Allegiance (28 page)

She paused for a moment,
noticed several people looking questions at her. Took a drink from her bottled
water.

“The Chinese programmed
their hunter-killers with Dead Hand protocols similar to the way the Soviets
had their ICBMs set up to strike if the USSR was attacked. Essentially, all of
the attacks on our assets were ordered—preprogrammed if you will—well before
Omega escaped from their BSL-4 facility. That every one of us are still
breathing is the reason why we are certain Jinlong and the generals are dead.
If they were not, the second phase of any attack we have ever war gamed would
have come next. A wave of ICBMs would have been launched against us... and
snuffed the rest of humanity out in the process. The bang following the whimper
at least. I’m going to step aside now—President Clay wants to say a few words.”

As Cade processed the
major’s briefing, the proverbial light bulb went off in his head and the reason
Nash hadn’t been able to provide real time satellite blanket over Jackson Hole
was now crystal clear.
You’re forgiven, Freda
, he thought to himself.

He watched Clay come to
the podium. The way she moved suggested she had a ballistic vest strapped on
under her ACU blouse. Her security detail lagged back, watching everybody’s
hands. Their training dictated they watch for telltale clues that might precede
an attack. And hands going into pockets were one of those signs.

Nash shook the
President’s hand and then stepped aside. The President didn’t need to adjust
the microphone or take a drink of water. She didn’t have a fistful of notes,
nor did she look nervous. She wasted no time and dove right in.

“I want to commend
General Ronnie Gaines first and foremost for the stellar job he’s done in place
of Mike Desantos, whose boots were big enough for two men to fill.”

She looked Cade’s
direction. He shifted his gaze to Gaines, who just happened to be staring in
his
direction.
Shit
, Cade thought.
Don’t do this here. Not now
.
Suddenly he regretted affixing the captain’s bars to his uniform.

“All kudos go to the 4th
ID and the 10th Special Forces who have been under his command. Downtown is
nearly clear of the dead,” Clay added. After a few seconds of applause she went
on. “They have also moved a number of shipping containers south to construct an
improvised barrier. Something to slow the dead that have been a constant
trickle up from Pueblo.” She paused. A ripple of subtle movement made rounds of
the room as excited people processed the added snippet of good news. A sort of
poor man’s wave sans the sporting event. “I also want to recognize Captain Cade
Grayson for his continued allegiance to the flag and to the country,” she said,
meeting his gaze.

Here it comes
, he said to himself. He nodded. Smiled. It was
forced and tight. He watched her step from the podium and stride in his
direction. He thought about bolting. Then a quick burst of flash traffic from
Egoville
entered his thought process.
General Grayson does have kind of a nice ring
to it
. But the G word carried way too much baggage for his liking. And as
the President squared up less than a foot in front of him, he asked himself:
how in the hell am I going to politely decline
this
?

Like a Secret Service
agent, his eyes tracked her hand as it delved into her pocket. Out came a black
velvet box.

With his gut doing flip
flops, Cade stood at attention. Too late to say or do anything. For lack of a
better word—he was
trapped
.

She unsealed the box.
Inside was a light blue ribbon that appeared to be folded over on itself more
than once. As the lid hinged fully open, President Clay rotated it towards him.
Nestled atop the ornate ribbon, decorated with a field of tiny white stars, sat
a gilded five-pointed star surrounded by a green laurel wreath. He’d seen this
before in books and once in person at the Smithsonian in DC. His throat
clenched upon noticing the American eagle sitting atop a gold herald, on which
the word VALOR had been inscribed in bold, important-looking letters.

“You earned this,” she
whispered in his ear as she stood on her toes to place the Congressional Medal
of Honor over his bowed head. “And this one is for Mike,” she added, covertly
slipping an identical black box in his blouse pocket. “Had to look high and low
for these, but that’s a story for another day.” She backed away a couple of
steps and offered up a professional looking salute. Cade reciprocated. And as
he held his arm at the proper angle, he noticed on the edge of his vision the
rest of his peers go rigid and do the same. His throat was closing in on
itself. He felt on the verge of tears. And not a single one of them could he
attribute to his situation. They were all reserved for the Desantos family.

***

Twenty minutes later,
after Clay had concluded her pep rally and Shrill had touched over an impending
nuclear crisis which most of the facilities in the country were sure to face in
the coming weeks and months, the majority of the people in attendance were
politely asked to leave by Major Nash.

