“You hope? Do you need simultaneous deployment of all their packages?”
“No. One package will do the trick, if the arrow goes true to the mark. The multiple assets are for redundancy. Which is fortunate, since I have no direct control over the delivery assets themselves.”
“You mean because we can’t establish real-time contact with anyone in Indonesia?”
“That, too.”
Jonesy looked at Richard from the corner of his eye. “What else would keep you from having direct control over your delivery assets?”
“Personal matters.” As in, every damn one of them went AWOL after our last meeting.
“Okay. So, what are they delivering to the target?”
“That’s secret.”
“And without any orbital tracking or wireless commo with Indonesia, how are you even tracking the assets?”
“Can’t say.”
“Jesus, Richard. What can you say? Does the op even have a name?”
“It does. It’s designated Case Timber Pony.”
“Huh. That’s some bizarre name. So where’s the support staff?”
Downing crooked a finger at Jonesy, mounted the stairs at the back of the trailer. “They’re in here.” He opened the door, led the way in.
The sudden outward wash of humid heat took a little getting used to. Jonesy, who had every reason to expect the opposite—mobile command centers usually had double-strength air conditioning—sputtered. “Damn, Rich. What are you doing? Opening a sauna? Man, this is—”
And then Jonesy stopped speaking. And moving.
The figure at the center of the van was not quite five feet tall, had a rear-sloping teardrop head, large eyes, a lamprey-sucker mouth, gray skin with teal highlights, wide feet and what looked like a parody of an hour-glass figure perched on duck-feet and almost froglike legs.
Jonesy’s mouth worked for a moment before a sound emerged. “Richard, what the fu—What’s going on here?”
Downing smiled, put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Rear Admiral William Jones, I would like to introduce you to Custodial Mentor Alnduul of the Dornaani Collective. He is here out of his personal concern for our situation.”
“This is your support staff? You mean you’ve got ETs working for you now?”
Downing smiled as the answers to Jonesy’s questions emerged from Alnduul’s mouth in mild, unaccented English. “We volunteers from the Custodians do not work for Mr. Downing, but with him. And with you. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Admiral Jones. Enlightenment unto you.”
Opal pushed her regulator out of the way, leaned over the sheet of paper as if she were going to embrace it, and wrote:
Dear Caine:
I hope you’re safe and sound. I wish I knew where you are. But be warned. When I finally find you, I’m going to acquaint you with a few new brown belt moves the hard way. I figure that should teach you not to go running off on me!
Opal stared hatefully at the words: try as she might to find a romantic yet light-hearted tone, she kept failing. Badly, awkwardly. She pushed on:
I got through security in San Diego without a hitch. I just flashed the card Downing gave me, walked into the Naval Yard, and got myself assigned to a composite JSOC infiltration team.
The team is all Tier Three and higher—SEALS, Rangers, Delta, even some Special Forces types who tried to attach me to their T.O.O. But I had already cut some orders of my own, and thanks to Scarecrow’s magic card, there was nothing the green beanies could do but pout. When Downing finally gets around to finding and court-martialing me, reading out the list of charges is going to take longer than the trial.
So here we are, waiting to hop in the water and sneak in under the Arat Kurs’ noses, or whatever that is on the front of their face. If you can call that a face. Well, you get the idea. Anyhow, I’m just glad they haven’t twigged to this scam yet. According to the folks who briefed us, all the psyops analysis and inferential exoanthropology studies tentatively identify the Hkh’Rkh as notably hydrophobic and the Arat Kur as neurotically so. So although the Arat Kur have wonderful maritime sensors, they don’t have a great variety of such equipment, nor much of it, nor a great deal of imagination regarding submerged operations. Word is that they check the bottoms of the ships just before they enter the harbor in which they’re scheduled to offload their foodstuffs, but they don’t have enough submersible drones. From what we’re told, they have those out patrolling at the fifty-kilometer limit to keep the boomers well back from Java.
So once we ride the bottom of this freighter into the Strait of Madura, we’ll be dropped off, along with extra gear. I’m told that they don’t cut us loose until we’re in less than thirty-five meters of water, which is good because this night-diving isn’t exactly something I’m looking forward to. Scuttlebutt is that you’ll get ashore all right as long as you stay connected to the group lanyard and your dive leader remains alive and able to do his or her job. But if you lose the dive leader—well, they just tell us not to think about that. They don’t even train us for that eventuality. I don’t know if that’s because there’s no time, or because it just wouldn’t matter…
At any rate, the good news is that when we cut loose, the dive leader gets his or her bearings and then frogmans us all down to the bottom, where a nonmetallic, 1.0 density pre-laid floor-to-shore cable is waiting. We snap on to that, detach from the SEAL and tow ourselves in. One by one. At ten-minute intervals. In the dark. Under radio silence.
Now throughout this entire approach, you’re only allowed to move at six meters per minute, so there’s no signature worth a damn to enemy sensors. My group is scheduled to come ashore at Kaliasan Point, near Tandjung Patjinan. Into marshes and fishponds. I’m told it’s one of the best infiltration points: only a seven-hundred-meter tow-and-swim from twenty fathoms, with a mild current, and the towline (an old telegraph cable) moored within fifteen meters of the shore. The SEALs try to make us thankful by pointing out that some of the other infiltration points involve fifteen-hundred-meter crawls from depths of thirty-five fathoms. That means a five-hour, double-tank marathon for the landing team.
So anyhow, once I get to the end of the towline at Kaliasin Point, I will do what the military likes us to do best. I will hurry up and wait. For thirty minutes, I just lie in the muddy sands, breathing.
She almost wrote, “Probably thinking about you.” But didn’t. She sighed and kept on scribbling:
When and if we get the all clear, we come up, stow gear where the SEALs tell us, and the different units in the landing team break up to carry out their different assignments. Which is, of course, a big mutual mystery. We all know we’re going to Java to raise hell, but where, and how, and when—that’s the secret that no one is allowed to share. Even with the other units in the same landing team.
Opal looked at the sheet of paper, saw Caine’s face. There are so many things we do not know, which we may not tell. I wish I knew how you really feel about me, but I don’t. I wish I could tell you about the baby growing inside me, but I’d best not. Everything in this life seems to be a covert operation, in one sense or another.
She looked up: there were two lazy plumes of gray smoke on the horizon, one fore and one aft. Both of those were cargo ships, about fifteen klicks off. And stretching away beyond them, in either direction, was an unseen treadmill of other, similar ships. It was a seaborne conveyer belt of groceries bound for Indonesia, where, at the height of its rainy season, estimates indicated that at least forty million mouths would go hungry without the relief shipments. Hundreds of ships had been mobilized to make the slow passage. Slow enough to enable the modified hulls among them to put troops and equipment under the keel and thus, into position for a submerged run to the coast.