Bio-Strike

TWENTY-FOUR

Remote was a relative term nowadays, paul “Pokey” Oskaboose was saying as he dipped his single-prop Cessna 172 from the cloud rack. “I read some magazine article by somebody a while back, and I think it said there are something like six, maybe eight places left on the planet where you can spend an hour — or maybe it’s a night, I forget — without hearing an engine noise of some kind or other.” He banked sharply toward the bunched, snow-draped hills to port.

Seated on his right, Ricci watched the world slant down and away. “How long till we’re over the plant?” he asked, his stomach lurching.

“Should be any minute.” Oskaboose pointed out his window. A Cree-Ojibway Indian with a wide, bony face and dark hair worn in a buzz cut, he was on loan to Ricci from the Sword watch quartered amid the radomes and communications dishes of an UpLink satellite ground station to the southwest, located midway between the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury and Lake Superior. “You see the twin rises over there, sort of rounded, got all those wrinkles in them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The local tribes call them Niish Obekwun. Means Two Shoulders. Past them’s a gap where a stream slices down to the White River. And then that third taller slope. Goes up pretty steep.”

Ricci nodded.

“Far side of it, on the west face, is our spot,” Oskaboose said. “Go ahead and check the moving map on the instrument panel. Groundhog like you, it’ll help with your orientation.”

Ricci glanced at the nonglare video display, where a Real Time Geographical Information System map overlaid a live image of the rough, frozen vista below, plotting the airplane’s course with a series of flashing red dots, and enclosing Earthglow’s position in a bright green square. It was helpful, he thought. And precisely matched his recollection of the Hawkeye-I photos he’d seen back in San Jose. With a zoom resolution of under three centimeters, they had afforded detailed aerial close-ups of the custom biological facility and its perimeter defenses. But Ricci had wanted to get a visceral feel of the land that for him would only come with firsthand observation.

Oskaboose leveled the aircraft. “In today’s world, Tarzan wouldn’t have to worry about being raised by apes,” he said. “You’ve got, what, a couple thousand gorillas left in Africa, that’s counting all five subspecies. And they’re more used to having their pictures snapped than models and movie stars. Some British kid in knickers being nursed at the breast of a furry mama would be spotted in no time by rich tourists on photo safaris. And brought back to civilization, heaven help him.”

The guide’s apparent non sequitur drew a puzzled glance from Ricci.

“Another instance of how the wilderness isn’t wilderness like it used to be,” Oskaboose said, noticing his expression.

Ricci grunted.

“Give you one more example,” Oskaboose continued. “People hear the name Tibet, they think robed Buddhist mystics levitating and astral-projecting in transcendental bliss. Or at least I do. But you know, it’s become just another getaway for Hollywood stars with personal problems. Donate a million bucks to the temple chest, they’ll issue you a wallet card listing the chakras, declare that you’re pure of spirit, and initiate you as an honorary monk of the order. I kid you not.” He made a sad tsking sound and motioned out the window again. “We’re about to head over the basin. You might want to take a peek.”

Ricci looked downward. The folds of the rise they were overflying were thick with pine forest. On the almost perpendicular uplift at the basin’s far side, the growth was sparser, clinging to the rock face in stubborn, woolly tufts between wide, white expanses of snow. Directly below them now, the tributary was a crystalline blue ribbon in the midday sunlight.

“That water frozen solid?” Ricci asked.

Oskaboose shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to be sure from up here,” he said. “You can tell for yourself that there’s a surface layer of ice. But it only takes a little silty runoff for the crust to stay thin in patches. Especially this early in the season, when the temperature can still poke above freezing.”

Ricci compressed his lips. “The snow on the slopes. You have any idea how deep it is?”

“The precip hasn’t been too bad, so I’d guess about a foot, with drifts coming up maybe knee high.” He gave Ricci a quick glance. “Inexperienced climbers have to watch out for cracks in the rock that get covered by bridges of crusted snow. Fall into some of’em, and you can take quite a plunge.”

Ricci nodded thoughtfully.

“Okay,” Oskaboose said. “Soon as we cross that next hill, you’ll catch sight of Earthglow to your right, down on a ledge near its base.”

“We do one pass. That’s it. No doubling back.”

“Understood.” Oskaboose shrugged again. “The point of what I was explaining to you, though, is that the sight of a plane is nothing to make anybody suspicious around here. Pukaskwa National Park isn’t too far to the south. Rangers there use fixed wing aircraft and choppers for wildlife observation, search and rescue, and supply transport. Then you have airmail deliveries to townspeople, recreational pilots, and so on. We don’t have to be too worried about being noticed.”

Ricci kept silent, his pale blue eyes staring out the window.

In a large conference room at the Sudbury ground station, Rollie Thibodeau and the rest of the twenty-four-man RDT were gathered before a flat-panel wall monitor, viewing the same pictures that appeared on the Cessna’s video display as it made its flyby.

The Earthglow facility was a low, concrete building backed directly against the almost vertical eastern slope, bounded on its other three sides by a high, industrial chain-link perimeter fence topped with multiple rows of electrical wiring. A sliding gate in the north-facing section of the fence opened onto a two-lane blacktop that curved along the base of the hill and then stretched off eastward toward the railway station at Hawk Junction — about a hundred miles distant, across rolling, heavily forested country. Small guard posts were visible at the southern and western corners of the fence. A third stood outside the gate at the terminus of the blacktop. A network of access roads branched from the gate to various building entrances.

Watching the stream of recon images over his microwave link with the aircraft, Thibodeau muttered unhappily under his breath. He knew Tom Ricci better than he liked — would have liked not to know him at all — and could anticipate the mission plan he would present upon returning to base.

What bothered him, in part, was that it stood to be dangerous to the extreme. But the thing that filled him with deepest distress was also knowing there was no workable alternative.

Back at the ground station an hour later, Ricci and Pokey Oskaboose had joined Thibodeau and the others in the conference room. The lights were dimmed around them. On their screen was a bird’s-eye color still of the Earthglow building and its surrounding terrain, the key tactical points highlighted with Xs.

“That high slope behind the building is a natural defensive wall.” Ricci indicated it from his chair with the beam of his pen-sized laser pointer, feeling queerly as if something of the wicked Megan Breen’s persona had rubbed off on him. “Our pals at Earthglow don’t have a guard post there, either on the peak or any of the ledges. And it isn’t hard to understand why. It looks like they’re unapproachable from that flank.”

