thrashing up the face of a waterfall, he muscled into the mass of people and started climbing.
He recalled what Frey had told him, just before the attack. Sara had gone to the fourth floor. Was she still there?
Is she still alive?
King abandoned all pretense of being polite. We waved the gun ahead of him, and the crowd parted like sea in some biblical miracle. He reached the fourth floor a few moments later and burst through the door.
Most visitors had already evacuated, but the medical staff was busy moving patients, beds and all, to the elevator. Hospitals were one of the few places where using elevators in a fire was an absolute necessity. King caught the eye of one of the nurses, and was about to ask for Sara’s whereabouts, when a bloodcurdling shriek from down the hall startled them both.
“Never mind,” King breathed, and took off in the direction of the noise.
It wasn’t Sara. That wasn’t just wishful thinking. It hadn’t been Sara’s voice-he knew that with complete certainty-but more to the point, he couldn’t imagine any circumstances where Sara would scream. That knowledge however didn’t necessarily make him feel any better. Whatever was causing the persistent howl couldn’t be good.
The shriek led him to an open door, and he charged through with the MP5 at the ready. The scream was issuing from the woman thrashing in the single hospital bed in the room, but King barely noticed her. His attention was fixed on the two men in black assault gear that stood on the far side of the bed. One of them was in the process of sealing a plastic biohazard bag over what looked to King like a skull. The other was raising his gun.
King shot him between the eyes, but even as his finger released the trigger, the full impact of what he had just seen landed on him like a ton of bricks. That gun…
He shifted the machine pistol to the left, ready to take out the other attacker, but withheld fire when he saw the incendiary grenade in the man’s outstretched right hand. The pin was out and only the pressure of his fingers, covering the trigger spoon, kept it from deflagrating.
“Kill me and we all burn,” snarled the gunman.
King kept the weapon trained on the man and weighed the consequences of simply taking the shot. He knew he could escape the room before the grenade started burning, but there were other considerations, not the least of which was the hysterical patient.
The shooter edged away from the bed, the biohazard bag with its mysterious contents tucked under his left arm. He glanced down at his fallen comrade, and then met King’s stare. Although the balaclava concealed his visage, there was no mistaking the rage burning in his eyes. “Maybe not today, but you’re a dead man.”
King ignored the bluster, keeping his gaze and his MP5 steady as the man backed toward the door, but both of them knew exactly how it would end. The man took one more step toward the door, and then threw the grenade.
The gray cylinder arced through the air and landed on the bed. King squeezed the trigger, but the man was already gone, ducking as he fled into the hallway. The shot was an indulgence-a Hail Mary pass-and he hadn’t really expected to hit his target. Hit or miss, he had other things to worry about.
Unlike standard fragmentation grenades, which had a 3-to-5 second time delay fuze, the M201A1 igniter in the incendiary grenade burned in less than 2 seconds. In the instant he saw the spoon fly away from grenade body, even before it left his opponent’s hand, King started a very short countdown clock.
One Mississippi…
Even as the grenade landed on the bed… even as the round from his MP5 flashed through the suppressor on its way to nowhere, King’s mind tumbled with conflicting priorities.
The grenade! Deal with that first. How?
Two Mississippi…
He must have been counting too fast because nothing had happened yet.
None too gently, he snared the female patient’s flailing arm with his left hand and pulled her to him. In the same motion, he launched a kick at the bed’s side rail. Because its roll-brake had been engaged, the heavy bed only scooted a couple yards. Before King could lower his extended foot, the room was filled with brilliant white light.
He looked away quickly, but bright streaks now painted his retinas. The bed erupted in flames and smoke, both rendered almost invisible by the intensely bright fire from the burning grenade. Barely able to see anything except with his peripheral vision, King knelt over the frantic woman, hugging her to his chest, and stabbed the MP5 at the doorway.
He figured the odds were about fifty-fifty that the black clad intruder would be waiting for him in the hall; he expected to walk into a blast from the man’s very distinctive handgun. But staying in the room was not an option, and ‘maybe dead’ beat ‘definitely dead’ any day of the week.
This time, the odds broke in his favor. The other man was gone, evidently eager to escape with the prize contained in the plastic biohazard bag.
“You can let go.”
The voice, weak and breathless, startled him. He glanced down at the woman, locked in the embrace of his left arm, and realized she was no longer thrashing. He eased the pressure of his grip, but didn’t release her. She didn’t look strong enough to stand on her own, much less negotiate four flights of stairs to safety. Despite her abruptly calm demeanor, there was a trace of madness in her eyes. Her face was streaked with something that looked like baby food, and blood was leaking from her arm where her IV had ripped out.
King glanced at the blood, and for the first time, it occurred to him that this woman was almost certainly the patient whom Kerry Frey had spoken of, the patient in the isolation room. The patient whose illness had summoned Sara and her team across the ocean in the first place.
Wonderful, he thought, trying to imagine what almost-always-fatal new disease he had just been exposed to. There were definite drawbacks to having a CDC disease detective for a girlfriend.
But Sara wasn’t here. He didn’t think she would have abandoned a patient when the fire alarm sounded. So where was she?
Black smoke was beginning to billow from the open doorway, and he felt the glow of radiant heat on the exposed skin of his face and arms.
He turned to the woman again. “What’s your name?”
“Felice.”
“Felice, I’m Jack. I’m going to get you out of here, but you need to do what I say, okay?”
She nodded.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so. Let go.” He did, gradually releasing his embrace, but ready to catch her if her strength failed. After a few seconds on her own, she nodded again. “I can manage.”
“Good. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
8.
Fulbright cocked his head sideways, listening, and then frowned as he too heard the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell. “Damn it. All right, this isn’t going to be pretty. Just stay close to me.”
The lady or the tiger? Sara thought, recalling the classic short story of a Roman gladiator faced with two equally undesirable choices. She half-expected him to charge down the stairs, headlong into the force of unknown but surely superior strength, with guns blazing in typical CIA cowboy fashion, but instead he chose the other door. Literally.
He opened the roof access door just enough for them to squeeze through single file. As she stepped out, Sara got a better look at the waiting helicopter, and at the two men who appeared to be guarding it. Like the pair she had seen in hospital ward, they were clad entirely in black assault gear.
Sara felt very exposed as she followed Fulbright along the perimeter of the raised concrete superstructure that housed the stairwell. She expected at any moment to hear gunfire. Or maybe she wouldn’t hear anything; the bullet that would snuff her out of existence would probably be traveling faster than the sound of the shot.
