Patient Zero

Chapter Fifty-Six

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, July 1; 12:59 A.M.

ECHO TEAM CAME jogging into the big room at the warehouse looking very much awake. Wired, scared, and thoroughly pissed-off, but awake. I told them to gear up and they followed Gus Dietrich over to the arms locker. Alpha Team was already there.

Rudy turned to Church. “This is killing you, isn’t it?”

Church looked at him.

Rudy said, “I don’t know you, Mr. Church. We’ve only had some weird little talks.” He waved a hand. “Zombies and all that. But since what happened in Room Twelve I’ve been thinking about this situation, about this organization you’ve constructed. I know only enough about the military to know that this isn’t the way things are done; and I do know enough about governments to know that the DMS operates on its own schedule. It’s virtually red-tape free. Lots of authority, and it’s shared.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Your background has to include some training or practical experience either in psychology, therapy, or psychological manipulation. Maybe all three. You know how to set a mood and cultivate trust; you apparently care about the well-being of your staff. You like toys, and you pride yourself on having the best toys in the schoolyard. The labs here are bizarrely overdone. You have equipment I’ve never heard of let alone seen in actual use. Everyone I’ve met here has an above-average IQ. A lot of individuals, not a lot of team players.”

“Your point being?” Church asked, though if he was impatient or unnerved it didn’t show.

“What Joe and I are seeing is probably DMS lite. I’ll bet your Brooklyn hangar is ay-jay squared away. The tightest security, checks, and double checks; a lot of security redundancies. But down here you’ve had to put this facility together in days. Mind you, what you’ve accomplished in those days is incredible, and I frankly would never have thought it was possible to do. You’re a remarkable man, Mr. Church.”

“I don’t need an ego-stroke, Doctor.”

“Nor am I in the mood to give you one,” Rudy said with a touch of asperity in his voice. “My point is that out of necessity you’ve had to put this whole thing together too fast and under too much pressure. The Brooklyn model is probably a good one but for it to be as tight as you want it would require time. More time than you have. You’ve probably had to call in markers, ask for favors from other agencies; you’ve probably had to go through channels in ways you normally wouldn’t, and as a result the local reality of the DMS station here at the warehouse has holes in it. And as a result of that… people have died.”

“Hey Rude, c’mon, man,” I said softly.

He ignored me. “I’m not saying any of this to blame you, Mr. Church. Not at all. My point is that you are up against the wall, and all of the practiced cool in the world can’t change the effect that has on you as a physical being. Brain chemistry is only ever partially under our control. You are under tremendous physical and psychological strain… and right now you are probably tearing yourself up inside because of what happened in Room Twelve.”

“I don’t think we really have time for this,” Church said, but his eyes never left Rudy’s face. I don’t think he even blinked.

“We don’t have time for us to get into it as deeply as we need to,” Rudy said, “but we have to address it, in part, right now. My friend’s life is being put on the line. For the third time today. My own life is potentially in jeopardy as long as I’m in this facility and as long as there is a traitor here.”

“We’re all at risk—”

“No. That’s not what I mean, and I think you know that. I’m not asking you to open up to me, Church, not here and not ever unless you choose to; but what I am saying is you have to acknowledge that these events and the presence of the traitor are connected to actions you’ve taken.” He held up a finger to keep Church from interrupting him. “Actions you have had to take. If we could wind this back and start over again I don’t know if there is anything that could have been done differently. This may be an inevitable occurrence given the circumstances. Therefore you need to bear in mind that today’s events may have been beyond your control. Yes, you need to tighten security in any way you can. Hindsight advises that. Yes, you need to conduct your search for the traitor, leaving no stone unturned. Yes, you need to triple-check the backgrounds of every single person in the DMS, especially recent hires. But—and this is the real point—you have to keep focused, eyes on the prize, and not let guilt or anger deflect you from the primary purpose here, which is to stop the terrorists from launching this dreadful weapon. If today’s tragedy throws you off your game, then we could all die. My advice to you, Mr. Church, is to take your guilt and anger and put them on a shelf, at least until Joe and his team are back from the crab plant. Stay focused and stay in charge.”

Church said nothing for maybe five seconds. “Do you think I’m unaware of these things, Doctor?”

“I don’t know what you’re aware of, Mr. Church. You keep your emotions under check better than anyone I’ve ever met. But no matter how tough you are, and I imagine you are one very tough hombre, you are still human. Inside you might be seething with rage, and if God is kind I hope he never puts me in your path when you’re enraged. You and Joe are a lot alike in that. Controlled most of the time, but there is a point where control goes all to hell and what is left is pure, lethal rage. That’s all well and good if you find yourself—God forbid—in a room full of walkers; but I would not like to think that the man directing the subtleties of an operation of this kind is going on rage and looking for payback. The problem is that with you I can’t tell how close to a loss of control you are. You aren’t a robot, so you have to be suppressing your emotions. Just remember that suppressing emotions is not the same thing as actually removing emotions from your physiological makeup. If you’re as smart a man as I think you are then you’ll consider what I’ve said. You have to recognize distracting emotions and make very, very sure that they don’t affect the decisions you make, and the time frame in which those decisions are made.”

Rudy took a small half-step back. It was as if he diminished in size from a giant to an ordinary man in that subtle move. He switched off his perceptual X-ray, withdrew his own energy from the moment, and left a gap for Church to fill. How Church filled that gap would make all the difference, and I wished I could be inside Rudy’s head to see how he was measuring the moment.

Church was silent for maybe fifteen seconds. I held my breath. Then Church gave one of his fractional smiles and a short nod. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Rudy studied him and he must have found something in the stone mask that was Church’s face, because he nodded in return. “Fair enough.”

“Hey, guys,” I said, “I hate to break up this Dr. Phil moment but I kind have to go fight some zombies.”

Rudy said something very foul in Spanish and Church turned away to assess the teams, though I think he really did it to hide a smile.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, July 1; 1:16 A.M.

WE PILED INTO the helicopter, a SH-60 Seahawk fitted out with every kind of gunpod and missile launcher in the catalog. Once we were in and the door closed, we huddled down and switched to helmet mikes so everyone could hear above the rotor noise. Church joined us. He put an open pack of small high-protein cereal bars on one corner of the map. Combat version of cookies, I thought. Guy was a freak.

When we’d boarded I pushed Rudy into a corner. “Sit tight, watch and listen,” I said. He nodded, looking scared. He was going only as far as the staging area, but I wanted him next to Church throughout.

The Seahawk’s big T700-GE-701C engines roared and the bird lifted off and headed southeast at one hundred and fifty knots, with three other helos—two of them bearing Alpha Team and the other with support staff—in close formation.

“Here’s the bottom line,” I began once everyone was settled down around the map. “Someone bypassed the security and opened the door to Room Twelve. As a result we have ten casualties: six medical staff, our prisoner, and three soldiers, plus one other soldier who has been bitten and infected by the walkers. That means that pretty soon he’ll be dead, too.”

Bunny and Top said nothing; they’d been there. Ollie ran a shaking hand through his hair. Skip looked ten years old and terrified.

“Who did it?” Skip asked.

“Unknown at this time.”

“This was an accident, right?” Ollie said.

I let silence answer that.

“Oh man,” he said. He looked down at the stock of his MP5.

Skip was a half-step slower. “Wait… you mean this wasn’t an accident? Someone did this on purpose?”

“Are we talking a spy here,” Ollie asked, “or a terrorist infiltrator?”

“We have to look at both options,” Church said, and when Ollie started to say something he added, “And until further notice this discussion is over.”

My guys all looked at me, and despite what Church just said I wanted to put my own stamp on things. “Right now we don’t know who did this or how many infiltrators we have, so until further notice everyone—and I do mean everyone—is a suspect. You don’t like it, too bad. I’m not asking for comments right now, but hear me on this: I will find out who did this and when I do that person is going to live forever in a world of hurt. If anyone knows or learns anything connected with this I want to hear about it. Come to me in private, talk to me one to one. I’m offering a white flag for contact but it expires in twenty-four hours, after which I’m going to be witch-hunting under a black flag. I want to know that you hear and understand.”

“Hooah,” growled Top.

Bunny nodded. “Loud and clear, boss.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skip.

Ollie bared his teeth. “We find whoever tried to rat-fuck us, you hold him and I’ll cut his balls off.”

The tension in the air was thick as quicksand. I handed out intelligence briefs. “Read through the materials. You have fifteen minutes.”

“Questions?” I asked when they all put the intel reports down.

Bunny cleared his throat. “Boss, not to be a pain in the ass, but all I’ve been reading here is ‘we don’t know this’ and ‘we don’t know that.’ I mean… what do we know?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well,” Bunny said to Church, “for a start who are the hostiles? Saying ‘terrorist’ kinda tells me dick. Sir.”

“I’ll tell you what I told Captain Ledger,” Church said. “The cell taken down by the task force represents a broad range of terrorist and extremist groups.” He turned and looked at Bunny, who was making a face. “Go on, Sergeant,” he encouraged, “ask it.”

“How does that make sense? I mean, sure we all call it the ‘international terrorist community’ but it’s not like they all get together for bowling night. It’s not a club, right? But we’re supposed to believe that these guys are, what, a terrorist coffee klatch?”

There were some chuckles and even Church managed a small smile. Probably fake, but still there.

“You find that to be unlikely? You’re an NCO with eight years in and you think Homeland is wrong in the way it interpreted the task force intelligence?”

He stared at Bunny and Bunny gave it right back to him. “Yes, sir, I think it’s bullshit.”

Church gave that smile again. “Of course you do, Sergeant, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” He let that sink in for a moment. “And if any of you ever accept info without thinking it through and raising reasonable questions you’ll be out of here so fast you’ll get motion sick.”

“Then…” Bunny hadn’t expected that kind of comeback and it derailed him for a moment.

“Tell me what we should infer, Sergeant,” Church prompted. “Because the intel, as far as details go, is correct. Those men were from different groups. We’ve verified that. Homeland thinks this means the terrorist community is uniting to form a front against America. What do you think of that?”

Bunny cut a look at me, and I nodded. I liked that Bunny was following the same logic I’d explored with Church. “Well,” he said, grabbing on to a leather strap as the chopper banked into a climbing turn, “we got a lot of ears and eyes out there. CIA got spooks out the ying-yang. Every branch of the service has their MI guys wiretapping the shit out of the whole Middle East. If the extremists were forming some kind of ‘axis of evil,’” and here he paused for a laugh, and got it, “then there’s no way we wouldn’t have heard at least something about it. All this time and we don’t hear a peep? No fucking way.”

“Go on.” Now Church’s smile seemed genuine.

“So… has anyone thought that instead of this being the start of the Terrorist Mighty Marching Society, it’s more like a kind of whaddya call it? A brain trust?”

“Keep going,” I said.

“Maybe someone—maybe the sick fuck who cooked up this prion bullshit—kinda had a great idea but needed an A-team to make it work. Not your run-of-the-mill fanatics but guys with real brain cells. The report from Dr. Hu says that this is—how’d he put it?—‘radically advanced’ technology. So somehow our bad guy puts the word out that he’s recruiting top of the line only.”

“I don’t buy it,” said Ollie.

“Me, neither,” agreed Top Sims. “That’d be in the wind, too. We’d have heard something. No, this smart sumbitch has a pipeline into the terrorist community and he’s directly recruiting. One to one. It’d be safer that way.”

“Sure,” Ollie agreed. “Easier to keep it all on the down-low.”

“But that brings up another problem,” said Bunny, but then he shook his head. “No, maybe a lead. If he’s recruiting outside of his own group then you got to figure there’s going to be a percentage of times he’s going to get turned down. Not everyone’s going to want to play that kind of baseball. If this guy is as smart as he seems to be, then he wouldn’t let anyone just stroll off who has even a whiff of what he’s doing.”

Skip snapped his fingers. “Right! We should check international records to see if any terrorists with known skills in high-end weapons or medicine have gone off the board. This guy would probably kill anyone who doesn’t sign with his team.”

