Z (26 page)

“Do you have a probability of success for the actual assault?”

Colonel Martin was impressed that the chairman’s face remained expressionless. “We estimate a forty percent chance of success.”

“How do you define success?” the president asked.

“Successful recovery of the vaccine and the Anslum four.”

“So even if—by your terms—the mission is a success, the assault force is going to take losses.”

“It is inevitable, sir.”

“How many losses?”

Cummings didn’t blink. “We estimate fifty to seventy-five percent casualties in the initial assault force.”

The president shook his head. “I’m not sure I can order men to go on such a mission, General.”

“Suppose you ask them, sir,” General Cummings said.

The president was surprised at that response. “What?”

“I have the men of the First Ranger Battalion and the Second Battalion, Hundred and sixtieth Aviation Regiment on board the Abraham Lincoln standing by in one of the hangars. We have a live satellite feed to that hangar. The men have all been briefed on this plan. They know the risks.” Cummings pointed at a video camera and a TV next to it. “Not exactly your standard video conference, sir, but it will work.”

The president steepled his fingers and considered General Cummings for a long minute, then he nodded slightly. “All right. Put me on.”

Cummings pointed at the technician in charge of the rig. The television screen came alive and it showed a cluster of men gathered in a large metal hangar, painted gray. Navy jets could be seen parked in the background. The majority of the men wore camouflage fatigues and had high and tight haircuts—the traditional cut of the Rangers. A smaller group was dressed in one-piece green flight suits and their hair was at the limits allowed by army regulations.

Apparently a screen on their end went live also, showing the president, because the men all jumped to their feet and stood at rigid attention.

“They can hear you, sir,” General Cummings said.

“At ease, gentlemen,” the president said.

The Rangers merely spread their feet shoulder width apart and snapped their hands to the small of their back—eyes and heads were locked forward. The task force men became more relaxed, but everyone’s attention was riveted.

“I understand you have been briefed on the risk of the mission to recover the cure for this virus and to punish those who unleashed it. I just told General Cummings that I have reservations about ordering you on such a high-risk mission. He suggested that I”—Martin could swear he saw the slightest trace of a smile on the president’s face—“ask you. It is rather unprecedented, but this situation is rather unprecedented.

“Gentlemen, I would understand if you do not desire to go on such a hazardous operation. There are other diplomatic options that I am prepared to undertake to resolve this issue. The problem is that time is of the essence. Over four hundred members of the Eighty-second Airborne Division are afflicted with this disease and will most likely die unless we recover the cure very quickly.”

The president seemed to catch himself. “You know the situation. No one will think less of you for not wanting to go. All those who volunteer, please hold your hand up.”

As one, the entire group of men raised their hands. The president glanced at Cummings, then returned his attention to the screen. “Very well. You will hear my decision shortly.” The president indicated cut and the screen went dead. He focused on Cummings. “Was that a setup?”

“No, sir.”

“Every single man?”

“They’re Rangers, sir.”

“What about the pilots?”

Despite the severity of the situation, Cummings smiled. “Oh, the task force? They’re just crazy, sir.”

The president stood. “When do you need to have a decision?”

“To allow the people on the carrier sufficient time to prepare and launch on time, by midnight.” Cummings hesitated. “But I have to tell General Scott what to do right away. He has a long way to travel.”

The president sighed. “Tell General Scott to do what he has to do. As far as the rest of the plan—I’ll have to get back to you after I do some more thinking.”

Colonel Martin saw the opening and took it, standing up and catching everyone by surprise. “Sir, there’s something you need to know.”

The president glanced quizzically at Martin, and General Cummings quickly stepped forward. “This is Colonel Martin. He’s head of the medical team investigating Z.”

“And what do I need to know?” the President asked.

Martin held up the report. “Z is here.”

“Here?”

“In the United States. We have an outbreak at Andrews Air Force Base.”

The president slowly sat back down. He rubbed his forehead. “What’s happened?”

Luanda, Angola, 17 June

“The helicopter is ready, sir.”

General Scott stuffed his red airborne beret in his pants pocket and ran out to the waiting chopper. He carried no weapon, not even a sidearm. And aside from the pilots and crew members of the Black Hawk, he was going alone.

