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She knew about the incredible fires that were almost yearly events in that part of the world. Thousands of hectares of jungle in the heart of the Malay peninsula, peat-soil fires similar to the fires in Indonesia. The pollutant haze and smoke spread across the entire region all the way to Hong Kong. Most of them were started in land-clearing operations by farmers. They got out of control in the heat of a dry season and just kept burning. Jungle fires have been known to burn for months and months.
She knew that right now over a thousand fires were burning in East Kalimantan province of Indonesia alone. It seemed they would never get a handle on the fires if they couldn’t stop farmers from clearing bush for crops and companies from burning forests and jungles after logging to make way for new palm oil plantations. Between the two, the fires came every year. And now, more than a year after the horrible tsunami, and the endless battles with radical guerrilla groups, the fires were burning again.
“You’re going to be jumping at night. The fire there is really bad because of all the debris left from last year’s tsunami.”
“You said I was going to be trained. Trained for what? Jumping I already know.”
“Small-arms combat.”
He said it as if he was certain she would accept the pronouncement without hesitation. As if packing a gun and having to shoot somebody was just the course of nature…his nature, perhaps, but certainly not hers.
“I’d rather not.”
“You can’t go into a bad place without some preparation.”
“You think you’re going to make a soldier out of me overnight?”
“You’d be surprised what I can do with you in a short period of time.”
He said it with a blank face, but she peered into those pale green eyes of his and wondered if he was fooling around with a double entendre. She decided he wasn’t the type. But then, given her condition, she doubted he was seeing anything to invite double entendres.
“If you can stay awake, I’d like you to practice with a video game.” He pulled a laptop from a black case on the floor, opened it and started some sort of combat game. “It’s designed to teach the use of small arms in combat situations. You need this training and we don’t have a lot of time. You’ll need to play various levels of this video game until we get to Guam. Then I’ll put you through an intense course until we embark on the mission. It’s just a precaution. If things go right, we’ll never run into an unfriendly.”
“You’re jumping in with me?”
“Yes. You can’t go in alone. It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re one of those guys.”
“What guys?”
“What are they called? Commandos? Special Ops? What are they…oh, right, Delta Force.”
Brock concentrated on the video game, not looking at her. Immediately, she knew she’d struck a nerve. Delta Force flew under the radar screen and liked to keep it that way.
“I’m just a soldier on a mission.”
Bullshit, she thought. This guy runs around with no uniform, no name tag. Marines are flying him in choppers, then he commands a huge cargo plane with all those other commando-looking guys. Yeah, right, he’s just your average soldier. “And I’m a ground-pounding firefighter.”
Brock ignored her comment and concentrated on setting up the game.
She asked, “Is this a commercial game?”
“Not quite. This is mine.”
“You wrote it?”
“Yes. Military is doing a lot of their own now. It started with the release of America’s Army in 2002. That was mostly an interactive army-recruitment ad downloaded by millions of gamers. Since then, they’ve gotten even more sophisticated.”
For once he showed some emotion, some enthusiasm. The guy was human after all.
“This makes better soldiers?”
“Absolutely. Proficiency with the games increases reflex speed to situations, and eliminates thought pauses. Reaction time is everything. The percentage of targets hit has been increasing dramatically per round fired.”
“How did you get involved in this? Were you a big game player growing up?”
“Isn’t every kid? I was involved for a while in the Army Government Applications office in Cary, North Carolina, with a team of video-game creators and simulation specialists. I worked with guys from Red Storm Entertainment, Interactive Magic, and Timeline. Then I joined another group. This video game isn’t for public preview.”
“And that’s what this is?”
Brock looked as if he was going to smile, like this whole thing turned him on, and he couldn’t talk about it enough. She liked him much better like this, but it still didn’t mean she trusted the guy.
“Yes. What you’ll be dealing with you won’t find in your local toy store or video store. This is a big inside industry now. We have a lot of support in the field from several D.C. agencies, West Point and the Special Ops center in Florida where most of the simulation and training technologies are located. They’re all heavily involved in the military-video business.”
“They produced this game?”
“It was created by six people. I led the project. You’re going to learn everything you need to know about operating and firing certain weapons under stress. Plus escape and evasion tactics in jungle conditions. We have games to fit just about every condition, but you’ll only need this one. What’s good about this system is I’ll coach and instruct and rerun scenarios until you get them right. It can condition your reflexes in a few hours of this kind of prep. Then some fieldwork and in about the tenth of the time that it used to take, we can have you online and operational.”
