by Tom Clancy
“I thought it got cold at night in the desert.”
“Depends on the desert,” Howard said. “It probably gets colder here in the winter. You ready?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go over this one more time,” Howard said. “The scooters have fat tires that will work fine on dirt, though it will take most of an hour to get there. The spookeyes will make it look like daylight, and all you have to do is stay behind me. I’m tracking Julio, and he has mapped out the safest route, using GPS grids. Troopers Holder and Reaves will bring up the rear. If you can keep from falling off your scooter, you’ll be fine. You had a chance to check on it, right?”
“On the nice, flat, concrete parking lot at Net Force HQ.”
Howard grinned. “You’ll do fine, Commander. Just remember to hang on to the little handle grip and lean. We won’t be doing any fancy maneuvers out there.”
Michaels nodded.
Howard looked at his watch. “Okay, people, time to mount up!”
Michaels walked to his scooter. It looked sort of like a filing cabinet with some odd bits projecting from it, angled so that one edge was leading. The back of it was hollowed out, and the whole thing was mounted on what looked like an old nonmotorized push lawnmower. The only part of his body that would be visible from the front to radar would be his head, and the stealth helmet with its built-in spookeye heads-up display shield was supposed to take care of that.
Well, they’d find out how well it worked soon enough.
Lieutenant Fernandez climbed onto his machine, leaned forward, and started to roll. Howard followed suit. Michaels mounted his own two-wheeler, put his helmet on, and flipped the motor’s power switch.
“Here we go,” he said quietly.
* * *
Ames awoke past midnight, almost one A.M., not sure what had awakened him. He got up and padded to the bathroom. On his way back to bed he heard a little beeping noise.
He frowned. What was that?
The control console on his bedside table flashed a red light from the screen, pulsing in time with the noise. It took a second for him to realize what it was.
The radar alarm. He had company!
He didn’t bother to dress, just grabbed his pistol and ran to the computer center down the hall in his pajamas.
The radar/Doppler screen showed activity to the north, a mile or so away. Who was that, and what were they doing out here?
There were two dozen cameras on his property, with others hidden in the ground or in bushes or trees past that, all wireless remotes. He cranked up the one closest to the intruders. It was a hundred yards away from them, but the optics were very good, light-gathering intensifiers making the night scene easily visible even at almost one in the morning, although with a slight greenish cast to it.
What he saw was a big truck, a flatbed, with two guys standing next to it. The truck had the hood up, and a third guy was poking around in the engine compartment. They didn’t look like any kind of official anything, just three guys attending to a malfunctioning truck. On their way from no count to no place, and broke down in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t even know this place was here.
Still, he wasn’t going to take his eyes off them. No sense taking chances. Not at this point.
But maybe he should put some clothes on, just in case.
Riding the scooter across the ground was both easier and harder than Michaels had expected. The ride was bumpy and slow. Then again, he hadn’t fallen off, which was something.
He had no idea how far they had come. It seemed as if they had been riding for hours, though a glance at his watch showed they’d actually been rolling for only about forty-five minutes.
The five of them wore LOSIR gear, line-of-sight infrared com sets that wouldn’t be picked up by ordinary radio receivers, and on scrambled channels so that anybody else with such gear couldn’t hear them anyway. Even so, Howard had ordered com-silence except for emergencies, and so far, at least, there hadn’t been any of those.
Knock on wood…
The night vision devices worked well enough. It wasn’t exactly like noon, and the helmet’s computer coloration was more pastel than reality. But it didn’t look like an unlighted desert in the middle of the night, either. The wonders of modern technology.
On point, Julio Fernandez slowed. Howard followed suit, and Michaels leaned back a hair to slow his own scooter. Michaels watched carefully. Once they arrived, there was a pattern in which they would have to park the vehicles, so as to screen them from the sensor’s view. There would be a dead zone behind the scooter screen, Howard had told him, an invisible gap in which they could work undetected. Well, at least unseen. They’d be making a fair amount of noise pretty quick…
Julio raised his hand and made a “stop” gesture. He angled to his left a hair. Howard altered his course. Michaels followed Howard, knowing that he had to park his scooter two meters to the right and a meter back. The other two troopers would complete the pattern behind and to the side of Michaels.
Thirty seconds later, the five were parked. Fernandez came back and the men gathered close. “Right there,” he said, pointing.
Howard said, “You heard the lieutenant. Do it.”
The two troopers said, “Yes, sir!”
They looked pretty strange, outfitted in the gear they wore. Exoskeletons, Howard had called them. Specialized equipment with motors and frames that essentially turned the wearer into Hercules, several times as strong as an ordinary man. There was a mechanical hum as the power units started. The two troopers, looking like something from a science fiction movie, moved to what looked like any other patch of dirt out here and started digging. One wielded a heavy pick, the other a shovel.
Howard had examined the plans for the once-secret bunker with great care. He had talked at length with his engineers, and determined a method of attack that should work.
“There’s thirty or forty feet of earth between the surface and the roof in most places,” he’d said. “It would take a backhoe days to dig all the way down. And the entrances are all hardened steel and reinforced concrete, so blasting through those would be a major chore. However, there are relatively weak spots.”
