Contagious (44 page)

Jordan had watched Flight 2961 take off, waited for it to come around and start curving north. He knew that it would, because he knew that it was heading to Bangor—he’d used his cell phone to look it up on a travel website. Once that curve carried the jet close to Detroit, he had aimed his Stinger missile, acquired the target and fired. Bye-bye, Flight 2961.
“Fuckin’-A, Jordan,” Brian said. “Chelsea will love you so much. That was a great shot.”
Private Jordan Willis nodded. He could only hope his actions pleased Chelsea. And it
was
a great fucking shot.
“Wait for it,” he said. “I think I double-dipped.”
Fifteen miles away from their position, the A319 trailed a thick, curved column of smoke as its nose dropped toward downtown Detroit. It sailed down into the city. Seconds later, a ball of flame rose into the sky.
“Bonus points,” Brian said. “Nice work.”
“Thanks. Wow, look at all the planes bailing out. I’m betting they aren’t asking the tower for permission to change their flight plans.”
One jet had been approaching and another had been circling, waiting for clearance. Both now turned away from DTW. Those suckers were big beasts, sure, but it looked like they could still haul balls when they kicked in the engines.
Brian shouldered his own Stinger, looking for just the right target.
“You gonna shoot that thing or just pose with it?” Jordan asked.
“I think I better save it,” Brian said. “The general says they could still try to bring in C-5s or some C-17s. They do that, I’ll hit one on the way in.” He set the Stinger down and picked up one of five AT4 antitank weapons.
Jordan shook his head. He liked Brian, but sometimes the guy just didn’t think. “That’s an antitank missile, dumb-ass. Ain’t no tanks here.”
“How about a fuel tank?” Brian pointed to a 747 sitting at a runway’s back edge. “I think that plane was probably going to take off before you shot down the other one. They can move pretty good in the air, but something tells me they can’t exactly turn on a dime when they’re on the ground.”
Jordan looked at the plane, a giant white sitting duck. Huh.
“I should have never doubted you,” Jordan said. “In fact, you’ve inspired me. I think I’ll see if one of these AT4s can hit the tower. I apologize for calling you a dumb-ass, good sir.”
“Don’t mention it,” Brian said as he sighted in on the stationary 747 and pulled the trigger.
12:25 P.M.: Home Base
Clarence, Gitsh, Marcus, Dan and Margaret sat in the computer room of Trailer A. Each of the three computer screens played a different local channel. The left screen showed a live shot of a fire burning just east of Dearborn. The news anchor said a plane had been shot down by a missile. The middle screen showed jittery shots of panicked people rushing away from the towering Renaissance Center, the broken-glass top of which belched smoke from some large internal fire. Apparently gunmen had rushed into the center tower, killing everyone in sight, then started shooting the place up with shoulder-fired rockets. The screen on the right showed a bulky A-10 fighter sweeping in, strafing a green vehicle up on the Eight Mile Road overpass. Even with the poor camera work, Margaret saw the Humvee shake and shudder as bullets tore through it.
“This is insane,” she said. “It looks like footage from Iran or something.”
“I think we stay here,” Gitsh said. “There’s people all over out there, cars whipping down the streets and smashing into each other. Ogden’s men could spot us anywhere.”
“No, man,” Marcus said. “People all over is
why
we need to go now. Then we’re just more civvies running around looking for a place to hide our heads.”
“We’re on a railroad track that hasn’t been used in decades,” Gitsh said. “We’re tucked under a fucking overpass, man. You can’t even see us from the road. We just stay right here and we ride this out.”
Marcus shook his head. “Look, that John Doe in the autopsy room? He was found not a block from here. That was fine when it was just him, but now there’s infected all over the place. These people pack together, which means their base or whatever has to be close. All it takes is one rocket hitting this trailer and we’re
all
dead. We get out there on foot, find a building to hide in, maybe we live.”
“You mean maybe
some
of us live,” Gitsh said. “You just want to get out there because you know this urban-combat bullshit and you want to save yourself.”
“Motherf—”
“Enough,” Clarence said. He spoke quietly, but his voice carried command. “It’s my call, and we stay. Those highway interchanges they attacked are ten miles from here. That probably means most of Ogden’s men are nowhere close to us. We’re not equipped to take them on. They see us, we’re screwed, so we stay right here under cover.”
“What about the cop?” Gitsh asked.
“What
about
him?” Margaret said.
