The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [127]
“Is this a trick question?”
“Yes.”
“Kill him with what, exactly? You took my rifle away.”
“You might use this ray gun that I am pointing at your chest, Tony. Because I put one of your rifle rounds inside of it. And then I plugged it in.”
Tony looked at the ray gun skeptically. “You’re kidding me. What the hell kind of weapon is that? You plug it in, you turn the heat on, and sooner or later a bullet explodes and somebody gets killed? That’s your big concept here?”
“That’s cyberwar, Tony.”
“Look, Van, I don’t want to play your weird ray gun game.”
“Now you don’t want to play it, Tony. Because I play it better than you do.”
Tony bent to look up the gun’s barrel. “You really put a real bullet inside that cool little toy?”
“Cyberwar is real.”
The ray gun exploded: Carew catapulted backward out of his chair. A 250-grain elk cartridge was designed to take down a bull elk at four hundred yards. It ripped a hole through Carew.
Van looked down at a stinging pang in his arm. A blackened shard of metal had lodged in his flesh. There were perforations all through his black shirt. Little dust-sized bits of titanium shrapnel. He could feel the bigger ones dribbling fresh blood.
Hickok walked up from the black doorway. He leaned down without a word, grasped the shard of metal, and yanked it out of Van’s arm. Van gritted his false teeth and said nothing.
“I’ll get a field dressing on that wound,” said Hickok, opening his pack. “I can’t believe you just shot this bastard. Those Cyberspace boys are being so good down there. They didn’t hurt even a fly.”
“Mike, listen to me. In information warfare, a shooting never counts for much. Media is everything. We’re going to vanish this guy and all his works. We’re gonna break all his tools. Nothing that happened here ever really happened. So the public never learns.”
“I get you, sir,” Hickok said.
“Those foreign techs in the Network Operation Center? Five minutes ago they were a bunch of engineers on visas. From now on they are a covert cyberterror cell. If you have to shoot them, that’s fine. If they run and hide, good luck. If Ashcroft gets them, God help them. It’s time to phone in some backup.”
“Hoo-ah, sir.” Hickok dressed the bleeding wound in Van’s arm with comradely tenderness. “Who exactly do we telephone about a situation like this?”
“That would be the Homeland Security Computer Emergency Response Team. Oh, wait, they don’t exist yet. Who’s closest over here? The Air Force in Colorado Springs? Phone the damn Air Force, Mike. Get me the black helicopters.”
Van winced as Hickok tied off the bandage. “Demerol,” Hickok said knowingly.
“Yeah, Demerol,” said Van. “That’s wonderful stuff.”
Hickok examined the spreading stain of blood under Tony Carew’s corpse. “Boss, we got ourselves a very dead rich guy here.”
“I’m ahead of the curve with that. We’ve got to sanitize this whole area. I’ve got a plan.”
“I knew you would have a plan, Dr. Vandeveer. Can I tell you something now? I have seen a lot of people killed. A whole lot. I stopped counting back in 1998. Nintendo wars, yeah, air strikes, yeah, collateral damage, yeah. But in all that time, I have never killed a bad guy with my own hands, no, not ever.” Hickok looked Van in the eyes. “You are one tough bastard, boss. You are the true pro.”
“The evildoer goes straight into his weapon of mass destruction,” Van said.
“Aw, no, Van. Jesus.”
“Yes. We dump his body into the telescope. We override his weapon’s operating system. We turn up those laser amps to eleven. We shut the gates to heaven. We lock that door from outside. Then we vanish this terrorist. Utterly. He is less than history, he is less than ashes. He’s going to vaporize. This is an airtight building made of flammable straw. When the heat and pressure builds up in there, we are going to blow this gizmo into bits.”
Hickok scratched beneath his helmet. “How do we do all that, again, exactly?