Operation Sea Mink (2 page)

Movement on the phablet screen caught his eye.

“West,” Miller said into his earpiece. “Thirty degrees.”

“I saw it, too,” the pilot said. “Swinging back around.”

The chopper banked and Miller reached out, unthinkingly grasping the wasp containers to keep them from tipping—before whipping his hand back with disgust.

He went back to examining the phablet, trying to ascertain where best to drop the boxes.

Given the size and dexterity of the heat signature he saw dart between two buildings, it was human—or Infected, given how many of them bunched around one another. It joined a faint cloud of body heat clumped into what Miller could only suppose was the lobby of a building of some kind.

They were three blocks east of 34th and 12th—and from what he could tell from the readings, a pair of titan-birds had taken control of the top of the building, forcing the commune down into the lower levels. The only evidence the commune was there at all was because they seemed to be on the move—their heat fading right before Miller’s eyes.

Wait. Fading? Why would their signatures disappear like that?

Down
. They were occupying basements, Miller realized. Moving underground as he watched.

The subway system was probably teaming with communes. That was why they were having such issues finding them on infrared.

Miller switched his earpiece to the all channel. “Aim for the subway entrances, they’ve gone underground.”

“No wonder we can’t find the little blighters,” Doyle said. He almost sounded impressed.

“Drop payload near or into subway stairwells and get back to the compound ASAP,” Miller said. “The wind’s picking back up.”

“That’s like dropping a ping pong ball into a coffee mug from a hundred meters away,” Morland said, a hint of a whine in his voice, “while standing on a surfboard in the ocean.”

“Just do the best you can,” Miller snapped. He switched back to the internal channel and urged the chopper pilot to descend.

“Any more and I could clip the side of a building,” he said. “This is the best I can do, sir.”

“Alright, here goes nothing,” Miller mused, twisting in his seat. He peered at the darkened ground below, and released the lever that held the wasp containers in place.

Picking up one box at a time, he pushed the containers out the open side of the chopper, working down the block and hitting any subway staircase he was able to spot. Three. Five. Ten. Finally, when there were only a few left, he slid the wooden pallet with a hard shove, pitching the remainder over the side.

Miller held tight as the chopper bucked from the loss of weight and watched as the containers dropped out of sight into the darkness below. He listened for the sound of ground contact, but knew he’d never make out the noise over the thump of the helicopter’s rotors.

“Bugs away!” the pilot cheered, pulling the chopper up and banking toward the left, back toward the compound.

Miller held tight and glared at the open end of the attack chopper, the second passenger seat and door had been removed to make room for the wasps.

He listened over the all channel as the other teams made their drops and announced their return toward base.

It was a victory—technically. Payload was delivered, and they’d go back at it the next evening, although it would be days, maybe even weeks, before they’d know if the super-wasps were doing their job.

Still, Miller felt the familiar twist in his gut as his eyes trailed up and outside the chopper, resting on the red glow of the moon. He wondered if there was such a thing as safety up there.

2

“W
HAT THE FUCK
is the Tartarus Protocol?” Miller barked.

Brandon Lewis stood behind his desk and shifted his prosthetic legs, rocking back on his heels.

“And why do you need me to do it?” Doyle asked from beside Miller.

Both stood on the opposite side of Lewis’s desk, facing him, their backs to the door and their arms across their chests.

Miller’s skin felt sticky. He and Doyle had just returned from another bug drop, and stunk to high hell of fungus and chopper fuel. If it had been up to him, they would have been enjoying a hot shower or getting some shut-eye, not reporting to Lewis’s office in the wee hours of the morning.

Besides, there wasn’t much point to this meeting, as far as Miller was concerned. Given how Lewis’s hands were tied, he wasn’t sure what the man’s role was within Schaeffer-Yeager. If the orders came directly from Harris, what was the point in having Lewis give them?

Still, this latest development required immediate interference, even if Lewis was only Harris’s parrot. Miller hoped he would side with him in the matter—for all the good it would do.

Lewis nodded, as if agreeing with the question. “They need a sniper,” he said. “And you’re the best in the compound.”