“Be the reason it’s the best way for us to come at them,” Thibodeau said. His tone was grimly resigned. “Take advantage of their overconfidence, soit.”

Ricci nodded and moved the pointer’s red dot to the right, focusing it on a small, flat hollow between the northernmost rims of the Two Shoulders hills.

“We can land a chopper here. Off-load our equipment, and one of those radio-frequency-shielded tents that we can use as a command and communications center,” he said. “It’s a nice pocket of concealment. And as close to Earthglow as I want to set down.”

“The RF-secure tents are cold-weather white, and should blend right in with the snow on the ground and slopes,” Oskaboose added. “Guess we can hide the copter under some cammo pretty easy, too.”

“Sounds good.” Ricci’s laser dot jumped up and to the left onto the blacktop leading to the facility. “We’ll have an escape vehicle ready to roll around this area west of the bridge, not far from where the two-laner swings around the bottom of the hill toward the perimeter gate. My team’ll have to reach it on foot once we’re out of the building. Then it takes us across the bridge, the chopper picks us up on the other side, and we’re off.”

“You catch a break, make a clean getaway, sure,” Thibodeau said. “But we can’t depend on it. Got to figure there might be somebody on your tail wants to stop that from happenin’.”

Ricci looked at him. “So your team prepares something to stop them from stopping us.”

Thibodeau scratched his beard.

“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I got me an idea or two.”

Ricci nodded again. Then he turned back to the photo image on the wall, slid the red dot down onto the icy stream spanned by the bridge, and tracked its course through the basin that divided Two Shoulders from the larger hill.

“Our approach is going to be what’s trickiest,” he said. “From where we strike camp at Two Shoulders, my insertion team needs to hike to the stream, ski across its banks, then climb the northeast side of the hill and go down the northwest. That’ll leave us behind the building. From there we move along its side to the guard station at the gate, take out the sentries, and carry on with the rest of the program.” He inclined his head toward Pokey Oskaboose. “I know it seems like you’d have to be a damn spider to make it up that big slab of rock, but Pokey mentioned a couple of things I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“You and whoever built Earthglow figuring the hill would guarantee protection from the rear,” Oskaboose said. “Anybody knows this country could see how it’s tough but not anything near the worst. You’ve got all kinds of plants clumped on its slopes: juniper, pines, spruce, cedar, berry bushes. That means root systems to keep the ground from slipping out from underfoot. Also means plenty of handholds and matted branches to break your fall in case you do take a slide.”

Thibodeau gave him a look. “An’ you intend on bein’ there to point out them mats an’ handholds?” he said.

Oskaboose seemed unbothered by his dubious tone. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I usually prefer to get my high-altitude kicks in a pilot’s seat, but for special company like you boys, I’m thrilled to make an exception.”

That night, before his group set out on their cross-country hike, Ricci emerged out of the metalized fabric igloo tent and stood surrounded by the humped granite rises of Niish Obekwun, their furrowed contours other-worldly in the darkness. The temperature had fallen well below freezing with sundown, and continued to drop at a precipitous rate. The wind had also picked up. Swirling into, over, and through the snow- and brush-covered crannies and ledges of the hillsides, it filled the cavity below with a toneless idiot chant, as if the landscape itself was astir with some impersonally menacing ritual.

Ricci stood there, alone, outfitted in a snow cammo shell jacket and pants, a polar liner, his Zylon vest, and thermal undergarments. He carried his baby VVRS on a shoulder sling and wore an ALICE pack on his back. His hands were covered with ultrathin-insulate gloves that wouldn’t get in the way of firing his weapon. On his feet were white rubber boots and tapered-tail aluminum alloy snowshoes. His sleekly molded full-head helmet was equipped with an integrated, hands-free wireless audio/video system, its dime-sized color digital camera lens invisible above his forehead, its microphone embedded in the chin guard. Ricci’s polycarbonate ballistic visor was pulled down over his eyes-only balaclava and shielded the exposed portion of his face from the fiercely cold air. But he could still feel its bite through his breathing vents, feel its tingle in his lungs with each inhalation. Never in the coldest, bleakest Maine winter had he experienced such inimical cold. No sane human being would expose himself to it without good reason. Ricci hadn’t had any desire to contemplate his own reason. He had simply wanted to be by himself before leaving: to be still, without thought, quiet inside. That was really all.

He turned around now, stepped back toward the tent, and then leaned his head through its entrance flap to signal his men to gear up and assemble. He’d had his moment of solitude and was ready to get under way.

The glazed surface of the stream gave out with occasional complaints as they tramped across its banks, making crumpled-cellophane noises under the glittering snow cover. They proceeded in single file, Oskaboose at the head of the column, followed by Ricci and his Cape Green graduates: Seybold, Beatty, Rosander, Grillo, Simmons, Barnes, Harpswell, and Nichols. Three additions had been made to boost the number of men in the insertion team, a seasoned hand from Kaliningrad named Neil Perry, and Dan Carlysle and Ron Newell, both veterans of the Brazilian affair and recommended by Thibodeau.

Oskaboose kept his eyes downward, wary of thin ice. He would test any suspect area by putting one leg carefully forward, shifting his weight onto it, and pressing in hard with the crampons of his snowshoe, alert for the slightest hint of cracking or buckling or a telltale flit of shadows around the snowshoe’s edges that would reveal the movement of water beneath a shallow, weakened crust. Although the group was on a networked communications link, he remained entirely silent, using hand gestures to wave the others forward when he was confident of the footing or to steer them clear of places where its soundness was questionable. Ricci didn’t need for him to explain why. It was the habit of someone who had spent a lifetime in this terrain, knew it inside out, and preferred to negotiate it without technological mediation. Who wanted his senses freed up to listen and feel for its hazards.

The cold had seemed to deepen after they left the Two Shoulders camp, but perhaps as a result they only encountered a few potential trouble spots during their crossing of the stream… although on a single instance, just yards from its west bank, the ice cracked under Oskaboose’s foot with a sound that reverberated between the dark walls of the cleft like a rifle shot. The men started in their heavy packs, Ricci’s eyes briefly going to the slope, the buttstock of his VVRS gun raised against his shoulder. But then he heard a splash and turned to see Oskaboose pull his snowshoe out of the break, water gushing up around its frame, droplets of moisture wicking off the leg of his shell pants.

