Weapons of choice

He and Hardoyo were being accommodated-or detained, to be perfectly accurate-in separate cabins far apart from each other. They hadn't been badly treated or abused. Indeed, the reception for Kakuta and Hidaka had been much sharper. For the moment, the Indonesians were regarded as a curiosity and a potential asset. When that changed, he knew, he'd better have an exit strategy locked down. Or something of great value to trade for his skin.

The sweet notes of the cigarette induced a lonesome melancholy in the Sutanto's executive officer. An intensely childlike desire to run for home overwhelmed his confusion and anxiety, while compounding deeper feelings of desolation and irrecoverable loss. He was surprised to find his throat tightening as hot tears welled in his eyes. Moertopo quickly jammed a knuckle into his mouth, lest the guard outside his room hear him. The grief built in intensity until there was nothing to be done but to give himself over to it, curling into a tight fetal ball on his bunk and fighting to draw breath between the great racking sobs that overpowered him. It was as though he were being pummeled underneath a tsunami of wretched sorrow.

In time, a few minutes at most, the seizure passed, leaving in its wake a bleak emotional landscape. He lit another cigarette and raised it between shaking fingers. He drew in a sharp, shuddering breath. As stupidly soothing as this clove cigarette was, Moertopo turned it in his fingers, examining it with a frown. It was emblematic of all his problems. The company that produced this before the war had been a monopoly. In the year before he was born, it had been handed over to an idiot son of the president, who had added the profits from that corrupt transaction to his already formidable business holdings. Both the son and the old man were gone within three years, swept away by the blast wave of the nineties' financial meltdown. The cigarette company reverted to its original and natural owners, the armed forces, which generated 70 percent of its budget from commercial enterprises, most often monopolies.

Little wonder, then, that as Indonesia began to disintegrate under the onslaught of radical Islamists, the generals and admirals had reacted less like professional military men than as the ham-fisted, profiteering mafia they actually were. Moertopo cursed the fools and robbers who had delivered his country into slavery beneath the heel of the Caliphate. But mostly he cursed them for so mismanaging their affairs that he should end up here, in the belly of an iron behemoth, decades before he was born, when he could have been safely tucked up beneath the wings of the Americans.

If only they had trusted him.

But then again, he admitted, why should they?

The Sutanto was little better than a pirate ship. And in a dismal insight, Lieutenant Ali Moertopo realized his only hope lay in embracing that.

15

USS ASTORIA/LEYTE GULF, 0331 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Slim Jim Davidson hadn't ever seen anything like it. Not even at the World's Fair in New York, before the war. The future was here, and it was a fucking treasure trove. If it weren't for Chief Mohr riding his ass like a chariot driver he'd have stowed away enough loot to set himself up for life.

He'd already grabbed and stashed away two of them electrical books, three electrical watches, one pair of goggles-also electrical-and a pistol that looked like it'd stop a bull elephant. The hand cannon he understood. The watches, sort of. They had to be like something out of Dick Tracy, radio watches or something. But the other stuff, that was a mystery. He just took them because he recognized a first-class score. There was just something about those gadgets that cried out, Take me Slim Jim. I'm yours. At some point he was going to have to drop the loot off and start again. Or else Mohr was certain to get wise.

But it was worth the risk. That's why he'd allowed himself to be "volunteered" by the chief for the gruesome business of cleaning up the body parts that lay throughout the dense labyrinth created by the intersection of the two cruisers. The confusion and darkness created endless opportunities for profit. One of the watches, for instance, had just "slipped off" a severed arm and into Slim Jim's pocket as he cleared out a niche where the Astoria's electrical storeroom met a small crew cabin on the Leyte Gulf.