Target Lock

by James H. Cobb

  “Curtin, this is Carlson JIC. What in the hell are you guys playing at, aborting our search ops? … Screw the fuel reserves! We need every second of coverage we can pull with the Global Hawks…. Screw your standard operating procedure while you’re about it! We’ll cut your birds loose at absolute bingo and not one second before. Got that? …Glide ’em home if you have to! … Go ahead and call your squadron commander, Lieutenant. I’ll see your lieutenant colonel and raise you a three star admiral!”

  She broke the connection. Noting Tran’s level gaze, she grinned sheepishly. Brushing back her tousled bangs with her hand, she crossed to the inspector.

  “God,” she murmured, “you’d think I was some kind of a Navy puke or something.”

  “Easy, little one,” he replied even more softly. “There is actually no real difficulty in, as you say, finding a needle in a haystack. Once you have ascertained the needle is there, everything else is merely a matter of patience.”

  “That’s just it,” Christine whispered back. “I’m beginning to wonder if the needle is in the haystack. All the evidence indicates Amanda is somewhere on the southern coast of New Guinea. That’s where she pointed us to, but we still don’t know for sure.”

  “Then work the possibility until you do know. Then, if required, move on to the next. That is the way of the investigator.”

  “I know, I know. ” She put her back to the same bulkhead Tran had leaned against. “This should be like any other problem I’ve ever worked. It’s only that …” Her words trailed off.

  He rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “It’s only that this time it involves someone who matters greatly to you. Thus, you must still do your job, but with a dagger driven into your heart.”

  Christine took an unsteady breath. “I wish it was appropriate to kiss you just now.”

  Tran smiled soberly. “In due course.”

  “Commander Rendino!” The call came from one of the real-time analysis tables. “We might have something here.”

  Christine and Tran were both across the center in an instant.

  The analysis table was a horizontally mounted flatscreen display currently accessing the download being transmitted from one of the Global Hawk drones. The HDTV imaging was as clear and razor-sharp as a view downward through a window from five thousand feet.

  A glance at the status hacks in the corner of the screen indicated the Remotely Piloted Vehicle was actually flying at eight times that altitude. Invisible from the earth’s surface, it currently was cruising slowly south eastward along the New Guinea coast.

  Approaching now along the RPV’s track, a narrow peninsula jutted out from the New Guinea mainland. Perhaps a mile and a quarter in length, the tip of the peninsula was bifurcated by a narrow, curving inlet. Nguyen Tran thought it rather resembled the partially opened claw of a crab or lobster. The rampant greenness of the tropical forest covered the full length of the peninsula, while the surrounding waters were a deep and vivid blue, with little of the azure paleness that might denote shallows, even between the parting of the crab’s claw.

  “What do we have, Chief?” Christine demanded.

  The female chief petty officer looked up from the screen. “A possible abnormality, ma’am. This imaging is from Teal Niner, currently between Jantan and Aiduna in that broken stretch of coast under the Bomberai Penninsula. In standard spectrum all you see are the treetops, but check out the thermographic scan.”

  The reconnaissance analyst tapped a sequence into the keyboard on the edge of the display table. The image of the little cape went to an inverted black and white, like a photographic negative. Now an entire constellation was revealed, glittering sparks of white light, dozens of them, scattered down the lengths of the crab’s claw like a diamond incrustation.

  “Open surface fires,” Christine noted. “About the right size for cooking or mosquito smudges.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the analyst replied. “Enough for a good-sized village. But this isn’t like any of the other coastal plain villages we’ve been seeing. Way too dispersed. More like a whole lot of independent camps in one general area.”

  “She’s right,” Tran commented. “There are no central village clearings and no outlying cleared areas for crop-raising. Also there is no easy access to the sea, no decent beaches, and there are cliffs all along the sides of the peninsula. They can’t be fishermen or boatmen.”

  “Hunting parties?” Christine inquired.

