The causeway road was a concrete ribbon across Benoa Harbor, linking the ordered arrays of golden work arcs at the port island with the scattered constellations of the shoreside villages. Half a dozen sets of head lights flowed along it, heading inland, the motorcade carrying the task force officers into the island capital.
Precautions had been taken. Cellular communication was being maintained with the ships, a pistol rode under every jacket and in every shoulder bag, and a Marine security guard sat beside the Balinese driver of each of the rented Toyota sedans, an ominously heavy briefcase in his lap.
However, others had taken precautions as well. As the Navy motorcade cleared the causeway road, a second group of vehicles also in contact with a central headquarters and also carrying a heavily armed party of men began to maintain an expert alternating front and rear tail on the convoy.
Taman Werdi Budaya Art Center
1830 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008
Located in the suburbs of the boisterous island capital of Denpasar, the Taman Werdi Budaya Center lingered as a preserve of the old Bali, a place of lotus ponds, delicate gardens, and fantastically decorated Balinese architecture.
Here gathered the elite of a race of artists, the sculptors, the painters, the actors, the musicians, and the dancers, especially the dancers, to perform for the world at the center’s amphitheaters.
The prerequisite preliminary reception was held outside of the theater area in a garden lit by the flicker of oil lanterns. Elliot MacIntyre found the setting exotic and interesting, even while going through the appropriate political motions. Especially as he was in the company of Amanda Garrett.
In the last minutes before the opening of the night’s performance, they found themselves walking slowly along a path that circled the garden’s perimeter, a cool and darkened place away from the core of the talk and forced official joviality.
The unsecured environment made shop talk unwise, and MacIntyre was willing to take advantage of the fact.
“One of the problems I’ve found with the Navy is that while you do see the world, it’s just in glimpses.”
“I know what you mean,” Amanda replied, trailing her fingertips over a piece of path-side statuary, its features half erased by time and exposure. “You catch a taste of something in passing, but the full flavor doesn’t hit you until you’ve had the chance to think about it for a while. Only by then it’s gone and you’re moving on to the next mission, the next tour.”
“There are other ways to live, I suppose.” Eddie Mac hesitated for a moment. “Amanda, have you ever thought about what you’re going to do after the Navy?”
It was her turn to hesitate, a thoughtful expression crossing her shadowed features. “For a time I was, but I sort of gave up on it when you gave me the Sea Fighters. I could never really come up with a solid idea of what I wanted. There were the superficialities, like maybe picking up a consultant’s job somewhere or buying a real cruising boat, but no true vision ever jelled.”
“What about a family?”
“It would be nice,” she replied softly. “I envy you Judy and your sons. But I’m running out of time there. Pretty soon, having children won’t be such a good idea.”
MacIntyre snorted. “Nonsense! You’re still a young woman, Amanda. There’s no reason you couldn’t start a family if you wanted one.”
She chuckled. “Thank you. But there is still one complication: I’m old fashioned in some ways. If I were to have a family, I’d want someone to have a family with. That hasn’t jelled, either.”
MacIntyre stopped walking. “I can’t understand that. For someone like you…” He fumbled with the words, suddenly feeling awkward. “There must have been opportunities.”
She gave an acknowledging tilt of her head. “Oh, yes, a couple of times, but never quite the right one at the right time. The luck of the draw.”
“Some kind of luck, anyway.” Elliot MacIntyre felt himself on the verge of doing something catastrophically wrong. His hand ached to reach up and brush aside the curtain of red brown hair from Amanda’s cheek, and he hungered for the first time in many years for the feel of a woman’s lips under his—this woman’s.
“Amanda.” It was another voice out of the night. A tall figure in a white evening jacket strode down the walk toward them. “Ah, and you as well, Admiral MacIntyre, good evening!”
“Good evening, Mr. Harconan.” MacIntyre was pleased with the way he kept the snarl out of his voice, even as he watched the way Amanda looked up at the approaching taipan.
“Good evening, Makara.” There was an odd timbre to Amanda’s reply, a hesitation yet an excitement as well. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”
“And why should you think that? With your permission, Admiral, I’d like to invite Captain Garrett to sit with me this evening. I’d greatly appreciate the chance to share this performance with her.”
“That’s entirely her call, Mr. Harconan.”
“Amanda?”
“Well …” She paused a moment more before accepting the arm offered her. “If you don’t mind, sir?”
“Why should I, Captain? Enjoy yourself. I’ll see you and Mr. Harconan after the show.”
As he watched them start down the walk to the amphitheater entry, MacIntyre found that his hand still ached from the fist he had clenched.
Benoa Port, Bali
1859 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008
It started with a breakdown on the causeway road. A heavily loaded tractor trailer truck swung across both traffic lanes and stalled, blocking all passage. The driver dismounted and tilted the truck cab forward, as if seeking for some mechanical fault.
“As if” because there was nothing wrong with the truck—at least, there hadn’t been until he had completed his tampering. Seeing headlights approaching from landward, the driver ran a short distance farther dawn the causeway. Vaulting over the roadside rail, he scrambled down over the slimy breakwater boulders to where a fast outboard launch awaited him.
