Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  Once more he turned, this time to Echo Team.

  “A Black Hawk is smoking on the roof,” he said. “You will be on it four minutes. It takes off in five. Weapons and equipment are already being loaded. Hammer suits and BAMs for everyone. Full kits for the new team members.”

  “Sir,” began Lydia, but Church cut her off.

  “No time. You’ll be briefed en route and will rendezvous with Captain Ledger. This is a Code Zero.”

  They did not argue or hesitate.

  A few blurred minutes later they were in the air.

  Interlude Twelve

  The Barn

  DMS Special Teams Field Office

  Near Houston, Texas

  Three Years Ago

  Dr. Bliss sat next to Dr. Hu, both of them sipping Diet Cokes and swinging their feet off the side of an open Huey. The big helicopter was a rebuilt holdover from a war that ended before either of them was born. It was also the personal property of Colonel Samson Riggs. It was parked on the side of a runway behind the Barn, the massive former dairy farm that had been recommissioned as the field office for the DMS’s new “special teams” division. Riggs ran two teams out of the Barn, Shockwave and Longhorn. The latter was used as backup for whenever the ATF ran up against something coming over the border other than cartel gun thugs and drugs. Bioweapons and teams of foreign terror squads trying to use the Mexican pipeline as a conduit. That sort of thing. The former, Shockwave, was a go anywhere, do anything all-purpose team. Freed from normal duties as a regional team like those at the Warehouse in Baltimore or the Hangar in New York.

  A few feet away, leaning a muscular shoulder against the Huey’s frame, was Gus Dietrich. He was pretending to look at something on his smartphone, but Bliss knew that he was listening. Dietrich was always listening, always watching. Because he did such a stellar job of fading into Mr. Church’s shadow, and because he looked like a muscle-bound mouth-breather, people tended to regard him as slow. He wasn’t. No one who worked for Church was slow. No one who worked for Church was even ordinary.

  Bliss and Hu were at the Barn to take possession of boxes of scientific research records Riggs and his shooters had taken from a biological warfare lab in Bucharest. That lab was supposedly closed during the last days of the Cold War, but Interpol had discovered otherwise. Sadly, the Interpol team had been wiped out. Riggs brought Shockwave in and got some useful backup from Echo Team, which had been in Europe anyway. Echo was the only other team authorized to go anywhere.

  Beyond where the tech people were offloading the boxes of records, two figures stood together, talking and laughing. Colonel Riggs and Captain Joe Ledger.

  “They seem to have bonded,” observed Bliss. There had been a running bet at the Hangar that the two team leaders would do nothing except butt heads. Instead they’d developed a quick and, apparently, deep friendship. Their combined teams had mopped the floor with a much larger force of mercenaries in Bucharest. A four-to-one fight, and every member of Shockwave and Echo Teams had come home, alive and whole.

  Hu sniffed. “Cut from the same cloth,” he said in a way that implied no compliment.

  She looked at him. “What is it with you and them? You can’t stand either of them.”

  “They’re at the wrong end of the evolutionary curve,” sneered Hu. “Useful when we need something dead, but otherwise they’re meat. And arrogant meat at that.”

  “Oh, come on, Willie,” she countered, “that’s not fair. If you combine their clearance rate for high-profile jobs it exceeds the rest of the DMS combined.”

  Hu made a small, disgusted noise. “So they can pull triggers. Big deal. Hugo Vox has compiled a list of men—and some women—with the same potential. Same military and martial arts background, same psychopathic tendencies. Same lack of intellectual refinement. Don’t fool yourself, Artie, they’re entirely replaceable.”

  There was another sound, equally disgusted, but not from Hu. The two scientists leaned out to look at Dietrich.

  “Excuse me,” said Hu with chilly contempt, “did you have something to add?

  Without looking up from his cell phone, Dietrich said, “For a smart guy, Doc, you do say some stupid shit.”

  “What did you say?” The chill in his tone turned to arctic ice.

  Bliss jumped in. “What do you mean, Gus?”

