Viral Justice

by Julie Rowe

  “Deal,” he breathed, then cupped her head and ducked down for another kiss. He could nibble on her soft, full lips all day.

  And then she was gone.

  Max stared after her for a moment, then moved to a part of the building away from the rock face where he could get a signal and pulled out his satellite phone.

  “Stone.” The general’s voice was as professional as always, but there was a note of worry or perhaps impatience in it.

  “Sir,” Max replied. “I’m requesting a quarantine of this area. I’ve identified the virus and if it gets out the death toll could be catastrophic.”

  “Define catastrophic.”

  “Millions, sir. Hundreds of millions dead. Everywhere.”

  “Is it Akbar?”

  “My gut and the message Ali found on that body earlier are telling me it’s him.”

  For a moment Stone didn’t say anything, then his voice came back over the connection. “What do you need?”

  “I need vaccination supplies and enough doses of the latest Influenza A H5N1 vaccine for three hundred people.”

  “Will that vaccine help?”

  “It’s a long shot, but it’s better than doing nothing at all. None of the locals here have been vaccinated and the mortality rate is around thirty-five percent.”

  “Is it contagious?”

  “Extremely. One of our own appears to have died of it about hour or two ago. He’d reported a slight cough, went to grab a few hours of sleep and died. Another of the men is reporting flu-like symptoms, but his illness isn’t progressing. His appears to be like any other flu in a healthy adult. Irritating, but not lethal.”

  Max took a deep breath and continued. “But two cases don’t tell me much. That’s why I want to attempt to vaccinate the remaining population here. If it helps hundreds of people, then I’ll have hope that the vaccine is helpful.”

  “What’s your plan B?”

  “That is plan B. Plan A is two-fold. We’ve collected blood from survivors so I can harvest antibodies to the virus, to use as a treatment for those who are gravely sick. I’m also going to try to culture a vaccine here from the full virus. In case plan B doesn’t work. That’s forty-eight hours away, though.”

  “Which soldier died?”

  “Bull. I mean, Sergeant Bullard.”

  “Good man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to give the phone to your assistant he can get your stuff. We’ll have to coordinate a covert drop for this one.”

  “My thought as well, sir.”

  “Don’t risk yourself or any of our soldiers if you don’t have to.”

  He didn’t say “take care of my daughter,” probably because that sentiment would earn him a nasty reaction from said daughter, but Max didn’t have difficulty in inferring the meaning.

  “No, sir, I won’t. I need every one of them able to perform at their current impressive level.”

  “Good.”

  There was a bit of static, then Eugene greeted him and Max began to list off the supplies he’d need.

  “Have you heard anything on Akbar’s movements?” Max asked when he’d finished.

  “No, sir. It’s been quiet. No suspicious letters or packages.” He paused. “Do you think he’s in Northern Iraq?”

  “I really hope not, but I think I’m going to be disappointed.”

  “You need biohazard suits if you’re dealing with him.”

  “That would be like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out. Too little too late.”

  “Sir, do you need assistance?”

  “No, Eugene, I’ve got three Special Forces medics assisting and Sergeant Stone is off right now gathering eggs for me. I’m good.”

  “Eggs?”

  He sounded flabbergasted.

  “It’s a little old school, but I want to try to culture a live but weakened version of the virus. The deadly version isn’t safe to work with.”

  “Very good, sir. Anything else?”

  “Not now. Thank you, Eugene, and carry on.”

  “Yes, sir.” There was a pause, voices in the background. “Sir, I have the information on your covert drop.”

  “Excellent.” Max took down the coordinates and time—just after sunset—then he ended the call.

  He went out to Jessup, who was guarding the front door. “Can you get Nolan to come in? I’ve requested a covert drop and we need to send a team to intercept it.”

  “He’s got eyes on the front door of the building, so that’s no problem.” Jessup went to one of the windows next to the door and moved the old, ratty curtain so it covered about a third of the window.

  “That’s it?”

  “Simple is always better. Of course the next signal isn’t the same.”

  “Huh, you have a whole list?”

  “Yeah, six or so.”

  Movement outside caught both their attention, but it was Alicia returning. She didn’t arrive via the shortest or most direct way. She zigged-zagged all over the place.

  After a few minutes she walked slowly up to the entrance and eased her way inside carrying a sack filled with lumpy egg shapes.

  “How many did you get?” Max asked, pleased to see so many eggs in the bag.

  “A couple dozen,” she replied.

  Max nodded at Jessup and led the way to the lab.

  “You were right,” she added. “There were a lot of chickens whose eggs haven’t been collected in a few days. A lot of people are dead. If the sun ever comes out, it’s going to stink worse than a funky Cadillac for miles.”

  “Did you see any militants?”

  “Not close up. They seemed to be moving out into the tents. I hope Nolan isn’t in their sights.”

