Apache Dawn: Book I of the Wildfire Saga (12 page)

“Why you think I need to get out by midnight?”

“Uh, ‘cause you’re such a lightweight?” asked the short, wide-shouldered, well-muscled SEAL.

“Man, I bench press more than you
weigh
.”

“All right guys,” Charlie stood up.
 
“Can you help get the rest of the beer unloaded?
 
Hey Joan, can I borrow you for a second to check on Allie?”

Cooper limped behind Jax and Mike, elbowing each other around the corner when he happened to glance at the TV.
 
He froze.

“
…BREAKING NEWS
…” flashed across the screen in big, bold flashing letters, designed to gather attention.

“What’s wrong?” Joan asked behind him, sudden concern blossoming in her voice.
 
Cooper noticed her back was to the TV. She peeled off her own sunglasses as she moved into the shade.

“Oh, with all the news about the flu in L.A., Allie’s convinced the Blue Flu is coming back,” Charlie said, ushering Joan toward the house.

“Oh, the poor dear,” she said sadly.
 

“Yeah, I tried to tell her that if there really was another Pandemic we’d all be called back, you know?”

Cooper turned back to the screen. His heart skipped a beat.
 

“Well, of course, I can—” Joan’s response was cut short by Cooper’s gasp.

“I’m not the only one seeing this, am I?”
 
He turned up the volume.

“…
interrupt, but I’m being told there’s a… Wait.
 
Chuck are you serious?”
 
The anchor put his hand to his ear, listening to someone off-camera.
 
The box in the corner of the screen showed something that looked pretty amateurish. A shaking image of grass, rotating to trees and sky, before finding buildings.
 

“There’s a mushroom cloud over Atlanta?
 
You’ve got to be kidding me… Oh…oh my God,
” the suddenly pale-faced anchor said.
 

The small preview image on the screen expanded from the corner.
 
Now it was clear that the shaky, grainy image came from someone’s camcorder.
 
They had been looking at a city skyline in the distance.
 
A mushroom cloud, lit from within to a burning, orange glow, loomed over the city as it clawed its way into the sky.
 
The shockwave had passed, but dust and debris still expanded out from what looked like the downtown district.

Across the bottom of the screen scrolled: “…
sensors in Savannah, Georgia measuring spikes in radiation…BREAKING NEWS
…
beach-goers in Florida report seeing missile launch off-shore…BREAKING NEWS…
”

“Jesus H
…”
muttered Charlie.
 
“A sub off the coast of Florida…”
 

“Did he say Atlanta just got
nuked?
” asked Cooper.
 

“Say
what?
” asked Jax.
 
He and Mike had arrived carrying cases of beer and bags of ice.
 

Mike slowly removed his aviator glasses.
 
“Son of a
bitch
.”
 
He cracked a beer and drained it in two gulps.
 
Eyes still locked on the screen he belched and dropped the can to the ground, missing the trash can a foot away.
 

“I…I’m going to go check on Allie.
 
Jess!
 
Come with me, sweetie.”

Mike watched his rebellious daughter follow his wife with a scared look on her face, eyes on the TV.
 
“Well, all it took was a major city getting whacked for her to listen to her mom…” he muttered.

A shrill, desperate ringing sounded from Cooper’s pocket.
 
He frowned and looked at Charlie.
 
Cooper checked the number after he fished the whining phone out of his pocket.
 
It was their deep-shit emergency line.
 
It meant he needed to get his ass back to base,
now
.
 

Three more phones added their noise to the first.
 

“I’d say our shore leave just got canceled with extreme prejudice
…”
muttered Charlie.

The SEALs looked at each other, then at Cooper.

Cooper frowned.
 
“Screw the retirement party, boys.
 
We got work to do.”

“Hooyah, Master Chief,” replied Jax softly.

C
HAPTER
6

Washington, D.C.

U.S. Naval Observatory.

Vice Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

T
HE
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
PUSHED
past his Secret Service bodyguard and slammed the door to his private suite in The Bunker.
 
Alone at last.
 
He looked toward the ceiling of the oak-paneled briefing room.
 
Above him, there was a hundred or more feet of earth and a veritable labyrinth of rooms and tunnels.
 
He may not occupy the White House
yet
, but the Vice President’s nuclear bunker was pretty close to anything the White House offered.
   

He strolled into the expansive kitchen area and tore open the large stainless steel fridge to find it fully stocked with his favorite beer and wine.
 
He grabbed a cold Stella Artois and savored the first cold, crisp taste.
 
In two swallows he had downed half the bottle.

It had been a hell of a day.

Out of habit he walked over to the far wall in the living area expecting to pull the curtains back and see a window.
 
He had spent so many nights in hotel rooms across the country and around the world in the last four years he almost felt more at home gazing through a window overlooking a foreign city than staring at his own backyard in Ohio.
 
Yet, when the curtains were ripped open, he saw only a large black screen embedded flush in the wall.
 

