Tom Clancy - Net Force 07 - State Of War

State OfWar – Net force 07

Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy’s

NET

FORCE

STATE OFWAR

Created by

Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenii written by Steve Perry and Larry

Segriff

BERKLEYBOOKS,NEW YORK

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that

this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the

author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE : STATE OFWAR

A Berkley Book published by arrangement with

Netco Partners

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkleyedition March 2003

NET FORCE is a registered trademark of Netco Partners.

Art and cover design by Tony Greco and Associates.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.” 375 Hudson Street,New York ,New York10014.

For more information on Steve Pieczenik,

please visitwww.stevepieczenik.com

Visit our website at www .penguinputnam.com

ISBN: 0-425-18813-2

BERKLEY

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.” 375 Hudson Street,

New York,New York10014.

BERKLEYand the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

PRINTED IN THEUNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321 Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Denise Little, John Heifers,

Brittiany Koren, Lowell Bowen, Esq.” Robert Youdelman, Esq.” Danielle Forte, Esq.” Dianne Jude, and

Torn Colgan, our editor. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our

collective endeavor has been.

Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

PROLOGUE

Saturday, June 1, 2013C.E. Front Royal, Virginia

Solomon “Sony” Bretcher, the Democratic senator fromFlorida , looked down at the woman beside

him.

She had said her name was Joan, and she was young. She’d claimed to be twenty-one when she’d

picked him up at that bar back in D.C.—but she had smiled when she’d said it, just a little, just enough

so that he had known she was lying. He thought she was probably closer to eighteen.

She was also very slim, almost boyish in her figure, and he believed she must have had some yoga or

gymnastics in her background. Athletic, strong and supple, cute as a bug, and young enough to be, what,

his daughter at least. Maybe even his granddaughter.

But none of this was what had drawn Sony to her. No, the reason he was

here now, lying naked in some strange hotel room inVirginia , a good

fifty miles from his offices, had nothing to do with the way she

looked or how old she was or whatever perfume she was—or wasn’t—wearing. It was more powerful

than that, more compelling, and it had everything to do with the way she had looked at him, the raw,

overpowering hunger in her eyes as she approached him.

It had been a long time since anyone had looked at him like that. He couldn’t even remember the last

time someone had wanted him just for himself and not for whatever access he could grant or the votes he

could provide.

She had looked at him like that. She had let him see the naked desire in her eyes. She had told him, not

with words but with every gesture, every glance, and every breath, that she wanted him, and he had

agreed.

He looked down at her now.

“Joan,” he said softly.

She opened her eyes and looked up at him, a slow smile spreading across her face.

“Joan,” he said again, liking the way her name slid across his lips. He wanted to say something to this

woman in his arms, to thank her, perhaps, to let her know how deeply she had touched him. He wanted

to mark this moment before it slipped away. He never got the chance.

As he reached for his next words, he was interrupted by the sound of somebody kicking in the hotel

room door.

Joan reacted faster than Sony, scrambling out from under him and jerking the sheet up around herself

while he reached for his glasses.

“What is the meaning of this?” he said, still fumbling with his glasses. “Who the hell are you?” He was

trying to sound irate, not the easiest thing to do when you were lying naked in bed with a young woman

not your wife. He shut up when he managed to get his glasses on and saw that the man standing there had

a gun pointed at him.

“Get your clothes on, you little harlot!”

Sony’s gut twisted. Her husband? Lord, Lord, what was he going to do?

If Marsha found out--!

“And you, you pervert. I ought to shoot you dead! God would bless me, and so would the police!” The

man had a funny accent. Was it French?

“Listen, mister,” Sony began. “There’s been some kind of mistake! I—I

didn’t know she was married—“

“Married?! You son of a bitch! She’s not my wife! She’s my daughter!

She’s fourteen years old!”

Sony’s vision swam with millions of swirling motes. He swallowed dryly and felt light-headed. Fourteen?

She couldn’t be fourteen!

“Daddy, I’m sorry—“

The man strode forward and slapped the girl’s face. It was a loud noise in the otherwise quiet room.

“Put your clothes on! I’ll deal wid you when we get home! First, I got to call the police and get this

pervert arrested! They gonna put you under the jail, baby raper!”

Cajun, Bretcher realized. That’s what the accent is. Louisiana.

Joan hurried to obey, holding one hand to her slapped face.

Senator Sony Bretcher felt his life swirling around the drain, going down. Fourteen. He would be totally

disgraced. They would crucify him. The press would eat him alive, and if they didn’t, his family would. He

was a dead man.

As the man reached for the phone, Bretcher raised his hand. “Wait!

Wait! Don’t do that! Maybe we can come to some ... arrangement!”

