by Tom Clancy
Seybold had a bare moment to register the damage. The rest of the guards were advancing past the sprawl of bodies, their weapons stuttering, and it was his job to stop them.
He took a deep breath of air, slung the Benelli over his back, then gripped his baby VVRS in his hands and fired a tight burst. To his left and right, hunkered close to the walls on either side of the exploded steel door, his companions were also firing their weapons.
More guards went down, and then another came running forward in a kind of wrathful, aggressive hurtle, yelling at the top of his lungs, his gun blazing away. A couple of feet to Seybold’s left, Beatty grunted and was slammed back against the wall, smearing it with blood as he sank to the floor. Then bullets rippled from one of the other men’s VVRS rifles, and the charging guard spun around in a circle and fell dead, his weapon slipping from his fingers, clutching his chest with both hands.
That left two of them. One dove onto his belly to present a low target, skidding over the blood of his companions, sustained fire pouring from his weapon. Carlysle and Newell trained their guns on him and fired in concert, a brief chop. These were men whose partnership went back, and it showed in their expert performance. The guard jerked once on the floor and then ceased to move.
A single guard remained now, and he was unwilling to commit suicide. He turned down the hall, running, his uniform splashed with blood that may or may not have been his own.
“We gonna let him take off?” Carlysle asked Seybold.
Seybold looked at him. The question had sounded almost distant through the loud throbbing pulse beat in his ears.
“The son of a bitch isn’t important,” he said. Seybold rushed over to Beatty, on the floor now, propped into a sitting position with his back to the wall. Barnes and Newell were already huddled around him, getting their first-aid kits out of their packs. Perry had raised his helmet visor.
“How bad?” Seybold asked. His eyes went from Beatty’s bloodied shoulder to his face.
“Feels like a slug drilled through my arm, but I think I’ll be all right,” Beatty said. He licked his lips. “Can’t say I love it, though.”
Seybold breathed and nodded. “We’ll get you patched up,” he said.
“Wait,” Eric Oh said. “That one. No, no, you’re pulling the wrong disk. Count two up. Okay, that’s it.”
Ricci slid the gem case from the cabinet and turned it over in his hand so the print on its index label faced his helmet’s digital camera lens.
Silence over the comlink.
“Doc ...”
“I need you to slip it into your wearable,” Eric said. “Send me its contents so I can have a look.”
Ricci bit his lip. He could hear gunfire somewhere in the direction of the blown security door.
Reaching down to the miniature computer on his belt, he ejected its CD-ROM tray, set in the disk, and pushed the tray shut. Then he hit the preset UpLink intranet key and uploaded the disk’s contents as a wireless E-mail attachment.
Tortured seconds passed.
“Well?”
“The data’s coming through now, I’m going to scan it on-line, give me a chance to—”
Ricci’s heart knocked. “Well ... ?”
“My God,” Eric said. “Oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
His SIG-Sauer P220 in his hand should the enemy be waiting near its door, Kuhl rode the pneumatic elevator up from the biofarm sublevel. The underground passages he’d taken had enabled him to bypass the breached security entrance on Earthglow’s main floor. When the tubular car opened, he would be in the microencapsulation section, a few turns of the hall from the room that was the intruders’ certain objective.
He did not know the size of their invasion force or how far they had penetrated. If he determined that they could be prevented from accomplishing their mission, he would. But his survival had always rested on being a swift contingency planner.
The elevator stopped.
Outside in the corridor, Simmons and Rosander heard the whisper of the arriving car and raised their VVRS weapons.
Kuhl caught a glimpse of them before its door fully opened. His edge over them in speed might have been narrow. In his merciless capacity to kill without restraint, he was a creature alone.
Simmons was on the left of the elevator, and as he prepared to give its passenger a warning, Kuhl pivoted toward him, stepped in close under his gun arm, and brought his own pistol up to Simmons’s side, pushing the muzzle between his fourth rib and underarm, where he knew the straps of his soft ballistic vest would leave an unprotected gap. Three shots of Teflon-coated .45ACP rounds against his body, three muffled blats of sound as the snout of the gun discharged through layers of cold-weather clothing, and Simmons went down to the floor.
With the man who’d come out of the elevator pressed close against Simmons, Rosander had been unable to do anything but hold his fire, fearing he might accidentally hit his teammate. But as Simmons crumpled, he brought his weapon to bear.
He was almost fast enough.
In a streak, Kuhl spun toward Rosander on the ball of his foot, moved in at him, grabbed his wrist behind the outthrust VVRS, and twisted it sharply around, wrenching it, simultaneously slamming his powerful forearm up under Rosander’s chin to crush his windpipe.
His eyes rolling back in their sockets, Rosander sagged back against the wall and fell.
Kuhl crouched to take the VVRS from his hand, heard movement behind him, turned again to the left, in the direction of the laboratory where the inhibitor formulas were stored. His side sticky and wet from point-blank bullet wounds, the intruder Kuhl had shot still clung to life and was weakly raising himself onto his elbows, fingers fumbling for the grip of his own weapon. Kuhl bent, shoved his knee into the man’s diaphragm to crush the air out of him, lifted his helmet visor, and, looking directly down into his eyes, finished him with a shot to the center of his forehead.
