Kurtzman made a face. “Not really?”
“No, probably not really,” Tokaido said, “but even if it doesn’t work, they can tout their new system of satellites and make it seem like they’ve got better information than anybody else. Perception is everything. Anyway, what they do have is a dynamically fluctuating ground-based Doppler radar system that nobody else does have. So what they do is feed the signals from the Doppler radar from other analysis systems, along with their proprietary satellite climactic imaging, and they crunch it and come up with some pretty accurate current weather pictures. Maybe the most accurate simulated, real-time weather imaging on the planet.”
“I see,” Kurtzman said.
“But here’s the cool part,” Tokaido said. “They can take pictures of the shapes of meteorological activity at resolutions that nobody else has ever been able to achieve. They can image storms in real time using their fifteen satellites. They don’t even have to have clear access to all of them because the children feed their signals to the big daddies, and the encrypted data comes back down through the feed from the daddies. But they can have multiple satellites looking at a single storm system and get incredibly detailed pictures. Makes for really excellent weather-channel video.”
Kurtzman rubbed his forehead and tried to process this information. “What, exactly, is fluctuating dynamically in the ground-based Doppler radar system?” he asked.
“The frequency,” Tokaido said. “The network meteorological gurus claim to have an algorithm of Doppler fluctuation that is supposed to give them better on-the-fly pictures of the current weather conditions. Like high resolution of wind speeds and precipitation and even cloud density.”
Kurtzman considered that. “I can see the usefulness when it comes to making pretty weather simulations. How’s it help us?”
“So,” Tokaido continued, grinning broadly, “what you do is, you fluctuate the radar and you analyze the signals on the fly. And that way, you find anomalies. And when you find them, you tune in the frequency in that vicinity. The frequency is always going to be different, depending on things like air pressure, humidity, wind speed, and that’s why it’s impossible to find using regular radar. The thing is, you program it to do this automatically. Like I’ve just done. And then you turn it on, and it will automatically find the thing that can’t be found with run-of-the-mill radar. And the fifteen satellites make an image of the weather where that is.”
Kurtzman finally felt like he was catching up to what Tokaido was explaining to him.
“Or,” he suggested, “it can let you digitally visualize a CMC stealth airplane?”
“It will.” Tokaido was still grinning.
“You sure?”
Tokaido nodded. “I’m sure.” He touched his keyboard and pulled up a colored radar view of two hundred miles of the U.S. border with Mexico, centered at El Paso. On the screen, highlighted by red circles, were the faint images of two aircraft.
“Those are both stealth aircraft?”
Tokaido nodded. “Probably. The system cross-references with known aircraft. Again, it’s gotta have a feed from air traffic control, military, whatever systems are out there tracking aircraft. Then you have to cross-reference those with the weather satellite reading in order to cull the known aircraft. Other factors can narrow them down, too. Speed. This plane is moving too fast for a prop plane.”
Tokaido tapped one of the aircraft on his screen.
“It’s not on any digital flight plan. It’s not military. On every other method of looking at air traffic, it does not exist.”
Kurtzman was grinning himself now. “These weather network satellites provide full coverage?”
Tokaido nodded. “Worldwide Weather News isn’t just a name. Their new satellites cover the globe. The question is, will the weather news network be ticked off about us stealing bandwidth and data right off their proprietary system?”
“They’ll get over it,” Kurtzman said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
East Malaysia, Borneo Peninsula
The locals claimed there had once been a rich man living here. They said the facility was a huge private vacation home owned by a Hong Kong underworld millionaire. It was certainly a beautiful location, in the midst of a valley five miles long and three miles wide and surrounded by hills blanketed with rain forest. It was remote, seventy miles by air or rail from the nearest metropolitan center.
Once the local indigenous people had prospered from the generosity of the Hong Kong millionaire who’d chosen the spot for his outlandish home. He’d bought the locals’ loyalty with outlays of money and gifts. He’d given them houses, televisions and cars.
Then the millionaire’s business ended badly, and the vacation home burned dramatically to the ground. It moldered for more than a decade before someone new arrived to make use of the land. The locals got gifts again—new cars, new cell phones—and some of them even got jobs. Today the land housed a warehouse—a distribution hub with its own power-generation facility, a landing strip and a water supply.
There was one unique skill that locals offered, and it was invaluable to the new operation. The locals knew the river. The Sungei Paitan began in the hills far south of the valley, and quickly became deep, but also twisting and tortured. It was navigable only by a skilled pilot who was familiar with its tricks and hidden dangers and narrow, treacherous passages. The locals had been riding the river all their lives, bringing in a meager income by selling locally produced lumber.
It took lumber-herding boats to bring those logs down to the ocean docks. The new distribution operation also used similar shipping vessels to bring their cargo to the docks on the coast of the peninsula.
Business was apparently good. In the three months that the operation had been in place there had been almost a hundred shipments going downriver.
