Blaine pulled himself from beneath the Russian and leaned over him. “Andre—”
Too late. The Russian’s eyes had locked open in death, looking strangely at the end as they had in the jungle that day near Highway 9.
Blaine rose just as three men wielding Ingram submachine guns tore into the bar. McCracken drained the rest of his clip at them to cover his dart for the swinging kitchen door. He crashed through it and heard yelling in Spanish directed at him, which ceased when the workers saw his gun. He bolted past them and negotiated the clutter of stoves and counters where chefs were busy preparing meals. That route took him through a storage area lined with messily stacked shelves, the bottoms of which held a number of propane tanks.
Blaine propped two of them against the other side of the door, certain to be knocked over as soon as his pursuers came crashing through. He
backed down the hall, reloading, and held his ground until the door rocketed open. In that instant, McCracken fired twice, once for each of the tanks that had clattered to the floor.
The explosions rocked the corridor and brought sections of both walls and the ceiling tumbling inward. Blaine was close enough to feel the heat of the blasts before he sped through the exit that took him outside the Buena Vista.
Three jeeploads of Cuban militiamen had arrived, and the last of the uniformed men were just racing toward the hotel. He waited a moment until all of them had vanished inside before lunging atop the lone jeep featuring a pedestal-mounted machine gun. He turned his SIG on the remaining jeeps and shot out two tires in each before speeding off.
The objective now was to get off the main avenue as quickly as possible, use back roads to reach the extraction point at an airfield a twenty-minute drive from here. Since this had been a setup all along, though, chances were the airfield would be covered by more Cuban militiamen before he reached it, and no pilot in his right mind would chance a landing under such conditions.
Blaine had no choice. The airfield was his only option.
He pushed the jeep on at top speed, the events at the Buena Vista flashing through his mind. He and Marokov had been set up, lured here by men certain that these two apparently implacable enemies would not be able to resist the endgame that had eluded them for so long. If only they had known the truth …
The only truth that mattered at this point was that McCracken had been lured to Cuba to do a job somebody wanted done. Marokov had said he’d been working with some faction of the CIA. Maybe he had outlived his usefulness to them and this was their way of paying him back. Involving Blaine had been a mistake they would be paying for now.
McCracken sped off the main drag and thumped down the back roads, hoping he could outrun the reinforcements certain to be summoned by the soldiers he had left stranded at the hotel. The ride passed uneventfully, and he had actually begun to relax by the time the thin, poorly paved road spilled out onto another primary route that would take him the last stretch to the airfield.
Then he froze, brakes jammed hard and jeep screeching to a sideways halt.
Directly before him, up a slight rise, an armored personnel carrier was parked sideways across the road. He glimpsed men scampering into better positions of cover behind it, weapons readied. Blaine swung the jeep around only to find a pair of troop-carrying trucks steaming toward him from a half-mile away.
He had resigned himself to fighting it out with the jeep’s fifty-caliber machine gun when a distant whirring sound grabbed his ears. It was
familiar and yet forgotten, as impossible as the sight that followed it out of the west.
An old Helio Courier, something he hadn’t seen since the Nam days, banked free of the mountains and dropped for the road. It wasn’t the craft Blaine had arranged for his extraction and this certainly wasn’t the pilot. Helio Couriers had been used by Air America pilots to ferry Operation Phoenix personnel in and out of impossible situations. Utilized for their ability to fly low and to land with virtually no airfield, they had saved many a life, their pilots—like the famous Harry Lime—as crazy as the men they transported.
The Courier seemed to stop dead in the air and drop out of the sky, whining as it split the wind. Its wing-mounted machine guns began clacking, carving up chunks of the roadbed in the direct path of the troop carriers heading Blaine’s way. The lead one swerved to avoid the fire and the trailing truck slammed into it. McCracken watched both spin onto the shoulder, while behind him soldiers hurried back into their armored personnel carrier to give chase.
But the Helio Courier was already into its rapid descent, kissing the road like an old friend and coming to a hunkering halt just two yards from Blaine’s jeep. The cockpit hatch popped up, revealing a man dressed in a polyester Hawaiian shirt complete with lei.
