Armageddon (11 page)

“Then the sale will be easy”

Mack wondered if the encounter had been meant as a sales demonstration. There was only one way to find out.

“Maybe we can talk in person,” he suggested.

“Of course. How about lunch tomorrow?”

“Lunch?”

“You don’t mind mixing a little pleasure with business, do you Mr. Minister?”

“What time?” he asked.

Washington, D.C.
8 October 1997, 2300

Jed Barclay was almost to the Metro stop when his beeper vibrated. He stopped, hung his head, and without bothering to check the number walked back to his office in the White House basement. He’d learned from experience that, whatever other virtues his boss had—and he did have many—understanding that his aides needed sleep was not one of them.

But it wasn’t Freeman who had called him. It was Mark Stoner, who’d sent a message to the NSC duty officer asking that Jed contact him immediately.

“I think you want to get a look at something that’s going on in Borneo,” said Stoner when Jed reached him at the apartment he was renting outside the city. “I’ve been looking at this all day with some of our guys”

“Borneo? 1 think maybe Fred would be better,” Jed told him, referring to a staffer who handled Southeast Asian matters.

“It may complicate that airplane deal the White House is pushing with Brunei,” said Stoner. “And you have some Dreamland people over there.”

Jed sighed. “Should I meet you at Langley?”

“I’d rather do this at your office,” said Stoner. “And I’m supposed to leave town in the morning. Pretty early.”

“Well, I’m here,” said Jed, pulling off his coat.

Stoner showed up a half-hour later. He had a day and a half’s worth of stubble on his face. Deeply tanned, he’d lost considerable weight since Jed had last seen him. If not quite gaunt, he looked more like a bleached-out castaway than a hardened former SEAL and CIA agent.

“I got an off-the-record phone call the other night from someone in Brunei,” he told Jed, starting right off without even bothering to say hello. “It didn’t make a lot of sense. So I hooked the person up with somebody there I met. And did some checking myself.”

“Okay,” said Jed, not quite following along.

“You have some satellite images from Dreamland’s deployment at Brunei. The images may include the northern part of the island, around on the eastern shore in Malaysian territory, south of Darvel Bay”

Jed turned to his computer and tapped into one of the databases. During the operations in the South China Sea, the U.S. had moved its satellites to provide extensive coverage of the region. They had also conducted surveillance with a variety of systems, gathering electronic signals and other information to compile a profile of activity. But most of the effort had been focused on China and India. America did not yet have the capability of observing every square inch of the globe twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Doing so with satellites was not only absurdly expensive but technically unfeasible given present limits in technology. Improvements were steadily being made, but the day when someone could sit in a bunker in Omaha and read license plates around the clock in Beijing—let alone a less important place like Borneo—was still a good way off.

Jed paged through some images, which had been filed as part of a routine series covering the Whiplash deployment. Borneo was a large island shared by three different countries. Brunei territory formed a misshapen W on the northern coast. Sabah, the Malaysian province on the northern part of the island, wrapped itself around Brunei. Below it was the Indonesian territory, Kalimantan.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“Piece of road that could be used as an airstrip. About three thousand meters.”

Jed hunted through the images, which mostly showed desolate rock or impenetrable jungle. “This?” he said finally, pointing at what looked like a thickened pencil line near Rataugktan.

“Compare that to an image a year ago,” said Stoner.

The only picture Jed could find was from two years before. The road seemed narrower and ended in a T, which no longer seemed to be there.

“What I think they did was widen and flatten a road that was there, making it into more of a highway. The photo interpreter I talked to says the concrete is pretty new,” said Stoner. “And that what looks like a gully on the northern end there is actually painted on. It’s fairly clever, and if you weren’t looking for it, you might not catch it.”

“So what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “But if you can tap into the Russian network and look at their archives, there are two photos that show aircraft on the strip. I came across it by accident when your person called. They were looking for a way to get an image of the island, and I knew someone who would have access to the mirror site that the Greenpeace hackers set up when they broke in a few months ago.”

