Net Force - Tom Clancy [17]
Good job, people, but lets move. Weve got six minutes to get to the rendezvous point.
The team started to move out-
Abruptly, the men, the street, the buildings faded. They went ghostly, transparent, then blinked out.
Priority call, John, a crisp military voice said.
Howard blinked, raised the VR eyeband and sighed.
He was in his office at the Net Force HQ, and the fire-fight in Sarajevo had been a computer simulacrum, not a real battle. It was nothing to keep playing at when there was a priority call on-line. Put it through, he told his computer.
The head-and-shoulders image of Net Forces civilian Commander, Alexander Michaels, appeared over Howards desk.
Howard nodded at the holoproj. Commander Michaels.
Colonel. We have a situation I thought you might want to monitor.
The explosion in Germany? Howard said.
Yes.
My people are already aware of it. Are we talking about an insertion here? Howard couldnt keep the interest out of his voice.
Not in Frankfurt, no, Michaels said, its too late for that. But Ive got all our listening posts and subnets on alert, especially in the European theater. Better make sure your Strike Teams are ready.
My Strike Teams are always ready, Commander. He felt the stiffness in his voice, but could not help that, either.
He had yet to get used to taking orders from a civilian, a man whose father had been a career Army noncommissioned officer, but who had never spent any time in the service himself. Yes, the President of the United States was the Commander in Chief of the military, and yes, the current one hadnt done any time in the service, either. But he was smart enough to let his generals do their jobs. Steve Day had been Navy, and that was bad enough; Howard wasnt sure about Alexander Michaels yet.
I didnt mean to imply otherwise, Colonel.
Sorry, Commander. Were on Alert Status Two. I can have my top ten teams airborne in an hour-half that if we go to AS-One.
I hope it wont come to that.
Yes, sir, Howard said. But what he hoped was that it would come to that. The sooner his troops got a chance to show what they could really do in a hot zone, the happier he was going to be. If you were going to be a warrior, you needed a war now and then-or a police action at the very least.
Ill keep you apprised, Michaels said. Discom.
Sir.
But Howard wasnt worried about that. He had his own wireheads working the nets. If Michaelss crew got it first, it wouldnt be by much.
Best he put them to work to be sure they didnt miss anything. He reached for the com again.
When he went on-line, Plekhanov still used old-style helmet and gloves, even though the newer systems didnt need either. These days, holoproj imagery could englobe a viewers field of vision with a simple eyeband no wider than a pencil, and the reader software behind a computers holocam could pick up finger-jive command language and translate it as accurately as even the best gloves. But he liked the gloves, was used to them. Just as most keyboard-ing was now Dvorak pattern instead of Qwerty, another system he hadnt switched over to. He didnt care what anybody said. Forty-five years of muscle memory just didnt go away and allow itself to be replaced by something else simply because the new method was more efficient.
He waved the web to life and said, Olympic Peninsula Trail.
The VR gear took over, producing an image of a temperate rain forest, a narrow path bounded on the sides by tall Douglas fir, thick ferns and patches of assorted fungi-mushrooms, toadstools and the like. Early July afternoon sunshine slanted down through the dense canopy of evergreens and alder trees, and painted the forest with slats of light and dark. Insects buzzed, birds chirped; a pleasant warmth, not overly hot here in the shade, suffused the woods.
Plekhanov was dressed in sensible hiking clothes: a khaki shirt and shorts, knee-length polyprop socks, waffle-stomper trail boots. He also wore an Irish rain hat. He carried a stout walking staff his own height, and a small day pack containing a rain poncho,