by Tom Clancy
For which Thorn, who was also passing familiar with politics and clout, heard: “Better kept in my hands.”
“But,” McClain continued, “I’m a long way from the top of the food chain, and the big carnivores have made a firm decision. Practically speaking, not much will change, at least to look at.”
Thorn gave a very small smile at that, but didn’t say anything.
McClain ignored it. “You’ll stay where you are,” he went on, “but instead of reporting to me, you’ll be talking to the DoD via a Marine connection. I’m not sure exactly who that will be yet, but if I had to guess I’d say it would be General Roger Ellis, who is the Corps’ Special Projects Commander at the Pentagon these days.”
Thorn nodded. This situation must have really angered McClain. Only on the job a couple of months and already they were carving away at his empire. Thorn would bet that Mac’s buddy the Prez had gotten an earful about this; obviously, it hadn’t done any good.
“You’ll be hearing from these people soon. Technically, the transfer of command won’t happen immediately, but as of now, whatever they want at DoD, you give them.”
Thorn nodded again. “Yes, sir.” Even though McClain had offered his nickname, he didn’t correct Thorn’s respectful “sir.” The man had came out of the Ivy League, and his just-one-of-the-boys routine was for show. He was not a bad guy, from what Thorn knew, but the story was, he was like a cat—dropped from anywhere, he always landed on his feet, and any business friendships were pragmatic before anything else. Not “What have you done for me lately?” but “What can you do for me now?”
“I’ll pass along whatever I hear,” the Director said. “Assuming you don’t hear it elsewhere first.”
Thorn gave the man another small and brief smile and left. It wouldn’t be that hard for him to find out about John Howard coming to visit—nobody had tried to hide it. But knowing it was Howard and being able to do anything with that was a horse of a different color. Howard was a private consultant now, not subject to Ellis’s command.
As he walked back toward Net Force HQ, Thorn rolled it around in his thoughts. Still too early to tell. He’d have to wait until he started getting calls from the DoD.
When he got back to his office, his secretary, who was on the phone, waved at him. She put the caller on hold. “General Ellis’s office for you,” she said.
Thorn smiled. “I’ll take it.”
No moss growing on the Marines . . .
Department of Defense’s High Performance Computer Modernization Program
New Pentagon Annex Washington, D.C.
Jay Gridley was annoyed. More than that, he was angry. He drummed his fingers on the clear plastic table in the holo room as he waited to meet the HPCMP’s liaison and thought about how irritated he was.
So it had finally happened. Net Force was moving out of the feds’ grip and into the military’s. Although Thorn hadn’t had the details, Jay knew that there had been a major systems failure during big simulations. Apparently the powers that be felt there could have been some outside cause of the crash and had been sweating blood trying to track it down. So much so that they’d arranged to take Net Force under their aegis just to make it a priority. That meant it had to be a truly huge event.
What was most irritating was, he’d had to come over here to meet someone physically for a briefing. Hadn’t they ever heard of VR and secure channels? He’d be stuck in traffic for at least an hour on the way home.
Plus, once he arrived, he had to walk the gauntlet: metal detector, explosives sniffer, bio-telltale. Had to take off the belt Saji had given him for his birthday and let it be examined by guards who let him have it back reluctantly, watching him as though they thought he planned to throttle their computer scientists with it. This on top of having to carry a smart-card badge that would set off an alarm if he went anywhere he wasn’t cleared to go, as well as an armed escort who had walked him to meet the HPCMP’s liaison and who was just across the room, waiting. It was like having a baby-sitter, and it was insulting, to say the least.
Jay knew that it had been that way at many military and government buildings since the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, of course, and he could understand that—U.S. security had been very lax in the good old days. Unfortunately, those days were long ago and far away.
He could even agree with the heightened security measures and the extreme caution. What bothered him the most, though, was the baby-sitter. Jay was a cleared, high-security employee and had been checked seven ways to Sunday, so what was the point of putting an armed guard on him? Jay wasn’t going to do anything. He was on their side. He was one of the good guys. He was here to help them find a computer breach.
If there had even been a breach. From what Jay knew of the HPCMP’s networks, sneaking in would be tough. For the last year or so, the Department of Defense had operated under new network protocols on their high-speed internal network. These were similar to but incompatible with commercial routers and networks. Any connection to an outside network had to be translated to standard packet protocols, and every such translation point was watched very carefully. Since the system was designed only for military projects, the efficiency and incompatibility were both desirable.
All of which made the entire process he was going through now seem like closing the barn door after the cow had gotten out.
Come on, Gridley, cut them some slack.
He smiled to himself, ignoring the guard. It was true that Thorn hadn’t given him much background about Net Force’s forced move into the military, but that didn’t mean Jay didn’t have it.
Smokin’ Jay Gridley did not go walking blindly down the garden path—not when he could find out what kind of grass grew in the garden, the names of the flowers, the name of the gardener, and the pH of the soil. And he could. Several hours of trekking through cyberspace had given him the background of the HPCMP’s mission, their current projects, and the name of the man he was going to see, George Bretton.
