The Archimedes Effect (2 page)

Fort Stephens, a high-tech installation and the newest jewel in the Army’s crown, wasn’t fully manned yet, but there was a working infirmary since the place was at least half-staffed with a couple thousand boots-on-the-ground. Not to mention asses-in-chairs . . .

Stevens thumbed the lock’s reader on his console. The reader matched his thumbprint to the one in the computer’s files, and the heavy electric steel door slid open noiselessly on its Delrin track.

The wind hit Stevens with an icy, take-your-breath-away slap as the door slid shut behind him. Damn! The antiram bumpers, squat chunks of rebarred concrete as big around as bridge supports, would stop a tank, but they didn’t offer any protection at all against the freezing breeze.

He went around the bumpers and toward the car.

As he got closer, he could see that the injured man had a star on each of his shoulders. Crap, it
was
a general.

“Don’t you die on my watch,” Stevens whispered under his breath.

He pulled the passenger door open. “Sir—?”

He found himself looking into the bore of a very large handgun. Muzzle big enough to stick your finger into it.

What the hell was this?

“Stay cool, Sarge,” the “general” said.

If these scumbags thought they were going to be breaking into the base by
his
gate, they were mistaken.

“You can’t open the door or the gate from out here,” he said to the “general.” “Especially on a ‘Code Alpha’ like this.”

He smiled. The outside of that armor-plated steel door didn’t have a knob; it was as smooth as a baby’s butt. The windows in the kiosk, including the door’s, were armor-tempered optical-grade Lexan, six centimeters thick, and nobody was shooting holes through
that
with small arms, not even the big honkin’ revolver this guy had pointed at him. Those windows would stop an elephant gun. You could plink at it with a .50 BMF and it would eat the slugs without shattering—for a while, at least.

The seven-ton steel gate and double-brace bars of more than two tons each would halt an eighteen-wheeler rolling at speed to a dead stop in its retreads.

Plus, Stevens was wearing a LOSIR ear-button with a mike pinned to the inside of his shirt collar, and unless Billings had gone completely deaf and stupid back in the kiosk, he’d hear this conversation and that “Code Alpha” and realize something was wrong.

As soon as he did, plus about forty-five seconds, a couple Hummers full of MPs armed to the teeth were gonna come roaring toward the gate, at which point Sergeant Theodore M. Stevens was gonna hit the dirt flat on his face so as not to get shot when the MPs lit up this car and these two losers. Code Alpha meant come shooting. Gonna be a most active war zone around here, and somebody was gonna get hurt.

The man smiled like he could read Stevens’s mind. “Have a look at your PFC in the kiosk, Sarge.”

Stevens frowned. He glanced back at the guard shack.

Billings was thumping the edge of his right hand—the one holding his side arm—into the comlink handheld with which he was supposed to be calling for Medical and MPs.

“I do believe your phone is, um . . . out of order,” the fake general said.

As Stevens watched, the man who had leaped out of the car took a couple quick steps to the kiosk door, and pulled the pin on some kind of grenade. He had what looked like a TV remote in his other hand, and he thumbed it.

What was he gonna do with that? It wouldn’t dent the kiosk wall, and it might scratch and fog the Lexan, but that was all it was gonna—

The kiosk door slid open a hand span and stopped. Billings dropped the comlink and swung his pistol up, but the driver shoved the grenade through the gap and moved to the side before Billings could fire.

The door slid shut again.

What the hell—?!

Billings saw the grenade, and he tried to get out through the other door—

There was a muffled
whump!
and the kiosk filled with green smoke.

Without thinking, Stevens reached for his side arm.

“Belay that, Sarge! It’s just puke gas. You behave, you’ll be telling the story to your buddies over beer tonight. But move crooked, and you bleed out right here and now. They don’t pay you enough, you know.”

Stevens nodded. “Yeah. I hear you.” He moved his hand away from his gun’s butt.