“Sorry, fellas,” Oskaboose said over their comlink. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d trod onto the ice. “Bad step there.”

Ricci loosened his grip on his weapon and followed him the rest of the way across the stream without incident.

Ricci’s recollections of the climb would later streak to gether in his mind, staying with him as a mostly random shuffle of images and impressions.

He would remember his men pausing at the base of the hill to remove their snowshoes and sling them over their backs, and then their first adrenaline-charged push up the lower ledges, the group surrendering themselves entirely to forward motion. Remember seeking out Pokey Oskaboose’s ascending shadow, following his lead, trying not to fall too far behind. Remember the feel of coarse, cold stone against his flattened body. And the gusts tugging at him. Snow spilling around him in loose talc-white clouds. Icicles snapping apart under his fingers. His gloved hands twisting into notches, grabbing hold of needled juniper branches, clutching at bare tangles of scrub that grew precariously out of hairline fissures in the rock. And, once, a startled bird bearing aloft with a querulous shriek, its wings flaying the air. He would clearly recall the moment he heard the scuff of Seybold’s boots below him and turned to see that he had stumbled, lost traction, and was swaying backward off a ledge, chunks of ice and pebbly material fragmenting underfoot to skitter down the slope. Then reaching for him with one hand, catching his wrist, driving his own feet against the rock as he pulled upward and steadied him. And drawing a long inhalation, and moving on, and on, always with Oskaboose in sight, toiling upward in that fury of wind and billowing powder.

And then finally the crest of the hill was above him. And his right arm was over it. His left arm. His chest. His legs. And almost to his own surprise, he was standing beside Oskaboose, and both were giving Seybold a hand up, the rest of his party appearing in ones and twos and threes, helping each other gain the final bit of ground, gathering there atop the rise overlooking the blockish spread of the Earthglow facility.

They had allowed themselves only a brief period to catch their breath before starting the climb down. Two or three minutes, as Ricci recalled. They had made progress, yes, but that wasn’t the same thing as having achieved their objective. Not nearly.

The job they had come to do was still ahead of them, and there was no time whatsoever to lose.

They descended the hill as they had started up its opposite side, in single file, and again the elements proved equal parts advantage and handicap.

Open to the constant force of wind and storm unlike its basin wall, the hill’s western slope was almost scrubbed of vegetation and bore the insults of constant battery: crumbling juts of granite, craggy scars and pockmarks, and deep gouges that looked as if they were bites taken out of its stony hide by some great, vicious set of jaws. Any of these could have been serious pitfalls for someone who didn’t know the territory. But to Oskaboose they represented options: handholds, footholds, covered niches where his teammates could take momentary respite.

The drawback was that the weather-blasted pieces of hillside had nowhere to go but down, an inevitable consequence of gravity that gave Oskaboose his full share of problems for the last fifteen or twenty yards of the descent toward its base. Picking his steps over and around tumbled boulders, pulverized rocks, and slippery cascades of pebbles, snow, and ice was a strenuous challenge complicated by his mindfulness of having to select a path that would be least difficult for those behind him.

The guide’s effort was not lost on Ricci. When his boots touched ground, a glance at the tritium dial of his wristwatch showed that over two hours had passed since his group had left camp. Longer than he’d expected, maybe, but thanks to Pokey Oskaboose, they had gotten this far without a single injury worse than a bump or bruise.

And straight ahead of them now was Earthglow, its shadow deeper than the black of night.

The dangers were supposed to seem real during tac exercises, and indeed they had to an outstanding degree. But there were parts of the mind that refused even voluntary surrender to illusion, and the spilling of simulated blood did not equal loss of life, no matter how true its shade of red.

Pressed against Earthglow’s windowless back wall, Ricci watched Rosander nose his telescoping probe around its corner with a powerful sense of déjà vu. Still, he was acutely aware that Cape Green had been little more than a stage set: Africa one day, Balkan Europe the next, Motor City if you wanted it to be. The here and now was what it was, and it never would be anything else, he thought. And this time the men who fell under his watch would not rise to joke, complain, or be chastised about it afterward.

“Picture any clearer on your HUD?” Rosander asked. He fingered a rocker switch on the probe’s pistol grip handle to adjust its nonvisible IR illumination level. “I’ve maxed the output, can’t get better res past about ten yards in this darkness.”

“It’ll do.” The image superimposed on Ricci’s field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building’s north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his Five-Seven pistol: small rounds, big punch. “Get rid of the sound, though. I don’t need to hear their horseshit about boffing townie high school girls.”

Rosander pressed another switch to cut his rod’s surveillance mike.

“These guys go down fast and quiet,” Ricci said. The comlink’s acoustical gain was set to output his whisper as a normal speaking voice to his team members. “Can’t let them get off a shot. Rather we don’t have to, either.”

He reached into his belt pouch for the DMSO, looked quickly over his shoulder, then gestured for Seybold to produce his canister.

“On my signal,” he said, raising his fist.

Seybold nodded to him, and they edged up beside Rosander.

They waited. The guards appeared to be in no hurry to complete their rounds. Just a couple of gun-toting chums on a leisurely stroll through the meat-locker cold of night in the Canadian Shield.

After what seemed an age, they approached the corner of the wall.

Ricci’s arm came up like a semaphore.

Seybold moved with him at once. They rounded the corner and got right in the guards’ faces with their canisters, knowing the high-pressure spurts of fluid would not disperse in the wind at close range and that the permeable fabric scarves wrapped around their mouths would do nothing to stop the sedative from acting instantaneously.

Silently and painlessly kayoed, the guards hit the ground unconscious and then were flex-cuffed and dragged into the shadows at the base of the hill. They would be out for hours.

Ricci turned to his men.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the gatehouse.”

Pokey Oskaboose’s guidance had been a blessing for more reasons than his familiarity with the physical terrain. He had also imparted a critical tip about area transport during the mission’s planning stage: Pretty well everything that made its way to and from the rest of the world was conveyed three times weekly via Toronto on the wilderness train. A single train. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like other outposts located many miles from the nearest railway depot, Earthglow would need to connect with the station by truck over the Trans Canada Highway. There was simply no other practical means.

