Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,4

until acquiring an actual target, had waited calmly for the enemy to appear. A mistake.

“Open fire!” he shouted.

The enemy descended.

From above.

Falling among branches and severed leaves from the canopy, they arrived. Through the debris filling the air, Trung saw figures—their exposed tan flesh and ruddy orange fur. Then a flash of white skin. A long beard. Perhaps glasses. The man appeared and disappeared as the chaos erupted.

Against roars and brute force his men fell one by one. Few shots were fired. Several attempted to fight hand-to-hand, but they lasted mere seconds. In less than half a minute, ten of his best fell to the savage yet incredibly organized attack. They were severely outmatched. As his remaining men fearlessly engaged the enemy, he slunk down and slipped behind a tree. Sure he hadn’t been seen, he turned and ran.

Four days later he emerged from the jungle, his feet swollen, his body craving water. He looked little better than Giang when they’d first found him stumbling from the jungle. When his men saw him, they kept their distance, fearing he’d been infected. After demanding a water bottle be thrown to him, he drank its contents and related his story. Still fearing Trung might be ill, but fearing his wrath even more, the soldiers helped him to his quarters, where doctors tended to him.

A week later, cleared of the mystery illness and feeling strong, Trung met with some of the nation’s best doctors, scientists, and government officials. The scientists were stumped. The disease confounded their attempts to understand it. Without discovering the source of the infection, they wouldn’t be able to understand it . . . or find a cure. Even with the source they doubted whether they could solve the riddle.

They needed help.

Loath as he was to admit needing assistance, he could think of only one nation with both the scientific and military capabilities that would be required to track down the source and develop a cure—America. He left the meeting having said nothing of the plan brewing in his mind. But he put things in motion that night. The Americans would bring their best military and scientists . . . and he would be waiting.

TWO

Beverly, Massachusetts, 2010

DANIEL BRENTWOOD HAD never fancied himself a family man. To be a family man, in his mind, you first had to be a ladies’ man. After all, procreation only happened with a willing partner. And throughout his life, willing partners were not lining up. He’d been a glasses-wearing, pocket-protecting geek in high school. An Apple IIc and a pirated copy of the kung-fu game Karateka had been his best friends. Throughout college he’d been a perpetually mocked virgin and the butt of more than a few shower room pranks, though he’d managed to trade the Apple in for a brand-new PC featuring Windows 3.1 and a pirated copy of Doom. And now, ten years later, he was CEO of Elysian Games, one of the top video game developers in the world, alongside Blizzard, Microsoft, and EA. At thirty years old he’d built an empire and made more money in a year than most people did in their entire lives.

His glasses had gone the way of the Tasmanian tiger, replaced by contacts, and his pocket protector had been displaced by a PDA, but he was still a geek to the core. There was a time when nothing could distract him from the games he created. Then he’d met the proverbial “her.” Actually, he’d hired her. Angela O’Neill. A brilliant programmer. He admired her talent. Few women got excited about creating realistic gaming physics, but this one did. But that wasn’t what pulled his eye away from the computer screen. It was her penchant for tight T-shirts that accentuated her chubby love handles. He wasn’t sure why, but those love handles drove him crazy.

As it turned out, she had a thing for PDAs. They’d married a year later—a grand spectacle and perhaps the only event away from the world of computers that half the guests had ever attended. Then, two years ago today, they’d had a child. Ben. A little runt with light blue eyes, pale skin, and jet-black hair. Angie liked to joke that God had turned up the contrast when Ben was formed.

And now that Ben was two, they were tearing themselves away from the business. Away from the computer screen. Away from the chaos. Lynch Park was their destination, a park full of green grass and tall trees with two small beaches, a half-shell