6
Alice’s Restaurant
University Park, Virginia
“You jivin’ me,” Jamal said.
Thorn smiled. “Nope. You get on the American team, I’ll cover your expenses to the World Games. Airfare, hotels, food, walking-around money.”
Jamal shook his head. “I appreciate it, but—why?”
“Two reasons, Jamal. One, I can afford it. Two, it’s not every day I get to sponsor a world-champion fencer.”
“I ain’t even got on the national team yet, Mr. Thorn, and you got me winnin’ the worlds?”
“Aim high, hit high,” Thorn said.
Jamal shook his head in wonder.
Thorn’s smile slipped into something more serious. “Look, Jamal,” he said. “Up until now, if you lost a big bout, you could just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what, I couldn’t have afforded to go anyhow.’ Now, you have to come up with another reason.”
Jamal looked at him for maybe five seconds without saying anything. “You a mind reader, too?”
“I grew up on a rez in Washington State, and we didn’t have any spare change lying around. ‘No money’ was my favorite excuse—until my grandfather went out and hustled enough from the tribe my senior year of high school to pay my way to the nationals.”
“You win?”
“Nope. Came in third in épée, fifth in foil, didn’t place in saber. Bronze wasn’t gold, but it might as well have been when I brought it home. No kid from our rez had ever won squat against a room full of white guys. That medal is still hanging in the trophy case outside the principal’s office.”
Jamal laughed. “They put a trophy case in my school, the whole thing would be gone the next morning, right down to the bolts holding it to the floor.”
“Yeah, yeah, your school is bad. You ever scalp a white man?”
Thorn kept his face deadpan, and for just a second, Jamal looked at him as if he was serious.
“Get out my face with that,” the young man said.
Thorn laughed. “Had you for just a second there, didn’t I?”
“No way.” But he grinned, too. “So, Mr. Thorn, what’s the deal with you and the fine sistah? You serious about getting married?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Salt and pepper. You gonna catch grief on both sides of the table.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Jamal. Fifty, a hundred years from now, it is gonna be like Julian Huxley said, we’ll all be tea-colored, and the world will be better off for it.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I don’t think the world is as far down that road as you do.”
Thorn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Marissa is worth any amount of grief anybody else has got to offer. Screw ’em if they don’t like it.”
Now Jamal’s grin got real big. “That’s what a man says about his woman. You all right, Mr. T.”
Thorn grinned back. He hoped so.
U.S. Army Recon School
Fort Palaka, Hana, Maui, Hawaii
The Army base at Hana was brand-new, small, specialized, and nobody local much liked it being there. Some kind of land swap with the government was the only reason it was. It wasn’t enough that the tourists filled the narrow road leading to Hana so you never could get anywhere. Now there were soldiers clogging things up—that’s what a man paying attention at a local cafe would hear, and certainly Carruth was a man who paid attention. . . .
As he lay in the lush growth ten meters away from the still-shiny chain-link fence surrounding the base, Carruth wasn’t so sure this mission was worth the trip. Still, it was what Lewis wanted, and it was her command. On the one hand, she was a fine-looking woman and he’d love to get to know her better; on the other hand, she was a cold bitch and he didn’t doubt she would shoot a man just to watch him bleed. But for the moment, he was willing to go along with her, because if things went the way she planned, he was going to walk away with enough money to buy his own tropical island and stock it with as many good-looking women as he wanted. He could put up with a little ball-busting for that.
Carruth had only two men with him on this one—Hill and Stark—and they were backup. Carruth was the only guy going onto the base proper.
Into his LOSIR headset, he said, “Two minutes, mark.”
“Copy,” Hill came back.
“Affirmative,” Stark added.
The fence patrol guard, a PFC who must have done something to get on somebody’s shit detail, strolled by in front of Carruth’s position, M-16 slung over his shoulder, not even bothering to look at the fence most of the time. Once he was past here, it would be thirty minutes before he came back to this spot, and if Carruth wanted to bother to try and hide them, the doofus probably wouldn’t even notice the clipped links in the wire.
Speaking of which . . . On the two-minute mark, Carruth crawled to the fence, came up to a squat, and applied the wire-cutters to the links, snipping out just enough of a gap to slide through. This position was one of many that wasn’t covered by security cams, and was far enough away from anything so nobody but the perimeter guard would likely see you come through.
