Net Force nf-1

by Tom Clancy

  "Wolf Pack, this is Cub Omega One, do you copy?"

  "This is Alpha Wolf, Cub. Go ahead."

  "Sir, we're broken down in the middle of a giant oil-tank farm and we've got two security officers a hundred meters away, approaching us on bicycles."

  Bike cops. Great. "Follow planned procedure, Omega One. Smile politely and wave your documents, they will pass muster."

  "Yes, sir — oh, shit!"

  "Say again, Cub Omega One?"

  The captain's voice came back, but he wasn't talking to Howard: "Somebody shut him the hell up!"

  "Omega One, report!"

  There was a dead silence that stretched long.

  "Cub Omega One, reply."

  "Ah, Alpha, we have a, uh… situation here. Our passenger started screaming bloody murder and these stupid damned cops just up and opened fire!"

  Next to Howard, Fernandez said, "Jesus, what kind of trigger-happy bastards are they? They can't know who they're dealing with."

  "Alpha, we have returned fire, repeat, we have returned fire. Omega Cubs are all uninjured, say again, no injuries our squad, but we have one local down and the other has — has—" Proper report terminology failed him. "Has hauled ass behind a big fucking oil tank, sir. Stand by. Barnes and Powell, flank right, Jessel, left, go, go!"

  Howard waited for what seemed like another couple of thousand years. He exchanged glances with Fernandez.

  Captain Marcus came back on-line. "Sir, the downed local is… ah, defunct. He had a belt phone, and we have to assume the other one also carries communication gear, but we lost him. I would guess that we are going to have unfriendly company soon, Alpha. Please advise."

  Howard looked at Fernandez. There was no choice. Nobody was leaving anybody out here. "Bag it up, troops! We lift in three minutes!"

  To the squad leader waiting on the other end of the scrambled comline, Howard said, "Stand fast, Omega. The pack is on the way."

  "Copy that, Alpha. Thank you, sir."

  "Let's go, Julio."

  "Yes, sir!"

  Howard and Fernandez ran for the helicopters.

  Saturday, October 9th, 4:10 p.m. Quantico

  Michaels and Toni were in the small conference room, working on their second pot of coffee. As the doctor had predicted, Michaels was a lot more sore than he had been right after he'd been shot. It hurt to move, it hurt to stand still, it hurt to sit. He'd taken pills at home, to sleep, but he wanted to stay sharp while Howard's operation was in progress. He had finally popped a couple of the pain tabs from their plastic-and-foil blisters, and washed them down with his fifth or sixth cup of coffee an hour or so ago, and the sharp stabbing pain had faded to a more-bearable dull stabbing pain. And despite all the coffee, he felt relatively mellow.

  "How's your arm?" he asked Toni.

  "It was a nice clean cut. It doesn't hurt much," she said, "but it itches."

  He had thanked her after it had happened, but he'd had plenty of time to think about it since. "You saved my life in that locker room," he said. "If you hadn't jumped that woman, she would have killed me."

  "Rusty saved us both. I'd never gotten to her if he hadn't come in and started yelling. Holding an ink pen and pretending it was a gun." She shook her head.

  "I'm really sorry about Agent Russell," he said. "I knew you were teaching him your fighting art. Were you, uh, close?"

  She hesitated for a moment. "Not really, no." She stared into her coffee cup. "His parents are having the body flown back to Jackson, Mississippi, for the funeral and burial. That's where he was from. They seem like nice people. I'd like to go, if that's all right. It's in a couple of days."

  "Sure. After we get though all this — if we get through it — I wonder if I might get you to show me some of what you do — the silat?"

  She looked up from her coffee.

  "Lately, I don't know why, I've kind of felt the need to know a little more about self-defense."

  He smiled, and she matched his expression.

  "I'd be happy to show you."

  "Might take a few weeks for me to stop gimping around." He touched his bandaged leg.

  "I'll wait."

  He sipped at the coffee, then decided if he had anymore, he was going to have to have a bladder transplant. He put the cup down. "I wonder how it's going. They are supposed to be done about now."

  "I'm sure they'll call as soon as they can."

  "I'm sure. And I am confident that Colonel Howard will execute his mission."

