by Dale Brown
* * *
“They know he’s there,” Deci told Breanna over the interphone. “Altering course slightly. They should be in visual range of Mack in, uh, thirty seconds,” said Deci.
“I’ll pass it along,” said Breanna.
“Radar — uh, they just turned on their air-to-air weapons,” said Deci. “They may really want to shoot him down.”
* * *
Mack came out of his turn about three seconds too soon, and had to push into his dive before he saw the first Sukhoi. He got a glimpse of it in his left windscreen, then heard the RWR complain that one of the fighters had switched on its targeting radar.
“I was afraid of that,” he groused out loud, as if the device could do anything but whine. A second later it gave another pitched warning, indicating that the enemy’s radar had locked on him and was ready to fire.
Then the unit freaked out, obviously a result of Breanna’s ordering the Megafortress crew to jam the airwaves so he couldn’t be shot down.
Mack sighed. A completely unnecessary order, even if her heart was in the right place. Mack pulled his plane into a tight turn and put himself right below the Su-27s as they turned. Separated by ten thousand feet and a good bit of momentum, all he caught on the gun’s video camera — rigged for the training exercises — was a gray blur. He pounded the throttle but there was no hope of keeping up with the Su-27s. Within two minutes, they were beyond his radar.
And he was short on fuel.
“Jersey, this is Dragon One. I’m bingo on fuel, headed for home”
“We’re close to our reserves, as well,” replied Breanna. “Did you get any sort of IDs on those Sukhois?”
“Negative,” said Breanna. “They had old-style N001 radars. Seem to be Su-27S models.”
The NOO1 was a competent but older radar type, and no match for the Megafortress’s ECMs or electronic countermeasures. It meant the planes themselves were relatively old and had been purchased second- or even third-hand. But it didn’t say who they might belong to. For the moment, at least, their identity would have to remain a mystery.
“Your seaplane didn’t show up?” he asked.
“I don’t think it was a seaplane.”
Probably not, thought Mack to himself. More than likely, his neophyte radar operators had bungled a routine contact with a speedboat, then sent him out on a wild goose chase.
He 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 Mega-fortress One,” said Mack, touching his speak button. “Kick-ass job. Very, very good job. Attaboys all around.”
Chapter 9
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.”
Chapter 10
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 ARC 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 h
ave 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.
Chapter 11
Brunei
8 October 1997, (local) 0900
As Mack pulled himself out of the A-37B’s cockpit, the fatigue that had been trailing him the whole flight jumped out and wrapped itself around his neck. The sun beat down on the concrete apron, and the humidity hung around him like the thick steam of a shower room. Mack had originally planned to go home and take a nap after debriefing the training session, but the morning’s developments meant there would be no rest for the weary; quite the contrary. The sultan would undoubtedly be wondering what was going on and expect a personal briefing, as would Prince bin Awg. The central defense ministry — a collection of service heads and other military advisors, including Mack — would also be looking for information.
The EB-52 banked overhead, preparing to land. Mack turned back toward the runway, watching the big plane swing in. It wobbled slightly — obviously one of his people was at the stick. Still, the landing was solid. All in all, they were making progress.
Slow progress, but progress.
“ ‘Scuse me,” said a woman’s voice behind him. “You Mack Smith?”
Mack turned, surprised to hear what sounded like an American accent.
“You’re the minister of defense?” said the woman.
“Deputy minister of defense — air force,” said Mack, giving his official title. “Such as it is.”
He might not have added the last comment if the woman had been anything other than, well, plain, though plain didn’t quite cover it. She was somewhere over twenty-one and under forty, five-four, on the thin side. Her short hair had a slight curl to it, and that was the nicest thing you could say about her looks. She wore a pair of jeans and a touristy blue shirt.
“I’m McKenna,” she said, thrusting out her hand.
“McKenna is who?” said Mack.
“Pilot. You were looking for contract pilots? Does it help that I can speak Malaysian?”
She reeled off a few sentences in the native language, which was shared by Brunei and its island neighbors. Mack hadn’t been here long enough to understand more than a few words; he thought he recognized the phrase for “have a nice day,” but that was about it.
“I think you have the wrong idea,” said Mack. “I’m putting together a combat air force. The civilian airline is still on its own”
“Well no shit,” said the woman. “I’ve flown F/A-18s for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and for the last year I’ve been a contract pilot for a horse’s ass of an outfit trying to sell third-hand Russian-made crates of crap that I wouldn’t put my worst enemy in. That light your f-ing fire?” said McKenna.
Well, she could talk like a pilot at least, thought Mack.
“I don’t have any F/A-18s,” he told her.
“I can fly anything,” she said. “Ask Prince bin Awg. He let me fly his MiG-19 and his Sabre last year. We went at it a bit and I waxed his butt good. I’d love to get behind the wheel of one of those,” she added, thumbing toward the Megafortress, which was just heading toward its parking spot in front of the hangar on the left.
“It doesn’t have a wheel. It’s got a stick, like a real airplane,” said Mack. “They put it in when they upgraded it.”
“Well kick ass then,” said McKenna.
Mack started toward the hangar to change, and McKenna fell in alongside him.
