Kingdoms of Sorrow

by JK Franks

  Puzzled, Kaylie replied, “Likewise . . . see you around,” and resumed her late-night workout.

  Chapter Four

  August, the previous year

  Pakistan - Undisclosed Location

  The wind blew fiercely but gave no relief from the oppressive heat. Instead, the sand cut and burned the hands holding the binoculars. “Shit,” he said as he dropped them back to his side. What a clusterfuck this assignment was becoming.

  Two days before it all went to shit, he was standing above the River Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. He had been watching a group of teens harass a pretty girl. Hooligans, his grandpa would have called them. He was trying to decide whether to get involved or not. That was the moment he got the call. The call from a special phone, the same phone that even now was in his pocket.

  He had been in Ireland to help teach counter-terrorism tactics to a small group of French, British, Irish and Belgian soldiers and police, all of them, spec-ops members. Even in August, Ireland had been so cool, just wonderful compared to this nightmarish heat. He was on loan to the Army when the phone rang. When the higher-ups called, you did what they said. In this case, what they had said in a nutshell was, “Get to Pakistan immediately.” The tasking instructions sent later added that he was not to travel by air nor take any of the European high-speed trains that were so efficient. So, he was to rush but not take anything fast. Military intelligence was indeed an oxymoron.

  Puzzling as the instructions were, he went to his loft apartment and collected all military insignia and papers that identified him, even though none were in his actual name. He placed them in a burn bag, which he would drop in the furnace chute when he left. Packing his gray-and-beige-patterned battle fatigues, he pulled on his rarely used civilian travel clothes, geared up in as covert a manner as possible, then checked the ferry schedule to England. Once again, his identity to them was just the combat call sign and a number. He was on permanent assignment to Praetor, full name Praetor Paramilitary Battlegroup 9. No one used a real name or rank. He was simply Skybox-5: five for his rank, something close to a captain in the Army, though any comparison to the normal military was irrelevant. Praetor Battlegroups had a ground-up command structure: soldiers in the field made the decisions, and since every fighting member of Praetor was an elite soldier of command rank, those decisions were generally the correct ones.

  The trip had been exhausting and eventful to say the least. He had almost made it through Austria on his way toward Turkey when the solar flare hit. He had been on a regular passenger train, but even that ground slowly to a halt. While most passengers stayed put, he had hit the door and immediately started off on foot. In the distance, he saw the large steel support towers with dozens of electrical lines. Random electrical discharges were arcing up and down the wires. He felt sure someone must have dropped a nuke or an EMP bomb somewhere on the continent. This close to good old Mother Russia, anything was possible.

  It soon became evident that the problem had not just been with the train and the electric lines. While most of the old cars on the road were still working, most newer vehicles had been abandoned. Some seemed to have gone out of control and wrecked or drove off into ditches. Every single one of the small towns he walked through was dark.

  He walked for three hours before his phone chirped. He knew it was hardened against EMP blasts but was still relieved to see it was working. He had to admit, P-Group always had the best toys. The ID documents they provided got him through every checkpoint without incident, and his compact go-bag included almost anything he could possibly need to move across both hostile and friendly territory with ease.

  The text message contained his tasking instructions and acknowledgment that electricity worldwide had been affected by a massive, X-class CME (a coronal mass ejection to civilians). He was to continue on his original orders by making his way to a seaport on the east coast of Italy. Suitable transportation would be waiting.

  Yeah, I’m fine, thanks for asking, he thought. They knew he was alive; they tracked his every movement on the phone. That was all they needed to know. The instructions also contained a time limit. He had to reach the Italian port of Ancona in twelve hours. That didn’t give him much time.

  At a small farm near the Austrian city of Graz, he reluctantly “borrowed” an old Fiat sitting outside a ramshackle barn. He left two gold coins on the steps of the barn as a very healthy rental fee.

  The car was older than he was, and none of the instruments worked. He didn’t imagine the car—let alone whatever fuel remained—would get him all the way, but it beat walking. His priority, as always, was to fulfill the mission. Never did he waver from that objective.

  As he crossed into Italy a couple of hours later, he had to fight the urge to stop and help when he saw the unmistakable wreckage of a sleek, bullet train. He guessed the train had left the track traveling near its top speed: over 400 kilometers per hour. The kinetic energy would have been like a bomb going off. It had demolished most of the idyllic village with which it collided. The unmistakable sounds of people in agony came from across the wreck site, the carnage partially masked by billowing black smoke that came from the ruined buildings and the twisted wreckage.

  While he was a hardened soldier, he was not heartless. Far from it, in fact. Staying focused on getting to the port instead of rendering aid to these poor people took a great deal of effort. His many years of training and experience in the field forced him constantly to compartmentalize and prioritize. His assumption was whatever the mission he was on must be vital. Another thought that kept creeping in was that someone at command had known the CME was imminent. The original instructions on the call had said as much by its specific travel instructions.

  Whatever the reason, his new mission took precedence over everything else.

