Target Lock

by James H. Cobb

  The sedan shot away, its tires smoking.

  Standing six feet away, Nguyen Tran slid his Glock automatic out from under his evening jacket. “Will you permit me to assist you, Captain Quillain?”

  Quillain wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand. “More’n that Mr. Tran, I’d appreciate you. Let’s go!”

  Their car had halted a good hundred yards from the crash site and the two men separated, working up the road through the scrub cover on either shoulder. Their instinct was to race back, but their wisdom said that would only lead to disaster. There would be waiting guns covering their approach, and stealth was their only chance.

  But stealth took time.

  The scent of hot metal and steam told them they were close. The Toyota had center-punched a large and elderly Mercedes-Benz station wagon. There were no other vehicles immediately in sight, but less than a minute later a rattletrap farm truck appeared, coming in from behind the wrecks. The illumination of its single headlight revealed no activity at all around the crash site.

  Stone bit the bullet and charged.

  Nothing.

  The Toyota’s air bags had worked, but the Marine driver was still sprawled behind the wheel, unconscious. The shattered driver’s side window and the bruise on the side of his head resembled rifle-butt work far more than it did a collision injury. As for Amanda Garrett, there was nothing except for her shoulder bag lying on the car floor.

  “Elegantly done,” Tran commented. He returned his pistol to its holster and went to calm the startled driver of the farm truck and to arrange for a lift.

  Badung Strait

  1025 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008

  With the PGACs deployed in an anti-small-craft screen, the task force steamed to the northeast, seeking for the open waters of the Bali Sea. The lights of the Bali coast faded to port as did those of Penida Island to starboard.

  The green and red sparks of the Sutanto’s running lights trailed astern. The Indonesian warship, noteworthy in its uninvolvement in the fight at Benoa Port, had hastily sortied after the task force and resumed its shadowing. To the Sea Fighters, its presence served only to magnify the sensation of being run out of town.

  Stone Quillain stared down at the untouched mug of coffee on the wardroom table. “It’s my fault, sir. I accept the responsibility for the loss of Captain Garrett.”

  Reembarked aboard the Carlson, the task force’s senior command officers had immediately gone into an emergency operations group to assess their current catastrophe.

  “No, cancel that, Stone.” Passing behind his chair, MacIntyre clapped the Marine lightly on the shoulder of his dust-stained uniform blouse. “It’s not a matter of anybody’s fault. We thought we had all the bases covered, but Harconan got ahead of us. I gather we all agree that the gentleman is responsible for this action.”

  “Given the sophistication of the operation and the speed with which it was organized and executed, I would say almost undoubtedly,” Tran replied. His evening wear also showed the signs of his brush-busting. “To the good, this was obviously not an open attack on the officers cadre or an assassination attempt. It was a kidnapping, targeted specifically against Captain Garrett. Thus we can assume she is still alive and a hostage, no doubt with the intent of using her as a bargaining chip of some nature.”

  Commander Ken Hiro, as the new Sea Fighter TACBOSS, scowled up at the inspector. “Okay, the captain’s alive and that’s great. What do we do about getting her back? Shouldn’t we be on the horn to the authorities on Bali about this?”

  Tran shrugged. “That’s one of the conventional acts we can perform, Commander. However, I doubt we can expect much from that sector. As you had your evacuation route preplanned, so will Harconan. It’s questionable if Captain Garrett is even on Bali any longer. Besides, it’s apparent that any networking done with the local authorities will benefit Harconan more than us.”

  “He’s right, Ken,” MacIntyre said, continuing his slow pacing path around the table. “I’ll be filing a report with the Indonesians concerning the attack on the task force. As an aspect of that, I’ll put in a request that a search be made for any U.S. personnel who might have accidentally been left behind in our rapid departure. For the moment we’ll keep Amanda’s disappearance to ourselves and we’ll work the problem ourselves. The moment we bring the governments in, theirs or ours, we’re going to lose control of this. The more red tape we get snarled up in, the more it will work in Harconan’s favor.”

