Darkness at Dawn (40 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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Lucy was swaying with fatigue and blood loss. She’d already been fitted with the mask and hood. “Mike.” The respirator made her voice sound mechanical, almost alien. She stopped, coughed. In the unzippered opening, Mike could see that the cough made fresh blood well up.
“Goddammit! At least close up the wound, stitch it or put butterfly bandages or something! Can’t you see the shape she’s in? She could—” Mike’s mouth closed with a snap.
Die. He’d been about to say it. She could die.
Wilson shook his head sorrowfully as he zipped Lucy up. He’d reholstered his Beretta, but it was within reach. And Mike knew that the whole crew had orders. He could, conceivably, pull Wilson’s Beretta and shoot him, but he’d have to kill the whole crew, and then who would fly the plane?
“It’s okay, Mike,” Lucy said again in her metallic voice. “It’s necessary.”
“Lie down, please, Doctor.” Wilson helped Lucy lie down on the cot. Mike could see her grimace of pain and his hands clenched.
The engines revved, the plane started taxiing.
Wilson checked his watch, looked at Mike. “We’re taking off early. The Learjet is waiting on the tarmac at Mumbai. Pilots say there are tailwinds. There’s a full medical team waiting on the other end, at Atlanta. You better strap yourself in for the flight. Sir.”
Wilson’s dark eyes were steady. He was sympathetic, but Mike had no doubt at all that he would do his duty and follow his orders to the letter.
There was a very good chance Lucy might not survive the flight. Something had to be said before he strapped himself in.
He put his face right against the transparent faceplate of Lucy’s Hazmat suit and just looked at Lucy. She was so beautiful. So brave. He touched her hand, encased in three layers of gloves.
“I love you,” he said.
A faint smile. “I know,” the alien metallic voice answered. “Go buckle up.”
Five minutes later they were airborne.
An hour into the flight, Lucy lost consciousness.
N
INETEEN
 
TEL AVIV 3 A.M.
 
IT was a dusty house on a short side street on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Though it was only ten years old, it looked ancient, the corners of the inferior-grade cement already crumbling.
There was no one about. The soldiers had quietly made sure of that, contacting all the neighbors on the street, quietly evacuating them. There were no nosy insomniac neighbors, no barking dogs, just ten men in Level A Hazmat suits, hiding in the shadows. Waiting.
Two ambulances and three vans with SWAT teams were on a side street.
Two clicks in the leader’s headset and he brought his hand down. The go signal.
The soldiers were all brave, technically proficient, had gone over the plan again and again, but a shiver of superstitious terror ran under their skins. They would have had to be robots not to feel it, for inside the crumbling, nondescript house was a plague designed to destroy their country.
These men were the only line of defense against the massacre of their people.
Each man had a moment of atavistic terror, then their nerves steadied. Each man was a scientist, as well as being a warrior. They were the best of the best their country had to offer.
One of the soldiers held a stethoscope-like device against the walls. There was no question of placing his ear against it. His head was encased in twenty pounds of plastic. The listening device transmitted the sound waves it picked up directly into his headset. Except there was no sound. Nothing, not even the ticking of a clock.
He wanted to wait, but their SCBA respirators only had an air supply of twenty minutes. They needed to do this perfectly, but they also needed to do this fast.
The soldier gave thanks that it was not summer. It was an area too poor for air-conditioning. The windows would have all been open. But it was November, and cold. All the windows were tightly shut.
He gave the sign. The soldiers surrounded the house, half of them climbing ladders they’d brought with them, scrambling up to the second floor.
They all carried tiny precision drills, and at the click, they quickly bored holes through the wooden frames of the windows and threaded tubes into the rooms. Each tube was connected to a canister filled with a derivative of fentanyl, the most powerful narcotic in existence, one hundred times more potent than morphine. The drug was fast-acting for a short duration. Those inside were guaranteed to be unconscious for at least half an hour. It would be enough.
When the canisters were emptied, the men simply broke into the house, uncaring of the noise. Nobody inside was going to wake up.
Moving fast, they carried the bodies outside to the waiting ambulances, where they would be taken to a special laboratory in the desert, to a prison seven floors down, from which they would never emerge.
The men searched the house thoroughly and found ten injection guns and one thousand tiny cylinders, to be dispersed throughout the country. Everything went into a special container, built to withstand an atomic blast.
The contents would be studied for years to come.
Every stick of furniture, every object in the house, was carried out and stored in special vans.
As the sky in the east lightened slightly, they piled into a van that would take them back to Mossad, where they would get out of their suits, have breakfast and then be debriefed.
By midday, they’d be home with their families, having saved their country, sworn to secrecy to the end of time.
MID ATLANTIC DAWN
 