The launch carried three Bugis seamen, automatic weapons, and a pair of crude but effective magnetic limpet mines built around fifty-pound charges of industrial dynamite.
Backing away from the causeway, the launch turned and started to move toward the harbor island, one of half a dozen such craft on the same mission.
On the artificial island itself, other men, men who had been trickling out to the island all day long in one, twos and threes, rendezvoused in the shadows of the warehouses and collected weapons from a previously positioned cargo container.
The roving polisi patrols that should have spotted the growing accumulation of armed men had been called elsewhere. Likewise the sole Indonesian warship in port, the frigate Sutanto, had been ordered to haul off and anchor in the harbor away from the port facility, well away.
Stealthily, by land and water, the net began to close around the Sea Fighter Task Force.
USS Carlson
1905 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008
Commander Lucas Carberry had not minded catching the senior-officer-afloat duty for the evening. In fact, he appreciated the opportunity. It gave him a chance to pursue one of his own private passions.
Tonight’s project was of a favorite ship of his: the old protected cruiser USS Olympia, Dewey’s flagship at Manila Bay. The assembly wasn’t excessively difficult. Deftly filing and fitting the turrets and upper works was second nature. But as with all of the Edwardian age, pre-gray-camou naval vessels, the painting was the challenge, getting the white hull, buff upper works, and black masts and funnels just right, with no bleedover, and applying those faintest of hints of silver and gilt in just the precise places.
And all on a model two inches long.
His den back home in Philadelphia was lined with the dreadnought-age navies of the world, as well as with dozens of first-place and best-of-show awards for naval miniatures. Within the enthusiast’s snug world of naval war-gaming, owning a Carberry miniature had come to mean something. They were
never sold, only given away as gifts to close friends or to individuals who had defeated Carberry in a combat scenario.
There were few who could make the latter claim. Carberry, like his miniatures, was something of a legend in war-gaming circles as well. A chubby, cold-eyed legend who could win the battle of Jutland with either side with equal ease, who had sunk the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen both with the HMS Hood, and who had turned the Battle of Tsushima Strait into a Japanese rout.
Tenderly he eased his latest creation down onto the droplet of glue in the center of its black plastic mounting plate, allowing his desk phone to buzz twice before freeing a hand to answer it.
“This is the captain.”
“This is the officer of the deck, sir.” The voice on the other end of the line was tense. “We have unusual activity quayside. Possible hostiles.”
Carberry’s own voice was precise and emotionless. “Have all security stations been alerted?”
“Yes, sir, we are at flash yellow both here and aboard the Cunningham.”
“Very well. I’ll be on the bridge momentarily.”
Carberry started forward, wiping a dab of paint from his fingers with a Kleenex.
The view through the LPD’s wide bridge windscreen presented no obvious call for alarm, only the broad concrete quay apron and the wall of gray and rust warehouses beyond it illuminated by a scattering of arc lights. Nothing moved, save for the foredeck security patrol and the gangway watch. However, the OOD and the Marine lieutenant serving as security officer of the watch both looked concerned as Carberry pushed past the light curtain.
“What do we have, gentlemen?”
“Sir, the task force moorage has been placed under observation, and we have detected the movement of a large unidentified body of men into the area. Their intent is unknown, but they appear to be deliberately staying under cover.”
“When was the activity first noted?”
The security officer fielded the question. “About five minutes ago, sir. A gunner in one of the 30mm mounts spotted a man on a warehouse roof watching us through a set of night glasses. We have a deck camera locked on his position.”
The Marine crossed to the console under the windscreen and called up an image on a brow monitor. On a magnified section of roof beside a ventilator box, gray-toned in the lowlight television, a man’s head could be made out peering over ridgeline binoculars set to its eyes. A second head bobbed up intermittently in the background.
“Our lookouts and the Duke’s have picked up on three other OPs like this one, covering the whole moorage area.”
Carberry nodded. “Interesting, and she’s the USS Cunningham, Lieutenant, let’s be precise. Now, what about the large bodies of men?”
“Uh, yes, sir, the Cunningham, sir. As for the large bodies of men, we have them located inside the warehouses on the mast-mounted sighting systems, FLIR mode.”
The Marine switched imaging systems, accessing the Forward Looking Infrared scanners.
This set of cameras did not see images of light but of heat: Focusing on the thermal radiance of the environment, they could look through visual impediments like darkness, smoke, fog, and, to a degree, walls.
The front of a warehouse appeared on the screen, the outline of its facade and doors hazy and almost ectoplasmic in nature. A large number of amorphous blobs of light could be seen within the structure, some of them moving intermittently.
“We’ve spotted four groups of about fifty men each, not one of whom has let himself be seen.”
“Anything on the radio watch?”
“We aren’t sure, Captain,” the OOD replied. “Signal intelligence indicates there may be something in the citizens-band ranges. Maybe just random make-and-break static of some kind, or maybe somebody doing a carrier click code on a number of walkie-talkies.”
Another captain, such as Amanda Garrett, would have asked opinions at that stage, but not Carberry. His subordinates had given him the required data; it was up to him as senior-officer-on-station and captain under-God to make the decision—in this case an effortless one. A false alarm would merely provide for a good training exercise, of which in Carberry’s opinion there could not be too many.
