Armageddon

Chapter 65

Danny Freah tightened his hand on the side of the seat as the Quick Bird thundered over the Brunei Jungle, heading for the last launch point for the LADS system. He’d given up his usual spot in the front of the helo to Jennifer Gleason, who had hooked one of her laptops into the blimps’ command system. Jennifer had modified some of the programming en route, allowing them to activate the sensors on the fly as each blimp was launched. Though the system was scalable (meaning units could be added without major hassle), before her alterations it had to be shut down and rebooted, a lengthy process, each time a new unit came on line.

Who said scientists weren’t useful? And this one, even in a carbon-boron vest, was damn easy on the eyes.

“Thirty seconds to touchdown, Captain,” announced the pilot. “Hawk Three says we’re clear.”

“Good:’ said Danny. He stamped his foot up and down, trying to knock away the pins and needles.

“Problem, Cap?” asked Boston, who was sitting next to him. “I’m all right.”

“Foot fell asleep, huh?” Boston laughed.

“My leg,” said Danny.

“My grandmamma had an of recipe to fix that.”

“Your grandmamma, huh?” said Sergeant Garcia. “Did it involve castor oil?”

“Mighta. She put castor oil into anything, including the stew”

Danny’s grandmother had actually done the same thing. But he wasn’t about to encourage Boston, who’d find some way to make another joke out of it.

“Here we go,” said the pilot, tipping the helicopter downward.

Danny and Garcia jumped from the helicopter just as it set down on the wide highway. They ran in opposite directions, scouting the dark terrain around them with their helmet sensors. Once they were sure the area was clear, Danny had Boston and Jennifer unstrap the small LADS vehicle kit from the side of the helicopter. The helicopter cleared out to scout the area as they began inflating the lighter-than-air vehicle.

“Cap, got something moving down off the road,” said Garcia.

Danny spun around and ran down the highway. The long day and steamy weather were starting to take their toll, and he was huffing before Garcia came into view, crouched at the side and looking down a long curve.

“Too far away to get a good view,” said Garcia, pointing along the ravine. “Two bodies, but I can’t tell if they’re people or what”

Even at maximum magnification, Danny couldn’t see anything.

“Whiplash team to Quick Bird, I want you to stay clear of the area south of us,” Danny told the helicopter pilot. “We have something moving. I’m going to get the Flighthawk to take a look.”

Chapter 66

Lieutenant Kirk “Starship” Andrews acknowledged the request from Captain Freah for a close-up of the area to the southeast of the LADS deployment team and turned his Flighthawk back in that direction.

Lieutenant James “Kick” Colby sat next to him on the Flighthawk deck of the Indy, controlling Hawk Four. Kick had just taken his plane up for a refuel, leaving Starship to handle the reconnaissance request on his own.

Not that he didn’t prefer it that way.

The U/MF-3 slid through five thousand feet, descending toward a blur of vegetation. Starship rode the plane over the right shoulder of the road for about a mile and a half, then started his turn to bank in the direction of the area Whiplash had pointed out. The sensors in the belly of the Flighthawk scoured the ground as he flew; the computer gave him two frozen frames as he pulled up.

“Hawk Three to Whiplash ground team. Captain, we got some blurs on that pass. Computer ID’d two people, but there may be more. I’m taking another run. I’ll feed you the video from the sensors,” he added, reaching with his left hand to the one-switch toggle that allowed the data to flow through the Dreamland network. “Thick canopy,” he added, meaning that the trees and vegetation would limit the sensors’ ability to see.

“Whiplash leader,” acknowledged Danny.

Starship banked Hawk Three well south of the target area and lined up again, practically walking over the area. He came around and found himself barely fifty feet higher than the rock outcropping on the opposite end of the highway. He’d been so intent on flying the airplane that he was surprised when Danny asked if he could give him another view of the troops.

“Sorry Whiplash, I lost that:’ he told the captain on the ground.

“Take another run,” said Danny. “I couldn’t tell if they were rebels or regular troops.”

Starship banked around and began another pass. As he did, he got two warnings from the computer — one because he was drifting too far from the Megafortress to control the Flighthawk properly, and the other because he was into his fuel reserves.

“I can manage one more pass,” he told Danny, “but then I have to refuel. Hawk Four is en route to take over.”

“Give me a good one then.”

“I can’t tell who they are,” Danny told Garcia after the third pass failed to show anything definitive. “We’re just going to have to wait and see if they get close.”

“Yeah,” said Garcia.

Danny ran back to Jennifer and Boston. They had not yet begun to inflate the blimp.

“We have some people moving up about a mile and a half from here, in the jungle:’ he told them. “We can’t tell if they’re good guys or bad guys. How long is it going to take to get that bag up in the air?”

“Another five minutes before we can start the inflation,” said Jennifer. “Then about ten minutes on top of that.”

Once inflated and launched, it would take the blimp at least ten minutes to climb up and out of easy range. The engine was fairly quiet, but could be heard when the craft was at ground level.

“All right,” Danny told her. “Move as quickly as you can. “Boston, you’re the last line of defense here. Garcia and I are going to go down into the jungle off the road. This way if that patrol comes up in your direction we can cut them off before they get close enough to do any damage. We’ll hold them off long enough to get the LADS vehicle launched and you guys out”

“We’re not leaving without you,” said Jennifer.

“Yeah, Captain, no way.”

“It won’t come to that,” said Danny, turning and running back to Garcia.

Chapter 67

Kick finished the refuel and ducked away from the Megafortress, gliding back to the southwest. He could see the Quick Bird that had deposited the LADS team off on his right as he descended toward the jungle to update the Whiplash people on the situation.

“Hawk Four to Whiplash leader. Looking for you,” said Kick, trying to orient himself. He banked and got the road on his right. He had two people at the top of his screen — the LADS team, getting ready to inflate the lighter-than-air vehicle.

The response from the ground was garbled and partly overrun as Major Alou gave an update on Indy’s position, flying north so it could cover one of the government’s strongholds as well as the Whiplash operation. Kick double-checked his Flighthawk’s position to confirm for Alou that he would remain in communication range. He lost his bearings again; as he banked he temporarily lost sight of the road. He came westward and realized he was completely disoriented, now nearly two miles south of the team’s position. He found the road again and flew along it, following the curve back in the direction of the LADS unit, which had just activated a radio beacon as part of its start-up.

Some figures moved through the brush a few hundred yards south of the launch point.

The soldiers threatening the team.

His heart thumped as he put the Flighthawk into a wide turn so he could position himself for a run back at the enemy. The Flighthawk cut a lollipop in the sky, its altitude dropping as he came around.

“I have two, three figures, in the jungle, near the road, very close to the team, in a threatening position,” he said. “Can’t see them too well.”

“Make sure they’re not our guys,” said Starship over the plane’s interphone circuit.

“No shit.” He clicked back into the Dreamland channel. “Ground, we got somebody just about on top of your guys.”

“Where?”

“Northwest.” Kick activated his weapons screen and pushed his nose down, running toward the road area in a diagonal from the northeast. Something moved on the left but he was going too fast to get a view, much less fire; he cursed and pulled off, trying to wing back and get another angle from the south. The geometry just wouldn’t work and he cursed himself again as he came out of the turn far too fast. He could feel his chest starting to pump with his quick, shallow breaths, and tried to force himself to breathe more slowly.

Zen had told him that the trick to flying the small aircraft in combat was to relax and keep your adrenaline level down. It was only by remaining relatively calm that you could process the information being given to you, and punch the right buttons.

“Let the computer do the frenetic stuff,” Zen had advised. “You’re like the CEO, checking off the options.”

“Northwest?” asked Danny on the ground.

“Looking at them — I have one blur. They’re in range of your people.”

He brought the Flighthawk around, putting the road on his left wing. He couldn’t see anything for a moment. Finally he got a target. His heart jumped, and his body moved reflexively to nail down the targeting pipper.

The computer didn’t let him. In the next second he realized he was looking at the Whiplash team. Fortunately, the signals from the smart helmets had registered in the computer system and the safeties wouldn’t have permitted him to fire without an override.

If I’d been piloting an A- I OA, Kick thought to himself, I might have splashed my own guys.

Shit.

“Hawk Four to ground team. All right, I have it all sorted out now. There are five, six men, uh, three hundred yards from where you are.” Even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Kick’s hand began to tremble. “I can take them out.”

“Negative,” responded Danny. “Hold off. We’re still not sure if they’re friendly or not. Just hold your position.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, banking around.

Chapter 68

Danny studied the blurry infrared in the left-hand side of his helmet’s visor, still trying to figure out if the people coming toward him were terrorists or government troops on patrol.

Since they were off the road, was it a reasonable assumption that they were terrorists?

“Getting closer, Captain,” said Garcia, who was crouched about ten yards to his left.

“Can you see their weapons?”

“I can’t tell.”

“How we doing back there, Boston?”

“Two more minutes. We’re doing the pre-launch countdown while we’re still inflating. This girl’s a whiz.”

“Good”

“Two hundred yards,” said Garcia. “They heard the Flighthawk that time — they stopped when it came around.”

“Hawk Four, this is Freah. Can you take a really loud pass at them?”

“Not sure what you mean, Captain.”

“I’m trying to get more time. When you cross overhead they stop. If they hear you again, we’ll get the last few seconds we need to launch the blimp.”

“Uh, I’ll give it my best. You want me to fire my cannon?”

“Negative for now.”

Danny could hear the Flighthawk come overhead. Sure enough, the patrol stopped.

“We’re launched,” said Boston. “I’m setting out the radar disrupters right now”

The disrupters were small, backpack-sized units that jammed radars in the vicinity of the blimp.

“Garcia, let’s move back up toward the road,” said Danny. “Swing up through that gully to your left.”

He waited until his sergeant had reached it before he started up himself. “We need another pass, Flighthawk.”

“Hawk Four.”

Danny moved slowly, climbing over several tree trunks as the Flighthawk took another run. His foot slid down into the muck as he got over the last tree; as he leaned back and pulled his leg out he heard a shout.

“Shit,” said someone over the Dreamland circuit.

Then the jungle lit up with gunfire.

Jennifer tapped the arrow keys on the laptop, steering the small airship to the north, away from the gunfire. She had the power set low so it would be very quiet; unfortunately, that made its speed slower than a person walking.

As the bullets continued to fly, she moved the throttle command to max. Even so, the blimp couldn’t move very quickly; it walked rather than ran away.

“Come on,” said Boston, pushing on her shoulder. “Let’s get across the road to some cover.”

“I can’t leave the unit right now,” said Jennifer.

“I’ll carry the transmitter,” said Boston. He started to reach for the antenna, which looked like a small satellite dish with a rectangular collection of tubes at the center.

“No,” she told him, grabbing him. “It’s not meant to be portable. I don’t know what’ll happen if we change the transmitting location. The blimp has to be above a thousand feet before it’ll go on auto-guide.”

“Well I know what’ll happen if we get shot,” said Boston. “We’re not going to get shot. Danny has it under control.”

“He’s not Superman,” said Boston, but he let go of the antenna and instead went and crouched between her and the area that the firing was coming from.

Chapter 69

Starship came off the refuel early and winged back toward the Whiplash team. The ground action was a mishmash, and while he had a general idea of what was going on, the two sides were so close together it was difficult to figure out exactly who was who.

“Get up to the highway and we’ll pepper the tree line,” Kick told the ground team.

Starship didn’t catch the acknowledgment — he was too busy ducking out of the way of the blimp as it rose to the north of the team. He banked back and came down just over the road, identifying the four members of the Whiplash ground unit and turning his nose just to the side of the highway as he lit his cannon. His forward air speed dropped and he had to break off; as he did there was a flash on the ground and he got a warning that a shoulder-launched SAM had been fired. He unleashed decoy flares and tightened his turn. The missile sniffed one of the flares and flew north, exploding about three-quarters of a mile away.

Danny and Garcia pulled back toward the blimp launch point as a second Flighthawk made a run at the enemy position, splashing it with cannonfire.

“Yo, get into the trees on the other side,” Danny yelled as he ran toward them.

“We’re almost ready,” replied Jennifer. “I’ll be able to transfer control to the central unit in another minute or two.”

“Put it in auto mode,” said Danny.

“I can’t until it’s at a thousand feet.”

“Just let it go”

“Sixty seconds,” protested the scientist.

“Boston,” said Danny. “Move her.”

“Urn, yes, sir, if you say so.”

The sergeant physically picked up the scientist and began dragging her off the road.

“EB-52 Indianapolis to Whiplash leader,” said Major Alou. “Danny, if you can put more distance between you and them I can launch a five-hundred-pound bomb”

“We’re working on it,” said Danny. “We’re going to go off the road to the northeast and get across that ravine there”

But as they started, gunfire raked the highway and the ridge. The guerillas were now on both sides of the road; Danny and his small band retreated along the pavement. Reinforcements were coming up from the southwest; another twenty had made it to the road about a mile and a half away and were trotting toward them. If the nearby group managed to bog them down, the Whiplashers might be overrun.

“I don’t know if we’re going to make it to that ravine,” Danny told Alou.

“Acknowledged. Hold on,” added Alou.

Danny’s helmet included a laser-dot pointer showing where his MP5 was aimed. He fired as three figures came up the road, hitting one and sending the others scurrying back.

