25
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
“Boss?”
Thorn looked up and saw Jay in the doorway. “Jay. What can I do for you?”
“I just got an urgent priority report from Homeland Security and the FAA—probably a copy heading into your in-box right now. A helicopter blew up and fell out of the sky over in Nowhere, Virginia. Killed nine people.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“It gets better. The guys in the copter were hauling enough guns and ammo to start a small war. M-16s, AK- 47s, and hand grenades, at the least. HS has ID’d a few of them, and those were on the don’t-let-’em-in-the-country-and-shoot-’em-if-you-see-’em list.”
“Terrorists?”
“ ‘Suspected’ is what HS says officially. Off the record, though, they absolutely were terrorists of the worst kind. A couple are from Qatar, one from Iran. They traced the pilot. He was a Saudi, no IDs on the others yet. The bird was a rental.”
Thorn shook his head.
“Here’s where we come in—the FAA guys said the copter was brought down by a rocket, and that it came from an FGM-77 Dragon. They found some kind of wire and bits of the rocket that confirm it.”
“As in the same kind that was stolen in the raid in Kentucky.”
“Oh, yeah. As in exactly the same kind. Odd coincidence, huh?”
“I’m sure.” Thorn frowned. “So, why is whoever stole the launchers using them to shoot down armed terrorists?”
“Got me. Patriots, maybe. Or maybe they are bucking for jobs in Homeland Security?”
A chime on Thorn’s computer alerted him to an incoming priority message. Thorn waved his hand, and a security-encoded text appeared, repeating what Jay had just told him.
“How did you get this before I did?”
“Friends in low places.”
Thorn sighed. “You will see what you can find out about this, won’t you?”
“In my copious spare time, sure.”
“Thanks, Jay.”
“No problem, Boss.”
But after he was gone, Thorn sat there thinking about it. It was a problem. That the missile had been used against the bad guys was good, but they still had two left, and the next one could just as easily be shot in another direction. Or not. He wanted to run these thieves down and make sure they didn’t get another shot off in any direction. . . .
His assistant said, “General Hadden is on the phone.”
“Of course he is,” Thorn said. He shook his head and reached for the receiver.
002
Tex’s Truck Stop and Grill
Alexandria, Virginia
Lewis listened to the story without interrupting. At the end of it, she nodded. “Couldn’t be helped. Even if you’d known they had a chartered helicopter, you would have still had to take it out. Bringing the rocket launcher was smart.”
Somebody fed money into a jukebox by the pool tables. A country and western song started playing in the background. A twangy-voiced woman singing something about a lyin’, cheatin’ man.
Ain’t they all, honey?
Carruth nodded. “I’m guessing our boy was on it, and unless he melted down to butter during the fire, they’ll eventually get around to identifying him.”
“Already have,” Lewis said. “And he was killed in the fire. Good news for us. He doesn’t appear to have any more blood kin in the terrorist business, so maybe we are done with that.”
“Must be nice to have access to all that,” he said.
“It is. And to have them giving it to you because you are helping protect them from yourself? That’s even better.”
“You hate the Army, don’tcha?”
She blinked at him. “Why do you say that?”
“I’m maybe not the brightest bulb on the string, Captain, but I’m not completely stupid. I can hear. It comes out every time you talk about the service, there’s a nasty edge in your tone. Contempt.”
She didn’t speak to that. It wasn’t supposed to show, though. If Carruth here could see that—and he wasn’t exactly a candidate for Mr. Sensitive—then somebody else could. She would have to work on that. It wouldn’t do at all for people on the inside to be looking at her squinty-eyed. Certainly not Mr. Jay Gridley.
“So, now what?” he said.
“We’re back to one decent buyer. If he’s legit, we talk deal. If he pans out, we’re done. If not, we keep trolling the waters.”
“Think ole Benny is gonna want another token of our ability to deliver?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Whatever it takes. I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”
“Yes, ma’am. You do that.”
After she was gone, Carruth ordered a beer and listened to the jukebox. He liked country music, and a truck-stop bar was as good a place as any to have a beer. Truckers and cowboys, though most of the guys in Western gear here would be all hat and no cattle. There might be a few real ranchers who dropped by—they still had farms and ranches in this part of the world. Carruth had grown up in cattle country, at least partially, outside of Denver, and he had some good memories of that time. First girl, first woman, first beer, first bar fight, all as a teenager. One of the reasons he went into the Navy had to do with the last of those bar fights, in which a loudmouth a*shole had bought himself a week in the local hospital when he pissed Carruth off. The judge, an ex-Marine, thought that the service was a good place for boys who liked to mix it up, and Carruth agreed with him—given the other choice, which had been doing a few months working on a road crew out of the local jail.
