“I hate this place,” Nick grumbled over the intercom.
“Wouldn’t be the strait without you saying so,” she replied as always. Though Royal Australian Air Force Group Captain Rowena McCain couldn’t argue.
She’d flown more than two hundred patrols in this claustrophobic 737 above the strait. Watching it not through her eyes, because the operational center of the plane had no windows, but instead at the ten stations of tactical displays. She knew the critical seaway below as well as her own hand, though she’d rarely seen it with her own eyes.
For the last two years, this roaring tube flying over the strait had become her home far more than the base housing at RAAF Tindal in the arid bush of the Northern Territory.
The Strait of Malacca was a tactical nightmare, which had become like that itch that no amount of scratching eased. It teetered on the verge of collapse at every level: sea, air, and space. Every minor problem could have global ramifications with the amount of trade moving through here.
“No, I really hate this place.” Wing Commander Nick Nelson completed the ritual that had existed since they’d both been lowly flight lieutenants on their first patrol together along the distant Arafura Sea. When they’d first flown the Strait of Malacca, he’d taught her the sign language for No, really!—the Bruce Willis two fingers pinching down to the thumb, then a forefinger flicked outward from the point of the chin. As if the hand gesture made it more true here than everywhere else he’d ever served. He raised a hand from his keyboard to make the gesture without turning from his displays.
Nick, atypically dour for an Aussie but brilliant at his job, was a great hulk of a man. She’d chosen him to sit at her left hand as the senior Surveillance Officer the moment they’d bumped her to the command seat—all of last month.
The Wedgetail—technically the Boeing 737 AEW&C, Airborne Early Warning and Control plane—was the hottest flying command in the RAAF. It was the only plane in the Royal Australian Air Force staffed by a group captain, the equivalent of an American colonel. She had the responsibility and the power to order immediate action if needed.
“It’s a bit of clutter, mates,” Squadron Leader Grant Felton laughed. “But the place is bound to clear up one of these days.” The diametric opposite of Nick, Grant would be chortling at some joke during his own funeral. Pity he wasn’t as funny as he thought he was—though he was definitely as handsome. But she’d long since refused to fall for that.
Her promotion to group captain—raising her to be the highest ranked Black Australian in the RAAF—made her twice the target she’d ever been before. Especially in the eyes of a dog like Grant. His conviction of being the best dingo in a shaggy pack didn’t make him the least bit more delightful. He’d hit on her the first day he’d joined the crew. To back him off, she’d finally threatened to recommend him for a lifetime of latrine duty in her next review. Which he referred to annoyingly often—as if the year since hadn’t worn the edges off it long ago. He remained convinced it was a bonding joke between them rather than an unvarnished threat.
They occupied the first three of the ten side-facing consoles in the main cabin of the E-7A Wedgetail patrol jet. Grant’s role placed him at the forward end of the cabin closest to the main entry door and the cockpit. His job was to communicate with the two pilots forward and make sure that the plane stayed aloft and secure.
She sat next in the command seat, with Nick to her left managing the surveillance team.
Down the main cabin ranged seven more consoles, each wide enough for two screens, keyboard, keypad, and headset. Three along their port side of the plane and the remaining four to starboard. The count was split because of the large radio cabinets occupying the first two forward positions along the right side of the cabin.
Each station faced the hull. Not that there were any windows to see out of. Instead, each headset-wearing operator in their comfortable swivel seat stared at a bank of displays showing different aspects of the world around them. They could talk to a nearby jet or access anywhere on the globe via satellite with equal ease. Some flights only called for a few operators, but all ten stations were manned continuously when patrolling the strait.
Nick oversaw six of the seven down-cabin stations. He had responsibility for surveillance of everything that happened outside the plane. Somehow, he always managed to make sure that she was looking at the right thing at the right time. Nick had always done so, and now she had the absolute faith of experience in him.
Grant managed his own console and the tech who oversaw communications. Between them, they handled every aspect of the aircraft’s operational integrity, including all the radars and radios that could be squeezed into or hung onto a 737’s airframe.
