Meat also heard the runner and bolted to the base of the house’s central staircase. He immediately spotted his target and opened fire. An agonizing scream rang out just before a rifle came cartwheeling down the stairs.
By the time Jason made it to the hall door, Meat had ducked into the next room and reappeared, shaking his head to indicate that it was empty. Jason signalled for him to remain still.
A perfect silence settled over the house.
Then Jason heard a small voice coming from a room at the top of the stairs. He listened intently. Someone was chanting a prayer.
‘Fuck this,’ Meat grumbled. ‘Cover me.’
Before Jason could stop him, Meat charged up the stairs.
Jason raised his AK-47 to cover the landing, fully expecting Meat to get hit with a faceful of lead. But there was no resistance from above. At the top of the stairs, Meat popped in and out of the room to the right, then disappeared through the left door.
Three seconds later, he yelled down, ‘Google, get up here!’
62
Crawford shone the floodlight up at the gaping hole the marines had opened on top of the rubble that dammed the tunnel passage.
Emerging from the other side, a grimy face capped by a sand-coloured helmet appeared in the light. The marine reported, ‘It won’t be easy, but we can get through.’
‘Fine, Corporal,’ Crawford said. ‘We’ll make it work.’
‘Colonel, there’s a lot of blood on this side,’ Corporal William Shuster reported matter-of-factly. ‘Some fingers and tissue too. Not pretty. I’m sure there’s plenty of meat buried under these rocks. I don’t see how anyone could’ve survived the explosion.’
Crawford remained stonefaced. ‘Al-Zahrani managed to walk out of here. Let’s make sure no one else does.’
Shuster scuttled down the rocks, holding a flashlight in his right hand, an M-16 slung over his shoulder. His left hand was balled up in a fist and he opened it to reveal a palm full of gum-ball-sized metal ball bearings covered in a tacky film – trademark shrapnel used in padding suicide vests. ‘Found these on the ground,’ he said. ‘They’re covered in C-4 residue. Not sure why one of them would have detonated himself in there. You’d think he’d have waited for a few of us before pushing the button . . . take a few infidels with him on his way to paradise.’
‘Mystery solved,’ Crawford grunted for show. None of this news surprised Crawford. It wasn’t just the lingering smell of motor oil that clued him in on the source of the blast. Stokes had been quick to inform him about the clumsy gunman who’d let loose some rounds into the man who’d been strapped with plastic explosive. With the cameras knocked off line, however, even Stokes had seriously underestimated the extent of the collapse. More troubling was the quiet calm on the other side of the blockage. Crawford anticipated activity. Lots of activity. And not from the holed-up Arabs. ‘Now I need you to take a couple men in there with you. See how deep that tunnel runs. Make sure it’s empty.’
‘We could use the PackBot,’ Shuster suggested.
Crawford wasn’t hearing it. ‘No time for robots, Corporal. Don’t think. Just do.’
Shuster was amazed by Crawford’s stubborn fixation with this tunnel, particularly in light of the devastating ambush that the platoon had marginally endured (thanks to Crawford’s refusal to radio for backup). With the medic having been killed by Al-Zahrani’s abductors, the wounded were left to tend to one another. Every remaining able-bodied marine had been ordered back to the tunnel to finish the debris removal. No one could yet confirm if Crawford had radioed for reinforcements. That had the platoon grumbling about the colonel’s motive. With Staff Sergeant Richards unaccounted for, discontent was fast brewing throughout the ranks.
Crawford turned to the six men tightly congregated in the passage behind him. ‘Ramirez . . . Holt. You two get in there with Corporal Shuster and see what we’ve got.’ The marines looked at one another in a way that clearly suggested latent dissension. More reason for swift action. ‘This isn’t a democracy, gentlemen. Get your lights and your weapons and get in there! And your radios won’t be any good under this mountain, so leave them behind.’
The reluctant designatees took up their M-16s and light gear packs, filed past Crawford and clambered up the rocks.
‘And where’s that damn Kurd?’ Crawford blasted.
‘Here, sir,’ a quiet voice called from the rear.
The four marines made room for Hazo to shuffle through.
