Z (27 page)

Riley didn’t give him a chance to recover. With all his might he slammed a punch—the middle knuckle of his left hand leading the way—into Skeleton’s right eye. The orb crunched under the impact and Skeleton screamed in agony.

Riley pulled the knife out of his forearm and dropped it to the ground. He reached down with his one good hand and drew Skeleton’s pistol out of the holster, then snap-kicked the man in the chest, driving him away.

Riley pointed the gun at him. “The destruct controls?”

Skeleton’s remaining eye saw the gun, but he shook his head.

Riley fired, the round ripping into the other leg and dropping Skeleton to the floor. “The destruct control.”

“Fuck you,” Skeleton said. “Pieter’s got it. It’s a remote.”

“Where’s Pieter?”

“Down in the vault.”

Riley aimed and fired two rounds into Skeleton’s forehead. A searchlight came in the window from a helicopter hovering just outside. Riley could see the Ranger sharpshooters hanging out the window and the small laser dots creeping around the room, searching for targets. He saw something on a table and grabbed it, putting it into one of the pockets on his combat vest.

He pulled down the boom mike, which had been knocked askew when he’d first jumped down into the room. “This is Riley. Van Wyks has the destruct control and he’s down in the basement. Over.”

The first rule of military operations was: What can go wrong will. Colonel Rogers was improvising, keeping things flowing. Since Riley’s first call that the video had caught the recon platoon landing on the roof, he’d been running this by the seat of his pants.

The Little Birds were in without incident, flitting about the main building, unnoticed so far. But reaction was coming. The AWACS was picking up antiaircraft radars being activated—seeking targets. The main air assault force couldn’t go in until that problem was taken care of.

And now Riley was saying that the recon platoon had failed in its mission. They didn’t have the destruct control. For all they knew, the mission was already a failure. Rogers briefly considered halting and cutting his losses—for all of half a second.

“Eagle, shut down these radars and take out the ground reaction forces. Phase three.”

“This is Eagle. Roger. Phase three. Out.”

Riley kicked open the door to the room he’d been in, his reloaded MP-5 in his left hand. He spotted two men in khaki with their backs to him firing around the corner. Riley killed them with one burst.

“This is Riley!” he called out, moving down the hall. Turning the corner, he met three Rangers—all that were left of the sixteen who had come down. They gathered by the stairwell, one of them holding his muzzle inside the door, firing an occasional shot to keep more of Van Wyks’s men from coming up.

“The floor’s clear,” a young staff sergeant, the ranking survivor of the recon platoon, reported. Now that the firing had stopped—however briefly—the reality of the situation was setting in and there was a quiver in his voice.

“All right,” Riley said. “We have to get to the basement.”

“There’s eleven floors of people between us and the basement,” the sergeant reported. “We blew the elevators.” He pointed at the stairs. “That’s the only way down.”

“No, it isn’t,” Riley said.

The F-4G Wild Weasel was the only remaining version of the venerable F-4 Phantom still in the U.S. inventory. It had one very specific job—kill enemy radar and anti-air systems.

Two Weasels came in on Eagle’s orders fast and high out of the west. The radar systems of the Van Wyks compound picked them up and locked on, just as Colonel Harris, orbiting far overhead in the AWACS, had hoped.

Missiles leapt off the wings of the Weasels—Shrike, AGM-78, and Tacit Rainbows—fancy names for smart bombs that caught the enemy radar beams and rode them down to the emitters.

The pilots of the Weasels banked hard and were already one hundred and eighty degrees turned when the missiles struck. Almost all of Van Wyks’s air defense went down in that one strike.

The Little Birds were going down the building floor by floor, now that they knew the top was all friendlies and all the other floors were the bad guys. The two armed with 7.62 mini-guns were firing through windows, shooting blindly. The Ranger snipers hit anything they saw moving. Windows shattered out and tracers crisscrossed the floor, tearing through walls. The men inside lay low, hiding from the carnage as best they could.

The two Little Birds with rockets had a more difficult job. They were firing up the barracks buildings nearby as troops poured out of them. As the first armored vehicles began appearing, they switched to those.

The four Apaches arrived just in time and fired a salvo of eight Hellfire missiles at the armor. Each one was a kill.

