It was comparatively rare to see a member of this tribal group away from the dock areas of the city, for the Bugi were a people wedded to the sea. They were master mariners, sometimes called the sea gypsies. For centuries, they had ranged the vast Indonesian archipelago from the coasts of Asia to the Philippines, more at home on the waters than upon the land.
Almost every inhabited island in the East Indies had at least one Bugi colony that served as a base for the tribe’s vast fleet of sleek Pinisi schooners. They were the maritime glue that tenuously bound the myriad islands of Indonesia together, a proud people with a proud history as sailors, fishermen and traders.
They had also been the most savage and successful pirates in all the sea reaches of South East Asia.
On this particular day, this Bugi did not look exceptionally piratical. Clad in worn jeans, flip-flop sandals and a T-shirt bearing a Thailand sports shoe logo, he worked his way through the crowded upper middle-class neighborhood near Freedom Square, deftly avoiding both the streets gridlocked by the growing demonstrations and the police security checkpoints.
The Bugi had received his insurgency training from a former North Korean Death Commando turned mercenary advisor and had been briefed on police riot doctrine by a bought member of that agency. He had been preparing for this specific mission for over three weeks, finding a suitable strike point near a likely riot site close to the square and scouting his insertion and escape routes. All that was required was for the proper hysteric environment to develop. Two hours before, as the demonstrations had started to build to a critical level, he had received the go order.
The side street he now followed was parallel to one of the major arterials feeding into Freedom Square. The angry rumble of massed voices interspersed with shouts and bursts of chanted slogans flowed over the tops of the building. The security forces were focused on the demonstrators massed on the arterial; consequently, they had no time to waste on a nonpolitical innocent hurrying homeward with a burden of shopping bags.
One block short of the square, the Bugi turned into a narrow doorway between a restaurant and a novelties shop, climbing the narrow stairway beyond. The building he had entered was a comparatively new structure, a combination apartment and business complex, the apartments all being on the second floor, spaced on either side of a corridor that extended the full width of the block.
The corridor was warm, humid and rich with the smell of Indonesian cooking. The Bugi hastened down to its far end, ignoring the murmur of radio music and television chatter leaking from some of the apartments. His destination was the right-hand door at the end of the passage. Pausing, he listened. All seemed quiet in the rooms beyond and the door’s cheap lock yielded readily to the silent thrust-and-twist of the heavy-bladed screwdriver he carried.
The apartment belonged to a young, childless married couple, both of whom had day jobs with the Indonesian civil service. That was one of the reasons the Bugi had chosen it, following an extensive reconnaissance. Clean and brightly decorated with inexpensive furnishings and knick-knacks from Thailand and Malaysia, the studio apartment boasted both a personal computer and a DVD equipped television set, the universal symbols of the young and upwardly mobile.
It also boasted a window that looked out over the arterial and the approaches to Freedom Square. This was the other reason the Bugi had selected it.
Setting down his shopping bags, the Bugi removed a gallon plastic jug from one. Filled with a viscous dark red fluid, it had a crude tear strip igniter screwed into its neck. He placed it carefully on the table in the center of the main room. Then he produced a folding stock AK-47 assault rifle and a single thirty round clip of ammunition from the second bag. Extending its wire stock, he expertly snapped the magazine into the weapon and glanced at the gold-finished wall clock, cross-referencing the time it displayed with the wristwatch he had been given for the mission.
Two minutes remained. Perfect.
Setting aside the rifle, the Bugi crossed to the front window. Rolling up the rattan blind, he opened the glass pane to its fullest stop.
Below, the broad street was a solid, jammed mass of milling angry people. At the head of the block, where the arterial entered Freedom Square, a line of riot police backed by a Cadillac Gauge armored car held the human avalanche back.
Here the rumble of voices had turned into a roar. There were swirls and eddies within the crowd, pushing and shoving taking place as rival factions within the demonstration clashed. From somewhere came the crash and splinter of storefront glass. Tension was a physical thing in the air, like a cloud of explosive vapor – but the igniting spark hadn’t yet been struck. The protestors had not quite become a mob. Beyond hurled epithets and the occasional bottle, the police line had not been challenged, the demonstrators held at bay by the poised rattan riot batons of the security forces.
The Bugi retrieved his rifle and set its selector to “autofire”. Standing far enough back from the window to be invisible in the room’s shadows, he aimed at the interface line between the police and the demonstrators. He noted one uniformed individual working his way up and down the line of riot police, obviously the commander of that particular tactical detachment. He would be the logical first target.
The Bugi thumbed off the safety and peered over the AK’s sights.
