Target Utopia

1

Mofitt led Danny down to the Malaysian camp. The corporal, with the tall, lean build of a natural runner, trotted at a strong pace, glancing over his shoulder every few paces to make sure Danny was still with him. By the time they reached the edge of the Malaysian army bivouac, Danny was winded and had to pause for a moment to catch his breath.

“You all right, Colonel?” asked the Marine.

“I’m OK. You can go back now.”

“No offense, sir, but the captain wouldn’t like that.”

“All right. Come on.”

The Malaysians’ tents were arranged in a semicircle, with their commander’s tent in the middle; they were all empty.

“They might be in the trenches,” said Mofitt, trotting in the direction of a sandbagged defensive position about thirty yards downhill from the tents. But the Malaysians were nowhere in sight.

“Hang tight for a minute,” said Danny. He took the radio and called back to the Marine commander, asking if the Malaysians had checked in.

“Negative. Where are you?”

“In their camp,” Danny told him.

“They’re not there?”

“Roger that.”

“Stand by.”

Captain Thomas came back on the line a moment later, having checked the video from his overhead UAV. “They’ve gone down to the spot on the perimeter already,” said the Marine. “They’re in defensive positions.”

“All right, we’re going,” Danny told him.

“Is Mofitt with you?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Roger. Be advised, the rebels look like they’re getting ready to attack.”

Danny looked over at Mofitt, crouched nearby against the sandbags. The corporal was scanning the area in front of them with his night vision.

“They’re holding the line near the road,” said Danny. “But they have no coms.”

“Let’s get there, then.”

“Good.”

“Uh, one thing, sir. I gotta tell ya… I don’t speak Malaysian, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Neither do I,” said Danny, scrambling to his feet.

Turk’s fingers tightened involuntarily on the F-35B’s stick as the mortar shell struck the field to his left, close enough for the air shock to push the plane sideways as it lifted off. For an instant he was sure he would lose control. But the aircraft was extremely stable, even in short-takeoff mode, and while the explosion had spooked him, it wasn’t strong enough to actually disturb the plane. The plane’s computer adjusted the angle of the rear nozzle, and the plane continued up and off the runway, quickly gathering speed. The massive fan behind the cockpit churned furiously, adding its own impetus to the thrust of the engine at the rear. Airborne, Turk cleaned the landing gear, folding the wheels inside the plane. The large panel above the fan and the two smaller ones behind folded down for level flight, the F-35B becoming “just” another fifth generation fighter.

I’m up, Turk thought. Not too bad. So far.

“Basher Four, Basher Four, are you reading me?” asked Greenstreet over the radio.

Turk clicked the mike button. “Yeah, I’m up. I’m still getting used to the, uh, controls.”

“Get south and stay out of the way.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” said Turk sourly.

Gunfire erupted on the western side of the base as Danny and Mofitt reached the position where the Malaysians were supposed to be. The positions — a few logs and sandbags with good sight distance down the hill — were empty.

“Colonel Freah, are you reading me?” blared the radio.

“This is Freah. You’re loud and clear.”

“The Malaysians moved all the way down to the road. They’re another two hundred and fifty yards from your position,” said Captain Thomas. “We need them to pull back — we’re going to hit the rebels with bombs when they come up the road. Then they can sweep in behind us.”

“All right.”

“Can you send Mofitt down to them?”

“We can get down there.”

“The rebels are moving — we need it quick.”

“We’re on our way.”

Danny told Mofitt what they had to do, leaving out the fact that Thomas hadn’t wanted him to go. There was no way Danny was staying behind.

“I don’t know exactly what’s down there,” said Mofitt. “I can’t see through the brush.”

“I know. We’ll go as fast as we can. But don’t get too far ahead of me.”

“Colonel, you don’t have a weapon.”

“I have my sidearm.” Danny unsnapped the holster of his personal weapon, a Glock 20 chambered for 10mm. It was a big gun, and the ammo packed an extreme wallop. The recoil was nasty as well, though not quite as extreme as might be expected from such a large round. “Lead the way.”

Mofitt took off, sorting through the trees in a zigzag pattern, occasionally stopping to let Danny catch up. He heard two trucks on the road, as well as more gunfire from the western end of the base. He visualized what was going on: the rebels had split their ground force, with a small group making an attack to the west. Meanwhile, the main group was coming up the road, intending to sweep up from the southeast while the defenders were occupied on the other side. The Malaysians had either somehow realized this and gone down to meet them, or simply blundered into the right spot at the right time.

Or wrong spot at the wrong time, depending on your point of view.

The F-35s would make quick work of the trucks, but they couldn’t hit them if the Malaysians were too close.

Mofitt stopped about ten yards from the road. Danny went down to his knees as he reached him.

“They must be moving up the road,” said Mofitt. “You can hear the gunfire. I’m thinking they realize the flank’s vulnerable.”

“Yeah,” agreed Danny. “But we gotta pull them back. Come on.”

“They may be trigger happy, Colonel. Better stay behind me, just in case.”

“You move so damn fast, I don’t have a choice,” said Danny.

Once in the air and moving like a “regular” airplane, the F-35B was relatively easy to fly. She wasn’t one of the racehorses Turk was used to, but she wasn’t a dog either. She went where she was told to go, responding crisply to his inputs.

Turk climbed through 5,000 feet, moving into a gradual orbit around the airfield as he sorted himself out. His helmet was an extension of the plane’s display panels, providing critical information on the systems; it was similar enough to the systems he was used to that he had to keep reminding himself he couldn’t handle the controls with gestures or voice commands, but actually had to fly with his hands and feet.

Not that this was a bad thing. It forced his mind and body to work together in a familiar and reassuring way, one that chased away trivial cares and worries. It was both a release and an exhilaration, a combination he had felt the first time he slipped into a pilot’s seat, as if his DNA had been programmed exactly for such an environment.

But he was more than a pilot. He was a warrior as well, and as he climbed he started looking for a way to join the battle.

The experience in Iran had cemented that identity. Thrust into an environment that was completely foreign to him — one where control was quite frankly beyond his grasp, where there were no checklists and where logic had almost nothing to do with what happened — Turk had not simply survived, but thrived. Iran’s nuclear warheads and their secret stockpile of weapons grade uranium had been destroyed because of Turk Mako. Plenty of other people had helped, but at the very end it had been him, his actions, that completed the mission.

In another man that realization might have caused extreme conceit. But in Turk it had the opposite effect — it tempered him, made him realize he should be humble. If he was a great pilot and a great fighter, then he surely didn’t have to prove himself, much less boast about it; what he had to do was his job. Destiny had given him tools, like a kid born with special math skills who had to work twice as hard to put them to work in the best way.

And so as he saw the other planes mustering for attack, Turk brought his plane into the tail end of their formation, forming as wingman on Basher Three, flown by Cowboy. Greenstreet, in Basher One, immediately noticed.

“Four, what’s your sitrep?” said the squadron commander.

“Forming up. I have Three’s wing.”

“Negative. I want you to maintain orbit over the base. Stay out of the way.”

“I’m armed and ready to help.”

“You’re armed and dangerous,” snapped Greenstreet. “Just chill, Air Force. You’ve done a hell of lot already.”

Three months before, Turk might have responded angrily, interpreting the remark as a slam against his abilities. Now he just shook his head, shrugged, then acknowledged. He’d find another way to contribute.

Danny could hear the trucks moving on the road as he and Mofitt finally reached the Malaysian captain.

“We have to fall back,” he told Captain Deris. “Come on. Pull back.”

“The enemy are going to attack,” said Deris. His thick accent took Danny a moment to decipher. “We must fight.”

“The planes will get them,” said Danny. “Come on. It’s OK. We’re not giving up. Let the planes do their job, and then we’ll take over.”

The captain nodded, then began shouting to his men, ordering them to fall back. A few moments later a pair of mortar rounds exploded behind them. The Malaysians hit the dirt. Bullets began raining through the brush. The enemy had seen that they were falling back and misinterpreted it as a panicked retreat.

Danny got on the radio. “We’re taking fire,” he told the Marine captain. “Where are those jets?”

“They’ll be there in a few minutes. They’re going after the mortars first,” said Thomas. “We have the mortars zeroed in for them.”

“We’re pinned down here,” said Danny. “Looks like they have machine guns mounted on the pickups.”

“Copy that. The planes will be ASAP.”

ASAP wasn’t going to do it. A fresh volley of fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets sent Danny prone. The Malaysians began returning fire, but that only intensified the attack. Another set of mortar shells fell behind them, these closer.

Captain Deris came over to Danny. The battle had changed dramatically in the last few moments; the Malaysians not only were no longer on the attack, they were now cut off from any reasonable defensive position.

“I have men down,” Deris told him. “We are going to be overrun.”

“The planes are coming,” said Danny. “The mortars are hitting above the hill. You can’t go up there. You’ll be cut down.”

“We will have to move,” said Deris. “At least if we take our chances through the shells, some will make it. Here, all will be killed. We have only these thin trees for cover.”

“How many men do you have?”

“Ten now, and two of those are wounded.”

Mofitt rose next to him and peered through his sight.

“Bastards are coming fast,” he said, then squeezed off a three-round burst, plunking one of the rebels.

It was too late to try running for it, Danny realized. He clicked the radio to talk to the Marine ground commander. But Thomas beat him to it, transmitting before Danny could say a word.

“Colonel, stand by for a transmission from Basher Four.” The Marine captain’s voice sounded hoarse; the gunfire in the background sounded very close. “Go ahead, Basher.”

“Colonel, this is Turk. Say location.”

“We’re about twenty yards from the road, on the southwest side directly below the Malaysian camp. There are two—”

“Yeah, roger, I got you. Hold your position. I’m taking the trucks out. I’ll check in before the next pass.”

“Everybody get down!” shouted Danny. “Down!”

The bombs came off the wings in quick succession, like the snap of a drummer’s wrist as he rolled on his snare. Turk banked, lining up to take a run with the cannon strapped to the F-5’s belly. The lead vehicle was on fire and the other had been broken in half by one of the bombs. He lit the cannon as his targeting pipper came up on a small pack of figures behind the second truck. They disappeared in a tornado of smoke.

Pulling back on the stick, Turk had a fleeting vision of what it would be like on the ground — chaos and death, the stink of burning metal and flesh in your nostrils.

It was truly hell. But you fought for your own, and you protected them, and that meant the other guy had to die.

The other guy. Which was why he was so mad at Breanna. She should have protected him, not sent an assassin.

“Basher Four to ground — Colonel, how are you looking?”

“Nice job, Four.”

“Do you need more? My gun’s full.”

“We have it under control. Trucks are on fire. Rebels are retreating. I owe you one,” added Danny. “Thanks.”

“Roger that. See you back at base.”

2

Zen wheeled himself out from behind his desk in his Senate office, revving himself into full-blown senator-at-work mode. There was a lot to do in the next few hours, starting with a vote in the chamber.

“OK, people,” he said, zipping into the outer office. “I’m off. See you all around three.”

“Senator?” His appointments secretary stood up from her desk, waving frantically to get his attention as he passed. “I have the President’s office on the line.”

“Tell ’em I just left for a vote,” he said, not bothering to stop.

“The President wants to set up a lunch. Today.”

Zen stopped at the door. President Todd didn’t call often, let alone ask to have lunch. When she did, it was usually trouble — for him.

But Breanna’s recounting of Todd’s comment the other night made him wonder what she was really up to. If he wanted to find out, lunch was the price he’d have to pay.

Maybe.

“I can’t do lunch,” he said, fudging, since his appointment could be easily put off. “But if she wants to see me at some point after three, that’s OK. Schedule it and text me.”

Zen saw Fran Knapp, his recently hired political aide, giving him a wary eye — blowing the President off for lunch was not considered a good political move.

Zen smiled at her, and kept smiling all the way to the Senate.

3

“The attack on the base had to have been helped by whoever is handling the UAVs,” said Danny, speaking to Breanna and Jonathon Reid a few hours after the attack had ended. “They’re trying to get rid of us.”

“It could easily be a coincidence,” said Reid. “There were no UAVs.”

“They had precise locations.”

“That airstrip dates to the 1950s,” answered Reid. “You have to be mindful of the politics here, Colonel. Both domestically and in geopolitical terms.”

“If they’re going to be this aggressive, we need to step up our force,” said Danny. “Or the Marines are going to take casualties. That’s going to be a disaster.”

“I think Danny has a point,” said Breanna. “We should have a full force there.”

“You know the problems with that,” said Reid.

“How about more observation assets, for starters?” said Danny.

“Even that will require the President’s approval,” said Reid. “And I don’t know that she’s going to give it.”

“We might as well ask for everything we want,” said Breanna.

“I’m not arguing with that,” answered Danny.

Three Malaysians had been killed and four wounded in the attack; the wounded had been medevacked via a Marine Osprey to the eastern Malaysian capital. Two Marines had been hit by shrapnel; both were taken back to the MEU’s flagship, offshore on the eastern side of the island several hundred miles away. The MEU was supporting Malaysian operations there.

“We still don’t know where the UAV came from,” said Reid.

“But we do know that it flies like one of ours,” said Danny. “And to me, that’s a bigger problem than whatever politics we’re worried about.”

“We’re well aware of the implications, Colonel.”

“All right,” said Danny.

“We’ve moved Team Two to Hawaii,” said Breanna. “So if the President does green-light us, they’ll be ready quickly. Sergeant Rockland is there with them. We have the Tigershark and four Sabres ready as well.”

“Right.”

“I’m not arguing with you,” put in Reid. “I’m just telling you what the situation is.”

They talked a while more about contingencies and different plans, but Danny couldn’t wait for the conversation to end. He was tired and beginning to feel frustrated, the inevitable result when politics or admin bs got in the way of action.

