“Really.” His smile looked frozen into place. “Church told me about St. Michael’s and about that village in Afghanistan.”
I nodded, and for a moment I had this weird feeling that we were standing there surrounded by ghosts.
“And now you’re working for them,” Rudy said.
“Working for them maybe isn’t the right way to say it. It’s more like we’re both working against the same enemy.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“Something like that.”
“Church said that you might be leading a small team against these terrorists. Why not send the entire army, navy, and marine corps all at once?”
I shook my head. “The more feet on the ground the bigger the risk of uncontrollable contamination. A small team wouldn’t get in each other’s way; there would be fewer instances where a soldier would be faced with the choice of whether to shoot an infected comrade. It simplifies things. And if worse comes to worst and the infection has to be contained like it was at St. Michael’s then there are fewer overall losses of assets.”
“ ‘Assets’?” Rudy echoed.
“People.”
“Dios mio. How do you know all this?”
“It’s just common sense,” I said.
“No,” he said, “it’s not. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Most people wouldn’t.”
“A fighter would.”
“You mean a warrior,” said Rudy.
I nodded.
Rudy gave me a strange look. Behind him my four team members came filing in dressed in black BDUs. Rudy turned and watched as they walked over to the training area. “They look like tough men.”
“They are.”
He turned back to me. “I hope they’re not so tough that they’re hardened, Joe. We’re not just fighting against something we’re fighting for something, and it would be a shame to destroy the very thing you’re fighting to preserve.”
“I know.”
“I hope you do.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go. Mr. Church is going to introduce me to the research teams. I think he’s trying to recruit me, too.”
“Ha! That’ll be the day.”
But Rudy gave me a funny look before he turned and headed back into the offices with the guard a half step behind him, rifle at port arms. I watched them until they passed through the far doorway.
“Shit,” I murmured. I walked over to the team and had just opened my mouth to explain the first drill I wanted them to do, but I never got the chance as behind us a door banged open and Sergeant Gus Dietrich came pelting into the room.
“Captain Ledger! Mr. Church wants you immediately.”
“For what?” I asked as Dietrich skidded to a halt.
Dietrich hesitated for a fraction of a second, the new chain of command probably still uncertain in his head. He made his decision quickly, though. “Surveillance teams found the missing truck. We think we found the third cell.”
“Where?”
“Delaware. He wants you to hit it.”
“When?”
“Now,” said a voice, and I wheeled to see Church and Major Courtland striding across the floor. “Training time’s over,” he said. “Echo Team is wheels up in thirty.”
Chapter Forty
Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:18 P.M.
FOUR HOURS AGO I was buying coffee for Rudy at a Starbucks near the Baltimore aquarium and now I was ankle deep in shit and sewer water in a tunnel under Claymont, Delaware. Life just gets better and better. I was even wearing my street shoes, too. Once we’d gotten the go order there was no time to find boots my size or change into fatigue pants.
We all wore Kevlar chest protectors, limb pads, gun belts, and tactical helmets and night-vision goggles. We had enough weapons to start a small war, which was pretty much the plan.
We’d taken a chopper from Baltimore and offloaded in the parking lot of an abandoned elementary school near Route 13 near Bellevue State Park. Not a lot of foot traffic out that way. From there we’d piled into the back of a fake UPS van borrowed from the local vice squad’s surveillance team and they drove us around behind a liquor warehouse up the street from Selby’s Fine Meats. We used the warehouse’s cellar to access the storm drains and from there into the main sewer line that was supposed to have a vent in the meatpacking plant. My handheld GPS tracker pointed the way.
Ollie Brown was on point and I liked the smooth way he moved, making very little noise despite the water; he checked his corners and kept his eyes pointing in the same direction as his gun sights. The big guy, Bunny, was our cover man, tailing us with a M1014 combat shotgun that looked like a toy in his hands, and in the bad light he looked like a hulking cave troll as he walked bent over, filling the tunnel. I was second in the string, with Top Sims and Skip Tyler behind me. I didn’t have a silencer for my.45 so Sergeant Dietrich had loaned me a Beretta M9 with a Trinity sound suppressor and four extra magazines. I didn’t have a long gun, though everyone else did; handguns were always my thing.
We moved like ghosts, no chatter, just a line of men moving through shadows to face monsters. It was unreal, I felt like I was in a video game. Shame real life doesn’t have a reset button.
In the chopper we’d sketched out what plans we could. “Here’s the skinny,” I said as we nodded our heads together over a map in the narrow confines of the chopper’s cabin. “Church has a en route to give us a thermal scan of the place, but that’s about as much intel as we have. He’s also arranging to have phone lines cut and Major Courtland said that they’ll get a presidential order allowing them to disrupt all cell reception in the area. We don’t want one of the hostiles texting his buds on his LG Chocolate.”
“LOL,” Bunny murmured.
“We’ll come up through the sewers. We pulled up the schematics for the storm drains and there’s a big line that goes right under the plant, very nicely placed for a quiet walk-in once the lights are off. Questions?”
“Mission priorities?” asked Top.
“Mr. Church wants prisoners for interrogations. We’d all like more intel before we kick the doors on that crab plant. From all indications that’s going to be the big enchilada. The computer geeks think this meatpacking place is a storage depot for our hostiles, not a main action center.”
“Does that mean taking a bullet to give him his prisoner?” Ollie asked, his eyes hard, challenging.
“No, but don’t let it fall that way. Shoot to wound, try to disable whenever possible, but don’t get killed.”
“High on my to-do list, boss,” observed Bunny, and Skip nodded.
“What about those zombie motherfuckers?” asked Top.
“If we’re lucky the walkers will be in their containers, locked up and on ice.”
“And if we’re not lucky?”
“If it doesn’t have a pulse, Top, you have my permission to blow it all the way back to hell.”
They all nodded. It was the only part of the plan that they liked. I could see their point. In the annals of warfare there was a long history of men getting killed because they lacked clear intelligence. We had jack shit.
Before we boarded the chopper I said, “Look, we don’t know each other and we haven’t even had the chance to train as a team. Church is asking us to hit the ground running. Let’s do just that. None of us are green at this sort of thing, so let’s act and function like professionals. Chain of command is me, then Top. Everyone else is equal. We all watch each other’s backs as well as our own. Five of us go in, five of us come out. We all clear on that?”
“Hooah,” Top said.
