He waited his breathing now normal.
After a few minutes, he saw movement in the tree line on the opposite side of the trail that he had followed through the Breaks. The man was adopting the same tactics as Stryker had used, and was moving through the concealment of the trees and bushes.
“Damn, this guy is good,” Stryker whispered with a note of exasperation. “I’m going to drive a stake into this asshole’s heart when I’m done killing him.”
Assess and evaluate. Options. Stryker thought he might be able to let the man pass and quietly make his way back to the Jeep and clear the area. He also knew that he could not take a chance on having another round with the man. He was too good and might well track him back and turn the existing ordeal into a saga of biblical proportions. Stryker was running on fumes, badly needed water, and wasn’t built for this sort of contest. It had to end now, he concluded. He had to get water and he had to rest. Risk and reward.
He sighed quietly, rose to his feet, and moved up the slope to find some elevation and a spot to get a clear shot. He moved slowly, careful to not disturb branches. He continued up the slope until he saw a clearing that the pursuer would have to cross to continue moving in the same direction. He again dropped to the prone position and pointed his M-4 toward the clearing.
The first thing he saw entering the clearing was the barrel of the .308, then the scope mounted on the weapon. The man was moving very slowly, gun up, but looking over the scope, hoping to spot him and get the shot. Stryker peered through his scope, his finger tightening on the trigger. The man slowly fully emerged from the trees and traversed his weapon toward Stryker’s position. He knew his opponent was somewhere on the other side of the trail, but had not yet spotted Stryker.
He softly exhaled, gently squeezed the trigger, and three rounds exploded out the barrel of his weapon. They struck the man center mass, creating a puff of pink haze from his chest. He fell to the ground as though he had fallen through the hatch of a gallows, and in a sense, he had. Stryker waited for a few moments and then watched the man roll over on his back. His weapon had fallen a few feet away, and he struggled briefly to reach it, but fell back and remained still.
Stryker emerged from behind a stand of cedar, glanced up and down the trail, and slowly approached the man with his M-4 up and ready. He let the rifle dangle from his two-point sling, muzzle down, after he drew his pistol from the drop holster. As he got closer, he noticed that his pursuer was a wiry little nugget of man, with a wild beard that seemed to point in every direction. He groaned once and then his eyes flew open. What he saw was a giant pointing an XD at his head and looking grim.
“You’re going to bleed out in a few hours. Even if I was inclined to help you, which I most definitely am not, there’s nothing I can do,” the giant said, his voice sounding like the rumble of a diesel engine.
“I know,” the prone man wheezed.
“You want me to end it or not?”
“End it,” the man replied, after briefly considering the question.
“Just one question. What kind of training have you had?”
“I was in the teams,” he whispered.
“SEALS?”
The man nodded.
“Okay, I got another question.” The man nodded again.
“Do you know a five-letter word that means ‘guiding principals’?”
“Hell you talkin’ about?”
“It’s from a crossword puzzle. I can’t get that one, and I’m glad you told me that Navy thing.”
“Why?”
“You just made things a lot easier for me. I hate the Navy. If I were to tell you all the things I hate about the Navy, you would bleed out before I could shoot you.” Stryker leveled the pistol and fired into the man’s skull. A red blossom appeared on his forehead.
Stryker searched his pockets and assault pack, discovered a canteen of water, and drank it. He pocketed a spare mag for the .308. He picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He started to move away, but after two steps, he turned back and fired two more rounds into the man’s forehead. “That’s for turning my day into a track meet,” he muttered.
As he moved down the slope, he turned on the imaginary CD player in his head and listened to the At Fillmore East version of the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post.” It started with a low rumble of Berry Oakley’s bass guitar, then Duane Allman’s electric guitar entered, and Dickey Betts joined in. The twin lead guitars mirrored every note with amazing precision. The rhythm gained speed and momentum as the plaintive notes gathered velocity and turned into angry snarls, and the pounding of the drum increased. Gregg entered the fray with a gravelly, despondent voice that turned into an angry shriek. Stryker could feel every emotion in that voice: the despondent desperation, the longing for what was and didn’t last. He knew the emotions well. Somehow, it didn’t seem gloomy or disheartening. Rather, he heard it as an expression of hope and an embracing of pain and injury.
As he walked, his eyes never stopped scanning the terrain, stopping every 10 paces to check behind him before he again set off. He thought about the pursuer he just killed; now that he no longer was a threat, Stryker felt a grudging admiration for the man. He was determined, skilled, and a pretty good shot considering the conditions and ranges from which he fired. In another time and place, they may have been drinking in some run-down bar, trading stories about their deployments, and telling jokes at the cost of the other’s branch of service. They would talk about weapons, which were best for which missions. They would have talked about wives and family. In the end, they would leave that bar with the promise to stay in touch, both knowing they never would, but happy to have spent time with another warrior.
The song was exactly 22:04 in length. Stryker decided to let it play through his head three times, then rest for ten minutes. If he did that for the rest of the day, he could sleep in the Jeep tonight and head home tomorrow.
