Cannibal

by Jeremy Robinson

Perhaps because he was already overloaded on adrenaline, King didn’t even flinch when he heard the sound, like the report of a small pistol, echoing across the field. He shouted for everyone to get down, unnecessarily since the others had reacted as quickly as he had. Heeding his own advice, he dove for cover and craned his head around to identify the source of the noise. Something streaked across the night sky, a bright red star, falling from the heavens.

  A signal flare.

  “I’m detecting movement!” Deep Blue sounded uncharacteristically frantic.

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  As if on cue, a shaft of light appeared in the field off to their left. As the glasses compensated for the sudden brightness, King saw that there were actually two lights, set close together. Headlights.

  The beams tilted forward until they were parallel with the ground, partially obscured by the gently undulating terrain, but there was no question that the vehicle was moving. Another pair of lights stabbed into the sky to the right. In the tactical overlay, the vehicles appeared as yellow spots—one on either side and four more rolling up from behind the pyramid.

  “The fuck did they come from?” Rook gasped. “Knight, how did you miss those assholes?”

  Deep Blue supplied the answer, speaking quickly. “They were dug in, covered with thermal blankets and radar scattering camouflage nets.”

  King cut in. “Blue, we need Crescent. Right here, right now!”

  “I do not think they know where we are,” Bishop said. She sounded hesitant, as if afraid of stating the obvious.

  “Damn it, she’s right,” Queen said. “We’re friggin’ invisible.”

  King stared at the moving dots. While they were definitely converging on the general area where the team was moving, there was no sense of concerted effort. Rather, they seemed to be meandering, sweeping back and forth to flush out their prey. The fact that the vehicles had appeared was proof enough that their presence had been detected, but now with their chameleon camouflage, they were, as Queen had so eloquently observed, invisible.

  In the back of his mind, King turned over Deep Blue’s hasty assessment of the enemy’s tactics. The cartel soldiers had dug concealed fighting positions, hidden themselves under foil blankets and camouflages nets. “They knew we were coming.”

  “Do you think?” Rook snapped.

  “No, I mean they were expecting us.” Rook had no answer for that. “They knew how to hide from our night vision, thermal…everything.”

  “We weren’t exactly subtle last night,” Queen said.

  King watched the dots moving in what appeared to be an erratic fashion. One of them was going to pass within fifty yards of their position. He trained his carbine on the approaching headlights. “Time to find out just how well our cloaking devices work. Hold your fire until I give the word.”

  The glasses easily adjusted for the brilliance of the headlights and the surrounding darkness, revealing two figures in the cab and four more in the bed. The latter were facing out in different directions, sweeping the landscape with their rifles but evidently unable to find a target. As they passed, one of the men seemed to look right at King, but his gaze did not linger. The truck abruptly veered north and headed away, continuing the search.

  “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. Blue, bring Crescent in on our position. When our ride shows up, everyone is going to have a pretty good idea where we are, so be ready to lay down suppressive fire. Bishop, stand by to blow the cache. Maybe that will buy us a few seconds.”

  There was a chorus of affirmative replies, but the only one that mattered to King was Deep Blue’s, informing him that the stealth transport would be on the ground and ready to pick them up in two minutes. He had a feeling it would be a very long two minutes.

  Crescent came down fast and hard, but its chameleon camouflage made it nearly invisible, even with the glasses. King was only able to judge its location and distance because it, like the team, was tagged in the virtual environment. Unfortunately, even though Crescent was outfitted with an experimental acoustic noise-canceling system to muffle the sound of its turbines, there was no concealing the rush of wind created by its downdraft, which even from a few thousand feet up, sounded like a tornado. The last semblance of stealth disappeared when the downward blast stirred up an enormous cloud of dust all around the team’s location.

  “Bishop, now.”

  There was a flash of intensely brilliant light almost a mile away, followed a few seconds later by the strident hiss of the thermate core spiking to a temperature of nearly four thousand degrees. It was impossible to tell if the appearance of an artificial sun on the horizon had sufficiently distracted the roving cartel soldiers from the tumult caused by Crescent’s impending arrival, but it was a human reflex to turn in the direction of bright light. Up close, the blaze would be bright enough to do permanent damage to the optic nerve of anyone staring at it, and even from a distance, it would effectively destroy a person’s night vision for a good twenty minutes.

  The downdraft intensified as Crescent descended lower still. The dust storm completely obscured King’s field of view, but the swarm of trucks remained visible in the virtual landscape, ghostly images generated by the quantum computer at Endgame, using the feed from Crescent’s cameras. The vehicles were definitely turning in the direction of the disturbance.

  “Open fire!”

  Even before he finished giving the command, Rook unleashed the 240B, spraying the nearest truck with a five-second long burst. King concentrated his fire on a different vehicle, aiming at what he hoped was the space right above the left headlight. A moment later, the truck veered sharply and started rolling. He caught a glimpse of bodies flying through the air before his attention switched to another truck. It was about half a mile away, outside the effective range of the SCAR, but only just. He kept the truck in the aiming circle and waited for it to get closer.

