Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (26 page)
“And butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, either. Give.”
“Claire here is a test model, from CamCanada, up in Toronto. They specialize in making devices to inspect the inside of big pipelines, checking weld integrity, hunting for cracks, like that, but they are looking to get into the police and military market. This is one of three prototypes they sent off for tests. The Mounties have one, one went to some sultan somewhere in the Middle East, and we have the third. We test it out under field conditions, write up a report, and for our trouble, we get one of the first models when they go into full production, absolutely free of charge. Well. Except for the maintenance contract, of course. But that’s nothing.”
“Interesting.”
Julio picked up a remote and pushed a button. The little robot whirred.
“It does all the usual forward, back, left, and right stuff, and the POV cam shows an image right here on the handheld. Digital images and sound, and instant capture of info on its own wireless modem and DVD burner, which are around here somewhere. Those can be plugged into just about any computer for study and analysis.”
He held the remote so Howard could see it. “Everything is shockproofed out the wazoo, structural components are machined from titanium or aircraft aluminum, and you can supposedly set off a stick of dynamite ten feet away without hurting it. Got a gyroscope for balance, low center of gravity, and she’s very stable.”
He brought the robot close enough to them so he could kick it. His combat boot drove it back a few feet, but it whirred and stayed upright. He touched a control. “This shuts off the gyroscope. Watch.”
He moved to the little device, which was slightly shorter than knee-high, and managed, with some effort, to shove it over onto its side with his foot.
The robot whined, and a rubber-tipped metal rod extruded from the robot’s side and shoved it back upright.
“Automatic righting system,” he said. “She can pick herself right up and keep on going. A byproduct of BattleBot technology, I’m told.”
He picked up another remote and pushed a button. The windowless warehouse got very dark.
Howard saw the remote control’s screen light up, and the false-color IR images of himself and Julio, looking like two washed-out ghosts, appeared on the screen.
“Lieutenant, I believe you just turned me into a Caucasian.”
Julio chuckled. The false-color computer-augmented image tinted Howard’s skin slightly darker, but no more than a redhead’s tan might be.
“Only with the lights off, sir.”
He switched the lights back on. “But wait, here’s the really fun thing,” he said. He touched another button, and the robot hissed like a giant lizard, leaped two feet into the air, flew about four feet forward, and came down. It clunked when it landed, but not hard enough to knock anything loose.
Howard raised an eyebrow.
“Compressed gas jets. The tank isn’t that big, so it’s only good for eight or ten hops before it runs out, but if Claire here comes to a ditch that would take too long to go around, she can make like a bunny and leap right over it.”
Howard smiled. “Might make recon of a building full of armed terrorists easier, at that. What are they going to run when they go into production? Any idea?”
“Ballpark only. They’re saying a hundred thousand, Canadian.”
“Lord, Lieutenant. For that much, we can buy an armor-plated car.”
“Yes, but it can’t do this.”
The little robot hissed and jumped again.
“And it’s free.”
“What’s the service contract run?”
“Practically nothing. Three years, maybe thirty thou, U.S.”
“For thirty thousand American or so, I can find a lot of enlisted men who would spit and jump up, even if they can’t see in the dark.”
Julio shook his head. “Have I ever mentioned that the general is somewhat old-fashioned?”
“Never know when my buggy whip is going to come in handy, Lieutenant. It does the job it was designed to do and never needs batteries.”
“Come on, John, give it a try. You know you want to.” He passed the controls to Howard.
Well, yes, he did. It was just like playing with Tyrone’s new toy on Christmas morning when the boy was nine. As his mother was fond of saying, If you couldn’t have fun, what was the point?
Howard pushed the button, and grinned as the robot jumped again.
22
Washington, D.C.
Santos waited until the senator came out of the supermarket on his way home before he made his move. One of the most powerful men in this country, one of only a hundred altogether, and he not only didn’t have a bodyguard, he drove a small car and did his own grocery shopping. Amazing. In Rio, a man in this senator’s position would be guarded, chauffeured everywhere in an armored limo, and would not have the slightest idea what a carton of milk or a loaf of bread cost, unless somebody happened to tell him. What was the point of having power if you did not exercise it?
