Mickell looked up as the OH-58 swooped in from the south, its bright searchlight blinding the guards on the ground as it settled in toward the landing pad. The man in charge of the demolitions gave Mickell the thumbs-up. Mickell signaled for him to wait.
* * *
The skids of the bird settled on the concrete landing pad. Two guards were moving forward toward the aircraft from the front, trying to identify it. Corsen suddenly twisted his throttle to flap the blades. The two guards bent their heads even farther and covered their eyes at the sudden onslaught of wind.
As they did so Jones and Shartran leaned out of the open back doors, one on either side, and gunned down the guards, using their silenced MP-5s.
“Tiger, two down LZ,” Gillis reported over the radio as he got out. Jones and Shartran started sprinting for the front door, their weapons at the ready. Corsen rolled off the throttle and waited, weapon at the ready…
* * *
Mickell signaled. There was a flash and hiss as the charge ate through the lock. The door swung open and the ten men slipped in, Mickell in the lead. They halted at the foot of the stairs and the team split. Four men headed toward one wing, while the other six began work on the other.
They fanned out on the second floor, moving in a practiced routine. They began clearing, cell by cell. The first indication that anything unusual was happening in the building finally occurred — the muffled roar of a machine gun echoed up from the east wing.
* * *
Turcotte slid through a ground-floor entrance that was open and stepped through to the right while Yakov stepped to the left, Kenyon staying safely behind them.
“Turcotte, east wing,” he whispered into the mike as he and Yakov turned for the hallway.
A figure stepped out in front of them and Yakov cut the man down in a hail of bullets. The roar of a machine gun to their left startled both men.
* * *
Gillis let up on the trigger of the squad automatic weapon, SAW, with a satisfying click. “Tiger, one down first-floor foyer, main building.”
He swung the muzzle slightly to the left as another door opened and a half-dressed guard stepped out waving a pistol. As he pressed the trigger. Gillis could see the outlines of other men behind the first. He decided to make a clean sweep of things. Keeping the trigger depressed, he swept the doorway and then stitched a pattern on the walls.
The 5.56mm, steel-jacketed rounds tore through the brick wall and made a carnage in the guardroom. Gillis fired until he expended all hundred rounds in the drum magazine. When the bolt slid forward and halted for lack of ammo, he expertly pulled another drum out of the bag on his hip and reloaded.
“Tiger, a bunch down, first-floor foyer, main building.”
Gillis swung his barrel to the left as two figures stepped out of the hallway from the east.
“Friendly, Wolf element!” Turcotte yelled. He looked around the main foyer. Two large double doors were off to the left. “There!” He remembered the plans Duncan had managed to get hold of — those doors led to stairs going down to the old solitary confinement area.
Turcotte led Yakov, Kenyon, Gillis, and the other men to the doors. Gillis slapped a charge on the thick wooden doors. They all dove for cover, then the doors blew wide open. Gillis led the way in with a burst of fire from the SAW.
“We need them alive!” Turcotte yelled, seeing the wide row of stairs leading down. He pushed past Gillis and took the stairs two at a time. They ended at a steel door with dire warnings printed in several languages. Turcotte recognized the international symbol for bio-hazard.
More men came down the stairs, weapons at the ready. Colonel Mickell in the lead.
“Mike!” Mickell called out, seeing Turcotte. “We’ve got both wings secure. My men are checking the exterior, but I think we’ve got it all.”
“Can you get us in there, sir?” Turcotte pointed at the doors.
Mickell responded by yelling orders. A demolitions man ran up with a heavy backpack. He put it on the floor, pulling a cylindrical black object out. Working rapidly, he placed it on a tripod, one end eighteen inches away from the steel.
Turcotte knew it was a shaped charge, designed to focus a blast of heat and force at exactly the distance it was from the door.
“Fire in the hole!” the demo man called out, causing everyone to scatter for cover. Turcotte grabbed Kenyon and dove behind a desk that had been a security checkpoint. There was a loud bang, causing his cars to ring. Poking his head above the desk, Turcotte saw a four-foot-wide hole had been torched through the steel.