  It had taken five more days just to cross the Mediterranean on a smelly fishing boat, then navigate down through Saudi Arabia. A suffocating, hot train ride and yet another fishing boat across the Gulf of Oman got him at last to Pakistan. Finally, thirty-six hours after crossing the border, he reached the site outside Peshawar in the Khyber Province.

  He had been frustrated at how long it had taken, but he was still the first of his group to arrive. Now they were all here in this hot, miserable sandbox. One of his senior leaders, a man he had only ever known by the call sign Reaper-3, reported that the patrols were back.

  “Very good. Did they confirm our intel?”

  “Yes, sir, all occupants of the university as well as the village are dead.”

  “Anything on the PBS?” The portable biohazard sampler was one of their nifty gizmos from Praetor command.

  “No, sir. Genghis doesn’t think it’s working. He said the sunspots probably took it out. I ordered the patrol to wear the bio-battle suits, but they’re all suffering from the heat and dehydration now because of them. Those damn things are just too hot to use here.”

  Well, shit, Skybox thought. Genghis was the group’s lead tech, and he would know if the PBS were on the fritz. Apparently not all the cool tech they had was hardened sufficiently. “Reaper, verify that everyone got both rounds of immunizations. Whatever the hell got out of that lab down there could wipe us out, too. We take no chances.”

  Nodding, Reaper turned and walked away. Command had said the vaccines they supplied yesterday would offer protection from the pathogen that had been released from the level 4 facility. The medical university nearby had provided abundant talent for the secret facility. Skybox wasn’t sure if it was one of theirs or someone else’s, but the fact the vaccine arrived so quickly made him think this was their problem. Black sites like these would not be put on domestic soil: usually the more remote the location the better. And this is pretty damn remote. The small village ahead and this large university were all there was for hundreds of kilometers.

  Pulling up the schematics on the tablet, he still could not grasp how a failure could have occurred. When the power failed, there were backup generators, and other fail-saf
es, and multiple levels of redundancies to make sure the facility was self-contained . . . No circulation of air, water or people would leave the building in such a circumstance. Everything went into lock-down. The damn thing’s designed with failure in mind. He dropped the device back to the table and dropped heavily into the hard chair beside it.

  Darkness was settling in, but he had to come up with a plan. Looking over the valley, he could almost see it in his mind’s eye. Closing his eyes, he went over the intel. From the surface, the small building looked like any other structure on the campus. The actual labs were many stories below the non-descript stone-and-brick building. He knew that the most dangerous labs lay in the very bottom levels, buried deep here in the desert. Nothing should have ever gotten out of that building when the power failed.

  Yet something did, and it was killing everything within miles already. Not just killing, either. What it did to the victims before death was unspeakable.

  Chapter Five

  Long before he was Skybox-5, he had been a somewhat reckless teenager living near Chicago. He had a different name then, not that it mattered now. Only one person from that life still existed, and he was trapped in a body with a damaged brain. That man, his friend, would never be able to speak his or any other name again.

  Skybox believed in the mission of P-Guard, or just the ‘Guard’ as they often referred to themselves now. What kept him loyal, though, was the brotherhood, the love for his teammates. It was the only brotherhood he had.

  He had convinced Tommy to join the Army with him when they turned eighteen. They went through basic together and early on had been assigned to the same unit. Skybox had made it up the ranks to become a Ranger and was eventually picked by the CIA to join the Jawbreaker team that went into Afghanistan after 9/11. Tommy had his own unique set of skills and later was also recruited into the paramilitary branch. Once more, he was deployed to the same Area of Operations as his best friend. The two met up as often as possible, and Skybox eventually got Tommy reassigned to his division.

  Skybox had been the one driving the Humvee when they hit the IED outside Fallujah in 2004. While he had come out with only a few cuts, a jagged piece of the passenger-side floorboard had blasted up and through the side of Tommy’s helmet. His friend would never be the same again, and he could never stop blaming himself for it.

  It was around then that the CIA had officially stepped out of Iraq, although not very far. When the unit came under new leadership and started referring to itself as Praetor, they offered him a command level position, an upgrade from P5 to P9. The one other inducement they had offered was to give Tommy the best care possible. His friend had no family, and Skybox couldn’t stand the thought of him being in a VA hospital for the rest of his life. He had signed on, and command had kept their word. Even with whatever was going on out in the world right now, he knew Tommy would be safe and cared for.

  That didn’t mean he understood or agreed with everything P-Group was up to. He hoped to hell they didn’t have anything to do with this lab being here. That would not sit well with him or his men. But why else would his deployment orders have brought him here before shit even went down?

  His eyes were heavy, and the reports were starting to blur when a thin man with vague Asian features walked into the tent. Genghis was command level 2, but right now their tech guy was the one really in charge of figuring out how to fight this microscopic enemy. “Tell me you have an answer,” was Skybox’s greeting.

  “You aren’t going to like it, Sky. We have to pull back and do it now. This pathogen is unlike anything on record. It’s scaring the shit out of all of us.”

  “We’re protected, we have suits and the vaccines. All we need—”

  “No!” the ferocity of the man’s voice surprised them both. “You don’t understand. What we have isn’t working. The men that went on patrol are showing symptoms. They’re not allowed outside the Q-hut.”