He was so convincing that Anna decided to give the training tool a try, not that she was ready to jump into a Malaysian warzone, but the game looked interesting enough.
Anna played war with Brock for six straight hours. She killed hundreds of people. Some of them over and over and over until she got it right. He was a very soft-spoken instructor, nothing like she expected from his demeanor.
The only weapons Anna had ever fired before were a shotgun and a hunting rifle. Her mother, an outfitter in Colorado, was a skeet shooter and a meat hunter. Neither of those weapons was involved.
At one point when Anna was growing tired of all the action, she asked, “Do rookie soldiers really learn how to kill another person by playing these video games?”
“This just helps train reflexes. Gets the brain pathways set. The training’s progressive. You’ll go out and fire live ammo at shifting targets next. Each step will be faster and closer to the real thing.”
She looked at him, trying to get a sense of reality out of him. “You really think you can teach me how to kill someone in a day? Seriously?”
“I can get you close enough that, in a bad situation, you might just react to survive. But it’s not a given. Movies and TV shows aside, it’s very difficult to turn a civilian into someone who can kill at close range.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Actually, it’s true. In fact, studies have shown that soldiers have done all kinds of things to avoid just that. Most ground-combat units in World War I rarely fired their weapons. When they did, they rarely fired to kill. They fired high. Some of them died because they couldn’t make themselves kill. Most killing was done from long range. Mortars, bombs, cannon and machine guns. But we’ve discovered advancements that overcome most of the natural resistance.”
“You consider this an advancement?”
“In combat, yes. Not in civilization. I’m not in the business of advancing civilization. I’m in the business of trying to protect it.”
“By uncivilized means.”
“By any means necessary.”
His apparent honesty was about the only thing she liked about him at the moment. “I’m exhausted,” she told him after a long yawn. “I’ve suddenly developed a loathing for this video game and I really don’t think you’re going to make much of a killer out of me in a hundred days, let alone one. I’d just like to take a nap. There’s no shower on this plane, is there?”
“No. You can shower when we get to Guam.”
“I can’t wait.”
He smiled, finally, a warm, charming smile, and she began to warm up to this strait-laced soldier until he said, “Neither can we.”
Chapter 4
Anna dreamed that she was naked and clean, lost between creamy white sheets, ecstatic with their cool embrace, but angry at the mattress for being so uncomfortable.
When she woke a second time she still didn’t open her eyes. Instead, she listened to the steady drone of the plane’s engines, considered getting up, but the thought took too much effort. Weeks of constant grind had taken their toll. It would take a week to recover. Every part of her body ached. She realized she hadn’t moved for hours. Her muscles had locked up and she had to work to get them unwound, get some circulation. She stretched one arm, then the other. She finally opened her eyes when a smell wafted to her that she responded to with enthusiasm.
Her body felt like a piece of lead as she undid her seat belt and pulled herself up. The five men on the plane were up front talking and drinking coffee. Three sitting, two standing.
She got up and went forward.
“Coffee’s fresh,” one of the men said. Brock was talking on a satellite phone.
She accepted the offer of coffee. She smelled of fire and sweat and tried to keep some distance between her smelly self and the men.
After he hung up, Brock brought her a blueberry bagel with cream cheese and another cup of coffee. She was starving again. Then he showed her the island on the computer screen.
They huddled shoulder to shoulder around a laptop and discussed the latest satellite images of the Malaysian and Indonesian fires. The images, acquired by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, showed a thick soup of smoke.
The island was virtually invisible, covered by a massive cloud of dense smoke.
“Where are the winds?” she asked no one in particular.
“There’s no wind. It’s dead calm.”
Using a new technology she’d never heard of, the images were run though some kind of color spectrometer, and visual penetration became possible. She could see the heat pattern from the fires.
Brock pointed to an area. “This is where we’re getting our periodic beeps from. It’s the densest and hilliest part of the island. Jason was moving north, but apparently he can’t get over those mountains. He’s trapped about here,” he told her, gesturing to an area.
“How are we getting him out once we get to him?”
“We’re hoping to find a burned-over area and bring a chopper in. But the fires are now so big it’s getting hard to tell where to land. That’s going to be up to you.”
She studied the fire pattern, and the distance to the ocean. There were several lagoons, but they had limited information on the island’s trees.
“We were thinking of here,” Brock said, pointing to a spot. “It’s the closest point. The fires aren’t joined and that leaves something of an alley.”
