“Why? Because you have tanks?” Ross asked, still with the rifle at his shoulder. “Great. Bring them on. You can park them right here. We might be able to hold the line tonight if you do. And that’s no joke, sir. My men are exhausted and on the verge of…” He stopped just short of saying they were on the verge of running. As true as it was, he wasn’t going to disgrace his men by saying it aloud.
“All I’m saying is that tanks would be welcome,” he said after the shortest of pauses. “You know what’s not welcome? These Soviet-style political officers…sir.”
Even though the general had been flown in from the Pentagon, he detested the political officers as well. But that didn’t mean he was going to put up with this shit. “Take your sir and shove it up your ass, Ross. You’ve threatened a superior officer! Your days are numbered.”
“I’m not too worried,” Ross shot back. “If a million zombies can’t kill me, I doubt a fat, brown-nosing general and his government appointed butt-buddy can even scratch me. Come back when you’re ready to fight the real enemy, sir.”
In a fury, the general and his people left and when they had turned their trucks and Humvees back the way they came, the little group of soldiers and wanna-be soldiers cheered.
Clarren suddenly appeared at Ross’ side, sighing sadly. “I take it you’ve never read that book How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Ross shook his head, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach. “I’m not much of a reader.” In a whisper, he added, “What have I done?”
Clarren considered the question. “Apart from becoming more of a criminal than I am? Well, for one you suggested that your commanding officer was gay, which probably wasn’t helpful. It’s weird. Soldiers seem to make a lot of homophobic jokes. You ever notice that?”
“Yeah, I noticed it. But I figure there’s no reason to be a fag about it.” Clarren chuckled; Ross only sighed, feeling low. “If they come for us, the line will fall and if the line falls, I don’t see how Boston can stand for very long.”
“You should’ve let them have me,” Clarren answered.
“And lose the toughest rump-ranger this side of the Mississippi?” Ross replied, trying to smile. Clarren only rolled his eyes—Ross shook his head at this. “No, that’s the wrong response. What you should’ve done was punch me in the arm and crack on how fat my mom is. What’s with you Bostonians? You used to be tough. The founding of the revolution and all that.”
This set Clarren in a reflective mood. “We’ve had our ‘Bunker Hill’ moment. Now we need a Lexington and Concord. This is April after all.”
Ross had no idea what the month had to do with anything, and the same was true with Lexington and Concord. He knew they were Revolutionary War battles, but that was about it. “Meaning what, exactly? You had your own personal rebellion and it failed. I don’t see how another will work.”
“But now we have the illustrious Colonel Troy Ross on our side. You may not know it, but you’re kind of famous out here. You’re the reason we’re still holding the line. That’s what I hear. The artillery, the air strikes; everyone thinks that was your doing. If you lead them, men will follow you.”
“Not against tanks they won’t. And where do you think they would follow me to?”
Clarren grinned. “To arrest those fucking political officers. Once they’re gone, we can win this, Ross. Everyone knows they’re screwing things up. If you take them out, even the tanks will follow you. Trust me.”
Chapter 19
6:20 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Moscow, Russia
The Sukhoi Superjet 100 touched down twenty-eight minutes ahead of schedule. With China convulsing in its death throes behind them, and the launch of nuclear weapons reportedly only minutes away, the pilot pushed the SS100s cruising speed to its maximum. The last Russian officials to leave the country weren’t going to complain, and neither would anyone at Aeroflot airlines. They wanted their plane back as fast as possible.
It wasn’t germs they feared. They had scrubbed the jet from top to bottom and had forced the passengers and crew to sit through a four-hour quarantine before being allowed to board.
No, they were worried about their jet flying through a wall of radiation forty-thousand feet high.
Not that they were blind to the possibility of bringing the plague into Russia. There were two government officials on board watching the passengers with piercing eyes. Each carried compact pistols, rubber gloves, masks and spray bottles filled with bleach. Thankfully, no one showed even the least sign of a headache even now after the long flight.
