He roused from his half-conscious state and grabbed Will’s arm, holding it with inordinate strength.
“Do you have the canister?” Shakir asked desperately.
“Yes, we … Doug, you better get that thing down from your seat.”
Doug nodded and moved to the cockpit, returning with the silver container and holding it in Shakir’s view as he nodded painfully.
“You promise me it will be incinerated? You give me your word as an officer?” His eyes were boring into Will’s.
“You have my promise, Shakir. But just hang in there and you’ll be able to verify that yourself.”
“I … am dizzy. I did not realize … this was a bad wound.”
“Easy, Doctor,” Will said. “We’ll get medical help on the way.” Will turned and yelled through the open door at a half-dozen faces to get an ambulance and saw at least one officer nod and race away.
“Lie back and rest,” Will told Shakir. “You’ll be okay, we’ll make sure of that.”
But Shakir’s grip increased on Will’s arm as he pulled himself up again, struggling with pain and an increasing mental fog to focus on something he wanted to say.
Doug moved in and supported Shakir’s back as Will looked him in the eye, saying, “We owe our lives to you, Doctor. You came through for everyone on this.”
The sound of a siren outside heralded the approach of an ambulance.
Doug was nodding firmly. “He’s saying it for me, too, I …”
“You must listen, Colonel.” Shakir was focused on Will. “There is … another …”
Shakir’s eyes rolled back and his body went limp as unconsciousness overtook him. Will checked for a pulse and felt a faint beat. A team of medics had arrived, and they clambered aboard and began work immediately, transferring Abbas to a stretcher, then into the ambulance, which roared off with its siren in full cry.
EPILOGUE
CENTCOM, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Tuesday, March 12, 1991—4:00 P.M. (1300 GMT)
Forty minutes at one thousand degrees was finally up. The lab technician switched the machine off and turned to a small group of assembled officers who had witnessed the procedure.
“It’s done, and as you gentlemen saw, it was all in there. That eliminates the last of the deadliest human virus ever discovered, and I’m damned appreciative of that fact.” He took out his pen and leaned over a desk to sign the certification paper that had been drawn up, then stood and shook Colonel Richard Kerr’s hand.
“It was really that bad?” Kerr asked.
“You can’t imagine the suffering and destruction it could have caused, Colonel. You can’t begin to imagine. The tests we ran in just ten hours on lab animals were gruesome. We diluted it to one-five-hundred-thousandth of its original strength and it still killed a rhesus monkey within two hours.”
Kerr and Jon McCarthy of the National Security Agency walked together toward the security door lost in thought before Kerr broke the silence.
“We need to tell Dr. Hajek he’s off the hook before he shoots himself,” Kerr said. “How are you going to handle that little task, Jon?”
“Me?” McCarthy feigned amazement, but he had effectively caused the arrest of Dr. Hajek on suspicion of destroying government property, and it fell to him to undo the deed. He knew Hajek was waiting in his Riyadh hotel room in mental agony for the next shoe to drop.
“Yes, you,” Kerr echoed, grinning. “Poor guy. A lab assistant simply tries to follow the doctor’s orders to sterilize ‘everything’ and gets hold of the live samples by mistake, and we jump to the conclusion that Hajek’s guilty of sabotage.”
“He is,” McCarthy reminded Kerr. “At least guilty of sabotaging our attempts to send that sample home.”
“Hajek was right in one way, though,” Kerr added. “I don’t ever want anything that dangerous back in the States.”
“Well, it’s a moot point now,” McCarthy said.
“Is it? I mean, yes, this stuff is history, but what about the next time someone stumbles on a biological weapon and our side decides to take the Trojan Horse home? That’s what it might turn out to be, you know.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” McCarthy said.
“I mean, Jon, I hate it that we have to keep this whole thing secret. I understand why, and I know we have no choice, but it’s a damn dangerous shame. The people need to know what happened, and what could have happened.”
“Are you talking about what Dr. Abbas did, Richard, or about the virus itself?”
“Both. Abbas didn’t have to put everything on the line like that, and he certainly didn’t have to rescue our men. Even though he created that bug, he also made it possible to get rid of it. But he risked everything warning us, and what do we do? Keep it secret. I’m upset about the President sealing the record.”
McCarthy started chuckling again, as he had been doing off and on all day after getting the full report from Kuwait. “I just can’t believe that those two crazy colonels of ours flew a goddamned Hind right out from under Saddam’s nose! And neither of them had ever flown a chopper before. That’s what I’d like to publicize. Everybody in the Air Force would’ve gotten a kick out of that!”
