“Carolyn, what has you convinced the level 5 is Soviet?” Rammes asked.
“The creatures were active during darkness and hid in the shadows when the sun came up. They’re sensitive to light. That fact, combined with the mutation of both animal and human species that we’ve seen, points to a Soviet agent. We were able to get a sample smuggled out of their biological research facility in Kiev back in the late ’80s. One of their researchers decided he had to get a sample to us.”
They passed through the second set of heavy doors and headed down a long, sloping ramp to the next set of doors, right outside the facility’s initial decontamination chamber.
“Officially, they called it agent 1Z65. Unofficially, they called it Bliznetsy. Gemini.”
“Gemini?” Garrett asked.
“Their work was based on Mengele’s experiments with—”
“Wait. Mengele? Josef Mengele?” Garrett was very familiar with that name. Mengele, the meticulous Nazi bastard who’d stood on the unloading ramp in his highly polished boots, holding a riding crop, deciding with a flick of his wrist which people would be sent to the gas chambers and which would be sent to hard labor — or medical experimentation — as soon as they stepped off the train. Nazi soldiers would move through the crowds of people, looking for those who met Mengele’s twisted physical criteria for experimentation, the most prized being twins, who would immediately be taken from their parents, most likely never to see them again. His grandmother had been subjected to Mengele’s extensive twin studies when she’d been held at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The endless experimentation. The endless measurement, study, and taking of blood. The endless terror. His grandmother had survived. Her twin sister had not.
“Yes,” Carolyn said. “Doctor Josef Mengele. The Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ from Auschwitz. Apparently he’d done a great deal of the initial development work on the original agent. Our Russian friends decided to continue where he left off.” She turned to face the general as they reached the final set of heavy doors. “I could be completely wrong, General. I need to dig into the numbers and see if my theory is correct.”
“If you are correct, Carolyn, what does it mean?” Rammes asked.
“It means we’re in more trouble than we thought.”
CHAPTER 30
The sun disappeared below the rim of the blast crater, throwing the interior of the hole into twilight shadow as daylight slowly drained away. It had taken a little more than two hours for the mining crew to dig down to the nearest casing, and they were now in the process of hoisting the object up through the shaft they’d constructed.
The mining supervisor looked at his watch and frowned. He’d hoped the digging would’ve gone quicker, but they’d come across a tough layer of large rocks that had severely hindered their ability to go any quicker. They’d ruined three drill heads breaking through.
“How much time until it reaches the surface?” the Army major asked.
“It’s on its way up the shaft right now. Probably another fifteen minutes at the most.”
“Okay. I want you to release as many of your people as you can. Only keep the people you need to bring the casing up. Everyone else needs to get the hell out of here. Now.”
“And once we get it out of the ground?”
“My people will take over.”
The mining supervisor saw a large group of soldiers ringing the circular rim of the blast crater, all heavily armed. There was an olive-green truck backed up to the edge, its back open, ready to receive its cargo. A tracked vehicle was slowly crawling down the slope of the crater toward the hole, black diesel smoke belching from its exhaust. He figured it was going to be used to get the casing out of the crater.
“And then you need to get out of here, too,” the major continued. “We’ve got transportation arranged. You’ll leave all your equipment in place.”
Good, the supervisor thought. The quicker we can get out of here, the better. Tearing down all his equipment and packing it out would’ve taken much more time than he was comfortable with.
Within five minutes, all the people the mining supervisor didn’t need were scrambling up the edge of the crater, heading for waiting Humvees, which would take them away from the large area of buried casings and, hopefully, to safety.
The sun was sinking fast. The supervisor had seen the news reports and had watched the president’s address to the nation. He knew what might happen if they were still here when it got dark. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect.
The sound of the chain breaking was the last thing he wanted to hear at that moment. It was immediately followed by a scream.
The supervisor ran over to the hoist. “What the hell happened?”
“We have a break. It looks like the casing is jammed in the hole, boss. We just lost the fucking chain!”
“Fix it, and fix it fast! We don’t have a hell of a lot of time. You got me?”
“Got it! We’re on it, we’re on it!”
One of the workers had been unfortunate enough to be standing in the wrong place when the broken chain sliced through the air, and it tore into his right arm like a steel whip. The supervisor could tell the arm was broken, and the jagged wound was bleeding profusely.
“Get that man out of here! Take him—”
“We’ve got him!” the major said. “Just get the goddamned chain fixed and get the thing out of the ground!”
A group of soldiers quickly carried the wounded man away from the scene and up the side of the crater.
An Apache attack helicopter thudded through the air above the crater, adding another dimension of surrealism to the whole situation. He was just a miner, for Christ’s sake! This was all a bad dream. The feeling of dread he felt when the sun had slipped below the crater rim was building in intensity as he watched his work crew, now one man short, frantically try to replace the hoist chain. The hair on the back of his neck bristled with an almost electric fear. He looked at the long, sloping side of the blast crater and wondered how fast he could make it to the top.
He felt like his time was running out.
CHAPTER 31
Garrett had worn full chemical gear before, but it didn’t quite measure up to the protective suit he was wearing now. It was lightweight and permitted much more freedom of movement than his heavy charcoal-lined chem gear, and the slow, constant airflow from his small backpack — providing positive pressure in case of a puncture or tear — kept him surprisingly cool. He, Carolyn, and General Rammes stepped through the portal to one of the many clean rooms in the Vanguard complex, the heavy six-inch-thick door sliding closed behind them. A series of interconnected locks slid into place.
In front of them lay the three bodies that had been flown to the complex earlier in the day, each separately encased in a thick Plexiglas coffin-like structure. Heavy rubberized gloves were inserted into the sides so workers could handle the bodies without direct contact.
Garrett was comforted by the level of protection this place employed to avoid any sort of release. If there were any bugs in those things he could catch, he knew the chances were infinitesimally small that something could actually get to him.
He was also struck by the whiteness of the place — he felt like he was in a dream world, where every bit of color had been sucked away, leaving only white. The only colors he could see were on the readouts of the computer screens that lined one wall of the room, and the faces inside the protective helmets.