Of course, Oskaboose hadn’t known the facility’s specific shipping and receiving schedules. But that hadn’t been necessary. These were the boonies, last stop on the civilization express. Conduct the insertion in the long, murky period that bridged Thursday and Friday — say at two, three, four o’clock in the morning — and you could safely assume that the delivery gate would be manned by a skeleton crew. Warm bodies, if the expression was applicable here at world’s end. You could also figure they would go on shift expecting to do little more than gulp coffee and pick their noses. Because not for a million bucks would a driver try rolling his wagon over the frosted local roads at such an hour, especially the black, winding spools of blacktop off the main highway, where painted lanes were nonexistent, and you had to sort of guess whether you were in danger of getting smacked by opposing traffic. Well, maybe for a million bucks, Oskaboose had reconsidered. But far as he knew, nobody had gotten offered that amount yet.

It was now a few ticks of the minute hand short of three A.M., and Ricci was thinking that Oskaboose’s skinny had been worth a fortune and more.

The gatehouse was nothing fancy. A lighted, heated modular steel booth designed for a small handful of personnel, it could have been lifted from where it stood and dropped at the entry to any commercial building anyplace, maybe a factory that manufactured fountain pens, or fan belts, or soda bottles, or zippers for ladies’ skirts. It was hard for Ricci to imagine it as a breeding farm for a killer germ of a type never before known to man. Hard for him, sometimes, to remember that the shape of evil could be so drummingly bland and commonplace. The devil as the guy next door.

Hugging the north wall of Earthglow about a hundred feet from the gatehouse, his men drawn up behind him, Ricci could see three guards through the plate glass windows of the booth. Two were seated behind a control panel with a bank of video monitors on it, talking, neither of them apparently paying attention to the screens. A third was dozing on a chair behind a desk or counter, legs stretched, arms folded, head tucked to his chest.

Ricci thought a minute. The door was on his side of the booth, a magnetic swipe card reader on the frame. It would automatically lock when closed, but these pre-fab housings weren’t designed to store the crown jewels. He was sure one good kick would take care of it.

He called four men over to him. Grillo, Barnes, Carlysle, and Newell. The rest would stay put. This would have to be perfectly coordinated, and he wanted experience with him.

His instructions took seconds: Fast, quiet. The guards at the other perimeter posts had to remain oblivious.

Ricci shuffled forward in a squat, the others close behind him, all of them sticking to the shadows along the main building’s wall. At the edge of the wall he signaled a halt. There were ten yards of open ground to the gatehouse. Dark yards. His group would be fine if they stayed low. He gave his command, and they made the stealthy dash.

Out of sight beneath the windows now, pulse racing, epinephrine flooding his system, its taste filling his mouth like he’d bitten into an allergy pill, Ricci waited for his men to hastily take their positions, Grillo and Barnes to the right of the door, gripping their VVRS guns, Newell right behind him on the left side, Carlysle crouched back in the darkness facing the door, ready for the kick.

Three fingers of one hand raised, Ricci drew his expandable ASP baton from its belt scabbard with the other and counted off. Vocally and manually. One finger went down.

“… two, three!”

In a heartbeat, Carlysle sprang erect and took two giant steps forward, his leg thrusting up and out. The sole of his boot hit the door under the handle, and it banged inward.

Ricci rushed into the gatehouse, clenching the tactical baton’s foam grip, thumbing the release stud to extend its tubular-steel segments. The guards seated side by side at the control panel twisted around toward the entrance, agape with stunned surprise. Peripherally aware of his own men moving in around him, Ricci saw assault rifles slung over the guards’ chair backs: a P-90 for Mr. Left, and an H&K for Mr. Right.

Mr. Right was quickest on the uptake, snatching for his weapon. Ricci went at him with the baton, smashed a blow to the back of his wristbone, and with a continuous movement slid it under his forearm, grabbed hold of the tip so he was holding both ends, and crossed it, applying strong pressure. The ulna snapped like brittle wood. Mr. Right flopped around on his chair and started to scream. Ricci pulled the baton free of his arm and then brought it up and struck his neck sideways at the pressure point below the ear. He made a noise like water sucking down a partially clogged drain and hit the floor motionless, the clouted arm bent at several unnatural angles.

Ricci pivoted toward Mr. Left, the baton arcing in front of him, but his hands were raised in the air, his firearm already taken, Grillo and Barnes jamming their guns into his ribs. Carlysle and Newell had their weapons trained on the guy who’d been caught napping.

Ricci stood between the two captive guards, looked from one to another, then gestured at the control panel.

“Which of you gamers wants to let us in the freight door?” he asked.

Neither of them responded.

He turned to Mr. Left, waved Grillo and Barnes aside, snapped the baton across his face. Blood gushed from his broken nose, and he crashed back over his chair to the floor.

Ricci whirled back toward the now wide-eyed napper, bunched the front of his shirt in his fist, and hauled him to his feet.

“Guess it has to be you,” he said.

“You still with us, Thibodeau?” Ricci asked over the comlink.

“Check,” he replied from the Two Shoulders camp.

“How about you, Pokey? Everything under control?”

“Yup.” Oskaboose’s voice now, from the gatehouse. “It’s a big mess, though.”

“Next time, I’ll try to be neater,” Ricci said. “Those two guards should be out for a while. Either one starts to squeal, hit him with some more DMSO. He’ll conk.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t want you or Harpswell taking your weapons off that third crack lookout. If anybody from the facility radios or approaches the booth, he’s your receptionist. Make sure he answers with a smile. And that he doesn’t forget what’ll happen to him if he says the wrong thing.”

“Got you again.”

Ricci paused a moment to order his thoughts. Then: “Doc?”

“I’m here.” This was the voice of Eric Oh, at the San Jose headquarters with Nimec and Megan the Merciless. “They just patched me into the A/V a minute or two ago.”

“Figured you could live without seeing the preliminaries,” Ricci said. “The signal clear at your end?”

“It’s a little scratchy, but they’re working to clean it up,” Eric said. “Where are you in the building right now? It looks like a kitchen.”

Ricci looked around, his helmet’s monocular NVD sight down over his right eye. Minus Oskaboose and Harpswell, his team had made their way through the opened freight entrance and then down a couple of dim and empty branching corridors, seeking the path of least resistance into the main section of the building. The first unlocked door had led them here. And a kitchen it was. A big one, too. Obviously, it produced food for the resident staff. There were heavy steel commercial appliances, walk-in refrigerators, triple-basin sinks, overhead grid hooks hung with cookware. Shelves stocked with seasonings, coffee, and other supplies.

