The helicopters arrived at midnight, and the men they carried killed everyone they met.
There were three of the machines, black and hulking but sleek as sharks, all emblazoned with the red stars of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army. They were Harbin Z-20s, heavily armed, capable of three hundred knots airspeed at treetop level and each hauling a dozen assaulters. They looked much like U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawks, but they were not cheap knockoffs. Their rotor systems had been expertly cloned from a crashed American stealth helicopter, gifted to Beijing by the Pakistanis after U.S. Navy SEALs had terminated Osama bin Laden.
The Harbin Z-20s were very quiet. No one heard them coming at Toqui 13, the most secret biological warfare laboratory in all of China.
The lab was a Level V facility drilled into the summit of a wind-scarred butte that resembled Devils Tower in Wyoming. It was located in the absolute nowhere of the north central Chinese badlands, ten kilometers from the Mongolian border. You couldn’t just stumble upon it, and if you did you’d be shot on the spot and no one would find your corpse. Toqui 13, whose name meant “Spearhead” in Mandarin, had been built to harvest only one thing: a genetically enhanced corona virus called Gantu-62 that could kill a Notre Dame linebacker in fifteen minutes.
Dr. Ai Liang, a full colonel in the People’s Army, was the laboratory’s director, and up until recently she’d been fervently dedicated to the Chinese Communist Party. The daughter of a distinguished couple of the Cultural Revolution, she’d already become a star of the Chinese Communist Youth League at age sixteen and had graduated with honors from Changchun University of Science and Technology while simultaneously pursuing her military career. Mao Zedong was her God.
But three weeks ago something had happened that had flipped a switch in Dr. Liang’s head. Her research assistant, Second Lieutenant Chang Wu—a handsome young man with a lovely wife and three precious girls in Shanghai—had slipped on a spill of lubricant from an air compressor and had smashed the glass of an incubator with his elbow. The shards had sliced open his Military Oriented Protective Posture suit, as well as his flesh.
Lieutenant Wu instantly knew what was going to happen, and so did his mentor. Together, they had tested Gantu-62 on laboratory animals—first mice, then rabbits, and finally rhesus macaque monkeys. The viral storm had swept through Wu’s bloodstream in minutes, and his immunological response was explosive. It was like an Ebola reaction in hyper speed. Helpless and horrified, Dr. Liang had watched the poor boy wretch up his own intestines, drown in his own blood, and choke to death on the laboratory floor.
Two days prior to this evening, she had finally emerged from three weeks in quarantine isolation, where she’d examined her life and its purpose and had wept until she had no tears left. She had firmly concluded that there should be no Level V biowarfare laboratories, or anything like Gantu-62, anywhere in the world.
Tonight she was going to shut the whole damn thing down. . . .
The numerical designation of all such facilities is a reference to how many segregated floors there are. Level I, at the very bottom of Toqui 13, held the effluent decontamination systems. Above that on Level II was the research lab with inflatable seal doors, autoclaves, petri dish germ farms, and breathing hoses into which lab workers plugged their MOPP helmets. Next came Level III—the serious business floor—with buffer corridors, steel double-entrance doors, incubators for “arms-only” handling of samples, electron microscopes, more breathing hoses, and reverse suction pumps to keep the air pressure at less than one atmosphere.
Level III was where they carefully deposited the already deadly, naturally occurring viruses being farmed on Level II and genetically enhanced them to be fifty times more lethal. If you ripped a hole in your PPE on Level III—as Wang Chu had done—they took your corpse right down to the giant incinerator below the blending tank under Level I and sent a very nice note and the Medal of Loyalty and Integrity to your mother.
Levels IV and V were all about reprocessing air, with HEPA filters, exhaust fans, and breathing air reservoirs—two whole floors just to keep everyone alive. And finally at the top was the last level, which didn’t count numerically, containing the lab’s administrative offices, cafeteria, sleeping quarters, one small amphitheater, and outside past the entrance, a helicopter landing pad.
It was a large facility shaped like a giant steel travel mug sunk into the excavated rock of the butte, with only the top floor and its camouflaged roof exposed. To get there, you had to fly west from Beijing to Hohhot on a PLA aircraft, then ride a blacked-out government bus all the way to Baotou and turn north for Bayan Obo. From that point on, the primitive mountain roads tortured your spine for another sixty kilometers until you reached the alpine tram that took you up to one of the most dangerous buildings on earth. But you only had to do that twice—once to arrive and once to leave. Deployments were a year long. There was no leave time. It was like working at an outpost on Mars.
