Jay said, “Selling keys to the candy store, maybe.”
Thorn nodded. “Yeah. Could be. There are loons running around out there who would pay big money for that. Demonstrate that there is an easy way into an Army base a few times, and the crazies will line up to buy your key.”
Jay said, “Or maybe these are just feints, designed to convince the military they don’t really need to worry, and they plan on something a lot worse. One of the bases in the bug game has tactical nukes on hand, and from the part of the DCP we got, there were ways to get past the first level of security. Hard to tell what is in the bits we missed.”
“You’ve told the Army about this?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s all in my report, ought to be in your in-box somewhere. They’ve changed security procedures on all the bases I matched, new codes, new guard routines, beefed-up whatevers. We might have short-circuited them.” Jay frowned. “Wait a second. You said a base in Hawaii?”
“Yes, a new one, not much there but a recon school. Near Hana, on Maui.”
Jay shook his head. “I don’t recall cross-referencing a base in Hawaii.” He paused. Then: “Shit!”
“What?”
“The guy has another game running!” Jay stood. “I have to get on the net. I should have thought of this before!”
“Go,” Thorn said.
After Jay was gone, Thorn sat at his desk. Net Force spent a lot of time stamping out little fires, and every now and then a big one, like this, or the Chinese general. And Thorn felt as if he had gotten better at running the agency, even with the switch in command. Still, it wasn’t what he had thought it would be when he left civilian life to do it. He could have retired a few years back and sat around thinking up creative ways to spend his money. He wasn’t super-rich, but he could live pretty well just off the interest his millions generated. Working for the military hadn’t gotten onerous yet, but he feared that it would eventually. If Hadden was right—if he was going to be made into a military general, even if it was more technical than real—what would that mean?
He didn’t want to be part of the problem. He’d taken the job as commander to give something back to his country, which had been pretty good to a poor boy from an Indian rez in Washington State. The tribe was doing better these days—they had a casino outside of Walla Walla, and were dickering for another one near the Idaho border, in a land swap with the feds. Not enough money coming in to make everybody rich, but enough so nobody would be poor. That was good.
Once he and Marissa were married? What then? She could quit her job at the CIA if she wanted. Or not. That would be up to her. And maybe he would quit if she did. He wasn’t getting any younger. They could travel, see things, do things together, enjoy life. Outside of his fencing and his collection of swords, he didn’t have any expensive hobbies. He had a nice house, was about to hook up with a fantastic woman. Life was short—he could get hit by a truck, a tree could fall on him, and all his money wouldn’t matter. Maybe it was time to pack it in at work and enjoy whatever time he had left?
His com buzzed.
“Yes.”
“General Hadden on one.”
Of course. “I got it.”
He reached for the receiver. This would be a fun conversation.
Retirement sounded better all the time. . . .
7
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
General Abe Kent had something he wanted to show to Thorn.
They met at the quartermaster’s warehouse, a nice brisk ten-minute walk from Thorn’s office. The pair of armed guards didn’t salute, but they weren’t supposed to—they needed to be able to open up with the subguns they held at a moment’s notice if somebody who didn’t belong here somehow showed up.
He saw Kent coming across the concrete, not quite a march, but more than a stroll.
“Abe,” Thorn said.
“Sir. Right this way.” General Kent nodded at the two guards.
“What am I going to look at?”
“A SWORD fighter,” Kent said.
Thorn blinked. He thought he knew about such things, but certainly there weren’t actually guys in the military these days who still used swords. . . .
“Excuse me?” he said, frowning. “Did you say ‘sword fighter’?”
“S-W-O-R-D,” Kent said. “Stands for ‘Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.’ ”
Thorn smiled. “I see. The military sure does love those acronyms, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir, they surely do.”
“You don’t need to ‘sir’ me, Abe.”
“That’s not what I hear, General Thorn.”
Thorn shook his head. “Hasn’t happened yet. What is it, the SWORD?”
Kent led him to a cleared-out spot in the warehouse. Except for what was parked in the middle of the space.
“What on earth—?”
Kent said, “Basically, sir, it’s a robot. About a meter high, rides on tracks, like tank treads—even looks kind of like a stripped-down tank, doesn’t it? This model weighs about fifty kilos, runs on lithium-ion batteries. It has a working range of a thousand meters, can go about thirty-five klicks on a charge, or sit parked and watching for four or five hours before the battery runs down, and you can swap that out in a couple minutes. What you have is four cameras—a wide-angle and zoom facing front, one facing to the rear, and one lined up as a gunsight. Mounts an M240 light machine gun, the ammo belt rides in a can, holds about three hundred rounds.”
Thorn stared at the device. It looked deadly just parked there.
“You need more punch, you can get one that comes with an M202-A1 6mm rocket launcher.”
Thorn glanced at Kent, then back at the SWORD device.
“SWORD is radio-controlled,” Kent continued. “Take some kid who grew up playing with a Gameboy or Xbox, put him in a VR helmet. He holds a controller, and it’s just like playing a video game. He can roll it down a street, look this way and that, and engage enemy targets from inside a protected location up to a kilometer away.”
Thorn shook his head, unsure whether he was impressed or simply depressed. “And what does this toy cost?”
“Starts out just over a quarter million, runs to three hundred fifty, four hundred thousand, depending on the bells and whistles. There’s one with an ordnance sniffer good to a few parts per million—it’ll nose out an ammo dump a walking soldier might miss. Or you can get one with a chemical/radiation detector. There’s another one with a flamethrower—you park it, a little tube comes up and spins around spewing fire in a complete circle—covers three-sixty for fifty meters. Pretty good for stopping a major shooting riot in its tracks. For less-lethal encounters, there’s a model that will spew gas the same way—tear, pepper, puke, whatever, and it comes with an extra battery that charges a capacitor which gives anybody foolish enough to lay bare hands on it about ninety thousand volts of low-amperage charge that will knock them onto their ass in a hurry.”
“Nice.”
“Yep. They started rolling them out in Second Iraq, Stryker Brigade. They were an outgrowth of the bomb-defusing Talon robots built by Foster-Miller, up in Massachusetts. Somebody said, ‘Well, if we can defuse a bomb, why can’t we put a gun on it?’ So they did.”
Thorn shook his head again. He was pretty sure he wasn’t impressed after all. “Sounds like some kind of science-fiction movie.”