“Officer of the Deck, bring the task force to general quarters. Hush mode. Prepare to repel boarders.”
No alarm Klaxons clanged. No bellowing voices thundered over the MC-1. lnterphones and command headsets buzzed all over the ship, and call to arms was passed by word of mouth, division officers swarming down from officers’ country and CPOs from out of the goat lockers, yelling to seamen as they ran.
It was somewhat slower than a standard battle-stations call, but outwardly it left no sign of the explosion of activity within the hulls of the task force. On the Carlson’s bridge, the cruising watch stormed up the access ladder and manned their workstations. Light patterns began to shift on the consoles, going from the yellow of in-port standby to the green of ready for sea. Rows of monitor screens lit off, displaying ship’s status of not only the Carlson but also the Cunningham as the Cooperative Engagement interlinks came up.
The standard deck patrols, alerted through their headsets, maintained their even pacing as per the ops plan, but other Marines appeared topside. Fully armed and armored, they snaked up through the vertical hatches and belly-crawled to their posts in the superstructure and along the deck edges, staying low and out of sight.
On the bridge, as per the call to general quarters, all hands had grabbed Kevlar helmets and combat/flotation vests en route to their battlestations. Now a female rating hurried forward from the arms locker, burdened with pistol belts and side arms. Distributing them, she went back for a second load of shell bandoliers and combat shotguns.
The task force bristled, awaiting assault. Any force launching a surprise attack on it would be met with a very nasty surprise. Which was the entire intent of the exercise.
“The task force is at general quarters, sir,” the OOD stated from behind the master helm console. “Ships are ready to repel boarders and are ready in all aspects to commence power up and to get underway.” He glanced over at a Marine demolition specialist standing by in the corner of the bridge. “Ready to execute emergency unmooring procedure.”
“Very good, Mr. Johnson.” Carberry stood stolidly, his hands clasped behind his back, helmet and flak vest stacked on the chart table beside him. “I think it’s time we advise the task force commander about the situation.”
Taman Werdi Budaya Art Center
1910 Hours, Zone Time: August 20, 2008
Makara Harconan shot a careful glance down at his wristwatch. Soon … it would be soon. Seeking divertissement to keep himself relaxed, he returned his attention to the stage and the performance.
In honor of the guests from the task force and the accompanying government officialdom, the current resident troop at the center was performing the Legong, the most difficult and dazzling of the Balinese women’s dances. Glittering costumes of silken brocade and gold leaf blazed on the stage as the youthful performers spun the tale of the beautiful kidnapped princess Rangkesari and her evil and arrogant suitor, the king of Lasem.
Even after a life lived in the archipelago and a hundred performances seen, Harconan could still lose himself in the elegance and perfection of the Balinese dance and the discordant yet flowing percussion of the gamelan orchestra. The woman beside him was totally enthralled.
Amanda Garrett leaned forward, eyes wide and intent, catching every gesture, every nuance. As a dancer in her own right, she must appreciate even more than the average patron the skills and training involved in developing this precision.
“God, I wish I could learn some of this,” she whispered, never shifting her eyes from the stage.
“For the Legong, I fear it is too late,” he replied under his breath, studying the fine line of her jaw and undercurl of her hair beneath it. “A Legong dancer begins her training when she is five and must retire with her first menstruation.”
Amanda made a sl
ight face. “I’m an inch too tall to be a ballerina, too.”
“There is training you could take in other schools of the dance,” Harconan encouraged. “It could be arranged with the proper instructor. It would take time—two years at a minimum.”
“That would be nice, but the Navy doesn’t provide for dance training sabbaticals.”
“You aren’t going to be in your Navy forever, Amanda.”
“That’s true,” she answered absently, “but by the time I retire, I’ll be too old for anything more demanding than a foxtrot.”
A court-martial for losing your command could expedite that retirement, Harconan added silently. But would that be something she could ever forgive him for?
He sneaked another look at his watch. Two minutes more to the jump-off.
Abruptly, Amanda sat erect in her seat. Her hand darted into the bag at her side, drawing a cellular phone. Harconan realized that she must have received a prompt from a silent pager concealed somewhere on her person. He had to suppress the urge to slap the phone from her hand.
“This is Garrett.” She held the phone tightly against her ear, her hand cupped around the mouthpiece to seal in her words and seal out the sound of the orchestra. And then she was looking at him, every hint of the dreaming dancer stricken from her face. Those molten gold eyes narrowing in rage like a mother whose child has been threatened.
“Execute immediate departure! Extraction Bravo!” Her voice lifted. “Get those ships out of there now!” She was on her feet, lifting her voice again, yelling over the orchestra. “Sea Fighters! Back to the task force! Move!”
The Gamelan musicians stalled and the dancers hesitated. Around the amphitheater white-uniformed naval officers and blue-jacketed Marines were hastening from their seats to the exits.
What the hell had happened? Had his people launched the attack early, or had they been spotted? Harconan had known the Americans would be alert, but he’d hoped for a few minutes of surprise or confusion. She must have been holding them coiled and poised to counterstrike like an angry cobra.
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