  “No, I had Jessup give the secret handshake to call him in.”

  Ali began pulling eggs out of the sack and placing them carefully on the plastic-covered counter. A few of them had cracked, but most, twenty-three, were intact and appeared to be fertilized.

  Max smiled and turned to thank her for a job well done, when a deep-throated explosion rolled through the air and shook the building.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ali ran.

  The explosion hadn’t sounded like it impacted the old hospital itself, though dust continued to rain down from the cracked ceiling as the seconds passed. Behind her, their booted feet pounding like bullets on the fly, ran Max, Hunt, Tom and Holland.

  As they approached the entrance, gunfire became audible. A lot of gunfire.

  Jessup was crouched a couple of feet behind one of the big glassless windows, his weapon braced on a chair, but he wasn’t firing.

  “What the fuck?” hollered Max.

  “We’re not under attack,” Jessup said. “Not yet anyway. The explosion detonated farther out in the tents.”

  Hunt, Tom and Holland took up positions in the other windows.

  “Is Nolan or any of our team back?” Max asked Jessup.

  “No, sir.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

  “Kid at three o’clock,” Hunt called out.

  “Looks like a couple more behind him,” Jessup said.

  “We’re not a fucking daycare,” Tom snarled. “We’ve got too many civilians in here as it is.”

  Ali was about to tell him to shut up when the air rattled with the sound of multiple bullets. But it was too far away for it to be a rifle.

  “That was no rocket-propelled grenade,” Jessup said. “What the hell are they firing, a Howitzer?”

  “Whatever it is,” Max replied, “I hope to hell they don’t point it in our direction.”

  “Where did those kids go?” Hunt asked.

  Ali glanced in the direction
that they were coming from, but saw no one. “Maybe the noise made them duck into a house.”

  Small arms gunfire popped faster than Fourth of July fireworks somewhere outside their field of vision.

  “Someone is getting their asses handed to them,” she said under her breath.

  Max must have heard her because he said, “If Nolan or someone from his team isn’t back within five minutes, I’m going to need a volunteer to find out what the hell is keeping him.”

  “I’ll go,” she heard herself say.

  Max didn’t respond right away. A few seconds passed. A few seconds that lit an angry fire in her gut. If he was hesitating because she was a woman, she was going to kick his ass.

  “I’m concerned that you’ve been seen a lot in the village. People might have a pretty good idea of who you are and who you’re with.”

  “Who I am?” He didn’t want to assign her this task because she was a certain general’s daughter?

  “An American soldier.”

  Okay, that distinction was one she could accept, but he was forgetting other things. “You need the medics to help you with the people who are already here and any wounded who may arrive. I’m the one soldier you’ve got who can leave without leaving you shorthanded.”

  He glanced at her, his face grim. “You’ve convinced me, Sergeant Stone. Use extreme caution while searching. Do not risk yourself any more than you have to.”

  Ooh, he sounded pissed. “Yes, sir.”

  Ali slipped out the doorway and was across the empty space between the front façade of the building and the nearest house in the time it took to breathe twice.

  She needed to see what was going on before running headlong into a firefight that might not have anything to do with Nolan’s absence. She chose to go up the hill, looking for a spot that would give her a view of the valley.

  She climbed the hill the way the Berez had shown her and found a good spot within a couple of minutes.

  She crouched behind a tree and used her scope to find the source of all the fighting.

  There were a couple of craters in the ground in the tented area, smoke from several fires that were blazing without hindrance among the tents. A number of men with small arms shooting at each other, engaging in small skirmishes and running for cover.

  Nolan and his men were conspicuously absent.

  One of the groups of men fighting rolled something ungainly across the uneven ground, then they hauled ass in several directions.

  Holy fuck it was a Howitzer. Where the hell had they gotten that?

  Only two men stayed with the piece of artillery. She watched them fire it a fraction of a second before the shells hit and the sound of it rattled the teeth in her head.

  She watched them load fresh ammunition and prepare to fire it again.

  She braced herself for it, but it didn’t happen the same way. This time, the Howitzer disintegrated with an explosion that screamed of torn metal and old age.

  The men on the side of the artillery gun looked at the crater where the piece of hardware, and its operators, had been with a deep shock she could see through her scope. They staggered like drunkards or extras from a cheap zombie movie.

  Was this good news or bad news?

  She had no idea if either of the two groups shooting at each other was sympathetic to the civilians that lived here or the Americans in their midst.

  There was still no sign of Nolan or his team.

  Where the fuck had they gone? Or were they all dead already?

  The group that had been under attack by the Howitzer charged toward their enemy with a roar she could hear. The other side broke and ran. Those who could run anyway. The rest were overtaken and beaten or shot. It didn’t look like the attackers had any interest in leaving anyone alive.

  That was not good.

