“Yeah,” Graham replied. “He was my instructor on one of those things. It has the sling? He shoots it SAS style.”
“Using the sling to brace it…good plan,” Reader said. He pushed the OA-93 to Graham who placed it in the war bag they were assembling for Striker. Reader frowned as he looked at his gear. He took a stubby version of an AK-47 off the rack. “I’ll take my Krinkov.”
“Good plan. That’s pretty concealable, too,” Graham commented.
Reader slid the sling over his shoulder, then tested it out hanging under his winter coat. With the Krinkov’s full-length 30-round magazine, it wouldn’t zip up without poking out, so he rummaged for a short 10-shot magazine. This hid quite well. He stuffed spare 30 rounders in his deep coat pockets.
“Narrow as you are, you can still hide that thing,” Graham stated.
“It was either be narrow from all the biathlon training or just lapse and swell up on my diet of Mountain Dew and whoopie pies,” Reader admitted.
Graham laughed. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Graham took the larger MP-5 from Marrick, and a 15-round magazine for the machine pistol. His barrel chest hid the larger weapon well under his winter coat. Marrick and the smaller PDW were well suited to each other. She wore a loose parka to make up for the folded machine pistol’s bulk. The swell of her breasts also lessened the printing of the gun.
“All set?” Reader asked.
“We’ve got spare mags for our pistols,” Marrick said.
“All right,” Reader answered. For a moment he looked at a cabinet, then opened it, then tossed each of them a canister from it. “A flash-bang grenade. Just in case.”
Graham pocketed his. “Toss me a couple for the war bag.”
Reader lobbed them to him. “They’re going to let us into Hill with all of this hardware?”
“Brognola’s given us a free pass,” Graham replied. “Faxed over the paperwork from the Justice Department this morning.”
“Okay,” Reader said. Graham handed him the bag as they locked the lodge up, and Reader staggered under the unexpected weight. “Wow.”
“Sorry,” Graham said. He took the war bag back.
“No, I was just surprised. Drive,” Reader said, taking it again. Marrick got into the shotgun seat and Reader threw the duffel onto the back seat and crawled in after it. The folded Krinkov jabbed him in the ribs, and he twisted in the seat to get a little more comfortable. He pulled out his PDA and began scanning.
“They’re talking. They know we’re moving,” Reader announced.
Graham and Marrick nodded. “We’ll be ready for them.”
Reader took a deep breath. “I hope so.”
“THEY’RE ON THE MOVE,” Pave announced to Stevens. “They grabbed a heavy bag and threw it in the back seat. Looks like they’re armed for a war.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Stevens answered. “It’s two FBI agents and a geek. They should have been dead long ago. Who do you have on the operation?”
“Shock,” Pave said.
Stevens nodded. “He did well at the bank job. Remind him that we’re trying to make this look like a Korean street-gang hit.”
“He knows,” Pave answered.
Stevens smiled. “But have him wait until they’ve left the base. Meeting with the man in black.”
“Yes, sir,” Pave said. He got on the cell phone.
MACK BOLAN RUBBED his eyes as he awoke. Jack Grimaldi was on approach. His sleep was far from dreamless; nightmares of shambling Americans strewed through the streets, begging for the sweet release of death haunted his mind. The potential for millions of humans begging to die as their brains and nerves turned to spongy pulps of useless, misfiring neurons hung with him like a frozen cloak. “You okay, Sarge? You didn’t sound like you slept too well,” Grimaldi called.
“Just land, Jack. I’ll be fine,” Bolan answered. He looked at the PDA in his lap. He powered it up and checked to see if the mutant proteins could survive immersion in water supplies, through treatment systems and filters. So far, Aaron Kurtzman found nothing to corroborate after raiding CDC files.
“I found another way for the prions to be spread, after doing a lot of research,” Kurtzman had told him. “I discovered a paper that showed the presence of the proteins in olfactory cilia and the central olfactory passageway.”
“Airborne,” Bolan said.
“With sufficient mutation,” Kurtzman stated. “It could be weaponized into an airstream dispersement.”