Rising then, he heard footsteps down the hall.
Another enemy in winter camouflage was rapidly approaching from the lab area, his weapon ready to fire.
Hearing gunshots down the corridor to his right, knowing Ricci desperately needed more time in the room behind him, Nichols turned and rushed toward the sound of the reports.
All at a glance he saw a man he recognized as the Wildcat standing above Simmons’s blood-soaked form, saw Rosander slumped near the wall behind them, and with a surge of horror opened fire on the killer.
Cold-eyed, Kuhl triggered the VVRS he had taken from Rosander, aiming low, a right-to-left sweep of the barrel.
Nichols’s legs gave out underneath him, blood splashing from both knees. And then he felt the floor hard against his back.
Kuhl fired three accurate bursts into him, saw the body quiver as fifteen bullets ripped into it, and for an instant considered advancing farther up the hall.
His teeth clicked. Footsteps were coming from the penetration site behind him, four sets, the sound of their heavy boots distinct from those of his own men. His squad had apparently been held off, and he did not know how many more intruders were ahead of him.
Kuhl took an instant to consider and then made his decision.
He turned toward the elevator, pressed the call button, stepped through the opening, and retreated.
“... oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
Ricci’s face was bathed in sweat.
“Talk fast, Doc,” he said. “Have we got what we need?”
“We have it, yes. We have it, we have it. Several different types of inhibitors. Stored as computer models rather than pills. Novelty cures for novelty viruses. They had no reason to preproduce them, not physically, and they didn’t. But Ricci, what we’ve stumbled onto is beyond what we expected. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of activators. The virus must be infinitely mutable. A potential doomsday bug, and we’ve found—”
Ricci’s attention broke away from whatever Oh was telling him. He’d heard the thud of what might have been pistol sho
ts down the hall. Two, maybe three. A fourth. Fairly close by. Then, perhaps five seconds afterward, several controlled, staccato bursts from a semiautomatic weapon that sounded like a VVRS.
He turned abruptly, ran across the room, through the door, and into the corridor. Looked left, then right.
No sign of Nichols in either direction.
His heart malleting in his chest again, he bounded down the hall, swung a corner past the microencapsulation lab, putting on speed. This was where the shots had come from.
Another turn, and then Ricci was met by the scene near the bottleneck elevator. It was a sight he would remember always.
Nichols was on the floor between him and the elevator door, sprawled on his back. Simmons and Rosander were down at the elevator itself. Seybold crouched over Nichols, cradling his head in his arms, the helmet off. Barnes, Newell, and Perry squatted over the other two fallen men, examining them, checking the severity of their wounds. And then Barnes looked up from the bodies at the sound of his approach, saw the question on his face, and shook his head no.
No.
Ricci dashed forward and knelt beside Seybold.
“How bad?” he asked.
Seybold glanced up from the young man in his arms, met Ricci’s gaze, held it. His long, pained look told him everything.
Then, weakly, Nichols’s hand came up from his side, and Ricci felt its touch on his arm. “Sir ... I ...” The thin, dry sound from his dying lips barely qualified as a whisper.
Ricci pushed his visor up from his face, swallowed, and leaned over him. “I hear you,” he said. “Go on.”
Nichols looked up at him, his lips still moving, shaping unintelligible words.
Ricci took his hand into his own, bent closer. Their faces were almost touching now.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on, I’m here with you.”
Nichols grimaced, struggled out a sound.
“Wildcat,” he rasped. “Wild ...”
Ricci felt something turn inside him. Slowly, grindingly. Like a great stone wheel.
He held Nichols’s hand.
“Okay, I heard you. Try to be easy now.”
Nichols lowered his eyelids but was still trying to talk. “Did ... did we ... ?”
Ricci nodded to his closed eyes. “We got it, Nichols. We—”
Nichols shuddered and produced a low rattle, and Ricci stopped talking, pulled in a breath that didn’t seem to reach his lungs.
The kid was gone. Gone before the answer to his question had left Ricci’s mouth.
“Pokey, you reading?”
“I hear you, Ricci.”
“Tell me what’s happening at the perimeter.”
“It’s getting busy near the main gate. Looks like some guards down there, a couple of jeeps. We saw two other cars turn out onto the road, really hauling, I don’t know where they came from. Didn’t exit through any of the gates, it’s like they came right out of the damn north side of the hill—”
Ricci thought a moment, standing over the bodies he would have to leave behind. Go far, killer. Go as far as you want, and we’ll see if it’s enough.
“Can’t worry about them now,” he said. “Your status?”
“We’re okay. Somebody radioed our booth to order the perimeter sealed. We had the caged bird answer, and Harpswell made sure he sang like we trained him.”
“Good. Be ready to open that service gate for us. We’ll meet you at the guardhouse, head to the pickup vehicle together.”
“Roger,” Pokey replied.
Ricci turned to Seybold.
“Let’s collect Carlysle and Beatty and get the hell out of here,” he said.
There had been eleven of them when they entered. Now there were seven, one wounded, helped along by his companions.
