by Justin Bell
A dangerous day for planes. Jackson wondered if it was an equally dangerous day for people in general.
Cutting across the broad expanse of tarmac where other planes sat, ready to be boarded, Jackson focused on the terminal far in the distance and picked up his pace. His small backpack was light on his shoulders; he’d only been gone the weekend, so he’d packed light. Lisa would have never let him get out of the house with so few clothes, even for a two-night trip, but he didn’t have to worry about that anymore.
The thought hit him with a mixture of freedom and disappointment, a bizarre combination of emotions that he couldn’t quite rationalize. What good was having such freedom if he had no one to share the freedom with? As much as he complained about how protective and over-prepared she was, it had felt nice to have someone looking out for him, someone to take that tiny bit of responsibility away.
Scattered buildings making up Hanscom’s main terminal rose up ahead of him and he moved left, heading toward Civil Air Terminal parking. He had no car here—he had no car at all—but his hope was that one of the taxi stations had a landline or, even better, an empty car waiting for him. Somehow he doubted that either of those things were true. Sweat beaded down his forehead as he walked, his cramped legs aching slightly with the shift from no leg room in the plane to aggressively walking across the long tarmac toward the terminal.
Far in the distance there was a muffled thump like the faint sound of a faraway July 4th grand finale.
Jackson walked in silence, picking his way across the smooth concrete, growing nearer and nearer to the cluster of buildings ahead, angling toward the parking lot he knew was just south of the complex of terminals. As he walked, the doors from the terminal burst open, clanging out against the wall, and three figures dashed frantically across the parking lot. He thought he heard the faint echo of a scream from inside the building but couldn’t be sure. He saw crash bars on the inside of the door as they slowly eased closed, and he heard the distinct latch of the doors locking as they settled back in place. His stomach twisted at this sound, hoping that it hadn’t meant what he thought it did.
Moments later he arrived at the street parallel to the terminal, but as he suspected, no cars awaited and there were no phones available to call with. Even on the slowest days there had always been at least a taxi, hired car or some other vehicle out front and idling, but today there was absolutely no one in sight. Public pay phones had become a thing of the past several years ago. Walking toward the terminal, he hooked his fingers on the front door handle and pulled, but found the door securely locked, as he feared it may have been. It was a small runway and the terminal wasn’t always staffed, and that certainly seemed to be the case today. On previous trips, there had always been a car waiting, or he’d used his cellphone to ring for an Uber, but today neither was an option. He stood for a moment in the hot light of afternoon, swiping the shine of sweat from his forehead. Bedford was about twenty miles outside the city, and he needed to get back to his apartment. A long walk, to be sure, made even more treacherous by the vague and persistent threat that seemed to exist everywhere and nowhere all at once. Something was happening in the city. Something big, being carried by an oppressive invisible force that grated against his very skin and slowly filled him with fear.
A chill ran down his spine, a chill on a dozen little legs leaving goose flesh in its wake. He turned and glanced over his shoulder, muscles tensed as if he was being watched, as if some vast and angry menace glared down upon him in judgment, ready to hammer the gavel of sinister punishment for some crime he didn’t know he had committed.
***
Sirens filled the air and she could smell the faint whiff of smoke, but Amy Draper proceeded as normal throughout her routine, as much as she didn’t want to. Driving through the city, even at this time of day was a nightmare and she had no real interest in visiting the in-laws. Her husband Kevin was away on business and their normal ritual to his parents’ house usually involved him driving. Amy had figured with him out of town, the weekly trip might be canceled, but no such luck as her mother-in-law had called last night and asked when she and the kids would be over.
She could have told her they weren’t coming. As much as they annoyed her, Kevin’s parents were nice people who cared very much for their grandchildren… cared to the point of overwhelming, if Amy was honest with herself. Keeping the kids from their grandma and grandpa for one week certainly wouldn’t change the world, but rather than put up with the passive-aggressive grief she’d get from Kevin and the guilt trip he’d no doubt get from his mother and father, Amy had decided to just buckle down and do it. It was only a few hours, and the drive would likely be the most frustrating part.
Hey, maybe she could actually slip down to the coffee shop and have a quiet latte while the in-laws watched the kids? Silver linings and all that.
Less than twenty minutes later she’d coaxed the kids into the car, a two-year-old BMW that came courtesy of Kevin’s six figure salary. The salary giveth, and then as Kevin hurtled across the country on a plane, the salary taketh away.
Mentally shutting out the quiet bickering of her two sons, Amy accelerated down the gradual slope of the driveway, once again noticing the stale stink of smoke in the air. Was something on fire?
***
Fifty miles west of Baltimore, the city of Frederick stood with a population of over 60,000 and the second largest incorporated city in Maryland. Nestled within the valleys of the Appalachian Mountain range, the central Maryland city forms a corner of the Washington/Baltimore/Arlington triumvirate, though typically isn’t as well known as the other three.
