Part 34 (1/2)
”Sure, sure,” said Hu, breaking his own silence, ”and what are we supposed to do if we ever encounter this 'chaos factor' in one of our enemies?”
”If it was someone like that, we'd throw Ledger or Riggs against him.”
”And if they weren't available?” asked Bliss.
”G.o.d help us if that ever happened, doc,” said Dietrich. ”Because we would stand no chance at all.”
Chapter Fifty-two.
Euclid Avenue Station Euclid and Pitkin Avenues Brooklyn, New York Sunday, August 31, 1:37 p.m.
We jumped the curb and drove straight into Prospect Park and tore deep furrows in the dirt of the baseball field as we raced to meet the Black Hawk. The big helicopter's wheels touched down at the same time that I slewed us into a bad skidding, turning stop. We left the doors open and ran bent over through the rotor wash, Ghost ranging ahead. The bay door opened and we dived in.
”Go, go, go!” I bellowed, and the helo rose straight up into the afternoon air.
By car, it's twelve congested miles from Park Slope to the subway entrance on Euclid Avenue at Pitkin, and by now the streets around the station would be jammed with civilians wanting a peek at a disaster. The Black Hawk helicopter tore above the traffic at nearly two hundred miles an hour. We were there in minutes.
It still felt like too long.
During that short flight, Top, Bunny, and I shucked our torn and bloodstained suits and pulled on black BDU trousers and tank tops. Then the tech crew helped us into Saratoga Hammer suits. These are two-piece, lightweight overgarments consisting of a coat with integral hood and separate trousers. The suit incorporates a two-layer fabric system consisting of liquid repellent cotton fabric and a carbon sphere liner. The double layers protect against chemical warfare vapors, liquids, and aerosols. The ones Mr. Church bought for us were not the standard off-the-rack variety but a special grade designed by a friend of his within the company. They were tougher and they had spider-silk fabric woven into what is normally Kevlar sheathing. Very tough and tear-resistant.
Not tear-proof, but tear-resistant. The difference mattered and it was never far from our minds.
Our suits were black and unmarked. No agency patch or rank insignia of any kind. With the helmets on and balaclavas in place we looked like high-tech ninjas. We strapped gun belts around our hips and equipment harnesses to our torsos. These harnesses had pouches for lots of extra magazines and hooks for flash-bangs and fragmentation grenades.
They don't make Hammer suits for dogs. ”You're staying on the chopper,” I told Ghost. He gave me a wounded and baleful glare.
The weapons tech from the Hangar, a moose named Bobby Cooper-Coop to everyone-handed out lots of useful gizmos and additional equipment, including various-sized blaster-plasters, knives, strangle wires, and everything else a psychotic kid might have on his Christmas list. The last thing Coop did was strap a tactical computer to each of our forearms. When he was done, he patted me on the shoulder. ”You're good to go.”
”Thanks, Coop. Take care of my dog, okay?”
He grinned. ”With all the s.h.i.+t that's going on today, Joe, I think Ghost and I should go the h.e.l.l out and get drunk.”
”He'd like that.”
Coop's grin was fragile and it eventually slid off. ”Is it true? Are you going after walkers?”
”We'll see,” I said to Coop. He didn't press it.
Bunny clipped a st.u.r.dy fighting knife handle-downward onto his rig, ready for a fast pull. He said, ”Is this more Mother Night stuff, too?”
”Don't know,” I said.
”It is,” said Top. We didn't argue. We couldn't be sure, but the day had a certain feel to it. A lot of things were sliding downhill, but it seemed to be one hand doing the pus.h.i.+ng.
”How'd they get this s.h.i.+t?” asked Bunny. ”I mean, we have it secured, right?”
”Yes, at the Locker,” I a.s.sured him.
”You sure?”
I wanted to tell him that of course I was sure. Instead I contacted Nikki. ”Have someone run a security check on the Locker. Let's make sure that-”
”We already did,” said Nikki. ”As soon as word came in about the subway, Aunt Sallie initiated a system-wide security lockdown and status check. All the lights at the Locker are green.”
That was a tremendous relief. Keeping that place safe was always number one on any security to-do list. Always.
The Locker is the nickname for the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, located three quarters of a mile beneath a wooded hill in a thinly populated corner of Virginia. There are other similar facilities scattered around the country and the world, places where dangerous things like chemical weapons and VX nerve gas and other monsters are stored. Domestic and international agreements have shut a lot of them down, but we still have a few, some being closely monitored by congressional watchdog groups and teams of independent observers composed of members of NATO, the U.N., and others. And there are facilities squirreled away in places no one would think to look for them. Places funded by obscure allotments in black budgets; places you might pa.s.s every day and never know what insanity was stored behind nondescript stone walls and meaningless signs.
But there's no other place exactly like the Locker.
In the six years since its inception, the Department of Military Sciences has gone to the mat with the world's most extreme terrorists. Not just al-Qaeda fanatics wearing explosive vests or Taliban fighters with shoulder-mounted RPGs. I'm talking about actual mad scientists who put vast amounts of money and their own towering but fractured intellects to the task of creating the most dangerous bioweapons imaginable. Things like quick-onset Ebola, mutated strains of anthrax, radical new forms of ultracontagious tuberculosis, weaponized HIV, and even genetically engineered contagious forms of diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell, which had previously been purely genetic disorders. And, not that this s.h.i.+t had to get any scarier, but there were also a slew of designer superpathogens in there, each of them constructed as doomsday weapons, either as threats in the postnuclear covert arms race or as kill-them-all-let-our-version-of-G.o.d-sort-'em-out holy war weapons, or retaliatory devices for use as a Hail Mary pa.s.s if their side was losing a war. Stuff like Lucifer 113, Vijivs.h.i.+y Odin-Vasemnartzets, Reaper, and the seif-al-din. Stuff no sane human, however politically or theologically motivated, should be capable of dreaming up, let alone making. All of these things were out on the bleeding edge of science.
In my four years with the DMS I've taken my fair share of these toys away from people like the Jakobys, Sebastian Gault, the Cabal, the Seven Kings, the Red Order, the Hebbelmann Group, and others. Too many others. I've had to do some terrible things to keep those weapons from creating the misery for which they were created. Things that have ruined any chance I will ever have of sleeping peacefully through an entire night.
I told Nikki to make sure Church called me as soon as he was free and then disconnected. In my pocket my cell phone vibrated. I removed it and all three of us looked at the message window.
ALWAYS REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE HEAD.
”Well, ain't that d.a.m.n interesting?” said Top sourly. ”Nice of someone to give us advice in our time of trials and tribulations.”
”Amen, Reverend,” said Bunny. His tone was light, but his eyes were bright with tension.
I said nothing. It was getting harder and harder not to smash the phone against the metal wall of the helo.
”Those texts have to be from Mother Night,” said Top. ”This new one proves that she knows what we're about to step into. It proves that she has the seif-al-din.”
Bunny licked his lips. ”Okay, but how the h.e.l.l did she get her hands on it?”
”I don't know,” I said. ”But we're going to find out.”
”Hooah,” Bunny agreed.
Without taking his eyes from mine, Top Sims said, very softly, ”And then we are going to kill her and everyone working with her.”
I added two extra magazines to my pouch. ”Yes, we d.a.m.n well are.”
”Hooah,” they both said.
”Coming up on it,” called the pilot.
Interlude Thirteen Terror Town Mount Baker, Was.h.i.+ngton State Three Years Ago When Dr. Bliss heard the news it rocked her.
Hugo Vox was a traitor.