Net Force (14 page)

    “This is true.”

    “If we are to run the table, we must consider our next position with each play.”

    The Ukrainian bowed slightly, a military gesture done mostly with the head.

    “As usual, Vladimir, you are correct.” He glanced at his watch. “I must get back.”

    Plekhanov held up one hand, gesturing toward the trail. “Please. Good to see you again.”

    “I’ll call later.”

    “It is not necessary, but thank you.”

    After the Ukrainian had gone, Plekhanov watched the ants for a short time. He inspected his pocket watch. He had time before he needed to get back. Perhaps a quick walk on that side trail he had been meaning to explore? Yes. Why not? Things were unfolding more smoothly than even in his best-case scenarios. Indeed they were.

    

    
Monday, September 20th, 7 a.m. Quantico

    Alexander Michaels sat in the stern of the houseboat, watching a brown pelican dive for fish. Pelicans were saltwater birds, he believed, but he liked their look and so had included them in his scenario. He was on a southern Louisiana river, a large bayou, actually, and the brown water flowed sluggishly toward the distant and unseen Gulf of Mexico. A small, flat-bottomed green-anodized aluminum bateau approached from a side channel, the harsh drone of its outboard motor enough to shoo the diving pelican away. Michaels stood, walked to the railing, leaned against it, and watched the boat come.

    Jay Gridley sat in the rear of the flat-nosed bateau, one hand on the motor’s control arm. He throttled the motor down so that it popped and burbled, swung the little boat sideways as it drew near and allowed it to drift to a gentle stop against the houseboat’s stern. Metal thunked against fiberglass. Gridley threw a nylon rope up to Michaels, who caught the rope and wrapped the end around a brass cleat under the rail. Gridley stepped to the short ladder and clambered up onto the houseboat.

    “Permission to come aboard, Cap’n?”

    Michaels shook his head in mild amusement. “Granted.”

    Once he was on the craft, the younger man looked around. “Funny, I’d have thought you’d be in the Prowler.”

    Michaels shrugged. “It would spoil the RW version for me if I did that. Car’ll never run as good there as it would here.”

    “That’s true. Well, it’s not a bad scenario. Commercial software?”

    “Yes.” Michaels felt a little uncomfortable saying that, but the truth was, while he could have written his own program-he was, after all, a computer-literate operative-he had never been that absorbed in VR per se. True, it was more interesting sitting on the deck of a big houseboat, drifting past cypress trees hung thick with Spanish moss, than tapping commands into a keyboard. But it was not his thing, despite his position in Net Force. Probably people would have thought it odd, his take-it-or-leave-it attitude about VR, but Michaels liked to think it was kind of like a carpenter’s attitude toward his tools-you didn’t
love
your hammer or saw, you used them to do your job. When he wasn’t working, Michaels didn’t spend much time on the net.

    He waved at a deck chair. “Have a seat.”

    “Thanks.”

    After Jay sat, the younger man said, “We’ve come up against a bunch of dead ends so far. The sabotage links bounce off in all directions, and that’s real interesting.”

    “Go on.”

    “Well, what that means is that the rascals came from more than one locus, like we figured, so the actual piece is played by an orchestra and not a solo artist. Thing is, while we have multiple loci for the initiators, all of the firewalls are the same.”

    Michaels knew enough about systems to know what that meant. “So we’re talking about one programmer or team, and a wide distribution of software.”

    “Yep.” Jay looked up as they passed by a huge live oak whose branches hung low over the shore of the bayou. A fat reddish-brown king snake sunned itself on a big limb. “Or, given the setting you have here, maybe ‘sho’nuf, y’all’ is more appropriate?”

    Michaels smiled. “You recognize the programmer’s style?”

    “No. The firewalls are off-the-shelf Netsoft bullet-proof; anybody could install ‘em. But the trails
leading
to the walls? They’re all different, but they’re different in similar ways. They have a… rhythm. We’re talking about a single conductor directing the orchestra, I’d bet my paycheck on it.”

    “Not a major surprise,” Michaels said.