The locals were told that the only way the company could keep this operation here, in this town, with all the benefits that it offered the villagers, was if no one knew about it. Indeed, the shipments came into the distribution facility by rail in strange wooden crates on open railcars. There might be twenty such crates on a single train, and they were quickly moved inside the new warehouse.
The distribution facility apparently did nothing other than store them temporarily, and then move them out again.
It was a curious operation. There were, at most, twenty employees at the place who spent most of their time sitting around doing nothing, or so the locals reported. Few of the locals had actually been inside the place.
There were aircraft flights that came and went from the warehouse. To be more accurate, the locals said, the aircraft went, occasionally, but it never seemed to come. The locals witnessed that quiet little aircraft leave the place several times, but never saw it arrive.
The locals could not understand why anyone would want to choose their valley for a warehouse. It was far too remote from the big outside world to be practical. But the locals were enjoying their new cell phones, and the frequent payoffs that came from the owners of the distribution plant, and they weren’t about to mess with a good thing.
A large transport prop plane could be heard over the valley an hour after dark. A young man from the village looked up from the game on his smartphone and watched the aircraft. It flew over and was gone a few minutes later.
The young man went back to his Angry Birds.
It was too dark for the young man to see the five parachutes that were descending into the jungle not a mile from where he was sitting.
* * *
THE INSERTION WAS UNEVENTFUL. The five Phoenix Force commandos put down in a clearing, quickly wadded up and hid their parachutes and set out through the Borneo jungle.
The jungle ended at the bottom of a long incline, where the groundscape changed oddly. The big valley had obviously been heavily landscaped. There were gravel walkways, brick courtyards, raised stone planters and wooden gazebos and atria. When it was active, a small army of gardeners must have been required to m
aintain it.
Years later, everything made of wood had disintegrated, the jungle had invaded the walking trails and the plants had surged out of their planters.
There were a few trees growing in the valley now, but it was mostly clear, giving them good visibility. In the clear night, under a bright moon, the area appeared empty and silent. The warehouse at the far end of the valley showed some light, but there was no sign of activity.
Gary Manning and Calvin James had volunteered to make a soft probe of the building. They had little trouble approaching across the valley. The access road was cobblestones, installed by the Hong Kong millionaire and utterly impractical in the hot tropical climate of the Borneo peninsula. When the millionaire had left and grounds maintenance ceased, the weeds had taken over and the cobblestones had almost disappeared. The new occupants of the valley had brought in heavy equipment to build their warehouse, ripping up the weeds and the cobblestones. The road was a wreck.
But there was no security here. No electronics on the road. No camera. Soon Calvin James found himself standing with his shoulder against the warehouse building, undetected.
He began to doubt they were on the right track.
* * *
THE WAREHOUSE HAD BEEN their first and only Asian target identified so far, and it had come as a result of intelligence obtained from Noah Brezius.
“The man has latched on to Pol,” Price had reported to Phoenix Force hours before. “He wouldn’t speak to anyone else, but he’s talking to Rosario. He identified the warehouse in Malaysia as the only permanent site he ever set foot on. All his other technical meetings with the buyers were at temporary locations. At some point they brought thermoforming equipment into the industrial building at Sungei Paitan and test-molded parts using the CMC material that Brezius provided them. He was at the site for several weeks, helping them test-mold large components. The other tests had been in rented industrial spaces, but Sungei Paitan was to be used for the stealth jets. Brezius thought they might be manufacturing them there, although in the end he learned that the molding equipment would be shipped away from the site, and Sungei Paitan would be strictly for distribution.”
The remoteness of the location appeared to be a success, as well.
“The Chinese have been looking for the source of the aircraft itself—so much so that they were willing to offer Brezius millions for his assistance. And when he refused, they were willing to sacrifice a highly secret in-country Special Forces cell to kidnap or kill Brezius.”
“But he doesn’t know the source of the stealth planes,” McCarter said.
“That’s what we need to learn from the distribution point in Malaysia,” Price said.
When the conference with Stony Man Farm was done, McCarter glared at his commandos. “Able Team got the bloke with the intelligence and Able Team got an unbelted stealth plane.”
“Think we can be as great as Able Team when we grow up?” said T. J. Hawkins.
“All I know is we better bring something useful to this damned party, mates, or that dick Lyons is gonna be acting awfully smug,” McCarter said. “There is nothing gets my goat worse than smug Carl Lyons.”
* * *
THERE WERE OTHER GOOD reasons to track down the source of the stealth aircraft other than denying Able Team bragging rights. Keeping the balance of global military power was one.
Several cars arrived at the warehouse, forcing Calvin James and Gary Manning to halt their reconnoiter and seek the sparse cover of low scraggly shrubs. Fourteen cars arrived in total, with nineteen men. It was the night shift. There was no sense of urgency in their behavior. Just a bunch of guys coming to work.
James and Manning made their way along the building to a gap in the plywood exterior, where they had a view of the inside of the building.
