“It grows on you,” Carolyn said.
“Yeah, well, so does moss if you sit still long enough. Looks like he’s waiting for us. We don’t want to keep a flag officer waiting any longer than we have to. Let’s go.”
The pilot lowered the jet’s small stairway, which doubled as the cabin door, and Garrett snapped a sharp salute as he approached General Rammes, Carolyn just a step behind. Rammes was short, stout, and built like a bulldog. “Sir, Colonel Garrett Hoffman, reporting as ordered.”
Derek Rammes returned the salute. The two men shook hands. “Colonel, it’s good to see you. I know what happened at Kansas City. Your boys put up a good fight.”
“Yes, sir.” Garrett looked at the ground, the feelings of guilt he’d been trying to ignore sweeping over him again.
Rammes knew how the younger officer felt. “I’ve lost troops before, too, Colonel. It’s never easy. Soldiers die in wars. Innocent people under your protection die, too. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent that. But now that you’re here, and now that Carolyn is here, you’ll have a chance to help us figure out how to kill those goddamned creatures. You can get your vengeance, son.”
“Hooah, sir.”
“Hooah is right, trooper.”
Carolyn had heard soldiers say hooah before, but never really understood what it meant. To her, it sounded like getting sucker-punched in the stomach.
Rammes turned to Carolyn. “Thank God you’re alive. I’m sorry to hear about the other members of your team. They were all fine individuals.”
“Yes, General. They were.” The vision of Matt’s head being torn from his shoulders flashed through her mind once again, as it probably always would. It had been so utterly horrible.
They all climbed into the Humvee and sped away from the ramp toward the entrance to the Vanguard complex.
Speaking loudly to be heard over the noise from the speeding Humvee, General Rammes said, “We’ve got two of the ratlike creatures and one of the humanoids. The CDC discovered a level 5 in the blood and immediately sent the bodies here.”
“A level 5?” Carolyn asked. Her hunch suddenly became less of a hunch and more of an actual theory.
“Level 5. Small traces, but it’s there. We’re trying to identify it right now. There’s a lot of other crap in the blood that we’re trying to nail down as well, but none of it’s identifiable.”
Carolyn knew level 5 was the code word assigned to only the worst of the known biological warfare agents currently catalogued. Ebola, Marburg, smallpox… all level 4, and quite deadly, but science had devised even more horrid things. Level 5 meant the agent had been weaponized, changed at the genetic level to increase its effectiveness. The Vanguard complex was the only BSL-4 facility in the country cleared to handle level 5 material. The thought of that type of agent loose in the environment — regardless of which specific agent it turned out to be — chilled her to the bone. It was all nasty stuff. And that was a severe understatement.
As the Humvee screeched to a stop in front of the entrance to the Vanguard complex, Carolyn said, “General, I think I know what it is.”
“You know what what is?”
“The level 5. I know what it is.”
CHAPTER 28
Small wisps of smoke rose from the charred earth of the blast crater formed by the massive explosions from a series of high-explosive bunker-buster munitions dropped from a trio of F-15E Strike Eagles (affectionately called Mudhens) from Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. It had been a very spectacular way to dig a hole. A big one, at that.
The Mudhens had been able to blast away roughly one hundred feet of prime Nebraska farmland, leaving the mining crews with a much easier task: to burrow the fifty-or-so feet that remained to the shallowest casing. If the explosions had reached any deeper, the ground shock might have shattered the casing, or worse, blown it into a thousand bits.
A young Army major stumbled over to the drilling supervisor, nearly losing his footing on the jumble of rocks and loose soil lining the surface of the crater. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Probably three hours,” he replied, wiping the sweat from his brow with a rag. “Another hour to set up the equipment and two hours to dig the thing out.”
The major looked at his watch. Three hours would put them close to sundown. He didn’t particularly want to be here when it got dark. “You’ve got to do it in two.”
“We can only do this so fast, Major.”
“In three hours, when the sun goes down, we could all be running for our lives.” He looked down at the supervisor’s heavy work boots. “Hope you can run in those things.”
The mining supervisor thought for a second, shot a glance at the sun hanging over the western horizon, and then turned to his team. “Let’s get on this thing, people! Let’s move!”
CHAPTER 29
The elevator hummed as it slid down the long shaft to the Vanguard underground complex.
“It’s Russian?”
“I think so, General,” Carolyn said. “Soviet, to be exact. If it’s what I think it is, we can trace it back to the Nazis, early 1945. The Soviets discovered a rudimentary sample of the stuff when they took Berlin.”
“I knew the Nazis were developing some horrible things, but in 1945? Did they have the technology to make something that could cause all this?” Garrett asked. The mention of Nazis had a close personal meaning for him — he could still remember brushing his finger across the faded blue numbers tattooed on his grandmother’s forearm. It was one of his earliest memories. She, and others like her, had been branded. Like cattle.
“No, nothing the Nazis had could cause this by itself. Our Russian friends were able to refine the agent over the years, though. They were very, very good at making some truly horrifying agents.”
The elevator stopped at the bottom of the shaft, the Utah desert sitting a couple hundred feet above them. As the doors slid open, they were met with the stern gazes of two sentries, M16s at the ready.
“Identification, please, General.”
General Rammes handed a coded card to the sentry, who slipped it into a small slot in a reader next to his undersized desk. Satisfied by the green light on the reader’s panel, the sentry directed the general to a small eyepiece protruding from an oddly shaped piece of equipment on the wall next to the elevator. The retinal scan confirmed the general’s identity.
“Identity confirmed, sir. Welcome to Vanguard, General Rammes.” The sentry saluted smartly, and the general returned the courtesy.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I will personally vouch for Colonel Hoffman.”
“Copy that, sir.” Both sentries lowered their weapons, satisfied that all was in order. “And welcome back, ma’am. Glad to see you’re okay.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.” Carolyn handed the sentry her own coded card, and peered into the retinal scanner. The readout confirmed that she was, in fact, Ms. Carolyn Ridenour.
“You’re cleared to proceed, ma’am.”
As the trio passed through the first set of heavy doors, which immediately slid closed behind them, Garrett said, “I’ve been in secure facilities before, but nothing like this.”
“Colonel,” Rammes said, “when you see what we deal with down here, you’ll know why. Let’s suit up.”
“Yes, sir.” He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to see what kind of horrors were being studied here, kept hundreds of feet belowground in this desolate area of Utah. He was, however, strangely looking forward to seeing the bodies of the things up close. He wanted to take a good look at the enemy that had killed so many of his soldiers. Carolyn helped him don his protective ensemble, a positive-pressure suit that covered him head to toe. He felt like one of the scientists from E.T.