No Contest

“What about the consortium angle?” Smith prodded. “My investigation has come up with nothing,” Mark said. “No common theme among the participants. There’s no organized-crime connection that I can find, although they’re starting to get interested. There’s a lot of big wagering happening on the ESN events, but the dollars are going down, not up, because of the suspicious wins. Everybody is getting suspicious.”

“Insurance?” Smith persisted.

“No big policies are getting paid off. The contestants are not insurable.” Mark looked frustrated. “I still think it could be a nationalist thing. Somebody with a political agenda.”

Smith grimaced and tapped his desk screen. “There are too many anomalies for me to buy that as a motive. Whatever the Brazilians and the Europeans will say, the winners are not always from the U.S. The yacht race proved that.” Smith tapped the line item for the Around the World All by Yourself sailboat race.

It was the first time Smith acted upon his suspicions about the events, putting his enforcement arm in the field, or in the sea. Off the coast of the southern tip of South America, in the Drake Passage, the leaders of a solo around-the-world yacht race had met with foul play until Remo put a halt to it. He parachuted onto the boat of the new leader and waited for sabotage to happen. It came in the form of a stealthy, ground-effect craft that skimmed over the waves. The craft raced out of the islands around the southern tip of South America and attempted to sink the winning sailboat. Instead, Remo sank it. The attackers died before they provided any clue as to their origin.

The attackers did succeed in taking Remo’s boat out of the race, however, and that’s where the nationalist agenda pattern was skewed. Remo’s boat was the last American contestant of its class in the race. A Hong Kong businessman crossed the finish line first and took home a huge prize purse.

“The boat race was broadcast on ESN, even if it wasn’t an event they organized,” Mark said. “They got the news coverage, they got the new viewers. They’ve got strong viewership in Hong Kong as a result.”

Smith asked, “Is it your estimation that someone at ESN could be behind this?”

Mack nodded tightly. “I think it could be. They’ve got big resources. It would take big resources to put together the naval attack team Remo met in the Drake Passage.”

The no-expense-spared approach was a hallmark of the saboteurs, as Remo’s second encounter proved. Remo joined in with a group of extreme parachute racers. They jumped from an extremely high altitude and whoever used the least total time to touch the ground was the winner. This was military-style HALO jumping taken to its most dangerous limits—by opening their chutes at ever lower altitudes, the jumpers cut their times considerably. They also hit the ground with considerable force, but the attitude was that a pair of broken legs was a small price to pay for a million-dollar prize purse.

But at the championships that Remo participated in, many of the jumpers paid a larger price—the ultimate price. Their chutes melted before they could be deployed. Remo’s intervention saved a few lives, but not all.

It took weeks to determine that the chutes had been hit with narrow-beam microwaves from the ground, which reacted with a special woven metallic lining of the chute packs. The chute packs were supposed to have been provided by an ESN sponsor, but the ESN packs were stolen at some point and replaced with sabotaged replicas. Nobody noticed until too late. The cost of the woven alloy fabric and the near perfect replication of the sponsor chute packs must have been considerable.

An American did officially win the skydiving race—ESN’s policy was to declare a winner for every network-sponsored event, regardless of “extreme circumstances.” ESN presented the prize purse in a ceremony right there in the burn unit of a Portland hospital, where the winner was undergoing extensive skin-grafting to replace his roasted dermis. The media made light of the fact that the champion’s medical bills would eventually double the one million dollars he won—not that he was ever likely to regain consciousness to appreciate the irony.

The award ceremony was longer than coverage of the HALO jump itself, with viewer share that was just as high. It seemed ESN could do no wrong. ESN ad revenues were exceeding projections.

In a brazen ploy to steal the core audience of traditional professional sports, ESN began staging weekly events on Sunday afternoons against the big, traditional sporting events. Lately they were starting their contests a half-hour after the start of professional football games, and their ad campaign told viewers to switch to ESN when they became bored with whatever else they happened to be watching.

The audience did as it was told. Ad revenues ballooned.

Smith didn’t care about the massive financial losses suffered by some broadcast corporations. In truth, he cared little about the increasing death toll during ESN events.