“Come on, Doc,” Gitsh said. “What if he wakes up and starts screaming?”
Dan shook his head. “He’s not going to be screaming anytime soon. He’s in pretty bad shape.”
Gitsh laughed. “Yeah, well, Betty Jewell was in pretty bad shape too, right? Besides, these fucking things can talk to each other mentally and shit.”
“Not him,” Margaret said. “We cured him.”
“You
think
we cured him,” Dan said. “You don’t really know.”
“We’ve got to kill him,” Gitsh said.
“He’s right,” Marcus said. “We have to kill him.”
“You can’t,” Margaret said. “This isn’t just about the five of us. Officer Sanchez could be the key to a cure for the new strain. I’ll watch him.”
“I agree with Gitsh,” Dan said. “He starts talking, we’re screwed. I vote we kill him.”
Margaret sneered at Dan. “And what happened to being a doctor?”
He shrugged. “He’s going to die anyway from an overdose of latrunculin, so what’s the difference? Kill him now.”
Gitsh nodded. “That’s three votes. Majority rules.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” Clarence said. “It’s a dictatorship, and I’m the dictator. Sanchez is a civilian, a cop. He caught this shit in the line of duty. And Margaret is right—he could be the key to a cure. Unless we know he’s a threat, he stays where he is. Margaret will watch him. I’ll stay with her. If he poses a threat, I’ll kill him myself. Cool?”
Gitsh, Marcus and Dan all traded looks, then nodded. None of them doubted for a second that Clarence would kill Sanchez if it came to that. Margaret wondered if she’d saved her patient or only delayed his execution.
“Margaret and I will suit up,” Clarence said. “When we’re done, you guys do the same. I want everyone sealed up nice and safe. Dan, you stay in here and keep an eye on the news. Holler if there’s anything major we need to know about. Gitsh, Marcus, you take up positions at the front and back of the trailers. Watch for trouble. You see anything fishy, call it out over the comm system. Do not engage without the rest of us, got it?”
Gitsh and Marcus nodded.
“Come on, Doctor Montoya,” Clarence said. “Let’s get to work on your patient.”
12:30 P.M.: A City Paralyzed
The cacophony of a dozen animated phone conversations filled the Situation Room. Satellite images of Detroit lit up the main screen. Other monitors showed live feeds from news cameras and tactical maps dotted with unit symbols. One screen showed two tallies: one for dead, one for wounded.
The top of every screen showed a countdown: forty-five minutes and fifteen seconds, the time remaining before the clock struck 1:15 P.M.
President John Gutierrez sat at the end of the table, his face an expressionless mask. He looked at the monitors one by one, then circled back again. Murray was sweating like a pig, damn near hyperventilating, and Gutierrez sat there looking calm, collected—like a leader.
The unflappable Vanessa Colburn wasn’t sweating at all. She worked the phones, quietly offering advice to Gutierrez, but only when he asked for it. As Murray’s World of Secrets crumbled around him, he started to wonder if maybe she
wasn’t
the political vampire he’d made her out to be. For the first time, Murray wondered if his way was wrong and Vanessa was right for wanting him out.
General Cooper had a phone pressed to each ear. He nodded once, then put a phone on each shoulder and called out to the room.
“A military convoy has been spotted heading south on I-75,” he said. “Seven vehicles, including two troop trucks. Around sixty men. I’ve got a squadron of Apaches moving to a good kill point.”
“On a highway?” Gutierrez said. “What kind of civilian damage will we face?”
“Moderate,” General Cooper said. “But a hell of a lot less than if those two platoons get off the road and into the countryside.”
“Do it,” Gutierrez said.
No hesitation. This guy might turn out to be okay after all. Murray certainly hoped so, because it was high time to pass the baton to the next generation. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. It was one thing to go Cold War or cross swords with the Iranians, but Ogden’s men were tearing Detroit to pieces.
Detroit
.
Eight Mile Road passed over every major highway to the north of the city. At each interchange a massive pileup blocked the roads. Hundreds of cars, some burning, along with the sprawled bodies of people who had been gunned down trying to escape on foot. Ogden’s men had also hit the major arteries on the west side: the I-96 and I-94 interchange, the interchange of I-96 and I-75. Surface roads were the only way in and out of the city, and those were choked with traffic from panicked citizens trying to escape the burning buildings and the random automatic-weapons fire that hit every few minutes. The citywide traffic jams had the Detroit police scattered and disorganized. When isolated police units did encounter Ogden’s gunmen, the gunmen either cut them down or blew up the cop cruisers with shoulder-launched rockets.
