Field of Fire

by Marc Cameron

  The Chairman of the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye or GRU, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Zhestakova wielded immense power. He had the direct ear of the President and, more important, the collective backing of those generals who provided the presidential muscle. Nicknamed Koschei the Deathless, after the fairytale king who rode naked on horseback through the countryside stealing peasant girls, Zhestakova was also a difficult man to kill.

  As a junior officer with the elite Special Forces Alpha Group, Zhestakova had at first been allied with hardliners during the Avgustovsky Putch to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. At the last moment, his boss had switched to the winning side, refusing along with other Alpha and Vympel commanders to move against the Soviet White House as had been planned. The coup failed, and Zhestokova won promotion over prison.

  He had enjoyed a noteworthy and even prosperous career since that time, always seeming to be on the winning side, if not necessarily the right one. He made it very clear that his fortunes would not be the only ones to change should the situation with Novo Archangelsk not resolve immediately.

  “Do you not see the magnitude here?” Zhestakova asked. It was his first actual question in five minutes, and Rostov paused to make certain it was not rhetorical.

  Judging Zhestakova’s pause long enough to warrant a reply, Rostov decided to reply, but carefully. “I do understand, General,” he said. “The American’s are touchy. If they were to link the Novo Archangelsk attacks to Russia—”

  “And therein lies my point,” Zhestakova said, his voice breathless as if he were running in place while he talked. “The President is about to give the preparatory command for Full Combat Readiness.”

  Rostov held his breath. Full Combat Readiness was equivalent to what the American’s called DefCon 2—with forces from all branches prepared to mobilize at a moment’s notice. The president did it periodically. A trigger-happy Turkish government, an overly independent Ukraine—there had been many reasons for the elevation in operational tempo. But, such escalation came with a price, invariably rattling neighbors who wondered about hidden intentions.

  “The Americans will ask questions,” he said, regretting his words immediately.

  “Are you suggesting that we not protect ourselves?” Zhestakova said. Then, calming some, “We will blame our escalation on preparation for similar terror attacks.”

  “Which is plausible,” Rostov said, showing that he was in full agreement. “U.S. sources say the perpetrator in Texas was an Islamist. Russia is also a target—”

  “Which brings to mind several other questions the President would like you to answer.” Zhestakova cut him off.

  “A question for me personally?”

  “Indeed.” Zhestakova gave a quiet chuckle, as if were watching an old enemy roast on a spit. “The questions are for you personally, Colonel Rostov.”

  The fact that the President would speak of him directly made Rostov’s head throb. At times of crisis, anonymity was far better than heroism.

  “For instance, how did Novo Archangelsk end up in the hands of Islamists?” Zhestakova said. The sound of shuffling papers came across the line, then the tap of a computer keyboard. “And who do you have in command in Providenya?”

  “Captain Evgeni Lodygin, sir.”

  “That little shit,” Zhestakova said. “Was he not sent to Providenya because of some unpleasantness with a subordinate’s teenage daughter?”

  “That is true,” Rostov said. “I have found him odd enough, but extremely competent and trustworthy.”

  “Yes, quite,” Zhestakova said. Rostov could almost hear the saliva dripping off Zhestakova’s teeth as he dragged out the word. “Until one of our top scientists defected and a secret nerve agent turned up in the hands of terrorists under his watch.”

  Rostov knew any indictment of Lodygin was an indictment against him as the commanding officer of the entire Novo Archangelsk project. “I assure you, sir,” he said, “trusted operatives are even now about to return Dr. Volodin. I, myself, leave within the hour for Providenya to oversee a thorough investigation of everyone with access to the laboratory.”

  “Including Evgeni Lodygin?” Zhestakova said. “An investigation takes time . . .” He was breathless again, sounding like Rostov had imagined Koschei the Deathless when he was a small boy. “It might interest you to know that the President and I often find the simplest solution is often a bullet to the back of the head.”

  “Of course, General,” Rostov said, dropping his pencil.

