Harper’s uninjured hand was freckled with powder burns and skin was missing from two knuckles. He ran his trembling fingers through his sandy hair as he spoke. He did it two or three times each minute. His other hand lay in his lap, the hand cocooned inside gauze wrappings.
I waited. I had more time than he did.
After a full minute, though, I said, “Where did she come from?”
Harper sighed. “She was a refugee. We found her staggering in the foothills.”
“A refugee from what?”
“From the big meltdown out in the desert.”
“In the Helmand River Valley?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t tack on “sir.” He was fucking with me, and I was okay with that for now. He didn’t know me, didn’t really know how much shit he was in, or how deep a hole he’d dug for himself. All he knew was that his career in the Marines had hit a guard rail at seventy miles an hour, and now he was sitting across a small table from a guy wearing captain’s bars and no other military insignia. No medals or unit patch. No name tag. Harper had to be measuring that against the deferential way the colonel treated me. Like I outranked him, which I don’t. I’m not even in the military anymore. But in this particular matter I was able to throw more weight than the base commander. More weight than anyone else in or out of uniform on the continent. As far as Harper was concerned, when it came to throwing him a lifeline it was me and then God, and God was off the clock.
Harper couldn’t really know any of that, but he was smart enough and sly enough to know that I had some juice. On one hand, he rightly figured that I could drop him into a hole deeper than the one he’d dug for himself. On the other hand, he had information that I wanted, and he was stalling to see how best to play his only good card.
“How long are they going to keep me here?”
“To be determined, Sergeant. Do you feel you’re being inconvenienced?”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
“It’s been three days.”
“Not quite. Forty-seven hours and change.”
“Seems longer.” He didn’t even know that we’d already met. Not sure when I was going to spring that on him. It wouldn’t do anything to calm him down.
I opened my briefcase and took out a file folder.
“I’d like you to look at some photos,” I said and took two color eight-by-tens from my briefcase and laid them on the table. If I’d tossed a scorpion on the table he couldn’t have jerked back faster.
“Jesus Christ!”
I nodded at the print. “That’s her?”
“Fuck me,” muttered the sergeant. “Oh fuck me fuck me fuck me.”
Take that as a yes.
I sat back and waited him out. Sweat popped all along his forehead and leaked out from his hairline. He smelled like urine, cigarette smoke and testosterone, but I could smell fear, too. A whole lot of it. I used to think that was a myth, or something only dogs and horses could smell, but lately I’ve learned different. The kind of shit I deal with? I smell it a lot, and on myself, too. Like now, but I wasn’t going to let this asshole know it.
“Could…could you turn the pictures over? I don’t mean to be a pussy, but I don’t want her staring at me the whole time, y’know?”
“Sure,” I said, and did so. But I left them on the table. “Try to relax. Smoke one if you got any.”
He shook his head. “Never took it up. Jesus H. Christ. Wish I did.”
I opened my briefcase and took out two bottles of spring water, unscrewed one and handed it to him. He drank half of it down. Then I took some airline bottles of Jack Daniel’s and lined them up in front of him. One, two, three.
“If it helps,” I said.
He snatched one off the edge of the table, twisted off the cap and chugged it, then coughed. More bravado than brains.
“Tell me about the woman,” I said. “And what happened in the cave.”
He gave that some thought, drank half of the second bottle of Jack.
“Do you know my outfit? Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. We were part of Operation Khanjar, working that corner of Helmand Province, doing some recon stuff up in the hills,” he began. “Counterinsurgency work, and some fox hunts to flush the Taliban teams running opium through the area. That whole part of the province is nothing but dead rock riddled with a million caves. You could hide a hundred thousand people in there, camels and all, and it would take us fifty years to find half of them. That’s why this war was fucked from the snap. The Russians couldn’t do it twenty years ago, and we can’t do it now. Besides, nine out of ten people you meet are friendlies who look and dress just like the hostiles, so how you going to know?”
“Skip the politics, Sergeant. Talk about the woman.”
He shrugged. “It was weird out there because last week the whole place was lit up by some kind of underground explosion. We got word that some Taliban lab blew up, but the blast wasn’t nuclear. Something to do with geo-thermal chambers or shifting plates or some bullshit like that. A whole section of desert just fell into itself and there was this spike of fire that shot a couple hundred feet in the air.”
“No radiation?”
