The sudden trill of multiple alarms snapped her head toward another pair of monitors.
“What is it?” Gage stepped quickly to her side.
“It’s her blood and fluids analysis. Look. Blood in the urine… high protein level, too. Albumens, I’d bet. Bilirubin count starting to climb. This is not good.”
“Kidney failure?”
“More than just that. Look here. I’d say that almost certainly means her liver is shutting down, too. We’ve got to get a full body scan on this woman right now!”
59
“Blood clots in her kidneys, liver and lungs. If there’s any more damage, she’ll die within days… maybe hours.”
Bridges was visibly shaken as he delivered the news.
“What is the most serious injury? What do we attack first?” Kierkegaard asked.
“Right now, I would say her kidneys are the most immediate problem,” the doctor answered. “But it’s the combination of all of the injuries that will kill her. The treatment for some symptoms will worsen others. I have a terrible feeling that we haven’t seen the last of the damage.” He couldn’t help looking at Hunter. “How could so many bombs hide from us?”
Tamiko responded instead. “A number of them must have been programmed to keep circulating in the bloodstream until commanded to embed themselves in an organ and detonate. Odds would be in the billions against Hunter encountering one by accident. I’ll bet our scans have been showing us shadows of moving bombs, but we just didn’t know what we were looking at.” She turned to face Kierkegaard. “Someone knew of our progress, sir, and knew it was time to detonate these secondary bombs… maybe even knew our strategy from the beginning, and how to beat it with free-floating devices.”
Kierkegaard merely nodded, his face a mask of stone. Then he gave a curt nod at Bridges, signaling the man to continue.
“The damage to the kidneys is significant, but manageable so far,” the doctor said. “However, as more kidney cells fail, the pressure increases on the ones that remain. They’re like tiny dams holding back a flood. Once a few more start to go, they can begin to topple like dominos—and very quickly you’ve got a catastrophic failure.”
“What about dialysis?” asked Tyson.
“Of course, and the equipment is being put in place right now. We already had it on hand, just in case. Still, the combination of injuries is the problem. The best treatment for the blood clots in her lungs is an aggressive dosage of a clot-dissolving thrombolytic such as one called ‘t-PA’, then a drip of heparin to thin the blood to improve the flow around the clot and help break it up. This also calls for high fluid intake by the patient. Unfortunately, dialysis doesn’t remove much fluid, so we could easily end up with dangerous swelling of tissues. Maybe even around the heart and lungs, which are already under a strain.”
“And her liver?” Mallory asked.
“The damage appears to be very localized there,” Bridges replied. “The clot hasn’t blocked a major artery, but a smaller vessel deeper inside the organ. Even so, the trouble will spread, and there isn’t any quick remedy. We can only monitor her blood protein levels, and the concentrations of certain chemicals, while her body weakens. The liver dysfunction puts even more strain on the kidneys.”
He looked at Kierkegaard. “In my opinion, other dangers are more immediate, but the liver damage is the most serious long-term threat to her life. The success of liver transplants is not encouraging. If we can’t save her liver, we could still be sentencing her to a long, slow death.”
“You’re not narrowing this down for us,” Kierkegaard observed. “What do you recommend?”
“I’m sorry.” The doctor wiped a hand over his face. “It’s like doing triage in an emergency room, except more injuries could still occur. It’s not easy to prioritize.” He cleared his throat and sat up straight. “First, I think we need to use plasmin to break up the clots in the kidneys and the liver.”
“Primus only carries enough for one clot at a time,” Hunter interrupted. “You’d have to remove the sub and re-load her. Twice.”
“I know that,” Bridges answered. “I suggest we send Primus to the liver. That clot is deep inside—we can’t get at it any other way. The blockages affecting the kidneys are both in branch arteries just before the organs themselves. So they should be accessible by needle with the HPIS… the robot High Precision Injection System that we’ve used to position Primus.”
“And the lung clots?” asked Kierkegaard. “No plasmin for them?”
“As a last resort, perhaps, but I think we’ll have good success with the t-PA and heparin, as I mentioned. It will be a good preventative measure to have those chemicals in her system anyway, in case more bombs detonate. The damage hasn’t affected her breathing yet, because the damaged areas are still fairly small and isolated.
“But there’s another step I’d like to take….” He waited for a nod to continue. “It’s risky in her weakened state, but I’d like to implant a Greenfield filter. It’s a sort of conical filter that’s placed in the inferior vena cava—if a blood clot breaks loose and starts to travel through the bloodstream, the filter will trap it before it can get through the heart and into the pulmonary arteries. I’ve called in our backup surgeon, Anthony Vitale—he’s an expert in this surgery, and also with thrombolytic treatment.”
“Why didn’t we use one of these filters in the first place?” Hunter’s face clouded with anger. Had they missed a chance to protect her because of some careless oversight?
“Because the bombs themselves are too small for a Greenfield filter to catch. However, if we’re really seeing evidence of drifting bombs, I think there’s now a significant risk that a clot created elsewhere could travel to the lungs. A large blockage in the wrong artery and we could lose her within minutes.”
