Bio-Strike pp-4

by Tom Clancy

  Guillermo rounded an abrupt bend in the path, widening the variable focus of his flashlight. It revealed countless overlapping footprints in the earthen floor, some of them fresh, others little more than faded scuffings that were probably generations older than he was.

  Then the conical beam glanced off a heap of scattered rubble that Guillermo recognized as a trail marker of sorts. He was nearing the last portion of the underground march. In another fifty, sixty yards, the tunnel would ascend to its exit on the western side of the arroyo, where Lucio’s men would await him with their transport vehicles. Guillermo would have a short rest as they loaded up, and then it would be back into the hole for the return trip with the villagers and forzadores, tiring work for the fittest of men — and the growing paunch above his belt was conspicuous evidence he had never been especially good at self-maintenance.

  Guillermo continued on for another fifteen minutes or so before the ground began to rise, and the tunnel’s stagnant atmosphere was relieved by a stream of fresh air from outside. Soon afterward, he noticed a wash of spectral moonlight through the break in the rock face that opened into the gully.

  He increased his pace despite his weariness, impatient to reach it.

  * * *

  Felix Quiros had been patient. Resisting any impulse to act prematurely, he had waited for several breathless moments after Guillermo appeared from the tunnel’s entrance, waited until the long line of mules had filed into the arroyo behind the stupid fucking cabrón, even waited until all but a few of the Salazar forzadores had emerged — which was to say, until he was positive that the entire shipment of heroin had been carried out — before he reached a hand down to the radio detonator’s transmitter unit on the ledge beside him.

  Then, with a quick tug on its antenna to be certain it was fully extended, he flipped the device’s firing switch.

  Inside the tunnel, its receiver sent a jolt of current through the wires leading to the multiple TNT satchel charges that Quiros and his men had planted along the final yards of the passage, covering them from sight with stones and loose earth.

  The explosion was virtually instantaneous. It clapped and rolled through the arroyo, shaking its very walls, a fantastic claw of flame and smoke lashing from the tunnel’s entrance. Debris pelted from the spiky edges of the fireball like meteors, buffeting the forzadores who had been last to exit the tunnel as its sides came tumbling down in a cascade of blasted rubble, slamming some to the ground.

  Felix aimed his bullpup at Guillermo and opened up on him, taking him out with a rapid volley that knocked him onto his back, his legs jerking and kicking, his hands on his spurting chest. Felix poured several more rounds into him and, when he finally stopped moving, began to rake the bottom of the gully with fire, raising little geysers of sand and pebbles into the air, fanning his weapon from side to side even as his men did the same from their own perches. Screaming in pain and terror, the helpless young mules were cut down where they stood, some crawling on the ground under their bulky loads in futile attempts to reach cover.

  Meanwhile, the handful of stunned forzadores who remained on their feet had begun blindly triggering their own weapons at the outcrops, but they were easy, exposed targets for the scissoring barrage from the ambush positions.

  The men on the slopes continued to lay down fire until all movement in the gully had ceased. Paused in the echoing, smoking stillness. Reloaded. And on Felix’s signal chopped out another sustained hail of bullets, emptying their magazines into the sprawled bodies below, making sure every one of them had been left a corpse.

  The slaughter had taken less then ten minutes from beginning to end.

  Lathrop kept recording for a while longer, wanting to catch a scene of Felix and his men as they descended into the arroyo for the scag. They worked fast, cutting the straps of the dead couriers’ bundles with folding knives, then tearing them from their backs and gathering them into a single huge mound. While this was going on, a few of Felix’s hombres split off from the rest and went scrambling toward the north end of the gulch, presumably to bring the vehicles they’d use to haul away their score.

  Lathrop considered waiting for them to return, maybe taking a shot of them in the process of loading up, but rejected the idea almost immediately. He’d got Felix hands down for the killings and the snatch, got what he needed from A to Z. Why push the envelope? Sometimes there was a temptation to make too much of a game out of things. He knew his weaknesses and had to be careful about giving in to them. No way a guy in his position could afford that.