  “Do you know how they did it, Ruslan, back in the Soviet days?” The general had never before addressed Rostov by his given name and to hear it spoken in that breathless hiss made it difficult for Rostov to swallow. Of course he knew how they did it. He’d done it himself.

  Zhestakova told him anyway. The words brought a flood of memories that Rostov had worked very hard to suppress, particularly after the birth of his daughter.

  “It begins with a surprise visit from a superior,” the general said. “A quiet walk down a dead-end hallway—and an unexpected bullet. Many progressives view the practice as barbaric, but I have always thought it kind—a tender mercy—quick and without the unseemly snot and fear on the part of the condemned. But then, I have always tried to be kind in my dealings with subordinates. Have I not, Colonel?”

  “Yes, General,” Rostov managed to reply. He wondered if the reference to the bullet in the head was a suggestion on how he should proceed or a thinly veiled threat. In the end, he knew it was both.

  Chapter 6

  Dallas

  Special Agent Joel Johnson was fifteen yards out when Allen Lamar dropped to his knees, still clutching the cardboard tube the FBI agents had mistakenly thought was a can of potato chips. The boy pointed the canister toward the crowd like a mortar tube. Even from that distance, Special Agent Johnson had a clear view of Lamar’s face. His eyes had gone glassy, looking past the crowd in an unfocused, thousand-yard stare.

  Agent Johnson’s breath caught like a stone in his throat as he watched the foam pour over the lip of the container in a seemingly endless flow. For the first time, he realized Allen Lamar was wearing latex gloves.

  Gillette moved left toward the bleachers, vaulting a short fence to get a shot at Lamar without the stadium behind him. This new angle gave him a better target but put him downwind from the foam. He fell before he could raise his sidearm, knees slamming against the concrete walk, before pitching face-first into the fence he’d just jumped. His contorted face pressed against the chain links.

  “Stay back!” Johnson shouted to the rest of his team as he himself rushed forward. His heart told him to rush toward his friend and save him, but his instinct told him he had to stop the threat.

  Four seconds after Allen Lamar activated the cardboard tube an elderly man in the first row of bleachers began to laugh uncontrollably. A child of five or six seated next to him dropped a bag of popcorn and stared transfixed before throwing up and toppling sideways. Spectators all around the laughing man tried to get to their feet and put some distance between themselves and the vomit. Other bodily fluids were spreading among the crowd like a fast burning fire. Unable to control their muscles, those affected fell like ragdolls on the people below them. Some became hysterically angry, tearing at their clothing and screaming nonsensical threats into the night air. Eyes grew bloodshot in an instant. Mucous streamed from noses.

  Muscles began to spasm, causing people to arch violently backward, throwing them down in a human blossom as if a powerful wind had been aimed directly at the grandstand. Allen Lamar and his two compatriots fell moments later, overcome by their proximity to the fumes pouring out of Lamar’s canister. The invisible cloud moved on the breeze, felling everyone it touched.

  Spectators began to stampede, back pedaling away from their dying neighbors, yanking at spouses in a frantic effort to get ahead of the unseen monster attacking the stadium. Terrified parents grabbed their younger children and fled, slipping on the vomit of the person n
ext to them, clutching their throats as they ran. The band fell silent and the air was filled with mournful wailing and the pounding of feet on aluminum stadium seats.

  His back to the wind and still a dozen yards away from Lamar, Johnson pulled up short. He caught sight of Andrea Lopez running directly toward him. Of course she would be the one who disobeyed his order. She had an ass-magnet that pulled her toward danger with the gravity of ten thousand suns.

  A father and his teenage son stumbled directly in front of her, and then fell headlong into the paved walkway. Lopez hit the invisible cloud at a sprint, chest heaving, drawing in a lungful of whatever deadly stuff this was. Her legs gave out as if she’d been hit in the head with an iron bar. Forward momentum carried her skidding across the concrete nose first. Her hands dangled at her sides on useless arms. Legs writhing, she struggled, trying in vain to rise.

