by David Stone
“I have a suggestion.”
“What?”
“Your whole plan depends on Dalton coming back to this plane of his. If he doesn’t, we’re screwed. There’s only one other way you can play this.”
“Okay.”
“We go to whatever he’s looking for. Wait. When he gets there . . .”
Ong closed his eyes, and, for a time, looked profoundly weary. Lujac didn’t blame him. When this was all over and everybody else was dead, he was going to take the Subito somewhere warm and sultry and stay there until he forgot his own name. Ong opened his eyes after a moment.
“Okay. We go there.”
“Is it far?”
Ong closed his eyes again, put his head back, folded his hands.
“Wait. You will see.”
40
KIPAM Marine Blackhawk, airborne, one hundred and eight miles east of Manado, northern Sulawesi, the Indonesian Archipelago
Major Kang turned out to be a serious combat leader whose grasp of the English language simply needed some polishing. A rocky-faced old lifer in his mid-fifties, with a touch of the thousand-yard stare in his eyes, he was clearly adored by his men, and the little KIPAM base seemed orderly and well run. Kang had listened carefully to Dalton as he explained, in simple terms, leaving out volumes, why they had come, in the middle of the night, on an unmarked plane, on a mission to Manado. Kang had asked a couple of acute questions and listened patiently to the answers.
“So you think a stolen ship might have passed through the Celebes Sea. Maybe right by Manado?”
“Yes, sir.”
Kang sat back at his desk at the KIPAM base, looked out at the perimeter wire and the low, palm-covered hills beyond the base. A pair of Blackhawks was sitting on the pad, being worked over by ground crew. A platoon of T-shirted young Marines was running cadence on a soccer field at the far end of the drill ground. The sound of their chant came across the hardpan, faint but clear, the insistent, rhythmic pounding of the words sounding like home to Ray Fyke and Micah Dalton, sounding like an old familiar song sung in an unknown language.
“We patrol these waters all time, Captain Dalton. Not likely to miss very much. Also, we keep radar sweep. Pirates are a big problem in these waters. So our eyes always open. Ships go by, yes. Busy channel. Some tankers, yes.”
“Do you check the papers of these ships?”
Kang made a gesture, taking in the tiny base.
“We are not . . . equip? Too many jobs. Anyway, ships that do not stop in Diapati or Manado are not our problem.”
“Did you see a tanker, like the one Mr. Fyke has described to you, did any of your air or sea patrols pick up on a tanker like that?”
“Boat you describe, this could be any tanker. Yes, we see a few— maybe nine or ten go through the Celebes Sea past Manado every week. Far offshore, because this is shoal water, very hard to navigate. But this ship, the Mingo Dubai? I remember a notice. It sank. Cleared Malacca Strait, and then break in two in big storm. One survivor. They put him in Changi jail.”
“That ship never sank, sir,” said Fyke, with some heat.
“But report says they do a sonar scan of the seafloor there. Lots of big iron down there, east of Malacca. Ship is down there, not in the Celebes Sea.”
“With respect, sir,” said Fyke, controlling his anger, “the Japanese lost a lot of shipping in that channel during the war. There’s no way to tell one hull from another. And I give you my word as a soldier, Major Kang, the Mingo Dubai did not sink. It was hijacked by pirates.”
“You know this, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
Kang looked as if he’d like to ask Fyke why he was so sure. But something in Fyke’s eyes suggested that it might not be wise.
“Why would pirates take ship through the Celebes Sea. Most pirates take a stolen ship to China, or maybe Mindanao.”
“No idea, sir.”
“Major Kang,” said Dalton. “This trouble you were talking about. What kind of trouble was it?”
“What kind . . . ?”
Kang went quiet, looking at the two men sitting in his office.
“You two are not just soldiers, right?”
Fyke did not react, but Dalton nodded.
“We’re looking into the disappearance of this ship because we think it might pose a security threat to the United States.”
“So you are CIA?”
“We’re sort of freelancers,” said Dalton.
“Okay. But for the CIA?”
