Snakehead

agreed. We have very little time, but I’ve assembled some of our best people. They’re getting equipped right now. You and Daniels go with them. We parachute you onto the oil rig. You find Royal Blue and deactivate it. Meanwhile, my people kill Major Yu. If you can locate the whereabouts of Ash, so much the better—but he’s not a priority. What do you say?”
    Alex was too shocked to say anything, but next to him, Ben Daniels shook his head. “I’m happy to go,” he said. “But you can’t be serious, asking Alex. He’s only a kid, if you hadn’t noticed. And I’d have said he’s already done enough.”
    Some of the Australian officers nodded in agreement, but Brooke wasn’t having any of it. “We can’t do it without Alex,” he said simply.
    And Alex knew he was right. He had already told them what he had done on board the Liberian Star: the bomb and the scanning equipment. “I scanned my fingerprints into Royal Blue,” he said. “I’m the only one who can deactivate it.” He sighed. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
    “I’ll expect you to look after him, Mr. Daniels,” Brooke continued. “But we don’t have a lot of time to argue about this. It’s already seven o’clock, and it’s a two-hour trip.” He turned to Alex. “So, Alex. What do you say?”

    Two men and a woman were watching the sun set on Reef Island.
    The island was only a quarter of a mile long, but it was strikingly beautiful with white beaches, deep green palm trees, and a turquoise sea…all the colors somehow too vivid to be quite real. The north side of the island rose up, with limestone cliffs covered in vegetation and mangroves below. Here sea eagles circled and monkeys chattered in the trees. But on the southern side, everything was calm and flat. There was a wooden table and a bench on the sand. But no deck chairs, no sun umbrellas, no Coke bottles or anything that might suggest that, just over the horizon, the twenty-first century was ticking on.
    There was only one building on Reef Island, a long wooden house with a thatched roof, partly on stilts. Normally, there were no generators. The only electricity was supplied by wind or water power. A large organic garden provided all the food. The owner of the house ate fish but not meat. A few cows, grazing in a field, were milked twice a day. There were chickens to lay eggs. An elderly goat, wandering free, was no use at all, but it had been there so long that nobody had the heart to ask it to leave.
    In the last few days, the island had been invaded by a press corps, which had established itself in a series of tentlike structures behind the house. The journalists had brought their own generators. And meat. And alcohol. And everything else they would need for the press conference the next day. They were enjoying themselves. It was nice to be able to report a story that people actually wanted to hear. And the weather during the last week had been perfect.
    The woman on the beach was the actress—Eve Taylor—who owned the island. She had made quite a lot of bad films and one or two good ones, and she didn’t really care which was which. They all paid the same. One of the men was an American multimillionaire…a billionaire, in fact, although in recent years he had given much of his wealth away. The other man was the pop singer Rob Goldman, who had just returned from his tour of Australia.
    “ASIS are still insisting we should leave,” Goldman was saying. “They say we could all be killed.”
    “Have they explained the nature of the threat?” the millionaire asked.
    “No. But they sounded serious.”
    “Of course they did.” The actress let sand run through her fingers. “They want us to go. This is a trick. They’re just trying to scare us.”
    “I don’t think so, Eve,” Goldman said.
    Eve Taylor gazed at the horizon. “We’re safe,” she said. “Look how beautiful it is. Look at the sea! That’s part of the reason we’re here. To protect all this for the next generation. I don’t care if there’s danger. I’m not going to run away.” She turned to the billionaire. “Jason?”
    The man shook his head. “I’m with you,” he said. “I never ran away from anything in my life and I’m not starting now.”
    Three hundred miles farther south, in the cities of Derby, Broome, and Port Headland, thousands of people were watching the same sunset. Some of them were on their way home from work. Some were tucking children into bed. In