The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  He was left lying in total darkness, wedged face-first into a small vent tunnel. There was a whining, pinging sound in his ears, like a jet engine.

  “Hello?” he called.

  There was no answer.

  “Alice?”

  He assumed that the grenade had had virus material in it, Cobra crystals.

  He shouted, “We’re hot! I think we’ve gone hot in here!”

  There was no answer.

  He wondered if his suit had been breached. He wondered especially about his air filters, and if his head-bubble had been ripped. The lungs were the most vulnerable part of the body. Struggling against the tight walls of the tunnel, he put his hands up to his soft helmet and pushed on it and felt around. It seemed to be okay. The blowers were still humming. Good.

  It was almost totally dark, but not completely. Where was the light coming from? He realized that he was lying on his Mini Maglite. He got a hand under his chest and pulled it out. The light revealed his radio headset lying in front of his face, inside his helmet. He spoke into the mike. “Alice? Are you there?” He waited. “Hello, come in.” Nothing but a hiss of dead radio noise.

  ALICE AUSTEN saw Hopkins throw the grenade up into the vent hole and then begin to climb a ladder, heading for another vent hole, trying to get away from the blast. Then she rolled back behind the doorway, to protect herself from the coming explosion. She saw the light, but heard no sound.

  The flash died instantly, and now she was lying in total darkness. Hopkins had been carrying the only flashlight.

  “Will? Will, are you there?” she called on her headset. She received an answer of white noise. Nothing but the sound of blood rushing in her head and her breath panting.

  She did not want Hopkins to be in trouble. She really did not want him to be in trouble.

  “Will!” she screamed. “Please talk to me, Will! Will!” Nothing.

  Then she thought: I’m making a lot of noise. If Cope is around here, he’ll hear me.

  She would climb down into the chamber, to help him if she could. She felt around in the darkness. She grasped the ladder that went down into the chamber. It came away in her hand, and leaned crazily away from the wall, or so it seemed from the way it felt in the darkness. The blast had done a number on the ladder, had broken it. There was no way to get down in there. No way to see if Cope’s flashlight still worked, which was unlikely anyway.

  Now what? She could either stay where she was, lying on the floor, waiting for help to arrive, or she could try to get back to the main tunnel. Soon there would be people and lights in that main tunnel. That was where she wanted to go.

  She stood up in pitch darkness. Trying to remember which way she had come, she retraced their route, waving her hands back and forth in the blackness in front of her. She reached a ladder. Yes, we climbed up this ladder to get here. She called softly on her radio again: “Will? Are you all right? Please answer me, Will. Can you hear me?” She inched down the ladder, working by sense of touch. Now she was standing in a room. Which way to go now? Ariadne had had a thread; she had her memory. She began feeling her way along the walls in pitch-darkness.

  Austen was playing her hand along the wall when it came into contact with some fabric. Then she felt his arm. It was Cope, and they were inches apart. He had been waiting against the wall.

  He fired his gun twice. The muzzle flashes illuminated the two of them, frozen in the light like nocturnal creatures caught in the flash of a naturalist’s camera. Both shots went under her arm, missing her by inches.

  She dove across the room, howling with terror, and leaped through a doorway into total darkness. Suddenly she was tumbling and falling. She fell down the metal stairs into the main tunnel, gasping with pain. She picked herself up and ran, and collided with something.

  She found herself lying on her back in pitch-darkness, weeping with terror. Everything hurt. She wondered if she had broken any bones. Stop it. Stop crying. She rolled over and stood up. Have to move away from here.

  It was pitch-dark again, but she knew she must be standing in the main tunnel. She moved off to one side, then crouched by what felt like a wall. She tried desperately to get her breathing under control. Her body ached from falling down the stairs. She could not make a sound. He would target his gun on any sounds. But maybe he was trying to get away. Maybe he was gone. He doesn’t have a light. She listened. Heard nothing. She could not hear well, because her head was shrouded in the protective helmet, and her blowers were making a gentle hum.

