Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 55

They had caught her before. Caught her and shamed her in her own eyes. They had made it seem like she wasn't strong enough or quick enough or smart enough to stay one step ahead. They'd caught her. They'd laid a trap for her. They'd outwitted her.

That fact screamed inside her head every night and every day. It had been like a knife in her mind from the moment of her arrest.

They had outsmarted her and stolen her power.

If she walked away now, how could she ever prove to them that she was stronger, quicker, and smarter? And if they closed in on her and she had no weapons left, then how could she fight back? Her stock of the pathogens was almost gone. All she had left were what she thought of as party favors. To absolutely insure her safety she needed much bigger supplies, and a greater variety of them. If she had those, no one would dare harm her. They could never be sure she didn't have something poised to go off in a gavotte of mutually a.s.sured destruction. After all, hadn't she already proved that she was crazy, that she would do absolutely anything?

Yes, she d.a.m.n well had. Ask anyone.

Walk away ...

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!"

Mother Night screamed it so loud it filled the whole suite.

"No-no-NO!"

She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the TV remote and hurled it with savage force at the screen, which exploded in a shower of gla.s.s and sparks.

Mother Night glared at it, hunched from the throw, chest heaving as if she'd run up a steep hill, teeth bared.

"No."

That time her voice was so soft, so small, so cold. Like a bullet waiting to be fired.

Chapter Ninety-three.

The Locker Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility Highland County, Virginia Sunday, September 1, 11:27 a.m.

From the air the Locker looked exactly as nondescript as it was supposed to look. A small tractor parts store with a wraparound parking lot. Pair of green metal Dumpsters on the west side. Scattering of vehicles in the lot, mostly pickup trucks. Ghost whuffed softly at the apparently empty terrain.

"I thought a lot of people worked there," said Montana. "Where are their cars?"

"Secondary parking lot close to town," I said. "Staff comes in on a bus and they stay down in the Locker for three-week s.h.i.+fts. Bus drops them off when the store is officially closed."

Top nodded to the pickup trucks. "We can scan their plates once we're down, but from here they don't look like the kind of vehicles an infiltration team would use."

"Maybe the bad guys came in a bird, too," suggested Dunk, but I shook my head. "The staff at the tractor store would have seen that and hit the alarms. No, they either came in nondescript vehicles or they came over the hills."

We pulled on the hoods of the Hammer suits and fitted the visors into place. They had clear lenses with night-vision goggles mounted above, ready to swing down should the lights go out. I ordered the pilot to set us down by the heavy Dumpsters. They would provide cover while we offloaded.

"Then dust off and stay on station," I told him, "eyes open and weapons hot."

He set down as light as a feather. The rotor wash picked up dirt and old trash and swirled it around in a cyclone of detritus, but it all whipped away and fell out of sight. With the stealth mode engaged, the nearly silent landing of the helicopters had a ghostly and unreal quality that provided no comfort.

Top jerked the door open, and Sam leaped out first, fading left, kneeling with his rifle to his shoulder to offer cover as the rest of the team hit the ground and ran for the cover of the Dumpster. They looked like gray shadows in their Hammer suits.

Ghost fidgeted and whined, eager to get out and bite something, but we were going to do an infil into a potentially biohazardous site, and they don't make hazmat suits for dogs. They should, but they don't. I told him to stay topside with Sam. Ghost gave me a look of such hurt and personal affront that it let me know in no uncertain terms that he would p.o.o.p in my shoes at the first convenient opportunity.

"Don't give me that face," I said. "If the bad guys get out I promise that you can track them down and go all Hound of the Baskervilles on them. But you're not going inside."

We jumped down from the bird and ran fast for cover. Top took Lydia and Noah with him and headed around back. Bunny, Dunk, and Montana ran straight to the front of the building and flattened out in a blind spot of the security cameras. Or, what would have been a blind spot if the cameras were functioning. They sat there, unmoving, their little red lights gone dark.

Sam Imura broke right and ran to a tumble of three cracked boulders and laid his rifle in a cleft where two of them had smashed together. When he gave me the nod Ivan and I made our run. Sam's weapon of choice is a 408 Cheyenne Tactical sniper rifle that fires .338 Lapua Magnum supersonic rounds. Getting hit by one of those rounds is like being swatted off the planet by G.o.d. And if Sam fires at you, you will get hit. It's easy math. Sam's worst day on the range makes my best day look pathetic, and with him there I felt confident in running the distance from the helo to the iron Dumpster.

Behind us the Black Hawk lifted up and away, rising to a height of two hundred yards and making a slow circle of the building.

Ivan and I found a secure location and he took up a firing position while I did a visual sweep of the terrain. Nothing moved but dragonflies, grackles, and a squirrel who panicked and ran like a gray streak when Ghost materialized behind him.

