the bullet went, assuming you didn't jerk too much when you dropped the hammer. No parallax. And unlike a laser, there was no beam or glowing dot for an enemy to see and target — the dot wasn't visible from the muzzle side, and if it had been, it was a seven-minute-of-angle pinhead, anyhow.
The unit weighed about as much as a round of starfish ammo, didn't add much bulk, and was a lot easier to line up than standard iron sights. It was almost indestructible, too, according to reports. While Howard didn't need glasses to read his newspaper yet, the front sight on his short-barreled pistol had seemed a little fuzzy the last few months. When the rangemaster showed him this little toy on one of the range pistols, he'd tried it, just for the hell of it.
And had shot 15 percent better the first time he tried it.
For a man to improve his combat efficiency with a handgun by 15 percent just like that was nothing to wave off lightly. After a couple more magazines, that went up a couple more points, too.
At first, he'd tried to ignore it. But on subsequent visits to the range, he'd used the thing again. The armorer told him he could pull the back sight, grind the front post off, and bead-blast the Smith, mount the electronic replacement, and get it done in a few days. Hell, he'd said, begging the colonel's pardon, but at real close range you were gonna point-shoot that antique and not use the sights anyhow, and outside six or eight yards, the red dot would make the colonel a better shooter. What was the problem?
Howard hadn't said, but mostly the problem would be the taste of crow.
Julio would never let him live it down.
It had taken a month or so, but once he started down that road, it was impossible to go back, there was no arguing with the numbers. Same gun, same ammo, and he was more accurate and faster with the dot scope. So it was a done deal, he'd had this technological marvel mounted on top of a weapon whose basic form went all the way back to Samuel Colt's first designs, in what? The 1830s? Even the double-action revolver wasn't a new invention; it was used on Robert Adams's self-cockers only sixteen or eighteen years after Sam Colt's early revolvers. The scope and the Smith thus made for an interesting marriage: seventeenth-century technology and twenty-first.
And this was a May-December marriage Howard didn't want his sergeant to notice, just yet. Maybe when he did, things would be heated up enough so it wouldn't require an explanation.
He looked up and saw Julio coming back from the can. He shoved the revolver back into his bag. At the same time, one of the flight crew, the navigator, approached from the other direction. 'Colonel?'
He looked at the navigator. 'Yes?'
'We, uh, have a problem, sir.'
The new light-rail shuttle train, carrying 674 passengers from Pretoria to Johannesburg, blew through the scheduled stop at Tembisa Station at almost 140 kilometers per hour. The engineer threw the manual override, took control from the computer, applied the brakes, and the train began slowing. It would have been all right — except for the second passenger train stalled just south of Tembisa.
The shuttle was still doing more than 90 when it plowed into the back of the stopped train that was supposed to be ten minutes ahead and moving at speed.
Both trains buckled, and more than two thirds of each left the tracks, accordioned like toys jammed together by a spoiled child.
Half the people in the rear car of the stopped train were killed instantly. Others were thrown from the smashed car to their deaths.
A few were electrocuted by downed power lines.
The engineer of the moving train stayed at his post and died there, along with scores of panicked passengers just behind him. His last words, as recorded by the black box, were, 'Oh, shit!'
A fire, started by sparks from the impact or maybe electricity, set the interior of one of the stopped train's cars aflame. Smoke boiled forth and laid a black cloud over the scene.
Estimates of the dead were ballpark, but the number was more than 200. More would doubtless die on the way to area hospitals or later from injuries.
Nobody even worried about the third shuttle following ten minutes later. They should have. The engineer on this train frowned as he realized that his communications gear was out and that his vehicle was going too fast as it approached the station.
By the time he wrested control away from the computer, it was too late.
His last words would never be known, as the impact was sufficiently violent to destroy this train's black box, leaving only a burned-out husk.
The beacon switched off just as the L10-11C3 wide-body jumbo jet from Japan came in for a landing at Kona during a tropical shower. The pilot apparently overreacted as the plane yawed, and JAL Heavy dropped hard enough to collapse the rear landing gear on the port side. The big craft slewed starboard, spun, and slid sideways across the runway, square into a Hawaiian Air MD-80 waiting to taxi for takeoff for the short hop to Maui. The smaller bird spewed flaming jet fuel, ignited, and the resulting fireball set the larger craft on fire. There was a terrific explosion. Tourists waiting inside the airport were killed as shattered aluminum sleeted like shrapnel through the open-walled terminal, cutting down everything in its path.
Pieces of the jumbo jet and human body parts rained down as far as half a mile away.
Four hundred and eighty died in the crash, fourteen were killed outright in the terminal or on the aprons, and fifty-six more were seriously injured.
Despite heroic measures, eighteen polio patients breathing on respirators in the Dundee Memorial Hospital died when the backup generators failed after a power outage blacked out the city. The problem was worse because it was so dark in the building away from the battery-powered lighting that nobody could find some of the dead until almost an hour later.
'Oh, Lord,' Alex Michaels said. 'He's killing people.'
The video of the South African train accident came from a security cam at Tembisa Station. The plane crash was recorded by a tourist waiting for a passenger on the JAL jet. The Australian deaths were vox only, no video.
'Yes,' Cooper said. 'He's bollixed dozens of major systems. I don't see how it is possible.'
Neither did Michaels, but like the apocryphal ostrich with his head in the sand, not seeing it didn't make it go away. Communications, transportation, even traffic signals were screwed up. Who was this guy? How could he do such things all over the world at the same time?
They were in the office that MI-6 had provided, and the building around them hummed with frantic energy that matched their own. He looked at Toni. 'We need to talk to our people at home.'
'Unless you have a fast carrier pigeon, good luck,' Toni said. 'The landlines that work via the Atlantic cable are jammed, and anything going up to satcoms is scrambled worse than Humpty Dumpty.'
'I can't believe it. He's managed to shut down virtually everything tied into a major computer net. The power is beyond anything we've ever seen,' Cooper said.
That was for damn sure. Worse, why was the hacker doing it? What did he stand to gain? Was he a terrorist? Michaels knew he needed to do something. But — what? What could you do when the tools you normally used were all broken?
'We got these vids and reports on our shielded and hardened lines,' Cooper said. 'We'll get as much input via