    A small town appeared on both sides of the bayou. A drawbridge linking the halves of the split town loomed ahead of the drifting boat. Downriver, a pair of weathered shrimp boats churned against the slow current toward the bridge. A warning horn blasted from the drawbridge as the center span clamshelled up. Traffic stopped on both sides of the interrupted road, parked behind red-and-white-striped barriers.

    Michaels stood and walked to the pilot’s chair inside, on the port side of the houseboat. He cranked the engines, waved at the bridge tender, throttled up and hurried the boat toward the opposite side of the bayou from the boats coming upriver.

    Behind him, Jay said, “Build the bridges kinda low in this scenario, don’t they?”

    “He’s not raising it for us. It’s for the shrimp boats,” Michaels said.

    In reality, the passage was a rerouting of a multigigabyte information flow from one node to another server, a switching operation necessary when large amounts of data needed to move in bulk without interruption. The drawbridge was as good an image as any.

    Once they were clear of the bridge and fishing craft, Michaels steered the houseboat toward the center of the bayou, then cut the engines and let it drift. He moved back to the stern. Normally, he’d be paying more attention to the channel around him, but he’d chosen this scenario in part because it didn’t require his full attention on the straight and wide sections of the waterway.

    Gridley said, “We’re running the signature and looking for matches, but there are hundreds of thousands of professional programmers out there.”

    “Assuming he even is a professional and not some gifted amateur,” Michaels said.

    Gridley shook his head. “Guy’s gotta be a player. Rascals are too clean to be some kid or duffer.”

    Michaels nodded. “All right. Keep looking. Anything else I should know?”

    “Not really. We’ve got rovers everywhere, looking for more trouble. You know Tyrone Howard?”

    “The colonel’s son?”

    “Yeah. I talked to him netmail. He’s checking with his friends. They spend a lot of time on the air, they might notice something. He and his buddies are even checking out CyberNation.”

    “CyberNation?”

    “A new VR abode. Supposed to be a whole country online.”

    “Interesting. Is this something we need to worry about?”

    “Someday, maybe, but I don’t think it has anything to do with our current problems. CyberNation didn’t erase the Commander, and I don’t think it’s them doing rascals on the net.”

    “So about our problem…?”

    “Well. If this guy uses the same setup he’s been using, we should be on him like ketchup on fries pretty quick.”

    “But you don’t think he’ll use the same setup?”

    “Nah.
I
wouldn’t-and this guy is almost as good as I am.”

    Michaels laughed.

    “Hey, it’s hard to be humble when you’re great,” Gridley said. He looked at his watch. “Oops. Better shove off. I have a VR staff meeting in half an hour. Probably take me twice that long to get there using this thing.” He waved at the green bateau, then pointed at the bayou with a side-ways nod. “Fortunately, I cleverly left my car just around that next bend.”

    Michaels cast off the rope as Gridley climbed down into the bateau and started the outboard motor.

    “Bye-bye, you-all!” Gridley yelled.

    Alex watched the young computer genius head toward the nearer shore. A red Viper convertible was parked at a small dock. As Michaels continued to watch, Gridley pulled the boat to the dock and tied it to a piling. He climbed out of the craft, turned and waved at the houseboat, then headed for the car.

    

    
Tuesday, September 21st, 11:50 a.m. Kiev

    The terrorists’ meeting was supposed to begin at 1130 hours, but Howard had allowed twenty minutes more for late arrivals. That extra allotment of time was now up. There were eighteen men and three women inside the warehouse, and while none of them had openly carried weapons, several had worn long coats, and at least three had arrived bearing what appeared to be cased musical instruments-a cello, a double bass and some kind of large-belled horn, probably a tuba, to judge from the shapes.

    Howard would be very surprised if those cases contained anything a musician would use onstage. More likely, inside the cases would be pistols, assault rifles and a rocket launcher, maybe even a few grenades or other explosives. Since this was the staging area for the attack on the embassy, there was a distinct possibility there were other armaments already hidden inside when the terrorists arrived.