“Danny, the Brunei air force is two minutes from your location,” said Alou. “They have napalm and want to know if they can help out.”

“Sounds like a great idea if you can get them into the right location,” Danny told him. “Maybe we can sneak the helicopter in at the same time.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

McKenna spotted the tail end of the little Flighthawk three hundred yards to her left as she approached the target area. The moonlight wasn’t strong enough for her to see more than a smudge, but the smudge was enough to get her on course.

“You see that?” she asked Captain Seyed, who was flying as her wingman.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right. Follow him into the target. Once the flare ignites I’ll come in and give them a good thrashing.”

Lacking high-tech night-vision gear and GPS locators, McKenna had fallen back on a strategy dating to World War II. Seyed, following the Nighthawk to the area where the American unit was under fire, launched a large parachute flare called an LUU-2 just as he passed overhead. Descending by parachute, the flare illuminated the darkness, a giant candle that descended slowly because of the heat of the flame. An old method — but highly effective.

McKenna swooped downward, nose at a thirty-degree angle as she cleared the narrow roadway. She saw four or five guerillas ducking behind the tree line, pushed them into her bomb screen, and dropped two of the napalm canisters. The bombs — which were probably nearly as old as her tactics — dropped down and ignited. McKenna didn’t stop to admire her handiwork; as soon as she pulled up she spun the Dragonfly back and dumped two 250-pound bombs behind the conflagration. Her right wing sagged as she started to recover; she’d been peppered with gunfire and one or more of the bullets had damaged the ailerons, elevator, and her rudder. She had to fight a bit, arm wrestling the wind gods to get the plane level.

“Commander, you’re on fire,” said Seyed.

Shit, thought McKenna. She started to climb to the north, trying to both get away from the terrorists and to get her plane high enough to bail out if she had to.

The helicopter, meanwhile, had swooped in about a half-mile away to pick up the Whiplash ground team. As she passed by it, she saw the shadow of the mountain rising quickly in front of her. McKenna pulled the stick back and slapped the throttle against the last stop, but the Dragonfly wouldn’t put her nose up. Realizing she wasn’t going to clear, she muscled the aircraft right. The controls began to buck, the stick jerking in her hand as if an elephant were jumping up and down on the control cables. McKenna glanced at the instrument panel and saw one of the oil pressure gauges spinning, as if it had decided to unscrew itself from the panel.

“Listen, Seyed, I don’t know that I’m going to make it very far from here,” she told her wingman.

“You’re on fire!”

“I don’t doubt it,” she said as another mountain loomed ahead.

Danny could see the aircraft flaming in the sky as their helicopter took off.

“We better follow her,” he told the pilot. “See if we can pick her up”

Starship watched as the front of the Dragonfly came apart. It didn’t look like an explosion — it was more like a sneeze and then a disintegration, with the plane separating into large chunks. He steadied the Nighthawk and waited, watching the sky nearby.

“Got a chute!” he said finally. “Got a chute. Good chute. I’ll feed you a GPS coordinate.”

For all her experience, McKenna had never actually hit the silk from the pilot’s seat. She had taken a grand total of six jumps for training purposes, including two jumps at night; none compared in any way to this.

The seat pushed her out of the doomed plane with the loudest sound she had ever heard in her life, except for the time her cousin exploded a cherry bomb in her aunt’s bathroom. She flew straight into the darkness, soaring into the black night on what seemed like an unending trip. And then, just as she thought she’d reach orbit, something grabbed the top of her chest and yanked her backward, pulling her along as if from the back of a freight train.

Whoa, she thought. This might be pretty cool if it weren’t so dark and weird.

Somewhere in the back corner of her brain was a long lecture on the intricacies of a night-time ejection, instructions on the importance of checking the chute to make sure it had opened properly, tips on controlling the descent, some pointers on how to hold your body and the pros and cons of giving yourself a pep talk as you fell. But McKenna’s brain cells were so awash in the adrenaline of the moment that they didn’t have the patience to search for any of that information. She felt herself tipping forward and to the right; somehow she managed to get her body situated perpendicular to the ground just as a large shadow came up to meet her. She tried to get her legs ready to hit the ground. As she did, something smacked her from behind and she lurched to the right — she was falling into a large tree. McKenna grabbed for a branch, tumbling and twisting around as she skidded downward. When she finally stopped she was hanging upside down, suspended several feet from the ground. Her arms and face burned with the scrapes.

“Well, that was fun,” she said to herself, reaching for her knife.

The lads got a good image of the parachute twisted around the top of the trees, beaming it back through the Dreamland network and down via satellite to Danny’s smart helmet. Jennifer had stalled just long enough to get the blimp operational, and while Danny felt he couldn’t condone the fact that she had exposed herself to the bullets, he was grateful for the result. He spotted a clearing a hundred or so yards from the trees, up a rocky slope.

“There’s a spot where you can put us down over there,” Danny told the pilot, pointing to the clearing.

“Terrain’s rough back to that tree,” said the pilot. “If you have to take her out with a stretcher you’re going to have a hell of a time.”

“Maybe we can take her out somewhere else,” said Danny. “If we go east a little.”

They looped around the area, looking for a better spot. There didn’t appear to be one, at least not nearby.

“Let’s see what the situation is,” said Danny. “We’ll just have to work it out on the ground”

The helicopter tipped toward the trees, the pilot weaving back toward the clearing. He eased the Quick Bird into a hover about twelve feet from the ground and Danny and Boston quick-roped down.

The slope was more severe than Danny had thought from the air, and he slipped against one of the rocks before he’d taken more than a step. He tumbled down, bouncing against a boulder.

A pair of hands grabbed him from behind and helped him to his feet.

“That little helicopter’s going to carry all three of us?” asked a woman, shouting at his face.

Danny flipped up the visor on his helmet. “You’re McKenna?”

“Brunei Air Force Air Commodore McKenna, thank you very much. You know, you look like a Star Wars space trooper in that armor. Very impressive.” She put her hands on her hips. “So, we getting out of here or what?”

Chapter 70

By the time the truck finally stopped it had been nighttime for hours and Mack had fallen into a fitful sleep. The guards shook him awake, unlocking the chain that had kept him attached to the truck bed and prodding him out. His neck and the back of his head were sore, the muscles mangled by the awkward posture of his body.

They put a blindfold on him, and then removed the manacles from his hands. Mack, cold and stiff, lost his balance as he was led off the truck and fell against one of his captors. He felt, or thought he felt, the metal of a pistol near his side, but before he could grab for it he was yanked to his feet.

“Hey!” he said. “Don’t push. I can’t see where the hell I’m going. And my legs are all screwed up.”

A set of hands took him by the shoulders and steered him to the right. Mack’s feet kicked against some stones and he nearly tripped again. Another hand pushed him from the left side; he found himself walking over a smooth path. After twenty paces he was stopped. He heard a lock being turned and then felt something, probably a rifle barrel, prodding his legs to step upward. He made it up some steps and into a building, where he was led down a hallway. His captors left him in the middle of a room; Mack waited a few seconds before reaching for his blindfold and peeking out.

The room had a small mattress on the floor near the corner. There was a window at the left side of the room, covered with a simple curtain.

Mack slipped back to the door, sidling next to it to listen; there were people in the hallway, talking softly. He walked quietly back across the room to the window; he couldn’t see anything through it. He tried tugging at it to see if it would open; when it didn’t give way easily he gave up for the moment and sat down on the mat.

Mack rubbed at his wrists where the manacles had been, then began kneading the back of his neck, trying to work out some of the cramps. When he heard the truck drive off, he got back up and went back to the door. This time he didn’t hear anything, and so he put his hand on the doorknob and slowly twisted it open. His heart began thumping wildly. He sensed that his captors had gone off and left him. Cracking open the door, he peeked out but saw no one in the hall.

Mack pulled open the door and took a step out of the room — only to find an AK47 in his face.

A man shouted at him in Malaysian or some other language. Mack couldn’t decipher the words but the intent was pretty clear — he threw his hands out at his side.

“I have to take a leak,” he claimed. “Bathroom. Bathroom” The voice repeated whatever it had said.

“I don’t understand.”

Once again the words were repeated, this time slow enough for Mack to realize they were English.

“Step outside the room,” said the voice in his thick accent, “and you will be shot.”

“I have to pee,” insisted Mack.

“There is a can in the room for you.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said, finally retreating.

Chapter 71

Dog borrowed — “shanghaied” was probably more accurate a word — two Air Force Special Tactics Squadron members from a unit in Korea and flew them south to the Philippines to help the Dreamland team set up operations at the secret Malaysian air base near Borneo’s southern coast. The men, adept at creating airfields out of strobe lights and chewing gum, parachuted off Dreamland’s MC-17 and helped guide the Megafortress in. The airstrip was just barely long enough for the EB-52, but Dog figured the risk was worth it; it would cut nearly two hours off each way as they patrolled from the Philippines but also allowed for rapid response to any developing situation.

And situations were developing. The sultan’s army had retaken two posts on the southern border with Malaysia and now seemed in firm control of the southwestern third of the country. Police units in the towns on the northern coast that had not fallen to militants had rallied over the course of the day. A number of telephone and power lines that had been cut had been restored. Loyal forces had won a major battle with guerillas near Kapit, killing over a hundred. Neither LADS nor the patrolling Megafortresses had detected any Malaysian army units assisting the terrorists, and in at least one instance a Malaysian army unit had helped the Brunei police force pursuing a group of rebels over the northeastern border.

On the other hand, the militants had spent the preceding day tightening their grip on the area around the capital. They controlled the shoreline and had appropriated at least two small patrol boats, operating them on the river.

The LADS system provided low-powered radar coverage of much of the kingdom. It also provided video coverage of much of the capital and several major road and waterways, along with the entrance to the harbor and the platform where Whiplash was. Two more units were en route from Dreamland; one was intended for the Malaysian air base, and the other would be used as a roving sentry. Twice as long as the others, the sentry carried better resolution cameras and could be flown higher and faster. It did not, however, include the LED technology that made the others almost impossible to see from the ground.

Dog steadied Penn into her final approach for the runway, fighting the optical illusions that made it appear as if it were two different roads, a ravine, and a set of boulders. The men on the ground had cleared the obstructions and assured him that it was solid concrete covered by paint; Dog focused on the landing cues in his HUD and settled perfectly onto the runway.

“And for our next trick, we land in downtown Las Vegas,” joked McNamara, his copilot, as they spotted one of the Special Tactics controllers playing traffic cop near the end of the runway. He had them turn on an apron to an access ramp at the side; from the sky it had appeared to be a pond, though up close the camouflage didn’t work nearly as well, making it seem more like an abstract painting by Mark Rothko. The trees bordering the ramp were real enough, as was a collection of jagged rocks; the path was too narrow for the Megafortress and so Dog had to park the plane there.

Dog had picked up a three-man U.S. Army Special Forces team in the Philippines; the men had worked with the Malaysian military in the past and would assist with setting up security, which was to be provided by the local Malaysian forces for the time being.

“All right, let’s get the plane squared away and assess the situation,” he told the crew and the soldiers below as they shut down the engines. “McNamara, you find out what the status of the C-17 is with our tech people and maintainers while I go talk with the locals. Don’t anybody go too far away,” he added. “I hear the snakes in the jungle can be pretty vicious.”

Chapter 72

Dazhou Ti felt as if the terrace he was standing on had given way and he was now falling toward the sea. The smokestack of the tug that had brought him to the seaside town loomed below, a black whirlpool sucking him toward that abyss.

General Udara had traveled to the seaside town to speak to Dazhou personally: not to berate him for losing the Barracuda, but to tell him that the war was over. The sultan was to be allowed to regain his kingdom.

“Impossible,” said Dazhou, who had only finished notifying the kin of his dead crewmen an hour before. “Impossible.”

“The president has decided,” said Udara.

“No. No. My men have died.” The general was not a man to argue with, but Dazhou could not help himself. “No,” he repeated. “This cannot be. There is so much to be done — the Americans, we can defeat them. They’re paper tigers.”

“You of all people should know they’re not,” said Udara. “They proved it in their encounter with your ship. This all helps us in the long run,” added the general, trying to remain upbeat. “Because the guerillas will be taken care of by the Americans. Leaving the maggot sultan and his family alone is a small price for ridding ourselves of the fanatics. Kuala Lumpur has spoken,” he said. He referred to the central command, not the prime minister, and meant that the matter was closed.

“No,” said Dazhou.

Udara’s patience was now exhausted. His face flushed, its brownish tint becoming nearly purple with his rage.

“You will accept your orders, Chinaman!” he thundered. “You will do as you are told!”

“My men,” Dazhou said. “They must be revenged”

“You will do as you are told. You are lucky, Dazhou, that I remember the contributions you have made, and your own glory under fire. Because otherwise I would pummel you with these two fists.”

Their faces were so close that Dazhou felt the heat of the general’s rising blood. He knew that the proper action now — no matter what he really intended — was to feign submission, to pretend to be willing to go along with his orders. But he could not control his emotions sufficiently to make an accommodating gesture, even a small one. The best he could do was keep himself from yelling back at the general.

“Do you understand me, Dazhou?” said Udara.

