all business again.
Damn. She had a sudden flash of fantasy — lying with him right here, making passionate love in this wild purple car of his.
Wishful thinking, Toni.
Still, it had definitely been a good thing to have sent that birthday present to his daughter. His gratitude had been real enough. She felt that, too.
'You want the bad news? Or the worse news?'
'God.'
'Colonel? I think maybe you ought to saddle up,' Michaels said.
'Sir?' John Howard sat forward in his office chair, his back suddenly straight and tense.
'According to a coded message intercepted by CIA listening post at the U.S. embassy in the Ukraine, a physical attack is planned on the station there, likely in the next few days. We'd like two things. One, you take a platoon or so of your best to augment the Marine guard at the embassy and head off any attack. Two, and more importantly, we wouldn't be real unhappy if you could find out who is behind it while you're sitting around waiting for the shooting to start.'
Howard grinned at the blank screen.
'Officially, yes. Officially, you and your troops won't be leaving the embassy, which is U.S. territory. Unofficially, the local government won't get in your way. We've got a Dad Tee policy in effect for this operation.'
Howard grinned again. Dad Tee, from the acronym DADT — Don't Ask, Don't Tell — a policy spawned long before the Clinton Administration had made the term popular. What that meant was, as long as he and his men didn't get caught doing something too blatant, the host country could — and would — pretend it didn't see them. If he didn't burn down the capitol or assassinate the President while CNN had a camera on him, they'd be okay.
'I'll have my teams in the air in thirty minutes, Commander Michaels.'
'Don't break a leg, Colonel. Take an hour or two. The pertinent information is being downloaded to your S&T computer even as we speak. Your contact at the embassy will be Morgan Hunter, the CIA station chief, but it's your operation.'
'Sir.'
After he hung up, Howard couldn't keep the grin from his face. Finally. A field operation, and not a virtual one. The real thing.
He found himself breathing faster, and with a sudden urge to visit the bathroom. This was it.
'Time to rock and roll,' he said to the air. 'Rock and
8
In his office, Jay Gridley prepared to ride the net.
Cyberspace wasn't really like the old movies that had first depicted it, Gridley knew. But virtual reality constructs — VRCs — did use imagery to help a webwalker navigate the web. The images could be almost anything a user wanted. There were hundreds of standard commercial overlays, from cities with freeways, to old Western towns, to space flights. And there were tens of thousands of shareware scenarios to be had on the web. Some of the best software you could get was free. Download or timeshare the ware, and the net could be anything anybody had ever bothered to program. If you couldn't find anything that suited you, you could create your own vehicle. You didn't even need to be a programmer; any fool could do it. WebWeaveWare these days was easier than paint-by- numbers.
Gridley had several favorite travel pieces he used when he donned his VR gear and went on-line. He did the finger weave to access the command mode, waved the web to life and said, 'Dodge Viper, Bavaria.'
The VR gear gave him an image of a mountain road in a somewhat-stylized German landscape. He was inside an RT/10 Viper, a black convertible roadster with broad white racing stripes, driving down a steep switchback. There would be a border crossing coming up soon. He clutched and downshifted from sixth into fifth, tapped the accelerator and grinned at the crisp breeze ruffling his long black hair. He enjoyed the classic James Bond movies, even though saying, 'Gridley,
The border crossing loomed. A single uniformed soldier stood behind a black-and-yellow-striped pole blocking the road, a submachine gun held at port arms.
Gridley downshifted and braked. The roadster rumbled deep in its muscular throat as it rolled to a stop.
The guard said, 'Your papers, please.'
The guard smelled like cheap aftershave and stale sweat, with a touch of cigarette tobacco thrown in.
Gridley smiled, reached into the pocket of his tuxedo — well, if you were gonna play, you might as well go all the way — and removed his passport.
Eventually, he would have to program himself a female passenger to complete this scenario. A sultry redhead, perhaps, or a dark and deadly brunette. A woman afraid of the speed, but excited by it nonetheless. Yeah…
In the real world, an electronic password was tendered to a gate server on the web, bits of binary hex code pulsed from one system to another, but in VR, the visuals were so much more pleasing and much more intuitive.
A cursory inspection, then the guard returned his passport, nodded curtly and raised the barrier. Gridley had come this way before. There was never any problem.
Around the next curve, the mountain road turned suddenly into an autobahn, with traffic zooming past at speeds in excess of 160 kilometers per hour. He tromped the Viper accelerator, laid rubber — first… second… even in third — upshifted when the engine peaked in fourth, then fifth gears, achieved sixth as he merged with the flow of cars and trucks barreling along.
James Bond's old Aston-Martin, and in the later movies the BMW, would never have kept up with the Viper. It had a top speed of around 260 kilometers per hour, with an eight-liter, ten-cylinder engine that would get one to that top speed with unbelievable rapidity. It was a rocket with wheels.
He was in the netstream now, his program running smoothly. He liked the freeway image, but he could, if he wished, switch to a more leisurely hike along a stream, or a bicycle tour of France, although that kind of sudden program change did tend to jar one somewhat.
Ahead was an exit sign: CyberNation.
Gridley frowned. There had been a lot of infospew lately about CyberNation, a VR 'country' that was accepting not only tourists, but residents. They — whoever the programmers were who'd created the VRland — were offering a whole bunch of computer perks if you were willing to 'emigrate' to their creation — if you were willing to give up your electronic citizenship in your own country for theirs, a thing that seemed unlikely. He hadn't checked into it himself, but it was an interesting idea. Some day, in his copious spare time, he'd have to see what all the fuss was about.
He glanced at the analog clock inset into the car's dashboard — no digital gauges for this beast.
A sleek Jaguar passed the Viper, and Gridley smiled at it. Oh, yeah?
He goosed the Viper, felt the jolt of acceleration even in sixth gear as the car surged forward and began to gain on the Jag as if it were standing still. He flew past, seeing the frowning driver's face. Gridley grinned. The Jag didn't have any more, and the Viper wasn't even close to redlining the tach. So long, pal!
He was still feeling pretty full of himself when he saw the wreck about half a mile ahead of him. A big semi had flipped and turned onto its side, the trailer now blocked all the lanes on his side of the freeway. Traffic was lined up for a quarter mile, and the line was getting longer fast.
Damn!
Gridley hit the brakes — carefully, they were top-of-the-line disk but not little-old-granny ABS — and started downshifting. Fortunately, the Viper was as good at stopping as it was at going. He pulled to a halt behind a big