Greenstreet put his face barely two inches from Turk’s. “You still haven’t explained who said you could bomb those trucks.”

“I didn’t figure I needed permission to save the base,” answered Turk. He had to struggle to keep his voice level.

“I told you where to fly and what to do,” said Greenstreet. “We were coming back as soon as we took care of the mortars. We were back on target inside of five minutes.”

“Our guys might have been dead by then,” said Turk. “With respect.”

The conversation had been going on now for at least ten minutes. Conversation was the wrong word — it felt more like an inquisition.

“Hey, Colonel, you oughta lighten up,” said Cowboy, coming into the flight room at the end of the trailer. “Or at least lower your voice. We can hear you outside.”

“Who the hell asked your opinion, Lieutenant?”

“Just sayin’.”

“Do your sayin’ somewhere else.”

“Yes, sir.” Cowboy gave Turk a sympathetic look as he left the room.

“I know you’re a hotshot,” said Greenstreet, lowering his voice a few decibels. “But here you work for me. You got it?”

“I got it.”

“Just because I’m easygoing doesn’t mean I go for insubordination. I give an order, I expect it followed.”

Turk was at a loss for a response, wondering how Greenstreet could consider himself easygoing. Maybe because he hadn’t ordered him flogged.

“If you were a Marine, I’d have you busted to ensign,” continued the colonel.

“I don’t think you would,” said Turk. “I think if I were a Marine, you would have expected me to take out those trucks. You would have kicked my ass if I didn’t. Because my guys and my commander were in danger, and sure as shit it was my job to protect them. If I didn’t do that, and I was your pilot, you’d have me court-martialed. And I would deserve it.”

Greenstreet looked as if he’d been slapped across the face.

“Dismissed,” he told Turk.

“I don’t work for you,” said Turk, rising. “Even when I’m on the ground.”

“Get the hell out of my sight.”

Turk walked from the room at a deliberate pace. He knew he was right, and he knew that Greenstreet knew it, too. The knowledge filled him with an odd if grim satisfaction, as if he were the hero in an old-fashioned western like Shane — the misunderstood good guy never given credit for saving the day.

It was a dangerous notion, though. Different service or not, Greenstreet outranked him, and while the colonel would never in a million years sustain a charge of insubordination against him for saving the base, he surely could find a way to make things uncomfortable for him. This wasn’t the military of the Cold War, where an unreasonable officer could literally break a man just on a whim. But it was still the military, and Turk knew that by standing up to Greenstreet he was skating very close to the edge.

Still, he was right.

Getting brow-beaten had left him with an appetite. He went over to the tent that was serving as a mess area. Cowboy and Haydem, the Marine’s fourth pilot, were sitting at one of the tables when Turk walked in. Both men rose solemnly and applauded — albeit very lightly — when Turk went over with his coffee.

“Hey, Air Force,” said Cowboy. “Thanks for saving our plane.”

“Screw that. Thanks for saving the base,” said Haydem. “I hear our beer supply would have been blown up if the attack went on much longer.”

“It was nothing,” he told them. “Push button stuff.”

“We’re also applauding your entry into the brotherhood of abuse,” said Cowboy. “Now you’re one of us.”

“You’ve been christened,” said Haydem. “By Greenstreet’s spit.”

Turk laughed.

“He didn’t mean any of what he said,” Cowboy told him. “He knows you did the right thing.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Turk.

“He gets his underwear twisted up,” added Haydem. “But he’s a good pilot and a decent commander.”

“He’s a decent pilot,” said Turk, aware that he might be judging him on a harsh scale. “But as a commander…”

“He is definitely a hardass,” conceded Haydem.

“Prick’s more like it,” said Cowboy. “But it takes all kinds.”

“Our squadron’s the highest rated in the wing,” said Haydem.

“You can get good results without being an asshole,” said Turk.

“I’m not going to defend him,” said Haydem. “I’m just stating the facts.”

“And the facts are, these eggs suck,” said Cowboy.

“I heard that,” growled a Marine over by the food trays. “You think you can do better, you come up here and try it.”

Haydem and Turk laughed. Cowboy jumped up. “Hey, Slugs, I thought you’d never ask.”

Slugs — the cook — shook his head. Cowboy was well known in the unit as a wise guy with a good heart, and treated as such.

“I better apologize,” he told Turk. “Or I’ll end up like Rogers. He’s still flat on his back.”

“Jolly got that way because he ate some of the Malaysian shit,” said Haydem. “He was bragging about it.”

“Oh.” Turk realized he’d eaten with them, too, several times a day. He wondered if he was also going to get sick.

“You flew pretty well,” said Haydem. “You fly F-35s a lot?”

Turk shook his head. “Not too much.” He wasn’t sure how much to explain. “I fly a lot of different things, so, you know, variety.”

They talked about the F-35 for a bit more. Turk avoided mentioning the planes he flew, since the details were all pretty much classified. They were just discussing how much faster the aircraft might be with a bigger engine — no pilot was ever satisfied — when Cowboy came back to the table with a tray of doughnuts.

“How’d you manage that?” asked Haydem.

“Me and Slugs are friends from way back,” said Cowboy. “I appreciate his time in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait a few minutes and you can get some fresh coffee,” added Cowboy.

“I don’t need any more caffeine. I won’t be able to sleep.”

“You aren’t going to sleep, are you?” asked Cowboy.

“I was thinking about it.”

“No time. They’ll have us up for another mission ASAP.”

“Really?”

“What do you think, this is the Air Force?”

Turk laughed. “The Air Force was flying two and three missions a day in Libya when I was there.”

“You were in Libya?” asked Haydem.

“I’ve been in a few places.” Turk took one of the doughnuts.

“Our mysterious stranger,” said Cowboy. “Where do you keep your cape, Superman?”

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to brag.”

“He’s just a top secret man,” Haydem said. “He flies all sorts of things.”

“Flying saucers?” asked Cowboy. “They have those at Dreamland, right? That’s where that UFO landed.”

“Before my time,” said Turk. “Where’s that fresh coffee at?”

4

“As you can see, the flight pattern is exactly the same as WX2-BC, an early evasion path for the Flighthawks.” Ray Rubeo paused the video, a simulation that showed the actual path taken by the unknown UAV and the preprogrammed Flighthawk path. “Captain Mako identified it correctly.”

“Coincidence?” asked Jonathon Reid.

“Doubtful.” Rubeo touched his right earlobe, an old habit when faced with a difficult question. The gold stud earring was well worn. “The pattern is precisely the same. Not only do you have the initial maneuver, but you have the acceleration and escape as well. Any of the Flighthawk family would have acted precisely the same way, assuming that they are in autonomous mode.”

“It’s certainly not a Flighthawk,” said Breanna.

“No,” said Rubeo. He’d managed to nap a bit before the meeting, but it hardly compensated for the hours and nights he’d missed over the last two weeks. “Smaller, and faster than series Two or Three. Nor have we intercepted control transmissions.”

Rubeo flicked his hand in front of the screen to change the slide. The fuselage that Danny had recovered a week earlier appeared.

“As you know, the electronics of the aircraft that Colonel Freah came back with had been destroyed. First fried — to use the vernacular of some of my assistants — and then blown up by a small explosive, which severed this portion of the aircraft from the rest. However, we were able to recover some small bits of one of the chips, which were embedded in this portion of the remains.”

He flipped to a new slide, which showed what looked like a slag of brown dirt laced with silver tints.

“To give you an idea of scale, here is the chip, or what remains of it, with a dime.”

The coin loomed over the tiny bit of silicone.

“The chip is a computing unit,” continued Rubeo. “It is quite sophisticated. It appears to make use of ten-nanometer chip technology. That is significant for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact — or I should say apparent fact — that it had to have been custom-fabricated. It is at the high end of the scale.”

Rubeo continued, talking about how the technology allowed for massive processing power in a relatively small space. To give the others an idea, he mentioned that Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors — commonly used in high-end desk and laptop computers — contained in the area of 1.4 billion transistors (or actually the chip equivalent). The processor could change state roughly 100 million times a second. That was beyond the processing power of a supercomputer in the Cold War.

Assuming it was anywhere close to a standard size, the chip they had examined would have been several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Ivy Bridge, both in terms of size and speed. Rubeo’s people weren’t entirely sure how much faster — there was just too little to go on — but the technology appeared comparable to that in the nano-UAVs so recently used to wipe out Iran’s nuclear weapons.

The biggest problem for the chips was the heat they generated; this seemed to have been solved with a rather ingenious and extremely elegant air piping system, where microtunnels were bored into the surface of the aircraft and used to bathe the processors with cooling air. The so-called pipes were thinner than human hair, and webbed in a way so that the structural integrity of the aircraft was not harmed. The discovery of those pipes — Rubeo didn’t mention that he had been the one to spot them — were significant in many ways.

“What we’re looking at here is enormous manufacturing ability,” concluded Rubeo. “Even assuming these aircraft are essentially one-offs, hand-built. The skill necessary to create the airframe — let alone the brain that fits into it — is very, very high.”

“So it’s definitely not Chinese,” concluded Reid.

“I didn’t say that.” Rubeo touched his ear. “It doesn’t fit with the Chinese capabilities that I’m aware of. But that doesn’t mean it’s not Chinese. I have no evidence. I know several companies that could have manufactured the processors. All are in the United States. Including mine,” he added, feeling he ought to make explicit what Reid was probably thinking. “We have a laboratory facility dedicated solely to government work, and it would be capable of producing these chips.”

“But it didn’t,” said Breanna quickly.

“Our ten-nanometer chips are all accounted for,” said Rubeo.

“The nano-UAVs?”

“They were destroyed in Iran,” said Rubeo. “But those use eight nanometer chips. Which you will recall is why they are so absurdly expensive. And my company didn’t create those processors. We believe the CMOS limits no longer justify the technology, and so we’re moving in a different direction. Perhaps incorrectly,” he added.

“We should check every fab site we can think of,” said Breanna.

“Yes.” Rubeo had already made his own discreet inquiries without finding the actual manufacturer. “I would guess, though, that it was somewhere in Asia, maybe even Malaysia. An underutilized facility that has been overhauled with new equipment at much expense.”

“That could be anywhere,” said Reid.

“Yes.”

“So what are we dealing with?” Reid asked.

“Impossible to tell until we capture one,” said Rubeo. “If they are this sophisticated in chip technology, I can only make guesses about the weapons.”

“Twenty-five-millimeter cannon?” asked Breanna.

“I believe something lighter.”

“There were no weapons used in this last encounter,” said Reid.

“True. Maybe some carry weapons and some don’t. Or they weren’t correctly positioned for attack. Or many other possibilities,” said Rubeo. “But planes were shot down previously, and we have to assume that if they have the base technology, they can weaponize it. The Gen 4 Flighthawks would have carried lasers. And the Gen 4 Flighthawk appears to be an excellent model.”

He waved his hand for the next slide, which showed an artist’s rendition of the unknown UAV next to a Gen 4 Flighthawk. The Gen 4’s wings were a little longer, its tail a bit stubbier, but the airfoils were very similar. The Gen 4 had not gone into production, superseded by the smaller and faster Sabres, which were capable of distributed autonomous control — they made real-time decisions on their own.

“Lasers small enough to be on that class of UAVs are too impractical for combat,” said Reid. “The Air Force studied the matter in great depth.”

“They’re impractical only in a high-threat environment,” answered Rubeo. He had strongly disagreed with the Air Force’s assessment of small weaponized lasers, though the decision to choose the Sabres instead of the Gen 4s made the point moot. “And the report didn’t consider the latest evolutions.”

“It was a cost problem as much as anything,” said Breanna. “Outfitting a fleet of UAVs with lasers was a budget buster. The Flighthawks and the Sabres have proven that lightweight cannons are enough in aerial combat, and have an advantage in ground attack. For the foreseeable future, at least, they make a lot of sense.”

“All right. We need to tell the President that we need more data,” agreed Reid. “And we need it quickly. Clearly, it’s a critical threat. And it’s not coming from China.”

“No,” said Rubeo. “Ultimately, I’m afraid, we are probably the source of the technology.”

“We?”

“Dreamland, Special Projects, or my companies,” said Rubeo. “The links may seem vague, but their sum total is unmistakable.”

5

The Malaysian unit had been hit hard, with four of their men wounded and four dead. So Turk was surprised when Captain Deris came and told him he wanted to get back into the field immediately.

“There are only two places they could be now,” the captain told Turk after asking for his help. “If we can get flyovers we can see where they came from and strike at dark.”

“There were a lot of rebels. Most of them got away. Are you going to have reinforcements?”

“If the planes back us, we have more than enough.”

Deris sketched out a plan on a map of the area, then asked Turk to take it to the Marine squadron for approval. Turk, unsure what sort of reaction he would get from Greenstreet, decided to discuss it with Danny before doing anything else.

“I was worried you’d be sleeping,” he told the colonel when he spotted him in the mess tent.

Freah held up his coffee cup. “Not with the coffee these guys brew. I won’t be sleeping for a month. What’s up?”

“The Malaysians want to attack. They think they have the rebel bases figured out.”

Turk explained the plan to Danny.

“They’re brave, but that’s no substitute for firepower,” said Freah. “They don’t have enough people to do all this.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think so either,” said Turk. “But they want to get these guys.”

“The Marines are talking about finding the rest of the rebels who attacked them,” said Danny. “Maybe we can figure something out.”

Captain Thomas had asked for a platoon of reinforcements to be sent in from the MEU to go after the rebels who’d attacked. With three rifle sections or squads, the unit totaled forty men, and would be there by nightfall.

“We could send two squads with the Malaysians,” suggested Thomas. “That will be more than enough to deal with these guys, as long as we have air support.”

