The Archimedes Effect Read online

  A very stout man wearing the costume of a Klingon warrior bumped into Jay, jolting him. “Watch where you step, p’tahk human!”

  “Sorry,” Jay said.

  “Qui’yah!”

  For just a second, Jay considered manifesting a blaster and turning this clown into a pile of smoking ash. He didn’t recognize the words in what he assumed was Klingon, but he knew an insult when he heard it.

  Then again, why bother? Everybody had to be somewhere, and if it made this guy, who was probably a file clerk or an accountant, feel better to spend a couple hours getting into costume as a Star Trek alien to wander around a media convention spouting a made-up language, so what? It was a harmless fantasy, and better than a lot of ways he could be getting into trouble. At least he wasn’t out on the street mugging old ladies or selling crack.

  Jay was all for whatever floated your boat, as long as you didn’t hurt anybody when you did it.

  Jay raised his right hand and split his fingers into the Vulcan V-sign that Spock used to do on the Trek television show. “Live long and prosper, Warrior.”

  The ersatz Klingon sneered, but moved off.

  Cowboy, cowboy, where was the space cowboy?

  Jay wound his way past a display of toy rockets and space ships, then a table stacked with lurid magazines featuring busty women in what looked like brass bikinis, being menaced by tentacled monsters. A television monitor flickered with an old black-and-white serial showing Flash Gordon in front of the Emperor Ming. The music sounded familiar. Was that Liszt’s Prelude?

  He glanced up from the TV and caught a glimpse of a white hat ahead. Definitely a Stetson-style cowboy hat.

  He smiled as he recalled the Stagolee scenario. All about the hat . . .

  Jay tried to worm his way closer, but the crowd was thick here. He stepped on an alien’s foot, and was rewarded with a curse that was very much human. He brushed past a guy with a head shaved bald, save for a topknot, with green makeup on his face and hands, and long fingernails. He was holding hands with a drop-dead-gorgeous blond woman in purple spandex and leather boots, with a blaster on a hip belt.

  Jay nearly stepped on somebody down on all fours, dressed up like some kind of four-legged alien critter and following the happy couple. The creature snarked at him, halfway between a bark and a moan.

  Lord.

  He looked up, but he’d lost sight of the hat.

  Damn!

  A very tall man dressed as an Amazon woman, complete with a wig, a spear, and what looked like a fiberglass copy of a bronze breastplate over huge fake hooters, stood in front of a table stacked with tapes from 1950s Saturday morning television shows, like Howdy Doody. The Amazon was six-four, if he was an inch. Somebody that tall would have a good view. “Excuse me, I’m looking for a cowboy,” Jay said.

  “Honey, aren’t we all?” the faux-Amazon said. “Her” voice was as dark brown as L-O-L-A Lola’s, and closer to Darth Vader’s than any woman Jay had ever heard. She could sing the bass parts in opera, easy.

  After a fruitless fifteen minutes of searching, which included at one point hopping up on a bare table to see better, Jay gave up, at least for now. The cowboy with his six-gun was here at the convention somewhere, but he seemed to have left the room.

  Maybe he had gone across the street? There were all kinds of programs scheduled at the hotel.

  Jay headed for the door. As he worked his way through the stream of humanity, real and fake, he thought it was kinda fun, actually, though he wondered what a straight person who happened into this scene would think upon seeing people dressed up in such outlandish costumes.

  Probably think they were all nutty as fruitcakes.

  Oh, well. Reality was almost always stranger than fiction.

  Jay headed out into the hot afternoon. Jeez, it was like an oven! Like being hit in the face with a board. Dry heat or not, when you went from seventy and AC to maybe a hundred and ten, that was hot. A wonder people weren’t passing out in the street.

  The hotel was just across the street. Jay started walking.

  Was that somebody wearing a cowboy hat, just heading into the building?

  Heedless of the heat, Jay ran.

