Deadly Strain (Biological Response Team)

by Julie Rowe

  “It’s killing me knowing the danger that’s ahead. The guy behind this biological weapon is nuts. He’s like a loaded handgun with no safety. One squeeze and there’s no calling the bullet back.”

  “Are you saying I’m not capable of doing what might be needed?”

  “No, that’s the problem,” he said in a tone that sounded casual when the words were the opposite. “How fine is the line between a situation you can salvage and one you can’t?” He stood and left her considering her answer.

  She didn’t know.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Someone found Sharp a backpack and he jammed in every weapon he could get his hands on, along with extra water and energy bars.

  He found himself wishing Grace wasn’t the damn good soldier she was.

  Then there was her tendency to do practically anything to save another person.

  He’d seen her, goddamn it, seen her leave a place of safety and put herself in harm’s way to save another soldier. Him. She’d do it again. She’d do it over and over. It was the way she was built, for service and sacrifice.

  If she were a man, she’d have made an excellent Special Forces soldier.

  Green Berets were trained to get the job done and to think outside standard warfare tactics. Grace and Max were the only two people who understood the weapon their enemy was using, and neither of them were disposable. Max, at least, was doing the smart thing by staying out of sight and getting the lab work done. Where he wasn’t smart was sending Grace to do the fieldwork.

  She was a wild card. She didn’t think in terms of warfare, she thought in terms of life and death.

  Black and white.

  No compromise. No surrender.

  It hit him like a two-by-four to the back of his head. She thought like their enemy thought, in terms of all or nothing. She was willing to die to defend her people, like their enemy was willing to die to kill them.

  If only Marshall knew he had the perfect weapon in the woman he seemed to be trying to destroy.

  She also probably saw them as friends with benefits. Could he be satisfied with a pseudo-relationship? A part-time girlfriend, a woman not totally his own?

  No way in hell.

  He wanted her, all of her, twenty-four-seven, no holding back, no hiding anything. He wanted to shout to the world that she belonged to him and he belonged to her. She was the best partner he’d ever worked with at anything. Her laughter, her smile, her gorgeous eyes. He couldn’t imagine a future without her in it.

  Oh fuck. He loved her.

  Smoke appeared in front of him. “You ready?”

  Sharp jerked his stunned brain back to earth, gave his pack one last look, decided it was full and closed it up. “Yeah.”

  He found Grace outside the plastic wall, talking to Max. He wanted to kiss her, hold her and order her to stay here in the relative safety of this disguised garbage dump. He could do none of those things.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything else I can do?” she asked her commanding officer.

  Max shook his head.

  “Grace,” Sharp said. “Can I have a word?”

  “Of course.” She followed him a short distance way. “What is it?”

  “We’re missing some vital intel.” He hoped what he was about to ask her wouldn’t blow up in his face. “What happened two years ago to make Marshall think you’re responsible for the death of his son? Which brings up my next question. He had a son?”

  Grace stared at him for a moment, the color draining from her face.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but it’s impacting everything we’re trying to do.” He glanced around at the men in the cave. “We’re all soldiers here and you won a Star for what you did then. Whatever it is that’s tearing you up inside, we understand.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded and seemed to deflate, her shoulders hunching. “I’m sorry. I should have told you a long time ago, right after the night he confronted me. I don’t like thinking about it, let alone talking about it.” She shook her head. “I’ve tried to forget that day, but it’s a part of me now.” She glanced around, blew out a breath and said, “I need a place where I can sit down.”

  Smoke gestured at the rock he’d been sitting on earlier and she sat. “Okay.” She took a couple of moments to get settled. “The convoy had a dozen trucks in it. We were moving our combat support hospital to one of the forward bases seeing a lot of injuries. We were supported by armored vehicles with mounted guns. You know, the big ones.” She’d spoken to Sharp, but all around him, he could see heads nodding.

  “I don’t remember how long we’d been driving when the IED went off. Maybe two or three hours? The explosion took out the first vehicle entirely, and no one survived. The second truck was badly damaged, and the third was disabled by enough shrapnel from the blast to make it mechanically unsound.

  “There had been six people in the second truck. Two died right away, the other four sustained injuries. Only two people in the third truck were injured. The other four escaped immediate injury.

  “My surgical team was split up between three trucks in the middle of the convoy. We grabbed first-aid kits, jumped out and ran toward the blast zone. That’s when we started taking fire. I don’t know how many people were shooting at us, but it seemed like the bullets were coming from everywhere.” She stopped to catch her breath, but she couldn’t seem to slow her breathing down.

  Sharp crouched next to her rock and put a hand on her shoulder. She relaxed a little. This was going to be bad. Really bad.

  “I don’t remember how I ended up there, but the next thing I knew, I was behind the door of another armored truck, a marine crowding me into the corner as he fired again and again at whoever was firing on us. A bullet took him in the neck. I tried to stop the bleeding, but it ripped his carotid artery apart and there was nothing I could do.” She sort of smiled, but not really. It was the kind of thing a person did when they felt they’d done a particularly stupid thing.

