Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

“No.”

“Laura—”

“This is nonnegotiable.”

“What?”

“Nonnegotiable.”

He stared at her. She stared back defiantly, pulling the cat against her body.

The ’hog was no more than sixty yards away from them. They couldn’t stand out in the open any longer.

“You win,” he said, tugging at her elbow. “Now, please let’s hurry up.”

And with that, they ran for the gap between the huts, Buttons cradled deep in Laura’s arms.

5

Satu Mare District, Romania

Dixon and his follow vehicle reached the Wolf’s Lair at half past midnight, killed their lights, and drove along its wrought-iron outer fence toward a high, ornamental entry gate.

The second BearCat stopped just before reaching the gate and pulled parallel to the road. Moving on ahead, Dixon halted, shifted, and reversed across the blacktop and shoulder onto a wide, flat farm field lying empty and still under a thin sheet of snow.

He looked across the road at the gate. Kali sat beside him in the passenger seat, her night-vision smart glasses defining the world outside in varied shades of rose. Though less effective than the DNVGs worn by the entry team, they allowed for greater freedom of movement. She thought it a worthwhile trade-off.

The Cat’s engine ticked. She watched the snow fall steadily outside.

Dixon turned to her. “Your show.”

Kali’s fingers pattered against her tablet. Behind her, the farm field was a vast, featureless expanse running back toward the southern Carpathian foothills. There was a fine cover of snow over everything—the dirt shoulder; the dry, frozen grass; the stacked, rectangular bundles of cut, tied grass. Somewhere in that distance there would be a small Magyar farm cottage with stone walls and a roof of orange or brown clay tiles. It would have a barn outside for storing the potato and sugar-beet crops, a shed for the farm tools. A stable with a couple of strong, broad-backed mules or workhorses inside. Possibly a henhouse. With the power grid out, the local homesteads would not have electric lights or heating tonight. But most had woodstoves and fireplaces, and there would be candles and oil lamps. They would not freeze.

In the Romanian countryside, the people lived much as they had for centuries. The encroachment of technology was creeping and tentative, and they had not yet become altogether reliant on it. To many who tracked the evolution of cybercrime, it seemed paradoxical that the technologie vampiri had originated in this remote corner of the world. But Kali understood.

The internet was a magic portal. Distances meant nothing in the space. Governments and territorial laws were of little consideration. The youth of these remote villages explored and connected over its boundless pathways. They could shape worlds without physical constraint, and it empowered them. And with that great power came temptations.

Kali understood. She especially understood Drajan Petrovik.

She sat tapping on her device. Drajan had replaced the security and surveillance cameras around the estate after the raid on his Bucharest stim club. But once the Sentinel drone surveillance images disclosed the new system’s manufacturer, she had been as good as in. She hoped to someday stand eye to eye with the imprisoned Chinese hacktivist, Mad Dragon Butcher, and thank him for the backdoor exploit.

“Done,” she said. “I have the camera feeds on a thirty-minute delay.”

Dixon glanced at her and nodded. “Just like Munich.”

Silence. Not just like. In Munich, she was the hunted, and he one of the hunters. She had not forgotten.

Dixon was looking out to his right at the second BearCat. “Rover Two, you’re on,” he said over the RoIP.

The Cat’s rear door swung open. Kali watched a man in jeans and a hooded parka exit and then lean back inside. After a moment, an enormous tan Belgian Malinois followed him out, bounding from the troop compartment on a short leash. The man led the dog over to the fence and stopped in front of it. His name was Joe Banik. A translator/interpreter and K-9 handler, he was on loan to FOB Janus from the Army’s Third Special Forces Group. Banik spoke fourteen languages fluently and several more with a high degree of proficiency. Hungarian and Romanian were just two of them.

The BearCats had passed only a few scattered homes on the road—the nearest a third of a mile back—and it was a dark, snowy night. There was perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of any locals showing up to investigate when they heard a commotion. But if curiosity got the better of them, Banik would represent himself as one of the Wolf’s security guards and send them off.

Dixon waited until he and the dog were positioned outside the fence. Then: “Whiskey, your turn.”

This time his vehicle’s rear door opened. In full assault gear, E4 Adam Warren, Quickdraw, hopped out. He carried a silenced MP7 over his right shoulder and a black leather sling bag under his left arm.

Warren hurried across the road. There were no guards stationed at the gate; its cameras, electronic lock, and telephone entry system—presumably Wi-Fi/Ethernet—were designed to keep it secure from intrusion. A breach at the fence or gate would bring men down from the estate’s secondary access-control point, a guardhouse twenty yards beyond the fence.

By then, Kali knew, it wouldn’t matter.

Approaching the gate, Warren reached into his sling bag and extracted an object about the size and shape of a kitchen sponge. Kali and Dixon watched him attach it to the electronic lockbox and then walk quickly back across the road to their vehicle.

Dixon waited until he was back inside to contact Carmody.

“Preacher, we’re ready and set,” he said.

“On my go,” Carmody replied in his earpiece.

Raven was the sneakiest aircraft Faye Luna had ever piloted. Its composite rubber-panel skin was shaped and angled to deflect radar beams, sunshine and earthshine—but that was a countermeasure that her old-school Army flight instructors would crow about in the cockpits of aging Apaches. The tilt-rotor’s extreme stealth was really the product of three major innovations. First, its outer panels were colored with carbon nanotube blackest black, a material engineered at MIT that was ten times blacker than any other substance known to man and absorbed nearly a hundred percent of all incoming light. Watching Raven fly in broad daylight was said to be an unsettling experience—like looking at a huge hole in reality, a winged, dark-as-the-void shape cut out of the sky.

Hardly as dramatic, but equally essential, were the bird’s secondary and tertiary stealth elements, an integrated network of electronic radar jammers and sound dampers, as well as a state-of-the-art infrared-emissions-distribution system that ran the entire length of the fuselage, remixing and cooling the hot air and gases produced by its running temperatures.

With all that going for her, Luna was confident she could avoid detection en route to the target. But things were sure to get dicier once they reached it. She and Cobb needed to be on top of their game.

She banked and dropped down, then banked again and dropped more steeply over the Wolf’s Lair, its towers coming up large and aggressive in her naked eyes. Finally, she straightened into a flat, stable hover some thirty-five feet above the north bastion.

Crouched at the door in the troop compartment, Carmody slapped a round into the chamber of his pistol, then put on leather fast-rope gloves like the rest of the men.

The line was two inches thick, forty feet long, and tied into the aircraft with an eyehole splice. Carmody tested it with a hard jerk and nodded to Schultz, the broad-chested man behind him.