by Tom Clancy
Despite his sudden rush of adrenaline, Howard said, “And Lieutenant Winthrop isn’t supposed to be snooping in certain areas, now is she?”
Fernandez opened his hands, spread his fingers, and held them in an I-give-up gesture. “What can I do? I’m just a sergeant; she’s my superior. What I know about computers you can put in your ear, with room left over for your finger. Besides, what’s the point in being part of the world’s best geek team if you can’t poke around in the stuff wherever you want? It’s real. Congratulations, John.”
“Thanks, though I’ll believe it when I see it.” He felt his spirits soar. General Howard. Now there was a term.
Fernandez chuckled, reading his mind.
Howard recovered, tamped down his excitement and ego. “How as Joanna?”
“Pregnant as a crowded maternity ward. Not due until September, and I have to tell you, I don’t think I’m gonna survive it. One minute I’m her angel and I can do no wrong, the next minute she takes my head off ‘cause I’m breathing too loud. She eats catsup on mashed potatoes and sprinkles salt on her ice cream. She pees forty-nine times a day.”
Howard laughed. “Serves you right. When are you going to make an honest woman out of her?”
“June first, so I have been told. She’d rather wait a year, it supposedly takes that long to set up a wedding, though that doesn’t make any sense. Failing that, she wants to get married before the baby is born, and she doesn’t want to look like a brood sow, so it’s got to be by then. It’s not up to me, I’m just the groom.”
“Weddings and pregnancies are like that, Julio.”
“I do get to pick the best man, though. You interested in the job?”
Howard nodded. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss watching the infamous Sergeant Julio Fernandez tie the knot for all the tea in India. Got a sex on the baby yet?”
“A boy.” He grinned.
“Picked out a name yet?”
“Five of them: Julio Garcia Edmund Howard Fernandez.”
Howard stopped walking and looked at his friend. “I’m honored.”
“Not my idea, blame it on Joanna. Got a couple of grandfathers in there, too. Me, I’d have named him Bud and let it go at that. You get to be a godfather, too—another of her crazy ideas.”
Howard smiled. He was going to be best man at his best friend’s wedding, godfather to a boy wearing one of his names, and promoted to a general in the Net Force version of the army. You didn’t get many days like this one.
“I hate to spoil the moment, but how about our fugitive?”
“No spoilers there, sir. He lives in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, all by himself, doesn’t even have a dog. Most ambitious thing he seems to do is building a rock wall along one edge of his property. He keeps a zero profile, doesn’t socialize, doesn’t talk to anybody, far as we can tell. Just piles up local rocks. Hard to believe this is an ex-Spetsnaz wetwork specialist with forty-four confirmed deletions to his credit.”
“Well, if Vladimir Plekhanov can be believed—and the interrogation shrinks assure me that he can—the man who calls himself Mikhayl Ruzhyó is somebody whose skills are not limited to stacking rocks in the desert. We want to do this by the numbers, nice and clean, and gather him up gently enough so he’s alive to answer some questions.”
“No problem, piece of cake. Though I thought the Russians were our friends these days.”
“I believe that is a facetious comment, Sergeant. You know as well as I do that the more we know about our friends, the better off we are.”
“Amen.”
“All right. Let’s see what Big Squint has for us.”
“Command post is in the coolest corner I could find, General.”
“Let’s wait on that promotion until I see it in writing, Sergeant.” He grinned.
“Something funny, sir?”
“I was just picturing you as a lieutenant.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“If I was a general, they’d have to listen . . .”
The worried look on Fernandez’s face was priceless.
Saturday, April 2nd
The Yews, Sussex, England
Major Terrance Arthur Peel—Tap to his mates—stood next to Lord Goswell’s greenhouse, behind the main house, watching as the beat-up black Volvo arrived. The groundskeeper’s trio of dogs—a pair of border collies and an Alsatian—set to barking.
Peel liked dogs. He’d rather have one of those in a tent with him in the bush than the most sophisticated alarm made. A dog would let you know when you had company, and a well-trained dog could tell the difference between your friends and your enemies. And he would rip the enemy’s throat out if you set him to it, too. Unlike people, good dogs were loyal.