The aircraft was fitted with extra fuel tanks on pylons. They had a long flight ahead. “Let’s go,” Scott ordered. The helicopter lifted and they headed due south.

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, 17 June

The chief coroner looked out his office window and saw the Air Police cars parked outside and the armed guards surrounding the casualty facility.

A man in a full-body bio-contaminant suit drew his attention back inside. “Is this the entire list of everyone you had contact with since you worked on the bodies from Angola?”

“Yes.”

The man turned to leave.

“What are you going to do with that list?” the coroner asked. “We’re isolating everyone.”

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 17 June

When Delta Force had been formed, it had been stationed on the main post of Fort Bragg, out near the area where ROTC cadets had their billets during their summer training.

A new compound had been built in the early nineties on a more remote part of the post. It included everything they would need, with training areas, ranges, and mock-ups all inside the chain link fence surrounding it.

The guard at the main gate looked up in surprise as a convoy of trucks pulled up and soldiers in gas masks jumped off, weapons at the ready. An officer walked up to the guard. “I’m Colonel Peterson. I need to talk to your commander. Get him on the phone and out here. But in the meanwhile, no one exits this compound.” He shoved a piece of paper under the guard’s nose. “Orders of the president.”

Abraham Lincoln, 17 June

“We’re presently located here.” Colonel Rogers pointed at the large-scale map. He was no longer wearing his gas mask, only a blue surgical mask. The whole situation had changed since the president had given the go for the mission. There wasn’t as much concern that someone might catch Z from the people on the deck. After all, they were going into the center of the hurricane that had formed Z.

Rogers continued. “We were originally going to launch at zero six thirty Zulu, at two hundred kilometers out. That’s been changed. The ship’s captain is pushing his engines to the max, so we’re making better speed than anticipated. Also”—Rogers looked around the room—“that called for enough fuel to remain for all aircraft to make a round trip. We’re going now for a one-way mission fuel-wise. We’re going to launch the first choppers at zero two thirty Zulu, right here. That will be four hundred and fifty kilometers out. That will put our slowest aircraft on target at zero four thirty Zulu. One hour before dawn local time.”

Riley nodded. He was feeling slightly better. Whether it was a slight remission in his fever as Comsky said, or the energy born of hope as Conner had told him a few minutes ago, it didn’t matter to him. He looked across the flight deck. Some of the Rangers were rigging equipment. Others were doing a last cleaning of their weapons; honing knives; smearing camouflage paint onto their faces. Pilots were walking around their aircraft, using red-lens flashlights to do a final visual inspection.

“There’s no sign that anyone in the Van Wyks compound expects anything,” Rogers continued. “We have repositioned the KH-12 that was overlooking Angola to give us real-time imagery on the target. The SADF column is now only two hundred kilometers away. It is expected that it will arrive at the compound just at dawn, which gives us a window of about one hour.

“An AWACS is in position off the coast. It will control all flight operations. I will be the commander of all ground forces. I will be on board an MH-60 until the first air assault wave lands. At that time, I will reposition to the roof of the primary target. If I am incapacitated or lose communications, my executive officer will command from the C-2 that will drop the initial assault force.”

Rogers folded up the map. “Questions?”

“Who do we go with?” Riley asked.

“Those of you who are up to it can go with one of the air assault Black Hawks.”

Riley pointed at a group of Rangers who were rigging parachutes. “Can I go with them?”

“You HAHO qualified?” Rogers asked.

“Yes.”

Riley could tell that Rogers didn’t want him to go with his recon platoon, which had the most difficult and essential mission. The platoon trained to work together and his addition might disrupt their precision. “I’ll jump last and hang above until they’re all down,” Riley added.

“All right. I’ll take you over to the platoon leader.” Rogers looked out at the ocean, then turned back. “That is all. Good luck and load up.”

Airspace, South Atlantic, 17 June

The C-2 that Riley was on was the largest aircraft the Lincoln had in its inventory. It was normally used to move personnel and equipment from the vessel to shore and back. Right now the small cargo bay held sixteen heavily armed Rangers in tight proximity to each other, and it was the lead aircraft in the attack procession. Riley adjusted the leg straps on the parachute rig he wore, making sure that they were as tight as he could make them.