  He glanced up at her. Pointedly at her. “You think that Riggs and Ledger have such a good clearance record because they’re lucky? You think shooters of their quality are interchangeable? If that’s what you think, then you either don’t understand them or don’t understand how the DMS works.”

  “As if you do?” demanded Hu.

  Bliss elbowed him lightly.

  “Ow!”

  “Go on, Gus. What were you saying?” she asked.

  Dietrich put his cell phone into a pocket and folded his arms. He had a bulldog face that was scarred and weathered. “I’ve seen Hugo Vox’s list. I recruit from it all the time. I’d have any of them at my back in a fight. Any kind of fight. But none of them have a certain thing that Riggs has and Ledger has. Major Courtland had it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, all of the operators on Hugo’s list are top-notch, best of the best, but they don’t have that thing, that X factor.”

  “What X factor?” asked Hu belligerently.

  “Well, Doc, if I knew exactly what it was I wouldn’t call it an X factor, would I?”

  Bliss had to bite down to keep a laugh from bubbling out. Hu went livid.

  “Can you explain it at all, Gus?” Bliss asked.

  He nodded, shrugged, shook his head. Shrugged again. “If you understand combat from a spec-ops perspective, then you know there’s a lot of variables. You guys, the science team, and Bug’s team, do a great job providing real-time intel so that the field teams can adjust to the variables and react in the right way. Without the science and computer teams we’d have lost a lot of fights, no doubt and no joke. But sometimes, deep in the heart of something, there comes a point when things are going south so fast there isn’t time to ask for or use additional intel. Not just the heat of battle,” he said, “but times when everything is totally crazy, shifting inside the firefight, with radical new elements being introduced that no one could foresee. Like when Echo Team ran into the Berserkers the first time. No one could have predicted mercenaries amped up with DNA from silverback gorillas. I mean, seriously, who could have seen that coming? It wasn’t part of the game as we understood the game at the moment. The first DMS team that ran into them was slaughtered. So was a Russian kill team. Then Ledger, Top, and Bunny got ambushed by them. They should have died right there and then. No doubt about it. Do a statistical-probability assessment of it and it comes out with them dead ten times out of ten.”

  “But they didn’t die,” said Bliss, fascinated by where Dietrich was going with this.

  “No. Joe Ledger changed the game. It wasn’t exactly what he did, ’cause from a distance it was just him using a knife. But it was how he did it in the moment. The lack of hesitation, the choice of target, the way he reacted, the fact that he attacked rather than retreat, that he wasn’t trapped by how freaky and fucked-up everything was. It was his X factor that changed it from a certain loss to a win that just pissed all over the odds. The same thing goes for how Riggs dealt with those cyborg baboons. I mean, shit, cyborg baboons. Most guys, even top shooters, would be like, ‘holy fuck, those are cyborg baboons, what the fuck?’ And they’d have died. Riggs just adapted to it because in his mind it wasn’t Freaky Friday, it was how things were in the moment. I’ll bet those frigging baboons where thinking ‘what the fuck’ when Riggs went apeshit on them.”

  Bliss nodded, seeing it.

  “If those were the only instances, you could throw statistics at me again and say it’s a fluke. But go browse their files. Those two. And look at how many times they’ve thrown Hail Mary passes and won a game that everyone—every-fucking-body—said was lost. Time and time again, and those are numbers that do not lie.”

>   Hu sniffed dismissively, but he said nothing.

  Bliss was still nodding. “So … this X factor is what defines them.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And they’re the only two who have it?”

  “So far,” said Dietrich. “The big man is always scouting for others, but guys like that are pretty scarce. And believe me, we are looking.”

  “Gus,” she said, cocking her head to one side, “have you ever played games?”

  “Games? Like what? Poker?”

  “Video games, board games. Ever play Dungeons and Dragons?”

  “Nope. Never much gone in for wizards and dragons and all that shit. Not fake ones. Why?”

  “There are a lot of qualities that make up your characters in D and D, and it’s all based on how you roll the dice. You can be good, evil, neutral, or chaotic.”

