The Dragon Factory (25 page)

“They’re airborne, sir,” said a tech at a nearby console.

Otto looked down at the screen. “Wait until they’re at twenty thousand feet,” he said softly. “And then turn on the jellyfish sensors.”

“Yes, sir.”

When the Twins’ jet had been refueled the fuel had included dozens of tiny sensors no bigger than a drop of water. They floated in the gasoline and transmitted a signal via several wiry tendrils. The sensors used collaborative nannite technology—singly their signal strength was faint, but a dozen of them could broadcast a strong, clear signal for miles.

“What’s the status on the pursuit craft?”

“Birds one, two, and four are at thirty-five thousand feet. Bird three is coasting along the deck at one thousand feet. All remote stations are on alert and the infiltration teams are on deck. Everything’s ready to go, sir.”

Otto smiled.

“Good,” he said as he watched the blip on the radar climb into the sky and begin a slow turn toward the southeast.

Sokoto, Nigeria

Six Days Ago

Dr. Hans Koertig banged through the swinging doors of the field surgical suite, tore off his mask and gloves, and threw them into the trash. For two minutes he stood in the center of the scrub room, his eyes bright with fury, his fists balled into knots. He didn’t turn or look when the doors opened and Frieda Jaeger came in and quietly began stripping off her stained scrubs.

“I’m sorry, Hans,” she said softly, but he said nothing. Cartilage bunched at the corners of his jaws. “You did your best, but these things happen—”

Her words died on her tongue as he suddenly wheeled on her. “Did my best? Is that what you think, Frieda? That I did my best?”

He took a step toward her and she backed up.

“What I did in there was
superb
work. Superb.” Spit flew from his mouth as he shouted. “I’ve done reconstructive surgeries on two hundred noma patients in the four years I’ve been in Nigeria. Two hundred. I have never once—
not once
—lost a patient on the table.” He pointed at the doors. “That boy in there is the sixth child to die under my knife in eight days. Don’t you dare tell me that these things happen!”

“Perhaps you’re just overworked—” But as soon as she said it Frieda Jaeger knew that it was the wrong thing to say. Koertig’s eyes blazed with dangerous fury and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her, but instead he wrenched himself away, stalked to the sink, and began scrubbing his hands as if he wanted to wash the reality of it from his skin.

“I don’t lose patients, Frieda,” he said over his shoulder. “You can call me an arrogant ass, but the facts are the facts. I don’t lose patients. Not here, not in Kenya, not back home in Munich. God damn I
don’t
lose patients. Not children with noma. This isn’t the nineteen fifties, for Christ’s sake. This isn’t an aid station treating gangrene with a first-aid kit and a prayer. This is an AWD-Foundation surgical unit. No one on the continent has a better record than us for saving children.”

“I know, Hans,” she said weakly, “but the children are dying. It’s not just you. We’ve lost thirty in six weeks.”

Koertig wheeled on her. He looked stricken. “Thirty? What are you saying?”

Noma was a terrible disease, a severe form of infectious gangrene of the mouth or cheek that affected malnourished children throughout Africa, parts of Asia, and sections of Central America. Nearly all of the patients were between two and six years old and the disease literally ate away at the flesh of their cheeks and mouths, leaving them horribly disfigured and vulnerable to secondary infections. Since the mid-nineties the AWD-Stiftung Kinderhilfe, Dutch Noma Foundation, and Facing Africa has sent medical teams to Nigeria and other afflicted places. The teams, like this one in Sokoto, had done miraculous work in combating the disease and improving living conditions for the people. Plastic surgeons from Interplast had volunteered to do hundreds of reconstructive
surgeries for children so they could return to normal lives. So they could
live.

The disease was no longer universally fatal unless left untreated . . . but treatments existed, preventive medicines were being distributed, and food supplies were coming in from humanitarian organizations around the world.

And now this. Children dying from a disease that should no longer be able to kill them.

“How are so many dying?” he demanded.

“We . . . don’t know.”

“Have you done tests, for God’s sake?”

“We have. It’s noma . . . but the disease has become more aggressive.”

“Are you talking mutation?”

She shook her head, then nodded. “I’m not sure what to call it.”

Frieda Jaeger was a pediatric nurse in her fourth month in Nigeria. She was clearly out of her depth.

“Who is handling the tests?” snapped Koertig.

She gave him the name of the lab. The doctor finished scrubbing and then hurried out to make some calls. Noma was an old disease. It was vicious but stable, predictable.

Terror gripped his heart as he ran to his trailer and the satellite phone he used for emergencies.

God help these children if it had mutated.

God help the children everywhere.

Deep Iron Storage Facility

Saturday, August 28, 3:59
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 1 minute E.S.T.

I kicked my way out from under the boxes and rolled over into a crouch, pulling my Beretta.

Top Sims knelt nearby, his M4 in his hands. He had a shallow cut across the bridge of his nose and one eye was puffed shut.

“Clear!” he yelled.

