by Tom Clancy
The big thing was, Jay was afraid. No, not just afraid, he was terrified. This was the jungle where the tiger had been, where it had leaped from cover and clawed him, ripped at his brain so he couldn't think. Maybe killing his ability to walk the web forever, and, if so, killing him, too.
He didn't have to be here. Nobody was making him go back into the jungle. But if he couldn't play computers, he might as well be dead.
He took another breath. The little handgun wouldn't even slow the tiger down, he knew, but he couldn't work the machete and hold the big double rifle ready. If it came at him again, he would get hurt again, maybe worse than before.
He could get help. Saji was willing to come with him. He wouldn't carry a gun, because he wouldn't shoot even a VR creature, but he could offer moral support. And there were other ops, some in Net Force, some not, who could link with Jay and share the scenario, some of whom would cheerfully tow a howitzer and who'd blast anything that moved. But that wasn't the way. Jay couldn't spend the rest of his life asking for help. If he couldn't walk in the valley of the shadow alone, he couldn't do his job, and if he couldn't do the thing he loved most in the world, what was the point?
He took yet another breath and let it out slowly. He was going in. If it got him, then it got him, but he was going to go down swinging the big knife and pulling the Webley's trigger if he went, and to hell with it.
He raised the machete. The VR wall of vegetation rippled and wavered. The image started to fade. Crap!
He came back into himself in front of his home workstation, soaked with sour-smelling sweat, heart still thumping madly away.
He'd been ready. He had. He was willing to do it.
Just not ready and willing enough to hold the scenario.
He blew out a sigh. Okay. He'd go back, try it again.
In a little while. When he'd had a chance to get his breath back, to rest a little. Really, he would go back. Really.
Chapter 19
Saturday, April 9th
London, England
Mikhayl Ruzhyo, now looking like just another tourist, walked toward the Imperial War Museum. The building, with its centered dome and pillared front, could have almost been an Italian church, had not the approach been guarded by a pair of fifteen-inch guns, taken, according to the sign nearby, from HMS Resolution and HMS Ramillies.
Churches had been violent places through the centuries, but he had never heard of one protected by naval guns outside the front entrance.
To one side of the walkway, a tall concrete slab stood, a section of the Berlin Wall taken from near the Brandenburg Gate. He had been a teenager in 1989, when they had started taking the wall down, and the significance of it had been lost on him. What an American president had once called "the evil empire" had been much closer to home. He had known very little about the world outside his homeland in those days. He had learned too much about the world since.
The piece of the Berlin Wall had been painted to look like a giant cartoon face, done in blues and blacks, with its mouth stretched wide open. Against a dark red background in the mouth were the words "Change Your Life."
Easy for you to say.
Ruzhyo had been to London several times, usually on his way elsewhere, once on assignment to erase a wayward colleague, and he had seen a few of the tourist sights: Buckingham Palace, the Wellington Monument, Abbey Road. He and Anna had almost come to England on a holiday once, before she got sick, but something or other had prevented it. Since Anna had died, he hadn't done much tourist activity. Anna would not have enjoyed this place, but these days, war museums suited his tastes.
Inside, the main gallery was full of old tanks and artillery pieces, with various airplanes hung from the ceiling. He strolled past a Mark V tank, a 9.2-inch howitzer, a Jeep. Gray greens were the dominant colors.
The most impressive display was of a giant V2 rocket, the side cut away to show the engine, such as it was. The missile was huge, painted a dark green. It looked to him like a cartoon rocket ship, a pointed cigar with fins on the tail.
Ruzhyo stared at the V2. How frightening it must have been to civilians to see this monster dropping from the skies during the Blitz. According to the placard, more than 6,500 of the V2s and smaller V1s fell on London and South East in hard and explosive hailstorms, killing a total of 8,938 people.
How, he wondered, had they been able to come up with the exact number killed? 8,938?
If the Germans had been able to manage a decent guidance system for these beasts, they would have killed a lot more. But while they had been fearsome devices, shooting them off had been rather like launching pop bottle rockets. That they were able to hit London at all had been more due to luck than skill. Many, if not most, of the V1s and V2s had fallen harmlessly into the sea or onto the countryside. And in a war, 9,000 civilians mean little in the overall casualty count. A few drops in an ocean of blood.
What men did best was to kill other men. Especially when given leave to do so in a war.
Ruzhyo strolled past a searchlight, another item painted a flaky military green; he looked at a shellacked and unpainted wooden fishing boat used during the evacuation at Dunkirk; he examined Monty's tank, one in which he'd ridden during the North Africa campaign against Rommel, when Montgomery was still a lowly general and not yet the famous field marshal.
The monuments of killing.
There were also side rooms with cryptography equipment the museum-goers could play with, and on the lower ground floor, a World War One experience, designed to look like the trenches. This floor also had a Blitz display, and a Second World War area, as well as a more modern conflict display: Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Falklands, Bosnia, the Middle East. Ruzhyo quickly passed through the more contemporary presentations; they held little interest for him. He knew about those kinds of wars. Chetsnya and the invading Russians lived in his memory as real as if it had taken place yesterday and not almost twenty years past.