Just before he had split from the others who had accompanied him from Cacolo, Comsky had given him a handful of pills. “You don’t want to know,” the medic had answered when Riley had inquired as to what the pills were. “They’ll keep you functioning for a few hours.” So far whatever Comsky had given him was keeping him alert and the sickness at bay.

“Ten minutes!” the jumpmaster called out. They were up high, over thirty thousand feet, and the cabin was pressurized.

What Riley found fascinating was the fact that the Ranger Recon element only had eight parachutes for the sixteen men. He had seen dual rigs—two people hooked together in harness with one chute—used by civilian jump instructors to train novice jumpers but had never imagined they would be used by experienced military parachutists. One man was attached in front of the man with the parachute on his back, the harness keeping the pair tight together for the ride down.

“Six minutes. Switch to your personal oxygen and crack your chem lights.”

Riley stood up at the front of the cargo bay, behind the coupled parachutes. He unhooked from the console in the center of the cargo bay that had been supplying his oxygen up to now and hooked in to the small tank on his chest. He took a deep breath and then reached up and cracked the chem light on the back of his helmet.

“Depressurizing.”

Riley swallowed, his ears popping. A crack appeared at the back of the plane as the back ramp began opening. The bottom half leveled out, forming a platform, while the top half disappeared into the tail section.

“Stand by,” the jumpmaster called out over the FM radio as he inched forward until he was at the very edge, looking out into the dark night sky. Riley knew from Colonel Rogers’s briefing that they were still over the Atlantic, outside the twelve-mile international limit to avoid attracting any attention from ground-based radar.

“Go!” The jumpmaster and his buddy were gone. The others walked off, the pairs moving in unison. Riley went last, throwing himself out into the slipstream and immediately spreading his legs and arms akimbo and arching his back, getting stable.

He counted to three, then pulled his ripcord. The chute blossomed above his head. He slid the night vision goggles down on his helmet, checked his chute, then looked down. He counted eight sets of chem lights below him. He turned and followed their path as the Rangers began flying their chutes in toward shore. With over five miles of vertical drop, they could cover quite a bit of distance laterally by using their chutes as wings. Riley didn’t know what the current record was, but he had heard of HAHO teams covering over twenty-five lateral miles on a jump. He felt confident that with the sophisticated guidance rigs the front man of each pair of jumpers had on top of his reserve chute, they would find the target. All Riley had to do was follow.

Riley was cold for the first time in weeks. Even at this latitude, thirty thousand feet meant thin air and low temperatures. As he descended, it got warmer. Eventually he could see the coastline through his goggles. The white of the surf breaking on the rocks was a bright line, running north and south. Riley’s hands were on the toggles that controlled the chute, both turning and descent rate. He adjusted as the line of chem lights below him changed direction slightly. He checked his altimeter: fifteen thousand feet. Not long now.

Twenty kilometers out to sea, the first wave of the air assault element was flying in toward the coast. Four AH-6s—known as Little Birds—led the way. They were modified OH-6 Cayuse observation helicopters. The AH-6 is one of the quietest helicopters in the world, capable of hovering a couple of hundred meters from a person and not being heard. The two pilots both wore night vision goggles and used forward-looking infrared radar to help fly in the night.

Two Little Birds carried a 7.62mm mini-gun pod and the other two 2.75-inch rocket pods. In the backseat of each aircraft, two Ranger snipers armed with thermal scopes provided additional firepower. The Rangers wore body harnesses and could lean completely out of the helicopter to fire their rifles.

Ten kilometers behind the Little Birds, four Apache gunships followed. Besides the 30mm chain gun mounted under the nose, the weapons pylons of each bristled with Hellfire missiles. A Black Hawk helicopter was directly behind the Apaches: Colonel Rogers’s command aircraft. And ten kilometers behind the Apaches came the main ground force: eight Black Hawks carrying ninety-six Rangers ready for battle.

