Let it be minor. But he knew in his heart that they were due a major blast.
Jay smiled and shook his head as he disconnected. He'd seen a lot of different sides of Alex Michaels over the years, but this goofy dad thing was a new one. He couldn't help wondering what kind of father he would make.
He shook his head again and let those thoughts go. Fatherhood was for the future--if ever. Right now, he had a hacker to track.
He was working from home. After they got back from the honeymoon, he and Saji had moved to a larger place, one that allowed each of them to have a work space. At the moment, Saji was in her office, offering advice to an on-line class of students beginning the study of Buddhism. She'd be working for another hour, so he had plenty of time to do his own job.
The wirelessware he had at home was the same as what he used at Net Force HQ--the latest generations of haptic gear, including optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and weathermesh--so he had full sensory capability when he went on-line. He put on the gloves, the headset with its ear and nose plugs, and the eyecups, adjusting them so they were comfortable. He already wore the tight-fitting mesh suit.
The piece he had sent to Commander Michaels was but a tiny hint of something he knew--he knew--was much larger. But knowing it was not the same as finding it. Like the scenario he was about to dive into, there were a lot of submerged logs in the swamp, and while not all of them were alligators, you had to be very careful when you poked at them with a stick. . . .
He grinned at the thought. "Scenario on," he told his computer.
Bayou Baritaria, Louisiana
Jay cruised slowly through the murky waters of Bayou Baritaria, the air boat's throttle nearly closed, watching carefully for submerged logs. Even without an underwater prop, hitting one at speed would be bad--not so much for the air boat as for him. Air boats were tough. The"- thick 5086 marine aluminum that made up the boat's flat hull was coated with an additional layer of a Teflon-based polymer, and would slide over pretty much anything, up to and including dry land. A land speed record had been set some time back in the late nineties with an air boat--on asphalt at over forty-seven miles an hour. Bad for the coating, but it worked.
However, hitting anything submerged at speed would put him in danger, in case the boat flipped, or spun toward one of the huge cypress trees that stood sentinel, gray Spanish moss draped thickly over their branches.
Only way to tell north on these trees would be to look for the dead Yankee.
Jay recalled a factoid he'd read somewhere, that all statues of southern Civil War generals faced north. They'd lost the war, but never really given up down here.
Beams of sunlight shone through the thick canopy of the swamp, touching here and there upon the murky waters, which, of course, teemed with water moccasins and leeches. The air had that dank, spoiled, rotting-vegetation odor that overlaid everything, a fecund, earthy stink. In the background he could hear the high-pitched whirring of cicadas.
A mosquito hummed by, and he swatted at it.
He grinned. Few took the time for VR details like that. That was the difference between a pro and amateurs: the little things.
His hot-rod air boat, a 560-horsepower V-8 engine with a 2:1 reduction gear, drove the six-bladed carbon-fiber propeller that pushed him along in the deep brownish green waters of the bayou. The flat bottom of the boat would let him float it in as little as an inch of water, and if he had to chase anything, he could be up to forty or fifty miles an hour in just a few seconds--faster, depending on the water conditions.
The air boat was a simple and effective design, invented over a hundred years ago by no less than Alexander Graham Bell. Apparently the inventor had used it as a test bed for early airplane engines, which had been the engine of choice for air boats until the 1990s, when the lower cost of maintenance for automobile engines made them the power plants of choice.
It tickled Jay that the great-granddaddy of modern networking, the first man to get to market with a telephone, had also invented the craft he'd chosen for his VR scenario.
It turned out that air boats were very ecofriendly as well--no submerged screw meant less disruption of the underwater ecosystem. In this case, the metaphor was extended to his investigation: Jay made significantly fewer ripples as he trolled for information.
Sure, he could be doing this the old-fashioned way, eyeballing a TFT monitor, a thin window separating him from the data, but who wanted to? The immediacy of all five senses gave him an edge--and Net Force's chief VR jockey liked it that way.
