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Operation Raptor.

  Lieutenant Commander Hunter knew she shouldn’t even remember the code name. And right now, she wished more than anything that she’d never heard of Raptor, or of Colonel Max Stegar, the man in charge of it.

  But it was too late for regrets, Hunter knew. She’d already “bitten the apple,” as her husband was fond of saying.

  As she thought about her family, Marissa Hunter slowed her pace, still torn by doubt about what she was about to do.

  Am I doing the right thing? she wondered.

  Lieutenant Commander Hunter paused in front of an office door. She looked up and saw Max Stegar’s name plate on the door.

  If I knock on that door, there’d be no turning back, she thought grimly.

  Then she took a deep breath … raised her hand, and gave door a couple of sharp raps.

  “Come in,” United States Marine Corps Colonel Max Stegar said when he heard the knock. His voice was gruff as he looked up from the paperwork spread across his desk for the first time that morning.

  The door opened and a female Navy officer walked in and saluted smartly, signaling that this was an official visit.

  Stegar returned the salute. That’s Marissa Hunter, he recalled. The Naval aviator who helped to plan the evacuation phase of our upcoming operation.

  The Marine officer decided he’d better listen to what she had to say.

  “What can I do for you, Lieutenant Commander Hunter?” he asked.

  “Permission to speak off the record, sir,” the woman said.

  Stegar threw his pen on the desk and frowned. “There is no ‘off the record’ in my office, Lieutenant Commander,” Stegar said. “Speak your piece, or leave now and I’ll forget you were ever here.”

  “Then, permission to speak, sir.”

  “About what, Lieutenant Commander?” Stegar asked.

  “About a possible special operation that might currently be in the planning stages, sir.” She met his eyes squarely as she said that.

  “You are aware that you’re not supposed to discuss special operations once they are beyond the preliminary planning stages, aren’t you?” Colonel Stegar asked.

  “But I have new information, sir,” she replied without missing a beat.

  “New information about what?” Stegar asked.

  “About Raptor, sir,” she said.

  Colonel Stegar’s jaw tensed. “All right, you’ve got my attention. Tell me what you know.”

  And so Marissa Hunter took a deep breath and told him about her son’s on-line adventures with his young friend Julio Cortez, and his conclusions. As he listened to the wild story, Colonel Stegar’s gut tightened. Scattered among the trappings of a tale that would do a speculative-fiction writer proud, he found a few elements that verified hard-won military intelligence in Corteguay. Those elements made him wonder if there wasn’t something here he should listen to. The matter was one of considerable importance to Stegar. He would be putting his life, and the lives of his men, on the line in Corteguay in the very near future.

  After she’d finished, the Navy officer stood in front of Col! onel Stegar and waited for his reaction.

  He sat silently, wondering what he should do next. He thought about what he should—what he could—tell this woman. Her security clearance was high enough to tell her everything, and that was finally what he decided to do. He owed it to his men to utilize every resource at his disposal. “We’re in the process,” he began, “of an evacuation operation for several United States citizens currently being held captive in Corteguay. Seven months ago, two retired military personnel—one of them a former Navy SEAL—accompanied an overzealous Christian missionary into Corteguay’s jungles.” Stegar activated a map-table inset in his desk’s surface.

  “They sailed in and anchored here”—he pointed out the location—“in an unoccupied cove far from any human settlements. They hid the boat, and moved inland southeast through Corteguay’s rain forests.”

  On the flat horizontal screen, a map of Corteguay was projected over real-time images of the country itself, beamed continuously by spy satellites to computers in the Pentagon. The two images, with dark borders and geographical names over the real-time projection, meshed perfectly on the map screen.

  “Dr. Price, the missionary who led the expedition, had heard rumors that a tribe called the Huertos was being persecuted by the socialist regime in Corteguay,” the colonel continued. “Price and the two others were captured, of course.”

  “Sounds like they knew what they were getting into,” Lieutenant Commander Hunter remarked.