  She smiled again.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing. I was just remembering something from a long time ago."

  "Yeah?"

  "Between my junior and senior year at John Jay, I moved to an apartment with two other students. My brother Tony had lost his job, so his wife and two kids moved in with my parents while he went to Maine to find work.

  Things were a little crowded at home. We lucked into a rent-controlled place that actually had heat and windows that would open. Building is probably a parking lot by now, but it was perfect for three girls away from home for the first time.

  "Anyway, one of my roomies was an Eye-tie like me, that was Mary Louise Bergamo, from Philadelphia; the other was a tall, lanky black woman from Texas, a volleyball player, Dirisha Mae Jones. She was the funniest person I ever met. She was always coming up with these little homespun homilies she'd gotten from somewhere. One night we were drinking cheap wine and making a lot of noise and she defined ‘confident' for us.

  " ‘Well, girls, listen here. There's this black man, name of Ernest, who is married to this here beauuutiful woman, Loretta, but Loretta is gone up and leave him ‘cause Ernest got fired from his job — even though it wasn't no fault of his own.' "

  Michaels grinned. Her imitation of her friend's Texas accent was pretty good.

  Toni continued: " ‘So Ernest gets up one morning and puts on his best tie and his only white shirt and his Sunday-go-to-meeting pants, and leaves the house to go to this job interview. Ernest knows he don't get this job, his woman is gone leave him. He also know the good old boy doing the hirin' don't particularly care for men of color, so he got to be sharp.

  " ‘By now, though, it's lunchtime. On the way to the interview, Ernest stops at Rick's Pit Barbecue, where he orders a double helping of pork ribs and a beer to wash ‘em down. So while he's waiting for Rick's boy James to dish up the ribs — which are drenched in about half a gallon of hot, greasy barbecue sauce, and which are the absolute best ribs anywhere in East Texas, and pretty much in Central or West Texas, too, and that's sayin' something — while he's waitin', Ernest walks on over to the phone and calls up Loretta. Says to her, "Honey, shake out your blue dress — we gone go out dancin' tonight to celebrate my new job."

  " ‘Now, a man that eats ribs wearing a white shirt he knows got to stay clean, that's a confident man, girls."

  Michaels laughed.

  "I like seeing you do that, Alex. Laugh. You don't do it enough."

  Michaels felt a little stab of something through the pain medication. Something in her voice. She liked him. It made him feel a little uncomfortable, but not too uncomfortable. "There have been better times for it. So, what happened to them? Your roommates?"

  "Mary Louise went to law school — Harvard — then home to go into practice with her father's firm. She was on the team that took the State versus Pennco Housing to the Supreme Court last year and won."

  "And the woman from Texas?"

  "Dirisha joined the Woman's Pro Volleyball Tour right after she graduated. Played for three years, was on the Nike Team that won the Four Woman Outdoor Championships a couple of times. She retired from the circuit, wrote a book about her adventures, got a job as a sports columnist for The New York Times. Got married a few years ago, had a baby, a boy. Want to guess what she named him?"

  "Come on."

  "Yep. Ernest."

  "You're making this up."

  She raised her hand, made the scout sign. "Not a word, I swear."

&n
bsp; He chuckled again. She was right. He needed to laugh more.

  Right now, though, he was a little nervous. Where was Howard? He should have called by now. He looked at his watch.

  Even if it all went as smooth as silk on silk, Michaels was going to have to do some fast and fancy dancing to keep Carver from going for his throat when he found out. If they went through all this and failed to retrieve Plekhanov, well, he was definitely going to be in crap up to his eyebrows.

  If this operation failed, he'd sure as hell get a lot of time to practice his laughing, probably a long, long way from anything connected to Net Force. Though he didn't think he'd feel much like yuk-yukking it up for a while.

  Sunday, October 10th, 12:12 a.m. Grozny

  "She's at top speed now, sir," the pilot yelled. He had to yell to be heard over the Huey's rotor and wind noise. All those action vids where they showed people having normal conversations inside a big chopper with the doors open, like two aristocrats sharing tea in an air-conditioned Rolls Royce, were pure fantasy. Those vids were produced by somebody who had probably never even seen a helicopter close up. Even the radio chatter in the headphones was hard to hear.

