“I mean we all feel bad about those dead girls, those dead women. I feel it, too. But that’s diff’rent from thinking I could stop it.”
“That’s because you weren’t the one who had to make the call. I was. I could’ve stopped it.”
“Bule, how is it someone with a brain like yours can be so dumb? Now you lissen to your Indonesian brudda, and you lissen good. In war, no matter how smart your plans are, things gonna go wrong. ’Cause once the shooting starts, you not in charge anymore. You think you are—but that’s where you are wrong, wrong, wrong.” Teguh’s dim silhouette shook its head. “The war is in charge, brudda. Which means no one is in charge. You American, right? So you the people who came up with a saying a long time ago that we still use in Jakarta: ‘shit happens.’ And it does. And war is nothing but shit, and now it is happening all around us, all the time.”
Caine felt Teguh lean closer, his breath a mix of stale peanut sauce and cheap lager. “You think you bigger than this war? That any brain, no matter how smart, can control war? Then you are a crazy man. Crazy like bules are, sometimes, when they think there’s nothing they can’t fix, nothing they can’t do, nothing they can’t control. That’s crazy bullshit thinking, brudda. And as long as you think that way, we can’t depend on you.”
“But I—”
“Not done yet, brudda. I know you feel bad for those girls, those women. But I also know that not one of us would have walked out of that kempang alive if you’d stopped those rockets. You know that too. You gotta remember that in war, you’re not deciding between the bad thing to do and the good thing. You’re choosing between the bad and the worse. And you can’t control the shit that happens after you choose.”
Caine heard Teguh rise, start to walk away, stop, turn. “Caine, brudda, one more thing. You think those women and girls were going to get away? The second they came out of hiding, they were dead. You could have stopped the missiles, yeh, but what about the Sloths who were shooting at us? And all of us would have had to shoot back, including our hidden salvage teams. That crossfire would have been as bad as the missiles.” He seemed to kick at the ground a bit. “Now, you gonna get some beer and food, or what—bule?” Teguh walked away.
Caine looked after the sound of his departure, started to think about the rightness and wrongness of what Teguh had said—and then stopped. Sometimes, thinking just didn’t do any good, didn’t provide any answers. Because for some questions—such as the arbitrariness of life and death during wartime—there weren’t any answers.
Caine rose to his feet and began feeling his way toward the low voices he could hear muttering over their beers.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Trevor heard movement in the bush yet again. He looked at Stosh, who had evidently heard it also. Farther down the line, Bannor Rulaine was already lowering his rifle.
Trevor shook his head, spoke into the brush. “You’ve got us.”
A single human duck-walked out of the undergrowth. He was festooned with fronds, mud-spattered camos leading up to a green-painted face and a rather floppy bush-hat. His brown and drab dustmix carbine took a moment to place: H&K, bush version, produced under license. Trevor smiled: Aussies. “Good to see you.”
The soldier’s eyebrows raised. “Be-damned! Lieutenant Tygg! Yanks!”
“I can hear him as well as you can, Gavin.” Another Aussie, this one very tall and lean, wound out from between the leaves behind them. The bush hardly quivered as he moved. He crouched down, his own HK aimed resolutely at Trevor’s belly. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”
Trevor nodded. “Corcoran, Trevor. Captain, USSF, reactivated. My team: Captain Rulaine, Chief Witkowski, Rating Cruz—all reactivated. And Mr. Barr, formerly Secret Service, retired.” Trevor put out his hand.
The taller Aussie looked at it then back at Trevor. “So you’re just a mob of weekend warriors, gone on walkabout halfway around the world?”
Stosh smiled brightly. “That’s us.”
“Eh heh.”
Crouching down himself, Trevor let the underslung launcher of his assault rifle rest against the tops of his thighs. “I’m sure you’ve got specific questions, Lieutenant. Ask away.”
“Okay. Let’s start with this. What the hell are you Yanks doing out here beyond the black stump?”
“It’s where we thought it best to come ashore. The rest of the West Java coastline seemed pretty populated and well-watched. And fifty kilometers is a pretty long swim. So after we came through the canal—”
“Pardon?”
“The Panama Canal. We started in the Caribbean. Once we were in the Pacific, we caught a pretty fast tow to New Guinea with a group of grain transports coming out of Guayaquil. We left them when we hit the Solomons, kept the Queensland coast on our portside horizon until we saw the lights of Darwin. Then we crossed the Timor Sea into the Lesser Sundas, picked up some supplies and local scuttlebutt and made for Christmas Island. Ported overnight to get the best weather reports and to time our final approach to the Strait of Sunda.”
“An inspired plan,” commented Stosh.
Lieutenant Tygg raised an eyebrow. “So West Java was your choice from the start?”
Trevor nodded. “Yeah. I wanted deep water on the final approach, because although we were running a high-water ferry on the surface, we were making our actual insertion by small sub.”
“So the ferry was—what? A stalking horse?”
“Correct. We had VTOLs on the deck, rigged for autoflight. So we entered the Strait just beyond the fifty-klick limit, then came over hard-a-starboard and crossed the line at best speed.”
“And then some,” complained Stosh. “He was burning out those lovely engines.”
Trevor shrugged. “Those lovely engines were going to be scrap metal soon enough, anyway. So we hopped into the sub, stayed in the shadow of the ferry, launched the planes as we came near to Panaitan.”
Tygg nodded. “So that they’d hit the ferry, make a big mess, and you slip off in the chaos on their scanners. Fine, but how’d you control all that from the sub? You had to see what you were doing.”
Trevor could easily visualize Stosh’s rolled-eyes histrionics behind him. “Well, someone had to stay on deck, ready to go over the side when the party started.”
The Aussie looked back at Stosh. “You?”
“Me? Me? I’m a noncom; I’m wasn’t crazy enough to stay on deck!”
—although I had to order you not to, you lying bastard, Trevor emended silently—
“—Oh, no. It was him. Captain Hero… er, Corcoran.”
“Your CO simply sounds decisive, Chief Witkowski.”
“Decisive, sir? Well, sir, I suppose it’s just a matter of how one describes certain kinds of COs. For instance, the ‘decisive hero’ type of CO is invariably an officer and a gentleman and a lunatic.”
The Aussie lieutenant tried very hard not to smile, almost managed it. “So how far inside the limit did you get, Captain?”
“I autohovered the VTOLs and went over the side after about eight klicks. I figured if they were going to use orbital interdiction, I didn’t have much time left.”
“Had they wanted, they’d have had you in five klicks. You got lucky.”
“Very lucky, evidently. They sent drones to investigate first. Then they dropped the hammer, just as we were entering the Panaitan Strait.”