Black Storm (37 page)

Here she didn't have any decontaminant but the dandruff shampoo, and that wouldn't do much against smallpox. But on the slim remaining chance that they were still dealing with anthrax, and for the mechanical cleaning action, she squirted it out over the bag and her gloves and rubbed it up thoroughly, scrubbing in between her fingers and around the seal of the Ziploc.

“Major, you better pull your finger out,” Sarsten told her. “We're going to have one lot of thoroughly excited jundies crawling up our arse very soon.”

“I'm ready, here it comes. Don't let it touch till it's fully inside.”

The SAS pulled the lips of his bag open and she dropped hers in. Watched as he sealed it, then made him double it over and put it into yet a third bag. That would have to do. She took it out of his hands and pulled her soft-sider open and dropped it in, careful not to touch the exterior fabric with her glove.

“That's it?” he said.

“That's it.”

At just that moment someone began firing at them from the darkness above, from the direction they'd come from, back toward the refrigerators. Sarsten gave a muffled grunt and fell back against the cab. She stared into the darkness, reaching for her Beretta. But he was already aiming past her. His gun went off practically in her ear. Four rapid detonations, and the Iraqis spun and fell, rifles clattering away.

“You hit?”

“Caught a packet. Not a bad one,” he told her, but she heard the shock in his voice. She couldn't see a wound, but the way he hunched forward told her it was the upper body. “You take the next lot,” he told her.

“Forget it. You're the shooter here.” She straightened and felt her legs cramp, so bad she nearly fell; caught out, by reflex, at a metal jut; felt the sharpness of it, but too late, felt her glove tear, deep, then her skin, a tear right down into flesh. It didn't hurt yet, but when she held it up she saw the stain of blood welling up through the sliced latex. In her right glove. In her
contaminated
right glove.

“Fantastic,” she said aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She climbed down the access rungs and reached up to help him. Sarsten nearly fell into her arms, staggered as his feet hit concrete, but managed to stay upright. She saw him blinking through the mask lenses. More firing from the far side, the boom of another grenade, so close, fragments whined past like wasps. The eerie buzz of men shouting in gas masks.

She took a step and then, looking at the bodies on the concrete, stopped dead. Put the flashlight on one of them, on the blouse, the pants suit, and moved it up to the masked face.

“Fayzah?” she said.

 

DAN JOGGED
forward along the right side of the transporters, next to the curving wall, to the truck closest to the exit. He didn't feel tired anymore, or scared. He didn't know how long it would last, but right then he felt like he could leap tall buildings at a single bound. He had his weapon in his right hand, cradled ready to fire pistol-fashion, and the two lumps of C-16 Nichols had given him in his left.

When he got to the lead truck he hesitated, looking at the ladder. His left arm didn't reach above his head very
well, hadn't since a fiery night in the Irish Sea years before. Okay, that was the one cradling the explosive; but what to do with his weapon? Finally he stretched up on tiptoe and set it atop a fenderlike protrusion above the rear wheel. Then pulled himself up, holding the C-16 close to his chest.

On top of the carrier frame, close against the missile's drab-colored metal, he slid along its length to vestigial-looking fins. Behind them a protective shroud covered its base. He pulled at it and at last discovered it hinged upward, probably for maintenance access. He fumbled at it for another few seconds and discovered the toggle hinge that held it open.

All
right
. He bent over and thrust his arm deep into the base ring. When he felt the lip of the engine nozzle, a bell-shaped machining that directed the exhaust jet, he plunged his other arm in with the kneaded ball of explosive. He pushed it up against the smooth curved metal of the chamber's lip. Then took the detonator Nichols had given him and reached in again and pushed its tube into the yielding clay of the explosive.

Deep breath, deep breath, making sure he was ready. Then he twisted and pulled and let go. He pulled his arm back and bent to retrieve his weapon. Then went quickly forward along the missile, holding on to a steel erector-arm that cradled it as a brace cradles a weak leg. When he could go no farther, he ducked and tucked, making himself as small as possible, crouching to use the missile body itself as cover.