He knew Bretton, of course—you didn’t get to be one of the top cyber-jocks in the country without bumping into those few who could run with you. Or actually, a little behind you. Bretton was good—more a specialist in simulations and Human Behavior Modeling than security—but he had some chops.
One of the things Jay had found out was that the HPCMP didn’t just do sims. They coordinated immense computing power for other uses as well—modeling of new missiles, design of new weapons and vehicles, and other R&D. If there had been a break in to their network, the potential for espionage could be serious indeed.
Okay, so maybe they had reason to be paranoid.
He glanced at his watch, which wore an old analog face—an Omega Seamaster Chronograph Professional. When you looked closer, you could see that it was a pixel job—a datastore that also doubled as a watch, the display showing any one of hundreds of styles.
And right now it was showing that he’d been waiting for fifteen minutes.
Which started him fuming again.
Cool down, Gridley.
It was another five minutes before a short, muscular man in uniform who looked like a recruiting poster walked in Bretton.
Jay tried not to let his irritation show. All the agencies were supposed to exude brotherly love these days, however their people felt.
“George—glad you could make it.”
Apparently his skills at acting were worse than he had thought, or else Bretton was just as unhappy.
“Yeah, thanks for coming, Jay.” Not much enthusiasm there. Practically deadpan.
This was great. All the hassle of getting here and the guy he came to help didn’t even want him here.
Jay wanted to sigh, but held it. This was why he liked cyberspace. What was it Saji said? Sometimes the journey of a thousand steps had to go the extra mile? He waited for a few seconds and tried to imagine how he’d feel if Bretton had been brought in to check up on Net Force security.
Not too good.
Let it go. Give the man some face.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know why they dragged me over here when they’ve got you,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not like I have a bigger hammer.”
Bretton grinned and the tension level dropped.
“Thanks, Jay, I appreciate that. The thing is, I haven’t found the problem yet, and as much as I hate to say it, I may not be able to. I’ve looked under more rocks than litter the surface of Mars.”
Hmm. If Bretton couldn’t find anything, it might be worth looking into.
“You’re sure it’s a break-in?”
“Yeah.”
Bretton tapped on the table and instantly the empty room disappeared. They were on a crowded street, packed crowds of tourists looking up into the sky where the huge flower of a nuclear fire had just begun to blossom. Everything was still; the scene frozen. The light was harsh and actinically bright, and Jay squinted to protect his eyes.
Bretton unfroze the tableau and the people began to die in slow motion, melting into shadows on the sidewalk. Buildings exploded, glass flew, and steel beams buckled and bent. There was no sound.
“You can see the simulation was going okay,” said Bretton.
Jay wondered if the man had kids. Watching the families snuffed out like candles, he felt a sense of helplessness and fear he’d never felt before. A phrase his mom used to say popped into his head. “When you love someone, they become a hostage to fortune.” He understood that now like he never had before. He had a new son.
Clinically, he noted the accuracy of the physics models. They would be the primary focus of the sim, after all. The orange-red mushroom cloud forming after the initial event was beautiful, though, in its way.
Bretton waved his hand again and things slowed down even more. The explosions expanded almost imperceptibly, feathers of flame blooming in stop motion. The 3-D imaging in the room was perfect—crystal-clear and sharp. And suddenly the scene started missing pieces. Tourist bodies disappeared, and then part of the explosion vanished, revealing blue sky. Some of the buildings went away, then the cars, and finally the remaining people and landscape, leaving nothing but darkness.
The HPCMP liaison made a motion and they were back to the moment just after the explosion, frozen again.
Jay got it immediately. The sim was so huge that it had to use the power of more than one supercomputer, each running different pieces. At real-time speed, the effect would have been like a light going off, but in bullet-time, it was visible how each piece of the network had failed—had been switched off by something.
“Can I see the background AI data?” he asked.
Bretton nodded, a look of quiet approval on his face at the question. Jay had often found it useful to impress people in their own specialties, so he’d done some studies on the background HBM and AI modeling before coming over. The code that appeared to replace the landscape was the inside of the sim model—what made it work, the physics and lighting, the object scripting.
By looking at this information, they could monitor more carefully the impact of the intruding virus.
The lines of code executed rapidly as Bretton took the speed up a notch, rolling upward like parts on a conveyer belt. And then suddenly, they started to change.
“The key modeling factors just went crazy,” said Bretton.
Within seconds errors began bringing down parts of the simulation.
Jay nodded. It was a virus all right. Someone had introduced it into the system, it had waited for the right moment, and then, pow.
Knockout.
The question was, how?
He looked at Bretton.
“I’m stumped,” the man admitted. “I’ve been all over the I/O going back for the last year, and there’s nothing. The transducer network routers haven’t sent anything across, timed or not. They’re clean.”
“Physical memory?” asked Jay. “A disk? Flashmem stick?”
“Locked out without authentication and logging,” Bretton said. “And smuggling one in or out would be . . . difficult.”
