"You guys are no fun at all," the man said as he slid the disk into the drive. The computer to which it was attached was a new Apple Macintosh IIx, each of whose expander slots was occupied by a special circuit board, two of which the technician had personally designed. O'Day had heard that he'd work on an IBM only if someone put a gun to his head.
The programs he used for this task had been designed by other hackers to recover data from damaged disks. The first one was called Rescuedata. The operation was a delicate one. First the read heads mapped each magnetic zone on the disk, copying the data over to the eight-megabyte memory of the IIx and making a permanent copy on the hard drive, plus a floppy-disk copy. That allowed him to eject the original, which O'Day immediately reinserted in the baggie.
"It's been wiped," the man said next.
"What?"
"It's been wiped, not erased or initialized, but wiped. Probably with a little toy magnet."
"Shit," O'Day observed. He knew enough about computers to realize that the magnetically stored data was destroyed by magnetic interference.
"Don't get excited."
"Huh?"
"If this guy had initialized the disk, we'd be screwed, but he just swiped a magnet around. Some of the data is gone, but some probably isn't. Give me a couple of hours and maybe I can get some of this data back for you - there's a smidge right there. It's in machine language, but I don't recognize the format... looks like a transposition algorithm. I don't know any of that cryppie stuff, sir. Looks fairly complex." He looked around. "This is going to take some time."
"How long?"
"How long to paint the Mona Lisa? How long to build a cathedral, How long..." O'Day was out of the room before he heard the third one. He dropped the disk off in the secure file in his office, then headed for the gym for a shower and a half hour in the whirlpool. The shower removed the stink, and while the whirlpool went to work on the aches, O'Day reflected that the case against the son of a bitch was shaping up rather nicely.
"Sir, they just ain't there."
Ramirez handed the headset back and nodded. There was no denying it now. He looked over to Guerra, his operations sergeant.
"I think somebody forgot about us."
"Well, that's good news, Cap'n. What are we gonna do about it?"
"Our next check-in time is zero-one-hundred. We give 'em one more chance. If nothing by then, I guess we move out."
"Where to, sir?"
"Head down off the mountain, see if we can borrow some transport and - Christ, I don't know. We probably have enough cash we can use to fly out of here -"
"No passports, no ID."
"Yeah. Make it to the Embassy in Bogot ?"
"That violates about a dozen different orders, sir," Guerra pointed out.
"First time for everything," Captain Ramirez observed. "Have everybody eat their last rations, rest up as best they can. We stand-to in two hours, and stay alert all night. I want Chavez and Le n to patrol down the hill, say two klicks' worth." Ramirez didn't have to say what he was worried about. As unlikely as intellect told them it had to be, he and Guerra were on the same wavelength.
"It's cool, Cap'n," the sergeant assured him. "We're going to be all right, just as soon as those REMFs get their shit together."
The mission briefing took fifteen minutes. The men were angry and restive at the losses they had taken, not fully appreciative of the danger that lay ahead, only of their rage at what had already happened to their numbers. Such bravado, Cortez thought, such machismo.