The girl’s father looked at him. “What you talkin’ about?”

“Anything you want,” Bretcher said. “Anything!”

In the car, Joan laughed. “Fourteen?” she said. “That’s a stretch, Junior, even for me!”

Driving, Marcus Boudreaux, “Junior,” the man who had pretended to be

her father, smiled. “Well, fourteen sounds so much worse than sixteen or seventeen, no? And he bought

it. You saw his face, yeah?”

“No, I was too busy holding mine. You didn’t have to hit me that hard.”

He shrugged that off. “I had to make it look good. And like I said, it worked. That senator will do

whatever we say.”

Joan shook her head. She was twenty-four but had always looked much younger than her age. Being

flat-chested, slim-hipped, and skinny had their uses. Convincing a frightened old man you were an

adolescent was one that had earned her plenty before now—and had just earned her another ten

thousand dollars.

“Now what?”

“Never you mind that. You just take your money and go lie on the beach down inBiloxi . I’ll call you

again if I need you.”

She shrugged. Ten thousand for a couple hours’ work? Beat doing fake pedo-porn on the net. And her

tan could use some work. Why not... ?.

Washington,D.C.

It was a Sunday afternoon, hot, muggy, and about to rain-typical D.C. weather for this time of year. A

good day to stay home. Alex Michaels was doing just that. In his garage, currently without a project car

and thus more or less empty, he was having a short but intense practice session with Guru. She was the

one who introduced Toni to the Indonesian fighting art of sil at Now, all these long years later, she was

still amazing.

She wore a ratty sweatshirt over a long batik skirt and rubber sandals, and looked about as scary as a

stuffed teddy bear. A really old stuffed teddy bear. But if you bought that, you would find yourself in big

trouble in a big hurry. One of the first rules of fighting was Never assume that what you see is what you

get.

She punched, and Michaels did the block-punchblocknch-elbow sequence, that pap-pap pap! timing,

like two sixteenth notes followed by an eighth note for the first three moves.

She nodded. “Not so bad. But watch the low line, be sure the first

punch comes from the hip and cuts the angle as it rises. Punch for me.”

He did, and despite the fact that she was old enough to be his grandmother, her response was so fast he

wanted to shake his head. She could hit him three times before he could blink and, while he was standing

there surprised, easily drop him onto the concrete with a sweep or heel-dragging beset. A perfect

example of technique mastery over physical strength.

“Again,” she said.

Ten minutes later, he was picking himself up from the floor after she had put him there with an effortless

little sweep when Toni came into the garage. She had Little Alex balanced on one hip and looked like a

Polynesian princess in a sarong, her hair wrapped up in a towel. “Are you beating up on Guru again,

Alex?”

“Oh, yeah, right. You ever hear what the U.S. cavalry said about what you were supposed to do if

captured by the Lakota Sioux? Whatever happens, don’t let them give you to the women.”

“How droll. You have a call.”

She handed him his virgil—the acronym standing for Virtual Global Interface Link—the handy-dandy

pocket electronic device that was phone, fax, GPS, homing beacon, credit card, computer line, and other

things he hadn’t even thought about, including a spy device that told HQ where you were. That the call

came in on the virgil meant it was important, since the device’s com was also scrambled as well as Net

Force’s programmers could manage.

Speak of the devil... The tiny screen was lit with Jay Gridley’s picture as Michaels took it from his wife.

“Jay.”

“Boss. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Just me getting my ass kicked.”

”Toni beating up on you again?”

“Guru.”

“Isn’t that embarrassing, Boss, getting thumped by a lady old enough to be your granny?” Michaels

grinned. “You’re welcome to drop by and stand in for me, if you’d like.”

“I’ll pass, thanks. I just called to update you on a couple of things. We got another e-mail virus making

waves on the web. It’s just a filler—clog your system, dupe-and-send thing—nothing real nasty, but it’s

got good coverage, so you’ll be hearing about it. From what I can tell, it’s a standard kid-hack kind of

thing. No real damage, just counting coup. We should be able to backtrack the guy and nail him.”

“Okay.”

“The other thing is, we got a funny hit on one of our watch bots I thought you might want to know

about.”

Michaels grinned again. “A ‘funny hit.” Is that a computer geek technical term, Jay?” Net Force had

been on a roll lately. Nobody had attacked them, and nothing major had hit the net or the web. Even

hackers seemed to be taking the long hot summer off. Michaels knew better than to tempt fate by feeling

smug, however. Every time he did that, something came along and Net Force got creamed.

“Are you making a crack about marriage dissolving my brain?” Jay asked.

“Not me. Not with my wife standing six feet away holding a squirming toddler she might throw at me.”