Everything either Nick or Grant tagged as critical hit her display. At the moment, she was in overall command of far more than her plane. Security operations for the entire eight-hundred-kilometer length of the Strait of Malacca was hers for the duration of this patrol.
Which left her in the middle…again. Story of her life.
She’d been a middle sister with two gung ho brothers. One now a footie star and the other a world-class sailor. Not bad for a First Nations family working the big mines on the edge of the Great Victorian Desert. No longer in their shadows, she still sometimes felt stuck between her brothers’ bigger-than-life personalities.
Always the quiet one, she now sat between the surveillance officer and the plane’s systems officer. Not to mention being a single woman caught between a pair of RAAF bachelors. One with puppy-dog-sad eyes that saw the world all too clearly; the other convinced he knew far more about her than he did.
Nick tapped his screen, which highlighted a ship icon on hers.
Too fast for a fishing vessel, too small for a container ship.
“Satellite handy?” she asked.
“UK bird coming up over Sri Lanka. We’ll have a visual five-minute window in three minutes.”
“Roger that.” Rowena returned to studying other shipping activity while waiting to see if some pirate was unlucky enough to commit his crime within her Wedgetail’s long view of the strait.
In her two and a half decades of service, Rowena had seen plenty of ugly around these parts. Malacca wasn’t going to be clearing up anytime soon, no matter Grant’s prediction. The only thing that would stop this glut through the strait was war. She’d gamed that all too often at headquarters; one of the ultimate no-win scenarios no matter how they looked at it. Sink a handful of big ships across the gut of the strait and it would be closed. The only real shocker was that it hadn’t happened yet; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore might need each other, but they certainly didn’t like each other much.
If the strait ever was closed, the only way to bypass it was a long haul south around Indonesia for the Strait of Lombok or on toward Australia and New Zealand. Ship owners most certainly didn’t want to pay for their deliveries to travel an extra three thousand kilometers before turning north.
At the three-klick-wide choke point where the Malacca emptied out at Singapore, it wasn’t unusual to have ships three hundred meters long that needed half an hour and six kilometers to stop, lined up two or three abreast. One kilometer apart, with the same passing in the opposite direction.
And that was merely the big trade boys. Add in more little boats than bugs in an Outback termite mound: local transports, fishermen, and world sailors, along with the occasional US Navy carrier group complete with submarines.
The real trouble came because where there were countries, there was squabbling.
And where there was congestion, there were pirates.
The pressure of eight billion people on the planet made for a lot of poor—near enough half a billion of them within shooting distance of the Strait of Malacca—and a lot of those feeling no qualms about taking from the rich and giving to themselves.
One poor freighter had been robbed four times in a single passage. The first time for the crew’s cash and valuables. Then someone pulled alongside and cross-pumped a hundred thousand gallons of diesel at gunpoint. Another pirate took twenty thousand more gallons, leaving her almost dry of fuel for her engines. The final pirates, finding the ship stripped, had ridden along for two days eating as much food from her stores as they could before disembarking. Thankfully, that hadn’t been on Australia’s watch.
As there were no flotillas of military ships passing through at the moment, the pirates were the focus of today’s mission.
Of course, from up here at thirty-nine thousand feet in the Wedgetail, they could also keep an eye on the pissing match China had turned into the next most likely war zone across much of the South China Sea. And not to forget Myanmar at the other end engaging anyone who’d listen to the latest military junta, which was no one with a pinch of common sense.
“Never two days the same,” Grant teased.
“Each worse than the one before,” Nick embraced his moroseness like an art form.
Unlike her prior commander, Rowena appreciated the banter. A standard patrol lasted twelve hours unless something bad kicked in. Then they’d get a midair refueling and often hit twenty hours aloft. She could rotate some of the operators to the comfortable crew rest seats in the rear, but she never took advantage of that herself.
That created its own kind of trouble. Being labeled as an overachiever pleased the top levels of command but irritated those immediately above her. They assumed she was after their jobs, which she was. The fact that she was smarter than most of them put together, and everyone knew it, didn’t help matters.
The man she’d replaced had been aged out. Rather than making the grade to air commodore, he’d been grounded and was completing his final year from the ground. Angrier than a sack full of hornets, he’d turned over the Wedgetail to her command with only the barest of military protocols. She’d known he’d despised her for being better than he was—long since obvious to both of them as well as Command, who had promoted her—but she hadn’t known how much until the handover.
