Infected (47 page)

“Dew, what the fuck is going on?”

“And that satellite, is it redirected to Wahjamega yet?”

“Yes,” Murray said. “It already made a pass. The squints are looking at the images now.”

“I’m going to take a picture of a symbol and send it to you as soon as I hang up. This symbol, that’s what the squints are looking for, got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“And I want a surveillance van punched into that satellite, and I want it there in thirty minutes. And a chopper
better
pick me up in the next
fifteen minutes
. I don’t care if we have to commandeer the fucking Channel Seven Eye in the Sky, you get me transport
ASAP
.”

“Dew,” Murray said quietly, “I can’t get you all that so fast, and you know it.”

“You get it!” Dew screamed into the cellular. “You get it right fucking now! You can’t
believe
the shit I just saw.”

PARTY TIME

It was the third time he’d seen that symbol, only this time it wasn’t scrawled on a map or carved into human skin.

This time it was from a satellite image.

Four hours after he’d shot Perry Dawsey, Dew Phillips stood next to a Humvee, his booted feet on a dirt road that was frozen solid. A map and several satellite pictures were spread out on the vehicle’s hood. Rocks had been placed on the pictures to hold them in place against the stiff, icy breeze that cut through the winter woods.

Trees rose up on either side of Bruisee Road, trees thick with under-growth, crumbling logs and brambles. Bare branches formed a skeletal canopy over the road, making the dark night even darker. The occasionally strong gust of wind knocked chunks of wet snow from the branches, dropping them on the assemblage below: two Humvees, an unmarked black communications van and sixty armed soldiers.

Around Dew stood the squad and platoon leaders of Bravo Company from the 1-187th Infantry Battalion. The battalion was also known as the “Leader Rakkasans,” an element from the Third Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The Rakkasans were the current Division Ready Force, or DRF, a battalion that stood ready to deploy anywhere in the world within thirty-six hours, regardless of location. The fact that the deployment location happened to be about 620 miles from Fort Campbell, and not thousands of miles across an ocean, made them that much faster.

A pair of C-130 Hercules transport planes from the 118th Airlift Wing had taken off from Nashville less than two hours after Dew’s panicked call to Murray Longworth. Those C-130s landed at Campbell Army Air Field thirty minutes after takeoff. Thirty minutes after that, loaded with the first contingent of the 1-187th, the C-130s took off for Caro Municipal Airport, an active airport not quite two miles from where Dew now stood.

Back at the tiny airport, more C-130s were landing. It would take fifteen or so sorties and several more hours to bring in the entire battalion task force. But Dew wasn’t waiting for the full battalion. With four sorties complete, he had 128 soldiers and four Humvees—that was the force available, and those were the men he was taking in.

Most of those men wore serious expressions, some tainted with a hint of fear. A few still thought this was a surprise drill. These were highly trained soldiers, Dew knew, but all the training in the world don’t mean jack squat if you’d never been in the shit. All the squad leaders, at least, had seen serious action—he could tell that by their calm, hard-eyed expressions—but most of the men carried the nasty aura of combat newbies.

Their leader was the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ogden. Normally a captain commanded the first company in, but the urgency, the unknown enemy, and the fact that they were operating on American soil demanded Ogden’s direct attention. A gaunt man in his forties, Ogden was so skinny the fatigues almost hung on him. He looked more like a prisoner of war than a soldier, but he moved quickly, he spoke with authority, and his demeanor was anything but weak. His skinniness was also deceiving: he could go toe-to-toe with any of the young bucks in his unit, and they all knew it. Dew could sense that Ogden had seen action, and plenty of it. He was grateful to have a seasoned combat veteran in charge.

“So why here?” Ogden asked. “What’s so special about this place?”

“You got me,” Dew said. “All we know is that there were cases in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Toledo. Wahjamega is easy travel distance from all of those. And there’s a lot of farmland and forest around here, huge tracts of space for them to hide in. We think they’re gathering, either the human hosts or possibly as hatchlings, maybe both.”

On the helicopter ride from Ann Arbor, Dew had talked to Murray and filled him in on what little they knew about the hatchlings. Murray initially demanded that Dew keep the info from the ground troops, as they “didn’t have clearance,” but Dew fought and quickly won that argument—he wasn’t leading men into battle who didn’t know if they might be shooting American civilians or some inhuman monstrosity. Which of the two was worse, Dew couldn’t really say.

“What’s the story on our air support, Lieutenant?” Dew asked.

Ogden checked his watch. “We have three AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, ETA is twenty minutes. A company of the 1-130th Army National Guard out of Morrisville was doing live-fire exercises in Camp Grayling, about a hundred and twenty miles northwest of here.”

“Armament?”

“Each bird has eight AGM-114 Hellfire missiles with HEAT warheads,” Ogden said.

Dew nodded. Twenty-four antitank missiles would make a really big bang. Plus, each Apache had a thirty-millimeter chain gun that could take out an armored personnel carrier from four kilometers away. All in all, that provided exceptional air support for this mission.

He had ground forces. He had air support en route. The Michigan State Police were throwing a cordon over the area, evacuating residents and keeping everyone else out.

Ogden picked up a satellite photo. It showed the warm colors of an infrared shot. Most of the photo consisted of the blues and greens typical of a nighttime forest, but in the middle was a bright cluster of reds with a strange pattern the squints had outlined in white.

The squints had also marked what measurements they knew:
width approx 135 feet, length approx 180 feet, height unknown.
Dew looked at those measurements and thought of Nguyen’s painting—would it be made out of people parts? Was the painting symbolic or literal?

Ogden tapped the photo. “And that’s what we’re going after?”

Dew nodded.

“So what is it?” Ogden asked.

