The first perimeter guard was standing in the shadow of two low trees. That alone indicated that the security detail was on higher alert, possibly expecting trouble. The guard was also equipped with night vision equipment and Kevlar protection, but that had been anticipated. The mercenary squad’s own dynamic armor would pass for Kevlar at a glance.
It took long seconds for Evers to get into position. He needed a clear shot with his suppressed Heckler and Koch, but he wanted to make sure there was no chance of another guard position spotting any trace of muzzle flash. Once he had the shot, he took it. The sound of the guard’s outstretched body hitting the ground made more noise than the gun. Branson ran to the spot and pulled the corpse back in under the shrubbery, then quickly stood up in the guard's place. Anyone who looked would think they saw the usual guard doing his job. Branson would stay there throughout the mission, ready to give covering fire or create a distraction if either was needed during egress.
Other guards were positioned like spokes in a wheel and could not be taken out the same way. Each was too visible to others; the chance was too great that one of them would see his comrade fall and raise an alarm.
After another few moments of observation, Kellogg and Chavez moved toward the distant building and into the blind zone. Chavez stopped within a shadow and huddled low, while Kellogg stepped out into an area of brighter light and approached a guard. To the soldier, it would appear that his nearest compatriot was coming to talk to him. Unorthodox, but not immediately threatening. Especially once Kellogg used a tiny penlight to send two quick flashes, then a longer one, and another short flash—Morse code for the letter ‘F’, meaning friendly. Unexpectedly, the other flashed back a ‘query’. Was there more to the protocol? That would pose a problem.
Kellogg stuck to the information he’d been given. He continued his approach and repeated his letter ‘F’, then added the code ‘XP’. For that day, it should indicate someone of command rank. The soldier would be wondering why a superior would be approaching from the outer guard position, but he would not fire right away.
So Kellogg did.
His silenced .45 caliber Mark 23 was loaded with armor-piercing bullets. They penetrated the Kevlar easily from the twenty-foot distance, and the man was likely dead as he hit the ground, but the mercenary leader took no chances and swiftly drew his knife across the soldier’s neck.
He looked toward the building—there was no reaction from the guard nearest the wall. The man could barely be seen past a chest-high bush, and the view from that direction would be just as bad.
Kellogg waited for Chavez to reach him, then stepped forward again to repeat his performance with another unsuspecting victim. According to plan, Kowalski and Jackson would soon meet up with Chavez, then go left and right, circling to approach the next mid-field guards using the same ruse as their leader. By the time those two did their killing, Kellogg and Chavez would be placed to eliminate the next two inner guards before they could act. The rest of the team would move up quickly after that.
They needed to. A well-lit entranceway remained their biggest obstacle. The staggered shift changes of the guards would not include those already eliminated—they weren’t due to be relieved for another two hours at the earliest. But the replacements for the door guards would be on their way within moments. Wahlberg and Romero had to be in place to make sure that those soldiers never reached their assigned post.
So far no routine checkup calls had come for any of the guards. That was good. The team had been issued the radio codes for the day, but it was better not to have to use them. The voice of a stranger, instead of the expected barracks-mate could raise the alarm even more quickly than a botched code.
Kellogg permitted himself a slight smile. Adrenaline always made him feel good, and he couldn’t help but anticipate the moment that he would come face to face with his prey.
65
The bomb floated in front of him. Menacingly silent.
Hunter pushed the throttle forward and brought the ship to ramming speed. This one was far bigger, so its casing could be much stronger. No matter—he knew Primus would be up to the challenge. She felt indestructible to him now, even as he sensed the last remnants of her shredded lipid shield being torn away by her passage through the fluid. There was no point worrying about running afoul of the body’s defenses. The heart was stopped, the great current of life stilled. Primus charged forward.
Then, at the last moment, he veered off. Something was wrong. This bomb didn’t look like the others—its shell seemed strange. Both color and reflectivity were off. Could its casing be a different material? Why?
All too conscious of the ticking clock, he backed off far enough to send a radar pulse. He was right. The returning signature was not the same as that of other bombs.
His mind raced. What could it mean? Why would there be one bomb made of different stuff? The mysterious HIV bomb they’d assumed was a ruse? He looked back at it, straining to spot any possible clue to its purpose. Was there a significance to the fact that he’d found it within the heart itself, placed very close to the pulmonic valve?
There was no time left. He should ram it and get the job done, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Something was not right. He had to get help.
Wrenching his mind away from the inner world brought a brutal flood of nausea as he tore the helmet from his head a second time.
“There’s a bomb in the heart!” he gasped. “A different kind. If you were intending to do direct damage to the heart in a big hurry, what would you use?”
Tamiko and Gage were startled, but quickly grasped his need.
“I… I can’t think of anything,” the circulatory specialist spoke frantically. “But you’ve only got thirty seconds left!”
Gage’s forehead furrowed in concentration. Then his head snapped up. “A highly reactive metal—pure potassium or sodium. Burns instantly on contact with water. Very hot.”
