by Rick Chesler
Rick Chesler
OUTCAST Ops:
The Poseidon Initiative
PROLOGUE
1999: Scheveningen Beach, Netherlands
The surf was high that day, a day budding marine biologist Jasmijn Rotmensen would never forget. Breaking right on the sand, the waves exploded into a fine mist of sparkling water droplets that filled the air, delighting hundreds of beachgoers along the packed shoreline that hot Summer day as they ran and splashed and basked in the sun.
The twenty-year old stood on the edge of the sand, her backpack slung on one shoulder as she glanced at the pier to her right. She cursed the fact that she’d been up all night studying and slept in. Now she’d be lucky to find a patch of sand large enough to accommodate her towel, and it would be far back from the water’s edge. Such is life, she thought, as she tip-toed across the scorching beach. All she wanted to do, anyway, was to read a few s from her biochemistry text and get outside for a little while. No big deal.
Threading her way between people’s blankets and dodging tossed frisbees and balls, Jasmijn reached a relatively open spot of sand and stood there, gauging her chances of getting any closer to the water. It didn’t look good. This will have to do if I want to get some reading done anytime soon. Shielding her eyes with a hand, she glanced longingly at the ocean directly in front of the beach, just beyond the breaking waves. A frown formed over her delicate features. She blew a wisp of her blonde hair away from her eye as she studied a discolored mass just beyond the waves.
What’s that?
A shapeless, reddish-brown patch lay in the water, stretching roughly parallel to the beach in both directions as far as her eyes could see. An onshore breeze cropped up, causing her to blow another strand of hair off her face, and also, she noted, to push the discolored mass of water toward the breaking surf where dozens of kids and a few adults frolicked. She thought back to one of her biology books, her quick mind associating the physical thing in front of her with a passage of text she’d read a year earlier.
Red tide!
She couldn’t recall all of the details, but Jasmijn knew that a red tide was a massive bloom of algae — microscopic plants in the water — that could be dangerous to fish because they depleted the surrounding water of all oxygen. Neither plants nor animals, they belonged to a classification of living creatures known as Protists.
She was trying to remember more when she heard the first screams.
“Help!” First one voice, then many more. “Help me!”
Others stood around her and Jasmijn had to crane her neck to look at the water’s edge, where clusters of bathing-suit clad people knelt on the wet sand.
“He can’t breathe!”
Up and down the beach the cries were repeated. A mass exodus of swimmers swarmed up the beach, trampling those who didn’t bother to get up to see what the commotion was about.
Shouts went up about making emergency calls.
Jasmijn squinted, looking past the throng of bodies now lying in the sand to the water beyond. The waves were red in color now, and when they crashed, a thick plume of red mist rose into the air where the onshore wind caught it and sprayed it over the beach crowd like a mister fan. Jasmijn stopped trying to make her way to the water as she dredged up a little more of what she knew about red tides from her memory banks.
Red tides are caused by dinoflagellates. They produce a powerful toxin that is accumulated by shellfish. People who eat shellfish that have been exposed to red tides sometimes contract Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning.
But that was through eating them. Even people who swam through a red tide weren’t known to get sick from it. As far as she knew, it only happened from eating shellfish, which accumulated the red tide toxins in their flesh. When cooked, that toxin failed to break down. Could it be that these people were breathing the red tide organisms in through the wave plumes and concentrating the toxins in their bloodstream that way?
Jasmijn watched another wave smash on the sand, sending another plume to waft out over the crowd of people which had swelled with those arriving to help.
Within an hour, the death toll would rise to nearly three hundred people.
ONE
Present day
Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Den Hoorn, Netherlands
Dr. Jasmijn Rotmensen looked up from a microscope and rubbed her tired eyes. The hour was late. Looking out the single lab window, she could see only a couple of dim lights on in the neighboring buildings. She was the only one crazy enough to work weekends. Then she quickly bent to the ‘scope again as if things might have changed in the last few seconds. Tanks full of saltwater bubbled on the lab bench around her. To a glance they appeared empty, but Jasmijn had carefully stocked them with dinoflagellates. She looked at the slide again and sighed, brushing a strand of hair — still blond but no longer the platinum it used to be — out of her eyes.
“Didn’t work?” Jasmijn’s research assistant, Nicolaas Aarens asked. Nicolaas was a second-year master’s degree student who had pestered Jasmijn for over a year in order for the chance to work with her. Yes, her reputation in the scientific community was unmatched after over a decade of hard work, but she suspected it was also a bit more than that. She often caught him looking at her a little too long. He produced quality work, though, and so she was willing to ignore it, at least for now. She looked up from the scope to return his gaze, his white lab coat one size too large for his slender frame, his bulbous nose anchoring a face full of freckles.
“Oh it worked all right,” she said with a sarcastic laugh, turning her attention to a cage nestled amidst the water tanks. She pointed inside to a still rat.
“The cancer’s dead. Trouble is, so’s Oliver.”
“Rest in peace, Ollie. You were my fave lab rat!”
“This STX derivative kills everything I throw at it within minutes.”
“Who would have thought that applying the red tide toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning in this way would be too effective?”
