The Great Race

by Tom Clancy

  The connection was made, and Leif recited the address. A second later, a computer’s silvery voice responded. ‘Owner of the address in question - Milos Wallenstein.’

  ‘Oh, ho, ho,’ Leif muttered, staring up at the beach house in triumph. There was a quick flash in the picture window, and his satisfaction abruptly curdled. That was the kind of reflection you usually got off lenses - say, a pair of field glasses.

  While he’d been tracking Cetnik and Wallenstein through high technology, they might have spotted him the old-fashioned way. Using binoculars, they could have also identified Ludmila.

  Leif threw the car into gear.

  ‘Did that tell you whose house that was?’ Ludmila asked.

  ‘It belongs to Milos Wallenstein,’ Leif replied shortly. Right now, he just wanted to get out of there. ‘He’s a big supporter of the anarcho-libertarian movement. And as you may know, some factions in that movement are very fond of your country.’

  They drove back to the hotel in silence, his grim, hers puzzled. ‘We may have been spotted back there,’ Leif finally admitted. He pulled off the side of the road a couple of blocks from the hotel, next to a line of shops. ‘I know this isn’t the gentlemanly thing to do, but I think we should arrive at the hotel separately. You might want to go play on your own here, maybe come home with a couple of bags from some tourist traps, and at a later time than I do.’

  ‘I have no money,’ she said. ‘Mr Cetnik pays for everything.’

  ‘That is something I can remedy.’ Leif took out a few bills and handed them to her. ‘Tell them your mother saved up to give you money to buy mementos of the trip.’

  ‘They will never believe it, but they can’t prove me wrong. If they accuse me of seeing you, I will deny everything!’ Ludmila cried. She tore off her cap and glasses as if they were damning evidence and threw them into the car. ‘I took a walk and went shopping.’

  Leif smiled. ‘That’s the spirit.’

  He watched her until she was safely inside a store. Then he pulled away from the curb and continued on to the hotel. Once inside the parking garage, Leif pulled the car into its assigned space, and got out.

  A figure suddenly appeared from behind one of the concrete support pillars - a large, broad, male figure.

  Zoltan, the captain of Ludmila’s team, stood glaring at him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The hulking boy from the Carpathian Alliance moved toward the car. ‘So where is our Ludmila?’ Zoltan asked.

  ‘I don’t know - you’re the ones who’ve been keeping her under lock and key,’ Leif replied. ‘Did you lose her?’

  ‘Do not deny what I know to be true. You won’t like what happens next.’

  ‘Oh?’ Leif asked. ‘Is this where you set yourself up for a charge of assault?’

  ‘Your smart mouth won’t save you now,’ Zoltan told him. ‘This isn’t like the time on the bus with that Corteguayan fool. There are no witnesses.’

  He snarled something in his native language as he looked Leif up and down. ‘So much crime in these American cities,’ he purred, grinding his right fist into his left palm. ‘Who will care about one more statistic?’

  His smile was confident as he stepped forward. After all, there was enough of him to make two of Leif. ‘Perhaps I’ll take your wallet, so it will look like a robbery. Or maybe I’ll leave it. You look like the type to get on the wrong side of a jealous boyfriend.’

  The smile was gone as he turned back to Leif. ‘Foolish American,’ he said venomously. ‘Soft. Decadent. Obsessed with toys. Your time of greatness is long past, yet you sit like a heavy weight on those who would change the world. And your arrogance! Like this foolish show, where you imagine your weak-minded ideal spreading across the galaxy!’

  His laugh was like a sharp bark. ‘When men got to the stars, they will be more like Thuriens than your weak-kneed Galactic Federation - strong, racially pure warriors!’

  Zoltan was almost on Leif now, reaching out with his long arms to grab him. ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he gloated. ‘Breaking your - hwuuuuuuuulp!’

  Leif took a single step forward, the stiffened fingers of his right hand striking a lance-head just below Zoltan’s breastbone and up.

  The air gushed out of the bigger guy, and he folded over.

