“Yes, sir. It doesn’t hang around very long.”
“Where are we storing it?”
“Sanbourne Army Depot in Utah, Mr. President.”
“How quickly can we deploy it?”
“Almost immediately, sir. Your predecessor directed that some of it be kept in ready-use status. Just in case.”
“Ray, I want you to make preparations to—” The president stopped when he saw that his chairman of the Joint Chiefs was no longer looking at him from the plasma screen. His face had been replaced by an Air Force colonel’s.
“Sir, this is Colonel Jerry Taggart. I’m General Smythe’s aide.”
“Where the hell is General Smythe?”
“Mr. President, the general just received a phone call from his daughter. She’s stuck in traffic outside of Lincoln.” He paused. “Lincoln is being hit right now, sir.”
For a moment, the president didn’t know what to say. He’d watched the numbers build on the status boards — hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of his citizens had either died or were soon to die — but it hadn’t been personal yet. Her name was Laura.
He’d met the general’s daughter on a number of occasions. He remembered her as an attractive young lady, ready to take on the world as she prepared to leave Washington, DC, for the University of Nebraska. Andrew knew she probably wouldn’t survive to see morning.
“Colonel Taggart, please tell the general…” For one of the few times in his life, Andrew couldn’t find the words he so desperately wanted to say. They were stuck in his throat.
“I understand, Mr. President.”
“Thank you, Colonel.” The president cleared his throat. “Here are your orders. I want you to make immediate preparations to employ the soman nerve agent weapons against the ground waves. You will stand by for execution orders from me. Is that clear?”
“Clear, Mr. President.”
The president turned his attentions to the rest of his cabinet. “If we use this agent, I need to know what the effects will be on the surrounding population. I want to know weather effects, I want to know duration, and I want to know expected casualties. Brief me in an hour.”
Jessie smiled as she left the situation room — General Smythe had come through for her after all! Using his doomed daughter as a motivator had worked brilliantly, just as she’d hoped it would. She hurried to her office. She had work to do.
CHAPTER 38
General Rammes hung up the phone and hurried over to Carolyn and Colonel Hoffman, both huddled over one of the rat-thing’s bodies in its thick Plexiglas container, slowly cutting into the body to discover its secrets. His voice startled them.
“We’ve got a live one.”
“They captured one alive?” Carolyn said.
“It’s fifteen minutes out right now. They’ll bring it down as soon as they land.”
“Humanoid or animal?”
“Animal.” He looked at the creature in the container, now fully splayed open from the neck to the lower abdomen. “Like this one. One of the rats.”
“That’s awesome!”
Awesome? Garrett was a little surprised at the enthusiasm in Carolyn’s voice. Scientists can be so weird sometimes.
“They captured it about ten miles north of Omaha,” Rammes explained. “Still had a chunk of casing stuck to it, so it couldn’t move as quickly as the others. It was a straggler.”
“How’d they capture it?” Garrett asked, amazed that anyone would have the cojones to get anywhere near one of the things without blowing the living hell out of it. Or the luck to avoid getting eaten first.
“Special Forces.”
Those two words were all the explanation Garrett needed. Those guys had balls big enough to handle anything, including a mutated rat with a taste for human flesh.
“They jumped on the thing with a steel ammo box.” Rammes smiled, glad that guys like that were on our side. “They drove it to Offutt — before it was overrun — and put the box in the backseat of a Strike Eagle. It’s been on its way here — at Mach 2—for the last thirty minutes. Barely got out in time.”
“Omaha is being attacked?” Carolyn’s heart sank. Although it had been hours, she felt as if she’d just left there.
“Yes. Looks like Lincoln is going to get hit any minute, as well. They’re heading west awfully damned fast,” Rammes said.
“My God.” Carolyn was afraid to ask if any of the people still in the city had managed to escape. So she didn’t.
“General Smythe informed me the president has ordered preparations to use chemical weapons against the creatures. Some of the old Soviet crap we’re keeping over at Sanbourne Depot. Soman.”
“Soman? We don’t even know what kind of effect it will have on the creatures, General! These things are built to mutate rapidly against any kind of threat. The Russians discovered it when they were playing with Gemini. They might just adapt to it and—”
“The other option discussed was nuclear weapons, Carolyn.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.
“They’re considering nukes? On our own soil?”
“Conventional weapons are having little effect, Colonel, like you saw for yourself. To make matters worse, we’ve now got three more major cities under attack, four if you count St. Paul. Minneapolis, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City.”
“How can that be, sir? The waves are nowhere near any of those cities.”
“Birds, Colonel. Giant flocks of the things.”
Carolyn immediately understood the gravity of the situation they now faced. If the mutation had spread to birds, the expansion of the creatures might be impossible to control. The thought chilled her. The excitement she’d felt learning that they were going to be able to examine one of the things alive quickly vanished, replaced by an indescribable feeling of dread.
They could spread incredibly fast now — multiplying every twenty-four hours, doubling in number — attacking every population center in the United States. Next would come Canada. Mexico. Fly to Central and South America. Fly across the Bering Strait to Russia. Fly south to population-rich Southeast Asia — China, Japan, Korea. Fly west to India, through the Middle East. Fly south toward Africa. Fly north toward Europe.
Suddenly, she thought Australia would be a nice place to settle down.
The tinny, electronic voice of Lieutenant Ewing filled their protective helmets. “General, the Eagle just touched down. The thing should be on its way down in about ten minutes.”
“Okay, Carolyn, what do we do with it?” Rammes asked.
“Soman. We expose it to soman.”
“You don’t want to do any other experiments on it first? What if the soman kills it? Then we’ve lost the chance to see if there’s any other way to kill these things.”
Carolyn sighed. “General, if I’m right, we’ll still have that chance.”
CHAPTER 39
The knock on her office door startled her.
She quickly hung up her secure phone, rattling the handset against the cradle in her haste to terminate the call. “I thought I told you I wasn’t to be disturbed—”
The door opened, and President Andrew Smith poked his head in. “Jessie?”
“Mr. President!” She stood. She was flustered, not only because she’d just sniped at the president, but because she’d nearly been caught doing something that in the old days would’ve earned a quick trip to the gallows and a nice leisurely swing at the end of a rope. If, that is, they’d been able to decipher what she was saying to the person at the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know it was you.”