Santos had already driven the route the man would take to get to his townhouse. He had a woman there—not his wife, who was back home in West Virginia with their two teenaged children until the school year was done. Santos had seen the mistress himself when he had driven by earlier. The information about the wife and children was public knowledge, available to anybody who cared to look for it. Another amazing thing. Back home, men of wealth and influence knew that knowledge was power, and they kept it to themselves. Why would you give a potential enemy anything he might use against you? Foolish.
The senator from West Virginia swung his car out onto the street and headed home, driving in the right lane. Santos followed him, two cars back on the four-lane road. Three blocks later, Santos swung into the left-hand lane and passed the senator. He sped up slightly, just a few miles an hour over the limit, not enough to trigger photo radar or the interest of a traffic cop. He gained a block on the senator’s car, pulling into his home street forty-five seconds ahead of the honorable Wayne DeWitt. He gunned the car’s engine, sped a hundred feet down the street, and hung a skidding one-eighty turn. He stopped the car, his steel-toed workboot resting on the brake, but still in gear. He lifted a motorcycle crash helmet from the seat next to him and slipped it on, pulled the straps tight. The helmet had a face-shield of heavy clear plastic. He flipped the visor down into place. He already wore the heavy leather and rubber grappling gloves used by NHB ring fighters for matches, with the wrist wraps cinched tight. You could use your hands, but there was a lot of padding on the outside. He put a boil-and-bite mouthpiece into his mouth and slipped it over his upper teeth. Guaranteed for the first seventy-five hundred dollars of dental work if you hurt your teeth while wearing it, nine dollars at K-mart. A great deal. He wore a boxer’s cup in a jock-strap over his leather pants, and a weightlifter’s thick and wide belt covering his waist and his lower back under his leather jacket. Without special springs and belts, he was as protected as he could be in this car.
When the senator’s car rounded the corner, Santos mashed the accelerator pedal.
One thing you had to give big gas-guzzling American V-8s—they had power to spare. He left tire rubber smoking on the asphalt as he took off.
He was doing almost fifty when he switched lanes and slammed into the senator’s compact car.
It was at a slight angle—he wanted to be able to drive his car away, if possible, and there was too much chance of rupturing the radiator in a head-on, even against a smaller car.
There was a hard
thump
! and crash, and a sense of time slowing down, almost of drifting through space. Even though he was braced and ready, the seat belt tight, he still went forward into the air bag as it deployed. The face shield and gloves saved him from a flattened nose and brush burns on his arms as he hit the bag, which immediately collapsed. Striking an air bag in an accident was not, as some people seemed to think, like being hit in the face with a soft feather pillow. It was more like being punched by a gloved boxer, hard.
thump
! and crash, and a sense of time slowing down, almost of drifting through space. Even though he was braced and ready, the seat belt tight, he still went forward into the air bag as it deployed. The face shield and gloves saved him from a flattened nose and brush burns on his arms as he hit the bag, which immediately collapsed. Striking an air bag in an accident was not, as some people seemed to think, like being hit in the face with a soft feather pillow. It was more like being punched by a gloved boxer, hard.
The big car’s windshield didn’t shatter, that was good, but something shiny flew up from the impact and hit on the passenger side hard enough to crack the safety glass.
He saw the senator’s car spinning, saw the man’s head hit his side window, blasting the tempered glass into squarish little bits that burst outward in a glittering fan of shrapnel. The air bag in the senator’s car had gone off, but the deliberately angled impact had caused the senator to hit the bag well to the side, so the safety device didn’t do as much good as it would have—another reason to avoid the full frontal smash.
Once past, Santos stood on the brake, and his car, already slowed by the crash, skidded to a noisy stop. He looked back in time to see the senator’s car pinwheel into a fiberglass light pole that snapped off at the base and came down on top of the auto just as the car plowed into a row of bushes, wiped them out, and smashed the right rear panel into a thick oak tree. The tree shook violently, but held.