Dew shrugged and tapped another photo, showing a different angle of the strange construct. “We don’t know. We think it might be some kind of doorway. The victim was raving about a ‘doorway’ in Wahjamega, and we found this.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ogden asked in his ever-calm voice.

“A doorway? Like a portal or something? Are we talking
Star Trek
shit here, Dew?”

Dew shrugged. “Don’t ask me. All I know is that if you’d seen what I’d seen, you’d know why we’re here. You have a problem with that?”

“No, sir,” Ogden said. “A mission is a mission.” He carefully examined the picture. “Those four crossbeams, whatever they are, run directly east-west. Is that significant?”

“How the hell should I know?” Dew asked. “All I know is we’ve got to blow it up.”

Ogden leaned closer to the picture. “No telling how tall it is. You got a normal shot?”

Dew produced a detailed picture of the same area, the resolution so fine it revealed individual branches of the bigger trees. The strange design was visible, but barely, its green and black shading blending into the natural ground colors. This one had been taken by aerial recon, not even an hour earlier. Intel guys had highlighted the construct. The area around it was a patch of exposed forest floor surrounded by the whiteness of the winter woods. Five yellow circles marked vehicles spread across the map—three cars, a pickup and an RV.

“That construct, or whatever it is, melted the snow,” Ogden said. “It’s hot all right. Damn thing blends in so much it almost looks camouflaged. What are those marked vehicles?”

“Abandoned cars,” Dew said. “Local police found them, nobody home. We think that the triangle hosts drove them here, ditched them, then walked to the construct.”

“What about all these little red dots on the infrared shot?”

“Those are the hostiles,” Dew said. He produced a sheaf of papers. Each held a composite artist’s rendering based on Dew’s brief glimpse of the burning creature that fell from the third-story window. He didn’t know it yet, but the picture was a passable representation of the hatchlings. He passed the sheets out to the squad leaders.

“The red dots are individual heat signatures, either human hosts or something that looks like these critters.”

A soldier saw the sketch and laughed out loud. Dew fixed him with a death stare; his voice took on a new and dominant tone. He’d commanded boys just like these, and seen them die by the truckloads.

“You think this is funny?” Dew said. “These things are responsible for the death of at least fifteen people, and if you don’t get your shit straight,
you’ll
probably be dead within the hour.”

The soldier fell silent. The only sound came from wind hissing through the barren branches.

Ogden pushed the satellite photos out of the way and smoothed the map. “If I may suggest, sir, we should break into a primary assault group of eight squads, which will attack from the west, and two containment groups of two squads each, one north and one southeast of the target.”

Ogden tapped three spots on the map. “Here, here and here. The woods are too thick to get the vehicles in, so it’s all on foot. We have enough men in place for containment groups one and two. Containment group three is at the airport. They will move out shortly and can be in position in fifteen minutes. Artillery will be guns-up in thirty minutes.

“The Apaches will be here before the infantry sets up the full perimeter, so they’ll stay on-station about a mile out. Once artillery is ready, we send in recon to take a shitload of pictures, then paint the target with a laser and have the Apaches blow the living piss out of it. After that the west containment group moves in and we clean up.”

Dew stared at the map for a moment. Ogden had the west group moving in from a hill, giving them the high ground. If the hatchlings ran, they would probably follow the easiest path, a narrow valley that ran north to southeast—and that would take them directly into a killing zone of dug-in squads.

“That’s an excellent plan. You tell your men to kill anything that moves.”

“What about the hosts that drove here?” Ogden asked. “They’re civilians.”

Dew looked hard at Ogden. “Like I said, anything that moves.”

Dew turned to face the men again. “You’ve all seen the picture. Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. We don’t know how dangerous these things are, so assume they are dangerous in the extreme.”

The looks on the soldiers’ faces said it all. Half of them simply didn’t believe they were about to go up against some movie monster; the other half did believe it, and those men had wide-eyed expressions of fear.

“Keep your lines tight,” Ogden said. “Know where your man is on your right and left. Shoot anything in front of you. It doesn’t matter if it looks like a critter or your Aunt Jenny, it’s the enemy and you shoot it just like you would an enemy soldier. Now get your squads ready. We move out immediately.”

The grim-faced young men hurried away, leaving only Ogden and Dew.

“You know what’s fucked up here, Dew?”

Dew nodded. “Yeah. Just about every last bit of this thing.”

“Besides that, of course,” Ogden said. “If this is some kind of a gateway, like they’re going to bring troops in through that crazy thing or what have you, why the hell would they build it two miles from a landing strip?”

Dew grunted once. He’d been so thrilled at the easy access, that question hadn’t crossed his mind.

“Maybe it’s above their pay grade,” Dew said. “The only thing that makes sense is they just didn’t know. Whoever they had run recon on this, that party either just plain missed the airport or didn’t know what it was.”

Ogden nodded. “That’s got to be it. Kind of weird, though—they are obviously high-tech as hell, and they screwed themselves with location, location, location. I don’t know what these things are, but looks like we’re kicking their ass on intel.”

Dew nodded. The satellite images gave him total command of the area, images he wouldn’t have had if not for Margaret Montoya’s hunch. Without her demands they would still be trying to bring a satellite online, and might not know the exact location of the construct for several hours—and Dew Phillips had a feeling that every second mattered.

The door to the black communications van flew open. A man ran out, a printout clutched in his fist. He slid on the frozen dirt road, regained his balance and slammed the printout down on the Humvee’s hood.

“That thing just heated up in a hurry,” the squint said. “Here’s an updated infrared.”

The picture looked almost the same, except the squint hadn’t outlined the strange symbol. He didn’t have to. Its lines blurred into a smudgy mess of reds, yellows and oranges.