A test of time

Life is a dream Act 1

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Life is a dream, dreaming of your life

Genre & Author: A work of modern Sydney fiction by Tobias Nixon
Warning: Novel contains use of profanities (swearing); 1337 words & TLAs
Rating: MA 15+

Act 1: The house of bits n’ pieces

Scene 1: A taste of the future

Life is a dream, dreaming of your life.

Half asleep, moments earlier, that single sentence had held so much truth. Now though it was like just another piece of cheap logic. Such a richness and sense of purpose bereft of the sense of urgency and truth for which my dream world empowered it.

I drowsily half roll over in bed. From my right eye I see yesterday’s dead tree copy of SMH* lying crumpled on the floor, a photo of a crazed killer, some guy the paper has labelled the city basher. The waking world is full of vileness; I close my sleepy mind to it and think back to the dream.

A simple statement, a statement of life. My life. The life of one introvert corporate programmer, Thomas Daniels. The one that happens whenever I closed my eyes. The world so real and yet so imagined. A life without a life. Truth takes its hand at the wheels of justice, but the law of life precludes fools and cheats.

My imagination is my enemy. I love it so when I am asleep, wrapped tightly within my dreams, yet blame my constant state of inertia on it when waking to this “real world” every morn. The dreaming is so complete, mostly I am in complete control, it is better in every respect I know.

Slow tender moments shattered. Bleak thoughts that will not end. The snow of blissful ignorance, more often brought on by external dependencies on drugs of choice and addiction. My world melts each night, a place within a place for which I am reborn. I think back to the images of collateral damage that linger. Chunks of dream rise bubbling from my shadow mind.

A charnel house. A narrow corridor, forced ever onwards to the end. To a sharp right corner. To a list of bins full of blood and horror. The room of missing limbs, a place for all the ghosts that never felt peace in death. Victims of war, victims of tragedy and natural destruction. The morbid scene is truly graphic. Each bin is teaming with an endless array of arms, legs, heads, and torsos.

The walls are red with a splash of white specks here and there. I can hardly clamber past these tall overflowing bins, but that’s what I do. To get to the end. The chopping table is a thing to disturb the mind with f3ar. Horrible scythe like blades are set at regular intervals along its surface. A power saw retracts within the wall at the far end of the table. Always the palatable sense of urgency and fear that they will return at any moment.

I am safe from the murderers that feed this place, it’s place within this reality only exists so long as the human scum feed it’s rubbish bins. No the things I fear are the keepers of this place. The bonders that live out of our reality but within it. There single dream sense is attuned to the smell of fear. Like sharks in a bay of blood, these creatures pack feed on those lost or drowned souls that of accident or wit end up within these lonely corridors. The smell of f3ar pervades each pool of shadow. Yet despite the environment you can NEVER show an ounce of the stuff.

I am not innocent. I do not come here, through some accident of imagination, or perhaps a stray spoke in the wheel of fate. One day it occurred to me that if some ghosts were bound to places; houses, graveyards or shipwrecks, perhaps some ghosts were bound within their own long dead dreams. So I imagined a place like that. That night was the first time I saw the charnel house within the realm of my dreams.

You will never see a human get chopped up in there. A fact that should disturb you. How do they get there? Maybe you have inferred it from what I have told you already, the living dead appear here whenever someone dies in circumstances of the most horrific destruction. Plane and car crashes, train and boat wrecks, war, assassination, genocide, earthquake, tsunami are all a small subset of the completely valid ways you may take to end up here. But only if you don’t want to let go.

Apart from never showing f3ar I had previously learnt the symbol name of the shadow scourge. Unable to vocalise it (even had I known the ancient tongue) I was however prepared to form it into a large burning symbol that with practise I could hurl at the things whenever they arrived. It was this symbol that kept me safe. It was the only thing they would not approach.

I had found it on a strange stone cube, soon after stumbling into this place on my first visit. By accident I’d opened a door with a person’s name scrawled and hacked with a fresh coat of blood into the door. The name was written in modern Japanese kanji. I didn’t know Japanese but within the dreaming that didn’t matter. Just tap the global dark pool of latent subconscious talents. The language was in current use so the name conversion was instantaneous.

Kenji Harido. Japanese central banker. Doyen of currency appreciation. Victim of extortion. Noble warrior. Pride before dishonour. Where blackmail fails death entails. Yakuza sword strokes decorated his otherwise pristine naked ghost body as it lay on a large grey stone cube. It was the far side where the burning symbol was written. All the other sides I would later discover contained things relating to the victim. One side was this place (the underside); the four “naked sides” told his story: his lifetime achievements, his disappointments, his name and other personal details, and the way he died. The top was for the victim. The back was for the collector. It was always the same.

Kenji was reported dead twenty four hours later, in the exact way expressed on the stone cube. A proponent of banking reforms his death sent a clear message to others trying to dismantle the centuries old corruption endemic within Japanese financial markets. The only message that made sense to me was someone had died in the same excruciating way I’d already witnessed.

Why were my dreams bringing me back to this place? It wasn’t a place I wanted to visit very often. The images stayed with you for days afterwards. The place was just too graphic. As I lay now in bed I remembered. More shadow scourge than I’d seen. A new door coated in fresh blood, but the name not yet scrawled. The scourge were preparing for a feast.

Tomorrow night would be the only chance to find out whoever was due for the cold slab. I had to go back there, damn. First I had to get to work. Jumping out of bed I started a day that would end like any other.

Scene 2: To find a killer

Another dream, another night. The coldness in the room was not from some imaginary wind, but rather the chill that forms inside you when shit gets too real for your rationality to control. Logic dictated that I run and never come back. Logic be damned, if there was a life to save then I would do it. I dreamed of the house of bits n’ pieces once more.

Drifting through rooms, down corridors so narrow I felt I should have to squeeze through. Looking for a door, freshly marked. Where was the kill room? I looked around the hallway I was in, a ghost suddenly went screaming past me, a human like cry of unholy pain. No doubt looking for the exit I thought... sadness descended upon me, for there was nothing that could be done for that one.

Let me tell you a story about being a ghost. Ghosts don’t like to let go. Ghosts are only ghosts because they want to be. Huh? Who’d want to be a disembodied entity forever doomed to traverse the waking world as a wrath of fantasy. To watch as your world era is transformed, unable to help, the ones you left, left to perish, knowing that you are trapped and that they are already within the grasp of golden wonder, what some fools call paradise.

Ghosts are ghosts because they can’t let go. All humanity is bombarded with one simple lesson, made complex by our natures and the incurable condition of never learning from it until it’s far, far too late. Ghosts are ghosts that were humans once. The great lesson of humanity is that stimuli arise, muddy the mind with emotional attachment and must then be released. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. Almost immediately upon growing up, the human mind muddies itself with attachments and thoughts, emotions and the general chains that make up humanities shittiness are not released. Like ever. It just builds up.

Surprisingly while life deals almost every human being a crippling blow that they are too ignorant to learn from, too stupid to do anything about; when presented with their death, an entirely new experience un-muddied by their minds web, the vast majority pass uneventfully into it’s gaping black maw.

The only light I have ever heard of from the few ghosts that talk is the one given off by the soul reaper. It is visible so you don’t run into it by mistake presumably, if your some higher level state of entity capable of riding the inter-dimensional lines that run in a mobius strip beyond the edges of time.

And how do you escape these narrow suffocating corridors if you ever trip within its bounds? What to do with the cursed shadow scourge that haunt it’s walls? If they catch you they will kill you for real. Being human there is no defence against them.

They are bilateral extensions within the dream realm of big grim himself. Humanities death ripping in early. A few sharpened teeth from the black maw that grew a bit longer than the rest. Those teeth are not waiting after death, the mouth is just the front door to the realm beyond. Perhaps.

So that is the first chunk. A place of pain and torture, built from emotions that have no place left within our reality to go. Perhaps the original house was pulled down, maybe the war field has been reshaped with concrete. Whatever. If you’re a ghost that’s not stuck to something on earth your headed here. Built from souls whose destruction lingers. Defended by the shadow scourge. A place to visit the day you are sure you wish to die. Your friends or family will find you... later.

A sleeper who never wakes. A mind that drifts in a sea of fear, thoughts mere plankton for the shadow feast. In these days of life support what was probably intended to only be some minutes of misery, is variously lengthened to hours, days, weeks or even decades of the most indescribable mental torture known to man. Pray then that you’re well meaning family pull the plug on your harmless comatose body. Cos’ peaceful it ain’t. Scraping each thought from your brain. Taking it, repurposing it, changing it, and adding every sick, Freddy Krueger-esque fantasy you can’t try to imagine into it. Thoughts and emotions mere paint dye for a tapestry so vile, the devil has several on pre-order for his new residence. Of course that is a joke, there is no devil. Only a gaping maw that devours the life force lent out to you from the start.

So that is the second bit; the sick twisted nature of the place. A place made to create in a way that is completely beyond the typical understanding of energy dependant organic beings; a complex tapestry of suffering which the shadow scourge can use as a source of food. Food made from the rarefied and disparate energies that exist between life and death.

Back to the dream last night. It had been strange for two reasons. The dream had a room with a stone cube. The writing was in English, not unusual in of itself, except that the cubes surfaces spoke of a young Aussie, a brilliant musician slain by a serial killer in Sydney’s CBD. I kept thinking back, scribbling madly on my pad. Basically writing down anything I could still remember.

Finally exhausted by journaling my recollection of the dream I get out of bed and head off to work.

As I sit down at my desk in the fishbowl, the IT hub of Techred, Coutil and Banks’ martin place offices, I fire up the browser and check the news. Sure enough the breaking news section is covering a story about a missing world class musician, by the name of Samuel Matthews. The information on the cube matched! The poor man had by my limited understanding of how the cubes worked probably no more than ten or twelve hours remaining on this earth.

Could he be saved? Where the hell was he? There had been more on the stone. Vital clues if I could only use them somehow.

His death was preceded by a long drawn out torture of peak brutality. Given the length of time the killer would need a house. Hmmm that didn’t exactly narrow things down. The stone tableau had spoken of achievements. Oddly the last one had been a private performance of the entire Ring cycle to a single individual, it even stated that this had been Samuel’s greatest ever rendition. The man’s name was Frank Siccalori.

So, Samuel gave his greatest performance, less than twenty four hours before he died. By which point he was already missing. Hadn’t there been reports recently of a serial killer in Europe that had already wacked several leading performers? The press were calling him the Virtuoso killer. Could this be the Virtuoso killer? A globe trotting serial killer targeting the artistic elite of our society. Social terrorism, bizarrely by someone that apparently appreciated much of the beauty of a virtuoso.

All I had was a name. A name that had to be stopped. Faceless in a sea of madness. His reign of terror in absolute terms, mean more than mine. One life for a hundred. The killer was going exponential. Choice was just the fear of a lesser man. It was time to turn to my other talent. Time to do a spot of hacking.

Scene 3: Search & Rescue

I woke from the dream in a sweat. Beads of salty water trickled down the contour of my chin, down my neck and onto my chest. I had a hardened mind, trained by long hours of mediation. Right now a solid line of fear vibrated like a galactic constant in the background. I’d been out for only five minutes, but it had felt like an eternity.

The words that escaped my lips were unconscious, “No!! Don’t kill him.”

The dream had been a vibrant re-run of what would happen if I didn’t find Samuel Matthews. His body lay shattered on a stone tableau. His corpse had been cut so many times that the parts lay in ruin. A room soaked in blood. Nightmares like this reflected eerily against the sobering wall that was my current emotional state of mind.

My face was mashed against a dell keyboard in need of a good clean. The view of the desk was too close. I pulled back as my vision slowly returned to normal. Ever so slowly the blurred outline of the LCD monitor emerged from the square of light. My minds language centre switched to code.

I’d been running a couple of hacking programs non-stop from my workstation for the last five hours. As the last of the analysis programs had swung into action, there output was screaming down the screen matrix style - I had modified the source code to do this, purely as it looked rather cool.

I had taken a quick power nap. I shouldn’t have. Replays in your head of what would happen were unneeded motivation.

A quick message to a virtual friend and I had the confirmation of a certain Mr Siccalori arriving weeks earlier in Sydney. On this occasion my friend assured me, the immigration database apparently had yielded no further secrets.

After several traces, I located a dormant Trojan virus lying asleep within the Telstra network. Cracking its protection was a piece of cake. The author hadn’t even changed the core source code released to the net. Fire and forget by a script kiddie with more luck than sense? No matter it was an asset ready to exploit. Activating it, I injected a self-destruct-on-completion routine into its core assembly; I then set it the task of searching the directory records for any instance of the name.

Sure enough the name came up exactly once, on an ISP pre-paid wireless package. No address, no fixed IP to trace back from the exchange. But I had the source IP last used to connect, not more than twenty minutes ago.

With luck the murderer would still be online. Ping command. IP reachable. This meant the IP address was active, his machine was on. Next came the less certain part of the venture. Opening up a remote shell session, executing the password cracking tool; I literally had no idea how long it would take to brute force my way into this son of a bitch’s machine. For all I knew I could be one attempt away and he could power down his machine. This was where the bulk of the time today had been spent. Watching columns of failed attempts.

The process could be accelerated if you knew which words or numbers the person liked. Luckily it appeared that the killer was still on Windows XP, an older operating system, for which I had the necessary rainbow tables required to drastically speed up the process. The rainbow tables contained pre computed hashes of different passwords. The hashes could be used to recognise patterns in the encrypted value on the disk.

It was as I awoke from the dream that I had a thought about password cracking. Hoping the dream of Samuel was not just coincidence, I added his full name to the search algorithm. The user had been online for over two hours, this might be my only window of opportunity today. I crossed my fingers, smiling, as, several minutes later the remote session at last reported successful login with the user’s account, which he had stupidly given local admin rights to.

A dramatic keyboard mashing of the ENTER key, and had I initiated the final program; a file search that checked for files and emails with certain types of information such as addresses. No address yet, but my algo** was a 1337 piece of code and had found an encrypted zip file marked leasing agreement.

Another 50 minutes cracking the AES 256 bit standard encryption on the zip package. Inside a Word file that also had a password. Laughing I opened an Office specific cracking program. Ten seconds later the word file was password free. Now to see what was inside.

Meanwhile another application was busy copying as much of the user directory as it could before the connection went down. Another app was silently installing an app that would prevent Windows from closing down. Of course that wouldn’t stop someone from ripping the power or network cables out. Just slow them down a bit. Bingo I now had an address in Sydney’s inner west.

I logged onto the companies server farm. The array was normally used for extremely cpu intensive tasks that needed to be completed within the same day to determine whether a particular transaction represented good value according the companies complex financial modelling.

Here it was, there was no turning back now. If there really was someone trapped about to die I had to do this. Even if there was I’d never be able to explain why I diverted mission critical backend infrastructure towards software cracking. There were ends to this story that had no beginning. Well at least not without an ending that concluded with yours truly spending most of his thirties in a psyche ward.

I punched in the password to my admin account launching the master scheduling app. At a click existing jobs were paused, another couple of clicks and small purpose built script I had written was launching my custom decryption application and pointing it to the collection of files that I had been harvesting from the targets desktop PC.

In some server backroom, the array of multi cored servers started chewing through the datastream at 10 Terrabytes per second. Even so it would be at least an hour before the application finished, and resumed regular operations.

At least I could avoid cursory examination. I prayed there were no large transactions planned for this afternoon. Another script was busy deleting all the logs replacing them with faked ones that represented a snapshot I’d taken before running any apps.

I set the app to send my HTC an email with the results when it finished, then killed the remote session to the server array and logged off my workstation. Grabbing my jacket from behind the chair, I headed towards the lift, to the road below and a taxi that would take me a block or so from 15 Loftus Street, Rushcutters bay.

The taxi dropped me at the bottom of the street, when perhaps in hindsight it should have dropped me at the top. The street is probably the steepest in Sydney, if not Australia. Halfway up and I was sweating, shaking as two lean runners raced by chatting happily as they loped uphill.

The address was a luxurious studio filled with fine art.. I knew this because the door was open. No killer leaves an open door. I wandered around the place looking at the photos on the mantel piece. Family, friends, achievements. All really normal stuff. The photos were of a happy looking... musician. Oh shit. This wasn’t the killers house. This was probably his next victim.

The killer must have at least some hacking skills. He was tracing his victims through their real estate agents. Cunning bastard. The agents probably had unencrypted networks, open offices, physical access and completely comprising the network via injection of Trojans would be a cake walk for a motivated individual. Meanwhile they were trusted with alot of customer information. Just what scum like this needed.

I was stuck. My hacking, might be detected by the killer (and there was every reason to believe that it would be, if he was even half decent a simple network trace app setup with notifications would detect it). I was going to have to wait for him to attack his next victim. That implied that Samuel would already be dead. Sh1t.

The phone hummed in my pocket. I pulled it out and unlocked it. The app had finished its decryption run and sent me the results. Two files met the search criteria of the algo. The second on looked promising and I opened the attachment. The file contained a list properties for lease.

Perhaps a list the old Frank had compiled when first arriving in the city? The list was fairly long but consistent, in that all the places had a cellar featured. Several were listed as sound proofed. Focusing on those I picked the closest, most centrally located, a large terrace in Paddington, and raced out to the road. By my own calculations I had about one hour before things became irreversible.

I’d asked the taxi to wait and he had the car parked where I’d left him at the bottom of Loftus. Running in giant leaps down the hill I pulled up next to it jumped in, slammed the door hard and yelled at the driver to step on it. To get him going I casually flicked a hundred dollar bill in his direction. I’ve never seen a taxi driver break more traffic laws in my life. It probably helped that the rest of his days wages had been promised on arrival. A man’s life was at stake. Now was no time to compromise.

I had the taxi pull over just short of the five ways roundabout in Paddington. The terrace was metres away, yet the shops nearby provided excellent cover. I had to assume the guy had setup surveillance on the entrance.

I still had thirty minutes but no idea how to mount a rescue operation. Guessing the guy would be keeping his victim in the basement and was probably there right now torturing him was a safe bet.

I walked up to the front door, and jammed a metal wedge into the hinge. Being a slightly built man with small arms I had to get this right first time. The wedge should provide what my biceps couldn’t. I pulled the foot long Steel mallet out of my jacket pocket. With a mighty swing I bashed it with all the might I could muster against the wedge. It was a trick I’d seen on YouTube.

Keeping the hammer tightly in my left hand as the door swung open; I charged silently inside. The floor plan included in the Agency leasing document showed the cellar had a small stairway in the narrow hallway directly to the left on entering the house. I walked up and tried the closed door. It opened faintly with a smooth action that scared me more than a creaky door ever could. For some reason it was just like the motion of opening a door in the house of bits n’ pieces. Creepy coincidences were awesome. Less so when serial killer lay waiting just beyond your line of sight.

The staircase was well lit, the stairs carpeted. Noiselessly I descended, just as well because my heart was beating at close to two hundred beats a minute. The drum roll of blood and adrenaline, had me goosing at shadows. God why couldn’t someone hardcore like my mate Davis Lockyer be here. That guy probably did stuff like this for fun. I must be fucken stupid, why hadn’t I asked him to come with me?

No time for backing out; men didn’t let other men die with dishonour. Good men didn’t walk away from bad situations. I knew I was at a crossroads, as I stood halfway on the stairwell, the last step before it was too late to turn back.

I descended down to the cellar. As I approached the exit, I crouched down low keeping to the side of the stairwell. Frank was there, looking at his handy work. All I could see of Samuel was a man tied down to a table, drenched in blood from cuts and wounds all over his body.

I felt Frank turning. He had to turn. Only he didn’t. His movements were towards a table containing his tools of the trade. His hands moved slowly guided by the eyes of his victim. He reached for a cruel looking serrated scalpel. It looked wicked.

The victim moaned now. Uncontrollably. The moan became a scream as Frank stepped in towards the table. I walked ever so slowly towards him, every iota of my brain listening to the sound of my footfalls. The journey seemed to take years. With five metres still to go I stepped on a piece of rubbish left on the floor.

“Oh sh1t!” I said, as at that sound Frank then spun suddenly, his dark eyes gleaming with a mixture of anger, hatred and fear.

Instinctively I threw the heavy steel in my hand. It spun through the air, end on end towards Frank. He was slow to dodge. It was an all or nothing throw (my only weapon) aimed straight for his head.

Even so he managed to move aside as it glanced him on the temple, still knocking him from his feet. I ran over wondering what on earth I would do next. I had never been in a single fight in my entire life, well not counting the internet anyways.

Blood ran from the side of his head, he groggily tried to rise. I grabbed the steel and bashed him over the back of the head again, knocking him unconscious. His body slumped back down.

I moved over to the table and pulled Samuel from it. He could hardly stand, but leaving him there on that platform of horrors was hardly an option. Instead I held him close, hugging him. Blood soaked both of us, but he seemed to relax. Compared to what I’d seen in my dreams, he was positively healthy. I pulled the mobile and dialled the ambos, followed in quick succession by the cops.

It was only as I put the mobile back in my pocket that the tears began. His cheeks were drenched. His body wracked with shudders of emotion.

“I couldn’t... Nothing would make him stop!”

Samuel looked into my eyes, pleading, demanding, frightened and lost all at once.

“It’s over now, your safe.” I comforted him.

“Everything feels like an out of control dream.” He sighed, “I hate him so much.”

“I know mate, I know.”

But I didn’t. No one did.

Scene 4: Beers @Chambers

Killer captured, victim saved. The dream faded as it had begun, the inside of charnel house drawing the eye to fresh horror. The killer’s body would never find its way here. They rarely saw themselves as victims; they were too pathological to be ghosts.

That one was riding straight to hell. I had had my fill; there was only so much even I could take of it. I had gone back one last time out of curiosity, to check the room that the ghost of Sam should have found himself in. Instead I found a door ajar, the stone cube within shattered. Oddly the stone looked to have been shattered from within. A single large purple tentacle, with thousands of small scythe like appendages grovelled from a small circular hole in the centre of where the stone should have been.

That was enough of it for me, I left. I had a thought once that being inside that house; it would be enough to make a serial killer uneasy. Certainly there was ample content to make such an imagination run riot. A place to check into from time to time, perhaps to find another “Sam”. I awoke from the killing rooms feeling completely ruthless. It was a lasting effect of spending time there.

I had a message waiting on the HTC. It was time to bounce.

The friends of Samuel Matthews wanted to catch up. It had been a couple of days and he was ready to check out of St Vincent’s. There was little the doctors could do for him anyway. In this age, wounds to the mind were still very poorly understood.

Samuel would always be scarred now, but he was also one tough hombre. Not the sort to let a beat down keep a good man down. His boys were taking him for a drink at the Chambers bar in the city and wanted me to come along. I messaged back that I’d see them after work.

When I pushed through the door at Chambers, they had occupied the couches closest to the street window. Recessed down below street level, the chambers was a ambient little bar running along the south side of martin place.

They looked comfortable and relaxed. Lounging and chatting like successful city suits. The boys roared upon spotting me, and several called me over.

“Thomas! What are you drinking?” – “One Fifty lashes”

“Good man, so are we, here’s a spare schooner.” – “Thanks... ?”

“Sorry rude of me, I’m Nathaniel James. This is big Rusty Greenheart, little Sam you have met”

At which point everyone raised their schooners to Samuel, giving him a cheers. He looked to be at peak happiness, his smile was contagious.

“And this is our resident Richie rich, Mr Angus Goodman.” Wooah, I thought, I’d seen this guy in the social pages, he was all over the scene; attending A-list parties and fucking the best socialites.

Nathaniel continues to chat along happily talking mainly about himself, and some of the many adventures this tight krew have shared. I’m a listener, and sit silently, happy to be part of their circle. The more I listen the more relaxed I get. I slink back into the part of the couch I share with Samuel.

Suddenly the leader, Nathaniel jumps up from his couch to the left of me. He steps into the open area in front of me, hands free he puts tight hooks around my shirt ripping me from my seat. His giant chiselled six foot four frame has no problems lifting me completely from my feet. All the good humour of moments before is gone. The group sit silently staring at me, all that is except Sam who sits sullenly looking at the others.

“I have one question for you. How the fuck did you know where our buddy was?”

I knew straight away the story I had told the cops wouldn’t wash with these guys. They had spoken with Sam, and probably didn’t understand any of what I had told him.

“Look Nathaniel just leave him alone, he saved me.”

Nathaniel turns to Sam with savage lines of fury burning across his nose, cheeks and neck.

“My friend, he told you he saw you in a dream, woke up then went and saved you. He told the cops he had just happened to be going for a morning walk and heard a scream. He’s lucky the cops are so stupid, they don’t question why the guy lives 40 km from where he takes that stroll, or that the walls to the dungeon that freak had were sound proof above street level. Yeah! I got a couple of questions to ask this... Thomas. Starting with how the FUCK did you know?”

I realise this is a water shed moment but their blood has already boiled over. Tell the truth and get flogged or lie and walk away?

“I saw your friend in a dream. I can see fragments of reality in my dream, Nathaniel.” There it was as simple as I could put it.

The punch when it came was stiff, strong and straight to the gut. Oh and it really hurt. I double over and then come back up. Gasping.

“I told you guys. This scum is a mate of that bloke that did Sam in. I say we run him down to the cop shop right now... After we take him outside and teach him a lesson.”

“NO!!!” bellowed Sam. It didn’t matter I thought. The others had blood in their eyes. Red rimmed with anger.

“Let me explain” I said weakly.

“Ok. Go for it shitbag.” This guy Nathaniel was really getting worked up. Moments earlier when we sat down I’d actually thought this guy is cool, he is the one out of the group I’d most likely be friends with. Now though his eyes were focused on me. He looked really mean. As in scary looking, drunk freak I’m going to fucken kill mean.

“I saw Sam lying on a stone cube in the House of Bits n’ pieces.” As openings go it probably wasn’t that intelligent.

I continued, “In my dreams I sometimes see I house. In that house are the ghosts of people that have recently died. Every so often, in one of the rooms, a new body will shimmer on a stone cube. The cube holds a person yet to die, both on earth, and then in the house. It is a type of foretelling. This one time I managed to read the symbols on the cube, they told me barely enough it would seem, to save your friend in time.”

“Thankyou” whispered Sam, looking right at me for the first time since I had entered.

The look of horror that the victim has; seemed for one moment to recede almost completely from Sam’s face, except that it then returned just as quickly.

“Man that is the craziest shit I have never heard of.” Nathaniel said it, looking out the window at the street.

He had released me sat back down on the couch with the others. But he didn’t look at me, and he looked completely unconvinced.

“Seriously mate, what are you smoking?”

That guy Angus cut me down unimpressed.

“Yeah... wow.” A third echoed sarcastically. I was no longer listening, lost thinking of how impossible it was to explain something that seemed so simple to me.

This wasn’t working, these guys thoughts were solidifying now around a single concept. How much damage to do before dumping me with the police. Revenge spoiled with anger amongst their brows.

An empty schooner and a wild idea. Blood rushing through my temples. I pick up the schooner and smash is dramatically with my left hand against the table. Everyone focuses but no one moves, I’m one against many. Too quickly for any reaction I draw the serrated edge down against my right wrist. Estimated time to death by arterial exsanguination; approximately 1 hour. More than enough time.

I had everyone’s attention now.

“I mean what I said, I don’t care if you believe it but its the truth. Do you think any sane rational person would do this? I’ve run out of ways to make you believe and I really don’t want to get set upon by a pack of wild dogs.”

I reached out and grabbed a nearby couch cover, wrapping it quickly and efficiently around the wound. They all stared at me now, like a crazy person with a gun. You just give respect.

I looked up and reached out a hand to Nathaniel.

I said “Will you suspend your disbelief for 5 minutes? I will try and show you what I mean.”

He nodded so I said “Just relax, try and relax, and then to go to sleep.”

He nodded again, this time lying right back into the couch relaxing. I moved and sat down next to him lying back as well. I had never tried this before. It was as impossible as seeing the future, but right now I didn’t seem to have a lot of choice.

Before I fall asleep I need to scare the others. Help them to understand their reality has changed, is changing, will change from here on in.

“Everyone else needs to protect us. If we aren’t awake in fifteen minutes you need to take both of us back to the hospital and ensure we get a shot of adrenaline each. By no means allow us to be separated at any point. In either case we could each face instant death.”

I didn’t tell them that as soon as I released Nathaniel he would wake up. Or that I could control my dreamscape and wake up at any point. I didn’t tell them because I wanted them scared, not as payback, but because it was one of the rare human emotions that provided a gateway past the logic trap directly to the unknown. Human beings were normally so sure of themselves. So sure of the blindness they all shared, that new belief was easily negated, especially in groups.

I placed my left hand above Nathaniel’s right and drifted quickly into the dreaming void. I’d never tried it before but somehow I knew I could do it. It was not the same as a dream, at least not for me. As soon as I felt Nathaniel’s etheric shell next to me I latched onto it instinctively. The feeling was like pulling a giant stone egg between my legs up a very, very steep hill. It was almost impossible. Eventually I felt the egg started to loosen, soften. I pushed it towards a room I’d imagined, one with a wall that said in giant bright red neon letters “Hi Nathaniel it’s your friend Thomas.” It was stupid, simple and effective. Once Nathaniel the egg saw it, once he was pushed fully inside the room, he started to melt even more.

I saw a loose golden outlined shape, vaguely human standing next to me. Three white doves flew through the wall and perched on his shoulders and his head. A pit of snakes opened up in front of him. Symbols flashed across the wall, fighting with my self-imposed mental block on the regular imagery of his dreamscape. His own dream mind was fighting the temporary bounds that I had imposed via the dream bridge. The ancient Tibetans had been right; you couldn’t share another’s dreams. They’d just failed to set out the fact that you could influence them. Or perhaps they had deliberately left that bit out.

While we were out a situation had developed amongst the remaining trio. The security at Chambers had come over to investigate two guys they had seen confronting each other. As soon as the thick burly black teed roid munchers came over an air of menace began to permeate the zone.

“What the fuck your buddies doing asleep huh? Get them to wake up now. No sleeping!” – said the burly looking white boy with the thick brown beard.

“These guys are good friends, but they both suffer from epilepsy. Right now their both fitting. We have to leave them where they are.” said Angus.

The other bouncer was looking around distrustingly and spotted the blood from the wrist cut and the broken schooner glass. He pointed at it.

“What’s this? You boys been fighting? Let’s grab these two vagrants Thommo”

The bouncer motions to his bouncer mate.

The trio stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the two sleepers. Angus speaks again.

“Don’t take another step forward.”

“Or you’re going to do what champ?” The bouncer questions menacingly.

Rusty folds his arms across a massive chest, his head never moved. His eyes say volumes.

“How the fuck do you explain this mess champ?” The bouncer was unmoved, itching now for violence.

Angus’s face muscles don’t move. He is world class when it comes to board room antics.

“The glass was dropped; the one on the right accidentally made the cut. The guys are brothers and started fitting at the sight of the blood. If you move either of them there’s a fair chance you’ll kill one of them. Now that I have warned you, if you still do it that’s premeditated manslaughter. Guys sure that’s what you want to do?” answered Angus smoothly.

The two bouncers shared their single brain cell, deep in conference for several seconds. Then reaching a mutual decision they retreated not even looking at the krew. They could be seen calling in the paramedics.

Lost in the dream world with Nathaniel we whirled through a rainbow kaleidoscope of tropically coloured clouds. When we finally drop out of reality we are apparently in Angus’s luxurious city pad. The most beautiful melody I have ever heard performed is echoing softly around the room. As I squint my sleepy eyes I see Sam playing the piano.

His friends smile knowingly at me,

“Samuel is world class virtuoso. Just relax and enjoy.”

The music is incredibly uplifting, drifting in on the warm soft Sydney breeze that floated through the apartment.

*SMH: Sydney morning herald newspaper

**Algo: short for; Algorithm, a core piece of code within an application.

Chapter 9

2011-12-23T16:24:00.001-08:00

A test of rebirth – A test of time

Chapter 9 by Tobias Nixon

Blue Tiger Headquarters, 12:00:21, Hong Kong, China (P.R.C.)

The Ninja Master is sitting silently, apparently meditating, in the stone alcove of the small temple that is part of this fortress. Built into the side of a mountain, it had originally been a Buddhist temple that taught gung fu to the locals. His gaze is fixed on a large wooden carving of an encircled hexagram. Yellow smoke pours from a candle lit directly below the wall piece.

His mind is blank the spirit on his shoulder taps him lightly and he feels the touch like a man standing at the centre of an earthquake. The touch is heavy, the reverberations almost too much to control. As they settle his mind follows the powerful spirit. A silver trail like a cord of thick rope chases away in the distance. It is the way he imagines himself when travelling in his spirit body.

He meets the ancient master at the place they always do, atop Hung Kwong Hai mountain in central china. Amongst these mountains there is a hidden temple, the final earthly abode of Blue Tiger’s ancient master. Both men now sit opposite each other, choosing to float cross legged one metre in the air. Red light leaked from the Ninja Master’s eyes, a similar purple glow from the ancient ones.

The two of them spirit talk.

“How will you get this LU-bomb into America?” The ancient one enquired.

“Where they least suspect it, through legitimate shipping channels. Crate it up in a standard shipping container. Refrigerated so the uranium in the bomb doesn’t show up with an unusual thermal signature. We’ll leverage contacts in the North-West so we expedite its movement through customs and onto a truck. From there it’s a couple of hours drive to a disused garage in lower Manhattan. Ground zero will be the yard out the front of the shop.” Said the Ninja Master.

“Aren’t you worried that customs will open the shipping container at some point?”

“It’s a risk, but the reality is that they only open one in ten. Of course you’re right in that they are the biggest risk to this operation. That’s why we have invested significantly in insuring there are plenty of officials on the take. It wasn’t hard, the usual approaches were made; money first, dirty secrets second, family if they turned out to be a fucking priest.”

“When does it arrive?”

“It arrives on the 27^th of June, and should have cleared customs and be in place by the 4^th of July. Two days from now.”

“Good. Good. As I have asked you before though, do you want to poke the most powerful tiger in the world, straight in the eyeball? Make sure you understand the consequences of each action exactly. You must now realise they will come after you with everything. What are you going to do then?”

“And if they do? Blue Tiger are ninjas; we will just blend back into the shadows, waiting for the shit storm to fly right by us. The best they can do is wipe out all numerous front operations; delink us from our local markets in HK, Singapore and Taiwan. Our “puppets of state” strategy from three years ago worked out well. Spies in the US state department have discovered they still think our head quarters are at the old location. Lok Fung Ng, and his second man, Shi Te Tang do a convincing job of issuing our instructions.”

“So we have a proxy to bear the brunt of the inevitable attack that will follow. Of course you do not honestly believe that the US will not go after us because we are located inside China? They will hunt down and destroy everything they can find. You are talking about civilian casualties on a massive scale. If they want they could even use it as an excuse to start a war with China. A war that neither of country wants, and which America cannot afford.”

“Of course, all those things are possible, but then this was never about trying to blow up America. This is about an insurance policy. This is about our endgame for the people of Somalia. This is the last piece of the puzzle to gaining the political power and legitimacy that our clan craves.”

“Hmmm, as you say an insurance policy then. So explain to me again, in what way can alerting the Americans to the existence of a nuclear bomb on their doorstep, possibly achieve that?”

“We are going to tell them there is one. We’ll even hang the customs guys out to dry for proof. We won’t tell them where its located. Just show them some video of the bomb, and a video of the good scientist that made it talking about how it could wipe out half their eastern seaboard cities.”

“The Americans will be hamstrung initially. In the short-term they will be unable to act against us. This will certainly up the ante, and of course you must also realise that there will be no hiding once this starts? They will not stop, day and night until they believe that every last Blue Tiger clan member is wiped out. We must act swiftly and leverage the power of the situation that is presented to us.”

“Exactly! In reality the bomb will be a dud. The “LU” crystal will never leave Somalia. Construction of a massive power station capable of supplying all their needs, will give Blue Tiger social legitimacy in this country. We cannot exist within China alone. The party is deluded each year they grow bolder with radical elements. The socially progressive faction that has driven China to greatness is now subservient to factions that are driven by a level of greed that will see the country returned to the twisted oligopolies of the past.”

“So why not go build this somewhere else where a government can soak up the massive capital expenditure? Why Somalia? It’s a war zone and a famine state.”

“That’s exactly why we chose Somalia. The mood of public opinion. By the time the world see’s the “good” we are doing, the Americans will be unable to act. Until then we need the L-Bomb as insurance.”

Level 2 of the Power Station, 20:00:02, Northern Mogadishu.

Much later, several floors higher, and one hundred bombs later our intrepid adventurers were gliding in to the main turbine room number two. This was the last of the rooms on this level with a significant heat signature. Beyond was the main entrance to the building, a complex corridor of mesh wiring, barbed wire wrapped around large stakes, five inch steel blast doors and enough semtex to blow the shit out of half the city.

The message was clear enough, the place was booby trapped to the hilt. The only question was what message? The chances of anything recognisable being left within the blast zone was remote at best. It almost seemed to the men that the terrorists were testing them. The only viable entrance was the one they had chosen, the one that they had found out about.

What if they hadn’t found out about it at all? What if the bastards wanted them to find the tunnel, take the route less trodden, to what purpose? If they had gone for a full frontal assault there would have been no bodies to hold triumphantly in front of the screaming masses. No evidence of American interference. No the options were limited at best; provide a suitable explanation to the government forces in control of the city, or if things went to plan...

No time to think the team were moving within the final room now. The devices instantly seemed more sophisticated. At a command from Aimee both men froze. One of the Americans had spotted a tell on the far wall that strangely was not registering with the suits analysis. A small dark protrusion now un-mistakable, had earlier escaped detection in the field sweep performed with an extended robotic arm prior to entering the room. Suddenly red laser light filled the room. A grid erupted silently in the air. The two men stood helplessly as the lasers crisscrossed their position. Oddly none of the neon tripwires intersected the men’s positions, coincidence or not? Or not thought Dusty.

“Commander” Dusty eye texted to Aimee, “We appear to be in a spot of bother. Nothing to worry about should be out of it in a Jiffy.”

“Don’t move a muscle, either of you.” Aimee looked worriedly back at the Captain of the SAS who was sitting cross-legged next to her right shoulder on the flat blue roof. “They won’t do anything stupid will they Captain?”

“Not on your life Commander” the Captain replied formally. “What do you suggest we do next?”

“I don’t like it, but I think we have very few choices at this point. I want you to lead the rest of the SAS into position outside the door to the second turbine room. We need to disable that sensor, whatever it is, and clear that room. Analysis seems to indicate that the LU crystal is coming from the centre of the room at best twenty metres from their current position. We cannot risk allowing it to slip through our fingers.”

“I understand Ma’am. Ghost squad, get ready.” He said it more for the benefit of the Americans that were not currently looking over their ePads.

On each device the SAS suits were showing a computer generated assault plan. The descent time, position of entry (via the hole that Easy-E had cut earlier) landing spot, and path to door were all shown in exacting detail. Total time for fast descent entry eight seconds. The first SAS soldier had already deployed a grapple next to the manhole cut by Easy. He didn’t check, he just latched a rope with a self locking carabineer and jumped through the hole. The next man followed so closely he looked like he was jumping on the head of his colleague. The captain went last stepping gracefully from the ledge, into the abyss below.

The team landed and deployed in seven and half seconds, simulation be damned. Once in position they waited for the order to begin disabling the room, starting with the strange black sensor. There Captain calmly ducked low then sprang at the open doorway. He executed two perfect somersaults, and then to his credit nailed an Olympic level landing to finish in the square of laser trip lights that surrounded the section of wall with the embedded device. He rose and immediately deployed the XO series arm given to him as squad leader. The arm extended over the device, active micro probes extended further if by mere fractions of an inch. Each probe transmitted live imaging data in a relay program. That program contacted a controller algorithm which in turn loaded a deactivation search protocol. Six seconds later the probes retreated having found a way to turn this thing off. Five multi jointed fingers replaced them, in appearance each was like a tiny blue metal rod, while in behaviour giving much the same appearance as a human hand.

The arm expertly tweaked what resembled on closer inspection a matchbox size spetnatz era space craft capsule. The jet black surface suddenly shined silver, and the arm beeped audibly.

“Fuck!” screeched the Captain softly.

At that very moment the four walls of the room began to split cleanly apart at the four corners. Less than a second later they came crashing down to the ground. The noise they made was ear shattering. The suits filtered it out without missing a beat. As the dust rose, the squad reacted quickly performing a broad spectrum scan and moving to form a defensive position behind the two still unmoving recon members.

The lasers that had previously shot out from the walls now crisscrossed the entire room. The ghost squad was now trapped in their entirety. Invisible suits mattered not in this labyrinthine maze of glistening ruby fractals.

A slight mist slowly surfaced the entire room. Rising to obscure ground level, troop without field scanners would have been blind. Instead each SAS trooper saw the scenery changing, as machine bays rose from the ground.

With no pause for good theatrics the complex web of red lasers began to shift in seemingly random patterns. Estimated time to hitting a “ghost”? One to two seconds at best. Aimee blanched her silent observation up until now bowling along nice with the tension. Now however things were starting to look somewhat grimmer.