The home of Fort Detrick, Frederick was at one point the home of the United States’ biological weapons program, but as time evolved it shifted its focus to research and defense against those same biological weapons. Detrick’s 1,400-acre campus was unique; a collaboration between government units dedicated to defending against biological and genetic warfare by employing some of the most talented biologists and geneticists on the planet and developing an aggressive set of responses to such potential attacks.
In the early twenty-first century, as a combined effort from the Army Medical Research and Material Command, the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research and National Interagency Biodefense Campus, Fort Detrick developed Team Ten, a state-of-the-art special operations unit designed to isolate and intercept next generation biological weapons. Team Ten was constructed of men and women who were experts in their field, but also trained in the use of military tactics and weapons, hoping to create a team of soldiers who could not only identify the potential threats, but lead the strike team that would take down the rogue nations or organizations who threatened to use them.
In the years since their development, while biological weapons remained a constant and aggressive threat, the soldiers on the team were slowly dispersed to other programs, working with intelligence agencies on early detection systems and espionage. Slowly but surely the attention spent purely on biologic or genetic weapons faded. Since aggressive offensive tactics against the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other foreign nations had increased, concern about a domestic attack decreased, and now Fort Detrick remained an important—yet sometimes overlooked—cornerstone of genetic research within the United States Army.
Team Ten was still in existence and still remained a highly trained force of geneticists, biologists and soldiers, but their funding had been greatly reduced and they served more as a supplement to Army structure and not as their own individualized unit.
***
The conference room was a wide, white room, relatively unremarkable with a long, polished wood table and no less than half a dozen different whiteboards bolted across two separate walls.
Joan Chaboth stood in front of one of the boards in her dress greens, arms crossed behind her slender back, jet black hair pulled tight into a smooth ponytail. She peeled away one of her hands from behind h
er back and adjusted her narrow glasses, looking at the writing on the board, a hand-drawn web of connecting lines between different shapes containing names within.
Chaboth had graduated from Georgetown with a degree in microbiology and never once thought she’d be standing in a conference room within a United States Army facility preparing to discuss international military operations. After graduation, she’d visited Johns Hopkins with a possibility of an after-school internship program in their medical research department, and that’s where she’d met her husband.
A Army brat since birth, Lance Chaboth had extolled the virtues of world travel, doing good work and, most importantly, learning while you were doing it. Six months later, Joan was enrolled in Officer Candidate School and beginning the long trek on her new career path.
Here she stood. She was now Major Chaboth, and the leader of Team Ten, her husband four years dead after a routine visit to southern Africa left him in the middle of an Ebola crisis. They’d tried to rush him home, but he’d died in one of the foreign lands he loved, thousands of miles from home and from his wife. As Joan looked at the white board, she thought of him, as she always did, and thought of her last conversation with him, a static-filled Skype talk. She’d told him he looked pale, and he told her he was fine, and he’d be home in a week.
He’d died forty-eight hours later.
He died doing what he loved! That’s what they all used to tell her, back when she actually listened. She doubted he loved anything about coughing up his liquefied organs, lost in a third world country, but she allowed them their sentiments. They needed to rationalize how he’d died far more than she’d needed to. Joan had loved her husband, fully and deeply, but she was independent as well, and though she hadn’t been interested in the Team Ten assignment, out of respect for her husband, she’d taken the duty. Now, three years later in the midst of so much useless work it felt like they finally had at least the genesis of a purpose.
A goal they were aiming for. What she’d recognized most about her new place at the head of the table was the useless bureaucracy and the vast oceans of red tape and busy work. It had taken a full eighteen months before she’d had a sniff of actual field work. Now, they had a mission she’d been following since the very beginning and had actually started developing some targets. Broderick had done most of the heavy lifting, but her leadership and delegation of resources, not to mention the previously impossible collaboration with other government agencies, had drawn up a series of leads.
However, with those leads came a considerable level of apprehension. There were some nasty people out there in the shadows experimenting with biological and genetic weapons, and the more light the team shone on them, the deeper into the shadows they seemed to scurry, like a floor full of cockroaches.
“So, talk to me about Graybar,” she said, turning to look at Sgt. Dean Davis who was sitting on top of the table, a tablet clutched in his hands. When she mentioned the name, Davis scrolled through the rows of text, isolated an image and pressed it with his finger. Chaboth looked back and he flipped the tablet around, showing her his face. The single word “Graybar” was written in one of the various circles on the board, several straight lines linking it to other shapes and names. Davis was one of the few non-scientists on the team, and it had taken some time to get him acclimated to the kind of work they were doing. Formerly of the Army Rangers, his specialty was military tactics, and he brought a macho action-movie hero brutalism to their group of doctors and physicists. When it came to the field operations side of the house, Dean Davis was the man, and Chaboth defaulted to his perspective.
“Nationality unknown,” Davis said. “We had a tail on him in Istanbul based on a tip from CIA. We linked him to a European group of Islamist Nationals who were thought to have been developing biological weapons. Some pretty revolutionary stuff.”
“Revolutionary how?” Chaboth asked.