Greenstreet was in a better mood, or at least one that allowed him to ignore Turk when he saw him. Reviewing the plan with Cowboy, he gave a grudging nod, then said he was handicapped with Rogers still sick.

“I’m down to three pilots,” said Greenstreet. “I can only get three planes up.”

“We can do it with two,” said Thomas.

“You have to worry about the UAV showing up,” said Danny. “Are two planes enough?”

“You’d want two planes to deal with it,” suggested Turk. “So really, two planes handle the attack, and two fly cover.”

Greenstreet bristled, but didn’t contradict him.

“Then one jet on the attack, if we only have three,” said Thomas.

“It’s tight if they’re at both spots,” said Greenstreet. “It’s just a question of how much ordnance we can bring. Maybe we mix the loads, have one flying CAP and the other two attacking but ready to tangle with the UAV.”

CAP was an old acronym for command air patrol, meaning that the single aircraft would fly top cover for the others when they attacked.

“What about Turk flying?” asked Danny. “He did pretty well.”

“These are Marine aircraft,” snapped Greenstreet. “Marine aviators will fly them. I’ll work it out.”

Danny and Thomas exchanged a look, but there was nothing more to be said. Greenstreet stomped off, Cowboy in tow.

“He’ll come around,” predicted Thomas. “He’s just protecting his turf. Some guys are like that. Even Marines.”

“WE’RE MARINES, NOT pussies,” complained Cowboy as soon as they were out of earshot. His anger and language were calculated, though his sentiments were not. “I’ll go up and help them.”

“Relax, Lieutenant,” said Greenstreet. “I fully intend on doing the mission.”

“What?”

“I said I would work it out.”

“You kinda sounded—”

“Pissed off? Yes. We want two planes to deal with a UAV — what was that about?”

“He’s just being careful,” said Cowboy.

“You think he would have said that to an Air Force pilot?”

“Turk’s pretty straight up.”

“And another thing. They’re not sharing everything they know. That UAV is the entire reason we’re here. What do we know about it? Jack shit.”

“They say they’re here to get intel.”

“They’re spoon-feeding us information. That’s what I think.”

Cowboy didn’t think that was fair, but it was really beside the point. They had to fly the mission.

“We had casualties on the ground,” he told his commander. “That means we get out there and get some payback.”

“We’ll get payback.” Greenstreet folded his arms. “But we’ll do it right.”

“That’s why I’m here,” replied Cowboy. “It’s the only way I know how to do things.”

6

The appearance of the advanced UAVs in an obscure third world guerrilla battle had set off alarms within the American intelligence community. The immediate consensus among the tech people was that China had leapt several generations in UAV development and was testing the equipment in a place where few would notice. The fact that China had no ties to the rebels who were benefiting — and in fact had every reason not to support them — gave rise to another theory that Russia was actually the country behind the aircraft. This was backed by a smaller group, who had even less evidence on their side. Outlier theories — that Japan or Israel were involved — had occasionally been floated, only to be quickly shot down.

None of the theories tied the aircraft to either Dreamland, which had originally developed combat UAVs, or Rubeo’s different firms, which had worked on the AI and some of the avionics and body shaping.

But Rubeo knew they would. And for that reason alone, he had to figure out exactly what the aircraft were and who was flying them.

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. The combat UAVs had revolutionized air combat. And as dangerous as they were in the hands of China, they could be even more dangerous if controlled by someone else. From what Rubeo had seen so far, they were still being tested. Give whoever was handling them a few more months and they would be even more formidable.

Technically, Rubeo was no longer a government employee, but as the head of the firm that had designed most of the Cube’s systems and had an extremely close relationship with the Office of Special Projects, he’d been allotted an office in the deepest basement of the bunker, next to the situation room — convenient, since it allowed him to go back and forth quickly when he wanted. The office was spartan — a wooden desk, a very old, barely padded chair, a single lamp — but that was the way Rubeo liked it.

If he needed to sleep and wanted something more comfortable than the chair, he had a small bedroll tucked next to the desk.

The furniture was spare, but his communications and computing gear was state of the art. The desk sagged under the weight of four different sets of screens and hand-built CPU units, each more powerful than the standard IBM mainframe of only a generation ago.

He’d uploaded data from the UAV to one of his units, where he ran flight and computation simulators, trying to divine what the unidentified UAV was capable of. The parallels to the Flighthawk Gen 4 were striking. But as Rubeo looked at the data they had gathered so far, he went back to the destroyed chip.

He’d called it a processing chip during his briefing, but that wasn’t entirely correct. It seemed to actually function as a gateway between other processing chips, or at least that was his engineer’s theory. And Rubeo’s team had managed to extract a long piece of code from a memory unit embedded in the fuselage remnant.

The code sequence matched sequences used in the early Flighthawks, with an additional “tail” added for the brains used in the Gen 4 version.

There was no way that was a coincidence. While the “tail” solved a number of common problems that might be arrived at independently, appending it to the other sequences had been a matter of expediency — why reinvent the wheel?

The sequence had a command syntax: had it been words rather than numerals, it would have had a specific grammar and punctuation indicating that it was a command. But it was encrypted — though it was clearly a command, it was impossible to tell which command it was. To use the sentence metaphor, it was as if all the letters in the sentence had been exchanged for others.

The exchange wasn’t random, of course. And since Rubeo had a database of all the Gen 4 commands, breaking the encryption, while not trivial, was not impossible.

The computer back at his New Mexico lab had just done that. The command initiated a “flee” sequence, directing the aircraft to leave the battle ten minutes after the start of the encounter. It had been intended as a fail-safe if the controlled UAV lost its connection to the base; here it was probably being used to get the aircraft home.

But it wasn’t the command that interested Rubeo — it was the encryption. The Gen 4 Flighthawks used a software process for the encryption that took advantage of the nano-architecture of hand-built chips off the main circuits. There were advantages to this approach, most notably since it allowed for a more complicated — “robust” was the preferred term — system of encrypting the data in real time, which in turn made the UAV brains harder to hack. The process turned out to be too cumbersome for large-scale production; they could never get the chip count high enough to make it practical. Now, advances in manufacturing made that problem trivial; at the time, though, the process had been a breakthrough. DNA snippets were used as keys.

So here was a fingerprint — the DNA might reveal who had stolen the work, or at least whose work had been stolen.

“Compare vector in cycle Mark 56Z through Mark 987AA7 to typical DNA pattern,” Rubeo told the computer.

He waited as the mainframes back in New Mexico churned.

“Pattern would fit on X chromosome,” declared the computer.

Rubeo leaned back from the screen. He wasn’t sure whether to go on or not.

“Compare the possible encryption key to DNA contained in all personnel files for present and past employees, and in the Dreamland archives.”

It took twenty minutes — less time than he had thought.

“Match discovered,” said the computer.

“Identify,” said Rubeo.

“Gleason, Jennifer. Now deceased.”

7

None of the Malaysians had ever been in an Osprey before, and while Turk kept telling them it was no different than riding in a helicopter, they approached the aircraft with expressions similar to those of four-year-olds queuing for a pony ride. The wide-eyed stares continued once aboard the aircraft, whose interior was surely no fancier than the Eurocopters and Sikorskys they were used to. The Marine crew chief winked at Turk as they took off, joking that he could have charged the Malaysians for the ride and made a killing.

Dusk had fallen a few hours before. The sky was clear and there was enough light from the moon and the stars to see a good distance, though the jungle would make that far more difficult. But the darkness favored the Marines, who were not only equipped to fight in it but had practiced extensively to do so.

Sitting between Captain Deris and Private Isnin, Turk checked his gear. The Marines had outfitted him with an M-16 assault rifle and night vision, as well as body armor and a helmet. He had his own smart glasses, which not only tied into Whiplash but also to the Marines.

Though officially the Marines were “assisting” the Malaysians, in actual fact the operation was far more American than Malaysian. The Marines were not only supplying more men, they had redrawn the game plan from start to finish. It was better in any number of ways, and not simply because they had more men at their disposal.

A small group of rebels had been spotted at one of the clearing areas southwest of where they mounted the mortar attack. Apparently exhausted, they had stopped there to rest and restock; the rebels typically cached weapons in different areas for just such an occasion. Located some twenty miles from the base, the area lay along a dirt road that wound up on the side of a ridge. The nearby jungle canopy was too thick for the sensors on the Marine RQ7Z Shadow UAV to penetrate, but the Marines assumed that lookouts had been posted both near the road and at local high points, which would make any force moving on the road itself easily detected.

Their attack plan took advantage of that. Split in two, the assault teams would be dropped at two different landing zones four miles from the rebels, one northeast and one southwest. The group dropped to the southwest would move into a blocking position straddling the road a mile south of the rebels. The other would advance toward the camp from the north along the road. The idea was simple: the rebels would see the advancing unit and move to get away, running into the group at the bottom. They would be “encouraged” to move by an air attack just as the northern force came into sight.

There was a possibility, of course, that the rebels would stand and fight, even though their position was not well chosen for defense. In that case, the hammer and anvil attack would turn into an envelopment, with the southern group pressing most of the attack. This would be a slower operation but it would still allow the Marines to bring overwhelming force against their enemy.

Turk and most of the Malaysians were with the southern group; only Sergeant Intan was with the northern group, providing Malaysian presence more for legal reasons than strategy.

The Osprey taxied for a few seconds then lifted off, flying more as an airplane than a helicopter. Only a few moments seemed to pass before the Marine crew chief walked down the aisle at the center of the aircraft and held up two fingers.

“Two minutes,” he said. “Two minutes.”

Danny Freah ducked his head involuntarily as he ran toward the rear of the Osprey. The rotors, just starting to spin, were nowhere near him, but there was something about the windmill sound overhead that triggered the ducking reflex.

“Hi, Colonel, what’s up?” asked Corporal Mofitt. The corporal was with Group North, the augmented Marine rifle squad that would attack the rebels first.

“I decided to come along for the ride.”

Mofitt gave him a thumbs-up, then turned to the officer next to him. “Sir, do you know Colonel Freah?”

“We met,” said the lieutenant, Tom Young. The squad leader got up from the nylon fabric bench to stick out his hand. Danny had met him during the mission brief.

“Hey, Tom,” said Danny, sticking out his hand to put the young man at ease. “Don’t mind me. I’m just along for the ride. It’s your show.”

“Yes, sir, thank you,” said Young.

Danny knew that the lieutenant would feel a little uncomfortable having a senior officer looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t here to criticize or even supervise; he just wanted to be where the action was.

“I’ll try to stay out of your way,” he told the Marine officer, whose square chin looked a little too wide for the rest of his face. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d make myself useful.”

“Yes, sir.”

Danny took a seat across the aisle and scanned the rest of the faces in the aircraft. A few were expressionless, eyes locked on some invisible point in the distance. A few looked worried, not fearful exactly but apprehensive. Danny recognized the look, common in men who had never faced combat — concerned that they might let their buddies down.

The majority had nothing to fear in that regard.

There were also a few expressions that spoke only of eagerness. These belonged to men whose adrenaline was already raging, for whom danger and excitement were life itself.

Danny suspected his face looked very much like theirs, even though he did his best to hide his emotions.

Combat was an unforgiving and uncompromising master; it extracted things far more valuable than the momentary adrenaline high. People he loved had died, and worse. That there were many worse things than death was still something that shocked him.

And yet he went to it willingly. More — he sought it out.

There was something about sitting in a metal container hurling toward destiny at a few hundred miles an hour that he could never get enough of.

He studied the lieutenant. He was a good-looking kid, six-two, a little thin but rangy, the way Marines liked their officers. There was something about his intense look that Danny knew his men would respond to. Leadership a lot of times hinged on those subtle signs as much as training and intelligence, even more than courage. The tone of voice, a habit of staring — there were any number of accidental ways that a man might inspire others just by being himself.

“LZ ahead,” the crew chief said, walking down the aisle of the Osprey.

“Already?” said Mofitt. “We barely took off.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” said Lieutenant Young.

It took roughly a half hour for Turk and Force South to reach their positions along the road below the rebel camp. The Marines moved with quiet precision, stretched out in a staggered single file. Their UAV scouting overhead showed that the rebels remained in place. While a handful of men moved in the jungle on either side to ensure there were no surprises, the main force stuck to the road, which allowed them to move quickly.

The Malaysian squad was interspersed with the lead company; though they’d had a long and harrowing day, they had no trouble keeping up. They were spoiling for battle, eager for revenge. Monday Isnin’s head bobbed back and forth as he walked, almost like a radar dish scanning for trouble.

The road twisted around the side of a low rise in the terrain. As they reached the area where they had planned to mount their ambush, the Marines discovered it was separated from the road by a thick marsh, which would make it difficult for them to pursue the rebels. Captain Deris had worked them a little closer to the rebels; it was on lower ground, but the surrounding area was better, and they had good fields of fire to the road and beyond. The Marines settled in, sending a pair of scouts ahead to monitor the approach.

The rebels were still far enough away that Force South could relax a bit. The Malaysians took out their cigarettes and began smoking; it was their normal habit.

Marlboros were the preferred brand. They could have done a commercial.

“You know Mai Thai Warrior?” Monday asked Turk as he settled against a tree trunk on the jungle floor.

“I don’t know him,” said Turk, confused. He thought the soldier was talking about another squad member and couldn’t place him.

Monday gave him a funny look. “Movie,” he said. “Mai Thai Warrior.”

Turk still didn’t understand.

“Hero,” prompted Monday. “Movie.”

“I know it,” said one of the Marines. “Martial-arts movie, right?”

“Great warrior,” said Monday. He began mimicking one of the fight scenes. Then he and the Marine traded notes about some of the techniques.

“Great hero,” said Monday. His voice was solemn.

“I’ll have to check it out,” said Turk.

“We watch it together when we get back to city,” said Monday.

