The Weapon (26 page)

Wenck hummed to himself, dancing at the helm. He came slowly left and managed for once to steady up on the right course. Dan went forward and balanced on the bow, watching for coral heads. After a while Oberg handed up a pair of sunglasses. “Polarized,” he said. Sure enough, they helped.

He squatted. Took a GPS reading and matched the longitude against the chart. It showed marsh along the shore, with two small settlements and no roads leading inland. He didn't feel great about going in, but if they had to, he wanted to keep their interaction as brief and anonymous as possible. “Could you ask Sumo to come up here?”

When Kaulukukui came up Dan said, not taking his eyes off the flat sea, “What languages you speak, Sumo? Any Arabic?”

“Arabic? I can tell a guy to drop his gun. Why?”

“Need you to do some shopping. You're the least identifiable dude, by sight, as American, we've got aboard.”

“Copy that, sir. Water, food, and gas?”

“Since we didn't get a full loadout, back in Mindanao.”

“What are we paying in?”

“Uh, dollars. But that doesn't necessarily point to us as Americans, does it?”

“No, sir. Seen dollars used lots of weird places.”

“See Henrickson for the money. But don't flash it, okay? Buy at different places . . . use your good judgment. Speak whatever language gets the message across, as long as it isn't English.”

“Yessir. No problem. Want me to swim ashore?”

“No, no. We'll run in to the beach. There's got to be an inlet or pier or a landing. If there's a village there.”

He had Henrickson get a list together as the land slowly rose. The mountains farther north had gradually dropped and receded toward the horizon, then vanished as they'd run westerly.

He remembered the last time he'd sent men ashore in tropical seas. Years before, when he and the orphaned
Oliver C. Gaddis
had been on the loose not far to the north. On their own, without a country or flag . . . now he was a pirate again.

A shudder traveled his spine. At least he didn't have any serial killers aboard this time.

 

He didn't like putting Sumo ashore alone. Especially when there turned out to be no sign of an inlet, just endless bright green salt marsh and mangrove. They motored along it, making it clatter eerily with their wake, and finally made out a huddle of rusty roofs a few hundred yards beyond. He edged in as close as he could, probing for the bottom with one of the boarding poles, and at last dropped Kaulukukui overboard to wade ashore. Dan turned and ran out to deeper water and put the anchor down. Then they sat and baked, slapping stinging flies that came out to them and watching the beach through the binoculars.

The SEAL came back four hours later in a dugout canoe, paddled out of the mangrove by a dwarfish, skin-over-bones oldster who chanted without stopping in a high singsong. Dan kept everyone under cover except Henrickson, and told him to speak anything but English, but the Malay didn't even look up. Kaulukukui handed up blue plastic jerries of water, red plastic containers of gasoline, and cloth-wrapped bundles of cooked fish, rice, plantains, and flat bread. When the Hawaiian heaved himself out of the dugout he folded bills into the outstretched hand. The old man dug in his paddle and angled away, still chanting as he merged again with the mangroves. Kaulukukui said he'd walked into town, found a store, pointed to what he wanted, then made signs for a boat to run it out. Everything had been very low-key.

Dan started a different engine, figuring to give each one some run time, make sure they could all be depended on, and headed ten miles out to sea, out of sight from shore, before resuming his original course.

They ran westward into the afternoon and then the evening and then the night again, the motor singing a steady burring drone. The only traffic was a few native lateens, miles off. It was perfect tropical weather, the sea nearly flat, the faintest swell lifting and dropping them; at sunset a few fluffy clouds hovered near the dying sun. He wished he could enjoy it.

Henrickson seemed better once he had some water in him. The analyst even managed to keep some of the rice down. But he still looked weak.

The coast gradually left them, dropping away to the southward until it vanished, and they ran in the open sea all night, a boundless desert of water under the gazes of millions of stars. Dan lay staring at the Pleiades. His eyes would drift closed to the hum of the engine, but he never quite lost consciousness. Just too much going on in his head.

