Trial by Fire - eARC (39 page)

“Not just
this
ship, rating: all of them. Even the ones that are still carrying nothing but grain.” Downing’s tall companion paused. “Now, unless I’m mistaken, each ship’s loaders become part of her crew. So when do you ship out to babysit the surprise package you’re readying?”

“Three days, sir.”

“You have family you want to see again? A sweetheart, maybe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then don’t be sloppy—here or when you get to Indonesia.”

“Yes, s—” The rating’s hand had started to come up again. He grimaced, snapped it back down. “Yes, sir,” he said apologetically.

Rear Admiral Jones shook his head, continued on down the dock. Downing matched his stride, waited until they were out of earshot. “A bit tough on him, weren’t you?”

“Richard, coming from you, that’s like blasphemy from a preacher. We’ve got all our chips on the table. This isn’t the time to take any chances or overlook any details.”

Richard smiled. He liked Bill Jones—Jonesy, as he was known and addressed by a favored few—and had from their very first meeting, thirty-four years ago. Their maternal grandmothers had been school chums in Johannesburg, cellmates during the violence and suppressions of the Forties, kept in touch when one fled to Toxteth in Liverpool and the other to the South Side of Chicago. Both rebuilt their careers, relocated to better environments, married, kept in touch, finally brought their families together in Nevis.

Jonesy had always been brash, assertive, and utterly sentimental. He physically resembled the local boys on the streets of Nevis, but it was Richard who found it much easier to meet them, and blend into their lives. Downing had been an outwardly quiet and cheerful child, behind which he maintained a careful, even detached, watchfulness. Not so Jonesy: he always led with his chin and wore his heart on his sleeve. And from the first, Downing had loved him for that. No less so today.

“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.