Chapter LX: Those who are not with us…
1030hrs, 22 December 2013, Yokota Air Base, Tokyo, Japan.
"How do we pick and choose where to get involved? …Peacekeeping nations have become accustomed to acting if, and only if, international public opinion will support them, a dangerous path that leads to a moral relativism in which a country risks losing sight of the difference between good and evil, a concept that some players on the international stage view as outmoded." Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil.
Amy and Mina had flown back to Japan after the entire India operation. There had been no time for congratulations; there was still much more work to be done in regards to the assault on the Socotra fortress. Serena and her team were on a video call with the rest of them from Aviano Air Base, when they were interrupted by President Hamilton with an urgent message.
"I've got some really bad news."
The call from POTUS wasn't unexpected, despite the rushed introduction. The news she had was.
"Beryl has several more nukes on hand," she said, the bags under her eyes betraying what had been haunting her for the last couple of hours.
There was a collective silence from the gathered SAILOR team.
"Are you sure?" Amy finally asked.
"Beryl told me herself. She just called me and we had a nice long chat."
"Fuck," Raye hissed.
"I've moved the attack schedule up to 26December, but that's just one day before Beryl deploys the nukes to wipe out the fleet. I have not told any of my highest advisors of this information."
"Why not?!" Amy was in disbelief, as were the rest of the SAILOR team.
"We need Beryl and Kunzite brought to justice, and brought to justice, now." POTUS put extra emphasis on the word, "now." "Whatever is left of the Nakanishi Group is contained in that island, and perhaps, their information on their research would be extremely beneficial to rest of the world. Be it as it may, Beryl is more than willing to deploy nuclear weapons in order to make her point, and to kill many more people in process."
She took a sip of water before continuing. "SAILOR team. Quite literally, you our last hope, since you are in a position to take down the Nakanishi Group singlehandedly."
"But…shouldn't others know about this?" Raye asked.
"Like I said before, you are very personally involved in this mission," POTUS replied, coolly. "You have the training and ability to infiltrate this fortress, and my special operations units will not be able to assault the fortress until the fleet arrives there on the 26th. You'll be there in front of them, and help to secure the fortress."
"What if things go wrong though? What then?" Lita asked her, obviously concerned about the amount of trust the President of the United States was putting into them. This was completely off the scale, and if they didn't live up to their expectations…
"You won't mess up," POTUS said to them. "This is only to expedite things, and while I will be using Special Operations teams, you are the ones that know the entire scope of the mission, and as such, the ones to enter the base and ensure that Beryl and Jadeite are terminated."
"And how exactly are we supposed to do this?" Serena asked her. The President looked surprised to hear her speak without the aid of Amy or Mina. "Err, my English has gotten better in the last couple of days."
"Right…anyway, I'm going to have the British government transfer whatever else they captured on that raid on the Nakanishi Cyberwarfare people. Perhaps you could find something else in there that they missed."
"Understood," Serena said. "Amy, you get on that with Luna and Artemis, and make sure that you that you comb every single piece of information concerning the Socotra fortress."
"Got it." Amy terminated the link with Serena and her team, and turned to Luna, who was sitting there in the hanger there with them.
"I don't know where to begin," Luna said, frustrated. "The information that we have is mostly memos, bank statements, and the minutes of literally thousands of meetings. I've done some preliminary searches, but no blueprints, no plans, not even an email concerning Socotra."
"Did you look through the new information from the UK?"
"Yeah. Nothing."
Luna, Artemis and Amy spent the next couple of hours looking for something that might help them in the terabytes of information that they had to wade through. Mina made some tea and biscuits, refilling their cups and passing the biscuits around. They were quickly gobbled up.
"Dammit," Artemis cursed, looking at a particular directory that was complete gibberish. "This data is corrupted here."
"Let me take a look at it," Amy said. Artemis scrolled back to the directory and clicked on it. More gibberish. Weird and strange symbols filled the screen, akin to the mojibake that occurred when a computer didn't have the proper means to read Chinese characters.
"See? Nothing." He started to exit out of the directory when something caught Amy's eye. It was an email in plain text, buried in the nonsensical information. From a computing standpoint, that was pretty shoddy encryption; that email should have been buried underneath mounds of encrypting software, password protected with a hundred-thousand character password, and stored on an offsite and offline secure server. But, here it was.
