Springboard (12 page)

“CyberNation?” Thorn said. “The computer geeks who want to start their own on-line country?”

Jay nodded. “Yeah, that’s them. They came at us electronically, politically, and live and in person.”

“I don’t remember being briefed on this—and believe me, I would have remembered if I had ever heard a word about it.”

Jay shrugged. “It’s been a couple years and they’ve been quiet since. This was back when they were trying to get big numbers to join up, and they didn’t care how they did it. Part of their scheme was to take down a major chunk of the net, leaving themselves as the only real viable option.”

Commander Thorn shook his head. “The net was designed so that couldn’t happen.”

“The Internet was, yeah, Commander, but that was a long time ago. The World Wide Web pretty much replaced the old Internet a while back, and with the increased ease of use came increased vulnerability. These days, if you know which backbone servers to take out, you could do a whole lot of damage. The net, the web, they are more complex now than ever before, and everything is linked to everything else—communications, servers, private companies, government, military. There were some real bad apples at CyberNation, and it came down to guns and bombs. People died. The government apparently decided it was better to keep most of it hush-hush. Eventually it all got squared away, but not to my satisfaction.”

Thorn thought about that for a moment. “So why is CyberNation still around if they are such bad folks?”

Jay smiled grimly. “Good question, Boss. These guys all wear eye patches and pegs legs and carry cutlasses, as far as I am concerned. But the official tale was that a rogue splinter group was responsible for the crimes. We took them down, and nobody could prove it went beyond them, so that was the end of the story.”

Thorn shook his head. The concept of CyberNation was like that of Communism—too idealistic to work. The hope that geographical nations would cede the rights and privileges of a real country to citizens of a virtually created one? It would never happen. However much time you spent on-line, you still had to
be
somewhere in the real world, and that spot, if it was on land, belonged to somebody. Nobody had built a giant raft-city way out at sea yet, and if they did, probably not a lot of folks would go live there. You were subject to the laws and regulation of an RW country, and the idea that most countries would give that control up because some net organization paid them taxes on a citizen was simply not realistic.

Oh, sure, there were some poor countries that might go for it. Some Third World spots where the idea of big numbers being able to get wired and on-line was fairly unlikely, which kind of killed the point, but only a relative handful of those would take such a deal. No major country was going to buy into the idea that one of its breathing citizens living in a house on Elm Street would suddenly become a foreign national who had allegiance to a web server and was no longer subject to the local laws, like some kind of diplomat. No way, nohow.

And yet, CyberNation had convinced millions of people to join up in the hope that just such a thing was going to come to pass. In doing so, it had become bigger than AOL and able to offer some very good programs. They had the best VR scenarios available commercially, with a wide range of choices.

Still, Thorn was always amazed at how gullible some people continued to be, even in this supposedly enlightened age. A virtual country? Not on this planet.

“Listen, Jay, we have reason to believe that whoever is attacking our military is also taking potshots at CyberNation.”

“Good for them.”

Thorn shook his head. It was just the two of them, alone in a VR room. “Things change. Yesterday’s enemy is today’s friend. You know how that works. At the moment, CyberNation and Net Force seem to have a common problem. We want to solve that. We will take any help we can get.”

“It sucks.”

“Come on, Jay. That is the way of the world, and you are much too bright to not know it.”

Jay didn’t say anything.

“We’ve also got a guy coming over from China, the head of their Internet police agency.”

“Chang Han Yao?”

“You know him?”

“I know who he is. He’s got a few moves. What’s he over for?”

“Ostensibly, to talk about modernizing China’s agency, maybe to pick up some tips. The Chinese are our friends these days. Communism is on the way out, and they have become a major trading partner. Have you seen that exhibit from the Forbidden City at the Smith?”

“Yeah, VR. Very interesting. I got no grief with the Chinese.”

“And you’ll help with the man from CyberNation. A French guy.”

“Seurat. I know his work. He wrote a paper on quantum computer applications that was . . . passable.”