  She waited, straining her ears, in total darkness. She saw sparkles in her eyes—her optic nerves were firing with nothing to see. She heard something—a metallic rattle. Then nothing. Then a faint scraping sound. She waited, absolutely still, trying to avoid the slightest rustle of her suit, but she could not do anything about the hum of the Racal blowers. A great deal of time seemed to pass. Her muscles became stiff and sore. Trapped inside her space suit, she couldn’t hear the sounds around her. She was tempted to rip open her hood so that she could hear better. But that grenade he had set off might have been full of Cobra.

  Suddenly she noticed a tiny light, a red spot on the wall. She did not know what it was. It moved rapidly, seeming to bounce over coffers and columns. It moved and jumped like a red firefly. She couldn’t tell where it came from. It had a life of its own, unconnected to anything else.

  It was seeking her.

  It was a laser pointer.

  She almost screamed. She hunched down.

  The red light went bouncing around. She couldn’t see Cope, but she realized he was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, aiming the laser out into the tunnel, over her.

  The dot went down the tunnel. It came back. It went down the tunnel in the other direction.

  “I can hear your suit humming,” he said. He had a calm voice, rather mild and high-pitched but strangely blurred, as if his mouth were full. “I can’t quite locate it. My ears are ringing.” The red dot hopped across the floor. “Eventually this will find you,” he said.

  The red dot hopped across some columns and turned and moved up the floor toward her. It touched her suit.

  She screamed and dove sideways. The gun roared, a flat deafening smack in the tunnel, with a bright flash.

  She found an opening between two columns, rolled through it, picked herself up, and ran in total darkness. The red dot hopped around, looking for her. She stopped running and crouched down low. She put her fingertips on the floor, in the stance of a runner at a starting block, trying to ready herself to jump in any direction.

  His voice came sharply out of the blackness, echoing on the concrete around them. “I am not wearing a mask.” The voice was about forty feet away, to her right. “I can hear you better than you can hear me.”

  On her radio headset she heard Hopkins say: “Hey! Anyone there?” He’s alive, she thought.

  “Ah, your radio,” Cope said.

  She reached for her belt and ripped the headset out of the jack, then tried to keep herself still.

  “The gun is loaded with hollow-point bullets. Each bullet has a viral glass bead in the tip. BioArk is selling this technology, too. I have acquired a great deal of technology from the Concern.” His feet clanked down the metal stairs. “You don’t understand what I’m doing. I’m not trying to kill too many people. Just some of them.”

  IN THE F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building, Masaccio was talking with the subway system operators. “You’ve got a lighting system in that tunnel complex? Well, turn on the goddamned lights! I’ve got people in there! What? What power transformer? Why is it a problem?”

  IN THE DARKNESS, she could almost feel the heft of the gun swinging toward her as he focused on the sound coming from her blowers. She tensed herself, preparing to explode from the starting block. She sensed the fragility of her body, the delicacy of her mortal being, and felt the jelly of her mind surrounded by hard bone, that can splinter—

  Suddenly, with a humming sound, banks of
fluorescent lights clicked on up and down the tunnel, bathing the tunnel in a blue-white glow.

  He was holding the gun in a police stance. His face was glistening wet. Fluid was running from his nose and coating his chin. His lips were bloody, his eyeglasses flecked with bloodspatter. He had started chewing. He fired. The bullet splashed on the concrete. She was running fast. The lights went out again.

  In total darkness she ran at full speed straight up the tunnel toward the dead end. Suddenly everything exploded. She saw purple flashes and she sprawled on the ground, certain she had been hit. She had tripped over a piece of concrete and was lying behind it. She stayed there, afraid to move.

