Armageddon

Malay Negara Brunei Darussalam 7 October 1997, (local) 0802

In Zen’s opinion, the official Brunei reaction to the incident on the beach was schizophrenic beyond belief. On the one hand, they clearly didn’t consider it, or didn’t want to consider it, as anything but an isolated and freakish incident.

On the other hand, they considered it an insult to the country, which prided itself on being the perfect host. Because of this, the authorities felt obliged to apologize in person, and therefore Breanna and Zen had been invited to breakfast at the Royal House, an exclusive club used only by very high-ranking government officials just outside of town.

Zen might not have minded it except that he was due to catch a flight home at one o’clock, which meant rather than spending the next few hours alone with his wife he had to sit stiffly through a long and formal breakfast. He even had to wear a civilian jacket and tie, purchased specially for him by the State Department liaison, due to some obscure protocol that he didn’t understand.

‘Oh, you look handsome. Stop complaining,’ said Breanna.

‘I’m sorry, but it really is necessary to present the proper image,’ said Brenda Kelly, a state department liaison who had been sent over to help smooth the Stockards past the protocol hazards. It was at least the third time she’d apologized. ‘And wearing your uniform might have sent the wrong message.’

‘I wasn’t going to wear my uniform,’ said Zen.

‘You’ll have to excuse my husband,’ said Breanna. ‘He thinks wearing a clean T-shirt is dressing up.’

‘I’m on vacation, Bree. It’s not that advanced a concept.’

‘There are elaborate customs here,’ said Kelly. ‘Just as people in Brunei usually eat with their fingers – ’

‘Only the right hand,’ said Breanna in a stage whisper to remind him.

‘We have to follow their lead,’ finished Kelly.

Zen sighed. It was no use arguing; he was stuck in a tie, without hope for parole.

‘So are they going to catch these jokers or what?’ asked Zen.

‘Please don’t ask that when the minister comes,’ said Ms Kelly.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s insulting, Jeff. Of course they’ll catch them,’ said Breanna.

‘They were probably guerillas from across the border,’ said Kelly. ‘Islamic terrorists who want to disrupt the Malaysian government. Brunei itself doesn’t have an insurgent problem. There’s no poverty here. Everyone’s happy.’

Zen thought that was incredibly naive. People didn’t rebel against governments just because they were poor. The people who threw the tea into Boston Harbor weren’t starving.

‘I think it was a kidnapping for money,’ said Breanna.

‘Well they tried to get the wrong people then, obviously,’ said Zen. ‘They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by looking at our checking account.’

‘If they could figure it out,’ laughed Bree.

‘I think they were going after the royal family,’ said Zen. ‘It was their beach.’

‘Oh, my God, I was afraid of this,’ said Kelly. She pushed away from the chair and rose.

Zen looked up. The sultan himself had just come into the room. He wore a white Western suit, with no outward sign of his rank, but there was no mistaking his authority; a phalanx of aides followed in his wake, and they were trailed by a dozen soldiers. He strutted confidently across the room – the gait even seemed a bit arrogant, thought Zen, but then if he were absolute ruler of an oil-rich kingdom, he’d be a little arrogant, too.

The sultan smiled at Breanna and Kelly, waving his hands at them to make them sit in their seats. Zen watched him bow to the ladies, then bowed his own head as the sultan looked at him.

‘The heroes!’ exclaimed the ruler.

Attendants and restaurant staff swept in behind him, one pulling up an oversized chair and others appearing with trays of food. Zen’s coffee was refilled; the ladies were given fresh tea. Breakfast meats and sweets suddenly covered every inch of the table.

‘I apologize to you on behalf of the people of Brunei,’ said the sultan, looking at Breanna.

‘Oh, an apology isn’t necessary,’ Bree told him. ‘It was nothing.’

The sultan shook his head. ‘These criminals. They are outlaws before the eyes of God.’

‘Who were they, exactly?’ asked Zen, ignoring the evil-eye glare Kelly shot at him.

‘They came over from Malaysia, we believe,’ said the sultan, who did not seem offended. ‘Or they were Chinese criminals. We will catch them.’

‘Good,’ said Zen.

The sultan turned to Breanna. ‘You have been training our pilots.’