The Volvo pulled to a halt, and the door squeaked open on the right side, disgorging a tall, spindly man of fifty, hair gone gray, with more ethnicity than perhaps his name would imply: Peter Bascomb-Coombs had a bit of the hooknose in him, Peel knew. He had done the background check himself.
Bascomb-Coombs wore an expensive, if ill-fitting, ice cream suit, a yellow silk shirt and blue tie, and handmade, pale gray Italian leather shoes. Certainly none of his ensemble was cheap. The shoes alone had to set him back three, four hundred quid. His lordship did not stint on what he paid his favored employees, and Bascomb-Coombs was favored, Jewish roots or not.
Not that the scientist’s ethnic background mattered. It didn’t affect the man’s brain a whit, and whatever else he was, Bascomb-Coombs was as bright and shiny a penny as they came. Brilliant, a certified genius, so far ahead of the rest of his field that he was like an Einstein or a Hawking—in a class by himself—except that he couldn’t keep track of a sodding social calendar. He was supposed to have been here for dinner last night, and he had simply gotten it wrong. And even if this had been the proper day, he was still half an hour late.
The stereotype of the absent-minded professor certainly had a basis in fact, if Bascomb-Coombs was the indicator. Goswell himself had shrugged off the slight. One had to suffer such things. What could one expect from the working class, geniuses or not? Goswell wasn’t entirely foolish, save for his mania about the Empire, and he certainly had sense enough to know that Bascomb-Coombs was too valuable to toss away because he got a dinner date wrong.
Peel smiled and adjusted the black SIG 9mm in the Galco paddle holster on his right hip. He was a big enough man so the pistol was easily concealed under the white linen Saville Row sport coat he wore. Six-two, fourteen stone and a bit, and still in fighting shape. Naturally, his lordship wasn’t the kind of man to have some thug in camouflage clothes standing about with a submachine gun, menacing guests. Peel, though retired from His Majesty’s service under a cloud, was presentable. Good regiment, decent schools, still fit at forty-five, able to choose the right fork at formal dining if need be. An educated, civilized man, he could chat with the rich and famous and not seem out of place. He’d be a colonel by now, had it not been for that . . . unpleasant business in Northern Ireland on his final tour. Bloody country, bloody savages living in it.
The small com unit in his jacket pocket cheeped. That would be Hawkins, at the gate, confirming the arrival of the Volvo at the house, checking to be sure no terrorists had boiled from out of the car’s boot to blast Peel.
“G-1 here. Package arrive?”
“Roger that, G-1. We are green at the house.”
“Copy green. All clear here, as well.”
Peel looked at his watch, a black-faced Special Forces analog with glow-in-the-dark tritium inserts, a gift from his men when he retired. None of them had been happy to see him go. The rest of the security team should be reporting in about . . . now.. . .
“R-1. No activity here.”
“R-2. Got a couple of the fat man’s cows chewing cud over here, otherwise clear.”
“Rover-3. Fence is clear from Grid 4 to Grid 7.”
“Gate-2. Slow as bloody Christmas out here.”
Peel acknowledged each
of the gate guards and rovers as they called in their reports. He had ten men, all exarmy, spread out over the perimeter. This was not nearly enough for realistic coverage in a shooting situation, but most of his lordship’s enemies weren’t the kind of men who would try to storm The Yews to attack him. More likely they’d skewer him with sharp bonds or pointed hostile stock deals.
He grinned. Of course, his lordship had enemies who didn’t know they were on his list, and now and again, they had to be . . . attended to, in a circumspect manner, of course. Which is how Tap Peel came to be in his lordship’s service. It was because Peel’s father and Lord Goswell had been classmates at Oxford, of course, and that the senior Peel had managed a knighthood of his own before he died. One kept these things in the family, or, failing that, among the chums.
Looked like rain to the north. Supposed to do that in London today. A little shower wouldn’t hurt the vegetation hereabout, either, though the troops would bitch about it. Well, there was a soldier’s lot, wasn’t it? If you signed on, you signed on rain or shine, cold or hot, and that was that. God knew, he had stood in enough downpours, water running into his collar, cursing the officers who had posted him wherever he happened to be.
