Section 8

by Bob Mayer

  “And you?”

  Abayon reached down and pulled the intravenous needle out of his arm, dotting the small drop of blood with a piece of gauze. “I am staying here.” He held up a hand as Fatima started to say something. “I am old. I am tired. I do not want to do this again,” he said, indicating the dialysis machine. “It is your time now.”

  Fatima reluctantly turned toward the door.

  “There is one more thing,” Abayon said, causing her to turn back, tears in her eyes.

  She waited.

  “We might not be alone.”

  Fatima frowned in confusion.

  “This battle against our unknown enemy; I think there might be others out there also opposed to them.”

  “Al Qaeda and—” Fatima began, but Abayon raised a hand, silencing her.

  “Not other groups like us. I think there might be a group, or groups, as secret as our enemy who fight against it.”

  “Why do you think this?”

  Abayon shrugged, tired beyond belief. “I should not have mentioned it. But there have been times over the years when I received information or heard things that made me think there was a force in place opposing the enemy and trying to manipulate me in this battle. I mentioned it because if there is, you must be careful.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Fatima quoted.

  “Not necessarily,” Abayon said.

  *****

  Vaughn checked his weapons one more time, while Tai slumbered uneasily next to him. Waiting was always the hardest. And most of his time in the Army had been spent waiting, in one form or another. They even had a saying for it: “Hurry up and wait.”

  They were on top of the mountain, a rounded cone with a flat open space in the center, which dropped off precipitously on all sides, giving them a sixty-meter circle to work in. Very little space on which to drop the remaining members of the team. He glanced at the terse message that had come in response to his report on finding Abayon. The team was coming in low and fast. And the exfiltration was to be by Fulton Recovery via Combat Talon. Not the best of plans; not the worst.

  A Fulton Recovery with six people was dicey at best. The basic concept was sending up a cable attached to a small balloon. The six people would all link their harnesses to the cable. The Combat Talon would come flying in low, below the float, and “whiskers” on the nose of the plane would catch the cable and draw it to the center, where it would be snatched and held.

  The six people would then be jerked up into the air, their momentum causing the cable to swing underneath the plane, where it would be caught by a small crane on the back ramp. The crane would then winch the people into the cargo bay. Vaughn had done one Fulton Recovery, two years ago, and it had been quite an experience. With six, he envisioned some bumps and bruises—that is, if all six of them survived to make it to exfiltration.

  He turned as Tai stirred. She sat up, blinking sleep out of her eyes, and he saw that moment of confusion as her conscious brain tried to figure out where she was. He’d experienced that himself many times in the past.

  Her eyes focused on him. “Everything all right?”

  “As all right as things can be sitting on top of a mountain full of terrorists,” he said. “I’ve been hearing a lot of trucks moving over there.” He nodded to the southern side of the mountain. “Headlights going back and forth. Something’s happening.”

  Tai checked her watch. “Not much longer.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  Tai nodded. “Yeah. I figure I’d best find a hide spot up here. Cover the infiltration and then the exfiltration. The guys coming in will have a plan to take down Abayon without my participation. I’ll cover your back when you come back up for the exfil.”

  “You think there’s a double-cross?” Vaughn asked.

  “I don’t think we can trust Royce or Orson,” Tai said. “And I think I had too many malfunctions coming in.”

  “Why did they try to take you out and not me?” Vaughn asked. The question had been on his mind the past hour.

  Tai sighed and leaned back on her rucksack. “Because I’m Military Intelligence.”

  “Yeah, Orson said you came from—”

  “I didn’t just come from,” Tai said. “I still am.”

  Vaughn lay the MP-5 across his knees and stared at her. “I’m a simple guy. Why don’t you lay it out for me?”

  “Some people very high in the military intelligence community have become concerned about . . .” She seemed to be searching for the right words. “. . . certain operations occurring around the world.”

  “Such as this one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because?”

  “Because we’re not sure who is sanctioning these operations.”

  “Ah, shit,” Vaughn muttered.

  “The orders are not coming down the military chain,” Tai said. “Our requests to the alphabet soups— most particularly the CIA and NSA—have been met with blanket denials.”

  “It could just be highly classified and compartmentalized,” Vaughn said.

  “That’s what Royce says,” Tai acknowledged. “And the goal of this mission seems in line with national security interests. As were a couple of others we got wind of.”

  “But... ?”

  “But there are some people in the military who are very concerned that there might be something else going on.”

  “Such as?”

  Tai shrugged. “We don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “And that’s why someone tried to take you out on the jump,” Vaughn said.

  She reluctantly nodded. “They doctored my records to make it look like instead of reporting prisoner abuse in Iraq, I instigated it and was going to be charged. Just the type of person Section Eight comes looking for.”

  “This is fucked,” Vaughn said. “If that’s the case, they’re not going to let you on that cable for exfiltration.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to let you on? What makes you even think the plane is going to come by to do the snatch?”

  Vaughn stared at her. “That bad?”

  “Could be. I had three malfunctions coming in.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Got that right.”

  Oahu

  “What’s going on?” Royce demanded when he saw that the simulation operations center was empty. “Where is everyone?”