Now off the plane and out of the No. 2 Security Forces Squadron, he was no longer her problem.
Neither Nick nor Grant despised her, that she could tell. And neither aspired, both glad to be in straightforward service roles.
Rowena, however, had her eye firmly trained on trading in the four thin stripes on her uniform for that one wide one of air commodore, equivalent to a US brigadier general. To achieve that, she had to hone her crew and her billion-Australian-dollar plane until they shone.
Under the Five Power Defence Arrangements—Australia’s key military treaty with Singapore, the UK, New Zealand, and Malaysia—they helped to keep the trade moving as safely as possible throughout the region. Indonesia lay along the other side of the strait. Being too snarled in problems of their own, they cooperated, reluctantly, but did little to help.
Australia’s Wedgetails had proven to be major assets in achieving smooth flow along this globally critical sea lane and she planned for her plane to be the most effective one in the fleet.
But now that she was here, sea traffic wasn’t her only mission.
“Talk to me about the air.” She hit the top right button on the soft-touch pad beside her keyboard to flip her view, relegating the sea to her secondary screen and showing her the surrounding air space on the primary.
Nick flipped his screen to match. His three maritime staff specialists would alert him if anything went astray.
“About the same sorry state,” Nick groused.
They flew at thirty-nine thousand feet over two of the busiest airports in the world: Singapore’s Changi and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International. The horizon lay four hundred kilometers away in all directions due to the Earth’s curvature, and they could see out to nine hundred for aircraft at altitude. Everything from Ho Chi Minh City to Jakarta showed up on the screens—it almost made the clutter down in the strait look rational. At least the shipping remained on the surface of the sea, other than the occasional submarine. The clutter of the air routes crisscrossed at every altitude imaginable.
But the Wedgetail wasn’t called the most capable AEW&C plane aloft without reason. It specialized in sorting the noteworthy from the mundane at sea, in the air, and in near space out to a thousand kilometers. They might be watching the sea and air today, but if someone lofted a ballistic missile from beyond the horizon, the Wedgetail could find it before it reentered the atmosphere.
Rowena scaled her view to the closest hundred kilometers in all directions and began identifying the patterns—something she did faster than anyone aboard. Always good to set a high bar for the staff.
The magic of her view was created in the back half of the plane.
Past the ten consoles and the small crew rest area, the aft half of the fuselage was closed off. From the wings back to the tail ranged some of the most sophisticated electronics anywhere. They controlled, fed, and watched through the Top Hat radar antenna. The antenna—like a fat-handled dough scraper jammed into the spine of the plane by a giant trying to split the fuselage in two lengthwise—ran from the plane’s midpoint to close before the tail and nearly as tall.
This was not the thirty-foot-wide black-and-white spinning disk of the fifty-year-old E-3 Sentry AWACS planes. Those updated their radar view with one sweep every ten seconds. The E-7A Wedgetail’s MESA radar—multi-role electronically scanned array—offered a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view: sea low, airspace mid, and space high.
“What’s the status on our stray boat?” Her internal timer had gone off that the imaging satellite should have cleared the horizon by now and be able to see the boat they’d spotted earlier.
“Hang on. Hang on.” Nick counted the phrase off in seconds, working his keyboard. “There. The boat’s a service vessel. Registered. Called out to assist with a Saudi’s broken Number Two engine. Liberian registry, of course.” No accidental oil spill that could be traced to the Sauds, at least financially.
Rowena glanced over at his console and saw a low-angle satellite image, a static picture of the same boat for comparison, and basic registry information. It was one of many kept docked along the strait, like tow trucks pre-positioned on major highways during rush hour.
“Tell him to turn on his damn AIS.” Ships were supposed to run with their Automatic Identification System transponder operating for just this reason.
After a quick radio call, the ship’s ID blinked to life on the screen, reporting that the boat was who she said she was.
“Sounded hungover to me,” Nick said in a voice that sounded that way himself. But then he always did, sober or not.
