Retribution (SSU Trilogy Book 3) (The Surgical Strike Unit) (2 page)

There had been traces of Agent Styx in one of the samples. The same Vietnam era biochemical agent that had driven her father into uncontrollable rages. The U.S. government insisted they had stopped producing Agent Styx in 1971 and that they’d destroyed all existing samples.

Except Gabby possessed two vials of Agent Styx that her father had left her upon his death. Proof of the government’s horrible experiments. She’d studied Agent Styx. Seen traces of it in the blood of several of her patients who’d served in Vietnam. But she’d never found the chemical in anyone under the age of thirty. Until those samples she’d stolen.

When she’d seen the familiar marker glowing under her microscope, she’d thought wildly of running. Of taking the evidence to the authorities.

How naïve she’d been.

Gabby turned on the faucet and shoved her wrists under the cold water, adding soap and scrubbing until her skin was red. But no amount of soap could cleanse her of what she’d done.

She hadn’t realized that the security cameras had come back online in time to catch her leaving the secret lab. The next day, Dr. Pierce had confronted her in his office with proof of her trespassing. He’d threatened to throw her to his subjects as a target for their rage.

He’d bound Gabby’s hands behind her and marched her through the corridors into the secret lab. To what Gabby had believed would be her death. Dr. Kaufmann had explained that he’d been using her research to help mitigate chemically triggered, berserker rages that made his subjects impossible to command. And since the goal of his program was to create mind controlled superhuman soldiers, obedience was mandatory.

Kaufmann had offered Gabby one chance to save herself. She could work with him to overcome the men’s rages. Or she could die at the hands of his subjects.

Gabby splashed water on her face, wishing she could go back in time and tell Kaufmann no. He’d agreed so quickly, she wondered if she’d been manipulated into helping him. Still, she hadn’t seen any other way to stay alive. At least by easing the men’s rages, she’d thought she’d lessen their suffering.

Now, after a week of watching man after man put through mental and physical experiments that left them screaming in agony, she was ready to break. She wanted to tell Kaufmann she’d changed her mind.

Let him kill her.

Because she now believed that curing the rages would do more harm than good. Anger gave the subjects a degree of power. A chance to strike back at their tormentors. And a mental break from the constant orders of the scientists.

Gabby’s help only made their situation worse.

She scrubbed the towel over her face, but still didn’t feel clean.

Few of the men remained sane. Yet, if she could remove all the subjects from the program within a couple of days and get them into treatment, she thought most of them could regain some degree of mental clarity.

Which is why she and her co-conspirator had originally come up with a plan to free them tomorrow. Instead, Gabby had told Laurel this afternoon that they had to move the timetable up to tonight. Gabby feared that with her own shaky mental and physical condition, she’d give them away if they waited much longer. Already she’d made some mistakes in the lab—dropping a beaker, mixing the wrong chemicals—that had Kaufmann’s head of staff eyeing her with suspicion.

Knowing she was being watched and judged only made the sea of acid in her stomach burn that much hotter.

If she had to work at the lab for even another two days, Gabby thought it was very likely she would be the one who ended up insane.

Or dead.

Chapter 2

T
he last of his team had just slipped through the breach in the electrified fence when Rafe’s radio vibrated.

“We got activity at the rock face, boss,” Muldovsky said from his perch watching the back of the lab. “Part of it’s raising up, like a garage door.”

Rafe signaled his men to hold positions. “O’Ryan, you see any headlights coming our way?” The former Marine was stationed up a tall pine, with a clear view of the single road.

“Negative, boss.”

Rafe studied the lab. It appeared as deserted as the last two nights. The security guards were out patrolling the perimeter. If they held to schedule, this sector would remain clear for another ten minutes.

“We’re staying on plan,” Rafe announced. The wind had picked up, stirring the scent of pine and earth into a potent musk. Rafe knew the sounds of moving branches would help mask any sounds his men made, but a quieter night would have let him hear any approaching danger.

Rafe found himself smiling. Without a blueprint of the building and a security diagram, tonight’s maneuver was strictly improv from here on out. He loved missions like these, when success depended more on his team’s ingenuity than planning and technology.

“Well, well, lookee what we’ve got here,” Muldovsky murmured. “One of those transports from the satellite photos is leaving the building.”

