Payload (34 page)

“A lucky break.” Dennis came over and gave her a thumb’s-up.

“Yep.”

“And everyone is OK with this transaction?”

“Marv didn’t really keep us in the loop on the subject-I wasn’t the only one who thought you guys were trying to destroy the payload. With him gone it wasn’t hard to bring the others around.”

“Where do we make the exchange?”

“Are you looking at Google Earth?”

“Give me a minute.” She tapped keys for the sound effect. “Its loading…there we go. OK, yeah, I’m there.”

“OK, the town is mostly north of a very deep creek bed running sort of east-west. Look for a flat-roofed building roughly at the center of town whose lot backs up to the creek, there’s a wrecked gray truck in the center of the road about two doors down.”

“Got it.”

“There’s a flagpole in front of the building, you can’t see it because its vertical, not attached to the building. We’re going to attach the payload to the rope and run it to the top of the pole; you’ll be able to get a good look at it with binoculars or your drone. We’ll meet in the creek bed directly behind the building, there’s a concrete run-off channel there. You give us the stones, and we haul ass.”

“No deal-you stay put until I have the payload.”

“You can see it long before you get there.”

“Yes, but what stops you from putting a bullet into it as you’re heading out of town?”

“It’s made out of titanium-I don’t think we have anything that would dent it. But OK, we’ll wait. But any monkey business, any sign of trouble, and we’ll start shooting. That building will be zombie central no matter how the firefight plays out.”

“I understand.”

“See you in ninety minutes.”

“They’re at or within sight of the town,” she told Dennis as they trotted to the plane. “Are we sure its over-run?”

“Yeah, there’s a two-day-old State advisory. We’ve got a team rolling at best speed for the airstrip, ETA fifty. They’re coming in from the west, should be completely out of sight.”

“Great.” Climbing into the plane, she leaned close to the pilot, who was running the pre-flight checklist. “Bring us in with as minimal an exposure to Cross Plains as possible. And don’t waste any time.”

“Ok, they know everyone’s names except Dyson and Addison, and they know Addison came from Jacksonville,” Bear reported. “How they pulled that off, I’m not sure.”

“They had a body count from my e-mail at the river, with JD and Bear’s names,” Marv mused. “Plus we already knew about them being at Berlin, so they confirmed the numbers and got pictures. I’m guessing at least one of the three from Jacksonville got identified, which gave them the other two. Chip and Brick, I’m not sure about.”

“We left our trip book in the truck,” Chip sighed. “They must have found it.”

“So Dyson doesn’t exist, and you’re a ghost,” JD mused. “That’s a help.”

“Plus us,” Bambi jerked a thumb at Sylvia. “I want some payback on these bastards. I was going to be next after the homeboy got his juices going from watching the porn, and it was a coin toss between me and Sylvia over who got the job on the deck.”

The group were sitting at two old picnic tables at a defunct junk store a half mile from Cross Plains, studying a hand-drawn map of the town.

“OK, we stash the vehicles in this hay shed, that should suffice. Addison, are you up to the job?”

“Yeah,” the dark Gnome sighed, looking up from the designs he was drawing on a legal pad. “Have to find some green paint, though.”

“She was stalling,” Bear said. “But she was OK with ninety minutes.”

“The ground element was the drag,” Marv nodded. “She needs a vehicle and a reaction force.”

“Is she going to double-cross us?” Chip asked.

“She wants the payload-if you accept what she gives you and she gets the payload, no real problem,” Marv shrugged. “Future payback, now, that’s another issue.”

“GPS in the payoff?” Dyson suggested.

“I would think so,” Marv nodded. “OK, lets finish up-they’re on their way. One handicap we’ll have is that we can’t use the CBs for the final event, because you can bet they’ll be listening.”

The District 13 team arrived in two white SUVs with cross-country kits and battered paint jobs, five men and three women, all shaved-head Evening’s Door members in military surplus woodland BDUs. They were an even mix of ages and races, all stamped with the look of fanatics going about their true calling.

Sophia recognized that look from videos of men chopping off the heads of the enemies of Allah, stoning women, ethnically cleansing the unworthy. These were the true believers, diehards for whom no lake of blood was too wide to wade across in order to secure their goals. She had little in common with them, but she recognized their utility. She had been lucky-most of the blocking units were drawn from the Aryan Brotherhood and other ethnic prison gangs, tough customers but not greatly motivated, whereas the Door were few in number but seriously hard core, determined to purge Mankind so that the mother-ship would return, or something like that. Sophia wasn’t clear on the particulars of the belief system involved, but she was certain that these cultists were determined to kill, rape, and burn until their quest was accomplished, whatever that quest was.

“You’re early,” she observed as the eight swaggered up.

“We had already diverted north to purge a nest of the unworthy.” The spokesman had the Door symbol tattooed across the front of his scalp. “We left the rest to man your barricade.”

“Perfect timing. I require one of your vehicles and two of your best combatants to conduct an exchange in that town,” she pointed. “I’ll need the rest of you to stand by as a reaction force until the deal is done, and then you will eliminate the other side of the exchange, a group of petty criminals. Thereafter your time is your own-the barrier operation will terminate.”

“Why just two?”

“Conditions of the exchange. The town is completely over-run with infected, so we have to avoid conflict ourselves. The enemy will be in a recreational vehicle.”

The leader nodded thoughtfully.

She tossed him a tracker unit. “The payoff has a GPS chip inside, and this unit will lead you to it. Dennis will sort out radio issues and the details of the plan.”