“Like, next century revolutionary,” said Zacharia Randolph, making his way around the table from the other side. “Ethnic bio-weapon kind of revolutionary.” Randolph was far more typical of the rest of the team, someone who had specialized in the sciences and had leveraged that knowledge to get linked to the research center, then begun his military training after the fact.
“Ethnic bio-weapons are theoretical only,” replied Chaboth, turning back toward the board.
“That’s debatable,” said Dalton Smith, coming around the other end of the table. “We’ve heard rumors of successful launches against Turkish insurgents as long as two decades ago.”
“Not interested in rumors,” Chaboth replied. “Plenty of real monsters under our bed to keep us up at night without worrying about the monsters that might be in our closet.”
“Well, the field team was able to snag a laptop and got the hard drive partially decrypted before it zeroed itself out,” said Randolph. “Some pretty convincing formularies.”
“And what was the target?” asked Chaboth.
“Unknown,” replied Smith. “We didn’t get the whole genome map on the laptop. But if the partial data that we reconstructed is accurate, we’re on the verge of a whole new world. A very scary world.”
Chaboth turned back toward the board, crossing her arms.
Rapid slamming came from the conference room door to her left and she turned, narrowing her eyes to look through the small, rectangular window. She saw wide eyes and a frantic, strained expression filling the glass space and waved the person inside.
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Katherine Fielding, one of the Team Ten field agents. “We’ve got a bonafide red flag.”
“Red flag?” Chaboth asked, already taking a step toward her.
Fielding nodded. “Call came in about five minutes ago from just south of Boston. Sounds like a localized outbreak.”
“Just happened?” Chaboth asked.
Fielding shrugged. “Unsure. The call was garbled and they didn’t identify themselves.”
“And we don’t know who made the call?” Chaboth asked, following Fielding from the conference room. As they exited, another man fell in from the hallway next to her.
“Negative,” said Staff Sergeant Broderick Schmidt as he joined them both in their brisk walk back toward the command center. “Spoke with a heavy voice, call was distorted. Sounded like there may have been signal issues.”
Broderick Schmidt was arguably the brainchild of Team Ten, though he’d never been the one in charge. Like Sergeant Davis he’d joined the military first, in ROTC out of high school, using the G.I. Bill to pay for his college education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and eventually getting a Master’s Degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics Research. With a love for the structure of the United States military, he hadn’t even considered a job in the private sector, instead moving right to Fort Detrick and jumping from department to department for a decade and a half before landing squarely in the middle of Team Ten. Throughout his time at Detrick, he’d been asked to lead the team three separate times, including after Joan’s husband died, and he’d always declined, feeling like a leadership position would get too much administrative work in the way of his true love. He matched pace with Chaboth, his neatly pressed dress greens moving in unison with hers. His receding arc of thick, red hair drew far back on his balding forehead, and his mouth moved from within the equally thick rust-colored beard now streaked with gray.
“Are they still on the line?” asked Chaboth as they turned left down a neatly polished hallway.
“Negative,” replied Schmidt. “Lost signal halfway through the call. We’ve tried to reach back out, but we’re having a hard time getting through.”
“To the caller?”
Schmidt’s face grew deadly serious. “To Boston.”
Chaboth stopped walking, her polished shoes squeaking on the smooth, tile floor. She glanced over at Broderick.
“Excuse me?”
“The city of Boston has gone dark. As of about two hours ago. We’ve heard scattered reports of a p
lane crash in the middle of downtown.”
“Good lord,” Chaboth said. She turned toward Fielding. “Go to communications. We’ve been isolated in that conference room; start getting some intel, figure out exactly what’s going on in Boston.”
Fielding nodded curtly and vanished down the hallway.
“So what raised the red flag?”
“It was a child,” replied Broderick.
“A child?”
“The entire market was filled with corpses, with the exception of a lone child. She had been there with all the others, yet somehow whatever killed everyone else in the market skipped her.”
“And you think it’s because the weapon used was genetic in origin?”
Broderick shrugged. “Too early to tell, but I thought the situation was urgent enough to warrant a closer look. Based on what else is going on in the city right now, I think that we should be erring on the side of caution.”
“I’m inclined to agree.”
“So what’s our plan? Mobilize a team?” Broderick squared his shoulders, preparing to launch into action.
Chaboth nodded. “If something serious truly is happening in Boston, there may not be a team to mobilize. We may have to tackle this one ourselves. Grab everyone from Team Ten that you can. Tell them to meet at the helipad in fifteen. I’m going to get clearance for a UH-60, should have enough range to get us to the city. We’ll suit up on the way.”
“On it,” Broderick replied and spun around, walking back toward the conference room.
Chaboth watched him go and wondered if things in Boston really were this bad, what could her small team of eight do? Were they even moving quickly enough to implement quarantine procedures? Or was this all too little too late?
She didn’t know, but she wasn’t going to wait to find out. Angling down the left hallway, Joan Chaboth made her way toward the colonel’s quarters, already working out what she was going to say in her mind.