So he joined the Navy, found he had a talent for warfare, and was accepted into SEAL training, where he did real good. He’d always been a swimmer, no fear of the water, and the physical stuff was challenging, but something he liked doing. He was big, strong, got the training, and nobody messed with him. There were a lot worse ways to get by in life.
He sipped at the bottle of beer. Of course, there came a time when he and the Navy found themselves at odds and he had more or less been told to leave under his own steam or be tossed out, but he had learned a trade, and he’d done okay since. This deal with Lewis would be his ticket to freedom. He could travel, live high, enjoy his life, work or not as he felt like. There was risk—but, hell, all life was risk. You could get caught in an earthquake, be hit head-on by a drunk driver, or have a heart attack—you never knew when your number was gonna be up, and Carruth figured that it was best to live life to the hilt before God tapped you out.
He finished his beer. At the pool table closest, a couple guys in baseball caps wrangled over something. Time was, he’d have moseyed over that way and looked to put himself in the middle of whatever was going on, and maybe got into kicking some ass. He couldn’t risk that now. There was too much riding on him staying out of trouble. Time to pack it up and go home. That mess with the Metro cops? That had sobered him. The big gun under his jacket was worth his neck just being on his hip—
A sudden thought ghosted through his head, and it went by so fast he almost couldn’t snag it. The gun, something about the gun . . .
Holy shit! The Army guy!
Carruth sat there stunned, unable to move, held in his chair by the realization. How could he have missed it? His brain was turning to Jell-O!
Well, yeah, okay, blowing up the Humvee full of soldiers a few minutes later had kind of taken over the memory of that night, the first guy he’d tapped had faded, but still. Stupid!
He dropped a ten on the table to pay for his beer, stood, and headed for his car. He had to hide the big revolver. The cops all talked to each other these days—feds, NCIC, everybody—and sooner or later, somebody was gonna notice that the ballistics on the BMF slug that nailed the Army guy in Kentucky matched those on the bullets that hammered the D.C. Metro cops. It might not happen soon, but it would eventually. Now he had three dead guys notched on the big honker, and a line between them. It wasn’t as if it had his name on it or anything, but Jesus, carrying it around really wasn’t smart. If he had to shoot somebody else, they would start triangulating in on him. They already had too much information; he ought not give ’em any more.
He didn’t have to destroy it. He could get down in the crawl space under his house, wrap the piece in a plastic bag, stick it under the moisture shield. Nobody would find it there by accident, and if they found it on purpose, he was screwed anyhow.
He should have done it as soon as he had capped the Metro cops, he knew that. He just hadn’t wanted to—he really liked the BMF, liked carrying it, liked how it made him feel. It was a man’s gun.
But if he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string, he also wasn’t the dimmest one, and he needed to get his act together. He had a SIG, an S&W, he could use one of those, and they were enough gun for soft targets like people. When it was all done and he had money coming out the wazoo, he’d buy another honker or two, and maybe move someplace where it was legal to carry, get a license, and never have to worry about it again. Yeah. That was the way to go.
He headed for his car. If he could get home without being pulled over by a state trooper, he’d be fine. And he was gonna drive real careful. . . .
Graham Land, the Weddell Sea
Antarctica
High over the ice, Jay Gridley considered the geekiness of programmers. He’d long known that while people in most professions tended to enjoy in-jokes, programmers in general tended to take it to the extreme.
Like this VR, for instance. It wasn’t his, but somebody had put a lot of thought into it. A lot of silly thought . . .
Down below, thousands of Adelie penguins waddled about, moving little chunks of ice from a huge white pyramid in the middle of their rookery. Adelie penguins were the ones most associated with the classic “tuxedo” look—black and white with the white ring around their eyes.
What Jay was really doing was looking at a huge records database at MIT. He’d come to see if he could check the data logs from the Troy game. Those records had naturally been stored and archived—put “on ice,” so to speak.
Ice tended by penguins. Geek joke one.
Men dressed as arctic explorers stood in a huge queue in front of several desks, each one manned by an identical green-garbed figure with black question marks stenciled onto his fur costume. The explorers were actually information requests—from a variety of sources—and the green figures were the processors that directed searches via penguin to the ice cathedral.
The guys behind the desks were out of the old Batman TV show.
The Riddlers and the Penguins. Joke two.
But flacking the metaphor even further was that each of the portly penguins much resembled “Tux,” the famous penguin mascot of the Linux operating system.
Said mascot had been named not due to its appearance, but due to the fact that a man named Linus Torvald had written the key kernel of the OS—itself based on another operating system called Unix. The name for the penguin had apparently come from Torvald Unix. Which were in-jokes three, or four, depending on how you looked at things.
