Read Online Checkmate by Tom Clancy - Free Book Online

said.
    Redding nodded. “Meet the Mark V Tactical Operations Suit, code-named RhinoPlate. Weight, four pounds unloaded; thickness, eight millimeters—about a quarter inch. Outer shell is Kevlar; core material RhinoPlate; inner layer is seventh-generation Gore-tex.”
    “Stats?”
    “Good against shrapnel at twelve feet; rifle rounds at fifteen; pistol and shotgun at eight feet. The Gore-Tex is tested to maintain core body temperatures down to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit with the hood up, and as high as one hundred ten. You could go from Alaska to the Sahara and stay relatively comfortable.”
    “The color’s different.”
    “Good eye. New camouflage. The outer layer of the Kevlar is treated with a polymer fiber similar to the coating on stealth aircraft: matte-black, slightly rough to the touch for maximum light absorption. I won’t bore you with the physics, but the micro-roughened exterior partially defuses light. Basically, about thirty percent of whatever photons strike the surface gets trapped—if for only a split second—but enough to diffuse them. Bottom line: You stand still in a shadow, you’re virtually part of the shadow.”
    “And the pouches and harness points? Everything’s moved. It looks . . . lumpy.”
    “Disruptive patterning. We’ve resized and rearranged them to break up your form.”
    Mother Nature abhors straight lines. In low-light conditions the human eye tends to seek out movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, movement was the easiest to address: stand still. Color difference was also easy: Black gives the eye little to draw from the background. Form, however, was problematic. The human body is a unique collection of angles and lines easily discernible to the human eye. By rearranging the pouches to various spots on the suit, the familiar outline of the body becomes fuzzy.
    Fisher took the suit from Redding and examined it. He nodded. “I like it. One question.”
    “What?”
    “Where do I put my car keys?”
     
     
     
    “ OKAY, one more item,” Redding said. “An add-on to the SC-20. Again, I’ll spare you the technical stuff. We’ve nicknamed it Cottonball.” He handed Fisher two items: what looked like a standard shotgun shell, and a spiked soft rubber ball roughly the size of marble. “The basic firing mechanism is the same as the sticky shocker and ring airfoil, but with a big difference. Once it’s out of the barrel, the sabot breakes away, leaving only the Cottonball. When it strikes a hard object, an inner pod of aerosol tranquilizer is released. The cloud radius is three feet. Anyone inside that will be unconscious in three or four seconds.”
    “Impressive. Duration?”
    “For a hundred-eighty-pound man, a waist-up strike will give you about twenty minutes.”
    “Accuracy?”
    “Plus or minus six inches over fifty feet.”
    Bird’s voice came over the intercom: “Hey, boys, incoming transmission for you.”
    Fisher tapped his subdermal. “Go ahead,” Fisher said.
    Lambert’s voice: “Your target’s gone mobile, Fisher. The Duroc just lifted anchor; she’s steaming northeast out of Freeport City harbor.”
    “Destination?”
    “Working on it, but we’ve confirmed she took on provisions the day before, including fuel.”
    “Probably not a day trip, then. So we either wait for her to put in somewhere, or intercept her under way.”
    On headphones, Redding said, “Uh, Colonel, we’ve got a full load-out onboard. I was thinking . . .”
    “Skipjack?”
    “Skipjack.”
    Fisher groaned. “Ah, man, I hate the Skipjack.”

11
    “ SEVEN minutes to target,” Fisher heard Bird say in his subdermal. “Descending to five thousand.”
    “Roger. Give me the ramp, Bird.”
    “Ramp descending.”
    With a mechanical groan, a gap appeared along the curved upper lip of the ramp, revealing a slice of dark night sky. Fisher felt a slight vacuum sensation as the pressure equalized. After a few seconds, the ramp was down level with the deck.