The single saving grace was that only the A-type element had leaked, so the two hadn’t mixed. That would have been a complete catastrophe. The B element would have chewed through the disposable suits, and the resulting contamination would kill them all. That protocol was much different and included opening all the train’s outer doors and windows. He’d seen it before, and there was very little defense. As it was, there was still enough of both chemicals to do the job General Tympkin wanted accomplished, though only just barely.
As Uintergrin stripped off his suit, he noticed a piece of the barrel leak tape was attached to his suit. He pulled it off with a gloved hand and stuck it into a clear plastic chemical containment bag, finished his washdown, and made his way forward. He waited a moment outside Colonel Karataev’s door. The man was either cowering inside and awaiting a report or still sleeping. Uintergrin wasn’t sure which was worse. He knocked, and a weak answer came from within.
So he is a coward. Uintergrin slid the door open to see his boss crouched up on the train seat, the window wide open, air blowing hard against him. He must’ve pulled the window’s emergency latch. Uintergrin could see both panes had fallen free. Mostly he noticed the man was still not in his NBC suit.
Too panicked to move, he thought. The fool studied nothing of the chemical protocol and procedures manuals I gave him.
“Is it safe?” the colonel yelled over the rushing wind.
“We’ve had a containment leak,” Uintergrin said loudly but calmly.
“How bad is it?” Karataev said. His eyes grew in horror, and he bent his face closer to the window.
“Two barrels cracked. Limited liquid and aerosol leak. We’ll move the good barrels to the prisoners’ car . . . and the last car is to be considered contaminated.”
“Unfortunate. But I heard we lost men. I heard they died horribly from the exposure.” He sounded pleading now.
“It’s true. We had four patriots who died heroically for Mother Russia. Their names will be noted, and I will ensure the general declares them heroes before the month is out.”
“Fine, fine, I will call Tympkin shortly and let him know. But shouldn’t we ditch the train and abandon the mission? We are already limping along . . . must be twenty, maybe thirty kilometers an hour. Will you keep the prisoners—I mean the comrades—in their bio-suits? I know I’m in charge of this mission, Uintergrin, but you know I’ll support your decision if you think we ought to call this quits.” His voice was coming in fits and starts. He added, “Doomed from the start, just as I said,” before Uintergrin could speak.
“We have it contained. We can continue the mission.”
He saw Karataev’s body slump; it was not the news he wanted. It was clear the man wanted to be anywhere but here, and Uintergrin’s news sent him further into a panic.
Like a cornered rat, now Karataev lashed out. “Damn it, man. This will not work. How can we continue? I must call Tympkin. We should let him decide. After I give him all the facts, that is.” Karataev heaved a few times, like a child in the middle of a crying fit. “He’ll see. It’s madness to continue. I just need to know when it’s safe to leave my cabin. Then we can get some answers.”
“Yes, sir. You are, as you said, in charge.” Uintergrin watched the man whimpering and gasping a moment more, then moved to leave.
Before he did, he opened the plastic bag and pushed the open end over the door handle, making sure that the still-wet chemical tape covered the handle thoroughly as he turned it and slid the door open.
He looked back at his boss and slid the bag off the handle. “It’s safe now, sir. All the chemicals are contained in the rear of the train, and all the aerosol that leaked will flow behind the train with the wind as we continue to clean the cars. The towns we pass through might not be too glad tomorrow morning for their new presents, but we will remain fine up here. You may make your report to the general when you are ready.”
Karataev nodded and was visibly relieved, but remained gulping the cold night air coming through the window.
Once outside the cabin, Uintergrin sealed the bag, careful to only hold it by the outer plastic edges. He walked to a window, released the catch, and lowered it, still holding the bag with his other hand. He meticulously peeled off each finger of the special charcoal-lined black leather gloves he always wore, then tossed them together with the bag out the window. Next, he hurried over to one of the nearby portable decon stations and fastidiously washed his hands and arms with the chemical reacting foam. If he’d been fast and careful enough, any limited exposure to his skin shouldn’t cause any problems. His boss, he believed, would not be as lucky.
