by Tom Clancy
And straight ahead of them now was Earthglow, its shadow deeper than the black of night.
* * *
The dangers were supposed to seem real during tac exercises, and indeed they had to an outstanding degree. But there were parts of the mind that refused even voluntary surrender to illusion, and the spilling of simulated blood did not equal loss of life, no matter how true its shade of red.
* * *
Pressed against Earthglow’s windowless back wall, Ricci watched Rosander nose his telescoping probe around its corner with a powerful sense of déjà vu. Still, he was acutely aware that Cape Green had been little more than a stage set: Africa one day, Balkan Europe the next, Motor City if you wanted it to be. The here and now was what it was, and it never would be anything else, he thought. And this time the men who fell under his watch would not rise to joke, complain, or be chastised about it afterward.
“Picture any clearer on your HUD?” Rosander asked. He fingered a rocker switch on the probe’s pistol grip handle to adjust its nonvisible IR illumination level. “I’ve maxed the output, can’t get better res past about ten yards in this darkness.”
“It’ll do.” The image superimposed on Ricci’s field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building’s north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his Five-Seven pistol: small rounds, big punch. “Get rid of the sound, though. I don’t need to hear their horseshit about boffing townie high school girls.”
Rosander pressed another switch to cut his rod’s surveillance mike.
“These guys go down fast and quiet,” Ricci said. The comlink’s acoustical gain was set to output his whisper as a normal speaking voice to his team members. “Can’t let them get off a shot. Rather we don’t have to, either.”
He reached into his belt pouch for the DMSO, looked quickly over his shoulder, then gestured for Seybold to produce his canister.
“On my signal,” he said, raising his fist.
Seybold nodded to him, and they edged up beside Rosander.
They waited. The guards appeared to be in no hurry to complete their rounds. Just a couple of gun-toting chums on a leisurely stroll through the meat-locker cold of night in the Canadian Shield.
After what seemed an age, they approached the corner of the wall.
Ricci’s arm came up like a semaphore.
Seybold moved with him at once. They rounded the corner and got right in the guards’ faces with their canisters, knowing the high-pressure spurts of fluid would not disperse in the wind at close range and that the permeable fabric scarves wrapped around their mouths would do nothing to stop the sedative from acting instantaneously.
Silently and painlessly kayoed, the guards hit the ground unconscious and then were flex-cuffed and dragged into the shadows at the base of the hill. They would be out for hours.
Ricci turned to his men.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the gatehouse.”
Pokey Oskaboose’s guidance had been a blessing for more reasons than his familiarity with the physical terrain. He had also imparted a critical tip about area transport during the mission’s planning stage: Pretty well everything that made its way to and from the rest of the world was conveyed three times weekly via Toronto on the wilderness train. A single train. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like other outposts located many miles from the nearest railway depot, Earthglow would need to connect with the station by truck over the Trans Canada Highway. There was simply no other practical means.
Of course, Oskaboose hadn’t known the facility’s specific shipping and receiving schedules. But that hadn’t been necessary. These were the boonies, last stop on the civilization express. Conduct the insertion in the long, murky period that bridged Thursday and Friday — say at two, three, four o’clock in the morning — and you could safely assume that the delivery gate would be manned by a skeleton crew. Warm bodies, if the expression was applicable here at world’s end. You could also figure they would go on shift expecting to do little more than gulp coffee and pick their noses. Because not for a million bucks would a driver try rolling his wagon over the frosted local roads at such an hour, especially the black, winding spools of blacktop off the main highway, where painted lanes were nonexistent, and you had to sort of guess whether you were in danger of getting smacked by opposing traffic. Well, maybe for a million bucks, Oskaboose had reconsidered. But far as he knew, nobody had gotten offered that amount yet.
It was now a few ticks of the minute hand short of three A.M., and Ricci was thinking that Oskaboose’s skinny had been worth a fortune and more.
The gatehouse was nothing fancy. A lighted, heated modular steel booth designed for a small handful of personnel, it could have been lifted from where it stood and dropped at the entry to any commercial building anyplace, maybe a factory that manufactured fountain pens, or fan belts, or soda bottles, or zippers for ladies’ skirts. It was hard for Ricci to imagine it as a breeding farm for a killer germ of a type never before known to man. Hard for him, sometimes, to remember that the shape of evil could be so drummingly bland and commonplace. The devil as the guy next door.
Hugging the north wall of Earthglow about a hundred feet from the gatehouse, his men drawn up behind him, Ricci could see three guards through the plate glass windows of the booth. Two were seated behind a control panel with a bank of video monitors on it, talking, neither of them apparently paying attention to the screens. A third was dozing on a chair behind a desk or counter, legs stretched, arms folded, head tucked to his chest.
Ricci thought a minute. The door was on his side of the booth, a magnetic swipe card reader on the frame. It would automatically lock when closed, but these pre-fab housings weren’t designed to store the crown jewels. He was sure one good kick would take care of it.
He called four men over to him. Grillo, Barnes, Carlysle, and Newell. The rest would stay put. This would have to be perfectly coordinated, and he wanted experience with him.
His instructions took seconds: Fast, quiet. The guards at the other perimeter posts had to remain oblivious.