“I have no ship,” he managed finally.

The general took a step away. “Then the matter is settled.”

Dazhou didn’t respond. Udara had not berated him for losing the Barracuda, but this was completely in character for the general. Since he had nothing to do with its creation or operations, Udara looked on it as just another weapon, little more than a jeep or armored car that could go to sea.

Kuala Lumpur would have a considerably different view. Dazhou’s options were clear. Either he ran, or he sought revenge.

“Do you understand me?” Udara said, once more master of his emotions.

“I have no ship,” Dazhou repeated. “And no men.”

Udara nodded grimly. “War is a difficult thing.”

Somehow, Dazhou managed to nod, rather than telling the general what he really thought of his easy cliché.

Chapter 73

Sahurah’s head throbbed constantly, a sharp thump at the top and right side, God’s drumbeat calling him to task for his failures.

How could he doubt the wisdom of his teachers?

How could he think that the devil American was as honorable and holy as he?

Sahurah tried to set the questions aside, tried to ignore his transgressions, his many failings. He had to concentrate on his duties. Brothers were streaming into the city, each one willing to do what needed to be done, but each needing to be shown his responsibilities step by step. Sahurah had selected several deputies, but they still turned to him for orders. He had become the most important person in the capital, after the imam.

Success had been incredibly swift; not even in his dreams would Sahurah have thought things would go so well. And yet, when he thought of this, when he saw the obvious sign that Allah had blessed them, his head pounded even more. He wanted — what did he want?

His place in Paradise. Nothing beyond that.

One of his lieutenants, a young man named Dato, appeared at the door and was searched by the two bodyguards who had attached themselves to him since the attack at the airport. Dato had come from near Djakarta, and a slight accent of the poorer districts around the Indonesian city lingered on his tongue when he spoke.

“Fifty more brothers have come to watch the road to the south,” said Dato in Malaysian. “We need weapons”

“What about those at the police station?”

“The weapons there have been given out.”

“The armory?” asked Sahurah.

“What wasn’t blown up by the nonbelievers is so antiquated we have no ammunition for it,” explained Dato.

The pain in Sahurah’s head subsided as he focused on the problem. “We can give them trucks, and the supplies taken from Tutong. Deliveries have been promised from our allies. But we cannot wait; send the men while you search for weapons. I would expect a counterattack soon.”

Another of Sahurah’s men came to the door. This was Paduka, a native of the capital who had proven invaluable in finding sympathetic friends.

“Two pilots,” announced Paduka triumphantly. “Including one who worked for Air Defense Minister Smith.”

“Who?”

“His name is Captain Yayasan. He’s in the hallway.”

“Is he a sincere believer?”

“We have spoken many times before today,” said Paduka. He told him of an encounter the pilot had had at the start of the offensive when he had feigned cowardice to avoid shooting at a unit of brothers.

“He would have done better to have shot down the other plane,” said Sahurah at the end of the story. “Bring him in. Let me talk to him.”

“Just him? Or both men?”

“Just him.”

Sahurah turned to the table where a map of the area had been laid out. He showed Dato where the brothers were to be deployed. A network of reinforcements had to be established. They had machine-guns mounted in several pickup trucks; they could bring firepower within a few minutes if attacked.

They lacked heavy weapons; Sahurah was hardly a military strategist, but he understood that this was a great weakness.

Paduka and the pilot Yayasan stood silently as they finished. Sahurah turned to them. Yayasan was a short man, no taller than five-three; his face had sharp, tight angles.

“You believe?” Sahurah asked.

“I–I do,” said Yayasan.

The hesitation reassured Sahurah. He glanced at the pilot’s hands. His fingers moved as if they were on fire.

Sahurah recognized that the man would crumble under pressure, and that as much as his faith may have accounted for his decision not to fire on the brothers the other day. He could be used, but very carefully.

“Could you teach the other pilots how to fly the large American plane?”

“My lord, of course.”

The top of Sahurah’s head pummeled him. “I am not a lord. I am nothing but a servant. Address me as ‘Commander’.”

“Pardons, Commander.” The pilot’s fingers vibrated ever more violently.

“What do we need?” asked Sahurah.

“I would have to examine the aircraft, Commander.”

Sahurah nodded, then looked at Paduka. “There is a man at the terminal, he piloted a 747. He told me last night he would be able to fly the large aircraft. Yayasan will teach him. And the other man you found.”

“Yes, Commander.”

The guards at the door snapped to attention. Sahurah turned to see the imam and the Saudi. An entourage of bodyguards and others flooded into the room behind them. Though the room was fair-sized, it now seemed crowded.

“Imam,” he said, bowing his head.

The imam gave him a tired smile and touched his shoulder. “Sahurah, my young friend, you have done well.”

Sahurah felt himself blush. “The Americans have formed an alliance with the Malaysians,” said the Saudi, speaking in Arabic. “It was not unexpected. But now will come the test”

Sahurah turned to him. This was the first time that the older man had addressed him directly. His voice seemed thin, almost frail, and yet his eyes were steely. Their gaze held Sahurah, and for a moment his pain retreated.

“We will triumph because Allah is on our side,” said Sahurah. “It is a holy war, and our cause is just.”

The Saudi said nothing. He did not smile, and his eyes did not blink.

This is what faith looks like, Sahurah thought. These are Allah’s eyes, shining through his holy servant. If only I were worthy of such a gaze.

The imam tapped his shoulder gently. “Prepare then, son,” he said. “Prepare well.”

Sahurah bowed, and for a moment everything else in the world receded. When he put his head back up, the imam and the Saudi, along with their entourage, had gone.

Chapter 74

One thing he had to say for captivity: it sure made him hungry. Mack had eaten all of the slop they’d given him for breakfast — or lunch or dinner, whatever meal it was.

He could tell from the window that it was daytime outside, but he’d fallen asleep earlier and couldn’t be sure how long he’d slept. The window had been nailed shut from the outside; now that there was light he could see one of the nails at the very top where it had come through the casing. The glass panes and wood between them would undoubtedly give way if he hit them hard enough. But the sound would undoubtedly alert the guard near his door, and there was no telling how many others were posted around on the outside. He couldn’t see anything out the window except for vegetation.

Paper covered the walls, which were constructed of wooden boards nailed up against studs. The paper had buckled near the mat that served as his bed. The bubble ran along one of the boards, as if the air had squeezed in from the outside. Mack glanced at it several times as he walked back and forth, trying to come up with a plan to escape. Finally he went to the wall and poked at it with his finger. The material, though thick with paint, was pretty brittle, and he was able to punch a slight hole by jabbing with his thumb. He started tearing the paper, and exposed a jagged strip about six inches wide and two feet long, where two of the boards were joined together. A bit of sunlight poked through at the corner.

If he had a crowbar, or something he could use for one, he thought he’d be able to dismantle the panels easily. Mack stepped back from the wall, reexamining the room for something he could use as a tool, though he’d been over every inch earlier. He flipped the mat and ran his hands over the material, thinking there might be a spring inside.

Just as he concluded there were none, the door opened. Mack looked up from his knees at the large man who came in. The man, dressed in loose-fitting white pants and a long white tunic, seemed perplexed; Mack, on his knees, realized that the militant thought he had found him praying.

“What?” Mack snapped.

The man said something he couldn’t understand, then glanced around the room. He finally spied what he was looking for: the piss bucket. He walked to the corner and took it.

Mack got up, walking slowly to the doorway. A guard stood just outside; he had an AK47 in his hand. Unlike the man who had come for the can, he was short, and in Mack’s opinion easily overpowered. As Mack stared at him the idea of rushing the man began to percolate in his brain. His adrenaline began screaming at him, blood and hormones rushing together.

Then he heard more footsteps. The man who had taken the can returned with it, empty. He glanced at him but said nothing.

My chance, thought Mack. Rush the kid and grab for the gun.

But by the time the idea formed in his head the man was closing the door.

Chapter 75

Breanna swung the EB-52 over the southeastern tip of Borneo, checking her location as she got ready to land at the scratch air base. With the rest of the crew starting to drag after a long patrol and return to the Philippines to refuel, Bree had done almost all the piloting.

“Pretty country,” said Major Alou.

“Yeah. It’s paradise down there, I’ll tell you,” she said. “If you ignore the madmen with the guns.”

She hit the last waypoint and turned, spotting the airport in her windscreen. The other EB-52 and the C-17 that had brought the tech people sat at the far end of the strip. The airfield was narrow and the camouflage a bit disorienting, but Breanna had landed under much worse conditions; the wheels didn’t even chirp as she touched down.

“Hey, stranger,” said her husband when she came down the ladder ten minutes later.

“Hey;” she said. She leaned over and grabbed him, felt his strong arms clutching her back.

“I missed you,” he whispered.

“I missed you, too.”

She felt tears coming to her eyes, then running down her cheeks. She pressed her head against the side of his head for another few seconds, then slowly, reluctantly, straightened. “Boring flight?” asked Zen.

“Boring flight.”

“Good,” he told her. “So I hear you’re first officer now.”

“Don’t rub it in, Zen.”

“Want to see our digs?”

“Nice?”

“Sure,” said her husband, wheeling himself away from the plane. “If you like concrete and spit.”

The Malaysian commander assured dog that his twelve men were more than enough to secure the base. The terrorists in the area had fled a month before.

“You think he’s right about the terrorists?” Dog asked the Special Forces soldiers when they left the Malaysian commander’s post.

“I doubt it,” said one of the soldiers. “The Malaysians were always underestimating them.”

“You guys better look over the defenses and see what you need to beef them up,” said Dog. He paused, watching as a Hummer descended from the MC-17 with the Dreamland trailer in tow. The MC-17 was to take off as soon as it was unloaded, flying back to the Philippines for supplies. And Dog had plans for the Hummer.

“That trailer will be our headquarters,” Dog told the SF men. “Make a list of what you need and we’ll try to get it.”

“Battalion of troops wouldn’t be bad,” said one of the sergeants, Tommy Lang.

“If you can find one, let me know,” said Dog.

He walked over to Zen, who was overseeing the deployment of the command trailer. “How we looking?”

“Should be up and running in a few minutes,” said Zen. “Can’t wait for the AC”

“Bree okay?”

“She went to look for a shower,” said Zen. “I tried to warn her.”

Dog smirked. “I have to go down to the village south of here and meet the lieutenant governor for the area. He’s expecting me sometime today and I’d like to get that over with. The Malaysian commander said we need to truck more water in no later than tomorrow. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Zen, swiveling his wheelchair around momentarily. Dog realized he’d gotten so used to Zen being in the wheelchair that he now simply took it for granted, not even considering whether it might be a factor in his doing his job.

“You’re not going by yourself, are you?” Lang asked him.

Dog shrugged. “I don’t think I need a translator.”

“Two of us ought to go for security,” said another of the SF sergeants.

“Fine with me, as long as one of you stays and figures out what we need for security here,” said Dog, heading for the Hummer.

The capital of the tiny region was a small village five miles from the base. The road through the jungle was paved and easy to travel. Once they reached the village, however, they found that the main street was no wider than a sidewalk back home; they had to leave the Humvee near a pack of small houses and walk in on foot. Dog and the two soldiers got about ten feet before they were surrounded by a mob of children. The Army men had come prepared — they pulled pieces of candy from their pockets, making sure the kids got a good look at them before tossing them to the side. But there were so many children that the way remained clogged.

Dog tried to push them aside as gently as possible. One kid held onto his leg, and the only way to dislodge him was to pick him up. This actually helped clear the way for some reason, the other kids stepping back to get a better glimpse of their friends in the stranger’s arms.

“Here we go, Colonel,” said one of the sergeants, pointing to a white-washed three-story building made of masonry block. It had no sign but it was clearly the most substantial building on the block.

Dog made it to the threshold, still holding the child. He turned around awkwardly, then settled the tyke on the ground.

“Sheesh,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Sergeant Lang. “Almost enough to make you get a vasectomy.”

Dog roared with laughter.

The meeting lasted only a few minutes. Dog thanked the Malaysian region’s lieutenant governor with some stock phrases a State Department official had suggested. The Malaysian, who spoke impeccable English, assured him that his country was a “steadfast ally” and would provide any hospitality possible.

“A truckload of water would be greatly appreciated,” said Dog, adding that the Malaysian base commander had said the arrangements were already in place.

The lieutenant governor knew about this and said it would be arranged. And then he suggested that they have something to eat. This could not be refused without giving offense, and Dog and the soldiers went inside to an office that had been hastily made over into an impromptu banquet hall.

The soldiers were familiar with the local cuisine. Even better, they were extremely hungry, and while his rank demanded that Dog take the first bite, he had no trouble letting his companions consume most of the food. They raved about the satay; Dog nodded and picked strategically at his plate, making sure to sample and praise everything while ingesting as little as possible.

After forty-five minutes of lunch, he used another State Department supplied formula to excuse himself. The Malaysian protested; he apologized and excused himself again; they protested once more, though less profusely, and Dog repeated the formula. The procedure took ten whole minutes to complete. Finally outside, he and his two escorts made it about halfway up the block before the children appeared again. Once more Dog found his way blocked by a two-year-old. He hoisted the kid to his chest, then scooped up another and made it to the Humvee.