He hefted the bag with the gold coins, thinking what a pity that someone died over them. If he had it to do over, he would never have entered the house. But, nobody is right 100 percent of the time. Risk and reward. It wasn’t like doing accounting. The perfect ledger didn’t end with a zero in each column. It usually was a one-to-zero ending and Stryker was lucky the zero wasn’t in his column that day.
CHAPTER TWO
DIE OFF MINUS ONE MONTH
Richard Biggs sat in the first-class section of a Lufthansa 747 that was making its way to Frankfurt, Germany. He grinned as he reviewed the email that confirmed the deposit of four million dollars into his bank account in the Bahamas.
After years of eking out an existence as a Department of Defense bioengineer, he was retiring. He did take a parting gift with him, though. It was a small vial of weaponized Ebola virus. He had slaved away for twenty years in the labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The installation had been the center of the U.S. biological weapons program that theoretically halted in 1969 by virtue of the U.S. signing an international treaty banning further development of the weapons. The truth was known to only a handful of researchers, including Biggs: the development of bioweapons had never stopped, and the security where Richard worked was so compartmentalized that nobody even knew he had developed the deadliest weapon in the history of the world.
Richard did most of the work on weekends and after hours. He was seen as a workaholic by most of his fellow scientists, and he was just fine with leaving that impression. The work was entirely off the books, as was the development of the new virus. He had not used computers or kept lab notes. He kept it in his prodigious memory until he arrived home, then made the notes and used a computer that was not connected to the Internet. It had taken close to four years.
There were two strokes of true genius with his strain of Ebola. He had managed to make the virus into an airborne pathogen that would spread much more quickly than the normal strains that required human fluid to transmit the disease. He also found the means to make the virus mutate with every new host; the
incubation period grew shorter with each mutation. So when the outbreak actually occurred, it would hit all the victims at roughly the same time, thus overwhelming the medical care system. Ebola was not always deadly as long as intensive medical care was available. Often, as many people died from the lack of treatment as they did from the disease itself. But this strain would tax any health care systems to the edge of a total breakdown, and beyond.
He also invented a vaccine for the virus, and nobody knew that either. He was on his way to Frankfurt to collect the second of three payments he was due. His new friend, Hans, owned a large German pharmaceutical company, and was purchasing the vial and a single sample dose of the vaccine.
During a previous meeting in New York, Hans explained the plan in stunning simplicity: He intended to release the pathogen in a small remote village in Africa and immediately rush in medical staff to reduce the loss of life. Once quarantined, the disease would be contained in that village. But, the market for the vaccine would explode, and Hans was paying Biggs another four million dollars for the formula to mass-produce the vaccine once the outbreak was contained. It seemed like a workable plan to Richard, and it would give him enough money to buy anything he desired. He would drop his facade and live the way he truly wanted.
Biggs, a tiny man with bird-like features and beady eyes, was an angry person. Having put up with bullies throughout his childhood and well in the high school, he was forged into someone who saw only evil in others, and didn’t particularly care for the human race. He was also a 200-point IQ genius with an incredibly complex mind. He understood things that others just couldn’t see, even if they were pointed out to them. He lived behind a carefully constructed facade at work. He was polite and outwardly respectful and considerate. He took orders from superiors who were intellectually inferior to him without complaint. He learned long ago that anything else would cost him his job. And, he always resented that he couldn’t publish his work and receive the accolades that his giant intellect needed and wanted.
At one time, Biggs attempted a relationship with a woman named Julie, who he met through a dating web site; but she never returned his calls. Biggs was friendless, wifeless, childless, and pretty much on his own – and he liked it that way.
The part of his research he enjoyed most was watching the lab animals die slow and painful deaths. It was nothing new to him, as he had experimented with neighborhood pets as a child. Most people in the neighborhood suspected that he was responsible, but nobody could ever prove it and there were never any witnesses. He was far too clever for that. Watching animals die still gave him a huge erection, and he often had to relieve himself in his private bathroom after a lengthy process of watching life drain away from some hapless lab creature.
“May I get you something to drink?” the flight attendant asked. Richard was startled out of his reverie and looked at the young woman. She was stunning. Her hair was long and very blonde, and her blue eyes showed a sense of merriment.
“Certainly. May I have a glass of port?”
“Of course,” she replied, jotting a note on her order pad. Richard watched her walk away. Soon, he would have someone like her every night, whenever he wanted. He smiled at the thought and was asleep before the flight attendant returned with his drink.
The Frankfurt Airport is one of the largest in the world, with more than 2,000 flights a day landing and taking off to and from every point on the globe. More than 200,000 travelers passed though the terminals on given day, usually making connections to other destinations. It was a hub for almost every international airline in the world and was in a state of perpetual expansion and renovation.
Richard passed through a sea of people heading in both directions, cleared customs, and moved out of the secure area of the airport. What he was about to do was carefully choreographed to be an exchange of briefcases that went unnoticed. He passed by theatres, porn shops, restaurants, and bars. The airport really was a small city and it would be possible to live in it, quite comfortably, for long periods of time.
