The Mission

CHAPTER 13

Duncan stepped out of the plane, feeling the warm California breeze in her face. She felt light-headed for a moment. She wasn’t even sure what time it was, as she’d crossed so many time zones in the last couple of days.

She looked around. The Pacific Ocean crashed onto the rocky shore to the west. Vandenberg was halfway between Los Angeles and Monterey, home of the Air Force’s missile test base. It was also home to the alternate launch site of the space shuttle.

The launch pad for that craft was the dominating feature between Duncan and the ocean. Standing over 184 feet tall, the shuttle Endeavor was mated to its solid-rocket boosters and external fuel tank, sitting next to its tower.

Even as Duncan caught her first glimpse of the shuttle, a loudspeaker crackled and a voice rolled across the tarmac.

“T-minus six hours zero zero minutes. The count has resumed. Next planned hold is at T-minus three hours. Tower crew perform ET and TPS ice/frost and debris evaluation. ET is ready for LOX and LH2 loading. Verify orbiter ready for LOX and LH2 loading.”

“Something, isn’t it?”

Duncan turned. Six men and one woman were waiting to the rear of the C-7 she’d flown in on from the Stennis. There was a patch on their left shoulder — a half-moon on one side and a star on the other, with a dagger in between the two. The man who had spoken walked forward, hand extended. He was a tall, black man, well built, head completely shaved. He wore camouflage fatigues with the “budweiser” crest of the Navy SEALs sewn on the chest above the name tag. Duncan returned the handshake, feeling the strong grip.

“I’m Lieutenant Osebold, Endeavor Mission Team Commander.”

“Lisa Duncan, Presidential Science Adviser.”

Osebold smiled. “Here to spy on us.” He turned. “Here’s the rest of our team.” As Osebold introduced, they stepped forward.

“Lieutenant J. G. Conover is my executive officer.”

Conover was a skinny, red-haired man. He was sporting a bandage on his right hand. Seeing Duncan’s glance, he held it up. “Slight training accident.”

“Chief Petty Officer Ericson is our weapons specialist.”

Ericson was a small man, compactly built.

Osebold moved to the next in line. “Lieutenant Lopez is our medical officer.” Lopez was a dark-skinned Hispanic, a smile on his face as he shook hands with Duncan.

“Lieutenant,” Duncan greeted him.

“Lieutenant Terrel is our engineering specialist,” Osebold continued. Terrel had a big hook nose, a balding head, and tight lips. He nodded at Duncan, not moving forward.

“Terrel’s always thinking,” Osebold said. “He’s actually not too happy about the job your friend Captain Turcotte did on the talons and the mothership, because he’s been working with the NASA team on how to fix them.

“Chief Maxwell is our communications specialist.”

Maxwell was a short, stocky man, with a bright red face.

“The last member of our team is Ms. Kopina. She’s from NASA. She’s the mission specialist and our ground coordinator. She won’t be going up with us.”

Kopina was a solid-looking woman in her mid-thirties. She had brown hair, cut short. Her face was unadorned with any makeup and marked with worry lines.

“Ms. Kopina is our jack-of-all-trades,” Osebold said. “She’s the one who makes sure we can do our job in space.”

At the mention of space, Duncan looked once more at Endeavor.

“Ever see a shuttle launch in person?” Osebold asked.

Duncan shook her head.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Osebold said. “It goes up in less than six hours. We’re doing a polar insertion.”

“A what?”

Kopina answered that. “We have a different launch window into orbit from here than they do at the Cape. Vandenberg’s launch limits are 201 and 158 degrees. The orbital trajectory will be within 14 degrees of due north.

“Most people think the shuttle goes straight up, but that isn’t even close.” She pointed from the ocean inland. “The Earth rotates on its axis at about 950 miles an hour from west to east. We take advantage of that also when we launch.”

Duncan assumed Osebold and Kopina were telling her these facts to impress her that they knew their stuff. She knew quite a bit about the shuttle, but she had learned long ago to pretend to be ignorant in order to get people to disclose more than they should.

The loudspeaker crackled once more. “Initiate LOX transfer line chilldown. Verify SRB nozzle flex bearing and SRB nozzle temperature requirements. Activate LCC monitoring software.”

“What now?” Duncan asked.

Osebold extended his hand toward the van they had driven up in. “We do last-minute prep and fitting.”

“Fitting?” Duncan asked as she followed.

“Our TASC-suits.”

“Task-suits?” Duncan repeated.

“T-A-S-C-suit,” Osebold spelled it out. “Stands for Tactical Articulated Space Combat suit.”

“The bitch,” Terrel muttered as they climbed into the van.

