State of War

39

Ames arose at dawn, showered, dressed, made himself a cup of coffee, and then hiked to the emergency escape hatch past the garbage dump. Once there, he climbed the three flights of stairs up to the surface. The door, a hydraulically operated vaultlike monster, was designed to keep out the riffraff fleeing atomic attack. Disc-shaped, it was slightly larger in diameter than a manhole cover, two feet thick, and hinged like a jeweler’s loupe. It pivoted on a massive, tempered pin as big around as a large man’s arm. It was camouflaged on the surface by a flat stretch of sand on a motorized frame that raised up on command. When the sand frame was in place, the entrance was virtually invisible. And even if you knew it was there, opening it would be a major chore without the proper keys, codes, and commands.

Ames used the periscope hidden in a creosote bush to check and make sure nobody was around. When he was certain that everything was clear, he pushed the door control button. It took thirty seconds for the sand frame to rise high enough for the door to pivot open.

He climbed up and out, standing under the sand frame, which now stood some seven feet above the ground.

This was the best time of day if you wanted to go outside here in the summer. It was as cool as it was going to get this time of year, and only the jackrabbits and birds were stirring. There were no other humans for as far as he could see, though a distant jet contrail arrowed across the pale, cloudless sky, too far away for him to hear the craft that created it.

Quiet, peaceful, and all his…

He spent ten minutes or so breathing the fresh air, glad to be out of the confines of the bomb shelter, laying his plans for the coming days and weeks. Satisfied, he went back inside, shut the door and lowered the frame, and headed back along the echoing tile corridor toward the kitchen. He had in mind salmon hash and eggs for breakfast this morning, and maybe a mimosa to wash in down.

He grinned. Wonder what the poor folks are doing this morning.

The Net Force jet was nearly there by the time dawn broke locally, pacing the sun from the east. They would have all day to get set, plenty of time.

Michaels, surprisingly, had fallen asleep on the trip, and awoke as the craft began its descent toward the new Air Force base a couple of hours away from their target. Howard had arranged to borrow some trucks from the Texas National Guard, Net Force technically being a part of the Guard, at least for accounting purposes. In theory, the vehicles should be there when the jet landed.

After they were down and the unloading process under way, John Howard joined Michaels in the back of the mobile operations center, which was essentially a canvas-covered flatbed truck. Despite this, it was air-conditioned, after a fashion.

“For the computers,” Howard said. “The personal tactical units don’t need it, but the bigger ones get goofy once the air temp rises above body heat.”

“Is it going to get that hot here?”

“West Texas in the summer? Oh, yes. It’ll be cooler after dark, but we will have to load and move out in the daylight.”

Alex looked at him. “Do you really think this will work, John?” he asked. “It seems like an awfully big place to assault with only ten men.”

A forklift wheeled past bearing a pair of wooden crates bigger than coffins. There were three more like them still on the jet.

General Howard said, “I think so. The truth is, though, that either we nail it with ten men or we wouldn’t be able to do it with a hundred. Like you said, it’s a big place, and surprise will work better for us than sheer numbers.”

Alex nodded. He’d known that already, of course, but this entire operation was going forward on his say-so alone. He had the final word on go/no go, and he still could cancel it at any time up until they actually entered Ames’s bomb shelter. After that things got a lot dicier.

Ames had plenty to distract him. He had full net capabilities as well as satellite-reception radio and video. He could get five hundred television channels from around the world, and local programming from the radio stations in Addis Ababa, if he wanted. He had a library to rival those in many small towns in hard copy alone, legal tomes, medical books, not to mention thousands of novels, entertainment vids, and musical compositions on DVD and minis, should his net connection somehow go out. He had a gym, a lap pool, a shooting range, a basketball court, and even a six-lane bowling alley. He had food, wine, and a pharmacy deep enough to take care of a hundred people all sick with different diseases.

He had art on his walls, paintings by masters. He had sculptures. He had three of his favorite chairs, and a computer-operated bed of biogel that was the most comfortable in the world.

He had everything he needed, except a challenge.

Ames shrugged. There was nothing he could do about that right now. His plans were in place. Net Force was tied up by the lawsuit, afraid to do anything, and every day they delayed brought the passage of the CyberNation bill closer to reality.

Everything was moving along nicely. All he had to do was wait.

And that, he’d found before, was the one thing he did not do well.

He shrugged. That’s why he had this place stocked as well as he did. He needed the distractions.

Thinking about them, he decided that he felt like doing a few laps in the pool, then maybe a little shooting at the range. It would be good to keep a sound body and sharp eye to go with the sound mind…

The staging area was twelve miles away from the target, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, it was a hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit. The only shade came from the trucks and a few scraggly willow trees along an almost dry creek bed.

Howard saw Julio coming toward him, wiping his face with a rag.

“I hope these things don’t go belly up in this heat,” Lieutenant Fernandez said.

Behind Howard, Michaels said, “Is that likely?”

“I hope not. It’ll be a long walk home if they do.”