Church turned to me. “Your team seems to be able to read your mind.” To the men he said, “Captain Ledger had the same thought and as a result I’ve initiated just such a database search. At his suggestion we’ve also begun searching for nonterrorist-affiliated scientists in the appropriate fields who may have disappeared, or whose family members are conspicuously missing.”

“Scientists might take all sorts of radical research risks if their wife or daughter were sitting somewhere with a gun to their heads,” Top agreed. “My kids were in that kind of danger, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do.” I saw a shadow pass over his face and remembered that he’d buried his son and saw his daughter crippled for life because of this war.

I said, “Okay, tell us why our mystery man is searching so far out of his own group.”

Bunny was about to speak but Ollie got there first. “ ’Cause even in a large group or small country you’re not going to have enough top minds in the right fields who are also extremists willing to die for their cause.”

“Right,” Skip said.

Top nodded. “Yeah, that’s too much to ask, and it’s too shallow a fishing hole. You need to pick and choose; you need to find the right guys—smart as a motherfucker and willing to die. That’s got to be a small club even worldwide.”

“What I’m saying,” Bunny agreed, nodding. “This stuff is slick. Really slick.” He sipped some coffee from a metal travel mug and looked at Church and me over the rim. “No one at Homeland thought of that?”

“Red tape and too many levels of bureaucracy can impede practical thought,” Church said.

“Which is a nice way of saying they have their thumbs up their asses,” Ollie interpreted.

Church said nothing, but he didn’t appear to disagree.

Top narrowed his eyes and looked appraisingly at Church. “Sir… I pretty much know why you picked us. And those science geeks you got on our team? I’m gonna guess there’s not one of them that ever scored second best in the school science fair.”

Church smiled.

“So what we have here,” Skip said, “is an all-star squad.”

Ollie grinned. “Okay, so they got a geek squad and the DMS has a geek squad. But you also got a crew of first-team shooters. Who do they have?”

I said, “Javad Mustapha—one player on their team—started an outbreak that wiped out two DMS teams and over two hundred civilians. You saw firsthand what the walkers did to those kids and to the guards and lab techs in Delaware; and you know what happened in Room Twelve. We have shooters, they have walkers.”

That shut everyone up for a while and we sat there in the belly of the chopper as it tore through the Maryland skies.

“Surprise was a big factor in the loss at the hospital. Same goes for what happened last night,” I said. “What are the chances that any of us are going to be surprised if we run into a walker at the crab plant?”

Bunny snorted. “If it moans and moves I’m gonna kill it.”

“Hooah.” They all said it together.

“And if there are a lot of them?” Church asked.

“I killed me a bunch of walkers in Delaware, sir,” said Top, “and I was in a good mood. After Room Twelve I’m a mite pissed off.”

“Fucking-A,” Skip agreed.

“Fine,” Church said, “but here’s the thing. Echo Team is going into the plant for a look-no-touch. As you rightly put it, our intel is weak. The mission objective is to get more information because we got virtually nothing of worth from Delaware. If it looks like a pull-back-and-rethink then that’s what we’ll do. We have the option to upgrade into an assault but there are some operational priorities which include securing undamaged computers and drives, and apprehending suspects. If you have to pull triggers then try—and I mean really try—to bring me back someone with a pulse.”

Skip said, “I thought that these clowns die after six, eight hours unless they take a pill. How you going to sweat info out of them with that kind of deadline?”

Mr. Church’s face was stone. “My copy of the Geneva Convention got burned up in a fire. I won’t need six hours.”

They were four very tough men and every one of them was scared silent by the uncompromising tone of his voice. After a moment Ollie cleared his throat. “What do we do if we run into armed resistance?”

“If you draw fire you return fire. This is not a suicide mission, Lieutenant Brown. I’ve already buried too many of my people in the last week.” He paused to make sure everyone was giving him every bit of their attention. “You will try to accomplish the mission objectives in priority order, but you do what you have to do to come back alive.”

“Okay,” I said, “eyes on the map. The crab processing plant is located on the Chesapeake Bay off Tangier Sound. The southwest side of the building fronts the Pocomoke River eight hundred yards from where the river spills out into the bay. There’s a wooden dock where crab boats tie up. The rest of the property is a U-shaped parking lot. Lots of open ground.”

Ollie tapped the map. “Almost no cover. If they have cameras with night vision we’d be chopped to pieces. We’ll need some kind of diversion or another route in.”

“I have something in mind,” I said. “The building is one story, flat, and about fifty-five thousand square feet. Before it was used for seafood it was a boat storage warehouse, but has since been converted. We know from the building inspector’s report from this past January that the northeast corner is used for offices and bulk storage—empty containers, labels, rolls of plastic wrap, that sort of thing. The rest is the actual plant.”

“They still processing crabs in there?” Skip asked.

“Negative. The place is in receivership. The original staff was laid off on February fifteenth.”

“So, okay, if this place is closed then why are there, what… eight, nine vehicles in the lot?”

“That’s one of those things we don’t know,” I said. “Under ordinary circumstances I would presume that they’re there to oversee the company’s reorganization; but these three trucks here are all of the same make and model as the one followed to the crab plant by the task force.”

“Trucks carrying what?” Bunny asked.

“Cargo unknown, but it could have been one or more of those big blue cases.”

Ollie narrowed his eyes as he studied the satellite image. “What kind of traffic in or out since then?”

“Except for a security guard,” I said, “none.”

Top looked dubious. “We see anyone other than the guard?”

I shook my head. “No. Just the one guard and he works four ten-hour shifts a week, from ten at night to six A.M. Long-range photos have ID’d him as Simon Walford, age fifty-three, a rent-a-cop from a company based in Elkton, though Walford lives right up the road. He’s worked the plant for two years and change.”

“We know anything about him?” Skip asked.

“Nothing that fits the profile of a terrorist sympathizer. Widowed, lives alone. No military record, no arrests, no memberships in anything except Netflix and BJ’s Wholesale. Cheats on his taxes, but it’s penny-ante stuff to hide income from a side business he has repairing two-stroke engines. Lawnmowers, weed whackers. Son owns a lawn care business. His bank records show what you’d expect—virtually no savings, no portfolio, and maybe two grand in checking. Not living check to check, but close enough. His e-mail is clean and about the only thing he uses the Internet for is Classmates.com. His thirty-fifth high school reunion is in August.”

“So he’s a nobody,” Skip concluded, but Bunny and Top both turned to him.

“That’s not what the man said, boy,” Top snapped. “He said that he has no trail. Doesn’t mean the same thing as no involvement.”

“Trust no one,” said Bunny. “Didn’t you ever watch the X-Files?” Skip colored.

“I went over this guy’s profile,” I said, “and sure, it looks like he’s okay; but he could be anything from a turncoat to a closet mercenary to a convert to the cause. Or he could be clueless. We don’t know until we get there.”

“Just the one guard?” Skip said, eager to correct his mistake. “Four shifts a week?”

“One we’ve seen,” Church corrected, pleased with the observation. He leaned over and slid the box of cereal bars toward the young sailor. Skip hesitated and then took a granola one and looked at it for a full five seconds without opening it. I wondered if he was going to have it framed.

“The grounds are not patrolled during the day,” I said. “When Walford goes home he locks the gate from the outside. Except for Walford; no one else has come or gone.”

“If I say ‘that’s weird’ I won’t get a cookie, will I?” Bunny said, and Church kind of smiled. Bunny reached out and took a chocolate cereal bar with a “Mother, May I?” expression on his face. He tore it open and popped it in his mouth.

There was a burst of squelch and the pilot’s voice said, “ETA forty minutes.”

“Okay, guys… assessment,” I said, and everyone’s face sharpened.

Skip said, “Nine vehicles… so we got nine potential hostiles.”

“Truck had two,” Ollie said looking at his notes, “so make it ten.”

“No,” Top said, rustling his copy of the intel report, “look at page four. Trucks are registered to the company. Probably parked there on a regular basis, which means that the two guys who drove it there likely commuted in by car. We have six cars in the lot.” He looked up. “Thermal scans?”

“Place packs seafood,” Church said. “They got ice machines and refrigeration. Thermal signals are weak. We’ve picked up a max of four weak human signals at one time. Distortion is too bad to permit any useful guesses as to how many people are in there.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Bunny said, “if this place has been shut down since the beginning of the year why the hell they running ice machines and fridges?”

I beamed at him. “That’s a damn good question, isn’t it?”

Church considered him for a moment, then pushed the package of cereal bars all the way over to Bunny. Skip looked crushed.

“Shit,” Top muttered. “So we got no idea what the hell we’re stepping into. Could be twenty people in there. Could be twenty of those dead-ass zombies in there, too.”

“We have to be open to any possibility,” I agreed.

Church nodded. “We know this: as of the Presidential Order in my jacket pocket that crab plant is now designated enemy soil. Rules of war apply, the Constitution is suspended. Hostiles are designated as enemy combatants.”

“Sucks to be them,” Bunny said, munching a cookie.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 2:33 A.M.

WE TOUCHED DOWN behind a volunteer fire station a mile from the plant. A second chopper stood nearby and the lot was crammed with all manner of official vehicles, most of them painted to look nondescript. But I’ve seen enough of them to tell.

We piled out and hurried in through the station’s back door. Gus Dietrich was already there, standing by two wheeled racks of equipment. Each member of the team was issued a communicator that looked like a streamlined Bluetooth. By tapping the earpiece we could change channels. Channel one was secured for team communication, which would be monitored by Church and his command group in a van that was parked a half-mile away from the plant. Other channels were for full-team operations, should it become necessary to bring in the special ops, SWAT, and other specialists on standby. One channel was reserved as my private line to Church.

The Saratoga Hammer Suits had arrived and we all tried them on. They fit like loose coveralls and were surprisingly comfortable and mobile. I did some kicks and punches in the air while wearing my suit, and even with the Kevlar vest and other limb padding it didn’t slow me down much at all. Bunny’s was a bit tighter and he looked like a stuffed sausage.

We had our choice of weapons. I still didn’t have a sound suppressor for my .45, so I kept the Beretta M9, and anyway it was lighter and already loaded with nine-millimeter Parabellum hollow-points. When I looked up I saw Rudy watching me, his eyes showing doubt and concern.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum,” I quoted as I holstered the gun.

He squinted as he worked out the translation, “‘If you seek peace, prepare for war.’”

“Hooah,” Top murmured from a few feet away.

“That the trademark of the gun manufacturer?” Rudy asked.

“No,” I said as I checked the magazine and slapped it back into place. “The ammunition is nine-millimeter Parabellum. The name comes from a quote by the Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus.”

“At least formal education wasn’t wasted on you,” Rudy said. He cleared his throat. “Good luck to all of you. Come back safely.” He backed away and sat on the rear bumper of one of the fire trucks, hands in his lap, fingers knotted together in a nervous tangle. He was sweating but I doubt it had anything to do with the heat of this humid July night.

I gave him a wink as I put extra magazines in a Velcro pouch around my waist. Each of my four guys had MP5s fitted with quick-release sound suppressors. I strapped a sturdy fighting knife to my calf—the Ranger combat knife, which is ten and three-quarter inches from pommel to the tip of its black stainless steel blade and is nicely balanced for close fighting or throwing.

Grace Courtland’s chopper landed while my men were checking each other’s equipment; she led Alpha Team in and they immediately began sorting out their Hammer suits. She walked over to me.

“Enjoying your first day with the DMS?” she said with a wicked grin.

“Yeah. I find it very relaxing.”

“Well, maybe tomorrow we can go find some bombs to defuse.”

“It’d make a nice change.”

She grinned at me, but I could see ghosts behind her smiling eyes. St. Michael’s was still as current for her as Delaware and Room 12 were for me. The “mark” was there in her eyes and I knew she could see it in mine. I found the mutual recognition weirdly comforting.

“How’s your team?” she asked.

“Ready to do their jobs. Yours?”

“My team will be on deck throughout. You say the word and we’ll come running.” She paused. “I wish I was going in with you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “When this is over I would like to get drunk. Care to join me?”