He smiled. It was a great life, being a solider. Too bad this was as close as he could come these days. Well, unless he wanted to traipse off to some third-world republic to be a hired mercenary. Hardly. In his grandfather’s day, a soldier of fortune had been a more or less honorable profession, but now, a fool without any military service could answer an ad in an American magazine and wind up protecting your rear in some African jungle. Thank you, no. British fighting men were an odd lot, to be sure, but far and away a better class of soldier than one would find by advertising in a bloody magazine.
He supposed he should move inside now. Dinner would be started shortly, and there would be a round of drinks before. Bascomb-Coombs was a white-wine sort of fellow, and his lordship did not feel comfortable with men who did not drink, so Peel would go and have a sociable whiskey.
His lordship hated to drink alone.
So, a short one, two fingers, no more, to make sure his head stayed clear.
He grinned again. He had certainly had worse duty.
4
Saturday, April 2nd
Washington, D.C.
The National Boomerang Qualifying Championships were being held at the new Clinton High School track and field ground, and Tyrone Howard was thrilled just to be there, not to mention how ecstatic he was to actually be entered as a contestant. Sure, it was Junior Novice Division, and he was only in one event, Maximum Time Aloft, but still, it was pretty amazing. He’d only been seriously throwing for, like, six months.
Next to Tyrone, his best friend, Jimmy Joe, blinked through thick glasses at all the contestants doing warmups. “Yo, slip, isn’t this, like, dangerous? Happens if you get cracked on the stack with one of these things? This ain’t VR, it’s the real O’Neal.”
Jimmy Joe was VR all the way, same as Tyrone had been just a few months ago, but Tyrone thought maybe he was coming along okay on this . . . outside stuff. Even though it had taken him a week to convince his friend to leave the computer and go to an actual competition. He said, “So you get knocked over and wake up with a bump on your skull. Hey, you could short out a REM driver and get brain-fry, too, hillbilly.”
“Oh, yeah, right, I could. Past a triple fail-safe and with like a half milliamp of vamp? Couldn’t fry a pissant’s egg with that. Not the same as getting whopped on the head with a big ole stick, slip.” Jimmy Joe shook his head. He gleamed in the sunshine. He had to wear skinblock to walk to the bus in the mornings, and it took him two weeks in the sun just to darken from bright to white. Something of a contrast to Tyrone, who was a nice chocolate color even if he stayed inside all the time. Which he hadn’t been doing much of late. He’d been a hardwired compuzoid, sure enough, and good at it, too, until that whole business with Bella blew him out of VR and into RW. Being jettisoned by her had done a doody on him, sure enough. His thirteenth year had been hard, that was a facto, Jacko.
“All right, you got me there,” Jimmy Joe said when Tyrone didn’t reply. “Frame the game, slip. What’s all this twirly stick-dick about?”
Tyrone grinned. “Okay, there are two basic kinds of boomerangs. One is a stick that comes back when you throw it. It might do a lot of fancy stuff on the way out and back, or not, depending on the type. They can range from the basic model that looks like a cross-section of a banana up to helicopter-like things with six or eight blades.
“The second kind is based on the abo war sticks, and it doesn’t come back, it just keeps on going until it drops—or it hits somebody in the head. A war boomerang can go farther than anything else as heavy that you can throw. They fly due to gyroscopic precession caused by asymmetric lift. The lift comes from rotation combined with linear motion.”
“Code interrupt that last transmission, slip! Put it in my native tongue.”
“It flies because it turns into a wing as it spins; it comes back because the wing angle is different in different places.”
A red and black German shepherd ran past, chasing a hard-silicone Frisbee Jackarang.
Tyrone shrugged out of his backpack, pulled out his basic Wedderburn. “See how the edge is slanted on this blade, on the inner aspect? But on this side, the trailing edge has the slant. When it spins into the wind, the push is different every time the thing rotates, so it starts to curve. You throw it right-handed, like this—” Tyrone showed him the grip, with the concave side forward and the end up “—and it flattens out and curves to the left.”