The Captain must have caught her mood, for smiling to himself, he eye texted into the ePad general band chat room – Never fear, the SAS are here.

With anyone else it would have read cheeserly. With the good Captain it was matter a fact. SAS never backed down.

Arms deployed from each suit once more. This time the fingers of each hand were loaded with special mirrors. The suit computers had calculated a group defence using just the outer three members to reflect up all the beams intersecting the group and their path forward to the device.

Well this was true to an extent. The computer couldn’t account for additional traps. The Captain was slowly moving his way towards the remaining members. The two recon members plus another joined him. Together they made their way toward what was the centre of the room.

No sooner had they progressed passed the area that was free of the deflected laser tripwires, than three small black cylinders rose from the ground. Each advancing trooper had his robot arm already deployed with the laser reflector attachment. It was probably all that saved them.

With a hiss and an explosion of hot gas from the base of each cylinder the weapons roared to life. They each shot out beams of blue laser light, each beam was designed not to provide a low energy tripwire, but as a high intensity stream that could cut through five inch steel plate armour. The beams were an array of vicious photons emitting extreme heat and light. The gases forced from the base filled the room with a bass like rumble, which echoed out towards the buildings walls.

The men were beaten back noticeably by the onslaught. Only the captain, being untargeted by the blue lasers was able to continue. The others duck or dodge as they might, were barely able to lose the tracking signature of the lasers. They could not continue any closer due to the power of the laser cutters. In fact two of the three were being gradually forced back. The third foolishly advanced closer, and was cut nearly in half as the laser first overloaded the arm’s reflection mechanism then proceeded straight down the middle of trooper’s body. The result was not pleasant. Each half fell down to the side, the men to either side of their downed buddy yelling, “NO!!”

The laser immediately continued its deadly arc, ignoring the advancing captain, and ganging up on the one of the two remaining members of the recon squad. The captain looked back on his under siege unit, the man being targeted suit would overload in seconds with the combined power of the two laser towers.

The Captain made a decision, the mission objective was worthless if he lost his squad achieving it. He stopped moving carefully forward, with his active field scanner, and pivoted hard to his left towards the nearest laser tower. The arm over his right shoulder became a crude yet effective battering ram, as his spin ended it spun out like a spinning back fist that had somehow started from the middle of the back. The force of the metal hand hitting the electronic tower was ear piercing. The metal tore apart with the first blow, the electronics inside were shredded apart by a fist free now to tear it apart. The innards were soon scattered in a loose wreckage around the base of the device.

The two remaining lasers must have been co-ordinated by a CPU somewhere with multiple sensor types. The Captain had gone invisible as he destroyed the first laser tower, but the remaining two instantly locked onto him and began the attack. The Captain should have been destroyed. However as the “suit” overloaded and the invisibility failed what appeared when the invisibility faltered was not the Captain but a small device on the ground that resembled a small turtle with metallic spider legs. Atop its back was the Captains invisibility component, reconfigured to output the heat signature of a human. It advanced impotently on the laser’s and was quickly cut to pieces.

Even as the lasers attacked the turtle-spider drone, the Captain calmly marched towards the rear of second tower. The two members of the recon squad similarly attacked the final tower. Even as their metal fists descended on the electronic sentinels to wreck with vengeance these killing things, each tower made desperate counter measures. The two teams ducked quickly as a wide arc sprayed from the top of each tower in a semi circular arc. The beams missed and the towers were quickly destroyed.

The three men advanced on the centre of the room. A raised dais of metal plates folding in towards the centre sat right in the middle. Around it cables snaked over and into the middle of it. Three leather couches decorated the outside of the large raised circle. In the middle of the dais a red triangle vibrated. On closer inspection the leather couches were actually computer server bays sitting horizontally and covered with leather rugs. A icey breeze blew up from below the red triangular hatch.

The captain advanced towards the dais. “Commander Blackbear, I assume you would like me to investigate the hatch?”

“Yes. But get a trooper to connect up to the nearest server rack, I want to know what sort of information we can retrieve.”

“Excellent! Dusty deploy your electronic scavenging. Go!”

Dusty moved up next to the nearest server rack and several cables that looked like small harpoons shot out of his arms punching through the walls of the server rack and injecting smaller cables that raced among the motherboard architecture looking for ports and slots to connect to.

Data began to stream back to Aimee from the suit. The LU Crystal appeared to be housed below the red triangular hatch. At least the servers were programmed to protect an object with the same dimensions. As Aimee continued to examine the data streaming past on her ePad an un-easy feeling began to rise in the pit of her stomach. She changed the filter on the search program to provide a report of the power output from the now defunct laser stations and the supply of energy coming from the hidden recess below the dais.

As she suspected the energy readings were not consistent with a super powerful source such as the LU crystal, but rather a more modest set of diesel generators that appeared to be located at the rear of the building.

“Sarge! Send one of the men over the side and take out those two generators around the back, the rest of you haul ass downstairs to the ground level and wait outside the entrance, for further orders.”

“Yes ma’am.” The SEAL members clipped onto a metal rappelling hook that had been driven into the roof of the building hours earlier by Easy-E. Sarge led the men over the edge two stories down to the ground, each man rappelling face first at break neck speed.

Easy-E went over the opposite edge landing to one side of the generators. Two casual shots through the sides of each metal container disabled the machines. The hum of the engines and thick acrid smell of burning diesel, was replaced with silence and thick oily smoke plumes. Having completed his objective, Easy-E began to move around the perimeter of the building looking for signs of any enemy stationed on overwatch.

The SAS inside the building were trapped. As soon as the generators cut out, what appeared to be an emergency routine suddenly activated. The room went pitch black then red lights came on. A siren started to whirl noisily somewhere far from there.

The SAS were unaffected by the dark, HD night vision was just an integrated subroutine in their suits. But what their suits were reporting was much worse than the dark. Each member’s feet were snagged in solid steel rings, which had clicked into place in sync with the confusion. Additional layers of rings had engaged soon after leaving team members stuck to the floor. The armour plates on the leg seemed to shield them, but several suits were reporting elevated levels of integral damage.

Aimee looked down at a near holographic layout design of the building below. Each floor was mapped in detail from the suit recon. Surprisingly the main generators taken out by Easy, were not the most predictable place to put them. Now that she thought about it that meant they probably weren’t the main generators.

Aimee looked up at the night sky. As she had turned her head the rush of events in this deadly battle had turned south, now looking down again the way forward felt clearer. Thoughts gradually started to unwind in time to the battle. They would get something back, if that was they got out of this mess.

“Sarge. You still at the front entrance?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sending you co-ords for a blue beta attack.”

She looked below to the ground beyond the front of the building, but heard rather than saw the massive blast erupt from inside. It was a pinpoint rail strike by four warriors in perfect harmony. The shots so closely circled that you couldn’t tell fire patterns even with the US military grade image analysis package that displayed in their visors. The result was that the ground just below the Dias seemed to sink and four floors below, a massive fuel generator exploded.

The various traps disabled the SAS began to roam about looking for a control box, and a controller. Although they suspected remote control offsite, this level of sophistication may have required onsite interference. The US team below had already started smashing their way in past the dormant traps on the ground floor. Someone gave a shout from the far corner, however by the time everyone arrived all they had was the fleeting image of a set of legs disappearing down a sloping metal hatchway on the side of the building. Easy-E was dispatched to investigate the area, and recorded further footage of someone running, quickly consumed by the night and the buildings.

Buildings and Alleys, 24:00:00, Northern Mogadishu

God! Allah! Praise is to him. But still, how did he just escape those men? The insanity of this rush through madness was not lost on him. He knew he must have been given some kind blessings, and he now knew his enemies strengths. Truly today was a great day if only he could survive it. His rush took place through a thoroughfare of various shops that seemed to spill out from small multi storey terraces.

Through side streets and back streets, across a narrow dirt covered strip between two buildings, now he knew little by little he was home free. For starters he’d been moving for the last five minutes through terrain that no spy satellite could track. On top of that the area was controlled by loyal gangsters who would fold in around his entry, making pursuit next to impossible. That was unless you could withstand point blank attacks from RPGs.

In this lawless zone, he was as much a commander now as a man of science. As the scientist entered a nearby alcove a burly man, wearing a full length robes waited for him to pass and then stepped in front of the door blocking the passage. The scientist continued down a flight of steps inside the small building, down into a basement section. Here he was met by a secure vault door, with iris and fingerprint sensors embedded on the door panel. He entered a pass code on the num pad then titled forward to complete eye and finger authentication.

As soon as the door opened up the Guards on the other side stepped aside to allow him access to the narrow passage way. Once inside he would continue his work on the LU crystal. According to applications that he knew blue tiger had installed on the LU crystal field detection servers he was making good progress towards a connecting the LU as a power source to the grid. He wondered though if they knew how good that progress really was. He estimated he would have a window of two to three weeks before they realised the project was complete. More than enough time.

Chapter 8

2011-12-23T16:23:00.001-08:00

A test of traps – A test of time

Chapter 8 by Tobias Nixon

Outskirts of Mogadishu Refugee camp, 18:35:25, Beyond the city walls of Mogadishu.

Aimee realised they had made good time, when she looked at her watch. Twenty eight minutes to the edge of the huge camp site that sprawled alongside the city proper. As with all such impoverished arrangements, the majority of living quarters were in various states of disrepair. The people of this place walked slowly, their old clothes belying a down trodden existence, of daily subsistence living.

They didn’t look out of place. Minutes earlier each team member had donned extra layers of “urban camouflage”. Old clothes placed strategically gave a gun toting bad boy the look of a chubby farmer. Head clothes and arm wraps disguised tight fitting helmets and comms bracelets.

The rendezvous point was at the other end of the camp. A contact would be waiting with two cars.

As they walked amongst the squalid conditions of the camp, they could not help but notice the shambolic state of its inhabitants. Poor farmers from the south, driven wild by the desperations of living under a nihilist movement. Al Shabab made you give your heart to god, and your gold to them. Like cutthroats throughout history they hid behind whatever social truths were available, in this case religion. The reality, that hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers were now starving.

One in two of the population. An awful statistic, until you saw the awfully awfuller truth in front of you. Truth lay somewhere out there in the great camp. Amongst the people with their skin hanging and their bones weakened. The hollow looks and desperate gazes looking in vain for salvation. That silent plea, for something, anything. The burden of a generation born unto abject poverty.

These are a people who are refugees in their own country, too hungry to feed their own children, thought Aimee. Sadness flooded her mind. She was a professional and held to the objectives and parameters of her mission plan. Still she was a human and the unbearable pain of these times made their mark on her.

A small Somalian women hobbled up to them, she wouldn’t have been more than twenty eight, already driven old by hard living, “Are you the one I pray for every night? Help me! Save me!”

She tried to push closer, noticing the rigid looks of the soldiers for the first time. Each having been trained, they looked straight ahead rather than engage her eyesight. It was left to Aimee to push the women to the side of their path. Pressing a small bundle of food into her hands, she whispered, “May god heal your pain sister.” [In Somalian]

The lady gave up with a sullen disgruntled look at her new found source of food, wandering back towards the line of tents.

The two man squad of SAS, codenamed “Tunnel Rats”, jumped in one car with the contact, they would be driven past checkpoints stationed with friendly guards to the start of the entrance to the tunnel. The rest of the team, codenamed “Death Angels”, moved into the second car and sped off in another direction, towards the north east of the city.

Old Power Station Sub-basement 2, 15:30:30, City of Mogadishu.

The scientist carefully pulled back the stick of explosives, wrapping the wire tightly around the detonator, before pushing it very firmly back into the Plastique. He moved with the experience of someone for whom the deadly secrets of chemical engineering were second nature. The scientist was a man of true intelligence if somewhat lacking in a corresponding degree of ethical behaviour to control his fertile mind. Once when he was five he had almost destroyed the family home mixing a couple of household cleaning agents. Ever since then his parents and insisted he pursue a career in science. Looking back now it seemed almost as though fate had had a guiding hand in ensuring a once in a generational mind was put to good use.

The lack of clear specific goal early in his life, and a desire to do more than just write research papers, had once again conspired to point his younger self down roads less travelled. In fact it was while studying abroad for his 3^rd PhD in as many years that the scientist met the first of a group of radicals that would guide his path for the next twenty years to come. His good friend through college Hasseem Al Haqua had introduced him to a Mullah who believed in true freedom for North Africans.

Always there was one more mission to complete for Al Qaeda, for the Turkish underground, the Syrian brotherhood, the Muslim brotherhood, Hamas, Al Aqsa brigade. A never ending pipeline of desperate cells all needing the genius of a man who had no scruples. Or so they had all thought. Some bombs didn’t explode, other exploded early, but always in a way that left his masters in no uncertain terms that those carrying the weapon had been at fault. Of course there was never going to be much evidence, or if there was it would usually end up in the hands of the authorities.

The scientist knew his one true shield was his anonymity. He had used all of his impress brain power to construct an elaborate scheme of proxies both physical and web based. The channels for communicating with him were complicated indeed. After every job he naturally assumed his existing network was completely compromised and rebuilt it from scratch. The efforts were not cheap but the results spoke for themselves. The authorities weren’t even sure if he was African. No name, no details, no birth of origin, no list of friends (he had none), no family or political allegiances. He was a ghost in the machine of life.

Getting up from a crouch he mentally checked his preparations. Everything was in readiness. The strange Chinese in his black ninja garb had been very specific. At seven o’clock all hell would break loose. The foreigners wanted their LU crystal back. It was not possible. It was a gift from Allah to his people. After a lifetime of carrying out other people’s orders, the Scientist had been given the ultimate means of saving Somalia from the crippling effects of starvation and civil war.

He just needed the time to design and build. For now he had to collaborate with the Chinese. They were a necessary partner. Al Shabab however was a necessary evil, the sooner they were destroyed the better he thought. The government were no better. The forces would feud and meld. Ultimately a solution would emerge for a united Somalia, one with the economic power to rise above the quagmire of challenges that held it back.

The Scientist moved on throughout the sub basements looking at each trap. Checking each tripwire, the power circuits, the position of the device. Nothing escaped his attention; his hallmark was the meticulous nature of his planning. He had never failed.

Checkpoint Alpha, 18:35:25, Inside the city walls of Mogadishu.

The two SAS soldiers began removing the outer layer of rags almost as soon as they entered the car. Disguises would be useless. If the guards at each checkpoint weren’t paid off, a careful visual inspection would quickly reveal they were not African or starving. It mattered not.

Through each checkpoint they breezed, never stopping for a soldiers head through the door, just the lining of pockets and the slack style of talk that preceded such bribery. Soon the car was in position to unload its cargo. The two SAS warriors running as soon as their feet hit the ground, moving swiftly through a nearby back alley to stand at the start of a rough concrete hold that formed the entrance to the tunnel.

The smell of the brackish water and associated filth would have been considered overpowering to most. Each step taken was a step into an ever rising stench of shit. Two steps would, or rather should have induced a near fatal reaction. Certainly the human nostril was not designed for an assault of this degree. For the two SAS it was barely worthy of any attention other than as a guide to the age of the tunnel, or their relative location to sources of danger.

Their suits were already performing spectral analysis of the various chemicals in the tunnel. Nothing came up dangerous. Next the suits combined their full spectrum sweep coverage to work over half the tunnel each. Each member of the SAS team was able to review the results of the completed analysis in real time. The suits internal LED retina displays, revealed what they had collectively suspected, that a multitude of traps existed even in the tunnel leading up to the entrance of sub basement level 2. Each source of explosives was marked by a small red circle, a rotating internal arrow indicating the direction of the electronic detonator.

Working forward carefully and efficiently the two man team approached each trap meticulously. They were all the same. Laser tripwires acted as the trigger points, while semtex provided the disincentive. The suits were pretty cool, having detected the lasers; they were capable of feeding in a dummy signal to prevent the device triggering. This then allowed the team valuable time to disarm the device. Each suit had a mini-robotic arm that popped from the left shoulder blade area. The tiny tri fingered maniples made small delicate movements such as disabling a bomb much easier, whilst the inbuilt laser cutter made pinpoint destruction of the internal electronics a snap.

At the entrance they looked back, the LED displays registering 10 laser triggered bombs disabled. There was little hope of most people getting through ok. The bombs had been placed in the obscurity of darkness, triggered from ten feet out by a multitude of laser lines. Even the dude from mission impossible would have struggled without one of these suits. Which led to an interesting point. Did they know about this latest tech? Surely not, so that meant they really did have something worth protecting up top. Each man came to the conclusion at the same time Aimee said to them over the encrypted comms link, “Gamma Foxtrot, you are clear to engage with primary objective, proceed with caution. These guys are serious about keeping their secrets, go smoke ‘em out!”

“Yes, ma’am” they repeated in unison.

Gary “Dusty” Tikehurst and Paul “Lion Tamer” Laverty, adjusted their assault rifles, the inbuilt laser targeting giving instant feedback to the right eye retina display of Dusty, and the left eye of the lefty lion tamer. Each man approached the large metal door cautiously. Doors were by virtue of their nature, the perfect place to booby trap, necessitating as they did an enemy to open them. The suits reported heat sensors deployed along the door handle, no doubt with a failsafe pressure gauge placed under the foot of the door itself.

A metallic arm extended out and grasped the door handle, tugging it gently open. The other man was already on his knees in front of the opening. Sure enough electric wires ran from a hidden pressure plate up the inside frame to a narrow hole halfway up the door hinge. The wires were intercepted by the second arm, which first held the cabling aloft then clamped and sutured it with the laser cutter. Finally a new dummy emitter was soldered onto the “live end” of the wire. The entire operation to disable the device had taken less than ten seconds.

Each man stepped through the gap carefully, already dialling up the spectral analysis within the sub basement. The team perched above on the enchanted blue roof of the power station, pooled their collective skills now to provide distributed analysis of the best way to deal with each individual bomb. The other SAS suits now acted as localised data processing units. The suits found only devices on this level similar to those found in the tunnel. Each was easily dismantled in rapid succession. The two man team proceeded rapidly through the sub basement to a grubby shadowed set of stairs that ran one flight up to the upper basement level. Before proceeding further analysis was completed.

Dusty muttered, “Just as well Mr Lion Tamer”
His LED retina display showed more lasers on the upper part of the stairwell. At least two more bombs with pressure pads placed on different steps.

Paul smiled back at his mate Dusty. It was a running joke that the largest most formidable hand to hand fighter in the squad had once come face to face with a lion in the mountains of Syria and lived to tell the tale. To this day he kept the skin on display but refused to say, how, armed only with a knife he had bested it. Only a deep scar that cut across his upper chest bore any testimony to that day of life and death.

The lion tamer pushed down onto his belly and slithered forward. Using elbows and knees he got to within a short distance of the first laser tripwire, and deployed the robotic arm. Dusty watched from below monitoring the activity of the first bomb. Suddenly he detected a change. Another type of sensor they had missed? There was no time! Immediately he deployed his own arm albeit in a somewhat different configuration. The arm extended... with a small mace looking attachment in place of the three fingered hand. Then at full extension, the arm released the mace weapon which shot out towards the position of the first bomb, trailing a small metal chain linked cord as it did so.

The small device with the club like design hit the part of the wall that was partially hiding the bomb. Plasterboard and wood had been partially torn out just enough to hide what was inside. It didn’t matter. Anyone sent to investigate would have been long dead before they got anywhere near that section of the wall. As soon as the device made impact it seemed to pop up three small metallic nodules from around the circumference of its head. Each one glowed blue, then the device released a strange whirring noise. Like a mini-turbine, this was the crucial pre-load stage, the electricity from the suits invisibility generator re-routed along the metal cord to the device. Less than half a second later the device emitted an ear piercing whine! A tiny localised EMP field was the result. Too small to effect either man’s suit it was nether the less powerful enough to knock out both of the bombs on the stairwell and the surrounding lighting.

The pitch blackness was soothing to the small squad. They trooped up the stairs in the quiet darkness, eyes long since taking in the view from their passive field scanners. It was bizarre, but SAS had consistently found during testing that night ops made the suits easier to handle, primarily because the volume of retina based information did not have to be reconciled with a naked interpretation of reality. Everything was soo much clearer in shades of green when you were British.

The second basement level was the same as the first. The only difference was they now had to work their way back in the opposite direction to the main stairwell on the other side of the floor. They moved forward, starting to listen to any tell tale signs of other humans. Breathing, talk or footsteps; the audio analysis was running constant background checks that could do pickups from two hundred metres away. Dusty looked over at his mate. This was going to be a long slow day, with more surprises than a nasty day in hell fooken guaranteed.

The Kimberly Ranges, Midday, Far North Western Australia

Cub stares over at Bear... woo00oo wooah!

Bear just stares back. Wtf is Cub doing?

Cub gets up and looks around.

“Yarnyum Gianarma tribe land. This is a sacred site. We are the first white people to see it.”

Cub smiled secretively to himself, while Bear sniggered at him and said.

“Is that what your Aussie spirit tells you Cub? That we are in some super remote fucking part of Western Australia? I’ll tell you exactly where we are, without any GPS wristwatch.”

Cub smiled back at him, “Where?”

“The middle of the fucking Kimberly Cub. We are as far from civilisation as it is possible to be and remain on dry land. Luckily for us, it’s not the wet season. We may still have a chance of survival.”

Cub began to shiver uncontrollably. Immediately Bear hugged his brother, as he too was overtaken by wracking shakes. Both look past the others right shoulder, catching glints of shadow in the dawn.
Each man knew the reality. This place, because of its remoteness and the in hospitability of terrain, was completely unsurvivable.

They had been trained by some of Australia’s greatest trackers to survive. They would need all their skills. The first one was energy conversation and getting better. There were plants; they also needed meat quickly to avoid toxicification from the nanites that were now circulating through their blood streams.

When they had been re-corporealerised, the physical forms required the briefest contact with the other realm. At transfer the exposure tarnished them, causing the weakness. It would pass, but each knew that could be measured in years. There was one catch though, as surely as there always was in life. If you could flush the nanites quickly enough they wouldn’t get a hold and do as much damage. Recovery then could be in days, as the body fought of the vestiges of what had already been done.

Flushing nanites required consuming roughly a third of your bodyweight in protein, and the quickest way to do that in the wild was, hunting and eating animals. But first they needed energy. It was no good tracking if you couldn’t move properly. They were like recently arrived astronauts. Weak from space, desperate to renormalise to earth’s conditions.

Each moved off after a further minute, in exactly opposite directions from the cave mouth, having decided that this would be their base camp. The men soon found loose branches and bent to making a sharpened leading edge. No second was spared for fashion, only killing potential was considered. Each knew that any attempt at this point to use chi for pyrokenesis or what the westerners called using your mind-force-chi-spirit to control the elementals such as fire. Any attempt could or at least would eventually lead to permanent death.

They had been lucky, it was best not to push it, when you got your life’s back.

The two ninja adepts, stepped through the portal of darkness. Night descended into that pit, sharp noises and howls of ghoulish proportion roamed and echoed. Each ninja dressed head to foot in black wraps, most of which concealed ancient and modern weapons.

Both were fully grown cold eyed fellows. Each carried a large blade in hand. One was slightly and an inch or two shorter, seemed to move with the grace of a women. The adepts leaned into the black sphere’s entrance chancing forward to the void.

The edges of the sphere collapsed crackling with arcane purple lightning bolts. This was the magic of the Ancient Master. His wizened wizardly form appeared even now urging them on through the portal. They quickly made landfall, hurling themselves from the crackling-frozen surface of clouds back into reality. Immediately the portal winked out of existence.

Landfall was a set of bushes deep in the vast jungle of... the Kimberley Ranges in far north W.A. So said the device on the left arms of each adept. The female adept stepped forward silently looking back at her male companion. Each had deployed non reflective silver wraparound shades.

The male adept suddenly hold out his left hand in a complex triangle symbol. A faint red glow emanated. A fine mist formed rushing outwards from his palm. The female blew on to it, and another red mist shot out creating two dots on across a large topographical map. The map features seemed to shift and alter like those in a dream. They are near that cave, it was a gesture that conveyed a statement from the male to the female. Two sets of eyes when red with power chi. Each adept was now measuring the distance to the kill sight in physical kilometres, preparing their bodies to unleash the devastating psi attacks they had been taught, as well as a vast array of standard weaponry should such an attack vector prove necessary.

The adepts ran with smooth efficiency. Each strode in close fitting but comfortable black mesh. The ninja blades were retained in micro sheaths on their backs. The secret of their clan was stamina. They could run for days if necessary. One of the secrets. Now that most of the other clans were broken or missing they carried many secrets. Like how to get a man to vault over ten feet, keep warm in a blizzard or see long distances underwater.

As they closed on the two targets they formed a mental bond wall, and reviewed strategy. Each posted ideas for potentially improving the odds on killing one target by effectively favouring the other thus causing that target to act overly offensively. Ultimately though the o.g. strategy of simply going one on one, and trying to use the element of assassination if possible was key. In fact you could say the ancient master almost didn’t want his targets to be potentially taken out early by crafty ninjas in the night. He wanted these two humiliated, after the triumph they had endured in forcing him into seclusion in the mountains in china.

In addition to run power-chi circuits every forty seconds to keep muscles on standby, each adept fed chi into an active psi trap relay on their blades. This “red energy” accumulated slowly and let them deliver deadly psi chain attacks that could knock out victims, making them easy prey.

Cub and Bear come back in to the sacred site. They are deep in the Kimberley, thousands of kilometres from anyone. Wet season or no, even so it will take all their tracking skills just to survive. And they are weak from their journey. They know what is coming. They have seen the adepts that were sent to kill them. Being pure spiritual beings they can see their karma.

Each is currently gorging on the last edible piece of a massive wild boar. The gods have been kind. A plentiful sacrifice for coming back. A gift from god, fate, destiny, or good luck. They had expected nothing and had twin boars present from the first thicket. Sensing closure Cub had grabbed Bears spear from his left carrying hand and hurled it right handed at the left board. Then seeing the wild rush of the escape, he made the judgement to chance his left arm, hurling his own homemade spear at the beast on the right.

They have finished eating the cooked insides of the second carcass, feeling fat and bloated from so much red meat. The nanites are sated. Now it was as though chains had loosened and they could... React! Quickly each man hurled himself from the scene of wanton gluttony. No sooner were they each combat rolling in opposite directions than black blades burning with red mist slashed through the spaces they had been.

An oddity then that saved them. Cub had heard a faint twitch in the darkness. Not an adept crunching leaf underfoot, but that of a wombat bashing through the foliage. Whatever saves you was meant to be. Cub was coming out of the roll jumping into the air seeming to almost fly; the female adept followed.

Bear stood from his roll, roaring defiantly with his voice. The male adept leaned back as though temporarily overcome, then walked forward swinging his blade from side to side. The swirling motion of the tip made tiny circles from the red the mist. The eyes of the ninja were now leaking with a faint red glow that seemed to trail for several inches behind him. The adept twirled on the spot swinging his blade out wide. It made a wicked arc out in front. Having brought his body into a tightly heeled circle, the adept now stepped onto his right leg and chopped down from the three hundred sixty degree circle toward Bear’s knees. He stepped back nimbly.

Bear roared a second time. The adept was frozen, as he stepped inside the blade’s range, delivering closed fists directly to the side of the ninja’s body. Whack, whack, smack. The blows fell like the blows, of a particularly nasty and vicious claw hammer.

The adept was knocked back, recovering straight away, he advanced once more. Bear felt the first moment of wonder. Back in the day when he had been Davis’s age, that punch would have knocked Mohammed Ali into next week, now it barely kept him in the fight.

The sword was cutting through the end at Cub once more. He rolled backwards into a defensive crouch. Without taking her burning red eyes from him, the ninja pulled a brace of shuriken from her vest and threw them at him. Her arm shot forward from two metres away, Cub jumped, just, gracefully into the air, somersaulting over the top of her attack.

More shuriken followed, now Cub was running. In a circle trying to outflank her. She twisted in time to everything he did. The small barbed pieces of steel barely missed him now. Speed is not your ally anymore my friend, Cub said to himself. The adept stepped in cutting downwards with the blade. He dodged to the left and the blade instead cut down the middle of a tree trunk, treating it like soft butter. He waited till the adept was just about to pull free of the trunk, then kicked out with all his might. As he thought even though the weapon was like a turkey carver for trees and humans, it still got stuck in the base of the tree. He followed up with a second snap kick to the adepts hand and then to her shoulder.

He reached inside the void, pooled all his strength, and it was like a baby lifting itself to stand. Like the tiniest speck of power had decided to flow. He knew what he wanted to do, but the days of meditation required to regain control of that flow were currently beyond him. Even so the barest skerrick of power existed. Just for that second it seemed.

As the saying goes it’s not how much you have its how you use it. Cub was doing just that. He used his tiny connection to bend the thread that curled air around the female adept’s right foot. Samsara enforced the intent of the universe via the laws of physics. Cub changed that instance to enforce the laws of Cub. Tiny wisps of air became steel, for a bare half second, but it was enough. The foot tripped, the adept fell forward off balance.

Cub knew now that a crucial junction had been reached. Both adepts were instantly aware of the use of power on the local threads of samsara. How could they not?

Everything in the universe was connected. There are not those things now that reflect what I want but those things that matter more now that they are gone? What do you want Davis? What for you is still permanent in this place of non-existence? – Cub questioning Davis, 5 seconds before his initiation began.

The female adept’s loss of balance was all he needed. Stepping in he grabbed her neck, breaking it swiftly in hands that were even in this weakened state still strong than most forms of steel. In such life and death battles there was no extended fight sequence. Just a loss of advantage, followed most usually by a swift and brutal ending.

Cub rounded on the fighters in front of him, advancing swiftly to within striking range. A furious exchange of punch, chop, and block was going on, and his brother was starting to flag badly. A peerless fighter in his own right, Bear was however slower and more vulnerable in his current physical state. The adept was holding nothing back. Using mind power to focus his attacks, he launched punches that could tear through brick walls, and blocks that must have felt like iron bars.

Still Bear fought on through gritted teeth. His pain was obvious, but then again so was his courage. Like drops of water, the blood from his many wounds now dropped freely towards the ground. Beaten back by an advancing enemy, Bear suddenly stiffened, even as a fatal blow descended. The ninja adept had unleashed a cruelling blow, using a chi push to temporarily block Bear upper vertebrae, an instant cause of body paralysis.

Cub screamed forward, jumping onto the back of the remaining adept. His body was locked like a lover on the adept from behind, moving his arms up and in front of the adepts body, holding him in a full nelson. The ninja strained clearly not used to having to fight off such a wiry yet impossibly strong man as Cub. Like a UFC fighter at the top of his BJJ prowess, Cub twisted and turned to counter everything the other fighter had. Bear looked on silently fighting the paralysis, willing his body to get back into the fight. What should of taken seconds to recover from, what should not have even been possibly to inflict in the first place was in fact an attack for which to Bear had almost proven fatal.

I believe I will conqueror fear. You will fear the thing you come to like the most, yourself. Then you will grow to distrust your own shadow, and when you at last become that shadow? Cub hummed in the ninja’s ear, and as he had predicted the adept thrashed to the other side with his head... straight into Cub’s upraised elbow smashing back in the other direction. Knocked by the blow but not unconscious Cub quickly used the advantage to once again snap the neck of his opponent.

He let the body drop to the ground, and walked over to his brother. Blood streamed from his wounds as Cub grabbed his arms and gently pressed subtle chi energies along the spine every few inches. The key to quickly restoring the body for one untrained or unable to wield their own chi, was to use small pushes that gradually brought the chi to the surface of the main channel letting it flow again. Everything was just blocks and flow. Press in the right place and you could kill a man in less than ten seconds.

Cub caught Bear as his body suddenly went limb and slumped.. some seconds later Bear was groggily raising himself. He looked disbelieving at his younger brother.

“You saved me brother! My little brother saved my life! How will I ever live down the embarrassment?” Bear said still disbelieving. He felt keenly the humiliation of allowing the adept to paralyse him.

Cub just smiled warmly at his brother. They had been through too much, put up with too much, done everything together, to worry too much about Bear’s emotional state. Besides they were baby boomers, life wasn’t fucken fair, you worked hard, then maybe if you were lucky you got to go on holidays before you died. What his brother felt now, was his own way of saying thank you, in a way that neither of them could or would ever tacitly acknowledge. Such was the way of men, to share without talking, to say through action what was only confused in the tongue of man.

I am the alpha, I am the omega. Hadn’t god said that? Yes but man had never realised quite where things really began. One day Cub had been curious and asked Bear to come along on a trip to Thailand. It was a journey that would, some twenty years later lead here. I have seen the end thought Cub, I know where I will return. It filled him with an amazing sense of purpose. The energy of that place was something unto which there was nothing similar at all on the earth. The land of the living dead, the place that souls go to wait.

Cub nodded slowly at Bear. Bear nodded back. It was going to be a long trek, perhaps in a few days they would be strong enough to tele-link with one of the tribal elders of the far north, to ask for a pickup. First they had to get stronger, and even then there were not many of the old ones left. Western ways had cut and insidious path through the culture of this countries proud guardians. The young had lost interest in the ways of their fathers. The great dream, that held Australia in its midst. The spirit which without most people’s knowledge gave it the true moniker of “the lucky country” was slowly fading.

Cub looked back around at the bodies of the two adepts thinking they could scavenge clothes and perhaps some food. Instead he instantly went into a defensive crouch. Bear was soon in front of him, hurling forwards at the two re-animated puppets in front of them. Each moved more rigidly as if pulled by a master puppeteer, yet each still just as deadly. The chi enhanced swords swung in deadly precise arcs towards each man. Now loosened from the restriction of pain the adepts became deadly whirlwinds of non-stop attack and destruction. Cub ducked picking up two heavy stones and handed one to Bear. Raising their right hands each man threw the heavy stone with all his might. Cub’s one skimmed past the male adepts blade landing a blow smack into the bridge of the nose, cracking the head back. The adept stepped forward its head rolled back at an obscene angle. Bear’s one was deadly accurate from less than one metre it crashed into the shoulder of the female adept causing a compound fracture that left the collarbone hanging loosely.

The adepts seemed to cackle madly! If this was fun, I’d hate to think what they didn’t like, thought Cub even as he knew that they must be already dead. This was all part of the sinister ancient master’s bag of tricks. How he would be furious that he had failed to kill them. Cub was suddenly worried, he thought he had seen this trap before. He grabbed Bear and began to run away into the bush beyond. They had made perhaps two or three hundred metres on the slow moving puppet adepts, when suddenly a wild and unholy roar ripped through the jungle. A massive fireball had erupted behind them, but for them it seemed the first sign were intense waves of heat burning down their backs.

A second later and they were hurled forward by a blast wave. Close enough to feel the rush of compressed air forced out from ground zero. Close enough to stand amongst the crashing trees as the whole jungle floor was desiccated by the explosion. Singed now, burnt and weary from the fight of a life just after a journey back from the beyond the grave, each man lay down to sleep the sleep of the dead. No dreaming for a long time, this time, it would be a small time still each thought before either of the two dreamers dreamed again.

Xmas day is every day

2011-12-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

Xmas day is every day
A work of fiction by Tobias Nixon

Rating: MA 15+

Profanity (swearing) warning

Reading pretty much most books (other than Mein Kampf say) is an opportunity to open your heart. When (if) you finish this novella go donate some money (but only in lieu of your time if you’re too busy) or your time to someone that needs it. Then do something even more amazing and don’t tell anyone about it. You will feel at least 2000 years old! This is what Buddha and Jesus were banging on about; that moment. Trust me. It’s priceless... unlike Xmas which can be expensive, except that luckily shopping is fun.

Friday the 28^th of January, 2011

William Davies was a smart, articulate and well heeled young man. A grommet that loved to surf his local, all he did these days was surf the web looking for new ways to make his employers the Royal bank of Scotland, obscenely rich. Part of the banks private wealth equity division, Will was that peculiar kind of genius known as dealer. It was just in Will’s case no one, not even his boss, could quite define his role.

To guys like Will everything just came naturally, automatically; It was an un-written rule of wealth creation, as long as they kept things in the black most of the time, you didn’t put too many things in their way of a guy like Will. That was pre-GFC land anyway. This year things had started to heat up, the bean counters in financial accounting wanted more details, more data, and more analysis. To Will what they wanted amounted to one thing, they wanted him to give them a guarantee against risk, whilst locking in ever tighter margins at the line. It was ridiculous, but hey boss dogs got what boss dogs wanted.

William had flown through high school and university finishing his masters in economics and applied mathematics before the age of twenty four. He lived in an apartment on York Street, no more than six or so blocks from work. It was one of the things he enjoyed the most. Every morning leaving his neat one bedroom apartment with the pre-Bangaroo water views and heading down past the Wynyard bus exchange to the bottom of martin place, walking up martin place and heading left along Elizabeth towards RBS.

Walking purposefully, his large six foot two frame strode forward in the blue striped Versace tailored suit he always wore on Fridays. The morning shot of doppio was held between left thumb and naked ring finger, ready for consumption during the 8 am market briefing. It always helped to stay awake when Dr. “boring” Etswitzch was banging on about an equity market’s volatility or the euro-zone’s risk premiums, something that seemed to come up alot of late. What a joke thought Will, if you were green enough to have missed the latest overnight market data and couldn’t analyse it for yourself on the spot, then you were probably the poor bastard helping Dr Boring with his daily slide deck.

For guys like William this was a summary of info he’d been consuming since he awoke three hours earlier. Power to the people, the smart got rich, worked harder and smarter. Then you had a fucken chance. Otherwise you were just fish food for some equity dealer to short the shit out of. There was no such thing as being on your game and unlucky. Will didn’t believe in it. He believed in what he could fold and count. Power was a gift to spend and in the scheme of things buy even more. Lend it out and gather more in, borrow, buy, borrow, buy, borrow, sell, payback, and bank that fat roll every time.

Breaking through the George St throng, he headed up in the early dawn sun past the Anzac memorial. His head tilted curiously on a sharp angle to the right as the sunshine glinted from the top of the tomb. It caught in his eyes and made him blink. He thought he saw an old soldier with a ramrod straight back and the most powerful look he had ever seen staring back at him. When he blinked the image of the man standing next to the tomb was gone.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around an old man sitting close to the wall of the ANZ bank’s ATM. His form was obscured by a blanket and the worst smelliest clothes that William had ever seen. People made a visible effort to maintain a metre’s separation as they skirted his crappy cardboard plea-sign and soft upended hat of silver coins.

Was he a druggie? A doped out Cabra junkie, out of cash and chasing the dragon. Half the hopeless seemed to be smackie’s. Their lost vacant stares absolved in the escapism they craved. Dissolution of pain, into the warmth of the dragons caress. The sweet feeling you never, ever wanted to let go of.

William Davies didn’t quite know, now he thought to himself. Was it the smell or his nasty appearance that meant those of a less charitable nature (everyone) blocked him out as they walked quickly by. His pathetic hat had by William’s eagle eye all of seventy cents, not a coin more.

For some strange reason he felt his hand reaching inside for loose change. He never did that, not ever. These guys were all government employed beggars that supplemented their income with cash from the misguided. It was society’s guilt trip, everyone knew that. Still he bowled the gold and silver in his hand ($5.85, by his touch), underarm, roughly at the cap, and walked on.

For a moment he thought the old man stared at him. The stare wasn’t a drunken haze gaze. It wasn’t the self-hatred of life time of misery. The man looked back at him with pity. The warmth of that gaze was truly a wonder to behold; William felt a strong rush of heat up his spine and shivered.

Both at the warmth he felt and the lasting effect that look of pity had had upon him. A second later he pushed the experience back down into the mind-depths and walked on. All that was left was confusion and anger towards the beggar that had looked down at him.

He had a feeling today was going to be a day to remember. A day to be a rock star, make big fat rolls of fold. A giant shark swimming in a tiny fucken fishbowl.

Friday the 25^th of February, 2011

William slid out of bed, past the magnificent Chinese beauty that lay rugged up beneath the light summer sheets. Cute, the way she had kept him at bay. Last night had been months in the planning. Now though her sweetheart was just another entry in his book of girlfriends. His room looked brand new he reflected, because it was.

Post morning routine, adrenaline still pumping as he passed through Wynyard park. A couple of old drunks lay happily in a semi-stupor amongst the grass edge and the plants. All liquored up with nowhere to sleep. Not that they could feel the difference between a soft bed of duck down and a concrete slab. Loser-scum. They had life fail tattooed in invisible ink on their foreheads. He felt hatred towards them, for the abject rejection of everything he held dear. End stage retro grade failure.

As he wheeled around the corner from George st onto martin place, the early sun blasted his vision. As he passed the Anzac memorial it shot down. The sun seemed to hit his eye; just like it had... he walked on. Three city pigeons were sitting on the ground, they took to flight in front of him rising quickly straight up.

