“Turn, you bastard,” Renee murmured as the first truck neared the projected turn.
Jack and Naomi watched over Renee’s shoulder, their attention riveted on her computer screens. The yellow icon of the first truck slowed, then turned onto the new route. The other two, trailing about a quarter mile behind one another, followed.
“Yes!” Renee shouted jubilantly. “It’s working!”
Leaning down, Jack gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “You’re bloody amazing,” he whispered.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” Renee told him, “but you can give me a big smooch after we’ve accounted for every one of these bastards. We’re still a long way from being out of the woods.”
“And then, of course,” Naomi said, “we have to deal with the little problem of the facility itself.”
Jack frowned. That was the one part of the plan that he hadn’t liked at all, but Naomi had made it clear that Jack was staying put. Staying here. “Hathcock’s a good man. He and his team will take care of it.”
Hathcock and eight other men had boarded the Falcon on a quick turnaround from the nearby airport and had headed back to Nebraska as fast as a grumbling Ferris could fly them after they’d gotten back from Baltimore.
Jack glanced at the time displays running along the bottom of the main screen. “They should already be in position. Once the last trucks are away...”
“They’ll turn that place into an inferno,” Naomi concluded softly.
***
“Ladies and gentlemen,” President Curtis was saying, “this is truly a historic day.” He was standing behind the podium in the White House press room, a broad smile on his face. Beside him was the CEO of New Horizons, Aaron Steinbecke, who wore a matching expression.
One of the members of the EDS command center staff was tasked with monitoring the news channels for relevant information, and it hadn’t taken long to find plenty. It had been six hours now since the first trucks had rolled out, and the last of them had been shown leaving the plant just as President Curtis had begun his news conference. A real-time video feed of the plant was being shown in the lower right corner of the news screen as Curtis continued, “I have here with me Aaron Steinbecke, the CEO of New Horizons, a company that is going to literally change our nation and our world. Mere hours ago, a fleet of trucks was sent out–” the lower corner video feed cut to an earlier scene near daybreak that showed a stream of tractor-trailer rigs rolling out of the New Horizons facility as the sun rose behind them, “–that are carrying what very well may be the most important cargo ever delivered: grain that will not only provide us nourishment, but that will also protect us from disease, including the outbreak of a new virus that some scientists believe could rival the influenza pandemic in 1918 that killed millions.
“But instead of producing vaccines that are both expensive and often difficult to distribute, New Horizons has been able to engineer a cure into the very crops that we grow for food. And this morning I am submitting a bill to Congress requesting the necessary funding to subsidize the cost of these new strains of wheat and other food crops to keep the price at current market levels.” He looked into the camera, his expression one of caring and compassion. “This salvation, born through years and billions of dollars in research, will be for all mankind, and we will make it affordable for every country in the world.”
Jack turned his attention from the President’s speech as the handset for one of the phones in the command console beeped. Picking it up, he said, “Dawson.”
“We’re ready,” Hathcock told him.
Jack looked at Naomi, who nodded. “Blow it.”
***
After hanging up, Hathcock motioned to Claret, who flipped open the protective cover over a red button of the remote detonator he held. Hathcock raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and looked at the New Horizons plant that stood half a mile away.
He and his men had taken a page out of the harvesters’ play book and had put together a fuel-air explosive bomb, but this one was much larger than any the harvesters had used on the genebanks. Much larger. His team had rigged a trailer with tanks containing six thousand gallons of gasoline and high pressure air tanks to disperse it into an aerosol inside the building. After that, a single spark would blow the place into oblivion. Hathcock, however, wasn’t content with something so mundane as a spark: the trailer also contained ten bricks of C-4 explosive, connected to a remote detonator.
He shook his head, still astonished at their luck. He and Claret had hijacked one of the trucks contracted for New Horizons and driven it to the facility, fully expecting it to be a suicide mission.
Much to their surprise, while New Horizons was worried about security of the seed itself, they weren’t inspecting the incoming trucks and their empty trailers. When the two men arrived at the outside perimeter gate, fully expecting a shootout with the guards and a heroic dash into the building that would end in a fiery demise, the guards simply checked the truck against their list and waved them on through.
“Right, then,” Hathcock had told them, barely able to conceal his surprise as he put the semi into gear and joined the line of trucks entering the big building.
Once inside, Hathcock faked a mechanical breakdown with some imaginative use of the clutch and gear shift, and the harried loading supervisor angrily directed them off to the side of the loading area to get out of the way of the other trucks waiting to pick up their cargoes.
After that, New Horizons security personnel had unceremoniously shepherded the two men out of the building and off the compound, not wanting a pair of truckers gawking around the facility. The truck was to be towed away later, once the loading operation was complete.
One phone call later, Hathcock and Claret were picked up by a team member in a pickup truck, who brought them here to their designated observation point inside a barn that had a clear view to the facility from the hay loft. While it had been a huge temptation to simply blow the facility to bits right away, they had orders to wait until the last of the trucks had cleared out. It had been a long wait, but the time had finally come.
