Juan came to a quick decision. He knew at some point he was going to have to split his forces. The Oregon was a perfect platform for espionage operations, but he needed the flexibility of people on the ground with access to jet travel. He had no idea where this case was going to take him. Most likely Indonesia, if that was where O&O still kept an office, so now was the time to get assets en route.
“Do me a favor and find Eddie Seng. Tell him to pack up some gear. We’ll be going international, so nothing that can’t pass airport security. Have him pick two of his men. We’re hitching a ride on Tory Ballinger’s helicopter to go hunting hyenas and lions.”
“But where?”
Juan tapped Mark’s report. “Have an answer by the time we land in Japan.”
9
ANTON Savich would have preferred meeting Shere Singh at his office in a downtown Jakarta high-rise, but the stubborn Sikh demanded they meet at the site of Singh’s latest venture, across the Sunda Strait on Sumatra. Savich had developed a healthy fear of flying after crisscrossing the Soviet Union for years on Aeroflot and would have taken a ferry despite Indonesia’s dismal maritime safety record but was saved when Singh offered him use of his company helicopter.
He looked out the yellowed Plexiglas at the strip of beach below the chopper that seemed to guard the jungle from the sea. It was a primeval landscape, and the villages that flashed under him looked as though they hadn’t changed in generations. The wooden fishing boats clustered in secluded bays had likely been built by the grandfathers of the men who sailed them today. The land to his left was hidden by an impenetrable canopy of vegetation that had yet to fall to slash-and-burn farming or industrial timber cutting. To his right, the sea was clear blue and pristine. A double-masted schooner, a coastal freighter he assumed, cut through the light swells with her sails bellied taut by the trade winds. She looked as though she’d sailed out of the nineteenth century.
How could a people who had known such a paradise as the archipelago create a city like Jakarta with its eighteen million people, gridlocked traffic, crime, poverty, disease, and smog as thick and noxious as a World War One mustard gas attack? In their rush to modernize, the Indonesians had embraced the worst of what the West had to offer and then abandoned the best of their own culture. They’d created a patchwork of consumerism, corruption, and burgeoning religious fanaticism that teetered on the brink of collapse. Through contacts, Savich had learned that the United States had clandestinely stationed more than a thousand soldiers on the islands to help train local forces to fight the twenty-first century war.
The pilot tapped Savich’s arm and pointed ahead. He grudgingly looked away from the peaceful sailing ship and focused his attention on their destination. The complex was hidden in a bay by a rocky promontory, so all he could see was the flotilla of ships lying at anchor. Even from this distance and altitude he could tell they were derelicts, the steel husks of once-proud vessels that had outlived their usefulness. Several were wreathed in shimmering halos of their own spilled bunker fuel, like murdered corpses surrounded by their own blood and waste. One had lain so long here that her keel had succumbed to corrosion. Her bow and stern both pointed skyward with her crushed stack vised in between like a nut in a giant cracker. A quarter way to the horizon a line of oil containment boom cut a wide arc around the bay. There was an entrance gate manned by a pair of small tenders that could open the floating boom to allow the ship’s entrance. No ships ever left the facility, at least by sea.
The chopper banked around the headland, and the Karamita Breakers Yard came into view. More ships of every size and description were moored within the bay like cattle in a chute headed for slaughter. A pair of supertankers, each at least a thousand feet long, had been dragged up the sloping beach by a combination of tidal surges and huge winches. An army of men swarmed over the hulks, tips of glowing flame sparking whenever their cutting torches touched metal. A crane on wide crawler treads sat just at the surf line and plucked steel sections of hull as soon as they were sliced free. It swung them farther up the beach, where even more workers were ready to cut and beat the slabs into manageable chunks. Other teams of men ripped piping and electrical cables from within the ship’s hull, eviscerating the supertanker as though they were dissecting a carcass for consumption
And in a sense they were. The smaller pieces of metal were transferred to railcars for the short journey northward to the Karamita Steel Works. There, the scrap was melted down and remilled into steel reinforcement bars for the never-ending construction boom going on in southern China. Behind the modern steel mill shimmered the artificial lake backed up behind Indonesia’s largest hydroelectric plant, the engine that allowed for such heavy industry in an otherwise inhospitable jungle.
The once pristine sand that ringed the bay had turned into a black, tarry porridge that clung to the men’s feet like clay. Beyond the oil boom the sea was reasonably protected, but inside the floating containment wall, the water was a toxic soup of oil, heavy metals, PCBs, and asbestos. Acres of land had been turned into storage yards littered with ships’ boilers, mounds of lifeboats, an assortment of anchors, and hundreds of other items that could be resold on the open market. Behind the fenced lots rose dozens of drab dorm buildings little better than tenements. A squatters’ camp of prostitutes, con men, and crooks had sprung up along the rail line to drain the workers of the few pennies a day they earned turning retired ships into scrap.
Savich noted that the forest behind the facility was slowly receding as thousands of workers cut the trees for their cooking fires. While the air was free of pollution because the mill ten miles north ran on hydro rather than coal or oil, an industrial pall hung over the breaker’s yard, the miasma of its own corruption and filth.
But there was one modern element to the process, and this was doubtlessly what Shere Singh wanted Savich to see. On the far side of the tankers was a gleaming corrugated metal building nearly as large as the ships, with dozens of translucent panels on the tin roof to provide light within. Two-thirds of the eight-hundred-foot building was constructed out over the water on large pilings. Four sets of train tracks met the inland side, and as the chopper thundered over the facility Savich saw two pairs of small diesel engines haul a five-foot-long portion of a ship out of the building. He recognized the curve of the hull, the thick keel, and could see interior passages as though peering into a cut-away model. No, he thought, it reminded him of a slice taken from a loaf of bread. The cuts were straight, and the metal shone silvery in the tropical light. He couldn’t fathom how something as large as a ship could be carved so perfectly.
The helicopter pad was several miles from the breaker’s yard, protected from the din and smell by another promontory of naked rock. Around it were tended lawns and breezy bungalows for the supervisors, clerks, and skilled workers. An open jeep was waiting next to the landing zone, the driver standing by to help Savich with his luggage. The Russian had no desire to stay in Indonesia longer than necessary, so all he carried was a briefcase and a battered leather grip. The bulk of his luggage was in an airport locker. He allowed the driver to put the bag in the back of the jeep but kept the calfskin case on his lap as they drove toward the breaker’s yard.
It took a few moments for his hearing to return after an hour’s flight in the helo, and when it did, his ears were assaulted by the racket of pneumatic cutting chisels, spade-like jackhammers, and the piercing throb of countless generators. The crane dropped a ten-ton slab of metal onto the beach with a dull thump, and seconds later men were hacking at it with sledgehammers and handheld electrical saws designed to cut steel. They wore little more than rags, and Savich could see their legs, chests, and arms were covered with dark scars from contact with hot, sharp metal. He saw more than one missing an eye, fingers, or part of a foot.