The Archimedes Effect

detected by a radio scanner, and it was a different spectrum than the Army guys used in their own LOSIR systems.

Patrick Hill was the gearhead, an uber-geek who could build most of the electronics they carried from scratch, but who also could kill sixteen different ways with the soldering iron he’d use to do it.

“Any eyes?”

“No, Boss, clear canopy for the next twenty. No sonics, radios, or LEDs active. Passives either, as far as I can tell.”

Good. They were clear from satellite recon, and no active sensors were operating. Of course there weren’t supposed to be, according to the specs that the chief had given them, but a man like Carruth didn’t leave things to chance. Weren’t-supposed-to-be could get you killed quick.

“Give them the sig,” he said.

“Roger.”

Hill would signal the other two men on their team, and start the clock ticking.

Carruth slid forward on the wet grass, letting the cold soak into him, doing his best to become part of the landscape. Smooth movement, slow and steady was what won this race. Leaves and twigs pressed against him as he moved.

Damn, it was wet. He could use a mask and snorkel. . . .

Twenty-five meters. Twenty. As he slid forward, he could hear the sound of the ambulance as it rolled up to the gate.

The guards looked a little more animated. One of the men in the guardhouse stepped outside, exactly as Carruth had expected—and the scenario had predicted.

That left only one inside the shack.

Carruth crawled faster now. The slowly moving vehicle had captured the attention of the guards—they’d be looking southwest.

When Stark stopped the ambulance and started to talk to the guards, Dexter, his copilot, would shoot the guards, using an air gun firing special hypodermic darts. Once they hit, lightweight capacitors in the darts would release several thousand volts. Low-amperage, but it didn’t take much under the skin. Zap, the guards would go down, out and probably not dead, though that didn’t matter, and no big bang for anybody to overhear.

The ambulance slowed to a stop at the entrance.

“Howdy.” Stark’s voice, flat and nasal. “We’re here to pick up a Major Kendrick—seems he busted his hand up pretty bad, and the base doctors wanna send him out.”

The guard seemed to relax. It wasn’t uncommon for such transfers. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll just check with the OIC—he didn’t tell us you were coming.”

Two dull whuuuuft! sounds punctuated the guard’s words.

Carruth was at the guardhouse now, low, so he wouldn’t be seen. The ex-SEAL slid smoothly upward and saw the guard inside turning toward a monitor.

“Hey, Sarge?” Carruth said as he stepped into the room.

“Yeah?” The man started to turn.

Carruth darted him. “You lose, Sarge. Sorry.”

The guard fell heavily to the ground.

Carruth and Hill slid into the ambulance with Stark. Dexter had already taken his place in the guard’s hut. The gate slid open. Not as heavy as the one in Oklahoma, but stout enough so that ramming it would have been a waste of time.

Ahead was the barracks.

Stark had been telling the truth at the gate—they really were here to pick up Major Kendrick. The principal lock on the armory was a biometric palm scanner. The device used infrared light and ultrasound to read the pattern of veins underneath the skin, a signature as unique as a fingerprint or retinal scan. They hadn’t been able to get the matching file from the camp’s computer, so they had to do it a different way.

The problem was that the scanner also read the temperature of the hand while the ultrasound checked on the arterial flow. Dead hands tended to cool pretty quick, and no blood circulated, so they needed Kendrick alive. Microwaving a hand to body temp might be a viable option, but faking the live arteries was impossible. Different than the hit in Oklahoma, but you had to adjust, that was the name of the game. Roll with the punches, and don’t get caught flat-footed . . .

The three of them entered the building. Stark pushed the collapsible stretcher. They made no attempt at stealth. One of the oldest tricks in the book—look like you belong, and you won’t be questioned. The three moved down the hallway to Kendrick’s room. Once there, Carruth opened the door and stepped in. Kendrick was asleep, and the quick injection he gave the man would keep him that way.

They rolled Kendrick to the ambulance without incident.

They drove to the armory. The building was a large warehouse within a carefully guarded perimeter. It was good security—human guards outside and technological ones inside.

Again, they darted the guards. Stark took over at the kiosk, while Carruth and Hill drove inside.

At the outer door, Kendrick’s hand worked exactly as advertised. Patrick did some kind of geek-magic and opened the electronically controlled inner door.

“You ready?” he asked.

Carruth nodded.

Things were about to get hot.

The warheads couldn’t be removed without activating indicators well away from the armory. Such alarms were active at all times, part of SOP for keeping track of the weapons. So they had to move fast.

“Go.”

The target they were after was a big one—approximately three hundred pounds. They pushed the stretcher —now clear of Kendrick—close to the rack, and rolled the device onto it. An audible alarm went off.

Hill smoothly tightened two nylon safety belts as Carruth pushed the nuke toward the door. They hurried.

They made it to the ambulance. Carruth drove while Hill locked down the warhead.

Go-go-go—!

They sped toward the armory perimeter, hearing sirens approach. Stark ran, hopping in while they were still moving.

They were halfway to the gate when the world flickered and jumped, making Carruth slam on the brakes.

“Damn machine!”

Carruth smacked the side of his heads-up display and the image stabilized.

This is what happens when you buy cheap.

Carruth thought VR training was for shit—no amount of pretending to crawl through the forest prepared you for the real thing. The cold, the bugs—VR just didn’t cut it. Sure, the spacing of the base, the time factors, and the movement could be worked with their setup, but the little random things—Kendrick deciding to go pee, or being out on a date—those could never be factored in accurately.

But their current operations budget didn’t cover full-scale mockups. Or as the boss had put it, “You can spend the money on your field gear or your training gear, you choose.”

So they’d compromised. The system they were using wasn’t full VR—it mixed real-time computer graphics and a heads-up display with simulated models. The guards and base were all VR, spun on the Kraken Cluster back at camp, and ’cast to their headsets. But the crawling through grass, climbing, and driving were for real.

They hadn’t bothered with much training for the other attack. That had been simple hit-and-run—get in, do damage, and get out. And there, they’d had all the computer codes. Because this one was more complicated, training was a necessity.

But it was worth it. The attack would drive the price of their U.S. military base information through the roof. And on a more personal level, Carruth was looking forward to the black eye it would give the military.

Teach them what happens when they mess with me.

They made the entrance and picked up Dexter without any problems. By then, the ambulance sirens and flashers were running.