Ahead he saw a brown lump in the water.
He reached down and adjusted the lever to the left of his seat, moved the twin foam-filled airfoil rudders that steered the boat. Like a leaf on a pond, the craft skated to the left slightly, just enough so that he would miss the target by a hair.
He glanced down--a submerged log. It wasn't really a log, of course, but a packet of information sliding slowly along this section of the net.
The section of VR he was checking was an older one--one used for datastreams that didn't take as much bandwidth--and data that sometimes wasn't what it seemed to be.
It was a modern variation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter: Instead of sending encrypted high-speed data, some of the newer data pirates--and other hackers--hid it in plain sight, risking slower transmission speeds in less observed areas. After all, who would ever suspect anyone of using such a slow section of net to transfer anything critical?
Well, Jay Gridley, for one. Keeping an open mind about everything kept you from getting caught short a lot of times.
He was following a trail he'd started a few days previous, when he'd been rechecking the terrorists of CyberNation. Net Force was being real vigilant with these folks, after what had happened the year before. So far, nothing major had come up.
Another shape drifted by, this time a little faster than the log.
This one was greener, and he could see eyes and nostrils poking above the water--an example of Alligator mississippiensis --the American alligator.
The data in that packet was obviously a little higher priority than the info in the log, given a measure of protection, and speeded up slightly. Around him, Jay could see more shapes in the water, some gators, some logs.
Another set of gator nostrils and eyes slid past the air boat. Jay looked at the space between the eyes and nostrils--about twelve inches, he figured.
Now there's a big one.
It was an old gator hunter's rule of thumb: The distance between the inside of the nostrils and the eyes in inches was the approximate size of the animal in feet. This one should be about twelve feet long.
But when he looked for the gator's wake, it was wrong: Instead of a tail tip sloshing water ten to twelve feet behind the eyes and nostrils, it was way too short--only about two feet.
Well, well.
Had he been looking at a computer monitor, he would have just seen that the checksum for the data packet he was looking at didn't match. In his experience, that didn't happen with legitimate data. Somebody was trying to make a big thing look small.
Time for a closer look at Mr. Gator.
He reached for his ketch-all pole--an extended piece of stainless steel tubing with a steel noose at one end that could be used to snare dangerous animals--and turned the air boat to follow the gator. The creature must have been imbued with some form of simplified warning system, because as soon as he started tracking it, it sped up.
Fast. Much too fast for a gator, unless it was jet-powered.
Jay grinned. Looked like he was going to get a chance to use his boat after all.
He accelerated rapidly, the roar of horsepower shoving the air boat after the gator. It looked like the critter was making for a branch off the bayou, just ahead. Jay pushed the throttle harder, and cypress trees whipped past. A low-hanging section of Spanish moss smacked him in the face.
Sometimes, he was too good, maybe.
The gator was fast, but no match for his boat. As he g
ot closer, Jay lowered the ketch-all so its noose was just ahead of the gator. At this speed he'd have to be quick, lest the water rip the pole out of his hand.
He dipped the loop into in the water and yanked on the loop that drew the steel rope taut. The pole pulled hard at his arms, and had the gator been as long as advertised, it would have been a very unpleasant experience. But, of course, it was only a shrimp, just as he had figured.
Right yet again. It was a burden, sometimes. People got to expecting it.
He killed the engine and unbuckled his seat belt before lowering the gator onto the deck of his boat.
The two-foot-long beast was most unhappy, it thrashed and smacked its tail against the tough aluminum, making a thunking sound. Jay hand-over-handed his way down the ketch-all. He reached down and squeezed its jaws shut--not difficult, as its more powerful muscles were designed to bite, not open its mouth--and slipped another noose over its snout, pulling it tight.
Gotcha.
What he'd actually done of course was rascal the address of the gator's destination so that it came to him instead of going to its original destination. But a gator chase was much more exciting than that.
