Tom Clancy's Netforce: The Archimedes Effect by Steve Perry and Larry Segriff

When enemy agents somehow make it through the defenses at two army bases and wreak havoc without actually doing much damage, the army wants to know *how* exactly these agents are breaking through the deepest security the army can manage without breaking a sweat. Feeling that one of their own might be involved, the army turns to NetForce, the government agency formed specifically to fight Internet Crime and track down internet Criminals.

Since this is the future, the Net has penetrated far more deeply into the typical American life than it has currently, and in just about every other country as well. But recently, NetForce has been put under the jurisdiction of the Army, and Colonel Thorn, the nominally civilian head of NetForce, has been made a general to put him on an equal footing with many of the army brass he'll be encountering. Nonetheless, Thorn can see what is coming, and he knows that the end has come for the organization he created. Soon it will be completely subsumed into the army, and many of the people working for NetForce will be let go, or go on their own, when it becomes clear that NetForce plus the army's specialists will be a redundant series of personnel.

Thorn sets Jay Gridley, top Net Force computer man and programmer, on the track of the criminals. He's paired with Rachel Lewis, the Army's top computer programmer. Jay has already found out that the bases were cracked with the help of a supposed game distributed over the internet. The game is one where you supposedly are fighting off an alien invasion on the moon, and the alien bases, with the look of the architecture changed, are mocked up on actual army bases and their extant security. When a gamer "solves" how to get through the base's security and gets inside, the game shoots off a squirt of information showing the programmer of the "game" how they managed it.

The programmer then passes on the information to the operatives who break into the army base. What's more puzzling is that no real destruction or theft accompanies the break-ins. It's as if whoever is doing this wants it to be known that they can actually do it, i.e. defeat the security of army bases, possibly to sell that information to interested parties who would do more than just break in, do a little damage and leave.

And that's exactly what Rachel Lewis intends. Although a member of the army herself, she hates the army because of what it did to her father. Her father was an ex-army man when her boyfriend, also in the army, raped her before she could consider offering herself to him. When her father found out, he took his gun and killed her rapist. The army caught him and was going to try him when her father took his own life. She joined the army to blacken its eye and inflict upon it the same damage she feels that the army inflicted on her own life.

But Jay Gridley is just as good... or better, than she is at programming. How can she throw him off her track? The answer is by keeping him off guard and coming on to him. Knowing he's married and has a child, she figures that whether his gives in to her or not, his own body's reaction and the guilt and lust he'll feel will keep him reeling emotionally and keep him from thinking as effectively as he would if she was all business.

But Jay isn't the only trouble Rachel has with her plan. Her main operative, a man named Carruth, uses his very expensive and very rare personal weapon and ammo to kill two D.C. Metro cops hassling him. Instead of getting rid of the gun, however, he keeps it because he likes it so much. But when he's forced to use it on one of the army base jobs, it leads NetForce to his door, and makes Rachel see him as more of a threat than an asset. By the time she is forced to take him down, NetForce, and Jay Gridley, are on to her. But can they find her when she disappears and goes off the radar after killing Carruth? Or will Rachel end up being "The Big One that Got Away"?

I always love the NetForce books, but this one is definitely the last. By the end of the book, it is clear that NetForce will vanish to become little more than a footnote in some history text, while all the people in it leave and go on with their lives. Most of the subplots of the book are the various unattatched people getting married or meeting and falling in love, and by the end of the book, proposing marriage, and presumably end up living a long, happy life together.

It's as if the authors deliberately set out to find every loose end and tie them up into a bow during this book so that no one could find a loose end and go "What about this?" and thus force them to write another book. The overall effect is that NetForce goes out with a whimper, being more or less forcibly subsumed into the military. While I always doubted that the series would go out with a bang, it was nice, and at the same time, disturbing to read. Life is rarely, if ever, that neat and it made me feel as if I'd catapulted headlong into Uncanny Valley- serious book edition!

Aside from the sadness of the series ending, and the uncomfortableness I felt at how each loose end is so quickly and neatly tied up, the other problem I had with the book is how Jay Gridley is really the only NetForce operative we see in action in the entire book. All the peripheral NetForce characters (except for a few scenes with Thorn) are all shown outside of the office. Perhaps this was to show how their jobs had become more or less supernumary positions, but it also made me strangely uncomfortable, like the whole of NetForce had been reduced to only two people: Thorn and Jay Gridley. Because aside from a few scenes with Jay in Thorn's office and Thorn dealing with Generals, that's all we see of NetForce.

Still, for a last hurrah, it wasn't bad. The main story was excellent, and the action scenes still rocked. I just felt that the story really didn't need the imprimatur of the NetForce name on the book, or in the characters. It would have worked perfectly find as a *not* NetForce novel, and that's why I feel strangely lukewarm about it on the whole. It didn't *feel* like a NetForce novel, and as such, I'd only recommed it with a strong caution on the whole thing. In fact, I'd rather *not* have read it, as it went a long way towards destroying the strong liking I had for the series up until this point.