Target Utopia (2 page)

Malaysia

C
OLONEL
D
ANNY
F
REAH
adjusted his sunglasses and stared out the passenger window of the Escalade as the SUV wound its way across a jungle ridge, its wheels clinging to a highway so narrow that brush poked against the windows on both sides. The lush jungle of southwestern Borneo in East Malaysia was considered a natural wonderland, one of the few pristine places left on earth. A few years before, this had made it a much-sought-after destination for rich tourists. But the outbreak of virulent guerrilla warfare involving combatants ranging from radical Muslims to sociopathic Maoist throwbacks had dimmed its attractiveness to even the most adventurist arriviste. There were many easier ways to cheat death.

Danny, though, wasn't here as a tourist, and though his eyes scoured the nearby jungle eagerly, he wasn't admiring the sights. Nor were the glasses he was tweaking actually sunglasses. They were high-powered smart glasses, Google
glasses on steroids, as the developers called them. Developed from the “smart helmet” technology Dreamland had pioneered a decade earlier, they allowed him to scan in infrared as well as an optically enhanced and magnified mode.

“One time I was in Honduras,” said his guide, a portly CIA officer named Melvin Gephardt. “I was in the U.S. Army then, seventeen years old. First or second night there, and we're in the jungle.”

“Uh-huh.” Danny had learned to throw in a few absentminded remarks every so often to keep Gephardt from bothering him with actual questions, or anything that had to be taken seriously.

“So we're sleeping in these tents, right? Each one of us had one. Canvas, you know the drill. So anyway, one of the guys is sleeping and his arm somehow gets out of the tent, right? All of a sudden, middle of the night, we hear this bloodcurdling scream. I mean, someone is dying.”

“Mmmm.”

“Jump up, run out—this huge Anaconda has his arm like up to the pit in its mouth. Oh my God. The snake had to be like as long as this car.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So everybody's yelling, and this Special Forces guy, right? He's like there as an advisor for the Honduran army—”

“Stop the car!” yelled Danny, pulling at his seat-belt buckle.

Gephardt hit the brakes. Danny leapt from the SUV before it stopped moving. He trotted down the road about five yards, then made his way into
the brush. Pushing his way between the thick vines and trees for about twenty yards, he made his way to a sickly looking Mahang tree, the lone survivor of a clear-cut harvest some ten years before. Older than the other trees, it stood out like a gnarled senior citizen in the middle of a high school prom dance, as thick as its neighbors were slender, stooped where its neighbors were bounding boldly toward the sun.

Eight feet off the ground, a Z-shaped limb rose from the trunk. Fending off the thick vines, Danny clambered up, then pulled himself out onto the limb. Conscious of his weight and the slowly sagging branch, he stretched out toward a black piece of wood wedged in the thin branches at the end.

A piercing screech froze him. Danny glanced to his left and saw an orangutan ten yards away, perched in the swaying top of another tree. The ape bared its teeth in a gesture clearly intended to intimidate.

Danny tried to remember the very brief advice he'd been given on dealing with the animals. The orangutan screeched again, then began shifting its weight so the tree swayed sharply. Ten yards was nothing for an angry orangutan; the animal could easily launch itself and land on Danny's tree, if not his back.

“Go away,” Danny snarled, as nastily as possible. He couldn't remember if this was the advice or not; it just seemed like the most sensible thing to do.

The orangutan screeched again.

“Get!” shouted Danny.

The animal gave one last ferocious screech, then retreated.

Danny breathed slowly, then continued out along the limb, moving cautiously but determined to get what he'd come for as quickly as possible.

The branch cracked. Danny felt himself slipping downward, but he didn't fall; the damage was only partial, not enough to sever the limb.

The leaves of several trees nearby rustled violently. A dozen small black figures fled, looking like a swarm of giant bees following their queen to a new hive.

Monkeys. But at least they were going away.

“Sumabitch!” yelled Gephardt below. “Don't fall.”

“Yeah, I'm working on that,” muttered Danny, stretching a bit more.

