Church managed not to smile.
“If you’re sending us, then she hasn’t been apprehended.”
“No,” he said. “Spotted only. I arranged for two Marine Recon squads to locate and detain.”
“What if Amirah’s infected?”
“I shared a limited amount of information with the appropriate officers in the chain of command. If anyone reports certain kinds of activity—from Amirah or anyone—then the whole area gets lit up.”
“Lit up as in—?”
“A nuclear option falls within the parameters of ‘acceptable losses.’”
“Can you at least wait until me and my guys reach minimum safe distance?”
He didn’t smile. Neither did I.
“You’ll be operating with an Executive Order, so you’ll have complete freedom of movement.”
“You got the president to sign an order that fast?”
He just looked at me.
“What are my orders?”
“Our primary concern is to determine if anyone infected with the Seif al Din pathogen is loose in Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, that’ll be about as easy to establish as bin Laden’s zip code.”
“Do your best. We’ll be monitoring all news coming out of the area, military, civilian and other. If there is even a peep, that intel will be routed to you and the clock will start.”
“If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”
“Noted.”
“What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”
“Amirah would be a prize catch. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The vice president thinks she would be a great asset to our own bioweapons programs.”
“And is that what you want?” I asked, and then he told me.
-3-
The Helmand River Valley
Sixty-one Hours Ago
We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT—Small Kill Team—operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.
Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed: “Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pick-up point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”
He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.
The six of us went out into the desert, split into two teams and headed into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.
Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool: This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind—sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.
“Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”
Bob Faraday—a big moose of a guy whose call-sign was Slim—ran point. It was getting dark fast and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night-vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed behind, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt out from under rocks and rise up from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread out to join the ocean of shadows that was night.
Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.
As we ran up behind him I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.
I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.
The dark objects were people.
Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth-and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race or even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.
“There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab,” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”
“Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.
Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”
“Even so,” said Bunny.
We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.
The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”
“Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.
There was a long pause.
And it got longer.
I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”