Allegiance (27 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

Schriever AFB

Colorado Springs,
Colorado

The numbers glowing
green on Cade’s Suunto read zero-four-thirty. He had been awake since
zero-three-hundred, and save for the soft steady breathing of the two loves of
his life, everything was quiet in the Grayson billet.

He sat in the chair by
the door, lacing his boots and thinking about how he was going to handle the
Whipper thing. There had been no witnesses. No security cameras recording his
lapse in judgment. So what it boiled down to was that it was between him,
Whipper, and the wall, and the only thing he had to answer to was his own
conscience. That and the man’s word, of course. The fact that he was taking up
Nash’s offer—with a little added encouragement from his family—dictated he
would have to make up for his transgression sooner or later. Furthermore,
Whipper seemed like the type of individual who might take something like this “
up
the chain
.”

The main thing Cade had
going for him when he had decided to play a little chin music on the crotchety
first sergeant was the fact that, at the time, he hadn’t technically been an
Army captain. Therefore, he supposed, the likelihood that he would be summoned
before General Gaines for a disciplinary hearing hovered somewhere between slim
and none—especially taking into consideration the high priority nature of the
pending mission. So, for now, the only fallout that he feared would be a loss
of respect amongst his peers. And the sad fact of the matter was, that was the
consequence he feared the most.

He passed the bottom
bunk he had been sharing with Brook as he made his way towards the rear of the
building. Sharing not being the optimal word when under the covers with his
bed
hog
of a wife. She seemed to be sleeping soundly as he padded by. Then he
marveled at how just a few days and a new numerical title had changed his
daughter as he heel-and-toed it past the
twelve-year-old
section of the
family dwelling where three of the bunk beds had been pushed together (with a
little forced Dad labor) and now formed a sort of elevated island sanctuary
within the sea of adultness that Raven indicated their living conditions had
become.

He counted two bunks
over. Reached up, feeling around blindly in the gloom, and pulled the sheets
concealing his secret onto the floor. He stepped up onto the lower bed so he
had a better angle and an added measure of leverage, grabbed one of the shiny
painted aluminum tubes in each hand, and lowered the mountain bike to the
floor. He didn’t want to wake anyone prematurely, so he carried the thing to
the front door with one hand on the knobby rear tire to keep the noisy
freewheel from giving him away. The purple and white belated birthday present
went propped against the wall next to the door where Raven would see it. Then
he placed the white envelope addressed to Brooklyn Grayson on the small metal
table near the entry. On top of the envelope he left the single white rose for
his wife.

Then he shouldered his
pack and strapped on the black combat dagger. Grabbed the M4, clicking it onto
its single-point harness, and then holstered both Glocks. And then as he left
the billet, he blew a kiss towards his sleeping family.

0500
Hours - 50th Space Wing Satellite Operations Room

To Cade, the air inside
of the low-ceilinged room where Major Freda Nash and the men and women of the
50th Space Wing would be presenting their briefing seemed like it had been
piped in from hell. A run of three uninterrupted hundred degree days, with a
possible fourth just dawning, had made even the nights in the high desert muggy
and barely tolerable.

Trying to compete with
the phalanx of humming computers, dozens of warm bodies and the multiple
heat-emitting monitors scattered about the room would have given the
commercial-grade roof-mounted A/C unit a workout, let alone the jury-rigged
little wall-mounted box in the corner currently waging a losing battle. And
with the base still at the mercy of the half-dozen aging diesel backup
generators, and the power hungry electronics inside the TOC—Tactical Operations
Center—already a major drain, running the internal air conditioning had been
out of the question.

He ran his fingers
between his neck and collar, letting the trapped body heat escape, then took a
quick inventory of the room. Next to Nash, standing at rigid attention, his
bald ebony pate gleaming in the diffuse overhead lighting, Colonel Cornelius
Shrill tracked the moving images on the flat-panel with an intensity Cade had
yet to see the base commander exhibit. To his right—a foot and a half shorter,
petite, brunette, and with a firm set jaw—stood President Valerie Clay. Though
she was unarmed, dressed in desert tan fatigues she could have been mistaken
for any one of the female soldiers or airmen who called Schriever Air Force
base home.