The things to which Julio was referring were the five specially fitted Segway scooters that Howard, Michaels, Julio, and two troopers would be riding toward the target from the south while the other five soldiers rolled in on the position from the north.

The little electric scooters wore stealth gear, the latest generation of polycarb fiber sheathing, all sharp angles and smooth surfaces. They had used similar camo on trucks. It worked, especially on civilian-grade radar and Doppler, but it wasn’t perfect. That was why the troops in the truck would be feinting from the north as Howard and the others sneaked in from the opposite direction.

If Ames was awake when they rolled in, and if he had his radar on, he would see a nice, fat blip thrown by the truck, and, with any luck, not the scooters. They wouldn’t be totally invisible, but they would be fuzzy and dim enough so he probably wouldn’t notice them.

The plan was to pull the truck to within a mile or so and stop it. The men would get out and move around, offering enough activity to occupy a watcher’s attention. Even if he had FLIR or some kind of spookeye starlight scope, the hope was that he’d be focused on the obvious threat. Which wouldn’t seem imminent, since they wouldn’t be close to any of the known entrances.

Meanwhile, Howard and the strike team from the south would get there, get inside, and grab the guy before he knew what hit him.

In theory, anyway.

The commander had asked the big question: Just how did they get into a secure facility designed to keep everything up to and including nuclear radiation out? Digging through thirty or forty feet of dirt wasn’t a chore for ordinary men with shovels, not if they were in hurry, and the doors were more than likely going to be locked.

Howard thought he had an answer, but that remained to be seen. If the plans they had of the place were accurate, if they could get there undetected, and if the other new gear worked, they had a shot at it.

If, if, if.

“We’re pretty much ready to roll,” Julio said. “I think I’m going to take a nap.”

Julio ambled off and climbed into the back of the truck with the computer gear in it. Howard nodded. It was at least twenty degrees cooler in there. He’d find room — and sleeping curled in relative cool was better than stretched out on the dirt in the middle of a Texas summer day.

“It’s not a bad idea, getting some rest,” Howard said. “We won’t start our run until midnight.”

Michaels looked dubious.

“One of the first things you learn as a soldier is to eat and sleep whenever you can,” Howard said. “Never know when you’ll get the chance again, once things start cooking.”

Ames put on an old Marx brothers’ movie around six, fixed himself a sandwich and a microbrew beer when that was done, and headed for bed. Though there was no real reason for it, he was tired. A couple of hours in the magic bed would fix him right up.

Michaels looked at his watch. It was five of twelve. The day’s heat had died down considerably, but it was hardly what you would call “cool”—it was still about eighty or so, he guessed.

Howard, dressed in chocolate-chip camo that matched the clothes Michaels himself wore, even to the spider-silk body armor, walked over to where Michaels stood.

“I thought it got cold at night in the desert.”

“Depends on the desert,” Howard said. “It probably gets colder here in the winter. You ready?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go over this one more time,” Howard said. “The scooters have fat tires that will work fine on dirt, though it will take most of an hour to get there. The spookeyes will make it look like daylight, and all you have to do is stay behind me. I’m tracking Julio, and he has mapped out the safest route, using GPS grids. Troopers Holder and Reaves will bring up the rear. If you can keep from falling off your scooter, you’ll be fine. You had a chance to check on it, right?”

“On the nice, flat, concrete parking lot at Net Force HQ.”

Howard grinned. “You’ll do fine, Commander. Just remember to hang on to the little handle grip and lean. We won’t be doing any fancy maneuvers out there.”

Michaels nodded.

Howard looked at his watch. “Okay, people, time to mount up!”

Michaels walked to his scooter. It looked sort of like a filing cabinet with some odd bits projecting from it, angled so that one edge was leading. The back of it was hollowed out, and the whole thing was mounted on what looked like an old nonmotorized push lawnmower. The only part of his body that would be visible from the front to radar would be his head, and the stealth helmet with its built-in spookeye heads-up display shield was supposed to take care of that.

Well, they’d find out how well it worked soon enough.

Lieutenant Fernandez climbed onto his machine, leaned forward, and started to roll. Howard followed suit. Michaels mounted his own two-wheeler, put his helmet on, and flipped the motor’s power switch.

“Here we go,” he said quietly.

Ames awoke past midnight, almost one A.M., not sure what had awakened him. He got up and padded to the bathroom. On his way back to bed he heard a little beeping noise.

He frowned. What was that?

The control console on his bedside table flashed a red light from the screen, pulsing in time with the noise. It took a second for him to realize what it was.

The radar alarm. He had company!

He didn’t bother to dress, just grabbed his pistol and ran to the computer center down the hall in his pajamas.

The radar/Doppler screen showed activity to the north, a mile or so away. Who was that, and what were they doing out here?

There were two dozen cameras on his property, with others hidden in the ground or in bushes or trees past that, all wireless remotes. He cranked up the one closest to the intruders. It was a hundred yards away from them, but the optics were very good, light-gathering intensifiers making the night scene easily visible even at almost one in the morning, although with a slight greenish cast to it.

