Stryker: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (2 page)

The next time he stopped to get his
wind, he saw the man had closed the gap between them to around 700 meters
again, and was laying prone, setting up his next shot. He immediately began
running again, moving away at an angle from the straight line he had followed
toward the Breaks, sidestepping occasionally to throw off the aim of the
shooter. At this distance, the bullet would be in the air for over two seconds,
and a lot can happen in that period of time in ballistic terms.

Both gravity and drag resistance affect
the projectile from the moment it leaves the barrel, and serves to force the
bullet to slow and drop.
Snipers’ ballistic
tables will predict how much elevation correction must be applied to the sight
line for shots at various known distances. A projectile has both forward and
vertical motion. Forward motion is slowed due to air resistance, and the
vertical motion is dependent on a combination of the elevation angle and
gravity.
Wind
was also factor, and it was gusty that day. A target can move or duck. In
short, the man was trying to make incredibly difficult shots from a distance
that made each shot more a matter of luck than skill. Another slug whizzed by
his right side, and he again accelerated to a sprint to gain back the distance
he had until a few minutes ago.

“Who the hell is this guy?” he mumbled
to himself as he settled into a long stride and slower pace. Glancing over his
shoulder a few minutes later, he saw that he had opened the gap to around 1,000
meters. The man continued to follow at the now-familiar lope.

Stryker noted that he was no longer
sweating – not a good sign. He was out of water, and would soon begin to falter
and eventually pass out. He looked ahead and noted the Breaks were around a
mile off. The sound of his boots impacting the concrete-like compacted earth
echoed in his ears. He was coming up to a series of rolling hills filled with
trees and shrubs and full of concealment options. He slowed down, allowing the
pursuer to close again to 800 meters, before he entered the first set of hills
and jogged up the slope. Jogging down the backside, he slowed to a walk and
gradually climbed the second hill, where he waited for the man to reach the top
of the first hill. Stryker ran down the third hill and up the next few until he
widened the gap by 1,200 meters.

Moving off the trail, he hand-railed his
way through the trees and back to the depression between the last two hills by moving
parallel to the path he followed up, traveling through the concealment of the
trees that lined the trail. He plopped down beneath a scrub cedar. When he
finally got his breathing under control, he raised his M-4 and waited in a
prone position with his weapon pointed at the trail he just traversed.

The man topped the third hill and
stopped to glass the trail ahead. He was 500 meters out; though tempted,
Stryker could not take the shot in his condition. His attacker moved forward,
obviously cautious and knowledgeable about how the tactical situation had
changed. Stryker knew the man understood he was now the hunted and not the
hunter, and his slow approach told Stryker he would be spotted and taken out in
a matter of minutes if he didn’t land the first blow.

He remembered his grandfather, a World
War II vet that was hard as a woodpecker’s beak and gentle as a lamb. He once
told Stryker, who had just come home with a black eye from the first of many
schoolyard fights, that there were only two rules to fighting. The first was to
try to stay out of them. The second was get in the first blow and keep going
until your opponent is helpless; don’t give him the chance to mount an offence
against you. Stryker waited patiently for the man to reach the top of the next
hill. That would put him at 120 meters, and he was confident he could make that
shot. He switched the selector to burst and aimed at the spot where he expected
the guy to appear at the crest of the hill.

He waited his breathing now normal.

After a few minutes, he saw movement in
the tree line on the opposite side of the trail that he had followed through
the Breaks. The man was adopting the same tactics as Stryker had used, and was
moving through the concealment of the trees and bushes.

“Damn, this guy is good,” Stryker
whispered with a note of exasperation. “I’m going to drive a stake into this
asshole’s heart when I’m done killing him.”

Assess and evaluate. Options. Stryker
thought he might be able to let the man pass and quietly make his way back to the
Jeep and clear the area. He also knew that he could not take a chance on having
another round with the man. He was too good and might well track him back and
turn the existing ordeal into a saga of biblical proportions. Stryker was
running on fumes, badly needed water, and wasn’t built for this sort of
contest. It had to end now, he concluded. He had to get water and he had to
rest. Risk and reward.

