The Coward's Way of War

by Nuttall, Christopher

  He scowled as he heard another burst of gunfire echoing over the city. The ROE – and he was thinking more like the Marine he had once been, rather than a cop – had changed over the last two days. The NYPD had authorisation to fire if they believed that they were under threat, along with the National Guard and Army units near the city. Flights of helicopters and drones roared overhead, ready to fire down at terrorists and insurgents within the city. Their presence was a warning that Al hoped the enemy – whoever they were – would heed. The city was on a knife-edge as it was. If it collapsed into itself, millions of people would die.

  A new convoy of army trucks arrived and headed towards the Command Post, which had been established in a school. Al found himself praying that they carried some Force Recon Marines, or even ordinary jarheads; hell, he would have welcomed the presence of SEALs or another SF unit. There was no way to know how long it would be before Johnston’s people started to show the first signs of Henderson’s Disease...and then all hell would be out for noon.

  ***

  Lindsey winced as she was hauled to her feet and her bonds were removed, struggling to keep her expression calm and under control. Some of the younger nurses had become hysterical as they realised that they were captives, begging and screaming for their captors to release them or to at least let them tend to their patients. The older doctors, including a pair with military experience, had been brutally beaten, but the women had been left alone. Somehow, Lindsey didn't find that reassuring; the terrorists might not have touched any of the women, but their eyes undressed them openly every time they looked in their direction. The leaders, a pair of very dark men with cold dead faces, had clearly forced them to keep their hands off the women. If their authority ever slipped...well, Lindsey had seen recordings from Africa and Latin America. The nurses would be lucky if they were merely killed out of hand.

  “Do not attempt to escape,” one of the guards said, as he escorted her down the corridor into the designated toilet block. The terrorists were unwilling to allow the nurses any freedom at all, even though some had offered to treat their wounds if they would allow them to tend to their patients. The lack of care had clearly hastened some patients along the path to death and their bodies had simply been left to rot. Lindsey couldn't understand how they could be so ignorant of basic hygiene. Each of the bodies was breeding Henderson’s Disease as they decayed. She winced as the door was opened and the stench struck her. The terrorists didn't seem to worry about keeping the toilets working either. The guard shoved her towards a cubicle – they’d searched her thoroughly the first time they’d allowed her to use the toilet, removing everything that could possibly be used as a weapon before allowing her out of her sight – and allowed her to bang the door closed, giving her a few seconds of privacy. It felt like heaven.

  She did her business quickly and came out of the cubicle before the guard could get impatient. He didn't seem to care if she took time to wash her hands as best as she could, although it might have been because he was staring at her rear end. Lindsey found herself considering a dozen schemes to get him off his guard, but none of them offered any real prospect of success. The terrorists had been careful to keep their hostages away from any weapons they could use, nor had they allowed her any chance to see how they had made their deployments. She might knock one of them down and get out into the corridor, only to run into others and find herself recaptured, whereupon she would probably be killed, unpleasantly. She owed it to Doug and the children to remain alive so she could go back to them one day. The thought made her smile bitterly. The chances were that Doug was already plotting her rescue.

  “Come on,” the terrorist barked, finally. Lindsey nodded submissively and allowed him to push her back towards the door, wincing slightly as the door opened and a different smell assailed her nostrils. The dead or dying had been left to rot in their own filth. Lindsey found herself realising that even if Henderson’s Disease didn't get them, something far more common probably would. A dirty hospital was a breeding ground for nasty bugs. “Give me your hands and...”

  “Cuff her and bring her to the boss,” a different voice ordered. The speaker was black – so far, all of the terrorists seemed to be black – but his voice struck Lindsey as surprisingly cultured. The others had acted and spoken like gangsters. “He wants to see one of the bitches.”

  Lindsey felt her heart flip over as her guard pulled her hands behind her back and cuffed them tightly, before pushing her along the corridor, down a flight of stairs and into an office that had once belonged to one of the hospital managers. God alone knew what had happened to him – he had been a careful if unimaginative professional – but the room was now occupied by a single black man, of roughly middle age. He looked oddly familiar, yet Lindsey couldn't place him. He looked as if he was normally very clean-shaven and well dressed, but his suit was rumpled and his beard was starting to look untrimmed. A single pistol lay on the table beside him.

  “Put her down on the chair,” he ordered, flatly. The guard obeyed. “Now...leave us.”

  Lindsey grimaced inwardly as the guard left, closing the door behind him. In a bad movie, she would have broken free and killed the man with his own weapon, yet the cuffs somehow refused to budge despite her struggles. She thought about trying to kick him in the groin, but she knew it wouldn't work. His screams would bring in his guards and she would be killed.

  “Tell me about you,” the man ordered. He had a rolling, almost hypnotic voice that would have been impressive, had she not been far too aware of her surroundings. “What do you do at this place?”