Marching still filled with an anger that burnt. Holding his doppio regally, back straight, the morning hardened his thoughts. It felt right to be powerful, to be entering the inner circle. The dealing was getting intense. The vast flows of capital from china seemed to want coverage of an ever increasing range of investment options opening up all over the North West corridor of Australia. There was an energy crisis coming and the smart banks were preparing for the inevitable crunch.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around an old man who was begging near to the ANZ hole in the wall. More scum. As he came closer, he noticed it was the same beggar from a month ago. Same dirty hair. Same dirty fucken stare. He turned to look as he was all the way past the seated man. The beggar smiled sadly. Pity leaked from his eyes.

The feeling Will got was nothing like last time, when he’d felt a mild rush of heat up his spine. This time was like a furnace. After the fire rose, his head lacked the rationalisation of fear. He was one hundred percent open. Suddenly the other man’s pity felt very real. His own honesty was laid bare, exposed to a mind suddenly hungry for truth. Then the beggar laughed at him, laughed crudely, roughly but not cruelly. The laughter echoed in Will’s ears. Time seemed to stop and his eyes were able to concentrate on the entire field of vision. He felt low. He knew that he was small, tiny. Golden shadows walked back and forth, but nobody even knew he was there.

A black pit of emptiness opened up around his feet. He felt his body sinking. As he sunk shadows of everyone, everything, every object of his hatred floated past. The more he watched the procession the faster he sunk. He looked down, there was nothing.

An age past, eventually only a tinge of sadness remained. He opened his eyes and stared back at the beggar. He looked at his watch, he’d only been stopped for a minute. Wtf? He’d been pulling back to back 14 hour weeks. Hallucinations were a job hazard.

As he continued on across the road to the Channel 7 building in Martin place, he though he heard the beggar whisper, “... how quickly we rationalise that awkward truth we chose to forget.”

Friday the 25^th of March, 2011

William swung out of bed, careful not to alarm the gentle Namibian hottie. Gentle that was unless you made the mistake of waking her up. Only assholes made the same mistake twice. Last night had been a top ten moment. Sad because the last two weeks were holding down spots 1 through 5. He almost felt bad about the break up email he had scheduled Outlook to send later today.

Post morning routine, adrenaline still pumping as he passed through Wynyard park. Rushing. Walking at full stride through the under throng past Bar 333, and wading into the west side traffic waiting to cross George St.

As he wheeled around the corner from George onto martin place, the early sun met his vision. He passed the Anzac memorial, and... Almost crashed straight into an old lady.

“Look where you’re going.” She cried.

He stared not sure what had happened. Cross traffic? No she had acted as though he had stumbled towards her. He smiled quickly at her, apologetically. It felt unnatural, but, whatever. Smiles were free.

“You a lawyer sonny?” she questioned him as he stepped around her and continued on. “Forgotten how to say sorry?” her mild tone and scolding manner grated on him, reminding him off his mum.

He was marching on now filled completely with a red hot anger that burnt. Holding his doppio regally, back straight, the morning hardened his thoughts. Some people composed symphonies in the shower; he built strategic models investment risk as he walked. The nameless faces were his “notes” each new face caused his mind to instantly reconnect the thousands of data points. Then he’d let things settle down. Usually before lunch he would fly into the head dealer (Jack Stevens) office and put forward a proposal that made shareholders happy.

Four weeks ago the things had gone to whole new level. Audit had found liquidity short fall of over four billion dollars. Dealing room was on a mad scramble to make it back pronto. High risk trading ensued. Forex and low cap mining stocks were plundered. People’s bonuses were on the line. Sleep was an option for the lazy.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around the beggar he had seen last month, in the same place, near to the ANZ hole in the wall. The beggar smiled at him with an intense pity that burnt. Pity that leaked from his eyes. Why? Why do you pity me old man? He asked silently. He felt the warm eyes trailing him as he walked straight past.

Friday the 29^th of April, 2011

William rose from his slumber, the gorgeous finish blonde murmured. As he tried to swing from the bed she laid soft hands across his belly.

“Don’t” it was a command with a promise attached. And who exactly was he to argue with that?

Several extremely pleasurable minutes later and he was working up a different kind of sweat. The morning routine never quite felt so good when it came second. Not that there was a single ounce of sympathy anywhere on the planet. Adrenaline eventually overrode testosterone. It had to it was the alpha hormone.

As he wheeled around the corner from George onto martin place, the early sun met his vision. He passed the Anzac memorial. In the distance the sound of music filtered softly past his ears. A kid on a skateboard zoomed by. Leering at him.

A beggar sat near the steps of the Armani Exchange shopfront. The man was drunk and high. His slurring speech barely audible as he asked for cash. His pocket had loose change from last night’s boozy birthday party for the hot Exec P.A. at Eden. He pulled it from his pocket in disgust. Held it out palm up stretched, as he walked straight past. He could feel the man’s eyes. Trying to decide whether to rob him right there and then. Only for half a second, before those red eyes sunk back into their hollow skull.

He walked on driven by his fury at those that refused to help themselves. He wondered idly if the drunk had made him angry because he reminded him of that bloody... beggar! There he was sitting straight backed on his smelly rag. Dirty felt hat upturned to collect the meagre droppings of a society that had both failed and scorned him.

In a dash he broke a half step, to bend and drop the shower of metal currency into the cap. It was like a ritual. It made him feel better, and not because he was “giving to the poor”. He was sick of feeling that pity. The beggar should pity him. The man barely collected enough coin to buy a big mac. He smiled condescendingly down at the old man.

As he regathered his stride on the full step, the man’s voice cut a line of ice along his side, “I thank you good Sir. You are a generous man. Are you sure however you would not like keep this?”

Will didn’t look back as he crossed the road with the Channel 7 sunrise lights burning in his eyes. He just knew the old man was holding his felt hat up towards his back.

Friday the of 27^th May, 2011

William was lying wide awake as sunrays cut across his open bedroom window. The flaming redheaded beauty that lay beside him slept, nuzzling in the foetal position up against his side.

He flew through his morning routine. Arms bulged, feeling tight from the build-up of lactic acid.

Ground hog day once again he thought as he passed the Anzac memorial. The sun seemed to hit his eye; just like it had... he walked on with his eyes closed for several seconds.

Walking purposefully, in his nice blue striped Versace suit. The morning shot of doppio held between his left thumb and ring finger. Truly life was grand when you were making close to twenty grand a week in commission. He kept getting emails from private equity affiliates telling him he could earn twice as much if jumped ship. Hell he could make twenty times as much if he bet against his own position, then routed the market, by shorting the hell out of whatever garbage was on the hit list for today. Probably why it was illegal, as well as an incredibly dumb way to get caught on the take.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around that old man who was begging near to the ANZ hole in the wall. The man smiled at him as he approached. He didn’t even look at him. He knew the look of pity that went with those eyes. So caring and so full of inner wisdom. He had a takeover to complete before lunch. Feeling bad today just wasn’t on the agenda.

As he passed the beggar he threw a thin rollette of fifty dollar bills down. “Enjoy old man”.

The beggar didn’t even seem to notice him.

Friday the 24^th of June, 2011

William bounced out bed, making up for lost time he skipped his usual routine and only did 500 sit-ups, 100 push-ups, skipping the twenty military pull-ups all together. His rock hard abdominals were usually the last thing his current brown haired honey needed to feel. Shear unfaked ecstasy quickly followed. Shower-breakfast-shave was a new record time and he was back on track.

Ground hog day he thought as he passed the Anzac memorial. The sun seemed to hit his eye; just like it had... he walked on.

Walking purposefully, his large frame filled out the blue striped Versace suit nicely. The morning shot of doppio held between left thumb and ring finger.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around an old man who was begging near to the ANZ hole in the wall. As he came closer, he noticed the smell it was so nasty. He turned to look as he was halfway past the seated man, the man smiled the sweetest, most pure smile he had ever seen. Not at him, but around him. He felt, better, without really knowing why. He knew it was the smile.

Walking on past the dirty beggar, he turned and looked back at the man staring at him. Both men looked at each other deeply for several seconds, and then William broke the gaze, looking down. He got the impression that the beggar could have kept that trick up all day.

Instinctively William walked back to the man, asking him, “How do you do that?”

The man just smiled back for long seconds, and then he said, “How do I do what? This universe, it trembles every time you take a step young man, the real question is, will you ever figure out how in time to do something with your immeasurable power?”

Who was this beggar to be lecturing him? William started to feel indignant. He’d just wanted to say hi, and thanks, but somehow the whole thing had been taken to another level. I mean come on, he had already achieved more in his twenty five odd years of life than this bum was ever going to experience. Still it was hard for him to feel pity.

“Listen douche bag, I’d like to stay and chat, explain to scum like you, exactly how fucken worthless you are, why cockroaches like you are nothing but a burden on society... but I have an 8 am. Enjoy the dirt, traveller.”

“I apologise if I have offended you, it was no more and no less than you needed to hear. If the words fall on deaf ears, the listener must learn a new way to hear the words. I am Master Batia-chan; it was my master’s name before he passed it on to me. If you would like, what is your name?”

William stared at the man. He really stared and felt like he was on the cusp of a decision. He kept coming back to that smile; it had eclipsed all the random shit of work and life in one fell swoop. He really wanted to know. “I’m... William Davies.”

He paused, normally at this point if it was an acquaintance, he would have mentioned “senior equities dealer, for the Royal bank of Scotland” or more simply, just “Banker, RBS” if it was a platinum piece of booty, that he was trying to drop a value proposition on.

“It is a pleasure to meet you Mr Davies, I have a feeling you are going to open those ears of yours very soon. Now however, I guess I should point out its well 7:57 am, and... Uh, didn’t you say you had an 8 o’clock?”

“Shit! Last man in buys the first round after work... I’ve never been last.”

Something made him want to stay even as he looked down at his watch. Impossible. He’d been here for barely a minute, but the watch said twenty.

Pushing impossibilities to the bottom, he let the latest Euro bond cross rates percolate up, dominant headlines speaking of unspeakable economic destruction. He sprinted now, not caring about damaging the four thousand dollar suit. It felt good to run. Like not everything was yet under his control. Oh, but soon. He had a feeling this was the year of the dealer’s paradise. A year to make a fortune, on ultra volatile world markets. He fucken lived for this shit.

Friday the 29^th of July, 2011

William moved his legs in precision like a gymnast to slide from bed to ground. His morning routine was the start to success. So said his dad, a man Will could quote at will. 1000 sit-ups, push-ups till failure, twenty military pull-ups. The brunette lying naked amongst the silk sheets. Her soft heaving chest uncovered. Long slender arms held back against the bed head. Dammit if he didn’t stop looking soon, they’d both be sweating it out for another quarter of an hour. He was curious though, he thought maybe the old guy would be there today. No idea why but somehow curiosity won out over a nine from ten stunner, that would do... anything. An RBS PR chick. Go figure. Shower-breakfast-shave.

Sure enough he noticed the start of another ground hog day as he passed the Anzac memorial. The sun seemed to hit his eyes, the morning’s luminosity jumped slightly, things felt lighter... he walked on.

Blue striped Versace suit wearer. One percenter. Living the dream. The morning shot of doppio was held between left thumb and ring finger. His arm was raised and he carried the small cup like an attendant walking in front of his king.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around an old man who was begging near to the ANZ hole in the wall. As he came closer, he seemed not to notice the smell. The man’s appearance was less noteworthy. Will knew he was being superficial when he judged someone like that but somehow he’d always justified it as a necessary cost of doing business. A cost that always seemed so necessary and yet also mildly unpleasant.

He looked closer at the beggar, the eyes were sharp. There was no mistaking it, it was... Master Batia-chan, gazing straight out at him through the crowd. The soft felt cap was even emptier there was barely ten cents inside. Batia-chan looked down at the cap despondently, then brightly back up at Will. He smiled, and William’s world started to dissolve. The accumulated stress of a week of back-to-back planning meetings for the firm’s latest acquisition was starting to add up. Suddenly it was all gone. Just a black void and two men. One sitting peacefully, the other starting to talk, his head wrapped in the demons that consumed him.

“William Davies?”

“Hi... Batia-chan??”

“That is I, young Will. May I call you that?” smiling he continued on, not waiting for a response.

“There are eight noble truths in this world. However only the first is really important, all the rest come from that one. Your path, my path, we are all guided by compassion. Compassion for our fellow human beings, for the creatures, for the earth and its fauna. Most of your fellow human beings get to the finish line without a seconds thought for the journey. Young Will, I wonder if you can let go of your greed and embrace those who are less fortunate?”

“I’m listening.”

“That is a start as they say, young Will. But I wonder if you understand my words...”

Just then someone bumped roughly into Will. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from the seated man. He looked to his left where the other person had come from. The sight that greeted him made him angry at once. A young junkie, track marks fresh on pale white arms stared back at him with a half vacant, half uncaring visage.

“Fuck you asshole! Watch where your fucken well going.” He cursed. He made to push the junkie but the guy was too quick, small, hungry, but nimble and quick.

The next second his right arm was reaching low, scooping the meagre contents of Master Batia-chan’s hat and running across the Elizabeth Street intersection.

Suddenly the old man began to laugh. Someone had just taken his last ten cents, and he had the good humour to laugh like a world class comedian was giving him a private show. Will couldn’t help it, the laughter was completely infectious. It rolled out deep from the man’s belly, a rumbling for which each wave of bass hit him like something physical. After a couple of seconds he began to laugh too. At first he had no idea why he felt this way, but then he realised, he was letting go of the moment before, letting go of the things which in his mind he used to judge that poor miscreant.

“Good. You have much to learn. However that’s a start Will. The most important part about compassion is letting go of those that hurt you. There will always be situations that cannot be resolved but through force. At which point you have a choice most of the time, to run or to confront that force and cause more violence. The hardest thing is to show a kindness to someone straight after they have slapped you in the face. That takes ten times more courage than to raise your fists in anger.”

“Sounds like the Buddhist philosophy of non-aggression. Fundamentally I don’t disagree with it, but let’s face it, in this dog eat dog world of ours, you would get trampled back into the dirt if you lived by that kind of credos. It’s just the reality; we can’t really be compassionate, until we are loaded like Bill Gates.”

“He is a good man, who does great good in this world. But no matter how powerful, he is one man.”

“One man, with an army of help.”

“Yes you are right. You speak of the reality of that situation, but here is reality and it is filled with beings that are all capable of the same degree of compassion. It is only our imagination that limits us. The power to change the world is inside each one of us. You are a man of great good, young Will. I see this inside you. I also see seeds of anger and the onset of greed. You have a choice young man, one you will be asked to make before this year is out; you can either embrace the true path, or be crippled by the forces that have already begun to consume your mind.”

He left the old man then walking briskly towards work, feeling somewhat hollow not knowing quite what to think. Harsh words, made harsher by the recent events. The adrenaline from the shove had elevated his blood pressure, giving him the jitters. It seemed to trigger goose bumps and warm rush of heat up the back of his spine.

He thought of his mother, the final time he’d seen her, her blackened body burnt beyond recognition, trapped within a twisted metal cage. He’d refused to even climb into a car for two years afterwards, and he still preferred to walk. Silent tears trickled down the outside of his eyes onto and along the strong male jaw line, two rivulets arcing towards his chin.

Still it was hard to think of the junkie as a fellow human being, much less someone to have compassion for. The man was just scum wasn’t he? His watch said 7:58 AM. Shit, time to run, after last month he really didn’t want to buy another $1000 round. The time dilation effect. Again. #Time-fail. What was with that? Why did he keep running into this old man that made him laugh and cry.

Friday the 26^th of August, 2011

William moved his legs in precision like a gymnast to slide from bed to ground. The bed was filled with a petite young thing with long unfurled locks of honey brown hair. His quest for female perfection seemed matched to his age. A quest unfulfilled, because the conquest always came first, conversation second, the “getting to know you”... hmm well not yet anyway.

The pretty uni student (he think he remember her saying) pushed one of her pins out slowly alongside his outer thigh, rubbing it. She curled around on top, and then started to give him a gentle back rub.

He brushed her off gently in return. No time for games, today. He had a market to beat, he had to stay focused, on... his morning routine.

1000 sit-ups, push-ups till failure, twenty military pull-ups.

Undeterred by a governor-general’s daughter, undeterred by what was left of her lingerie. She started to massage his back. She was moving in to press her chest against his; warmth quickly spread sucking him backwards towards the bed. Undeterred by fate, he made opportunities, he didn’t succumb to them.

Morning playthings be damned. Morning routines were made to be adhered to. If she was there when he got home tonight, he’d make it up to her. Shower-breakfast-shave.

He marched gamely down through the Wynyard bus interchange, Gucci loafers clicking crisply against the hard concrete skin of the city. The early morning light was invigorating. The passing traffic cast hollow stares vacantly at him, past him, through him at destination dullness. Such was the lot of the city worker.

Three white doves dove low as he passed the Anzac memorial. As the doves wheeled, rising, two children screamed into view around the far side of the cenotaph. Smiling happy little kids, Australia’s future. The sun seemed to find his eyes, hitting them hard. The morning’s luminosity jumped up noticeably, things felt light... he walked on.

A Versace suit that drew and held the eye. A morning shot of doppio that was held between left thumb and ring finger. The ten thousand dollar Cartier watch around his left wrist.

Halfway up the left side of martin place the human traffic thinned around Master Batia-chan, who was begging near to the ANZ bank. As he came closer he realised there was no smell, the smell was visual, quite simply Batia-chan looked so terrible he had to smell. But he didn’t.

“Hello young Will!” Batia-chan beamed enthusiastically. He smiled in that infectious way he could.

“Hi.” Said Will, more noncommittally. Last month felt like yesterday. He was prepared today he left half an hour earlier, and he was keeping a close eye on his watch.

“It will do you no good young man. You think that you can control the flow of time? How bold, how arrogant.” His smile beamed out looking over William curiously.

“Why are you filled with so much happiness? Life can’t be that good.” Despite the man’s sometimes harsh character assessment to date, Will who was never one to shy away from feedback, had started to warm to Batia-chan despite himself.

“Au contraire young Will, life has never been better. As I sit here I know that my life is fulfilled, while when I look over at you, sadly I only see a discontent individual whose life is slipping past him. Mental happiness starts up here Will.” Batia-chan pointed to his head, and continued.

“Are you happy Will?”

“I’m driven, successful, life just comes easy, it’s my playground and I’m its rock star. So yeah Batia-chan I’m happy. If I do it right I’ll be retired by next year. Not bad huh?” He didn’t know why he’d added the last, he never shared that. The rest was a throwaway line; he’d said it so many times it felt real.

Batia-chan just looked at him mournfully. Just then across the intersection somebody screamed. The sound of heavy braking briefly preceded audio visual carnage. A truck had come roaring up behind a car which had suddenly stopped for a pedestrian mistiming the crossing.

The much larger truck punched the car from behind, jack-knifing it forward, and narrowly missing the harried jay walker, who scuttled for the safety of the gutter. The car was another matter, it was a wreck, the truck had now stopped and the driver was gamely trying to get out. Nearby people were stopping, some running including from nearby buildings to help with the emergency.

Without even realising it, tears started to stream down William’s eyes. He watched as the police and ambulance arrived. It seemed the lady in the car was stable enough to take to hospital. The impromptu crowd roused a cheer. She in turn smiled weakly from the ambulance trolley half raising a hand in response to the them.

“Are you ok Will?” asked Batia-chan, the concern was etched into his eyes. The concern was deep it felt like someone was tugging on his soul. Words came then, stream of consciousness styles.

“No. Your right though, I’m not happy. What kind of a man, just freezes and cries at tragedy like that? Don’t worry I know the answer to that. Real men don’t cry. Aww shit, I don’t know Batia-chan, I got so angry after my mum died you know? I was angry at the world, and my selfishness had no one to reign it in any longer. She died in a car crash. I rebuilt the only way I knew how, with shear bloody minded determination. I kept succeeding, because I would never, ever let up. Her body was broken mate. Have you ever seen someone so mangled you can’t even tell if they are human? She died in agony Batia-chan. I wasn’t even there for her.”

“I am so sorry to hear of your loss William. Truly I am.” The rivers of tears continued to stream down William’s face. He couldn’t focus, in his mind he was ten standing on the side of the road, as the fireman tried in vain to cut the wreckage for a better look inside. And then the explosion of pain, the visual waves of nausea. Her body ungazing back at his. Chaos ripped through his mind as he shuffled along the footpaths that led to the RBS building.

Friday the 30^th of September, 2011

“Hi Will”

“I’m sorry to have left you like that last month Batia-chan. The moment stirred a kind of madness inside of me that turned to something I still don’t quite understand.”

“It’s ok. Your mind was torn by an event which in your mind is as raw as the day it happened. You still have great anger towards yourself, anger that you left to burn for far too long. At first it helped you, motivated you. Now like all things it comes calling for payment. The price as you are beginning to realise is too high. It will either kill you or drive you insane. “

“How do I let go of that though Batia-chan?”

“Simply Will? You don’t. Why should you? It is as much a part of you as that beautiful watch or your powerful right arm. You must forgive yourself, and then you must try and do good in this world. Showing real kindness to others is one way you can begin to heal your broken heart.”

At that time a poor old lady, in an even more dishevelled state than Batia-chan limped by. In her eyes were tangible lines of pain that cut through the two of them. Torture-pain-abuse. This woman had not a single drop of hope. The sparkle in her eyes was not there at all.

Without hesitation Batia-chan sprang up from his small dirty mat, and stepped into the path of the woman. He bowed to her, then spoke in another language (it sounded Cyrillic) smiling all the while at her. She stepped back from him but he stepped neatly into the gap using his left arm to protectively hug her shoulder in a comforting gesture. As he did this he placed the money from his begging cap into her tight gnarled paw.

He pressed it there when she resisted, her once proud features suddenly jumping to the forefront. He smiled at her and spoke again in her native language. The woman hesitated. It was as if, at that moment an epic battle raged within her. Her hardened features searched Batia-chan’s face suspiciously.

Then the most amazing thing happened, she cracked a strong vibrant smile and hugged Batia-chan. This old twisted mean looking lady suddenly looked as sprightly as when she was twenty years old. They were still chatting happily as Will quietly sauntered off towards work. In his mind a world for which he had invested so much, was slowly crumbing into a sea of sorrow he had never even known existed. In his eyes the pain of a cold uncaring world could for this moment at least no longer be fully rationalised. The pain-tears welled and poured, but he didn’t care. Something brewed inside, something he no longer cared to hide.

Friday the 28^th of October, 2011

Breaking through the George St throng, he headed up in the early dawn sun past the Anzac memorial. His head tilted curiously on a sharp angle to the right as the sunshine glinted from the top of the tomb. It caught in his eyes and made him blink. He thought he saw a Buddhist monk, the prayer beads handing from his right hand, his left arm folded in supplication. When he blinked the image of the monk standing next to the tomb was gone.

“My friend!” shouted Batia-chan across the concourse.

Will had not seen his friend at the normal place outside the bank, knowledge that had unexpectantly hit him like a rocket. That the beggar genuinely meant something to him. Just another of life’s harsh lessons. Now though he was happy, and charged across the concourse to his friends spot outside the MLC complex.

“How are you Batia-chan?” Will smiled back

“I see you have remembered to smile.”

As they began to chat, Will pulled out a roll of cash that he had withdrawn earlier. It was in the thousands. As he slowly lowered it to Batia-chan’s hat, a shocking thing happened.

Contrary to the beggars weedy appearance, with his frail stooping bent and gnarled looking face and hands, an arm as strong as a heavy weight boxer shot out encircling Will’s wrist in an iron lock. Despite the shock Will instinctively struggled to break the grip. To not do so would be a sign of weakness. Batia-chan’s hand didn’t even tremble. It just stayed in exactly the same position.

“Do not give this to me William. You insult me, as a friend.” Batia-chan turned precisely ninety degrees to the right facing away to the subway entrance. His hand disappeared back into his robes.

“I fear that you still have not understood what I have been trying to show you all along. It is right before your eyes. The anger you have towards yourself, you must find some way of atonement that lets you release it.” He paused then turned to look directly at William. He wasn’t smiling. The pity was gone, only sadness remained.

“If I see you again, it will be because you have started to walk the path of the Tao.”
Will looked at his friend again but the other man wouldn’t look back at him. In the end feeling uncomfortable and more than a little lost he turned towards work. Batia-chan didn’t want his money, but clearly wanted him to be a better person. It seemed that to Batia-chan, money had no true value; it was the value of the individual’s contribution, the helping of other human beings.

Friday the 25^th of November, 2011

William Davies sat alone, cross legged in his bed. The morning light shone through the window. He barely felt the warm rays on his back. In his thoughts a rebellion was mounting. The forces of good could be held back no longer. The priorities he had held so dear: To have a star studded career with an important equities dealer, to meet every last hottie in Sydney, to retire by the age of 35.

Such things seemed now to him so incredibly hollow. The fantasies of another man, from a time when he had stopped calculating the truth worth of others. Too busy calculating how he could use every last thing around him to his advantage. His edge in business had been his personal downfall in life.

Now though the mind seemed gradually each day to be clearer. The thoughts that came to him now were infinitely more rewarding. All of them stemmed from a single source, a man that had been willing to open his eyes and his heart to the fact that life had so much more to offer. A friend that he believed was now lost to him forever. Betrayed by his own greed.

Atonement: that’s what Batia-chan had said he needed to find. The day after he had last seen Batia, the last Saturday in October, William had hired a small ute, spend the entire bank roll of notes on supplies, loaded them up into the pickup and missioned out west to distribute them.

That money had felt like poison after Batia rejected it. He hadn’t been able to concentrate at all until the food and clothes had all been given out.

Now sitting here in bed, his thoughts were caught up in memories of the smiling faces of those he had helped. The golden look of a child, receiving a much needed sweater. The gruff yet thankful look of appreciation from a parent too poor to properly cloth their family. To Will it hadn’t been until he’d got out there and begun to see the silent pain of Sydney’s underbelly that he had begun to understand how deeply he might have hurt Batia.

He raised himself; the period of reflection had been sobering. Swinging wide from the bed, he stripped down and began a new kind of morning ritual. A cold shower followed by a vigorous scrub down. The first couple of times it had been shear torture to his soft shell. Now weeks later the ritual of purification raised his awareness to new levels, both physical and mental skins felt clean.

He yoga-stretched, then forced his legs into a half lotus and began to meditate. Amazing how since he had started with a five minute routine four weeks ago, he had no more headaches, no more stress. The mind wanted to respond, but he realised you had to feed it. It wanted to think thoughts that made the individual happy, it was just that if you filled a cup full of acid; it was kinda hard to swallow. The mind was like that, it could take just about anything, but if you put enough shit in there sooner or later the chaos would erupt in very human emotions; anger, hate, self-loathing and fear.

His walk to work was just the same, only just that it was completely different. Instead of seeing “scum” he saw people in need. Instead of seeing “losers” he marked the location of the needy letting ideas that had at their root a philosophy of doing good, incubate. He knew deep down that the change was on him now, that what Batia had done was push him down his own path, his Tao.

He had half expected his career to slide of the face of the earth, but confusingly to him, if anything the opposite had happened. Everyone seemed to like the new Will. It seemed no one shared his concern that you could be both a nice guy and successful. The pre-conditions to success in William’s mind had taken a 180 degree shift.

When he saw a different beggar sitting at the spot Batia had used to occupy outside the ANZ building, he knew it was time to start the next part of his journey. Approaching the man he poured some coins into the hat, then squatting bent down and began to chat pleasantly to the troubled street warrior. He gave himself an extra half an hour these days. Just to listen. It was almost more than he could take. The first time. Now several weeks later, as he listened intently to this man’s tale of pain and woe, his eyes shone with care and understanding. The same set of sales skills that made his company millions of dollars from wining, dining and schmoozing clients were now put to better use.

Friday the 23^rd of December, 2011

William woke up this morning, it was still dark. His eyes shone with inner light. He had been up all night making preparations. Now though all he wanted to do was cleanse himself and prepare for the day. Work had finished on Wednesday. Since sleeping in wasn’t in his DNA, his morning routine remained unchanged.

The meditation now lasted close to an hour. He was making progress, able to keep his mind empty for minutes now. The thoughts that had controlled and consumed his mind were distant now. The rage and anger were gone starved of fuel.

He went downstairs, carrying two boxes in each large hand. Checking the ute, he made several more trips loading it up each time with more boxes. Finally he made one more trip, putting the suit on and scrambling out the door.

First stop was a hospital out at Liverpool. The children screamed in excitement as Santa Claus came through the ward doors. When they ripped open the presents the screams of excitement were so loud several nurses came rushing in checking to see if their patients were ok. He tried to listen to each set of parents, but it was hard. Some of the kids were as young as one; almost all of them would save but for the grace god, be dead within twelve months. Tough little troopers he thought. A single thought filled his mind; I would give everything I had, just to save one of you. To take away the pain.

As he left, his Santa beard moist with tears, he made a few calls. Next stop a YMCA near Cabramatta. Then housing commission block of units out at Penrith. Each time he made sure that he spent time listening to the problems and the tales of life that the needy told him. Each time he smiled gently, wished them all the best and promised that he would return to visit.

By the end of the day he was beat. Not so much physically, but the emotional strain had long since reached its climax. All he wanted to do was sleep. Instead he parked the ute and walked back towards Martin place. Maybe just maybe he would catch up with Batia one more time. Then man had become like a guru to him, and he desperately wanted to tell him that he had changed.

But even though he searched all over the cbd for three hours, the old beggar was nowhere to be seen. He spent time with the homeless he could find, but no one had even ever heard of Batia-chan.

Finally, smiling in final realisation, he knew that this was what Batia-chan had really meant about finding the way for himself. The way without Batia-chan to hold his hand, the way unclouded by his own emotional baggage. Feeling free at last he walked back down Martin place.

As he past the Anzac memorial, his eyes lit up. For a moment he thought he saw the image of Batia-chan, in golden bursts of sunrays, smiling down at him from atop the cenotaph. Then he blinked and the image was gone. He would remember it always. It was the face of Batia-chan, but he was dressed in the most elegant suit Will had ever seen. The stance, the bearing, and in his hand he carried the ceremonial sword of office given to the chief of Army. For Will this was the final lesson; that appearances did not matter, that every human being mattered, that to heal others or yourself you first had to be prepared to listen, and not to judge. Giving was/is just an expression of caring. Material things have no value to the soul unless they are given with a smile and a purpose.

: End

Chapter 7

2011-11-23T03:39:00.001-08:00

A test of true belief – A test of time

Chapter 7 by Tobias Nixon

Advanced Recon Desert Camp, 8:34:04, just North-West of Mogadishu, Somalia

Davis woke sweating from the dream. It had been so vivid. He had been in the dreaming. The place had a distinctively different quality from a regular dream. The elders had taught him to recognise this essential quality of the dreaming versus that of a dream that was just inside your head. They believed that entering the dreaming was a life and death journey because it was a realm just like the samsara of our own reality, and that it was connected to each body by life force. He was fully conscious and able to recreate the reality around him just as he had been taught by the elders.

For Davis, as a dream walker, the act of sleeping was simply a gateway into another type of reality. Being a highly productive individual, as soon as he had discovered this control at the age of twelve, he had put it to work. Closing his eyes had suddenly meant he could be practising; homework, new languages, his passion for finance even different approaches to handling people, rather than just taking a nap.

Once you know it is what is behind those walls, there will come a time when you will stop walking into the next room. Once you know this you will tear down those walls and change them into anything you want. It is at this point that you will become the master of your own reality and enter into the realm of the dreaming.
The voice of bear so small it sounded tiny, hardly there at all.

Davis had known this each time he went to sleep. To dream was to be awake in one’s own mind. Nothing could intrude, into a realm in which he was a god, capable of building up and tearing down the world around him with equal measure. Always though he had thought of it as something he did, inside his own mind, unaffected by the outside world.

Now though he was awake, sitting up, feeling the perspiration of a cold sweat. He thought back immediately to the dream, reminding himself of every detail of it, as he had been trained to do. The world had been a desert, nothing lived in that world, or so he thought. He felt he had been wandering for aeons across that dusty plain. Eventually he would cross this place he thought, and at once he was somewhere else just across the plain on the other side in the shadows of a great rock. Uluru reared up from the desert floor, fifty times more massive in dream than in samsara, its towering height reached up to the skies like Everest. The elders had told him it was still dreaming of younger days when it was a mountain.

Davis had smiled recognising as all dreamers of the Australian bush do this signpost. The great rock spirit was a favourite meeting point for entering the dreaming together. Today there was only one other. He appeared as a kindly old man. A visage of a man that instantly touched his heart, for Davis had known this man from when he was a pup.

The eldest of the tribe, old man Tribett, had taught Davis in ways of his tribe since he could remember. At first Bear and Cub had taken up his training, mainly since the elder Tribett couldn’t speak English very well. Then later once Davis was able to enter the dreaming on his own, it was Elder Tribett that had instructed Davis directly via the dreaming. It was Davis’s first taste of the power of the dreaming realm, where all languages effectively became one if you used the correct mental trick.

Feeling such a comforting presence Davis had felt relaxed, and yet the old man had pointed, then suddenly the two of them were far from Ayers rock. They stood at the start of a dreaming trail. Connecting the outback to the dreaming, these pathways acted as conduits for mixing the life force of reality with the power of the dreamtime. The indigenous peoples believed it was what gave them their connection with the land even after they died.

This trail was different. It ran somewhere else. As Davis used his dream sight, looking down the path, it went black. Everything went black, as a tidal wave of rage-hatred came flooding towards him like a black tidal flow of the blackest bile. Within that blackness small creatures stirred. Each wanted nothing more than to bight and tear with beak or claw. Just looking at the hideous visage was enough to inspire fear. Most disconcerting perhaps, was the fact that the longer you looked at the hideous tumble of creatures the more you began to realise it was really one big chaotic entity, unbound by the trans-dimensional realities that pervaded samsara. An entity never designed to deal with the physics of gravity or entropy.

In front of them two small figures loped. They never stopped moving. Scant metres distant from the leading edge of the monstrosity. Blurs yet Davis was positive, it was Bear and Cub! But these were dead men in their dream bodies coming toward him. He wanted to scream with joy, but like everything about reality it was suppressed, a vaguely abstract feeling of tenderness bound within the dreaming boundary.

The elder Tribett, smiled, then pointed again in the distance, it was just beyond the end of the path. Now Davis was really scared. What he saw seemed to be like a portal. A maw within reality had opened up and was extending along the pathway in front of the running bears. It was just as well the nearest claw was only moments from Cubs legs.

At the last moment as it seemed that truly both would be lost to the tearing of the hideous ball of things that chased them, the old man Tribett reached out his wizened hand. Suddenly he was right next to them, pulling them with a mighty bulging arm of pure muscle flesh, taunt and writhing from exertion. His whole body was huge like a modern day Hercules. Every muscle seemed tensed, the body was beautiful. A walking 3d Michelangelo brought to life.

He jerked them away from the creatures, and then in the next movement flung them forward toward the gaping maw of the portal. It rushed to greet them. Ejecting the two of them out into some form of reality beyond the dreaming realm, where the end of the pathway led.

Just as he felt the chains of samsara tugging at him, the still herculean Tribett brushed a hand softly onto Davis’s left shoulder pressing down.

Be careful young cub your fate is your own, but a being of evil intent even now tries to stalk your dreams. He is as powerful as me, and is the leader of the Blue Tiger clan. He cannot touch you in the dreaming where you are stronger, but in that reality [points away from Davis at receding edge of the dreaming] he can cut you down as easily as a babe. He will carry a dark blade; do not let it touch you. It’s cut is pure death.

He leapt with a start once more, for those images of his father, his uncle, his spiritual grandfather, they had seemed so real. Memories, nothing more. Just a lucid dream. His father. His uncle. They were dead. Weren’t they?

All these lessons he had pushed deep down inside were starting to leak out at an alarming rate. Always he had assumed they were part of his crazy hippie childhood. The last couple of days had made Davis realise that the line between the dreaming and samsara was not as defined as he had believed. Walls existed that could be broken down. Great powers existed, ones that had fealty to neither good nor evil. They existed like all forces, to be used or abused as human leverage dictated.

One of the main reasons he had wanted to come here, apart from making sure Ronnie was safely stowed away with her relatives, was to get away from the crazy shit he had gone through in Sydney in the last day or so. He had wrongly assumed that the problem was localised, a product of fighting those shitbag ninjas. The problem was him, the more he confronted his fears the faster those fears rushed up to meet him.

He’d never wanted to use the old man as an excuse before, always he had looked up to his father as the man that had given his son a golden childhood of adventure, learning and a deep spiritual connection with the land of his birth. In some ways his father was another in a long line of Australian explorers of the bush. At some point you reached a line where you became a protector and a guardian, because in exploring the vast perfection of the Australian outback, all such adventurers discovered the knowledge and power that was held within its character, a character that in the process largely transformed their own. It was what the Aboriginals called being one with the land. It was not something they strove for, it was something that bound them by their own deep affection for it.

Takes time to master doesn’t it young pup? Bear’s words half-faded in the dusk.

Memories of his father bubbled up; Davis stifled a yawn and hopped out of the makeshift bed he had procured the night before. Everyone else was up, making breakfast from rat packs and dry stores dropped by cargo plane the week before. He had brought his own food, knowing that commandos tended to eat about as well as the rest of the army, in other words to a strict and somewhat healthy diet. Davis pulled the food out and took it over to where Aimee was already making hers.

“Ho Blackbear! How are you this fine morning?” Davis smirked as he looked down at her.

“I’m fine. That looks breakfast of yours’ looks good, Davis.”

“Wanna share?” he said with a charmer’s smile and knowing wink in her direction.

“You’re not funny Davis, not even close. Why are you here anyway, apart from getting all Rambo and wanting to kill these bastards that is?” Aimee seemed to say it casually, but Davis knew it was anything but.

“I’ll be honest with you Blackbear dearest, going Rambo as you put it is only part of my motivation. As I already told you there was a major deal that my firm was negotiating just before I left for Abu Dhabi with you, Tim and Ronnie. It turns out that this deal has become somewhat mired in pirate trouble. I’ve been in contact with my customer and will be meeting up with him late this evening. I’ll keep in contact in case we find out anything useful.”

“So you intend to go after the pirates?”

“Yes” said Davis.

“Good luck, I guess you should know we have Intel on a secret tunnel into the building where they are holding the laser cutter and we believe the lattice uranium. We go in at midday.”

“Don’t go that way Aimee. It’s a trap.”

“What? Why did you say that Davis? What do you really know?”

“Look ask Tim ok, sometimes I have premonitions, if you can’t handle that level of craziness, just chalk it up to my intuition. Whatever. The point is you should at least split up your attack. That way if this place is a trap you won’t be left holding a complete shit sandwich.”

“You want me to just change our plans ‘cause you have feeling? You do realise what could happen if they are in there right now putting the finishing touches on a nuclear super bomb? It doesn’t even bare thinking about.”

“What about the alternative Aimee? Have you thought about that? There is only one way we can get out of this. We have to find that lattice crystal. What if it’s not inside, what if even now they are spiriting it away to another location in the city?”

“Our current Intel suggests all their actions to develop the tech capable of utilising this crystal require a scientist of Tim’s level of experience. We are actively tracking all such known individuals. They would need to relocate to Russia or China at this point to get anywhere close to someone else. No the guy inside that building is definitely up to something, even if he is not in direct possession of the crystal. Shutting this scientist down and interrogating him will in a worst case scenario should still some valuable insights and help us with recovery.”

“Ok. I’d just hate to see anything happen to Tim’s new girlfriend.” Davis smiled as he walked away.

Aimee’s high feminine cheeks had suddenly gone a lovely red, unnoticed as her head was hidden now within an oversized hoodie. Her eyes however were clearly visible, hurling daggers at his back.

He was off to arrange a meeting with a Russian boat, the Illuyuz’s, captain. Captain Albinilovoz had scheduled for a small boat to pick him up from the beach. He’d been given a GPS location and a time.

The trip was pretty uneventful, he’d had one of the SAS drop him at the beach, and then sat down to wait. He waited while the sun rose. He waited while the tide came in. The solitary nature of the beach helped calm his mind.

He adopted a meditation pose then, sitting cross legged in the full lotus position. His head raised, eyes closed he wanted to let the dreaming come to him while awake. He rarely tried to enter into a trance state while awake. Now though he wanted to understand something about these powers that seemed to be awakening within him.

Close your eyes young one. You must be courageous. When the fear seeps in, I will stand beside you, shoulder to shoulder. Now. Close your eyes young one, and keep them closed until the true darkness comes. Cub was talking to him.

He sat straddled atop Bear’s massive chest. He was only seven years old, and crying uncontrollably, thinking of his mother. Why are you not here mum. Why did you leave?

He was once more a young care free boy. Caught up in a spiritual life, given him, by a father’s grand ambitions.

When the darkness comes tell me what you see, young one.
Cub now more insistent, his voice rising in pitch, taking on a noted urgency.
Tell me, release it, and be free, forever.

He let his mind go free.
Nothing comes when you concentrate little cub. A still young looking Bear had said to Davis as a child. You must learn to let go. Make your mind empty of the very thing that you need to focus on. Let everything in your head fall away, until without trying the power flows within you.

