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.
‘It is good that we are early then,’ he told the others on the bridge in Spanish.
It was the last thing the captain said on this earth. For as he raised his cup of coffee to his lips, the missile that had been launched from the shadow in the distance exploded five feet behind him.
The French-built Exocet missile carried a relatively small warhead at 364 pounds; while the explosion destroyed the bridge it would not by itself have been enough to sink the ship. The more damaging blow was landed by the second weapon, fired a bare second and a half after the first; this missile struck at the waterline just ahead of the exact middle of the ship. The warhead carried through the hull before exploding; the vessel shuddered with the impact and within moments began to settle. Nearly a third of the crew had been killed or trapped by the two blasts; the others were so stunned that it would be several minutes before most even got to their proper emergency stations. By then the ship would be lost.
Five miles away, the man who had given the order to launch the missiles stood over the small video screen, watching through a long-range infrared camera as the doomed merchant ship began to sink.
The attack had been an easy one; a bare demonstration of the Malaysian navy vessel’s capabilities. Named the Barracuda, the experimental high-speed craft was every bit the voracious predator, clothed in dark black skin made of metal and fiber-glass arranged in sharp facets to deflect radar waves. The craft used a technology known as ‘wing-in-surface-effect,’ which allowed it to skim over the water at high speed; it could reach over four hundred knots, though to fire effectively it had to slow to below one hundred, and had to go even slower in choppy seas and bad weather. A one-of-a-kind vessel built in secret as part of a concerted effort to upgrade the Malaysian military, the Barracuda heralded a new age for the nation that spread out over more than a thousand miles of the southeastern Pacific.
A new age, and new opportunities, thought the vessel’s commander, Captain Dazhou Ti. He had great wishes for the future, and above all a lust for revenge