Abruptly, he was diverted by a call from the lookout at the schooner’s masthead. “Aircraft warning! Warplanes! Coming from the north!”
His brooding thoughts erased, Harconan stepped back from the heavy machine gun, letting the crew clear their weapon for action. Whipping his pair of binoculars up from around his neck, he scanned the northern sky.
There they were. Half a dozen of them, flying in a dispersed “loose deuce” formation. Helicopters, moving fast, exceptionally fast. Gunships,
American-made AH-1 Cobras. But Indonesia hadn’t purchased the AH-1. The only force in these waters flying the Cobra would be
the United States Marines …
But the American Marines didn’t fly any Cobra that looked like that!
The leader of the weird flight pulled out slightly ahead of its formation and dipped. The damn thing was dipping wings that it shouldn’t have! The strange machine’s pilot was making the universal aviator’s signal for a friendly aircraft.
Harconan tore his walkie-talkie out of its belt holster. “Hold your fire!” he roared to other captains of his squadron. “This is Harconan! Hold your fire! I command it! Hold your fire!”
Refugee and Bugi seamen alike goggled up as the black flight shrieked overhead, not even sounding like conventional helicopters. The aircraft ignored the evacuation fleet, obviously intent on other business in Singaraja.
And then Harconan knew. He knew without the faintest shadow of a doubt.
“Amanda.”
*
The waterfront of Singaraja flowed under the nose of the Jeannie II as the suppression flight crossed the coast.
“Little Stinker Lead to Stinker Flights. Like we briefed it, people. Pom Pom,
your flight has the center temple. BoJoe, you guys have the north. Pink, you’re with me. We’ll take the big one.”
“Affirmative, lead.”
“Rog that, Commander.”
“Right with you, Vince.”
“Good enough, guys. Bestow the choke and puke and beat it out of there. Watch for
ground fire. They’re not going to be happy with us here presently. Little Stinker Flights … Ready? Break, break and break!”
Wingtips snapped up as the two-aircraft elements peeled off, the white cylindrical bomblet dispensers prominent on their hard points.
Arkady thumbed the coolie hat switch on the velocity controller, calling up his weapons displays and arming his own dispenser pods. Flicking a glance down at the ground, he picked up Gajah Mada Road, the main highway south from the port area. Then, swaying the SPEED Cobra in line with the highway, he followed it toward his own objective.
In the spare seconds he had before acquiring the target, he mused that he had undertaken any number of peculiar missions for king and country, especially under the command of Amanda Garrett – but he had never been ordered to bomb a church before.
“This is Little Stinker lead. Watch your dispersal interval, Pink,” he murmured into his oxygen mask. “Descending to drop altitude.”
“Still with you, lead.”
Arkady pushed the SPEED Cobra into a shallow dive. Ahead, beyond the city cemetery, lay the pura dalem of Singaraja, the temple of Shiva the Destroyer.
The temple grounds, the terraces surrounding them and Gajah Mada Road, were jammed with people, a mob-to-be working itself up into a religious frenzy for the final march on the massed Muslim refugees in the port.
This mob was the target to be destroyed.
Destroyed, but not killed.
Arkady caught the flow of motion across the surface of the crowd as thousands of faces turned up towards the black monsters that came intruding out of the sky, the howl and growl of rotors and turbines crashing through their chimes, drums and chanting. Around the perimeter of the massed populace, he saw a few scattered flaming sparks and he heard the ‘tack’ of a rifle bullet glancing off ceramic fuselage armor.
Third World mobs did so dearly love to shoot at helicopters.
Then they were cutting across drop zone at the keyed altitude. “Little Stinker lead is in and hot!” he chanted into his hot mike, triggering his sub-munitions dispensers. “Drop! Drop! Drop!”
A soft patter of detonations rippled from beneath the wings of the SPEED Cobras and hundreds upon hundreds of baseball sized bomblets sprayed out in their wakes, raining down upon the people massed around the temple.
As each bomblet was hurled from its launcher tube, a tiny chemical cell activated within it. A supercharged relation to simple kitchen baking soda, the cell fizzed into life as the bomblet fell, pressurizing the thin plastic shell from within. While still twenty to thirty feet in the air, the shells popped like a multitude of soap bubbles, each bomblet spraying out a cupful of a clear oily fluid.
The released fluid pattered down upon the assembled multitude, the fall catching the majority of the people clustered around the temple. For a few moments, nothing happened beyond a puzzled exchange of looks. Then the biochemical witch’s brew began to react with the oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a peculiarity of twenty-first century warfare that, in an age when mass annihilation was available in an unprecedented number of formats, one of the primary concerns of the modern First World military was the development and employment of new and improved ways of not killing people.
In a world of asymmetrical warfare, peacekeeping had become as critical a military evolution as warfighting. Terrorists and tyrants alike cowered behind the innocent and helpless; “holding babies over their heads” had become a favorite defensive tactic. As a counter, non-lethal weaponry had become the new cutting edge. Weaponry such as the CCD-N (Chemical Crowd Dispersant Non-lethal) 6 “Pigeye” cluster munition.
Chemical crowd dispersants such as tear gas and red pepper spray had been an anti-riot mainstay for police agencies around the world – but Pigeye took simple teargas a broad step further.
Within seconds of exposure, skin began to tingle and then to itch and burn, first aggravating, then maddeningly and finally agonizingly, the ultimate combination of sunburn and Alaskan mosquito bite. Eyes began to water, then itch, and then swell shut, tears gushing.
Noses gushed with a massive flood of mucus. Genetically engineered neural trigger agents carried by tissue permeation compounds crawled through skin and entered the bloodstream. As they reached the brain, the triggers targeted their selected ganglia centers. Intense, writhing, nausea struck with accompanying explosive vomiting. Bowels and sphincters released beyond the control of their owners.
And, over everyone touched, rose literally the most appalling stench conceivable, a fiendishly blended perfumer’s nightmare of the scents instinctively repellant to the human animal, distilled into their most concentrated form. Skunk squared.
There was no protection from the riot agent barring a full MOPP biochemical warfare suit – and, barring the massive application of detergent and hot water, there was no escape from the effect until the volatiles of the compounds had completely evaporated in somewhere between one and two hours.
And Pigeye was not simply an area weapon. The rioters were not merely affected by the ghastly miasma; they carried it with them, inescapably bonded to their own living flesh.
The two-fold intent of Pigeye was simple: to break up the dangerous massed humanity of a riot by making the presence of the rioters intolerable even to each other, and to destroy the focus of those rioters by making them so totally miserable that any conceivable political or emotional motivation was irrelevant.