The last seconds ran down. The spit and crackle of gunfire sounded in the distance. On this cue, the Bugi opened fired as well, his first rounds dropping the targeted officer. Alternately lifting and lowering the muzzle of the assault rifle, he raked short, three round bursts indiscriminately into the security line and the front ranks of the demonstrators, the blood of the police and the protestors spraying and mixing as they fell. Chanted slogans turned to screams. The crowd writhed like a wounded living thing and the surviving police instinctively clawed for their sidearms.
The AK’s magazine emptied and the Bugi sniper abandoned the weapon, letting it fall to the rice-matting floor. Then he turned to the table and the plastic jug resting upon it. The container had been filled with a mixture of gasoline and oxblood, the blood serving as a gelling agent to produce a crude form of napalm.
The Bugi yanked at the igniter in the neck of the jug, pausing for half an instant to ensure the fuse had sputtered to life. Then he was out of the apartment door and running down the hall, ignoring the other opening doors along the passageway.
He was in the stairwell when the incendiary exploded.
Once in the street, he was just another figure running through a city suddenly gone mad. More gunshots sounded over a growing rage of lifted voices, many more, followed by the savage rip of a heavy machine gun.
The plume of smoke that rose over the burning apartment block was only one of
several lifting into the Javanese sky.
The White House, Washington D.C.
1435 Hours; Zone Time, September 17, 2008
The situation briefing was informal only in that it was held in the small Presidential study off the Oval Office, and that it involved a single, select advisor. The matters discussed were of major import, not merely to the United States but to an entire corner of the planet.
President Benton Childress, forty-fourth President of the United States – intent, portly and scowling – lightly buffed the lenses of his glasses with a Kleenex. He was an ex-High School History Teacher, an ex-Mayor of the city of St Louis, an ex-colonel in the Missouri Air National Guard and the first black American to hold the presidency. In all of these incarnations he had not been a man given to wasting time.
“The short form, please, Harry,” he said to his Secretary of State, “short and sweet – or bitter as the case may be. We’re due to meet with the congressional leadership this afternoon and they’ll be expecting direction from this administration.”
“As you wish, sir.” A graying Caucasian New Englander, Secretary of State Harrison Van Linden was a
physical counterpoint to his president, but he too disliked the squandering of
time. He aimed a computer access pad at the fifty-two-inch flat screen display
set into the far wall of the study. “But I’m afraid there is nothing short or simple about any aspect of this situation.”
At the touch of a key the screen filled with a map, a great, crescent shaped archipelago off the northern coast of Australia, extending some three thousand miles from the Philippines to the tip of South East Asia.
“The nation of Indonesia, Mr. President, made up of some thirteen thousand six
hundred separate islands, six thousand of which are inhabited. The total
population is in excess of two hundred and twenty million, divided among better
than one hundred distinct ethnic groups and cultures, speaking over three
hundred mutually unintelligible languages and dialects. Forty percent of the
world’s maritime trade passes through its territorial waters, including one of the
primary oil transit lanes from the Persian Gulf. It is the fourth-largest
nation on the planet and a major petroleum producer in its own right.” Van Linden glanced at his Commander in Chief. “At the moment, it is also dying. If it goes terminal, reverberations from its
fall will shake the geopolitical structure of the South East Asia and the
Pacific Rim, not to mention the entire global economy. The monetary loss from
such a collapse will go into the hundreds of billions. Given the conflict
models we’ve seen during the Indonesian anti-Communist purges in the 1960s and in the East
Timor conflict, the loss in human life will also be staggering. We can expect
casualty counts that will range well into the six and possibly the seven
figures.”
The Secretary of State paused for a deliberate breath. He wasn’t pleased with having to speak his next sentence. “It is also questionable if anything can be done to check this disaster.”
“I’m not a believer in the single-option scenario, Harry,” Childress replied firmly. “There is always something that can be done.”
Van Linden nodded. “There is one possible corrective measure that I have heard proposed by our
people in-theater.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“We have to kill this man.”
The image on the plasma screen changed to that of smiling, debonair figure in a well-cut safari suit of the kind that served as business wear in the East Indies.
“This is Makara Harconan, Mr. President, the instigator of Indonesia’s current state of anarchy.”
“I’ve seen the name in the security briefings.” Childress sat back in his chair, the soft leather creaking. “He’s a good-looking devil. What else does he have going for him?”
“Considerable personal wealth for one,” Van Lynden continued. “Harconan is, or was, a prominent twenty-first century taipan, a trading magnate and business entrepreneur. His holding company, Makara Limited, was a major economic force in South East Asia, especially within Indonesia. He had links to international cargo brokerage, banking and the shipping industry. This was not a coincidence. All of these factors were critical to his long-term intentions toward his homeland. In fact, it can be safely said that his entire life has been focused on one specific goal.”