  Not unless he wanted to join Guillermo and those other victims who’d come out of the tunnel with him in the great hereafter.

  Carefully detaching the night scope from his camcorder, Lathrop put both back into their cases, shouldered his weapons, and silently retreated into the darkness.

  FIVE

  VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 2, 2001

  “Any success convincing lang to pay for his chits?” Nimec asked, and held up his punch mitt.

  “You’re starting to sound like Roger.” Megan threw an off-balance left jab that barely nicked the padded leather.

  “Shit,” she muttered, winded. Her face was glistening with perspiration.

  “Let’s go, keep your rhythm.”

  “We’ve been at this for almost an hour, might be a good time to call it quits—”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Pete, I’m bushed. It isn’t coming together for me this morning, and I still have to get showered for work—”

  “What I hear, you were tired in Kaliningrad when you took down an armed assailant. Way before you started these lessons.”

  “I had no choice then.”

  “You don’t now, either,” he said, sidestepping to the right. “Breathe deep. And stay on me!”

  Megan opened her mouth and swooped in some air. Keeping her left foot in front of her right, she pivoted toward him and took another shot. It landed more solidly, closer to the white target dot in the center of the mitt.

  “Better,” he said. “Again.”

  Her fist snapped out, caught the edge of the dot.

  “Again! Keep that arm in line with your lead foot!”

  Her next punch was precisely on the spot.

  “Good,” Nimec said. He stepped in closer, pressing her, flicking the mitt past the side of her cheek. “Cover up, I could’ve nailed you right there. And what do you mean ‘like Roger’?”

  Megan raised her arms, tucked her chin low to her collarbone. Her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she was wearing a white sweatband around her head, a white tank top with an Everlast logo in front, black bike shorts, and Adidas sneakers.

  “I mean that you’re both assuming Bob feels he owes us,” she said.

  Bob, Nimec thought.

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “I think he thinks we’re even.”

  “With regard to what? The time we saved a nuclear sub from being hijacked with the President aboard? Or found out who did the Times Square bombing after his people got steered down the garden path?”

  Megan let his question ride, bouncing on her knees to stoke her energy. They were in a regulation fight ring on the top level of his San Jose triplex condominium, the entire floor a sprawling rec/training facility that included, in addition to the professionally equipped boxing gym, a martial arts dojo, a soundproofed firing range, and an accurate-down-to-the-reek-of-cigarette-butts-awash-in-beer reproduction of the South Philadelphia pool hall where the blush of youthful innocence was slapped off Nimec’s cheeks by the harsh red glare of neons when he was fourteen or so. Megan had never spoken to him about that period of his life at any length, never gotten the gist of why he looked back on a past that included being the junior member of a father-son hustling team, a borderline juvenile delinquent, and, by her standards, a victim of child exploitation — what else would you call being kept truant from school to hold a cue stick in a dive full of chronic gamblers? — with such obvious fondness. Whether this was because her
own upbringing was so different from his, she couldn’t really say for sure, but Ridgewood, New Jersey, might as well have been worlds away from downtown Philly, and while she’d taken courses on Old and Middle English at Groton prep, there had been nary a mention of draw, follow, left, or right English in the offered curriculum.

  She concentrated on her workout now, measuring Nimec with repeated flicks of her outthrust fist as he continued side-shuffling to her right, protecting the outside margin of the defensive circle he’d taught her to imagine around herself.

  “Back to Lang,” he said. “We have to utilize the NCIC database if we’re going to get the intelligence we need.”

  “And his inclination is to ask the director to okay us,” she said. “Right up to the highest classification levels.”

  “Up to,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “But not including.”

  She nodded again.

  “That won’t cut it,” he said. “Your average uniformed cop can input the overall system from his prowl if it’s got an onboard computer. I want Lang to arrange for unrestricted access.”

