The Zulu Virus Chronicles Boxset (Books 1-3)

by Steven Konkoly

  The ground-floor lobby was littered with broken glass from Stansfield’s desperate effort to get off the street and out of Larsen’s line of fire. The operative must have crashed through the bullet-peppered door with his body. A trail of glass shards snaked along the slate floor from the entrance to the stairwell door. Larsen approached the front of the lobby cautiously, hugging the left side of the long, narrow space to remain unseen from the third-floor apartment across the street. When he got as close to the front of the lobby as possible without exposing himself to Ochoa’s firing position, he took a deep breath and sprinted through the shattered door.

  Larsen caught movement to his immediate left. A man wearing frayed boxer shorts and a torn, blood-splattered white T-shirt took a few steps back when he burst onto the street. He ignored the man until he reached the other side of Virginia Avenue and ducked under the apartment building’s overhang, safe from Ochoa’s rifle. A second figure appeared in the street across from the parking garage, attracted by his movement. He pulled at the door to the apartment, not surprised when it didn’t budge.

  Shit. He’d been hoping to get off the street without firing his weapon and alerting Ochoa. If Ochoa hadn’t seen him emerge from Chang’s building, Larsen might be able to surprise him upstairs. Now he was faced with the choice of shooting both of the crazies or shooting his way into the building. He’d almost settled on a quick shot to each of their heads, the quieter of the two options, when another idea materialized.

  “This is a stupid idea,” he muttered, unsheathing the serrated combat knife from his vest.

  He did the math, concluding that he should be able to pull it off. Of course, that was without the leg injury. By the time he reworked the equation, it was too late. The first crazy was ten feet away, running full speed at him with a pair of kitchen scissors. Given the man’s single-minded focus and rage, it wasn’t a fair fight on any level. Larsen twisted left at the last moment, deflecting the scissors with his left forearm and jamming the combat knife to the hilt under the guy’s rib cage with his right hand. The knife’s impact was immediate, the man instantly losing all fight. He jabbed the knife into the crazy’s stomach twice in rapid succession before tossing him to the ground to face his second attacker.

  A woman dressed in pristine khaki shorts and a purple drop-neck shirt had closed the distance faster than he’d anticipated. She swung a broken wine bottle, scraping it across the rifle magazine pouches attached to his body armor vest. He quickly stepped inside her swing radius before she could bring the bottle back around, and grabbed the back of her neck, yanking her forward onto his knife. Like the other guy, her body slackened with the first blow and came to a near complete standstill after the next two. He let her fall to the sidewalk and scanned the streets, not seeing any immediate threats.

  “Did you hear any of that?” whispered Larsen.

  “Hear what?” said David.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m almost inside the apartment building. Out,” he said, opening a pouch on his vest that had remained unopened until now.

  Larsen removed a plastic olive drab device the size of a cigarette pack and pulled the cover off the adhesive strip on the back of it before pushing it flush against the edge of the door, directly next to the card reader. He pulled the cotter pin on the device and stepped to the side. The thermite charge ignited, burning in place against the door with an intense light that lasted several seconds. The cloud of smoke produced by the charge drifted mercifully to the right, vanishing around the side of the building. He’d gotten lucky, having forgotten about the large quantity of smoke produced by the burning thermite.

  Larsen tugged on the door, which easily came loose, exposing the red-hot area cut straight through the locking mechanism. Careful not to touch the melted steel, which could easily ignite the material on his vest, he slid into the lobby and started searching for the stairs. Less than a minute later, he was on the third floor, standing several feet away from the door to apartment 302. The mess in the hallway around the door indicated he was in the right place. At least a dozen of the bullets he’d fired from Chang’s apartment had penetrated the back wall of Ochoa’s position, punching jagged holes in the drywall, leaving chunks of the building material strewn across the floor.

  He inched closer, careful not to cross one of the holes and possibly give his position away. A few feet from the door, he lowered to the floor and crawled under one of the openings in the wall, rising on the other side next to the door frame. He now faced a second choice. Loud and fast or quiet and slow.

  He took two explosive breaching charges from the same pouch, not wanting the thick smoke created by the thermite charge to obscure his immediate view into the apartment. The thermite would certainly mask his entry, making it hard for Ochoa to hit him, but in a situation like this, the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against the entry team. If he didn’t neutralize Ochoa within the first few seconds, all bets were off. Within moments, he’d attached the charges to the door, best-guessing the deadbolt’s location.

  “This is going to suck,” he muttered, simultaneously pressing the timer buttons on both devices.

  Larsen had enough time to crouch and open his mouth to avoid an overpressure situation, before the small charges detonated, knocking the door partially inward. He shouldered the door the rest of the way and rapidly moved inside the room, sweeping his rifle across the apartment. A figure sat upright in a dining room chair that had been moved behind the couch, head slumped forward and both arms slack at the sides. The stock of a rifle protruded above the top of the couch.

  “You lose, Larsen. Or Ragan. Or whoever,” croaked Ochoa from the chair, his head rising an inch before falling forward.

  “It’s Larsen,” he said, sidestepping along the edge of the apartment to a point where he could see the side of Ochoa’s face.

