The Cannibal Virus

by Anthony DeCosmo

  That is what made his task force's cover so complete. As far as the accountants were concerned, Archangel was merely a component of the larger Opposing Force — or OpFor — operating at Irwin. More specifically the Eleventh Armored Cavalry, also known as the Blackhorse Regiment. They were tasked with simulating enemy combatants so as to prepare the army for America's potential adversaries. Indeed, the massive grounds at Fort Irwin included mock villages built to resemble real-world places.

  In any case, Task Force Archangel was billed as a special red team that conducted penetration testing in a variety of settings. In truth, they existed to face and defeat unconventional threats, ranging from downed extraterrestrials to various manmade nightmares. The type of threats the government did not want the public to be aware of, usually because the government had created the threat in the first place.

  The Darwin facility occupied an isolated a corner of the sprawling grounds, but the airfield was one element of the greater facility that Archangel accessed on a regular basis.

  Gant hurried toward a Bombardier Learjet 45 waiting on the runway. Behind him followed Specialist Jupiter Wells with a backpack full of equipment. Next came Dr. Annabelle Stacy in BDUs a size too big and struggling with two suitcases and a backpack of her own.

  Major Gant spoke into a cell phone as he walked. The closer he came to the plane, the louder he spoke, so as to be heard over the spooling engines.

  "Jean, yes, I think it will be several days, maybe a week."

  Informing his wife of his departure was a shallow courtesy. There had been plenty of occasions when he disappeared for days without explanation or warning. But she did not question, she did not wonder. She simply accepted and went on with her routine of tending the garden, cleaning the house, and the occasional cards night with friends.

  Yes, he understood how his job had turned their marriage into a farce. He knew she remained faithful, he knew she still loved him, and he knew that this life was killing her one day at a time, like dead leaves falling from an autumn tree.

  The entity they had found a few months ago at Red Rock had showed that to him.

  He cared. He wished things could be different. But Major Thom Gant was trapped by duty and training. He knew no other way. Not so long ago, Thom had had a friend who had tried to force him to break the cycle, but he had been lost in that Hell hole deep beneath a mountain in Pennsylvania.

  Besides, the more dangerous the mission, the more likely he would not return, and that might be the one thing that could free Jean from her prison.

  He could have told her he was sorry but it made no difference.

  She said, "I love you," out of instinct and he responded in kind before hanging up the phone, slipping it in a pocket, and focusing all his attention on the mission to come.

  A growling engine and the squeal of two tires delayed boarding as a high-performance motorcycle skidded to a stop near the ramp. The helmetless rider was a tall, thin fellow wearing round glasses and a little stubble beneath his nose that might have been a mustache.

  Sal Galati quickly dismounted his ride, offered a casual salute, and said, "Major Gant, request permission to join, you know, the mission and all."

  Gant knew why Sal wanted to come along; he and Wells were good friends to the point that they incessantly chattered like junior high kids on a field trip whenever the team traveled. However, he had already added a third person to what he had originally planned as a two-man insertion.

  "Request denied. You will be a part of the follow-up team."

  "Then, sir, um, I'm the best shot in the unit and you're headed to an open environment. Maybe I should be going instead?"

  Sal had a point. Despite his glasses he was, in fact, the best sniper in the detachment. That, however, did not change anything.

  "Negative, soldier. We are executing a high-altitude jump and Specialist Wells has aerospace physiological training. I promise, if there is anything worth shooting you will receive a call. Now stand aside."

  Galati reluctantly moved. Wells gave him a fist bump as they passed.

  While Gant appreciated their camaraderie, he found it somewhat annoying. He hoped their friendship would not someday get in the way of an objective. As for himself, Thom felt it best to keep his distance from the men, considering he might need to order them to their death at any given moment. Like the brass above, Major Gant understood that while this was a highly trained and unique unit, they were also expendable.

  Sergeant Ben "Biggy" Franco met them onboard. This large brute of a man walked with a distinct limp, the result of a Red Rock denizen having eaten a chunk of his leg. He had undergone several reconstructive surgeries and while he would eventually recover, he was somewhat limited in his duties.

  He also seemed limited in another way. Prior to the Red Rock mission, Gant had found Franco brash and disruptive, the result of the sergeant's obvious racism toward his black commanding officer.

  During the Red Rock mission three months ago, the entity in the bowels of that subterranean complex had reached into the minds of each of the invading soldiers, finding their weak spots. In Franco's case, the entity had turned his prejudices into a weapon, tricking the sergeant into killing two black members of the team. If Campion had not shot Franco and left him for dead, Wells and Gant might have been next.

  Ironically, later in that mission a well-placed rifle round fired by Franco saved the day.

  Since then, the sergeant would not look Gant in the eye despite assurances that no one held those actions against him. After all, others on the team had been similarly controlled. Indeed, it turned out that the monster trapped in that underground maze had deceived and manipulated many people over the course of many years.

  It seemed to Thom Gant that while the mission at Red Rock had ended months ago, they would be dealing with the consequences for years.

  "Major, we're loaded and ready to go," Franco reported. "We'll be in Hawaii in a few hours."

