Phantom force the uss cu.., p.19
Phantom Force (The USS Cunningham Quintet Book 5), page 19
“Quite so, Grasshopper. You would have undergone a surrealistic experience that could not be coordinated with conventional reality. These dudes are currently undergoing the same kind of dis-coordinated experience. We grabbed them off their boat this evening. Tomorrow morning, they’re going to wake up back aboard that boat with no solid, overt indication that anything has gone on. They’ll only have some hazy, disjointed memory that, in the interim, something very strange happened.”
Amanda cocked an eyebrow. “Like receiving a deep body massage from an azure masseuse.”
“You’ve got it. Here’s how the package works. At the moment, our subjects are being fed a continuous stream of short-term tranquilizers and hypnotics that suppress the will and rational thought. They’re also floating on a couple of blood temperature waterbeds in a darkened, soundproofed space.”
“Sensory depravation?” Amanda asked with some concern.
Christine shook her head. “Oh no, just sensory control. We’re being careful to feed them a scootch of local, easy-listening music to keep them from slipping into depravation shock. We’re also being careful to hold them in a pleasure state that doesn’t trigger any of the animalistic, instinctive fear-flight reflexes. Trust me on this, Boss Ma’am, these guys are enjoying themselves.
“This environment we’ve established is also irrational. It doesn’t connect or relate to any kind of normal, rational experience, so it doesn’t invite normal, rational reactions like a resistance to questioning.”
Amanda decided she’d pretend to understand. “I thought you always said that interrogations under truth serum couldn’t be trusted.”
“We’re dealing in generalities here, not rocket fuel formulas,” Christine replied. “The advantage to this interrogation technique is that we don’t have to disappear these guys. We can reinsert them back into their environment without their being able to recognize what’s happened to them.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure.” Christine gestured toward the biocontrol console and the interrogation team working it. “Right now, we’re hitting the first subject with a massive dose of scopolamine, the same stuff they sometimes give to women during childbirth so they can’t clearly remember the pain of the experience. It can’t erase the memory totally but it will further blur an already blurry event to the point they shouldn’t have any kind of coherent recall.
“Most Indonesians – be they Muslim, Hindu or whatever – still have a very strong connection to a native mythology that’s just crawling with gods and spirits and demons and all sorts of other unearthly entities. If they don’t consider this just one exceptionally wild dream, they may very well pass it off as some kind of supernatural event or visitation. With a little luck, the last thing they’ll think of is that they were guests of the bad guys.”
Long ago, Amanda had learned the wisdom of leaving esoteric specialties to the specialists. “I’ll take your word for it, Chris. Stand on.”
Amanda started for the passageway door, then paused and looked back. “What you’ve been doing here, this whole procedure, sounds a great deal like some of those alien abduction stories I’ve read about. You know, the ones involving the little gray space men from the flying saucers. I don’t suppose …”
Christine Rendino looked acutely uncomfortable.
Amanda held up her hands. “I know, I know. You could tell me but then you’d have to kill me.”
“Uh, not exactly, Boss Ma’am.” She indicated the CIA team. “I could tell you but then they’d have to kill us both.”
The insurance salesman and the motherly RN looked up and smiled pleasantly.
*
Malang Sengosari jerked awake and sat up. The high riding sun reflected off the waves of the inlet and stabbed deep in his eyes.
They had slept far too late. His head was exploding and his mouth was foul as a week dead fish. Mahmud was sitting up in the bow, looking haggard and somewhat green under his seaman’s tan.
Something had happened. Something had come out of the sea – and there was the girl … the blue-skinned girl who had smiled and whispered …
Allah and all his Prophets, what had happened?
Malang took up a gourd of rainwater and drank off half its contents. Mahmud moved aft and took the gourd from his hands, draining off the other half. For a full minute they crouched in the bottom of the prahu, looking at each other. Finally, Mahmud said. “I’ll get the anchor up. It’s late.”
Malang nodded. “I’ll get the engine running. Let’s have another look at the anchorage before the pinisi comes.”
Eventually, when he was a gray-bearded clan captain yarning with his respectful crew, Malang would tell the tale of a night spent in the arms of a beautiful sea jinni. But not today and not for many long years to come.