Richard Kerr bade McCarthy good-bye and headed for the air base to catch a ride back to Dhahran, where Doug Harris and Will Westerman were about to be released from the hospital and debriefing. He would need to make arrangements for the Abbas family.
And as for Dr. Shakir Abbas himself, there was the matter of a funeral.
The tragedy of Dr. Abbas’s death had been compounded by the mysteries he had left behind. The stories of how he had retrieved the remaining canisters, how and where he had disposed of the first one, had died with him.
But at least the threat was over.
Western Iraqi Desert
Tuesday, March 12, 1991—5:45 P.M. (1445 GMT)
The sun dipped large and fiery orange toward the western rim of the desert, casting long shadows from a single Bedouin as he led his camel across a small wadi. The man moved slowly and with timeless deliberation as he thought of making camp and looked forward to his tea. He would rest somewhere on the other side.
He had topped the rim of the wadi when his camel stumbled, the beast’s rear hooves churning the sand of the wadi’s steep side as it struggled for footing. The man turned and hauled at the line, willing the camel up with prayers, oaths, and muscle.
When the camel had crested the wadi at last, the man set course for a point somewhere on the other side of the intrusive highway before him, ignoring a passing truck and the burned-out hulk of a smaller vehicle on his right.
Unseen behind him, a small rivulet of sand began falling steadily from the wall of the wadi, a tiny record of the camel’s momentary struggle, which grew to a trickle and continued unabated, even after the Bedouin and his camel had disappeared over the horizon. The sandfall persisted until at last it began to reveal something hard and shiny within the bank—something alien to the rhythms and substance of the desert.
A small metal canister rolled into the open then, and accelerated down the side of the wadi, tumbling across its floor before coming to rest in the middle—its polished silver surface reflecting the last dying rays of the setting sun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Flying for ten months on active duty for the Military Airlift Command (MAC) was the seminal event that inspired this high-intensity thriller. More precisely, it was the people of MAC that did it.
The key Air Force characters in this book are fictional, of course, but I know them like brothers and sisters. They embody the good traits and the intellect, the humor and the strengths, the weaknesses and the humanity of the men and women I’ve served with since 1971 in MAC. Desert Storm/Desert Shield brought home how fortunate I’ve been to know such people over two decades and through two wars.
After the storm—after we reservists returned to civilian life and this writer returned to his word processor—I leaned heavily on fri
ends, family, and associates to help me elbow aside my other books in progress to bring this work into being.
As publicly as possible, then, I want to thank:
The impressive number of people on three continents who talked to me in person and by phone regarding a long list of technical questions aimed at producing a novel of authenticity and technical accuracy without compromising national security;
All the people who took time to read and comment on the manuscript, including those at MAC Headquarters and the Pentagon who helped complete a thorough security review on a tight schedule;
Captain Dennis Isaacs of the 97th at McChord, who fought a similar pitch problem and brought his C-141 home safely to tell us the story;
My editor at Crown, James O’Shea Wade, who first legitimized the idea that became Scorpion Strike;
My wife, Bunny, and my executive assistant, Patricia Davenport, for their extensive and professional in-house editing and guidance;
My literary agents, George and Olga Wieser;
And the short-lived but best-of-show aviating firm of Nance, Fernalld, Valkenaar, Barnes and Dellinger. The road to Rotterdam will never be the same, guys!
JOHN J. NANCE
Lt. Colonel, USAFR
About the Author
John J. Nance is the author of thirteen novels whose suspenseful storylines and authentic aviation details have led Publishers Weekly to call him the “king of the modern-day aviation thriller.” Two of his novels, Pandora’s Clock and Medusa’s Child, were made into television miniseries. He is well known to television viewers as the aviation analyst for ABC News. As a decorated air force pilot who served in Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm and a veteran commercial airline pilot, he has logged over fourteen thousand hours of flight time and piloted a wide variety of jet, turboprop, and private aircraft. Nance is also a licensed attorney and the author of seven nonfiction books, including On Shaky Ground: America’s Earthquake Alert and Why Hospitals Should Fly, which, in 2009, won the American College of Healthcare Executives James A. Hamilton Award for book of the year. Visit him online at www.johnnanceassociates.com
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by John J. Nance
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2792-2
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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