“So what’s all this cloak-and-dagger business, Richard? I’m a busy man. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Oh, I always notice.” Richard took Jonesy by the elbow, led him in the direction of an outsized truck trailer, painted a dull, lusterless gray. “How’s it coming, around here?”
“They’ll manage without me, wharfside. Which is good, since I’ve got to make port in Perth in nine days if I’m going to set up our forward command center in time.”
“Which is why I’m hitching a ride. They’ve given you a pretty rum ship.”
Jonesy grunted. “I could use a little rum about now. But damn it, Rich, don’t go dodging my questions. Why’re you coming along? Don’t you belong in DC, chatting with the president?”
“Yes, about that.” Downing waggled a finger at a man standing near the entrance to the trailer, hands folded. He was in his mid-fifties, wearing a somewhat worn civilian suit, and approached at a leisurely pace. “Jonesy, this is Gray Rinehart, ex-S.O.G. operative. He’s going to need your clearance to set up a temporary executive emergency line through your CIC.”
“An executive line? On my ship?”
Downing nodded. “As you observed, I may need to chat with the president. Wherever I happen to be.”
Jonesy nodded at Rinehart, jerked his head back toward the wharf. “My XO, Commander Ashwar, will set you up.”
Rinehart nodded and was gone. Jonesy looked after him, then at several other, older men who took Rinehart’s place near the entrance to the trailer. “Rich, no offense, but—these guys. Shouldn’t they be thinking about retirement instead of operational requirements?”
Downing nodded. “Most of them did think about retirement and took it. Some years ago.”
“Then what the hell—?”
“Jonesy, first of all, the bleachers are empty. Combat and security operatives are all committed. Secondly, I don’t need young bodies, or crack shots. I need dependable people. People who have not only proven that they can and will get a job done, but have demonstrated that they can keep secrets not for a month or a year, but for a decade, or two.”
“Or three,” added Jonesy, who was looking at one bearded fellow whose eyes were lost in craggy valleys of accumulated wrinkles.
“True enough. And that’s fine. Because we’re not going into combat, at least not directly. We’re just setting up a forward HQ and commo center in Perth.”
“Richard, I’ve gotta ask. Why the hell are you even doing that? The South Pacific is already crawling with forward-positioned command and control posts, all waiting for the word.”
“True. But mine is a special group overseeing just one operation—one very sensitive operation—and its very sensitive support staff.”
“What? These guys?” Jonesy stared at Downing’s Old Guard.
Richard smiled. “No, they’re just providing security. The support staff for this op possesses a unique skill set.”
“Which usually means they are being tasked to perform a unique job.”
“Yes.”
“Which is?”
“Jonesy, if I told you, then I’d have to kill you.”
“Huh. You and what platoon of Marines? But seriously, Rich, what’s the op? Since I’m setting up your links, I figure I’ve got to have the clearance to know.”
Downing smiled. “We have a number of critical strategic assets moving into proximity with a high-value target. We have to keep track of where those assets are. Exactly. At all times.”
“Huh. You should have come to my guys for that job. We track individual ships, planes, and rockets. Every day.”
“Our delivery systems are a little bit smaller than that.”
“Like how small?”
“Individuals.”
Jonesy leaned back. “Damn. Backpack nukes? How’re you getting them in? I hear the Roaches have rad sensors keen enough to detect the smallest warhead in our inventory at over fifty klicks.”
Downing shrugged. “This operation is far more important than any one—or any fifty—nukes. It’s extremely high risk, but extremely high payoff.”
“You never were a gambling man, Richard.”
“And I’m not now. This operation is giving me an ulcer. And costing me all my friends.”
Jonesy became a little less jocular. “So how do you get the assets next to the target?”
“On foot. They are to collapse on the target from multiple vectors. We hope.”
“You hope? Do you need simultaneous deployment of all their packages?”
“No. One package will do the trick, if the arrow goes true to the mark. The multiple assets are for redundancy. Which is fortunate, since I have no direct control over the delivery assets themselves.”
“You mean because we can’t establish real-time contact with anyone in Indonesia?”
