Retribution (37 page)

CHAPTER 74

 

“D
o you see them up there?” Furlong pointed to the ridgeline to both the south and north. They were slowly being surrounded. Now the wind and storm had left, moving off to the east. It had become quiet. Quiet on the battlefield is never good. Like the eye of a hurricane, silence only ever signals the imminent return of the storm.

“They'll be above us if we don't move.” Frix was huddled nearby in the rocks with Parker. As it was nearing dawn, the temperature was dropping. Frix's words had a wisp of visible vapor as his warm breath turned cold.

The stars were back, but with the increasingly graying light they were disappearing one by one.

“Can he be moved?”

“I can do it.” Parker suddenly stirred, then leaned up from the rock. The transfusion of blood had bought him time and a false sense of security. The fentanyl lollipop hadn't hurt either.

“Captain, you have to make a call.”

“What?”

“Now! I may not have much time.”

Furlong reached for the radio. A broadcast at this point would let the world know who they were and where.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as the four million in Chicago.”

Parker spoke with Scott only briefly, giving him two cell phone numbers. One was in Chicago and the other, locked in Yousef 's phone and Parker's memory, in New York.

The message was sent through the system by a plasma designator. Red hot. No higher designation. In a few minutes, teams from the FBI and Canadian Mounties were chasing the trail of every new transient that had arrived in Canada. The description was a young woman with a limp.

“It's a hump up to that plateau, but they can't get above us.” Furlong was studying a laminated map in the gray dark. He was using a small pin light with a red filter and was hugging the bottom of a rock to stay out of sight. “Any chance of you making it, Colonel?”

“Yeah, I can make it.”

“What about the gunny?” Frix asked.

“Where's Moncrief?” Parker's face looked chalky in the dark, all the more so framed by his black-and-white checkered shawl wrapped tightly around his neck and
pakol
hat pulled down as far as it would go.

“He went on an errand.” Frix put his finger on Parker's neck to check the pulse.

Like the leader he'd been trained to be, Furlong didn't hesitate with his decision. “Fury, you and Villegas get to LZ Echo on that plateau and lay down cover fire. If the Gunny gets back, Frix will give Parker the IV. We will gather up the rest and join you as soon as we can.”

“We'll stay on this eastern face.” Fury pointed out a path that cut up the ridge.

 

 

James Scott looked up at the digital clocks above the screens in the bridge.

“It's getting near dawn.” Prevatt's face showed a look of frustration. The clock seemed to slow down as they waited. Both Scott and Prevatt stared at the thermal feed from the Predator on station above. The two watched the small white dots move in small lines across the terminal screen like ants moving across a sidewalk. The dots seemed to be surrounding a much smaller group of other dots in the center.

“You told them about the core?”

“Oh, yes.”

Prevatt had made it clear to the Marine Special Operations Team that the stakes were very high, not merely combat-essential. The MSOT team would not turn around for any reason.

“Checkmate six, this is Dash One.”

The radio transmission was being fed directly into the bridge. Everyone in the operations center had gotten a sense of what was going on. The tension was building as the transmissions were broadcast over the speakers.

“Dash One?” Scott questioned the call sign.

“It's a Marine squadron,” said Prevatt. “VMM three-six-five. The Blue Knights. I've seen them in Iraq. They come back with their aircraft looking like Swiss cheese, no problem. Nothing stops them.”

“How are they going to get through that front?” Scott held up a printout of the weather over the Hindu Kush. The lines of isobars indicated powerful winds when they were close together. Similar to the topography lines on a map, when the parallel lines were bunched together like the engravings on a dollar bill, they indicated one was heading toward a cliff on a map. On the weather map, one was flying through a cliff.

Prevatt looked at the weather map again and shook his head. Mountains that topped twenty-four thousand feet, flying on night vision and close isobars, meant one hell of a ride. In those mountains, there were no ground lights. At well over three hundred knots, a hiccup would mean eating a cliff face.

“Dash one, this is checkmate six.”

“We are rocking and rolling up here. We are one zero miles out.”

“Dash one, roger.” Prevatt was handling the communications directly. “Slashing talon six, are you at LZ Echo?”

“Negative.”

Prevatt shook his head. “God, I hope they make it.”

Scott nodded. “You and several million fellow citizens.”

CHAPTER 75

 

The bullets popped, ricocheting off the rocks that surrounded Furlong, Frix, and Parker. The enemy had now climbed above them, firing down in the morning light.

Seemingly from nowhere came a familiar voice: “Well, how long will this take?”

The trio turned in surprise to find an exhausted Gunny Moncrief crouching next to them, holding the antibiotic solution bag that he had retrieved from the tent.

“It takes what it takes.” Frix sounded more like the physician who had finished medical school. “Hey, Gunny.”

“What?”

“You did good!”

