ViraVax

by Bill Ransom

  The Colonel loaded Harry, Sonja and Marte aboard the forks and lifted them atop the hangar, then tied the lever off to make the trip himself.

  Harry gave the Colonel a hand off the moving forks just as a loud whoomp and a series of pop-pop-pops caught his attention. Towards the dam, a large black plume streaked the sky.

  “One chopper down,” the Colonel said. “Four to go. Ever fly any runs, Sonja?”

  “Just simulations,” she said. “These are armed?”

  “Nothing fancy,” he said, “just a cannon on each one. I don’t know how much ammo. We didn’t want any of these people to be able to fight their way out.”

  Harry was conscious of the casual way his father said this, and the shocked disbelief on Marte Chang’s face when she heard it.

  “I can handle it,” Sonja said.

  Freckles stood out like buckshot in her pale face, and her lips tightened into a thin line. Harry had no doubt that she could.

  Another chopper left its observation post and sped towards the guerrilla emplacement at the dam.

  “Get going!” Rico said, and gave Harry a push towards the B/M-3. “If they spot you up here, they’ll shoot you.”

  Rico turned back towards the forklift.

  “Where are you going?” Harry asked.

  “I’m going after whoever it is that initiated shutdown,” Rico said. “He could get away with this, live down there for years. I want to make sure he doesn’t come after us again.”

  “You can’t. . . ” was all Harry got out.

  His father had already dialed a load on the trank gun and popped it into his thigh. Harry felt equal measures of relief and betrayal and little else. He was aware, but helpless.

  His father dragged Harry to the loading bay and Sonja helped him inside. Marte scrambled up beside him and strapped him in.

  “They’ll hit you as soon as you lift,” Harry heard his father tell Sonja. “Just clear the compound and get as high up the valley as you can before you have to set down.” He indicated his radio. “You’ll have support.”

  Sonja grunted and busied herself with her checklist. Harry heard the hiss that preceded the whine of the turbine, and his father talking into his radio outside. Then his father leaned down next to his ear.

  “I love you, son,” he whispered, and left, latching the hatch behind him.

  The Colonel had been right about Garcia’s choppers. Sonja blasted off the pad, and the ticking of sand and gravel into the fuselage was replaced with the heavier tick-tick-tick of machine-gun fire. The plane lurched aloft as though slung by a rubber band. The turbine was loud, but not loud enough to drown out Sonja’s expletives from the pilot’s seat. He had never heard her swear seriously in either Spanish or English. Her eloquence in both surprised him.

  They teetered left, hard left, and the engine started a pop-pop, pop-pop that developed into a clank-clunk, clank-clunk just as they pancaked into the hillside.

  We’re out! he thought, and felt Marte scrabbling for his belt release.

  Sonja’s face appeared above his own, a laceration across her forehead bleeding freely. She and Marte worked together with hardly more than a few grunts to get him out of the plane. They dragged him a few dozen meters into the brush, set him down, and Marte shrieked. Harry couldn’t see what startled her, but he could see Marte and Sonja pale even more.

  Both women put up their hands, Sonja weaving slightly, her face awash in moonlight and blood. A well-armed squad of four men and three women stepped out of the foliage and into Harry’s view, the muzzles of their weapons scenting the air ahead of them.

  “Who are you?” the nearest one challenged.

  He was the shortest of the men, and looked the oldest. His well-worn fatigues bore neither rank nor insignia.

  “Shut up,” one of the women barked, and shouldered past him to take Sonja by the shoulders.

  “Sit,” she ordered, and Sonja sat.

  To the short man, she said, “Give me the bag, Cortes.”

  Nothing more was said and the rest of them stood uneasily listening to the fight at the dam while the woman shook a Kotex out of its wrapper, pressed it to Sonja’s forehead and taped it in place.

  “The boy,” a bearded man asked. “Is he all right?”

  “A tranquilizer,” Sonja said. “He didn’t want to leave without his father. Ah!” She winced as the tape cinched her dressing tight.

