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.
But in their search for the lone sniper, the Hkh’Rkh hit the rebel hardpoint: a colonial era bank. There they encountered almost twenty well-armed humans, half equipped with relatively modern Pindad caseless assault rifles. Following their new counterinsurgency doctrine, the Hkh’Rkh held position while a third APC positioned itself in the fields well behind the bank. Any rebels fleeing the kempang in that direction would run directly into its massive firepower. And so the Hkh’Rkh waited for the game-ending air strike.
And they waited.
As Caine knew they would. He had coordinated this operation with two other resistance cells. Triggered by a daisy chai
n of pager signals, those two cells had mounted sharp, short attacks in other, distant kempangs as soon as the Hkh’Rkh had been spotted wheeling their way out to the one in which Caine was currently situated. And that meant that the forward-deployed enemy air assets in this region were already committed to attacking other rebel forces. Which had disappeared by the time the invader attack craft reached their target zones.
Consequently, the Hkh’Rkh in Caine’s kempang had to wait that much longer for the already overtaxed air assets based at smaller, harried airfields around Jakarta. Or, even more likely, due to the low threat of concerted insurgency in the kempang’s region, the Hkh’Rkh would simply be ordered to do what they most wanted to do: close with the enemy and kill them. Personally.
When the two Hkh’Rkh squads waiting at the edge of the kempang started moving to join the first, Caine knew what orders they had received, just as if he had intercepted and decoded them.
The Hkh’Rkh had settled in half of their forward squad to pin down the insurgents in the bank, which proved extremely resistant to their fire. The reason: steel construction sheeting and engine-blocks of old cars lining its interior walls. The remainder of the squad split and probed the flanks to find a route that skirted the structure and enabled the follow-up squads to hit it from the sides and rear. Their probe of the bank’s right flank found an indeterminate number of resistance fighters with relatively modern weapons. But the primary threat they posed resided in the variety of small, wire-detonated IEDs at their disposal. After suffering two casualties there and making no progress, the Hkh’Rkh withdrew to a safe distance, pinning that flank without any further probing.
The left flank of Caine’s resistance cell presented the invaders with a more promising tactical opportunity. They encountered only two command-detonated mines, and the few humans there were only armed with AKs. The venerable rifles were not reliably lethal to the Hkh’Rkh except when discharged at very close range and in very great numbers. After driving these humans back from their first position, the Hkh’Rkh became bold and tried charging across a street to seize what seemed like that flank’s final fallback position.
That was when they learned that the sniper who had greeted them upon entering the town had relocated himself to cover this flank. With one Warrior killed outright by the rifle, and another wounded and then hammered senseless by the rebels’ AKs, the rest of the Hkh’Rkh withdrew back across the street. Their two casualties laying in plain sight of Caine’s mission tower CP, they traded shots with the humans occasionally, without any result in either direction.
However, in tactical terms, the Hkh’Rkh probes had been successful: they had found the insurgents’ position and had identified the left as the weak flank. The subsequent deployment of their reserves—reported by a seventy-five-year-old grandmother speaking into a hard-wire phone in her second-story sitting room—made the invaders’ attack orders quite clear. They were bringing up the next two squads with an acoustic trackback system and heavy weapons. They’d try to overrun the human position on the left flank, then turn sharply northward and roll up along the now-uncovered left side of the bank, assaulting it from the side and rear with superior numbers and supporting fire from heavy weapons and portable rockets. For all Caine knew, they might have stocks of CoDevCo-supplied tear gas with them as well.
A few minutes later, the rebel overwatch in the minaret of a dusty, dilapidated mosque a kilometer outside of town confirmed that the Hkh’Rkh assault forces were moving into engagement positions. The observers’ signal—closing the shutters on the top window of the tapering tower—had been visible to, and understood by, every human unit: approximately three minutes to contact.
Caine looked at his ancient, wind-up wrist watch. The timing was crucial: the first rush of the Hkh’Rkh attack upon the left flank had to be blunted enough to ensure that they would not all charge across the street. Not immediately, at any rate. He turned to Hadi as Teguh entered the mission tower CP from the rear. “Any reports?”
Hadi shook his head. “The Sloths are quiet up by the bank and the right flank. Some of the townspeople are coming out, though.”
“What? We told them—”
“They’re coming out to run away, Caine. Now that the firing’s died down, they probably think it’s a good time to get out. Before it starts again.”
There was nothing to be done about it now, and hopefully, the Hkh’Rkh would perceive the fleeing women and children as civilians trying to distance themselves from the insurgents in their kempang. Hopefully.