When it landed, they were all glad to get away from the plane, but none more so than Svetlana Melnikova. She’d had a plastic tube shoved up her ass for the last five hours and couldn’t wait to get the thing out of there.
After passing through security she went straight to the bathroom, as always, thankful that Aeroflot employees rated private stalls. Two minutes later, she sighed in relief and slid the tube, now smelling strongly of ethyl alcohol, into a plastic bag, which in turn was thrust into Svetlana’s knock-off Chanel purse. Now that she had her ass uncorked, she strolled out of the bathroom and through the main terminal, careful to keep from hurrying.
Without being able to explain why, she thought that hurrying would only make her look guilty. In truth, she really didn’t have much to worry about. Practically everyone was crowded about the many airport screens televising the countdown to the nuclear strike. Svetlana could have turned cartwheels through the airport and not be noticed. Still, she thought of herself as a professional spy and maintained her poise until she came to the parking garage.
Here the air was sharply cold and the quiet was, well, it was too quiet. After three days in China, a land of nearly one and a half billion people, she felt startlingly alone. Her pace picked up as she looked left and right for the drop signal. The signal was nothing more than a line of chalk scratched across the back of one of the parking spaces on the way to her car.
If it wasn’t there, she’d go home and wait for a second signal: a single ring on her phone. That would require her to take a long boring walk around a park, which would suck because she was tired and wanted to be done with the assignment as fast as possible.
Thankfully, the chalk was there and she breathed another sigh of relief. Had she any idea what she was carrying or who she was really working for she would’ve cried with relief to be rid of the vial. At a million rubles per job—which came out to about $15,000—she didn’t care about the who or the what. Svetlana liked to think she was working for the CBP, as a secret agent, but in her heart, she worried that she was working for the Bratva: the Russian mafia. The man who had brought her in, her “handler,” was cool, handsome, rich beyond reason and coldly Russian.
The one time she had asked what she was smuggling in and out of China, his eyes had assumed a dead sort of look and he had replied, “Don’t ask that. Never ask, and don’t think about it. Do your job and hope the seal on the tube is never broken, because…” He ended the threat with a little shrug of one shoulder, and a small what-can-you-do smile.
The message was perfectly clear, they would kill her. It was something both the CBP and the Bratva were known to do.
It was also something operatives of China’s Ministry of State Security(MSS) would do without batting an eye. The fact of the matter was that Svetlana had been working for a fabulously wealthy Chinese businessman who was openly tied to the Communist Party, and secretly to members of the MSS.
If she had known this, it would have made her sick to her stomach, and if she had known she was carrying a vial of infected zombie blood up her ass, she would have quite literally shit herself.
When she saw the chalk mark, she went into her normal routine of making a show of fumbling through her purse. It would be dropped and the bag with the vial in it would be brushed under the next car; just another piece of litter in a city that was slowly filling with garbage. This was not a normal drop, however. Nowhere close.
“Huh?”
“Your purse.” He pointed with his cigarette. “You normally drop it. This time, don’t.”
The knock-off Channel wasn’t going anywhere. She had a firm grip on it as if the Chinese man was far more formidable than he appeared. With her three-inch heels, Svetlana towered over the paunchy little man. “Who are you?”
“Just a link in the chain,” he lied. He was usually the last link, but with this drop, he thought it better to cut out the others. There was no need for layers of security, now. His identity…his entire life, at least as it had been, was soon to be over. “I’ll take the vial if you please.”
It did not please and she backed away. He sighed out a cone of blue smoke. “Svetlana, don’t make me kill you.” As she watched, he pulled out a small black pistol and held it loosely, easily. “Nothing is different about this drop except that instead of leaving the vial beneath a car, you’re going to hand it to me. Be cool.”