The charge went off with an earsplitting crack. When he looked back, sparks were still falling and the air was thick with black smoke. Twisted metal jutted up. That engine wouldn't be going to Israel. Or anywhere else. But just to make sure, he backed off and fired a full magazine of nine-millimeter slugs into the area he figured for the guidance section. Some missed, going low, but that was enough. He only had two magazines left.

He jumped down to the floor. Staggered at a flash of pain in his knee, then went to a crouch and swept the area, weapon to his shoulder.

Another flat crack and burst of sparks from behind told him Nichols was working on the far side. Bullets sang over them, ricocheting off the vaulting. The Iraqis were getting over whatever qualms they might have had about firing on the transporters. That wasn't good. Soon they'd come over in person.

One more missile and he'd be done. He reached it, panting inside the mask, and pulled himself up. Fitted the second handful of explosive and to his astonishment managed to do it all a second time. This time he aimed more carefully, stitching all his bullets into the guidance compartment. A workmanlike job. The second hunk of explosive was slightly larger than the first, and when it went off, a sizable chunk of the nozzle took off and slammed into the overhead.

Nichols, running past, M16 to his shoulder. A tinny voice: “Australian Peel.” This time Dan remembered: firing and pulling back by turns. He slapped in his last full magazine and sprayed the transporters, then corrected and sent his last few rounds into the dark alleys between them.

 

MAUREEN LOOKED
down at the woman who lay at her feet, covering her with the drawn nine-millimeter. The others were in the Iraqi drab uniforms, but she wasn't. She was in civilian clothing, tan pants and a flowered blouse. She saw one bare foot, and a shoe lying a little distance away. A woman's shoe, a spiky-heeled, expensive-looking one: Manolo Blahnik or Prada. And with a quick motion she bent and saw the dark hair spilling out behind the straps of the respirator mask, looked into dark eyes that blinked up into hers.

“Fayzah?” she said again, uncertain.

Al-Syori didn't answer, and Maureen wondered if she recognized her. Or if she was in shock. Or if it really wasn't her; it was hard to tell through the mask. She squatted and pulled the woman's blouse aside, looking for the wound. It was her shoulder; the slug must have knocked her down, dazed her. The woman looked like Fayzah, a few years older, that was all, with strands of gray now in the long glossy black hair she remembered. “I'm Maureen Maddox,” she said. “We studied together. At Ohio State.
Staphylococcus aureus
? The twenty-three-to-twenty-nine kilodalton proteins?”

“Maureen,” the woman said. Her voice was weak, but even through the mask Maddox recognized it. “What…what are you doing here?”

“Stopping you.” She glanced back at the missiles, then back down. “So it's true, it was you. It's variola. Smallpox. Isn't it?”

Al-Syori didn't answer. Just stared back up at her, eyes huge and disbelieving. Maureen slid her hand under her shoulder. “How could you do it? You're a doctor, for God's sake. How could you do something like this?”

“You know nothing about it.” Al-Syori struggled to sit up. She was surprisingly strong, and pushed Maureen's helping arm aside. She pulled her blouse open with her uninjured arm, tearing the buttons off to peer down at the entry wound. She wore a lacy brassiere beneath it; expensive, like the shoes, Maureen thought. There was blood now, and the bruise was growing dark, the flesh purpling and going puffy around it. Then she looked up again, and her eyes were suddenly full of fear. “Get out of here, Maureen.”

“I intend to. Believe me.”

“But first, do me a favor. Will you? Please?”

“What?”

“Shoot me.”

Maddox said stupidly, “What?”

Al-Syori spoke quickly. “I see you have a pistol. I said,
shoot me
. Do you think I wanted to do this? You must know better. But when
he
has your family, you do what he wants.” She pointed between her eyes. “Right there. If you kill me, he can't punish my family. And I won't have to do this anymore.”

Maureen stood slowly, looking down at her. The pistol drooped in her hand. She said, “I'm not—I'm not going to shoot you.”

“Then go. Go! There are hundreds more soldiers on the way. Run! Get out of here!”

Al-Syori was sitting up now, face contorted with pain. Impelled by her tone, Maddox turned. She ran a few steps, looking for the others.

Then stopped.