“Someone?” asked Jed.

“Just someone,” said Stoner. “Private guy. Thrives on information. He probably can get into the Russian system on his own, but I didn’t ask.”

Jed couldn’t get into either the Russian or Greenpeace systems from his computer, since doing so would potentially leave a trail and therefore represent a security breach. He could have any of a number of people do it for him, however.

“What sort of planes?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Stoner. “The interpreter thought they were Sukhois.”

“Breanna Stockard reported that the Brunei air force encountered Sukhois,” said Jed.

“Two plus two,” Stoner deadpanned.

“I could see having a base for counter insurgency there,” said Jed. “The guerillas are operating throughout that entire area. But why would you put interceptors there? Those are pretty useless against terrorists.”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “There was a ship that was blown up, right?”

“They’re still investigating. No one thinks it was sunk by a plane.”

“Maybe no one’s right, then,” said Stoner.

Jed turned back to his computer, tapping into SpyNet—the informal name for the intelligence community’s intranet featuring briefings and information from around the world. The CIA was tentatively agreeing with the unofficial Brunei assessment—a terrorist bomb had been planted in the ship.

“This your assessment?” Jed asked.

“No”

“You agree with it?”

Stoner said nothing. Obviously he didn’t, Jed realized—that was his whole point in coming over.

“What about a submarine?” asked Jed.

“Australians keep track of the Malaysian subs, as do the Chinese,” said Stoner. “Very unlikely.”

“Okay,” said Jed. “But why would the Malaysians want to attack a Brunei ship?”

“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “Maybe they’re trying to help the guerillas.”

“Are you still working on this?”

“I’m not working on anything at all,” said Stoner. “I’m being parked.”

“Parked where?”

Stoner made a face that was halfway between a grimace and a smile. “I’m going to be an adjunct history professor at a college up in Poughkeepsie.”

Jed listened as Stoner explained that his supervisors had decided, for his own good, to give him a kind of working vacation, arranging for him to go to the college as part of procedure to build a cover for a future mission. Or at least, that was the story they told him. The reality, as both Jed and Stoner knew without it being laid out, was that the CIA powers had lost confidence in Stoner for some reason, or more likely were preparing to lay the blame for certain agency failures on him. Stoner had been in charge of developing information about several Indian weapons, and had in fact been in the middle of doing that when he nearly got killed from the fallout. At the same time, his section had missed the development of two small tactical nuclear weapons and their delivery system by a private company in Taiwan. It looked to Stoner like the skids were being greased for him to tacitly take the fall. He’d never be accused of screwing up; people would just know he was “parked” and assume the worst.

“Maybe I’m just paranoid,” he said.

“You want to teach history?” asked Jed.

Stoner shrugged.

“Why don’t you come work for us?”

“Let me think about it,” said Stoner. He got up. “Sorry, but I got to work on a lesson plan. I missed the first couple of weeks of class.”

Brunei International Airport, military area, Megafortress hangar
9 October 1997, 1311

Breanna had just finished running through the last simulated flight session of the day when one of the air force liaison officers poked his head up onto the
Jersey’s
flightdeck.

“Madame Captain,” said the man, “a Mr. Jed Barclay wishes to speak to you without delay.”

While it was the rule rather than the exception, Breanna found the formal politeness an unending source of amusement, and it wasn’t until she reached the phone in the small office at the side of the hangar that she realized it must be one o’clock in the morning back in Washington.

“Jed, what’s up?” she asked.

“I need you to go to a secure phone,” he told her. “Can you get to the embassy? It’s at Teck Guan Plaza in the city.”

“I guess. This about the planes?”

“I’ll call you there in a half-hour.”

“Give me an hour.”