Crawford squared up with the interpreter. He had to make a conscious effort not to react to the Kurd’s appearance. The man looked haggard and feverish, his eyes bloodshot. The striking similarity to Al-Zahrani’s early symptoms was alarming. Since the onset of Operation Genesis, Stokes had been forthright about the wide reach of a custom virus that would target Arab males. ‘It won’t be only the terrorists who fall. Know that the innocent fathers of our future enemies, too, will be sacrificed along the way,’ Stokes had told him. ‘If we have any survivors in there,’ Crawford briefed the Kurd, ‘I’ll need you to talk some sense into them. Tell them to be smart and surrender. Can I count on you to do this?’
‘Jesus, Colonel,’ Shuster said defiantly. ‘Clearly he’s in no condition to—’
Crawford’s chest puffed out like a rooster. He stepped up to Shuster and put his face so close, the two men touched noses. ‘Corporal, you are way out of line.’
‘Please,’ Hazo said, putting an appeasing hand on Shuster’s arm. ‘I will help you.’
‘I hope you’re right about all this, Colonel,’ Shuster warned.
Thick veins webbed out over Crawford’s red face.
Shuster unstrapped the M9 pistol from his side holster and proffered it to Hazo. ‘If you’re going in there, take this.’
Hazo nodded and accepted the gun, though no matter what might happen, he vowed not to go against his beliefs.
Shuster gave Hazo a quick tutorial on how to flip off the safety and fire the weapon. ‘And stay behind us,’ he added.
‘I will,’ Hazo said, clumsily holding the gun away from his body.
Shuster climbed up and disappeared through the hole.
‘Good luck,’ Crawford said to Hazo.
Hazo offered no reply and began his climb towards the hole.
63
LAS VEGAS
The instant Stokes attempted to close the vault’s door, Flaherty snatched the clay map from Brooke and bolted after him. He was only four steps away when the door stopped short from seating against the doorframe. On the other side of the door, Stokes tried pulling harder on the handle, yet the door didn’t budge. It took mere seconds for Stokes to detect the problem: the dead-bolt was slightly engaged so that the thick slide bolt protruded just enough to keep the door from seating. While no one had been watching, Flaherty had tampered with the deadbolt just before he’d come into the vault.
Immediately, the door swung inward.
But Flaherty was already in a wide pitcher’s stance with the clay tablet cocked back above his right shoulder.
On the other side of the door, Stokes was raising his gun to prepare for a cautious re-entry. His eyes, however, went to the room’s centre – not directly in front of him.
Flaherty’s faster reaction time won out. He launched the five-pound tablet at Stokes’s head.
The tablet whirred through the air on a direct line for the pastor’s face. Stokes nimbly bobbed sideways so that the tablet instead skimmed his right ear. In the process, he managed to fire one misaligned shot that sailed past Flaherty and thwacked into the thick security glass on the front side of the display case containing Lilith’s head.
Before Stokes regained his footing, Flaherty charged forward like a linebacker and buried his right shoulder in the preacher’s abdomen. The tackle lifted Stokes, brought him crashing down on to the floor with his chest catching the brunt of the impact.
There was a loud pop and Flaherty felt something under him give way. He was shocked to see a glossy wingtip stic
king up over his shoulder. Flaherty realized it was the business end of the pastor’s prosthetic limb – tangled under his arm.
Stokes was quick to respond and the gun came arcing towards Flaherty’s face.
With both hands, Flaherty grabbed at Stokes’s wrist and forced the Glock sideways. A second shot rang out and punched through the wall.
Getting into a wrestling match with Stokes was a losing proposition, Flaherty was certain. But Stokes had two things working against him: a missing leg and Anthrax-tainted lungs. With the struggle escalating, Flaherty could hear bubbling sounds coming from Stokes’s chest.
Stokes responded with a head butt that caught Flaherty on the bridge of the nose and made him see stars.
‘Aaaghh!’ Flaherty screamed out. He managed to hold on to the gun. At the same time, he buried his shoulder in Stokes’s face.
Choking, Stokes struggled to push Flaherty away.
