He looked at Park – whose face had now gone dark.
Lovell took a breath. “I defied him by giving Sarah Cameron a SCAR with a suppressor and grenade launcher, which can’t hurt. But it’s only one weapon.”
“Wait a minute,” Park said. “So you’re saying they were set up to fail?”
“No. But they were set up so that if they did fail, we wouldn’t suffer any great losses from it. Basically, Abrams was hedging his bets.”
“Bets?” Park said. “That son of a bitch! This isn’t Texas Hold’em. These are people’s lives – people who put themselves into danger because I said they had to!”
The scientist stood up and genuinely looked like he was going to march upstairs to the bridge and personally kick Abrams’s ass. Lovell shook his head. “It’s too late. These cards have been dealt. Now we’ve just got to play them the best we can.”
Maybe, Lovell thought, they would get lucky and things would go smoothly. Sometimes, like today, luck was all you had going for you. And now they at least had ISR up, which meant they could be the team’s eyes, seeing the whole complex before they set foot anywhere in it.
“C’mon,” he said, turning on a second monitor beside the one with the shoulder-cam feed. This one now showed the drone video – currently just the exterior of the gigantic warehouse-like structure the team had disappeared inside. “Now we can add some strategic value for the men on the ground.” Slightly lowering his voice, he added, “As soon as they get outdoors again, at any rate…”
Park sat down, leaned back, and tried not freak out too much.
And he tried to remember the operator lesson that not freaking out was job one.
* * *
At that moment, inside the gigantic power plant room, Sarah could feel Browning, beside and just behind her, exercising all his willpower to stay off his trigger.
“I got ’em…” he said, tracking with his rifle.
And it was true that now the closest runners were all but sliding into Sarah’s kneeling form by the time she dropped them. But she was determined to get this done – without the dangerous noise of unsuppressed gunfire.
“No!” she said. “I’ve got it.”
“Door’s clear!” Jenson shouted from behind. “Move out – come on!”
But Sarah didn’t turn around or lay off. She knew if she didn’t finish this, they’d have the same problem they had before – a mob of moaning dead drawing more – just on the other side of that door this time. So she kept shooting until the last sprinting figure in the crowd dropped and slid across the floor.
There were actually only six of them in the end.
But it had felt like a battalion at the time.
Looking down, Sarah saw her rifle bolt locked back.
That was the last round in the rifle.
As she climbed to her feet, still flooded with adrenaline, but super-pleased that she had done exactly what she set out to do, motion caught her eye – up high this time. It was a Zulu way up on the catwalk suspended over the giant room.
She changed magazines, then took a bead and took two silenced shots. But the damned thing was really far away, and she couldn’t seem to nail it.
Browning stepped forward with his rifle to his shoulder. If Sarah was super-pleased with her performance, he had been super-frustrated – at having to hold his fire throughout the fight. He felt like he brought one real skill to the party – his marksmanship – and he wasn’t being allowed to use it. But he could finish this last one. What would one rifle report matter, after all that moaning?
But as he started to squeeze his trigger, a hand pushed his barrel down.
It was Wesley. “Don’t worry about it, mate. It’ll never get down here, and will probably just go to sleep again after we’re gone. Come on, let’s go.”
Last out into the corridor, Wesley pressed the door closed behind them.
Bingo
Jizan Economic City - Outside the Electrical Plant
And in closing the door behind him, Wesley plunged the hallway beyond, which had no windows, into total blackness.
Everyone there had either a flashlight or, in the case of Wesley and Sarah, weapon-mounted lights. But not one of them knew how to get to them or turn them on by touch. Everyone fumbled. While they were doing so, the overhead halogen lights came on – revealing Jenson standing there with his hand on a wall switch.
“Didn’t think that would work!” he said. He was smiling big, thinking he’d done good by finding the light switch in the dark.
But then there was an extremely loud pop – and the overhead lights sparked and sizzled and went out again. They had been on just long enough for some of the others to find their own lights and those came on now, illuminating the corridor, albeit starkly and unevenly.
“How does this place even have power?” Browning asked.
Burns said, “It’s an oil-fired power station – which means this city is its own grid.”
Sarah nodded. “Which also means it would have had grid storage against peak demand – battery arrays or hydrogen storage – so the plant wouldn’t have to surge every time usage did. There might be power hiding out in this place for years.”
“Either way,” Wesley said, “it’s out again now, and it’s not our problem.” He turned and moved out, leading the group down the corridor by the light spilling from underneath his rifle barrel.
Burns, at the rear of the column, sniffed once at the air before leaving. He was pretty sure he could detect a burning smell, but that could be accounted for by the fluorescent lights popping from the power surge. He considered saying something to Wesley and the others. But in a long career of doing this kind of thing – namely sneaking into places he wasn’t supposed to be – he’d learned that the really important thing was to get in, move fast, and get the hell out again.
He exited the door at corridor’s end and shut it behind him.
* * *
Ten minutes later they were in another corridor, one on the desalination-plant side of the complex. It was darker here. Much darker.