  Stegar nodded. “They put their own fannies into the fire, that’s a fact,” he agreed. “But there are … complications. The SEAL with the group was a former anti-terrorism specialist. Colonel Breen was good at what he did, and in his day he formed many cells within some of the worst terrorist groups active today—The Shining Path, Cuba Libre, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Jewish Defense League, you name it. The names and faces of those spies are locked in Breen’s head.”

  “What was he doing there then?” Hunter asked.

  “He found religion,” Stegar replied. “I can’t fault him for that.”

  “So Raptor’s a plan to get him out, along with anybody else you can grab,” she said.

  Stegar nodded. Then he waved his hand over the map station and the image shifted and magnified, until they were looking at another spot on Corteguay’s coast, about fifty kilometers from Adello, the nation’s capital.

  “The men were brought here,” Stegar said, pointing to a magnified image of a primitive prison on a jetty of rock jutting out into the chasm of a river basin.

  The buildings were made of wood and tarpaper, the fences were mostly barbed wire—though a code in one corner of the map station indicated some of them were electrified. The details of the real-time images were so clear that Hunter could see men in ragged clothes moving around in the yard and near the latrines, and armed guards in the towers.

  “In less than a week, we’re going in to rescue those men,” Colonel Stegar said. “The mission was green-lighted when we learned that Ramon Cortez and his family are also being held in this camp.”

  Marissa felt a pang of apprehension. So much could go wrong. Though she’d flown her share of missions to support men like the ones who would extract the prisoners, special ops were too out of control for her tastes, too dependent on chance and the lay of the land. She always wondered how men like Colonel Stegar did it on a regular basis. No wonder this Colonel Breen had found religion.

  “We’ve modified the plans slightly since you saw them. We’ll arrive underwater, then move inland along the river,” the colonel continued. “SEALs have already deactivated the coastal defense—though the Corteguans don’t know it yet— and once we’re there we’ll take out these guard towers. It’s all by the book. The prisoners are in this building.” He pointed to a shack not much different from the others. “We’ll be in and out before the security forces even know about it.”

  “But I don’t see how these shacks could hold a veeyar installation,” Marissa said. “The individual buildings don’t even have power, and I don’t see any technicians.”

  Colonel Stegar looked up from the table, straight at her.

  “I’m sorry, Hunter, but I can’t buy your son’s story. It’s just too Larry Bond for my taste. The Corteguan socialists are brutes, not technicians.”

  “Then how do you explain the fact that Matt knew that Julio and his family had been taken prisoner? My son was absolutely right about that, and it’s hardly common knowledge.”

  “I’m willing to allow that your son got a message of some sort from his friend. I just don’t think the boy got his details straight about where they’re being held,” the colonel said.

  Marissa Hunter clearly didn’t believe her son could be mistaken in what he’d seen and heard. She scanned the map, looking for another possibility. Finally, she spotted something a few kilometers away, a low concrete building with two or thr
ee outbuildings, one next to a propane tank with electrical lines fanning out from it—clearly a power generator of some sort, and a water tower with a small parabolic dish antenna mounted on top of it and a pump next to it.

  “What about this?” she asked, pointing.

  “Insignificant,” Stegar said, shaking his head. “A Dutch-built electronic fresh-water pumping station. The Corteguans can’t afford desalinization technology, so they pump deep water up from underground. The pump works without a crew and hardly anyone ever goes there.”

  “If the station’s unmanned, why does it have a communications antenna stuck on the water tower?” she asked.

  “It’s the tallest structure, man-made or otherwise, around there—has to be, to build enough pressure to run fresh water all the way to the capital city, Adello. Also, the station’s where the electricity, what there is of it, that they use at the prison camp is generated. It makes sense to mount an antenna there. But we’ve been watching, and the place is deserted almost all of the time.”

  But as she gazed at the real-time image, Marissa Hunter saw a military-looking vehicle parked right outside the central structure and a soldier loitering nearby. Colonel Stegar saw it too, but said nothing.