  “Chaotic?” Dietrich thought about that and a slow smile grew on his face. “Yeah, Doc, you might have put your finger on it. It’s not an X factor—”

  “It’s chaos,” said Bliss, finishing it for him. “Chaos resists computer models, it can’t really be predicted. What Joe Ledger and Samson Riggs bring to any fight is a chaos factor.”

  Dietrich nodded. “Yes, ma’am, and that’s what makes them so damn dangerous. Understand something, I’m good—I’m real fucking good—but if it came to it, I would never want to go up against either of them.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Hu, breaking his own silence, “and what are we supposed to do if we ever encounter this ‘chaos factor’ in one of our enemies?”

  “If it was someone like that, we’d throw Ledger or Riggs against him.”

  “And if they weren’t available?” asked Bliss.

  “God help us if that ever happened, doc,” said Dietrich. “Because we would stand no chance at all.”

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Euclid Avenue Station

  Euclid and Pitkin Avenues

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 1:37 p.m.

  We jumped the curb and drove straight into Prospect Park and tore deep furrows in the dirt of the baseball field as we raced to meet the Black Hawk. The big helicopter’s wheels touched down at the same time that I slewed us into a bad skidding, turning stop. We left the doors open and ran bent over through the rotor wash, Ghost ranging ahead. The bay door opened and we dived in.

  “Go, go, go!” I bellowed, and the helo rose straight up into the afternoon air.

  By car, it’s twelve congested miles from Park Slope to the subway entrance on Euclid Avenue at Pitkin, and by now the streets around the station would be jammed with civilians wanting a peek at a disaster. The Black Hawk helicopter tore above the traffic at nearly two hundred miles an hour. We were there in minutes.

  It still felt like too long.

  During that short flight, Top, Bunny, and I shucked our torn and bloodstained suits and pulled on black BDU trousers and tank tops. Then the tech crew helped us into Saratoga Hammer suits. These are two-piece, lightweight overgarments consisting of a coat with integral hood and separate trousers. The suit incorporates a two-layer fabric system consisting of liquid repellent cotton fabric and a carbon sphere liner. The double layers protect against chemical warfare vapors, liquids, and aerosols. The ones Mr. Church bought for us were not the standard off-the-rack variety but a special grade designed by a friend of his within the company. They were tougher and they had spider-silk fabric woven into what is normally Kevlar sheathing. Very tough and tear-resistant.

  Not tear-proof, but tear-resistant. The difference mattered and it was never far from our minds.

  Our suits were black and unmarked. No agency patch or rank insignia of any kind. With the helmets on and balaclavas in place we looked like high-tech ninjas. We strapped gun belts around our hips and equipment harnesses to our torsos. These harnesses had pouches for lots of extra magazines and hooks for flash-bangs and fragmentation grenades.

  They don’t make Hammer suits for dogs. “You’re staying on the chopper,” I told Ghost. He gave me a wounded and baleful glare.

  The weapons tech from the Hangar, a moose named Bobby Cooper—Coop to everyone—handed out lots of useful gizmos and additional equipment, including various-sized blaster-plasters, knives, strangle wires, and everything else a psychotic kid might have on his Christmas list. The last thing Coop did was strap a tactical computer to each of our forearms. When he was done, he patted me on the shoulder. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thanks, Coop. Take care of my dog, okay?”

  He grinned. “With all the shit that’s going on today, Joe, I think Ghost and I should go the hell out and get drunk.”

  “He’d like that.”

  Coop’s grin was fragile and it eventually slid off. “Is it true? Are you going after walkers?”

  “We’ll see,” I said to Coop. He didn’t press it.

  Bunny clipped a sturdy fighting knife handle-downward onto his rig, ready for a fast pull. He said, “Is this more Mother Night stuff, too?”

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  “It is,” said Top. We didn’t argue. We couldn’t be sure, but the day had a certain feel to it. A lot of things were sliding downhill, but it seemed to be one hand doing the pushing.

  “How’d they get this shit?” asked Bunny. “I mean, we have it secured, right?”

  “Yes, at the Locker,” I assured him.

