by Tom Clancy
• “Clear!” Chavez shouted, jumping to his feet and going to the images of the bad guys. One, the computer said, was still residually alive, albeit bleeding from the head. Ding kicked his weapon loose, but by that time #4’s shade had stopped moving.
“Clear!” “Clear!” shouted his team members.
“Exercise concluded,” Clark’s voice told them. Ding and his men removed their Virtual Reality goggles to find a room about double the size of a basketball court, and entirely absent of objects, empty as a high-school gym at midnight. It took a little getting used to. The simulation had been of terrorists who’d taken a kids’ school—evidently a girls’ school, for greater psychological effect.
“How many did we lose?” Chavez asked the ceiling.
“Six killed and three wounded, the computer says.” Clark entered the room.
“What went wrong?” Ding asked, suspecting he knew what the answer was.
“I spotted you looking around the corner, boy,” Rainbow Six answered. “That alerted the bad guys.”
“Shit,” Chavez responded. “That’s a program glitch. In real life I’d use the mirror rig, or take this Kevlar hat off, but the program doesn’t let us. The flash-bangs would have gone in clean.”
“Maybe,” John Clark allowed. “But your score on this one is a B-minus.”
“Gee, thanks, Mr. C,” the Team-2 leader groused. “Next you gonna say our shooting was off?”
“Yours was, the machine says.”
“God damn it, John! The program doesn’t simulate marksmanship worth a damn, and I will not train my people to shoot in a way the machine likes instead’a doing it the way that puts steel on target!”
“Settle down, Domingo. I know your troops can shoot. Okay, follow me. Let’s watch the replay.”
“Chavez, why did you take this way in?” Stanley asked when everyone was seated.
“This doorway is wider, and it gives a better field of fire—”
“For both sides,” Stanley observed.
“Battlefields are like that,” Ding countered. “But when you have surprise and speed going for you, that advantage conveys also. I put my backup team on the back door, but the configuration of the building didn’t allow them to participate in the takedown. Noonan had the building spiked. We had good coverage of the bad guys, and I timed the assault to catch them all in the gym—”
“With all six guns colocated with the hostages.”
“Better that than to have to go looking for them. Maybe one of them could flip a grenade around a corner and kill a bunch of the Barbie dolls. No, sir, I thought about coming in from the back, or doing a two-axis assault, but the distances and timing factors didn’t look good to me. Are you saying I’m wrong, sir?”
“In this case, yes.”
Bullshit, Chavez thought. “Okay, show me what you think.”
It was as much a matter of personal style as right and wrong, and Alistair Stanley had been there and done that as much as any man in the world, Ding knew. So he watched and listened. Clark, he saw, did much the same.
“I don’t like it,” Noonan said, after Stanley concluded his presentation. “It’s too easy to put a noisemaker on the doorknob. The damned things only cost ten bucks or so. You can buy one in any airport gift shop—people use them on hotel doors in case somebody tries to come in uninvited. We had a case in the Bureau when a subject used one—nearly blew the whole mission on us, but the flash-bang on the outside window covered the noise pretty well.”
“And what if your spikes didn’t give us positions on all the subjects?”
“But they did, sir,” Noonan countered. “We had time to track them.” In fact the training exercise had compressed the time by a factor of ten, but that was normal for the computer simulations. “This computer stuff is great for planning the takedowns, but it falls a little flat on other stuff. I think we did it pretty well.” His concluding sentence also announced the fact that Noonan wanted to be a full member of Team-2, not just their techno-weenie, Ding thought. Tim had been spending a lot of time in the shooting range, and was now the equal of any member of the team. Well, he’d worked the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team under Gus Werner. He had the credentials to join the varsity. Werner had been considered for the Six job on Rainbow. But then, so had Stanley.
“Okay,” Clark said next, “let’s roll the tape.”
That was the nastiest surprise of all. Terrorist #2, the computer said, had taken his head shot and spun around with his finger depressed on the trigger of his AK-74, and one of his rounds had neatly transfixed Chavez’s head. Ding was dead, according to the Cray computer, because the theoretical bullet had gone under the brim of his Kevlar helmet and transited right through his brain. The shock of it to Chavez had surprising magnitude. A random event generated by the computer program, it was also quite real, because real life did include such random events. They’d talked about getting Lexan visors for their helmets, which might or might not stop a bullet, but had decided against it because of the distortion it would impose on their sight, and therefore their shooting . . . maybe we need to re-think that one, Chavez told himself. The bottom line of the computer’s opinion was simple: if it was possible, then it could happen, and if it could, sooner or later, it would, and somebody on the team would have to drive to a house on post and tell a wife that she’d just become a widow. Because of a random event—bad luck. A hell of a thing to tell somebody who’d just lost a husband. Cause of death, bad luck. Chavez shivered a little at the thought. How would Patsy take it? Then he shook it off. It was a very low order of probability, mathematically right down there with being hit by lightning on a golf course or being wasted in a plane crash, and life was risk, and you avoided the risks only by being dead. Or something like that. He turned his head to look at Eddie Price.
