Dick Stivers - Deathbites

"Let's go see if this damn thing works," Lyons said.

Officer Jim Gillies of the Atlanta Police Department was the first on the scene of a reported gun battle. He had just stopped his cruiser in front of Elwood Electronic Industries when four people emerged from the front door. Three wore combat fatigues; a small, Oriental female wore a white smock. The men carried the meanest collection of automatic weapons that the young officer had ever seen.

He later tried to tell his fellow officers about the experience: "One was a fully-automatic 12-gauge, honest to God. I decided not to bother drawing the .32 the department gives us. Those weapons made me feel like I was carrying a peashooter. I sort of wanted to hide it. You know what I mean?"

He paused, but none of his brother officers told him that they knew what he meant.

"Well, before I could get out, they all got into my squad car. In the front seat, right beside me, was the meanest looking dude I've ever seen. With eyes like those, I don't see why he figured he needed those guns he was carting around.

"He flashed a Justice Department buzzer at me and said, 'The airport.'"

His fellow officers were hooked.

"What the hell did you do?" one demanded.

"I drove them to the bloody airport. What the hell do you think I did?" Gillies replied.

"Those credentials could have been faked," someone pointed out.

Gillies sighed. "You didn't see those men. You didn't see those eyes beside me, and you didn't see those weapons. That buzzer could have been from the Pretoria Department of Sanitation, I would have still driven them to the damn airport.

"The airport security didn't argue either. We picked up a pilot at the gate and went straight to a black jet marked Acme Pest Control, honest to God."

"It was nice working with you," one of the other officers said.

Gillies shrugged. He was not going to try to explain that someone from Washington had already straightened the mess out.

July 9, 1420 hours, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Lao Ti gave a roll of solder back to Gadgets.

"Not acid core, resin core," she instructed.

Gadgets pulled a two-pound roll of the desired solder from a drawer in the workbench.

Hal Brognola, the head Fed at Stony Man, sat on a high wooden bar stool, looking uncomfortable and a bit irritated.

"Why do we have to hold a briefing in Gadgets's workshop?" he asked.

Ti had a Kaypro 10 scattered across one of the workbenches and was in the midst of adding two extra boards that she had made up herself. She answered without looking up.

"So I can finish this computer. Please go ahead. I will listen most attentively."

Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man's erstwhile top computer man who was paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet taken in the bloody Stony Man smash, swung around in his wheelchair. "That was a good computer before you took it apart."

"A toy," she replied. "The RAM was only 64K, and the reaction time abominable."

"Some people consider that toy the best portable computer on the market," Kurtzman, "The Bear," reminded the computer scientist. Kurtzman's knowledge of computers was enormous. But now, because of injuries, his job status was that of computer-maintenance man.

She nodded in agreement.

"I'm remodeling it to suit our needs. I've kept the case, the hard disk drive, and the floppy drive. I yanked the microprocessor and the minute memory chips. Mr. Brognola found me some of the new, compact, geranium arsenide chips at NASA. I put those in with parallel microprocessors. Of course, that meant too much heat. So Gadgets helped me install this small, high-velocity fan at the back and improve the cooling ducts. Then I changed the addressing system on the hard disk. So now this little computer is faster, and stronger.

"Now I'm building in a compact telephone modem. Clear?"

Kurtzman's eyes sparkled. He was impressed. "Very," he said. "What will the computer do now?"

Ti finished soldering a crowded connection before answering. "It has about half the response time it had before. Instead of 64K of random access memory, it has a megabyte. The disk now stores fifteen megabytes quite reliably."

Kurtzman whistled. "That's a lot of computer."

"You asked what it will do. I'll tell you, because this is your specialty. I'm putting together a program. I'll need Stony Man's help and all the computer space you can steal. We want this little computer to be able to talk to strangers.

"It will not be easy, but it is possible. We hook this to a strange computer. First, it must analyze the microprocessor and the strange computer's addressing system. Then it listens to the computer for a while and decides which programming language has been used. Once it tells us all that, we can talk to the strange computer, have it tell us what it knows, and even tell it what to do."

The Bear shook his head. "Anyone who could do that, could end up owning every dollar in America."

Lao grinned. "That's a thought. We'd better not publish our program. But because these terrorists are using computers and data banks to go after us, I thought it might be helpful if we could use their own computers to go after them."

Ti turned her attention to Brognola. "You were going to brief us?"

Brognola dug right in to the topic.

"First," he said, "the bodies at Elwood Electronics. No identification. The coverall uniform doesn't help. They're the largest-selling national brand. Several of the dead terrorists had records, several are known internationally. On two bodies we found membership cards that link them to WAR."

"Which war?" Ti asked.

"That's W-A-R, Worker's Against Redundancy. It's a union of the unemployed that lays all the blame for high unemployment on automation and computers," Brognola replied.

"That makes some sort of connection," Politician mused.

Brognola continued. "We've done some research on WAR. The organization is nationwide and has regional offices in Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and San Francisco. At each of those offices there seems to be a core group. They call the core groups Harassment Initiation Teams."

"You're putting us on. No one would be that blatant," Gadgets protested.

"I'm not putting anyone one. Those initials are H-I-T, hit. We don't seem to be able to get a handle on what HIT is supposed to do, but we're beginning to have our suspicions."

"What's the plan?" Lyons interrupted.

Brognola fastened his eyes on Lyons. "We need more intelligence before we can go ahead," he said. "We should try to get someone inside one of those Harassment Initiation Teams, and we should try to get a tap on their computer. We've traced back Small Chips on the computer net, and we're reasonably sure that it comes from WAR'S main computer in California."

"That's why I'm putting this thing together," Ti added.

"How long will it take to crack their computer?" Lyons asked.

Lao thought before answering. "Hard to tell. I'll finish this today. I could leave for California tonight. I want to find an office close to theirs. Then it all depends how long it will take to penetrate their security."

"Take Gadgets and Pol," Lyons said. "They'll get you inside overnight. That means I'm going to have to get inside a Harassment Initiation Team in a hell of a hurry.''

"Hold on," Brognola shouted.

"Two of those terrorists got away. They can identify you."

Lyons shook his head. "They can identify Pol and Gadgets. None of the scum who saw me are able to tell anyone about it.

"I think I'll go back to Atlanta to join. Maybe I'll get lucky and meet that witch woman and her Japanese sidekick. Besides, they're short of troops there. They should be hiring."

Brognola opened his mouth and then closed it again. "You want this?"