Jericho 3 (20 page)

The temperature gauge on Camp’s watch registered 33-degrees Fahrenheit. The moisture was borderline snow and rain.

Crossing out of Sherwood Forest and through the field, Alpha Team returned to Bannu Road. There were two more sets of tire tracks.

The pace increased as the two squads spread out. Lynch and Veggie were on either ends of the Tac4 as they double-timed carrying Banks.

Suddenly, the two scouts on point raised their hands and dove into the ditch on the east side of Bannu. Fifteen other Alpha members did likewise and settled. Veggie and Lynch covered the white body bag and the Tac4 with their own bodies.

Three pick-up trucks full of Pakistani ISI drove past them. Alpha Team, sprawled out in the water ditch next to Bannu Road, remained motionless and undetected.

“They’ll follow our tracks in the snow. Call in the drone.” Omid whispered to Captain Sanchez lying next to him.

“And cause an international incident by attacking members of a sovereign nation’s military? Not on your life. We roll!” Sanchez said as Alpha erupted out of the ditch and sprinted down Bannu Road.

“Brick, when we get to the riverbed take squad one up and along the road, and we’ll head down through the riverbed. Give us cover if you can. Muster at Toledo,” Sanchez said into the helmet comms while running at full speed.

Three, four-wheel drive Toyota pick-up trucks pulled outside in front of the second house on the south side of the second street in Datta Khel Village. Six men emerged from the cabs, and another 12 jumped out of the truck beds anxious to warm themselves by the fire that certainly would welcome them beneath the smoke stack pouring out from above.

Seventeen men carrying weapons and another unarmed man sauntered through the gate and up to the house. They were in no particular hurry. The Pakistani ISI soldiers were oblivious to the conditions on the ground as Kazi’s eyes examined the snow-covered ground. He held up his hand, and everyone stopped as he pointed to numerous sets of waffle-like boot prints in the snow.

AK-47’s rose immediately, and the men spread out front and back around the house. Within seconds they realized the full carnage of an event that had taken place 30 minutes before they arrived. The bodies of three of their comrades were still warm to the touch. But the boy was missing.

The Commander sent a detachment of six to follow the tracks in the snow which led over the wall, across the street, and over the next wall to the vacant house. Within a few short minutes, the Pakistani soldiers found the boy and brought him back and quickly removed the tape and rag from his mouth and cut the plastic restraints.

“White suits, white suits,” the boy screamed in Pashtu.

Kazi walked up to the boy as the ISI Commander was trying to calm him down.

“How many?” Kazi asked.

“I don’t know…maybe eight,” the boy said. “I told them. Then they took him.”

“Told them what?” Kazi demanded. “They took what?”

“They were looking for the American. They came for him.”

Kazi ran out of the room and down the long hallway to the room with the curtain walls. The SkitoMister was exactly where he had left it. Kazi stroked the machine like a woman’s face.

“They can’t be far. Four on the ground, the rest in the trucks,” the Commander said as he walked toward the front of the house.

“Put the machine in my truck. We’ll head to Miran Shah right now,” Kazi said as two soldiers picked up the SkitoMister and carried it out to Kazi’s truck.

The boy knelt down alone next to his father’s body and started crying as ISI soldiers and Kazi left the house as fast as they had arrived.

The four ISI runners were standing on Bannu Road after emerging from the grove of trees in Sherwood Forest and running through the field. The footprints they followed led north toward the Hindu Kush, the border with Afghanistan, and the same direction they had just driven in from.

The Commander slowed down, and the four got into the back of the two vehicles. Kazi and his two soldiers turned the opposite direction and headed south toward Miran Shah.

Sanchez took his squad down along the riverbed. Omid stayed up with the scouts at point since he needed to chart a different egress on the fly. There was no visible trail, and the conditions had gotten worse. Camp and Finn ran on opposite ends of Veggie and Lynch who carried Banks on the Tac4.

Brick’s squad was running at full speed when they heard the sounds of approaching vehicles. The 40-mile-per-hour speed of the ISI Toyotas was no match for Brick’s team, Special Forces or otherwise.

They had just crossed a one lane bridge over the shallow mixture of water and ice from the Hindu Kush run-off when AK-47 fire sprayed the fields wildly all around them.

