by Don Brown
“Good. Then I want you to remain here at the air base and oversee the unloading and proper transportation of these nuclear materials. Colonel Croon will drive me back to our quarters, where we will continue to work on tomorrow afternoon’s military operations.”
“Yes, sir, General.”
“Let us get to work,” the general said. “In forty-eight hours, we will have crossed the rivers of history, and we will have emerged on the splendid, sparkling shores of our great destiny!”
Hassan got out of the car. A minute later, it disappeared from sight.
He walked to the 737 to inspect its deadly cargo. Within two days, if he performed his duties to perfection, he could become the youngest general in the Indonesian army, a key player in the world’s newest superpower.
St. Stephen’s Catholic Church
Jakarta, Indonesia
10:45 a.m.
Kristina stepped into the confessional room and started to make the sign of the cross. Then she stopped.
It had been so long since she had made the sign that she realized she had forgotten how to do it. Was she supposed to cross from right to left? Or was it left to right?
She tried right to left. That seemed right. If she was wrong, surely God would understand.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Do I hear a voice that is familiar?” The sound of the warm, accepting voice from behind the blinds was as comforting as it had been before.
“Perhaps, Father. I was here a few days ago.”
“Yes. I seem to remember your voice. We priests get very good at that, you know. Are you coming to confess the sin of leaving prematurely before?”
She wiped the sweat from her forehead. “I cannot promise you that I will not leave prematurely again today.”
“Hmm. You can run from God’s priests. We are but men, full of flaws like other men. But none of us can run from God. The Scripture proclaims that the eyes of the Lord are everywhere. He is omniscient, omnipresent, and all-seeing.”
“Yes, Father. In my head, I know this to be true. Yet I continue to run, and often in the wrong direction.”
“We have all run in the wrong direction, my child. But Jesus, the Good Shepherd of our souls, grieves in his heart if even the least of us goes astray. So tell me, why have you come today?”
Could she trust anyone? Even a priest? The priest was God’s representative. Surely she could trust God. “I am afraid something bad is about to happen, Father. Something very bad. I found some information, I think, and if the wrong people know I discovered it, I will die.”
“I see.” The calm voice was reassuring. “Remember the words of the Scripture. ‘Fear not, for I am with thee. My rod and my staff, they comfort thee…Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, bring your requests to God…And the peace of God, that passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.’”
The words of the Scripture were strangely comforting to her, even in the midst of the horrible black storm in which she found herself at the moment.
“You know that your words are safe here, my daughter,” the reassuring voice continued. “What would you like to share with me?”
Her breath quickened. Sweat drenched her body. She looked up. The picture of Jesus hung on the wall, just as before. “I saw their plan, Father. I saw their plan and I believe it.”
The priest did not respond. Perhaps he was calling another priest to hear this. Perhaps she should go. Now.
“What is so bad that is going to happen?” The voice brought her back into her chair.
She gazed at the picture. Were his eyes following her? “Someone is going to die, Father.” A huge exhale. She touched the Bible on the table under the lamp below the picture. She closed her eyes.
“Who is going to die?”
“Someone important. Someone very important.”
“Can you tell me who?”
“I’m so afraid, Father. I’m afraid they will kill me too.”
“Fear not, my child. You are safe in the church.”
“I feel safe nowhere.”
“You are safe here.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Okay. If you cannot tell me who, can you tell me when?”
She gasped. Water. She needed water. Her eyes met the picture again. “Soon, Father. A very important person will die soon.”
“You sound like you are having trouble breathing.”
“I must go, Father. I’ve said too much already.” She stood and reached for the door.
“No. Please…”
She opened the door and sprinted down the hall, out into the sunshine. Under a palm tree, she bent over and heaved. She wanted to vomit, but she could not. Water. She needed water.
The Pentagon
11:30 p.m.
Cappuccinos might be popular in New York, at the New York Mercantile Exchange, at Starbucks, and at other pricey coffee joints around America, but black coffee was the order of the day in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon, where officers of the United States military came together to plot and war-game and mastermind America’s defense.
Or in this case, black coffee was the order of the night. Though he had been assigned a Bachelor Officers Quarters room at nearby Fort Myer, Lieutenant Robert Molster had erected a cot in “the Building,” as the Pentagon was called, to do his best to keep a watchful eye on whoever or whatever was out there. This night watch was mandated by the twelve-hour time difference between Washington and Singapore. The middle of the night in Washington was the middle of the next day in the Malacca Strait region.
Molster checked his watch.
23:30 hours.
11:30 P.M. in Washington meant it was 11:30 A.M. in Singapore and Kuala Lampur, 10:30 A.M. in Jakarta. He was used to staying up all night. That had been his job in New York. But in New York, he slept during the day.
Here, he had been conducting daytime briefings in the Pentagon to get the top brass up to speed on the intricacies of the oil markets and paying attention to the markets all night. He’d had time only for brief naps.
