Net Force - Tom Clancy [15]
She must be getting up there, Michaels said.
Eighty-two on her last birthday, Toni said, and I still wouldnt want to try her head-to-head.
Amazing.
Its a very scientific art, based on leverage and angles. It assumes youll be fighting with multiple opponents, all of whom will be bigger and stronger than you. So it relies on technique and not muscle, which in my case is a good thing. Normally, women didnt get into it very far, but Guru DeBeers husband traveled a lot. He wanted her to have something to protect herself. Toni stopped. But I wont bore you with any more esoteric fighting stuff.
No, Im interested. How does this compare with something like boxing or judo?
Well. Most of the older arts come from countries long civilized. Things like Chinese kung-fu, Korean taekwondo, Japanese jujitsu-theyve had hundreds, even thousands of years to refine the techniques. Along the way, some of the really ugly stuff got replaced with more spiritual aspects. Fighting to the death tends to get frowned on in civilized company. Which is not to say that an expert in any of these arts isnt dangerous. A good kung-fu or karate stylist will surely hand you your head if you dont know how to stop him.
I hear a but in there, he said.
She grinned. A lot of silat came out of the jungle only two or three generations ago. There are hundreds of styles, although most of it wasnt practiced in public until Indonesia gained independence in 1949. Its real primal stuff, designed for one thing-to cripple or kill an attacker. Its not civilized. It is as deadly and efficient as they could make it. If a technique didnt work, the player who used it either wound up maimed or dead, so that piece didnt get passed on.
Interesting.
She grinned. What you saw here? That was the Bukti, the simple stuff. The parent art, Serak, is a whole new ball-game. Really nasty, and a lot of weapon work-sticks, knives, swords, tridents, even guns.
And youre supposed to be a nice Italian girl from the Bronx. Remind me not to get on your bad side.
Hey, Alex?
Yeah?
Dont get on my bad side. She laughed. Okay, so whats up? You didnt come here to watch me beat recruits up, did you?
No, its business. Weve got another problem, he said. Somebody just blew up the main subnet server at the Net Force post in Frankfurt, Germany.
You mean the CIA post.
Right. Net Force being chartered to operate in this country only, except in cases of international emergency and requiring Presidential authorization for such operation, of course what I meant was the CIA listening post.
That got a grin from her. Memorized that right out of the charter, huh?
Why, whatever do you mean, Deputy Commander Fiorella? Net Force would never do anything illegal.
She smiled wider. He kind of liked that, making her smile. The idea that an FBI unit set up to do computer monitoring would be restricted to the United States was fairly foolish. There were no borders on the net; the web stretched everywhere, and while you could access most of it from anywhere, certain systems were easier to log into with a certain amount of proximity. The CIA was willing to lend its name to Net Force from time to time, in exchange for certain favors they couldnt get on their own. The CIA wasnt supposed to operate within the United States, but nobody really believed it did not. Let me clean up and lets go see, she said.
5
Wednesday, September 8th, 4 p.m. Sarajevo
An incoming tankbuster rocket hit the building behind Colonel John Howards Net Force Strike Team, no more than twenty feet above their heads. The missile exploded on impact, blasting a blackened crater in the eighty-year-old structure. A shower of brick fragments and glass pattered down around the half-dozen soldiers where they crouched behind a twisted metal Dumpster. It was a sharp rain, but the least of Howards worries at this point. They had to take the sucker with the missile launcher out fast!
Reeves and Johnson, flank, left! Howard said. It wasnt necessary to yell-all of them wore LOSIR headsets built into their helmets; he could have whispered