by Sean Ellis
“Did you hear it? An explosion?”
“I heard nothing,” said Abdullah, looking perplexed.
Suddenly, the quiet environment of the hospital ward was shattered by a wailing fire alarm siren.
Fulbright drew a compact semi-automatic pistol from a holster concealed beneath his shirt. “We need to get out of here,” he declared. “It’s an attack.”
Even though she knew better, her first impulse was incredulity. Denial. It’s just a coincidence… He’s being paranoid… Everything is going to be okay…
But the appearance of two men at the end of the hall, dressed head-to-toe in black combat gear and brandishing guns, swept away all trace of doubt.
3.
The taxi rolled three times.
King was sure of that. His perceptions were heightened by the rush of adrenaline through his bloodstream, and everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Even curled as he was in a protective ball, he watched as the interior of the cab rotated around him, batting him around like a wet sock in a tumble dryer. Each impact was like getting hit by a linebacker in a football game.
But then, after an eternity of spinning and slamming into nearly every surface in the taxi’s interior, the cacophony of the Corolla’s destruction ceased, and King found himself jammed against the passenger side door, with something heavy pressing down on him.
He lay there for a moment, surprised to still be conscious, grateful to be alive, and vaguely certain that there was something important he should be doing.
Get moving…
Even though the motion had ceased, he felt like his brain was still spinning, flinging his thoughts away before he could string them together in a coherent fashion.
I’m in a taxi, he thought. There was a rollover accident… What’s this holding me down?
It was a body; a dead man.
Get moving…
A dead man that got shot by…who again?
It doesn’t matter. Someone killed him and they’re coming from you. Get moving!
“Get moving, soldier.” He said it aloud, like a boot camp drill sergeant, and something inside him clicked. Reaching down past the pain and disorientation, he willed himself to action. He squirmed out from under the weight of the dead driver and took a quick look around.
The taxi had come to rest on its right side. The broken windshield was completely gone, and beyond it he saw the Dodge pick-up that had caused the wreck. It had also rolled, and had come to rest upside-down, only a few feet away. The reinforced roll-cage had prevented anything more serious than cosmetic damage to the vehicle, but the men inside did not appear to have faired as well. King could see the driver through the open window and resting on the inverted headliner. He assumed it was the driver because the man was entangled with the steering column, which had sheared away during the wreck.
King stared at the man, as if in the twisted limbs and blood, he might find some hint of what to do next, and then he remembered; there was a second truck.
The realization galvanized him. He squirmed through the windshield and, propelling himself on elbows and knees, crawled into the overturned Dodge. He scraped past the unmoving-dead?-driver and got a look at the passenger, likewise motionless in a heap on the truck’s ceiling. The man still clutched the weapon he had used to strafe the taxi and kill its driver, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5, fitted with a noise suppressor.
When King tried to wrestle the machine pistol free, the man’s eyes fluttered open and he instinctively tried to jerk the gun away. Without a moment’s hesitation, King punched the man in the Adam’s apple, crushing his trachea. The gun fell from the man’s grasp, forgotten, as he commenced clawing at his throat, an activity which occupied him for the last few seconds of his life.
With the MP5 in hand, King wormed through the window opening on the passenger side and onto the hot pavement. He quickly got his feet under him, but stayed low in a crouch, as he peered around the back of the truck’s cab. Beyond the wreckage of the taxi, he saw the second truck, parked with both doors open. A man wearing the same digital-camouflage pattern fatigues and tactical gear as the occupants of the crashed truck-and sporting an identical HK MP5-was peering into the smashed taxi.
These guys work in pairs, King thought. He drew back, pivoting on one foot just as the second man rounded the front end of the truck. The gunmen started to bring his weapon up, but King was faster.
The MP5 hardly made any noise at all. The suppressor muffled the report so effectively that King heard only the clicking of the pistol’s bolt sliding back and forth, not much louder than a toy gun. Nevertheless, a three-round burst stitched the man’s face with blotches of red and he pitched backward.
King was moving before the body hit the ground. He turned again, dropping onto his belly, and low-crawled under the bed of the truck. A cautious peek revealed the remaining gunman crouching at the front of the taxi. The man edged forward and King dropped him with well-aimed burst from the MP5.
King wasted no time. He crawled out from under the pick-up and crossed the short distance to where the gunman lay. The fallen man wore a tactical chest rig, similar to the kind Chess Team utilized on mission, with numerous pockets and pouches containing spare magazines, grenades, and other equipment, but there nothing to indicate who he worked for or why he and his comrades had made the assassination attempt. King gathered four magazines for the MP5, then skirted around the front end of the taxi, his weapon at the ready in case he had misjudged the size of the assault force.
He had not. The second truck sat idle, with the front doors open and no one else inside.
Nevertheless, it was too soon to count this as a victory. He had no idea why the men had ambushed him, but it almost certainly had something to do with Sara’s assignment, and that meant she was in imminent danger.