“The what?” Duncan was surprised.

Osebold laughed. “We call the TASC-suit ‘the bitch’ among ourselves. No offense, Ms. Kopina.”

“No offense taken,” Kopina said. “It is a bitch.” She didn’t smile. If anything, the lines on her face got deeper.

Duncan buckled her seat belt. “Can I ask something?”

“That’s what you’re here for,” Osebold said.

“What exactly are you going to the mothership for?”

“To secure it,” Osebold said.

“Secure it?” Duncan repeated. “For what?”

Osebold threw up his hands. “Hey, I just follow orders. We’re to rendezvous with the mothership and try to get a secure atmosphere inside.”

“That’s a big project,” Duncan said. “Can you carry up enough material to do the job?”

“They’ve got some lightweight, highly expansive material,” Kopina said. “I think they can do it.”

“And then what?” Duncan asked.

Osebold shrugged. “That’s up to UNAOC. I assume we might be able to bring the mothership back down. Maybe back to Area 51.”

Duncan was startled. She hadn’t even thought of that. “And the talon?”

“The crew of the Columbia has to ascertain its status, then a decision can be made,” Osebold said.

“Isn’t this all a little rushed?” Duncan asked.

She picked up some nervous rustling among the crew, but Osebold’s answer was confident. “We can do it.”

“Flank and far security report in all clear,” Faulkener whispered, one finger pressing the earpiece from the small FM radio into his ear.

Toland nodded, watching through his binoculars at the small clearing on the other side of the border. He and Faulkener were lying in a shallow trench they’d dug the previous evening. Toland had dismissed most of the patrol, keeping only two other men besides Faulkener. All people he had worked with before and trusted, as far as you could trust anyone who was a mercenary. Which, Toland had to admit to himself, wasn’t very far.

There was another reason besides the better split on the money for going light. Several of the men were ill, and he didn’t want to be burdened with them. Toland wanted to travel light to get his job over with as fast as possible. They’d put two of the men on the far side of the clearing and one on each flank to make sure nobody else moved in during the night.

There was a distant noise, getting closer. Toland recognized it — a car engine. Ten minutes after he first heard the sound a Land Rover pulled into the clearing.

The vehicle was covered in mud and looked as if it had had a long trip.

“Long way from the nearest town,” Faulkener whispered. “They been on the road awhile.”

“Yeah.” Toland had half expected a helicopter. Travel by vehicle was very difficult in this part of South America. But maybe The Mission still had to be wary of the Americans’ drug trafficking surveillance in this part of the world. The Americans tracked everything in the air in the top half of South America.

The Land Rover came to a halt and two men armed with AK-47 assault rifles jumped out. A man in a dark gray jumpsuit exited more slowly from the front passenger seat.

“Damn Nazi,” Faulkener hissed.

The man was over six feet tall, with straight blond hair. Even at this distance, Toland could tell he had blue eyes. The man would have been considered the perfect physical specimen in the Third Reich.

The man began unloading several green cases from the back while looking about the clearing. The two guards moved ten feet from the vehicle and waited, weapons at the ready.

“Professionals,” Faulkener muttered. “Why don’t they take this fellow in?”

“We know the terrain,” Toland replied, but it was a good question. Any adequate soldier with a map could navigate in terrain they hadn’t been in before. There were a lot of pieces that didn’t fit together here.

The man in the gray suit was done. The two guards climbed back in the Land Rover and drove away, back the way they had come. Toland waited until he could no longer hear the engine. He glanced at Faulkener.

“All clear,” Faulkener reported after checking on the FM radio with the security men.

Toland stood up. “What’s in the cases?” he called out.

The man was startled by the sudden apparition. He stood. “Equipment.” He spoke with an accent, which Toland tried to place. European.

“Step away from it,” Toland ordered. When the man complied, he gave more orders. “Kneel down, forehead in the dirt.”

“Is this really necessary?” the man asked.

Now that he was closer, Toland could see that the man’s skin was pale, indicating he had not spent much time in the outdoors.

Toland gestured with the muzzle of his Sterling, and the man reluctantly got on his knees and bent over. Toland walked forward and looked at the three cases. They had hard plastic cases and locks on the opening snaps. He turned back to the man. “What’s your name?”

“Baldrick.”

Keeping out of Toland’s line of fire, Faulkener quickly frisked Baldrick. No weapons.

“You can stand up, Baldrick,” Toland said. “Open the cases.”

“No,” Baldrick said.

Toland closed the distance between the two men in a breath, jamming the muzzle of the Sterling into the skin under Baldrick’s chin. “I didn’t hear that. Say it again.”