And the final self-referencing gag in this scenario—at least the last one that Jay saw—was that the VR scenario was actually being run on a cluster of Linux-based systems.
It was a little over the top, but he understood it. If you can’t have fun, why bother?
In his current guise, Jay was a Skua gull, one of the natural predators of Adelie penguins, the eggs and young ones anyhow. He flapped his wings and soared slightly higher, watching the queue below.
He didn’t much care for nonhuman VR avatars, but this scenario required it. The security on the database was extensive. On the other hand, there were always weaknesses.
In this case, the programmer had wanted to keep the scenario realistic. It would have been more secure to restrict the VR avatars to just the penguins, riddlers, and requesters. But the programmer had been fixed on keeping the scenario more realistic, which meant a few Skua gulls flying overhead, leopard seals in the water, whales, the works.
Which had left Jay a way in.
So here we was, having dropped his request for information on the back of one of the explorers below—in the usual gull way. When said explorer reached the riddler desks, he’d include Jay’s request with his own.
My piggybacked request. If his gull avatar could have grinned, it would have. Instead he let out a craw.
Within the scenario the request wouldn’t be checked. But when the penguin brought the information back, it would be checked before being given back to the explorer.
So Jay had to grab it from the penguin before it got there.
He looked again. His explorer was at the request desk.
The man made the request, and Jay watched as the riddler handed a slip of colored paper to a nearby penguin attendant. The penguin walked away from the desk and toward the giant ice pyramid.
Jay glided along, letting out gull cries as seemed appropriate.
The penguin made its way to one of the pyramid entrances and disappeared inside. Now all Jay had to do was wait for the penguin to come back.
There were thousands of penguins here, and they all looked alike. How was he going to know when his came back out?
The request paper. The VR resolution was sharp enough that he could see the coded order number.
Penguins waddled back and forth, in and out of the pyramid, through the entrance, which was about halfway up. The steps up the side were incredibly shallow, made for the tiny strides the penguins took, which meant the pyramid was much wider than it was tall.
Jay took his time, soaring up and down the walkway, tracking each penguin that came out, dialing his vision in to check the order numbers.
There.
There was his tuxedoed bird.
Skua gulls were the natural predators of Adelie penguins, but they tended to only attack young or old and sickly ones—healthy adults were not usually on the menu.
So while the sight of a diving gull might not stand out in the scenario, seeing one dive on a full-grown healthy penguin would probably set off some kind of alarm.
Then again, once he had his data he could drop out of the scenario. He just had to get it and boogie.
Jay dove.
Some avian sense warned the little waddler. It tilted its head to the side and saw him coming. The penguin leaped over the edge of the walkway and belly-first onto the icy pyramid, using its stomach like a sled.
Jay tightened his wings and increased his speed.
Almost there . . .
The penguin shot up a short incline and then was airborne.
What?
Penguins couldn’t fly—!
And this one didn’t either—it coasted briefly before falling and splashing into the water below.
Damn!
Jay dove into the water, morphing from Skua gull to leopard seal as he hit.
If the penguin had seemed fast on land when it was sledding, it was like a rocket now, little wings flipping out, propelling it like some kind of formal-wear torpedo.
Jay focused on his seal body.
They swam around submerged pieces of ice, through silvery schools of fish, faster and faster.
Jay realized that he wasn’t going to catch it.
Well, hell. How did leopard seals get by without starving?
Wait a second—something he’d read about cautious penguins—how they didn’t want to jump into the water and risk being eaten. But . . .
Jay slowed and let the penguin swim on ahead.
Most successful attacks happened when the penguins were least cautious—coming back onto land.
Jay circled back, went up for a fresh breath, then sank and hid behind a chunk of iceberg. He waited with a predator’s patience.
Thinking he had outrun his attacker, Tux eventually made a big loop and headed back to shore. Jay spotted him a couple minutes later—fortunately, the paper was waterproof, the number still visible. It was his, all right.
Jay waited until the penguin was almost to the ice before he made his move.
Compared to the earlier chase, it was easy. He pounced and grabbled the little bird with his seal teeth.
Gotcha, Opus!
Unfortunately, after all that, catching Tux didn’t do him any good. The bird turned out to be hollow—a simulacrum. Not a real data carrier, but a fake. It took Jay all of two seconds to determine that it wasn’t a penguin at all—it was a mouthful of red herring.
Damn!
The guy who had built the Troy scenario was good. Too good. Why would he have done this? Unless he had known he was going to use the game for nefarious purposes that far in advance? That was a hell of a long-range plan. Who had that kind of patience? That kind of forethought? That he would leave false clues years in advance?
Jay shook his head.
Something was not right about this. What? And how to find it?