“In effect. Yes.”
More contemplative regard from the lifer. Steel wheels spinning.
“Tell you what. I will show you my trouble, you will tell me what you see, maybe then we can talk about your trouble. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like a deal, sir,” said Dalton.
Kang picked up the phone, ordered up a KIPAM Blackhawk, and they were airborne, heading east into the sea green channel between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea an hour later. The sun was coming up out of a storm bank over Papua, and the Celebes Sea looked like a sheet of etched green glass. They flew high and fast. A Blackhawk can do around one-eighty, so they were hovering over a tiny tropical island called Pulau Maju forty-five minutes after they lifted off from the KIPAM base.
The island, which was shaped almost exactly like a shark’s tooth, was a coral atoll that had formed around a volcanic cone thousands of years ago, like most of the islands in the Indonesian Archipelago. Four miles deep and five miles wide, it had a peak in the center, jagged, like a broken tooth, and the land, sloping away from this conical peak like a green felt skirt around a Christmas tree, was ridge-backed and rocky and coated with dense jungle, dotted with stands of coconut palms and bamboo groves.
It looked like difficult terrain to Dalton and Fyke, ground you would not want to have to fight in or over. Major Kang was leaning out the open side door of the Blackhawk, staring down at a village he had called Pasirputih, the only village on the island.
The KIPAM pilot brought the Blackhawk to a hover about five hundred feet above the village, which was not much more than a large cluster of cinder-block and tin buildings around a long, narrow inlet that ran into a long fissure, or gap, in the volcanic base of the island. It was a unique feature, almost a fjord, about two thousand feet long and a couple of hundred feet wide. Halfway up the fjord, the channel took a hard left turn. Beyond the turning, at the closed end of the fjord, there was the burned-out wreckage of what might have been at one point some sort of cannery, now nothing more than a tangled heap of charred poles and caved-in tin roofing and the remains of a great deal of bamboo scaffolding.
The village itself looked deserted, and several of its main buildings also looked as if they had been either burned or torn down by hand. No dogs ran in the ruins, no cattle wandered through the glades, and no villagers looked up at them as they drifted across the site, the downdraft kicking up dust devils on the packed earth, and flattening the sea grass.
“What are we looking at?” Dalton asked, shouting over the roar of the engines. Major Kang shook his bald head slowly, his expression grave.
“We are looking at a massacre.”
He spoke into his headset, and the pilot banked the chopper, flared it out, and set it down on the beach, fifty feet from the waterline. They hopped out—Fyke, with some help from one of the two young KIPAM Marines who had come along; Dalton and Major Kang; and the pilot, a lean and lanky kid, quite tall for a Chinese man. Dalton had been warned by one of the two Marines in the escort detail that the MP Ray Fyke had taken down a few hours before was the pilot’s younger brother. Which probably explained the pilot’s stony manner and hostile silence. Kang led them up the beach and into the main area of the village.
“We clean up the bodies. All over here, and in the hills. Four hundred sixty-two people. Boys. Girls. Old men. Women. May be some still in the jungle, but nobody alive here. Also place was set on fire. What you call accelerant—gasoline. Anything bamboo or wood. We think at
first a terror group call Babi Rusa Brigade. They like pretend they are Abu Sayyaf, Jemaya Islamiya, like that—al-Qaeda wannabe—but really all they do is pirate stuff and extort money from villagers.”
He got onto one knee, dug down into the sand, and came up with five or six spent shell casings, held them out for Dalton and Fyke to look at.
Fyke picked one up, turned it in his fingers.
“Seven-six-two. NATO.”
Kang nodded,
“Yes. How many shell casings like this you think we find?”
Fyke looked at Dalton, shook his head.
“I’d have to guess, couple of hundred?”
“So far, we find more than ten thousand rounds. Just in the village.”
“Ten thousand?” said Dalton.
Kang nodded again, his expression hardening up as he recalled what it had been like to walk through this village a few hours after it had been wiped out.
“M134,” said Fyke. “Had to be.”