  Dr. Stacy — huffing, puffing, and sweating — followed inside and asked, "How exactly is this going to get us to Hawaii? Operational range on this has to be, what, nineteen hundred miles?"

  Gant smiled and told her, "We have made a few modifications."

  * * *

  General Albert Friez followed a little man with glasses into a corner room at the National Reconnaissance Office.

  The name "National Reconnaissance Office" sounded innocuous enough, but in truth the NRO coordinated intelligence from all of the United States' spy satellites.

  General Friez wore his new blue dress uniform, complete with all the old badges and medals earned during his distinguished career in the U.S. Army, and while protocol might suggest otherwise, he kept his cap on tight despite being indoors. To General Albert Friez, the uniform was the person. He felt it critical that subordinates saw the medals, the ribbons, and the rank without a glimpse of the human being underneath. This was not due to vanity or arrogance, but because discipline and respect lead to efficiency and results. He could not afford to be seen as a man. That was a luxury long ago discarded.

  "This is what we've got on such short notice," the short man with the glasses told Friez as he turned on a rectangular light table and laid out a series of photographs. "Still, I don't see anything atypical in these images."

  General Friez stroked his thin mustache as he leaned over the table. The light emanating from beneath the black-and-white photographs provided the only illumination in the room.

  "This is all you have? Black and white?"

  "Yes, General. The only thing we had on an appropriate trajectory this soon was one of the old KH-11 birds. We're working on other options but based on these images, that doesn't appear necessary."

  "I thought all of the Keyhole assets dropped out of orbit years ago."

  The NRO representative — who wore a name tag identifying himself as "Springer" — answered, "I think the bosses figured it was helpful to have a satellite in orbit that everyone thinks burned up."

  "They
could have picked a better choice. I'm looking at images from a satellite that dates back to the Carter administration."

  The man with the glasses dressed in a plain white shirt with a plain black tie did not respond. Instead, he shuffled a trio of photographs around the light table. Those photographs depicted scenes from Tioga Island in the South Pacific taken by an aging spy satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit. That orbit resulted in shadows, and shadows helped discern ground images.

  Using a pen as a pointer, the analyst started to direct the general's attention, but Friez brushed him aside. This was the not the first satellite photograph he had analyzed.

  "People, here and here," he said, more to himself than to Springer. "Groups of a few here, maybe a dozen over there. What's that? That's the airstrip, right?"

  "Yes, General. But it looks kind of small for a resort island. It would be tough to land any heavies there."

  "Not that type of resort, son. The only people invited to this island are those with their own transportation."

  While the images were of relatively low resolution compared to what the general had come to expect from the NRO, they worked well enough to capture what appeared to be just another day at someone's private resort. However, trees — mainly coconut palms and banyans — covered most of that tiny patch of land. That meant something could be hiding away from the bird's eyes.

  Still, Friez concentrated on the information at hand. That information suggested several dozen people still wandered the resort grounds. In fact, it appeared a rather large crowd had gathered around a plane that had recently landed. No doubt another of the transient celebrities who made frequent stops at one of the world's rarest places: a "private" island that was literally private.

  One nation or another claimed just about every square foot of real estate on planet Earth. But not Tioga. From what he had been able to find out so far, several rich partners owned the place and had crafted it into a secluded getaway. The perfect spot for a senator to meet a mistress during taxpayer-funded trips to the Pacific Rim.

  "So what have we got?" Friez spoke, again, more to himself. "No sign of a disaster, people, a few small cars, a plane, and I don't see any structures that aren't intact. So why is it no one answers the phone on Tioga Island?"

  "There is a volcano," Springer said and pointed to a photograph depicting a steaming mound on the northwestern tip of the island. "Could that have something to do with it?"

  "No sign of an eruption," Friez said as he studied the photo. "Besides, if anyone on Tioga was concerned about that volcano, you would not see all these people milling about. Still," Friez said, leaning in close to the photos, "there's no response on satellite phones or radios. At first I thought that meant there was no one left to answer the calls."

  "Based on what we can see here, General, there are plenty of people on the island."

  "Then that means the calls aren't getting through." He stood straight, looked at Springer, and said, "Call me a pessimist, but that tells me that someone or something is jamming those transmissions."

  4

  A huge C-17 Globemaster shared the otherwise lonely sky with a bright half-moon, both floating over what resembled a solid bed of white clouds that created the illusion of a firm surface where, in fact, another thirty thousand feet separated the gigantic cargo carrier from the Pacific Ocean. Despite its size, the vast emptiness between that phony floor of clouds and the outer rim of space made the craft appear miniscule.

  A fake manifest indicated a cargo haul of fifteen master pallets of assorted clothing and gear destined for troops in South Korea. Instead of the thousands of pounds of equipment officially stowed on board, the big, empty, and pressurized cargo area carried four members of Task Force Archangel.

  Each wore a black polypropylene body suit and a full-face helmet. Three of the four were connected via plastic umbilical cords to a console from which they drew 100 percent pure oxygen, part of the necessity of purging all nitrogen from their bloodstreams.