As he finished his sweep
of the room, his gaze passed Clay’s Secret Service detail and fell on General
Ronnie Gaines. The tall SF operator’s attention was focused laser-like on the
hundred-inch flat-panel—and the look on his face matched the others in the
room—businesslike and deadly serious.

Cade’s attention wavered
momentarily, then returned to the briefing. Nash’s voice faded in and out as
the images of insurmountable suffering and wide scale death flashed across the
LCD screen. He was becoming numb to it all. He had seen the carnage wrought on
the United States by the roaming packs of dead from every angle. Beamed in from
a Reaper drone orbiting at ten-thousand feet. From the safe confines of a
helicopter roaring by a hundred feet off the deck. He had seen real-time
satellite imagery of zombies, six hundred thousand strong, shambling lockstep
out of Denver on a collision course with his family. Monsters tumbling like
lemmings off of the Golden Gate bridge, much of its span dangling into space,
didn’t even register. Nothing was new for the hardened Delta Force operator. A
new image graced the flat-panel in front of him, but unfortunately the
thousands of watercraft, all shapes and sizes, a sort of floating morgue that
dotted Sydney Harbor, failed to make a blip on his give-a-shit radar. The
horrific image splashed on the screen was nothing different than the death and
misery he had seen recently on the Flaming Gorge Reservoir—just a greater
measure of it. Every person out there was suffering—worldwide—and he had seen
enough of it since the dead began to walk to last ten lifetimes.

Death came in many
different guises. Yeah, the Pale Rider was an underhanded bastard, Cade mused.
The humorless fucker kept coming up with new and extraordinarily horrific ways
for man to make his acquaintance.

He was drawn from his
Many
Faces of Death
moment by Freda Nash’s voice. “This next image was taken by
one of our three remaining KH class satellites,” the diminutive major stated.
She looked over at Cade, nodding her head ever so subtly. “Watch for the glint
in the lower right corner. That
is not
one of our birds.”

Cade made a face.
Three
left?
he thought incredulously, as the new image on the screen caught him
flatfooted. To his knowledge, the Department of Defense had more than a dozen
of the billion dollar crafts in orbit at all times. For early warning as well
as an orbital spying platforms. But what the birds were really capable of was
way above his pay grade. He had assumed this briefing had been called to go
over what was on the newly discovered thumb drive. Maybe touch over any
actionable intelligence the President’s men had coaxed or hopefully beaten out
of Robert Christian. Instead he was looking at an HD video taken from a low
earth orbit in outer space, at what appeared to his untrained eye to be the
International Space Station. And as the silver and white speck grew larger, he
discerned the monstrous array of solar panels and finally the white cylinders
that were fastened together to make up the space station’s living and working
areas.

Nash dabbed beads of sweat
from her face and then continued. “Although the Chinese have not contacted us
since they spread the Omega virus, we believed at first that they
had
some continuity of government. However, after this incident happened four days
ago, our assessment has changed.” She clicked a button on the remote sending
the image moving. “Watch the station closely. There are six crew aboard. One
Israeli, one Chinese national, and four Americans. Most of you know the
commander of the ISS...” She paused, bowed her head momentarily, then continued
on. “Many of you
knew
Colonel Chris Mashfield,” she corrected herself.
She wiped her eyes and turned to face the flat-panel.

Cade marveled at the
image captured by the Key Hole satellite. The Earth was a brilliant blue, and
the continents and islands looked abandoned and lonely surrounded by vast
oceans. As viewed through the high-flying lens, the contrasting white clouds
seemed to be randomly frozen in place. And contrary to how fucked up things
really were on the surface, the Earth looked peaceful and inviting from two
hundred miles up. Then, after roughly ten seconds had elapsed, and with the
South Pacific passing slowly underneath the space station, a shiny foreign
object moved into view. The KH-12 satellite’s high resolution optics zoomed in
and it became clear to Cade that the second object was some kind of satellite.
It kind of looked like a kid’s homemade robot costume, square and shiny, like a
box wrapped in tinfoil, with shiny sails and bristling with what he assumed
were sensors. It seemed to decelerate as it rotated on axis. Either that was
the case, Cade thought to himself, or he was mistaken and the difference in
size between the trailing satellite and the ISS in the background made the
intruding craft only
seem
like it was making some kind of closing
maneuver. Suddenly the screen froze and Nash resumed her commentary.