Now that everyone had more or less worked out their flashlights and weapon-mounted lights, they were using them. Their narrow cones of lonely illumination lit up the long stretches of dark and cramped corridor ahead.
Soon the team emerged into another cavernous open area – but one more complex, elaborate, and filled with hazards and hiding places. Wesley figured this was the desalination plant itself. Trying to make it out through the small cone of his light, one tiny patch at a time, was like a blind man trying to identify an elephant by touch.
But he could vaguely work out that it consisted of three extremely large pipelines running down the center of the room, two of them green and one gray. Somewhat smaller pipes led off these at intervals, disappearing into either large boxy machines, or else arrays of vertical tubes. Walkways, presumably for workers, snaked above, beside, and around the pipelines in the center. Out on both edges of the blimp-hangar-like space were towering stacks of what looked like hundreds and hundreds of horizontal blue tubes in racks.
There was more, but it was all kind of overwhelming – and Wesley had no idea how a desalination plant worked, so he didn’t know what any of it was anyway. Really, he was much more worried about running into more dead in here – where there was very little open space, and thus no time to react. Any attacking Zulus would be on them nearly instantly.
On top of that, Wesley didn’t even really know what the hell his job was in here, trying to do LT Campbell’s mandated recon. All she’d told him was that she wanted to know if it looked “intact and functional.” So he told his team to stay together while they walked the length of it, occasionally ducking their heads under big pipes or stepping over others, all the while making as little noise as possible – and checking every corner and cranny, as best they could, for dead. Along the way, Wesley tried to shine his light in various directions. None of the crazy towering machinery looked obviously broken or decayed.
And that would have to
do for Campbell’s intel.
When they finally reached a door at the far end, Wesley was relieved that they had accomplished his main goal: not getting anyone killed or turned in there.
He opened the door and led them back outside.
And while they had been indoors, the sun had gone down. Night had fallen.
After letting the others out, he turned back to the door. The security guard in him wanted to secure this outside entrance. But the ascendant military leader in him hesitated – and told him they might need to quickly get off the street again, and might not have time to pick the lock.
He compromised – unlocking the door, but pulling it shut behind him.
* * *
The door was actually on the long side of the plant building, but right at its very end – and they emerged into the deep shadow of one more giant structure, which they could just make out in the last glow of twilight.
This one was nearly the size of the entire power and desal plant itself – except cylindrical in shape, with huge pipes coming out of it top and bottom. It had to be where the desalinated water was stored – water storage for the whole city. If those vats of oil had been the size of water tanks, this was like the municipal water tank for Brobdingnag, land of the giants. It practically blotted out the sky. It was something like what Wesley imagined the Superdome looked like from the parking lot.
Turning back, Wesley could see a big array of eight pipes emerging from the plant side by side, each at least eight feet in diameter, and all snaking down the gentle slope toward the Red Sea. At some point, these had been slowly sucking the ocean dry. Wesley seemed to remember reading that the Red Sea was one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world. So the plant had its work cut out for it.
“Jesus,” said Jenson, never having seen a tank that big. “Is that full of water?”
“Probably,” Wesley said. “But we’re not climbing up it to find out. Our recon’s done. Time to get on with the real job.”
There was maybe only twenty feet of space between the water tank and the plant, at their closest approach, so Wesley led them on a circuit around it and out onto a street that continued west, away from the water, uphill, and flanked by office buildings on either side. This whole area was the high-technology campus, and the road led right where they were going. However, he could also dimly see a few standing figures in the middle of it farther up, so he led the team off the street, ducked behind one of the buildings, and continued west up the little grassy parks behind them.
Checking his forearm map periodically, the glow of which was starting to make him feel conspicuous in the dark, in another few minutes he had them to the pharmaceutical complex – and then, following another dual-language map on a post, found the bioinformatics/genomics facility. All without mishap, and all without any close encounters with the dead. After their quick and brutal fight in the power plant, this almost seemed to be going too well.
He decided to post Judy at the entrance while they went inside. “Guard,” he said to her, and she sat by the door, ears erect, looking alert.
The whole target building was fronted with glass, and the doors were glass themselves, but Wesley motioned Burns forward to pick the lock for them. In another few seconds they were in. There was still some ambient light inside, due to all the exterior windows. As they moved into the interior, though, it grew too dark to see without lights, and they all clicked theirs back on. As they paused to do so, a voice spoke in Wesley’s ear. It was Dr. Park.
“Okay, you’re looking for the labs – and probably a clean room facility.”
Wesley found this exceedingly strange, being addressed from hundreds of miles away like the man was looking over his shoulder – or over Sarah’s shoulder, actually. But he got over it quickly and found his radio button. “Roger that.”
He motioned Sarah up beside him, so that Park could see exactly what he saw. There were no maps on the walls, but it didn’t take much poking around in the crossing cones of their lights before they found it – the complex of labs. They moved into the first big room – and Wesley cast his weapon-mounted light on exactly three boxy pieces of lab equipment before he found it. It looked like an oversized desktop copier with a touchscreen on top, but with four tubes sticking out the front, and three bottles in a transparent enclosure on the right side.
