“I sure hope that antidote doesn’t knock you out.”
“If it does, I won’t feel the pain of the crash.”
Carl closed the case and bumped fists with Blick, then jumped out of the helicopter. He closed the door behind him and ran ducking out from under the rotors as the whine of the wounded engine got even louder. The helicopter lifted off and flew away to the south, a trail of thick black smoke streaming from the portside engine outlet.
Carl turned and looked to the northeast where a line of emergency vehicles approached the gate barrier of the municipal airport property. They’d flown over the small convoy and Carl had seen two boxy paramedic trucks escorted by three police cars and two army Jeeps. The police cars normally wouldn’t have concerned him. Back in the States, he’d never seen the medical first responders at an emergency scene without police involvement. Often, the police arrived first.
The presence of the army, though, told Carl his time had run out. The Mexican military was undoubtedly mobilizing all over the country. People across northern Mexico were no doubt starting to show viral symptoms and the vast resources of the government would be needed for quarantining those affected to limit the contagion.
Carl figured airport employees had already succumbed; hence, the army was here to close down the airport. Hopefully, the first responders would head first toward the tiny passenger terminal or maybe the control tower where someone, perhaps the superintendent, might have collapsed.
The good news was that his team was in the hangar near the south side of the airport complex and the passenger terminal was on the northeast side, close to the main entrance where the first responders were entering. The control tower was even farther from his hangar, all the way on the northwest side of the airport and on the other side of the main north-south runway.
Carl raced through the personnel door that was integrated into one side of the huge hangar door assembly. He entered immediately in front of the Gulfstream and saw Colonel Reichert sitting in the cockpit with his headset on. There was a concerned look on his face and Carl figured he was coming to the same conclusions as he absorbed military chatter or air traffic control chatter or maybe even broadcast radio news.
Reichert saw him as soon as he ran in, so Carl thrust his hand in the air waving it in a circle, giving what he hoped was the universal whirly-bird symbol to start the engines. Reichert nodded, but as Carl ran down the side of the plane on his way to the office where his team was, he saw the pilot descending the stairs with his electronic tablet in his hand.
“Forget about the safety check, Colonel. If we’re not in the air in four minutes, we’re dead!”
Carl ran into the office and tended to Agent Palmer. She lay on her side, next to her chair, curled up in a fetal position. She had somehow managed to get out of her tactical vest and black turtleneck. Her black sports bra was all she wore up top and it was soaked with perspiration. She was unconscious, breathing in ragged shallow breaths.
He straightened her legs and rolled her onto her back. He opened the case and pulled the injector from within. He locked one of the tiny vials of antidote into the injector, placed the business end against her bare shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. He heard the hiss and watched the blue liquid in the vial disappear. Carl wrote Palmer a note on the back of her one-page synopsis and folded it up as small as he could. Then, he hid the note where only she would find it.
If she woke up to find it.
Carl quickly checked the others. Mercs Three and Four were sprawled somewhat arm-in-arm on the couch and had been able to spend their last moments of consciousness together. Merc Three still had a pulse so he got a dose, but his wife, Merc Four, was dead. Two of the remaining mercs were still alive so Carl injected them. Luisa and Julia Reyes both registered a faint pulse, so Carl injected them as well.
The LED counter read enough charge for thirteen more doses. His first thought after injecting Palmer was to simply discard the empty vial, but then he realized what an extremely dangerous biohazard that would present. If someone uninfected accidentally broke an empty vial and got the tiniest bit of residue on their skin, they’d die instantly, according to Orizaga and Palmer’s report. Instead, Carl replaced the expended vials upside down in their foam depressions so he’d know which vials still held serum. He closed the case and carried it out into the cavernous room of the main part of the hangar.
The colonel had already spooled up the engines. In the closed hangar, the sound was deafening even though the engines were merely at idle. Carl started to run around the front of the jet, but a quick glance up into the cockpit showed the pilot jabbing his finger with an animated gesture at the red knob near the massive hangar doors.
Carl changed directions and closed the personnel door in the center of the big door he’d entered moments before so its safety interlock wouldn’t prevent the main hangar doors from opening. He slammed his palm against the button. A horn blared briefly and yellow warning lights rotated near the door to warn people to stay away from the tracks of the moving doors. He ran up the starboard-side bulkhead stairs, then closed and locked the cabin door.
By habit of years of programming, Carl headed toward his left to the passenger cabin, then he reversed course and stepped through the open cockpit door. He took the front, right seat, set the case of antidotes on his lap, and opened the case. He removed two vials and pushed one onto the injector. He leaned over to inject Reichert’s arm, but the man leaned away.
“What’s that going to do to me?”
“Dude, it’s going to save your life!”
“No, I mean, is it going to knock me out or make me groggy or disrupt my vision or something? I can’t fly in any of those conditions.”
Carl nodded in understanding. That was the very reason he had withheld his own injection until his other team members were injected.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He had no idea what the recovery process was going to be like for a normal infected person who was not already comatose. He pressed the business end of the injector against his own shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The blue liquid hissed into him and he immediately felt a momentary heat spread through his arm. Then the heat faded.