Traffic on Ring Road had ground to a halt behind the scene of the accident and curious motorists were disembarking their vehicles to get a better look. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of sirens was audible, and King knew he had to keep moving. He crawled back inside the taxi just long enough to grab his duffel bag then headed for the abandoned pick-up.
The truck was outfitted with a dash-mounted GPS device, and unlike the app for King’s phone, this unit communicated directly with the orbiting satellites. He quickly tapped in the coordinates for the hospital, and as the route flashed on the map, he started the engine and sped away from the scene of the ambush.
4.
As he climbed out of the pick-up, King glanced at his watch. Although it felt like hours had passed since he’d left the ambush, according to his Timex, it had been more like ten minutes.
The drive had seemed interminably long. The unfamiliar environment was a flood of new sensory information that had to be interpreted and categorized. At the same time, he wrestled with the mystery of the attack.
His mind was like a computer, sorting what he knew and what he suspected, running through all the possible explanations to see which made the most sense, and like a computer running a complex program, the activity slowed down his processing speed.
He was certain that the four shooters were private contractors, and knew that, once he could establish contact with Deep Blue he’d be able to pin down exactly who they were. The trucks and other equipment would have left a money trail. But because the attackers were in all likelihood hired guns, there was no guarantee that the trail would lead back to the person or organization that had ordered the attack. A connection to Sara’s mission in Africa was by no means explicit, but none of the alternative explanations made any sense.
Dead end, he thought. I need more information.
He contemplated calling Deep Blue then and there on the dedicated Chess Team satellite phone stashed in his bag, but he wasn’t even sure what questions to ask.
He jogged the half-block from where he’d parked the truck to the hospital’s main entrance, his senses on alert for any hint of trouble. The first few steps were excruciating. His body was a mass of brui
ses from the crash, and as the adrenaline drained away, pain and stiffness had set in with a vengeance. For a few minutes, he moved like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, creaky with rust. But he was no stranger to pain. He didn’t think he’d suffered any internal injuries, and the muscle soreness would eventually pass. He’d found a first-aid kit in truck, and had used it to clean and bandage the worst of his lacerations, including the wound on his arm where a bullet had grazed him. He had also downed an 800 mg Motrin tablet.
There would be time to rest and heal once he knew that Sara was not in danger.
He entered the hospital building on high alert, his right hand close to the MP5 concealed in the duffel bag slung over his shoulder, but nothing appeared to be amiss. Despite the language barrier, he managed to convey to the woman at the reception desk that he was looking for the CDC team, and a few minutes later, he opened the door to the conference room where the disease detectives had set up a command post.
The room was a hive of activity. Five people-Caucasians all, wearing familiar American clothes-were hastily unpacking computer and laboratory equipment from a stack of plastic containers lined up near the back wall. There was no sign of Sara.
A kindly looking older man noticed him. “Can I help you?”
King frowned. He hadn’t anticipated having to deal with Sara’s co-workers. The last thing he needed right now was to be given the runaround. He strode across the room, getting close enough to the man to be able to speak in low voice, barely louder than a whisper. “I need to speak with Dr. Fogg. It’s urgent.”
The man flashed a patient smile that suggested he was used to hearing people make such claims for the sake of expediency. “I’m Kerry Frey, Dr. Fogg’s assistant in charge of personnel. She’s busy right now.”
“I need to speak with her. I…” He took a deep breath, wondering how much to reveal. “My name is Jack Sigler. She asked me to come here.”
A gleam of recognition dawned in the other man’s eyes. “So you’re Jack. Sara has spoken of you. She’s with the patient in the isolation room on the fourth floor…”
Frey’s voice trailed off as something else in the room grabbed his attention. King turned, following the direction of the other man’s gaze to the door through which he had just entered.
Because he was trained to deal with surprises, King did not lapse into the same paralysis that now afflicted Frey, but he was nevertheless taken aback by the pair of figures, all in black from the soles of their combat boots to the tops of the balaclavas which almost completely covered their faces. A curse formed on his lips, but before he could speak the word, the two figures, in perfect synchronization, each tossed something into the room.
“Shit!”
Even though the objects were tumbling through the air, King recognized them immediately. Black metal tubes about three inches long, an inch in diameter, and perforated with a Swiss cheese pattern of holes.
Flash-bangs! Shit!
There was no time to seek cover, no time to even shout a warning. King did the only thing he could think of: he dropped to the floor, curling up like a hedgehog. He pressed his face into his thighs, and covered his ears with his forearms.
Suddenly, the world was transformed into pure light and noise. It was like being inside a lightning bolt. The flash of the magnesium/ammonium nitrate pyrotechnic charge in the M84 stun grenade lit up every fiber of King’s body; even with his eyes covered, he “saw” the flare as a red-yellow blaze. Simultaneously, the detonation produced a wave of sound that drove through his head like a freight train.
But King had been trained to deal with the after-effects of a flash-bang; he knew how to cope with the disorientation of sensory overload, and more importantly, knew the consequences of not taking immediate defensive action.
When he opened his eyes, the room seemed dark, as if all the lights had been switched off, but King could see two shapes moving through the room. One of the figures stopped and a tongue of flame erupted from his outstretched arm. Even through the ringing in his ears, King could hear the sound of gunfire.
