It was about as loosie-goosy of a plan as Jake had ever devised, probably worse than anything he thought up as a Plebe at West Point, but they had almost zero intel about the situation. “Corporal Jones, you had a question?”
“Yes, sir,” Jones said. “How do I know when to move up? Our radios are out of juice.”
The batteries in their radios had died after losing the Strykers’ recharge capability, so the damn things were little more than added weight at this point. Jake’s mind flashed back to all of the training he’d done, both notional and live. Back then, he’d always had a flare available to him. That wasn’t an option in the real world. “Um…”
“I’ve got a whistle,” Sergeant Turner said, digging into the pouch on his vest, emerging with a dusty OD green plastic whistle. “Old school land nav habit that you young ’uns wouldn’t understand.”
Jake grinned. In fact, he didn’t know what the whistle was for, but the old platoon sergeant had joined the Army when Jake was still in elementary school. He’d been in for a long damn time, so there had to be a reason for the whistle. It wasn’t a flare, but it sure as hell might work in a pinch.
“One long blast means to move forward to assist the LT,” Sergeant Turner said gruffly. “Two long blasts means to help us out over in the other position. Best I can do, sir.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. That’s perfect. Any more questions?”
“ROE?” Gallegos asked. Up to this point, their Rules of Engagement had been strictly to fight off thugs in the city with as minimal violence as possible. But these were straight up gangbangers, very bad dudes. What passed for the authorities in Manhattan were afraid of them. They needed to be removed if there was ever going to be peace.
“Weapons free,” Jake replied, earning several nods of approval. “But remember that we are extremely low on ammo. What we have is all we’ve got, so don’t go apeshit with suppressive fire and junk. Tell your men to pick their targets, and end their existence.” He looked around the small group of platoon leadership. “Anything else?”
Sergeant Turner’s rough, gravelly voice made him turn to look at the man standing next to him. “Yeah, I got one, sir. I heard what Jackson Jefferson’s guy said, but the platoon didn’t hear him, so it’s best if they hear it directly from you. What do we do if we find Harper dead, or can’t find him at all?”
“Given what little bit we know about the gang, that’s a very real possibility. Our number one priority is to retrieve Harper, whether that’s dead or alive. The scientist that we linked up with said that having him alive would be best, but even the body would be better than nothing. We are not leaving that neighborhood without Harper. He’s one of us now and we don’t leave our people behind. Got it?”
A chorus of affirmative answers met his assertion that they were going to search until they found Grady, whatever that took. “Thank you, Sergeant,” Jake nodded to his platoon sergeant. “Anything else?”
Nobody said anything, so Jake pointed a knife hand at Staff Sergeant Gallegos. “Alright, Sergeant. I want your squad moving out in five minutes. Understood?”
“Roger, sir.”
The lieutenant returned the flurry of salutes as his squad leaders went back to brief their men. “Over-under on whether this will work?” Jake asked Sergeant Turner as the taciturn old grunt went over a few last minute adjustments to his kit.
“Probably ninety-ten, sir. Harper’s dead. We just gotta get the body before they dump it in the river—or eat it.”
Jake kicked at the concrete in frustration. “Fucking asshole.”
“Yeah. Selfish. That’s all it was. Now we gotta clean up his mess.”
Jake glanced at his watch. Only a minute or so had passed of the five he’d given the first squad. “Okay. Good luck, Sergeant. I’m gonna move over with third squad.”
“Good luck, sir. Keep your head down. I don’t believe for one second that this gang is completely out of ammo.”
“Me either,” Jake agreed. “This whole thing is cocked up.”
Sergeant Turner’s weathered cheeks creased as he smiled. “Welcome to the Infantry, sir.”
24
* * *
BRAZILIAN HIGHLANDS RAINFOREST, BRAZIL
MARCH 7TH
The facility was larger than Hannah would have thought from the outside. The Iranians tunneled downward, creating two sublevels underground. As she walked behind a group of soldiers, the dampness of the air on the second basement level made her skin crawl.
“God, it smells awful down here,” she mumbled.
“It’s all the bodies in the holding pens,” a soldier nearby said through the closeness of his t-shirt over his mouth and nose. “Looks like they were eating each other for a while until they all died.”
After poking around the experimentation area a little more, Doctor Lawrence was convinced that the Iranians had been trying to improve the virus at the site when the infected were released to fight off the Havoc Group team outside. Major Edmunds surmised that the creatures had then attacked the workers and the site had to be abandoned. It was a pretty good guess of what happened considering the events of that day, but Hannah had reminded them that Grady Harper had been with her outside of the facility on that day, and the pictures that they found of him were clearly over a longer period of time.
The major didn’t like being corrected by a civilian, but he let it go with only a passing comment. Then, a call came over the radio from the captain in charge outside telling Edmunds that the infected from the surrounding jungle were still making their way toward the facility, following the sounds of the C-130 landing. Their slow stream of curiosity was keeping the snipers busy and the captain was worried that their numbers were increasing.
They had no idea how many of the damn things were out there, so the major wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible. He ordered a full sweep of the building to retrieve any and all written documentation, computers, disks, and thumb drives. The search team was given ten minutes, no more, to bag everything and get back outside to the plane.
