Springboard

8

Abe Kent was no Luddite — he used VR training for his troops as much as the next commander — it was just that he preferred reality over virtual reality. Unfortunately, the reality was that there were some scenarios you simply couldn’t do in the real world. The Iraqis and the Iranians, even the Colombians, tended to frown upon a small military unit taking target practice on their citizens, no matter what their crimes.

The days of gunboat diplomacy and backing up private companies like United Fruit were long past, and Kent had no desire to see them come around again, so when you needed to work in the field against a team of Bosnians or Afghanis on their home ground, you dressed your men — and women — in sensory gear and did it in VR. It worked out all right, for the most part, and it was far better than nothing.

But Colonel Kent never lost sight of the fact that no matter how good the electronic impedimenta, no matter how well the stim units worked muscles, the computer scenario was not reality. You could simulate the feel of crawling over a muddy field, the sounds of gunfire, even the heat of a desert afternoon, but nobody broke an ankle, tore a groin muscle, or got fatally shot in VR.

Yes, there had been a few heart attacks in scenarios that were exciting enough to start the blood pumping fast, though most of these, Kent understood, had been using gear that simulated sexual encounters. Kent had never lost a trooper in VR, and he was in agreement with Bill Jordan, the famous gunfighter who had come out of the Border Patrol in the 1950s and ’60s.

Jordan, whose skill with a double-action revolver was legendary — he could pick aspirin tablets off a tabletop at fifteen feet by point-shooting, without scratching the table’s finish — had written a book on gunfighting called No Second Place Winner. Kent had an autographed copy of that book at home and had read it several times.

When talking about fast-draw experts who popped balloons with their side arm’s muzzle blast, Jordan said that in the history of gunfighting nobody had ever died from a loud noise — meaning that you needed to practice hitting a target using a real gun with full-power ammo. Speed was fine, but accuracy was final, and the only way to make sure you had both was to practice using the gun you’d have when the bullets flew for real.

The troops grumbled when Kent took them out to the Marine training field in a pouring rain to practice tactics, but he knew that those experiences would pay off if they ever found themselves in such a situation.

Of course, lying on the sloppy, cold ground in the rain, as he now was, wasn’t the most pleasant way to pass an afternoon, but this was how you got real practice. If your LOSIR gear shorted out when it started raining, this was the place to find that out, not on a real battlefield where somebody was trying to shoot you. If you jammed your assault rifle or subgun’s barrel into the mud and plugged it, best you learn how to clear that, since firing a weapon with a slug of mud blocking the muzzle could get you a face full of shrapnel when the barrel exploded, as it could. At the very least, that weapon would be useless.

Kent had once seen a soldier on a firing line at a military range in Texas using a.308 assault rifle with a suppressor fitted to it. No way to silence that boom completely, certainly not with hypersonic rounds, but the idea was to quiet it a little, to make it harder to pinpoint the location. The machinist who had made the suppressor, or the shooter who had threaded it onto the barrel, or maybe both, had made a mistake. When the shooter fired off the first round, the bullet caught something in the silencing device, tore it off the muzzle, and hurled it thirty meters downrange.

“Whatcha got there, son?” the rangemaster had called out. “A grenade launcher?”

The.308’s muzzle was damaged enough so that firing it again without repair would have been dangerous to anybody close.

Kent smiled at the memory.

If you had to have such an experience, a safe shooting range was the place to have it — not facing a platoon of enemy soldiers with AK-47s that might be old but that worked fine. A man could kill you with a cap-and-ball carbine that had been old-tech during the Civil War…

“Clear,” came the voice over Kent’s LOSIR headset.

“You heard the mine-finder,” Kent said. “Let’s move, people.”

