State of War

1

It was a Sunday afternoon, hot, muggy, and about to rain — typical D.C. weather for this time of year. A good day to stay home. Alex Michaels was doing just that. In his garage, currently without a project car and thus more or less empty, he was having a short but intense practice session with Guru. She was the one who introduced Toni to the Indonesian fighting art of silat. Now, all these long years later, she was still amazing.

She wore a ratty sweatshirt over a long batik skirt and rubber sandals, and looked about as scary as a stuffed teddy bear. A really old stuffed teddy bear. But if you bought that, you would find yourself in big trouble in a big hurry. One of the first rules of fighting was Never assume that what you see is what you get.

She punched, and Michaels did the block-punch-block-punch-elbow sequence, that pap-pap pap! timing, like two sixteenth notes followed by an eighth note for the first three moves.

She nodded. “Not so bad. But watch the low line, be sure the first punch comes from the hip and cuts the angle as it rises. Punch for me.”

He did, and despite the fact that she was old enough to be his grandmother, her response was so fast he wanted to shake his head. She could hit him three times before he could blink and, while he was standing there surprised, easily drop him onto the concrete with a sweep or heel-dragging beset. A perfect example of technique mastery over physical strength.

“Again,” she said.

Ten minutes later, he was picking himself up from the floor after she had put him there with an effortless little sweep when Toni came into the garage. She had Little Alex balanced on one hip and looked like a Polynesian princess in a sarong, her hair wrapped up in a towel. “Are you beating up on Guru again, Alex?”

“Oh, yeah, right. You ever hear what the U.S. cavalry said about what you were supposed to do if captured by the Lakota Sioux? Whatever happens, don’t let them give you to the women.”

“How droll. You have a call.”

She handed him his virgil — the acronym standing for Virtual Global Interface Link — the handy-dandy pocket electronic device that was phone, fax, GPS, homing beacon, credit card, computer line, and other things he hadn’t even thought about, including a spy device that told HQ where you were. That the call came in on the virgil meant it was important, since the device’s com was also scrambled as well as Net Force’s programmers could manage.

Speak of the devil…

The tiny screen was lit with Jay Gridley’s picture as Michaels took it from his wife.

“Jay.”

“Boss. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Just me getting my ass kicked.”

“Toni beating up on you again?”

“Guru.”

“Isn’t that embarrassing, Boss, getting thumped by a lady old enough to be your granny?”

Michaels grinned. “You’re welcome to drop by and stand in for me, if you’d like.”

“I’ll pass, thanks. I just called to update you on a couple of things. We got another e-mail virus making waves on the web. It’s just a filler — clog your system, dupe-and-send thing — nothing real nasty, but it’s got good coverage, so you’ll be hearing about it. From what I can tell, it’s a standard kid-hack kind of thing. No real damage, just counting coup. We should be able to backtrack the guy and nail him.”

“Okay.”

“The other thing is, we got a funny hit on one of our watchbots I thought you might want to know about.”

Michaels grinned again. “A ‘funny hit.’ Is that a computer geek technical term, Jay?” Net Force had been on a roll lately. Nobody had attacked them, and nothing major had hit the net or the web. Even hackers seemed to be taking the long hot summer off. Michaels knew better than to tempt fate by feeling smug, however. Every time he did that, something came along and Net Force got creamed.

“Are you making a crack about marriage dissolving my brain?” Jay asked.

“Not me. Not with my wife standing six feet away holding a squirming toddler she might throw at me.” He smiled at Toni as he said that, and waved and made a funny face at his son. He loved to see Little Alex smile.

Jay caught that on the virgil’s screen. “Um, right, Boss. Anyway, yeah, I can send it to your workstation. Nothing major.”

“Fire when ready, Gridley.”

Jay rolled his eyes. “Oh. Like I never heard that one before. Discom, Boss.”

Michaels shut the virgil off and went over to give his wife a kiss and a hug, and to hold his son for a moment. Then he would go see what Jay thought was important. At the least, it would keep him from getting thumped around by Granny Death here.

