Thank you for your reviews on the last chapter. This story is starting to wind up but there is still a lot to go and a lot happening in the next few chapters.
Enjoy and please review.
Chapter Sixteen
It was Raffy's turn to be the man with the plan. Fed up with Ethan's immoral rise to glory, he was going to come up with a way, a better way, to ascertain the whereabouts and scheduled scheme of the faction they were searching for. He arrived back in Denpasar just after midday and organised to meet Mike and Kate back on the Hammersley. They had spent the morning in a debriefing with Ethan and Don McAllister at the Intercontinental hotel. It had been a difficult and unwanted experience.
Raffy's instructions to them had been clear—he would organise their transportation outside of the embassy's boundaries and without Ethan's knowledge and they would have to slip away without being seen. He and Ethan were once close friends, but events of the past, just before he took leave and then transferred to the Hammersley, and the situation they'd been in the previous evening had changed that rather dramatically. There was a strong issue of trust, and the fact remained that Raffy could no longer trust Ethan with his life or the lives of his coworkers. Maybe he was growing too straight for this business, but he wasn't about to let the unclean antics of a rogue ASIS Intelligence Officer ruin his life.
Kate and Mike had taken some R'n'R in the pool area and left Ethan to tend to the video conference call with Jakarta. His subordinates hadn't followed them there but they could no longer escape through the front door. Instead, they had sneaked along the periphery of the resort until they found a low enough section of the pointed, black iron fence to leap over, and then a short trek along the road until they came to a T-intersection. There would be a man in a grey panel van on the opposite side, waiting for them. Mike was wary, but Kate had an unwavering faith in her XO and he would have to trust it.
As it turned out, that trust was not misplaced. The driver dropped them about a hundred metres away from the port and, at an Olympic power-walk pace, they continued along the road until security stopped them. Once back on to the Hammersley, home again, Kate would call it, she changed into her AUSCAM overalls and asked Raffy to pipe senior sailors to the ship's office. They greeted her and Mike with expressions of surprise and auras of confusion.
"What happened?" Dutchy asked immediately. Raffy had failed to mention this to him and their injuries looked rather fresh. They certainly didn't have them on the Hammersley yesterday.
Kate was sporting a long red gash on her left cheek and remarkable bruising under the eye. But Mike looked a lot worse and oddly reminiscent of the last time he was held, tortured and beaten. Both eyes were discoloured, there was a cut above his left brow that required stitches, his lips were chaffed in different places and they could see that his wrists were a bloody red raw.
Swain looked expectantly from Mike to Kate to Raffy and Charge, loitering in the dark corner, was silent waiting for their response.
"Something happened when we left the port yesterday," Kate admitted.
"We can see that," Charge said from the back of the room. "What?"
Kate looked at Mike and back at her sailors. They were anticipating an answer. "We were captured by members of a terrorist faction for certain information."
"They were found quickly," Raffy put in, not at all in the mood to discuss it with the sailors. He hadn't told Dutchy for that reason, but he probably should've known that they'd work out something was wrong by the beaten faces of two of their commanding officers.
"But we have work to do now," Kate said authoritatively and before the sailors could interrogate them further. After spending the morning in a debriefing, she didn't need another one. Naturally assuming the role of CO, she continued, "There is an imminent attack planned against Australia. We are likely looking at a similar weapon to what we pulled off that boat a few days ago."
"How imminent?" Swain asked.
"We're not sure," Raffy answered, speaking for his CO. "But with this level of communication outside of Jakarta and this organisation, we know it's going to be soon. Very soon."
"Three members of this group were killed last night," Kate put in. "We know that they will be moving this by sea. It's likely that a large amount of explosive material was transported from Jakarta to Denpasar via the maritime trade network."
"So won't it be in a port somewhere," Dutchy suggested.
"Exactly," Kate said and turned her back to the group, picking up a marker. She drew a rough map of the south Balinese coastline and circled all of the ports from Jimbaran Bay to South Denpasar. The Hammersley's position was in the far west. "I have a plan."
Mike looked at her, surprised. He wasn't astonished by her intelligence or mental acuity, but he was shocked to learn that she didn't tell him or run it by him. It wasn't just Kate then, that was shocked by the changes in command.
"X?" Kate said, hinting for him to explain his part.
"Yes," he said quickly and stepped up next to her. "I hired three dinghies from a small shop here." And he marked where 'here' was on the map. "We're going spread out in groups of three and scour the area."
"Photographic equipment, binoculars, night-vision," Kate added. "Your role is strictly reconnaissance. I want you in and out of ports, wherever you can go without raising too much suspicion, looking for anything that seems out of the ordinary."
