Net Force (27 page)

    He stood, walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He took out a carton of milk and poured himself a small glassful. Put the carton back. Sat at the table and stared at the glass of milk.

    He was, he realized, depressed.

    Oh, not clinically depressed, nothing to run to a shrink about, but definitely glum. He didn’t understand it. There wasn’t any reason to feel that way. He had a beautiful wife, a great kid, and a job most military officers would kill to have. He had just come back from a mission in which all of his objectives had been achieved, he had not lost a single soldier while under fire and everybody was happy with him. His civilian boss had put him in for a Presidential Commendation. What was the problem?

    What was wrong, other than that he wanted to jump into the middle of an all-out shooting fracas?

    What kind of attitude was that? No sane man wanted war.

    He stared at the milk. It was the test, he knew. He’d never been tested, not really. He’d slipped between the cracks, missed the shooting in Desert Storm, been teaching when the police actions in South America got hot, gotten to the Caribbean dustup a day after the guns had gone cold and quiet. He had spent his adult life as a military man, training, learning, preparing. He had the tools, the skills and the need to use them, to see if they would really work-but there was no place for such things in peacetime.

    It was why he had joined Net Force. At least there was a chance he’d get dropped into a hot spot. The mission to Ukraine was as warm as it had gotten so far, and while it was better than sitting in an office reading reports, it was… lukewarm…

    “Morning.”

    Howard looked up and saw Tyrone standing there in his pajama bottoms.

    “Just after 0600,” Howard said. “What are
you
doing up so early?”

    “I don’t know. I woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep.”

    Tyrone walked to the fridge and got the milk out. Shook the carton, saw that it was almost empty, then drank from it. Grinned at his father. “Mom says it’s okay if I’m going to drink it all,” he said.

    Howard grinned, too.

    Tyrone took another sip of the milk, then wiped at his lips. “Can I ask you something, Pop?”

    “Fire away.”

    “How do you deal with a force that’s bigger and stronger than yours, if it already holds territory you want to occupy?”

    “Depends on the objective, the terrain, the weapons and equipment available, transportation systems, a bunch of things. First you define your goal, then you have to come up with a viable strategy, then the tactics to make it work.”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “When did you get interested in such things?”

    “Oh. It’s what you do. I thought I ought to, you know, kind of check it out. You know.” He stared at the floor.

    Howard held the grin back, kept his face serious. The boy was thirteen. Puberty. It had been a while but, yes, he knew.

    He said, “Okay, let’s talk about goals and strategy for a second. Your goal is to take the territory without destroying it, am I correct?”

    “Oh, yeah.”

    “So you have to move carefully. The enemy’s forces are bigger than yours, so he’s stronger, but-is he smarter? You know you can’t just charge in and engage in a stand-up fight if you are outgunned. You’ll get slaughtered. So before you move, you have to assess the situation. You look for your enemy’s weak points. In guerrilla warfare, you find a weak place, you hit it, then run. You do it fast, then hide, so not only can’t he find you, he might not even know who you are.”

    Tyrone leaned against the fridge. “Yeah, I can see that.”

    “Also, according to Chairman Mao, to win a guerrilla war, you have to get the locals on your side.”

    “How do you do that?”

    “You offer them something they can’t get from the enemy, something more valuable than what he is giving them. Allow them to compare you to him, and when they do, show them his shortcomings. You reveal how you are better for them. You can’t match his guns, but maybe he can’t match your brains.

    “So you show them why brains are more important than brawn. You teach the locals stuff he can’t. How to get more fish in their nets, grow better crops or… how to use their computers, for instance.”

    The boy nodded again.

    “You have a goal, you move toward it most of the time, but not always. Sometimes you have to take an oblique angle, move away a little so you can come at it from another direction. Sometimes you have take a step forward, strike, then retreat a few steps, so you don’t get hit with return fire. Patience is the key in this kind of war. You have to pick your targets carefully, make every shot count. Wear the enemy away slowly.