“Wait for it to cool,” the demo man advised as Turcotte approached the hole. Turcotte threw a chair across the bottom of the hole, the wood arms hissing as they met the red-hot metal. He grabbed a flash-bang grenade off his combat vest, pulled the pin, and tossed it through the hole. As soon as it exploded, he followed it through, diving headfirst, his belly sliding over the chair.
Turcotte rolled left once, then to his feet, weapon at the ready. He froze as he saw the white-coated bodies crumpled all over the floor amid the sophisticated equipment. He slowly stood.
The Mission had completely gutted the level and put in a Biolevel 4 lab. Turcotte considered the situation. Had the virus already taken over here? Had there been an accident? But the guards had seemed fine.
“What happened to them?” Mickell demanded, carefully stepping through the hole in the door.
Turcotte knelt next to a body and looked closely. He had seen this before. Deep under the Great Rift Valley. “They were killed by the people they worked for. The Mission is covering its tracks.”
“Exfil is only a couple of minutes out,” Mickell said.
“That’s not important right now,” Turcotte said as he stepped forward into the room. There were six men in the white coats. All dead, their faces contorted in agony. All were middle-aged. Hemstadt — the Dulce Nazi — wasn’t here.
There was a lot of complicated equipment in the room along with several highspeed computers. Yakov had a difficult time getting through the hole, singeing his shoulder on the cooling metal but not seeming to notice it. Kenyon followed him.
“Are we too late?” Yakov asked.
“I don’t know,” Turcotte responded.
“The payloads.” Yakov ran over to a large door on the left side of the room. A crane was bolted lo the ceiling. He threw the door open. A tunnel beckoned, a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks bolted to the floor. A lone lightbulb every thirty feet dimly lit the way.
Yakov pounded his fist against the rock wall. “They got the payloads out!” Turcotte oriented himself. The tunnel led to the west. Toward the ocean. “The patrol boat!”
“The cure!” Turcotte grabbed Kenyon’s shoulder. “Is it in here?”
Kenyon unlatched a large freezer door and swung it open. Turcotte looked over his shoulder. There were rows and rows of rubber-lined slots designed to hold test tubes. They were all empty.
Kenyon read the labels below the empty racks. “The first batches of Black Death are gone, along with the cure.”
* * *
Yakov was staring down the dark tunnel. “There is no time. We must go after them.” He headed down the tunnel, shoulders hunched to keep his head from hitting the ceiling.
Turcotte turned to Colonel Mickell. “We need to get to the pier.”
Turcotte pushed a man trying to get into the lab out of the way as he bullied his way through the breach in the doors, Colonel Mickell behind him, Kenyon following. They took the stairs up two at a time. Sergeant Gillis was standing guard in the main foyer.
“What’s going on?” Gillis demanded as Turcotte sprinted past him. “Follow me,” Turcotte yelled over his shoulder.
Entering the courtyard, Turcotte saw the OH-58. He ran to the passenger side. “Get us in the air!”
Corsen was staring at him. “Who the hell—” He paused as Gillis, Kenyon, and Colonel Mickell crowded into the backseat of the chopper.
“Get us down to the docks as
quickly as possible.” Turcotte forced himself to speak more slowly.
“Now!” Colonel Mickell added from the backseat.
Corsen turned the generator and fuel switch on, then rolled the throttle. The engine began to whine.
Turcotte felt time ticking away. The blades began to slowly turn overhead. “You have a chopper coming in for exfil?” he asked Mickell.
The colonel nodded. “HH-53 Pave Low.” He checked his watch. “Only a minute out.”
Turcotte grabbed a headset and put it on. “What’s the call sign?”
“Hawk,” Mickell said.
Turcotte keyed the radio. “Hawk, this is Wolf. Over.”
* * *
The pilot of the Pave Low flared the chopper to slow it as he got his new orders from Turcotte. He banked hard right and followed Devil’s Island’s western coastline.