Once he was inside, Carruth moved fifty steps to the SSW, then altered his direction and did thirty-six more steps directly east.
This kept him out of any security cam’s view—so the intel said.
At that point, he started walking as if he owned the place. He was dressed in the uniform of the day, Army tropical, and wearing the insignia of a master sergeant. Anybody who saw him on a cam probably wouldn’t call out the MPs—they’d figure he belonged here.
His goal—another stupid one, far as he was concerned—was the enlisted soldiers’ mess hall, at the south end of the complex, a three-minute walk from his entry point. At ten-thirty hours, the place should be relatively empty—breakfast was long over and lunch wasn’t being plated yet.
The maps he’d studied and the photographs he’d memorized were accurate—he had no trouble recognizing his route to the target.
A few enlisted soldiers passed along the way, none close, and he offered a snappy salute to the one officer who came within range, a young lieutenant, who returned the salute and did not speak.
The hall lay just ahead.
Carruth circled to the back side of the place, where the Dumpsters were lined up. He opened the lid of the largest, using a handkerchief so as not to leave prints. He caught the spoiled-milk reek of food rotting in the steel bin. Phew! What a stench!
He removed the device from his pocket, started the timer, and dropped it onto a mass of overcooked scrambled eggs, splat.
The bomb was a simple composition device—RDX/PETN blended with dense wax and a little oil, a C-4 knockoff from India stabilized for hot climates, cheap and untraceable—at least nobody could trace it to him. The electronic timer was a throwaway quartz runner’s watch he’d bought at a Kmart, no prints anywhere, and if he built another one, he’d do it differently, so as not to leave a signature the bomb guys could read.
Ten minutes from now, the Dumpster was going to pop the lid and spew a goodly portion of its stinking contents into the air—the steel walls would almost surely hold, it wasn’t that big a boomer—and the result would be a nasty mess for some poor bastard on kitchen patrol to clean up. Come all this way to blow up a garbage can? Well, it was what Lewis wanted, and probably she had some reason, though he damn sure didn’t know what it was.
He turned and started to walk away. In ten minutes, he’d be halfway back to where they’d anchored the boat. By the time the Army figured out what happened—he wouldn’t put it past ’em to blame it on methane gas—he and Hill and Stark would have sailed away.
He grinned. Stupid Army wonks . . .
“Sergeant,” came a masculine, if somewhat high-pitched, voice.
Startled, Carruth turned. It was that shavetail second lieutenant he’d passed earlier, standing three meters behind him. A big mistake on his part. He should have been paying better attention. “Sir?”
“What is your unit, soldier?”
Carruth repressed the urge to sigh. Just his luck to run into a kid officer who apparently had a eye for faces and didn’t recognize Carruth’s.
“My unit, sir? I’m on loan from the 704th Chemical, Arden Hills, sir. USASOC. I just arrived this morning to teach a class in decontamination procedure.” He took a step toward the lieutenant.
The younger man—he couldn’t be more than twenty-two or -three—frowned. “I don’t recall seeing a posting about that.”
Carruth stole another step. “I wouldn’t know about that, sir. I just go where I’m told and do what they say. I have my orders right here.” He reached toward his pocket, as if to remove them.
The lieutenant waved that off. “What are you doing messing around back here with the garbage cans?”
“I got lost, sir. Saw some trash on the ground and picked it up.” He didn’t have time for this. The clock was ticking.
He was close enough now, but maybe it wouldn’t come to that. If this idiot would just leave it, he’d be on his way.
“Show me.”
“Sir?”
“The trash you picked up. I want to see it.”
Aw, shit. He had a problem. This conversation had gone on long enough so that buzz-cut here would remember him once the can went boom! and that was bad. Plus the fact that when he opened that Dumpster lid, that ED lying on the bed of yellow egg residue would stand out like a red flag.
“Yes, sir.” And with that, Carruth clocked the lieutenant, a short hammer-fist to the temple, putting his hip into the hit.
The lieutenant fell like his legs had vanished. He was out cold.
But he was gonna wake up in a few minutes and probably his memory would work just fine. That wasn’t gonna do.
Carruth picked the unconscious officer up, shouldered him, and carried him the Dumpster. He lifted the lid and dropped the lieutenant into the bin. Wiped the lid where he had touched it, then latched the top shut.
He walked away. Too bad for the soldier, but risk went with the job. Probably the explosion would kill him; at the least, it would mess him up enough that he wouldn’t be talking anytime soon.