“So if I’d cracked open the casing ….” Hunter’s legs felt suddenly weak.
“Twenty-five seconds!”
The pilot raised the headgear and shouted, “Tell Bridges… use the HPIS—plunge a hypodermic into the heart as close as he can get to the top of the right ventricle, and suck out as much fluid as he can. I’ll try to get the bomb to it. Hurry!”
As the helmet slipped over his head he caught faint traces of Kierkegaard’s voice speaking to the clinic, and Tamiko saying, “Twenty seconds….”
He was sure Gage was right. The sodium bomb hung there, mocking him with his nearly disastrous mistake. How could he possibly move such a thing? Primus’ engines, for all their power, would be too slow, the fan blades too small.
Sodium was a metal? Could he pull it with an electric field? But what if the casing was non-conductive? He had no time to experiment.
It was taking forever for Bridges to insert the needle. Hunter had to wait for the intake of fluid to begin, before he could know which way to move the bomb. Wait for the whirlpool….
An image leapt into his mind. Could he create a whirlpool himself?
As if on cue, he felt the jolt of a mammoth shock wave. He scanned the gloom desperately for the needle tip. It would have taken Bridges at least the remaining twenty seconds to get the thing into place. They were on borrowed time now. Brain cells would soon begin to die.
There it was—enormous, but heartbreakingly far away. So much for his slim hope that the suction would reach them on its own.
Frantically he moved the ship in front of the bomb and pivoted the drive fans. Giving them full thrust, the sub began to spin, faster and faster. He adjusted their angle of attack, and could feel cavitation begin to build. A whirlpool was what he needed. A maelstrom to draw the deadly device to its doom. He swiveled the fans a fraction more, and as the funnel deepened, the ship began to move.
With fierce concentration, he split his mind into two—one part needed to control Primus; the other needed to be able to see wi
thout being at the mercy of its violent spin. He stared at the bomb, desperately willing it to move. He looked the other way. The titanic needle had begun to draw. How long would it take to fill? He had to reach it before then.
Was the bomb following? Yes! He could see details of the heart valve beyond, disappearing slowly behind the edges of the grey globe. He poured the force of his mind into the straining nano engines, goading them to produce extra thrust…110%… 115%…. How far could he push them? The engines themselves might be nearly indestructible, but if the damaged power cell gave out….
Suddenly he felt the change—the engines began to race, their load lightened, captured by the pull of the needle! He backed off the thrust just enough to stop the overload and hung on for the ride.
The ship jolted, as if reluctant. Another sudden lurch… and then a powerful surge as the submersible was yanked sideways and catapulted to incredible speed within fractions of a second, faster than the mighty bloodstream itself.
Somehow, Hunter knew when they passed out of the body.
They had won! Bridges and Vitale would restart her heart. Emma was young and strong; she would recover. He was sure of it.
Shaking with relief, he killed the thrusters and leaned back into the couch.
He had come so close to losing her, had nearly killed her himself by unwittingly triggering the fearsome new weapon. Had that been part of the design? Had the enemy known that their bombs were being destroyed and planted an even deadlier one designed to be set off by Hunter’s own actions? Or was it equipped with a remote detonator, to be activated by someone nearby, as a cruel final blow in the event of impending defeat?
Through a fog of fatigue he heard a ripping chord of thunder, rumbling metallically for long seconds. It was followed by another, just as long and frightening. Like distant cannon fire, but stretched and distorted. What could it be? Was he hearing it through Primus? Or with his own ears in the lab? Could it be the bomb?
He looked at the monstrous orb, startlingly close in the murky liquid, just in time to watch a mammoth crack open in its side.
There was a blinding flash that consumed the world.
66
The Pave Hawk helicopter dipped low over the subdivision. Mannis trusted its pilot to stay well clear of the taller structures, especially a nearby cell tower with its winking red beacons. The pattern of streetlamps below reminded him of a crossword puzzle.
“We’re coming up on the target now, sir,” the flight engineer said. They would make a slow pass, aiming the nose camera at the suspect house. He was willing to risk the noise this time—residents of a neighborhood so close to Langley base had to be used to the sound of aircraft coming and going, even in the middle of the night. He shifted forward to get a better view of the pilots’ displays.
The co-pilot was adjusting the intensity controls. “We’ve got decent thermal imaging, sir,” he reported. “It’s a good night for it. Heat sources will show red and yellow. That’s the house at the top of the screen right now, sir.”
Only a trained eye would have been able to extrapolate the shape and design of the house from what they were seeing, but he knew it to be an average-looking two-story home with a small yard and a single garage. They had the layout on file, in case the nine troops with him needed to go in. There was a better-than-average chance that this was a safe house used by right-wing militia groups, and possibly others, but there was no guarantee that it included the people he was looking for. The latest reports from the North Carolina farm made him certain he’d been close, yet it was possible his quarry had caught wind of his pursuit, and gone to ground somewhere else.
