Night Moves (1999)

by Tom - Net Force 03 Clancy

  "Really? Then why aren't you king of the world?"

  The man laughed yet again. "I like you, Peel, you are so refreshing after years of mealy-mouthed scientific types. The simple answer is, the computer isn't perfect yet. It has a few glitches, and now and again, it goes down. Somewhere about half the time I use it, actually. So I am loath to waste my up time on frivolous things like money and power--at least until I get it more stable. That's where I'm spending my energies, on the system. Because Goswell owns the physical unit and has it quite well guarded, I can't turn down his requests just yet. But the time is coming. And I'll need men with your skills with me."

  Peel thought about the million euros in the Indonesian bank. He was already richer than he'd ever expected. His father, title notwithstanding, had been a land-poor duffer who'd lost even that before he died. A million euros was nothing to sniff at, but if he stuck with this strange character, the chance of more was distinctly possible.

  "I am at your service, Mr. Bascomb-Coombs."

  "Oh, do call me Peter, Terrance. I'm sure we're going to get along just fine."

  14

  Wednesday, April 6th

  Seattle, Washington

  Ruzhyo rode the underground train through the SeaTac airport toward his gate. He was booked on a British Airways 747 to London. He had taken a bus from Mississippi to New Orleans, a Stretch-727 from there to Portland, and a Dash 8 from there to here. Had anybody been able to follow him to Mississippi, they would have seen a similar travel pattern from Las Vegas to Jackson: He had rented a car and driven to Oklahoma City, then caught the first of three short commercial flights south-eastward from there. A pursuer might have expected him to continue east or south, to Miami, say, and instead, he had reversed his direction. Once in London, he would fly to Spain or Italy, from there to India or Russia, and from there, home.

  If you were being chased, it was not wise to run in a straight line, especially if the hounds were faster than you.

  The train was full, and when it stopped again to load more passengers, Ruzhyo got up from his seat and offered it to a young and very pregnant woman carrying two bags. He and Anna had wanted children, but that was not to be.

  The woman thanked him and sat. He held onto a railing and watched the wall pass in front of the windows.

  The train stopped, the passengers alighted, and Ruzhyo headed for his gate. He was hours early, but he had nowhere else he wanted to go. He would find a sandwich shop; a bathroom to attend to his needs; a place to sit and perhaps to sleep. In the military, one learned to sleep whenever the opportunity arose, and sleeping in a comfortable chair was easy.

  The flight to Heathrow was a direct one, only nine or ten hours, and he was booked in the center cabin, as would be a man traveling on business. He wore a medium-price suit, a pale blue shirt and tie, and carried a briefcase full of magazines and blank paper to augment the image. He was just another corporate wheel in the machine, nobody to look twice at.

  British Airways wasn't as bad as some, certainly much better than any of the Russian or Chinese internal airlines. His last flight on the English carrier had been dull enough, save for the touchdown. The big jet hit the runway hard enough to deploy the oxygen masks and to shower passengers with luggage from the overhead bins. No one had been hurt, but it had been something of a surprise. Perhaps they had been letting the stewardess practice her landings. Or maybe the pilot had fallen asleep.

  He mentally shrugged. He had hit harder. Once, during a monsoon, the JAL flight he was on had landed in Tokyo hard enough to collapse the nose gear, sending a shower of sparks past the passengers' windows despite the wet pavement. Once, on a flight to Moscow, the vintage turboprop Russian plane upon which he had been traveling had landed safely but hit a refueling truck as it taxied to the gate, killing the driver and throwing to the floor half a dozen passengers in too much of a hurry who had unbuckled and left their seats. Bones had been broken on that one. And once, after he had alighted from a small Cessna at a remote field in Chetsnya, the little craft had taxied away toward the runway to depart, rolled over a land mine sixty meters away, and had been blown to pieces.

  He had ceased to worry about such things long ago. If your number was up, then it was up. Until then, the old saw was true: Any landing you could walk away from was a good landing.