“I’m on it.” In its earlier flyovers their satellite hadn’t even picked up a heat signal from the drivers of the trucks, which meant someone was going to a lot of trouble to hide what was going into, or coming out of, the hidden section of the lab. Rafe needed to know what was on those trucks.

He motioned for two of his men to head back to the road. Because the team had walked in, they didn’t have their own vehicle to follow the truck. But the road wound through the compound, so his men would have plenty of time to get in position and hit the truck with a tracking device. Then the satellite would be able to locate it and send back photos.

“Hold up, boss. It’s not going down the road. It’s heading into the trees… Okay, good, the truck’s moving slow enough that Willits is gonna sneak onboard.”

“Roger.” Rafe shifted his attention from his radio to the men around him as they approached the compound. At the signal from his point man, Rafe dashed across the lawn and onto the building’s tiny front step. He pulled the dummy passkey out of his pocket and was just raising it to the electronic reader, when Muldovsky’s voice crackled through the radio at his ear.

“Fuck!”

Rafe froze, then gave one quiet click of his mic to let his teammate know he’d been heard.

“Boss, Willits reports dead bodies in the back of the truck.”

Rafe squeezed his eyes shut. He knew they were all wondering the same thing. Was Nate’s body among them?

Rafe shook his head. He couldn’t think about that now. He gave another click of the mic to acknowledge Muldovsky.

Then he proceeded with breaking into the lab. If Nate was indeed one of the dead, Rafe was damn well going to find out how and why he’d died.

G
od bless Janey Reese, Rafe thought ten minutes later as the light on the lab’s electronic lock turned green. The SSU’s self-styled Gadget Goddess was the female equivalent to James Bond’s “Q.” Sixty if she was a day, she ran rings around her younger counterparts when it came to practical innovations. This dummy passkey was a perfect example. It had gotten them into the building and now allowed Rafe and his men to access each individual lab.

Unfortunately, the labels on the neat rows of chemicals and test tubes in this small room meant little to Rafe. His brother-in-law was a biochemical expert, but Kai was currently recovering from a severe malaria attack caused by a mutated parasite that didn’t respond well to current drugs. Sparing a quick prayer for Kai’s health, Rafe asked, “Anything look out of the ordinary to you, Addison?”

“Besides the fact that there’s no power in the lab, not even a live battery backup for the computer, and there isn’t so much as a Post-it in sight?” Addison whispered dryly. “Not a thing.”

Yeah, the sterility of the room also bugged Rafe. He had no way of knowing if the lab was about to be closed down for good, or if removing all notes and disconnecting all power to the labs was standard post-hours procedure.

“Chemicals all seem pretty standard,” Addison added. He was the only one on the team who’d taken chemistry in college, so he was the de facto expert. He waved a handheld sensor over the bottles and test tubes, across the counter, around the sink and underneath to the empty trash can. “No traces of any known biochemical or radioactive weapon-grade material,” he announced.

Rafe nodded. The sensors were designed to detect the slightest residue that even a thorough cleaning might miss. He signaled Addison to follow him and stepped out into the hallway. “Anyone else have better luck?” he breathed into his lip mic.

“No smoking guns, or smoldering cauldrons, boss,” Teng replied. “But I do have a locked door that our guru’s passkey isn’t opening. They’ve got a second layer of security here.”

“I’ll be—”

“Boss,” Muldovsky’s voice cut in. “You boys done something to draw attention to yourselves? I’ve got a team of six guards leaving the lower level and heading your way.”

Fuck. Rafe met Addison’s eyes, seeing the same suspicion reflected there.

“We must have triggered a silent alarm,” Rafe murmured. “Time to head out. Muldovsky, any word from Willits?” Rafe jogged down the corridor toward the front door.

“Negative boss. He’s still with the truck.”

“Keep me posted. Going radio silent.”

With the coordination of long practice, Rafe and his men slipped out the door, across the lawn, and back into the trees with mere seconds to spare before the compound’s security team moved stealthily into view.

As they headed back to the rendezvous point, Rafe started plotting how to get access to that hidden room.

W
illits stalked into camp a good hour after Rafe and his team. The other men stepped out of his way, aware from the muscles working at his jaw that their teammate was furious and looking for a fight.

