“Oh my god!” Christine breathed, a chill rippling through her. “When did it start? How widespread is it? Are the local authorities getting it
under control?”
The watch officer shook his head. “No answers to any of the above, ma’am. Communications are apparently breaking down in the Tabanan area.”
“This is not good. This is extremely not good. Do we have any drone coverage over
Tabanan?”
“No, ma’am. Not at the moment.”
“Then contact Global Hawk command at Curtin Air Force Base and get me some! Then
get me a sat link to the Shenandoah. I need to talk with Captain Garrett immediately.”
“Right away, Commander.” The duty officer felt his own unease grow. Their easygoing, slightly oddball,
detachment C.O. was suddenly as serious as a new coffin. “What do you think is going on over there, ma’am?”
“Judgment day. Now get me on line with the Lady!”
The CIC, USS Shenandoah
1818 Hours; Zone Time, October 25, 2008
“Put it on the Alpha Display,” Amanda commanded.
The low murmur of operations-speak scaled back within the darkened interior of the Combat Information Center. The watch officers and duty SOs cut quick looks over their shoulders at the imaging on the big forward bulkhead screen.
They saw a high, side-angled view of a small city, the regency capital of Tabanan, surrounded by green un-ripened rice fields. Multiple smoke columns were rising from its eastern end. The view rotated slowly as the Global Hawk drone circled the objective at sixty thousand feet.
Amanda leaned forward in the Captain’s chair, eyes narrowed, jaw set. “Magnify.”
The drone control officer murmured into his headset, passing the word to the Shenandoah’s RPV control node.
Half a thousand miles away, the lens system in the drone’s camera turret responded to the command, zooming in on target. Tabanan was, or had been, a neat community, ordered and growing rapidly into modernity. Now, flames could be made out dancing at the base of the smoke clouds.
“That was the mosque,” the control officer said, blipping a target box around the largest fire. “That’s the police station. Those other buildings along the main street – those residences near the mosque. They probably belong to the local Muslim
population.”
“Probably. Take us in closer.”
“Aye, aye. Going to max mag.”
Once more, the cameras pulled the ravaged city closer until people could be seen, the living crowds massing in the Hindu temples and the smaller number of the dead. The still forms of men, women and children lay in lines along the roads and in the town marketplace. They were not sprawled or scattered. There was a grotesque orderliness to the way they lay, the mark not of passionate violence but of deliberate execution.
“Pull back. Zero the magnification.”
The scan widened and the world fell away, pulling back above the stripes of wispy cloud until the ground was a dozen miles below.
“Rotate the scan, three sixty.”
The camera view panned slowly across the verdant terrain of Bali, the patchwork pattern of the rice fields, the paler patches of the scattered villages, the great craggy bulk of Mount Karangasem to the northeast and the azure of the sea to the southwest.
Smoke plumes writhed into the sky in at least four other locations.
“Is this being seconded to the Embassy?” Amanda inquired.
“Yes, Ma’am. And to NAVEX 7.2 Flag and NAVSPECFORCE Headquarters.”
“Very good.” Amanda tapped the transmit key on her own lip mike. “Signal Intelligence, this is the Captain.”
“Signal Intelligence, this is Captain Montgomery,” a crisp feminine voice replied.
“Captain, are we getting any signal intercepts out of the Bali Global Hawk?
Anything that can tell us what’s happening on the ground?”
“Nothing definitive, Ma’am, just continued generalized indications of large-scale anti-Muslim terrorism
and a general collapse of civil authority. Tabanan regency appears to be the
flashpoint of the disturbance and we have heard references to an event or
incident at one of the local Hindu religious shrines.”
That seemed ominously similar to the execution style death patterns they were seeing. The worst-case scenario would be for the angered pedanda of the Science of the Holy Waters to call for an exorcism of the Muslim “demons” living on Bali as they had done with the communists in the 1960s. If such were the case, if a call for the mass cleansing of the island in the name of the Trisakti were indeed flashing from temple to temple, then this was only a hideous beginning.
“The civil telephone net’s gone down throughout the central regencies – as have the security force radio nets,” the signals officer continued. “All we’re getting is random traffic from a scattering of isolated tactical units. The
police headquarters are apparently being targeted by the mobs.”
“That’s to be expected. Most of the senior police cadre on Bali are Javanese Muslim.
What are you getting out of Denpasar?”
“Not much. Civil radio and television are starting to make references to civil
disobedience and rioting in some northern towns and villages, but the deaths
and the extent of the outbreak are being downplayed. The authorities are ‘reacting’ to the situation. We’re also seeing repeated calls for national unity and the ‘we are many but all are one’ ideal. I’d say it was a classic ‘whistling in the graveyard’ package from a very scared administration.”
“What are the authorities doing?”
“Police headquarters in Denpasar was sending out repeated demands to the regency
stations for more intelligence on the situation, along with orders to suppress
the outbreak at all costs. Lethal force authorized. Then, about twenty minutes
ago, Denpasar dropped off the net completely. We’re receiving fragmentary traffic on the civil emergency services channels,
indicating a massive explosion at the police brigade command post, possibly a
car bomb.”
“Damn!” Amanda murmured. “This couldn’t get worse.”
“Yes, ma’am, it could,” Montgomery said, remorselessly. “Very much so. We’ve started to pick up something else over here that I think you urgently need to
listen to.”
Amanda had not known Captain Janet Montgomery of US Army Intelligence for very long, but Amanda sensed that she was usually a very understated individual.
“I’m on my way.”