“Balls to the wall,” was Colonel Rogers’s less-than-elegant order to the pilot of his Black Hawk. The other eight Black Hawks holding his main assault force were right behind him.

“There’s the coastline,” the pilot said. “We’ll be there in four minutes.”

Next to Rogers, Conner Young held the camera steady, filming Rogers as he barked out commands. She felt very calm, as if she weren’t really there, simply watching a scene play out in a movie. After all that had happened the last several days, she wondered that she could even move.

The Rangers had blown the two elevators the Ranger way—simply and violently by throwing satchel charges into the shafts, which had landed on the cars eleven floors below. Nothing remained of either—just a gaping shaft. With a steel cable running down the center attached to nothing.

“Ever fast-rope a steel cable?” Riley asked. Fast-roping was a way of infiltration from a helicopter—using an eight-strand Pilmoor synthetic rope that soldiers grabbed and slid down.

“We...” The sergeant paused and looked at Riley to see if he was serious. The other man was wrapping a dressing tight around Riley’s forearm, slowing the bleeding. “Sir, I don’t think that will work,” he finally said, looking at the thick steel cable.

“Won’t know until we try,” Riley said. He grabbed a cushion off the couch in the small foyer that the elevators opened onto, then leaned into the shaft. He wrapped the cushion around the cable, then jumped out.

He almost lost his grip—he had almost no control of his right arm. He hooked his left all the way around the cushion and cable and grabbed his harness with his left hand as he plummeted down.

The cushion began shredding and Riley wondered which he would run out of first—cushion or altitude. He hoped the latter.

A pair of SAM-7—shoulder-fired heat-seeker missiles and thus not affected by the Weasel attack—streaked up at one of the Apaches. The craft exploded in a ball of flame.

“Shit,” Colonel Harris muttered as he saw the signal for the Apache disappear and heard the pilot screaming before the radio went dead.

His mood didn’t get any better as one of his analysts called out. “Sir, the SADF convoy is five kilometers from the west gate of the Van Wyks compound!”

Riley hit hard as the last shreds of the cushion disappeared. He shook his head to clear it and looked about. A letter was painted on the wall next to the doors—B.

Riley unhooked the sling of the MP-5 and held it. He hooked the stock into the doors and pushed. At the pressure they opened like they were designed to in an emergency.

Riley rolled into the room, ready to fire. Nothing. Just a short corridor ending at another set of steel doors. He heard a noise behind him and the staff sergeant came sliding down.

“Fuck, sir,” the sergeant said with a grin. “That was wild.”

* * *

One of the Little Birds was hit by ground fire and auto-rotated down. Once it was on the ground, the four men got off and immediately became embroiled in a gun battle with ground forces.

The Apache pilots were firing wildly now, trying to suppress any SAM shoulder-fired missiles. They would be out of ammunition in another minute at their current rate of expenditure.

“One minute!” the pilot said.

Rogers grabbed his M-16 and put a round in the chamber. It was going as they had expected—heavy losses—and they still didn’t have the Anslum 4. And the SADF armored column was knocking at the gate.

“Two on the roof,” Rogers ordered. “The rest on the ground.”

Two Black Hawks broke off and gained altitude, heading up to put their men down on the roof. The other six stayed low.

“Up or down?” Rogers’s pilot asked.

“Down,” Rogers said. He watched, shocked, as one of the two climbing Black Hawks was hit by a SAM-7 and banked over hard, the pilots trying to keep control, then exploded in a ball of flame as it hit the side of the building.

Conner held the camera steady, but she could see the bodies inside the helicopter as it slid down the side of the building. She thought of all the young men with the high and tight haircuts smiling and joking as they’d boarded the helicopters on the Abraham Lincoln. The Black Hawk touched down and she jumped off, following Colonel Harris. The chopper was back up and gone just as quickly, the pilots eager to get out of this inferno.

Riley felt the building shake.

“What the fuck was that?” The three Rangers looked up as if they expected to see the roof cave in. One had not done so well on the ride down and his hands and forearms had been ripped open. The staff sergeant was bandaging him as best he could, but it was obvious to Riley the man was out of the fight.