The interior was stacked with huge wooden crates or small, freestanding wooden structures. James estimated they were better than thirty-five feet square and more than ten feet in height. Each was big enough to hold one of the small stealth jets. To James the big plywood packages reinforced the impression that these things were not real aircraft at all, but toys.
Sure enough, the night shift was busily opening one of the crates. Power screwdrivers backed out the wood screws holding wooden cover panels in place. They were apparently going through what passed for a safety inspection on the product.
After removing the lid, one man jumped into the crate to activate an aircraft, trailing, of all things, jumper cables. The cables snaked back to a charging box and were clamped on the inside of the cockpit. The aircraft was allowed to charge for several minutes, then the systems were powered up. The men went through a series of checks. Electrical readings were taken. Fluid levels were checked.
The jet was deemed shippable in a matter of a half hour. The lid was put back on the crate and screwed into place, and an overhead crane was employed to lift and carry the bulky crate across the warehouse to an interior dock. There, a dilapidated shipping boat was waiting. Cargo doors were opened and the aircraft was slipped inside, to be followed by several dozen more crates of goods. Paper products, canned vegetables, boxes of textiles marked Made in Malaysia. They were all piled on top of the crated jet.
Calvin James relayed his observations to David McCarter.
“I count ten crates in the warehouse,” James said.
“What about locals?” McCarter asked. “Any of them in evidence?”
“No,” James said, “these are all well-dressed Chinese-speaking employees.”
“All right,” McCarter said, “let’s shut them down and drive them out.”
James and Manning circled back along the exterior of the warehouse to the generator shack they had identified upon their approach. Manning spun the wing nuts on an access panel, finding a bank of circuit breakers. He flipped them and returned the panel to its place.
“All dark,” Manning reported.
“Hold, Phoenix,” McCarter said. “We’ve got activity on the perimeter of the valley.”
“What kind of activity?” Manning asked.
“Uncertain,” McCarter responded. “I think when you turned off the power, you may have alerted a guard force we didn’t even realize was there.”
“Report, Phoenix,” Price said via the headset.
“Six or eight figures, all becoming active at the perimeter of the valley,” McCarter said.
Manning switched his night-vision goggles to Thermal and found the human-shaped hot spots becoming active at the base of the jungle. “I see them. There’s more than eight.”
“There sure the hell is,” McCarter said “We now count twelve. Fifteen. They’re on the south perimeter, as well. We’re seeing weaponry and equipment. These are not locals.”
David McCarter was quickly reassessing their situation and their strategy as the figures materialized via his thermal lenses. A lot of heat signatures, with enough detail to show battle gear, automatic weapons and electronics. This was not a bunch of local villagers patrolling the jungle with hunting rifles and fifty-dollar shotguns.
McCarter’s mind went back to the briefing he had received from Stony Man Farm on Able Team’s recent activity in Ohio. In hunting down Brezius, the man who’d given him the lead on this facility, they had found themselves unexpectedly engaged with American mercenaries—hired by China.
The Chinese were consistently the playground bullies on the global weapons front. They wanted what you had, and then they wanted you to not have it anymore.
“It’s the Chinese,” McCarter declared.
Encizo and Hawkins gave him a curious look.
“Do you have intelligence I don’t have?” Encizo asked. “Or is it just that your night-vision glasses are so much better than mine?”
“It’s all guesswork,” McCarter said. “But I know I’m right. Who else would it be? Who else would be trying to shut this operation down?”
“I’d say anybody,” Hawkins said.
McCarter ordered urgently, “Cal, Manning, pull out now
, via the west jungle.”
“No, abort that,” Hawkins snapped. “Check it out. They’re coming in from the back end, too.” He pointed to the far west side of the valley, where the jungle reached out close to the warehouse.
“Shit,” McCarter said as he looked to the far end of the open plain. Another force of unfriendlies was emerging from the jungle, a swarming green monster in his night-vision goggles. McCarter had a sinking feeling in his chest: a quiet, clandestine probe may have turned out to be a suicide mission. These new arrivals were closing the pincers, using a coordinated approach, and James and Manning were caught inside of the trap.
“Stony,” McCarter said quickly, “we’ve got trouble. Approximately twenty-four heavily armed troops have joined the party. They were stationed in the jungle. They must’ve been biding their time to take the facility themselves. I think they reacted when we shut off the power.”
“Are they moving in to engage the crew in the warehouse?” Price asked.
“It would appear so,” McCarter said. “But Manning and James are on-site, and they’re not getting out without being apprehended by the new arrivals.”
“Chinese?” Price asked.
“That is my assumption,” McCarter responded.
McCarter was thinking fast. Their only advantage in this situation was that, as far as he could tell, the new arrivals were not aware of the presence of Phoenix Force. They were totally ignoring himself, Hawkins and Encizo, ensconced in a small copse of decorative trees gone wild some two hundred yards east of the warehouse.
As the Chinese closed in on the warehouse it became more clear that they were not targeting McCarter’s hiding place. It was time to make their presence known, McCarter thought.
Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Page 19