themselves.'
'I don't see any floppies or CD-RWs either,' Jeffrey said. He pointed to empty spaces on the desks, where disk holders had probably been. Bullets hit the door and Ilse and Jeffrey ducked.
'They've been destroying the evidence,' she said, 'the whole time we were breaking in.'
'You're the expert, Ilse. What do we do?'
'I don't see any lab notebooks either.' More bullets clanged off the door and the TV monitor imploded.
'Shaj,' Jeffrey shouted — inside the lab his radio was jammed. 'Shaj! We need to take a prisoner!'
'Look for an older bald guy!' Ilse yelled at the top of her lungs. 'I have a feeling he'll be in charge!'
'Come on,' Jeffrey said. He and Ilse dashed forward, pistols drawn. They passed two dead Boer soldiers, one with sergeant's stripes. They caught up with the SEALs.
'No one else in sight,' Clayton said. 'We searched all the offices, and this whole wall's shielded…The encapsulated diesel generator's over there.'
'Keep it running,' Jeffrey said. 'We need the power in the bunker.' Ilse peered around. 'They've wrecked every PC and took the laptops with them. They must have gone through the containment air lock.'
'Wouldn't they be killed?' Jeffrey said.
'No,' Ilse said. 'This outer lock's a precaution. Up to level three's a shirt-sleeve environment. You only need space suits in BL-4.'
'How do we get this thing open?' Jeffrey said. Ilse worked the air lock.
'Let's go,' Jeffrey said. He yanked the handle of the inner door and pushed. The door gave a fraction and stopped. He put his shoulder to it. Nothing. 'It's barricaded,' he said.
'The Halligan tools,' Clayton said. SEAL Eight pulled two special crowbars from his pack. Eight and Clayton jammed the forked ends into the crack. Using all their strength, they forced the door open an inch, then lost their points of leverage.
'Jaws,' Clayton said. SEAL Nine handed him the tool. Nine worked the hydraulic foot pump while Clayton held the expanding tips to the jamb of the door. Jeffrey covered the opening from above Clayton's head while he worked, using Nine's weapon. Eight covered the opening from floor level, aiming between Clayton's legs. When there was enough clearance, Clayton dashed through. Again Ilse went last.
A floor-to-ceiling freezer rested against the door. It was unplugged, but her visor told her everything inside was still frozen. The team was in an area of marble-topped lab benches, centrifuges, polymerase-chain-reaction machines. They double-checked under the tables — the area was clear. 'Keep going!' Ilse shouted.
The wall in front of them was shielded. They went through another door, with no barricade this time. Two men in white lab coats turned to face them, unarmed. Four others fed diskettes and papers into fires blazing in the exhaust hoods of biosafety three. SEALs Eight and Nine made them move aside.
'Save whatever you can,' Jeffrey said. Eight and Nine closed the hoods to smother the fires.
In the middle of one wall was another air lock, much heavier and with a different mechanism. A big red 4 was painted on the hatch. Jeffrey looked through the porthole.
'Someone's in there,' Jeffrey said. 'He's putting on a suit.'
'He'll try to lock himself in,' Ilse said, 'then wait until we leave. Let me get this thing open.' She peeked through the porthole, then worked the door mechanism and yanked the handle. Suction fans began to roar.
The bald man took hold of the inner door. 'Get back or I'll open it.'
'You can't,' Ilse said, 'not while this one's ajar. The interlocking won't let you.' The Boer turned. 'You,' he said, staring at her. He held the space-suit hood under one arm.
'Otto,' Ilse said, covering him with her gun. 'I somehow knew you'd be behind all this.' The man grabbed a ring hung by a chain from the ceiling and pulled. Nothing happened.
'Come on, Otto,' Ilse said, 'use your head. The alkali hot bath won't work now either.
Or do you use liquid nitrogen?'
'How did you get here?' Otto snapped. 'Who did you come with, the Special Air Service? A parachute drop on the airstrip?'