Jay flipped the gator and looked at its belly. No seams.
Nice work.
Well he had ways around that, too.
He took a small skinning knife and slit the belly of the gator open. Instead of warm guts, however, pages of information spilled out, only the top one damaged by his rapid opening of the gator. He glanced at the writing on the first page and grinned.
Well, well. Look at this. How interesting. . . .
2
Net Force Shooting Range
Quantico, Virginia
General John Howard arrived with his son Tyrone. They stopped to talk to Gunny at the check-in station. He was a master sergeant, but he'd always be "Gunny" to the shooters who came here.
"General. And is this Tyrone? You've grown some since I saw you last."
Tyrone, at that voice-breaking fifteen-year-old stage, smiled and nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.
"You shooting rifle today, sir?" Gunny asked the general.
"No, the sidearm. Tyrone hasn't had a chance to shoot the Medusa."
"What load do you want?"
"Some nines, some .38 Special, a few .357s," Howard said.
"Is your ring up to date, sir?"
Howard nodded. The electronic control ring he wore, that all Net Force and FBI active agents wore, controlled the firing of his personal weaponry. Well, except for the old Thompson submachine gun his grandfather had left him. He hadn't wanted to screw around with that; it was a collectible item, probably worth more than his car--not that he would ever sell it.
"You need me to fit Tyrone with a ring?"
"No, he's got his own. Has Julio shown up yet?"
"Yes, sir, he's already on the line. Lane six."
"I figured," Howard said. "He needs all the practice he can get."
Gunny chuckled.
"Am I missing a joke here, Sarge?"
"With all due respect, sir, you and Lieutenant Fernandez both need all the practice you can get. If all the Net Force ops shot as slow and bad as you do, it'd be more effective for them to throw their weapons than fire them."
Howard grinned. He was, he knew, a better-than-average shooter with a handgun, and superior to most with a long arm. But Gunny here could shoot the eyes off a fly with either hand with a pistol, and with a rifle he could drill neat patterns in targets so far away you could drink a beer waiting for the bullet to get that far. Figuratively speaking. And Howard was never a man to stand on ceremony with his men.
Gunny gave them a box with the revolver ammunition in it along with two pairs of electronic earmuffs and shooting glasses. Howard and his son slipped the sound suppressors on before they went through the heavy doors to the range itself.
There were a couple of shooters firing pistols, and they saw Julio in the sixth lane, blasting away at a holographic target with his old Army-issue Beretta. He had fitted the pistol with Crimson Trace laser sights, built right into the grip, and that had improved his shooting somewhat. With the built-ins, all you had to do was point the weapon, you didn't have to line up the notch-and-post, and you could shoot as well from the hip as from the classical sight-picture pose. When it was properly calibrated, your bullets would hit wherever the little red dot was when you squeezed the trigger. Yeah, you still had to be able to hold the weapon steady, but it was a distinct advantage for older eyes.
Julio, who had talked him into his current sidearm, a Phillips & Rodgers Model 47, also called "Medusa," had been trying to get Howard to put the laser grips on that. So far, however, Howard had resisted. They weren't that expensive, a few hundred dollars, which was cheap when it was your life on the line, but Howard had an old-fashioned streak running through him that made him slow to adopt such things--at least for his personal use.
Julio finished cooking off a magazine, looked up, and saw them. He smiled. "Hey, Tyrone. How's the leg?"
"Doing just fine now, Lieutenant."
Julio looked at Howard. "You told him to call me that, didn't you? Have to keep rubbing it in."
"Well, I figured you might as well get some use out of the title. In no time at all, you'll be a captain."
"Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat," Julio said.
"Might as well. You okay with Tyrone shooting a few with us today? He's never been much interested in handguns, and I thought he might like to see how hard they are to score with compared to a rifle."
"Why would I object to that, sir? I mean, compared to the way the general does it, even a first-timer who didn't know the muzzle from the butt could hardly do any worse."
