From the first, Hendra could see that there was something extraordinary about the CPU powering the toy. A little investigation on the Internet proved how right he was. The Z80 processor inside the Gameboy was indeed special, and now it formed the heart of his latest attempt at a workable guidance system.
Hendra was staring so hard at the horizon, trying to penetrate the perpetual haze that blurred the line between sea and sky, that he was developing a headache, a solid pounding at the back of his head. He could sense Duat beside him, and felt the man’s growing anger and disappointment as the seconds ticked by. Everything Babu Islam had planned was resting on his shoulders and again Hendra cursed himself quietly for making rash promises. He glanced at his watch. The drone was late, but only by a minute. Three minutes was the cut-off. Two minutes of sweating remained. Hendra chewed on a fingernail, ripping it off painfully at the quick. A few bars of inane music chirped electronically behind him. ‘Turn that off,’ he snapped at Unang.
It will work, it will work…be patient. Hendra again examined the intricacies of the new guidance system in his head in an attempt to isolate anything he might have overlooked. He’d discovered that the Z8 °CPU had been around for a very long time — twenty-five years — and was the basis for many amateur robots. It was also, apparently, very easy to program, something of purely academic interest to Hendra because computer programming, he decided, was beyond him. But not, it seemed, beyond Unang. Hendra had been following the instructions conveniently set out on the website for programming the chip, but making little headway. Then Unang arrived, inquisitive. He watched over Hendra’s shoulder for a time and then said, ‘You’re doing it wrong, Hitu. You are repeating every command. The language is self-documenting. I’ll show you.’ Hendra stood back and watched mesmerised as the boy went to work.
Finally, the day had arrived for the over-the-horizon test. Hendra had nervously invited Duat to witness it. A buzz had gone through the encampment, largely because of Unang’s involvement in the project, and a sizeable audience had grown on the beach to watch it. The drone took off uneventfully under remote control, whereupon Hendra switched it over to fully automated flight. It climbed to fifty feet, banked gently and tracked down the beach, turned again and flew over the encampment before changing course again and flying out to sea, all as preprogrammed. There was nothing more to watch for forty minutes. The test drone disappeared into the mist and all the spectators drifted away. Except Duat. The Emir stood rooted to the spot, his toes occasionally digging into the sand, silently watching the horizon through his binoculars. These were the moments when Hendra realised how important his work was to Babu Islam, and he desperately wanted it to succeed.
But perhaps, again, it would not succeed today.
Hendra’s watch gave him the bad news as the second hand swept around the top of the dial and, simultaneously, a little stopwatch alarm sounded. Time was up and there was no sign of the drone. Another failure, and Hendra realised he’d have been more surprised if the test had been a success.
And then a smudge of smoke appeared on the horizon in exactly the spot where the drone should have appeared. ‘Do you see that, Hendra? There, on the horizon.’
Unang joined them, searching the horizon, his interest rekindled.
‘Yes, I see it,’ Hendra said, squinting through his binoculars, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. While he looked at the light grey stain that marked the transition from sea to sky, willing the VHF receiver to begin squawking with the signal sent from the UAV, a wheelhouse climbed above the rim of the world and sat beneath the smudge. Hendra’s spirits fell. It was a fishing trawler.
‘Hendra, I’ll need twenty men. Armed,’ said Duat quietly, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.
Hendra’s excitement turned to fear as the reality of Duat’s order reached the part of his brain not involved in his project. Duat’s gaze remained riveted on the approaching fishing boat as Hendra turned and ran back along the beach towards the encampment. Boats were not an unusual sight on the Java Sea, Duat told himself, but one heading directly towards them was. He willed it to veer away but it kept coming.
Hendra returned quickly, a ragtag platoon of men in his wake armed with an assortment of weapons from assault rifles and RPGs to machetes.
Through his binoculars, Duat saw that several men toting submachine guns had assembled on the trawler’s foredeck. It was cutting through the water fast, much faster than any fishing boat Duat had ever seen, white foam tumbling from its high bow. And then the national flag of Myanmar appeared on the boat’s radio mast and a wave of relief flooded through him. ‘Friends,’ Duat called out suddenly, waving an arm high above his head, lowering the binoculars, ‘you are welcome.’
The men on the beach reacted swiftly to the change in Duat’s attitude. They lowered their weapons and became an instant and enthusiastic welcoming committee, waving boisterously.
The trawler surged forward briefly on its own stern wave as the throttles were cut. It coasted into the small bay and dropped anchor. A small dinghy was lowered and three men climbed in, two of them heavily armed and obviously bodyguards for the third. Moments later, the dinghy’s keel carved a groove in the sand and a weatherbeaten man of around sixty hopped nimbly ashore. ‘Where is Duat?’ he said in halting English.
Duat walked forward from amongst his men and held out his hand in welcome.
Within half an hour, exactly two hundred kilos of heroin number four — the injectable variety — was ferried off the trawler and stacked neatly on a tarpaulin spread on the sand. It was the balance of what Duat had bought. Each brick, packed in red greaseproof paper stamped with the White Stallion logo, weighed exactly one and a half kilos. Together, the bricks represented exactly forty million US dollars. Duat did the sums in his head and the figures made him giddy. The street value in Australia was around one point two million dollars per kilo. This small stack would generate around two hundred and forty million dollars’ worth of income. Add the income already earned from the fifty kilos previously received and distributed — all up three hundred million dollars!
Duat still found it difficult to believe Babu Islam’s potential income. Once various middlemen, officials and retailers took their respective cuts, it would fall to around two hundred and thirty million — a clear profit of one hundred and eighty million Australian dollars. Duat shook his head in awe.
‘Where is Abd’al Rahim?’ said Duat, glancing around. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at one of his men. ‘Give this to Rahim and tell him we need it tested.’ Duat tossed him one of the red bricks and the man ducked away instantly. Duat realised there was little he could do if the general had delivered merchandise below the quality promised and previously received but, at the very least, he needed to reassure himself.
Rahim lay in bed and cursed the arrival of yet another day. His joints ached and his bowels rumbled. Sleep had been impossible, for no sooner did he lie down than he would need to run to the toilet, sometimes to vomit but mostly to sit. His head throbbed with an ache that felt like his brain had been thrashed by an eggbeater. Lately, his skin had begun to bruise easily and large crimson stains resulted from even the lightest pressure. Soon, Rahim knew, the real pain would begin as his internal organs shut down. He hoped he had enough time left to finish his important work here before death took him gratefully to Allah and to paradise.