“Armed,” Claret said. A green light glowed on the remote detonator, showing that it was communicating with its counterpart that was connected to the bomb in the truck.
“Initiate aerosol,” Hathcock ordered.
Claret flipped a switch on the detonator and was rewarded with another green light. “Initiated.”
Half a mile away, servos actuated, opening valves to the gasoline and high pressure air tanks in the trailer they’d left behind, turning the liquid gasoline into a fine aerosol mist that sprayed out vents cut in the roof and floor of the trailer.
***
The creature that mimicked Dr. Martin Kilburn stared impassively at the humans who had loaded the trucks. Because of the losses his kind (although he technically was not a “he,” as the adult form of his species was neuter) had suffered at Spitsbergen, he had been sent here from FBI headquarters to help ensure the final processing and loading of the seed went according to schedule.
Kilburn was not the only one. All the other creatures like him were here, save the one now imprisoned by the Earth Defense Society after the unfortunate incident on Spitsbergen, and another in Washington, D.C.
Looking down from his perch, he saw one of his genetic kin wearing the body of the one called Rachel Kempf, running diagnostics on one of the computers that controlled the various machines on the loading floor. His kind had no leader as the humans would understand. But if they had, it would likely have been Kempf. “She” had been central to their planning, and had been the one to understand how best to motivate the humans to assist in their own destruction.
Kempf glanced up at him, her face betraying no emotion before she returned her attention to the computer.
None of them had human emotions, although they could mimic them well. As he surveyed the loading docks, where thousands of bags of the precious seed were being loaded into the stream of trucks, Kilburn displayed an a
ir of satisfaction. Aside from the unfortunate breakdown of a single truck inside the facility, everything had gone smoothly in loading the seed.
The seed. It was the key to everything, to the very survival of his ancient and nearly extinct species. His kind could not procreate directly, as could the other species on this world. He knew that this had once been possible, dark ages ago, but their form had mutated over time, and this adaptive trait had been lost. Those like him were old, very, very old, so ancient that he had no memory of what had once been, other than indistinct dreams and visions. He no longer remembered where his race had been born, on this planet or another. But at one time, he knew, there had been many of his kind. Now only a few remained, all but two of which were in this building, ensuring their future.
For that future lay in genetic transmutation of other species, spreading the building blocks of his kind like a virus, using a virus. This was the only form of reproduction that had been left to them. But this required technology, technology that had required centuries to develop with the help of the humans. They had guided the efforts of the humans as best they could, but they were slow, so slow, to learn what his own kind knew by instinct, by genetic coding. And his kind had learned over time that it was unwise to take matters into their own hands, to push the humans too far or too fast: many had perished at the hands of humans after revealing too much of themselves. The nightmare creatures popular in human myth and legend were not all entirely the stuff of fantasy. Many of his ancient kin had been burned at the stake, beheaded, or worse.
Soon, he thought, looking at the humans recovering from the hectic labor of loading the many trucks that were now on their way to distribution centers across the country, these creatures will be nothing but incubators and food for our species, and this world shall be ours.
“Hey!” someone down on the loading floor suddenly shouted. “What’s that?”
Searching the work area, Kilburn found the human who had shouted, and saw that he was pointing at the broken down truck that still sat at the side of the loading area.
A heavy mist was pouring from the top and bottom of the big trailer, billowing out into the facility.
Then Kilburn caught the first whiff of the unmistakable odor of gasoline. It’s a bomb, he realized instantly, having been among those of his kind who had designed similar devices to destroy the world’s primary genebanks.
Even though he was standing on a supervisory platform thirty feet off the ground, he didn’t hesitate. There was no time to warn his genetic kin who still worked below, and his kind was not given to self-sacrifice.
He saw Kempf suddenly look up toward him, just before he pivoted around and hurled himself through one of the windows at the back of the platform.
Kilburn knew that she and the others would not survive.
***
On Claret’s remote, another light winked green. “Aerosol discharge complete,” he said, his thumb now hovering over the red button that would set off the C-4 explosive and detonate the vaporized gasoline.
“Det…” Hathcock began to say, then abruptly stopped. “Son of a bitch!” he cursed as he saw a person fly from one of the windows set up high in the building. Except by the time it reached the ground, it clearly wasn’t human. “Rifle!” he snapped, tossing aside the binoculars. One of his team members handed him the Barrett sniper rifle. They had brought it along, just in case.
“Should I detonate?” Claret asked urgently.
“Stand by,” Hathcock said tensely as he brought the Barrett to his shoulder and lined up the magnified sight picture in his right eye with the wide field of view in his left. The creature, clearly a harvester, was dashing on four multi-segmented legs across the compound toward a nearby stand of trees. “Mother of Christ,” he hissed as he tried to keep the thing centered in the Unertl scope.
