Sword of Allah (43 page)

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Niven, when the Internet connection closed and the frame on the screen turned black. ‘What do you blokes think?’

‘I think Monroe and Wilkes have got it dead right,’ said Felix Mortimer, eating his favourite sandwich of white bread, chips and butter liberally soused with tomato sauce.

Griffin looked at the unconscious doodle on the notepad on his knee. The word ‘shit’ was written, and it was surrounded by stars and exclamation marks. Wilkes and Monroe had followed a path of logic no one else had pursued. Darwin and Jakarta just seemed the natural targets, and the truth was, no one had looked much further than that. Except for Mortimer. He’d also thought Darwin wasn’t the target, but was too polite to say, ‘I told you so.’ As for Wilkes, he was obviously no ordinary grunt, and the CIA spoke highly of their man, Atticus Monroe. Just because they weren’t defence experts or strategists didn’t mean they had to be wrong, did it?

‘Let’s assume these boys are on to something – and I think we have to,’ Niven said. ‘What’s up there?’

‘Around twenty trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, for one thing. Oil, too. We did a paper on it six months ago,’ said Mortimer, his face sweating. A vague pain in his chest had suddenly intensified as if an invisible hand had pushed a hot knife through his breast.
Is this normal? Am I okay?
‘There are thirty or forty rigs up there. The VX front could be tens of kilometres wide. If it rolls over three or four of them and maybe a research ship, we could be looking at up to a thousand deaths.’

‘Jesus…’ Niven was at a loss. What could be done to stop the drone in the time left? If Wilkes and Monroe were right, the assets were deployed in all the wrong places.

‘And once the VX settles, it’ll get into every crack,’ said Mortimer, unconsciously rubbing his chest, a dull pain in his left arm. ‘The rigs will be unusable for a very long time afterwards.’

Griffin looked at Mortimer and saw that the man was in some kind of distress. ‘You okay, Felix?’

Mortimer nodded. ‘Forget the casualties for a minute. That’s not what these terrorists are about. If the hit on the Timor Gap succeeds, it could start an oil crisis like the one back in the seventies. It could mean that terrorists are getting smart, targeting the West where it really hurts. Oil prices will skyrocket, especially if this and other groups follow up with a statement about this being the first of many strikes on oil installations, pipelines and refineries, tankers and such.’ Mortimer glanced around the room, looking for some water, wanting more than anything to splash some on his face.

‘Okay, so what have we got in the area?’ Griffin asked, certain the news wouldn’t be good.

A quick review of the vast whiteboard covering one entire wall confirmed the worst. ‘One frigate, two F/A-18s and thirty-six thousand square kilometres of goddam ocean,’ Niven said, grinding his jaws.

‘Striking at an oil field, throwing the West into a panic…that would make a lot of sense if you’re a terrorist group bent on igniting nationalistic and religious fervour,’ said Mortimer with the strange sensation that he was talking, but that no sound was passing his lips. The impression was strengthened when he saw that neither Griffin nor Niven appeared to be listening to him, but he continued the thought anyway. ‘Those fields were Indonesia’s before East Timor’s independence and now they’re pretty much being developed by the West – us, mainly, with money from Shell and a few others. If a fundamentalist group like Babu Islam were to hit those fields with VX nerve agent,
poisoning the infrastructure and killing a bunch of westerners into the bargain, what sort of fire –’

‘Jesus, Felix, are you okay?’ said Niven. Mortimer’s face was shaking and his skin had turned purple. The man’s eyes were bulging, fixed and staring.

The hot knife in Mortimer’s chest had suddenly turned into a hand grenade with the locating pin removed. He fell to the floor, spilling his notes and his sandwich onto the carpet. The defence analyst clutched at his heart as the pain exploded within. And in that instant, the answer to the question of the number series suddenly became blindingly apparent to him.
1511472723
. Something Niven said in an earlier meeting clicked.
We’re banking on them being not significant.
Suddenly, he knew exactly what the series meant. He tried to get the words out but they wouldn’t come and instead his mouth opened and closed several times soundlessly.

