Carolyn was amazed at how quickly General Rammes had made the switch from “Sergeant Wilson” to “this thing.” She realized, as Garrett had told her, that Sergeant Wilson was as good as dead as soon as the monster sank its fangs into his leg. The mutated creature standing just a couple feet away from the general was no longer human. It was no longer Sergeant Wilson. She regained her composure and answered. “Sir, what we’ve just seen is the Gemini agent mutating in response to the soman. The mutated rat is now immune to its effects. When it bit Sergeant Wilson, it passed this immunity on to him. Sergeant Wilson—it—is now impervious to the soman gas.”
“Can we raise the exposure? Maybe overwhelm the thing’s defenses and—?”
“General, I released the entire container of soman. There’s enough gas in there right now to wipe out a good portion of the eastern seaboard.”
General Rammes sighed. “I’ll let General Smythe know. He’ll have to tell the president to call off the attack.”
At that very instant, General Smythe’s body was being removed from the NMCC.
In the air above Des Moines, Springfield, Wichita, and St. Louis, B-52s were dropping their loads of ex-Soviet soman gas on the remaining ground waves of mutated creatures.
And on all the people who were still trying to escape.
CHAPTER 48
The commander, United States Strategic Command, was brought into the video-teleconference in a matter of seconds. Since Offutt AFB had been overrun, and USSTRATCOM headquarters had been abandoned, General Metzger was airborne. “Mr. President, this is General Metzger.”
“Hello, Thad. I’m pulling you out of STRATCOM. You’re taking over for Ray Smythe. You need to get your butt to Washington.”
Surprisingly, he wasn’t stunned by the announcement. Not even a little. “Understand, sir. We’re airborne over Ohio right now. We’ll divert to Andrews AFB immediately.”
“See me when you get on the ground, General.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” He paused. “And sir, let me pass my condolences on to you regarding General Smythe. He was a fine man. I know he was a personal friend of yours.”
“Thank you, General. I agree—he was a fine man.”
“Yes, sir. STRATCOM out.” The video link was broken.
The president turned to Tank Stone. “Tank, get him up to speed as quickly as you can.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And get those aerial sprayers ready to go. Yesterday.”
“Copy that, sir.”
Inside, Jessie was beaming. Generations of effort, years of endless waiting and personal sacrifice to perform a mission once abandoned by those who’d originally launched it, had all come down to this moment . . . And in the end, it’d been surprisingly easy. First, she’d conquered the president of the United States—the most powerful man on the planet. And then she’d ensured one of her own—a person much like her—had been placed in a position of enormous power as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The suicide of General Smythe had been a blessing in disguise—completely unexpected, but completely welcome. Her clandestine calls to her counterparts in foreign lands were also beginning to pay off. The Chinese. The Russians. Soon, she knew the intelligence agencies would be reporting on troublesome events in North Korea. Great Britain. France. Germany. A worldwide network of those who shared her vision was alive with advice whispered into the ears of other powerful men, just as she had done. No, was doing.
The events of the last two days had been completely unexpected—the whole situation had caught her off guard. She didn’t know if the chaotic, fast-moving situation could be managed effectively yet, but chaos was never frowned upon by her and those like her. It opened doors to opportunity. Her time, their time, was now. As Vladimir Ilyich himself had once said, It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. Lenin was right. Mysteries were at work here, and the laws were in their favor.
She gently stroked the president’s thigh, and was delighted to notice that he made no effort to remove her hand. She had him.
Even in the situation room, in front of his war cabinet, she had him.
It was a delightful thing.
The president was in a weakened state. His wife’s death, which had been a beautiful example of planning on her part, had set the most powerful man on the planet on a course straight into her loving arms. Soon, he would be speaking her words, ordering her desires, and the world would be finally be prepared for the moment for which she’d lived her life.
She silently thanked the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti visionaries for designing such a useful tool as Spetsial’naya Podgotovka 117. If they’d known a derivative of their psychotropic SP-117 was to one day be given to the president of the United States himself . . . No one in the old KGB would’ve dreamt such a thing were possible. God knows they’d tried to do it before.
The KGB had passed into history.
But others, like her, had not.
For decades, her kind had sat dormant—sleeping, as it were—always scheming, awaiting the order to awake and strike.
The villages built in remote parts of the Soviet Union—crafted to resemble an American or British town, where agents would lose their Soviet identities and immerse themselves in the culture of their target country—now sat abandoned. Children, selected for their racial or physical characteristics, had been raised from birth in these villages, given their lives to the great cause, and when ready, traveled abroad with new foreign identities provided by the KGB. New York, London, Washington, even Beijing blindly welcomed the newcomers, the secret soldiers of the Soviet dream.
Her grandfather had been one such child. He lived his life waiting for an order. His son—her father—grew to accept the cause, as well, and he waited.
