And he and his colleagues would have to be very unlucky for someone to be able to work out what had really happened, and why the Fu Yu Shan had been hijacked in the first place.
Richards felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, and pulled it out, reading the text message.
Yes. His secretary had information about the Asset.
Richards excused himself from the conference room, and fled down the corridors of the West Wing to make his call, and learn everything that she had found out.
The day’s training finally over and done with, Treyborne’s detailed briefing now also out of the way, Jake Navarone sat in front of the secure laptop computer in the squad’s recently commandeered recreation room.
‘Hi!’ he said happily, connected via the internet to his family’s home computer back in Tampa, Florida.
‘Hey Jake!’ his father replied, a huge smile over his weathered face. ‘How you doin’, son? And where the hell are you? Oh, I forgot, you can’t tell me, right? Secret stuff I bet, wow, my little Jake the secret agent man!’ Ernesto Navarone broke off his diatribe and turned behind him, yelling out, ‘Celia! Girls! Get down here, we got Jake on the phone from Mars or someplace! Come on!’
Behind his dad, Jake could see feet coming hurriedly down the stairs; the large pair belonging to his mom, the next two pairs those of his sisters.
Jake Navarone wasn’t married; nor did he have a steady girlfriend. The fact was, he just didn’t think it was fair. The life of a commando in SEAL Team Six wasn’t that of a married man, or that of a father. Not a good one, anyway. And his family had been so good to him, he only wanted the best for his own wife and children when he was eventually ready to settle down. Which, the way he felt now — charged up and excited about the mission ahead, filled with the fear-tipped thrill of adrenalin — probably wouldn’t be any time soon.
But he kept in constant touch with his parents and kid sisters, at least as much as operational security allowed. They kept him grounded in reality, and his head screwed on right.
His mother’s grinning face pushed past his father’s into the video camera. ‘Hey Jake!’ she said, ‘How’s it going? How you doing?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You looking after yourself? You eating right?’ She leaned closer to the screen, examining him from a thousand miles away. ‘You look a little skinny.’
‘Leave him be, Celia,’ Ernesto said, pulling his wife onto his lap and letting Jodie and Bobbi get past.
‘Jake!’ they screamed as one, excited to see him as always. Navarone felt his heart warm, and he smiled. He could be anywhere in the world, preparing for any kind of mission, but the feeling he got when he called home was always the same.
The sisters were twins and were just ten years old, an eighteen year gap between them and Navarone; a big enough gap for people to wonder if there’d been a mistake of some kind. But his parents refused to use terms like ‘mistake’ or ‘accident’, believing that anything so perfect could only have been a blessing for their family.
Navarone had an older brother too, a great guy just two years older who had his own small office supplies business up in New York and a young family of his own. In fact, Brandon Navarone’s two boys weren’t much younger than the twins.
‘Where are you, Jake?’ asked Jodie.
Bobbi shook her head and tutted at her sister. ‘He can’t tell you that,’ she said impatiently, before a smile played across her lips. ‘If he did, he’d have to kill you. Isn’t that right, Jake?’
Sitting on a broken canvas chair in a bland concrete rec room on a Singapore naval base, Navarone nevertheless felt he was back at home, right back with his family.
‘Well, I don’t know about killing anybody,’ he said with a grin, ‘but I might have to — ’
Navarone felt a vibration against his waist and looked down at the pager on his belt. But before he had a chance to read the message, the door to the rec room burst open and Tim Collins, a young Team Six shooter from Tallahassee, shouted over to him, excitement across his eager face.
‘We’re on!’ Collins shouted across to Navarone. ‘Come on!’
Watching the man as he raced off down the corridor, Navarone turned back to his family. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to call back some other time.’ He was already rising from his chair, hand reaching out to disconnect the call, and he reflected again that this is why he wasn’t married.
‘I’ve got to go to work.’
From his vantage point across the river, Cole had seen enough to distinguish the regular daily routine of the pirate hideout. And what he had been witnessing over the past few hours was decidedly out of character for the previously quiet little cavern.
Men had been racing around all over the place, checking nets here, weapons there; and more men were arriving too, presumably other pirates from Liang Kebangkitan who had been getting some R&R away from the base.
Cole had identified the man he believed to be Arief Suprapto, and could listen in to the man’s screamed orders through the parabolic mike which rested next to him, nestled in the undergrowth. The words meant nothing to him unfortunately, as they were spoken in an unintelligible Indonesian dialect; but he was feeding the data directly back to JSOC, and perhaps they would be able to decipher it.
President Abrams and General Olsen had decided to link Cole up directly with Lieutenant General Miley Cooper, commander of US Joint Special Operations Command, and Cole had been impressed by their common sense. All too often, politicians and military bigwigs tried their best to get themselves inserted too deeply into special ops missions, with the result that decisions were delayed, information was not passed on, and — ultimately — the wrong people often got killed as a result. But in direct contact with JSOC, Cole would be able to help guide in any team that was sent.
He had described the situation to Cooper over the secure sat-phone he’d taken from Wong’s warehouse — defenses were being shored up, and the hostages had been moved back on board the Fu Yu Shan.
Cole realized that Suprapto must have gotten wind that something was happening, and wondered how he knew. Was there a leak in the White House? The Pentagon? If China knew, was there a leak on their end? Or else had Suprapto found out about Wong Xiang back in Jakarta, and was merely taking precautions just in case?
He didn’t know, but at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter either; all that mattered was that the situation was changing, and things would have to happen fast on the American side if they were to have any hope of resolving the situation.
Cole suspected he knew the reason for moving the hostages back aboard the cargo ship — if the hideout was attacked, Suprapto would set sail with the boat and threaten to sink it and kill the crew unless the assault force withdrew.
Cole had reported all of this back to JSOC, and had been pleasantly surprised by the speed of the response; not a full hour had passed before Cooper was back informing Cole that the mission had been given the presidential green light.
Cooper wanted Cole to remain in position and help guide the team in. Apparently there would be a squad from DEVGRU, Cole’s own old unit, who would insert on inflatable boats up the riverine channel the same way Cole had. Once close enough they would swim underwater and enter the docks, several of their number gaining access to the ship through the steel hull, from where they would secure the hostages and re-take the hijacked vessel.
At a certain point after this initial action, other team members would emerge from the cave’s waters and take out the pirates and secure the hideout.