aren’t being followed.” There were too many things in this place that didn’t add up.
“The troops should be arriving any second,” I said. I looked up at the shuttered windows set high in the wall. “Bet you a dime they’ll come through those, so be smart when they enter. If they ask you to lay down your arms you do it. Remember, the first thing they’re going to be thinking is that we’ve been killed or infected. Let’s not give anyone a reason to get trigger happy.”
“I’m with you on that, boss,” said Bunny.
“Hey,” Ollie said as he got groggily to his feet, “where’s Skip?”
Bunny glanced at me. “Unknown,” I said. “He went missing around the same time you did.” Ollie looked like he was about to ask a question, but I turned away and looked down at the dying scientist. “How’s he doing, Top?”
“This guy’s circling the drain. You want to ask him a question now would be the time.”
I squatted on my heels. “You’re dying,” I said in Farsi. “You have a chance to do some good, turn things around before you die. Tell me, what is Seif al Din?”
He sneered at me. “The infidels will all drown in rivers of blood.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I want you to tell me about the Sword of the Faithful.”
He laughed. “You’ve already seen its power. It will consume your entire country,” he said, nodding with fierce joy, delighted at the thought.
“If this thing is a plague, friend, then it’s going to consume your people, too.”
He barked a laugh and blood flecked his lips. “Allah will protect His people.” He mumbled something else but all I caught were the words “generation twelve,” and I had no idea what it meant.
I leaned close. “Right now about two hundred Special Forces soldiers are descending on this place. None of your infected subjects are going to get out of here. Not one. Everything you’ve worked for is going to stop right here, right now.”
He tried to spit at me, but he lacked the power. He was fading fast. I glanced at Top who shook his head.
“You have stopped nothing,” whispered the dying man, then repeated the word, savoring it. “Nothing.”
“Is there another lab, another cell?”
“It is past that time,” he said with a bloody smile. “El Mujahid is coming. He wields the Sword of the Faithful. You are all too late. Soon all of Islam will be free of you.”
Then he threw his head back and screamed out the name of God with such force that it tore the last bits of life out of him. He sank back against Top and his head lolled to one side.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:34 A.M.
“ALPHA TEAM! ON me!”
Grace sprinted toward the hole that had been blown in the side of the building. The agents of Alpha Team followed her into what looked like an industrial shower, but the grime-streaked walls were cracked from the blast and one row of metal lockers was torn off the walls. There was no sign of life.
“Redman,” she snapped, and the explosives tech was at her side in a second. “This hallway looks like the only exit. Rig it with C4. If backup hasn’t arrived and anything comes this way that doesn’t look friendly, blow this whole side of the building down. Repeat my orders.”
He did so.
“Major!” called Allenson from a few yards up the hall. He knelt over the body of a man wearing a white lab coat and plastic cuffs. “Got a prisoner down. Neck’s broken. Blast must have smashed him against the wall.”
“Worry about it later.” She shone her flashlight down the hall. Every door along the long corridor stood ajar. “Two-by-two cover formation,” she ordered. The agents moved past her, covering each other as they pulled the doors wide and shone lights and pointed guns into each of the rooms. Four of them were empty, but they stank of human waste, sweat, and misery. In the corners there were indefinable lumps that might have been bodies. Or parts of bodies.
Forty yards up the hallway was evidence of another explosion-probably the one they’d heard from outside. The walls had been torn outward and the hall was heaped with debris. A cursory glance inside revealed the high- end mainframe sequencing computers Joe had reported. Most of them were melted or torn to pieces, but a few appeared to have withstood the blast.
“Major!” cried Allenson. “My God!”
Grace stepped out of the computer room and her heart froze in her chest. What she had taken for mounds of debris from the blast was something else entirely. The team’s unflinching flashlight beams revealed a mound of corpses. Debris and brick dust covered most of it but as Grace played her own flash over the mound she saw that there were dozens of corpses.
“Bloody hell,” Grace breathed. “This isn’t from the blast.” The floor was littered with shell casings and the air was a cordite pall.
There was one more room to check before they would have to climb over the dead to continue down the corridor. Two agents flanked the door and then one went inside.
“Major! In here.”
Grace stepped through the doorway. There were seven corpses sprawled on the floor, all of them dropped by multiple head shots. And in the corner, huddled down, shivering with shock and cold despite the terrible heat, was a man. His clothes were torn, his face streaked with blood, his eyes wild. The floor around him was littered with shell casings and he held a pistol in his trembling hands.
“Gun!” Allenson yelled and instantly the man’s chest was flickering with red laser sights.
“Don’t shoot!” he cried and quickly lowered his pistol. “Please don’t shoot!”
Grace Courtland shone her light in his face.
It was Skip. Grace moved forward and took his gun away from him, passing it back to Allenson. “Chief Tyler are you injured? Tyler, have you been bitten?” she snapped.
“No,” he gasped, then shook his head. He looked at the blood on his clothes. “No this isn’t mine. It’s it’s ”
“Steady on, sailor,” she soothed. “Where’s Echo Team? Where are your men?” And though she didn’t mean to say it, she asked, “Where is Captain Ledger?”
Skip shook his head. “I don’t know. Something happened I blacked out and woke up here and those things were everywhere!” He rubbed at his neck and Grace shone her light on it.
“Looks like a burn,” Allenson said, then speculated, “Liquid Taser?”
Grace signaled to one of her agents. “Beth, go back to the exit and apprise backup of the situation. Tell them to come find us and be bloody quick about it. We’ll proceed and try and locate Echo Team.”
Beth looked from her to the mound of the dead that blocked the hall. “My God you really want to crawl over that?”
“As the saying goes, life’s a bitch.” It was a bad joke and as soon as she said it Grace was sorry she’d opened her mouth. The second part of that catchphrase was: “And then you die.” The unspoken words hung in the air like a jinx.
The climb over the corpses was horrific.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, she told herself as she crawled to the top of the heaped dead. Don’t think about it. She scrambled down the far side and jumped onto the concrete as soon as she could, happy to feel hard reality under her boots rather than the yielding madness of the flesh and bone over which she’d come. As her team followed her she saw that each of them were shock-faced and white, their mouths tight, eyes glistening. Some of them looked furious, some hurt. In silence they hurried down the rest of the hall, checking the last few doors but finding nothing alive.
At the T-junction she stopped. With Beth, Redman, and the shooter back at the entrance she was down to nine, with her making ten. She sent Allenson with four agents down the left corridor and she took the right.
MASTER SERGEANT MARK Allenson was thirty years old and had been Marine Force Recon for four years and a DMS agent for fourteen months. He was sharp, intelligent, and had been Major Courtland’s first choice as her
