Gut Instinct: A Taskforce Story

by Brad Taylor

  He came back, “Who is this? What’s your callsign and why are you on the radio?”

  I saw him passing twenty-eight thousand feet and said, “You stupid shit, you have a bomb on your aircraft! Level the fuck off or die. Is that plain enough for you?”

  I got nothing back. We waited, me looking at Jennifer and seeing the fear on her face. I called again but received no response. I knew what that meant. I was pulling the headset off when the pilot came back.

  “Okay. I’m level at twenty-eight. What do you want me to do?”

  Johnny sagged against the control panel and Jennifer actually clapped, like she’d just seen a fabulous golf shot.

  I said, “Drop lower. Get it down to twenty thousand. And get your ass back to Manila.”

  The controller heard my words and freaked out, screaming that I couldn’t tell him that with all the aircraft in the air. I passed him the headset and said, “You figure it out, but he’s not going any higher than twenty thousand.”

  I rubbed my face, the adrenaline beginning to subside. When I pulled my hands away, Jennifer was in front of me, a smile splitting her face.

  “We did it.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, I guess we did. Meaning you.”

  The cop that had let us up said, “I’m going to need to see some identification now.”

  I looked at Johnny and he said, “They were undercover. Your Department of Homeland Security has been working with them from the start. I’ll vouch for them.”

  He looked bewildered, saying, “Our Department of Homeland Security? Who is that?”

  “Jesus. I thought you guys were on board with counterterrorism. The person who placed the bombs was a Filipino. Surely you’re tied into the security apparatus on the threat. We called your department a week ago about it. I thought this was a big win for you considering how quickly you reacted. You saved the day. Are you saying you don’t know who we are?”

  The man looked at me, then at him, and said, “Yes, of course I do.”

  Behind his back, I mouthed to Johnny, Getting out now.

  He nodded and continued to engage the cop. I was glad I didn’t have to do cleanup, because it was going to be a mess. We reached the door leading to the elevator and he shouted my name.

  I turned and he jogged up. I said, “What, now you want my help? Might I remind you that this is your mission?”

  He grinned and said, “I got nothing for you, Pike. You mess with a mission of mine again, and I’ll rip your dick off.”

  He turned to Jennifer, clearly uncomfortable. “This pains me more than you could possibly know, but your gut was right. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  She smiled, a conciliatory expression that set him at ease. She said, “Trust me, I know how hard it is for you guys to say you were wrong. I started here with this man. He’s never wrong.”

  Johnny said, “Hey, I didn’t say I was wrong . . .”

  She said, “I know. And I appreciate it.”

  He grinned, nodded at me, then walked away. We entered the elevator. I waited until the doors closed and said, “Honey badger don’t quit, huh?”

  She smiled again, the radiance shining off her face at what she had done. By preventing both bombs from detonating, she’d saved the lives of more than three hundred people.

  She slid her hand into mine and squeezed, then let go. Watching the elevator numbers tick down, she said, “No. Honey badger don’t quit.”

  • • •

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  Read on for an exclusive extended excerpt of Brad Taylor’s

  THE WIDOW’S STRIKE

  A PIKE LOGAN THRILLER

  Available July 16, 2013, wherever books and eBooks are sold

  1

  The technician thought the sign on the door said it all. WARNING: BIOHAZARD LEVEL IV—H5N1 RESEARCH ONGOING. It looked official enough, the universal biohazard symbol followed by a host of precautions proclaiming its authority, but it was listing a bit to the side, the tape holding it in place losing adhesive in the humid air. An indicator of the less-than-perfect nature of the work beyond the door.

  Takes more than a sign to make a level-four facility. The technician thought again about telling someone what they were doing. Perhaps preventing a tragedy. He knew he wouldn’t, though, because the money was too good, and there just wasn’t anywhere else to do the research.

  Singapore had only one level-four biosafety facility in the entire country, and it was owned by the government at the Defence Science Organisation laboratory. No way was his employer going to let them in on the action. Too much profit at stake. Not to mention the red tape involved.

  He clocked in on the computer and pushed through into the anteroom, seeing the old BIOSAFETY LEVEL III warning mounted in a frame on the wall—what this facility had been rated before they used some tape and a new sign. He waited for the outer door to snick closed, then entered the lab, still empty at this hour, and continued on, through another double-doored anteroom and into the animal housing facility.

  He moved straight to two isolator boxes, ignoring the large cage at the back of the room teeming with European ferrets. Before he even reached the first box, he could see through the containment glass that the vaccine had failed. The ferret lay on his side, a small bit of blood seeping out of his eyes and nose. Golf Sixteen had lasted as long as Golfs One through Fifteen, which is to say about four days. Three healthy, and one day of agony before his body quit.

  He turned his attention to the other containment box and was surprised to see the ferret sniffing the glass, patiently waiting to play.

  The door opened behind him, and he heard, “Another female lived, huh? That’s going to be a blow to the weaker-sex theory.”

  He smiled at his partner, knowing she secretly liked the fact that all the males croaked no matter what the scientists did. “Good morning to you too, Chandra. And it remains to be seen whether the vaccine took or if she’s just an asymptomatic carrier like the others. We’ll get the sample from Golf Sixteen in a second. Help me with Sandy Eight here.”

