Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

“Sir...are you all right?” Wasserman asked.

Howard did not answer. He opened his mouth wider and inhaled. But Wasserman didn’t think the breath looked right at all. It was visibly shallow and hitching.

“Sir?”

The colonel tried to pull in air, gasping, his hand still on his chest. Then his eyes rolled back, and he tottered where he stood like a tree without roots and sagged toward the ground.

He’d passed out.

Wasserman dove forward and managed to catch him an instant before he would have crashed hard into the snow. But Howard’s lurching fall almost brought him down as well. His knees bent, he tried to prop him up, stumbled, and realized he wouldn’t be able to get him over to the C&C alone.

Then he realized he wouldn’t have to.

He saw the door at the battlewagon’s rear open again, Fernandez simultaneously jumping out his hatch and scrambling around to help.

“Come on, Wass,” he shouted. “Let’s get him inside!”

The sergeant got his back under Howard, and they moved him up toward the wagon with their combined strength. As they reached its open hatch, Wasserman heard the rat-a-tat of renewed machine-gun fire and glanced nervously at the sergeant. The sound was coming from their right—from the east side of the lot. And close by.

They held up, Howard between them, and glanced in that direction. Both knew what they would see.

The last of the hedgehogs, Earl, was barreling toward the coil.

Exactly three minutes earlier, Mario had climbed back into the Jolt’s cargo section, grabbed what he wanted out of a covered storage bin, and set it down across his lap.

“Okay,” Laura said, as they banged rapidly along over the hard grass. She’d managed to pass Earl up, pouring on speed. “I won’t ask what you’re going to do with the car jack.”

Silent with concentration, he expanded the rail from its stowed length of two feet to its full forty-eight inches, making sure it was locked into place.

She flicked him an impatient glance in the rearview mirror.

“Por favor, Mario!” she said. “Tell me what you’re doing with that car jack!”

He tested the rail a second time.

“We need to get out of the Jolt,” he said abruptly.

She cut him another glance in the mirror. “Are you serious ?”

“Totally,” he said and paused. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“Then listen close...”

He quickly explained his plan, and they scrambled out of the idling vehicle. Mario had the binocs around his neck and the car jack in his right hand.

He raced around toward Laura’s wide-open door and stood there looking south through the glasses. They were directly above the barracks parking area, around two hundred yards north of the shed. He saw the four armored battlewagons parked in a circular formation around the shed, each pointed in a different direction, with wide, open lanes between them. Laura had stopped the Jolt in an almost perfectly straight line above the Pumas facing north and west.

He could make out three men at the far end of the lane separating them. Two were Sergeant Fernandez and Glenn Wasserman, a private on Colonel Howard’s HQ staff. He recognized a third as the colonel himself...and he looked in bad shape. From what Mario saw, Fernandez and Wasserman were helping him along toward one of the vehicles.

If the ’hog was going to do damage—the most damage possible—that lane would be its best, easiest lane of approach.

Mario frowned and swung the glasses to his left. Earl was about a quarter mile east, and still roughly half as far north of the shed as he and Laura were. A hundred yards, give or take.

His move would have to be perfectly timed.

A quarter mile east , he thought. Four hundred forty yards. Okay, so...

He estimated that the ’hog’s speed maxed out at sixty miles an hour. The Jolt eighty miles an hour, tops. If Earl was going full tilt, it would be about fifteen seconds till it crossed between him and the Pumas and turned left toward the lane.

And once it made the turn...

Sixty miles an hour. A hundred yards of ground to cover. That’s just under thirty yards per second.

Which meant the ’hog would reach the lane in about three seconds.

“Laura, you’d better move out of the way,” he said, looking up. “In case the tires skid.”

Her face anxious, she nodded and backed a few feet off to the side without questioning him.

Mario hurried. Tossing the jack through the driver’s door, he dove in after it and swung the vehicle around so its front end was turned south toward the lane. Next, he shifted into Neutral, pulled up his seat-adjustment lever, and slid the seat all the way forward. Finally, he reached for the jack on the seat beside him.

His four-foot extension had been a guesstimate, and at a glance it looked on the money. He quickly jammed the jack into the footwell, pressing its heavy iron baseplate against the gas pedal, and the nose of its rail up against the bottom of his seat. The vehicle’s big, loud, five hundred–horsepower engine revved and surged as he tested the jack to make sure it was wedged firmly in place between them.

An instant later he hopped out of the Jolt and peered through the binocs. Earl was now about three hundred yards to his left and a hundred yards below him, still racing forward in a straight line.

He knew the ’hog normally would have 360-degree situational awareness. Normally it would locate and identify him as a threat and attack. But he was betting the bank that wouldn’t happen. Because its behavior was anything but normal. It had become deranged. Fixated. Obsessed.

Compulsive.

Mario thought that gave him a chance.

He watched. Waited. Earl’s distance to his left—eastward—shrank with each stroke of his heart. It was two hundred fifty yards away. A hundred fifty yards east. Seventy-five...

He shot Laura a glance. She caught it and smiled encouragingly. The ’hog was now within fifteen yards of coming in a direct line with the front of his JLTV—and the lane.

Ten yards...

He only hoped he’d gotten his math right.

He dragged in a breath, leaned in behind the Jolt’s steering wheel, and slid its transmission from Neutral to Drive, tossing its electronic key fob into the front seat so the ignition wouldn’t cut off. Then he let the driverless vehicle go.

It bucked forward like a stallion freed from a rope, almost ripping his arm off before he pulled it out the open door.

And that was it. He’d done everything he could. He’d soon find out if it was enough.

Mario prayed to God and the angels as Laura had shown him.

As far as malicious codes went, this one was a tiny script, a monoworm with a single purpose. Namely to turn Earl into a robotic suicide bomb and bomber, all wrapped into one.

The idea behind it was simple but ingenious.

The ’hog’s RPGs fired and detonated using mechanisms that were many decades old and technologically unsophisticated. A charge of propellant fuel powered the grenade’s rocket motor. The solid fuel comprising this charge was ignited by a squib of nitroglycerine, which, in turn, was ignited by a gunpowder primer when the launch was triggered.

Thus, the primer sparked the squib. The squib ignited the rocket fuel. And the fuel propelled the grenade from its launch tube on a tail of built-up gases.

Simple.

The explosive part of the grenade was its warhead. The warhead was primarily designed to detonate on impact. But as a backup, most RPGs were provided with a piezoelectric fuse that was timed to initiate the warhead’s combustion four and a half seconds after launch.

There was nothing too fancy about piezoelectric devices. They used materials like quartz or certain kinds of ceramics to generate a small amount of current. A spark. They were used in everything from grill igniters to cell phones. A physical mechanism—a tiny hammer, for instance—or really anything that caused friction—would strike the piezoelectric material and create the spark. That spark could light a fire.