“So? Am I hired?” she asked.
“Hired for what?”
“For a pilot.”
“What Russian planes did you fly?”
“Anything and everything.”
“MiG-29s?” asked Mack.
“Do it in my sleep.”
“How about Su-27s?”
“One or two”
“You fly them around here?”
“Nah”
“Out of Labuan?”
“Are you kidding? The Malaysians don’t operate jets out of there”
“Ever?”
“About six months ago we tried to sell a pair of MiG-29s,” said McKenna. “We brought them to Kuching at the far south of Borneo from the peninsula to demonstrate some of the changes that extended their range. But no one was buying.”
“What about the Indonesians? You fly Sukhois out here for them?”
“For the Indonesians?” McKenna laughed. “Malaysia, Indonesia — their governments aren’t on Borneo,” said McKenna.
“You have to sell where the money is.”
“You haven’t flown Su-27s on Borneo at all?”
She shook her head.
“You hear of either country having them?”
“You’d know better than me, Minister.”
Mack stopped. “Yeah, cut the shit. They have them?”
McKenna examined his face for a moment before answering. “Indonesia doesn’t have anything newer than Northrop F-5s. The Malaysian Royal Air Force has MiG-29s and F/A-18s over in West Malaysia, near the capital of Kuala Lumpur. Most of what my boss sold was used and it’s hard to buy used when you’ve been buying new. Her dealings with the Malaysians were mostly for ammunition and some avionics spare parts.”
“I was jumped by two Su-27s this morning,” said Mack.
“Get out of town.”
Mack smiled sardonically. “They came up out of the south-west, from Malaysian territory, turned on their targeting gear to scare me, and took off.”
“They scared you?”
“Yeah, right.”
“What’d you do?”
“Gave them the finger and took their pictures,” he said. “I want to figure out who they are”
“I’ll look at it for you if you want”
Mack shrugged. It couldn’t hurt, though most likely it wouldn’t help, either.
“They could have come out of Kuching,” admitted McKenna. “But it’s a good hike to get up here, over five hundred miles. And your spies would have told you they were there, wouldn’t they have?”
“Who says I have spies there?”
“You have spies everywhere,” said McKenna. “Dragonfly, huh? You would’ve been dead meat.”
“What, from a couple of Sukhois? Give me a break,” said Mack.
“Depends on the pilot,” said McKenna, her voice only a bit conciliatory. “If it were me, I’d’ve waxed your fanny.”
“If you were in the Sukhoi?”
“Either way”
“If you fly half as good as you talk, McKenna,” said Mack, resuming his stride toward the hangar, “you got yourself a job.”
Chapter 12
Brunei
1600
The time difference between the States and Brunei made it difficult for Breanna to get any information without invoking official channels, which she didn’t want to do. Finally she thought of Mark Stoner, a CIA agent who’d worked with Dreamland on some recent missions and who was back east in D.C. By the time she tried him, however, it was midnight there, and when she got his machine she left a message, asking him to call “when he got a chance.” Then she forgot about him until, to her great surprise, the hotel desk buzzed her room at 3 P.M. to tell her he was on the line.
“Mark — what are you doing up at 2 A.M.?” she asked.
“It’s 3 A.M. here,” said Stoner. “There’s a twelve-hour difference. No daylight savings. We’re a half-day behind you. You said you had a question.”
“Couple of questions. Unofficially.”
Breanna told him about the aircraft, which according to the images
captured by the Dragonfly had no identifying marks.
“They came out of Malaysian territory?” Stoner asked when she had finished her summary.
“Looked like.” She didn’t want to be too specific, worrying that anyone listening in would be able to gather information about the targeting system’s abilities — and she had to assume that might include Malaysian spies.
“There are two Malaysian air bases, auxiliaries to civilian airports. Neither field is really set up to support military jets, at least not that I know.”
“Can you check?”
“Have you talked to the Department of Defense?”
“I filed a report, but no one seemed particularly interested. A pair of Sukhois doesn’t really rock their world.”
Stoner was silent for a moment, then he asked, “If I gave you an address, could you get to it this afternoon?”
“I think so “
“It’s in Kampung Ayer. Do you know what that is?”
“The island city in the bay off the capital?”
“Write this down.”
* * *
Breanna found Mack standing on the back of a pickup truck at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean several miles southwest of the airport. A British-built truck sat nearby, with two Brunei air force sergeants working an old field radio in the back. Below the cliff was a narrow plateau of rocks just out of the water’s reach. Several pieces of plywood were set up as targets for an A-37B.
Breanna watched as the airplane came around from the north and made a run parallel to the coastline. The rocks bubbled and one of the plywood panels split in two. The airplane then rose abruptly, its right wingtip no more than ten feet from the cliff edge.
“I have to say, pretty good,” said Mack. “Tell her to nail the last target any way she wants,” he shouted to the men in the truck.
Not five seconds later, the Dragonfly rolled back toward land, heading dead-on for the beach — upside down. The last piece of plywood folded in half.
Not that anybody on land had seen. They’d all ducked for cover as she blew past, maybe six feet off the ground.