The young scientist they’d rescued from Boston was currently in the lab, surveying an intricate system of glassware in preparation for a new batch of Phoenix Compound. It seemed as if the lab had turned from research facility into a miniature factory for the albumin-coated pharmaceutical compounds that coalesced around the nanobacteria responsible for turning people into Skulls. The Phoenix Compound enabled the body’s immune system to do what it couldn’t otherwise—identify and eliminate the nanobacteria in the bloodstream, even past the near impermeable blood-brain barrier.
“I just hope the researchers at Fort Detrick and the NIH are willing to listen to us again,” Lauren said. “They need to start mass-producing the compound. There’s no telling how quickly new strains of Oni Agent are evolving around the globe. For all we know, the FGL could be developing new strains of the Agent, too.”
“It’s a nightmare to think about,” Sean said, leaning back against a bulkhead. “It was one thing to model the spread of the Agent before. If it becomes globally airborne, any governments no longer in tatters are going to have a heck of a time.”
“That’s too true,” Lauren said. “If Matsumoto can help us, maybe it’ll convince me that giving him the Phoenix Compound was worth it.”
“Maybe,” Peter said, glaring at the unconscious man. “Maybe not.”
The hatch to the bay opened, and Lauren’s heart gave an uncharacteristic skip as Glenn Walsh barged in with a book in hand. The former Green Beret’s eyes were glued to the book until he reached Lauren. Only then did he glance up, give her a smile, and plant a kiss on her cheek.
“Afternoon, Doc,” he said in his rolling baritone voice. He plopped onto an empty patient exam chair. “Ready for my checkup.”
“Bet you’re ready for a whole lot more than that,” Sean said with an exaggerated wink.
“Give it a break,” Lauren said. But as she rolled up one of Glenn’s sleeves, revealing the thick muscles, she had to admit Sean might be at least a little bit right. She wished she could spend more time with Glenn outside the regular checkups she had the crew report for. But the lab and med bay kept her entirely occupied outside of meals and a few hours of sleep. She dabbed a spot on his forearm with an alcohol-moistened cotton swab, sterilizing the area. “Still feeling okay?”
“One hundred and ten percent,” he said. He used his free hand to open his eyelids wide. “No bloodshot eyes.” Then he held his hand out with fingers splayed. “No bony claws. Human through and through. No sign of being a Skull, thanks to my talented and beautiful doctor.”
“You’re too much,” Lauren said. “All the same, I’d like to keep it that way.” She drew a blood sample.
“I get the picture. You don’t know how long the Phoenix Compound will keep on working or if the Oni Agent will return.”
“That’s correct,” Lauren said, handing the blood sample to Divya to run.
“And you don’t know what the prolonged side effects might be. We’re all walking lab experiments.”
“Right again.”
“As long as one of those side effects includes me not turning into a Goliath or Drooler, I’ll be happy.”
Lauren patted his arm, and he rolled down his sleeve. She hated to think of Glenn constantly going into the field, facing those bony bastards head-on while she was stuck back in the lab. She wished he’d use his brains for something that kept him on the ship, like engineering or research. But as bookish as he was, she knew she couldn’t stop him from fighting.
Still, she didn’t want to dwell on it. With a nod, she indicated the book he’d dragged in. “What are you reading today?”
“The Tao of Physics,” he said.
“Any interesting insights?”
He waved the book in the air. “The only thing I’ve learned is that if there’s some coincidental parallels between science and any old strain of mysticism, you can sell a bunch of books.”
“So you’re saying I should start working on my bestseller now so I can get rich after we solve the whole Skull dilemma.”
“Exactly. You can be my sugar mama.”
“You have no idea how much I’d like that,” Lauren said.
And she meant it. The very idea that there might be a future where people still published books, where she and Glenn weren’t on a ship, on a mission to save the world...that alone was something to fight for.
She looked at Matsumoto. The old man slept on, seemingly unaware of the hell he’d unleashed on Earth.