Niven rolled Mortimer onto his back and began administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Griffin was on the phone, calling for an ambulance. Niven knew it was pointless but he continued the heart massage, alternating with mouth to mouth. After several minutes of getting nowhere, he stopped.

‘Poor bugger,’ said Griffin.

‘Yeah.’ Niven’s own heart was racing and he took a few deep breaths to calm it. His mouth tasted of Mortimer’s sandwich and he spat out fragments of salt and vinegar crisps.

‘Hey, what’s this?’ Griffin was studying something on the floor.

Niven stood, knees cracking, and went over to have a look. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Griffin shook his head. He had no idea. Scratched into tomato sauce smeared across Mortimer’s notes was the word ‘swift’.

The rig manager’s throat was dry and swallowing didn’t help.

‘Fuck,’ said the drilling contactor, blinking. ‘How long is it going to take us to shut the platform down and get everyone off?’ He was new to the job, having spent most of his time on dry land in head office.

‘We’ve got two shifts, one of them asleep. Ninety people in all. We can pinch the drill string…twenty minutes.’

‘We’ve got ten.’

Both men were vaguely paralysed by the news that the terrorist weapon was not targeted at Darwin, but at
them
. Or rather, the entire oil field. The news had just been conveyed via satellite link from Canberra by no less than the head of Australia’s defence forces himself, Air Marshal Ted Niven. Understandably, everyone on the rig with friends and family in the north of Australia had been preoccupied with the evacuation of the city ever since the prime minister’s shock address. And all the while they’d been the ones in the target zone. Right now, the platform had to be cleared, but the reasons for it would have to wait until they were bobbing in the Timor Sea. That was the air marshal’s advice – get into the lifeboats and motor upwind of their platform as fast as they could. Australian warships
and merchant vessels were heading there now to pick them up.

The rig manager hit the large red knob hard with the flat of his hand and the air around them suddenly filled with an ear-splitting wail. The rig was sitting on a trillion tons of explosive gas and everyone was well versed on the emergency evacuation procedures. All over the rig, the manager knew, the men and women would have one thing on their mind – to get the fuck off the platform now, now, now.

Commander Drummond had brought
Arunta
through a forty-five degree course change and was now steaming south, the edge of the Timor Gap a few miles off its port beam, a long, curved white road of foam behind the stern. ‘Jesus wept,’ he muttered under his breath.
Commander, the fact is we have your ship, two Hornets and a KC-130. That’s it. What happens from here on in is up to you and those aircraft.
They’d received the message only minutes ago from Canberra. In other words, there was virtually nothing between the Bayu-Unadan gas and oil fields and a load of VX gas. So the target wasn’t Darwin after all.
I wish the buggers would make up their bloody minds…
Drummond was back out on the starboard wing with his Zeiss binoculars, scanning the horizon, the band of grey-white haze that obscured the transition between sea and sky.

Leading Seaman Mark Wallage stepped onto the confined space and announced himself to the captain.

‘Mark, you know the task. What are our chances of finding the UAV?’ said Drummond, scowling. It had been a long cruise and the men all knew each other well enough to dispense with rigid navy formality.

‘Sir, the Vectronics is an amazing piece of technology, but it’s not magic,’ he said, the airflow tearing the words from his mouth so that he had to shout. ‘The UAV we’re looking for’s designed not to be seen. It’s constructed with RAM – so we’d be lucky to get a primary even if it was sitting right on top of us. If we get it at all it’s likely to register on our screens like a couple of birds, and small ones at that. And if it’s clipping the waves like everyone suspects, well, for us to see it it’s going to have to pass within nine miles of us, otherwise it’s going to be over the horizon.’
And there’s a lot of bloody sea out there…
‘We’re going to be looking for it as hard as we can and we might get lucky, sir, but, frankly, the best chance we’ve got of finding it is if it knocks on our door and asks to borrow a cup of sugar.’