The Temple of Pura Luhur Batukaru
Northern Tabanan Regency, Bali
1200 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
Located deep in the cool, mist-streaked rainforests at the foot of the sacred mountain Gunung Batukaru, Pura Luhur Batukaru is the ancestral temple of the Tabanan princes.
As it is dedicated to the deities of mountains and lakes, every other temple in Western Bali, in turn, has a shrine dedicated to it. Legend says Pura Luhur Batukaru was founded in the eleventh century by the Hindu sage Kuturan, but ancient stone monoliths have been unearthed that indicate the temple site has been a place of mysticism and veneration since prehistoric ages.
Flanking the main shrine complex, steps guarded by demon statues lead down to a small square pool with a tiny island in its center, a symbolic microcosm of the Hindu Mount Miru. Placed on the tiny island are two platforms, one dedicated to Gunung Batukaru, the other to the deities of the Three Lakes – Tamblingan, Buyan, and Bratan. Nearby, sacred hot springs bubble and steam on the moss-sheathed riverbanks.
It is a place of great spirituality to the followers of the Science of the Holy Waters, and a place of great power.
That was what had brought the four Muslim teenagers to the temple.
Likely they meant no true harm. They were city youths, the sons of Javanese government officials and businessmen from the regency capital at Tabanan. Heir families were well-to-do for the island and, as is frequently the case with privileged adolescents all around the world, the boys were cursed with an excess of energy, time and hubris.
As youth elsewhere might have fallen into the trap of drugs or alcohol, they had fallen into the pit of excessive religion.
Islam in Indonesia was, for the most part, a far different thing than the militant Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. The beer-sipping or bikini-wearing Indonesian Muslim generally had a far mellower and more tolerant world view.
Therefore, to this small band of restless, callow young people, Islamic radicalism was a road to individuality. It was a way to feel “special,” to stand out from the crowd, and it provided a moral high ground from which attacks on parental authority could be launched. The responding parental outrage only made the forbidden fruit sweeter.
These youths were far from the suicide bombing stage, however. Today’s long planned expedition to the temple of Pura Luhur Batakaru was more an act of public defiance, a personal pledge of dedication to Allah and a slap in the face of public propriety.
They did not intend to die.
The aged Imam in their school of religion who had encouraged them in this act did not mean for them to die either. He was an embittered, intolerant man who did not know the Balinese Hindus and who did not want to know them. He did not understand that he was blindly flicking ignited matches at a spilled pool of gasoline.
In due course, he would die for his ignorance and bigotry as well.
The four Muslim youths left their battered Toyota in the small parking area below the temple. Carrying their prayer rugs, they swaggered up the lichen-covered steps to the broad terrace in front of the gates, pretending not to notice the cold stares aimed at them from the scattering of other temple visitors, but secretly relishing them.
With exaggerated meticulousness, they oriented their rugs toward Mecca and knelt. Loudly, they began their noon prayers, brandishing their sacrilege of one of Agama Tirta’s holiest shrines under the nose of propriety. They were young, they were immortal, they were the favorites of God. Besides, the Hindus were a race of pacifists.
Were they not?
Deep in their devotions, they didn’t notice the crowd gathering on the steps of the terrace, a silent, staring throng that filtered down the paths to cluster around the interlopers. The Muslims had no way of knowing that they were not the first to intrude at Pura Luhar Batakaru.
During the previous night, one of the subsidiary shrines in the forest around the temple had been viciously vandalized. The shrine’s pemangu had been beaten and left for dead, and these villagers had spent their morning washing animal filth off the representation of the gods and picking up shattered bits of sacred tablets and artwork.
The four Muslim youths had played no part in the vandalism – more calculating minds than theirs had planned the desecration – but none of the outraged present particularly cared. The crowd pressed closer. There was no sound save for the words of prayer and then they trailed off into silence.
The Muslims looked up to find themselves walled in by a solid mass of stone-featured Balinese: grim, silent, impassive, totally unlike the islanders they had known. Now they sensed the building wave of wordless implacable rage. Again, the Muslim teenagers prayed – this time wordlessly, not out of bravado but in terror.
A child, an eight-year-old girl struck the first blow, hurling a stick at the quailing youths. Then the crowd swept forward.
