by Bob Mayer
Riley did the introductions. “This is Master Sergeant Knutz. He’s the operations NCO for the team.”
Freeman shook the team sergeant’s hand and then gestured for both men to follow him. “Let’s go inside and I’ll fill you in on what’s going on. Your men can wait out here.”
Riley and Knutz followed Freeman into the lobby. Riley had already noticed the sign on the front of the building that read Biotech Engineering. That, plus the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency, made for an interesting combination. Riley could see two other people waiting inside: A tall, distinguished-looking man in a white lab coat and a frumpy dark-haired woman seated at a large desk.
Riley had spotted the remote cameras on the roof of the building as they landed, so he assumed that the television screens here were the terminus for the cameras. That pointed to a pretty extensive security setup for a place in the middle of the woods. The only thing Riley could figure from this sketchy visual data was that some sort of security leak had occurred.
Freeman introduced the two groups to each other. “This is Doctor Ward, who is in charge of this lab, and his assistant, Doctor Merrit. This is Mister Riley and Sergeant Knutz. They’re from the 5th Special Forces Group over at Fort Campbell and are here to help us with our little problem.”
After all parties shook hands, the two Special Forces men pulled over some plastic chairs. Riley unbuckled his load bearing equipment (LBE) and laid his M16A2 across his knees. His first impression of the two doctors was that they were very upset by something, especially the woman, but trying hard not to show it. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and prepared to take notes.
Freeman shook his head. “No notes. Everything that you do, hear, and see here is classified top secret. It shouldn’t take us long to take care of things. You all should be back at Fort Campbell by dinner.”
Riley shrugged and put the notebook away. He’d go along with them. He’d played the secret game longer, and in more real situations, than this DIA major had.
Freeman turned to Ward. “Doctor, perhaps you could give these men a quick rundown on what this lab does, without getting into anything too classified. Enough so they understand the background.”
Ward turned and faced the two men. “Biotech Engineering conducts research into mutating various viruses in an attempt to find cures for the effects of the original viruses. We work mostly for the National Institutes of Health, doing some of their more sensitive projects. Right now, we’re working on various forms of the known biological weapon viruses, hoping to find a mutated form that might act against the pure form as an antidote. We conduct live experiments on monkeys to stimulate the growth of the mutated viruses in a host organism and examine the results against the original virus.”
Freeman cut in. “That’s the reason you gentlemen are here. Four of the lab’s monkeys escaped last night. These four were infected with a mutated form of the biological agent VX.”
Riley frowned. VX was a biological agent that was in the Soviet inventory. What the man was saying was serious, but why was he using the past tense? The female doctor, Merrit, was curiously quiet and looked uncomfortable. Before Riley had a chance to ask a question, Knutz jumped in, anxious, Riley supposed, to show that he was still working for a living.
“How did they escape?”
Riley noticed a glance between Ward and his assistant as Freeman answered. “How they escaped isn’t important. What is important is that we find their bodies as quickly as possible.”
Knutz cut in again. “What do you mean ‘bodies’?”
Freeman gestured at the portable computer. “The animals were wearing collars that contained both a homing beacon and an explosive charge. When we determined that they really had escaped, we electronically triggered the charges in the collars. The charge was more than sufficient to kill the animal. Prior to firing we got a direction fix on them.”
These people were certainly serious about not letting those animals run free, thought Riley. Freeman slid a map over to the edge of the table. Riley and Knutz got up to look at it.
Freeman pointed at the penciled-in line. “The bodies must be somewhere along this line, which is the last azimuth we had prior to detonation. The range is less than five kilometers. What we need you and your men to do is move along this line and find the bodies for us.”
Riley frowned. “Why’d you kill the monkeys? Why not just capture them?”
Freeman fielded that question. “We couldn’t take the chance of their running into people. Even though the possibility was low, we didn’t want to expose anyone to this new, mutated virus. We felt we had to kill them in order to stop them.”
