“Me too,” Stone interjected. “When I was in Sweden doing a training exchange with the Swede marines. They’ve moved most of their naval basing underground, tunnelin’ into the sides of those fjords or whatever you call ’em. You got sub pens and fast-attack docks sunk right under their coastal mountains. You couldn’t even scratch ’em with a tac nuke.”
“That’s exactly what this structure is, Stone,” MacIntyre asserted. “This is a sub pen or some other kind of bombproof dock. You can see where it opens into the head of the inlet. If you’re careful with your pilotage, you could run a fair-sized ship in there: You’d have the water depth and the room for passage.”
“You’d have a hell of a time doing it if they didn’t want company, though,” Steamer Lane spoke up. “Check out the cliff edges overlooking the inlet. More gun positions with a larger return. Heavy machine gun or light autocannon, I’ll bet. Maybe even recoilless rifles. Anything coming up that inlet would be nailed by a three-way crossfire from the cliff tops and from the mouth of the pen.”
The drone completed its transit of the peninsula, pulling out over the Banda Sea.
Christine turned to one of the other drone systems stations. “ELINT Monitor, did you get anything on that pass?”
“There’s somebody in there all right, Miss Rendino,” the SO replied, looking up from his console. “The iron in that black rock lava makes for a good natural Faraday screen, but we caught a couple of spikes just as we crossed over the inlet. Generator static and leakage off a small power grid.”
“Understood. Drone Control, take her back up. Establish a sentry circuit and keep these coordinates under continuous surveillance.” She turned back to the others. “Fa’ sure, I think we’ve just zeroed Harconan’s prime base.”
Stone snorted. “Boy howdy, I’ll call that a base. It’s the Rock of Gibraltar West.”
Tran shook his head, awed. “I knew Harconan had resources, but I never imagined he had enough to build an underground facility like this.”
MacIntyre shook his head. “Harconan didn’t build it, Inspector. At best, he’s established squatter’s rights in something that’s been here for a long time.”
Christine’s eyebrows lifted. “The Second World War?”
An immediate operations group had been called, dedicated to assessing the discoveries made on what had been dubbed Crab’s Claw Peninsula. MacIntyre, the intel, and the other element commanders had withdrawn from the cramped confines of the joint intelligence center to the relative comfort of the Carlson’s wardroom.
Christine’s activated and interlinked laptop computer stood by, ready to grant access to the onboard intelligence files, while meter-size hard copy images of the cape taken from both radar and visible spectrum covered the tables.
No one even made a pass at the coffee urn.
“That’s where I’ve seen structures like this before,” MacIntyre replied, tapping one of the radar prints. “Maps of the old underground fortifications at Corregidor and the Bonin Islands. I’ll lay you odds this is an installation left over from the Japanese occupation.”
“But there’s nothing in the records about any facility like this along this stretch of coast,” Christine objected. “There’s nothing about it in the Admiralty Pilot for the New Guinea Coast or in any of the war records. We checked the Navy archives when we were assembling this database!”
“Then we may presume, Miss Rendino, that the Navy never knew it was there. And as for the Admiralty Pilot, I suspect the last time the Royal Navy’s hydrographers ever really had a look at this coastline was well before World War Two. This site’s natural isolation and security were why it was constructed in the first place. That and the fact that the underground structures here are probably not entirely man-made.”
He tapped the radar print once more. “As you pointed out, this little cape is of volcanic origin, an outflow point for a series of lava flows. Well, one of them probably created a lava tube down the center of the peninsula, a natural cavern of considerable size that opened into the sea.
“During the Second World War, the Japanese were very much into building fortifications. Likely they stumbled across Crab’s Claw and its lava tube and recognized its potential as a superb hardened basing site for submarines and small naval craft within strike range of the Australian coast. When they invaded the East Indies, a Japanese army or navy construction unit was landed on Crab’s Claw to enlarge the natural core cavern and fortify the peninsula.”
“Like they did up at Biak off the north coast of New Guinea,” Stone grunted. I remember studyin’ about a big old tunnel complex they had up that way.”
“They called it the Sponge,” MacIntyre acknowledged, “so named because of its ability to soak up Japanese troops and American blood. An entire six-thousand-man Japanese infantry brigade simply disappeared underground. Like Crab’s Claw, here, it was a combination of man-made and natural tunnels. We were never able to learn just how extensive it was because it was invulnerable to any kind of conventional attack.”
“Just out of curiosity, how’d we ever take that place out?” Labelle Nichols asked from her position astride a wardroom chair.
Stone Quillain shrugged. “In the end, MacArthur’s boys ran a pipeline up into the mountains and pumped a couple of tankerloads of diesel and aviation gasoline into the tunnel air vents. Then somebody fired a flare gun into the main entrance. Blooie!”
The SB officer cocked a well-formed eyebrow. “That would have been something to see.”
“Back then, we were lucky,” MacIntyre continued. “Probably before Crab’s Claw became fully operational, we counterattacked and retook New Guinea. The Japanese abandoned the facility.”
“But you still would have found the base when you reoccupied the island, wouldn’t you?” Nguyen Tran asked.
“Not necessarily, Mr. Tran,” Stone Quillain said. “Because we never did occupy New Guinea in the way you’re thinking. MacArthur was in charge of the showdown here during the war, and one of the notions old Dugout Doug came up with during one of his smart spells was island hopping. He figured you don’t have to dig out every little garrison and resistance point in an island archipelago, like you would block-clearing in a city. You just land and secure the main bases and you use air and sea power to isolate and starve out the smaller ones.
“He used the same tactic on New Guinea. He’d amphib his troops along the coast to take out the main Japanese installations, bypassing the smaller outposts. With their supply lines cut, and with the sea on one side and an impenetrable jungle on the other, the little guys were just left to die of disease or starvation.”
Stone squinted at one of the high-altitude photoprints. “From the look of it, that’s a mighty mean stretch of coast. If we didn’t think there was a reason for it, we’d likely never land troops along it.”
“I see,” Tran agreed. “Much the same would apply after the war. The southwestern coast of Irian Jaya has its own special name, the Land of Lapping Death. If not from the saltwater crocodiles and the endemic diseases, then from the headhunters who contentedly followed their old tribal ways well into the twentieth century. A scion of one of your notable American families, Michael Rockefeller, disappeared along this coast not far from this location in the 1960’s. It’s widely suspected that his well shrunken head still graces a native rooftree somewhere in the vicinity.”