"Wait, wait, go back to that. Click on that." From what it looked like, Amy noted that it was an email about the Socotra fortress. "Looks like it was gleaned off of Beryl's personal email account. Someone cracked her password and was able to access all of her secure emails."
"Who did that?" Artemis asked, his interest peaked. Amy pulled up some information about anything that had to deal with security breaches in the Nakanishi Group's servers.
"Some persons named Anne and Alan. No last name given." Amy pulled up some personnel records that had been saved in the database. "Anne, born in the Russian Federation, DOB, unknown, but apparently, she's a great data manipulation expert. Alan, born in the Netherlands, DOB, unknown, served in the French Foreign Legion, joined up with the Nakanishi Group as a data security expert. Both promoted over that incident with Beryl's email."
"Promoted?" Artemis asked, finishing up the last of his cheese puffs. "Why's that?"
"It's an industry standard. If you get into something that secure, then obviously you must be really good at your job. It's not without some risk, but if you succeed…well."
"Except these two were killed by the SAS." Luna brought up a Sky News report on the internet that described the shootout with the SAS and the official statement from the PM's office. Apparently, no one was mourning too much for these people.
"Very much so," Amy said, reading the news report.
"She looks really strange," Mina appeared again, this time with more tea. "Alan, now he looks pretty hot," she said, trying to get a rise out of Amy. It didn't work.
"What does the email say?" Artemis steered the conversation back on topic.
"Oh, right. Let's take a look at it." Amy stripped the junk data away, leaving only the email and a couple of attachments.
It read;
"Beryl,
Here's the 'hypothetical' plans that we've drawn up for the installation you requested. I'm not quite sure why you want to do this to this island, but it's your money. The construction job will take at least 100 million dollars, and plus another hundred or so in regards to shipping all the necessary personnel, equipment and other things that might be needed on the island.
Attached are the blueprints that we came up with. I hope it's better than the other ones that those idiots in France came up with.
Sincerely,
John Albertson, CEO.
Howard-Griffins Construction Group (a Nakanishi Subsidiary)."
"What happened to that guy, anyway?" Artemis asked.
"Let's see."
Luna searched for "John Albertson," and came up with several more articles on him.
"Surprise, surprise," she said dryly. "He died in a car accident in 2008, a year after his company was bought out by the Nakanishi Group. At that time, the Nakanishi Group was still mostly tech and banking, but purchasing this medium size company was something of an odd maneuver for them at the time, since the recession hit construction companies really hard."
"Not a big surprise, considering how Beryl acts," Amy noted. "Let's take a look at these blueprints."
She opened up the attachments.
"Whoa."
The blueprints described the entirety of the proposed facility, from the hallways, specifications on living quarters, dining halls, greenhouses and storage spaces.
"Any mention of gun emplacements or missile sites?" Luna looked intensely at the blueprints, scanning for anything that could be of use.
Amy shook her head on that one, coming to the same conclusion as Luna as they looked over the blueprints. "I don't see them on here. I don't think they would trust a civilian company to do stuff like that, considering they had the CEO killed."
"So much for locating anything useful," Mina said, frustration edging into her normally serene voice.
Luna tried to be optimistic. "It still could be some use, albeit limited. Once you get in there…"
Amy shook her head at that. "If we can get in there, period. I don't see any entrances…"
Artemis suddenly saw something that could be of use. He brought it to the attention of the rest of them.
"Take a look at that."
Artemis pointed to a small spot on the south side of the island, near one of the now abandoned towns. Luna leaned in a bit further to take a look at the blueprints. "It looks like…a submarine pen?"
Amy did some quick calculations on the dimensions of the place. "It's too small for actual submarines, but something like those research submersibles…it's a perfect place for them to dock."
"That's a quite convenient place to have," Mina said.
Amy shrugged. "In case of emergencies, I guess."
"Do you think we could use it to get in there?" Mina wondered, peering at the submersible dock.
"It looks like one of the more viable entrances," Amy noted. "There's an airport on the west side of the island, but I don't see any actual 'entrances' per se. They must have added them later, using a different company."