  “I was really hoping it wasn’t you,” said Ochoa. “I can’t stand you.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” said Larsen.

  “Just get it over with,” said Ochoa, trying to lift his head again.

  “I think I’ll take a look at your CTAB first.”

  “Finish it. You fuck!” he hissed, his head coming up a little farther than before.

  “Not until I see what you’ve been up to,” said Larsen, moving closer.

  “You don’t have the guts to kill me, do you?” said Ochoa. “Ha! You’re pathetic. Everything you do is pathetic.”

  Larsen fired a single bullet through the top of Ochoa’s right thigh, yielding no response beyond a slightly turned head. A second bullet passed through his right hand, with the same result. He was paralyzed from the neck down—posing no threat.

  “Damn, Ochoa,” said Larsen.

  “What? Feeling bad about this?” said Ochoa.

  “Not really,” said Larsen, walking past him to recover the CTAB, which lay next to Ripley’s dead body. “But I’ll do the right thing before I leave.”

  “What a consolation.”

  Larsen picked up the CTAB, seeing that the screen was locked. Not a problem. He took the device over to Ochoa and lifted his hand onto the screen, pressing his blood-smeared thumb against the biometric reader. The CTAB activated, the sophisticated software installed into the reader capable of rendering a decision despite the bloody mess on the screen. He scrolled through the message history, selecting the last message received.

  “You son of a bitch,” he mumbled, looking at Ochoa.

  The man grinned, his scarred face twisted in delight.

  “You lose.”

  Without giving the decision any thought, he raised the barrel of his rifle even with Ochoa’s head and pulled the trigger, putting the man out of his misery.

  “David, David, it’s Larsen,” he said.

  “Yeah. We’re here,” said the police officer. “Is that Ochoa guy done?”

  “He’s done,” said Larsen. “But he left us with a serious problem.”

  “Yeah. You guys have attracted some attention from the local crazy po
pulation.”

  “It’s a far bigger problem,” said Larsen, tossing the CTAB on the table next to Ochoa’s corpse. “Ochoa reported that he had Chang in custody.”

  “Jesus,” said David. “How long do we have?”

  “ETA twenty minutes,” said Larsen. “And that was four minutes ago.”

  Chapter 19

  David peered over the top of the concrete wall, careful not to expose too much of his head. He spotted at least six people slowly converging on the stretch of Virginia Avenue between the two apartment buildings. He wasn’t sure if their infected and damaged brains could piece together enough of the scene to determine that someone had just killed two of their own a few feet from the entrance to the building across the street. If they could, and they got curious, Larsen would have to deal with them inside the lobby, wasting precious time.

  They no longer had the option of waiting around for Howard’s security crew to patch up the SUV for a second diversion. The people behind Larsen’s mysterious agency would descend on them within fifteen minutes, and he couldn’t imagine they’d be happy to discover Ochoa’s team slaughtered—and Chang missing. They needed to be as far away from here as possible when the pickup team arrived.

  He scanned the street again, not liking what he saw.

  “Larsen, I have six—make that eight—crazies converging on the front door to your building,” said David. “One of them is very interested in the bodies.”

  “I’m on my way down,” said Larsen. “Will look for a rear exit.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a great idea,” said David. “At least out here I can lend you a hand if things get out of control.”

  “Agreed,” said Larsen. “Did you send Howard over to the other building?”

  Howard answered, “I’m holding the door for you.”

  “Head on down to the lobby and prep Jeremy for an immediate departure,” said Larsen. “We can’t leave him behind at this point. They’ll see the sheets hanging out of the building and put two and two together. Jeremy won’t last two seconds under the kind of pressure they’re sure to apply, and he knows you’re the head of the tactical team at NevoTech.”

  “Shit. There’s no way we’re getting him out of this building,” said Howard.

  “Tell him he leaves with us or I’ll shoot him.”

  “He won’t believe that. You wouldn’t shoot him,” said Howard.

  “Dan, if he doesn’t come along, I’ll shoot him,” said David. “My son is back at NevoTech. We can’t have any concrete links back to the campus. These people will turn the place inside out looking for Chang. Everyone back there will be in danger if they suspect he’s there.”

  “What if they head there anyway?” said Howard.

  “It’s a big campus,” said Larsen. “Which you know inside and out. We’re better off dealing with this on familiar territory.”

  “I’m headed down with Dr. Hale,” said Howard. “I’ll leave the door propped open.”

  “We’ll meet you in the lobby,” said Larsen. “David?”

  “Still here. I count ten close enough to give you trouble,” said David. “Two look like they’re about to check out the door.”

  “I’m in the stairwell on the lobby level. Start thinning the herd closest to the door.”

  Thin the herd? They were still human beings. People you might have held the door open for at a coffee shop or said good morning to on the street less than twenty-four hours ago. David still thought of them as people, even though he knew they’d try to kill him on sight. He still hesitated—a problem that didn’t appear to plague Larsen. The former SEAL had been trained from day one to eliminate targets with extreme prejudice. It was a black-and-white world with good guys, bad guys and defined rules of engagement. David’s job as a police officer couldn’t be more different. He drove his police cruiser out of the department lot with the assumption that everyone out there was a good guy until they proved otherwise. He had been conditioned to treat everyone he came across on patrol that way, with few exceptions. It was the cornerstone of the job, and it would be a hard habit to break. He wished he didn’t have to, but things were different now. He needed to be more like Larsen to stay alive and keep his son safe. More like David Olson, the infantry Marine. With that thought in mind, he lifted his rifle above the top of the concrete barrier and started thinning the herd.