  HOPKINS HAD BEEN calling for help on his headset. When he got no answer, he concluded that his radio was broken. He was lying on his stomach in a low horizontal passage. The tunnel was not meant to fit a human body, especially someone wearing a space suit with chest armor. The tunnel went straight ahead into darkness. It was about eighteen inches high and two and a half feet wide. He could not possibly turn around in it. His feet were blocked by the chunk of concrete that had fallen. He had to go forward into the crawlway; he had no choice. He was now beginning to feel the first bad tremors of claustrophobia. If he stayed where he was, he might run out of breathable air. So he crawled forward, occasionally calling on his radio headset. Got to slip this armor off, somehow, that would give me more room in here. He tried. He found that he could undo the Velcro straps, but he couldn’t take his arms out of it.

  He was coming to a dead end. “Oh, no,” he said. Now he would have to back up. But as he reached the end, his fingers felt a lip or corner of some kind. It was a shaft going down. The tunnel went straight downward into darkness. He pushed his face over the lip and pointed his light into a shaft that seemed to be about twenty feet deep. It ended with a flat dead end. A dead-end hole. Just looking at it made him feel sick. What now? I’m going to have to back up, get back to the blockage and wait for help.

  He tried to back up. It was more difficult than pushing himself forward.

  Then it occurred to him that there might be a way to turn his body around and reverse direction. Then I can maybe get more air, maybe shout around the blockage, and maybe someone will hear me.

  It seemed that the vertical shaft, which joined the horizontal shaft at a right angle, might provide enough space in which to turn his body around. He squirmed and twisted and fought against the confinement. He tried every position he could think of, his face suspended over the hole, working his shoulders this way and that. “It’s a mathematical problem with no solution,” he muttered. The problem was the damned armor vest. Again he struggled to remove his armor. Then a terrible thing happened.

  He slipped. He fell headfirst down the hole, a plunge of twenty feet. He whumped to a halt facedown in the bottom of the hole with a sudden wedging jerk. He had almost broken his neck. He was jammed vertically in the shaft, his arms pinned at his sides. And it had gone pitch-dark. He had lost his minilight. He was upside down, face-first in a dead-end hole, with no light and no air. There was no way he could back out.

  The roaring in his ears was the sound of his own voice begging for mercy. The panic shook him like a series of electric shocks. He was screaming uncontrollably, howling from pure claustrophobic terror. He struggled, fighting the concrete walls, trying somehow to move up and backward again, but he was jammed face downward at the bottom of the tight, airless shaft. He could not get enough air in his lungs, and he could not force his body upward. He thrashed, moaning, screaming, kicking his feet.

  Hopkins took a deep breath and held it. He held it for a while, then let all the breath out of his lungs.

  He tried to hold his breath again. He wanted to make himself pass out. If he could pass out, then this would be ended.

  He could not pass out, which meant that there was enough air in here to keep him alive.

  For a week.

  Don’t think about that.

  I’ve got to relax. I’m dying. If I’m going to die, I’ve got to come to some kind of peace.

  Think of something. What is that Zen saying? A wise man can live comfortably in hell. Forget hell. Think of California. Think of the best beach in California. It might be Malibu Beach. No—those little sculpted coves at Laguna Beach. Yes. He tried to imagine himself lying on his back on the warm sand at Laguna, the smell of the salt air, the cries of the seagulls, the whush-haaa of the surf, the sun falling into the Pacific Ocean…. So many lost opportunities…you geek, if you get out of this alive, you really should ask her out. Strike a blow for geekdom. The air really is depleted in here, it’s making me slightly demented.

  He realized that something was pressed against his cheek. It felt like—the Mini Maglite. But it was dead. He moved his hand. He got one hand around it, and twisted it, and it came on.

  Light. This was progress.

  He moved his neck left and right. He saw bare concrete a few inches from his eyes. His face was flushed and sweating, engorged with blood from hanging upside down.

  That was when he got a shock. There was something dark and open behind his head. An opening!

  Twisting his head as far around as possible, he saw that it was a tight passage that went off into darkness. Wedging his flashlight around, he managed to get a view into the tunnel.

  Then he got another shock.

  He saw a large glass tube standing upright on the floor of the tunnel at the foot of a ladder. It was packed full of hexagons of viral glass. It was Cope’s biological bomb.

