Dale Brown, Jim DeFelice
Target Utopia
Dreamland Whiplash: Target Utopia
Various locations in Malaysia and the nearby waters; Washington, D.C. and environs.
Breanna Stockard, director, Department of Defense Office of Special Technology; Whiplash Director, DoD
Jonathon Reid, special assistant to CIA deputy director; Whiplash Director representing CIA
Colonel Danny Freah, U.S. Air Force; commander, Whiplash
Chief Master Sergeant Ben “Boston” Rockland, U.S. Air Force; senior NCO Whiplash military detachment
Captain Turk Mako, U.S. Air Force pilot, assigned to Office of Special Technology/Whiplash
Ray Rubeo, President and CEO, Applied Intelligence; key consultant and contractor to the Office of Special Technology
President Christine Mary Todd
Senator Jeff “Zen” Stockard, member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees (Breanna’s husband)
Vice President Jay Mantis
Defense Secretary Charles Lovel
Secretary of State Alistar Newhaven
White House Chief of Staff David Greenwich
Riyad Achmoody, team leader
Chris Bulgaria
Tony “Two Fingers” Dalton
Eddie Guzman
Glenn Fulsom
“Baby Joe” Morgan
Ivan Dillon
Captain Joe Thomas, head of ground protective forces, Temporary Task Force Tango-Bravo-Mary
Lieutenant Colonel James “Jocko” Greenstreet, commander, Temporary Task Force Tango-Bravo-Mary Air Squadron
Lieutenant Torbin “Cowboy” Van Garetn, pilot, executive officer, TTF Tango-Bravo-Mary Squadron
Lloyd Braxton, scientist
Thomas Fortine, naval expert, ship captain
Dietz Talbot, recruit
MYSTERIES
1
Colonel Danny Freah adjusted his sunglasses and stared out the passenger window of the Escalade as the SUV wound its way across a jungle ridge, its wheels clinging to a highway so narrow that brush poked against the windows on both sides. The lush jungle of southwestern Borneo in East Malaysia was considered a natural wonderland, one of the few pristine places left on earth. A few years before, this had made it a much-sought-after destination for rich tourists. But the outbreak of virulent guerrilla warfare involving combatants ranging from radical Muslims to sociopathic Maoist throwbacks had dimmed its attractiveness to even the most adventurist arriviste. There were many easier ways to cheat death.
Danny, though, wasn’t here as a tourist, and though his eyes scoured the nearby jungle eagerly, he wasn’t admiring the sights. Nor were the glasses he was tweaking actually sunglasses. They were high-powered smart glasses, Google glasses on steroids, as the developers called them. Developed from the “smart helmet” technology Dreamland had pioneered a decade earlier, they allowed him to scan in infrared as well as an optically enhanced and magnified mode.
“One time I was in Honduras,” said his guide, a portly CIA officer named Melvin Gephardt. “I was in the U.S. Army then, seventeen years old. First or second night there, and we’re in the jungle.”
“Uh-huh.” Danny had learned to throw in a few absentminded remarks every so often to keep Gephardt from bothering him with actual questions, or anything that had to be taken seriously.
“So we’re sleeping in these tents, right? Each one of us had one. Canvas, you know the drill. So anyway, one of the guys is sleeping and his arm somehow gets out of the tent, right? All of a sudden, middle of the night, we hear this bloodcurdling scream. I mean, someone is dying.”
“Mmmm.”
“Jump up, run out — this huge Anaconda has his arm like up to the pit in its mouth. Oh my God. The snake had to be like as long as this car.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So everybody’s yelling, and this Special Forces guy, right? He’s like there as an advisor for the Honduran army—”
“Stop the car!” yelled Danny, pulling at his seat-belt buckle.
Gephardt hit the brakes. Danny leapt from the SUV before it stopped moving. He trotted down the road about five yards, then made his way into the brush. Pushing his way between the thick vines and trees for about twenty yards, he made his way to a sickly looking Mahang tree, the lone survivor of a clear-cut harvest some ten years before. Older than the other trees, it stood out like a gnarled senior citizen in the middle of a high school prom dance, as thick as its neighbors were slender, stooped where its neighbors were bounding boldly toward the sun.
Eight feet off the ground, a Z-shaped limb rose from the trunk. Fending off the thick vines, Danny clambered up, then pulled himself out onto the limb. Conscious of his weight and the slowly sagging branch, he stretched out toward a black piece of wood wedged in the thin branches at the end.
A piercing screech froze him. Danny glanced to his left and saw an orangutan ten yards away, perched in the swaying top of another tree. The ape bared its teeth in a gesture clearly intended to intimidate.
Danny tried to remember the very brief advice he’d been given on dealing with the animals. The orangutan screeched again, then began shifting its weight so the tree swayed sharply. Ten yards was nothing for an angry orangutan; the animal could easily launch itself and land on Danny’s tree, if not his back.
“Go away,” Danny snarled, as nastily as possible. He couldn’t remember if this was the advice or not; it just seemed like the most sensible thing to do.
The orangutan screeched again.
“Get!” shouted Danny.
The animal gave one last ferocious screech, then retreated.
Danny breathed slowly, then continued out along the limb, moving cautiously but determined to get what he’d come for as quickly as possible.
The branch cracked. Danny felt himself slipping downward, but he didn’t fall; the damage was only partial, not enough to sever the limb.
The leaves of several trees nearby rustled violently. A dozen small black figures fled, looking like a swarm of giant bees following their queen to a new hive.
Monkeys. But at least they were going away.
“Sumabitch!” yelled Gephardt below. “Don’t fall.”
“Yeah, I’m working on that,” muttered Danny, stretching a bit more.
“What the hell are you doing, Colonel?”
Danny didn’t bother to answer. He inched out closer to the black object, grabbed it and wrestled it from the branch. Just over five feet long, its skin was as smooth as polished stone; the end closest to Danny looked like the nose of a dolphin, with small, round protrusions where the eyes would be. Two oblong stubs marked the middle of each side; the rear looked as if it had been bitten by an animal three or four times larger than the orangutans that were now fleeing.
The object was a little too cumbersome to carry down with him. Danny maneuvered it to an open space in the foliage and let it drop. Then he half shimmied and half climbed back down to the ground. He banged his knee as he went; it complained quite adamantly, reminding him of every other time he had hurt it, which was quite a lot. It strongly implied that he had reached the age when he shouldn’t be climbing in trees.