  A little pub in the terminal had Rueben sandwiches on the menu, and he ordered one and a beer. The television set was on, a sports channel. Hideously ugly women, puffed up like human toads and stained dark brown, paraded back and forth on a stage, flexing their muscles. They looked like men in bikinis. Backstage, one of the women was interviewed, and when she spoke, her voice was deeper than an operatic bass singer's.

  Amazing what people would do to themselves. Ruzhyo had once trained briefly with Russian Olympic track athletes, and he knew something of the chemicals they used to enhance their performances. The male steroids these women bodybuilders took left them with permanent changes in their bodies: deep voices, acne, hairy faces and bodies, and enlarged sexual organs. It was fine to pump up when one was twenty-five to stand on a stage, but what would these poor women look like at fifty or sixty? He shook his head. No eye for the future.

  "Jesus, would you turn that shit off?" one of the other bar patrons said to the man behind the counter. Several of the other men raised their glasses in support. The counterman shrugged and changed the channel.

  Ruzhyo ate his sandwich and drank his beer.

  Wednesday, April 6th

  London, England

  MI-6 had given Alex and Toni a fair-sized office with full access to their computer systems. Well, at least insofar as this particular problem went. Toni had come across plenty of off-limits files.

  Alex was down the hall, conferring with Hamilton. Toni was alone in the office, cross-referencing airline computer data, when Angela Cooper tapped at the open door.

  "Come in," Toni said.

  "Sorry to bother you, Ms. Fiorella, but Alex wonders if you might join him and the director-general for a word?"

  Alex? She was calling him Alex?

  "Sure," Toni said. She logged out of the workstation. Cooper stood there waiting, smiling, but looking somehow impatient.

  "This way, please."

  Toni felt short and dumpy next to the blonde, who wore a dark green suit with the skirt hemmed a couple of inches too high above her knees, and sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She had good legs though, and maybe if Toni were tall and leggy, she'd showcase them, too, instead of wearing a plain blue silk blouse, jeans, and walking shoes. Well, she hadn't packed for work, had she? After the conference, at which she'd worn both suits she'd brought and then sent them to the cleaners, pretty much all she had in the way of clothes were casual things. It was supposed to be a vacation, wasn't it? But she'd call the cleaners and get her work clothes back. She wasn't going to let Ms. Cooper here make her look any worse than she had to look.

  "Sorry about interrupting your vacation this way."

  Toni pulled her thoughts away from clothes and back to the moment. "What? Oh, well, it's not your fault. We got to see a little of your country anyhow."

  "Different than the States, isn't it?"

  "You've been to the U.S.?"

  "Oh, yes, of course. A few work trips. And I spent a summer at UCLA back when I was a student. Lovely climate, I got my first real tan there."

  I bet you did. Toni imagined Cooper in a bikini. She would be striking. The line of men hitting on her would form quickly in the SoCal sunshine. She'd have to carry a stick to keep them off--unless she wanted the attention, and probably she did. She was the type.

  "Alex says you are from the Bronx?"

  Oh, did he? What was Alex doing telling her that? "Yes. I'm afraid New York isn't anything like California."

  "I spent a week in Manhattan once, late in August. The heat and humidity were fairly awful."

  "It's worse in July."

  Ten paces went by without any more conversation. The silence was just get
ting awkward when Cooper said, "I understand that Alex is divorced and has a daughter. Have you met her--the daughter?"

  Jesus, what was Alex doing, telling her stuff like this? And when had he had a chance to tell it? Next thing you knew, he'd be giving this woman pictures of him and Toni in bed together! She said, "No, I haven't met her. Talked to her on the com a few times. Seen pictures of her. She lives with her mother in Idaho."

  "That's out West, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Out West."

  "Ah, well, here we are, then." She indicated the door with one hand.

  "You aren't coming in?"

  "Afraid not, other duties. I'll see you later."

  Cooper turned and left, a hint of a sway in her hips as she walked.

  The bitch.

  Inside, Alex stood next to a table with Hamilton, both of them examining hardcopy photographs under a bright light. Alex looked up at her. He didn't smile. "Toni. Come check this out."