“Unforgiving things, dice,” the sergeant major observed with a wry smile. “But I got the chappie who killed you, Ding.”
“Thanks, Eddie. Makes me feel a lot better. Shoot faster next time?”
“I shall make a point of it, sir,” Price promised.
“Cheer up, Ding,” Stanley observed, noting the exchange. “Could have been worse. I’ve yet to see anyone seriously harmed by an electron.”
And you’re supposed to learn from training exercises, Ding added for himself. But learn what from this one? Shit happens? Something to think about, he supposed, and in any case, Team-2 was now on standby, with Peter Covington’s Team-1 on the ready line. Tomorrow they’d do some more shooting, aimed at getting the shots off a little faster, maybe. Problem was, there just wasn’t any room for improvement—not much anyway—and pushing too hard might have the effect of dulling the sharp edge already achieved. Ding felt as though he were the head coach of a particularly good football team. The players were all excellent, and hard-working . . . just not quite perfect. But how much of that could be corrected by training, and how much merely reflected the fact that the other side played to win, too? The first job had been too easy. Model and his bunch had cried aloud to be killed. It wouldn’t always be that easy.
CHAPTER 6
TRUE BELIEVERS
The problem was environmental tolerance. They knew the baseline organism was as effective as it needed to be. It was just so delicate. Exposed to air, it died far too easily. They weren’t sure why, exactly. It might have been temperature or humidity, or too much oxygen—that element so essential to life was a great killer of life at the molecular level—and the uncertainty had been a great annoyance until a member of the team had come up with a solution. They’d used genetic-engineering technology to graft cancer genes into the organism. Specifically, they’d used genetic material from colon cancer, one of the more robust strains, and the results had been striking. The new organism was only a third of a micron larger and far stronger. The proof was on the electron microscope’s TV screen. The tiny strands had been exposed to room air and room light for ten hours before being reintroduced into the culture dish, and already, the technician saw, th
e minute strands were active, using their RNA to multiply after eating, replicating themselves into millions more little strands, which had only one purpose—to eat tissue. In this case it was kidney tissue, though liver was just as vulnerable. The technician—who had a medical degree from Yale—made the proper written notations, and then, because it was her project, she got to name it. She blessed the course in comparative religion she’d taken twenty years before. You couldn’t just call it anything, could you?
Shiva, she thought. Yes, the most complex and interesting of the Hindu gods, by turns the Destroyer and the Restorer, who controlled poison meant to destroy mankind, and one of whose consorts was Kali, the goddess of death herself. Shiva. Perfect. The tech made the proper notations, including her recommended name for the organism. There would be one more test, one more technological hurdle to hop before all was ready for execution. Execution, she thought, a proper word for the project. On rather a grand scale.
For her next task, she took a sample of Shiva, sealed in a stainless-steel container, and walked out of her lab, an eighth of a mile down the corridor, and into another.
“Hi, Maggie,” the head of that lab said in greeting. “Got something for me?”
“Hey, Steve.” She handed the container over. “This is the one.”
“What are we calling it?” Steve took the container and set it on a countertop.
“Shiva, I think.”
“Sounds ominous,” Steve observed with a smile.
“Oh, it is,” Maggie promised him. Steve was another M.D., Ph.D., both of his degrees from Duke University, and the company’s best man on vaccines. For this project he’d been pulled off AIDS work that had begun to show some promise.
“So, the colon cancer genes worked like you predicted?”
“Ten hours in the open, it shows good UV tolerance. Not too sure about direct sunlight, though.”
“Two hours of that is all we need,” Steve reminded her. And really one hour was plenty, as they both knew. “What about the atomization system?”
“Still have to try it,” she admitted, “but it won’t be a problem.” Both knew that was the truth. The organism should easily tolerate passage through the spray nozzles for the fogging system—which would be checked in one of the big environmental chambers. Doing it outside would be better still, of course, but if Shiva was as robust as Maggie seemed to think, it was a risk better not run.
“Okay, then. Thanks, Maggie.” Steve turned his back, and inserted the container into one of the glove-boxes to open it, in order to begin his work on the vaccine. Much of the work was already done. The baseline agent here was well-known, and the government had funded his company’s vaccine work after the big scare the year before, and Steve was known far and wide as one of the best around for generating, capturing, and replicating antibodies to excite a person’s immune system. He vaguely regretted the termination of his AIDS work. Steve thought that he might have stumbled across a method of generating broad-spectrum antibodies to combat that agile little bastard—maybe a 20 percent change, he judged, plus the added benefit of leading down a new scientific pathway, the sort of thing to make a man famous . . . maybe even good enough for a flight to Stockholm in ten years or so. But in ten years, it wouldn’t matter, would it? Not hardly, the scientist told himself. He turned to look out the triple-windows of his lab. A pretty sunset. Soon the night creatures would come out. Bats would chase insects. Owls would hunt mice and voles. Cats would leave their houses to prowl on their own missions of hunger. He had a set of night-vision goggles that he often used to observe the creatures doing work not so very different from his own. But for now he turned back to his worktable, pulled out his computer keyboard, and made some notations for his new project. Many used notebooks for this, but the Project allowed only computers for record-keeping, and all the notes were electronically encrypted. If it was good enough for Bill Gates, then it was good enough for him. The simple ways were not always best. That explained why he was here, part of the newly named Shiva Project, didn’t it?