Now Dr. Liang—outwardly composed though her stomach churned and her eyes were ringed with exhaustion—took her place at the amphitheater’s podium to start her emergency briefing. She was an attractive woman in her early forties, petite and toned from the lab’s daily tai chi sessions and the yoga that relieved the stress. She had long dark hair swirled up into a bun, hazel eyes, a small nose, white teeth and wore fashionable purple glasses. She was also very pale, but everyone who worked at Toqui 13 was pale.
“I must apologize to all of you for waking you up,” she began as she clutched a set of phony PLA directives that she’d forged on her own computer. “However, we have received urgent orders with which we must all comply.”
She looked at the twenty-three wide-eyed faces staring back at her. Almost everyone was dressed in PLA track pants and T-shirts because she’d rousted them from their beds. Six of them were women and none of them was older than thirty-one. They were lab technicians, analysts, biomedical experts, and maintenance personnel, and all were patriots and dedicated Party members. The colonel-doctor had dressed in her brown camouflage Military Medical Team uniform to emphasize that her words were blessed by officialdom.
“You are all aware of the unfortunate fate of Lieutenant Chu,” she continued, “which has been reviewed by the Committee for State Security. The Party has now deemed Toqui 13 as a domestic risk beyond acceptability.” She was lying. She didn’t dare tell them the truth because she knew that soon they’d all be interrogated, and if any of them were suspected of conspiring with her treachery, they’d spend the rest of their days in a reeducation camp with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. “Therefore, I am very sorry to say . . . tonight we are closing down this laboratory.”
Her minions gasped, as if a surge of electricity had coursed through their amphitheater seats. They looked at one another, then back at Liang. One of them clutched an ornate chess set to her bosom and another clamped his own mouth with both hands.
“Yes.” Dr. Liang nodded with a mournful expression. “It is a terrible blow, yet it is true. I know this is difficult, and you’ve all done spectacular work here, but the needs of the Party . . .”
She glanced over their heads past the heavy tempered glass entrance doors. Outside on the landing pad four internal security guards were pacing languidly back and forth. They were armed only with Type 77B pistols. No one ever threatened Toqui 13.
“You have one hour to pack your personal effects, and you will leave everything else behind. We will assemble outside at the tram and begin our journey back to Beijing.” She smiled—a nurturing expression, especially for a colonel. Her plan was to be the last one to leave, after she first descended below Level I, poured all over the floor the thirty liters of generator fuel she’d been secretly hoarding, sliced through the high-pressure oxygen hoses, fired up the incinerator, and opened its doors. “Just five minutes for questions, please, and then we must hurry.”
A young man raised a trembling hand. He’d been Lieutenant Wang Chu’s best friend at Toqui 13 and his heart was still broken.
“Colonel Liang,” he began in a quaking tone, “with respect, why can we not first complete the application analysis for weaponization? After all, it is nearly . . .”
Dr. Liang raised a hand to shush him because she’d noticed something strange outside. A thrumming vibration was shivering the entrance glass and she saw a red-orange glow flooding the tarmac apron. The guards were looking up at the sky, and stepping back, and two of their fur hats fluttered off their heads.
A helicopter appeared. It was one of those brand-new Harbin Z-20s she’d seen on the PLA’s internal video news network. There was very little dust and debris at the top of Toqui 13’s private mountain, so there wasn’t the usual brownout caused by these big machines. All at once her heart sank like a stone through dark honey as she realized headquarters had dispatched some sort of military contingent without advising her, which was never a good sign. Moreover, her treachery would soon be exposed. It could all end with her summary execution this very night.
But the helicopter didn’t actually land. Its big fat wheels hovered a meter off the deck. Liang’s audience followed her gaze and turned to watch as the cargo door slid open and figures began jumping onto the tarmac in the glow of the aircraft’s tactical lights. Strangely, they were not regular troops. They were wearing sophisticated black MOPP suits and helmets, with oxygen hoses and their own compact air supplies on their backs. Their faceplates were tinted, and above each was a pinpoint spotlight. They looked like spacemen, except they were all carrying QBZ-95 bullpup assault rifles in 5.8 × 42 mm, and the barrels were fixed with large thick tubes that resembled . . . suppressors.
“Tien Tahng”—God in heaven—Ai Liang whispered as they shot the first guard in the chest and he slammed backward into the entrance doors. Then they spun on the other three, who were trying to draw their pistols, but the assaulters’ muzzles flashed and their silenced weapons clacked and the guards screamed and collapsed.