The room fell silent. Their confidence was badly shaken. Hunter was devastated.
“What are we waiting for?” he blurted. Surprised faces turned to him.
“Mr. Hunter is right,” Kierkegaard said. “We’ve seen our best options. Let’s get to it, people.” He swiftly left the room. His superiors would be waiting for his report, and they wouldn’t be waiting patiently. He looked up at the clock on his way out.
11:25 pm. It was going to be a long night.
# # #
Mannis loved helicopters. He always had. In his military days he’d even begun pilot training on them before he’d been promoted and moved into the intelligence community.
Now, as he sped through the night in the belly of the huge MH-53J Pave Low he was too distracted to enjoy it, consumed by his thoughts. The thirty heavily-equipped soldiers with him left him alone. He was dressed in clothing similar to theirs, but they knew he wasn’t one of them. They didn’t know where he fit in, so they minded their own business.
That business was close at hand. He’d paid a heavy price to learn the location they were heading for: two suspected traitors released from life-sentences in prison. In return for their freedom, they had separately and independently revealed a secret training facility in this part of the North Carolina countryside, used by right-wing hardliners. Quick work by the FBI had narrowed the search down to an isolated farm. No one in the sheriff’s office of the nearest town had seen or heard any unusual activity. In fact, they knew almost nothing about the property.
Mannis had recognized the signs from long experience.
Now he was aboard the Pave Low transport helicopter full of special ops troops, only minutes away from finding out if he’d been right. Slightly behind them and to the left flew a smaller MH-60G Pave Hawk, also fully manned. The giant rotorcraft and their specialized passengers were testimony to the seriousness of the threat. If the mercenary squad he was looking for was here, they would be heavily armed and exceptionally skilled—and he had no idea of their numbers.
He’d already briefed the pilots. There was to be no fly-by to assess the environment. They couldn’t risk alerting their targets
, so they would have to go straight in.
They were flying only a few hundred feet above the trees. He felt the sudden drop of the aircraft as it began its dive. Within moments, its descent flattened out, and seconds later came a springy jolt as wheels touched the ground. The rear door was already opening, and the men began to spill out in well-drilled order, without words.
As the last soldier hit the dirt, the helicopters lifted off again since no one knew what kind of weapons the enemy might have and there was no sense in risking forty million dollars worth of aircraft close to the ground. They’d been needed for infiltration and delivery, but now all they could do was to stay out of harm’s way and listen to the fight.
Mannis chafed at the need to remain in the Pave Low. He was a man of action, but he knew that he was too old for these games. Instead, he took advantage of his official status and leaned over one of the flight engineers to see out the windows.
The night was overcast and very dark. The most he could see was occasional quick sparks of light from flashbangs—flash grenades that made tremendous noise and a blinding light, but did little damage. The troops would be using them to temporarily incapacitate anyone inside a structure before they risked entering it. Short bursts of words over the radio sounded routine and unhelpful. There was no gunfire that he could see.
It was all over within six minutes.
The farm was empty. Abandoned.
Dammit! Were they already gone? Or had they never been there? He had to know.
He ordered the pilots to land, and in another five minutes he had his answer. At his instruction, the special ops boys had brought metal detectors. They found shell casings—a lot of them—scattered in the grass. Large caliber, probably from automatic assault weapons. Quick inspection showed they’d been fired recently. Someone had been there—now they were gone.
But where?
One of his other inquiries had implicated a private property in a Poquoson subdivision just to the north of Langley AFB. The information was graded only medium reliability, but a ground assault on the Primus project might require a staging area close by.
He transferred to the Pave Hawk and ordered its troops back aboard. The others would stay behind to try to find more clues. If the bad guys were now in a residential subdivision, he couldn’t go in with planeloads of heavily armed commandos. A different approach would be needed. He’d have to think that through.
As four giant blades dug hard into the night air and heaved the helicopter from the ground, Mannis used the radio to update the commander of the project’s security contingent who, in turn, would notify the base commander.
He hoped to hell that the enemy hadn’t jumped the gun and already put their assault plan into play. If so, he’d be better off going straight to the base.
But the deadline was still a day-and-a-half away. If they wanted the president to drop his plans for the G20 summit without raising suspicions they wouldn’t risk everything in a headline-grabbing bloodbath. Would they?
No, he decided. He would go to Poquoson first.
60
Kellogg’s goggles were held firmly in place by his headgear, but the slight pitching of the rubber dinghy made it difficult to find the two tiny pinpoints of light he was looking for. If he hadn’t imagined the lights, it meant that the north-facing shoreline of the small inlet was protected by passive detection systems. Maybe if he tried thermal imaging. He flicked a dial.
There they were. Four… possibly as many as six.
His high-level information had said that the mouth of the creek was unguarded, but that was wrong. It looked like there was a series of infrared sensors just above the waterline. He had been correct not to depend on the intelligence, and risk going ashore by boat since they would have been spotted hundreds of yards out. Instead, they had a long swim ahead of them. Hennings would have to be dead accurate with his underwater navigation, but they stood an excellent chance of passing undetected up the inlet, under the bridge, right to the verge of the Eaglewood golf course that bordered Langley Air Force Base to the north. That would place them just northwest of their target, with marshland and undergrowth to give them cover.