  “You sure?”

  I wanted to tell him that of course I was sure. Instead I contacted Nikki. “Have someone run a security check on the Locker. Let’s make sure that—”

  “We already did,” said Nikki. “As soon as word came in about the subway, Aunt Sallie initiated a system-wide security lockdown and status check. All the lights at the Locker are green.”

  That was a tremendous relief. Keeping that place safe was always number one on any security to-do list. Always.

  The Locker is the nickname for the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, located three quarters of a mile beneath a wooded hill in a thinly populated corner of Virginia. There are other similar facilities scattered around the country and the world, places where dangerous things like chemical weapons and VX nerve gas and other monsters are stored. Domestic and international agreements have shut a lot of them down, but we still have a few, some being closely monitored by congressional watchdog groups and teams of independent observers composed of members of NATO, the U.N., and others. And there are facilities squirreled away in places no one would think to look for them. Places funded by obscure allotments in black budgets; places you might pass every day and never know what insanity was stored behind nondescript stone walls and meaningless signs.

  But there’s no other place exactly like the Locker.

  In the six years since its inception, the Department of Military Sciences has gone to the mat with the world’s most extreme terrorists. Not just al-Qaeda fanatics wearing explosive vests or Taliban fighters with shoulder-mounted RPGs. I’m talking about actual mad scientists who put vast amounts of money and their own towering but fractured intellects to the task of creating the most dangerous bioweapons imaginable. Things like quick-onset Ebola, mutated strains of anthrax, radical new forms of ultracontagious tuberculosis, weaponized HIV, and even genetically engineered contagious forms of diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell, which had previously been purely genetic disorders. And, not that this shit had to get any scarier, but there were also a slew of designer superpathogens in there, each of them constructed as doomsday weapons, either as threats in the postnuclear covert arms race or as kill-them-all-let-our-version-of-god-sort-’em-out holy war weapons, or retaliatory devices for use as a Hail Mary pass if their side was losing a war. Stuff like Lucifer 113, Vijivshiy Odin-Vasemnartzets, Reaper, and the seif-al-din. Stuff no sane human, however politically or theologically motivated, should be capable of dreaming up, let alone making. All of these things were out on the bleeding edge of science.

  In my four years with the DMS I’v
e taken my fair share of these toys away from people like the Jakobys, Sebastian Gault, the Cabal, the Seven Kings, the Red Order, the Hebbelmann Group, and others. Too many others. I’ve had to do some terrible things to keep those weapons from creating the misery for which they were created. Things that have ruined any chance I will ever have of sleeping peacefully through an entire night.

  I told Nikki to make sure Church called me as soon as he was free and then disconnected. In my pocket my cell phone vibrated. I removed it and all three of us looked at the message window.

  ALWAYS REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE HEAD

  “Well, ain’t that damn interesting?” said Top sourly. “Nice of someone to give us advice in our time of trials and tribulations.”

  “Amen, Reverend,” said Bunny. His tone was light, but his eyes were bright with tension.

  I said nothing. It was getting harder and harder not to smash the phone against the metal wall of the helo.

  “Those texts have to be from Mother Night,” said Top. “This new one proves that she knows what we’re about to step into. It proves that she has the seif-al-din.”

  Bunny licked his lips. “Okay, but how the hell did she get her hands on it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

  “Hooah,” Bunny agreed.

  Without taking his eyes from mine, Top Sims said, very softly, “And then we are going to kill her and everyone working with her.”

  I added two extra magazines to my pouch. “Yes, we damn well are.”

  “Hooah,” they both said.

  “Coming up on it,” called the pilot.

  Interlude Thirteen

  Terror Town

  Mount Baker, Washington State

  Three Years Ago

  When Dr. Bliss heard the news it rocked her.

  Hugo Vox was a traitor.

  Worse than a traitor, he was a terrorist and mass murderer.

  And, worst of all, he was a founding member of the Seven Kings. A faux secret society that borrowed the myths and legends of other secret societies—real and imagined—to make itself appear ancient and vastly powerful.