Bunny's squad moved to the parking lot and quickly went from vehicle to vehicle, using helmet cams to send images of each license plate. Nikki's team ran them through MindReader.

"Cowboy," said Nikki, "every plate checks out as either an employee of the tractor store or a farmer from within a twenty-mile radius."

The terrain continued to be empty and uninformative. I headed to the far side of the front wall and knelt in a cleft between two withered decorative shrubs, then crabbed slowly sideways toward the front door. It stood slightly ajar, blocked from closing by something I couldn't yet identify. I tapped my earbud. "Report."

"Sergeant Rock to Cowboy," said Top. "Nothing going on back here. Rear door is closed and locked. No recent footprints in the dirt leading to or from. No windows back here."

"Copy that. Leave a door prize and converge on me."

Top clicked off. "Door prize" was another name for a blaster-plaster, which was a sheet of flexible material saturated with high explosives. When it was inactive it could take a rifle bullet and not detonate. But there were small wires running through it that, when the material was stretched and placed over the seam of a closed door, leaked compounds that combined to form a chemical detonator. You peeled off plastic film to expose a strong adhesive that bonded it to almost any solid surface. Left undisturbed, it could sit there for hours. Left too long and the detonator chemicals oxidized and became inert. However, if anyone opened a door or window sealed with a blaster-plaster, then it went boom. It packed a lot of oomph per inch.

A few seconds later, Top's squad came running around the far end of the building, moving fast, with a lot of small, quick steps so that their aim wasn't jarred. They squatted down behind me, Lydia facing back the way they'd come, Top shoulder-to-shoulder with me.

"Something's blocking the door from closing," I told him, "but I can't get an angle on it. Watch my back."

I leaned out and took as close a look at the door as I dared. A mailbox blocked my view of the obstruction and the front of the building was in shadow. Too dark to see well but not dark enough for night-vision gla.s.ses. I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta, which is easier to fire when moving in a low crouch and which has a powerful flashlight mounted below the barrel. Four slow crabbing steps got me to the right spot and I trained the flashlight beam on the obstruction.

"s.h.i.+t," I whispered.

"What are you seeing, Cap'n?" asked Top.

I said, "It looks like a hand."

Another step, then I changed the angle of the flash in order to see inside.

It was a hand, no doubt about it.

But it wasn't attached to anything.

Chapter Ninety-four.

The Locker Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility Highland County, Virginia Sunday, September 1, 11:31 a.m.

The hand lay in a pool of dark blood. It had been cut off a few inches above the wrist. Not a clean cut, either. There was a heavy silver school ring on the pinky. I used the zoom function on my helmet cam to pick out the details.

"Nikki? Can you see the ring?"

She had clean-up software that-as Ivan once put it-could count freckles on a gnat's b.a.l.l.s. "Highland High School," said Nikki. "Cla.s.s of '92. A local, probably a farmer."

I felt a dart of sadness bury its needle in my chest. Some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d, maybe working his dad's farm instead of going off to college, comes in here to buy parts and walks into a nightmare. Walks off the cliff at the end of his life. Sometimes the hardest deaths to take aren't those of fallen heroes but of innocent bystanders who, had they stopped at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, might have missed this whole thing and gone on with their lives.

"What's the play, Cap'n?" asked Top.

I didn't answer immediately. We now knew for certain that this was no technical glitch, no industrial accident. Sure, we knew that coming here, but there had been a tiny fragment of hope. Ah well. Our luck had been running p.i.s.s-poor for a while now. Why change? Mind you, I was still hoping that there were only one or two maniacs hiding inside, waiting to give up peacefully and get right with Jesus. And turquoise warthogs might fly out of my a.s.s.

I took two devices from my pockets. The first was the size of a deck of playing cards. I thumbed a b.u.t.ton and adjusted a dial, then held it toward the door, moving it back and forth slowly, first from side to side and then up and down. The small green light didn't change, didn't moderate toward orange or red.

No electronic devices.

That was the first relief. This doohickey didn't scan for jammers, it scanned for devices keyed to electronically detonate bombs. So far so good, but still not the time to do the happy dance. The second device looked like a collapsible cane for the vision-impaired, and when I unfolded it the lightweight hollow sections fit into place exactly like a cane. Except this one was nearly ten feet long and ended with a small red rubber ball that looked like a clown nose. It wasn't. It was actually about twenty thousand dollars' worth of sensors suspended in a ball of foam. The alloy of the cane was nonconductive, the handle wrapped in rubber.

