“Could…could you turn the pictures over? I don’t mean to be a pussy, but I don’t want her staring at me the whole time, y’know?”
“Sure,” I said, and did so. But I left them on the table. “Try to relax. Smoke one if you got any.”
He shook his head. “Never took it up. Jesus H. Christ. Wish I had.”
I opened my briefcase and took out two bottles of spring water, unscrewed one, and handed it to him. He drank half of it down. Then I took some airline bottles of Jack Daniels and lined them up in front of him. One, two, three.
“If it helps,” I said.
He snatched one off the edge of the table, twisted off the cap and chugged it, then coughed. More bravado than brains.
“Tell me about the woman,” I said. “And what happened in the cave.”
He gave that some thought, drank half of the second bottle of Jack.
“Do you know my outfit? Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. We were part of Operation Khanjar, working that corner of Helmand Province, doing some recon stuff up in the hills,” he began. “Counterinsurgency work, and some fox hunts to flush the Taliban teams running opium through the area. That whole part of the province is nothing but dead rock riddled with a million caves. You could hide a hundred thousand people in there, camels and all, and it would take us fifty years to find half of them. That’s why this war was fucked from the snap. The Russians couldn’t do it twenty years ago, and we can’t do it now. Besides, nine out of ten people you meet are friendlies who look and dress just like the hostiles, so how you going to know?”
“Skip the politics, Sergeant. Talk about the woman.”
He shrugged. “It was weird out there because last week the whole place was lit up by some kind of underground explosion. We got word that some Taliban lab blew up, but the blast wasn’t nuclear. Something to do with geo-thermal chambers or shifting plates or some bullshit like that. A whole section of desert just fell into itself, and there was this spike of fire that shot a couple hundred feet in the air.”
“No radiation?”
“No. Most of us still had TLD badges and the badges stayed neutral. The area was hot, though…not with radiation, but actually hot. Like a furnace. When we reached the outer perimeter of the event zone we could see a weird shimmer, and I realized that big sections of the desert had been melted to glass. It looked like a lava flow, rippled and dark.”
“And is that where you found the woman?”
He drank the rest of the second bottle of Jack Daniels and chased it with a long pull on the water bottle. He was pale, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips dry. He looked like shit and probably felt worse. Just mentioning the “woman” made his eyes jump.
“Yeah,” he said. “Locals started calling in sightings of burned people, and then word came down to scramble a couple of recon teams. We went in…and after that everything went to shit.” He turned away to hide wet eyes.
Chap. 2
I was on the mats with Echo Team’s newest members — replacements for the guys we lost in Philadelphia. There were four of them, two Rangers, a jarhead, and a former SWAT guy from L.A. For the last couple of hours Bunny and I had taken turns beating on them, chasing them with paintball guns, trying to carve our initials in them with live blades, swinging at them with baseball bats. Everything we could think of. Actually, let me rephrase that. There were ten of them this morning. The four who were left were the ones who hadn’t been taken to the infirmary or told to go the fuck back to where they came from.
We were just about to enter a practical discussion on pain tolerance when my boss, Mr. Church, came into the gym at a fast walk. He only ever hurries when the real shit is coming down the pike. I crossed to meet him.
“Good evening, Captain Ledger,” said Church. He nodded toward the recruits. “Are these four men in or out?”
“Is something up?”
“Yes, and it’s on a high boil.”
“They’re in.”
Church turned to Bunny. “Sergeant Rabbit, get these men kitted out. Afghanistan. No ID, no patches. You’re wheels up in fifteen.”
Bunny flicked a glance at me, but he didn’t question the order. Instead he turned and hustled them all toward the locker room. Bunny was a nice kid most of the time, but he was still a sergeant. And we’d been through some shit together, so he knew my views on hesitation. Don’t.
“What’s the op?”
Church handed me the file. “This came in as an email attachment. Two photos, two separate sources.”
I flipped open the folder and looked at two photos of an incredibly beautiful woman. Iraqi, probably. Black hair, full lips, and the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen. Eyes so powerful that despite the low res of the photos and graininess of the printout, they radiated heat. Her face was streaked with dirt and there was some blood crusted around her nose and the corner of her mouth.
I looked at him.
“These were relayed to us by the people we have seeded into a Swiss seismology team studying an underground explosion in the Helmand River Valley. We ran facial recognition on them and MindReader kicked out a ninety-seven percent confidence that this is Amirah.”
My mouth went dry as dust.
Holy shit.
When I was brought into the DMS a month ago my first gig was to stop a team of terrorists who had a bioweapon that still gives me nightmares. I’m not kidding. Couple times a week I wake up with the shivers, cold sweat running down my skin, and clenched teeth that are the only things between a silent room and a gut-buster of a scream.
There were three people behind that scheme. A British pharmaceutical mogul named Gault, a religious fanatic from Yemen called El Mujahid, and his wife, Amirah. She was the molecular biologist who conceived and created the Seif al Din pathogen. The Sword of the Faithful. They test-drove the pathogen with limited release in remote Afghani villages, trying out different strains until they had one that couldn’t be stopped. Seif al Din. An actual doomsday plague. El Mujahid brought it here, and Echo Team stopped him. But only just. If you factor in the dead Afghani villagers and the people killed here, the body count was north of twelve hundred. Even so, Mr. Church and his science geeks figured we caught a break. It could have been more. Could have been millions, even billions. It came down to that kind of a photo finish.
Most of the victims turned into mindless killers whose metabolism had been so drastically altered by the plague that they could not think, had no personalities, didn’t react to pain, and were hard as balls to kill. The pathogen reduced most organ functions to such a minimal level that they appeared to be dead. Or…maybe they were dead. The scientists are still sorting it out. We called them “walkers.” A bad pun, short for “dead men walking.” The DMS science chief is a pop-culture geek. My guys in Echo Team called the infected by another name. Yeah. The “Z” word.
And you wonder why I get night terrors. Six weeks ago I was a Baltimore cop doing scut work for Homeland. Sitting wiretaps, that sort of thing. Now I was top dog for a crew of first-team shooters. Do not ask me how one thing led to another, but here I am.
I looked at the photos.
Amirah.
“The rumors of her demise have been greatly exaggerated,” I said.
Church managed not to smile.
“If you’re sending us then she hasn’t been apprehended.”
“No,” he said. “Spotted only. I arranged for two Marine Recon squads to locate and detain.”