-2-
Meredith opened the hatch to the electronics workshop. The hum of computer equipment accompanied the tinny beat coming from Samantha Hamlin’s headphones. Knowing her, it was probably some kind of German heavy metal. Samantha peered from behind the wall of crumpled energy drink cans on her desk and offered a single lifted hand in greeting.
At a desk markedly different in cleanliness and organization, Chao Li patiently scrolled through a host of documents plastered across the row of monitors before him.
“Good afternoon, Meredith,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Come to dig through the treasure trove with us?”
“It’s too juicy not to,” she replied.
“Your usual spot is open and ready,” Chao said. “Glenn helped us clean up some of the translations from the documents. There are plenty of video and audio files that need transcribing. We’ve run most of them through Samantha’s natural language processing software, but it’s still a work in progress.”
Samantha peeled back the headphones from one ear. “What he means to say is I’ve still got a shitload of work to do on it. So don’t judge too harshly.” She replaced the headphones and dove back into her work.
It was a wonder she could hear them at all above the thumping music blasting from the headphones. She and Chao made up the technical brains of the Huntress, a duo that could not be easily replaced. They’d lost the third member of their team, Adam Galloway, and his loss had been felt throughout the ship.
It was at his desk that Meredith now sat. Adam had made it into his own personal Batcave. She picked up one of the figurines from the desk and rotated it. It was a man with what looked like an owl mask. She knew it was a character from Adam’s favorite graphic-novel-turned-movie, Watchmen, but for the life of her, she couldn’t say what the character’s name was, superhero or real identity.
She replaced the figurine. Samantha had said Meredith could make the space her own, but something felt wrong about that. As if removing Adam’s belongings would somehow make it seem as though he had never worked here. Had never fought for the Hunters. Had never sacrificed himself to save Sadie, Navid, and Kara when a madman had threatened their lives back in Skull-riddled Virginia.
So with the company of plastic superheroes, she began to dig into the reports that Samantha and Chao were unearthing. While they focused on decrypting data and using their technical prowess to unlock the files they’d recovered in the Congo, it was Meredith’s job to make sense of the litany of facility maintenance reports, laboratory journals, workers’ schedules, and all manner of logs and computer files in hopes of piecing together narratives the computer techies might have missed.
Of particular interest were the documents they had managed to recover from Pyotr Spitkovsky’s personal intranet files. Many of the files were left incomplete or corrupted after the Congo facility became a warzone, interrupting the data transmission. Still, some intel had survived. She perused line after line of what looked like a manifesto outlining his hopes for the Forces of Global Liberation. Vague ideas about unshackling the chains of globalism. Spitkovsky wanted to see Lady Liberty bow to the resurrected Soviet empire.
Other than the manifesto, they had only been able to scrape together a handful of communications to other presumed leaders of the FGL. She desperately wanted to know whom those messages had been sent to. If they could find those people, talk to them...
The things we could learn.
She leaned back in her seat and folded her arms over her chest. What she really
wanted was to get her hands on Spitkovsky. To wring his neck. To bash his head into the concrete. Her thoughts turned to her old boss in the CIA, David Lawson, and how he, and what seemed like half the government, had been duped so badly by the FGL. They had accused Meredith and the Hunters of playing a role in developing and releasing the Oni Agent. If all those people pointing fingers at each other could see the data she was seeing, they’d know how wrong they’d been.
She needed to convince them she was on their side. Lawson and General Kinsey, the man reorganizing America’s military forces, needed to know what the FGL had planned for the world.
These people need to be stopped.
“Damn, Mere, you look like you’re ready to beat the living shit out of someone,” Samantha said.
Meredith jumped. She’d been so focused that she had neglected to see the tattooed hacker approaching her desk.
“That isn’t far from the truth.” She exhaled. “In fact, that’s exactly how I feel.”
“If it’s anything like half the shit I’m skimming, I understand why.”
“I think we better call Dom,” Meredith said.