She studied my face for a moment. “That sounds lovely. I’ll buy the first round.” She offered me her hand. “You’re a good man, Joe. Church thought so all along, and he’s seldom wrong. Sorry it took so long for me to catch up.”

I took her hand. “Water under the bridge.”

“Don’t get killed,” she said, trying to make a joke of it, but her eyes were a little glassy. She turned quickly away and headed over to where her team was loading their gear into the back of a fire truck.

I looked around and saw Church about fifty yards away just closing his cell phone. I signaled to him and went over. “Before we roll I want to set a few things in motion,” I said. “I want you to start building me a top-of-the-line forensics team. No second-stringers and nobody I don’t know personally.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

I pulled a sheet of paper out of my pocket. “This is a list of forensics people I know and trust. Most of all I want Jerry Spencer from D.C. I believe you already know him.”

“We offered to bring him on board, but he declined.”

“Make a better offer. Jerry is the best crime-scene man I ever met.”

“Very well.” Church touched my arm. “We have no leads at all on who the spy might be, Captain. That means it could be anyone.” He was looking past me to where Echo and Alpha Teams were gearing up. “Watch your back.”

He offered his hand, and I took it.

I turned away and yelled out loud. “Echo Team—let’s roll!”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 2:51 A.M.

THE FOURTH OF July was still three days away but there were already fireworks. Not a pretty starfield or fiery chrysanthemums in the night sky—this was a single bloom of intense orange-red that soared upward from the edge of a weather-worn set of wooden steps that led from the choppy waters of the Tangier Sound to the creosote planking of the dock at the Blue Point Crab and Seafood processing plant in Crisfield. The impact followed the roar of heavy marine engines as a blue cigarette boat fishtailed through the black water while an apparently drunk pilot struggled sloppily for control. The boat hit the dock at full throttle and exploded, the full fuel tanks rupturing from the impact and igniting from the laboring engine. There was a deep-throated roar like an angry dragon and flames shot upward to paint the entire sound in shades of Halloween orange and fireplace red.

It was too early in the morning for witnesses, but there dozens of people sleeping aboard their anchored boats and within a few minutes each of them was on a cell phone or ship-to-shore radio. Almost immediately the air was rent with the piercing screams of fire engines and ambulances tearing along the country roads.

Simon Walford was on duty in his guard shack reading a David Morrell novel by lamplight and sipping coffee when the boat hit the dock. He spilled half a cup down the front of his uniform shirt and was sputtering in shock as he keyed the radio handset to try and call the incident in to his supervisor, who did not answer the call. It had been two days since Walford had spoken to anyone in the plant, and two weeks since he had seen a single living soul. The cars were all still in the lot, though. It didn’t make sense. He grabbed his walkie-talkie, ran out of his booth, and raced across the parking lot to the dock, but as soon as he saw the flames he knew there would be no hope of finding survivors. The heat from the blaze kept him well back. All he got was a glimpse of a blackened form hunched forward in the pilot’s seat, his body wreathed in flames, his limbs as stiff and unmoving as a mannequin.

“Good God!” Walford breathed. He called it into 911, but even before the call went through he could hear sirens in the distance. Had he been a little less shocked by what had happened he might have been surprised at how incredibly fast the local volunteer fire department had been able to respond to the crisis, especially at that time of night. As it was, all he could think of was how helpless he felt. He tried his supervisor’s number again, but still got the answering machine, so he left an urgent and almost incoherent message. Shocked and impotent, he trudged back to his station and unlocked the fence to allow the fire trucks to enter.

Chapter Sixty

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 2:54 A.M.

WE WATCHED THE boat explosion on Dietrich’s laptop.

“Sweet,” Skip murmured. We were parked on the side of the road three quarters of a mile from the plant, lights off.

“Christ,” complained Bunny, “I’m boiling in this shit.”

“Life’s hard, ain’t it?” said Top, who was sweating as much as the rest of us but didn’t seem to care. I’m pretty sure that if Top Sims had an arrow stuck in his kidney he wouldn’t let the pain show on his face. Some guys are like that.

“Okay,” yelled Gus Dietrich, “the 911 call just went through.”

“Light ’er up,” I told him, and the driver fired up the engine and punched on the lights and sirens.

So far our hastily formed plan was going well. One of Church’s staff engineers had rigged a remote piloting unit to the cigarette boat that had been confiscated when the task force took the warehouse, and they’d gotten two store mannequins from God only knows where and strapped them into the front seats. Dietrich worked the remote controls and made quite a show by zigzagging the boat through the anchored pleasure craft and generally causing a ruckus. If there were any witnesses they would report a drunk driving like a lunatic. The cigarette was loaded to the gunnels with gas cans and small C4 charges which Dietrich radio-detonated as soon as the boat struck the dock. It was way too big an explosion, more like something you see in movies, and it was damned impressive.

Within minutes we were being frantically waved through the open gates by the security guard. Our driver angled left and headed toward the big red-painted emergency standpipe and as we squealed to a halt everyone piled out. The second engine pulled closer to the dock and we had calls in for three more engines to join us. That would put a lot of men and women in identical coats and helmets running around. A few of them would even be actual firefighters. Police cars seemed to appear by the dozen—state and local. I knew that Grace was in one of them, and Alpha Team was peppered throughout the rest. Church was in a command van parked around the bend in the access road, and the special ops teams were in vans behind him. Close, but would they be close enough if we encountered heavy resistance?

As we piled out, Bunny and Top went directly to the standpipe, passing the line of parked cars and trucks that had been spotted by the spy satellite and helo surveillance. Skip and Ollie pulled a hose off the truck and began unlimbering it as they walked backward toward the pipe.

“Camera on my two o’clock,” I heard Bunny say in my earpiece. “Slow rotation on a ninety-degree swing.”

“Copy that. I’m coming in. Give me some cover.” They took their cue and began fitting a hose nozzle to the pipe. I closed on the group, watching the camera out of the corner of my eye. As soon as it swung toward the main part of the lot where all the activity was in full swing I dashed forward and flattened against the wall in what I judged to be the dead spot beneath the box-style camera. When I ran to the wall a firefighter moved from a point of concealment behind the door of the engine and hurried quickly over to take my place. We repeated this process four more times and then Echo Team was all scrunched up against the wall and real firefighters were attaching the hose to the pipe.

“Skip… eyes on the camera,” I said. Bunny removed a sensor from his pocket and ran it over every square inch of the door and then showed me the readout.

“Standard alarm contact switch,” he said. “It’ll go off when we open the door.”

“Perfect. Ollie, go to work.” Ollie had volunteered to tackle the lock, which was a heavy industrial affair. He had to earn his pay, but in less than two minutes he had it unlocked. He kept the door closed, though, because the alarm would ring the second we opened it. If there was no one directly inside then our carnival act was going to pay off, but if even one person was inside then we were screwed as far as stealth went.

“Okay,” I said into the mike, “call the cops.”

The signal was relayed and a big-shouldered state trooper came loping over. I motioned to him to slow his walk so that the panning camera clearly caught him moving toward the door, and then as soon as it panned away I waved him in and he ran the last few yards. I turned and pounded my fist hard on the door for three seconds and then yanked open the door and we piled inside. Alarms began jangling loudly overhead. As soon as it closed, Ollie turned and reengaged the lock; and the trooper took his cue and continued to beat on the door, shaking it in its frame.

Immediately the five of us fanned out into a half-circle, guns out; but we needn’t have bothered—the room in which we stood was big, dirty, and empty. And cold. Like the meatpacking plant had been, maybe thirty-five, forty degrees with damp air and black mold on the walls. The floor was old tile and had a big gutter down its middle, and to our left was a low stone wall beyond which were oversized showers. There was a row of heavy pegs on which were still hung a couple of old oilskin jackets. This was where the crab fishermen must have come in after offloading their catch, to shower the seawater and crab gook off their foul-weather gear before heading into the interior of the plant. There was a line of foul-smelling toilet stalls to our right and the wall in front of us was set with rows of lockers. A corridor broke left past the lockers. All of it was visible in the piss-yellow glow of flickering fluorescent lights.

I signaled Skip to watch the hall while the rest of us shucked our coats and helmets and stowed them out of sight in a shower stall.

Skip signaled us by breaking squelch and then hand-signed that someone was coming. We all faded back. Ollie and Skip went into toilet stalls and crouched on the seats; Top and Bunny hid in shower stalls and I crouched down behind the low concrete wall. I could only see around the edge of it and there were shadows behind me so I was pretty well hidden. I had my silenced Beretta ready in a two-hand grip as I strained to hear the footsteps through the jangling alarm.

Right around the time we heard the running footsteps the alarm stopped. The trooper continued to pound on the door and now he was shouting, too, sounding genuinely outraged that no one had come to check out the fire. Then a man stepped into view with an AK-47 in his hands. He looked nervous and sweaty, his eyes round and white as he stared at the door. He licked his lips and looked around the shower room, but didn’t see anything. We’d been careful not to scuff the floor.

After a moment’s indecision he backpedaled, opened one of the lockers and put the assault rifle inside, closed it and pulled a small walkie-talkie from his jacket pocket. As he clicked it on he moved into the spill of weak light from one of the few overhead fluorescents that still worked. He was Middle Eastern, with a receding hairline, short beard, and a beaky nose. “I’m at the back door,” he said into the walkie-talkie, speaking in Waziri, a dialect from southern Iran. I could just about understand him. “No… the door is locked but I think the firemen want to get in. They are banging on the door.” He listened for a few moments, but the voice on the other end was too garbled for me to understand. “Okay,” he said, and clicked off the radio.

In very good English he yelled: “All right, all right, I’m coming!” He pushed the door open and the big state trooper filled the doorway with his bulk and shone his light right into the man’s face.

“Didn’t you hear me knocking, sir? Didn’t you hear the explosion? How can you not be aware that half the fire companies in the county are in your parking lot?” As ordered, the trooper went immediately into an outraged tirade, which provoked a defensive reaction in the other man, and within seconds the two of them were locked in a screaming match. It was clear the Iranian was regretting opening the door, but he was caught up in his role now, playing the part of a clueless and aggrieved worker who wants no part of something that happened on the docks. He made a lot of noise about being a supervisor for a crew mapping out renovations for a building that had already been sold. He shouted names and phone numbers for the police to call. He also told the cop to get the damn light out of his face; and he had to repeat that three times before the trooper did. Both the Iranian and the trooper could yell like fishwives. I checked my watch. The argument had lasted two minutes. Any second now another trooper would call the big guy away and they’d allow the “supervisor” to go about his business; and sure enough, I heard Gus Dietrich calling the cop away.

“The fire marshal is going to need you to sign a release form,” the trooper yelled.

“Sure, sure, fine. Don’t harass me. This is bullshit. Here is the card for the lawyer who is handling things. He will be happy to handle whatever needs to be done.”

The trooper snatched the card out of the Iranian’s fingers and stormed off. It was all very impressive, with exactly the right amount of indignation.

The Iranian pulled the door shut again and double-checked the lock. He keyed his walkie-talkie again and in rapid Waziri relayed what was happening. “Okay,” he said at length, “I’m coming back.” He pocketed the radio, cast one last look around, retrieved his AK-47 from the locker, and headed back along the hallway. I waited a full minute after the sound of his footfalls vanished before I stood up. The others crept out of hiding to join me.

“Skip, you watch the hall again,” I whispered. “You see so much as a cockroach you break squelch twice. Top, Bunny, I want you both to hold this position. Ollie, you’re with me. Code names here on out. Small arms only.”

They nodded and we began moving. Skip dropped down to a shooter’s kneel using one of the rows of lockers as cover. There was enough light to see, but only just; and if it went lights-out we had night vision as backup. Bunny positioned himself behind the low wall so that it would serve as a bunker if we got chased. Top faded to the other side of the big room and vanished into a bank of shadows.

Ollie looked down the shadowy corridor. “Clear,” he murmured. We set off into the belly of the beast.

Chapter Sixty-One

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:15 A.M.

