Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 (2 page)

“Oh, SHIT!” flashed through my head a half a second after I
leapt off the train.  The bottom of the bridge was 65 feet above the surface of
the Mississippi River, and with the height of the bridge deck and the
locomotive I was going to fall at least 85 feet before hitting the water.  From
that height it was likely I could be seriously injured or killed if I impacted
the water on my back or stomach.  Rachel had gone in feet first.  I hadn’t seen
how Dog impacted and didn’t give a shit about Roach.  Well, actually I hoped he
did a face plant and the river finished him off.

I recalled from jump school, when I was learning to use a
parachute, that there’s something called terminal velocity.  That is, when a
falling object cannot fall any faster because of the resistance of the
atmosphere as the object passes through it.  Wind resistance, in other words. 
A human who is positioned horizontally will reach terminal velocity very
quickly, in about the first 40 or 50 feet of the fall, since there is a large
area of the body creating drag.  Falling feet or head first greatly decreases
the drag and you fall faster and take longer to reach terminal velocity.  I
couldn’t remember the numbers, but knew I needed to go in feet first to have a
decent chance of surviving.

The fall seemed to take forever.  I had time to notice how
the surface of the river appeared swollen.  It roiled with eddies and looked
like dirty, liquid steel.  I tried to spot where Rachel and Dog had impacted,
but the surface of the water wasn’t giving up any clues.  As I continued to
fall I clamped my ankles together as tightly as I could and pointed my toes
down.  A couple of moments before impact I raised my arms straight over my head
so they wouldn’t be yanked up when I hit and leave me with two dislocated
shoulders.    In the last moment before hitting I squeezed my butt cheeks
together as hard as possible.  I’ve heard stories of water being forced up a
jumper’s anus upon impact, and while I didn’t know if that was true or even
possible, I sure didn’t want to find out by getting a Mississippi River enema.

Hitting the water was far less dramatic than I expected. 
Perhaps my body position was exactly where it should have been, or maybe it’s
really not that bad from 85 feet.  Either way, I knifed through the surface and
deep into the cold darkness.  Immediately upon entering the water, I twisted my
body and spread my arms and legs to create drag and slow my decent.  The river
was shockingly cold, much colder than I ever would have expected for the middle
of summer.  My body wanted to gasp in reaction to the sudden temperature change
and I barely managed to stop myself from inhaling as I continued to sink.

The current was strong, I could feel it pulling me along,
and I quickly became disoriented as I tumbled in the water.  Forcing myself to
stay calm, I started swimming.  I was heading for a lighter looking area, even
though I had initially thought the surface was in the opposite direction.  With
enough light to see, I let a few air bubbles trickle out of my nose and was
glad to see them rush in the direction I was already going.  Lungs burning, I
swam harder, suddenly surfacing and gulping air.

Looking around I had to dive and frantically swim to avoid a
large log that was spinning in one of the surface eddies.  Breaching the
surface again I swam to it and hooked an arm over its top, using its buoyancy
to hold me up while I surveyed my situation.  I was on the western side of the
middle of the river and the current had already carried me a couple of hundred
yards south of the bridge.  That was about all I could see other than water.  My
head was only a foot or so above the surface and while I could see land on
either side of the river I couldn’t see the banks from that low in the water. 

Holding on to the log, I let it spin me through a full 360
degrees, hoping to see a head bobbing in the water.  Nothing.  I tried climbing
up onto the log to gain elevation and a better view, but it had been in the
water for a while and was slippery with slime.  I couldn’t get a grip on it to
pull myself any higher.  Still spinning and watching, I started shouting
Rachel’s name, pausing to listen every few seconds.  No answering shout.  I
didn’t know what to do.  I had jumped without thinking, panic and fear at
seeing Rachel and Dog go into the water driving any reasoning out of my head. 

My makeshift raft was still spinning slowly, and as I faced
to the north once again I was surprised at how much farther downstream I was. 
Absently noting that the train had reversed and was heading back to the east, I
forced myself to calm down and think through my options.  Rachel and Dog had
gone off the train about fifteen seconds before I had jumped.  That meant they
were likely to my east as the train had been rolling west when we’d gone off. 
Was the current stronger or weaker where they’d entered the water?  Were they
ahead of me or behind me?  I had no way of knowing. 

