The Flood (12 page)

Five minutes later, most of it spent listening, Park’s mouth was hanging open again. Abrams, who had also been listening raptly, motioned to the ensign to turn off the speaker, then said to Park: “Okay. Is there
any
chance this guy is who he says he is? Or that he could have something like what he describes?”

Park nodded. “I don’t know who else it could be. I don’t know how else he could know these things. And if it is him… well, I worked with him pretty closely at the biotech in Dusseldorf. And he might just be the one guy on Earth who could produce a bioengineered disease like that. Designer pathogens were his whole thing – and he was
good
. Seriously good. Like, to the point that we worried about what he was going to do with them.”

Abrams paused and cocked his head. “But the world is a very tricksy place, Dr. Park. We can’t be taken in. You’ve got to try and verify him somehow.”

Park nodded, and the ensign flipped the speaker switch. “Dr. Aliyev,” Park said. “What’s the molar mass of adenine?”

“What…? Okay, okay. About a hundred and thirty-five grams per mole.”

Abrams looked down at Park, who nodded – close enough
.
“What does the MC1R recessive gene variant cause?”

“Redheads!”
The Kazakh sounded like he was getting into it now. He spoke in an easy, competent English, with an accent that sounded kind of Russian but kind of not – the
R
s weren’t so hard, and the
H
s were heavier.

“What color was the ferret owned by the director at the lab in Dusseldorf?”

“Trick question. It wasn’t a ferret, it was a badger. And all badgers are black and white. Hint of brown maybe.”

Park exhaled. His look to Abrams said it all. “And you’ve
really
got a designer pathogen that will destroy the dead?”

“I swear on my life. Kills zombies dead – better than Raid on cockroaches. Massively virulent – and as contagious as freshman dorm flu.”

Park paused and took a deep breath. “Okay. Just tell me one last thing. Who were you really working for back in Dusseldorf?”

Long pause.
“The FSB.”

“I knew it! You were a goddamned Russian spy.”

“Yes. Sorry. I swear I will spend the rest of eternity making it up to you – if you just get me the ever-living fuck out of here. Please, Simon. Save me – save humanity. Between your vaccine, and my pathogen, we can fix all this. You just have to come and get me.”

Park looked up to Abrams, his expression twice as serious as it had been when he first came up here to talk him into something – namely the mission to retrieve the DNA sequencer from Saudi Arabia.

He said, “We’ve got to go get this guy, Commander. Whatever it takes. This will change everything.”

* * *

“We’ve lost the transmission,” the ensign said.

Park nodded. Aliyev’s radio must have died, as he’d warned them it would. But they’d managed to get some details out of him before the end. And what he told them about his location, bizarre as it sounded, jibed with what radio direction-finding told them. They’d been triangulating from the carrier and from their airborne F-35, giving them a reliable transmission source.

Park repeated himself, a foot away from Abrams’s face. “Seriously. We have
got
to go get him out of there.”

Abrams exhaled wearily. “Who exactly is
we
?”

“I don’t know. Someone in Britain, I think. CentCom. They’re a lot closer.”

Abrams shook his head. “We’ve already been through this with them. They don’t have any more long-range air transport. Their only refueling tanker is halfway to us right now.”

Park looked down to the map display already up on Abrams’s screen. “But this is a much shorter flight. Look…” He scrolled and zoomed out the map, then eyeballed the map scale, and pinched off the distances. “It’s nearly four thousand miles from London to us here in the Gulf of Aden… But it’s probably no more than… fifteen hundred from London to Moscow. Plus it doesn’t have to be an aircraft that can land on a carrier.”

“Yeah,” Abrams said, unimpressed. “Instead it has to land in Red Square. With God knows how many undead on the ground there. Quite a few, if your guy is to be believed. Wait a minute – how do you know him again?”

