The Ares Decision

83

“This is all we have?” Smith said, staring down at a single grenade that looked like World War II surplus.

The young man standing in front of him nodded weakly, bending at the waist and trying to slow his ragged breathing.

“How hard would it be to get back to the main entrance?”

“There were four of us when we entered,” he replied in thickly accented English. “I’m the only one left.”

“Jesus, Sarie. How many of those monkeys are there?”

“Thirty-one. And two people not counting the one you killed.”

“Everybody back!” Howell shouted as the clatter of claws became audible down the hallway.

They’d erected floor-to-ceiling barricades on both sides of the corridor, but the available materials — mostly office furniture — made for a fairly porous barrier. Howell and Smith stood in the middle of the floor with their pistols at eye level as the others retreated behind them. The animal was approaching fast, brief flashes of crimson through the gaps.

Despite its less-than-impressive construction, the barrier did what it was designed to do. The monkey hit hard and immediately went for an obvious hole they’d made sure was large enough to be enticing but not so large that it would be easy to fully pass through. The macaque got its head in but then was stalled when its shoulder got caught. Smith held his fire and let Howell use his superior marksmanship to put a round through the top of the animal’s skull.

“It worked!” Farrokh said, coming up behind them. “I have to admit I had my doubts.”

“We were lucky,” Howell responded, checking his clip. “One is easy to handle. Maybe even two. More than that and they’re going to get through.”

He was right. As bad as infected humans were, they were relatively large, slow targets compared to these little horrors. And according to Sarie, there were six full-grown chimps that wouldn’t be drawn in by the gap left in the barricade. They’d make their own.

“What now?” Farrokh said. He was holding a walkie-talkie in his hand, but after his initial success in getting the grenade brought down to them, all attempts to raise his men had failed. Beyond knowing that their reinforcements had arrived, they were completely in the dark as to what was happening outside the hallway they’d barricaded themselves in.

“Sarie, you’re sure this is the door Omidi went out?” Smith said.

“Positive. The fact that it’s locked means it leads outside,” she said and then pointed to a smear of blood on the floor. “And that’s mine.”

“Then we have to get through.”

“The steel’s too thick,” Farrokh said. “That grenade won’t penetrate.”

He was right. Putting the explosive directly against the door would probably just bend the metal — making it even harder to open.

“Perhaps…,” Farrokh continued hesitantly.

“What? If you have an idea, speak up.”

“I’ve never worked on this type of mechanism specifically, but I used to be an engineer. If you were designing this, how would you make it lock?”

“Sure…,” Smith said, focusing on the wall to the left of the door. “Why make things any more complicated than you have to? All you need is a simple actuator that moves something to block it.”

They worked quickly, tearing down the rear barricade and using the pieces to create a structure that would help direct the blast against the wall next to the door. It left them unprotected, but at this point, there was no choice but to go all-in.

When they were finished, Smith pulled the rusty pin on the grenade. “Everyone back!”

They ducked around the corner and flattened themselves against the wall as the explosive detonated, filling the air with a haze of shattered concrete.

It worked. The mechanism was exposed, but also twisted and charred. Smith used his hands to clear away the debris while Farrokh examined the design.

“This is it,” he said, pointing to a simple steel rod lodged against the main gear.

Smith picked up a piece of concrete and swung it repeatedly at the bar, bending it back while Farrokh and his men pulled on the door. It moved a couple of inches and then stopped.

“Harder! Come on!” Smith said.

They put everything they had into it, but it didn’t budge.

“Again!”

“Jon,” Sarie said, coming up behind him. “What’s that at the top of the hole you made?”

He wasn’t sure how he’d missed it, but there was a blackened wiring harness tangled in the top rail, blocking the door’s movement. He reached up and yanked it out as Farrokh and his men curled their fingers through the small gap they’d made.

It happened a painfully slow quarter-inch at a time, but the door ground its way back. When they’d opened it a little more than a foot, the young man who had brought them the grenade stepped in front of it. “I think it’s large enough!” he said. “I can get through.”

“Stop!” Smith shouted, but it was too late.

The man had barely entered the gap when a gunshot sounded and he went limp, his body suspended between the door and the jamb — a victim of the same trap they’d set for the monkeys.

