by Tom Clancy
The pierced waitress hustled over. Hustled. Jeez, that hadn’t taken long.
The waitress gave Lewis a big smile. “What can I get for you, hon?”
Yep. Definitely a lesbian . . .
When the waitress was gone, Lewis told him.
“Damn, that’s ballsy. You think that will sell it?”
“Oh, yeah. This guy is so macho he makes you look like a sissy. If we pull this off—meaning if you pull it off—then I think he’ll fall all over himself to make the deal.”
“I’m up for it. When?”
“Soon as we can. Plug the stats into your VR program and run it a couple times. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll go.”
He nodded. It was good to have something to do. Take his mind off the other stuff. Dead cops and all . . .
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
“Can you get off work, Tommy?”
Thorn nodded at the image of Marissa on his desk’s phone screen. “I don’t see why not. The DoD can breathe down my neck just as easily over my virgil if I’m in Georgia as they can if I am here.”
“Good. I’ll tell my grandparents we’re coming.”
“You want to take the jet?”
She laughed. “The jet? Oh, yeah, they get a lot of those landing on the red clay road running to the Pinehurst farm. Chickens would stop laying eggs for a year. Jet, right. We’ll take my car—I wouldn’t want your pilot or chauffeur to get lost. When can you leave? Tomorrow?”
“No reason not to. Will the CIA let you take a vacation?”
“I expect so. I could quit, given as how I’m about to marry a rich guy, but they owe me six weeks. Nothing I’m doing can’t wait a few days to finish. Pack warm—it’s chilly down there this time of year.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
When they discommed, Thorn called his assistant. “I’m going to be out of the office for a few days,” he told her. “Emergency calls can be routed to my virgil. I’ll check e-mail and messages while I’m gone.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?”
“Georgia. To meet Marissa’s grandparents.”
Bugworld
Bug Base #13
Jay lay on a slope covered in tall and thick red grass, overlooking one of the alien bases. The sky was a swirly orange, with a dark blue sun and fluffy, electric-blue clouds. Down below this hillside was his target, and the alien base was itself mostly a study in bright green. The visual contrasts were stunning. There was an odd, ozonelike smell to the air, and strange sounds—creaks and cracks, and animals-but-not-as-we-know-them noises—added more layers to the illusion. Jay felt as if he really were on an alien world.
It was just coming on dusk on this part of the planet. The blue sun cast long and eerie shadows. Given the local star’s hue, he wasn’t sure what the real colors would be, but that didn’t matter.
Almost time.
Jay had planned his attack for a hair after sunset. This would provide some cover, and the guards might be less wary, with it only just getting dark.
He peered through the sniperscope, and zoomed in on the guard shack beside the gate. Almost two hundred meters away, the two dark-purple aliens stood there, creatures from a nightmare, each holding a futuristic carbinelike weapon. Their heads were huge, and reminded Jay of Venus flytraps—flat and slightly rounded with huge jaws. Bony ridges sat atop the heads, guarding three eyes—two in the front, and one in back. Sneaking up on them was a bitch.
They were big suckers, too. Had to be at least two and a half meters tall, with three thick stumpy legs and three arms each.
The bugs looked altogether wrong in a human biped’s view.
Which was part of the fun of the game. After all, how hard would it be to want to knock off such creatures? It added to the immersion factor, the being-there aspect of a top computer game, by giving the player an attractive goal.
Earthling versus the u-u-ugly monsters.
Jay double-checked his own weapon. It was an Accuracy International AW-SP with a heavy barrel and suppressor, one of the most accurate of all sniper rifles.
This was his third time at this base. He’d tried getting closer with shorter-range weapons, but he’d been unable to do so unseen by the guards.
So this time he’d come up with a long-range attack.
The War Against the Bugs had an extensive database of weapons built into the game, ranging from swords and knives to modern firearms. Anything that might be available on Earth to somebody trying on an Army base, you could use here. Which made sense.
The game allowed for team play—either with other VR players or AI-bots—but Jay liked playing solo.
This time he thought he had the gear and his strategy right.
The trick was timing. Every twenty minutes roving guards cycled past the gate. Jay wanted to time his attack so that he’d have the maximum window before the dead gate guards were spotted by the rovers. He had tried to take out all the guards at once, but he hadn’t been fast enough—one of them had always managed to get a call for help out, and that was no good. Two at a time was his limit—they were fast for big bugs. . . .
Once inside the base, his goal was to blow up the armory vault. He had all the explosives he’d need in his kit, but to destroy the target he’d have to break inside—it was protected by armor plate and a heavy steel door. One of his gadgets was an electronic code descrambler. Intelligence he’d gained on the alien base showed it to have a high-bit encryption lock. This meant it could take up to five minutes to break into the vault.
The time factors—twenty minutes before the guard came back, minus the five through the door, plus the time required to get down the hill and to the armory—put him on a short clock. At least if he wanted to get back out again.
He could take out the roving guard once he was inside, but there was no way to know how many other checkpoints that guard passed, or when he would be missed.
There went the roving guard, his three legs moving him along at a solid thump-thump-thump.