  There was a flash at the back of the truck, and for a fleeting moment, he thought perhaps Knight had put a round in its gas tank. Then he saw a butterfly-shaped flame race away from the truck and realized that the flash had been a different kind of explosion: a missile launch.

  There was a harsh roar as the pilot aboard Crescent took immediate evasive action, revving the turbines faster than the compensation rate of the sound-dampening device. The plane started to simultaneously rise and pull away. There was a series of loud pops and a burst of light directly overhead, as the automated defense system on the plane deployed chaff countermeasures designed to confuse heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles. The missile, however, continued on course, moving almost lazily across the distance.

  Even though it was little more than a point of light in his display, King knew what the missile was. “It’s a TOW!” he shouted, and despite the fact that the truck was still more than five hundred yards out, he opened fire.

  The TOW—Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided—anti-tank missile did not rely on a sophisticated internal guidance system. Instead, it was guided by the person who fired it, via a thermal tracking sight connected to the launch tube and a string of wire that could extend more than two miles. The TOW had the reputation of being ‘low and slow,’ perfect for hitting stationary or slow moving ground targets. It was not designed to engage aerial targets, but Crescent’s VTOL capability made it extremely vulnerable to such an attack.

  They knew, King thought again, maintaining a steady rate of fire at the truck.

  There was no way to jam the communication between the missile and its operator, but to hit a target, especially a moving target, the TOW’s sights had to remain on the target at all times. That was the system’s greatest weakness; once fired, the operator had to remain exposed for the duration of flight. If King could distract the operator, cause him to lose his fix on the target, even for a second…

  There was a hissing whoosh as the missile passed overhead. King looked up, an involuntary reflex. Crescent was moving away, starting to pick up speed.


  But not fast enough.

  24

  Endgame, New Hampshire

  Cold fear slammed through Deep Blue as the feed from Crescent II went dark.

  No. Not possible.

  But it was not only possible, it was the harsh reality. The plane and its two pilots, the team’s salvation, was gone, and with it, his ability to see what was happening on the ground.

  “King, report.” The request sounded impotent in his ears. What could King possibly say, except to confirm the obvious, and what then? What could he do to fix this?

  King did not answer him directly, but instead shouted a command to the others. “Fall back to the ruins!”

  The ruins? It was the obvious place to regroup, obvious to their enemy as well, but what other choice was there?

  He turned to Aleman who sat beside him in the command room, looking as devastated as he felt. “Lew, you’re their eyes. Keep them alive until I can get them some help.”

  He had no idea what shape that ‘help’ would take. There were no contingencies for something like this. Crescent was their only dedicated long-range air asset, and even if he could wrangle another military aircraft or scramble some close-air support, it would take time, perhaps several hours. Since the death of General Michael Keasling, it had been necessary to conduct all dealings with the military through an elaborate system of back-channels, and those wheels turned slowly. He considered involving the Mexican authorities, but even absent the political firestorm that would create, a coordinated response would take time that his people didn’t have.

  Aleman shook off his paralysis and bent over his keyboard. “I’m patching in Knight’s thermal feed. That should increase your visibility until you can get clear of the dust cloud.”

  Deep Blue saw the immediate change on the wall-mounted plasma screen, but the effect was negligible. The landscape of the virtual environment was filled with blobs of heat, the burning debris of Crescent falling from the sky like a meteor shower. Nevertheless, the team was moving, and that was something at least.

  A shrill noise startled his already jangled nerves. It was the security hotline phone on the console. Damn it! He stabbed a finger at the speaker button. “Whatever it is, deal with it.”

  “Uh, sir, I think we have an incursion.” The male voice, quavering with uncertainty, was another surprise. Where’s Anna?

  He recalled that he had sent Beck to North Carolina to provide security for Sara Fogg. The voice belonged to White One, Scott McCarter, Beck’s second-in-command.

  McCarter’s words finally sank in. “Incursion?”

  “A whole bunch of black SUVs just rolled into the campground. They’ve got federal motor-pool plates. DOJ.”

  Before Deep Blue could reply, Aleman chimed in. “He’s right. And that’s not the worst of it. There are four Black Hawks headed this way. Five minutes out.”

  Deep Blue shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to will away this emerging crisis. The Black Hawks were probably just National Guardsmen on a training exercise. McCarter had misinterpreted the significance of the SUVs.

  ‘They were expecting us.’

  King’s shout still rang in his ears, but now it took on a new urgency. Were these disparate crises connected?

  “They’re inside the campground,” McCarter said, his anxiety rising. “On the road that leads to Post One. Should we engage?”

  Post One had been one of the two original entrances to the facility back when it had been Manifold Alpha. In the days that had followed their takeover of the site, Deep Blue had ordered the old entrances sealed, and they had installed new concealed entrances to facilitate movement in and out of Endgame. The significance of this news was not lost on Deep Blue. Someone knew about Manifold Alpha, and they knew how to get into it, or at least they had access to the old plans.

  He turned to the other person in the room, Domenick Boucher, who likewise sat stunned at the console. “Dom, what’s your gut say?”

