The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  I will get out here, where I don’t have to take the stairs up to the street.

  The tunnel came out close to the Essex Street platform. A couple of hundred yards past the platform, the tracks headed up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The platform was deserted. In the distance Cope could see lights. That was his way out. They wouldn’t think to block this way.

  Meanwhile, a group of New York City police officers were sweeping a set of stairs to the Essex Street platform.

  Cope was hurrying along the tracks by the platform. He heard a sound of running footsteps, voices shouting; he saw movement on the stairs, and he turned around and retreated the way he had come. He faded into a niche in the wall back in the BJ 1 tunnel, listening to their radios crackling. They were searching the platform. It was certain that any moment they would come into the tunnel looking for him. What to do?

  He knew that an F.B.I. team was coming down the BJ 1 tunnel behind him. He was trapped between the F.B.I. and the New York City Police Department.

  I should do it here. Set it off. He hesitated. But the issue wasn’t so simple. He wasn’t absolutely certain he was infected with the virus. Maybe he wasn’t infected. It is hard to choose to die. It is easier to choose to be alive, as long as you have life left in you. There might be a way out.

  He heard the rustling sound of the space suits, the pounding of their light rubber boots. They were coming fast.

  He moved out of the niche and crept along the wall, and entered a dark area, some abandoned rooms. Ducking, moving fast, he hurried through the rooms. He was not more than forty feet from the police officers on the platform. He found some old air-blowing equipment, broken and unused machinery. A refrigerator. Where to go? For a moment he thought that he could climb inside the refrigerator. It had been painted black—weird. But it was too small; he couldn’t fit in there. He got down on his knees and curled up against the wall, beside the black refrigerator.

  He opened his bag and pulled out a bomb full of viral glass. He opened one end of the tube, and tugged out the detonator wires. If he crossed the wires, shorted them out, the bio-det would explode. He would die, but his life-form would live and go into the world.

  THE ESSEX STREET STATION contains a large abandoned area that was at one time a trolley-car station. The police officers, having swept the platforms, prepared to move out into the trolley area. At that moment, the Reachdeep team arrived at the Essex Street platform. The ninjas had a conference with some of the police officers. Cope seemed to have vanished.

  “He could have gone onto the bridge, there,” a policeman said. “Either that, or he’s in that trolley area.” Meanwhile, he was wondering: If these agents are wearing space suits, what am I getting exposed to down here?

  “You guys stay back. You don’t have protective gear,” Wirtz said to the police officers. The F.B.I. people did not have flashlights, while the police officers did. They borrowed the officers’ flashlights, and began to sweep through the trolley area, shining the lights left and right, moving among columns. Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry remained where they were, standing on the subway tracks near the BJ 1 tunnel with no flashlights. In their suits, with the soft, clear helmets around their heads, it was difficult to pick up sounds, but Hopkins thought he heard something at his back. He spun around and found himself facing a group of abandoned rooms heaped with trash. He saw some air blowers and what looked like a black refrigerator. The sound seemed to have come from behind the refrigerator.

  Hopkins drew his gun. He circled around the refrigerator. Nothing there. He looked around, and he looked down at the dust. The black subway dust. On the far side of the refrigerator, he found what appeared to be recent scuffmarks. Then he noticed blood. Several fresh drops of blood.

  He opened his pouch and pulled out his Boink and a swab. He swabbed the blood and stuck it straight into the sampling port of the Boink. The device gave off its peculiar chime. On the screen it said “COBRA.”

  Hopkins spoke quietly into his headset. “Breaker. Emergency. It’s Hopkins. We’re on him. He’s near us! Hey!” A veil of silence seemed to have fallen over his radio headset. This was a dead zone. “Frank! Frank, come in!” he hissed. “Anybody hear me? We’re tracking on Cope!”

  Hopkins heard fragments of Masaccio’s voice. He couldn’t understand what Masaccio was saying.

  “Frank! Come in!”