Let it be minor. But he knew in his heart that they were due a major blast.

Jay smiled and shook his head as he disconnected. He’d seen a lot of different sides of Alex Michaels over the years, but this goofy dad thing was a new one. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of father he would make.

He shook his head again and let those thoughts go. Fatherhood was for the future — if ever. Right now, he had a hacker to track.

He was working from home. After they got back from the honeymoon, he and Saji had moved to a larger place, one that allowed each of them to have a work space. At the moment, Saji was in her office, offering advice to an on-line class of students beginning the study of Buddhism. She’d be working for another hour, so he had plenty of time to do his own job.

The wirelessware he had at home was the same as what he used at Net Force HQ — the latest generations of haptic gear, including optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and weathermesh — so he had full sensory capability when he went on-line. He put on the gloves, the headset with its ear and nose plugs, and the eyecups, adjusting them so they were comfortable. He already wore the tight-fitting mesh suit.

The piece he had sent to Commander Michaels was but a tiny hint of something he knew — he knew—was much larger. But knowing it was not the same as finding it. Like the scenario he was about to dive into, there were a lot of submerged logs in the swamp, and while not all of them were alligators, you had to be very careful when you poked at them with a stick…

He grinned at the thought. “Scenario on,” he told his computer.

Jay cruised slowly through the murky waters of Bayou Baritaria, the air boat’s throttle nearly closed, watching carefully for submerged logs. Even without an underwater prop, hitting one at speed would be bad — not so much for the air boat as for him. Air boats were tough. The ³/₁₆“- thick 5086 marine aluminum that made up the boat’s flat hull was coated with an additional layer of a Teflon-based polymer, and would slide over pretty much anything, up to and including dry land. A land speed record had been set some time back in the late nineties with an air boat — on asphalt at over forty-seven miles an hour. Bad for the coating, but it worked.

However, hitting anything submerged at speed would put him in danger, in case the boat flipped, or spun toward one of the huge cypress trees that stood sentinel, gray Spanish moss draped thickly over their branches.

Only way to tell north on these trees would be to look for the dead Yankee.

Jay recalled a factoid he’d read somewhere, that all statues of southern Civil War generals faced north. They’d lost the war, but never really given up down here.

Beams of sunlight shone through the thick canopy of the swamp, touching here and there upon the murky waters, which, of course, teemed with water moccasins and leeches. The air had that dank, spoiled, rotting-vegetation odor that overlaid everything, a fecund, earthy stink. In the background he could hear the high-pitched whirring of cicadas.

A mosquito hummed by, and he swatted at it.

He grinned. Few took the time for VR details like that. That was the difference between a pro and amateurs: the little things.

His hot-rod air boat, a 560-horsepower V-8 engine with a 2:1 reduction gear, drove the six-bladed carbon-fiber propeller that pushed him along in the deep brownish green waters of the bayou. The flat bottom of the boat would let him float it in as little as an inch of water, and if he had to chase anything, he could be up to forty or fifty miles an hour in just a few seconds — faster, depending on the water conditions.

The air boat was a simple and effective design, invented over a hundred years ago by no less than Alexander Graham Bell. Apparently the inventor had used it as a test bed for early airplane engines, which had been the engine of choice for air boats until the 1990s, when the lower cost of maintenance for automobile engines made them the power plants of choice.

It tickled Jay that the great-granddaddy of modern networking, the first man to get to market with a telephone, had also invented the craft he’d chosen for his VR scenario.

It turned out that air boats were very ecofriendly as well — no submerged screw meant less disruption of the underwater ecosystem. In this case, the metaphor was extended to his investigation: Jay made significantly fewer ripples as he trolled for information.

Sure, he could be doing this the old-fashioned way, eyeballing a TFT monitor, a thin window separating him from the data, but who wanted to? The immediacy of all five senses gave him an edge — and Net Force’s chief VR jockey liked it that way.

Ahead he saw a brown lump in the water.

He reached down and adjusted the lever to the left of his seat, moved the twin foam-filled airfoil rudders that steered the boat. Like a leaf on a pond, the craft skated to the left slightly, just enough so that he would miss the target by a hair.

