by Graham Brown
Hawker listened to the voice. He heard madness and instability. He sensed that Gibbs would destroy the world if he couldn’t be part of it. Especially now.
“And killing your own people?”
Gibbs smiled through his busted face. “I didn’t need them anymore,” he said. “The definition of expendable, so I expended them. Besides, they were bad for the bottom line and I had to let you in somehow.”
Hawker listened to the two of them. It felt as if Danielle was trying to keep Gibbs talking, trying to stall him from acting until the air strike hit. But strangely enough, it felt as if Gibbs was trying to stall as well. In his weakened state, Hawker tried to see through the fog. One last attempt to put the puzzle together.
It seemed as if everything Gibbs had done was a smoke screen. The cult, the threats, the cryptic language that never quite made sense, all these things now seemed no more than various means to an end. It some ways it had worked. It had kept the NRI guessing, kept them in a state of self-imposed blindness as they searched for some clue that would link it all together. But that clue was a ghost. It didn’t exist because the whole thing was a con, a trap designed to get them here and get Gibbs’s hands on 951 and the Eden virus.
The missiles, the old Soviet missiles La Bruzca had sold him, were probably the last piece of bait. But the information Danielle had coaxed out of Yousef had gotten them here early and Gibbs had struggled to finish, ending up on his own sinking ship.
All guesses, he realized, and probably only half-right, but they were all Hawker had to go on.
Gibbs seemed acutely deranged but still calculating. So why wasn’t he running now? Why wasn’t he backing down the hall with Nadia’s wheeled gurney in front of him as a shield? He had to know some type of air strike would be on its way. Did he think it was going to be held off until Hawker and Danielle resurfaced? Probably he knew better. He’d been in command once.
The only answer Hawker could come up with was that he wanted the air strike to hit for some reason. If he was cornered, maybe he was playing for a tie. Or more likely he had some other way of winning even if they all died in flames.
“And all this,” Danielle asked. “The cult, all this insanity?”
“New religion for the fools,” Gibbs said. “If you want someone to reject God you have to put something in His place. I chose … me.”
Moving his hands in such a way as to show the syringes better, Gibbs continued. “And now you get to choose. Red for death, white for life.”
“We’re all going to die here,” Danielle said. “And your dream is going to die with us.”
“My dream is to see you suffer,” he said. “And this planet will suffer for what you’ve done to me.”
“I destroyed your missiles,” she said, moving sideways as if she were trying to get a better line to shoot her old boss. He turned, moving the gurney on its wheels; the child seemed to stir.
“You were lucky,” he said. “But do you think I would have left them in plain sight if they were my weapon of choice? Missiles to spread disease are very hard to come by. Even with all I’ve accomplished, I couldn’t manage that. But at least I thought they’d draw you in.”
Hawker’s thoughts raced. Gibbs did have something else, one more trick. He glanced at the wall. A Series of beakers filled with clear liquid were secured there. Each one was hooked up to an electrical pump and a length of thin tubing that left the room. Hawker recognized the thin, irrigation-like drip lines.
“The birds.”
Gibbs turned to him, careful to stay in his crouch.
“You’re smarter than you look,” he sneered. “I’ve been feeding them sugar water and fish guts for weeks. At this point they’re well trained. Airborne versions of Pavlov’s dog. I hit that pump and they suck down whatever comes out of the tube. This time it’ll be the virus. And when the inevitable shock and awe air strike obliterates this ship, it will scatter those birds to the wind. Some will live and some will die, but those that survive will land in other places. Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait. It’ll give a whole new meaning to the words ‘bird flu.’ ”
Hawker noticed the beakers were divided into those with a red mark and those with a white one. Red for death, white for life.
Gibbs inched toward the beakers.
“Don’t,” Danielle said, tightening her grip on the rifle.
“You won’t shoot,” Gibbs said. “Not till the very last second at least. Because in your weak little mind you still think there may be a way out for you and him and this girl. Shoot me and she’s Typhoid Mary on a whole different scale. You’ll have to leave her here to die.”
As Gibbs spoke, Nadia opened her eyes. She looked out across the room. “Sonia?” she cried. “Savi?”
She was groggy, coming out of sedation. Hawker guessed she couldn’t see without her glasses. Sonia tried to respond but couldn’t. She reached out, her face contorted in pain.
“Sonia, don’t,” Hawker pleaded.
Grunting in agony, Sonia fell back into a pool of her own blood. Hawker put his hands on her shoulders, trying to calm her.
She looked up into his eyes. Her skin was pale, her lips turning blue, her pupils massively dilated. “I’m sorry …,” she said, barely audible.
Behind him Gibbs was inching closer to the pump. Across the room, Danielle was trying to get a bead on him. They were closing in on one minute. Maybe they would all die together after all.
Sonia reached out, touched Hawker’s face, the blood of her hand covering his cheek. Her other hand was clenched and trembling. She looked at him and then right past him. Her eyes were blank, most likely blind. “I … changed … it,” she whispered.
“Changed what?” he asked.
“White … for life. It will heal Nadia but it can’t …” She gulped for air. “It can’t live … outside … the body.”