  While he was talking, Hopkins was turning around slowly, trying to see into the darkness. He turned to Austen and Littleberry. “Lie down on the floor, please.” He moved forward, inching around some machines. “Dr. Cope! Dr. Cope! Please surrender yourself. You will not be harmed. Please, sir.”

  There was nobody there.

  But on the far side of the machines he found an open doorway leading to an unlit area heaped with trash. Homeless people had been living there. Hopkins moved forward, creeping along the wall in semidarkness, wading through trash, ready to dive for cover. He came to an opening in the wall. It was a low tunnel, about three feet high, full of electrical cables.

  Hopkins debated what to do. He could hear snatches of talk on his headset. “Frank! Masaccio! Wirtzy!” he called. No dice. Should he go into the tunnel? He had his Mini Maglite flashlight, but it wasn’t exactly useful for night operations. Nevertheless, he switched it on, getting ready to dive if the light drew gunfire.

  Nothing happened. He shone the light down the tunnel.

  He yelled over his shoulder: “Mark! Alice! Go back and find Wirtz! There’s a tunnel.”

  He bent over and entered the tunnel, shining his minilight along the electrical cables. The tunnel went straight ahead. He moved quickly now, hunched over, concentrating on the problem at hand. Was Cope himself lost, or did he know a way out? He wondered if at any moment a shock wave would ram down the tunnel, from the bomb going off. It seemed pretty clear that Cope had been heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, but that his escape route had been cut off by the police. He had been heading for the open air. He wanted to blow his bomb outdoors at night.

  Hopkins had gone an unknown distance down the tunnel when he realized that he was being followed. He stopped. It was Austen, directly behind him. He turned to face her. “You don’t have a gun! You don’t have a light!”

  “Get going,” she answered.

  “You are a pain in the ass.”

  “Get going, or give me your light.”

  “Where’s Mark?”

  “He went back to find Oscar.”

  Without another word, Hopkins surged forward, annoyed with Austen, but most of all angry with himself. He felt responsible for having let Cope get away. If a lot of people die…don’t think about that. Keep on Cope. Find him.

  Hopkins and Austen moved along through the tunnel. Sometimes they had to crawl on their hands and knees. The electrical cables were alive, no doubt, and Hopkins wondered if he or Austen would wind up being electrocuted if they touched a broken insulator. The only good thing about these power cables was that perhaps Cope would fry first.

  Then Hopkins noticed something troubling. His flashlight was becoming fainter. The beam turned a distinct yellow.

  The electrical tunnel led southwest from the Essex-Delancey Street subway station under the Lower East Side, heading downtown. Hopkins and Austen came to a right-angle bend, and then another. The tunnel continued for several blocks, passing under Broome Street, under Ludlow Street, under Grand Street. Hopkins and Austen came to a crossing point in the tunnels—a choice of three routes to take, three tunnels.

  They stopped. Which way to go? Hopkins got down on his knees and started searching for blood on the floor with his minilight. There was no blood. He noticed a puddle of water lying on the floor of the right-hand fork. The puddle had been recently splashed. Cope had gone this way. Hopkins was disoriented. He had lost his sense of direction, and he wasn’t quite sure where he and Austen were headed. In fact, they were entering Chinatown.

  Now the tunnel narrowed into a crawl space. The going became very difficult. Hopkins got
down on his hands and knees and began to crawl forward on his belly, sliding over electrical cables. The cables felt slightly warm, and he could feel them vibrating. As he crawled, he talked with Austen on his radio headset.

  “Dr. Austen. Will you stop now, please? Just stop. You’re going to get yourself hurt.”

  She did not reply.

  They had gone an unknown distance when they came to a steel plate blocking the way. It was a small access hatch. He tapped the hatch lightly with his gloved fingertips. It creaked and began to move.

  “What is it?” Austen said behind him. “Move your feet.”

  “I can’t move my feet. Lie down, please, there could be gunfire.” He pushed gently on the hatch, his gun ready, and the hatch opened with a drawn-out creak. The sound bounced away into deep echoes and then silence. A vast black space loomed beyond the hatch. Hopkins shone his minilight around the space.