  Lindsey answered him slowly, stalling for time as she tried to think. The man was clearly intelligent and well-spoken, which made his position as leader of the terrorists rather odd. She studied him, trying to place his features, as she answered his other questions. Why, she wondered, was he suddenly interested in her? Had he captured Doug? Or, a different part of her mind reminded her, she had simply been chosen at random. It might have been one of the other nurses being interrogated.

  “I need you to answer a question,” the man said, finally. “Will you answer truthfully?”

  Lindsey blinked, and then decided to push her luck. “Can I ask a question in return?” The man nodded. “Who are you?”

  “I am the Reverend Lucas Johnston, founder of this movement,” the man said. His words rang with conviction. Lindsey remembered seeing one of his speeches on television, some months ago, and winced. He would quite happily kill Lindsey and the other hostages to accomplish his aims. “Is there a cure for Henderson’s Disease?”

  Lindsey shook her head, mutely.

  “But then, that’s what the feds told you,” Johnston said, thoughtfully. He sounded angry, yet that anger wasn't directed at her. “You could just be parroting their lies.” His eyes narrowed. “And are you sure that there’s no cure for the disease?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, there is not and has never been any cure for smallpox,” Lindsey said, knowing that she was risking her life. Johnston might decide to hurt her until she gave him an answer he liked. “The original disease can be survived if the victim receives sufficient medical care, yet they are often scarred for life. No one has yet survived Henderson’s Disease. The only cure seems to be to be vaccinated before you enter a hot zone.”

  Johnston regarded her levelly for a long moment, his dark eyes burning into hers. Lindsey was transfixed, forgetting the cuffs and her vulnerability in the midst of a horrific realisation. Johnston believed what he was saying. He’d doubtless told his followers that the federal government could give them the cure, if they were forced into it, yet he was unable to accept that he might be wrong. The entire hospital was going to die, just because Johnston was determined to find a non-existent cure!

  “Thank you,” Johnston said, finally. He helped her to her feet and pushed her towards the door. When he opened it, the guard was standing outside. “Take her back to the holding area.”

  “Yes, Reverend,” the guar
d said. He took Lindsey’s arm, surprisingly gently. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Lindsey studied him as he pushed her back towards the hostage room. He was a young man, hardly older than twenty, unaware of the real danger. She thought about trying to convince him of the truth, yet what good would it do? Unless he had been vaccinated before they entered the hot zone, he was as good as dead. Shaking her head, she allowed him to push her into the holding area and leave her sitting with the other female hostages. There was nothing else she could do.

  ***

  Doug knew that he and his unit should have been pulled back to the blockade, but he’d managed to wangle a position for his remaining soldiers at the Command Post. The NYPD had been surprisingly willing to allow the National Guard to share their facilities, although the presence of heavier firepower – in the form of a pair of Bradley Armoured Fighting Vehicles – had probably convinced them to keep the Guard on hand. The SWAT team had been deployed, but retaking the hospital would be a bitch of a job. Doug wanted to take his platoon and get stuck into the terrorists, yet he knew better than to try. The National Guard weren't trained for hostage rescue.

  He stared down at the situation board he’d started to compile, merely to give himself something to do. The Brooklyn Hospital Centre had been sealed off and surrounding buildings had been evacuated, but there was very little else to report. No one had any accurate idea of just how many terrorists were in the building, although some estimates claimed that there were over twenty-five men inside. Doug suspected that it was a great deal more. The coach the terrorists had used to reach the building could have carried a hundred men, if they didn't mind being very friendly. There wasn't even much data on what weapons the terrorists had on hand. They were certainly far better armed than the average street gang.

  A man wearing a simple green uniform stepped into the Command Post. “You must be Sergeant Mann,” he said. His accent was odd, almost as if he had blended Arabic with English, even though he was clearly an American native. “I am Command Sergeant Justin Herald, Delta Force.”

  Doug studied him carefully, looking for the obvious signs. Herald had the attitude alright, even though his uniform was a disgrace, but then, Delta Force allowed its operators wide latitude in choosing their uniform and weapons. His handshake was firm without being overpowering, suggesting a self-confidence that was truly remarkable – and considerable strength held in reserve. Doug had never considered attempting to try out for Special Forces, yet he’d heard enough about the selection process to know that anyone who passed would be an exceptional soldier.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Doug said, and meant it.

  “My unit has been tasked with dealing with the situation,” Herald explained. Doug nodded in relief. His nightmare had been an NYPD SWAT team attempting to deal with the terrorists and failing miserably. “I understand that you have been gathering intelligence on the building and the terrorists.”

  It wasn't a question. “Yes, sir,” Doug said. Sergeant or not, the Delta Force Commando definitely rated a ‘sir.’ “This is what I know so far.”

  The briefing took longer than he had expected, for Herald kept asking questions, including a couple that hadn't occurred to Doug. It was a reminder that there were Army units experienced in dealing with hostage-takers and terrorists, even on American soil. A number of other men had appeared, watching over their leader’s shoulder as he studied the diagrams, but the others were staying well back. Hopefully, Herald explained, if the terrorists caught a glimpse of them, they’d think that they were more reporters swarming the building.

