The Widow's Strike (17 page)

E
lina slowly walked
down the
aisle of the aircraft, trying to keep from bumping her carry-on into the man in front of her, the anxiety rising with each step. She reached the exit door, seeing the pilot smiling and wishing her well. She nodded, plastering on a fake smile of her own, and exited the aircraft into a world that frightened her to her core.

Moving with everyone else, she left the aircraft gate and entered the hallway of the Hong Kong International Airport, jostled by the waves of people all anxious to get to immigration and customs. She stood confused for a moment, wondering where she should go.

She had never traveled outside of the Russian Federation, and apart from one trip to Moscow, she had never been more than fifty miles from Grozny. In truth, she had never been on an airplane, a fact that she had lied about to her friends because it had brought a secret shame. Now it brought nothing but fear.

When she’d visited Moscow she had felt bewildered but at least could speak the language. Here, she was completely out of her element. Almost everyone was Asian, and they all appeared to be staring at her. Apprehension bubbled up inside her. A xenophobic feeling that was almost overwhelming, making her want to return home to what she knew. Return to where her mission made sense.

Straining to read the English on the airport signs, she began following the crowd, believing that they knew more than her. She couldn’t help but notice the Asians wearing surgical masks, just like the ones she had been instructed to purchase. The sight confused her. Made her question her purpose.

Surely I’m not going to martyr myself here. Why? What has Hong Kong done to Chechnya?

After the praise Doku had given her, she had agreed to the new mission. He’d said she might not understand the target she would attack, but that others did. Others who held the fate of her country close to their heart. He had admonished her not to question, but to simply execute. He’d ended by saying she would be the most valuable Black Widow in history. The one who would turn the tide against the hated Kadyrovtsy.

When she’d asked how an attack outside of Chechnya could do that, he’d initially told her that they required support for the fight, and this attack would cause others to provide help for their cause. That didn’t sit well with her. She may have been a simple peasant, but she wasn’t stupid. Something Doku was well aware of.

In a little bit of a pique, she’d said, “So I’m to sacrifice my life to ensure that we will be given arms? Is that it? You do them a favor, and they return the favor? Using me? Who will I attack?”

Doku had paused at that. Then he’d said, “No, no. You’re not something for simple barter. There are others who support the Russian Federation. Others who keep them in power and, by extension, keep the
Kadyrovtsy
operational
.
Your attack will cause them to cease the support.”

Still not convinced, she’d said, “Who? What others?”

“You’ll be told that when the time comes. Remember your operational security. Remember your training. And trust that we know what we’re doing.”

Now, standing on a moving sidewalk, a bit of technology that almost caused her to fall over, surrounded by Asians who would have had trouble finding Chechnya on a map, she wondered,
Am I simply a pawn? Something to trade, like the saddle for a horse?

She banished the thought immediately. Doku was an honorable man. Someone who had fought and bled for their country. He had always treated her with respect and had never lied. She would trust in what he said. At the very least, she would meet the contact and let him tell her the mission.

She stumbled off of the moving sidewalk, almost run over by the scrum of passengers speed-walking behind her. She let them pass and chose to continue in the center of the terminal, without the mechanical help.

She continued on, seemingly walking for miles. She became more and more anxious, feeling a tightness in her chest that left her unable to catch her breath. She believed she was heading the wrong way and had no one to turn to for help. She was petrified to ask directions. Convinced they’d see through her subterfuge. Convinced someone was going to stop her, question her, and then arrest her. She had done nothing wrong, but the fact that she held a forged passport from the country of Latvia did nothing but increase her fear.

She saw the sign for immigration ahead and let out a mental sigh.
Just get to the hotel. One step at a time. Get to the hotel.

She was chanting the mantra in her head when a shorter Asian woman, wearing a surgical mask, stepped into her path.

In accented English, she said, “Please remove your head scarf.”

Elina felt faint. She barely understood the woman and wanted to turn away, to flee back to her plane and demand it return her home.

“What? Remove my head scarf?”

The woman nodded.

Elina began to panic, believing there was some magical piece of technology that could spot an imposter. She stuttered, stalling for time, when the woman pointed to a desk behind her.

The counter was curved and modern, with a plethora of computer displays behind it, all manned by other Asians in masks. It had a placard on the front that read
TEMPERATURE CHECK
in English, along with Chinese symbols that she assumed said the same thing.

The woman said, “We check passengers for sickness. Your scarf blocks the sensors.”

For the first time, Elina noticed the myriad of cameras around her, all screening the flow of people into the immigration area.

She removed her scarf, feeling sick to her stomach. The woman nodded and smiled. A man behind the desk waved her on, and she entered immigration, confused by the whole process.

She stood in line behind an affable man with an English accent. He attempted to strike up a conversation.

“They’re serious about the flu, aren’t they?”

She nodded weakly, afraid to open her mouth.