“No. Most of us still had TLD badges and the badges stayed neutral. The area was hot, though…not with radiation, but actually hot. Like a furnace. When we reached the outer perimeter of the event zone we could see a weird shimmer and I realized that big sections of the desert had been melted to glass. It looked like a lava flow, rippled and dark.”
“And is that where you found the woman?” I asked.
He drank the rest of the second bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and chased it with a long pull on the water bottle. He was pale, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips dry. He looked like shit and probably felt worse. Just mentioning the “woman” made his eyes jump.
“Yeah,” he said. “Locals started calling in sightings of burned people, and then word came down to scramble a couple of recon teams. We went in…and after that everything went to shit.” He turned away to hide wet eyes.
-2-
The Warehouse
DMS Tactical Field Office / Baltimore
Ninety-two Hours Ago
I was on the mats with Echo Team’s newest members—replacements for the guys we lost in Philadelphia. There were four of them, two Rangers, a jarhead and a former SWAT guy from L.A. For the last couple of hours Bunny and I had taken turns beating on them, chasing them with paintball guns, trying to carve our initials in them with live blades, swinging at them with baseball bats. Everything we could think of. Actually, let me rephrase that. There were ten of them this morning. The four who were left were the ones who hadn’t been taken to the infirmary or told to go the fuck back to where they came from.
We were just about to enter a practical discussion on pain tolerance when my boss, Mr. Church, came into the gym at a fast walk. He only ever hurries when the real shit is coming down the pike. I crossed to meet him.
Church nodded toward the recruits. “Are these four in or out?”
“Is something up?”
“Yes, and it’s on a high boil.”
“They’re in.”
Church turned to Bunny. “Sergeant Rabbit, get these men kitted out. Afghanistan. No ID, no patches. You’re wheels up in fifteen.” Bunny flicked a glance at me, but he didn’t question the order. Instead he turned and hustled them all toward the locker room. Bunny was a nice kid most of the time, but he was still a sergeant. And we’d been through some shit together, so he knew my views on hesitation: Don’t.
“What’s the op?” I asked.
Church handed me the file. “This came in as an email attachment. Two photos, two separate sources.”
I flipped open the folder and looked at two photos of an incredibly beautiful woman. Iraqi, probably. Black hair, full lips, and the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen. Eyes so powerful that despite the low res of the photos and graininess of the printout, they radiated heat. Her f
ace was streaked with dirt and there was some blood crusted around her nose and the corner of her mouth.
I looked at him.
“These were relayed to us by the people we have seeded into a Swiss seismology team studying an underground explosion in the Helmand River Valley. We ran facial recognition on them and MindReader kicked out a ninety-seven percent confidence that this is Amirah.”
My mouth went dry as dust.
Holy shit.
When I was brought into the DMS a month ago my first gig was to stop a team of terrorists who had a bioweapon that still gives me nightmares. I’m not kidding. Couple times a week I wake up with the shivers, cold sweat running down my skin, and clenched teeth that are the only things between a silent room and a gut-buster of a scream.
There were three people behind that scheme. A British pharmaceutical mogul named Gault, a religious fanatic from Yemen called El Mujahid, and his wife, Amirah. She was the molecular biologist who conceived and created the Seif al Din pathogen. The Sword of the Faithful. They test-drove the pathogen with limited release in remote Afghani villages, trying out different strains until they had one that couldn’t be stopped. Seif al Din. An actual doomsday plague. El Mujahid brought it here, and Echo Team stopped him. But only just. If you factor in the dead Afghani villagers and the people killed here, the body count was north of twelve hundred. Even so, Mr. Church and his science geeks figured we caught a break. It could have been more. Could have been millions, even billions. It came down to that kind of a photo finish.
Most of the victims turned into mindless killers whose metabolism had been so drastically altered by the plague that they could not think, had no personalities, didn’t react to pain, and were hard as balls to kill. The pathogen reduced most organ functions to such a minimal level that they appeared to be dead. Or…maybe they were dead. The scientists are still sorting it out. We called them “walkers.” A bad pun, short for “dead men walking.” The DMS science chief is a pop culture geek. My guys in Echo Team called the infected by another name. Yeah. The “Z” word.
And you wonder why I get night terrors. Six weeks ago I was a Baltimore cop doing scut work for Homeland. Sitting wiretaps, that sort of thing. Now I was top dog for a crew of first-team shooters. Do not ask me how one thing led to another, but here I am.
