The thing was, the helmet was pretty damn heavy and hot besides. Fortunately, Egg had told him it Page 57

wasn’t necessary to wear it; he’d alert him to any problem. The helmet was clipped to his belt.

Boston wasn’t the only flesh-and-blood sentry. A battalion of Brunei soldiers blocked access to the area Dreamland had been assigned. There was also an honor guard—a mixed unit built around British Gurkhas, a storied unit of foreign troops that had originated in Nepal—which conducted a ceremonial changing of the guard on the apron twenty yards away every fifteen minutes, or so it seemed.

“Yo, Boston, trucks coming,” said Egg in his earbud.

“Another ceremony?” asked Boston. His mike was clipped to the top of his carbon-boron bulletproof vest; it was sensitive enough so that he could whisper and be heard over the Dreamland com system.

“Negative,” said Egg. “These are customized SUVs. Not military.”

“I hear them,” said Boston. He brought his gun up, though there was no way any intruder could get by the Brunei soldiers, whose weapons included several antitank missiles.

Unless, of course, they stood back and let the trucks pass.

“What’s this?” Egg said in his ear.

The first truck—a large black Chevy Suburban with a block of lights across the top and enough chrome to make a drug dealer jealous—roared straight toward Boston.

“If he doesn’t stop, I’m taking him out.”

“Careful. I think they’re VIPs,” said Egg.

“If he doesn’t stop, I’m taking him out,” repeated Boston. He drew back, squaring as if to fire.

The driver of the SUV slammed on his brakes and swerved, stopping a few yards away. Two other SUVs pulled in alongside.

The doors of the vehicles flew open together. Men in lightweight civilian suits emerged from the trucks.

Bruisers all, they were clearly bodyguards, with vests under their jackets.

“No weapons,” said Egg, giving him the read from the monitor.

“If you say so,” said Boston.

A short, slightly paunchy man stepped forward from the other side of the middle vehicle. He was obviously a local, and was wearing what seemed to be relatively expensive clothes.

“Hello,” said the man with a jovial smile.

“I’m sorry,” said Boston, his voice hard enough to make it clear that was a lie. “No one is allowed past this point. No one.”

The man laughed.

“Sir, no one is allowed past this point,” said Boston. “Not even the sultan.”

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“Oh well,” laughed the man. “I’m just his nephew.”

Thoroughly confused, Boston had the man covered. Someone else got out of the SUV from the other side.

“Colonel Bastian is on his way,” said Egg. “Oh, I see now—that’s Mack Smith.”

“Who’s Smith?” Boston said.

“Major Smith—he’s ours. The guy getting out of the SUV. Colonel Bastian brought him as a political officer.”

The somewhat bedraggled man came out from around the truck and approached Mack.

“It’s all right,” he told Boston. “They’re with me.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Boston. “I have very strict orders. No one gets past me. I’m authorized to shoot,” he added, as Mack continued to within a few feet of him.

Smith squinted at him. “You know who this is?”

“The sultan’s nephew, sir.”

“A prince,” said Mack. “His Royal Highness Pehin bin Awg. Very, very important man in Brunei.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir. But he’s not coming past unless my orders change.”

“You really going to shoot?” asked Mack, taking another step forward.

“Bet your ass. Sir.”

“Jeez.”

Bin Awg laughed. “No need for an upset, Mack. We can come back another time.”

“Colonel Bastian’s at the gate,” said Egg.

“Sir, my colonel is on his way,” Boston told bin Awg. “I apologize, but my orders are very explicit.”

“Let’s have breakfast, then come back,” the prince said, turning back to his vehicle. “Come on, Mack.”

Smith frowned. Boston caught a whiff of perfume, stale cigarettes, and even staler alcohol as the major walked back to the SUV.

“That was really Smith?” asked Boston.

“The one and only.”

Aboard EB-52 Pennsylvania, South China Sea

Near the Vietnamese coast

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10 September 1997

1430

“ACTION ATDANang,” the EB-52’s copilot, Kevin McNamara, said over the interphone, the Megafortress’s onboard communications system. “We have two MiG-21s taking off. We’re tracking.

You have the data.”

Starship felt his throat constrict. His hand involuntarily tightened on the control yoke, even though he didn’t have control of the plane yet.

“Hawk leader copies,” said Zen. “They have two more coming, huh?”

“Looks like it.”

“Should we go ahead with the handoff?” asked Starship, sitting next to Zen on the Flighthawk control deck. They had just begun the prehandoff checklist before the MiGs scrambled from the Vietnamese airfield about a hundred miles to the northeast.

“Absolutely,” said Zen. “You all right?”

Five minutes earlier, Starship would have told him that he’d never felt better in his life. Aspirin and the Brunei coffee had helped him get over the banger of a headache he’d had this morning, a hangover obtained courtesy of a few whiskey sours with Major Smith after the official reception.

But with McNamara’s warning, his headache had returned. His muscles were twitching and his mouth felt dry.

Nothing a shot couldn’t cure, but that wasn’t possible here.

“Let’s do it,” he told Zen, forcing enthusiasm into his voice.

The Flighthawk commander gave verbal authorization. Starship acceded. Zen hit the keys on his panel and gave up control of the bird.

“Authorization Zed Zed Stockard,” said Zen as the computer asked for final confirmation. C3buzzed in Starship’s ear, turning over the helm.

“Handoff complete,” said Starship. “On course.”

He read off his bearing, altitude, and course speed—a prissy bit of the procedure in his opinion, though no one was asking—then worked through a full instrument check with the computer. Starship went by the book, aware that not only Zen but Kick were watching everything he did, ready to point out the slightest deviation from Major Stockard’s prescriptions.

While ostensibly designed to familiarize the crew with the area and procedures for communicating with the ASEAN task force, Starship sensed that today’s mission was really a tryout. Major Stockard had said during the preflight that he hadn’t decided who was going to take the U/MF-3 on the decoy flight tomorrow, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that today’s flight would help determine who got the glory and who sat on his thumbs in the fold-down rumble seat at the back of the compartment.

Starship liked Kick as a person, but he’d never be able to stomach playing number two to the other Page 60

lieutenant. Kick had never been a top jock. Heck, he’d been a Hog driver, flying A-10As before coming over to Dreamland, and everyone knew the A-10As were basically cannon fodder.

Granted, he was a hard worker and a decent guy, but he wasn’t first-team material. If he were, he’d’ve been in Eagles like Starship before transferring here.

“Be advised there are now two MiG-21s off Da Nang, bearing at three-one-five,” said McNamara. The Megafortress copilot customarily kept the crew apprised of the location of other players on the field.

“Climbing through eight thousand feet, accelerating—looks like they want to come say hello.”

Like many of the members of Dreamland’s Megafortress fleet, the Pennsylvania was named for a famous battleship, in this case the venerable battlewagon Pennsylvania, a member of the Iowa class that had served after World War II. She was equipped with a powerful AWACS-style radar, which rotated in a fuselage bulge around the wing root; augmented by a phased array unit in her nose and a host of other antennas and sensors, Penn could sniff out targets five hundred miles away. She and her sisters were intended as replacements for the venerable and considerably more vulnerable E-3 AWACS Sentry, though more mods and updates were planned before the type went operational with the “regular” Air Force.