It couldn’t be!
But it was.
“At your service, Captain!” Harry Lime yelled down to McCracken, flashing a mock salute. “Better get yourself on board.”
B
laine squeezed into the cockpit and took the copilot’s seat as a spectator. The strands of Harry’s lei bobbed a bit in the air. The wind caught his baggy Hawaiian shirt and ballooned it outward until Blaine sealed the hatch behind him. Then he watched Harry deftly maneuver the old plane back into takeoff mode, whizzing by the disabled trucks even as the closing armored personnel carrier’s machine gun opened fire. If the bullets bothered Harry Lime, he didn’t show it. He expertly skimmed the tree line low enough to leave branch scratches on the Helio Courier’s underside and flew in zigzag fashion until he reached the Atlantic. Once there he gave the plane full throttle and let her hum over the water so low the ocean spray dropletted the windshield.
“You’re better than ever, Harry.”
Lime tried to smile, almost blushing, working an unlit cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “Good to see a guy like you still needs a guy like me, Captain.”
“Castro’d be smoking me like one of Havana’s best if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”
“Got my own reasons this time.”
Only then did Blaine notice the quivery expression that had crossed Crazy Harry Lime’s face. “Keep talking.”
“You gotta help me. You’re the only one who can. That’s why I took this run. That’s why I had to come get you. Leave you down there in Castro’s shithouse and I’m fucked as bad as you.”
“Hard to believe, Harry.”
“It ain’t, trust me. See, Captain, something happened … .”
S
usan Lyle had practiced laboratory work in full isolation gear many times. Nothing, though, could prepare her for the autopsies she opted to perform personally upon returning to Atlanta from Cambridge early Monday. Five bodies had been shipped in a refrigerated hold of the CDC jet that was now effectively hers. Normally a pathology specialist would handle this chore and Firewatch had a team that would take over after she had done the preliminary work. But something territorial had taken over Susan. She had trained so long and often in preparation for a crisis event that she was reluctant to delegate any responsibility, especially anything as sensitive as this. Beyond that, there was the danger factor to consider. Both of Firewatch’s pathologists were family men, which in Susan’s mind made the risk of exposure to the Cambridgeside corpses unacceptable for them.
This event had already made her no stranger to risk. The creature that had flown at her and smashed her faceplate back at the mall was a dog: frantic, terrified and somehow very much alive. The panic she’d felt when the potentially contaminated air rushed in through the shattered plastic had forced the breath to bottleneck in her throat.
It’s happening. My God, it’s happening to me!
The dog’s tongue sweeping across her face told her she was okay. She recovered enough of her senses to quiet the animal down and remain
inside the mall for another hour until a decontamination unit arrived from one of the CDC’s six regional crisis management centers in Connecticut. She moved about, continuing her laborious trek with an almost maddening calm. Facing death had left her with the feeling she had gotten the upper hand on whatever Biosafety Level 4 hot agent had penetrated the Galleria. It was hiding, it was afraid. The first round had gone to her.
The autopsies formed the second. Accessing the isolation wing where the bodies were waiting meant first passing through several preparatory stages required to insure maximum protection. She was showered with both water and chemicals, air dried, wind blasted, powdered and dressed in several layers of protective clothing that would all be burned at the conclusion of her work.
Susan thought she’d be ready when the time came to enter the wing, but the tension she felt made her heavy gloves bulkier and turned her space suit into an oven. Instead of being outfitted with a portable air supply, this suit took its air from a hose snaking from the wall to a slot custom-tailored for its nozzle. The hose followed her like a chain wherever she went. Every breath quickly became an effort and her faceplate kept misting up until she calmed herself down.
The sights she recorded through that faceplate as she began the first of the autopsies were clear enough, though. Her scalpel cut the flesh down the center of the torso like crinkled cardboard. In years past, the use of scalpels or any sharp cutting instrument was strictly forbidden in the presence of a suspected Level 4 agent, since slicing through a glove or sleeve meant possible infection and even death. But the space suits used by the Firewatch team had been outfitted with gloves and sleeves reinforced with a thinner weave of the same Kevlar material used for bulletproof vests.