They needed guys with guns, but they were hard to find—at least the right ones, with the right attitudes—and the task was made more difficult by government activities with similar, but divergent aims. It helped them keep away from the more obvious kooks, though.
“Damn, it’s pretty out here,” Mark observed.
His host snorted. “There’s a new house right the other side of that ridge line. On a calm day, I can see the smoke from their chimney.”
Mark had to laugh. “There goes the neighborhood. You and Dan’l Boone, eh?”
Foster adopted a somewhat sheepish look. “Yeah, well, it is a good five miles.”
“But you know, you’re right. Imagine what it looked like before the white man came here. No roads ’cept for the riverbanks and deer trails, and the hunting must have been pretty spectacular.”
“Good enough you didn’t have to work that hard to eat, I imagine.” Foster gestured at the fireplace wall of his log cabin, covered with hunting trophies, not all of them legal, but here in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, there weren’t all that many cops, and Foster kept pretty much to himself.
“It’s our birthright.”
“Supposed to be,” Foster agreed. “Something worth fighting for.”
“How hard?” Mark asked, admiring the trophies. The grizzly bear rug was especially impressive—and probably illegal as hell.
Foster poured some more bourbon for his guest. “I don’t know what it’s like back East, but out here, if you fight—you fight. All the way, boy. Put one right ’tween the running lights, generally calms your adversary down a mite.”
“But then you have to dispose of the body,” Mark said, sipping his drink. The man bought only cheap whiskey. Well, he probably couldn’t afford the good stuff.
A laugh: “Ever hear of a backhoe? How ’bout a nice fire?”
It was believed by some in this part of the state that Foster had killed a fish-and-game cop. As a result, he was leery of local police—and the highway patrol people didn’t like him to go a mile over the limit. But though the car had been found—burned out, forty miles away—the body of the missing officer had not, and that was that. There weren’t many people around to be witnesses in this part of the state, even with a new house five miles away. Mark sipped his bourbon and leaned back in the leather chair. “Nice to be part of nature, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. It surely is. Sometimes I think I kinda understand the Indians, y’know?”
“Know any?”
“Oh, sure. Charlie Grayson, he’s a Nez Percé, hunting guide, got my horse off o’ him. I do that, too, to make some cash sometimes, mainly take a horse into the high country, really, meet people who get it. And the elk are pretty thick up there.”
“What about bear?”
“Enough,” Foster replied. “Mainly blacks, but some grizz’.”
“What do you use? Bow?”
A good-natured shake of the head. “No, I admire the Indians, but I ain’t one myself. Depends on what I’m hunting, and what country I’m doing it in. Bolt-action .300 Winchester Mag mainly, but in close country, a semiauto slug shotgun. Nothing like drillin’ three-quarter-inch holes when you gotta, y’know?”
“Handload?”
“Of course. It’s a lot more personal that way. Gotta show respect for the game, you know, keep the gods of the mountains happy.”
Foster smiled at the phrase, in just the right sleepy way, Mark saw. In every civilized man was a pagan waiting to come out, who really believed in the gods of the mountains, and in appeasing the spirits of the dead game. And so did he, really, despite his technical education.
“So, what do you do, Mark?”
“Molecular biochemistry, Ph.D., in fact.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh, figuring out how life happens. Like how does a bear smell so well,” he went on, lying. “It can be interesting, but my real life is coming out to places like this, hunting, meeting people
who really understand the game better than I do. Guys like you,” Mark concluded, with a salute of his glass. “What about you?”
“Ah, well, retired now. I made some of my own. Would you believe geologist for an oil company?”
“Where’d you work?”
“All over the world. I had a good nose for it, and the oil companies paid me a lot for finding the right stuff, y’know? But I had to give it up. Got to the point—well, you fly a lot, right?”
“I get around,” Mark confirmed with a nod.
“The brown smudge,” Foster said next.
“Huh?”
“Come on, you see it all over the damned world. Up around thirty thousand feet, that brown smudge. Complex hydrocarbons, mainly from passenger jets. One day I was flying back from Paris—connecting flight from Brunei, I came the wrong way ’round ’cuz I wanted to stop off in Europe and meet a friend. Anyway, there I was, in a fuckin’ 747, over the middle of the fucking Atlantic Ocean, like four hours from land, y’know? First-class window seat, sitting there drinking my drink, lookin’ out the window, and there it was, the smudge—that goddamned brown shit, and I realized that I was helpin’ make it happen, dirtyin’ up the whole fuckin’ atmosphere.
“Anyway,” Foster went on, “that was the moment of my . . . conversion, I guess you’d call it. I tendered my resignation the next week, took my stock options, cashed in half a mil worth, and bought this place. So, now, I hunt and fish, do a little guide work in the fall, read a lot, wrote a little book about what oil products do to the environment, and that’s about it.”