by Tom Clancy
“I know that much. What else?”
“He hung with ex-troopers, mostly. Mercs, freelancers, guys who made money in shooting wars, guarding dopers or smugglers.”
“Any names?”
“Groves. Russell. Hill. Thompson. Carruth. Couple others I never got to know. Special Forcers—Recon, green hats, Rangers. Badasses. Just as soon kill you as smile at you.”
Ahead, Reef said, “We’re almost—ah, shit!”
Jay turned his attention to the old man, who had dropped to his knees. What—?
There was something that looked like an arrow piercing the man, the barbed point of it coming from his back. As he watched, Reef was jerked off his feet and dragged along the wet ground. Jay saw that the “arrow” was actually the end of a long, vinelike tentacle, connected to a creature he couldn’t immediately tell was animal or plant. Looked kind of like a squid, but squatter, and covered with what looked like scales or bark. It had a huge, circular mouth with lots of pointed teeth in concentric rows.
Whatever Reef had, there was no getting it now.
Terrific scenario, no question. Scared himself.
“FREEZE RIGHT THERE!” came an amplified voice.
Jay glanced up and saw a five-man flitter floating twenty meters above them, the snout of a plasma cannon pointed over the side at them. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Crap.
“I’m not goin’ back!” Gauss yelled. He started running, lumbering through the brush.
The squidlike thing fired a sharp-ended tentacle at Gauss, but missed.
The gunner in the flitter was more accurate. He opened up with the plasma cannon and when the bolt hit Gauss, like a tree being hit with lightning, Gauss’s sap turned into superheated steam and blasted him apart—ka-blam!
“Euuww,” Jay said. “Ick!”
Time to leave.
“End scenario,” Jay said as the gunner started to line up on him.
Not much, maybe, but he had a few names. Something, at least.
Washington, D.C.
Lewis, at home, worked out the best way to deal with Carruth. There were a few risks, but she figured she could handle those. It was all in the setup.
First, she had to pick another Army base. Which one didn’t matter, as long as she could convince Carruth he had every chance of getting in and out okay, and that ought not to be a problem. Then, it was just a matter of how best to make sure he wouldn’t be captured alive.
She could use a vox-scrambler and make the call from a moving car in the middle of the city; she knew who to talk to to get the maximum response, and they’d never be able to get a fix on her in time.
She imagined how it might go:
“Listen, don’t talk—the terrorists who have been hitting the Army’s bases are going to hit another one.” She’d fill in the blanks here—time, place, like that. “But here’s the thing: the leader of the group, guy named ‘Carruth’? He’s an ex-SEAL who won’t let himself be taken alive. He’s already killed a bunch of GIs, plus a couple of civilian cops—he carries this monster handgun—and he has wired himself up with explosives. There’s a button on his belt, if he pushes it, he’ll take down half a city block when he goes. . . .”
She smiled at the scenario she was creating. She could easily imagine that she was the officer in charge of security. They wanted these suckers, bad, but they sure as hell wouldn’t let Carruth and his boys get within a hundred meters of anything they didn’t want to see blown up. So the ideal place to take him down would be in the middle of nowhere. But if they stopped him before he got onto the base, they’d have to bring in the civilian authorities—local and state police, FBI counterterrorism force, Homeland Security, maybe even the National Guard. The Army wouldn’t like that for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which would be the lack of control.
If, however, they could channel Carruth once he was on the base—a detour into an artillery range would be good, like that—then they could surround him somewhere relatively safe, and if he went nova, too bad. There were some stiff antiterrorism laws on the books these days, but if Carruth was simply captured, eventually he’d get a day in court.
An Army security guy would almost surely be thinking that it would be better for a bunch of killer terrorists to go up in smoke than maybe having some bleeding-heart liberal lawyer convincing a jury to let the clowns off because they had unhappy childhoods or some such crap.
That Carruth wouldn’t be strapped with bombs wouldn’t matter. Some Army sniper who could shoot out a bug’s left eye from a kilometer away would be perched somewhere with a scoped rifle and when Carruth tried to run—believing that he could get away, because Lewis had convinced him there was a secret bolt-hole he could use—then Carruth would be no more. . . .
Shoot, she could even set it up that he had to go into the base alone—that since he was just going to collect a colonel, there wasn’t going to be any shooting necessary. . . .
She smiled again. She was good, she knew it. Good enough to pull this off.
Carruth didn’t have a prayer.
31
Fort McCartney
Chesapeake Point, Maryland
Something was wrong.
Carruth couldn’t put his finger on it, but it felt . . . off, somehow.
He had the information Lewis had given him, codes, orders, specific and detailed directions, same as always. The gate-check had gone smooth as silk. The sun was shining, felt almost like spring was in the air, getting close to shirt-sleeve weather.
Lewis hadn’t screwed up yet—the time that things had gone south was something nobody could have figured, some GI who wasn’t supposed to be where he was, an X-factor for which it was impossible to calculate, and certainly not Lewis’s fault.
