The 6th Extinction (14 page)

She’s safe
.

That was victory enough for him.

The expedition might not have learned anything significant about the base, but hopefully the collected samples would help lead them in the right direction.

The truck began to turn around outside the gate when Jenna spoke up again. “Wait!”

Drake called for the driver to stop.

Painter sat back up.

“I just realized something. I don’t know if it’s important, but I forgot to mention it earlier.” She pointed to the gate. “When I arrived last night, this was open. Like it is now. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but now it’s got me wondering.”

Painter followed her train of thought.
The enemy had departed by helicopter. Likely that’s the way they arrived, too
.

“Who left the gate open?” Jenna asked. “What if it wasn’t someone
entering
the base, but someone
fleeing
out?”

Painter considered the timeline. “When the mayday was dispatched by the base’s system analyst, she mentioned the containment breach, but nothing about an attack.”

“Which means someone—someone on the inside—likely sabotaged the base in advance, setting everything in motion. And knowing what was coming, the saboteur fled before all hell broke loose.”

Painter weighed the likelihood of this scenario. “Makes some sense. The resulting chaos would’ve helped cover the arrival of the assault team, allowing them to land and nab Hess.”

Jenna pointed to the crater. “And with this level of destruction, it would take weeks, if not months, to find and identify all the bodies. No one would know Hess had been snatched for quite some time.”

“Which goes to explain why the enemy was so determined to silence
you
. They didn’t know how much you saw and couldn’t risk letting knowledge of the kidnapping get out.”

“But they failed,” Jenna added. “And now we know someone probably fled from here, too. The only road out of these hills passes through either Mono City or Lee Vining. Both towns have multiple traffic cameras. If we could track the saboteur down . . .”

We might learn what really happened here—and why
.

Earlier, Painter had had a full rundown on events back in D.C., detailing the attack on DARPA’s headquarters and the execution of Dr. Lucius Raffee. Someone was clearly trying to erase all ties to this base.

But now they had some hope of getting a jump on them.

Painter scratched Nikko behind the ear.

You have one smart owner
.

He leaned to the microphone. “Okay, good job everyone. Let’s get you all home safe.”

6:55
A
.
M
.

Lisa sat in sullen silence as the Hummer descended out of the hills. In her head, she reviewed the protocols for their return to the forward staging area.

At the border, a group of Marines—working with a team from the CDC—had already constructed a makeshift quarantine garage for the truck. After offloading inside there, she and the others would strip and go through multiple decontamination stages. Additionally, the team would be isolated for twelve hours to watch for any signs of contagion or contamination.

She stared at the rolling black hills, recognizing the seriousness of this threat. She estimated this dead zone covered at least fifty square miles.

But what did it mean? Had the explosion aerosolized whatever was growing in that lab, seeded it far and wide? If so, had Dr. Hess’s toxic countermeasures managed to neutralize it?

The only answers lay back at the Marine base, where a Level 4 biolab was being set up within a hangar. She was anxious to get back there to study the samples and specimens.

Finally, green hills appeared ahead, softened by the morning light. It looked like they were traveling out of a black-and-white film toward something shot in Technicolor. She took hope from that beauty, from the resilience of nature.

Then she spotted all the bodies in the hills—birds, deer, even lizards and snakes—and a heavy despair settled over her shoulders. Or maybe it was these darned oxygen tanks. She shifted her harness trying to get more comfortable.

“Look over there.” Jenna pointed toward the edge of the blackened swath.

Then Lisa saw it, too. “Stop the truck,” she ordered Drake.

He obeyed, and the vehicle ground to a halt.

To the side of the road, the line of wooden stakes that marked the boundary of the dead zone was still where the Marines had pounded them into place earlier. Only now, that dark shadow had spread past that margin, edging farther down that green slope.

“It’s still spreading,” Jenna said, her voice hushed.

Drake swore.

Lisa swallowed away the dry fear in her mouth. “We should measure how far it’s moved past the stakes.” She ducked to check the clock on the dash of the Hummer. “We can calculate a rough estimate about how fast it’s moving.”