  ‘Not smart, Zoltan,’ Leif scolded his adversary, who was still trying to suck into his emptied lungs. ‘You were so busy exercising your mouth muscles, you forgot to tighten up your gut. Even a soft, decadent guy like me could nail you in the solar plexus.’

  Hunched and gasping, Zoltan tried to grab Leif and crush him in a bear hug. But Leif twisted aside, smashing his hulking opponent in the side of his face with his forearm. Zoltan staggered, and Leif came up behind him, kicking the back of his knee.

  Zoltan toppled, hitting the concrete floor hard.

  ‘Man, that’s got to hurt,’ Leif told him.

  The hulking team captain managed to lever himself up on his hands and knees. But he stuck there, his breath still coming in rattling gasps.

  Leif stood over him. ‘One thing you should bear in mind,’ he suggested. ‘Net Force Explorers are taught how-to handle themselves by U.S. Marines. And while Marines are American, they certainly aren’t soft!”

  He punctuated his message with a looping overhand punch that solidly connected with Zoltan’s temple. The big guy keeled over and crashed to the floor again.

  This time he didn’t seem to be getting up.

  And so, we have a demonstration of three important truths, Leif thought as he walked to the elevator.

  One, it was better that Ludmila had missed this. She wouldn’t have liked what she saw.

  Two, although it was a cliche, the bigger they come, the harder they do fall.

  And three, the trainers in Quantico were right. Never punch into bone.

  Leif kept wiggling his hand, trying to work the pain out of his knuckles, all the way up to the third floor.

  ‘We’re so pleased to have your input,’ Andy said in annoyance as Leif entered the suite. The Net Force Explorers were in a corner of the living room, working over David’s laptop. In the background, a music holo was playing - musicians in drippy green makeup as if their faces were running. A barf-rock band. Leif watched their act for a moment, shaking his head. Doing that all over the audience didn’t look like fun to him,

  ‘We’ve been trying to figure out how we’re going to survive the end of this race,’ Matt pointed out a little testily. He didn’t actually come out and accuse Leif of goofing off, but the thought was definitely in there.

  ‘Me, too,’ Leif told him curtly. He went to the holo-suite, killed the music, and initiated a call to Captain Winters. ‘Ive been talking to a member of the C.A. team,’ Leif told the captain. ‘She believes they’ve got something worse than that fit-inducer up their sleeves - something lethal.’

  The captain’s face set in familiar lines - the worry of a commander sending troops into danger. ‘I want you to pull the plug,’ he said.

  Leif couldn’t answer, thanks to a storm of protest from the other guys. He waited for his chance. ‘Can Net Force shut this down?’

  ‘Pinnacle Productions pays its lawyers well - and they earn their pay,’ Winters grimly replied. ‘If you had details of this lethal application …’

  ‘Captain, I can’t even be sure it’s for real,’ Leif unhappily admitted. ‘If you can’t stop the race and we pull out, the C. A. wins. And even if you keep them from shipping the stuff home, can you block them from evaluating the equipment for charitable donations?’

  ‘If the Pinnacle lawyers get in the way, it might take time,’ Winters didn’t like what he was saying, but he told the truth.

  ‘The rule of law,’ David said bitterly. ‘While the lawyers wrangle, C.A. spies could be dissecting all that cutting-edge technology.’

  ‘That’s not my concern. You boys, however, are very much my concern. And I’m not having you put yourselves at risk. These people have already demonstrated tha
t they’re willing to do anything to win. I want you to fall behind and stay there once you start the race. In fact - I’d prefer it if you crashed and burned as soon as possible. I want you out of there before there’s any possibility of trouble.’

  ‘But, sir …’ Leif protested.

  ‘You heard me. I’ll keep you posted on the lawyers. Now go get some rest. You look like you could use it.’ Winters signed off.

  As soon as the image faded, Leif looked at his friends.

  ‘Are we going to back down and lose the very thing we’ve come this far to win?’ he asked.

  The chorus of protests from everyone in the room made it clear that he wasn’t the only one who thought that was a bad idea. ‘So we stay in the race, but take every precaution we can think of.’

  ‘What if we run into trouble?’ David asked.