He knew her name and he knew the protocol. It had to mean he was legit, she told herself. And he had a gun. What could she do? Nothing. That’s what she would tell her handler, if she was being set up. Slowly, she lifted her hand with the purse in it, but couldn’t bring herself to walk across the intervening fifteen feet.
The Chinese man cocked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and looked up and down the parking garage before he crossed over to take the purse from her. Plunking it down on the trunk of her car, he dug through it without taking his dark eyes from her. He found the vial by feel and when he did, he surprised Svetlana: his body spasmed as he stuck it deep into an inner pocket of his jacket and when he sucked on the last of the cigarette, his hand shook.
He paused for several long seconds looking up at the girl. Amazingly, he found himself struggling over the idea of telling her to leave the city. It was wrong and stupid, but she was young and pretty, and had been a reliable mule for three years. Hadn’t he sent his other agents off with warnings not to look back?
They had been different. Seven of them were Chinese and two Lithuanian.
This girl was Russian. He had been raised to hate and fear the Russians. They couldn’t ever be trusted. And Svetlana was no different, he decided.
He patted his pocket, said, “Good day to you,” and turned to his car: a five-year-old Lada Largus. The Russian-built subcompact was about as dull and nondescript as a vehicle could get. Svetlana eyed it with distaste, thinking it wasn’t the kind of car a real spy would drive. She couldn’t be more wrong. The Asian got in and within minutes virtually disappeared into the city.
As he drove, he was hyper-aware of the vial. It felt huge beneath his coat, as if it was swelling. He wanted to check it, to measure it perhaps, or to make sure the seal hadn’t been broken or was being dissolved by the plague within. With a strength of will, he put both hands on the wheel and kept them there until he was in the heart of Moscow. Pulling over to the side of the road, he dug out the vial and held it up so he could inspect the seal on the plastic. It was unbroken.
That was good and yet when he tried to swallow, his throat clenched like a dry fist. He stowed the vial away and once more patted his jacket.
Inside the tube would be a second vial. This one was also plastic but with a rubber stopper. It held 30ccs of diseased blood, more than enough to wipe out Mother Russia.
It would also kill Chen Qi.
Chen was the station chief’s real name. It was a name only a handful of people knew. He had seven other aliases and seven different passports, none of which would save him. Chen had been picked for both the position of station chief, as well as for this particular job for a reason: his loyalty was beyond question and utterly unshakable. It would need to be. Nothing could be left to chance.
His phone buzzed with a text message: Pick up bread on the way home. Another spasm racked Chen. The message meant that the ICBMs had been launched; China was an hour from being virtually destroyed.
Taking a deep breath, he stuck the Luga in gear and headed for the Kazansky railway station. In a startlingly clean bathroom stall, he opened the first tube, revealing the deadly second one. It was whole and clean, the rubber stopper set down in it snuggly. Chen brought out his needle and syringe and, although his chest was fluttering, his hands were now steady as he drew out 10ccs. His plan to infect the train station was simple: he placed a drop of the blood on the corner of a stack of rubles.
They were 200-ruble notes. Because of inflation, it was the lowest denomination still used in bill form. Chen spread them around, spending them at every kiosk, newsstand, restaurant and food cart he came across. In all, he handed out seventy-seven of the bills, which were in turn handed out as change to fifty other people, who boarded nineteen different trains.
It took one hour and forty-eight minutes to spend the money. Halfway through, Chen paused along with the rest of the station to watch as satellites recorded the detonation of the first dozen nuclear weapons. People looked at him strangely after that. They wouldn’t look him in the eye—it made killing them easier.
When Chen had gone through his first stack of bills, he was still feeling like himself and not some sort of monster. He got back into his Luga and headed cross town to the Kursky railway terminal, the next busiest train station in the city. This one connected three major metro lines that shot trains around Moscow. As well, it ran lines towards the western sections of the country. A number of its trains went to the Ukraine and beyond.