Her strength failed and she collapsed, but Hawker found a surge of energy.
“Shoot red,” he shouted, turning and lunging for Gibbs.
He heard a shot fire and expected to see Gibbs’s hand fly off the red plunger, a bullet hole through his forearm or wrist. But instead the IV line split. Danielle had shot it out, eight inches above where it hit Nadia’s arm.
It was brilliant. No matter which plunger Gibbs pressed nothing would enter the child.
Gibbs seemed to realize this too, and he dove for the pump switch.
Hawker charged, hitting the gurney and driving it forward; he pinned Gibbs against the wall.
Gibbs stretched for the switch, which was just out of reach, and then convulsed suddenly as Danielle blasted three holes in his chest. Blood splattered the wall behind him. His arm fell and he slumped forward.
As Hawker took his weight off the gurney, Gibbs slid down the wall. He ended up facedown on the floor.
Hawker looked at the two syringes. Neither had been depressed. He glanced at his watch. Fifty seconds.
“Let’s get out of here,” Danielle said.
As fast as his weakened body would move, Hawker stood and pulled the straps off Nadia.
“I got her,” Danielle said, picking the girl up and carrying her out the door.
Hawker had to go, but for a second he dropped down beside Sonia. She was dead. He touched her face. He was sick at the thought of leaving her there, but there was no time. He went to stand and noticed something clutched in Sonia’s hand. It was a syringe, capped off and marked with a stripe.
White. White for life.
He grabbed it, stood, and lumbered down the hall.
By the time he reached the main deck he was choking and coughing up blood. He saw Danielle and Nadia go over the side. Saw Keegan come racing up in the boat.
He jumped after them, hitting the black water. His world went dark and silent.
Inside the laboratory, Stuart Gibbs twitched. He was not yet dead and somehow through the pain and the blood, he realized it. With great effort he managed to push the gurney away, get to his knees, and begin to crawl. He was beyond hope now, but
hate drove him on. He would not let them survive. He would curse the world that had rejected him.
He reached the table beneath the beakers, pulled himself up, and stretched for the pump switch. The pain was incredible and the agony coursing through his body caused him to scream aloud as he stretched for it. He flicked the switch and fell back to the floor.
Lying in an awkward heap, Stuart Gibbs heard the pumps engage. He felt the vibration throughout the room as they drew the viral suspensions into the driplines.
Through his failing eyes, he saw the levels in each beaker begin to drop. He would die but his last act would bring hell to the world one way or another.
Kicking hard, Hawker made it back to the surface. The body armor weighed him down; he slipped free of it. As he came up, powerful hands yanked him out of the water and into the speedboat.
He heard Keegan shout “Go!” as he sprawled out onto the deck.
At the driver’s console, Danielle shoved the throttle to full. The boat leapt forward, accelerated away from the freighter, and raced south at top speed.
Hawker lay in the back, exhausted, barely able to breathe and facing the sky. Overhead he saw the cormorants circling like dragons in the dark. And then they suddenly veered off and dove toward the island en masse.
No, he thought. It can’t be.
Seconds later the sound of whistling death shot over their heads, as the first of the Tomahawks raced past them on its way to the island. Two others followed, converging from different angles.
The cormorants swarmed over their feeding places, jostling and pushing against one another to get at the free buffet they’d grown used to finding. Liquid oozed from the thin black tubes. They squawked and flapped, stretching their beaks down, snatching the line from one another and then fighting to keep it.
And then they looked up and turned to the south in unison. A strange whistling sound came toward them. Thunder boomed a second later and a concussion wave blasted through them, ripping their feathers and wings apart. Some of the birds tumbled, others tried to fly, but even as they flapped their wings, a wave of thousand-degree flames crashed over them, engulfing them from every direction and incinerating them on the ground and in midair.
Aboard the powerboat Hawker stared back at the conflagration. A half mile off, the explosions were still deafening. In the moments after each impact, chunks of rock and flaming debris rained down like small meteors.
At one point, three or four missiles hit simultaneously. A blinding explosion stretched across the island like a halo before rising skyward like a mushroom cloud.
Behind him, Keegan held the little girl, who was now fully conscious and confused. “Sonia?” she asked. “Where’s Sonia?”
Hawker felt his heart break even more. He continued to stare at the island behind them as another round of Tomahawks hammered it, once again raising fire to the sky.
CHAPTER 55
Sunion, Greece
In the shade of some trees, fifty yards back from a white sand beach and the warm waters of the Aegean, Danielle Laidlaw sat on an old stone wall. The wall wasn’t ancient enough to be from the classical Greek era or from Roman times, but she guessed a few generations had passed since its construction.
Enough time for the world to change and the height of technology to go from steam engines to spacecraft, from vacuum tubes to computers, from penicillin as the only miracle drug to the manipulation of DNA and the very building blocks of life.
All paths of growing knowledge that might lead to either paradise or perdition.
She wasn’t sure they’d ever know the truth about the place they’d found, whether it was connected to the biblical Garden of Eden or not. She wasn’t even sure if such a fact could be determined. But with the Iranians fuming over the incursion and the bombing of the cormorant island, and the American government trying to explain why they’d unleashed twenty-four missiles on a flyspeck in the middle the Gulf, she doubted anyone, particularly an American like McCarter, would get the chance to try.
