Black Storm (36 page)

No lights overhead, but the gun flashes and flashlights and headlights, a confusion of sudden light and utter dark, made the goggles useless too; they dangled at his neck, still turned on.

He and Blaisell had taken out the five or six troops that'd come charging out of some area to the left, just
charging out without any idea what they were doing. He and the corporal had mowed them down on full auto, holding the jerking HKs level with the ground and just hosing them along, brass pinging and tinkling away. Then slapped in fresh magazines and moved forward, past what looked like a stairwell, dark and empty; laying fire into where the troops had come from, some sort of quarter-deck or personnel area to the left of where the trucks were parked. Glass windows back there; he could hear the rounds smashing through them. Between him and them, pallets of cardboard boxes, food or some sort of consumables. Whatever it was, it soaked up fire just fine, giving a solid thud as each projectile hit.

That was good. What wasn't so good was how rapidly that fire had started coming back, and in such volume. None of them heavies, sounded like they were all AK-types, but five to seven weapons were hosing it out and for the first time he worried about his own ammo. Then he remembered the dead men behind him, their weapons lying not far from flung-out arms. Kalashnikovs were crudely finished compared to an HK or an M16, but they never jammed and they'd kill a man just as dead.

He wasn't nervous anymore. Every atom of his mind was locked into putting down the men opposite. In Combat Town they taught you to move toward the threat. Take the fight to the enemy, keep him under stress and off balance. But that only worked when you outnumbered him, or were at least equal. Advancing into this would just end up getting them chopped, and not only that, leaving the second team, with the attachments, uncovered.

He popped up to fire again, putting rounds into where the fire was coming from, then dropped again. Looked anxiously toward the transporters. Only two were visible from this angle, parked nose to ass, close under the curve of the ceiling. He'd heard one burst from over there and then no more. Well, maybe that was good. He and Blaisell drawing fire, keeping the Iraqis bottled up while the doc and the commander did their work.

This was the objective. Everything they'd done and suffered up to now had been to put them here. Jake and Tony had died for it. All he had to do now was keep everybody alive for five more minutes, till the attachments did what they had to do, then cover them as they fell back. He had to keep the security force fixed, at least keep their heads down.

It might work. It just might. Getting out would be tough, but maybe they could do that too.

He popped his head up and fired, and saw a dark object sail out of the darkness where the guns flashed. It hit concrete and bounced. He ducked as it exploded, then stood again, firing; but seeing as he did—too late to stop it—scuttle helmets moving out toward his left, moving to flank him. He yelled that to Blaisell, and saw a grenade fly out of his position. But it fell wide, missing the Iraqis, and then he couldn't see them anymore.

He fired the mag out and moved, trying to work his way back now. If they got flanked and cut off, they'd be dead in short order. But he had to keep their attention away from the transporters. He glanced that way again, but still couldn't see the doc or the commander.

Then he told himself that was good; they were doing what they had to do over there and keeping out of sight. And tried to make himself believe it. He fired till he ran dry again, dropped the mag and slapped in another and fired again. Wondering all the time where the Iraqis to his left had gone.

 

HIGH ON
the blind side of the transporter, standing close against the rounded length it carried on its bed, Maddox heard the firing swell to a steady roar. Gault was over there, and Blaisell. She didn't know how long they could hold the Iraqis off. She had to hurry.

But she didn't know what to do, how to get at what she had to have. She ran her hand over the smooth surface, feeling its cold hardness, its smoothness. Then a disconti
nuity. She traced it round the curve away from her. The missile-warhead join? She flicked her combat flash on and ran it over the side, looking for a way in. Some access, some way to fill it, perhaps. But she didn't see any. Just that smooth metal skin.

Then she shifted her boots, and heard in a lull in the firing an unmistakable sound; the squish of liquid. She looked down and realized she didn't have a problem after all. Or at least, a different one than she'd had a moment before.

For a frozen second of horror she couldn't think, couldn't move, just looked down at her boots. Her problem wasn't going to be getting to whatever was inside this thing. Because she was standing in it.