Even though it had been a sea of mud then, it was a much cleaner business in the trenches in France in 1915 than it was when Ruzhyo had been Spetsnaz. Cleaner in the sense that you knew who your enemies were, you knew where they were, and you had things laid out for you in black and white. Attack here, shoot there, live or die along the way. There was little skulking about and shooting people while they sat at a desk or lay in bed with a wife or mistress. Those had been his stock in trade. He knew about that kind of war.
It wasn't particularly satisfying, these monuments to war, but it seemed appropriate. He would book his flight out and leave today, if possible. Perhaps by way of Spain, using another identity. Madrid would be warm by now, and the smells of Spain were more pleasing than those of England.
Saturday, April 9th
Quantico, Virginia
He should have been at home, visiting with his wife and son, John Howard knew, but he couldn't relax enough. He'd just sit there simmering, and his family would know and feel it. It wouldn't be pleasant for anybody. Might as well be at work, though there didn't seem to be much he could do here, either.
He thought about Ruzhyo, wondered about him. How could a man be a cold-blooded killer? He had started out a soldier, and killing sometimes went with the territory, but somewhere along the way, somebody had recruited the man for wetwork. He had stopped being a soldier and become an assassin, a thing of the dark. Howard could understand that an adrenaline rush could pump you up for sneaking around in the back alleys two steps ahead of somebody chasing you, but the stone-hearted murders? That was different—
"Wool-gathering, John?"
Howard smiled at Fernandez. "Just thinking about our quarry."
"Wishing you knew where to find him?"
"That, too. But more wondering how he can do what does." He explained, expecting Julio to agree with him.
To his surprise, his friend shook his head. "Not a lot of difference, way I see it."
"Shooting men in the back of the head? You don't see the difference?"
"Would they be
any deader if he had shot them in the front of the head?"
"Come again?"
"Those two we lost were soldiers, on guard duty. The risk goes with the job. If they'd been paying attention, they'd probably still be alive — or at least they'd have gotten to shoot back. But when you get right down to it, how is it different, really? Somebody shoots you for evil and might, or they shoot you for goodness and right — you're still cold, either way. Their reasons won't matter to you, will they? Dead is dead."
Howard stared at Fernandez as if the sergeant had just turned into a big caterpillar puffing on a hookah: Whoo are youu?
Fernandez caught the look and grinned. "You don't like spies and assassins, but they're as much a part of an army now as they ever were. You want to go into battle with the advantages on your side, or at least not against you. So you send a spy into the enemy camp to find out where they plan to march. He's doing the same to you, so the side with the quicker, smarter, faster spy gets a half step on the other side. That game is as old as war, isn't it?"
"Spies aren't the same as assassins," Howard pointed out.
"Yeah, that's true. But let me ask you a hypothetical question, Colonel. Suppose you could go back in time to Germany in the late thirties—"
"— and assassinate Hitler?" Howard finished. He had heard this one before.
"Yeah. Would you?"
"In a heartbeat. He was a monster. It would save millions of innocent lives."
"You'd still be an assassin, then, right?"
"Yes, but in this case, the ends would justify the means. Sometimes it does, Julio. I'd take the moral heat."
"No question, and I'd pop him, too. But how do we know what our quarry's ends were? Why he got into what he's into? And think about what you might have done in his place, out there in the desert. We went to collect him, and if he had come out shooting, we'd have clotheslined him, right? Deleted him cold?"
"Yes."
"So, tactically, he was surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. The way we saw it, he either gave up or died."
"We saw it that way. We were wrong."
"Yes, sir. He beat us, straight up, and he did it with the tools he had. I wouldn't have been able to do it. You wouldn't have, either, would you?"
"No."
"You'd have gone down shooting."
"Probably."
"Me, too. And we'd be dead. Ruzhyo isn't. And he's on the loose."
"You admire this guy?"
"Man beats me at my game, oh, yeah. I'm pretty good at what I do; so are you. This guy, he's a formidable enemy, and when push comes to shove, those are the ones we want to face off with, aren't they? You remember the shoot-out in Grozny?"
Howard nodded. He remembered.
"Those revolutionaries we took down weren't in our league. They never had a chance once we decided to scoop 'em up. Screwed, blued, and tattooed. You remarked on your disappointment on the flight home. How… easy it was."
"I remember."
"This ice man we're after, he's not easy. He's in our league — hell, maybe better than we are. Catching him will mean something, won't it?"
"Damn straight."
"It's not a war, John, but it's not a walk in the park. You're pissed off because the guy whipped us, not because he shoots people. The samurai killed a lot more people than the ninja ever did. It's not about body counts. It's about winning."
Howard couldn't stop a small grin. "When did you get to be such a… Taoist philosopher, Julio?"
"I'm about to be a married man with a child. It makes a man think."
"Well, go home and take care of your bride-to-be. You aren't doing any good here."
The warning chime on Howard's computer peeped. A flagged subject.
"Go ahead, computer," Howard said.