‘I think I get the picture. Okay, Mark, I know you’ll do your best.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the leading seaman, aware that his best wouldn’t be nearly good enough. ‘Will that be all, sir?’

‘On your way back, ask the XO to join me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Drummond scanned the horizon again while he waited for the executive officer. ‘Captain?’ said Briggs moments later.

‘X, how many pairs of these have we got on board, do you think?’ Drummond asked, holding up his binoculars.

‘No idea exactly, sir, but there’d be a few.’

‘Post as many lookouts around the ship as possible. Looks like eyeballs are the best chance we’ve got of finding the damn thing.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Briggs, the hopelessness of the task now confirmed by their reliance on binoculars.

Drummond resumed his search. He trained the lenses on the horizon, realising as he did so that the UAV could pass the ship closer in and he’d miss it completely. He followed an albatross heading away from the boat, watching it wheel and bank through the sky on its three-metre wingspan. The bird’s flight was graceful and flowing, carving circles against a background of mist. And then it abruptly shifted course, appearing to stop in mid air before climbing rapidly. Drummond lowered the binoculars to see what had spooked it and saw what appeared to be a handful of flying fish flickering across the wave tops. And that’s when he saw it. Or at least, he thought he saw it, a patch of water that – oddly – appeared to be travelling faster than the sea around it.

‘Mark,’ he said, finding it hard to keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘You back in operations?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Wallage as he sat in his seat.

‘forty-five degrees off the starboard bow,’ said the captain. ‘What do you see?’

‘Intermittent contacts, sir. Hard to tell. Could be a couple of birds,’ said the radar op.

‘I saw one bird out there,’ said Drummond, ‘not two. Mark that spot!’ he commanded. ‘Anything else?’ Drummond was talking into his microphone out on the ship’s waist but the exchange was heard over the bridge’s
PA. Briggs picked up a pair of binoculars and hurried to join the captain.

‘There,’ said Drummond pointing in the direction of the sighting, but not taking his eyes from the binoculars. ‘A slow mover, fifteen or maybe twenty metres above the water.’ As he said it, the sea and the sky swallowed the shape, and it disappeared like a fragment of morning fog.

‘Can’t see it, sir,’ said Briggs, wondering whether he was looking in the right place.

‘Jesus Christ, X. I’m not sure it was there either,’ said Drummond after a handful of long seconds, trying to will the UAV into view.

‘Sir,’ said Briggs, lowering the binoculars and turning to the captain, ‘can you be sure it
wasn’t
there?’

‘Boys, you are now the only show in town. Find it. Kill it.’

‘Roger, sir,’ said Corbet. Jesus, it was the defence forces commander himself, personally amending their orders. A Royal Australian Navy vessel had apparently reported a suspected sighting of the UAV. A few seconds of static in his ’phones told him the exchange with Canberra was done. ‘Shogun two. You get that?’

‘Loud and clear, sir,’ said the flying officer.

Corbet waited while Burns finished topping up his tanks and backed away from the KC-130. Someone would no doubt vector the tanker to their rendezvous with the navy ship. They peeled away from the flying bowser.

The power of the F/A-18’s General Electric F404-GE-400 turbofans pushed Flight Lieutenant Corbet back into his seat as the aircraft accelerated to .9 mach. Thirty miles out from the
Arunta
, they throttled back and began their descent. Within minutes, the frigate appeared suddenly out of the tropical mist like a ghost ship. They shot past it at five hundred feet then banked hard over to the north in a high g turn, condensation streaming from the wing roots, the massive drag bleeding off their speed.