“It’s a deal.”

Danny went down to one knee next to Lieutenant Young as the squad leader stopped to take stock of their position. They were about a quarter mile from the rebel camp, just north of a bend in the road where they would be visible.

“I’m ready to call the planes in,” said Young, who was looking at a feed from the Shadow UAV overhead on a hardened tablet computer. About the size of an iPad but several times as thick and encased in rubber, the tablet gave the commander a real-time view of the battlefield. “Looks like they have a lookout on the hill there,” added Young. “Just one guy.”

“Across the road?”

“Scouts don’t see anyone.”

“If you can take him, you can get closer to the camp before they see you,” suggested Danny.

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Young. “It’s a gamble, though. If he radios back, we won’t have surprise.”

“True.”

Young weighed the chances. There was no right answer.

“I’m going to send my sniper,” he said finally. “Take him out. Then we move farther down.”

“It’s what I would do,” said Danny.

Flying Basher Two north of the engagement area, Cowboy listened to Greenstreet as he talked to the air combat controller assigned to Group North. The ground unit had just reached its mark north of the rebel site.

“We’re going to take out their lookout,” said the controller, relaying what Lieutenant Young was telling him. “Once he’s out, we can get within a hundred yards before they’ll be able to see us.”

“How long is that going to take?” asked Greenstreet.

“Ten minutes. We sent a sniper team.”

“All right.” Greenstreet exhaled heavily. “Let’s move it along.”

“Problem, Colonel?” Cowboy asked over the squadron frequency after the exchange.

“I feel like shit,” admitted Greenstreet. “Rogers gave me his disease.”

“I can take it myself, Colonel.”

“I’m good.”

Cowboy checked his fuel, then ran his eyes over the gauges, making sure the plane’s brain agreed with his gut feel that it was operating exactly to spec.

With the exception of a few high clouds to the west, the sky was perfectly clear. The stars twinkled above; the tiny sliver of moon sat between them, a silver comma.

The sensors were clean as well — they were the only aircraft in the skies for a hundred miles or more.

Which meant no UAV. Cowboy wanted another shot at the little bastard. He’d replayed the encounter in his head a few hundred times, seeing how he could have nailed the little sucker.

Next time, he would.

The mysterious little aircraft intrigued the hell out of him. It was fast, and from what Turk had said, very much like a Flighthawk in its approach to air combat. Cowboy had flown against a pair of Flighthawks in a series of training exercises. Of the five encounters, he’d managed to beat the little robot planes exactly once — and been shot down all the rest.

He wasn’t particularly proud of that, even if it came against some of the best Flighthawk pilots in the Air Force. And even if he had the only shoot-down in the squadron.

He wanted a measure of revenge, and waxing the little sucker tonight would give it to him. A robot better than a human? No way — even if that robot was being flown by a team of people in a bunker.

Especially then.

“Basher Two, tighten up,” said Greenstreet.

Cowboy acknowledged. The ground commander came on the radio. They would be ready for the first strike in sixty seconds.

It was an intricate dance, but it moved exactly as it had been drawn up by Young and Thomas.

Danny heard a shot on the hill ahead — the sniper took out the rebels’ lookout. The Marines began to move in force. The planes swooped down and dropped four bombs on the center of the rebel camp. As they cleared, the Marines attacked the perimeter.

They were within fifty yards of the rebels’ makeshift lean-tos before there was any gunfire. And then it was on big-time, tracers and flashes lighting the night.

A few of the Marines, untested in war, were nervous, and it showed: firing on the run, shooting too soon. But it was an almost necessary mistake, and within moments they realized they had to stay within themselves, had to fight the way they’d been trained, the way they’d drilled. The dozens of exercises they’d worked through over the past several months had embedded memory in their muscles. They slowed down, still moving forward but now doing it with more precision. They fired with better purpose, picking targets one by one.

Before the mission they’d been boys, most not old enough to drink legally in the States. In a few minutes this night they became men, and more than that, Marines. They worked together, in pairs, in threes, in fours, as a whole group, never alone.

Used to fighting small, ill-equipped units of the Malaysian army, the rebels buckled. Exhausted from the earlier fight, they had trouble seeing the enemy even in the clearing. As the gunfire intensified, their conviction wavered. The drugs most had used to gather courage earlier in the day had worn off. In chaos, they began to run.

“Hold back! Hold back!” yelled Lieutenant Young. “We’re sending the planes in for another run. Sit tight.”

Cowboy relaxed as the piper in his targeting screen settled on the knot of rebel soldiers in the lead. He pressed the trigger on the stick, pickling two bombs, then pulled the plane upward, rising above the target area quickly and preparing to circle back for another run. He glanced right, looking for the infrared image of the cluster bombs he’d dropped exploding, but he was moving too fast and was already beyond the explosions.

“Good hits,” said Lieutenant Young over the radio. “Basher, stand off.”

“Roger that,” said Greenstreet. His voice was weak.

“One, you good?” asked Cowboy.

The flight leader didn’t answer. Cowboy saw his F-35 flying above and to his left, about two miles away. He began climbing, aiming to get closer to his commander and make sure he was OK.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” said Greenstreet finally. He sounded anything but.

“Sick?”

“Ughhh…”

“Why don’t you go back, Colonel? We’re done here. These guys are just going to mop up. I can handle it.”

“Roger.”

The answer came so quickly that Cowboy knew Greenstreet must be really sick. He altered course slightly, widening his orbit as Basher One angled away.

“Nothing left to do but sing,” said Cowboy, humming a song from Drowning Pool as he radioed the ground for a sitrep.

The first man came through the brush, pushing a large clump of brush away as he ducked onto the road. Turk studied him in his scope, waiting until the rebel turned toward him so he had a broad, easy target. Finger against the trigger, Turk squeezed so gently that it seemed to take forever before the mechanism released the hammer and set the charge.

But then everything went quick: three rounds sped through the barrel, slicing through the man’s chest. A misshapen rose bloomed in Turk’s viewfinder, and the man folded into the ground.

“Three more, left,” said one of the Marines on his right.

The last word was nearly drowned out by gunfire as the others started to fire. The edge of the jungle was suddenly full of rebels. Turk zeroed in on one, only to see him fall before he could squeeze the trigger. He moved his scope right, toward the road; a half-dozen rebels were crouched, trying to return fire. All were down before Turk could aim.

Suddenly there was a loud yell behind him, then a whoop that made Turk think of the battle cries Indians made in old westerns. Captain Deris leapt forward and started to run down the embankment toward the road and the rebel position. In a flash his men rose to follow. The Marines hesitated for a moment, and then they, too, began running.

The battle was over by the time they reached the road. Fourteen rebels lay dead or dying; another two found severely wounded in the high grass on the southern side. Turk used the infrared on his glasses to search the area and found four rebels huddled about 150 yards west in the jungle. They were the only survivors of the rebel force that had attacked the base earlier in the day.

“Are they dead or alive?” asked the Marine captain.

“Alive, but maybe wounded,” said Turk. “They’re not moving much.”

“We’ll take the Malaysians up there and see if we can get them to surrender,” said the Marine commander. “Maybe we’ll get some intel.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

The bombs and cluster bombs had made a mess of the rebel camp, and even Danny wasn’t prepared for what he saw when he reached it.

Body parts hung from shattered trees; severed torsos littered the ground. The area stank of burnt flesh. One of the bombs had hit an underground spring, and water was seeping everywhere, filling the wide crater made by a five hundred pounder.

Danny’s boots squished in the bloody mud. The water made it seem as if the earth itself were bleeding.

Seeing that the area was secure and there were no more rebels in the immediate vicinity, the Marines lit flares for illumination. The light was fickle, as if not even Heaven wanted to look at the destruction.

“We’re never going to know how many are dead,” said Lieutenant Young, coming over to Danny as he surveyed the scene. “Pretty damn brutal.”

“Yeah,” agreed Danny.

“Bunch of assholes,” said Young bitterly. “Who the hell do they think they’re fighting against? Look at them — no armor, shitty Chinese weapons. That kid’s what, fifteen?”

Danny glanced at the face. A thick shadow fell across the bottom half, obscuring his cheeks and mouth, but the eyes were clear, large and shiny with reflected light.

“Yeah,” admitted Danny. “Sixteen at most.”

“What a fucking waste,” said the Marine officer bitterly. “What the hell are they even fighting for? Islam? Like God wants them to kill each other. Shit. Idiots.”

Young detailed four men to “organize the remains,” as he put it. The looks on their faces made it clear they would have welcomed any other order in the world, but it was a necessary job; no support units were going to roll in and sweep up. With Sergeant Intan’s help, they chose a dry bomb crater and began moving the dead to it. The burial was intended to be temporary; the Marine command would formally notify the Malaysian government, which would then decide how to repatriate the remains with their families.

In theory, anyway, Danny suspected that the government would not put a high priority on the job.

He checked in with Turk, who told him that South Force had completed the ambush, vanquishing the rebels.

“There are four guys alive in the jungle,” Turk added. “They’re surrendering. They may have intel on the UAV.”

“OK, good.” It was unlikely they had real information about the UAV, but they might have details about how the forces coordinated with it and possibly who worked with the rebels. There was scant data on the rebel group to begin with, and any information might be helpful.

“Pretty brutal over here,” Danny added as two men passed with a body.

“Yeah,” said Turk. “Here, too. That’s what they get.”

While Danny certainly understood Turk’s comment — in a way it was little different than the Marine commander’s — he was surprised by it. It was out of character, particularly coldhearted for the pilot.

Fallout from Iran, Danny thought.

With the area now completely secure, the Marines not assigned to provide security pitched in to help move and organize the remains. It was a grim, silent task, performed as much as possible with eyes closed.

Danny watched as one of the Marines picked up a trenching tool and began shoveling dirt into the hole. Two more shovels, the small portable ones carried as gear, were located and the dead began to be covered. Walking away from the grave, Danny saw Mofitt resting on his haunches. He had his head in his hands.

“You OK, Corporal?” he asked.

Mofitt looked up. “I’ve seen shit, but this is bad.”

“Yeah,” agreed Danny.

Mofitt shook his head. “They would have done the same to us.”

“They tried to. With the mortars.”

“True. Mothers.”

“You OK?”

“I’m fine,” said the corporal, continuing to stare. “Tired, but fine.”

8

Ray Rubeo sat in his office for hours, his mind blank, shaken by the discovery that the DNA key in the UAVs belonged to Jennifer Gleason.

It ought not to have surprised him, he realized. She had been the lead scientist on the project. Whoever had stolen the coding and presumably the plans it was part of had taken her work files and used them with little or no alteration.

Rubeo was an unemotional man, but he felt his stomach queasy and his hands trembling. Jennifer Gleason had been his prize pupil, his best employee, and in many ways his best friend.

Few people could have had access to her work files, which not even Rubeo could see without running a long bureaucratic gamut of checks, balances, and obstructions.

And according to the records office, no one had, since they were sealed shortly after her death.

He saw the expression on her face, her death mask — she’d been beheaded.

Rubeo leaned his head down, shattered by the memory.

Finally, almost unconsciously, he took out his satellite phone and called one of the few people whom he could speak to about her, the one person closer to Jennifer than he was.

Tecumseh Bastian answered on the third ring.

“Hello, Ray,” he said. “What’s going on that you’re calling this late?”

“I…” Rubeo stopped speaking. It took a moment for him to regroup. “I think someone stole some of the work we did at Dreamland,” he told his former commander. “I need — I just wanted to bounce some names off you.”

“Shoot.”

“Lloyd Braxton.”

“Hmmmph,” said Bastian.

“I know you don’t like him.”

“I have good reason. What has he taken?”

“I don’t know if it’s him,” said Rubeo. He was lying — it had to be Braxton, who was not only a genius but had left Dreamland just before Jennifer’s death, and under difficult circumstances. Just saying his name out loud convinced Rubeo he was right.

“So, why are you calling, then?” asked Bastian.

“I need to talk this out with someone I trust.”

“Talk.”

“I’d… I’d like to come up in person.”

“I’m too busy, Ray. Talk now.”

Rubeo knew Bastian wasn’t busy; he hadn’t been busy since he left the Air Force following Jennifer’s death. He just didn’t like interacting with the world, even with Rubeo, who was probably his only friend from the Dreamland days still in touch. Bastian didn’t even talk to his daughter, Breanna Stockard.

“I wonder if Braxton could have left with the computer files on the Gen 4 Flighthawk project,” said Rubeo.

“I doubt it.”

“He might have stolen them before he was cashiered,” said Rubeo.

“That’s possible,” said Bastian. “But I doubt he could have taken much.”

“He might not need much,” said Rubeo. “A chip, early prototypes. He’d be able to remember much of what he did — he had a phenomenal brain.”

“You know he’s rich, right? He owns that company.”

“I’ll have to do a little background work,” said Rubeo. “I lost track of him.”

“He has a whole foundation,” continued Bastian. “He’s an anarchist.”

“An anarchist?”

“You never were much of a people person, Ray,” said Bastian. “That’s why I liked you.”

Rubeo had nothing to say to that.

“Tell you what — I’m going back to bed. If you want to talk, you know where I am.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not your commander anymore, Ray.” Another man might have chuckled, but Bastian simply hung up.

9

Turk told Basher flight what was going on, then got up and ran to Captain Deris and his Malaysians. The soldiers were advancing warily up the hill as the Marines came down with the captured rebels.

“Pick one of them to question,” Turk suggested. “And hold the rest for pickup.”

Deris chose the oldest rebel, and led the group down to the road to Captain Thomas and the Senior Marine NCO, “Gunny” Smith. The trio started questioning him, with Deris acting both as inquisitor and interpreter. Turk stood by, listening to the halting dialogue — Deris peppered the man with questions, the rebel answered in monosyllables, Deris translated.