A deafening explosion, so close and confined it made her ears buzz. She shook herself out of it. The Smart Tickets were the first thing she had to do. She pulled them hurriedly from her kit.

Smart Tickets were immunochromatographic assays, rather like the pregnancy strips sold over the counter in pharmacies. A basic antigen-antibody reaction with a chromogen attached to the antibody. Samples could be collected as either a liquid suspension or on a swab, then placed in contact with a test strip. If it contained the target antigen, its reaction with the antibody-chromogen complex produced a color signal visible to the naked eye.

She split out a leaf of it, bent, and pressed it into the pool. She could feel its coldness through the double layer of gloves. The coldness of liquid death, if she wanted to get melodramatic. Perspiration ran under her respirator. She absolutely could not touch her face with anything around here. Pools of it on the truck. Leaking warheads. No wonder they had casualties. Not only didn't the Iraqis mind killing Israeli civilians, they didn't seem to care that much even about their handling crews.

“Hold this,” she snapped, handing the flashlight over.

Sarsten had been looking over the missile, his back to
her, aiming his weapon toward the racket of the firefight. At her order he frowned down. “What?”

“Hold this, I said. I have to have light.”

The strip was still orange. No color change at all. So whatever this stuff was, it wasn't anthrax. She went quickly through the others, bowing to dab each in the puddle, counting the seconds, then examining it under the flash. Negative for botulinum toxin…negative for
Clostridium perfringens
…the mycotoxins (both trichopycenes and aflatoxins) test was negative too.

She looked closely at the fluid again, wondering if it could be fuel, or water. Or even urine, if one of the guards got caught short, although up here would be a funny place to go. No, it was definitely coming from the warhead. Then she saw the runnel, a faint shine of fresh liquid, where it had come out of a filling port. And understood why she hadn't noticed it before. The fill port was beneath the missile. Meaning that they'd filled the warhead separately, then hoisted it up here and bolted it on.

She didn't have a test strip for smallpox. Fort Detrick didn't make one. It had been soberly considered, and at last judged unthinkable, that any human being would unchain that demon again. That anyone would unleash again a scourge that had destroyed millions of human beings down the centuries, toppled empires, depopulated whole continents, a plague that killed and killed without reason or remorse.

But as a doctor, she knew death didn't come in millions. It came one individual at a time. A child, a mother, a young man, and with each death a universe of heartbreak and loss. What madman would open the door for it to return to a world that had fought free of it?

But obviously someone had. Had gone to the trouble of manufacturing it, designing a special dispensing warhead…she didn't want to think about how they'd tested it. She thought again of the bodies back in the tunnel, of the young Iraqi, dying as she stood over him.

Sarsten was still holding the light. He said impatiently, words buzzing through the mask: “You done, then?”

“No,” she said, trying to snap out of the horror. Looking again at what she stood in. God help her, there was enough on her boots to kill thousands.

Hands shaking, she reached back into her kit.

 

THIRTY METERS
away, Dan was at the rear of another missile. He and Nichols together. The sniper had set his rifle aside. They both had flashlights out, searching around a shroud or base ring that circled the nozzle. One of Nichols's premade charges lay like a hunk of window putty against the rocket casing. To which Nichols pointed, now, not saying anything, a cock of his masked head asking the question as plainly as words could. More plainly, given the clamor of gunfire that was steadily rising now under the curved ceiling close above them.

“No,” Dan said, but the word was caught and smothered by the mouth cup, held close and absorbed by rubber and activated charcoal and sweating flesh. He shook his head instead; tried to steady down and think.

Scuds were liquid-fueled missiles, with storable propellants. But the outer shell of a rocket was the merest skin, and the fuselage little more than a tin can full of flammable fuel. A pound of C-16 wouldn't just breach the casing, it would scatter burning fuel the length and width of this cavern. Four pounds of Detasheet, on four airframes, would turn this subterranean parking garage into a very respectable approximation of Hell.