  The fourth — Sergeant Franco — kept his visor up and was not attached to the console. The injury to his leg meant limited duty.

  Dr. Stacy sat between Major Gant and Jupiter Wells, where the trio had spent the last half hour preparing their bodies for the big jump.

  Annabelle Stacy had lived quite a lot for a woman still under thirty years old. Yes, much of that living had been in classrooms and laboratories, stops along the way to each of her three PhDs. Yet those studies had also sent her around the world, to some exotic as well as many not-so-exotic locales, oftentimes traveling and staying in less-than-first-class accommodations.

  A stint in service to Doctors Without Borders had taken her across the Sudanese desert on board a bullet-hole-ridden Cessna and she had endured weeks of travel through some of the roughest parts of Mexico in search of Toltec ruins.

  Go out there and live, her father had told her on many occasions. Archangel gave her exactly that chance, plus the opportunity — as promised by General Friez — to see things that most people on the planet would not believe, all while working to keep America — the world — safe.

  Of course she had come to realize that most of what the world needed to be kept safe from apparently came from the other types of people with whom Friez worked. It seemed Archangel's primary role was to wait around for someone to screw up and then clean up the mess.

  She had yet to participate in an actual field mission, in part because General Friez had decided to rest the team for an extended period, apparently due to a particularly nasty job a few months back at some place in Pennsylvania.

  Just as she had started to worry that this "exciting" new job differed from a corporate cubicle only in that her office was situated underground, along came this trip. In the span of a few hours she had moved from that boring subterranean office to a massive cargo plane cutting through the night six miles above the Pacific Ocean.

  Franco grumbled, "Ten minutes."

  She swiveled her head around at the sound of his voice.

  Stacy found Franco a strange man. On the one hand, he was big, tended to be loud, and had already made more than his fair share of sexist, racist, raunchy, and just plain stupid jokes in the short time she had known him. Exactly the type of behavior his brutish nature would suggest.

  At the same time, however, he came across as somewhat restrained, particularly whenever he was around Wells or Major Gant. Almost shy or embarrassed. That puzzled her, because if the stories she had overheard were true, it had been Sergeant Franco who had saved the day in Pennsylvania.

  Her head turned fast in the other direction as Gant answered Franco with a flat, "I know."

  Ah, yes, another puzzle. Major Thom Gant. She knew him to be stubborn and one glance told her he was tough as nails. At first she had thought his reluctance to share all the secrets of the Darwin facility came from chauvinism or a general dislike of any newcomer to the Archangel fraternity. However, Colonel Thunder had suggested a different motivation.

  She thought about that. She wondered if Thunder was right.

  Then she thought about Franco again and how such a loud, boisterous man could become so quiet so fast. She considered—

  Stop it, Annabelle. Your mind is racing a thousand miles per second because you're nervous. Just take in the oxygen, one easy breath at a time.

  She knew she was not a soldier, regardless of what the jumpsuit and gear might suggest and despite all her training in preparation for joining the team.

  Yes, she had practiced high-altitude low-opening jumps, but this was not practice; this was her first real mission and she was going to jump practically from orbit, free-fall for miles, and land on a tiny little island in the middle of the world's largest body of water.

  Jumping from this height meant staving off hypoxia, not to mention the extreme cold at such a high altitude. She could literally die before hitting the ground. Indeed, that was why Wells had been Gant's choice to come along. Wells had aerospace physiological training, meaning he would watch the
jumpers for problems caused by the altitude.

  Well, at least before we jump.

  Her mind picked up speed again, retracing previous thoughts from new angles. As she sat there and felt the pure oxygen rush through her lungs like a cleansing agent she wondered exactly why she was a part of the whole thing. She held three PhDs and was still in her twenties. Her social and political leanings were so estranged from the military environment that she figured her superiors considered her the biggest security risk on the team. Annabelle Stacy knew she could command just about any post at any university, corporation, think tank, or research center. Yet she had accepted the offer of civilian scientific consultant to Task Force Archangel. Why?

  She considered. Sure, she could be studying the melting polar ice caps, researching the medicinal treasure chest of the rain forest, or exploring the subatomic secrets of a supercollider, but Archangel promised to show her things few people knew existed.

  But if you're going to get to see those things, Annabelle, she thought, forcing her rambling mind to focus, you'll have to get stop being so damned nervous.

  Stacy grew determined to chase away any fear of the coming jump. She would focus on the facts, using logic and treating the whole thing like a procedure. No different than baking a cake or setting up an experiment.

  "Hey, you okay?" Franco's voice cut through her thoughts. "It's okay to be scared, you know. Most chicks don't really like jumping out of—"

  "I used to skydive for fun," she replied with the type of confidence she knew was needed to stop Franco's annoying jabs.

  He trumped her, however.

  "From outer space, honey? This ain't some Cessna you're jumping from on a sorority dare."

  Gant interceded, "Sergeant Franco, establish satellite contact with base. I want to check in before the jump."

  Stacy did not mind. She was nervous, and Franco could sense it. And he was the type to keep hitting the same nerve. Apparently his bashfulness was reserved for others.