sinking site indicated. In the left I’ll be showing an imaging series taken by the Remotely Operated Vehicle sent down from the salvage ship.”

  Christine executed the call-ups, narrating as each flashed before its small audience. “Okay, here you can see the distinctive bullet-hole patterns of heavy machine-gun fire on the Starcatcher’s upper works…. Here’s a view of the empty well-deck bay. Obviously no INDASAT…. Here’s a very indicative picture of one of the ship’s Boston Whaler power launches. It’s been lashed down in its deck cradle and you can’t mistake the ax blows that caved in its flotation tanks…. And here is a view through one of the portholes into the crew’s quarters…. By this time the body had been worked over pretty badly by the local sea life but the wound in the skull is still quite distinctive. Pathology confirms that she was shot in the head, execution-style, at point-blank range, with a military caliber weapon.”

  Even Senator Donovan was momentarily suppressed.

  Christine closed out the windows. “All evidence confirms that the INDASAT Starcatcher was attacked and boarded and the satellite she was carrying was stolen. Her crew was massacred, right down to the last man and woman, and the recovery ship was scuttled deliberately in a way to conceal its location and fate.”

  “Do we have any clue as to the identity of the terrorist group or nation responsible for this act of barbarism?” Van Lynden asked quietly.

  MacIntyre fielded the question. “In our opinion, Mr. Secretary, it was neither a nation nor a terrorist group as you may mean the term.”

  “Then who, Eddie Mac?”

  “Pirates, Mr. Secretary,” MacIntyre replied levelly. “By our best estimation, the INDASAT recovery ship was attacked and its satellite seized by pirates.”

  Senator Donovan’s scowl deepened. “You are aware, Admiral, that this is the twenty-first century? Captain Kidd has been out of business for a long time.”

  MacIntyre raised his brows. “And are you aware, Senator, that you are living in the new golden age of high-seas piracy? That today, piracy is a major international criminal concern, with shipping and cargo losses that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars each year? Or that more than five hundred incidents of piracy are reported annually and that those numbers have been growing steadily for the past decade?”

  “And the operative word here is reported incidents, Senator,” Christine Rendino added. “The ones with survivors left alive to file a report.”

  The senator was taken aback. “Well, I suppose I’ve read things in the papers. But I’ve always thought those were comparatively minor incidents—native fishermen pillaging yachts, that kind of thing. With the theft of this satellite, we’re talking about a completely different scale of events.”

  “That once might have been the case, Senator, fifteen or twenty years ago, but not any longer.” Christine’s fingertips did another swift dance on her laptop keyboard. “Here’s another incident report from Indonesian waters near where the INDASAT Starcatcher was taken. It concerns a comparatively new eleven-thousand-ton tanker of Philippines registry with a crew of twenty-four.”

  The file had long been committed to her eidetic memory, but she read from the screen for form’s sake. “After taking on a full load of mixed petroleum products at a Brunei refinery, the vessel sailed on its return voyage to Manila. Shortly afterwards, all communications with the tanker were lost and the ship and crew vanished.

  “The only result of the immediate search following the disappearance was the discovery of several members of the tanker’s crew washed up dead on an island beach. Their hands were wired behind their backs and their throats had been cut. Of the ship itself and its cargo, no trace was found for over two years.

  “Eventually,” she continued, “insurance investigators found the tanker operating off South America. It was sailing under the Ecuadoran flag with a new name, a new owner, and a masterfully falsified set of ship’s documentation. The ship’s new owners testified that they had purchased it in good faith a year and a half before from a ship’s brokerage in Goa, India, and that they had no clue that they had been operating a pirated vessel. Further investigation revealed that the involved ship brokerage was a ‘one-off’ operation set up specifically to dispose of the tanker and that the broker and his staff had long since closed shop and disappeared.”

  Christine turned back to the wall screen. “Over the past decade there have been numerous other instances on this same scale.”

  Donovan shook his head slowly. “I had no idea.”

  “Not many people do, sir. In most instances, piracy is an ‘invisible’ crime. The events usually take place in isolated corners of the world: the Indonesian archipelago, the South China Sea, the coasts of Africa and South America. Also, it’s mostly been a Third World problem. Much of the world’s shipping operates under various flags of convenience and sails using Third World crews. The U.S. media generally would consider the disappearance of a Greek-owned, Panamanian-flagged freighter with a Malay crew a non-story. No flash for the news bites.

  “You’ll see articles about it in the dedicated trade journals now and again,” she concluded, “but the shipping lines don’t like to talk piracy up too much, even while they’re the ones being victimized. They’re scared of spooking their crews and clients and of seeing their insurance rates sky rocket.”

  “What’s triggered this explosive growth in piracy?” Van Lynden inquired.

  “I can name any number of general reasons, Mr. Secretary,” Christine replied with a shrug. “The draw-down of the world’s navies following the end of the Cold War. The international turbulence caused by the collapse of Communist China and by the various Third World splinter conflicts. A failure of the First World powers to recognize the renewal of high-seas piracy as a critical point of concern. But in the Indonesian archipelago, we may be facing another, much bigger, problem.”