  ‘We’ll report it immediately,’ Leif promised.

  If we’re alive to do so, a gloomy little voice snickered in his brain. But he wasn’t running away like a whipped dog at the first sign of trouble. None of them were.

  They went back to the problem at hand.

  ‘Death threats or no death threats, we’re the only competition left that’s even close to the Thuriens. The other ships are so far back, they’ll be breaking out of hyperspace several minutes after we do.’

  ‘And you know what that means,’ Matt said grimly. ‘No witnesses.’

  Where have I just heard that? Leif wondered, heading over to the refrigerator to get some ice for his knuckles.

  ‘The Constellation and the other ships are barred from the system until one racer has tagged the finish buoy,’ David said, repeating the winning conditions.

  ‘Which means there’s nothing to stop the Thuriens from tagging us with their lasers if we even give the suggestion that we can beat them to the buoy’ Andy shrugged. ‘What do they need this killer program for?’

  ‘I can only tell you what Ludmila told me,’ Leif said. ‘She overheard Cetnik talking about another trick they’ve got up their sleeves. Something one-hundred-percent lethal.’

  ‘Like what?’ Matt demanded.

  Leif shook his head helplessly. ‘She doesn’t know.’

  David looked at his friend. ‘Do you think she’s serious, or is this some kind of ploy for information?’

  ‘After what happened to old Jorge from Corteguay, I’d have to say you’ve got a point,’ Leif admitted. He looked around at his friends. ‘But I’d say she was serious - and telling the truth. After all, the C.A. team has already shown itself to be pretty inventive - and nasty.’

  ‘They were willing to hurt people,’ David agreed. ‘But outright murder?’

  ‘Hey, with some of those seizure victims, it could have gone either way,’ Andy said. ‘Is that so very different?’

  ‘So we’ve got something else to worry about,’ Matt said. ‘Well, maybe we should look harder at this emergency mode David’s been talking about.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Leif asked.

  ‘If you’d been here, you’d have heard it from the beginning,’ Andy snapped.

  ‘And if I’d been here, the only technical advice I could have given was “make it with a red button or a green button,” ‘ Leif replied. ‘You guys are the programming geniuses.’

  ‘Well, it’s going to take a lot of work,’ David said. ‘Essentially, I’m suggesting a way to bail out of the sim but still run it.’

  ‘How?’ Leif wanted to know.

  ‘With my little box here.’ David patted his lap top computer. ‘We’ll have to patch it in to the cables connecting the computer-link couches. We’ll give up a lot of control, so I haven’t suggested it earlier, but then, I’d never have believed a simple contest could get so dangerous. Given the choice between winning and living, I can tell you which side I come down on. So, running things off of my laptop - we won’t have the brains to run full simulations, but we can preprogram certain emergency measures. Evasion, full forward thrust—’

  ‘Tagging the finish buoy,’ Andy suggested. ‘Unfortunately, we won’t be able to pull off more complicated stunts, like Project Blindfold.’

  Leif managed to keep his face calm. No need to set Andy off again.

  ‘That’s one of the countermeasures we discussed the last time,’ Matt said, taking pity on his friend. ‘Extending our force-sails to knock out their scanners.’

  ‘You found out a way to make it work?’ Leif said. ‘Great!’

  ‘Yeah - it just took most of the time since we got back here,’ Andy said ironically. ‘And what have you accomplished?’

  ‘Well, I gassed up the car,’ Leif replied. ‘I pumped Ludmila for information. And I knocked Captain Zoltan of the Thurien Warfleet flat on his ugly face when he tried to ambush me in the garage.’

  ‘We’ll want to hear all about that,’ David said in his own captain’s voice. ‘But first we need to program the emergency measures. Anybody have more suggestions?’

  Working up the emergency programs kept the team busy almost to the time they were supposed to leave for recording the big finale. Some parts of their planned countermeasures proved easier said than done. Hours were spent developing the proper program hooks, working from the simple action sims in the hotel system’s games files.