Farrokh dove for cover, but Smith moved up behind the man. There was no time for regret or respect for the fallen. Omidi was getting farther away with every minute and they couldn’t afford to get pinned down here.

More shots rang out, thudding dully into the dead man’s flesh as Smith grabbed him by the back of the jacket and lifted him fully upright. It sounded like a single gun, semiautomatic, with rounds designed for impact, not penetration.

“Peter! You’re with me!”

The Brit fell in behind as Smith shoved the bleeding corpse through the hole, using it as a shield as he entered a cavernous, intermittently lit parking garage.

The shots kept coming, absorbed by the dead weight of the body, which was getting increasingly awkward to maneuver. He could feel Howell pressed up against him as they moved right, taking cover behind a concrete pillar that looked to be on the verge of collapse.

Howell returned fire, getting close enough to the prone man to spray sand and broken rock into his eyes. He leapt to his feet and ran stumbling toward a van twenty yards behind him, but instead of taking cover behind it, he just kept going.

“I believe he’s had about enough of this day,” Howell said. “Hard to blame him.”

Smith turned back toward the door. “It’s clear. Come on through.”

After Sarie, Farrokh, and his surviving men were safely out, Smith ducked back into the facility and worked a table into the cavern so that he could use it to block the gap.

“You three stay here,” he said, pointing to Farrokh’s men. “Nothing comes out — even if it’s someone you know. Do you understand? If they want out, tell them to go back to the main entrance, where we’ve got people trained to check them for wounds that could indicate infection.”

They nodded and he ran toward a group of vehicles parked on the other side of the cavern with Farrokh in tow. A quick search didn’t turn up any keys, and Smith jabbed a finger in the Iranian’s direction. “You said you’re an engineer, right? Can you hot-wire a car?”

“An engineer is different from a thief, Colonel.”

“Great,” Smith muttered as Howell kept watch in case the guard they’d chased off rediscovered his courage. Sarie, though, had disappeared.

He was about to call to her when the sound of an engine firing up echoed through the enormous chamber. A few moments later, a pickup full of maintenance equipment skidded to a stop in front of him.

“Need a ride?” Sarie said, leaning out the open window.

“Peter! We’re rolling!”

She slid over and let him take the wheel as Farrokh jumped through the passenger door. They were already pulling away when Howell threw himself into the bed, tossing out toolboxes and shovels to make room as they accelerated toward what Smith prayed was an exit.

The cavern was much larger and more complex than he expected, but they followed a set of fresh tire tracks until they passed through the mouth of a meticulously camouflaged cave entrance.

Farrokh immediately got on his phone and Smith squinted into the blinding sunlight, heading toward the road leading north. They were a good half mile outside the facility’s perimeter fence and probably two hundred feet higher in elevation. It looked like all the fighting was inside the building now, and trucks had been used to block the bridge, with supporting gun placements being constructed out of sandbags.

Farrokh spoke urgently into the phone in Persian and then looked over at him. “My men engaged a vehicle with a mounted machine gun on the road to Avass.”

“That’s it,” Sarie said. “That’s the truck Omidi was in. Did they stop him?”

The Iranian shook his head. “We have people in the village, though. They’ve been told what to look for.”

“Can they stop a vehicle like that?” Smith said.

“Given a free hand, yes. But Avass is a conservative place, and the government will have many friends there.”

“What about the lab?”

“We are gaining control. The two remaining infected men are dead, though there are still some animals loose.”

“How many of your men have been exposed?”

“Many more than we anticipated. But that problem is being handled with the procedures you put in place. Everyone understood the risks of volunteering for this. And the consequences.”

Sarie leaned forward and put her head in her hands. “It’s my fault. I infected them — we were going to lock down the facility and set them loose. If I just hadn’t done anything, you’d have only had a few half-dead animals to deal with. Your men would be okay.”

“There was no way for you to know,” Farrokh said. “You had to act. It was my own stupidity for not anticipating the possibility that Omidi would release lab animals to cover his escape.”

“Our stupidity,” Smith corrected. “Any word on the Iranian military?”

“I’m afraid so. An elite force is in the air.”