  Johnson slammed the top of the chain link fence with both hands, fighting the urge to rush in. It was much too late to save her—and there were hundreds more lives to consider. Instead, he vaulted over the fence and onto the track that surrounded the football field—pushing dumbstruck cheerleaders and the flag-waving drill team back farther, into the wind.

  Angie James’s voice crackled across the radio. “Lopez is down—”

  “Stay back, Angie!” Johnson screamed, for the benefit of his agents as well as all those around him. “Everyone stay back! This is gas! Repeat. We’re dealing with poison gas!”

  The press gaggle, there to do a story on a state football championship, smelled something much more tempting in the carnage. The reporter’s mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads,” drew them toward the danger as surely as it had poor Lopez. One of them, a balding guy with a hefty belly, rushed past Johnson in the melee to get a closer look. His camera fell from his grasp moments later as he sagged to his knees, clutching his chest and staring at the night sky in shock. A group of four other cameramen watched him fall and skidded to a stop, deciding it was best to keep their distance.

  “Are you getting this?” Johnson heard a female reporter ask one of the photographers.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” the cameraman said, the giddiness in his voice belying the carnage spilling across the field. “We’re live.”

  The death blossom grew as the invisible poison moved through the grandstands, felling everyone it touched.

  Johnson looked back and forth, wracking his brain for some kind of plan. Well over a hundred killed by an unseen and apparently unstoppable force, their horrific deaths streamed on live television.

  It was the stuff of terrorists’ dreams.

  All the girls on the drill team but one dropped their flags and fled to the far side of the field. The remaining girl stood frozen in place, eyes glazed at the sight of so much death—the false maturity of high school draining away to expose the face of a frightened little child.

  Her flag popped and waved in the breeze, folding in on itself as the wind shifted—to blow back toward the field.

  In the stands, spectators broke in a full stampede, pushing and shoving, jumping over the dead and dying, trampling the small and weak, anything to escape—anything to live. A referee, not two steps away from Johnson, fell where he stood, laughing hysterically and ripping away his striped shirt. Beyond the ref, the Reavis High student dressed as the red-and-white ram mascot swayed on his feet before toppling at the sidelines. The gigantic horned head rolled off to reveal a shock of blond hair and the stricken face of a young man.

  Johnson’s hands tightened reflexively into fists. A heated knot seethed low in his belly. For a fleeting instant, he wondered if it was the poison gas or anger. He decided he didn’t care. Taking three quick breaths, he ran for the horned head of the ram mascot, jumping the lifeless body of the referee on the way. Holding his breath, he scooped up the hollow costume head and carried it toward the cardboard canister that still foamed and spewed its deadly contents into the air from the grass beside the arched body of Allen Lamar. Johnson did his best to approach from upwind, and dropped the giant ram head over the canister like a lid in an effort to contain the gas. He thought it worked until he noticed the cartoonish screen mouth the mascot used to see through. Exertion and adrenaline worked to deplete his body of oxygen. His lungs screamed for air.

  With no clear vision of what the threat actually was or where it was coming from, people ran in every direction. Some even stampeding across the field, street shoes slipping in the fresh grass, floundering to their feet and running on. Some were in a panic, hoping only to save themselves. In others, humanity bloomed, and they risked their lives to aid those falling victim around them. One of every two who got within fifteen feet of the spewing canister fell in their tracks, even now that it was covered with the costume ram head.

  A half second before his lungs convulsed and forced him to draw a breath, Johnson stripped off his leather jacket and draped it over the mascot, plugging the screened opening.

