by Marc Cameron
The MH-60 pilot made two passes to surveil the hillside and then overflew the twisted remains of the hibiscus tree one more time. Satisfied the threat was neutralized, he gave the all-clear for Chavez and the others to come to the beach for pickup. The little Fire Scout remained aloft, providing overwatch.
The MH-60 pilots weren’t keen about spending any more time than necessary in Indonesian airspace, but since the orders to pick up this package had come directly from the secretary of defense, they did as Adara requested and flew seven miles down the beach, where they dropped off Konner Toba a mile past his house so he couldn’t be identified by any neighbors getting off the helicopter.
The Papuan shook Chavez’s hand and then cried when Adara gave him her entire med kit. “You good folk,” he shouted, as the helicopter prepared to lift off from the beach. “Me say prayer for you.”
Chavez collapsed into his seat, wounded, exhausted, and wondering to whom Konner Toba planned on directing his prayer.
60
President Gumelar used the telephone aboard Marine One during the forty-minute flight to Nusa Kambangan Island. He made a quick call to his military adviser first, clearing the way for Marine One and the accompanying aircraft to overfly the country unmolested. Not surprisingly, he called his press secretary next, speaking in rapid-fire Bahasa Indonesian. Ryan couldn’t understand the conversation but got the gist of it when Gumelar used the words hashtag and China in the same contemptuous-sounding phrase. Like everywhere else in the world with access to the Internet, Indonesians were sensitive to public sentiment. Astroturfing what looked like a grassroots campaign to question the validity of Chinese influence in Indonesia would take some political pressure off the president. Such a life ring might come at the expense of Chinese Indonesians—but Gumelar had always struck Ryan as the sort of man who would climb on top of his own mother in order to save himself from drowning.
Only after he’d created a backstop for himself did he call his commanding general of the Indonesian National Police. Marine One was fifteen minutes out when he was finally assured that everything would be in order when they arrived on the prison island. Gumelar passed the phone to his security man, who spoke to the Marine One crew chief with instructions on where to fly. Sergeant Scott in turn relayed the instructions to the pilots, who passed the word to the other aircraft in the presidential lift.
As in the United States, three identical White Tops flew in shuffling formation. Two greenside V-22 Ospreys loaned to HMX-1 from VMM-262 out of Okinawa flew overwatch. At the insistence of President Gumelar, three heavily armed Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighters accompanied the lift on behalf of the Indonesian Air Force.
Only Marine One would land at the prison.
With his phone calls complete, Gumelar’s hands fell into his lap. “Very well,” he said. “There are seven prison sites on the island. Father West is being held at the one called Batu. Your pilot will land at a small soccer field behind the compound itself. I will exit the helicopter first to let the guards know I am acting of my own volition, after which point you and I will enter the facility together. I will sign the requisite clemency papers, a few—”
Special Agent Gary Montgomery leaned forward against his harness, very nearly bursting out of his seat. “Mr. President, I cannot let you go inside the prison.”
Gumelar ignored the agent and spoke directly to Ryan. “You must go inside, Jack,” he said. “We will do this together.”
“Mr. President,” Montgomery said. “This is completely unacceptable. You—”
“I hear you, Gary,” Ryan said. “But sometimes I have to—”
Ryan had never seen Montgomery angry. The agent was a bear of a man anyway, but the space he took up in the aircraft seemed to instantly double in size. His face flushed red, the tendons on the side of his neck tensed as if he were lifting a heavy weight. “When was the last time you were inside a lockup, sir?”
Ryan sighed. “Fifteen, twenty years. Maybe more.”
“Everything we train for, prepare for, will be rendered useless inside those walls. We will not be in control. And I like being in control.”
“Gary—”
“The choice is yours, of course, Mr. President,” Montgomery continued. “But if anything goes wrong in there, I will be unable to protect you without killing a lot of people.”
Ryan gazed out the window as Marine One began to descend in the field beside a run-down compound of concrete and corrugated metal. He didn’t give a damn about President Gumelar’s hurt feelings as long as Pat West was released.