“What the hell are you doing, Colonel?”

Danny didn't bother to answer. He inched out closer to the black object, grabbed it and wrestled it from the branch. Just over five feet long, its skin was as smooth as polished stone; the end closest to Danny looked like the nose of a dolphin, with small, round protrusions where the eyes would be. Two oblong stubs marked the middle of each side; the rear looked as if it had been bitten by an animal three or four times larger than the orangutans that were now fleeing.

The object was a little too cumbersome to carry down with him. Danny maneuvered it to an open space in the foliage and let it drop. Then he half shimmied and half climbed back down to the
ground. He banged his knee as he went; it complained quite adamantly, reminding him of every other time he had hurt it, which was quite a lot. It strongly implied that he had reached the age when he shouldn't be climbing in trees.

“You gotta watch these monkeys,” said Gephardt when he reached the ground. “They're pretty strong when they're mad.”

“Yeah,” said Danny, trying not to make it too obvious that he was stretching his knee.

“That's it, huh? That's from the airplane? UAV, sorry. That's the part they didn't get?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, resisting the temptation to say something sarcastic.

“That's what, from the fuselage? Where's the motor?”

“Got me.”

Actually, he knew from the techies who'd been examining the UAV's capabilities from afar that it was likely the motor had broken off, and recovered with the wings and rest of the aircraft by the rebels who were controlling it. But even though he was CIA, Gephardt wasn't cleared to know anything about it. So Danny kept the details to himself.

“We're gonna want to get moving,” said Gephardt, looking at the object as Danny picked it up. “Rebels are all over the place.”

“Coming.” Danny turned the long fuselage around, making sure the glasses were recording every inch. The visuals were being sent back to a situation room in a bunker at Langley, the CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia. When
a barely audible beep told him the techies were satisfied that he had examined every conceivable angle, he lifted the slender fuselage onto his shoulder. “Let's go.”

“How the hell did you see that thing through all the foliage?” asked Gephardt.

“I eat my carrots. Let's get back.”

Gephardt continued his story about the snake as they started back down the hill. It was a story Danny had heard in many different guises over the years: a Green Beret or some other resident expert would come out, measure the victim's other arm, then chop the snake about two inches deeper, releasing the victim. He was then medivacked out, his arm scarred with acid burns.

Anacondas were rare in Honduras and had their pick of much easier prey than sleeping soldiers. Still, the size of the snakes made it exactly the sort of tale suitable to be passed down from generation to generation, a kind of campfire ghost story that many of its tellers—Gephardt undoubtedly among them—told so often that they inevitably became convinced
must
have happened. While Danny had a relatively high opinion of the Agency as a whole—he worked with some of the best officers in the business—the little he knew of Gephardt made it clear that he swam in the shallow end of the pool. It was more indication of how low a priority Malaysia had to not just the Agency, but the U.S. in general. Ironically, upward of forty percent of the world's commerce shipped through the nearby waters, a fact not lost on the pirates operating there.

“So, you flyin' right outta here?” asked Gephardt as they turned off the scratch road onto a slightly wider one.

“Yeah. I gotta get back.”

“I'll still stand you that beer when we get into town.”

“If there's time,” said Danny, hoping there wouldn't be.

“Shit!”

Danny looked up. There was a man with an assault rifle in the road ahead.

“I can deal with it,” said Gephardt. “Not to worry.”

“Two more on the side,” said Danny. He touched the right frame of his glasses, switching them into infrared mode.

“Yeah, I see 'em. You know what? We're just gonna blow right by 'em. Screw the bribe. I don't like the idea of stopping.”

“Guy with an RPG farther down. Twenty yards. On the right.”

“Shit. How are you seein' that?”

The discovery of the man with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher changed the equation; running past would be too risky.

“Back up,” said Danny. “We can backtrack.”

“Too late. Just be cool,” added Gephardt. “It's only going to cost us money. Agency money.”