“You could run for mayor, Colonel,” said Lang as they eased the Hummer back onto the highway.

“Yeah.”

“You got kids?” asked the other soldier, who was driving.

Dog laughed. “Yeah. One. She’s a captain in the Air Force. Matter of fact, she should be on the ground back at our little base by now”

The sergeant did a double take. Dog decided that he would recommend the man for a decoration for his diplomatic tact.

“I got a two-year-old,” said the sergeant. “Smartest little kid you ever saw.”

“I’ll bet,” said Dog.

“Then he sure can’t be related to you, huh?” said Lang.

“Always busting my chops,” said the soldier.

As he spoke, the Humvee ran over a mine that had been planted in the road. It exploded under the left front wheel, killing the driver and throwing Dog and the other sergeant out of the vehicle into the brush beyond the shoulder of the highway.

Chapter 76

Danny Freah hunched over the table in the first room of the oil platform building, looking down at the satellite photos of Brunei Airport spread on its surface. The civilian portion of the airport sat at the right; the military base was beyond, to the left. At the very bottom of the map was a narrow access ramp through a boggy area which led to a trio of large hangars.

The hangars were owned by His Royal Highness Pehin bin Awg; he used them to house his impeccable collection of Cold War aircraft, including the MiG-19 that Brunei Air Commodore McKenna wanted to commandeer.

“That section of the airport is completely isolated,” McKenna told him. “There’s a fuel truck in the hangar on the extreme left; we blow the lock, hot-wire the truck, and we’re in business.”

Danny got up and went over to the table where the LADS field control units were set up. Blimp Four was directly over the airport; the three hangars were unguarded and in fact there were no more than a handful of people at the airport.

“Drop me off, I take the MiG,” said McKenna. “Simple as one-two-three.”

“Risky operation to retrieve one aircraft,” Danny said.

“Well, I’d take more if I could.” She laughed and hooked her thumbs into her belt loops, looking a bit like a Canadian cowboy. “You find me some more pilots. I’ve flown that MiG-19, though, and I know I can operate it off my strip. As long as the parachute at the rear works.”

“What else is in there?”

“A very nice but temperamental F-86, a large Tu-16 Badger C — Mack Smith’s claim to fame — and a Hawker Hunter. I don’t know what model Hunter it is, but it dates from the fifties. Everything else he has doesn’t fly, at least not reliably.”

“I’d rather blow them up than steal them.”

“Seems like a waste of good hardware,” she told him. “None of the planes are going anywhere without good pilots. And trust me, there aren’t too many of them on the island. But go ahead — blow them up right after I take the MiG”

“How are you going to maintain the MiG if you take it?”

“Two of bin Awg’s men are back at my base. Think of it this way, Captain: You say you can’t spare either of your helicopters to transport me back to my airbase at least until tomorrow night. This way, not only do I get back to my base, but you take out a potential threat. You trash the hangars and they’ll be out of business.”

“I can order an air strike by the Megafortress,” said Danny. “Less risky.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

Danny frowned at her. “This isn’t fun and games”

“Yeah, no shit,” she said. “Look, taking that plane out of there helps everybody and it’s easier than hell. I see by your blimp video thing no one’s around. The approach is isolated from the rest of the airport — it’ll be bodaciously easier than what it took for you to launch that bag of air down south.”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t help me do it, I’ll swim ashore and find my own way to the hangar.”

“Hey, Cap,” said Bison, monitoring the LADS images. “We got movement going into the airport. One vehicle. No — two, a car and a fuel truck”

“They heading toward the Megafortress or the civilian plane?”

Bison waited a second, watching. “Looks like the Megafortress.”

Chapter 77

As Dog started to get up from the dirt he smacked his head against the side of a tree or a rock and rebounded to the side, rolling into a thick clump of brush. He pulled his head back, got his arms under him, and looked up, disoriented and not completely sure what the hell was going on. Something fell against him, a green blur — it was one of the Special Forces soldiers, scrambling back toward the road. Dog pushed after him, then threw himself down as an automatic weapon began popping somewhere to the right. The SF soldier did the same; Dog crawled up next to him and saw that the soldier had recovered his rifle, a small, lightweight version of the M16 favored by special operations troops and known as the M4.

“Got at least two shooters, up over there,” said the soldier. It was Lang. He pointed to the right. “Must’ve planted some sort of mine in the road, detonated it when we got close.”

The Humvee, its front end torn up, sat upside down on the opposite shoulder. One of its tires had been ripped off by the impact and landed in the middle of the road.

“Where’s your partner?” Dog asked.

“Don’t know.”

A burst of bullets slashed through the vegetation. Dog took out his Beretta, but neither he nor Lang fired; it wasn’t clear where the gunners were.

“You cover me while I go to the truck,” said Dog.

Lang started to object, but to Dog it was a no-brainer.

“I’d guess you’re a better shot with that gun than I’ll ever dream of being,” he explained. “If I can get over there and get our radio, we can get all sorts of help. Otherwise those assholes’ll pick us off eventually.”

“Yeah, okay, that makes sense,” said Lang. “You wait until I lay down some fire, okay? When I yell ‘go,’ you just scoot right across. Save your pistol until you have a damn close target.”

“Will do.”

The soldier crawled forward, then fired a short burst, which was immediately answered by at least two enemy soldiers, who fired long, poorly aimed bursts from their weapons, draining their magazines. Lang held his fire until the shooting died down. When it did, he jumped up, shouted “Go!” and began blasting the area where the gunfire had come from.

Dog threw himself toward the Humvee, leaping headlong across the road. He ran several miles every day, but the five or six yards he ran now felt like a marathon. By the time Dog slid down behind the wrecked Humvee, he was out of breath. He rolled onto his belly and crawled along the side of the truck, watching the vegetation on his left.

The driver’s body had been pitched in the tall grass just at the edge of the shoulder. Dog crawled over to him. As soon as he got there he realized the man was dead; his leg had been sheered off and his left arm was a blackened stub. Dog turned away, pushing back to the truck as more gunfire erupted.

The SF men had carried an A/PSC-5 (V), a lightweight but very powerful radio that could use both satellite and UHF frequencies. Dog hunted for it but couldn’t find it in the jumble of the truck. He did see his pack, however. Besides extra ammunition for his pistol, a survival knife, and a small first-aid kit, he had a PRC-90 radio there, an old emergency radio from his flight gear that he habitually carried as a backup.

The pack was wedged against the crushed windshield, next to an M4 rifle. Dog pushed in through the side of the truck, making his way in like a gopher exploring a new hole. As he reached for the pack he saw that his hand was covered with blood; three long, jagged scrapes had been torn along the flesh. He grasped the bag, expecting to have to fight to free it. But it came out easily, and so did the gun. He searched once more for the Special Forces’ radio but couldn’t find it. He got out of the truck and looked around the nearby jungle but saw nothing; finally he went back to the vehicle to look again. As he did, the Humvee began to shake and he heard gunfire in the distance.

They must have some sort of damn mortar in the hills that they’re firing nearby, Dog thought, not realizing at first that the vehicle was shaking because it was being pummeled by bullets. By the time he finally saw he was the target, he was out of the truck and in the shallow ravine. Dog pulled the M4 up, hunched over it, and put his finger on the trigger, aiming in the direction of the gunfire. He braced himself and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. He looked down at the gun, made sure it was loaded, and then looked at his hand, double-checking to make sure he had his finger positioned against the trigger. But still nothing happened when he tried to fire.

Dog stuck the barrel of the rifle into his pack, took out his pistol, then crawled forward along the side of the road. The enemy gunfire had stopped, but Lang waved at him to stay there from across the road. Dog scouted the area for the soldiers’ radio before scrambling back behind the Hummer, where he took the PRC-90 radio from the pack.

While the PRC-90 was still used by some aircrews, it had been superseded by newer models long ago and had a number of drawbacks as a general-purpose radio, not the least of which in this case was its limited range. It had an auto-beacon mode which sent out special distress signals, as well as a voice mode, but it could only communicate effectively with another radio in line-of-sight, and given the terrain there was no hope of being able to contact the Dreamland Command trailer directly. But Dog hoped that its signal might be picked up by one of the LADS units or perhaps an aircraft operating nearby. In any event, it was all they had.

Something caught his eye in the brush about thirty yards away. He pushed the radio transmit switch to “auto beacon,” then tossed it down and pulled out his Beretta. When the shadow moved again he fired twice; the pistol jumped in his hand and his second bullet hit the leaves high above.

Lang yelled something to him, then started firing. As he did, the Humvee was peppered with gunfire. Dog flattened himself, then pulled his pistol into firing position, both hands properly on the weapon this time. He sighted into the brush, waited until he saw something move, then fired. The recoil didn’t seem nearly as bad this time.

“They’re all over the place. Get back here!” Lang yelled.

“Good idea,” shouted Dog. He slipped the radio into the pack and backed up, still moving on his stomach. As bullets began ripping into the ravine, Dog scooped up his knapsack and ran for it, crossing in two bounds and diving head-first into the bushes. Guns popped everywhere. Dog waited for the burn and catch in his stomach and chest, sure he’d been hit. When they didn’t come he turned himself over and crawled on his hands and knees to Lang, pushing the rifle to him and then retrieving the PRC-90.

He made a broadcast. He didn’t get a response but he hadn’t really expected one; he tried twice more, then put the unit back on beacon. The radio was small enough to slide into the pocket on his bullet proof vest.

“I couldn’t find your radio,” Dog told the other man. “This unit has pretty limited range. It may be a while before someone hears mine.”

“I don’t think it matters at the moment,” said the soldier. “We’re on our own here.”

“They’ll send somebody for us.”

“They don’t have anybody to send,” said the soldier. “At least not right away.”

Dog reached back into his pack for his first-aid kit. “Your face is cut up,” he told the soldier. “I have some antibacterial ointment that’ll keep it from getting infected.”

“Save it for yourself.”

“I’m not cut,” he said.

The soldier looked at him as if he were out of his mind.

“I’m cut?” said Dog. Then he remembered that he had gashed his hand and arm. He looked down at it, and saw that much of his uniform was torn and covered with blood. “This is nothing,” he told Lang.

Despite their predicament, the soldier laughed. “That’s the spirit, Colonel. Keep thinking positive.”

Chapter 78

This time, Mack was ready when the door opened. He’d filled the can with urine and was poised near the door, balanced on his haunches and ready to spring.

He hit the big man full in the face with the urine; as the terrorist reeled backward, Mack bolted through the open space, aiming to flatten the man in the hallway who stood guard with the rifle. He caught him in the neck with his fist, then felt himself tumbling across his body, the AK47 in his hands.

How he got it turned around, much less how he managed to aim it or make sure it was ready to fire, Mack didn’t know. It seemed to him that one second he was smacking his left shoulder against the wall and the next he was standing over the two dead Muslims, the AK47 smoking. The hallway became a cave filled with smoke. Mack saw the door at the end of the hall in front of him and ran for it, sure that flames were roaring behind him.

Someone shouted as he flew through the door. He turned left and right, firing from his hip and not stopping, never stopping as he ran for the road. As he reached it he heard the pop-pop-pop of an assault rifle behind him; the next second he fell nearly straight down. He threw his hands out, realizing he’d slipped onto an embankment, but there was nothing to grip, and he tumbled wildly down a deep ravine, sliding past a thin strip of vegetation to dirt and stone and then mud. He crashed into a wide, deep stream, flailing in the water that bit at him and pushed him wildly backward in its current. At first Mack was content just to get away. Then he realized the rushing water represented a danger all its own. He tried to grab something, anything, and stop himself from being carried away. Finally, at least a mile if not more from where he had gone in, Mack crashed into a log and managed to hold on.

Water rushed all around. He spit and coughed as he worked himself up the log toward the stream’s bank. He kicked against something solid; thinking he could stand he tried to get his feet under him, only to lose his balance and nearly his grip on the log.

When Mack finally got to the side, he crawled up over a small, narrow bed of sand into the bushes. There, exhausted, he lost consciousness.

Chapter 79

Zen had just finished showing Starship how to work the communications board in the command trailer when Danny checked in from the platform.

“We have movement at the airport near the Megafortress,” said Danny. “I’m going to knock it out of action with the helicopters as planned. We’re just about to board the choppers.”

“Okay, do it.”

Danny hesitated a moment. “I have this other proposal — request, really. From the Brunei air force. They want to liberate one of their planes.”

“At the airport?”

“There’s apparently a section owned by a prince that has older aircraft, which could be used.”

“We’re talking about Prince bin Awg?”

“Yeah. We’ve examined the airport with the LADS blimps. There are no forces in that section, and we can cut off their access pretty easily once we disable the Megafortress”

“I’d say go for it. Just don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“Yeah. Dog’s not around?”

“Went to pay a courtesy call on the locals. He’s due back any minute. I’ll have him get a hold of you when he’s back if you want.”

“All right. I’m going to move ahead”

“I’ll have him get in touch, one way or another,” said Zen.

A peal of thunder rumbled in the distance as Zen signed off. Zen looked over at Starship, who glanced toward the nearby window. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

A second clap came so close that the trailer vibrated up and down.

“Was that thunder?” asked Starship.

The door to the trailer jerked open. “Incoming!” yelled Major Merce Alou. “We’re being shelled!”