“There are two on that south ridge that have us zeroed in.” Furlong took a brief glimpse around the rock. “But several more are moving up.”

“Colonel, how are you doing?” Frix felt Parker's pulse. It was rapid.

“Ready to get out of here.” Parker's voice sounded slightly stronger.

“Okay. Just five more minutes.” Frix laughed. “You look like shit!”

Parker had a twisted little grin on his face.

“We have to hump it up that hillside.” Furlong peered over the rock and then ducked down again. “Now!”

“The way they're zeroing in on us, we don't have more than fifteen minutes. After that you won't have to worry about blood poisoning,” Moncrief told Furlong. “You'll have lead poisoning.”

Wham
.

“There you go.” Furlong liked the deeper sound of the .338 Lapua high-velocity round from Villegas. It meant a fair fight.

“Frix, can you carry Parker while Burgey and I do cover?” Furlong checked the magazines. One was empty. He threw it on the ground and put the two loaded magazines in his front pouches so that they could easily be reached.

“I've got it.” Parker started to stand up. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Fifty meters up this hill and then we can run this IV.” Frix was being optimistic. “I'll save the rest of this in case you make it to the top.”

“I'll lead,” said Furlong, “and then Parker will follow. That way, if the pace gets out of whack, you others can help out.” Furlong was suggesting that he knew the route but that Parker needed to be near the front or risk being left behind. “Gunny, you have the box.”

“Great. So if a stray bullet hits my box, I'm the one that gets vaporized.”

“You, us, and all of western Pakistan.”

“No problem.”

Parker was using his one arm and the pistol with the silencer.

Furlong waited for another
wham
from the Windrunner. It meant one less gun to worry about and the enemy would keep their heads down for a few seconds. He disappeared around the rock.

Parker inhaled, and started to move out. At first he felt the blood rush to his head. Then the adrenaline took over. He followed Furlong's moves, cutting up the goat path that crisscrossed the rocky hillside. Furlong stopped and then Parker stopped. He heard the
whap, whap
of bullets increase as the hostiles detected his team moving up the hill line.

Parker felt like his tongue had been glued to the roof of his mouth. He tried to breathe through his nose, stopping only briefly, and then moving, trying to keep his pace irregular so a sniper's aim would be off. For what seemed an eternity, Parker moved up the hillside.

The miles and miles they had run through the summer in the sweltering heat, up hills, exhausted, with the muscles in their legs burning—all of the miles were now keeping Parker alive. He actually moved closer to Furlong, using short, choppy steps like a long-distance runner to work his way up the steep hill.

The small object flashed across his vision in the dawn's light. The rocket-propelled grenade missed Furlong and him narrowly, detonating ten to fifteen meters away. Though Parker hunched and knelt instinctively, the blast knocked him to the ground. Matter-of-factly, he managed to stand and begin moving again. He heard Moncrief's rifle firing behind him, the silencer making a
thud, thud
sound with each round. Furlong, a few feet ahead, was down on his face, bleeding from the back and stunned but clearly alive.

A glance across the ridgeline and Parker saw two of the enemy stand with another RPG aimed at Furlong's position. Moncrief was busy reloading. Parker couldn't see Frix or Burgey. He lifted his pistol and took aim. The two-hundred-meter shot would be nearly impossible for a .45-caliber pistol. It took more than aim. It took a sense of the drop of the bullet, like a golf shot being cut around a tree. And the slope. Still, he had to try.

Pop, pop
. Parker's silenced pistol fired. The two men with the RPG disappeared.

Parker grabbed Furlong by the belt under his
pay-raan tumbaan
shirt and lifted him to his feet. Furlong whipped his head around, stunned. Parker put Furlong's arm around his shoulder and both moved up the hill with one dragging the other.

“We need some help if we're going to make it.” Parker spoke the words just before the flash.

The Predator's Hellfire struck the other ridgeline.

Another flash and boom echoed across the valley, more missiles dropping in rapid succession now, one after another.

Parker crossed over the edge of the plateau just as a powerful gush of warm wind nearly knocked Furlong and him back over the rocks. Moncrief braced them from behind, keeping them from falling as the air filled with the sulfur-tinged smell of cordite.

The sky before them wavered with heat vapor, then split as the Osprey aircraft rose above the ridge. Its blades, in full tilt, caused the hybrid aircraft to stop in midair and hover directly over Parker's head as the machine gun in its tail sprayed the hillside across the valley with bullets. The hot, small brass casings rained on their heads as they dropped to their knees.

Within what seemed like mere seconds, Parker was surrounded by the Marine Special Op Team setting up a perimeter. He heard their silenced rifles pick off targets rapidly, one by one, as well as the continued boom of the Windrunners firing as he collapsed in the cargo hold of the aircraft.

“Let's get that going again.” Frix was already kneeling over Parker, pulling up his sleeve and starting an IV with the remaining bag of antibiotics.

