Point of Impact Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  EPILOGUE

  The Bestselling Novels of

  TOM CLANCY

  RAINBOW SIX

  John Clark is used to doing the CIA’s dirty work. Now he’s taking on the world....

  “ACTION-PACKED.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  EXECUTIVE ORDERS

  The most devastating terrorist act in history leaves Jack Ryan as President of the United States....

  “UNDOUBTEDLY CLANCY’S BEST YET.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  DEBT OF HONOR

  It begins with the murder of an American woman in the back streets of Tokyo. It ends in war....

  “A SHOCKER CLIMAX SO PLAUSIBLE YOU’LL WONDER WHY IT HASN’T YET HAPPENED!”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

  The smash bestseller that launched Clancy’s career—the incredible search for a Soviet defector and the nuclear submarine he commands ...

  “BREATHLESSLY EXCITING.”

  —The Washington Post

  RED STORM RISING

  The ultimate scenario for World War III-the final battle for global control ...

  “THE ULTIMATE WAR GAME ... BRILLIANT.”

  —Newsweek

  PATRIOT GAMES

  CIA analyst Jack Ryan stops an assassination—and incurs the wrath of Irish terrorists....

  “A HIGH PITCH OF EXCITEMENT.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

  The superpowers race for the ultimate Star Wars missile defense system....

  “CARDINAL EXCITES, ILLUMINATES ... A REAL PAGE-TURNER.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  The killing of three U.S. officials in Colombia ignites the American government’s explosive, and top secret, response....

  “A CRACKLING GOOD YARN.”

  —The Washington Post

  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

  The disappearance of an Israeli nuclear weapon threatens the balance of power in the Middle East—and around the world....

  “CLANCY AT HIS BEST ... NOT TO BE MISSED.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  WITHOUT REMORSE

  The Clancy epic fans have been waiting for. His code name is Mr. Clark. And his work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and efficient... but who is he really?

  “HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  And don’t miss Tom Clancy’s

  fascinating nonfiction

  works ...

  SPECIAL FORCES

  A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

  “CLANCY IS A NATURAL.”—USA Today

  CARRIER

  A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

  “CLANCY IS A MASTER OF HARDWARE.”

  —The Washington Post

  AIRBORNE

  A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

  “NOBODY DOES IT BETTER.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  SUBMARINE

  A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  “TAKES READERS DEEPER THAN THEY’VE EVER GONE INSIDE A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ARMORED CAV

  A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment

  “TOM CLANCY IS THE BEST THERE IS.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  FIGHTER WING

  A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

  “CLANCY’S WRITING IS SO STRONG THAT READERS FEEL THEY ARE THERE.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  MARINE

  A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

  “NO ONE CAN EQUAL HIS TALENT.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE!

  NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY

  The Hunt for Red October

  Red Storm Rising

  Patriot Games

  The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  Clear and Present Danger

  The Sum of All Fears

  Without Remorse

  Debt of Honor

  Executive Orders

  Rainbow Six

  SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Games of State

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Acts of War

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike

  NONFICTION

  Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment

  Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

  Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

  Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

  Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

  Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

  Into the Storm: A Study in Command

  (written with General Fred Franks)

  Every Man a Tiger (written with General Charles Horner)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE®: POINT OF IMPACT

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  Netco Partners

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / April 2001

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Netco Partners

  NET FORCE® is a registered trademark of Netco Partners.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be

  reproduced in any
form without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00248-3

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., and Tom Mallon, Esq.; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers of Hollywood.com, Inc.; and the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb, without whom this book would never have been conceived. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday, October 1, 2011

  Atlantic City, New Jersey

  “We should go outside and enjoy the sunny weather,” Mary Lou said.

  Bert snickered. “Right. We’z drove alla way from da Bronx to Atlantic City to take the goddamned sun? I can sit onna stoop at home, I want to get hot. No thankyuz, I’m happy right here.”

  Bert fed another dollar into the slot machine and pushed the button. He didn’t like the new electronic machines as much as the old mechanical ones, like those in the back rooms of the New Jersey bars where his father used to sneak off with him when he was a kid. Those had been fun, with the big arm you pulled down and the real wheels going round and round. Cost a quarter, was all. He didn’t quite trust the new ones to pay off—it’d be too easy for some computer geek to rig ’em so they’d keep every damned dime you put in—but it was what it was. Hell, he was up seventy-five bucks, he should complain?

  Around him, the machines flashed colored lights, hummed and whirred and played crappy music, and now and then dropped tokens into a metal tray.

  Mary Lou said, “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

  The slot’s computer screen whirled to stop on a cherry, a bar, and a picture of some dead rock star. Crap. Only seventy-four dollars ahead now.

  Irritated, Bert said, “What?”

  “Over there. Lookit.”

  He glanced in the direction Mary Lou was pointing. He saw right away what she meant. There was a fat, white-haired old guy, maybe sixty-five, walking into the casino. Way he moved, he was like a man with a mission, nothing real unusual there, except the dude was in a tiny red Speedo and nothing else.

  “God, I’m trying to win money here, you wanna make me puke? There ought to be a law against a suit like that if you’re thirty pounds overweight.”

  “Prolly there is. I’m pretty sure the casino rules say no swimsuits without a robe and some kind of sandals or shoes. There you go, see, the security guard is gonna toss him out.”

  A big uniformed guard, six five, two sixty, easy, angled toward the fat guy in the red Speedo. This might be worth watching. You didn’t get to see a guy in a bikini bottom get bounced up by a casino guard real often. In fact, Bert had never seen it before.