  Endgame had been hit before, and the possibility that it might be targeted by law enforcement—Homeland Security or some other agency—had always been at the top of Deep Blue’s list of concerns. As CIA director, Boucher had helped establish a monitoring protocol so that they would not be taken unaware—listening to inter-agency chatter, eavesdropping on official communiqués, but it was impossible to cover all the bases.

  Boucher swallowed and sat up in his chair. “This isn’t a coincidence. Someone is making a move against us.”

  Deep Blue resisted the urge to accuse his friend of stating the obvious, but he needed more. “Who? This didn’t come out of nowhere.”

  Boucher shook his head helplessly.

  Long before he was Deep Blue, before he was the President of the United States, Tom Duncan had been a soldier, an Army Ranger. In his earliest days of military training, his instructors had drilled into him the procedure for reacting to contact with the enemy.

  Seek cover and return fire. Locate the enemy position, and launch a counter-attack.

  The order of the response was important. Immediate action had to be taken, even before the threat was identified, to overcome the paralyzing effect of the ambush.

  Ambush.

  That was the only way to describe what was happening. A two-stage assault. The trap in Mexico had hit with the devastating force of a roadside IED, stunning them all and leaving them vulnerable to the second phase—the raid on Endgame.

  Endgame was by no means defenseless. There were passive and active anti-intruder measures at each of the entrances, including those which had been sealed, and an armory full of weapons, which the ten-man strong White Team—tasked with security and logistics—could use to repel anyone who made it past the doors.

  Yet this was not a squad of mercenaries hired by an enemy, not Ridley’s gang of dishonorably discharged ex-military psychos. The men in the SUVs were American law enforcement agents.

  They were the good guys.

  Seek cover and return fire.

  King was already doing that in Mexico. The team had taken out at least two of the trucks in the moments before Crescent’s destruction. They were outnumbered, but still held a considerable tactical advantage.

  Let King do his job, he told himself. And you do yours.

  Immediate action.

  He located the emergency lockdown button on the console. When the site had been Manifold Alpha, conducting hazardous genetic research, the underground complex had been equipped with thick steel bio-safety doors that would instantly seal off sections of the facility. The doors would keep any intruder out, but they would also have the effect of trapping anyone inside, at least temporarily.

  Not yet.

  Instead, he turned back to the security phone. The indicator light showed that McCarter was still on the line. He took a breath. “White One, initiate Desperado. I say again, Desperado.”

  25

  Manteo, North Carolina

  Despite the late hour—or rather the early hour, since it was already after four a.m.—and the fact that she was dead tired, Sara did not sleep. She was afraid that if she slept, she might transform into something like the poor wretches in the isolation ward.

  She knew, of course, if she had indeed been infected by the bite, the transformation would happen whether she was conscious or not, but at least she would be able to document the process, providing important data for the next scientist sent to investigate the outbreak. But aside from a perversely contradictory mix of bleary-eyed fatigue and gut-churning anxiety, she felt perfectly healthy.

  To stay busy—and awake—she had run a few tests on the blood sample, checking for abnormal acidity, excess protein and microbial agents. The results were irregular, but not conclusive, making it impossible to separate cause from effect. She would need more blood, from all three patients, to run a full battery of tests, and there was no guarantee that even that would yield results. Unlike in movies, there was no machine that could look at a specimen and immediately identify the cause of an illness. It was a
process of elimination, looking for specific antibodies and chemical reactions.

  After her interview with Ellen Dare, she had ventured back into the isolation ward, this time using the same precautions as the rest of the hospital staff, visually confirming what Dr. Foster had already told her. All three patients were suffering from the same effect; they were all wendigos.

  In the absence of any other official diagnosis, she had begun using the term in her notes. It would not have been her first choice, but she had to call it something. Hopefully, further research would give her the actual scientific name for the disorder, but if it was something new, then following medical tradition, the disease would be named for her. Wendigo Disease was preferable to Fogg’s Syndrome.

  If this had happened next week, it would have been called Sigler’s Disease, she thought, with just a hint of regret.

  She had no baseline comparison for Haley Stephens or the paramedic, Doug Stovall, but something had definitely changed with Jason Harris. The deformity had become more pronounced, particularly in the skull, where the bony growth had almost completely covered his eyes. His skin also seemed more substantial, no longer paper-thin and translucent, but thicker, like animal hide, and pale white. Although Sara’s mind balked at the idea, she could think of only one variable that might account for the change.

  Jason Harris had tasted her blood.

  Her thoughts kept coming back to Ellen Dare’s ominous declaration about the Lost Colony.

  There was a well-established link between cannibalism and the spread of certain diseases. The most widely-known example was Kuru, which had plagued the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea until the 1950s, when scientists connected the disease to the tribe’s custom of funerary cannibalism. The practice, as well as the disease itself, had been effectively stopped, but there were other ways for the pathogen—a prion that caused transmissible spongiform encephalopathy—to be spread. A similar prion was responsible for Mad Cow disease, and just as with Kuru, it had been spread, albeit unwittingly, through cannibalism, specifically the addition of ground-up animal protein to the food supply for beef cattle.