“I do seem to recall something about quantum computers and Net Force,” Thorn said.

“Yep, that was a crazy English scientist and a dotty old lord. They shot at us, too.” Jay shook his head again. “You know, for an agency that is supposed to be a bunch of desk jockeys riding expensive chairs in dark and quiet rooms, we seem to get shot at a lot.”

Thorn smiled. “Probably that won’t happen here.”

Jay didn’t smile back. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Boss. CyberNation claimed to have gotten rid of all the bad guys, but it’s hard to believe the people at the top didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

“But you’ll help me with this guy?”

Jay nodded, his face glum.

“Thanks, Jay. I appreciate it.” Thorn paused. “So, anything new on the war game hacker?”

Jay frowned again and shook his head. “I’ve been running things down, but so far, nothing. The military sysop is pretty good, and the system isn’t supposed to be reachable from outside, so it isn’t like some wahoo can just dial up and log in, even if he had the codes. We’re dealing with somebody who has been very careful.”

“But you’ll get him, eventually?”

“Oh, yeah. I always get ’em, Boss. It’s just a matter of time. . . .”

Chang stared through the window, but there was nothing to see save a dense layer of clouds a few thousand feet below the jetliner. Normally, he didn’t take a window seat when he flew, especially on long flights; he preferred to have the aisle, so as to be able to stretch his legs now and then, or attend to business in the toilet.

But the flight had been crowded—relations between China and the United States were at an all-time high, and even with a new airline that added several flights a day to the States, the jets were, so he had been told, usually full. Plus, this was a direct flight to Washington, D.C., and much faster than the old ones where you had to fly to Los Angeles, then switch to an American carrier for the final leg across the country.

Cutting five or six hours from your travel time made this flight much in demand. Normally, Chang would not have had the clout to merit such a flight. Then again, a man who knew as much about computers as he did had some advantages. He had access to reservation codes, and booking his own flight with those had been a simple matter. The state of the industry in China was such that this was not even illegal—nobody had ever worried about it, since nobody outside of himself and a few of his employees even knew it was possible.

He grinned. He would have to plug that hole when he returned home. At least for others . . .

“Would you care for a drink, sir?”

The flight attendant, a pretty, moonfaced young woman with a bright smile, stood in the aisle, leaning slightly over a couple traveling from Beijing to visit a daughter who, Chang had been told, lived in Baltimore. The attendant’s chest, completely covered under a shirt and buttoned jacket, loomed over the husband, who had the aisle seat.

“Some club soda, please,” Chang said.

The young woman moved on, much to the disappointment of the man seated on the aisle, Chang felt.

The Canadian, Alaine Courier, had provided Chang with some excellent software, and, more importantly, an introduction to a U.S. official who had access to Net Force. As a result, Chang was traveling to Washington to meet the head of the agency, which could not help but be useful. Just to see how the place was laid out, what equipment he could see, anything, that would be wondrous.

There were those in his government who wanted very much for China to be a match for the United States in all things. Properly approached and primed, such men could be most helpful to Chang’s desire to upgrade his systems and technicians.
Why, yes, Comrade, I went to Net Force Headquarters. They are so far ahead of us, I fear it will take many years for us to even begin to catch up. Of course, a few million carefully spent would close that gap considerably, if a man knew exactly what to buy and how to use it, but . . . what are the chances of that happening . . . ?

Chang would rather not play those political games, but in these times, there was no choice—not if you wanted to stay in the race. He did not enjoy such things, but he was learning how to be adept at them. It was, alas, part of the job. Better he know how to do it than not. . . .

Next to him, the woman said, “Did I mention that my daughter and her husband have given us three grandchildren?”

Several times,
Chang thought. But he smiled. “Really? How wonderful for you. . . .”

Abe Kent was no Luddite—he used VR training for his troops as much as the next commander—it was just that he preferred reality over virtual reality. Unfortunately, the reality was that there were some scenarios you simply couldn’t do in the real world. The Iraqis and the Iranians, even the Colombians, tended to frown upon a small military unit taking target practice on their citizens, no matter what their crimes.