Howard had shown Michaels on the diagrams. “Here, at these access ports, the stairwells are open all the way down. Now, there is a big plug of concrete and rebar surrounding the actual entrance and exit, but if you go just a couple meters out, the slab is much thinner, only about a meter thick, under half a meter of earth. They couldn’t make it too heavy without having to build massive support structures. Punch through that, move a little more dirt, and you are in the stairwell.”
“Three feet of reinforced concrete doesn’t seem like something a couple of guys with picks and shovels are going to cut through in a hurry, even wearing Spider-Man suits,” Michaels had said.
“No, sir, that is true. However, they built this place back in the 1950s, and they designed it to withstand the technology they had back then. Obviously they didn’t have the resources we have today. These days we have shaped charges that will go through concrete and rebar like a hot knife through butter. All we have to do is clear away the dirt and get to the hard stuff.”
“That seems awful easy. Why didn’t Ames update things when he moved in?”
“I’m guessing that he was banking on the fact that no one knows about this place. You don’t need thick walls to guard a place no one knows about. And besides, I don’t really know what he could have done about it. These weak spots are design elements. He would have had to essentially rebuild the entire bomb shelter to get rid of them, and there was no way to do that and still keep this place a secret. Like I said, though, I’m guessing here.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Assuming you’re right and these weak spots are still here, isn’t the idea to surprise him? Won’t this charge make a pretty loud ‘bang’ when it goes off?”
“It will. But I think we have that covered.”
Howard had told him why, and Michaels had to admit, it s
ounded as if it might work.
The two troopers were moving dirt at an incredible rate. In just a few minutes they reached the concrete. A few more minutes and they had cleared a rough circle five feet across.
Those exoskeletons were certainly impressive.
Fernandez climbed down into the shallow hole and set a brick-shaped block the size of a loaf of bread onto the concrete.
Fernandez said, “Ready, sir.”
Howard looked at his watch. He touched a control on his LOSIR headset and said, “Thirty seconds, on my mark.”
Fernandez nodded and touched a control on the shaped charge.
“Mark,” Howard said into his throat mike.
“Twenty meters, people, that way!” Fernandez said.
They moved. Quickly.
40
Odessa, Texas
Ames was back at the monitors drinking a cup of coffee when the truck blew up. He was looking right at it when it turned into a fireball, washing out the filters on the cameras with a bright white glare. He could feel the room vibrate, and heard the sound echo around him.
He set his coffee cup down carefully and rubbed at his eyes, still staring at his monitors.
When the images cleared, he saw what was left of the flatbed, mostly just the frame and wheels, burning like mad. Even the tires were on fire.
Of the men who had been there, there was no sign.
Blown halfway to Mexico, no doubt.
What could have happened? A fuel leak? Maybe the truck had been hauling explosives? No. He shook his head. He had seen that the thing was empty.
He shook his head, then took a sip of his coffee. What should he do about this? Anything? The men were beyond help, that was for sure. He hadn’t seen them for a few minutes, had assumed they had climbed back inside, unable to fix whatever was wrong. If they had — and they must have, because he didn’t see them running around out there — they were toast.
He could call the state police, he supposed, and report it, but he didn’t really want to have his presence noted. Even out here, somebody passing by would spot it soon enough and call it in. Yes, he was curious — but not enough to talk to the police. It didn’t concern him, and it wasn’t worth giving up the privacy and secrecy he had worked so hard to establish here.
Besides, the men in that truck were beyond help. There was nothing he or anyone else could do for them now. At least they probably never knew what hit them.
* * *
Where there had been a slab of concrete and steel rods, there was now a crater. But there was still dirt to be removed.
“Reaves, Holder, front and center!” Fernandez yelled. “Get those supersuits in gear!”
The pair of exosuited troopers moved forward, not quite a zombielike lurch, but not as smooth as a normal man’s walk, either. Accompanied by the hums of motors and hydraulics, they started moving dirt again.
“He surely heard our explosion,” Michaels said, pointing to the crater.
“If he is down there, I’d say he did,” Howard said. “That was unavoidable, which is why we had the decoy timed to go off at the exact same moment. The question is, did it work?”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
* * *
Ames watched the truck burn for a while, but there weren’t any more explosions, and he lost interest after a few minutes. He decided to get something to eat and go back to bed. One cup of coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping.
He loaded a fresh set of tapes into his recording devices, though. He’d check them in the morning, see how long it took the state patrol to arrive, and what they did while they were there. He also wanted to be sure they all left when they were finished. He didn’t want any stragglers anywhere on his property.
* * *
“We’re through, sir,” Reaves said.
Behind Reaves, Holder kept one augmented hand locked onto the trooper’s suit, preventing him from falling into the hole he’d just dug.
Howard nodded. “Lieutenant, the rope ladder.”
Julio came forward, unrolling the nylon and cross-slat device.
“It looks like it’s a good twenty feet to the landing, sir,” Fernandez said. “We’re going to be dangling.”