“I can’t,” Baldrick said in calm voice. “I’m under orders too. You aren’t authorized to see what’s in the cases.”

“Bad answer,” Toland said.

“I can open one,” Baldrick said. “I have to for us to get where we’re going.” Toland glanced at Faulkener, who met the look and shrugged. Toland removed the weapon. “Open what you can.”

Baldrick flipped open the lid and pulled out a laptop computer with several cables coming out the back. Next he took out a small folded-up satellite dish with tripod legs.

“SATCOM?” Toland asked. It looked more sophisticated than the rig Faulkener carried in his rucksack.

“Not quite,” Baldrick said, unfolding the fans that made up the dish.

Toland stepped forward, bringing up the barrel of his submachine gun.

“Don’t do that!” Baldrick glared at the soldier. “Do that again, I call this off and you can forget your bonus. Plus I tell The Mission you blew this. You wouldn’t want that. They are most ruthless. I and my equipment are more important here than you or any of your men. Is that clear?”

Toland stepped back and gritted his teeth. He waited as Baldrick hooked up the computer to the satellite dish.

“What I have here,” Baldrick said, “is a terrain map of this area loaded in the computer. When I hit the enter key here, we get a kick burst up to a satellite, which activates the homing device in the object we’re looking for, which bounces back up and gives us a location.” With that Baldrick hit the enter key.

Two seconds later there was a glowing dot on the electronic map. “That’s where I need you to take me,” Baldrick said.

Toland looked at the screen. The dot was located in the foothills just over the border in Brazil. Very rough terrain. Toland pulled out his map case and looked at it, comparing it to the screen.

“How long to get there?” Baldrick asked, turning off the computer and beginning to repack it.

“About forty kilometers,” Toland said. “My men can make it in a day. Maybe less.”

“Good.” Baldrick snapped shut the case. “I’ll need help carrying this.”

“Bring in the security,” Toland ordered Faulkener. He turned back to Baldrick. “Mind telling me what we’re looking for?”

“Yes, I do mind,” Baldrick said, shouldering his own small pack.

Toland smiled, but Baldrick didn’t see it. Faulkener did see the smile, and it sent a chill through him. He’d seen Toland smile like that before, and it meant trouble.

“That’s it,” the pilot called out.

Turcotte looked down through the clear bottom of the bouncer. “Goddamn,” he whispered. Vilhena looked deserted, not a single person visible.

“Where do you want me to set down?” the pilot asked.

Turcotte turned to Kenyon and Norward.

“There — that empty field on the east side of the town,” Kenyon said. “Are you sure it’s safe?” Turcotte asked.

Kenyon shrugged. “We don’t know what the transmission vector is, so I can’t answer that. But it should be safe; plus we’ll gear up before venturing out.”

The bouncer silently floated down until it was less than a foot above the ground. Kenyon and Norward opened a couple of the cases they had inside and pulled out blue, full-body suits.

“One size fits all,” Kenyon said, handing one to Turcotte. He also handed him a hood and a large, heavy backpack.

Turcotte stepped into the suit. He gave Yakov a hand and they zipped each other up. The hood had a full-face, clear plastic mask. With a little help from Norward, they got completely garbed, settling the heavy backpacks on their shoulders and hooking up the hoses from it to the suit properly.

Turcotte felt the slight rush of bottled air as Norward turned a switch on the pack. A small boom mike was built into the hood.

“How much air do we have?” he asked.

“Three hours,” Norward’s voice sounded tinny coming through the receiver.

The pilot of the bouncer had just a hood on, breathing from a tank strapped next to his seat. He hit a release and the cargo nets on the outside of the craft dropped loose, tumbling the large cases the USAMRIID men had brought to the ground. The bouncer still had not touched the ground, hovering two feet above the earth.

Turcotte climbed the ladder to the top hatch. He opened it, then, with great difficulty, clambered outside. He slid down the sloping side of the bouncer until he was at the lip. He then hopped off onto the ground. Kenyon came next, followed by Norward, then Yakov, who had shut the hatch behind him. The bouncer immediately went back up into the air, to hover a hundred feet above their heads.

“Norward,” Kenyon’s voice came over the radio. “You and Yakov set up the habitat. I’ll find us a specimen.”

Turcotte listened to the quiet thump of the re-breather tank on his back. He’d never worn a suit like this before and hoped it was working properly. He could easily remember the sight of the man dying on the video.

He followed Kenyon as the other slowly walked toward the town. Behind them, Yakov and Norward were opening a large case.