  “It made me angry, so I grabbed my weapon and began firing myself. I shot at every target I could see until I ran out of ammunition. For a second or two I thought the weapon had jammed, then I realized I was out of bullets. Shouting for help from farther forward in the convoy got me moving again, but without anyone firing at me. I figured I’d scared off whoever had been responsible for the shooting.” She twisted her fingers together, pulling at them as if there was something wrong with them.

  “When I got to the third truck, I was waved forward by the lead surgeon. He couldn’t go as he had his hand inside a man’s chest, probably trying to control a bleeder. I rushed up to the second vehicle and found two of our trauma nurses dead. Shot in the back of their heads while trying to triage the dead and wounded inside, I think. At first I thought everyone was dead, then I heard moans and knew someone was alive inside.”

  She swallowed hard and continued. “I pulled the bodies of the nurses aside and discovered two men alive. One was even conscious. I began triaging them, but someone started shooting at us again. One of the wounded’s sidearm was only inches from my hand. I grabbed it, turned and aimed over the edge of the door. The shooter was only about twenty feet from me and couldn’t have been older than nine or ten years. He looked terrified and was shouting at me in Arabic or Dari, but I don’t speak either one, so I didn’t know what he was saying.”

  She glanced at Sharp. “How could I kill a child?” She looked away before he could answer and continued. “I hesitated, certain that if I just stayed still and let the boy calm down, he wouldn’t shoot.”

  Tears dripped down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice. “There was a shout from down the convoy and a marine ran toward me, firing at the boy. He missed. The boy didn’t. It was a head shot and the marine went down fast. So fast. The boy turned his weapon on me, but I shot him fir
st. Twice in the chest. More extremists came toward the convoy and I kept shooting.”

  “Marshall’s son was the marine who tried to help you? The one the kid shot?” Sharp asked.

  “Yes. I hesitated to kill that boy, and Marshall’s son paid the price for my mistake.”

  “They don’t share a name.”

  “No. Marshall told me he’d only become aware of his son’s existence when the soldier tracked his father down after his mother died. He found his birth certificate with her papers with Marshall’s name on it. Marshall told me, he’d never been prouder of anything or anyone than he was of his son. He’d only known him a year.”

  “Grief is one thing,” Sharp said slowly. “But blaming you for the death of a soldier—”

  “They gave me a medal,” she interrupted. “If he had been your son, how would you have felt?”

  “Proud,” Sharp said. “He drew fire from you and gave you the chance to defend yourself and the wounded.”

  All around the room, men nodded in agreement.

  She stared at them, her hands opening and closing, like she wanted to hit someone. “He should have gotten the medal, not me.”

  “Several someones thought differently,” Sharp said, keeping his tone as solid and sure as tempered steel. “We’re fighting people who use terror as their primary weapon. They want you to feel guilty. They want you to feel afraid. Don’t rent them space in your head.”

  “Oh,” she said, partly laughing and partly crying. “They’ve got a mortgage on the whole thing. I’m going to need a good therapist after all this is over.”

  “Get evicting already, we’ve got a job to do,” Sharp told her in his best drill sergeant voice.

  “But, Marshall—”

  “You let me worry about him. You’ve got to get your head back in the game. Get your stuff together. Wheels up in ten.”

  Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times before she visibly pulled herself together and stood.

  Max pointed at a stack of crates. “There’s ten percent formaldehyde solution. Take as much as you can.”

  “Formaldehyde?” Sharp asked.

  “It’s one of the better disinfectants for anthrax spores,” Grace explained.

  “How else do you kill them?”

  “Heat works, but it needs to be a controlled burn.”

  “So blowing shit up is out?”

  “That would be my last choice. Surfaces contaminated with spores might be moved or thrown clear of any resulting fire before the spores are destroyed. Spores can be viable even after forty years in soil. No viability range has been established for surfaces exposed to air, but I would err on the side of caution and assume years.” She began sorting through the supplies Max brought and seemed fine enough to leave alone for a few minutes.

  Sharp walked to the other side of the plastic room Max worked in and waved the doctor over. “I don’t have time to convince you she’s safer with me than anyone else.”

  Max didn’t say anything, just watched him with careful eyes.

  “You’re her commanding officer and her friend. How do I help her?”

  “That was the right question.” Max smiled at him, the ruthless sort of smile a brother might wear when he’s about to irritate his little sister for her own good. “She’s intelligent and fearless when it comes to the safety of other people. It’s herself she’s not so good at looking after,” Max said in a low, rushed voice. “Become her shadow. Support her decisions. If she tells you to run, grab her and take her with you.”

  Sharp let out a breath. “Thanks.” He turned, gathered up her pack and his, grabbed his loaned sniper rifle and flashed the hand signal for a huddle with his team.

  “You can come with Grace and me to Bostick or stay here. What’s it going to be?”

  Hernandez spoke first. “We’re with you and the doc.”

  The others nodded.

  Sharp looked at them all in return. “Okay. Let’s get moving.” He headed toward the stockpile of supplies with his men a step behind him.

