by Dale Brown
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. Exhaus
ted 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
Suburban Washington, D.C.
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.