Park shook this off. “It’s not important. Look, they’ve got to make this happen – whatever it takes. Professor Close and I have already talked about this, and nobody else has any plan for getting rid of the seven billion walking dead plaguing our planet. Infecting them with a lethal virus or bacterium is probably the
only
way we’re going to get the Earth back in our lifetime. I’m telling you, if this works, it could be the salvation of the world. And if we
don’t
get this guy, that could be it. This could be the one thing that actually— listen, they said the noose is closing on London, right? That Britain is hanging on by a thread. That they’re out of time.”

“Yeah.”

Park nodded, touched the corner of his eyeglasses, and steeled himself. He said, “Okay. Well, listen, the vaccine’s going to take a few days even to start protecting people who are inoculated with it. And that’s
after
we finish perfecting it –
and
get it back to Britain. Which is only going to happen
after
Alpha gets back with the sample I need. These are all critical-path tasks – a delay at any stage pushes the whole thing back.”

Abrams seemed to slump slightly in his chair.
Great, more bad news.

“But if this guy, Aliyev, has a working biowarfare agent that destroys the dead, and is highly contagious among them… well, that starts working, and having an effect, almost
instantly
. Picture thousands of undead just spontaneously falling over. It could take the pressure off London. It could relieve the siege. It could save Britain.”

Abrams saw the logic of this. He also wasn’t insensible to the force of Park’s argument – or his adamance. They had moved mountains to get him out of Chicago, because he was supposed to be the one man who could cure the plague. Maybe they’d better listen to him.

“Okay,” he said. “I can try to contact CentCom again. And I can put this to them – but I don’t think they’re going to be enormously enthusiastic about yet another air mission out into the shit to pick something up for us.”

“Perhaps they should generate some enthusiasm for something that could save them all – save all of us. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’ve
got
to convince them. Because I’m telling you the fate of the world hangs in the balance. This mission could save the world – for real. It will give us the breathing room we need to finish the vaccine, and for it to start protecting people.”

Abrams sighed. “You are a damned insistent son of a bitch, aren’t you?” He had only just approved Park’s DNA sequencer shore mission. And now he was pushing hard for another one.

“Okay, okay,” Abrams said, picking up a handset. “You win.”

Park nodded – plus crossed his arms, threw his shoulders back, and stood up to his full height. He was a very different man than the one who had been cowering in his bunker, waiting for the end of the world. It was obvious he wasn’t going anywhere. And he was going to keep pushing on this – all of it – until it was done.

Or until they were.

Take the Fat Cow

CentCom Strategic HQ - JOC

Major Jameson – former officer of a very small unit of Royal Marines, now seemingly commander of all of CentCom, for all eternity, ever since the outbreak there and immolation of the helo flight of senior officers who were supposed to relieve him – put his radio phone handset back down. He was standing, but hunched over, both his hands pressed into the desktop. They were holding his weight. For now.

He looked up and directly into the eyes of Sergeant Eli, his best friend, long-time troop sergeant, and now unflappable second-in-command. Luckily, Eli had been in the JOC when this latest call from the USS
John F. Kennedy
came in. Jameson had quickly got him on another extension, so he had heard almost all of it.

This was good, because otherwise Jameson might not have believed his ears.

One person among many there who hadn’t heard the call was Lieutenant Miller, one of the two surviving operations officers from the original staff of the Joint Operations Center – and who Jameson now saw standing looking at him, no doubt needing something else from the nominal commander of this royal shit-show. But Miller instantly saw from the expressions on both of the Royal Marines’ faces that something had changed.

“What is it, Major?”

Jameson didn’t know how to say it in any kind of way that did justice to the daftness of the idea. And he didn’t have the energy anyway. So he just said it. “That was the Americans on the aircraft carrier. They said there’s a bloke who’s got a virus that will kill all the dead. He’s trying to get to London.”

“
What?
”

Jameson knew he had heard him just fine. He looked over at Eli. “If something like that exists… if it actually worked…”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “We could fight back – in a way that actually worked.”

“It’d relieve the pressure on London. Hell, it could be the beginning of the end.”

“Where?” Miller asked. “Where is this person?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jameson said, as if only now remembering that bit. “Moscow. They just want us to pop over there and rescue him.”