“Okay”

“THEY WERE DEFINITELY SU-27S,” BREANNA TOLD JED WHEN she reached the embassy. “But beyond that I don’t know anything else. They were over Malaysian air space the entire time, and the standing orders for
Jersey’s
training flights are that they be conducted either over Brunei or over international waters”

“Would an American crew have picked them up if they took off from that airstrip you found?” Jed asked.

“I don’t know. Deci thinks so, but the routines we were running had us pretty low at a couple of points, and I think they would have been missed.”

“Could they have hit the freighter?”

“No way. Just no way. We might not have caught them at the precise moment of attack, but we sure would have seen them earlier. Besides, I doubt they would have returned after an attack. To get back around—no way”

Jed asked her questions about the Brunei air force and the defense ministry in general. It was Breanna’s opinion that, the purchase of the Megafortresses and the hiring of Mack notwithstanding, the Brunei air force remained at best a paper tiger.

“Their attitudes—they’re not very serious,” she explained. “Not even about counter-insurgency. They have trouble getting fuel and supplies. I think that the sultan is trying to turn things around, and certainly Mack is, but there are a lot of other people who are more interested in other things.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Jed. She could hear him stifling a yawn. “What’s going on, do you think?” she asked. “Were the planes and the attack on the merchant ship related?”

“I don’t know. So far it doesn’t fit together. The Malaysians have a pretty serious insurgency problem. Islamic terrorists have been trying to overthrow the government for years. But Brunei hasn’t been targeted by the terrorists, at least not seriously. Their base of operations has been too far away.”

“The people who tried to kidnap Zen and I a few days ago were supposedly terrorists,” said Breanna. “So maybe they’re coming into Brunei now. That incident, the ship—maybe they’re looking for easier targets here.”

“Could be,” said Jed.

“I’m due to leave for Dreamland in a couple of days. You want me to put together a brief on the military situation here when I get back?”

“Be a good idea,” said Jed in between another yawn. “If you come up with anything in the meantime, let me know”

“Will do. Now get some sleep.”

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
2011

Sahurah waited for nearly an hour before he was picked up. Two scooters drove up and stopped; the man on the first turned to him and nodded his head. Sahurah took that as the signal to get on and he did so without comment. He held on as the bike whipped through the city streets, turning down alleyways and then doubling back, carefully eliminating any possibility of being followed. Finally it stopped in the middle of a street four blocks from the spot where he had started. As Sahurah slipped off, a battered Toyota drove up behind him. For a moment, Sahurah feared that the government had decided to arrest him.

The window on the car rolled down an inch. “Come,” said the man.

Sahurah walked slowly to the vehicle, opened the door, and got inside. There was another man sitting next to him, middle-aged, someone he had never seen or met before. The car began to move, driving along the narrow road out of town and then climbing up the hill to the cliffside highway. Even at night, the view of the ocean as it spread out north was spectacular, an inspirational hint of God’s expansive universe, but Sahurah did not take the chance to glance toward it.

“What happened?” asked the man.

“The imam is the only one I will address. He instructed me”

Sahurah pressed his fingers together so they would not tremble. Only a few weeks ago he would have felt anger rather than fear at being tested this way. How weak he had grown in such a short time.

The man took a pistol from his pocket. “What if I shoot you?”

That would be a great relief, Sahurah thought to himself. But he said nothing.

The man nodded and put his weapon away. “I was told you were a brave man, brother. I am impressed.”

ROUGHLY AN HOUR LATER, THE CAR PULLED OFF THE shoulder of another road overlooking the sea. Within a few minutes, three cars passed, then two pickups with men in the rear. Finally, a battered black taxi pulled next to them. The imam sat in the back seat; the Saudi visitor sat next to him. Sahurah was told to sit next to the driver, and did so without comment. They drove for a while, taking a dirt road that tucked through the jungle and then doubled back to a promontory over the water. The driver stopped and got out of the car.

“Report now,” said the imam.

Sahurah told him everything that had occurred.

The Saudi murmured something Sahurah could not hear. The imam answered, and then both men were silent.