  The muscles in the agent’s back tensed as soon as he breathed, yanking his head back as if some unseen hand grabbed a handful of his hair. A searing pain ran like an electric current up both sides of his spine—a Taser jolt that didn’t abate. He fell backward, balanced for a long moment on his heels and the back of his head, his eyes wide and staring up at the stadium lights. The muscles in one side of his back overpowered the other, convulsing even harder so he fell sideways. He struggled to regain his balance, to push himself up, but there was nothing there. It was as if something had been scrambled between his brain and the muscles he wished to control. The tension in his back grew until he thought his bones would crack, but the pain eased, and he suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to laugh. He lay on his side now, the cool grass of the football field pressed against his cheek. From the corner of his eye, he could just make out Andrea James directing people away from the overturned costume head. She must have seen him cover it and knew the threat was there. Johnson tried to close his eyes, but even the muscles in his face rebelled, drawing back into a grimace that he was sure looked like a terrifying grin. His chest heaved as if crushed by an unseen weight. Spasming lungs made him begin to giggle uncontrollably, even as a single tear escaped his eye and ran down his stricken cheek and into the trampled grass of the football field.

  Twenty yards upwind, a slender brunette woman wearing a red fleece jacket and matching hat used two fingers on the screen of her phone to zoom in on the picture of the downed FBI agent. “This is gold,” she said to the cameraman beside her. “Tell me you’re getting this . . .”

  Chapter 7

  Alaska

  Quinn brought up a live stream from Dallas on his phone while he listened to the breaking news on the Hoyt’s truck radio. He’d spent enough time in Iraq to know the devastating effects of poison gas when he saw them.

  An Alaska State trooper and three uniformed officers and a handful of detectives and brass from Anchorage PD rolled up but let the cop shooters sit handcuffed on the side of the road. Everyone stood in the shadow of the mountains alongside the Seward Highway, glued to their phones as the news of the terrorist attack unfolded.

  Seeing enough, Quinn checked for traffic and trotted across the two-lane, pressing #2 on his speed dial as he slid his way down the gravel ledge on the other side of the highway. He came to a stop beside a set of railroad tracks that ran on a raised gravel bed between the highway and the ocean. The metal rails provided a convenient and relatively indestructible target for the toe of his riding boot and he kicked at them repeatedly while he waited for his phone call to jump through the series of towers, switches, and cables that would connect him to the White House. Ronnie Garcia followed, surfing down the incline on the loose gravel, one foot in front of the other to come to a stop beside him. Turning her head just right for the afternoon light to catch it, she gazed out across the frothy chocolate waters of Turnagain Arm.

  “No answer,” Quinn said, looking at Garcia. A stiff sea breeze blew a thick strand of ebony hair across a deeply bronzed cheek. She didn’t bother
to move it. If he’d had time, he would have told her how incredible she was standing in the wind wearing full motorcycle leathers.

  Garcia shrugged, wonderfully oblivious to her own beauty. “Probably that whole National Security Advisor thing. I’m sure he’s busy.”

  Quinn kicked harder at the rails and ended the call, redialing immediately.

  This time, a female voice answered on the first ring. It was Emiko Miyagi, Quinn’s martial arts teacher and friend. The mysterious Japanese woman also happened to be Winfield Palmer’s right hand. The two were as close as people could be without being romantically involved. They’d even had that for a time, when they were younger, until Miyagi had decided Palmer knew far too much about her past.

  Quinn was surprised to hear her voice. She’d been out of the country, trying to locate her daughter—and it had not been going so well.

  “Quinn san,” she said. Miyagi was normally curt, wasting little time on pleasantries, but now she seemed strained. Quinn chalked it up to the futile search for her assassin daughter. “He is on another line at the moment. May I take a message?”

  A message? Quinn shook his head in disbelief. This was a first. When Quinn needed briefing on something important, Miyagi was, more often than not, the one who read him in. They’d been through far too much for her to shut him out with the we’ll get back to you line.

  “I’ll hold,” he said.

  Winfield Palmer must have snatched the phone away because he came on the line a half moment later.

  “Quinn,” he said, his voice a detached whisper. “I’m not sure if you’re watching the news, but we’re in the middle of something here.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m calling, sir,” Quinn said. As much as he respected Palmer, he couldn’t remember a time in the three years they’d known each other that either man had called the other just to chat.