“I don’t know,” Riley said. He pointed at the door. “I need that open.”

“I got just the right tool,” one of the Rangers said, shrugging off his backpack. “Shaped charges. Burn through three feet of concrete like crap through a goose,” he said lovingly as he held up a conical black object.

At the main gate to the Van Wyks compound the security guards were inside two Ratel-90 armored vehicles, their main guns pointing down the road. They could hear and see all hell breaking loose inside the compound, but their job was the road, and one thing Skeleton had stressed was to do the job assigned.

In the faint light of morning, they could see a long dust cloud coming from the northeast. The highest ranking guard stood up in his commander’s hatch and peered through his binoculars. He relaxed when he saw the old South African flag flying from the lead vehicle. Help had arrived as Skeleton had promised.

Colonel Rogers’s men were pinned down. Two of the Black Hawks were stuck with them in their makeshift perimeter around the headquarters building—too shot up to take off again. One of the Little Birds had joined them on the ground, its hydraulics shot out. The others were gone. Colonel Harris had pulled all helicopters that could still fly out of the fight to avoid more losses.

A Ratel-90 came nosing up a hundred meters from the building. A Ranger fired an AT-4 antitank weapon and missed. Another AT-4. This one hit and the Ratel exploded.

Rogers could see a cluster of armored vehicles massing to the south. AT-4s would only do so much. His men were heavily outgunned. As they had been afraid they would be.

“Steady men, steady!” he called out. “Don’t waste any of your antitank shots!”

Riley’s head rang from the explosion. He peeked around the edge of the elevator shaft. The steel doors were twisted on their hinges. He ran forward and leapt through into the room beyond, no longer caring if he was met by bullets.

He skidded to a halt. He was in a large laboratory. A pressure hatch on the far side must lead to the bio-level four lab, Riley guessed. But his attention was riveted on the lone person in the room.

Pieter Van Wyks was seated at a desk. Between Riley and the desk was a thick clear wall. The old man held up a hand, displaying a device looking very much like a TV remote control.

“Looking for this?” Van Wyks’s voice came out of a speaker in the ceiling.

Riley fired a shot at the glass just to check. The round didn’t even make a shatter impact as it just ricocheted off.

“You won’t get in here that easily,” Van Wyks said. “If you try to destroy this glass with an explosive, I will simply push this button—” the liver-spotted hand twitched—“and the Anslum four is gone. That is what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

“Why?” Riley said, letting the MP-5 hang on its sling. He signaled for the two Rangers to lower their weapons as they came charging through.

“Why?” Van Wyks laughed. “Why? Because I could. Because there simply are too many people. The scientists whine about it in the newspapers every day. Too many people. Too many mouths to feed. Too much pollution. Too many wars. Too much of everything bad. All caused by too many people who aren’t worth a damn.

“You do know, of course, that viruses are nature’s defense, don’t you? It was bound to happen soon. Within twenty years, according to the information I was given by the best minds money could buy. Either a virus, or our own man-made scourge, nuclear weapons. I just helped it along a bit.”

Van Wyks shrugged. “Didn’t quite work like I had planned, but there’s not much I can do about that now. I suppose I will have to negotiate my way out of this.”

“You’re crazy,” Riley said. “You aren’t going to negotiate your way out of this.”

Van Wyks turned slightly and pointed. A television monitor was mounted on a bracket. The screen showed the main gate to the compound. “Your force above will not last much longer. Help is just a few minutes away, then I will be back in control. Namibia will be the new homeland. I still have the virus, which means I still have power. Oh, they’ll negotiate, all right.”

Riley was looking around. The only way into the room Van Wyks was in was through a door made of the same clear material. The latch was solid and looked like it could take a pounding.

Van Wyks smiled. “You’ve lost.”

The lead vehicle in the convoy was a quarter mile away. The guards were waving small flags—the old South African flag, from before the change in power.

The flag flying from the antenna of the lead tank suddenly flew off, the line holding it there cut. Something snapped in the breeze, being held by the man in the top hatch—two pieces of cloth, one in each hand.

The guard post commander snapped the binoculars to his eyes. The new South African flag and the red, white, and blue of the Americans.