The Eden Plague

by David VanDyke

  I was feeling better and better about things, now that I believed this wasn’t an official effort. It was compartmentalized, maybe even rogue. And while the memory of executing Jenkins still pained me, it pained me less now that I knew he was off the reservation, maybe making up his own op as he went along, probably having read too many cheap spy novels. Unfortunately he ran into me. The old me.

  I think the new me could have kept control.

  One more little piece of the puzzle clicked into place, somewhere at the back of my mind, the part that worked unconsciously. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew it was working, and it would come up with something eventually.

  Zeke replied, “That means we got a shot here. They don’t have the resources, unless their sponsor decides to call in some favors.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful. They probably put you on federal fugitive lists, no-fly lists, terrorism watch and report lists. But that’s routine, low-level threat. It means we got breathing room, and it means we might be able to extract your girl Elise, get her away clean and pump her for everything she knows. Figure our next move from there.”

  My girl Elise. Funny how that sounded good, though I’d only spent maybe fifteen minutes with her total. We all stared at each other for a few seconds, then I stuck my hand up. “I’m in.”

  “Me too,” said Vinny.

  Spooky grunted affirmatively.

  Zeke grinned even wider. “God, it feels good to be operational again.”

  “On your own dime, though,” I said wryly.

  “If this thing turns out to be real and usable and helps Ricky, I’d sell everything I have to get it.”

  I knew he was dead serious. He loved that kid.

  “Well, I got twenty grand you can use.” I tossed him the packet of cash.

  -9-

  Vinny kept at his cyber-research with Uncle Spooky standing over him. That probably didn’t help much. Zeke eventually said something to the elder Nguyen, so he stalked away to do sneaky Spooky things.

  Zeke and I cut back a few bushes that were crowding the cabin, and caught up on personal history. I felt elated but a bit fidgety, waiting on information, like the part between the warning order and the op order, when I knew I had to prepare for something but not for what. Waiting on the intel, which was always the best that could be had but was never as good as you wanted.

  Intel specialists, poor schmucks, usually scrawny googly-eyed nerds with oversized Adam’s apples and way too much trivia packed into their noggins. And the worst thing was, for them, if they provided a perfect assessment, everyone just got on with the mission and no one remembered. If they missed anything, everyone hated them and no one forgot.

  I’d rather be an operator any day.

  I fidgeted until dinnertime, but a lot less than I would have. I could tell Zeke was a bit awkward around me, acting like I might pop or break or grow another head at any time. He tried to cover it, but I could tell. At the same time I was sure he very much wanted to find out what we needed to know. Desperately wanted to cure Ricky, if it could be done. Probably had other plans, as well. Zeke was a thinker, more than I was, and I never thought of myself as a dumb jock. A smart jock at least, if not a geek like Vinh. But Vinny was too young to think more than one or two steps ahead. Zeke was deep. Dummies don’t get to be senior officers in Special Forces.

  We had venison for dinner, along with powdered mashed potatoes, boiled peas, bread and butter. It smelled heavenly. Spooky had brought a deer in, a little buck scrawny from winter, but he cooked up fine. I had no idea if it was deer season or even legal. I laughed to myself. My conscience had worse things to beat me up about right now than a deer out of season.

  Over dinner, Vinny laid it out. “INS’s office is in Norfolk, but a few phone calls and some pretexting found out that only two people work there. One office, one front desk, one conference room, and a closet. Most of the employees live in Onancock.”

  I looked blankly at him. In fact, we all did. I waited for someone to make a vulgar joke about such a funny name.

  “It’s a little town up on the peninsula north of Norfolk. Here.” He spun around a map he had printed off, showed us.

  “Why there?” I asked.

  He smiled, kitty-cream. “I’ll show you. Look over here.” He pointed to the west, off the inner coast of the peninsula, at an island about ten miles off shore from the town of Onancock. There wasn’t even a name printed, but he’d handwritten “WATTS.”

  “Watts?”