Twenty seconds later, the kiosk door opened. The night wind cleaned out the vestiges of the greenish smoke to reveal Billings on his knees, heaving his guts out, the partially digested remains of his most recent meal splashed all over the floor in front of him. Stevens hated emetic gas. It was worse than pepper spray, though not as bad as DG—diarrhea gas. Put that together with PG, the dreaded P-G-D-G double-ended spew combo? Oh, that was messy, messy. . . .

The driver ran into the kiosk, and used a cuff-strap and manacle on the still-vomiting Billings.

“Turn around, put your hands behind you.”

Stevens did as he was told. He felt the cool touch of a plastic wrist-cuff wrap around his wrists. He thought about lunging backward and trying to knock the guy silly, a head butt to the nose, but even as the thought crossed his mind, a second car skidded to a stop to his right, and five guys piled out, hooded and goggled and dressed in black, armed with submachine guns.

His mama didn’t raise any foolish children. Sergeant Theodore M. Stevens lost the idea of further resistance in a big hurry. These guys knew what they were doing.
He
wasn’t going to do anything stupid, no, sir. The Army didn’t pay him enough to die for nothin’, for sure.

The massive gate swung open.

How could they do that? The gate, like the kiosk door, was keyed to thumbprints—this watch, his, Billings’s, and those of the OOD back in the MP HQ, plus their relief. Nobody else was supposed to be able to open this kiosk or gate if they weren’t in the system.

Somebody’s head was gonna roll for this, for damn sure.

He sure hoped it wouldn’t be his. . . .

Four-Star Army General Patrick Lee Hadden—should have had five stars, but the continuing War on Terror wasn’t an officially declared conflict. There hadn’t been one of those for a long time, not since WWII.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a most unhappy man. He said, “Okay, you’ve seen recordings we did with the MP sergeant and his PFC, and other personnel inside Fort Stephens. You’ve seen the reconstruction as put together by our computer people. What you did not see were the actual recordings from the gate camera, or any other security cameras on the base, because the attackers shut those off just as easily as they did everything else, including opening the gates and getting into the base.”

Net Force Commander Thomas Thorn nodded. “Yes, sir. And you want to know how they did it.” They were alone in Thorn’s office, which was pretty amazing—Hadden could have called the meeting in his office. There was no way Thorn could have turned down that invitation.

“No, I don’t give a rat’s ass how they did it. What I want to know is
who
they are and
where they live
. If the way to get that information is to figure out how they did it, fine, if that’s what it takes. Those men got into my shiny new high-tech Army base and did damage to it. Not much, but
any
is too much. I want them, I want their heads on a platter and their bodies roasting over a slow fire, and I want it
yesterday.
”

Thorn didn’t smile. When the Chairman of the JCOS said something like this, he might be joking. Then again, he might not be. And since Thorn and all of Net Force had left civilian control, shifted from being a branch of the FBI to the military, General Hadden was their master. Thorn didn’t like it, but he had to either live with it or leave, and he wasn’t ready to walk out just yet.

“The Army’s computer people tell me what happened, and even how it happened, in theory, but that’s not what I need. I want these bastards tracked down.”

“You’ve got some pretty good people in the Army.”

“That’s right, we do. But your people are better—and
you
are in my Army now. What you did to break up that Chinese thing? That was outstanding work. I need you to get me these people, General.”

General
. The man forgot who he was talking to. Thorn was a civilian, and a “Commander,” but no way a general.

Hadden must have seen it on his face. Not that it would have taken a particularly perceptive man to see that. Thorn’s surprise—and his anger—were undoubtedly very apparent. “It’s a new technicality,” Hadden said. “You’re heading up a military outfit now, son. And besides, we’ve promoted Abe Kent to general and he reports to you. You need a commission and a rank higher than his, so no more ‘Commander.’ You are now ‘General Thorn.’ Two stars to Abe’s one.”

Still stunned, Thorn said, “You can’t do that! You can’t
draft
me!”

“Son, if I want, I can get a million GIs, swabbies, jarheads, flyboys, and National Guardsmen to stand on their heads and whistle ‘Dixie’ in four-part harmony. The President will have to sign off on it, of course, but the new Terrorist Powers Act gives me all kinds of leeway. I’ll have the paperwork put through—it’s a done deal.”