"A general could have a lieutenant shot for such sass," Howard said.
"Yes, sir, but the only general I know? He'd have to have somebody else do it for him, otherwise he'd waste a whole lot of the taxpayers' money on ammo before he scored a hit."
Tyrone laughed, and Howard grinned again. Twenty-odd years of soldiering together gave him and Julio a camaraderie that was way past commander and enlisted man, at least when there wasn't anybody else around, and Tyrone was family, so he didn't count.
"Well, let's just see, Lieutenant, if your mouth is writing checks your butt can't cash, shall we?"
"Yes, sir. You want me to use my left hand? Stand on one foot?"
"Why? You still owe me ten bucks from last time when you used both your hands and feet. I'm not the least bit worried."
Julio smiled.
Washington, D.C.
Guru was watching the baby--having a live-in baby-sitter was a gift from God, no doubt--and Toni took the opportunity to go for a ride on Alex's recumbent trike. He usually kept the three-wheeler at work, but she'd had him bring it home so she could get back into shape. Since the baby had been born, there never seemed to be enough time to work out, and while she had kept up with her silat practice, she had gained an inch on her thighs and hips she just couldn't seem to get rid of, no matter how many times she did her djurus. She could get a pretty good burn pumping the pedals, and the trike would allow her to hit the muscles from a different angle than the martial arts moves did. She hoped.
Of course, riding a trike in Washington traffic was an invitation to serious bodily harm, even with strobe flashers and a bright orange pennant flying from a tall whip antenna eight feet up. She had promised Alex she would use the new bike lanes and paths winding in and out of the park not far from their house. She had also chosen to go out in the middle of the morning on a weekday. That was the best time to go out, since there was hardly anybody using them.
She was on a straight stretch that ran for about half a mile along the fenced border of the park. Nobody was in sight, and the paved path was dry. It was cloudy, but still muggy, and the sweat drenched her bike shorts and T-shirt as she upshifted into high gear and began to do some serious cranking on the pedals. The trike was very stable on a straightaway, and the brakes were good, s
o she wasn't worried.
The warm afternoon air blew past at a speed somewhere about thirty-five miles an hour by the time she peaked, pedaling as hard as she could, and she started to slow down three hundred meters from the end of the run. Trying to take that curve at this speed would have her eating macadam in a hurry.
Her legs burned, but that was what she wanted.
Since Guru had come to live with them, Toni could have gone back to work full-time, but she hadn't. Nor had she wanted to. The baby came first, even though he was not really a baby anymore. He was walking, talking, turning into a little boy more and more every day. He was smart, quick, and beautiful, and even leaving him alone for a few hours was hard. Yes, there were times when she enjoyed the break. And yes, she missed work, because it challenged her in ways staying home did not. Still, if push came to shove and she had to make a choice, she'd be a housewife and mother.
Fortunately, it hadn't come to that. When your husband was your boss, you could be flexible. Besides, since she'd retired from the mainstream FBI job, she was technically a "consultant," which apparently satisfied the legal department. . . .
Her com chimed. She was down to a fairly safe speed now, so she pulled the phone's clip from her shorts' hem. The caller ID sig told her who it was.
"Hey, babe," she said.
"Hey," Alex said. "Where are you?"
"Riding the trike."
"Oh, good."
"What does that mean? You think I need to ride it? That I'm fat?"
There was a long pause.
She laughed. "I'm just kidding, Alex. You are so easy."
"Yeah, right. I've been down this road too many times before, thank you very much. You are not fat. I was merely expressing happiness that you could get out and enjoy yourself. It's supposed to rain later today."
"So I heard. What's up?"
"I've got to fly to New York for a meeting with the director and the Home Defense folks. Should be a quick turnaround, I'm catching the bureau's Lear, so I won't have to wait in the lines for a commercial flight. I should be home for dinner, but just in case I'm running late, I wanted you to know."
State Of War (2003) Page 2
