And maybe, if he were very fortunate, there even would be a little bloodshed to make things more interesting.
His eyes wide with disbelief, U. S. Secretary of Defense Conrad Holden looked at the telephone receiver in his hand as if it had been invaded by an evil poltergeist… albeit one that possessed the voice and speech mannerisms of Roger Gordian, someone he'd known for many long years.
"Roger, are you certain?"
"I'm telling you it's going to be Sandakan, Conrad.
And it will roughly coincide with the sub's embarkation. They won't want to give us time to disable the key-codes."
"But the sub's launching in a half an hour—"
"Then get off the phone with me and call somebody who can stop this from happening!"
Hotter and sweatier than he was accustomed to feeling, Luan was about to change his shirt when he heard it: the regular thup-thup-thup of rotors beating the air, rapidly getting louder and closer.
He looked across the room to where Xiang and his bodyguards had been throwing a pair of dice.
"What's that sound?" he said, already knowing the answer. The army helicopters had been ubiquitous when he was driven from the hills of northern Thailand.
The pirate tossed down the dice and turned abruptly to his fellows.
"Get your weapons," he grunted. "We're being attacked."
Leaning out the door of the Bell Jet Ranger chopper, Nimec extracted shells from his utility webbing, slapped them into his 12-gauge and pumped the forestock to chamber the first round. Like Osmar and the other three Sword ops in his team, he had on a pullover cowl, gas mask, and black Nomex Stealthsuit. The Zylon body armor underneath his shirt was both lighter and stronger than Kevlar.
Nimec gestured for the pilot to lower the chopper to a stabilized hover, and peered at the wooden structure below. There were a number of windows on all sides. He chose one of them as his target and pulled the trigger of his pump gun.
The finned CS bomblet disgorged from its muzzle in a train of propellent vapor, punched through the window, and burst open to release a cloud of tear gas.
Nimec chambered another round, fired, and loosed a third at the Thai's hideout. Billows of white smoke erupted from the windows.
He slung the weapon over his shoulder — he also had an MP5K against his side — donned his gloves, and signaled his companions to the door.
A moment later the rope line was dropped from its hoist bracket. One after another in quick succession, the men gripped the line and fast-roped to the boardwalk like firefighters sliding down a pole.
Submachine-gun volleys erupted on the ground almost the instant they alighted — stuttering from inside the house, from the dwellings around it, and from the wooden walkway that ran the length of the canal.
His head ducked low as his teammates laid down a lane of covering fire, Nimec raced around to the front of the hideout.
A man surged into his path from the gushing smoke of the building, bringing an FN P90 up in his direction. But he was half-blinded from the CS, and Nimec was quick to react. He jogged out of the way as the pirate released a stream of 9mm rounds. Nimec raked him across the middle with a burst from his MP5K, then kept dashing for the entrance without a backward glance.
He paused in front of the heavy plank door, sprayed the lock with bullets, and kicked it in with the flat of his foot. With his peripheral vision he could see Osmar running up on the left.
He looked over at him, signaled a crossover entry, and ticked off a three-count with his fingers.
Together they rushed forward into the house.
Minutes after the ribbon-cutting fanfare concluded, the delegation of world leaders was ushered across the gang, over the black anechoic tiles covering Seawolf's hull-like rubber flagstones, and then down into the sub by its executive officer. President Ballard dropped through the hatch first, followed by Prime Minister Yamamoto and the Malaysian and Indonesian heads-of-state.
The press contingent came next, Alex Norstrum at the back of the line, straining to see past a tall, broad-shouldered Canadian reporter who had been directed to board ahead of him.
As the group filed through a passageway toward the control room, Ballard felt as if he were about to step into the set of a Hollywood space opera, something about star-ships and wormholes in the space-time continuum. And in a sense he was entering a time machine, one which was capable of hurling him back through the accumulation of years and distance that had brought him to middle age, stripping the overlay of political cynicism and calculation from his face, and briefly revealing the excited countenance of a ten-year-old orphan from the Mississippi boondocks whose dreams had fueled a long, difficult journey from poverty to the Presidency. He goggled at the equipment and status boards filling up every corner of the brightly lit space with open wonder, his wide eyes no sooner landing on one piece of gadgetry than getting snagged by another of equal or greater fascination.
The sub's commanding officer, Commander Malcolm R. Frickes, USN, was saluting his guests from the control room entry way.
''It is my honor and privilege to welcome you all aboard," he said, stepping aside to let them enter.
Ballard enthusiastically returned the salute, swallowed, and gestured toward the periscopes on a raised platform in the center of the room.
"Do I get to look through one of those)" he asked.
Frickes smiled.
"Sir, you're the Commander-in-Chief," he said. "And that means you get to do anything you wish."
General Yussef Tabor, commanding officer of the Malaysian Army's 10th Parachute Brigade, could scarcely believe the orders that had just come down the line. He was to deploy his three airborne battallions — almost three thousand men — to Sandakan at once and assist the regular key-bank guard units in defending the beachhead.
Against who or what it was to be defended was unclear — but he at last saw an opportunity to be a true soldier. As the closest element of Malaysia's Rapid Deployment Force, stationed in Sabah less than thirty miles from the city, his would be the first of the support units to arrive. And that sat just fine with him.
After a decade of hunting illegal immigrants like a dog-catcher chasing down helpless puppies, it was high time for a mission he could be proud of.
Overcome with tear gas, his face tomato-red, Khao Luan was uncontrollably retching and coughing as Xiang tried to drag him into the barn. Gripping him under both arms from behind, the pirate opened the door and started to back his way through, but was still trying to maneuver his boss's weight when Nimec and Osmar burst into the house.
Osmar thrust his weapon out.
"Hold it!" he shouted in Bahasa. "Both of you!"
Breathing hard, Xiang stared at him a moment through thick braids of CS gas. Then, still partially supporting the Thai with one hand, he whipped the other behind his back and brought a donut-shaped P90 around on its strap.
The burst went wide, peppering a roof support, chewing out splinters of wood, Osmar got down into a crouch and fired back, intentionally aiming low. With Luan between him and the big man, he wanted to avoid shooting to kill, knowing the Thai might hold the answer to Blackburn's disappearance.
Luan sagged, clutching his meaty thigh, blood spraying from his femoral artery. Xiang tried to keep him erect, but was unable to manage it, and he went down with a crash. Retreating into the barn, the pirate triggered his weapon, sweeping it in an arc between Osmar and Nimec. Glass shattered somewhere in the house.
This time it was Nimec who fired back, squeezing off two crisp trigger pulls, brrrat-brrrat. He could hear sporadic exchanges of fire out on the walkway, and now and then a groan from one of the incapacitated pirates on the floor.
"Cuff Luan and the rest of these bastards!" he shouted to Osmar through his gas mask. "I'm going after him!"