Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

Darkness at Dawn (33 page)

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn

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He watched them for almost an hour, fascinated. They were magnificent creatures, silver-stippled, with long, elegant muzzles, the males thick-chested, a few females with balls of fur curled against their bellies.

It was freezing cold, at least twenty below, but the wolves slept comfortably, protected by their thick fur and by the heat of all the members of the pack. Even in a raging snowstorm, they’d be safe.

Mike had envied them, sleeping so comfortably with their kind, warm and safe, snuffling through the night, dreaming of the hunt, in a complex geometry of bodies, each part fitting beautifully and perfectly to create a magnificent whole.

Lucy’s head turned slightly to find a better fit on his shoulder, and he smiled down at her. Her eyelids were at half-mast.

“I’m not as sleepy as you think,” she protested. “I’m just going to rest my eyes.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t even smile when she yawned. “Absolutely.”

Inside a minute she was gone.

Mike moved a little, found an even more perfect position and closed his eyes.

It was good to sleep with his pack.

S
IXTEEN

CIA HEADQUARTERS LANGLEY OFFICE OF THE DD/O

EDWIN Montgomery rubbed his chest, where it burned. Acid reflux.

This was it. This was his last mission. Once the bioweapons lab that threatened to unleash a terrible plague upon the world was closed down, the threat eliminated and, above all, Lucy brought home, he was going to retire. Just stay home. Stay home and . . . what?

His mind pulled a blank.

The intercom pinged. DS&T. “Yes?”

“Deputy Director, we’re sending the results of Stop Cold Essence,” the contents of the flash drive, “to your computer.”

Ah . . . the geeks. He’d been told it might take three days, and they’d done it in less than one.

“Is the intel intact?”

Silence. “Not quite, sir. There’s a section that is only partially recovered.”

Everything was coming online now.

“Have them continue. Get NSA involved if necessary.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice was gelid. He’d just told his own people that he thought the NSA techies were better than the CIA techies, which would have been cruel if it weren’t true. Montgomery didn’t give a shit about hurt feelings. He wanted results.

He read through the contents of the flash drive, dread rising in his system. Christ. A two-pronged attack—Manhattan and Israel. Maybe three-pronged, depending on what was in the destroyed part of the flash drive.

Analysts had even given some preliminary estimates of casualties and consequences.

Manhattan, during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Estimated casualties: at least 8 million. Manhattan closed down for years, maybe forever, as Hazmat-suited officers combed every single building, floor by floor, for containers of the virus, going very slowly, because it would take very little to put in place trip wires that would trigger new outbreaks.

The entire island, and a buffer area of miles into the neighboring boroughs, would be no-man’s-land for generations. Maybe forever.

A large chunk of America’s wealth was in Manhattan, in every sense. The companies, the banks, Wall Street, real estate. A loss of several trillion dollars just in economic terms alone. Over and above the 8 million lives. And that was a lowball estimate.

A devastating blow, from which the country would never recover.

The cost to Israel: another 8 million, wiping the country out. Plus at least another 1 million from the neighboring countries and Palestine. Montgomery was very clear on the mind-set of his enemies. The fact that maybe a million of their people would die an agonizing death meant less than nothing to them.

So Israel would be taken out and America wouldn’t lift a finger. Once the attack on Manhattan was unleashed, all troops stationed around the world would be brought home immediately to deal with massive security issues, the country closing in on itself. It would be torn apart, martial law declared. The military would be necessary to contain the violence.

The United States as an expeditionary power would be gone, maybe forever.

Certainly no troops could be spared to help the Jewish diaspora. They’d be on their own.

Israel was well armed, and generations living in the midst of crazed fanatics had hardened its resolve. Before it died, Israel would have its revenge.

In its dying throes, someone in Israel’s security establishment would pull the nuclear trigger, and the crazed jihadists would be indirectly responsible for the deaths of even more millions of their coreligionists.

The horrible thing was, Montgomery reflected, some wouldn’t even mind. Pakistanis were behind this plan. They wouldn’t care if the entire Middle East were taken out. More power for them.

And General Changa? What did Nhala have to do with this plan? Nhala was a peaceful kingdom with no known hereditary enemies and no terrorism, whether homegrown or imported.

So what was Changa doing? Was he just the conduit? Offering a site for the biolab where no one would think to look? It was the third element of the plan, if there was one, where the intel was degraded. Though what had been preserved was horrible enough.

He lifted his receiver. Thanks to Captain Shafer and Lucy, maybe millions of lives could be saved.

“I want to talk to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the NSA and the head of Mossad. And patch this all through to DHS. Now.”

“Yessir,” the smooth voice of his assistant said.

One by one, faces appeared on his monitors. The Director of the NSA, Admiral Robert Larsen, face as ascetic as any monk’s. They said he ran ten miles a day, every day, and never ate. It was entirely possible he wore hair shirts and cilices.

Then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Keith Ripley, came up. No asceticism there. He was at least thirty pounds overweight and ruddy. And very smart.

Finally, after five minutes, a third monitor lit up and the face of the head of Mossad appeared, surrounded by a wreath of smoke. Dov Zamir, the world’s greatest pessimist. He had deep lines in his face and looked as if his best friend had just died.

When they were all online, Montgomery folded his hands and leaned toward the tiny camera at the top of the central monitor.

