He put his arm around her as she lost it. “Shh, it’s okay. I’m going to get you out of here. Is there anyone else here? Any other girls?”
“They’re locked up in a room. Down the hall.”
“Show me.”
Sheridan Ernstmeyer arrived at the eleventh-floor landing first, sweat pouring beneath her rebreather mask and down her face. For a well-deserved moment, she luxuriated in the intense burning sensation in her quadriceps, the endorphin high always accompanying a good workout.
Turning back to the stairs, she looked down — Ernest Lozano lagged two floors below. “Anytime, Mr. Y-Chromosome. Preferably before the apocalypse.”
No answer.
“What’s the apartment number? I’ll handle this myself.”
“Eleven-oh-two. Why didn’t you tell me that nine floors ago?”
“You needed the workout. Man up while I grab Shepherd’s wife.” She yanked open the fire door, gun in hand.
The apartment was close to the stairwell, second door on the left. She knocked loudly several times. “Mrs. Shepherd, open up! Hello?” She banged again, readying herself to kick down the barrier.
Someone inside approached. “Who is it?” The voice belonged to a woman in her thirties.
“I’m with the military, Mrs. Shepherd. It’s very important I speak with you.” She held her identification up to the peephole.
A dead bolt was retracted. The door opened—
— revealing a thirty-two-year-old African-American woman dressed in a flannel bathrobe.
“Beatrice Shepherd?”
“No, I’m Karen. Beatrice is my mother.”
“Your mother? No, that can’t be right. Your husband… your estranged husband, Patrick… he needs to see you.”
“I’m not married, and my mother has been a widow for twenty years. I think you have the wrong person.” She attempted to shut the door, only Sheridan’s boot was in the way.
“You’re lying. Show me some ID.”
“You need to leave.”
The assassin aimed her gun at the woman’s face. “You are Beatrice, aren’t you?”
“Karen?”
The voice came from somewhere in the dark living room. Sheridan pushed her way in. Candlelight revealed a figure sprawled out on the sofa.
Fifty-seven-year-old Beatrice Eloise Shepherd lay in a pool of her own sweat and blood, the woman’s body wracked with fever. An obscene dark bubo, the size of a ripe apple, protruded above the neckline of her silk pajamas. She was clearly on death’s door—
— and she was clearly not the estranged wife of Sergeant Patrick Ryan Shepherd.
The female assassin backed away, then turned and left the apartment—
— running into Ernest Lozano in the corridor. “So? Where’s Shepherd’s wife? I thought you were handling it, hotshot.”
Raising the 9mm pistol, Sheridan Ernstmeyer calmly and coldly shot the agent three times in the face, bone shrapnel and blood spraying across her mask. “We had the wrong person.”
Stepping over the corpse, she hurried for the stairwell, enjoying the fleeting rush of endorphins flowing in her brain.
Ninth Circle
Treachery
“We silently climbed the bank which forms its border. Here it was less than day and less than night, so that my vision could hardly reach farther than a few yards. But if I was limited in sight I heard a high horn which made such a loud blast that the effect of thunder would have been slight by comparison. Immediately my eyes passed back along the path of the sound to its place of origin. Not even Roland's horn surpassed its dreadful wail. Not long after I'd turned my face to follow the sound there appeared to my eyes a number of high towers, or so I believed, and I asked: "Master, what is that city which lies before us?" And he explained: "What you've perceived are false images which come from trying to penetrate the shadows too deeply. You'll see how you're deceived once we get closer, so try to accelerate."
Major Steve Downey sat in the front passenger seat of the black military Hummer, his gaze focused on the live video feeds coming from the two Reaper drones hovering over Chinatown. For nearly two hours, his team of Rangers had maneuvered their military vehicles along sidewalks littered with the dead and dying, progressively working their way south as they tracked their quarry through Lower Manhattan. And then, somehow, Shepherd and his entourage had evaded them. By the time the Reapers had reestablished contact, Downey’s crew had reached Houston Street.
The east — west thoroughfare that separated Greenwich Village from SoHo was a wall of vehicles that could not be negotiated. With chopper extractions banned because of the cloud cover and the UN evacuation set for seven thirty, time was running out quickly.
“Base to Serpent One.”
Downey grabbed the radio. “Serpent One, give me some good news.”
“The ESVs have landed. ETA for ESV-2 is three minutes.”
“Roger that.” Downey switched frequencies to speak with his second-in-command. “Serpent Two, the road’s being paved, prepare to move out.”
While the backbone of the US Army’s ground forces remained the Abrams and Bradley tanks, these heavily armored vehicles, weighing upward of sixty-seven tons each, often required months to transport to the battlefield. For assignments requiring rapid deployment, the Defense Department developed the Stryker Force, eight-wheeled attack vehicles that weighed only thirty-eight thousand pounds, could be airlifted via a single C-130 aircraft, and possessed enough armor to stop small-arms fire.
The two vehicles that had been off-loaded from flatbed barges in Battery Park and Hudson River Park were M1132 Stryker Engineer Support Vehicles, each fitted with a seven-foot-high, two-foot-thick arrowhead-shaped steel tractor blade mounted to the Stryker’s front end, converting the ESVs into fast-moving bulldozers.
Having deployed at Pier 25 in Tribeca, ESV-2 plowed its way east along Houston Street doing thirty miles an hour, its driver viewing Manhattan through night-vision and thermal-imaging cameras as he rammed his V-shaped blade into the gridlocked avenues, pushing vehicles aside and flipping buses as the Stryker cleared a twenty-foot-wide path through Lower Manhattan. Reaching Broadway, the all-terrain vehicle turned right, obliterated the wall of cars blocking the two black military Hummers, then headed south, the two Ranger teams following in its wake.
David Kantor exited the building’s southwest stairwell, the seven-year-old boy in his arms, the rest of the students in tow. The older teens looked around, in shock. “What happened?”
“Oh my… there are dead people everywhere.”
“Eww!” Children screamed, panicking the rest of the herd.
“It’s okay. Stay calm.” David looked around, desperate to find a means of transportation, even as he realized the futility of the task. “Kids, do you know where the school keeps its buses?”
“I do!” The sixth-grade girl pointed west down 41st Street.