fly to Los Angeles, then switch to an American carrier for the final leg across the country.
Cutting five or six hours from your travel time made this flight much in demand. Normally, Chang would not have had the clout to merit such a flight. Then again, a man who knew as much about computers as he did had some advantages. He had access to reservation codes, and booking his own flight with those had been a simple matter. The state of the industry in China was such that this was not even illegal — nobody had ever worried about it, since nobody outside of himself and a few of his employees even knew it was possible.
He grinned. He would have to plug that hole when he returned home. At least for others…
“Would you care for a drink, sir?”
The flight attendant, a pretty, moonfaced young woman with a bright smile, stood in the aisle, leaning slightly over a couple traveling from Beijing to visit a daughter who, Chang had been told, lived in Baltimore. The attendant’s chest, completely covered under a shirt and buttoned jacket, loomed over the husband, who had the aisle seat.
“Some club soda, please,” Chang said.
The young woman moved on, much to the disappointment of the man seated on the aisle, Chang felt.
The Canadian, Alaine Courier, had provided Chang with some excellent software, and, more importantly, an introduction to a U.S. official who had access to Net Force. As a result, Chang was traveling to Washington to meet the head of the agency, which could not help but be useful. Just to see how the place was laid out, what equipment he could see, anything, that would be wondrous.
There were those in his government who wanted very much for China to be a match for the United States in all things. Properly approached and primed, such men could be most helpful to Chang’s desire to upgrade his systems and technicians.
Chang would rather not play those political games, but in these times, there was no choice — not if you wanted to stay in the race. He did not enjoy such things, but he was learning how to be adept at them. It was, alas, part of the job. Better he know how to do it than not…
Next to him, the woman said, “Did I mention that my daughter and her husband have given us three grandchildren?”
8
Abe Kent was no Luddite — he used VR training for his troops as much as the next commander — it was just that he preferred reality over virtual reality. Unfortunately, the reality was that there were some scenarios you simply couldn’t do in the real world. The Iraqis and the Iranians, even the Colombians, tended to frown upon a small military unit taking target practice on their citizens, no matter what their crimes.
The days of gunboat diplomacy and backing up private companies like United Fruit were long past, and Kent had no desire to see them come around again, so when you needed to work in the field against a team of Bosnians or Afghanis on their home ground, you dressed your men — and women — in sensory gear and did it in VR. It worked out all right, for the most part, and it was far better than nothing.
But Colonel Kent never lost sight of the fact that no matter how good the electronic impedimenta, no matter how well the stim units worked muscles, the computer scenario was not reality. You could simulate the feel of crawling over a muddy field, the sounds of gunfire, even the heat of a desert afternoon, but nobody broke an ankle, tore a groin muscle, or got fatally shot in VR.
Yes, there had been a few heart attacks in scenarios that were exciting enough to start the blood pumping fast, though most of these, Kent understood, had been using gear that simulated sexual encounters. Kent had never lost a trooper in VR, and he was in agreement with Bill Jordan, the famous gunfighter who had come out of the Border Patrol in the 1950s and ’60s.
Jordan, whose skill with a double-action revolver was legendary — he could pick aspirin tablets off a tabletop at fifteen feet by point-shooting, without scratching the table’s finish — had written a book on gunfighting called
When talking about fast-draw experts who popped balloons with their side arm’s muzzle blast, Jordan said that in the history of gunfighting nobody had ever died from a loud noise — meaning that you needed to practice hitting a target using a real gun with full-power ammo. Speed was fine, but accuracy was final, and the only way to make sure you had both was to practice using the gun you’d have when the bullets flew for real.
The troops grumbled when Kent took them out to the Marine training field in a pouring rain to practice tactics, but he knew that those experiences would pay off if they ever found themselves in such a situation.
Of course, lying on the sloppy, cold ground in the rain, as he now was, wasn’t the most pleasant way to pass an afternoon, but this was how you got real practice. If your LOSIR gear shorted out when it started raining, this was the place to find that out, not on a real battlefield where somebody was trying to shoot you. If you jammed your assault rifle or subgun’s barrel into the mud and plugged it, best you learn how to clear that, since firing a weapon with a slug of mud blocking the muzzle could get you a face full of shrapnel when the barrel exploded, as it could. At the very least, that weapon would be useless.
Kent had once seen a soldier on a firing line at a military range in Texas using a.308 assault rifle with a suppressor fitted to it. No way to silence that boom completely, certainly not with hypersonic rounds, but the idea was to quiet it a little, to make it harder to pinpoint the location. The machinist who had made the suppressor, or the shooter who had threaded it onto the barrel, or maybe both, had made a mistake. When the shooter fired off the first round, the bullet caught something in the silencing device, tore it off the muzzle, and hurled it thirty meters downrange.
“Whatcha got there, son?” the rangemaster had called out. “A grenade launcher?”
The.308’s muzzle was damaged enough so that firing it again without repair would have been dangerous to anybody close.
Kent smiled at the memory.
If you had to have such an experience, a safe shooting range was the place to have it — not facing a platoon of enemy soldiers with AK-47s that might be old but that worked fine. A man could kill you with a cap-and-ball carbine that had been old-tech during the Civil War…
“Clear,” came the voice over Kent’s LOSIR headset.
“You heard the mine-finder,” Kent said. “Let’s move, people.”
The team, six troopers and Kent, scrabbled up in the rain and muck and splashed their way across the field. There were AP mines buried here — electronic ones that sent an IR pulse to the receivers the men wore in their SIPEsuits. If you stepped on one, any receiver in range announced it with a loud “beep.” To make it more realistic, a small flash-bang in the ground went off, and that was enough to singe your clothes a little, reinforcing the electronic sig in a way that you didn’t forget. Scared the hell out of you and stung a little, but a real mine would have blown off an arm or leg or killed you outright, and the little popper reminded you to pay attention.
The scout had located the hidden mines in their path, and electronically tagged them, so the heads-up panes in the unit’s helmets, run off the backpack computer, showed the location of each antipersonnel device. As long as the suits worked, you could zigzag your way across the field and not worry about stepping on a mine. If the suits failed, then you had to do it the old-fashioned way, which took a lot longer. Now and then, Kent arranged for the suits to fail, but not today. Today, they would make it across the field before they were ambushed by an automatic motion sensor-operated tracking machine gun that fired either electronic bullets or paint balls, depending on the programming. Today, it would be paint balls, because those left no doubt, even in the rain, as to whether or not you had taken a hit.