  “Which is, Commander?”

  “In my opinion, we may very well have a new pirate king out there.”

  “A pirate king! Now, that is preposterous!” Donovan exploded. “This is the real world, Commander, not a … Gilbert and Sullivan opera!”

  An edge came to Christine’s voice. “Excuse me, Senator, fa’ sure this is far, far too real. Maybe I picked an inappropriate word for it, but there is a growing body of evidence that we have someone who is attempting to weld the Indonesian pirate clans into a single unified naval combat force capable of dominating the Indonesian littoral and the sea-lanes that pass through it.”

  The intel continued. “The Indonesian pirate clans are primarily factions of the Bugis tribal grouping. These people have a long, long history as shipwrights, master mariners, and sea warriors. Until broken by the coming of the British and Dutch colonial navies, the Bugis fleets ruled the archipelago.

  “However, during the twentieth century, their buccaneering operations had mostly been small-scale, disorganized, and primitive—as you said, Senator, primarily targeting yachts, small craft, and local coastal traffic. A few years ago, however, that started to change dramatically.

  “Suddenly, someone began providing them with large-scale logistical and organizational support. They’re receiving better boats and equipment, including electronics and military heavy weapons. They’re also receiving training on how to effectively maintain and use this new higher-tech gear. Someone is also providing the pirates with a secure multi-currency money laundering link and is serving as a fence for high-value ships and cargoes on the international market. This individual or group of individuals is also procuring advanced cargo-targeting data from within the shipping industry and, I suspect, is systematically buying off s
enior government and security officials within the region.”

  She spun back to her personal computer and executed another call up. The image of a sleek merchant ship with a stern deckhouse rezzed into the corner of the video screen.

  “Consider this case, Senator. This is the Dutch containership Olav Meer. Two months ago, she sailed from Amsterdam eastbound to Kobe, Japan, with full tier loads of mixed cargo. Off the coast of Surabaya, she was intercepted by a flotilla of Boghammer gunboats, fast outboard motor launches mounted with automatic weapons and light antitank rocket launchers. The Meer was ordered to heave to and then was boarded by a well-organized band of Indonesian natives, believed to be Bugis, all armed with modern assault rifles, submachine guns, and hand grenades.

  “As the Meer was being boarded, the captain got off distress calls to both his company home office and to the International Maritime Bureau’s Regional Piracy Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both immediately notified the Indonesian authorities of the event. However, for reasons explained only as ‘communications difficulties,’ the nearest Indonesian naval patrol craft was not informed of the situation.

  “While the Meer crew was held at gunpoint, pirate demolition teams proceeded to blow open a series of outer-tier cargo containers with the expert use of shaped plastique charges. Two million dollars’ worth of high-value cargo was stolen, including pharmaceuticals, bricks of ultra high-purity silicon used for the manufacturing of computer chips, and industrial lens-grinding compounds—stuff that your average Bugis raider would not recognize as treasure trove.”

  Christine looked up from the laptop’s screen. “Here is where it really gets interesting, Senator. Not only did the pirates have the specific bill of lading numbers for these specific cargo containers, but high-value loads of this kind are routinely stored in the core tiers of a containership’s cargo stacks. where they are impossible to get at while the ship is at sea. According to the ship’s load manifests and those of the Amsterdam container port that had stacked the Meer’s cargo, that’s where these items had been stored.”

  Christine tapped the tabletop with a fingernail to emphasize each word. “But they hadn’t been. The books had been cooked and the high value cargo containers had been loaded into the outer tiers of the stacks, right at weather-deck level—easily accessed by the pirates. Someone within the Amsterdam stevedoring crew had been bribed to misload this cargo specifically so it could be intercepted and stolen in Indonesian waters ten thousand miles and three weeks later.”

  Christine leaned back in her chair. “I’d call that some kind of an organization.”

  “I would as well, Miss Rendino,” the secretary of state replied. “Do we have any direct links between this piracy cartel and the INDASAT incident?”

  “Only in the form of probabilities, Harry,” Admiral MacIntyre said. “In our best estimation the cartel is the only force in the region that has the assets in place to do the job and to effectively move the merchandise. Either they have the satellite up for sale to the highest bidder within the industrial espionage networks or they’re already working on consignment for one of the corporate multinationals. The zero-gee industrial systems aboard the INDASAT and the materials they’ve produced would be worth tens of millions on the covert international tech market. The National Security Agency and the FBI are already working that end of the problem.”

  Christine nodded in agreement. “Either way, we aren’t going to have much time before the INDASAT is completely disassembled and shipped out to … wherever.”

  “Fine. You know who stole our satellite and why,” Donovan said. “Now, what are you doing about getting it back?”

  MacIntyre lifted his hands from the table. “At this moment, Senator, there’s very little we can do … directly. In theory, this is a matter for the Indonesian authorities, as the satellite is probably within their territorial waters. Unfortunately, as Commander Rendino has pointed out, the fix is likely in and we can expect little joy from that line of attack.”

  “What about our reconnaissance satellites?” Donovan demanded. “The ones that you used to spot the wrecked recovery ship. Why can’t you use them to spot where they’ve taken the INDASAT? I’ve been told that you can practically read a newspaper from orbit with one of them.”