Santos put the car into reverse and backed up. Seemed to be driving okay, nothing scraping against the wheel, that was good.
He came abreast of the senator’s car. No way they were going to repair that, the whole front end was shifted to one side, the frame bent and badly distorted. Steam came from the ruptured cooling system.
The senator’s head lolled through his shattered side window. Blood welled from his head and dripped onto the ground, and from the angle of his neck, Santos thought it might be broken. Certainly it was wrenched enough to damage muscles. The front of the car was collapsed enough so that the man’s legs were probably pinned, maybe they were broken, too.
Good enough. Maybe he would die, maybe not, but he wasn’t going to be playing golf any time soon, if he survived. And he would not be a thorn in CyberNation’s side for a while, either.
Santos put the car into forward gear, and drove away. People were coming out of their townhouses to see what had happened. He kept his head down, knowing he was disguised by the helmet and face shield.
Once he was around the corner, he pulled the helmet and gloves off and spat the mouthpiece into his hand. He unbuckled the lifting belt, pulling it from under his jacket. He used a small pocket knife to cut the elastic on the jock and cup. With one hand he stuffed all the protective gear into a big shopping bag from Trader Joe’s.
Three miles away he came to a major bus stop. There was a movie theater across the street. He parked the car in a movie lot, damaged front end toward the building, got out, and dumped the bag in the nearest trash bin. Anybody who found the bag would probably not be the kind of person who’d run straight to the police, and even if they were, what was illegal about gloves, a helmet, and a lifting belt? By the time anybody found the hit-and-run vehicle, he would be long gone.
He walked to the bus stop. Smiled at an old black lady who saw him coming. She smiled back.
A good night’s work, this. Made a man proud.
Mount Fuji, Japan July 2012
Jay Gridley sat on a bench provided for pilgrims and watched the sunset. Fuji-yama was a walk-up, lots of people climbed it every day. It was a volcanic peak, a strato-volcano shaped like a squat cone, but more than twelve thousand feet high, in Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, near Honshu. The sacred mountain was the highest in Japan. It hadn’t had a major eruption since the early 1700s, but it vented steam and smoke now and again. Gave folks a bit of a thrill, maybe, to know it could possibly wake up and blow the climbers into the next world, however unlikely that was.
Most of the pilgrims started their ascent at the Fifth Station, about seventy-five hundred feet up, from where it took six or eight hours to make it to the top. The official climbing season ran from July to the end of August. Climbers on the north side used the Yoshidaguchi trail, which ran from Fujiyoshida City to the summit. The Fuji Subaru Line toll road met the trail at the Fifth Station, halfway up the mountain.
It was crowded—Fuji-yama was always crowded, sometimes hundreds of people walking in a long serpentine line, only a few inches apart, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves. It wasn’t Mount Everest. More than a hundred thousand people a year climbed the sacred mountain. Now and again, one would die making the ascent, usually from a heart attack, but sometimes from heat exhaustion or dehydration. It was cool, maybe ten degrees above freezing at the top today, but a steady climb produced a lot of heat, and the heavy jackets tended to come off pretty quick.
The old saying in Japan was you were a fool not to climb the mountain once, and a bigger fool if you climbed it twice.
Jay watched the pilgrims slog past, many with walking sticks—canes, staves—backpacks holding small children, even a seeing-eye dog leading a blind man. Old, young, fit, flabby, tourists, seekers, dressed in every color of the rainbow and a lot of hues not found anywhere in nature.
It was not a totally safe climb, however, even for those in good shape. Falling rocks injured or killed people, if rarely. Those who wandered off the trail had sometimes fallen. And now and again, a tourist would be hit by lightning, sometimes out of the blue. Jay carried a small transistor radio Velcroed to his backpack, tuned to a time sig from somewhere. Supposedly, if the radio started blasting out a lot of static, it was a good idea to hit the ground and lie flat.
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