He smiled at Toni as he said that, and waved and made a funny face at his son. He loved to see Little

Alex smile.

Jay caught that on the virgil’s screen. “Urn, right, Boss. Anyway, yeah, I can send it to your workstation.

Nothing major.”

“Fire when ready, Gridley.”

Jay rolled his eyes. “Oh. Like I never heard that one before. Discom, Boss.”

Michaels shut the virgil off and went over to give his wife a kiss and

a hug, and to hold his son for a moment. Then he would go see what Jay thought was important. At the

least, it would keep him from getting thumped around by Granny Death here.

Let it be minor. But he knew in his heart that they were due a major blast.

Jay smiled and shook his head as he disconnected. He’d seen a lot of different sides of Alex Michaels

over the years, but this goofy dad thing was a new one. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of father

he would make.

He shook his head again and let those thoughts go. Fatherhood was for the future—if ever. Right now,

he had a hacker to track.

He was working from home. After they got back from the honeymoon, he and Saji had moved to a

larger place, one that allowed each of them to have a work space. At the moment, Saji was in her office,

offering advice to an on-line class of students beginning the study of Buddhism. She’d be working for

another hour, so he had plenty of time to do his own job.

The wireless ware he had at home was the same as what he used at Net Force HQ—the latest

generations of haptic gear, including optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and weathmesh—so he had full

sensory capability when he went on-line. He put on the gloves, the headset with its ear and nose plugs,

and the eye cups adjusting them so they were comfortable. He already wore the tight-fitting mesh suit.

The piece he had sent to Commander Michaels was but a tiny hint of

something he knew—he knew—was much larger. But knowing it was not

the same as finding it. Like the scenario he was about to dive into,

there were a lot of submerged logs in the swamp, and while not all of

them were alligators, you had to be very careful when you poked at them

with a stick.... He grinned at the thought. “Scenario on,” he told

his computer.

Bayou Baritaria, Louisiana

Jay cruised slowly through the murky waters of Bayou Baritaria, the air boat’s throttle nearly closed,

watching carefully for submerged logs. Even without an underwater prop, hitting one at speed would be

bad—not so much for the air boat as for him. Air boats were tough. The Vie”-thick 5086 marine

aluminum that made up the boat’s flat hull was coated with an additional layer of a Teflon-based polymer,

and would slide over pretty much anything, up to and including dry land. A land speed record had been

set some time back in the late nineties with an air boat—on asphalt at over forty-seven miles an hour.

Bad for the coating, but it worked.

However, hitting anything submerged at speed would put him in danger, in case the boat flipped, or spun

toward one of the huge cypress trees that stood sentinel, gray Spanish moss draped thickly over their

branches.

Only way to tell north on these trees would be to look for the dead Yankee.

Jay recalled a facto id he’d read somewhere, that all statues of southern Civil War generals faced north.

They’d lost the war, but never really given up down here.

Beams of sunlight shone through the thick canopy of the swamp, touching here and there upon the murky

waters, which, of course, teemed with water moccasins and leeches. The air had that dank, spoiled,

rotting-vegetation odor that overlaid everything, a fecund, earthy stink. In the background he could hear

the high-pitched whirring of cicadas. A mosquito hummed by, and he swatted at it.

He grinned. Few took the time for VR details like that. That was the

difference between a pro and amateurs: the little things.

His hot-rod air boat, a 560-horsepower V-8 engine with a 2:1 reduction gear, drove the six-bladed

carbon-fiber propeller that pushed him along in the deep brownish green waters of the bayou. The flat

bottom of the boat would let him float it in as little as an inch of water, and if he had to chase anything, he

could be up to forty or fifty miles an hour in just a few seconds—faster, depending on the water

conditions.

The air boat was a simple and effective design, invented over a hundred years ago by no less than

Alexander Graham Bell. Apparently the inventor had used it as a test bed for early airplane engines,

which had been the engine of choice for air boats until the 1990s, when the lower cost of maintenance for

automobile engines made them the power plants of choice.

It tickled Jay that the great-granddaddy of modern networking, the first man to get to market with a

telephone, had also invented the craft he’d chosen for his VR scenario.

It turned out that air boats were very ecofriendly as well—no submerged screw meant less disruption of

the underwater ecosystem. In this case, the metaphor was extended to his investigation: Jay made

significantly fewer ripples as he trolled for information.

Sure, he could be doing this the old-fashioned way, eyelling a TFT monitor, a thin window separating

him from the data, but who wanted to? The immediacy of all five senses gave him an edge—and Net

Force’s chief VR jockey liked it that way.

Ahead he saw a brown lump in the water.