Dom was with Kara and Sadie at the moment. Meredith hated to interrupt the little time Dom got to spend with his daughters. But they needed to act on this intel. The fate of the world might be in their hands, and they couldn’t shoulder that burden alone.
“While you’re at it, call in Shepherd,” Meredith said.
Colonel Jacob Shepherd, the former acting commander of the Fort Detrick army garrison, was their sole—albeit tenuous—connection to the military forces on American soil. They might need him to leverage whatever credibility he had left to convince Kinsey, Lawson, and whoever else might listen to them. Without the help of the military, she doubted a group of mercenaries, scientists, and techies, as talented as they were, could do much to stop the tide of the Oni Agent.
“Both are on their way,” Chao reported.
In a matter of minutes, Shepherd and Dom had joined Chao, Samantha, and Meredith in the workshop. They sat around the central table, where a few tools and gizmos still lay, evidence of Chao’s earlier work modifying one of the many weaponized enhancements to Miguel’s prosthetic arm.
“Chao promised me good stuff,” Shepherd stated in a gruff voice.
“I don’t know if I’d call it good,” Meredith said. “It’s pure goddamned evil.”
“But we can go with ‘good’ if that’s what you’re into,” Samantha said.
“Do we know where we should go next?” Dom asked.
Meredith shook her head. “I’m not sure about that. But I do finally have some insight on the Titans. And most importantly, what Spitkovsky planned to do with them.”
“Do tell,” Shepherd said.
Chao jumped in. “It wasn’t possible to recover all the files, so the narrative we found isn’t necessarily a complete one. We parsed through what we could decrypt, however.”
Shepherd’s brows pinched together as if he were growing impatient. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning we have enough of the pieces to make sense of the story,” Meredith said, picking up where Chao left off. “We can support it with plenty of hard evidence from the mouth of the devil himself. Apparently, Spitkovsky’s father, Boris, learned of the US’s classified research after Operation Paperclip. He was a scientist in the USSR’s biological weapons program, the Biopreparat.”
“Paperclip? That’s when the US recruited scientists and researchers from post-Nazi Germany,” Shepherd said. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, but the guy snoozing in your med bay is Japanese.”
“Boris followed the careers of several former Nazi researchers and engineers,” Meredith said. “He was infuriated with the United States leeching bioweapons research from the Germans after World War II. He thought the USSR deserved a bigger piece of the pie. Somewhere along the line, he found out about Unit 731—the Japanese biological weapons research program during World War II—and that the US had recruited a number of their scientists.”
“Including our good friend Dr. Matsumoto,” Dom guessed.
“Correct. Boris became obsessed with the Amanojaku Project led by Matsumoto. It was designed to turn even the weakest of citizens under the Rising Sun into supernatural warriors to be the last line of defense against Western invaders. Somehow, Boris convinced the KGB of Matsumoto’s importance, and a deal was made.”
“What kind of deal was this?” Shepherd asked.
“That, we don’t know,” Chao said. “There’s very little information on the logistics of the matter. All we know is that Matsumoto ended up in the Biopreparat.”
“Interesting,” Dom said. “And Pyotr Spitkovsky took up his father’s mantle?”
“It appears that way,” Meredith said. “After one of the USSR’s senior researchers defected to the West in 1989 and revealed Biopreparat was continuing operations in spite of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, Pyotr and his father took their work underground. They buried everything, including Matsumoto, under layers of bureaucracy.”
Shepherd frowned. “We knew some of this before. So what’s the big bombshell?”
“What we didn’t know was the scope of their interest in biological weapons.” Meredith took a breath before continuing. “Matsumoto and Boris worked together to create the Oni Agent as we know it now. Before the USSR got their hands on the Amanojaku Project, the Agent was only a prion. Just an infectious protein. It was contagious through transfer of bodily fluids, and it made people go stark raving mad. Amped up their aggression and strength, but that’s it.”
