Michaels, surprisingly, had fallen asleep on the trip, and awoke as the craft began its descent toward the new Air Force base a couple of hours away from their target. Howard had arranged to borrow some trucks from the Texas National Guard, Net Force technically being a part of the Guard, at least for accounting purposes. In theory, the vehicles should be there when the jet landed.
After they were down and the unloading process under way, John Howard joined Michaels in the back of the mobile operations center, which was essentially a canvas-covered flatbed truck. Despite this, it was air-conditioned, after a fashion.
“For the computers,” Howard said. “The personal tactical units don’t need it, but the bigger ones get goofy once the air temp rises above body heat.”
“Is it going to get that hot here?”
“West Texas in the summer? Oh, yes. It’ll be cooler after dark, but we will have to load and move out in the daylight.”
Alex looked at him. “Do you really think this will work, John?” he asked. “It seems like an awfully big place to assault with only ten men.”
A forklift wheeled past bearing a pair of wooden crates bigger than coffins. There were three more like them still on the jet.
General Howard said, “I think so. The truth is, though, that either we nail it with ten men or we wouldn’t be able to do it with a hundred. Like you said, it’s a big place, and surprise will work better for us than sheer numbers.”
Alex nodded. He’d known that already, of course, but this entire operation was going forward on his say-so alone. He had the final word on go/no go, and he still could cancel it at any time up until they actually entered Ames’s bomb shelter. After that things got a lot dicier.
Ames had plenty to distract him. He had full net capabilities as well as satellite-reception radio and video. He could get five hundred television channels from around the world, and local programming from the radio stations in Addis Ababa, if he wanted. He had a library to rival those in many small towns in hard copy alone, legal tomes, medical books, not to mention thousands of novels, entertainment vids, and musical compositions on DVD and minis, should his net connection somehow go out. He had a gym, a lap pool, a shooting range, a basketball court, and even a six-lane bowling alley. He had food, wine, and a pharmacy deep enough to take care of a hundred people all sick with different diseases.
He had art on his walls, paintings by masters. He had sculptures. He had three of his favorite chairs, and a computer-operated bed of biogel that was the most comfortable in the world.
He had everything he needed, except a challenge.
Ames shrugged. There was nothing he could do about that right now. His plans were in place. Net Force was tied up by the lawsuit, afraid to do anything, and every day they delayed brought the passage of the CyberNation bill closer to reality.
Everything was moving along nicely. All he had to do was wait.
And that, he’d found before, was the one thing he did not do well.
He shrugged. That’s why he had this place stocked as well as he did. He needed the distractions.
Thinking about them, he decided that he felt like doing a few laps in the pool, then maybe a little shooting at the range. It would be good to keep a sound body and sharp eye to go with the sound mind…
The staging area was twelve miles away from the target, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, it was a hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit. The only shade came from the trucks and a few scraggly willow trees along an almost dry creek bed.
Howard saw Julio coming toward him, wiping his face with a rag.
“I hope these things don’t go belly up in this heat,” Lieutenant Fernandez said.
Behind Howard, Michaels said, “Is that likely?”
“I hope not. It’ll be a long walk home if they do.”
The things to which Julio was referring were the five specially fitted Segway scooters that Howard, Michaels, Julio, and two troopers would be riding toward the target from the south while the other five soldiers rolled in on the position from the north.
The little electric scooters wore stealth gear, the latest generation of polycarb fiber sheathing, all sharp angles and smooth surfaces. They had used similar camo on trucks. It worked, especially on civilian-grade radar and Doppler, but it wasn’t perfect. That was why the troops in the truck would be feinting from the north as Howard and the others sneaked in from the opposite direction.
If Ames was awake when they rolled in, and if he had his radar on, he would see a nice, fat blip thrown by the truck, and, with any luck, not the scooters. They wouldn’t be totally invisible, but they would be fuzzy and dim enough so he probably wouldn’t notice them.
The plan was to pull the truck to within a mile or so and stop it. The men would get out and move around, offering enough activity to occupy a watcher’s attention. Even if he had FLIR or some kind of spookeye starlight scope, the hope was that he’d be focused on the obvious threat. Which wouldn’t seem imminent, since they wouldn’t be close to any of the known entrances.
Meanwhile, Howard and the strike team from the south would get there, get inside, and grab the guy before he knew what hit him.
In theory, anyway.
The commander had asked the big question: Just how did they get into a secure facility designed to keep everything up to and including nuclear radiation out? Digging through thirty or forty feet of dirt wasn’t a chore for ordinary men with shovels, not if they were in hurry, and the doors were more than likely going to be locked.
Howard thought he had an answer, but that remained to be seen. If the plans they had of the place were accurate, if they could get there undetected, and if the other new gear worked, they had a shot at it.
If, if, if.
“We’re pretty much ready to roll,” Julio said. “I think I’m going to take a nap.”
Julio ambled off and climbed into the back of the truck with the computer gear in it. Howard nodded. It was at least twenty degrees cooler in there. He’d find room — and sleeping curled in relative cool was better than stretched out on the dirt in the middle of a Texas summer day.
“It’s not a bad idea, getting some rest,” Howard said. “We won’t start our run until midnight.”
Michaels looked dubious.
“One of the first things you learn as a soldier is to eat and sleep whenever you can,” Howard said. “Never know when you’ll get the chance again, once things start cooking.”
Ames put on an old Marx brothers’ movie around six, fixed himself a sandwich and a microbrew beer when that was done, and headed for bed. Though there was no real reason for it, he was tired. A couple of hours in the magic bed would fix him right up.
Michaels looked at his watch. It was five of twelve. The day’s heat had died down considerably, but it was hardly what you would call “cool”—it was still about eighty or so, he guessed.
Howard, dressed in chocolate-chip camo that matched the clothes Michaels himself wore, even to the spider-silk body armor, walked over to where Michaels stood.
“I thought it got cold at night in the desert.”
“Depends on the desert,” Howard said. “It probably gets colder here in the winter. You ready?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go over this one more time,” Howard said. “The scooters have fat tires that will work fine on dirt, though it will take most of an hour to get there. The spookeyes will make it look like daylight, and all you have to do is stay behind me. I’m tracking Julio, and he has mapped out the safest route, using GPS grids. Troopers Holder and Reaves will bring up the rear. If you can keep from falling off your scooter, you’ll be fine. You had a chance to check on it, right?”
“On the nice, flat, concrete parking lot at Net Force HQ.”
Howard grinned. “You’ll do fine, Commander. Just remember to hang on to the little handle grip and lean. We