Slowing the SUV's pace to a bare walk, Gephardt rolled down the window and held up a small wad of cash, yelling something at the man in Malay. The man seemed unimpressed—he lifted the rifle in front of his chest with both hands and
motioned for Gephardt to stop. Gephardt slowed to a stop by applying the brakes, but kept his right foot on the gas.

“Hello,” yelled Gephardt—the greeting sounded roughly the same in Malay as in English. “
Apa yang anda mahu?
What do you want? The tax?”

The man said something in return that Danny didn't catch, then walked over to Gephardt. Meanwhile, the two men Danny had spotted on the side of the road trotted toward them. One went to Danny's window, the other continued around to the back of the vehicle.

“Tidak, tidak,”
said Gephardt. Danny recognized the word as “no”; the rest of the sentence was indecipherable. He was out of range for the microphone embedded in the frame of his glasses, or the computers at the Whiplash “Cube” could have interpreted for him.

That seemed unnecessary. The man who'd stopped them spoke in tones that suggested they were conducting normal business: he seemed to want more money. Danny glanced at the man standing near the passenger side. He was young, maybe fifteen, or even fourteen. The Chinese QBZ-95 bull-pup assault rifle he was clutching looked several years older than him, and surely had seen more action—the bull pup's dull green surface was scratched and even dented; the box magazine was wrapped with tape in two places, and it looked like a small piece of the top handle grip was missing.

The hand-me-down Chinese weapon suggested
that the man was a member of the 30 May Movement, one of the three rebel groups vying with the East Malaysian government in this part of the island. Not nearly as well funded as the others, 30 May was smaller than the others, though every bit as ruthless.

Gephardt continued to speak with the man on his side of the SUV as Danny scanned ahead. The man with the RPG was pointing it at the front fender. Another man had joined him. Two more figures were heading down a small hill in the distance, just at the very edge of his infrared range.

The man at the back of the SUV grabbed at the handle for the rear hatch.

“That's no good,” said Danny loudly. “That's mine.”

“I got it,” said Gephardt quickly. He turned back to the man at the door, his voice louder than before.

Something he said apparently angered the man, who raised his rifle.

“Easy,” said Gephardt. “Relax.”

Danny had seen enough. “Whiplash Rotor, command Danny Freah,” he said, alerting the system to accept direct commands. “Terminate all targets within one hundred yards of vehicles. All targets are hostile.”

In seconds the air began to percolate, as if the very molecules of nitrogen and oxygen were exploding. The men around the truck fell to the ground.

“Gephardt, go!” said Danny. “Go! Get us out of here.”

The CIA officer, not quite understanding what was going on, hesitated, though only for a moment. The SUV lurched forward, dirt spinning as it veered first left and then right.

“What the hell?” said Gephardt.

“Just stay on the road.”

He did, though barely. They careened through a dozen curves before the road straightened out.

“All right, slow down,” said Danny as they hit a wider, well-paved stretch of highway.

“What the hell just happened?” asked Gephardt.

“They were getting dangerous.”

“We were just arguing on a price—”

“No. They were too aggressive. I didn't come all this way to lose my fuselage. I can't afford to take chances.”

Danny tapped the side of the right temple tip at the back of his glasses, then studied the image that appeared.

“There's a clearing about three-quarters of a mile up ahead,” he told Gephardt. “Stop there.”

“Why?”

“Just stop there.”

“Not without a reason. If those guys had a radio or phones—”

“They're all dead,” said Danny. “Just do what I say.”

Gephardt tightened his lips. Danny scanned the nearby jungle, making sure there was nothing ahead.

“There,” he told Gephardt as they came around the bend. The clearing was small, maybe a dozen yards long and another two dozen deep; the far
side was all jungle, and there were some rocks amid the high brush near the road.

Danny got out of the truck and went around to the rear of the SUV. He took out the fuselage he'd retrieved and hoisted it onto his back. It was so light it felt as if it had been made out of Styrofoam, not high-tech carbon and metal fiber.

“You comin'?” he yelled to Gephardt, who was still in the vehicle.