Balance of Power

by James W. Huston

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it. You want a memo or something?”

  “One page. Bullet points. What he can and can’t do.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Mind if I get some help?”

  “Whatever it takes—don’t work on anything else right now.” He looked up at Dillon. “We know any more about the jerks who did this?”

  “Just what’s on CNN.”

  Stanbridge nodded.

  The sun had already set on the sweltering Java Sea. Swells were calm and the water was smooth with a slight chop. The engines on the three cigarette boats throbbed as they reduced their throttles entering the beautiful lagoon. Captain Clay Bonham stood behind the small man driving the boat with his hands tied behind him. Another man held a large knife at his back.

  Bonham tried to memorize the entire scene in case he could ever break free of his captors and try to describe this island to the Navy. He strained to read the latitude and longitude from the GPS satellite navigation unit on the dash. He knew the chances of getting free were zero. He knew the chances of living through this were about the same. No blindfold. They didn’t care what he saw because he wasn’t going to be telling anyone about it. He winced as he remembered his crewmen. Even though the F-14 had spotted the Pacific Flyer, the Navy had not been able to reach the ship before Washington and his terrorists executed his crew and kidnapped him. There was no hope anyone was going to get him out alive. Bonham gritted his teeth.

  The three boats coasted to a pier that had obviously been recently constructed. It was solid and well built. One of the men jumped off the bow of the lead boat in which Bonham and George Washington were riding and secured the bow line to a post. As soon as the aft line was secured, the men scrambled onto the pier and into the jungle surroundings. The man with the knife pulled up on Bonham’s arm, causing pain to shoot through his shoulders. Bonham refused to cry out. He stepped onto the side of the boat and onto the pier and marched forward as directed by the man with the knife. There were several tents and lean-tos in what was obviously a temporary setting.

  I’ll bet they have dozens of these, Bonham thought. Good pier, temporary settings, fast speedboats, and a mother ship to carry them around. He shook his head. The Navy would never find them.

  Admiral Billings growled to himself as he stared at the chart. The thought of an entire battle group looking for three speedboats in the immense Java Sea was ridiculous. If there was one thing he hated, it was looking ridiculous. Only seventeen thousand islands in Indonesia. And he was supposed to find three little boats, no matter what. Even though it was considered critical to the security interests of the United States, for some reason they couldn’t redirect the necessary satellites to the area to help in the search. Satellites would be able to image and identify the boats if they were in port. But other commitments were more critical—even though no one would tell him what those commitments were.

  He looked around the table at his staff, who were all staring at him, trying to read his mind. They knew better than to speak first. He pointed to the chart. “You see how many islands there are? By now, those boats could be on any of them, or none of them. Agree?” he said looking at his intelligence officer, who nodded her head. “I’m up for any ideas you have. We’re steaming around here looking stupid, wasting nuclear fuel, jet fuel, and sleep.”

  “I think we need to start flying recce hops over the beaches of some of the closer less-inhabited islands, Admiral,” the CAG said. “We’ll never find them in the open ocean. They can’t be that stupid.”

  “What else?” Billings asked, peeved.

  The chief of staff looked around, then spoke. “I think we need to be coordinating with Indonesia to get permission to overfly their territory. We’ve got to lean on them.”

  The admiral sat back and waved his hand. “You’ve read the messages on that. We asked Indonesia, and they said no. Don’t ask me why, but they did. Probably don’t want to look impotent, letting a bunch of Americans run around showing the only way they can catch them is if the U.S. Navy does it for them. I know how those things go. They want us involved but don’t want to acknowledge that.”

  “Well, we’ve got to lean on them to let us get involved, or nothing will ever happen.”

  “Can’t. Anything else?” No one spoke.

  “Until something changes, I want all flights to do surface surveillance and recce, and find those three boats. If they can peek into harbors and islands with radars or TV units, then do it. But stay in international waters.” He looked at his operations officer. “SEALs and Marines ready to go if we find them and get the go-ahead from the President?”

  “They’re ready, Admiral,” the chief of staff replied, jumping in.

  The admiral nodded. “I want hourly reports on where our aircraft have gone and whether we’ve seen anything suspicious. I want every flight charted in SUPPLOT.” Beth nodded. “Until we find them, we’ll just have to sit tight.”

  “Any traces on those strange explosives the SEALs found aboard the Pacific Flyer?”

  “No, sir. Apparently neither the military nor the intelligence community has seen anything like them before, and no one else has either. All the descriptions in our messages came up with blanks. No one has seen anything anywhere like it.”

  The admiral sat back and put his hands behind his head. “Maybe these guys are more sophisticated than we’re giving them credit for.”

  Commander Beth Louwsma spoke first. “Probably just bought them from China or Iran or somewhere. Hard to say where they got them. We can be certain, though, they didn’t create ’em. Those devices showed some sophisticated manufacturing. Not something a terrorist group is going to be able to pull off by themselves.”

  “Still. Don’t underestimate them. If they have access to those, they may have more surprises up their sleeves. We need to be very cautious.”