"Well, this looks like a promising development, nonetheless," Luna positively commented. "Anyway, we'd better share this with the rest of the SAILOR team." Amy and Luna set up the call, and within a couple of minutes, they were talking with Serena.
"Take a look at this." Amy had put up some schematics up on the screen. "Took us awhile to find it, but after much looking, we got it."
"What is it?" Serena asked, squinting at her laptop screen.
"This was apparently in the Nakanishi servers in the United Kingdom before they got shot up by the SAS. It's the blueprints for the island…"
"Alright, way to go Amy!" Serena exclaimed.
"…in 2007." That killed the mood immediately.
"So, we still have the blueprints, right?" Serena was still hopeful that this could help their cause, no matter that the information was out of date.
"Well, they might have changed things between then," Amy said. "From what I can tell, there were several more variants planned for this fortress, and this was only one of them."
"So we might just have an incomplete or completely out of date floor plan," Raye glumly added. That was no fun at all.
"Exactly. Still, this gives a good sense of scale of this fortress. There's hundreds of kilometers worth of tunnels in facility, living spaces for up to forty-thousand people, research facilities, greenhouses for food, storage areas, the whole lot of it."
"Any place where Beryl might be located?" Serena asked.
"Let's see…yeah, there's an executive office complex located underneath the highest point on the island. There's a name for it…let me see." She looked up the article on the internet "It's the Haghier Mountains," Amy said. "On the blueprints they give the height…its 1503 meters high."
Luna shook her head at the massive amount of work that must have taken. "How the hell did they manage to excavate all that land in that amount of time?"
"Beats me. Maybe they used a lot of lasers or something like that," Mina chimed in.
Amy jabbed her in the ribs, causing her to wince. "Mina, that makes no sense."
"Sorry."
Serena wondered why Mina was wincing, but continued on with the conversation. "Anyway, that might take days to fight through from the surface. Is there any other way that we can get into this facility?"
"There was a planned submersible entrance on the south side of the island. I'm not quite sure about how that was executed in reality, but there might be a place for us to enter there via underwater infiltration."
Lita groaned in the background, hearing the plan unfold in front of them. "Great. We've never done anything like that before."
"Only in the VR sims…and we only briefly went over that part," Serena said, her eyes narrowing at the prospect of a scuba dive into enemy territory.
"That's the only way I can see getting there without getting shot up," Amy said.
"Uh, question?"
Everyone focused their attention on Raye. Questions from Raye were few and far between.
"How are we going to get to the island in the first place if they're shooting everything that moves? I mean, a ship would be a really big target, and a helicopter could easily be shot down."
There was silence as the team pondered their options.
"We could use a RIB," Amy finally said.
That brought some confused looks from the other people in the team. "Um…Amy…" Serena began, asking her to elaborate.
"Sorry." She pulled up some images. "A Ridged Inflatable Boat. Most naval ships carry one, and it's small enough to avoid detection.
"What's the catch?" Raye asked.
"It's going to be one hell of a ride toward the island. Most of the fleet is located about 75 nautical miles out, and most, higher performance RIBs have a top speed of about 40 to 50 knots. So that would be…"
She did some calculations.
"That would be about an hour and forty five minutes. It can be shorter if we push it faster, but we might risk capsizing or even worse."
"Amy, this is a risky plan you're proposing," Serena said to her.
"I don't see what other choice we have in order to get close enough to the island. It's that or letting Beryl nuke a couple thousand people to death."
"Can those boats hold all five of us and our equipment?" Serena asked.
"Yeah, they can. But it's more of a case of what we're taking rather than how much we can hold. If it's our scuba equipment, weapons, explosives, and everything else that we might possibly need for this mission, then we might need to take more than one RIB. But that's only in case if all of the stuff doesn't fit, and I think it will."
"That sounds good. We'll take two just in case."
Serena looked down at her tablet computer to see what was next on her agenda.
"What are we going to need to assault this place?"
"Well…" Amy seemed a bit hesitant on that one. "Um, to backtrack on what I said earlier…We're not going to be able to carry everything in there, even with the RIBs."
"Why is that?" Serena's eyes narrowed, again. It wasn't like Amy to be indecisive.
