Balance of Power: A Novel (17 page)

A
DMIRAL
B
ILLINGS HADN
’
T LEFT THE BRIDGE ALL DAY
. The airplanes had come and gone, doing their usual missions—fighter intercepts, ocean surveillance, electronic warfare, bombing practice, strafing practice—all the missions intended to maximize the ability of the carrier battle group to attack and kill anything within reach. Anything.

In the past few years though, Billings, like most admirals, felt like a chainsaw at a woodcarving contest. Very effective, but maybe not the right tool. Not that there wasn’t a role for the carrier battle group anymore; there was—perhaps more than ever. But the politicians didn’t seem to know what it was.

Bunaya would be different, though. Billings fought to keep from smiling. An isolated island, bad guys ashore, and nowhere for them to go. Between the airplanes aboard the carrier and the Marines and Special Forces aboard the amphibs, he could deal with anything. Absolutely anything short of an armored division in a forest, and even that could probably be dealt with if he had just a little more time.

The bow of the supercarrier cut smartly through the dark ocean westward. The sun was directly in Billings’s face as he watched the progress of the ship. The wind had died down to five knots, so the ship was making up the rest of the thirty knots required to land airplanes by crashing through the ocean at twenty-five knots, effortless for
the USS
Constitution
, one of the fastest ships afloat. Maybe
the
fastest now that the
Pacific Flyer
was at the bottom of the Java Sea. Billings glanced at the nuclear cruiser to the north of the carrier and the turbine-powered destroyer off to the south. They were keeping up nicely. He loved being at sea and watching the gray ships pound their way through the ocean.

He climbed into his chair and squinted into the sun, putting the bill of his baseball cap just below the orange disk to block its direct rays.

Commander Beth Louwsma ran onto the bridge. “Couple of interesting developments, Admiral,” Beth said, out of breath from her climb to the bridge.

“Like what?”

Beth looked at a message in her hand. “By back channel message,” she said looking around, “we’re informed that maybe these Islamic terrorists aren’t all they claim to be.”

Billings frowned, confused. “Speak English.”

“They claim to be the Front for an Islamic Indonesia,” she said as she pulled some stray hair behind her ear. “But nobody’s ever heard of a group by that name, including Indonesia. That seems curious. You’d think they’d know their troublemakers. Well, turns out, they do. And these guys ain’t them. The first intel report we got implied they were tied to Iran. That Iran was giving them arms and weapons, kind of the Islamic brotherhood thing—fomenting revolution around the globe for a worldwide Islamic solidarity. Good theory. Only it doesn’t hold together. We’ve been watching Iran like a hawk for a long time. We know where they’re trying to stir things up. They’re in touch with some people in Jakarta, some fundamentalists, but these guys who took our ship don’t seem to be among them. Indonesia confirms it.”

Billings stood up and began to pace the bridge. Forward, aft. Forward, aft. He stopped and asked quietly, “So they’re not some fundamentalist Islamic front?”

Beth shook her head. “We don’t think so.”

“Well then, why would they say they were?”

“I don’t know…” Her voice trailed off.

“Whenever you do that, where you let your voice trail off, you have something else to say. Spit it out.”

“I don’t want to guess….”

“Go for it. Guessing is good exercise for thinking. It can’t hurt.”

“My guess,” she responded, contemplating whether she should speak freely, “is that they’re using that as the bogeyman—they know we’re spring-loaded to respond to Islamic fundamentalism. We’re used to dealing with it, to attributing all terrorism to them immediately. It’s like”—she stopped and thought—“like default logic in software. Whenever we don’t know who has done something, we assume it’s Islamic fundamentalists. We’ll believe anything about them. It’s a stereotype.”

“So?”

“So if they
say
that’s what they are, we’ll believe them instantly. Nobody would claim to be fundamentalists if they weren’t. It’d be like pretending to be a leper…”

“And?”

“And their real identity will go unexplored.”

Billings studied her face for indications of how sure she was. “Well, who are they really then?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying they probably aren’t the Islamic whatever of wherever.”

“Well, that’s not very helpful. That message tells us that much.”

“Yes, sir. I just wanted to add my two cents’ worth.”

“I think maybe one cent’s worth. If I’m generous.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry.”

“Find out who they really are and what the hell they’re up to. If they murder people and then lie about why, something is going on.”

“Yes, sir.” Beth turned to leave.

“I want national assets over Bunaya. I want an overflight
by photo bird and satellite imagery. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“Yes, sir, but the President said we’re not going after them.”

“That’s for public consumption. You watch,” the admiral said confidently. “We’ll be in there within forty-eight hours. I’ll bet you. I expect an order any time now appointing me as the joint task force commander. I’ll need you and ops to get a list of JTF assets in the area—Air Force, Army, whatever there is.”

“Yes, sir. Never hurts to be ready.”

Billings was thinking hard, thinking ahead, the way he was paid to do. To anticipate every contingency. “We’ll also need the beach studies, helicopter landing zones, the usual.” He took his eyes off the active flight deck for a moment. “What intel can you give us about this place right now?”

“Frankly, sir, not very much. I didn’t expect much because it’s so out of the way, but it’s also uninhabited—not much need to photograph uninhabited land. We’ve got enough to do—”

“Anything else?” he said, cutting her off.

“No, sir. I’ll see what else I can dig up.”

“Not good enough,” Billings said in a tone tinged with frustration. “I want you on-line with all the pinhead intel types you know in Washington or anywhere else. Get with the attachés in Jakarta, anybody who might know anything. Get it straight from the sources. As unfiltered as you can. We need to know what we’re up against.” As he finished talking, Captain Black walked onto the bridge. “Anything new?” he asked his chief of staff.