“No more alive, he says. I don’t trust him,” Deris told the Marines.

“Ask him the size of the force,” said Gunny Smith. “We can work the rest out for ourselves.”

Deris asked a question. When the rebel answered by shaking his head, Deris began shouting at him.

“Ease up, ease up,” said Thomas. “That’s not getting us anywhere.”

“I have to make him talk.”

“He’ll just lie to get you off his back,” said the captain. “Get someone else. We got three more.”

“This one was a squad leader. The others are frightened children. They’ll know nothing. Not even their prayers.”

Gunny Smith reached into one of the pockets on his tac vest and took out a candy bar. He tossed it to Deris.

“Try making friends and see if that works,” suggested the sergeant.

Deris frowned, but started to hand the bar to the rebel. The rebel backed away.

“Tell him it’s food,” said the Marine.

Another round of shouting ensued.

“He thinks we’re trying to poison him,” explained Deris finally.

Gunny Smith took the bar back, broke it in two and pulled off the wrapper. Then he began eating half of it.

“Not bad,” he said, holding the other half out to the prisoner.

The rebel batted it away. Deris swung his fist, hitting the man in the side of the head.

Turk jumped forward and grabbed the Malaysian captain around the chest. The Malaysian was shorter than him but powerfully built, and Turk had to struggle to hold him off the POW.

“Hey, hey, none of that,” said Thomas. “Relax. These fuckers are prisoners of ours. We can’t be hitting them.”

“He’s a criminal,” said Deris.

“You’re right,” said Smith. “But we have to follow the law. Capisce?”

“Law? What law? He is criminal and killer.” Deris looked up at Turk, who was still holding him. “Why are you protecting him, Turk? He killed my men. He tried to kill you. Why would you protect him?”

Turk stuttered, unable to find an answer — in truth, he agreed with the Malaysian captain emotionally, even though he knew he was not permitted to strike a prisoner. It was Gunny Smith who spoke up.

“Listen, I’d love to slam the son of a bitch myself,” he said. “It’d feel pretty damn good. But we need the bastard for interrogation. Intel. This way other people don’t get hurt. If that means laying off, not belting him — that’s what we got to do. Damn. We’re just saving other lives. Maybe people we love, you know?”

“He’s right,” agreed Turk, wishing he’d been the one to say it.

Deris didn’t look impressed. He said something in Malaysian, then put up his hands, signaling to Turk that he wouldn’t struggle any more. Turk let him go.

Deris yelled something at the rebel — Turk guessed it was along the lines of, You’re lucky these guys held me back or you’d be dog meat by now — then turned and stalked back to his men.

“Kind of a hothead, huh?” Gunny Smith smiled at Turk. Then raised his rifle at the prisoner. “Don’t try anything or I’ll shoot your balls off.”

The man may not have understood English, but he certainly understood the threat. He put up his hands. When Gunny Smith gestured for him to sit down, he quickly complied.

“Can you hold on to him while I get some cuffs?” the Marine asked Turk.

“Sure.” Turk raised his rifle.

Gunny took a step back, then another, making sure the prisoner wouldn’t try anything. Turk steadied the gun on the prisoner. Dirty and exhausted, the rebel looked even younger than the Malaysians. He stared at Turk with hard eyes, defiant. Turk wondered if he was thinking of trying to run — not to actually escape, but to get shot and die like his friends had.

If he does that, will I be able to shoot him?

Easily.

The answer surprised Turk, yet as soon as it formed in his brain, he knew it was true. He was angry, deeply angry — not at the rebel, not the way the Malaysians were. Their anger was immediate. It made sense — they were mad at the people who had killed their friends.

Turk’s rage ran deeper. He was mad at Breanna for ordering him killed. He was mad at the Iranians for cheating on their nuclear agreement and making the attack that had killed so many lives necessary. He was mad at the senselessness of the rebel movement, angry beyond reason at whoever was helping them with cutting-edge technology.

He was mad at mankind in general for being so thoughtless, so careless with life.

And he was mad at himself for not being able to do anything about any of it.

The sergeant came back with the handcuffs. Glancing at Turk to make sure he was watching carefully, he dropped to a knee behind the prisoner and quickly trussed his hands. Then he pulled him to his feet and pushed him in the direction of two of his men.

“Hey, Captain, you all right?” Gunny Smith asked Turk as the prisoner was led away.

“I’m OK. Why?”

“I thought for a minute you were going to shoot me, too,” said the Marine. He laughed and reached into one of his pockets for a tin of chew. Wadding the tobacco, he tucked it into the corner of his lip. “Dip?”

“Nah.”

“Dirty habit.” The Marine smiled. “Best keep away from it.” He worked the plug a bit. “You seen a lot of action?”

Turk shrugged.

“I heard you were in Iran,” added the Marine. “Top secret shit.”

“I was over there,” admitted Turk. “How’d you hear that?”

“Word gets around.” Gunny Smith worked the plug of tobacco in his mouth. “You don’t think we’d work with just any Air Force punk, do you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t work with just any Marines,” said Turk.

The sergeant laughed, then spit. “You sure you don’t want some chew?”

“No thanks.”

“Let’s go try talking to another of these guys, right?”

As Turk started to follow, the radio buzzed. It was Cowboy, in Basher Two.

“Ground, I have more of those UAVs en route,” he said. “Six of them, two hundred miles away. And they are moving! Twelve hundred knots, right at my face.”

10

Unable to sleep, Zen lay faceup on the bed. Breanna wasn’t home, and had told him she might not be until sometime the next day. It was worse than when they both worked at Dreamland.

Not really. For all the pressure, things were a lot less stressful now. And safer.

He thought of getting up but knew he needed sleep. He tried diverting his thoughts, but inevitably they came back to his meeting with the President.

She was in campaign mode… for him, not her.

“Senator Stockard is here, Madam President.”

“Show him in, and bring the coffee, please.”

He’d been waiting at the door. He started wheeling in; she met him a few steps inside the Oval Office.

“Jeff, so good to see you. Come on in. Tracey’ll bring us some coffee.”

“No beer?”

It took Todd a moment to realize he was pulling her leg. She shook her head and took a seat in front of her desk, waiting as he maneuvered his wheelchair. Her aide came in with a tray of coffee and cookies.

“Raspberry filled,” said Zen, picking one up. “My favorite.”

Raspberry cookies. They’d be worth getting out of bed for. But they didn’t have any.

No?

No.

“Tracey’s very good at remembering things,” said Todd, loud enough to make sure her aide heard as she left the office.

“So what vote am I being asked for here?” said Zen.

“Vote?”

“Come on, Madam President. I know you don’t engage in cookie diplomacy for no reason.”

“Actually, I wanted to say that I appreciated your vote on the NSA bill,” said Todd. “Your voice was important in the committee, and it was critical in the Senate. Thank you.”

“It was the right thing to do.”

Zen picked up his coffee — black — and took a sip. Todd put hers down and plunged ahead.

“I ran into your wife the other day, and I mentioned that I thought you would make an excellent President,” she said. “I wanted to follow up on that.”

“You’re not planning on resigning, are you?”

The remark caught her by surprise. She wasn’t, but she wondered if there were rumors.

“No, no,” said Todd. “But… if I were to decide not to run again, I wonder if you would be the sort of person who would toss their hat in the ring.”

Had she said that? It didn’t sound like her.

Something along those lines, at least.

“Because I for one would want to be in a position to help that along,” she continued. “I think you’d be excellent. And I think you could get the nomination.”

“You’re not planning on running for reelection?”

“I’m giving it a lot of thought, and will be giving it a lot more thought,” she told him. “If I knew someone like you — you specifically — were interested in running, that would certainly be a factor. And, candidly, I would work to make sure that you were in the best position to do that. If I stayed on for a second term, one way or the other, it would certainly help, I think, not hurt you.”

That was as close as any politician would ever come to urging someone else to run. It was an admission — but an admission of what, exactly?

That she was giving up power. And who did that?

Willingly, anyway.

But Todd was different. Todd — well, they’d had disagreements, but at the end of the day she was a strong, moral person, someone with integrity. And a good President.

“Wouldn’t Vice President Mantis be the party’s likely candidate?” asked Zen.

“Preying Mantis?” She made a face.

They certainly shared that opinion. Her vice president was the most despicable, lying, conniving politician he’d ever met, and that was saying quite a lot.

“I think he can be defeated in a primary,” said Todd.

“I wonder if the country’s ready for someone in a wheelchair,” said Zen.

“We’ve already had a President in a wheelchair,” she said. “Franklin Roosevelt.”

“Yes, but the public didn’t know.”

“I think the public is ready. Certainly in your case.” She rose. “Let’s have another discussion in a few weeks. There are people whom I’d like you to speak to.”

“Why exactly aren’t you going to run?”

“If I decide not to run,” she said, “it won’t be because of a scandal, or anything to do with the job.”

“No?” He stared at her; she met it.

“I think you know me well enough on that score.”

“I do,” admitted Zen. “I assume you’d want this absolutely confidential.”

“I know I can count on you.”

“As much as anyone,” said Zen.

He really missed Breanna.

Zen rolled over, closing his eyes and trying to slip back to sleep.

11

Cowboy continued to climb, intending to use the altitude to help him build speed for an attack. There were six of them, moving tightly in a diamond, with one in the lead, then two, then three. The two aircraft on the ends split off, angling away from the others in what looked like a pincer movement. Cowboy assumed they were going to try and tuck around him if he stayed on his course.

“Ground, the aircraft just split up,” he told Turk.

“Yeah, I’m looking at it,” answered Turk. The feed from Cowboy’s F-35 was being piped through the Whiplash system into Turk’s display.

“They’re going to come behind me, I think.”

“What they’re looking for you to do is break one way or the other,” said Turk. “Then whichever side you’re on, the fighter in the lead and then the one behind will engage you head-on. The idea is to slow you down so the rest can swarm in.”

“Yeah?”

“They do it all the time.”

“So how do I beat it?”

“Come straight at them. All their attack patterns are optimized for a rear quarter attack because of their weapons,” added Turk. “If they’re armed, that is.”

“You don’t think these are armed?”

“We won’t know until they attack. No weapons radars.”

“Right,” said Cowboy. “But they sure look like they’re aggressive — they’re climbing.”

Aggressive or not, neither pilot could fire until they were in imminent danger — fired on or locked by a weapons radar. So they had to wait — or hope for a direct order from Danny Freah, who was empowered to interpret the situation according to his overall mission orders as well as the ROEs, or rules of engagement. So they had to prepare themselves for combat — and yet do nothing.

“If they go hostile, target the middle aircraft,” suggested Turk. “Fire your radar missiles.”

“Not at the lead?”

“No. They’re keying the attack off the plane in the middle. If it diverts, they have to re-form. It’s a vulnerability in a large formation — they were originally designed to work in pairs.”

“You sure?”

“I’m guessing,” admitted Turk.

Basher Three, which was flying top cover over the base, checked in. He was coming south. Turk told him to stay back over the base — the UAVs might split and make their primary attack here.

“You’ll know by their reaction when Cowboy fires,” he said.

At the speed they were closing, Cowboy had another thirty seconds before the UAVs were within firing range.

“You think these guys are hostile?” Cowboy asked Turk.

“Hell, yes. Don’t you?”

“Yeah, and they’re getting close. But the ROEs are pretty specific.”

“I’m working on that. Stand by. I’m going to patch Colonel Freah onto the shared frequency.”

Danny Freah came on the circuit. His voice was clipped and formal — Cowboy realized he was talking “for the record.”

“Basher, state your situation,” directed Freah.

“Colonel, I have six unidentified UAVs coming at me in what Captain Mako says is an attack pattern. I want permission to shoot them down.”

“Do you feel yourself in imminent danger?” asked Freah.

“I feel I’m about to be fired on, yes sir.”

“Permission to engage granted,” said Freah.

Wow, that was easy, thought Cowboy. He’d expected an argument, or at least more questions.

The F-35 had two AMRAAM missiles in its larger internal bay, along with a pair of Sidewinder heat-seekers on its wings. Cowboy dialed up the radar missiles, designated the two targets, and got good locks on both. Just as he was about to fire, however, he lost his fix — the little UAVs had initiated ECMs.

They also started a countermaneuver. The four planes that had stayed together separated into two groups. One charged upward while the other dove toward the earth.

It took Turk a few moments to figure out what they were doing.

“Dive on the ones that are hitting the deck,” he told Cowboy.

It was a counterintuitive move, to say the least.

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

Cowboy hesitated, but only for a moment. He pushed his stick in, plotting an intercept about five miles to the west, on his left in the airplane. As soon as the nose of his aircraft tucked downward, the two aircraft that had started to climb spun back in his direction.

“Roll on your wing and pull around as close to a 180 as you possibly can,” said Turk, telling Cowboy to change direction. “They’ll be on your nose in about thirty seconds. You’re going to want to fire right away.”

“I don’t have a lock.”

“Do it. They’ll get out of there anyway. Then push down and flip over. Look for the two fighters below you.”

“Easy for you to say,” muttered Cowboy, but he did exactly as Turk had suggested. The Lightning II slid down on its wing, then shuddered as Cowboy fought gravity and his own momentum through the turn. It was more a swerve than a pivot. The tail of the plane stubbornly resisted his input, and for a moment the aviator thought he would actually lose the plane; his airspeed had dropped precipitously, and his altitude dropped so quick he thought he was in a free fall. But the Pratt & Whitney F135-600 kept pumping thrust, the two-shaft power plant exerting some 43,000 pounds of force to shove the aircraft in the direction its pilot wanted. Cowboy grunted, fighting off the g forces smashing against his body as the two bandits moved magically into the sweet spot of his targeting pipers.