His hand found the grip of his MP5 and he triggered a burst in the direction of the nearest gunmen. The shots hit center-mass, driving the man back a few steps but he didn’t go down.
Body armor. Shit, shit, shit!
King got his feet under him and scrambled to the back of the room. He could just make out the chest-high stack of equipment crates, and while he knew they probably wouldn’t stop a bullet, they would at least afford him a degree of concealment. He crouched low, scanning both angles of approach, and waited for the killers to make their move.
The attack didn’t come.
His vision and hearing were both returning by degrees, but neither sense gave him any hint of what was happening on the other side of stacked containers. No more shots were fired, and if the gunmen were speaking to each other, their voices were too soft for him to discern. Shouldering the MP5, he rose out of his crouch for just an instant, and peered over the top of the barrier.
The shooters were gone. King cautiously emerged from concealment, sweeping the room with the barrel of his machine pistol, but his first assessment was correct; the assault force had finished their grisly task and fallen back. King was alone with the dead.
He spied the unmoving form of the older man he had first spoken with. A ragged hole had been torn in his chest, almost certainly the result of a several bullets in a tight grouping.
Kerry Frey, he thought. He had a name. He probably had a family and friends. He worked with Sara…
Sara!
King started for the exit, but before he could cross half the distance, he saw another pair grenades sail through the air in the room. Not flash-bangs this time, but cylinders-like stubby aerosol cans-gray in color, marked with purple bands.
Incendiary grenades.
Shit.
5.
Fulbright thrust Sara behind him and then snapped off a couple shots in the direction of the masked gunmen. Despite openly wielding firearms, the men seemed caught off guard. They fell back, out of view and did not reappear for several seconds. Fulbright, on the other hand, had reacted almost without thinking.
He expected this, Sara thought. He knew this attack was coming.
But there was no time to give voice to her suspicions. The man she suspected of being a CIA officer gripped her arm and all but dragged her away from the gunmen and, she hoped, toward safety. She looked over her shoulder and saw the two doctors seemingly paralyzed by the unexpected violence, and then they were lost from view as Fulbright pulled her through a doorway into a stairwell which was already crowded with people evacuating in response to the fire alarm.
Sara immediately turned toward the descending flight, but an insistent tug on her arm drew her in the other direction. Up.
“My team.”
Fulbright’s voice, like his expression, was grim. “What do you think that explosion was? If your team is still alive, there’s nothing we can do to help them. I need to get you out of here.”
Still alive? If? Sara shook her head. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.
As they climbed the stairs, pushing through the fleeing horde, Fulbright took a phone from his shirt pocket and made a call. “It’s me. Things have gone to shit here. I need air evac, ASAP.” Then, in a tone dripping with sarcasm, he added: “Five minutes ago would be nice.”
As the phone disappeared back into his pocket, Sara managed to get out a question. “What the hell is going on?”
Fulbright glanced back at her, his face stony and determined. His expression made her think of Jack; she desperately wished that he was the one leading her confidently through this crisis. She half expected Fulbright to dismiss the inquiry, but he surprised her. “That woman was exposed to something-some kind of pathogen. Something that can be made into a weapon.”
The information stimulated the analytical part of her brain, and for a moment, thoughts of grief and concern for her own safety were relegated to secondary prior
ity. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? We could have had security in place to prevent this. Hell, we should have airlifted her back to Atlanta.”
“I didn’t expect this.” Fulbright’s tone was self-effacing. “I should have, but I didn’t think they’d try anything like this.”
She didn’t know whether to believe him, but that wasn’t the important question. “Who are they?”
Fulbright turned his gaze forward, steering her around another landing-the eighth floor-and kept climbing. The flow of people responding to the fire alarm had dried up; evidently, everyone on the uppermost floors had already exited. “I think it’s Nexus Genetics, the company Felice Carter works for. They sent her out there to find something like this, prehistoric genetic material, an ancient virus. But something went wrong. The expedition must have been exposed to something. That’s all I know really.”
“You think they found what they were looking for?”
“I wasn’t sure. Now I am. The answer is in those samples you took. We have to protect them.” He looked back at her again. “I have to protect you. And you have to figure out just what it is they found, and come up with some kind of vaccine.”
Sara nodded. “That’s what I do. But I need my team. My equipment.”
“Once you’re safe, I’ll get you what you need.” He took a breath, and then added. “We’ll find a way to contact your team.”
If they’re still alive. Fulbright didn’t say it. He didn’t need to.
The stairs ended on a landing blocked by a heavy metal door. Fuller cautiously pushed the door open and peered out. Sara looked over his shoulder and saw a helicopter sitting idle on the rooftop, about a hundred meters away.
“That was fast,” she said.
But Fulbright pushed her back and pulled the door shut. “That’s not our ride.”
In the silence that followed, Sara’s hypersensitive ears detected the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell-judging by the cadence, there were at least three different people-and she didn’t have to ask who the helicopter did belong to.