One of the Muslims momentarily broke free of the mob. With his shirt and most of his skin clawed from his torso, he fled to the temple parking lot, a hundred silent people on his heels. His hand closed on the door handle of the Toyota just as a multitude of hands closed on him.
And through it all, there were no outcries of fury, no curses, no yelling. The only sounds were his screams – and the other noises produced when a human being is torn literally limb from limb.
Point Man Base
The United States Embassy, Jakarta.
1743 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
“What have you got?” Christine Rendino demanded, trotting into the Op Center from her interrupted dinner in the Embassy dining room.
“Some kind of trouble on Bali, Commander,” the watch officer replied, looking up from his workstation. “We’re getting heavy traffic on the Ministry of Defense taps from police command in Denpasar, indicating an outbreak of large-scale violence in Tabanan regency.”
“Define ‘large-scale’ and ‘violence’,” Christine said, donning her command headset and clipping the palm-sized receiver box to her belt.
“Denpasar isn’t too sure itself, ma’am. The trouble appears to be centered around the regency capital but it’s spreading. And it’s not conventional civil disobedience or rioting, but systematic bloodshed in the streets, apparently directed against the Muslim minority.”
“Oh my god!” Christine breathed, a chill rippling through her. “When did it start? How widespread is it? Are the local authorities getting it under control?”
The watch officer shook his head. “No answers to any of the above, ma’am. Communications are apparently breaking down in the Tabanan area.”
“This is not good. This is extremely not good. Do we have any drone coverage over Tabanan?”
“No, ma’am. Not at the moment.”
“Then contact Global Hawk command at Curtin Air Force Base and get me some! Then get me a sat link to the Shenandoah. I need to talk with Captain Garrett immediately.”
“Right away, Commander.” The duty officer felt his own unease grow. Their easygoing, slightly oddball, detachment C.O. was suddenly as serious as a new coffin. “What do you think is going on over there, ma’am?”
“Judgment day. Now get me on line with the Lady!”
The CIC, USS Shenandoah
1818 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
“Put it on the Alpha Display,” Amanda commanded.
The low murmur of operations-speak scaled back within the darkened interior of the Combat Information Center. The watch officers and duty SOs cut quick looks over their shoulders at the imaging on the big forward bulkhead screen.
They saw a high, side-angled view of a small city, the regency capital of Tabanan, surrounded by green un-ripened rice fields. Multiple smoke columns were rising from its eastern end. The view rotated slowly as the Global Hawk drone circled the objective at sixty thousand feet.
Amanda leaned forward in the Captain’s chair, eyes narrowed, jaw set. “Magnify.”
The drone control officer murmured into his headset, passing the word to the Shenandoah’s RPV control node.
Half a thousand miles away, the lens system in the drone’s camera turret responded to the command, zooming in on target. Tabanan was, or had been, a neat community, ordered and growing rapidly into modernity. Now, flames could be made out dancing at the base of the smoke clouds.
“That was the mosque,” the control officer said, blipping a target box around the largest fire. “That’s the police station. Those other buildings along the main street – those residences near the mosque. They probably belong to the local Muslim population.”
“Probably. Take us in closer.”
“Aye, aye. Going to max mag.”
Once more, the cameras pulled the ravaged city closer until people could be seen, the living crowds massing in the Hindu temples and the smaller number of the dead. The still forms of men, women and children lay in lines along the roads and in the town marketplace. They were not sprawled or scattered. There was a grotesque orderliness to the way they lay, the mark not of passionate violence but of deliberate execution.
“Pull back. Zero the magnification.”
The scan widened and the world fell away, pulling back above the stripes of wispy cloud until the ground was a dozen miles below.
“Rotate the scan, three sixty.”
The camera view panned slowly across the verdant terrain of Bali, the patchwork pattern of the rice fields, the paler patches of the scattered villages, the great craggy bulk of Mount Karangasem to the northeast and the azure of the sea to the southwest.
Smoke plumes writhed into the sky in at least four other locations.
“Is this being seconded to the Embassy?” Amanda inquired.
“Yes, Ma’am. And to NAVEX 7.2 Flag and NAVSPECFORCE Headquarters.”
“Very good.” Amanda tapped the transmit key on her own lip mike. “Signal Intelligence, this is the Captain.”
