“Count me in,” said Gary. “I’ll talk to Fitz and the rest of the security team. I’m sure a few of them will volunteer. We’ll get her back.”
David pulled him in unexpectedly and gave him a long hug. “I don’t even know what to say. Seriously.”
“Thank you. You’re welcome. All good,” said Hoenig. “What now?”
“We drive north and meet with Rich,” said David. “He’s finalizing the plan.”
“Any idea what he has in mind?” said Hoenig.
David shook his head. “No. But I guarantee it’ll be fucking crazy.”
“I’m all about crazy these days,” said Hoenig.
“What’s up with you?” said David.
Hoenig glanced back at the tent, thinking about Evelyn.
“A new lease on life,” he said before laughing.
Chapter 29
The auditorium provided no refuge from the roasting air Major Smith had just escaped. He’d stood on the sweltering pavement, watching the last of his company’s HUMVEEs roll into the Delta Middle School parking lot, thinking he had it the worst. Apparently, he’d been wrong. The school must have shut down their air-conditioning for some reason. He could probably guess why.
When the final soldiers from Special Purpose Company Bravo took their seats, he wiped his brow and nodded at Rich, who gave his tech team the thumbs-up to start their presentation.
“Just the highlights. Before we all melt,” said Smith, turning to face the men and women assembled for the briefing. “Sorry about conditions in here. I assumed the place would be air-conditioned.”
“Ain’t nothing, sir!” yelled one of the sergeants. “Beats any day back in the sand box.”
A discordance of hoots and hollers filled the auditorium, making him smile. The company hadn’t caught more than a few hours of sleep in the last forty-eight hours, but they were still fired up. A good sign, given what he was about to propose. Instead of cutting them off, he let the enthusiasm simmer to a quiet murmur.
“Kill the lights,” he said, and the soldier next to the switches at the top of the auditorium plunged them into temporary darkness.
The wall-sized movie screen next to Smith displayed a green-scale order’s template similar to what most of his soldiers have seen on their integrated data network displays.
“I’m not going to explain every one of these,” said Smith. “They were acquired through an extraordinary effort by some of the men and women sitting among you, to expose what’s really going on with the virus that has been unleashed on Indianapolis and a few dozen other cities across the country.”
The first screen was a highly classified communication between the Ajax Midwest regional commander based out of Grissom Air Reserve Base and the Ajax commander in charge of the Fort Wayne incident zone. 1st Battalion, 151st Infantry Regiment’s commanding officer had repeatedly relayed his deep concerns to the regimental commander about abandoning civilians in the kill box, suggesting that the orders were illegal. Somehow, that communication had been intercepted, and Ajax took action.
Several seconds of absorbed silence was broken by Staff Sergeant Vaughn, one of the company’s most experienced and capable squad leaders.
“This can’t be real, sir,” she said. “This is fucking treasonous.”
“They just killed him?” said another soldier.
“Lieutenant Colonel Reid was killed by a sniper while meeting with hospital staff in Fort Wayne, deep inside the quarantine zone,” said Smith. “It gets way worse.”
“I don’t see how,” said Vaughn.
Another screenshot appeared, this one causing nearly everyone in the audience to gasp at once. Smith waited a few moments before sharing the real shocker.
“Forty-eight minutes ago, Lieutenant Colonel Donnelley, Major Hollis and six soldiers from SPF Alpha were killed when the battalion commander’s HUMVEE was hit by a Hellfire missile fired from a circling drone. Soldiers from Alpha had assumed the drone had been assigned to protect them—a reasonable assumption for a U.S. soldier to make on U.S. soil. Apparently not.”
The entire auditorium broke out into chaos, which he let go unchecked for several seconds before yelling over them. The senior enlisted in the company took his cue and reeled the rest of the soldiers in. When the din had reached a manageable level, Smith spoke.
“Here’s the deal, soldiers!” said Smith. “I’m headed up to Grissom Air Reserve Base to burn the regional headquarters to the ground.”