CHAPTER 23
Tucker County High School
West Virginia
“This is the worst possible scenario, Colonel Asher,” said the vice president. “I’m still not clear how you let them get by you. Where does your intel section place the train now?”
Tyce had his head down as he listened to the vice president on speakerphone, but the question brought him out of his own thoughts. He looked over toward the intel section and caught Stacey staring at him. She looked away when he caught her gaze, but she seemed to be paying close attention.
Her hair was still pulled back and her cheeks were rosy, fresh from some reconnaissance mission she had been explaining to Tyce just as the VP called. She seemed to like working alone, like most intel types, and Tyce appreciated her autonomy in getting her job done, especially given how busy his command post always was. She glanced at a note one of her men handed her and cleared her throat in a melodic way, almost like an opera star trying to find the right pitch, and spoke.
“It looks like—and this is considering the time it took for you all to get back and factoring the train’s current speeds that we gleaned from the hasty debriefs—they are somewhere on our side of White Sulfur Springs, soon to be headed into Virginia. In another four or five hours, they will be in a position to either turn north or south in the Shenandoah Valley.”
“Your old stomping ground, Colonel,” said the vice president. “Too bad you don’t still occupy that piece of ground. Do you think they’ll use the big rail lines?”
Stacey answered for Tyce. “They won’t . . . sir. They’ll carefully keep to the backwoods rail lines. Getting caught in a city along the coast or anywhere near the suburban sprawl around D.C. or Richmond and Norfolk would kill their momentum.”
“Got it, thank you. Good analysis. Our team up here is nodding, they agree. Is that the new intel officer you were telling me about, Colonel Asher?”
“It is, sir. She’s proven invaluable. She also just got back from a mission conducting some local reconnaissance. But if I could also mention, we think we slowed them down at least some. The men said they could hear one of their cars had a jammed wheel or something after the parting shots I mentioned at the beginning of the call.”
“What’s to say we didn’t hit any of their cargo?” The VP’s voice sounded worried.
“We did, Mr. Vice President, but after the Russians took a chunk out of us, I personally felt we need to do something to accomplish our stated mission. I take full responsibility for any fallout.”
The room went so quiet for a moment you could hear the radios hum, but the vice president spoke first. “Okay, good work, Lieutenant Colonel Asher. I know those decisions on the ground are terrible, but I want you to know, and I need all of those in the room listening to know, that I support you one hundred percent.”
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President.” Tyce had been holding back, but up until that very moment, he had guessed there was a fifty-fifty chance of him getting relieved on the spot. He clutched his chest where the bullet and the binoculars had crashed against him. He had yet to go get it checked out, and it hurt, badly. “Our new chemical officer remained behind to gather some of his folks and assess the damage. We should get a report tomorrow.”
“Okay, boss man,” said the vice president. His tone was more upbeat now that he knew where things stood. �
�We don’t have the time for you to wait for that report. You and your team are still the best force I have in the region, and before you go off to formulate a new plan, I have some more intel updates for you. News that may change some of your strategizing.”
Tyce looked around the room. Everyone had a pencil and paper out or was listening intently. “Okay, sir, go ahead. We’re all ears.”
“I’ll make my acting director of the CIA available to you all afterward for your intel section for any additional details, but I want you to hear it all from me first so you know the gravity of your ongoing assignment. We’ve identified the prisoners that the Russians sprang from ADX Florence—that’s the supermax prison in Colorado—and you’re not going to like it. First one is former FBI agent Michael Hanson.”
A few exclamations went up around the room, especially from Stacey and her intel section.