"Out of the ordinary?" Dutchy asked. "Such as?"
"I know this will be difficult," Kate said understandingly. "We don't know enough to know what we're looking for. We do know that explosive material arrived from Jakarta and we also know that something was received in Medan from Iran. We don't know what that is or if it's in Denpasar now."
"So what are we looking for, then?" Swain requested.
"I'm trusting that you all know enough to know when something looks suspicious. It could be a warehouse with armed guards. It could be an empty port with a patrol outside. If they're hiding something here, we need to find it."
"Understood, ma'am," Dutchy put in. They knew their orders, even if it left a little to the imagination.
"As the X told you, we will be travelling in groups of three," Kate continued. "X, Dutchy, you will have the first dinghy with 2Dads. Charge and Swain, the second one with Tiger. Commander Flynn, the third with RO and Sharkey. Civvies, please. You can be tourists or fishermen or marine data surveyors, whatever you like. Something inconspicuous."
"Fishing," Charge said with a smile. He hadn't grabbed his tackle from under his rack in a while.
"As I mentioned, this is strictly a recon mission," Kate said over the chatter. "No cowboy heroics. We'll be in constant radio contact and I want your position all the time. Are my order clears?"
A part of her was specifically looking at Dutchy. Maybe pairing him with the XO wasn't a good idea, because Raffy would be the second person to ignore her orders. And then to throw 2Dads into the mix… she was going to keep an eye on Dinghy No. 1.
"Crystal, ma'am," Dutchy told her.
"Inescapably clear," Mike said from the side. He had yet to utter a word, letting her take over the show. He preferred to watch from the side and, in the last five minutes, he recognised again what he had seen to make him choose her for the command. It was an ideal choice and her leadership on the Hammersley only amplified it.
His team, like Raffy's, was assuming the identities of Australian tourists on a snorkeling trip. Charge has chosen the roles of pleasure fishermen for his group. They were kitted up and ready to go as the two unmarked vans that Raffy had organised to drive them into Kuta pulled up fifty metres from port security. Armed with Canon digital cameras and lens extension tubes, binoculars with adaptive night-vision, courtesy of Raffy Rodrigues, and several Brownings in case they ran into unwanted trouble, they departed from the ship and waved farewell to those left behind on the bridge as they went.
Kate was monitoring the radar with Bird channeling in on the EOD. The Hammersley stuck out enough to get a glimpse of the southwest Balinese coastline, but beyond that, they would be blind. Kate knew she was taking a risk in sending out half of her crew to do the work of local intelligence spooks, but they had little choice. Raffy was not in the mood to trust Ethan Saunders or Don McAllister and neither was she. There would probably be repercussions for their lonesome reconnaissance voyage, but that would have to wait until they shut down this terrorist cell.
The three dinghies departed in three different directions. Each team had been given zones to search and Kate was watching their movement on the cluttered radar. In port, it was usually a rather useless piece of technology, but in this instance, it was the best thing she had.
Dutchy was maneuvering his boat on the furthest sector from the Hammersley—the southeast coastline. This was the warehouse district and if there was anything untoward in any port in South Bali, it would probably be in this area. Raffy and 2Dads weren't dressed in snorkeling gear. They figured that, in this area, so far from the other tourists, they look more than conspicuous. There were a few ships, mainly of the cargo transport variety, in the area, but it was relatively dead in comparison to where they started. There were almost no signs of life. In reality, it would be the perfect place for a terrorist hideout.
"I'm not seeing anything suspicious," 2Dads voiced as they passed through more and more ship terminals and staging areas. They were all thinking the same thing.
"Keep looking," Raffy advised. "We've got to find something."
"Did that commissioner ever call you back?" Dutchy asked prudently.
"Not yet."
"Commissioner?" 2Dads was out of the loop.
"Keep looking," Raffy repeated in a sterner voice.
"Yes, sir."
"Do you have any ideas what they're planning?" Dutchy said over the rudder as they rounded another bend and approached yet another set of warehouse terminals.
"Some," Raffy conceded. Multi-tasking as he kept watch over the dead zone, he continued his vague response. "A bombing would be my first guess. Where? I don't know."
"What about when?" 2Dads asked.
"Well, recent history dictates that we can expect a rise in insurgency and terrorist activity by Muslim extremists during the month of Ramadan. Perhaps they want to celebrate the start with some fireworks," Raffy replied in a monotone.
None of what he said sounded good to Dutchy. It seemed that his XO was dolling out the bad news frequently for dramatic effect. He probably would've preferred it all in one go. "Okay. When does Ramadan start?"
The look he was given told the Petty Officer that he'd really rather not know.
"In about 36 hours."