The Extinction Code (36 page)

Mitchell reached for his rifle once again and as Ethan turned he saw Kruger move suddenly toward the assassin.

‘Gun!’

Ethan shouted the warning as Kruger aimed a small, black pistol at Mitchell. The assassin’s rifle swung around, too slow, imprinted on Ethan’s mind as moving in slow motion even as he saw the pistol’s muzzle flare with bright flame and smoke, heard the gunshot echo through the corridor.

The bullet hit Mitchell high in the centre of his chest. The big man staggered backwards, the whites of his eyes stark against his ebony skin as he toppled over and slammed down onto his back in the corridor. The assault rifle fell from his grasp and clattered onto the ground beside him as his eyes closed.

Ethan hurled himself at Kruger as the tall, gaunt man stepped forward and aimed to put another bullet into Mitchell’s skull. He slammed into Kruger’s side and the two of them sprawled onto the ground as he heard Lopez scream from behind him and a gunshot shatter the air once more.

Kruger growled and spat as Ethan wrestled the pistol from the cabal member’s grip, twisted it viciously against his wrist until the older man cried out in pain and released the weapon. Ethan jumped up and away from Kruger as he whirled to see Lopez on her knees on the ground, one masked man pointing a pistol at her as the other recovered Lopez’s weapon from her grip.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ one of them snarled at Ethan.

Ethan looked down at Kruger, who hauled himself to his feet and glared with malevolent delight at Ethan.

‘We just got you out of there,’ Ethan uttered in disbelief.

‘Worst thing you could have done,’ Kruger shot back as he held out his hand.

‘Don’t give it to him,’ Lopez shouted at Ethan. ‘Kill him!’

Ethan looked at the two masked MJ–12 survivors, and the one with the pistol took aim at Lopez more carefully. Ethan turned to Kruger and handed him the pistol. The gaunt man took it from him and smiled, his black hawkish eyes glittering with malice.

‘Did you really think that I or my companions would bend to the will of little people like you?’ he asked. ‘You’re nothing, Warner, you and your pitiful little band will be eradicated from existence, starting here. We will annihilate you all along with Garrett and everybody else connected to you.’

Lopez shook her head. ‘Go to hell, Kruger, it’s where you’re headed anyway!’

Kruger looked at her and grinned. ‘Let her live,’ he said to his companions.

In an unspoken gesture of deference they stepped back from Lopez and joined Kruger. The gaunt man surveyed their two captives, the heavy steel doors and the faint screams of terrible pain coming from within as the few members of MJ–12 who had survived the explosive charges died in horrific spasms inside.

‘I think this a most fitting end to your project, don’t you?’ Kruger asked Ethan. ‘Buried here, alone and with only this horrendous disease for company. You do know that the filters in these masks will only last a few hours, right, and that sooner or later those door seals will fail once we cut the power to this facility? If there is the slightest trace of the virus remaining…’

Ethan said nothing, not willing to dignify Kruger with a response.

‘Come,’ Kruger said to his companions as he turned away. ‘We’ll seal this place and leave them to die down here alone.’

The two other surviving members of MJ–12 turned with Kruger and moved away from the vault doors, careful to not allow Ethan the chance to pursue them. Moments later, they were hurrying away out of sight toward the main entrance.

***

XLII

Ethan whirled and dashed to Mitchell’s side, looked down at the big man’s shirt. The bullet had punched high in his chest, but then he reached down and ripped the shirt open to reveal a bullet proof vest, the silvery shell buried deep in the Kevlar.

Mitchell coughed and jerked awake, almost took a swing at Ethan on instinct. Ethan blocked the impulsive blow with his forearm and pinned it in place as Mitchell winced at a sudden pain ripping across his chest.

‘The vest caught it,’ Ethan said.

Mitchell glanced down at his vest, and then his brain re–engaged itself and he hauled himself to his feet.

‘Where’s Kruger?!’ he demanded.

‘They’re gone,’ Lopez replied, ‘and we need to find a way out of here.’

‘No way in or out except for the main entrance,’ Mitchell growled as he reached down and yanked a small pistol from a holster buried in the small of his back.

Ethan saw the weapon and grinned. ‘Shall we?’

