Net Force - Tom Clancy [18]
In his day pack, he also had the sealed packet he was to deliver.
He walked along the edge of a stream, listening to the cold and clear water burbling over smooth stones. Here and there, he saw small fish in quieter pools. He enjoyed the scent of fir, the feel of the humus-padded earth under his hiking boots, the empty trail, devoid of other humans.
After walking briskly for a time, he stopped and had a drink of water. While he was resting, he examined his watch. The device was a match to the one he had carried for more than fifteen years, a Russian analog-mechanical pocket watch. It was a Molnija, big, heavy, mostly steel, with an eighteen-jewel movement. This model had the hammer and sickle and star on the back and an inset of the Kremlin on the hinged front, and was a commemorative model celebrating the Russian victories in the 1941-1945 war. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, cash-poor Russia had sold everything that wasnt nailed down to anybody with the money to buy it, and such watches had gone for ridiculously small amounts. If you could find a non-digital timepiece this well made and sturdy in the West-and you could not-it would have easily cost ten times as much as he had paid for this one.
He thumbed the button, and the hinged cover popped open. He looked at the Roman numerals. Almost time for his meeting at the big rock on the coast. He snapped the cover closed. He needed to hurry. At the rock-a massive chunk of weather-beaten stone near the juncture of the Pacific Ocean and the Straits of Juan de Fuca at Cape Foul-weather-Plekhanov would deliver his packet to a courier. The courier would take the package by fishing boat-in this scenario, at least-to a certain fat man who had access to certain systems, and the fat man would, in exchange for the packet of valuables-in this case, binary jewels he could sell-cause to be put into effect a small series of electronic snowballs. By the time these reached their destinations, some of them would be no larger, just like balls of hard ice, but some would be veritable avalanches. Whatever was needed.
A small animal darted across the path in front of Plekhanov-a rabbit or perhaps a raccoon?-and there was a commotion in the ferns as the creature passed through. The man smiled. This was one of his favorite trips. He much enjoyed the counterpoint to the reality. Walking along a wooded trail was as far removed from computers and nets as the moon was from the Earth. No small irony here.
Naturally, such musings turned his attention to technology, and the uses to which he had been putting it of late. Most of it had been in VR or sublinks. Not all, of course. Sometimes the real world needed real actions.
The physical destruction of the CIA/Net Force post in Germany had been one such action, crude, but necessary. Too much electronic tampering with programmers as adept as the best of Net Forces hackers would send up a warning flag. A bomb, on the other hand, could come from any wild-eyed radical. There had to be some alternation. The kind of software and viral attacks he was about to launch on systems in several of the Commonwealth of Independent States, in the Baltics, even on a Korean or Japanese system or two, just to keep people guessing-well, those would be of a different nature.
There were going to be hundreds of programmers and systems engineers cursing and sweating soon, and much chaos to rectify. When chaos came, his talents were going to be in great demand. And who better to fix things than the man who knew exactly how they had been broken?
The trail wound to the left, then the right, and broke out of the forest into a sandy area dotted here and there with sedge grasses or stunted ground cover. Surf pounded on the rocky shore only a kilometer or so away. He saw the fishing boat anchored well offshore, and a high-bowed dory