Seawolf Mask of Command

by Cliff Happy

  Hunter of Gunmen

  Book 3 in the Friends from Damascus series

  Weaponized anthrax. So deadly a mere gram has over 100 million lethal doses, and terrorists are now in possession of it. When the world’s intelligence agencies are unable to locate the extremists before they unleash their pandemic, governments turn to the Friends From Damascus. This rogue counterterrorist team will go anywhere and take any risk to deliver their form of justice to extremists. But this time the team faces an unexpected challenge from within its own elite ranks.

  Their newest member, Katya Petrova, has lost all faith in humanity – the world’s and her own. Her bleak and ravaged past as a Russian agent has destroyed her sense of self-worth. Before the team can hunt down the terrorists and the toxin, Petrova must learn to believe in herself again. Then she must earn the trust of the team’s sniper, Joe Proffitt.

  Outcast, mercenary, convict and founding member of Friends From Damascus, Proffitt’s brutal life has taught him that all people are either hunter or prey. This former Marine and lone wolf trusts no one – so why should he trust scarred and hardened Katya Petrova?

  Read an Excerpt

  Galveston National Laboratory, University of Texas Medical Branch

  Dr. Dhann Singh sat quietly in his second floor office and toyed with the plastic vial in his hand, opening and closing it over and over again as he quietly considered the tenets of his faith. As a Sikh, life was precious, something to be respected and protected. He’d become a doctor for that very reason, with the goal of helping his fellow man. He was charitable and regarded by people of every faith in his Texas community as a generous man.

  Yet he held the small plastic tube, a tube he wasn’t supposed to have. It was smaller than his pinky, and any decent high school biology lab would have literally thousands of similar tubes. But not here… not in this place.

  He looked up at the three faces gazing at him from behind the glass of the trifold picture frame and felt the bitter pill of anger in his stomach. His faith taught him that they had lived good lives, and their souls were already born again to live another, more enjoyable existence. But this belief, something he had been taught since his early childhood, gave him no solace as he stared at the three smiling faces… the three lives cut short by an act of mindless rage. Sikhs didn’t believe in violence. All life was sacred, since all life was endowed with an eternal soul. It was wrong to kill.

  Yet he held the tube in his hand, an act that would lead to severe disciplinary actions against him if anyone were to learn of this significant breach of safety protocols.

  But of everything Sikhs believed in, of all the teachings of the Gurus, it was the words of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, “It is right to use force as a last resort when all other peaceful means fail,” that had been reverberating in Dhann Singh’s head for nearly two months, ever since the day when blind hatred had taken his entire world from him.

  He stared at the smiling faces. His only son Ajaib’s black, bushy hair refusing to sit properly, his lovely daughter-in-law Harpreet’s smile that had not only captivated his son, but had melted Dhann’s heart as well. Then, the last—the most tragic—his greatest treasure, his granddaughter Amita wearing a priceless smile that showed a space where two recently lost teeth had been. She would be the only granddaughter he would ever have, Harpreet his only daughter and Ajaib his only son.

  They had seen to that.

  Freedom fighters they had called themselves.

  Mindless thugs, Dhann had concluded succinctly. Mindless, foolish thugs who’d decided on violence to advance their goals. But they had no concept of the chain of events they had set into motion…the horror their senseless act would eventually unleash upon their world.

  They’d failed to consider Dhann and the pain of a father’s loss.

  Karma.

  This was another of his faith’s beliefs.

  It had been karma that had led the extremists to choose violence.

  The Pakistani government’s intelligence agency had trained them, equipped them, provided the terrorists with the documents to reach Mumbai. This had been karma as well, just as it had been fate which had chosen that particular hotel and that specific date for his son and family to visit India.

  Now karma would continue to rule the day. Only this time, it was Dhann’s destiny.

  Finally, as Dhann sat at his desk, staring through misty eyes at his lost treasures, he considered the last tenets of his faith: truth and, above all, justice. The one criminal who’d been taken alive had admitted, even boasted of his guilt. Yes, the Indian government had questioned him, and he’d admitted to the world Pakistan’s involvement in the attack. Some nations had even expressed outrage before going back to business as usual and turning a blind eye to the enormity of the crime and Dhann’s loss.

  There would be no justice coming from India or from the United Nations. The guilty would never be held accountable for their recklessness… their foolishness.

  Or so they believed.

  Dhann’s world had been stolen from him. The years of watching little Amita grow up, the chance of more grandchildren… all lost. Those responsible thought they were untouchable behind the façade of decency created by a world government. They assumed they were immune to prosecution. Surely the Pakistani government would never do what was necessary to root out the evil within their ranks.

  But Karma had seen to that, too.

  It was now perfectly clear to Dhann that his entire life had led him to this time and place. There was nothing random about his career path from pure medicine to biological engineering; there had been nothing unsystematic in his steady advance up the ladder of academia to his current position at the University or at the laboratory. The odds were too astronomical, too impossible to calculate the chance that any of this had been mere happenstance. There was no coincidence, only providence.

  Karma was in control and Dhann just its tool.

