Code Zero (54 page)

The Locker

Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility

Highland County, Virginia

Sunday, September 1, 11:31 a.m.

The hand lay in a pool of dark blood. It had been cut off a few inches above the wrist. Not a clean cut, either. There was a heavy silver school ring on the pinky. I used the zoom function on my helmet cam to pick out the details.

“Nikki? Can you see the ring?”

She had clean-up software that—as Ivan once put it—could count freckles on a gnat’s balls. “Highland High School,” said Nikki. “Class of ’92. A local, probably a farmer.”

I felt a dart of sadness bury its needle in my chest. Some poor bastard, maybe working his dad’s farm instead of going off to college, comes in here to buy parts and walks into a nightmare. Walks off the cliff at the end of his life. Sometimes the hardest deaths to take aren’t those of fallen heroes but of innocent bystanders who, had they stopped at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, might have missed this whole thing and gone on with their lives.

“What’s the play, Cap’n?” asked Top.

I didn’t answer immediately. We now knew for certain that this was no technical glitch, no industrial accident. Sure, we knew that coming here, but there had been a tiny fragment of hope. Ah well. Our luck had been running piss-poor for a while now. Why change? Mind you, I was still hoping that there were only one or two maniacs hiding inside, waiting to give up peacefully and get right with Jesus. And turquoise warthogs might fly out of my ass.

I took two devices from my pockets. The first was the size of a deck of playing cards. I thumbed a button and adjusted a dial, then held it toward the door, moving it back and forth slowly, first from side to side and then up and down. The small green light didn’t change, didn’t moderate toward orange or red.

No electronic devices.

That was the first relief. This doohickey didn’t scan for jammers, it scanned for devices keyed to electronically detonate bombs. So far so good, but still not the time to do the happy dance. The second device looked like a collapsible cane for the vision-impaired, and when I unfolded it the lightweight hollow sections fit into place exactly like a cane. Except this one was nearly ten feet long and ended with a small red rubber ball that looked like a clown nose. It wasn’t. It was actually about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of sensors suspended in a ball of foam. The alloy of the cane was nonconductive, the handle wrapped in rubber.

If we’d had more time, if there wasn’t a clock the size of Big Ben ticking as loud as gunfire in my ear, I could have logistics send me a bomb disposal robot. That wasn’t going to happen, so I waved everyone else back and then crunched myself into as small a size as possible, angling so that my body armor offered the greatest degree of protection in case I was dead wrong about that whole bomb thing. Then I extended one arm, holding the rod like a conductor with a baton. The red tip hovered an inch away from the door and then lightly brushed it. If it picked up anything—such as a trembler switch being activated by my opening the door—it would send a sharp warning to the electronics detector I still held in my other hand.

I took a breath, offered a generic prayer to whichever god was on call, and pushed.

Then froze.

The door didn’t move.

Was there a wire somewhere I didn’t see? Would further pressure snap it?

I licked my lips and pushed just a little harder.

The door swung inward.

I waited.

Nothing went boom.

I pushed again.

It wasn’t that there was resistance from a wire; the door was simply heavy. I waited some more. I could almost feel each of my team waiting, eyes sharp, breath held, fingers laid along the curves of trigger guards, hearts pounding.

There was no explosion.

After a thousand years I withdrew the rod and collapsed it, then stowed it and the detector into my pockets. I ordered Ghost to go find Sam and stay with him. Then I tapped my earbud to open the team channel. “Everyone get ready, I’m about to get loud.”

I pulled a flash-bang.

“Flash out!” I yelled and lobbed it side-arm in through the open door.

The flash-bang did what the catalog says it’ll do. It flashed and banged. I squeezed my eyes shut, buried my head, and clamped my hands over my ears. As soon as the blast was over I was in motion, Bunny and Top swarmed up behind me, and the others followed. We broke right and left, guns up, yelling at everyone and anyone to drop weapons, raise hands, not get shot.

However, everyone in that store was beyond caring or complying.

There were nine people in there. Eight men and a woman. The woman wore an apron that had the name of the tractor company on the bib. She sat on the floor behind the counter. Four black holes were stitched across her chest.