Mitchell turned and lumbered along the corridor as Lopez and Ethan followed him away from the vault toward the entrance. Ethan could see movement ahead, bright light from outside flaring briefly in the darkness, and then the light vanished and he heard a loud crash as the door was slammed shut.

Ethan sprinted to the door controls and sought a way to open them as Lopez made for the side entrance. Instantly he could see that the wiring was fried, the smell of burning cables in the air and a faint haze of smoke lingering.

‘Garrett must have triggered the circuitry to blow after he got MJ–12 inside the facility,’ he said. ‘There’s no way we can open the main doors.’

He turned to Lopez, saw her try the door even as he heard a vehicle engine from outside and then a crash against the side door. Lopez jumped backwards in shock at the impact, and Mitchell pushed past her and tried to open the door with brute force. After a few attempts he gave up.

‘They must have backed up one of the jeeps against it,’ he roared in fury and kicked at the door.

Ethan turned to the control office and saw a series of screens inside. He hurried in and saw CCTV feeds showing him the outside of the compound. There, he could see Kruger and his two companions back away from the facility and pull the masks from their faces. They threw them down onto the dusty ground, and then Kruger looked up at the camera and waved.

‘I suspect you’re just the other side of those walls, Mister Warner!’
he called, his voice reaching the interior of the facility through speakers inside the office.
‘They’re six feet thick and according to Garrett they would stand up to a direct hit from a thousand pound projectile, which doesn’t bode well for your chances of escape!’

Ethan heard the two men alongside Kruger chuckle as Lopez and Mitchell joined him inside the office.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Lopez growled through her mask.

Kruger’s voice called out one last time as he and his companions turned to the jeeps parked in the compound.

‘Don’t worry though! Once we’ve killed Garrett and taken control of his corporation, we will return here and recover the virus before we ensure that nothing remains of you or this facility. You’ll all become a dusty piece of history, Warner, one that nobody will ever know about because we both know that once those seals are blown you won’t open the facility doors and risk letting the pandemic out to infect mankind! You’re all just too damned nice! Your remains will never escape this place!’

Lopez seethed beside him. ‘The asshole’s right. If we don’t get out of here before those seals fail, we’ll never leave.’

Ethan felt futile rage surge through his veins as he watched Kruger turn for the jeeps as his companions climbed into each of them. He was about to search for a button to reply to the men outside, to plea for some sort of compromise as a last ditch attempt to save their lives, when a strange noise burst from the speakers.

Like a rush of waves crashing suddenly against a rocky shore it blazed noisily and then subsided almost immediately into silence. Kruger and his two companions looked up into the sky, and then both the jeeps suddenly accelerated for the gates and left Kruger standing alone in the dust.

Ethan saw terror rip across Kruger’s face and he rushed back toward the facility’s side entrance once more, his arms waving wide and his voice pitched with terror.

‘Open the side door!’

Ethan backed away from the screen as though doing so could distance himself from what was about to happen, and then he saw Lopez’s confused expression.

‘What was that noise?’ she asked.

It was Mitchell who answered, his experiences in Vietnam reminding him of the same noise.

‘Fighter jets,’ he said. ‘The first one recons the target if no enemy fire is expected, and confirms its location.’

‘And the second one?’ Lopez asked.

Kruger’s face appeared on the camera covering the side door, gaunt and filled with horror.

‘Open the door! Please, open the door!’

Suddenly trapped outside the only safe place on the island, Kruger had nowhere to hide. His screams soared through the office as Ethan found the speaker button.

‘The third jeep!’ he shouted. ‘Move the jeep!’

Kruger’s face stared blankly at the camera for a fraction of a second, and then suddenly the screen went white. In a fragment of time Ethan saw the blast rip the gaunt man’s body apart as though he had been constructed from nothing more than dried leaves that had been swept aside in a tremendous gale. A terrific blast hit the compound outside and the entire facility shuddered as it shouldered the explosion. Ethan saw the fences outside ripped from the ground and hurled across the forest, saw the two escaping jeeps hit the gates and then vanish in the fireball as they were lifted and thrown in flames onto their roofs.

The third jeep was lifted off the ground and hurled aside amid the roiling flames as the cameras suddenly switched off and the monitors went blank.

