The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [115]
“Mike, I know it’s late, but I need you. Right away.”
Hickok was crestfallen. His voice had sobered. “So, what, you didn’t like my piloting today?”
“Mike, this is spacewar.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
THE ALFRED A. GRIFFITH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL FACILITY, COLORADO, APRIL 2002
Look, it’s simple,” said Hickok. “Van is the strategic leader. I am the tactical leader.”
“Dr. Vandeveer’s a civilian,” Gonzales objected.
“Cyberwar is our brand-new kind of war, dude. I’m a civilian. You’re a civilian. He’s a civilian. The enemy are civilians. We’re all civilians.”
“I didn’t even want to be a civilian,” said Wimberley. “I got a dishonorable discharge. You know what that did to my job prospects?”
The four of them were sitting at midnight, in the mountains of Colorado, in the back of a rented camper-truck. The camper was parked off-road and hidden under a camouflage net. Van wore a black silk shirt, black cargo pants, a black leather jacket. He had a black shoulder bag, black socks, and black Rockport walking shoes. Van didn’t normally dress like a New York humanities professor, but it would do. If he was caught breaking into the premises of the Alfred A. Griffith International Astronomical Facility, he had a good cover story.
After all, he was Mr. Dottie Vandeveer. He was an old college buddy of the guy who ran the place. There was nothing in Van’s shoulder bag that couldn’t pass close inspection. Black gloves, black woven hat—well, it got cold up here. Earpiece and mike—that was just a cell phone. Digital recorder, videocam, big deal. Laptop, he always had a laptop with him. He was a computer scientist.
The other three cyberwar infiltrators looked like the Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mars. Hickok, Gonzales, and Wimberley were impossibly scary. Van was used to it now—it had been his idea—but he could hardly bear to look at them. Their monster helmets had inbuilt night-vision goggles. They were big pointed Cyclops snouts with matching counterweights in the back. They had faceless black ski masks of fireproof Nomex. They owned the night in their shapeless black battle jackets, black combat pants, black Kevlar gloves, and black lace-up SWAT boots. They had great big black humpbacked ALICE packs.
They looked like three giant black plastic action figures. Any normal man who saw these three trolls stalking past him in darkness would assume that they were hallucinations.
The odd part was that none of it was even official U.S. military gear. It had all been bought or rented off the shelf, from various mil-spec commercial suppliers. None of it was even secret. Except for the loaded AFOCI burglar case that Van had brought from Washington.
“Sure you don’t want to take the case with you?” Van asked Wimberley. The kid was looking shaky. “We could bungee it right to that ALICE pack.”
“I don’t deserve to carry it,” Wimberley sniveled. “I got my ass kicked over that fair and square.”
What was it gonna take to cheer this kid up? “There’s fifteen grand waiting for you in a bus locker in Boulder.”
“That helps,” Wimberley admitted. “That’s gonna help me a whole lot.”
Van was spending the down payment on a house in order to invade, burgle, wiretap, and hack his wife’s workplace. Van wasn’t quite sure why this cyberwar operation was worth forty-five thousand dollars to him, plus the rental for the gear, the truck, and the airline tickets. Van had almost crawled out from the shadow of total financial disaster. This misadventure had put him right back in.
Not to mention that agent-running his own unapproved black-bag operation was eighteen different kinds of illegal.
It was just—he had to know. If he did not learn the whole truth about this evil weapon and its capabilities, he would never have another quiet night in his whole life.
Don’t call it war. Call it science.
“This is only a recon mission,” he told his three employees, for the tenth time. “No rough stuff from you tough guys. We’re here to be the eyes-on-target. We infiltrate. We observe