“Signal Intelligence, this is Captain Montgomery,” a crisp feminine voice replied.
“Captain, are we getting any signal intercepts out of the Bali Global Hawk? Anything that can tell us what’s happening on the ground?”
“Nothing definitive, Ma’am, just continued generalized indications of large-scale anti-Muslim terrorism and a general collapse of civil authority. Tabanan regency appears to be the flashpoint of the disturbance and we have heard references to an event or incident at one of the local Hindu religious shrines.”
That seemed ominously similar to the execution style death patterns they were seeing. The worst-case scenario would be for the angered pedanda of the Science of the Holy Waters to call for an exorcism of the Muslim “demons” living on Bali as they had done with the communists in the 1960s. If such were the case, if a call for the mass cleansing of the island in the name of the Trisakti were indeed flashing from temple to temple, then this was only a hideous beginning.
“The civil telephone net’s gone down throughout the central regencies – as have the security force radio nets,” the signals officer continued. “All we’re getting is random traffic from a scattering of isolated tactical units. The police headquarters are apparently being targeted by the mobs.”
“That’s to be expected. Most of the senior police cadre on Bali are Javanese Muslim. What are you getting out of Denpasar?”
“Not much. Civil radio and television are starting to make references to civil disobedience and rioting in some northern towns and villages, but the deaths and the extent of the outbreak are being downplayed. The authorities are ‘reacting’ to the situation. We’re also seeing repeated calls for national unity and the ‘we are many but all are one’ ideal. I’d say it was a classic ‘whistling in the graveyard’ package from a very scared administration.”
“What are the authorities doing?”
“Police headquarters in Denpasar was sending out repeated demands to the regency stations for more intelligence on the situation, along with orders to suppress the outbreak at all costs. Lethal force authorized. Then, about twenty minutes ago, Denpasar dropped off the net completely. We’re receiving fragmentary traffic on the civil emergency services channels, indicating a massive explosion at the police brigade command post, possibly a car bomb.”
“Damn!” Amanda murmured. “This couldn’t get worse.”
“Yes, ma’am, it could,” Montgomery said, remorselessly. “Very much so. We’ve started to pick up something else over here that I think you urgently need to listen to.”
Amanda had not known Captain Janet Montgomery of US Army Intelligence for very long, but Amanda sensed that she was usually a very understated individual.
“I’m on my way.”
*
Amanda cocked an eyebrow. “Like receiving a deep body massage from an azure masseuse.”
“You’ve got it. Here’s how the package works. At the moment, our subjects are being fed a continuous stream of short-term tranquilizers and hypnotics that suppress the will and rational thought. They’re also floating on a couple of blood temperature waterbeds in a darkened, soundproofed space.”
“Sensory depravation?” Amanda asked with some concern.
Christine shook her head. “Oh no, just sensory control. We’re being careful to feed them a scootch of local, easy-listening music to keep them from slipping into depravation shock. We’re also being careful to hold them in a pleasure state that doesn’t trigger any of the animalistic, instinctive fear-flight reflexes. Trust me on this, Boss Ma’am, these guys are enjoying themselves.
“This environment we’ve established is also irrational. It doesn’t connect or relate to any kind of normal, rational experience, so it doesn’t invite normal, rational reactions like a resistance to questioning.”
Amanda decided she’d pretend to understand. “I thought you always said that interrogations under truth serum couldn’t be trusted.”
“We’re dealing in generalities here, not rocket fuel formulas,” Christine replied. “The advantage to this interrogation technique is that we don’t have to disappear these guys. We can reinsert them back into their environment without their being able to recognize what’s happened to them.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure.” Christine gestured toward the biocontrol console and the interrogation team working it. “Right now, we’re hitting the first subject with a massive dose of scopolamine, the same stuff they sometimes give to women during childbirth so they can’t clearly remember the pain of the experience. It can’t erase the memory totally but it will further blur an already blurry event to the point they shouldn’t have any kind of coherent recall.
“Most Indonesians – be they Muslim, Hindu or whatever – still have a very strong connection to a native mythology that’s just crawling with gods and spirits and demons and all sorts of other unearthly entities. If they don’t consider this just one exceptionally wild dream, they may very well pass it off as some kind of supernatural event or visitation. With a little luck, the last thing they’ll think of is that they were guests of the bad guys.”