  ”Watts Island. Uninhabited for about a hundred years. The INS company bought it from the State of Virginia five years ago for two point five million dollars. Way overpaid for three acres of usable land and a bunch of wet rocks, but the state didn’t ask too many questions. For that price they got an easement to build a facility and do ‘environmental research.’ Here’s imagery.” He laid down three overhead photos of the little island, with good commercial resolution. Not government spy-satellite quality, but plenty for our purposes.

  He’d marked the facility with a red circle. It looked like a big all-steel building, with two smaller ones of similar design, one at each end offset, with a parking lot between the three. In it was a lone white jeeplike vehicle. The buildings made a kind of ‘C’ shape with the open end to the east. There was a short paved road leading from the parking lot to a pier with a boathouse on the east shore.

  On the west side of the complex there was a white ‘H’ in the middle of a cleared circle, the universal symbol for a helicopter landing pad. No helo showed on the photo and there didn’t seem to be a hangar. The only other distinguishing features were some sort of utility installations inside a fence next to the building, probably a pair of generators and what looked like a large and a small satellite dish.

  “That’s where they are. I’d bet my next paycheck on it.”

  “No deal,” said Zeke. “You make more than I do, and you’re probably right. Great work, Vinny.”

  I said so too. Even Spooky looked pleased, which wasn’t something people saw very often.

  “So here’s this thing,” I said musingly, “maybe the greatest discovery since fire and the wheel, and it’s all pretty much out in the open to be found.”

  “That’s actually the best way to hide something anymore,” said Vinny. “Buried in a mass of innocuous data. I had to dig for this stuff. Without the idea that they had something valuable, they would be just another consulting company among hundreds, sucking down the government cheese and churning out reports nobody reads.”

  “The Scarlet Letter,” I said. “Hiding in plain sight.”

  “I think you mean the Purloined Letter,” said Zeke. “Unless you think these guys are wearing a mark of shame.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, you never know.” I guess my brain wasn’t perfectly healed yet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  We all looked at the photos for a while, and started familiarizing ourselves with the stack of resumes of the employees. No one had formally spoken it into being yet, but we all knew we were going to be planning a rescue operation.

  I felt elated, but uneasy. I didn’t want to be put in the position of injuring or possibly killing someone. While I had no problem with killing in self-defense – I’d done it before, to defend my patients or myself – one of the reasons I became a PJ was to get out of the business of assaulting the enemy as my primary mission. It was a fine line, I knew, maybe so fine that some people couldn’t see it. But saving lives is what I wanted to do, not take them. But even if we, yea verily, opened the benighted eyes of the poor misguided researchers and consultants, there were six security specialists, probably good Americans all, who would be doing their duty as they saw it by trying to stop me. Kill me, maybe, protecting their people.

  And the idea of putting Elise at risk, of her becoming collateral damage, made me positively sick, almost frantic. I had no idea why I was feeling this way, unless it was from the XH. Maybe it was because she bit me? Like there was really so
me biological connection between us now? It made no sense, but I knew how I felt.

  The good thing was, as far as I knew, I would be very hard to kill. This might give me some leeway to not kill them, strangely enough. Normally, when it was a matter of a split second, you didn’t hesitate, just put two or three center mass, and if they died, they died, because if you didn’t, they would do the same to you. But now, I could pick a shot. I could take a hit, maybe, especially if I had a Kevlar vest and helmet. I felt confident that hits to my limbs would take care of themselves, as long as I had food and water and a little bit of time. Elise had recovered from a hideous amount of damage in just a few minutes, though she might have collapsed from starvation if I hadn’t fed her.

  That was a scary thought, though. If we were captured, we were as vulnerable as anyone, especially if they knew about the XH. Someone could torture us, and the XH would try to heal even if it killed to do it.

  Another piece of the puzzle fell into place, but it was still fuzzy. That couldn’t be the whole downside. That was like saying a revolutionary super-tank got bad gas mileage. The tradeoff was obviously worth it, if it ruled the battlefield.