I looked at the photos.
Amirah.
“The rumors of her demise have been greatly exaggerated,” I said.
Church managed not to smile.
“If you’re sending us, then she hasn’t been apprehended.”
“No,” he said. “Spotted only. I arranged for two Marine Recon squads to locate and detain.”
“What if Amirah’s infected?”
“I shared a limited amount of information with the appropriate officers in the chain of command. If anyone reports certain kinds of activity—from Amirah or anyone—then the whole area gets lit up.”
“Lit up as in—?”
“A nuclear option falls within the parameters of ‘acceptable losses.’”
“Can you at least wait until me and my guys reach minimum safe distance?”
He didn’t smile. Neither did I.
“You’ll be operating with an Executive Order, so you’ll have complete freedom of movement.”
“You got the president to sign an order that fast?”
He just looked at me.
“What are my orders?”
“Our primary concern is to determine if anyone infected with the Seif al Din pathogen is loose in Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, that’ll be about as easy to establish as bin Laden’s zip code.”
“Do your best. We’ll be monitoring all news coming out of the area, military, civilian and other. If there is even a peep, that intel will be routed to you and the clock will start.”
“If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”
“Noted.”
“What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”
“Amirah would be a prize catch. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The vice president thinks she would be a great asset to our own bio-weapons programs.”
“And is that what you want?” I asked, and then he told me.
-3-
The Helmand River Valley
Sixty-one Hours Ago
We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT—Small Kill Team—operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.
Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed: “Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pick-up point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”
He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.
The six of us went out into the desert, split into two teams and headed into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.
Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool: This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind—sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.
“Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”
Bob Faraday—a big moose of a guy whose call-sign was Slim—ran point. It was getting dark fast and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night-vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed behind, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt out from under rocks and rise up from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread out to join the ocean of shadows that was night.
Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.
As we ran up behind him I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.
I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.
The dark objects were people.
Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race or even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.
“There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab,” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”
“Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.
Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”
“Even so,” said Bunny.
We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.
The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”
“Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.
There was a long pause.
And it got longer.
I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”
Two long damn seconds.
“Cowboy to Jukebox, do you copy?”
That’s when we heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire. And the screams.
We ran.
“Night-vision!” I snapped, and we flipped the units into place as the black landscape suddenly transformed into a thousand shades of luminescent green. We were all c
arrying ALICE packs with about fifty pounds of gear—most of it stuff that’ll blow up, M4 combat rifles, AMT .22 caliber auto mags on our hips, and combat S.I. assault boots. It’s all heavy and it can slow you down…except when your own brothers in arms are under fire. Then it feels like wings that carry you over the ground at the speed of a racing tiger. That’s the illusion, and that’s how it felt as we tore up the slopes toward the path Second Squad had taken.
The gunfire was continuous.
As we hit the ridge, I signaled the others to get low and slow. Bunny came up beside me. “Those are M5s, boss.”
He was right. Our guns have their own distinctive sound, and it doesn’t sound much like the Kalashnikovs the Taliban favored.
The gunfire stopped abruptly.
We froze, letting the night tell us its story.
The last of the gunfire echoes bounced back to us from the distant peaks. I could hear loose rocks clattering down the slope, probably debris knocked loose by stray bullets. In the distance the wind was beginning to howl through some of the mountain passes.
I keyed the radio.
“Cowboy to Jukebox. Respond.”
Nothing.
We moved forward, moving as silently as trained men can do when any misstep could draw fire. The tone of the wind changed as we edged toward the rock wall that would spill us into the pass where Second Squad had gone. A heavier breeze, perhaps? Moving through one of the deeper canyons?
A month ago I’d have believed that. Too much has happened since.
I tapped Bunny and then used the hand signal to listen.
He heard the sound, then, and I could feel him stiffen beside me. He pulled Slim close and used two fingers to mime walking.
Slim had been fully briefed on the trip. He understood. The low sigh wasn’t the wind. It was the unendingly hungry moan of a walker.
I finger-counted down from three and we rounded the bend.
Jukebox had said that they’d found five bodies. Second Squad made eight.
As we rounded the wall we saw that the count was wrong. There weren’t eight people in the pass. There were fifteen. All of them were dead. Most of them moving.
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