“The bloody thing’s moving like a cheetah,” Claret said quietly, having grabbed up the binoculars to act as Hathcock’s spotter. “If it reaches those trees…”
Hathcock had only seconds, not only to stop this harvester from escaping, but to finish off the others still in the building before they realized what was happening and tried to escape, too. He would only have time for one shot.
Eliminating all distractions from his mind, Hathcock focused his entire being on the eerie form that danced in the scope’s sight picture. Holding his breath, he waited until he was between heartbeats before he gently stroked the big rifle’s trigger.
***
The Kilburn-thing ran in its natural form, all concerns about revealing its true self gone. It knew that the humans and its kin would die in the blast that must come at any time now, but it was determined to survive. It had survived the explosion at the FBI laboratory. It would survive this.
It was five yards away from the safety of the trees when the bullet from Hathcock’s rifle speared it through the chest. The bullet’s incendiary filling detonated, igniting the creature’s malleable tissue and blowing it into flaming chunks.
***
“Detonate!” Hathcock ordered as he lowered the rifle and looked from the smoldering pyre of the harvester back toward the New Horizons facility, where people were just starting to pour out the doors. He knew that a lot of innocent civilians were about to die. Hathcock wasn’t a heartless man, but having been through the hell of war himself, he knew that it happened. “God forgive us,” he whispered as Claret pushed the button on the remote detonator.
***
On the news channel showing the White House press room, President Curtis was just turning to invite Steinbecke to the podium to speak when the video feed in the lower left that had been showing a close-up of the New Horizons plant suddenly flared a brilliant orange and went dark.
Even though the main view showed Curtis continuing to speak, his words were overridden by a news anchor who suddenly interrupted the broadcast from the White House.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” the man said, “we seem to have...wait a moment.” He put his hand to his ear as if unable to believe what he was hearing.
Then a new video flashed up, this time taking up the entire screen: it was the New Horizons plant. Or, more accurately, what was left of it. The view on the television suddenly split, showing the massive conflagration that had consumed the plant on one side, and the White House press room on the other.
Curtis paused in his introduction of Steinbecke as an aide rushed up and whispered in his ear. The President’s smile faltered, then was quickly replaced by shock as he audibly asked the aide to repeat his message. The man did, and Curtis turned back toward the hushed audience, his face a mask of undiluted rage.
“My fellow Americans,” he said in a voice that was so quiet that it was little more than a whisper. But it made up in anger what it lacked in volume. “Once again, we have been attacked. Many of those watching this broadcast must have witnessed what we here have not yet seen for ourselves: the destruction of the New Horizons plant, just a moment ago.”
Another aide, holding out a smart phone of some kind, rushed up to Curtis’s side. Curtis watched it for a moment, seeing the miniaturized broadcast of the plant exploding in a massive fireball, before gesturing for the man to move away.
“As of this moment, my friends,” he continued to the stunned audience in the press room and millions of television and Internet watchers across the nation and the world, including Jack, Naomi, and the others at the EDS base, “we are at war. This is no longer terrorism as we’ve known it in the past. Those who are committing these atrocities, who I believe are members of the so-called Earth Defense Society, or EDS, aren’t fighting for a political or religious ideal. They’re trying to destroy humanity’s future, and this is the last time they’ll strike, here in America or anywhere else.” Curtis stared into the camera, and Jack felt a chill run down his spine at the President’s expression. “We’ll find you,” Curtis promised. “And when we do, you’ll be shown no mercy.”
With that, he turned and stormed out of the press room
without another word.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“We found them,” Ridley announced as she strode into the emergency meeting of the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room. President Curtis had called the meeting after she had informed him that there had been a major break in the pursuit of the EDS.
Ray Clement followed her in and sat in a seat along the wall behind Ridley as she took a seat at the table.
“My God, Monica,” Jeffrey Komick, the Secretary for Homeland Security, gasped as he saw the bandages covering Ridley’s forehead and the right side of her face. Like the others in the room, he’d heard that she’d been injured in a shootout, but he hadn’t realized that it had been that close.
She spared him a glance, but nothing more. “As we suspected,” she went on, “they’re in California, in the Sutter Buttes area, not far from Beale Air Force Base.”
That sent a stir through the group that was silenced by an impatient wave of the President’s hand.
“We were able to make the connection between the plane and a series of service contracts and companies, even a local wind farm, that seemed to have a common controlling interest,” she said, giving a broad overview of what the hundreds of special agents who’d been scouring the area and every database and information source that the Bureau, Intelligence Community, and Homeland Security agencies could access, had managed to finally piece together through thousands of man-hours of investigation and analysis. “My agents finally pinned down the physical location of the EDS hideout by piecing together leads from truckers who’d seen some unusual things going on at a repair facility located in central California.”
Clement handed out photographs from a folder that had been tucked under his arm. The satellite images showed a very busy truck repair and trailer storage business. Semis and trailers were parked all over the compound.
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