Changing of the Guard nf-8 Read online

  It was unlikely in the extreme that he could just send somebody into Net Force HQ in Quantico to steal the incriminating information. All men had their price, but finding out what it was could be tricky. For some, it was easy, money would do it. For others, it might be something complex, not easily determined. Attempt to corrupt the wrong person, the almost-mythical honest man, and that would point a nasty finger at you in a hurry. Why was somebody offering a low-level government employee ten or twenty million dollars to give up a computer disk? What could possibly be on it that was worth that much? Who could afford to make such an offer?

  No, that could be a bad misstep.

  He frowned. Perhaps they might not be able to break the remaining code. Perhaps the disk would lie in the Net Force vaults for fifty years or a hundred, long after Cox had gone to his reward, and he would be beyond caring.

  He shook his head. He could not stake his future, his past, his life and legacy on that. If they had broken part of it, they could uncover the rest. He had to stop that, no matter what the cost.

  Think, Sam, think!

  But the desk offered no solutions, and his worry stood there grinning at him. Gotcha! it seemed to say. Gotcha!

  He sighed. This was not his forte. He had people who knew how to manage such things. He touched the intercom control.

  “Have Eduard drop by, would you?”

  “Yes, sir,” his secretary said.

  Natadze would have some ideas. He always did.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Jay was, he had to admit, stumped. Worse, he was a little worried that brute force, his method of last resort, wasn’t going to work, either. He wasn’t ready to try it quite yet, but he was approaching that point, and if it didn’t work, then what?

  He had tried fifty variations, coming at the code from every direction he could think of, and nothing else had clicked.

  “Hey, Smokin’ Jay.”

  He blinked and looked at the door. “Toni! How are you?”

  Toni Fiorella Michaels stepped into his office. “Doing great. How about you?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, frowning. He gestured at his desk. “Home is fine. Saji’s fine. But here…”

  Toni smiled. “Hasn’t it always been that way? And won’t it always be?”

  Jay shook his head. “Thanks. Just what I need to hear. You and the boss about ready to push off?”

  “Yep. Got the van mostly packed, and we’re on the road first thing in the morning.”

  “It’s a long way to Colorado.”

  “You’re welcome to drop by anytime,” she said. “You should be able to hook a ride on some Net Force or military jet going that way pretty much anytime you want.”

  He nodded. “We’ll still miss you,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know. We’ll miss you, too. But things change when you have a child to look out for, Jay. With my silat, I always felt as if I could handle myself in most situations when push came to shove, but after that situation at the house, with Tyrone and that psychotic, I realized I couldn’t stay in this business. You don’t call trouble to your family.”

  “I hear you.”

  “So, how’s the new guy?”

  Jay shrugged. “Okay, I guess. You ever met him?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “You’ll dazzle him, once he gets to know you.”

  “Maybe. Guy is richer than Fort Knox, he invented all kinds of computer stuff I grew up using, and is pretty much the smartest person in any room he walks into — and knows it. I don’t think he will dazzle easily.”

  She smiled. “What are you working on?”

  He returned her grin. “Can I tell you? Are you still cleared?”

  She looked at her watch. “If you hurry. My resignation starts officially in about twenty minutes.”

  Jay explained about the Turks and the Iranian disk.

  “I’m still hacking at the rest of it,” he finished. “I’ve got the Middle Eastern part down, and some of the South African parts, but what I think will probably turn out to be North and South America is still closed. It’s like the guy who wrote the code had a personality change and went off in an entirely different direction. I can’t get a pattern.”

  “Maybe the NSA crackers might help?”

  “I’d cut out my tongue before I asked them, especially after that thing with the California druggie. They don’t much like us anyhow. They’d love to show us up, and frankly, I don’t think they’ve got the chops. But just our asking for help would have them grinning from ear to ear, even if they couldn’t break it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  “I have the CIA, the regular feebs, and the Turkish ambassador all looking over my shoulder. Plus the new boss, of course.” He shrugged and gave her a weak grin. “The usual.”

  She grinned back. “I have to run,” she said. “I just wanted to come by and say good-bye in person. Stand up.”

  He frowned. “You’re not going to hit me, are you?”

  She laughed again, and when he stood, moved in and hugged him.

  “You’re a good man, Jay. Give my love to Saji.”

  Then she was gone, and Jay felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He never used to feel that when he moved around, or when other people did. His life had been in hardware and software, and people came and went, no problem — he was happier in VR than in the real world. This time, however, he really was going to miss Toni and Alex. They were his friends, and he didn’t have so many he could afford to lose any. He would have to make an effort to keep in touch. VR, RW trips, com, whatever it took. He really would.

  “Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  Kent looked at Julio Fernandez. They were in his temporary office, just off the corridor. “No, Lieutenant,” he said, “that will be all, unless you have something I need to know?”

  Fernandez smiled. “Well, sir, as it happens, I do have something. I expect General Howard would ordinarily go for it, but he’s told me he won’t step on your prerogatives for long-term acquisitions.”

  Kent stared at him.