  “This is going to be tricky,” Herald said, finally. He grinned suddenly, a strange crooked grin that revealed that someone had tried to rearrange his face a few years ago. “And we have to try and take the leader alive. Let me think...”

  He stared down at the building plans for a long moment and then looked up. “All right,” he said. “This is what we are going to do.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Hostage-rescue is one of the most dangerous missions any unit can be asked to perform. You can do everything right and still lose people, perhaps all of the hostages. Some terrorists will even rig their hostages with explosives, just to make sure that none of them survive the experience. And even if everything works perfectly, weird things can still happen. The hostages bond with the terrorists, a tiny accident leads to disaster...

  -Command Sergeant Justin Herald

  New York, USA

  Day 18

  “This is not going to be easy, dude,” Corporal Harris said. “This is going to be a stone cold bitch.”

  Command Sergeant Justin Herald couldn't disagree. Delta Force had come into existence, at least in part, to give the United States a weapon against terrorist tactics, including hostage-taking and hijackings. It was a mission the special force did extremely well, but what was rarely acknowledged – at least publicly – was that far too much could go wrong. The terrorists might do all kinds of things to make it impossible to rescue the hostages, or even recover their bodies. Terrorists were happy to do anything to harm the civilised world, if only in the court of public opinion. Justin, who came from deeply conservative stock, had never fully understood it, but there were people who somehow believed that the victims were always at fault and a terrorist strike was a blow for freedom and liberty. They should, in his opinion, try being hostages before they talked about how lucky the hostages had been, simply because they’d been chosen to serve as terrorist bait.

  And the Brooklyn Hospital Centre was definitely not going to be an easy building to assault. The hospital had been carefully designed to survive even an earthquake, or a bomb going off nearby, which meant that the terrorists would be able to use the building itself as a shield. The hospital’s power supply couldn't be interrupted, because it had two back-up generators under the building, while the internal security system was completely isolated from the internet and therefore not vulnerable to covert hacking. He’d seriously considered taking in the team through the sewers, but the designers had managed to seal them off, rendering it impossible to break in without making it very clear what they were doing. The terrorists would have time to react and kill their hostages.

  “Devious bastards,” he agreed, tartly. The Delta Force snipers had been deployed around the area, the tiny cameras mounted on their rifles providing images of the building that were being fed through the secure network into the command post. Some of the terrorists were very clearly in view, holding their weapons in a manner that suggested they were more interested in posing than threatening anyone, but Justin was sure that they were out there to draw fire. He’d seen that attitude from terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and it always boded ill for the hostages, for if the terrorists cared little for their own lives, they would care less for those of their hostages. If they’d had the time, he would have attempted to negotiate rather than risk an assault, but there was no time. Quite apart from the political pressure, Henderson’s Disease would reach out and take the terrorists...and God alone knew what they would do then, although Justin could venture a guess. “Martin?”

  No one would have believed that Specialist Martin Prince was a Special Forces A-Team member and, in a sense, they would have been quite right. Martin Prince had been a teenage social reject who’d taken to hacking into various computer databases in the hope that it would bring him a kind of acceptance from the hacker community. What it had brought him, after an alarmingly successful hack into a set of Pentagon computers, was a visit from the DIA, who had made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Come to work for the military, where he would have access to some of the finest computers and related equipment in the world, or spend the next few years serving an unpleasant prison sentence for hacking. Martin Prince had accepted their offer and, despite being short, bespectacled and overweight, had somehow ended up in a support role. No one could operate the surveillance equipment as well as he could. He had a devious mind that, at least to Justin, suggested voyeuristic tendencies. It wa
s lucky that he hadn't had access to such equipment while he’d been at High School.

  “Many of the bugs don’t work very well in such an environment,” Prince admitted. He had a habit of flinching away from the real soldiers, even though Justin had been at some pains to convince him that the soldiers weren't dangerous to him. Unless, as he’d added in the privacy of his own thoughts, the nerd screwed up by the numbers and got people killed. “They don’t have any sophisticated ECM gear, as far as I can tell, but the hospital is designed to limit transmissions into and out of the building. I’m having to relay signals from bug to bug just to extend my reach, which breaks down the bandwidth and...”

  “Never mind the technobabble,” Justin said, impatiently. “Just give me the breakdown.”

  America’s enemies – and not a few of its own citizens – would have been astonished and horrified if they had realised just how many advances American scientists had made in remote surveillance devices. Each of the bugs Prince had deployed was tiny, barely visible to the naked eye and almost completely undetectable without very capable counter-surveillance equipment. Flying through the air, they could be covertly inserted into almost anywhere, allowing American soldiers to literally look into their enemy’s territory without being detected. The live feed from the bugs showed the various people in the hospital, breaking them down by category and retransmitting the data to each of the soldiers. The secure and highly classified network – as far as they knew, only the British and French knew that it existed – was impossible to hack and almost impossible to shut down. The tiny bugs had survived fires and bomb attacks...and kept transmitting.