Point of Impact

by Tom Clancy

  Tad was out cold on the couch, and even the pitcher full of ice water hardly roused him. He mumbled something.

  Drayne started slapping his face. Eventually, his hand got sore and tired, but Tad came awake, sort of.

  “What?”

  “You idiot! You don’t have any idea what you did, do you?”

  “What?”

  “The gym! You trashed the gym! I stopped by there to work out, and that was all anybody was talking about! Even if I hadn’t sent you, I could recognize you from their descriptions! You moron!”

  Groggy, Tad sat up. He rubbed at his face. “I’m all wet,” he said.

  “You got that right. Christ on a pogo stick, Tad!”

  “I don’t understand, Bobby. I got the disk from the security drive, the job’s done, we’re free and clear, nobody has anything to link us to Zeigler. There’s no proof of anything.”

  “You really don’t see it, do you?” Drayne sat heavily on the couch next to his partner. Of a moment, he felt sorry for Tad. He kept forgetting most people didn’t have his horsepower when it came to cranking up the mental engines. “Obviously, the smart drugs hadn’t kicked in when you decided to feel up Atlas’s sister. Think about it.”

  Tad shook his head, still not tracking.

  “Look, I know you’re tired and stoned, and ordinarily I’d let you sleep it off, but time just got to be a problem. You made a mistake.”

  “I don’t see it. They don’t know who I am. No way.”

  “Okay. Let me explain it to you.” He looked at Tad, who made death warmed over seem the picture of health, and realized he had to take it slow for him to keep up with it. He eased off his anger a little. “Let me tell you a story. Just sit back and listen carefully, okay?”

  Tad nodded.

  “When I was in middle school, they had us in an arts and crafts track. We got three months each of music, art, and speech in one bundle, and three months of drafting, shop, and home arts in another.

  “So the first day I show up in music class, and sweet little old Mrs. Greentree, had to be about a hundred and fifty or so, has us all sitting there, and she says, ‘What is the universal language?’ And of course, none of us have a clue. And she says, ‘Music. Music is the universal language. The notes are the same in Germany as they are in France or America.’

  “Right, okay, so we got it. Music is the universal language.

  “So later that day, we get to to the first section of second bundle, which turns out to be drafting class. This is taught by Coach. Back then, every other male teacher in the school was Coach.

  “So we’re sitting there, and Coach says, ‘Okay, what is the universal language?’

  “So anyway, being as how I am newly educated and eager to impress, I shoot my hand up and Coach grins at me. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Music, Coach,’ I say. ‘Music is the universal language!’

  “Coach just about kills himself laughing. ’Music?! Haw! Music ain’t the universal language, you dip, pictures are the universal language! You in China and you run into some Chinaman and you want to ask him where the toilet is, what are you gonna do, sing to him? ”Oh, mister Chinaman, please tell me, where is the toilet, la la la...?”

  “ ‘Jesus, get your head out of your butt, son! You draw him a picture! Music! Haw!’

  “A couple years later, that same question came up in math class, and guess what? I kept my hand down and my mouth shut. Same thing happened when I got to basic computer class. Music, pictures, mathematics, binaries, they are all considered universal languages.”

  Drayne shut up and looked at Tad, who shook his head.

  “Okay, so what’s the point?”

  “Context is my point, Tad. Context.” He spoke slowly, as if talking to a retarded child. “Not just what gets said or done, but where and when it happens is critically important.”

  Tad frowned, and Drayne could see that he still didn’t get it.

  “Let me tell you another story.”

  “Jesus, Bobby, okay, I get it that you’re pissed—”

  “Shut up, Tad. Once upon a time I knew a guy who was a bouncer at a titty bar. One night, he and some of his friends went to a heavy metal rock concert, you know the kind, head-bangers, primal rock, big crowds standing on the floor screaming to the music, half of them stoned or drunk. So in the middle of the concert, a girl who is sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders decides to pull off her top and flash the crowd, or the band, or whoever.”