“Not by yourself, sir!” yelled a soldier, starting another round of hollers.
“That’s right! I can’t do this by myself!” said Smith, soldiers still buzzing with anger. “But I can’t order you to go, either.”
“Everyone shut the fuck up while the major talks!” said Sergeant Breene, one of the loudest soldiers Smith had ever met.
“I need to repeat that,” said Smith. “I can’t order you to go up there with me. This Ajax group has some significant firepower at their disposal. We just saw a request go out for an AC-130 gunship, ‘as a safeguard against mounting concerns by military and local government leadership.’ These people aren’t fucking around. They have drones, helicopters, armored vehicles and no rules of engagement. This will get ugly.”
“Can we coordinate with the other companies?” said Captain Gresham.
“My people are working on a way to make that happen without getting them killed,” said Rich, causing more murmurs.
“Before we get to any of that!” said Smith. “I need to offer you the chance to back out of this, no questions asked. And no—”
“For shit’s sake!” said Staff Sergeant Vaughn. “If you do not want to take part in this attack, and it will be an attack, raise your hand! There’s no shame in wanting to go home. Corporal, flip the lights on!”
When the lights came on, no hands were in sight.
“Sorry, sir. You were taking too long. The company is ready to fight,” said Vaughn.
“I guess so. Last chance to leave. Going once. Going twice. Gone,” said Smith, turning to Rich. “I’m going to turn you over to our new friends, who will share what they know and detail their requirements for the mission.”
“We roll over that place and leave it a smoldering ruin,” said one of the soldiers. “That’s the plan.”
The auditorium broke out into applause, and Rich patiently waited for it to settle down, nodding at Smith to finish what he was saying.
“Here’s the deal, Alpha,” said Smith. “There’s more to this mission than taking a wrecking ball to the Ajax operation at Grissom. These gentlemen need to infiltrate Ajax headquarters to extract information directly from their computer network. That’s the primary mission here, and we’ll support it unconditionally.”
Rich stepped forward. “Don’t worry. You’ll get your payback. I’ll make sure of that. But this won’t be an overwhelming speed and firepower kind of assault. It’s going to involve a little more finesse. Any big-picture questions before I get started?”
“What’s Ajax?” said Captain Gresham. “Who or what are we up against?”
“Great question. I’m afraid we’d all die from heat exhaustion before I could do it justice,” said Rich. “Long story short. It’s a kind of shadow government. A group of deep conspirators that have managed to assemble a private army on U.S. soil and execute a coordinated bioweapons attack across the country. My team has been hunting this group for close to a decade. I’m beginning to think it was a decades-long distraction leading up to this.”
“What do they want?” said the captain.
“We really don’t know,” said Rich. “But before Ajax, we knew them as True America.”
“The political group?” said a soldier.
“They’re gone,” said another. “One term and out.”
“They weren’t always a political group,” said Rich. “And to answer your question, Captain, I do know one thing based on the past decade’s fight. Whatever they want won’t be good for the real America. Shall we get start
ed?”
Major Smith stood in the background, thinking about the AC-130 gunship. Armed with a GAU-12/U 5-barreled Gatling cannon, a 40mm Bofors cannon and a semiautomatic 105mm precision howitzer, the AC-130 could stop his company in its tracks. Its presence above the airport should be an immediate showstopper, but he wasn’t convinced that Rich would call off the attack if the aircraft arrived on station. Smith sensed a pathological obsession with Ajax, which made all the more sense knowing that the man had spent the past ten years hunting them down. He just hoped that Rich’s very understandable obsession didn’t get Smith’s soldiers slaughtered.
Chapter 30
Major Smith stood next to the van, drumming his fingers on the headrest just inside the open sliding door. The two hackers typed furiously, going back and forth between multiple backlit keyboards and an array of curved screens that lit their faces. The few times Smith had stared at the screens and tried to make any sense of what they were doing had left him dazed. He checked his watch. David and three of his soldiers would arrive at the Miami Correctional Facility in five minutes to run their first active test inside the Ajax system.