Wesley shined his light down on it, while Sarah leaned over and pointed her shoulder at it. On the front was a logo – an A and a B with a little twisted double helix between them. The label below read: Applied Biosystems Ion PGM.
“Bingo,” Park said. “That’s EXACTLY what I need. Self-contained benchtop sequencing solution. Awesome. Well done, guys.”
Before Wesley could even instruct them to, Burns and Jenson appeared with a rolling cart, unplugged the device, lifted it up from two sides, and wrestled it onto the cart. And just like that, they were rolling it back through the corridors of the facility – right toward the front door.
As they neared the exit, Wesley had them turn their lights off, to avoid drawing the dead outside. The building faced west, straight back down the hill and toward the water and the marina – and as their eyes adjusted, the whole landscape started to resolve in the ambient moon and starlight. They were completely out of daylight now. But if everything kept going this smoothly, they’d be out of there and on their way back home in no time.
Slipping out just like church mice.
Yeah, Wesley thought, covering the rear now, watching the team and the cart moving ahead of him and out into the slightly glowing night.
This is going almost UNBELIEVABLY well…
Exquisite Dead Guy
Jizan Economic City - Electrical Plant
Grrrgghh. Grrrgghh-grrmph.
The dead electrical plant technician made bubbly guttural noises, its blue lips pressed into the metal grille that was the floor of the overhead catwalk.
Grrrgglle-grrrgghh.
The half-decayed corpse in its torn blue coveralls was looking straight down onto the floor of the electrical plant, from twenty-five feet above it. Spreadeagled, it lay face down on the section of catwalk directly above the door – the one in the northeast corner that all the living meat had exited from.
Starting out on the far side, this elevated dead guy, the last surviving Zulu in the room, had stumbled along the catwalk, following around the long side of the giant open area – until it was directly over where it had last seen the lovely-smelling, noise-making, fleshy meat creatures. It had then gone down on its knees, then onto its face, trying to burrow through the metal grate to get to the meat.
But at some point the meat stopped being there, so the dead plant technician had stopped burrowing. It simply rested on its face and went dormant again.
And there it lay for a good twenty minutes.
But now something was causing it to perk up again. There was a different smell – and also a sound, some kind of crackling. It didn’t sound or smell like meat, but it was something, and it might be meat making the sounds. Digging its fingertips and splintered nails into the metal grate, it dragged itself around until it faced the wall.
Both the sounds and the smells were coming from behind the wall. The dead Saudi man started clawing at the wall, but it was hard plastic molding at the base. Led by its nose, face, and gnashing mouth, it began to push itself upward, to hands and knees first, and then finally to an unsteady standing position.
And it proceeded to claw and dig at the wall, trying to get through to the crackling sound, and also to the smell, which it couldn’t recognize as the faint smoke of a smoldering electrical fire. Its clawing wasn’t really working, so it sort of randomly switched to banging – and after a couple of slams of its stiff claw-shaped hands against the drywall, it broke through.
Which caused oxygen to rush in through the gap and back behind the wall. And this caused the smoldering electrical fire to flash into a little burning one.
The dead technician continued to paw and scrabble at the hole.
* * *
With its arms sticking through the hole in the wall, oblivious to the fact that its hands were inside the fire and now cooking, the sleeves of its jumpsuit started to smolder. And with this a visible amount of smoke started to pass out into the open air of the plant, around the palsied figure, and began collecting underneath the ceiling – which was very high above the floor but low over the catwalk.
Thirty seconds after that, a different and louder noise, behind and above it, drew the dead guy’s attention. It pulled its arms free – both of them smoking and winking with little embers – then turned around unsteadily and looked up. This left it facing down one of the diagonal sections of catwalk, which led out over the room toward its center.
A few feet down the catwalk, and overhead, something was making a whizzing noise.
It was one of the sprinklers from the fire suppression system – which had been set off, but which had no water pressure to pump anything out of it. The overhead sprinkler just spun, making a whizzing noise.
The dead plant technician stumbled out until it was underneath the noise. It reached up, and due to the catwalk being quite close to the ceiling, was able to stick the fingers of one hand into the noise. A healthy hand might have survived this or just been cut. But, in this case, the tips of four rotting fingers came off – and were flung out into space over the room, arcing down to the concrete floor below, leaving little sprays of black blood in their wake.
Needless to say, the walking corpse didn’t notice this. All it knew was that it wasn’t meat making the noise here.
Its attention was now attracted by the next sprinkler down. Lowering its mangled hand, it stumbled out toward that one, its sleeves continuing to smoke and spark. As it reached this next one, and reached up toward it, one of its sleeves burst into flame. Also needless to say, it didn’t notice this either.
It simply moved onto the next noise maker. But by the time it reached the third one, out nearly over the middle of the room, its sleeve was burning bright, all the way up to the shoulder – turning the creature into an ambulatory zombie flambé. And as it pawed at the sprinkler and ceiling, the leaping flames on its arm started to scorch and singe – and finally to ignite – the ceiling panels.
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