Drummond and Briggs had been tracking the inbound fighters on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ said Drummond, screwing up his face as the howl from their shrieking turbofans suddenly penetrated the bridge and concentrated in a vibration behind his eyes. He stepped out onto the waist briefly and watched the aircraft turn and bank sharply, decelerating at a rapid rate. ‘Okay, operations, you can patch me through,’ he said, walking back onto the bridge and closing the steel door behind him to minimise the aircraft noise feeding back into his microphone.

‘
Arunta
, Shogun one,’ said Corbet through the bridge’s PA system.

‘Shogun one,
Arunta
. Go ahead,’ Drummond replied.

‘I understand you’ve had a suspected sighting of the UAV.’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Request a snap vector to the sighting.’

Drummond checked the monitor screen on the bench. It had been exactly twenty minutes since the UAV had possibly flown in and then out of his vision. ‘Fly heading one two zero. Estimate position nose twenty-three miles.’

Corbet repeated the instructions to ensure there was no
confusion. The fighters flew directly overhead and the roar set up a buzz in one of the bridge’s thick glass panes overlooking the foredeck.

‘Good luck, Shogun one,’ said Drummond.

‘Thanks,
Arunta
, we’ll need it.’

Commander Drummond exhaled and leaned forward over the display screen on the desk. The F/A-18s were now outbound heading east south-east. He picked up the binoculars from the steel bench and stepped towards the waist.

‘Sir,’ said Briggs, failing to contain his excitement, catching the commander before he walked into the wind. ‘Take a look at this.’ He led the commander over to a monitor. ‘We had some of the deck cameras on lookout. Seems your eyes weren’t deceiving you.’ Briggs rewound the tape and played it. The camera was trained on a patch of sea and the water rolled up and down with the swell. And then the UAV flew into the top third of the frame, banked right and disappeared.

‘Well, I’ll be fucked,’ Drummond said under his breath. ‘Work out its track and let’s get it to those RAAF boys.’

Corbet glanced over his left shoulder at the aircraft off his wing. This was Flying Officer Robert Burns’ first posting following advanced training and conversion to high performance jets. He was twenty-three years old and a good pilot. No, he was better than good. Frankly, you had to be God’s gift to aviation just to make it through the training and get to an operational fighter squadron. The kid was cocky, without being cocksure. And anyway, a bit of
additood
was
SOP for a fighter jock. So far, the kid was handling himself well, but things were about to get tricky. The word ‘suicidal’ popped into his brain. This kind of flying in an F/A-18 was something no one trained for and, while Corbet would have been far more comfortable with an experienced pilot off his wing, Burns did have something that partway made up for his lack of experience. He had the best eyes in the squadron, cool grey orbs behind sleepy eyelids that possessed phenomenal acuity. One of the questions in Corbet’s mind was how to best use those eyes.

Great vision or not, this type of flying was potentially lethal and required maximum concentration. It also required a delicate balancing of factors. They had to fly high enough not to hit the water, yet low enough and slow enough to see the UAV. And that’s when they came up against the F/A-18’s limitations for this mission. Sure, with no ordnance on the pods or centreline fuel tank the Hornet could fly at 100 knots standing on its tail with the angle of attack a massive thirty-five degrees, but that was a manoeuvre for air shows. The reality was that with less than 150 knots of air speed the Hornet felt like it was dragging its arse, especially with a full load of fuel, external tanks and heaters, AIM-9s, on the wingtip rails. Yet even flying at 150 knots was fast compared to the Prowler drone’s estimated speed of 70 knots, so they risked overshooting their quarry. But there was no alternative: 150 knots and 500 feet AMSL were the numbers. Not ideal for the job. The Hornet was a fighter designed to fight at 1.2 mach, not to crawl along at wave height sucking fish into the fans.

Corbet throttled back. Passing through 250 knots
calculated air speed, the flight control computer automatically lowered the leading and trailing edge flaps. When the air speed reached 150KCAS, Corbet trimmed the aircraft so that it would fly ‘hands off’, maintaining 500 feet. He glanced out across the wing. Five hundred feet left plenty of air under the wings – the squadron regularly operated at 150 feet over water. Not, however, while searching, eyes outside the cockpit, Corbet reminded himself. This was going to be bloody dangerous. The separation between his aircraft and the wingman’s had increased. Flying in close formation was another manoeuvre for air shows. ‘Take it easy out there, Shogun two,’ said Corbet. ‘We won’t find the drone in Davey Jones’ locker.’

