by Tom Clancy
Raven slapped the mat, to show he was done, but Michaels kept the pressure on the throat pinch. He said, “On the street, you can’t tap out. If I squeeze, you’re a dead man.”
The look of panic on Raven’s face was what Michaels wanted. He relaxed his grip, rocked up onto his feet and stepped away, turned in a half-circle with a crossover siloh back-step, and looked for more potential attackers.
There weren’t any. He relaxed, moved back to where Raven still sprawled, and put out a hand to help him up. The kid waved him off.
Michaels wanted to make sure the lesson stuck, so he said, quietly, “Thanks for not hurting me too bad, son.”
Raven shook his head. Youth would be served — but not today.
The Hawaiian grinned real big again and said, “Okay, so what’d he do wrong?”
A short redheaded woman with freckles said, “He got out of bed this morning?”
Everybody laughed — well, except for Raven there, just sitting up.
Raven came to his feet, gave Michaels a choppy nod, and said, “Okay, it works pretty well for a fairly big guy like the commander. But how about somebody like little Red Riding Hood there against somebody my size?” He pointed at the woman who’d spoken.
Michaels looked at Toni, and shook his head as she stepped onto the mat.
“Let me show you,” she said.
Poor kid just had to learn things the hard way, didn’t he?
On the Bon Chance
Santos thought about gold.
Ouro, the shining yellow metal that was the real measure of wealth. Missy was talking about fiber optic trunk lines crossing rivers underneath rail bridges, but Santos was wondering when he could get to a coin dealer to buy more Maple Leafs. He could do it on-line, of course, but he didn’t trust computers. Too easy for them to crash, especially now. He grinned a little at that.
No, he would rather get to the Mainland and one of the dozen or so dealers he used, each who knew him under a different name, none of which were his own.
The spot price was down a little from last week, only ten or twelve dollars, and the coin prices were higher than spot prices for bullion, of course, to cover minting and such, but still, this would be a good time to buy.
Missy said, “—the main cables cross here, and here—” as she pointed at a map of the United States.
Canadian Maple Leafs were the standard for gold coins. They were pure—99.99 percent gold, unlike the American Gold Eagles, which were only 22-karat, alloyed with a few grams of silver and copper. Krugerrands were only 90 percent gold, even more alloy in those, though they were good for working the berimbau string. Chinese Pandas were so-so. The Australian Kangaroos and Koalas were better, nearly as good as the Canadian, but the Maple Leaf was the way to go, for gold. Everybody in the world knew this.
Platinum? That was different. The American platinum Eagles were okay, and this metal was harder and worth almost twice as much as gold at current market prices. He had a few of those, but the white metal seemed colder, more… sterile than gold. He had nearly two hundred one-ounce Maple Leafs now, and in a few months, he would have three times that many. A year from now, maybe a thousand altogether. Paper came and paper went, especially back home, but gold was forever. When he had a thousand coins, then he could go home. It would not be enough to make him a millionaire, but still, he would be a man of substance. Worth more on the black market there than here, too. He could teach his art and not worry about the rent. If he had students who were adept but poor, he could carry them, as his Mestre had carried him. Then he could get serious about his art, study all day, every day—
“Are you listening to me, Roberto?”
He smiled at her. “I am listening, though I do not see why I should bother. A trained monkey with a stick of dynamite could do this.”
“And he’d be cheaper and would eat less than you,” she said. “But we aren’t going to blow up anything. We take out a section, no matter how big, they can fix it in a matter of hours. Even if we took the bridge down, a boat would lay a temporary cable in a day or less. No, we cut it in six places, each break many miles apart. They fix one, it still doesn’t work. They find the second one and fix that, it still doesn’t work. By the time they find the third break — which will be in a remote area and booby-trapped, tempers will be very short at the phone company. They’ll have to hire more inspectors, more security. We wait a week, then do it again, in six different places. They’ll be tearing their hair out.”
“A good plan,” he said, more to keep her happy than because he really cared. Cutting plastic cables was no work for a fighter. A man needed challenges, real challenges, from other men. Facing off, one-on-one, or one-against-many, that was worthwhile. But such work allowed him to amass wealth, and that was a goal to be attained for the long run.
He followed her with half his attention, nodding or murmuring now and then so she would see that he was listening, but considering with more of his thoughts the more important question of acquiring more gold…
San Francisco Bay San Francisco, California
John Howard’s assault team swam through the cold and murky waters, using rebreathers instead of scuba to better hide their exhaust bubbles. The wetsuits and gloves were the best quality, but the chill still seeped in around the seals. They used flippers and muscle power, no sleds or scooters, to make sure they didn’t make any noise a sound sensor listening for motors might pick up.
The target was two hundred meters ahead, and they wouldn’t be able to see it until they were almost there. Not that they would miss it — an oil tanker almost as long as three football fields and riding deep and heavy in the water wasn’t something you were going to swim around or under with it laying broadside to you — it drew more than ten meters. At five-meters approach depth, what they would see would be a wall of steel plates above and below.
