He silently prayed that she would.
“General, it’s ready. I’m going to release the soman as soon as our little friend pops his head out of the ammo box,” Carolyn said.
“Soldier, you get your ass back behind that door as soon as you take your shot. They move incredibly fast.”
“Yes, sir. No sweat.”
“Lieutenant Ewing, get ready on that door. As soon as he’s clear, you slam that thing shut.”
“Yes, sir.” Josh placed his finger over the button that would slide the inner entrance door shut. The outer door to the clean room was still open—he’d shut it, too, as soon as the soldier made his exit.
“Carolyn, are you ready?”
“Yes, sir. Ready.”
Rammes turned to the other soldiers watching their comrade wrap his rifle sling around his left arm to provide added stability. “If that thing escapes, you kill it. Clear?”
As a single person, they answered, “Hooah, sir.”
Carolyn was going to have to ask Garrett exactly what that word meant.
Rammes counted down. “On my mark. Three . . .”
The soldier centered his sights on the lock. It was moving slightly, as the creature in the box continued its frantic efforts to escape.
“Two . . .”
The soldier took a long breath, let it out only partway, and started a gentle pull on his trigger. His rifle was set for a single-shot burst. One bullet.
“One . . .”
The box jumped. The lock swung back and forth . . .
“Mark!”
“Stand by!”
The shot didn’t come.
“Stand by . . . stand by . . .” The soldier waited for the lock to stop swinging.
The rifle’s report was a dull thudding sound, masked behind the thick Plexiglas wall of the containment room. Sparks flew from the hardened lock as the bullet slammed into it, disintegrating it in a small shower of metal fragments.
The lid of the ammo box was flying open even as the largest piece of the shattered lock was falling to the floor.
The thing was out.
The mutated creature slammed into the ceiling of the containment room, about five feet above the hospital bed where the box had been lying.
Josh Ewing watched the rifle barrel retract from the entrance and mashed the button to close the inner door.
The creature spun in midair, looking straight at the entrance. Looking straight at the soldier with the rifle trying to get away.
It hit the floor and leapt at the sliding door. It moved as a blur, incredibly fast.
The inner door clicked shut just as the thing slammed into it. It cried out with a terrible wail, a scream of fury, as it hit the floor.
Out of the corner of his eye, Garrett saw the soldier dive out of the door to the clean room, tumbling across the white, polished floor. The second door slid shut behind him.
Josh Ewing stepped back from the control panel and shouted, “We’re sealed!”
Carolyn hit a key on the keyboard, releasing the soman gas into the confined space of the containment room.
“All right, you little bastard. Take a deep breath.”
In the instant before the soman rained down on it from the jets in the ceiling, the mutated creature looked through the thick Plexiglas and saw the group of people standing just on the other side.
Yellow eyes, as bright as fire, burned with a hellish rage as it turned its head from person to person.
Its mouth opened, revealing long, black fangs glistening and dripping with saliva, a small string stretching to the floor in front of it, translucent and shiny. The noise erupted from its mouth, chattering, clicking, loud enough to be heard even through the four-inch-thick Plexiglas.
The soman fell from the ceiling like a gentle rain, a misting of small droplets, settling to the floor below.
The creature’s eyes squinted as the powerful muscles in its legs tensed. Just as it was about to leap toward the Plexiglas viewing wall, the first mist of soman settled onto its back. Into its eyes.
The effect was immediate.
Silence. The chattering and clicking stopped.
At first, the creature seemed confused, not sure what to make of the wetness that was descending from above. It raised its ugly snout and sniffed the air—now filled with a strange camphor scent, the smell of rotting fruit—its restructured senses trying to categorize the new smell, the new feeling that was at that very moment racing through its nervous system, through its blood.
It blinked, as if someone had just kicked sand in its face. It scratched at its eyes with its long, black claws, rubbing and pawing at them with its front legs.
Its mouth was suddenly covered with a foamy mass of saliva, its long brown tongue slinging clumps of the foam from side to side. Its right front leg suddenly stiffened, stuck out to the side like it had been pulled by an invisible chain, and then it started to twitch, almost vibrate, as the first convulsions set in.
The creature’s rib cage expanded and contracted grotesquely as the lungs started to fail, its mouth opened wide, trying to get a breath. Its tail stiffened behind it, and then began to vibrate along with the rest of the creature’s appendages.
Death throes.
The creature rolled over onto its back, and a stream of pale brown urine shot into the air as the thing lost control of its bodily functions. A liquid mass of brownish-red feces literally erupted from its anus, spraying across the floor and splattering the side of the hospital bed.
Garrett watched in horror as the soman ravaged the mutated creature on the floor just fifteen feet away from him, watched as it quickly died from the gentle mist that had dropped from the ceiling. He knew agents like soman had been used against people before, and he was sickened to think that they’d died in much this same way.