He reached down and adjusted the lever to the left of his seat, moved

the twin foam-filled airfoil rudders that steered the boat. Like a

leaf on a pond, the craft skated to the left slightly, just enough so

that he would miss the target by a hair.

He glanced down—a submerged log. It wasn’t really a log, of course, but a packet of information sliding

slowly along this section of the net.

The section of VR he was checking was an older one-one used for data streams that didn’t take as

much bandwidth-and data that sometimes wasn’t what it seemed to be. It was a modern variation of

Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter: Instead of sending encrypted high-speed data, some of the

newer data pirates—and other hackers-hid it in plain sight, risking slower transmission speeds in less

observed areas. After all, who would ever suspect anyone of using such a slow section of net to transfer

anything critical?

Well, Jay Gridley, for one. Keeping an open mind about everything kept you from getting caught short a

lot of times.

He was following a trail he’d started a few days previous, when he’d been rechecking the terrorists of

CyberNation. Net Force was being real vigilant with these folks, after what had happened the year

before. So far, nothing major had come up.

Another shape drifted by, this time a little faster than the log.

This one was greener, and he could see eyes and nostrils poking above the water—an example of

Alligator missis-sippiensis—the American alligator. The data in that packet was obviously a little higher

priority than the info in the log, given a measure of protection, and speeded up slightly. Around him, Jay

could see more shapes in the water, some gators, some logs.

Another set of gator nostrils and eyes slid past the air boat. Jay looked at the space between the eyes

and nostrils-about twelve inches, he figured.

Now there’s a big one.

It was an old gator hunter’s rule of thumb: The distance between the inside of the nostrils and the eyes in

inches was the approximate size of the animal in feet. This one should be about twelve feet long.

But when he looked for the gator’s wake, it was wrong: Instead of a tail tip sloshing water ten to twelve

feet behind the eyes and nostrils, it was way too short—only about two feet.

Well, well.

Had he been looking at a computer monitor, he would have just seen that the checksum for the data

packet he was looking at didn’t match. In his experience, that didn’t happen with legitimate data.

Somebody was trying to make a big thing look small.

Time for a closer look at Mr. Gator.

He reached for his ketch-all pole—an extended piece of stainless steel tubing with a steel noose at one

end that could be used to snare dangerous animals—and turned the air boat to follow the gator. The

creature must have been imbued with some form of simplified warning system, because as soon as he

started tracking it, it sped up.

Fast. Much too fast for a gator, unless it was jet-powered.

Jay grinned. Looked like he was going to get a chance to use his boat after all.

He accelerated rapidly, the roar of horsepower shoving the air boat after the gator. It looked like the

critter was making for a branch off the bayou, just ahead. Jay pushed the throttle harder, and cypress

trees whipped past. A low-hanging section of Spanish moss smacked him in the face. Sometimes, he was

too good, maybe.

The gator was fast, but no match for his boat. As he got closer, Jay lowered the ketch-all so its noose

was just ahead of the gator. At this speed he’d have to be quick, lest the water rip the pole out of his

hand.

He dipped the loop into in the water and yanked on the loop that drew

the steel rope taut. The pole pulled hard at his arms, and had the gator been as long as advertised, it

would have been a very unpleasant experience. But, of course, it was only a shrimp, just as he had

figured.

Right yet again. It was a burden, sometimes. People got to expecting it.

He killed the engine and unbuckled his seat belt before lowering the gator onto the deck of his boat.

The two-foot-long beast was most unhappy, it thrashed and smacked its tail against the tough aluminum,

making a thunking sound. Jay hand-over-handed his way down the ketch-all. He reached down and

squeezed its jaws shut-not difficult, as its more powerful muscles were designed to bite, not open its

mouth—and slipped another noose over its snout, pulling it tight.

Gotcha.

What he’d actually done of course was rascal the address of the gator’s destination so that it came to

him instead of going to its original destination. But a gator chase was much more exciting than that.

Jay flipped the gator and looked at its belly. No seams.

Nice work.

Well he had ways around that, too.

He took a small skinning knife and slit the belly of the gator open. Instead of warm guts, however, pages

of information spilled out, only the top one damaged by his rapid opening of the gator. He glanced at the

writing on the first page and grinned. Well, well. Look at this.

How interesting.... 2

Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

General John Howard arrived with his son Tyrone. They stopped to talk

to Gunny at the check-in station. He was a master sergeant, but he’d

always be “Gunny” to the shooters who came here.

“General. And is this Tyrone? You’ve grown some since I saw you last.”

Tyrone, at that voice-breaking fifteen-year-old stage, smiled and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Tom Clancy - Net Force 07 - State Of War

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