“I’m on it,” Drake said.

The gunnery sergeant retrieved a tape measure from an equipment locker at the back of the bed and hopped down to the road.

Josh followed him. “I’ll help you.”

Lisa moved to join them, but Painter came on the radio. “Lisa, I’ve got you on a private channel.”

She stopped, gripping the edge of the truck bed. She waved for the others to continue. “What is it?”

“If that organism is still alive, if it wasn’t killed by the toxins in the gas, we might have to incinerate the area.”

“But will fire actually kill it?”

“I think it might.”

“Why?”

“The assault team arrived with a
flamethrower
as a part of their gear. It’s an unusual choice.”

Lisa understood. “Unless they were anticipating the need for such a weapon.”

“Exactly. The team had been sent to raid a lab with a known contamination breach. Someone might have dispatched them with the means to blaze a safe path to reach Hess.”

“I hope you’re right.” She looked toward the carcasses littering the landscape. “Maybe the secondary goal of the nerve gas—if the toxins failed to kill the organism—was to kill anything that could move, anything that might carry this organism out of the area.”

“To keep the contagion localized.”

She nodded to herself. This conversation made her even more anxious to get to that biolab, to test these theories.

A sharp cry drew her attention beyond the truck. Josh was down on one knee. Drake helped her brother up.

“Gotta watch those hidden rocks up here,” Drake said.

Josh shook loose of the man’s grip and backed a step. He was staring down at his left leg. “I got stabbed. A thorn, I think.”

“Let me see.”

Drake began to examine it—but Lisa yelled over to him. “Stay back!” She hopped down and hurried toward them. “Josh, don’t move.”

She reached the two men, noting her brother’s face had gone pale.

She crouched and examined the tear in his suit and the sliver of branch pinned to his leg by an imbedded thorn.

The bit of stem and leaf were both black.

“Get duct tape!” Drake yelled to the other Marine; then to Lisa he said, “We can patch up his suit. It’s not a big rip.”

Instead, Lisa reached her gloved fingers and tore the hole larger. She got a peek at Josh’s shin. The skin around the impaled black thorn had already gone a purplish red.

“Really stings,” Josh said, wincing.

Lisa turned to Drake. “We need rope. A belt. Something to make a tourniquet.”

Drake ran off.

“You’re going to be fine,” Lisa said, but even her words sounded rote and unconvincing. She stood with her kid brother, finding his hand and squeezing tightly.

Behind his mask, Josh breathed hard, his eyes narrowed by pain. He looked a decade younger, the fear turning him into a boy looking to his older sister for help.

Words echoed in her head.

Kill us . . . kill us all
.

Drake came pounding back, dragging everyone but the driver with him. He had a length of climbing rope in his hands. She helped secure it around Josh’s thigh.

“Make it as tight as you can,” she said.

Jenna stood with her arms anxiously crossed, clearly recognizing the threat. “Will the tourniquet keep it from spreading?”

Lisa didn’t answer, not wanting to lie.

Once the rope was secure, dug deep into the muscles of Josh’s thigh, the Marines helped haul Josh back to the Hummer. As they lifted him into the bed, Lisa crossed to the equipment box and retrieved what she needed.

Painter came on over the private line. “Lisa . . .”

“It has to be done,” she whispered back.

“At least wait until you get back here.”

“We’ll lose too much time.”

Drake gaped when she turned, seeing what she was carrying. She passed him the fire axe.

“At the knee,” she said. “Take it off at the knee.”

9

April 28, 10:17
A
.
M
. EDT
Washington, D.C.

“That’s him,” Gray said.

He leaned on his fists atop the computer station in Sigma’s nerve center. He was alone with Kat, though Jason was in the neighboring room, visible through the window, working on the files they’d recovered from DARPA’s servers.

Thank God I still had that flash drive with me
.