  “The Colonel?” the man asked Marte, first in Spanish, then in halting English. “He is not with you?”

  “He said he stayed to get Mishwe,” Marte explained. “The man who started all this. . . .”

  The beard’s face paled. He glanced at his watch, snapped his fingers, and another of the women produced a small radio.

  “Are those charges secured?” he asked. “The Colonel is still inside.”

  Static came back, then: “Mercury switches, set to detonate if moved. We pulled the men out. Too late.”

  Sputters of fighting increased nearby, the small-arms fire punctuated by mortar and the occasional rocket. Harry felt his body returning to him. He sat up, shaky, and faced the guerrilla leader, indistinguishable from the army in his jungle turnouts, except for the beard. Harry didn’t like the expression that met his gaze.

  “You can. . . you can get him out, can’t you?” Harry asked.

  His tongue made a mush of the words, but the man understood. Harry could tell by the stricken look in his eyes that the man understood completely.

  Suddenly, the ground rocked them to their hands and knees, followed a split second later by a concussion that popped their ears and knocked their breath away. Harry tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t hold him.

  Water and mud rained down on them through the trees.

  “The dam!” the leader shouted, and pointed up the valley. “It goes!”

  Harry heard the rush of water before he saw its muddy tongue lick the hillside just a few hundred meters away. The brown snarl of water shouldered trees and tractors alike against the downstream fence at the Double-Vee. Then, in a spurt of muck, the Cyclone fence gave way. At one point all that Harry saw of ViraVax was the top of the lift pad, and his father wasn’t on it. “Goddammit,” Harry said, his voice choking. “Goddammit!”

  Chapter 40

  The Colonel saw that the kids were hit as soon as they lifted off, as he had expected, but Sonja fought the bird around nicely and pancaked into the jungle almost a kilometer up the valley. It took just a matter of seconds. The Colonel stood, blinking, wishing he could see them. He reassured himself that he saw no smoke from the wreckage, then scanned the little radio for one of the guerrilla frequencies.

  “Mariposa, this is Jabalí,” he said.

  “I hear you, Jabalí.”

  “The plane? Did anyone see. . . ?”

  “Blue squad leader. . . static. . . three people leaving the plane. . . static. . . close by, two minutes to contact.”

  The Colonel estimated the distance across the lift pad to the forklift, then to the maintenance access shaft behind the heat exchangers.

  “Toss some charges at the north fence line,” he said. “Do not let your people approach the fence.”

  “. . . static. . . static. . . get out!”

  Rico shook the radio, but all he got was static. He keyed for voice again.

  “Repeat, do not approach the fence. Keep those choppers busy. Go.”

  “Charges . . . static . . . static . . . at the dam . . . static . . . out.”

  “Toss them in,” he said.

  A rasp of static drowned out the reply, except for the last, “Go with God, Colonel.”

  Rico ripped skin off both palms sliding down the carriage of the forklift, then spun the machine around on two wheels and raced for the bunker.

  The original access shafts inside the compound were covered with heavy concrete lids that could only be moved with the ten-ton crane. Like the elevator system that they connected with, the access shafts were a weak point in the ViraVax armor. The contracto
r had felt free to cut a few corners, and someone else had felt free to cut the contractor’s throat while he slept in his retirement mansion in Spain. Still, no one had bothered to upgrade. Existing plans detailed how ViraVax should have been built. Rico’s memory carried the secrets of the real thing.

  The Colonel knew that the lower level was sealed successfully, according to the original plans. But a half dozen passageways snaked through the inside, one of them all the way to the dam, and these would not be part of the shutdown sequence. The access tunnel to the dam had been his original goal, since it was the only one with a hatch that opened outside the ViraVax perimeter. But Casey’s guard-plants had stopped him cold.

  Mishwe had to come out eventually—maybe months, years from now. Rico wanted him sooner than that.

  I wish I had that Pulse unit of Yolanda’s to send down after him, Rico thought.

  Then he shrugged a Costa Bravan shrug.

  But I didn’t have anything else planned today.