“I take it from the noise most of your folks know who that is. The very same FBI senior agent in charge of counterespionage. Career man, worked for the agency for nearly thirty years, all the while feeding information over to Mother Russia. He was so good at his job, they say he single-handedly set our intel apparatus back twenty years. We were picking up the pieces on that disaster for a decade. He was directly responsible for the deaths of ten of our agents and likely more, if you include partnered nations’ agents. Most won’t divulge this, but we had to give up details on everyone he’d touched in thirty years to every one of our partners. Huge egg on our faces. He also helped many, many other operators infiltrate the U.S. before we caught him. No reason to explain why the Russians want him back; it’s pretty clear he is quite a prize for them, and springing him shows just how far they’ll go to take care of their own. Likely there are more of his sleeper agents out there.”
“Who ever said no one likes a traitor?” Gunny whispered jokingly to Tyce, who waved him to be silent.
“Your number two man is one Professor Doshkar Kozin-ski.” The room again broke out in a rumble of voices, this time more so than before. “Ah, so you all remember the so-called Omni-bomber. PhDs in chemistry and physics from Harvard. Worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground in the army labs for ten years as the absolute darling of the chem-bio defense world. Girls loved the pictures of him with his Einstein hair and boyish good looks. Put us on the map for modern chem-defense in countering other nations’ chem and bio. Seemed like an all-American. That is, until something clicked, and he unleashed the deadliest series of ricin attacks our country has ever known. For months we struggled to find out who could be behind it all, and he covered his tracks so well, even to this day there’s doubt among the public that it was him. All we know is the attacks stopped once we locked his ass up.”
“There’s still that geeky haircut named after him,” said Gunny.
“We got the right guy,” someone else said.
“I didn’t order from Amazon for a year,” said Sergeant Berringer.
“Who did?” said Gunny. “I mean, who suspects an Amazon package? We get them so regularly, you never even stop opening it long enough to think if you even ordered something.”
Tyce shushed them all; he was growing impatient.
“We believe he is on board to help with the chemicals. Exactly how—we have some guesses. We think that having a known criminal and serial chem-bio terrorist gives them the perfect fall guy. They understand the international ramifications of using chemicals against us and may have concocted some kind of scenario where they pin the attack back on the professor.”
“Fucking genius,” said Gunny. “They slime us with our own chem, then point the finger at this joker, and they’re off scot-fucking-free. Bet they even arrest his ass after the fact. Then they own the whole show, up to and including taking credit for his capture, all while avoiding any fallout. Very Soviet of them.” He chortled and glanced at Stacey, who grimaced back but kept her gaze fixated on Tyce.
“Possibly,” said Tyce. It sounded far-fetched, but it did clearly give the Russians both a method and a means. It was the motive that still wasn’t clear; but then again, things were rarely clear on a battlefield. The enemy was a thinking, living being, an opposing will, and that usually left motive difficult to discern. “They’d only use it in a spot where they were stuck. I don’t see the big picture, Mr. Vice President, I’m too focused on my own battles. Do you all have some ideas?” Right at that moment, Tyce realized just how much he needed General Custis. The general always seemed to see the big picture so well.
“We do. We believe they might use it to target the 82nd Airborne division down at Bragg or up north against the 10th Mountains Division at Fort Drum.”
“Jeez, that doesn’t bode well. If they’re North Carolina bound, we don’t have much time to waste.”
“Exactly,” the vice president said. “You get about an extra twelve hours if it’s New York. In any case, I can’t stress again how time is absolutely of the essence right now.”
The room was stunned into silence, with everyone lost in their own reflections on the implications of either target. “All right,” continued the vice president. “Our last man is still a bit of a mystery. He is Jean-Jacques DelaCroix.”
The room stayed silent.
“Yes, we had the same reaction: Who the hell is Jean-Jacques DelaCroix? No one seems to pay attention to the uber white-collar criminals, even though he’s possibly the worst and has had the widest-ranging effect of all of them. Jean-Jacques is a computer hacker. In fact, unlike the others, most of you have probably unknowingly been touched by his wizard powers at one time or another. One of the world’s best. He broke into eBay’s payment system and set up a funnel site that stole pennies from every purchase made, then converted it into untraceable Bitcoin. Flush with cash and confident in his abilities, he crashed Wall Street . . . six times. Each time, he made it look like foreign interference from—ironically—Russia and China. Worst fact: our NSA believed every crash was attributable to foreign governments and started to do the same things back to them.”
