Black Rose

CHAPTER 36

Schmidt heard the roar of the plane as it passed overhead and knew it meant trouble. He stepped outside in time to see it disappearing over the trees. It had American markings.

Transport, he thought. Military. There's no reason for them to be in the area or to be flying low like that. They must be coming here. It's time to leave.

Schmidt went back inside the clinic building. There had always been a chance someone would discover what was happening and attempt to intervene. Schmidt had anticipated the possibility of government interference, but he hadn't anticipated that it would come from the Americans.

There couldn't be any evidence left behind. He'd been getting ready to leave but he'd thought there would be more time to remove all traces of what he'd done. Now that wasn't possible. Fortunately, he'd prepared an alternative scenario.

Just in case.

The inside of the clinic looked like a medieval painting of hell, dark and full of suffering. Every place where someone could lie down was filled. The floor was covered with victims of the plague. More lay outside in a makeshift, open shed. The room stank of vomit and feces and old blood.

Schmidt picked his way carefully through the dead and dying, ignoring clutching hands and pleas for water. He walked to a tall cabinet next to a sink and opened the doors. The lower part was taken up by a small refrigerator powered by a generator outside the shack. That was where the remaining plague inoculations and vaccine were stored. He took out the glass vials and emptied them into the sink.

The upper part of the cabinet contained supplies on one side and a large, locked wooden box on the other. Schmidt took the box down and opened it. Inside was a steel gray cylinder attached by colored wires to a battery-powered digital timer. The cylinder contained enough explosive to obliterate the shack and everything else in the vicinity.

How long before they get here?

Schmidt set the timer and activated the device. Cries for water followed him as he hurried out of the clinic. He got into his truck and drove away. In two hours he would be out of the country. He never looked back as the dying village disappeared behind him.

A few minutes later, Nick and the others reached the edge of the town where it butted up against the Indian reservation. They'd seen no one on the trail. Nick held up his hand to signal a stop. The shack housing the clinic was fifty yards away, across a field of grass. It was made of wood with a rusted tin roof. Next to the clinic was a hastily constructed open shed of thin poles holding up a thatched roof.

"There are people over there," Selena said.

"Plague casualties," Nick said. His voice was hard. "There must be seventy or eighty people lying there."

"I don't see anyone taking care of them," Lamont said.

"Probably too scared to get near," Ronnie said.

"This is awful." Selena batted away an insect buzzing around her face. "What shall we do?"

"We can't do anything for them," Nick said. "We have to try and find evidence of what caused this and Gutenberg's involvement. We'll go over there. Selena and I will go inside while you two keep watch."

"What if Schmidt's in there?" Ronnie asked.

"I kind of hope he is," Nick said, "but I seriously doubt it. He's probably long gone."

"What are we looking for?" Selena asked.

"Papers, lab equipment, samples of the plague, anything that might point a finger at Gutenberg and Krivi. Schmidt, too. I'll photograph anything we don't want to take with us."

They started across the grass toward the shack. They heard moans and cries from the plague victims as they neared the clinic. The sound sent chills up and down Selena's spine. Some of the people lying outside under the makeshift shelter weren't moving, with the kind of stillness on them that made her think they were dead. In their fever and delirium, many had torn off their clothes. Even this far away, she could see black blotches on the bodies.

"Everyone check your mask," Nick said. "Make sure you're good. All those people are infectious."

"I'm glad we can't smell this," Lamont said.

"It must've been like this when the black death hit Europe," Selena said.

"I saw a movie once that was set in the time of the black death," Nick said. "It was about this knight who traveled around Sweden, playing chess with Death. It was bleak as hell, filled with skeletons and piles of bodies and people whipping themselves. Depressing."

Selena was walking just behind Nick. "I know the one you mean," she said.

Nick reached up to scratch his ear. She was about to say more when the shack disappeared in a violent clap of sound. The shock wave hit her with a blast of heat and wind that knocked her backward onto the ground. Fragments rained down all around. A spear of flying glass drove itself into the ground close to her leg.

Nick climbed to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. Ronnie lay unconscious in the dirt. Lamont was on his knees. Nothing remained of the shack or the shed. A thick column of black smoke rose cloud-like into the sky from a deep crater in the ground.

"Everyone all right?" Nick said. His voice sounded dead, muffled. The blast had shocked his hearing.

Selena was dazed. She looked at the shard of glass sticking out of the ground. It had just missed her.

I could have been killed. If that had cut me, I'd be infected now.

Ronnie sat up and rubbed his forehead. Lamont stood on unsteady legs next to him.

"You two all right?" Nick asked.

"Yeah," Lamont said. "Good thing we weren't any closer." He looked down at his uniform. There were red spatters on it.

"Oh, man, this is blood."

"It's on all of us," Selena said. "It must be from the people in the clinic."

Nick didn't want to think about plague infected blood.

"Lamont, you've got stuff on you," Ronnie said.

A piece of tissue had landed on Lamont's shoulder. He looked at it. It was an eyeball, a squashed human eyeball. He made an odd sound.

"Lamont, don't," Nick yelled. "Keep it down, don't lift your mask."

It was too late. Lamont pulled his mask away from his face and vomited a yellow stream onto the dirt. He lifted his hand toward his lips and stopped as he realized what he was doing. He dropped the mask back down over his face.

Nick used the tip of his knife to brush the eyeball off Lamont's shoulder. He shoved the knife into the dirt and left it there.

"You okay now?"

"Yeah."

"We'll go back and call for extraction. We're not going to find evidence now."

"Nick, we could be infected." Selena's face was pale.

"We're probably all right, " he said. "Unless blood got in an open cut or in your eyes, you should be okay."

He didn't know if that was true or not but it sounded good. Plague wasn't like ebola. At least he hoped it wasn't.

"Get out the medical kits. They were covered up and won't be contaminated. Use antibacterial wipes to clean off your hands and give yourself a shot of antibiotics. They might not help, but it's better than nothing. Make sure you sterilize the area before you do a shot. The first thing we'll do when we get on the ship is head for sick bay. They'll quarantine us until they get test results."

Lamont looked like he might be getting ready to throw up again.

"There's no point in worrying about it," Nick said. "They'll run tests. Come on, we're wasting time."

They went through the ritual of giving themselves shots and started back the way they'd come. Back at the drop zone, Nick opened the comm link to Virginia.

"Director, get us out of here."

Elizabeth could hear the stress in his voice. "What happened?"

"It's a mess. We saw a lot of people who were sick or dead. Schmidt left a bomb that went off and destroyed the clinic. There's nothing left. We won't find any proof of what he did."

"Was anyone hurt?"

"No, but tell the extraction team to bring new BDUs for us. The ones we're wearing have been contaminated. We can't get on a chopper wearing them."

Elizabeth felt her stomach tighten.

"Copy that," she said. "Extraction should be there in half an hour."

"Copy. Out," Nick said.

It was a little more than half an hour before a tilt rotor Osprey with Marine markings settled into the clearing. Three men and a woman wearing nothing but air waited for them. A pile of clothes and equipment smoldered nearby. It was a story that would become legend in the fleet.