  The Colonel ripped one of the heat exchangers out of the concrete with his forks to get a purchase on the access shaft lid. The lid was so heavy that it pulled the nose of the forklift down and the back wheels off the ground, and for a moment he was afraid that it had been sealed, after all. With full throttle he bounced his machine and the lid up and down, up and down, finally working it slightly cockeyed on its base.

  Rico heard some heavy charges blow, and his pulse picked up its pace. He hoped that Yolanda’s team would be satisfied with blowing the fence for him. There were too many surprises in here to risk any more people.

  At least it’ll be easier getting through that fence this time.

  The Colonel had to admit that he had come back here, not to corner Mishwe like a rat, but to die.

  A high-pitched whistle rode the growl of something big down the valley towards him. All five floors of concrete sandwiched with five layers of bunker material vibrated, shaking down dust from the rafters and drumming the tin roof.

  Earthquake! was his first thought.

  Rico looked out the double doors of the warehouse and saw, in the half-moon’s light, several columns of black smoke where the dam used to be. For the first time in this operation, Rico Toledo was perfectly calm. He knew, now, what they had tried to tell him on the radio. He wondered who had dealt him this, his last blow.

  El Indio, he wondered, or Dajaj Mishwe?

  He lowered the forks and pushed the concrete cover further back from its hole. Rico didn’t have the Pulse, but he had a few million tons of water that might do the trick. He gunned the forklift to the far end of the warehouse and located a second access cover.

  Rico thought it would be an honorable death, rescuing his son and Sonja and the Agency woman. He would not have to face his son’s disapproval again, nor the vagaries of politics, nor another failed relationship.

  I won’t have to quit drinking, either, he thought, trying for some self-amusement.

  His ego was short-lived. He had to admit that they had rescued themselves. Harry was using his brains, and their escape plan was working perfectly without him.

  Rico jammed the steel prongs against the second concrete lid and revved the little methane engine as high as it would go. Blue smoke from the tires gagged and blinded him, but he felt the lid give and pushed it aside as the first of the water hit.

  It was not the crushing wall of rock and mud that he’d expected. A satisfying sucking sound came from the throat of the access shaft. A surf-like tide lifted him out of the forklift seat, outrunning the mud that must be close behind. This warm water, from the surface of the lake, smelled of dirt and crushed leaves, and it tumbled him the length of the bunker before it spat him out the other side and pinned him to the fence.

  I should’ve had them blow the south fence, he thought.

  A tremendous crush of mud and vegetation squeezed air out of Rico’s lungs and ripped the top of his jumpsuit down to his waist. A cold, heavy surge collapsed all three fences and rolled him over and over, slashing his chest, back and thighs with razor wire. A huge root ball slammed him from behind. He grasped the tangle out of reflex and kept from being dragged under, but his searing lungs could not hold. He choked and scrambled up the root ball, gagging foul bile. He got a pocket of air, then another, then for the third time in one day everything faded from brown to black.

  Chapter 41

  Dajaj Mishwe did not check on his Adam and Eve right away; he had his own security to address. His private access had been a shaft that originated in the Level Two sewage treatment room, just behind the medical students’ dormitory. Mishwe triggered a switch with a flick of his finger. A blast at Level Two released nearly two tons of dry concrete into the shaft. Water from the flood would do the rest. He felt like a pupa inside a concrete cocoon.

  Mishwe monitored the shutdown of the top four levels and the pitiful escape attempts of those who had not yet sipped his special waters. Fists and chairs were no match for concrete and steel. In the eyes of the Innocents, he saw only confusion and terror. They did not fight, but huddled together awaiting direction from their missionaries.

  The missionaries, he saw, were frightened at first, then angry. Their anger gave way to an exhaustion framed in betrayal, and then fear. By the time he’d shifted to interior power and shut his topside monitors down, he had seen only one person praying, and that person was an Innocent in a surgical gown.

  “Hypocrites,” he said, and an Innocent at his elbow repeated the charge.

