Point of Impact

From the kitchen, he heard Toni call out. “You okay?”

  Must have yelled louder than he’d thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Stupid piece of crap Chevrolet!”

  Toni drifted into the garage doorway. He was leaning over the fender on the passenger side, under the hood, so he saw her. Five months pregnant, in one of his T-shirts and a pair of drawstring sweatpants, she was, if anything, more beautiful than ever.

  She smiled. “That’s not what you said when you were convincing me you needed to have it. ‘A fifty-five Bel Air convertible,’ you said. ‘A classic.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, that was before I had a chance to spend time with it. Thing is engineered like a tank.”

  “Also a selling point, if I recall.”

  He looked at the nut. It was tight enough, he decided. He put the wrench down, grabbed a red rag and some of the pungent lanolin hand cleaner and started wiping grease off his fingers. Well, it was a classic car. Created by the chief engineer of General Motors in the post World War II years, Edward Coles, with legendary designer Harvey Earl, the ’55 introduced the small block V-8 engine, the 265, later the 283, and then the 327. These engines became the standard against which all others were measured for more than forty years. A convertible in top condition would cost $60,000 to $75,000, easy. Even one in so-so shape like this one wasn’t cheap.

  He smiled back at her. “I thought it was your job to keep me from running off half cocked.”

  “I don’t recall that part of the marriage vow.”

  He walked toward her. “How did your djuru practice go?”

  Her smiled disappeared, and frown lines wrinkled her forehead. “Terrible. I’m all off-balance! I try to do the turnaround, I almost fall down. When I sweep, it’s all I can do to keep from falling over. When I dropped into the squat for djuru five, I farted!”

  He couldn’t help it; he laughed.

  Her face clouded up, tears welling. “It’s not funny, Alex! I feel like a big fat cow!”

  Michaels hurried to her. He hugged her to him. “Hey, it’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not! Nobody told me this was going to happen! If I can’t practice my silat, I’ll go crazy!”

  This was not the time for him to point out that her doctor had told her to avoid exercise because of some bleeding early in the pregnancy. Everything seemed to be all right, but just to be sure, Toni was supposed to take it easy. That theoretically included Toni not doing the short dances of the Indonesian martial art in which she was an expert. No, definitely not the time to bring that up. A wrong word, and she’d start crying, which was so unlike her that it still amazed him every time. It was just hormones, the doctor had said, a normal part of pregnancy, but Michaels still hadn’t gotten used to it. Toni could kick the crap out of most men, even some who were fairly good martial artists themselves—he had seen her do it a few times—and for her to well up and cry at the drop of a hat was, well ... it was spooky.

  “Maybe you should just, you know, take a break from djurus. It’s only another four months until the baby is born.”

  “Take a break? I’ve done djurus almost every day since I was thirteen. Even when I had pneumonia, I only missed three days. I can’t just give them up for four months!”

  “Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion.”

  Maybe it was better if he just kept his mouth shut. It had been a long time since he’d been around a pregnant woman. When his first wife Megan had been carrying their daughter, Susie, he had still been working in the field and was gone quite a bit, sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. He’d missed a lot of the experience, and at the time he’d been sorry he had. Now he was the commander of the FBI’s elite subunit Net Force, and maybe he might be spending a little more time at the office until things settled down at home.

  He immediately felt guilty at that thought.

  “I know it’s not your fault,” Toni said. “Well, okay, it is your fault, technically speaking.” She grinned. “But I don’t blame you.”

  He smiled back at her. Her mood swing was instant, zap, just like that, from angry to happy.

  “Go on back and finish installing your carburetor,” she said. “You putting in the four-barrel?”

  “I decided to go with three deuces,” he said. “You know, pep it up a little.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve been watching that old movie American Graffiti again, haven’t you? Boys and their toys. You won’t be able to afford to run it, you know. It’ll get what? Ten miles a gallon? You’ll have to take out a loan to fill the tank.”

  “Well, I really am going to sell it. Eventually.”

