It was all just so much useless technical babble to Santos, who cared only that these giant finned silver turds would blow up when and where they were supposed to blow up, and do the job they were intended to do.
These looked big and heavy, but the bomb man had assured him they could be easily transported by common aircraft. Even though they had come via supply ship, they could, in fact, be carried on one of the big passenger helicopters, no problem. Each one only weighed as much as, say, four or five big men, and on a craft that could carry
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r or forty people, half a dozen of these devices would i quite nicely.
bomb man started off on some new techno-rant, l Santos waved him quiet. “Yes, I understand,” he said, through his smile. “I need merely be certain you
nd where and when they must be delivered.” Dh, yes, I know.”
Attend to that. I will check back with you as jjgo.”
ntos strode away, his footsteps upon the steel grating oing slightly in the warm, dank hold. You’d think it lid be cooler down here, right next to the water and , but it was not.
Timing on all this would be critical. His part was easy ugh to accomplish, but a failure on the parts of others be fatal to the mission. They had only a week, and ng must be in place and synchronized exactly by It was not much time when you had to deploy men, fer bombs, and make certain you know exactly where 1 how to strike each target. But, it was what it was, and was happier to be going into the field than sitting and waiting.
“Moving was better than waiting, almost always. Once i got moving, to hesitate at the wrong moment, to look ay from the goal, that could get you killed. Yes, you 1 to plan in advance, know your tactics so that you did make a stupid mistake, but once you started rolling, sitation was a killer. The man who blinked first lost, that would not be him.
26
Crawfish Point Cohesion, Texas October 1957.
It was raining hard. There was a tropical storm offshore, maybe a hurricane, still far enough away so it wasn’t any real danger to the state yet, but close enough to bring lots of rain and choppy seas in the Gulf. Yet, there Gridley came, in an old-fashioned wooden shrimping boat, arrogant as always, secure in the knowledge that he was invincible.
Lack of confidence had never been one of Jay’s problems.
Keller, wearing a black slicker and hiding in a mangrove tangle at the edge of the estuary, with a scoped 3030 Winchester deer rifle, watched Gridley maneuver the boat through the shallow water as he headed for the Gulf, checking for roots or half-submerged logs he might hit with the boat’s propeller. Or did they call them “screws” on boats this size?
Once again, the scenario was over the top, much more
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necessary to troll for the kind of information Jay The man never let one simple vision serve when Icould do nine visions complicated. And even the public rios he chose were major sensory sims, like that stu- : climb up Mount Fuji. Please.
eller grinned at that memory. That had shaken old Jay f some, when he’d gone over in persona and sat down
: next to him. Old Jay hadn’t expected that. |When the boat got within range, Keller laid the rifle’s stock on a gnarl of root and aimed. The rain slashed hard, the wind blew, and the scope was wet and The trawler was bouncing up and down on the water, and enough of it was sloshing up through mangrove roots to keep Keller soaked, despite the
at. It wasn’t an easy shot. He managed to put the first round into the wheelhouse ; window, shattering it, but missing Jay by a good foot. : worked the bolt and fired again, aiming at the hull just slow the normal waterline when the boat came up on a ftve. He ejected the empty shell and chambered a third ad, which he fired at the life preserver hung next to wheelhouse. Must have missed that completely, he n’t see it hit.
* The boat chugged on, no sign of Jay, who must be I down inside the wheelhouse, wondering what the was going on. Enough. He had other business to which he needed to ad. This was fun, pulling Gridley’s chain, but Omega : coming, and they had less than a week to get ready. : nearly enough time. He was going to have to let this Too bad.
In this scenario, which was Jay’s, Keller had a small hidden behind the mangrove island in the swamp just short of the Gulf where some nameless river ied into it. Probably it had a name, come to think of since Gridley did stuff like that. Keller dropped the rifle, for which he had no further e, and worked his way to his boat. Might as well check
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things out as he left. Gridley wouldn’t have come here if he hadn’t been looking for something in particular, and maybe Keller could spot it.
He reached the boat, and started to untie the line that kept the craft from drifting away. When he did, a monstrous figure rose from the water like the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Keller froze.
The monster said, “Surprise!” and Keller realized it was a man in scuba gear and a wetsuit. Behind the face mask, he recognized Gridley’s basic persona, which looked pretty much like the real man.
Gridley had a big knife in his hand. He smiled and moved awkwardly toward Keller, his flippers slapping the water noisily-
Keller bailed.
CyberNation Train Baden-Baden, Germany
Keller came out of the scenario cursing. Dammit! He had underestimated Gridley again! He should have known better! He threw the wireless sensory gear down hard, and regretted that instantly. These headsets weren’t cheap. If he broke it, the replacement would come out of his budget.
He picked up the set, touched the test button. The diodes lit up green, one after another.
Thank God for small miracles. He put the set down more carefully, hanging it on its rack.
Over-confidence had been the downfall of a whole lot of programmers, and he had seen it happen enough to know nobody was immune, even him. Gridley might have opted for the status quo, turned into a fedhead, fat and happy, but he still had some moves. Keller was better than they’d been in college, but it wasn’t smart to think that
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,? Old Thai had stayed where he’d been. He was, after I1 the head of Net Force’s computer operation- He might ; be as good as Keller was, but he wasn’t a total lube- , either.
. was too bad he didn’t have time to call Jay out for 11 wrangle. To make it a one-on-one, no-holds-barred. r show Jay who was better now. |Well. There was no help for it. And no real harm done, ler’s net persona was a mule, a Joe-average construct ” didn’t look like anybody in particular, certainly not i real self. Even if Gridley had seen him, he hadn’t seen dy he could put a face to.
J even if he had known who it was, well, so what? .ring who and figuring out where he was, finding him doing anything about it before Omega launched n’t going to happen. And afterward? Jay wouldn’t be ,- to do much to him then, either. The train was moving. That very morning it had left ” siding where it had been for days, and was now only .couple hundred kilometers northeast of Dijon. France. \ would arrive at the border shortly, where- it would turn and and head back toward Berlin. The powers that b in CyberNation did not want their three mobile cen- i anywhere near their headquarters in Geneva. The ship in the Caribbean, the train went back afld forth be- ._sn Berlin and the French border, mostly, half-loaded iith tourists who knew nothing of the high-tech gear on ird the other half. The third station was on a barge ensibly being rebuilt at a shipyard in Yokohama, Japan, ugh it could be hauled off at any time. If the German .Jiorities being paid to ignore the train developed pangs ” _j conscience, or if the Japanese harbor officials who were fibribed not to worry themselves overmuch about the re- on the barge suddenly went mad, the ship was the jty, the most secure backup. If something happened to j train or the barge, or both, the ship would be the base ody could legally touch. But any one of them was ugh by itself to get the job done. All three were sim-
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ilarly equipped, and what one did was quickly uploaded to the others, so that at any given moment the lead team was never more than a few hours ahead of the others. Major data transfers were done four times a day in all directions, so if the train or boat or barge was suddenly hit by a giant meteor, there wouldn’t be more than six joint hours of work lost to the remaining two centers.