  The Sandy side of the house had fared better than the Golfs. Seven of the initial eight had lived after being given the vaccine, but in so doing had forfeited their lives anyway. The vaccine had prevented the virus from gobbling them up whole but had not created the antibodies necessary to destroy it. The end result was a biological truce, with the virus living inside the host without attacking, patiently waiting to be unleashed on another victim. Which meant the first seven Sandys had gone into the incinerator just like the first fifteen Golfs.

  He struggled into another set of surgical gloves, his third, while his partner put on a flow-hood respirator. Once he had his own hood in place, she unsealed the top hinge of the containment box. She reached in and pinned the ferret behind the skull, using her other hand to trap the animal lower on the spine.

  Before it could get antsy, he used a syringe to extract a small amount of blood. As the needle bit, the ferret writhed violently, twisting out of Chandra’s grip. They both ripped their hands out of the box, and he lost the syringe as Chandra slammed the lid down to prevent Sandy Eight from escaping.

  Taking in great gulps of air from the flow hood, the technician felt the sweat rolling down his face, the forced air making his skin clammy. He leaned against the box and said, “Man, I like it better when they’re dead. We need more sophisticated containment boxes. Biosafety cabinets designed for this instead of the makeshift stuff we have. Real equipment intended for the work.”

  Chandra’s face was chalk white.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  She began backing toward the door.

  His first thought was that she’d been bitten, and he knew the consequences of that. He held his hands up to calm her. To keep her from running o
utside the containment zone. And noticed the needle of the syringe hanging from the back of his left hand, a faint ribbon of blood visible.

  • • •

  Three days later the first symptom appeared. A simple headache. When he looked in the mirror, his eyes were bloodshot. The whites crisscrossed with a latticework of red. He felt his stomach clench in fear, wanting to believe it was coincidence. But he knew he was dead.

  Inside his quarantine room they began administering massive amounts of Tamiflu in an effort to stop the progress. Like the nurses feverishly cramming him full of intravenous injections, he understood it was futile. The virus had been genetically engineered to be resistant to Tamiflu, and true to its nature it continued to ravage his body from the inside out, exploding his cells in a furious haste to replicate.

  By day four he was on a respirator, with all manner of drugs funneling into him to slow the assault. He turned cyanotic from the lack of oxygen, his skin almost translucent, his lips looking like his meals consisted of grape popsicles.

  He made it to day five before he began to weep blood from his eyes and nose, his body drowning in the excretions created by the battle raging within.

  Doctors from the laboratory hovered around him in pressurized biohazard suits, but they could do little to help him. It had been almost one hundred years since the great influenza pandemic of 1918, when the very existence of viruses was still unknown, yet the doctors from the lab were just as powerless as their predecessors. They might as well have put leeches on his body for all the good the leaps of modern medical knowledge did them.

  On day six, at 0436 local time, his heart stopped beating. The cadaver sat inside the quarantine room for an additional eighteen hours while his employer decided what to do with it, the virus boiling away inside, desperate to find another host.

  At 2230 three men entered his room dressed like they were about to walk on the surface of the moon. One carried a roll of thick plastic sheeting. Two sported cordless bone saws.

  At 0100 local time his body was fed into the incinerator in ferret-sized chunks.

  At 0800, Golf Seventeen and Sandy Nine were inoculated.

  2

  Dressed all in black, the man blended in completely with the masonry on top of the wall. Someone would be able to see him if they were interested enough to look closely, but there was little fear of the caretaker guard’s doing that without a reason. Movement was the killer at this point, so the man simply lay atop the wall, waiting.

  The guard continued on his route, no longer in sight, but his footfalls echoed on the pave stones. The man looked at his watch, waiting until the sound was overshadowed by the tooting horns of the endless Bangkok traffic.

  Seven minutes to get inside.

  He pulled up the knotted rope and set the grappling hook on the opposite side of the wall, the rubberized cleats making not a sound as it gripped the ledge. He dropped the rope on the near side, then rolled off himself, hitting the soft grass fifteen feet below.

  He remained crouched where he had landed, not moving a muscle, all his senses straining for a break in the rhythm of the night. He saw no movement and heard nothing but the traffic from Luk Luang Road. Convinced he was safe, he slowly rose to get his bearings.

  He had been inside the compound on four different occasions, but each one had been during daylight, coming through the front gate on official business. It was a little bit different at night, climbing up an outside wall between two buildings.

  Orienting himself, the man took one step before his earpiece came alive. “Freeze, freeze, freeze. Knuckles, you got a four-man element headed across the lawn toward the front gate.”

  Knuckles faded back into the shrubbery. What the hell was someone doing working this late? His watch told him he had five minutes before another guard came back through on this route.

  “Decoy, I’m running out of time. What are they doing? Coming or going?”

  “Going. They just came out of the secretariat building and are now standing around talking on the lawn.”

  “I can’t wait. Give me a clear path.”

  “Stand by.”