“Shit. The planes,” said Zen, wheeling back. “We have to get the Megafortresses up. They’re sitting ducks.”

“Right,” shouted Alou, disappearing back outside.

“We’ll never get off the ground,” said Breanna.

“We have to,” said Zen, pushing his wheelchair for the door.

Chapter 80

Jennifer took over the LADS system for Sergeant Liu as he left to join the assault team. Jennifer made sure the feed for the airport was directly available to Danny’s team via the Dreamland network, then began switching through the others. The images were also being monitored back at Dreamland. The command center there was also receiving some of the operating data from the blimps, but could not control them unless the takeover command was specifically ordered from the field terminal. The satellite link used up a large portion of the available bandwidth, and was somewhat kludgy; it was generally considered easier to operate them directly from the field.

It had been a while since Jennifer had spoken to Dog, and she couldn’t resist the temptation to check in with him at the Malaysian base under the guise of seeing if the two additional LADS blimps had arrived there yet.

“Dreamland command trailer, this is Whiplash base,” she said. “Looking for an update on the new units. What’s their situation?”

There was no answer. Jennifer glanced at the communications board, making sure that she had it set properly.

“Dreamland command trailer — are you receiving me?” she asked.

“We’re under attack,” blurted Starship over the radio. “We’re taking mortar fire.”

“Mortar fire, copy,” she said. “Do you need assistance?”

There was no answer. Jennifer looked at the screen showing where the LADS units were located; the nearest blimp was monitoring the Brunei-Malaysian border about a hundred and seventy-five miles away from them — much too far to see them.

“Do you need assistance?” she asked again, but there was still no answer.

“Dreamland command, this is Whiplash base,” said Jennifer, switching over to the direct channel back home. “The team with the Megafortresses in Malaysia is under fire.”

“Copy. We’re working on getting some local support,” responded Major Catsman, who was on duty in the center.

“Okay,” said Jennifer, her voice so soft it was nearly a whisper.

What could she do? Sending one of the LADS units there seemed like a futile gesture; even at maximum speed it would take the blimp close to four hours to arrive.

But she had to do something. She selected the control screen for unit eight and cursored into the target area, setting the course. Then she enabled the unit’s auto-pilot; the blimp would fly its course on its own without needing to be checked, and then politely buzz its minders when it was within ten minutes of its destination.

“Whiplash Leader, are you hearing me?” she asked Danny.

“Roger base. We have the Megafortress in sight on the ground at Brunei International Airport. We’re preparing to disable it via TOW missiles.”

“Dreamland team is under fire at their site,” she told him.

Danny didn’t respond. Jennifer suddenly felt foolish for giving him the useless information; all she was doing was sharing her anxiety.

“I’m sending a blimp for observation,” she added. “They’ve called local support”

“Understood,” said Danny finally. “Keep me informed.”

“Roger that.”

Chapter 81

Zen cursed the wheelchair, cursed the Brunei kingdom, cursed the Malaysians, cursed the Islamic madmen, and cursed his no-good legs as he pushed himself along the cement as fast as he could go toward the EB-52, determined to help get it in the air. The short field — and certainly the situation — demanded that the Flighthawks be used as boosters, helping the plane rocket off the runway.

The ground shook as a shell landed about a hundred yards away.

Shit, he thought to himself. This is crazy. But he pushed harder, determined to get the big planes off the ground.

And then launch the Flighthawks to pound the daylights out of whoever was firing at them.

Zen felt the veins in his face and chest straining as he wheeled onto the roadway. A geyser burst somewhere behind him, close enough to throw dust against the back of his head.

Something grabbed the back of his wheelchair and he felt himself jetting forward.

“Hey, Major, figured you wouldn’t mind a push,” yelled Starship in his ear.

“I’m in Penn,” shouted Zen. “See if you can get into Indy. They need the assist off the Flighthawks.”

“Yes, sir.”

If Starship thought it was crazy to try and take off under such circumstances, he kept his opinion to himself. Zen twisted around. “Where’s Kick?”

“I think he’s already aboard with Major Alou, there,” shouted Starship.

Another shell landed, this one in the jungle to the left. The Air Force Special Tactics people started yelling as they hustled to the aircraft. Zen couldn’t hear what they were saying though it wasn’t particularly hard to guess.

“You can let go,” Zen told Starship as Penn’s engines kicked to life. “I’ll take it from here”

“Talk to you upstairs,” said the lieutenant, giving him a push and then hustling for Indy, whose engines also wound into action.

Zen had to twist the wheelchair around and back into the ladder, which had a special clamp for his chair. He hooked the metal into the side, then looked down to make sure the wheels were locked. Set, he arched his back and shoved hard, as if trying to pop a wheelie. The abrupt pressure activated a micro-switch, which turned the ladder into a primitive elevator, hoisting Zen up. As he lifted up, yet another shell landed, this one on the runway; the wheelchair abruptly stopped, sagging against the metal pipe that held it.

“Come on, damn it,” cursed Zen. He leaned backward, trying to see how far he was from the hold. Just as he had concluded he was going to have to twist around and drag himself up the stinking ladder and into the ship, the chairlift caught again and he moved up into the hold.

Hell of a time to be a cripple, he thought.

Breanna brought all four engines up in quick succession. The screens flew by on the glass cockpit wall, the indicators flashing green as the computer ran through its system checks. She’d grabbed a helmet from the rack at the back of the flightdeck, and pulled it on, connecting into the communications system. But she hadn’t had time for the rest of the flight gear.

“Override checklist,” she told the computer.

The screen beeped at her, telling her the override was not allowed.

“Override, authorization BreeOne”

“OVERRIDDEN!” flashed on the screen.

“Who’s with me?” she said over the com system.

“You and me, kid,” said Zen from below. “I need power to the Flighthawks if you want to get out of here.”

“Take too long,” she said. “I’ll jettison them and run down to the other end of the field.”

“All I need is sixty seconds,” said Zen. “And you’ll have enough thrust to take off from here.”

A shell landed close enough to rock the plane. “Do it in thirty,” she said, pounding the command sequence on the screen that authorized the Flighthawks’ engine ignition while they were still on the wings.

“I’m on it.”

Starship found Kick already running through the Flighthawk checklists with the computer when he reached his station.

“Hey!” he yelled, sliding into his seat.

“Hey,” said Kick. “Major Alou wants a quick start — he’s got the engines up. Flighthawks are cycling.”

“Yeah, no shit,” said Starship.

“We have to give him a thirty-second burn on his signal,” said Kick. “Zen says just ramp it up and hold on. As long as we go together, we’ll get up in a shot.”

“Zen would know,” said Starship.

The airplane bucked as something landed nearby.

Hope we get the hell out here quick, Starship thought.

“Yeah, me, too,” said Kick over the interphone.

Chapter 82

Dog could see the three men who had them pinned down. They formed a semicircle in the jungle; they’d crossed the road and moved in about ten yards.

“We pick the weak link on one of the flanks, and take him out,” said Lang. He’d torn a piece of his uniform off and tied it around his leg, which had been cut pretty badly.

“What if they have other people on the flank, watching their backs?” asked Dog.

“We deal with that when it happens.” Lang winced as he shifted his weight. “Can you do this?”

“Yeah, I can do it.”

The sergeant handed him one of the M4s.

“You better show me how to get it to fire,” said Dog. “I couldn’t before.”

Lang took the gun back and slid his thumb against the selector on the side above the trigger area. The weapon had been safed. As he watched him Dog realized he hadn’t even thought of checking.

“Brace yourself as best you can when you fire. You get three shot bursts,” said Lang, handing the weapon back. “You’ll probably tend to fire too high. Keep that in mind”

“I will.”

“We’re going to go after the guy on this side,” said the sergeant, gesturing to the left, “because if we get past him, we’re clear back to the village.”

“Okay,” said Dog. “Hold on a second, Sergeant,” he added as the soldier started to the left.

Lang gave him an intense stare.

“I’m sorry, but I forgot your first name”

“Tommy,” said the sergeant, scowling.

“Sorry I forgot. I’m Dog.”

“Yeah, I know, Colonel. Let’s do it, okay?”

Chapter 83

Danny leaned forward in his seat in the helicopter as they settled into a hover a little less than a thousand yards from the Megafortress. The terrorists who had driven the tanker in from the city got out of the cab.

“They’re going to shoot at us,” he said calmly as the pilot stabilized the aircraft.

“Firing,” said the pilot.

A TOW missile leapt from the side of the small chopper. The six-inch warhead hit the right stabilizer at the rear of the aircraft, carrying through the structure and exploding next to the left fin. A second missile, fired at the rear section of the plane, struck a few seconds later, obliterating the back portion of the aircraft.

“All right,” yelled Danny. “Phase two, phase two.”

The helicopter whipped to the side, spinning back around over the civilian terminal. The other helicopter had already started in toward bin Awg’s three hangars. The video feed from the LADS that showed there were no terrorists nearby but Danny wouldn’t trust it; the helicopters did a quick circuit to make sure the ground was clear before depositing the Whiplash team on the ground.

“McKenna, you got twenty minutes,” Danny said over the com circuit. “If you can get that plane launched by then, it’s yours”

“I only need fifteen,” she shot back.

Chapter 84

Breanna brought the EB-52’s engines to full military power, the thrust rippling through the muscles of the big jet as it was held in place by its brakes.

“Ready?” she asked Zen.

“Ignition in three,” he said.

They counted down together. At two, Breanna slapped off the brakes and the big jet leapt forward, propelled by nearly a quarter of a million pounds of thrust from its four P&W engines. A second later the Flighthawks added their thrust. Within a blink the plane’s speed passed a hundred miles an hour. Bree started back on the stick and the aircraft rushed upward, springing off the pavement as if its landing gear were pogo sticks.

A black streak flew across the right side of her windscreen; by the time Breanna realized it was a mortar shell she was far beyond it. The impact of the explosion was lost in the turbulence behind the aircraft; if it affected the plane at all the computer controls compensated without Breanna noticing. She held the Megafortress steady as the plane rose over the runway and out of danger.

Starship glanced at kick as they counted down together with Major Alou and the computer. The EB-52 vibrated madly, and the noise of the revving engines leaked past the noise-canceling headgear, a steady hum in the back of his head.

‘Two,” they said, and the Megafortress began to roll, cued by Major Alou up on the flightdeck.

“Three,” they said, and the Flighthawk engines whipped on. Starship felt himself pushed back in his seat as the Mega-fortress burst ahead in quick-takeoff mode. His view screen played a feed from the nose of the Flighthawk; he could see the tail of the other Megafortress disappearing to the right. The strip and surrounding jungle slid by, the EB-52’s speed ramping quickly. He could feel the plane starting to lift, gravity beginning to tilt his body back like the gentle rock of a cradle.

And then the plane sagged left. Something popped in Starship’s ear. A red emergency light blinked, and as Starship reached his hand to the screen control, a cold curtain of darkness descended around him and he fell unconscious.

Zen shut down the Flighthawk engines and began cycling fuel into Hawk One, replacing what they had used to get off the runway.

“Indy was hit,” Breanna told him. “They didn’t get off the runway.”

Zen felt his throat tighten. Trying to take off had been foolhardy, a ridiculous gamble. He was responsible for the men who’d been in that plane.

He glanced at the instrument screen on his left — he was using the auxiliary controls, since there hadn’t been time even to get his helmet — double-checking that he had enough fuel to launch.

“Ready to launch Hawk One in sixty seconds,” he told Breanna.

When Starship opened his eyes, he was at the stick of an F-15E. The altimeter ladder in his heads-up display showed that he had just notched up over forty thousand feet, and he was still climbing, winging upward like an angel called to heaven. The blue void of the atmosphere thinned as he rose, the color paling into white and then becoming almost black. The black deepened, and still he climbed, over a hundred thousand feet now, the altimeter calmly notching it off. One-ten, one-twenty, one-fifty, two hundred…

“I can’t go this high,” said Starship. “Not in a Strike Eagle.”

With that thought, the blackness turned red and he felt his body twisting hard against his restraints. His arm smacked against something hard and he heard a scream coming from the middle of his chest.

“I got to get the hell out of here,” said Starship, and by instinct he reached for the ejection handle, but he couldn’t find it. He managed to get his head down and look, then realized he couldn’t eject — they were too low, too low —

No, they were on the ground, and the seats hadn’t been properly prepared besides.

He saw one of the emergency lights blinking on a panel and realized they had crash-landed at the end of the runway.

“Out, out, out!” he yelled, and started to jump from his station. He couldn’t move and for a moment he despaired, thought he’d been crippled like Zen.

He’d kill himself before he lived like that, as much as he admired the older pilot.

And then he realized he was still buckled into his seat. A wave of relief powered into his legs and arms as he threw off the restraints, bolted upright, and started for the exit. He remembered Kick, turned and saw that he was still back in his seat. Starship shook him, then when he didn’t respond reached down and unsnapped the buckles, helped him up — more like picked him up — and dragged him behind him to the hatchway. The motor that worked the ladder growled as the lower door started to open. Something in the mechanism snapped and it stopped after moving only an inch or so. Starship pounded on the control, but it didn’t move. He swung around and tried kicking at the hatchway, first gently and then with all his weight, but nothing budged.