When the sun heated the sky red again it backlit a peninsula and two high islands stark against the horizon. Far beyond them a shining white hull that might be a passenger ferry was heading west. He made the islands as Tanjung
Datu, Pulau Serasan, and either Pulau Panjang or Pulau Subi Besar. “Pulau,” he figured, meant “island.” He took a round of bearings—he didn't trust the GPS alone—and ran out his dead reckoning line from the visual fix as the ferry dropped below the brightening rim of the sea.

He straightened, kneading his neck, exhausted. “Teddy. Monty. Let's put our heads together.”

“Feeling any better?” Oberg asked Henrickson. They were sitting up on the bow, the boat rolling slowly as swells from some far-off storm heaved them up and then dropped them. The sun was glaring already and it was only seven.

Henrickson shrugged. “I'll be okay.”

“Okay enough to climb a boarding ladder?”

“Do it if I have to.”

“These guys need to know how to shoot these AKs,” Oberg said. He watched Lenson carefully.

Dan thought about it, balancing what was incontrovertible about that statement with his misgivings about the mission. He didn't want any wild shooting. On the other hand . . . he leaned to dip his ball cap in the passing sea, fitted it to his head. The evaporating water felt good. “Uh, all right. Take them one at a time and fam fire off to port.

“Okay. Now. We're catching up to the schedule, but we're still a couple days ahead of the freighter. We need to find someplace to hole up.”

“Someplace there's no natives or residents to report us to the Malaysian authorities,” Henrickson said.

“Indonesian,” Teddy put in.

“Correct,” Dan said. “We're in Indonesian waters, anywhere to the west of Tanjung. I've operated with the Indonesians.” They were an ally, but even allies didn't need to know about covert actions. Especially those involving hijacking, theft, and arson. “Now. Here on the chart. The Kepuluan Tambelan group. Distance . . .” He dividered it off. “I make it fifty-five miles from the intercept point. And the
Pilot
says it's sparsely populated. Which means, if this weather holds, we could get underway after dark and just have a short run to intercept.”

“How do we know the freighter's still on the same schedule?” Oberg asked.

“Because they haven't called us on the sat phone.”

“I'd feel better if we had a positive confirmation.”

“That's a good point. Monty, ask for confirmation when we report in at noon.”

Teddy sat darkly pondering this whole lack of preparation as Lenson talked about the chart. This wasn't the way SEALs operated. This whole thing should be a Team operation anyway. He should have just backed out. But then, the way they were doing this, they really needed help.

Wenck stood at the stern, youthful features screwed into concentration. The crack of a Kalashnikov set to single shots whacked across the water, bursting up white fountains each time the rifle jerked.

 

The Tambelans pushed over the horizon the evening of their fourth day out from Zamboanga. By then everyone was sick of living aboard forty feet of boat with five other men. Dan had made them sponge off in salt water every morning, but they still smelled, the boat smelled, the fuel smelled, and they were all so scraggly, bearded, and burned they looked as if they'd spent their lives out here. Still, he kept them offshore that night, unwilling to close without a fathometer. The charts said he could have gotten in, but he didn't trust them. He couldn't anchor because he didn't have enough line for a proper scope. Fortunately the weather was still friendly. He hove to and let a current migrate them north during the dark hours. Then restarted an engine at 0400 and ran slowly westward, toward the smallest, most remote, and westernmost island, keeping a sharp lookout for lights or the outlines of boats. The
Pilot
said it was uninhabited, but even uninhabited islands had visitors.

Which was where they were now, anchored over coral heads on the east side of an islet too small to have a name on his chart, shielded from the swell and any storms that might come down on them, though he hadn't seen any storm sign and the met report at their last sat phone checkin had been
for five-knot winds. He stood and stretched, then picked up the binocs and once more checked the horizon. They were alone.

He lowered the glasses, then lifted them again, focusing on the island.

The far side had looked like bare rock or earth as they'd approached. This side was a thick, deep, threatening green, jungle and undergrowth and along the beach palms above a chalk-line of surf. He thought he glimpsed movement under them, but it was probably just shadows. Colorful yellow and blue birds wheeled and dipped. Their harsh cries piped faintly over the sigh of the breeze, the seashell-whisper of distant surf.