  “Yes, sir. Concur…”

  The door to the admiral’s cabin opened quickly and a first class petty officer came in. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the admiral, looking every bit as awkward as he felt in his dirty denim uniform. “This just came in and the Ship’s Intel thought Commander Louwsma should see it right away.”

  The admiral waved him in, and the petty officer crossed to Beth Louwsma and handed her a file. All eyes were on her as she opened the file and examined the contents. She frowned as she stared at the picture in front of her. It wasn’t a photograph, but it was clearly from a satellite. A radar satellite, but the United States didn’t have any radar satellites anywhere in the area. She motioned for the petty officer to approach and lean down. She whispered in his ear, and the petty officer pointed to a legend on the back of the photo. The petty officer backed away, and Louwsma looked at the admiral.

  “Well?” the admiral asked, annoyed at the intrusion.

  “I think we’ve got them, Admiral,” Beth said, unable to hide the excitement in her voice. Her chest rose and fell much more rapidly as she tried to catch her breath.

  “What? How?” The admiral leaned forward enthusiastically.

  Beth swallowed. “Radar satellite. Even though the boats are fiberglass, most of what is in them isn’t. They still show a distinctive shape. We had a file copy of the same Italian cigarette boat in the Mediterranean. One of the 53 pilots gave us a lead—said he thought it was an Italian boat.”

  “So, what do you have?”

  “We have a radar satellite image taken”—she looked at the top of the photo—“two hours ago that appears to have caught three cigarette boats under some very nice camouflage in an inlet of an island.”

  The admiral smiled with satisfaction. “So you got them to redirect the satellites after all. Well done.”

  Louwsma looked chagrined. “Not exactly, Admiral. This isn’t our radar image.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Russian,” she replied.

  The admiral tried to disguise his disgust. “How’d we get it?”

  “They called us and asked us if we wanted it.�
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  “Why in the hell would they do that?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. Could be the Islamic thing. They’ve always seen the Islamic fundamentalists as a threat. Many of them think that’s what caused the breakup of the Soviet Union, with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikist—”

  “Could it be bogus?” he interrupted.

  “Could be. The specialists will check it. I’m pretty sure it’s legit though.”

  “So where are they?”

  Beth Louwsma leaned over the chart, studied it for a minute, looked again at the latitude and longitude on the radar image of the three faint speedboats. She put her finger on a small island southeast of Sumatra, two hundred miles southwest of the battle group. “Here.”

  As Dillon walked back into his office, the phone rang. He shut the door loudly behind him and reached for the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Molly said. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” Dillon said, sounding concerned.

  “What?” she asked, perceiving his tone.

  “A lot going on. This thing has people pretty wound up.”

  “I’ll say,” she replied. “Listen, I know you planned on working tonight, but is there anyway we could get together? I was kind of tired the other night, I was short with you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty low on Hamburger Helper. I’ve got some canned tuna—if you bring a fork…”

  “My turn,” she said. “Something healthy.”

  “Sounds tasteless.”

  “It won’t be. Spaghetti.”

  “Now that is healthy.” He looked at the increasing pile of paper on his desk and tried to estimate the work ahead of him.

  “You’ve got to eat, as you always say,” she prompted him.

  “I really can’t. I’d love to, but I just can’t. I really appreciate the offer though.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, withdrawing before she was perceived as being vulnerable. “I’ll talk to you later—”

  “Hey, before you go, we just got word the President was going to make an announcement soon. Any truth to that?”

  “Not that I know of, but I wouldn’t necessarily know.”

  “I hear ya. What’s he got you working on?”

  “Oh, just some research.”

  “What about?”

  “You can’t ask me that.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  “Just War Powers stuff, you know, the usual crisis process.”

  “Same here, just different perspective. We should compare notes.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, his mind already elsewhere. “Probably not.”

  “See ya,” she said.

  “Yeah, bye,” he closed as he began reading a law review article on the War Powers Resolution.

  Commander Mike Caskey looked down at his nav display and saw that they were ten miles from the waypoint where they would begin their TARPS run to photograph the bay where the Russian satellite had spotted the three cigarette boats. Messer, in the back seat, was already slaving the television sight unit, the TVSU, to get a videotape of the area to complement the still photos that would be taken automatically by the TARPS pod they were carrying on the belly of the plane. He increased his speed to three hundred fifty knots and checked his fuel. “See anything yet?”

  “Nope. Just foliage. Come starboard ten degrees, prepare for run.”

  Caskey eased the stick slightly right and descended. The cobalt-blue ocean rushed by. The spot they approached, a small jungle island between Java and Sumatra, was thought to be uninhabited. At least that’s what Pinkie, the intelligence officer, had said. But he had said it with such a complete lack of conviction that Caskey knew he had no idea. “Think they’ve got any SAMs?”

  “Where they gonna get SAMs without us hearing about it?” Messer said. “No chance.”

  Caskey sucked pure oxygen in deeply from his mask and sighed.

  “Here comes the waypoint,” Messer said. He reached down beside his left knee and turned on the cameras.