“Run!” Liang yelled as she saw the spacemen stepping over the twitching corpses and stomping toward the entrance doors. There were six of them, no, eight or nine, and there seemed to be more helicopters now and her young laboratory comrades leaped up from their upholstered seats and started howling and scrambling in every direction, like a movie audience fleeing a theater fire. The front doors flew open and the killers walked into Toqui 13 with the cold temerity of bored executioners, and started mowing everyone down.
Submachine guns spat silenced fire, severed fingers spun through the air, brain matter splattered the white tile ceiling like gray scrambled eggs. Bullets ricocheted off the metal rims of amphitheater seat backs, but there weren’t many of those misplaced shots and as she turned to run, Dr. Liang had the fleeting thought that these bastards were expert killers.
A thundering sound and vibration came from above her as she sprinted across the theater, thinking she might be able to make it out the rear entrance doors, though she had no idea where she’d go after that. Then the landing gear of another helo crunched down on the roof and a second later the ceiling burst open with a flash and a whump that slammed her backward onto the floor. She saw the girl with the chess set, Mingyu, a sweet young thing from Nanjing, go sprinting by her on the right just as one of the spacemen zipped to the linoleum on an assault rope, grabbed Mingyu by her ponytail, spun her around, and shot her point-blank in the forehead with a pistol.
Liang had nowhere else to go. She jumped to her feet and rushed Mingyu’s killer, and as she hit top speed she left the floor and slammed him in the spine with her boot. He crashed to his face and his helmet bounced but she didn’t see or hear any of that because she rolled and kept on running for the glass exit doors at the far side, and as they got closer and closer, amid a torrent of screams and choked gunfire that sounded like a dozen madmen hammering a dead piano, the doors burst open and another five spacemen came stomping inside. Two of them were carrying satchel charges that looked like the thermite bombs she’d once seen at the EOD school at Kaohsiung, and one of them was hauling a gleaming metallic box the size of a large picnic cooler.
She knew immediately what it was: a lead-lined, temperature-controlled, vacuum-sealed system for transporting biowarfare weapons . . . like Gantu-62.
They gunned down Ju-Long, the young master sergeant in charge of the lab’s pneumatics, then turned their weapons on her. She ducked and jinked hard to the right as bullets whip-cracked past her ears, and she charged through the door to her office, slammed the dead bolt on the other side, and flew across the room without stopping to catch her ragged breath. The previous director of Toqui 13, the man who’d designed it, had devised an escape hatch for his office. Liang had always thought he was a bit paranoid and had never bothered to inspect it. But now she found it there at the back of her closet, a small door with a twist handle that she could barely see because all of her boots and extra uniforms were piled up inside. She whipped those things over her shoulders in a ferocious blur as the killers pounded outside on her door and opened fire on the lock, and she ripped the escape door open, grabbed the top of the frame, launched her feet through the hole, and crashed to the floor of the buffer corridor on Level V.
She expected a hand grenade to follow her, then realized these men were there to steal something volatile and deadly and wouldn’t risk using explosives, but they would surely kill her as soon as they could. She felt blood running down the inside of her trousers from some sort of wound, the adrenaline flooded her veins like baijiu hard liquor, and she swooned and felt like she was going to vomit, but she raced for the corridor stairs as the sweat flung from her brow.
Thank God there were no elevators at Toqui 13—no one could head her off. Access to all levels was via steel stairwells that could never fail, and that was also why all the workers had such strong legs. But those legs hadn’t saved them from bullets, and with the fresh coppery stench of her own blood in her nostrils, Dr. Liang charged down the stairs.
The lights went out. She fumbled for her cell phone to use its flashlight and found it had bounced out of her fatigue pocket, but that barely slowed her pace because she’d loped those stairs a thousand times. She heard clanging in the darkness above her, sledgehammers smashing the door locks on Level III. Her breaths spewed from her lungs as she passed every level and kept on going until she reached the very bottom and the final door to the effluent systems, and below that, the giant incinerator.
It was pitch-black. She fell down that last short set of steel stairs. She crawled on her torn hands and bruised knees along one cold stone wall. There was still the smell of incinerated flesh in the subterranean cave, but she managed to hold her bile down and felt her way to the expulsion hatch that was opened only for rare occurrences, such as extracting virus culture remnants after a 300-degree Celsius burn, or the charred remains of a loyal comrade like Lieutenant Chu.
She had the only key to that hatch. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably as her slick fingers flipped through the key ring that was still on her garrison belt and she found the right one out of twenty. The lock opened after eighteen seconds of coaxing, twisting, and praying, and she hauled on the hatch. A blast of icy air smacked her face, and she saw a long black tube, and at the very end in the distance, starlight.
