listened as Breanna updated the rescue situation – there were now two vessels conducting a search, with no survivors located as of yet.
‘Time to pack it in,’ he told the Jersey crew. ‘Head for the barn.’
He snapped off the mike, then did something that would not have occurred to him a few weeks ago.
‘Hey, crew of the Jersey – I mean, crew of Brunei Megafortress One,’ said Mack, touching his speak button. ‘Kickass job. Very, very good job. Attaboys all around.’
Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia 0853
Sahurah Niu’s feet trembled as he got off the motorcycle in front of the gate. The bike roared away and Sahurah was left alone. He tried to take a deep breath but the air caught in his throat and instead he began to cough.
As he recovered, a soldier walked up to him, gun drawn.
‘Who are you?’ demanded the soldier, pointing the pistol at him.
‘I was sent,’ said Sahurah. The gun comforted him for a reason he couldn’t have explained.
‘What is your name?’
Sahurah gave the name he had been told to use – Mat Salleh, a historical figure who had led an ill-fated uprising against the British on Borneo in the nineteenth century.
The soldier frowned and gestured that he should hold his hands out at his sides to be searched.
If I were carrying a bomb, Sahurah thought to himself, I would detonate it now and be in Paradise.
But he was not carrying a bomb, nor any weapon, and the search went quickly.
‘This way,’ said the guard, pointing to the gate. ‘The captain is waiting. You have a long journey ahead.’
Sahurah nodded, and followed along inside.
Flush with his victory at sea, Dazhou met the Muslim fanatic in his office.
‘Have a drink,’ he said to him, putting down a bottle on his desk. He laughed at the expression of horror on the man’s face. ‘It’s juice,’ he told him, ‘but you needn’t drink it anyway.’
He looked at him more closely. ‘You’re the messenger?’
The fanatic nodded. There was no possibility of mistake – no rebel would show up here on his own. Unlike many of the rebels in the movement, Sahurah appeared to be a native of Borneo, very possibly of Malaysian extraction, though with thirty-one different ethnic groups on the large island there were many who could claim to be native here. Dazhou’s own family had been on Borneo for centuries.
‘You know who I am?’ Dazhou asked.
The young man – he was surely in his late twenties, though his face showed the pain of someone much older – shook his head.
‘That is just as well,’ said Dazhou. ‘There is a bathroom there, if you need it. We will leave in five minutes. Once we start, we will not stop.’
Dreamland 7 October 1997, (local) 1630
After the botched demonstration of the robot warrior system, Danny’s day became an unrelieved series of frowns and down-turned glances. He avoided breakfast with the congressmen, claiming that he had to work with the technical team recovering the devices, and managed to skip lunch by tending to his normal duties as security chief on the base. But couldn’t avoid the afternoon debriefing sessions, which culminated in a show-and-tell session for the VIPs in one of the Dreamland auditoriums. Danny walked down the hallway to the room feeling like the proverbial Dead Man Walking.
The ACR robots had actually worked exactly according to spec. Unfortunately, they had been foxed by Boston, who exploited a weakness in the system to torpedo the mission. The inexpensive, off-the-shelf sensors in the units could not see very well through smoke. While the grenade that Boston’s team member had launched at the unit might not have blinded it for very long, once it started firing off its canisters the entire area was for all intents and purposes shrouded in an impenetrable fog. Boston had timed his intrusion just right, racing as fast as he could eight hundred and fifty meters to the downed airman, who by the exercise rules was unarmed and couldn’t hear him anyway because of the approaching Osprey. Armed with only his pistol – a rifle would have slowed him down – Boston incapacitated the airman, then waited for the rescuers.
It wouldn’t have worked in real life – the grenades would have been shrapnel rather than smoke, and presumably incapacitated or killed the intruders. But that distinction seemed lost on the congressmen who were watching the video feeds in the Dreamland conference center. And the army people present for the demonstration weren’t very happy about it either. The Army had supplied 90 percent of the development funding so far, and its contribution was up for review.
Danny stood gamely with the project officers and the science types as they opened the floor up to questioning. One of the congressmen started things off by asking where the man who had shown the way around the robots was.
‘Sergeant Rockland is probably enjoying a well-earned rest right now,’ said Danny, trying to force a smile. ‘One of my best men. We try to train them to think outside of the box.’
‘Or the robot,’ said the congressman.
Danny did his best to laugh along with them, ignoring the dagger eyes from the army people.
Boston was waiting for him in his office when he finally made it over there two hours later.
‘You were looking for me, Cap?’ asked the sergeant.
Something about his sophomoric smile burned right through Danny.
‘You blew the parameters of the test,’ Danny told him. ‘You screwed the whole stinking thing up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Those were supposed to be shrapnel grenades. Your team would have been dead.’
‘No, we were far enough away. I made sure of that.’
‘You ran right through the smoke,’ said Danny. ‘That wouldn’t have happened in real life. You would never have made it in time.’
Boston shrugged.
‘I don’t like your attitude, Sergeant,’ said Freah.
‘Captain – don’t you preach that we ought to use our heads?’
‘Go on. Dismissed. Go.’
‘But – ’
‘Out!’
Danny pretended not to see him shake his head.
Brunei 8 October 1997, (local) 0900
As Mack pulled himself out of the A-37B’s cockpit, the fatigue