“Don't lose this.” Moncrief handed the nuclear-device box like a football to a fast-recovering Captain Mark Furlong.

Parker felt the aircraft become light as it began to rise. He looked out of the open ramp on the end, seeing rocks and smoke and then blue sky.

And then the exhaustion took over.

CHAPTER 76

 

“W
ell, how are we doing, Mr. Jones?”

William Parker felt as if he was awakening from a long night's sleep. He tried to focus his eyes on the physician, in azure-blue hospital scrubs, sitting at his bedside.

“What the hell?”

“Thirsty?”

“Yes.” Parker tried to lean up in the bed. The sheets were clean and perfectly bleached white with just a small amount of starch. Somehow, for the first time in days, Parker felt clean, like the sheets. And hungry. He looked at his hands. The dirt of Pakistan remained embedded under his nails.

“Try some orange juice.”

“Dr. Paul Stewart.”

“Very good. It always helps a survivor of meningitis to remember my name.” The Buddy Holly clone from the CDC continued to check the pulse of his patient. “Of course, you survived NM-13. Amazing.”

“How about Yousef al-Qadi?”

“He did not make it. Intelligence reported that he made it back to his cave, cold and miserable.”

“Any others?”

“My guess would be one or two. If they had someone in their family tree that survived the black plague they had a chance.” Stewart had on reading glasses and was looking at the chart that had recorded Parker's vital statistics.

“I remember your telling me about that. Any eastern Europeans with inherited super-immunity.”

“That's it. Were there any Europeans there?” Stewart looked up over his glasses.

“I knew of only one.” Parker pulled the pillow up under his head. “But he should be dead. Any others?”

“It seems that the people stayed in their cave. We should not see any kind of major outbreak.”

“How about our team?”

“Well, you should not have been contagious after getting that first IV, so they should be uninfected. But we're treating them aggressively as a precaution.”

Parker looked around the Gulfstream. He was apparently in a medical suite in the rear of the aircraft. The oval windows were all dark with closed shades.

“Do you want to get some more sleep?”

“How long have I been out?” Parker felt stiff, as if every muscle had been strained to its limit.

“You been down for about thirty-six hours.” Stewart looked at his watch. “I didn't want to put you back up at altitude while your blood pressure was all over the place.”

“Thanks.” Parker didn't know how close he had come to lights-out.

“Besides, frankly, I didn't want you and your buddies back in the States until I knew we had this under control.” Stewart's CDC side was taking over.

“You didn't want to unleash NM-13?” Parker sat up on the side of the bed, got his bearings. As he sat there, he realized what Stewart was saying. If the disease wasn't stopped for both him and his crew, they would have never left the country. “Okay.”

“Where's Scott?”

Stewart shrugged. “A few are up front, but they're all down for the count.”

Parker glanced forward and saw the several sofa-like chairs folded out flat with odd-shaped bundles under gray-and-blue blankets. Although daylight crept in through the window shades, the cabin looked like a dormitory after an all-nighter.

The orange juice had an odd taste, which was, for the first time in several days, sweet and rich. Parker tasted the pulp. Following the fever, his senses seemed to be returning to normal.

“Here, take these. I want you to stay on some extra antibiotics for a few days.” Stewart handed him what looked like large white horse tablets.

“Okay.” He swallowed the tablets with another gulp of the orange juice. “Thanks.”

“No. I think I need to thank you, Colonel.” Stewart's voice was sober. “They told me enough that I understand the nuclear weapon was recovered because of you.”

“How about the one in Chicago?”

“They shut down half of Canada. All along the Lake Huron area. It's all over CNN.” Stewart held Parker's wrist as he spoke checking the pulse. “Some crazy young woman. You can see it up front.”

Parker smiled, looking through the doorway to the television screen in the front cabin. The graphics told everything.

No mention of the true nature of the bomb.

What the news didn't say—and what Parker would only learn later—was that the girl never made it to takeoff. The airplane was loaded and she had begun her taxi out into the lake for takeoff, but a bullet from the Canadian Mounty reaction team caught her in the chest. The airplane's wing dipped, and it taxied across the water into the shoreline. The team found her dead, surrounded by maps and photographs of the South Haven Lighthouse. The cabin was full of blocks of explosives and, in the center, there was a small nuclear core.

Her dream remained a dream.

She had a look on her face, with her eyes fixed, open, big, brown, as if she had made the final turn to the target. Next to her, on her lap, was a small, odd round bundle of socks tied tightly together by loops of plastic bags. The Canadians were, at first, not sure of it, and carefully removed it wary of what it contained. Later, it was determined that the small round ball was harmless. It closely resembled the homemade “footballs” used by children in rock-and-dirt soccer pitches near the ghetto of Danish Abad.

“What about Hernandez?”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Where are we going?”

“London.”