The team, six troopers and Kent, scrabbled up in the rain and muck and splashed their way across the field. There were AP mines buried here — electronic ones that sent an IR pulse to the receivers the men wore in their SIPEsuits. If you stepped on one, any receiver in range announced it with a loud “beep.” To make it more realistic, a small flash-bang in the ground went off, and that was enough to singe your clothes a little, reinforcing the electronic sig in a way that you didn’t forget. Scared the hell out of you and stung a little, but a real mine would have blown off an arm or leg or killed you outright, and the little popper reminded you to pay attention.

The scout had located the hidden mines in their path, and electronically tagged them, so the heads-up panes in the unit’s helmets, run off the backpack computer, showed the location of each antipersonnel device. As long as the suits worked, you could zigzag your way across the field and not worry about stepping on a mine. If the suits failed, then you had to do it the old-fashioned way, which took a lot longer. Now and then, Kent arranged for the suits to fail, but not today. Today, they would make it across the field before they were ambushed by an automatic motion sensor-operated tracking machine gun that fired either electronic bullets or paint balls, depending on the programming. Today, it would be paint balls, because those left no doubt, even in the rain, as to whether or not you had taken a hit.

Looking down and seeing that bright red splotch on your groin would make the point. Paint balls would sting a little — but then a high-powered AP round, even in good ceramic body armor, was going to seriously wound or kill you if it hit solidly.

The colonel himself didn’t know exactly where the gun would be set up. The field sergeant had chosen a spot for it. Kent did know it would be out there somewhere, and he had taught his troops that they should always expect the unexpected, so they ought to be looking for it, too.

Kent had always thought the Boy Scouts had come up with the best two-word motto that dealt with this: Be prepared.

Seurat paused to consider which suit he would pack for the trip to the United States. The Versace was a more modern cut, with a rougher tooth to the fabric, but the Gaultier was a more classical “power” suit, with a darker tone.

As he considered the merits of each, he looked, as he often did, at the painting facing his private desk. It was one of his most prized possessions, an original Georges Seurat, largely unknown to the rest of the world.

The painting wasn’t as polished as some of the artist’s earlier works — certainly not as much as La Grande Jatte, which had taken two years and countless studies, but it did bear the Neo-Impressionist pointillist dots of color that had marked his ancestor’s later works.

It was small, only three feet or so wide, and more intimate in subject matter than many of the artist’s famous pieces: A small child sat on the floor in front of a sofa; behind him was a Christmas tree, and on the right, trailing down from the top of the frame, was an adult woman’s arm, reaching down to hold the boy. The tone was dark: a mix of warm ambers and saturated magentas. The colors blended beautifully, each dot giving the painting a vibrancy no solid patch could hope to match. The composition was pure Seurat: static shapes, with little to disturb them. The diagonal of the woman’s arm broke the verticals typical of the artist’s work, but did not jar the mood.

In front of the boy were some toys: blocks, a top, a small stuffed animal. But the child wasn’t playing with them. Instead, he leaned into the arm, and looked out at the viewer, a slight smile on his face. There was a look of innocent awe, thoughtful joy, and the anticipation of something good to come.

The CyberNation leader had always thought the boy’s expression was one that embodied the joy of discovery.

He blinked, his eyes warm, as he stared at the painting. The subject was his ancestor’s son, Pierre George, and the approximate date of the painting was December 1890. Seurat the artist had died suddenly in March of 1891 of some infection — and his son had followed him the month after, apparently of the same ailment. The juxtaposition of the joy in the painting against the certain death that was coming was powerful.

The painter had not known he had but a few months left to him.

Seurat had known the painting for nearly his entire life. A great-aunt had given it to his parents when he was a young boy, and they had hung it in their sitting room. It had been purchased from Madeleine Knoblock, the artist’s wife, just before her death, and kept from the world. She had not been well liked by the rest of the family, and had disappeared for years after her husband’s and son’s death.

Many times he’d thought about the look of discovery on the boy’s face. It had encouraged him to try many new things, to seek out new experiences. He had been the boy. But tonight, he was the adult, reaching down to comfort the boy, to shepherd him from what might come. And the boy was CyberNation.

