She looked behind. The special forces colonel nodded to her. Beside him, one of the SEALs was hanging in his harness: he looked dead, but the occasional, modest eruption of bubbles indicated that he was either simply relaxing or taking a quick nap. Just another day at the office for him.
Opal looked beyond them into the back-rushing blackness: five more hours. Then it was her turn: to detach, to dive, to tow in, to lie in a fish pond, and to get ashore.
To get closer to Caine.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Caine.” A tinny reproduction of Teguh’s voice came out of the old-style telephone. “The Sloth reserves are heading toward our left flank, just up the street from you. They’re two minutes away.”
Riordan spoke softly into the receiver. “Acknowledged, Teguh. We’re set. Join me in the CP.” Caine handed the phone to Hadi, the IT-whiz, who had become his adjutant when Captain Moerdani had died a week ago. Hadi laid the receiver down beside the window of their second-story perch in an abandoned mission bell-tower: a highly iconoclastic historical structure in predominantly Muslim Indonesia.
But the mission’s tower complex had all the features Caine had wanted for this operation: few and narrow windows, solid construction, old-style hardwiring, and no occupants. For the last ten years it had been boarded up, awaiting historical restoration funds which never arrived.
The archaic hard-wiring had been its most attractive feature, given how the rebels were usually forced to communicate. In the field, they had to rely on one-use pagers, since the enemy could jam or fry small electronics quickly. But in a prepared ambush such as this one, the rebels could make use of hard-wired communication lines. It was technology that would have been unremarkable in the trenches of World War One, but it had the advantage of being virtually undetectable and unjammable. Which would be required for this operation to work.
Alongside him, Hadi peered out between the steel-reinforced louvers of the mission’s office. “Was that Teguh calling from the left flank OP?”
“Yes. It’s been all quiet there since they turned back the enemy’s first probe.”
Hadi jutted his chin at the two Hkh’Rkh bodies laying sprawled in the dusty street. “Guess they didn’t expect to run into resistance out here in a sleepy little kempang.”
Although Caine concurred—“I guess they didn’t”—he kept Hadi’s tone of bravado out of his reply. This was no time for overconfidence. The Hkh’Rkh did not often come to this nameless extension of Jakarta’s western sprawl, which was half crowded town, half semirural backwater. But when an aerial patrol had passed overhead late yesterday, Caine’s group had launched a single rocket at it—a firework, actually. That was enough to ensure that the kempang could expect a decidedly brusque visit on the next day.
As soon as the morning rains had let up, the invaders rolled in along the northern approach road. They left their high-wheeled APCs well outside the dense cluster of buildings at the center of the kempang: they had already learned about the brutal effectiveness of improvised explosive devices. Advancing on foot, one squad of Hkh’Rkh went in search of the local authorities. Two more squads waited at the outer edge of the rough cluster of buildings, and a fourth waited with the vehicles.
Just as the lead squad discovered that the kempang was oddly quiet and all the locals shuttered indoors, the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle announced the start of the rebels’ ambush. A Sloth went down with a bullet through his unprotected pony-neck. That didn’t surprise the intruders as much as the second hit by the scoped weapon. Although only wounded, that Hkh’Rkh was frankly baffled to discover that the big-game round had penetrated the body armor which was routinely proof against old cartridge-fed battle rifles and most of the caseless ones, also.
The Hkh’Rkh squad’s two heavy weapons—caseless rotary machine guns—hammered away at the sniper’s vantage point in the upper story of the kempang’s one governmental building. Directed by acoustic track-back systems, they made a ruin of the window he had fired from but completely missed the man himself, who had already left along a prearranged escape route.
The Hkh’Rkh continued their attack in accord with their standard playbook. While the point squad broke into fire teams that flanked the government building and sought contact with other insurgents, two APCs rolled up to the edge of the kempang. One evacuated the wounded trooper; the other situated itself so that its remote-turreted coil gun could provide a base of fire against second-story targets.
Two weeks ago, the Hkh’Rkh would simply have blown the kempang to smoke, ash, and strips of charred bamboo. Their wars were conducted by Warriors on battlefields devoid of civilians. In contrast, an insurgency which faded back into the huts and streets of civilians was not merely anathema, but a betrayal of the basic codes of conflict. Their first reaction—to destroy all offending parties together—had had the grim virtue of making such distinctions pointless.
However, while the Hkh’Rkh’s indiscriminate responses had pacified the offending kempangs, the Arat Kur discerned that these tactical gains had a mounting strategic cost. The Hkh’Rkh’s reprisals were driving more of the enraged general population into the rebel camp, swelling the ranks of the resistance and its surreptitious civilian abettors.
New rules of engagement had been imposed upon the Hkh’Rkh, and consequently Caine could now count on them to attempt to make contact with the local authorities first. However, if they encountered insurgents—as they had now—they would establish the limits and locations of the opposition, fix its units in place by engaging them at range, and wait for air assets to come in and reduce that part—and only that part—of the kempang to a smoking ruin.
But in their search for the lone sniper, the Hkh’Rkh hit the rebel hardpoint: a colonial era bank. There they encountered almost twenty well-armed humans, half equipped with relatively modern Pindad caseless assault rifles. Following their new counterinsurgency doctrine, the Hkh’Rkh held position while a third APC positioned itself in the fields well behind the bank. Any rebels fleeing the kempang in that direction would run directly into its massive firepower. And so the Hkh’Rkh waited for the game-ending air strike.
And they waited.
As Caine knew they would. He had coordinated this operation with two other resistance cells. Triggered by a daisy chain of pager signals, those two cells had mounted sharp, short attacks in other, distant kempangs as soon as the Hkh’Rkh had been spotted wheeling their way out to the one in which Caine was currently situated. And that meant that the forward-deployed enemy air assets in this region were already committed to attacking other rebel forces. Which had disappeared by the time the invader attack craft reached their target zones.