    “Once you get the locals on your side, then it doesn’t matter how strong your enemy is, because the locals will start to help you, to hide you from enemy forces. Sometimes they’ll overthrow your enemy on their own, and you won’t have to do anything. In the end, that’s the best way.”

    “Yeah.”

    There was a moment of silence. Then Tyrone said, “Thanks, Pop. I’m going back to bed now.”

    “Sleep well, son.”

    After the boy was gone, Howard grinned at his milk. It had been a long time since he’d been that young. And the problems then had seemed just as big as any he had faced since. It was all relative. He needed to remember that. And that being here to tell his son what he needed to hear was as important as winning any battle in some foreign country halfway around the world. In the end, being a father was more important than being a colonel.

    He tasted the milk. Warm. He walked to the sink, poured the milk into it, rinsed the glass and set it to dry on the rack. Maybe he could go back to sleep, too. Might as well give it a shot.

    

    
Sunday, October 3rd, 6:40 cum. Washington, D.C
.

    Alex Michaels stood by the sliding glass door and watched the dog wander around in the backyard. He’d been asleep when Scout came and hopped up onto the bed. It was a pretty good hop for a dog his size. Once up, he hadn’t barked or anything, just sat there staring patiently until Michaels got up and went to let him out.

    Michaels had some part of the alarm system lit all of the time now; a tech from the unit had come out and fine-tuned it, connected it to the voxax program of his house computer. All he had to do was say the word “Assassin!” loud enough for the house mikes to pick up, and the alarms would start screaming. He’d shut the system’s sliding-door link off to let the dog out, but he had his taser in his robe pocket. He hadn’t played with the taser much since it had been issued to him, but he was going to be spending a little more time at the indoor range practicing. He was going to work especially hard on getting it out of a pocket or belt clip in a hurry.

    There was a car parked at his curb with a pair of agents in it. A third guard stood by the gate on the side of the condo. Michaels wouldn’t have known about the third guard, except that the dog had seen the man and yapped at him until he’d been hushed. Better than the house alarm, the little pup.

    The dog finished watering and fertilizing the lawn and, now sure the territory was secure from intruders, trotted back to the kitchen. He stood by Michaels’ feet, tail wagging, looking up at him.

    “You hungry, boy?”

    
Yap
!

    “Come on.”

    Michaels had bought some expensive canned dog food. He peeled the lid from the little aluminum container and dumped the contents into a small bowl, then put it down on the floor next to the water bowl.

    As he always did, the dog waited. He was hungry, but he stood over the bowl looking up at Michaels, waiting for permission. Whoever had trained him had done a good job. “Go ahead, eat.”

    Scout bent and gobbled the stuff up as if he’d never been fed before.

    When the dog was done with his meal and enough water to wash it down, he followed Michaels into the living room. Michaels sat on the couch and patted his lap. The little dog leaped up and into his lap, and began to lick one of its paws as Michaels scratched behind Scout’s ears.

    It certainly was soothing to sit and pet the little critter. Susie had always wanted a dog. Megan had told her she had to wait until she was old enough to take care of it. She was getting there-faster than he liked. Eight, his daughter was, going on eighteen…

    Michaels liked dogs. He hadn’t gotten one after he’d moved to D.C. because he hadn’t wanted to leave it alone while he was at work, but as small as Scout was, the house was plenty big enough to roam around in. The previous owners of the condo had owned a cat, and they’d left a litter box stuck up in the rafters. Michaels had bought a sack of kitty litter, and during the day the plastic tub full of litter sat by the sliding glass door. So far, the dog had used that faithfully when he couldn’t get outside.

    Scout licked Michael’s hand. The man grinned at him.

    “You don’t care if I had a crappy day at work, do you? You’re perfectly happy to see me no matter what, aren’t you?”

    The dog gave out a small yip, almost as if he understood what Michaels said. He snuggled his head under Michael’s hand.

    Michaels laughed. That was the thing about dogs-you didn’t have to be anything special to impress them. He liked that. If you were as good a person as your dog thought you were, you’d be able to stroll across the Potomac without getting your ankles wet.

    Well. Time to get moving. Better shower and shave and get dressed.

