WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller (14 page)

The fact that the Chinese shipping firm hadn’t yet paid the ransom that he’d demanded didn’t trouble him unduly; negotiations like this often took a lot of time,
months
in some instances. He was aware of the strong line being taken by both the Chinese and the US governments, but he knew – sooner or later, when the ships and her crew still hadn’t been located, and everyone was tired of the story in the world media – they would open up and agree to Suprapto’s terms. Especially if he began sending back pieces of the hostages; a finger here, an ear there, and they would soon pay him what he wanted.

Not that he was in a hurry; the money from Jemaah Islamiyah was more than enough to tide them over for years to come.

The hooker in his bed, one of a group he’d brought over from Dumai as a reward for him and his men, reached out to caress his thigh, but he cast her hand away and stood, strolling naked to the bathroom to relieve himself.

His phone rang then, and he returned to his bedside to pick it up. It was Umar Shibab, his contact with JI. What the hell did
he
want?, Suprapto thought gruffly as he answered; their business should be concluded.

The answer came moments after he picked up the call, although the possible ramifications of the information took a while for his moonshine-addled brain to process.

It seemed that his arms broker had ended up dead in Jakarta, hurled from the top of the National Monument. It might not have seemed so strange in and of itself – arms brokers dealt with some pretty unreputable people, and such instances were not particularly uncommon – but a second body had been found right next to Wong Xiang. This man was unknown, with no ID or distinguishing features, but the rumor appeared to be that he was a Korean agent of some sort. And the bodies of three more Orientals – also thought to be Koreans – had also been found scattered throughout the city.

It only concerned Shibab – and now Suprapto himself – because the crate which had been delivered to Jemaah Islamiyah had been the one from North Korea which had been loaded onto the Fu Yu Shan at the port of Dalian.

Was it merely a coincidence? Or had North Korea found out about the link between Liang Kebangkitan and Wong Xiang, and sent men to question him? And if they had, what would they have learnt from the man before his fall from the tower?

And why had the Koreans been killed? And who had killed them?

Whatever the answers, Suprapto knew one thing – he would have to increase security measures on his island.

Pulling on his clothes, he raced from his cabin to find Reza Panggabean and get things organized.

5

Jeb Richards stifled a yawn. He and the rest of the National Security Council members had been in the Situation Room for hours now, and it was beginning to grate.

Sure, they’d had breaks to grab a coffee and use the restroom; and the group had broken up into smaller units on occasion to discuss things independently, to try and win people over to a particular way of thinking in a vain attempt to build some sort of consensus.

But the bottom line was that they had been at this damned table for most of the day, and a decision still hadn’t been reached about what was going to happen.

Essentially, the room was divided into those who favored direct and immediate military action, and those who wanted to approach things more diplomatically.

Richards and Mason belonged firmly in the second camp; Mason because he was a born diplomat, and ordering military action wasn’t really in his nature; Richards because he didn’t want a raid to reveal things he wanted to keep a secret, for now at least.

And his secretary
still
hadn’t got back in touch with him with any information about the Asset.

And so on and on the hours dragged, as Mason and the Attorney General discussed the legalities of operating in a foreign nation, and Olsen and his followers argued back about the primacy of US interests and how they had to strike while they had usable intelligence.

‘Look,’ Mason said reasonably, starting another round of negotiations, ‘the fact is that now we know where the ship is, where the crew are. We’ve got the upper hand now. I’ll go back to Jeb’s proposal’ – Richards nodded his head as Mason gestured towards him – ‘to block the channel and surround the island, in order to enter negotiations with this Arief Suprapto and his group. Furthermore, I –’

‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists!’ Olsen shot back quickly, cutting Mason off. ‘We never have, and we never will! What are we going to say? Please can we have our citizens back?
Pretty please? With sugar on the top?’ Olsen shook his head. ‘You must be out of your mind.’

