Hidden Agendas nf-2 Read online

  "It's just about money, huh?"

  "No, it's also about power. But that doesn't mean I have to be a homicidal maniac to get what I want."

  "What about the guys guarding the u-rain-e-yum? You don't feel like they're dead because of you? Was your fruitcakes that hosed ‘em."

  "I didn't pull any triggers. I didn't tell anybody else to either. If I give you a bread knife and you cut somebody's throat instead of using it to slice bread, that's your fault, not mine."

  "Unless you knew I wasn't gonna use it for bread when you sold it to me. And this wasn't exactly no bread knife, was it? More like a headsman's hatchet."

  "I didn't ask the Sons, they didn't tell."

  "Oh, yeah. The information we fed ‘em was for study purposes only."

  "No, it was to get things rolling in the direction I wanted them to roll in."

  Hughes didn't really think he could explain it to Platt, but for a moment he felt the need to try. "Do you know anything about how the Japanese traditionally made their samurai swords?"

  "I have a sheath knife with a Damascus blade," Platt said. "It's kind of like how they make them in Damascus. The Japs fold and sandwich the steel over and over and hammer it out, then temper the edge harder than the blade."

  "Right. But do you know how a master swordsmith would get started? How he would actually light the fire for his forge?"

  "I dunno, a Zippo?"

  Hughes ignored the wisecrack. "The smith would hammer on a piece of iron bar until it began to glow red. Then he'd put the iron into a bed of cypress shavings soaked in sulfur."

  "No shit? That must have taken a while, to get the iron that hot just by whacking it with a hammer."

  "Exactly. Making the finest swords the world has ever seen is not like ordering a Whopper and fries at the local BK. It takes skill, precision, patience. Which is what we need too. Our goal here is not to blow things up. Let's not forget that."

  "I hear you."

  "Good. I think it's time the subversive group responsible for all these problems on the net steps up to claim credit. Let's show them the manifesto."

  Platt grinned. "Hot damn. I've been waitin' to do this."

  "Don't embellish it, Platt. Just like I wrote it."

  "Nopraw, hoss. It's bad enough without me fiddlin' with it. The wogs and sand nigrahs are gonna love this!"

  A loose cannon with a short fuse. If Hughes didn't deactivate him soon, Platt was going to screw the whole thing up. A couple more weeks, a month, they'd be over the hump, and Platt was going to have a fatal accident. Maybe just… disappear.

  Saturday, December 25th, 9:35 p.m. In the air over southern New Jersey

  Toni sat on the left side of the commuter jet, staring into the dark over the ocean in the distance. She couldn't see the water, but she could see where the lights on the land ended, as if sliced off by a knife.

  She smiled to herself when she had that thought. There had been some problem when she wanted to take the kris onto the plane. They didn't have any trouble with her taser — most of the airlines would allow federal law-enforcement officers to carry tasers or even guns on their planes — but long and wavy-bladed daggers were apparently something else altogether.

  No way was Toni going to check the kris. Whatever its monetary value, it was irreplaceable, and according to Murphy's Law, if one item got lost in the baggage roulette on this flight, it would be the kris.

  Airline officials weren't going to allow her to carry the knife, despite the illogic of that versus a taser or a gun. Toni didn't tell them that she could kill somebody with her hands almost as easily as she could do so with a knife. That probably wouldn't have been helpful. In the end, after she threatened to call the FBI and have the plane held on the ground for security reasons, the officials relented. She could take the knife, if she let the flight crew have charge of it until they landed. That was good enough. The kris would be in the plane with her, and it was doubtful they could lose it with the doors closed.

  The copilot said he'd watch the cardboard box very carefully.

  Jay Gridley's call had come as a surprise, but it wasn't such a great loss that she had to leave the annual gathering a little early. She'd gotten a chance to see her family and Guru DeBeers, they'd all exchanged presents, and had eaten a huge Italian Christmas dinner. Mama and Poppa had gone to evening mass with as many of the relatives as they could bully into going with them. The fun part of of the gathering was mostly done, and the inevitable too-close-together friction would be warming up about now. She loved her family, but after a couple of days cooped up in the apartments with them, things could get a little contentious. She'd left them trying to convince her father he shouldn't be getting behind the wheel of his car anymore, and she knew that was a war the family was going to lose.