In the end, it probably didn’t matter. Those who wanted to believe it would, and those who wanted to believe something else would believe that something else. Like all things connected to religion and spirituality, it wouldn’t require faith if you could prove it one way or another.
She looked out to the beach where Hawker sat, shoes off, shirt open, watching the waves as his skin grew darker in the sun. For reasons known only to him, he’d insisted they come here and avoid hooking up with the authorities of any country or any representatives of the U.S. government, including the NRI.
After what he’d been through, what he’d lost and what he’d already done for her in his life, she didn’t question it, even as the days passed.
They were staying in Keegan’s place, a decent-sized chalet on the beach. But Keegan wasn’t there. He’d gone out on some mission for Hawker.
Since then life had been a model of consistency.
Every day Hawker would check in with Keegan by phone and then he’d bring Nadia to the beach and let her play, watching over her as if she were his own. Every day Moore would call Danielle on the satellite line and ask when she and Hawker would be returning for debriefing. And every day Danielle would say “maybe tomorrow.”
Truth was, she didn’t know. Even as Hawker’s physical wounds healed — helped on by a local surgeon — his mental anguish only seemed to deepen. Watching him, as he watched Nadia, Danielle felt a tremendous need to protect and shelter him. But he wouldn’t let her in, and so she had to do it from afar.
Back in Washington, Moore was doing the same, deflecting and redirecting the thousand questions that were probably pounding down his door. In a way, it felt good to raise their shields around Hawker. After all, he was one of their tribe.
Sliding the satellite phone into her pocket, Danielle started across the beach, walking across the warm sand until she’d reached a spot beside him. She sat, brought her knees up toward her chest, and rested her arms on them, leaning forward.
Ahead of them, a small wave swept in and over the sand castle Nadia was building. The young child, looking like a tiny old woman, shrieked with delight as the foamy water swirled around and then slid back into the ocean.
“She wants to know where Sonia is,” Hawker said. “Where Savi is. And when her father is coming back.”
He looked down at the sand and then over at Danielle. “How do you tell a little girl that everyone she loved is gone?”
“What about her mother?” Danielle asked.
“She died giving birth to Nadia.”
“Cousins? Uncles?”
“No one yet,” he said. “She’s all alone.”
Danielle turned toward him, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Is that why we’re still here?”
“I don’t know where else to go,” he said, sounding lost.
As long as she’d known him, Hawker had always been sure of himself. Even when he was wrong he made his mistakes at a thousand miles an hour. To be suddenly uncertain about things might feel worse than being wrong.
“You can’t keep her here,” she said. “You can’t stay here forever, even if Keegan says you can.”
For the first time he looked at her. “I know that. But where do we go?”
“We?” she said. “There are agencies. I’m sure with our influence—”
“A child with her problems?” he said. “You’re going to put her in foster care?”
“I’m not saying that but …” She started and then stopped, finding that she didn’t know what to say.
Hawker spoke again. “Sonia told me she’d only live another year. God help us if we dump her on the system for the last year of her life.”
Maybe he did plan to keep her here, maybe he planned to take care of her for the rest of her days and somehow honor Sonia’s memory that way.
“Why are you putting yourself through this?” she asked. “You did everything you could.”
“A long time ago I promised Sonia I’d never let an
ything happen to her.”
“You kept that promise when you dragged them out of Africa,” she said. “You put them on solid ground. They chose to go back into the land of snakes. Maybe they did it with good reason. But it was their choice. Not yours.”
He looked over at her. Obviously he knew that.
“I know,” she said, gently, thinking she might have overstepped her bounds. “Rational arguments aren’t going to do much for you right now.”
He nodded and gazed back toward the water.
“Did you love Sonia?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“It’s a yes-or-no question.”
“I loved the idea of her,” he said, proving that it wasn’t. “After five years looking over your shoulder and hoping the people you’re working with or the woman you’re sleeping with aren’t planning on killing you, you end up wondering if the world would be better off without you. Then you run into someone good who needs help and suddenly you matter.”
“And you’re not alone,” she said.
He nodded, then turned her way again. “I’m not big into psychoanalysis, but I wanted to feel alive. To feel normal. It almost felt normal.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Hawker,” Danielle said. “There’s nothing wrong with any of that.”
“There is when you know it can’t last,” he said. “I couldn’t go back into the light where she was going and I sure as hell couldn’t bring her with me or she’d have ended up dead somewhere.”
He stopped. He didn’t have to say it. She knew his next thoughts. She put a hand on his knee.
“Hawker, right now you’re feeling guilt stacked on guilt, but even at twenty Sonia was a grown woman and nothing that happened since had anything to do with you. The only people to blame are Gibbs and the others he corrupted.
“We destroyed them,” she added, thanking God that the president had chosen to obliterate the whole island instead of just the freighter.
“There’s no indication that the virus escaped that island. There are teams looking for infected cormorants, but they haven’t found anything, not even a bird with singed tail feathers. Nothing got away, not in that firestorm.”