  If Leif never saw another screen from Tail Gunner Mario, it would still be too soon. But when they finished, they were able to send the toy airplane into loop-the-loops and shoot at cartoon pterodactyls while using the keyboard to control it.

  Then they graduated to hard games, and more complicated sims, until David pronounced their programming ready for the ultimate challenge. Working over the Net, they accessed the virtual version of the Onrust in his home computer and successfully ordered it around.

  ‘This still isn’t going to be a walk in the park,’ David warned. ‘Remember where the finish buoy is located.’

  The race developers had come up with one final curveball for the competitors, turning the final buoy into a moving target. And that didn’t just mean matching velocities with a simple orbit. No, those sadistic geniuses had placed the buoy in a comet with a shattered nucleus. The teams would actually have to penetrate that mass of grinding space debris and get within a hundred kilometers of the buoy to score a victory.

  But that was a concern for the future. Leif’s present was devoted to handling all the domestic errands for his friends while their brains ground away at the software problems they had to solve. He did the accumulated laundry, brought in snacks, and even ordered room service to keep them fed through the course of the day. He also talked with a few of the teams that had been eliminated from the race. He was worried about the time the Net Force Explorers would spend in veeyar in this final round. Their actual real-life bodies could be at risk - certainly Zoltan had shown no signs of shyness about wanting to beat him to a pulp. Leif asked members from two of the teams no longer in the race if they’d unobtrusively stand guard over the door to their office at Casa Falldown during the race. Maybe he was getting paranoid, but better paranoid than pulped, he figured.

  And while he worked, he worried about Ludmila. He might be stuck as the temporary servant for the duration of the great programming marathon. But she was being kept incommunicado. Most of the time, she seemed to be in the C.A. team’s suite. On the rare occasions she came out, Ludmila was always under a teammate’s watchful eye. Leif hoped they were unsure enough of her visit with him to refrain from punishing her for it.

  She tried to pass you a warning. Leif silently accused himself. And you got her in deep trouble.

  How could he help her? When the race was over, she’d have to return to her domovina, her homeland. It wasn’t as though he could offer her asylum. Or that she would accept it, cutting herself off forever from her mother, her family, everything she’d ever known.

  It would have been nice to talk to her, just to be sure she was all right. But as they waited for the bus that would take them to Pinnacle Studio for the big showdown, even that small comfort looked prett
y unlikely.

  When they arrived in the lobby, almost all of the competitors were there. Even the teams who had lost their ships - at least those teams who hadn’t been sent home -would watch the final sequence in the large screening room. The kids who had agreed to watch his team’s backs nodded at him. It was the predetermined signal that they’d slip out as soon as the race started and keep an eye on things in the real world. Only one team still in L.A. was missing - the pariahs from the Carpathian Alliance.

  ‘The Carpathian Alliance’s handler or whatever you call him plans to drive them here in the car,’ the Danish captain told the Net Force Explorers.

  Leif shrugged. I hope this isn’t a sign of how the rest of the evening will go, he thought.

  • • *

  The halls of Casa Falldown smelled of disinfectant, but despite that, the sour scent of sickness still lingered in the air, David stood in the entrance, his nose wrinkled in disgust.

  ‘However it goes, this will be our last time in here,’ Leif said. ‘And once we’re in virtual mode, we won’t be able to smell it.’

  David nodded, and they headed to their office. As soon as they were inside, Leif closed the door as far as it could go against the bundle of wires. Matt and Andy pounced on the computer-link chair farthest out of sight from the doorway, yanking the chair’s line from its connection in the cable bunch and inserting a shunt wire between the two jacks. They worked quickly and neatly. In almost no time David’s computer had been patched into the circuit.

  At the moment, it interacted in a passive mode, merely showing what the special-effects department had prepared of the simulation. The computer’s display presented a miniature view of the Onrust’s bridge. It was really too small to make out what was on the Lilliputian viewscreen.

  We’ll find out soon enough, Leif told himself.

  If the boys cut their connection with the simulation, however, the laptop’s command link would surface, and they would be able to influence their ship’s operation from the small computer’s keyboard. Specific hot keys had been programmed to launch various maneuvers.