Riley noticed that the male doctor didn’t seem too thrilled about having terminated the monkeys. He traced his finger along the line on the map, noting where it ended at the lake. “All right. It shouldn’t take us long to move three klicks along an azimuth from here. Mind if we use this map?”
Freeman gave it over. “It’s all yours.”
Ward held up a hand. “There’s something else. When one of your men spots the bodies, he must be sure to immediately back off and call us in to take care of the remains. The virus might still be active in the corpses and we don’t want to take any chances. Your men are not to get any closer to the bodies than they need to for identification purposes.”
Riley shrugged. He doubted that any of his men would want to get close after they heard what the monkeys had been infected with. “Sure. I’ll brief them on that.”
“How contagious is this virus?” Knutz asked.
Freeman answered. “As you know, in the weapon form, the VX is sprayed or deployed by airburst. Here they injected it directly into the monkeys’ blood, so as long as you don’t make contact with the blood, you’ll be all right. Just do what Doctor Ward said.”
The female doctor spoke for the first time. “Are you at least going to tell them about the backpacks?”
Ward turned toward her angrily. Riley noticed that the senior doctor restrained himself with great difficulty.
“What’s she talking about?” Riley asked.
Ward turned from glaring at Merrit and spat out the words. “The monkeys took two pieces of equipment with them.”
“What’s in these backpacks?” Riley demanded.
Freeman cut in. “That’s classified. Your men are also not to touch the backpacks if you see them. They should be with the bodies.”
“Well, what do these backpacks look like?” Riley asked.
“About the size of a large ALICE rucksack,” Freeman answered. “But instead of nylon, the whole thing is plastic and painted gray-green. The bottom line is that you find the bodies and back off immediately. Call us in and we’ll do the recovery. Doctor Ward and I will be moving along with the center of your search line. Doctor Merrit will remain here.”
Riley had had enough of the “I’ve got a secret game. “All right, sir. Is there anything else we need to know?”
Freeman looked at Ward, who shook his head; then he turned back to Riley. “No. That’s it. Tell the helicopter pilots to stay here until we’re done. This shouldn’t take too long. We need to get body bags from the lab downstairs and some other equipment, and we’ll join you in the parking lot in a few minutes.”
Riley headed outside, closely followed by Knutz. The team had dumped their rucks near the wall of the building. Trovinsky had broken open one of the cans of 5.56mm and the 9mm and was passing out the ammunition. Each team member was loading magazines.
Riley got their attention. “All right, guys. We won’t be needing the ammo. Go ahead and put what you’ve got in your ammo pouches, but I don’t want anything live in your weapons. I don’t want to see any magazines in.”
Riley spread out the map that Freeman had given him. “Here’s the deal. They had — “
“I’ll brief the team, chief.”
Riley looked up in surprise at Knutz’s interruption, but stepped back, handing over the map. It was the team sergeant’s prerog
ative as operations NCO to brief the team, something he should have been doing long ago. Riley was glad that Knutz finally appeared to be taking his job seriously, but to be honest, he was also a little miffed. He was used to doing things his way.
Knutz used a pen to point at the map. “They had four monkeys escape from this lab last night. The monkeys had collars on that had a radio-detonated explosive device built in. The people working here fired the devices, so now there are four dead monkeys out there. Before they blew the devices, the direction finder on the collars gave an azimuth, which you see marked on the map. We’re going to move along that azimuth in a search line and find the bodies.
“Once you spot anything that resembles a monkey’s body, you’re to back off and call in the doctor who will be traveling along with us. There’s also something they call backpacks that the monkeys took with them — the size of a large ruck and gray-green in color. If you see these you’re to back off and call in the doctor.
“We’ll move with fifteen meters between each man. That gives us a hundred and fifty meters of frontage. Since the signal was good for only five k’s, it shouldn’t take us too long to find the bodies.” Knutz looked over the team. “Any questions?”