“Gary,” Ryan said. “If you’ll bear with me, I think we might reach a compromise on what to do here . . .”
* * *
—
Father West heard the squeak of shoes on the chipped tile floor long before he saw anyone. His cell was much larger now, fresh water, plenty of light. Even so, the odor of human desperation lingered in the air—and something West recognized immediately as the pall of impending death.
At first, when his conditions improved, he’d thought that his text had gotten through. But he gradually came to realize that these people were going to kill him because of a lie. They just wanted to clean him up beforehand, so they’d feel more civilized while doing it. He’d given up hope of ever being rescued.
There had been no trial. But what would be the point of one, anyway? It was as easy to whip up the records of a trial and conviction as it was to make up evidence of drug trafficking. He’d read about the Bali Nine. He knew that he was just a few kilometers from where two of them had been marched onto a field in front of twelve soldiers and shot.
It was not in West’s nature to hurry the moment of his death, and yet there was absolutely nothing he could do but pray.
The footfalls grew louder and a mountain of a man with dark hair and a tailored suit strode up to the iron bars of his cell. There was an Indonesian man with him who West knew he should have recognized but did not. The big man stepped to the side as two guards unlocked the door and pulled it open.
West backpedaled until he bumped the far wall, nervous to be around so many people. “Are . . .” he stammered. “A . . . are you from the embassy?”
The big man smiled serenely and shook his head. “No, Father West. I work for the President of the United States, and I’m here to take you home.”
* * *
—
Ryan gave the priest his seat, sitting across from him, facing aft. Dr. Bailey started a glucose IV immediately and went to work checking vitals, looking at West’s eyes and teeth. After a few moments, he gave Ryan a slight nod. He’d conduct a more thorough exam when they returned to Air Force One—Ryan didn’t intend to make West remain in Indonesia one second longer than he had to. The President held a cold can of Coca-Cola at Bailey, raising his brow. “How about it, Doc?”
“None for me, thanks,” Bailey joked. “But Father West might like it.”
Ryan chuckled and passed the can to his friend.
“Oh, my.” West held the sweating can to his forehead. “Merciful heaven, Jack. You have no idea . . .”
It killed Ryan to see his friend so drawn and hollow. He opened a packet of cashews and held them out to West. “You look like you could use something salty.”
Gumelar had been on the phone again with his press secretary since before Marine One even left the ground.
Father West drained the Coke at once and sheepishly asked for another, which the crew chief brought him immediately.
Suddenly animated from the sugar and caffeine, West leaned forward toward Ryan. “You got my message?”
“I did,” Ryan said.
“And?” West said.
“And what?”
“And did we get Calliope?” West asked, exhausted, but sounding to Ryan as if he’d never left the Agency. “If that tech is as Noonan described, it is extremely dangerous. And if the Chine
se have it, there is no telling what they might use it for.”
“We’re working on it,” Ryan said. He was unwilling to go into detail in front of Gumelar.
“And Noonan?” West asked.
“Unknown,” Ryan said, looking to President Gumelar. “I’m sure investigative efforts will intensify now that everyone knows the Chinese were involved in your kidnapping and the disappearance of Mr. Noonan.”
“So the Chinese still have the tech?”
“We believe so,” Ryan said.
West closed his eyes and took another drink of Coke. “This has the potential to be very, very bad, Jack. I’m not sure the essence of the situation came through in my text.”
“Tell me now,” Ryan said. “What makes you think that?”
“It was the way Noonan kept describing the thing,” West said. “As a non-player character that could be directed to perform all manner of tasks.”
He suddenly looked around the interior of the helicopter. “How long was I in custody?”
“Over four weeks,” Ryan said.
West blinked, looking as if the wind had been knocked out of him. “Okay, then. I have spent that entire time imagining the havoc an active agent could wreak, were it capable of moving freely through any device with connectivity. In the developed world with the interconnectivity of the so-called Internet of Things, that’s pretty much the whole shebang.”
“Our people at Cyber Com haven’t examined it yet,” Ryan said. “But they theorize it is something like a programmable virus.”