  Knuckles scanned the night sky, straining to see if he could detect the Wasp drone overhead. He came up empty, as he knew he would. The thing weighed less than three pounds and had a minuscule three-and-a-half-foot wingspan. With an electric motor, it was damn near soundless. Invisible—especially at night.

  “Knuckles, this is Brett. You want to roll over? Try again tomorrow night?”

  Brett was his exfil, sitting in a van on the corner of Luk Luang and Ratchadamnoen Nok Roads, right outside the United Nations offices. Knuckles considered, but ultimately decided against it. Just getting inside the compound had been a chore.

  He said, “Maybe. Give it a couple more minutes. If I abort, I’ll be coming over the same way. Pick me up on Luk Luang, canal side.”

  “Roger.”

  “Decoy, what do you have?”

  “I’m looking. Outside of the four unknowns, I’ve got bodies right where we expected them. Hang on.”

  Knuckles shook his head, still a little aggravated that his team had been called to do the mission. On the surface, it would appear a strange choice to risk so much breaking into the Thai Ministry of Education, but his goal wasn’t inside this compound. It was the Metropolitan Police Bureau across the street, on Phitsanulok Road.

  Another team on the ground had found getting inside that place was just too risky but had learned something interesting in the process: The fiber-optic data cable for the police department also serviced the Ministry of Education. All they needed to do was slave into it, which is where Knuckles came in.

  The Ministry of Education’s National Museum division was responsible for all archeological work in the country, a convenient arrangement that had given Knuckles’s team a plausible reason to conduct the four reconnaissance missions earlier. As far as the Thai government knew, he worked for a company called Grolier Recovery Services that specialized in facilitating archeological work.

  The team he was helping was in Thailand under a different cover and couldn’t simply switch hats to accomplish the mission, so he’d been called forward. He had never linked up with them in-country and didn’t even know who they were tracking. Just that they needed access to the Metropolitan Police database. His mission and theirs were completely firewalled.

  He waited in the brush, eyeballing the route he had planned earlier and feeling the time slip away. The compound was about two hundred meters across, but his target building was only one hundred meters away. Tucked between two larger buildings, it was smack-dab in the middle, at the apex of the lawn.

  He’d planned this route specifically because it was threaded through the myriad of CCTV cameras, but that was predicated on slipping in between the guard force patrols. He considered simply waiting where he was and letting the guard pass again but didn’t like the odds of discovery. He was hidden well enough in the darkness, but nothing was a sure thing when other human beings were involved. Murphy would raise his head at the worst possible moment. While he felt sure he could get out clean, the mission would be a failure. No way would they attempt another break-in after a compromise.

  “Okay, Knuckles, I got a route, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you got bodies in front of the building, cameras on the corners, and the guard shack in back. You got nothing on top.”

  “Are you kidding me? You need a UAV to tell me to climb to the roof? I could come up with that using a paper map.”

  “I know, I know, but the secretariat building runs lengthwise and butts right up to your building. The roof is sloped, so you could go the whole distance without being seen from the front. And I can track your progress.”

  “Do I look like a monkey? The secretariat is three stories tall.”

  “So you can’t do what
the chicks do?”

  Knuckles knew exactly whom he was talking about, and the jibe didn’t help his attitude any. He was about to call an abort when Decoy came back.

  “Just kidding. I’m looking at a fire escape ladder on the northeast corner. It’s inside the shadows. Can you climb a ladder?”

  He clenched his teeth, biting back what was about to vomit out of his mouth. “Roger. I can climb a damn ladder. Is it locked?”

  “Can’t tell from the video feed, but you need to make a decision quick. Guard is coming down the path. You got about forty-five seconds.”

  “Moving.”

  Knuckles sprinted in a crouch across the open area to the shrubbery on the near side of the secretariat building, then scampered down the wall to the northeast corner, underneath the cameras. He heard the guard’s footsteps at the same time Decoy called.

  “Freeze, freeze. Guard has stopped walking.”

  Knuckles tried to become the wall, breathing in a shallow pant, straining to hear if anyone came toward him. This was stupid. Only way out is through the guard. Which means compromise.

  “He’s moving again. You’re clear.”

  Knuckles duck-walked as fast as he could, finding the ladder right where Decoy said it would be. And a chain with a padlock sealing a cage at the base of it.

  Damn it.

  “Decoy, it’s locked with a cage that goes up to the second floor. It’s going to take me some time. Stay sharp. I need serious early warning.”

  “Roger.”

  “Brett, Brett, you copy?”

  “I got you.”

  “I get compromised, same plan; I’m going to deal with the initial issue, then come straight over the wall back to Luk Luang. I’ll need you there immediately.”

  “Roger that.”

  Knuckles pulled out a red-lensed penlight and studied the lock. An old Schlage. Not too much trouble. He placed his pack on the ground, pulled out a bunch of paperwork and brochures designed to support his cover if he was caught, and peeled back an inner lining, exposing his lock-pick kit. Besides the slave device for the fiber-optic cable, he carried no other special equipment. If caught, he felt it would be a hell of a lot harder explaining a bunch of 007 gee-whiz gear, so he’d opted not to bring any.