  “I’ve seen that a few times,” Tad said, trying to follow him.

  “Right. So’d my bouncer friend, and no big deal. And normally, the way it works is, the girl waves her hooters around, then puts her top back on, a fine time is had by all, and that’s that. But this time, while she was unbound and waving in the breeze, her boyfriend reaches up and grabs her breasts, starts rubbing them. Now, she doesn’t slap his hands away, she laughs, and next thing you know, she’s pulled off her steed and felt up by thirty or forty heavy metal fans. We’re talking mob mentality here, and the atmosphere is ripe for trouble. My friend the bouncer is too jammed in to help, and the crowd is so thick that concert security can’t get there, either. The girl vanishes.

  “Fortunately, aside from getting passed around and fondled against her will, it didn’t go any further. They let her go, she gets her clothes back, her nipples are sore, end of event.

  “So, whose fault was it she got mauled, Tad?”

  “Hers. She should have kept her top on.”

  “Yes. And people shouldn’t get drunk or do drugs and go to rock concerts, and we should always look both ways before crossing the street. No, it’s the boyfriend who set it off, and the girl, who could have stopped it, made it worse. See, soon as he laid a hand on her boob, she should have slapped the shit out of him. The implied message when somebody flashes in such a situation is ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ When the boyfriend broke the implied rule, the others assumed that a girl who’d do that in public, who was willing to allow touch along with the looking, well, she might be willing to let somebody else play, too, so they helped themselves.”

  “Not right.”

  “Nope, it wasn’t. But given the circumstances, a bunch of stoned mouthbreathing head-bangers, you can understand how it might progress to that, or worse. There’s the way things should be, and the way things are. You might not like it, but you ignore the way things are at your peril.”

  “And you are saying that I fucked up even though I got rid of the evidence. That it is going to progress to something else?”

  “That is exactly what I am saying. See if you can stay with me here: The police and the feds will know you were on the Hammer, because nothing else can explain a burned-out matchstick like you kicking major steroid ass like you did. And the bust at Zeigler’s was a major deal and on the minds of the cops. And if they dig just a little, they’ll come up with the Zee-ster working out at Steve‘s, and zap! A light will flash over their heads and they’ll think, ‘Hmm. Big movie star shoots it out with the DEA, and they find this superguy drug in his house. Then, within a real short time, somebody trashes a gym where the big movie star works out, obviously on the same superguy drug. Say ... isn’t that a funny coincidence?’ And somebody ... somebody in the FBI or the local police . . . they are gonna ask themselves the big question: Why? Why’d the guy—that’s you—why’d the guy come in and steal the security cam’s recording device? Other than coming in to feel up Brunhilda and kicking the crap out of a few bodybuilders, that’s all you did. And they are gonna come up with, ’Hey, maybe there is something on that disk the guy doesn’t want us to see. What could it be?’ And somebody is gonna take it one step further and make an assumption, since they know the Zee-ster worked out there, and that somebody is gonna say, ‘mm. Maybe because the big movie star was there with somebody who really doesn’t want to be seen?’ ”

  “But the recording is gone—” Tad began.

  Drayne cut him off, but his voice was quiet. “So it is. But the people who work th
ere aren’t. I know Steve, the owner, and he might remember that a couple of times when Zeigler was there, he and I came or went together. And if Steve or Tom or Dick or Harry or anybody else in the place remembers that, then my name is gonna come up in a conversation with the feds or cops. And even if Steve doesn’t remember, the cops will get a list of members and go looking for a connection. This is a cop lesson I learned at my daddy’s knee: When you don’t have anything, you check everything. And sooner or later, they are gonna send somebody out to talk to folks on the list, just routine, and there will be a knock on our door. And I have a nice made-up job that fortunately I didn’t mention on my application at the gym, one that’s all nice and electronically vouched for, so maybe they can poke at it a little and it might even hold up, but ... What is the fucking job, Tad?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Oh, shit, yeah. I’m a chemist. Think that’ll, you know, raise any red flags or ring any bells? Illicit drugs and a chemist? There are millions of test tube jockeys in the world, but how many of us working out at the same gym as the dead guy they are investigating up the wazoo? Even the stupidest cop alive could run with that one.