He felt like an alley cat. Half-awake. Half-asleep.
His body wasn’t sure whether to sleep or to wake up. He sat on the side of his cot and eyed the small picture of Janie. The image of her jet-black hair, her rosy cheeks, and her electrifying grin…she could bring a smile to his face even through the glass of a plain five-by-seven picture frame.
Since the limit moves and attacks in the Malaccan Strait, there had been nothing.
A couple of swigs of the now-lukewarm black coffee were left. No point in letting it go to waste. Bottoms up. All gone. Bitter.
It was a bit unusual to have real-time financial data reflecting commodities movement streaming into the Pentagon. Except for the fact that he was wearing a US Navy uniform, Molster could almost imagine himself back in New York.
Almost.
But when financial data or any other data becomes valuable to the United States military, such data becomes military intelligence.
So here he was. Brought here by fate. The perfect hybrid officer, in the eyes of the military, combining his unique military intelligence training with his unique commodities expertise.
“I’m going to try and catch some shut-eye, fellows,” he said to the two other intelligence duty officers, an army captain and an air force first lieutenant. “Wake me up if there’s so much as a minor blip on those charts.”
“Not a problem, Lieutenant,” the captain said.
Bob unbuttoned his whites, kicked off his shoes, and slipped under a sheet. The pillow felt relaxing to the back of his head.
He closed his eyes. The light hum of computer equipment and the soft, occasional murmur of voices served as an inconsequential backdrop to the images from his past that floated in his mind.
Disjointed images.
Beautiful, softly glowing, colorful pictures.
The red brick rotunda at the
University of Virginia…Small craft crisscrossing the Hudson River on a moonlit night. His first glimpse of Janie, so confident, yet with a haunting beauty, as she sat behind the recruiter’s table at UVA.
Oil futures.
Limit moves.
Charts.
More limit moves.
The comforting veil of sleep descended over him.
Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!”
Molster opened his eyes to the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. The computer’s alarm was on fire, or so it seemed.
The army captain and air force lieutenant were huddled over their computer screens. “Looks like we’ve got a huge limit move in progress, Lieutenant,” the army captain said. “Tons of sharp volume.”
Still in his T-shirt, Molster popped onto the floor and peered over the captain’s shoulder. He squinted his eyes and gazed at the screen.
“Here we go again,” he said. His stomach churned and knotted. “Lieutenant,” Molster tapped the air force lieutenant on the back of the shoulder. “Notify the J-2 duty officer. Limit move in crude oil.” He checked the time. “Mark it. 23:42 hours. Per standing orders. Alert chain of command. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” the air force lieutenant said. He picked up the phone to call the J-2 duty officer.
Mexican freighter Salina Cruz
Near the Texas coast
1:30 a.m.
Captain Alberto Mendoza throttled his freighter into neutral. The running lights of two other vessels blinked across the black waters, but under a new moon, it was impossible to see who or what they were.
His local radar swept the fifteen-mile circumference around the freighter Salina Cruz.
Based on the radar sweep, they were probably a couple of small trawlers out of Brownsville. Definitely not the right reading for a US Coast Guard cutter.
Other than that, nothing.
Mendoza turned to his guest. “We are at the drop point. Seven miles from shore. Are you ready?”
“Ready, amigo,” the skinny man with the black scruffy beard spoke in an accent that was not Hispanic.
Mendoza did not know the man’s real name. All he knew was that the man’s name supposedly was Rahman.
They were all named Rahman, it seemed. Every one of them. And they’d paid him more money than he’d ever seen in his life to sail to this spot off the Texas coast, under cover of darkness, to offload cargo and to keep his mouth shut.
“My crew will help you disembark.” Mendoza waved his hand. His first officer scrambled out onto the deck. Five Mexican deckhands began swinging three rubber boats, all inflatable, down toward the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rahman’s crew scrambled over the side, descending rope ladders, making their way down to the boats. A moment passed.
“Everyone in place?” Mendoza yelled down to the water.
“All ready.”
“Okay, we’re lowering the boxes.”
Mendoza gave the command. A crane onboard began lowering the first of three plywood boxes, about twice the size of a large coffin, down over the side. The boxes bore the words Bottled Water painted in English.
Probably cocaine or heroin. But Mendoza did not ask. Too many questions meant no repeat business. The manifest declared that the boxes were bottled water, and that would be his story if the Coast Guard stopped him on the high seas.
He struck a cigarette and leaned over the side of his ship. The stars cast a faint glow onto the waters of the Gulf. The whining sound of the ship’s cargo crane blended with the mild breeze blowing from the east. He watched as the third box of “bottled water” to be offloaded from his two-hundred-twenty-foot ship this week disappeared into the darkness below.
Moments later, the sound of outboard motors ignited from the surface, and then the sound of the three rubber craft pulling away, starting their westward journey to the Texas coast.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mendoza shouted. “Set course for one-eightzero degrees.”