For some incomprehensible reason, Ricci suddenly recalled his father’s preferred version of grace at the dinner table: Good friends, good food, good God, let’s eat. It had been years since that little snippet of his past had crested from the depths of memory.

“Yeah, Doc,” he said. “Hang tight, we’re moving.”

Ricci started toward a tall swing door at the far end of the room, leading his men down the aisle between a long cutting counter and a solid row of ovens, grills, and ranges.

A hurried glimpse beyond the door’s eye-level glass pane revealed the darkened commissary on the opposite side: tables and chairs; vending machines; convenience islands for napkins, condiments, and eating utensils.

Mundane. Commonplace. Like a high school cafeteria.

Ricci pushed through the door, his men at his heels, then saw the general employee entrance to the commissary to his left — double — swing doors this time — and hooked toward it.

He paused again at the doors, eased one of them open a crack with his gloved fingertips, and slowly leaned his head through the opening.

A hallway lined with doors stretched to either side. Name plaques on the doors, these were offices. And down at one end, he spotted something that simultaneously quickened his pulse and made his neck hairs bristle.

There were two signs on the wall, one above the other. The bottom sign was a simple arrow pointing to a cross corridor. The top sign displayed the biohazard symbol.

Ricci rapidly led his team along the darkened corridor and turned in the direction of the arrow marker, aware of the dull, leached-away sound of their footsteps between the thick concrete walls.

At the juncture with the connecting hall was another set of swing doors. Recessed ceiling fluorescents glowed in the passage beyond their windows.

Ricci ordered his men to fan out against the walls, then went to the double doors and carefully looked past the glass. The hall beyond seemed empty. He gently shouldered through the partition into the milky wash of light.

The doors lining the sides of this passage were no longer of the ordinary office building variety. These were metal-clad, bullet-resistant installations, most with swipe readers and entry-code keypads.

Instructing the others to follow close behind him, Ricci moved forward into the corridor.

“You have any pointers, Doc, let’s hear them,” he said into his helmet mike.

“My guess is you’re heading in the right direction. In general, bioengineering firms are laid out like any commercial or industrial facility. According to the stages of production, from start to finish—”

“You don’t warehouse the showroom-ready car with the parts that go into it.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, what else can you tell me?”

“The absolute best thing for us would be to find actual, preformulated inhibitors for the virus, chemical blockers that would prevent its binding proteins from attaching to Gordian’s cellular receptors. Failing that, we’d need to access Earthglow’s computerized gene banks to get the data on how the bug synthesizes its isoforms—”

A twinge of impatience. “Closer to English, Doc.”

“The proteins or peptides generated by alternative RNA splicing,” Eric said. “If we get those coded templates, we can use the information to derive our own inhibitors and stop the virus’s progress. But that could take a while, and Gordian’s condition doesn’t give us much — Wait, slow down, I want a look at that sign to your right.”

Ricci turned so his helmet camera was facing it.

The sign read:

“Okay, thanks, that’s not what we need,” Eric said. “Back to what I started to explain, the inhibitors would be an end-stage product. Microencapsulated like the triggers that awakened the bug. And probably kept in the same area. Storage wouldn’t be complicated. The capsules are designed to have a long shelf life in a dry, clean, room-temperature environment.”

Ricci hastened down the passage. “What am I keeping my eyes out for?”

“Signs with terms like coacervation or fluid-bed coating or hot melt systems. The microencapsulation units themselves consist of several large-batch tanks or chambers — usually acrylic, stainless steel, or some combination of the two — joined by pumping systems: ducts, blowers, et cetera. There would have to be a compressed air source. Computer panel controls. The materials used would be—”

Oh suddenly broke off his sentence. From his monitor thousands of miles away, he could see what Ricci had just spotted ahead of him at an intersection in the hall. It had pushed his heart up into his throat.

Ricci knew at a glance that the guards who’d appeared in the passage had better stuff than the perimeter security crew.

They had turned the corner in his direction just as he’d approached it and paused to motion Rosander over with the telescopic probe. Three men in light gray uniforms with submachine guns over their shoulders and the unmistakable look of quality troops.

Before either group could react, they found themselves facing each other across a straight length of hall, separated by four or five yards with no available cover… and no choice except to engage.

Swiftly rasing his weapon, its MEMS touch control on its lethal setting, Ricci had the briefest instant to once again recall the Cape Green maneuvers with that strange sensation of events doubling back on themselves.

The thought had not quite fled his mind as he opened fire, ordering his men to spread out and do the same.

The guard he’d targeted was only a little slower to trigger his own gun. He collapsed to the floor, his uniform blouse chewed and bloody, his rifle dropping from his hand.

Ricci saw a second guard train his subgun on one of the men behind him, instantly swung his around, and triggered another burst, a five-shot salvo. But this time, the guard managed to squeeze out a volley before falling onto his back, and he kept shooting even afterward, scattering a gale of ammunition across the hall. Ricci heard a grunt of pain from over his shoulder, didn’t turn. Couldn’t. He wanted that son of a bitch on the floor finished.

He angled the VVRS down and fired again, and so did another member of the insertion team. Red exploded from the guard’s belly, he rolled over and there was red splashed on his back from the exit wounds, and then he flopped a little and lay still.

More gunfire from Ricci’s left, more from his rear, and he turned to see the third guard shiver in place a moment and then spill loosely off his feet.

Okay, he thought. Okay, that’s all of them.

He spun around to see who’d been hit. Grillo. On his back, blood streaming from his throat. Simmons and Beatty were kneeling over him, getting off the helmet, opening the collar of his jacket, but he wasn’t moving, and his open eyes had the look Ricci knew came with the touch of death.

Ricci rushed over to his body, crouched, touched the pulse point on his neck, Grillo’s blood oozing over his gloves.

He tilted his face up to his men, tried not to let the clenching he felt inside show.

“Nothing we can do for him,” he said. “And we have to get out of this damned hallway while we can.”

The lightest of sleepers, Kuhl answered the telephone in time to clip its first ring. “What is it?” he said.

He listened to the report from his security officer, then flung off his blanket.

“Where in the building?” he said.

He listened again.

“Send reinforcements to the area,” he said. He decided that he had best notify DeVane. “I’m coming immediately.”

“Doc, I’ve got to hear from you!” Ricci snapped over the comlink. His team was speeding along the corridor, away from the section where the firefight had broken out.