“No problem,” Howard said.
Michaels said, “Good. Let’s go find this guy, shall we?”
“Yes, sir, Commander. My thoughts exactly.”
* * *
Ames sat in the kitchen, eating a duck-egg omelet and black rye toast with marionberry jam. He paused, a bite halfway to his mouth.
What was that?
He listened carefully.
Nothing but the hum of the refrigerators. He waited a few seconds but heard nothing else.
One of the problems with a place this big and old was that it was full of creaky, groany things. Even this far under the surface, some of the heat must seep down enough to cause expansion and contraction. Unless there were resident ghosts, nobody was here but him. He was safer here than in a bank vault — nobody had a combination to his doors.
He finished his snack, washed and dried the dishes, and headed back to the bedroom. You didn’t want to go off and leave food caked on a plate when you might not be back for six or eight months. He hadn’t seen any ants, and they weren’t supposed to be able to get in here. On the other hand, they had found a roach on one of the space stations a couple years back, so why tempt fate?
He sat on the bed and started to pull his shoes off when he heard another noise.
One of his sensors had gone off.
The weird thing was, it wasn’t one of his perimeter alarms. Instead, it was a flashing red light that indicated a clogged air filter in one of the ventilator shafts.
What made it weird was that he had the filters cleaned and checked regularly. Out here in the desert, he had to. The only way that filter could be clogged this soon was if he’d left the door open behind him.
He stopped, felt a chill frost him.
Or if someone else had found another way in.
* * *
Michaels looked at General Howard.
Howard was studying a map on his flatscreen. After a moment he gestured down a hallway. “If Ames is still here, he should be over in that direction. The bedroom closest to the sensor room is only a hundred meters or so that way. That’s where I’d be staying, anyway.”
Michaels nodded.
Howard and his men carried 9mm subguns, along with their sidearms. Michaels had a pistol, one of the issue H&K tacticals, with instructions not to shoot unless somebody was in his face shooting at him. If Howard, Julio, and the two troopers all got outshot by one lawyer, the pistol probably wasn’t going to do him all that much good anyhow.
“Spread out,” Howard ordered. “And be quiet. Hand signals from now on.”
Ames held his pistol pointed at the floor, his finger outside the trigger guard, and moved carefully down the hall. He had to be imagining this, right?
Maybe. But something isn’t right. First a truck pulls up, then explodes like a big bomb, then you get a clogged filter warning light. Maybe those two things are connected?
He didn’t like coincidences.
Assume for the moment a worst-case scenario: Somebody was in here. If that was true, then it was bad news, very bad news. Because that would mean they had come specifically for him. That they were organized, well-informed, and extremely resourceful, not only to have found him, but to have mounted an assault and gotten inside undetected.
No. That shouldn’t be possible. They shouldn’t have been able to bypass his sensors, and couldn’t have gotten in if they had. No way.
Maybe there’s a secret entrance you don’t know about?
No. He had seen the plans. He had explored every foot of the place. There were no secret doors he didn’t know about.
He stopped and listened.
Nothing.
He tried to reassure himself. The filter was wonky, or the warning system was. It had to be. It certainly made much more s
ense.
Maybe. But he was not going to start taking chances now. He’d check everything out, carefully, and if there was any sign at all that he wasn’t alone, he’d run. Simple as that.
He felt better.
Then he turned a corner and saw the soldier with the submachine gun coming toward him—
“Target!” Julio said.
No sooner was that word out of his mouth than the target opened up with a weapon. Howard couldn’t see either the man or the gun, and the helmet’s sound suppressors damped the noise, but it sounded like a handgun. Three quick shots—bam-bam-bam! — fired almost as one.
Instinctively, Howard moved to the wall, seeking cover.
Julio, four meters ahead on point, returned fire with his subgun, a pair of three-round bursts.
Behind Howard, Michaels hit the floor and went prone. Reaves and Holder crouched, weapons seeking targets.
“He’s gone!” Julio yelled.
“You hit?”
“Negative, sir.”
“You hit him?”
“I don’t think so. He boogied awful fast.”
They moved up, but the corridor was indeed empty. There wasn’t any blood on the floor.
“Okay, he knows we’re here. Move in. Crank up that heat sensor, see if we can spot him that way. Commander, you bring up the rear.”
Michaels didn’t argue. He was smart enough to know what he didn’t know.
The five of them moved, Julio clearing the way, waving a little handheld device that should be able to pick up a man’s body heat.
Ames was not immediately evident.
“Easy does it, Lieutenant.”
“Always, General Howard, sir.”
* * *
Ames clutched his pistol, his hands sweaty on the wood and steel. He had some kind of assault team, military guys, right here with him! What was he going to do?
Who were they?
He didn’t even have a spare magazine for his gun. How many rounds had he fired? Two? Three?
Panic flowed in him.
The voice of reason tried to rise through the surge: What are you doing, fool?! Put the gun down and raise your hands! Let them arrest you! You’re a brilliant attorney, for God’s sake! They can’t have anything on you that will hold up in court! And once in court, you’ll have them outnumbered and outgunned.