“Sì, Capitan,” came the voice of his first officer from inside the pilot room.
Mendoza flipped his cigarette overboard, watching the red, burning tip whirl down in the wind as Salina Cruz began her wide-sweeping turn to head back to her home port of Tampico, Mexico.
Gag Island
West Papua, Indonesia
3:30 p.m.
Captain Hassan Taplus stood on the sandy beaches of the remote tropical island and gazed seaward to the southwest. Only a hundred miles south of the equator, the sun was blazing high above the horizon and he could hear the sound of helicopters approaching. He brought his binoculars to his eyes for a closer look.
So far, nothing but water and horizon.
The sound of the rotors grew louder.
He swung the binoculars slightly to the right. Two choppers appeared in the viewfinder. They approached through the blue skies, low over the water, perhaps a half-mile downrange.
“Excellent.” He checked his watch and smiled. “Right on time.”
More goosebumps. When this operation was complete, his ascendance up the Indonesian military command would become a fait accompli.
A military hero. That is how history would remember him. A pioneer. A founding father of the new Islamic Republic of Indonesia!
Yes, General Perkasa would be viewed as the leader of the movement. But he would be remembered by history as a military mastermind who stood at Perkasa’s side.
One day, Perkasa would relinquish power. And on that day…chills descended Hassan’s spine…perhaps even the presidency would await him.
The choppers circled just overhead now. The first feathered down onto the beach about a hundred yards from where he was standing, not far from the chopper that had carried him in, along with the advance party. The second landed a few seconds afterwards.
Their engines powered down, and the bay door opened on the second chopper.
They stepped out, one by one.
The passengers were eight nuclear scientists who had been working on contingency plans for the development of a proposed floating nuclear power plant in Indonesia. Their work had met stiff resistance from the international community, particularly the Aussie government, which protested that a nuclear mishap would spread deadly radiation south over Darwin and other populated sections off Australia. Now these men, all loyal to the general, would oversee the technical aspects of the operation, under his command.
In teams of two, the scientists quickly made their way to the first chopper, where somewhere in the dark recesses of its bay lay one of the ten-kiloton nuclear devices that General Perkasa had purchased from the Pakistanis.
Just behind the two helicopters, a portable steel tower was already being erected by the advance team into the tropical sky. From this tower, the device would be suspended.
What a waste, Taplus thought, of such a rare and valuable weapon. However, virtually every nation that had ever entered the nuclear club had done so with a visible demonstration of power. Indonesia would do the same.
Six men lifted the crate out of the helicopter bay. This image would be forever frozen in his memory.
It was all so surrealistic. One of the most beautiful tropical refuges in the world would soon become a nuclear wasteland.
Chapter 11
The White House
8:00 a.m.
Lieutenant Robert Molster sat next to Admiral Roscoe Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watching the flat screen that featured a brightly lit map of the Malacca Strait and the nations around it.
This place was nothing like the underground bunker that had been portrayed by Hollywood in The West Wing and various other movies and television shows. The real Situation Room was more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
Created by President Kennedy in 1962 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Situation Room was in reality a five-thousand-square-foot conference room, run by the National Security Council staff, in the basement of the We
st Wing.
The wood paneling of the room’s walls housed the most advanced communications equipment in the world, from which the president executed his role as commander in chief of all US military forces around the world.
An hour prior to sunrise, Molster had learned that his sleepless night would remain sleepless, when Admiral Jones called to inform him that he was to brief the president, should the president have any questions of him, at a meeting of the National Security Council at zero-eight-hundred-hours.
Thus, he’d spent the hours between 5:00 and 7:00 A.M. preparing a briefing, should he be called on, then hitting the shower, shaving, and donning a crisp service dress-blue uniform.
At 7:00 A.M., he had ridden “across the river” from “the Building”-Washington talk meaning he had left the Pentagon and crossed the Potomac River-with Admiral Jones and the admiral’s aides, armed with a stack of briefing papers.
The door opened.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States,” the White House chief of staff announced.
Members of the National Security Council, including the vice president, rose to attention as if they were seamen recruits in boot camp acknowledging a gunnery sergeant.
“Sit,” President Mack Williams ordered. The sound of shuffling chairs followed as the council obeyed the president’s order. “Admiral Jones, what’s going on?”
“Oil futures prices again, Mr. President. Three limit moves last night. Aside from the potential rioting in the streets from rising gasoline prices, our intelligence gurus tell us this move is similar to the period just before the Singapore attacks.”
The president looked at Molster. “That right, Lieutenant?”
This was his cue. He felt for his briefing papers. “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“Not much sleep again last night, I take it?”
“No, sir,” Molster said.
“Okay,” the president said, his eyes still on Molster. “And this is the first run-up since the Singapore attacks.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And you think this means they’re getting ready to hit again?”
Again, the president’s blue eyes blazed directly at Molster.