Hannah had grabbed several of the pictures of Grady that the doctor tossed on the counter before heading off with the search team. She was convinced that there had to be further evidence of Grady’s whereabouts and what had happened to him. The fact that he’d been held in the facility was a blow to Hannah’s psyche. How the hell had he ended up inside as one of the unfortunate souls who’d been experimented upon? More pressing was the question of where he was now. What had happened to him?
She puzzled through that as she held a flashlight up for the sergeant she was with to search several desk drawers. Grady must have been immune, she decided. It was the only thing that made any type of sense as to how the infected outside hadn’t torn him to shreds like they’d done to poor Chris McCormick on the perimeter with her. She hadn’t known. She would have never abandoned him if she’d known.
Hannah wiped the unbidden tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. God, if she’d known that Grady, or anyone else from the team was still alive, she’d have done everything in her power to have tried to save them. Instead, she’d fled northward like a coward. All of the rationalizing of her actions on that day was shattered. She’d spent the past year telling herself that there was nothing that she could have done. It was all bullshit.
“Hey. Hey, I can’t see, ma’am.”
Hannah’s eyes snapped up. She’d allowed the flashlight to dip as she wallowed in self-pity, plunging the desk area into darkness. “Oh. Sorry,” she mumbled, elevating the beam back to the desk.
She’d come to Brazil in the hopes of finding closure, but all she’d done was create more problems for herself. She knew that Grady was dead. He had to be dead. There was no way he wasn’t. He’d been experimented on until his body finally succumbed to whatever they’d done to him.
He was dead. He was dead. He was—
“Hey, look at this,” someone called from another part of the sublevel.
The sergeant she was with pi
cked up the trash bag of journals that he’d tossed in there and walked toward the voice that’d called out to them. “Yeah, what is it?”
“The motherload!” the soldier proclaimed loudly, pointing his flashlight into a room filled with monitors and computers. “It’s the facility’s security room. They probably recorded everything that went on in here and it’s all saved on these hard drives.”
“Bag it all up,” the sergeant ordered. “Our time’s up. We’ll review everything back at Fort Bliss.”
Hannah eyed the banks of powerless monitors and knew that they’d found the answers to what actually happened here. This would give her the closure she needed. They’d videotaped the entire operation and it appeared as if they hadn’t had time to remove the data down here in the depths of the facility.
“Sergeant Wood, we need to exfil this site now. The natives are getting restless and beyond the snipers’ ability to control.”
Hannah glanced at the sergeant’s radio resting on his vest. “Okay, you heard the major. We need to go.”
“Wait!” Hannah exclaimed. “What about the videos? We can’t just leave them.”
“We don’t have time, ma’am. The infected are—”
“Screw the infected!” Hannah began grabbing disks off the shelf and tried to push them into the sergeant’s hands.
“Ma’am. Ma’am!” he yelled in her face, grabbing her hands. “We need to go. If the infected overrun this place, we’ll end up the same as the people who worked here. Dead. You hear me? Dead.”
“I was here,” she screeched. “I was here, dammit. I know. I need closure. I need…something.”
The sergeant stared at her for a moment. “Fine. We’re leaving in thirty seconds, boys. Get everything you can.”
The small team went to work. They swept compact disk cases into their bags by the armful. Hannah grabbed a laptop and disconnected the cords. Then, she thought better of it and pulled power cable from an outlet in case they needed a way to power the equipment and didn’t have a compatible cord. It was a weird two-prong connector that she’d only seen used in Iraq when she was there. Hopefully someone back at the base had an adapter kit.
“Okay, time’s up,” Sergeant Wood said. “We need to go.”
Hannah did a quick once-over of the security station. It appeared as if they’d gotten everything in that quick flurry of activity. She nodded, clutching the laptop to her chest with one hand, while grasping the pistol grip of her M-4 with the other. It was an awkward position and she hoped to God that she didn’t need to defend herself, otherwise the laptop was going to fall.
The team raced up the stairs, bags of evidence bouncing against their legs. With all the notes and files that had been left behind, Hannah wondered what in the hell had happened there. The facility had been abandoned quickly, did that mean that there was a chance that Grady had gotten out? Or was he one of the wretched creatures that they’d killed when they entered the building?
Sergeant Wood’s radio squawked constantly about needing to exfil the site immediately, urging them to run faster. One of the men tripped and fell, the contents of his bag scattering across the ground. He tried to scoop loose-leafed papers back into the sack, but Sergeant Wood yelled for him to leave it and go.
The distant sounds of unsuppressed gunfire reached their ears by the time they made it up to the ground floor. They tried following the orange arrows in the reverse direction since that’s how they’d gotten inside, but that didn’t work. The arrows pointed the way from several different sections of the facility and before too long, Hannah was convinced that they were lost.
“Stop!” she shouted when they came to another intersection of hallways. “Listen. Follow the sounds of gunfire.”
They held still for a moment, trying to suppress their heavy breathing. The men tilted their heads, trying to angle their ears for better clarity. Finally, one of the privates said, “This way. It’s coming from this way.” He pointed up a hallway that looked the same as any of the others.
