Net Force

'Eighty-two on her last birthday,' Toni said, 'and I still wouldn't want to try her head-to-head.'

'Amazing.'

'It's a very scientific art, based on leverage and angles. It assumes you'll be fighting with multiple opponents, all of whom will be bigger and stronger than you. So it relies on technique and not muscle, which in my case is a good thing. Normally, women didn't get into it very far, but Guru DeBeers' husband traveled a lot. He wanted her to have something to protect herself.' Toni stopped. 'But I won't bore you with any more esoteric fighting stuff.'

'No, I'm interested. How does this compare with something like boxing or judo?'

'Well. Most of the older arts come from countries long civilized. Things like Chinese kung-fu, Korean taekwondo, Japanese jujitsu — they've had hundreds, even thousands of years to refine the techniques. Along the way, some of the really ugly stuff got replaced with more spiritual aspects. Fighting to the death tends to get frowned on in civilized company. Which is not to say that an expert in any of these arts isn't dangerous. A good kung-fu or karate stylist will surely hand you your head if you don't know how to stop him.'

'I hear a ‘but' in there,' he said.

She grinned. 'A lot of silat came out of the jungle only two or three generations ago. There are hundreds of styles, although most of it wasn't practiced in public until Indonesia gained independence in 1949. It's real primal stuff, designed for one thing — to cripple or kill an attacker. It's not civilized. It is as deadly and efficient as they could make it. If a technique didn't work, the player who used it either wound up maimed or dead, so that piece didn't get passed on.'

'Interesting.'

She grinned. 'What you saw here? That was the Bukti, the simple stuff. The parent art, Serak, is a whole new ball-game. Really nasty, and a lot of weapon work — sticks, knives, swords, tridents, even guns.'

'And you're supposed to be a nice Italian girl from the Bronx. Remind me not to get on your bad side.'

'Hey, Alex?'

'Yeah?'

'Don't get on my bad side.' She laughed. 'Okay, so what's up? You didn't come here to watch me beat recruits up, did you?'

'No, it's business. We've got another problem,' he said. 'Somebody just blew up the main subnet server at the Net Force post in Frankfurt, Germany.'

'You mean the CIA post.'

'Right. Net Force being chartered to operate in this country only, except in cases of international emergency and requiring Presidential authorization for such operation, of course what I meant was the CIA listening post.'

That got a grin from her. 'Memorized that right out of the charter, huh?'

'Why, whatever do you mean, Deputy Commander Fiorella? Net Force would never do anything illegal.'

She smiled wider. He kind of liked that, making her smile. The idea that an FBI unit set up to do computer monitoring would be restricted to the United States was fairly foolish. There were no borders on the net; the web stretched everywhere, and while you could access most of it from anywhere, certain systems were easier to log into with a certain amount of proximity. The CIA was willing to lend its name to Net Force from time to time, in exchange for certain favors they couldn't get on their own. The CIA wasn't supposed to operate within the United States, but nobody really believed it did not. 'Let me clean up and let's go see,' she said.

5

Wednesday, September 8th, 4 p.m. Sarajevo

An incoming tankbuster rocket hit the building behind Colonel John Howard's Net Force Strike Team, no more than twenty feet above their heads. The missile exploded on impact, blasting a blackened crater in the eighty- year-old structure. A shower of brick fragments and glass pattered down around the half-dozen soldiers where they crouched behind a twisted metal Dumpster. It was a sharp rain, but the least of Howard's worries at this point. They had to take the sucker with the missile launcher out fast!

'Reeves and Johnson, flank, left!' Howard said. It wasn't necessary to yell — all of them wore LOSIR headsets built into their helmets; he could have whispered and they'd have heard him loud and clear. The line-of- sight infrared tactical com units had a short range and worked pretty much only if you could actually see the person you were talking to; on the other hand, they wouldn't be picked up by an enemy with a scanner unless you could see him, too, and that was the reason to use them. 'Odom and Vasquez, suppressing fire! Chan and Brown, go right! On my command… three… two… one— now!'

Odom and Vasquez opened up with their H&K assault subguns, unleashing a canvas-rip full-auto barrage of high-cyclic 9mm's from hundred-round drum magazines.

Reeves and Johnson bailed left and dodged their way across the street, stutter-stepped for the cover of a big tractor-trailer. The truck was long dead, the tires burned and melted away, the metal of the cab and trailer pockmarked with old bullet holes and darkened by soot and graffiti.

Chan and Brown bailed right, adding fire from their weapons as they ran broken-field lines across the killing zone.

The modified SIPEsuits the team wore should be enough to stop most of what the locals had to throw at them. The vests and pants were of cloned spider-silk hardweave, and held pockets of overlapping ceramic plates that would turn pistol or rifle bullets, provided they weren't armor-piercing hotloads. Helmets and boots were Kevlar, with titanium inserts. The backpack CPUs were shockproofed and double-ceramic-plated. The tactical comps encrypted radio, satellite uplinks and downlinks, gave heads-up ghost displays, with motion sensors, IR and UV spookeye scans, terrain maps, even instant flare-polarizers built into the helmets' retractable blast shields. The Net Force suits weren't as heavy as regular Army issue, since they had no SCBA, no distill, no biojects. For this kind of assault, in and out in one day, they didn't need full infantry bells and whistles; even so, the suits added twenty pounds to a wearer.

Howard popped up and shoved his Thompson submachine gun over the top of the Dumpster, cooking off several three-round bursts at the hidey-hole where the guy with the rocket launcher was. The tommy gun was definitely low-tech, an antique built in 1928, and had first belonged to an Indiana sheriff during Prohibition. Howard's greatgrandfather, being black, wasn't officially allowed on the force in those days, but the white sheriff he'd worked for knew a good man when he saw one, regardless of his color, so there was an unofficial Negro who spent twenty years making good money enforcing the law, even if it was off the books. When the sheriff died, he left the tommy gun to Grampa Howard. They called it a Chicago typewriter in those days.

No time for a stroll down memory lane now, John! Duck!

The rocket man had kept his head down, too, but somebody in the stairwell with him let loose a return blast of small-arms fire that pinged and clanged against the heavy Dumpster. Its battered steel was still thick enough to turn the bullets. Howard was glad of it, too, suits notwithstanding.

'Fire in the hole!' Reeves's voice over Howard's com interrupted the sounds of gunfire.

The grenade Reeves tossed into the stairwell went off. More shrapnel spanged against the Dumpster, and the stink of burned explosive washed over Howard, along with smoke and dust.

Two seconds passed. All shooting stopped.

'Clear!' Johnson yelled.

Colonel Howard stood. He saw Johnson grin at him and give him a thumbs-up gesture. Howard returned the grin. His men — well, five men and a woman — stood at the ready, weapons seeking possible targets as they scanned the street and buildings for more trouble. It would be stupid in the extreme for a local to stand up and wave hello to the nice Americans just at that moment.

Howard tapped his helmet flatpad, toggled on his heads-up display and got a digital time-read. He usually kept the display off when things actually got hot — he didn't want to be shooting at phantoms created by his computer. You were supposed to ignore such things with enough practice, but when real bullets started zipping past, it was amazing how many well-trained soldiers opened up on a heat-sig icon or a flashing timer in a heads-up