Thorn blinked. Whoa. This was getting really strange. But, as he thought about it, it did make a certain twisted sense—from their point of view, anyway.

“Can you do this job, Thorn?”

“General” Thorn gave him a little half smile and nod. “If it can be done, yes, sir. I’ll have Jay Gridley contact the Army computer experts and pick it up.”

“Good.” Hadden stood. Thorn stood, too. “My aide will provide the information. Your man will go through you and General Ellis.”

He turned and marched out of the room, leaving Thorn standing there alone.

“
General
Thorn? Sweet Jesus.”

A thought hit him. Some of all this, now that they were no longer part of the FBI, was tolerable because he knew he could walk away if it ever got too bad. But now that he was in the military, could he still quit if he wanted to?

Damn.

Marissa was going to
love
this.

There were two guards inside the kiosk at the south entrance, and a third man outside.

Lying in the wet grass in his gillie-suit, Carruth watched the guards through powerful binoculars, the magnification such that he could see the faces of all three. They looked bored.

You’d think the Army would be on high alert after the hit in Oklahoma. But that was the Army—they weren’t the Navy. . . .

The ex-SEAL grinned.
Don’t worry boys, your lives are about to get interesting
.

He thumbed the LOSIR microphone to narrowcast a message to Hill. The light used to transmit wouldn’t be detected by a radio scanner, and it was a different spectrum than the Army guys used in their own LOSIR systems.

Patrick Hill was the gearhead, an über-geek who could build most of the electronics they carried from scratch, but who also could kill sixteen different ways with the soldering iron he’d use to do it.

“Any eyes?”

“No, Boss, clear canopy for the next twenty. No sonics, radios, or LEDs active. Passives either, as far as I can tell.”

Good. They were clear from satellite recon, and no active sensors were operating. Of course there weren’t supposed to be, according to the specs that the chief had given them, but a man like Carruth didn’t leave things to chance. Weren’t-supposed-to-be could get you killed quick.

“Give them the sig,” he said.

“Roger.”

Hill would signal the other two men on their team, and start the clock ticking.

Carruth slid forward on the wet grass, letting the cold soak into him, doing his best to become part of the landscape. Smooth movement, slow and steady was what won this race. Leaves and twigs pressed against him as he moved.

Damn, it was wet. He could use a mask and snorkel. . . .

Twenty-five meters. Twenty. As he slid forward, he could hear the sound of the ambulance as it rolled up to the gate.

The guards looked a little more animated. One of the men in the guardhouse stepped outside, exactly as Carruth had expected—and the scenario had predicted.

That left only one inside the shack.

Carruth crawled faster now. The slowly moving vehicle had captured the attention of the guards—they’d be looking southwest.

When Stark stopped the ambulance and started to talk to the guards, Dexter, his copilot, would shoot the guards, using an air gun firing special hypodermic darts. Once they hit, lightweight capacitors in the darts would release several thousand volts. Low-amperage, but it didn’t take much under the skin. Zap, the guards would go down, out and probably not dead, though that didn’t matter, and no big bang for anybody to overhear.

The ambulance slowed to a stop at the entrance.

“Howdy.” Stark’s voice, flat and nasal. “We’re here to pick up a Major Kendrick—seems he busted his hand up pretty bad, and the base doctors wanna send him out.”

The guard seemed to relax. It wasn’t uncommon for such transfers. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll just check with the OIC—he didn’t tell us you were coming.”

Two dull
whuuuuft!
sounds punctuated the guard’s words.

Carruth was at the guardhouse now, low, so he wouldn’t be seen. The ex-SEAL slid smoothly upward and saw the guard inside turning toward a monitor.

“Hey, Sarge?” Carruth said as he stepped into the room.

“Yeah?” The man started to turn.

Carruth darted him. “You lose, Sarge. Sorry.”

The guard fell heavily to the ground.

Carruth and Hill slid into the ambulance with Stark. Dexter had already taken his place in the guard’s hut. The gate slid open. Not as heavy as the one in Oklahoma, but stout enough so that ramming it would have been a waste of time.