    The terrorists were in an office on the second floor of a small, and apparently otherwise unoccupied, two-story warehouse. No one was on the ground level, save for a guard at the building’s south entrance. Howard’s recon team, led by Fernandez, had done a quick scout when they’d arrived, and discovered that same guard just inside the big metal roll-up door on the south side of the building. While the stealthiest of the recon team could have easily slipped into the warehouse at another entrance and installed surveillance gear in the building itself, Howard chose not to risk it. Maybe these yahoos had set up some alarms of their own, and he didn’t want to be tripping one of those and scaring them off.

    Instead, he’d had his teams put cams, motion sensors and parabolics outside the building, along with digital radio and IR scanners. Each of the arrivees was photographed as they entered the warehouse, and vidcaps should clear enough to ID anyone who somehow escaped.

    Not that escape was going to be real likely.

    It was tempting to have his troops kick in the upstairs door, toss a few flashbang grenades inside, and then blast anybody not blind and bleeding from the ears stupid enough to go for a gun, but-no. Instead, he had his troops deployed around the warehouse, watching all possible modes of egress. He would prefer not to do any shooting outside; however, he was prepared for such an eventuality.

    There was still just the one guard watching the only unlocked entrance to the building.

    “Sarge.”

    “Sir.”

    “Do you suppose somebody in this unit of tripfoots might manage to take out the guard without raising the dead?” This was a rhetorical question. Howard already knew who had the assignment.

    “Why, yes, sir, I believe that might be possible.”

    “Then make it so, Sergeant Fernandez.”

    “On my way, sir.”

    “You? You’re going? A moth-eaten, tired
old
man like you?”

    The two men grinned at each other.

    Howard watched from his vantage point in the building across the alley from the south entrance as Fernandez approached the closed roll-up door. Fernandez did not wear any obvious weaponry, just dark and greasy coveralls and a battered yellow hardhat, and he carried an old metal lunch pail he must have scrounged from somewhere.

    The parabolics picked up the sound of Fernandez whistling something as he arrived at the door. Sounded like something from
Swan Lake
. Nice touch, that.

    Fernandez banged on the door with his free hand.

    After a moment, he hammered on the door again. The door accordioned up about six feet. The guard, unarmed, stepped into view and rattled off something Howard didn’t understand, but in a questioning and somewhat irritated tone of voice.

    Fernandez said something in return, and it had a familiar ring to it.

    Howard grinned. If he wasn’t mistaken, Fernandez had just asked the guard where the men’s room was. Before the man could respond, Fernandez said something else, and pointed behind the guard. The man turned to look, puzzled.

    A tactical error on the guard’s part.

    Fernandez swung the lunch pail and slammed it into the guard’s right temple. The man dropped as if his legs had suddenly vanished. Fernandez put the lunch pail down, grabbed the obviously unconscious man, and dragged him into the warehouse. After a moment, the sarge reappeared, and waved: Come on in.

    “A and B teams, go!” Howard said into the LOSIR tactical com unit he wore. He grabbed his H&K assault rifle and sprinted for the door.

    

    
Tuesday, September 21st, 11:53 a.m. Kiev

    From the time Julio Fernandez knocked the guard cold until the two assault teams were in place inside the warehouse had taken slightly less than forty-five seconds. Not a glitch.

    Now, they waited.

    There was an elevator, but the circuit breaker working the lift had been tripped; it wasn’t going to move. The only way down from the second floor consisted of two sets of stairs. The exit door on one set of those stairs was padlocked from the outside-wouldn’t
that
be lovely during a fire? Howard left two men watching that door anyhow, along with men outside watching the windows. Nobody was sneaking out of here.

    The other set of stairs was wide and straight, the door unlocked. This was how they’d gone up, and this was how they would come down.

    Howard deployed his men so they weren’t visible from the base of the stairs. Everybody was to stay hidden until he gave the word.

    Howard himself would have put on the unconscious guard’s coveralls to stand by the front entrance-until the sarge reminded him it wouldn’t be enough of a disguise-not unless these guys were
really
color-blind.