“Upstairs,” he told Kick, who was crouched over where he’d left him.

Starship grabbed his friend and tried pushing him up the ladder which led to the flight deck, but Kick was so out of it that he finally draped him over his side and back and pulled him up with him, crawling onto the rear of the long cockpit area. “Major Alou! Merce! Merce!” he yelled to Alou.

The pilot sat at his station, head slumped over, hand on the throttle slide. As Starship came close, he saw that the front wind panel and some of the aircraft structure around it had been shattered. A piece of metal twice the size of Starship’s hand had embedded itself in the side of Alou’s head. Blood covered everything around the pilot.

“We got to get the hell out of here,” he told Kick. He started to go back down, thinking they could use the emergency hatchways at the forward part of the Flighthawk compartment. But then he realized it would be quicker to use the emergency roof hatches above the ejection seats, which could be blown out by the computer or by hand.

He squeezed past the center console, trying not to look at Alou. The consoles were still lit.

Starship got up on the seat, balancing awkwardly as he struggled with the hatchway. He fumbled with the large red bar that had to be pushed back to override the computer’s emergency system and access the controls directly. Once that was out of the way, he hit the thick, square button at the top of the panel, which blew all of the upper hatchways off at once.

“Up we go, up we go!” he yelled to Kick.

He put his head out of the hatchway, breathing a whiff of the hot, humid jungle air. A machine-gun started to fire in the distance.

Starship ducked back down. Maybe it would be better to stay in the plane, where at least there was a modicum of cover. But the Megafortress would be a target for whomever was attacking; he turned and yelled at Kick, who still hadn’t moved off the deck.

“Yo, Kick boy, time to get the hell out of here,” he yelled to his companion. Once again he draped the other pilot across his back, wobbling as he snaked around and then up through the hatchway. A green arm appeared over the black skin of the Megafortress as Starship pulled upward. His heart nearly leapt from his chest before he realized it was one of the Special Forces soldiers.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Starship yelled, more to himself than the soldier or Kick. More arms appeared around him. He resisted as they started to push him toward the ground, then realized they had him; he slipped into the arms of a burly Special Forces sergeant, who immediately pushed him down and in the same motion whirled and began firing at something in the jungle fifty yards away.

Chapter 85

Every bone in his body felt as if it had been broken, and every muscle felt as if it had been twisted and bent and rearranged. But for Mack, the worst thing was the horrible taste in his mouth, which for some reason just wouldn’t leave him, not even after he gulped water from the nearby stream. He spit, he dunked his head, he stuffed the top of his flightsuit into his mouth — it stubbornly remained.

Mack started walking downstream, along the side of the stream opposite the one he had fallen down on. Within a few minutes he heard the rush of a waterfall. He climbed hand over hand down a scramble of rocks and dirt, descending nearly fifty feet before the ground leveled out in a bog. The only way through was over a jumble of felled trees. As he reached a run of boulders he finally caught sight of the waterfall, a spectacular spray that cascaded over a nearly sheer cliff. Mack, never much of a nature admirer, stared at the spray as it came off the flow, awed by it.

The bugs prompted him to move on. He threaded his way through jungle fronds, the stalks and leaves getting thicker and thicker. Finally he thought he might have to turn back and tried rushing ahead like a bull, crashing and struggling until he hit a clearing. Mack collapsed, resting for a few minutes; when he got up he saw that he had come out on a path.

He took it to the left, and within ten minutes heard voices in the distance. He froze, then moved off the trail, hiding as he tried to make out the sounds. They seemed to be kids, which meant he must be near a village; his best bet would be to go there and ask to be taken to the police station, where he could explain who he was.

As he took a step back on the trail, something crashed behind him; Mack spun just in time to see the back of some sort of animal disappearing into the vegetation.

When he turned around again, he found his way blocked by a short, squat man holding a large machine-gun in his beefy hands.

Chapter 86

Prince bin Awg’s MiG-19 sat in the center of Hangar Two, an access ladder propped to its cockpit. McKenna decided to take that as an omen of luck, rather than an indication that mechanics had been trying to fix something when the attacks began. She spun the tractor she’d taken from the other hangar into position, jumped off, and pulled away the wheel chucks from the plane. She climbed up into the cockpit to check on the brake and found a helmet and parachute stowed there. Those were clearly signs of good luck.

The tractor filled the hangar with thick diesel exhaust as she stomped on the pedal and got it moving forward. The vehicle — its vintage was uncertain, but it had Chinese lettering on the dash — groaned as it tugged the MiG out of the hangar. The two Whiplash troopers helping her were just pulling up with the fuel truck that had been in the other hangar. McKenna threw on the brakes and jumped off the tug.

“Fuel it! Let’s go! Let’s go!” she yelled, running to unhook the tractor and get it out of the way.

Prince bin Awg’s engineers had updated some of the systems, mostly with Chinese equipment intended for the vastly updated J-6, whose design was based on the MiG-19 family. The radio was state-of-the-art, and a small GPS device had been jury-rigged to the right panel. Otherwise, the cockpit remained exactly as it had been when this model rolled off the line at Gorki in 1957 — primitive even by Russian standards. McKenna switched on the backup battery and got a tentative read on her instruments, cinching her restraints at the same time.

“All right, that’s good,” she yelled at the men outside with the jet fuel. Her tanks were more than half full — more than enough to get her where she had to go. “All right, go. We’re going. See you at the end of the war.”

The twin Tumansky turbojets groaned as she brought them on line. Even with the brakes set the aircraft moved forward, and in fact when she removed them there seemed almost no difference. McKenna turned left onto the access ramp, snugging the canopy as she went. The aircraft started slightly to the right and she nearly went off the other side over-correcting; her controls felt sluggish and she thought one of the tires might be flat or close to it. A helicopter buzzed off to her left as she brought the plane onto the main runway. It seemed to be firing at someone but McKenna couldn’t spare the attention. The MiG was proving more of a handful than she remembered.

But she appreciated challenges.

The engines responded quickly as she goosed the throttle. The plane drifted right as she shot down the runway; remembering her earlier problem she treated the controls as gingerly as possible. As she hit one hundred and eight knots she began her takeoff rotation, lifting her nose wheel five degrees. But the MiG stayed stuck to the ground. Her forward air speed dogged, the aircraft struggled despite its lightish load; finally she managed to get it up, passing one hundred and sixty knots, just enough to lift off the ground. She crossed to the right, trying to stay clear of the area where the helicopters had been, climbing slowly and heading toward the ocean.

Now that she was airborne, the MiG’s speed built nicely, climbing up over two hundred and fifty knots. The controls got a bit lighter as she flew, and McKenna felt the pleasant tug of the old metal around her. The MiG-19 was the first supersonic fighter built by the Soviet Union; while it was quickly superceded in the Russian inventory by the MiG-21, the design had a number of virtues. It was built to go very fast and very high, enabling it to threaten the bombers of the day. The MiG’s speed would be a liability when she landed, even with the parachute that was standard equipment at the rear of the aircraft; the fact that the brakes hadn’t been particularly good was not a good sign.

But there was plenty of time to worry about that. McKenna decided there was no reason not to see what the plane could do. She gave her instruments a quick sweep, checked her altitude and the air around her, then pulled the throttle to afterburner.

“MiG is off,” the helicopter pilot told Danny.

“Pick up our guys,” Danny said, though the command was unnecessary — the pilot had already whipped the Quick Bird toward the hangar area.

“Danny, I have an update from the Malaysian air base,” said Jennifer. “They’re taking heavy fire. The command trailer has been hit by mortar fire. One Megafortress took off. Another is on the ground. They think it got hit. Colonel Bastian is overdue as well.”

“They asking for assistance?”

“They’ve radioed out to a Malaysian unit in the area. They didn’t get a response.”

Danny leaned back in his seat. Besides the length of time it would take to get there — upwards of an hour, if not more — they didn’t have the fuel.

“We’re ready to blow hangar one, Cap,” said Liu, breaking in. One had the Sabre and the Hunter, which McKenna has said were the most likely planes to be used. “Charges are set”

“All right, Jen, I’ve got a few things to attend to here. I’ll get back with you”

Danny was about to give Liu the okay to blow the planes when he saw the fuel truck on the tarmac near the hangar.

“Can we use their jet fuel?” Danny asked the pilot.

“We can use standard jet fuel, if that’s what it is,” said the pilot.

Danny clicked into the Dreamland circuit, asking Liu if he knew what sort of fuel he’d pumped into the plane. Liu had no idea. He then switched and spoke by satellite to Dreamland Command, where Major Catsman promised to get a fuel expert on the double.

“If I can smell it, I can tell if it’s okay,” said the chopper pilot while they waited.

“You sure?”

“Look, jet fuel’s jet fuel, right?”

Danny looked around the airport. The only terrorists who had been nearby were either dead or hunkered over by the civilian side of the facility. If he could refuel here, he could fly the helicopters down to the Malaysian base.

Just one helicopter. He didn’t want to leave the platform unprotected.

“Whiplash Commander, this is Dreamland Command.”

“Freah”

“Danny, I have the man who tuned the Quick Bird engines on the line here, speaking from his quarters.”

“Bottom line it, Major.”

“Bottom line is you’ll blow the warranty if you use commercial jet fuel — yeah, it’ll work.”

“Thanks”

Chapter 87

Dazhou Ti tightened the grip on the pistol as he strode across the dock to the wooden plank that had been thrown over to the side of the ship by his boarding party. He could feel the beat of his blood pulsing in his head, everything a rush. One of his men stepped across the deck as he came onto the ship, saluting smartly.

“The captain is in the bridge,” said the sailor.

Dazhou nodded and continued through the hatch into the ship’s superstructure, aware that he was being watched, aware that his course now was set and irrevocable. He went up to the bridge, where his men held the captain and another officer at gunpoint.

“You are with us, or you will die,” Dazhou told the captain, pointing his pistol at the man.

The ship’s captain had served under Dazhou two years before on the Perkasa, a coastal patrol ship. Until this moment he might even have considered himself a friend, though Dazhou had not included him in the inner circle of navy personnel who had worked with him on the Barracuda.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the captain.

Dazhou pressed the pistol against his cheek. “I would think it would be clear enough.”

“I am with you, of course, Captain,” said the man. “But your aim — I don’t understand.”

“We are going to assist the forces that have taken over Brunei,” said Dazhou. “There is an American force attempting to help them. We will attack them, and then we will find other targets.”

“But the government has decreed that we honor our treaty obligations.”

“You are very brave,” said Dazhou.

Then he pulled the trigger.

As the captain’s body fell to the ground, blood coursing from his skull, Dazhou turned to the other officer. The man stood in shock; he did not appear to be breathing.

“Where is the ship’s intercom?” Dazhou asked.

Without saying a word, the man went to a panel at the side and held up a microphone. Dazhou took it.

“This is Captain Dazhou Ti. I have been commanded by God to take over this ship to join in a holy war against the western devils who rule Brunei through the bastard sultan and his family. It is a holy war and the rewards of those who truly believe will be eternal and guaranteed. Any who do not wish to join us may leave the ship in five minutes. After that, we will set out.”

Allowing some to leave was a calculated risk. The ship’s complement was fifty-one; it could be operated with less, but most of the twenty-three sailors Dazhou had brought with him were not familiar with the ship and it would be difficult to operate it if everyone aboard deserted. On the other hand, the appeal to faith — and a religion that Dazhou himself did not share — put the argument to join him in its starkest, most obvious terms.

He handed the microphone back to the other officer. “You too may leave,” he told him.

“I am a believer. I stay”

Dazhou nodded, then turned back around. Blood still poured from the captain’s head.

“Throw him overboard,” he told his men. “Then report to the second officer. We have much to do”

Chapter 88

Dog crouched on his knee behind the tree, watching as something moved about thirty feet ahead through the brush. There was no doubt in his mind that it was the terrorist, but he could not actually see the man. He had the rifle wedged against a shoulder. He cocked his head down so he could see through the scope; the sweat on his palm made the M4 feel oily and he pressed his fingers tighter.

A white rag appeared in the middle of the scope.

Was the man surrendering?

He raised his head, saw only a blur. He was only twenty feet away at most. He had a rifle in his hand.

The white was the shirt he was wearing.

Dog put his head down again, his eye on the scope.

He’d lost his target!

Dog pushed the barrel to his right but couldn’t find his enemy. He brought the weapon down, scanning to his right — something moved dead ahead of him. He saw a white swatch, then a face, pushed his shoulder against the weapon and fired.

The gun popped in his hands, the recoil easier than he thought. He swung right, saw something much further away but hesitated, not sure exactly what it was. Finally he saw a rifle with a banana clip against a white background through the leaves and fired. This time he saw that he had hit what he was aiming at; it furled backward, falling to the ground.

Something cracked behind him. Dog swung around, nearly losing his balance. A white shirt loomed in front of him.

He fired point blank into the man’s stomach. The bullets didn’t seem to affect the terrorist at first. He continued fumbling with the AK47 in his hands, having trouble making it shoot. Dog fired again, still at point blank range.

A bulletproof vest!