Doyle snorted.

Miller frowned. “Who gave the order?” From Lewis’s expression, he already knew the answer.

“Who do you think?”

Miller ran his hands through his hair and scratched his scalp.

Doyle drummed his fingers against his arms but said nothing.

“There are only five Cobalts left as it is,” Miller said. “And technically Hsiung is on loan from your old squad. You can’t strip me of one of my best men...”

Doyle coughed. “One of?”

“...my
best
man, and not give me a reason except the name of some covert protocol I don’t have clearance to know about. It’s bullshit. Doyle reports to me. How can he know what he’s doing and I can’t? Besides which, I don’t take orders from Harris, and neither do my men. We take orders from Gray.”

“He knows,” Lewis said, sitting in his rolling office chair and grasping the desk’s edge. “Gray’s signed off on the transfer.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Lewis reached across his desk, dug through a pile of papers, and flicked one across to Miller and Doyle.

Doyle snatched up the paper before it hit the floor and handed it to Miller, who read the order and grimaced.

The sheet was headed
Operation Caspian Tiger: Tartarus Protocol
. Sure enough, Gray’s signature was scrawled across the bottom of the hand-written document. He handed it to Doyle, who took it and grunted.

“This still doesn’t explain what the hell Tartarus is,” Miller said.

“That’s on a need-to-know. Even I haven’t been told everything,” Lewis said, his face grim. “All I can say is that it has something to do with the results of those mouth swabs we took a while back. They’re separating some people out based off that.”

“And why do they need a sniper?” Doyle asked.

Miller could hardly believe what he was hearing. “They’re separating people
inside
the compound? What kind of McCarthyist bullshit is that?”

Lewis held up his hands. “The order came from Harris, and Gray’s done nothing to combat it. Look, son, this is between them and neither you nor I can do anything about it. There’s no sense in putting yourself in the middle.”

Miller dropped his arms and pressed his fingers onto the edge of Lewis’s desk. “I’m in the middle of it whether I put myself there or not. And now they’re playing poker with my
men
.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not running this show,” Lewis reminded him. “We’re soldiers. They point, we go.”

“I’m not a soldier, I’m a fucking bodyguard. I never signed up for this shit, and Doyle didn’t ask for this either.”

Lewis pressed his lips together. “You cannot
make
Gray stand up to Harris. He has to do that all on his own. In the meantime, we follow orders or desert and run for the hills. Nobody will stop you.”

Miller shook his head, his face hot, blood boiling. “I don’t like this.”

“Welcome to the club, son.”

“I get him back when it’s done,” Miller said. “Whatever the hell it is.”

“Understood,” Lewis agreed. “Now get out of my office.”

O
UT IN THE
hallway, Miller and Doyle stalked toward the break room. The whole ordeal stunk to high hell, the worst of it being there was nothing Miller could do to remedy that.

“What should I do, boss?” Doyle asked.

Although Miller hardly considered him a subordinate, Doyle continued to relinquish command to him at every opportunity. He bit the inside of his cheek, thinking. “Report as ordered,” he said.

Doyle arched an eyebrow. “What did I tell you about orders?”

“Better yet,” Miller said, lowering his voice. “Report as ordered and then tell me what the hell the Tartarus Protocol is.”

Doyle smirked. “Roger that.”

T
HE
B
RAVO RUMBLED
down the remains of 18th Street like a bulldozer in a library.

It was fascinating to Miller how much the streets had changed, even a week since their last drive outside the compound. The thug behemoths had decimated the roads almost in their entirety, making the trek more of an off-road excursion than an actual drive.

After the latest windstorm, the fungal growths had taken control of the skyline. Blooms wrapped around the buildings in thick coils all the way from foundation to tip, in and out of the broken windows, and blocking doorways.

Evidence of human existence was less and less apparent. It now made more sense to Miller why the Infected had retreated underground. Above, there wasn’t room left for people.