He sure was direct and to the point, Riley thought, but uninspired. Knutz would never be a leader. Riley decided that he’d better elaborate a bit. People worked better when they knew the why behind the what. “I’d like to highlight the reason we’re not supposed to go near the bodies. According to the doctors here, these monkeys had some sort of variation of the VX biological agent injected into them. They don’t want you to mess around with the bodies, and I’m sure you don’t either. They say the only thing that is contagious is the monkeys’ blood, but make sure you be careful. Let’s let the doctor earn his pay.”
Riley could see the men giving sidelong glances at each other. Doc Seay raised a hand. “Hey, chief. What’s in these backpacks?”
Riley shook his head. “They wouldn’t say. Let’s assume the worst and figure that it might be some sort of container for viruses or other types of biological agents. So let’s not mess around with this stuff. You see something that nature didn’t put in the woods, you yell out and we’ll let these people deal with it. We’re just the spotters on this operation. We’ll let them pick up their own garbage.” Riley looked around the gathered men. “Everyone got that?”
Eight bobbing heads indicated assent.
“We’ll leave rucks here with the helicopters.” Riley glanced over at the two silenced aircraft. He turned to the team’s intelligence sergeant. “Bob, I want you to tell the pilots to cool their heels. The man in charge said they’re to wait until we get done. Hopefully we’ll be back at Fort Campbell today.”
Sergeant First Class Bob Philips, a lanky New Englander with a massive hook nose that was often the butt of jokes, strode over to the two aircraft where the crews were still sitting inside.
Riley pointed at the open cans of ammunition. “T-bone, I want you to close those up and put them on one of the aircraft. We’ll account for all the rounds after we get done.”
Sergeant “T-bone” Troy, the junior weapons man, clamped shut the lids. Troy had picked up the nickname T-bone during a survival training exercise when he’d spent the last five days gnawing on the bones of a squirrel he’d caught on the first day. Since his real first name was Bob, same as Philips, the distinction had caught on. Riley’s philosophy for the team was that nothing on ODA 682 was sacred, so he’d ignored Troy’s protests about the nickname. The man was going to have to learn to live with it. Troy was a solidly built, six-foot, blue-eyed, blond-haired Viking. He spent most of his off-duty time working out and lifting weights. Unfortunately, in Riley’s opinion, the man had the personality of a rock, to match his muscles. T-bone’s lacking a sense of humor made the other members of the team pick on him that much more.
Riley’s musings on T-bone Troy were interrupted by Ward and Freeman coming out the front door of the building. Ward was carrying a day pack with something stuffed into it. Freeman, wearing a suit and dress shoes, didn’t look ready to go traipsing through the woods, but Riley figured that was the man’s own problem. Ward had changed into slacks and a short-sleeved shirt under a windbreaker, along with a pair of sneakers. Slightly better to go beating the bush, but not by much in Riley’s estimation.
The men of 682 were wearing the same uniforms they’d had on for their PT ruck march this morning prior to the close-quarters combat training: lightweight battle dress camouflage fatigues, jungle boots, load bearing equipment, and patrol caps. The only addition was the M16s. On their LBE each man sported two canteens, two ammunition pouches, a butt pack containing survival equipment, a first-aid pouch holding two dressings on the nonfiling shoulder, and at least one knife. A shoulder holster was strapped on beneath the LBE, holding each man’s 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol.
Riley pulled his Silva compass out of its case on the LBE. He laid the Silva down on the map, then rotated the fixed arrow in the compass base to line up with the penciled-in azimuth. By keeping the north arrow aligned with the outer ring, all he now had to do was follow the arrow to stay on the desired azimuth.
At the present moment the arrow pointed straight from the lab toward Lake Barkley. Since the map sheet was the same as the one they used for Fort Campbell, Riley knew the declination difference between magnetic north and grid north. His compass was preset to compensate for that difference.