For him, the lesson was clear: You never see it coming. And it put him on his guard. Surely his ancestor hadn’t seen his end approaching — could he hope to do better than his famous forebear?

Perhaps. Then again, no matter what kind of spin he put on it, the truth was the truth:

Not everyone wins.

He exhaled a long sigh, not having realized he was holding his breath. It didn’t matter really. Win or lose, one had to do what one could, oui?

He would do everything in his power to protect his own curious and thoughtful infant from the dangers threatening it. Which was why he was packing now, to go see the Americans, whose military systems had been attacked by the same person or persons who had assaulted his child.

Considering the history CyberNation had with the Americans, particularly their Net Force, Seurat would hardly have predicted such a trip for himself. But he would climb into whatever bed was required to protect his nation.

He grinned. Perhaps he might be able to find a beautiful woman’s bed somewhere along the way, eh?

That thought in mind, he considered the suits.

Power, he thought, and carefully folded the Gaultier into the Halliburton travel case on the bed. Neatly stacked socks, shirts, and ties surround it in tightly webbed compartments. These days, luggage was so often opened by airport security that it was embarrassing to pack less than neatly. And Seurat never did things by halves. Anyone who saw his packing in an airport would see the product of an ordered and considered mind.

Yes.

He closed the suitcase and checked the time on his old IWC chronometer. He still had a few minutes until Michel picked him up for the trip to the airport. Had CyberNation invested in its own plane — which it certainly could afford — there would be no need for such scheduling, but the nation of ideals kept one away from the physical world — he had never gotten around to it.

He wondered if the Americans would be able to help. They were smart — or at least they had a tremendous number of resources, which sometimes amounted to the same thing. An army of brutes could accomplish much, if there were enough of them…

Arrogance, Charles, arrogance.

He had to remember not to underestimate them. No matter what he believed of the nation as a whole, there had to be at least a few sharp people keeping the bread and circuses running. Were there not, the last remaining superpower would not be such, eh?

The real question — and his real concern — was whether or not the Americans were responsible for what had happened. A faked incident of their own might have been staged to draw CyberNation in, to deceive them into joining as an ally against a foe that did not exist — the purpose to fuse a partnership where CyberNation would remain a weaker ally, or perhaps to link the two nations symbolically in world opinion.

He didn’t believe that, though. If what he had learned was true, such a plot would have cost a great deal, and money was always such a consideration with the Americans that it seemed an unlikely scenario. Still, one had to consider all the possibilities.

America’s allies had a tendency to act as ventriloquist’s dummies for the huge nation, and Seurat would have none of this to taint the purity of CyberNation. Sooner or later the torch of the most powerful nation would be passed to another — and Seurat did not want to delay this inevitability in any way.

He leaned toward the idea that a government was behind the attack. It seemed unreal that a single man with limited resources could manage to do so much damage on his own. A government could support an apparatus large enough and powerful enough. Too, only a government would care enough to want to bring another government down. It was approaching hubris to consider that CyberNation was worth going to war with, but the evidence was there, non?

But could the United States be so worried about CyberNation that they had decided to act?

He didn’t know, but as the shepherd, as the adult, he had to find out.

If the Americans planned treachery, they’d find him a difficult target. Years of fencing had kept his body and mind honed to a razor’s edge. The lamb might lie down with the lion, but in his case, it was more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing lying down with the lion.

He smiled. What was the term they used about the French? Ah, yes, frogs.

Well, this frog has teeth, mon ami.

As they would find out, if they attempted to hurt his nation.

His alarm chimed. It was time to go.

It had been a long time since Chang had been to Washington. The place had a charm to it. It was different than New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Chicago. It felt much more like a Southern U.S. town than a big city. As the taxi took him to his hotel, he looked at the people and buildings, recently washed clean by rain and now basking in bright sunshine. Here was the head of the superpower that was the United States, and it looked so… ordinary…

Looks could be deceiving, of course. Chang knew this as well as any. He recalled an old joke he had heard as a younger man, here in the States.

