Net Force (1998) Read online

  Jimmy Joe grabbed one of Tyrone's arms and steered him back the way they came. "Ride, rider, ride! Time his brain clicks back on-line, we need to be scanning elsewhere !"

  Tyrone understood--he definitely prossed that, nopraw at all. On some level, though, he was really pissed off. He wasn't ready to die, but sooner or later, he was going to have to do something about Essay.

  What to do and how to do it--well, those were the problems.

  Wednesday, September 22nd, 6 a.m. San Diego

  Ruzhyo did not much care for television, though he sometimes watched the international news to see what mention there was of his homeland. CNN droned in the background as he fixed coffee in the small pot provided by the hotel. The coffee was prepackaged and stale, but it was better than nothing.

  It had been yet another bad night for dreams. After managing to get back to sleep for an hour or two, he came awake and knew it was pointless to try again. He had known a man in the army once who, it was said, could sleep while eating a bowl of hot soup. Ruzhyo was not that good, but he had learned to survive on a minimum amount of rest when he had been a soldier, catching naps when he could; two hours was enough to fuel a day.

  He took his coffee and went back to stare at the television.

  In Idaho, some cult had gone into a barn and set it on fire, to free themselves from the flesh to join their god. Ruzhyo did not know how free they were, but the flesh was certainly well-done, to judge from the pictures.

  In France, student demonstrators had attacked a police line outside a hotel where the French President was scheduled to speak. Nine of the demonstrators had been hospitalized with wounds from rubber bullets; two others had died from the same cause.

  In India, a flood drowned two hundred people, uncounted sacred cows, and washed away several villages.

  In Japan, an earthquake on the island of Kyushu had killed eighty-nine people in collapsing buildings and done major damage to the city of Kagoshima. During the quake, the new bullet train that spanned the island had also crashed when the ground in front of it dropped twenty feet, killing sixty and injuring more than three hundred.

  Of Chechnya, CNN had nothing to say.

  Ruzhyo sipped his bad coffee and shook his head. Just as well that there was no news of home, given how dreary it all seemed. The world was a dangerous place, full of misery. All over it, people would be lamenting the loss of loved ones this day, family or friends taken by accidents or illness or murder. During those few times when he had felt qualms about the work he did, all he had ever needed to do was watch the television, or read the newspapers, or just talk to someone. Life was full of woe. He was no more than a drop in a sea of misery. If he took a man out, what did it matter? If not him, something or somebody else would. In the end, it did not matter all that much, did it?

  His com unit cheeped. He sipped the coffee and stared at the com. No, it did not matter. And just as well--more wetwork was surely about to be forthcoming.

  Wednesday, September 22nd, 4:45 p.m. Washington, D.C.

  Naked, save for a sweatband around her head, the Selkie sat at the small kitchen table and examined her cane.

  She checked the wood for nicks and gouges. Every couple of months, she would take fine sandpaper and Watco satin-finish oil to the cane, to smooth and polish the already smooth hickory. It was hardwood, but it scratched easily, and she liked to have it gleaming. The manufacturer recommended mineral oil, but Watco gave a tougher finish. Smelled better, too.

  It was a couple hours work to do it right, the sanding and finishing, but one of the first things she'd learned from her father was to take care of her tools so they wouldn't fail her when she needed them. The guys who made the wooden weapons did excellent work. She owned five of their canes in three different styles, as well as two sets of escrima sticks, and a custom-made pair of six-inch yawaras .

  The cane she preferred for work in places where she did not carry a gun was the Custom Combat model. It was hickory, thirty-seven inches long, blond in color, with a round shaft a little over an inch in diameter; it had a large crook tipped by a flamingo-beak design. Hickory was best for the street, heavier than the walnut tournament models, more sturdy than the oak. The end of the curved hook--called the horn--was sharp and wicked enough to do some real damage. The ground end of the shaft was a dull and rounded point, innocuous-looking, and with the rubber tip in place, perfectly usable as a support cane. There was a series of decorative notches carved into the shaft just below the crook, designed to serve as a handgrip.

  That cane was at home. The one she inspected at the moment, the Instructor's model, was almost identical to the Combat style, same length and diameter, but the crook was a hair wider and the horn was rounded instead of beaked. It looked a lot more like the cane an old lady should be using to hobble about with. It wouldn't do for some eagle-eyed cop to see that pointed horn and think: Why, Granny, what a sharp stick you have. . . .

  The weapon looked okay, so the Selkie left the kitchen and padded naked into the living room of her rental condo where she had set up her practice target. This was a section of an inch-and-a-half-diameter aluminum rod with a ring-bolt on one end. The rod was wrapped in a pad of biogel, the same stuff they used to soften racing bike seats and the insteps of running shoes; the gel was then covered with a stretched sheet of chamois leather and held tightly in place with duct tape. It wasn't exactly the same as flesh over bone, but it was close enough for her purposes. At home, she had a wing chun training dummy set up with similar wrapping, so she could work the full range of angles, with weapons or feet and hands, but on the road, one had to make do.