At a higher altitude and circling, the air strike force from the Abraham Lincoln was poised. It was an eclectic group of aircraft, chosen for the job each could do: F-4G Wild Weasels to suppress air defense; F-18 Hornets with laser-guided munitions to follow, along with A-6 Corsairs with their heavier loads.

And circling high above it all was Colonel Harris in his AWACS, coordinating carefully with Colonel Rogers to make sure that everything arrived on target at just the right moment.

Riley understood the tandem rigs now. The man in the rear was flying the chute. The man in front, not having to bother with controlling the toggles for the difficult maneuvering to land on the roof, held a silenced MP-5 submachine gun in his hands with a laser scope.

The jump formation broke apart two hundred feet above the roof of the Van Wyks headquarters building. Riley knew the guards on the roof had to be awake, but would they be looking up? Not likely, he knew, and that was what they were counting on.

There was a brief sparkle to one side and below. The only sign that one of the Rangers was firing. Through his earplug, Riley could hear the men call in.

“Machine gun one clear.”

“Machine gun two clear.”

“Sam Two clear.”

“Machine gun three clear.”

“Sam One clear.”

“Team one down.”

The first Rangers were down on the roof, and it was clear of opposition without any alarm being sounded. So far so good. Riley let up on his toggles and aimed just off center of the roof. There was a large radar dish there blocking him from landing dead center. He could see the Rangers clearing themselves of their parachute rigs and moving on the next phase.

Riley pulled in on his toggles and braked less than three feet above the roof. His feet touched and he immediately unsnapped his harness, stepping out of it even before the chute finished collapsing. He turned, looking about, MP-5 at the ready. He could see bodies in the sandbagged pits. A clean sweep.

Then Riley did what the guards had failed to do. He looked up and it was as he’d feared: a video camera was set up on the struts holding up the radar dish. The small red light on top of the lens was on and it was panning the roof. They hadn’t spotted the camera in the imagery because it was inset under the radar dish. Riley tucked the butt of the MP-5 into his shoulder and fired a burst into the camera, destroying it.

“We’ve been spotted by a camera,” he called out into the boom mike just in front of his lips.

“Go in now!” Colonel Rogers’s voice yelled over the radio. “Everyone move up the pace!”

The Rangers had been carefully placing shaped charges on the roof; four different charges, evenly spaced. Bentley had been unable to tell them which corner Van Wyks’s office was in. He’d never been allowed up on the top floor. They abandoned their careful placement at Rogers’s order, and hurriedly ran out their detonating cord.

“Fire in the hole!”

The charges blew, searing the night with their explosive crack and brief flash. Four holes appeared in the roof, and Rangers jumped down into each one.

Riley paused, head cocked to the side. A roar of automatic fire reverberated out of the southwest hole. Riley sprinted over. A jagged opening, four feet in diameter, beckoned in the concrete.

Riley pulled a flash-bang grenade off his vest and tossed it in, counted to three, then jumped in, just as the grenade went off. He was firing even before he hit the ground. Except he didn’t hit the ground. He landed on the body of one of the Rangers and fell to his right side. It saved his life. A string of tracers ripped by, just above his prone body.

Riley stuck the MP-5 up and blindly returned the fire, spraying in the direction the tracers had come from. He heard the sound of a magazine being changed and was just about to move when he froze. That was too obvious. He rolled onto his stomach and peered about. Both Rangers were dead. There was a desk to his left. A wet bar in the direction the bullets had come from. That was where the man was. Whoever he was, he was using the mirror. Riley fired, shattering the glass.

“Very good,” a heavily accented voice called out.

Riley put a couple of rounds into the bar, confirming what he’d suspected. He wouldn’t be able to shoot through it.

“You’re outnumbered,” Riley yelled. “Give it up.”

“I doubt that my men are outnumbered so quickly. You came by parachute. I saw you on the video, which gave me time to be ready. Still no helicopters—haven’t heard them. I do believe that my people will get here more swiftly than yours. And I’m not outnumbered in this room, am I? I saw only one of you come down. That is after I shot the first two who came through.”

Riley checked the angles. “You talk too much, Skeleton,” he said.

There was a booming laugh. “You know me. What’s your name?”