In an instant, Ethan turned and dashed for the side entrance with Mitchell and Lopez alongside him. They needed no words, no sharing of the knowledge that bigger bombs would follow in seconds to entirely destroy the facility. Whether called in by the Defense Intelligence Agency or by Garrett himself, the total destruction of the site was clearly required to prevent the virus contained within from ever reaching the world outside, and they would spare no expense in hitting it with everything they had.

Ethan hit the door head on and it burst open to reveal a terrific firestorm tearing through the jungle around the site, columns of flame and smoke twisting up into the air. Ethan kept the mask on as he dashed through the searing inferno, felt the pain of the heat searing his skin as he sprinted directly south toward where he knew the fences had once been.

Mitchell followed, Lopez alongside him as they ran through the terrible flames and smoke, plunged into the jungle undergrowth and plowed through the trees and the ferns as they attempted to get as far away from the site as possible.

Ethan ran a hundred paces into the jungle before he ripped off the face mask and hurled it aside, crashing through the foliage and hoping against hope that he didn’t collect a venomous snake or spider bite as he plunged his way south.

‘Incoming!’

Lopez cried the warning and he heard the roar of fighter engines just a moment later as an aircraft that he did not see thundered overhead somewhere above the jungle canopy and a terrific blast shook the ground beneath his feet.

Ethan tumbled onto the jungle floor and rolled alongside a large fallen tree trunk. Lopez crashed down on top of him as a shockwave blasted through the trees around them and a fearsome fireball lit up the site. Ethan squeezed his eyes shut and rolled protectively over Lopez, threw his arm over her head and huddled down behind the trunk as a blast of heat washed over them on the wings of a ferocious wind. Sharp pain pierced his ears as the infernal roar of high explosives, burrowed deep into the ground from the kinetic energy imparted them by the fighter’s airspeed, exploded and churned the earth upward in a blaze of flame and shattered rock.

The trees of the jungle leaned away from the blast and sheets of flame tore through the canopy above, dense leaves shredded by supersonic debris scattering in clouds to fall all around them.

The tremendous noise and heat from the blast faded away, and Ethan lay with his arm across Lopez’s head and his ears buzzing. His vision was blurred, his body ached and he could feel little stabs of pain from where tiny pieces of shrapnel had buried themselves in his flesh.

With a force of will he managed to drag himself to his feet, saw Lopez wearily crawling onto her knees, her arms trembling. He grabbed her hand, staggered unevenly away as she clambered to her feet and followed him clumsily through the jungle. They got another thirty yards when the third blast hit, bigger than the previous two, and they both collapsed into the jungle and covered their heads and prayed that they might survive the hellish onslaught.

Ethan’s last conscious thought was that Mitchell was nowhere to be seen.

***

XLIII

DIA Headquarters,

Anacostia–Bolling Airbase,

Washington DC

A deep silence had enveloped the ARIES Watch Room for over four days, much of it spent sitting staring at monitors and display screens on the walls as investigative teams from the Central Intelligence Agency, DARPA, the Center for Disease Control and other major government agencies scoured the scorched jungle of Ilhabela.

Hellerman sat in a swivel chair and stared vacantly at them as staff hurried to collate information, some of them former field agents themselves who now liaised with teams on the ground as evidence was collected and data processed.

It had occurred to him that he was sitting in Nicola Lopez’s chair, something that he had only consciously realized when he had detected the scent of her perfume. For one brief and joyous moment he had expected to turn around and see her walk into the watch room with Warner behind her, her gorgeous smile and playful bravado lighting up the room, and Hellerman’s life, once again.

It had been with great dismay that he had realized the tantalizing scent was instead coming from a thin silk scarf that she had draped over the back of her chair. Hellerman, without conscious thought, had then picked up the scarf and held it to his face and closed his eyes, completely oblivious to the bemused stares of his colleagues.

There had been no word from either Warner or Lopez since the blasts that had struck Ilhabela, a series of no less than eight bunker–busting GBU–14 air to surface missiles delivered by FA/18E Super Hornets of the United States Navy having scoured the site of life in titanic blasts that had rendered the once lush tropical jungle a barren and scorched wasteland. Satellite photographs had revealed that there was, quite literally, nothing left of the facility that Garrett had built on the island. News media were already carrying the official report of a Brazilian Air Force jet that had supposedly crashed on the island after an engine failure, its fully armed weapons igniting on impact after the pilot had safely ejected. The reports claimed that there had been “no loss of life in the incident”.