So here he was. Brought here by fate. The perfect hybrid officer, in the eyes of the military, combining his unique military intelligence training with his unique commodities expertise.
“I’m going to try and catch some shut-eye, fellows,” he said to the two other intelligence duty officers, an army captain and an air force first lieutenant. “Wake me up if there’s so much as a minor blip on those charts.”
“Not a problem, Lieutenant,” the captain said.
Bob unbuttoned his whites, kicked off his shoes, and slipped under a sheet. The pillow felt relaxing to the back of his head.
He closed his eyes. The light hum of computer equipment and the soft, occasional murmur of voices served as an inconsequential backdrop to the images from his past that floated in his mind.
Disjointed images.
Beautiful, softly glowing, colorful pictures.
The red brick rotunda at the University of Virginia…Small craft crisscrossing the Hudson River on a moonlit night. His first glimpse of Janie, so confident, yet with a haunting beauty, as she sat behind the recruiter’s table at UVA.
Oil futures.
Limit moves.
Charts.
More limit moves.
The comforting veil of sleep descended over him.
Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!”
Molster opened his eyes to the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. The computer’s alarm was on fire, or so it seemed.
The army captain and air force lieutenant were huddled over their computer screens. “Looks like we’ve got a huge limit move in progress, Lieutenant,” the army captain said. “Tons of sharp volume.”
Still in his T-shirt, Molster popped onto the floor and peered over the captain’s shoulder. He squinted his eyes and gazed at the screen.
“Here we go again,” he said. His stomach churned and knotted. “Lieutenant,” Molster tapped the air force lieutenant on the back of the shoulder. “Notify the J-2 duty officer. Limit move in crude oil.” He checked the time. “Mark it. 23:42 hours. Per standing orders. Alert chain of command. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” the air force lieutenant said. He picked up the phone to call the J-2 duty officer.
Mexican freighter Salina Cruz
Near the Texas coast
1:30 a.m.
Captain Alberto Mendoza throttled his freighter into neutral. The running lights of two other vessels blinked across the black waters, but under a new moon, it was impossible to see who or what they were.
His local radar swept the fifteen-mile circumference around the freighter Salina Cruz.
Based on the radar sweep, they were probably a couple of small trawlers out of Brownsville. Definitely not the right reading for a US Coast Guard cutter.
Other than that, nothing.
Mendoza turned to his guest. “We are at the drop point. Seven miles from shore. Are you ready?”
“Ready, amigo,” the skinny man with the black scruffy beard spoke in an accent that was not Hispanic.
Mendoza did not know the man’s real name. All he knew was that the man’s name supposedly was Rahman.
They were all named Rahman, it seemed. Every one of them. And they’d paid him more money than he’d ever seen in his life to sail to this spot off the Texas coast, under cover of darkness, to offload cargo and to keep his mouth shut.
“My crew will help you disembark.” Mendoza waved his hand. His first officer scrambled out onto the deck. Five Mexican deckhands began swinging three rubber boats, all inflatable, down toward the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rahman’s crew scrambled over the side, descending rope ladders, making their way down to the boats. A moment passed.
“Everyone in place?” Mendoza yelled down to the water.
“All ready.”
“Okay, we’re lowering the boxes.”
Mendoza gave the command. A crane onboard began lowering the first of three plywood boxes, about twice the size of a large coffin, down over the side. The boxes bore the words Bottled Water painted in English.
Probably cocaine or heroin. But Mendoza did not ask. Too many questions meant no repeat business. The manifest declared that the boxes were bottled water, and that would be his story if the Coast Guard stopped him on the high seas.
He struck a cigarette and leaned over the side of his ship. The stars cast a faint glow onto the waters of the Gulf. The whining sound of the ship’s cargo crane blended with the mild breeze blowing from the east. He watched as the third box of “bottled water” to be offloaded from his two-hundred-twenty-foot ship this week disappeared into the darkness below.
Moments later, the sound of outboard motors ignited from the surface, and then the sound of the three rubber craft pulling away, starting their westward journey to the Texas coast.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mendoza shouted. “Set course for one-eightzero degrees.”
“Sì, Capitan,” came the voice of his first officer from inside the pilot room.
Mendoza flipped his cigarette overboard, watching the red, burning tip whirl down in the wind as Salina Cruz began her wide-sweeping turn to head back to her home port of Tampico, Mexico.
Gag Island
West Papua, Indonesia
3:30 p.m.
Captain Hassan Taplus stood on the sandy beaches of the remote tropical island and gazed seaward to the southwest. Only a hundred miles south of the equator, the sun was blazing high above the horizon and he could hear the sound of helicopters approaching. He brought his binoculars to his eyes for a closer look.
So far, nothing but water and horizon.
The sound of the rotors grew louder.
He swung the binoculars slightly to the right. Two choppers appeared in the viewfinder. They approached through the blue skies, low over the water, perhaps a half-mile downrange.
“Excellent.” He checked his watch and smiled. “Right on time.”
More goosebumps. When this operation was complete, his ascendance up the Indonesian military command would become a fait accompli.
A military hero. That is how history would remember him. A pioneer. A founding father of the new Islamic Republic of Indonesia!
Yes, General Perkasa would be viewed as the leader of the movement. But he would be remembered by history as a military mastermind who stood at Perkasa’s side.
One day, Perkasa would relinquish power. And on that day…chills descended Hassan’s spine…perhaps even the presidency would await him.
The choppers circled just overhead now. The first feathered down onto the beach about a hundred yards from where he was standing, not far from the chopper that had carried him in, along with the advance party. The second landed a few seconds afterwards.
Their engines powered down, and the bay door opened on the second chopper.
They stepped out, one by one.
The passengers were eight nuclear scientists who had been working on contingency plans for the development of a proposed floating nuclear power plant in Indonesia. Their work had met stiff resistance from the international community, particularly the Aussie government, which protested that a nuclear mishap would spread deadly radiation south over Darwin and other populated sections off Australia. Now these men, all loyal to the general, would oversee the technical aspects of the operation, under his command.
In teams of two, the scientists quickly made their way to the first chopper, where somewhere in the dark recesses of its bay lay one of the ten-kiloton nuclear devices that General Perkasa had purchased from the Pakistanis.
Just behind the two helicopters, a portable steel tower was already being erected by the advance team into the tropical sky. From this tower, the device would be suspended.
What a waste, Taplus thought, of such a rare and valuable weapon. However, virtually every nation that had ever entered the nuclear club had done so with a visible demonstration of power. Indonesia would do the same.
Six men lifted the crate out of the helicopter bay. This image would be forever frozen in his memory.