  She moved to stand next to him. The pictures were spysat overflies of some kind of military installation, computer-augmented for color and dimension. There was what appeared to be a pair of ICBMs on railcar launchers at one end of the complex. "What am I looking at?"

  Hamilton said, "This is the experimental rocket station in Xinghua, near the coast of the East China Sea. The Chinese have been developing a new long-range nuclear missile here." He tapped the ICBM in the photograph. "Last evening, a computer put two of the working prototypes on alert and began a ninety-minute countdown to launch. The missiles were aimed at Tokyo."

  "Lord!" Toni said.

  "Precisely. The computer was locked out, they were unable to shut it down. Fortunately, both warheads were dummies, and also fortunately, technicians were able to abort the launches manually. The Chinese, while not normally forthcoming about such things, are terrified. Someone bypassed their computer safeguards and codes and lit the fuses from outside. U.S. spysats that keep the station under observation saw the prelaunch movements, and the U.S. military scrambled stealth fighter-bombers from their base on the South Korean island of Cheju-do. If the Chinese missiles had lifted, the stealth jets would have tried to shoot them down, and they would very likely have bombed the station to prevent any further launches."

  Toni stared at Alex. He looked grim.

  "Even without the nuclear payload, a pair of rocks that big dropping into the middle of downtown Tokyo would have caused considerable damage," Alex said.

  "And it's our airline hacker?" Toni said.

  "Or somebody just like him. I can't believe there are two of them."

  Toni shook her head.

  "We've got to run this guy down, fast. And our best tracker, Jay, is out of commission."

  "Never rains but it pours, eh?" Hamilton said.

  Toni looked at the man, then back at Alex. Bad, this was definitely bad.

  Wednesday, April 6th

  Washington, D.C.

  Tyrone had figured out that if he got to the soccer field immediately after his school shift ended, the field would be empty for forty minutes before the next shift arrived. Forty minutes was plenty of time to get ten or fifteen good throws in.

  He stood near the middle of the field, testing the wind with a wet fingertip. There was a pretty good breeze coming in from the north, and he decided to tape a couple of pennies to his MTA boomerang to keep it from getting wind-whipped. That took only a minute, then he was ready.

  He angled himself against the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and shook out his shoulder to loosen the muscle. He'd been considering lifting weights. The top throwers were all in good shape, and he could use a little more power in his arms. The balance was tricky. If you threw too soft, you didn't get any time aloft, and if you threw too hard, you could get a fast nosedive. But there were times when you needed a little more strength, like now, when the wind was gusting, and at his size, Tyrone didn't have any extra muscle. He didn't need to be Hercules or anything, but a little more mass wouldn't hurt.

  He made his first throw, to check the angle of the blades and see how the taped coins balanced. The Indian Ocean glowed in a red blur as it spun but wobbled off-center and augured in too fast. He retrieved the 'rang and adjusted the angle on the blades by carefully bending them up. He moved the coin on the long arm in toward the angle a few millimeters, retaped it, then tried another throw.

  Better, but still off a hair. Well, he could spend all day adjusting the thing, especially in gusty conditions, and it was close enough for practice.

  He was on his seventh toss, having finally gotten above a minute for flights, which was about as good as he expected in the wind, when he heard Nadine yell at him.

  "Yo, Ty!"

  She came across the field, shrugged out of her backpack, and removed from it her own MTA, a long, L-shaped blue and white striped model. It was a Quark Synlin. He'd never seen one up close, but he'd seen holos, and he saw a couple at the tourney, from a distance, so he recognized it right off.

  "Man, how'd you come by that? I thought Quark quit the business."

  "He did, but there are a few still for sale. My mother told me if I could show her I could handle the top-of-the-line 'rang, she'd loan me the money for it. When I won the contest, she figured I was ready. It came air express this morning." She held it out. Tyrone took it from her as if it was a live baby, holding it carefully.

  "How does it throw?"

  "Dunno, I haven't had a chance yet. Why don't you give it a try?"

  He blinked at her. "You need to be first, it's yours."