"I think we might have to resort to enemy weaponry and equipment in order to render this base ineffective. I mean, we can pack as much equipment that we can on the RIBs, but they must have some other types of explosives that we can use in order to take down this place. I don't' know, I'm just making stuff up now…" Amy rubbed her eyes; she was tired, like everyone else. And when you started get really tired, you started making mistakes, words slurred together, actions became harder and harder to execute.
Serena just shrugged at her actions though, and pressed forward anyway. "I guess we'll get to that later. Raye, I'm going to give you the explosives and whatever else that you think might be necessary in order to complete the mission."
Raye nodded to her. "Gotcha."
"Lita, you can bring that taser along if you want, but I'm going to have to say that you're going to have to drop the shield and bring along a machine gun. We're going to be up against a lot of people in there, and the more firepower, the better."
Lita just nodded her head in reply to Serena. They couldn't get their weapons right now, but once they got to…wherever they were going to, they would get more situated and iron out the details there.
"Amy, I want you to focus on the technology aspect on this one. Since they have a facility of this size, most of their systems would be automated?"
"Most certainly. It'd be almost impossible to run a facility this size without some form of automated defenses, maintenance and intelligence gathering systems. Even if they were fully staffed down there, which I don't they are, the sheer size of the facility would make human operations difficult."
"Good. In terms of weapons, pack lightly and bring whatever technology…stuff…thingys that you deem necessary."
"Will do."
"Mina…er…" She seemed at a loss to what do to with Mina. She normally gave long-range sniper support, but she hadn't been doing that as of late, sticking with her guile skills. Those however, wouldn't be much use in a hostile environment such as this one, unless she could make Beryl give herself up. Which wouldn't happen in any case, since they were going to shoot her in the face the first chance they got.
Mina sensed Serena's hesitation and interjected her own thoughts. "You want me to provide long range support, perhaps with a battle rifle or designated marksman weapon that'll allow for further engagement of targets?"
"Yeah. That one."
"Won't it be a bit useless of me though, if we're going into a confined area?"
Serena just shrugged. "Mina, just do whatever. I trust you."
Although Serena was being very vague concerning her role in the mission, at least she could have some operational freedom with her loadout. "Got it, Serena."
"Artemis, Luna."
Artemis had been dozing off in the background, and Luna had been distracted by some other work before Serena called on them. Their reactions vaguely reminded her of a time when she was caught off guard, with no idea what she was supposed to be doing in high school. Oh, those were the days…
"Yes, Serena," Luna replied.
"Will you be in contact with us during the mission at Socotra?"
Luna shrugged at her, not exactly confident. "Artemis and I can try to be in contact with you during the mission, but it'll be difficult. We'll try to arrange a plane or some other craft that can loiter nearby and keep in constant contact with you."
"That's good," Serena started to say, but Luna continued on, cutting her off.
"However, I don't know how much of a help we can be, if we don't even know what is down there. The specs on that fortress that we have are outdated, and we don't know if they even have a network that can be hacked. Remember, these guys built almost all of the secure networks for the US military and the JSDF, so they'll be expecting any sort of incursion on their end. If we even find their network in the first place."
"At least you can give us some sort of support from up there, and keep us informed of the battle. Maybe even tell us where those nuclear weapons are supposed to be."
"Yeah…I guess." Luna seemed unsure of herself on that one, but they had to soldier on and make do with what little information they had at the moment. Amy suddenly interrupted the conversation.
"Serena, we need to get a move on now, otherwise we won't be able to catch a flight there on time."
It seemed that they would have to do more planning later, as Amy and Luna had to catch a plane to the airbase in Qatar along with everyone else involved in the mission.
"Understood," Serena replied. "Amy, Mina, what time are you supposed to fly out here?"
"Right now, actually. Our plane will take us to one of the airbases in Qatar. You guys are supposed to catch a plane from Aviano to that air base as well. I'll have POTUS or somebody else get you a flight ASAP."
"Thanks. I guess this will be the first time we'll be seeing each other in a couple of weeks, huh?"
"Yep. We'll see you then."
"Okay, bye." Serena terminated the conversation, wondering if they could actually pull this thing off.