“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 ARC 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.