  “I have to show it to you, Colonel. It doesn’t tell all that well. We need to go to the motor pool.”

  Kent glanced at his watch. “All right. Lead on.”

  “Why am I looking at a recreational vehicle, Lieutenant?” Kent asked.

  Fernandez smiled. “Not exactly your typical RV, sir, though this is a Class-C motor home chassis — a Class-A looks like a Greyhound bus; the C’s have that cab over-section shading the truck-style front end.” He nodded at the vehicle. “But we aren’t talking about something a rock star would tour in, or that Winnebago you’d take the wife and kids out in for a weekend to Diamond Lake. If you’ll follow me, sir.”

  Fernandez approached the vehicle, which appeared to be white fiberglass, with vaguely aerodynamic-looking decals on the sides in pale tans and blues. The coach entrance door was aft on the starboard side, behind the back wheels.

  The lieutenant pressed his thumb against a reader and the door’s lock snicked open. Two steps led into the vehicle.

  Inside there was enough headroom for a six-footer in boots to stand straight.

  “Head is to the left, behind this door,” Fernandez said. He reached for the knob, and Kent moved deeper into the vehicle to give him room to swing the portal open. The door looked like oak to Kent.

  In the head was a marine-style toilet, sink, mirror, cabinets, and a shower stall. Small, but useable.

  “Enough water to take a dozen military showers, to cook with, and drink, all without refilling the tank, though it will run off shore water — you just plug in a hose outside and turn the spigot on. Same for power — upgraded to fifty amps from the normal thirty-five. Drains for gray- and black-water outside, of course.”

  Behind Kent was a small galley, stove, sink, a microwave oven, and across from that a refrigerator/freezer. So far, much like any other RV. But past that, it got unusual.r />
  “This is your basic Born Free twenty-four-foot rear-bath coach,” Fernandez said. “But instead of a fold-out sleeper couch over here, we have a bank of computers, GPS, Doppler radar, FLIR, laser bouncers, and com-gear, all with hardened electronics.”

  A pair of captain’s chairs sat in front of the electronic array.

  “Over here, this little board pulls out to form a table, thus.” Fernandez lifted, pulled, then lowered it, and a tabletop jutted from the wall. “Suitable for having lunch or doing map work, or playing games on your laptop.”

  Kent nodded.

  “Up over the cab, we pull down this platform, like so, and there is sleeping space for two operators — three if they like each other real well. Even comes with a ladder.

  “There’s a big Onan generator installed, and if you aren’t plugged into shore power, this switch right here over the driver’s seat will crank it up. It is sufficiently large to run all the electronics for as long as you have fuel, which in this case means the vehicle’s fifty-five gallon gas tank. This is a Ford chassis and engine, your basic six-point-eight-liter V-ten engine, which, with its special beefed-up suspension and shocks, will give you approximately three thousand pounds of useable payload. That will include, with the installed equipment, three operators and their gear, and full fuel and water tanks, it will get nine or ten miles a gallon of unleaded if your driver doesn’t have a heavy foot, and climb anything you can take a sedan up. Cruises at seventy all day long.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, sir. And it gets more so. The thing is built like a Swiss watch. You can stay out in the woods, if you have sufficient supplies, a couple-three months. The air conditioner is enough to cool the electronic equipment to safe operating range in ninety-five-degree heat, the furnace will maintain warmth in subfreezing weather. It’s a little tight, but there’s not an inch of wasted space in it.”

  Julio led Kent to the driver’s compartment. “Here’s the real fun part. That bank of switches, there? Watch.” He lifted the switch covers and pressed three buttons. There came a hum of power, and as Kent watched, a pair of dark gray plates folded in from above and below over the windshield, coming to a sharp angle in front of the glass.

  “Stealth gear,” Fernandez said. “Extrudable spun-carbon fiber sheets and plates that give you some nice radar-shielding angles. You get an exploratory ping on your detector, you turn toward the source, hit the buttons, and you turn invisible, more or less.”

  “Very interesting,” Kent said.

  “Yes, sir. What with domestic and international terrorists getting more and more sophisticated with their own surveillance gear, this vehicle is the perfect Command-and-Control Center for mounting operations in a hurry at a far remove.”

  “I assume this hardware is not cheap,” Kent observed.

  “No, sir, but it is reasonable. If we supply the electronics, the maker will build it to our specifications, and our cost is less than a hundred thousand per unit, delivered.”

  Kent raised an eyebrow. “Really? That seems very reasonable.”

  “Yes, sir. Company is in Iowa, American to the core, good Christian family-value kind of place. Sure, if we let it to the lowest bidder, we might get units cheaper somewhere, but they won’t be made as well. See those ridges, there, there, and back there? Those are steel roll bars. This is the safest RV you can ride in. In the forty-odd years the company has been making them, they’ve never had a single fatality in an accident. Not one.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Yes, sir, I thought so.”

  “And you are telling me this because you think we should have some of these vehicles.”

  “Yes, sir. They are portable. Stash five or six around the country, we’d have one a few hours away from any situation we’d need covered. They run about eleven or twelve thousand pounds in this configuration, so if we borrowed a big transport plane from somebody, we could haul one to any air base in the world where we could land one of the big honkers, like a C5A.”