THE BUILDING WAS quiet as a tomb and as cold as a meat locker. I hated that because of what it implied. All I could hear was the faintest hum from the refrigeration compressors on the far side of the warehouse. Our gum-rubber shoes made no sound as Ollie and I crept along, hugging the wall, looking for security cameras, moving from shadow to shadow.

I knew from the schematics that there was a central corridor that ran the length of the building; that much was in the original floor plans, but the hallway in front of us didn’t look long enough to go the whole way. We had no plans that showed renovations made since the plant went into receivership. The corridor ran straight for maybe three hundred feet and then vanished in shadows that looked solid enough to be a wall. There were heavy steel doors set about every ten yards and as we moved up to the first one we checked every inch of the floor, walls and ceiling for cameras and saw none.

The first door we came to was set with a simple keycard lock. Nothing that would slow us up for very long if we were in a hurry.

“Bug,” I said, and Ollie fished in his pocket and removed two tiny devices. The first was the size of a postage stamp and painted a neutral gray. He handed it to me and I pulled off a clear plastic cover to expose the photosensitive chemicals, and then pressed it to the side of the metal door for three seconds. When I finished counting Mississippis I pulled the strip off and saw that it was now the same color as the door. I turned it over and removed the tape from the other side, exposing a strong adhesive, and then pressed it to the door at about knee level, below where the eye would not naturally fall when opening a door. I examined the results and Ollie and I exchanged a raised-eyebrows look. Unless you knew exactly where to look the thing was invisible, blending in completely with the paint on the door. The little chameleon bugs were supposed to have incredible pickup and could relay info up to a quarter mile.

“Nice,” Ollie said as he handed me the second device, a silver disk the size of a nickel. I removed the adhesive backing and placed the device on the underside of the keycard box. The bug would do nothing until someone used a keycard to open the door and then it would record the magnetic code and transmit it immediately to the DMS where it would be processed through MindReader and the code signal would be sent back to us. We each carried master keycards that could be remote-programmed by the DMS techs. Within ninety seconds of someone using a keycard here we’d all have cards with the same code. Our master keycards could store up to six separate card codes. Church really had nice toys, but I hoped it worked as well as promised.

I tapped my earpiece. “First one’s in place.”

We moved down the hallway and repeated the process at each door. Counting both sides of the hall, there were eleven doors in all; then the hallway ended at a T-juncture, with shorter corridors branching at right angles.

“Split up?” Ollie suggested.

I nodded. “Break squelch once if you find anything, twice if you need me to come running.”

“Roger that,” he said and melted away.

This part of the building was badly lit, with fluorescent lights hanging from their wires like debris caught in some gigantic spider web. The ceiling was cracked, water dripped from a damaged pipe somewhere in the walls. The floor was wet and the smell back here was awful. I edged forward carefully; debated switching to night vision, but the light was enough so that I could pick my way. My foot touched something and I looked down to see the bloated corpse of a dead rat lying there, its eyes and mouth open, tongue lolling. I stepped over it and moved forward until I reached the first door. It was closed and blocked by a row of dented trash cans filled with all kinds of junk: old coats, bent umbrellas, broken toys, newspapers, soiled diapers. Even with the cold there were flies buzzing everywhere and the stench intensified. I held my breath while I placed the chameleon bug and keycard scanner and was grateful when I could move away.

There was more trash in the hallway. Odd stuff. A deflated football lying on a brand-new left sneaker. An open briefcase whose papers had spilled out and become soaked with rust-colored water. A smashed cell phone. Two Frisbees and a push-up bra. Half a dozen iPods. Dozens of letters—most of them junk mail and bills—still sealed and stamped. The broken body of a headless Barbie doll. An overturned shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.

The sight of the junk scattered in the dark and rusty water gave me the creeps. Bad thoughts were forming in my head and the sane half of my brain was telling me to do an about-face and get the hell out of here. I moved along the hall to bug the last three doors before the hallway ended at another bend. With my pistol in both hands I hugged the near wall and then quick-looked around the corner, dodging my head in and back and then analyzing the flash image. What I saw sent an icy chill rippling down my spine.

Oh man, I thought. Don’t let me be right about this.

I rounded the corner, still checking for cameras and threats, pistol barrel following my line of vision so that it pointed everywhere I looked. In front of me was a big set of double doors. It wasn’t the door or even the stench that made me feel like there wasn’t enough air to breathe. The floor was heaped with lots more clothes, more personal items, more human detritus; some of it looked new, undamaged. It looked like stuff that had been taken away from ordinary people. A lot of ordinary people.

The door was sealed with a heavy padlock that was cinched tight through heavy metal rings that had been welded to the steel doorframe. And the door, the surrounding walls, and the floor were all smeared with some viscous substance that had dried to a chocolaty-brown color. I bent close and saw that hidden by the smeared goo were wires that trailed up the wall and disappeared into small holes that had been drilled through the concrete. I turned and followed the wires down the wall and along the hall for five feet to where they vanished behind a fire extinguisher that was mounted at chest height. Booby trap. Pretty well hidden, too. The question was whether the charge was inside the extinguisher or inside that locked room. Or both.

Screw this. I backed carefully away, then stopped and looked at where the water lapped against the bottom of the door. The rust color was richer and redder by the door as if something inside were feeding pigment to the mix.

Understanding hit me like a punch and I rose quickly and backed away from the door, feeling my heart hammering as an atavistic dread sprang up in my chest. I stared at the stained water and the smears on the walls as the full horror of it sank in. The dark muck smeared on the doors was not mud, and the water wasn’t stained with rust.

All of it, every square inch of it, was blood.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:23 A.M.

I TOOK A step forward and leaned as close to the door as I could without touching it. Beyond was silence. And yet… it was a strange silence, like someone holding their breath on the other end of a phone line. You’re sure they’re there but you can hear anything. I didn’t like this one damn bit and moved back to the bend in the hall. No sign of Ollie and no sounds from his direction. That silence didn’t feel good, either, but it wasn’t the same as what I’d sensed—or imagined—from beyond that grisly door.

I crouched down behind the trash cans and tapped my earpiece to open a secure channel to the DMS. “Deacon, do you read? This is Cowboy,” I said, using the code names we agreed upon before we saddled up. Rudy had suggested mine. Knowing the military sense of humor, it could have been a lot worse. I knew a guy back in the Rangers who got hung with the code name Cindy-Lou Who.

“Reading Cowboy; this is Deacon.” The headsets were so good it was like Church had snuck up behind me again and was whispering in my ear.

I quickly reported what I’d found, including the locked door and the blood.

“Leave it for now. All video went black as soon as you entered the building. We’re receiving zero wireless intel. Audio signal is fluctuating but still operational. Assume jamming devices. What’s your team status?”

“Scarface is taking a walk down the hall. Joker is on surveillance; rest of team is at door-knock.” I decided to give my team the nicknames I’d mentally hung on them when I met them. Joker, Scarface, Sergeant Rock, and Green Giant. “Note this: the ambient temperature whole building is just above freezing. Climate controlled. Confirm understood.”

“Understood confirmed.” There was a brief pause and I could guess we were both looking at that from the same angle. Church said, “It’s your call, Cowboy. Come home, go for a walk, or throw a party.”

“Roger that.” I paused and considered my options. “Will continue to take a walk. All options open, however. Confirm Amazing is on station.” Amazing, shorthand for “Amazing Grace.”

“That is affirmative.”

“Cowboy out.” I tapped the earpiece again to connect to the team channel. “Scarface. What’s your twenty?”

There was no answer, not even a squelch click.

“Scarface… this is Cowboy. Do you copy?”

Nothing. Shit. I looked down the corridor but it was as empty as before. It told me nothing.

“Green Giant and Sergeant Rock on my six, quick and quiet!”

“Roger that, Cowboy.”

I started moving as fast as caution would allow, retracing my steps down the hallway, happy to get away from that terrible door. At the T-junction I paused and looked to see Bunny’s hulking form moving quickly toward me with Top Sims two steps behind him.

“Scarface went down there and doesn’t answer,” I said, and quickly filled them in on the locked and barred room and the detonation wires in the walls.

Bunny frowned. “Trap?”

Top Sims turned to him. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”

“This is fubar, boss?” Bunny asked, looking up and down the hall. “That little drama at the front door could have been as much a fake-out on their part as ours.”

“Probably was,” I said, “but until we know for sure we have to try and complete the mission as assigned. Gather intel and get out with a whole skin.”

“I dig the ‘whole skin’ part a lot,” said Bunny.

“Hooah,” Top agreed, then he gave me a hard look. “Ollie going missing with no shots fired is a little strange, don’t you think?”

“A bit.”

“We still don’t know who the mole is, Cap’n,” he pointed out.

“Roger that, First Sergeant, but I’m not going to hang a label on any of my men until I know for sure.”

Top kept his stare steady for maybe ten whole seconds before he grudgingly said, “Yes, sir.”

“Not to piss in the punch bowl here,” interrupted Bunny, “but isn’t this all a bit beside the point right now? Begging your pardons, I mean, ya’ll being senior to a lowly staff sergeant.”

“Shove that where the sun don’t shine, farmboy,” Top said, but he was grinning.

Bunny rubbed his eyes. “Man… this is getting to be a long-ass day.”

I nodded in the direction of the corridor where Ollie had gone missing. “Primary mission rules still apply. Watch and wait. No shooting except on my say-so, and even then watch your fire and check your targets.”

We went right at the T-bend and then left to follow the hall. We were three quarters of the way down the hall when one of the side doors abruptly opened and a man in a white lab coat stepped out, head bent as he frowned over notes on a clipboard, four feet from Top.

There was nowhere to hide, no time to run. The man looked up from his clipboard and his eyes snapped wide. His mouth opened and I could actually see his chest expand as he drew in a sharp breath in order to scream, but Top rose up lightning fast and kicked him hard in the solar plexus with the tip of his steel-reinforced left shoe. It was a savage kick and the man’s whole body folded around Top’s foot like a deflating balloon and then he dropped to the floor with a strangled squeak.

We swarmed him and had plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles before he could manage to drag in a full breath of air. His dark skin had gone purple. Top went to the door through which the man had passed and looked in, then turned to me and gave a negative shake of the head. Bunny grabbed a handful of the man’s shirtfront and screwed the barrel of his pistol into the furrow between the man’s eyes. “Be quiet and stay alive,” he whispered.

The guy was still bug-eyed from the kick and his eyes bulged even more when he realized that there were three big and well-armed men clustered around him. We had the power of life and death over him and he knew it. Total and unexpected helplessness can be an event that purifies the soul. It sharpens one’s mental focus.

I leaned close and said in Farsi, “Do you speak English?”

He shook his head—as much as Bunny’s pistol barrel would allow—and then rattled off something in what I think was Myanmar, what they used to call “Burmese.” Not one of my languages. “Do you speak English?” I said in my own language.

“Yes… yes, English. I speak very good.”

“Lucky for you. I’m going to ask you a few questions and if you answer me truthfully and completely my friend here will not shoot you. You understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand!”

“What’s your name?”

“Nujoma.”

“Indian? Burmese?”

“Yes, yes, I come from Rangoon. In Burma.”

“How many people are in this building?”

“I am only a—” His voice cracked and he tried it again. “I am only a technician.”

“That’s not what I asked. How many—?”

“I… I cannot. They will kill me…”

I grabbed him by the throat. “What do you think I’ll do if you don’t answer me?”

“They have my wife. My children. My sister. I cannot.”

“Who has them? Where? Are they here in this building?”

“No. They took them from my home. They have them.”

“Who took them?” I demanded again. He shook his head.

Bunny tapped him on the forehead with the barrel. “Answer the man’s questions or the day’s going to end in a way you won’t like.” But Bunny’s threat was of no use. The man’s eyes filled with tears and he clamped his mouth shut, giving tiny shakes of his head. I looked into his eyes and felt like I could see all the way down into the man’s soul. He wasn’t a terrorist; this guy was just another victim.