“That, too.”
Jonesy looked at Richard from the corner of his eye. “What else would keep you from having direct control over your delivery assets?”
“Personal matters.” As in, every damn one of them went AWOL after our last meeting.
“Okay. So, what are they delivering to the target?”
“That’s secret.”
“And without any orbital tracking or wireless commo with Indonesia, how are you even tracking the assets?”
“Can’t say.”
“Jesus, Richard. What can you say? Does the op even have a name?”
“It does. It’s designated Case Timber Pony.”
“Huh. That’s some bizarre name. So where’s the support staff?”
Downing crooked a finger at Jonesy, mounted the stairs at the back of the trailer. “They’re in here.” He opened the door, led the way in.
The sudden outward wash of humid heat took a little getting used to. Jonesy, who had every reason to expect the opposite—mobile command centers usually had double-strength air conditioning—sputtered. “Damn, Rich. What are you doing? Opening a sauna? Man, this is—”
And then Jonesy stopped speaking. And moving.
The figure at the center of the van was not quite five feet tall, had a rear-sloping teardrop head, large eyes, a lamprey-sucker mouth, gray skin with teal highlights, wide feet and what looked like a parody of an hour-glass figure perched on duck-feet and almost froglike legs.
Jonesy’s mouth worked for a moment before a sound emerged. “Richard, what the fu—What’s going on here?”
Downing smiled, put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Rear Admiral William Jones, I would like to introduce you to Custodial Mentor Alnduul of the Dornaani Collective. He is here out of his personal concern for our situation.”
“This is your support staff? You mean you’ve got ETs working for you now?”
Downing smiled as the answers to Jonesy’s questions emerged from Alnduul’s mouth in mild, unaccented English. “We volunteers from the Custodians do not work for Mr. Downing, but with him. And with you. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Admiral Jones. Enlightenment unto you.”
Off Gunung Beluran, East Java, Earth
Opal pushed her regulator out of the way, leaned over the sheet of paper as if she were going to embrace it, and wrote:
Dear Caine:
I hope you’re safe and sound. I wish I knew where you are. But be warned. When I finally find you, I’m going to acquaint you with a few new brown belt moves the hard way. I figure that should teach you not to go running off on me!
Opal stared hatefully at the words: try as she might to find a romantic yet light-hearted tone, she kept failing. Badly, awkwardly. She pushed on:
I got through security in San Diego without a hitch. I just flashed the card Downing gave me, walked into the Naval Yard, and got myself assigned to a composite JSOC infiltration team.
The team is all Tier Three and higher—SEALS, Rangers, Delta, even some Special Forces types who tried to attach me to their T.O.O. But I had already cut some orders of my own, and thanks to Scarecrow’s magic card, there was nothing the green beanies could do but
pout. When Downing finally gets around to finding and court-martialing me, reading out the list of charges is going to take longer than the trial.
So here we are, waiting to hop in the water and sneak in under the Arat Kurs’ noses, or whatever that is on the front of their face. If you can call that a face. Well, you get the idea. Anyhow, I’m just glad they haven’t tweaked to this scam yet. According to the folks who briefed us, all the psyops analysis and inferential exoanthropology studies tentatively identify the Hkh’Rkh as notably hydrophobic and the Arat Kur as neurotically so. So although the Arat Kur have wonderful maritime sensors, they don’t have a great variety of such equipment, nor much of it, nor a great deal of imagination regarding submerged operations. Word is that they check the bottoms of the ships just before they enter the harbor in which they’re scheduled to offload their foodstuffs, but they don’t have enough submersible drones. From what we’re told, they have those out patrolling at the fifty-kilometer limit to keep the boomers well back from Java.