  "No, go ahead. You're already warmed up."

  "Yeah?"

  "Sure."

  He wet his finger, checked the wind.

  She said, "Medium-hard, angle up fifty, don't lay over. Better to over-vertical. Five to ten into the wind."

  He nodded. Set his stance. Took a good breath, reared back, and made the toss.

  The big Quark zipped out about fifty meters before it started to make its turn, gained height--a lot of height, thirty, thirty-five meters--then started to shift from perp to flat. It bounced a couple of times on an updraft.

  "Man, look at that!"

  It was a beautiful flight, wind and all. It just seemed to hang there forever, and it finally came down within twenty meters of where he'd made the throw, slightly down field. He did an easy slap catch.

  Tyrone didn't have his stopwatch, but Nadine had hers. "Two minutes fifty-one," she said. "Not bad."

  "Yeah not bad! That beats my PR!" With that time, he would have beaten her at the tourney, too. Damn!

  He looked at the boomerang, then smiled at Nadine. "Thanks." He handed it back to her. "Your turn. We've got like twenty minutes before the soccer geeks run us off."

  "Time enough for two throws, you think?"

  "You wish. " They both laughed.

  Nadine was all right. Especially for a girl.

  15

  Wednesday, April 6th

  Alamo Hueco Mountains, New Mexico

  Jay Gridley stood on a patch of high desert listening to the silence among the rocks and scrub growth. The sun was a blinding mallet, hammering everything beneath it into the dead ground. It looked like the middle of nowhere, and if you headed directly east, west, or south, you'd leave the U.S. and hit Mexico; from here, the nearest border was only a mile or three away.

  Next to him, Saji stood, looking much more like a Native American than a Tibetan. He wore faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved work shirt, and a white ten-gallon hat with a rattlesnake skin band around it.

  "Smell the water?" Saji said.

  Jay, dressed much like Saji, but with a shadier, wide-brimmed Mexican sombrero, shook his head. "All I smell is desert. Dust, sand, and baked rocks, that's it."

  Indeed, every step they took kicked up more reddish brown dust, fine as talcum powder. It coated his boots and clothes, stung his eyes and nose, and made breathing hard. There was no wind, so at least the dust settled quickly. A very realistic scenario, and it was Saji's. Something like this
was still beyond Jay's capabilities.

  "Okay, let's see if we can cut some sign."

  Jay shook his head. "How did you learn all this tracking stuff?"

  Saji smiled his idiot's grin. "Jerry Pierce, a Navajo buddy of mine, is a Son of the Shadow Wolves. Tracker for the Border Patrol. He taught me about this, I taught him about the Middle Way."

  "A Navajo Buddhist?"

  "Why not? Buddhism doesn't get in the way of most other religious beliefs, at least not the ones that aren't militantly monotheistic. Come on."

  The two of them walked carefully over the sandy ground. After a few yards, Saji said, "Stop. You see it?"

  They were maybe ten feet from the edge of a steep drop-off, a cliff that went down sixty, seventy feet. "See what? The end of the world?"

  "Nothing quite so dramatic. Right there in front of you."

  Jay strained his eyes, staring at the ground. Here were three things: hardpan dirt, a single broken blade of pale green grass, and a weathered, dusty, reddish rock. The ground here wouldn't hold a track. "I don't see anything."

  "Not anything?"

  "Okay, fine, I see something. There's a patch of hard dirt, a rock, a piece of dead grass. That's it."

  "Look around. Any other vegetation?"

  Jay raised from his crouch, glanced at the area around him. "There's something looks like a creosote bush about ten yards that way." He moved toward the cliff edge, peered over it. Nothing growing down that way. "Nothing close. There's a big cactus way the hell over there. It's desolation row here."

  "Okay, think about that for a minute."

  "No offense, Saji, but if I could think for more than thirty seconds without going blank-stupid, I wouldn't need you!"

  "Close your eyes, count your breath."

  Jay sighed. He did as he was told. One ... two ... three ... what ... did ... I ... see ... ?