  This Innocent was one of the caretakers for his Adam and Eve. He plucked Mishwe’s sleeve, but from an arm’s reach.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Mishwe said. “You are with the Angel of Eden, and no harm will come to you.”

  At that moment, Mishwe felt a rumble under his feet, something too big for the bunker to absorb. The maze of caged animals around him set up an unprecedented clamor of shrieks and barks. Mishwe smiled.

  “The dam,” he explained to the sad-eyed Innocent. “The dam is gone. We are safe here, forever.”

  “People gone,” the Innocent said.

  “Yes,” Mishwe replied, and ruffled the man’s scant hair. “The bad people are gone. Only good people are left.”

  “No, no,” another Innocent protested. “Adam and Eve people gone.”

  Mishwe felt the first icy twist of fear to grip his belly in twenty years.

  “Adam and Eve people?”

  The first Innocent nodded vigorously.

  “Decon people gone. Come see.”

  Mishwe pushed them aside with a snarl and sprinted for the Decon elevator two hundred meters across the lab. As he ran, he thought, They’re here. They’re here. They’re down here somewhere.

  He reached the large Decon elevator and shoved through a babbling knot of Innocents. The main room was empty, their bowls in place atop the table. Something didn’t feel right, a smell on the air that he couldn’t place.

  Dajaj Mishwe opened the bathroom door and saw what Adam and Eve had done. They had burst the mirror, tried to wall him out. He took a step and fetched a tremendous kick at the desk blocking the shattered mirror. It budged, but only slightly.

  The peculiar odor was stronger here and accompanied by a strong breeze that whistled through the shattered glass.

  Positive pressure pulls the air out of this room, not into it!

  The whistle developed into a howl. Mishwe stood atop the toilet and peered through a gap between the top of the barricade and the window. The other door was blocked off as well, but there was no sign of his precious couple anywhere in the small room.

  Where . . . ?

  Then he saw the open hatch above the far door and understood what they had done. In that instant, Dajaj Mishwe also understood the origin of the strange smell, the increasing howl and force of the wind.

  Before he could step down from the toilet or shout a warning to the Innocents crowded behind him, an explosion of muck and water punched through the ceiling and crushed his fragile skull like a bug against the b
athroom floor.

  Chapter 42

  Major Scholz shut down the viewer and everyone in their separate isolettes watched Red Bartlett fade to black. The major had previewed Bartlett’s incredible block of data the night before with Trenton Solaris, the DIA chief, who had flown in from Cairo specifically for the occasion. Solaris, the albino, had gone from white to whiter to nearly transparent during Bartlett’s display.

  Major Scholz gave Marte Chang, Harry Toledo and Sonja Bartlett a moment to compose themselves, then gradually brought the lights up. Harry, Sonja and Marte each occupied a separate, double-lined plexiglass cage that command had the nerve to call a “habitat” or “isolette.” They were cages, pure and simple, allowing complete monitoring of their biology and psychology. A gray plastic shower curtain surrounded each tiny lavatory for privacy, and the cubes themselves measured three meters on a side.

  Self-contained, they stood in an unmarked warehouse in the industrial section of La Libertad’s airport. This warehouse also held the secondary quarantine subjects—a SEAL team, a guerrilla squad and a squad of transportation specialists. Their vehicles, where the subjects had been held pending construction of the isolettes, had already been buried in concrete well out of town, along with every sliver of the remains of the B/M-3.

  Marte Chang’s face was impassive behind the glass. Her fingers flicked over the toggles in her gloveware as she poured notes into her Sidekick. She pored over the data block that Harry had snatched from ViraVax, in hopes of finding out what the enemy was, and how to fight it. The major had been horrified three times since sunrise at the information Marte was culling from that block.

  ViraVax is buried, but is it dead? she wondered.

  Sonja sobbed with her forehead resting on her arms. The last of the block contained a personal statement by Red Bartlett, recorded the day before his death. The Bartlett girl took it hard, but the major was glad to see it for personal reasons. At least she wouldn’t have to remember Red Bartlett as a smoking pool of waste fouling the carpets.