Silence.

“Come on, Doc, I mean now—”

“Tom, listen, it’s me.”

“Pete, where the hell is he? We’re running blind here.”

“I know. Eric saw the whole thing. The shooting. What happened to Grillo. He’s pretty shaken up.”

“Then pull him together—”

“Tom, for God’s sake, we know your situation.” It was Megan, her voice tense. “Give him half a second—”

“I’m all right,” Eric’s voice broke in. “Sorry. I… I just…”

“Later,” Ricci said. “We’re coming up to another cross hall. A bunch of signs. Can you read them?”

“No, you’re moving too fast, the picture’s blurry… jolting…”

“I’m going to stop and let you take a look. But we don’t have long. I don’t know who might’ve heard those guns.”

“Understood.”

Ricci signaled a halt, then craned his head toward the signs, turning it to allow the helmet’s digicam to pan across his visual path.

“You see them okay?” he said.

“Yes… Wait. The sign on your left. No, the next one over… okay, right there.”

Ricci’s eyes held on the sign. It said:

“Doc?” Ricci urged.

“That’s it. A synonym for the gelatin microencapsulation process,” Eric said. “The academic term.”

Ricci swung his gaze to the left. A steel door barred the way about three feet down the corridor junction. This had a biometric hand scanner rather than the swipe card reader. The level of security was escalating, itself a strong indication he was getting hot. And while he’d expected to encounter biometrics and come prepared with ways to fool them, the deceptions took time, and speed now took precedence over delicacy.

He turned to his men. “They know we’re here, no point tiptoeing,” he said. “We blow our way in.”

Johan Stuzinski was a specialist in the field of bioinformatics — the use of statistical and computational analytic techniques to predict the function of encoded proteins within genetic material, based solely on DNA sequence data. The applications of this discipline in terms of human genome research included the identification of proteins within chromosomes that caused inherited diseases and inherited predispositions toward diseases that might be triggered by environmental, dietary, and other external factors.

The fruits of this research promise to revolutionize modern medicine by helping scientists design drugs and therapies that target these culprit proteins, attacking or even eliminating the causes of health disorders at the cellular — in truth, the molecular — roots. If cures or vastly superior treatments for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, the muscular dystrophies, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and countless other maladies that have plagued mankind throughout history are found in the coming decades, it will be through application of genomic discoveries.

The very best in his field, Johan Stuzinski could have lent his expertise to any of hundreds of medical research establishments and pharmaceutical firms performing meaningful work toward improving the human condition in the twenty-first century and beyond. In January 2000, Stuzinski was offered a management position with a generous salary and benefit package by Sobel Genetics, a leader in the search for genome-based therapies. Though he came close to taking the job, Stuzinski had simultaneously received another proposal from Earthglow, a Canadian firm whose goals were considerably more obscure, even a bit irregular, as he chose to think of them. But its hiring executive had promised him various under-the-table, and thus nontaxable, financial perquisites that were communicated with subtle inferences. A nod and a wink, so to speak.

After some consideration, he had called Sobel to decline their proposition, packed his bags for Ontario, and gladly put on his moral blinders. He kept his eyes on his narrow portion of the work being conducted at the facility, rarely allowed himself to consider its eventual application, and very definitely never questioned the presence of the rather menacing armed guards who patrolled certain parts of the facility.

In that way, Stuzinski was exactly like hundreds of other top-caliber professionals who had come to lend their exceptional skills to Earthglow’s operations. He was like them in another way, as well: When the sounds of racing footsteps, dull claps that may have been gunfire, and something that could perhaps have been a small explosion distantly reached his apartment in the complex’s living quarters in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, rousing him from sleep, he got out of bed only to make sure his door was locked and then somewhat nervously stayed put.

Until and unless it became a direct threat to him, Johan Stuzinski’s attitude was that whatever might be happening outside was none of his personal business.

“You six stay here and cover the entry.” Ricci motioned to Barnes, Seybold, Beatty, Carlysle, Perry, and Newell. “Watch yourselves. That boom must’ve set off alarms everywhere. We don’t know what kind of manpower’s headed this way.”

The men nodded in unison. They were standing near the blown, broken remains of the security door in the smoke and haze left by the detonation of their breaching charges.

Ricci looked at their faces a moment, then turned to the other four members of his team. “Okay, here we go,” he said and led them through the ruptured entrance.

In Earthglow’s main security station, Kuhl studied the flashing light on his electronic display’s building schematic. The blast’s location supported what he had already construed about the goal of the intruders. And the connection between their goal and identity was like a match brightly struck in his mind.

His eyes went from the screen to his chief lieutenant. “Keep abreast of developments at the penetration site,” Kuhl said, thinking of the alternate path he could take to investigate the target area. “I will be in contact.”

He did not await the lieutenant’s nod of acknowledgment before leaving the room.

Looking up the corridor, Seybold realized he’d not only cut the opposition’s numeric advantage but dramatically shifted it to his own band.

It was a thing that gave him some relief, a thing he’d trained for, prepared for. But he was still human, and the violations combat weapons inflicted on human flesh sickened him.

Five or six of the guards were down in grotesque positions, sheeted in blood, the floor around them slick with blood. Some were screaming in pain. Another guard was pinned to the wall like an insect caught on a fly strip, drenched with superadhesive, his limbs tangled by the impact that hurled him against it, strips of skin flapping off his cheek where he’d torn himself from the concrete in a blind panic. Yet another guard stared dazedly on his knees at a baseball-sized hole in his abdomen.

Seybold had a bare moment to register the damage. The rest of the guards were advancing past the sprawl of bodies, their weapons stuttering, and it was his job to stop them.

He took a deep breath of air, slung the Benelli over his back, then gripped his baby VVRS in his hands and fired a tight burst. To his left and right, hunkered close to the walls on either side of the exploded steel door, his companions were also firing their weapons.

More guards went down, and then another came running forward in a kind of wrathful, aggressive hurtle, yelling at the top of his lungs, his gun blazing away. A couple of feet to Seybold’s left, Beatty grunted and was slammed back against the wall, smearing it with blood as he sank to the floor. Then bullets rippled from one of the other men’s VVRS rifles, and the charging guard spun around in a circle and fell dead, his weapon slipping from his fingers, clutching his chest with both hands.