  “How do you know they’re in that prison you’re pointing at, Colonel?” she asked.

  “Humint, Lieutenant Commander,” he said. “Human intelligence … we have a mole in the Corteguan government.”

  “Do you trust that agent?” she said.

  Stegar nodded. “He’s a native, and an insignificant member of their economic council. A man named Manuel Arias. We trust him.”

  Marissa looked away from the map, and back at the colonel. “So this has all been cleared?” she asked.

  “By the president himself,” Stegar said. “The State Department is in on it, too. They know Cortez and his family have been grabbed, but they’re not going to admit it to anyone, not until Operation Raptor is completed.”

  Ten hours later Colonel Stegar was still at his desk. “Come in!” he barked, annoyed at getting interrupted yet again. As the time for the mission called Raptor rapidly approached, more and more details had to be in place, and more things had to be set into motion. Like the dinosaur the mission was named after, Raptor threatened to get out of control and eat them all alive.

  Colonel Stegar had been at it for twelve hours straight, living on coffee and nutri-bars. He was beginning to feel the strain.

  The door opened and a young lieutenant entered and saluted. “I have your new sitrep, sir,” the Marine said.

  Stegar returned the salute and motioned the man forward. The young lieutenant handed the grizzled, battle-hardened colonel the situation report. There were red plastic tags on several pages of the hardsheet.

  “What’s this?” Stegar asked, pointing to one of the tags, on the first page of the hardsheet document.

  “You requested a report on any change of activity around Oz, sir,” the lieutenant said. “There has been some activity.”

  Oz was the code name for the prison in Corteguay where the hostages were being held. Stegar didn’t need complications, but apparently he had them. The colonel scanned the report, then dismissed the lieutenant.

  As the young officer departed, Colonel Stegar sank back into his chair. According to the hardsheet intelligence report, there had been increased activity at the nearest human settlement to the prison—at a Dutch-built fresh-water pumping station. Number 16, according to intel.

  Trucks and cars were coming and going, and at least five men had been spotted by satellite outside the concrete bunker at one point earlier this morning.

  He looked at the stillshots. One of the men was wearing a white lab smock. A few more were carrying boxes that looked suspiciously like computer equipment.

  Stegar sighed. He recalled Lieutenant Commander Hunter’s remarks about that pumping station, and her son’s wild theory that a secret computer center was holding his friend Julio prisoner, one that his mother felt was housed inside that innocent-looking concrete bunker.

  After this stillshot, Colonel Stegar was beginning to wonder if the theory was so wild after all. He dropped the report on his desk and rubbed his tired eyes. He had a sinking feeling that he wouldn’t be getting much sleep any time soon. In the next few hours he was going to put into motion an operation that had to be carried out flawlessly or people would die— lots of them, himself included—and his government would be embarrassed. And he still had to choose his target. He had a choice of two targets now—one based on the very best information that military intelligence and a trusted internal source in the Corteguan government could give him. The other choice was based on the testimony of a teenage boy who’d never set foot in Latin America, who claimed he’d learned of it while playing in a virtual reality competition.

  Picking the invasion site was Stegar’s choice to make, and the success or failure of the operation depended on it.

  He knew, of course, which was the logical choice.

  Taking a deep breath, he selected the target for the rescue operation. May God have mercy upon all of them if he was wrong.

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Matt Hunter said.

  The Net Force Explorers were sitting around in their Virtual Lounge. This was usually the time for their weekly meeting, but school was out and so many of their members were on vacation with their families or on a school-sponsored virtual field trip to Zaire that Matt, as president of the Washington, D.C., area Net Force Explorers chapter, had called the meeting off.

  That was when Mark Gridley showed up and gave them the bad news.

  “Why can’t the State Department do something?” David Gray asked. No one could answer him.