“Dino, Jazz…C4 discharge on the bridge, now!” Brick screamed as he and three other Alpha soldiers kept running.

Dino and Jazz descended the banks on both sides of the one-lane bridge and mounted their C4 bricks, then took off running. AK-47 fire danced on Bannu Road as Dino and Jazz ran z-patterns up the winding road.

“Above their heads, no shoot to kill,” Brick yelled as his team turned on a dime and opened fire at the Pakistani soldiers.

The nearly simultaneous C4 explosions sent the wooden bridge and a cloud of fire, ice, water and snow 70 feet into the air as the Toyotas veered to each side of the tributary trying to avoid open water below. The Commander’s vehicle flipped over sending four ISI soldiers airborne and down the embankment into the frigid water.

Brick and the squad kept running as bullets fell harmlessly to the ground behind them.

The explosions and fireball illuminated the riverbed as Sanchez kept his squad moving on the parallel path below.

“All clear,” Brick yelled into his helmet comms as the split Alpha Team kept humping toward muster at Toledo, a cave complex less than two clicks away and at the base of the Hindu Kush.

The snow turned to freezing rain as midday approached. It hid the mountains behind a gray, wind-whipped scrim of water and threw hailstones chattering to the earth. It flooded the gravel yards of the hillside and transformed the footpaths into freeways of chocolate-colored water.

Inside Toledo, the tempest knocked out comms and turned their muster into a dark, flooded cave, soaking body armor and wrecking bags full of electronics. Soaked soldiers stood miserably as Camp, Billy Finn and Omid gathered with Sanchez and CW2 “Brick.” The half-crazed, wandering eye Manson stood guard over the Tac4 holding Banks’ body bag.

“How’s the SAT phone?” Sanchez barked to Geek.

“Checking it now, sir.”

“We can’t stay here…these conditions are nothing for the Taliban and the tribesmen. You can count on 20 of them less than two kilometers behind us already,” Omid said as he pled his case for urgency.

“We need to get a strike on that beacon in the house,” Finn said to no one in particular.

“Screw the damn mosquito machine. We’ve got to go now!” Omid yelled.

“Geek? Give me something, brother,” Sanchez begged.

“Nothing, sir…maybe we’ll have better luck higher up.”

“Brick…we’re too damn wet. We’ve got to do better than point-six kilometers per hour, or we’re going to freeze up here,” Sanchez said as Brick nodded. “Let’s move.”

The Alpha Team started up the Hindu Kush and spread out for Taliban snipers. They were soaked to the bone. Veggie and Lynch carried Major Banks on the second leg of his long journey home. Camp grabbed Omid’s arm as they headed up the trail.

“I want to trust you, Omid.”

“Why?”

“I’m not really sure. Tell me the plan. I want to understand.”

Omid looked deep into Camp’s eyes. “Do you really think that we can ever become friends?”

Camp smiled and extended his hand. “Why not?”

ISAF Headquarters

Kabul, Afghanistan

T
he desk phone in General Ferguson’s office rang. He waved off Major Spann and took the call himself.

“Ferguson.”

“Sir, First Sergeant Morris in the Creech TOC.”

“Go, Sergeant.”

“Sir, we have 18 beacons on the move.”

Ferguson let out one of his very few smiles and fist pumped the air.

“That’s great news, sergeant.”

“Maybe not, sir. The 18th beacon is heading in the opposite direction of Alpha Team. Looks like it’s on the road to Miran Shah.”

“Any comms from Alpha?”

“Negative, sir. What would you like us to do with air support?”

Ferguson put the call on speaker and walked over to his classified wall map.

“Sir?”

“I’m here, sergeant…stay with Alpha Team until safe egress and comms. Maybe hostiles moved Major Banks before Alpha arrived.”

There was silence on the other end of the call. Sergeant Morris at the Creech TAC finally spoke.

“Sir…with all due respect…if hostiles moved Major Banks, then someone had to put a beacon on him. Is there any chance that we have a broken arrow, sir?”

Ferguson sat slowly in his chair and rubbed the fog of war out of his eyes. He thought about Camp’s penchant for going outside mission plan which is why he put Billy Finn on his hip. If Camp went all John Wayne on him then Billy Finn would have been riding shotgun.