That left two of them. One dove onto his belly to present a low target, skidding over the blood of his companions, sustained fire pouring from his weapon. Carlysle and Newell trained their guns on him and fired in concert, a brief chop. These were men whose partnership went back, and it showed in their expert performance. The guard jerked once on the floor and then ceased to move.

A single guard remained now, and he was unwilling to commit suicide. He turned down the hall, running, his uniform splashed with blood that may or may not have been his own.

“We gonna let him take off?” Carlysle asked Seybold.

Seybold looked at him. The question had sounded almost distant through the loud throbbing pulse beat in his ears.

“The son of a bitch isn’t important,” he said. Seybold rushed over to Beatty, on the floor now, propped into a sitting position with his back to the wall. Barnes and Newell were already huddled around him, getting their first-aid kits out of their packs. Perry had raised his helmet visor.

“How bad?” Seybold asked. His eyes went from Beatty’s bloodied shoulder to his face.

“Feels like a slug drilled through my arm, but I think I’ll be all right,” Beatty said. He licked his lips. “Can’t say I love it, though.”

Seybold breathed and nodded. “We’ll get you patched up,” he said.

“Wait,” Eric Oh said. “That one. No, no, you’re pulling the wrong disk. Count two up. Okay, that’s it.”

Ricci slid the gem case from the cabinet and turned it over in his hand so the print on its index label faced his helmet’s digital camera lens.

Silence over the comlink.

“Doc…”

“I need you to slip it into your wearable,” Eric said. “Send me its contents so I can have a look.”

Ricci bit his lip. He could hear gunfire somewhere in the direction of the blown security door.

Reaching down to the miniature computer on his belt, he ejected its CD-ROM tray, set in the disk, and pushed the tray shut. Then he hit the preset UpLink intranet key and uploaded the disk’s contents as a wireless E-mail attachment.

Tortured seconds passed.

“Well?”

“The data’s coming through now, I’m going to scan it on-line, give me a chance to—”

Ricci’s heart knocked. “Well…?”

“My God,” Eric said. “Oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”

His SIG-Sauer P220 in his hand should the enemy be waiting near its door, Kuhl rode the pneumatic elevator up from the biofarm sublevel. The underground passages he’d taken had enabled him to bypass the breached security entrance on Earthglow’s main floor. When the tubular car opened, he would be in the microencapsulation section, a few turns of the hall from the room that was the intruders’ certain objective.

He did not know the size of their invasion force or how far they had penetrated. If he determined that they could be prevented from accomplishing their mission, he would. But his survival had always rested on being a swift contingency planner.

The elevator stopped.

Outside in the corridor, Simmons and Rosander heard the whisper of the arriving car and raised their VVRS weapons.

Kuhl caught a glimpse of them before its door fully opened. His edge over them in speed might have been narrow. In his merciless capacity to kill without restraint, he was a creature alone.

Simmons was on the left of the elevator, and as he prepared to give its passenger a warning, Kuhl pivoted toward him, stepped in close under his gun arm, and brought his own pistol up to Simmons’s side, pushing the muzzle between his fourth rib and underarm, where he knew the straps of his soft ballistic vest would leave an unprotected gap. Three shots of Teflon-coated.45ACP rounds against his body, three muffled blats of sound as the snout of the gun discharged through layers of cold-weather clothing, and Simmons went down to the floor.

With the man who’d come out of the elevator pressed close against Simmons, Rosander had been unable to do anything but hold his fire, fearing he might accidentally hit his teammate. But as Simmons crumpled, he brought his weapon to bear.

He was almost fast enough.

In a streak, Kuhl spun toward Rosander on the ball of his foot, moved in at him, grabbed his wrist behind the outthrust VVRS, and twisted it sharply around, wrenching it, simultaneously slamming his powerful forearm up under Rosander’s chin to crush his windpipe.

His eyes rolling back in their sockets, Rosander sagged back against the wall and fell.

Kuhl crouched to take the VVRS from his hand, heard movement behind him, turned again to the left, in the direction of the laboratory where the inhibitor formulas were stored. His side sticky and wet from point-blank bullet wounds, the intruder Kuhl had shot still clung to life and was weakly raising himself onto his elbows, fingers fumbling for the grip of his own weapon. Kuhl bent, shoved his knee into the man’s diaphragm to crush the air out of him, lifted his helmet visor, and, looking directly down into his eyes, finished him with a shot to the center of his forehead.

Rising then, he heard footsteps down the hall.

Another enemy in winter camouflage was rapidly approaching from the lab area, his weapon ready to fire.

Hearing gunshots down the corridor to his right, knowing Ricci desperately needed more time in the room behind him, Nichols turned and rushed toward the sound of the reports.

All at a glance he saw a man he recognized as the Wildcat standing above Simmons’s blood-soaked form, saw Rosander slumped near the wall behind them, and with a surge of horror opened fire on the killer.

Cold-eyed, Kuhl triggered the VVRS he had taken from Rosander, aiming low, a right-to-left sweep of the barrel.

Nichols’s legs gave out underneath him, blood splashing from both knees. And then he felt the floor hard against his back.

Kuhl fired three accurate bursts into him, saw the body quiver as fifteen bullets ripped into it, and for an instant considered advancing farther up the hall.

His teeth clicked. Footsteps were coming from the penetration site behind him, four sets, the sound of their heavy boots distinct from those of his own men. His squad had apparently been held off, and he did not know how many more intruders were ahead of him.

Kuhl took an instant to consider and then made his decision.

He turned toward the elevator, pressed the call button, stepped through the opening, and retreated.

“… oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”

Ricci’s face was bathed in sweat.

“Talk fast, Doc,” he said. “Have we got what we need?”

“We have it, yes. We have it, we have it. Several different types of inhibitors. Stored as computer models rather than pills. Novelty cures for novelty viruses. They had no reason to preproduce them, not physically, and they didn’t. But Ricci, what we’ve stumbled onto is beyond what we expected. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of activators. The virus must be infinitely mutable. A potential doomsday bug, and we’ve found—”

Ricci’s attention broke away from whatever Oh was telling him. He’d heard the thud of what might have been pistol shots down the hall. Two, maybe three. A fourth. Fairly close by. Then, perhaps five seconds afterward, several controlled, staccato bursts from a semiautomatic weapon that sounded like a VVRS.

He turned abruptly, ran across the room, through the door, and into the corridor. Looked left, then right.

No sign of Nichols in either direction.

