“For your country.”
“For my country.”
She smiled. “For me.”
“For you.”
She leaned closer. Kissed him, long and hard.
He kissed her back.
This was the final test. She pushed him away. Slapped him. Hard.
The president of the United States looked up at her. His right cheek was reddened by the slap, but his face was blank. Like a child, waiting to be told what to do.
It was a success.
She had taken his wife from him, and for that she felt pity. He’d loved Kate so, and her loss caused him great pain. But it’d been necessary. The first lady of the United States had stood in her way and had to be removed. In war — even an ideological one — innocent people died.
She peeled a thin coating of spray-on latex from the palm of her hand, carefully avoiding contact with the outer layer. Another useful tool handed down from the KGB, and quite an ingenious manner to deliver the SP-117 derivative.
Before her sat the most powerful man on the planet. Utterly, completely alone.
And entirely open to suggestion.
Her feelings of pity were short-lived.
DAY THREE
CHAPTER 51
General Rammes stood no more than a few feet away from the most fantastic killing machine he’d ever seen. What had been Sergeant Wilson a few hours before now stood on the other side of the thick Plexiglas shield, yellow eyes burning furiously with a hatred and hunger that escaped description.
It just stood there. Staring back at him. Eye-to-eye. Unmoving, except for the slow rise and fall of its chest. The eyes didn’t even blink.
Behind those eyes, Rammes could sense intelligence. It was a horrible creature, rebuilt for rapid killing, but there was something un-animallike about the eyes. There were thoughts running through its head. It was watching him. Examining him. Studying him. It was reasoning.
The interior of the room was now dark, as the creature had smashed the overhead lights about an hour ago. The things had an obvious aversion to light of any kind, but the fluorescent lights of the holding room didn’t have the destructive effect that sunlight did. When the things entered sunlight, they died. They were true creatures of the night. Modern-day vampires mixed with the cunning of the wolf, the running ability of the gazelle, the strength of the grizzly bear, and the killing ability of a swarm of blood-frenzied great white sharks. Unstoppable, except when they were blown limb from limb. And there were so many.
Behind the creature, another set of bioluminescent eyes glowed from the darkness, the mutated rat slowly moving from one edge of the room to the next, its gaze fixed squarely on the general.
“It’s waiting for orders.”
“General?” Carolyn swiveled her chair away from the computer screen she had been studying for the last few hours.
“I said it’s waiting for orders. The rat. It’s waiting for orders from the bigger one.”
“How can you tell?”
“I’m an old soldier. I can tell.”
Garrett rose from his chair by Carolyn’s workstation and stood by the general. “It makes sense, sir. I’ve seen it. The rats react to the bigger ones. They understand audible commands. When I grabbed Carolyn from the crash site, one of the big ones seemed to alert the others to my presence. It was a low, moaning sound. As soon as it let out that sound, the whole wave of the things turned in my direction.” He shook his head. “It didn’t dawn on me until what you just said.”
As if on cue, the thinker let out a moan. Even through the thick Plexiglas, the members of the Vanguard team could hear it. They could feel it in their chests.
The rat began to scratch at the floor. Slowly at first, and then the motions grew more frantic. Its front paws, tipped by the long, black claws, tore at the steel floor, scratching away a layer of paint.
The thinker broke its gaze with the general and lowered itself to the floor. Its long arms began flailing at the floor, claws trying to dig through the steel.
“Carolyn? What do you make of this?” Rammes asked.
Carolyn glanced at the clock on the far wall. “It’s time for them to go to ground. The sun will rise here in a few minutes.”
“How the hell can they know that? They’re hundreds of feet underground!”
“General, have you ever known what time it is, even though there’s no clock in sight? Have you ever woken up just a few minutes before your alarm clock is set to go off?”
“Yes, I’ve done that before.”
“Biological clock. In some creatures, it’s as accurate as anything that comes out of the Naval Observatory. Quite amazing, actually.” She stood next to the general, watching as the creatures scratched furiously at the steel floor. “Most of us only experience it in subtle ways, like waking right before the alarm clock goes off. Some people have more advanced awareness of it. They can tell the time of day even after being secluded from any normal source of time — the sun, a clock, anything. Some can even tell you what day of the month it is even after being secluded for extended periods of time. We’ve seen it in some POW cases.”
“So you’re telling me these things instinctively knew it was time to start digging?”
“That’s right.”
“Looks like the little bastards are going to be awful disappointed when they can’t get through that floor.”
CHAPTER 52
The city of Little Rock, Arkansas, was a bloody mess.
The Army Stryker vehicles entered Little Rock from the east and northwest on I-40, moving rapidly toward the portions of the city that had been under attack by the flocks of mutated birds.
There were cars leaving the city, but not many. Not many at all. Blackhawk helicopters circled overhead, their speaker systems thundering evacuation orders to the survivors below.
The scene was unlike anything any of the soldiers had ever seen. Bodies littered the streets by the hundreds, torn apart and shredded by the thousands of ravenous beaks that had eaten them alive during the night. Arms and legs were still recognizable, but the torsos were mangled. Eyes had been plucked from screaming heads, tongues torn out from shrieking mouths. Quick. Incredibly violent.
As the eight-wheeled Strykers entered the center of the city, the drivers were forced to slow to avoid driving over the dead. They slowly weaved through the city streets, trying as hard as they could to show some measure of dignity toward those who’d been their fellow citizens just a few hours before.
It was a horrid scene.
A scene that was being repeated in Oklahoma City and Minneapolis-St. Paul as the sun began its leisurely rise into the sky, marking the start of another day. A day of hiding for the mutated creatures. A day of planning for their human foes.
Soldiers spilled from the combat vehicles, rapidly spreading out to find any sign of the birds that had so ravaged the city. They ran to the shadowy places — the darkened buildings, the alleyways, the sewers. They searched the back rooms of buildings, the attics of houses.
It didn’t take long to find them.
Where there wasn’t direct sunlight, there were casings. Thousands of them. Small, oval-shaped cocoons, gray and hard as bone, completely harmless-looking, but inside — the soldiers knew — dwelt incredible evil. Changing. Growing. And if the last day was any lesson, multiplying. Doubling in number. Preparing themselves for another night of flying. Of feeding. And killing.
The ground waves, as they’d done twenty-four hours before, had stopped their advances and had encased themselves in the thick, bone-like cocoons. But this time, they hadn’t gone deep. Most were just under the surface, no more than a few inches. Some were even visible, their curved surfaces breaking through the soil and dully reflecting the morning sunlight.