“Sure, technically he will. But once a jarhead,
Howard smiled. “Yes. But if you think you are such a hot hand with that old Beretta of yours, with those cheating laser-beam handgrips and all, why would you have anything to worry about?”
“Well, that’s true. A week off with pay, huh?”
“Versus two months more here. Your new job’ll wait — I can stumble along on my own that long.”
“I doubt it.” There was a pause. “You owe Abe Kent something, General?”
“In a manner of speaking. I don’t want him to start out in a hole.”
“They shoulda thought of that before they picked a Marine to run the show. Them people dig their own holes wherever they go.”
“You gonna fish, or you gonna cut bait, Lieutenant?”
“Rack ’em up, General. I’ll try not to embarrass you too bad.”
Howard grinned again. He touched a control on the lane’s computer. The first scenario was a pair of single attackers who would holographically appear thirty feet away in the double lane. Each man would fire at his own target, and the computer would mark the elapsed time and zones where the bullets hit.
This was a simple Stonewall Jackson dueling set: Whoever got there firstest with the mostest won the round. You could be a hair quicker, but if you drifted your point of aim out of the A-zone into the B- or C-zone, you would lose. If you shot too soon, trying to anticipate the target’s appearance, you got a clean miss. The computer was state-of-the-art and it wouldn’t let you cheat. Fast was good; fast and accurate were better.
Howard relaxed, dropped his hand by his side—
His attacker, a big bald man in a jumpsuit waving a tire iron, blinked on like a light, and started to run toward Howard. Howard pulled his revolver and thrust it at the attacker with one hand, point shooting, indexing with the entire gun rather than using the sights, squeezing the trigger double-action twice as he did—
The sound was muted by the earplugs he wore, and it was already much quieter than normal — instead of.357 Magnums, which went off like bombs, he was loading.38 Special wadcutters, an accurate, mild target round with considerably less power, and thus much less recoil, making recovery for the second shot faster. Point shooting was a hair quicker than searching for the front sight, and he didn’t need to look to know he had beaten Fernandez by at least a quarter-second.
Fernandez knew it, too, and he knew he’d been suckered. “Talk to
Howard smiled. “Not my fault your old issue piece only likes one caliber. You could shoot flatnose target rounds, too; I wouldn’t mind.”
“Start it up, General Backstabber, sir. We got nine more runs. I’ll whip your perfidious old ass anyhow!”
“ ‘Perfidious’? Is that any way for a lieutenant to talk to a general?”
“When the general is a hustler, yes, sir, it is.”
Howard smiled again. “Did I mention as how I might have been letting you win the last couple times we shot? Just so you’d think you could do it again?”
“You lie!”
Howard chuckled. The seed of doubt was planted. He had the edge and he knew it. All he had to do was stay one round ahead, and he and Julio usually were pretty close. Six out of ten would be good enough.
Of course, he could have just asked Julio to stay for two months and his old friend would have done it, no questions. They went way back together. Either one of them would take a bullet for the other, and had. But it was much more fun this way…
The pyramid before him held the ruined throne room he needed. Jay stood at the entrance, planning his attack.
At its peak, the room must have been stunning, but hundreds of years in the warm jungle climate had taken its toll. There were still beautiful stone carvings on the less exposed sections of the walls, and the huge pillars holding up the sagging roof maintained a sense of grandeur despite the clinging vines and cracks that marred them. But mold and decay permeated the ancient stones, from which an almost visceral miasma seemed to whisper the demise of all things man-made.
He grinned at himself.
Whatever force had caused the end of the ancient kingdom had motivated the fleeing king to install traps in the room — it was a maze of death. To encourage his ancient foes to enter this trap, the king had left his jeweled scepter on the throne.
All Jay had to do was cross the floor to get it.
The problem was that the large blocks of stone that made up the floor of the room weren’t all solid. If he stepped on the wrong block, he’d fall into a pit filled with who knew what.
Of course he wasn’t
In most code-breaking scenarios, the encoded data was run through a sifter that would find patterns, which revealed letters. But there were several factors complicating this particular code.
First, Iran had over seventy living languages — picking the right one to sift was a critical part of the process, and not the most difficult. The majority of the languages in the country used Arabic script as an alphabet, which had twenty-eight letters instead of English’s twenty-six. Western Farsi, the most commonly used language, added an extra five characters to that, taking it to thirty-three — and making the code-breaking several orders of magnitude more difficult.
On top of that, the Arabic/Farsi alphabet had been represented by three different encoding systems since it had migrated to the computer. In the late twentieth century, back in the days when computer standards were still up for grabs, there had been no less than two different character sets for Arabic — one for Unix and Macintosh systems, and another for the Windows world. Then unicode had come along — a larger character set that made it easier to standardize. And the letters could be in any of the three, depending on the hardware used to generate them.
But all of that was relatively easy compared to the way the data had been encoded.
None of the 2-D codes he’d examined so far matched the ones on the zip disk label. Treating the border as four long strips of data had proven fruitless, which meant it had to be in blocks. Before he could sift it, he had to get it into the computer.
Without orientation markers, he couldn’t tell which way the blocks ran — and to get enough data to make up an encoded sequence, he’d have to get several blocks in a row, so that he could see if it was encoded sequentially.
To make matters worse, he wasn’t even sure that the blocks were on an axis that was parallel or perpendicular to the borders of the label. Many 2-D encoding schemes had enough error correction that they could lose up to 25 percent of their visual area and still be decoded at 100 percent accuracy. This code could have been rotated off-axis to make things really tough.
He grinned, his tanned-and-grizzled face wrinkling. His old brown leather bomber jacket creaked as he leaned forward to stare at the gray stones. He had an urge to hum the theme from
He stared at the mortar between the stones. Did it look newer on the right or left?
Carefully, he began to put his weight on the stone to the left of the entry. Slowly he increased the pressure until nearly all of it rested on the stone he’d selected.
He enjoyed a moment’s satisfaction before the block abruptly fell out from underneath him. Jay toppled, started to fall, and lashed out with the twelve-foot bullwhip he was carrying, wrapping it around a stone outcropping on the wall nearby and yanking. The effort pulled him back to where he’d started.