Inside his head was empty, truly empty, even of the thought impulse to check if it was empty. What empty was. Was there something else called full? No matter for as such things seemed more distant, the eyes of his intent grew close.

The last and the first my friend, whichever comes in between. Words that had never made sense, not once, now seemed to crystallise his thoughts into action.

The purpose of the teaching is to make you have something to grab onto when you are past the point of help. I cannot go to that place with you Davis. Your spirit will guide you and protect you.
Bear had said this with great concern, looking genuinely worried at his young charge.

But we can show you how to get there. There is no eternal truth, only your own.
Cub whispering along the winds.

His insight stirred Davis into action. Closing his eyes, he marvelled at how the soft cold sand seemed to encompass his thoughts. Unmoved, absorbing anything that was not them. Like a sponge that held its shape. He sat smoothly upon a land washed clean by the ocean, given beauty by the sun, and made up of millions upon millions of tiny grains of sand.

There in the middle of his mind, was a black circle; he poured all his thoughts into it. More thoughts arose, he threw them in to. Still more came, he let go thinking only of the circle, forgetting even then, that he was supposed to be remembering something.

For a very long couple of seconds, the world stood still. The waves were paused mid break, a barrel stood unbroken upon the shore break. The blackness became a white light, and he felt a discernable pull as his spirit body began to drift above the body it was anchored to below. The circle was complete; it flared with white light as his spirit body drifted to a spot in the middle of it.

Davis looked around, and could see the desert in all directions. The distance his eyes travelled was far beyond the normal physical boundaries of the optic nerve. He looked now out to sea, and saw the Russian craft. It was easy to make out the white lettering, Illuyuz on the side. How could he not see them? He saw the small boat being launched into the sea.

He saw the captain, Albinilovoz, standing menacingly upon the deck, inspecting the forward fifty millimetre gun that was deck mounted. The ship was heavily armoured, having extra steel reinforcing added to the hull, an additional gun next to the first one, and a crew of the most cutthroat merciless ex-Russian soldiers you would ever find in this part of the globe. The mercs were all carrying scoped assault rifles and body armour.

Next he turned his gaze to the building that Aimee was currently planning to invade. He cast his sight inside, moving his spirit body to the front door and pushing in through the walls. Physical boundaries provided no barrier to a spirit. The body could move anywhere it wanted to, so long as he had seen it before. For some reason you didn’t need to see the inside, but if you hadn’t then you had to start outside. It was as he was entering that he felt a sharp pain. The pain intensified with each step he made until within cooee of the door strip it suddenly intensified and an invisible wall prevented him from making further progress. He assumed that one of the Blue Tiger ninjas must have put some type of protection on the building.

Ok, that wouldn’t work but maybe he could try something else. If they didn’t know about the tunnel? Would it work? He imagined the location of the entrance and was there. He quickly moved as a ghost through it until he reached the area where it connected to the buildings level 3 basement. The entrance to the building was open.

“Things are complicated because we imagine them to be that way. Things are simple because we don’t imagine them at all. Make yourself small and large Davis. Hold to the inside even as you slip beyond the farthest boundaries of reality.” Cub to Davis as they both sat in full lotus facing towards the western sun, as it set over Bangkok.

Davis moved back to the centre of the ground floor once he had finished his sweep. He was hovering half a metre from the ground. His spirit body was arched, powerful chest pumped out, arms splayed at his side forming a downward V shape. He began to let go again, thinking that this spot was so small, like a tiny dot in space. We think we know our bodies, but right then Davis had at once a body that was a tiny dot so small that the world around him was so massive it made him want to scream.

Davis made himself expand from the tiny dot, now his awareness was spread over the whole building, forcing its way into every part. He moved with the tenacity of a cat, looking around for people, their locations, what they carried and possible devices that could be used as bombs or booby traps. Finding nothing he moved on, scanning every available nook and cranny.

He swept through the building and located the scientist and his work, he hunted again for the crystal. Looking at the real world from the spirit realm actually made what he was doing easy he realised. The chi fields were visible, so any living thing gave off a distinctive aura or signature that could be identified by its size and shape in comparison to other such signatures. The mechanical and electrical systems that the scientist was building gave off no such signs.

He had hoped that the crystal would be here but he realised he had no way of knowing if it was. So having seen the giant laser cutter, he noted the booby traps one last time, then returned to his physical body. The last he achieved in the most bizarre way, rolling along a silver cord that seemed to go down instead of across, like you would expect if the body was travelling back across the desert to his actual physical locale.

He began entering everything into a small Galaxy tab using keyboard gloves. Once he was ready he made a conference call to Aimee and Tim, Aimee answering just a second quicker.

“What’s up now Davis?”

“Don’t be like that I have Intel, uploading the raw now Tim.” Davis said.

“I’m processing it. Woah! Is this for real Davis?”

“Of course mate, 100%. Now analysis it.”

“Did you get any indication from this that the Scientist might be there?”

Davis was about to say no, when he thought back to the moment, the moment he’d been a dot.

“No”

“No? Are you sure? These maps were drawn I assume with thermal imaging cameras, that’s the only way to explain what your sending me.”

“So what Tim?”

“So Davis! There’s no way of knowing that.”

“No. I know ok Tim? I know that he wasn’t there.” Davis said, not mentioning that it was because of Tim’s own very distinctive oversized chi field that he knew what to look for. The Scientist had not been there. Therefore it was logical that the crystal wasn’t either. Except nothing about the past 48 hours had been logical in any way. He wondered how Ronnie was going in Germany.

He closed his eyes. There was something amiss here. Every time they moved the enemy moved first. In war this level of preparedness was associated only with the greatest generals. It was safe to assume that the leader of Blue Tiger was an expert in the Art of war.

“Aimee? I need you to do a scan of the surrounding desert with satellites. Order full spectrum analysis. Tell them to go deep looking for masked heat signatures, up to ten feet below the surface of the ground.”

“Ok. But Davis?”

“If this is another one of your hunches, I am officially going to kill your ass when I see you next.”

“Aimee babe, who said you’re ever going to see me again? Well ok... maybe at Tim’s wedding. Peace out.”

He just caught the tail end of Aimee swearing like the trooper that she was as the encrypted link cut out into loud static.

The Illuyuz frigate, 16:45:02, The Gulf of Aden

Davis had climbed the rope ladder of the vessel around midday, making his way to the start of the bridge, where Captain Albinilovoz was waiting for him with a firm handshake, followed by a super strong Russian bear hug. The kind that broke men’s backs when friendly and typically, made them explode like jelly in tissue paper when, not.

The ship rocked with the sea. Lightly, but at her masters whim. The captain was nothing if not eccentric. Upon greeting Davis, he ushered him into a cabin that looked like something out of the sixteen hundreds. The cabin had been completely re-designed to be like that of a man o’ war gallery of yore. Wood panelling on every surface, a crystal chandelier dripping from the high ceiling, a map table covered in navigation aids of the sea.

They reclined like gentlemen, against the two green leather backed chairs in the room. This was not the only concession to luxury. Captain Albinilovoz smiled at Davis then nimbly jumped out of his chair and headed towards a large glass drinks cabinet. Pouring two double nips of vodka, he returned to his seat.

“So, Davis.”

Russian’s always left you hanging with that half greeting of theirs reflected Davis, he wondered idly if they did it deliberately to entice you into replying too early. Captain Albinilovoz continued.

“You want to hunt pirates, Ay?” Davis nodded his head faintly.

The Captains held his short glass untouched, it contrasted nicely with his breath which smelt faintly of vodka.

“Your company has assured me that you can be contracted to go after pirates, Captain Albinilovoz.”

“Ay, that is true. Best armed private vessel you’ll find in these waters.”

“And what of the pirates, that prefer hit and run tactics, and are invisible when hunted? Can you find them?”

With that the Captain let out a giant belly roar. His laughter was echoing within the tight confines of the cabin. His chair shook with his mirth. Pushing down, he rolled forward taking some of the weight from his back, pushing his neck up so he could look straight at Davis.

“What exactly do you think this is Mr Lockyer?” The Captain clipped slowly in a thick Russian accent.

Captain Albinilovoz continued on from this rhetorical question.

“The pirates are not ol’Blackbeard and co manning the four deck of a stolen frigate. No!” His voice seemed stronger now, the timbre taking on an intensity that compelled the listener to attention.

“Today’s pirate is a product of technology. They form raiding parties. Attacks are carried out in flat bottomed, fast attack boats that carry half dozen men. Grappling ladders with AK-47’s under the cover of darkness are the orders of any given day. Typically they will loot whatever they can fit into the boats. If the vessel is small enough they’ll take it back with them as well. Otherwise they take the crew hostage. In just one respect they are like the pirates of old.”

“Oh and in what way is that?” asked Davis.

“They are the blackest of curs, the most gutless bunch of seafaring dogs that you will ever meet. Most are taken young from their villages and raised to fight and steal by the age of twelve. They take hostages for ransom, and kill them if they don’t get paid inside a month. Sometimes they kill them anyway. Mostly though they hit and run, avoiding any target that is well defended, striking at night, constantly changing the direction of their attack. Fading into the night, back to their secret base.”

“They sound like a well organised gorilla force Captain. Perhaps you also have a plan for them?”

“I do, however alot depends on whether you are able to give me a fixed location on the hull of the ship.”

“Unfortunately we are unable to provide that information. It seems that while the ship has basic gps systems, they are not very accurate. We know the ship is close to shore, and can give you the location to within a twenty five kilometre area. Which I realise is quite a large distance. The pirates appear to have some type of sophisticated electronic counter-measure that can disable gps systems.” Davis paused, “So can you come up with a plan to get us that boat?”

“Yes. As I alluded to your colleague in Sydney, I have devised a way to locate their primary base. We will construct a ruse. Allow a vessel to be boarded and seized. The pirates will take cargo that is fitted with GPS, we will follow. You will go ashore and locate the missing boat, after you find it we will steam in, and provide close range support, while you get it under power.”

“An impressive plan Captain, however what other forces besides the pirates exist nearby?”

“Well there are those United Kingdom ships running around out in the deep water, and of course there’s a US aircraft carrier, which sits like a floating fortress outside of Yemen. From what we can see so far the British have deployed three destroyers, five frigates and two troop carriers. At least one of the troop carriers has been spotted in just the last week carrying out onshore operations, deploying soldiers and long range four wheel drives.”

“I’ve just heard from my colleague Firehead. He’ll be meeting us in ten hours via helo transfer directly to the aft deck. He’s organised the decoy ship to start making its way down the coast of Somalia tonight. He has also let me know he’ll be bringing along a team of his own.”

“I really do not care how many tourists you bring to my ship, Davis. Just keep them the hell out of my crews way and keep the rivers of gold flowing.” Ol Kap-e-tan said the last with a wry grin.

Advanced Recon Desert Camp, 17:05:04, just North-West of Mogadishu, Somalia

The team were geared up and ready to roll. Planning had been completed earlier in the day, with forces assigned to various assault positions around the building believed to house the uranium and the scientist. The British SAS had made contact and were preparing diversionary measures to draw the government forces away from the area.

Several vehicles had been rigged with explosives and were being driven into position. Later at a pre-planned time the cars would be destroyed, and along with smatterings of random gunfire, it was hoped should draw the ire of the local forces.

At the same time the force of SEAL and SAS troops led by Blackbear would begin their assault. A small force of two SAS would lead a daring raid up from the hidden tunnel, attempting to silence any sentries within. The main force would deploy from the roof. Easy-E had been camped up there for half the day already working tirelessly to cut a manhole in the roof using a handheld laser cutter. He reported no activity going into or out of the building. Ali Barba’s contacts continued to insist that nothing had left the building.

Aimee walked in a line with the Americans. Their rail gun rifles slung low, they sauntered along happy for the English boys to take point. One of the British was up far ahead, dropping disposable wifi breadcrumbs. These tiny devices acted as beacons and relay points, creating a mobile network as the team traversed from point to point.

The captain of the SAS turned to Aimee.

“Two kilometres ahead there is a small encampment of tribal warriors. They are Al Shaber, and will kill on site, if they recognise us as foreign troops. I suggest we go around them.”

Aimee responded, “The desert floor for the next twenty kilometres is dead flat, how do you propose we do that Captain? Unless you have a cloak of invisibility built into your suit as well?”

The captain grinned back at her, his good humour really was starting to become infectious. “I might do at that ma’am.”

So saying he walked slowly and started to shimmer His outline shifted to a blur, and, moments later he had simply disappeared from view. The effect was just like seeing the mirage of an oasis after days of thirst. It was impossible to deny the illusionary effect the eyes had witnessed.

“You will note that knowledge of the technology is classified beyond top secret. All operators are required to agree to explosive suicide measures in the event of capture, as it cannot be made available for reverse engineering. As commander of the team Blackbear you have been given the kill code authorisation. The short term ability of the suits to “go invisible” is what gave the squad the ‘Nightman’ designation.”

Sarge piped up at that point, “On second thoughts they can keep their hi-tech suits.”

The walked on towards the group of Al Shabab militia that were stationed ahead of them. Hard men who had the eyes of killers and the guns to match. Eyes that could not see the Nightman as he stood in their midst. Eyes that went past the shadow as it moved amongst the empty Bedouin tents. Never seeing the timed explosives placed carefully at each entrance near the dry goods and ammunition.

The team was now within four hundred metres of the camp. The remaining nightmen had moved into a defensive formation between the camp’s inhabitants and the approaching group of special forces. If the diversion didn’t work, they would have the wide open range of fire to pre-empt any similar action the enemy might take.

Aimee looked down at her encrypted ePad. The invisible Nightmen all had their encrypted locators enabled. She could see where they should be. In a small window to the side of the main display a text convo was taking place between several Nightmen.

The rest of the team of course had no clue as to their whereabouts, however one nice feature of the stealth suits was that the operator could pulse voice and text to others via a special mouth piece similar to the one used by the disabled.

The solo Nightman pulsed, “Explosives for diversion in place. Timer set to 10 seconds. On commander’s go.”

Aimee tapped her ePad texting back “go” to the SAS soldier. Immediately a digital timer counted down from ten.

Ten seconds later all hell broke loose. The last thing the occupants of the tent cluster were interested in was shadows moving in the desert beyond. Suddenly their transport, lodging and most of their ammunition and food were gone or in the process of exploding. Each man was out of his tent now, cursing and shouting. Each explosive eruption followed by echoes of men calling down empty threats on their enemies.

As Aimee walked past where her ePad told her the British were standing, she noted that the technology wasn’t perfect. One of the SAS must have been moving. In fact if her eyes weren’t playing tricks, he was saluting her. At least it seemed that way according to the outlines of a glass like arm that shimmered in the instant heat of four dusty fireballs that had once been cars. Unlike the Americans as mission commander she had already been briefed on all the capabilities at her disposal. The invisibility was nice but only lasted thirty seconds before requiring a one hour recharge, the advanced comms and counter measures were going to be very useful on the other hand.

The team moved off into the desert. The camp city was still thirty minutes away by the march.

Pirate Camp, 16:45:01, Somalian Coast

The pirate leader tossed noisily. Next to him on the king size bed a nubile twenty something lay stretched out in lingerie. Her dark smooth skin was half covered in blue silk sheets, her left side naked to the hot air. The pirate’s dreams were disturbed by a black dream. Men were coming, on boats to attack him. The dream repeated over and over. Each time he tossed more urgently on the bed. Several times his thrashing disturbed the ebony beauty next to him. The pirate paid no heed. He was locked in a battle now. Powerful forearms were straining against the bed; his whole midsection was rigid with the tension of fighting the nightmare.

He woke then unsure of whom he was. For the first time in a long time beyond his recall, very very much afraid. He climbed out of bed throwing clothes on as he rushed out the door of the tent.

Halfway through issuing instructions he began to think. It was just a dream, why was he worried. Because it had been both vivid and frequent and he was scared. So he called up his men and put them on alert. He had his guards ready his boat and leave it idling. Then he went back to his afternoon siesta, his companion already awake looking over at him with a mischievous grin.

Chapter 6

2011-11-14T04:45:00.001-08:00

A test of compassion – A test of time

Chapter 6 by Tobias Nixon

An old oriental Inn “The Flying Pig”, 23:31:21, Guangzhou province, China (P.R.C.)

The ninja master turned back to the far wall. His eyes locked on it.

“It is finally time for the realisation of my plans.”

He glanced up at the far wall again, this time caught by a disturbance he felt but did not feel. The fiery nature of the channel that had just opened, the wall was at once alight with a line of burning fire. It stuck to the wall, forming a circle. The circle was crisscrossed with a pentagram. The lines of the pentagram pulsed in time to the universe.

A dream like scene materialised in much the same manner upon the pentagram. The nature of the dream was one of chase. Two bears, one larger than the other, raced through a thick forest. Behind them the hordes of darkness followed. Ahead lay a fortress, already under siege.

Next the dream shifted, to a bucolic field where a wizened old man in a black monks robe stood silently. The master knew what would happen next. He braced himself.

Suddenly the old man, who had been enjoying the sunny day out in the field looked right through the dream at the master. It was a frightening moment, even for the ninja master. He felt the others gaze on him. Felt the stare of eyes no longer bright red, but incandescent purple, washing over his body into reality from the dream.

Suppressing your fear is useless, experience it, don’t let me get you that way again, apprentice.

Yes Master.

Did you see the previous dream apprentice?

Yes Master, our old enemies from Australia have returned perhaps through some unknown passage in the great forest.

So. Apprentice. There are still places you have not been shown by your spirit guide? Muawhawhahahaw. Good. The only way they could be on the way back, from there, is if someone helped them find one of the ancient outback trails. Even then it is not a sure thing. There are powerful entities of power guarding the trails. The ones whose sole purpose is keeping the dead from walking amongst the living; they were amongst the strongest of their kind, ever.

This is what I don’t understand old master, you say I saw the realms of the dead‽ How is that even possible?

We should never have been able to see that outback trail to begin with. Indeed the only reason we could was because you had another “moment of great power”. You’re mind is like a circuit board that can handle more than normal. It’s how you managed to get from adept to master so fast. So do you know what you must do now?

Yes Master, I must seek out these two and slay them. To fail is to die.

No! You will take the Toaken Sword and use it to cut down this Davis Lockyer. He is at the centre of our plans, and must be eliminated. Those other two will be both weak and impotent.

But Master‽ Surely you saw how powerful these bears can be? You saw them coming “back from the Shi Guo”!

No one has returned from the dead in more than 500 years. The last to do it, a monk from France, was in almost total paralysis for over two years. Since then the remaining pathways back from the land of the dead have narrowed. The life force that flows from there is extremely weak. No, you don’t have to worry about those two; they are only dangerous if they link with their protégé Davis. He may be powerful but it seems there are large holes in his knowledge.

As you say Master. Yet surely if he is still a learner in the arts, it would be worth using a circle to kill him in his dreams?

I would if could! The boys dreams are incredibly well shielded, creating a similar layer of protection in anyone within a kilometre of him. Spying in the land of dreams is impossible. He has been well trained in dreaming. No you must kill him in the land of Samsara [the waking world;reality]. By your hand he must die.

I will take the Toaken Sword and kill him Master!

Good. Once he is dead the two bears will not even be a fly worthy of swatting. In any case I will order the two adepts you requested earlier to track down these bears and kill them. They will take with them one of the clan’s star crystals. The extra power will be more than enough to kill both bears so long as they set a well planned ambush.

With one last glace the old man cut a withering look over his apprentice. Invisible Ice crystals of moist tangible fear ran down the ninja master’s back. It was despite himself, that he momentarily dropped his gaze then raised it again straight away.

He couldn’t be sure but he thought he saw his master half-smiling to himself. He is still stronger than me, if I tried to usurp him now I would be defeated. Worse he thought, as a lesson to the rest of the clan, the old man would no doubt contact a public torture and interrogation. The pain would be intolerable, but at his level, the ninja master could all but completely block out the nerve impulses. No the truly intolerable thing would be to see the eyes of all his minions looking down at him.

US Army Chopper, 01:30:23, (Flying below radar) Northern Somalia.

The chopper’s cargo bay was pretty full. In addition to Sarge’s team of four and the two civilians, Aimee had acquired three British SAS that had been in between missions in Israel. They were keen to get in and provide support for a larger contingent of SAS that was on long range recon north of Mogadishu.

The SAS were wearing the latest British army hacker52 suits. These suits were kitted out with both active and passive Electronic warfare technologies. In addition to providing video surveillance and map routing, they performed counter-electronic activities. The suits were incredibly useful in the field they could be used to do things such as signal jamming, line splicing, and war dialling that could hack most countries mobile phone system.

The American boys leaned back jealously from the English. Each one carried his railgun now, and both Sarge and Ditz had shoulder mounted laser pods. All were facing up towards the sky in the deactivated position.

Ali Barba’s rail gun was augmented with an ultra high range thermal laser scope, with digital scoping goggles.

Easy-E was now a moving tank. Shoulders mounted a micro dart missile system. His other arm was laser cannon central. Four lethal looking chambers sprouted out of a complex series of cylinders that wrapped around his forearm. This armament had the capability of both punching holes through tanks and troops with equal ease, and calling in strikes from drones.

Still they longed for the high tech sophistication that made their SAS brethren like cyber 007s. Right now the three were conferring, odd in itself because they eye text simple messages. Still faster complex language was still faster vocally.

“Equipment dump just up ahead. Prepare for rope descent.” Said the only officer of the three, a Captain.

“I didn’t know we were maintaining recon dumps inside of Somalia, Captain?”

Aimee looked pointedly at him, staring him down. The Captain didn’t seem bothered, he looked enthusiastically at her and replied,

“We don’t. My corporal has rerouted drones from the USS “Pride & Fury”, hum ha ha. You navy boys... Too much really. Anyway chaps, as it turns out, the local militia, they were only too happy to help us secure two utes, food and water for the journey... “

“We now have twenty seconds to descent” came a friendly computerised voice.

“We call that parrot, Super Siri” laughed the other corporal on his Captains left.

“Yup”, chimed the other one, “Because it’s never wrong.”

“Gear up people, the drones have now returned, and the militia have returned more rapidly than we predicted. We’re going to do a fly by once first to see what you guys can do from the side of a chopper. “

“Woot!” yelled Easy-E, “This is what I was fucken born for.”

So saying he marched boldly off into the rolling pitch of a twenty degree deck, as everyone else was hanging onto their seats. He was already in position, crouched as the helicopter came down from its high arc into view of the highest dune in the surrounding desert.

From above the sands, came the approaching hoards. Behind them and below, lay the prize. The pilot eased the chopper forward getting it to move diagonally across the field of pursuit, as Easy locked on. Small moving circles zoomed around his digi-glasses until they locked on to a target. When they did a thermal profile appeared to give instant confirmation of kills.

Right now though he was seconds from squeezing the trigger, not on the lead vehicle but at the sand below the tall dune’s neck. The sand was rapidly pummelled as he used maximum output from all four silver guns to dig away at the front surface of the dune.

Where there should have been an easy downward slope for the cars coming over the dune’s mound into the desert below, now there was a fearsome drop already beginning to crumble.

The lead cars didn’t have a chance, landing engine head first, engine blocks destroyed as they are rammed up into the cabins. There is carnage at the top as the rest of the pack swoop on the lead cars. They are too close for starters, and now it’s clear why. The other cars have no chance to brake, there are cars behind ramming them forward.

The chopper levelled out over the top of the dune, looking back Aimee scouted total destruction of the column.

“What kind of intelligence did we have to justify that type of extra judicial killing Captain?” Aimee turned again on him.

“Please watch this ma’am.” Said the Captain kindly.

So saying a small projector on his chest popped open and began projecting onto a open space half a metre in front of him. The video displayed was a little blurry at times and had random “streaks” of black, but was otherwise easy to watch. Clearly though the technology had not been perfected.

The images were of the previously engaged column moving through the Somalian desert. The column was approaching a small tribe that appeared to be busily involved with collecting some much needed water from a tiny water hole.

The lead car veered heavily and pushed forward towards the tribe. As it approached the lead passenger climbed out onto the windowsill, aiming his AK47 at the tribes members. His opening volley cut through the camels side causing it to fall back on an older male. Two females took head shots from errant fire. The tribe fled. Running up the sides of a the water hole against fast moving enemy with a height advantage was always going to be a one side battle.

Two cars pulled up as gangsters climbed out of the cars and formed up along a line on the slopes edge. Looking down, some smoking ciggies in the cool afternoon breeze they looked down dully at those below. Then they opened fire, it was a slaughter. Worse than inhuman, was the murder.

The image flickered and died as the Captain killed the video feed.

“Now do you see Blackbear?”

“I see that sometimes tough decisions are required in war.”

Aimee paused, reflecting on the young Captain in front of her, cocky and full of righteous arrogance.

“However in future, you will not break the chain of command, and will defer to me before ordering them, do you understand?” Aimee’s tone was like ice, her demeanour unchanged.

“Yes, ma’am.” The Captain was still the same affable cyber bond.

“Good” Aimee said shortly, “We will go back and get the cars and proceed as planned to reccy the enemy stronghold.”

After a moment’s pause, Tim said, “Good luck Aimee.”

He seemed out of place. He looked left and right, then back at Aimee. Then he really looked at her, and smiled brightly.

It was so dark outside, thought Aimee. The scent of the desert drifted through with the wind. As she took her turn at the rope, expertly dropping down legs crossed, she thought back to when she was a girl. How easy it had been then to imagine a world free from evil. The reality was somewhat different to what she had originally thought of she conceded.

Hitting the sand as a unit they had the two cars commandeered in record time. The US team split up between the backseats of both cars to give the team the maximum spread of firepower in a confrontation.

Driving off towards the deserts that exited onto a road near Mogadishu, Sarge was heard to comment,

“Here we go Easy, into the breach once more.”

Abandoned Power station, 23:30:30, North-West Mogadishu, Somalia

The scientist spied his co-workers at their cubicles. Each was working round the clock shifts processing the data that his models had generated. The resources and the special item that the Chinese gangsters had brought in for him were more than enough to do the job. What’s more he would have the ability to realise his own personal ambitions, god willing.

The scientist looked over at the laser cutter he’d helped modify for that buffoon. He was still horrified by the terror it had unleashed. We truly were in a new world of mass horrors, he pondered. That wall could have easily have been a thousand.

The scientist’s own origins were extremely shaded; no one faction in the Arab world had his permanent allegiance. It was rumoured that the he was a North African by birth, although with his full length coat and wide brimmed hat nothing was certain.

He did a double take at the cutting machine with disgust. Even though he had been an ideologue of many fundamentalist causes, some of which were entrenched in war. Even still, he didn’t feel endeared to humanity for figuring out how to reverse engineer an industrial laser cutter and then modifying it to use the lattice uranium.

The cause was just. After fighting through countless pitched battles, surviving near death cave ins and explosions, the scientist was finally ready to take his place amongst his people. It had come to him in a dream six months back. Allah wanted him to return to his people and lead them from abject poverty back into the mighty civilisation they had once been. Allah had even been specific saying he would be needed for his skills and that an opportunity would come.

A week later some Chinese gangsters had made contact, arranging for his escape from a prison in western Syria into North Africa. However what had impressed the scientist the most was a plan so bold and cunning that the scientist had been taken aback at first. Surely the Chinese did not have the technology of which they mentioned, otherwise why was America still the world’s only superpower? This lattice uranium had sounded like a fairytale, until they had produced it seven days later.

By the time it arrived, wrapped in Bedouin cloth of all things, the scientist had the laser cutting machine ready. That was stage one, prepare a weapon that would awe the locals into uniting. Give them their brother-ship through fear and the terrible destruction that would surely follow. In his world it had always been so. The strongest ruled, everyone else followed; his people had always looked towards strong leaders to rule them.

He realised now that what his people really needed though was survival. Abject corruption in government had lead to abject poverty. The rebellion had simply crystallised the discontent, the capital providing a convenient field of battle. It had also destroyed the Somalia’s main marketplace and distribution point. Now there were ideologically driven rebels, given free reign out in the countryside. The famine that had followed was amongst the worst on record. Certainly if it continued it had the potential to wipe out the country. Millions of people scurrying towards the capital looking for salvation. From a slow death to a quick one, the only difference was their servitude to pain.

He had his own plans to work on. While they had him developing the platform that would allow the use of the lattice structure inside a bomb, he worked hard on his own intended use. The interface was the same for both devices. That was what made it interesting. Once the interface design was completed the lattice could be fitted to a wide range of different devices, since it was stable storage device of energy. Even without fusion the device emitted enough energy to be used in low yield devices.

The scientist had been given a great gift from god. He just hoped it would be enough to save some of his people from destruction.

The remains of the central marketplace, 8:00:03, Central Mogadishu, Somalia

Ali Barba was in his element. He loved nothing more than to be amongst the people as he went about his morning work. Eating breakfast and drinking coffee seemed so relaxing. The people he met always filled his heart with warmth in a way that made this more fun than work. He likened it to following a stream downriver. It felt to him as though he was following the curves and the bends in the conversation, leading him on to his next contact.

This time the target was the group that had the taken possession of the lattice uranium crystal. They were known to be north of what had been the central business district, just west of the old palace. It hadn’t been hard to find them. They weren’t exactly disguising their presence. A steady stream of supplicants had been brought in days earlier from the other clans and outlying tribes. The people he spoke to seemed amazed at the way life enemies had walked side by side on the way out. Surely they said something had put the fear of Allah in to these people to make them forget their bloody grievances.

Ali Barba took a left into a street vendor’s hut that was setup for selling carpets. The carpets were draped all over the front of the shop and its sides. Inside they painted an amazing mosque that seemed to shine like the desert outside.

“God is great. It is my old friend Ali, I can say that you have not aged a day my dear friend.”

It was really his old friend Al Shemza that seemed not to have changed at all. His ageless face smiled back in appreciation at Ali Barba.

“We have so much time to catch up on my friend. How many years has it been?” said Al Shemza.

“Ah but the years they are only now as long the night was young when we first met.” Ali Barba replied.

“When god is willing the time will come. All things have their time.” It had always been this way between the two men. Each a philosopher, locked within a warriors body. Al Shemza had instantly become attached to the younger man in those days fifteen years ago. He saw at once a kindred spirit, a friend along the path, one to be helped and guided.

Indeed it was Al Shemza’s words that had carried with a young Ali Barba throughout much of his adult life. Upon first meeting Al Shemza on his first tour of duty as a grunt, he had told Ali Barba, “You are the man whose destiny is still to come, born an age early but a decade late. Seize life before it destroys you.”

Like old friends they broke bread and shared tea. Later they smoked some of Al Shemza’s aromatic tobacco. Ali Barba had the distinct feeling Sarge was gonna make him run all day tomorrow. Mindful of it, he bum puffed what he could. Feeling a bit high he had the distinct feeling that ol’ Shemmy had mulled up something else in the mix.

They discussed matters of family and life, and then at some point the conversation turned as it did with all his contacts to matters of espionage. Al Shemza could generally be relied upon to have some very useful intelligence. The recent movement of the various clans and government forces had not gone unnoticed. Central to current power sharing arrangement were two things; the intractability of the clans, and the recent demonstration of shock and awe by one of their number. However weary of being out manoeuvred on their home turf the government forces had started shifting a massive concentration of artillery into shelling range of the supposed location of the facility locating the laser. Things appeared to be at somewhat of a stalemate, although perhaps only until the civil war resumed in earnest.

“Does anyone honestly believe that the weapon is really housed in that building?” asked Ali Barba.

“It must be Ali”, Al Shemza paused puffing on the coil, pulling a deep lungful of the white smoke, “My eyes are everywhere, what is left of them, and we protect each other you see? They tell me that crates of electronics have gone into that building, while nothing except humans has ever come out. The only exception was that on one occasion the laser was taken by truck outside the city and then returned. We are sure it was the laser because we followed and saw. But they did not want to hide what they did Ali. They made sure that word spread like wildfire.”

The calming rush of warmth transpired throughout his body. He was completely relaxed, friendship, a full belly and warm evening breeze. It was what his friend said next that completely changed the mood.
“There is a scientist in their Ali. He is a man without a name. We barely even know that he is African, save that a son of mine who has eyes like a hawk, saw his left wrist bared, for a half a second as he climbed the stairs to the building. He made that mistake once in three months of daily observation Ali. Now something that will whet your appetite my friend. This scientist hasn’t left in over two weeks. There are regular arrivals of food, and container loads of electronic parts. Including a turbine and at least four large electrical generators. Most recently, possibly thinking they went unobserved; a ninja was seen slipping into the building. Things are afoot my friend, I know not what they do, but it is a serious undertaking. The building is huge, and has at least 3 sub levels. It is the old power station for the city before the war made it dysfunctional. Alas they forgot to seal one of the tunnels.”

Ali Barba smiled a cunning smile. His old friend was good, always saving the best Intel for last. He stood up abruptly, flexing his chest and arms. Looking down Al Shemza he pulled a large wad of US one hundred dollar bills in a grimy yellow envelope from underneath his belt. He handed it nonchalantly to the seated man, and strolled from the shop.

The Refugee camp, outskirts of Mogadishu, 10:00:01, 35 km West of Mogadishu

Tim really missed Aimee. Having worked with her for a considerable part of his recent history, and having just worked out how to let her know that he liked her, he was feeling like most men throughout history in such a situation; incredibly uncomfortable. Women were so much more pragmatic; instead he stewed over how he should say what he wanted to say to her. The one time having a suburb analytical mind was a burden. He wished he had Davis’s alpha male instinct. The guy was subliminal when it came to knowing what women wanted.

It wasn’t that he said much, most of the time Davis said very little to them. As much as knew what not to say Tim reflected, Davis was also supremely talented at making each woman like him. It was only now that Tim realised it was because Davis didn’t care about what happened, and because he cared so much about them, that he probably never thought things through. Why would he? He just did things that worked. Davis loved to give him advice, but on women he had always given very little despite Tim’s constant begging. Tim, you just gotta keep trying, mate. You got a way to player status before any o’my pro tips’ll make a diff.

It was hard not thinking about Aimee, but he had to, needed the focus, had to stay on task. Too many things were happening to rapidly, and it was critical to stay on top of the information. They first thing he was going to do was figure out where the leak had come from and who else had the knowledge to use the lattice uranium.

To that end he had been deployed along with an elite team of Australian SAS soldiers, drawn from the urban terrorism team specifically for this mission, in a refugee camp. The Americans had wanted to deploy S.E.A.L. team 6, but the in the end a tense standoff had been avoided by diplomatic wrangling between the Prime Minster and the President. The S.A.S. would guard Tim, and provide a personal assault force. The US would provide monitoring and onsite surveillance.

Where better to hide than in plain view thought Tim, although it helped that the refugee camp was staffed with several N.G.O. organisations that doubled as military outposts. Ostensibly to keep an eye on the western aid workers, the true purpose of these secret outposts was to provide monitoring and detection of potential terrorist cells. One thing Afghanistan had taught the west was that war was a breeding ground for fundamentalist ideologies.

Each day Tim got up early, and, while the SAS boys were doing morning exercises by going for a “light” 6km run with full pack, would wander seemingly at random amongst the tents of the refugees. He was always accompanied by one of the SAS, the “Mr short straw”, who would act like a bodyguard, sidearm unseen standing at a constant ten metres to his rear. SAS were trained for urban insertion and the one he took with him always looked more like a local than a soldier.

After a couple of days he found a family that he would pass by each time, finding the need to learn more about the personal tragedy of this war and the damage to its people, he felt he needed to check in with them to bring them some small measure of comfort. Most of the refugees were natives of Somalia fleeing their ancestral lands in the wake of the ultra strict groups that were controlling much of the country.

It was strange how this lady, Gal Dejibrie’s story came out. One day while giving her two sons some food and just sitting with them as he had each day from the beginning, she had begun in good English,

“Thank you for the things you bring Mr?”

“Tim. And really it is nothing. I wish I had enough extra to feed everyone here. It is so terrible to see so many people still suffering...”
he had looked down then suddenly aware of the raw emotion burning in her, silently yelling at him, You Have No Idea What Your Talking About.

“I thank you for things you bring. My life... is a misery.” So saying she signalled the two boys off to play.

They ran past her to a small area outside the next tent, kicking a small stone between them.

“These children have one tiny hope.” she continued, “Before I left the village and came here we were a family.”

Her voice starting to choke with emotion was caught in a single high note of pride at that last word. Immediately upon continuing however it descended once more to a dead flat sound.

“The Islamists came to our village in the first month. They talked with the men of the village and told them all would be well under their protection. The men said they believed them, but some left. We stayed; my husband said all would be well. At the end of the second month, they came back and demanded money.”

Now she paused, and turning her head away from Tim began to cry. Not really knowing what he should do, Tim threw an arm gently over the lady. She seemed to take small comfort, and digging deeply continued to recall.

“The famine had already been in force for several years. Being so close to the water the pirate gangs had taken many of our young men into their crews. We had no money. We had already started to eat day by day. Even our land was basically worthless.”
She turned back to Tim, her eyes now dry, face a serene cool mask. She challenged him with her look, and he flinched away looking toward his shoes. He dropped his head in his arms there, laying forward. She looked around now conscious of if anyone might be listening, and lowered her voice.

“They shouted at the men, calling them devils for not honouring Allah. They said the men must atone and organised prayers for them. Many of them went with the men as they were marched off in front of us we saw that there was one next to each husband or father. Later they told us, as they were raping us, that they had shot each of our men in the back of the head.”

She looked straight into Tim’s eyes now, and he didn’t flinch, he recoiled. He felt for a moment, terrible loss, humiliation and pain. He felt trapped, wanting to help, yet having no idea how.

“It went on for days. In the end perhaps those pigs gave up I do not know or care. We fled there after that, the village was no longer safe. It was a place haunted by the dead. We tried to come north at first, but then we ran into road blocks. The last time we were with the others we fled, but they tracked us down with utes and dogs. They found us and dragged away some of the remaining boys. My boys were only spared because I left the main group at the start of the first attack. I thought Allah had blessed us by guiding us here, but this city is worse than the country we came from.”

Tim choked back his own tears, reeling in the knowledge that this lady had shared with him. He said simply,
“I am so sorry to hear of your tale, truly I am. How is it that you came to speak such good English, if I may ask?”

Now Gal looked at him with real pride, a feeling that cut across all the pain and crap that had been thrown her way. Suddenly the future looked brighter.
“My grandfather taught it to me when I was a little girl. My mother always scolded me for being too nosey and asking lots questions, but my grandfather always said it was because I was smart. He knew English and taught it to me. Now both my boys are learning it every day. They will learn it and we will use it God willing to escape this hell.”

Tim smiled back at Gal. He was struck by an appreciation of how extremely small every single one of his problems were compared to a single second of her life. For all the vaulted achievements that he had made in this life, he would give them all up to erase the suffering this women had had to endure. It was terrible, and it was but one story in a tent city that was reaching into the hundreds of thousands. It was just despicable. Treating other humans like garbage, dehumanising the population.

All his university days he had been mildly apathetic to his friends concerns for Ethiopia, Eritrea or the various Balkan wars. People were dying in massive numbers, yet he had no way to relate to the human element, in his head were numbers of a different kind. Equations of the highest order, learning to process physics models for things that only existed on a theoretical level.

Now though he saw differently. So many of these lives were held down for no reason other than famine and war. They were good people that wanted to go on about their lives in the place they loved, but any chance of that had been scorched away.

He looked over at the SAS soldier standing nearby, then he quietly wished Gal well, and left her with her boys. On the way back they swung by the mess area and both picked up two heavy bags of rice. They carried them back in silence to Gal’s tent and hid them under old rugs that they had brought with them. Gal smiled at them on the way out, gathering her boys to shake hands with each of them.

“I thank you so much Tim, from the bottom of my heart. I hope your path is a blessing for Somalia.” She said it with a smile, looking west, patting the eldest of her boys on the head. The two of them walked off back towards the NGO area, the SAS soldier looking straight ahead lost for once in thought, Tim looking at each tent as they walked by a worried look creasing his face. He felt nothing. He just wanted, so badly, for her little family not to die.

Chapter 5

2011-11-10T05:26:00.001-08:00

A test of wit – A test of time

Chapter 5 by Tobias Nixon

Undisclosed Airbase, 23:59:56, Southern Jerusalem, Israel

Davis thought back to Ronnie and the way her soft red dress had swished against her white legs. He looked now along the mini human arc of individuals as they came to a stop in front of a rich wooden set of doors. In front of the doors on either side were US marines. Un-ceremonial, they carried 9mm Uzi’s for close quarter combat.

The group had been waiting only a couple of seconds, and were quickly ushered into the “war room”. A large map room with tech in every spare nook and cranny, large overhead monitors showed satellite imagery and US drone feeds from live operations in Afghanistan and Syria. In the centre of the room was the single most important person in this region of the world. The iron fist of US command. US General William P. Longmire, Commander Middle Eastern division.

“Ah good evening Blackbear, it is indeed an honour to see you again. I trust the trip from Abu Dhabi to Jerusalem was less eventful than the attempted hijacking on the way from Australia?” the General enquired.