He waited for something to happen, but nothing did. There was no fainting, nausea, or pain, or any other disorientation, but then he was a carrier. He didn’t know if the antidote would affect the colonel differently, and he hadn’t thought to check and see if David Blick had remained airborne. Hell, he didn’t even know if the antidote would actually cure a carrier.
“If I exhibit severe symptoms, then inject me. Otherwise, hit me after we land,” he said. “If we live that long.”
Carl nodded, closed the case, and stowed it in a small floor locker meant for pilot’s gear behind the co-pilot’s seat. He checked the temperature readout. It still read under fifty degrees. Had to be some kind of coolant mechanism built into the case, he figured.
Carl nodded to himself, then secured the locker and strapped himself in beside the pilot. The pitch of the engines increased to a thunderous roar inside the hangar, and the jet leaped through the hangar doors like a racecar and careened to the left.
Colonel Reichert turned the jet around the last hangar, glanced to his right, and cursed. Carl followed his gaze and saw two police cars, an airport security van, and the two army Jeeps racing toward them from the north end of the main north-south runway. He also saw that their best path to the southwest runway included a short jog to the right—north, toward the approaching police—and then left onto the wide runway. It was clear that the approaching cars would reach the intersection first and they’d be trapped.
“I thought you said I had four minutes!”
“Plus or minus,” Carl said.
The colonel plunged the throttles all the way to the stops and the jet bucked forward straight across the narrow taxiway and into the grass. There was a tremendous clanging sound as the jet bounced across the uneven grassy strip and up onto the concrete slab o
f the southwest runway. In Carl’s imagination, the front landing gear was slammed to its hydraulic stops when the front tire hit the edge of the concrete runway. Except the lead chase car got there first. It pulled in front of the jet and the driver slammed on his breaks. The patrol car slid sideways and stopped at the end of two pairs of black skid marks.
Right in the path of the Gulfstream.
Carl knew there was no way Reichert could stop the plane in time.
Chapter 46
1534 hours MST Saturday
Nuevo Casas Grandes Airport, North-Central Mexico
For a split-second, Carl thought they were actually going to slam right over the top of the car and race out into the grass on the other side of the runway. At the last instant before impact, the colonel worked his magic and the jet swerved to the left.
With his right shoulder pinned against the bulkhead, Carl actually looked down into the police car. He saw the panicked look on the cop’s face as the man stared at the behemoth getting ready to plow into his car. The front of the plane missed the patrol car by mere inches, then the jet straightened and sped down the middle of the runway.
“Damn, Colonel!” Carl said. “Where’d you learn how to fly? In the Navy?”
“Air Force all the way, brah!”
“Shee-yit!”
At full power, the business-class jet wobbled down the runway for a few seconds as the colonel fought to aim the aircraft true center of the concrete ribbon. At some point, Carl knew they’d be moving too fast for the man to adjust the plane’s course and they’d either stay on the concrete until take-off or they’d angle off to the side and crash.
Within seconds, Carl knew the colonel’s magic was good stuff. They quickly left the pursuing police and army vehicles behind and raced away into the sky.
Reichert glanced over at him and smiled. “That, my friend, is what we call a combat take-off. We fly or we die.”
“Go Air Force!” Carl said.
When he went to Officer Training School way back thirty-some years ago, he’d known some of the trainees that were selected for pilot training. Out of a hundred officer trainees, only four were selected. They were young and they were cocky bastards…and one cocky bastardette. Out of a hundred of those elite pilot selectees, only a handful were good enough to get the air force to spend millions of dollars training them to fly the world’s most advanced combat aircraft. Half of the rest were assigned as navigators or cargo pilots. The remainder were recycled back into non-flying officer billets.
Like professional athletes, the shelf life of an advanced fighter pilot is finite, because that career required the fastest reaction times and the highest combination of physical skills, stamina, and mental toughness. He glanced at the colonel beside him and judged him to be in his mid-forties. For him to have been selected at that age to command the president’s fighter squadron—the elite of air force fighter pilots—Carl figured him to be one of the military’s most decorated combat pilots. After that take-off performance, he had no doubt the colonel was the best of the best.
The colonel leveled the plane at an altitude of less than two hundred feet, according to a digital altimeter on the high-tech instrument panel. He assumed that was the colonel’s attempt to avoid radar detection. They changed course several times and looped back around far south of the municipal airport. Reichert explained this was to avoid the inevitable Mexican air force patrols that would have been notified by the airport tower or the ground troops.
At the end of the colonel’s evasive maneuvers, the Gulfstream was a couple hundred miles east of the municipal airport. To Carl’s best guess, they crossed the US border somewhere over western Texas, still flying in the trees. The engines screamed and Carl felt the turbulence near the ground buffeting the plane.
