Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane
The Deadliest Game
PROLOGUE
It was the kind of windowless room found in any one of a thousand office buildings nowadays, since the world had become truly virtual and any wall could become a window at the will of the inhabitants. However, the inhabitants of this particular room seemed unwilling to indulge in even the illusion of windowing; or perhaps what they disliked was the basic implication of a window, that someone might be able to see in as well as out. The walls were blind and bare, though they glowed softly white, shedding a cool, even light over the large, shiny black table in the middle of the room, and over the five men sitting at one end of it.
They were Suits. Some of their lapels or ties were marginally more slender than others, or wider, but only those slight clues to their ages or preferences in fashion made them look at all different from one another. Otherwise, their ties were all subdued, and their shirts were plain white or pale colors, no prints. In nearly all ways they were unremarkable-looking men, and wore that unremarkableness like a disguise.
It was one.
“So when will it be ready?” said the one who sat at the center of the group.
“It’s ready now,” said the man sitting furthest from him on his left, a youngish-looking man with iron-colored hair and iron-gray eyes. “The controls have been in place for eighteen months now, consolidating their positions and getting ready to go into maximal intervention mode.”
“And no one suspects?”
“No one. We’ve had zero tolerance for leaks…not that it would have been that much of a problem
The man in the center turned to one of the two on his right, an older man with a deeply lined face and shaggy blond hair going silver. “What about the people at Ecs? Are they set?”
The man with the silver-gilt hair nodded. “They had the point of maximum economic result picked several months ago. All the projections have matched real-world outcomes…if ‘real’ is the word we’re looking for. We can move the world, all right. The lever’s ready. All we need to do now is pick the place to stand.”
The man in the center nodded. “All right. Your two sections will need to work very closely together on this, but you have been anyway. Make sure you pick the right ‘spot’…and when you start to push, don’t spare the effort. I want the whole thing overturned. A lot of people are watching this demonstration, and they’ll expect to see something spectacular for all the funds they’ve diverted. Excuse me. I mean ‘laterally invested’”—the others smiled—“toward setting up the best possible result. Make absolutely certain the endgame position matches the modeling. I don’t want any bull afterwards about ‘equivocal results.’”
The two men to whom he had spoken nodded.
“All right,” said the man in the center. “Lunch with the people from Tokagawa is at one-thirty. Don’t be late. We want to make a unified presentation, and you know what a stickler that miserable little old man is for manners.”
“If this works out,” said one of the men to whom he had not spoken, “we won’t need to mind our manners much longer.
The man in the center looked at him: a slow, deliberate turn of the head, like a targeting mechanism turning on gimbals and locking on.
“If?” he said.
The other man went slightly pale, and glanced down at the table.
The man in the center held the look for a few seconds more, then stood. The others stood with him. “The car will be here at five after one,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”
The man who had gone pale was first out of the room, closely followed by the only one who had not spoken. The young iron-haired man glanced at the man in the center, then followed the others out. The door shut.
Then the man in the middle chuckled softly. “A nuke, huh?” he said. “It might be funny.”
The man with the silver-gilt hair produced a slightly sardonic expression, and turned to follow in the wake of the others. “Well,” he said, “frankly, I don’t know if I’d bother. They’d probably just think it was magic….”
1
The place smelled like a breakdown at a sewage treatment facility. That was what Shel noticed most as he pushed aside the tent’s door-flap and gazed out into the fading sunset light.
He looked out wearily over the russet-lit, shadow-streaked vista of pine woods and sloping fields and river- banks that had become, at about noon today, a battlefield. Then, for a few magic minutes, it had been exactly what one’s dreams of such a place would be at their best: the armies drawn up in their serried ranks, spears glinting and banners snapping bright in the brisk wind and the sun, and the trumpets shouting brazen defiance across the river that had been the boundary between their two forces, his and Delmond’s. Delmond had come marching down the road to the river with his two thousand horse and three thousand foot, and had sent his herald Azure Alaunt over the water with the usual defiance, or rather the defiance that had become typical of Delmond as he pushed his way across Sarxos’s lesser kingdoms. There were none of the courtesies that one opposing commander usually paid the other — no offer of single combat to spare the armies the bloodshed that must follow; not even the commonplace and pragmatic suggestion that the two armies’ quartermasters meet to investigate the possibility of one side buying out the contracts of the other army’s mercenaries, a move that would often render a battle unnecessary if, as a result, the strength of one side suddenly doubled and the other’s was halved. No, Delmond wanted to take Shel’s little land of Telairn on the other side of the Artel; and more, he wanted a fight — wanted the smell of blood in the afternoon, and the sound of trumpets.
So Shel let him have it.
There was no use pretending it hadn’t been satisfying. Delmond’s tactics had been positively insulting — no scouts, no attempt to reconnoiter or secure the battle site ahead of time. He’d simply marched right up the North Road to the River Artel as if there had been nothing to fear, and after that brief pause to issue formal defiance to the troops drawn up on the other side, Delmond had forded the Artel at the head of his forces, heading straight up the gentle grassy rise on the far side of the river as if there was absolutely no cause to be concerned about attacking uphill, and into cavalry already emplaced.
Delmond was heading for Minsar, the little city about two miles up the road from the fords of the Artel. He had apparently decided that the mixed force of five hundred cavalry and two thousand foot that Shel had positioned between the river and the road to Minsar was an obstacle easily to be swept aside; more so because, to judge by the lack of command pennons on the great-banner of the Telairn forces, Shel was apparently not with them.
But the Artel was an old river, winding and deeply oxbowed among the gentle pine-clad hills through which it meandered. Those hills held many secrets for the knowledgeable wanderer. Many little tracks and hidden roads, hunter’s paths and game paths, wound among and over them as the river wound around…and the paths and tracks were all quite hidden under the thick boughs of the towering pines and firs. The ground under those big old trees was cushioned deep with old dry needles that would muffle the sound of anything that moved.
So it was that, when Delmond’s forces were halfway across the river — the cavalry first, the foot following,