“Quite sir. The Authorities have taken in the unconscious ninjas. Perhaps we will learn more once they get turned over to the CIA; alot will depend on their level of resistance to torture.”

Davis interjected, “You won’t.” He stated as a matter of fact. “They’ll be dead long before then. SOP for Blue Tiger is to send in a clean squad if a member is taken hostage. It’s one of the ways they ensure tight internal security and obedience. It’s why they fight so hard to the death.”

Davis realised he was the sole civilian in the room as the military types all closed with spontaneous effect around the general. Suddenly there was a gulf of personal space between him and everyone else. He thought again about Ronnie. She was on a connection through to Berlin. Large brothers from Mannheim would take her in until he returned.

“Blackbear, who is this?” The General enquired in a clipped formal tone, looking pointedly at Davis for the first time.

“Sir, this is Davis Lockyer. An Australian civilian helping me to protect the maker of the Aegis.”

“I see.” He turned to Davis. “Please ensure that you do. Tim is probably more important to us right now than even our president. As soon as this situation has been resolved I want him on the next flight back to Sydney. No less than the fate of humanity for the next two hundred years may yet rest on his shoulders.”

The genial US General moved with regal military authority.

“Blackbear, you will have some additional assets for your operations.”

He pointed to the soldiers in the room.

“They are some of the best the US has ever produced.”

He paused then to stare at each man in turn. In return they all stood straighter if that was possible pushing proud chests at the collective mention by the old man.

“I don’t get to do as much field work as I’d like to these days.”

He chuckled, and then continued.

“These four men; codenamed: Sarge, Easy-E, Ditz & Ali Barba have been assigned to your command. Sarge will brief you further on operational aspects of what we know. I’ll expect you in the war room once you’re up to speed.”

“Blackbear?”

Tim enquired curiously at Aimee. She in turn looked mischievously at him for the briefest of instants, only to look past him at the assembled men.

“Sheez Tim, she’s got her own operational codename, and USCOM seem to know about her.” Davis had leaned into Tim’s ear and was whispering quietly.

“Gentlemen follow me.”

She commanded, and marched from the room out into open airfield. The night sky was filled with silver stones. Her eyes wide, she turned just as the trailing group broke the door edge.

“Sarge?”

“Yes major?” she nodded back at him and he continued.

“My men and I thought we were doing a standard snatch and grab op. But the fire turned, and we got burnt twice.”

“My sincerest condolences for the families of those men, Sergeant”, Aimee replied.

“Thank you, I appreciate you saying that”,

Sarge looked at Aimee with respect. She sensed it was a thing he granted extremely sparingly. Good because she sensed, that before this mission was over, she was going to need every ounce of bravery he had. More slowly now, but gruffly he spoke,

“We had Intel on a silver suitcase, which was eventually recovered, however the cargo was lost.”

Aimee inhaled deeply, looking up from the ground towards Tim, who was standing hands in pockets shivering in the cold desert air.

“We believe that a similar case containing $9 Million US dollars which we did recover was payment meant for pirates who recovered the silver case on the behalf of terrorists operating locally for a cell from the Deadly Eastern Wind.”

“That much?” it was Davis’s turn to pipe up. He’d been quietly listening as the two militaries had their usual pissing contest.

“From what I understand the object you failed to acquire was worth considerably more, as much as say a thousand times more on black markets worldwide. Either the pirates had no idea what they were being asked to hand over or the money like the handover was an elaborate ruse. I just don’t understand why they would do that.” Davis said.

Aimee’s eyes burned daggers into the oblivious back of Mr Lockyer.

“One second people, jus’going to make a call to some local contacts. I’ll have an answer shortly.”

So saying Davis walked a short distance from the group, his Android Nexus S already next to his ear.

Sarge spoke next, “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to find, our local Intel team came up empty on that front.”

He looked strangely at Easy-E. Then both men seemed to look at once to the far eastern horizon.

“Ok, so since we’re having a confessional, here is what we know Sarge”, Aimee looked straight at the older man.

“At approximately seven hundred hours GMT a top secret research facility was raided in central N.S.W., Australia. The only known rock of a new form of lattice uranium was stolen. At approximately the same time several attempts were made on Davis Lockyer and his colleague. From preliminary reports the same group, Blue Tiger, was involved in both the raid and subsequent snatch attempts. We believe they may have been after a much larger sum of money. Mr Lockyer was, at that time, negotiating a deal in excess of three billion US dollars.”

“We heard from Intel that the base had been raided.”

Then Sarge continued the convo combo, “Blackbear, it is your belief that the meeting was to pass on this new uranium to the terrorists? Interesting I wonder how the pirates got their hands on it. Intel was unaware of Blue Tiger’s involvement. They are not normally a player this far west. I’ll put in a request now to get the CIA tracking down any forward bases over in Somalia.”

Davis returned from his phone call frowning, he immediately approached the group and assumed a commanding presence with arms spread wide.

“My contact says the pirates were, and I use the term loosely, under contract with the group called the Deadly Eastern Wind who are currently attempting to control northern Mogadishu. Both groups were spotted about thirty minutes ago heading into the same compound. Also word on the street is that all ongoing street battles are about to stop. Deadly Eastern Wind is moving to talks with several other major factions fighting for control of outlying parts of the city. The transitional council which controls most of the city and has the backing of the African union has mysteriously started pulling out of all checkpoints north of the terrorists’ positions. Word is that a deal may be imminent.”

“What‽ In what way would the transitional council have any interest in backing the local Sunni warlords?” Aimee retorted.

Ali Barba stepped forward in the slightest of ways. Of all present he seemed most at ease. He was an undercover developer of localised assets, otherwise known as a spymaster. He’d done some spy training, but it wasn’t intended to turn him into a CIA operative. Ali Barba had a talent for befriending and relating to, the Arab world. He seemed to instantly put people in this region of the world at ease with themselves. Those who knew him variously preferred to believe he shared their religion. In truth he was Buddhist, but practised this in secret. It suited his purpose for those he mingled with to believe he was a pious Muslim, Christian or Jew.

“My current batch of informers, all local merchants, or what’s left of them anyway, they all share a common thread. Word is Deadly Eastern Wind has received a blessing from god. One so powerful that a single demonstration of its power was enough to convince the leader of the transitional council, President Lafi-Amur Daz Mohammed, to cease hostilities immediately and pursue a binding pact of non aggression. But I know right? As if that really makes any difference in this part of the world. I mean. Shit come on look up at the rising body count, people. You’ve all looked around those corners. Been the ones to see the fields barren, the villages bare. Where are the bodies? Then you see a dreadful sight, a human body, pushed days beyond rightful human endurance, limping along wracked by her hunger. So yeah lasting peace in Somalia, probably not, not even as an end game. This is an active conflict zone, and the pirates in this region are providing plenty of incentives for foreign powers to proactively protect their shared sovereign borders.”

“Stay on task solider!” barked Sarge harshly. Sarge hated it when soldiers got philosophical. Not because intelligent insight was bad, but because not staying on task, one hundred percent of the time got soldiers killed in a war zone. And they were in a war zone. A fact they had discovered to their detriment only yesterday. God protect their souls. Once more guilt swayed with anger, the eternal loss of a commander. That feeling that it really should have been him.

“Do we have any idea what this demonstration was?” asked Tim curiously.

“Yes” Davis intoned.

Davis’s face went taunt, a thing that Tim had never really seen his affable friend do before. Always in control, always full of fun. Davis exuded the devil may care attitude that the bravest of men only dreamed of. It was precisely because he never let anything get under his skin, that his reaction was all the more curious. Tim didn’t have long to find out.

“Deadly Eastern Wind is well known for taking western aid workers prisoner. About twenty minutes ago they are believed to have lined up one hundred and twenty young men and women against a brick wall over two hundred metres distant. People whose only crime was having a good and generous heart. They plugged the lattice uranium into a modified laser cutter, and put it on wide beam. The amount of power normally required to cut a one metre wide line at a distance of two hundred metres is colossal yes Tim?” Tim nodded, and Davis continued,

“The laser started at the left. It didn’t just blow the wall apart, it fucken obliterated it. In the end every single atom was reduced down to nano particulate. As it passed by the only thing left were the heads of the taller males falling to the ground. My contact said that by the end of it, about half the witnesses had thrown up. There was nothing.”

He paused, his eyes were hollow, he seemed to hate the more he went on, like a bright fire that burned with a purity undiminished by the passage of years.

“I want to find them. I want to find them and I want to fucken kill them. I want to kill them all. RAARGH!”

Davis was raging now in way that Tim had never known. Something told everyone that Davis was burning inside. He was standing with both arms held rigid. All his neck muscles were pulled taunt. His back was stiff and as he raged he looked out at an invisible enemy. Face locked in rage fear. A silent scream, a face lost in a living dream.

Not for the first time Tim wondered what his friend had seen when he was young. Davis was so driven, would literally move mountains, if you asked him to. He was incredibly good at what he did and most of the time pretty principled, but there were some things that would really set him off.

Instead Sarge stepped forward and gripped Davis in a warrior arm grip, right arms locked at the forearm.

“Mate! That’s what you Aussies’ say isn’t it?”

“In life many things are painful, of those things that are painful many things can make you lose your mind. Nothing is certain, but that life is a cruel and cunning mistress. When you are lost, trust the one that finds you. When you are found, thank the one who saved you. Never forget, never let yourself forget what we have seen this day. One day, one day soon you will repay all that is lost. One day you will avenge.” – The voice of Bear, Cub standing like a ghost in shadow somewhere hidden next to bear.

Sarge broke the ice, looking now up into the taller man’s eyes.

“You have my word that my men and I will help you track these mofos down. I doubt there can be much left but we will try and get Intel involved to help identify the bodies so we can get some word back to the NGO’s and the countries involved. Let’s gear up and get on that chopper, I want to catch me some ter-ro-rists.”

Black Skull’s main clubhouse, 10:04:03 Sydney, Australia

Firehead looked over at the older man, his only direct superior in the organisation. Both seemed to enjoy the harsh light and smell of spilt beer that permeated the bar area of the clubhouse. Each stood squarely facing the other their near arms resting elbow first on the wooden bar. As one would lean in to make his point, the others near hand would be wrapped around an icy cold schooner of Cooper’s Pale Ale, the other dragging neatly on a Winnie blue cigarette.

“Boss we got a problem. The transit of our gold shipment from Europe to Australia has been hijacked.”

Firehead had always been direct, even now when it was likely to be a deathwish. His boss looked at him with cold blue eyes, the aggressive nature of his stance and manner nothing compared to what Firehead knew he was capable of. Aggression was just a tool to keep the rank and file in line. Here it served only to underscore the stressful situation that both men now found themselves in.

“Jeezus Christ mate! You better have some better fucken news than that for me.” His voice was menacing, etching the flat gravel timbre of his tone. Like a chainsaw cutting through stone.

“As you know we equipped the ship with numerous GPS monitoring equipment, a crew of mercs, and several internal security devices. We also kept the nature of what was in the holds a secret, even from the captain. No sense in being double crossed. What we didn’t reckon on was those cunning bastards the Blue Tiger clan. The same fuck knuckles Davis and I ran into earlier today. It seems from our European chapter that the captain was turned early by holding his family hostage. The bodies turned up floating along the Seine yesterday. Phone records we acquired show Blue Tiger operatives have been in contact with his mobile phone for about three weeks prior to that.”

Firehead paused to take a quick drag of his ciggie. It could be his last guilty pleasure, the boss wasn’t looking happy, cop it square, and be a fucken man. Either way it was too late now.

“Firehead ya’gonna have ta make sure next time, none of these idiots we hire have families. With the level of surveillance the clans and cartels have access to these days it’s no wonder even an operation with this level of secrecy has come unstuck.”

Firehead didn’t change outwardly, but inwardly he was confused, he had half expected at this point to be copping a knife to the gut. His boss had done worse for less. He had just about lost seventy percent of the gang’s asset base. In one go. What was going on, the boss should have been fucken ropable by now.

“Ok boss; good news, although Blue Tiger appears to have had their black hand in turning the captain, they were never in control of the vessel. The GPS and internal security is still active. Internal sealed monitoring reveals that a Somalian pirate team have taken possession of the boat off the east coast of Somalia as it passed through the Gulf of Aden. Further analysis has revealed they have it at a makeshift dock. They have multiple teams working around the clock at trying to tear their way into the holds.”

“So tell me Firehead... Why the fuck is that good news?”

The bosses face was still calm. Weird Bill thought, it should be going bright red by now. Firehead knew he didn’t have much time, but damned if he was going to go out all stressed out. He took another drag, and then drained half of his beer glass. The nicotine and alcohol was shear magic and instantly brought about a feeling of whole body relaxation. A burp ended the interlude and signalled he was continuing with his report.

“Because boss, the GPS tells us exactly where they are. The holds were state of the art fit outs. The idiots are using standard low grade cutting tools. We know they don’t have lasers. I’ve done some calculations and it’s going to take them at least another week to crack the first hold and get an idea of what they have. The holds themselves are shielded from x-ray, subsonic, radar and thermal scanning.”

The Bosses face hatched a nasty smile. The full length scar that ran from his forehead across his left eye to his cheek started to twitch. A sure sign that he was hatching one of his cunning plans.

“So... we have a window of opportunity. At least until the Blue Tiger clan relocates the missing pirates. We can only assume they too have been double crossed.”

“Why do you say that boss?”

“For the simple reason that if they had not, our informants would have only located a burnt out boat and a dock facility that had been blown to smithereens. Every pirate within 100 km would be dead. I dealt with Blue Tiger in my younger days in Thailand. They are the completely ruthless killers.”

Now it was his turn to perform the ritual of taking a cleansing draught of beer. As he exhaled his smoke, he spoke. And as he spoke, his fingers slowly rolled over an open map with pencil markings, and ruler lines.

“Ya are going to Somalia, Firehead, on next plane out of Sydney. Now here is what you are going to do...”

An old oriental Inn “The Flying Pig”, 23:23:23, Guangzhou province, China (P.R.C.)

The shadows moved vaguely. All was quiet inside and out. A strong wind ran through the street, pushing half closed window shutters open, banging them eerily. Large pools of midnight shadow pervaded the inside. The inn was empty; at least that was something a passing stranger would never have wondered any further about. The place screamed; a place full of ghosts. The locals were a superstitious lot and always gave it a wide birth. Even at midday. The ghosts were alive in here though. From the nearest wall a ninja just “appeared”. He moved forward and bowed in his masters presence. The first ninja was soon joined a couple of moments later by a second.

All were standing, ignoring the furniture arranged around them. All along the walls of this inn were murals of ancient life. Scenes of simple bucolic pleasure and blood thirsty victory.

The leader was distinguished by a larger build; he was in short a hulking monstrosity. However it was his bright red eyes that indicated seniority. The eyes seemed to glow with residual power that even now leaked out and bathed his face in an unholy ethereal glow. As if the light was refracting off of a light and insubstantial mist that floated around his face.

He stepped out now and addressed the two underlings before him.

“There has been a small interruption in the plan. Strategy E has been modified to include contingency 7 as part of main strategic objective. Secondary objectives are still on track for completion. We will be allocating additional resources to the America strike. This part of the operation must not fail. Take my word and make it so.”

“Yes master.”

The first of the underlings bowed deeply, never taking his eyes from his master. He then turned and strode from the room.

“There is at least one”

He turned on the underling, cowering him with a glance from his eyes. All knew that to displease the master was a by rule the shortest road to a quick and painful death. The master could kill with his mind, and often used bad performances as a way of reminding those watching the price of failure.

Yet he did not turn on the minion. In fact he looked right through him, for even now it confused him. His master had never once spoken of this.

The training in mind magic was costly indeed. Ten years of physical conditioning from the age of five. Ten years of mental conditioning in the form of nearly non-stop meditation. Then twenty years of continuous practise in concentration. He had learnt all the tricks. The hidden symbols that opened up to lost worlds. The words of power that cast him far beyond himself, recast in some forms as Tiger or a Dragon. And the shear cost. The personal cost to his soul, was in a sense incalculable.

“That is an adept or above. I want you to take a message to our monastery in the Haung Dong Mountains. Tell the old master that there is one who is my...”

He really didn’t want to keep talking. His ego made him stop, but his sense of duty to the Blue Tiger clan overrode it. The minion didn’t move. The ninja did not even contemplate pre-empting his boss. Did not even move a muscle. Interrupting your laoban in Blue Tiger business could be a fatal one time mistake.

“Tell the old master that if he wants this adept out of the way, I’m going to need the Toaken Sword, and his two best protégés. Go! You are sworn on pain of death. Your reward for success will be to forget this mission completely. Fail and you know the consequences! Now Go!”

“Yes Master!”

The ninja bowed low and turning loped easily from the room. He would not stop until he had reached the heliport. There would be a pilot waiting. A sleek jet black chopper, its blades running, would be ready to jump.

Undefined segment of reality, Midnight, The Dreaming

A huge bear hunched drearily forward, only partially aware of having a body, and not of being a vague spirit presence. Ahead of him some metres away a younger cub bear also hunched wearily forward in an almost identical manner.

Why were they now awake again? Had they not already gone through the great dreaming. The door on that segment of their lives was by rights already over. And yet it seemed that it was not, or else something was very wrong with reality. Cub turned around instinctively sensing his brother, at which point Bear knew they were truly dreaming within distance of reality.

They had been asleep in the great woods. A forest no longer in existence in the desert of outback Australia, they were nonetheless content to hibernate forever in the land of their birth.

Now something, somehow had broken a seal that could not be broken. A seal on death, from which life was not meant to escape. That meant a guide must have walked down a very dark and very dangerous path, and there was no way they would have come all the way. So they had actually found a path? But then it would be very hard to follow. Very faint. His eyes would need to be sharp.

Instantly he was alert and running. Catching Cub by one arm as he hurtled along the forest path. The two of them dashed forward together, sensing the danger following, roaring now behind them. Bears in full flight are scary creatures, and these things were supernatural in strength. Anything in their way simply smashed apart as they trampled along the forest floor.

An almost invisible trail to read, an enemy that could not be fought, chasing at their heels, and death as the only option should they fail? Bear liked those kinds of odds. Actually he like those kinds of odds alot, he lived for them. Cub growled his appreciation and spurred forward taking his turn at point. Yeah this was gonna be fun. Suddenly he didn’t feel tired anymore.

Chapter 4

2011-11-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

A test of courage – A test of time

Chapter 4 by Tobias Nixon

VIP Boarding Lounge Virgin Club 8:02:11 Sydney International Airport

Aimee looked down at her encrypted smart phone. The sleek silver phone was super shiny, doubling as a mirror. Her long red nails contrasted against the shininess of the phone. Constant call-backs. The Director doing sit reps with a full board in conference. Ex-Com hook-ups into Executive briefings, rated top secret and above. The higher ups wanting to know what was going on.

Her sleek black dress cut an amazing shape with an ass that would turn any sane man wild with jealousy. An ass for the ages, well at least for 2002, the year she won top model with Aussie men’s magazine Ralph. And really who gave a fuck what the rest of the worlds men thought anyway. Right now one guy in particular seemed to find her incredibly absorbing. She could tell by the way he tried to look at his laptop every time she glanced in his general direction. She wondered idly how long before he told her he liked her, or maybe his professionalism would get in the way. She smiled maybe she wouldn’t let it.

Tim was pounding furiously at his laptop, as he had been every since the ninja bust-up back at the pub. There were so many possible leads, so many people to speak with. No one seemed to have all the information he needed. Aimee came over and touched his left forearm gently. He felt a jolt at her touch. Her sweet female smell. It was so intoxicating. She turned away back to an endless series of phone calls. He thought back, wondering at what point he had agreed to his part on this crazy journey. The trouble was the whole thing had been so fluid it hardly felt like he had made any decision at all. He thought back...

Early that day, directly following the attack on the pub, 7:15:08

They had arrived by chopper back at the secure facility. From the air the facility looked like a standard grouping of scientific buildings. It had been deliberately designed that way to resemble a CSIRO climate change research facility. Inside the top secret research was many, many times the surface area of the facility above ground. The unofficial joint ANZAC research facility contained all of the components necessary for creating atoms from scratch. Two thirds of the size of the facility at CERN in Switzerland its purpose was far less altruistic. Ten years ago whilst studying for his doctorate at the university of N.S.W., Tim had discovered the process by which he believed technically atomic fusion was not just possible, but commercially practical.

As the world has long known the biggest barrier to practical fusion is the law of thermodynamics. Technically fusion is a great idea. Rather than burning uranium rods through a process of fission, 95% of which is permanent radioactive waste, fusion allows the utilisation of atomic energy. Uranium fusion, suffers from commercial realisation primarily because of the insane cost of infrastructure necessary to keep the uranium stable. Once the energy costs (before production) are factored in the commercial viability drops to almost zero.

Tim believed he had discovered a way to generate a much more stable element for fusion. He had discovered a seemingly incongruous fact. If you could restructure the uranium into a lattice work arrangement, the integral structure of the bonds between the uranium neutrons was maintained. The very problem with radioactive particles, decay, was avoided, while the inherent benefit, the release of atomic energy was still present once the lattice work structure began to be weakened by heat.

The research was considered so important and such a matter of economic interest to the seven scientists that the governments of Australia and New Zealand approached to peer review the project that it was immediately assigned priority funding straight out of each military budget. Completely off the books, the beyond top secret classification meant that it was effectively a black ops project from an accounting point of view. Even so with an astronomical budget of over 8 billion dollars it required over ten years of concerted work just to get the build completed.

The final piece of the puzzle had occurred six months ago. Unable to find the necessary laser specialist and having reviewed every single available academic paper on the topic, Tim had turned back to his government handlers for help. He needed a specialist laser capable of outputting the huge energies required to rework the uranium’s quantum structures. The laser also had to be very sensitive, in order to be capable of the type of re-programming required to design the lattice structures used to imprint the atoms.

Almost on completion of the huge atomic collider in outback N.S.W., a spy from A.S.I.O. had come knocking on his door. He knew she wasn’t a scientist straight away; for starters he’d never met any scientist that couldn’t quote every element of the periodic table of by heart. Well at least none of the techno-brains that inhabited his circles. After that he hadn’t probed too hard. She had the information he needed, and apparently she was to be his assistant and sole provider of the insights into this application of laser technology. Besides he’d reasoned at the time anyone so beautiful, really shouldn’t be that hard to work with. It turned out he was completely wrong. She was almost as much of a nerd as he was, if anything it was her beauty to which he found both immensely beguiling and distracting to boot.

Upon touching down in the military bird the facility had seemed quieter than usual. It was less apparent until they made it underground to the first of the five sub levels why that was so. Normally there would be half a dozen personal on base completing non secure operations and keeping it running and looking “normal” from a satellite perspective.

When they entered the facility every guard was dead. Most had been killed at their stations. Death by shuriken to the throat seemed to be the most common cause of death. Scientists, poor defenceless scientists had been butchered in their sleep or at their desks. No-one had been spared. They followed the trail of destruction that seemed to have operated with surgical precision. Blast doors had been cut open with a combination of portable oxy-acetylene torches and explosives. Most alarmingly secure sub section X, sub level 5 had been comprised. The vault where there newly built prize was being kept. The room was bare, the prize taken. Tim had stared at the empty robotic arm, and for the first time since his mother died, he had cried.

VIP Boarding Lounge Virgin Club 8:05:13 Sydney International Airport

“Tim!” a friendly voice roared across the bar top.

Tim was positioned at the end of the bar, with Aimee moving between standing next to him and doing tight circles back and forth to the airport window. Her voice seemed to modulate between complaint and furious depending on whether her contact was a superior or a fellow agent. Neither received anything more than at the most carefully couched threats. Aimee was known to be a master of information manipulation. Right now she was bending every asset at her disposal to acquire fast passage to Europe and the information they needed to track the bad guys down.

“Tim! I know it’s you, brother! Don’t bury your head in that laptop, you know you’ll never be a spy”, the voice laughed mockingly at him.

Tim did know that voice, although it startled him to realise it. The voice was the unmistakable timbre of his best friend Davis. He pushed his head up from the screen. His two hands never stopped typing on the keyboard. Sure enough the big friendly face of Davis Lockyer was beaming down at him.

“HAHAHAHA! Tim my friend! It’s so good to see you.”

Then Davis paused, noticing Aimee for the first time, or in Davis case, making it clear that he was noticing her for the first time,

“My god, same old Tim, head buried in a laptop, and you have the most”

Davis seemed to linger on this word placing explicit emphasis on the word,

“Exquisite lady I have ever seen less than two metres away.”

He turned his head slightly away from Tim and looked straight into Aimee’s cool blue eyes. Suddenly Davis seemed to stiffen, and then almost as unnoticeably he relaxed again and turned back to Tim.

“I mean come on Tim what are the odds anyway, huh?”

That was Davis, such a smooth customer, always ready to change directions and re-manoeuvre. Something had made him change pace; Tim could read his friend, even if he had rarely seen him face to face for nearly ten years.

“Huh! I bet you’re what? Flying off to have a late lunch with Prime Minister Berlusconi, before dinner with the Queen?”

Tim joked; even back in university Davis’s ability to make a deal had been legendary. To getting rezoning for the student council building, to refinancing the universities long term debt facility, his seeming inexhaustible list of contacts had quickly endeared him to the universities chancellery.

“Nothing like that mate, look I can’t really say, things are ...”

An awkward pause began to develop between the two friends. Once again Davis seemed to look over at the Aimee, this time cautiously.

“Tim I know you must have a good reason to be hanging with her...”,

He looked at Tim now, his eyes burnt into Tim, made him want to look away. Davis turned his mouth in close to Tim’s ear, whispering.

“You should know mate, she is army, or ex-army, I don’t know what you’ve been into lately, but be careful ok bro?” , he smiled again then looking caringly at Tim.

“You always were my big brother Davis, thanks for the advice.”, said Tim.

“Anytime champ. I gotta say it was great to run into you, I just wish the circumstances were different. My colleague Ronnie and I are heading to Abu Darbi.” Davis mentioned.

“What are the chances hey? Davis I gotta feeling we are on the same plane! We’re heading there first then taking a connection to Somalia”

“Okay too weird, what the fuck are you really up to Timmy? Seriously you don’t go to Somalia, buddy, you!” Davis stared at Aimee,

“Not ever!”

Aimee turned now as if considering Davis for the first time. When she spoke she stared directly at Tim.

“Tim can you wrap this up, we need to have a chat...”

“Hey no offence lady, but my friend, I don’t know who you think he is but he ain’t going anywhere near no African hell hole.”, Davis stepped inside Aimee, standing directly now in front of Tim, protectively.

A standoff had suddenly materialised. The tension in the immediate vicinity was palatable. Those around turned as if sensing violence was about to abrupt. Some nearby suits took a half step backwards. Indeed it was probably only fractions of a second away. Indeed Aimee had already curled one of her deliciously seductive dainty little hand into a fist. It didn’t look dainty anymore.

“No!” Tim’s voice cracked.

“Listen Davis, Aimee is helping me. I can’t tell you how, but we have a good reason for travelling to Somalia. She is definitely in a position to look after me. You need to trust me!”

Tim finished, looking up at his tall friend pleadingly.

“Ok mate, I trust you.”

Davis turned grudgingly away. It seemed somewhat reluctantly. At that moment his companion came over, and Davis introduced Ronnie to Tim and Aimee.

The boarding call came up for their plane. The 777 was taxiing into the passenger boarding area. Davis glanced over at Tim’s laptop. He looked up in astonishment, but didn’t say anything. The screen was filled with a very unique type of isotope reaction. One Tim had theorised about repeatedly to Davis when they were roommates. For all Davis’s protestations at the time, Tim had just as repeatedly, almost fanatically expressed the view that such reactions were.. theoretical. Davis had had in Tim’s mind a very keen nose for money. Davis smelled rivers of pure gold. Now, though, now Davis looked extremely lost, and, hurt thought Tim.

“You always told me you wished that you could be like me, Tim, but you my brother were the one I looked up to.”

Davis turned theatrically. He moved like a dynamo pumping his chest and raising his arms to create a circle with Aimee and Ronnie. He continued.

“The one I wanted to be more like, and now I know. All the things I’ve learnt, and felt, they may have made me fell so alive.”

He said the last wistfully, staring out onto the tarmac beyond the terminals glass. Davis strode out until he was pushing against the bar, then spun perfectly through 180 degrees. His eyes shone as he said,

“But what you have discovered is amazing. I can’t begin to imagine what it felt like to make that discovery into a reality.”

He looked wistfully back at Tim again. He’s eyes shone even more if that was possible. But he said nothing further. Actually it was what was not said that seemed so poignant to Tim. He wasn’t a government tech, and right now he very much wanted his best friend to know something to help ease his hurt.

“Davis mate, I really wish I could’ve told you.”

He paused looking meaningfully back at Aimee,

“But you have to understand that to get to this point has been an incredible sacrifice.”

His friend knew instantly what he meant; they had shared much together, Davis teaching the freshman Tim the basics of reading people and many other important street skills. That Tim had gone to the government, had been working on his idea all this time. That also meant Aimee was his government minder, and that she was as Davis had earlier surmised a field agent.

“Tim mate, let’s get the hell outta here, I’ll swing it so we get matching seats to you guys.”, so saying Davis smiled and wandered off to towards the Virgin concierge.

The others grabbed their luggage and began trooping towards the exit. Davis soon caught up. He deliberately slotted in right on Aimee’s right shoulder, saying nothing but matching her pace exactly. She said nothing and they continued on to the boarding hall. The lady on boarding passengers at the Virgin checkout gate glanced at Davis as past. Right on cue he flashes his million watt smile, and she is putty in her hands.

“Ma’am, I’m so tired, did the crew make my seat up already?”

“Why yes Mr Lockyer!” smiling she asked shyly, “Are you at all related to the famous footballer?”

“What?! No not that I know of, but thank you for the comparison, miss?”

“Ms Carlton, I’ll be attending you in business class.”

“I look forward to it.”

With that Davis marched on quickly to catch the others, who smirking had all stepped ahead laughing. Truly the mood of their group had become charged Davis thought, like a crew about to hit the party circuit, each person with a single minded purpose; their thoughts in train for a night of total debauchery.

Virgin 777, Business deck 9:00:15 75km East of Singapore

Davis stared at Tim, Ronnie’s left arm was entwined in his, and she seemed to lose the constant fear she carried for those moments when she touched him. Aimee was staring at Davis, whilst talking softly into her shiny phone caressing it between long slender white fingers. Davis said,

“Tim less than 24 hours ago I almost got both Ronnie and myself...” he squeezed Ronnie’s hand,

“Killed twice. Some really nasty people, guys I’d only heard rumours of in Asia turned up everywhere I went. Kill squads, snatch squad” he paused for effect, “The works!”

Tim could hardly believe what he was saying; I mean if it was true? Then why was his friend smiling! He really was completely loco.

“So I figured Ronnie and I needed to get the hell out of Sydney. It’s too hot what with ninja death squads running around.” He was about to continue, but Aimee suddenly cried out,

“What? What did you say? Ninja squads?”

“Yes, Aimee, I believe.” She nodded back at him, “Ninjas that most normal people would’ve probably got themselves cut in half by. Any ideas why they might be waltzing around George St?”

“So! You are the one that is all over the net. I must say that was some impressive stuff. Where did you learn that?”

“Oh you know”

Suddenly Davis was coy, cunning,

“Just some backyard gym in Bangkok.”

Knowing that she would know it was anywhere but.

“But Tim why are you here? Why take some trip to East Africa if you just hit pay dirt?”

Tim looked at Aimee; she seemed to be struggling mightily. She argued twice into her phone, both times whispering harshly that it was her opinion Davis couldn’t be trusted. At the last she simply turned to Tim and her face an ice queen’s mask, nodded.

“Davis bro, you gotta understand, we didn’t just crack it. Nah mate, we nailed it. A super stable compound that has almost 100% mass to energy conversion, a safe, clean exponentially better form of uranium. Best of all, the compound, because of the inter dimensional properties of the lattice, is able, in a way I’m not yet fully able to explain trap energy and remain in a light gaseous state. This gaseous state actually has the appearance of a solid. So we ended up with a crystal that is no more than a large emu egg, weighs the same, and has the energy to power twenty cities for a decade. Bang! Right there. All the world’s energy problems solved. Next problem.”

Tim smiled for a second, the first time his friend had seen him do so since catching up again.

“So maybe they were onto you somehow through an insider?”

“Yeah maybe mate. Some ninjas jumped us and stole the crystal. I mean we can make some more, but it’ll take about six months, assuming they didn’t do any sabotage on the way out. The problem is with what’s now out there. In the wrong hands... I don’t think that I have to tell you.”

Davis nodded. Pieces of the jigsaw started to move, but one piece that was annoying him didn’t move into place.

“Aimee, the squads we encountered definitely had satellite access. What you have my friend caught up in; these guys have moles inside at least one of your departments.”

“We’re aware of the possibility.” was all Aimee would say.

Then she got back to her phone.

“So you still haven’t told me why you’re going to East Africa. All your contacts are in Europe Tim. Surely if somebody else is close to this tech, the end product might help them to crack the code.”

“I’ve spoken to everyone Davis, all morning discretely of cause, nothing remotely similar came up. Then Aimee’s white hat security expert came back with news that some group called the Deadly Eastern Wind have put out enquires to employ nuclear fusion experts, who technically don’t even exist commercially at ridiculous wages.”

“So you reasoned that this group must have staged the robbery. Ok but that still doesn’t explain why you and Miss little black dress here, are going there?”

Aimee stared him. Her eyes were burning holes in the side of his head. He seemed to get excited by the attention.

Aimee interjected, “How are going to find it? We need Tim to identify the infrastructure we think they would have to build in order to learn anything from it. Also Tim is the only one that understands its capabilities. The decision is made.”

“Ok, Aimee. Davis there’s something else, this uranium; I’ve done some preliminary projections. Unlike regular uranium used in fission, lattice uranium doesn’t require enrichment. It goes from a low output state to an ultra high output high yield state when used in a bomb. Assuming you had the tech to build a bomb this thing would give you a yield equal to one hundred Hiroshima’s, and weighing less than 30 kilograms.”

Davis whistled slowly, this was starting to make sense.

“Do you know what? Things are starting to make more sense. One sec.”

Davis got up, kissed Ronnie gently on the forehead, and made his way to the business class toilet at the back of the plane. He always hated airplane toilets. He was too tall and hit his head against the roof. He finished taking a slash, gave the snake a shake, and then turned towards the mirror washing his hands vigorously. He heard shouts outside and paused on the way out. Instead he put his ears to the door and listened. Beyond were excited Asian voices yelling in broken English,

“E bre body downnn! Nnn ow!”

Guided by instinct Davis placed his hand silently on the latch to the door, but didn’t turn it. His mind went blank. Mindscape extended. The emptiness became a vacuum. Within the vacuum the void seemed to call to him. His mind felt compelled towards the centre. A song drifted by. A song from his past, from his corroboree. A song with intent, one designed to loosen and free the mind bound in this reality for the dreamscape beyond. Inside out. The void took form.

Eyes closed his body uprooted and drifted astrally away from its mooring. A ghost floating forty thousand feet up in the air. A ghost floating right through the cubicle door and into the business class bar lounge beyond. He could see the first bad guy – more Blue Tiger ninjas by the look of things. They had regular clothes on but had pulled black ninja masks on and were wielding what must have been fully ceramic modular sub machine guns.

These guys were just too much, and he was starting to get really, really angry. I mean come on he could take out these clowns all day but picking on civilians like Ronnie and Tim? Shit was about to get real for these cats. But first he had some serious recon work to do.

KARARCH! Boom, the power word jolted him back. His physical body tingled. Nerves jumped tendons as hot energy reconnected nerve fibre bundles to consciousness. Poetry is a condition of love, then I am the colour of a feeling that makes me feel so goddam.. The rush was electric. Every. Time. He did it. Like honeyed gold it ran, dripping down his back. If you tried to explain it people thought you were a drug addict. Davis suppressed the association.

Temporary kinaesthesia brought on by astral travel was only a small drawback. The elders had told him it was because he had tried to eat something the first time they had taken him dreaming. Personally he just remembered Old Ninag and the smoke. That magic smoke that could take the tribe anywhere.

He braced his shoulder against the door, and then stopped. There was a better way. He picked up his mobile and touched Tim’s name from his contact list. His Bluetooth earpiece picked up straight away, and he slotted the phone back into his pocket.

“Tim put Aimee on straight away. Then grab Ronnie and make your way back, without starting a panic, to the back of business class. Don’t have time to explain mate, just grab Ronnie and move now!”

“What is it Davis?” Aimee’s voice was level without the earlier seductiveness that she had used around Tim and the others.

“Blue Tiger ninjas. They are taking over the plane. There are six, three of them are ahead of you in the flight deck between the flight cabin and business class. The nearest one is ahead of you moving in towards the start of business class. Approaching in 10 seconds. There are five more that I have detected still lurking in the forward hold. I need you to check that out. Davis out.”

He knew he had to trust her, the way that Tim already did. She was a secret agent though so it was going to be hard. Her steel blue eyes told him so much. Davis could make people turn away, make it hurt to look inside him. She had stared right back and then some. That told him something.

“In the world of man, there are many creatures made of fear. Those few who we call warriors are the brave because they have the courage to face these fears. In their eyes you will see the truth Davis. For it is in the eyes of the noblest of creatures that cannot hide who or what they truly are.” –

Bear five minutes before the end. The day the world destroyed a boy and built a man.

He shouldered the door roughly, partly smashing it off the hinges, as it burst open. He was desperate to cover the distance to the bar lounge as quickly as he could. He didn’t try to land on his feet. He rolled from the impact, twice. Coming up he lunged cat like across the remaining space towards the ninja. Too late the other man turned swivelling his gun at Davis.

Davis was faster. He had the strength of a leopard charged inside his forearm and a hand that was trained in smashing 20 kilogram bricks. His attack came like a hammer blow from above, and it was in more ways than one so excruciating. The initial contact knocked his opponent unconscious. The hammer blow cracked the shoulder, causing a compound fracture that popped the shoulder bone exposing it through the skin. As his opponent fell to the side, the man’s other arm was reaching desperately for a knife at his side. It slid out from his left arm straight towards the unprotected mid section of Davis. Wearing only a shirt the blade was sure to slice right in. Davis lunged back desperately. Fighting his balance he pushed himself back. At that exact moment the plane was rocked by shaking turbulence.

Both fighters were knocked off their feet and fell head over heels onto the ground. In the time it had taken for his opponent to hit the ground, Davis had shifted his weight to his right foot and was rising like a serpent on one foot. The other foot was rising towards the ninja. It struck the remaining left arm just above the elbow. A small shattering noise signalled that the ninja had taken another compound fracture. The pain must have been unbearable. The ninja through gritted teeth stared at Davis for a moment then keeled over finally unable to take it anymore.

Davis moved quickly past the bar area into the premium economy deck. He stopped at the curtained entrance to carefully peak through. There were at least two gun toting creeps with ceramic semi automatic weaponry. The area in front of the curtain was overcrowded. Mainly due to the pandemonium that had resulted from having armed ninjas with assault rifles patrolling the isles.

Davis had no sense of how this might play out. His mind was occupied with Ronnie and his friend Tim. He hoped Aimee was securing the business class passenger deck. Without it the plane would soon be in control of the ninja clan. The deck afforded the main access point to the flight cabin. The pilot was now the main objective. He wondered if Aimee was up to the challenge.

Virgin 777, Business class passenger deck 9:30:15 406 km North-East of Singapore

Aimee was moving slowly. So slowly that she didn’t make a sound. She had no intention of allowing the ninjas to open fire. Her opponents would need to be silenced with close quarter lethal force. Two lay ahead sectioning off either end of the business class deck. Getting past either of them without being seen would be next to impossible. If they were real ninjas they’d be trained in passive field detection, otherwise known as having an active sixth sense.

She walked quietly yet deliberately past the curtain, squeezing her narrow frame past the curtains edge so that it minimised the movement. The two ninjas were facing each other, offset slightly from the doorway so they could cover each other’s doorway and still not be taken by surprise.

Crouching, she removed metal throwing knives from her jacket. With a flick of her wrist, two knives became six, the three in each hand hanging with edges extended, hilts grip locked between each set of knuckles. She pulled back her left hand and hurled the first set at the ninja ahead at the other end of the deck. One knife buried itself in either shoulder, disabling any chance of nerve pulses firing the weapon. A millisecond later a third buried two inches deep in the forehead. The ninja pitched forward onto the ground.

A full half a second later the remaining ninja reacted to the other’s demise. That was already far, far too late. Aimee pivoted smoothly to her right leg, swinging the left around in a tight arc. Her movements were small and sensual. Black stockinged pins were like a deadly whirlwind. Her hips swivelled, her arms swung high and wide. Each fist came up; colliding against the ninjas head in hammer meets the anvil. He dropped to the ground, she dropped with him. Cradling him by the arms. Her smaller frame strained under the heavy male. Disarming him she rolled him roughly onto his belly, then uncoiled a length of restraining wire in a whipping motion from behind her jacket.