“No human presence there, sir,” the co-pilot said referring to the heat-imaging sensor. “It’s been long enough since sundown—people would stand out.”
“Is there any way they could be concealed in a better-shielded part of the house? The basement, maybe?”
“Negative, sir. This here….” He pointed at a small red-orange ball. “That would be the water heater in the basement. There are some high-tech materials that might be able to hide them, but they’d have to know we were coming, and what we’re using.”
They were past the house now. The pilot began to circle around to line up for another pass, per previous orders.
“What was that other heat source we saw?”
The co-pilot brought a still picture of the structure up on the screen. There was a small yellow smudge near an outside wall.
“Based on experience,” the soldier replied, “That would be the oven. It’s in about the right place for a kitchen. It could easily be putting out that much heat if someone cooked a meal in it a few hours ago.”
Cooked a meal…. Well, if you didn’t want anyone to see what you looked like, you wouldn’t be ordering in pizza. Had they left the place according to a schedule? Or had they been tipped off that the Pave Hawk was on its way?
And where were they now?
“We’re lined up for another pass, sir,” the pilot told him. “You want it at the same speed?”
“Thank you Lieutenant. No. How about giving me a pass over the whole row of houses instead? The same side of the street.”
“Yes, sir.” The rotorcraft swung well over for a few moments, straightened, then heeled over again. “Coming up, sir. We’re about five houses away right now.”
If the squad he was looking for had been alerted, there was just a chance they might choose to hide by breaking into one of the neighboring houses, occupied or not. So if there was a grouping of more than a dozen people, especially if most of them were clustered in one room….
He hoped that nobody on the street had picked this night for a party.
They passed over the suspected safe house and a further six houses, then he called off the run. He’d also been watching a monitor view of the street below, but there were no suspicious utility vehicles or unmarked vans. There was a pattern of two cars per driveway. There were none at the safe house.
If his targets had been there at all, he had no way to know where they’d gone. The base was nearby—the house could have been a staging area—but for what kind of operation? There was no way to tell unless they landed and conducted a thorough search, hoping to turn up some kind of clue.
As if reading his mind, the pilot asked, “Do you want to land, sir?”
“No, Lieutenant. For now, maybe you should just make arrangements to refuel. I’ll let you know if my plans change.” He felt like slamming a fist into the seat frame, but he didn’t want to show his frustration to the commandos watching. Was he on the right track at all? Even in the right ballpark? He’d rarely felt his confidence so low.
If an op was underway, there was no time to lose. But if he raised the alarm at the base… at the least he would blow the project’s cover. It might even bring about the very thing he was trying to prevent: pre-emptive action by the terrorists. He could end up causing Emma’s death.
Or maybe there was a compromise that would work.
“Lieutenant,” he ordered. “Get the clearance you need and swing over the northeast end of Langley Air Force Base. Then pass me a radio mic, please. I need to make a call.”
# # #
The blackness was puzzling. Was it night? Had he somehow gone blind? Hunter could feel the wetness of tears in his eyes, but he could see nothing from them. Yet he could hear a sound like radio static.
The headgear. He still had the helmet on.
As he yanked the equipment off, the bright overhead lights stabbed his eyes and made them tear up again. That had never happened before. There’d always been light in the visor—now it had gone dark. What was wrong? His head felt strange, too—numbed, boxed in.
The room was empty, but lights still flashed on control panels. Computer screens still showed their displays. Where had everyone gone? Why would they leave him alone?
Suddenly he knew what else was missing:
He couldn’t feel Primus.
For the first time in days there was no sensation of it in his mind. It had become part of his mental landscape. Now it was gone. Did that mean the ship itself was gone? Destroyed? He couldn’t believe it.
Then he remembered the blinding flash. The sodium bomb. It must have detonated in the hypodermic, with the submersible right next to it. Much too close. A searing fireball of white heat—a cataclysmic blast on that scale.
So that was it then.
Primus was gone. Inconceivably small, yet to him she had become a mighty weapon. And companion. But there had been a means to destroy her after all.
Worse, she had also been his link to someone else….
Emma.
The warm, sweet radiance that had been her presence within his mind was gone now, too. There was only cold emptiness when he reached for her.
Emma, no… she couldn’t be dead. He had saved her! He had ripped the deadly bomb from her body in time. The link had been lost, that’s all. The connection had been broken, but she would still be there, waiting for him. In the clinic.
He wasted no more time. A desperate need propelled him through the doorway and down the hall at a dead run.
67
Chavez smiled. He liked the look of this Asian woman. It had been a long time since he’d had a woman like her. Too bad there would be no time for that. Maybe another day. Instead he enjoyed prodding her hard in the solar plexus with the muzzle of his gun.
“Get back,” he barked. “Down that way. The way you came. I have a feeling you were all busy at something. I wonder what that was?”
The Primus Labyrinth Page 34