He sighed quietly, rose to his feet, and
moved up the slope to find some elevation and a spot to get a clear shot. He
moved slowly, careful to not disturb branches. He continued up the slope until
he saw a clearing that the pursuer would have to cross to continue moving in
the same direction. He again dropped to the prone position and pointed his M-4
toward the clearing.

The first thing he saw entering the
clearing was the barrel of the .308, then the scope mounted on the weapon. The
man was moving very slowly, gun up, but looking over the scope, hoping to spot
him and get the shot. Stryker peered through his scope, his finger tightening
on the trigger. The man slowly fully emerged from the trees and traversed his
weapon toward Stryker’s position. He knew his opponent was somewhere on the
other side of the trail, but had not yet spotted Stryker.

He softly exhaled, gently squeezed the
trigger, and three rounds exploded out the barrel of his weapon. They struck
the man center mass, creating a puff of pink haze from his chest. He fell to
the ground as though he had fallen through the hatch of a gallows, and in a sense,
he had. Stryker waited for a few moments and then watched the man roll over on
his back. His weapon had fallen a few feet away, and he struggled briefly to
reach it, but fell back and remained still.

Stryker emerged from behind a stand of
cedar, glanced up and down the trail, and slowly approached the man with his
M-4 up and ready. He let the rifle dangle from his two-point sling, muzzle
down, after he drew his pistol from the drop holster. As he got closer, he
noticed that his pursuer was a wiry little nugget of man, with a wild beard
that seemed to point in every direction. He groaned once and then his eyes flew
open. What he saw was a giant pointing an XD at his head and looking grim.

“You’re going to bleed out in a few
hours. Even if I was inclined to help you, which I most definitely am not,
there’s nothing I can do,” the giant said, his voice sounding like the rumble
of a diesel engine.

“I know,” the prone man wheezed.

“You want me to end it or not?”

“End it,” the man replied, after briefly
considering the question.

“Just one question. What kind of
training have you had?”

“I was in the teams,” he whispered.

“SEALS?”

The man nodded.

“Okay, I got another question.” The man
nodded again.

“Do you know a five-letter word that
means ‘guiding principals’?”

“Hell you talkin’ about?”

“It’s from a crossword puzzle. I can’t
get that one, and I’m glad you told me that Navy thing.”

“Why?”

“You just made things a lot easier for
me. I hate the Navy. If I were to tell you all the things I hate about the
Navy, you would bleed out before I could shoot you.” Stryker leveled the pistol
and fired into the man’s skull. A red blossom appeared on his forehead.

Stryker searched his pockets and assault
pack, discovered a canteen of water, and drank it. He pocketed a spare mag for
the .308. He picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He started to
move away, but after two steps, he turned back and fired two more rounds into
the man’s forehead. “That’s for turning my day into a track meet,” he muttered.

As he moved down the slope, he
turned on the imaginary CD player in his head and listened to the
At
Fillmore East
version of the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post.” It started
with a low rumble of
Berry
Oakley
’s
bass guitar, then Duane Allman’s electric guitar
entered, and Dickey Betts joined in. The twin lead guitars mirrored every note
with amazing precision. The rhythm gained speed and momentum as the plaintive
notes gathered velocity and turned into angry snarls, and the pounding of the
drum increased. Gregg entered the fray with a gravelly, despondent voice that
turned into an angry shriek. Stryker could feel every emotion in that voice:
the despondent desperation, the longing for what was and didn’t last. He knew
the emotions well. Somehow, it didn’t seem gloomy or disheartening. Rather, he
heard it as an expression of hope and an embracing of pain and injury.

As he walked, his eyes never stopped scanning
the terrain, stopping every 10 paces to check behind him before he again set
off. He thought about the pursuer he just killed; now that he no longer was a
threat, Stryker felt a grudging admiration for the man. He was determined,
skilled, and a pretty good shot considering the conditions and ranges from
which he fired. In another time and place, they may have been drinking in some
run-down bar, trading stories about their deployments, and telling jokes at the
cost of the other’s branch of service. They would talk about weapons, which
were best for which missions. They would have talked about wives and family. In
the end, they would leave that bar with the promise to stay in touch, both
knowing they never would, but happy to have spent time with another warrior.