Concentrating on the monitor, Gray stared at the photo of the man on the screen: his chiseled features, his pinched nose, his cropped blond hair. He remembered that same face glowering at him from the end of the hallway back at DARPA’s headquarters.

“You’re sure it’s him?” Kat asked.

“Without a doubt. Who is he?”

Hours ago, after returning to Sigma command from Arlington, Gray had been debriefed by Kat. She also had him sit down with a sketch artist, while another team had collected the bodies from the seventh floor hallway of DARPA. They found no identification on the dead, but fingerprints were taken. It hadn’t taken Kat long to determine they were all former British special forces soldiers, specifically SAS—22nd Special Air Service. Most likely they had become mercenaries for hire, some elite team that fetched a steep price.

Kat pointed to the screen. “Their leader here is Major Dylan Wright.”

“Let me guess. He’s also SAS.”

“Close. He’s British special forces, but he was with the SBS.”

Special Boat Service
.

Gray knew about that UK detachment. The unit was established in World War II to conduct raids on German targets, mostly in the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Adriatic seas. Now they were deployed worldwide as a counterterrorist group.

“If I had to guess,” Kat said, “I’d say this group was made up of former members of the British X Squadron. That specialized unit formed in 2004, made up of volunteers from both SAS and SBS.”

Same as the team that raided DARPA
.

“X Squadron is considered the best of the best,” Kat finished.

“So who hired these ex-soldiers?” Gray asked.

“Unknown, but I’ve got the word out across various intelligence services, along with some contacts in the shadowy guns-for-hire world. Hopefully we’ll have some answers in the next few hours.” Kat glanced his way, a sympathetic cast to her eyes. “In the meantime, if you want to attend to any personal matters, now should be a good time.”

Gray sighed. He’d already had a nap and swung by his father’s house. The day nurse had been there, and they had talked at length about installing door alarms and other security measures to help keep his father safe at night. But even she had admitted it was a stopgap plan at best, and that he and Kenny needed to think about taking that next step, which meant moving their father out of his home—if not into a memory care unit, at least into an assisted living facility.

“I think I’ll go hit the gym instead,” he said, needing to clear his head. “Work off some steam.”

Kat stared at him a second longer, then slowly nodded. “I think Monk is down there now.”

Knuckles rapped on glass behind them, drawing their attention around. Jason waved for Kat to join him. Curious, Gray followed her into the neighboring office.

Kat crossed behind the desk to join Jason. “Are you making any headway with those files?”

“Some. But I wish I had been able to recover more than this single folder of information about the base. It’s like trying to get a complete picture of a room by peeking through a keyhole. If only I’d had more time to back up additional files . . .”

Kat touched him on the shoulder. “The first thing you have to accept in the intelligence business is that you
never
have the complete picture. You learn to deal with the facts at hand and do your best to infer from there.”

Jason frowned, still plainly unsatisfied. From the shadowy bags under his eyes and the Rockstar energy drink by his elbow, it looked like the kid hadn’t slept at all.

“I did put in a call to the British Antarctic Survey,” Jason added, “to try to reach Professor Harrington, that paleobiologist who was in regular contact with Dr. Hess. He may be able to fill in a lot of the blanks in our investigation.”

“Hopefully so,” Kat said. “But why did you call us in here? Did you find something?”

“Maybe, but I wanted to run it past you. After so many hours buried in these files, I may be too close. I need fresh eyes.”

“No worries. I’ve been there many times myself. Go ahead and use us as a sounding board.”

Gray was struck by how gentle Kat was with the young man. It was a sharp contrast to her usual steely-eyed manner and no-nonsense sensibility. When he’d first met Kat, he felt like he always had to stand a little taller, his back a little straighter. She had that effect on people. Maybe it was the result of raising two girls, but here was a different side to her. While it was a far cry from warm and cuddly, she was clearly a good mentor.

Jason straightened in his seat, his manner more confident. “Okay, but you’ll have to bear with me, as I’ve been neck-deep in what various British military and research teams were doing in Antarctica.”