Jay stared at the screens, thinking. There was no other way in. But something had gotten in.
The old Sherlock Holmes adage came to mind. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
There had to be some other way.
All irritation forgotten, Jay sat down and started thinking.
A locked-room mystery. Oh, my.
This looks like a job for Jay Gridley.
He smiled.
4
Net Force Shooting Range
Quantico, Virginia
Abe Kent stopped at the desk to pick up ammo and headphones. He set his shooting bag down and looked at the man behind the counter.
“Gunny.”
“Colonel. Are you shooting the old Colt today, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Is your ring current, sir?”
Kent smiled. “It is.” Gunny was referring to the smart-gun chips, which had to be reprogrammed and checked every month. Kent didn’t think much of that program. Net Force-issue weapons were all rigged with electronic chips, one in your side arm and the second in a ring, bracelet, or wristwatch. If you used your own piece on duty, you had to have it so wired. Without the ring or watch in close proximity to the weapon, it would not fire.
The colonel knew that was probably a good idea in some circumstances. It would sure be nice if your neighbor’s little six-year-old girl couldn’t cook one off if she came across your pistol in the bedside table. Of course, anybody with a brain wouldn’t have a handgun where a little girl who didn’t know what it was about could come across it. If you had guns in your house, then you needed to make sure everybody who lived there knew the safety rules about them. There weren’t any kids in Kent’s life, but he still kept his old slabside .45 locked in a box when it wasn’t on his person.
Any technology, such as the smart-gun stuff, that added an extra possibility of failure to a pistol when it was in your hand and when you needed it to save your life? Well, that was a bad idea. Even without the smart-gun tech, guns weren’t perfect. Sometimes they just misfired or otherwise malfunctioned due to their mechanical natures.
If you didn’t know how to use the thing safely and couldn’t keep it from falling into the wrong hands, you ought not to be carrying it. No, the only argument he’d ever heard that made even a little sense to him was that these rings would keep somebody from taking your piece off your corpse and using it to shoot at your coworkers. Even that was foolish, though, he thought. If you were dead, somebody made you that way, which meant that not only were they armed, but they were likely to have better weapons than yours, so increasing the chances of yours misfiring just when you needed it to keep them from taking it was just plain stupid.
Kent took the box of ammunition, his hearing protectors, and his gun bag, and went to his assigned lane. There were only a few shooters in the range, most of them using handguns. As he got to his lane, he saw Julio Fernandez in the next one over.
“Captain.”
“Colonel. It’s just Julio now, sir. I’m a civilian. I appreciate that you still let me come in to use the range, though.”
“How is John? I haven’t talked to him for a couple of weeks.”
“He’s fine. I expect you’ve heard about his visit to Commander Thorn.”
“I heard.”
“Going to be a leatherneck again,” Fernandez said.
“So it seems.” Kent didn’t want to go too far down that road right now, so he changed the subject: “You still remember how to shoot that Beretta?”
“Yes, sir. I also remember how last time we shot together, I managed to beat you and that antique .45 of yours real good.”
“Three-hundredths of a second after five screens isn’t what I’d call ‘real good,’ Julio. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘barely.’ ”
“You thinking to win your money back, Colonel?”
“And then some.”
Fernandez laughed. “Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute. You want to pick the scenario?”
“I wouldn’t want to take advantage, since I probably practice more than you. You choose.”
“ ‘Gunfight at Red Rock?’ ” Julio asked. “Twenty bucks for the match, best three of five screens?”
Kent nodded. “Number of rounds?”
“Let’s keep it revolver-neutral. That’s what the bad guys have. Six shots per screen.”
Kent nodded. He had seven rounds in his piece, one in the barrel and six in the magazine. He had one spare magazine on his belt, his carry backup, and five more already loaded in his gun bag. He pulled the spares from his belt and bag and lined them up on the shooting bench. “Crank it in,” Kent said.
He pulled his pistol from his holster, pinch-checked to be sure he had one in the pipe, then popped the magazine out, checked that, and pushed it back in. He reholstered the handgun and adjusted his headphones a little, then nodded.
“Light it when you’re ready, son.”
Downrange, the target computer generated an image. One moment, Kent’s lane was empty, the next, the air shimmered and two Old West gunfighters stood facing him twenty feet away, hands held over their holstered six-shooters. They wore black cowboy hats and boots, black trousers and checkered shirts, handkerchiefs tied bandanna-style around their necks, and seemed real enough to look at. This was a VR holographic projection, and the computer was smart enough to tell where your bullets passed through them—assuming you shot and hit them before they did you. Fortunately, their bullets were only photonic—
“Draw—!” one of the gunslingers yelled. That was the start signal for this scenario.
Kent was already moving. Before the gunslinger finished speaking, Kent had pulled his model 1911, thumbed the safety catch off, and shoved it forward, one-handed. At this range, he didn’t need to use the sights, he just pointed the gun as he would his finger. He fired once at the pistoleer on the right, then shifted his arm a hair and fired again at the one on the left. One, two—!