  Speedo smiled at the giant guard, grabbed him by the arms just under his shoulders, picked him up, and threw him like the guy was a toy. The guard smashed into a slot machine with a loud, rattling crash.

  “Holy shit!” Bert said.

  He wasn’t the only one to notice Speedo at this point. Two more guards came running, pulling out those expandable steel batons they carried as they ran.

  Speedo didn’t seem concerned. He took a couple of steps to the nearest slot. It was bolted to the floor, so Bert didn’t know what the guy thought he was gonna do with it.

  Still smiling, Speed wrenched the slot from the floor with a sound like a nail being pulled from wet wood, and threw that, too. Made a helluva noise.

  Bert stared, frozen. This wasn’t possible. He hit the gym two or three times a week, kept in shape for a man pushing forty, could bench two fifty for reps, and there was no way this flabby old Q-Tip-haired dude had the muscle to do what he’d just done, no way! Nobody was that strong.

  The second security guard to get there let fly with his expandable night stick, took a good crack at Speedo’s white head. Speedo reached up, almost in slow motion, grabbed the baton as it came down, jerked it from the guard’s grip, and threw it. The thing whistled as it whirled away, so fast Bert couldn’t even track it. Speedo shoved the guard one-handed, and the guy just flew into two by-standers and knocked all three of them down.

  Mary Lou stared at Speedo, frozen like a deer in headlights. Bert understood that. It was like he was hypnotized himself. He couldn’t look away.

  The third guard, seeing what had happened to the other two, dropped his baton and went for his pistol. Bert thought this was a real good idea.

  Speedo took a couple of quick steps—really quick steps—and caught the guard’s wrist before he cleared leather.

  Thirty feet away, Bert heard the sound of the man’s arm bones breaking.

  Oh, man!

  The guard fell to his knees, screaming in pain, and Speedo stepped around him like he was doggy doo on the sidewalk.

  Then things really got going. Speedo waded through the casino like Sherman through Georgia, breaking stuff, throwing it, tearing the place up. He knocked over slots, he upended card tables, he flipped a roulette wheel table completely over. People scrambled to get out of his way.

  He was a human wrecking ball, he was smiling while he did it, and Bert couldn’t begin to understand how he was doing it. He just stood there and watched.

  It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two before the local cops showed up. Six of them in full battle array.

  The first couple of cops to reach Speedo tried to whack him with their batons and collar him. You’d think, after seeing what the guy had done, they’d have better sense, but they didn’t, and Speedo grabbed one and used him like a club on the second.

  The other four cops were smarter. One of them fast-drew his pepper spray, another pulled an air taser, and both let loose.

  Speedo ran at the cops. Through the pepper fog, and from where he stood, Bert saw the two electric taser needles in the old man’s chest, and if either the fog or the juice bothered him, you couldn’t tell. Either one should have stopped him, had him gagging or jittering like a spider on a hot stove, but he never slowed. Speedo slammed into the next two cops, knocking them sprawling. He went down himself, but he was up in a heartbeat. He looked pissed off now, and he scooped one of the cops from the floor—a big black dude who probably went two hundred pounds—and shot-putted the cop at a thick plate glass partition that separated a cafeteria hall from the casino floor.

  The partition had to be six, eight feet away, easy.

  The partition shattered, shards of glass flew everywhere, and the cop who went through it would be lucky if he wasn’t slashed to hamburger.

  “Everybody down!” one of the two remaining cops on his feet screamed. “Down, down, down!”

  People hit the floor, but Speedo wasn’t one of them, and Bert stayed up watching, too.

  The two cops had their pistols out by now—big ole Glocks—pointed at the old man.

  Speedo looked at them and smiled, a kind of sad smile. Like he felt sorry for them. He started walking toward the cops.

  “Stop, asshole!”

  He didn’t.

  Both cops fired, couple, three times each.

  Speedo kept coming, and they kept shooting.

  Bert saw the hits on the old man, saw dark puckers appear in his arms and chest, wounds that oozed blood,
but he kept going.

  People screamed bloody murder, but the cops kept blasting away. In some comer of his mind, Bert tried to keep count of the shots, but there were too many of them. How many rounds did those guns hold? Fifteen? Eighteen? They were going to town.

  It was like some monster movie. The old guy in the red bathing suit just kept shambling toward the cops. He was hit at least six or eight times, but he wouldn’t stop.

  “Fuck!” one of the cops yelled. He turned and ran.

  The other cop clicked empty, then, when Speedo was almost on top of him, he threw the Glock at the old man.

  Yeah, right. Guy takes a whole shitload of bullets and a plastic pistol is not gonna bounce off him like a cotton ball? Bert stared at the cop. Whaddayuz, stupid?

  The old man grabbed the cop, managed to get him five or six inches off the floor—

  —then the old man finally ran out of gas. He dropped the cop and fell, landing on the floor facedown.

  It got real quiet in the casino then.

  “Ho-ly shit, ” Bert said softly.

  “Amen, sweet Jesus,” Mary Lou said. “Amen.”

  1

  Sunday, October 2

  Washington, D.C.

  Alex Michaels grunted as the socket slipped off the hex nut and his hand shot forward, scraping his knuckles on the rocker-arm cover.

  “Ow! Crap!”

  At such times, he was wont to blame the nut or the wrench, but since he had put the bolt in himself, and the wrench and socket were both fairly new Craftsman tools, he knew he had nobody else to blame.