  “You know,” Andy Moore said, “Julio’s parents weren’t U.S. citizens, technically. They were political exiles who kept their Corteguan citizenship.”

  “But America is supposed to stand for something,” David shot back. “We have interests in the region.”

  “And anyway,” Matt added. “Julio’s little sister, Juanita, was born here. That makes her an American citizen at least!”

  “Bureaucrats really make me sick,” David said, his head resting on his hand.

  “Yeah,” Matt agreed. “My dad says that the State Department’s always been sympathetic to socialist governments. The diplomats feel they’re more stable for political purposes than a democracy.”

  “Maybe we should go public,” Andy Moore said with a devilish grin. His idea brought objections from practically everyone, especially Mark.

  “Don’t forget what my dad said,” Mark said. “Julio could be in danger if we blow the lid off this. We’re supposed to keep quiet about what we know.”

  “What good is that gonna do?” David asked. “It only plays into the Corteguan government’s hands.”

  “Wait a minute,” Megan O’Malley said. “We’ve got to stick to Mr. Gridley’s plan,” she said. “Monday is only a few days away. When we get back into those flight simulators, we’ll get some answers.”

  “But what do we do in the meantime?” Andy said.

  Matt Hunter and Mark Gridley exchanged glances. Then Mark spoke.

  “I know what I’m going to do,” he said. “Me, too,” Matt said. All eyes turned to the two of them. “What?” Megan finally bit. “I’m going to the flight simulator down at the Smithsonian and book some practice time,” Matt said with conviction. Andy, David, and Megan exchanged glances too. “Let’s go,” Megan said, leading the way.

  on the pilot. Despite this, after flying a dozen flights at the Smithsonian, David said that flying the P-51 Mustang was so effortless that he thought his grandmother could do it. Matt hoped David was right. But the Net Force Explorers were there to hone more than just their flying skills. They needed to learn to fight as a team, to learn theory, and to learn to communicate better under combat conditions.

  By the time they stepped out of the autobus in front of the Institute on Monday morning—all of them together, as a
team—the Net Force Explorers felt they were ready. If they failed now, at least they’d done their best.

  Dr. Lanier was almost jovial when he entered the classroom that morning. He informed the Net Force Explorers that a check of the entire computer system had been performed over the weekend, and the simulators were up and running perfectly, with no sign of the Rifts that had been plaguing them.

  Lanier made no mention of the illegal access of the program the week before, to everyone’s relief.

  So after a quick introduction to the legendary British fighter of the Second World War, the Spitfire, the Net Force Explorers were ushered into a non-interactive TeacherNet program about the Battle of Britain.

  Through a dramatic series of slickly compiled and edited holo-images, the Net Force Explorers learned about the events leading up to the Battle of Britain—the first-ever battle fought exclusively in the air, with two of the twentieth century’s greatest European military powers, Great Britain and Nazi Germany, struggling for superiority in the skies over England.

  The TeacherNet program began by taking the Net Force Explorers on a virtual tour of the early days of the Second World War.

  First they were dropped into the crowd at a Nazi rally, where they learned of Adolf Hitler’s plan to conquer Europe. Another jump took them to that fateful morning of September 1, 1939, when German troops launched their blitzkrieg— 4 ‘lightning war”—against Poland, starting a conflict that would rage for six years.

  The Net Force Explorers ducked for cover as German fighter-bombers swooped out of the sky, destroying Polish military facilities. Then, from the cockpit of a German Heinkel

  He-Ill bomber, the Net Force Explorers watched as Poland was decimated.

  Another jump took them to the ground again, where they observed streams of Germans fighting against valiant but outgunned soldiers of the Polish horse-mounted cavalry—who were easily defeated by the Nazis’ superior technology.

  The parade of images took them next to June 1940. The Net Force Explorers listened to the speech given by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to announce that the British Expeditionary Force had been successfully evacuated from the port of Dunkirk in France, and to lay out Great Britain’s hopes for the coming conflict—“victory at all costs.”