“No. Too hot.” She explained the coloring of the fires. “Whatever the fuel load is in here, it’s very hot-burning. Unless you think walking through two thousand degrees won’t turn you into a puddle of glue. The best approach is from here.” She made a line from one of the lagoons inland. “These must be groves of old hardwood. The fires will be mostly crowning and high. There’s a river to the north we can escape to, if things get bad.” She pointed to the river. “Once we get to him, I’ll find a pickup zone and you can call your guys for a chopper.”
While Brock went over plans with his men, she closed her eyes and visualized the jump, the descent, the lagoon where she wanted to go in. Without wind, she’d be able to control the descent, though having to worry about Brock’s descent only made hers more risky.
Jumping into a fire from a high altitude at night and into a tropic combat zone was going to be something new. She wasn’t at all sure what would happen.
All she wanted to do was just get Brock to the ground and let him take it from there. He’s a leader with the most elite commando force on earth, she thought. He should know what he’s doing. Just get him in, and he’ll get us out.
That’s what she hoped for, anyway.
“We’ll refuel in the air, put down in Guam in about five hours. If you need more sleep, now’s the time.”
She walked back to her seat, thinking she might have trouble sleeping again. She cuddled up on her pillow, shut her eyes and immediately floated off into a deep sleep.
Pouco Vulcao Island
Jason Quick came out of a shaking sweat and forced himself to get up. He tried to focus so he could check his symptoms. He feared he was going into some kind of toxic shock syndrome. Septic shock was marked by fever. He had that. Malaise, he had that. Chills and nausea, check. Damn, he was four for four.
He pulled the bandages back and looked at his wound. It was nasty. He cursed bitterly. He had to get the hell off this island and into a hospital, soon.
Jason took a drink from a water bottle, then opened the laptop. He had only two, maybe three hours of battery power left. He closed the computer. He’d been able to translate enough of the text to know what he had, and it was critical he get it out as soon as possible.
Somewhere between Jakarta and Europe a cargo ship had three marine cargo containers with machine tools on board. Inside those machine tools, virtually undetectable by current methods, was enough uranium to make a dozen dirty bombs.
Jason had alerted his handler to the situation a week ago when the containers were first being loaded. It had cost him his cover and the life of his primary agent, a man deep in the terrorist network of Jemaah Islamiyah.
So far nothing had been done to find and stop that ship. But Jason now had a laptop with the information that would identify not only the ship, but where the deadly material was headed. What Jason didn’t have was the program that could break the code and get into the specific data on the laptop.
It was his opinion that the cargo was headed for a port in Europe, before heading elsewhere—most likely the States.
He made his way slowly and painfully to the front of the cave. He pushed aside the blanket and stuck his head outside. At times the smoke so completely blocked the sun he couldn’t tell if it was day or night but for his watch. The front of the narrow entrance was covered by thick vines and wide lantana fronds. He’d found the cave by accident as he’d fled the men hunting him.
He didn’t want to waste the satellite phone’s batteries, but he had to make contact. He was getting sicker and weaker by the day. His spells of fever getting worse.
He wouldn’t last much longer.
Guam
Anna sensed an absence of movement. They were on the ground.
The door of the transport plane was open, and opening her eyes, she appeared to be alone. They had brought her all the way out to Guam and abandoned her in the plane.
A fine set of circumstances. Her anger and frustration was rising again.
Brock and his associates had, indeed, deplaned without her. No one was on board but her.
She could see the jungle beyond the plane framed in the open door.
Anna unfastened her seat belt, got up and stretched. The heat and light poured in through the open doors with a nasty vengeance.
She deplaned, squinting, and began to sweat almost instantly. It was like walking into a sauna. The sun beat down on her neck and face, the humidity sucked the sweat right up out of her pores onto her skin where it heated up but couldn’t evaporate because the air was already saturated. She’d rather be surrounded by fire.
Right across the road from where she stood there was a big sign above the feeder road into the camp: Welcome to Camp Nowhere.
The camp sprawled along the road on the far side of the airfield. No colorful tents like the ones she saw in firefighting camps. This one consisted of a half-dozen Quonset huts with semicircular, corrugated roofs, the structures bolted to large concrete slabs. Behind the Quonset huts stood several smaller stucco buildings and in the distance, across from what looked like a rice paddy, Anna saw several concrete outbuildings.
The sprawling base seemed empty. She had a weird feeling about it, as if she’d stepped into a horror thriller, or one of those great old Twilight Zone episodes.
She walked away from the C-17 and then stopped and stood staring across the dirt road at the camp. There was a small road sign: Harm’s Way. Hanging from that sign by one arm was a small skeleton of a man that had been fashioned out of wire.