If all went well, David’s ex-wife would be released to his soldiers and driven to the gas station across the base, where David’s Jeep and a few of his friends waited. They’d drive east and get clear of the chaos that SPF Bravo would unleash on the airfield shortly after.
Smith’s assault force of ten HUMVEEs and fifty-two National Guard soldiers sat on the shoulder of a tree-covered road, about a mile from the southwestern edge of Grissom Air Reserve Base. The road was on the outskirts of Lincoln, Indiana, a tiny green oasis in the middle of miles of open fields. Lincoln was about as close as he was willing to risk with a Reaper drone circling over the airfield. Captain Gresham’s force of four HUMVEEs was located a similar distance north of the airfield. They’d race into position along the northern edges of the Ajax compound, sweeping the open expanses of concrete with gunfire until Smith’s main assault force arrived. The rest of the company was parked a few miles south, ready to pounce on the quarantine facility.
“I just sent the orders to prepare one Meghan Olson for immediate release,” said Graves. “I was a little nebulous on the details of the transfer for obvious reasons. 2nd Battalion, 151st Infantry Regiment has been officially declared a rogue unit. Congratulations. You’re one of us now.”
“Woo-hoo! Party like federal fugitives,” said Gupta, grabbing a half-crumpled bag of chips and pointing it at him. “Celebrate with spicy nacho cheese Doritos, because this ignoramus doesn’t know the difference between the regular nacho cheese Doritos and the spicy nacho cheese kind.”
“That’s all I could find,” said Graves.
“That’s because everybody likes the regular kind,” said Gupta. “I’m sure you could have found a bag of the regular flavor.”
“I didn’t care to find a bag of the regular. I don’t eat that shit,” said Graves. “See what I put up with?”
“This isn’t a routine?” said Smith.
“I wish,” said Graves. “At least he grew out of the hip-hop gangsta phase. Riding around with the Notorious Gupta wasn’t a treat.”
“The rest of the package is ready,” said Gupta, putting a final tap into his keyboard. “Set for a timed release in case our van gets shredded by machine-gun fire on the way in.”
“Funny,” said Graves.
“You’ll be well protected,” said Smith. “I have two heavily armed HUMVEEs and a squad of soldiers solely tasked with keeping the two of you alive and your van intact.”
“That’s more than we usually get,” said Graves, turning in his seat to face his screen. “I’m going to run through the comms again, make sure everyone is synched. Then it’s sit and wait. Any idea when this will go down?”
“Once David and the rest of the civilian group is clear, it’s up to your boss,” said Smith, “and the flight schedule.”
“The next arrival is scheduled for 10:35,” said Graves. “After that 11:00.”
“My guess is he’ll go with the 10:35,” said Smith. “Keep the next one as a backup in case they have a problem on the approach.”
Rich’s assault team was currently airborne in the same aircraft that had delivered his team to NevoTech, flying as low as the pilot dared in a racetrack pattern west of the airport. The plan was to follow the scheduled airfield arrival on its final approach and split off at the last moment, dropping Rich’s team directly over the Ajax compound. The noise from the arriving C-17 Globemaster’s four turbofan engines should sufficiently mask the twin-propeller aircraft delivering the team. That was the theory at least. Smith thought the plan was a little sketchy, but Rich and his team felt confident it would work—and they came across as highly experienced and professional operators. He had to trust that.
“Then we have about thirty minutes to kill,” said Graves, snagging the chip bag from Gupta’s unsuspecting hand and munching on a handful. “Spicy nacho cheese Doritos?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Smith, reaching into the bag and grabbing a few.
“I knew it!” said Gupta. “You bought these on purpose.”
“Maybe,” said Graves.
Smith shook his head. He had to admire these two. They were thirty minutes away from driving into the middle of a pitched battle, in a windowless, unarmored van—and they were giving each other serious shit about a bag of Doritos. Who the hell were these people?