  Even worse, she didn’t know who any of these people were. They could be offshoots from militant groups from anywhere, or they could be family members of the people who lived here.

  Not that there were many of them left. The flu had killed more than half the people in the village and the tents. This fighting was only going to result in more deaths.

  By the time they were done, this place was going to be populated by ghosts and those it would have been kinder to kill outright.

  She shook herself. Defeatist, that’s what that was and she didn’t have time for it. She had some soldiers to find.

  Okay, if I were Nolan, where would I go to ground?

  The tent-town was three-quarters destroyed, either from artillery blasts, fire or people tearing it down. Not a good hiding place.

  The village, with its stone-walled houses—now that was a better bet. Where did it look the quietest?

  No one was out and about. She’d have to start someplace logical and work her way through the buildings until she found them.

  Ali abandoned her perch and went to the closest home. After a knock she went inside. She found nothing in the first room, a kitchen and main living area combo, but she could smell something rotting.

  The whole family lay dead in a bedroom. She couldn’t see any obvious injuries, so it must have been the flu.

  The next home was the same.

  The third home had only two survivors in it, both of them very elderly women.

  “What do you want?” one of the women asked.

  “I’m looking for strange men with expensive guns.”

  They shook their heads. “No, we haven’t seen anyone like that. Have you been in other houses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is anyone alive?”

  “No,” Ali managed to get out. “You are the first living people I’ve found so far.”

  “Kill us,” one of the women said.

  “What?”

  “We have nothing. No children or grandchildren. No husbands. Kill us.”

  Ali stared at them, horror filling her throat until she was choking on it. She couldn’t speak. She shook her head and backed out of the house, rushing to the next one and just standing outside the door trying to get air into her lungs again.

  Jesus Christ, how bad would the situation have to be before she begged to die?

  A few seconds later, she pushed herself to move and went into the house. This home was empty of people, living or dead.

  She moved on.

  The fighting in the tent area sounded less furious. The Howitzer blowing up must have demoralized the group that had been using it.

  She checked another three homes, finding only the dead, before screaming and single gunshots outside caught her attention. Instead of going outside to investigate, she stayed in the home she was in and peeked out a window pointed in the correct direction.

  A group of armed men had rounded up some women, children and elderly people. The men and boys were separated from the group and were made to kneel on the stone street. One of the gunmen shot an old man at the end of the row of people.

  All of the women began to scream, punch and kick at their captors.

  A silent snarl curled her lip and she had to make herself stay where she was and think through the desire to run out there and kill every man with a gun.

  There were twenty or more armed men. Could she do anything that would help the situation without making her own worse? She had a duty to protect herself and her men, to protect those civilians she’d already accepted responsibility for.

  The front door of the house she was in slammed open.

  The choice to fight these disgusting creeps might be taken from her. She was out of the direct line of sight from the door, but once the person who kicked the door in moved four or five feet farther in, they’d see her across the room near the window.

  Her position wasn’t all that good, so she turned to face the incomer and crou
ched with her rifle butt settled in the cradle of her shoulder, ready to fire.

  Someone took a step, two, three—on the fourth one, the gunman came into view, but he didn’t seem to see her for the first couple of seconds.

  He was looking at head height and wasn’t expecting a small person to be crouched on the floor, she supposed.

  She saw the moment he noticed her. His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath, but before he could yell a hand slapped over his mouth from behind as a knife cut his throat.

  The gunman sagged and the assassin behind him caught his body before it could make much noise.

  Ali stared the knife-wielding shadow, who lifted one hand to make a shushing gesture over his lips.

  Nolan.

  She looked beyond Nolan and noted several other Special Forces soldiers slipping into the house and closing the door.

  She stood and walked over to him. “Where the hell have you been?” she whispered.

  “Someone brought artillery to a gunfight,” Nolan said. “I lost four men in the crossfire.”

  “What?” She glanced at the other soldiers and realized he was short four of them. She also realized that some of them had injuries. “Holy fuck.”

  “We saw you duck in here, then some of those bastards started searching house to house.”

  “So, we can expect more of them to come through the door? Great.” She looked him and the rest of the men over quickly. There was blood on all of them, but it was impossible to tell if it was theirs or not. “Injuries?”

  “Some. Nothing that will slow us down right away.”

  Outside there were more gunshots. Three in a steady three-second pattern. “The fuckers are shooting all the men.” Her whisper ended on a growl.

  “There are women and children out there,” Nolan whispered back. “A direct assault will result in too many innocent deaths.”

  But she could see he was thinking hard.

  “We split into two teams,” he ordered. “Half of us lead the civilians away from this area. The other half overwhelms whoever is left.” There was no question in his voice, but he looked at her as he finished speaking, in a way that begged her to agree.

  Not a hard decision.

  She nodded once. “Go.”