Sergeant Wood asked, “You sure?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” the private answered.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
The gunfire grew louder and Hannah knew that the soldier had picked the correct route. “They’re trying to leave!” Sergeant Wood shouted, pointing at his radio. “Come on. Come on.”
The new information added an urgency to their pace as everyone tore through the facility at breakneck speed. Unsecured paperwork flew from bags that hadn’t been tied off, causing Hannah to wonder how much precious data they were losing in the process. Anything was better than nothing though.
They emerged into the bright South American sun. The sounds of M-4s firing was loud as it echoed into the loading dock where they stood. The big propellers on the C-130 were spinning and the plane was moving slowly down the short runway.
“Fuck! Let’s go!” somebody shouted, taking off running.
They all followed suit, sprinting as if their lives depended on it. In truth, they probably did depend on making it to that plane before they were left behind. As she ran, clutching the laptop to her chest, Hannah’s mind processed the fact that there were still men firing somewhere up ahead, so they weren’t being abandoned, but it sure as hell felt like it in that moment.
The team burst past the final row of shipping containers. Men fired into the jungle from beside the tarmac. Shapes moved in the darkness of the rain forest, indistinct and menacing. The crew chief from the C-130 stood on the ramp, motioning for them to hurry. Two or three soldiers stood by the end of the ramp shooting off beyond her line of sight.
When her boots thudded against the C-130’s ramp, an overwhelming sense of relief washed over Hannah. They’d made it back. They’d made it to—
The plane shuddered violently and a mass of dark red liquid covered the windows along the port side. They’d hit something with a propeller. Would that engine work now? Would they have enough thrust to take off from the shortened runway?
Around her, men shouted incoherently, pushing her forward into the bowels of the plane. She fell into a passenger seat as more men pressed inside the plane. She watched in horror as men fired their rifles from inside the plane, point-blank into the crazies attempting to board the plane. The infected were everywhere, their faces twisted in rage, screaming incoherently. The ramp rose too slowly. It wasn’t going to be enough.
The crew chief fired his puny 9mm pistol through the narrowing gaps between the ramp and the fuselage as the plane began to roll. There was still a solid twelve inches of daylight showing from the top of the ramp when the pilots pushed the thrust all the way forward, sending men and equipment tumbling toward the back of the plane.
There was a tense few moments as the big engines roared. Hannah used her fingers to plug her ears. The sound was deafening as the men and women in the cockpit struggled for control during the combat takeoff. Then, she felt the shift as the front wheels left the tarmac, followed quickly by the rear wheels.
They were airborne. All around her, men cheered. She allowed herself to smile, letting the moment take her.
The elation at their escape was quickly replaced by leadership getting headcounts and hearing the numbers of men lost in the operation. Medics went through the group, checking everyone for bite and scratch marks. Through it all, Hannah clung to the laptop she’d taken. This was the device that had been plugged in, recording the final moments of the facility’s security system. The answers to her questions about Grady’s fate were on the laptop. She just knew it.
25
* * *
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 7TH
The house smelled of unwashed bodies and blood. Grady crinkled his nose, making him wince in pain. He probably looked a mess after getting beat up and then Scorpion punched him a few times, ruining his face. He flexed his fingers around the heavy wooden closet rod that he held up high, ready to strike a blow to someone’s head. He’d broken the end of the rod off, giving him a jagged
side for stabbing and a blunt end to use as a club. It was a modern rendition of one of the oldest weapons in history.
He heard soft slapping of skin on skin and a deep moan of pleasure from the bedroom next to the one he’d been held in. He crept down the hallway. He’d expected the guard to be right outside the door, but he wasn’t. What kind of shitshow operation were these guys running? Pieces and parts of the previous night’s hunt came back to him. It’d been easy killing the undisciplined mob. Now would be no different, assuming he could stay awake.
The door to the bedroom was open. Grady started to peek around the doorframe, but saw a dresser with a mirror mounted on top across the room. He angled himself so he could ascertain the situation in the mirror’s reflection. Two men were on the bed, both naked. One of them was on all fours, facing away from the door while the other was behind him. The two guards that Scorpion had posted outside his door were busy getting busy while he was supposed to be fucking the whores. At least they’d go out doing what they enjoyed.
Grady rushed into the room and wrapped a hand around the upright man’s mouth as he twisted him to the side. The blunt end of the closet rod fell wickedly onto the back of the other man’s head. He crumpled like a sack of shit.
Pain erupted through Grady’s hand as the man he’d gagged bit into his palm savagely. Grady snarled and pulled the club backward, toward himself. The jagged part of the rod sunk into the man’s soft abdomen, eliciting a muted scream. Grady pulled the wooden stake from him and thrust it home once more.
Again, the man screamed through Grady’s bloodied fingers and bit down in an effort to free himself. Grady gave him another stab wound to the stomach. His struggling lessened. That one did the trick, Grady thought, letting a savage grin crease his face.
The stake sank surprisingly easily through the man’s armpit into the vital organs in his chest. All fight left him completely at that point and Grady released him. The corpse’s manhood slid out of his partner with an audible squelch of wetness.
Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Page 17