A man is walking a tailless little yellow dog on a leash when another man walking a snarling bulldog comes up. The bulldog takes a run at the little dog, growling and snapping. The little yellow dog opens enormous jaws and bites the bulldog in half.

The bulldog’s owner stares at the other guy. “Lord, man, what kind of dog is that?”

“Well, before I cut off his tail and painted him yellow, he was an alligator.”

Chang smiled at the memory. No matter how you disguise it, an alligator is still an alligator.

Here in this city, this unique district, lived men who had more power than the greatest rulers in all of history. With a spoken command, their leader could more or less wipe out every human being on the planet. There were enough atomic and hydrogen bombs in America’s arsenal to directly destroy hundreds of millions, with the resulting fall-out killing millions more. And if the scenario of nuclear winter was true — that awful theory that enough smoke and dust in the air would cast a pall over the whole of the world and bring about massive weather changes — it might be that one man could destroy most of the life on Earth. It was a frightening thought. Nobody knew this for certain, and Chang hoped nobody would ever have to find it out the hard way.

Washington might look innocuous to a visitor, but it was, like the yellow dog in the joke, more than it appeared on the surface. Just like the people of this country. Many in the world thought that Americans were overfed and lazy, concerned only with their toys and their easy lives.

That kind of thinking was a mistake. Americans were an affable people, sure enough, but when attacked, they did not shrink from a hard response. Witness what they had done to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and what they were almost certainly going to do to any other nation that was stupid enough to threaten them. To attack such a country was to court a terrible retribution.

Chang smiled. Such was certainly not his intent. The new China was more interested in commerce than war — there were more than a billion mouths to feed, and business was growing better and better.

Before he went to visit Net Force, he had appointments with several software and hardware dealers eager to have Chang’s business. There were some limitations on the technology he could legally acquire, of course, and there probably always would be, but such restrictions had lessened in the last few years. Nothing Chang wanted to get his hands on presented a threat to the U.S.’s national security. At least, he didn’t think so.

The cab arrived at the Constitution, a small but well-appointed hotel on Chang’s approved list. It wouldn’t cost much more than staying in a comparable place back home.

Chang alighted, paid the driver, then followed the bell-boy who collected his luggage into the building.

A sunny day in a sunny city, and he was a man about his business. What could be better?

Well, he thought as he approached the check-in desk, a beautiful and sunny woman with which to share it would be nice. He was between relationships at the moment, no girlfriend back home. He had thought to be married and a father by now, but work had gotten in the way. He would have to spend some time in that arena when he got home. A loving and passionate wife, sons and daughters, these were things he wanted. Life wasn’t all about work, after all. The Prophet had said so, and Chang believed it.

The sun was warm on Jay’s bare back. He wore a pair of ragged shorts and nothing else. The hot sand made little chee-chee sounds under his feet as he walked. A line of breakers rolled sudsy white surf onto the beach. Gulls crawed overhead. Palm trees wafted in the gentle breeze. The bananas and coconuts were ripe, you could see fish in the tide pools, and the heady scents of flowers and fruits drifted about him. It was as close to a tropical paradise as Jay could imagine. Because, of course, he had imagined it.

In such a place, the set of small footprints on the wet sand at the shoreline was easy to spot and follow. Once Jay caught up with the person who had made those prints, he would have access to a vital bit of information. Which, at this point, would be a lot more than he currently had — which was to say, at this point, he didn’t have anything at all.

Jay was not used to being stymied. Part of the problem with being really good at what you did was the realization that a lot of people weren’t able to run with you. You started to take it for granted that, when given a problem, not only would you be able to solve it, you’d be able to do it fast. Like being an international chess grandmaster, most of the players you ran into simply weren’t in your league. But even the world champion lost now and then — nobody was perfect. Nobody stayed champ forever. Sooner or later, somebody better came along and beat you.

Intellectually, Jay knew this. Emotionally, however, it was hard to accept.

