Again the image expanded, the sensor turret on the distant drone swinging on the designated target.
“It seems to pulse regularly,” Tran observed.
“Yeah,” Christine agreed. “A definite thermal modulation. That’s a diesel exhaust, and from a pretty big plant. There’s no sign of anything like a road. It can’t be a truck engine.”
“No building or structure outline, either,” the intelligence CPO commented. “More like its venting right out of the ground.”
“Ain’t that the truth, Chief. Shoot a thermocouple reading. What’s the temperature of those exhaust gases at the emission point?”
A numeric data hack rezzed into existence beside the thermal trace. “One-forty-five Fahrenheit, ma’am. Cool.”
“Which means a long exhaust pipe. Any sign of radar emissions in this sector? Any air traffic?”
“Negative, ma’am. Clean boards.”
Christine hesitated for a moment, thinking. “All right. I want another run made over this peninsula, east to west this time, down the full length of it. It’ll be active scan; we’ll risk using the synthetic aperture radar. We’ll also risk bringing the Hawk down to just above contrail height. Let’s make it fast: We’re coming up on sundown and I don’t want to risk that drone being spotted because of underlighting.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am! We’re on it.”
Christine looked into Tran’s face, a hot glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Keep reminding me about patience and the haystack.”
Beyond the crab-claw-shaped cape, which had no name recognized by civilization, the sun touched the brooding bulk of the Jayawijaya range, the arched and buckled spine of New Guinea. Soon would come the night and the minute lessening of the day’s smothering heat.
Around the perimeter of the peninsula, two-score pairs of eyes swept the jungle and the sea. The vision of some of these lookouts was augmented with powerful binoculars. With others, the only augmentation came from a hunter’s instincts honed from a lifetime lived in this verdant and deadly environment.
Among this latter group, a few, like Amanda Garrett, felt a faint, passing uneasiness, a sourceless sensation of being intently studied by an unseen presence.
Like a hunting eagle, the Global Hawk drone transited the cape a second time. Its fan-jet was throttled back to the barest idling whisper, inaudible from the ground, and its nonreflective gray stealth paint melded with the sky.
As it ghosted down the length of the crab’s claw, “smart skin” panels on the belly and underwings of the big RPV energized, becoming emitting and receptor arrays for its synthetic aperture radar system.
This was much the same kind of technology used by NASA geophysicists to survey and map ancient riverbeds, lakes, and trade routes long buried beneath the desert sands of the Sahara. It gave both the scientific researcher and the suspicious warfighter the ability to see things otherwise unrevealed.
Four hundred miles to the west, in the Carlson’s joint intelligence center, the task force’s senior command staff crowded in behind Eddie Mac MacIntyre and Christine Rendino. All watched the radar imaging crawl past on the main bulkhead flatscreen. They had more than a professional interest. The Lady, their Lady, might be out there.
“See the swirl pattern of the bedrock,” Christine commented. “Pahoehoe lava. You find this kind of image pattern all over around the Hawaiian Islands. A series of lava flows must have dumped into the sea at this point, building an extrusion outward from the coastline. This accounts for the steep dropoff and deep water on all sides. Bet you’re going to have a lot of pillar basalt along those cliff edges.”
Stone Quillain grunted. “Ain’t that going to be fun to climb if somebody’s at home and feeling cranky.”
“We don’t know if anybody’s home yet,” MacIntyre replied. “When will we, Commander Rendino?”
“Soon. Coming out over the peninsula now. There’s the narrows at the neck….” Her fingertip stabbed at the screen. “There… we have a geometric!”
A small, neat, glowing rectangle began to crawl up the display.
Far away, over the crab’s claw, the drone’s probing radar was looking down through the trees, through the undergrowth, through the upper few feet of earth itself, to reveal what was hidden underneath. Nothing short of metal, solid rock, or its equivalent could stop and reflect the carefully modulated beam.
“There’s more of them.” Stone’s blunt fingertip joined Christine’s outlining the developments on the display. “An inverted chevron pattern facin’ inland with interlocking fields of fire. Sure as hell, those are block houses. Hardpoints on a defense line.”
“The genuine article too,” Christine exclaimed. “To throw that kind of return, we gotta be talking poured concrete! See those fainter straight line shadows connecting them? Those might be ground displacement effects. Tunnels and entrenchments. Copleigh, are you recording this?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the SO replied decisively. “Double disks!”
A second chevron pattern appeared, then a third, each fortification placed with a mathematical precision.
“What are those smaller blips or whatever they are?” Cobra Richardson inquired, indicating a series of clustered sparks on the display.
“Weapons returns,” Christine replied grimly. “That’s about what you’d get if you bounce an SA beam off an infantryman packing a rifle and a load of ammunition. Copleigh, overlay of the thermal scan on this image.”
The systems operator rattled a command into his keyboard and the thermographic and radar images merged.
“Yeah,” Quillain commented. “Those gun returns are mostly grouped around the fires. Bet you got a series of squad-level camps dispersed all up and down the peninsula. I’d bet these smaller singleton returns along the cliff sides and across the shore-side neck are sentry posts and heavy-weapons emplacements. These old boys are taking care of business.”
“And nothing showed on the visual sweeps?” MacIntyre demanded, his arms crossed.
Christine gave a shake of her head. “No, not a thing. Just what looks like virgin forest. I know what you’re thinking, sir: Poured concrete would mean heavy construction gear, and there isn’t a sign of it from the air.”
“Mr. Tran, do you have any input on what we might be seeing here?”
“I have no idea, Admiral,” the inspector replied. “The Bugis is a shipwright, not an engineer. And the Morning Star separatists are a mobile guerrilla army. They have no use for fortifications, or the means for building them.”
The scan approached the outer third of the peninsula and the joint of the crab’s pincers.
“Somebody’s been doing some heavy work out here,” Christine murmured, perplexed. “If those are bunkers, this peninsula has been converted into a fortress, but what’s being… Oh, my God! Look at that! Look at that thing! Copleigh! Put a scale up beside that!”
To this point, the surface bunkers detected had been comparatively small, possibly the size of a two-car garage. This structure was titanic, a faint but definite outline just at the juncture of the claw at the head of the peninsula inlet. It didn’t show the sharp return of the surface structures concealed only by earth and vegetation: This was deeper, within the living stone itself, its presence revealed by fracturing and subsidence within the geologic structure of the island.
Still, it displayed the unmistakable straight-line signature of a man made artifact.
“That damn bunker or whatever has to be at least four hundred feet long and a quarter of that wide,” Christine said in simple awe. “It’s huge!”
“That’s not all there is to it,” MacIntyre added. “You’ve got more displacement shadows moving deeper inland. There’s a network of lateral tunnels as well. And see those two other surface structures? I’ll bet those are your surface entrances; they have to be a good hundred and fifty yards back from the primary complex and big enough to drive a truck through. Damn it, but I’ve seen something like this before!”