“Not quite.” West shook his head. “This thing is a predator—programmable, yes, but with a mind of its own.”
61
The deck of USS Makin Island was alive with sailors and Marines. To a layman’s eye, the Wasp-class Landing Helicopter Dock amphibious assault ship, or LHD, could be mistaken for her larger sister, the aircraft carrier. LHD runways were short, with no catapults and no arresting cables, but the Makin Island did have aircraft on board—helicopters, Ospreys, and fighters like Harriers and F-35Bs that were capable of short takeoff and vertical landings.
Half as wide and slightly less than one football field shorter than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, USS Makin Island (LHD 8) was not exactly small at 843 feet in length, with a beam of 104 feet. Her aviation assets on this trip consisted of six V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, a CH 53, two MH-60 Seahawks, two Bell AH-1 Super Cobras, two Harrier jump jets, and two F-35B Lightning IIs. She could have carried more, but the mix was mission-specific.
In addition to her air power, LHD 8 was armed with, among other things, Mk 38 chain guns, Sparrow missiles, and four .50-caliber BMG machine guns. The USS Preble and the USS Halsey, two Arleigh Burke–class destroyers out of Everett, Washington, flanked the amphibious ship and provided additional big-stick deterrence.
All the deck guns, aircraft, and support ships were impressive, but the most important component of the USS Makin Island was the eight hundred Marines that could be put on foreign shores to fight at a moment’s notice. Sometimes looked down on by line officers of the big-deck Navy, amphibious forces—or Gator Navy—sailors had a tight, if sometimes competitive, relationship with the Marines they carried. Some sailors called their ship a Marine Corps Uber. For their part, the Marine Expeditionary Units were happy for the lift.
All of them—well, most of them—loved to be at sea.
Captain Greg Goodrich, United States Marine Corps FAST Company, Pacific, stood on the foredeck, looking past the V-22s at the waves while he ticked through the list of his responsibilities for this mission. There was a rhythm to the ocean that appealed deeply to the kind of man he was. He loved casting all lines and leaving behind the distractions of shore. At sea, Captain Goodrich could shoot, exercise, train his platoon—and read. Staring out at the wind and waves was better than watching TV any day of the week. The fantail of the ship provided the perfect location to get his Marines range time, and the deck was big enough for some good outdoor cardio. He’d even organized a couple of boxing matches while under way.
Goodrich had been on the runty side through the seventh grade, athletic, but shorter than everyone else in his class, even the girls. Mostly knees and elbows, he endured a certain amount of bullying. He wanted to join the military and thought being a pilot would be good for someone who was vertically challenged—then he grew four inches the summer after eighth grade. He towered over everyone else in his class his junior year, and had reached six-foot-six by the time he was a senior—a little tall to squeeze into a fighter. He stopped growing a hair short of six-eight his sophomore year at Virginia Military Institute. His mother wasn’t completely on board with VMI. She was a surgeon and wanted him to be a surgeon, or at least an engineer. He compromised and went to a military school that taught engineering. She’d blanched when he’d decided to pursue amateur boxing, warning him that repeated blows to the head didn’t pair well with his calculus and physics studies. She was, of course, correct, but Goodrich found that his wingspan was long enough that he hit other engineering students in the head far more often than he got hit himself.
People tended to think of VMI as a bunch of shaved-headed Rats standing over steam vents in wool greatcoats getting hazed by upperclassmen. There was some of that, but Goodrich relished the visceral aspects of military discipline, the barking, the esprit de corps—the boxing. He’d always been a fighter, and knew he wanted to do it for a living. The Marine Corps allowed just that—and FAST allowed him to focus his fight.
Captain Greg Goodrich was highly educated, well read, and well spoken—but he could also be very, very uncivilized when circumstances called for it.
As was often the case, on this mission, Captain Goodrich’s Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team worked directly for the admiral. FAST Marines trained for unforeseen contingencies, short-notice deployments, force protection of U.S. interests, and anti-terrorism around the globe. They went into threatened embassies, protected nukes, did whatever the Fleet told them to do—anytime, anyplace.