  “I can’t see one of these on the back roads of Afghanistan or Iraq,” Kent said. His voice was dry.

  “We’re not supposed to go to those places anyway, sir; it’s against our charter. But from the outside, this could belong to Ma and Pa Retiree out to see America, and even without the stealth gear, it would give us advanced operations capabilities in places we couldn’t sneak into otherwise. Nothing like a fleet of camouflaged military trucks full of guys in uniform rolling down a desert highway in Utah or the woods of Idaho to draw attention.”

  Kent considered it. “Do we have room in our budget for this?”

  “Yes, sir. With a little creative swapping, I believe we can manage five units, maybe six, no problem.”

  Kent gave him a tight nod. He knew all about wheeler-dealers. If Fernandez could horse trade as well as he talked — and John had always said that he could — it was a done deal. “And you say that General Howard wants this to be my decision?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, Lieutenant. Make it happen.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What are you grinning at, Lieutenant?”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “You’ve been with John Howard since he was a shavetail, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can’t imagine he kept you shut up. Fire away.”

  “I was just thinking how reasonable the Colonel is, for a, uh…”

  “—a jarhead?”

  “Yes, sir. My thought exactly.”

  “We might have a reputation for respecting history and tradition, Lieutenant, but we aren’t stupid. We would rather have our people in top-of-the-line gear when we can get it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go do your deal, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir.” Fernandez gave him a crisp salute. Kent just shook his head.

  5

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  It was late when Thorn walked into the empty gym. He had his equipment bag with him — it was too big to fit in his locker. He looked around and smiled. He had hopes of eventually turning this into a regular salle d’arms—mirrors on the walls, racks of swords lining the room — but first he better make sure he was going to be here long enough to warrant the change.

  It was after nine P.M., long after he should have left for home, but he needed to work out. The exercise relaxed him, helped to clear his mind, and after these past few days, he needed both.

  He’d met everyone at this point, and it looked like a good team.

  General Howard had impressed him, so much so that Thorn would be sorry to see him go. Abe Kent seemed competent enough, and might turn out to be a better man even than John Howard, but right now Thorn would prefer Howard’s humor — and especially his experience — while he settled in to his own new role.

  Gridley? He wasn’t sure about him yet. There was no question Jay knew his stuff, or that he could handle just about any net-based problem. He’d shown that with the progress he’d already made with the Iranian disk. Still, there was something… young about him. He was certainly full of himself, and he had that type of cockiness that made Thorn wonder just how severely he’d been tested. Was he really that good, or was it just that he hadn’t run into a situation hard enough to knock the strut out of him?

  Had the ground truly quaked for him yet, as Thorn’s grandfather, a full-blooded Nez Pierce, would have asked.

  He smiled at the memory of the old man, and the quake reference brought up another recollection: What do you do in case of an earthquake? Go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Why? Because nothing ever moves at the BIA…

  He shook his head. Enough thinking. He’d come down here to get away from thoughts, after all. Now it was time to move.

  He started with stretches. He’d learned to fence in high school, and had stayed with it. It had earned him some flack as a teen — typical “Red-man-with-a-long-knife” kind of crap — but he’d eventua
lly earned a B rating in épée, and that had shut a lot of that down. He had been respectable at the national level, but he was not quite serious enough to pursue it beyond that.

  He’d wanted something more than mere strip fencing. He’d needed a challenge that extended beyond the narrow metal piste. Oh, he still enjoyed it, but it was not the be-all it had once seemed.

  He moved slowly into a lunge to stretch his hamstrings, and felt a little twinge. Used to be he never bothered to warm up or stretch. He’d always tried to bring a sense of reality to his game, going more for touches that would have counted in the real world rather than just lighting up the scoring machine. And in an RW setting, no opponent was going to give him time to loosen up his hamstrings before launching an attack.

  Of course, in a real-world setting, it wasn’t likely he’d be carrying a sword anyway…

  He could still fight without stretching if he had to, he knew that, but he also knew that he’d pay a price for it later, and limping around for three or four days just wasn’t worth it.

  Warmed up after a few minutes, he pulled his protective gear out of his bag and slipped it on. Without an opponent, he didn’t really need the padded plastron under his jacket. For that matter, he didn’t really need the jacket, mask, or glove, either. But fencing was, first and foremost, a sport of tradition. Courtesy ruled — at least until the director called allez! — and the uniform was a part of that tradition.

  Besides, if Jay’s little surprise worked, the feel of the jacket and plastron would be necessary.

  Thorn took his épée out of his bag, picked up Jay’s mask in his left hand, and went out to the fencing strip he’d earlier outlined with tape on the wooden floor. At the en garde line, he saluted his imaginary director and opponent, then he took a deep breath.

  “All right, Jay,” he said softly. “Let’s see how good you are.”

  He pressed a button on the back tab of the mask and then slipped it on.

  As the mask settled into place, Thorn looked up and saw his opponent standing on the opposite guard line.