“The attack occurs at
the forty-two second mark,” Nash intoned. “The newly arrived second vehicle is
a Chinese Yuan class killer sat. Watch closely.”

She turned back towards
the flat-panel and aimed the remote to put the image back into motion. The
tension in the room became palpable. Gone was the shuffling of feet and the
hushed conversation. All eyes were riveted on the flat-panel display awaiting
the inevitable.

Cade watched the elapsed
time running in the screen’s corner. He had never witnessed any kind of
space-borne laser being discharged either during a test or used in an attack of
this nature. And though he knew this footage was days old, he still felt a
twinge of sorrow for the people onboard the ISS—even the lone Chinese national.

The numerals crawled
forward, and when they hit the forty-one second mark he felt a sudden
overwhelming empathy towards the crew, all of who were totally oblivious that
they had only one second left to live. Every muscle in his body went rigid as
he waited for a green or red laser beam to lance from the Chinese sat and then
some kind of huge fireball to bloom as a result. In his mind’s eye he saw an
X-Wing Fighter being obliterated by the Death Star’s ion cannons.

Instead, two things
happened at once: some kind of cylindrical object—probably made from titanium,
Cade reasoned—flashed diagonally from the Chinese Yuan hunter-killer satellite,
transited space on a razor-straight trajectory, and then disappeared without
any kind of a fireball or cataclysmic explosion, sound, or light show, into
what he guessed was the crew compartment just aft of the fully deployed solar
sails. The impact tore a rapidly widening black wound into the station’s
pristine white skin.

Next, a burst of
propellant shot from the thrust gimbals located on the rogue satellite’s flank,
changing its attitude and setting it on a digressive tangent, taking it away
from the slowly disintegrating space station. A tick later, the Chinese Yuan
craft fell victim to a similar attack, as multiple projectiles of like size
blurred by the optics of the KH-12 and dissected the unmanned Chinese sat into
several smaller pieces, which in turn spun off in different directions, trailing
a glittering carpet of flash-frozen fuels and lubricants intermixed with
thousands of minuscule pieces of shimmering exotic metals. The entire
aftermath, minus the planet in the background, reminded him of how the lights
of Los Angeles use to sparkle at nighttime.

The room came alive as
every person took a collective breath. Then went silent as the fate of the
doomed crew aboard the ISS became evident. Finally on the upswing of the
emotional rollercoaster, a cheer went up as the Chinese satellite was
destroyed.

Emotion-filled
conversations erupted around the room and increased in volume until Nash
cleared her throat into the
hot
microphone. After a few seconds, she
stopped the footage. It was replaced with the 50th Space Wing’s logo on a
bright blue background. The room suddenly fell silent, and Nash’s commanding
presence took over.

“The attack that you
just witnessed was
not
initiated by the Chinese government as we know
it. At least not
recently
. Like Russia and most of Europe, China has
gone black. The entire country is quiet. Their military is idle. As for their
Navy, we’re certain their sub fleet is intact—at least the ones that were
underway when things went south for them. Nearly every vessel in their surface
fleet—littoral and blue water—was either in port or returned home by Z-day plus
two. The direct line to Secretary General Jinlong has been silent since Z-day,
and we have had
zero
contact with
anyone
in their government
since. So the fact that no one contacted the President after this heinous
act—either to confirm, deny, or apologize is not surprising, and says more than
the act itself. I don’t want to sound cliché, but ladies and gentlemen,
the
silence is deafening
. The only communication we have had with mainland
China
was
with a handful of people operating Ham radios, and that ceased
days ago. Every single one of those interactions indicated what we had already
suspected: the dead have taken over and their government has failed them. So
this begs the question: why are their space-based assets targeting our
platforms?”