Net Force

13

Vladimir Plekhanov sat on a mossy rock next to an old-growth tree, drinking cool water from the bottle he carried, enjoying a shaft of early sunshine that had angled in under the thick fir canopy. He took a deep breath, smelling the sharp scent of evergreen tree sap. He saw ants scurrying up and down the Douglas fir, and watched them swerve to avoid the sticky ooze. One of the ants blundered too close and the rosin caught him. The ant struggled.

Given another few million years, some creature that had once been human might find a bit of amber with that ant in it and wonder about its life.

Plekhanov smiled, reached over and using his fingernail, carefully freed the struggling ant. The creature hurried along its way. What would it think, if it did think, about the giant finger that had come from nowhere to spare its life? Would it speak of it to its fellows? Of how the hand of a giant god had saved it from the deadly trap?

His musings were interrupted by the arrival of the Ukrainian. The man appeared muscular, fit, dressed in hiking shorts and boots and a tight T-shirt. His footsteps made no sound on the soft path, but he did not look at ease as he moved. He spotted Plekhanov and nodded. "Greetings," he said in Russian.

The older man returned the salutation in the same language.

The Ukrainian came to stand next to Plekhanov's rock. He looked around. "Interesting imagery," he said.

Plekhanov snapped the cap back into place on the water bottle, and stuck it into his pack where it lay on the rock next to him. "I spend too much time in RW civilization — why bring it with me into VR?"

"A bit quiet for my tastes," the Ukrainian said. "But to each his own."

"Have a seat."

The Ukrainian shook his head. "I need to get back soon."

Plekhanov shrugged. "You have news for me?"

"The Americans have discovered the location of those planning the attack upon their embassy in Kiev. They will be acting upon this information shortly."

Plekhanov looked at the ants on the tree trunk. "Took them long enough. Perhaps we should be less subtle in our clues."

It was the Ukrainian's turn to shrug. "I don't understand why we did not simply allow the attack to go forward."

Plekhanov smiled. "Because damaging a perfectly good Ukrainian building serves no purpose. Why drain any more from your already sparse treasury to repair it? Why risk killing your innocent countrymen?"

"The plotters are also my countrymen."

"But hardly innocent. That band of fanatics is a loose cannon, overfilled with explosive powder. Sooner or later, it would have gone off and done as much damage to those nearest it as any target. We need such things removed from our deck — and the Americans will do that for us. The Americans have spent their time and money uncovering the plot, and it has also made them nervous in the process. They will be worried about such things, spending yet more time and funds to protect their other embassies. We kill several birds with one stone here, my friend. Do you still play pocket billiards?"

"Da."

"Then you know that sinking a single ball means little, especially early in the game, unless one positions himself for the next shot."

"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.

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.

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.