“I come here all the time, and I always wonder, if I had a cold, would they keep me out? How can they tell the difference between bird flu and the common cold with just a temperature check?”

She nodded again, the conversation hammering home how little she knew of the world.

Bird flu? What on earth is that?

K
urt Hale fiddled
with the
Proxima projector, mindlessly adjusting the focus yet again. It didn’t help him make a decision, but it did kill a little more time.

Ten minutes until the council update. Or what may forever be known as the first spontaneous combustion of the president of the United States.

The video-teleconference with Pike in Singapore had been over for more than two hours, and he still couldn’t decide what catastrophe he should broach to the Oversight Council first: the fact that Pike’s team had ignored orders and unilaterally attempted an Omega operation against an agent of a sovereign country—and failed—or the fact that that same agent was now running loose with a lethal and highly pathogenic genetically engineered bioweapon.

Maybe lead off with the one Iranian we did manage to catch, along with the fact that we have no support assets in country to exfiltrate him.

The thought made his head hurt.
Jesus. What a goat rope.

He remembered his last conversation with the secretary of state, Jonathan Billings, and knew he was going to get roasted—although at the end of the day, he stood behind Pike’s actions. The only thing Pike could have done differently was alert the police when he realized he was following the doctor. Instead, he’d attempted an interdiction with his team, and Kurt understood the decision.

Given Pike’s status in the country, he couldn’t call the police himself without an avalanche of repercussions and questions to answer. He would have had to call back to the Taskforce, then have them inject the doctor’s location into the CIA network, followed by the station alerting their liaison. In other words, lose the doctor yet again.

No, Pike had made the right call. If he’d stood on the sidelines, the doctor would have been killed, and they’d have no idea what they were up against.

At the end of the day, hunting humans was an imperfect science. The target was usually someone who had lived on the run for a while, honing his survival instincts and wanting to live to fight another day. You just couldn’t predict every outcome. The unexpected happened, and you either rolled with the punch or ceased to exist. Operations weren’t video games with checkpoints that you could attempt over and over until you found the perfect solution, although he’d have a hard time selling that to this crew. Most of the Oversight Council had no idea what the Taskforce did to accomplish missions and lived in a zero-tolerance world.

A world that doesn’t exist.

The door opened and the members of the council all began to file in, right on time. Last was the president, who said, “Hey, Kurt. These emergency meetings are getting to be standard procedure. From the message you sent out, this sounds like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tell me that was just your way of ensuring we all showed up.”

As everyone took their seats, over the scuff of the chairs, he said, “Sir, you know that saying ‘I’ve got good news and bad news’?”

“Yeah.”

The room now quiet, Kurt said, “Well, I’ve got bad news and worse news.”

For the next forty-five minutes the council said not a word as Kurt laid out what he knew, some members’ mouths actually dropping open as the briefing continued. Kurt finished and waited for the bloodletting.

It began—and ended—with Billings. “I told you we should have never let Pike’s team go to Singapore. He’s nothing more than a hammer that sees everything as a nail. What the hell are we going to do with a captured Iranian asset?”

President Warren, in a tone that reminded everyone in the room of his position, said, “Seriously? That’s what you care about? Cut the bickering. Forget the operation. That’s the least of our worries. This has the potential to make the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a bad day on the golf course.”

Billings turned red but said nothing. Ignoring his discomfort, President Warren continued. “Let’s take it from the top, starting with the virus.” He turned to Chip Dekkard. “You work in pharmaceuticals. What’s your assessment of the danger if it gets out? How bad can it be if we know it’s coming? If we prepare?”

To Kurt, Chip looked pale and slightly green, like he was about to be sick. Even a little dazed. He took a moment, then responded. “Sir, if what Kurt says is true, it’s going to be catastrophic if released. We simply don’t have the production capability to ramp up enough antiviral medication to slow the onslaught. The demand will be huge. And there is no vaccine. We won’t be able to even begin production until we isolate the virus, which means someone has to get sick first.”

“So someone gets sick. Then we get the vaccine. How long before that’s accomplished?”

“Six or eight months.”

The room broke into a low buzz, and Kurt heard various members talking about what they could do in the meantime. How they could prevent a panic and stabilize for six months. Chip cut them off.

“People, you’re not listening to me. This isn’t going to be a particularly bad flu season. It’s going to be a catastrophic wipeout that the world has never seen. H5N1 has a seventy percent mortality rate. The only thing it didn’t have was the mutation to get around the human species. If this virus has that ability—and I’m not trying to be over-the-top—we’re looking at the death of hundreds of millions of people. The entire collapse of our health care system followed by our economy, then quite possibly our country.”

The secretary of defense snorted, “Come on. We had the flu epidemic in 1918—while we were in the middle of World War One. That didn’t cause any country to fall apart, and that was with hundred-year-old medical practices.”

