“What do the Indonesians intend to do about the situation?” MacIntyre inquired.
“Stonewall. Overtly say and do nothing about the situation.”
“That won’t wash, Mr. Secretary,” Christine Rendino protested. “This thing is too big, with too many factors involved. Indonesia doesn’t exactly maintain what you could call a free press, but no way are they going to be able to bury this, even if we help.”
Van Lynden peered over his glasses. “They’re very aware of that, Commander Rendino. President Kediri knows he’s sitting on a keg of dynamite with a lit fuse. The best he can hope for is to try to limit the explosion when the truth does come out. He literally begged me to help him buy some time.”
“For what?” MacIntyre asked. “What are their intentions?”
“To locate Makara Harconan and to ascertain his intentions.”
“If, in fact, this Harconan even survived the attack on his base in New Guinea,” Harwell said. “From what you say in your after-action reports, I can’t see how he got out of that place alive.”
“But he did, sir,” Christine Rendino stated. “His body was never located anywhere within the tunnel complex or on Crab’s Claw Cape. We know now that Harconan had a whole escape-and-evasion operation preprogrammed and ready to go. He knew that sooner or later he was going to have to bail out of his international businessman persona. This E-and E program was initiated after we hit Crab’s Claw. Harconan must have been the one to order its execution.”
“What-all did this bail out program entail?” Harwell asked skeptically.
“When the Indonesian authorities moved in on Makara Limited, anything left was an empty shell. All bank accounts and stock portfolios had been emptied. The vaults of Makara Limited’s banking division were even emptied of cash assets. Harconan’s personal residence on Palau Piri Island and his corporate headquarters on Bali both self-destructed, burning to the ground and leaving nothing for the investigators. The disappearances and assassinations mentioned by the Secretary of State indicate that Harconan is also pulling his trusted lieutenants under cover with him while eliminating his not-so-trusted ones. He’s gone to ground somewhere within the Indonesian archipelago with a war chest we estimate to be in excess of three hundred million dollars.”
The intel leaned forward, meeting Harwell’s gaze. “Sir, Harconan and his whole organization has just executed a crash dive like a submarine, He’s still out there, running on course and continuing with his mission. We just can’t see him anymore.”
“The question then is, what is his mission?” Van Lynden asked.
“The destruction of the Indonesian government,” Amanda Garrett said, speaking for the first time. Her voice was level and controlled, her eyes distant, as if she were looking into the future. “Mr. Secretary, you were quite right with your assessment of this situation as being a government killer scenario. That’s always been Harconan’s intention. But he doesn’t want to just bring down the Kediri government; he wants to destroy the state of Indonesia as a whole, blowing the entire national structure as we currently recognize it apart.”
“I see,” Van Lynden said quietly. “I presume you gained some insight into this while you were his prisoner.”
“Enough to make some suppositions, sir, if you’d care to hear them.”
Van Lynden nodded. “Very much so, Captain. How does he intend to do this and why? What’s his justification?”
“A deep discontent with the way things presently are in Indonesia. This is an attempt by one man to restructure his world into what he visualizes as a better place.”
“A common-enough phenomenon. What’s his plan?”
Amanda turned to Christine Rendino. “Chris, how many major separatist and revolutionary movements are there in Indonesia, both in active hot-war mode or as a dangerous potential?”
“Jeez, ask me a simple one,” the intel replied. “Currently you’ve got two fair-sized shooting wars going on either end of the archipelago, New Guinea with the Morning Star separatists and the Islamic extremist separatists in the Aceh district of Sumatra. You’ve got another big batch of cranky hard-core Islamics, the leftovers of the Walid movement, in eastern Java, making the Balinese Hindus nervous.
“You’ve got a UN peacekeeping force still trying to keep that septic mess on Timor under control. You’ve got the Dayak tribesmen going after the Javanese transmigrasi in Borneo. You still have a bunch of Moluccans who haven’t really been happy since the Dutch left. You have all kinds of coup-grade factionalism within the Indonesian army and navy cadres…. I could go on all afternoon, Boss Ma’am.”
“That’s adequate to prove the point, Chris. Mr. Secretary, this is how Makara Harconan intends to bring about the downfall of Indonesia.”
“You mean, by somehow uniting all of these factions against the Jakarta government?” Van Lynden adjusted his glasses, puzzled. “I’ve put some time in on the Indonesia question of late, and I can assure you that’s all but impossible. Many of these groups are in diametric opposition to each other.”
“Unity is not what Harconan wants, Mr. Secretary. He’s promoting chaos, anarchy, and factionalism, a total breakdown of the Indonesian national order. He wants to return Indonesia to a scattering of independent island kingdoms, each with its own cultural group, religion, and leadership.”
“And what does he get out of this?” Admiral Harwell demanded.
“All of these diverse island groups will have only one thing in common,” Amanda replied. “They will, in fact, be islands dependent upon the sea for their communications and trade, and the raja samudra and his Bugis followers will control the sea. His will be the true power in the archipelago. Anyone who wants passage rights through his waters will have to pay him tribute. And that will include us.”
“Christ,” Harwell murmured, “do you have any idea how he intends to do it, Captain?”
“His plan is simplicity itself, sir,” Amanda replied. “Indonesia is a hotbed of rebellion. Harconan intends to throw a bucket of gasoline on the coals.
“As Commander Rendino has pointed out, there are any number of rebellious factions within Indonesia. Many of them haven’t been a major threat to Jakarta so far because of one simple factor: It takes money to run a good war.
“Back before the old USSR and Red China went under, they were always ready to supply some eager young group of insurgents. In recent years, however, things have gotten a little lean in the revolution business. Arms and support have been hard to come by. But then Harconan turns up. Chris, explain what we’ve been learning about Harconan’s arms trade.”
Rendino took over the flow. “Over the past few years, Makara Harconan has been a major arms purchaser. Nothing big at any one time, but all kinds of small-lot purchases using false front companies. Nothing fancy either: Third World and used First World armaments and ammunition, whatever could be picked up cheap without attracting a lot of attention. Your basic rifle, machine-gun, hand-grenade kind of thing.”
“What’s he done with it?”
“We think he’s been dispersing it out in hundreds of small, heavily camouflaged arms dumps located in isolated areas throughout the archipelago,” the intel replied. “We’ve uncovered a couple of them already. Crab’s Claw was apparently being used as a major disbursement point for the operation.”
“And his intention for these weapons?”
“That’s the gasoline I mentioned, sir,” Amanda resumed the briefing. “Wherever there is a Bugis colony, Harconan has agents provocateurs. It would be very easy for him to provoke incidents to increase national tension: religious violations, race riots, any number of things. His own corruption scandal could lay the groundwork for it. When popular disaffection reaches its peak, and the Jakarta government is strained to the breaking point, Harconan releases a location list of the arms caches to the leaders of the different rebel factions throughout the archipelago.”