Net Force

5

An incoming tankbuster rocket hit the building behind Colonel John Howard's Net Force Strike Team, no more than twenty feet above their heads. The missile exploded on impact, blasting a blackened crater in the eighty-year-old structure. A shower of brick fragments and glass pattered down around the half-dozen soldiers where they crouched behind a twisted metal Dumpster. It was a sharp rain, but the least of Howard's worries at this point. They had to take the sucker with the missile launcher out fast!

"Reeves and Johnson, flank, left!" Howard said. It wasn't necessary to yell — all of them wore LOSIR headsets built into their helmets; he could have whispered and they'd have heard him loud and clear. The line-of-sight infrared tactical com units had a short range and worked pretty much only if you could actually see the person you were talking to; on the other hand, they wouldn't be picked up by an enemy with a scanner unless you could see him, too, and that was the reason to use them. "Odom and Vasquez, suppressing fire! Chan and Brown, go right! On my command… three… two… one—now!"

Odom and Vasquez opened up with their H&K assault subguns, unleashing a canvas-rip full-auto barrage of high-cyclic 9mm's from hundred-round drum magazines.

Reeves and Johnson bailed left and dodged their way across the street, stutter-stepped for the cover of a big tractor-trailer. The truck was long dead, the tires burned and melted away, the metal of the cab and trailer pockmarked with old bullet holes and darkened by soot and graffiti.

Chan and Brown bailed right, adding fire from their weapons as they ran broken-field lines across the killing zone.

The modified SIPEsuits the team wore should be enough to stop most of what the locals had to throw at them. The vests and pants were of cloned spider-silk hardweave, and held pockets of overlapping ceramic plates that would turn pistol or rifle bullets, provided they weren't armor-piercing hotloads. Helmets and boots were Kevlar, with titanium inserts. The backpack CPUs were shockproofed and double-ceramic-plated. The tactical comps encrypted radio, satellite uplinks and downlinks, gave heads-up ghost displays, with motion sensors, IR and UV spookeye scans, terrain maps, even instant flare-polarizers built into the helmets' retractable blast shields. The Net Force suits weren't as heavy as regular Army issue, since they had no SCBA, no distill, no biojects. For this kind of assault, in and out in one day, they didn't need full infantry bells and whistles; even so, the suits added twenty pounds to a wearer.

Howard popped up and shoved his Thompson submachine gun over the top of the Dumpster, cooking off several three-round bursts at the hidey-hole where the guy with the rocket launcher was. The tommy gun was definitely low-tech, an antique built in 1928, and had first belonged to an Indiana sheriff during Prohibition. Howard's greatgrandfather, being black, wasn't officially allowed on the force in those days, but the white sheriff he'd worked for knew a good man when he saw one, regardless of his color, so there was an unofficial Negro who spent twenty years making good money enforcing the law, even if it was off the books. When the sheriff died, he left the tommy gun to Grampa Howard. They called it a Chicago typewriter in those days.

No time for a stroll down memory lane now, John! Duck!

The rocket man had kept his head down, too, but somebody in the stairwell with him let loose a return blast of small-arms fire that pinged and clanged against the heavy Dumpster. Its battered steel was still thick enough to turn the bullets. Howard was glad of it, too, suits notwithstanding.

"Fire in the hole!" Reeves's voice over Howard's com interrupted the sounds of gunfire.

The grenade Reeves tossed into the stairwell went off. More shrapnel spanged against the Dumpster, and the stink of burned explosive washed over Howard, along with smoke and dust.

Two seconds passed. All shooting stopped.

"Clear!" Johnson yelled.

Colonel Howard stood. He saw Johnson grin at him and give him a thumbs-up gesture. Howard returned the grin. His men — well, five men and a woman — stood at the ready, weapons seeking possible targets as they scanned the street and buildings for more trouble. It would be stupid in the extreme for a local to stand up and wave hello to the nice Americans just at that moment.

Howard tapped his helmet flatpad, toggled on his heads-up display and got a digital time-read. He usually kept the display off when things actually got hot — he didn't want to be shooting at phantoms created by his computer. You were supposed to ignore such things with enough practice, but when real bullets started zipping past, it was amazing how many well-trained soldiers opened up on a heat-sig icon or a flashing timer in a heads-up display.

"Good job, people, but let's move. We've got six minutes to get to the rendezvous point."

The team started to move out—

Abruptly, the men, the street, the buildings faded. They went ghostly, transparent, then blinked out.

"Priority call, John," a crisp military voice said.

Howard blinked, raised the VR eyeband and sighed.

He was in his office at the Net Force HQ, and the fire-fight in Sarajevo had been a computer simulacrum, not a real battle. It was nothing to keep playing at when there was a priority call on-line. "Put it through," he told his computer.

The head-and-shoulders image of Net Force's civilian Commander, Alexander Michaels, appeared over Howard's desk.

Howard nodded at the holoproj. "Commander Michaels."

"Colonel. We have a situation I thought you might want to monitor."

"The explosion in Germany?" Howard said.

"Yes."

"My people are already aware of it. Are we talking about an insertion here?" Howard couldn't keep the interest out of his voice.

"Not in Frankfurt, no," Michaels said, "it's too late for that. But I've got all our listening posts and subnets on alert, especially in the European theater. Better make sure your Strike Teams are ready."

"My Strike Teams are always ready, Commander." He felt the stiffness in his voice, but could not help that, either.

He had yet to get used to taking orders from a civilian, a man whose father had been a career Army noncommissioned officer, but who had never spent any time in the service himself. Yes, the President of the United States was the Commander in Chief of the military, and yes, the current one hadn't done any time in the service, either. But he was smart enough to let his generals do their jobs. Steve Day had been Navy, and that was bad enough; Howard wasn't sure about Alexander Michaels yet.