  It surprised her too that Alex had cut short his visit home to fly from Boise to Arizona. He wasn't a field operative, and she worried about him. John Howard wouldn't let Alex do anything dangerous — she hoped — but it still gave her butterflies thinking about Alex being on-site for a hot op. He should be back at HQ, and the strike team should be doing its job without him.

  When she'd called him, he'd told her she didn't need to go into HQ herself, but she'd cut that short. If this was important enough for him to be there, it was important enough for her to get back to work too.

  She leaned back in the seat and stared through the window. The jet was half-empty. Not a lot of people traveling on Christmas Day.

  Saturday, December 25th, 11:15 p.m. Sugar Loaf Mountain, Boulder, Colorado

  Sitting in the propane-heated spa inset into the redwood deck behind the cabin, Joanna and Maudie watched the snow fall into the hot water and melt. The deck had three eight-foot-high walls of cedar slats and wicker screen surrounding it, to keep occupants hidden from the neighbors' view, with the cabin as the fourth wall, but there was no roof. The spa itself was big enough to seat six people in comfort, maybe eight if they were on real good personal terms. Upon the steaming water and the two women in it, fresh snow fell, fat, heavy flakes, adding to that already piled up eight or ten inches deep on the deck, pristine save where it had been footprinted by the naked women going to and from the tub.

  Winthrop took another sip from the second bottle of champagne they'd bought, splurging their own money for the good vintage after they'd polished off Maudie's admirer's gift.

  Maudie raised her glass and watched a few snowflakes hit the wine. She said, "Problem with this is that you get spoiled real quick. After the expensive stuff, the cheap champagne tastes like something you'd clean your oven with."

  Winthrop waved her own glass. "Hear, hear." She reached across the big oval-shaped fiberglass tub with her foot and snagged the floating thermometer. She dragged it to her, lifted it, and looked at it.

  "Hundred and six," she said. "And the air temperature is what? Twenty, twenty-five?"

  "Sounds about right."

  Winthrop shook her head, and the melting snow fell from her hair into the water with a tiny slush! sound.

  "I wonder what the poor folks are doing," Maudie said. "You know, it might not get any better than this. Friends, Moet & Chandon, hot water, and snow."

  "Amen, sister. Well, except for maybe a couple of hunky young studs."

  "Wouldn't do much good in this," Maudie said. She dragged her free hand through the water. "You never heard of the Boiled Noodle Effect?"

  They both laughed.

  From inside the cabin, a com chirped, a one-two… three rhythm.

  "That's mine," Winthrop said. "Damn."

  "Don't answer it. Anybody asks when you get back to work, tell them we were in a digital dead zone. Mountains and all."

  She considered it for a moment. "Nah. I better. Could be my family."

  Maudie shrugged, waved at the French doors. "Go and sin no more."

  Winthrop stepped out of the water, and felt an almost immediate chill despite the red glow of her skin as she padded through the snow to where a pair of thick beac
h towels hung on a rack next to the doors, under the roof's overhang enough so they didn't get rained or snowed on.

  "Damn, girl, if I was into women, you'd be my first choice," Maudie said. "You got a great butt. Speaking strictly as somebody who knows how much work it takes to get one to look like that, of course."

  Winthrop grinned. "Beauty is only skin deep," she said as she wrapped the towel around her. It was cool, but not too cold.

  "Yeah, but a great butt is a joy forever!"

  Inside the cabin the fire crackled in the big stone fireplace.

  Winthrop walked over a patch of cold wood floor, onto the Oriental rug, and picked up her com.

  The caller ID showed the name "Lonesome Jay Gridley." She grinned in spite of herself. "Hello?"

  "Lieutenant. I take it you haven't been watching the network news lately?"

  "Nope. I've been enjoying champagne and a hot tub lately."