Deep down, though, he was glad. Glad that the thing was dying. Glad that it was suffering. He knew he was watching the end to all the terrible events of the last few days, as the mutated thing sprayed its bodily fluids and bodily waste around the room in a maddening display of malfunctioning nerves. All the little controls that keep a body running like a top had been completely destroyed in this creature—in a matter of seconds—and the thing was entirely out of control, twitching and writhing on the floor like it had been stepped on by a giant’s mighty foot. Squashed like a bug.
The convulsions were tremulous, and every single restructured muscle fiber in the thing’s body vibrated with incredible intensity—
And then it stopped.
The fiery eyes dulled.
It was dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Garrett muttered.
Carolyn turned toward him. “Are you praying, or just amazed?”
“I think a little of both.”
“It’s nasty stuff.” She paused. “But, there’s worse out there, believe it or not.”
“Unfortunately, I believe you.”
Lieutenant Ewing was watching a medical readout panel right next to the chamber’s entrance. All the needles and dials had stopped moving. “All biometric functions have ceased.”
“Is it dead?” Garrett asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Carolyn answered.
The first B-52 lumbered off the runway at Hill AFB, Utah. Ex-Soviet chemical weapons filled its cavernous bomb bay and hung from its wing pylons. It was immediately followed by four other BUFFs heading toward their preplanned targets in the heartland of the United States of America.
The president had given the order.
CHAPTER 41
“How much longer are we going to wait?”
“I’m not too sure, Garrett,” Carolyn answered. She glanced at Josh Ewing, and he shook his head. Still no readings from inside the chamber. “It looks like the soman did the job, but I want to wait a little longer before we call it
a success.”
“If it was going to come back to life, shouldn’t we be seeing something on the monitors?” General Rammes was getting impatient.
“This is a new species, sir, one we know very little about. It’s in this thing’s genetic code—because of Gemini—to adapt to anything harmful. We don’t know how long the process takes. If we had monitoring equipment connected to the creature’s body, we could tell what was going on inside, but we’re limited to the biometric sensors in the room. They can pick up a heart rate, breathing, some electrical activity, but not much else. We can’t be entirely sure the thing is stone-cold dead by looking at the monitors.”
“So when do we decide it is dead?” Rammes asked.
“The soman has been evacuated from the room. The environmental controls were set to purge it from the chamber at a rate comparable to how the agent would disperse in an open area. It’s been gone for about . . . fifteen minutes now. I want to wait a little longer.”
CHAPTER 42
“The president ordered the attack? I thought he wanted a briefing before he made any sort of decision!”
“I know, I know. He just ordered it about an hour ago.” Tank knew what he was going to hear next.
“Doesn’t he understand how many citizens we’re going to lose if he drops that crap where the things are right now? We’ll lose thousands of innocent people who’re trying to escape from those things!”
“He knows, Hugo. He knows.”
“We’ve got to convince him to let the conventional forces try to stop them, maybe until morning. It’ll give us more time to get more people out of harm’s way and—”
“The BUFFs have already launched, Hugo. They’re in the air.”
“Jesus. Is he hitting each of the ground waves?”
“Yes. Five B-52s, each heading toward a different wave.”
“The things are in Lincoln right now. Everyone is going to die, Tank. People are still trying to get out.”
“I know. The president’s decision is final, Hugo. He made that quite clear.”
“Does the vice president know?”
“I have to assume she does. He’s kept her informed on every single decision he’s made. I’m sure he consulted her.”
“Why the quick decision?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
CHAPTER 43
“Mr. President, this is Jessie.”
“Yes, Jessie.” As he spoke to her on his secure phone in his situation room, Andrew could still smell her perfume on his skin.
“General Stone informs me the first B-52 will reach its target area in the next thirty minutes, sir.”
The first target area was Lincoln. He knew there were still many of his fellow citizens on the ground. He also knew he’d signed their death warrants as soon as he’d ordered the strike, but it had to be done. She’d convinced him of that. No matter how horrible it was, it had to be done now, before events spiraled out of control. “Thank you, Jessie. Keep me informed.”
“One more thing, sir. The vice president wishes to speak to you.”
“Go ahead and put her through.”
“Yes, sir.” She paused. “Andrew?”
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll put her through now.”
The president hung up his secure phone and waited for Allison Perez’s face to appear on the plasma screen in front of him.
When her face did appear, she looked confused. And a little angry.
“Mr. President.”
“Hello, Allison.”
“You ordered the chemical strike?”
“Yes.”
“I understood you wanted a briefing on casualties prior to ordering—”
“There’s no more time for briefings, Allison. The things have to be stopped right now. It doesn’t make any difference whether or not I saw the numbers. People are going to die. Innocent people. I fully understand that.”