Ricci shuffled forward in a squat, the others close behind him, all of them sticking to the shadows along the main building’s wall. At the edge of the wall he signaled a halt. There were ten yards of open ground to the gatehouse. Dark yards. His group would be fine if they stayed low. He gave his command, and they made the stealthy dash.
Out of sight beneath the windows now, pulse racing, epinephrine flooding his system, its taste filling his mouth like he’d bitten into an allergy pill, Ricci waited for his men to hastily take their positions, Grillo and Barnes to the right of the door, gripping their VVRS guns, Newell right behind him on the left side, Carlysle crouched back in the darkness facing the door, ready for the kick.
Three fingers of one hand raised, Ricci drew his expandable ASP baton from its belt scabbard with the other and counted off. Vocally and manually. One finger went down.
“… two, three!”
In a heartbeat, Carlysle sprang erect and took two giant steps forward, his leg thrusting up and out. The sole of his boot hit the door under the handle, and it banged inward.
Ricci rushed into the gatehouse, clenching the tactical baton’s foam grip, thumbing the release stud to extend its tubular-steel segments. The guards seated side by side at the control panel twisted around toward the entrance, agape with stunned surprise. Peripherally aware of his own men moving in around him, Ricci saw assault rifles slung over the guards’ chair backs: a P-90 for Mr. Left, and an H&K for Mr. Right.
Mr. Right was quickest on the uptake, snatching for his weapon. Ricci went at him with the baton, smashed a blow to the back of his wristbone, and with a continuous movement slid it under his forearm, grabbed hold of the tip so he was holding both ends, and crossed it, applying strong pressure. The ulna snapped like brittle wood. Mr. Right flopped around on his chair and
started to scream. Ricci pulled the baton free of his arm and then brought it up and struck his neck sideways at the pressure point below the ear. He made a noise like water sucking down a partially clogged drain and hit the floor motionless, the clouted arm bent at several unnatural angles.
Ricci pivoted toward Mr. Left, the baton arcing in front of him, but his hands were raised in the air, his firearm already taken, Grillo and Barnes jamming their guns into his ribs. Carlysle and Newell had their weapons trained on the guy who’d been caught napping.
Ricci stood between the two captive guards, looked from one to another, then gestured at the control panel.
“Which of you gamers wants to let us in the freight door?” he asked.
Neither of them responded.
He turned to Mr. Left, waved Grillo and Barnes aside, snapped the baton across his face. Blood gushed from his broken nose, and he crashed back over his chair to the floor.
Ricci whirled back toward the now wide-eyed napper, bunched the front of his shirt in his fist, and hauled him to his feet.
“Guess it has to be you,” he said.
* * *
“You still with us, Thibodeau?” Ricci asked over the comlink.
“Check,” he replied from the Two Shoulders camp.
“How about you, Pokey? Everything under control?”
“Yup.” Oskaboose’s voice now, from the gatehouse. “It’s a big mess, though.”
“Next time, I’ll try to be neater,” Ricci said. “Those two guards should be out for a while. Either one starts to squeal, hit him with some more DMSO. He’ll conk.”
“Got it.”
“I don’t want you or Harpswell taking your weapons off that third crack lookout. If anybody from the facility radios or approaches the booth, he’s your receptionist. Make sure he answers with a smile. And that he doesn’t forget what’ll happen to him if he says the wrong thing.”
“Got you again.”
Ricci paused a moment to order his thoughts. Then: “Doc?”
“I’m here.” This was the voice of Eric Oh, at the San Jose headquarters with Nimec and Megan the Merciless. “They just patched me into the A/V a minute or two ago.”
“Figured you could live without seeing the preliminaries,” Ricci said. “The signal clear at your end?”
“It’s a little scratchy, but they’re working to clean it up,” Eric said. “Where are you in the building right now? It looks like a kitchen.”
Ricci looked around, his helmet’s monocular NVD sight down over his right eye. Minus Oskaboose and Harpswell, his team had made their way through the opened freight entrance and then down a couple of dim and empty branching corridors, seeking the path of least resistance into the main section of the building. The first unlocked door had led them here. And a kitchen it was. A big one, too. Obviously, it produced food for the resident staff. There were heavy steel commercial appliances, walk-in refrigerators, triple-basin sinks, overhead grid hooks hung with cookware. Shelves stocked with seasonings, coffee, and other supplies.
For some incomprehensible reason, Ricci suddenly recalled his father’s preferred version of grace at the dinner table: Good friends, good food, good God, let’s eat. It had been years since that little snippet of his past had crested from the depths of memory.
“Yeah, Doc,” he said. “Hang tight, we’re moving.”
Ricci started toward a tall swing door at the far end of the room, leading his men down the aisle between a long cutting counter and a solid row of ovens, grills, and ranges.
A hurried glimpse beyond the door’s eye-level glass pane revealed the darkened commissary on the opposite side: tables and chairs; vending machines; convenience islands for napkins, condiments, and eating utensils.
Mundane. Commonplace. Like a high school cafeteria.
Ricci pushed through the door, his men at his heels, then saw the general employee entrance to the commissary to his left — double — swing doors this time — and hooked toward it.