Bolan’s brow furrowed. “Containment breach at Dugway, if they can arrange it,” he said softly. “But it’s also a proving ground for various air and land weapons systems.”
“Meaning that there are artillery shells and rockets at Dugway that could be used to disperse aerial toxins or biological weapons,” Kurtzman concluded.
Bolan wondered about the time he’d spent in the slaughterhouse, but considering that the men tossing corpses into the grinders had no special respiratory filters, the possibility that the prions were already airborne was doubtful. However, sufficiently weaponized, with several tons of donor proteins to work from, Stevens could produce enough missiles to infect every major population center in the nation. And no one would know that they were infected until the first symptoms hit. The early symptoms were slowed-down thinking, followed by wild mood changes, irritability and dementia. Increased violence and more accidents would result among those infected, and not until muscle spasms and seizures began would doctors check for spongiform nerve tissue. If the doctors even had the mental capacity to figure it out.
“How long would it take to convert the proteins into a weaponized form?” Bolan asked.
“He’s had a decade and a half to whip something up, Striker,” Kurtzman answered. “The fact that he’s closing down his various operations means he’s already got it weaponized. He only needs delivery systems.”
Bolan’s jaw clenched. “Which means he has to get into Dugway long before the containment breech.”
“We’ve been watching meteorological charts, Striker. You’ve got forty-two hours before the winds shift and they can fake the accident,” Kurtzman explained.
“He’s already there,” Bolan said. “He was in North Korea for a decade. He’s got people inside the proving grounds.”
“Not outside the realm of possibility,” Kurtzman admitted.
“It’s the way his kind operates,” Bolan retorted. “This isn’t a small plan. This is a huge slap in the face to the world. He’s not asking for demands of surrender. He’s culling the herd, thinning out humanity. Whoever remain will fear him, and beg not to be exterminated.”
“I hope we never see that day,” Kurtzman said softly.
“I know I won’t,” Bolan told him. “If he gets that far, it means I’ll have died fighting him. But I don’t intend to die without pulling him down with me.”
SHOCK LOOKED AT HIMSELF in the van’s passenger side mirror. With a shock of red hair and hazel eyes, it was hard for him to imagine himself as the “leader of the vicious Korean bank robbers” from a few days ago. A balaclava had shielded his freckled cheeks, mirrored glasses obscuring his obviously occidental eyes. He spoke Korean fluently, however, after having been a guard at the 38th Parallel for his short military career. He knew the language like a native, down to the inflections.
And he despised the dirty bastards. When he could have gone on to a career in smuggling, he’d been unceremoniously discharged from the military. One of his Asian customers had ratted him out, or had been a plant, or had just tried to discredit him.
Whatever the case, Shock was dismissed, stripped of his rank and privileges. He had only barely gotten away from the prison transport, freed by Dr. Kent Stevens and his enormous bodyguard Pave. While the guards and driver died, dosed with small squirts of nerve gas, Shock had been taken, stripped of his past, a rusty-haired hobo left in his place to burn with the busload of dead military prisoners.
His new lease on life was owed to the criminal mastermind.
Stevens had needed someone who could run an operation linking United States and North Korean factions, and make it so that any facts pointed toward the Asians as the forces behind the deadly plot.
As such, when Stevens told him someone needed to die, that person died.
He patted the receiver of his AK-107 under the blanket in his lap. Hill Air Force Base was a half mile down the road, from where he stopped at the gas station. In the back of the van, his men sat, restless and tense.
They weren’t Korean immigrant gangs from Salt Lake City, but rather South Korean gangsters and soldiers of fortune that Stevens had hired as his smear squad. Even if they were from the south, however, Shock hated them. They were Asian thugs, the scum of the earth, the same people who’d cost him his sweet ride in the U.S. Army’s armory. Instead of living high on the hog from dealing surplus rifles to terrorists and criminals at top dollar, he was a dead man walking. Seamus Houllihan was a memory, a disgraced soldier who died in a freak bus crash on his way to twenty years in Levenworth.