“Yeah, I was just having a look at a cross-section of cells from the injection site to see if I could make sense of this, when—”
Suddenly the door to the lab burst open and in ran two armed men wearing combat fatigues and ski masks. Bursts of sound suppressed automatic weapons fire sprayed the lab. Glassware shattered, overhead lights blinked out.
“Freeze!” said the first.
“Don’t shoot the tanks! We all die if they break!” Jasmijn pointed at the row of bubbling water tanks plastered with hazardous materials warning labels. The special acrylic material was thick enough to handle an accidental drop to the floor, but wasn’t designed with stopping bullets in mind.
“Hands in the air!” shouted the second, eyes scanning the array of tanks. Jasmijn complied.
Then a third man entered the room, this one wheeling a hand truck supporting a tall, white plastic vat. He set the cart by the lab bench with the tanks and then said nothing while he roved about the lab, making certain no one else was here. He crouched and turned until he had scouted the entire room. He gave a hand signal to the other two, who then relaxed a bit before focusing on Jasmijn. One of the intruders, the taller of the two, stepped forward.
“Dr. Rotmensen,” the gunman said in Dutch. “Tell me. Why are you so concerned about the tanks?” He waved his gun at the row of bubbling rectangles.
“They contain an isolate of STX — Saxitoxin — it’s the chemical compound that comes from red tides.”
“It’s what gives people paralytic shellfish poisoning,” Nicolaas added, ever helpful. Jasmijn scowled at him.
“I’m using it to develop a cancer cure.”
In response, the third man, dressed head to toe in bla
ck, unscrewed a lid from his plastic vat and removed from it a coil of hose. He then brought the hose over to the nearest of the water tanks, where he examined the lids. They were sealed tightly shut, each retained with a heavy-duty combination padlock. He addressed Jasmijn.
“What is the combination?”
At this, Jasmijn balked. These men knew exactly what they were looking for. And that was what scared her most of all. This wasn’t a random break-in. The specific STX variant she had developed in her lab was a thousand times more potent than what occurred naturally. She had only recently made this breakthrough, however, and had then applied to her university for heightened security, so how did they know…
Damn it!
Jasmijn balled her fingers into fists with her realization even as she held them in the air. The security application! It was filed online with a university intranet system. Probably run by student assistants and not difficult at all to hack into. Could this be from where the breach had come? Her eyes tracked over to Nicolaas. His hands shook as he held them high. He attempted to turn his head like an owl as the sounds of one of the gunman’s footfalls echoed on the tile floor somewhere behind him while he circled the two scientists with his gun. The other shooter remained stationary, his snub-nosed automatic weapon aimed casually in Jasmijn’s direction from the waist.
“Dr. Rotmensen!” The masked man at the vat shook the padlock on the tank.
The circling gunman squeezed his trigger and chips of porcelain sprayed Jasmjin’s lower legs as the floor tiles broke up around her, a warning.
“The combination!”
Jasmijn blew another lock of hair off her face. “I can’t give it to you. Besides, I’m sure you could dismantle the locks or the tanks themselves if you really wanted. The locks are just to prevent people who don’t know any better from getting hurt. That’s not a protection I’d like to afford the likes of you.”
The gunman talking to Jasmijn nodded to one of his associates, who promptly walked up to Nicolaas and grabbed him by pulling his elbows sharply behind his back. He yelped with the sudden pain.
“Then I guess we’ll have to see if we can smash them open with your friend’s face, here.” The gunman started to drag Nicolaas toward one of the tanks.
“You don’t understand.” Jasmijn did her best to keep her pleading from sounding too much like outright begging. “If you bust even one of those tanks open and that water spills out onto the floor, the invisible SPX molecules it contains will aerosolize — that means they’ll become suspended in the air — we’ll breathe at least a few of them in, and we will die an excruciating death within minutes.” She paused to let this sink in, the only sound in the lab the bubbling of the tanks and the hum of their air pumps.
“Is that what you want?”
The one who did the talking for the group spoke up again, having produced a small pistol fitted with a sound suppressor in contrast to the submachine guns favored by his associates. Jasmijn was correct in her assumption that this made the man no less lethal, however, and he pointed his weapon at Nicolaas’ temple.
“You will unlock each of the tanks or I kill your friend, here.”
“He’s not my friend. He’s a just a lab assistant who works for me.” Jasmijn felt bad for a second when she saw the pain on Nicolaas’ face, pain that became evident even over his existing mask of stress at having a gun pointed at his head. But she knew that to reveal feelings for him would be a weakness that would be used against them.
“You do not believe me?” The pistol-wielding assailant raised his voice. “Perhaps this will convince you.” He lowered the gun sight until it aimed at Nicolaas’ right foot and pulled the trigger. They heard a quiet pffft and then saw a neat red circle appear on Nicolaas’ white Adidas. He dropped to the floor, hands clutching his ruined foot. The shooter raised his voice over the lab worker’s howling.
“The locks, Dr. Rotmensen! Every time I have to repeat myself, your assistant will receive another piece of lead.”