Ogden hadn’t stopped with the roads.
Fire poured from the top ten floors of the Renaissance Center’s middle tower. A westerly wind carried the thick, heavy black smoke plume across the city in the direction of Ann Arbor. The Fisher Building and the Penobscot Building were also in flames—three of the city’s tallest skyscrapers burning out of control. Firefighters were working on those blazes as well as a half dozen raging infernos caused by the crash of Northwest Flight 2961.
Two burning wrecks blocked the runways of Detroit Metro Airport. The main air-control tower was destroyed. Random gunfire. Hundreds dead. Airport security hadn’t found the attackers, which meant they were still out there. Some witnesses estimated five gunmen, others claimed ten or even twenty.
The smaller Detroit City Airport? Same deal—blocked runways, burning wrecks, tower destroyed. Totally out of commission.
The attack was less than forty minutes old, yet Ogden had taken out the airports, clogged the roads and tied up every cop, firefighter and paramedic.
“Look at this,” Gutierrez said. “Look at what’s happening. How many men does Ogden have in Detroit?”
“Maybe sixty,” Murray said. “We’re not sure.”
“Sixty men,” Gutierrez said. “Two platoons and he’s paralyzed a major city. What happens to America if the contagion spreads to six hundred people? Six
thousand
? We have to bottle this up here. We can’t let it get out.”
Murray looked at the screens and cursed Charlie Ogden. That man knew
exactly
what he was doing. All that would end when the five C-17s came in from Fort Bragg. Those planes carried two full companies, plus vehicles and heavy weapons. Ogden’s party was about to come to an end.
“General Cooper, we need an airport,” Murray said. “We have to assume that Ogden will take out anything that comes near DTW.”
“God
damit
!”
The room fell silent as all eyes turned to General Luis Monroe. The normally soft-spoken, God-fearing Monroe had just cursed at the top of his lungs. He held a phone with both hands, squeezing it as if it were the cause of all this misery.
“The C-17s,” he said. “Two of them just went down. There were reports of automatic-weapons fire in the cargo sections, where the troops were. Some explosions, possibly grenades. We’ve lost most of Zulu and Yankee companies, plus the crews. At least two hundred men.”
Silence fell over the Situation Room.
Another gift from Ogden—that guy really knew his stuff.
Gutierrez glared at Murray. “What else do we have that can get there before one-fifteen?”
“Dew Phillips and the sixty-three men left from Whiskey Company,” Murray said. “With the shape Detroit is in now, that’s all we’ve got.”
“We have no idea where the gate is,” Gutierrez said. “We have no forces on the ground. We have little or no communication into the city, and we have no reinforcements that can be deployed in less than six hours. I want Phillips in there now. Let’s not leave it up to our Strike Eagle options, shall we?”
Murray nodded. “General Monroe, you need to saturate the area with air assets, see if we can take out more of Ogden’s men and draw fire from the Stingers he has left.”
Monroe nodded and went back to his phone.
Dew and Perry had to find that gate and shut it down, because Murray most certainly did not want to leave it up to the Strike Eagles. They carried both the big two-thousand-pound bombs . . . and the nuke.
Gutierrez, he noticed, hadn’t specified which option he’d use.
12:32 P.M. Officer Sanchez
Wake up, sleepyhead.
Detroit police officer Carmen Sanchez opened his eyes. It took him a second to get his bearings. He was weak, could barely move. Well he
was
weak, sure, but the reason he couldn’t move was that his wrists and feet were tied down.
“He’s awake,” he heard a muffled voice say. There was a woman to his left, dressed in some crazy black Halloween costume.
It hurt to breathe. How messed up was it when it hurt to breathe? Pretty messed up, true, but not as messed up as God talking in your head.
“Officer Sanchez, can you hear me?”
He nodded. He could hear her, from speakers in the walls, and that was weird because she was standing right next to him.
Ahhh, there you are!
He’d never bought into the whole God thing. Never. He got married in a church, sure, but that didn’t mean shit—
everyone
got married in a church unless you were a fucking hippie. Now that God was chattering away, right in his head . . . well, that made it just a wee bit easier to believe.
“Officer Sanchez, my name is Doctor Montoya. You are very sick. Nod if you understand.”
He nodded.
Would you like to join us?
“Can’t,” Sanchez said. “Tied down.”