A dusty trail led through the trees at the west end of the clearing. Kenyon led the way. Turcotte was already hot inside the thick suit, feeling a small stream of sweat making its way down his back.

They passed a small hut. Kenyon swung the door open and leaned in. “Nothing.”

They continued down the path. A cinder-block building appeared on the left side of the road. The rest of the town of Vilhena lay beyond it, going downslope to the muddy river. It wasn’t very large, less than a mile and a half long by a half mile cut into the jungle. Turcotte estimated about five thousand people could live there.

Kenyon walked to the opening of the building, which was covered with a blanket, and pulled it aside.

“We’ve got bodies,” he said.

Turcotte followed him inside. There were six bodies. All had bled out badly. Turcotte glanced at Kenyon, but he couldn’t see the other man’s face behind the glazed plastic of the suit mask.

“I’ve never seen symptoms exactly like this.” Kenyon was kneeling next to the body of a woman. “They’re like Ebola, but the rash is something different.” With a gloved hand he touched flesh. “Notice these pustules on the black welts? Does sort of remind me of the plague.

“The thing that bothers me is the timing,” Kenyon continued. His fingers were probing the body. “Ebola takes two weeks. Here it sounds like a couple of days, maybe three.” He reached into a waist pack and pulled out a sample kit. He pressed the end of a tube into the body’s flesh, then capped it and put it back in the case. He also got a sample of the body’s blood.

The process was repeated several times, Kenyon moving from body to body.

“We’ll know shortly what it isn’t,” Kenyon said as he headed toward the door.

Back at the field, Yakov and Norward had been hard at work. The first large case they had opened had contained a medical habitat. Norward knew it had not been designed for this use. It was an inflatable tent designed for MASH units to be able to operate in a chemically contaminated environment. It had two flexible Kevlar walls — an inner and outer — with the space between filled with compressed air from tanks they had brought with them, allowing it to be set up very quickly. On the inside it was relatively spacious, with just he and Yakov in there along with their gear.

The air coining in and out was ventilated through special air filters. It wasn’t the most perfect Biolevel 4 facility, but it was the best thing Kenyon had found available in the government inventory when he’d conducted the jaunt.

The entryway was cramped, and with great difficulty Yakov and Norward had disinfected the outside of their suits and the other plastic cases they stacked in the entryway. Then they unsuited, placing the garments into sealed plastic bags and shoving the empty cases back outside.

Norward was setting up the equipment when Turcotte and Kenyon arrived at the entry. The two disinfected and unsuited, passing through the air lock. Kenyon carefully carried the samples, sealed inside his waist pack.

To handle a Level 4 bio-agent required either a full suit or a glove box. On top of the table, Norward set up the latter. It was a device four feet wide, by three tall, by three wide. It had its own one-way mini air lock so they could put samples in — once in, the sample had to stay there until they took the box back to the Level 4 lab and could sterilize the inside.

There were numerous compartments so they could keep samples separate and not contaminate each other. There was also a microscope built into the box, so they could examine the samples.

“What are you doing?” Turcotte asked. He was wiping sweat off his forehead with a towel. Yakov was sitting on the floor of the habitat, taking a drink of water from a canteen.

Kenyon was placing the waist pack inside the air lock for the glove box. “What we have to find is a brick — a block of virus particles. A brick contains billions of virus particles, gathered together, waiting to move on to the next host.” Turcotte glanced at Yakov. The Russian shrugged.

Finished with the mechanical task of getting the box ready, Kenyon went to work. Stepping up to the side of the box, Kenyon stuck his hands through two openings, flexing his fingers into the heavy-duty gloves inside. Deftly, he opened the pack, removing the tubes holding the various samples. He sorted those out, placing the tubes in racks.

“I’m going to test it for Ebola, Marburg, and Ebola3,” Kenyon said. He took samples and mixed them with solutions in preset tubes that had an agent that would react to the specific virus. The tubes were blue.

“They’ll turn red if the virus was recognized,” Norward explained as Kenyon worked.

While they waited for a possible reaction, Kenyon put another sample from the brick onto a slide and put the slide into the other end of the scope and pressed his eye up against it.

Kenyon’s voice startled Turcotte. “I don’t think it’s Ebola3.” Kenyon pointed at the microscope and gestured to Norward. “Take a look.”

Norward bent over and peered. All he could see was a mass of particles — there was no chance of seeing an individual virus to get a visual ID.

“How can you tell that’s not Ebola3?”

“I know Ebola3 and I’ve seen bricks from Ebola3,” Kenyon said. “That doesn’t look like an Ebola3 brick.”

“One of the other two Ebolas?” Norward asked.