Jay waited until he had stepped out of sight, and counted to twenty. As he did so, he dialed the magnification up on the scope.
There . . .
Bammff! The gun wasn’t completely silent, but the noise wouldn’t carry far. Guard one went down, yellow blood spraying from his head.
Guard two stood there in shock for a moment before turning toward the perimeter alarm button.
But Jay had timed this carefully—the remaining guard was three meters away from the alarm, giving time for another shot—
He got guard two in the upper chest, spinning him around—fortunately away from the alarm.
But this guard was made of sterner stuff, because he still tried crawling toward the control panel.
Jay fired again. The guard sprawled.
And then Jay was up, running down the hill, the backpack with explosives slung over his shoulders—
A countdown timer in his peripheral heads-up vision began running—
18:50 . . . He was at the guard station. He ran past.
The VR was flawless, maintaining a fluid frame rate so that everything stayed sharp and clear. Nothing on the left or right.
Over the simple lift-arm that blocked the entrance . . .
He looked to his right and could see the backs of the roving guards, hundreds of meters away. He slowed slightly, not wanting to draw attention to himself, but needing to keep his speed up—
17:45 . . .
He made his way past several buildings toward his target.
No one in sight.
He hadn’t made it this far before. He drank in every detail. Pale blue pole-mounted lights had begun coming on as the sun set, and he stayed in the pools of shadow surrounding each one as he moved toward the armory.
Almost there.
He readied the descrambler, pulling it off his belt and mashing the on button. His other hand held a silenced HK USP .45. An infrared laser sight provided an aiming point that, in theory, only he could see,
the aliens having vision similar to men.
16:10 . . .
Jay’s heart pounded. It was often this way when he made a leap in a game. He might play a single level dozens of times, getting stuck at the same point over and over again, but sometimes he’d break past the bottleneck and make it the rest of the way on the next try.
And it looked like that might happen. . . .
He glanced right and left, scanning for trouble. The problem with getting so excited was that it made you sloppy. Still clear.
He was at the armory.
Go, go, go—!
He slapped the descrambler onto the keypad lock and activated it. Ha!
Bright flashes of light blossomed in his vision—
Dammit!
Jay watched as his VR viewpoint shifted backward from his body, rising to a point three meters overhead.
An alien wearing a guard’s uniform popped out from behind a doorway twenty or thirty feet away. It was grinning. If that hideous expression could be called a grin.
Crap.
He hadn’t seen that one coming. Part of the problem with having never made it this far before. He’d gotten careless trying to beat the mission. Bright green letters from the VR menu popped up, accompanied by a deep bass techno theme:
Mission failed. Try again?
Jay checked the RW time. 12:45. If he didn’t quit now, he’d miss lunch. He looked at the game timer. 15:23. He could have made it if the damn guard hadn’t gotten him.
Yeah. And if your aunt had wheels, she’d be a tea cart. . . .
Screw lunch.
He used his VR hand to reach for the try-again control, but had a sudden realization and stopped. Playing the game to win isn’t why you are here, monkey-boy. Did you forget that part?
He shook his head.
He had to hand it to the guy who’d put this together. It was easy to see why it had gotten the results it had—it was addictive. But what he needed to do was figure out who had built the scenario, and how to run him down—not beat the game. He was here to drain the swamp, not wrestle the alligators. . . .
He smiled at himself. He could always play video games for fun. This was serious business. Best he remember that.
11
Huachuca City, Arizona
The terrorist—or “freedom fighter,” depending on your sociopolitical or religious belief—Abu Hassan was a Palestinian by birth, but raised in the U.S. as Ibrahim Sidys. He took his war-nom from, of all things, an old Popeye cartoon about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. That’s not where it came from originally—the name was not at all uncommon—but that’s where he got it.
Only in America . . .
This Abu Hassan had never been a cartoon version of Bluto, but a cold-blooded killer responsible for the deaths of hundreds, in bombings, shootings, and even a couple of poisonings. For nine years he had led one of the most radical factions in the Middle East, and was wanted by just about everybody for capital crimes—even the Syrians hated him—for Abu Hassan did not discriminate when he dropped the hammer. Almost everybody was his enemy, and he had no problems with collateral damage if he got the job done. Allah would know his own, and as for the rest? Who cared?
As it happened, one Sunday morning in May of 2012, Terry “Butch” Reilly, then a major in the United States Army, had been having coffee at a Starbucks just outside the old Green Zone when Abu Hassan’s group rolled up to machine-gun a police station across the street. Four cops and six civilians went down initially in the hosing, but something happened to Hassan’s Land Cruiser as it was pulling away—later it was shown that a return round, probably from an Iraqi policeman, penetrated the car’s hood and broke off a battery terminal. The car died and wouldn’t restart, and the assassins, five of them, piled out and took off on foot.
Abu Hassan, waving an AK-47, ran into the Starbucks to obtain another automobile, assuming at least one of the patrons owned a car. Calm as you please, Major Reilly, in civvies and crouched low with the other patrons when the shooting started, drew his Beretta side arm from under a sleeveless fishing vest and put two rounds into Hassan from four meters away, one in the chest and one in the head.