Chip said, “I’m glad you mentioned 1918. You talk about modern medicine, but there’s a flip side to being modern. They also didn’t have modern automobiles and certainly didn’t have air travel. It was much harder for that flu to get around then, and yet it did. In two years that pandemic killed more Americans than all the foreign wars we have ever fought combined. It killed upwards of five percent of the entire global population. And its mortality rate was between ten and twenty percent.”

When nobody responded, his voice became shrill. “Do you hear what I’m saying? One or two out of every ten that got it died. This virus is going to kill seven. And it’s going to spread faster than we can contain it. If it gets out, it will make 1918 look like an outbreak of the common cold.”

He leaned back in his chair again, saying, “In fact, the only good thing we have going for us is that H5N1 is so deadly, it might kill the host before it has a chance to spread.”

Nobody said a word, struggling to cope with the magnitude. The director of the CIA broke the silence.

“If that’s true, why on earth would the Iranians even use it? If there is no vaccine, it’ll eventually reach Iran and wipe them out as well.”

Someone muttered, “Because they’re crazy.”

“No they’re not,” the director snapped. “They’re definitely operating on a different agenda, but they aren’t crazy. They protect the regime at all costs, using logical cost-benefit calculations. Hell, their quest to become nuclear is for that exact reason.”

Kurt said, “Maybe they don’t know what they’ve got. Or maybe Malik doesn’t understand the damage it could cause. He’s not a doctor or anything. The bottom line is that they have the virus. The only questions left are whether they’ll use it and whether we can do anything about it.”

Billings said, “I’m inclined to agree with the CIA on this. They won’t use it if they realize the cost. I think it’s just a deterrent, a cheap nuke. We should take this slow and easy, not push them into something we’ll regret.”

The SECDEF exploded, “Have you lost your mind? No way am I letting that bunch of loonies hold the key to Armageddon.”

Chip surprised Kurt by shouting a follow-up. “I agree! We need to kill this general and get the virus back. Ensure it’s destroyed.”

The only thing that guy has ever said at a council meeting was questioning whether we should go after an Iranian. Now he’s bloodthirsty?

President Warren held up his hands for silence. “We don’t know their intentions, but we do know they have it. I’m inclined to let the Taskforce continue to track, but not for a blanket Omega operation. Let’s sort it out. Get more information, then come back and reassess. Kurt, do you even have anything to go on?”

“Very little. We tracked the general’s phone immediately, but it ended up being under the seat of a cab. The driver couldn’t remember who had left it. We found the hotel of the Iranian we’d caught, and doing some linkage work by hacking the registration computer of the hotel, we think we know the names the other two are using. They both took a flight that left Singapore directly to Hong Kong. It’s not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s all we have at this point.”

“What about that other Iranian? What are we doing about him?”

“I’d like to exfiltrate both him and the doctor back here. Get some debrief and interrogation going. Apparently the doctor was working on a vaccine, and he might be able to jump-start any research that becomes necessary. I’m just thinking worst case. I can do it, but I’ll need some help from the CIA station. There’s a US Navy base at Sembawang, in the north of Singapore. We have some assets I can use in Malaysia for a waterborne pickup, but I’ll need help getting the package on the base and through the indigenous guard force security.”

President Warren glanced at the DCI, and he nodded, saying, “I can get that done.”

President Warren said, “Okay, make it happen. Billings, I want you to put Cailleach Laboratories under a microscope. Who owns it, who runs it, and who made the call to create the virus. Somebody at State had to clear its credentials for work in Singapore. I want to know who it was and why.”

Chip Dekkard cut in. “Sir, I can do that if you want. It doesn’t sound like these guys followed procedure anyway, so the State Department will probably have less luck than me, given my connections in the private sector.”

Billings said, “Sir, he’s right. I guarantee that all of the credentialing is on the up-and-up.”

President Warren said, “All right. Chip, you got that ball. Thanks. I appreciate the help without the government paycheck. Final thing: I want the CDC read onto the potential threat. Don’t give out any specifics. Just get them on war footing. On the lookout for an outbreak so we can mitigate the damage, using the minimum information you need to justify it. Whatever you do, don’t go overboard on the threat. Just give them enough to get them prepared for what’s coming.”

He paused until he had everyone’s full attention and then said, “People, the biggest threat right now is panic. Maybe the Iranians intend to use the virus and maybe they don’t. Either way, the word gets out and we’ll have an epidemic of fear that’ll match the actual release of the virus. Nobody, and I mean
nobody
, is to breathe a word of the true facts until absolutely necessary. If I hear anyone on this council is out stocking up on Tamiflu, you’ll regret ever working for the government. Understood?”

He went from face to face, getting a somber nod from each member.

He then looked at Kurt. “Get to Hong Kong. Give me some good news for a change. I’d like the highlight of our next meeting to be something better than our only hope is that the virus kills so quickly it’ll mitigate its own spread.”