Don Brown - The Malacca Conspiracy

Still in his T-shirt, Molster popped onto the floor and peered over the captain’s shoulder. He squinted his eyes and gazed at the screen.

“Here we go again,” he said. His stomach churned and knotted. “Lieutenant,” Molster tapped the air force lieutenant on the back of the shoulder. “Notify the J-2 duty officer. Limit move in crude oil.” He checked the time. “Mark it. 23:42 hours. Per standing orders. Alert chain of command. Immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” the air force lieutenant said. He picked up the phone to call the J-2 duty officer.

Mexican freighter Salina Cruz

Near the Texas coast

1:30 a.m.

Captain Alberto Mendoza throttled his freighter into neutral. The running lights of two other vessels blinked across the black waters, but under a new moon, it was impossible to see who or what they were.

His local radar swept the fifteen-mile circumference around the freighter Salina Cruz.

Based on the radar sweep, they were probably a couple of small trawlers out of Brownsville. Definitely not the right reading for a US Coast Guard cutter.

Other than that, nothing.

Mendoza turned to his guest. “We are at the drop point. Seven miles from shore. Are you ready?”

“Ready, amigo,” the skinny man with the black scruffy beard spoke in an accent that was not Hispanic.

Mendoza did not know the man’s real name. All he knew was that the man’s name supposedly was Rahman.

They were all named Rahman, it seemed. Every one of them. And they’d paid him more money than he’d ever seen in his life to sail to this spot off the Texas coast, under cover of darkness, to offload cargo and to keep his mouth shut.

“My crew will help you disembark.” Mendoza waved his hand. His first officer scrambled out onto the deck. Five Mexican deckhands began swinging three rubber boats, all inflatable, down toward the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rahman’s crew scrambled over the side, descending rope ladders, making their way down to the boats. A moment passed.

“Everyone in place?” Mendoza yelled down to the water.

“All ready.”

“Okay, we’re lowering the boxes.”

Mendoza gave the command. A crane onboard began lowering the first of three plywood boxes, about twice the size of a large coffin, down over the side. The boxes bore the words Bottled Water painted in English.

Probably cocaine or heroin. But Mendoza did not ask. Too many questions meant no repeat business. The manifest declared that the boxes were bottled water, and that would be his story if the Coast Guard stopped him on the high seas.

He struck a cigarette and leaned over the side of his ship. The stars cast a faint glow onto the waters of the Gulf. The whining sound of the ship’s cargo crane blended with the mild breeze blowing from the east. He watched as the third box of “bottled water” to be offloaded from his two-hundred-twenty-foot ship this week disappeared into the darkness below.

Moments later, the sound of outboard motors ignited from the surface, and then the sound of the three rubber craft pulling away, starting their westward journey to the Texas coast.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mendoza shouted. “Set course for one-eightzero degrees.”

“Sì, Capitan,” came the voice of his first officer from inside the pilot room.

Mendoza flipped his cigarette overboard, watching the red, burning tip whirl down in the wind as Salina Cruz began her wide-sweeping turn to head back to her home port of Tampico, Mexico.

Gag Island

West Papua, Indonesia

3:30 p.m.

Captain Hassan Taplus stood on the sandy beaches of the remote tropical island and gazed seaward to the southwest. Only a hundred miles south of the equator, the sun was blazing high above the horizon and he could hear the sound of helicopters approaching. He brought his binoculars to his eyes for a closer look.

So far, nothing but water and horizon.

The sound of the rotors grew louder.

He swung the binoculars slightly to the right. Two choppers appeared in the viewfinder. They approached through the blue skies, low over the water, perhaps a half-mile downrange.

“Excellent.” He checked his watch and smiled. “Right on time.”

More goosebumps. When this operation was complete, his ascendance up the Indonesian military command would become a fait accompli.

A military hero. That is how history would remember him. A pioneer. A founding father of the new Islamic Republic of Indonesia!

Yes, General Perkasa would be viewed as the leader of the movement. But he would be remembered by history as a military mastermind who stood at Perkasa’s side.

One day, Perkasa would relinquish power. And on that day…chills descended Hassan’s spine…perhaps even the presidency would await him.

The choppers circled just overhead now. The first feathered down onto the beach about a hundred yards from where he was standing, not far from the chopper that had carried him in, along with the advance party. The second landed a few seconds afterwards.

Their engines powered down, and the bay door opened on the second chopper.

They stepped out, one by one.

The passengers were eight nuclear scientists who had been working on contingency plans for the development of a proposed floating nuclear power plant in Indonesia. Their work had met stiff resistance from the international community, particularly the Aussie government, which protested that a nuclear mishap would spread deadly radiation south over Darwin and other populated sections off Australia. Now these men, all loyal to the general, would oversee the technical aspects of the operation, under his command.

In teams of two, the scientists quickly made their way to the first chopper, where somewhere in the dark recesses of its bay lay one of the ten-kiloton nuclear devices that General Perkasa had purchased from the Pakistanis.

Just behind the two helicopters, a portable steel tower was already being erected by the advance team into the tropical sky. From this tower, the device would be suspended.

What a waste, Taplus thought, of such a rare and valuable weapon. However, virtually every nation that had ever entered the nuclear club had done so with a visible demonstration of power. Indonesia would do the same.

Six men lifted the crate out of the helicopter bay. This image would be forever frozen in his memory.

It was all so surrealistic. One of the most beautiful tropical refuges in the world would soon become a nuclear wasteland.

The White House

8:00 a.m.

Lieutenant Robert Molster sat next to Admiral Roscoe Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watching the flat screen that featured a brightly lit map of the Malacca Strait and the nations around it.

This place was nothing like the underground bunker that had been portrayed by Hollywood in The West Wing and various other movies and television shows. The real Situation Room was more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Created by President Kennedy in 1962 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Situation Room was in reality a five-thousand-square-foot conference room, run by the National Security Council staff, in the basement of the West Wing.

The wood paneling of the room’s walls housed the most advanced communications equipment in the world, from which the president executed his role as commander in chief of all US military forces around the world.

An hour prior to sunrise, Molster had learned that his sleepless night would remain sleepless, when Admiral Jones called to inform him that he was to brief the president, should the president have any questions of him, at a meeting of the National Security Council at zero-eight-hundred-hours.

Thus, he’d spent the hours between 5:00 and 7:00 A.M. preparing a briefing, should he be called on, then hitting the shower, shaving, and donning a crisp service dress-blue uniform.