Rafe stood slowly from his crouched position by the food pack. Willits stopped a foot from Rafe. “Nate wasn’t on the truck, sir.”

Rafe nodded and felt the fist around his chest loosen. He’d been prepared to deal with the news of Nate’s death, but all of them would sleep better tonight knowing their missing teammate could still be alive and inside the lab.

“Tell me what you saw,” Rafe commanded quietly.

Willits’s blue eyes lost their angry glitter and turned bleak. “Seven dead men. Cause of death—” His lips twisted and he looked away. One shuddering inhale later, he swung his eyes back to Rafe’s, his anger back. “One had his throat torn out. The teeth marks looked human.”

“Shit.”

“Three more had dried blood at their eyes, nose, ears and mouth. It looked like Ebola, but my sensor didn’t pick up any known virus. The others appeared to have died from having the living hell beat out of them.” Willits shook his head. “They were just fucking dumped in the truck, then driven out to a huge underground crematorium and tossed inside like fucking garbage.”

Rafe watched Willits’s fists open and close, and knew that wasn’t the end of the story.

“And?” Rafe prompted.

Willits notched his chin up. “I recognized one of the guys with the bloody eyes. Bert Landers. Lying, troublemaking sack of shit from the last basic training class I ran for the army before I joined the SSU. Six months ago, I heard he’d been killed in a training accident. But his body tonight in the truck…dead no more than a few days at most. And two more of the bodies were men on our list of missing personnel.”

“Fuck.” The soft expletive came from O’Ryan. He and the rest of the men weren’t even pretending not to listen.

“Here.” Willits thrust his smartphone at Rafe. “I took photos.”

Aware that the eyes of every one of his men were on him as he scrolled through the photos, Rafe kept his breathing even and his jaw relaxed even though he wanted to hurl the phone across the campsite.
They’ll face justice,
Rafe promised himself.
One way or another we’ll make certain they pay
.

“Teng,” he snapped to his communications expert when he could trust himself to speak without snarling. “Get Ryker on the line. Willits, you have anything to add?”

There wasn’t much more. Willits had stayed in the back of the truck until it stopped, then slipped into the woods and watched as the driver and another man carried the bodies to the crematorium, tossed them in, then pushed the button to set the fire.

“Yo boss. Ryker on line one.” Rafe dismissed Willits with a clap on the shoulder, then grabbed the satellite phone Teng held out to him.

Rafe walked out of camp as he greeted the director and founder of the SSU, then launched into an account of tonight’s developments.

After Rafe had finished, Ryker cursed softly. “Those symptoms sound like the ones reported with some of Nevsky’s subjects.” Rafe could just make out the faint sound of his boss spinning the antique globe he kept in his office, a sure sign Ryker was deep in thought. “We found Nevsky’s body, but not Kaufmann’s. It’s possible Kaufmann survived and started his own program.”

Rafe barely held back his own curses.
Their surveillance hadn’t shown anyone matching Kaufmann’s description exiting or entering the facility, but if the man lived inside the compound he wouldn’t need to leave. A select team of personnel drove into town once a month to pick up supplies. Aside from the staff that was bused to and from the housing complex, the SSU had been unable to get an accurate count of how many people, stayed inside the compound around the clock. The buildings had been built in such a way that infrared couldn’t penetrate.

“Any luck tracing the money?” Rafe asked.

“No. Whoever set up the bank account to cover the compound’s expenses in town buried the details well. It will take time to unravel all the connections and I suspect in the end we’ll run into a dead end. I’ll tell our researchers to add Kaufmann’s name to the search, but since he’s presumed dead, any money he’s getting for running the program will likely be under a false name.”

“Yeah. That could also explain why there wasn’t a single piece of branded paper in the labs or even a pencil with a customized logo on it. In case of infiltration, no one would know where to start looking for records tying the program back to its funder.”

Rafe hoped to hell the leader of the program wasn’t Kaufmann. Dr. Leonard
Kaufmann had been the right hand man of Dr. Mikhail Nevsky, a scientist who had worked for the United States government to develop a program for creating superhuman spies and soldiers. Using a combination of drugs, hypnosis and gene manipulation, Nevsky had made advances in physical strength, speed and immunity. There was just one problem. None of Nevsky’s human subjects had survived past five or six months. They either went insane and committed suicide, or they died from massive organ failure.