Long ago, Amanda had learned the wisdom of leaving esoteric specialties to the specialists. “I’ll take your word for it, Chris. Stand on.”
Amanda started for the passageway door, then paused and looked back. “What you’ve been doing here, this whole procedure, sounds a great deal like some of those alien abduction stories I’ve read about. You know, the ones involving the little gray space men from the flying saucers. I don’t suppose …”
Christine Rendino looked acutely uncomfortable.
Amanda held up her hands. “I know, I know. You could tell me but then you’d have to kill me.”
“Uh, not exactly, Boss Ma’am.” She indicated the CIA team. “I could tell you but then they’d have to kill us both.”
The insurance salesman and the motherly RN looked up and smiled pleasantly.
*
Malang Sengosari jerked awake and sat up. The high riding sun reflected off the waves of the inlet and stabbed deep in his eyes.
They had slept far too late. His head was exploding and his mouth was foul as a week dead fish. Mahmud was sitting up in the bow, looking haggard and somewhat green under his seaman’s tan.
Something had happened. Something had come out of the sea – and there was the girl … the blue-skinned girl who had smiled and whispered …
Allah and all his Prophets, what had happened?
Malang took up a gourd of rainwater and drank off half its contents. Mahmud moved aft and took the gourd from his hands, draining off the other half. For a full minute they crouched in the bottom of the prahu, looking at each other. Finally, Mahmud said. “I’ll get the anchor up. It’s late.”
Malang nodded. “I’ll get the engine running. Let’s have another look at the anchorage before the pinisi comes.”
Eventually, when he was a gray-bearded clan captain yarning with his respectful crew, Malang would tell the tale of a night spent in the arms of a beautiful sea jinni. But not today and not for many long years to come.
The Temple of Pura Luhur Batukaru
Northern Tabanan Regency, Bali
1200 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
Located deep in the cool, mist-streaked rainforests at the foot of the sacred mountain Gunung Batukaru, Pura Luhur Batukaru is the ancestral temple of the Tabanan princes.
As it is dedicated to the deities of mountains and lakes, every other temple in Western Bali, in turn, has a shrine dedicated to it. Legend says Pura Luhur Batukaru was founded in the eleventh century by the Hindu sage Kuturan, but ancient stone monoliths have been unearthed that indicate the temple site has been a place of mysticism and veneration since prehistoric ages.
Flanking the main shrine complex, steps guarded by demon statues lead down to a small square pool with a tiny island in its center, a symbolic microcosm of the Hindu Mount Miru. Placed on the tiny island are two platforms, one dedicated to Gunung Batukaru, the other to the deities of the Three Lakes – Tamblingan, Buyan, and Bratan. Nearby, sacred hot springs bubble and steam on the moss-sheathed riverbanks.
It is a place of great spirituality to the followers of the Science of the Holy Waters, and a place of great power.
That was what had brought the four Muslim teenagers to the temple.
Likely they meant no true harm. They were city youths, the sons of Javanese government officials and businessmen from the regency capital at Tabanan. Heir families were well-to-do for the island and, as is frequently the case with privileged adolescents all around the world, the boys were cursed with an excess of energy, time and hubris.
As youth elsewhere might have fallen into the trap of drugs or alcohol, they had fallen into the pit of excessive religion.
Islam in Indonesia was, for the most part, a far different thing than the militant Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. The beer-sipping or bikini-wearing Indonesian Muslim generally had a far mellower and more tolerant world view.
Therefore, to this small band of restless, callow young people, Islamic radicalism was a road to individuality. It was a way to feel “special,” to stand out from the crowd, and it provided a moral high ground from which attacks on parental authority could be launched. The responding parental outrage only made the forbidden fruit sweeter.
These youths were far from the suicide bombing stage, however. Today’s long planned expedition to the temple of Pura Luhur Batakaru was more an act of public defiance, a personal pledge of dedication to Allah and a slap in the face of public propriety.
They did not intend to die.
The aged Imam in their school of religion who had encouraged them in this act did not mean for them to die either. He was an embittered, intolerant man who did not know the Balinese Hindus and who did not want to know them. He did not understand that he was blindly flicking ignited matches at a spilled pool of gasoline.