He paused again at the doors, eased one of them open a crack with his gloved fingertips, and slowly leaned his head through the opening.
A hallway lined with doors stretched to either side. Name plaques on the doors, these were offices. And down at one end, he spotted something that simultaneously quickened his pulse and made his neck hairs bristle.
There were two signs on the wall, one above the other. The bottom sign was a simple arrow pointing to a cross corridor. The top sign displayed the biohazard symbol.
Ricci rapidly led his team along the darkened corridor and turned in the direction of the arrow marker, aware of the dull, leached-away sound of their footsteps between the thick concrete walls.
At the juncture with the connecting hall was another set of swing doors. Recessed ceiling fluorescents glowed in the passage beyond their windows.
Ricci ordered his men to fan out against the walls, then went to the double doors and carefully looked past the glass. The hall beyond seemed empty. He gently shouldered through the partition into the milky wash of light.
The doors lining the sides of this passage were no longer of the ordinary office building variety. These were metal-clad, bullet-resistant installations, most with swipe readers and entry-code keypads.
Instructing the others to follow close behind him, Ricci moved forward into the corridor.
“You have any pointers, Doc, let’s hear them,” he said into his helmet mike.
“My guess is you’re heading in the right direction. In general, bioengineering firms are laid out like any commercial or industrial facility. According to the stages of production, from start to finish—”
“You don’t warehouse the showroom-ready car with the parts that go into it.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, what else can you tell me?”
“The absolute best thing for us would be to find actual, preformulated inhibitors for the virus, chemical blockers that would prevent its binding proteins from attaching to Gordian’s cellular receptors. Failing that, we’d need to access Earthglow’s computerized gene banks to get the data on how the bug synthesizes its isoforms—”
A twinge of impatience. “Closer to English, Doc.”
“The proteins or peptides generated by alternative RNA splicing,” Eric said. “If we get those coded templates, we can use the information to derive our own inhibitors and stop the virus’s progress. But that could take a while, and Gordian’s condition doesn’t give us much — Wait, slow down, I want a look at that sign to your right.”
Ricci turned so his helmet camera was facing it.
The sign read:
FLOW CYTROMETRY
“Okay, thanks, that’s not what we need,” Eric said. “Back to what I started to explain, the inhibitors would be an end-stage product. Microencapsulated like the triggers that awakened the bug. And probably kept in the same area. Storage wouldn’t be complicated. The capsules are designed to have a long shelf life in a dry, clean, room-temperature environment.”
Ricci hastened down the passage. “What am I keeping my eyes out for?”
“Signs with terms like coacervation or fluid-bed coating or hot melt systems. The microencapsulation units themselves consist of several large-batch tanks or chambers — usually acrylic, stainless steel, or some combination of the two — joined by pumping systems: ducts, blowers, et cetera. There would have to be a compressed air source. Computer panel controls. The materials used would be—”
Oh suddenly broke off his sentence. From his monitor thousands of miles away, he could see what Ricci had just spotted ahead of him at an intersection in the hall. It had pushed his heart up into his throat.
* * *
Ricci knew at a glance that the guards who’d appeared in the passage had better stuff than the perimeter security crew.
They had turned the corner in his direction just as he’d approached it and paused to motion Rosander over with the telescopic probe. Three men in light gray uniforms with submachine guns over their shoulders
and the unmistakable look of quality troops.
Before either group could react, they found themselves facing each other across a straight length of hall, separated by four or five yards with no available cover… and no choice except to engage.
Swiftly rasing his weapon, its MEMS touch control on its lethal setting, Ricci had the briefest instant to once again recall the Cape Green maneuvers with that strange sensation of events doubling back on themselves.
The thought had not quite fled his mind as he opened fire, ordering his men to spread out and do the same.
The guard he’d targeted was only a little slower to trigger his own gun. He collapsed to the floor, his uniform blouse chewed and bloody, his rifle dropping from his hand.
Ricci saw a second guard train his subgun on one of the men behind him, instantly swung his around, and triggered another burst, a five-shot salvo. But this time, the guard managed to squeeze out a volley before falling onto his back, and he kept shooting even afterward, scattering a gale of ammunition across the hall. Ricci heard a grunt of pain from over his shoulder, didn’t turn. Couldn’t. He wanted that son of a bitch on the floor finished.
He angled the VVRS down and fired again, and so did another member of the insertion team. Red exploded from the guard’s belly, he rolled over and there was red splashed on his back from the exit wounds, and then he flopped a little and lay still.
More gunfire from Ricci’s left, more from his rear, and he turned to see the third guard shiver in place a moment and then spill loosely off his feet.
Okay, he thought. Okay, that’s all of them.
He spun around to see who’d been hit. Grillo. On his back, blood streaming from his throat. Simmons and Beatty were kneeling over him, getting off the helmet, opening the collar of his jacket, but he wasn’t moving, and his open eyes had the look Ricci knew came with the touch of death.
Ricci rushed over to his body, crouched, touched the pulse point on his neck, Grillo’s blood oozing over his gloves.
He tilted his face up to his men, tried not to let the clenching he felt inside show.