  “Not with that density,” Tran replied. “The lowland jungles on Irian Jaya are very thick and lush, but they generally don’t provide large amounts of food without cultivation. True hunter-gatherers would have to disperse more widely to survive. This concentration must be drawing on some other supply source than the local environment.”

  “If we have the average of eight to twelve people per fire, ma’am, we’re looking at between three and four hundred people on that peninsula.”

  Christine lifted an eyebrow. “Nguyen, any suggestions about who these guys might be?”

  Tran nodded. “My first thought would be we have stumbled upon a major staging base for the Morning Star separatist army. But why they’d be massing out here in the middle of nowhere is an open question.”

  Christine nodded. “Maybe. Chief, take us up to magnification ten.”

  A segment of the central peninsula windowed up to fill the display. Now each fire was a dancing crystalline dot surrounded by a hazy nimbus of radiant heat.

  “Small cooking fires, ma’am, with the smoke dispersing under the tree cover,” the recon analyst commented. “There are a couple of abnormalities here … here … and here.”

  Christine nodded. “Thermal plumes without a central flame node. The fires there must be inside of buildings, with the heat escaping through a vent or a chimney.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s what I thought,” the analyst concurred. “And they must be pretty substantial buildings to damp the node that thoroughly. We’re not talking about thatch-roofed huts here.”

  “This one appears different as well,” Tran commented, pointing to a thermal trace at the bottom of the screen.

  “It is,” replied Christine. “Chief, window in on that and bring us up max mag.”

  Again the image expanded, the sensor turret on the distant drone swinging on the designated target.

  “It seems to pulse regularly,” Tran observed.

  “Yeah,” Christine agreed. “A definite thermal modulation. That’s a diesel exhaust, and from a pretty big plant. There’s no sign of anything like a road. It can’t be a truck engine.”

  “No building or structure outline, either,” the intelligence CPO commented. “More like its venting right out of the ground.”

  “Ain’t that the truth, Chief. Shoot a thermocouple reading. What’s the temperature of those exhaust gases at the emission point?”

  A numeric data hack rezzed into existence beside the thermal trace. “One-forty-five Fahrenheit, ma’am. Cool.”

  “Which means a long exhaust pipe. Any sign of radar emissions in this sector? Any air traffic?”

  “Negative, ma’am. Clean boards.”

  Christine hesitated for a moment, thinking. “All right. I want another run made over this peninsula, east to west this time, down the full length of it. It’ll be active scan; we’ll risk using the synthetic aperture radar. We’ll also risk bringing the Hawk down to just above contrail height. Let’s make it fast: We’re coming up on sundown and I don’t want to risk that drone being spotted because of underlighting.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am! We’re on it.”

  Christine looked into Tran’s face, a hot glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Keep reminding me about patience and the haystack.”

  Beyond the crab-claw-shaped cape, which had no name recognized by civilization, the sun touched the brooding bulk of the Jayawijaya range, the arched and buckled spine of New Guinea. Soon would come the night and the minute lessening of the day’s smothering heat.

  Around the perimet
er of the peninsula, two-score pairs of eyes swept the jungle and the sea. The vision of some of these lookouts was augmented with powerful binoculars. With others, the only augmentation came from a hunter’s instincts honed from a lifetime lived in this verdant and deadly environment.

  Among this latter group, a few, like Amanda Garrett, felt a faint, passing uneasiness, a sourceless sensation of being intently studied by an unseen presence.

  Like a hunting eagle, the Global Hawk drone transited the cape a second time. Its fan-jet was throttled back to the barest idling whisper, inaudible from the ground, and its nonreflective gray stealth paint melded with the sky.

  As it ghosted down the length of the crab’s claw, “smart skin” panels on the belly and underwings of the big RPV energized, becoming emitting and receptor arrays for its synthetic aperture radar system.

  This was much the same kind of technology used by NASA geophysicists to survey and map ancient riverbeds, lakes, and trade routes long buried beneath the desert sands of the Sahara. It gave both the scientific researcher and the suspicious warfighter the ability to see things otherwise unrevealed.

