magnification, zooming in on the black cloud. The first thing he saw was a large flat piece of metal. Beyond it, red flames and a roiling cloud of smoke furled from a long tube.
A fuselage. He was looking at the wreckage of an aircraft.
“One of the MiGs,” said Danny, but almost immediately he realized he was wrong. The fuselage was too long, out of proportion to the tailfin for a fighter. Then he saw a large aircraft engine sitting off to the side.
He hesitated, then reached for the control on the smart helmet to record the image.
“Path is clear to the
“Good,” said Danny. “Good.”
General Sattari watched as Abtin Fars took a long, deep breath, then bowed his head and said a silent prayer before reaching to connect the wire with the trigger device he had devised. To a layman, at least, the device seemed almost overly simplistic. There was a small digital clock, two different types of very small watch batteries, and a three-inch board containing a few diodes and two small capacitors.
Sattari took his own deep breath as Abtin reached into the bomb assembly.
The engineer jerked backward. Sattari reflexively shut his eyes, expecting the inevitable.
“OK,” said Abtin after a few moments passed. “OK.”
The general found he had trouble catching his breath. “It will work?” he asked when he did.
“It should. I cannot make any guarantees. Let me solder the connections.”
Sattari bent over the device.
“Please, General,” said Abtin. “If you don’t mind, having someone looking over my shoulder makes me nervous. Inspect the work when I am done.”
“Of course,” said Sattari, backing away. “Of course.”
Everything hurt. Everything.
Breanna’s heart thumped against the ground.
“Oh,” she said.
Pushing the word from her mouth took supreme effort. She tried to say something else but was too exhausted.
“Oh,” she managed finally. “Oh. Oh.”
“We got it, Colonel. A definite location.”
Dog flattened the folds out of the paper map, translating the GPS coordinates to the grid. Zen and Breanna were on an unmarked island northeast of the Chebaniani Reefs, about seventy-five miles from the mainland and roughly parallel to Magalore — farther south than even he had thought. According to the map, there was no land there, just sea; the nearest marked island was about three miles away.
But they were definitely there. Disoriented, barely able to talk, and clearly thirsty and hungry, but there.
“Dreamland
“There’s nothing there on the chart, Bastian,” said the ship captain. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“It’ll take us three hours to get there. We’ll have the Werewolf over as quickly as possible.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Is your daughter all right?”
“She’s there. They’re both there. What kind of shape they’re in, I’m not sure.”
After a moment Storm replied, “I hope she’s OK.”
“Me too.”
The sound was so foreign he couldn’t process it, almost couldn’t hear it.
A moan, soft, long, plaintive…
Breanna, talking to him from the grave.
Calling for him.
“Jeff. Jeffrey. Zen. Where are you, Jeff?”
It was so far away, so injured, so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. A buzz descended from above, a cloud of hums as if angels were surrounding him. The air vibrated with a cold, parching dryness.
Is this what death was like? Or was it just loss, empty of all hope?
“Jeff. Jeff. Where are you?”
“I’m here,” he said. And the spell broke, and he turned and pushed himself back to the tent, where for the first time in days — for the first time ever it seemed like — Breanna’s eyes were wide open.
“Hey.”
He twisted his head down and kissed her, pressing his lips to her face, then pausing as the flesh touched, afraid that the pressure would hurt her — or worse, that the kiss would shatter an illusion and he would find she wasn’t here, wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t softly moaning for help.
He pulled back, eyes closed as they always were when they kissed. Fear overwhelmed him, choked out his breath. Zen shook his head and forced his eyes open, forced himself to face the inevitable mirage.
“Jeff. Everything hurts,” she said.
It was real, not a mirage, not a dream, not death or hopelessness, but life — she was alive.
He pushed in and kissed her again, happy beyond belief.
IX. Payments Due
Even the most avaricious of men had limits, moral lines they would not cross for any amount of gold. So General Sattari was not terribly shocked when he found that Abul Amin, the Egyptian whom he had contracted with in Rawalpindi, balked when he saw the shape of the cargo that was to be loaded into the Airbus 310. Sattari countered the man’s frown with one of his own, then suggested they discuss the matter in a corner of the nearby hangar while his men proceeded.
“No, you must stop,” said the Egyptian in his heavily accented English. “I cannot allow my plane to make such a transport. If the Americans found out—”
“Why do you think that the Americans don’t know?” asked Sattari. “Come, let us discuss the matter and make sure our payments are arranged. Then a pot of tea.”
More confused than mollified, the Egyptian began walking with Sattari toward his small office inside the hangar. The Egyptian employed a single bodyguard, who stepped out from near the door and glanced nervously at his boss. Abul Amin shook his head slightly, and the man stepped back into the shadows.
That was the problem with people like him, who made their living in the shadow of the law. They were too trusting of others they thought were corrupt.
Most of the Egyptian’s money came from transporting embargoed spare parts for oil equipment, with the occasional military item thrown in as an extra bonus. He would be hired to pick them up from a country on decent terms with the West, like Pakistan, and fly them to a place such as Iran, where the international community had prohibited their direct sale. Amin had been doing this for so long that he’d come to believe not so much that it was legal, but that there was only minimal danger involved, that he did not have to be on his guard when with someone like Sattari — for whom he had transported everything from circuit boards for F-4 Phantom jets to Western-style