Then Stokes let out a muffled scream and Flaherty felt the gun pinned hard against the floor. He glimpsed a chunky black clog grinding down on the gun.
‘Let it go, Stokes!’ Brooke yelled. She pulled her foot up again and stomped down a second time. Finally the gun fell free from his mashed fingers. A swift kick sent it skittering across the carpet.
Desperate for oxygen, Stokes flailed and bucked, trying to use his liberated stump for leverage.
Like riding a bronco, Flaherty couldn’t control the crazed pastor. To regain his balance, he had to relinquish his grip on Stokes’s wrist. That meant he had no choice but to pull his shoulder off Stokes’s mouth.
The pastor coughed fiercely, spraying blood on Flaherty’s neck.
Another forceful buck sent Flaherty tumbling on to the floor.
Stokes rolled on to his elbows and retched blood and bile on to the carpet.
It was the opportunity Brooke had been waiting for. In her hand, she clutched the nearest solid object she could find – the clay tablet. With all her might, she swung the map of Eden down at Stokes’s head. It connected. The pastor collapsed on to the floor.
64
IRAQ
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jason gasped, standing at the top of the stairs. He had to cover his mouth and nose with his sleeve to fight off a fetid stench.
In the room to the right, he caught a quick glimpse of the two men he’d struck blindly from downstairs. In opposite corners of the room, each body lay face down and twisted on the splintered floorboards.
‘In here, Google,’ Meat called again.
Jason lowered his AK-47, stepped over the dead guy Meat had gunned down on the landing, and went into the second room. The horrid smell sharpened, and its source was immediately apparent.
Sprawled atop a mattress that was the room’s only furnishing, Fahim Al-Zahrani lay in a gory mire of blood, vomit and tissue. Since much of the stringy red slime still draped from the corpse’s blue lips, Jason assumed it to be a purée of Al-Zahrani’s innards. Blood streamed like tears from the corpse’s lifeless eyes – the orbs solid red. And the entire mattress beneath his lower half was completely saturated in red, suggesting that blood and liquefied organs had found their way out every possible exit.
‘Man,’ Meat said from the far corner, ‘what the hell’s going on here?’
An elderly Arab – unarmed – sat on the floor beside Meat, legs tucked to his chest, rocking back and forth. He was chanting prayers in Arabic. Every few seconds, a spate of coughing interrupted the recitation. The old guy displayed the same pallid complexion Jason had noticed in the man whom Meat stabbed in the throat.
‘I mean, what did these guys do to him?’ Meat said.
‘They didn’t do this, Meat. They couldn’t have done this.’
‘Then who did?’
As if on cue, Jason’s sat-com vibrated. He dug in his pocket to find it, saw that it was Flaherty.
‘Tommy?’
‘Yeah, it’s me.’
‘Everything all right in Vegas?’
‘No. Not by a longshot, I’m afraid.’
Jason listened as Flaherty rehashed the candid tell-all discussion he and Brooke had had with Pastor Randall Stokes – the discovery of an ancient contagion that USAMRIID scientists under Frank Roselli’s guidance had weaponized for mass transmission throughout the Middle East. Staring over at Al-Zahrani, Jason felt his nerves turn to ice. When Flaherty detailed Stokes’s sinister objective – to annihilate the Arab male population – he could feel a dark cloud settling over him. He’d had a similar response when in September 2001 his sister Elizabeth had called to report that Matthew had officially gone missing at the World Trade Center.
‘Not sure if I’m buying what Stokes was saying about this virus he and Roselli concocted. Seemed a bit out there to me . . .’ Flaherty said.
‘He’s right, Tommy. Trust me. We just found Al-Zahrani and he’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you only pulled him out of that cave a few hours ago.’
‘That’s right. We thought he had a fever. But now . . . God, it looks like something minced his organs and pushed them out his throat. We killed a few others that had been in contact with him . . . it’s a long story. But they weren’t looking too good either. If you ask me, I’d say they were showing early signs of being infected with this virus.’
‘Virus?’Meat said, looking alarmed.His eyes wentwide with concern as he looked at Al-Zahrani again. ‘What do mean “virus”?’