Stopped, remembering what she'd forgotten, and faced the woman she recognized again. It was important, what she'd forgotten. Without “Doctor Death,” Saddam wouldn't have a biological weapons program. Fayzah had been the driving force behind actually producing this deadliness, and directing it against human beings. Not just against troops. Against innocents, children, old people, noncombatants. Smallpox wasn't a weapon. It was a plague from Hell.

If anything a human being did could be called diabolical, this was.

She turned, to see her classmate picking herself slowly off the concrete. Fayzah looked up at her. Just for a moment, Maureen saw the triumph in her eyes. Before it was replaced by realization.

The Beretta bucked in her hand. The shot thundered in her ears.

She lowered the pistol, shaking. Appalled at what she'd done. The physician. The guardian of life. She felt like her cortex was splitting, shaking apart within her skull in a cerebral earthquake.

A laugh behind her. A chuckle, muffled by plastic and rubber.

She wheeled, to find Sarsten watching. He was slumped against one of the huge wheels of the transporters. She saw his eyes crinkle through the eyepieces.

“See?” he said. “Don't honk at me, mate. I'm not the only murderer out here.”

She whipped the pistol up again, fingers tightening, and aimed at his chest. The front sight trembled in the flickering light, the growing roar of sound.

 

GAULT HADN'T
fallen back, they'd pushed him back. It was that or be flanked, and the way the cover was distributed here, to be flanked was to die. He'd not heard fire from Blaisell for a time, and was getting set for a rush in his direction when he heard the crack of a Glock.

At last he made out a yell from over by the trucks. It was Nichols. Fire team two, mission complete, pulling back. Gault yelled, “Fall back. Fall back,” then hosed his last magazine into the booth area. He followed it with his last grenade and hauled ass, running doubled over as he zagged among the pallets.

Behind him the fire built to a roar, bullets hissing past and smashing into machinery and boxes, into the walls. A flare popped up, hit the overhead, and flew down, bouncing and throwing thick, soft-looking sparks and billows of white smoke from the floor.

Sarsten, Lenson, F.C. and the Doc were laying down a base of fire from behind the refrigerators as Gault pounded up. He scooped up an AK from the floor, got a mag pouch too, heavy with rounds. Stood pressed up against the back of the big steel box, sucking air and fumbling with the heavy curved magazine. Then poked around the fridge weak-side and put a burst on an Iraqi who showed himself. The bullets kicked up concrete dust all around the soldier, but he scrambled back to cover without being hit.

“The missiles?” he said.

Dan said, “Out of action.”

Maddox, in a flat voice that buzzed through her speaking diaphragm, said, “You should have kept your mask on, Gunny.”

“I know,” he said. “Too late now.”

She remembered what Al-Syori had said. “There's a reaction team on its way. A big one.”

“I think they're already here.” Gault ducked his head out and fired another burst. He pulled back and panted, wishing he had some water.

Blaisell slid in. His face was bloody under the mask. His hood was pulled back so you could see where it was coming from, a scalp gash under his high-and-tight. He had his Glock in one hand, and did a speed reload without looking at it.

“You hit?” Gault asked Sarsten. The SAS nodded. Then he fired again. He had an AK too. He was firing single shots, picking his targets, resting the stock on a box and steadying it with his wounded arm.

F.C. was using the grenade launcher attached to his rifle, lobbing the golfball-sized projectiles. When they exploded, screams burst out. Then his bandolier was empty. He lowered his rifle, looking down at it sadly. “Gimme a round,” he said. Gault worked his action till a cartridge spun out. Nichols caught it, pushed the take-down pin down on his M16, and pivoted the receiver up. He pulled the bolt out and pushed it down into his cargo pocket. He swung, holding it by the barrel, and pinwheeled the useless weapon off into the darkness.

Bullets hit the stainless steel shielding them with dull puncturing thuds. Gault could hear the rounds smashing things inside. He yelled above the clamor, “Fighting withdrawal to the tunnel. F.C., take your attachments and withdraw toward the river. Set the claymore behind you. The rest of us will fight rear guard and withdraw east, into the hospital service area. That'll draw them away from you. Forget about transmitting. Just get to the truck and get the hell out while it's still dark.”