  "How long?" Howard shouted.

  "Two, three minutes," the pilot yelled back. "There's the edge of the tank farm ahead, to the right. And there's the river. I'm going to take us right over the main road."

  The ten men assigned to this craft carried H&K subguns and holstered side arms—9mm Brownings, along with Cold Steel sheath knives. They wore plain coveralls, but they also wore flak vests and generic Kevlar helmets and boots. The gear was all over-the-counter commercial — the subguns were from Germany, the pistols from Belgium, the vests Israeli, the knives Japanese. This was not supposed to be a stand-up fight, and if any gear got left behind, it wasn't going to point to the United States.

  The troops did wear dog tags, but that didn't matter — they weren't leaving any personnel behind. Either they all left or they all stayed.

  "There's the truck!" Fernandez yelled.

  "And there's trouble," Howard said.

  A convoy of military-style vehicles, three of them, was fast approaching the dead truck from the other direction. The lead vehicle was a Jeep-clone with a light machine gun mounted on it amidships, and a figure in camo manning the weapon. The second vehicle was a police car with a flashing blue light. The third vehicle was a large SWAT-style van, also with a light blinking atop it. Even over the roar of the noise in the copter, they could hear the sirens.

  "Well, shit," Fernandez said.

  Howard yelled at the pilot. "Will my headset reach C2?"

  "Yes, sir, it should."

  Howard trigged his com. To the commander of the other copter, Howard said, "C2, this is Alpha Wolf, do you copy?"

  "Alpha Wolf, we copy your trans."

  "C2, I want you to stand away, repeat, stand away. Circle back and we'll call if we need you. No point in giving them two targets."

  "Yes, sir."

  To his pilot, Howard said, "Put it down, Loot. Between our truck and the incoming."

  "Yes, sir."

  Howard's stomach lurched as the bird dropped toward the road. He felt his skin tighten. "Nobody fires unless fired on! Deploy in a staggered grid and stand ready."

  Howard looked at the uprushing road. No cover, but he wouldn't start blasting in the middle of an oil-tank field if it was his property. He was banking on the Chechen force commander's surprise and sense of responsibility. If it was Howard running some out-of-the-way post, and he got a call to investigate a shooting in the middle of the night, and an unmarked copter put down and disgorged armed and unidentified troops, he would hesitate before opening fire — as long as they didn't shoot first. There would be some important questions he'd want answers to: Who were they? What were they doing there? Could they be his own, doing some covert deal? Before you started blasting, you needed some information. It was one thing to shoot at some criminals in a truck you thought might have a hostage, but if you cut your own troops down, that would be bad for your career. If you riddled a bunch of oil tanks with AP rounds and created knee-deep pools of the stuff, that would also be bad. In the Chechen's place, Howard would be making some fast calls, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  The Huey touched down. "Lock and load!" Howard yelled.

  He checked his own weapon to make sure it was ready, then went out to collect his squad and their catch.

  40

  Sunday, October 10th, 12:18 a.m. Grozny

  The three Chechen vehicles skidded to a halt as Howard and his troops piled out of the Huey and spread out, weapons held ready but not locked on targets. The Chechens had the advantage as they bailed from their rides — they could use their vehicles for cover. There were fifteen, maybe eighteen, Chechens in military gear, and they deployed, pointing their weapons from behind the Jeep-clone, the van and the police car.

  Howard's men were in the open, and the pucker-factor here was extremely high. A car body would stop a lot of small-arms fire; thin air would not.

  "Marcus!" Howard said, quietly enough so he hoped his voice wouldn't carry to the Chechens. "Get the package into the bird and then get out here."

  Behind him, the squad hustled Plekhanov toward the Huey. Marcus was the language expert, and as soon as he had the Russian onboard, he hopped back out and came to stand next to Howard.

  Sixty meters away, somebody in the Chechen force began yelling in Russian. Howard had a few words and phrases, enough to recognize a "Who the hell are you?" query when he heard it.

  "What is the name of their secret police force?" Howard asked Marcus, sotto voce.