Chapter 31
David took a deep breath and exhaled. Of all the insanity he had been through over the past two days, he was more nervous about this trip than all of it combined. He wasn’t worried about his own safety. Five heavily armed HUMVEEs sat along the side of the road a few miles back, and he didn’t see anything in the correctional facility parking lot to suggest the people put in charge of the quarantine operation could mount any kind of pursuit. In fact, he suspected that Ajax agents had simply taken over the facility using their self-implemented authority, keeping the state guards in place.
No. He was terrified that the digital trick played by Rich’s “technology consultants” might not work, and Joshua’s mother would remain locked inside, pitted against the terrible odds calculated by those same technology wizards. Even if they managed to order the evacuation of the facility once hostilities commenced, the chances of getting everyone out before Ajax triggered FIRESTORM were slim. Her fate would be decided by her location at the time of evacuation, a dim prospect given the numbers—and he’d return to Joshua empty-handed.
According to the information gleaned by Rich’s people, the Miami Correctional Facility had been emptied of its three thousand inmates to make room for nearly ten thousand Charlie- and Delta-class quarantine detainees. All of them were asymptomatic citizens scooped up inside the Indianapolis or Fort Wayne quarantine zones. The two inmate cells now held four detainees, with hundreds more sleeping in common areas and open spaces. Tents had been erected on the grounds between the inmate buildings to accommodate the rest.
If detainees inside the facility turned symptomatic, they were taken to the one-hundred-and-fifty-acre reinforced-fence “farm” directly south of the state prison. They’d passed by the “farm” on the way up. Steel-girder-constructed watchtowers equipped with crew-served machine guns lined the concertina-wire-perimeter fence, portable light poles blazing inward—turning night into LED day.
A secondary fence stood about twenty yards inside the primary perimeter, bodies stacked up in heaps along the barrier. That was the Bravo class “farm” for those showing early to mid-range symptoms. The full-scale infected were located in a darkened plot of land immediately west. Nobody knew what happened in the “Alpha farms.” The Ajax system didn’t shed any light on those operations.
The entire place was a holding facility. A risk-mitigation operation implemented to strip the quarantine zone of uninfected and infected alike. The fewer survivors inside the zone, the better. Less evidence for the inevitable forensic and scientific investigations to follow
.
“We have a green light,” said Sergeant Rudolph, looking over his shoulder at David. “I have a good feeling about this.”
“That makes one of us,” said David. “Good luck.”
“Be right back with your wife,” said Corporal Chapman.
“Ex-wife,” said David.
“You need to let that shit go, brother,” said Rudolph. “The two of you survived the apocalypse. Time to reconcile.”
“Tell that to her,” said David. “Now get out of here before I change my mind.”
David climbed into the turret when they left, watching them walk into the front door of the facility. No way it’ll be this easy, he thought, resisting the urge to swivel the turret and aim the M240 machine gun at the building. His thoughts swirled in the gunner’s seat. If it didn’t work, he’d have to stay and work with Smith’s soldiers to find her amidst the pandemonium. He dismissed that thought just as quickly as it materialized. Sticking around might very likely kill both of Joshua’s parents, something he couldn’t allow. If she didn’t walk out with the two soldiers, he’d head west in the Jeep and wait for the dust to settle.
He sat in the nylon sling, taking deep breaths, the mostly empty parking lot closing in on him. What was taking so long? A quick look at his watch showed they’d been gone for less than a minute. This was going to be the longest wait of his life. A buzzing sound echoed through the turret, drawing his attention away from the building. Something at the airport. He considered going below and grabbing the pair of binoculars he’d seen earlier, but decided against it. His eyes were drawn back to the building that had swallowed Rudolph and Chapman. He wanted three people to walk through those doors more than anything in the world, which was ironic given the amount of time he’d spent hating her over the years.
The Zulu Virus Chronicles Boxset (Books 1-3) Page 75