Net Force - Tom Clancy [25]
Howard grinned at the blank screen. Yes! Wont the Ukrainians, uh, frown on us wandering around in their country chasing terrorists?
Officially, yes. Officially, you and your troops wont be leaving the embassy, which is U.S. territory. Unofficially, the local government wont get in your way. Weve got a Dad Tee policy in effect for this operation.
Howard grinned again. Dad Tee, from the acronym DADT-Dont Ask, Dont Tell-a policy spawned long before the Clinton Administration had made the term popular. What that meant was, as long as he and his men didnt get caught doing something too blatant, the host country could-and would-pretend it didnt see them. If he didnt burn down the capitol or assassinate the President while CNN had a camera on him, theyd be okay.
Ill have my teams in the air in thirty minutes, Commander Michaels.
Dont break a leg, Colonel. Take an hour or two. The pertinent information is being downloaded to your S&T computer even as we speak. Your contact at the embassy will be Morgan Hunter, the CIA station chief, but its your operation.
Sir.
After he hung up, Howard couldnt keep the grin from his face. Finally. A field operation, and not a virtual one. The real thing.
He found himself breathing faster, and with a sudden urge to visit the bathroom. This was it.
Time to rock and roll, he said to the air. Rock and roll!
8
Thursday, September 16th, 8:15 a.m. Quantico
In his office, Jay Gridley prepared to ride the net.
Cyberspace wasnt really like the old movies that had first depicted it, Gridley knew. But virtual reality constructs-VRCs-did use imagery to help a webwalker navigate the web. The images could be almost anything a user wanted. There were hundreds of standard commercial overlays, from cities with freeways, to old Western towns, to space flights. And there were tens of thousands of shareware scenarios to be had on the web. Some of the best software you could get was free. Download or timeshare the ware, and the net could be anything anybody had ever bothered to program. If you couldnt find anything that suited you, you could create your own vehicle. You didnt even need to be a programmer; any fool could do it. WebWeaveWare these days was easier than paint-by-numbers.
Gridley had several favorite travel pieces he used when he donned his VR gear and went on-line. He did the finger weave to access the command mode, waved the web to life and said, Dodge Viper, Bavaria.
The VR gear gave him an image of a mountain road in a somewhat-stylized German landscape. He was inside an RT/10 Viper, a black convertible roadster with broad white racing stripes, driving down a steep switchback. There would be a border crossing coming up soon. He clutched and downshifted from sixth into fifth, tapped the accelerator and grinned at the crisp breeze ruffling his long black hair. He enjoyed the classic James Bond movies, even though saying, Gridley, Jay Gridley, didnt have quite the same ring to it
The border crossing loomed. A single uniformed soldier stood behind a black-and-yellow-striped pole blocking the road, a submachine gun held at port arms.
Gridley downshifted and braked. The roadster rumbled deep in its muscular throat as it rolled to a stop.
The guard said, Your papers, please.
The guard smelled like cheap aftershave and stale sweat, with a touch of cigarette tobacco thrown in.
Gridley smiled, reached into the pocket of his tuxedo-well, if you were gonna play, you might as well go all the way-and removed his passport.
Eventually, he would have to program himself a female passenger to complete this scenario. A sultry redhead, perhaps, or a dark and deadly brunette. A woman afraid of the speed, but excited by it nonetheless. Yeah
In the real world, an electronic password was tendered to a gate server on the web, bits of binary hex code pulsed from one system to another, but in VR, the visuals were so much more pleasing and much more intuitive.
A cursory inspection, then the guard returned his passport, nodded