And damn it that Jake Winfield has to be out in the middle of this shitstorm…
Another of the moored freighters, this one only one hundred meters away from the wharf, took a Russian missile beneath the taffrail. Perversely, the explosion lifted her bow up, like an overloaded truck feebly trying to do a wheelie, before she dropped back down, her aft settling rapidly as the fuming, growling water rushed into her half-amputated stern.
Good, thought Lieutenant Jacob Winfield, watching the last element of the circling Arat Kur combat air patrol break off and head out to sea, they’ve decided the ships in port are all victims, too. He wondered if the four savaged freighters had all been part of the plan—selected and hit by ROVs—or just dumb luck. Scanning the remaining ships, he sought the telltale signs for which Tygg had told him to look.
Within seconds, Winfield found seven hulls showing the right combination of innocuous features that indicated there was an incognito spec ops team aboard. Each ship was a small freighter, each had one or more white T-shirts hung on a makeshift laundry line, and each had a severed hawser hanging from the port bow. On three of them, small fires were burning. Too small to be caused by missiles, but smoky and angry enough to add to—and blend in with—the panic and confusion that reigned in Jakarta Bay and all along the docks of Tanjung Priok. Boats of all sizes, from derelict barges to opulent pleasure craft, were afire, horns hooting, bullhorns blaring in half a dozen different languages. In direct violation of the “no contact, no dumping” restrictions upon the freighters, cargo containers and crates—along with canvas bags and desperate seamen—were streaming over their gunwales and into the comparative safety of the debris-choked water. It was chaos—but slightly more than could be explained by a handful of hits by large missiles and a few score by smaller ones. Winfield smiled. All part of the plan.
On one of the ships with a severed hawser, Winfield heard a set of muffled blasts which, to a practiced ear, recalled the sound made by older, twentieth-century grenades. A wash of thin gray fumes, and then a quickly growing plume of blacker smoke, emerged from a companionway, along with apparent shouts of distress. Winfield looked around: most of the Hkh’Rkh still manning the harbor checkpoints were too busy to look up, and those that did immediately returned to whatever task had occupied them the moment before. There was too much happening, too much that they weren’t familiar with, in an alien environment suddenly gone mad.
On the ship where the unusual explosions had given rise to equally unusual smoke—probably from a carefully controlled fire of wood and old tires—men and material were now pouring over the sides. Some of the objects plunging into the water were sealed black plastic bags. Winfield squinted. He watched one of the bags sink, leaving a thin line and a fishing bob trailing behind it on the surface. He smiled, wondered how many of the “desperate deckhands” jumping in around that bag were something other than merchant mariners.
As a SEAL, he also knew to look for the too-straight line of almost invisible bubbles that approached slowly, casually. More slowly and more casually than any fish ever did. Making sure his undersized mechanic’s overalls covered his composite-armor shin guards, Winfield moved to the edge of the wharf, miming an anxious search around the base of its pilings. Within seconds, down at the limit of his vision, a pair of dive goggles appeared, ghostlike in the oily water. He crouched closer, still acting as though he was searching, searching, searching, and thought, go ahead, check me out. But don’t take too long about it.
The goggles disappeared. Winfield counted off four seconds before a man dressed as a deck hand swam up and broke the surface, gasping for air and sputtering, splashing his arms about in a frenzy of desperation. Winfield reached down, caught the upper sleeve of the man’s light denim shirt and dragged him up onto the wharf where he proceeded to cough and retch mightily. “Don’t overdo it,” Winfield muttered.
The man kept his face toward the planking as he apparently coughed up bay water, but managed to say, “Are they watching?”
“Hell, no. You’re about the two-hundredth semidrowned boater or sailor they’ve seen today. And they’re too busy worrying about the missiles coming from the ocean in front of them and the armed mobs in the city behind them.” Winfield stopped to look at the man again. “You Indonesian?”
“No. Why?”
“You look pretty… convincing.”
The man looked directly up at Winfield. His face was broad, brown, round-cheeked. “What do you mean?”
“Well—you know. You look like a local.”
“Yeah? Well, mukha ng tae.”
“Huh?”
“He said ‘and you look like shit.’ In Tagalog,” added a new voice. Another face—this one spitting out a slimline rebreather and as distinctly Nordic as the other was Micronesian—appeared over the lip of the wharf. Winfield didn’t find the turn of phrase amusing. Mr. Blonde, Blue-eyed, and Square-Jawed detected the signs of disapproval and offered a sheepish rationalization. “Well, you don’t look like a local, anyhow.”
Winfield pointed a dark coffee index finger straight at the second fellow’s ski-ramp nose. “And you do?”
The man smiled as he hauled himself up onto the planks and crouched next to the other two. “You’ve got me there, sir.”
“Sir? How’d you—?”
Square-Jaw gave him a sidelong look. “Moment an officer starts talking, you know he’s an officer—sir.” He stuck out an immense, and equally squared-off hand. “Chief Edward Barkowski, Team Three.”
“Lieutenant Jacob Winfield—” He stopped, remembering. “Well, retired—sort of.”
The smaller man sat up, coughed one more time, nodded to Barkowski, who threw a child’s bath toy into the water. “I’m Alfredo Ayala, Lieutenant Commander, currently CO second stick, Joint SpecOpCom. I don’t remember your name on the contact lists, Mr. Winfield.” Another half-dozen men, all dressed as deck hands, surfaced near the floating toy and dragged themselves up onto the wharf. Dripping and coughing, they affected exhaustion: damn poor actors.
“My name wouldn’t be on your pre-infil contact lists. We came in under separate authority.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Winfield showed him the magic card that Trevor Corcoran had loaned him.
Ayala stared at it, then at Winfield. “Your CO is Nolan Corcoran’s son? No shit?”
“No shit.”
Ayala’s voice was suddenly tight with ready resentment. “Is he commandeering my teams?”
“No, sir. Unless my CO guesses wrong, we have the same objective.”
Ayala’s eyes narrowed. “And how would you know about my objectives?”