This would be easier, it involved stealth, and nobody would think twice about seeing him until he grabbed up the target. And even then, all he had to do was show the colonel the gun and keep it hidden, they’d be two guys walking to his car, nothing to see here, move along.
Once he drove onto the base, there was a roadwork sign blocking the main drag a couple hundred meters in, and the detour wasn’t on her plans, but that could have started this morning and even so, it shouldn’t matter. He ought to be golden.
But something was not right here. This place was so new the paint wasn’t dry. Why wouldn’t the road be in good repair?
Could be anything. Laying electrical lines, water or sewage pipes. Or maybe they just hadn’t finished paving yet. It was the Army—they didn’t do things like everybody else.
Could be anything.
But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like somebody he couldn’t see was out there, he could feel their gaze on him, tracking him. Stalking him . . .
Nothing reasonable about it, this feeling, nothing whatsoever to confirm it, but it was as if there was an invisible cloud of doom hanging over him, gathering itself to hit him with a monster lightning bolt that would blow him out of his shoes.
He’d had this sensation a couple times before. Once, it hadn’t been anything he could ever tell. The feeling came, he looked around, didn’t see anything, and eventually it passed.
The second time, he had been walking outside a camp in Iraq and he felt a panicked urge to stop right where he was. In that instance, he had halted, cold. Looked around, didn’t see anybody outside the camp within rifle range who might pot him. Then he’d looked down.
Another step, and he would have put his foot smack on the trigger of a terrorist-rigged mine planted by some local scumbag, what turned out to be an old artillery shell with a spring-loaded striker that would have no doubt blown off a foot at the least and probably killed him. IED, they called ’em. Improvised Explosive Device.
How had he known that? What sense had been tripped?
It wasn’t dependable, this feeling—he hadn’t felt squat when the two cops had braced him, nor when the shooting had started in Kentucky. But he felt it now.
If he kept going, he was going to die. He knew it r
ight to the marrow in his bones.
He pulled the car into a hard U-turn, breaking the back end loose, laying rubber and noise over the road. As soon as the car’s wheels regained traction, he tapped the gas.
Two things happened: Three men in field gear with M-16s at the ready came into view to his left, running in his direction.
A car started up behind him, a flashing light bar lit, and a siren screamed.
The M-16s opened up, their sounds reached him about the same time as the first rounds hit the car—clunk-clunk-clunk! —and punched through the metal just behind him. Part of a shattered bullet spanged around inside the car and blew out a back window—
“Shit—!”
He ducked instinctively and stomped the gas pedal.
The rental car wasn’t a Formula One racer, but it did surge a little. He turned the steering wheel sharply to the right, zig, then back to the left, zag. Soldiers kept shooting, but he couldn’t worry about that. They’d either hit him or they wouldn’t.
He saw a camo’d Hummer heading toward the gate, angling to cut him off.
The only weapon he had was a SIG side arm, a fucking nine, but he pulled it, aimed through the closed passenger window, and cooked off three fast shots, aiming at the other vehicle.
The first shot shattered the window, and it and the other two were damned loud in the car, but there was no help for that.
The Hummer’s driver hit his brakes. Too much to hope for that he’d hit the guy, but at least he’d slowed him down—
He saw sparks from the road in front of him. They were trying for his tires. He wouldn’t make much speed running on the rims.
He swerved the car again, slewing back and forth.
The gate was ahead, and a counterweighted pole was the only thing blocking the exit, though the guy in the kiosk had triggered the rolling gate and it began to close—
The pedal was floored, he wasn’t going to make the car go any faster, but it looked as if he might make it—
The guy in the kiosk ducked as Carruth pointed the SIG and let one go in his direction—
Why weren’t they closing on him? It was like they were hanging back on purpose—
The car threaded the gap, though the gate scraped the back passenger panel with a steel-fingernail-on-a-chalkboard noise. He had to be doing fifty, and in a few seconds, that went up to seventy.
Off the base!
Nobody was out here waiting for him—why the hell not?
Carruth uttered a steady stream of curses as he drove, watching the rearview mirror for pursuit. Another half a block into the base, he’d have never gotten out, even if he’d turned around and tried. His instinct had saved his ass—at least temporarily.
But—what the hell had happened? How had they gotten on to him?
Worry about that later, too. Right now, he had to drive like his life depended on it. Because it sure as shit did.
32
Net Force Gym
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn stepped out of the shower in the Net Force gym he had pretty much turned into his private practice salle, dried himself, and began to re-dress. Other people still came by to work out, but almost never when he was here.
He didn’t expect he would be working out here that much longer. As his grandfather used to say, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The zephyrs of change were about to start roaring through Net Force like a small hurricane. What had started out as a civilian-run group under the aegis of the FBI had been co-opted by the DoD into another arm of the military, and its mission had radically changed. A tank just didn’t run the same way a Corvette did.
So far, the military had left most things as they were, but eventually they would alter things. It was in their nature. Like a corporate raider forcing a company merger, the powers-that-be were going to look around and notice there was a lot of duplication of effort—and it would be cheaper, simpler, and smarter to eliminate that duplication—why have four when two were plenty?
