No, Al-Hazmi considered as he ran his thumb along the well-used blade of his priceless janbiya, he didn’t have to worry about the volunteers. And then he smiled broadly as he thought of what lay ahead.
No, he thought happily, it was the Americans who should worry about the volunteers.
2
The square was in absolute chaos when Cole finally returned to ground level. He’d known that police and security personnel would be using the elevator and stairs, and so he had ridden down on the roof of the elevator car, waited until the coast was clear, and then lowered himself through the access hatch and merged with the crowds.
Luckily, not enough time had elapsed for the authorities to cordon off the area or to secure it properly, and the square had been filled with hundreds of curious onlookers, many of whom were fixated by the two shattered bodies which had fallen from the top of the monument. It had been a relatively simply job for Cole to slip away in the confusion.
He’d since escaped fifty miles west to the city of Serang, where he’d located an internet café and was enjoying a cup of bandrek — a hot drink of spiced coconut milk popular in western Java — as he worked on the dead arms broker’s encrypted cellphone.
Cole used his hacking skills to piggyback onto one of the NSA’s decryption systems, and soon broke the encryption using sheer brute force. To Cole’s delight, the man had stored the contact details of many of his clients, one of whom was listed as Arief. Cole wasn’t surprised that Wong Xiang had such details; he would simply have believed that the sophisticated encryption would be enough to deter anyone who looked at his phone if it was ever lost.
Not that Cole could be sure that the number would still be being used by the pirate leader; a quick check of the number showed that it was a throw-away prepaid cellphone, and could easily have been replaced since the last time Wong had contacted him. But with nothing else to go on, Cole decided to pursue the lead.
Cole used the café’s secure landline modem to hack into the Indosat computer mainframe. He quickly called up the last known transmitter used by Arief’s cellphone, and found that it was a cellphone repeater station based in the town of Dumai on the coast of Sumatra — in the known operating zone of Liang Kebangkitan, and not a million miles away from where the Fu Yu Shan was hijacked.
Sure he was onto something, Cole nevertheless wanted something more concrete before he set out to perform a physical reconnaissance. A cellphone transmitter was one thing, but what he really wanted was a current GPS location for the phone.
Using the Indosat system, Cole remotely downloaded a tracking app to the pirate’s suspected cell phone and called up the information onto his own computer.
It immediately came up with a list of GPS coordinates, which Cole fed into a mapping system, pinpointing the cellphone exactly.
It seemed to be currently located on a narrow, unnamed island less than a mile long, sandwiched between the Sumatran mainland and the larger island of Pulau Rupat.
Cole smiled; it was an ideal location for a pirate base, an unknown islet wedged in a narrow channel which would deter large military vessels from attacking, whilst offering plenty of opportunities for the pirates to escape if discovered — to the mainland, to Pulau Rupat, or out of the channel and into deeper waters.
From the satellite maps, Cole could see that the island was heavily forested, the trees obscuring any rivers or internal channels which might be hiding a hijacked ship. In fact, at the resolutions offered by the maps, nothing of the little island except its vague shape could be made out at all.
Due to the nature of the area, Cole doubted that even the high-definition real-time surveillance footage of a targeted drone aircraft would reveal much more — the vegetation covered everything, and Cole was sure that the ship would also be camouflaged and perhaps even hidden in a sheltered sea cave, making positive identification next to impossible.
Cole wondered whether he should notify the US authorities, but thought better of it; what did he have to go on? At the moment, all he knew was that a cellphone which was linked to someone listed as ‘Arief’ was currently located on that little island. It could mean nothing, or it could mean everything, and Cole didn’t want valuable resources to be wasted if he was barking up the wrong tree.
Cole sighed as he finished his bandrek. There was only one thing for it.
He would have to find his way onto the island himself, and confirm that the Fu Yu Shan was actually there.
And if it was, he would remain on-site to provide real-time recon intelligence for the special ops team which would undoubtedly be sent to rescue the hostages and blast the pirates back into the fifteenth century.
The 35 day dry-aged rib-eye steak from the Shenandoah Valley Beef Cooperative tasted sublime as Jeb Richards consumed piece after mouthwatering piece.
It wasn’t on the menu for that particular evening, but Secretary of State Clark Mason had spoken to the maître d’ of 1789 and — sure enough — it had become instantly available.
The restaurant was one of the culinary icons of Washington DC, and was as good a place to spot political royalty as anywhere in the city. Richards knew that tongues might wag about his meeting with Mason, but who cared? They were both cabinet members, and meetings like this happened on a daily basis, especially at the city’s elite restaurants. Everyone knew that most of the important things which happened in the city originated over a good steak and a glass of wine during private meetings exactly like this one.
It would have been much more newsworthy if they had tried to meet clandestinely; for nothing was ever a secret for long in Washington, and the press would have had a field day with conjecture about what they were discussing.
As it was, relaxing in their mahogany chairs in the famous dining room, its cream-colored walls bedecked with centuries-old oil paintings, they were ignored completely; which suited Richards just fine.
‘So tell me you think this whole ship thing is a waste of time,’ Richards said through a mouthful of medium rare steak. The small talk was over for the evening, and now it was time for business.
Mason wiped at the edge of his mouth with a thick white napkin and took a sip of his Puligny Montrachet, regarding Richards with keen eyes.
‘I wouldn’t perhaps go that far,’ Mason began diplomatically. ‘I certainly think it’s important for us to put on a show, make all the right noises, don’t you? Ellen was right about the treaty with China, which is shaky at the best of times. Do we want to upset them?’ He shook his head. ‘Not really.’
‘But —’ Richards began, before Mason cut him off with a wave of the hand.
‘Sorry Jeb, but I didn’t finish. I said I think the pretense of doing something is important, not the actual doing itself. I would favor taking no real action, the same as you. As it happens, I think you’re right; I don’t think the kidnapping of three Americans — Chinese Americans in actual fact, and ones that don’t even live here, don’t pay their taxes here — well, I don’t think it’s anything to lose sleep over in the overall scheme of things, do you?’
Richards shook his head vigorously. ‘You’re damned right I don’t,’ he said. ‘A big waste of time and money is what it is. And it’s taking our eye off the ball, the things that really matter, you know? I mean, honestly, who gives a shit about a Chinese cargo ship?’