Better him than me . . .
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay Gridley sat in Thorn’s office, looking, as he often did, like a teenager late for a date.
“You got the report on the base in Hawaii?” Thorn asked.
“I haven’t read it yet,” Jay answered. “It was in the spool when you called.”
“Somebody cut through the fence and blew up a Dumpster.”
Jay laughed. “Whoa. Big-time assault.”
“The bomber apparently decked a second lieutenant and put him into the garbage bin with the bomb.”
“Jeez. Kill him?”
“No. The trash somehow partially muted the blast. Blew out his eardrums, gave him a major concussion, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, burns, and cuts. He’s in bad shape, but he’s still alive.”
“Poor bastard.”
“I’m expecting my phone to ring any second with an irate general on the line wanting to know what we have done toward catching these people. So—what have we done?”
“I’m grinding, Boss, you know how it goes. It’s like looking for one line of bad code in a million-line program—you don’t see it until you get to it.”
“I understand, Jay, but they won’t. Give me something. Anything.”
“The computer game is intricate and well built, so we’re dealing with a serious programmer, plus one smart enough to put it out there and then trash it without leaving an easy trail. I’m working with Captain Lewis at MILDAT, running down leads.”
Thorn nodded. “Whoever is doing this is trying to make a point. I don’t know what, but blowing up a Dumpster doesn’t have a lot of strategic value, any more than the raid in Oklahoma, where they knocked down an armory door, blew some windows out, and then turned around and left empty-handed. It looks to me like they are trying to show that they can get into these bases and do whatever they want.”
Jay said, “Selling keys to the candy store, maybe.”
Thorn nodded. “Yeah. Could be. There are loons running around out there who would pay big money for that. Demonstrate that there is an easy way into an Army base a few times, and the crazies will line up to buy your key.”
Jay said, “Or maybe these are just feints, designed to convince the military they don’t really need to worry, and they plan on something a lot worse. One of the bases in the bug game has tactical nukes on hand, and from the part of the DCP we got, there were ways to get past the first level of security. Hard to tell what is in the bits we missed.”
“You’ve told the Army about this?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s all in my report, ought to be in your in-box somewhere. They’ve changed security procedures on all the bases I matched, new codes, new guard routines, beefed-up whatevers. We might have short-circuited them.” Jay frowned. “Wait a second. You said a base in Hawaii?”
“Yes, a new one, not much there but a recon school. Near Hana, on Maui.”
Jay shook his head. “I don’t recall cross-referencing a base in Hawaii.” He paused. Then: “Shit!”
“What?”
“The guy has another game running!” Jay stood. “I have to get on the net. I should have thought of this before!”
“Go,” Thorn said.
After Jay was gone, Thorn sat at his desk. Net Force spent a lot of time stamping out little fires, and every now and then a big one, like this, or the Chinese general. And Thorn felt as if he had gotten better at running the agency, even with the switch in command. Still, it wasn’t what he had thought it would be when he left civilian life to do it. He could have retired a few years back and sat around thinking up creative ways to spend his money. He wasn’t super-rich, but he could live pretty well just off the interest his millions generated. Working for the military hadn’t gotten onerous yet, but he feared that it would eventually. If Hadden was right—if he was going to be made into a military general, even if it was more technical than real—what would that mean?
He didn’t want to be part of the problem. He’d taken the job as commander to give something back to his country, which had been pretty good to a poor boy from an Indian rez in Washington State. The tribe was doing better these days—they had a casino outside of Walla Walla, and were dickering for another one near the Idaho border, in a land swap with the feds. Not enough money coming in to make everybody rich, but enough so nobody would be poor. That was good.
Once he and Marissa were married? What then? She could quit her job at the CIA if she wanted. Or not. That would be up to her. And maybe he would quit if she did. He wasn’t getting any younger. They could travel, see things, do things together, enjoy life. Outside of his fencing and his collection of swords, he didn’t have any expensive hobbies. He had a nice house, was about to hook up with a fantastic woman. Life was short—he could get hit by a truck, a tree could fall on him, and all his money wouldn’t matter. Maybe it was time to pack it in at work and enjoy whatever time he had left?
His com buzzed.
“Yes.”
“General Hadden on one.”
Of course. “I got it.”
He reached for the receiver. This would be a fun conversation.
Retirement sounded better all the time. . . .