  The impact of Genghis’ words hit with the force of a heavyweight boxer. His was not a large squad; he had handpicked everyone in Talon Battlegroup. He had sent those men down there. “Neither the suits nor the vaccines are working?” he asked.

  “The suits didn’t work. Whatever these crazy bastards cooked up down there can get through our filters. It’s probably how it escaped containment when the power failed.” Genghis leaned heavily on the table, looking exhausted. He wiped a stream of sweat from his forehead. “Our research suggests that the vaccines we all took are slowing the pathogen, but they aren’t stopping it. This shit is worse than the Aral Sea incident.”

  Skybox wasn’t familiar with the reference, though he knew the Aral Sea was a mostly landlocked lake in Kazakhstan that had shrunk considerably over the last thirty-plus years. Genghis filled in the blanks. Vozrozhdeniya Island was a speck of an island in the vast Aral Sea—back when it was a sea. The Russians did bioweapon research there as it was thought to be ideally isolated. In 1971, they accidentally released a weaponized version of smallpox into the air. The first person infected was on a ship, nine miles away. The release was later attributed to maintenance personnel failing to change filters in the air scrubbers as needed. The facility also housed samples of modified anthrax spores and bubonic plague. While the number of deaths from the release was unclear, the genie was out of the bottle. And with the shrinking of the Aral Sea, Vozrozhdeniya was no longer an island; it was a peninsula. “Although the labs were closed shortly thereafter, it remains a biological hot zone—one wholly unprotected, so anyone can walk up to the front door. Just like here,” Genghis concluded.

  Skybox yelled for Reaper. Already he could feel his chest tighten and his breathing become shallower. Reaper poked his head in the tent flap. “Yes, sir?”

  “Time to move us back. We need to put a buffer between us and the hot zone. Relocate the base back twenty klicks.”

  “Roger that, sir. Gladly!”

  Chapter Six

  September, the previous year

  Khyber Province, Pakistan

  It had been a month since the solar flare had hit. Skybox had never faced an enemy like this; he felt sure no one had. Military solutions in this situation simply would not work. Yes, they could do a reasonable job of keeping any locals stupid enough to wander into the hot zone from ever leaving again, but the contagion was still spreading.

  He sat on the cot staring through an open tent flap at a beautiful sunset over a distant mountain peak. You did this. You are the enemy. A strange thought. He considered his options. Containment is failing, treatment and research is progressing too slow . . . Communication with the rest of the world is almost nonexistent. Normally, the Guard would have brought in top experts from around the globe. Now, they were cut off. They were on their own.

  The solidly built quarantine rooms, or Q-hut, had been moved just outside the camp’s perimeter. That was not so much for safety but in order to lessen the sounds of agony and torment that were coming from the infected. Talon was losing several men a week to the infection. If they became symptomatic, Genghis’ team separated them out. Everyone knew no one survived once they went into quarantine. Several of his team had taken matters into their own hands: opted for a faster way out. One had wandered into the desert and pulled the pins on several grenades clipped to his battle vest. No one wanted to go through those final stages of the infection.

  Even now, Skybox could hear the growls coming from the direction of Q-hut. This entire assignment was sliding sideways. To make matters worse, P-Group was requesting tissue samples and bodies. His men were not stupid; they felt like lab rats. Dying a stupid death in this miserable place only to wind up as a body in a research lab was not what any of them had signed up for. That, combined with the rumors of the rest of the world going to shit, had made keeping anyone focused on the mission nearly impossible.

  Skybox knew that he was a good soldier, maybe even one of the best. He followed orders, never failed on a mission and above all, was very adaptable. No plan survives contact with the enemy; every
soldier knew that. But this mission was tossing everything out the window. Everything had been reactionary, and nothing had been remotely effective. He needed answers. P-Guard Command wanted a military option. If he didn’t give them one, they would make the decision for him. Right now it was, at best, a war of attrition for his Talon squad. If he kept losing men and pulling back, it was just a matter of time before the end. The virus would be out, and all would be lost.

  “That would be a big mistake,” an aggravated soldier said as he looked out over a terrain filled primarily with sand and misery.

  “Diesel, would you care to elaborate?”

  “Sorry, sir. It’s just that dropping an incendiary bomb on the target would likely just disperse the agent even more. Sure, you can kill whatever is still in that building, but this little bugger is out. It’s breeding, multiplying and actively searching for new hosts. It’s a fucking plague, sir.”

  “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “It’s the truth. It’s a fact, and no one studying this pathogen will tell you anything differently.”

  His second-in-command was being insubordinate, but that did not mean he was incorrect. Skybox’s piercing gray eyes held the man’s glare. “Diesel, I need answers. The containment failed, the protective suits failed, the vaccine failed.” He swallowed down the thick taste of bile and stared out across the barren wasteland. “You make a good case not to carpet-bomb the place back into the Stone Age. But shit . . . the hot zone keeps expanding, and our job is not to just keep backing up. We’re almost fifty klicks from the lab now. Give me some options.”