The Poseidon Initiative

by Rick Chesler

“Not now. We’re not out of the woods yet ourselves.”

  “What’s happening?” President Carmichael demanded.

  “Mr. President,” Tanner returned, “it’s likely that the explosion on the barge was a deliberate attempt to expose you — and every one of us onboard this yacht — to the same STX neurotoxin that Hofstad has been using in their latest run of terror attacks.”

  The president’s eyes were wide with fear. “Give me some details.”

  Tanner laid it out for him, forgoing the use of formal titles for the sake of expediency. “The barge may have been on a timer to detonate so that a remaining tank of STX would blow, becoming aerosolized and disperse wherever it was.”

  “And it just so happened to be right next to my yacht.” No one replied, so Carmichael continued. “You mean to say…” He struggled to formulate his words. “…that what happened to those people in Miami, in Honolulu…”

  The president seemed to buckle under his own weight and had to be supported by two Secret Service agents, one of whom started into a coughing jag as he did so.

  “Unfortunately that is the situation we seem to be facing,” Tanner replied, “but there is hope.”

  The president looked up from the deck into Tanner’s eyes. “What hope? Those victims died within minutes.”

  “My OUTCAST team has been working in conjunction with a scientist…” Liam looked over at Tanner as he heard his voice catch. The STX taking hold, or something else, something triggered by the mention of Jasmijn? The interruption was brief, however. “…and an antidote to this particular STX formula has been developed in the Netherlands.”

  “Netherlands?” Carmichael erupted. “What good does that do us? We’ve got maybe ten or fifteen minutes to live!” At this, a few of the passengers overheard the president’s raised voice and began to panic, telling the others that the air was contaminated with some kind of poison.

  Tanner took a step closer to the POTUS. “Stay calm, please. Our team was dispatched hours ago with the antidote. I’ve just been in contact with my base of operations and they are en route now from Portland International.”

  “How soon until they get here?” Carmichael demanded. He pulled at his shirt collar.

  “Should be about five minutes, Mr. President.”

  “Five…minutes…” Carmichael muttered, lost in thought. Then suddenly he came back with, “How will they get out here? Do they know where to go?”

  Tanner smiled. “They know where to go, and let’s just say that they’re trained to find a way.”

  Around them they could hear labored breathing as the STX began to manifest itself. Tanner spun away from the president and contacted Danielle again on their comm system.

  “Can I get an updated sitrep? Dozens infected here including Liam, myself, and the Chief.” The Chief was the codename they used for the president.

  Danielle’s voice came back sounding grim. “Tanner, bad news. Naomi, Stephen and Dante are in Boothbay, but they’ve been detained by law enforcement. “

  FIFTY-TWO

  Boothbay Harbor, Maine

  “Let us through. We’re trying to save the life of President Carmichael!” Stephen Shah pleaded with the line of cops who guarded the most direct route down to the waterfront. There were other ways to get to the harbor that the OUTCAST operators could have taken to skirt the law enforcement presence, but none of them would allow them to reach the yacht in time. Instead they had tried to sneak through the line of policemen, each of the three of them carrying one third of the antidote in case only one of them could make it through. But none of them had.

  Then they had all been subject to a physical search, and because all of them were found with the same fluid-filled syringes, they were suspected as terrorists. As one cop started to cuff Dante’s hands behind his back, the ex-Secret Service agent eyed Shah. They had to do something or the president would die within minutes. Tanner would die. Liam…

  As the cop bent down to cinch the cuffs on Dante’s wrists, the field operative smashed his elbow into the officer’s nose, shattering it into a fountain of blood. Dante took off running down the hill toward the waterfront. Another cop standing next to the fallen one raised his service pistol to shoot, and Shah gave a karate chop to his arm, sending the weapon careening to the ground. “Run, Dante!”

  And run he did, maintaining an erratic zig-zag pattern down the hill, a couple of shots from other officers missing wildly. On the way down he paused to roll in front of a tree for cover here, a metal trash can, there. Still, a phalanx of cops took off after him while two more wrestled Shah to the ground. Nay stood cuffed in the hands of a female officer, saying nothing, but observing everything. She remained very calm.

  “We’re for real,” she said to the cop who had her in custody. “The syringes we carry are full of the antidote that can save the lives of all the people infected by the nerve agent the terrorists used.”

  The woman’s reply was icily detached. “Until that can be verified, we have no choice but to detain you.”

  Just then a squad car drove up and the uniformed driver jumped out. He walked over to the line of officers. “You have three detainees with chemicals?”

  A cop approached him and pointed down the hill, then to Stephen and Naomi.

  “I just received verified orders from the Secret Service to not only let them go, but to escort them personally to the president’s yacht. Let’s move!’