As had been the case in the mall, Susan’s helmet was outfitted with a microphone to record her observations. All she had to do was speak.
“This body is a male thirty-one years of age. Weight according to recovered identification eighty-one kilograms. Weight upon arrival at lab thirty-five kilograms. Height according to recovered identification one hundred sixty-two centimeters. Height upon arrival one hundred twenty-nine centimeters.”
She touched the rib cage and found the bones had taken on a puttylike consistency. Parting the ribs was as simple as pulling them back with her hands and affixing a clamp on either side, revealing the vital organs.
“Vital organs all intact but in the same dehydrated condition as the skin. Proceeding with inspection …”
Susan cut the heart out first. It fit easily in her gloved palm, reduced in scope and appearance to a baseball-sized prune, dry enough to resemble a balled-up piece of paper. She placed it in the digital scale eye level before her.
“Weight of heart one fifth of normal, confirming that loss of hemoglobin extended to muscle and vital organs as well as flesh. Condition of the skeletal system is similarly withered.”
Susan grabbed a microscope slide from the ample supply resting on the table next to her and centered a fragment of bone upon it. Then she took it to the electron microscope and quickly located what she was looking for.
“Entire capillary system running through the sternum has collapsed. No living tissue present whatsoever in terms of stem cells or reproducing blood cells, leading to deterioration and decalcification of the skeletal structure.”
Susan stopped here and returned to the body lying on the gurney. Strange how the absence of all but the isolation suit’s antiseptic smell lent a dreamlike aura to the scene. She had come to associate the autopsy procedure with many things, scents foremost among them. Now the only thing she could cling to was the process itself, a process that had become almost routine by the time she completed the fifth body, realizing she was in danger of being late for the Firewatch Command meeting she had called. She had neglected to leave sufficient time for the repeat of the decontamination procedures and actually dashed the last stretch of the way to the communication center, after rushing through the process.
The communication center had no windows and the knobless door sealed after her entry. A computer keyboard and monitor rested atop a single narrow table in the small room’s center, a chair tucked neatly behind it. The wall directly before the desk was made up of eight twenty-seveninch television monitors. Each was connected to the computer’s outputs so Susan could control the picture on each from her keyboard. Using the keyboard she could choose the picture she wanted the participants of the meeting to see, or divide their screens in up to four segments, even superimpose one broadcast picture over another.
The speaker boxes representing each of the participants enclosed her on both the left and the right, six to a wall placed atop innocuous-looking slate-black digital relay units, identifiable from the number glowing off a small LED screen atop each speaker. The voices that would emerge from those speakers belonged to members of the Firewatch Command control board, whose job it would be to evaluate her report and determine the appropriate response. She had never met a single one in person, although four or five of the voices were familiar to her, their identities placing her in awe of the position in which she had been placed. For the duration of the meeting that was about to take place, Susan effectively had the ear of the entire government.
Whatever she had been expecting the CDC to be like upon first signing on, this was nothing even close to it. She had come to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of Duke Medical School, by way of
three years’ residency in internal medicine at Brown University in Rhode Island, rejoicing in an assignment most of her contemporaries viewed as sheer drudgery. When pressed on the subject, Susan claimed she found the research process both exciting and exhilarating. Didn’t they stop to think that a doctor’s ability to diagnose and treat was nothing if the proper treatments and cures were not available? Her work in the lab might someday allow her to save more lives in a week than her classmates might in a lifetime. The CDC people believed her. She was very convincing.
And it was all a lie, her true motivation too secret and painful to explain. She wanted no one to think she was on some obsessive crusade that might blur the clarity of her vision. But “crusade” was exactly the correct term for it.
Her expertise in the infectious disease field alone led to the CDC finding a position for her. But it was her ability to work with people as both leader and administrator which had accounted for her being chosen for the Firewatch program. Firewatch had grown out of the CDC’s Special Pathogens Branch, which specialized in unknown viruses. But that branch lacked the capacity for quick response, something CDC officials deemed increasingly important with the rapid emergence of viruses and bacteria the world had seldom if ever seen before and was ill equipped to fight. Firewatch got the call when minutes mattered, while a crisis was still unfolding.