In due course, he would die for his ignorance and bigotry as well.
The four Muslim youths left their battered Toyota in the small parking area below the temple. Carrying their prayer rugs, they swaggered up the lichen-covered steps to the broad terrace in front of the gates, pretending not to notice the cold stares aimed at them from the scattering of other temple visitors, but secretly relishing them.
With exaggerated meticulousness, they oriented their rugs toward Mecca and knelt. Loudly, they began their noon prayers, brandishing their sacrilege of one of Agama Tirta’s holiest shrines under the nose of propriety. They were young, they were immortal, they were the favorites of God. Besides, the Hindus were a race of pacifists.
Were they not?
Deep in their devotions, they didn’t notice the crowd gathering on the steps of the terrace, a silent, staring throng that filtered down the paths to cluster around the interlopers. The Muslims had no way of knowing that they were not the first to intrude at Pura Luhar Batakaru.
During the previous night, one of the subsidiary shrines in the forest around the temple had been viciously vandalized. The shrine’s pemangu had been beaten and left for dead, and these villagers had spent their morning washing animal filth off the representation of the gods and picking up shattered bits of sacred tablets and artwork.
The four Muslim youths had played no part in the vandalism – more calculating minds than theirs had planned the desecration – but none of the outraged present particularly cared. The crowd pressed closer. There was no sound save for the words of prayer and then they trailed off into silence.
The Muslims looked up to find themselves walled in by a solid mass of stone-featured Balinese: grim, silent, impassive, totally unlike the islanders they had known. Now they sensed the building wave of wordless implacable rage. Again, the Muslim teenagers prayed – this time wordlessly, not out of bravado but in terror.
A child, an eight-year-old girl struck the first blow, hurling a stick at the quailing youths. Then the crowd swept forward.
One of the Muslims momentarily broke free of the mob. With his shirt and most of his skin clawed from his torso, he fled to the temple parking lot, a hundred silent people on his heels. His hand closed on the door handle of the Toyota just as a multitude of hands closed on him.
And through it all, there were no outcries of fury, no curses, no yelling. The only sounds were his screams – and the other noises produced when a human being is torn literally limb from limb.
Point Man Base
The United States Embassy, Jakarta.
1743 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
“What have you got?” Christine Rendino demanded, trotting into the Op Center from her interrupted dinner in the Embassy dining room.
“Some kind of trouble on Bali, Commander,” the watch officer replied, looking up from his workstation. “We’re getting heavy traffic on the Ministry of Defense taps from police command in Denpasar, indicating an outbreak of large-scale violence in Tabanan regency.”
“Define ‘large-scale’ and ‘violence’,” Christine said, donning her command headset and clipping the palm-sized receiver box to her belt.
“Denpasar isn’t too sure itself, ma’am. The trouble appears to be centered around the regency capital but it’s spreading. And it’s not conventional civil disobedience or rioting, but systematic bloodshed in the streets, apparently directed against the Muslim minority.”
“Oh my god!” Christine breathed, a chill rippling through her. “When did it start? How widespread is it? Are the local authorities getting it under control?”
The watch officer shook his head. “No answers to any of the above, ma’am. Communications are apparently breaking down in the Tabanan area.”
“This is not good. This is extremely not good. Do we have any drone coverage over Tabanan?”
“No, ma’am. Not at the moment.”
“Then contact Global Hawk command at Curtin Air Force Base and get me some! Then get me a sat link to the Shenandoah. I need to talk with Captain Garrett immediately.”
“Right away, Commander.” The duty officer felt his own unease grow. Their easygoing, slightly oddball, detachment C.O. was suddenly as serious as a new coffin. “What do you think is going on over there, ma’am?”
“Judgment day. Now get me on line with the Lady!”
The CIC, USS Shenandoah
1818 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
“Put it on the Alpha Display,” Amanda commanded.
The low murmur of operations-speak scaled back within the darkened interior of the Combat Information Center. The watch officers and duty SOs cut quick looks over their shoulders at the imaging on the big forward bulkhead screen.
They saw a high, side-angled view of a small city, the regency capital of Tabanan, surrounded by green un-ripened rice fields. Multiple smoke columns were rising from its eastern end. The view rotated slowly as the Global Hawk drone circled the objective at sixty thousand feet.
