The Flood (17 page)

There he saw two things.

One was a series of metal-grille catwalks that hung from the ceiling, perched over the whole room. It went around the four edges of the huge rectangular space, and also described an
X
, starting at the four corners and converging in the center.

The second thing he saw was what looked like an elaborate series of sprinklers dotting the ceiling. He followed the pipes back down to the pump station, and realized this was the heart of a serious fire-suppression system.
Set-up like this had better have one
, he thought, initially reassured. But then he saw a big white pressure gauge on the pump – the needle of which rested on zero. He guessed either the system had just bled off over the last two years, or else it had been shut off and drained by the last guys alive here, for some reason he couldn’t guess at.

He moved on and climbed up to check a couple more vats, and soon enough was safely back on the ground – or as safe as he was going to be on this ground – and he had the info Campbell had demanded of him. Half of it anyway.

Wordlessly he rallied the team and moved them toward the exit on the far side of the giant mushroom field of vats. Luckily there was another map of the complex beside the exit. Wesley re-memorized the route from there to the desalination plant, nodded contentedly, hefted his rifle, and moved to open the door.

Judy got there first. She barked, just one time.

Wesley looked to Sarah, who was giving him an
I told you so
look. Wesley wasn’t so sure. One hand on his rifle, he put the other on the door latch, pushed it down, and eased the door open slowly, and just a few inches.

The hallway beyond was full of dead.

As one, they all looked up at him.

Wesley shut the door again.

Unsafe House

Hargeisa - CIA Safe House

The CIA safe house in Hargeisa hadn’t burned to the ground – but only because big sections of the heavily modified structure had been constructed to be fireproof. Now it was kind of a burnt-out shell, with intact staircases, and two more or less intact floors, above the ground-level garage. Up above, the roof had totally burned away, leaving the top level open to the sky.

Handon, after stepping over the fallen fence and a bunch of long-ago destroyed dead, took point for Alpha – pushing the heavy security door out of its frame and mounting the stairs. If these fell through, he preferred to take the fall himself. Weirdly, he was the only member of Alpha who hadn’t suffered any wounds or injuries since leaving Britain on this globe-spanning epic mission.

And not epic in a good way.

The tiny little superstitious part of Handon’s brain thought the fact that he hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch up until now made him vulnerable – that his number had to be coming up. And it might prove to be a full ticket-punching. But that wasn’t a useful thought, so he pushed it away. It didn’t matter, anyway. Only the mission did. If it was his time, he would go. And the others would carry on – with Predator, highest ranking and most senior, left in charge.

“Two from One,” he said into his radio.

“Go ahead,”
Fick said, from the other side of town.

“We’re at the CIA safe house. Going in now.”

The charred and twisted stairs buckled but held, and Handon emerged onto the main floor. He knew four of his people would be following him up, with one strong-pointing the ground-floor entrance – Ali, in the event, as she’d been in the rear. As he stepped out into the hallway, he saw the joint looked to have taken every possible kind of damage: fire, bullet holes from both small arms and heavy machine guns, and blast damage – RPGs, probably.

It was utterly quiet and still, and smelled of must, mold, dry rot, and embers.

Reaching the first door off the hallway, Handon looked in and saw it was full of half-melted computers, monitors, and radios. It had clearly been the TOC and thus the room in which he had most interest. But they had to finish clearing the building, so Handon twisted at the waist and pointed a bladed hand, waving Juice in there. Pred squared up at the door, pulling security for his friend, a silent and hulking god of war.

Handon moved out again with Henno and Homer following close behind. All three moved in perfect silence, stepping heel-to-toe, heads on swivels, weapons panning smoothly to cover all directions and angles, the three operators perfectly coordinated. Tier-1 guys cleared rooms like the Swiss put together watches.

Farther down on this level they found a tiny kitchen, two bunk rooms – and what looked like a small team room, with weapons racks, gear lockers, and a modest improvised gym. Handon figured this was for the security detachment, and he’d seen enough of these to figure it had belonged to former team guys – SEALs. He put his rifle barrel through a twisted piece of metal and lifted it up. It was a pull-up bar, the kind you mounted inside a door frame.