  “Uh-huh. Go on, go scrape some more skin off your hands and curse the guys who made that big chunk of Detroit iron. I’m going to sit down and see if I can’t get your son to stop kicking my bladder.”

  “You sure are pretty when you’re pregnant,” he said.

  “Forget it. One baby: That’s my limit.”

  Toni went to her computer and slid the VR band down over her eyes, adjusting the earplugs and olfactory bulbs so they were comfortable. The set was wireless and had a pretty good range, so if her ankles started to swell, at least she could go lie down and prop her feet up on a cushion while she was on-line. She put on the tactile gloves and was ready.

  She allowed the system’s default scenario to play, and there was a small moment of disorientation as the virtual reality program took over and constructed a shopping mall in place of the small office that had been the guest bedroom. She found herself in front of a virtual elevator, the door of which opened. She stepped inside, along with other shoppers.

  “Arts and Crafts, please,” she said.

  Somebody tapped a button.

  The sensation was of rising rather than falling. After a moment, a chime sounded and the door opened. Toni alighted from the elevator and looked at the sign a few feet away. YOU ARE HERE pulsed in a pale green light. No, I’m at home in my office with my shoes getting tighter.

  But the suspension of disbelief that was VR was easy enough to accept. She found the place she was looking for listed: Hergert’s Scrimshaw. It was not far away—though it could have been if she wanted a long walk in VR—and she headed toward it.

  When she and Alex had been on their honeymoon in Hawaii, they’d gone to an art gallery in Lahaini, on the island of Maui. There had been some world-class work in the gallery, in all kinds of media and materials—every—thing from pencil drawings to oil paintings to sculptures in wood or bronze or even glass. Seascapes and dolphins and whales were big, but what had impressed her the most was a small display of microscrimshaw. There were pictures engraved on small bits of fossilized ivory, old piano keys and billiard balls, even a couple of sperm whale teeth. Some of the images were smaller than her thumb-nail but, when viewed under magnification, showed a wealth of detail she would not have thought possible. There were sailing ships and whales, portraits, nudes, tigers, and several with fantasy elements. She had been particularly impressed by a tiny black-and-white rendering of a long-haired, naked woman sitting in a lotus position and gazing up at the heavens, but floating two feet above the ground. The image had been done on a pale ivory disk the size of a quarter.

  “How do they do that?” she’d asked Alex.

  He’d shaken his head. “I dunno. Let’s ask.”

  The gallery manager was happy to explain: “There are different ways,” she said, “but in this case, what the artist did was to polish the ivory smooth, then use a very fine-pointed instrument, probably something like a sewing needle, to put thousands of tiny dots into the material, it’s a process called stippling. Then he rubbed the color onto it. This is a Bob Hergert piece, and he prefers oil paint to ink. I believe he uses a shade called lampblack.

  “Once the piece was covered with paint, he wiped it clean, and the oil paint filled up the stipple marks but came off the polished part. It has to be done under magnification, of course, and it is, as you might suspect, rather painstaking work.”

  “I can only imagin
e,” Toni said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, Bob is one of the better artists working in the medium. We handle some other scrimshanders who are also very good—Karst, Benade, Stahl, Bellet, Dietrich, even Apple Stephens—but Bob’s work is not only beautiful, it’s still reasonably priced. He does a lot of custom commissions on things like knife handles and gun grips.”

  “How much?” Alex asked.

  “Eight hundred for this one.”

  “We’ll take it,” he said.

  “No, Alex, we can’t—”

  “Yes, we can. It’ll be your wedding present.”

  “But—”

  “I made a good profit on my last car restoration. We can afford it.”

  As she packaged the scrimshaw and ran Alex’s credit card, the manager said to Toni, “If you are ever interested in seeing how he does it, Bob teaches an on-line course.”

  At the time, Toni had nodded and murmured something polite, not thinking such artwork would ever be something she’d have time for.