I shifted back a few inches to try and decrease the sense of threat, and when I spoke I softened my voice. “If you talk to us I promise that we’ll see what we can do to help your family.” But he shook his head, resolute in his terror.

“Tick-tock,” Top muttered.

“Okay,” I said. “Juice me.” Top fished a hypodermic from his chest pocket, removed the plastic cap and passed it to me. The technician’s eyes flared wider and tears spilled down his face. As I positioned the needle over his throat he began murmuring something in his native language; I bent forward, hoping to catch a word or phrase but then realized from the rhythm of his words that he was mumbling prayers. I plunged the needle. The tranquilizer knocked him cold in three seconds and he slumped to the floor.

“Bunny, take him back to the door. Tell Skip to alert Church that we have his prisoner. If he’s been infected with the same control disease as the others then we’ll need to question him before he kicks. Drop him and get back here asap.”

“You got it, Boss… but man, I’d hate to be in this guy’s shoes. I wouldn’t want Church questioning me.” He hoisted Nujoma over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and ran down the hall, his pace showing no indication that he was carrying at least a hundred and fifty extra pounds.

Now that we were alone I touched his arm. “Top… you seem to have a bug about Ollie. Why him?”

He kept looking down the hall. “Bunny was with us in Room Twelve. Says a lot. Ollie came in with everyone else. I don’t like it that he was slow to respond.”

“So was Skip.”

“Skip’s a kid. Whoever this mole is he’s got field experience. He’s slick enough to have pulled a fast one on Church and the whole DMS. Besides, Ollie’s done a lot of work for the Company.”

“The CIA? How do you know that?”

“He told us when we were trying to sort out who should be team leader. He said that he’d done extensive covert ops work. He’s a spook and I don’t trust spooks.”

“It could be anyone,” I said. “The DMS is ass deep in spooks and spies.”

“Yeah,” Top agreed slowly, “it sure could be anyone. For all you know it could be me. If I’d opened that door, then going back to Room Twelve with you and Bunny would have been perfect cover. Go in and pop a few caps. Who’d suspect me?”

“Yet you cleared Bunny because he was there. Double standard, Top?”

“Maybe I’m trying to confuse you, Cap’n.”

“You’re not. So, where’s that leave us?”

A smile blossomed on his dark face. It changed him, knocking years off, but even so it never reached his eyes. “I guess it leaves us both up shit creek, Cap’n. Personally, I don’t plan to trust nobody.”

“Trust is a hard thing to come by in this world.”

“It surely is.”

We let it drop and turned our attention to the room the Burmese lab tech had come out of. I snapped on the lights and we looked around at banks of computers. Big ones that whirred constantly. The temperature of the room was even lower than the rest of the building; a wall-mounted thermometer read thirty-five degrees. I examined the nearest computer, which was about the size of a Coca-Cola machine. The make and model were on brass plates screwed to the casing. I tapped the mike.

“Cowboy to Deacon, over.”

“Deacon.”

“Does the name IBM Blue Gene/L mean anything to you?”

“It does. Why?”

“I’m standing in a room full of them. Advise.”

“Cowboy, be advised you are holding winning lottery ticket.”

“Nice to know. Infil starting to get noisy. One guest catching Z’s. Green Giant taking him to back door; Joker is minding that location. Advise.”

There was a slight pause and I could imagine Church nibbling the edge of a vanilla wafer as he considered his answer. “Team status?”

“Scarface is MIA. Conducting search. My call is this: radio silence ten minutes plus one second then kick the doors. Cowboy out.”

The second I switched back to the team channel Bunny’s voice filled my ear. “Cowboy, Cowboy, this is Green Giant. Be advised Joker is MIA.”

I looked at Top who was frowning. “Repeat and verify, Green Giant.”

“Verified, Joker is MIA. No time for code, boss. Our long guns are gone and the back door is sealed. Some kind of security shutter rolled down over it. We’re in a box.”

“Drop your cargo and get back here on the double!” I snapped. Top and I rushed out into the hall, guns ready.

“That’s two down,” Top said.

We turned to see Bunny running up the hall like an offensive tackle after a slow quarterback. He skidded to a stop. “I left the prisoner at the door and called it in. No sign of Skip.”

I hit the button for the DMS channel. “Cowboy to Deacon, Cowboy to Deacon, request immediate hard infil. Kick the doors, repeat, kick the doors.”

But all I heard over my headset was the hiss of static. The signal was gone.

A sudden noise made us all jump and we formed a fast circle, guns pointing out. Somewhere deep inside the building there was a sound like the dying sigh of a giant as big turbine engines shut down, slowing their whine as they decelerated.

“What the hell was that?” Top growled.

“I think the refrigeration units just shut off,” Bunny whispered.

Then there was a loud blast as wall-mounted vents snapped from open and hot air shot into the corridor.

“Uh-oh,” Top said softly. The air coming out of the vents was intensely hot and within seconds the temperature in the hall had gone up ten degrees, then fifteen. It continued to climb.

“Something tells me this is not good news,” Bunny said, looking over his shoulder at me.

I tried calling Church again but still got only silence. It was the same on all channels. “Signal’s being jammed.”

“Yeah,” Bunny confirmed, “not good news.”

“Told you this was a goddamn trap,” Top said.

And at that moment the locks on all of the doors along the hallway clicked open. That’s when we heard the first moans as dozens of pale-faced people staggered out into the hall in front of us and behind.

This wasn’t a trap… it was a slaughterhouse.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:31 A.M.

WE WERE TRAPPED, front and back.

The closest of the people was twenty feet down the hall. It was a middle-aged woman with lank blond hair and a stained housedress. Her eyes were wide and she staggered and nearly fell as the crowd of them jostled her. I brought my pistol up and put the laser sight on her forehead. Bunny and Top were aiming at opposite ends of the hall, but none of us fired yet. My finger was still outside the trigger guard and I could feel cold slush churning in my stomach. These were civilians. Behind the woman was a young boy of no more than ten; and next to him a pretty teenage girl in a short denim skirt. There were people in business suits and bathing suits, and I caught the flash of a uniform and saw a mailman.

“Orders, sir?” hissed Top.

My finger stayed outside of the trigger guard. “We have to make sure.”

“Boss… this is getting tight,” Bunny whispered.

I wondered if this was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt at St. Michael’s. Was it the absolute inhumanity of the necessary response that kept them from shooting? The meatpacking plant had been different; that had been a straight good guys/bad guys shootout, but these people were not enemy combatants. At least, not yet. The crowd choked the hallway in both directions but they milled there, not moving forward, staring at us as we stared back. It was completely surreal.

“Hold your positions,” I said, staring at the crowd. The moment felt like it was stretching but in reality I knew that only a second or two had ticked off the clock.

“Maybe they ain’t walkers,” Bunny said.

“Say, farmboy,” Top said, “why don’t you go check ’em for a pulse.”

“Screw that.”

The middle-aged woman took an uncertain step toward us.

I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard.

She opened her mouth and for a moment I thought I saw her smile as if she was showing relief that someone had come to rescue her. But that smile stretched and stretched and stretched until it became a rapacious leer. With a scream like some jungle animal she ran straight at me.

Once she had probably been somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Maybe a grandmother with grandkids in diapers that she spoiled. I didn’t know who she was or how she came to be here in this terrible place; all I knew is that she was here and whatever loving personality she might once have had, and whatever memories and secrets she once knew, were gone now, torn away by a prion-driven parasite in her blood that left behind only a shell. A predatory thing in human disguise. This surely was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt: the dreadful certainty that no action could be right in a situation so thoroughly wrong. They must have felt the horror that I now felt as this woman lunged at me, running on pale legs marked with varicose veins, closing the distance in bedroom slippers that had a lilac print; her stomach bouncing, her breasts swaying, her mouth open in a feral grin of unnatural appetite. It was enough to take the heart and soul out of anyone. It had taken the soul out of all those men and women in those other two DMS teams.

But I shot her through the face without hesitation.

Dear God, what does that say about who and what I am?

Behind me Bunny and Top opened up. We all still had the sound suppressors on our guns so the fight became a ballet of muted carnage. The walkers in the back of the crowd moaned—and that sounded low and distant; the ones in the front screeched like cats, and our handguns made high, soft sounds like someone saying, “Psst!” to get everyone’s attention. Even as we fired the moment continued to be unreal.

There were at least twenty of them on my side of the corridor, and probably that many charging at my men. The narrow width of the hallway gave us no way out, but it also pushed them together into a line two abreast. They couldn’t surround us, couldn’t overwhelm us with their numbers. The magazine in my Beretta nine-millimeter carried fifteen rounds and I used them to kill eight of the walkers. I used one round to the chest to slow them and then a second to the brain. I shot the mailman next, and then I killed the teenage girl. I shot two men in business suits and a homeless man in rags. My fifteenth round dropped the little boy.

I dropped the magazine and slapped in another one as fast as I could, the action smooth from years of practice, but even with all my speed they nearly had me. A twenty-something who looked like she could have been a grad student had climbed over the bodies and was crouching to leap when I brought the gun back up. My shot caught her in the throat and flung her back against the others who were crowding forward. It bought me enough time to aim the next shot. And the next.

Behind me Bunny was saying: “Fuck me fuck me fuck me…” over and over again as he fired his gun dry and fished for a new magazine. Top fought in silence, but I believed I could feel waves of heartsick terror rolling off him as he fired.

I dropped two more and then my end of the corridor was choked with the dead. The walkers on the other side of the mountain of corpses clawed and tore at the bodies in their way, which was nearly blocked. I dropped my second magazine and fished for a third but now my hands were shaking and I almost dropped the clip. I caught it and fumbled it into place, released the slide, brought the weapon up, ready, ready…

“Clear!” Top yelled, and I turned to see that their combined gunfire had brought down all of the walkers on their side.

I didn’t hesitate.

“Go, go, go!” I pushed them both ahead of me and we began climbing over the heaped corpses. Top watched forward, I checked behind, as we scrambled awkwardly through the gun smoke and over the tangled limbs. A hand darted out of the tangle of limbs and closed around Top’s ankle; I kicked it loose and Top fired down into the mound of bodies. Maybe he hit the target, or maybe not—we didn’t linger long enough to find out.

“This is fucked up,” Bunny muttered as he pushed aside a fat man in a bowling shirt. Our Hammer suits were streaked with blood and I could feel droplets of it burning on my face. I heard a sound behind me and whirled, a snake of terror coiling in the pit of my stomach.

“They’re coming,” I snapped as the first of the walkers clambered over the piled dead at the far end. I dropped to one knee and fired two shots. His collapsing body plugged the hole, buying us seconds.

We ran. Ahead of us a door opened and a man stepped out and leveled an AK-47 at us. It was the same man who had argued with the cop. Top put two into him before he could get off a shot.

The hallway ended at another T-junction. The left-hand corridor ended in a brick wall; to our right a set of heavy steel doors stood ajar. A man was trying to pull it shut when Bunny leaped forward and grabbed him by the hair and shoulder and slammed him face forward into the wall. Bunny pounded three vicious uppercuts into his kidneys. The man groaned and sagged to his knees. If he lived through all this he’d be pissing blood for a month.

“Drag him inside,” I ordered. Top guarded the hallway while Bunny then threw the dazed man like a sack of cornmeal into the next room. We flanked the doorway to provide cross-fire protection. There were four people in the room, which was a large laboratory cluttered with dozens of worktables and metal shelves of chemicals and materials. Set against one wall were two familiar-looking big blue cases. Both doors were still shut. Three of the men were Middle Eastern, two in lab coats and one dressed in jeans and a tank top. The guy with the tank top had a .45 and was swinging the barrel up when I gave him a triple-tap: two in the chest, one in the head. The men in lab coats were unarmed, but the one closest to me held a small black plastic device in one hand. The other one was already raising his hands in surrender.

The fourth man was Ollie Brown. He was strapped to a chair and his face was covered with blood.

I pointed my gun at the man with the plastic device. “Don’t do it!” I yelled in Farsi and then in several other languages.

