Net Force (1998)

by Tom - Net Force 01 Clancy

  There came the repetitive bark of a submachine gun, followed by the spang! spang! spang! of jacketed teeth chewing at the wounded limo.

  Day rolled again, looking for cover. Nothing. Nowhere to hide!

  He glanced back at the car. Saw and felt time become mired in heaviness. Boyle exited the car, gun working, tongues of orange fire stabbing into the dark, but it was like a slow-motion scene in a movie.

  Boyle jerked as the small-arms fire beat at him, slammed into his torso.

  In a small corner of his mind, Day knew that most submachine guns used pistol ammunition and that the vests he and Boyle both wore would stop any handgun round. As long as they didn't--

  --blood and brain matter sprayed from the side of Boyle's temple as a bullet exited there--

  --as long as they didn't think to shoot for the head!

  Damn, damn! What was going on? Who were these people?

  In the limo, the driver kept trying to pull away, the roar of the engine continuing. Day could smell the exhaust, the burned tires--he could smell his own fear, too, sharp, sour, overwhelming.

  The mine attached to the rear door of the limo went off--blam!

  All the glass in the limo blew out. It sleeted in all directions--some of it hit Day, but he was only dimly aware of it touching him.

  The car's roof peeled up a little in the back, leaving a fist-sized gap. Smoke, bitter and acrid, washed over him in a hot wave.

  The driver hung partway out of his window, boneless.

  Dead. The driver and Boyle were both dead. Help would be coming, but he couldn't wait for it--if he did, he would be dead, too.

  Day came up, took two or three quick steps, jinked right for two more steps, then cut left. Broken-field, came back to him from football in high school thirty-five years ago.

  Gunfire tried to catch him, but failed to connect solidly. A bullet tugged at his jacket, punched through under his left arm. He felt a sense of outrage. The goddamned jacket was Hong Kong silk, it had cost him six hundred dollars!

  Another round smashed into his chest, right over the heart. He'd never worn the titanium trauma plate, had just used a trifold of Kevlar stuffed down in the trauma pocket over the heart like a lot of agents did, and the impact hurt like a bastard! Like he'd been hit with a hammer, right on the sternum! Damn!

  But it didn't matter. He was up, he was moving--

  A black figure appeared in front of him, waving a flashing Uzi. Even in the night and murk of his fear, Day saw the man wore bulky combat armor under his black jacket. Day had been taught to shoot to the center of mass first, but that wouldn't do now, no, no, the SIG .40 wouldn't hurt the attacker that way any more than the Uzi's 9mm's were hurting him!

  Still running, Day lifted the SIG, lined the glowing tritium dot of the front sight on the man's nose. Day's vision tunneled--all he could see was the face. The green night-sight dot bounced around, but he squeezed off three shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

  The armored attacker dropped as if his legs had vanished.

  All right! All right! He had taken one of them out, he had created a hole, it was just like in football when he'd been the quarterback so long ago.

  Now, go through the hole, fast, head for the goal line!

  He caught motion peripherally, glanced to his left, and saw another man, also in black. The man held a pistol in two hands. He was as still as a painting. He looked as if he were at the range, ready to practice.

  Day felt his bowels clench. He wanted to run, shoot, defecate, all at the same instant. Whoever these guys were, they were professionals. This wasn't any street gang looking for somebody's wallet. This was a hit, an assassination, and they were good--

  It was his final thought.

  The bullet hit him between the eyes and took away everything else he might ever think.

  In the backseat of the Volvo station wagon, Mikhayl Ruzhyo looked into the cargo compartment behind him at the body of Nicholas Papirosa. The body lay on its side, covered with a blanket, and the smell of death seeped into the air despite the covering. Ruzhyo sighed, shook his head. Poor Nicholas. It had been hoped there would be no casualties--it was always hoped to be so--but the fat American had not been as old and slow as expected. They had underestimated him--an error. Of course, it had been Nicholas who had been responsible for the intelligence about the FBI Commander, so perhaps it was fitting that he was the only casualty. Still, Ruzhyo would miss him. They went back a long way, to the days in the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SRV. Fifteen years. A lifetime in this business.

  Tomorrow would have been Nicholas's birthday; he would have been forty-two.

  In the front seat, Winters, the American, drove, and Grigory Zmeya rode in the passenger seat, mumbling to himself in Russian.

  Their last names--even Winters--were not those bestowed upon them by their fathers. They were jokes. Ruzhyo meant "rifle." Nicholas had named himself "cigarette." Grigory called himself after the Russian word for "snake."

  Ruzhyo sighed again. Done was done. Nicholas was dead, but so was the target. The loss was therefore acceptable.

  "You doin' okay back there, hoss?" the American said.

  "I am fine."

  "Just checkin'."

  The American had said he was from Texas, and either he was or his accent was a passable fake.