Amanda leaned forward in the Captain’s chair, eyes narrowed, jaw set. “Magnify.”
The drone control officer murmured into his headset, passing the word to the Shenandoah’s RPV control node.
Half a thousand miles away, the lens system in the drone’s camera turret responded to the command, zooming in on target. Tabanan was, or had been, a neat community, ordered and growing rapidly into modernity. Now, flames could be made out dancing at the base of the smoke clouds.
“That was the mosque,” the control officer said, blipping a target box around the largest fire. “That’s the police station. Those other buildings along the main street – those residences near the mosque. They probably belong to the local Muslim population.”
“Probably. Take us in closer.”
“Aye, aye. Going to max mag.”
Once more, the cameras pulled the ravaged city closer until people could be seen, the living crowds massing in the Hindu temples and the smaller number of the dead. The still forms of men, women and children lay in lines along the roads and in the town marketplace. They were not sprawled or scattered. There was a grotesque orderliness to the way they lay, the mark not of passionate violence but of deliberate execution.
“Pull back. Zero the magnification.”
The scan widened and the world fell away, pulling back above the stripes of wispy cloud until the ground was a dozen miles below.
“Rotate the scan, three sixty.”
The camera view panned slowly across the verdant terrain of Bali, the patchwork pattern of the rice fields, the paler patches of the scattered villages, the great craggy bulk of Mount Karangasem to the northeast and the azure of the sea to the southwest.
Smoke plumes writhed into the sky in at least four other locations.
“Is this being seconded to the Embassy?” Amanda inquired.
“Yes, Ma’am. And to NAVEX 7.2 Flag and NAVSPECFORCE Headquarters.”
“Very good.” Amanda tapped the transmit key on her own lip mike. “Signal Intelligence, this is the Captain.”
“Signal Intelligence, this is Captain Montgomery,” a crisp feminine voice replied.
“Captain, are we getting any signal intercepts out of the Bali Global Hawk? Anything that can tell us what’s happening on the ground?”
“Nothing definitive, Ma’am, just continued generalized indications of large-scale anti-Muslim terrorism and a general collapse of civil authority. Tabanan regency appears to be the flashpoint of the disturbance and we have heard references to an event or incident at one of the local Hindu religious shrines.”
That seemed ominously similar to the execution style death patterns they were seeing. The worst-case scenario would be for the angered pedanda of the Science of the Holy Waters to call for an exorcism of the Muslim “demons” living on Bali as they had done with the communists in the 1960s. If such were the case, if a call for the mass cleansing of the island in the name of the Trisakti were indeed flashing from temple to temple, then this was only a hideous beginning.
“The civil telephone net’s gone down throughout the central regencies – as have the security force radio nets,” the signals officer continued. “All we’re getting is random traffic from a scattering of isolated tactical units. The police headquarters are apparently being targeted by the mobs.”
“That’s to be expected. Most of the senior police cadre on Bali are Javanese Muslim. What are you getting out of Denpasar?”
“Not much. Civil radio and television are starting to make references to civil disobedience and rioting in some northern towns and villages, but the deaths and the extent of the outbreak are being downplayed. The authorities are ‘reacting’ to the situation. We’re also seeing repeated calls for national unity and the ‘we are many but all are one’ ideal. I’d say it was a classic ‘whistling in the graveyard’ package from a very scared administration.”
“What are the authorities doing?”
“Police headquarters in Denpasar was sending out repeated demands to the regency stations for more intelligence on the situation, along with orders to suppress the outbreak at all costs. Lethal force authorized. Then, about twenty minutes ago, Denpasar dropped off the net completely. We’re receiving fragmentary traffic on the civil emergency services channels, indicating a massive explosion at the police brigade command post, possibly a car bomb.”
“Damn!” Amanda murmured. “This couldn’t get worse.”
“Yes, ma’am, it could,” Montgomery said, remorselessly. “Very much so. We’ve started to pick up something else over here that I think you urgently need to listen to.”
Amanda had not known Captain Janet Montgomery of US Army Intelligence for very long, but Amanda sensed that she was usually a very understated individual.
“I’m on my way.”
*