A minute later, she was lying on her back outside on a forty-five-degree cliff face of slippery rock, a third of the way down the butte with nothing but blackness below. It was freezing cold and the wind was threatening to whip her right off the mountain.
She looked up, where the fat wasp shapes of three murderous helicopters were winging away into the midnight sky, and the crown of her once precious Toqui 13 exploded in a thundering fireball, and the top of the mountain was engulfed in raging flames.
Transylvanian Alps, Romania
Eric Steele fell ninety-seven feet and slammed into the side of a mountain. It was a vertical rock wall of black cosmic granite, and the only reason it didn’t kill him was that he’d belayed himself with a two-hundred-foot length of 12mm thick Petzl Vector climbing rope. Still, he bounced off the wall like a whiplashed marionette, shattered his MBITR radio, lost his hip pouch of Dutch V40 minigrenades, and it was only by pure miracle that his pelvis didn’t crack in half.
Holy mother of God . . .
It was nearly impossible to quietly hammer a rock-climbing piton into a cliff face, even with a custom rubber mallet, so he’d jammed a hex nut anchor into a crevice, linked a titanium carabiner to its steel cable, clipped the black rope into the carabiner and had kept on climbing upward. He’d been at it for more than two hours, repeating that process over and over, and had made it past the thousand-foot mark with fewer than another five hundred to go, when he’d put pressure on what looked like—at least on this freezing moonless midnight—a nice strong toehold.
Negative.
Now he was swinging in the wind with fifty-four pounds of gear on his back, including an FN P90 submachine gun, two extra fifty-round magazines of 5.7 × 28 mm ammunition, a Sig Sauer P226 MK25 suppressed pistol with three extra fifteen-round mags, two combat knives, a tourniquet, a mini water bladder, a rear plate carrier, black Mammut mountaineering boots, tac gloves, MICH helmet, night-vision goggles, and a hip harness of carabiners, ropes, pitons, hex nuts, rappel guides, and now . . . no freaking radio, or frags.
He was praying that the hex nut currently holding the rope would last just a bit longer, while the stretched nylon cable thwanged in the wind and yanked his climbing harness so far up into his crotch that he thought he might be a candidate for the Vienna Boys Choir.
He hung there for a moment, catching his ragged breath, arms drooping while he mentally diffused the kind of pain that came with smacking yourself into a concrete wall at the speed of a motocross bike. He looked down at the gleaming sliver of the Argeș river where it wound through a forested valley far below, then up the other side to the top of a mirroring peak, and the pink granite fortress that was, of all things, Dracula’s Castle.
That’s right. This was the spot in Romania that those Millennial Crude jokers had chosen for their new hacker hideout and cyber mayhem spree, a nice little bombproof structure still five hundred feet above Steele’s head, with a spectacular view of the former mountaintop citadel of Vlad the Impaler. Made sense to Steele, and gave him all the more reason to kill every last one of them.
He had many other reasons, of course, beginning with the deaths of three of his Program comrades at the hands of Lila Kalidi, a vicious female assassin who collected the ears of her victims. Kalidi had been contracted by Dmitry “Snipe” Kreesak, the leader of Millennial Crude, who in turn worked for Russia’s Federal Security Bureau. Millennial Crude had also battled with the Program’s own cyber warfare guru, Ralphy Persko, and while both sides had suffered casualties, nobody held a grudge. Steele’s friends were dead, but so was Lila Kalidi. He himself had killed her at close range. So he’d figured “all’s fair in love and war” and was prepared to let it go.
That is, until Crude really lived up to its name.
A month ago, the Russian FSB had decided to take out a Russian defector to the United States, Naftali Ostrovsky, who was making too much noise about Vladimir Putin’s sexual peccadilloes to American media outlets in Boston. An FSB agent had slipped into the United States and poisoned Ostrovky’s tea with polonium, which had put him on a ventilator in the ICU at Massachusetts General Hospital. But Ostrovsky wasn’t dying fast enough for the Kremlin.
Millennial Crude was called in, and from their remote headquarters in the Moscow suburb of Kapotnya, they’d shut down all the electrical power to Mass. General for two full hours, including the backup generators. Aside from Ostrovky, who’d expired in ten minutes, four other innocent patients on ventilators had died, plus three newborn infants in incubators.
Steele might not even have known about all this if not for Ralphy Persko. The Program had been disbanded by order of President Rockford, but Ralphy had a private obsession with Millennial Crude and had kept on tracking their activities. When he told Steele about their attack on Mass. General, the news about the helpless babies boiled Steele’s blood.