This time, they were guarding a long-range anti-ship missile given to the Navy by Lockheed Martin for the purposes of today’s test. The weapon itself was worth a cool three million dollars, but it was the sensitive artificial intelligence guidance technology inside that made it valuable enough to have FAST standing by to retrieve it should something go awry at launch.
Captain Goodrich’s Marines were young for special operators—mainly corporals and non-rates in their early twenties, but there were only about five hundred in the Marine Corps at any one time. The competition was fierce, and FAST got to be picky about who they chose. A lot of Marines thought they wanted to do FAST, until they found out about the PRP. The personnel reliability program—the Big Brother–like security check where you basically signed over your right to privacy for the privilege of guarding the nation’s nukes. A polygraph was required for the top-secret clearance needed to handle nukes, and virtually any infraction was disqualifying. Any hint of domestic violence, a single DUI, certain foreign contacts, too much porn—all were disqualifying.
Becoming a member of a Marine FAST Company wasn’t easy, but, so far at least, it was the best job Captain Goodrich had had.
Launch would be from one of the F-35s, two hours from now, in the evening, when there were no known Russian or Chinese satellites snooping overhead. The admiral was on the bridge, going over contingencies, and probably on the horn with someone higher up the chain than him at the Pentagon. The reps from the defense company were sweating bullets that their three-million-dollar baby performed as advertised and blew the hell out of the decommissioned Navy ship rigged to look like a Chinese destroyer, forty nautical miles to the south. Makin Island’s two MH-60 Seahawks patrolled the airspace around the target vessel, keeping any surface, submarine, or air traffic out of the area. The jet jockeys and their commanders were in the ready room, briefing. The V-22 Osprey pilots who would stand by on Ready 5 alert stat
us with Goodrich’s FAST platoon and a Navy SEAL team were in their own ready room, doing the same thing.
Goodrich touched a button clipped to the center of his load-bearing vest. “Ski, Ski, Goodrich,” he said, speaking in a normal voice.
Staff Sergeant Sciezenski’s voice came back loud and clear, inside Goodrich’s head rather than in his ear. “Go ahead, Captain.”
“Sitrep?”
“Ten minutes, sir,” the squad leader said.
“Roger that.”
Goodrich nodded to himself. As a rule, he was a little on the stodgy side for a man in his early thirties, preferring technology that was tried and true. He had to admit, though, that this new Sonitus Molar Mic they were testing was turning out to be awfully useful tech. Instead of an earpiece, the Molar Mic clipped over the wearer’s back teeth. Using the same near-field neck-loop utilized by a covert earpiece, the Sonitus device acted as a microphone, sending voice communication from inside the mouth, protected from external noise like gunfire or rotor wash. Instead of being transmitted through the eardrum, incoming signals were felt via vibration in the jawbone. Where earpieces became itchy and uncomfortable the longer they were worn, the body quickly adjusted to what was essentially a mouth retainer with a small mic. To Goodrich’s surprise, it was easy to forget the damned thing was there. So far, battery life was good, most of the day. The ability to hear and speak clearly to a helicopter or V-22 crew chief while you were hanging in the wind on a SPIE rig below it was nothing short of incredible. Staff Sergeant Ski had voiced the platoon’s greatest concern when he asked if they could chew with one of the mics in their mouths. They could, so the tech would get their seal of approval when their portion of the test and eval process was complete.
Goodrich’s two squads of eight Marines each were checking gear and weapons, taking on the last drink of fluid before they would load onto the Alert 5 Osprey, where there was no restroom other than an empty Gatorade bottle. Goodrich was a stickler for readiness and he wanted his squads on board both Ready 5 birds in full battle rattle a half-hour before missile launch. Goodrich laughed and shook his head as he thought about every other time they’d worked with SEALs on one of these missions. He and his men would sit in the stifling tropical heat inside the Osprey, waiting for something to go wrong, stewing in their own juices like good Marines. Outside the bird, also on Ready 5 status, the SEALs would be flopping around doing SEAL shit.