But if he understood what Maddox had been trying to tell them, they couldn't do that, attractive though the prospect might be in the short run. Catastrophic destruction would send a plume of pathogen up those stairwells and out that ramp door along with the fire and smoke.

He had to disable the missiles, not destroy them. And at that thought, the faintest possible smile curved his lips. For just once the military had actually sent the best man
for the job. Who better than an ex-missile engineer to disable a missile?

Shots clattered overhead and he flinched. For some reason he'd assumed the Iraqis wouldn't fire toward the transporters. But too many rounds were in the air now, in too close a space. He heard yelling, an officer or noncom urging his men to the attack. Gault and Blaisell couldn't hold them for much longer. They were outnumbered. The Iraqis had unlimited ammunition. Once they realized how small the opposing team was, a rush would finish the firefight.

Sweat trickled into his eyes and he couldn't fling it off. He blinked rapidly and brought his face close to the collar. Disable but not destroy. A tricky distinction. Maybe one you really couldn't make.

Then Nichols pushed the light in a little farther, working it past the ring, and he saw a swelling curve, the lip of a smooth circle of metal. And smiled again, beneath the mask.

 

A FEW
meters ahead of them, Maureen dumped the cooler bag down on a dry part of the transporter bed and dived into it looking for swabs. Her sample kit had rayon swabs and several small plastic sample vials, fifteen-and fifty-milliliter conical tubes, all carefully sealed in Ziploc bags to keep them clean and dry. Unfortunately, her flashlight showed brownish water sliding around in the corners of most of them. Sterile water would have been no problem, but murky, runoff-laden Tigris River water sounded like the ultimate contaminant. Finally she found the swabs and one clean fifty-milliliter tube. She fished them out very carefully, making sure she didn't touch the outside of the bag with her right glove. She'd gotten some of the leakage on her right hand while she was sampling with the tickets.

She was trying to think straight, but it was getting harder. She felt as if carbon dioxide was building up in
the hood. She tried to breathe slowly, and the dizziness backed off a little. An outer enclosure…she got out another Ziploc and held it out to Sarsten. The SAS just looked at it.
“Take it,”
she hissed.

“And do what? Give you a sperm sample?”

She ignored that. “Hold it open for me. Don't touch anything; just hold it so I can drop things in.”

He hesitated. For a moment she was afraid he'd argue. She'd had enough of this macho clown. The next step was pulling her gun on him. But finally he tucked the flashlight under his arm and laid his weapon aside and knelt down.

Blowing out, trying to think past her fear and rage, she got one of the swabs out and squatted down on her boot heels. Holding it by the very corner, in her right glove, she dipped it into the leakage; rolled it into a curl; then eased the cap off the tube with her left thumb. Brought the swab close, and dropped it in.

And missed. The dampened swab hit her knee and clung there. She flicked it off instantly, but saw the dark stain it left, felt the coolness against her skin through the plastic material of the suit. Shit, shit, shit. Now her outer suit was contaminated. If she was wrong and this was a nerve agent…. She wasn't sure she'd be able to tell if she
did
get a dose of organophosphates, she was shaking so hard. She searched desperately around her feet for the swab. It was gone. Sarsten cleared his throat, irritating her anew. She plucked out another from the cooler bag. Her last clean one.

In any normal sampling, she'd return the samples, tubes or swabs, to a team member who'd stayed back in the “clean area.” That person would hold open a second bag for the contaminated team member to drop his sample bag into. That way they could transport the sample safely, in their bare hands if they liked, since the outer bag was clean.

By now she had another sample taken up, and by dint of holding her breath, had managed to get it into the tube.
She capped it and sealed the bag tightly over it, using her left, clean hand.

Normally, now she'd have a dunk tank, containing 1:10 bleach, set up to rinse the first bag in before placing it into the second bag. Household bleach was the decon solution of choice. She'd never been in a part of the world where they couldn't find it. Even in Zaire, where she'd gone two years ago to help look for Ebola, they could buy Javelle, the French version of Clorox.