“I’ve got one vessel — patrol boat size — moving west, two hundred meters from shore.” the pilot informed Turcotte, seeing the ship clearly on his low-light television. He turned slightly, adjusting the camera mounted under the nose of the craft. “Second, smaller one is preparing to get under way.”
“Stop the patrol boat!” Turcotte ordered.
The pilot frowned. “Yes, sir.” All he had were door-mounted 7.62mm Gatling guns.
He rolled throttle, increased pitch, and headed in for a run, telling his left door gunner to be ready.
The gunner pulled the trigger as they passed the ship, two hundred meters off its port side. The electric drive ran the belt of ammunition through the gun, the barrels rotating, spewing out hundreds of rounds per second. The bullets ripped into the superstructure of the patrol boat, killing and maiming.
The ship retaliated a second later as a surface-to-air missile leapt out of a tube and headed for the Pave Low’s hot exhaust.
“Evasive manuevers!” the pilot screamed as he banked hard left, directly into the oncoming missile, reducing both his target profile and his heat signature. The missile flashed by to the right, narrowly missing.
Two more missiles were launched.
The pilot saw them coming and knew he had run out of options. They both homed in on the exhaust coming out of the engine.
The Pave Low exploded in a ball of fire.
* * *
Turcotte saw the explosion as the OH-58 finally lifted off the concrete pad and cleared the prison walls. “Goddamn,” Colonel Mickell exclaimed.
* * *
Yakov heard something ahead. Voices. Speaking in German. His hands tightened down on his submachine gun. The tunnel was narrow, less than six feet wide and the curved ceiling just under six feet high, causing Yakov to walk with knees bent. It went down at a steady angle toward the ocean.
He caught a glimpse of light reflecting off metal about fifty meters ahead and increased his speed.
* * *
“What do you want me to do?” Corsen’s voice was worried; he had just seen the Pauk-class patrol boat take out the HH-53.
A red light went on and a warning tone sounded.
“What’s that?” Turcotte asked.
“Fuel warning light,” Corsen said. “We have only a minute or two of fuel left.” It took Turcotte less than ten seconds to tell Corsen his plan.
* * *
A voice echoed back up the tunnel, inquiring in German who was there.
Yakov had the butt of the MP-5 nestled tightly in his shoulder. He could see two men now, with something metal in front of them on the rails. He pulled the trigger once, then twice. Both men flopped backward.
Yakov continued down the tunnel, then paused briefly when he recognized the metal object that was reflecting light — a wheelchair with a bald old man sitting in it.
* * *
Corsen headed straight into the first SAM launch, evading the first missile at the last second using his flares. The distance between the chopper and the Pauk patrol boat closed rapidly even as the helicopter gained altitude.
“They’re going to launch again!” Colonel Mickell warned,
Corsen reached up and flipped a switch. The sudden silence was startling as the engine emergency shutoff activated.
With a burst of light, another missile launched. And a third. Both flew by the OH-58, unable to find an infrared source because the engine had stopped putting out hot exhaust.
The blades whooshed by overhead as the chopper autorotated, the blades being turned by the air passing through them, in turn providing some lift, enough to keep them from gaining terminal speed.
Corsen was struggling with his controls, manhandling the hydraulics now that he didn’t have power from the engine to assist, pushing forward, trying to direct the fall.
He made it as they slammed into the rear deck of the Pauk, the blades cutting into the superstructure with a glitter of metal-on-metal sparks. The landing struts crumpled, and the helicopter ended up precariously perched on the deck, tilted hard to the right.
* * *
“General Hemstadt,” Yakov whispered, keeping the muzzle of his MP-5 centered on the old man as he slipped past the wheelchair and turned to face his enemy.
“Who are you?” Hemstadt asked in German.
“Where is the cure?”
Hemstadt’s face was surprisingly young-looking for a man in his late eighties. His hands were gripping the arms of his chair, his lower body covered in a blanket.
“You are Russian,” Hemstadt said. “I recognize the accent. A Russian pig. I killed many of your kind in the—”
“You killed many prisoners,” Yakov said. “Where is the cure?”