Dog started to aim higher, but just then the terrorist began to dance — it was the only way to describe what Dog saw, a kind of macabre shake and jump, a turn to the left and then to the right, as if the man were trying belatedly to duck away from Dog’s gunfire. He shook his shoulders, and then the gun dropped from his hands and he fell off to the side, confusion on his face.

Dog started to stand. As he did a shout made him lose his balance and he toppled forward, just in time to hear three short bursts of automatic rifle fire. To his right. Lang burst through the leaves and stood over him, firing again. Dog pushed himself back to his knees but Lang held him down, crouched over and scouting the nearby jungle.

“All right,” said the soldier, tugging him to follow. Dog stumbled and then started to run, moving sideways as well as frontward as they tracked toward the road. His feet sloshed in a wet spot and he nearly fell, but somehow he managed to keep his balance until he reached the road’s shoulder. His elbow and shoulder broke his fall and he rolled onto his stomach.

“It’s all right, we’re clear,” said the soldier from his haunches a few feet away. “Cross the road. We’ll move down the ditch there. There’s a little cover.”

Dog glanced to his left, then scrambled over the macadam and got into the vegetation. He started to relax, then realized he should be covering Lang’s crossing. He got up and watched as the soldier made his way across the roadway very deliberately.

It wasn’t that he went slowly, just that he was under control. Unlike Dog, he’d have been able to react and fire if anything had appeared.

“Let’s duck through this run of trees,” suggested Lang. “Then angle back.”

They began trotting through the jungle, going several hundred yards west before angling back in the direction of the road and the village they had visited earlier. When they had the highway in sight, they stopped to catch their breaths. They couldn’t hear anyone following.

“Good going back there, Colonel,” said Lang.

“Good going to you, too.”

“You want to give that little radio a go again or what?”

“Yeah” Dog took it from his pocket and put it back on voice, making another broadcast. After several more tries, he, gave it up, slipping it back to beacon. The battery was limited, but Dog figured that there was no sense trying to conserve it; they’d either be saved or dead by the time it ran out the way things were going.

“Nobody home, huh?” said Lang.

“Not yet.”

“We’ll just have to take care of ourselves, that’s all. You think we should head back to the village?”

“I think that’s a better idea than staying here”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Lang. It was the first time since they’d met that he’d expressed anything close to doubt, and Dog felt instantly uneasy.

“I don’t like to sit when I can be moving, if you know what I mean,” added the soldier. “I say we move”

“I agree,” said Dog.

“All right, let’s move out then. But listen, Colonel, no bullshit now — you get tired, you tell me, okay? I mean, no offense, but you got to talk up if you’re tired”

Under other circumstances, Dog might have been insulted — or even touched. But now he just shrugged. “Don’t worry about me. And you can call me Dog”

“Yes, sir,” said Lang, getting to his feet.

Chapter 89

Zen launched the Flighthawk and hastily tipped its nose down in the direction of the mortars. The radar beeped as it picked up a shell, and C³ began a quick set of calculations to determine not only the precise launch point but the best angle for an attack.

“Bree, I have a target.”

“I just need some altitude so I can launch one of the air-to-ground missiles,” she said.

“If there’s anything left of them when I’m through,” Zen told her, accelerating into the attack, “you’re welcome to them”

The terrorists had set up a pair of large mortars roughly three and a half miles from the base. Five men were working the two tubes, which were either 81 millimeter British or 82 millimeter Russian weapons, in both cases old but reliable and potentially devastating weapons. The guerillas had a van just to the north of the clearing as Zen approached. He put the Flighthawk’s nose onto the firing team on the left and pressed his trigger, working in a diagonal through the mortar area and into the van. His first shots missed both the mortar and the men serving it, but the vehicle exploded almost immediately. By the time he turned off it was engulfed in flames.

He came back and looked for another target beyond the thick cloud of black smoke. A long dirt road ran through the jungle toward a paved road to the west; Zen followed along it but saw nothing. He saw a reflection from a ridge to the north as he turned and headed toward it, guessing that there was a spotter using binoculars there. Sure enough, he saw figures scrambling and caught the outline of a gun in the magnified viewer. Zen pushed down to fire at them but by the time he got in range they had ducked away; he pounded the ground with shells but it was like trying to hit a flea with a spitball.

“Ground is reporting that they’re no longer under mortar attack,” said Breanna. “They have about a dozen guerillas trying to fight their way in from the southwest, near the end of the strip. They’ve radioed to another Malaysian unit for support. No response yet.”

“Yeah,” said Zen. He climbed back in the direction of the air base. “If you can get them to mark the position, I’ll make a pass with the cannon.”

“The guerillas are in white and they’re coming up the ravine,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, I see them,” said Zen. He pushed the Flight-hawk’s wing down, swooping into a wide arc to the far side of the ravine the enemy was using for cover. Zen walked the Flighthawk down the ditch, working the cannon back and forth.

“Zen, can you do that one more time? They want to use you as cover for a counterattack,” said Breanna.

“Hawk leader,” he confirmed, pulling back around and repeating his run from the opposite direction. He could see movement on both sides of the ravine but concentrated on the ditch itself, which had ten or twelve soldiers in it.

“You talk to Alou?” he asked Breanna.

“Negative.”

Zen’s path brought him over the airfield. He could see the other Megafortress at the end of the runway. Part of its right wing had been chewed off by an explosion and the nose had been mangled. The plane rested on its belly.

“Zen, I’m picking up a distress signal on the UHF band,” said Breanna.

“Yeah,” he said as the chirp flooded over the circuit. “Did Indy get off the field?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Stand by. Let me see if I can track it down.”

Zen spotted someone moving near the aircraft. He hoped they’d gotten out and the signal was just a glitch.

“I have the source three and a half miles south of the base,” said Breanna. “I’m marking it. Ground’s asking for more support back by that ravine”

“Roger that,” said Zen, pulling the Flighthawk around.

Starship didn’t realize that Kick had stayed back near the plane until the gunfire had nearly stopped. One of the Special Tactics people had found a medical kit and was trying to clean and bandage Starship’s arm, which he’d bashed up pretty badly somewhere along the way.

“I’m okay. I have to go back and get my friend out,” Starship told him. “I’m really all right.”

“Just hang on until the area’s secure,” said the air force special operations soldier.

“Yeah, okay,” said Starship. But he stood up and started moving toward the aircraft anyway. He saw a Flighthawk whip overhead and unleash its cannon. The sight locked him in place; he watched the small aircraft whip upward, disappearing in a blink of an eye.

“Kick,” he said, moving again toward the plane. “Kick!”

The joints in his knees were so unsteady he wobbled from side to side as he reached the wing of the giant plane. He hauled himself up, using the Flighthawk to get a boost, and then ran up along the top of the big plane. He navigated around the hatchways to the rear compartments and threw himself down to peer inside the opening over the pilot’s seat.

Major Alou stared up at him, his face a macabre death mask. “I’m sorry,” he told Alou.

He looked to the right but didn’t see Kick. “Kick! Kick! You asshole!” he shouted to his friend. “Get the hell out of there! Kick! What are you doing?”

He thought he heard Kick’s voice behind him somewhere. He looked around but didn’t see him. There was another shout, and he crawled to the side of the plane.

“Lieutenant, you better get off that plane,” shouted the Air Force Special Tactics soldier from the edge of the runway. “You’re an easy target up there”

“My friend — Kick, the other Flighthawk pilot. He went back inside.”

“No, sir, he’s down here”

“He is?” Starship climbed down the front of the smashed up windscreen and bashed nose, jumping to the ground. His knees gave way and he crumpled in what seemed like slow motion. As soon as he hit the ground he rolled back up and started to run to the side of the field.

“Kick, Kick, you idiot, where the hell are you?”

The Air Force Special Tactics soldier caught him from the side with his tree trunk arm.

“Lieutenant. Your friend—”

Starship turned and looked at him. The soldier shook his head. Starship shook his head as well.

“He can’t be dead. I pulled him out,” said Starship.

“I think he was dead when you pulled him out,” said the man. “Listen, we have to fall back to the bunker area until reinforcements come in. We don’t know how many more of these bozos are out there in the jungle. We’re down to six guys who can handle a weapon, not counting you and me.”

“I can’t leave Kick,” said Starship. “Where is he?”

“Sir, you’re going to have to leave him,” said the soldier. “Or you’re going to be dead, too.”

“He can’t be dead.”

“This way,” said the sergeant, starting to trot up toward the bunker.

Starship stared after him for a moment. Then, against his conscious will, his legs propelled him to follow.

Chapter 90

The man with the gun prodded Mack down the pathway past a cluster of small houses to a turnoff that led to a long wooden platform above the slope. At the far end of the platform sat a small building constructed from chipboard. Inside, Mack found several women holding or sitting with children on the floor of the single room. The far wall was a screen overlooking a rock-strewn slope down to the stream Mack had walked along earlier. A man with a pistol stood in front of the screen; he glanced nervously at Mack as his escort left him, then went back to watching out the side.

Unsure of the situation, Mack decided that his best course for now was to say nothing until he could puzzle out whether the men with the guns were terrorists who had invaded the settlement, or if they were the husbands of the women trying to protect them. But no one said anything, either to Mack or each other, outside of an occasional soft whisper to children who were fidgety.

“Are you for the government?” asked Mack finally. No one answered.

“Sultan?” he asked. But that didn’t draw a response, either.

“U.S.A?”

Nothing.

“Could I have some food?”

Still nothing. Mack propped his hands on his knees and leaned forward, baffled by the situation.

Chapter 91

Dog heard the whispery jet engine approaching from the north and realized it had to be a Flighthawk. He pulled the PRC radio from his pocket and switched it to voice.

“Colonel Tecumseh Bastian to Dreamland Flighthawk. You’re approaching my position,” he said.

The only response was static. Dog cupped his hand over the earphone as he broadcast and listened again.

“Dog, this is Zen. I should be just crossing overhead,” said the pilot finally.

“Yeah, I see you,” said the colonel as the black dart came overhead. “We were ambushed further up on the road. The terrorists got one of our guys.”

“I saw the Hummer. Danny is en route with a helicopter.”

“Danny?”

“He’s about fifteen minutes away. Pilot wants to claim a new speed record for an A-6,” said Zen. The transmission crackled and faded but then came back. “Can you find a good place for him to land?”

“Plenty of roadway,” said Dog.

Zen said something, but it was wiped by static. Dog asked him to repeat it but didn’t get an acknowledgment.

“You’re talking to the plane?” asked Lang, coming back. “Yeah. They have a helicopter en route. It’s about fifteen minutes away”

“We have to keep moving,” said the soldier. “They’re only a few hundred yards behind us, on the other side of the road”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. They’ve been following all along and now they’re starting to catch up. Come on”

Dog started to tell Zen that they were being pursued. He got only two words out of his mouth when the by now familiar rattle of an AK47 sounded through the nearby jungle.

“I didn’t get a good location,” Breanna told Zen. “I think his battery’s dying”

“They may be under fire,” he told her. “I see something popping down there. Something’s going on”

She flipped on the feed from the nose of the Flighthawk and watched as the small robot made a tree-top pass over the road. There was a flash off the right wing, but the robot plane went by so quickly it was impossible to tell exactly what had fired at it.

“I’d try raking the trees with the gun,” said Zen. “But I just can’t tell where they are”

“I have a better idea,” said Breanna. “Let’s show them we’re here and maybe they’ll back off.”

“Bree, they may decide we’re a good target—” said Zen, but she’d already started the aircraft downward. The Megafortress cleared the treetops by maybe five feet.

“Trying to break their eardrums?” Zen asked as she climbed.

“If it’ll help,” she said.

McKenna put the MiG-19 into a steep descent and got ready for her landing. She had to bleed off speed but keep the engine up in case she blew the approach in the unfamiliar plane; even a veteran MiG pilot could find the combination challenging on a rough field. The tiny runway came up quickly in her windscreen as she descended; she glanced at the dial tracking her engines’ rpms, making sure she had enough power to abort if necessary.

The MiG’s air speed plummeted from 325 knots to just over 200 as she dropped toward the hard-packed surface at the edge of the runway. Her flaps were open all the way and she was committed now. The craft sank abruptly, threatening to pancake. She got past it, the tail twitching slightly but her nose right, flaring up so the plane could help itself slow. But she reached prematurely for the throttle to throw it into neutral — a minor mistake in another plane, a potential catastrophe in the MiG-19 on a short runway. Cutting the speed so sharply caused the back end of the plane to slip downward abruptly once more, this time perilously close to the ground. She felt her heart thump, and then in the next instant felt something kick her from behind — her father, she thought, telling her not to be a jerk.

That was all it took. She managed to get the rear wheels down solid without scraping her butt on the runway. With her nose still up to increase drag, her speed quickly fell; when she slipped under 130 knots she dropped the front of the plane and went for the brakes and chute and brakes.

And brakes and brakes and brakes. She stopped with her nose over the end of the field.

“Never a doubt,” she said as she climbed out of the plane.

“My MiG!” exclaimed Prince bin Awg, materializing from the back of the crowd that ran out to greet her.

“She’s a beauty,” said McKenna.

“How did you rescue her?”

“She kind of called to me,” said McKenna.

The prince looked at her, then smiled. “For your bravery, you deserve a present.”