Jessie was American by birth, but a follower of the cause. Her father had taught her well . . . and she, too, waited.
The order never came from her true homeland, the land of her forefathers. The KGB’s tentacles had once reached far and deep, much more than anyone ever imagined, into nearly every government across the globe. They were so close to realizing their dream . . .
But those tentacles withered and died along with the Union. Thousands of willing soldiers—the sleepers—were abandoned in place, left to fend for themselves, their mission no longer important. For some, though—for many—the cause was too great to abandon. All their sacrifices would not be in vain.
The fight would go on.
From father to son to grandson—and granddaughter—the cause was kept alive. In London, Tokyo, Paris, and Washington, the fight would go on. In Berlin, Beijing, and even Moscow itself, the fight would go on. The old ones in the Kremlin had passed on, and the new leaders—the bastards who’d allowed decades of glory to fade away and then greedily embraced the corruption and excesses of Western society—had abandoned them, and for that, they would suffer the same fate. The descendants of the coward Gorbachev and the drunkard Yeltsin, and the string of fools that followed them in the Kremlin, would feel the sting of their sins.
The entire world would tremble when they made their move, and the new world, the one envisioned by the Fathers of the Revolution, would rise from the ashes.
Her father, and his father before him, would be proud of what she’d accomplished . . . and of what she was prepared to do.
A tiny dose on the skin was all it took. For weeks, small amounts of the drug had drawn Andrew closer. A larger dose—a risk she was prepared to take—helped prod him to use the soman, something he never would’ve done on his own. With larger, more frequent doses, the president would be hers to use as she wished, clay to mold with her hands. In his hands lay the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal.
For without fire, there can be no ashes.
CHAPTER 49
“When did that happen?”
&nb
sp; “Just a little while ago, Derek. He was on the phone with his daughter. She was stuck in traffic just outside Lincoln when they released the gas.” Admiral Don Burns didn’t have to explain any further. The tone of his voice said it all.
General Rammes was shocked to hear of Ray Smythe’s suicide, but he was even more shocked to hear the soman gas had already been used. “Don, are you telling me they used the soman?”
“Yes. Dropped it on the Lincoln wave, and the other waves as well. Looks like it’s working. The things are dropping like flies.”
“Those fucking idiots! Why didn’t they wait for our analysis?”
Burns was confused. “What is it, Derek?”
“The soman doesn’t work, Don. We exposed it to one of the live creatures, and it adapted to it. It dropped dead—at least we thought it was dead—and then it just came back to life. That’s why I was calling Ray. So he could tell the president.”
“Dear God.”
“No shit. And there’s more. The thing bit one of my troopers, and transformed him into a . . . into a thing. When it bit him, it passed its immunity to the soman on to him. We flooded the compartment with enough soman to kill a few cities, and it stood there and took it. No effect whatsoever. It doesn’t work.”
“We’ve killed thousands of our citizens. For nothing.”
“Get on the horn to the president, Don. Tell him the creatures are going to be on the run again in about thirty minutes.”
“I can’t get to the president. Neither can SECDEF, for that matter, unless he demands to see him in person or the president contacts him directly. That bitch won’t let anyone near him. I have to go through her.”
Derek knew he was speaking about Jessie Hruska. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“It gets better. They’re replacing Ray with Thad Metzger.”
“Metzger? He’s a goddamned looney tune!”
“Apparently somebody at the top thinks differently.”
“Metzger will go nuclear, Don.”
“After what you’ve told me, we may not have any choice.”
“We’re trying to find another option. You’ve got to buy us some time here.”
“I don’t think there’s a whole lot I can do. I don’t have any access.”
General Rammes thought long and hard before he spoke. He needed to choose his words carefully, for even secure lines were monitored at times. He knew one simple word should do it: “Coastie?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the secure line. General Rammes knew his old friend had immediately understood what he was getting at.
Insubordination was always a tricky subject. Especially when you were talking about directly circumventing the authority of the president of the United States.
CHAPTER 50
The president of the United States now had the blood of countless thousands of American citizens on his hands. He’d given the order to release the soman. An order at the time he’d felt was justified and completely necessary. No, essential.
Sacrifice some, in order to save many more.
But in the end, it had been a meaningless sacrifice. All the people had died for nothing.
“Mr. President, four of the waves are currently within the target cities. We’re going to lose Springfield, Des Moines, St. Louis, and Wichita.” The SECDEF rubbed his eyes, tired. “The wave outside Lincoln is continuing westward, roughly following I-80. We’ve started evacuation procedures in all the cities and towns along that path, from Grand Island to Denver.”
“Evacuation procedures.” The president spoke the words flatly, with no emotion. “It’s not going to matter, Tank. It’s not going to matter one bit.”
“We’ve got to try, sir.”
“And the birds?” the president asked.