  It was an enormous underground tunnel. Where the hell are we? Hopkins thought. What part of the city is this? His flashlight beam did not penetrate far into the tunnel, which seemed to extend a great distance, lost in blackness. It was a double tunnel, with a line of concrete columns marching down the middle of it. Twisted and bent pieces of steel reinforcement bar stuck out of the walls like black thorns. The hatch opened out of a wall about ten feet above the floor of the tunnel.

  COPE HAD a flashlight, but he didn’t want to use it, because he thought it might give him away. At intervals he flicked it on and off, but mostly he moved through the tunnel with his hand on the wall, going by sense of touch. He had no idea where he was.

  When he had arrived at the hatch he had turned on his light and looked around. He lowered himself into the big tunnel, holding the bag in his hand, trying to protect it. He landed hard on the concrete floor, and an ominous cracking sound came from inside his bag. One of the large glass tubes had cracked. That was too bad. Best to leave it here.

  He checked to make sure the chip timer was running, and then he placed the glass cylinder in a shadowy corner by a column. It contained some 435 hexagons of viral glass along with bio-det explosive. Then, flicking his light on and off, he moved along up the tunnel, his bag lighter now, but still containing one large bomb, the grenades, and the gun. The tunnel sloped upward, curving gently to the right. He knew where he wanted to be. He wanted to be outdoors. It was a soft gentle night out there, almost windless, a perfect night.

  The tunnel was a stretch of unfinished subway running under Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It was one of a number of planned subway routes in New York City that had been partly built but never finished. This was a length of tunnel intended for the never-completed Second Avenue subway line.

  HOPKINS LEANED OUT of the hatch door. What he saw looked like a subway tunnel, but there were no train tracks; the floor was smooth concrete. Hopkins swung himself out of the hatch, hung on the lip, and let go. He landed on his feet. Austen dropped down next to him.

  He said: “I’m giving you a direct order to freeze. I am the chief executive—”

  She brushed past him.

  The unfinished subway tunnel ran from north to south under Chinatown. It headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River. As they proceeded along the tunnel, Hopkins played his light around, holding his gun at the ready. There seemed to be no exits from this tunnel.

  Hopkins tried his radio again. “Frank? Wirtzy? Are you there?”

  There was no radio service in the tunnel. They kept walking, Hopkins shining his minilight around the columns, until they came to a set of metal stairs leading up to an open doorway. The question was whether Cope had gone up the stairs or had continued to follow the tunnel.

  They continued along the tunnel until it ended at a blank concrete wall. Construction of the Second Avenue subway had ended here years earlier. There was no way out from here; it was a dead end. Cope must have gone up the stairs. They hurried back, having lost valuable time, but when they arrived at the stairs, Hopkins hesitated.

  “Pull yourself together or give me your gun,” Austen said to him quietly.

  “That’s a bullshit statement! I’m terrified, Alice. You should be, too. He has a bomb and he’s armed.”

  He climbed the stairs, though, and found himself in an empty room. It led to a number of dark, open doorways.

  IN THE COMMAND CENTER, Frank Masaccio was beginning to understand the situation. He had been having great difficulty maintaining contact with Reachdeep on the radio. Wirtz and Littleberry had reported that the team had become separated. Cope had disappeared in the Essex Street subway station. There had been much confusion and delay, with police officers running out onto the Williamsburg Bridge, stopping traffic, and sweeping the bridge. Now it appeared that Cope was still in the subway, still underground. He had apparently disappeared into an electrical service tunnel. Hopkins and Austen had followed him. After a delay, Wirtz and the ninjas had now also entered the service tunnel. As soon as they went in they dropped out of radio contact. Masaccio had lost contact with all elements of Reachdeep.

  “Where’s Littleberry?” he said to an agent on the radio.

  “Dr. Littleberry has gone into the tunnel with Wirtz.”

  “What? My whole goddamned Reachdeep team has gone down a rat hole!” Masaccio shouted. “Go in there and find them!”