  24

  Townenda Hollow

  Virginia

  Carruth picked a place he’d been to back when he’d been in the Navy. He and a bunch of buddies had gone camping, hiking into the woods in Virginia, and they’d passed this old falling-down barn way the hell out and gone in the country, down a gravel road. The farmhouse that had been there was gone, burned down, except for a chimney mostly covered with kudzu.

  There were other farms around, but nobody within a mile or two of the old place.

  He took Dexter, Hill, and Russell. They spent a couple hours checking things out—nobody had been down the gravel road as far as the barn lately; there might have been some hunters or cold-weather campers using the road, but no fresh tracks.

  One they had the lay of the land, they turned to tactics. A couple shaped-charge shot-canisters were set up next to the road in trees, devices that could be triggered by a remote, right at eye level for a guy driving a car or van. Those would serve as backup. Nasty little things, they were essentially explosives packed heavy inside a fan-shaped tube that was welded shut on one end. The explosives were laced with little steel ball bearings. When the thing went blam! anything in front of the blunderbuss-bell would get blasted hard. It would turn the driver of a car within ten meters into bloody hash, window down or up, and with a pair of them, one on both sides of the narrow road, any passengers would be likewise chewed to ratburger PDQ.

  Other than that, they didn’t need anything fancy. They had the ground. Carruth knew that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid was the best way. It might not always work every time, but KISS kept you from screwing up more often than not.

  There were plenty of trees and scrub brush around the barn. Nobody would be inside the place—the wood was so rotten it might collapse from a big sneeze. They’d come in two cars—one would be the decoy, set up where it was easy to see, the other well hidden. They’d wear gillie-suits, and when the bad guys showed up, they’d do it by the numbers. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am . . .

  He opened his cell phone. NO SIGNAL, it said. Good.

  “Okay, boys, rendezvous at my place tomorrow morning, 0600. I’ll bring the hardware. Get some sleep, I want fresh eyes and trigger fingers, come the dawn.”

  The other three nodded.

  They had the decoy car set up—one that Hill swiped and switched plates on—and they were well hidden in the woods. Hill and Russell had overlapping fields of fire, using M-16s, though if it went the way they figured, they would only need those for mop-up.

  They were in place and ready an hour before Lewis made the call to Al-Thani. The meeting was set for four hours after that, but it would only take maybe half that long for Al-Thani to drive there, assuming he was in or around the District, and if Carruth had been him, he would have pushed that to make it even sooner. But ninety minutes was way more time than they needed, since they were ready to rock now. . . .

  Carruth had the Dragon, and the plan was simple. As soon as Al-Thani and his troops arrived, he would put a rocket through the windshield of whatever vehicle they were in and cook ’em. Bye-bye, boys.

  If anybody survived that and managed to get out of the car alive, Hill and Russell would chop them down with automatic-weapons fire, and the dance would be over.

  It would be a bit noisy, but by the time anybody got curious and came to see what all the thunder had been about, Carruth and his troops would be long gone.

  They just might be smart enough to have a second car following, and if so, the shrapnel exploders would spray that sucker with hard sleet and Dexter would run a couple magazines of ammo after it, with Hill coming to add his fire as soon as they were done here.

  It didn’t get much simpler than that. See the bad guys, cook the bad guys, and see ya, boys—we’re outta here. . . .

  The four of them wo
re short-range, low-power LOSIR headsets that wouldn’t carry for more than a klick, and any changes that were necessary could be conveyed instantly. Carruth was wired, feeling speedy from the adrenaline rushing in his body. That’s how it always went when you were getting ready for war. Everything tuned up to full alert and hammers circulated in your blood . . .

  It was forty-five minutes later when things stopped going according to plan.

  It was Dexter who heard it first. They all wore shooters’ earplugs, designed to stop loud noises and to amplify normal sounds, but Dexter had always been able to hear a mouse twitch in the next room.

  “Incoming helicopter,” Dexter said.

  After a second, Carruth heard it, too. Well, damn!

  He didn’t believe for a second it was a coincidence.

  Crap. He hadn’t figured they’d be that well equipped.

