“You know Markis, I let you blather on because it amuses and gratifies me to see you lying there like a twisted freak.”
“So you must trust these men implicitly? You’re not afraid of them hearing anything you say?”
“They are utterly loyal to me.”
Daniel glanced at them, seeing nothing to contradict what Jenkins had to say. Still, the longer he kept Jenkins talking, the more time the other parts of the plan had to succeed. Maybe he might even get through to one of the minions.
“Did you tell them it will cure anything? And give them functional immortality? Live a thousand years like a man of twenty? Never have to watch what you eat, or worry about all the pains of growing old? Do they think a couple of grunts like them will get a piece of that? That it won’t be reserved exclusively for the rich and powerful?”
“They will get it, just as soon as I do. As soon as the bugs have been worked out. They don’t want to end up in a pathetic situation like you are now.”
Daniel chuckled. “Just a little longer, and everyone will have a better world, right? It’s always just a little bit longer, until they find a cure for cancer, or nuclear fusion gives everyone clean energy, or we balance the budget. But those things never come, Jenkins, because the rich and powerful don’t want them to come. If they did, the little people wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, and people like you would have no leverage. Nothing to hold over their heads. But the Eden Plague can free them now, and we can still work on making the virus better as we go along.”
Daniel wasn’t sure how convincing he was, or how much of this he even believed himself, but he had committed himself to the course and he wasn’t going to back out now. And maybe this was penance for his crime, even if it accomplished nothing else.
“You think I’m evil, Markis? You’re a pie-in-the-sky raving lunatic. You want to just roll the dice on a slice of Soviet-designed biological warfare and hope it all turns out all right.”
Daniel shrugged, as well as he could. “At least I put my money where my mouth is. What have you risked, Jenkins?”
“As little as possible. That’s how great things are achieved.”
“Really? I think truly great people would say just the opposite.”
Jenkins stood up. “We’ll just have to see who achieves greatness, then,” he sneered. “Good luck from that position.” He picked up the chair, backing out of the room. The other two followed.
“I could use some food, if you want more than a corpse to torture later.”
He laughed. “I think I’d rather see you suffer some more the way you are. Bon appétit.”
The door shut with a heavy slam. Bon appétit’s cat-claws ripped at his guts.
Eventually he slept.
-26-
Infection Day.
Jervis A. Jenkins III sat in the command vehicle half a mile from the terrorist’s underground lair. Outside, C Squadron, Special Forces Detachment, Delta – commonly known as Delta Force – deployed across the mountain. Measurement and signals intelligence, MASINT, had identified the hidden entrances using infrared and radar imagery comparisons, and each was being covered by a squad of elite special operators.
Jenkins looked down at the piece of paper in his hand, almost orgasmic every time he read it. The President’s signature at the bottom, handwritten, not autopenned, authorized him to take control of the counterterrorism operation under the “clear and present danger” clause of the Patriot Act. It was probably extralegal, perhaps illegal, as it severely bent if not broke the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibiting the use of Federal troops for law enforcement within the United States.
The power to break the law with impunity was intoxicating. Jenkins reveled in it.
Even now, select committees of the US Congress were being briefed and martial law would soon be declared, assuming they agreed. Even if they didn’t, that damn infected cruise ship was now under the guns of the Atlantic Fleet, and would stay quarantined offshore for as long as necessary. He wished he had been able to persuade the President to sink it immediately, but like all politicians, the man had wanted to keep his options open, and a massacre was always bad for poll numbers.
It was a stroke of luck, the anonymous tip that turned the Markis group in, that pinpointed this bunker.
When he’d been briefed on the facility later, by an ancient civil engineer they had dug up – who had worked on it shortly before it was sealed up in the fifties – he’d been appalled at how the Pentagon had lost track of it. He wondered how many other installations like this were scattered around. It could have been a nightmare.
“I wish we’d been able to bring Markis to see us capture his people and their hidey-hole,” he mused as he pushed buttons, checking feeds from the various personal cams attached to the helmets of selected operators. “Better to have him locked in the secure facility, though.”
His driver and the communications techs, contractors rather than regular military, chuckled approvingly at their boss’s comment. As well as they’re being paid, they’d better approve, he thought.
A buzz, then terse voices reported their positions and readiness. Most of the teams were just to cover the exits, to keep the rats from escaping. They had orders to shoot first, then capture wounded if it was absolutely safe.
These men were among the best elite hostage rescue and direct action specialists in the world. They had been briefed about the plot to spread a genetically engineered virus that would make Ebola look like the sniffles, and every one of them was cocked and locked, burning with eagerness to take down the enemies of their country, their families, and their way of life.
Jenkins loved this kind of control, and laughed inside. Fine upstanding stupid square-jawed suckers, so easily fooled by real leaders like me, using their own pure innocent patriotism against them. He looked at his watch, checked with his comm tech one more time, then said, “All right. Execute.”
In two different locations simultaneously, precisely calculated shaped charges blew hatches open, leaving smoking holes but not collapsing the tunnels behind. Then tactical stacks of operators, heavily armored for this short-range op, piled into the tunnels in lockstep, rushing down the corridors toward their selected targets.
Alpha Team got to the big cavern first, and designated men spread out to find vehicles that could be started. Within fifteen seconds, six men roared out the vehicle tunnel toward the inside of the bunker’s main entrance, to open it to more forces outside.
The rest fanned out, quartering, searching and clearing each room, finding no one until they met Bravo team coming from the other direction, in what looked like a cafeteria. It was obvious the terrorists had prepared food here in the kitchen and eaten in the dining room. One of the soldiers reached down to pick up a crayon drawing of a truck in a tunnel under a mountain, a yellow sun shining incongruously above, its rays like petals of a flower.
“Patricks, if it ain’t intel, put it down. We got the whole place to clear.”
“But sir…” He held it up. “They didn’t say there were kids here.”
“Shit.” The lieutenant changed frequencies to the general net, and transmitted, “Common push, this is Delta Alpha One, we have evidence of children here, over.”