  Foster held out a folder with a red top secret band across the cover. “They all were called back to the real operations center for a real emergency.”

  “What happened?” Royce asked as he opened the folder.

  “Someone took out Johnston Atoll and escaped with four canisters of ZX nerve agent.”

  Royce scanned the message traffic. Over a thousand estimated dead. The Pacific Fleet was on alert, beginning to scour the sea and sky for whoever had done it. He closed the folder.

  “No one has any idea who did this?”

  “So far nobody has claimed responsibility. But the amount of ZX they have is enough to wipe out a major city.”

  “And our operation?”

  “The simulation was shut down thirty minutes ago.”

  “And our operation?” Royce pressed.

  Foster nodded. “I’ve kept the message traffic up as if the operations center and the mission are still running.”

  “Good.”

  “The team is taking off from Okinawa as we speak.”

  “Very good.” Royce waited until Foster went back to his bank of computers and message traffic before opening his laptop. He scanned his own traffic, and there was nothing from his contact about the Johnston Atoll issue. The second team was en route from Hong Kong to Manila and would be arriving shortly.

  Hong Kong had gone smoothly, except word about the Golden Lily was already in the media. That was unfortunate. Royce had been tracking Abayon for many years and he respected the
old man. They’d short-circuited him in Hong Kong, but Royce was wary—he knew Abayon would not move without having carefully considered the situation.

  His satphone buzzed and he checked the screen. A message from the Organization’s High Counsel. He hooked the phone to his computer and downloaded the message, allowing the computer to decipher the text.

  ABU SAYEF SUSPECTED BEHIND JOHNSTON ATOLL RAID AND ZX THEFT. HIGH LIKELIHOOD THEY ARE ON BOARD AN OLD DIESEL SUBMARINE. DESTINATION UNKNOWN. CHECK FOR LOCATION. PREPARE A TEAM FOR ACTION. ABAYON’S INTENTIONS UNCERTAIN. HANDLE WITH DISCRETION AND EXTREME PREJUDICE.

  Royce cursed when he finished reading the message. It was a bit late to be getting this now. There was no way he could prepare a new team quickly. Which meant he had to use a team he already had. He glanced at the board for the location of the second Talon. Less than an hour from drop. He’d have to use them after they took care of their current mission.

  Royce sighed. Check for location? He had no doubt the entire Pacific Fleet was doing that. And if the Abu Sayef were using a submarine, they had to have a line on it. Royce had worked the Pacific theater long enough to know that.

  He hooked his computer to the Sim-Center computer and then accessed the Pacific Fleet’s mainframe using his passwords. He quickly found the program he was looking for: SOSUS—the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System, which blanketed the entire Pacific Ocean.

  Developed at the height of the cold war, SOSUS consisted of groups of hydrophones inside large tanks, each almost as big as a large oil storage tank. They were sunk to the bottom of the ocean and connected by cables, which were buried to prevent the Soviets from trailing cable cutters off their trawlers and severing the lines.

  The series of underwater hydrophones were so sensitive that since the cold war, the Navy occasionally let marine biologists have access to the system to track whale migration. The entire system was coordinated using FLTSATCOM—the Fleet Satellite Communication System—which Royce currently accessing.

  He brought up all submarine activity and their corresponding tags: their identifiers. The Navy had belatedly realized after hooking the SOSUS system together that while it could pinpoint a submarine’s location, it wasn’t able to tell friendly subs from unfriendly. And since the U.S. Navy didn’t know exactiy where half its own subs were—the boomers, nuclear missile launchers patrolling wide areas of ocean entirely at their commanders’ discretion—they had to come up with a way when SOSUS pinpointed a sub to know whether it was friendly or enemy. Thus, every U.S. and NATO sub had an ID code painted in special laser reflective paint on the upper deck.

  SOSUS pinpointed a sub’s location, then one of the FLTSATCOM satellites fired off a high intensity blue-green laser. It penetrated the ocean to submarine depth, was reflected by the paint, and the satellite picked it up and read it. If there was no reflection, it was assumed to be an unfriendly sub.

  Since the Kursk disaster, the Russian fleet had stopped sending its boomers out to sea, and most of them were rusting away in port. That meant that other than the Chinese, few countries were sending submarines out to sea. Looking at the display, Royce immediately noted that the time-delayed tracking for the past twenty-four hours had only one unidentified submarine—located between mainland China and Taiwan—and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who owned that one.

  Where the hell was the Abu Sayef submarine if it had taken part in the raid on Johnston Atoll? Royce pondered this while staring at the display of the Pacific Ocean. The only thing he could come up with was that the submarine was sitting on the bottom somewhere, waiting.

  He shook his head. That didn’t sound like Rogelio Abayon.

  Royce looked forward to closing out this mission, but beyond that he was uncertain. He’d been moved up a notch in the Organization, but toward what end? The same end that David had just met?

  On the other hand, he knew there was no way out He couldn’t just tender a resignation because that was the same as “retirement” and he’d seen how that went. He was bound to the Organization by invisible chains that he had to be careful to not even tug on or else bring unwanted attention.