What he saw was a big truck, a flatbed, with two guys standing next to it. The truck had the hood up, and a third guy was poking around in the engine compartment. They didn’t look like any kind of official anything, just three guys attending to a malfunctioning truck. On their way from no count to no place, and broke down in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t even know this place was here.

Still, he wasn’t going to take his eyes off them. No sense taking chances. Not at this point.

But maybe he should put some clothes on, just in case.

Riding the scooter across the ground was both easier and harder than Michaels had expected. The ride was bumpy and slow. Then again, he hadn’t fallen off, which was something.

He had no idea how far they had come. It seemed as if they had been riding for hours, though a glance at his watch showed they’d actually been rolling for only about forty-five minutes.

The five of them wore LOSIR gear, line-of-sight infrared com sets that wouldn’t be picked up by ordinary radio receivers, and on scrambled channels so that anybody else with such gear couldn’t hear them anyway. Even so, Howard had ordered com-silence except for emergencies, and so far, at least, there hadn’t been any of those.

Knock on wood…

The night vision devices worked well enough. It wasn’t exactly like noon, and the helmet’s computer coloration was more pastel than reality. But it didn’t look like an unlighted desert in the middle of the night, either. The wonders of modern technology.

On point, Julio Fernandez slowed. Howard followed suit, and Michaels leaned back a hair to slow his own scooter. Michaels watched carefully. Once they arrived, there was a pattern in which they would have to park the vehicles, so as to screen them from the sensor’s view. There would be a dead zone behind the scooter screen, Howard had told him, an invisible gap in which they could work undetected. Well, at least unseen. They’d be making a fair amount of noise pretty quick…

Julio raised his hand and made a “stop” gesture. He angled to his left a hair. Howard altered his course. Michaels followed Howard, knowing that he had to park his scooter two meters to the right and a meter back. The other two troopers would complete the pattern behind and to the side of Michaels.

Thirty seconds later, the five were parked. Fernandez came back and the men gathered close. “Right there,” he said, pointing.

Howard said, “You heard the lieutenant. Do it.”

The two troopers said, “Yes, sir!”

They looked pretty strange, outfitted in the gear they wore. Exoskeletons, Howard had called them. Specialized equipment with motors and frames that essentially turned the wearer into Hercules, several times as strong as an ordinary man. There was a mechanical hum as the power units started. The two troopers, looking like something from a science fiction movie, moved to what looked like any other patch of dirt out here and started digging. One wielded a heavy pick, the other a shovel.

Howard had examined the plans for the once-secret bunker with great care. He had talked at length with his engineers, and determined a method of attack that should work.

“There’s thirty or forty feet of earth between the surface and the roof in most places,” he’d said. “It would take a backhoe days to dig all the way down. And the entrances are all hardened steel and reinforced concrete, so blasting through those would be a major chore. However, there are relatively weak spots.”

Howard had shown Michaels on the diagrams. “Here, at these access ports, the stairwells are open all the way down. Now, there is a big plug of concrete and rebar surrounding the actual entrance and exit, but if you go just a couple meters out, the slab is much thinner, only about a meter thick, under half a meter of earth. They couldn’t make it too heavy without having to build massive support structures. Punch through that, move a little more dirt, and you are in the stairwell.”

“Three feet of reinforced concrete doesn’t seem like something a couple of guys with picks and shovels are going to cut through in a hurry, even wearing Spider-Man suits,” Michaels had said.

“No, sir, that is true. However, they built this place back in the 1950s, and they designed it to withstand the technology they had back then. Obviously they didn’t have the resources we have today. These days we have shaped charges that will go through concrete and rebar like a hot knife through butter. All we have to do is clear away the dirt and get to the hard stuff.”

“That seems awful easy. Why didn’t Ames update things when he moved in?”

“I’m guessing that he was banking on the fact that no one knows about this place. You don’t need thick walls to guard a place no one knows about. And besides, I don’t really know what he could have done about it. These weak spots are design elements. He would have had to essentially rebuild the entire bomb shelter to get rid of them, and there was no way to do that and still keep this place a secret. Like I said, though, I’m guessing here.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “Assuming you’re right and these weak spots are still here, isn’t the idea to surprise him? Won’t this charge make a pretty loud ‘bang’ when it goes off?”

“It will. But I think we have that covered.”

Howard had told him why, and Michaels had to admit, it sounded as if it might work.

The two troopers were moving dirt at an incredible rate. In just a few minutes they reached the concrete. A few more minutes and they had cleared a rough circle five feet across.

Those exoskeletons were certainly impressive.

Fernandez climbed down into the shallow hole and set a brick-shaped block the size of a loaf of bread onto the concrete.

Fernandez said, “Ready, sir.”

Howard looked at his watch. He touched a control on his LOSIR headset and said, “Thirty seconds, on my mark.”

Fernandez nodded and touched a control on the shaped charge.

“Mark,” Howard said into his throat mike.

“Twenty meters, people, that way!” Fernandez said.

They moved. Quickly.