I was preparing to abandon the log and strike out across the
water to the east when a Black Hawk roared into a hover directly over me.  I
looked up and could see two heads leaning out of the side door staring at me. 
One of them waved and I waved back with my free arm.  Moments later a weighted
rope splashed into the water twenty feet downstream.  Riding the log, I
released just before coming abreast of the line and swam a few strokes before
grabbing on.  The rotor wash was fierce, churning up the water and blinding me,
but this was an old drill and I soon had a foot firmly shoved into a loop and a
death grip on the rope.  I released my hold long enough to twirl a hand in the
air, then grabbed on as the pilot gained altitude and plucked me out of the
river.

The Black Hawk headed straight to the western shore where I
was deposited on a tall levee that separated the river from what looked like
endless miles of rice paddies.  Stepping away from the rope, I shielded my eyes
as the helicopter descended to pick me up.  It came to a hover a few feet off
the ground, dirt and debris swirling around it, and I dashed forward.  Hands
reached out the open side door and pulled me in as I scrambled up, the pilot
spinning us around and gaining altitude over the river before my legs were all
the way inside the aircraft.  Captain Blanchard reached out and snapped a
safety tether onto my vest before dragging me the rest of the way in where
Colonel Crawford waited.  One look at his face and I knew I was in for an ass
chewing.

“Are you dumber than a fucking box of rocks, or do you just
have a death wish?”  He roared in my face, clearly audible over the noise of
the helicopter even without benefit of headphones.  “I’ve seen some fucked up
shit in my day, but you take the goddamn cake!  Twenty fucking helos flying
around up here that can actually fucking
see
what’s in the goddamn river,
and like a dim-witted moron, you go and jump in the fucking water.  I swear to
God, you don’t have the brains of the turd I flushed this morning.  If I didn’t
need you I’d bust your ass back to no-nuts Private and let you clean latrines
for the Jar Heads!”

I looked back at him for a few moments, watching him breathe
heavily as the anger boiled inside.  “Wow, sir.  You sound just like my old
Command Sergeant Major.  He could chew ass and spit it out like no one I’ve
ever met.”  I grinned, calculating my response would defuse the situation and
not prompt the Colonel to carry through with his threat.  Oh well.  I’ve been a
Private before.  There’s worse things in the world.  Captain Blanchard stared
at me with his mouth hanging open in disbelief.  Crawford clenched his jaw, his
face going even redder for a moment before barking out a laugh and letting out
a huge sigh.

“You are a pain in the ass, Major.  A five star, big balled,
tiny brained pain in my ass.”  The Colonel turned away with a shake of his head
to speak to the pilot.  Blanchard sat there like he was at a tennis match, head
moving back and forth as he looked from me to the Colonel.

Dismissing the incident from my mind I turned and stuck my
head out of the door, looking down at the river.  We were now about a mile
south of the bridge and moving slowly downstream no faster than the river was
flowing.  To my east I could see another Black Hawk matching our speed and
direction.  I was mildly surprised that Colonel Crawford was devoting two of
his assets to search for one woman and one dog, but wasn’t about to look the
gift horse in the mouth.  I looked to the north when a rumble of explosions
reached me, watching as two Apaches fired missiles at the bridge.  Moments
later a huge section of the mid-span collapsed into the river. 

Movement to the west caught my attention and I turned my
head to look at a large flight of helicopters approaching, just skimming the
surface of the rice paddies.  There were at least two dozen aircraft in the
flight and I wondered why the Colonel had called in more air support.  As the
helos approached the river they broke into three groups, two of which quickly
gained altitude while the third appeared to be accelerating directly at the
train which had just reached the western shore.  They looked like they were on
an attack run, which didn’t make sense.  You didn’t make runs on the infected,
you hovered and hosed them down.

