Directive 51 Read Free

he was also on the fast track for promotion, he’d been doing well here, and the simple, easy task he had to do was part of a vital mission at the highest security level; all he had to do was not screw up and there was a great big plum of cred on his resumé.
    He swirled the rum and Coke to make sure the ice was doing its job, and swallowed the rest. Maybe his next post—
    His cell buzzed in his pocket. “Cooper, US Consul.”
    “Cooper, it’s Seagull. Routine op in ten seconds, are you ready?”
    He glanced at the computer screen, which said his antenna was aligned. “Ready . . . send the test . . .”
    “Sending.”
    The screen said confirmed clear.
    “Good here.”
    “And good here. Sending one main message.”
    The screen said msg rec’d 48 mgb, relaying.
    “Just the one this time?” Cooper asked.
    “Just the one.”
    Successful realay, wiping msg.
    “Relayed and erased,” he said.
    “That’s it for tonight. Unofficially, thanks for everything and bye.”
    “Bye.”
    So they were leaving. He’d thought they would be, soon; he’d been fielding more and more odd requests from the big white plane that he could just see through binoculars, across the bay at Sentani airport.
    Well, time to bag it and head home. He might give himself a few days off sometime soon, maybe hop over to Oz or Tahiti for some nightlife and just to feel like nobody was watching his ass all the time. He rinsed his glass thoroughly—wouldn’t do to have it smelling of liquor when the Indonesian help came in—and locked the fridge after making sure he had returned everything to it. He started the sequence that would do a secure memory wipe on the satellite uplink server’s disk, and did some straightening up and putting away while he waited for it to finish.
    The crowd outside was shouting and chanting; his Bahasa wasn’t terribly good and rumbling AC and armored windows made it hard to hear, so he went to the window.
    The first brick bounced off right in front of his face, and he ducked away and crouched as a dozen more thudded against the window. Thought I heard “America” in that chant. And the uplink will be down for another five while it finishes—
    Slams and scraping noises overhead. Ropes passing by the windows, flying up or spiraling down. Then a groaning and creaking overhead, a loud bang as bolts gave, and he saw the satellite uplink antenna plunge past the window to the ground. Make that the uplink is down.
    Cooper crawled to the opposite wall, where the light switch was, but before he quite reached it, the power went out. He made sure his door was locked, sat up behind his heavy desk, and dialed the emergency desks at the Embassy in Jakarta, the Consular Service in Washington, and the local police department, leaving voice mail each time. Probably the person on duty at State was in the bathroom, the one in Jakarta was napping, and as for the local police, they might be out there with the mob or gone fishing for the month.
    He was glad he had a prerecorded native-speaker message on the phone, and gladder still he’d made Abang stop giggling and record it perfectly straight. Minuses, he thought, I’m in a place where a prepared guy like me has LOCAL POLICE FOR VIOLENT MOB in his prerecorded speed phone list. Double minuses, voice mail all around.
    He called Seagull to let them know there was trouble in the city; no voice mail picked up while he let the phone ring fifty times after he started counting. The stones and bricks had stopped after that first flurry, but so far three shots had caromed off the armored glass and screamed off into the dark.

ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. 151°6’E 11°23’N: ABOUT 450 NAUTICAL MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF GUAM, IN THE PACIFIC. THE NEAREST LAND IS GUAM. 9:10 P.M. GUAM TIME (8:10 P.M. JAYAPURA, 6:10 A.M. EST). MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
    Seagull Watchdog One, the flight of three F-35s, arrived on the dot—literally, because the rendezvous point, 151°6’E 11°23’N, was just a dot on the