She expertly tied his wrists. Her mind was suddenly filled with another presence. The passive field detection training was kicking in again.

“Give in to your senses, your mind is like a lake, when the ripples become a tsunami great danger approaches.” - PFD trainer Samantha “3^rdeye” Jones

There was a presence, and it was causing waves to wash over her. She was sensitive to the way they felt as they rolled over her skin. Right now it felt like, incredibly negative.

A ninja stepped through the curtain that separated the flight deck from business class. As the curtain flashed up Aimee could see another ninja. He was using a handheld oxy-acetylene torch to cut through the door to the flight cabin. Then the curtain flashed down again and the hulking ninja stepped forward.

It was immediately apparent that this ninja was different. She stepped gingerly into the isle, looking down at his feet. She quickly studied every part of his body, looking out for any concealments or weapons. He seemed to radiate an evil power. He raised a clenched fist; suddenly she was raised from the ground by an invisible force. She grimaced with pain, there were invisible bands wrapped thickly around her neck, her whole weight pulling against them. Aimee let go of the invisible bands and held her breath. She disbelieved there were any bands around her neck. Suddenly she was falling to the ground, as the openly shocked ninja went into a defensive posture. She hit hard and rolled, coming up into a cartwheel. Her remaining knives flew out as went all aimed directly at the ninjas head. He parried each with his lead arm, as though swatting away flies.

She rose two metres from him. His eyes are grey, small slits that look like snake eyes. He looks out at her and she can feel his hate. Feel the evil that he has committed. He is used to feeling overwhelming power; it shows in his contemptuous stare. She feels rigid. It’s like there is ice in her veins. Her body is frozen and numb. She feels an urge to retreat. A little girl, one that she thought was a long way away, suddenly seems really close. She is that little girl, and she just wants to ball up into a comfy warm ball.

No! She wrenched the rapid decision making away from the false image of her past. The ninja was less than half a metre away, her elbows and keens felt jammed up. His body seemed to move towards her with lightening speed. Or rather her own limbs, still felt fresh from a deep, deep sleep.

His massive right arm shot out engulfing her lithe neck in a choke. His hands felt like solid steel. Almost as though a cyborg were choking her, the arm extended of the shoulder joint raising her helplessly into the air. She started counting; she knew she had fifteen seconds before a lack of oxygen rendered her ineffective.

Fifteen seconds to use, how often did life come down to that? Her mind was a electrified with determination, you won’t take me you, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, because you evil chump. I-am-stronger! So thinking, Aimee used the first couple of seconds to completely relax. Now that she had broken the mental hold of this evil psychic she needed to flood her limbs once again with invigorating nerve pulses. They flooded down her nerve fibres, a great ladies body is reawaken from slumber. The anger was gone now, the rage replaced with a warm uniquely female emotion far in excess of anything a male could summon. Her thoughts were crystal clear once more. Her body had been returned.

At the sixth second she smiled, and as the white of her teeth beamed out, for the first time the man in front of her looked unsure. He looked back into eyes that held not a speck of fear. His method of mental domination completely failed, he raised the other arm intent now on finishing his prey.

The other arm came up with what looked like a cruel sickle weapon. A round metal bar, one end finished with a sickle shaped serrated cutting blade, while the other had a long metal chain. The chain was clumped in his great hand with end of the bar. The weapons sickle blade was even now coming down centimetres from Aimee’s chest. She had less than four seconds of air left.

Those long, sexy black legs rose up like a gymnast on the high beams. Making perfect half circles that formed an inverted V on either side of her opponent. With one second left those long legs came in hard. Putting everything into it she squeezed her legs together into his head. The heels of her shoes crashed into his temples, momentarily knocking him a daze.

As she fell from his grip blood and oxygen seemed to want to flood in, she suppressed the feeling knowing she needed to remain very calm. She could already feel this creep trying to intrude back into her mind. Her arms struck out in a series of lightening attacks. Open palmed strikes broke against his body without any seeming effect. Then with a momentary pause in between her barrage he struck out at her. His closed fist smashed hard against her abdominals. Pain! Like a rush of hot lava exploded inside her. Hurled back five metres along the isle.

Force yourself up woman. No one is going to do it for you. Get up now. Her body didn’t want to respond. That punch had knocked her badly, she knew she would have to be more cunning, she couldn’t duke it out with the ninja. Limbs already heavy were soon forced to endure; she half punched her left arm into the ground and rose. Arise Aimee, I believe in you, I believe in me, and I will not falter. I love my nation, and right now, it depends on me. Wobbly legs straightened. You will not beat me.

Aimee advanced, it had to end now. There would be no second chances. Not this time. For the first time the ninja spoke evil dripping from his voice,

“So! A worthy opponent. By rights bitch you should be dead. I think now is the time to stop toying with your mind and put you out of your misery.”

A wave of nausea engulfed her as his mental tricks reached a zenith. As she walked closer to him the nausea got more intense. It’s just a trick; there is nothing, in this reality or the next; that can hurt me. She wiped blood from her nose. It ran away in rivulets across the top of her slender hand.

She casually wiped it neatly with a handkerchief that as if by magic appeared and disappeared the moment she needed it to. She spun once, twice, and kicked heel first. Driving hard the upswing of her kick landed cleanly into the abs of the man now behind her. Devil may care style; she somersaulted in the isle, with zero clearance for error. The tips of her shoes softly brushed the cabin roof, descending down. Snapping out and landing at the top of his chest. The ninja was knocked back, falling down, and then getting back up into an instinctive lion stance.

“Ha!”

The man turned and sprinted back through the curtain. Aimee raced through not caring for her safety, expecting a trap. What if this freak got within the cabin with the pilot? Her mission was always first and foremost to protect Australian life. These guys were terrorists on a level of sophistication that did not bear decent people thinking about. The trouble was that they existed at all she thought.

The ninja she had just been fighting was missing but the sixth and final minion was there. Beyond him lay an open door and the final room before the cockpit. He had turned from his assigned task, looking menacingly up at her.

Enough she thought, throwing herself headlong into knocking out the bad guy with a knee to the solar plexus, then wrapping her arms around his head until she had chocked him unconscious. She slowly advanced past the door dreading what she would find. If the ninja had control of the craft.. She considered this might actually be her last mission, but just as quickly dismissed the thought.

Virgin 777, Flight Cabin, 9:32:11 415 km North-East of Singapore

Captain Daniel “Maccas” Johnson shifted within his seat, uncomfortable at the heat coming into his air conditioned cabin. The noise had been growing louder for the last couple of minutes.

They had received a brief distress message from an agent on board telling them to hunker down and keep the already locked cabin door sealed. When the captain had discreetly made enquires he’d been advised of possible terrorist action, then abruptly further communications had been cut off. Now all internal and outbound radio was blaring static across all channels. No ground contact, but the active and passive radar systems still worked. Somebody didn’t want any word getting out.

His co-pilot, First Officer Darryl “Fly-boy” Simmons was working up an unhealthy sweat in the co-pilots seat. His actions belied the nervous disquiet of someone that has far too long to think about a fate for which they would rather not. He cast furtive glances every ten to twenty seconds at the door behind them. Really though it was futile. They could put the plane on auto pilot, and then what... suddenly Maccas had an idea.

He proceeded to put the plane on auto-pilot. He then reached under the seat and located the emergency axe that was secured there. He carefully brought it out and lofted it two handed.

“What the hell?” said Fly-boy,

“You’re not seriously thinking of using that think are you, Maccas mate?”

“Mate, what choice do we have? You know these terrorists, do you think we’ll be heroes if we meekly surrender the plane then they dive bomb into the twin towers in Kula Lumpar? Mate we got two choices. Sit still and wait for the shit that’s gonna come through that door. Or wing it and gut the thing as it comes flying through.”

So saying he lofted the axe once more and carefully made his way around the cabin to the outside of the cabin door. He waited on the side without the hinge. That way when the door swung open the first thing that stepped through had an even money chance of copping a swift path straight to hell.

Moments later the lock on the door was cut. The door was carefully, slowly opened. Fly-boy couldn’t help himself. He climbed out of his chair and turned to face the unseen menace. Slowly, slowly the door swung open.

Fly-boy just stared. At first Maccas thought that he was transfixed in fear or horror. But as he looked closer he noticed that his co-pilot’s eyes were glassy. Still no-one had come through the door. Maccas let the axe drop low resting it close to the wall. His co-pilot seemed to be mumbling semi-incoherently.

“Yes...” drooled Darryl.

“Simmons.” Maccas spoke up trying to get through to him.

“Yes..” entombed Darryl.

“Simmons!” insisted Maccas.

“Yes... Master... I... will... fly... the... plane.. for you.”, Fly-boy droned.

He then turned compliantly, his relaxed state in quiet contrast to his earlier state.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Really what was so wrong that made him act like that thought Maccas. He was deadest off his tree. Then he heard the voice. That superfluous voice. It melded with reality making you want to do its bidding.

“You can come out of the dark little hero” the voice mocked in a condescending tone.

Maccas knew it was useless, his surprise was gone. Who knew what lurked there. He stepped out into view of the doorway. Immediately he saw what had controlled his colleague. A large dark clothed man. A huge man, clothed like a, like a ninja, and with the scariest red eyes he had ever seen. Eyes that seemed to bore into him speaking of things tainted and poisonous. Things so dark and evil that no one could hope to live with the knowledge. He seemed to promise all these things to you with his eyes.

Maccas side stepped bolding out into the open, his axe pounding heavily into his outstretched left hand. It felt like some FF gym class. Like some evil instructor the faceless ninja, nevertheless had a look that expounded untold pain in the session to come. Who could face such a horror and live?

Maccas didn’t want to die. He still had his axe. He looked up at the bad guy and stepped into the breach.

Instantly he was wracked with a wave like force of unnerving pain. Real pain. The type that Maccas new, even though he had never experienced a state remotely similar with his body before, was akin to torturing his essence. He burned, from within.

Then as quickly as he felt the rush, it was gone. It didn’t exactly get replaced, just reduced to a tiny spec in his mind. The ninja seemed for a second to be looking at him as though a man that still looks upon a slave bound in heavy chain. The black ghost’s very body language was contemptuous of Maccas physical presence.

Very slowly, calling on his years of precision flight controls, Maccas kept his upper body from his shoulders down completely rigid. Nothing to give the hulking monstrosity in front of him a clue. His fear had reached the supreme level. Nothing within his field of vision did not elicit or excite some form of fear. The ninja himself was so scary that he had never dared looked on it directly and did not now. Instead he kept his gaze low and to the right, giving a cross glance of the legs and left side lower body.

Maccas knew that he had no time to lose. He had succeeded in raising the axe as close as he dared, it was now a short distance to the other man. Not knowing if he would have a second chance and assuming not, he punched out with his left hand, while he curled his right arm around the hilt. His axe went out wide of the ninja, and then he pulled it in hard. Suddenly his weight was shifting completely to the right, both hands now wrapped around the axe hilt.

The ninja instantly knew the ruse was up, but.. He had no time to react, and he knew it! He shifted his lead leg back with supernatural swiftness, but, even so, it was not enough. The leg was caught by the downward cut of the axe. Blood spurted away from the garish wound. Blood lust seemed to fill Maccas mind. He knew suddenly what the ancient warriors of yore had felt, navigators of the ocean, and warlords of the lands that they swept through. Once again just as quickly as before the image disappeared into a tiny dot within his mind.

Ever since he was a tiny kid, he’d been able to do that. Not really a skill that ever came to the attention of others, he had still at times found it to be useful. Like the time the cool kids had finally caught him, done with pranks and calls, they’d held him down. Dad had always told him how you took a beating was what defined you as a man. But just as suddenly as the punches had started he filed them all away. After that they called him mad. He had laughed at them, laughed as the biggest punched him in the head. What kind of a freak did that? Maybe dad had been right in a way, because after that nobody messed with him.

The ninja had recovered from his initial shock, the wound itself; enough to knock out a lesser man simply forced him to favour his other leg.

“So! I do not know how! But you! Argggh! We are not done little hero. Very few people have ever seen me defeated. Consider yourself in very elite company.” So saying the ninja took another step back from Maccas but not in a fearful manner.

Instead he turned to his left and bowed. Then with his left hand he began to draw a detailed hexagram in the air over the frame of the corridor. As he drew extremely thin threadbare red lines followed his left index fingernail.

His eyes glowed. Light emanated out for a foot around his eyes, and his face was bathed in an unnatural red glow. The hexagram now pulsed, then with a flash that filled the room in red light the lines rushed out toward the edges of the circle. At which point a tear in the fabric of reality seemed to open.

Maccas would swear later that was what happened. As the beautiful female agent had come into view, then a man who seemed to be her companion. He told them the guy they were after, had simply leapt into thin air. When they then went back into the cabin, Fly-boy seemed to back in control normally. Back in control and totally unaware. The two with him weren’t though. The male who had introduced himself as Davis went over to the pilot and gently touched him on the shoulder. The pilot seemed to straighten up. He turned and smiled at Maccas.

“Hey mate, what are you doing letting all these people in the cockpit?” Fly-boy joked, not caring.

Davis looked hard at Maccas.

Maccas thought, don’t make this hard on Fly-boy. He really had no idea. Shit Maccas thought, he himself had never even seen anything remotely like that before. He didn’t even know how he’d been equipped to survive it. But he had.

Maccas piped up to Fly-boy.

“It’s all good, they are friends. Let’s get this bird home.”

Chapter 3

2011-10-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

A test of Desert Heat – A Test of Time

Chapter 3 by Tobias Nixon

’85 Ford station wagon 19:02:09 18 km north of Mogadishu (west coast)

The Somali desert was hot. The aircon just never quite worked. Even when you had it cranked up high. At least that’s what the crew of American Special Forces troops holed up in a civilian station wagon thought. The legroom was cramped with boots and the space filled with assault rifles and webbing.

They were coming flying out of the desert on the main highway into Mogadishu. Twin dust trails spun up from behind the car. The reflection of the sun in the distance bounced off the boiling tarmac. Heat spun through every pore of each man’s body. Only eyes remained cool and calm. Unblinking as the city came into view.

It was then that the sedan left the road, and stated to drift along a side road that wound towards the coast and away from the city. They drove for another hour until reaching the dunes near the sea.

The thick tendrils of the sand the only sign of their passing. Within minutes the strong winds had covered any remaining tire tracks. The vehicle was a high end V8 turbo under the hood. It also had long range fuel tanks fitted under the chassis. The boot was full of enough arsenal for the five occupants of the car to take out a small town.

Sargent Henessy worked the open mike in front of him.

“Bravo-Two-Zero-Alpha. Reporting successful completion of movement through echo-two-tango. Proceeding with commencement to objective Alpha-One-Five-Zero.”

“Acknowledged, Whisky-Five-Zero. Your mission is cleared. Proceed to Alpha-One-Five-Zero.”

Alpha-150 was the wait point. Army intelligence had got wind of a meet up between some high levels. Of those in control of large parts of the capital Mogadishu, there was no greater terrorist group than The Deadly Eastern Wind. The terrorists were meeting with their pirate brothers at a remote and deserted point on the eastern Somalia coast line. The pirate teams operating out of this area were incredibly well organised and it was long suspected that they were simply more mobile marine based teams of terrorists. The source of income they provided from ripping off rich pleasure craft (these seemed to be quite rare now) and commercial vessels coming down from the gulf was still impressive. With the wealth of Somalia’s natural resources and its people in almost complete disarray the terrorists needed a source of wealth to continue operations against what was left of the existing government forces.

“Team get ready.”

“Sarge, are we expecting anything to come in hot?”, the youngest member of the team, nicknamed Ali Barba, Ali had the gift of tongues.

One of those gifts was Arabic, but he wasn’t expecting to need that particular gift, more his other an almost supernatural ability to nail pinpoint targets at all ranges, in all conditions.

“It’s possible, but Intel tells us the meeting isn’t scheduled for another three hours. We’ll recon the position then settle in with some snipers and a snatch squad and see if we can’t get close enough to their leaders.”

The Sarge lent back against the front passenger seat. His gaze long on the hot dunes disappearing into the side view mirror. Reflected heat seemed to amplify his thoughts.

“There’s something else boys. The targets may not all be Somalian nationals. Reports are that some of the heat signatures are pretty unusual. Too high to be human, was what Intel said. I want Ali Barba and Mikey on sniper duty. Ditz you and Diego take point as the snatch squad hidden in this shed here”,

He pointed at the digital map on his modified galaxy tab s. Army modified so that the encrypted coordinates could be automatically updated in real time no matter how intense the battle raging around them. Right now it calculated the distance between the tip of his finger and their destination. Distance, duration, time to each objective.

“Easy E, I want AA and suppressing fire from the high ground. This is going to go down. Everyone stay ready.”

Fixed stares became iron hard, as each man said his silent prayers.

“Whisky Five Oh, deploy.”

Sarge drawled from the front seat.

He had been monitoring the route on the virtual map and had his own mental countdown going on. Whisky-Five-Zero immediately burst from the vehicle, still under heavy brakes. Military boots tracks left heavy prints as the soldiers secured armaments from the boot then left single file at a fast jog towards the final recon point.

The squad were just shadowy wrathes in the sands. Each man had dug in under a tarp, then had the last guy standing, Easy-E give them a light covering on top. The results were impressive. Easy-E went back to the high ground, and lay down with his Stingers and light machine gun laid out to the right. To the left were a series of switches and a brace of hand grenades.

Desert sands, 22:01:23 25 km north of Mogadishu (west coast)

Three hours later. Late afternoon cast long shadows across the sand. The ocean not far distant by the rumbling sound of crashing waves. Two cars from opposite directions converge on the ambush point. Tall men dressed in soft white flowing robes and dark rich skin get out of a silver Mercedes. Native Somalians’, these presumably are the terrorists, Easy-E thought. As the only team member with line of sight he was tasked with giving the encrypted voice comm start operations. This group of men walked with casual intent, swinging their AK and M16 assault rifles jovially about, talking quickly in Arabic.

The second group were just as casual but clearly more comfortable at sea. This group was more eclectic, consisting of a Moroccan, two Yemeni’s, an Egyptian, two Somalian’s. But it was clear the older taller Somalian was in charge. He didn’t quite have a skull and crossbones, well not quite. The guy had obviously watched too many pirates of the Caribbean movies though. He had long dark dreadlocks platted with small sun bleached bones, Easy E guessed hand or foot, anything else human was too big. The pirate captain’s clothes were a multi coloured assortment of garish labels stolen from rich wardrobes, the pants were a sturdy black hemp kept up with rope that also kept up the contrasting styles of this modern pirate just nicely.

Each member of Whisky-50 waited and listened to the “chatter” from two parties. Their leaders were arguing. An automated translation program filtered the signal and provided a rapid if sometimes inaccurate interpreter.

“Captain you and your crew should be congratulated for finding the suitcase undamaged. The deadly wind of the east will not forget your contribution.”

The terrorist leader seemed kind almost fond of the captain as he lent in and gave the traditional greeting. His smile would soon turn to a deadly crease of concentration. The terrorist leader was not a man one negotiated with easily, if for that, at all.

“There has been a small complication. The syndicate will not sell for less than $5 million US dollars. Recovery of the cargo was not without significant risk and loss of life. We were not told the boat would be carrying heavily armed guards.”

The terrorist leader’s eyes began to burn. Burn into the captains skull. The captain was blissfully unaware of the hatred being directed towards him. He extinguished a half smoked cigarette in the dirt. Bending back up he smiled at the terrorist leader, knowing that his words carried weight. In the desert the man with the water was king.

“That is Unacceptable. You were made aware of the risks when you were asked to hijack the old frigate Mary-Magee. The cargo in that suitcase is not easily fenced, be reasonable we are offering you a lot of money.”

The captain didn’t seem to hear him. His eyes were blinded by greed. If the terrorist leader didn’t pay, his crew of cutthroats’ next stop would be a meeting with a US forces contact that could facilitate negotiations with the CIA. Given what he’d seen on the boat he could guarantee they would be interested. He didn’t really care so long as he got paid.

“Terrorist leader plainly the suitcase is valuable, we assume at least one other much less preferred client will want this suitcase “back”. Therefore what you say is somewhat ingenious. I couldn’t care less what your group thinks, if I don’t see the $5 Million, this suitcase is going back to the boat with my crew.”

“But surely you can understand? We previously agreed on $2 million USD. It is simply not possibly to arrange an extra $3 million for you without warning.”

“Haw! The very fact you contemplate a larger payment tells me something very useful. I’m beginning to see that Dibra was right when she told me to take it straight to the fencers in Morocco. I did not as we have had many honourable dealings in the past Terrorist leader.”

The terrorist leader’s head went red. His already scary countenance dominated by blood shot puffy eyes, skin pulled tight, and a jaw wide, jawboning his adversary before unleashing his final verbal tirade.

“You fucking cur of a dog. Dog shit eating Scum! Don’t you understand? We must have that suitcase tonight!”

So saying he ripped a throwing knife out of the robes at his front and threw down at the captain’s feet. The knife flew hard and straight embedding itself in the captain’s right foot.

“Ahhhhhhhh! You bastard, kill these fools!”, the captain roared, attempting to walk backwards, raising his hand pistols. The lights of the cars were suddenly killed. Easy-E had thought both groups were with their respective leaders but now it appeared at least one member of each group had remained with the cars. As per the original orders the snipers would be lining up primary targets in their night vision scopes. Snipers should be just about ready to...

“Wait!”, the Sarge screamed over the comm line, encrypted static burbling before and after, “This feels like a trap to me. If you’re the captains men killing the lights is a good move as it causes confusion in the terrorists, but why would the terrorists kill their own light, they don’t have scopes and there’s no moon light in the desert tonight. Stay hidden.”

Indeed, thought Easy-E, the only man with a clear line of sight in the blackness.

“Sarge, I can report no casualties from either side.”

“What about the pirate captain?”

“He is nowhere to be seen. Wait...”, Easy-E pressed his right eye into the receptacle of the night vision scope. Somewhat disbelieving he stared harder to confirm his earlier judgement. “Sarge, pirates are missing. The man we identified as a terrorist leader earlier appears to be in charge. Wait..”, Easy-E scanned the surroundings near the group.

“I can see a dead body of to the side of the pirates vehicle. I can confirm it is the captain. Ah-Haar, he’ll be disappointed not to have had a watery grave dah Capt’n Blackbeard will.”

“Lose the wise cracks Easy”, Sarge focused his breathing, it was the time before combat when his nerves pulsated like this, blood to be spilled, the responsibility of command. But he needed clear thoughts, something was not right out there among the dark dunes.

Desert sands, 22:10:10 24.6 km north of Mogadishu (west coast)

The terrorist leader stroked his thick black beard. He was lying face down on a dune less than five hundred metres away. Away at the bottom stood an off-road bike, tied to it, a shiny silver case. By now the pirate captain would be on his way back to the small clipper that would make the run back to base. Carrying $50 million in diamonds.

He looked down with night vision goggles at the chaos unleashed. They had planned this operation, but had only expected the Americans to watch by satellite. That they were here already with an armed response told the leader everything. They would risk international outrage to get the silver suitcase back again. He had several contingencies, but the warriors below were tearing his guys to shreds. Time to even the odds. He reached for his small mobile. Touching it he activated an encrypted web based chat service. Each time the user account was brand new.

“Activate Archangels. Allah Akbar.”

The terrorist leader stretched to his full height and with that he scooted back down the dune. Kicking the bike’s clutch hard he gunned it back towards Mogadishu.

Desert sands, 22:11:05 25 km north of Mogadishu (west coast)

Sarge got them ready for battle,

“Listen up troop. We assault in 5-4..”

someone else took up the count, “3-2-1”.

Like well drilled soldiers it started with a distraction, Easy-E opening up on the engine block of the terrorists’ car igniting it in less than five seconds with armour piercing ammunition. The fuel line caught, and a giant fireball exploded from the direction of the fuel tank, causing the back half of the car to jump into the air.

As he turned the barrel to increasing his personal terrorist body count, the twin sniper positions opened up on the group by the car who on hearing he explosion had scattered like frightened ants in the hot noon sun. Nowhere was safe. The long barrelled thermally scoped experimental AR-18 rail guns ripped there targets apart.

“Double kill!”, barked Ali Barba.

Mikey swore, then made a 500 metre kill look Eaasy. The rail gun made no messy explosion the bodies just dropped like potato sacks. He had been waiting to get a double kill with the new rail gun. It’s lethal penetration capability on soft targets made it ideal for punching through wood and light building materials into infantry.

As the mayhem reached its zenith, the three remaining men exploded from their hidden positions in the sand. Even rising bullets were flying. Each squeezing the contents of a clip into those running from the car ten metres away. It seemed to be a wildly successful ambush if for one small detail, they needed some Intel to keep the desk jockeys happy.

“Easy, report have you got a visual on the remaining enemies?”

“The terrorists are accounted for, six dead.”, Easy said, and the Sarge’s assault troop checked the bodies in front of them.

“The pirates are nowhere to be seen, but that’s odd, I swear I see the Moroccan pirate from earlier in the outfit of that terrorist leader.”, Easy-E was tracking his scope across the dunes now, searching for any trace of movement.

The Sarge had moved straight to the terrorist leader and was checking the body with his free hand. The others had now formed a defensive triangle around him.

“Mutha fucken cocksucking whore!” he roared. “We’ve been played. That terrorist leader is on the loose. Who knows where the pirates are. Ditz hold the pirate captain up in the air. Easy, that look like the Pirate Captain to you?”

“No sir!”

The Sarge, pushed a tab on his Bluetooth squad link secure comm. Transmission switched to include the squad on a call patched directly through to USSCOM.

“Requesting immediate close range imagery at Alpha-One-Five-Zero. Pan thermal for targets vacating the vicinity.”

“Confirmed, I have the sat-link; he is in egress by motorbike back toward Mogadishu. Time to follow n bag em boys, everyone mount up now!”

The assault team moved quickly past the burning wreckage of the cars, and got going. The hunt was on!

Mikey began to move his scope to the left tracking the assault team as they made their way to the car. A gigantic explosion rocked the car to from the right. The whole car jumped a foot from the ground, as the team dove to take cover across from the car. Diego was off to the side, and he never saw the two pirates that came at him from behind. Five bullets, three through the throat from the first, two through the chest from the second. Honour be, honour thee, the others silently echoed the chant.

These weren’t your grandpa’s pirates. Their preferred choice of weapon the humble AK-47 original. Sold out of an arms dealer with gun shop huts along the beaches of western Yemen. The Sarge needed to act fast. Before his teams’ rage revenge motive turned things into a blood bath. He was holed up with Ditz near the car.

The dead lifeless body of Diego was just metres away but it might as well have been a mile. The distance cut by the field of fire from the remaining pirates. They seemed content to keep the squad in position.

A giant ruse to keep the high tech Americans from completing their mission. Sarge should have known the pirates and terrorists were collaborators. The Intel had been solid for months that these two groups had staged joint operations. The terrorists acting as buyers for some of the pirate gangs harder to store items, and excess weaponry.

The snipers moved. The angle was useless with the pirates camped behind the car, they would have to take out the only ride out of here to ... “Sarge what if were to take the pirates car? Do we have permission to destroy our vehicle?”

“Do it, now!”

“Roger that.”

The snipers moved through a 90 degree field of view until they had located all of the pirates via thermal vision. Easy relayed in advice from his alternative angle to their right halfway down the highest dune on the high ground facing the killing field. Ali Barba moved his right eye into position. Focused his breathing. Stopped his breathing. Moved his right hand with deadly precision into place. Now the kill shots. Mikey acted as spotter calling in the changes in height and distance.

“Target acquired. Shoot to kill!” Ali’s finger curled, and holes started to open up in the side of the car. Precision holes that the rail gun ripped at half an inch in diameter. The effect was amazing. Crouching bodies became falling corpses. Their cover completely comprised the remaining pirates broke hastily from cover. Ali Barba cut two more down with another double kill. Easy E opened up with his light machine gun as the final two pirates ran from cover. Bullets spilled onto the dirt surrounding him, the hot gun was throwing out metal slugs at a voluminous rate that tore through the walking corpses of the pirates. Heads popped back, as bodies fell to the ground.

“All enemy within range of close range sat scans are accounted for. Only the leaders of each group appear to be missing, Sarge.”, Easy-E was back in contact with imaging.

“See if they can track down Capt’n Blackbeard. Tell ‘em mission parameters have changed, where going after the Terrorist leader. We believe he is in possession of the target.”

“Sarge I thought capturing the terrorist leader was the target?”, queried Ali Barba over the comms. Already he and the other two were jogging down the dune hill kit shouldered, Easy just ahead of them.

“This mission is top secret, even I have no idea what is in the suitcase. Capturing that terrorist leader alive with the suitcase is our top priority. All I know is that we got sent because the contents of that suitcase cannot under any circumstances enter the capital Mogadishu.”

The squad were soon in hot pursuit. The car they occupied was considerably slower than their own car, but made good progress, and, crucially had fuel in the tank. Easy was cruisin’ with one of his RPG’s shoulder mounted and half hanging out the rear left window. It was probably all that saved them. Several seconds later they saw what looked like twin flares descending at incredibly speed through a high altitude arc. Swooping lights, with the glint of what was it thought Sarge? Steel? No!

“No!” – he screamed.

Easy-E reacted without thinking he dropped the hammer on his RPG pointing in the direction of the flares. Massive percussion sounds exploded in their ears. The peace of the desert was ripped apart as a fireball exploded from within the pitch horizon. Still one to go.

The driver Ditz never even blinked as he took extreme evasive manoeuvrers. The car swung violently to the left from the road to the flat desert sands beyond. It raced as though the road was a snake. In truth it was. Ditz was running full speed perpendicular to the road.

The lights were advancing through the western sky rapidly now. Mikey spoke aloud to crack the intense and paranoiac atmosphere that was building within the car. Surfaces seemed to drip with humidity, pulses raced.

“Aircraft, 3 o’clock. Assume approach hostile.”

Data streamed into the Sarge’s pad, the others crowded over.

Easy-E had got his other RPG out of the window. This one was gonna have to count. Easy-E placed his weapon arm on the top of the car, draping it across his other.. face focused on targeting the approaching lights.

Ditz drove the car, now parallel to the road and once they were once again in pursuit of the terrorist leader.

The pad was showing disturbing images. The aircraft appeared to be unmanned drones. Armament level was assumed to be lethal to infantry. These must have been the unusual heat sigs registered by the high level scan earlier mused Sarge.

The drone came screaming in.

At three hundred metres it levelled its descent. The car started to swerve violently from side to side, moving in big twenty metre arcs.

At two hundred metres the retractable machine gun barrels extended from their pods.

At one hundred and fifty metres the bullets started to trace a path along the ground towards the car. Bullets chewed up the dirt in two neat little rows as the nose of the drone dipped and then rose towards them.

One moment they were tense cats coiled inside the car, the next two dozen bullets had crisscrossed the cabin. It was shooting fish in a barrel and they all knew it. Incredibly only one of them was hit. Mikey took the hits like a champ. His massive front rower body relaxed as the first two drove deep into his chest, the back seat was suddenly awash with blood. The final bullet was enough. It ripped right through the roof and into his skull.

“Poor damn bastard never stood a chance.”, Sarge grunted. The others clung to his words, seeing your mate murdered in front of you was soooo fucked. Ali Barba just kept swearing, until Sarge eventually had to give him the look to shut it.

Easy-E was the only one not to witness the gruesome killing. His body was tensed half hanging from the rear left window. Guiding the sights of his RPG through a tight arc as the drone ran past its target to circle for a another kill run. He waited, he knew he had only one chance. This was the only weapon that could damage something moving so quickly. Even so its evasion was superior to a regular aircraft, it had no need to slow down a human. The drone could pull 15g’s on the fly, then back up for another change of direction time after time. It meant he had to wait till the drone was committed to another attack run. Just at the end of its turn arc, just about now.

“This is for Mikey you metal piece of shit”, said Easy-E as he thumbed the trigger squeezing tight, holding steady guiding the rocket towards its destination. The drone had just come out of its turn and was heading back towards the car. The rocket came smack bang straight into the front of its nose, resulting in a colossal explosion that ripped the metal bird apart. Clearly it hadn’t just been carrying bullets. From half a click away they could feel the warmth of the explosion wash over them.

Terrorists leader bike 22:31:09 2.9 km north of Mogadishu (city limits)

The terrorist leader knew he had a healthy lead on the Americans. Even so he did not have any intention of relying on his benefactors air support. At forty he was a veteran of the gulf wars, insurgencies in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Palestine. He had fought in Lebanon, blown up bridges in Syria and most recently helped with operations against the Turks. To survive as long as he had, meant that he was a man that always planned meticulously and then assumed the worst.

He never went anywhere now without two contingency plans. His entire life was given over to battle, and so his every move was calculated on the premise that his world was a battlefield. Now these Americans had got wind of his plans. Somehow. How had they? Who had talked?

No matter it was too late now, soon, very soon from the chaos would come a new Somalia. One.

One that was? Hmm he didn’t really know. Then his heart felt heavy and invisible tears soaked his mind. One that was not a warzone for his people. One that was not a living hell of starvation, or a place of casual brutality, or of the intercine warfare or murders that were left to be unpunished. From this lawless hell would come a new Somalia. It’s people deserved another chance. They would be given the means to build a new society.

Knowing you were winning was never the same as winning, unless you were Charlie Sheen the leader reflected. He ripped the throttle down and the bike accelerated an extra five kilometres an hour to eighty kilometres. The fastest that he dared given the sandy uneven terrain. He needed to get to the capital before sun up.

Terrorists car 22:31:26 5.3 km north of Mogadishu

The Sarge had rolled Mikey’s body forward in the passenger seat. He had carefully placed a poncho over the body. The mood was incredibly sombre but also focused. These men were elite soldiers. Each knew the risks of his chosen field. Each accepted the dangers without question. Nothing prepared you for the gut retching feeling of sudden death.

The men sat stoically. No one had congratulated Easy-E. It was as though they had all pulled the trigger and downed the bird. The shared sense of revenge was all that kept Ali Barba from cursing once more.

Ditz didn’t hold back, “Fuck!! Mutha fucker has turned again he’s heading to the northern edge of the city.”

Then the car swerved once more and was flying of a low lying sand dune through 2 feet, before bottoming out the suspension. The bike was somewhere ahead. The pad was feeding higher resolution pictures now that they were in the same grid as their quarry. Alarmingly another car was approaching on an intercept trajectory with the bike. It looked like they would meet before the team could catch up. Ditz floored the car, desperate for extra speed. Ahead the car and bike were drawing close.

As the Sarge watched both vehicles drew closer but never slowed to a complete stop. The icons for each vehicle shifted slightly, Sarge immediately order a more detailed analysis to see what had happened. A couple of seconds later the screen updated with high resolution photos of a silver briefcase being passed into the car. Then both were speeding off in opposite directions.

Sarge was starting to get really suspicious, none of this made any sense. He ordered another scan of the bike. It still had a silver briefcase. What the hell? He wondered if the switcheroo was deliberate.

High tech drones, awareness of sat imaging, it seemed incongruous that terrorists that fought with low tech AK’s had access to sophisticated tech and training. Maybe command had this one all wrong. Something was missing. Something he just couldn’t quite pinpoint. Command responsibility. The pressure to lead. His drill instructor was on his mind.

<Drill yard, Kentucky SEAL training facility> 15 years ago>

The voice of old Jed, “When so m-thing dohn’t loook right, it ain’t! Now keep your eyes peeeled for Charlie.”

“Stop the car now!” Sarge ordered.

Ditz pulled over. Brakes schreeched, as he rammed his foot onto the pedal.

“Ali Barba out.”

Ali stepped out into the cold desert sands. He removed his kit and the car was off again. No questions only a solitary figure, trekking to the top of the nearest king dune. By chance this happened to be in the same direction as the departing car. The cold skittish grit kicked up from the wheels and spat into Ali’s face. He didn’t care. He popped broad shoulders, puffed his impressive pecs, and set off at march.

Terrorists car 22:32:45 3.5 km north of Mogadishu

“Callin’ it in Sir. We are pursuing the operative rec name “Blackbeard” instead of the primary.” Sarge barked into his comm uplink.

“What makes you think the other car is the pirate?”

“Just a hunch” chewed out the Sarge, annoyed now at his comm link.

“The primary target is classified shoot to kill, the briefcase cannot fall into the wrong hands. What is your contingency?”, said an encrypted voice.

“Yes sir. I have left my remaining sharpshooter to reccy with chopper inbound to final point of termination.”

“Acknowledged. Chopper is inbound on gps beacon in two minutes mark. At current speed estimate point of interception at 0.5 km from city outskirts. Your man will have one shot only.”

“He only needs one. He’ll make it.”

“I hope so” (for your sake) Sarge finished in his head. He then opened another channel back to Ali Barba. A secure data transmission got him up to date.

Ali whistled softly through the link. “Even I have limits my friend.”

Sarge thought of his friend in Australia. Now seemed to be as good a time as ever, so he said to Ali in what he knew was a terrible Aussie accent, “She will be right mate.”

Ali immediately lightened up.

“Sure thing Sarge” (normal self)

Sarge and Easy scanned the surroundings with their night vision goggles whilst Ditz focused steadfastly on the road, or lack thereof ahead. Up till now every five hundred or so metres they had been seeing small clumps of desert bush but not much else.

Suddenly they were closing in on the pirate vessel. The pirate car screeched around. Taking a massive right turn on the desert floor. Ditz let them get close then slammed hard on the brakes. Both cars were at standoff one hundred metres apart. The US soldiers stayed relaxed and in their vehicle, while the motley crew inhabiting the other car quickly dispersed.

But it would be completely wrong to say that those soldiers had been lazy or brazenly stupid. They were simply extremely cunning.

Quite intentionally Ditz slammed the manual gear stick into the lower right of the H working the pads so that the car positively leapt backwards. As the team made steady distance away from their quarry, the quarry in turn took chase in pursuit.

Thus set the trap was sprung, the explosives left by hand to detonate did so. And in the ensuing aftermath men still walked albeit dazed in stupor. The US team had deployed chemical grenades. They were taught during classified sessions that targets would be “Doey” once overcome and could then be subdued. This proved the case. Only the leader of the crew who had been standing back somewhat distant seemed unsubdued. Instead he was cackling like a madman.

The leader laughed as Ditz tackled him to the ground.

“What’s so funny you dirtbag?” Ditz screamed at him, he wanted to say “You killed my friend. You fuckbag why did you do it?” but he knew he wouldn’t.

The pirate just stared at him with a smile in reply. Ditz pushed away from him and grabbed hold of a silver suitcase that he had been holding in his left hand. He flung it back towards Easy, he then used that arm to spin the pirate around. He deftly pulled both arms up at the elbow into a nelson lock.

The pirate started to laugh again.

“Infidels!”

Easy went about opening the case. In so many tens of seconds his electronic wrist tool had already cracked the lock. The case opened under its own motion. Inside was ten million US dollars. At least Easy-E was pretty sure you couldn’t fit any more cash inside. Sarge whistled toothlessly.

“What a fortune ai boys?”

Easy snapped the case back shut and retreated to the car. Throwing the case on the backseat, he pulled out his machine gun.

Sarge said to the pirate,

“Unless you want my boy here to toast all your dazed looking comrades, I suggest you unload with us on what the fuck is going on.”

The pirate sneered back,

“You’re picking on the wrong players Sergeant. My people died for this country, and will continue to do so until you are all gone.”

“Sorry not interested”, Sarge sounded flat.

“Boys give me your comms.” They did so. He stomped all three sets into the dirt. Busted tech good no more.

“Kill them all Easy!”

“What! No, you cannot do what you say?!?” screamed the pirate leader. His eyes were white with naked fear. His legs trembled. Suddenly his seaborne cockiness evaporated.

Easy-E held his machine gun two handed dominant position pointing down at this targets. It was a heavier grip to master. He squeezed the trigger briefly, bullets spat down at the leaders feet.

“Ok! Just please do not kill. Come I will show you.”

The others hustled him to the car as Easy went about using the butt of his weapon to knock the other pirates unconscious. Driving back to base, a relaxed Easy-E sat back on the seat, stretched his muscled frame and reflected that now was the perfect opportunity to see whether his buddies would object to a few US denaros going missing between here and base.

Chopper, 22:38:01 0.55 km from outer city districts of Mogadishu

It was coming in low, really low. Ali was perched ready to respond. The clear night made the game so electric he thought. The bike rider ahead was speeding on looking straight ahead. The chopper slowed and rotated slightly to give him a full field of view. His gun arm adjusted and he used his knees as stabilisers.

The rifles thermal scope registered the target. The target bobbed up and down constantly due to slight variations of movement from the chopper and the extreme distance of the shot. Breathing out he held his breath and calmly squeezed the shot. The terrorist leader was spun from his bike. He flew head over heels, rag dolling towards the ground. The bike ditched into the hard sands, along with its cargo.