  “The feds might not be the fastest mill wheels in the world, but they grind exceedingly fine. They are plodders, but that’s what they do best, and if they get this far, we are fucked. Even if the house is as clean as a wetware assembly room. If they can’t prove anything, they’ll know who I am, and that will throw a big rock into the gears. I won’t be able to go pee from now on without seeing an underwater camera lens in the toilet bowl looking up at me.”

  Tad shook his head. “I’m sorry, man.”

  Drayne shook his head in response. “I know, Tad, I know. And it’s done. Now, we have to see if we can manage some kind of damage control.”

  “How?”

  Drayne looked at him. “You know the guy in Texas, down in Austin?”

  “The programmer who buys two caps every three or four weeks, for him and his girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, him. I read about him in Time. He’s supposed to be a genius, supposed to be able to make a computer sit up and bark like a dog, if he wants. Got his start hacking into secure systems just for the fun of it.”

  “So?”

  “So, we make him a deal. He does us a favor, we supply him with whatever rings his bell, for free.”

  “Dude is richer than Midas, he doesn’t need the money.”

  “But I know how geniuses think,” Drayne said. “Especially outlaw geniuses. He’ll do it so we’ll owe him, and in the doing, he can prove he’s still got the chops he started out with. He gets to exercise the old muscles and feel like a badass outlaw again.”

  “What is he gonna do that’ll help?”

  “He’s going to make us invisible. Get ahold of him.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea. It could work. If they moved fast enough, it definitely could work.

  24

  Baghdad, Iraq

  Sweat ran down John Howard’s face.

  In the heat of battle, the SIPEsuit’s polypropyl/spidersilk layers didn’t get rid of the perspiration nearly fast enough to keep you dry. The weight of the ceramic plates wasn’t bad, but it didn’t help cool things any. Even during a tepid night, such as it was now, the helmet’s sweatband quickly got soaked, and you had to blink away the moisture that oozed down into your eyes. And you couldn’t raise the clear face shield to let some air in, because the heads-up display wouldn’t work without the shield, and neither would the seventh-gen spookeyes built into the armored plastic.

  The good thing was, night was no cover for the bad guys. The latest-release intensifiers in the starlight scopes were powerful enough to let you see with the slightest city glow, and the suit’s computer false-colored the images so they didn’t have that washed-out, pale green look. The blast shield cutouts had been upgraded so that if some yahoo threw a flare or a flashbang, the filters would pop on-line within a hundredth of a second, saving you from a sudden nova-lume that would sear your eyeballs blind in a heartbeat. Though this was something of a mixed blessing.

  “You can run, Abdul, but you can’t hide,” Howard said.

  From the LOSIR headset, Sergeant Pike’s voice: “Sir?”

  “Disregard that,” Howard said. He shifted his grip on the tommy gun. His good-luck piece wore the pistol grip forestock and a fifty round drum, weighed a ton, and it took a little practice to use properly, especially if you were used to the cheek-spot-weld, right-elbow-high, left-hand-under-the-foregrip the Army liked to teach long-arm shooters when Howard had gone through basic all those years ago.

  “Sir, I make it nine ceejays coming in through that alley to the left.”

  Howard’s own heads-up display verified that. “Copy, Sergeant. That’s two each and one left over. Wake up troops and mind your fields of fire.”

  The other three men with Howard did not respond. They knew what they were supposed to do.

  Howard clicked the selector onto full auto and raised the finned barrel with its Cutts compensator over the top of the rusty oil drum he had chosen for cover. The old drum was full of what looked like brick and concrete fragments, so it was cover and not just concealment. If the enemy spotted him and directed fire his way, he did have some protection.