If we'd had more time, if there wasn't a clock the size of Big Ben ticking as loud as gunfire in my ear, I could have logistics send me a bomb disposal robot. That wasn't going to happen, so I waved everyone else back and then crunched myself into as small a size as possible, angling so that my body armor offered the greatest degree of protection in case I was dead wrong about that whole bomb thing. Then I extended one arm, holding the rod like a conductor with a baton. The red tip hovered an inch away from the door and then lightly brushed it. If it picked up anything-such as a trembler switch being activated by my opening the door-it would send a sharp warning to the electronics detector I still held in my other hand.

I took a breath, offered a generic prayer to whichever G.o.d was on call, and pushed.

Then froze.

The door didn't move.

Was there a wire somewhere I didn't see? Would further pressure snap it?

I licked my lips and pushed just a little harder.

The door swung inward.

I waited.

Nothing went boom.

I pushed again.

It wasn't that there was resistance from a wire; the door was simply heavy. I waited some more. I could almost feel each of my team waiting, eyes sharp, breath held, fingers laid along the curves of trigger guards, hearts pounding.

There was no explosion.

After a thousand years I withdrew the rod and collapsed it, then stowed it and the detector into my pockets. I ordered Ghost to go find Sam and stay with him. Then I tapped my earbud to open the team channel. "Everyone get ready, I'm about to get loud."

I pulled a flash-bang.

"Flash out!" I yelled and lobbed it side-arm in through the open door.

The flash-bang did what the catalog says it'll do. It flashed and banged. I squeezed my eyes shut, buried my head, and clamped my hands over my ears. As soon as the blast was over I was in motion, Bunny and Top swarmed up behind me, and the others followed. We broke right and left, guns up, yelling at everyone and anyone to drop weapons, raise hands, not get shot.

However, everyone in that store was beyond caring or complying.

There were nine people in there. Eight men and a woman. The woman wore an ap.r.o.n that had the name of the tractor company on the bib. She sat on the floor behind the counter. Four black holes were st.i.tched across her chest.

Everyone else was just as dead.

Sh.e.l.l casings littered the floor. They looked like little metal islands in an ocean of red. But not all of the killing had been done with guns. Someone had used a heavy, bladed weapon in here. Long wounds were gouged across bodies. Heads and limbs were hacked off. Top nodded to a wall display of fire and woodcutting axes. There were clips for six axes but only five were on the wall.

"Check the air," I said, but the others were already looking at the screen displays of the portable BAMS units clipped to their belts.

"In the green, boss," said Bunny from the far side of the room.

"Green here, too," said Ivan, who stood by the door.

"Green and good," confirmed Top.

I glanced down at mine. Green.

I wondered how long it would take my nuts to crawl down out of my chest cavity even if it stayed green. Maybe by Christmas. Definitely not today.

We checked the whole store and found only the echo of pain and the persistence of death. The people here had died hard. Maybe the counter woman had it the easiest, she was the only one who looked to have been shot to death. We were all silent as we took this in. We weren't shocked into stillness. It wasn't that. We were a.s.sessing the situation, gauging our unknown enemy. We'd expected there to be bodies here. The level of savagery was surprising. The efficiency with which this installation had been invaded spoke to a brilliant and calculating mind; the butchery spoke of pa.s.sions that were out of control.

"No sign of Dr. Van Sant," observed Montana. "Does that mean he made it into the facility?"

"Don't know," I admitted. "Be real useful if we found him alive and able to talk, though. He knows the day code, and without those we have to blow open a lot of doors. I'd prefer not to have to do that."

"Because of the damage?"

"No, because if any of the fail-safe systems are still functioning then the shock might trigger them. In which case we don't get out."

Montana studied me for a moment, then nodded. "Then I guess we better find him."

Top walked over to one corpse whose body had been hacked almost beyond recognition as human. I watched Top's eyes as he took in what little information was left.

"Boy," he said. "Fifteen, sixteen."

He didn't say anything else, didn't fill the air with any macho threats, but we all knew and understood. Top was the only active DMS team member who had kids. Well ... one kid, his daughter, who'd lost both her legs when an IED exploded under her Bradley. His son was buried in Arlington. They'd found enough of him for funeral purposes. Those tragedies had been the impetus that made Top apply for the DMS. The memory of a son torn apart by enemy fire and a beautiful, brave daughter living her life in a wheelchair made Top into a different kind of soldier than the rest of us. His fury was cold, calculating, and enduring. He never lost control or fell prey to battle madness, but if he had his sights on the bad guys who did this, then they were going to come to watershed moments in their lives that they would not enjoy.

I moved past Top and he followed in my wake as we rounded the counter and went through the open doorway to the back room. The curtain part.i.tion was on the floor, tangled around the dead woman. b.l.o.o.d.y footprints tracked past her.

"What do you figure?" I asked him, nodding to the prints.

"Too many to count," he said. "The overlap. But they're all wearing the same shoes."