  “Then that brings us back to my original question, sir,” Hiro said hotly. “What do we do about getting the captain back?”

  “We work the problem with our own secure assets, Commander. We count on what we can count on.” Maclntyre’s features were expressionless as he continued his slow, deliberate orbit of the table, as was his voice. Whatever he was feeling at the moment was locked within, as if he were fearful of letting it out. “We are going to find where he’s taken her, and we are going to get her back, and to hell with everything else.”

  “Then, may I make a suggestion, sir?” Quillain said, looking up. “How about letting me and some of my boys pay a call on this guy’s home base, this Palau-whatever-it-is. Let’s kick a few doors down and see if we can get our hands on him. It won’t take long to get some answers. I guarantee it.”

  “I doubt it would be that easy, my friend,” Tran said. “I think it may be assumed that Harconan is not going to permit himself to be available to either us or the Indonesian authorities. I would say he’d likely disappear down the same escape-and-evasion route as he intended for Captain Garrett.”

  MacIntyre stopped his pacing. “Yes. He’ll be with her. Wherever they’re headed.”

  “East.”

  Up to that point, Christine Rendino had taken little part in the conference. She had drifted silently into the far corner of the wardroom and to the planter there, lightly caressing the leaves of the miniature palm tree with a fingertip. “It won’t be either Java or Sumatra,” she said, her voice oddly distant and detached. “Too civilized, too high a population density. It won’t be Sulawesi, either: too expected, too close to a large Bugis population. It will be off in the eastern end of the archipelago somewhere, in the wild islands.”

  Banda Sea, North of the Tayandu Group

  1106 Hours, Zone Time: August 22, 2008

  Amanda Garrett writhed through a protracted nightmare, reaching out for consciousness but never getting a solid grasp upon it. Pain … fragments of voices speaking in tongues she didn’t know … a stranger’s hands stripping away her clothing … a wetness being poured on her head … a protracted time with nothing but a vibration and a roar hammering at her dully aching mind … at last the deeper, safer darkness of true sleep.

  Her eyes opened, and after a vague moment more she forced them to focus. She was in a small room—no, a cabin—on a boat or small ship. Her surroundings were moving and with wave rhythm and not just vertigo.

  The cabin was maybe eight by eight, white-painted but grimy, with rice matting on the deck. She was lying on the cracked plastic cover of a foam rubber mattress in the lower of a double-decker bunk. There were no other furnishings or accouterments except for a cracked mirror and a number of heavy nails driven into the bulkhead to serve as clothing hooks.

  And speaking of clothing, her own was gone. Her uniform replaced by a wraparound sarung of bright cheap cotton print, the almost universal garment of the archipelago. Her feet were bare, but a pair of woman’s size rubber sandals had been thrown on the deck.

  Amanda sat up too quickly and had to fight an explosive surge of nausea. The side of her head throbbed, a result of the … she groped for memory … a result of the car wreck. There was also a less readily identifiable stinging on the inside of her left elbow.

  Glancing down, she noticed the two needle punctures in her skin. Drugged on top of being knocked out. No wonder she felt like the wreck of the Hesperus. What else had been damaged? She pulled herself to her feet, using the bunk frame, an
d promptly lost the sarung, the securing tuck at its top having come undone. To hell with it: The cooler touch of air on her skin helped to clear her head. Lurching across to the mirror on the bulkhead, she peered at herself.

  Someone else looked back.

  The effect was momentarily startling. Her hair had been dyed jet black. After a moment, Amanda smiled grimly at the stranger. She’d always wondered what she might look like as a brunette.

  There was nothing left in the room to examine, save a single porthole and the door. The porthole was open and latched back for air, but a heavy wooden bar had been screwed across it on the outside. Only open water, sunlight, and sky were visible beyond it.

  The ship was wooden-hulled; Amanda strongly suspected it to be a Bugis pinisi, but the deck was vibrating to the drive of a propeller, and she could hear the rumble of a powerful marine diesel. They were underway under power with none of the steadying lean of a schooner under sail.