“I’ m not much for medals, Prince,” she told him. “Besides, it was mostly the Dreamland people. The terrorists made a move to the Megafortress and they decided they had to keep her on the ground. They took her rear stabilizer off and wiped out the fuel truck they’d brought in from outside the city somewhere”

“The Megafortress was destroyed?” asked the prince.

“Temporarily disabled. They blew the back section of it off. It’ll fly again someday”

“And my planes?”

“I saved this one,” said McKenna. “Best I could do.”

The prince nodded grimly, as if lamenting the passing of a dozen old comrades — which in a way he was. “You deserve a reward,” he said. “It is yours.”

“What is?”

“The MiG.”

“Really?” McKenna looked back at it. “No kidding?”

The prince looked at her solemnly. “My uncle owes you his life. I would give you twenty such planes”

“I’ll settle for this one and a new set of brakes,” said McKenna. “Mind if we get some grub? Those Dreamland people were nice, but the only thing they had to eat were MREs. One more peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a tube and my stomach would have hit the eject button.”

Sahurah watched as the men pulled the last of the metal from the wrecked hangar entrance. Two of the hangars at the prince’s side of the airport had been completely destroyed, but only the doorway to this one had been blown up. A large aircraft sat untouched a few yards away.

“It may be of use,” said Yayasan, the pilot who had deserted from the sultan’s air force. “It hasn’t been used often, but it was flown recently. The Russians called it a Tu-16. The Western nations referred to it as a Badger. This model was used for maritime patrols, and some bombing.”

“Could we use it against the sultan’s forces?” asked Sahurah.

“Certainly. There are machine-guns, those racks are there for bombs or missiles. Missiles, but we could use bombs.”

“Can you fly it?”

“I have never done so.”

“That is not my question.”

Sahurah looked into the pilot’s face, filled with fear. Sahurah knew from his own experience how difficult a foe fear was. He wished he had the ability to inspire others to face it, but realized he did not. Sahurah turned and started to walk away.

“I will try, Commander,” said the pilot behind him. “I will try.

Chapter 92

Dog tried the radio again, but once more all he got was static. The terrorists had stopped firing their weapons but they were still in the jungle somewhere across the road.

“I think they’ll follow us all the way to the coast,” Dog told Lang as they crouched in the weeds, catching their breath. “They’re persistent bastards.”

“No, they won’t go that far,” said the sergeant. He pointed to the south. “There’s another group coming up on our side. Look.”

Dog saw the last man in the small column as he ducked over a hilltop in the brush about a quarter of a mile away.

“Shit,” said Dog. He picked up his radio to broadcast again. “Wait,” said the sergeant. “Listen.”

Dog raised his head and heard the chopper approaching from the distance.

Sitting in the front seat of the Quick Bird as it whipped toward the area where Colonel Bastian had been located, Danny caught a glimpse of the Flighthawk darting back and forth in the sky. It looked like a crow protecting its young from a prowling cat.

“I see you, Zen,” Danny said over the Dreamland satellite circuit. “Are you in contact with them?”

“On and off. I haven’t had anything from him in the last ten minutes, but I have a rough idea of the location. The terrorists are very close by.”

He gave him GPS coordinates, and then described the spot as just west of the highway, about a hundred yards from a sharp bend.

Danny discussed it with the pilot, who thought their best bet would be to take the Quick Bird directly in while the Flighthawk laid down some covering fire near the terrorists. The pilot told Danny they could hover above the highway; if Dog came out they could pick him up, and if the bad guys came out they could fire at them themselves.

It was a risky plan, but the pilot claimed he’d done things twenty times as dangerous when he was flying with the 160th SOAR, the Army’s special operations helicopter regiment. Danny didn’t doubt that he was telling the truth.

They flew south a mile and a half, then made a wide turn on the side of the jungle where Zen thought Dog was. They dropped low and hovered over the road as the Flighthawk dipped down toward the trees, looking for something to shoot up.

“There,” said Boston. “On the left, your left, just in the ditch near the road.”

“And there,” said Danny, pointing ahead. “Terrorists at two o’clock”

Dog watched as the helicopter whipped over the road behind them and then started to turn. Before he could get up and run for it, it began firing at the row of trees to the north. The terrorists there answered, one of them firing a rocket-propelled grenade. Dog watched in horror as the grenade flew toward the cockpit of the plane and then seemed to disappear inside it. Fortunately, it had actually sailed to the side, curving like a baseball hit down the line. By the time it exploded in the jungle, the Quick Bird had unleashed a pair of TOW missiles into the tree line.

Lang began firing his M4, and Dog whirled around just in time to see six or seven terrorists throwing themselves down about three hundred yards away to the south. He too began to fire; as he did, something darted down overhead and he heard a roar and a grating sound, the kind of thing a garbage truck might make it if digested a load of steel.

“To the road, to the road,” Lang shouted, pulling him away as another grenade flew through the air. Dog fell backward; bullets flew nearby and he seemed to be breathing dirt.

“Stay down, stay down!” Lang yelled. The Flighthawk roared right overhead, its cannon roaring.

“The helicopter,” said Dog.

Lang didn’t reply. Dog raised his head, then felt something push it down as a fresh gunfire erupted nearby. Something hot creased the back of his neck.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” yelled Lang, and Dog found himself running up onto the road. The helicopter appeared on his left, moving along slowly with its skid a foot from the ground. One of the Whiplash people, dressed in his black body armor and helmet, leaned out and started firing his gun toward the rear, while someone else leaned from the front of the cockpit. Dog threw himself toward the helicopter, grabbing for it; as he did he felt it lifting away from him. His M4 slipped away but he knew better than to fish for it; he felt himself falling to the rear and his stomach revolted for a moment. Green and black swirls passed before his eyes and his head rattled with the roar of the engine. He saw something green below his feet and realized he was not quite inside the helicopter, even though they were lifting up above the trees.

Zen saw the helicopter dart upward. Three figures were clinging to the side.

“Clear,” Zen told Breanna.

“Launching”

The bomb fell from the belly of the Megafortress, sailing on a direct, short dive to the roadway where the terrorists were emptying their assault weapons at the helicopter and Flighthawk. The helicopter managed to clear away before the weapon exploded, but Zen had doubled back to keep the terrorists interested, and the blast of the thousand-pound warhead was so immense that the small plane stuttered momentarily, tossed so severely that Zen thought he’d lose it.

“Good shot,” said Zen finally, back in full control of the plane. “How’s your fuel?” Breanna asked.

“Have to tank inside twenty minutes. How’s yours?”

“We’re fine for four or five hours. Let’s escort the helicopter back, then set up a refuel. We may have to head back to the Philippines or to one of the Malaysian airports,” she added. “I don’t know that they’re going to be able to move Indy off the end of the runway any time soon.”

“Roger that,” said Zen, sliding over the Quick Bird.

Danny pulled Colonel Bastian into the helicopter and held him as they rushed to get away. He pressed his weight down against Dog’s back as the chopper whipped over the nearby tree tops.

“We’re all right,” said the pilot as the airstrip appeared ahead, but Danny didn’t stop leaning against Dog until the helicopter’s engine had been cut, a few minutes later.

“You look like hell, Colonel,” he told him as he helped the colonel out onto the concrete.

“I feel better than I look, I think,” he said. “You okay, Tommy?”

The SF soldier started to grin — then leaned over and threw up. “My stomach feels like his,” said Dog, taking a step away. “What happened here?”

“Base was hit by a mortar attack,” said Danny. “That’s all I know. What happened to you?”

Dog recounted how they had been ambushed, and what had happened to the driver. By the time he finished, the Special Forces soldier who had stayed behind had found them. He filled them in on the casualties, which included Major Alou and Kick.

“Why the hell did they try to take off when they were under fire?” said Dog. The cuts on his face had turned deep red. “Danny? What the hell did they do that for?”

“I don’t know, Colonel,” said Danny. “Maybe they were trying to save the planes.”

“God damn it. God damn it.”

“It’s lucky for you they did,” said Danny finally.

“Losing two of my people is not lucky for me,” said the colonel angrily, stalking toward the hangar bunkers.

Chapter 93

Prince bin Awg waved his hand over the map as he finished his summary of the situation. All over the country, people had shaken off their initial shock and were fighting back against the madmen; there were uprisings throughout the areas held by the terrorists.

That was the good news. Here was the bad: the terrorists were slaughtering many innocents, indiscriminately killing women and children as well as legitimate combatants.

“It is a grave, grave sin and evil,” the prince told McKenna and the local commanders, whom he had gathered for a briefing. “To spare our people, the army must launch its attack against the capital as soon as possible. The sultan has ordered it.”

The army was already on the move. Two separate columns of armored cars, augmented by pickup trucks and a few private vehicles, were now within ten and fifteen miles of the capital, approaching from different roads. They were being helped by intelligence flowing in from Dreamland’s LADS system, which was fed directly through a video hookup at the sultan’s headquarters.

“Troops should reach Bandar Seri Begawan by nightfall,” said Prince bin Awg.

“By nightfall?” asked McKenna.

“The people are rising everywhere. We cannot move quickly enough.”

“Well, fuel my plane and let’s get going,” said McKenna. “We’ll fly out in support of the column, bomb whatever we see, come back, refuel, and bomb some more.”

She punched her wingman’s arm. “You too, Seyed,” she told him.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Captain Seyed.

McKenna turned to the techie who’d come in with the prince to maintain the planes. “Can we put the bullets from the Dragonfly into the MiG?”

He shook his head. The bullets were the wrong caliber and there was no way to adapt them or the gun so they could be used. “Can we put bombs on, at least?” she asked.

“Bombs, sure. You have four hardpoints.”

“Do it.”

“The MiG is not much of a bomber,” said the prince. The sight on his MiG was an afterthought, added by the Poles after the aircraft had become too antiquated even for them to use as an interceptor. Bin Awg had purchased the plane through an intermediary when the Poles surplused it after years of storage; it was likely the plane had never dropped more than a dozen bombs, and those had all undoubtedly been dummies.

“Not much of a bomber’s better than no bomber at all,” said McKenna. “Let’s load her up.”

Chapter 94

Mack felt his leg starting to go to sleep. He rose, shook it, and then walked back and forth. The man with the pistol paid no attention to him.

What would happen if he just walked away?

He had started toward the door when the man who had brought him here came in, followed by two others whom Mack had not seen before. The men started talking to the man with the pistol excitedly; they seemed to be arguing.

“Say, uh, you mind if I ask some questions?” said Mack finally.

One of the men gave him a disdainful look, then signaled for the others to go outside.

“Don’t leave on my account,” said Mack, watching them go. He sat back down.

“They’re arguing about what to do,” said one of the women near them.

“You speak English?”

One of the other women reached to stop her but she pushed away, defiant. “They said they would kill us and our children if we spoke. They’ve taken the men who were here. They arrived two days ago. They wore white uniforms until today. Now they seem scared.”

“Where did they take the men?” asked Mack.

The woman said nothing, instead looking toward the door.

The two men Mack had seen before came in. They walked to the nearest woman, yanking her up so ferociously her baby slipped from her hands. They pushed her, not letting her bring the child.

“What the hell?” said Mack as they left. “What the hell?” The answer came a few seconds later, with the muffled crack of a pistol fired into a skull at very close range.

Chapter 95

Jennifer watched the display as LADS Vehicle One tracked the two ships approaching from the north. Both were Malaysian navy vessels, according to their markings and flags. The first appeared to be a Spica-M class attack craft; the computer ID was tentative but Malaysia had several, and it was of roughly the right size.

The second ship, larger and better armed than the first, was clearly the Kalsamana, an Italian-built corvette obtained only a month ago with her sister ship, the Laksamana. The Kalsamana packed Aspide anti-aircraft missiles and Otomat anti-ship missiles, along with a sixty-two-millimeter cannon and a twin forty-millimeter gun.

“Sergeant Garcia, what do you make of this?” Jennifer asked, calling Garcia over to the control station. “These are Malaysian navy ships.”

“Maybe they’re looking for those bastards we took care of the other night,” said Garcia. “They claimed they were rebels who had stolen the ship.”

“Maybe we should send the helicopter up, just to get it off the platform so we don’t call attention to ourselves,” said Jennifer.

“Let me get Sergeant Liu,” said Bison.

Liu and the helicopter pilot came down and took a look at the screen, staring at it as Jennifer explained how she had tracked the two ships.

“The Malaysians are our allies,” said Liu.

“I know,” said Jennifer. “But I don’t trust them at all. I think we should launch the helicopter and lay low.”

“Agreed,” said Liu.

The pilot nodded. “I’ll loop away, then come in from the north, ask them what’s going on.”

“Have you received an update from the base in Malaysia?” asked Liu.

“Colonel Bastian was recovered,” said Jennifer.

Liu nodded. They already knew that Merce Alou and Kick had been killed. The helo kicked up above, and the building shook as it took off.

“Ships are probably nothing,” said Liu.

“Probably,” said Jennifer.

“I’m going back to my lookout post. We’ll take turns eating at 1800”

“Sounds good to me,” said Garcia.

Just as Liu walked out, the LADS system emitted a loud beep. Jennifer looked down at the screen, where a warning flashed:

LAUNCH DETECTED.

“They’ve fired a missile at us!” she yelled, jumping up from her chair.