He cried, “Seif al Din!” in a high, hysterical voice and made his move. I shot him in the shoulder to try and stop him from pressing the button on what had to be a detonator, but it was no good: it was rigged with a dead-man’s switch. Even as my bullets tore his shoulder to rags his hand flexed open. The signal was sent.

Suddenly there was a rumbling explosion on the far side of the building, the whole place shook all the way down to its foundations. The floor tiles rippled beneath our feet. Lab equipment vibrated to the edge of the tables and fell with a crash to the ground.

The man I’d shot writhed in pain, but he was laughing in triumph, still chanting, “Seif al Din!”

The Sword of the Faithful. The holy weapon of God.

The deep-throated roar of the explosions slowly subsided.

“Mother of God!” gasped Bunny.

“That oughta tell the cavalry to come running,” said Top. There was a sound in the hall and he leaned out. “Shit. We got company.”

“Walkers?” I demanded.

A barrage of bullets pinged and whined as Top ducked out of the doorway and back-kicked the door closed. Bullets pelted the heavy steel. “Not as such,” Top said dryly.

“Those are AKs,” Bunny said, listening to the gunfire. “Not our boys.”

“Cavalry’s always late,” Top muttered as he threw the locks.

Bunny grabbed the remaining scientist and punched him in the stomach then snapped plastic cuffs on him. “Deal with you later, shitbag.” He crossed to Ollie and slashed at his bonds with a folding knife. “How you doing, hoss?”

Ollie spat blood onto the floor. “I’ve had better days.”

Chapter Sixty-Four

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:32 A.M.

“MA’AM, I’VE LOST the signal,” reported the tech who was hunched over the communications board inside one of the ambulances. He tried another line, then another. “Cell lines are out, too. We haven’t yet set up the landline to ops. We’re blind and deaf. Everything’s being jammed by a very powerful transmitter. Has to be military grade, nothing else could cut us off this bad.”

Grace bent forward to look at his display and then tapped her earpiece, heard only a hiss.

“Ma’am,” called the tech again, “right before we lost our feeds audio picked up a change in ambient sound. I think the refrigeration units have all shut down. I got ten seconds of thermals before we went blind and it looks like the temperature inside the building is spiking.”

Allenson, Grace’s second in command, gave her a sharp look. “Mr. Church said that Captain Ledger requested backup in silence plus ten minutes.”

She turned to the tech. “Do we have that landline yet?”

“Negative. ETA five minutes.”

“Bugger that.” To Allenson she said, “This whole thing is wrong, I think Echo Team is in trouble.”

Allenson grinned. “Alpha Team is locked and loaded, ma’am.”

Grace pointed to a technician sitting in front of a screen that showed nothing but white noise. “You! You’re a runner. Find Mr. Church, tell him we have a total communications blackout. Apprise him of the temperature change. We need a full-team hit and we need it five minutes ago. Tell him the next sound he hears will be Alpha Team kicking in the door. Move!”

The runner leaped out of the van and tore across the parking lot to the fake cable news van parked outside the gates.

Grace Courtland snatched up her helmet. “Let’s go.”

By the time the team was assembled at the door one of her men had a fast-pack charge beside the knob. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled and everyone fanned back as the doorknob blew apart. The door swung violently open but beyond it was a flat gray wall. The agent pounded his fist on it. “Steel plates. Going to take a hell of a big bang to get through that.”

Then a moment later there was a second and much heavier explosion, but this one was deep inside the building. It shattered the glass in the windows and sent a shiver through the walls, then subsided into a threatening silence.

“That was inside,” Allenson said.

Another sound rent the air as heavy steel shutters slammed into place over every window in the building. Grace let out a string of vile curses and hoped that Church had the backup coming fast.

“Make me a hole, Corporal,” she snarled, but the man was already sliding the pencil detonators into place.

God, she prayed as they backed away from the explosives, don’t let this be another St. Michael’s. For one brief moment she closed her eyes and imagined Joe Ledger being dragged down by a sea of hungry white-faced ghouls. Please, God!

The side of the building exploded.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:33 A.M.

“WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Ollie.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off fleas. “I don’t know. I was blindsided. Maybe Tasered. I remember a whole lot of pain and then it all went black. Next thing I know I’m duct-taped to a chair and some asshole is smacking me in the face and yelling in Arabic.”

Top gave him a quick once-over and found a wet burn mark on his neck just above the collar and the back of his shirt was soaked. “Looks like you got hit with a liquid Taser, boy.”

“Damn. I didn’t think those things worked that well.”

“Little dab’ll do ya,” Top said from where he knelt by the scientist I’d shot, applying compresses to the wounds.

Bullets were still whanging off the door, but so far they didn’t seem to be able to get in, and eventually they stopped firing. I don’t know if Bunny, Ollie, or Top thought that was strange, but I sure as hell did. There was a keycard station outside. How come nobody was trying to use a keycard? I almost said something to the others, but decided to keep it to myself for the moment. As the saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you aren’t being followed.” There were too many things in this place that didn’t add up.

“The troops should be arriving any second,” I said. I looked up at the shuttered windows set high in the wall. “Bet you a dime they’ll come through those, so be smart when they enter. If they ask you to lay down your arms you do it. Remember, the first thing they’re going to be thinking is that we’ve been killed or infected. Let’s not give anyone a reason to get trigger happy.”

“I’m with you on that, boss,” said Bunny.

“Hey,” Ollie said as he got groggily to his feet, “where’s Skip?”

Bunny glanced at me. “Unknown,” I said. “He went missing around the same time you did.” Ollie looked like he was about to ask a question, but I turned away and looked down at the dying scientist. “How’s he doing, Top?”

“This guy’s circling the drain. You want to ask him a question now would be the time.”

I squatted on my heels. “You’re dying,” I said in Farsi. “You have a chance to do some good, turn things around before you die. Tell me, what is Seif al Din?”

He sneered at me. “The infidels will all drown in rivers of blood.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I want you to tell me about the Sword of the Faithful.”

He laughed. “You’ve already seen its power. It will consume your entire country,” he said, nodding with fierce joy, delighted at the thought.

“If this thing is a plague, friend, then it’s going to consume your people, too.”

He barked a laugh and blood flecked his lips. “Allah will protect His people.” He mumbled something else but all I caught were the words “generation twelve,” and I had no idea what it meant.

I leaned close. “Right now about two hundred Special Forces soldiers are descending on this place. None of your infected subjects are going to get out of here. Not one. Everything you’ve worked for is going to stop right here, right now.”

He tried to spit at me, but he lacked the power. He was fading fast. I glanced at Top who shook his head.

“You have stopped nothing,” whispered the dying man, then repeated the word, savoring it. “Nothing.”

“Is there another lab, another cell?”

“It is… past that time,” he said with a bloody smile. “El Mujahid is coming. He wields the Sword of the Faithful. You are all too late. Soon all of Islam will be… free… of you.”

Then he threw his head back and screamed out the name of God with such force that it tore the last bits of life out of him. He sank back against Top and his head lolled to one side.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:34 A.M.

“ALPHA TEAM! ON me!”

Grace sprinted toward the hole that had been blown in the side of the building. The agents of Alpha Team followed her into what looked like an industrial shower, but the grime-streaked walls were cracked from the blast and one row of metal lockers was torn off the walls. There was no sign of life.

“Redman,” she snapped, and the explosives tech was at her side in a second. “This hallway looks like the only exit. Rig it with C4. If backup hasn’t arrived and anything comes this way that doesn’t look friendly, blow this whole side of the building down. Repeat my orders.”

He did so.

“Major!” called Allenson from a few yards up the hall. He knelt over the body of a man wearing a white lab coat and plastic cuffs. “Got a prisoner down. Neck’s broken. Blast must have smashed him against the wall.”

“Worry about it later.” She shone her flashlight down the hall. Every door along the long corridor stood ajar. “Two-by-two cover formation,” she ordered. The agents moved past her, covering each other as they pulled the doors wide and shone lights and pointed guns into each of the rooms. Four of them were empty, but they stank of human waste, sweat, and misery. In the corners there were indefinable lumps that might have been bodies. Or parts of bodies.

Forty yards up the hallway was evidence of another explosion—probably the one they’d heard from outside. The walls had been torn outward and the hall was heaped with debris. A cursory glance inside revealed the high-end mainframe sequencing computers Joe had reported. Most of them were melted or torn to pieces, but a few appeared to have withstood the blast.

“Major!” cried Allenson. “My God!”

Grace stepped out of the computer room and her heart froze in her chest. What she had taken for mounds of debris from the blast was something else entirely. The team’s unflinching flashlight beams revealed a mound of corpses. Debris and brick dust covered most of it but as Grace played her own flash over the mound she saw that there were dozens of corpses.

“Bloody hell,” Grace breathed. “This isn’t from the blast.” The floor was littered with shell casings and the air was a cordite pall.

There was one more room to check before they would have to climb over the dead to continue down the corridor. Two agents flanked the door and then one went inside.

“Major! In here.”

Grace stepped through the doorway. There were seven corpses sprawled on the floor, all of them dropped by multiple head shots. And in the corner, huddled down, shivering with shock and cold despite the terrible heat, was a man. His clothes were torn, his face streaked with blood, his eyes wild. The floor around him was littered with shell casings and he held a pistol in his trembling hands.

“Gun!” Allenson yelled and instantly the man’s chest was flickering with red laser sights.

“Don’t shoot!” he cried and quickly lowered his pistol. “Please… don’t shoot!”

Grace Courtland shone her light in his face.

It was Skip. Grace moved forward and took his gun away from him, passing it back to Allenson. “Chief Tyler… are you injured? Tyler, have you been bitten?” she snapped.

“No,” he gasped, then shook his head. He looked at the blood on his clothes. “No… this isn’t mine. It’s… it’s…”

“Steady on, sailor,” she soothed. “Where’s Echo Team? Where are your men?” And though she didn’t mean to say it, she asked, “Where is Captain Ledger?”

Skip shook his head. “I don’t know. Something happened… I blacked out and woke up here… and those things were everywhere!” He rubbed at his neck and Grace shone her light on it.

“Looks like a burn,” Allenson said, then speculated, “Liquid Taser?”

Grace signaled to one of her agents. “Beth, go back to the exit and apprise backup of the situation. Tell them to come find us and be bloody quick about it. We’ll proceed and try and locate Echo Team.”

Beth looked from her to the mound of the dead that blocked the hall. “My God… you really want to crawl over that?”

“As the saying goes, life’s a bitch.” It was a bad joke and as soon as she said it Grace was sorry she’d opened her mouth. The second part of that catchphrase was: “And then you die.” The unspoken words hung in the air like a jinx.

The climb over the corpses was horrific.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, she told herself as she crawled to the top of the heaped dead. Don’t think about it. She scrambled down the far side and jumped onto the concrete as soon as she could, happy to feel hard reality under her boots rather than the yielding madness of the flesh and bone over which she’d come. As her team followed her she saw that each of them were shock-faced and white, their mouths tight, eyes glistening. Some of them looked furious, some hurt. In silence they hurried down the rest of the hall, checking the last few doors but finding nothing alive.

At the T-junction she stopped. With Beth, Redman, and the shooter back at the entrance she was down to nine, with her making ten. She sent Allenson with four agents down the left corridor and she took the right.

MASTER SERGEANT MARK Allenson was thirty years old and had been Marine Force Recon for four years and a DMS agent for fourteen months. He was sharp, intelligent, and had been Major Courtland’s first choice as her second in command. She trusted his judgment and relied on the skills and abilities he’d demonstrated in seven separate DMS-related firefights. The team liked him, and Grace was aware that he was more popular with the troops than she was, which was as it should be. It was always better to have a more human number two; it allowed the commander to maintain the necessary aloofness.

Allenson ran along the corridor, his rifle following his line of sight. They reached another junction and Allenson held up his hand to stop the team. The floor was littered with strange debris. Clothes, personal belongings, toys. He measured the amount of it against the number of corpses they’d seen in the hall and the math came out fuzzy. There were a lot of bodies there, but the debris here looked like it belonged to twice that many people. Maybe three times that many.

