“I, uh… Ma’am?”
“Just go get the S-2, Sergeant.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hannah turned slightly in her chair and watched one of the guards leave while the other one stayed where he was just a few steps behind her. As his partner left, he edged toward the side slightly to increase the angle of fire if things went south. She was impressed. They’d been trained well.
“So, Ms. Dunn,” the colonel said, drawing out her name to bring her attention back to the older woman sitting behind the desk. “I bet you’re wondering what that’s about.”
Hannah shrugged. “Since you didn’t believe me or care about what I said when I referenced the North Korean mission, I figure that you don’t know anything about them. But the fact that you stopped the guards from taking me out of here when I mentioned the Iranians means you guys have already gotten intel about them, so now you’re taking me seriously.”
Colonel King nodded, her eyes narrowing. “Very astute, Ms. Dunn. Where did you say you served?”
“I was in the 1st Air Cav at Fort Hood, then joined the 160th. Deployed to Iraq twice in support of 7th Group. Then I got out and became a contractor—which is how I ended up in the thick of things. Otherwise, I’d probably be dead.”
“Excuse me, ma’am. You wanted to see me?”
Hannah turned once again to see the brigade intelligence officer that she’d spent a few hours with while trying to convince them that she had legitimate information about where the virus came from.
“Yeah, come on in, Josh. And shut the door.”
“Ma’am?” the guard who’d left asked.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sergeant Grant. Yes, you can come in here,” the colonel groaned. Hannah filed away the fact that as a carrier of the disease she was very much considered a threat by their security.
Once everyone was situated in the office, Colonel King asked the S-2 how much he knew of Hannah’s story. “I believe she told me everything, ma’am.”
“Did you know about the Iranians?”
“She mentioned a logbook with dual language entries, but that’s about it, ma’am.”
The woman’s gaze fell back on Hannah. “Okay, so you went to North Korea, somehow made it to a lab that was abandoned and found out the Iranians were involved. How does that translate to South America, where you say this all began?”
Hannah arranged her thoughts before she spoke. “While our team EXFIL’d by submarine into the Pacific, we got word that the pictures we took of the logbook pages had already been transcribed.”
“A submarine?” Colonel King asked quizzically.
Fuck it, Hannah thought, deciding to abandon any pretense at mission security. “Yes, ma’am. We stole a North Korean fishing boat and got picked up by a British sub that took us to Japan.”
“How many nations knew about the virus before the outbreak?” the colonel asked with obvious disgust at the massive international failure to contain it.
“Um… I don’t know, ma’am. At least us, the Brits, the Japanese, and the Brazilians.” She went back to her original train of thought. “So, originally, the Norks and the Iranians had been working together to create super soldiers immune to pain, but their experiments changed somehow—I don’t know how or why. The book noted that the patients with the immunity to pain had become mentally unstable and the disease passed from person-to-person. The Iranian passages seemed to take on a religious bent, whereas the Korean ones tended to stay more clinical and fearful of the disease getting out into the population. It said the operation was moved to Brazil to ease the release on the West.”
She took a sip of water before continuing. “When we got to Brazil, we got intel from the local military commander that a Middle Eastern company had built a big manufacturing plant in the middle of the jungle under the auspices of mining minerals, but that no actual mining had occurred yet. My team leader knew right away that the place they told us about was our target, so we headed there after a quick rest and planning session. By the time we got there, the facility had been alerted and they released several hundred of the crazies on us. My team got separated and my weapon jammed. I saw Chris—one of my teammates—get torn to shreds by three of them and I ran instead of clearing the jam. I just ran…” She faltered, then said quietly, “I— I left them.”
Her eyes focused on the aviation brigade commander and the woman smiled sadly. “There’s nothing you could have done, dear. You would be dead now too.”
Hannah thrust her hand up. “It turns out that I’m immune, so I could have—”
“Bled out from a hundred bites and injuries with no medical treatment. Being immune doesn’t mean you can’t be killed. Early on, we had a research facility here on Bliss to try to understand why some people were immune and whether the scientists could replicate that somehow, but an outbreak in the clinic wiped it out and all of the patients who were immune were killed by the infected as they raged through the building. Believe me when I say that there’s nothing you could have done.”
The colonel’s gaze shifted to the S-2. “I think it goes without saying that Ms. Dunn’s story corroborates what Division is saying about the Iranians showing up here in the States and that they’re the ones jamming our communications.” She looked at the two guards. “Not a word of this leaves this room, do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they answered in near-perfect unison.
“Good,” Colonel King said, nodding curtly. “Ms. Dunn, as little as two months ago, we had a lot of aerial support from Holloman Air Force Base in