  The first of the nine soldiers appeared at the mouth of the alleyway. They stopped, and the leader held up his hand, signaling for the others to halt. He looked around, didn’t see Howard or the rest of his quad, then hand-signaled for the rest to advance.

  Howard touched a recessed control on his helmet and shut off the spookeyes. The bright-as-noon scene went immediately dim, but there was still enough ambient light to make out the shadowy forms of the enemy troopers. He slitted his eyelids, to make the scene even darker, forcing his pupil to dilate wider.

  When the ninth soldier appeared, one of Howard’s quad tossed a five-second photon flare. Bright, actinic white light strobed, casting tall, hard-edged shadows from the startled soldiers.

  Howard waited a beat, then opened his eyes wider.

  His men let go with their subguns, and the enemy soldiers returned fire, yelling and blasting away.

  Howard indexed the two in his assigned field of fire and gave them each a three-round burst.

  In the light of the still burning photon flare, the nine went down like pins in a bowling alley. The scene fell quiet. The five-second flare winked out, and it went dark, much darker than before. Even though he had been using hardball .45 auto ammo with low-flash powder, the after-images of his fire decreased his vision. Howard touched the control, and the spookeyes turned night into day again. The heat sigs on the downed soldiers showed no movement. Good. A perfect ambush.

  “End sim,” Howard said.

  The Baghdad street scene vanished, and John Howard removed the VR headset and leaned back in his office chair. The exercise had been designed to practice with the spookeyes, and it had gone as planned. The ability to see in almost total darkness was a great help, but there were some drawbacks. Because of the automatic filters built into the scopes, any scenario that included random, repeated weapons fire effectively rendered the spookeyes useless, just as it did wolf ear hearing protectors.

  With a single bright flash of light, the scopes’ filters would kick on long enough to diminish the light to safe levels, then open back up. This worked great for an explosion. However, with multiple flashes of bright orange muzzle blasts going off all around you, the filters would kick on and off, going from light to dark so fast it was extremely disorienting. The effect was rather like being surrounded by strobe lights all timed differently. Early sims showed the accuracy rate of troopers firing in such a scenario dropped dramatically.

  So different tactics had been employed to get around the problem.

  At first, the scientific types had tried to rig the scopes to drop filters and leave them down for five or ten seconds. Unfortunately, this made the
scene too dark to see anything except much-dimmed muzzle flashes, your own or the enemy’s. Spray and pray was a sucker’s game.

  They tried adjusting this, but since firefights sometimes lasted for five seconds, sometimes a lot longer, the results were less than satisfactory.

  They also tried raising the gain threshold, so it took more to cause the shields to deploy, but even an amplified kitchen match in the dark would be enough to temporarily blind a soldier.

  The scientists and engineers scratched their heads and went back to their CAD programs.

  It fell to the men and women in the field to come up with a better way, like it usually did. Using the scopes to find and track an enemy, then reverting to the old-fashioned method seemed to be the best approach. At least it worked in VR scenarios and at the range. How it would work in the real world remained to be seen, at least for his units.

  Howard sighed. He had run dozens of war game scenarios over the past few weeks, and there was only so much of that a man could take. In his time as the commander of Net Force’s military arm, there had been slack periods, but never as slow as it had been these last few weeks. He knew he was supposed to be happy about that, the idea that peace was better than war, and he was, but—

  —sitting around and doing nothing but figurative paper clip counting was boring.

  Of course, he wasn’t as likely to get shot sitting around and doing nothing, and that had been on his mind lately, too.

  Washington, D.C.

  Toni tried doing her djurus while sitting on the couch, just using her upper body, as Guru had told her. Yeah, she could do it, and yeah, it was better than nothing, but it was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. You couldn’t really feel the water.

  She stood, moved the coffee table out of the way, and did a little stretching, nothing major, just to limber up her back and hips some. The doctor hadn’t said she couldn’t stretch, just nothing heavy-duty, right?