“Well, if there was a lot of digging going on, and a lot of talk about upgrading to—”
“Major, with respect, this is Indonesia. People talk, and people dig, and most of the time, nothing ever comes of either activity. And be aware, this was not a megacorp job. It was a joint American project which went into limbo when the Indonesians started cozying up to CoDevCo right before the Parthenon Dialogs. There’s been no work on this project for at least a year, no talk of it for six months, and no hardcopy maps of the projected tunnels have turned up. No software on them, either.” He smiled. “Except right in here.” He tapped what looked like a GPS relay.
“That’s not for GPS, is it?”
“Better not be. From what I hear, we don’t have a single satellite left. But this will show me the maps of our bombproof, scanproof tunnels. Where we have a lot more friends waiting.” He paused and met her eyes solemnly. “A lot more.”
Opal smiled. Having heard how all the pieces fit together, she knew now: this was all Nolan Corcoran’s work. Another part of his jigsaw-puzzle plan to save Earth. It was as if his ghost were standing there now, smiling and waving them all in the direction of the tunnel, one satisfied hand on his hip. “The tunnels:” Opal asked, “do they go into Jakarta?”
“Didn’t know you were a psychic, ma’am. In fact, we’ll be moving there in just two—”
He and Opal both stopped moving, even breathing. They only listened. She gave her order—a hiss that sounded like “Cover!”—a split second before he snapped out the same word. She hit the rain-muddied ground, sank in a bit, smelled the sweet stink of natural composting processes.
The roar of VTOL jets up-dopplered into a nearby crescendo—and passed high overhead, down-dopplering without stopping.
“They’re checking out the ravine first,” Little Guy murmured.
“Could they have missed us?”
“See this mist? Feel this heat? Thermal systems work, but they need a few stationary moments to get details. They were going too fast. But after they assess the kill zone and come up empty-handed, they’re going to start orbiting, looking for us. Or—”
“Or what?”
“Or burn off the nearby slopes. They know that if they don’t get us fast, they won’t get us at all. As recently as a week ago, they still reconned from standoff. Now, they recon by fire. Indiscriminately.”
“So we—?”
“We make like Alice and go down our magic rabbit hole. C’mon.”
They sprinted the rest of the way down the slope, converging near a half-completed power line. They swarmed down a narrow spillway that paralleled it, veered left toward a culvert that burrowed into one of its sloping sides.
“In there?” Opal pointed.
“Yep. Connects to drainage tunnels, one of which runs under the fiber-optic conduits.”
There was a shout from the Kopassus trooper bringing up the rear. “Plane. Coming fast!”
Opal crouched into a run. “Then we’d better be faster. Double-time like your lives depend on it.”
“’Cause they do,” Little Guy added. They reached the entry and she waved them on. Little Guy and his unit crouch-sprinted into the dark maw of the tunnel, followed by the Kopassus man. She was right behind him.
A sudden concussive roar, bloom of orange-yellow light, and tumbling shock wave were right behind her.
Chapter Thirty
Riordan ducked as the stream of coil gun needles tore through the side of the corrugated metal shack, which promptly folded over on itself like a half torn sheet of perforated paper.
“That was close, Caine,” said the young Indonesian beside him, listening as the rotors of the Arat Kur attack ROV hummed into the distance.
Caine nodded. “It wasn’t sure we were in here. That was just a little recon-by-fire.” The rotors slowed, picked up in volume again. It was doubling back. Because, no matter where I hide today, they know where to find me.
Which made less than no sense. At the start of their occupation, the Arat Kur had seeded the streets of Jakarta with dust-sized nanites purportedly able to identify and track any individuals already in their database. According to informants, the project had been an utter failure. Firstly, the entire project had depended upon meshing the visual data gathered from the Arat Kurs’ “phased array” of pervasive nanites with the advanced biometric programming provided by their megacorporate allies. The reason for its failure had been an object of considerable speculation. Perhaps the Arat Kur had been unable to sync such different software systems; perhaps the culprit was data overload, or nanite failure due to the hot, supersaturated air and merciless pounding of the monsoons. But there was no question that the scheme had been a complete failure—so how had multiple Arat Kur ROVs been able to track one Caine Riordan almost flawlessly for the past two hours?
The effectiveness of his guerilla cell was not a reasonable explanation for the sharply increased attention. Other insurgency groups had been far more troublesome in terms of raw casualty and damage infliction upon the enemy. Caine had concentrated on what he did best: specially prepared ambushes such as the one in the western kempang that had gained them a treasure trove of lethal Hkh’Rkh weapons. Such operations were very useful, but couldn’t be carried out too often. They took considerable prep time, and could not be safely conducted in the same region: after an attack, the Arat Kur invariably shifted a crippling density of reconnaissance and surveillance assets to that area. Also, the Hkh’Rkh had resumed their tactic of hammering any kempang that became particularly restive, ruthlessly punishing the indigenous population for ambushes which they had neither aided nor abetted.
“The ROV is coming back, Caine,” said the young Indonesian nervously.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.”
“Yes, but it could still—”
Caine turned and stared at him. “Soldier, we are going to be all right.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
Caine smiled, nodded, tried to peer out the tiny sliver of sky visible between where the roof and front wall had folded over and down against the rear wall. At least I hope we’re going to be all right.
He could hear the Arat Kur ROV hovering closer, tracking slightly from side to side like a scenting dog.
Damn it, Teguh, where the hell are you with that—?
From fifty meters away, an antivehicle rocket sprang out of a fire-gutted building with a screaming hiss. Although Caine could not see the ROV’s response, he heard the familiar sounds of its chassis spinning in that direction, the pop as its short-range active defense rockets jumped toward the incoming threat.
In the microsecond before those rockets made their intercept, the oncoming missile’s warhead launched from its bus, speeding even faster toward the ROV. The minirockets jinked over, just managed to intercept it—but missed the slower, heavier projectile that had been launched right behind the HEAP warhead.
Caine heard the launch-hiss of a second wave of intercept rockets, but they were too late. The slower tungsten warhead crashed into the ROV with a sound like a screwdriver punching through a car door—right before that projectile’s small, tail-covered back-charge went off.
The combined impact and explosion sent rotors spinning in all directions, one screeching wildly across the back of the bisected tin shack. Looking out the similar gap at the other end of the folded expanse of corrugated metal, Caine watched as the savaged chassis of the Arat Kur patrol unit was flung down with a crunch, raising a path of dust until it stopped rolling.