He consulted a map of the facility, turned left at the next intersection, and took a seat in the back corner of the Jet Set restaurant and bar. A few moments later, Hans entered and took a seat opposite him. Richard studied him for a moment. He was an entirely unremarkable man. Average height and weight, brown eyes, and dark hair that was going gray in spots. He was dressed in an immaculate grey suit with a red tie, and looked the part of a business traveler. Richard was dressed the same way. They were just two colleagues stopping for coffee or a drink before they continued their journeys.
“Can I get a coffee for you?” Hans asked. While his English was fluent, it was heavily accented.
“Of course.”
“Black?”
“Please.” Hans set down a briefcase that was identical to Richard’s next to his chair, and moved off to get the coffee. While he was out of sight, Richard got up and switched chairs, and then patted the briefcase that had arrived with Hans. All it contained was a single piece of paper that had the account number and password to the account Hans had set up for him in Mallorca, Richard’s ultimate destination.
Hans returned and placed a mug of coffee in front of Richard, then sat in the chair that Richard had occupied. Hans glanced around and noted that nobody was paying any attention to them. He relaxed in his chair and took a sip of coffee. Richard did the same.
“Did you find the villa in Mallorca yet?” Hans asked.
“I made the down payment by wire transfer yesterday.”
“Have you confirmed the second deposit I sent you?” Hans asked.
“Yes, by telephone yesterday.”
“So, I guess we’re done until we need the vaccine.”
“When do you think that will be?” Richard asked.
“Around thirty days.”
“You have my email and phone number. Just call or email me and I will forward the documents with the vaccine formula to you by email attachment.”
“It’s been a pleasure,” Hans said as he offered his hand. Richard shook it briefly.
“I better get to my flight,” Richard said. He finished his coffee, stood with the briefcase in hand, and walked away without looking back.
Hans removed a newspaper from his jacket pocket. When Richard was out of sight, he opened the briefcase and slipped the syringe holding the single dose of the vaccine into his jacket pocket. He sat at the same table for another fifteen minutes reading the paper.
A swarthy-looking man entered the restaurant with another identical bag, found Hans, and set the briefcase down next to one of the chairs. Hans stared at him for a moment, noting the hawk-like nose and the gleam of the zealot in his eyes. The man’s blue eyes stood in sharp contrast to his other dark features, and he would be considered handsome by most. He also wore a business suit and seemed to be a wealthy Arab on a business trip.
“Can I get you a coffee?” Hans asked. The German-accented English had disappeared, replaced by Russian-accented English.
“Please, Serge,” the man replied.
“Of course, Mohammed,” he replied. The two men performed the same ritual as Hans and Richard had done, but neither drank their coffee.
“The scientist?” Mohammed asked.
“He’ll be dead in a few hours.”
“Poison?”
“In the coffee. No matter. It’s not traceable. The autopsy will indicate a heart attack. He’ll die somewhere between here and Mallorca on the plane.”
“So there is no antidote or vaccine for the virus?”
“No,” Serge lied.
“Well done.”
“I’ll be on my way,” Serge said, rising and exiting with the briefcase Mohammed had left when he arrived. Serge personally hated dealing with the ISIS operative, but they were his best customers, so he tolerated the man to keep his weapons-trading business going. He had neglected to inform him, however, of the vaccine. That was his little secret. He had been scrupulous in his dealings with them until now, because w
hen your clients are perfectly capable of killing you anywhere in the world, it’s a good idea to play it straight. This was his one exception. He had no idea what the crazy bastards were planning to do with the virus, but he would make sure the vaccine coursed through his blood before the end of the day.
He seriously doubted Richard’s claims as to how virulent the virus was. The weapon the little weasel described was beyond anything he knew of and the man was a braggart. Serge decided to do the transaction because it was very lucrative, he had the vaccine sample, and the likelihood of the bumbling ISIS operatives actually pulling off anything serious was laughable.
Mohammed went into a stall in the bathroom and extracted the vial from the briefcase, then shoved it into his pocket and left the case in the stall. As he moved through the ticketing area, he speed-dialed his contact in Afghanistan. The man answered in English. They always spoke English as the NSA computers gave priority to any of the tribal languages spoken in that part of the world.
“Are the lambs all home safe?” he asked.
“Yes, and may God be with you,” the voice replied. “Do what you must do.”
“I will,” he replied, and broke the connection. What he just learned was that all the 12,000 zealots selected to survive the end of the world were now safely in caves in the
CHAPTER THREE
DIE OFF MINUS SIX YEARS
Stryker had never been more proud. He was exhausted, filthy, thirsty, and sore. He had completed the thirteen-week Marine Corps. Basic Training. They had just finished The Crucible, the culmination of the course. It was the final test to become a Marine, and consisted of a fifty-four-hour exercise with eight hours of sleep and very little food. The tasks they completed during the exercise included marches, night infiltration, and a host of other physical and intellectual challenges. Each challenge was named after a heroic Marine or a famous Marine battle, and they were referred to as “Warrior Stations.”
Stryker: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Page 2