  Chapter 20

  Gary Hoenig leaned forward in his seat, squinting at the curved, panoramic command and control screen mounted to the desk in front of him. One of the cameras with a view of the secure research facility (SRF) had detected movement. He swiped the track pad and sent the video feed to the wall of integrated screens on the front wall of the sunken auditorium-style room.

  Four heavily armed figures, wearing streamlined tactical gear and night-vision-equipped helmets, ran across the grassy area between the SRF and one of the lower security research buildings, heading north. He “hooked” one of the figures and activated the “track object” feature. Now all of the security cameras would work together to follow the figure, automatically triangulating its location based on motion-sensor input and choosing the clearest camera feed.

  The SRF maintained a separate internal security force hired by the facility director from one of the nation’s top security contracting companies. All former FBI, SWAT or Tier One Special Forces types. At first glance, the team on the main screen fit that bill, though he found it odd that they had left the SRF in such a large group. Even if the SRF security team was staffed with far higher numbers than he had previously guessed, sending four out at once had to be an anomaly. Maybe the facility director was headed to the campus?

  He shook his head. That would be a disastrous idea. The odds of something going wrong on the way in, even with four seasoned operators covering the approach and the gate transfer. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Why wouldn’t they use the VIP parking garage access on the west side of the campus? It was perfectly secure. Maybe he should reach out to the SRF and suggest an alternate approach, or offer assistance. Roscoe still had a nice supply of smoke grenades, which could come in handy.

  Hoenig dialed the SRF security number, which would put him directly in touch with the on-duty team leader. The screen changed to a front-facing view as he waited for the team leader to answer. Several seconds later, with the call still unanswered, he noticed something unusual. He zoomed in for a closer look. Interesting. All of their rifles were equipped with suppressors, just like the rifle the Homeland Security agent carried. He zoomed in a little further.

  “Couldn’t be,” he mumbled before accessing the feed archive on one of his desktop screens and calling up a video of Larsen’s group.

  He found a clear shot of Larsen in one of the hallways and zoomed in on the image, comparing it to a still shot taken of the SRF team. Their gear was identical. One of the other teams Larsen mentioned had been on the NevoTech campus all along.

  “Dan, this is Gary. I have a heavily armed team of four between buildings five and seven. Headed north in a hurry. They originated from the SRF.”

  “SRF security?” said Howard.

  “I called, and nobody responded,” said Hoenig. “Their gear is identical to Larsen’s.”

  “This is Larsen. How identical?”

  “Down to the suppressors on your HK416 rifles,” said Hoenig.

  “They came from the SRF?” said Howard.

  “I’m looking at the historical data feed right now,” said Hoenig. “They emerged about a minute ago.”

  “This is related to Ochoa’s little stunt,” said Larsen. “They’re all converging for a pickup.”

  “Right on top of us. Son of a bitch,” said Howard. “Gary, I don’t have time to explain, but we need to get back onto campus immediately.”

  “I can’t send Mitch out to recover you right now. The SUV isn’t ready,” said Hoenig.

  “How long?” said Howard.

  “Ten to fifteen minutes?”

  “We can’
t wait that long,” said Larsen. “Plus it’s too risky with that team in the immediate vicinity—and possibly another inbound.”

  “How many teams are still out there?” said Hoenig.

  “Two. Including the one you’re watching,” said Larsen. “Is there any way you can keep them on campus? Maybe override their keycards?”

  “Frankly. I’d rather get them off campus and lock them out,” said Hoenig. “Locking them inside might create more problems than we can solve. They’ll know we’re onto them.”

  “I agree,” said Howard. “We have a responsibility to keep the people who sought refuge there safe. Causing trouble for Homeland might jeopardize that.”

  “Well, we need to get away from here,” said Larsen. “They’ll turn this area inside out when they discover Ochoa’s team dead—and Chang missing.”

  “Without a solid diversion, we won’t last very long out there. The streets are too hot,” said David.

  Hoenig stared at the main screen for a moment. The team of operatives had just cleared the northernmost building and turned east, apparently headed toward the same gate Howard had used to sneak over to Chang’s apartment. That put the team directly in the path of their return. Even if the SUV were ready for the trip, it probably wouldn’t reach the apartment before the team, and if it managed to get there ahead of them, there was no telling what might transpire. The vehicle was bullet resistant, but not bulletproof. Four skilled shooters could easily knock it out of commission if they managed to concentrate their gunfire. Not a hard task to accomplish on empty streets.

  “Any ideas?” said Larsen. “We need to get moving.”

  “I only have Roscoe up high right now,” said Hoenig. “And a few security officers on foot patrol. They wouldn’t stand a chance against trained operators, even with Roscoe—”