Without thinking he grabbed a rope already attached to the side of the cargo bay and flung himself from the chopper. Because they were so low, by the time he came to a stop half way down the rope he was nearly at the bottom. He broke fall landing lightly and immediately began sprinting towards the bike.

At that moment, noises went off in the cockpit and the pilot began screaming about incoming missiles. Down below Ali could only suspect that this too had been a trap. But he had no time to lose, this silver suitcase needed to be returned. He climbed aboard the bike, dropped the clutch and gunned it back towards the open desert.

The chopper exploded in mid air. Its flaming wreckage tore from the sky and came crashing down towards the ground troops. They fired impotently past the wreck into the night, at the faint sound of a dirt bike at maximum engine revs.

Desert floor, 22:45:03 0.5 km from outer city districts of Mogadishu

Elements of the Deadly Eastern Wind gang moved back towards Hamid’s body. The terrorist leader had been in charge of a team of ten originally. Now only two were left. Such was the burden of operational success reflected the leader Urqa. The remaining men would be reassigned to other important missions. Some would not return. It was as Allah willed it.

Hamid’s last request to Urqa had been to check his body. A slightly odd request but one that Urqa obeyed. He had his men carefully pickup the dead body of Hamid and bring it with them. As they went to pick him up, Urqa reached down and pushed his left hand through Hamid’s jacket.

“Allah be blessed!”, Urqa was in shock.

It was the object Hamid had been after. So, it was not in the silver suitcase after all thought Urqa. Hamid’s last act of defiance against the soldiers had been to secret the object on his person. Urqa smiled picking it up carefully and wrapping it in his own jacket.

“We return to Mogadishu at once! Ride out and summon everyone immediately. I don’t care if you have to wake them up, assemble everyone at once.”

Men dispersed to the four corners of the city, while Urqa and a small band of elite cadre walked back towards the city centre.

Chapter 2

2011-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

A test of Australian Character – A test of time

Chapter 2 by Tobias Nixon

Tim Multzein turned his head and stared across at the screen. A large chart inhabited most of the screen. It floated gently up across a line marking positive territory. The chart was showing the amount energy being emitted by the laser. His laser. A laser he had designed to smash atoms. He had spent two years just designing and building the diagnostic equipment that monitored and controlled the laser. It had taken another year of effort to get the laser working. Now three years later he was finally powering on this awesome beast of subatomic power.

His lab was well lit. White walls and tables evoked a clean room feel. His fellow researcher, Aimee Jackson looked back at the monitor and smiled. Her beautiful smile lit up the already bright room.

“You’ve done it Tim”, her smiled pursed, as she looked at the line.

“Increase the gamma emission range; I think we can get more output if we do.” She said.

“Ok”, said Tim and smiled back.

Over the time they had been working together both had become something more than just good friends. Being highly dedicated scientist types, neither had yet quite decided to act on the nervy loved up feelings that had both rushing whenever they thought the other person wasn’t looking. Suddenly there was a noticeable increase in the energy output, reaching the required level and stabilising. The generator in the background was humming steadily.

“Oh yeah Aimee, we’ve reached output capacity. Let’s put this baby through some hoops.”

Aimee went over to the side panel where several more monitors showed the rate of decay for a small chunk of uranium isotopes. The yellow cake was in the form of a super high density crystal held securely in place by a robotic arm that could position the modular design along a rail that similarly provided the variety and multitude of different laser components to also be reconfigured. Systems were in a constant state of test. Production systems had independent maintenance schedules that required autonomous re-engineering of both onboard as well as chip level components. These could range from a new cybernetic arm or eye, to the latest in silicon injection of digital signal gates and nano-circuit overrides onto existing chipsets.

Lines of inch thick power cables crisscrossed the floor like giant anacondas. Smaller pythonesque yellow and red data cabling rested within its recesses connecting each substation to the server bank. A final set of conduit cabling carried the many network and optic lines that were used by each device for running the server management application. In effect Tim reflected, one team of two people could now achieve more with automation than the entire human race working together could have less than twenty years ago.

Aimee twirled her cute golden locks of hair to her customary right side. She was so cute when she did that. At least that always seemed to be the cue for boys to start fawning over her. Her thoughts though were on another plane entirely. Completely consumed not by the high grade laser design skills that she had supposedly been brought into the project for, but by her assignment.

“Keep Dr Multzein alive. Even at the expense of your own.”, Chief of the armed force, General Clifford had said.

She looked back over at the man standing at the fold out control station for the server core. Steel rack mounted server assets were positioned neatly into every available slot. Upgrades had had to be ordered twice during initial testing. He had been the one both times to identify the bottle neck early before they had got to phase trials. His intelligence on systems integration was almost limitless. Whereas other specialists would become brilliant in one domain, Tim seemed to be the master of whatever he needed that day. From electronic re-engineering, to assembly programming or higher level C++ and C# applications he was an adept. Right now he stood casually, wide shoulders cast in a relaxed and powerful manner. A manner she found rather attractive.

Her own field of specialisation was somewhat different she reflected. She had been trained first as an ASIO undercover operative, but then in access to restricted government technologies. She would never be a mad scientist like Tim, but her skills were enough to understand the hidden databases she had access to. Databases controlled by shadows that didn’t trust civilians. Well she reflected.. Unless you were someone like Tim. Someone that they wanted to catch up to. Someone that needed to be watched and protected from other nations.

Tim strode back to the central control panel for the lasers now. Full of purpose. A giant of a man he stood at over six foot three and worked out regularly on his footballers physique. He turned the knob adjusting the density of laser saturation to full. Her locks shone under the halogen lights.

“You know I never mentioned it to you before Aimee..”, Tim started, keeping his eyes focused on the feedback readouts coming from the central panel.

“but you’re not really a civilian laser specialist are you?”.

It came completely out of the blue, almost innocuously, such that Aimee didn’t really have time to adjust, instead she said,

“Tim I’m not sure what game you’re up to, but the uranium could become unstable if you increase the energy levels too quickly.”

“Aimee, listen to me”, Tim paused and looked up at her. “My best friend taught me a trick, so that I’d know if someone was lying to me. Look into my eyes and tell me your a civilian laser specialist.”

Aimee held his gaze and delivered a cold and impartial response, “Tim, what is this about? We have been working for months and months together. Whats wrong?”

Tim looked down, thinking to himself, an innocent mind answers the question, that was what Davis had taught him.

“Aimee I knew from the first week you started, when you had to consult your computer for the difference between the purple and green diodes we installed in the vacuum tube.”

She knew this moment was coming. It hadn’t been a question in her mind of if but when. However her superiors were not as convinced of Tim’s ability to see the truth. She knew, as she calmly turned to face him chin down staring demurely into his eyes, that she would have to reveal some of the truth, if only to avoid Tim becoming suspicious.

The glare of the iridescent globes seemed to perpetrate the intense mood that had been simmering these last several minutes. Moments of science prevailed upon them both. It seemed in these last months that she had really felt what it was like to reach ones true intellectual potential. Einstein’s ladder to infinity was opening up to her mind and she was loving it. Aussie girls were known for being both archly conservative and carefree. Aimee had an amazing figure. All through school she had been her families primary bread winner. Magazines had lined up, following a national campaign which had left her very well of. Except that it was because of that reason, that she had really never thought her lifelong ambition of being an elite Australia spy, would be realised. It was a hardly a modern phenomenon that spies had to be invisible. Modern times however had given the spy game a much trickier recruiting path. Facebook had ruled out vast swathes of the population. Google ruled out most of the rest.

“Get ready!”, Tim smiled over at her, “1..2..3..”

The room lights were dimmed. The neon glow of the server racks glowed tumescent blue. Red laser suddenly ebbed from the quad head 1200 Megawatt power lasers. Each one had fat power cables flowing greedily out to the power generation facility located in the primary sub basement. Both of them quickly flicked on heavy anti glare goggles designed specifically to reduce the effects by thousands of times. Suddenly her world was made up of darkness and the straight edges of four high intensity beams, each far far more powerful than an industrial cutting laser. Each impacted, or at least appeared to naked eye to do so, on the yellow cake. In reality they each targeted four very specific points in the object’s chemical structure. The phased laser technology that they had designed and built was capable of modifying the molecular structure of the uranium without changing its underlying physical state.

Even Tim had struggled with the math needed to construct the time matrix necessary for implementation of phased tech. Phasing had been just another theory lying in governments secret blackbox before Tim had done this she reflected. She giggled as she had when she was a girl. Then shivered and felt a rush of happiness down her body. He was so sexy right now, a man taking his first steps at titanhood. This discovery once proved would pave the way for the creation of completely theoretical compounds and agents. In turn leading to the development of advanced bio meta organisms and nano powered cyber tech.

Twenty minutes later the machine powered down, but to Aimee it seemed like no more than a minute had past. Her senses were on high alert now. A mechanical arm extended into the secure irradiated metallic egg shell that extended around the lower two thirds of the uranium diamond. The robot arm’s three elbows (a neat enhancement from Tim) all shifted down in perfect unison. The seven fingers spread in a perfect half circle around the thumb gripper. The “open” hand cupped the diamond, plucking it from its perch. The arm then receded into the chemical analysis unit, a massive twelve foot rectangular box that occupied the entire north wall. It was a complete lab and quickly produced a result. She whistled as she read from the display.

“You’ve done it Tim, come on let’s go celebrate your triumph!” she followed with an unconscious wink that she knew would drive him wild.

“Our triumph Aimee, our triumph..” he looked down at his feet.

“I don’t feel triumphant, not yet. I won’t be happy until this technology is used to bring true peace to this world.” Now his head was fully erect staring with a messianic gaze directly into her eyes.

“I’ll come out with you now. You’ve worked hard for me and I owe you a drink.”

She smiled. “Let’s go. One sec.”

She punched in the code as they left the room that would shut everything down and lock the room.

They walked to the car park of the secure facility. Tim just thought she was a brilliant scientist, like him a contractor brought in to solve a problem that had eluded the governments own scientists for too long. They caught a ride in Tim’s XR8 Ford falcon. The turbo howled, as they cruised the outback roads to the pub. If anything Tim’s eyes had got more set. Great thoughts were in train.

“Do you realise Aimee, with this technology, with the modified nugget of uranium back at the lab, we could power entire cities?...limitless cheap clean energy. It might be the only way we can truly avoid a future war for resources.”

“I think that you really owe me that drink Tim.”, she hid her frustration, why did scientist types need to be so clueless with women. She moved her right hand so that it rested gently on Tim’s braking leg. She felt the muscles momentarily go rigid and then relax. She smiled.

The country pub was nearly empty, and they took a quiet table near the corner closest to a large wooden display featuring the local rugby league and cricketing greats. Both were drinking MB (Melbourne Bitter), the only drink that was on tap other than VB (Victoria Bitter). A true country pub. Red dust, hard work and always the hot burning sun. These were the constants of life in the outback. Such constants required a man to quench his thirst. Generations of Aussies had grown strong on its simple taste. But times were changing, competition had come to the beer industry. Aussies always a discerning bunch, had in their laid back style, quietly shifted their drinking habits to the newer super premium range of beer.

Tim’s head was dropped forward staring into the swirls at the bottom of his glass, contemplating the history of beer in Australia. Such a glorious and proud history. He stopped himself and stared up at Aimee. She was so unbelievable, he still couldn’t believe he was working with someone so gorgeous. So smart at everything she did. Too bad she wasn’t interested in him on that level. She probably thought of him as a friend though, she was always so nice to him. He definitely hoped that that was the case.

There was a strange commotion outside. Like a loud bang but with a ripping noise as well. Many things seemed to happen suddenly. Aimee seemed to blur. The table spilled. She rammed him to the ground with a swinging arm. The perfect arc swung tightly as it made contact with his chest, punching him to the ground. Why was she attacking him? The air filled with the unholy noise of steel rain. The distinctive catch of machine guns loading, punctuated with the shearing force of the steel that pounded every surface. Wood splinters seemed to fill the air. Furniture was confetti. Where the flying fuck was Aimee? What the fuck was going on? He didn’t understand, no, he didn’t want to. He was too shit scared to care what he thought.

“Tim stay where you are, don’t move, and keep your head down” sane words from Aimee cut through the melee.

He looked up briefly at her, crouched behind the upended table. Her slim curved figure was jet black in tight black jeans and a figure hugging black tee. Only her white arms seemed out of place carrying the twin 9mm uzi’s that hung with a gunman’s cold purpose at her side. One pointed down the other half raised toward the ceiling. The metal storm abated momentarily. As if on cue at that exact moment, Aimee rolled end over end in a tiny ball to her right towards the pubs front door. He heard rather than saw what happened next.

“Time to meet your maker you cock sucking bandits”, Aimee roared as she rose from her combat roll.

She held the weapons steady and unleashed a hail of deadly fire through the open door, just as quickly retreating to safety behind the bar.

“Tim, we are trapped this is an ambush. There are six of them outside that I can see. Can you shoot this?”

Her question was accompanied by the sliding of an uzi in his direction. It stopped an inch from his left foot.

“Yeah, pull the trigger right?” His words must have sounded hollow and confused, he was fighting a rising tide of overwhelming fear and panic. Man the fuck up Tim, don’t die like this. His old friend’s words seemed to echo. God dam what he would do to have Davis at side right now.

“When I tell you, and not before mind, point at the door and pull the trigger, keep going till its empty ok?” Aimee was already moving leaving the safety of the bar through the current storm of lead. Moving closer to the nearby window staying out of the enemies line of sight. Staying low.

“Now!!!” Aimee screamed. An ear piercing harpies scream. The storm of lead had seemed to slow again. He raised his right arm and squeezed the uzi. He tried to keep it tight and focused on the door. Aimee was no more than two metres to his left. She didn’t even glance in his direction. She had uncoiled from below the window, smashed it and was hurling grenades from both hands out the window. Then she was running back towards him, jumping the final two metres to slam into him even as the magazine on the uzi was empty. For a second time she forced him hard back to the ground. Finishing on top of him, she looked down and smiled.

“You know I like being in control Tim. If you keep this up... oh, ah” she smiled a wicked sexy smile at him that just as quickly vanished from her face. “Don’t worry these guys are small hit squad. But we have to get out of here before they can call for backup.”

Even as she said it, three ninjas came sauntering through what was left of the door. Each held a straight edged ninja sword in one hand and a smaller dagger in the other. Aimee left him circling back towards the window as they advanced. They all seemed intent on him. Tim shivered with fear. Anyone of these jokers could send him to the afterlife with a single swipe of their blade. He shivered again, the fear was like an ice cold poker that seemed to fill every ounce of his being.

Aimee attacked. Her small daggers whirled into hands that seemed to blur as she moved. Legs constantly sweeping in small quarter arcs making it impossible for her opponents to ever face her front on. The right most ninja’s blade was caught in between her daggers. He stopped and drove his dagger towards her chest. She did the splits dropping quickly to the floor. This had the effect of pulling the ninjas trapped blade arm to the ground and pulled him off balance towards her. She rose out of the splits just as rapidly, pulling the ninja towards her as she did so. In a smooth mini arc her left arm parried the dagger in his left arm while her right disengaged the blade and planted itself in his face. He fell towards her. She released her dagger and pulled his sword away as he fell dead to the ground.

The other two ninjas now realised she was the main opponent. One continued towards Tim while the other advanced on her.

“I’ve had just about enough of ninjas for one day.” Aimee leered.

From nowhere the gaps between the fingers of each hand were alive with small serrated circles, no Tim corrected himself small shuriken. Aimee expertly launched them at the ninja advancing on Tim. The first one embedded itself two inches into his carotid artery, the second at the base of his neck sent him tumbling harmlessly to the floor.

While this was happening the third ninja had started swinging in Aimee’s direction. She seemed to effortlessly dance just beyond each swing. Growing frustrated the ninja raised his dagger and hurled it at her. The power of the throw forced her to dodge to the left. The ninja was ready lunging towards her with his blade. She raised her forearms defiantly towards his swing. It was straight down, and she would be cut to pieces by the heavy stroke. Tim screamed, he rose and charged the ninja from behind. Tackling the ninja as he made contact with Aimee’s extended forearms. Only her forearms didn’t cut in two. The blade made dull contact with metal of even greater strength.

As Tim tried to hold the man down, Aimee quickly grabbed his neck and broke it with a swift pull of the ninja’s head. She dropped the motionless body to the floor. Inwardly drooping slightly, then as she recovered her breath, once more exuding a steely resolve and supernatural speed that had been a constant of the battle thus far. Tim looked at her in awe, at last realising he had far more than a colleague by his side. This lady was a pint sized Rambo. She carried enough fire power to take down a section of ninjas hell bent on ambush. The kamikaze nature of the goons amazed him. These people had a look of professional detachment even in some cases up to the point of their death. Although he had seen at least one say something foul in Chinese before being dispatched to the afterlife by pinpoint flying shrapnel from Aimee.

Come to think of it he mused, thoughts still racing, where was she? He turned through three hundred and sixty degrees of total devastation. Every wall was shredded to the insides. The air was so thick with dust that bits of plasterboard were floating lazily down. The detached logical part of Tim’s mind mused on how much better the pub would look now with the open plan afforded by having no internal walls.

Again he heard her before he saw her. Waves of staccato fire came directly from his left out the front, close by. Crouched now with a low sight through the debris of the second window he could partially see a pale shadow drawing of the side of the car and leaping into the air. Her form gracefully twisted, the lead leg drawing toward a ninjas head even as he fought vainly with the air to make small tiny circles that... Thud! Her foot cracked his chin, music played, another body dropped to the dirt.

The other ninjas were advancing on her from behind the other side of the car. No longer carrying swords, all were armed with heavy AK-47 assault rifles that had been modified for urban warfare. Shorter metal folding stocks, thermal scopes, and larger magazines. Five metres from the car they simply opened up. In seconds Tim saw the car would be ripped apart destroying her cover.

Moments earlier, even as the men had begun to squeeze their triggers, Aimee was lying comfortably in the dirt her right elbow stuffed into a patch of mud. She loved getting dirty, and she hated bad guys. Oh! This was so much fun. Her heart slowed even though she wanted to burst with happiness. Her right eye was pressed closely against the glass. The long black sniper rifle had its barrel hidden beneath the car in front of Aimee pointing back towards the three ninjas.

Like lightening Aimee’s arm’s aimed, fired, cocked the bottle action weapon and repeated. The entire time her body lay in a motionless prone position. Hugging the dirt below the line of fire. More dangerous was the random directions the AK’s could go off from a dead man’s arm. Aimee had been expertly trained. Her first three shots left each man clasping his right arm, or rather what was left of it. One man appeared to be barely holding it on. Suddenly two of them fell backwards, killed from bullseye hits to the forehead. Aimee got up.

She scanned around then looked back at the pub. “Come on Tim, its safe. Please. Come quickly!”

Even as he ran out, a silver helicopter dropped in from the sky. The enormous roar that accompanied it filled his ears. The chopper had official markings, side mounted chain guns on both sides, and a massive bulb that was in fact a state of the art sensor cluster.

Aimee seemed to relax to Tim’s eye. He hugged her protectively with his left arm, looking over at the imposing beast. Casually dressed men with blue eyes stared at him from within it. The chopper was now hovering less than ten feet away, one foot from the ground. Aimee hugged Tim back, shouldered the sniper rifle gingerly with her left arm, racking it back on the strap like a pro. She gave Tim a gentle shove towards the chopper.

“Time to get out of here Tim.” Aimee’s words were like echoes.

Something was happening to his mind. Hands descended from the chopper pulling them bodily into the crew bay. Tim felt someone put a seat belt on him.

“Thanks” he mumbled.

Something wasn’t right here, he could sense his mind drifting away from the present. It had happened before, but never like this. All that death, all those killers... dead. He was their silent witness. His perfect world suddenly felt cracked. Irrefutable intellectual arguments became questionable. Give everyone a second chance... yeah but these guys tried to kill us... yeah but nobody deserves to die... ah huh, so it’s Aimee’s problem? His mind could take on each angle of Confucian logic but in the end it kept coming back to the fact that she had single handedly saved his life.

There was no question that they had wanted him dead.

“Aimee. Who were those guys that tried to kill us?”

Aimee considered him from behind a laptop that she was still typing into. Without pausing she said, “Your assailants were members of a group of Chinese mobsters who call themselves Blue Tiger.”

Tim perked up, “You mean Japanese mobsters? Those guys were ninjas.”

The hulking warrior in the chinos and red flanno next to Aimee sniggered. He stopped when Aimee drove her elbow into his side. But he didn’t seem to recoil at all from the elbow either. The blow seemed to make a dull sound like metal.

“Oh Tim! You’re so cute. No, there not Japanese, they’re Chinese. Blue Tiger hit squads are famous for dressing up as ninjas. They are mercenary thugs with body armour, heavy weapons, blades and Kung fu.”

“But you beat them Aimee! You singlehandedly wiped them out.” Tim knew he was getting slightly hysterical, he could hear the tone in his voice.

“Tim, you have to trust me ok. Now is not the time, but suffice it to say, I had some help.” By way of explanation she removed a clear rounded eye patch that had been covering her left eye and lent over Tim. She cupped over his left eye and pushed firmly until the tiny seals around its edge stuck. Suddenly his vision was filled with tactical data. Streams of information flowed along, but the one he could see related to the people surrounding him.

The stream showed video and text that explained the teams’ current operational status, their designation and mission parameters. It was clear from what he saw that they were an elite espionage squad working for ASIO. Captain Aimee Jackson was there highest ranking field officer. Her latest assignment had been him.

Aimee was to provide him with theoretical knowledge of phased power lasers. She was then to remain on overwatch to protect him from what the military expected was an inevitable backlash. That had come pretty much straight away. Tim didn’t understand it. Security had been super tight since he had started on this project. They had only just generated the first of many possible exotic compounds.

Aimee looked at him, and as if reading his mind said, “Hey look don’t sweat it. They probably had that pub under round the clock satellite coverage. Seeing both of us together may have been enough to trigger a takedown condition. We captured one of the bad guys, maybe he’ll talk...”, her tone suggested she thought that was unlikely.

“We’ll be back at the facility soon Tim.” She smiled up at him, filling him with warmth.

“It’ll be ok, Aimee. This shit happens to me all the time dont’cha know?!?” he looked at her hard, as she started to laugh. A deep belly laugh.

“You make me laugh, Tim, you know your my favourite assignment right?”, he smiled back at her shocked by her sudden admission of interest and the hot glare of the western sun burning his unshaded retinas.

Chapter 1 Part 2

2011-10-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

A Test Of Australian Character – A Test Of Time
Chapter 1B by Tobias Nixon

No sooner had Davis Lockyer returned to the grass and his corporate buddies than the police descended on him. Inspector Ian Kramer was authoritarian and controlled in what he said,

“Mr Lockyer?”

“Yes”

“I understand you were present when the helicopter crashed into the side of the building.”

“Yes”

“Crashed into the conference room that you were sitting in?”

“Yes”

“Was there anyone else there with you?”

“No”

“Well that is fortunate, but I’m slightly confused, were you sitting near the door, however did you escape?”

“I was positioned near the door, by chance I caught a glimpse of something coming towards the window, then instinct just took over Detective.”

“hmmm, you are a very lucky young man, just one last question.”

“Sure”

“We see your firm has declared dealings with the Black Skulls”

“Yes, they have investment needs like everyone else Detective. We provide excellent returns on our investment products. Are you interested?”

Kramer laughed at him,

“Not on my salary mate, but listen I don’t recommend Techred, Coutil and Banks do business with that scum.”

“Why ever not? They are the same as all our other premium customers. They pay up front and have money to invest. We have done extensive due diligence as you would expect when dealing with a bikie gang with links to organised crime, and have never found any reason to believe the equity they bring to the party is problematic.”

“Like I said Mr Lockyer, I don’t recommend it.”

Detective Kramer left with a slightly worried look on his face. He didn’t move far. Back to Davis he crunched over to a cluster fuck of senior police who were “assessing” the devastation that had erupted in one of the busiest blocks of the central business district.

Most were senior officers, however one plainclothes guy caught his eye. The man was casually dressed, his clothes were hard to distinguish. Come to think of it, his face his body language he was almost blending into the scene before Davis’s eyes. He had a cat like grace and seemed to at once be both standing at the shoulder of Kramer, then in the next blink of the eye, be standing at the same shoulder of Kramer’s commanding officer.

Just as Davis was looking away he felt a draw in his eye, and looked back catching the shadowy figure looking directly at him. The man smiled at him. Not in a particularly menacing way but not in a way that could be in any way considered friendly either. Like an; “I see you fucker, and I know who, what, you are.”

The company secretary had worked tirelessly for the last twenty minutes to gather everybody around her boss the CEO Michael Douglas Weyman. He now held court, and Davis moved over to stand at the edge of the assembly.

“Guys! I’m proud of you. Today was an extremely difficult day for us. Thanks to some fast thinking and a bit of luck, everyone will be ok. I can’t ask you to go back in there..”

chuckles and outright laughter are quickly replaced by more silence.

“The company has an offsite recovery site so our server infrastructure is intact and failed over the moment the techies cut the switch. You have all been given RSA tokens, so please head home now and as of tomorrow continue your work from home. Please speak to your managers before you leave. Thanks team!”

Time to bail, Davis said goodbye to his team and started walking back towards Wynyard with Ronnie. The distance and the walking seemed to help him think. He had made lots of money on the thinking man’s walk through Martin Place. It had overtaken the hot shower in the morning as the biggest gold mine of new ideas.

“I don’t know about you Davis, but I don’t really want to go home right now..”

Said Ronnie, the long haired brunette was tilting her head at him, letting the rays of sun glint magically from her long shiny locks.

“There’s something special about you Ronnie”

Davis started,

“But I don’t really feel like an all night bender, off my chops crawling along Oxford Street at four in the morning.”

He smiled realising how lame he probably sounded to this hungry hot young lady.

“Not at all Davis, I didn’t mean that...” She stopped talking and stepped in closer towards him.

“I’m..” he waited patiently, picked up her right hand and held it.

“I’m a bit scared tbh, nothing like this has ever happened to me before.” [pause]

“Can you come over for a bit?” Davis just nodded, it had never been this easy before, especially not with someone as drop dead gorgeous as Ronnie. Girls – what a fucken ongoing mystery he thought.

They swung by the DJs food mall on Pitt street picking up an impressive array of things for dinner, and a bottle of Semillon Sauvignon Blanc. The trip back to Ronnie place was uneventful, but Davis could feel his nervousness increasing. His heart beat raced. He’d never really thought of trying to actually follow through with the constant flirting which they enjoyed each day. Now she was asking him to deliver. His skin raced with a feeling of static electricity. His spine tingled.

The sun had dipped, and late afternoon had been replaced by the shadows of early evening. People walked quickly to their ride home. The streets were packed with fast paced salary men.

Two blocks from Ronnie’s place, and the two of them were keeping up good banter, enjoying the warmth and security of each other’s company. The late afternoon of the Emerald isle was always deliciously intoxicating to young couples. The warm air and seductive promise of the night gave purpose and intent to their journey. The sea of suits seemed to thin. The corner was still one hundred metres away, they were walking past the Queen Victoria Building where the crowds were a thick stream unending flow.

The lovey-dovey moment faded. Davis looked harder at the shadows running down each shop wall. Given the events of the day Davis felt justified in being jumpy. The slightest thing out of place and it was making him jump like a bitch in a dead end alley. Loosen up he told himself stop looking for shadows to jump at.

The shadows. The twenty metre stretch of crowd in front of them was covered in unnatural shadows. Davis skin was crawling badly now, years of hard training in Thailand starting in his late teens made what happened next, happen on a purely instinctive level. The shadows were men in dark suits that leaped forward impossibly fast. Davis used his free left hand to push Ronnie well behind him, forcing her back towards the crowd, and in one continuous motion completed a graceful spin move which started him running towards the oncoming ninjas.

There were five of them, each carrying short flat blades that looked like the thinner Chinese or Siamese weapon than the thicker better wrought Japanese version. It didn’t matter the results of being stuck by one were the same. Death cleared Davis’s mind of any thought, his mind was primed for attack. In this case how to survive the onslaught of a squad of death dealing ninjas.

The first ninja warrior to his left slowed as he closed the final metre, rolling past and to the left of Davis so that he came up directly behind him. As the human shadow rose his blade cut smoothly in an arc through the air towards where he thought Davis’s throat should have been. Several seconds earlier the second ninja had also closed the distance. This shadow was then in the act of following up with a second blade directly to where Davis’s sternum should have been.

“In battle sped is of the greatest concern, it is the road to victory.” – Sun Tzu.

Davis was a student of the master. In a moment that seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously, he had jumped and caught the overhanging roof awning outside the two dollar shop that was the stage for his impromptu street battle.

He dangled for less than a second, just long enough to let the first two get too close to each other, and then he dropped. His right hand came down in a powerful arc, letting the dynamic of falling turn his hand chop, which hit the first ninjas shoulder, into a force equal to over a quarter of a tonne. In an instant the ninja’s collar bone snapped, forcing him to crouch on the ground in agony. As his feet touched the ground he rounded and spun on his back leg bringing his left hand up and catching the short blade falling from the broken mans arm. This was instantly pivoted in the left wrist turning back towards the body of the second ninja, even as a third one glided in from the right making lightening quick short stabs straight at Davis’s midriff. Instead of pulling back he continued moving forward.

Slamming his blade into the blade of the second ninja, he pushed up violently in a brutal motion that forced the man’s arms into his head, a rough punching action that slammed the man’s own sword handle into his nose. He spun hard moving around to face his back. The fourth ninja moved in from the shadows raising a sickle looking weapon high and bringing it down towards Davis’s head, the third ninja moved off balance as his blade sailed harmlessly through the air where Davis had been standing. Davis pushed hard and slammed into the back of the second one, pushing him into the third. At the same time he threw a reverse leg kick pushing out hard and slamming the hardened heal of his foot with a sickening crunch into the balls of his enemy.

The guy crumbled with an audible curse “ta ma de” [Chinese:Fuck], so these guys weren’t true ninjas thought Davis, at least one of them was Chinese, probably all of them. That meant this was likely a gang sent from the mainland. No one that he had seen in the local fight scene had shown these kinds of skills, at least not five guys with this much talent. Lucky he thought that they weren’t really ninjas.

Such idea thought bubbles were like a thin wisp of smoke, when the battle demanded his full attention, demanded he keep a clear head. He pivoted again on his back leg, adopting a low crouching stance, as he grabbed a handful of the fourth ninja’s hooded head and pulling him like a battering ram towards his buddies.

He knocked this one out by ramming him into the second one, who was now off balance. In a flurry of hand movements he threw 10 hard punches to his adversary’s solar plexus. Predictably the forearms protecting the head and neck dropped.

Davis moved in very close, never slowing as in a smooth arc, he wrapped his thick right forearm around the back of the neck of the second ninja. The dark hood shook slightly, groggily, as Davis crashed it down into his sleeping buddy. Blood spilled from head wounds on both men. The ground had taken on a light hue of dark red.

The third and fifth men circled him now, wearily, blades drawn out pointed in. The blades were dancing now.

They had seen how quickly Davis worked without a blade but by keeping distance and moving as a team it would or should be significantly harder for their adversary. The blades rose and dove cutting towards their intended victim.

The victim bit back. Davis ducked then rose in a side lunge to the left, rolling even as he rose and launching from the roll straight into a tackle into the fifth’s left leg. The chop from the swinging sword arm came down off target pulled of course by the tackle in a much wider arc. It caught the other pseudo ninja in the upper right arm, burying deep.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” screamed the assailant.

Now only the fifth and final shadow man remained. Davis’ left leg shot out catching the guard of the blade, knocking it to the ground. Davis then started a feint, using a combo of two swift left jabs and a right cross to the man’s head, the arms of his opponent went straight up to protect himself. Davis was already shifting to his right, turning inwards away from the ninja.

His next left hook quickly turned into a reverse left elbow to the stomach. The elbow made contact ripping up into the sternum forcing the arms down. Davis was already in another small arc pivoting one hundred and eighty degrees to bring a twelve to six right elbow sailing down from above.

It cracked his opponent right on the crown of the head, forcing him to stumble backwards. Davis spun again this time three hundred and sixty degrees and followed up with a spinning heal kick that landed cleanly on the fifth’s head snapping it back in an audible thud. Knocked out before he even hit the ground.

Davis looked around surveying the carnage. He quickly removed one of the hoods. The Asiatic features were distinctive. As a long time resident of South East Asia, Davis knew his hunch about them being from a Chinese gang was correct.

More worryingly this guy had a gang tattoo of a red teardrop under his right eye. Proof enough of involvement from mainland china. The Blue Tiger were in Australia. Shit had got very serious.

He moved back towards where he’d left Ronnie. She was standing at the front of a small crowd that were transfixed, forming an open ring of people stunned into silence by the intense one way nature of the fight. Clearly no one knew quite whether to cheer or run.

Several were already on their mobiles to the police. Most likely grainy footage would be on the nightly news or at least the local YouTube channels. It was time to move. He held her, whispering to her that they had to clear the scene in case more ninjas arrived.

They shared a long undefined moment of tenderness, lost in a tight embrace of shared nervousness and fear. He could smell her fear.

Davis looked back around at the crowd. A white van with no number plates had pulled up next to the pavement, the unconscious and the dead ninjas were already loaded into the van, the door slamming shut ripping out into the traffic narrowly missing oncoming traffic as it used the other lane to jump ahead.

Why Davis considered, did they not want their identities revealed? Why didn’t they want the authorities to know that the Blue Tiger was on a secret mission into the heart of Australia’s largest city?

By rights the five mercenaries that had been sent would have been able to take down almost anyone. There masters would not make that mistake twice. Blue Tiger were drug traffickers, gun runners and slavers extraordinaire. He had to get out of here.

The timing was too much to be a coincidence, he thought as he pulled Ronnie quickly through the crowd. She was in shock, as many of the watchers in the crowd were. So much blood and violence was to the uninitiated almost inconceivable until you lived through it once or twice he reflected.

As he marched on it was two blocks before the parting crowd started to recede again and the pair returned to a relative state of anonymity. He reasoned even with the lack of hard evidence, some grainy iPhone footage would on the six o’clock news.

Before long he was going to get more questions from Inspector Kramer, and he had fuck all by way of answers. Answers, he needed some.

They marched on desperate now to get to a place of relative safety. His calm even pace and alert protective nature, seemed to feed into her growing sense of panic and need for control.

She looked over at him every five or six paces trying to gauge his thoughts or just ground her thoughts? He could have calmed her but he didn’t even try.

“When times are easy be tough, when times get tricky it won’t be as rough” – Jo-Jo “Muay Thai” Pho,

His kickboxing instructor had often seemed to be far more of a master of the internal arts than just the external brutality for which he was renowned throughout Thailand for. If he let her ride it out now, her own mind would have significant mental defences should she have to go through it again, something he had no way of knowing. If he made her feel better she would be at best a liability, at worst a basket case for the rest of her life. He did however turn and smile at her.

“You really are as pretty as a rose, Ronnie, I don’t know why I never told you that before.”

She smiled exquisitely back at him, her lower lip trembling, but never took her eyes away from his. The moment seemed to slow, as her eyes searched his face looking for signs of weakness. Some common ground for her fear to feed on.

There was nothing. Ironically this seemed to feed her hunger. She stared again, but he was striding ahead pulling her with him towards the entrance to her inner city apartment block.

“Ronnie, let’s get you home, I’ll make you dinner. Also I don’t think its safe tonight, do you mind if I sleep on the couch. We’ll go see the cop shop first thing in the morning.”, Davis had a voice that was at once casual, yet also very firm.

It said I am dependable, something he had found over time that women loved. It said I am a secure human being.

It probably helped that he was also being sincere.

“Ok” –Ronnie.

They entered the lift. Her nerves were too much. She.. broke down crying pushing herself into him, and then it was on. The lift was a whirl of two bodies unleashing months of pent up passion. Davis felt her sweet lips and waited trying to savour the moment, praying the lift would rise even faster. He wanted so badly to fuck her brains out right now.

“Slowly Davis” Ronnie cooed, “I want you to hold me, all night. I want you zooo bad. I’m scared and I really don’t want to be alone.”

Lonely darkness descended on the city. Random lights filtered through the bedroom window as they lay in bed together naked. His chiselled stomach was pushed up flat against her tasty curves. His left hand loosely hanging on to her right breast.

Her skin was so soft and peachy reflected Davis as he relaxed in post coital bliss. Her hands never stopped moving, strugglingly to cover every part of his ripped musculature. He could tell she still awake, all they could think of was more of the same. He stared at her, and felt a shiver of pleasure run down his spine. Her body was hot from sex; the temperature was rising.

Hours later, in the small hours past midnight, Davis lay awake by himself, the sleeping body of an angel beside him. The full moon was hanging low in the sky. He deliberately avoided looking at it, preferring to conserve as much of his natural night vision as possible. The one bedroom apartment was fifteen stories up, sitting just behind town hall, on Liverpool Street.

His gaze fell to the bed sheets; the soft duvet was made with Egyptian cotton and duck down feathers. He imagined her curvaceous white body beneath the surface. He knew what he had to do now. He needed to form a circle, enter back into the dream world, speak with his father.

But to do that, to be able to stay long enough and have the strength to hear his father’s words he would need help. He simply wasn’t developed enough to do it on his own. He needed to go and see the tribal elder.

As Davis ideally thought of the magical times of his childhood, spent following the tribe around central western N.S.W., memories of rites and rituals came back to him. The first time he had been taken into the dreaming.

The visions that had resulted, and the endless conversations which his dad, Bear had said were all part of fine tuning his “receptivity” to the practise. Even now he could barely summon the dreaming on his own. Today in the office had been a strange fluke.

“The need comes with the moment, the moment is created from the person’s need.” –Cub.

Cub, his uncle the one who had saved him. Had it been him? Or was it just his imagination? Something had stopped a couple of hundred gallons of jet fuel from exploding in his face. Cub hadn’t done that though. He had seen him fighting with a fire elemental.

The huge fiery being had looked alive with rage. Had wanted to kill him. Cub had calmly held it at bay. Stopped the fuel from igniting? He only had questions and desperately needed to advance his understanding of these strange events.

The ridges and dips of the duvet were like a mini mountain range. It reminded Davis of his adventures in the Himalayas. Looking at a particular spike it reminded him of the ascent up the Eisner, or crossing one of the major ridgelines after base camp on the northern ascent of Everest. That light red line looked out of place though. A laser light coming from... Thoughts stopped, adrenaline pumped hard forcing his muscles to take on super human levels of strength. Rock hard arms wrapped around the sleeping form of Ronnie, and his body rolled out of the bed, letting his back take the impact as they tumbled onto the floor.

“What? What are you doing?”, like an angry bee, she was buzzing, yet confused.

No time to explain, only act. A hail of noise erupted inside the room. The bed where moments earlier they had been asleep was being ripped apart by a storm of bullets. The feathers exploded upwards from the doona. The room was quickly filled with duck feathers floating to the ground.

“Oh my god!, oh my gawdt‽‽” Ronnie shrieked with a wilders eyes.

Aside from this outburst she was shaking, her naked body was calm. Her large breasts rising and falling evenly. A sure sign she was coping with the pressure.

“Crawl to the door, Ronnie, Go!” so saying Davis let go of her and started crawling himself.

Who knew what else would be coming through that window. Clearly they had a night vision or a heat vision scope. The laser light from the sight was military. The bad guys were tooling up and coming in hot.

Outside the room they quickly found some clothes for Ronnie, then headed for the front door. Outside of the apartment, Davis quickly checked the elevator, it was heading up, still five floors away.

“Quick!”

He had a basic intuition it was them, and had no intention of hanging around with Ronnie in tow to find out.

“Fire stairs!”, Davis held Ronnie’s wrist and tugged her into motion.

They started to descend the stairs.

“De ja vue?”, Ronnie asked, but Davis silenced her.

“The stairwell echoes sound, shhh”, then he smiled at her.

At each level a digit was painted onto the back of the door leading out to that level of the apartment complex. They had just past “2” and were descending the last four flights of stairs. He was jumping down the stairs as fast as he could behind Ronnie, when he heard the number two door crack open.

“Keep going Ronnie! When you get to the bottom get straight out onto the street and head directly for the police station on George Street. Stand next to someone else at all times. Even though its late, try and find and stay with a crowd of people walking in the same direction. Nothing they have done to this point indicates they are willing to start indiscriminate killings.”

Davis wasn’t too sure about that, but he needed her to be strong. She seemed to vacillate between staying and going. Her eyes looked up into his imploring him.

“Go!”

Davis forced his voice up as high as he dared. “Go now!”

The light footsteps were descending in seconds his assailants would be upon him.

How had they found this place so quickly? He’d ensured they weren’t followed. Doubling back, taking false routes, changing appearance twice. That meant some form of high tech surveillance. Either long range scopes from building tops, or perhaps, illegal access to satellite imaging. Hmm what if it was worse? What if there was someone on the inside? Access to the police database? The level of organisation required was starting to really add up.