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise, Colonel."

"Sorry, Commander. We're on Alert Status Two. I can have my top ten teams airborne in an hour — half that if we go to AS-One."

"I hope it won't come to that."

"Yes, sir," Howard said. But what he hoped was that it would come to that. The sooner his troops got a chance to show what they could really do in a hot zone, the happier he was going to be. If you were going to be a warrior, you needed a war now and then — or a police action at the very least.

"I'll keep you apprised," Michaels said. "Discom."

"Sir."

But Howard wasn't worried about that. He had his own wireheads working the nets. If Michaels's crew got it first, it wouldn't be by much.

Best he put them to work to be sure they didn't miss anything. He reached for the com again.

When he went on-line, Plekhanov still used old-style helmet and gloves, even though the newer systems didn't need either. These days, holoproj imagery could englobe a viewer's field of vision with a simple eyeband no wider than a pencil, and the reader software behind a computer's holocam could pick up finger-jive command language and translate it as accurately as even the best gloves. But he liked the gloves, was used to them. Just as most keyboard-ing was now Dvorak pattern instead of Qwerty, another system he hadn't switched over to. He didn't care what anybody said. Forty-five years of muscle memory just didn't go away and allow itself to be replaced by something else simply because the new method was more efficient.

He waved the web to life and said, "Olympic Peninsula Trail."

The VR gear took over, producing an image of a temperate rain forest, a narrow path bounded on the sides by tall Douglas fir, thick ferns and patches of assorted fungi — mushrooms, toadstools and the like. Early July afternoon sunshine slanted down through the dense canopy of evergreens and alder trees, and painted the forest with slats of light and dark. Insects buzzed, birds chirped; a pleasant warmth, not overly hot here in the shade, suffused the woods.

Plekhanov was dressed in sensible hiking clothes: a khaki shirt and shorts, knee-length polyprop socks, waffle-stomper trail boots. He also wore an Irish rain hat. He carried a stout walking staff his own height, and a small day pack containing a rain poncho, a water bottle, a plastic bag of trail mix, a compass, a flashlight, matches, a basic first-aid kit, a Swiss Army knife and an emergency cell phone/ GPS unit. Though he planned to keep to the trail, it was always better to be prepared than not.

In his day pack, he also had the sealed packet he was to deliver.

He walked along the edge of a stream, listening to the cold and clear water burbling over smooth stones. Here and there, he saw small fish in quieter pools. He enjoyed the scent of fir, the feel of the humus-padded earth under his hiking boots, the empty trail, devoid of other humans.

After walking briskly for a time, he stopped and had a drink of water. While he was resting, he examined his watch. The device was a match to the one he had carried for more than fifteen years, a Russian analog-mechanical pocket watch. It was a Molnija, big, heavy, mostly steel, with an eighteen-jewel movement. This model had the hammer and sickle and star on the back and an inset of the Kremlin on the hinged front, and was a commemorative model celebrating the Russian victories in the 1941–1945 war. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, cash-poor Russia had sold everything that wasn't nailed down to anybody with the money to buy it, and such watches had gone for ridiculously small amounts. If you could find a non-digital timepiece this well made and sturdy in the West — and you could not — it would have easily cost ten times as much as he had paid for this one.

He thumbed the button, and the hinged cover popped open. He looked at the Roman numerals. Almost time for his meeting at the big rock on the coast. He snapped the cover closed. He needed to hurry. At the rock — a massive chunk of weather-beaten stone near the juncture of the Pacific Ocean and the Straits of Juan de Fuca at Cape Foul-weather — Plekhanov would deliver his packet to a courier. The courier would take the package by fishing boat — in this scenario, at least — to a certain fat man who had access to certain systems, and the fat man would, in exchange for the packet of valuables — in this case, binary "jewels" he could sell — cause to be put into effect a small series of electronic "snowballs." By the time these reached their destinations, some of them would be no larger, just like balls of hard ice, but some would be veritable avalanches. Whatever was needed.

A small animal darted across the path in front of Plekhanov — a rabbit or perhaps a raccoon? — and there was a commotion in the ferns as the creature passed through. The man smiled. This was one of his favorite trips. He much enjoyed the counterpoint to the reality. Walking along a wooded trail was as far removed from computers and nets as the moon was from the Earth. No small irony here.

Naturally, such musings turned his attention to technology, and the uses to which he had been putting it of late. Most of it had been in VR or sublinks. Not all, of course. Sometimes the real world needed real actions.

The physical destruction of the CIA/Net Force post in Germany had been one such action, crude, but necessary. Too much electronic tampering with programmers as adept as the best of Net Force's hackers would send up a warning flag. A bomb, on the other hand, could come from any wild-eyed radical. There had to be some alternation. The kind of software and viral attacks he was about to launch on systems in several of the Commonwealth of Independent States, in the Baltics, even on a Korean or Japanese system or two, just to keep people guessing — well, those would be of a different nature.

There were going to be hundreds of programmers and systems engineers cursing and sweating soon, and much chaos to rectify. When chaos came, his talents were going to be in great demand. And who better to fix things than the man who knew exactly how they had been broken?

The trail wound to the left, then the right, and broke out of the forest into a sandy area dotted here and there with sedge grasses or stunted ground cover. Surf pounded on the rocky shore only a kilometer or so away. He saw the fishing boat anchored well offshore, and a high-bowed dory motoring from the larger vessel toward the shore. Come to see him, to collect what he carried, then to do his bidding. The weather was going gray, fog rolling in, and it was also growing chilly. Appropriate for this scenario.

Here was VR power, the ability to create such visions, but VR power was but a small part of his talents.

He laughed aloud. It was good to be in control. And it was going to get better, very soon.