Shock had taken great pleasure in destroying the targets in Salt Lake, murdering the bastards who looked just like the ones who had sold him out. He especially enjoyed the teenage girl, young and ripe, so soft and vulnerable.
The South Koreans in the van hadn’t been with him. He was the sole survivor of the group that had hit the street gang’s apartments, driving away when Graham and Reader had broken up the ambush, surviving the firebombs by sheer tenacity. The men with him didn’t know that he’d exploded in rage when he killed the helpless gang members, executing them, but taking extra time with the girl. They didn’t know of the racist hatred burning in his breast, nor the desire he had to find another Korean girl and crush her as he did the victim from that morning. It was a glorious release, a brand-new form of drug, even better than the first illicit money he’d gotten from giving Uncle Sam’s M-16s over for thick wads of cash. The rush was something he wanted to repeat.
The woman, Agent Marrick, had dark hair and hazel eyes. She didn’t look Asian, but there was a stirring down in Shock’s loins.
He didn’t voice the desire to take her alive. Pave’s orders were to kill them, but he was supposed to make certain that the man in black whom they picked up from Hill was the first victim.
Maybe he could wound Marrick, enjoy her as she bled out, the light fading from her eyes as she became a dead thing. Shock licked his lips.
Maybe.
“Sir?” The South Korean driver spoke up.
Shock looked at him, tugging his knit cap tighter over his red hair, obscuring the last visible vestiges of it. He adjusted his mirrored glasses so they wouldn’t fall off on impact. Shock momentarily fancied the thought of firing his .45 point-blank through the Asian’s moonlike face, spraying thick, syrupy blood over the windshield. The homicidal racist urge passed, and he nodded for the driver to continue.
“I see headlights,” the driver said. “A civilian vehicle.”
Shock raised a set of night-vision binoculars and looked at it. The same FBI-issue sedan they’d followed was now rolling slowly down the road back this way. He pushed the blanket off his rifle. “Ramming speed.”
The driver threw the van into gear, its engine roaring as it shot forward. The pickup truck with the backup team screeched its tires and whipped onto the road behind them.
That’s when the spotlight exploded to life, blazing through the windshield.
MACK BOLAN INSPECTED the gear that Brognola’s contractors had brought with them. He was impressed, and slid everything under the jacket they’d provided for him. His tall, powerful frame and the drape of the winter coat rendered the weaponry invisible.
“I wish you’d let me come with, Sarge,” Grimaldi said.
“We’ll need backup. Hal’s sending in a team of blacksuits from the Farm,” Bolan told him. “You’ll take charge of them—”
“In case you get killed? Dammit—” Grimaldi began.
Bolan shook his head. “You’re a good leader, Jack. If I fall, I’ve got you to fall back on. You, Carl and David…”
“You’re expecting to be killed?” Grimaldi asked.
“I’m expecting the worst,” Bolan said. “If worse comes to worst, we might have to activate emergency sterilization at Dugway.”
Grimaldi’s eyes widened.
“I have Aaron online. He’s inside their mainframe’s back door, ready to fire up the self-destruct systems in case I send the signal,” Bolan explained.
“You’ll be killed if he does that.” Grimaldi swore. “And so will Graham and the others, and whoever else is on that base.”
Bolan nodded. “I’ll try to evacuate any hostages, but if I can’t, it’s only a few thousand soldiers in exchange for millions of Americans. My life isn’t worth one civilian’s.”
Grimaldi winced. “You’ve saved—”
Bolan cut him off. “Nobody owes me anything. I’m doing what I do because it’s the right thing. I’m expendable. I’ve always seen myself as expendable. I’m not cut out for suicide, but if I am reduced to ash to prevent a cloud of lethal microbes from descending upon a city and killing millions, then so be it.”
“You’re going to give them that option?” Grimaldi asked.
“I’m going to try to talk them out of coming with me,” Bolan said. “But it’s their choice…”
“It’s my choice, too,” Grimaldi snapped. “We’ve been a team since you started this whole damned crusade. Remember Vegas? Remember the Caribbean? You saved me from being another scumbag.”