The aircraft shook as he fired, the doors to the bays opening and then closing as he pushed down his nose. Gravity seemed to welcome him. His airspeed jumped. He saw the other two planes some 8,000 feet below him, but he was too far off to fire the Sidewinders.

Rather than flipping over as Turk had suggested he pushed steeper into the dive, sure he would be able to close the distance before the planes reacted. But he was wrong; the UAVs seemed to disappear, and before he could react he realized they had managed to pull farther down toward the terrain, temporarily getting lost in the clutter.

Cowboy started a turn, guessing that the UAVs would be ahead on his right. The F-35’s radar found them behind him, at very low altitude. He tried to turn toward them but they were already moving away. He started to follow but then saw one of the drones that had split off earlier angling toward him from above. It had worked to within five miles and was closing fast; had he stayed on his course it would have come down right on his tail.

He lit flares and rolled right. Sweat poured from every pore in his body. Cowboy realized he’d made a mistake, leaving himself vulnerable. His RWR lit with a targeting radar — the drone was trying to get him.

It was the signal he’d needed, but it came at the wrong time — now he was the vulnerable one. Cowboy jerked his stick, tightening the turn so hard that he nearly blacked out, the g forces building so quickly that even his suit couldn’t quite keep up. But the maneuver broke the UAV’s grip. He saw it pass overhead, within range of his missile for a fleeting second.

Cowboy couldn’t react quickly enough, and the aircraft flew off. Basher Three, not close enough to take a shot, banked south to continue guarding the base.

It was over. All six of the UAVs were gone, moving back in the direction they had come.

The pilot let out a string of curses. His radar missiles had missed and he felt like a dope, beaten by robots.

“You all right?” Turk asked over the radio.

He replied with a curse.

“It’s all right,” said Turk. “They wanted to see how you would react. They’ll use that for the next encounter.”

“Bastards.”

“We’re tracking them. You did good,” Turk added. “You did real good.”

“Then why do I feel like an idiot?”

12

Even as the encounter ended, the staff of experts in the Cube were analyzing the performance of the UAVs. The evidence was now overwhelming that Rubeo was right — they were using technology developed for the Flighthawks.

They had a traitor on their hands.

“Theft is not the only explanation,” said Jonathon Reid, standing with Breanna and Rubeo at a console in the front of the situation room. “They may have salvaged the C³ automated pilot units from one of the Flighthawk aircraft lost in Africa last year.”

“All of the computer units are accounted for,” said Rubeo, who had watched the raw video of the encounter with a deeply distressed face. “More to the point — the only transmissions the elint Global Hawk recorded were brief bursts between them. They’re using something similar to the system the Gen 4 Flighthawks use. We just don’t know what it is yet.”

“But it’s a good bet it’s exactly the same,” suggested Breanna.

Rubeo scowled. “It may be better.”

“That’s quite an indictment of your organization,” said Jonathon.

Rubeo looked as if he’d been shot.

“We need to find out who these people are,” said Jonathon. “And what else they have.”

“Why they’re doing it would be good to know as well,” said Breanna.

“I believe I know the who, at least,” said Rubeo. “Lloyd Braxton. And it may be related to a movement he calls Kallipolis.”

“Kalli-what?” asked Reid.

“Kallipolis. It has to do with Plato and a movement of elites toward a perfect world beyond government.”

“That’s crazy,” said Reid.

“That’s Braxton,” said Breanna.

Rubeo’s people had prepared a short PowerPoint summarizing Braxton. A poor white kid from the hardscrabble area of Oakland, he’d won a scholarship to Stanford at the tender age of fifteen, graduated at eighteen, and gone across the country to MIT to work in their famous robotics lab. Two years later after winning numerous awards for work combining AI with robotics, he was recruited for a Dreamland project that adapted the physical design of the original Flighthawk to make it more suitable to combat conditions. He stayed to work on projects ranging from the unmanned bomber to nanotechnology. The ability to work across such a broad spectrum of areas was the rule rather than the exception at Dreamland, but Braxton was a standout intellect even there.

What was unusual were his politics, or more precisely his antipolitics. They were as unconventional as his mind. And he wasn’t shy about sharing them.

Braxton had flown in the back of several Megafortress test beds Breanna piloted, and she had interacted with him in any number of debriefings and planning sessions. They’d chatted numerous times at parties and other social occasions. He constantly intermingled thoughts about Plato and philosopher kings with g forces and artificial intelligence.

But that wasn’t why Breanna remembered Lloyd Braxton.

He’d had a huge crush on Jennifer Gleason, who at the time was not only the number two scientist at Dreamland, but was engaged to Breanna’s father, Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, the commander of Dreamland.

Crush didn’t begin to describe it. Even obsession didn’t quite capture his behavior. Braxton did everything from asking to be assigned to her projects to slyly following her around the base. Things reached a peak when Jennifer came home to her on-base apartment one night and found him inside.

Colonel Bastian — he hadn’t been promoted to general yet — had him escorted off the base the next day.

But even though the incident was reported in his employee file, Braxton retained his top level security clearance. Not only that, but he was hired almost immediately by DARPA, the Defense Department’s equivalent of Dreamland, and later by the CIA. It wasn’t clear what he’d done — most of the CIA projects were so highly classified that even Reid wasn’t familiar with what lay behind the nondescript names they were given — but it was obvious that they had to do with artificial intelligence and its application.

Since then, Braxton had left government service five years ago to start a firm in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what his background might have predicted, the company made toys — high-tech racing cars for boys that tied into games on iPads, and a miniature balloon-based UAV that kids could fly in their backyards. The toys didn’t sell particularly well — he was underfinanced, having found it impossible get backers — but the technology the toys exploited was considered so valuable that four different global companies bid to buy the entire company. Braxton cashed out with over ten billion dollars — not the biggest payout in Silicon Valley history, but up there. And it didn’t hurt that Braxton not only got all the money, as he lacked partners, but paid no taxes on the money, thanks to an extremely clever set of maneuvers that included his renouncing American citizenship and moving his company’s headquarters overseas.

In many ways Lloyd Braxton had lived the American Dream. Starting from conditions that could be best described as horrible — his mother was a crack addict — he had become a billionaire. But along the way he’d developed a massive contempt for others who weren’t quite as smart as he was. It was an extreme arrogance not just toward other scientists, but toward the human race in general.

After selling his company, he founded a think tank called Kallipolis, a reference to a mythical utopian island ruled by “philosopher kings” in the ancient Greek philosophy espoused by Plato. Ostensibly designed to advance Plato’s teaching that the world should be run by the best and brightest, in practice it preached Darwinist anarchy, where the “rabble” were to be left to fend for themselves while the “best” were equally free to do whatever they wanted. Seminars were held on the best way to leave behind the ties of government authority, which amounted to everything from taxes and speeding laws to banking regulations designed to prevent terrorism.

Kallipolis wasn’t simply against intrusive government, something most people could agree with. The think tank and the circle that developed around it found no legitimacy for any form of government. Governments were anachronisms left over from the days before high-speed communication, lightning-fast transportation, and high-tech computing. Borders were archaic, and meaningless to the wealthy and intelligent elite. Which of course Braxton and the people associated with Kallipolis were.

The group claimed governments had no right to arrest anyone or defend their borders. According to Kallipolis — or at least the speakers and organizations it gave money to — the best people should divorce themselves entirely from government and the rest of the human race. Only when they did that would humankind evolve to the next level.

What exactly this next level was remained to be seen. Braxton never said explicitly. But he had hired a ghost writer to write a science fiction novel, privately published as an enhanced e-book, that depicted a unified world ruled by a small, brilliantly intelligent elite.

“Proles” — about ninety-nine percent of the population — lived in peaceful harmony, tending to robots and computers designed by the elite and manufactured by other robots and computers. The peaceful harmony was enhanced by ecstasylike drugs that heightened the pleasure centers of the brain.

In the book, things went off the rails when one of the proles stopped taking his medicine. Unlike standard sci-fi fare, where the rebel prole would have been the good guy rebelling against a jackbooted society, in Braxton’s book he was the bad guy, hunted to the end and eventually killed.

Asked by a reporter whether the book encapsulated his philosophy of life, Braxton demurred. “Fiction is fiction,” he’d said. “Things happen in fantasy that don’t in real life.”

But his portfolio of investments — carefully researched by Rubeo when he suspected the connection — suggested otherwise. Braxton bought out a number of small high-tech companies, and was rumored to have purchased land offshore. He had also become very media-adverse; a thorough search of Web news turned up no articles on him in the past eighteen months, and no public statements by him in the past twenty-four.

“This is a new sort of threat,” said Breanna, “an extragovernmental organization stirring up trouble in a foreign country. We’ve never faced this before.”

“There are precedents in the nineteenth century,” said Rubeo.

“Is he capable of funding all this without backing from China or Iran?” asked Reid.

“It would appear so.”

“The Islam connection,” said Reid, referring to the fact that the 30 May Movement in Malaysia was Sunni Muslim. “Maybe Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states are helping.”

“Braxton doesn’t care for religion,” said Rubeo. “It’s the opiate of the people, to borrow the phrase from Marx. He despises religion nearly as much as governments.”

“It’s hard to believe private people could put this together,” said Reid. “And why?”

Rubeo gestured at his computer. “If you want to read their manifestos, be my guest. In any event, he is certainly capable intellectually of guiding the construction of this technology. He had access to the data. And he has the money to pull it all off.”

“I think we have to lay this out for the President,” said Breanna.

“Agreed,” said Reid.

“You two always present me with interesting problems,” said the President when they reached her via secure video a half hour later. She was in her private office at the White House, due to leave for Air Force One in an hour. She was heading that morning to a NASA facility in Texas to unveil the start of a manned mission to Mars.

“Regardless of what the intentions are here,” said Reid, “the technology is impressive, and in the wrong hands will present considerable problems. Used as terror weapons, these aircraft would be difficult to stop.”

Reid detailed more of the possible links to Dreamland, which had already been suspected and outlined. The connection to Ray Rubeo and his billion-dollar companies — even if it was indirect — would undoubtedly become a weapon for the administration’s political enemies. Rubeo and his company’s lucrative contracts had lately become a target for critics. There was absolutely nothing untoward going on, but the secrecy the firms operated in and Rubeo’s prickly and hermitlike public personality made for easy speculation.

But that was a matter for the future.

“The Chinese are not directly involved?” asked the President.

“We believe not,” said Reid. “But I would have to assume they will grow more and more curious. We can’t rule out a situation where they cut some sort of deal with either Braxton or perhaps the Malaysians to capture the technology, as they did with Iran and the stealth drone.”

“So, Breanna, Jonathon, what are we proposing?” asked the President.

“We want to pursue them,” said Breanna. “Wherever that may take us.”

“We’re not sure who is protecting them,” explained Reid. “And the Chinese carrier task force that was north of the area has moved south. We’ll try to avoid a confrontation with them, but we can’t make any guarantees.”

“Avoid confronting the Chinese, if at all possible,” said the President. “I have enough problems with Congress. But get to the bottom of this. And if it’s our technology, get it back. I’ll deal with the Chinese, and Congress, if it comes to it.”

13

Danny hadn’t slept in close to forty hours, and while that was nowhere near his record, he was so tired that his arms ached when he raised them. Rubbing his eyes, he refilled his coffee cup, then walked to a table at the far corner of the mess tent. Pulling his tablet computer from his pants pocket — the machine and its seven-inch screen fit snuggly, but it did fit — he sat down, pressed his thumb on the reader and stared at the camera just long enough for the retina scanner to ID him and show the password screen.

It took two tries and three sips of coffee before he got the password in right; the screen popped to life and he started scanning his secure e-mail.

The first message was from Breanna: the Tigershark and the ground team were en route, due to arrive within twenty-four hours, as was another surveillance aircraft. They would operate out of Sibu airport, about ninety miles north of the Marines in an area considered far less open to guerrilla attack.

The next e-mail was from Breanna and Reid, a formal authorization allowing Danny to call on the Marines for help in an assault on any base believed to be harboring or controlling the UAVs. It included the name of a Pentagon official who had been tasked as a liaison. This was a bit of bureaucracy Danny didn’t particularly care for — in effect, a general several thousand miles away had been assigned as a gatekeeper and de facto impediment to the people who were actually on the scene.

Breanna had clearly anticipated that Danny would object to this, and added two sentences to the effect that, once the overall plan was agreed to, General Grasso could be consulted if there were additional roadblocks.

The general is a facilitator only, Breanna wrote. Danny had to smile — he could hear her saying that in his head as he read the words. But keep him in the loop.

“Hey, Colonel.” Turk sat down across from him, a tray full of fresh bacon, scrambled eggs, and potatoes in his hands.

“Where’d you get the chow?” Danny asked. “I thought the kitchen was closed.”

“Cowboy’s friends with the cook. Want some?”

“Sure.”

“Take mine. I’ll be right back.”

Turk was up and gone before he could object. Danny spun the tray around but waited until he saw Turk returning from the kitchen area, a big grin on his face and an even heavier tray in his hands.

“These Marines know how to take care of their people,” said the pilot, plopping down. “Even found me a cinnamon roll.”

“You joining the Corps now?” joked Danny, digging into his eggs.

“I might. If they always eat like this.”

Danny thought of bringing up Turk’s request for a transfer but decided this wasn’t the time. He scanned the rest of his e-mails quickly; they were routine reports on training and procurement, nothing exciting, even if they were critical to the operation of the ground team. Whiplash was in the middle of an expansion program and so many details had to be taken care of that Danny needed another administrative aide. In fact, he’d already been approved for one, but had simply not been able to find the time to begin interviewing.

“So, any word from Washington?” asked Turk after Danny shut the tablet down and put it aside.