  Stephen and Naomi were put into the back of the police car with their backpacks. Stephen wondered for a moment if this was a ploy to get them into the car without a fight, but he figured they wouldn’t let them have their bags if that was the case. With sirens and lights on, they barreled down the hill until they saw Dante, sprinting across a walkway to the water’s edge. He looked around frantically, as if deciding his next move. He looked back, saw the cop car, then began scanning the water in front of him as though he was planning on diving in.

  “Let me talk to him,” Stephen urged the two cops up front, one of whom had picked up the microphone to the squad car’s PA system. He stretched the microphone on its cord to the back seat where Shah clutched it.

  “Dante! Dante it’s us, Stephen and Nay. It’s okay! They got the message. They’re giving us an escort! Jump in.” Dante began running to the police car.

  “How do we get out to the yacht?” Naomi squinted into the sun to look at the majestic vessel still at anchor in the harbor.

  “Police boat at a dock up ahead,” the officer driving answered.

  “I see the dock but I don’t see a boat.” Dante pointed ahead.

  The other officer turned around, holding up the radio transmitter. “It’s on the way. In fact…” He faced front again and looked out to the right. “…here it comes now.”

  A rigid hull inflatable boat with a metal wheelhouse sped toward the dock.

  The squad car driver pulled up to the dock and addressed the trio of operators in his backseat. “Go, go, go! They’re waiting.”

  Stephen had the door open and was outside the car before the officer finished his sentence, with Naomi and Dante close on his heels. Each wore a small backpack. They ran to the dock, arriving just as the boat pulled alongside. It was manned by two officers, one driving and one on deck. The one driving spun it around expertly so that it was next to the dock but facing out ready to take off again.

  The deck officer waved them aboard while the boat’s engines idled, the water churned to foamy froth by the pilot’s skilled maneuvering while he waited for his unexpected passengers to board.

  The three OUTCAST operators jumped aboard and the deck officer urged them to grab a handhold as the pilot accelerated. Seconds later they were hydroplaning, the twin two hundred horsepower outboard motors pushing them along at almost sixty miles per hour toward the stricken yacht full of VIPs.

  Stephen saw the boat pilot pick up his radio transmitter and say something into it. The engine noise was too loud to let him hear the words, but he guessed he was alerting the yacht’
s bridge that they were dropping off passengers who would deliver the antidote.

  The pilot brought the police craft to the yacht’s rear boarding ladder, at the top of which waited a couple of Secret Service agents. Dante, Naomi and Stephen climbed up onto the yacht.

  “Stephen!” Shah heard Tanner’s voice and whipped his head to the right.

  “Tanner!”

  The OUTCAST leader waved a hand. “This way. Hurry!”

  He began to run, Dante and Naomi behind him, the Secret Service guys escorting them along the way.

  Tanner was waiting in a knot of people, at the center of which was President Carmichael. The leader of the free world knelt on the deck, hunched over like a sick person. And sick he was. Tanner pointed to him. “Him first.”

  “Do we have a medic?” Stephen ripped off his backpack and unzipped it. He removed one of the syringes — each containing a single human dose according to Jasmijn’s final instructions, and held it up.

  “We have a ship’s doctor,” one of the Secret Service men said, indicating a tall, very harried-looking man with close-cropped black hair, wearing a white doctor’s coat. He came forward.

  “I can administer the shots,” he said, looking Stephen squarely in the eye. He spoke rapidly but clearly. “I understand time elapsed is critical at this point. We’ve already lost some people. Any special instructions?” he asked, eyeballing the syringe and tapping it with a finger to eliminate air bubbles.

  “Bicep shot,” Stephen returned.

  The physician nodded and set a medical bag down next to the POTUS. “Give me space, please.” People backed out of the way as he rolled up the president’s sleeve and swabbed it with an antiseptic wipe. He explained what he was doing to the president, but Carmichael was rapidly deteriorating and had no coherent response.

  “Hopefully this stuff works,” he said. And then he stuck the hypodermic needle into the arm of the president.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Boothbay Harbor, Maine

  Tanner, Liam, Stephen, Naomi and Dante huddled together watching the president. All around them people were dying or close to it. The sounds of dry heaving rent the air along with the smell of vomit. Multiple people were having seizures while those close to them did their best to provide comfort, knowing they were probably next. President Carmichael’s condition seemed to Tanner to be unchanged since receiving the antidote a couple of minutes earlier, but there was no point in waiting to see if the antidote was effective. It was all they had, whether it worked or not.

  The OUTCAST team distributed the antidote syringes they had — minus five for themselves— to the Secret Service agents, who wasted no time in shooting themselves with the hopefully life-saving antidote. Then — because we can’t help others if we don’t help ourselves, kind of like putting the oxygen mask on your kids first in an airplane, they said — they passed out the syringes to the rest of the people aboard the yacht.