  Nimec lifted both mitts in the air. She threw a one-two combination, followed through with a straight left, and blocked another swipe at her head without surrendering any canvas.

  “It gets sort of complicated,” she said. “National security’s foremost with him.”

  Nimec looked confused.

  “He doesn’t trust us?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then complicated how?”

  “I’d rather not explain it right now.”

  She saw his frown of confusion deepen.

  “Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”

  Nimec looked at her a moment.

  Bob again, he thought.

  Then he gave a little shrug and shifted direction, dropping his right mitt to take an uppercut. Megan swung and made only glancing contact.

  “You pulled that one. Again.”

  She brought her arm up smoothly, throwing her shoulder into the blow, and felt the satisfying impact of her fist thumping the leather dead on.

  “Okay, that was perfect. Relax a minute,” he said, coming to a flat-footed halt. “Now listen, this is important.” He patted the middle of his rib cage with his mitt. “A guy comes at you, here’s where you hit him. Do it hard and clean, and it’ll collapse his diaphragm, doesn’t matter how big he is. And he won’t have expected it from a woman. People who don’t know how to fight will generally make the same mistakes. They either aim for the nose or chin, which aren’t easy to tag, or the gut, where there’s more muscle, fat, whatever sort of insulation, than anywhere else.” He lifted the other mitt to the side of his neck, just below the ear. “If you don’t have an opening for the upper body, and you think you have the reach, you’ll want to pop him right here. At the pressure point. Got it?”

  “The chest or the neck,” Megan said, the words spaced between long gulps of breath. She brushed a trickle of sweat from her eye with her glove. “You’ve told me that at least a dozen times.”

  “Reinforcement’s never hurt anyone I’ve trained.” He wiggled the mitt in front of his ribs. “Quick, let me have some—”

  “Pete—”

  “And we’ll be through for today.”

  She let him have some.

  Ten minutes later, they were outside the ropes, towels draped over their shoulders, their T-shirts splotched with perspiration and clinging to their bodies. Nimec went over to his supply locker, put away his target mitts, then helped Megan to unlace her gloves.

  “There’s another item of business we need to discuss,” he said, hanging the gloves on a peg inside the locker.

  “Concerning?

  “Ricci’s brain flash about establishing RDTs,” he said. “I’ve been mulling it over and feel it ought to be done.”

  Megan stood undoing her hand wraps, her open gym bag on a bench against the wall behind her.

  “I agree,” she said. “Provisionally.”

  “Your provisions being…?”

  “It would have to be on an experimental basis and subject to constant review. And I’d want everybody on board. Meaning Gord and Rollie.” She looked at him. “You seem surprised, Pete.”

  Nimec shrugged.

  “You didn’t seem too enthused about the suggestion when it was offered,” he said. “I figured I’d run into more resistance.”

  Megan considered how to respond. She finished removing the linen wraps, wound them up neatly, then turned to the bench and dropped them into her bag.

  “Ricci’s aptitude isn’t anything that I question,” she said finally, looking back at Nimec. “I just don’t enjoy his contentious solo flier routine. And sometimes I need to be where he isn’t to get past it.”

  Nimec shrugged a little, his hand on the locker’s open door.

  “Sounds like some kind of solution, anyway.”

  “You could call it that,” she said. “I think of it as keeping my sights on the bigger picture.”

  He gave her a questioning glance.

  “Whoever attacked us in Brazil last spring killed a lot of our people and would have caused even more destruction… would have been able to blackmail every country on earth… if we hadn’t gotten in the way of their plans,” she said. “Put me in our enemy’s shoes, I’d be carrying one serious grudge. And the thought of not being ready if and when it’s acted upon worries the hell out of me, Pete.”

  He kept looking at her for several long seconds and then swung the locker door inward. It shut with a dull, metallic clang.

  “Makes two of us,” he said.