He sighed and took another swallow of the cold beer.
 
He chuckled, looking at the fancy European label and remembered how the Prime Minister of England had laughed when he had seen the Vice President’s beer of choice.

“Surely you jest, old boy,” the stodgy Brit had said over the rims of his Ben Franklin glasses.

“Nope.
 
Love it,” he had told the British leader, while smiling at another dignitary across the room.

After he stopped laughing, the PM gave the visiting VP the hairy eyeball.
 
“You do realize, of course, that particular beverage you are enjoying so earnestly right now is considered the…ah…
wife beater
of beers?”
 
He had burst out laughing again, a deep, throaty, guffaw.

Barron had grinned and saluted the PM with his gold-rimmed pint glass. “Cheers, mate!”

Returning to reality, the Vice President belched and turned on the large TV screen and immediately saw the classified reports that were privy to only the upper echelon of the U.S. Government.
 
One channel had an up-to-date map of reported cases of the mysterious H5N1-variant strain across the country.
 
He could clearly see the angry red welts on the map, in California, up the West Coast and into Canada. Vancouver looked like one big red blob—they were taking it on the chin pretty hard up there.

New York appeared like a red cancer. A chain of dots stretched to Boston in the north and Philly in the south. Washington was surrounded by a small army of red dots.
 
The cases thinned out the farther south on the map his eyes traveled, but he swore there were a hell of a lot more dots on the screen—representing 100 cases as marked on the map legend—than there were just
two hours
earlier.

Guilt washed over him.
 
He knew.
 
He alone in the whole country knew the truth of where and how this massive epidemic had started.
 
It was
his
fault.
 
The deaths of all those Americans rested on his shoulders, threatening to crush him with remorse.

He, Harold J. Barron, Vice President of the United States, had authorized the release of the North Korean-made bio-weapon based on an especially deadly strain of flu last seen during The Great Pandemic.
 
He had committed High Treason.
 
When he had given his soul to Jayne and Reginald, he had given them certain codes to gain access to American security grids, protocols, and agencies.
 

Days.
 
It had only taken
days
for Reginald’s employers to wreak havoc on the country.
 
Reginald was one very well-connected man.
 
A sickening thought occurred to him: how well prepared were Reginald’s employers for this?
 
How long had they plotted and lain in wait for the right moment to strike?
 
Months?
 
Years?
 
How many political victories had he racked up because of the unseen hand of Reginald’s employers?
 
How long had they owned him?

The Vice President hadn’t given the actual command to launch the attack, and of course he had taken no physical part in it, but he had
allowed
it.
 
He had enabled it.
 
Guilt crashed against his psyche again and again, like waves that pummeled a crumbling shoreline.
 
He stared at the red dots on the map.
 
All those Americans were sick because of him.
 
So many would die because of him.
 
So many
had
died, because of the frailties of
his
flesh.

Jayne.
 
All of this, the nuclear strike, the weaponized-flu—it had all started in that hotel room with Jayne.

Jayne had forced him to receive what she called “the only known” vaccine last week, so he wasn’t worried for himself, or even his family.
 
He had made sure his family had secretly received the vaccine as well.
 
He stared at the dots and finished the rest of the bottle.
 
He purposely avoided looking at the angry black and red bull’s-eye over Atlanta.

“Jesus…God, forgive me,” he muttered, tears welling up in his eyes again.
 
Anger fought with guilt to control his emotional roller-coaster.
 
He threw the beer bottle toward the wall in frustration.
 
It exploded on impact and showered the carpet with glass.

James Conway, his permanently assigned Secret Service agent, threw open the door and scared the Vice President half to death.
 
He thought he had locked the damn door.

“I’m
fine!
” he called as the Agent stormed the room, pistol in hand.
 
“I just…” the Vice President looked at the broken glass on the floor by the far wall and shrugged.
 
“It’s been a rough day…”

James relaxed with a barely perceptible dip of his shoulders.
 
The gun vanished inside his coat in a well-practiced flash of movement.
 
He nodded and took one more look around the room.
 

After he shut the door, the Vice President turned to face the screen again and loosened his tie angrily.
 
He ripped his jacket off and threw it on the floor in impotent rage.
 
Reginald was behind this, he was sure of it.
 

“You never said
anything
about nuking an American city,” he hissed under his breath, glaring at the bull’s-eye over Atlanta.
 
The casualty figures on the right side of the map continued to rise.
 
The last official count was 326,987 killed, and another 273,432 missing and suspected dead.
 

He reached out a finger and touched the angry bull’s-eye.
 
The screen flickered and was split into four quadrants.
 
The upper left screen showed a live feed from Atlanta, just outside the radiation zone on the south side.
 
Crumpled buildings, illuminated by the countless fires that burned uncontrolled in the deepening night, reached up from the ground like the charred fingers of a corpse.
 
It was a ghoulish nightmare scene.