Black walked over to him. “Yes, sir. We just got a report from one of our EA-6Bs. They flew near Bunaya and picked up a fire-control radar.” One of their ultrasensitive electronics airplanes had picked up the signal of a radar that was created for only one purpose—to guide a missile or a gun.

Commander Beth Louwsma flushed with embarrassment.
This piece of information had made its way to the admiral without any intelligence analysis or any chance for her to research it. “From Bunaya?” the admiral asked, concern on his leathery face.

“They couldn’t tell for sure. There are a lot of islands around there. Hard to pinpoint it to that island, but they think so.”

“What kind of fire control?”

“That’s the thing. Couldn’t correlate it to a specific type. Right frequency range for fire control, but not from a platform they readily recognized.”

“Beth, what do you think?”

Louwsma thought for a moment. “I don’t know what to make of that at all, Admiral. Do these terrorists, or whatever they are, have surface-to-air missiles or antiaircraft batteries? Seems unlikely, especially something we don’t recognize.”

Billings looked out past the bow of the
Constitution
, then back at his staff. “What does Indonesia have in the way of SAMs?”

Louwsma blushed, immediately and painfully aware that this was a question she should have anticipated. “I don’t know, sir, but I will sure find out,” she replied weakly.

Billings looked at her with disapproval. “You should know the order of battle for every country within a thousand miles of us.”

“I know, sir. I’ve concentrated on the countries I thought might be hostile to us….” She stopped, seeing the look on Billings’s face. He turned and looked down toward the flight deck.

He spoke with his back to them. “Everybody better be doing their homework. We could be going ashore within twenty-four hours. I want to know who the hell we’re up against, what they have, and who, if anyone, is behind them.” He turned to face them. “Is that such an unreasonable request?”

“No, sir,” they said in unison.

“You all took off your packs because you heard the President say we weren’t going to respond. I’m telling you, that was for public consumption only. I’ve got a feeling. I think we’ll be going after these guys. Soon. I don’t think we’re going to let them get away.” He smiled and the crow’s-feet around his blue eyes wrinkled up. “Either the President’s ruse will work, or if it isn’t a ruse, Congress will pressure him into it.”

Captain Black replied, “You think this Letter of Reprisal thing…”

“Letter of Marque and…”

“Latest thing on CNN is that the Speaker’s calling it a Letter of Reprisal….”

“Why? That doesn’t make sense.” The admiral seemed puzzled. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. We just need to be ready.” He thought for a moment. “Bill, get a message to the rest of the battle group. I want a recon plan by 1500, and plans for attacking this island by sunset. We may have to hit them before they try to move again. We were lucky to catch them once. We might lose them if they go again.”

“Yes, sir.” Captain Black glanced sideways at the others. “How big a force do you plan to send in?”

Billings stared at Black, annoyed. He adjusted his ball cap down toward his eyebrows, as if putting on a helmet. “I’d tell the Marines to expect to send in all fifteen hundred. Every one.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Bunaya?” Lieutenant Jody Armstrong said, staring at Tyler Lawson. “Where the hell is that?”

“I have no idea,” Lawson replied. “But I’ve got the coordinates.” Lawson indicated the chart in front of them. “It’s supposed to be kind of near Singapore.”

“What do you think these guys are up to?” wondered Armstrong.

They stared at the chart, alone in the planning room, as
the USS
Wasp
steamed westward with the rest of the battle group toward Bunaya. Neither of them had ever heard of the island. But then, neither of them had given Indonesia a second thought before leaving on this cruise for the Southern Pacific. Neither Lawson nor Armstrong cared very much about the politics or religion of their destinations. They had long since put behind them the idea that the military leaders who ordered them on their missions and the political leaders who were behind those orders should be questioned. Long ago they had decided such questions were rarely fruitful and often led to slowed response time. Now they simply did what they were told.

Armstrong’s frustrations at the earlier two missions continued to mount. He had lost the
Pacific Flyer
and then stalked a deserted island like a fool, looking in vain for the terrorists. He leaned over and examined the chart. It showed Bunaya clearly, with the terrain outlined and graded for density of foliage and ground elevation. It appeared to be an unremarkable island with no high points above four hundred feet and covered with heavy foliage. Most islands that he had encountered in his time in the Navy were similar—arid on the coast and tropical inland. This island appeared to be tropical down to the water, a less common setup, but certainly not unheard-of. “Sure isn’t very big,” Armstrong remarked.

Lawson leaned over his shoulder.

He looked up at Armstrong. “The bad news is we don’t have any beach studies of this place at all. We don’t know anybody who’s even been ashore at this island, and we’ve got no imagery.”

“How are we supposed to do this?”

“On the fly.”

“Let me guess. A night mission,” Armstrong said, raising his eyebrows twice, mischievously.

Lawson smiled with the understanding of a comrade. “Only if we’re lucky.”

“You really think Admiral Billings would send us poor
boys in there at night without having any idea what this shoreline looks like?”

“Sure. What do you think you are, important?”

“I lost my head.” Armstrong stood up and stretched his arms back, his large muscles pressing against the fabric of his shirtsleeves. “Shouldn’t really be much to this. There were only, what, thirty guys that went aboard the
Pacific Flyer
?”

Lawson squinted as he thought. “Yeah, something like that, but we don’t know that they didn’t rendezvous with some other guys when they went aboard that mother ship.”

“Right, so maybe thirty or forty guys total. We could probably take care of them with one squad if we took them by surprise.”

Lawson looked worried. “Don’t assume anything. These guys may be highly trained. You know better than to assume anything—don’t assume you’re as good as you think and don’t assume they’re as bad as you think.”

“I’m not assuming anything. I’m just saying we should be able to handle this without too much difficulty.”