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 after 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.
Santos had assigned himself the most remote of the attack sites, where the cable was strung out over a gorge, somewhere in cowboy country. He was fairly high up in the hills, five, maybe six thousand feet, he guessed, from how thin the air was in his lungs. Even so, the air did have a clean and fresh, pine-treelike scent, and it gusted and swirled in a fairly stiff turn-your-head-around breeze now and then. It was cold up here, dark and crusty old snow piled in shady patches everywhere. It was clear and sunny, though, and warmer near the larger rocks where it was protected from the wind. It had taken him three hours to hike in from where he’d parked his four-wheel SUV, and he’d worked up a sweat under his warm clothing, though he’d kept his gloves on. His hands never seemed to stay warm when the thermometer’s reading dropped to near freezing. He liked climates where you could run around with no shirt on if you wanted, tropical heat, with snow seldom, if ever.
When he had gotten close to the spot where he intended to burn through the protected cable, using a few coils of Thermex welding cord he carried in his pack, he ran into unexpected company.
He thought this strange, since the place was in the middle of nowhere, a long way on foot from the nearest road.
There were two of them, big men. They wore back-country cold weather clothes—dark wool trousers and hiking books, plaid wool shirts and heavy Gore-Tex parkas, and orange caps with state logos on them. The logos indicated that the pair were game wardens.
Bad luck. For them.
Santos was not carrying a gun, and thus shouldn’t be thought a hunter, unless they thought he was chasing mountain goats and throwing rocks at them, but the two men decided to give him a hard time anyway. Santos figured out why in a few seconds when one of them said, “Well, well, whadda we got here—a hiker? Hey, Jerry, you ever hear of niggers hiking?”
“Can’t say as I have, Rich. They only have two forward speeds—cock-stroll and feets-do-your-stuff! But they show up nice against the snow, hey?”
Both men laughed at the lame humor.
That made it easier, not that it was necessary to be easier. He would have had to take care of them anyway, since they’d seen him, but it made him feel better that they weren’t nice men.
Santos waited for the two to get closer. Both men wore sidearms in holsters, visible under the unzipped jackets, the guns being Glocks, probably in 9mm or .40. The one named Jerry had a scoped bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder on a hand-tooled leather strap. Looked like a Winchester Model 70, no way to tell the caliber. A good weapon, the Winchester.
“Colorado game wardens. Let’s see some identification, boy,” Rich said.
“Am I doing something illegal?” Santos said. “I thought this was public property. I’m not hunting or fishing.”
“Ooh, listen to that accent, we got us a foreign nigger. You from Mexico, boy?” That from Jerry. “Habla Spicko?”
“We want to take a look in that backpack of yours,” Rich said. “See if you have a gun you might be using to illegally hunt with. Hand it over.”
“Okay,” Santos said. “You’re the law.”
Both men smiled, glancing at each other, secure in their ability to whipsaw this one black man into subservience out here in the cold mountains.
He swung the backpack into Jerry’s face, hard, and before Rich could react, Santos did a cartwheel and kicked the surprised man flush on the mouth. Yes, it was a flashy move, one his Mestre would have slapped him for trying so quickly in even a street match, but these were not players, they were white racists. He wanted to bash them with style.
Rich went down, hard, and as Jerry managed to recover from being hit in the face with the backpack, Santos danced in and slapped the man, slinging his arm around using the twisting of his hips like popping a whip to deliver the power. The heel of his hand connected with Jerry’s temple and sent a shock up Santos’s arm. A good hit.
Jerry sprawled, and Santos would bet gold against sawdust the man was out of it.
Rich came up, clawing for his pistol, but Santos got there, grabbed his wrist and wrenched it, turned the gun so the muzzle faced Rich’s belly, then grabbed Rich’s fist with his own free hand hard enough to trigger the weapon.
The explosion was very loud in the quiet afternoon.
The empty shell ejected in a lazy, slow-motion arc, glittered in the sunshine, and fell, bounced from a flat rock, and tumbled from sight.
It shocked the hell out of Rich as the bullet hit him in the belly, you could see that.
The wounded man released his grip on the gun and fell to his knees, trying to stop the blood flow with his hands. That didn’t work. Red seeped through his fingers, dripping to the ground. It smelled like warm copper.
Santos grabbed the pistol, pointed it at Rich’s head.
“No, please, don’t—!”
Santos grinned. “Vaya con Dios,” he said. “That’s Spicko, right?”
“Don’t—!”
He shot the man right between the eyes.
Jerry was still down, feet twitching. Must have knocked him cold.
Santos took two steps, aimed, and put a round into Jerry’s head. The man spasmed, then went limp.
Two men, armed, and too easy. He sighed. In his country, the women fought better.
Santos tucked the gun into his belt. He would get rid of it later, where it wouldn’t be found. His prints weren’t on record in the United States, but he didn’t want this coming back to bite him twenty years from now. The authorities had long memories when you killed any of their own. Fingerprints, DNA, whatever they could get, these things stayed in the system forever. He had heard about guys picked up thirty years after they did a murder when something that had been sitting in a refrigerator at some lab for all that time matched with new crime scene evidence. He didn’t want that, always to be looking over his shoulder.
He went to the bodies and squatted. He already had his gloves on so there was little risk as he went through the dead men’s pockets.
He found two wallets on each man, which puzzled him. A look at the contents brought a big smile to his face. Huh. What do you know about that?
He dropped the wallets, collected his backpack, and headed back toward his target. He’d be done in an hour, long gone by nightfall . . . This high up, cold as it was, if the animals didn’t get them, they would keep a long time, turning to dessicated mummies. But the authorities would discover what the scavengers left when they came to find the broken cable, which would be sooner rather than later.
When he was far enough away, maybe he’d use a throwaway phone to call the authorities about these two. Just to make sure they didn’t go undiscovered. T
hat would be amusing, no?
Yes. Most amusing.
Toni came into Michaels’s office looking at a computer printout. “Here’s something that will probably make the director happy,” she said.
“What?”
“You know those two federal fugitives, the militia guys? Ones suspected in the killings of a couple of game wardens in Colorado a few weeks back?”
“Bank robbers and armored car hijackers, right? Numbers five and six on the Ten Most Wanted? The ones the regular FBI has been combing the mountains looking for for the last three months?”
“That’s them. Seems some anonymous call tipped off authorities about where to find the pair. And sure enough, they had the game wardens’ ID and some of their clothing on them when they were located.”
“Captured alive? I seem to recall they swore they’d never be taken that way.”
“They were right. But they were both cold when the local sheriff’s deputies got there. Shot to death.”
“Who shot them?” he asked.
“Nobody knows. I’d venture to guess nobody really cares, either. Somebody who saved the state and the federal government the costs of a couple of trials.”
“Life is strange sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it just? The local cops also found a major transcontinental fiber-optic phone cable nearby had been cut.”
“Maybe the phone company shot them. Hear anything from home?”
“Yes, I just talked to Guru. Little Alex is sleeping. Has been no problem at all.”
“Ask her if she wants to move up here permanently, be a full-time nanny. Just for, oh, fifteen or so years?”
“You think you’re joking,” she said. “I’m considering it.”
“Now you’re joking.”
“Nope. She’s an old lady and I love her. I owe her a lot—what she taught me helped make me who I am. She’s all alone in New York. Her own family doesn’t pay much attention to her. And she’s really good with the baby. Would it be so awful if she lived in the spare bedroom and helped take care of him?”
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