Why have two when one could do the job?
Thorn finished dressing. He checked himself in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. He had come out of private industry, he had been involved in his share of buyouts and takeovers, and he knew how things worked. Things changed, and for all kinds of reasons: Buggy whips weren’t made anymore because there were no buggies. There came a time when the old gray mare was put out to pasture because she couldn’t keep up. That was how it had always been, and Thorn didn’t see that stopping anytime soon.
When the DoD took over Net Force, the agency’s days were numbered, and, as he looked at it, that number wasn’t very large. Six months, a year, maybe longer, but his guess was sooner rather than later. It didn’t make any sense otherwise. Net Force would be broken into components and the chunks sold or traded or given away, and in the end, nothing would be left. The name might stick around for a time, but the heart and soul would be gone. It wasn’t about the hardware, but about the people, and if they left, the party was over.
Thorn had an older cousin who had been a paper company manager twenty-five years or so past. The company, thinking ahead, always replanted the trees it harvested, put three in the ground for every one they chopped down. They were cutting third-growth, fourth-growth wood now. And they were adding new kinds of trees that grew faster and made better pulp, but now and again they would screw up the timing. A region would start to be harvested and trees replanted as they went, but they would cut down all the viable timber before the new plantings matured. There would be a five-year, sometimes a ten-year gap. When that happened, all the local loggers and support people were laid off. Thorn’s cousin had been the manager of one such area, up in Alaska. He’d had to shut the operation down to a few caretakers; a couple hundred workers, most of whom had been working the woods all their lives, thirty, forty years some of them, were let go. The little mill town had no other industry, and property values went into the toilet. Those people who couldn’t make it farming or fishing or hunting had to leave and find work elsewhere. The town effectively died.
Thorn’s cousin would tell the story at family gatherings, how the heart went out of the people who worked for him. How there had been suicides, divorces, vandalism against the company. It was a terrible experience, his cousin would say, taking another drink from his beer. Awful to be part of, depressing to watch. A way of life being lost. Much like what had happened to the Indians.
The listeners in the room would mutter and nod, and take sips of their beers. Yah, but who could have sympathy for the white men who went through it? Their own fault. Not like being herded onto a reservation and kept there by force.
Even though it was nearly as dramatic in this situation, Thorn wasn’t going to do that with Net Force. He had no intention of leading a funeral march. The party was winding down. It was time to think about getting his coat and taking his leave.
Pentagon Annex
Lewis called Jay, using the private number to his virgil this time. She was past trying to rattle Jay’s wife. It was time to get down to serious business.
“Rachel?”
“I need to see you,” she said. “I’ve got a break in the hunt.”
“Now?”
“As soon as you can. I figured out who designed the game. But I can’t ship you the file.”
“I’m on my way. It’ll take me an hour or so.”
“I’ll be here.”
She leaned back in her form-chair and smiled. She had a another red herring for him. Roy “Max” Waite, a fellow student who had graduated the same year she had. He’d gone into design for one of the big entertainment companies, built a couple of movie-tie-in games, had several other good game credits. In one of those lovely bits of good luck that sometimes happened at just the right time, Max Waite had been killed in an auto accident recently—only a few weeks ago. She had come across this just yesterday; somebody sent her an e-mail of a posting on an alumni website, lamenting the man’s early departure from life.<
br />
Big, fat, ole Max was dead. What a shame.
She’d seen immediately that she could use this. She’d gone through the system files, through her backdoor into the original game, and found what would look like a clue pointing to the dear departed Max, whom she remembered as a very stout man who’d spent most of his time in the computer labs perched precariously on a sturdy, but complaining, chair. It wasn’t real, the clue, but Jay wouldn’t know that, and he’d have no reason not to believe her. And even better, it would be almost impossible for him to check it further. Perfect.
Earlier, it could have been another wild hair for Jay to hunt down and tug at, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted him to come and see her. Once she got him behind the locked door of her office today, she was going to go for something much more primal. And she was sure he would be up for it.
Jay’s escort tapped on Lewis’s door. “Come on in.”
Jay did, and the sergeant ambled away. He shut the door behind him. “Gear up,” she said. “I’ll show you what I’ve got.” All crisp business, which was good.
He went to the guest chair and started slipping into sensors. He was already wearing his mesh under his clothes. He had taken the time to put it on so he wouldn’t have to do that here.
He jacked in, and the scenario blossomed. This time, it was a 1950s version of a big-city newspaper’s newsroom—copy boys bustled back and forth carrying typed sheets of papers; reporters, mostly men, smoked cigarettes or cigars at their desks and pounded away on old manual typewriters. The place even smelled like pulp paper and ink and cigar smoke. Nice.
Rachel said, “This way.”
Jay followed her down the hall to a door with a brass plate on it bearing the word MORGUE.
They went inside. An elderly woman in a gray wool suit and sensible shoes behind a scarred wooden counter smiled and handed Rachel a manila file folder. Rachel led Jay to a nearby table, and sat in an armless wooden chair, then patted the seat of the one next to that. He sat.