  “We can,” Christine replied, “literally. But first we have to know exactly where that newspaper is. The Indonesian archipelago is three thousand miles long, Senator. That’s the width of the Atlantic Ocean. There are seventeen hundred islands within that stretch of sea miles. Many of them have rugged, broken coastlines and many are blanketed with dense tropical rain forests and jungle. We’d be looking for a single cylindrical object roughly ten feet wide by forty in length in all of that. It’d be like trying to use a microscope to spot one particular germ on the surface of a basketball court.

  “Beyond that, these guys know about satellite recon. The whole reason behind their attempt to conceal the sinking of the Starcatcher was to buy themselves enough time to get the satellite somewhere where it could be camouflaged or concealed. I’m not saying we couldn’t spot it with enough reconsat passes and enough Black Manta and Aurora overflights, but I am saying the analysis would take time. They could knock that satellite down to its nuts and bolts and mail it out by Federal Express before we could even make a decent start.”

  Donovan muttered a curse under his breath.

  “If we can’t do this by recon alone, and we can’t rely on the Indonesian authorities, what other options do we have, Eddie Mac?” the secretary of state asked quietly.

  “There’s only one that we can see, Mr. Secretary. We work the problem from the top down. We don’t go after the INDASAT, we go after the cartel that stole it. I propose we bypass the Indonesians and go direct action. We move a covert intervention and intelligence-gathering force into the archipelago and we start targeting the piracy cartel operations. If we can shake their tree hard enough, the INDASAT may fall out of the branches and back into our hands.”

  “You’re talking about an intrusion into the affairs of another sovereign nation, Admiral,” Donovan cut in. “That satellite is your problem. The criminal activities of this pirate cartel are a matter for the Indonesians to sort out.”

  “If you recall, Senator,” Maclntyre’s voice hardened as he leaned forward over the conference table, “there is considerably more involved here than just stolen property. As you pointed out earlier, there were twelve American citizens murdered aboard the Starcatcher. I’d call that a matter for the United States government and the United States Navy to ‘sort out.’

  “Above and beyond that, in my professional opinion, the United States has allowed this piracy problem to go unchecked for far too long. If something is not done soon, we could see this piracy cartel not just operating within but controlling the Indonesian littoral. That will include the strategically critical international shipping lanes that pass through those waters and the forty percent of the global maritime trade that regularly utilize them.

  “The freedom of the seas has always been a paramount concern of the United States,” MacIntyre concluded, winding down, “and this is definitely a freedom-of-the-seas issue. I’ll say that to you now, Mr. Secretary, and to you, Senator, as l intend to say it in the situation reports I’m preparing for both the Joint Chiefs and for the President on this matter. It’s time we clean out this viper’s nest before we have real problems in that theater.”

  “It’s still an unwarranted and unnecessary involvement in foreign affairs!” Donovan rejoined hotly.

  Christine Rendino peered over the top of her glasses at Donovan. “Senator, excuse me, but do you want your damn satellite back or not?”

  Donovan subsided.

  “If the word from the JCS and the Old Man is go, who would you propose committing to the operation?” Van Lynden inquired.

  “The most suitable outfit available would be our littoral warfare test bed unit, the Sea Fighter Task Force,” MacIntyre replied. “They aren’t completely up to spe
ed yet, but they are partially operational and are on a working-up deployment in the Med at this time. They have the tools and expertise, and l believe they’re our best bet at getting the job done.”

  Van Lynden grinned. “That’s Mandy Garrett’s command, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, Harry. That’s why I said it’s our bet to get the job done.”

  Donovan scowled. “Amanda Garrett? She’s that … officer who got us tangled up in that UN mess in Africa.”

  MacIntyre smiled behind his poker face. The West African operation had been a major foreign-policy victory for the administration of President Benton Childless, and a humiliating defeat for the isolationist faction in Congress that Donovan supported.

  “That’s correct, Senator. Captain Garrett is the officer responsible for the success of the UNAFIN blockade. I’m sure you recall her being invited to speak before the General Assembly at the conclusion of the operation … and the special medal of commendation the Security Council awarded her for leading the raid on Port Monrovia.”

  Donovan’s scowl deepened. “To many of us, Admiral MacIntyre, Amanda Garrett is a loose cannon.”

  Maclntyre’s eyes narrowed slightly, iron-frosted brows lowering. “I prefer to look upon her as a top gun, Senator.”

  Eastern Slope of the Syrian Coastal Range

  7.4 miles North-Northwest of Apamea, Syria

  0122 Hours, Zone Time: July 27, 2008

  It was a scene out of the Bible.

  The sheep, spread across the moonlit hillside, grazing drowsily or asleep on the sun-crisped grass. And watching over them, the shepherd boy.

  In ages gone by, he would have been guarding the flocks from wolves or from a prowling Sinai lion or a Bedouin raiding party.

  Now, though, the wolf and the lion were extinct in these lands. Likewise, the time of the Bedaoui raider was past. Still, the watch must be kept by day and by night.