Soon it was too dark to continue flying so low, and the colonel took the plane to a higher altitude. Carl looked over at him as the man wiped sweat from his brow. He’d been working extremely hard for two hours, manually flying the airplane, constantly battling with the aircraft’s controls, and watching the ground and the instruments.
“That was a nice piece of flying,” Carl said.
The colonel just grunted. “We’re about an hour from Albuquerque.”
Carl had wanted to land farther south, perhaps in El Paso, so he’d be close enough to get doses of the antidote to the president and her daughter. But he knew he couldn’t just land the airplane and take a cab to the hospital that was locked down tight by the army or the national guard.
Or the Unit.
He needed leverage. He needed a plan that didn’t rely on trying to convince someone—anyone—to listen to him. He needed something Breen and his people wouldn’t see coming. Something they couldn’t react to.
“So Blick didn’t make it?” the colonel said.
“I gave him a dose of the antidote and turned him loose.”
“I was listening to an English language news station just before you got back. They say you destroyed five buildings.”
“I don’t know how many buildings went down around the main lab building.”
Fiery debris and chunks of concrete and steel had plowed into every building within a couple hundred yards of the seventeen-story office. As the helicopter flew away, the initial billowing smoke had cleared a bit and he’d seen gaping holes and gashes in the neighboring buildings as falling debris rained into them. Two buildings had caught fire immediately. Then, the lab building had fallen and the roiling cloud of dissipating smoke and dust had covered a couple square miles.
“They say dozens of people died. Maybe hundreds.”
“Millions,” Carl said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
Reichert looked over at him. Muted yellow and green light from the instrument panel illuminated his face. “Johnson, what did you do?”
Carl took a deep breath and gazed out the front into the darkness. “I saved the president’s life. Or…I just killed every human on the planet.”
He thought about his former nemesis, Aaron McGrath, again. He didn’t envy the man his mission to keep America safe. He understood how the man made difficult decisions, and appreciated the inner strength McGrath possessed to live with the consequences of his actions. Carl was silent for a while as various scenarios slowly threaded through his mind.
“Colonel, we’re all that’s left. If we fall, the country falls.”
“The country has already fallen, Johnson. America is now a dictatorship, and the population doesn’t even know it. Breen directly controls the most technologically advanced intelligence infrastructure and the most powerful military force on the planet, and he has no Congress to answer to.”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “He only answers to a trio of Mexican power brokers.”
“This war is over. We need to think about a strategic evasion.”
“Colonel, strategic evasion means conceding defeat. It means we haven’t done everything possible to save the president.”
“There’s nothing more we can do. You say the word, I’ll turn this plane around. I know places that will take us in. There’s nothing more we can give to the cause.”
“It’s not over until President Mallory is dead, and we still have about forty-four hours to prevent that.” He looked the pilot in the eyes. “Besides, we haven’t given everything, Colonel.” The man smiled. Carl got the feeling Reichert was taking measure of his commitment. “We haven’t given our lives.”
“Alright, Johnson. Let’s go be heroes.”
Chapter 47
1605 hours MST Saturday
Undisclosed Security Bunker
“Mr. Vice President, you’re needed in the conference room ASAP.”
Walter Breen acknowledged the civilian aide’s voice through the closed door.
“Tell them I’ll be there in one minute.”
“Yes, sir.”
Breen launched himself from his cot in the small subterranean room and stretched. He’d taken his nap in his suit pants and T-shirt, ready to
throw on his pressed white shirt and suit jacket at a moment’s notice, in case he had to make a statement by video to the press or to the American people. Soon enough, though, he’d be back in the White House. No more cowering in an underground bunker. He’d be occupying the Oval Office, not an office down the hall. In less than twelve hours, far sooner than he’d originally planned, thanks to Carl Johnson, he’d be the real president, not the acting president.
Breen refreshed himself and was quickly ready for business. As he emerged from his small concrete chamber, his stomach began growling and he remembered the last time he’d taken food was over six hours ago. He walked down the short hall and entered the conference room. He grabbed a stale bagel from a tray on the small conference table.
Dr. Thomas Murphy arrived just after him from an adjoining hallway. He was a tall, slender man with a full shock of curly red hair and regarded Breen with dark scared eyes behind his bifocal glasses. The mid-forties triple-PhD was a specialist in the business of pathogens and the deputy director of the CDC.
Breen hadn’t figured a man as experienced as Dr. Murphy was in the business of viral death would be the one to fall victim to fear. Breen had faced a huge variety of stressful situations in his career, but this was a new kind of stress for most of his staff. What Breen and his team were doing was not something one could practice for. They were taking over the country and a good chunk of the world. The dice were cast and they couldn’t turn back now even if they wanted to.
“This is getting out of control, Mr. Vice President,” Dr. Murphy said. “We should think about exit contingencies.”
He understood the virus expert was feeling trapped, physically and emotionally. Their underground bunker had been scheduled to remain sealed for at least the next two days, until President Mallory was dead and the virus was completely eradicated. Only now the vice president would risk exiting early to publicly take the oath of the presidency.
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