‘Yes. They’re very good students.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, bowing his head. ‘Your plane is a wonderful aircraft. I hope we will be able to purchase many.’

‘Maybe you should get more counter-insurgency aircraft, if guerillas are a problem,’ said Zen.

The sultan’s expression gave only the slightest hint that the comment was out of line. Kelly, on the other hand, seemed to be having a heart attack.

‘We have requested many aircraft to bring ourselves up to present standards,’ said the sultan, his tone slightly indulgent. ‘Fortunately, we ourselves do not have an insurgent problem. We need the aircraft to fulfill our role in ASEAN, the Asian alliance. Beyond that – well, you see for yourself. Everyone is happy here.’

The sultan rose. Kelly jumped up. Zen half expected her to beckon at him to rise out of his chair.

Hey, if the sultan had any real power, maybe Zen would be able to.

‘I apologize again, and I hope you will enjoy your stay,’ the sultan told Breanna. ‘Anything that can be done to make you happy, will be done.’

Then he held out his hand for her to kiss his ring. Zen rolled his eyes, but Breanna did it, as did Kelly. Then the sultan, trailed by his entourage, strutted his way out of the room.

‘You insulted him,’ Kelly said when they were gone.

‘Relax,’ Zen told her. ‘What’s he going to do? Nuke us?’

‘Jeff, that’s terrible,’ Breanna told her husband. ‘Really, hon. I know you’re still upset. But cut the guy some slack.’

‘Why? He’s the supreme ruler, right? He’s in charge. Who else should take the heat?’

Breanna rolled her eyes. It was always obvious when he was upset – he got even crankier than normal. She turned to Kelly. ‘I don’t think he really insulted the sultan. And he has a point about the aircraft. Megafortresses are overkill.’

‘The sultan was insulted,’ said the state department rep. ‘Believe me, I could tell. You don’t understand this country.’

‘I do understand that we almost got killed,’ said Zen.

‘Weapons procurement is none of your business.’

‘I know more about those weapons than the sultan ever will. And I’ll tell you – Brunei doesn’t need them. They do need counter-insurgency aircraft. That’s what you should be selling them. Those people who attacked us yesterday are just the tip of the iceberg, I’ll bet.’

Kelly got up. ‘Please contact my office if you need anything else. Have a good flight home, Major.’

‘You were really rude,’ Breanna told him when Kelly was gone.

‘Come on. Kelly forgets whose side she’s on.’

‘She’s just trying to do her job. And I meant to the sultan. He’s a very nice man. Very charming.’

‘Aw, come on, Bree. He’s a dictator. Just because he calls himself sultan, you’re going to let him off?’

‘He’s very educated and civilized. He’s a hereditary ruler.’

‘So was King George, the guy we kicked out of America two hundred years ago, remember?’

‘I forgot your ancestors came over on the Mayflower.’

‘It was the Guernsey,’ said Zen. He wasn’t joking – his relatives had come over in the 1600s, landing in Virginia.

‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be more diplomatic,’ she insisted, taking her cup of tea. ‘You’re going to have to be more diplomatic if you want to make colonel.’

‘Why? Your dad doesn’t kiss ass.’

Breanna put her hand out and touched his arm. ‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey yourself.’

‘Let’s not fight.’

‘Who’s fighting?’

‘Okay.’

‘Want me to cancel my flight?’

Breanna looked at him. She did, actually. Not just for this afternoon – for weeks and months. She wanted him to stay here with her, stay in paradise.

Or something less than paradise. As long as they were together.

She’d been scared yesterday, worried what she would do if she found him dead there. Breanna had faced that fear before, but that didn’t make it easier – if anything, it seemed to be getting worse.

She wanted to tell him to stay. But he had a job to do. He was due back at Dreamland for a VIP demonstration.

‘I do want you to cancel your flight,’ she admitted finally. ‘But you better not. I’m okay.’ She put her hand down on his. ‘We have some time left. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said, stroking her fingertips as if they were the soft petals of a flower.

Outside Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia 1400

Sahurah Niu waited outside the hut, trying to clear his mind of all distraction. The mission, so long in the planning, had been an utter failure. The operation – the first launched by their group against Brunei instead of Malaysia, their long-time enemy – had resulted only in their own losses. The corrupt sultan and his puppet government would now prepare themselves against further attacks, and perhaps even work in concert with the Malaysians.