  He went over the terrain in his mental map. The nearest clearing big enough to land a chopper was three hundred meters to the south. They’d put the bird down there; the troops would alight and try to ghost through the woods, to set up on the barn. Once they hit the ground and spread out, that would be bad—Carruth and his men might well be outnumbered and the advantage of surprise would only go so far. They needed the targets in a bunch.

  “Go, go, the clearing to the south!” Carruth ordered.

  It was a bitch running in a gillie-suit, all that crap flapping in the breeze, and the Dragon was heavy enough to start him breathing fast after a hundred meters, but the sound of the chopper was getting louder. Walking wasn’t going to get it done.

  It seemed to take forever, but they reached the edge of the clearing while the chopper was still a couple hundred meters up. Looked like a Sikorsky S-series to Carruth, a 76 or maybe the S-76A. Those would hold six or eight passengers and two pilots comfortably, with gear, but you could stuff as many as a dozen people into one and still get it into the air. Even if the pilot stayed with the craft, that could mean as many as ten or eleven pairs of boots on the ground, and that was way too many against their quad.

  “Fan out,” Carruth ordered. “Don’t nobody get behind me.”

  Somebody laughed.

  Carruth sat, perched the rocket launcher on his shoulder, and lined it up on the gently settling helicopter.

  There came the big whoosh! of exhaust back-blast blowing leaves and bushes apart behind him, and the missile zipped away.

  The pilot must have seen the flash or the back-blast and recognized it; he tried to turn and power up, but it was too late. Carruth kept the crosshairs on the craft’s body amidships, and almost instantly the rocket lanced into the copter and blew up, making a hellacious noise that his earplugs cut out. Mostly cut out, anyhow.

  The main rotor ripped loose from the impact. The tail rotor then spun the bastard like a top as the Sikorsky dropped like a brick soaked in flaming fuel—which is what it had become.

  From two hundred meters, it wasn’t likely anybody was going to survive the impact, but Hill and Russell tracked it to the ground. When it hit, it rocked Carruth like an earthquake. Fiery gas spewed in all directions, arcing sheets of flame up and out in a ragged circle as the frame crunched and collapsed in on itself.

  Hill and Russell ran toward it, but couldn’t get any closer than twenty meters because of the intense heat. Carruth could see their suits stirring under the force of the radiant heat.

  If you couldn’t get any closer than that, then anybody in there was already quick-barbecued by now, Carruth knew. If the fall hadn’t killed them, the fire sure had.

  Thick, roiling, black smoke erupted into the clear sky in a great cloud, and even if there was a car coming later for backup in an hour or so, Carruth and his men sure as hell weren’t going to be here to see it. This much smoke in the woods was a bad thing, and the locals would be heading this way to check it out in a hurry. Which meant Carruth and his troops needed to be leaving for the car right this minute.

  Carruth triggered his LOSIR transmitter.

  “Dex, grab the explosives, crank up the decoy car, and head out. Rest of us’ll take the primary vehicle. Don’t stop until you get to the rendezvous.”

  “Copy.”

  “Let’s go, boys. We’re gonna have company if we stick around here.”

  They ran for the hidden van.

  The FAA would show up sooner rather than later, too, and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that a helicopter full of armed guys hadn’t fallen out of the sky due to pilot error. Well, except that he was stupid enough to be flying out here where Carruth was with his rocket launcher.

  Wouldn’t take the feds long to figure out what had done the trick, either; he didn’t have time to clean up, they had to cut and run. If they found pieces of the rocket, and they would, there was the wire stretched out right there, it’d be like a fingerprint, so they’d know it was from a Dragon, and it wouldn’t take a big brain to figure out where that had come from, either.

  Who had gotten shot down and why? That might be harder, but probably they’d figure out the dead guys were on some list. Maybe one terrorist faction was going after another, and let Homeland Security try and sort through that.

  Not that it mattered. Carruth and the boys wouldn’t be here.