The tanker had been hijacked in Indonesian waters by Tamil terrorists and sailed to a spot just outside San Francisco Bay to draw attention to the terrorists’ cause, whatever the dickens that was. If their demands were not met, they would, they threatened, blow the vessel to kingdom come, allowing hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil to escape along the California coast.
Such an event would be an ecological disaster, not to mention very bad for tourism from Big Sur to Santa Barbara, at the least.
This wasn’t going to be allowed to happen. While authorities negotiated and delayed the terrorists, Howard and his team moved. The plan was simple: Get to the ship, scale the hull, prevent the terrorists from rupturing the bays holding the cargo, by whatever means possible. They would have to be quick, and they would have to be perfect — one psychotic with a fast hand would be disastrous.
They weren’t expecting enemy frogmen, but they were prepared, just in case. Their dive suits were equipped with the latest high-tech toys. They had LOSIR coms, infrared sensors, and bubble comps that fed heads-up displays in their full-face masks. Aside from that, each member of the six-man team carried weapons that would work in water or in air. Primary defensive arms were the Russian 5.56mm APS underwater assault rifles. These were selective-fire, gas-operated weapons. The firing mechanisms for these were based on the Kalashnikov rotating bolt system, and except for the oversized magazines that held twenty-six rounds, they looked a lot like an AK assault rifle. The projectiles were drag-stabilized darts, the cartridges based on 5.56 X 45mm NATO rounds. The darts were twelve centimeters long. The effective soft target killing range in air was slightly over 100 meters. The underwater range at this depth was about thirty meters. In water this murky, if you were close enough to see an enemy diver, you would have more than enough punch to take him out — the fléchettes would blast through a face mask or wetsuit, no problem.
Each of Howard’s divers also carried 7.62 X 36 H&K P11 dart pistols, five-barreled weapons with sealed chambers. The effective range of these was much less than the Russian assault rifles, about thirty meters in air, half that or less underwater. Furthermore, once y
ou’d fired your five shots to reload the weapon you had to send it back to the armorer — it was a factory-only procedure. Howard figured if it came to that, things would be pretty bad — if two dozen-plus rounds from the Russian weapons weren’t enough to do the job, another five from the handguns probably weren’t gonna help too much. Still, it was better to have it and not need it…
Suddenly Howard got a shimmery red sig on his heads-up display. His team’s transponder-coded heat-sigs were false-colored blue, so red meant company. A beat later, a second red image came into view. His display told him they were thirty meters out, right at the limit of their assault guns. The pair of reds moved slowly from east to west.
On patrol, he figured. And they haven’t seen us yet.
Visibility was no more than seven or eight meters in the cold water, with nightfall coming on fast and about to drop that to almost zero. They wanted to be at the tanker hull soon, where they’d use the gecko-foot climbing pads. As soon as it was dark, they’d ascend. Timing was critical; they couldn’t afford to mess around out here.
Howard stopped swimming forward and used hand jives to signal his men, all of whom but the tail were in visual range. He could have used the line-of-sight infrared coms, but it was possible the enemy had LOSIR, too, and even though his transmissions would be coded, the unfriendlies might pick up a stray signal. They wouldn’t know what it said, but that it was there at all would let the cat out of the bag.
Howard pointed into the murk, held up two fingers, then pointed at his eyes, ending with the jive for a question.
I see two enemy frogs ahead. Everybody see them?
He got affirmative hand signals from everybody.
He pointed at his two best men, in the direction of the enemy divers; he pointed at his watch, then made the classic fingertip drag sign across his throat.
His two men affirmed the order and quickly swam off into the gloom.
Howard turned to watch them go, following them visually for the few meters he could still see them, then with his sensors.
The two blue forms slowly closed on the two red ones. When they were within visual range of each other, the enemy divers apparently noticed his men. They took evasive action—
It seemed as if it took a long time, but in reality it was over in a couple of heartbeats. He didn’t hear it, and he couldn’t see it, except for the sensor images, but the two red forms stopped moving. The blue forms approached, merged with the red, and formed an odd-looking purple as his suit computer tried to figure out what color to paint. Then the two red forms began to sink, vanishing from the sensor’s range in a few seconds.
Howard waved at the rest of his team. Time to move in…
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
The priority call bell chimed and automatically cut the VR scenario as it had been programmed to do. Since only two people had that priority code number — his wife and his boss — Howard was quick to answer. He did so without checking the caller ID.
“Yes?”
“John, it’s me,” his wife said. Her voice was tight, on the edge of panic.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Tyrone. He’s been in a car wreck. He’s at Mercy General. I’m on the way there now. The nurse who called said he’s banged up and his leg was broken, but he’s going to be okay.”
Howard’s sudden fear, launched like a missile by her first words, dropped fast. Thank you, Jesus, for sparing my boy.
“I’m on the way,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Howard touched a button on his virgil as he stood and pulled off the VR gear.
“Alex Michaels. What’s up, General?”