He crept forward through rusty water to the junction and peered around. There was a steel door fixed in place by a heavy chain. A chill passed through him. He saw the chocolaty-brown smears on the walls and put it all together into a picture that didn’t fit comfortably in his head.

“Oh Christ,” he whispered as he backed away from it.

To his left an emergency light mounted on the wall suddenly flared and burst, shooting sparks out into the hall that fell onto a large heap of old newspapers and torn clothes overflowing from a trash can. The paper caught instantly and fire leaped up bright and hot. Allenson backed another step away, but a piece of burning paper fell from the can and landed on another heap of rags. Allenson caught a faint chemical whiff just as the rags ignited.

“Sarge,” called one of his men, “there’s a fire extinguisher right here.” He reached to grab the unit.

Allenson spun around, his mouth opening to shout, “No!”

But the world exploded before the word was out of his mouth. He and his team were vaporized in a heartbeat.

GRACE FELT THE blast before she heard it and even as she turned toward the sound the shock wave picked her up and flung her against the wall. She rebounded and fell to her knees. The impact knocked the breath out of her and as she fought for breath a cloud of smoke rolled over her, filling her lungs and twisting her into a paroxysm of painful coughing. Concrete dust stung her eyes. Nearby she could hear her remaining team members gagging and groaning, but the sound was strangely muted and it took her a moment before she realized that she was half-deafened by the blast.

The blast.

“Allenson…” she gasped. “My God…”

Grace felt blindly for her gun, found it half buried in debris and pulled it to her, using the stock like a crutch to get to her feet. The smoke was thinning, but only enough to see a gray and blurred world. Grace pulled the collar of her T-shirt up through the opening of her Kevlar vest and used it as a filter. Her lungs protested, wanting to cough, but Grace fought the reflexes, struggling for physical calm. When she could trust her voice, she croaked, “Alpha Team—count off!”

A few voices responded. Only a few, and as she called them together she saw that all she had left of her original team were four agents, all of them bloody and bruised. She staggered back to the T-junction, clutching to the smallest of hopes that one or two others had survived. But there was no one. The corridor walls had been obliterated and there was a huge crater in the floor. She saw some debris. Part of a gun. A hand. Not much else.

In front of her, past the smoking crater torn into the hallway where the heavy steel doors had been, there was movement. Figures, pale as the smoke in which they stood, began moving toward her. Grace raised her flashlight and shone it into the cavernous room. She could see at least a dozen corpses, their bodies torn by the blast; but beyond them, filling the room nearly wall to wall, were walkers. Hundreds of them. Some of them, the ones nearest to the door, were torn apart, missing arms and chunks of flesh; the others farther back were still whole. All of them were staring at the gaping hole in the wall. They saw the light and followed the beam to its source, and their eyes locked on Grace. A mass of shambling dead things, all with black eyes and red mouths that gaped and worked as if practicing for a grisly feast; and as one they set up a dreadful howl of unnatural need and began moving toward her.

“No… God, no…” someone breathed beside her. Jackson, her only remaining sergeant. Grace knew that to stand and fight was suicide. “Fall back!” she cried, but as she moved backward the walkers shuffled forward over the bodies of their own dead.

Then, around the bend in the corridor, she heard the distant staccato rattle of automatic weapons fire. Even half-deafened, Grace recognized the chatter of AK-47s.

“Joe…” she said to herself, then louder, “Joe!” She whirled and pelted down the hallway in the direction of the gunfire. Jackson, Skip, and the remaining Alphas followed. This, at least, was something they could fight; this was something they could understand.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:38 A.M.

A SECOND BLAST rocked the whole building, this one ten times louder. Plaster and metal fittings fell from the ceilings and several lights flared white and then exploded in showers of smoky sparks. We all crouched, staring around, waiting for the next shoe to drop, but after a moment the rumblings stopped and the building settled in to an eerie silence.

“The hell was that?” Bunny grumbled.

Top spat out some plaster dust. “Still ain’t the cavalry, farmboy. Wrong blast signature.”

Outside the door the gunfire started up again, but there was no way they were going to shoot their way in. I wondered why they bothered. Then it hit me… gunfire doesn’t always have to be an attack: it could also be a lure.

“Grace!” I said aloud, and that fast there was a fresh burst of gunfire—definitely MP5s this time. I paused and looked at Bunny, who was grinning.

“Now that,” he said, “is the cavalry.”

He took a single step toward the door when the wall blew up. I dove left and pushed Ollie out of the way as the whole door careened inward. Top did a neat little sidestep to avoid a big chunk of twisted metal, but a piece of cinderblock the size of a softball caught Bunny on the helmet and knocked him flat.

Figures began moving through the smoke; Top and I darted to either side, hunkering down behind lab tables, guns held straight and level. Two figures leaped into the room brandishing guns and yelling for us to freeze, to lay down our arms. They yelled in English. The loudest voice belonged to a woman.

Grace.

I started to smile and then I saw the blood on her face and the wild, almost inhuman expression in her eyes and my trigger finger twitched at the same moment my heart slammed against the walls of my chest. God! Is she infected?

“Hold your fire!” I yelled and everybody froze. “Grace! Stand down, stand down!”

She wheeled in my direction, bringing the barrel of her weapon up. Her hair was gray with dust and blood flowed freely from cuts on her forehead and cheek. She was panting—whether from effort, stress, or infection I couldn’t tell. Though it hurt my soul to do it I put the deathly red finger of my laser sight on her chest, right over her heart.

“Grace… stand down!” I shouted.

“J… Joe?” A few other Alpha Team agents clustered around her, all of them bleeding, all of them in torn and dusty uniforms. Their barrels aimed past her toward me. They hadn’t seen Top from his place of concealment. Ollie was with me, down behind the table, unarmed. Bunny hadn’t moved from where he’d fallen.

“Stand down,” I repeated, keeping the edge in my voice. “I won’t tell you again.”

“Joe… are you hurt? The walkers…”

“No one in here is infected, Grace. What about you?”

She took a breath, and then shook her head as she lowered her gun. To her team she said, “Stand down.”

Everyone slowly lowered their weapons except Top and me. He remained where he was, quiet and ready, while I got to my feet and walked toward her, my gun out, the red dot steady on her chest.

“Joe,” she said with evident relief, “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“I’m not looking to take a chance here, Grace. Tell me what happened.”

“There was a team of hostiles holding this end of the hallway, trying to get in.”

I caught that she said “was.” Another figure moved through the dust and as he stepped into the lab I was surprised to see who it was. I lowered my gun and held it down at my side.

“Skip? Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry, Captain… I got blindsided.”

The young man looked worse than Grace. His eyes were jumpy and darted back and forth and his smile was both brief and tremulous. I gave him a nod and he stayed where he was, looking around uncertainly as if unsure to which team he belonged.

I moved closer to Grace. “Tell me what happened.”

She told me everything in a few terse sentences. The hurt in her face and voice was bottomless. “We saw a group of hostiles trying to shoot their way in,” she concluded. “We took them out. All communications are jammed, so we couldn’t download a keycard code, so I had Jackson blow the door.”

Behind me Bunny swore. I turned to see that Top had helped the big young man to a sitting position. Bunny was groggily shaking his head, blood trickling down the left side of his face. Top removed Bunny’s helmet and examined the bruise, then he turned and gave me a quick nod. “Farmboy here took a blunt-force hit to the head. He’ll be okay.”

“I ain’t a farmboy, you shit-kicker,” Bunny complained. “I’m from Orange County.”

Top patted his shoulder. “Now that the cavalry’s here maybe we should saddle up and ride.”

“The cavalry’s still not here,” Grace said softly. “My team is… Gus Dietrich and the others should be breaching the wall any minute.”

I suddenly felt old and used up. “Well, then we’ll have to make our stand here and wait. No back doors, and I don’t particularly want to go back down that corridor.”

“Sod that,” murmured Grace.

Ollie stood by the table looking as much like an uninvited guest as did Skip. I avoided looking at either of them at the moment. Both of them had gone missing in ways as yet unexplained, both miraculously alive despite the terrorists and the walkers. I was going to have to sit down and have long talks with each of them. It would be better for everyone if they both had nice, clear, and believable stories.

Over by the door Jackson called out sharply. “Major… Captain Ledger… we’re about to have company.”

“What have you got?” I called.

Jackson looked stricken. “Walkers! Hundreds of them.”

“Terrific,” Top said sourly. “I’m down to one magazine, Cap’n.”

“They’re here!”

We all turned to see the shambling mass of walkers round the bend in the hall outside and fill the doorway. Rank upon rank of them.

There was no time to think, just to act.

“Make a barricade!” I grabbed the nearest table to me and heaved. Grace caught the other end and we shoved it forward, the legs screeching on the concrete floor, the vibration sending delicate instruments crashing to the ground, and I hoped we weren’t breaking anything that contained a virus or parasite. The Hammer suits would protect us from skin contact but none of us were wearing masks.

Bunny was sick and dazed from his head injury but he bulled his way through it; he grabbed the corner of one big table and with a grunt of effort heaved it over onto its side then rammed it with a shoulder to drive it into the doorway. Top began tossing chairs over the table to create an obstacle course to slow the walkers down. Ollie rushed to help him. Skip looked around and grabbed another table and hauled on it without much effect; I took the other end and we pushed that against the others.

Then the mass of walkers hit the barrier like a tidal surge. They were only as strong as ordinary humans but there was so many of them that their sheer weight of numbers acted like a battering ram that drove the barricade backward nearly three feet. Jackson reached over the edge of the barricade and opened up into the massed bodies. A few went down, but most of his bullets tore through chests and limbs without doing much to stop them.

“Pick your bleeding targets, Jackson!” Grace snarled. “Shoot for the head.”

The barricade shuddered again and slid farther into the room as hundreds of the living dead surged forward again and again. At the front of the mass a few of the walkers collapsed, crushed by those behind them, and I could hear bones breaking. But it was weird, without screams or grunts, just low moans, even from those who were being trampled.

“It’s not going to hold,” warned Ollie as he shoved another table against the barricade.

“Nothing gets over that wall!” yelled Grace as she leveled her gun and opened fire, dropping two walkers with headshots and tearing away the jaw of a third. I drew my gun and stepped up next to her and fired; Top and Bunny flanked us and then Skip and Jackson. Ollie and Skip took handguns from Alpha Team members who had MP5s. Eventually all of us had formed a shooting line a few yards on our side of the barrier, shooting point-blank at the walkers as they climbed up the sides of the tables and overturned chairs. The thunder of our combined gunfire was deafening as we fired, fired, fired. The walkers fell but the surge never faltered. As the creatures in front died, the others climbed over them to try and get to us.

The slide of my pistol locked back and I fumbled for my last magazine and slapped it in. Fifteen rounds. “Last mag!” I yelled.

“I’m out!” Top said a moment later. He spun out of the line to look for one of the AK-47s, found it and came back firing, the selector switch set to semiauto.

Grace was shooting slower than the rest of us but she was making more kills. She aimed and fired, aimed and fired, and with each shot a zombie toppled backward, its infernal life force snuffed out. I followed her lead and slowed my rate of fire.

The walkers fell by the dozen. By the score.

The dead were heaped so high that for a moment they blocked the door, but then the surge hit the other side of it and the mountain of corpses toppled into the room. We had to jump backward to keep from being buried by them, and that broke our line. The barricade was gone and now the walkers were climbing into the room over the heaped dead.

“Remember the Spartans,” Bunny mumbled as he backed up.

“We ain’t dead yet, farmboy,” Top said.

“I told you already that I’m not… aw, fuck it.” He shot two walkers who tried to rush him from his blind side. His gun clicked empty as the slide locked. “Shit! Who’s got a mag?”

Nobody answered him. Those of us with bullets kept firing.

“Shit!” he swore again, and threw his pistol so hard at a rushing ghoul that it knocked the creature onto its back. Bunny rushed over to a far wall and tore a fire axe out its metal clips. “C’mon, you undead sonsabitches!”