“Meaning they didn’t turn into Skulls,” Samantha clarified, miming horns with crooked fingers.
“Spitkovsky Senior’s work was the key to integrating the nanobacteria component of the Oni Agent,” Chao said.
“Boris did that,” Dom said. It sounded almost like a question. “The nanobacteria which inhabit the bones. They create the claws and armor that have been such a pain in my ass when dealing with the Skulls.”
“Exactly,” Meredith said. “Boris died about a decade and a half ago. The project was, according to the Russian Federation’s records, scrapped for all intents and purposes. But Spitkovsky didn’t give up his daddy’s work.”
“Things get murky between then and now,” Samantha added. She popped the top on a canned energy drink and put her feet up, apparently enjoying the unfolding drama.
“Skip ahead, and we get to a project code-named Human Machine,” Meredith said. “That research was supposed to create a genetically engineered super soldier. We lost the details of the project, but we do know that it eventually intersected with Boris and Matsumoto’s work on the Oni Agent.”
Dom leaned forward. “The Titans.”
Meredith nodded gravely. “That’s what we think. Spitkovsky admired the power of people transformed by the Oni Agent, but they were uncontrollable. What good is a weapon if it can’t be aimed properly? He sought to correct this through the use of the Titans. Don’t ask me how, but the Titans somehow exert influence over the Skulls. The big bastards keep the little ones in line.”
“Ho-ly shit,” Shepherd said. “If we knew how the Titans did their thing, we could find a way to control the Skulls ourselves.”
Meredith shrugged. “Maybe. But the Titan project wasn’t completed. Spitkovsky didn’t have total control over the monsters he created.”
“Still, we have to share these results with Lauren,” Dom said. “If they can find anything that could at all influence Skull behavior, it might save a lot of lives. Ours included.”
“Agreed. Unfortunately, that’s all we’ve got,” Meredith said.
Shepherd’s face turned to a stony grimace. “Not exactly the revelation I was hoping to hear.”
“We don’t have any confirmation about what’s going on in Baghdad or any of the satellite labs?” Dom asked, referring to data Chao had shown them before the Congo mission. Iran, Russia, and Iraq had set up a supposed joint communications center in Baghda
d. The Hunters weren’t sure what actually went on there, but a massive amount of data had been transferred between Baghdad and the Congo FGL facilities.
“There were some cryptic messages that seemed to indicate they weren’t done spreading the Oni Agent. Maybe there were new weapons that were going to be launched or something,” Chao said.
“It seemed like these messages were intended for several sites around the world,” Samantha added. “We couldn’t get any locations.”
“Damn,” Dom said.
“We also have no idea what Spitkovsky’s end game is,” Meredith said. “Or for that matter, what his motives are. I don’t buy this whole ‘glory of Mother Russia’ thing. But whatever’s going on, it looks like Spitkovsky’s version of the apocalypse hasn’t even begun.”
Meredith saw a fire start to burn behind Dom’s eyes. It was the same fire that had been swelling in her chest since she initially studied all this intel with Chao and Samantha. Without anyone saying a word, she knew they had all come to the same conclusion: they were damn well going to find out what Spitkovsky was up to. And they wouldn’t stop at anything to do it.
***
Dom marched from the electronics workshop with Meredith on his heels. So far, they had been gentle with Matsumoto, hoping that the old man would gradually recover from his ordeal. But the time for gentleness was over. Only two people in the world knew what Spitkovsky was planning, and one of them was aboard Dom’s ship. His vision narrowed as he approached the med bay.
“Dom!” Meredith said, grabbing his shoulder.
He shrugged her off. “That bastard is going to talk. I don’t give a shit if he’s half-dead and senile. No more waiting.”
“He’s only been lucid for no more than a few minutes at a time,” Meredith said.
“Lives are at stake. If Spitkovsky is planning something even worse than the Oni Agent outbreak, Matsumoto might be our last shot at finding out what that is.”
The Tide: Dead Ashore (Tide Series Book 6) Page 3