  As she walked through the virtual mall, she smiled to herself. Well, she had time now. Plenty of time. She was supposed to sit around and twiddle her thumbs for the next four months, and even if she wanted to practice her silat, she was, for all practical purposes, a beached whale. She’d just flop around on the sand if she tried to do anything physical, she could already see that, and she was only five months along. At seven or eight months, dropping into a djuru turn was just not going to be in the cards. But sitting at a table and scratching on a piece of faux ivory with a pin? She could do that, and the idea of creating something anywhere close to as beautiful as that tiny scrimshaw Alex had bought for her was appealing. Of course, she didn’t really have much artistic talent, but maybe she could learn. It was worth a shot.

  She arrived in front of a small shop. On the window it said, Bob Hergert, Microscrimshaw—www.scrimshander.com.

  Toni took a deep breath, let it out, and walked into the shop.

  Inside, the place was neat and well laid out. There were glass-topped cases with pieces of ivory on black velvet, everything from knife handles, gun grips, and billiard balls to larger framed pieces. Several magnifying glasses on little stands had been set up on the glass so that the smaller pieces under them were easier to see.

  An electric guitar hung on the wall behind the longest counter. Toni didn’t know from guitars, but there was an ivory plate on the body of the instrument, and she recognized the man’s face lovingly engraved upon the plate.

  A medium-sized man with a thick mustache came out of the back and smiled at Toni. “The King,” he said. “When he was in his prime. About 1970 or so, the television concert where he wore the black leather suit.”

  Toni nodded. “I bought one of your pieces in Hawaii,” she said. “A naked woman sitting in a lotus pose, floating in the air.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Cynthia, the Goddess of the Moon. I enjoyed doing that one. How can I help you, Mrs.... ah ... ?”

  “Michaels,” she said, still feeling somewhat strange about using Alex’s name that way. “Toni.”

  “Toni. Nice to meet you.”

  “I understand you give lessons in how to do this.” She waved, taking in the shop’s interior.

  “Yes, ma’am, I surely do.”

  “I’d like to sign up, if I could.”

  “No problem at all, Toni.”

  They smiled at each other.

  2

  New Acquisitions Warehouse, Net Force HQ, Quantico, Virginia

  “You look like hell, Julio.”

  “Thank you, General Howard, sir, for your astute observation.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was up half Sunday night feeding the baby. Your godson.”

  “I thought Joanna was breast-feeding.”

  “Yeah, she is. But somebody told her about a little pump that lets you take mama’s milk out of the original container and put it into little bottles. That way the father can be part of the suckling process.”

  “Don’t look at me, I didn’t tell her.”

  “No, it was Nadine, your lovely wife, who was the snake in the garden.”

  Howard laughed. “Well, you know how women are. Never let a man spend too much time getting by with something.”

  “Amen.”

  “So, what are we looking at this fine morning, Sergeant Fernandez?”

  “Three new items of field gear unrelated to weaponry, sir.”

  Howard glanced around the inside of the small storage warehouse. There were crates, boxes, and items covered with tarps, the usual.

  “Proceed.”

  “Over here, we have our new tactical computer units, supposedly shockproof backpackers that will plug into the SIPEsuits. Seven pounds, more FlashMem, DRAM, and ROM than a high school computer lab and faster than greased lightning. Ceramic armor and spidersilk webbing, all bullet-resistant and waterproof and like that. I turned one on and dropped it on the floor from chest height, and it still ran fine. Twelve-hour batteries the size of D cells, so you can carry a few days’ backup without recharging, no problem.”

  “Good, about time they came up with something that didn’t go down every time somebody sneezed. What else?”

  “Right this way. This here is our emergency broadcast jammer, which will supposedly make any radio inside a ten-kilometer circle spew static and nothing else. Doesn’t work on LOS infra or ultra headcoms. They say it’d stop KAAY in Little Rock at its peak, but I haven’t tested it yet.”

  “Bad guys use LOS, too.”

  “What can I say? This is RA stuff. You know how they are.”