“Whiplash Team Two and the Tigershark will be here in twenty-four hours,” said Danny. “We have other surveillance assets en route. I want to set up an assault plan that will let us go in as soon as we know where they’re flying from.”

“Great.”

“Which means you should be getting some sleep,” added Danny.

“Yes, Dad.”

Danny smiled sardonically. He was tempted to give Turk a lecture about the need for him to be in top condition mentally and physically, but held back; he didn’t like being a hypocrite.

“What do we do in the meantime?” asked Turk.

“You’re going to sleep.”

“The Malaysians have another platoon coming up this morning,” said Turk. “They have a target to hit tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“They managed to get some intel off one of the prisoners. They want to keep up their momentum. They think they have the rebels on the run.”

“Where’s this target?”

“They say there’s a village about twenty miles southwest of where they were that the rebels are using. It’s close to the border with Indonesia. It may even be over it.”

“If it’s over the border, we’re not helping them,” said Danny. He didn’t add that they might not help in any event; the UAVs were now the Marines’ top priority as well as his.

“Captain Deris says he knows. They’re going to deal with it themselves, if they have to.”

“Can they handle coms with the Marines?”

“Captain Deris can talk well enough to get a target nailed down. Thing is, Colonel, the Marines may not be able to support them at all, even if the target is approved,” added Turk. “Colonel Greenstreet is out with the flu, and so are Rogers and Haydem.”

“I knew about Rogers,” said Danny, “but not the others.”

“Both of the guys were throwing up like crazy in the air. Only Cowboy’s good to go.”

“So the Malaysians have to go without air.”

“If necessary,” said Turk.

Danny suspected that Turk was hinting that he should go, but he didn’t rise to the bait; he wasn’t sure whether he wanted him to or not. “Can the Marines get other pilots in from the assault ship?”

“They’re heavily committed at the eastern part of the island. Big assault under way. I had an idea,” Turk added. His voice dropped a few decibels; Danny had to lean closer to hear. “I was thinking I’d volunteer to fly with them.”

“I don’t know, Turk. The colonel wasn’t crazy about you flying earlier. He’s kind of proprietary.”

“Is that a new word for a jerk?”

“Even so—”

“Cowboy’s all for it. And it makes a lot of sense — if the UAVs come back, we’ll be able to shoot them down.”

“In the Tigershark, not an F-35B.”

“I could shoot them down in a Fokker triplane,” said Turk.

Danny was no pilot, but he recognized the aircraft as a WWI fighter. He also recognized Turk’s statement as typical fighter jock bluster — rare in Turk, though not in the breed.

“I’d prefer to wait until the Tigershark gets here,” said Danny. “And I have the rest of the team in place.”

“What happens if the UAVs come back?”

“We’ll take that as it comes.”

Turk rose without saying a word.

“Get some sleep, Captain,” said Danny sharply as the pilot sulked away. “That’s an order.”

Turk stalked out of the mess tent, angry with himself as well as Danny. He’d gone about asking to fly on the mission all wrong, dancing around the subject until the very end, and then blurting rather than calmly laying out all the reasons he should.

The hell with it.

Cowboy met him a few yards from the tent.

“What’s he say?” asked the Marine.

“That I should go to bed.”

“No shit.” Cowboy laughed.

“We have more assets coming so the operation is in a holding pattern,” Turk said, trying to calm down. “And the colonel’s worried about the border.”

“We aren’t going over the border. I can guarantee that.”

“Whatever.”

“Maybe I should talk to him,” said Cowboy. “I’m definitely doing that mission. Greenstreet’s OK’d it. And I need a wingman.”

“Good luck.”

“What are you going to do?”

Turk shrugged and stalked off.

If he’d been in any other place in the world, Turk probably would have hit a bar. He thought of calling Li but decided not to. He’d have to explain why he was mad and would probably end up sounding like a cranky baby. And besides, talking to her would only make him miss her more.

Frustrated and bored, he headed back to his room in the trailer, where he took out his e-reader to read a book on World War II.

He fell asleep within five minutes.

“The thing is, Colonel, I don’t one hundred percent know that I’d survive another encounter with the UAVs,” Cowboy told Danny. “I do know I wouldn’t have made it out of that last one without Turk telling me what to do.”

“I agree Turk is a great pilot,” said Danny. “It’s a question of priorities.”

“The priority is getting information on the UAV, right? You’re not going to be able to do that if it shoots me down.”

“I’m sure that would give us plenty of information,” said Danny sarcastically.

“Maybe.” Cowboy smiled. “That was a bad example. I’m just saying, we need another pilot, there’s another pilot here. It would be great if we could use him.”

“What’d Greenstreet say about it?”

“Haven’t asked him yet. Figured there be no use dealing with him unless you were good with it.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” said Danny. “When I know about the Malaysian plans. And when your squadron commander says he’s good with it.”

“Great!” Cowboy jumped up from the table. “Thanks, Colonel.”

Why do I think I’ve just been had? wondered Danny.

14

The security encryption and procedures Kallipolis employed imposed a significant performance penalty on real-time communications; it split the video and audio streams, and so there was always a slight delay between the video and the sound during the best of times, and at sea the additional security and network overhead made it even worse. It was so bad tonight that Lloyd Braxton had to look away as Church Michaels spoke; the audio was nearly a full second ahead of the visual.

“You shouldn’t have launched the attack,” continued Michaels. “We aren’t prepared.”

“I have four bases. I have a dozen aircraft. I have ships, I have submersibles. We’re making more UAVs and weapons. I need the structures for the distributed intelligence units. When do I wait for? The next millennium?”

“The involvement of the Dreamland people makes things much more… difficult,” said Michaels. “They’re not going to back down. It’s a vast escalation.”

“On the contrary. The fact that they’re involved means there will be no escalation,” said Braxton. “And besides — they are the ones who have the computing technology. This is the best way to get it. And we need it. Or else we have to hire an army and become a government. Which none of us want.”

“I don’t see them backing down.”

“You’re in the Ukraine. I doubt you have much to worry about.”

“The bribes are killing me.”

Braxton snorted. Michaels had sold his carbon-fiber fabrication business to General Electric for roughly $3 billion worth of GE stock. He had numerous other investments, and had bankrolled at least one black hat hacker operation specializing in credit card theft. He could certainly afford whatever trivial amount the authorities were holding him up for; it was cheaper than legitimate taxes.

“You have all these high-minded ideals,” countered Michaels, obviously wounded by Braxton’s response, “but how much of this is because you had the hots for Jennifer Gleason and she dissed you?”

“She never dissed me. Ever. Bastian did. Him and Rubeo. Rubeo was the real problem, the sexless prick.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Michaels, calling a quick truce. “Rubeo was always decent to me.”

“You met him twice.”

“Do you really think you can control 30 May? They’re Stone Age crazoids. They don’t just believe in God, they think He talks to them through the Koran. Give me a break.”

“They’re useful. For the moment. As I say — we either get the technology that allows the machines to work together or we hire an army. Which do you want?”

The arrangement with the rebels was based solely on mutual convenience, and Braxton put no trust in them. True, when they started, he had hoped to carve out a refuge here in Malaysia, a place Kallipolis could use as its physical base. But after a few months it had become obvious that neither the rebels nor Malaysia would be suitable in the long term. Even if the locals could be dealt with, the Chinese were too active. Apparently aware of some of the technology Braxton was exploiting, they’d tried to infiltrate the rebel network and even reached out through intermediaries to make a deal. Braxton would have nothing to do with them; they were even worse than the Americans.

“What are you going to do if the U.S. sends more than a few Marines?” asked Michaels.

“What we’re doing now. We bloody them, and we do it publicly. The President will back off. Her approval rating is sinking. She has all sorts of problems. Don’t fret, Christopher. As soon as I have one of the Sabres, I’m gone and on to the next phase. As planned.”

“I say, get the ships, get everything the hell out of there. That’s the best bet. We don’t need this fight. We have all the freedom money can buy. That’s what we need.”

“What?”

“You heard me. We don’t need this. This — it’s a pipe dream.”

“What happened to your ideals?” asked Braxton, truly shocked. Michaels had been one of his most fervent backers from the beginning.

“I still have them.” Michaels’s mouth moved for a moment, finishing the sentence. His eyes were intense, but something had changed.

“You’re getting married,” said Braxton. “You’ve decided.”

“We’re not going to a government, or a church,” said Michaels. There was the faint hint of a smile on his face. “But we are making a commitment. To each other.”

“That’s very nice.”

“Thank you.” Michaels didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

“I’m going ahead as planned. I’ll see you in Kazakhstan in six weeks. We can discuss your future involvement then.”

Braxton knew there would be none, but it made no sense to declare that now.

“I can’t talk you out of this?” asked Michaels.

Braxton frowned, and hit the kill switch, ending the conversation.

Love, he thought bitterly to himself. It was a worse opiate than religion.

15

Finally giving in to the demands of his body, Danny hit his cot around 1000 hours, planning to sleep for two hours. But he slept until close to 6:00 P.M., when Turk Mako was shaking his shoulder.

“Colonel, you need to check this out,” said Turk. “We have hot video — there’s a column of rebels coming up from the south. It has to be a couple of hundred guys.”

“Wh-What?” stuttered Danny, still half-buried in sleep.

“Come on over to the command post and have a look,” said Turk.

Danny folded himself out of bed. His body was stiff, his muscles complaining that the humid air didn’t agree with them.

“You OK, Colonel?” asked Turk.

“Yeah.” He stretched. “Any coffee over there?”

“Plenty, and it’s stronger than the liquid scat the mechanics brew at Dreamland.”

“Good.”

Danny pulled on his boots and grabbed his tablet on the way out. The Marines were already suiting up for battle, their Ospreys warming on the airstrip.

“Looks like we got their attention,” said Captain Thomas. “We’re going to hit them when they come through the valley. Both sides.”

The Marines would land near the route the rebels were taking. Splitting in half, they would attack from the north and the west, hammering them from two sides. The Malaysians would accompany them.

“We need air support and protection when the UAVs come,” said Captain Thomas. “The squadron is down to one pilot, which means one plane. I’m asking for more coverage from the assault ship, but they’re way overstretched and it’s quite a haul. I don’t think they can make it in time.”

Danny glanced at Turk. The pilot studiously avoided his gaze.

“Turk may be able to take one of the slots,” Danny said. “I’ll discuss it with Greenstreet.”

“Great. Thanks,” added Thomas. “What about you, Colonel? Where do you want to be?”

“I’m going to sit this battle out,” added Danny. “I need to coordinate with Washington on our next move.”

“Understood.”

“With regret,” added Danny, resisting an urge to change his mind and go. There was just too much to do before his people got there, and if the UAVs appeared, he would be in a better spot here to monitor them.

Contrary to what he expected, Greenstreet told Danny he had no problem with Turk flying. He didn’t necessarily seem pleased, but he was certainly professional.

“If my ground commander wants another plane for more support, he’ll have it,” said the colonel.

“With Turk flying,” added Danny, just to be sure.

“He’s a competent pilot.”

A lot more than that, thought Danny, but he saw no reason to poke the bear.

“Very good, Colonel. I appreciate your cooperation. He’ll get a full update on the UAVs and brief you preflight.”

Greenstreet nodded.

“You don’t have a problem with Turk, do you?” Danny asked.

“He’s a hotshot,” said Greenstreet, a tiny bit of his professional mask slipping. “But we’ll live with it.”

Turk tightened his face as Breanna came on the screen to brief him on the UAVs. He was going to be professional, and only professional.

Her frown told him he didn’t quite succeed.

“Turk, I hope you’re feeling well,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“We’ve been able to analyze the encounter and we have a great deal of information for you. The aircraft looked to be modeled after the Gen 4 Flighthawk, though prior to the improvements we made for the New Mexico range.”

“Right,” said Turk tightly.

“Are you familiar with that project?”

“Somewhat,” said Turk. “It was before my time.”

“Their onboard maneuver library is exactly the same as Gen 3.”

“I recognize that.”

“John Rosen will go through it with you if you need him to,” she said, referring to one of the analysts on the program who had been brought over to Whiplash to help. Rosen worked for one of Rubeo’s companies. “We still have no firm data on the weapons. It’s most likely a 25mm cannon based on the tactics and the visual. Fred McCarthy is going to run down the probable capabilities.”

McCarthy’s face flashed on the screen. A retired Navy intelligence specialist, he had spent several years working for the CIA and was now on loan to Special Projects. McCarthy knew as much about weapons as any engineer — or database, for that matter.

“This is what we think they’re firing,” he said, holding up what looked like a thick metal needle. “Depleted uranium. High mass, very small volume. Consider it roughly the equivalent of a 25mm round in an M-242 — yes, I prefer the Army weapon as an analogue for the following reasons…”

While McCarthy certainly knew his stuff, there was a downside to his store of knowledge — he tended to unleash vast amounts of it when explaining even the simplest concept or finding.

The M-242, he said, was used in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Marine Corps LAV-25 personnel carrier; the 25mm gun had itself used depleted uranium rounds, though they were not standard equipment. The material’s density gave the DU BBs — as McCarthy called them — an inherent advantage over conventional slugs; a smaller size bullet could carry as much momentum as a larger round, giving it more kinetic energy and thus more penetrating power. But the metal’s qualities went beyond that; McCarthy theorized that the rounds were engineered so the rear portion spread as the nose hit, creating a wider “wound” in its target.

The weapon would have an effective range of just over 1,500 meters, about the same as a 20mm cannon. That would account for the tactics the UAVs employed; it had to be relatively close to fire. The weapon would have a fairly good recoil, which in the small aircraft would have a significant impact on its flight energy. It would be fired in very short bursts, perhaps as low as three at a time, and in any event would not carry much ammunition.