  Masaccio got on the telephone with engineers from Con Edison and with the subway system operators, demanding information. Where does that tunnel lead? People were telling him that it ended up in the Second Avenue subway line.

  “What Second Avenue subway?” Masaccio yelled. “Do you take me for a fucking idiot? I’ve lived in New York all my life and you can’t tell me there’s a Second Avenue subway. There isn’t!”

  But there is, the subway operators insisted. It’s an empty tunnel.

  “Aw, shit, an empty tunnel!” He turned to his managers. “Send in our Hostage Rescue people. Jesus! How did this happen?”

  The subway operators told Masaccio that the best access to the Second Avenue tunnel was a hatchway at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, in Chinatown.

  HOPKINS HAD TO DECIDE which of the empty doorways to choose. He tried to think the way Cope would think. Cope would be heading up for the street. He would want to get into the open air. Hopkins tried all the doors, and behind one he found a steel ladder leading upward. Hopkins climbed the ladder, with Austen following him. They reached another room. There was a dark open doorway on the far side. Then he heard a sound coming through the doorway—a metallic clink. A light blinked on and off.

  He dove for the ground, dragging Austen down with him, and turned off his flashlight. He squirmed forward in the darkness, on his belly. He heard a sharp clattering and a muttered curse. He moved across the floor, gun ready, light off, afraid of dying, if the truth be told, and afraid that Austen might die. He thought to himself: I will never, ever join a Hostage Rescue Team. I don’t know how those people do this kind of thing.

  He had now arrived at the open, black doorway. He could hear and feel Austen moving behind him. He was so angry at her that he wanted to scream. It would serve her right if she took a gunshot, but he couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to her.

  He lay behind the edge of the door, for cover, and briefly flicked on his light into the space where the sound had come from.

  The light revealed a deep chamber. The floor was twenty feet below the level of the doorway. It seemed to be some sort of air-circulation chamber. There was nobody in it. But on the floor of the chamber lay a flashlight. It was off.

  Cope had dropped his flashlight! That was the source of the clattering sound and the reason for the curse.

  On the inner faces of the chamber there were small openings, vent tunnels, reachable by ladders that ran vertically up the walls of the chamber. Cope had obviously been climbing on one of the ladders moments before—that was the metallic sound they’d heard, and then he’d dropped his flashlight. He must have gone into one of the vent holes. Which one? There were six
holes.

  “Dr. Cope! Dr. Cope! Give yourself up!” he shouted.

  I have to go down in there, I guess.

  He swung out into space and started climbing down a ladder into the chamber, holding his gun. He was going to try climbing up each of the ladders, looking into all the vent tunnels, one by one. What else could he do, except give up? But if Cope got away—. He reached the bottom of the chamber and stood looking up the ladders at the vent holes, pouring with sweat inside his space suit, getting ready to dive and shoot if Cope opened fire on him. He realized he was a vulnerable target, and he began to think that he had just done something stupid, something Wirtzy would never have done.

  He was moving to pick up Cope’s flashlight when Austen’s voice on the radio burst in his ears. “Will! Heads up!”

  At the same moment he saw the plastic object. It flew past him. It had been thrown from one of the openings. It bounced at his feet, rolled a short distance, and came to a stop under a ladder. A red light was blinking on it.

  Grenade. There was no way he could climb the ladder out of the chamber in time. It was going to explode in the chamber with him.

  He heard Austen screaming.

  He picked up the grenade and threw it on a hard, flat trajectory into one of the vent openings in the chamber. It disappeared into the opening. He heard it bouncing in there.

  That wasn’t good enough. He still had to get out of here. The explosion was going to come out of the vent hole.

  He leaped for a ladder and climbed it like a chimpanzee being chased by a cloud of hornets from hell, dropping his gun in the process. He was trying to reach another vent hole, to get inside it for cover. He reached the opening and hurled himself in on his stomach.

  There was a yellow-red boom. A thudding shock wave rolled down the tunnel and tugged at his biohazard suit. This was followed by a crunching, creaking sound, and a piece of concrete fell off the roof of his tunnel, trapping him.