‘Virus,’ the elderly Arab echoed grimly. ‘Yes . . . virus,’ he said holding out his hands and staring at them with vacant, yellowed eyes.
‘Shut up!’ Meat demanded, kicking the old man.
Jason stifled Meat with an abrupt hand gesture.
‘The others you killed . . . were they Arabs?’ Flaherty asked in a low voice.
‘They were.’
A pause.
‘So it’s true,’ Flaherty said in a grim tone. ‘It only kills Arabs.’
‘For our sake, I hope so.’
‘Stokes was pretty proud of the fact that this virus could specifically target Arabs,’ Flaherty reiterated. ‘Let’s not go making any assumptions. I hope you’ll be fine. Are you okay?’
Jason wasn’t so sure. ‘You said this thing can spread through the air?’
‘What?’ Meat said, startled by the bits and pieces he was overhearing. ‘You mean just breathing it—’
‘These men you’ve killed . . .’ Flaherty said, thinking it through. ‘You’ve got to get rid of the bodies. Burn them or something. Until we find out what’s really happening, we can’t risk letting this thing get out in the open.’
‘Agreed.’
‘There’s something else too. However Stokes was planning to spread the virus, it’s in that cave. He referred to it as a “delivery system”. I don’t know how or what that might mean, but he implied that it somehow uses nature, not warheads. Our friend Crawford has been in on this thing all along. And he’s determined to finish this, understand? So you’ve got to wrap things up there quickly and find a way to get back to that cave and stop Crawford.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Jason said, ruing the fact that he didn’t force the issue of calling for backup earlier. ‘Hey, is Stokes dead?’
‘No. But he will be soon. And not from the bump on his head. Seems there was a mutiny among the ranks. Frank Roselli, the USAMRIID guy, managed to infect Stokes with some military-grade anthrax. Talk about poetic justice. Anyway, when Stokes comes to, I’ll see if we can get anything else out of him.’
‘Great work, Tommy. I’ll take it from here.’
65
‘How long till Candyman gets here?’ Meat asked, uncapping another of the five-gallon gas cans they’d liberated from the shed where the stolen truck had been hidden.
‘Ten minutes,’ Jason replied with little emotion. His vacant eyes fixated on the elderly Arab whose chant had come to an abrupt halt, thanks to a single shot Meat had pumped through the top of his head. All things considered, the execution was
truly a mercy kill. The old man had offered no resistance.
In every way, the mission added new meaning to the phrase ‘take no prisoners’. The death toll Jason had witnessed over the past nine hours was as deep as it was wide. Undoubtedly, the demise of Al-Zahrani and his militant underlings was to be celebrated – and in time, would be. After all, he reminded himself, these men were terrorists of the worst variety: extremists hell bent on indiscriminately destroying civilization; brainwashed by radical interpretations of the Qur’an and the Hadith; convinced that sacrificing innocent lives was sanctioned by Allah.
But for Jason, a disturbing truth was fast coming into focus: terrorism was a two-way street. If Stokes were to succeed in unleashing his wretched apocalypse on the Middle East, the combined acts of terror carried out by the minuscule minority of Muslim extremists would seem trivial in comparison. And the fact that evangelical fanaticism stoked the pastor’s fervour was all too similar to the enemy Jason had been fighting all these years. What could have pushed Stokes over the brink of sanity? he wondered. Jason knew firsthand that war could easily blur the lines. Even as he stood over the grand trophy of this conflict – the body of Fahim Al-Zahrani – he felt no true sense of victory.
‘Come on, Google,’ Meat said. ‘We don’t have much time. Soak him really good.’
‘Right,’ Jason said. He uncapped another gas can and began dousing Al-Zahrani and the mattress, trying to avoid breathing.
‘It’s a fucking shame, really,’ Meat said, motioning to Al-Zahrani.
‘How’s that?’ Jason said, pouring out the last of the gasoline.
‘We’re about to light up a ten-million-dollar barbecue. We actually bagged this fucker and now we’re going to destroy any proof of it. For the record, though, it’s not about the money, Google,’ Meat confessed. ‘I’m just glad this fucker’s dead. You know, for Camel and Jam.’
The Genesis Plague Page 27