The song was exactly 22:04 in length.
Stryker decided to let it play through his head three times, then rest for ten
minutes. If he did that for the rest of the day, he could sleep in the Jeep
tonight and head home tomorrow.

He hefted the bag with the gold coins,
thinking what a pity that someone died over them. If he had it to do over, he
would never have entered the house. But, nobody is right 100 percent of the
time. Risk and reward. It wasn’t like doing accounting. The perfect ledger didn’t
end with a zero in each column. It usually was a one-to-zero ending and Stryker
was lucky the zero wasn’t in his column that day.

DIE OFF MINUS ONE MONTH

Richard Biggs sat in the first-class
section of a Lufthansa 747 that was making its way to Frankfurt, Germany. He
grinned as he reviewed the email that confirmed the deposit of four million
dollars into his bank account in the Bahamas.

After years of eking out an existence as
a Department of Defense bioengineer, he was retiring. He did take a parting
gift with him, though. It was a small vial of weaponized Ebola virus. He had
slaved away for twenty years in the labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick,
Maryland. The installation had been the center of the U.S. biological weapons
program that theoretically halted in 1969 by virtue of the U.S. signing an
international treaty banning further development of the weapons. The truth was
known to only a handful of researchers, including Biggs: the development of
bioweapons had never stopped, and the security where Richard worked was so
compartmentalized that nobody even knew he had developed the deadliest weapon
in the history of the world.

Richard did most of the work on weekends
and after hours. He was seen as a workaholic by most of his fellow scientists,
and he was just fine with leaving that impression. The work was entirely off
the books, as was the development of the new virus. He had not used computers
or kept lab notes. He kept it in his prodigious memory until he arrived home,
then made the notes and used a computer that was not connected to the Internet.
It had taken close to four years.

There were two strokes of true genius
with his strain of Ebola. He had managed to make the virus into an airborne
pathogen that would spread much more quickly than the normal strains that
required human fluid to transmit the disease. He also found the means to make
the virus mutate with every new host; the incubation period grew shorter with
each mutation. So when the outbreak actually occurred, it would hit all the
victims at roughly the same time, thus overwhelming the medical care system.
Ebola was not always deadly as long as intensive medical care was available.
Often, as many people died from the lack of treatment as they did from the
disease itself. But this strain would tax any health care systems to the edge
of a total breakdown, and beyond.

He also invented a vaccine for the
virus, and nobody knew that either. He was on his way to Frankfurt to collect
the second of three payments he was due. His new friend, Hans, owned a large
German pharmaceutical company, and was purchasing the vial and a single sample
dose of the vaccine.

During a previous meeting in New York,
Hans explained the plan in stunning simplicity: He intended to release the
pathogen in a small remote village in Africa and immediately rush in medical
staff to reduce the loss of life. Once quarantined, the disease would be
contained in that village. But, the market for the vaccine would explode, and
Hans was paying Biggs another four million dollars for the formula to
mass-produce the vaccine once the outbreak was contained. It seemed like a
workable plan to Richard, and it would give him enough money to buy anything he
desired. He would drop his facade and live the way he truly wanted.

Biggs, a tiny man with bird-like
features and beady eyes, was an angry person. Having put up with bullies
throughout his childhood and well in the high school, he was forged into
someone who saw only evil in others, and didn’t particularly care for the human
race. He was also a 200-point IQ genius with an incredibly complex mind. He
understood things that others just couldn’t see, even if they were pointed out
to them. He lived behind a carefully constructed facade at work. He was polite
and outwardly respectful and considerate. He took orders from superiors who
were intellectually inferior to him without complaint. He learned long ago that
anything else would cost him his job. And, he always resented that he couldn’t
publish his work and receive the accolades that his giant intellect needed and
wanted.