“Clear!” I heard Bunny growl, and to my right I saw him crawling out from another mountain of toppled boxes.

“Where are the hostiles?” I demanded.

Bunny switched on a minilantern and pointed to the rear door, which stood ajar. He kicked it shut. There was no interior lock.

“We giving chase?”

“No. Barricade the door.”

We worked fast and stacked boxes in front of both doors. Top was watching me as we worked.

“What?” I asked.

“Looked like that last box hit you in the head. You need me to go through all that ‘do you know who you are and who’s the President of the United States?’ crap, Cap’n?”

“I know who I am, and for the record the Vice President’s a total dick,” I said.

Top grinned. “You’ll live.”

Bunny sat down on the floor and began applying butterfly stitches to a long, shallow slash on his thigh. “Well,” he said, “this was fun. Don’t know about you fellas, but I’m getting tired of being ambushed by people who shouldn’t even be mad at me. I mean . . . what the hell was that all about? Did we just have a firefight with the Hulk and the Thing?”

“Something like that.” I looked at the bloody remains of the Russian team.

Top said, “Any idea what the hell we just stepped into, Cap’n?”

“I’m starting to,” I said but didn’t elaborate. “It seems pretty clear that there were at least two teams down here searching for the same stuff.”

“Three teams,” said Top, “if Jigsaw’s down here somewhere.”

I didn’t comment on that. If Jigsaw was in Deep Iron and hadn’t come to investigate the gunfire, then it meant that they weren’t able to. Top read my face and didn’t pursue it. Bunny was watching us both and he cursed under his breath.

The flashlights did a good job of lighting the room. The firefight with the Russians had taken place in one corner, over by the door through
which we’d come. That part of the room was a charnel house of mangled bodies. I’d seen a lot of death and I’d caused a lot of death, but there was something about this that was jabbing wires into my brain. I wanted to turn away, but I knew that would be the wrong choice. Denial is always a bear trap—you’ll forget about it and step in it later.

Top pulled the magazine from his M4, saw that he was down to three rounds, and replaced it with a full one. “Cap’n, either I’m getting too old for this shit or we nearly got our asses handed to us by just two guys. They were winning, too, until you shanked one in the mouth.”

“No joke,” said Bunny. “One of those guys knocked my rifle out of my hands—and not to blow my own horn, but that’s not so easy to do. So I laid into him, hit him four times. Two uppercuts, a hook to the ribs, and an overhand right. I might as well have been brushing lint off his lapels.” Bunny had twenty-two-inch biceps and could bench 460. When he laid a combination into a pair of boxing mitts, whoever was holding them went numb to the wrists. Bunny’s blue eyes looked deeply spooked. “Son of a bitch didn’t even grunt. It’s not doing a lot for my self-esteem.”

“He’s right, Cap’n,” Top agreed. “I put a full mag into both of those assholes and it barely even knocked them back. Sure as hell didn’t knock them down. I think we’re seeing a new kind of body armor, something that absorbs impact like nothing I ever seen. It was only when I went for a head shot that he turned tail and ducked behind the boxes. But . . . until then I was slowing him down, but I wasn’t hurting him.”

“Nobody’s got body armor that good,” Bunny said.

“I may have clipped one of them in the leg—the one you didn’t stab—because he was limping when he went out the door. He should have been Swiss cheese, though. And, considering how strong these guys were, maybe we’re looking at an exoskeleton. They’ve been working on that stuff for—”

Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard, Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”

“Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with all the confusion—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had something extra, so we’re lucky
we were able to turn the tables on them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”

“Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m okay with that.”

They stood on either side of me and looked at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere, but most of the floor was clear.

“Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find much, but we have to look.”

“Balls,” murmured Bunny.

“Then I want to move the remains to that section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were no boxes.

“Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked Top.

“Because we have work to do and we don’t want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”

He nodded.

I squatted down and began searching the dead Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me, none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose, and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily substances the room was getting ripe.

As expected, the search yielded nothing. No ID. Nothing.

Without saying a word we began moving the bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of thing before in Iraq—pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond the capability of the rational mind to associate this with deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from a guy like me—someone who’s killed people with guns, knives, grenades, garrotes, and bare hands—but there is a difference between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly clinical. This was . . . what? The two brutes we chased out of here had done this to the Russians here
and to the staff upstairs. They had enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an opponent—say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head—had given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it. Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another person . . . and I believed that’s what I was seeing here.

As this was going through my head, Top muttered three words that said it all.

“This is evil.”

Bunny and I looked at him and then each other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put his finger on it. This
was
evil.

WHEN WE WERE
done we washed our hands from our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover the corpses as best we could.

I turned and surveyed the rest of the room. Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all that was stored here was paper.

“Top, Bunny . . . the guys we chased off, did they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records? Anything?”

“Not that I saw, unless it was small enough to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going, Cap’n?”

“We’re staying for the moment. If those guys with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to guarantee a safe run back.”