There was no way to take it back now. Regrets were useless. He must face the punishment that awaited him like a man.

An aide emerged from the hut and beckoned to Sahurah. He lowered his head and stepped inside, preparing himself with a silent prayer. His head throbbed, but he sturdied himself against the pain; he would find redemption in punishment, he decided. He would accept his punishment gladly.

The Saudi visitor sat beside the imam, legs crossed on the rug covering the dirt floor. Sahurah had met the Saudi a year before at the training camp in Afghanistan; he was a devout, humble man filled with fire against the Western corruptors and devils, as holy in his way as the imam who had been the spiritual and temporal leader of the movement on Borneo island for more than a decade. Sahurah had seen him arrive yesterday, but it was clear that the Saudi did not recognize him; he said nothing then, and he said nothing now, lowering himself humbly. It was unusual that another witnessed their talks, but perhaps that was intended as part of the punishment. Sahurah bowed his head and waited.

But the imam did not berate him. He asked instead if he would like something to drink.

Sahurah declined, trying to hide his surprise. He glanced at the Saudi, but then turned his gaze back to the rug in front of him.

‘The next phase of struggle has begun,’ said the imam. He spoke in Arabic for the benefit of their visitor, who did not speak Malaysian. ‘You will go to Kota Kinabalu, and carry a message. It has been arranged.’

Kota Kinabalu, on the coast below them, was a stronghold of the Malaysian government. It contained a police station and a small naval base. Until now, the imam had forbidden operations there – it was considered too well guarded by the Malaysian authorities.

He was being sent to become a martyr. For the first time in months, Sahurah felt truly happy.

‘You will meet with a Malaysian, and you will bring back a message,’ added the imam. ‘Specific instructions will meet you near your destination, as a precaution for your security. Do this successfully, and much glory will come to you. There will be other tasks.’

Sahurah struggled to contain his disappointment. He bowed his head, then rose and left the hut.

Dreamland 7 October 1997, (local) 0432

‘Dream Mover is approaching target area, preparing to launch probe units,’ the airborne mission commander told Danny Freah over the command circuit.

‘Acknowledged,’ said Danny.

‘Software’s up and running,’ said Jennifer Gleason, hunched over a laptop next to Danny in the MV-22 Osprey. ‘Ten seconds to air launch.’

‘Let’s get it going,’ whispered Danny under his breath.

‘Launching One. Launching Two,’ said the pilot.

Two winged canisters about twelve feet long dropped off the wings of the C-17. Their bodies looked more like squashed torpedoes than aircraft, but the unpowered rectangles were a cross between gliders and dump trucks. The canisters – at the moment they did not have an official name – were the delivery end of the Automated Combat Robot or ACR system, a cutting-edge force multiplier designed to augment the fighting abilities of small combat teams operating in hostile territory. As the canisters fell from the aircraft, two mission specialists aboard the C-17 took control of them, popping out winglets and initiating a controlled descent onto Dreamland Test Range C, five miles away.

Jennifer, monitoring the software that helped the specialists steer the canisters, began pumping her keyboard furiously as the screen flashed a red warning.

‘Problem?’ asked Danny.

‘Ehh,’ she said. ‘Sensor read won’t translate quickly enough.’

‘Is it going to crash?’

‘Hope not.’

‘If he crashes it, three congressmen are going to tell everyone in America the system doesn’t work.’

‘Not everyone in America,’ said Jennifer, putting her nose closer to her keys.

Danny tried to relax. In his capacity as the head of the Whiplash ground team, he was responsible for the system being tested. It was his first – and so far only – program responsibility, and he shared it with two senior engineers. But as the ranking military officer on the project, he’d been the one to meet with the congressmen, the face VIPs liked to attach to a mission.

The congressmen were already in a bad mood. When they had insisted on seeing the Automated Combat Robot or ACR system in a ‘real live test,’ they apparently didn’t realize that it was meant to operate at such an ungodly hour.

The event scenario was straightforward. A downed airman had just been located behind enemy lines by a search and rescue asset. Danny and two of his Whiplash troopers, aided by the robots, would rescue him from the clutches of Red, the enemy patrolling all around.