    He had a thought: Why not take the dog with him to work? He could let him run around the office, take him out to pee once in a while. There wasn’t any policy against it. He was the boss, wasn’t he? At least for another day or two he was. Sure. Why the hell not?

    

    
Sunday, October 3rd, 7:40 a.m. Quantico

    John Howard wore an Army-green T-shirt and faded, frayed cargo-pocket fatigue pants over his Kevlar combat boots. He also wore a black headband-he sweated pretty good once he got going, and keeping a garrison cap on was hopeless-but otherwise, he looked like any of the other fifty troopers doing the obstacle course this early Sunday morning.

    John Howard was no armchair commander ordering his troops to do something he wouldn’t-or couldn’t-do himself.

    He was last up.

    Fernandez blew his whistle. “Go, go!”

    Howard felt his belt transponder buzz, starting his personal clock. He sprinted toward the water hazard, jumped, caught the thick rope and swung out over the pit, more mud than water. The trick was to let your momentum swing you back and forth, pump a little with your arms and crunch your body, then jump on the
second
swing…

    Howard released the rope, fell, landed two feet beyond the edge of the pit. He ran for the razor-wire tunnel. There was a backstop at the end of the razor-wire approach, enough to stop machine-gun bullets. The gunners had the day off, but during the graduation run, a steady stream of jacketed full-auto fire, every tenth round a tracer, laid a roof over the wire. This would scare the crap out of a green recruit, but most of his troops were old hands: They knew you couldn’t catch a bullet unless you stuck your head up through the razor wire, a difficult proposition even if you wanted to do so.

    “Clock is running, Colonel!” Fernandez yelled.

    Howard grinned, dropped prone, began knee-and-elbowing his way under the razor wire. As long as you stayed low, the only thing you’d get is dirty. If you got uppity, the razor wire
would
bite you.

    Clear!

    Ahead was a fifteen-foot-high wall with a rope draped over it. If you got there at speed and jumped high as you caught the climbing line, you could make it over with two or three pulls, roll and hit the sawdust pit in three seconds. If you had to climb eight feet of rope, it took longer.

    Howard leaped, grabbed the two-inch hawser with both hands a good ten feet up, reached high with his right hand and caught the rope again, did it on the left side, and was over.

    The next obstacle was essentially a forty-foot-long telephone pole lying in a series of six-foot-high, X-shaped, four-by-four supports. You had to boost yourself up on the end-there was a short step built in there-mount the pole and walk the length. If you fell, you had to go back and start the walk over. The trick was to move steady, not too fast, not too slow. It wasn’t that high, but a fall from six feet could sprain an ankle or break an arm. Once, they’d had a man break his neck when he slipped and landed on his head.

    Howard reached the step, bounced up, stood on the pole. He had walked this hundreds of times, he had the pace down. Steady-not too slow, not too fast.

    At the other end, there was another sawdust pit, though the archaic term was not really appropriate-the dust was not wood, but reconstituted buckyball-plastic. The best way to land on the stuff without sinking to the bottom, a good three feet, was to do so in a sitting position or stretched out and supine.

    The colonel reached the end of the pole walk, jumped outward, lay back and hit flat on his back, hands extended, palms down. Buckyball-plastic splashed, but quickly settled back. Howard rolled, sank a little, but reached the edge of the pit and came to his feet.

    The trooper in front of him was slower than he was. He had just gotten free of the pit himself, and was on the way to the minefield.

    Howard came up behind the man. “Track!” he yelled. The trooper moved to the side and allowed Howard to pass.

    He was making good time. Not his best, but not bad, he felt.

    The minefield was a twenty-foot-wide corridor of sand thirty yards long. The mines were electronic, about the size of a softball, and not dangerous, but if you stepped on one, you knew it-it let out an amplified scream that would wake a man six days dead. Every one you hit cost you fifteen seconds. You could see where the mines were; there were little depressions that dropped the sand a half inch or so over them. If you were first through, it was easy, you could see them and run the field in ten or fifteen seconds, but after a few people went through ahead of you, it got harder to spot the mines among all the boot prints.