Once the TOC was cleared
of all nonessential personnel, she launched into the real meat of the briefing.
“I’m going to keep this short, gentlemen... and lady,” said Nash, nodding
towards Major Ripley, who in her navy blue flight suit stood apart from her
male counterparts. “First of all, Captain Grayson, congratulations. Don’t let
it go to your head.” She smiled at him and then moved her gaze around the room.
“As all of you know, a thumb drive containing notes taken by Sylvester Fuentes,
who was working on the Omega antiserum, has been located. Not to put any undue
pressure on the men and women who will be going downrange... but finding the
right people to interpret the data contained on the drive
is
the
linchpin to producing more of the antiserum Fuentes used successfully one time.
I’m not going to go into all of the details of how it came into my possession,
but do know that without decisive action taken by Captain Cade Grayson this may
not have fallen in my lap. It’s real,” —she held up the brushed metal device
for all to see— “and your mission to the CDC’s counterpart in Winnipeg, aptly
named Operation Slap Shot, may be the linchpin to mankind’s survival.” Nash
paused as a low murmur circulated the room. Then, to infuse some hope in the
support crew as well as the operators, she offered up an extra nugget of
information. “As of 1500 hours yesterday afternoon, we have proof of life
inside the facility. The general has all of the details and he’ll share those
once you are underway.”

The briefing lasted
another twenty minutes. Call signs were issued to the air and ground elements.
The Ghost Hawk would go by Jedi One-One, the original title bestowed upon the
black helo the day it rolled out of the Skunk Works facility at Area 51. The
name had stuck like glue, and no one, not even the desk pilots who loved
coining new and sometimes silly call signs, had ever attempted to change them.
And considering the fact that the Gen-3 helos were now affectionately called
Jedi Rides by the elite warriors who rode the stealthy helicopters into combat,
the paper pushers knew better than to ever broach the subject.

The President’s Osprey,
call sign Jedi One-Two, with a chalk of Rangers aboard would accompany Jedi
One-One on the mission.

Nash went over the
refueling logistics, which seemed to have multiple redundancies already put
into place—just in case.
Good to see the little—but very important—details
were being attended to
, Cade thought to himself. He glanced at Lopez, Tice,
and General Gaines. The three operators seemed to be listening closely as the
feisty major continued going over contingencies and emergency procedures. They
would have limited sat coverage, Cade was pleased to hear.
Better than none.

“What about drone
support?” he asked.

His interruption
received a chilly glare from Nash but she obliged anyway. “Not as of now,” she
said. “We’re still trying to reconstitute those forces.”

“Copy that,” Cade
intoned. He subconsciously fingered the medal he had just received. Then,
feeling a little embarrassed, he slipped it off and dropped it into his pocket
next to Mike’s posthumous award. He looked around. Thankfully, it appeared his
action had gone unnoticed. He glanced sidelong at Ari and Durant, then shifted
forward in his seat and regarded Hicks, the oftentimes quiet flight
engineer/door gunner, who rounded out the crew responsible for keeping Jedi
One-One in the air.

After the Jackson Hole
op, Gaines had ordered everyone who had gone “
down range”
to take a
mandatory two-day stand down. That, in Cade’s opinion, had left all three of
the SOAR members looking well rested and raring to go—at least as good to go as
a person could appear with ninety-plus percent of the populace walking around
hungering for flesh.

Ari busted Cade
eyeballing him, cracked a wide smile, and flashed a thumbs up.

Someone likes his
mission profile
, Cade mused.
He
can thank me later for the extra refueling tankers.

Cade put his hand in his
pocket, felt the medal sitting there. Touched the points of the star just to
make sure he hadn’t been daydreaming. So it was decided. Coming to the briefing
had been more than a gesture. In fact, the moment he Velcroed the black
captain’s bars on his ACU’s and strapped on his weapons there had been no
turning back.
Brook knew what she was doing
, he thought. She knew he
could never say no to this mission. She had seen the pull of duty drag him back
in too many times to count during their thirteen years of marriage. He
was
too much of a patriot to turn down something on the order of this magnitude.
The far-ranging implications of the mission’s failure were too many to
calculate and too cataclysmic to ignore. He had nobody to blame but himself
that this mission to Canada’s version of the CDC had been dropped into his lap.
After all, he was the one who’d yanked the tail of the cosmic tiger. It had
been his decision to rescue the girl at Grand Junction Regional—the girl who
had found the thumb drive. A fair amount of serendipity had gone into the
events leading up to this moment. Therefore, he concluded, who was he to decide
that his part in God’s plan was over?