Du Trieux maneuvered the Bravo through the terrain while Miller rode shotgun, grabbing the support bar above the window for balance. Hsiung and Morland sat in the back, bouncing around as if on a trampoline.

“We can’t go any farther,” du Trieux said, slamming the brakes and careening the Bravo to a full stop. “The roads.”

“We’ll have to hoof it from here,” Miller said, snatching up his M27.

Du Trieux nodded and grabbed her Gilboa—snapping the clip tight and pocketing another magazine from the Bravo’s console. Hsiung and Morland poured out the back and came around to meet them.

They advanced on alert, du Trieux on point. Dirt and crumbled cement crunched underfoot. The noise echoed across the boulevard, bouncing from one broken building to the next with deafening clarity. From their vantage point, the area looked deserted, although the rat-things scurried in corners and crevices, skittering and squeaking.

The building on their left had a blue wooden door that was boarded up tightly with splintered two-by-fours. On the right, the entire glass storefront of an old laundromat had been shattered. The shredded strips of the laundry’s awning fluttered in the wind—whispering into the hot fungal breeze.

If their mission perimeters were correct, not far from their position a group of researchers had gotten stuck—for reasons unspecified—and had requested escort back to the compound. Lewis had sent them out to retrieve the civilians with a casualness Miller couldn’t help but distrust. He’d just stripped them of manpower, and now he was sending them back out into the wild. It was hard for Miller not to resent his old mentor.

They rounded a curve in the road and the air turned putrid. The stench was so bad Miller felt the inside of his nose burn.

“There,” Morland whispered.

Miller swung around. To the right, sitting on what was left of the curb, sat a medical cooler, half opened.

Swinging the muzzle of his M27 toward it, Morland nodded and approached the container. Using the edge of his combat boot, he tipped up the lid. “Shit!”

“What is it?” Hsiung said, facing south to cover their backs.

“It’s shit,” he repeated. “Literally. Petri dishes of the stuff.”

“The researchers were collecting samples from the Infected,” Miller informed them. “They can’t be too far.”

Without much by way of working sewers, finding and sampling faeces—which was generally disposed of a reasonable distance from the communes—would be the best option for testing the Infected to see if the latest dispatch of NAPA-33 was working.

The whole idea seemed repulsive to Miller, but he was curious to hear if Harris’s latest scheme would bear fruit, and with no other way of telling, he supposed there was purpose to the nauseating exercise.

That didn’t deter from the fact that by coming to escort the researchers, Miller and the remains of Cobalt had found themselves in the middle of an Infected septic tank. The stench was overwhelming. Miller’s eyes watered as he turned full circle, catching Hsiung, who walked with her arm covering her nose.

Du Trieux, a meter ahead, had put on her gas mask and held up a fist.

Freezing in position, the four strained their ears. Aside from the echoes of the rat things, movement and whispers could be heard inside a brick building on their right. They approached, weapons drawn.

A woman’s voice said, “If you go after him too, then I’ll be left here alone, and I’m not leaving until the cavalry arrives.”

“We can’t stay here,” a man’s voice answered. “We have to go after Lester.”

“No. We don’t. Let the escort handle it.”

“But...”

“Just shut up, Linus.”

Despite himself, Miller grinned. “Dr. Davenport?” he called softly.

From the building’s interior, they heard more shuffling and whispering—panicked movements made as if someone had been caught with their pants down.

“Wait!” the man’s voice said. “How do we know it’s them?”

“They wouldn’t know my name, Linus. Honestly, for a man with doctorates in microbiology and immunology, you can be so dense.”

Dr. Davenport appeared. Looking disheveled and covered in what Miller hoped was dirt, she cautiously peered out from a crack in a boarded-up window, saw him, and smiled. “We really have to stop meeting like this,” she said.

Miller laughed and felt himself blushing.

Du Trieux approached the entrance, a broken wooden door with peeling green paint. It looked as if someone had punched a hole through in order to open it. “Are you all here?” she asked, an edge in her tone. “We should go.”

“What about Lester?” the man said. From beside Dr. Davenport, Dr. Winters appeared, also covered in splotches of dirt and road dust.