“We don’t even know if the soman will kill these things yet. If it doesn’t work, we will—”
“—suffer a nuclear holocaust on our own soil, Allison. That was my only other option, wasn’t it? You heard exactly what I heard: conventional weapons will not be able to stop these things. And they’re spreading, Allison, they’re spreading.”
“Mr. President, may I speak freely?”
“We’re not in the military anymore, Allison. You don’t have to ask my permission. I expect you to speak your mind. You know that.”
“I also know, sir, that making a decision like this is your prerogative, and yours alone, as commander in chief. However, I do not appreciate being kept out of the loop.”
Her statement surprised him. “How in the hell have I kept you out of the loop? You’ve been a part of every single briefing I’ve received on these things!”
“I’m your vice president. I should hear about important decisions from you, sir, not as secondhand information passed to me by the national security advisor. Especially when it’s a decision like this, with thousands of lives at stake. I’m suddenly being held at arm’s length, Mr. President, and that’s not where I belong.”
“I had a decision to make, Allison, and I made it. You’re correct when you say it’s my prerogative as commander in chief to make decisions like this. It’s my call. If I feel a threat to the national security—no, the survival of the United States—warrants my immediate action, then I will take it, regardless of whether or not I’ve been properly briefed or whether or not I’ve called you personally.”
“I understand that sir, but—”
“No, I don’t think you do. We’re facing a situation that no one has ever had to deal with before. No one! Our country is being eaten alive and we haven’t been able to stop it. We have to take quick action—and if I deem necessary, drastic action—to stop it. If this chemical attack doesn’t work, I’ve only got one option left. One option, Madame Vice President.”
There was a moment of silence in the situation room as the two top leaders of the United States stared at each other through electronic eyes, seeing faces on the screen that neither had seen before.
“Then, Mr. President, let us both pray that this option works.”
“It will, Allison, it has to.”
“And if it doesn’t, sir, I hope I don’t find out about an order to use nuclear weapons by looking out my window and seeing a mushroom cloud on the horizon.”
“I’ll keep you informed, Allison.”
The screen went blank.
Allison sat alone in the breakout room, struggling with her thoughts. She and Andrew had argued before—especially following the Cleveland attack—but never, never had he been so . . .
Different.
She’d seen him stressed. Seen him angry. After Kate’s death, she’d watched him wrestle with his inner demons, struggling to find himself again after such an important part of his personal life had been so cruelly ripped away.
She’d seen the best of the man, and the worst. But through it all, he’d never kept her at arm’s length. Especially not during a crisis.
Something was wrong. She wasn’t sure what yet, but the gnawing ache in her gut was screaming a warning. She pressed a button connecting her to the NORTHCOM senior controller and asked to see Admiral Grierson. He entered the room a moment later.
“Keats, where’s the nearest E-4?”
“Denver, ma’am. Sitting standby at DIA.”
She’d flown to Colorado Springs on Air Force Two, a modified Boeing 757 the Air Force used for vice presidential—and at times, congressional—travel. It was a capable platform, but she needed something designed to perform a mission she hoped wouldn’t be necessary.
Allison had learned over the years that hope, like wishing, was also a sign of poor planning. What she was a
bout to do was highly irregular, but she’d answer for it later. She was the vice president, and if anyone didn’t like it, they could kiss her Coastie ass.
“Bring it here.”
“Ma’am?”
“Get me the fucking E-4, Keats. I’m going airborne.”
High above the Nebraska farm fields, the first B-52 started its bombing run. The bomb bay doors slammed open, and the first of the old Soviet chemical weapons dropped from its belly. It was followed by many, many more.
CHAPTER 44
Ray Smythe was making the most difficult phone call of his life. On the other end of the line was his baby girl.
“Daddy?”
“It’s me, honey.”
“We’re stuck, Daddy! There’s wrecks all over the place and nobody’s moving!”
For once, her cell phone reception was crystal clear. He was glad for that at least. “I know, honey. Try to stay calm. We’ve got soldiers west of you who are going to stop them. I promise.” He’d never lied to his daughter before.
“I’m scared, Daddy, I’m so scared!”
“It’s all right, honey. It’s all right.” He could hear the low rumble of the B-52’s engines through her phone, as it thundered through the night sky above his daughter, dumping its load of death. He knew he only had minutes to say what he needed to say.
“Daddy, I—oh God, I can see them! I can see them, Daddy! They’re coming! Ohmygod, ohmygod, I’m gonna die, Daddy! I can see their eyes!”
“Shhhh. Hush, little one.” He’d called her that as a child. “I want you to listen to me, okay?”
“Okay . . .” Her voice was trembling.
“I want you to know that I love you, Laura. I love you more than anything in this entire world. Do you know that?”
“Yes, yes, I know that . . .”
“Your mother and I love you so much, and we’re so very, very proud of you.”
“Daddy, what’s going to happen to me? What’s going to—”
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