  He walked into the small lavatory and washed his face clean. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see him sweating or the tears staining his face. From there he removed his sport coat and pulled on his lab coat. He placed the contaminated tube in his desk drawer and removed a fresh tube containing a tiny amount of transport medium. Similar to other tubes he’d used since high school, this one had a double O-ring seal that, once in place would prevent anything outside the tube contaminating the interior, or more importantly, prevent anything inside from escaping.

  Deep within him, the last vestiges of his humanity pleaded with him to reconsider his plan. The rational side of him, the compassionate doctor that had personified his existence for his entire adult life begged him to alter his course of action. It wasn’t too late. He could stop the chain of events carefully laid out before him after two months of painstaking planning.

  But karma was inescapable.

  He slipped the plastic tube into the pocket of his coat, clipped his security access badge to his lapel and then stepped from his office toward the elevator leading to the upper floors. He passed through the biometric sensors that protected access to the inner sanctum of the building and the laboratories hidden away there.

  The building was in fact a bunker to safeguard the deadly secrets inside. From the outside, it looked like any other building on campus. But this gentle exterior was another façade to hide the truth locked deep within. The building’s pilings were sunk over one hundred feet into the earth. Its engineers had designed it to withstand the worst nature might throw at it. It could brush off the fury of a Category-5 Hurricane sweeping in from the Gulf of Mexico. All the building’s laboratories were positioned a full thirty feet above the hundred-year flood plain. Vehicles couldn’t approach within two hundred feet of the building, making the threat of a car bomb more of a nuisance than a danger. Even aircraft turned into flying bombs would find the structure virtually invulnerable. State of the art intrusion detection monitored every square inch of the building, and the most elaborate security system ever devised protected the horrors withi
n from ever escaping.

  No army could reach it, no mere thief could breach it, and no terrorist could destroy it. Only someone trusted, someone educated, someone respected could ever enter.

  As Dhann stepped from the elevator into the immaculately clean hallway that smelled of disinfectant, he couldn’t help but offer a wan, hapless smile to the destiny laid out before him. He could no sooner change the course of events fated for him than he could alter the orbits of the planets. It was as if the future were already written and he just a mindless participant.

  “Good morning, Dhann,” a colleague coming from the Level IV Biosafety laboratory greeted him.

  His name was Jamie Goldberg, a fellow bioengineer at the laboratory. Dhann had known Jamie for eleven years; they’d eaten dinner together, and they’d worked on charitable foundations together. But even Jamie hadn’t recognized Dhann’s anguish. Jamie and the others had, of course, known about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that had killed so many, but because they had suffered no loss, their lives had been remarkably unaffected by the calamity.

  “Good morning, Jamie,” Dhann replied automatically upon seeing his friend. “Off to class?”

  Jamie and Dhann, when not working in the National Laboratory, taught biological science as part of the university faculty.

  “Yeah,” Jamie replied. “Off to nourish young, impressionable, and completely clueless minds.”

  Dhann offered what he hoped was an understanding smile. “Have fun,” he added as an afterthought, hoping Jamie wouldn’t notice the perspiration on his forehead. The temperature in the building was deliberately kept operating-room cold to help prevent the spread of bacteria, and normally Dhann was cold even in a knit sweater.

  But not this day.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jamie replied cynically. “Like a root canal.”

  Jamie disappeared behind the closing elevator doors and Dhann proceeded forward.

  His security badge and a biometric scan of his iris gave Dhann access to the buffer corridor around the lab itself. As the door opened, he heard the familiar rush of air as the seal was broken and air was sucked inside. This positive air pressure outside the laboratory was just one of many safety measures to protect the world from the dangers within.

  Dhann stepped through the door and then into the locker room where he removed his clothing and donned a simple jumpsuit. He placed his valuables in a locker and then stepped into the suit room where he stepped into the positive pressure suit necessary to go further into the lab itself. As he dressed, he kept the tiny tube hidden from view of the security camera that monitored this room. But he feared no savvy security guard here. Even the well-trained and hand-picked security guards at the National Laboratory didn’t have access here.

  Only those who would never consider doing the unthinkable could get this far.

  Dhann finished donning the level IV biohazard suit, secreting the unauthorized tube in his left hand. He then passed through the double airtight doors into the laboratory itself. He was now in an environment completely sealed off from the rest of the world. Nothing living could escape this room except through the airtight doors, and these were kept at higher pressure to keep whatever was in the lab from leaving.

  Dhann saw two of his colleagues working diligently at their cabinets across the laboratory. They hardly noticed him as he entered, and he offered them just a brief nod in greeting when they bothered to look up from their work. There were several level II biosafety cabinets in the lab, and he carefully picked one a discreet distance from his two colleagues who were clearly focused—as they should be—on their delicate work.

  Dhann gathered his equipment, setting everything he would need at his cabinet; once ready, he turned to a row of incubators. For the last three months he’d been working on a particularly virulent staph bacteria that was virtually invulnerable to anything short of an autoclave. He had nearly a dozen cultures growing in petri dishes in the third incubator.

  But they weren’t what he was here for.

  He stepped past the incubator holding his samples to a fourth incubator with a strip of red warning tape on the lid. The tape had been placed there by a select group of researchers who’d been tasked months earlier for this specific independent study. Dhann saw the warning; and knew that only those researchers assigned to the project were to handle the material within. The red tape clearly labeled the contents of the incubator as part of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) study.