He glanced down — a submerged log. It wasn’t really a log, of course, but a packet of information sliding slowly along this section of the net.

The section of VR he was checking was an older one — one used for datastreams that didn’t take as much bandwidth — and data that sometimes wasn’t what it seemed to be.

It was a modern variation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter: Instead of sending encrypted high-speed data, some of the newer data pirates — and other hackers — hid it in plain sight, risking slower transmission speeds in less observed areas. After all, who would ever suspect anyone of using such a slow section of net to transfer anything critical?

Well, Jay Gridley, for one. Keeping an open mind about everything kept you from getting caught short a lot of times.

He was following a trail he’d started a few days previous, when he’d been rechecking the terrorists of CyberNation. Net Force was being real vigilant with these folks, after what had happened the year before. So far, nothing major had come up.

Another shape drifted by, this time a little faster than the log.

This one was greener, and he could see eyes and nostrils poking above the water — an example of Alligator mississippiensis — the American alligator.

The data in that packet was obviously a little higher priority than the info in the log, given a measure of protection, and speeded up slightly. Around him, Jay could see more shapes in the water, some gators, some logs.

Another set of gator nostrils and eyes slid past the air boat. Jay looked at the space between the eyes and nostrils — about twelve inches, he figured.

Now there’s a big one.

It was an old gator hunter’s rule of thumb: The distance between the inside of the nostrils and the eyes in inches was the approximate size of the animal in feet. This one should be about twelve feet long.

But when he looked for the gator’s wake, it was wrong: Instead of a tail tip sloshing water ten to twelve feet behind the eyes and nostrils, it was way too short — only about two feet.

Well, well.

Had he been looking at a computer monitor, he would have just seen that the checksum for the data packet he was looking at didn’t match. In his experience, that didn’t happen with legitimate data. Somebody was trying to make a big thing look small.

Time for a closer look at Mr. Gator.

He reached for his ketch-all pole — an extended piece of stainless steel tubing with a steel noose at one end that could be used to snare dangerous animals — and turned the air boat to follow the gator. The creature must have been imbued with some form of simplified warning system, because as soon as he started tracking it, it sped up.

Fast. Much too fast for a gator, unless it was jet-powered.

Jay grinned. Looked like he was going to get a chance to use his boat after all.

He accelerated rapidly, the roar of horsepower shoving the air boat after the gator. It looked like the critter was making for a branch off the bayou, just ahead. Jay pushed the throttle harder, and cypress trees whipped past. A low-hanging section of Spanish moss smacked him in the face.

Sometimes, he was too good, maybe.

The gator was fast, but no match for his boat. As he got closer, Jay lowered the ketch-all so its noose was just ahead of the gator. At this speed he’d have to be quick, lest the water rip the pole out of his hand.

He dipped the loop into in the water and yanked on the loop that drew the steel rope taut. The pole pulled hard at his arms, and had the gator been as long as advertised, it would have been a very unpleasant experience. But, of course, it was only a shrimp, just as he had figured.

Right yet again. It was a burden, sometimes. People got to expecting it.

He killed the engine and unbuckled his seat belt before lowering the gator onto the deck of his boat.

The two-foot-long beast was most unhappy, it thrashed and smacked its tail against the tough aluminum, making a thunking sound. Jay hand-over-handed his way down the ketch-all. He reached down and squeezed its jaws shut — not difficult, as its more powerful muscles were designed to bite, not open its mouth — and slipped another noose over its snout, pulling it tight.

Gotcha.

What he’d actually done of course was rascal the address of the gator’s destination so that it came to him instead of going to its original destination. But a gator chase was much more exciting than that.

Jay flipped the gator and looked at its belly. No seams.

Nice work.

Well he had ways around that, too.

He took a small skinning knife and slit the belly of the gator open. Instead of warm guts, however, pages of information spilled out, only the top one damaged by his rapid opening of the gator. He glanced at the writing on the first page and grinned.

Well, well. Look at this. How interesting…