Joint Intelligence Center, USS Carlson
1732 Hours, Zone Time: August 23, 2008
“Commander Rendino”—the systems operator at the drone control station lifted his YR-helmeted head, his voice sharp—“Curtin Base just tried to override me on G-Hawk Teal Deuce.”
“Did you lose it?” Christine demanded, hurrying across the darkened center to lean down at the SO’s shoulder.
“Nah, I got the signal strength on ’em. I jumped ops frequencies and regathered the aircraft. If those Air Force clowns keep screwing with us this way, they’re going to dump us a bird.”
“Is Teal Deuce still good with fuel?”
“I’m projecting we still have a good fifteen minutes to absolute bingo, ma’am.”
“Then use all fifteen of them. I’ll take care of the Air Force.” She mashed her thumb down on the Transmit key of her headset belt unit. “Communications, patch me into the hot link to Curtin drone control! Expedite!”
From his seat across the compartment, Inspector Tran watched the fierce little blonde press the earphone tightly against the side of her head. It was interesting to see his irreverent and playful lover so transformed into the steel-willed warrior. A Hindu would say the shade of some past incarnation had come forward at need to guide her through her current crisis.
“Curtin, this is Carlson JIC. What in the hell are you guys playing at, aborting our search ops?… Screw the fuel reserves! We need every second of coverage we can pull with the Global Hawks…. Screw your standard operating procedure while you’re about it! We’ll cut your birds loose at absolute bingo and not one second before. Got that?…Glide ’em home if you have to!.. Go ahead and call your squadron commander, Lieutenant. I’ll see your lieutenant colonel and raise you a three star admiral!”
She broke the connection. Noting Tran’s level gaze, she grinned sheepishly. Brushing back her tousled bangs with her hand, she crossed to the inspector.
“God,” she murmured, “you’d think I was some kind of a Navy puke or something.”
“Easy, little one,” he replied even more softly. “There is actually no real difficulty in, as you say, finding a needle in a haystack. Once you have ascertained the needle is there, everything else is merely a matter of patience.”
“That’s just it,” Christine whispered back. “I’m beginning to wonder if the needle is in the haystack. All the evidence indicates Amanda is somewhere on the southern coast of New Guinea. That’s where she pointed us to, but we still don’t know for sure.”
“Then work the possibility until you do know. Then, if required, move on to the next. That is the way of the investigator.”
“I know, I know. ” She put her back to the same bulkhead Tran had leaned against. “This should be like any other problem I’ve ever worked. It’s only that…” Her words trailed off.
He rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “It’s only that this time it involves someone who matters greatly to you. Thus, you must still do your job, but with a dagger driven into your heart.”
Christine took an unsteady breath. “I wish it was appropriate to kiss you just now.”
Tran smiled soberly. “In due course.”
“Commander Rendino!” The call came from one of the real-time analysis tables. “We might have something here.”
Christine and Tran were both across the center in an instant.
The analysis table was a horizontally mounted flatscreen display currently accessing the download being transmitted from one of the Global Hawk drones. The HDTV imaging was as clear and razor-sharp as a view downward through a window from five thousand feet.
A glance at the status hacks in the corner of the screen indicated the Remotely Piloted Vehicle was actually flying at eight times that altitude. Invisible from the earth’s surface, it currently was cruising slowly south eastward along the New Guinea coast.
Approaching now along the RPV’s track, a narrow peninsula jutted out from the New Guinea mainland. Perhaps a mile and a quarter in length, the tip of the peninsula was bifurcated by a narrow, curving inlet. Nguyen Tran thought it rather resembled the partially opened claw of a crab or lobster. The rampant greenness of the tropical forest covered the full length of the peninsula, while the surrounding waters were a deep and vivid blue, with little of the azure paleness that might denote shallows, even between the parting of the crab’s claw.
“What do we have, Chief?” Christine demanded.
The female chief petty officer looked up from the screen. “A possible abnormality, ma’am. This imaging is from Teal Niner, currently between Jantan and Aiduna in that broken stretch of coast under the Bomberai Penninsula. In standard spectrum all you see are the treetops, but check out the thermographic scan.”
The reconnaissance analyst tapped a sequence into the keyboard on the edge of the display table. The image of the little cape went to an inverted black and white, like a photographic negative. Now an entire constellation was revealed, glittering sparks of white light, dozens of them, scattered down the lengths of the crab’s claw like a diamond incrustation.
“Open surface fires,” Christine noted. “About the right size for cooking or mosquito smudges.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the analyst replied. “Enough for a good-sized village. But this isn’t like any of the other coastal plain villages we’ve been seeing. Way too dispersed. More like a whole lot of independent camps in one general area.”
“She’s right,” Tran commented. “There are no central village clearings and no outlying cleared areas for crop-raising. Also there is no easy access to the sea, no decent beaches, and there are cliffs all along the sides of the peninsula. They can’t be fishermen or boatmen.”
“Hunting parties?” Christine inquired.
“Not with that density,” Tran replied. “The lowland jungles on Irian Jaya are very thick and lush, but they generally don’t provide large amounts of food without cultivation. True hunter-gatherers would have to disperse more widely to survive. This concentration must be drawing on some other supply source than the local environment.”
“If we have the average of eight to twelve people per fire, ma’am, we’re looking at between three and four hundred people on that peninsula.”
Christine lifted an eyebrow. “Nguyen, any suggestions about who these guys might be?”
Tran nodded. “My first thought would be we have stumbled upon a major staging base for the Morning Star separatist army. But why they’d be massing out here in the middle of nowhere is an open question.”
Christine nodded. “Maybe. Chief, take us up to magnification ten.”
A segment of the central peninsula windowed up to fill the display. Now each fire was a dancing crystalline dot surrounded by a hazy nimbus of radiant heat.
“Small cooking fires, ma’am, with the smoke dispersing under the tree cover,” the recon analyst commented. “There are a couple of abnormalities here… here… and here.”
Christine nodded. “Thermal plumes without a central flame node. The fires there must be inside of buildings, with the heat escaping through a vent or a chimney.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I thought,” the analyst concurred. “And they must be pretty substantial buildings to damp the node that thoroughly. We’re not talking about thatch-roofed huts here.”
“This one appears different as well,” Tran commented, pointing to a thermal trace at the bottom of the screen.
“It is,” replied Christine. “Chief, window in on that and bring us up max mag.”