Glancing around the interior of the Black Hawk I spied a
pair of tethered binoculars, scrambled across the deck to grab them and
returned to the door.  Focusing on the newly arriving helicopters I was
completely unprepared for what I saw.  So unprepared that at first I didn’t
believe what I was seeing.  Thinking I had to be mistaken, I shifted the
glasses to an Apache to compare.  I wasn’t mistaken.  The design was similar,
but these weren’t Apaches.  Lowering the binoculars I reached out and grabbed
Colonel Crawford, pulling him to the open door and shoving them into his
hands.  I pointed and he looked, freezing when he saw the helos.  The Apache
pilots in the area had noticed the intruders and tuned to meet them, several of
them firing missiles as they raced forward.

“What’s going on?”  Captain Blanchard had moved to squat
right behind me and was peering over my shoulder.

“The goddamn Russians are here.”  Crawford answered before I
could say anything.

Russian President Alexie Barinov looked around the large
conference room adjacent to his office in the Kremlin.  The room was filled to
capacity with senior politicians, Generals, Admirals and all of the associated
aides that came with busy, powerful men.  Barinov was not a young man, his
still thick hair a mop of white that framed his broad, peasant face.  He was
short with a blocky build, but the eight thousand dollar, custom tailored
Armani suit he wore managed to make him look almost elegant.  Glancing at the
gold Rolex on his left wrist, he compared it to the “official” clock on the
wall of the conference room, satisfied that his aide had properly synchronized
them to the second.

Alexie had grown up in a peasant village on the slopes of
the Ural Mountains during the time of Soviet rule.  He may have been born a
peasant, but he had been blessed with a very high IQ and a canny mind.  At only
five years old he had watched as the KGB rolled into his tiny village to arrest
a man who had complained about the government seizure of the meager crops he
had produced on a small plot of land.  He had only been trying to feed his
family.  Rather than frightened, Alexie had been in awe of the men dressed all
in black, driving the shiny black Volga sedan.  He decided that day to become
one of them when he was old enough.

Barinov joined the right youth groups, consistently
impressing the group leaders with his vocal and rabid support of the Kremlin
and all things Soviet.  By his early teens he had been noticed by the right
people and plucked out of abject poverty to attend the Stalin School for Boys
in Moscow.  He soon became the school master’s favorite, regularly informing on
his classmates that exhibited anything less than absolute zeal for the Soviet
way of life.  Upon graduation he received a glowing recommendation from the
school master, who happened to be the brother-in-law of a Colonel in the KGB. 
Young Alexie realized his dream at the tender age of 17, taking the oath of
loyalty to the most brutal intelligence agency the world had ever seen.

His rise in the ranks of the KGB was meteoric, joining the
Communist Party and becoming a full Colonel by his 35
^th
birthday.  Alexie
was on the cusp of becoming a Major General when the Soviet Union fell. 
Suddenly, the power he had wielded was so diminished it was as if it had never
been.  Not one to despair, Alexie aligned himself with the criminals that
quickly took all but political control of Russia in the absence of the heavy
boots of the Soviet government.  He became enormously wealthy, cultivating
friends and assassinating enemies in the shadows.

When Vladimir Putin came to power as Russia’s strongest
leader since Brezhnev, Barinov rode his coattails into the Kremlin.  The hammer
and the spear behind Putin, he was ruthless in silencing any dissent, and
quickly became the most feared man in Russia.  Two years earlier he had
approached his counterpart within the Chinese government with a plan to finally
destroy America.  Alexie blamed the Americans for ultimately causing the fall
of his beloved Soviet Union, and had been plotting his revenge for decades. 
Science had finally progressed to the point where he felt he could achieve his
goal without risking the destruction of Russia by American nuclear weapons.

Diverting hundreds of millions of dollars, the Chinese
wouldn’t accept Rubles, Alexie seduced highly placed men within the Chinese
communist party to participate in his plot.  Not only to participate and
develop the nerve agent/virus combination, but to execute the actual operation. 
To take the blame and the brunt of the American response.  But for his plan to
work, Barinov needed to have control of the Russian military.  While even
Generals trembled at the mention of his name, he couldn’t order the armed forces
to do anything.  For that, he needed Presidential authority. 