Riley looked up and called out to the team. “Azimuth is two-oh-two degrees magnetic.” He waited while the rest of the team set their compasses. “It’s three klicks from here to Lake Barkley, so that’s our far limit.” He designated personnel with quick jabs of his finger: “I want you five to my left and you four to my right.” He checked with Freeman. “Ready, sir?”
“Let’s do it.”
Riley swept his free hand overhead and they started. The team moved around the building and then spread out on the indicated azimuth. To Riley’s immediate left, Chief Knutz beat his way through the undergrowth; to Riley’s right, Doc Seay was the closest man. Ward and Freeman followed several paces behind Riley.
Immediately behind the building the terrain dropped off into a creek bed running southwest. Riley selected a tree on line on the far side of the ravine and used that as his aiming point.
As he went down into the creek bed, he wondered what the remains of the monkeys would look like. An explosive charge in a band around the neck was pretty nasty. Riley could understand the concern, though, about letting any sort of biological hazard get free. Stringent control measures did seem necessary.
Despite that, a few things about the operation didn’t fit, in Riley’s opinion. Knutz’s question about how the four had escaped was a valid one. The lab seemed to have a good security system, and if those Biotech people had gone to the trouble of rigging homing beacons and explosive collars, they must have taken other strong steps to prevent an escape.
Another thing that bothered Riley was the lack of any security personnel at the building. He very much doubted that one of the doctors had been on the guard shift last night when the escape had occurred, yet there had been no sign of a guard. Riley had noticed the old pickup truck in the lot: It had a retired enlisted sticker on it, which authorized the driver to enter the closed Fort Campbell main post. He wondered who that belonged to. Obviously not to Ward, Freeman, or Merrit.
Riley was a suspicious and observant person. Harsh experience had imbued him with those characteristics. His boyhood, growing up on the streets of the South Bronx, had taught him the value of observation. A person who couldn’t learn to notice the warnings of various developing situations didn’t stay healthy very long on those streets. Riley had survived the Bronx for seventeen years, threading a delicate path through the demands of a rough environment and avoiding the kind of trouble that would end any hope he’d had for getting out of the cesspool that lapped at him. Earning a high school diploma under those conditions had been a major achievement
and had allowed Riley to enlist in the army.
Riley’s introduction to Special Forces had reinforced those early lessons. He remembered his first team sergeant in Special Forces: MSgt. Frank Kimble, Okinawa, 1981. Riley was a young E-4, fresh out of the Qualification course, when he ran into Kimble. Kimble had tried hard to pass on to the younger man knowledge earned in three tours in Vietnam and nineteen years in Special Forces.
Kimble had constantly honed Riley’s powers of observation. They’d be sitting in a bar on a Saturday night getting drunk, and the veteran would suddenly ask Riley to describe all the people behind him without turning around. After six months of that, Riley had learned to be much more observant — just in time for his first live mission to Thailand, running classified border operations. In the years since, Riley had sharpened his skills, always trying to notice any anomalies in the environment. Right now, his instincts were buzzing from several anomalies he had picked up at the lab.
Riley pushed his way through the thick undergrowth that lined the watercourse. He carefully extracted his arm from a thorny bush and high-stepped through the storm-swollen creek. Behind him, he heard Ward curse as the man became caught in the brambles. Riley stepped out of the water and halted, listening carefully, tuning out the man-made sounds. Looking to his left he spotted Knutz, who gave him a quick nod. To his right, Seay took a few more seconds to appear.
Riley was pleased that his team was moving silently and staying on line. Riley’s philosophy was that the members of 682 had to travel like ghosts through the woods. Despite the fact that there was no need to be quiet here, the team was reacting that way because they knew what Riley expected. To him, every moment was training.
Riley dug in his feet and pushed himself up the far side of the ravine. His eyes were constantly scanning back and forth, searching for any signs of the bodies or the backpacks. When he reached the tree he had designated, he pulled out his compass and selected another target along the azimuth. From his pace count, confirmed by a studied look at the map, he estimated that they had progressed six hundred meters from the lab.