Chen’s headache was just beginning when he left the bathroom stall with a wad of newly bloodied bills. The headache was expected and he swallowed five white pills. These helped long enough for him to spread his bills far and wide, infecting people on a further twenty-two trains. He was now out of money and the smuggled vial was empty, but he wasn’t done. There was still a source of zombie blood available to him. It was burning through his veins and making his head rage.
After dry-swallowing seven more pills, he used the needle from his syringe to cut his left wrist. It wasn’t a major laceration, just a cut big enough to leave blood smears from the ticket windows to the 319 train to Volgograd, what used to be known as Stalingrad. It was six-hour trip, but he only stayed on the train long enough to stagger from one end to the next, dripping blood. Forty-four people were infected before he went to the caboose, climbed up on the rail and ended his pain with a single bullet to the head.
He toppled away into the darkness, leaving behind a train that would never make it to Volgograd. It would make it only as far as Borisoglebsk, where it would jump the track and keel over on its side. No one died in the crash because the only ones left on board were the undead.
By then, a third of China was burning in a nuclear holocaust. It was a horror, but at least the zombies were dead—the Chinese zombies that is. In Russia, there were now close to three-thousand infected people scattered throughout every major city west of the Volga, an area encompassing over 350,000 square miles with a population of ninety million people.
Chen had done his job. Three-thousand became ten-thousand before Svetlana Melnikova lay down to sleep, and that ten-thousand became twenty before the first military units were sent racing in ten different directions, trying to contain a multiplying plague that was in many ways the equivalent of the mythological Hydra. As soon as they cast a perimeter around one outbreak, two more would spring up.
Still the police and the army fought on, not realizing that Russia was already doomed.
2-6:23 p.m.
Newville, Pennsylvania
The F-15E Strike Eagle was so close to the ground that its huge Pratt & Whitney engines sent the pines wagging back and forth after it roared by. Tony “Stubby” Alvarez was playing the Wild Weasel game of Here, kitty kitty.
It was a simple game, for Alvarez that is. His w
ingman on the other hand, had the dangerous part. He was twenty miles northeast of Alvarez flying nap-of-the-earth(NOE), at 500 knots, but doing so like a scrub right out of the academy. When he “hopped his hedges” instead of scraping over the hills, he would pop up sometimes as much as a hundred meters at a time. And when he cleared a valley, he would ease around as if he were out sightseeing.
The whole idea behind this pathetic display was to get the SAM radars focused on him, leaving Alvarez free to come up undetected and release his AGM-88s. These were High-speed Anti-radiation Missiles(HARM) designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar systems.
Of course, the 3rd ID’s anti-aircraft teams knew all about the kind of weasel games that the Air Force was likely going to play. There was a good chance that Alvarez had just shot right over the top of some kid with a shoulder-mounted Stinger. These could lock in on the immense heat signature of the F-15’s engines and blot him out of the sky in a second.
“You getting anything, Matt?”
His backseat weapons officer answered quickly, “Not a blip. What are you up to on the ol’ PF range?”
Alvarez’s pucker factor had just edged past a six on the usual one-to ten scale. “Nominal,” he lied. The 3rd ID knew they were coming and they possessed the most advanced anti-aircraft missiles in the world. They were playing it so cool that it had Alvarez sweating.
He was the lead for a flight of fourteen planes and if he couldn’t identify and knock out a few of the SAM sites, it was going to spell trouble for those behind him. He might have been conflicted over killing civilians, but this was warfare that he understood. These people would kill him if he didn’t kill them first. Yes, it was terrible that these were American soldiers, but that didn’t mean he could look the other way while they committed treason.
“Cove Gap in thirty seconds,” Matt warned.
“I see it.” At 460 knots the gap in the hills looked like the size of a thumb nail. It was on him in a blink as he banked hard to the right, cutting into the gap. At this speed, he knew he would shoot out of it in four seconds. Almost on faith, he banked hard left on the count of four and now he was rushing up the valley.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 27