“Sir, this is John Howard. My son has been in an automobile accident. He is injured but not critically so. I’m going to the hospital.”
“Take a copter,” Michaels said. “It’ll be a lot faster this time of day.”
“Sir, it’s personal business—”
“Take the aircraft, John. Consider it an emergency readiness drill. We’ll eat the cost if anybody kicks.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Call me when you can.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
Howard ran toward the helipad, calling ahead as he did so. It was good that nobody got in his way as he moved — he would have had trouble slowing down.
13
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
“How’d the demonstration go?” Jay asked. It was good to see the boss and Toni working together again.
The boss said, “I believe the FBI recruits learned a certain amount of respect for small women with extensive martial arts training.”
“And men in skirts, too,” Toni said.
Jay missed the byplay on that, but both Michaels and Toni thought it was funny.
“So, what do you have for us?” the boss said.
Jay looked up from his flatscreen. It was just the three of them. General Howard’s son, Tyrone, had busted his leg pretty good in a car wreck, so Howard was out at the hospital. Tyrone had his leg in traction — a pin through his shin hooked to a sandbag over a pulley. He was gonna be there a few more days, at least. Jay had dropped by to see him. He was a good kid. Lieutenant Julio Fernandez was out testing some new piece of equipment.
Jay said, “Well, not that much. After that hit on Blue Whale, everything died down again. But I started following a lead I got on CyberNation.”
“CyberNation? Are they still around? ‘Information should be free?’ ”
He looked at Toni. “Oh, yeah, they’re bigger than ever. And they have a point, you know. That genie is out of the bottle, it ain’t goin’ back in.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound convinced.
Jay shrugged. “And every time the net jigs instead of jags, they get more subscribers. Makes a good motive.”
“Lot of people could have motive,” Michaels said. “All kinds of things thrive in chaos. Have you got anything that makes them a better suspect than a thousand other companies whose stock went up when the net stuttered?”
“Nope, not that I can prove. I’ve got one interesting thing, might be a coincidence.”
“Which is…?”
“You know the vice president, the security guy for Blue Whale who got killed?”
“Yes. Something more on the cause?”
“No. Still an accident, far as the cops are concerned, though they are checking into it further. If somebody cooled the guy, he was good. But here’s the thing: A couple days before he died, our VP went on a cross-country trip and did a little offshore gambling off the coast of Florida, on one of those international water floating casinos.”
“Did he lose more than he could afford?” Toni asked. “Somebody trying to collect?”
“Not according to his coworkers. When he got back, he was up six grand, a happy man.”
“What, then?”
“The gambling ship where the dead guy won his money? The thing is refitted, was formerly some kind of tanker, registered out of Liberia, and is now called Bon Chance. The ownership of this beast is real muzzy when you try to pin it down, runs through a fistful of dummy corporations. But at the top of this chain of hide-the-owner razzmatazz? A corporation called InfoMore that belongs lock, stock, and barrel to — tah dah! — our friends at CyberNation.”
The boss raised an eyebrow at that.
Toni jumped in. “So you’re saying that maybe somebody from CyberNation picked up on who the Blue Whale veep was, followed him home, and extracted security codes from him before they drove him off a cliff?”
Jay shrugged, though he was glad to see Toni hadn’t lost too many steps and could see where he was going. “Naw, I’m not saying that, that’s too big a stretch given what we got. Only that it seems like a coincidence that needs to be checked out, is all. If the guy was murdered, and if it was for what he knew, then you have to at least think maybe there is some connection. Last place I tried to run it down was booby-trapped: The information I went afte
r self-destructed when I got to it. That makes me suspicious, too. You don’t booby-trap info unless it’s something you want kept private.”
Michaels said, “You think you can find a connection?”
“Hey, that’s why you pay me the big bucks. Well, okay, the medium bucks. Which I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I’m getting married, don’t you think I deserve a raise?”
Michaels chuckled. “You already make as much as I do, Jay. You want to embarrass me by making more?”
“I could force myself to live with it, boss.”
“Not for a while, you won’t.”
Jay laughed.
“So you’re going to follow up on this?” Toni said.
“Yep. I haven’t found anything pointing anywhere else, so this is as good a direction as any. And you got to figure, if CyberNation is involved, they’ll have pirate servers set up somewhere to make it harder to trace ’em. Mobile is better than stationary, and a ship on the high seas is worldwide mobile.”
“Good,” Michaels said. “Keep us apprised.”
“Always.”
Somewhere in Colorado
Things had just gotten more interesting than Santos had hoped for. Setting up the fiber-optic cable attack had been easy enough. Six cuts, ranged at odd intervals over a two-hundred-mile section, all made at about the same time — not that that mattered. Once cut in one place, the thick cable wasn’t transmitting anything, so they could take hours to do the other five breaks. The idea, however, was to get in, do the job, and get out. If anybody spotted one of the cutters in one place, by the time they got police after him, the attack would be over, the phone company wouldn’t be able to set up extra security in time to do them any good.