  Ruzhyo looked down at the pistol on the seat next to him, the one with which he had killed the man who had killed Nicholas. It was a Beretta 9mm, an Italian weapon. It was a fine piece of machinery, well made, but it was also big, heavy, with too much recoil, too much noise, too much bullet for Ruzhyo's taste. When he had been spetsnaz and involved in mokrie dela--wet affairs--he had carried a little PSM, a 5.45mm pistol. The round it fired had been perhaps half as large as those in the Italian gun, and the weapon itself was much smaller than this piece. True, he'd had the armorer tune it for him; but still, it had always been sufficient to do the job. It had never let him down. He would have preferred that weapon to this one, but of course, that would not do. This had to look as if the killing was by someone inside this country, and a Russian assassin's weapon would ring enough alarms to raise the dead man. The Americans were not altogether stupid in these matters.

  He frowned at the Beretta. The Americans had this obsession with size; to them, bigger was always better. Their policemen would sometimes empty handguns containing eighteen or twenty high-powered and large-caliber rounds at their criminals, missing each time, what they called "spray-and-pray." They did not seem to understand that a single shot from a small-caliber weapon in the hands of an expert was much more effective than a magazine full of elephant-killing bullets in the hands of an untrained idiot--as many of the American policemen seemed to be. The Jews knew this. The Israeli Mossad still routinely carried .22's, weapons that fired the smallest commercially available rounds. And everybody knew Mossad was not to be taken lightly.

  But at least the FBI man had died well. He had taken one of them with him and that had been unexpected. He had hit Nicholas three times in the head. Once might have been an accident; thrice, certainly by intent. He had seen the body armor, known what it was, shot for the head. Had he been a bit faster, he might have gotten clear of the initial attack.

  In the front seat, the Snake muttered something, loud enough for Ruzhyo to hear. He gritted his teeth. Ruzhyo did not like Grigory the Snake. The man had been in the army in 1995, one of the units that had stomped into Ruzhyo's homeland of Chechnya to kill and rape. Yes, yes, Grigory had been a soldier, just following his orders, and yes, this mission was more important in the long run than any grudges Ruzhyo might have against the Snake, so he would endure the man. But perhaps one of these days, the Snake would speak of his beautiful Medal for Action in Chechnya once too often, and if that day came near enough to the end of the mission so he would not be vital, Grigory Zmeya would go to join his ancestors. And Ruzhyo would smile while he throttled the stupid oaf.

  Not today, however. There was still much to be done, bridges
to be crossed, objectives to be achieved, and the Snake was still necessary.

  Which was lucky for him.

  Alexander Michaels was only half asleep when the small monitor on the nightstand next to his bed lit. He felt the pressure of the light against his closed lids, and rolled toward the source and opened his eyes.

  The screen's blue Net Force background came up and the computer's vox said, "Alex? We have a priority-one com."

  Michaels blinked, and frowned at the timesig on the monitor's upper right corner. Just past midnight. He wasn't awake. What--?

  "Alex? We have a priority-one com."

  The computer's voice was throaty, sexy, feminine. No matter what it said, it always sounded as if it were asking you to go to bed with it. The personality module, including the vox program, had been programmed by Jay Gridley, and the voice he'd chosen for it was, Michaels knew, a joke. Jay was a great tech, but a better cook than he was a comedian, and while Michaels found the vox irritating, damned if he would give the kid the satisfaction of asking him to change it.

  The Deputy Commander of Net Force rubbed at his face, combed his short hair back with his fingers, and sat up. The small motion-sensitive cam mounted on the top of the monitor tracked him. The unit was programmed to send visuals unless he told it otherwise. "All right, I'm up. Connect com."

  The voxax--voice-activated--system obeyed his command. The screen flowered, and the somewhat-harried face of Assistant Deputy Commander Antonella Fiorella appeared. She looked more alert than he felt, but then she had the graveyard watch this week, so she was supposed to be alert.

  "Sorry to wake you, Alex."

  "No problem, Toni. What's up?" She wouldn't be calling him if it wasn't vital.

  "Somebody just assassinated Commander Day."

  "What!?"

  "His virgil sent out an alert. D.C. PD rolled on it. Time anybody got there, Day, his bodyguard Boyle and the limo driver, Louis Harvey, were all dead. Bombs and submachine guns, looks like. Maybe twenty minutes ago."

  Michaels said a word he seldom used in mixed company.

  "Yeah," Toni said. "And the horse it rode in on, too."

  "I'm on my way."

  "Virgil's got the address." A short pause. "Alex? Don't forget the assassination protocols."

  She didn't need to remind him of that, but he nodded. In the event of an attack on a senior federal official, all members of that unit had to assume it might not be the only attack planned. "I copy that. Discom."

  His assistant's image vanished, leaving the Net Force blue screen. He slid off the bed and started pulling on his clothes.

  Steve Day was dead? Damn.

  Damn.

  Wednesday, September 8th, 12:47 a.m. Washington, D.C.

  Red and blue lights from the D.C. police patrol cars strobed the street with primary carnival colors, an effect appropriate to the circus of activity now going on. It was pushing one in the morning, but there were dozens of people lining the road, held back by police officers and bright plastic crime-scene tape. More curious onlookers peered down from nearby buildings. There was something to see, too, what with the blasted limo, the litter of shell casings, the three bodies.