Corbet flicked back the sun visor on his helmet and tried to blink some focus into his eyes. His own advice was as much to himself as to Burns. Already he was starting to lose concentration. It was so goddam misty out here that it was easy to mistake the sea for the sky and vice versa. Shit, he said quietly to himself. It was a hell of a risky business. Lose the horizon for a few seconds at the wrong moment and his beautiful Hornet could become a submarine.

‘Roger. We could play waterpolo from this height.’

‘No thanks,’ said Corbet. ‘If I wanted to get wet, I’d have joined the navy.’

‘It was the natty white shorts that turned me off, sir.’

Chitchat like this wasn’t normal, but then neither was this sortie. The truth was, both men were nervous as hell.

A burst of static through the ’phones announced an incoming VHF transmission. The reception was poor. ‘Shogun one,
Arunta
.’

‘Shogun one,’ said Corbet.

‘Earlier sighting of UAV is now confirmed. Repeat, sighting confirmed. Nose position now one-two miles. Estimate UAV’s speed as approximately seven-zero knots. Revise heading one-two-five.’

‘Request INS coords for initial contact with bandit,’ said Corbet. A set of figures came through his headphones. He punched them into his inertial navigation system as they were received and verified them on screen as the
Arunta
repeated them. He knew Burns would be doing the same. This was a huge break. The UAV had been sighted by the
Arunta
and its position marked. Now, he and Burns had that position. That made their job of finding the drone a little easier, but it was still far from a done deal.

Corbet allowed himself a minute to put the tactical situation together in his head. They were now cutting the corner and heading directly to the ‘bullseye’, the confirmed spot where
Arunta
had sighted the bandit. And they had another factor that would help them find the Prowler – they had its track: one-two-five degrees. The bullseye would become the start point for their search. They were coming up on it fast, and when they did, the search pattern had to be established and understood. Corbet checked his fuel load: 8200 pounds. He thumbed the send button on his control stick. ‘Shogun one, eight point two.’

A moment later, Burns returned with, ‘Shogun two, seven point zero.’

Okay, thought Corbet. The flying officer was burning fuel at a higher rate than himself, probably riding the throttle a little to stay on station. He’d had wingmen who were far worse. They’d left their tanker with 12 000 pounds of fuel, roughly two hours of flying time. But the run to
the
Arunta
had been unexpectedly expensive. They had a bit under seventy minutes’ flying time in their tanks in total, including thirty minutes to get back to the tanker with some safety margin. The bingo fuel alarm would sound when there was 3000 pounds of fuel left. Hopefully, they had more than enough to get the job done because there probably wouldn’t be time for a top-up. But no doubt
Arunta
would also vector the KC-130 to their vicinity anyway. Fuel, or lack of it, was the fighter pilot’s constant concern.

The INS told Corbet that the bullseye was two minutes’ flight time away. He scanned the sea all around him and took a deep breath of the cooled air in his mask. This was going to be a very tricky business indeed, as the sweat pouring from his armpits and staining the Nomex flightsuit black reminded him. ‘Let’s get this shit on the road,’ he said aloud to himself before thumbing the send button. ‘Shogun two, counter-rotating cap, bullseye start. Track one-two-five degrees, twenty-mile legs. Shogun one at 500 AGL searching track and north. Shogun two at 1000 AGL searching track and south. Hot leg one-five zero knots, cold leg two-five-zero knots. Set radar alt at 500 feet.’