  "I thought not, or you'd have called. A few things you need to know."

  She listened as he filled her in on the situation with the terrorists attacks on nuclear transports. When he was done, she said, "Christ. I'll catch the next plane I can get back to HQ."

  "That isn't necessary, I believe we can get along without you for a couple more days. Enjoy your hot tub."

  "What aren't you telling me, Gridley? I hear something else hiding there. What is it?"

  "Not much. That leak I mentioned that seemed to come from inside Net Force?"

  "Yes?

  "It came from your station."

  "What?"

  "Yes, ma'am, no doubt about it. You weren't here when it went out, of course, and we all know you had nothing to do with it, but I'm sure glad it didn't come from my station. Bye-bye. Talk to you later."

  He discommed.

  Winthrop stared at her com as if it were a rat come to life in her hand.

  Oh, man! This sucked!

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sunday, December 26th, 1:50 a.m. Gila Bend, Arizona

  Howard looked around. His strike team troops were loaded in three transport vehicles, and they were parked in a dusty stretch of desert with a slightly overcast sky. Without their headlights, it would be very dark out here. The troop vehicles were highly modified Toyota Land Cruisers — mostly just the engines, frames, and wheels left from the originals — and they all wore flat-black carbon-fiber stealth shells. Close-range radar was cheap, a rig swiped from any big powerboat or sailboat would be sufficient for a ranch house, and since they had the cruisers, they might as well use them.

  The trick was not so much to be completely invisible, but rather to be hard to see and identify — until you were right on top of whoever was looking at you. Even the new stealth gear wasn't a hundred percent efficient on a land vehicle, but it would give a radar operator an odd blip that might be mistaken for ground clutter or maybe even a herd of deer or something. Probably the stealth shells wouldn't even be necessary; so far, there hadn't been any radar signature emitted from the ranch, so maybe the terrorists hadn't had time to get a unit, or if they had, to set it up. But you tried to cover all the bases as best you could, just in case.

  Each of the vehicles held six troopers, suited, locked, and loaded. The assault suits were modified from Regular Army SIPEs, slimmed down a bit since field operations were usually in and out, and the LOL — live-off-the-land — systems weren't necessary. The tactical suits should be enough to turn away what the average terrorist had to shoot at them. The shirt-vests and pants were cloned-spidersilk hardweave, with overlapping body pockets lined with ceramic plates. Boots and helmets were Kevlar, with titanium inserts in the helmets.

  The slimback CPUs were armored and shockproofed, and the tactical CPUs did everything from encrypting long-range radio and short-range LOSIR units, to downloading and uploading sat-links and giving motion-sensitive heads-up displays. Except for the LOSIR headsets — line-of-sight-infrared tactical coms — the strike team would keep radio silence until after they had secured the objective. And since LOSIR signals were encrypted, even if the terrorists had a full-range scanner, they wouldn't get anything but gibberish. Besides, by the time the strike team was close enough for the terrorists to scan and hear LOSIR, it would be too late even if they could understand the voxtrans.

  Weapons of choice were H&K 9mm subguns, and H&K tactical pistols. They had considered using the 5.65mm OICW, with the 20mm grenade launcher. The bullpup-stocked weapon had an outstanding bracketing/tracking target laser, and it could drop an explosive round into a trench where you couldn't even see an enemy, but Howard didn't completely trust it. Too many bells and whistles with the cameras and computers, and besides, they didn't want anything blowing up on this operation, not even a little bit. Bad enough that the SIPEsuit radios went out every time a thunderstorm passed within a parsec, or that the tactical comps sometimes got confused and had to be reset on the fly.

  Howard himself carried a much more unofficial weapon, a 1928 Thompson.45-caliber submachine gun that had belonged to his grandfather. The vintage gun wore a loaded fifty-round drum and had the gangster front grip and sight-through-the-top bolt-slot. He almost never carried the beast, since it weighed about fifteen pounds and was a bear to haul around, but somehow it had felt like the right thing to do on this operation. Normally, he'd be using a.30-caliber assault rifle, or a 7.62, but like the S&W revolver strapped to his right hip, the tommygun was a good-luck piece — an old, but still functional, good-luck piece.