Accordingly, a Firewatch field leader
had
to be able to interact, had to be able to take charge on scene even as the inevitable number of agendas came into play. She had accepted the position primarily because it offered the most rapid advancement to the area where her true interest—obsession, actually—lay. And if she handled the Cambridge incident well, then perhaps that advancement would come sooner than she had anticipated.
Susan’s eyes lifted to the camera suspended from the ceiling at the joint in the front and left side wall. The light beneath it changed from red to green, signaling the broadcast was now active.
“Let’s begin.”
“I can’t help but notice your face, Doctor,” came a male voice she couldn’t put a name to out of box number five. “The written report you faxed to all of us yesterday was rather vague on the circumstances of your injury.”
“Purposely so, sir. A dog jumped at me and landed on my helmet. Impact shattered the faceplate. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Did you say a dog?” asked the voice from box number two, which Susan recognized as belonging to the director of the FBI, Ben Samuelson.
“Never mind that,” followed a voice from box number one. “My question is how could the dog have possibly been alive?”
“I’m not sure yet. It would be best for all of you—and me—to follow
the events of yesterday in the order they occurred. I’ll answer any of your questions, of course, but many of those answers may come in the natural progression of my report.”
Standing, Susan worked the keyboard beneath her so that the screens of all the meeting’s participants would be filled with the recording made by her built-in helmet cam the day before. “You are about to see on your monitors what I saw in my trek through the Cambridgeside Galleria yesterday afternoon.”
Susan relived every step all over again, no less chilled this time than in any of her previous viewings. She had edited out her run-in with the dog and the result was a surreal walking tour through a graveyard gone mad.
“My God,” said the voice out of speaker nine when Susan had leaned over to scan one of the victims in more detail.
“I’d like to see that again,” from speaker six.
“In slow motion, please,” requested a voice she recognized as belonging to Clara Benedict, deputy national security adviser to the president.
Susan hit four keys in rapid succession. Instantly the tape rewound and began playing again, in slow motion. She’d seen the shot a hundred times now and it still scared her. The body was not so much a body as a slab of dried, virtually petrified flesh. The slow-motion scene started at the head and worked downward, revealing a mouth that seemed to have been swallowed up by skin that had shriveled. The nose looked to have fallen into the skull, while the eyes bulged grotesquely outward since the lids, brows, and cheekbones had receded. The skin was a ghostly white, almost like chalk, with the texture of cracked leather.
The torso and neck had flattened into a shapeless mass before petrifying. The arms and legs were angular, molten piles of what used to be flesh and bone.
“We are to assume, then, Doctor, that all the bodies you found inside the mall were in this condition,” proposed speaker four.
“That is correct.”
“What is the count of fatalities?” asked the voice out of the sixth box.
“Approximately seventeen hundred.”
“And how are we progressing in identifying them?” asked Clara Benedict.
“At this point, all we can do is use wallet contents to do the job. It’s slow because of the safety precautions involved.”
“Stop the tape, please,” requested Clara Benedict. And, after Susan had done so, “Dr. Lyle, what exactly are we looking at? What happened?”
Susan cleared her throat. “They were drained of all hemoglobin. Blood,” she added after a short pause.
“I hope we’re not talking about vampires here,” snickered another voice she recognized, that of Daniel Starr, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“No, because our examination of the bodies has yet to reveal a single wound in any of the victims through which the blood could have been removed. Add that to the fact that no blood whatsoever was found spilled at the site and we’re talking about something else entirely.”
“Like what?”
“Exposure to a foreign organism that ingested every drop present in the mall.”
“Your initial reports called it a foreign ‘agent,’” noted General Starr. “What changed?”
“No inorganic agent could possibly be this target-selective.”
“Are you saying we’re dealing with a virus or a bacteria here?”
“Very probably, but one that behaves like none ever previously charted.”
“A bacteria or virus that goes after blood,” General Starr picked up, “and doesn’t stop until it’s ingested every drop.”
“Not
every
drop,” Clara Benedict reminded. “There was that dog that broke out of the storeroom in the pet store and jumped on you. How do you account for such an anomaly, Dr. Lyle, considering all the other animals in the store were found dead?”