  Four hundred miles to the west, in the Carlson’s joint intelligence center, the task force’s senior command staff crowded in behind Eddie Mac MacIntyre and Christine Rendino. All watched the radar imaging crawl past on the main bulkhead flatscreen. They had more than a professional interest. The Lady, their Lady, might be out there.

  “See the swirl pattern of the bedrock,” Christine commented. “Pahoehoe lava. You find this kind of image pattern all over around the Hawaiian Islands. A series of lava flows must have dumped into the sea at this point, building an extrusion outward from the coastline. This accounts for the steep dropoff and deep water on all sides. Bet you’re going to have a lot of pillar basalt along those cliff edges.”

  Stone Quillain grunted. “Ain’t that going to be fun to climb if somebody’s at home and feeling cranky.”

  “We don’t know if anybody’s home yet,” MacIntyre replied. “When will we, Commander Rendino?”

  “Soon. Coming out over the peninsula now. There’s the narrows at the neck….” Her fingertip stabbed at the screen. “There … we have a geometric!”

  A small, neat, glowing rectangle began to crawl up the display.

  Far away, over the crab’s claw, the drone’s probing radar was looking down through the trees, through the undergrowth, through the upper few feet of earth itself, to reveal what was hidden underneath. Nothing short of metal, solid rock, or its equivalent could stop and reflect the carefully modulated beam.

  “There’s more of them.” Stone’s blunt fingertip joined Christine’s outlining the developments on the display. “An inverted chevron pattern facin’ inland with interlocking fields of fire. Sure as hell, those are block houses. Hardpoints on a defense line.”

  “The genuine article too,” Christine exclaimed. “To throw that kind of return, we gotta be talking poured concrete! See those fainter straight line shadows connecting them? Those might be ground displacement effects. Tunnels and entrenchments. Copleigh, are you recording this?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the SO replied decisively. “Double disks!”

  A second chevron pattern appeared, then a third, each fortification placed with a mathematical precision.

  “What are those smaller blips or whatever they are?” Cobra Richardson inquired, indicating a series of clustered sparks on the display.

  “Weapons returns,” Christine replied grimly. “That’s about what you’d get if you bounce an SA beam off an infantryman packing a rifle and a load of ammunition. Copleigh, overlay of the thermal scan on this image.”

  The systems operator rattled a command into his keyboard and the thermographic and radar images merged.

  “Yeah,” Quillain commented. “Those gun returns are mostly grouped around the fires. Bet you got a series of squad-level camps dispersed all up and down the peninsula. I’d bet these smaller singleton returns along the cliff sides and across the shore-side neck are sentry posts and heavy-weapons emplacements. These old boys are taking care of business.”

  “And nothing showed on the visual sweeps?” MacIntyre demanded, his arms crossed.

  Christine gave a shake of her head. “No, not a thing. Just what looks like virgin forest. I know what you’re thinking, sir: Poured concrete would mean heavy construction gear, and there isn’t a sign of it from the air.”

  “Mr. Tran, do you have any input on what we might be seeing here?”

  “I have no idea, Admiral,” the inspector replied. “The Bugis is a shipwright, not an engineer. And the Morning Star separatists are a mobile guerrilla army. They have no use for fortifications, or the means for building them.”

  The scan approached the outer third of the peninsula and the joint of the crab’s pincers.

  “Somebody’s been doing some heavy work out here,” Christine murmured, perplexed. “If those are bunkers, this peninsula has been converted into a fortress, but what’s being … Oh, my God! Look at that! Look at that thing! Copleigh! Put a scale up beside that!”

  To this point, the surface bunkers detected had been comparatively small, possibly the size of a two-car garage. This structure was titanic, a faint but definite outline just at the juncture of the claw at the head of the peninsula inlet. It didn’t show the sharp return of the surface structures concealed only by earth and vegetation: This was deeper, within the living stone itself, its presence revealed by fracturing and subsidence within the geologic structure of the island.