Everyone else was just as dead.

Shell casings littered the floor. They looked like little metal islands in an ocean of red. But not all of the killing had been done with guns. Someone had used a heavy, bladed weapon in here. Long wounds were gouged across bodies. Heads and limbs were hacked off. Top nodded to a wall display of fire and woodcutting axes. There were clips for six axes but only five were on the wall.

“Check the air,” I said, but the others were already looking at the screen displays of the portable BAMS units clipped to their belts.

“In the green, boss,” said Bunny from the far side of the room.

“Green here, too,” said Ivan, who stood by the door.

“Green and good,” confirmed Top.

I glanced down at mine. Green.

I wondered how long it would take my nuts to crawl down out of my chest cavity even if it stayed green. Maybe by Christmas. Definitely not today.

We checked the whole store and found only the echo of pain and the persistence of death. The people here had died hard. Maybe the counter woman had it the easiest, she was the only one who looked to have been shot to death. We were all silent as we took this in. We weren’t shocked into stillness. It wasn’t that. We were assessing the situation, gauging our unknown enemy. We’d expected there to be bodies here. The level of savagery was surprising. The efficiency with which this installation had been invaded spoke to a brilliant and calculating mind; the butchery spoke of passions that were out of control.

“No sign of Dr. Van Sant,” observed Montana. “Does that mean he made it into the facility?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted. “Be real useful if we found him alive and able to talk, though. He knows the day code, and without those we have to blow open a lot of doors. I’d prefer not to have to do that.”

“Because of the damage?”

“No, because if any of the fail-safe systems are still functioning then the shock might trigger them. In which case we don’t get out.”

Montana studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Then I guess we better find him.”

Top walked over to one corpse whose body had been hacked almost beyond recognition as human. I watched Top’s eyes as he took in what little information was left.

“Boy,” he said. “Fifteen, sixteen.”

He didn’t say anything else, didn’t fill the air with any macho threats, but we all knew and understood. Top was the only active DMS team member who had kids. Well … one kid, his daughter, who’d lost both her legs when an IED exploded under her Bradley. His son was buried in Arlington. They’d found enough of him for funeral purposes. Those tragedies had been the impetus that made Top apply for the DMS. The memory of a son torn apart by enemy fire and a beautiful, brave daughter living her life in a wheelchair made Top into a different kind of soldier than the rest of us. His fury was cold, calculating, and enduring. He never lost control or fell prey to battle madness, but if he had his sights on the bad guys who did this, then they were going to come to watershed moments in their lives that they would not enjoy.

I moved past Top and he followed in my wake as we rounded the counter and went through the open doorway to the back room. The curtain partition was on the floor, tangled around the dead woman. Bloody footprints tracked past her.

“What do you figure?” I asked him, nodding to the prints.

“Too many to count,” he said. “The overlap. But they’re all wearing the same shoes.”

The tread was unmistakable. Not military boots, or even the pseudo-military stuff the wannabes and militiamen favored. These were all Timberlands.

Dunk looked over our shoulders. “Tims? All new, too. No signs of wear. Weird.”

“They’re dressing for this job,” said Top. “Probably changed in a van. We catch them, they’ll have civvies to change back into and the clothes they wore in here will go into a bonfire.”

Lydia pressed her foot down next to one of the intruder prints, then lifted it away to compare the marks. Our shoes had a distinctive pebbled tread, the kind you see on tactical footwear made by companies like Saratoga.

We all saw what she meant us to see.

“They’re not wearing Hammer suits,” said Ivan.

“Or anything like Hammer suits,” said Montana. “Pretty sure Timberland doesn’t make biohazard versions of their shoes.”

Dunk said, “They could have hazmat suits on with the booties tucked into their shoes.” He paused, frowned, shook his head. “No, that’s stupid. Sorry.”

“Well,” said Bunny, blowing out a breath as he looked around, “this is either very good or very, very bad.”

The good would be if the bad guys just wanted to steal the pathogens without immediately releasing them. The bad would be if they were on a suicide mission and didn’t give a fuck about protective equipment.