“The birds are still fully engaged in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City.” He paused. “It seems to take them longer.”
The president looked at his watch. Soon, the sun would rise over Washington, DC, signaling an end to the most horrific night in American history. A night when thousands of Americans had died. Some at the hands of the beasts. Many more at the hands of their own president.
“Tank, we’ve got a few more hours until they go to ground again. When they do, I want exact locations mapped out and targeted.”
“Targeted, sir?” He didn’t want to know what the president was thinking, although he was certain what he meant.
“Targeted. Fixed. Exact locations. We’re going to have to move fast while we have daylight.”
“Understand, sir.”
“The birds, Tank. During the day, can we assume they will go to ground as well? Stay in the cities?”
“Possible, sir. Once we have daylight, we can find them. If they form some sort of cocoons—like the ground waves did—they’ll be immobile long enough for us to locate most of them.”
“Just as long as they’re in the same general area, Tank.”
This statement confirmed it. No pinpoint targeting. No conventional attacks. The president’s meaning was crystal clear. “Sir, if we choose this course of action, I recommend we wait until the last possible moment. We need to allow as many people as possible to escape the immediate areas. Upwind. Away from the fallout.”
“Start working on a plan, Tank. I want something ready by sunup.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
As Tank Stone exited the Oval Office, he passed Jessie Hruska. She offered a greeting, but he didn’t return it.
He closed the office door behind him.
“Mr. President?”
“Sit down, Jessie. Please.”
She sat in one of the chairs placed in the center of the Oval Office, facing an identical set of chairs just a few feet away, the Great Seal of the President of the United States embroidered on the rug at her feet. “Tank looked like you’d just kicked him in the stomach. What happened?”
The president sat beside her. “I have to nuke them, Jessie.”
She fought to conceal her excitement. “But, the soman—when I left, the reports said—”
“The reports were wrong. They’re resistant to it. Vanguard released soman on one of the captured creatures, and it lived. If I’d have known, I wouldn’t have ordered the attack.”
“Andrew, you did what you had to do. You had to act.”
“Too quickly. If I’d only waited an hour longer—”
“You’d only have delayed the inevitable. Those people were as good as dead, Andrew. We both know that.”
“Have you ever seen what soman does to a person, Jessie?”
“Yes, I have. I know what it does. It’s a horrible, painful death. But would it have been any less painful for them if they’d been attacked by the creatures? We’ve seen what they can do, too.”
“I killed thousands of people who may have otherwise survived.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Bullshit. You made the right decision based on the information you had at the time. There’s no other way to look at it, Andrew. Second-guessing yourself is not going to do you—or this country—any good. It’s over. It’s done. We know chemical weapons won’t work now. We don’t have to waste time considering that option any longer.”
The president was tired. More tired than he’d felt his entire life. Her words were making sense. Yes, he’d made a decision when a decision had to be made. It had turned out to be wrong—terribly wrong—but at the time, it seemed like the most logical course of action.
They knew conventional forces wouldn’t be able to stop the creatures.
They knew—now—that chemical weapons would be useless.
Not issuing the order would just have delayed the inevitable.
When the whole nightmare began, deep down in his gut he knew he would eventual
ly be forced to resort to the release of the most powerful weapons ever devised by man, to stop the spread.
That time was now.
Jessie leaned closer, placing her hand on the back of his neck. She rubbed, gently, and his tension began to fade away.
As did Andrew Smith.
This was the strongest dose yet.
The first dim light from the rising sun shone through the thick bulletproof windows of the Oval Office. Her red hair reflected the morning light, thin strands of fire framing her perfect face. The president was transfixed by her beauty.
Even with all the death and destruction weighing so heavily on him, he found it impossible to concentrate on anything other than her at that moment.
Just her.
She took his hand. Her grip was soft, warm. Loving. Incredibly alive.
“Andrew?”
He looked into her eyes. The effect was hypnotic. He couldn’t look away.
“You know what you have to do, Andrew.”
“I know what I have to do.” His voice was far away, detached.
“For your country.”
“For my country.”
She smiled. “For me.”
“For you.”
She leaned closer. Kissed him, long and hard.
He kissed her back.
This was the final test. She pushed him away. Slapped him. Hard.
The president of the United States looked up at her. His right cheek was reddened by the slap, but his face was blank. Like a child, waiting to be told what to do.
It was a success.
She had taken his wife from him, and for that she felt pity. He’d loved Kate so, and her loss caused him great pain. But it’d been necessary. The first lady of the United States had stood in her way and had to be removed. In war—even an ideological one—innocent people died.
She peeled a thin coating of spray-on latex from the palm of her hand, carefully avoiding contact with the outer layer. Another useful tool handed down from the KGB, and quite an ingenious manner to deliver the SP-117 derivative.
The Gemini Effect Page 19