“I would rather have killed them myself,” Dennis observed as they prepared for the exchange. Mabry was donning black BDUs, a tactical vest, and some sort of complex-looking assault weapon; Sophia simply shouldered the Gucci purse that held the bag of diamonds and checked the stainless snub-nosed revolver she had borrowed before heading to the plane. She had caused large amounts of pain, suffering, and death before joining FASA, but had never personally harmed another person face to face, and she didn’t believe she was going to have to today. However her being armed was to be expected by the Gnomes, and if zombies came into play she might need a weapon.

“I understand, but the payload is the priority. Once we get it back to Georgia you’ll be free to resume ordinary operations.”

“All right.” It wasn’t, she could tell, but he would wait. There would be more victims in the future for all of them.

“How does it look?”

“No news. We’ll stop a half-mile out and run the drone.”

“How do you feel about the situation?” Sophia had a lot of faith in the mind’s ability to process data below the level of conscious thought-hunches or instincts, if you will. Especially in people like themselves, who lived apart from what passed for modern society.

Mabry sighed and surveyed the surrounding countryside, stroking the sighting system on his weapon. “I’m not happy about it. We’re playing their game, on their ground, at their timetable, with an improvised force.”

“You seem to have prepared very thoroughly.”

“If they’re telling the truth, I have. If they’re lying and this is a trick, we have a problem. The Ranger served four tours, and from what was between the lines in his service record, he is a very dangerous man.”

“More dangerous than you are?”

“In a fair fight, no. But I’m restricted by having to guard you, while he would be a free agent.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she assured him. “He would never take this sort of risk with the payload. He was reckless and very prone to violence, but he never delayed for more than two or three hours of daylight without accomplishing a key element in getting the payload delivered. To throw away half a day or more just to kill a few of us isn’t something he would do. He was a highly programed individual.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am,” she said with confidence. “He understood the value of the payload, and until it is delivered to the site he would be a slave to the mission.”

“So you’re confident he is dead.”

“Dead, or trying to get the payload to the site alone. If this is a false operation, it is either an attempt to bilk us or distract us, and we’ll know the instant we see the payload.”

“All right, then.” Dennis motioned the two Door operatives to join them. “This is Trek, and that is Portal.”

Trek was a young woman, flat-eyed and mean looking, like a well-scarred feral cat, skinny and hard-boned like a meth addict coming back from the bottoms. Portal was a Hispanic male in this late thirties with prison tattoos on his neck, rec yard muscle filling out the BDU top, and a flat, emotionless convict stare.

“Trek will operate the THOR unit and come with us, while Portal will drive and stay with the vehicle. We’re ready when you are.”

“Let’s go.” She checked her watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

Portal caught the job of supervising the drone, which was a square little unit about two feet on a side; Dennis programed its path and sent it on its way, and a minute later the screen zoomed in on the payload hanging from the flagpole.

Sophia adjusted the controls for a manual zoom and took a couple screen shots. “That’s it. That’s the real thing.”

“Looks like a lunchbox,” Portal observed.

“It does,” Sophia nodded. “But its made out of titanium, hermetically sealed-it could survive a lot. The company that makes them also builds the housings for black boxes on planes.” She studied the images. “How much longer for the sweep?”

“Couple minutes,” Mabry advised from the back seat. “We need to look for signs of a wire-controlled IED. THOR will handle anything else.”

“These guys really that dangerous?” Trek asked in a husky smoker’s voice.

“Not really,” Sophia kept her eyes on the screen as the drone passed over a group of infected subjects standing in the shade under a carport. “They have done well against zombies, but they only had one man who could operate against uninfected humans, and he died earlier today. Still, we must exercise caution.”

Her phone buzzed. “How you doin’, babe?” Bear sounded happy. “You’ve got five minutes by my watch.”

“You counted my drone as one of my people, so we’re there-the clock stops,” Sophia purred, and was pleased to hear Bear fumbling for an answer.

“Ah…OK, fine. How much longer?”

“One more circuit and we’ll head in-we’re a mile out. There’s quite a few zombies in the open, and I don’t want to walk into any by accident.”

“Ok, we’ll be here.” The phone went dead.

“He’s nervous,” she told Dennis. “A small-timer trying to play with the big girls.”

“It looks good,” Mabry nodded. “Where they set up its concrete and soft dirt-no way they positioned command wires. Time to go.”

Bear hit the speed dial button, using the hands-free kit to ensure that the drone couldn’t pick up what he was doing. “She’s on her way. Cocky as hell.”

“Good,” Marv said. “Yeah, I can see some movement, her vehicle. Looks like we’re going to be OK.”

“All right, good luck.”

“You, too.”

Stowing the ear buds, Bear took a deep breath. Shooting at those guys behind the concrete planter at the roadhouse had been done at a decent range-he had just fired at some shapes that had been shooting at his friends. This cold-blooded face-to-face stare down was an entirely different business entirely. He was glad Marv had sounded so cool and calm on the phone even though he knew the Ranger couldn’t see them in the creek bed.

Chip and Brick had dragged a tree trunk across the dry stream bed and were sitting on it in a patch of shade. The creek bed was about fifteen feet below ground level with tall trees on the upper portion of both banks making the sandy bed shaded and cool. Down at the bottom the bed was about eight feet across, and to his right JD crouched behind a tree, while off to his left beyond Brick Addison sat on the middle reaches of the north bank with his back to a wide Spanish Oak, watching the rear. Twenty feet to their front Bear sat in Doc’s green camp chair on the base of the concrete drainage channel.

He was nervous, but not as much as he had been in other places. The five of them constituted a large quantity of badass, he kept reminding himself, and they had a plan. The truth was he was more worried about Sylvia’s involvement in this affair than anything else. He had thought that facing real humans would be harder, but these were terrorists, the people behind the outbreak. They wanted him, Chip Wilson, dead, and that was good at washing away the moral objections.