  Grace looked up from an open box filled with what looked like spray bottles. “We need this case of disinfectant.”

  “There is more in the truck,” Max told them without looking up from the microscope. “In buckets. Take what you need.”

  “There aren’t enough bio-suits for everyone,” she said, her lips pressed together tight. “Only me.”

  “You’re the most likely person to come in contact with the spores, so that makes sense,” Sharp said.

  She bit her bottom lip. “Maybe we should limit the number of people who come on this trip.”

  Sharp smiled gently. “You’re going to need all of us, darling. You’re the bug expert, but we’re the bad-guy exterminators.”

  She glanced behind him and the team and said, “But—”

  “You can’t talk us out of this,” Sharp explained. “We don’t know how Marshall is going to react when we get there. You need backup.”

  “What about General Stone?”

  “We’re going to recommend he leaves as soon as possible after we land.” Sharp waved a hand at the case of spray bottles, and Hernandez stepped forward to pick it up.

  “Are you ready?” Sharp asked her.

  “No,” she told him with a sigh. “But I guess I’m going anyway.”

  Sharp offered her pack to her and she took it with a wry grimace. “I think I’m going to burn this when I get home.”

  “There you go,” Sharp said, nudging her a little with one elbow. “Now you’re thinking ahead.” He led the way into the tunnel and they began the trek toward the hatch at the other end. She fell in behind him.

  “Why are you so cheerful?” she asked, frowning at him.

  “It’s just nice to get out of the cave for a little while,” he said like he was some 1950s housewife.

  She rolled her eyes. “Why is it, that when the danger is the highest, you get really silly? Like when you had to slap me out of my hysterics after our helicopter crash.”

  “Dude,” Hernandez said, disapproval coloring his tone. “You slapped her?”

  “No. I slipped a spare magazine for her Beretta into her back pocket.”

  “Huh,” Smoke grunted. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”

  For a moment no one said anything, then Grace began to laugh. So hard she stopped walking, slapped a hand over her mouth and had to lean one hand against the tunnel wall to keep from sliding down to her knees.

  Sharp grinned at Smoke, the sly devil, and winked at the other man.

  Smoke gave him a brief smile in return, his straight white teeth gleaming in the darkness and against his tanned skin.

  Grace stopped laughing and smacked Smoke on the shoulder. “You ought to come with a warning label.”

  “What, like slippery when wet?” Hernandez asked.

  Smoke appeared to give it some serious thought. “Smoke. Fire. Boom,” he said.

  “Yours would read, ‘out for lunch,’ Hernandez,” Sharp said as he started walking again.

  Very quietly behind him, Grace said, “I shouldn’t be laughing. Our situation is so...terrible. Is it okay to laugh?”

  Sharp glanced at her over his shoulder. She sounded so tentative, so uncertain, he wondered if her fever had come back.

  “Doc, we don’t have time for the sniffles now. We’ve got to use every weapon we’ve got to stay focused and alive. We’ll cry together later, when it’s safe,” Hernandez answered her.

  “Humor,” she said slowly, “is a weapon?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “You cry together?”

  “Laugh, cry, get drunk and generally lose track of a couple of days. If you don’t find a way to vent the crap you pick up when you’re on a mission, you’ll go loc
o.”

  “Well, I sure wish someone had told me that a couple of years ago.”

  “Someone should have,” Sharp said. “You’re welcome to our decompression party.”

  “Ooh.” Hernandez coughed. “That means we’ll have to keep our clothes on.”

  “You are the only one who feels he has to be completely free, Hernandez,” Sharp said.

  Grace choked and snorted.

  Up ahead, the hatch to the room above came into view. Sharp held up a hand and any noise anyone was making disappeared. Even Grace went quiet.

  She knew what their hand signals meant. Hell, he shouldn’t be so damn surprised, he’d been using them in front of her and with her almost constantly for the last few days.

  He knelt at the base of the ladder that ended at the hatch and waved Hernandez forward.

  He went up the ladder and cautiously lifted the wooden door. He used a small dental mirror to scan the room above, then disappeared up into it with no sound at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A few seconds later, the hatch opened and Hernandez gave the all-clear signal.

  Sharp went up next, then Smoke slipped past Grace to wait at the bottom of the ladder. After a few moments, he urged her to follow Sharp.

  The room above was dark, and she realized she was going to have to ask someone if it was night or early morning. She didn’t even know what day it was.

  Shadows moved and Sharp was suddenly there, a firm, strong hand under her elbow as he guided her away from the hatch and toward the front of the building. Hernandez was there, talking softly to two men dressed in traditional Afghan clothing. They nodded and moved off before she was close enough to make out what language they were speaking.

  CIA was there too, and for once he looked calm. Their leaving was probably the best thing he’d heard of in a couple of days.

  Sharp leaned down to whisper in her ear, “This place is being watched, so when we go, we’re going to go fast. It might be a bumpy ride at first.”

  “Bumpy because of the helicopter’s engines or because people will be shooting bullets and rockets at us?”