At one time, Biggs attempted a
relationship with a woman named Julie, who he met through a dating web site;
but she never returned his calls. Biggs was friendless, wifeless, childless,
and pretty much on his own – and he liked it that way.

The part of his research he enjoyed most
was watching the lab animals die slow and painful deaths. It was nothing new to
him, as he had experimented with neighborhood pets as a child. Most people in
the neighborhood suspected that he was responsible, but nobody could ever prove
it and there were never any witnesses. He was far too clever for that. Watching
animals die still gave him a huge erection, and he often had to relieve himself
in his private bathroom after a lengthy process of watching life drain away
from some hapless lab creature.

“May I get you something to drink?” the
flight attendant asked. Richard was startled out of his reverie and looked at
the young woman. She was stunning. Her hair was long and very blonde, and her
blue eyes showed a sense of merriment.

“Certainly. May I have a glass of port?”

“Of course,” she replied, jotting a note
on her order pad. Richard watched her walk away. Soon, he would have someone
like her every night, whenever he wanted. He smiled at the thought and was
asleep before the flight attendant returned with his drink.

The Frankfurt Airport is one of the
largest in the world, with more than 2,000 flights a day landing and taking off
to and from every point on the globe. More than 200,000 travelers passed though
the terminals on given day, usually making connections to other destinations.
It was a hub for almost every international airline in the world and was in a
state of perpetual expansion and renovation.

Richard passed through a sea of people
heading in both directions, cleared customs, and moved out of the secure area
of the airport. What he was about to do was carefully choreographed to be an
exchange of briefcases that went unnoticed. He passed by theatres, porn shops,
restaurants, and bars. The airport really was a small city and it would be
possible to live in it, quite comfortably, for long periods of time.

He consulted a map of the facility,
turned left at the next intersection, and took a seat in the back corner of the
Jet Set restaurant and bar. A few moments later, Hans entered and took a seat
opposite him. Richard studied him for a moment. He was an entirely unremarkable
man. Average height and weight, brown eyes, and dark hair that was going gray
in spots. He was dressed in an immaculate grey suit with a red tie, and looked
the part of a business traveler. Richard was dressed the same way. They were
just two colleagues stopping for coffee or a drink before they continued their
journeys.

“Can I get a coffee for you?” Hans
asked. While his English was fluent, it was heavily accented.

“Of course.”

“Black?”

“Please.” Hans set down a briefcase that
was identical to Richard’s next to his chair, and moved off to get the coffee.
While he was out of sight, Richard got up and switched chairs, and then patted
the briefcase that had arrived with Hans. All it contained was a single piece
of paper that had the account number and password to the account Hans had set
up for him in Mallorca, Richard’s ultimate destination.

Hans returned and placed a mug of coffee
in front of Richard, then sat in the chair that Richard had occupied. Hans
glanced around and noted that nobody was paying any attention to them. He
relaxed in his chair and took a sip of coffee. Richard did the same.

“Did you find the villa in Mallorca
yet?” Hans asked.

“I made the down payment by wire
transfer yesterday.”

“Have you confirmed the second deposit I
sent you?” Hans asked.

“Yes, by telephone yesterday.”

“So, I guess we’re done until we need the
vaccine.”

“When do you think that will be?”
Richard asked.

“Around thirty days.”

“You have my email and phone number.
Just call or email me and I will forward the documents with the vaccine formula
to you by email attachment.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Hans said as he
offered his hand. Richard shook it briefly.

“I better get to my flight,” Richard
said. He finished his coffee, stood with the briefcase in hand, and walked away
without looking back.

Hans removed a newspaper from his jacket
pocket. When Richard was out of sight, he opened the briefcase and slipped the
syringe holding the single dose of the vaccine into his jacket pocket. He sat
at the same table for another fifteen minutes reading the paper.