He lowered the glasses, hawked, and spat over the side again, noticing fish moving down there, above the multicolored, fissured coral heads, slowly finning in and out of the shimmering shadow the boat printed over the reef, as if that shadow was protection or safety.

Kaulukukui squinted toward the island. “Think there's any pigs over there?”

“Thought I saw something moving. Under those palms.”

“An AK'll take down a pig.”

“No shooting,” Dan said. “And nobody goes ashore.”

“We been on this boat four days, sir. At least, swim call. Doesn't that water look great?”

Kaulukukui rooted out mask and fins from his gear bag and held them out. Dan considered. He tugged on the anchor line. Then looked down into the clear again. He really ought to get some sleep while he could. It would be a long day tomorrow, a long night after that.

“Watch out for sea snakes,” the Hawaiian said. “One of those suckers starts gnawing on you, you'll be sorry.”

Dan nodded. He pushed off his stinking, hot boots, strapped the mask on, and stepped over the side.

 

The surface rocked silver above him; the powdery blue surrounded him. He pulled himself down the smooth braided nylon of the anchor line, paused, cleared his ears, then kept
going down. To the sugar-white sand between the coral heads, where he tugged on the chain pendant. The anchor held. He let go and floated upward lazily and broke the surface beside the boat.

Wenck, pale-chested and bony in shorts, cannonballed over him with a whoop and hit with an enormous splash. Dan sucked air, jackknifed, and surface dove, into the blue once more.

The top of the nearest head was only about five feet down. He leveled off and coasted along its crest. Finned over it, and came face to face with a huge green parrotfish. The fish eyed him and angled off, casually, not panicked. Not many divers here, then.

Suddenly he was at peace. The endless demands of keeping a team pulling together, the looming danger of the boarding seemed a million miles distant. All around him fish darted, intent on tiny missions probably just as important in the grand scheme of the universe as his search for the Shkval. If only he could stay here forever, drifting in the powdery blue . . . but he needed air. He turned his face up reluctantly, and finned upward, toward the golden light.

As he surfaced he caught the flicker of someone else going overboard. He turned away and swam for a hundred yards, enjoying the water on his skin and the sun on his back. Looking down on the colorful teeming life of the reef, he tried again to forget what they had to do tonight. The closer he was getting to the attempt, the less he liked it. But it had to be done. Taking the carrier task forces off the board would skew the whole calculus of deterrence, all around the world. Ever since the days of Morris and Decatur, sea power had been the only answer to those who considered their contiguous seas their own, and traffic on them lawful prey.

It had always struck him that a world in which violence was the price of existence had not been well designed. But he had to accept it, just as every wrasse and damsel scurrying from his passing shadow had to accept the conditions of their own watery lives. Without security, the predators would rule.

He went deep, as deep as he could, right down again to
the white fine powder between the coral heads. He stayed alert for sea snakes and lionfish, and actually saw one snake, a black and white banded one, zigzagging some distance off. He finned in the opposite direction. That'd be a great way to go, paralyzed from a neurotoxin.

He came to a hollow in the reef. Chunks of bleached dead stone lay scattered across the bottom. He hovered, gradually understanding some explosive had gone off here. Some errant shell or bomb? Or, more probably, blast fishing? That was how some of the locals fished. With dynamite. Destroying an entire intricate universe, for a day's catch.

He was sculling on the surface, sucking breath for another dive, when a shot clapped from the island.

 

When he pulled his fins off on the beach, shin weeping blood from painless razor-cuts from the coral he'd bumped on the way out of the surf, Oberg was crouched over something in the undergrowth. The birds whirled over their heads, keening warnings. Glancing his way as he came up, the SEAL held aloft a large green reptile, blood pumping slowly from where its head had been.

“Lizard sushi, Commander? Guaranteed fresh.”

“I said no one goes ashore, Obie.”

“Didn't hear that order, sir. Figured we could use fresh meat. A boar or something.”