So once we ride the bottom of this freighter into the Strait of Madura, we’ll be dropped off, along with extra gear. I’m told that they don’t cut us loose until we’re in less than thirty-five meters of water, which is good because this night-diving isn’t exactly something I’m looking forward to. Scuttlebutt is that you’ll get ashore all right as long as you stay connected to the group lanyard and your dive leader remains alive and able to do his or her job. But if you lose the dive leader—well, they just tell us not to think about that. They don’t even train us for that eventuality. I don’t know if that’s because there’s no time, or because it just wouldn’t matter.…
At any rate, the good news is that when we cut loose, the dive leader gets his or her bearings and then frogmans us all down to the bottom, where a nonmetallic, 1.0 density pre-laid floor-to-shore cable is waiting. We snap on to that, detach from the SEAL and tow ourselves in. One by one. At ten-minute intervals. In the dark. Under radio silence.
Now throughout this entire approach, you’re only allowed to move at six meters per minute, so there’s no signature worth a damn to enemy sensors. My group is scheduled to come ashore at Kaliasan Point, near Tandjung Patjinan. Into marshes and fishponds. I’m told it’s one of the best infiltration points: only a seven-hundred-meter tow-and-swim from twenty fathoms, with a mild current, and the towline (an old telegraph cable) moored within fifteen meters of the shore. The SEALs try to make us thankful by pointing out that some of the other infiltration points involve fifteen-hundred-meter crawls from depths of thirty-five fathoms. That means a five-hour, double-tank marathon for the landing team.
So anyhow, once I get to the end of the towline at Kaliasin Point, I will do what the military likes us to do best. I will hurry up and wait. For thirty minutes, I just lie in the muddy sands, breathing.
She almost wrote, “Probably thinking about you.” But didn’t. She sighed and kept on scribbling:
When and if we get the all clear, we come up, stow gear where the SEALs tell us, and the different units in the landing team break up to carry out their different assignments. Which is, of course, a big mutual mystery. We all know we’re going to Java to raise hell, but where, and how, and when—that’s the secret that no one is allowed to share. Even with the other units in the same landing team.
Opal looked at the sheet of paper, saw Caine’s face. There are so many things we do not know, which we may not tell. I wish I knew how you really feel about me, but I don’t. I wish I could tell you about the baby growing inside me, but I’d best not. Everything in this life seems to be a covert operation, in one sense or another.
She looked up: there were two lazy plumes of gray smoke on the horizon, one fore and one aft. Both of those were cargo ships, about fifteen klicks off. And stretching away beyond them, in either direction, was an unseen treadmill of other, similar ships. It was a seaborne conveyer belt of groceries bound for Indonesia, where, at the height of its rainy season, estimates indicated that at least forty million mouths would go hungry without the relief shipments. Hundreds of ships had been mobilized to make the slow passage. Slow enough to enable the modified hulls among them to put troops and equipment under the keel and thus, into position for a submerged run to the coast.
The dive leader for Opal’s team—a lanky fellow from Oklahoma who took a perverse pride in telling the story of how he had never seen the ocean before he joined the Navy—emerged from between the transall containers that lined the deck. He nodded, held up a pair of fingers as he loped toward the taffrail. Two minutes left. She chewed on the end of her pen, struggled to resume:
I’ve got to go now, bag this with the rest of the letters, and hope you’ll get them all real soon.
She raised her pen, almost succumbed to the temptation to write more, but didn’t. Instead, she folded the letter carefully, opened the waterproof bag in which its many fellows already waited. If he’s been writing me, too—well, then we’re in the same place. If he hasn’t, then we’re not. And that’s all there is to it. You can’t make someone think about you, or need you, or love you. Feelings are like wild animals: they can’t be reasoned with, or corralled, or tamed. They are what they are—or what they’re not.
The SEAL reapproached at a quicker lope, raised a fist and nodded. Time.
She stowed the bag, checked her gear, found it no less ready than when she had checked it fifteen minutes ago. Or on any of the six quarter-hour checks she had conducted before that one. She walked to the rail, found the starboard half of the infiltration team already there.
It was a pain in the ass, really, having to go over the side like in some cheesy movie. The majority of the ships carrying infiltrators had been hastily modified so that the teams could enter a false keel compartment through a panel down in the orlop deck. This ship was no different, but when they had run the ingress drill yesterday, the access panel had jammed, and no amount of coaxing had freed it up. Which, scuttlebutt said, was not an uncommon occurrence on the modified freighters; it was no great surprise that some of the panels got pinched and frozen in place.
