All at a glance he saw a man he recognized as the Wildcat standing above Simmons’s blood-soaked form, saw Rosander slumped near the wall behind them, and with a surge of horror opened fire on the killer.
Cold-eyed, Kuhl triggered the VVRS he had taken from Rosander, aiming low, a right-to-left sweep of the barrel.
Nichols’s legs gave out underneath him, blood splashing from both knees. And then he felt the floor hard against his back.
Kuhl fired three accurate bursts into him, saw the body quiver as fifteen bullets ripped into it, and for an instant considered advancing farther up the hall.
His teeth clicked. Footsteps were coming from the penetration site behind him, four sets, the sound of their heavy boots distinct from those of his own men. His squad had apparently been held off, and he did not know how many more intruders were ahead of him.
Kuhl took an instant to consider and then made his decision.
He turned toward the elevator, pressed the call button, stepped through the opening, and retreated.
“… oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
Ricci’s face was bathed in sweat.
“Talk fast, Doc,” he said. “Have we got what we
“We have it, yes. We have it, we have it. Several different types of inhibitors. Stored as computer models rather than pills. Novelty cures for novelty viruses. They had no reason to preproduce them, not physically, and they didn’t. But Ricci, what we’ve stumbled onto is beyond what we expected. There are hundreds, maybe
Ricci’s attention broke away from whatever Oh was telling him. He’d heard the thud of what might have been pistol shots down the hall. Two, maybe three. A fourth. Fairly close by. Then, perhaps five seconds afterward, several controlled, staccato bursts from a semiautomatic weapon that sounded like a VVRS.
He turned abruptly, ran across the room, through the door, and into the corridor. Looked left, then right.
No sign of Nichols in either direction.
His heart malleting in his chest again, he bounded down the hall, swung a corner past the microencapsulation lab, putting on speed. This was where the shots had come from.
Another turn, and then Ricci was met by the scene near the bottleneck elevator. It was a sight he would remember always.
Nichols was on the floor between him and the elevator door, sprawled on his back. Simmons and Rosander were down at the elevator itself. Seybold crouched over Nichols, cradling his head in his arms, the helmet off. Barnes, Newell, and Perry squatted over the other two fallen men, examining them, checking the severity of their wounds. And then Barnes looked up from the bodies at the sound of his approach, saw the question on his face, and shook his head
Ricci dashed forward and knelt beside Seybold.
“How bad?” he asked.
Seybold glanced up from the young man in his arms, met Ricci’s gaze, held it. His long, pained look told him everything.
Then, weakly, Nichols’s hand came up from his side, and Ricci felt its touch on his arm. “Sir… I…” The thin, dry sound from his dying lips barely qualified as a whisper.
Ricci pushed his visor up from his face, swallowed, and leaned over him. “I hear you,” he said. “Go on.”
Nichols looked up at him, his lips still moving, shaping unintelligible words.
Ricci took his hand into his own, bent closer. Their faces were almost touching now.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on, I’m here with you.”
Nichols grimaced, struggled out a sound.
“Wildcat,” he rasped. “Wild…”
Ricci felt something turn inside him. Slowly, grindingly. Like a great stone wheel.
He held Nichols’s hand.
“Okay, I heard you. Try to be easy now.”
Nichols lowered his eyelids but was still trying to talk. “Did… did we…?”
Ricci nodded to his closed eyes. “We got it, Nichols. We—”
Nichols shuddered and produced a low rattle, and Ricci stopped talking, pulled in a breath that didn’t seem to reach his lungs.
The kid was gone. Gone before the answer to his question had left Ricci’s mouth.
“Pokey, you reading?”
“I hear you, Ricci.”
“Tell me what’s happening at the perimeter.”
“It’s getting busy near the main gate. Looks like some guards down there, a couple of jeeps. We saw two other cars turn out onto the road, really hauling, I don’t know where they came from. Didn’t exit through any of the gates, it’s like they came right out of the damn north side of the hill—”
Ricci thought a moment, standing over the bodies he would have to leave behind.
“Can’t worry about them now,” he said. “Your status?”
“We’re okay. Somebody radioed our booth to order the perimeter sealed. We had the caged bird answer, and Harpswell made sure he sang like we trained him.”
“Good. Be ready to open that service gate for us. We’ll meet you at the guardhouse, head to the pickup vehicle together.”
“Roger,” Pokey replied.
Ricci turned to Seybold.
“Let’s collect Carlysle and Beatty and get the hell out of here,” he said.
There had been eleven of them when they entered. Now there were seven, one wounded, helped along by his companions.
Battered with loss, strong in purpose, Ricci’s men left the same way they had come, retracing their steps from lighted corridors to darkened ones, then through the commissary, kitchen, the freight entrance, and, at last, out into the night. The lack of resistance didn’t surprise Ricci. For all its malevolence, this was a working scientific facility, not an armed camp. The remaining security would be stretched thin, spread throughout the building or called to reinforce what they thought was a blocked perimeter fence. They did not know how the insertion team had gained access, did not know one of their gatehouses had been seized, and would be searching for a breach in the building’s integrity rather than an elevated freight door. But beyond any of that, they were without leadership. Their commander had fled, abandoned them as he’d abandoned his mercenary raiders in Kazakhstan. Brothers in arms.
Oskaboose and Harpswell remained in the booth until their teammates appeared, hit the switch to slide back the gate, and then hurried to join them. The activity inside the main gate had intensified; there were overlapping voices, headlights blinking on, engines thrumming to life.
They scrambled out the gate toward the road and the waiting escape vehicle.
Ricci had raised the driver on his comlink, advised him to be ready to roll, and as the insertion team arrived at the meet spot, the big armored van pulled out of the roadside trees with its rear payload doors wide open.
The insertion team poured inside.
And they rolled.
Crouched in back of the van, Ricci peered through its Level III ballistic cargo windows and saw two pairs of headlights above the black curve of road behind them.
Again, no shocker. There was only the one route across the hills to the highway, and it wouldn’t have taken