  She got a sudden mental image of herself trying to check a wing chun dummy in at an airport with her luggage, with the reaction that would bring, and grinned.

  A thin nylon rope ran from the target's eyebolt through a second eye hook she'd screwed into a ceiling rafter; the other end of the line was tied to a doorknob. This way, she could adjust the target's height. Right now, it was at knee level. Knees were great targets for a stick--a broken knee put a big crimp in anybody's fighting style.

  She moved within range of the target, took a couple of cleansing breaths and assumed her basic stance, cane in front of her, tip on the ground, both hands on the crook. She was aware she would look very interesting to a watcher were not all the curtains pulled closed: a naked woman standing with a cane in front of her crotch in the middle of a room empty except for something weird hanging from the ceiling. She grinned. She'd always liked working out nude, there was something so primal about it.

  She cleared her mind. Wait. Wait . . .

  She whipped the cane up from the floor in a short arc from her right, slid her right hand to mid-shaft to guide the strike, her left hand to the carved grip to power it.

  The solid thunk! of the wood into the padded bar felt very satisfying. A good hit.

  She spun the cane, caught the target in the crook, pulled it toward herself, then pivoted the stick and hit the padding from the opposite side.

  One more solid hit and the target stopped cold, no swing.

  Yes!

  She pulled the cane back, held it like a pool cue and thrust the tip forward. Hit the target high, knocked it back.

  Yes.

  It was just practice, but even so, the Selkie was in the zone--she was in the killing zone. And there was no place more exciting.

  Monday, September 27th, 3 p.m. Maintenon, France

  Plekhanov sat in an old stone bell tower, a long-barreled Mauser Gewehr Model 1898 rifle balanced across his knees. The piece weighed about four and half kilos, was intrinsically accurate, fired the 7.92mm cartridge at high velocity, and had an appropriate-period M73B1 telescopic sight mounted upon it. Even though the scope was American-made, used primarily on the Springfield 1903, some of the optics had found their way into Germany. This was somewhat ironic, given the uses to which they had been put. The long bolt made the rifle's action slow to operate, and it held only five rounds in the box magazine, but the ran
ge would be enough to allow plenty of time to escape despite the sluggish operational speed.

  The church steeple was the tallest point in the picturesque and nameless little village southwest of Maintenon, and offered a good view of the approaching armies. The AEF--American Expeditionary Force--had come late to the Great War, but they were here now, and would help turn the tide. Recent storms in the region had been torrential, and it was one of their brigades now slogging its way across the muddy fields even as Plekhanov watched.

  Along with the Americans was a polyglot combined-unit comprised of Russian, Serbian, Chechen, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Chinese and Indian soldiers.

  Plekhanov removed the clunky helmet he wore and ran one hand through his sweat-damp hair. He grinned. Historical accuracy fell down a bit in this scenario, since no Oriental countries had fielded soldiers in this area during World War I, even though Japan and China had been considered allies of the western Europeans battling Germany. Certainly there had been no Koreans or Thais--still called Siamese back then--nor Indians, unless perhaps the Brits had sprinkled a few Gurkhas or Bengal Lancers in among their troops. The British were odd ducks, so he supposed that might well have been possible. Plekhanov's research was not as thorough as it might have been, since it wasn't really necessary. While writing the software, he did recall reading a piece about how outraged the Brits had been when the nabob of Bengal, one Suraj-ud-Dowlah, sacked Calcutta in 1757. After the battle, the nabob had stuffed 146 captured Brits into a small and very hot room at Fort William. When they were released the next day, only twenty-three of them were still alive; the rest had died, most of them from heat stroke. Thus was born the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta."

  Careful there, old man, you are drifting. Best you get back to the business at hand.

  Plekhanov put his helmet back on, shifted his position from where he sat upon the empty wine cask and propped the rifle onto the ledge under the tower's opening. He could have used the hiking scenario, but since he was taking direct action himself--there was nobody he could trust to do this particular job--he thought a more active imagery was appropriate. A German sniper picking off enemy troops at long range seemed eminently suitable. Poetic, even.

  He chambered a round, and lined the scope up on a rather fat American officer who looked like a caricature of a Wall Street stockbroker, despite the military uniform. Even with the optics, the target was still somewhat small at the distance--nearly two hundred meters, he judged. The scope was zeroed in at one hundred meters, so he aimed a bit high, for the head, to allow for a little extra drop. He took a deep breath, held it, squeezed the trigger. . . .

  In New York City, a currency tasking computer subcontracted to the Federal Reserve sent copies of all user ID codes admitted to every connected terminal--

  Even as the fat American collapsed with a bullet buried in his chest, Plekhanov worked the bolt and shifted his aim.