As Opal checked the lanyard she would soon use for clipping onto the rappelling line, the team’s most senior officer—the Special Forces colonel who had tried to recruit her into his truncated A-team back in San Diego—put out a hand. “Good luck, Major. Good to see that your seasickness isn’t giving you so much trouble anymore.”
Guess you didn’t hear about this morning’s performance. Which had nothing to do with mal de mer. “Thanks. And good luck to you, too.” They exchanged the smiles of people who never expect to see each other again and together found something else to look at: the extinct volcanic cone of Gunung Beluran, now rising up like an oddly flat black triangle, backlit by an almost fully set sun. Their ship—the venerable Asturia Return—started a slow starboard crawl into an NW heading. Which, according to old maps that Opal had dug up in the Army Survey archives, more or less followed right on top of the undersea cable which snaked in around the Situbondo headland.
“Gear in,” the dive leader ordered. “Test.”
Opal slipped the regulator into her mouth, puffed a few times, checked that her hair wasn’t in her mask, felt that the flip-down fins were away from her feet, patted at her dirtside equipment: bagged, sealed, secured. She turned to the boy from Oklahoma, gave a thumbs-up.
He nodded, then said so quietly that it was almost inaudible, “Let’s go.”
Opal crouched under the nearest lifeboat, took hold of the line that was cinched to the forward davit and swung a leg over the side. She snapped on to the line, cleared the other leg as if she was mounting a horse, and lay both feet flat against the hull, back to the scudding swells beneath. With a bend of the knees and a light push, she started rappelling down the side: a fairly short vertical trip, since the ship was riding low in the water. Staying directly under the lifeboat to remain undetectable by orbiting bug-eyes, she went slowly down to the waterline, where she found a magnetic handle—and a SEAL diver already waiting to
help her with the transition into the five knot side-wake. He looked past her, spoke loudly into her ear. “Stay in line and in trim under the hull. Let’s not give their satellites anything to see.” He turned back to her. “Let’s go, ma’am.”
She went in. The tug of the current wasn’t so bad, but the sense of immense volumes—of the huge wake generated by the Asturia and her gargantuan hull, disappearing into the darkness ahead and behind as if she went on forever—was so foreign that she felt an edge of fear pushing up through her task-listed consciousness. Years of training and experience allowed her to push that sensation back down with a single mental gesture.
It was a little like moving at heights, where there the rule was “don’t look down.” Here she kept focused by obeying the rule “stay zoomed in; don’t zoom out.” She kept her eyes on the next spot of hull she needed to move to or manipulate, kept her mind on her gear and on the next discrete task that needed performing.
Which got her quickly and safely into the already flooded false keel reservoir and her harness therein. The SEAL got her cinched into the straps, pulled loose an air-line from the hull-mounted auxiliary air tanks, snapped that into the other lead on her gear’s dual air valve. He snapped it over to the auxiliary feed; she was no longer consuming her own air, which she’d need for her actual insertion. He gave her harness one last tug to make sure it was secure, gave her a thumbs up, nodded when she returned his gesture, then began towing himself back to the waterline transition point on the starboard hull.
Opal looked out through the false-keel’s open aft-end into what had nearly become black water. Over her head, illuminated so faintly that it barely stood out, was the red “panic button,” in case something went desperately wrong with her gear. She turned; a fellow-traveler was being snugged into the harness behind her by the lanky fish from Oklahoma. Behind and beyond that pair, she could just make out the failure that had forced them to make an external entry to the false keel chamber and keep it flooded: the dynamic tensions on the hull had buckled the interface valve that connected to the access panel in the orlop deck. Consequently, after dropping off the team, the Asturia would break off from her approach, citing hull problems and the need to head to Perth for repairs. It was extremely unlikely that the false-keel would have been detected had she continued on to deliver her load of grain, but the standing order was to take no chances.
Trial by Fire - eARC Page 31