"Subject A-1 located," the computer said.
Howard reached for the computer. Damn! They had him!
Well, if they could get there fast enough. Wherever there was.
PART TWO
Base, Angle, Leverage
Chapter 20
Saturday, April 9th
Old Kent Road, London, England
Peel stood watching Bascomb-Coombs, once again not having a clue what the man was doing. But BC liked an audience, so he gave him a running commentary.
"Here we go. We insert the passwords we have ras-called from the gatekeepers, thus… and we are in. A straight shot to the inner doors, which we also open with no effort at all…."
He tapped at the keyboard, his fingers dancing like little elves over the thing. He hummed to himself and laughed softly.
"Poor sods. They've rebuilt their walls and made them twice as thick and high as they were, but it doesn't matter, you see. There still must be the pass-through, and no matter how narrow the gates, if you have the keys, you are unstoppable! Voila!"
He turned from the computer screen, all awash with complex lines and clots of numbers and letters that Peel did not comprehend. "How is your desire for power, Terrance?"
"Excuse me?"
Bascomb-Coombs pointed at the keyboard. "Come over here and press this key, and for a few milliseconds you'll be the most powerful man in the world. You will have more of an effect on more people's lives than anyone else on the planet."
Peel stared at the man but didn't move.
"Ah, you hesitate. You must know the dictum, 'With great power comes great responsibility'?"
"Churchill?"
The scientist smiled. "Spider-Man, actually. Sure you don't want to do the deed?"
Peel shook his head.
"Well. Onward and upward, then." He tapped the key once, smartly. "That ought to give the rabble something to think about."
Saturday, April 9th
MI-6, London, England
"Commander Michaels?"
Michaels looked up from his desk. He didn't recognize the man standing there, he was just another of the young and clean-cut types running around the place, dressed in a suit and tie. Could have been an FBI agent, save that his clothes were cut better. "Yes?"
"DG Hamilton wanted me to deliver this to you, sir."
He handed a silvery disk about the size of a quarter to Michaels. "If you'll thumbprint here, sir?" He held a print reader out. Michaels pressed his right thumb against a small gray panel on the device. The messenger looked at the readout and was apparently satisfied with the print match. "Thank you, sir."
Michaels looked at the tiny computer disk. If you were worried about your computer system being burgled and you didn't trust your electronic protection, there were ways to circumvent your fear. The easiest method was to disengage your computer from all contact with other machines, strip out all communications right down to the hardwiring. If it was unplugged and not firewired or optically linked to any other computer in a network, local or external, you were safe.
Nobody could sneak in your house if you didn't have any doors or windows.
Of course, you couldn't get out, either, and that was a problem.
So if you isolated yourself, you accepted input only via secure and scanned disks. And if you needed to reach out to another computer, you sent them a hand-carried disk. It was slow, it was cumbersome, but it was safe.
Michaels stuck the disk into his reader and had his viral software crunch it. Even though it was supposed to be secure, you still checked, always.
The software — the best antiviral/antivermal/Betty Crocker program MI-6 had — dutifully reported that the coin-sized disk was clean, no sign of viruses, worms, or unwanted pastries.
Michaels ran the disk. Things were looking up on a few fronts. The airline reservation and flight control computers were, by and large, back up and running smoothly. That was the good news.
The bad news was, they hadn't been able to backwalk the hack that had caused the problem in the first place. It just… stopped past a series of firewalls and foolpits.
"Good afternoon, Alex."
He glanced up at Angela. She was in a green T-shirt, faded and kind of tigh
t jeans, and tennis shoes. His surprise at her outfit must have showed. She smiled and said, "Casual Saturday."
"Ah."
"Anything new?"
"Afraid not. I was just going over the disk your boss sent over. The airlines are back on-line."
She strolled in his direction, leaned in to look over his shoulder.
He felt her right breast brush against his back.
Apparently Casual Saturday meant no bra, too. Damn.
She quickly leaned back. "Well, that's good news, at least."
The young man who had delivered the disk came into the room, not exactly running, but close to it. "Commander, DG Hamilton would like to have a word. You, as well, Cooper."
"Trouble?"
"I couldn't say, sir."
Trouble.
Saturday, April 9th
The Yews, Sussex, England
Lord Goswell sat in his study, sipping a gin and tonic, looking through the French doors. Seemed as if it might rain again. Maybe it would come down hard enough to drown the bloody rabbits; certainly his shooting hadn't been much good there. Perhaps he needed to have his eyes done sooner rather than later.
He heard one of the maids chattering madly at somebody in the hall. He smiled as he sipped his drink. He pulled his pocket watch out and looked at it.
"What is the problem, Applewhite?"
The butler came into the room, looking apologetic. "Sorry about the disturbance, milord. The maid and Cook were distraught."
"Whatever for?"
"It seems the telly has gone down. And the telephones are also on the blink."
"Really?"
"Yes, milord. Can't even pick up most of the radio channels on the battery unit or in the automobiles."
"Well, that would be distressing then, wouldn't it? Think it's the Russians dropping bombs?"
"I hardly think so, milord."