No more time to think, those light featherlike footsteps... Davis crouched waiting for his opponent in a small unseen area of the stairs just below the level one landing. Feather feet walked across the flat landing. Davis’s leg shot out hooking and tripping the lead right leg. Dressed all in black, just like the others. Another ninja? Blue Tiger!

His rage intensified, he would make these clowns pay. Davis retracted his leg forcing the ninja to trip forward, keeping a the other’s leg in a tight hold with his own. As he fell forward Davis brought both arms forward using his fists to bury a hail of punches into the upper body. Causing it to fall backwards in the opposite direction. The result was that the other man fell horizontally towards the ground. He brought his elbow down on the other man’s head and throat, knocking him unconscious and leaving a nasty headache for the morning when he awoke. When he awoke, well, the Blue tiger clan were not exactly known to be a forgiving bunch to those that failed on missions.

He heard a scream from below and immediately began running for the exit two flights of stairs below. Hurling himself down the stairs he leapt-ran each flight in two giant strides. His ankles compressed and groaned at the strain of hitting hard concrete. Davis reached the ground exit and immediately hurled an explosive front kick at the doors, which obeyed and exploded outwards with a groan of hinges partially ripping from their housings.

In front of him a helicopter was hovering half a metre from the ground. The blades ripping through the air forcing the air back against his face, throwing up all the debris and loose dirt in the surrounding gardens. He pushed himself forward against the power of the wind. The chopper was a light grey colour with thick blue and red diagonal stripes. A modified, stripped back huey.

He peered into the guts of the door less cargo bay, seeing Ronnie trussed up, arms bound to legs like a pig. The modified nature of the chopper became more apparent. As he advanced, a ninja sitting behind a mounted 50 cal belt fed machine gun opened up.

Reflexes already on edge from a day’s fighting gave him a narrow edge. He drove his body to the left not even knowing what was there. He felt his body scraping against the hard concrete of the path, as he popped into a judo roll and came up behind a short brick wall. All around him the entire courtyard was being ripped to shreds by the untold power unleashed from a storm of .50 calibre bullets.

Davis waited, counting. At the precise time, remaining out of site behind the short wall, he rose, knowing as he did that the machine gunner would have to wait several seconds to allow the weapons barrel to cool sufficiently. This guy apparently had no idea or just didn’t care and continued firing. The weapons firing chamber made a chinking noise, at the same time that the red hot barrel stopped spitting instant death, and like a fat Cuban cigar smoked lazily.

Davis knew he had only moments, he sprinted down the path, the chopper was starting to pull off the ground, he could feel the backwash of air being fanned down from above. The chopper pilot had turned the aircraft away to the right so that the cabin crew could no longer see the path. The tail spun around, the blades narrowly missing Davis as he came forward beneath the rising chopper.

He jumped thick hands wrapping around the legs of the chopper. He threw his left arm over the top locking it in with the right hand. As he kicked his left leg up and over the bar he looked over his right shoulder and saw the ground falling away already one thousand metres distant. Over the engine noise he could hear the faint screams of Ronnie, but nothing else.

This was a Blue Tiger snatch squad, sent to retrieve a bargaining chip. Standard practise in Asia. Use your friends, your family, even your children as blackmail. They must have had extensive surveillance setup to get that far. These days if you wanted to track someone down double quick you needed access to an eye in the sky.

The latest satellites, launched since 2008 could use laser spectral analysis to pinpoint everything from the signature of any electronic modern consumable to the water density of every type of known organic on the planet. They could see under, over and through the sea, a fact that was still not widely known outside of the intelligence community. They could use heat and chemical sensors to detect movement in any direction, through buildings and even underground. In short staying undetected was next to impossible from one of these suckers. And it had been quick. Far too quick. The deal with the bikies had only been on the horizon three weeks ago. The bikies had only committed to terms and transfer protocols in the last week.

That meant that even with an inside rat and state of the art surveillance they had been in place for one to three days. Once again he wondered at the level of his own governments’ involvement. The mobsters didn’t have satellite time. Not even state sponsored ones. Especially not the state sponsored ones.

He knew there would have to have been at least one bad cookie in ASIO cookie jar. A greedy bureaucrat signing away US satellite time. He wondered if Uncle Sam would be pleased to know that its south pacific sheriff was proxying resources to Chinese mobsters. He filed it away for later, when not if there was one.

He had two options. Remain hidden until the destination, or enter the cargo bay and kill everyone but the pilot. The problem with hijacking a chopper which wasn’t a highlight of most Hollywood films was that even if you could fly a chopper yourself, most didn’t have an autopilot. By the time you removed the existing pilot from the seat the whole thing would most likely have pitched sideways and fallen out of the sky. Davis had an ace up his sleeve.

He twisted on the bar so that he was now draped over it, and brought his feet back towards his knees letting them rest on the choppers landing bar. He reached up with both hands and as the chopper rocked to its right, his side was jerked up. Like a panther he launched upwards, inwards towards the cargo bay, past the silent machine gun mount.

Four more ninjas were inside keeping Ronnie company. Arms folded, eyes ahead. His method was brutal but effective. Using aikido leg throws, he grabbed the smaller Asian men and hurled the first straight out of the chopper. Pivoting to the other side, he grabbed a ninja with each hand and pulled them to their feet. As he did he dropped all his weight forward and threw each arm out perpendicular in scything overhand elbows. Each clipped the inside temple of the two rising ninjas. Stunning and pushing their centres of balance dangerously towards the open sides of the cargo bay.

The roar of the chopper screamed. It began tilting more violently. The passenger had turned and was silently screaming at his pilot. The two stunned ninjas stooped low and began to rise, flailing their arms to stop from falling. Davis moved closer and then stepped between them, moving past and spinning one hundred and eighty degrees fast, so that he was behind them. He grabbed each from behind, with a fair grip of skin and black ninja cloth. Then he pushed.

“Fly”

Davis said, “if you can”.

With that they fell towards the ground. The remaining ninja was out of his seat, approaching warily. Without any warning, Davis used a sudden forward tilt of the chopper to lunge at his opponent. This time putting a hand snake like, up, in, in there.

“Kai!”

Davis screamed an ancient war cry he had been taught using his voice. Time seemed to slow, for the ninja at least, even as Davis’s arm slid up and past his defensive pose. He struck with his fingers extended in a hard spear like posture. Aiming behind and just below the neck, inserting the index finger into the central nerve point at the top of the spine. It created a mild block, stunning there lower limbs. It was then a simple matter to kick away their legs. And push. Only Ronnie remained lying tied to a seat in the cargo bay.

Her hair was dishevelled. Her eyes had run, leaving thick trails of mascara running down the sides of her pretty face. Her head was tilted slightly to one side as she looked up at him with big dove like eyes. He gave her a quick thumbs up and leaving her to sit and watch, turned his attention to the cockpit. There was only a small sealed persplex window for observation. If he wanted to enter the cockpit, he was going to have to mount an assault from the outside of the chopper and somehow get either door open. This was easier said than done. Even if the doors were unlocked and nobody was holding them in the downwash from the blades acted as a drag holding the door in towards the frame.

It was time for his ace. He positioned himself in front of the small window and focused his mind. True concentration came from completely letting go of thoughts, letting them merge into a single powerful thought. His fist was tight, held next to his ribs. The thought released. Soon he would have this, soon he would unleash his surprise.

The arm sprung forward like a catapult. The fist hit the persplex completely shattering it. The chopper veered violently down and to the left as the pilot was distracted from the plastic shattering on top of him. His fist turned into a powerful grip which shifted to the right.

The passenger had recovered from his shock and was already turning and shifting to the left, bringing his gun up to shoot. Davis used his wrist to slip a lock around the hand holding the gun, forcing it to go off whilst it was still pointing at the pilot, who promptly fell over dead.

Davis’s world seemed to stop. Up until that point everything had seemed somehow sane, in a quirky kind of post modern James Bond kind of way. The ace was trumped. Open mirza. So how exactly was this chopper going to land now anyway?

The control stick pushed forward, the chopper lurched forward. Time slowed down. Rain pellets pounded the windscreen. The passenger screamed an unholy high pitched jarring sound. Massive arms extended out and grabbed the pilot ramming him hard to the left and up against the pilot door. The passenger shifted over to his left, scooping up the control stick as he did so.

For a moment he seemed distracted from the previous minutes. His cold stare was held on the parabolic descent path that the front of the chopper was sliding down. The rain no longer struck the windscreen. In mere seconds the blades would lose their “grip” on the air. At that point time really slowed down. Davis’s own eyes were glued on the scene confronting him. He was looking at the ground rushing up. The blades were straining against the limits of their powers. The engine was emitting a loud thudding noise and a noticeable increase in thermal output.

The passenger’s hooded ninja suit seemed to billow as his upper body rippled with muscular power. Biceps squeezed and ripped massive rippling forearms yanked and pulled. It was immediately obvious that his actions were not those of a noob. Unseen beneath the cockpit his feet worked the pedals, shifting and guiding the arc from straight down to an equally violent arc towards the heavens.

The bird screamed as the motor hit max revs. Oil began to burn from excessive heat build-up. The passenger coolly glinted out at the world that was now passing on a steadily rising diagonal horizon. His head was hidden behind a full face ninja mask, so that only evil intent eyes looked out upon the world. Big black eyes with red irises gave the devil’s own cause for wickedness a good impression of walking the earth. Even as the chopper stopped its heaving, his subtle manipulations of the bird continued.

Davis was taken completely off guard by the choppers sudden wide arc to the left. He had been allowing the passenger time to right things and deliver his surprise. His flaw almost proved fatal. He felt rather than thought that he was in freefall. Unlike Ronnie he was not tied to the floor. The passenger improved the angle turning the entire cargo bay on its side, almost but not quite pushing the rotor blades beyond the vertical limit. Davis had hands. I mean when boxer talk about having hands, they mean fast fabulous hands that dance all day. Davis had hands that were faster. It was all that saved him.

In the moments preceding the freefall he had been standing about one third out from the middle of the cargo bay, closest to the broken cabin window. When he fell his left hand shot out and grabbed the upper rail that ran around the top of each side of the cargo bay. Using a rock climbers grip, he held grimly as his entire body weight time’s six gravities was pulled towards the ground. He knew the passenger could not hold his aerial manuvoure for more than two seconds. By the time the bird swung back into a true line with the ground, his left arm was numb from the strain.

He let it fall to his side. He only needed one good arm. His two feet fell like panther paws to the deck. They sprung him in a single smooth arc that landed right up next to the cabin window.

The passenger sensed and reacted as his senses warned him of impending disaster. Leaving his left arm to guide the bird, the ninja dextrously raised his right arm and twisted his wrist so that the curved dagger that suddenly appeared pointed backwards in a wicked arcing motion towards Davis’s shoulders. The ace was already in play.

Davis didn’t even try to block the knife arm. Instead with complete reckless disregard for personal safety he spun one hundred and eighty degrees so that his right arm was closest to the passenger’s body. His right elbow shot out violently. It’s powerful tricep punching with the forward motion of a air fed jackhammer.

The tip punching the knife forearm, even as it in turned sliced a shoulder to shoulder blade crimson tide. A wide arc of flesh seemed to hand loosely. But that was because Davis had his good arm moving with incredible speed. With a single touch of his index finger, Davis drove into the T4 vertebrae at the base of the neck. Stopping as his nail was mere millimetres away from the spinal nerve. His ace was delivered.

He felt a rush of energy that seemed to mingle with the evil spirit. It didn’t matter he felt the warm rush that signalled his “energy” had taken subconscious decision making capacity away from his adversary. The passenger was also an adept an fought bitterly against the mental intrusion. But it was no good. The point of the physical contact, as Davis had been taught, was to attain an overwhelmingly initial advantage over the opponents mind, so that they could not defend.

It was said some ancient masters no longer needed even physical contact to incapacitate foes, before eventually giving up such techniques altogether. Davis had been gifted with relearning some of the first stages of this technique, the only ones that still existed. The passenger sat rigidly as Davis sat on his ear issuing instructions.

“Find a flat area of ground and descend.”

The passenger, face hidden from view, was sweating profusely. Veins popped out near his temples as he fought with every ounce of his being to break the psychic lock. It was no use it was all he could do just to stop himself from slavishly following the other’s instructions. His dark pool, the part he thought of as himself, was under attack. No it was worse, it was being hidden from him. All he could do was follow the immediate orders given to him, stay busy and wait.

The chopper landed in the green fields of Parramatta park. As if by design the exact moment of landing seemed overly rough, and as Davis looked, the passenger somehow, completely against his own understanding of human physiology managed to grab the pilot door, open it, ram the dead body and himself head first out of the door, and combat roll away into the park surrounds. Before Davis could pursue he quickly had to hit the kill switch on the chopper. The engine seemed sigh as parts cooled back to within standard operating tolerances.

He looked up but the passenger was gone. At least both he and Ronnie were safe. He looked around, and she was crying. The tears of a lady whose purpose was confused and set upon. He immediately went to her and wrapped his huge arms around her, pulling her tight. They looked out of the cargo bay at a small pond. A gaggle of ducks sailed sedately on the ripples from the chopper’s down wash.

“Just hold me Davis”, she said.

“I will. For as long as you want me to.”

He replied.

Chapter 1 Part 1

2011-10-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

A Test Of Australian Character – A Test Of Time
Chapter 1A by Tobias Nixon

Davis Lockyer’s 3 bedroom apartment, 7:02:09 Rosebay by the water

Davis Lockyer left the realm of dreams. He was a daywalker once more and an emperor no more. He woke gradually, rolling groggily out of his fart sack to hit the smoothly ground.

The alarm clock started buzzing five seconds later, and died just as quickly from a well aimed shoe travelling at close to the speed of sound. His morning routine started... now. One thousand bicycle crunches, then fifty chin-ups from the bar hanging above the bedroom door.

Bam! The Suns up, bright rays burn through the wide open glass, his eyes light up and shift focus. Pushups... always until his arms are burnt and the pain has turned to the numbness that signals the onset of lactic acid induced muscular failure.

Protein, carbs, water; the holy mantra of millions of gym junkies. His body was toned and proportioned. Sculptured so that the limbs and torso were hard and thin like a boxer, with the same amount of body fat.

Lean and quick as his brain processes 3 different channels. Financial news, overnight, overseas aggregated market data and proposals already flowing through from the centralised trading platform that the company ran.

The days trades, the daily grind. He runs. It’s what he does, to unwind and to think. To and from work every day. 10 km in 38 minutes. It wouldn’t get him to the Olympics, but then he didn’t run for others, he ran for himself. Each day to start the grind with a map he built on the way to work.

His mental map for how to get to X. Where X was a giant gold pyramid with Davis sitting on top. Of course being a prodigious runner also helped to burn the long lunch on the way home.

Long lunches were as much a part of business as data analysis and board room brawls. You needed clients with fat bankrolls if you wanted to build the world’s greatest private equity firm.

Muscles bulged while he adjusted to the strain of the final uphill climb on the way to work.

“Whenever your mind imagines a challenge, the world has another, greater one in store for you Davis. Always remember mate, your work is never done until it’s started...” his uncle Cub’s words.

The words of bear, from the mouth of his brother cub.

“Life was never simple, until it got complicated. Then, when the shit really started, the men stood up and the boys walked away.”

More words, this time from bear, floating to him like the cool September breeze that billowed over his face as he raced past Rushcutter bay’s foreshore.

“Why do my words find you? Because of time, and patience.”
This time the words of cub, but in the voice of bear.

Sometimes the pain of complete sadness seemed so overwhelming, that he prayed it would engulf him. For to engulf him he felt, would give sanity to an insane world. Sometimes he felt rather than saw a world he could never go back to.

A simpler world, containing people he would never see again, that he wanted so desperately to speak to one last time. Life truly was a one way road, with most people waiting till they were at the end of the street before realising it was too late. But pain, pain was a tangible asset. His to induce and control.

He was near work. Time to put memories of childhood back in his mind box. He remembered what happened when he let emotions get in the way of professional ambition.

Reverie replaced with hunger. Success is the motivating character in the drive to conquer fear. But for Davis failure was the one word he just didn’t understand. Nothing in this life could not be conquered. He knew how to step it up whether by concentration, determination or longer hours at work.

This credo wasn’t universally shared. Most of his work buddies just tried to get through their nine to five workloads. Even so most ended up pulling ten to twelve hour days just to do that.

This was a young man’s game. A game that chewed up and spat out ninety nine for everyone it let slip through.

“If you start with nothing, what you feel is no less real, so when you are finally, truly nothing you will realise there is still so much more.”
Bear and cub standing in the faintest of shadows their voices in unison and barely a ripple...

His office was a shared cubicle space. Spiralling out from a central lift well. The entire floor of Level 8, 42 Martin Place represented the culmination of eighty years of Techred, Coutil and Banks’ business acumen.

The space above each cubicle dripped with hanging monitors and huge flat panel TVs displaying detailed rate and equity charts and streams of datasets. The odd spare panel beamed the fox sports feed with replays of NRL and AFL games.

Stock tickers ran the numbers in an endless flow. Clean unadorned charts that zigzagged in response to the ever changing sentiment of that most elusive of personalities, Mr Market.

His desk was more or less a microcosm of this high tech den. The four flat panel monitors and quad core i9 64bit workstation were the tools of his trade. But the twenty thousand dollar custom leather back chair was probably his most substantial, but necessary luxury, he gently reminded himself.

Davis ran the key equities team, which had a wide ranging brief to gain exposure domestically as well as in key Asian markets. The teams research assistant Ronnie came over with his morning macchiato.

“Mmm tanks Ronnie, gotta say mate ya looking unbelievable. How much weight have you lost?”

“Hai! Achtung Davis”

“Why?”

“Why are you about to spill coffee all over that Chart pack?”

“Ficken Hell!”

“Mmm I love it when you try and talk German to me, by the way Friday drinks, ja?”

“Will you bring me jugs of Hahn premium all night, balanced between you, ah Jugs?”

“Nein that would seem unlikely...”

“Ok! It’s a hard skill to master... I’ll give you until the end of the month. By the way where’tcha get this macchiato it’s delicious, just like you”

“Cafe lab on my way from Wynyard they do it well, do they?”

Ronnie smiles in a genuine and intriguing way. She cocks her head looks away then just as she looks back she raises her eyes, making them big and engaging. At this point most male, and some female visitors were putty in her hands.

Gorgeous and highly intelligent research assistants imported from Germany were only one of the many fringe benefits of working for TCB. As companies went TCB tended to take employee satisfaction, and therefore retention, very seriously.

The screens were a steady mixture of green and red. Patterns of capital flow between equities, players and institutions. An eternal war of attrition. His companies positions were a couple of points out in front of the market, a situation that could change at any second.

At thirty two he was already middle aged by the standards of his industry. No touch of grey, Davis loved what he did, and you never needed to stress if you didn’t lose too often he reflected.

“There is only the one true path, hold to the centre” – Bear.

“The centre is hidden, whichever path you take” –Cub.

“The true path is whichever path gets you to the centre” – Bear.

Davis had what he hoped was only going to be a thirty minute meeting at 10:30. He wanted to get out for lunch, maybe hit up that nice bank teller for some chitchat. But that was only if he could convince his new client to buy his pitch.

The meeting was with a shadowy Lebanese biker. The guy called himself, Bill “Firehead” Kaboul. He preferred “Firehead”. He wanted access to the firms enhanced rates, and, with the kind of flows this guy had promised, Davis’s job was to do anything possible to make that happen.

Davis decided casual and charming was probably the best lead. He was leaning back in his chair, right leg laying loosely across his left, left hand twirling a gold plated pen expertly between his fingers five or six times a second. Overall it was a carefully crafted image of casual anticipation. Davis was smiling a big white toothed grin as Bill entered the room.

The biker seemed more massive and fearsome in real life. Davis reflected photos in the paper had a way of hiding life’s ugliness. Bill farted as he sat down, a deliberate slap down of any inference or deference to the culture of TCB.

“Davis?”

“Please to meet you Mr Kaboul. On behalf of my firm TCB I’d like to say how excited we are to be working with your company.”

“Listen...”, FireHead pauses leaning menacingly across the table, slamming his closed right fist like a boulder against the expensive teak table,

“Cut the BS matey. I’m a Black Skull. We don’t represent the kind of business you normally deal with.”
Davis waited several seconds, letting the raw tension of the moment drain away.

“I appreciate that, how can we help?”

“Your firm is looking to expand its operations into Asia with at least three billion dollars in new funding, but in today’s market you’ll never get that kind of wholesale funding and maintain your current profit margins... you’d have to increase TCB’s already impressive returns by another four to five points, which of course everybody knows is impossible.”

“You seem well informed of our current operational strategy Bill, for a biker...”

“Don’t be fooled sonny there are lots of kinds of bikers, the Skulls are an international organisation these days and we aren’t really good at trusting outsiders with our accounting. It’s funny never thought riding a hog would get me into tax law, haw haw haw”

“Impressive, but in all honesty we need alot of money to get the next phase of expansion right, were you looking for a couple of points stake? Our firm also has some other excellent existing funds under management”

“No! You misunderstand, the Skulls will wire you the entire amount you seek.”

Davis outwardly didn’t change, he remained calm, but inside his head a storm was brewing.

“The entire sum? Ok, Not to be rude, but what exactly do you want in return Bill? Why not spread the Skulls money out, minimise their risk for a small cut in profit, I can show you how to get a better than market return on that kind of sum.”

FireHead looked at him deadpan, then let out an enormous belly laugh,

“I think that if I wanted to minimise risks I would not be in the business I am... Davis.”

Davis returned a deadpan expression,

“hmmm, ok, so you’re looking for high yield returns, which is what my firm specialises in. The problem you have though is your going to be investing a large amount of capital. That kind of amount comes with liquidity problems, problems that again our firm is well positioned to assist you with.”

Davis got up and walked towards the glass windows that covered the north wall facing towards the opera house and Sydney harbour.

“For such assistance we will require a fee of eight percent.”

Davis turned to face the much older bikie. His old leather vest reeked of sweat and oil. His girth was so large it rested on the armchair’s arm rests. His hair was rough and blown from thousands of kilometres riding bare back in the hard Aussie sun, wind ripping through him as he rode his ancient Harley machine.

But his eyes. His eyes were precise diamonds that cut straight through Davis. Here was a man that was equally at home at an outback pub brawl, or in one of the cities corporate boardroom brawls.

His eyes contained a simple message, don’t fuck with me, or I will fuck you and everyone you know. Not a boast, just a promise. Old school.

Both parties stared at each other for long minutes, Davis could feel the tension, but this was not the moment to break it.

“Show no weakness, unless you want your balls cut off” – Cub & Bear.

As if by some strange miracle Davis looked over to the left out the massive glazed windows towards the opera house. The sun blazed through, and something else. A strange glint as if from metal. It was metal. A huge metal object, hurtling through space incredibly fast.

Blades whirling at impossible angles. Huge counter rotating blades that scythed through the air towards his window. Davis, even if he knew what he was looking at, which he did not, had no way to process the rapid sequence of events that was currently unfolding.

“Get down mate, nowwwww!” growled Firehead in a guttural snarl.

Davis felt a dull thud, and the rough shoulder of Firehead crashing into his back. Firehead had moved round the table and was in the process of crash tackling the both of them towards the door and the floor in no particular order.

Somewhere extremely close by, Davis felt rather than heard the sound of a massive explosion. The sound was exquisite torture to the ear. A harpy’s shriek, red hot steel had reached melting point, causing any remaining fuel to explode.

Twisted metal tearing through metal and glass. Jet fuel burning.

A twisted wreckage of what looked like the front of a helicopter coming towards the two of them with impossible speed. Even with Firehead’s tackle they were metres short as the shrieking steel, should, have flattened them like pancakes. In effect it should be cutting them to pieces and then barbequing the leftovers to a blackened charcoaled crisp right about now.

Instead his body was shaking violently. The axis of the room wobbled alarmingly, seeming to reset the horizontal to the vertical. For a moment he sensed rather than saw a ripple effect spread out from the far wall.

The room itself took on a dream like feel. Walls no longer had hard edges.

Firehead was missing, and so was the source of the explosion. There was simply no end to the vibrations that savagely broke through every layer of his being in waves of pain. Then came the fire.

An elemental being of light and energy seemed to engulf the room,

“Nothing escapes, everything burns!” it shrieked at Davis.

It turned its huge dragon like head towards him. Massive overlong arms reached out. Each finger tip was a short lance of fiery molten lava. It wanted to shove those lances through him. It wanted to rip his soul apart. He could hardly move.

This new realm had another dreamlike quality. It was all but impossible to control. His feet felt like they were buried in molasses. Another ripple ran down the far wall.

The timing was just as well. He suddenly felt a burst of energy in the dream and moved rapidly back from the hulking fire daemon that was stalking him across the room. Then the room wobbled again, and cub was there dancing in wisps of smoke.

“Bear says you must hurry young nephew, we will try to hold this thing back, but it is beyond us to do so for very long”, said cub in an ethereal voice.

It echoed from beyond reality. Like ripples across a lake.

Davis cracked a wicked smile wishing he had the power necessary to speak back to Cub, but it was all he could do just to move his legs. The true dreaming had begun. The fire thing cracked its left maw, dripping hot molten droplets to the ground. It was preparing to crush them, battle must be joined.

Its right arm was raised high, as it approached. The slow speed of its advance mirrored the arrogance that raced across the black daemon eyes. Cub was still dancing in the smoke. Davis looked closer and realised he was dancing above a corroboree fire.

Around him the smoke seemed trapped, billowing up his sides but never straying more than a few inches from him. It rose to a point like a burning gas flame. A point that challenged the eyes to follow. Trapped within a cave that was not a cave, in a dream that was no longer a dream. Was the room a cube or a sphere?

Cub lifted both arms palm up, slapping them three times together then pressing them together high above his head. Smoke billowed out of his mouth like words. The smoke words raced together then through each other, until they were apart. Like bees the smoke was chaotic – unable to remain in one place, just as quickly it raced into forming sentences, sentences that soon turned into pictures, pictures that started to blow away. As the smoke cleared, each picture was revealed to be a new dream entity. The last vestiges of smoke were gone now, leaving several new beings that now stood between Davis and the elemental.

Its rage was very clear; the being of fire was a mortal enemy of the new group of creatures. Nothing else could produce such hatred. It was etched in every line of fire that cut across the hulking monstrosities face. Hatred was too weak an emotion but it was all Davis had as a point of reference.

The eons of mutual animosity that these two types of creatures shared was impossible to quantify. The nature of their battle however was not.

The group of smaller creatures were squat and had human like bodies, however that’s where the similarity ended. The head was massive and extended from the shoulders straight up with no neck. They were also hairier than a caveman. If Davis thought about it he would probably have said they resembled small yetis. Each one carried a massive club. They triggered a memory for him of one of the beings said by the elders to exist in the dreaming.

The group of five advanced on the fire daemon. The battled was almost fully joined. The yeti like creatures broke into two groups each parrying the wild fiery sweeps. One copped a lance straight through the chest, it screamed as a jet of hot lava burst through the other side. Another took the opportunity and smashed its bat against the same arm.

The other arm was like a skewer. While one of the defenders went low and bashed the legs of the daemon, its arm drove through his two buddies, finishing them with hot jets of molten lava.

However the little creatures were hardier than Davis thought. The skewered creatures used their bulk to pull the daemon off balance keeping it from attacking. Davis wondered if he could have displayed such utter courage in his final moments.

He suspected it would not be an easy choice. The bats of the creatures were keeping the daemon at bay but were making little headway towards killing it. Suddenly one of them shrieked what sounded like a command at Davis’s uncle Cub.

“Eay she dah gur mer Qi” [Fire can be held at bay no longer, bring the waterman we must return to the dreaming]

So saying Cub brought his arms down from above his head and made a single booming clap in front of his body. Another creature entered the room through the far wall. It was similar in appearance to the fire daemon but made of running water. It took two steps each one over two metres and jumped onto the back of the fire daemon. It’s much thicker arms wrapped around the other beings thin neck. Pushing, merging into its body.

The two daemons became less distinguishable. Less giant humanoid figures, now two balls. One of fire, one of water. Now there was just one ball chasing itself. And then there was smoke, wisps of thick acrid smoke that smelt of ozone. The two remaining stocky creatures picked up their three stricken comrades and ran towards Cub and the far wall. The smoke got thicker around them, and then they were gone.

The room shifted. The walls took on straight edges, the corners of each surface were visible once more. The fire was real. The heat emanating for it, burnt. It burnt the hair and clothes. Instinct drove him now, forced backwards, he grabbed a clearly confused Firehead and pushed him out the still intact double doors to the conference room. The doors didn’t close. Even as they rounded the corridor connecting the room to the rest of the floor. Those doors exploded outwards unleashing the hidden hell that was growing within.

“Stairs, where are the fucken stairs matey?” asked Firehead.

“I ain’t got no fucken idea how we survived that living inferno. By rights we be dead men walking. I mean I already seen my life flash past on fast forward, so I know that shit was for real.”

He paused seeming to realise what he had just said. Davis instinctively understood that this was not a man that normally questioned his existence let alone discussed such matters with others.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here Mr Lockyer... Now!”

Davis led them toward the fire stairs. They were further than the lifts and he felt a need to take them, but reasoned it was a stupid idea. Whatever had happened in that room was going to spread, fast. He risked a glance behind. That half of the floor was burning. Fire had already ripped up the walls, anything more than twenty metres away was hidden behind thick arid black smoke. The smell of foul plastic carbon turning into gas choked the lungs. Nothing was clear beyond that gaseous wall. There position less than thirty seconds ago was literally a hell on earth.

“Don’t slow down sonny!”, Firehead yelled hoarsely, ripping Davis along by the arm.

“I ain’t gonna asphyxiate just after surviving that!”

They jogged brokenly towards the stairwell. Once inside the air was cleaner, and packed with panic stricken men and women that like sheep were falling, running, pushing and shouting their way towards the exit many floors below. From what he could see on the way through the floor had been empty. He hoped to hell everyone had made it out. Nothing was going to make it out any longer. At least they were on the top floor. No chance of people being trapped higher up above the fire. At least he hoped so.

He saw Ronnie. “Hey are you all right?”

“Yeah Davis, I think so, god what happened?”

“I don’t know, did everyone get out?”

“We were soo lucky Davis. Did you see what happened?, someone rang the fire alarm, but nobody knows who or why. But no sooner had it sounded than fire started ripping through the floor. Everybody just ran. Will from market operations kept his head and got everyone moving in the right direction. Oh god!”

She started to ball up. Crying was all she could do right now.

“Its ok Ronnie, its going to be ok.”

Not knowing what else to do he started giving her a comforting back rub.

“Your alive lady, and your... ok. Just hold onto that.”

He smiled at her a big warm smile. She looked at him softly clearly her moment of panic had been broken. “Thanks Davis your like the big brother I never had.” Davis stared at her in mock aghastment.

“ZOMG Please don’t say that, I’m still going to hook up with you one of these days.”

She looked at him again, the out-and-out horror replaced with a cheeky grin, then kept moving down the stairwell.

As he moved he jumped the stairs two at a time, some sense of urgency seemed to push him onwards, and it wasn’t just fear of what was quickly burning its way down from above. He slowed as he caught up to Firehead who in his own unique way was rolling down the stairs like a sailor. His feet shimmied along the stairs. Legs bowed his concentration was clearly focused on getting speedily out of the burning building. They didn’t talk the rest of the way down just worked as a team, through the thickening crowd of people emptying from each floor as they descended.

At about three quarters of the way down, they encountered fire fighters heading back up. The senseless sheep gradually became calmer and more orderly, people stopped shoving to get past, and thoughts of immediate painful death retreated from everybody’s collective consciousness. On the grass outside gathered with the rest of his team and the other company groups, he sat and thought about what had happened.

“We can’t hold it for long” Cubs words came back to him like an echo through a dream.

It had seemed like a dream, only more like an out of body experience. A waking dream. The place had been the conference room but the walls were not. The space inside was not. He had seen cub. Not imagined him. He had seen him. Unlike the rest of the room, cub had been crystal clear. Just like the last time he had seen him. The old warrior had looked him in the eye. What the fuck had happened? Two or three tonnes of white hot aircraft wreckage had been held at bay.

The jet fuel that was already evaporating into a gigantic fuel bomb inside the room had been prevented from burning them both to cinders. What could stop three and half thousand degrees of brazing heat? The laws of thermodynamics said not much, certainly nothing came to mind. Davis’s hunched body must have looked graven. His frame like stone as he pondered on the events just moments before. Firehead brushed against him as he sat down, his wide girth making and taking up the ground around him.

“Listen, Davis. Cops are gonna be here soon.”

“Yeah no doubt”, Davis said somewhat distracted, but on closer examination of Bill Kaddoul’s ashen face he added, “Look don’t worry about it. Get out of here I’ll handle it, say I was in that room by myself preparing for a meeting later on. I get that. And I’ll get straight onto the proposal for you.”

Bill laughed, “Mate you’d be forgiven for not thinking about work at a time like this. I like your professionalism. We’re going to do some business!” He gripped hands in a wrist lock, very firmly, staring hard into the young investment banker’s eyes.

This wasn’t your average hairy, beer drinking, hard riding, drug running biker scum, but Davis had already known that. He’d done his analysis of the gang’s structure. Most of the Intel hadn’t been found in the archives of Bloomberg or the net. Some, but the most interesting had been restricted police Intel. Intel TCB had had to pay handsomely for. It had been worth it. You didn’t get jump into bed with a new partner without some protection. Definitely not when several billion dollars were at stake. The police informants had been unanimous. Bill was close to the top. Close enough to make decisions, far enough that he wasn’t under constant surveillance, and powerful enough that he still had his hands on the till. Bill walked away towards the bike he had illegally parked up on the curb right outside the front of the building’s foyer.

Something else occurred to Davis now, a small warm rising feeling that rushed like lightening up and up from the small of his back. That feeling like warm water running along his nerves. Felt so many times around the campfire with Bear and Cub. Right before... Bang! No! This time it was different, something else was happening. His field of vision changed, altered subtly. The side peripherals became as sharp as in front. His natural focus seemed to track along a thin string several kilometres in length. He could see four blocks away as clearly as the back of his hand. Most startlingly though the people around him each had a small cloud above their heads. No that wasn’t right, it was more like a mushroom and it fell down to either side of the body, engulfing the entire body in a thin wispy transparent multi coloured shell.

Davis started to notice not everyone had the same colours washing over them. For starters almost everyone seemed to have a healthily looking blue green ocean wash above their corona. Several people did not. One employee that was being treated for smoke inhalation by the ambos, had black flecks running in random patterns all over his chest. The ambos were fitting a mask over his head; suddenly the flecks grew smaller and less frequent.

Davis gazed beyond the milling crowds back towards the entrance of TCB’s building. His sharp gaze instantly cut across the distance. The rolling pot bellied figure of Firehead was climbing aboard his hog. Hot red energy engulfed Firehead’s mushroom shell. It was super shiny though, seeming to contain more raw energy like a sun was blazing from inside. Davis looked closer at Firehead. Beyond the shell, concentrating hard on the red shell above his head. The red became lines of red, lines that lead and were followed. Like a river, Davis had his eyes drawn by the pull of the current it exerted.

Images appeared; images flashed and were each replaced like a disjointed movie. The director randomly throwing his audience between scenes shot at the beginning and the end, moving the audience towards the middle. Davis tried to concentrate on what he was seeing, but the harder he focused the more the images seemed to slip.

“Let go of what you try to hold. Stand in the centre so the whole is revealed.” – Bear’s words.

Perhaps your right old bear. He tried to loosen up and stop focusing. He let the rush of images fall into his mind. But it was no use he felt weak, weaker by the second, whatever had given him this ability, and it was fading fast. The images were dynamic like little scenes, each one had Firehead somewhere in the frame. They all seemed to centre on the clubhouse and people that Bill was talking to. The other senses were blocked, there was sound but it was deliberately faint, the words of each party merging into a single background noise.

“Focus hard enough, and you will hear and see everything.” – Bear again.

Davis redoubled his efforts; he had to find out what this strange vision was trying to tell him. A scene sharper than the others emerged. Firehead was standing with a taller biker, who in most other respects looked just like Bill. He was the Black Skulls global chieftain.

“Bill the game is changing. The money from the latest crops and batches is coming under renewed interest from the AFP and their getting help from the states. The amounts are too large to keep in cash, it’s being tracked according to our informants, even after it’s been cleaned. Who knows how long it is before they try and declare us as terrorist organisations. The fucken irony, we are their rebels, we are the last tangible fucken link that these broken monkey’s have with freedom.”

Mid rant tall guy spun and slammed his huge rocklike fist into the counter bench. The three beers sitting there jumped as if in alarm, the counter mat an old Manchester united scarf skidded towards the recessed beer taps.

“Black Skull’s need to move now on the full burn strategy, and I’m placing you in charge of that mate.”

Firehead appeared to grunt, looking intently into the his bosses eyes. Tall guy paused for emphasis, then continued,

“The time for action has come, you’ll take over the negotiations with the firms we have selected, and work with the Dame-Chaser and Low-Blow to arrange transfer of the gold once you are ready for it. I don’t even need to tell you what happens if you fuck up mate. You know, I know, that’s enough...”

He looked back at pictures on the wall behind the bar. Fallen comrades in arms, honoured forever in the clubhouse in which they had found sanctuary as was its tradition. Tall guy’s eyes blazed focused back on Firehead.

“One more thing boyo. Recent intelligence seems to indicate that our efforts to conceal the full extent of our cleaning and transfer operations were not entirely successful. Word is that the Rebels, along with that Chinese mob we used in that equity buy and sell are after some pie. They may have hired private contractors. Be very fucken careful mate. I don’t have to tell you how.”

Suddenly the crystal clear nature of the vision was gone. Davis felt rather than saw his regular vision return. The small ice like clarity of every object, reflecting details that could so easily be absorbed by the eye, was gone. It didn’t fade, just one moment he could see four blocks clearly, and the next he couldn’t see past the first.

What the fuck was happening? He suddenly felt an immense and prolonged wave of sadness. The world was a harsh and unforgiving place, and right now he felt like retreating to his inner city loft and curling up in a ball under the thick duvet. Maybe even calling someone not so special to come around and provide a false sense of belonging. To in truth let him fuck and forget this day, in the same way some men polished a bottle of Jack before hitting the hay.

Nothing made sense, but he knew sure as shit that punishing or pleasing himself wouldn’t help either. He needed to remember. He knew that, instinctively. What had happened had reminded him of a tale from his childhood.

“When you run through the woods by day, or by night, there are signs, ignore them at your peril” – Cub, or “Keep your eyes open young bear, the wind whispers your song” –Bear.

When Davis had been born his mother and father had already been divorced. He spent the first five years of his life living in a small house in Balmoral on Sydney’s north. Then his mum had snagged a rich American and headed off for the big apple. Many years later it had been his step dad who had provided the references to his first job at DeutschBank. He had missed out on that year’s graduate intake.

Despite being rated in the top one percent of students all through high school, he’d flunked his way through economics on a massive alcohol and drugs binge. His mother and father had never really been enemies; they had in his mothers words grown apart as his father became more intensely spiritual and emotionally distant. In his father’s words his mother was not prepared to let go of the false imprisonment of society. The familiar trappings were indeed something that Davis had had to let go of even before he really knew they existed.

At the age of six, his mother had left him with his father and uncle, to live in a remote indigenous community in central western NSW, some ten or twelve hours west as the crow flies from Sydney. At that time and even in this day and age of increased social interest, very few white fellas had tried to live alongside the aboriginal people who continued to live the traditional nomadic lifestyle. Davis had grown up with a boy from the tribe called Jay, his best friend. Until he was fourteen and his mother had returned to Australia, he had been schooled by his father and uncle in the ways of western society, completing primary school by distance education.

He had been trained by the tribe, his mob, in the ways of the tracker. Jay was the son of the tribes chief elder, together they had learnt the songs, the dances, the ways and the words. Then the real teaching had begun, until on his thirteenth birthday he had been sent out alone into the wilderness for three weeks to live off of the land. The land had thrown up many challenges but from that day on he had never felt scared. Not until today.

One of the less important (to the young Davis) aspects of his spiritual training was the lessons in the dreaming. At the time they were stories. Stories he assumed like everyone else to be a living document. A way for the tribe to pass on stories that sat at the core of the tribes’ belief system. Perhaps more had been passed on. Bear had told him that the dreaming was real, that he and cub believed it was a manifestation of human potential in the waking world. They had spent every morning analysing his dreams, waking him up in the middle of the night, constantly reminding him to remember who he really was. By the age of ten he could control every dream he had.

Then as a teenager the partying had taken over and the dreams had reverted to the normal kind that everyone had. Sporadic, hard to remember with Davis as a passenger rather than a driver.

He understood at an inner level that Bear and Cub had taught him things, and embedded even more at a much deeper level. But the things that had happened today, they made no sense. Or maybe? The vision he had been shown, it seemed to indicate that there were parties after Firehead. After today it was obvious to Davis these groups were trying to put a stop to the deal Firehead was charged with completing. With more questions than answers Davis Lockyer closed his eyes. He thumbed his temples. This was zomg wtf.