  Ah. There was the White Russian, saber in hand, leading his men. Plekhanov put the crosshairs on the man's throat, held his breath again, fired--

  In Moscow, the computer interlink responsible for balance-of-trade statistics with the European Commonwealth scrambled and went down--

  There was the Korean officer, trying to get his troops to duck and cover. Plekhanov worked the rifle's bolt, ejected another spent shell and chambered a fresh round. Good-bye, Mr. Kim--

  A small setting inside the fabber making the new PowerExtreme mainframe computer chips at the Kim Electronics plant in Seoul altered, not enough to be noticed by the operators, but enough to change certain pathways in the chips' silicon circuitry. The virus had a time limit, so the settings would revert, but a thousand chips would be affected before that happened, turning the high-end systems they would eventually control into electronic time bombs waiting to go off--

  And here on the muddy French field was an Indian looking for a place to hide. Sorry, Punjab, old Wog, there's no cover there--

  The newly installed computer traffic system in Bombay blew its triple-redundancy circuits. All two hundred main traffic signals under its direct control turned green. All passenger-and freight-train track signals turned green. So did all light-rail crossing signals--

  One unfired bullet remained. He had to use it before they got too close. He already knew his target. Plekhanov swung the rifle's barrel to the right. The Siamese commander held a pistol; he fired it wildly. He would not be able to hit Plekhanov at this distance, save by accident, even if he could see him, which he could not. Still, it paid to be cautious. Plekhanov recalled the last words of the American General John Sedgwick, speaking of the Confederate sharp-shooters during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance--"

  Plekhanov grinned.

  Aim. Squeeze--

  The Thai Prime Minister's collection of personal pornography, most of which showed recognizable images of him in sexual congress with women not his wife--and some of which showed him in such congress with her, too--somehow uploaded itself from his home computer and into the mainframe of the Southeast Asian News Service. Then, two of these pictures went into the hourly edition of SEANS NetNews in place of scheduled images.

  Plekhanov raised his face from the Mauser. An oily wisp of smoke drifted from the muzzle, the smell of burned powder entwined with it. Below and still a hundred meters distant, the enemy soldiers milled around in panic, then dropped prone, looking for targets. Some of them returned fire, but none of the bullets came close to where he was.

  Enough damage for one day. He shouldered the rifle by its sling and headed for the tower's steps.

  Monday, September 27th, 8:11 a.m. Quantico

  Everywhere Jay Gridley drove on the net, sirens screamed. The virtual highways were full of fire engines, ambulances, police cruisers, a whole shitload of activity as people went to repair the damage and to haul away metaphorical bodies. Within a few minutes, there had been major wrecks in at least three or four supposedly secure systems internationally, maybe more.

  Jay drove the Viper at speed and got to the spots as best he could, legally when they allowed it, illegally when they didn't; what he saw was not good. It was the same guy dropping sharp spikes on the roads. The pattern was there, the same blurred and unidentifiable footprints as before, leading away and quickly dead-ending. Maybe the local operators couldn't see it, but Jay was sure of it. He couldn't ID the terrorist, but he knew it was one guy.

  He pulled the Viper to a halt on a long and relatively straight stretch of the new Thailand-Burma Highway. A reporter stood next to a smoldering limo with a bunch of cops, making notes on a little flatscreen. Jay knew the guy slightly; he was a distant cousin a couple of times removed.

  "Hey, Chuan, how's it goin'?"

  "Jay? What are you doing here? Something I ought to know about?"

  "Nah, just cruising."

  The other man looked around, seeming to shift his gaze as he blinked. "Ah, your highway metaplay. I see you're still driving that bomb on wheels. I disremember what it's called, some kind of lizard or snake?"

  "Viper. It gets me there." He looked at the limo. "So who's the cookie in the shake-and-bake portable oven there?"

  "A mess, isn't it? Behold, our beloved Prime Minister Sukho. This is what's left of his career, anyhow. Somebody got past the OS security wards on his personal system, and then became very clever with the nasty pictures hidden therein. Gave them to my bosses. My service somehow managed to accidentally send a pair of them out with the feed--or so the editors say. I know a few would have happily done it on purpose.

  "So, on the sports screen, instead of the photo of the Indonesian football team winning the World Soccer Cup in Brazil, we got our beloved Prime Minister being attended to by an enthusiastic professional girl well known in Bangkok as Neena the Cleaner. And two jumps later, on the international screen, instead of Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad doing a nice ribbon-cutting with a bunch of dignitaries for a new rec facility at Cyberjaya, we gave our viewers Sukho on a big round bed wit
h two other very naked Bangkok working girls seeing what will go where. Bet those pix raised an eyebrow or two at the old water cooler during break." He smiled. "Hey, you ever been to Cyberjaya? In RW, I mean?"

  His cousin was talking about a nine-mile-by-thirty-mile zone in Malaysia called the Multimedia Super Corridor. Begun in '97, the MSC stretched south from Kuala Lumpur, and included at the south end a new international airport and a new federal capital, Putrajaya. "Once," Jay said. "I spent a few days there a year or so back, a real-time seminar on the new graphic platform. Unbelievable place."