Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

He looked at his dripping knuckles for a second, put the cup down on the table. A split second later, a second rattling, shuddering vibration tipped both his cups over on their sides.

Fernandez stared across the table at Wasserman, meeting his stunned, uncomprehending eyes with his own. His mind on overdrive, he hardly noticed the coffee dripping all over him. Two sets of stairs connected the sublevel to the main floor. One led directly from the rec room to the Operations Center. It was the stairwell Fernandez had come down a few minutes ago, its entrance just a few feet away. The other was in the adjacent conference room and led up to a corridor on the far end of the building.

The boom seemed to have come from directly overhead. From Ops. Fernandez wasn’t about to lead Wassy straight up into the middle of whatever caused it. They would take the farther set of stairs.

“We better hurry,” Fernandez said, jumping up off his chair.

He ran for the conference room, Wasserman close on his heels.

3

Satu Mare District, Romania

Carmody was back in the crew compartment prepping for the drop when Cobb’s voice sounded in his earpiece.

“Zero minus fifteen, Preacher,” the copilot said. “Thought you might want a look below.”

He quickly went on with his inspection. He wore a two-gun harness with loops for his H&K MP7 and a nylon shoulder holster for his sidearm, a custom Sig P225 15 + 1 chambered for .40 S&W rounds with reduced trigger pull, a flared magazine well, tritium/fiber-optic front and rear sights, and a rail-mounted Foxtrot night light. The knife in his leg sheath was a Microtech Combat Troodon with a titanium-coated, steel-alloy blade. The flipdown digital night-vision assembly on his helmet would provide a panoramic view of his surroundings and was jacked into both Raven and the Sentinel drone for multispectral visual, radar, and data scans. The contents of his lightweight backpack were standard demo and survival gear—a couple of C-4 charges, a CamelBak hydration pack, some Frog Fuel shots, and a blowout kit for first aid.

The last thing on Carmody’s checklist was the smartphone-size device on his forearm. He powered it on and off, then made sure the strap was securely fastened. Kali’s sniffer-spoofer digital lockpick would be vital to his success.

Satisfied, he moved up beside Cobb in the cockpit. Glancing at the touch screen, he instantly recognized the estate’s upper stories and rooftop bastions.

Fox Team’s practice mock-up back at Janus, where they had conducted weeks of rehearsals, was nearly identical.

“We’re live,” Cobb said. “Sentinel’s at fifteen thousand feet. The night vision’s color-enhanced for clarity.”

Carmody studied the aerial images.

Drajan Petrovik’s estate was nested amid the forests and widely scattered farm plots of the mountainous countryside along Romania’s extreme western border. While planning, Carmody had scratched up old documentation that told him it was once the fortress of the spectacularly paranoid Count Anton Graguscu the Poisoner, a sixteenth-century royal who’d honeycombed it with secret escape routes and was said to have executed his wife and twin sons after dreaming they would someday conspire against him.

It was an enormous hundred and fifty acres shaped like a horseshoe, with the fortress at the bottom of the curve and the front gate stretching across its open southern side. Between were outbuildings and stables, manmade and natural ponds and streams, and wide, rolling fields of grass where noble generals had once trained in the saddle. The castle’s front and flanks surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, its rear rimmed by thick deciduous and evergreen woods, it was best reached by road via a serpentine drive that ran four looping, curling, curving miles from the main gate to its wide front plaza.

Not part of the original landscape, the drive was graded and paved during World War II, when Nazi occupiers used the castle as a Wehrmacht headquarters and officers’ billet...until Soviet tanks rolled in and blasted them out and left it abandoned and falling to pieces for the next seven decades.

The drive, however, had remained in good shape, as did some of the outbuildings that Drajan Petrovik now used as guardhouses.

He’d owned the property for several years, purchasing it at auction for three and a half million euros. Repairing, renovating, modernizing, and building upon its walls, towers, and baroque spirals was an entertainment that had gone on for many months. The available photos of the castle interior all dated back before the renovations, but there was nothing of recent vintage. Carmody had combed through the online records of Rosalvea and Salta, the villages comprising the nearest commune, and come up empty-handed.

The lack of search results didn’t surprise him. The estate’s extensive rehabilitation would have required construction and electrical permits, and the floor layouts needed to obtain them were typically kept in online databases. But he knew the score. The combined population of Rosalvea commune’s two villages was six thousand—the same number of residents as fifty years back, and fifty years before that, and fifty before that. It was the sort of place where nothing much changed and people were desperate for work and wages. A place the Wolf could run like the feudal lord who built the estate. His renovations would have been a financial windfall for local builders, tradesmen, and suppliers of construction material.

Carmody assumed he had bribed some town clerk to circumvent the permit laws—or to wipe out whatever official records were on file.

“Trapdoors, hidden passages,” he said. “We’re going into a trick box. And you can bet Petrovik’s added some new ones.”

Cobb nodded. “I hate that there’s no way of knowing what they are, sir.”

Carmody suddenly remembered something he’d heard way back. He was on a base near the Iranian border that wasn’t supposed to exist, ramping up for a mission that never officially happened.

How do you rehearse for the unknown?

It was on Armed Forces radio. A talk show. Someone was listening in an officer’s tent, and he’d heard a snippet of conversation as he walked past. The person on air had posed the question rhetorically. He hadn’t sounded like a soldier. He might have been a musician, an actor, a writer. A politician for that matter. Even so, he easily could have been asking about Carmody’s upcoming mission, which was full of dangerous unknowns.

How do you rehearse?

Carmody supposed that if anyone wanted to know that of him, he would reply that you couldn’t. Would say that if you were good enough, capable enough, experienced enough, if you had properly honed skills, you didn’t waste time worrying about unknowns. All that counted was what you brought into a situation. What came at you from outside was hardly a consideration.

He moved up between Cobb and Luna to the virtual window. “Okay if I use this thing?” he asked.

“Sure.” Cobb leaned sideways to give him some room. “Better do it quick.”

Carmody reached for the screen, drew a box around a section of the roof with his thumb and forefinger, and zoomed in. The fortress’s main entrance looked eastward toward Rosalvea proper, about ten miles away over an unmarked country road. Its fully restored bastions projected from the roof in three directions, the largest extending to the north. Solid stone with a heavy wrought-iron rail, the semioval lookout was wide enough for a dozen people to stand atop. A stone staircase twisted down from the bastion to an arched entry tower one story below.

Probably the three bastions were part of the estate’s original structure. Western Romania was a historically quarrelsome region. There had been floating civil wars between princes and governors and ethnic tribes. There had been successive waves of invasion from Dacians, Wallachians, Visigoths, Moldavians, Turks, Hungarians, and Austrians. Count Graguscu, a Goth, lived in an era filled with conflict and would have kept a watchful eye on his neighbors.