‘We don’t negotiate with terrorist
s?’ Mason asked gently in response. ‘That’s a naïve attitude, and you know it. We’ve negotiated with every terrorist group in the world at one time or another, when we thought it would serve our interests. Hell, we
created
the Taliban when we sponsored the mujahedin against the Russians, if you can remember that far back.’

‘If I can remember that far back?
How dare you, sir! I was fighting Soviet proxies in Granada and Panama back when you were jerking off to the Sear’s catalogue in your mommy and daddy’s bathroom! I –‘

‘Gentlemen, please!’ President Abrams interjected
quickly. ‘This is not the time or the place for behavior like this, do both of you understand?’

Olsen nodded his head, his military training
instantly making him obey his commander-in-chief. ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said. ‘Please forgive my outburst.’

Mason nodded also, though he was slower and more reluctant to respond than Olsen. ‘Sorry Ellen,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s just the pressure getting to us.’

Abrams looked around the table. ‘We’re all under pressure,’ she said. ‘I understand that. But unfortunately, that’s the job, and we’ve brought it on ourselves. The American people expect a decision, they expect us to act, and we will sit here and work things out until a decision is reached. Do I make myself clear?’

There was a murmuring of acceptance around the huge conference table, and Abrams nodded. ‘Good. Now, my own gut instinct is to move in immediately, as soon as all our pieces are in position – which won’t be until tomorrow morning. So you’ve got until then to convince
me,’ she said, eyeing Mason and Richards. ‘If you think diplomacy and negotiation is the answer, fine. But you need to lay out exactly what you propose, and how you intend to achieve it.’

Mason nodded his head and smiled. ‘No problem. We can do that.’

‘I have a question,’ Richards asked. ‘Given that the Fu Yu Shan is a Chinese ship, and that most of the crew are Chinese, when are we thinking of telling President Tsang Feng about all this?’

Richards didn’t know what the answer would be, but he
did
know that the mere thought of the Chinese would muddy the waters yet further. They couldn’t take the risk of upsetting their partner, and yet if a combined rescue operation was to be launched, it would take weeks, if not months, to set up and organize.

By which time, it wouldn’
t matter what was discovered there.

‘The situation is delicate,’ Abrams responded, ‘but I have already spoken to President Tsang, and he is happy to allow our forces to take the lead on this, given our proven track record in direct action raids. He is aski
ng to send personnel from the PLA Special Operations Command to liaise with DEVGRU in Singapore, and JSOC is currently working out the details.’

Pete Olsen nodded his head, glad to be able to stop Richards’ troublemaking in its tracks. ‘DEVGRU’s squadron commander actually thinks it might be a good idea to have li
aison officers there, as the PLA spec ops people have had some recent experience on anti-piracy missions and know that area better than we do.’

Ah well,
Richards thought, shrugging his shoulders at Mason,
it was worth a shot.

Still, there were still plenty of other things they could use to delay and obfuscate the –

Just then the secure telephone rang on the table in front of the president.

She picked it up immediately and kept her composure as she listened to the person at the other end of the line, all eyes on her.

‘Thank you,’ she said after a time. ‘I will be in touch shortly.’

She replaced the receiver and looked down the table at the members of her security council.

‘Looks like the timetable’s been moved up,’ she said. ‘The Asset has just reported activity at the pirate base. It looks like they’re getting ready to move the hostages.’

Oh shit
, Richards thought helplessly as he looked across the table at Mason.

‘General,’ Abrams said, turning to Olsen, ‘I authorize the rescue mission to go ahead, effective immediately.’

Olsen grinned. ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said as he picked up his own phone. ‘Get me General Cooper at JSOC,’ he barked down the line. He waited impatiently for several moments as he waited for the JSOC commander to be located. ‘Miley,’ he said eventually, ‘it’s General Olsen. We have the green light for the hostage rescue operation. Mission is a go. I repeat –
mission is a go.
’

Richards slumped back into his chair and sighed. It was possible that all was not lost; perhaps enough time had already passed for it not to matter anyway?

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 tou
ch 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?