“Riley.”

“Riley,” Skeleton repeated. “What are you?”

“Special Forces,” Riley said, not wanting to get into a detailed discussion of his status. The clock was running. “Where’s Van Wyks?”

“What do you want him for?” Skeleton asked.

Riley heard just the slightest sound of someone moving over broken glass. “We want the Anslum four.” Skeleton could come from around either side of the bar, and if Riley picked the wrong one, the other man might get the first shot.

“I told Pieter that he had raised the stakes too high,” Skeleton’s voice sounded like it came right from the center of the bar. “There was no need for a gamble—but Pieter—he’s been living alone with too much money and power for too long. No longer in reality.”

A small object came flying over the top of the bar. Grenade, Riley thought, and reacted, rolling right. Skeleton was right behind the object, vaulting the bar-top—which didn’t make any sense if it was a grenade. Riley knew he’d made a mistake as he fired offhand with the MP-5, still rolling.

Skeleton was also firing in midair, his bullets trailing Riley’s rolls by a few inches, Riley’s winging by him.

Riley slammed into the wall just as the bolt in his MP-5 slammed home on an empty chamber. He scrambled to his knees and froze. Skeleton—all six feet eight inches of him as Quinn had described—was standing in the center of the room, a folding-stock R-4 assault rifle looking like a toy in his massive hands. Except the muzzle trained right between Riley’s eyes didn’t look like a toy.

“I’d like to chat, but I must get my men ready for your follow-on forces,” Skeleton said. “Good-bye, Yank.” He squeezed the trigger and nothing happened.

Both men reacted instantly, throwing down their empty weapons and whipping out pistols and training them on each other’s foreheads.

“Well, well, well,” Skeleton said. “Standoff.”

“I’ve got nothing to lose,” Riley said. “I already have your virus. Where’s the destruct for the bio-level four lab?”

“Well, I do have something to lose,” Skeleton said. His left hand slid down to his belt and came up with a wicked-looking Bowie knife. “Man to man—blade to blade,” he said.

Riley knew he could kill Skeleton with a shot to the head, but that would still leave the secret to the destruct unknown. He didn’t know how the other Rangers were doing, but he had to assume that if Skeleton was in this room, then the destruct was in here. Or at least one of the destructs.

“All right,” Riley said. “Man to man.”

Skeleton slid his pistol back into his holster. Riley drew his thin, double-edged Commando knife.

“Mine’s bigger.” Skeleton laughed.

Riley fired twice, both rounds tearing into Skeleton’s right thigh and half spinning the big man around. Riley leapt forward, throwing aside his pistol.

Their blades met with a spark, then both stepped back.

“You fuck,” Skeleton said, glancing down at the blood pumping out of his leg.

Riley circled left, blade up. “Fuck your man to man shit. One thing I learned on the streets of the Bronx was there is no such thing as a fair fight.” He staggered, feeling a wave of nausea.

Skeleton’s blade flashed forward. Riley ducked and swung his blade up at the other man’s gut, but Skeleton was surprisingly agile for his size, and the knife only caught air.

They both backed off again. There was a burst of automatic fire from somewhere else on the floor. Skeleton smiled. “My men.”

Comsky’s pills were wearing off. Five feet separated Riley from the other man. Riley stumbled back, and as he expected, Skeleton reacted, coming forward, blade leading. Riley threw his knife in one smooth motion. Skeleton twisted, the knife slicing along the side of his face and blood spurting forth.

Riley’s arm continued the motion and he slammed down on Skeleton’s knife arm with his left hand. His right elbow came up, catching the big man on the chin and staggering him back.

“I still have mine,” Skeleton said, tossing his knife from one hand to the other, then back. Riley backed up until he felt the wall come up behind him.

Skeleton stepped forward. He was circling the knife, looking for the kill.

The knife flashed forward and Riley reacted, swinging his right forearm up and deliberately catching the point in the flesh. Riley twisted his right arm, ignoring the agony of sliced muscle. His left hand clamped down on Skeleton’s knife hand. The knife popped out of Skeleton’s hand, more from surprise than the strength of Riley’s move.