“Not here.”
* * *
Corsen was dead, the control panel smashed against his chest. Turcotte had narrowly escaped the same fate. He kicked out the front Plexiglas and rolled onto the deck. He got to his knees and noted green tracers flashing by perilously close. He rolled left.
The sound of a SAW firing roared in his ears and red tracers tracked back down the green ones. Sergeant Gillis was standing on top of the wreckage of the chopper, firing rolling bursts with the automatic weapon, the recoil slamming into his shoulder.
Gillis swept right, then left. In a matter of seconds, he got off five twenty-round bursts before a bullet caught him in the head and knocked him backward on top of Colonel Mickell and Kenyon, who had been trapped below him in the wreckage of the chopper.
By that time, Turcotte had maneuvered up the left side of the ship’s superstructure. He killed the man who had shot Gillis with one round through the head, knocking him off the wing of the bridge.
Turcotte blew out the bridge windows with a burst, then threw a flash-bang grenade through the opening. He dashed up the metal ladder onto the bridge. There were two men doubled over, hands pressed against their heads, suffering the aftereffects of the grenade.
“Freeze!” Turcotte yelled, knowing they probably couldn’t hear him.
One of the men reached for a pistol on his belt, and Turcotte shot him. The second man saw that and paused in his grab for a weapon. Then the man reached for a lever on the instrument panel.
“No!” Turcotte yelled.
The man’s hand closed around the lever. Turcotte fired, hitting him in the shoulder, knocking him back against the wheel. The man’s right arm flopped, useless. He reached with his left hand for the lever. Turcotte fired again, hitting him in the chest. The man grinned, then pulled the lever. Turcotte put a round right between the man’s eyes.
He ran forward to the console. A digital timer welded into the metal frame was counting down second by second from one hundred. As Turcotte watched, it went from 98 to 97.
* * *
Yakov placed the muzzle of the MP-5 on Hemstadt’s chest. “Where is the cure?” “Gone.”
“The Mission,” Yakov said. “Where are they?”
Hemstadt smiled. “‘They’—as you call them — are long gone. You will never find them.”
“Who are they?”
Hemstadt simply shook his head. “Far beyond you. You don�
��t have a clue about what is really going on. What has been going on throughout history. Nothing is as you were taught.”
“They helped you in the camps during the Great War.”
Hemstadt snorted. “Helped? They invented the camps. We helped them. You have no idea—”
Yakov jabbed the steel barrel into the old man’s frail chest. “Why don’t you tell me, old man.”
Hemstadt laughed, the sound echoing off the stone walls. “You think you have accomplished something here? You haven’t stopped us. The launches have already been aborted and this plan abandoned. They’re taking the cure out to sea to sink it.”
* * *
Turcotte left the bridge and raced aft. Kenyon and Mickell were pushing pieces of the helicopter out of the way. There were several large plastic cases tied down on the deck.
“You’ve got a minute,” Turcotte yelled.
“What?” Kenyon was at the cases.
“This ship’s going to blow in a minute.”
Kenyon flipped open the latches on the first one. A large stainless-steel cylinder rested on the cut-out foam, about three feet wide by six in length.
“One of the satellite dispersers,” Kenyon said. He turned to the next case. It also held one of the satellite payloads.
“Thirty seconds.” Turcotte knew that the concussion from an explosion carried well in water. Even if they got off in time, the blast would kill them as they tried to swim away.
Kenyon skipped the next two cases, which were the same size.
The fifth, smaller box was different. Kenyon opened the lid and the top of rows of glass test tubes appeared, each one inserted in the foam padding. “Black Death?” Turcotte asked.
Kenyon pulled one out and read the German label. “Yes.”
He opened the next box. Pulled out a tube. “More Black Death.”
Turcotte looked up. A bouncer was hovering overhead. A voice spoke in his earpiece — Duncan had arrived. He swung the boom mike for the FM radio in front of his lips to tell her what he needed.
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