They came. They swarmed at him and he laid into them with the axe, swinging it with such incredible force that arms and heads flew through the air. His backhand slash dropped two walkers with broken necks. One walker lunged at him and sank its teeth into the fabric of his Hammer suit and though Bunny broke its back with a chop of the axe the creature’s bite tore the whole front of the suit open.

I fired my last shot and tossed the gun aside. Grace and her team still had ammunition and they re-formed into a tighter line, firing constantly but now their shots were killing only one in two, and then one in three as their hands went numb from the recoil and their hearts froze in their chests. Even Grace was missing the kill nearly half the time.

“Out!” Top called and fell back. He caught my eye and gave me a wicked grin. “Be nice if this was like the movies. Nobody ever runs out of ammo in the goddamn movies.”

Ollie fired his last shot and dropped out of the line, too. “Now what?” he asked.

I cast around for something to use as a weapon and spotted a set of shelves made from wire racks and chrome-plated pipes. I snatched it up and swung it with all my strength against a wall where it exploded into its component parts. I picked out a six-foot-long upright and swung the bar with all the force I could muster from need and terror, and laid into the front rank of the walkers, crushing the head of one and breaking the neck of another. I heard a roaring sound and realized that it was my own voice, raised into an animal howl of rage as I swung and smashed and thrust at the living dead.

I swung low to knock the legs out from under two of the creatures and suddenly Top and Ollie were there, both of them with shorter pieces of chromed pipe in their hands. They crushed the heads of the walkers I’d knocked down and that fast we had a rhythm. I knocked them down and they finished them off. I could hear Bunny’s bull roar behind me, as loud as my own. Top’s arm was red to the shoulder; then Ollie slipped in a pool of blood and went down with three of the creatures on top of him. In a flash Skip was there, his gun empty but a KABAR in his hand, and the blade flashed out, cutting tendons and slashing throats. Top pulled Ollie up and the three of them fanned out behind me as we met the next wave. And the next. And the next.

Five walkers rushed me and I chopped the outermost one in the temple so that he crashed into the others and knocked the whole line off balance. Top leaped at them, hammering away with the pipe, but I could see that his blows were coming slower and with less force. He was tiring. So was I. It had been an insanely long day and this was past human endurance.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and wheeled to see three walkers coming at Grace from her blind side.

“Grace! Left flank!” I yelled, and went for a long reach with my pole.

She saw my swing and ducked under it, allowing the bar to smash into the face of one of her attackers. She shot the other two and then she was empty.

I pulled her away and pushed her behind me. “Fall back!” I shouted to the others. There were six tables at the back of the room. If nothing else we could try a second barricade. “Bunny, plow the road!”

Bunny leaped forward and cut down two ghouls with a swing that was so powerful that it cut one of them nearly in half. He hacked his way to us. I realized that both sides of the lab were lined with tall metal cabinets. They were freestanding, not bolted to the wall, and it gave me a spark of hope. “Skip… Ollie!” As they turned toward me I grabbed the corner of one of the cabinets and pulled it as hard as I could. It toppled easily and fell with a deafening crash, crushing one of the walkers under its ponderous bulk. The others got the idea at once and immediately began overturning the cabinets so that within seconds we had created a steel corridor that limited how many of them could approach at once.

Grace herded her team back, and Jackson had enough presence of mind to drag our prisoner with them. That showed optimism, I thought. Then something caught my attention and I turned to look at a steel cabinet mounted against one wall. It was chained shut and across it was stenciled ARMS in Farsi.

“Top! Arms locker on your nine o’clock!”

He spun around and saw the cabinet and a big grin broke out on his face. He couldn’t read Farsi but he got the picture and with a heave of his whole body he brought his bar down on the lock, shattering it. He pulled open the door and we saw six police-style .38 revolvers hung on pegs and a shelf of boxed cartridges. Top’s smile faltered. Automatics and preloaded mags would have been a lot more comforting.

“Buy me some time, farmboy,” he called to Bunny as he and Grace began pulling down guns and tearing open boxes.

I stepped into the corridor to meet the rush of walkers who had succeeded in climbing over the piles of their own dead; Bunny flanked me and together we attacked. The pipe felt like it weighed a ton and each time the shock of impact sent painful shudders through my wrists and shoulders. I could barely drag in enough breath, and sweat stung my eyes. Bunny had to feel the same, and we stood there, fighting to hold the line. But every few seconds we were forced back a step and then another.

“Joe!” I heard Grace scream. “Fall back.” And suddenly the air around me exploded as six pistols fired at once. The front rank of the walkers was hurled back; then a second volley dropped more of them. I felt one round sing past me so close it burned the air next to my ear. I turned and saw Ollie staring at me with a shocked expression, and the gun in his hand trembled. Was it fatigue? Or fear of the walkers? Or had he missed the target he was aiming at? He opened his mouth to say something but I shot him a hard look as I rushed to get behind the line of guns.

Grace and her team had pushed tables together to create a redoubt. Skip was at the far end, boxed in behind the edge of a table and the last remaining cabinet; the rest were shoulder to shoulder behind the makeshift battlements. It was flimsy, but it was all we had. On the floor at Skip’s feet was the lab tech, wide-eyed with fear.

As Top passed me a pistol he murmured, “Getting to be a real nice time for that cavalry, Cap’n.”

“Prayer might help,” I said. “You a churchgoing man, Top?”

“Not lately, but if things work out right I might start up again.”

Grace and I stood behind one table, sharing half a box of bullets, timing our shots so that one fired while the other reloaded. “Some rescue, huh?” she said, trying to make a joke of it even as tears glittered in the corners of her eyes.

“I’m sorry about your team.”

She sniffed and cleared her throat. “We’re at war. People die.”

I looked at her for a long moment but she turned her face toward the door and I could see her features harden up like concrete drying in a hot sun. On top of everything else the loss of her team was a terrible blow, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a fatal one. Not only for us in the moment, but for her if she lived through this. Maybe Rudy could help. Or, maybe I could. I hoped the schism didn’t run too deep for anyone to reach.

I drew a breath as two more walkers shuffled into the corridor, then three more, then nine. They moaned like lost souls, though I wondered if they were truly without souls or if in some dreadful way the person that these creatures had once been was somehow trapped in those undead bodies; caught there with no way to control the killing machine that their bodies had become, watching with awful impotence as they shambled toward murder or death.

It was bad, bad thinking and I wondered if I was going into shock. Shit, I snarled inwardly. Got to stay solid. Got to stay sharp.

I squeezed the trigger and the leading walker was flung backward against the others, the whole front of his face disintegrating in a cloud of pink mist. I fired again and Grace shot at the same moment. Then everyone was firing and once more the room became a hell of earsplitting gunfire, the moans of the dead, and the screams of the living. The living dead kept coming, wave after wave of them. We shot well, a head shot nearly every time, but they kept coming.

The hammer of Grace’s pistol clicked on an empty cylinder. “Bugger all,” she hissed, “I’m out.”

One by one we emptied our guns and they kept on coming, moaning, reaching for us. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grace’s profile. Even dirty and marked by strain she was beautiful. So brave and noble. As I fired my last bullet I could feel my heart sink to a lower spot in my chest. The dead were going to get to us. There were still forty or more of them in the room and more of them kept shambling through the door. I knew what I was going to have to do. It would be simple… stand up and take her chin in one hand and gather up her hair in the other. It was easy, nothing more than a quick turn of her head and then she’d be free of all of this, beyond the reach of the walkers and their plague. I could do it. I’d done it twice with walkers—with Javad and with the walker in Room 12. I could do it now for Grace to keep her from slipping into that ungodly hell. The last gun clicked empty. Around us the air was filled with the hungry cries of the dead.

I felt myself getting to my feet, felt my hands flexing open, felt myself starting to move toward Grace, the movement necessary but the motion stalled by doubt. What if I’m wrong? What if she stops me and they get us both while we’re struggling? What if I… and then above us, all at once, six of the steel-shuttered windows blew inward.

We all looked up, and even some of the walkers turned their dead faces upward as the steel panels—buckled and in fragments—tumbled murderously into the room.

“Heads up!” I screamed and my reaching hands closed on her shoulders and pulled Grace back as a huge chunk of steel drove like a logger’s maul right down onto the spot where Grace had been leaning, cleaving the table in half. We both screamed as my pull carried us back and down, and then we were rolling over and over each other until we collided with the wall. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in the crook of her neck as debris pelted down on my back. The others dove beneath the heavy lab tables or crowded into the corners as hundreds of pounds of jagged steel slammed into the ground. The front three ranks of the walkers were crushed and torn to rags, but the others, unable to feel shock or surprise, tottered forward with no change in their singleness of purpose. We had no cover except the shattered debris of our redoubt, but even as we raised our heads the air was rent by the heavy chatter of automatic gunfire. We scrambled farther back against the walls and covered our ears and eyes as a hail of bullets tore the crowd of walkers to pieces. Ricochets slapped the walls over our heads and dusted us with plaster.

I caught Top’s eye and he looked at me, looked up, rolled his eyes and shook his head. Despite the absolute insanity of the moment, he mouthed the words “Hooray for the cavalry.” Then he cracked up.

With bullets whipping past us and death all around, I felt a hitch in my chest and thought with horror that I was about to cry, but I burst out laughing instead. Grace looked at us like we’d lost our minds. Bunny joined us and we howled like madmen.

“Bloody Yanks,” Grace said, and then was laughing, too, though tears coursed down her cheeks. I pulled her to me and held her as her laughter melted into sobs.

I was still holding her when Gus Dietrich came down through a window on a fast-rope, firing an automatic weapon as he dropped into the room.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

SS Albert Schweitzer / Wednesday, July 1

MEN IN BANDAGES walked the decks, or slumped onto chaise longues, or sat in wheelchairs with the brakes locked against the slow pitch and yaw of the freighter. The SS Albert Schweitzer had been on semipermanent loan to the International Red Cross for over sixteen years now, and for more than half a decade it had assisted the British and American navies with the transport of wounded and convalescing service personnel from theaters of war to their homelands, or to nations where the right kind of medical treatment was available. Experimental surgery in Switzerland and Holland, reconstructive surgery in Brazil, microsurgery in Canada, thoracic and neurosurgery in the United States. Funding for the ship’s staff and enormous operating costs were underwritten by five governments, but in real dollars and cents the government donations barely kept coal in the furnaces. The crew and staff salaries, the medical equipment, the drugs and surgical supplies, and even the food and drink were provided via generous grants from three different multinational corporations: Hamish Dunwoody of Scotland, Ingersol-Spüngen Pharmaceuticals of Holland, and an America-based vaccine company called Synthetic Solutions. The companies shared no known connection, but all three were owned in part, and by several clever removes, by Gen2000. And Gen2000 was Sebastian Gault.

The big man standing by the railing only knew that Gault was involved, though the level and scope of that involvement was unknown to him. Not that it mattered. To El Mujahid the only crucial information was that while aboard this ship he was believed to be Sonny Bertucci, a second-generation Italian American from the tough streets around Coney Island in Brooklyn. In his wallet was a snapshot of Sonny and his wife, Gina, and their two young sons Vincent and Danny. A search of his fingerprints would show that he had worked as a civilian security guard at a Coast Guard base and that he had served for three years with Global Security, a private company licensed to operate in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the most scrupulous computer search would only come up with information verifying this identify because all documents, from the New York State driver’s license to the frequent blood donor’s card he carried in his wallet to the credentials locked in the ship’s safe, were issued by the actual organizations. Gault was wired in everywhere.

The fighter rested his muscular forearms on the cool metal rail and looked out over the waters to the far horizon. The swollen summer sun was setting in the west and its dying light was a fierce red that seemed to set each wave top ablaze. Everything was painted with the hellish glow, and the skyline far across the waters was as black as charred stumps against the fiery sky. Closer to the ship, standing all alone in the burning waters, the Statue of Liberty seemed to melt in the inferno of the sun’s immolation and in El Mujahid’s fierce stare.