Net Force - Tom Clancy [87]
Clock is running, Colonel! Fernandez yelled.
Howard grinned, dropped prone, began knee-and-elbowing his way under the razor wire. As long as you stayed low, the only thing youd get is dirty. If you got uppity, the razor wire would bite you.
Clear!
Ahead was a fifteen-foot-high wall with a rope draped over it. If you got there at speed and jumped high as you caught the climbing line, you could make it over with two or three pulls, roll and hit the sawdust pit in three seconds. If you had to climb eight feet of rope, it took longer.
Howard leaped, grabbed the two-inch hawser with both hands a good ten feet up, reached high with his right hand and caught the rope again, did it on the left side, and was over.
The next obstacle was essentially a forty-foot-long telephone pole lying in a series of six-foot-high, X-shaped, four-by-four supports. You had to boost yourself up on the end-there was a short step built in there-mount the pole and walk the length. If you fell, you had to go back and start the walk over. The trick was to move steady, not too fast, not too slow. It wasnt that high, but a fall from six feet could sprain an ankle or break an arm. Once, theyd had a man break his neck when he slipped and landed on his head.
Howard reached the step, bounced up, stood on the pole. He had walked this hundreds of times, he had the pace down. Steady-not too slow, not too fast.
At the other end, there was another sawdust pit, though the archaic term was not really appropriate-the dust was not wood, but reconstituted buckyball-plastic. The best way to land on the stuff without sinking to the bottom, a good three feet, was to do so in a sitting position or stretched out and supine.
The colonel reached the end of the pole walk, jumped outward, lay back and hit flat on his back, hands extended, palms down. Buckyball-plastic splashed, but quickly settled back. Howard rolled, sank a little, but reached the edge of the pit and came to his feet.
The trooper in front of him was slower than he was. He had just gotten free of the pit himself, and was on the way to the minefield.
Howard came up behind the man. Track! he yelled. The trooper moved to the side and allowed Howard to pass.
He was making good time. Not his best, but not bad, he felt.
The minefield was a twenty-foot-wide corridor of sand thirty yards long. The mines were electronic, about the size of a softball, and not dangerous, but if you stepped on one, you knew it-it let out an amplified scream that would wake a man six days dead. Every one you hit cost you fifteen seconds. You could see where the mines were; there were little depressions that dropped the sand a half inch or so over them. If you were first through, it was easy, you could see them and run the field in ten or fifteen seconds, but after a few people went through ahead of you, it got harder to spot the mines among all the boot prints.
There were two troopers still walking the sand when Howard got there. Newbies tended to think they could run in the old boot prints and get home free, and if the mines had been real, that would have worked. But the traps reset randomly every two minutes, and stepping where somebody had gone before might earn you fouls. You couldnt be sure.
You couldnt learn a pattern, because Howard had his techs change it every week or so.
Again, steady was the key. Try to hurry, and youd get sonicked good. Too slow and you started worrying, seeing traps where there werent any.
He stepped into the sand.
Forty seconds later, he was clear, without triggering a sonic blast, and feeling pretty good since he had passed one of the troopers in the sand and caught the other on the way to the final obstacle.
The last test this day was Sergeant Arlo Phillips, a six-foot-four-inch 240-pound hand-to-hand-combat instructor. Phillipss role was simple: You tried to get