  And that left the door.

  She reclaimed the sarung, spent a few moments securing it, and slipped her feet into sandals. Crossing to the doorway, she carefully tried its tarnished brass handle.

  Locked from the outside. That confirmed it. She was in enemy hands.

  She returned to the mirror. A small wooden box had been bolted underneath it, and Amanda recalled seeing half of a broken comb lying in it. Taking it up, she sat down on the bunk once more and, after carefully examining the comb for possible passengers, began to smooth and order her hair.

  Amanda’s motivation was simple: Do something to improve your situation now! Even if only combing your hair, it was a refusal to surrender to apathy and helplessness, a statement of control over one’s destiny. It was never too early to start fighting that battle. As she worked on her snarled mop, she did the only other viable thing possible. She thought.

  She was clearly a prisoner, taken in an action possibly tasked for that specific purpose. But she was also a “soft” prisoner. She was neither bound nor blindfolded, she was being permitted clothing and she was being held in fairly comfortable surroundings. This all pointed to a single specific conclusion as to who was responsible.

  A positive factor, the potential for at least a slight degree of leverage. Amanda didn’t fool herself into thinking it would be much, but even the poorest card can be built into a fighting hand.

  She tore a strip from the inner hem of the sarung and used it to bind her hair back. Crossing to the mirror once more, she checked the result of her grooming. Deliberately she slapped herself twice across the face, pulling up a little color into her cheeks. Without a make-up kit, it was the best she could do.

  Going to the cabin door, she pounded insistently on it with her palm, stepping back as she heard a bolt draw back on the far side.

  Amanda found herself confronted with a Bugis seaman, an older man, gaunt, scarred, and lean, his naturally bronzed skin darkened from the salt baked into it by decades of tropical sun. He, too, wore a sarung around his waist and a bandanna binding his graying hair.

  He also cradled a well-maintained L2 Sterling machine pistol under his arm. Cancel seaman and substitute pirate. He stared levelly at Amanda.

  She met his gaze head on, with no attempt at obsequiousness. This was Asia. Prisoner or not, she must set “face,” establishing herself as a person of position, mandating respect. “I don’t know if you can speak English or not,” she said, “but you know who Harconan is. I want to see him, now!”

  The Bugis schooner was a big one, a hundred-and-fifty-footer that had undergone a conversion into a motor coaster. A large combination deck and wheelhouse had been constructed atop the aft half of the hull, and the foremast had been shortened to serve as a kingpost for cargo handling.

  The inside of the wheelhouse was spartan in the extreme, the wheel itself the control pedestal for the engine and a binnacle. No electronics were apparent, nor was there even a chart. For a Bugis skipper, such affairs Would be irrelevant.

  Harconan was there in the wheelhouse, sharing the watch with the Bugis helmsman. It was a very different Harconan than the one Amanda had so far known. He wore faded jeans and a disreputable dungaree shirt, half unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled. Comfortable sandals were on his feet, and a broad sun-cracked leather belt was cinched in at his waist. He hadn’t bothered with shaving. At the receptions and on Palau Piri be had looked suave, polished, and ineffably debonair. Here, leaning in the open wheelhouse window, with the trade winds ruffling his dark hair, he was merely magnificent.

  Amanda sensed it was because her captor was truly himself now, at ease in what he must feel was his own environment. In spite of everything that had happened, Amanda felt her body stir in response.

  He looked back at her and smiled. It seemed a genuine smile of greeting and pleasure at seeing her. “Good morning. I hope you’re feeling well.”

  “A little hung over but good enough,” she replied coolly. Ignoring the guard who had trailed her to the bridge, she moved forward to peer ahead off the bow. “Where are we?”

  He issued a good-humored challenge: “You tell me.”

  She glanced around the half circle of horizon visible from the wheel house. There was nothing to be seen but a slow, rolling sea reflecting a piercing sun. The sky was sun-washed pale azure, with only a single mound of cloud off to the south. No other sea or air traffic was visible nor a solitary point of land.