  10

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER PINKIE COUSINS, THE AIR wing intelligence officer, leaned over the table and examined the photograph from Caskey’s airplane. The quality was stunning, especially for an airplane that wasn’t designed for reconnaissance using a pod attached to the bottom of the plane. He examined the picture more carefully. The sideways angle of the camera lent itself to revealing things that an overhead photograph, like a satellite, would never see. Like this. Clear as a bell, three cigarette boats at anchor underneath a beautiful camouflage cover in a small inlet on the island of…of what? He looked at the chart next to him to find the island. It wasn’t even named. Too small.

  It may not be named, he thought, but it sure isn’t going anywhere. He picked up the phone to the admiral’s intelligence officer. He dialed the number he knew by heart. “Hey, Commander,” he said, wondering for the hundredth time how a Navy officer could be so gorgeous. He had lusted after Beth Louwsma ever since he was an ensign, when she had been one of the instructors in his intelligence course. But every single male intelligence officer had lusted after her to no avail.

  “Morning, Pinkie. What you got?”

  “Found ’em. I’m sure. TARPS photo confirms that Russian radar satellite. Unless somebody had a sale on white cigarette boats at about five hundred thou each, unless there’s a butt-load of these boats running around in the Java Sea hanging out under camouflage netting for fun, then we’ve found our boys.” He shifted his feet and looked at the photograph again.

  Beth responded without hesitating. “Let’s brief the admiral right away. Bring the photo.”

  “You got it,” he said as he grabbed the photo and slipped it into a file. He walked down to SUPPLOT and fingered the rocker keys on the wall. He moved the spring-loaded keys with the lightning speed that comes from daily repetition of the code and the lock buzzed open. He pushed the steel door and stepped into the dimly lit room. It was small, with charts on the walls and electronic gear humming all around. Less than a minute later, the admiral entered.

  Pinkie had been fond of Admiral Billings ever since he had known him as the commanding officer of Fighter Squadron Eighty-four on the Nimitz. Pinkie had been a wide-eyed ensign on his first tour as an intelligence officer assigned to the Jolly Rogers.

  “What you got, Pinkie?” the admiral asked, skipping the preliminaries as he always did and glancing at Beth Louwsma, whom he trusted completely, not only to provide him with good intelligence but also as a sounding board.

  “Recce photos from the F-14 TARPS mission that MC flew.” He handed a copy of the photo to the admiral, who looked at it carefully. “Look closely in the shadow toward the left of the middle,” he said, pointing. “There are three cigarette boats parked there—”

  “Moored,” the admiral corrected.

  “Moored there,” Pinkie said, “under camouflage netting. These photos are being shown to the Marine captain who was flying the CH-53 with the SEALs who saw three similar boats heading away from the Flyer. I have no doubt he’ll confirm these as the ones.”

  Billings frowned and looked at the two intelligence officers. “Does the location match up with that Russian radar satellite?”

  “Yes, sir. Small island,” he said, crossing to the chart of the Java Sea. “Right”—he leaned forward and touched the chart—“here. Just southeast of Sumatra and west of Java.”

  “What’s on the island?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It’s not even named on the chart. Indonesia has a pile of islands, most of which aren’t even inhabited—although you’d think with two hundred million people they’d take advantage of every island.” Pinkie smiled as he glanced at Billings. Billings stared at the photo carefully, unsmiling. “In any case,” Pinkie continued, “I’m trying to find out what I can about the island, but right now all I know is the general terrain—jungle. We’re just south of the equator here, and the heat just hovers ove
r these islands, crushing them into submission.”

  “Very poetic,” the admiral quipped. “Any idea how many people are there?”

  “No, sir. The jungle cover is too dense to get any good reconnaissance. We really have no way of knowing.”

  The admiral looked at him and frowned. “What do you mean, ‘no way of knowing’?”

  “We can’t get good imagery of the island, only the water around it, and the radar info is useless, basically.”

  The admiral sat back in his leather chair and looked at Pinkie and at Beth, who was standing to his left. “Seems to me we need to put someone on the ground there.”

  Pinkie looked at Beth, then at the admiral, and nodded.

  “What?” the Speaker exclaimed as he jumped up from his chair. “What’s he going to say?” He listened to the President’s Chief of Staff on the other end of the phone explain that the President would address the nation tonight. “That’s not good enough. I want to know what he’s—I understand that. I am the Speaker of the House,” he said slowly. “Fine, just remind him of the War Powers Resolution. If he doesn’t think we’ll—I don’t care!” he said, raising his voice and putting his free left hand on his hip. He stared at Dillon and Grazio as he spoke. His eyes were covered by his frowning eyebrows. “That’s a crock. Just tell him what I said. Fine.”

  He turned to Dillon as he hung up. “I tell you what; if he sends troops over there without consulting us, I’ll raise the roof. I’ll call him on it—he better not think I won’t.” He looked at the rest of the staff that had gathered in his office for the brief on the War Powers Resolution Dillon had just finished. “He’s going on the air tonight at nine to announce what his decision is.”

  “Good thing we’ve already looked at the War Powers. Should we fax him an outline?” Dillon asked smugly.