  Howard nodded. Regular Army did have its own whys and wherefores. He’d been there, done that, and was much happier being the head of Net Force’s military arm, such as it was. He had expected it to be a lot more quiet than when he was a colonel in the RA, but in the last year or so, it sure had been anything but that. In fact, after his last fracas, he’d been thinking about retiring. He still ached from his wounds when it got chilly, and the idea of not being around to see his son grow up bothered him a lot.

  Julio kept talking:

  “And under this here cover, we have the toy of the week. Ta-da!” He pulled the lightweight tarp off, revealing what looked like a table with four jointed arms sticking up from it, two in the corners at one end, two more in the middle. The thing had wheels and a closed compartment under it.

  “And what is this? A high-tech electric golf cart?”

  “No, sir, this is Rocky Scram—that’s R-O-C-C-S-R-M, the acronym standing for Remote-Operated, Computer-Controlled Surgical Robotic Module.”

  Howard frowned. “We talking about a doc-in-the-box?”

  “Actually, a surgeon-in-the-box, only this is just the box. You’re gonna love this one, it actually might be useful.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Here’s the deal. You need a surgical PA, couple nurses, and orderlies. They set this sucker up in a field hospital. Guy comes in, all shot up, needs fixin’. The PA—that’s physician’s assistant, for those of you who missed the medical personnel lecture—does a triage, examines the guy, and makes a quick diagnosis. They plunk him on the table, get him prepped, and dial up a first-class REMF surgeon, who can be up to a thousand miles away, give or take. He cranks up his unit—that part is over here, come look.”

  They walked to another covered unit, and Julio removed a tarp from it. There was a chair, a computer screen mounted in front of it on a platform, and some odd-looking appendages on the arms of the chair.

  “Your surgeon sits here and slips his fingers into the surgical controls, that’s these rings here. He uses his feet on pedals down on the floor, one each, with a freeze pedal in the middle, kind of like a brake.”

  Julio sat in the chair and slipped his fingers into the jointed ring arrangements. The computer screen lit up. “These control the waldos, those are tools you can connect to those arms on the operating table. Left foot runs the endoscope, which holds your light and your ca
mera. Right foot works various clamps and suction things. The hand tools will hold scalpels, hemostats, suture needles, scissors, and a bunch of other things.”

  “You’re telling me a surgeon can operate on a patient from a thousand miles away using this gadget?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what the RA medicos say. The surgeons who qualify have to cut up a bunch of pigs and cadavers and RA soldiers before they let them work on real people. They’ve repaired bowels, done blood vessel grafts, stitched up torn hearts, all kinds of things. Nurses and the PA assist, just like in a regular OR. RA medicos say a guy good with this toy can pick up number-six BBs and never drop one.”

  Julio waggled his fingers, and there was mechanical hum from the nearby table as the surgical arms moved around.

  “It’s all self-contained, battery backup if you can’t get a generator going. Wheel it out there, slap’em on the table, and you cut and paste.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Yessir, I expect He is impressed.”

  “Downside?”

  “Heavy, expensive—million and half a copy—and you need a repair tech who’s qualified to service’em if they break down. Still, RA figures it’s cheaper than training and replacing a surgeon who catches a stray round on the way to do his cutting.”

  “Good point.”

  “There’s a civilian model been around for a while, but it’s not so compact, and it ain’t portable.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Ain’t it, though? Now, if the general is through being impressed with modem hardware, I’d like to go catch a nap.”

  “Go ahead, Sergeant. Oh. Wait. Hold up a second. I got something for you.” Howard grinned. He was going to like what he was about to do. He was going to like it a whole lot.

  Julio paused, and Howard tossed the small plastic box at him. Julio caught it, started to open it. “Not my birthday. What’s the occasion?”

  Howard didn’t say anything, just kept grinning.

  When Julio got the box open, his eyes went wide. “Oh, shit. No!”

  “Oh, shit, yes. And we’re skipping right over shavetail and going to right to first.