Caine picked up his Pindad caseless carbine. “Hadi, signal the launch crews to stand ready. The Hkh’Rkh will be finding their assault positions now. Knowing them, they won’t waste a lot of time debating optimal attack procedure.”
“No,” agreed Teguh, “the Sloths got no problem with being decisive.”
Hadi leaned over. “Launch crews signal they are ready and waiting for the launch order.”
Up the street, in the buildings across from those rebels who’d drawn the risky job of manning the weak left flank, there was movement. “Get ready,” whispered Caine.
Human shouting arose from the buildings in which the Hkh’Rkh were probably readying themselves. It subsided quickly.
“What was that?” Teguh asked, peering up the street, clutching his Pindad six-millimeter caseless more tightly.
“Don’t know,” Caine murmured. “Could the Hkh’Rkh be trying to interrogate civilians?” To date, the Hkh’Rkh did not torture opponents, even though they killed them readily enough. But perhaps they had decided to try something new—?
Hadi’s head snapped up. “Left flank observation post reports movement in buildings along the expected enemy assault route. Do we launch?”
Caine scanned those buildings through binoculars. “Not yet.” He glanced overhead at the ceiling. “Are they ready up in the attic?”
“They are,” Teguh answered with a nod. “They’ve only got the two RPG rounds, though.”
Caine nodded. More for show than anything else. Something upon which to focus the attackers’ attention, to break their momentum in mid-assault for a few crucial seconds. Up the street, Caine heard more shouting; this time a dog barked. What the hell—?
Muzzle flashes erupted out of the windows of the buildings across from the rebels’ left flank. A high-pitched growl rose up a moment later: a coil gun. An incredibly lethal weapon, and a pearl of great price. As if fleeing its ear-rending reports, a dog ran out of one of the houses, tail between its legs.
The return fire from the left flank was fierce but dropped off quickly. Out of the phone receiver held by Hadi, lilliputian shouts of desperation rose and then were suddenly silent.
“Caine,” started Teguh.
“Wait,” said Caine, watching the street through his binoculars.
Another dog ran out of the same building—from which the two expected squads of Hkh’Rkh emerged in a rush, their distinctive loping strides carrying them rapidly toward the center of the street, firing as they came.
As Caine took the phone from Hadi, he shouted, “Flanking fire!” Teguh threw open the mission’s shutters. Without stopping, he shouldered his Pindad and dumped half a clip into the right flank of the charging Hkh’Rkh. Hadi was doing the same a moment later—just as Caine heard the defunct attic fan overhead get kicked outward, followed immediately by a hoarse, roaring rush: an RPG sped down the street toward the enemy.
This hail of deadly fire—but particularly the rocket—made the Hkh’Rkh dive for cover or go prone in the street. With sickening speed, however, they shifted their fire to the mission tower. Caine heard rounds ringing against the steel sheeting they had mounted inside the double-coursed brick-and-mortar walls.
He counted to two as the Hkh’Rkh’s personal weapons continued to roar and rounds started coming in through the open window, pulverizing the walls behind them. “Launch,” Riordan shouted into the phone’s receiver, just before grabbing Teguh and the less-willing Hadi, one with each hand. Pul
ling them downward, he yelled, “We’ve got to go!”
With a whining growl, the coil gun unloaded at them. The street-facing wall started coming apart; the steel plating screeched as hornet-screaming rounds spattered it, some going straight through.
One caught Hadi square in the sternum. In the same instant that a dime-sized entry wound appeared on his chest, his back blew out in a cascade of red mist, meat, and spine fragments. The air overhead was alive with a shrieking torrent of four millimeter projectiles that ground everything they hit to gravel and dust.
Caine and Teguh stayed low, scrambled back to a waiting rope in the stairwell, slid down to the ground floor. While Teguh hooked up the phone they’d readied at this fallback point, Caine peered out the doorway, to the south. The rebels’ six precious fire-and-forget missiles—the kind that could be left sitting in a trashcan until launched—were arcing up from their launch points along the tree line. The trajectories of the missiles suggested their apparent targets: the APCs waiting outside of town to the north.
Meanwhile, the Hkh’Rkh up the street were already reorganizing and checking their wounded. Those who had been providing covering fire from within the buildings now shouldered out to join the others, ignoring the fitful sputters of a sole AK-47 as they prepared to complete their overrun attack of the left flank—
—just as a third dog, this one not much more than a puppy, ran into the street, heading south after the first two. More human cries arose from the buildings being vacated by the Hkh’Rkh. From between their ogrelike shapes, a little girl carrying a doll darted out, screaming after the young dog.
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