“And I’m going to ask you to keep up the fight. You’ll have the authority to run any mission to support me, but, I need you here to coordinate with the blacksuits in case the enemy tries to slip out the back door,” Bolan stated. “Jack, I’m holding you in reserve.”
“Excuse me.” A tall, gangly man spoke up.
Grimaldi and Bolan both looked at Stan Reader as he interrupted them.
“The men who trailed us are waiting at a gas station, half a mile down the road,” Reader announced. “Two vehicles.”
“You told me that you’d been under surveillance,” Bolan announced. “Thanks for the guns, again.”
Reader waved off the thanks. “If we pull out, they’ll try to ambush us.”
Bolan nodded. “We can turn that to our advantage, then.”
“It’d be the first prisoners we’ve taken so far in this investigation,” Kirby Graham admitted. “The first ones we’d catch that we’d keep, at least.”
“But we need to flank them first,” Marrick noted. “Someone has to act as bait, and someone has to slam the door on them.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Well, I’ve got an idea on how to nail them and maybe even take them flat-footed.”
“Helicopter,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi nodded.
“When you’re done, you stick to the base,” Bolan ordered.
“Absolutely,” Grimaldi answered. “But at least I won’t feel like I’m sitting on my thumbs.”
“I’d never accuse you of that,” Bolan replied.
BOLAN VOLUNTEERED for the job as bait, driving Marrick’s FBI-issue sedan, but she said he couldn’t go it alone.
“Why not?” Bolan asked.
“If they don’t see at least two of us in the car…” she began.
“I could use a dummy,” Bolan replied.
“We don’t have any wigs. It’d be too different,” Marrick argued. “Besides, I don’t have any training in rappelling out of helicopters. Kirby and Stan do.”
Bolan took a deep breath, then let it out evenly.
“Besides, your hands will be full with combat driving,” Marrick added. “I’ve got body armor, and I’ve got a machine pistol.”
“They have rifles with armor-piercing ammunition, Rachel,” Graham complained.
“So what? You’re going to make me sit this out?”
“You could ride shotgun in the helicopter,” Graham offered.
“It won’t work,” Reader said. “Striker will
need some backup. Sir, do you know how to operate a Krinkov submachine gun?”
Bolan nodded. Reader took his from under his coat. “Rachel, you’ll need to use the OA-93, since you’re trained with M-16s. I’ll take your PDW. You’ll need all the firepower you can get.”
“Good enough plan,” Bolan stated. “Since they’ll be dropping on the enemy’s exposed flanks, they won’t need the kind of punch our weapons will need.”
Graham glared at Reader for a moment, a spark of irritation igniting in the big man’s features before he cupped Marrick’s cheek. “Be careful.”
“I will,” she’d replied.
With the OA-93 in her lap, her lips pursed into a flat line of worry, Marrick was a contrast of innocent young beauty and deadly readiness. She glanced at the Executioner, but to her credit, her trigger finger rested on the frame of the powerful SMG, not on the trigger. She knew how to handle weapons safely.
“It’s okay to be worried,” Bolan told her as they drove toward the ambush. They could see a van and a pickup truck waiting in the lot of the gas station hundreds of yards ahead of them.
“I’m the most worried about my temper,” Marrick replied. “These assholes killed a cop trying to get me.”
Bolan nodded. The Krinkov was tucked alongside his thigh. He’d fire the stubby assault weapon right through the windshield when it was time. The 7.62 mm rounds would turn the glass into a sieve and still have enough punch to tear into the enemy vehicle if necessary. “Remember, if you screw up, you kill both of us. Think of how guilty you’d feel then.”
Marrick chuckled nervously. “Okay, I’ll keep my head.”
“That’s all anyone can ask,” Bolan responded.
“I don’t see the helicopter,” Marrick mentioned.
“That’s because he doesn’t want to be seen,” Bolan answered. The OH-6 Little Bird they borrowed from the Air Force was painted jet-black, and Grimaldi was flying it without running lights. At altitude, in the night sky, he was invisible and inaudible. “He won’t let us down.”
Marrick nodded. “I didn’t mean to say—”
Contagion Option Page 18