  It would be helpful to know who exacdy the “Organization” was, but that was a chain he knew he would have to be very careful about tugging. Better to get someone else to tug.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jolo Island

  Abayon kissed Fatima’s hand. Then he reached up and wiped away the tears on each of her cheeks. “You will do well.”

  “I will miss you,” she said.

  The last of the trucks carrying the treasure rumbled down the narrow jungle trail toward the dock where an old freighter waited. They had rehearsed abandoning the Hono Mountain facility many times, and the execution had gone off flawlessly. Abayon was in his chair, between the two large doors that had sealed this cave off so many years ago. A jeep waited for Fatima, the last to leave. When she was gone, he would be alone.

  “It is all for the people,” Abayon said. “All peoples.”

  Fatima nodded, at a loss for words.

  “Go now,” Abayon said, wheeling his chair back. She hesitated, then headed to the jeep. Abayon hit the control that shut the doors. Protesting on rusty hinges, they slowly swung shut with a resounding clang.

  Abayon turned his chair and began heading farther into the complex. He could feel the presence of ghosts all around. Japanese and Filipino. And others. This mountain had been the hub of much death and destruction. He knew the recent raid had been the signal he’d been both dreading and looking forward to.

  Abayon wound his way through the complex until he reached the stone balcony from which he had watched the raid. He rolled out onto it and looked to the west, where the sun was setting. This night would bring much change. He looked down at the red button on the handle of the wheelchair and sighed.

  Pacific Ocean

  The Jahre Viking was cruising less than forty miles southwest of Oahu. It was en route to Long Beach where it would off-load its cargo of oil. The captain of the large tanker was surprised when a United States Navy destroyer appeared off his starboard bow, bearing down at almost maximum speed.

  The radio crackled with an order from the captain of the destroyer to prepare to be boarded. Since they were in international waters, the captain of the Jahre Viking did not have to comply with the request. But the tone of the American officer’s command left little doubt about the extreme seriousness of the demand.

  Having nothing to hide, the Viking’s captain acceded, and within minutes a helicopter from the destroyer landed on the huge tanker’s helipad. A squad of armed sailors jumped off. The chopper immediately lifted and went back to the destroyer, staying long enough to fill up with more troops before returning. And then again and again, until the captain estimated he had half the destroyer’s crew on his ship, searching.

  One of those who came over was the Navy captain, and he was escorted to the bridge. The American apologized but said the search was over an issue of grave concern to all human beings regarding a recent event at an island in the middle of the Pacific. He also admitted that American satellites had tracked the Jahre Viking ever since leaving Indonesia and knew it had stayed on course, but orders were orders and they were taking no chances.

  The search took an hour, and then the Americans left, the destroyer leaving at flank speed to find another ship to search.

  *****

  Moreno’s sonar man had heard the American destroyer approach and then listened to it run alongside for over an hour. Then he heard it move away. Moreno watched both the clock and his chart, waiting until the American would be out of range.

  Finally, he could wait no longer. “One quarter ahead.” For the first time since they’d mated with the tanker, the submarine’s engines began to turn the ship’s screws. Satisfied he had power, Moreno issued the next order. “Cut power to the magnets.”

  The instant the power was cut, Moreno ordered the sub to dive, to get clear of the Jahre Viking’s screws. The submar
ine descended as the tanker passed by overhead. When it hit the wake caused by the massive screws, the submarine vibrated violently for half a minute, then slowly settled.

  “Course five-five degrees,” Moreno ordered. “Half ahead. Bring us up to just below the surface.”

  The nose of the old submarine turned to the northwest, directly toward Oahu and Honolulu.

  Jolo Island

  Vaughn checked out the small redoubt Tai had built for herself next to the open spot on the top of Hono Mountain. She had two logs stacked, facing the clear area, with enough space between them for her to get a clear field of fire. She’d covered the logs with vegetation so that unless someone walked right on top of her location, she wouldn’t be spotted.

  He checked his watch. “They should be five minutes out.”

  Tai nodded in the dark. “Time to get ready.” She checked her FM radio, hitting the transmit button. “You set?”

  Vaughn heard her in his left ear. He nodded and transmitted. “Roger. You got me?”

  “Roger.”

  Vaughn tapped the radio. “This isn’t going to do me much good once I’m inside the mountain.”

  “It will give us a couple of seconds to react once you’re back up top.” She paused before she climbed behind the logs and stuck her hand out. “Good luck.”

  Vaughn shook her hand. “You too.” He wasn’t sure what else to say because he still wasn’t sure he trusted her. He walked into the center of the open area and pulled out his infrared strobe. He wasn’t sure he trusted any of those who would be parachuting in either. It was a hell of a situation. He had always been able to count on his teammates in combat situations, and now he was getting ready to conduct a mission where he wasn’t sure of anything.

  He checked his watch once more. Two minutes.

  He turned the strobe on.

  *****

  The Combat Talon was flying just above the wave tops. The back ramp was open and the four members of the team were clustered just near the edge, the two outermost men with a solid grip on the hydraulic arm holding the ramp in place.