  “The Banda Sea,” she said after a minute. “Given the lack of other shipping, it’s the eastern Banda.”

  She pointed to the cloud mass to the south. “Off to starboard there is the Tayandu group. As we’re standing on east-northeast, I’d say we’re bound either for the Kai Island group or the western coast of New Guinea.”

  “Indeed, and why couldn’t we be in the Arafura, standing on for Torres Strait, with Jervis Island to starboard?”

  Amanda shrugged. “The wave action is wrong. The Arafura is open westward to the Indian Ocean and you get the longer, slower deepwater rollers there. We’re still inside the archipelago. Besides, you wouldn’t risk running the Torres Strait with me aboard. No doubt you know about the Australian navy corvette usually on station there.”

  Harconan threw his head back and laughed. “Ha! I knew you had to be a real sailor and not just a button-pusher. I’d give you one of my schooners to command any day.”

  “There’s only one problem with that, Makara. I’m on the other side.”

  “I see.” He grimaced slightly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I suppose it is time we drop the sophistry. Our game of mutually pretended ignorance has worn a little thin. I trust, Amanda, you’ll agree that a little honesty between us might be pleasant.”

  “I don’t find any of this pleasant. Why am I being held prisoner?”

  “Amanda, don’t talk foolishness. Of course you know why you are here. You’re a prisoner of war, taken honorably in combat. And while I confess that Makara Limited is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention, I can promise that you will be well treated. There is no reason for you to be afraid. No harm will come to you if you act reasonably.”

  “And what’s the definition of ‘reasonably’?”

  Harconan nodded toward the guard, who stood at the rear of the wheelhouse. “Ask him.”

  Amanda noted that the old Bugis raider always stayed back a step or two, keeping himself more than a grab away and unobtrusively positioning so Harconan was out of his line of fire but she was not. The inference was plain.

  “I see,” she said.

  “I’m glad you do, Amanda.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “I know that your instinct will be to attempt something heroic. Please don’t. It won’t succeed and I genuinely don’t want you hurt or killed.”

  She jerked away angrily. “That doesn’t ring particularly true, Makara. If I’m a prisoner of war, then we are at war and you’re the one aiming the gun at my back, even if one of your hired hands pulls the trigger!”

  “Amanda, you’re talking foolishness again. You know I
don’t want to harm you and why.”

  She lifted her head defiantly. “Because of what happened on your island? That was just a mutual reconnaissance mission and you know it.”

  “No!” His hand slashed the air saberlike in a gesture of denial. “Because of who we are and what we are, we have lied to each other since the first moment we met. I suspect we will continue to lie to each other for a long time to come. But we have had one moment of truth together, there on my beach at Palau Piri. You cannot deny that anymore than I can. Let’s at least acknowledge that. Maybe we can use it to find other truths.”

  He turned to stare back out to sea, a silence following as might have existed between two lovers in a quarrel—which, Amanda mused, was exactly what they were.

  She looked forward over the tarped ranks of oil drums that constituted the coaster’s deck cargo and on past the upcurved bow to where the flying fish skittered and gleamed as they fled the cutwater.

  “Why did you have my hair dyed black?” she asked eventually.

  “Oh, that? Call it protective coloration. I’m fully cognizant of the capabilities of your reconnaissance satellites and remotely piloted vehicles. There are few redheads riding about on Bugis pinisi. It was either make you look like one of us or keep you confined belowdecks until we reached our destination. That would have made it more … unpleasant for you.”

  “I see. Thank you. Where are we heading, anyway?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.” He turned back to her with a tentative smile. “Our dress suits you well. You look lovely in it.”

  Now, lower the eyes, Amanda, and smile, just a little. “Thank you, it’s very comfortable…. Makara, may I ask you something? And please, could we find some of that truth we were talking about?”

  “Possibly.”

  “How badly did you hurt us last night? How many of my people were killed? Please tell me.”