He’d never seen the base from this direction before, but he could pick out certain features of its shadowy silhouette and fill in the gaps from imagination and memory. The runways were well south of where they were going. The wind was moderate from east-northeast, so the control tower would be directing even small traffic onto the long runway from the west.
“This is as far as we go,” he said in a low voice to Chavez, who passed word along. He thought he heard a small groan from the stern. Probably Rakov, realizing how far they would have to swim. He was their weakest swimmer—maybe there weren’t a lot of good beaches in Chechnya—but he was their night insertion specialist. If anyone could keep them unseen, it would be Rakov. “Can’t go any closer,” Kellogg explained. “There are infrareds on the shore.” Chavez nodded silently. He, too, had expected as much.
They were already suited up, with weapons in weighted waterproof cases beside them. Two took turns gently rowing against the wind to keep the dinghy on station, while the others made final checks of their gear. When all were ready, they slipped over the side. The small sounds of tethered equipment knocking against rubberized re-breather tanks did not carry over the light slap of the low waves.
Branson, Evers, and Jackson slit open the cells of the rubber raft with dive knives, ensuring that the weights they’d left behind would carry it to the bottom. Evers and Wahlberg both carried lightweight inflatable rafts in their backpacks for the team’s return after the attack.
Hennings and Romero gave the high sign. They had their compass headings.
After slowly pivoting in the water to ensure they were all together and ready, Kellogg took one more look at the well-lit military base in the distance, then held his fist out, thumb pointing downward, and slipped beneath the dark surface of the Back River.
# # #
Emma’s liver was only centimeters away from Primus’ position near her ovary, but it required a journey through most of her body to get there. Truman Bridges and Anthony Vitale would wait until the sub was in position at the target before attempting to implant the Greenfield filter in the inferior vena cava. The filter would be inserted at the end of a long wire through an incision in her neck, fed slowly through the venous system, then opened and wedged into place. No one knew if the process would pose a hazard to their billion-dollar submarine, but it was better not to take the chance.
To Hunter the trip seem endless. Too much time to think.
He had made love to a married woman in her mind. Did that make him an adulterer? In a hideously vulnerable mental state, had she merely grasped at the nearest lifeline out of desperation? If so, he had violated her innocent trust no less than the man who had violated her in the flesh.
I WANTED YOU. I STILL WANT YOU.
The sudden thought, blazing across his mind, startled him so badly that his body jerked in the chair.
No. I will close my mind. The job comes first.
A huge dark mass loomed ahead. Primus had arrived at the clot.
It was bigger by a third than the one he had encountered in her finger so very long before, but this one was fresh, only hours old—not so tightly bound together. He felt his confidence rise. He could do this. With the right spread, Primus’ cargo of plasmin would be enough.
As he worked, he had the uncanny feeling of someone watching over his shoulder.
# # #
Kellogg floated motionless in the water, about ten feet below the surface. It was tempting to go all the way up and take a look around, but it wasn’t necessary, and would only increase the risk of detection. Hennings and Romero had to break surface to check their bearings. The presence of underwater electrical cables, even a nearby metal shipwreck buried under the silt could be enough to affect a compass and throw them off course. The two navigators knew what they were doing. The
y had no wish to find a welcoming party waiting for them onshore.
Kellogg could see flashes of light that winked every few seconds, spread in a rough circle through the dark water around him. They were a necessary evil, too: small strobe lights attached to the first stages of the breathing apparatus, behind the diver’s neck. It was the only way to be sure no one would accidentally lose the others in this inky water. The lights were only activated while submerged. The odds were hundreds to one against anyone above the surface seeing them, let alone knowing them for what they were.
A slight pressure in his ears told Kellogg he had sunk a foot or two. His index finger squeezed the trigger on his inflator hose, bleeding a little air into his buoyancy control vest. Long experience told him precisely how much was enough to stop his slow descent without making him positively buoyant. He hoped the others were being equally attentive to their depth. In the dark, it was much harder to tell if you were rising, unless you watched your depth gauge. Once begun, the ascent would accelerate with the dwindling pressure until you popped above the surface like a cork. Disastrous in their present situation. They were easily within range of the infrared detectors, and the motion sensors that almost certainly accompanied them.
He held the lens of his flashlight over the face of his dive computer and gave it a quick flicker of light. The resulting glow lasted long enough for him to check the time. Not quite on schedule, but not far behind. He would have preferred a buffer, in case any unexpected obstacles delayed them, but a minute or two wasn’t critical. He was still completely confident. He had more than surprise on his side. Much more.
And when the crucial moment came, could he still do what he had to do?
Yes he could. Very definitely. He almost smiled at the thought.
A disturbance in the water caught his attention. Hennings and Romero were on their way back down. When they had reached him and pointed the way, he shined his flashlight on himself, drew a circle in the water with his forearm, then held it out in their direction of travel, letting himself tip into a horizontal position as he did.
The Primus Labyrinth Page 32