When he came out again, he found Homer in the second bunk room. Stepping up behind him, he saw the SEAL holding up a half-burnt and twisted photograph. It wasn’t too burnt to hide the striking beauty of the woman in the photo.

“Recognize her?” Handon whispered.

Homer turned to face him. “No. But I recognize the taste in women.” He let the picture drop, then turned toward the other bunk and flipped open another small burnt object with his rifle barrel. It was a thick paperback, charred but intact. The cover showed a single chess piece, a king, and it read
Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual
. Homer gave it a long and deep look. Finally, he said, “I knew the men who slept here. Both from Dam Neck.”

Handon didn’t waste breath or time commenting on the coincidence. They all knew how small the special operations community was. And virtually all the CIA paramilitaries had been Green Berets, SEALs, or in some cases Delta or DEVGRU guys. But then Homer actually surprised him. He said:

“I saw one of them.”

“What? Where?”

“Back at Lemonnier. He was still on his feet.”

That didn’t surprise Handon. It was tough to knock down a Team Six guy. Whether Homer’s acquaintance had been alive or dead was neither here nor there. They still had another level to clear. Handon headed out again, knowing the others would follow. When they emerged onto the roofless top level, it was into the lengthening shadows of dusk and the end of day.

The scene up there was more dramatic – or looked like it had been at one time. Handon could do the forensics, and work out that there’d been some kind of defense of the building run from up here. The piles of brass by the four windows partially told the tale. There had also been wounded treated on the floor. But the only thing of any real interest was some big Pelican cases stacked against one mostly intact wall. Handon knew they, and their contents, would have survived the fire. Pelican cases were built to survive anything.

When he flipped a couple of them open, he found a lot of heavy metal: a couple of Javelin missiles, a TOW missile, even a light mortar – the kind that SEALs employed by the CIA never fired from rooftops anymore, not after Benghazi. This was the kind of stuff that could prove useful in a pinch, so Handon took two seconds to put it out over the radio, making sure the Marines knew it was here. He also reported that the safe house had been cleared.

He’d just squelched off when Juice came on.

“Hey, Top. Got something for you in the TOC.”

“On my way.”

* * *

“Copy that,” Fick said about the heavy weapons.

“Nice,” Brady said. “Could come in handy – a big stack of fuck-shit-up.”

Fick scowled. “We’re not here to fuck shit up,” he said, sounding cranky.

Brady put his hand up placatingly.
Okay, Master Guns…

But rather than being placated, instead Fick raised his rifle right at Brady – and cranked off a shot over his shoulder. The rifle was suppressed – but it still surprised the shit out of him, as well as Reyes and Graybeard.

“Contact left,”
Reyes said across the radio, almost as an automatic reflex.

The whole fire team was on the verge of lighting up that stretch of deeply shadowed forest – and it was only because they were super-seasoned spec-ops Marines that they held their fire. Your ordinary group of nineteen-year-old Jarheads would in that instant be going cyclic on the treeline, launching grenades, and calling in air strikes and arty.

“What are you engaging?”
Graybeard asked, from way back behind them.

Fick took a deep breath. He was forced to admit: “I don’t know.” He shook his head again. “I saw something moving in the trees.”

Brady touched Fick’s elbow. “So not so much on how we’re not here to fuck shit up, then.” He was trying to make light of it.

But he, Reyes, and Graybeard couldn’t help but be concerned.

Their grizzled and unflappable Master Gunnery Sergeant, who had seen and done it all, seemed spooked.

And that was more than enough to spook them.

“Move out,” Fick said, shaking it off.

* * *

Handon passed Predator outside the door and entered the ruined TOC to see Juice bent over a desk with his back turned.

“What is it?”

Juice straightened up and pointed at the station to his immediate left. From the large number of melted monitor frames and shattered glass, plus the stacks of radio sets, also mostly melted, Handon figured the main TOC jock, whoever ran this place, had sat there.