Apparently, nobody was more amazed at this action than Reilly, largely because he was, and had been throughout his military career, a paper- and photon-pusher—he worked in PR, information services, and was doing a tour in the “semiactive, advisor-status-only” war zone only because he couldn’t get any more rank without it. He hadn’t fired a gun since basic training, except for recertification once a year, and had barely qualified doing that.
That the most wanted terrorist in the region was taken out by an armchair computer geek who barely knew which end of his weapon put forth the bullet eventually got much play in the press.
When Reilly went over to make sure the terrorist wasn’t going to be getting up and shooting anybody, he saw that the dead man carried a pistol along with his AK. Quite a striking gun it was: a blued-steel Walther PPK .380, with ivory grips, hand-tuned, Butch would eventually learn, by a master gunsmith in Laredo, Texas. The gun, Butch would also find out, had been a present from a fellow terrorist who had once been very high up in the PLO and a close associate of the late Yasir Arafat.
The major didn’t see as how Abu Hassan would be needing the piece any longer, and it would be a shame to have such a fine talisman wind up in some Iraqi evidence locker, so he stuck the gun into his pocket. If any of the stunned Starbucks patrons noticed, or cared, none said anything.
Taking out one of the most wanted terrorists in the world in a one-on-one didn’t hurt an officer’s career any. A few months later, Major Reilly was promoted to Colonel Reilly, and eventually assigned a base command back in the States. This turned out to be one of the new high-tech installations built to house a partner organization for Fort Huachuca. The fort and the partner organization, coming up just ahead, were north of the Mexican border off SR 90, outside of Huachuca City, Arizona. Colonel Reilly’s command was responsible for information management, DISA, in conjunction with JITC, mainly interoperability C4I support, operational field assessments, and technical assistance to various combat commands and assorted related agencies.
A buncha desk commandos, Carruth knew. Spin-controllers.
But: Behind his desk on the wall, mounted in an oak shadowbox, Colonel Reilly kept a souvenir from his one active afternoon in the field—Abu Hassan’s pistol.
All of this was public record, and Carruth had read about it, seen it on television, and heard stories about it when he’d still been in the Navy. Be in the right place at the right time, and even a pencil-neck could be some kind of accidental hero.
There was still some residual shame amongst terrorists that the deadly Abu Hassan had been taken down by someone who was less than a glorious warrior. It was one thing to be Goliath slain by a sneaky and treacherous David fielding superior weaponry; it was something else entirely to be potted by David’s dweeby little four-eyed Starbucks-coffee-drinking brother.
Despite the recent attacks, all you needed to get onto this particular base was a driver’s license, proof of car registration and insurance, and a copy of your orders or TDY. Carruth knew a printer who could make money that would pass, so ID was nothing.
Carruth flashed his phony orders and ID, drove onto the base, made his way to the adjunct run by Reilly, flashed more phony orders there, and during lunchtime, just strolled down the hall as if he owned it to the colonel’s office.
There was a keypad lock on the door, which was not much—he could have booted it open, but that would have set off an alarm. Since he had the code for the lock, which was supposed to be changed weekly, but which was changed maybe twice a year, Carruth just tapped in the combination and walked in.
Security. What a joke.
He took the shadowbox down, opened it, put the gun in his pocket, and replaced the stolen one with a BB-gun copy of a PPK he’d fitted with fake ivory grips. It wouldn’t pass inspection up close, but if you just glanced at it, you mi
ght not notice immediately. That could be fun, the next time the colonel showed it off:
Abu Hassan was carrying a BB pistol when you shot him? What was his AK-47, a water gun . . . ?
Carruth had to hand it to Lewis, this was brilliant. This particular trophy would be worth its weight in gold to a hard-core fanatic—it was practically a holy relic. . . .
Carruth smiled as he left the office, the building, got into his car, and drove away. How easy was that?
It was criminal, that’s what it was. Fucking Army.
But the terrorist wannabe Lewis had on the line didn’t have to know how simple and easy it had been, now did he?
Just in case nobody noticed the substitution until after he was long gone, Carruth would make an anonymous call, once Lewis had things set up. Not to Colonel Reilly, who might be disposed to keep the theft to himself, but to the news media. Lewis’s buyer would pick up on that quick enough. And he’d fall all over himself to give Lewis money once he saw the Walther. . . .
Things were going along pretty good so far.
Churchill, Virginia
Kent pushed back a little from the table. “Best pasta I’ve ever had,” he said, smiling.
Nadine Howard returned the smile. “Uh huh, I’m sure.”
“Well, okay, best pasta I’ve had all week, then.”
“Better,” she said.
John Howard said, “I’ve got a couple of Cuban cigars left.” He looked at his wife. “Leave the dishes, hon, I’ll get them before I go to bed.”
“Go smoke your noxious weed,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”
Kent had given up cigarettes thirty-five years ago, and never gotten much into other forms of tobacco, but Cuban cigars two or three times a year probably weren’t going to kill him if they hadn’t yet. Plus he was living on borrowed time anyhow.
“Don’t light them until you get into the garage,” Nadine said. “I’m not having my new house stunk up by those nasty things.”
Howard and Kent both smiled.