A swarthy-looking man entered the
restaurant with another identical bag, found Hans, and set the briefcase down
next to one of the chairs. Hans stared at him for a moment, noting the
hawk-like nose and the gleam of the zealot in his eyes. The man’s blue eyes
stood in sharp contrast to his other dark features, and he would be considered
handsome by most. He also wore a business suit and seemed to be a wealthy Arab
on a business trip.

“Can I get you a coffee?” Hans asked.
The German-accented English had disappeared, replaced by Russian-accented
English.

“Please, Serge,” the man replied.

“Of course, Mohammed,” he replied. The
two men performed the same ritual as Hans and Richard had done, but neither
drank their coffee.

“The scientist?” Mohammed asked.

“He’ll be dead in a few hours.”

“Poison?”

“In the coffee. No matter. It’s not
traceable. The autopsy will indicate a heart attack. He’ll die somewhere
between here and Mallorca on the plane.”

“So there is no antidote or vaccine for
the virus?”

“No,” Serge lied.

“Well done.”

“I’ll be on my way,” Serge said, rising
and exiting with the briefcase Mohammed had left when he arrived. Serge
personally hated dealing with the ISIS operative, but they were his best
customers, so he tolerated the man to keep his weapons-trading business going.
He had neglected to inform him, however, of the vaccine. That was his little
secret. He had been scrupulous in his dealings with them until now, because
when your clients are perfectly capable of killing you anywhere in the world,
it’s a good idea to play it straight. This was his one exception. He had no
idea what the crazy bastards were planning to do with the virus, but he would
make sure the vaccine coursed through his blood before the end of the day.

He seriously doubted Richard’s claims as
to how virulent the virus was. The weapon the little weasel described was
beyond anything he knew of and the man was a braggart. Serge decided to do the
transaction because it was very lucrative, he had the vaccine sample, and the
likelihood of the bumbling ISIS operatives actually pulling off anything
serious was laughable.

Mohammed went into a stall in the
bathroom and extracted the vial from the briefcase, then shoved it into his
pocket and left the case in the stall. As he moved through the ticketing area,
he speed-dialed his contact in Afghanistan. The man answered in English. They
always spoke English as the NSA computers gave priority to any of the tribal
languages spoken in that part of the world.

“Are the lambs all home safe?” he asked.

“Yes, and may God be with you,” the
voice replied. “Do what you must do.”

“I will,” he replied, and broke the
connection. What he just learned was that all the 12,000 zealots selected to
survive the end of the world were now safely in caves in the
Hindu Kush area of Afghanistan. They had
picked 4000 of their toughest fighters, along with the most religious and pious
Muslims they could find. The group included doctors and scientists, as well as
tradesmen and farmers. The plan was well thought out and their survival was all
but assured, absent an outside threat. Each man had selected two wives to
accompany him to the area. The caves had been widened and winterized, and
contained enough food and water for two years. For the next two years, if
anyone approached their enclave, they would be shot, and the body burned. They
each vowed not to tell relatives and friends where they were going and each of
them kept their word.

The freighters
that would carrier them to America were mothballed in ports around the Middle
East, and the crews were quarantined on the vessels. When the time came, they
would travel to the country that repressed them for decades, take over their
infrastructure, fertile land, and abundant water. The playing field would be
tilted in their favor for the first time in history, and they would inhabit the
land of plenty.

He took a
moment to rejoice in his victory. It had been four years of cajoling and
lobbying his Council’s leadership to get the approval for the virus contagion.
At first, they didn’t understand what he proposed to do, and they couldn’t
comprehend the carnage that would ensue. They were simple men who wanted to see
things explode and burn. They wanted to be present when the death occurred. It
was their way, and they were slow to accept a more efficient, if less
satisfying, means of destroying their enemies.

He resorted to
graphic descriptions of American cities filled with bloated corpses, and
explained how it not only would the kill the Great Satan, but all the allies as
well. The military of those countries would cease to exist and no longer pose a
threat to their religion. Even the hated Sunni would be eradicated, and their
blasphemous form of Islam would die with them. Only one religion would survive.
They would emerge as the single unifying faith on earth. Things would be as
they should have always been, but for the ceaseless interference of the
infidels.