Jay Gridley did not like to lose. Ever.

The track followed the shoreline for maybe a quarter of a mile, then veered into the dry sand, heading away from the beach. The footprints weren’t as distinct here, but still easy to see across the otherwise smooth sand. Two hundred yards away from the water, there was a line of trees and underbrush, and there the footprints disappeared. But even so, there was a trail, narrow and winding, and no sign of broken branches or disturbed bushes leaving the path. A couple years back, Jay had learned how to track a man on foot, even one trying to hide his trail, and whoever this was, he was sticking to the easy way.

There was a gentle rise, and it was cooler here in the trees, but not enough so that Jay needed a shirt. The dirt and moss underfoot were soft and warm. Birds cheeped, some kind of small creature chittered in the trees, and Jay enjoyed the hike.

After another fifteen minutes or so, the animal track widened into a clearing, ringed by banana and palm trees.

In the middle of this glen stood a woman dressed in a sarong, a bright red patterned wrap that covered her from her breasts to just above her knees. She had a Polynesian look to her, silky black hair that hung to the middle of her back, dark skin made darker by the sun, and a flashing white smile. Altogether gorgeous, Jay decided.

He returned her smile. Well. This was easy enough. About time.

He walked toward her. She waited.

Fifteen feet away, he stepped onto a broad palm leaf and felt his belly lurch as he fell into a pit.

He landed heavily on his feet, collapsed, and stood up again, shaking his head, already angry with himself. Fortunately, the trap had not been lined with stakes; but it could have been. As it was, the edges of the pit were two feet above his outstretched hands. He jumped up, caught the edge, and it gave way under his grip. He fell, cursing.

He shook his head again, disgusted with himself. And here he’d just been thinking about how great he was.

Jay shook his head. He would have to dig climbing notches in the dirt, which, with his bare hands, was going to take a while, even in the soft soil. And he knew that the smiling woman he had been following would be long gone by the time he reached the surface.

Gritting his teeth, and biting back a few more choice curses, he got to work.

Locke wished that the Concorde SSTs were still flying the Atlantic route between Paris and New York. Yes, he was in first class, and certainly there were things he could do to pass the time; still, commercial air travel was so much less interesting than almost any other mode of transportation. There was nothing to see, just clouds and distant ocean. The air on board a modern jet was dry, stale, and full of enough germs to infect an entire army.

A train, a riverboat, those gave you sights. Even an old prop plane chugging along at low altitude was better. Riding a bike or walking was the best of all — you could interact with the scenery. You saw things while walking you’d miss in a car or on a train, and certainly would miss on a jet roaring along at six hundred miles an hour.

Still, if you needed to get somewhere quickly, the jet was obviously the way to travel. Crossing an ocean on a ship could take a week; flying over it, a matter of hours. One had to balance the means against the end. Too bad there were no such things as matter transmitters, like in the sci-fi stories on television.

Locke had seen those as a kid — with Captain Kirk and Spock speaking dubbed Mandarin. Step onto a pad, Scotty pushes the sliders, and presto! You were instantly where you wanted to be…

Locke sipped at his club soda. When he had been making his living from women, he had drunk alcoholic beverages at social gatherings; it was necessary. These days, he seldom indulged in liquor. He did not like to have his thoughts fuzzed by anything.

In fact, he had found certain smart drugs and mild psychedelics to be enhancing, and he sometimes took these. In competition, with all things else being equal, the smartest player had the advantage. The kind of work he had come to required a sharpness of mind, a concentration, and anything that altered his consciousness and made him feel less clever? No, thanks.

This venture with Wu was intriguing on many levels. If it succeeded, it would be hard to top. The money aspect of it was enormous, the level of detail needed immense, and offhand, Locke couldn’t think of any way he could better it. Well, toppling a government, perhaps, and becoming a king himself…

Locke smiled, and sipped his tonic water again. He would worry about that once he accomplished the task at hand.

He had come a long way from the streets of Hong Kong. And not just in distance.