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted. I had to get some sleep. I never used to sleep this much. Maybe that was part of the XH too. Might as well store it up while I could. I said good night and turned in.

  -10-

  The next day dawned cold, with a few flakes of snow and a sharp wind. I popped out of bed while the other three were still stacking zees, ate some toast and jam to still the growling and went for a run. My nose and ears were burning red with the cold by the time I came back but I felt like a million bucks, better than I’d ever felt in my life. I made breakfast for everyone, ate and drank my fill, which meant I consumed as much as all of the rest put together. I wondered if this state of affairs was going to continue. It seemed like if the XH put my body into peak condition, I should actually be eating less, using everything more efficiently.

  We really, really needed to get Elise, to find some answers.

  Washing the breakfast dishes, I heard a vehicle approaching. The white stuff was coming down lightly and Spooky slipped out the back, dressed in winter camo.

  Zeke and I grabbed assault rifles while Vinny looked worried and went to the window. Zeke came up beside him and looked out too. He put a hand on Vinh’s shoulder and said, “Relax. It’s my guys.”

  It was a big black Suburban – no, it was actually an Escalade, with gold trim and those spinning hubcap things, blacked-out windows, running boards, fender flares, and other geegaws and add-ons that I couldn’t name. It blasted a multi-tone horn as it pulled to a stop in front of the cabin, and a big black man in a fancy track suit got out of the driver’s seat. He looked to be about three hundred pounds, fat but fit, like a football lineman. He was in his thirties, with gold chains on and a short but expensive haircut, some kind of logo shaved into the hair.

  “Larry!” cried Zeke, wrapping him up in a bear hug.

  “Come on, man it’s ‘Lawrence,’ how many times I gotta tell you?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.” Zeke grinned.

  I don’t think he’d forgotten. It must be some kind of inside joke. I nodded to Lawrence, then held out my hand as he approached.

  “Hi Lawrence. Dan Markis. Call me DJ. I was a PJ.” It was an old joke, DJ the PJ.

  “Air Force? Aim High, baby. Call me Larry, Larry Nightingale,” he said, with a smile full of gold and white teeth. He squeezed my hand, just to see what I was made of, I guess.

  I returned the grip effortlessly.

  His eyes went wide, and he grinned even wider. The XH had restored my strength, and more.

  “Larry was my engineering and demo guy before he decided to chase the green,” Zeke said, mock-disapproving.

  “Hey, E-6 pay wasn’t squat compared to what I make now. Dolla dolla bill, y’all. And I expect to get paid now too. Honeys give it up for the bling.” He made some kind of urban hand sign, laughing with those golden teeth showing again.

  I could tell he was caricaturing himself, but you never know. The urban gangsta shtick was so ubiquitous now that it was hard to tell what was real and what was just image. Culture is a funny thing.

  The passenger door opened and another man stepped out, tall and thin, with a shaved head and deep-set black eyes in a narrow face. Late thirties, very fit. Skin and bones and wiry muscles, and a trace of Native American in his background for sure. He looked like an undertaker stuffed into tactical pants and polypropylene, and he peered distastefully at the thinning flakes falling from the sky, waving a hand as if to shoo them away. He had a Patek timepiece on his wrist that probably cost more than the Escalade, but it was pure functionality and understated elegance.

  “Skull!” Zeke cried, seizing the man’s hand enthusiastically. Skull looked pleased, but his smile was tight and reserved.

  “I’m here, Zeke. Hey, DJ.” He nodded at me, I nodded back.

  Alan “Skull” Denham and I were acquainted. He had been a Marine sniper, a very closemouthed guy. We’d only met a couple of times, through Zeke, and didn’t really hit it off. I never got the full story of how he ended up working with Zeke, and I had the feeling he always looked down on anyone that wasn’t a jarhead, hiding it well but not well enough. Still, they were all Zeke’s guys, and if Zeke vouched for someone, that was good enough.

  “Where’s Denny?” Zeke asked.

  Larry’s smile faded and he dropped his eyes. “Couldn’t make it. Got a woman and he’s whipped.”