Jasmijn’s inner turmoil was so great that she almost collapsed, so devoted was her brain to sorting out her thoughts that it could no longer control her muscles. She could not bear to see Nicolaas — or anyone, for that matter— suffer. On the other hand, knowing what these men could do with her SPX product made her cringe for the sake of humanity. The amount of death that could be caused…She started to curse herself for proceeding too quickly with her work, without pausing to let the administration catch up with security protocols, but stopped herself. There was no time for that now.
“Too late!”
The intruder’s silenced weapon spat once more, and Nicolaas had a matching set of tennis shoes with red circles on the toes. The young man curled into a fetal position on the floor, crying softly.
“Next I go to the knees,” the tormentor said, moving in a slow circle around his victim as he tested his aim.
Jasmijn could take no more. She rationalized that she didn’t know exactly what these men were going to do with her dangerous concoction born of the sea. Or to herself. That was part of it, wasn’t it? She asked herself the question as she looked at Nicolaas’ crumpled form, fat smears of blood now arced across the floor where he flailed his feet in agony. Maybe they’re from a competing lab and they want to beat me to publication so they’re stealing my modified SPX stock? She laughed aloud at the absurdity of it.
“You laugh at us?” The shootist aimed his deadly pistol at her breasts, first the left, then the right, then back again.
Jasmijn was so deep in thought she hadn’t realized her laugh was not only in her head.
“No. I’m just nervous. That’s what I do when I’m nervous. I laugh. All right. I’ll open the locks. Please, no more violence.”
“Move slowly!” All three gun barrels in the room tracked Jasmijn as she walked to the nearest of the six tanks. She put her fingers on the lock and paused, giggling out of nervousness.
“I’m sorry. I forgot the combination.”
“Do not toy with us!” The leader pointed his pistol at Nicolaas’ knee.
“No! I’m just…tired and stressed. I know it. I know it…” She stood there thinking for a second and closed her eyes. She pictured herself standing on a tranquil beach, gulls in the air, dolphins jumping in waves that were free of red tides…When the series of numbers alighted in her brain she bent once more to the lock and opened it.
The gunman motioned her out of the way with his pistol and one of his henchmen wheeled the dolly over. This man paid out a plastic tube and dropped it into the unlocked aquarium. Then he flipped a switch, starting a pump that began to suck the water from the tank into the vat on the dolly. Jasmijn noted that the vat was a properly equipped vessel to deal with hazardous liquids. The opening had a narrow, fluted neck to prevent splashes. The container was labeled with poison and biohazard warnings.
“Next!” the gunman warned.
Jasmijn repeated the process for the rest of the aquaria, the vat becoming more full with each emptied tank. It also bothered her that they were nearly exactly correct in their estimation of how much capacity their vat would need in order to hold all of her product. How did they know this?
She would have plenty of time to ponder it, but right now the men were on the move, one of them wheeling the vat toward the lab door while the other two kept their weapons trained on their victims as they backed out.
“Good night, Dr. Rotmensen. The world will thank you for your good work!” He laughed as he walked to the lab door. Then he turned around to face her in the doorway.
“Perhaps you wonder why we are leaving you with your life?”
The words chilled Jasmijn. Now that she thought of it, what good reason was there not to kill her? They were presumably stealing her ultra-toxic lab product to exterminate as many people as they could, or to sell to someone else who had that goal. She said nothing.
“We want for you to continue your good work. In particular, we’d like you to focus on an antidote to STX. You don’t have one y
et, do you?”
She shook her head. “I only just developed the STX product.”
“We would like an antidote. We will pay you a visit again in seven day’s time. Perhaps here. Perhaps at your house. Perhaps somewhere else. Have the antidote ready or you will be truly sorry.”
Jasmijn turned red with anger despite her inner voice telling her it would be best to let these thugs leave with no further interaction. “I have no idea if that’s even possible!”
The terrorist turned around to the vat on the dolly and produced something that looked like a fancy squirt gun. When he turned around again he was wearing a gas mask of some sort over his balaclava. His two associates put one on as well. He tossed an identical one to Jasmijn. “Put it on.”
He did not offer Nicolaas a mask. He shook the pressurized squirt device and strode back into the lab until he stood over the fallen research assistant, now in a sitting position clutching both feet.
“What are you doing?” Jasmijn shrieked. “Do not play around with this substance!”
He shook his head as one of the terrorists aimed his automatic weapon at her.
“This is not play. Perhaps you are lying to me and you already have an antidote.” The man with the squirt gun thing aimed its fat nozzle at Nicolaas’ head. Nicolaas put his hands up in protest, sputtering nonsensical syllables.
“I don’t have an antidote!”
“Then this should incentivize you to develop one within the next few minutes.”
The masked terrorist pulled back on a plunger attached to the device and a plume of fine mist was ejected from the nozzle onto Nicolaas’ face.
TWO
Bethesda, Maryland
Tanner Wilson picked up the secure line in the second-floor study of his modest suburban house.
“Tanner here.”
“I couldn’t do it, Tanner. I couldn’t do it…” He was just able to recognize the female voice on the other end of the line before it broke into uncontrolled sobbing. His expressive eyes — one white and the other black due to a condition called heterochromia — took on an intense glint as he flashed on good times years ago, then spoke into his handset.