  Still, it displayed the unmistakable straight-line signature of a man made artifact.

  “That damn bunker or whatever has to be at least four hundred feet long and a quarter of that wide,” Christine said in simple awe. “It’s huge!”

  “That’s not all there is to it,” MacIntyre added. “You’ve got more displacement shadows moving deeper inland. There’s a network of lateral tunnels as well. And see those two other surface structures? I’ll bet those are your surface entrances; they have to be a good hundred and fifty yards back from the primary complex and big enough to drive a truck through. Damn it, but I’ve seen something like this before!”

  “Me too,” Stone interjected. “When I was in Sweden doing a training exchange with the Swede marines. They’ve moved most of their naval basing underground, tunnelin’ into the sides of those fjords or whatever you call ’em. You got sub pens and fast-attack docks sunk right under their coastal mountains. You couldn’t even scratch ’em with a tac nuke.”

  “That’s exactly what this structure is, Stone,” MacIntyre asserted. “This is a sub pen or some other kind of bombproof dock. You can see where it opens into the head of the inlet. If you’re careful with your pilotage, you could run a fair-sized ship in there: You’d have the water depth and the room for passage.”

  “You’d have a hell of a time doing it if they didn’t want company, though,” Steamer Lane spoke up. “Check out the cliff edges overlooking the inlet. More gun positions with a larger return. Heavy machine gun or light autocannon, I’ll bet. Maybe even recoilless rifles. Anything coming up that inlet would be nailed by a three-way crossfire from the cliff tops and from the mouth of the pen.”

  The drone completed its transit of the peninsula, pulling out over the Banda Sea.

  Christine turned to one of the other drone systems stations. “ELINT Monitor, did you get anything on that pass?”

  “There’s somebody in there all right, Miss Rendino,” the SO replied, looking up from his console. “The iron in that black rock lava makes for a good natural Faraday screen, but we caught a couple of spikes just as we crossed over the inlet. Generator static and leakage off a small power grid.”

  “Understood. Drone Control, take her back up. Establish a sentry circuit and keep these coordinates under continuous surveillance.” She turned back to the others. “Fa’ sure, I think we’ve just zeroed Harconan’s prime base.”

  Stone snorted. “Boy howdy, I’ll call that a base. It
’s the Rock of Gibraltar West.”

  Tran shook his head, awed. “I knew Harconan had resources, but I never imagined he had enough to build an underground facility like this.”

  MacIntyre shook his head. “Harconan didn’t build it, Inspector. At best, he’s established squatter’s rights in something that’s been here for a long time.”

  Christine’s eyebrows lifted. “The Second World War?”

  An immediate operations group had been called, dedicated to assessing the discoveries made on what had been dubbed Crab’s Claw Peninsula. MacIntyre, the intel, and the other element commanders had withdrawn from the cramped confines of the joint intelligence center to the relative comfort of the Carlson’s wardroom.

  Christine’s activated and interlinked laptop computer stood by, ready to grant access to the onboard intelligence files, while meter-size hard copy images of the cape taken from both radar and visible spectrum covered the tables.

  No one even made a pass at the coffee urn.

  “That’s where I’ve seen structures like this before,” MacIntyre replied, tapping one of the radar prints. “Maps of the old underground fortifications at Corregidor and the Bonin Islands. I’ll lay you odds this is an installation left over from the Japanese occupation.”

  “But there’s nothing in the records about any facility like this along this stretch of coast,” Christine objected. “There’s nothing about it in the Admiralty Pilot for the New Guinea Coast or in any of the war records. We checked the Navy archives when we were assembling this database!”

  “Then we may presume, Miss Rendino, that the Navy never knew it was there. And as for the Admiralty Pilot, I suspect the last time the Royal Navy’s hydrographers ever really had a look at this coastline was well before World War Two. This site’s natural isolation and security were why it was constructed in the first place. That and the fact that the underground structures here are probably not entirely man-made.”