“What’s the tie-in with Harconan?” MacIntyre demanded.
“All six of their names were pulled out of a Makara Limited data file. Not out of one of the primary business or accounting blocks: There’s no mention of them or of their parent firms in any of the Makara primary files. We lifted these names out of the day work log of Makara Limited’s director of public relations. She hard-linked her palm pad computer into her workstation terminal at just the right time, for us anyway. We have a list of flight arrivals, hotel reservations, limo service, meal and entertainment expenses, all the nickel-and-dime stuff that goes along with wining and dining a body of valued corporate clients.”
Christine held up a finger. “Here is where it gets interesting. Inspector Tran has confirmed the arrival of these men through Singapore customs. We have also verified that rooms are being held in their names at various four- and five-star hotels across the island. But the listing of entertainment and support expenses cuts off abruptly about twenty-four hours ago.”
“Have they left the island?”
“Not according to Singapore customs, but the expense trail ends cold. Harconan Limited has stopped spending money on them, at least in Singapore.”
Christine produced a second sheet of hard copy. “I had cyberwar service the problem from an Indonesian angle. Their government systems are steam-age stuff, a walk in the park to hack.”
“And?”
“And yesterday the Indonesian customs station at Pekanbaru in the Rau Island group listed two Koreans, two UAE nationals, one Indian, and a Russian coming in from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on a passenger hydrofoil. The names are different, but the racial grouping and the physical descriptions match.
“The Indonesian polisi at Pekanbaru also issued these individuals with extensive surat jalan letters of passage, a kind of an internal Indonesian visa granting them free passage to just about anywhere in the archipelago.”
MacIntyre scowled. “Any chance we could be looking at a coincidence?”
Christine shook her head decisively. “Uh-uh, not when you consider that a quick dip into the Malaysian customs-control database indicates that they’ve never heard of any of these guys, at least as listed. It’s questionable if they were even on that hydrofoil. They just needed some kind of official entry mode to list on the paperwork.
“To me, Admiral, sir, it’s apparent these three major international industrial combines, Yan Song, Falaud, and Marutt-Goa, have taken Harconan up on the INDASAT offer and he’s ghosting their inspection teams into Indonesia to look over the merchandise.”
“ls there any way for us to track them?”
The intel shook her head. “I’d doubt it. I suspect they’re already long gone en route to the location of the satellite base. Harconan is probably moving the inspection teams covertly via his own ships and aircraft. They probably won’t be a blip on anybody’s scope until they magically reappear in Singapore, ready for extraction.”
MacIntyre studied the hard-copy sheets, finding no point of disagreement with the intel’s assessment. “Well, this was something, at any rate. It’s a hint we aren’t barking up the wrong tree, but it’s also not a smoking gun. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a justification for those expense accounts. What else do you have?”
“Two other factors, sir,” Christine replied, “both of which are really interesting.”
“Explain.”
“For one, we’ve completed the analysis on the weapons we captured from the Piskov boarding party. The report has a disturbing bottom line — to me, anyway.”
“Disturb me, Commander.”
Christine took a deep breath. “Okay, sir, but this is sort of complex. I have to walk you through it. First, there was no big surprise with the Uzi machine pistols we captured. They were license-produced Uzi clones manufactured here in Singapore, part of a two-hundred-gun shipment to the Philippine government taken by pirates about two years ago.
“The automatic pistol we took from the prizemaster was a different matter. It was an inexpensive Beretta 92-F knockoff produced by Helwan of Egypt. The serial number indicates it was one of a five-hundred-unit shipment supposedly bought and paid for by the government of Vietnam for their national police. However, the Vietnamese claim to know nothing about buying or paying for such a shipment of handguns.”
“Go on.”
“The medium machine guns mounted on the Bugis Boghammers were South African MG-4s, an unlicensed 7.62 NATO variant of the old American Browning M 1919. We have no idea where they came from, except they all have similar series ID numbers, and one of our specialists thinks he recognizes Israeli-style refurbishment work.
“Things really get interesting with the assault rifles. They were a short-barreled folding-stock variant of the AK-47, ex-Hungarian army issue. A few years back, when Hungary went to NATO standard with their small arms, they took all of their old 7.62mm Warsaw Pact stuff, refurbished it, and put it on the international arms market for resale. Last year a Thai arms dealer purchased a block of six thousand rifles, theoretically on speculation. The paper trail on that arms shipment leads from Budapest to Bangkok, where the weapons are supposedly sitting in a locked warehouse, gathering dust.”
“And the reality?”
“All that’s left in the warehouse is the dust. The arms and the arms dealer have both disappeared. Six thousand assault rifles, Admiral. Enough to equip two entire infantry brigades.”
“I know my unit strengths, Commander. What’s your disturbing bottom line?”
Christine passed across the new sheaf of hard copy. “Admiral, the sizes and diverse origins of these arms shipments suggests to me that Harconan is covertly acquiring and moving a lot of firepower from a large number of diverse sources — much more than he’d need to simply supply his pirate fleet.”
“What could he be doing with it?”
She shrugged and sat back. “That’s just it. I don’t know, unless he could be gunrunning for some of the other rebel factions within Indonesia. Fa’ sure, there’s enough of them and he has the transport network for it. The problem is, none of the extremist groups like the Morning Star separatists on New Guinea or the Muslim Aceh separatists on Sumatra have shown any indication of being up-gunned lately. If Harconan is arms trading, who’s getting the stuff and what’s it going to be used for?”
“Think cyberwar will be able to dig up the answers for us?”
He saw the regretful shake of Christine’s head. “Not unless we get another lucky break like that leaky palm pad. That’s the other interesting factor: Harconan Limited has two entirely different levels of communications going.”
“Go on.”
“On one level, there are the day-to-day business transactions. Cyberwar indicates we are in with that data flow. It all seems to be pretty standard corporate stuff: buy, sell, trade, ship routings, etc. It’s commercially encrypted but we can bust it, no problem. The second level is a different story. Not much of it shows up in the Makara Limited corporate net, and when it does, zip, it’s routed straight over to Palau Piri Island. I suspect a lot more is going in direct to Harconan through his satellite links. This is presumably the hot dope on his piracy operations and arms deals. Unfortunately, we can’t read any of it.”
MacIntyre looked perturbed. “With all of the funding we’ve been channeling into cyberwar, we can’t crack a commercial encryption package?”
“It’s not that simple, sir. Contrary to what the Reverend Dr. Gates up in Seattle would have his corporate purchasers think, there isn’t any encryption program you can’t break eventually with a large enough baseline, a fast enough computer, and a degree of time to work the problem. Harconan’s aware of this, so he’s had someone run him up a computerized variant of the old single-use, tear pad cipher.