A few comments broke out in the room.
“Yeah, you probably never heard that before.” There was some commotion on the other side of the phone, then the VP continued, “I’m being told it might be best you disregard that little tidbit. Besides the numerous worms, viruses, and hacks, he sent through the web of which you were all probably unwitting recipients, he is probably best known for dumping millions of bits of U.S. classified data, then letting his friend Julian Strange take all the blame. You’ve heard of Julian, but the real mastermind, the one who stole all the data, was Jean-Jacques. He did it to conceal his sixth and final Wall Street hack, but that was actually the sole reason we caught him. Otherwise, he’d still be at large counting his billions. What the Russians want with him is anybody’s guess.”
Tyce waited to see if there was more, then looked around the room to see if there were any questions. There were none, so he spoke up. “So what does this mean for our mission, Mr. Vice President?”
“In short, it means you must get that train. Can you please clear the room down to just your inner circle? We have some sensitive future operations to discuss.”
“Sure.” Tyce would prefer if all his decision makers remained, but he dismissed everyone but Gunny and Stacey. If Victoria or even Blue had been there, he would have kept them, too, but Victoria had yet to report in, and no one knew what had happened to Blue after he was summoned to the mayor’s office. Tyce looked at his watch; it was almost midnight. The clock was ticking, and though the purview of officers was supposed to be planning, he really felt they needed to get on the road and back into the fight.
A terrible, sweaty feeling had been creeping over him throughout the whole briefing. His insides were screaming for him to jump into action. Things seemed to be slipping away from him on the battlefield. He also knew that overly hasty action was exactly what killed Ned and so many of Ned’s men. If Victoria were there, she would have understood his predicament. Tyce was now personally feeling the loss, death and sickness
of much of his inner circle
Tyce indicated that the room was clear, and the VP continued, “A chemical attack on our troops would take out a unit and also serve to kill the morale of the other units still fighting. Including yours. It would make it clear that we have no other resources to protect you. Because, speaking frankly and mano a mano, Colonel Asher, we have no more tricks up our sleeves. The Russians would only need to hint at using chem again and the rumor mill in all the units still fighting and among the troops would account for the highest desertion rates we’ve ever seen.”
“We’re sure they won’t use it against civilians?” Tyce asked.
“Even with the professor as a scapegoat, politically they couldn’t justify an attack on civilians. The Canadian military has come to the same conclusions, you may like to know, and they have grave concerns if their ultimate target is Fort Drum.”
“Only if it’s Fort Drum?” Gunny scoffed, only somewhat under his breath.
Enlisted men, especially senior enlisted men, had a knack for snide and offhanded remarks. There was a certain leeway given to them by their officers. Having a group of mid-level leaders who spoke their mind and voiced doubt had come in handy through most of the Marine Corps’ almost 250 years of existence, and Tyce certainly appreciated the men who spoke freely. It was when they held their tongues that he got really worried. Often, that meant they didn’t believe in the mission or, worse, in their leader.
The VP was still going. “A full-fledged chem attack, enough to kill or sicken the men of the 10th Mountain, would decimate the entire region. The men up there are fighting from towns, houses, in the forests, and, like you all, up in the mountains. The Russians would need to spread those chemicals very broadly over northern New York State, and the analysis from our Canuck buddies is that Lake Ontario would be rendered a dead sea within the month. With the Russian invasion, world food supplies have become scarce, expensive, and harder to move around. The Russians have, as of yet, not blockaded commerce at the mouth of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, but they have been using aircraft to stop anything coming across the lakes from Canada. Canada is counting on those lakes for a meager fish supply, as are we.”
The Kill Box Page 18