“Yeah.” He looked up into the sky, then past the booming surf to the broad plain of glimmering green sea. “Came in airborne.”
“Had to be in a chopper. M134. Six barrels. Made by General Electric. Thing weighs forty pounds loaded, and vibrates like crazy. Rate of fire, over five thousand a minute.”
“Not a chopper,” said Kang, who had given the matter a lot of thought. “Too far to come. Most chopper range less than three hundred miles. Had to have a base inside that perimeter. And it was not one of ours. And not from Papua either. We work with them all the time. All accounted for. Had to be a plane.”
“Ten thousand casings in this sector. ID any more areas?”
“Yes. Up there,” he said, nodding toward the open end of the long, narrow bay. They walked along the beach and reached the mouth of the inlet. The water here looked much deeper, as if the floor of the cut had been dredged out. Dalton stood at the edge and stared down into the deep green water. There was something down there.
Boats, rafts. Tangled wooden structures.
He shaded his eyes and saw that there were perhaps fifteen or twenty small craft scattered around the bottom of the lagoon.
And something else—a large, angular object with two long tubes . . .
“That’s an antiaircraft gun,” he said. “Looks like something the Japanese left here.”
“Yes,” said Kang. “Also down there we find over sixty men and boys. All had weapons. Over here”—he walked around to a depression in the ground; the sand looked like it had been bulldozed into a heap and then plowed back—“here we find a pit. Maybe every--body in village. Men. Boys. Old women. Young girls. All had been shot many times with this bullet. This seven-six-two NATO. There was a ... ?”
He made a gesture, indicating a spearhead.
“A lance? A stake? On it is stuck a head. Old man named Bittagar Chulalong. He was headman of Pasirputih. Somebody cut his head off and stick on this. Leave him there. In that water, maybe thousands of shell casings. Too many to bring up. We find most in the sand. There will be more up there.”
He pointed to the jungles covering the sides of the cliffs.
“Were the casings scattered all over, or concentrated in these fire areas?” asked Dalton. Major Kang had to work out the meaning, but he was quick enough.
“No. Many in one spot. More in another.”
“But not a trail, one after the other?”
“No. All in heaps.”
Dalton looked at Fyke, who nodded.
“Had to be a chopper, Major. Planes have to strafe. Choppers can hover. That’s how you get all those casings in one area. People were concentrated there; the shooter comes in, hovers, lights them up with his minigun. Drive motor is electric, operates so fast you can’t see individual rounds. Just a buzzing sound, and everything in front of it just disintegrates. He could lay down twenty thousand rounds in five minutes. The spent casings would shower down while he raked the crowds. A gun like that, you can kill everybody in a sector in five minutes. Major, are you sure it couldn’t have been a chopper?”
“Pretty sure. Like I say, short range. We searched for a base from Diapati all way to Papua; all the little islands too. No chopper.”
“What was up at the end of the valley here?”
“Come on. I will show you.”
They walked in single file along the edge of the inlet. The hills rose up sharply on both sides until they were in a shaded gorge. After about a thousand yards, the trail took a sharp left turn into a narrow valley, bounded by volcanic cliffs thinly covered in jungle greenery and stubby palms. Dalton stood at the edge of the gorge and looked down into the water, which was not the right color.
“This channel. It’s deep. Even this far from the shore. Must be fifty, sixty feet down.”
“Yes,” said Kang. “They used to have cannery here. Many years ago. Russian company. They bring in barge and dredge out the channel so they can bring in big boats right to loading dock.
“How long ago?” asked Fyke.
“Maybe twenty years. All gone now. Just ruins.”
“The factory looks like it was blown up.”
“Yes. Fire too. All fresh.”
Dalton and Fyke stood there, looking up the cut at the tangled heaps of bamboo and rusted iron about five hundred feet away.
“Where’s the canning machinery?” said Dalton.
“Sold for scrap by Bittagar. Long time. Nothing there now but rusted conveyer belts and boilers. Anything too big to move.”