  He paused, glancing at his colleagues who were dutifully working, ignoring him. His hands shook as he opened the incubator, and looked at the fifteen petri dishes within. They were identical, but batch numbers identified the specific strain in each dish. They were all variations of the Ames strain. A misnomer. The original bacteria sample had come from a diseased cow in Texas in 1981, but with typical government efficiency, the strain had been misidentified as coming from Ames, Iowa, and the name had stuck. He knew there were at least eighty-nine different variations of the original culture.

  He saw the batch he wanted, recognizing the number. To most people the number twenty nine had no significant meaning, but for Dhann and any other biological engineer, Ames-29 wasn’t just any bacteria culture. Just like Uranium-235 wasn’t just another metal to nuclear engineers.

  Dhann carefully removed the single petri dish. He closed the incubator and stepped away, trying to appear casual with his movements but unable to stop his hands from shaking. He looked down at the petri dish and the harmless looking, mold-like culture in the red medium.

  He would have to be careful. He had only one vial with the specially prepared transport medium. Dhann could ill afford to be careless now. He returned to his cabinet, concealing the petri dish from direct view. He was breathing heavily and sweating so much inside his biohazard suit that it fogged up slightly.

  Dhann paused to steady his nerves, knowing this was the critical moment. It still wasn’t too late. He could return the dish. No one would ever know. A single thin strip of red tape provided a security seal on the petri dish. If he opened the dish the seal would be snapped, and anyone looking at the dish would know someone had accessed the contents without authorization. But the researchers weren’t scheduled to be back in the lab for another thirty-six hours, which meant, with karma on his side, he would have almost two days before his treachery was discovered.

  His hands were trembling. He couldn’t possibly perform the simple, necessary steps with shaking hands. He had to be precise. He couldn’t afford the slightest mistake.

  Dhann forced himself to take deep, steadying breaths. He needed to be calm. In his life, he’d worked with virtually every deadly bacteria and virus known to man, and he’d never broken a sweat. Now the inside of his biohazard suit felt like a tropical forest. He was literally dripping with nervous perspiration.

  He set the USAMRIID sample inside his cabinet out of view. The work area was designed to protect him and the world from anything he might be working on. Although his gloved hands could reach inside the cabinet, his face and body were protected by a shatter-proof view screen. Air ducts sucked air into the cabinet itself and then through a series of HEPA filters so any airborne particles wouldn’t be able to escape into the rest of the laboratory. Therefore, by necessity, the cabinet was relatively enclosed, meaning only someone looking directly over his shoulder would be able to see the petri dish.

  Dhann glanced at his colleagues, needing to be certain he wasn’t being observed, but they were absorbed in their own work. He checked the observation room, separated from the lab by heavy safety glass. It was empty.

  Dhann opened his hand and saw the Eppendorf tube with his transfer medium waiting. His rapidly dying humanity was screaming within him. Don’t… don’t do it! Return it. Take a leave of absence. Think about the consequences!

  But those who’d ruthlessly slaughtered his family hadn’t considered the consequences. Dhann had identified his dear family in the morgue. He’d seen the effects
of the monstrous act. His children’s bodies ripped and torn, poor little Amita barely recognizable as human from the blast that had disfigured her. The terrorists had never paused to think what their act might unleash, what horrible justice would be the reckoning of their crime.

  He took a final deep breath to steady himself, set the tube down, and picked up the petri dish containing his messenger of justice. As expected, the security seal broke as he twisted the lid. He set the dish back inside the cabinet and picked up a plastic transfer loop. He opened the wrapper and removed the sterile loop. The slender handle led to a tiny loop hardly visible to the human eye. Then, he briefly brushed the transfer loop across the bacteria culture. With his naked eye, he could see nothing on the tip of the loop. But thirty-five years of experience as a biological engineer told him there would be hundreds, maybe even thousands of microscopic spores on the transfer loop.

  He set the petri dish down and picked up the Eppendorf tube. He’d used similar tubes more often than he could count. Since his days in high school biology he’d been opening and closing similar tubes hundreds of times a day. It was as natural to him as any action could be. He positioned it between two fingers of his left hand and opened it with a simple flick of his thumb. Dhann hesitated, knowing he had to be careful not to contaminate the outside of the tube. It was absolutely vital that nothing touch the outside of the tiny tube.

  He took another steadying breath and then carefully placed the hoop of the transfer loop inside the tube and into the transport broth. He didn’t need to swirl it, but he did so just the same, making a few minute sweeps with the hoop to transfer as many spores as possible. He carefully removed the transfer loop and, using his thumb, resealed the vial.

  Dhann felt sweat trickling down his spine and stinging his eyes as he looked back into the cabinet at the innocent-looking vial. He knew its potential. Dhann briefly marveled at what nature had wrought. No man could have created something so biologically perfect. Deceptively simple. The elegant design. Virtually immortal. It could survive extremes of temperature. It could exist without sustenance for hundreds of years in a dormant state. Yet so horrific when aroused from its slumber.