The waves slammed into Indah without mercy, hurling her onto the rough volcanic black sand. She coughed, vomiting up cold, salty seawater, while her hands still clung tightly to the collar of Joko’s life vest. The man lay beside her, gasping like a fish starved of oxygen, but his arms still hugged his waterproof backpack as if it were his own heart.
Indah immediately rolled over, pressing herself behind a large, jagged chunk of coral rock. Her instincts never slept. Her sharp eyes swept across the shoreline.
The island was silent, yet thick with danger. Black stone cliffs towered beneath the pounding storm, looking like enormous claws trying to tear open the sky. Atop the cliffs, the faint blink of red lights showed from an automated watchtower.
“Joko. Wake up,” Indah whispered, her voice hoarse but firm. She slapped Joko hard across the cheek.
Joko choked, spat out seawater, then stared at Indah with wide, panicked eyes. “We... we’re still alive?”
“For now,” Indah said. She inspected the wound on her arm. The seawater had washed away the blood, but the wound now looked pale and swollen. She pulled black duct tape from her tactical pocket, then wrapped it tightly over the injury to stop the bleeding. She didn’t even blink as the skin was squeezed hard.
“Get out your laptop. Check whether the beach security system is active,” Indah ordered.
Joko, his hands trembling from hypothermia, opened his bag. Luckily, the military-grade pack was completely waterproof. His specialized laptop powered on with a soft hum. “The network... the network is incredibly strong here. This isn’t a normal cellular network. It’s a closed military frequency.”
Suddenly, a soft humming sound came from the sky.
“Get down!” Indah shoved Joko’s head into the sand.
A spherical surveillance drone, half a meter in diameter, drifted slowly over them. Blue light from its scanning sensor swept across the sand, passing only a few inches from their feet. Indah held her breath, pressing her entire body against the wet ground, merging with the darkness of the volcanic sand.
The drone hovered for a moment, then continued its patrol along the shoreline.
“That’s a Nine Class-A drone,” Joko whispered in a trembling voice. “They have active thermal trackers. If we move in the open, the defense lasers on the cliffs will roast us instantly.”
“Is there a way in from below?” Indah asked.
Joko typed quickly, searching for an opening in the topographic map he had managed to download before their boat exploded. “There is. The cooling-water drainage channel from the generator reactor. It empties into a gap in the coral on the western side. But the passage is extremely narrow and guarded by motion sensors.”
“Show me the way,” Indah said. “I’ll handle the sensors.”
They crawled between the gaps in the coral, avoiding the sweeps of the watchtower’s searchlight. The heavy rain helped mask their body heat from the thermal detectors, but the jagged coral tore through their clothes and skin.
At the end of the coral passage, they found a circular iron tunnel sealed by thick steel bars. Warm, chemically scented water flowed out from inside.
“This is the place,” Joko whispered. “The bars are electrified with high voltage. If you touch them, you’ll be burned to a crisp.”
Indah moved closer, her eyes studying the cables connected to the bars’ frame. She felt along her tactical belt and pulled out a small cylindrical device—a portable electromagnetic pulse generator (EMP) she had taken from an agent in Jakarta.
She pressed the device against the control panel on the tunnel wall. Zzzt-click.
The red indicator light on the bars went out.
“We have thirty seconds before the system automatically reboots,” Indah said. She gripped the steel bars with her bare hands, then pulled with her extraordinary muscular strength. The thick metal bent and snapped with a heartbreaking screech.
“Get in!” Indah shoved Joko into the dark tunnel, then followed right behind him just as the red indicator light came back on behind them.
They had entered the womb of Nightingale’s Cradle.