  Zeke shrugged, playing it off. I think he was hurt, but didn’t want to show it. “He never could say no to a skirt,” he said, sighing.

  “Said he’d try to get away, but you know him…”

  “Forget it. This one needs to be rock-solid, no weak spots. Let’s go inside.”

  We got the Escalade into the barn. I noticed it rode heavy. Probably armored. It was getting crowded in there. We had a whole motor pool.

  Inside, we made some coffee and heated up a pie from a box. I slipped another one in the oven when Zeke wasn’t looking. At this rate we were going to have to make a grocery run soon.

  Seated around the dining room table, we briefed the two recent arrivals. It took the rest of the morning, what with the questions and disbelieving looks. I had to do my healing thing again. I let Skull stab me with a fork this time, just to make sure they knew it wasn’t a trick. I wasn’t ready to get shot just yet. Once we’d settled that, we started brainstorming the operation.

  “We have to assume Elise is locked up on the island. They know she wants to run, and she’s a test subject too, so it makes sense. That means one, probably two shooters to keep an eye on her and the others at all times. Two or three shifts, but they can’t keep more than two guys in prison-guard mode all the time. “

  “They could have a jail cell,” Spooky said.

  “Yeah, that would make it easier for them, but that’s good for us too. Fewer shooters means fewer problems,” Zeke said.

  “Do you think the researchers stay there or go home at night?” I asked.

  Zeke replied, “If it was me, I’d keep to a normal schedule. Ten miles by boat or helo – probably boat, much lower profile – makes for an easy commute. Thirty minutes each way or so. Probably have facilities to stay overnight, though, if they need to or want to. So we figure Miss Wallis, one or two guards, maybe a scientist.”

  “Recon?” This from Skull.

  Vinny replied, “Yeah. I’ll find some more recent overhead imagery, that there is three months old. I need to buy a drone if you want really good stuff from up close.”

  “No drones for now.”

  Vinny looked disappointed. He wanted the toys.

  “No need to get that fancy, and it might draw attention. We just need a fishing boat.”

  “Pleasure fishing in February? In the Chesapeake?” I asked.

  “Crap,” replied Zeke, rubbing his bearded chin. “How do we get close?”

  “A boat is fine,” I sai
d, “but we’ll have to just do a few slow passes on the way to and from Tangier Island." I pointed to the map.

  Tangier Island was a fishing and tourist destination, with quaint bed and breakfast places, crab shacks and fancier seafood restaurants, and its own marinas and an airport. Anyone leaving from the mainland near Onancock would naturally pass by Watts Island on the way.

  Spooky spoke then, softly. “And surveillance on their houses. See what their routine is. See where their boat is. Find the helo. Also exfiltration plan. Snatch will be the easy part. Getting away clean is harder.” He pursed his lips, brooding. Took a sip of his special tea.

  “Element of surprise, boys, element of surprise,” Larry rumbled. “They won’t know what hit them. But Spooky’s right. We’re going to blow the lid off this thing. We can’t expect to get everyone, so someone will go to their boss or bosses, and then there will be some heavy-duty blowback. If word of this gets out – and it will – we’re going to need a bolt-hole deeper than this cabin. No offense Zeke, but this place is a matter of public record, right?”

  “Sort of. It’s in my wife’s maiden name.”

  “Well, that will take them an extra hour to find out,” Vinny said sourly.

  “What’s wrong, you getting cold feet?” Skull asked accusingly. Vinny glared at him and folded his arms.

  “My nephew’s manners may be in question, but not his courage,” said Tran quietly, and Skull sniffed, mollified. He looked away, as if he didn’t care. I think he just didn’t want to cross Spooky.

  “We have a bolt-hole. Never you worry.” He showed off that I’ve-got-a-secret grin. “All right, team, because that’s what we are now, a team, let’s start acting like one,” Zeke stated with emphasis, “Let’s get planning. DJ, put some more coffee on and start making more stew out of that venison, will you? I know you can cook.”