Battered with loss, strong in purpose, Ricci’s men left the same way they had come, retracing their steps from lighted corridors to darkened ones, then through the commissary, kitchen, the freight entrance, and, at last, out into the night. The lack of resistance didn’t surprise Ricci. For all its malevolence, this was a working scientific facility, not an armed camp. The remaining security would be stretched thin, spread throughout the building or called to reinforce what they thought was a blocked perimeter fence. They did not know how the insertion team had gained access, did not know one of their gatehouses had been seized, and would be searching for a breach in the building’s integrity rather than an elevated freight door. But beyond any of that, they were without leadership. Their commander had fled, abandoned them as he’d abandoned his mercenary raiders in Kazakhstan. Brothers in arms.
Oskaboose and Harpswell remained in the booth until their teammates appeared, hit the switch to slide back the gate, and then hurried to join them. The activity inside the main gate had intensified; there were overlapping voices, headlights blinking on, engines thrumming to life.
They scrambled out the gate toward the road and the waiting escape vehicle.
Ricci had raised the driver on his comlink, advised him to be ready to roll, and as the insertion team arrived at the meet spot, the big armored van pulled out of the roadside trees with its rear payload doors wide open.
The insertion team poured inside.
And they rolled.
Crouched in back of the van, Ricci peered through its Level III ballistic cargo windows and saw two pairs of headlights above the black curve of road behind them.
Again, no shocker. There was only the one route across the hills to the highway, and it wouldn’t have taken the guards long to notice the open service gate.
“Those jeeps are getting close,” he said and snapped his head toward the driver. “How far to the bridge?”
“Less than half a mile,” he said. “We’d see it right now if this damned road wasn’t so full of twists.”
Ricci breathed. The van was powered by a turbocharged V-8, but its heavy, armor-plate hull gave the jeeps the edge in speed, and they were gaining fast.
He lowered the high, fold-down seat mounted to the side of the right load door, got into it, slid open a hidden gun port in the door, and thrust the muzzle of his VVRS through the port. At his nod, Seybold did the same behind the opposite door.
The jeeps were gaining, gaining, their high beams spearing the darkness. The lead vehicle was maybe a hundred yards back ... ninety ... eighty ...
Ricci poured out a stream of fire, Seybold triggered his own gun, the two of them peppering the road with bullets, hopefully throwing some fear into their pursuers.
It worked. The jeeps dropped back, their ineffectual return fire spacking off the rear of the van.
“How we coming?” Ricci shouted to the driver.
“Almost there, almost, almost—”
They swung onto the short, concrete bridge.
Ricci and Seybold kept laying out parallel bands of fire, kept the jeeps trailing at a distance.
“Okay!” the driver called out. His foot tramped on the accelerator. “We’re across, we’re home, I can see the chopper straight up ahead!”
Ricci nodded, stopped firing, gave the lead jeep a chance to make the bridge.
Its front tires rolled onto the span.
“Now, Thibodeau!” he shouted over the comlink. “Do it! ”
At the Two Shoulders base camp, Rollie Thibodeau lightly fingered a switch on his handheld remote-firing device, initiating the radio-addressable mines his team had affixed to the bridge support pillars.
Behind the pickup van, the bridge went up with a flash and a roar, its center heaving upward and then disintegrating, an avalanche of concrete that went crashing downward, taking the jeeps and their occupants with it, mangled, burning, tumbling, down and down and down in a great dome of flame to the frozen streambed below.
“Done,” Thibodeau grunted.
TWENTY-FIVE
VARIOUS LOCALES
NOVEMBER 18, 2001
AS HE REACHED FOR THE TELEPHONE, HARLAN DeVane was pleased to note that his hand was not trembling. Perhaps his control was
only temporary and would slip once the ramifications of Kuhl’s call from Earthglow sank in. Perhaps some part of his mind was still denying that the Sleeper project was finished. He had invested so much in it, made his pronouncements, staked his name on its success. But the inhibitor codes had been expropriated. Seized by men Kuhl was convinced were operatives for Roger Gordian. What was left?
DeVane pressed the “flash” button on his telephone’s keypad and listened to a programmed sequence of bleeps go out into electronic space. The codes, too, were out there. Or soon would be. He pictured them as mathematical formulas on little sheets of paper, dispersing in a loose circle that stretched around the globe. Countless hands grasping for them, snatching them from the air. A cure for this one, this one, and this one. It was a vivid image, and DeVane supposed it would grow even sharper as he came to terms with what had happened in Canada.
Yes, DeVane thought, Zeus had flung a thunderbolt, and now his chariot was tumbling to the ground. But not everything was wreckage. Not yet. He could still leave a trail of flame across the sky.
A ringing tone in his ear now, cut short as a male voice answered.
“Yes?”
DeVane held the receiver in his grip.
“Proceed with the backup option,” he said.
Steadily.
From the roofs beyond Roger Gordian’s window at San Jose Mercy, only a small corner of his bed was visible, and then at a strained and awkward angle. This placement was intentional and appropriate for the stepped-up security around Gordian. As soon as suspicions arose that he was the victim of a deliberate biological attack, the bed had been moved out of line with the window to minimize the threat of outside observation and sniper fire.