Kenyon looked down into the box at the four test tubes with the various Ebola reactants. They were still blue. “No.”

“Marburg?” Norward asked, hoping that at least they would know what they were up against. Even though there was no cure or vaccine for each of the viruses he had just mentioned, knowing the enemy would help clarify the situation.

Kenyon was looking in the box. “No.” All test tubes were still blue and the requisite time had passed. “It’s not a known. Could be a mutation of a known.”

Despite the air-conditioning pumping outside, Norward felt a trickle of sweat run down his back.

“Any idea what it is?” Yakov asked.

“It’s definitely a virus,” Kenyon said. “But it’s moving way too fast. It’s got to be passed on quicker than blood contact to hit this many people so quickly. And it looks like it’s one hundred percent fatal.”

“We didn’t check the town,” Turcotte said. “Maybe someone’s alive.” “Maybe.” Kenyon didn’t sound very optimistic.

“Could it be airborne?” Norward whispered, the very thought enough to make him wish he were very far away from here.

Kenyon stared at the isolation box. “I never thought we’d see an airborne virus that killed this quickly and could stay alive in the open. It doesn’t compute in the natural scale of things,” Kenyon said. “But…” He shook his head. “But it’s got to be vectoring some way quicker than body fluid.”

“The Black Death was transmitted by fleas,” Yakov said. “Could this virus be carried by some sort of animal or fly or something like that?”

Kenyon was still looking through the microscope. “Possibly. But then, it probably doesn’t kill its host. We need more information. And quickly.”

Peter Shartran carefully dipped the tea bag in a mug of hot water. He placed it on a spoon, then wrapped the string around, squeezing the last drops out, then discarded the bag into the waste can next to his desk. He cradled both hands around the mug and leaned back in his large swivel chair, staring at the oversized computer screen in front of him. He had six programs accessed, and his eyes flickered from one to another.

The NSA was established in 1952 by President Truman as a replacement for the Armed Forces Security Agency. It was charged with two major responsibilities: safeguarding the communications of the armed forces and monitoring the communications of other countries to gather intelligence. The term “communications” had changed from the original mandate in 1952. Back then the primary concern was radio. Now, with the age of satellites and computers, it involved all electronic media.

Shartran had been “given” a special tasking by his supervisor — to watch two separate locations, one in South America and one in China. So far it had been uninteresting, but mainly because he had spent the last several hours shifting through the communications and signals generated by Chinese forces and trying to get an order of battle on forces deployed near Qian-Ling, a routine task for an intelligence analyst. There had been nothing from the South America locale.

Shartran’s ears and eyes were a battery of sophisticated and tremendously expensive equipment. A KH-12 satellite had been moved over to a fixed orbit over Qian-Ling in China. Covering South America was much easier, as he had simply tapped into the Department of Defense antidrug network that blanketed that region of the world.

Shartran took a sip of his tea, preparing to get back to work on the order of battle, when a flashing symbol on one of the displays caught his attention. Several minutes before, something most unusual had happened: someone had bounced a signal off a GPS satellite and then received a back signal through the satellite.

The signal was strange because the satellite uplink went to the GPS satellite instead of one of the commercial satellites that handled SATCOM traffic.

GPS, which stood for ground positioning system, was a series of satellites in fixed orbits that continuously emitted location information that could be downloaded by GPRs — ground positioning receivers. The transmission had been sent up in such a frequency and modulation that it piggybacked on top of the normal GPS transmission on the way back down both times.

Shartran looked at the data and took another sip of tea as he considered the brief burst. Why would someone do that? The first and most obvious reason was to hide both brief transmissions. Shartran knew that even a one-second burst using modern encoding devices was enough to transmit a whole message, but maybe this wasn’t a message. The key question was why use the GPS satellite?

“Because they want to know where something is,” Shartran said out loud. But then, why didn’t the people on the other end simply tell the first transmitters their location? The answer came to him as quickly as he thought the question: because there was no one at the second site. It was all clicking now, and the more Shartran thought about it, the more his respect grew for whoever had thought of this. Using the GPS signal allowed the first transmitter to get a fix on the response, which was blindly broadcast up. And there was more. Maybe, just maybe, Shartran thought, the second signal was very weak and needed the GPS signal to add to its power.

“Most interesting,” he muttered as he summarized the information on his computer and e-mailed it into the Pentagon intelligence summary section. As the report flashed along the electronic highway, it fell in among hundreds of other summaries coming out of the vast octopus of intelligence agencies the United States fielded. And there it spooled, waiting to be correlated and even perhaps read. But Shartran also made a copy and sent it to the address his supervisor had told him to.