“Gentlemen. I have just received news of the greatest import. Several days ago, one of our operatives, acting upon intelligence, retrieved information from a hidden bioweapons laboratory in Nhala.”

The three men facing him were immune to surprises. Their entire professional lives had been spent juggling huge problems thrown at them from nowhere. But even they allowed themselves the barest minimum of a surprised expression. He could almost hear the cogs in their brains whirring. Bioweapons lab—there was a place in their heads for that, unfortunately. A dark, scary place. But a bioweapons lab—in
Nhala
? That took a second to compute.

And he could see in their faces the immediate
oh, shit
reaction. Up until now, the small, peaceable Himalayan countries had been outside the circle of the War on Terror.

If Nhala was joining world terror, then the other Himalayan countries might, too. And the entire intelligence community would have to man up—recruit new types of agents, add those languages to the mix, immediately change the curricula of most of the faculties of political science in the West to create new areas of expertise, change the latitude parameters of the spy satellites . . . It didn’t bear thinking about.

If they managed to save the world once again, this time he really was going to retire.

Now the second half of the double whammy.

“Part of the information our operative retrieved concerns this nation, and part of it concerns yours, Mr. Zamir.” Dov’s puffy eyes remained steady, one more vital threat to his country. But first, the threat to Montgomery’s own. “Director Larsen, General Ripley, there is a ship crossing the Atlantic right now, which will land somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard sometime in the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours, and which is carrying an unspecified number of jihadists in the hold. At some point before offloading these terrorists, they will be injected with a bioweaponized form of a mutated viral hemorrhagic disease which is fast-acting and airborne.” The two tough soldiers, who’d survived any number of crises, blinked. It took a lot to make them blink, but this did it. “It is our belief that they intend to land, make their way one by one to Manhattan and be on the streets in time for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

Montgomery gave them time to digest this.

“It goes without saying that the ship must be found and stopped at all costs. We must find this ship and destroy it and everyone on board. We don’t have a name and we don’t know where landfall will be. All we know is that it stopped in the port of Bengazi and that it is headed for somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard and, ultimately, for Manhattan. Details have already been sent to you. So NSA will use all its resources and work in close conjunction with the navy and air force to find this ship and neutralize it. As of this moment, every single resource of the United States government is to be concentrated on this task, and this one alone. There is no higher imperative. Is that clear?”

He waited for the murmurs of assent from the director and the chairman and then turned to Dov Zamir.

“Mr. Zamir, our intelligence leads us to believe that there are a number of jihadists already in your country, in a safe house in Tel Aviv, waiting to spread the disease. This bioweaponized form of hemorrhagic fever burns itself out within twenty-four hours, reducing the contaminated body to dust. It is, essentially, a weapon to empty a country, and that is what we fear is planned. To kill every single Israeli citizen, plus some collateral damage along the neighboring borders.” Montgomery stopped for a moment, heart heavy, telling a man that perhaps his whole country was about to be wiped off the face of the earth. “We are talking about the annihilation of Israel as a state, and its subsequent repopulation by Israel’s enemies. This is scheduled to occur two or three days after the elimination of Manhattan, in the certain knowledge that no US forces will be deployed for the protection of Israel, as we will have sustained a lethal blow ourselves. You would be entirely on your own. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Zamir?”

“Very.” Dov’s cigarette-roughened voice was steady.

“We will make available to you the precise intel we received, and it will be up to your agents, using whatever means they can, to discover the exact location of the safe house and to deal with its occupants. How many Level A Hazmat suits does your country have, sir?”

Dov Zamir’s mouth tightened. “Ordinarily that would be confidential information. But this is an extraordinary situation. We have about one hundred Level A Hazmat suits.”

“You’re going to need more for your soldiers. I’ll order three thousand to be airlifted to you, immediately.”

The head of Israeli intelligence bowed his head briefly, in thanks.

Montgomery didn’t mention the corrupted files. There was no point, until his geeks could restore them. The intelligence services and military already had their hands full dealing with the disasters they knew about.

He put his hands on the table. “Gentlemen, that is it. We have already sent all of you everything we know about what our agent discovered. We all now have one priority and one alone—to find the ship carrying a mutated virus to Manhattan and to find the safe house where terrorists are about to unleash that virus on Israel. Everything else takes a backseat. I’ll expect updates from all of you, and rest assured that the full resources of the CIA are at your disposal. That’s all.”

Montgomery pressed the button that cut the connection off, thinking hard, rubbing his chest. Maybe . . .

He called the head of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“General Sharinsky.”

“Montgomery. Do you have drones with IV capability?”

“Yes, sir, we do. Not many.”

“I want nighttime flights over the Atlantic, throw every asset you’ve got at it, retrofit some drones if you can. Count every ship in the Atlantic that gives off a heat signal.”

“Yessir. What are we looking for?”

“A plague ship. Headed straight for us.”

A pause. Then—“Yes, sir.”

Montgomery sat at his desk quietly, thinking hard, feeling each heavy heartbeat like a dull, throbbing pain. When his monitor lit up, his heart squeezed, hard, when he saw the origin of the message. DS&T. He didn’t know if he was up to any more news. He read, barely breathing, switched his monitor off and sat, head bowed.

The last words were still in front of his eyes in glowing white. The last piece of intel that had been decrypted from the flash drive, concerning Nhala. An attack on India.

And the last words were:
Estimated deaths: at least 100 million.

THE PALACE CHILONGO, NHALA

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn

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