“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.”
Chapter 17
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.”
Chapter 18
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.”