Something was fluttering in the undergrowth a few feet away. Dalton climbed up the hillside and saw a piece of cloth, shredded, singed, in tatters. He held it up to the light. A woodland camo pattern was still visible. The thing was made of nylon netting, strong but light. And it was new. He stood there on the hillside, staring down at Fyke and Kang, and then letting his eyes travel along the inlet, from the sharp left turn to the charred wreckage at the end of the channel.
“Ray, how long is this part of the inlet?”
Fyke ran a practiced eye over the ground.
“Five hundred feet. Give or take.”
“And wide?”
“Two hundred feet here. Maybe a hundred and fifty at the far end.”
Dalton slid down the hillside and handed the piece of camo nettingto Fyke. “There are scraps of this stuff all over that hillside, Ray. The camo net must have been huge. Major, do you have any way of finding out who the people were who ran this cannery? You said they were Russians?”
“There would be records in Manado. Many fishers there took their catch to Pulau Maju. I will find out.”
“Thanks. Ray. Do you see what I’m seeing?”
Fyke stared at the cut for a while.
Then he had his Gestalt moment.
“The tanker. They brought it here. Hid it under the camo netting. So no satellites or planes could spot it. What’s up there is what’s left of the dry dock. They brought the Mingo Dubai right here.”
Kang was watching the exchange.
“The ship? Mingo Dubai?”
“Yes,” said Fyke, his face reddening as the implications sank in.
“The Mingo was five hundred feet long. A beam of ninety feet. She drew almost thirty feet of water fully loaded. This channel has been dredged out to sixty feet. It would have been perfect. A hundred miles from anywhere.”
“These the same people killed all the villagers?” asked Kang.
“I think so,” said Dalton.
“Who are these people?”
“Serbians. From Montenegro.”
“You know this for sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“But where’d it go from here, Mikey?” Fyke asked.
“I don’t know. How many tankers like the Mingo are there?”
“Worldwide? Maybe five hundred, maybe a thousand, in her class. She’s one of the smallest types, a Seawaymax. Obsolete now. Too small.”
“How much can she carry?”
“Sixty thousand metric tons. Why?”
“Branco Gospic had the ship taken. Who does Gospic trade with?”
“Terrorists. The Chechyns. Taliban. Al-Qaeda. Iran. North Korea.”
“If they got hold of a tanker, what do you think those assholes would do with it? Turn legit and go into the shipping business? Or fill it full of ammonium nitrate—or something worse—and sail it into a U.S. port?”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly. How many ports in the United States?”
“Why just the U.S.?”
“Because that’s who we work for, Ray. We’ll let everyone else know, alert all their agencies, but we’re concentrating on the U.S. How many?”
“Hell . . . maybe a hundred and fifty.”
“What are the major ones? I mean, ones that could handle a midsized tanker like the Mingo?”
“Got to be at least eighty. Port of South Louisiana. Houston. New York and New Jersey—”
“New York? Christ. They’re gonna have to go to red, bring in Homeland Security, the Navy, the Coast Guard—”
“Major, can you patch us through to a landline from the chopper?”
Major Kang nodded.
“Sure. Come with—”
Two things happened at once.
The Major’s radio set beeped, and they heard the sound of a plane closing in. The sound seemed to come from all around them, echoing and reechoing up and down the inlet. Kang picked up his radio and thumbed the CALL button, barking out a question in Chinese.
The reply was a tinny crackle. Kang issued some orders. He was putting the radio back in his belt and reaching for his pistol when a large aircraft flew straight across the cut, blocking out the sun, a twin-rotor Osprey, olive-drab, without markings.
They all looked up as the Osprey, in hover mode, hammered down the gorge toward the KIPAM Blackhawk parked on the beach. The rear loading ramp was open, and there was a figure in the bay, a young Asian boy, in jeans and a bomber jacket, standing behind a tripod-mounted weapon. An M134 Minigun. Beside the gun mount stood a crate with a belt of ammo running up to the gun. The kid on the trigger was looking east toward the beach and did not seem to notice them.