“I don’t know, sergeant; I just don’t know.”

National Interagency Biodefense Center

BSL-4 Facility

Fort Detrick, Maryland

T
he technicians were fully dressed in their BSL-4 body suits, yellow oxygen tubes connected to the ceiling grid, as Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Raines watched from the command center’s video monitors.

A SkitoMister from the manufacturer in Illinois was in the room. Four rhesus monkeys were in their cages nearby as the technicians hooked up the tularemia recipe into the tank on the SkitoMister. Cooking up a toxic rabbit fever blend that was lethal by inhalation was anything but easy. But if it could be simulated in Raines’ BSL-4 lab, then an antibiotic or vaccine could be cooked up too.

Tularemia was a less than glamorous bio-weapon. The world was focused on other leading actors like anthrax, the Black Plague, Marburg’s and smallpox. Even though rabbit fever was a Category A pathogen, the words “rabbit” and “terror” never seemed to go together.

Tularemia was first mentioned as a plague-like disease of rodents in 1911 when it killed a large number of ground squirrels in the area of Tulare Lake in California. The lake gave the name to the disease – tularemia. Scientists determined that tularemia could be dangerous and humans could catch the infection just by touching an infected animal, dead or otherwise. The illness became more frequent among hunters, cooks and agricultural workers. If any of the pathogenic organisms penetrated a body through damaged skin or mucous membranes, then a potentially severe and fatal illness developed for infected people.

It was one of the key reasons why BSL-4 facilities were designed and created, biocontainment labs where epidemics
inside
could be prevented from escaping
outside
.

Raines knew that tularemia was one of the fastest sprinters among all infections. It took only 10 microbes of the bacterium to cause an extremely dangerous disease. The disease had a very fast and acute beginning. It was the three-to-five day infection window that caused her the most angst.

A weapon using airborne tularemia might not even be detected within five days. Without treatment, the clinical course could progress to respiratory failure, shock, and death. By the time a true diagnosis was rendered, millions could be ill if not dead.

But the most alarming conclusion for Raines was the status of the vaccination: incomplete. In volunteer studies, the live attenuated vaccine did not protect all recipients against aerosol virulent tularemia.

This was the aspect of animal research that bothered Raines the most. If she and her technicians had cooked up a lethal recipe of inhalation tularemia, all four rhesus monkeys would be sick within three to five days and dead soon thereafter. If not, then they had to go back to the biological pantry of ingredients and try a new recipe.

If the monkeys died, then the research team knew they had achieved sufficiently lethal inhalation tularemia. They could then get busy developing vaccines and antibiotics to protect the next batch of monkeys
from
dying.

Dr. Groenwald walked into the command center as Raines watched her technicians load the SkitoMister with the fourth recipe they had concocted of inhalation tularemia.

“What’s the plan, colonel?” Groenwald asked.

“We’ve cracked the so-called vaccine-resistant tularemia the Soviets developed in 1982. Now we’re trying to cook a recipe that even we can’t solve. We’re simultaneously working on microbes of bacteria and vaccines.”

“Progress?”

“Not yet, all four NHPs have handled each recipe thanks to their vaccines.”

Groenwald looked out over the TV monitors feeding images of the technicians working with the SkitoMister and the non-human primates.

“Keep me posted, colonel.”

Four rhesus monkeys or four million people? In order to save four million people, Raines needed to make sure four monkeys died.

It was an easy choice, even if she didn’t like to make it.

Combat Outpost Chergotah

Khost Province, Afghanistan

E
merging out of the Hindu Kush, Alpha Team stumbled into the Combat Outpost, deprived of a badly needed, four-hour sleep break and pushed to cover almost a kilometer an hour through the high country, all the while fearing that they were being chased by a hot pursuit.

Dex unpacked the SAT phone as the others stripped out of their frozen snow camo and into warm battle dress uniforms. The soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division stoked the fires and put some water on the cook stoves for the weary Alpha Team members.

Dex connected with Creech Air Force Base and confirmed that all 17 had indeed made successful egress over the Hindu Kush. The duty sergeant asked him to hold so he could patch in General Ferguson at ISAF headquarters in Kabul.

“Captain, need you here, sir,” Dex yelled. “They’re patching in Command at ISAF.”