His heart malleting in his chest again, he bounded down the hall, swung a corner past the microencapsulation lab, putting on speed. This was where the shots had come from.

Another turn, and then Ricci was met by the scene near the bottleneck elevator. It was a sight he would remember always.

Nichols was on the floor between him and the elevator door, sprawled on his back. Simmons and Rosander were down at the elevator itself. Seybold crouched over Nichols, cradling his head in his arms, the helmet off. Barnes, Newell, and Perry squatted over the other two fallen men, examining them, checking the severity of their wounds. And then Barnes looked up from the bodies at the sound of his approach, saw the question on his face, and shook his head no.

No.

Ricci dashed forward and knelt beside Seybold.

“How bad?” he asked.

Seybold glanced up from the young man in his arms, met Ricci’s gaze, held it. His long, pained look told him everything.

Then, weakly, Nichols’s hand came up from his side, and Ricci felt its touch on his arm. “Sir… I…” The thin, dry sound from his dying lips barely qualified as a whisper.

Ricci pushed his visor up from his face, swallowed, and leaned over him. “I hear you,” he said. “Go on.”

Nichols looked up at him, his lips still moving, shaping unintelligible words.

Ricci took his hand into his own, bent closer. Their faces were almost touching now.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on, I’m here with you.”

Nichols grimaced, struggled out a sound.

“Wildcat,” he rasped. “Wild…”

Ricci felt something turn inside him. Slowly, grindingly. Like a great stone wheel.

He held Nichols’s hand.

“Okay, I heard you. Try to be easy now.”

Nichols lowered his eyelids but was still trying to talk. “Did… did we…?”

Ricci nodded to his closed eyes. “We got it, Nichols. We—”

Nichols shuddered and produced a low rattle, and Ricci stopped talking, pulled in a breath that didn’t seem to reach his lungs.

The kid was gone. Gone before the answer to his question had left Ricci’s mouth.

“Pokey, you reading?”

“I hear you, Ricci.”

“Tell me what’s happening at the perimeter.”

“It’s getting busy near the main gate. Looks like some guards down there, a couple of jeeps. We saw two other cars turn out onto the road, really hauling, I don’t know where they came from. Didn’t exit through any of the gates, it’s like they came right out of the damn north side of the hill—”

Ricci thought a moment, standing over the bodies he would have to leave behind. Go far, killer. Go as far as you want, and we’ll see if it’s enough.

“Can’t worry about them now,” he said. “Your status?”

“We’re okay. Somebody radioed our booth to order the perimeter sealed. We had the caged bird answer, and Harpswell made sure he sang like we trained him.”

“Good. Be ready to open that service gate for us. We’ll meet you at the guardhouse, head to the pickup vehicle together.”

“Roger,” Pokey replied.

Ricci turned to Seybold.

“Let’s collect Carlysle and Beatty and get the hell out of here,” he said.

There had been eleven of them when they entered. Now there were seven, one wounded, helped along by his companions.

Battered with loss, strong in purpose, Ricci’s men left the same way they had come, retracing their steps from lighted corridors to darkened ones, then through the commissary, kitchen, the freight entrance, and, at last, out into the night. The lack of resistance didn’t surprise Ricci. For all its malevolence, this was a working scientific facility, not an armed camp. The remaining security would be stretched thin, spread throughout the building or called to reinforce what they thought was a blocked perimeter fence. They did not know how the insertion team had gained access, did not know one of their gatehouses had been seized, and would be searching for a breach in the building’s integrity rather than an elevated freight door. But beyond any of that, they were without leadership. Their commander had fled, abandoned them as he’d abandoned his mercenary raiders in Kazakhstan. Brothers in arms.

Oskaboose and Harpswell remained in the booth until their teammates appeared, hit the switch to slide back the gate, and then hurried to join them. The activity inside the main gate had intensified; there were overlapping voices, headlights blinking on, engines thrumming to life.

They scrambled out the gate toward the road and the waiting escape vehicle.

Ricci had raised the driver on his comlink, advised him to be ready to roll, and as the insertion team arrived at the meet spot, the big armored van pulled out of the roadside trees with its rear payload doors wide open.

The insertion team poured inside.

And they rolled.

Crouched in back of the van, Ricci peered through its Level III ballistic cargo windows and saw two pairs of headlights above the black curve of road behind them.

Again, no shocker. There was only the one route across the hills to the highway, and it wouldn’t have taken the guards long to notice the open service gate.

“Those jeeps are getting close,” he said and snapped his head toward the driver. “How far to the bridge?”

“Less than half a mile,” he said. “We’d see it right now if this damned road wasn’t so full of twists.”

Ricci breathed. The van was powered by a turbocharged V-8, but its heavy, armor-plate hull gave the jeeps the edge in speed, and they were gaining fast.

He lowered the high, fold-down seat mounted to the side of the right load door, got into it, slid open a hidden gun port in the door, and thrust the muzzle of his VVRS through the port. At his nod, Seybold did the same behind the opposite door.

The jeeps were gaining, gaining, their high beams spearing the darkness. The lead vehicle was maybe a hundred yards back… ninety… eighty…

Ricci poured out a stream of fire, Seybold triggered his own gun, the two of them peppering the road with bullets, hopefully throwing some fear into their pursuers.

It worked. The jeeps dropped back, their ineffectual return fire spacking off the rear of the van.

“How we coming?” Ricci shouted to the driver.

“Almost there, almost, almost—”

They swung onto the short, concrete bridge.

Ricci and Seybold kept laying out parallel bands of fire, kept the jeeps trailing at a distance.

“Okay!” the driver called out. His foot tramped on the accelerator. “We’re across, we’re home, I can see the chopper straight up ahead!”

Ricci nodded, stopped firing, gave the lead jeep a chance to make the bridge.

Its front tires rolled onto the span.

“Now, Thibodeau!” he shouted over the comlink. “Do it! ”

At the Two Shoulders base camp, Rollie Thibodeau lightly fingered a switch on his handheld remote-firing device, initiating the radio-addressable mines his team had affixed to the bridge support pillars.

Behind the pickup van, the bridge went up with a flash and a roar, its center heaving upward and then disintegrating, an avalanche of concrete that went crashing downward, taking the jeeps and their occupants with it, mangled, burning, tumbling, down and down and down in a great dome of flame to the frozen streambed below.

“Done,” Thibodeau grunted.