Trial by Fire - eARC (40 page)

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.

The
Asturia
made a slight turn to port, meaning that she was out of the Sea of Flores and entering the mouth of the Strait of Madura. Opal felt a dull bump through the harness, turned, saw that two of the SEALS had detached from their harnesses and moved to the rear of the cradle, where they were detaching one of the equipment carriers: a neutral buoyancy, nonmetallic “tumble cage” which looked a lot like a geodesic jail cell in the shape of dodecahedron. Black watertight packages were suspended inside as a central cluster.

One of the SEALs attached a line from the cage to a backpack-sized magneto-hydrodynamic dive-scooter and powered down into the black. The other SEAL snagged the line and followed, the tumble cage moving down after him. Within three seconds, they were invisible in the lightless depths. They had the tricky job of guiding the gear down to a special line that had been moored on the old undersea cable that they were still paralleling. Their final destination, was secret, of course, but not proofed against reasonable conjecture. Opal checked her watch. Given their speed, the now-repaired Pulau Karangmas light should be plainly visible over the starboard beam at a distance of nine or ten kilometers. According to her close study of the Army survey maps, that would put them just a few hundred meters northeast of a sizable, charted wreck which lay where the headland’s curve began to ease into the strait’s southern coastline. A wreck such as that one—only a few dozen yards offshore, but still in more than twenty fathoms of water—would be a perfect cachement point if divers had groomed it beforehand. Not only would it anchor a new or secondary tow line to the land, but the metal of the old hull would serve as shielding and concealment for both equipment and personnel.

She looked behind. The special forces colonel nodded to her. Beside him, one of the SEALs was hanging in his harness: he looked dead, but the occasional, modest eruption of bubbles indicated that he was either simply relaxing or taking a quick nap. Just another day at the office for him.

Opal looked beyond them into the back-rushing blackness: five more hours. Then it was her turn: to detach, to dive, to tow in, to lie in a fish pond, and to get ashore.

To get closer to Caine.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Kempang beyond the western metro limit of Jakarta, Earth

“Caine.” A tinny reproduction of Teguh’s voice came out of the old-style telephone. “The Sloth reserves are heading toward our left flank, just up the street from you. They’re two minutes away.”

Riordan spoke softly into the receiver. “Acknowledged, Teguh. We’re set. Join me in the CP.” Caine handed the phone to Hadi, the IT-whiz, who had become his adjutant when Captain Moerdani had died a week ago. Hadi laid the receiver down beside the window of their second-story perch in an abandoned mission bell-tower: a highly iconoclastic historical structure in predominantly Muslim Indonesia.

But the mission’s tower complex had all the features Caine had wanted for this operation: few and narrow windows, solid construction, old-style hardwiring, and no occupants. For the last ten years it had been boarded up, awaiting historical restoration funds which never arrived.

The archaic hard-wiring had been its most attractive feature, given how the rebels were usually forced to communicate. In the field, they had to rely on one-use pagers, since the enemy could jam or fry small electronics quickly. But in a prepared ambush such as this one, the rebels could make use of hard-wired communication lines. It was technology that would have been unremarkable in the trenches of World War One, but it had the advantage of being virtually undetectable and unjammable. Which would be required for this operation to work.

Alongside him, Hadi peered out between the steel-reinforced louvers of the mission’s office. “Was that Teguh calling from the left flank OP?”

“Yes. It’s been all quiet there since they turned back the enemy’s first probe.”

Hadi jutted his chin at the two Hkh’Rkh bodies laying sprawled in the dusty street. “Guess they didn’t expect to run into resistance out here in a sleepy little
kempang
.”

Although Caine concurred—“I guess they didn’t”—he kept Hadi’s tone of bravado out of his reply. This was no time for overconfidence. The Hkh’Rkh did not often come to this nameless extension of Jakarta’s western sprawl, which was half crowded town, half semirural backwater. But when an aerial patrol had passed overhead late yesterday, Caine’s group had launched a single rocket at it—a firework, actually. That was enough to ensure that the
kempang
could expect a decidedly brusque visit on the next day.

As soon as the morning rains had let up, the invaders rolled in along the northern approach road. They left their high-wheeled APCs well outside the dense cluster of buildings at the center of the
kempang
: they had already learned about the brutal effectiveness of improvised explosive devices. Advancing on foot, one squad of Hkh’Rkh went in search of the local authorities. Two more squads waited at the outer edge of the rough cluster of buildings, and a fourth waited with the vehicles.

Just as the lead squad discovered that the
kempang
was oddly quiet and all the locals shuttered indoors, the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle announced the start of the rebels’ ambush. A Sloth went down with a bullet through his unprotected pony-neck. That didn’t surprise the intruders as much as the second hit by the scoped weapon. Although only wounded, that Hkh’Rkh was frankly baffled to discover that the big-game round had penetrated the body armor which was routinely proof against old cartridge-fed battle rifles and most of the caseless ones, also.

The Hkh’Rkh squad’s two heavy weapons—caseless rotary machine guns—hammered away at the sniper’s vantage point in the upper story of the
kempang
’s one governmental building. They made a ruin of the window he had fired from, and the one next to it, but completely missed the man himself, who had already left along a prearranged escape route.

The Hkh’Rkh continued their attack in accord with their standard playbook. While the point squad broke into fire teams that flanked the government building and sought contact with other insurgents, two APCs rolled up to the edge of the
kempang
. One evacuated the wounded trooper; the other situated itself so that its remote-turreted coil gun could provide a base of fire against second-story targets.

Two weeks ago, the Hkh’Rkh would simply have blown the
kempang
to smoke, ash, and strips of charred bamboo. Their wars were conducted by Warriors on battlefields devoid of civilians. In contrast, an insurgency which faded back into the huts and streets of civilians was not merely anathema, but a betrayal of the basic codes of conflict. Their first reaction—to destroy all offending parties together—had had the grim virtue of making such distinctions pointless.

However, while the Hkh’Rkh’s indiscriminate responses had pacified the offending
kempangs
, the Arat Kur discerned that these tactical gains had a mounting strategic cost. The Hkh’Rkh’s reprisals were driving more of the enraged general population into the rebel camp, swelling the ranks of the resistance and its surreptitious civilian abettors.

New rules of engagement had been imposed upon the Hkh’Rkh, and consequently Caine could now count on them to attempt to make contact with the local authorities first. However, if they encountered insurgents—as they had now—they would establish the limits and locations of the opposition, fix its units in place by engaging them at range, and wait for air assets to come in and reduce that part—and
only
that part—of the
kempang
to a smoking ruin.