Bio-Strike

This was going to be it.

As the gunnie scuttled into the hall, his weapon spitting bullets, Ricci caught him with a single shot to the center of the chest. He went down hard, his green fatigue shirt turning brilliant red.

Ricci pushed from the wall, racing around the fallen bodies in the corridor to join his team. He could see Simmons complete his scan, move himself out of the doorway—

His eyes widened. Nichols had suddenly moved toward the door with the rammer, was swinging it back for momentum, about to drive it against the jamb, unaware of Barnes reaching out to stop him.

“Hold it!” Ricci shouted. “Fucking hold it!”

He could see Nichols try to check himself, but the warning registered an instant too late. His entire upper body was already into the forward swing.

The rammer hit the door and it flew inward with a crash, and that was when the attack dogs came lunging out. Pit bulls, five of them, silent and vicious, their voice boxes surgically removed. Called hush puppies by the SWAT personnel Ricci had known in his police years, too often encountered in crack- house raids, they were usually maddened from drugs, torture, and starvation, reduced to a core of frenzied, bestial aggression by their keepers.

Their muscles humped and rippling under their pelts, jaws snapping, lips peeled away from their carnivorous white fangs, they sprang into the corridor and were on his men in a heartbeat—

“Stop!” A voice from Obeng’s office. “Sit!”

The pit bulls stopped in their tracks and got onto their haunches, immediately heeding the firm command.

“That’s it, that’s it, nice doggies,” the voice said. This time coming from just inside the doorway.

A hand reached from the entrance, rows of shiny gold and silver bracelets clattering around the wrist. Then an arm in a colorful, hand-beaded shirtsleeve.

The man who stepped into the corridor a moment later had performed his role to the hilt, even dressing the part of a warlord.

He bent over the dog nearest the door, scratched behind its ear, then reached into his trouser pocket for some biscuits and began passing them out to the obedient animals.

They crunched them happily, tails wagging, crumbs flying from their jowls.

“Hate to be the one to say this,” he told Ricci, looking up at him. “But—”

The Sword op who’d been the Wildcat for the week-long training exercise strode from the office to finish the sentence for him.

“But your guys just got their balls chewed off,” he said. “And probably some other chunks of their anatomy, too.”

Expelling a long breath, Ricci turned from the office door in disgust. Down the hall, the militiaman he’d nailed with his practice round rose from the floor and pulled his dye-soaked shirt away from his chest.

“Shit’s sticky,” he muttered. “And cold.”

Ricci glared over at Nichols.

In that kid’s case, getting his balls chewed off was exactly what he could look forward to.

No playacting.

TEN

VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 6, 2000

AWAKEN THE SLEEPER

FEE: 50 MILLION

INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE WEEK

In suburban illinois, a man named Lance Jefferson Freeman, formerly known as Ronald Mumphy…

An identity he’d shed once he emerged from federal prison upon getting his investment fraud conviction overturned on a so-called legal technicality, the appellate judge reluctantly citing an error in the submission of prosecutorial discovery filings…

In his home office in the affluent town of Hanscom, Illinois, the reborn and redubbed Lance Jefferson Freeman, or simply L. J. as his devoted Internet radio show listeners affectionately called the founder and crown minister of the White Freedom Church, was having thoughts that were in many respects identical to those of Arif al-Ashar in East Sudan, which was quite extraordinary, given the vast gulf of miles, culture, ideology, and personal background separating them. Even more remarkable in terms of their congruence, L. J.’s thoughts had also framed themselves as a familiar saying, albeit one that took its context and meaning from a classically (though by no means uniquely) American experience.

“A kid in a candy store,” he muttered to himself. “That’s what I am, yes, mister…”

Meaning, in other words, that L. J., too, was coming to understand he would have to prioritize between the many ethnic groups he wished to see deleted from existence, like the terse three-line solicitation about to be electronically wiped from his computer screen.

L. J. lifted a pencil off his desk and started nibbling at its eraser with his large, white, perfectly even front teeth. Then he checked himself, recalling that his dentist had warned him the nervous habit could damage the cosmetic bonding he’d recently gotten done. When you were in the public arena, a media personality of sorts, a smile was your calling card. So scratch the pencil. You did not need to constantly chew on something when you were trying to plan things out.

L. J. lowered the pencil from his mouth but instead of putting it aside found himself tapping it against the top of his desk. Well, no harm in that, he supposed. Whenever he got chugging along on full horsepower, he’d work up a potent head of steam and had to find a way of blowing a little of it off somehow.

L. J. tapped. Where was he? Oh yes, the Jews. The Jews. They would be high on his list. Probably foremost. It was through books given to him by a cellmate during his prison stint (the most influential had been titled The Wisdom and Prophesies of Adolf Hitler, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and Satan’s Seedline: The Evil Race) that L. J. had learned the truth behind the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG, that had secretly wrested control of America from its God-chosen founders through its institutions of high finance, absorbing it into their multinational New Imperium and using fiat money…

In other words, the legal tender minted by the Federal Reserve Bank, from penny coins to printed notes of every denomination…

Fiat money to replace gold and/or silver weights and measures as an honest system of exchange, thereby allowing usurious Jewish moneylenders to manipulate interest rates and leech away the assets of the Anglo Saxon, Teutonic, and kindred white races, who, in their natural superiority, were the only blessed and rightful inheritors of the kingdom of God — the United States, in other words — just as they had craftily fleeced the people of Germany before the heroic martyrs of the National Socialist Party had stood up in brave resistance.

L. J.’s pencil-tapping quickened. The Jews, absolutely, it had to be them. Pulling together fifty million to rid the land of their domination wouldn’t be difficult, considering the resources of his more well-off supporters, a core group of patriots and true believers who’d pledged to open their wallets for the cause. In fact, right now he was projecting a surplus of funds, enough to simultaneously purge another corrupting racial element from society. The tough thing was deciding which one.

Well, truth be known, maybe not. L. J. supposed it got back to his readings about the preservation of racial rights when he was behind cell bars, a whole lot of material written by some high-gigahertz thinkers and supported by the work of people like the world’s leading phrenologist, an eighty-two-year-old pioneer who’d run an institute of his own in Austria since before World War II. Anyway, L. J.’s early research had made it clear that the black race presented the second greatest threat to the children of Adam, these being people of ruddy complexion, in other words whites, according to a biblical code that yet another of L. J.’s favorite authors had unraveled.