'No,' Ilse said as Jeffrey and Clayton came up behind her. 'U.S. Navy SEALs.'
'I should have known,' Otto said, dripping venom. 'You always were too close to American culture.' 'Come out of the air lock,' Ilse said.
'No,' Otto said. 'You'll have to kill me first.'
'You'd like that, wouldn't you?' Ilse said. 'Another martyr for the cause, and all your secrets die with you… Not a chance.'
Jeffrey and Clayton went past Ilse and grabbed Otto by the arms. He struggled, but Nine moved in and gave him a shot of morphine in the neck.
'You filthy sons of bitches,' Otto cursed. 'You racially polluted scum!' He looked right at Ilse. 'You miscegenating whore! I'll tell you nothing!' His voice was already slurred, his eyelids drooping.
'No, Otto,' Ilse said, patting him on the shoulder as he slumped to the floor. She gave him a great big smile.
'You don't know U.S. Naval Intelligence. They have ways to make men talk.'
'Commander, Ilse, check this out,' SEAL Eight said. He was still covering the other prisoners with his machine pistol. Jeffrey and Ilse came over. Eight pointed to another TV monitor and VCR.
'It's a kid,' Jeffrey said. 'He's having convulsions.' 'The archaea,' Ilse said. 'This must be what they were watching.'
'Get the tape,' Jeffrey said. 'At least we'll have it as data.'
'Wait a minute,' Ilse said. 'It's on record, not play. This is live feed we're seeing.'
'It's happening now?' Jeffrey said.
Ilse turned to the air lock. 'Somewhere in there.'
SEAL Eight handed Ilse a partly burned research diary, then did a radar scan through the wall. 'Yeah,' Eight said, 'in there. No one else, he's alone.' Ilse eyed the pages, the binding scorched and still warm through her flameproof gloves. Base gene sequencing homology, initiation codons GUG, UUG, CUG, and so on. Grams dry weight per mol-hour culture growth rates, and substrate uptake kinetics.
'Isn't there something we can do?' Clayton said, staring at the monitor.
'Nothing that would save him,' Ilse said. 'See the way his face looks melted, how his limbs flop? He's lost all muscle tone. The infection's far advanced.'
'Can't we.,' Jeffrey said. He had to clear his throat. 'Can't we go in and help him? You know, a morphine overdose, anything?'
'The procedures to get in there safely,' Ilse said, 'the decontamination afterward. ' The child was shivering and writhing, more like a rubber dummy than a human. Pink foam oozed from his mouth, and his chest heaved erratically. He made animal grunting sounds that came over the speakers in stereo.
'Christ,' Jeffrey said, 'his eyeballs keep jerking in different directions. They aren't even in sync.'
'He's in some kind of inner chamber,' Ilse said. 'Look.' The child was strapped to a bare metal gurney, under robotic grapnels hung from the ceiling. He soiled himself once more and the upper-intestinal effluent dripped to the floor. There was a sump in the white tile floor, in one corner next to autopsy tools— hoses, saws and knives, retractors. Beside them were the mechanical hands and thick viewport of a glove box.
'It makes sense,' Ilse said, 'a higher biosafety zone past BL-4. Biosafety level five.'
'We just have to watch this?' Jeffrey said.
'What do you want me to do?' Ilse snapped. 'Suit up and go through the air lock, move the stretcher to the waldoes with the grapnels, then reach in and grab a scalpel and cut his throat? He can't last long now anyway.'
Electrodes were taped to the boy's forehead and over his heart. Ilse ransacked the level three work area near the monitor, trying to find the readouts. She gasped when she saw his EEG traces — his brain waves were wild, chaotic and jagged.
As Ilse flipped through more research papers, Clayton turned to the prisoners. 'Did you do this to him?'
No one answered.
'Did you do this to him?' Clayton screamed.
'He told us to,' one Boer said, pointing to Otto asleep on the floor. 'The whole project was his idea.' 'They threatened our families,' another pleaded. 'Did they?' Ilse said. She'd seen enough in the notebooks. 'I don't