Outbreak - Day 16

Logan Winters’s Compound

“If I would have known
then what I know now, this is the first prep I would’ve done after I bought
this plat of land. Only I think I would have gone with surgical steel—ground
the bastards down to a sharp point before sticking ‘em in the ground.”

Duncan stabbed his
dagger into the earth and handed Logan another finished product. “Woulda,
coulda, shouldas don’t carry much weight these days, baby bro. How’d it go
escorting the kid to his vehicle?”

“Did just like you said.
He about shit himself when I handed him his AK. Coulda swore he was thinking
about turning it on us.”

“Gus pick up on that
too?” Duncan asked. “Him being law enforcement and all.”

“Yeah, nothing untoward
happened though. Gimme one of those,” Logan said, motioning to the sticks
Duncan was whittling. Working by the sterile blue-white light of his headlamp,
Logan gripped the first foot-long branch firmly with both hands. It was alder,
and about as big around as his thumb. He worked the blunt end into the mud and
clay wall of the two-foot deep hole, making sure that the whittled point
slanted downward at about a forty-five degree angle. He planted a dozen more of
the sharpened sticks into the walls of the hole, pointing in from all
directions of the compass. When he was finished, he policed up some dried
foliage and used it to conceal his handiwork.

“These things
effective?” Logan asked, a measure of skepticism in his voice.

“Punji traps?” Duncan
nodded, the beam from his headlamp moving lazily up and down. “Good as a
bear
trap
... when you don’t have a bear trap,” he added in his usual slow drawl.

Logan grunted as he
exerted himself, trying to get the angle on the next stick just so. “How
exactly does the thing work?”

“Well, it’s pretty
simple. The fella steps in there and his foot hits the bottom—VC sometimes put
spikes there too. So now he’s up to his knee in a hole. He’s pissed and kinda
stunned like he just stepped off a curb he wasn’t expecting... and what’s the
natural thing he’s gonna do?”

“After he shits himself
?” Logan said, smiling at the visual. “He yanks his leg out, of course.”

“Correct. That’s why the
Viet Cong angled their sticks downward. Picture it... so now the spikes are
biting into his leg. They might be splintering, but the more he struggles the
deeper they dig into the muscle. He can’t pull it out,” Duncan intoned, his
eyes widening. “He’s stuck now, like a kid that got hisself caught in a Chinese
finger trap.”

Then, as if someone had
flicked a switch, some birds in the canopy above them suddenly came alive. Dull
sleepy chirps, sporadic at first, that swiftly ramped up to a raucous chorus.
Duncan went silent, gazing up through the spiderweb of limbs at the sky. The
black was giving way to a deep purple as the sun prepared to make its first
appearance of the day. He scanned the surrounding forest. Turned a full
three-sixty, slowly, with his AR-15 held level. At the ready. After a few ticks
he looked back at Logan, shrugged, and continued. “Most times the VC put their
own
shit
on these things. Not quite a
million dollar
injury. Like
a through and through gunshot wound could be. That kind of shit came with a
Purple Heart and a jet plane ride home... stewardesses and all. Still,
sometimes the infection brought on was good enough to get a fella sent to
Da-Nang... maybe even get laid by a horny nurse. Shave a few days off his tour
if he’s lucky.”

“Back from your trip
down memory lane yet?” Logan asked.

The question, though he
was clearly joking, earned him a cold glare from his older sibling. “There are
a few things this old hombre can teach you. Might come in handy when I’m no
longer around to wipe your butt.”

“That’s right... you’re
so ancient you
did
wipe my ass. How could I have forgotten?” Logan
slapped Duncan on the shoulder. “In all seriousness... I know there’s no way
those mindless rotters are going to notice this camouflage... but do you really
think this is gonna fool a person?”

“We ain’t up against the
VC. I’m confident from what I saw when me and Phil tried to go to town... these
folks don’t cover their tracks. The gunfire I heard sounded to me like some
fool shooting holes in the sky. Bottom line... they aren’t very cautious.
Either way... something
or
someone comes this way, they’re getting stuck
in one of these.”

Logan pulled a laminated
overview of his property from a cargo pocket, unfolded it and marked the
location of the trap on the map in black ink. He twirled his mustache and
looked at his brother.

“How many more you
think?”

Duncan looked up at the
rapidly lightening sky. Made a show of checking his watch. “As many as we can
finish before noon,” he replied. “Something tells me Chance and his kind
are
not
early risers.”