Lieutenant Cary Entwiler looked down at the dark ocean, lightening slightly to the east, then looked at his radar.
“There she is,” he announced to his squadron. Privately, he thought this was overkill. Six F-16 Fighting Falcons, each with four Boeing Harpoons, was enough to take down a small country, let alone a fishing vessel.
But what was below him was apparently not a simple fishing vessel. He and his crew were not cleared to know what the vessel carried, but they were smart enough to figure it out.
Something really fucking scary, that’s what.
Well, the navy was counting on them to eliminate it. and that’s what they’d do.
They were cruising at Mach 1.5, at fifty thousand feet. No way anyone on the ship could see them. But the infrared cameras on the lower deck were following every move on the ship. In the sunlight, those cameras would allow Lieutenant Entwiler to see what brand of cigarettes the sailors smoked.
“There it goes,” he told his pilots. They were seeing the same image he was seeing. A blue tarp being slowly pulled over the ship. Camouflage. Because they were bringing something deadly to the United States and didn’t want to be seen by satellites.
Not today, boys
, Lieutenant Entwiler thought.
Not ever.
He locked in the ship’s position, sent it over an encrypted line and a minute later received the message
Proceed.
“Squadron release,” he ordered his men, and the bays of all six F-16s emptied their payload—four Harpoons each, traveling at 500 mph, with two-hundred-pound warheads, arrowing straight to the ship. Each Harpoon cost a million bucks.
Someone wanted every molecule on that ship destroyed.
They watched the massive explosion on their screens, a geyser of water arcing almost half a mile high. The six F-16s remained in a holding pattern for half an hour, watching the sun rise over the calm sea, without any hint that there had been a ship there.
“Okay, guys,” Lieutenant Entwiler announced. “Time to go home.”
He pulled his plane up, curved around and headed west.
FORTY MILES NORTH OF THE PALACE
 
The C-130 Hercules lumbered awkwardly across the bright blue Himalayan sky, so clumsy it was almost endearing. Unless you knew what it carried in its hold. A MOAB—Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—affectionately known as the Mother of All Bombs, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created. The pilot had his GPS coordinates and so did the bomb itself. It had its own guidance mechanism and was accurate down to an inch.
The ultimate bunker buster.
Only the pilot’s screen showed no bunkers, just an endless stretch of snow. But he had his orders and they were absolutely clear. Destroy even the molecules at that particular GPS location.
Well, he had the equipment to do just that.
And he and his crew also had permission from the brand-new queen of the country they were flying over, Queen Paso, to bomb the bejesus out of one corner.
So be it.
When he heard the click in his headset, the pilot calmly pulled a lever and loosed hell on earth from the bomb bay of his plane.
He watched his screens, watched as the equivalent of eleven tons of TNT hit the ground, digging deep, destroying anything living within the blast radius of 450 feet.
There she goes
, he thought, as the bomb exploded underground, snow and dirt and rocks flying up with massive force.
There were only fifteen MOABs in existence, and he’d just fired one. It would have made for a good drinking story if he’d had permission to tell it. If he did, though, he’d face a firing squad, so it would just have to be tucked away with the three or four other things he’d carry with him to his grave.
“Heading home,” he told the comms officer eight thousand miles away in the Indian Ocean, and veered back south.
His job here was done.
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL ATLANTA, GEORGIA THREE DAYS LATER
 
Lucy gained consciousness forty-eight hours after the operation.
The doctors had assured him over and over again that she would be fine. They’d made it to the operating theater, sirens screaming, with twenty minutes to spare. The doctors had been waiting, scrubbed and ready. They had operated deep underground in a Level 4 lab with its own self-contained oxygen supply, negative air pressure and a foot-thick steel door.
Mike had waited topside, ready to chew the couches, until four hours later the head surgeon came out, pulling his mask away from his mouth.
Mike wondered how the guy could walk, seeing as how he had two stones the size of refrigerators. The doctors knew that if the capsule in Lucy’s shoulder exploded and they were infected, the steel door would never open.
That took cojones.
They had got the capsule out of her shoulder right away and put it into a sealed container and sent it up, then got to work on Lucy.
Who was now alive . . . or not.
“Captain Shafer?”
Mike stood and watched the doctor cross the room, trying to read his face. But all he could see was kindliness and exhaustion.
Mike’s heart was thumping heavily in his chest, static in his head.
“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m Captain Shafer.”
“Pleased to meet you, Captain.” The surgeon’s grip was strong and dry. Mike’s palms were sweating. He’d had to wipe them on his trousers before taking the surgeon’s hand.
“So . . . how did the operation go?”
The surgeon gave a gusty sigh and Mike’s heart leaped in his throat.
“She lost a lot of blood. It was touch and go. We infused her with three sacks. She lost her spleen, too. But she’s young and healthy and we hold out hope for a complete recovery.”
Mike’s knees nearly gave out. He gasped in air, suddenly realizing he hadn’t breathed in over a minute.
“Good—good news.” He hardly recognized his own voice.
The doctor nodded. “Yes, indeed.” He narrowed his eyes at Mike. “She’s going to be weak and recovery could take a long time. Make sure she rests.”
Mike nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Oh yeah. She wasn’t going to do anything for six months. He’d personally see to that.
“Can I, can I see her?”
“Sure. She’s heavily sedated, but you can stay as long as you like. I understand she has no family.”
“Not true,” Mike said firmly. “She has me.”
He sat by her bedside for two days and two nights, just watching her. The nurses came and went and discussed him in a whisper, and he didn’t budge except to go to the bathroom.
On the morning of the third day, Lucy’s hand fluttered in his. He sat up, all drowsiness gone. Half an hour later, her eyes moved beneath her lids, back and forth, like windshield wipers. An hour later, her eyes opened suddenly.
“Hey.” Mike leaned over her, holding her hand. She gripped his hand hard, and he’d never felt anything better in his life. “You’re back.”
She breathed in and out. Looked at him. “I made it.” Her voice was thin and scratchy.
“Yeah.” He tried to smile, but it was wobbly. His cheeks were wet. Was it raining in the room? He swiped at them impatiently. “You made it.”

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