Jimmy Joe looked at the boomerang. Hefted it. “Hmm. I could code a pro, put in the factors—weight, RPM, speed, aerodynamics, all like that—and make it work exactly the same in VR.”
“Welcome to the past, slip. Serious throwers all have their own scenarios, since B.C. days. I’ve got exacts for each of my birds. But the program is just the map—these are the territory.” He opened his backpack to show his friend his other boomerangs. He had three classics and three MTAs, ultrathin and light, rosin-impregnated linen L-shaped blades designed for maximum flight time. His favorite of these was the Möller “Indian Ocean” model, a standard Paxolin model he had gotten pretty good with.
He indicated the Möller. “I’ll use this one for my event.”
“Hmmp. Doesn’t sound as hard as DinoWarz.”
“Analog real time is different than digital, hillbilly. Talkin’ muscle memory, judging wind speed, temperature, all like that.”
Jimmy Joe wasn’t impressed. “I could program all that in. One session.”
“Yeah, but you couldn’t walk over there and throw this and make it work.”
The dog ran back with the Frisbee in its mouth and dropped it at the feet of its owner, a tall dude with green hair. “Good girl, Cady!” Green-Hair said. “Go again?”
The dog barked and bounced around.
“And the event you are doing is which one?”
“Maximum Time Aloft. You throw, it twirls up and around, a judge puts a stopwatch on it. Everybody gets a throw, the bird that stays up the longest wins. You have to catch it when it comes back or it doesn’t count, and it has to land inside the fifty-meter circle. You want something light and with a lot of lift. The current record is just over four minutes.”
“Feek that! Four minutes twirling around? No motor? Come on.”
“That’s just the official record. There are guys who have put one in the air for almost eighteen minutes, unofficially.”
“No feek? That doesn’t seem possible.”
“I scat you not.”
Tyrone held up the Möller. “My best with this is just over two minutes. If I could throw that today, I could probably make the Junior National Team.”
“That’d be DFF.”
Tyrone smiled. Yep, data flowin’ fine. Too bad his dad wasn’t here to watch. Dad had been real helpful when Tyrone had gotten started, even had an old boomerang at
Grandma’s house he’d found. Of course, Dad couldn’t keep up with him now, but that was okay. He was not bad—as dads went.
The PA system blared to life. Tyrone’s event was up.
Tyrone swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. Practice was one thing; competition was another. This was his first, and he suddenly felt a need to go pee, real bad, even though he had gone just ten minutes ago.
Despite his indoor pallor, Jimmy Joe seemed to be getting into the spirit of things. “So, when do you do your thing?”
“I’m eighteenth. There are thirty-some-odd throwers in my class. Some of them have come all the way across the country for this, and some of them are real good.”
“You gonna watch the others?”
“Oh, yeah. Might see something useful. Plus I want to know what time I have to beat.”
“You know some rude dude has, like, three minutes, that helps you?”
“Just like knowing the high score in DinoWarz does.”
“Copy that.”
There were several other events under way at the same time—distance, accuracy, Australian—and Tyrone and Jimmy Joe found a shady spot under a dealer’s canopy and watched the juniors.
First guy up was a tall, lean kid with a shaved head. He threw a bright red tri-blade—not the best choice for this event—and Tyrone clicked his stopwatch. Forty-two seconds. Nothing.
The next guy was a short, stout kid with a Day-Glogreen L-shape, which looked like a Bailey MTA Classic or maybe a Girvin Hang ’Em High. Or it could be one of the clones; you couldn’t really tell from this far away.
Tyrone clocked the flight at a minute-twelve. No winner here, he was pretty sure. Winds were light, from the northeast, so he wouldn’t need to tape coins or flaps to his blades to keep them from getting batted down.
Third thrower up was a girl, as dark as Tyrone was, probably about his age, and she had a Möller, same model as his. She took a couple of steps, leaned into it, and threw.
The bird sailed out and up, high, hung there for what seemed like forever, spinning, drifting, circling back. It was a beautiful throw and an exemplary flight. Tyrone glanced away from the bird at the girl. She was looking back and forth from her stopwatch to the bird, and she was grinning.