Eli shook his head. “Aces. Another mission into fallen Europe.” He looked up at his commander. “Just when we think we’re out…”

“
They pull us back in again.
”

Jameson felt like crying.

* * *

Four hundred yards from the Strategic HQ building with the JOC in it, Group Captain Guy Gibson struggled back to consciousness. He was lying on his back and something was scratching his neck. Reaching around behind him with tingling fingers, he found it was grass. He was lying on his back in the grass.

Hmm. That’s very odd.

As his senses slowly came back online, he realized many of his muscles ached – and the exposed skin on the front side of his body, including his face, felt warm, or maybe slightly burnt. Singed. Had he been lying out in the sun? At his family’s country estate in Cambridgeshire? The sun was almost going down now, so maybe he’d fallen asleep while sunbathing.

But when he tried levering himself up on his elbows, and raising his head… he realized he was still on base, still at CentCom HQ. And in front of him was the main aircraft hangar.

Except… two thirds of it was gone. Torn away. Burnt down. Blown up.

Panning to the right, he saw there was some kind of wreckage all over and around the helipad. RMPs were going around, roping off the whole area, as firefighters packed their gear and loaded up their fire trucks.

Group Captain Gibson blinked once and half-smiled – realizing he didn’t have the faintest idea what the hell had happened. Searching his memory, the last thing he recalled was… leaving the Pilots’ Ready Room. Yes, that had been it. He had left to go back to his quarters and get another paperback. Because he’d read all the way to the end of the one he’d brought with him – and it was quite a long one. He’d got back to his quarters, swapped books… and was walking back.

And he remembered he saw two Chinooks flaring in to land on the helipad. They had been the incoming command element, replacements for everyone killed in the outbreak, sent to take over control of CentCom HQ and the whole war.

And that was it. That was all he remembered. From what he could see now… their landing evidently hadn’t gone very well. Climbing to his feet, he found himself to be basically uninjured. And his first instinct was to get back to the Ready Room and check on the lads, the other standby pilots. But a four-minute walk got him close enough to realize: there was no longer any such thing as the Pilots’ Ready Room. It was nothing but twisted steel, black soot, and brackish pools of water – which Gibson assumed were from the efforts to put the fire out.

He wandered back out toward the helipad, passing various people involved in whatever recovery effort they had managed to muster. No one really seemed to take notice of him – not until he got to the tape that surrounded the wreckage, and a Royal Marine in full combat kit looked his way. He looked him up and down, seeming to clock the flight suit, and then walked briskly up to him. As he approached, Gibson saw his rank – Private – and his nametape:
Simmonds
.

“Sir,” the Marine said, throwing up a salute. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, Private, just fine, thank you. Marvelous.” Gibson paused and cocked his head. “Any chance of you telling me what in the blazes just happened?”

“No problem, sir. But if we could just talk as we walked…”

* * *

Jameson got both Eli and Miller into one of the command offices that fronted the JOC – the one that had been least blown up, shot out, and filled with bodies and shell casings during the outbreak. The three of them swept off chairs, and the desk, and took seats around it.

Jameson knew he was about be faced with yet another world-changing decision – namely whether to launch another damned air mission into Europe. And, as with all his other vexed matters of command, the buck was going to stop with him.

But… the very first thing they had to do, before making any kind of momentous decision, was figure out if there was even any kind of
theoretical
possibility of them doing what the Americans had now asked of them. Jameson had a strong feeling there wasn’t – and that would collapse his decision space in a very pleasant way. When a problem went from difficult to completely impossible, it became easy again.

“There’s that last Beechcraft King Air on the tarmac,” Miller said.

“Keep talking,” Jameson said.

Miller nodded. He’d brought a laptop with maps, and with access to all the CentCom internal systems. “Okay,” he said, calling up the plane’s specs. “Max cruising speed of that Beechcraft is 333mph. And it looks like it’s 1,555 miles from here to Moscow. So you’re looking at a little over four and half hours flight time.”