Top, who was always in the same gear as me, touched my arm and said, “If these jokers came down here to die for the cause, then why try for anonymity with the new shoes? I think they’re here to take the Ark, not open it.”

It was a glimmer of hope. But a little hope can be like a splinter in the mind. It can lure you into believing in a positive outcome, and that can take the edge off your skills.

“We’re not making any assumptions,” I said to the team.

We were in a small dummy office that held two desks, a water cooler, and a file cabinet. Enough for appearances. A door marked “Employees Only” hung by one hinge. The lock assembly had been torn out by a savage kick. The footprint on the door wasn’t huge—maybe size ten—but whoever had delivered that kick knew their business. Single kick, too.

We went through into the next room and then wasted five minutes checking and clearing the administration offices that comprised the rest of Level One of the Locker. As we passed from room to room the stink of cordite clogged the air, and the gun smoke was almost thick enough to block out the sheared-copper smell of blood.

Almost.

There was simply too damn much blood.

Bug’s intel said that there were fourteen support staff members working in the Locker’s topside offices.

We found all fourteen. With the nine in the store this added up to the twenty-three cooling thermal signatures.

Twenty-three people whose lives had ended. Unexpectedly, terribly.

In bits and pieces.

Body parts were strewn around on the floor. Some of the secretaries and staff members were sprawled across their desks, their bodies torn open in a final indignity worse than rape. The walls were spattered by arterial sprays. Blood dripped from the overhead fluorescents.

“Christ’s balls,” murmured Ivan.

Bunny said, “What the fuck?”

You’d think that people like us wouldn’t or couldn’t be shocked by yet another example of man’s potential for appalling brutality. You would be wrong.

“Berserkers?” mused Bunny.

“Got to be,” said Top.

Bunny waggled his combat shotgun. “Glad I brought my boom-stick.”

“
Jefe
,” said Lydia, “how many ways are there out of this place?”

“Two,” I said. “This way and a service corridor.”

“Okay, ’cause I’m only seeing footprints going into this elevator. I haven’t seen anything coming out.”

I nodded and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Ronin.”

“Go for Ronin,” said Sam.

“Any movement from the service exit on the east side of the building?”

“Negative.”

“Very well, but get close and tell me exactly what you see,” I said.

There was a rustling sound and then Sam said, “Okay, I’ve got eyes on it. Confirming that it’s undisturbed. Exterior screws are intact.”

“Lift the cover plate.”

The service corridor was a tunnel big enough to wheel parts down. From the outside it looked like a big electrical junction box, the man-sized ones that county power companies put up. But those doors opened to reveal a cubicle in which were the same kind of high-tech hand and retina scanners we had down here. And there were several levels of security behind that, including a length of reinforced corridor that could be filled with fire at a moment’s notice.

“Everything is intact,” he reported. “No one’s come out this way. Even the weeds are undisturbed. Your bad guys are still inside.”

In light of all the vicious slaughter, that news should have scared us. But I felt a weird little smile carving its way onto my face. I avoided meeting the eyes of the others, or even looking at their faces. They’d be wearing the same killers’ smiles. It was an ugly thing to see on the faces of good people.

I looked at the main security doors that provided access to the elevators. The built-in scanners—hand, retina, and keycard—were junk. Wires dangled from what was left of them.

“Okay,” I said, tapping my earbud again, “Ronin, put a blaster-plaster on the grille and find cover. You’re our eyes topside. If you see anything hinky—I don’t care if it’s a bobcat walking with a limp—put it down.”

“You got it, boss,” he said. “Me and Ghost will watch your backs.”

I heard a soft
whuff
in the background.

“Green Giant,” I said, “let’s get those doors open.”

Bunny applied a magazine-sized blaster-plaster to the heavy doors. “Ready.”

We moved away and hid behind desks.

“Fire in the hole!” yelled Bunny as he triggered the detonators. Bigger the bomb, bigger the boom. The steel double doors blew apart, open like the petals of a flower to reveal an elevator shaft. No car.