  It was a bad neighborhood to die in, Toni Fiorella thought. But then, when you got right down to it, any neighborhood was a bad one to die in when death came from a hard and sudden sleet of submachine-gun fire.

  "Agent Fiorella?"

  Toni blinked away her thoughts on mortality and looked at the police captain, who had, judging by the size and shape of his sleep-wrinkles, been roused from his bed. He was an easy fifty, nearly bald, and certainly, at this moment, a most unhappy man. Dead federal agents in your yard, on your watch, were bad things to wake up to. Real bad.

  "Yes?"

  "My men have come back from their initial canvass."

  Toni nodded. "Let me guess. Nobody saw anything."

  "You should go into law enforcement," the captain said. His voice was sour. "You have an eye for detail."

  "Somebody in this crowd must have outstanding warrants for something," Toni said. She waved one arm in accusatory benediction.

  The captain nodded. He knew the drill. When a cop was killed, it didn't matter if he was local, state or federal, you did what you had to do to find whoever did it. Squeezing some low-life drug dealer or even a citizen with too many parking tickets for information was penny-ante stuff. Whatever it took. You did not let cop-killers slide.

  Toni looked up, and saw the new Chrysler town car glide to a stop just outside the police barricade. Two men, the bodyguard and the driver, got out first and scanned the crowd. The bodyguard nodded at the passenger in back.

  Alex Michaels alighted, saw Toni and headed for her. He held his badge case up, and was waved through by the cops blocking the street.

  Toni felt that mixed rush of emotion she always felt whenever she saw Alex for the first time on any given day. Even in the middle of all this carnage, there was a certain amount of joy, of admiration, even of love.

  Alex's expression was not grim, but as he habitually wore it, neutral. He didn't let himself show that he felt such things, even though she knew it had to be causing him great pain. Steve Day had been his mentor and his friend; his death must be stabbing deep into Alex's heart, though he would never let on, even to her.

  Maybe even especially to her . . .

  "Toni."

  "Alex."

  They didn't speak as they toured the murder scene. He squatted and examined Steve Day's body. She caught a flash of tightness in his face, a quick flex of jaw muscles as he looked at Day. Nothing more.

  He rose, moved to the limo and looked at the other dead agents and the ruined auto. FBI and local police agents still circled around with light bars and videocams, covering the entire street. Forensic techs drew circles around each of the spent shells on the street and sidewalk, noting the location of each empty hull before they bagged it. Somebody would do the super-glue steam on those shells, the fine mist of cyanoacrylate ester that could, when done properly, find a fingerprint on a sheet of toilet paper; and they would do the biological-activity scan that could find a germ in an ocean. But Toni figured that coming up with useful prints or DNA residues wasn't going to be likely. It was almost never that easy. Especially on something as well planned as this obviously had been.

  After he'd gotten as good a look as he wanted, Alex turned to her. "Okay. Lay it out."

  "As nearly as we can tell so far, it was an assassination, Commander Day the target. A bomb under a manhole cover kicked the limo into a light pole. The door in the rear was blown open--probably a marine limpet of some kind--and the passengers were cut down by several attackers. From the ejected brass patterns, there were three or more shooters. Porter will run the ballistics stuff, but he's pretty sure from what he's already seen they were using 9mm's, at least a couple of submachine guns, and one handgun."

  She kept her voice level, as if talking about sports stats. She came from a family of expressive Bronx Italians who wore their hearts on their sleeves and who laughed hard or cried hard as needed. It was tough to keep the emotion from her words--she'd liked Steve Day and his wife--but it was her job.

  "Boyle and Day both returned fire. Boyle managed to get off twelve rounds, Day three. Porter has come up with a couple of deformed handgun slugs found on the street whose impact shapes indicated they hit something harder than Kevlar and bounced off. He'll have to run the nose prints to be certain, but--"

  Alex cut her off. "The assassins wore armor, probably military-grade ceramic or spider-silk plate. What else?"

  "Over here."

  She led him to a spot behind Day's body. The coroner's people were bagging the corpse, but Alex didn't spare them or his friend a glance; he was all business now. "Day's brass was found there, there, and over there." She pointed at small chalk circles a few meters apart on the street. She moved a couple of steps, and pointed at the street again. "There's a small, congealed blood ooze, right there, and a spray pattern of bloo
d and brain tissue angled that way, behind the blood," she said. She waited, knowing he would make the connection.

  He made it. "Somebody tagged one of the assassins, despite the armor," Alex said. "Day would have known to shoot for the head. But the killers took the body."

  "D.C. Police have set up roadblocks."

  He waved this off. "This was a professional hit. The shooters won't get caught in a roadblock. What else?"

  She shook her head. "Until we get the lab work, I'm afraid that's about it. No witnesses have come forth. I'm sorry, Alex."

  He nodded. "All right. Steve--Commander Day--ran Organized Crime for a long time. Crank up the system, Toni. I want to know everything about everybody Day ever talked to in his tenure at OC, anybody who had a grudge. And anything current we are working on. This looks like a New Mafia operation, it's their style, but we don't want to overlook anything."