  It was several feet from his head, and it contained enough viral glass to render areas of New York City and downwind lethally hot.

  He would have to try to disarm it. It must have a timer of some kind.

  This was going to be difficult, because he was hanging upside down in the shaft. He turned his body and jerked it, and twisted and hunched and struggled. He managed to slowly rotate his body. He was still hanging upside down, but he was facing the bomb. By wrenching his shoulders, he managed to get one hand through the opening. He would try to grab the bomb with his fingers and drag it toward him, where he could work on it. He reached his fingers out for the glass tube…it was too far away. It was three feet away from his extended fingertips.

  He moved his hand up to his waist, found his Leatherman Super Tool, and unfolded it to the pliers. Tried to grab the thing with his pliers.

  Nope. Totally hopeless. I need almost three feet.

  Three feet might as well be three light-years.

  At his waist he wore a pouch—he had used it to hold his minilight and his pocket protector. He got one hand up to it and unzipped it. The pocket protector fell out, scattering things. He said to himself: Think. A wise man can build gadgets in hell.

  He looked down at the stuff that had fallen from his pocket protector and he tapped his fingers around, taking inventory, and speaking out loud: “Mechanical pencil. Small box of pencil leads. Goober or Raisinet, not sure which. My Fisher space pen, writes in zero gravity. Swab. Another swab. Another swab. Length of duct tape wrapped around a pencil stub. Ticket stub from a Red-skins game. Half an Oreo cookie.”

  Nobody but a fool goes into a federal counterterrorism operation without duct tape. “To build a sticky probe,” he said out loud.

  With his head twisted to see what he was doing, and working with one hand only, he pulled a strip of tape from the pencil stub, and he began taping the objects together, trying to make a long stick. He debated trying to remove his glove for better coordination but decided against it; too much virus around here.

  With one hand he began stripping small pieces of duct tape off the pencil. He taped the mechanical pencil to the Fisher space pen and the pencil stub, end to end, using strips of duct tape, making a kind of extended stick. A probe. Then he stripped the swabs from their wrapping paper, and taped them together, end to end. That made another stick. Next, he taped the swabs to the pencil-and-pen stick. What he had now was a long probe. The light, flexible, delicate end of the probe
consisted of the three medical swabs, taped end to end. They flopped around, but they added length to his probe. He packed a small ball of tape to the soft tip of the leading swab, attaching it firmly to the swab with extra strips of tape. He was running desperately low on tape.

  He had built a sticky probe of the classical Caltech design, approximately two feet long, using junk from his pocket protector. Such probes are commonly used to remove nuts and washers and other parts that have gotten loose deep inside tangles of high-tech equipment. He gripped the probe with his Leatherman pliers—that lengthened the probe somewhat more. He reached out toward the bomb. Nope. It wasn’t long enough by about five inches.

  “Damn, damn!” he said.

  Think. Use your God-given brain.

  “Jackass—your flashlight!” he blurted. Now he taped his Mini Maglite to the sticky probe, and then held that in the Leatherman pliers. He reached out. The tape ball touched the bomb. He let it sit for a moment, to allow the adhesive to bind to the glass of the cylinder. Then he pulled it toward him. The cylinder shifted and toppled over.

  It thudded on the concrete with a loud sound, and the glass broke, dumping out hexagons of virus. They poured out in a heap, skittered here and there, gleaming like fire opal in the light of the flashlight.

  “Excellent!” he said. The warhead material had spilled out, giving him access to the detonator.

  He could see a chunk of explosive in the center of the pile of virus. There was a blasting cap stuck in it, and what looked like a chip timer. He couldn’t see the timer. Boy, this was crude. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a virus bomb, as long as you had the virus material.

  Then he saw movement and heard a sound. It was a rat, crouched and approaching the viral glass. It appeared to be about to eat some of the glass.

  “Get away! Stupid rat!”

  The rat looked at him, unafraid.

  He found the piece of Oreo cookie. Pushed it at the rat. “Eat that.”

  The rat took it and waddled away.