Burns kept an eye on the INS, another eye on the sea, flicked both of them up at the boss in his two o’clock, and then cycled through the positions again. He wanted to pull over somewhere and have a nervous dump quietly in a toilet. He’d never experienced this much tension. Indeed, he believed that this moment was the very fulcrum of his existence, and the pressure of it was almost unbearable. At 1000 feet AGL, he had to fly his Hornet more accurately than he’d previously thought humanly possible. It was that
or crash. Earlier, and for the briefest moment, the horizon had disappeared and he’d mistaken the sea for the sky. It was all he could do to resist the impulse to roll inverted and pull back on the stick. The two things that had prevented him doing exactly that were instruments that told him the manoeuvre would be fatal, and the fact that he trusted the flight leader in his two o’clock.

The INS informed Burns that the bullseye, now displayed on the HUD, was nearly upon them when the flight leader’s instructions came through his headphones. Those instructions were clear and unequivocal. They were to search for the UAV independently of each other. Burns had been absolved of the wingman’s responsibility of keeping his attention focused on his leader’s six o’clock. The flight lieutenant had told him to climb to 1000 feet, maintain 150 knots, fly down the UAV’s track of one-two-five degrees and concentrate on looking south. The boss would be doing the same thing, only at 500 feet and he would be concentrating his eyeballs on the north of the bandit’s track. Burns dialled 800 feet into the radar altimeter. If he drifted below that altitude, ‘Trailerpark Tammy’, the southern belle living inside his flight control computer, would warn him to check the air under his wings.

Burns thought Shogun one sounded cool and in control, and he hoped his radio work didn’t betray the truth niggling away at his insides that he wasn’t sure he was up to the task at hand. The flying officer throttled back when he reached 1000 feet as instructed.

‘Shogun two, you are cleared off,’ said Corbet. With that instruction, Burns had become his own master. Below
him, Corbet banked left and took up the first leg of their search pattern tracking one-two-five degrees.

Corbet cycled his eyes from the smudge that indicated the general position of the horizon to the information on his HUD to the rolling swell off his left wing’s leading edge. He allowed his eyes fifteen seconds out of the cockpit, scanning the sea, before bringing them back to the reassurance of the hard numbers and figures presented by his instruments. The lines of swell were mesmerising, and there was a vast patch of ocean to search framed by the wing’s leading edge and the nose of the Hornet. Even though they had the bandit’s speed and track, finding it against the moving backdrop below was just plain remote. He could be looking straight at the damn thing and not see it. Although Burns had more altitude, the flying officer would have a better chance of spotting the UAV with those eyes of his, picking up its shadow against the sea.

Trailerpark Tammy suddenly cautioned, ‘
Warning! Warning!’
Jesus H. Christ. The radar altimeter. Corbet glanced at the HUD. He was heading down through 300 feet at 300 knots and accelerating. That kind of speed would eat up a couple of hundred feet in a few seconds. Corbet felt the sweat trickle down his forehead as he eased the stick back and the aircraft climbed gently. The alarm stopped sounding at 300 feet. In a couple of minutes he would be completing the first twenty-mile hot leg.

A little behind and above Corbet, Burns wasn’t faring much better. His radar altimeter had sounded on two occasions. He’d somehow managed to just float below the minimum altitude. That could happen when you flew low and slow with your head outside the cockpit, he told himself.
Burns was thankful for the alarm but, on both occasions, hearing it had almost given him a heart attack. At least he had additional air to play with, and was pleased he wasn’t sitting on 500 feet. He wondered how the boss was doing.

‘Shogun one, turning cold,’ said Corbet as he banked left carefully, staying visual with the ocean off his wingtip. No sign of the bandit. He reminded himself that the Prowler drone was no ordinary target. The thing could wipe out a whole city. He and Burns were the last line of defence. ‘Jesus…’ he said quietly into his oxygen mask. Somehow, the fact that he and Burns were ‘it’ was suddenly driven home, perhaps because the drone was near and yet invisible. This was a mission he’d never trained for, and certainly had never imagined having to perform.