  His antique revolver and Chicago typewriter notwithstanding, whoever these camo clowns were, they didn't have the state-of-the-art combat gear that Net Force had.

  Howard would be going in his Humvee, which also wore a radar-slipping shell. He glanced over at his ride and saw Fernandez grinning back at him from the driver's seat, camo paint darkening his face below the SIPEsuit's helmet.

  In war, sooner or later, this was what it came down to: troops going in against troops. The Air Force could drop tons of bombs or smart missiles, the Navy could shell or hard-rain rocket a target from fifty miles offshore, but in the end, it was the infantry that had to go in, to take and hold the ground.

  Next to Howard, Commander Michaels said, "I would say I'd like to go with you, Colonel, but that wouldn't be true. I'm a lousy soldier. I'd trip over something and get in somebody's way."

  Howard grinned. "Yes, sir, and that is why you pay us the big bucks. I expect that Assistant Commander Fiorella would have my family jewels if I allowed you to go along anyhow."

  Michaels smiled.

  Howard looked at his watch. "The transport plane will be entering the drop zone in thirty-three minutes. It's running whisper-props, but even so, out here, sound carries. It won't slow down and even if the terrorists do hear it, they'll be listening for a change in the engine sound, which they won't hear. If we work it right, our assault teams should be flashing puke-and-dizzy lights hot and hard to distract the guards as our four sappers float into the compound on their parawings. I've got a man standing by who will simultaneously cut the power line to the ranch. They've got backup power next to the storage shed, a little gas or diesel generator, but it won't kick on automatically, somebody will have to go out there and start it. Time that happens, he'll have company waiting for him.

  "We've had a series of spysats providing continual footprints of the area, so we pretty much know where every terrorist is. We'll have continual coverage through the expected duration of the attack, and a little longer too, just in case things don't go quite as planned. There are three guards posted, two at the front, one at the rear, and if it goes as planned, they will be taken out by the time the two vehicles reach the fence. The main gate is to the front, but there are two smaller gates to the rear, at the north and south corners. Alpha Team will hit the main building with flashbangs, while Beta Team covers the rear of the house, the barn, and the storage shed. Delta Team will patrol outside what's left of the fence in case anybody slips past us. With any luck at all, we'll have them rounded up before they can get the
ir pants on.

  "Of course, it's said that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, so we'll just have to go and see."

  Michaels nodded.

  Howard glanced at his watch again. "All right, people, this is it. Let's roll!"

  "Good luck, Colonel. Give ‘em hell."

  "Thank you, sir. We will."

  Howard hurried to the Humvee. They had gotten an exact distance from the compound to this location from the foot-printing satellite. They'd be running on spookeyes without lights, but the terrain was mostly flat with a little scrub, and they had a route mapped, so they should be able to calculate their speed and distance and nail it to the second.

  "Drive, Sergeant. And switch off the brake lights. I don't want the yahoos to see us flashing red because you stopped for a lizard in our path."

  "Already done, sir. I've been down this road before."

  Fernandez slid his helmet visor down and clicked his spook-eyes on, then cranked the engine and moved out. Howard picked his computerized helmet up from the floor by his feet and slipped it on, put the visor down, and lit his own night-vision scope. He buckled his three-point seat belt into place, snapping the black steel latch shut with a hard clack!

  The landscape seemed to light up in that eerie, washed-out green that the starlight amplifiers traded for the seemingly opaque darkness. Then the suit's computer kicked in, adding false colors to give a more realistic image, and it was almost like driving in a somewhat dim and hazy afternoon.

  "You don't think this pointy-nose plastic stuff is really going to hide us from radar, do you?" Fernandez said. "Seems like a shame to ruin a perfectly good truck by hanging all this crap on it."

  Howard said, "I don't think the boys in the ranch had time to set up a full-scale HQ. They only had a day and some to plan the attack. I'd be surprised if they had a mobile field unit roll into this location with radar or doppler."