  Several minutes later one of the president’s agents returned from the boat’s upper deck and reported that all of the doses had been administered, but that many had already died. Naomi, Stephen and Dante, who had arrived after the cloud of STX had dispersed, reported feeling strange and physically unstable, as if they were about to be sick but weren’t yet. But Tanner and Liam were incapacitated. They could still talk and hadn’t yet descended into the worst depths of symptoms that STX had to offer, but they now sat on the deck, legs stretched out before them, lacking the energy to stand.

  “How’s the president?” Tanner asked, eyes looking a bit glazed. He knew that the fate of the president over the next few minutes would mirror his own. Dante looked over at Carmichael, who was now holding his head up. The POTUS was sort of the canary in the coal mine everyone watched, since it was he who had received the antidote first.

  “Looks a little better.” Dante sounded a little surprised.

  “I feel a little better!” Carmichael announced without warning. Immediately a clutch of agents descended on him, asking him if he was okay. “No really, I feel better,” he insisted. “The headache is gone! That damnable headache!”

  Soon after, other reports of healing began to trickle in. Headaches subsiding, strength returning, seizures abated…Still, no one wanted to put a hex on things by voicing the hope: it was working.

  There were still a lot of dead. Dozens. A couple of more souls succumbed who did not respond at all to the antidote, those who were nearly expired when it was administered.

  But overall, the members of OUTCAST could see, the tide was starting to turn. The antidote was working. From beyond the grave, Dr. Jasmijn Rotmensen had made a difference. Within a few minutes, the president was standing and demanding a briefing on the situation in Boothbay in preparation for a live press conference. His people protested the idea, but he brushed them away, insisting that the American people be updated on the developments.

  The Secret Service agents were feeling well enough to canvass the yacht from top to bottom in order to ensure there were no terrorists that had somehow snuck aboard, or devices that had been implanted. The barge, meanwhile, had sunk to the bottom of Boothbay Harbor, a stream of bubbles breaking the surface marking its location.

  In the midst of it all, Tanner Wilson rose to his feet. He reached out an arm and pulled Liam Reilly to a standing position. Stephen Shah, Naomi Washington and Dante Alvarez crowded around their associates, ready to support them physically should their legs prove unsteady.

  But it wasn’t necessary.

  They stood their ground.

  “Remarkable!” Liam said at length. “I was feeling way under the weather for a while there, and now I feel almost fine.”

  “Almost fine?” Dante asked, concern creeping into his voice.

  “Well yeah, maybe like I have a cold or something, still lingering. But even that feels like it’s receding. For a while there…” He looked at Tanner who nodded.

  “I didn’t think I was going to make it, either.” The leader of OUTCAST looked over at the president, who was busy conferring with his inner circle, and then around at the yacht. Clusters of people gathered in knots, consoling those who had lost loved ones or friends, many of them also marveling at the transformation they’d experienced due to Jasmijn’s antidote.

  Then he turned back around to his team. “Jasmijn.” They shared a moment of silence for the marine scientist who had saved them all at the expense of her own life. Then he placed a call to Danielle. She answered immediately and he updated her on the developments.

  “Media reports are just hitting the wires now,” she responded. “Ten dead on the Boothbay waterfront walkway, an unknown number on the yacht. All terrorists reported as deceased. Good work, Tanner. Now what?”

  The former FBI agent stared out across the water, wondering what other secrets the ocean held. But for now, he had learned enough of them.

  “Now we go home.”

  EPILOGUE

  Rabat, Morocco

  Mustapha Aziz Samir, the leader of Hofstad, stared out across the Atlantic Ocean from his table at a seaside cafe. He dined alone, preferring solitude after the failure of his pet project, the Poseidon Initiative. It had been a mistake to gamble all of their precious STX on one high-stakes mission. He should have listened to the advisor who had recommended against this course, recommending instead that he hold onto the nerve agent, keeping it in reserve for many years into the future, doling out deadly attacks in fits and starts according to the needs of the organization. But he had disregarded that advice. He had gambled and lost.

  Nevertheless, the initiative wasn’t a complete failure, he told himself as he watched the pleasure boats come and go from the Bouregreg Marina. Much had been accomplished. The President of the United States of America had been made extremely ill, his nation thrown into a panic as several of his guests aboard his fancy personal yacht were killed. Three other attacks, too. The effort wasn’t too shabby, he mused, now watching the gulls vie for table scraps from a family of tourists two tables over.

>   Even so, his demands had been willfully disregarded. The U.S. embassy in the Hague remained open, never having closed for a single minute. He took consolation in the fact that this decision had cost the blood of American citizens.

  And there would be other chances for retribution. Other opportunities for terror.

  His server returned. Was he ready to order? He had forgotten to even look at the menu. Samir quickly perused it before handing it to the server with a smile.

  “Perfect. I will have the Shellfish Delight.”