“One of the drives from that station,” Juice said, pointing at a blackened CPU case he’d already cracked. “It’s basically intact. The bad news is, it’s encrypted. The good news…” and he pointed at his own bit of charred desk, where he already had the drive mounted on his Toughbook, “is that it’s not encrypted enough.”

Handon shook his head. “We don’t have time to sit around while you crack strong CIA crypto.”

Juice leaned over and checked his screen. “Don’t have to. It’s already done.”

Handon arched an eyebrow.

“It’s a back door, basically. Works great on this type of hard-drive encryption. Took it with me out of the Activity.”

Handon almost smiled. “That legal?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But you don’t think this is the first time I’ve had to crack Agency’s shit, do you?”

Handon knew the military intelligence establishment had basically been set up because everyone in DoD hated working with, waiting for, and being dependent on the CIA for intel. The two intel communities were at odds pretty much by design.

“What have you got?” Handon repeated. They needed to wind this down.

“The second-to-last modified user file on here is a spot report. It’s about a quarantine tent at the local hospital. It was definitely the Hargeisa virus – after it hit, but before everything came down. A lot of infected there.”

Handon nodded. “I like your initiative. But the hospital was our next stop anyway.”

“I figured it was,” Juice said. “But the very last user-modified file on here is different. Take a look.” He leaned out of the way and started scrolling. “It’s a whole analysis document. A lot of stuff about emerging diseases, the threat of pandemics – plus bioweapons and bioengineered viruses. Including a chimera virus evidently purchased by al-Shabaab, a combination of smallpox and myelin toxin. The combined symptoms of which sound a hell of a lot like Hargeisa.”

Handon’s eyes lit up. “Get that uploaded to CIC so Park can see it.”

“Already done it.”

When Handon turned toward the doorway, he saw Ali standing in it, her lips parted wide, eyes squinted. She didn’t look happy. And then he remembered that her last mission with Delta, before coming to Hereford, had been to disrupt an al-Shabaab bioweapons plot. Right here in Somalia.

“Those the virus stocks you destroyed?” Handon asked.

Ali nodded once, seeming numb. “Yeah. I thought so.” She looked past Handon to Juice. “Whose name is on that report?”

Juice looked back to his screen. “GS-15 Zack Altringham.”

For one second, Ali looked like she’d seen a ghost.

Four minutes later, when they were back out on the ground and moving through increasingly dark streets toward the hospital, CIC put Park on the line with Handon.

“That report is a gold mine,”
he said.
“I’d say it could very possibly represent the origin of the zombie virus, though it also obviously mutated in some way. It makes a lot of things incredibly clear – stuff that was a total mystery before. It will be a huge help in beating and then eradicating this thing.”

“Copy that,” Handon said. “Does it take the place of a sample from Patient Zero?”

“No. Not at all. Sorry.”

“Then I’ve got to go.”

It was only a ten-minute patrol from the safe house to the hospital. When they arrived it was nearly dark outside – and basically pitch black inside. Handon already had his NVGs mounted on his helmet, as did the others. Now he pulled them down.

And he led the way in.

Man Down

Hargeisa Hospital

Everyone in Alpha had thousands of hours of operational experience under NVGs. (Hell, Ali had thousands of hours flying under NVGs.) Back in the counter-terror wars, every mission was a night mission. And, until the jihadis started getting their hands on primitive night-vision gear, it had been one of their many superpowers. ISIS had nicknamed the Tier-1 guys
Shyatyn Allyl
– “Night Devils.” And the operators had embraced it. Handon had seen more than one tattoo with those words on Unit and team guys. He’d even seen one in Arabic.

So not only were these four-barreled, ridiculously expensive night-vision devices the best ever produced by man, but the Alpha operators were more skilled at using them than anyone left alive. Nonetheless, the interior of this hospital through night vision was giving Handon a serious case of the creeps.

It was always the hospitals where the shit first came down. Well-meaning citizens, police, and paramedics brought the infected back there, where they soon turned – and where there was absolutely no ability to deal with the aftermath. Handon figured the most dangerous job in the entire zombie apocalypse was
hospital security guard
. Those guys went down like the front row at a machine gunning contest.