The weapon assumptions were being made based on thin data, and so Turk took them with a grain of salt. The Sabres had been fitted with a similar weapon at one point in their trials. But the uranium slugs had proven to be overkill — you didn’t need to make big holes in an aircraft to shoot it down — and have a weight penalty as well. The Sabres now used conventional bullets.

McCarthy moved on to tactics, where he and Turk were mostly in agreement. It seemed likely the enemy UAVs were programmed to fly to a certain area, then used a combination of passive sensors to home in on their targets — a simple electronics detector would get them close, where an infrared sensor could take over for the final targeting. The simplicity gave them certain advantages: the aircraft could be small and therefore hard to detect and highly maneuverable. But it also extracted a price. They were surely vulnerable at long range, and they seemed to have to make a rear-quarter attack to guarantee a kill. Cowboy’s encounter appeared to prove all of that, and also implied that Turk’s suggestion for him to attack at long range had been sound.

As McCarthy continued, the camera pulled back to show the others sitting near him in the situation room. Rubeo was there, and Reid, and a dozen other specialists.

And Breanna, right in the middle, standing, arms folded, lips pressed tightly together, clearly worried.

Is that how you looked when you ordered them to kill me? Turk wondered. Does your conscience bother you now? How would you have gotten this mission done if they’d succeeded?

Hate welled inside him. Then he felt guilty, sad even — he had admired Breanna and her husband Zen greatly. Both were heroes, and at the same time unpretentious, just regular people, at least to the extent possible in Washington, given their jobs.

But Breanna had let him down. She stood revealed as someone who could not be trusted.

Zen was different. Turk still admired the former pilot, who had done so much to make combat UAVs successful and become the first Flighthawk ace. To have come back from a crippling injury, especially at a time when people looked at disabilities as if they were contagious diseases and a mark of bad character, had taken a tremendous amount of courage, courage that Turk himself wasn’t sure he possessed. It wasn’t just bravery under fire — which Turk certainly did possess — it was the ability to take a long-range view of the battle and to put up with the constant setbacks, large and small, that were inevitable. Perseverance under fire was a different kind of courage, a quality that someone who was impatient, as Turk was, couldn’t count on.

“So, bottom line, Captain Mako,” said Rubeo, thankfully interrupting the analyst’s dissertation. “Target them at long range, and don’t let them behind you.”

McCarthy turned to him. “I’ll defer to Captain Mako on the precise tactics,” he said. “But you have it in a nutshell.”

“That’s pretty much the best way to deal with any enemy,” said Turk, even though he knew it was much easier said than done in this case.

“Good luck, Turk,” said Breanna.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He switched off the feed and went to get suited up.

16

Jonathon Reid stopped Breanna as she started to leave the situation room.

“A minute alone?” he asked.

“Of course.” She glanced around. Except for the two duty officers at the front, everyone else had left to take a break or get something to eat.

“I couldn’t help but notice, you looked a little upset,” said Reid, his voice barely above a whisper. “Are you worried about the operation?”

“I’d feel better if we had all our assets in place,” said Breanna. “And if we had a full force.”

“We will in another eighteen hours.”

“The UAVs will probably come with this attack,” said Breanna. “We really should have our people there. In a perfect world—”

“In a perfect world we’d all be millionaires. But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

“Things aren’t right with Turk. He doesn’t trust me.”

“Why not?”

“Iran. The order I gave Stoner.”

“You did what you had to do,” said Reid. “Right?”

“I know, but… I can’t take back the fact that if he was killed, it would have been on my orders. My fault. My responsibility.”

“And what about the several million people your order saved?” asked Reid. “That mission — if we hadn’t destroyed the bombs, don’t you think Iran would have used them at some point?”

“It’s more complicated than that. And maybe they wouldn’t have,” added Breanna. “We don’t know.”

“That’s true. We can’t see the future. What we do know is what happened — the bombs were destroyed, and Turk is still alive.”

“No thanks to me.”

“On the contrary. You sent the one person who had a chance of saving him. You don’t give yourself credit for that. Why not?”

“Because Turk doesn’t,” said Breanna.

17

Turk steadied the F-35B into a comfortable orbit at 20,000 feet. The night was clear, with not even a whisper of wind. The plane felt solid around him, responding precisely to every input. Taking off the other day, he’d been unsure of himself, and the aircraft seemed to have sensed it, reacting with slight jerks and the occasional stutter through the early parts of the flight. Now his muscles moved with smooth assurance, and the plane responded accordingly.

Cowboy flew about a half mile ahead in Basher One. They had the sky to themselves.

“Two, scope’s clean. How you lookin’?” asked the Marine, telling Turk he had no radar contacts.

“Copy. Same. Systems are good. Looks like you dialed up an easy one for us.”

“The night is still young,” answered Cowboy. “Ospreys are off the mat in zero-two.”

“Roger that, I copy,” said Turk.

As soon as the aircraft carrying the Marine assault units were off the ground, Cowboy swung south, aiming to overfly the area where the rebels were advancing. A Marine UAV was already in the vicinity, providing real-time infrared reconnaissance.

Turk stayed with the Ospreys, tucking down toward 12,000 feet. The transport aircraft were far lower, close to the jungle treetops, hugging the curve of the Earth as they sped south.

Three miles from the landing zone the lead Osprey began to slow. The flaps on its wings deployed as they approached the LZ, and with the airspeed gently dropping, the long engines and their massive rotors began to rotate. The aircraft seemed to swing out as if they were on a trapeze, descending smartly to the ground.

The landing area was a hard-packed dirt road, and there was only room for one of the aircraft at a time. The second Osprey banked a short distance to the north, revolving slowly around a hilltop. Within a minute and a half the Marines on Osprey One were off; it rose and its companion came in. Ninety seconds after touching down, the second aircraft pulled up, having disembarked its platoon.

Still escorting the rotobirds, Turk swung back in the direction of the base. His sensors scanned the air at long range to make sure the enemy UAVs hadn’t chosen this moment to appear. The Ospreys had a short run back, but they were extremely vulnerable to enemy aircraft, with no weapons to defend themselves.

Cowboy remained over the LZ. He made radio contact with Captain Thomas and the CCTs — combat controllers — with each platoon.

While the Corps had its own personnel trained to act as ground controllers, they sometimes “borrowed” similarly trained men from different services. In this case they had two of the profession’s finest: Air Force special ops pararescuers, both of whom had seen action in Libya just a few months before, working clandestinely with the rebels there.

The Air Force combat controllers were descendants of the World War II pathfinders, paratroopers who’d dropped into Europe ahead of D-day. As the war evolved, the pathfinders had called in air strikes, helping the allies move quickly across Europe. Given jeeps and allowed to ride with the tanks in Patton’s spearhead, the small band of sky-dropping daredevils had revolutionized warfare.

In the contemporary military, their Air Force descendants trudged through the mud and gravel alongside troops from every service, from “ordinary” grunts to Tier One SEALs. Able to do anything from locating the landing zone for a parachute drop to creating an airfield in the middle of a jungle, their job today was to direct air strikes if things got hairy. They’d spent a month working with the MEU on the other side of the island. Cowboy had worked with both; they recognized his voice as well as his call sign, and gave him a little bit of ribbing along with their sitrep.

It was a sign that things were going well, Turk thought — they didn’t fool around when the situation was tight.

With the Ospreys safely home, Turk returned, taking a high track above and slightly behind the figure eight Cowboy was cutting in the area. He stayed at 18,000 feet — high enough to assist in a ground attack if necessary, while still at an altitude he thought sufficient to deal with the UAVs.

Both F-35s carried two AMRAAM air-to-air missiles in one of their bays, along with a pair of Sidewinder infrared heat-seekers on their wings. Because of the way the aircraft was designed, the wingtips of the F-35B were bare; the Sidewinders were mounted on the last of three hard points on each wing. That left the other four external points and one internal bay for a mix of Redeye cluster bombs and “small” SBD-II bombs. The SBDs were fitted four to a rack, giving the two aircraft considerable versatility if called on for ground support.

Twenty minutes of flying loops and crazy eights left Turk bored, and he found himself half wishing the UAVs would appear. He knew it was wrong — bad karma and all that — but still, he was ready.

Finally, the lead segment of rebels left the jungle and headed for the road north, aiming directly at the ambush point Captain Thomas had plotted. But only a few minutes passed before they left the road again, splitting into two columns along the western side and moving north. The move complicated things for the Marines, but they quickly adjusted, setting up an ambush about a mile deeper in the jungle. That was a good thing for the F-35s — it gave them a little more room to maneuver without going over the border. While Indonesia was powerless to stop them, it had radars in the area able to detect the F-35s when they were carrying weapons under their wings, and any transgression of the border would bring protests at the UN.

On the ground, time was moving quickly; the Marines were hustling through the jungle as quickly as they could, scrambling to make sure they were in place. In the air, time dragged. Turk rehearsed a dozen scenarios in his head, then rerehearsed them.

“They’re saying zero-five from contact,” Cowboy told Turk after the Marine controller with West Force checked in.

“Roger, I heard.”

“I have nothing on long-range scan.”

“Copy,” said Turk.

“They engage the lead elements, and then we get called in if they have enough of a target for us,” said Cowboy, who was simply repeating the basic briefing. Turk realized he was bored, too. “We may not have a target in the early stages.”

“Roger. Got it.”

“There’s a hill about two miles south of the ambush point, overlooking the road,” added Cowboy. “I’m thinking that if the rebels retreat, they may try to take a stand there. We may end up hitting that position.”

“Copy.”

As Turk began scanning for the position, West Force radioed that they had made contact and taken the rebels under fire. Now came the hardest part of the mission for the pilots: waiting for something to happen, while knowing that the guys on the ground were taking fire.

The battle on the ground — in a jungle, at night, in terrain unfamiliar to both sides — was a confusing mélange of explosions, bullet rounds, and blind cursing. The Malaysians and Americans had the advantage of night vision and superior communications; the rebels had numbers. Surprise was a factor at first, and greatly aided the American force. Their initial volleys of fire drove the rebels back in confusion. But the thick jungle made it difficult to see even with the night gear, and before the allied force could take real advantage, the rebels rallied. The two columns retreated and then consolidated. Better trained or at least better disciplined than the force the day before, the rebels managed to organize a line of defense along a stream that ran down the center of a shallow rift. Lying on the high side of the ground, they used machine guns to stop the Malaysian and Marine squads pursuing them.

But that just gave Cowboy and Turk something to do. With a clear line marking where the enemy was, Basher One and Two went to work.

In the not too distant past, precision ground support meant getting very close and personal to the target — the lower, the better. That subjected the airman to a fair degree of danger from the ground. Most enemy soldiers didn’t particularly like being bombed, and could be expected to fire whatever they had at their attackers. Even a rifle could potentially bring down an airplane; there were, in fact, stories of American soldiers in the Pacific taking down Japanese airplanes with their M-1s by striking the pilot.

Getting close to the enemy still worked well in certain situations and with certain weapons, but in this case it was unnecessary. The small-diameter smart bombs the F-35s were using allowed the pilots to hit targets beyond sixty nautical miles — making the word “close” in close-air support a misnomer. With a multimode sensor — the bomb could be directed to its target by radar, infrared, and laser as well as GPS and an inertial guidance system — the weapon was as versatile as it was accurate.

Officially, the bombs had a margin of error that allowed them to strike within about a four meter radius of any given target. Unofficially, the margin of error was much less than that, depending on the guidance mode.

Just inside five miles from the target area, Basher One unleashed four bombs, all guided by GPS locations that he had double-checked with the friendlies on the ground. The bombs hit in a staggered line on the rebel side of the creek, devastating the middle of their position and eliminating both machine guns.

“Woo-hooo,” said the controller over the radio as the explosions lit the sky. “Good hits!”

Now it was Turk’s turn. He lined up his crosshairs on a cluster of rebels about three hundred yards farther south and closer to the road. Coded with the GPS coordinates from the F-35’s weapons system, the two bombs he dished sped toward their destiny. With those off, Turk moved to a second cluster of bad guys in the jungle to the west about a quarter of a mile away. There were about thirty rebels there, gathering for a counterattack; with more area between them and the Marines and a larger count to boot, Turk selected his cluster bombs. The weapons were like dump trucks carrying small packages of destruction; rather than concentrating hundreds of pounds of explosives in a single area, they spread out smaller bomblets, showering the enemy positions.

Turk got another ya-hoo for his efforts.

The air strikes broke the rebels’ will. They retreated in confusion and panic, small groups of two and three men bolting through the trees in the general direction of the Indonesian border. The American and Malaysian ground units moved south, capturing stragglers and the wounded. The battle was done. It had lasted less than half an hour.

Back to being bored, Turk blew into his mask. The muscles in his shoulders and his forearms ached, not from exertion but from the almost unconscious tension. His flight suit was damp; he’d been sweating the entire time without even realizing it. It might be a push-button war in a lot of ways, but it was still war; danger waited at the edges, always ready to push its own buttons.

“How’s your fuel?” asked Cowboy from Basher One.

“Good,” said Turk, checking the gauges. “I have about an hour before bingo.”

“Copy. Me, too. You fight well, Air Force. So when are you joining the Corps?”

“When are you joining the Air Force?”

“The hell with the Air Force. I want to be in Whiplash,” said Cowboy. The serious note in his voice surprised Turk.

“Really?”

“Hell, man. You bet.”

“It’s not as glamorous as you think.”

“From what I’ve heard, it’s even better.”

“I don’t know about that…”

“I’m serious.”

“I can tell,” said Turk.

“We’ll talk about it when we get down.”

Turk started to acknowledge, but Cowboy suddenly sounded an alert.

“Two bogie contacts, bearing 290 degrees, moving like all hell,” said the Marine pilot. “Gotta be the UAVs — looks like our night is about to get a lot more interesting.”