The dive leader for Opal’s team—a lanky fellow from Oklahoma who took a perverse pride in telling the story of how he had never seen the ocean before he joined the Navy—emerged from between the transall containers that lined the deck. He nodded, held up a pair of fingers as he loped toward the taffrail. Two minutes left. She chewed on the end of her pen, struggled to resume:
I’ve got to go now, bag this with the rest of the letters, and hope you’ll get them all real soon.
She raised her pen, almost succumbed to the temptation to write more, but didn’t. Instead, she folded the letter carefully, opened the waterproof bag in which its many fellows already waited. If he’s been writing me, too—well, then we’re in the same place. If he hasn’t, then we’re not. And that’s all there is to it. You can’t make someone think about you, or need you, or love you. Feelings are like wild animals: they can’t be reasoned with, or corralled, or tamed. They are what they are—or what they’re not.
The SEAL reapproached at a quicker lope, raised a fist and nodded. Time.
She stowed the bag, checked her gear, found it no less ready than when she had checked it fifteen minutes ago. Or on any of the six quarter-hour checks she had conducted before that one. She walked to the rail, found the starboard half of the infiltration team already there.
It was a pain in the ass, really, having to go over the side like in some cheesy movie. The majority of the ships carrying infiltrators had been hastily modified so that the teams could enter a false keel compartment through a panel down in the orlop deck. This ship was no different, but when they had run the ingress drill yesterday, the access panel had jammed, and no amount of coaxing had freed it up. Which, scuttlebutt said, was not an uncommon occurrence on the modified freighters.
As Opal checked the lanyard she would soon use for clipping onto the rappelling line, the team’s most senior officer—the Special Forces colonel who had tried to recruit her into his truncated A-team back in San Diego—put out a hand. “Good luck, Major. Good to see that your seasickness isn’t giving you so much trouble anymore.”
Guess you didn’t hear about this morning’s performance. Which had nothing to do with mal de mer. “Thanks. And good luck to you, too.” They exchanged the smiles of people who never expect to see each other again and together found something else to look at: the extinct volcanic cone of Gunung Beluran, now rising up like an oddly flat black triangle, backlit by an almost fully set sun. Their ship—the venerable Asturia Return—started a slow starboard crawl into a northwest heading. Which, according to old maps that Opal had dug up in the Army Survey archives, more or less followed right on top of the undersea cable which snaked in around the Situbondo headland.
“Gear in,” the dive leader ordered. “Test.”
Opal slipped the regulator into her mouth, puffed a few times, checked that her hair wasn’t in her mask, felt that the flip-down fins were away from her feet, patted at her dirtside equipment: bagged, sealed, secured. She turned to the boy from Oklahoma, gave a thumbs-up.
He nodded, then said so quietly that it was almost inaudible, “Let’s go.”
Opal crouched under the nearest lifeboat, took hold of the line that was cinched to the forward davit, and swung a leg over the side. She snapped on to the line, cleared the other leg as if she was mounting a horse, and lay both feet flat against the hull, back to the scudding swells beneath. With a bend of the knees and a light push, she started rappelling down the side: a fairly short vertical trip, since the ship was riding low in the water. Staying directly under the lifeboat to remain undetectable by orbiting bug-eyes, she went slowly down to the waterline, where she found a magnetic handle—and a SEAL diver already waiting to help her with the transition into the five-knot side-wake. He looked past her, spoke loudly into her ear. “Stay in line and in trim under the hull. Let’s not give their satellites anything to see.” He turned back to her. “Let’s go, ma’am.”
She went in. The tug of the current wasn’t so bad, but the sense of immense volumes—of the huge wake generated by the Asturia and her gargantuan hull, disappearing into the darkness ahead and behind as if she went on forever—was so foreign that she felt an edge of fear pushing up through her task-listed consciousness. Years of training and experience allowed her to push that sensation aside.
It was a little like moving at heights, where there the rule was “don’t look down.” Here she kept focused by obeying the rule “stay zoomed in; don’t zoom out.” She kept her eyes on the next spot of hull she needed to move to or manipulate, kept her mind on her gear and on the next discrete task that needed performing.
Which got her quickly and safely into the already flooded false keel reservoir and her harness therein. The SEAL got her cinched into the straps, pulled loose an air line from the hull-mounted auxiliary air tanks, snapped that into the other lead on her gear’s dual air valve. He snapped it over to the auxiliary feed; she was no longer consuming her own air, which she’d need for her actual insertion. He gave her harness one last tug to make sure it was secure, gave her a thumbs up, nodded when she returned his gesture, then began towing himself back to the waterline transition point on the starboard hull.
Opal looked out through the false keel’s open aft-end into what had nearly become black water. Over her head, illuminated so faintly that it barely stood out, was the red “panic button,” in case something went desperately wrong with her gear. She turned; a fellow traveler was being snugged into the harness behind her by the lanky fish from Oklahoma. Behind and beyond that pair, she could just make out the failure that had forced them to make an external entry to the false keel chamber and keep it flooded: the dynamic tensions on the hull had buckled the interface valve that connected to the access panel in the orlop deck. Consequently, after dropping off the team, the Asturia would break off from her approach, citing hull problems and the need to head to Perth for repairs. It was extremely unlikely that the false keel would have been detected had she continued on to deliver her load of grain, but the standing order was to take no chances.
The Asturia made a slight turn to port, meaning that she was out of the Sea of Flores and entering the mouth of the Strait of Madura. Opal felt a dull bump through the harness, turned, saw that two of the SEALS had left their harnesses and moved to the rear of the cradle, where they were detaching one of the equipment carriers: a neutral buoyancy, nonmetallic “tumble cage,” which looked a lot like a geodesic jail cell in the shape of dodecahedron. Black watertight packages were suspended inside as a central cluster.
One of the SEALs attached a line from the cage to a backpack-sized magneto-hydrodynamic dive-scooter and powered down into the black. The other SEAL snagged the line and followed, the tumble cage moving down after him. Within three seconds, they were invisible in the lightless depths. They had the tricky job of guiding the gear down to a special line that had been moored on the old undersea cable that they were still paralleling. Their final destination was secret, of course, but not proofed against reasonable conjecture. Opal checked her watch. Given their speed, the now-repaired Pulau Karangmas light should be plainly visible over the starboard beam at a distance of nine or ten kilometers. According to her close study of the Army survey maps, that would put them just a few hundred meters northeast of a sizable charted wreck, which lay where the headland’s curve began to ease into the strait’s southern coastline. A wreck such as that one—only a few dozen yards offshore, but still in more than twenty fathoms of water—would be a perfect cachement point if divers had groomed it beforehand. Not only would it anchor a new or secondary tow line to the land, but the metal of the old hull would serve as shielding and concealment for both equipment and personnel.