The days of gunboat diplomacy and backing up private companies like United Fruit were long past, and Kent had no desire to see them come around again, so when you needed to work in the field against a team of Bosnians or Afghanis on their home ground, you dressed your men—and women—in sensory gear and did it in VR. It worked out all right, for the most part, and it was far better than nothing.

But Colonel Kent never lost sight of the fact that no matter how good the electronic impedimenta, no matter how well the stim units worked muscles, the computer scenario was not reality. You could simulate the feel of crawling over a muddy field, the sounds of gunfire, even the heat of a desert afternoon, but nobody broke an ankle, tore a groin muscle, or got fatally shot in VR.

Yes, there had been a few heart attacks in scenarios that were exciting enough to start the blood pumping fast, though most of these, Kent understood, had been using gear that simulated sexual encounters. Kent had never lost a trooper in VR, and he was in agreement with Bill Jordan, the famous gunfighter who had come out of the Border Patrol in the 1950s and ’60s.

Jordan, whose skill with a double-action revolver was legendary—he could pick aspirin tablets off a tabletop at fifteen feet by point-shooting, without scratching the table’s finish—had written a book on gunfighting called
No Second Place Winner.
Kent had an autographed copy of that book at home and had read it several times.

When talking about fast-draw experts who popped balloons with their side arm’s muzzle blast, Jordan said that in the history of gunfighting nobody had ever died from a loud noise—meaning that you needed to practice hitting a target using a real gun with full-power ammo. Speed was fine, but accuracy was final, and the only way to make sure you had both was to practice using the gun you’d have when the bullets flew for real.

The troops grumbled when Kent took them out to the Marine training field in a pouring rain to practice tactics, but he knew that those experiences would pay off if they ever found themselves in such a situation.

Of course, lying on the sloppy, cold ground in the rain, as he now was, wasn’t the most pleasant way to pass an afternoon, but this was how you got real practice. If your LOSIR gear shorted out when it started raining, this was the place to find that out, not on a real battlefield where somebody was trying to shoot you. If you jammed your assault rifle or subgun’s barrel into the mud and plugged it, best you learn how to clear that, since firing a weapon with a slug of mud blocking the muzzle could get you a face full of shrapnel when the barrel exploded, as it could. At the very least, that weapon would be useless.

Kent had once seen a soldier on a firing line at a military range in Texas using a .308 assault rifle with a suppressor fitted to it. No way to silence that boom completely, certainly not with hypersonic rounds, but the idea was to quiet it a little, to make it harder to pinpoint the location. The machinist who had made the suppressor, or the shooter who had threaded it onto the barrel, or maybe both, had made a mistake. When the shooter fired off the first round, the bullet caught something in the silencing device, tore it off the muzzle, and hurled it thirty meters downrange.

“Whatcha got there, son?” the rangemaster had called out. “A grenade launcher?”

The .308’s muzzle was damaged enough so that firing it again without repair would have been dangerous to anybody close.

Kent smiled at the memory.

If you had to have such an experience, a safe shooting range was the place to have it—not facing a platoon of enemy soldiers with AK-47s that might be old but that worked fine. A man could kill you with a cap-and-ball carbine that had been old-tech during the Civil War. . . .

“Clear,” came the voice over Kent’s LOSIR headset.

“You heard the mine-finder,” Kent said. “Let’s move, people.”

The team, six troopers and Kent, scrabbled up in the rain and muck and splashed their way across the field. There were AP mines buried here—electronic ones that sent an IR pulse to the receivers the men wore in their SIPEsuits. If you stepped on one, any receiver in range announced it with a loud “beep.” To make it more realistic, a small flash-bang in the ground went off, and that was enough to singe your clothes a little, reinforcing the electronic sig in a way that you didn’t forget. Scared the hell out of you and stung a little, but a real mine would have blown off an arm or leg or killed you outright, and the little popper reminded you to pay attention.