Steele knew there’d be no Program support or equipment for a hit on Millennial Crude, so he and his currently unemployed keeper, Dalton “Blade” Goodhill, had turned to an old CIA special tactics hand, Thorn McHugh, who happened to be as wealthy as Mark Cuban. The three men had met one night in East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., and after hearing Steele’s and Goodhill’s pitch, McHugh had simply walked away. The next day a FedEx letter had arrived on Steele’s doorstep at Neville Island, Pennsylvania. It contained a black American Express card in Steele’s name—no limit.
After the Boston slaughter, the Russians had decided that Millennial Crude should relocate for a while till the whole thing blew over. Romania seemed the perfect spot: lots of remote mountains and less-than-curious villagers. The country had been a Soviet satellite for decades, but even after Gorbachev nothing much had changed. You could buy just about anything with oligarch money in Bucharest, including a modular ceramic tactical operations center shaped like a giant igloo, with double thick tempered glass doors, sidebar living quarters, a Jamie Oliver kitchen, minigymnasium, banks of 8Pack OrionX personal computers and satellite uplinks, and all of it delivered by contracted heavy-lift helos and assembled by FSB engineers. The nine bodyguards were Russian private military contractors from Grupa Vagnera, who slept outside in a trailer and never entered the dome.
Ralphy Persko knew all this because ever since the Program had stood down, he was incredibly bored and had lots of time on his hands. He hadn’t asked Steele for one penny for the intel. Nevertheless, Steele intended to add a fat tip for Ralphy to the Thorn McHugh budget.
Steele finally stopped swinging at the end of his rope, reached over and grabbed the main line, and pulled himself back to the vertical wall. The granite was slimy and slippery as hell and he didn’t have crampons on his boots, but he’d file that memo for later—if there was ever going to be a “later.” He spread his black-clad legs wide, found what seemed like two load-bearing toeholds, reached for a couple of fingertip ledges, and started inching his way back up the cliff face like Spider-Man—just much slower, and more cautiously, and extremely bruised.
It took another hour setting belay hexes, paying out rope, inching upward and sweating in the icy night, and then he was peering over an onyx shelf at that salmon-colored dome, straight ahead on a summit clearing among a copse of Romanian pines. The moon had just popped up from behind a charcoal fur ball of clouds and it was so high and bright in the indigo sky that he wasn’t even going to need the NVGs mounted on top of his helmet. He slithered on his stomach over to the left behind a long coffin-like slab of granite, took one long pull from his hydration bladder, and started quietly shedding gear—the rock-climbing hardware, ropes, harness, and carabiners. He came to his knees, slung the P90 subgun over his back, pulled the P226 from his thigh holster, screwed on the Knights Armament silencer, and press checked the handgun. He wished he still had his radio so he could tell Goodhill he’d made it to the top. And oh yes, the grenades; he wished he still had those too.
Oh, well, FIDO . . . fuck it, drive on . . .
He rose and moved forward at a hunched, graceful glide, especially for a large muscular man wearing mountaineering boots. The slab of granite on his left had a twin on the right, forming a roofless corridor, and suddenly at the end of it a figure stepped into view. It was one of the Russian sentries, a tall man wearing a Spetsnaz camouflage smock, black tactical pants, a fur hat, and slinging a Romanian AK-47 with its peculiar folding stock. He was lighting up a smoke and his back was turned to Steele.
For a moment, as he floated closer, Steele felt a twinge of remorse.
Dude’s just a gun for hire, probably doesn’t even know what he’s doing here, or who these people are he’s protecting. . . . Maybe he’s got a wife, little kids, a faithful dog. . . . Maybe even a little old mamushka back in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. . . .
Steele shot him in the back of the skull.
He stepped over the bleeding corpse and kept on going, and at that moment he crossed the mental bridge over what he internally called his “red river.” You could conduct surveillance of a target, or any sort of long-range recon mission, and withdraw without reaching that next laser-focused level if you did no harm. But once you’d taken that first life it was like everything collapsed into a very narrow tunnel, at the end of which appeared each of your mortal opponents, and there were only two lives at a time, yours and theirs, and only one would survive. His red river wasn’t a pretty feature, but every true warrior had one, and once you crossed it you had to be totally on your game, or die.
The dome grew larger. It was late at night but he could see a soft red glow suffusing the interior like the combat bulbs in a warship’s combat information center, and it was no surprise that these Millennial Crude cyber thugs would still be up working because they wreaked havoc all over the world in multiple time zones. ...
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