At her nod, he cleared the screen. One of his techs would keep an eye on it to make sure that it wasn’t a false-flag operation or, if legitimate, that the ship they were assisting didn’t break the traffic pattern in any dangerous fashion.
Back to studying the air traffic.
Commercial and cargo flights clustered in neat lines toward the major airports. Like a high-flying web that connected them to the wider world. Below them, feeder flights appeared like flowers, their predictable patterns blooming outward from major airports to smaller fields, then feeding back the other way.
Every pattern wove together on her monitor to make clear and predictable forms that—
“Who’s this?”
She tapped her screen.
Nick glanced over at her console, squinted at it for a second, then turned back to his.
“Small plane,” he reported. “Large bizjet class.” Another pause. “Fifty-five kilometers out. Heading zero-six-zero. Crossing our course in one minute fifty seconds. Flight Level Four-Zero.”
The Wedgetail flew northwest at thirty-nine thousand feet along the length of the far-below strait; they could sweep it from one extremity to the other every hour. The unknown flight flew northeast at forty thousand feet.
If it was a feeder flight climbing out of West Sumatra, Indonesia, it would still be far lower. To the southwest, beyond Sumatra, there was nowhere to come from. Nothing except the vast empty stretches of the Indian Ocean where the Malaysian airliner MH370 had disappeared, and not found even a decade later after the largest search-and-rescue operation in maritime history.
“Forty thousand should be a dead zone,” she reminded Nick. “Verify.”
“Flight Level Four-Zero verified. Ninety seconds out.”
Eastbound aircraft should be at Flight Level Three-Seven or Four-One. With their own present westbound course at Three-Nine, it created a two-thousand-foot vertical buffer between planes going in opposite directions—or it was supposed to. Nobody should be at Four-Zero unless they were in transition between flight levels.
“Identity?” Rowena asked.
“No transponder. Radar shows…” Nick kept working his keyboard.
In seconds he’d re-tuned the big Top Hat radar from wide-area survey to threat-sector analysis in the direction of the unknown aircraft. Focusing the entirety of the MESA radar on a single aircraft vastly increased the detail.
“Bogey is a Dassault Falcon 2000 business jet. Typically, ten passengers and two crew. There’s a belly extension I don’t recognize. It isn’t an antenna.”
She didn’t like this.
“Perhaps it’s lost. Or going walkabout. Forty-five seconds out.” At a combined closure rate of seventeen hundred kilometers per hour, distances shrank fast.
She watched it continue its approach for five more seconds. That earlier itch turned into a burn.
“Grant. Get us away from this guy.”
“Roger.” He keyed his connection to the pilots. “Jackson, turn immediate heading—”
He yelped and slapped off his intercom headset.
“What the bloody hell?” He was rubbing at his ears.
“Report?” Rowena asked when he didn’t speak.
“Pray I’m hallucinating.” He picked up the headset, held it near one ear, then dialed down the volume before pulling it back on. “Jackson? Boller?”
The Wedgetail pilots’ names.
Rowena tapped for the cockpit intercom channel.
Nothing.
Except a loud roar.
Like—
“What did you hear, Grant?”
“Screams. Like blood-curdling ones. Kind of sound you never want to hear—ever. Jackson? Boller?”
All she heard was wind.
Grant undid his seat harness.
Rowena had been wearing only her lap belt, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Nick pulling on the two shoulder straps to make it a four-point harness. She did the same for herself. When she pulled the strap from the front-edge of the seat to attach all five points, Nick looked pained before doing the same. All down the cabin, she could hear the quiet snick of five-point harnesses being latched into place.
Grant pounded on the door a few times. Then he keyed in the unlock code on the external keypad beside the cockpit’s safety door.
After waiting through the long pause that gave the pilots the option to override the unlock request, the three lights turned green, indicating all three locks had opened.
He turned the handle and tugged.
Then harder.
He pulled his hand back and looked at it strangely for a moment, rubbing it. Then he ran his hand around the edge of the door.
Next, he shoved aside one earmuff of his headset, picked up the intercom phone hung beside the door, and called out the pilot’s names. He listened, then hung it up very slowly and turned to face her.
“I think we just lost the pilots.”
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