In real life, such a rescue would probably have been done with considerable force, or at least as much firepower as possible. There was basically no such thing as too much muscle in that situation, and the more boots – and guns – available, the better. But the more people in the package, the more things that could go wrong. ACR could make it possible to limit the exposure of the rescuers and increase the odds of success.

‘They’re in. Okay,’ said Jennifer. ‘Deployment. You’re looking good, Danny.’

‘Ten minutes,’ he told his men.

Down on the ground, the two gliding canisters had landed on the scrubby desert. Their sides had fallen away, disgorging a trio of ACR robots. The units were roughly two feet in length and were propelled by articulated tractor treads at both sides, an arrangement that allowed them to get over obstacles two feet high and avoid anything larger. Besides the small infrared and video cameras studding the units, the ACR robots carried what looked like a bouquet of pipe organs atop their chassis. These were reworked M203 forty-millimeter grenade launchers, which could be equipped with a variety of grenades, making the ACR units weapons as well as scouts.

The units began fanning out to form a perimeter around the downed airman. ‘Deployed without a problem,’ reported Jennifer. ‘The Toasters are marching on.’

Danny winced at the nickname, hoping it wouldn’t catch on. He picked up his smart helmet and put it on, flipping down the visor, a display screen which could be tied into the ACR system, or any of several other sensor sets supplied through a special Dreamland system.

‘Gear up,’ Danny told his team. Then he began flipping through the ACR screens, looking for the four members of Red who were hunting his downed airman.

Sergeant Ben ‘Boston’ Rockland, the Red commander, smiled as he heard the drone of the approaching Osprey. Though it was still a good distance off, the aircraft had a very distinctive sound.

He turned and nodded to the ranger a few feet away. They’d decided not to use their radios, figuring that the Whiplash team might be able to home in on the signal. The ranger, another member of Red, lobbed a smoke grenade at the lumbering robot that was trundling toward them twenty yards away. As the grenade exploded, Boston saw that the ruse would work even better than he had hoped – the robot began peppering the air with its own smoke grenades, and provoked the robot to the north and south of it to start firing as well. The thick layer of smoke began drifting over the test range, obscuring the robots’ sensors.

‘Bonzai!’ yelled Boston, throwing off his vest and starting to run.

They used ropes to get off the Osprey quickly. The large blades of the aircraft’s engines whipped up the dirt, pelting the team with a mist of rocks. Danny got to the ground and spun to his right, hustling after his two men as they sprinted the fifty yards to their ‘airman.’ One of the ACR units had engaged the Red unit to the north; from this point out it was going to be a jog in the park.

The whirling sand blocked Danny’s optical image momentarily, but as it cleared he saw his man a few yards away, standing in his shirtsleeves and waving his hand. His other team members had apparently detoured to protect the perimeter, so Danny went to his airman to tap him per the exercise rules and call the Osprey in for the pickup.

Except it wasn’t his airman.

‘Bang bang, you’re dead,’ grinned Boston, producing a pistol from behind his back. Its laser dot settled on Danny’s bulletproof vest, officially killing him. ‘Gotcha, Captain. Boy, if I only had a camera right now …’

Off the coast of Brunei 8 October 1997, (local) 0502

The stars had begun to fade from the sky, and the ocean swelled with the mottled shadows of the approaching morn. A solitary merchant ship cruised in the darkness, heading toward the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, which lay upriver from the Brunei Bay on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. The ship rode low on the waves with a load of motorbikes and electric goods, along with a variety of items ranging from Korean vegetables to American-style jeans.

Arriving on the bridge from his cabin, the captain of the ship noticed a shadow on the southwest horizon. He stared at it a moment, trying to make sense of it. The dark smudge moved with incredible swiftness, riding so low against the water that it could only be a wave or some sort of optical illusion; still, the captain went to the radar himself, confirming that there was no contact. His thirty years at sea had made him wary, and it was only when he looked back and saw nothing that he reached for his customary cup of coffee. He took a sip from his cup and listened as the officer of the watch described the expected weather. A storm had been forecast but was at least several hours away; they would be safely in the harbor by then.