  Lewis probably wasn’t gonna be too thrilled about this, either. Chances were, the head honcho had been in the chopper—the backup car, if there was one, wouldn’t have been the way for the boss to travel. Carruth couldn’t be positive—maybe the guy was afraid of flying or something—but probably he was in the copter, which was mostly melted into slag by now and anybody inside it would be a crispy critter. No way they were gonna be able to stick around and get IDs, though. He mentally shrugged. It was what it was. You did the best you could with what you had. Anything else, fuck it. . . .

  25

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  “Boss?”

  Thorn looked up and saw Jay in the doorway. “Jay. What can I do for you?”

  “I just got an urgent priority report from Homeland Security and the FAA—probably a copy heading into your in-box right now. A helicopter blew up and fell out of the sky over in Nowhere, Virginia. Killed nine people.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “It gets better. The guys in the copter were hauling enough guns and ammo to start a small war. M-16s, AK- 47s, and hand grenades, at the least. HS has ID’d a few of them, and those were on the don’t-let-’em-in-the-country-and-shoot-’em-if-you-see-’em list.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “ ‘Suspected’ is what HS says officially. Off the record, though, they absolutely were terrorists of the worst kind. A couple are from Qatar, one from Iran. They traced the pilot. He was a Saudi, no IDs on the others yet. The bird was a rental.”

  Thorn shook his head.

  “Here’s where we come in—the FAA guys said the copter was brought down by a rocket, and that it came from an FGM-77 Dragon. They found some kind of wire and bits of the rocket that confirm it.”

  “As in the same kind that was stolen in the raid in Kentucky.”

  “Oh, yeah. As in exactly the same kind. Odd coincidence, huh?”

  “I’m sure.” Thorn frowned. “So, why is whoever stole the launchers using them to shoot down armed terrorists?”

  “Got me. Patriots, maybe. Or maybe they are bucking for jobs in Homeland Security?”

  A chime on Thorn’s computer alerted him to an incoming priority message. Thorn waved his hand, and a security-encoded text appeared, repeating what Jay had just told him.

  “How did you get this before I did?”

  “Friends in low places.”

  Thorn sighed. “You will see what you can find out about this, won’t you?”

  “In my copious spare time, sure.”

  “Thanks, Jay.”

  “No problem, Boss.”

  But after he was gone, Thorn sat there thinking about it. It was a problem. That the missile had been used against the bad guys was good, but they still had
two left, and the next one could just as easily be shot in another direction. Or not. He wanted to run these thieves down and make sure they didn’t get another shot off in any direction. . . .

  His assistant said, “General Hadden is on the phone.”

  “Of course he is,” Thorn said. He shook his head and reached for the receiver.

  Tex’s Truck Stop and Grill

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Lewis listened to the story without interrupting. At the end of it, she nodded. “Couldn’t be helped. Even if you’d known they had a chartered helicopter, you would have still had to take it out. Bringing the rocket launcher was smart.”

  Somebody fed money into a jukebox by the pool tables. A country and western song started playing in the background. A twangy-voiced woman singing something about a lyin’, cheatin’ man.

  Ain’t they all, honey?

  Carruth nodded. “I’m guessing our boy was on it, and unless he melted down to butter during the fire, they’ll eventually get around to identifying him.”

  “Already have,” Lewis said. “And he was killed in the fire. Good news for us. He doesn’t appear to have any more blood kin in the terrorist business, so maybe we are done with that.”

  “Must be nice to have access to all that,” he said.

  “It is. And to have them giving it to you because you are helping protect them from yourself? That’s even better.”

  “You hate the Army, don’tcha?”

  She blinked at him. “Why do you say that?”

  “I’m maybe not the brightest bulb on the string, Captain, but I’m not completely stupid. I can hear. It comes out every time you talk about the service, there’s a nasty edge in your tone. Contempt.”

  She didn’t speak to that. It wasn’t supposed to show, though. If Carruth here could see that—and he wasn’t exactly a candidate for Mr. Sensitive—then somebody else could. She would have to work on that. It wouldn’t do at all for people on the inside to be looking at her squinty-eyed. Certainly not Mr. Jay Gridley.