  "ZhalitKulk, sir."

  "Tell them that's who we are. Tell them we're on a secret mission. Tell them to get the hell away from here or we'll have their balls for breakfast." Howard didn't think they'd buy it, but they'd have to think about it. What if it was the truth? Could they take the chance?

  "Sir." Marcus turned and loudly rattled off a fast string of Russian.

  Howard kept his voice low, but loud enough for his troops to hear over the Huey's twin engines. "Fall back into the transport by twos. Last out, first in."

  As the first pair of his troops climbed into the Huey, the Chechen commander yelled something, and his men took more precise aim with their weapons.

  "I don't think they want us to leave," Fernandez said.

  Howard's belly was suddenly full of dry ice and liquid nitrogen. He nodded. But the longer they stayed here, the more dangerous it got. Somebody might get nervous, his finger might slip, and the first round that went off would trigger a fusillade from both sides.

  Slowly and carefully, Howard triggered his com headset, opened the opchan to the second Huey. He hoped they weren't too far away to hear him on the portable. "C2, this is Alpha Wolf."

  There was a moment of dead air.

  "C2, respond."

  "Copy, Alpha, this is C2."

  Howard repressed the urge to sigh in relief. "We need a distraction here. There's a big van with a flashing blue light about sixty meters north of our position next to Cl. I would appreciate it if you would approach from the north and have somebody lean out and put a couple of magazines of hardball into the roof of that vehicle."

  "Consider it a done deal, Alpha. We're coming in."

  "Give me an ETA."

  "Forty-five seconds, sir."

  They hadn't gone far, a thing for which he was extremely thankful at the moment.

  "We are leaving, troops," Howard said, loud enough for his force to hear. At this point, he didn't much care if the opposition heard him. "On my command, by twos, as fast as you can."

  He saw a few of the Chechens glance away from their sights, looking up and behind. They'd be able to hear the oncoming Huey's engines — the big Pratt and Whitneys could put out almost 1200 horsepower in a pinch, and at full bore, quiet they were not.

  "Stand ready…" Howard said.

  In the reflected light from the Chechen vehicles and t
he yellow sodium lamps outlining the oil tanks, Howard saw the Huey roar in and swing into a drifting broadside turn eighty feet up. After a beat, the rapid yellow-orange flashes of two or three submachine guns blasted from the open doorway.

  His troops could shoot. The roof of the van rattled under the jacketed hail.

  The Chechens turned to face the new and more active threat.

  "Go, go, go!"

  Howard's troops piled into the Huey—

  The Chechens opened up on the hovering copter—

  The last of his troops scrambled into the grounded bird. Only Howard and Fernandez remained outside.

  "Get in, Julio!"

  "Age before beauty, sir."

  Howard grinned, and leaped for the copter. Fernandez bumped him from behind as he cleared the door.

  "Lift, lift!" Howard yelled.

  The pilot powered up, and the Huey lurched into the sky.

  The Chechens realized the attack from the air was a diversion. They turned their fire in two directions. Jacketed bullets chunked into the copter.

  "Keep their heads down!" Howard yelled.

  Fernandez, closest to the door, opened up, waving his H&K back and forth like a garden hose. The Chechens ducked behind their cover. Bullets hammered their vehicles.

  The command Huey canted and fell away at a sharp angle, climbing slowly and spiraling upward. A couple more incoming rounds hit and clanged, but a moment later, they were clear.

  "C2?" Howard yelled into his mike.

  "Right behind you, Alpha."

  "Casualties your way?"

  "Negative, sir."

  "Sergeant?"

  "Anybody hit?" Fernandez yelled.

  Apparently nobody was.

  Howard blew out a big breath and grinned. They had done it! Man!

  "This is kidnapping! You can't do this!"

  Howard regarded the indignant Russian. He felt a cold hatred fill him as he looked at the man.

  "You fools will create an international incident! I have influential friends! You cannot expect to get away with it!"

  Howard stared at the man. "We already have gotten away with it."

  The Russian began cursing, in Russian. Howard recognized a few of those words, too. He was not disposed to listen to them. He held his hand up for silence. The Russian fell silent and frowned at him.