  Some months earlier in Madrid, in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado, he had gone to view Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, and even now was unsure how long he had stood before it. It was as if time had stilled around him. As if his innermost visions had been projected onto the wall of the gallery.

  He had not known where to rest his eye. On the molten orange landscape with its pools of fire, its spewing clouds of black, volcanic smoke? Or the medieval village besieged by an exterminating army of skeletons, banners of war hoisted above their skull heads, the hollow sockets of their eyes showing only a pitiless adherence to their single objective? Here they hacked at the living with broadswords. Here they impaled them on the points of spears. There a cadaverous looter knelt over his prostrate victim, holding knife to throat to deliver the finishing stroke. In the right foreground, a peasant woman who had fallen atop a pile of twisted corpses raised her arms in a futile plea for mercy as a bone soldier stood with one conquering foot planted on her body, his battle-ax swinging inexorably downward. Where to rest the eye? On which scene of fabulous annihilation? The death barge advancing over a mire of crushed bodies and blood, its skeletal crew wrapped in the white cerements of the grave? The townsman hanging, limp, from the single forking limb of a shattered tree? The emaciated dog, all skin and protruding ribs, sniffing hungrily at the child in its fallen mother’s embrace? Or the revelers in peacock finery scattering from their dinner table in helpless panic as a swarm of cadaverous marauders closed ranks around them?

  Where, indeed, to rest the eye?

  The painting had been remarkable. Absorbed in its sweeping infernal beauty, Siegfried Kuhl might have believed its creator had reached a hand across the centuries and tapped deep into his mind for inspiration. His umbilical connection to it had been overwhelming. It had at once seemed to draw its energy from him and infuse him with its own.

  Until that unforgettable experience, Kuhl had never been moved by a work of art. He had gone to the museum out of curiosity and nothing more, compelled by Harlan DeVane’s remark that he might find it of interest. Six months ago, it had been. After the debacle in Kazakhstan, where only a chance diversion had allowed him to break away from the Sword operative with whom he’d grappled in the launch center’s cargo-processing facility.


  The man’s features were framed in his mind in photographic detail. Whenever he pictured the sharply angular jut of his cheekbones, the set of his mouth, he would feel the restless desire for vengeance slide coldly through his intestines. As he felt it now, six months later and a continent away, sitting at a window table in a brasserie called La Pistou, opposite the Champs de Bataille Pare, in Quebec City. Watching the entrance to the park, waiting for his lovely courier to arrive.

  Kuhl’s failure at the Cosmodrome had been a severe blow. Driven underground, wishing to get far ahead of his pursuers, he had altered his appearance, obtaining colored contact lenses, darkening his hair, filling out his lips with collagen injections, even growing a short beard. Then, in his global migrations, he had found himself in Spain for a time, and he realized it was no accident that brought him there.

  DeVane had understood how it would be for him to see Brueghel’s masterpiece, reflecting, as it did, the grim sensibility of an age when the Black Death had raged across continents, an indiscriminate scourge exempting no man or authority, no civilized institution, from being laid to waste. An age when none knew whether to blame Heaven or Hell for their miseries.

  What power a man who let neither hold sway over his conscience, a man of iron and will, could have seized amid such upheaval. In violent action Kuhl was calm. In chaos he was whole. In the storm amid cries of turmoil he was strongest. And in strength he achieved fulfillment.

  DeVane had understood, yes. And it seemed in retrospect that his comments had been as revealing as they were insightful — most probably by design. He found it amusing to lay out enigmatic, far-winding paths for others to untangle.

  At any rate, his Sleeper Project must have been well along at that point. Kuhl was not a scientist, but he had sufficient knowledge of the basics of genetic engineering to be certain it would have taken years to produce a pathogenic agent of the type generated at the Ontario facility. The procurement of recombinant DNA technology and raw biological materials would have been a difficult, expensive undertaking. As would the search for top experts in the field from around the world. And preliminary challenges of that sort would have paled to insignificance before those that emerged in the later developmental stages.