Almost a year before the Chinese launched the attacks,
Alexie had found an opportunity to have a private, late night meeting with
Putin.  A vodka drinker in public, Putin preferred single malt whiskey when in
private.  Barinov arrived for their meeting with a $100,000 bottle of
Glenfiddich single malt whiskey in hand.  The alcohol had already been laced
with a lethal dose of polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that was undetectable
by the Kremlin’s radiation detectors as it gives off no gamma rays, and the
alpha rays emitted are so weak they couldn’t pass through the heavy glass
bottle that held the whiskey.  Alexie abstained from drinking during his
meeting with Putin, and three weeks later the Russian president died of a
mysterious ailment.  Alexie ensured there was no investigation into the cause
of death.  Within 24 hours of Putin’s death, Barinov seized control of the
Russian government and installed himself as the new President.  Within a week
he had removed all opposition through a series of assassinations and bribes. 
The last part of his plan was in motion.

“Comrade President, the missiles are within one minute of
targets.  Operation Red Hammer is on schedule.”  Marshall Ludnikov, a staunch
supporter of Barinov, spoke from the chair immediately to the President’s
right.

Alexie looked up at the Chinese made OLED screen that
covered an entire wall of the conference room.  The screen was divided into
five sections.  The left half was a real time satellite image of the United
States, zoomed so that an area stretching from West Virginia to Colorado was
all that was in frame.  The right half of the screen was spilt into four, equal
parts.  Each quarter was the view from the nose of an orbital launched, penetrator
missile carrying an 80 Kiloton nuclear warhead.  Newly developed, each missile
accelerated out of orbit, reaching near hyper-velocity speeds prior to impact. 
Tests had confirmed that each missile was capable of penetrating over 100 feet
of Earth, or up to 40 feet of hardened concrete.  Everyone in the room was
anxious to see the results of the fabulously expensive development effort that
Barinov had started over a decade ago.

Two targets within the continental US were digitally circled
in red on the left hand screen.  Target 1 was a hardened bunker deep inside
Mount Weather in the West Virginia Mountains.  Well paid spies within the White
House staff had confirmed that this was where the US President and the
surviving members of Congress had fled.  Target 2 was Cheyenne Mountain in the
Rocky Mountain range in Colorado, where the Vice President and military
leadership from the Pentagon had taken refuge after the Chinese attacks.

 In each of the quarter screens that showed the view from
the missiles, a small digital timer blinked in the corner, counting down time
to impact.  The two upper screens read 00:00:10, ten seconds, the two lower
screens exactly one minute behind.  Alexie kept his eyes on the upper screens,
shifting to the real time satellite view when each of the missile’s video feeds
blanked out and their timers reached zero. 

On the larger screen, two brilliant flashes suddenly
appeared, each within the red circles identifying the targets.  Huge plumes of
dust billowed into the atmosphere as the warheads detonated well below the
surface.  Thousands of cubic meters of rock was atomized by each bomb, simply
ceasing to exist.  Millions of tons of pulverized rock, steel and hardened
concrete blasted into the atmosphere, creating a two hundred foot deep crater
for the follow on missile to strike.

Mount Weather and Cheyenne Mountain had both been
constructed at the height of the Cold War, but when they were built neither the
US nor the Soviet Union possessed the technology to build penetrator missiles. 
The two bunkers were intended to provide a survivable environment that could
withstand a direct surface strike from a Soviet ICBM.  Not a subterranean
detonation directly on top of them.  Mount Weather was breached and completely
destroyed by the first penetrator.  The second missile, when it arrived, wasn’t
needed.

Cheyenne Mountain, carved out of solid rock, fared better
from the first strike.  Electricity was knocked out and numerous cave-ins
killed dozens of personnel, but the hard Colorado granite held.  Until the
second penetrator arrived.  The granite that had withstood the first penetrator
had cracked from the unimaginable force of the nuclear explosion.  The second
penetrator dove into the crater created by the first, impacting the fractured
rock and burrowing deep into the mountain before detonating.  Every living
thing within the bunker ceased to exist less than half a second after
detonation.

A cheer sounded in the conference room as massive plumes of
dust obscured the satellite view of the two targets.  There were no iconic
mushroom clouds since the detonations were subterranean, but even on the
monitor it was obvious that dust and debris was being thrown all the way into
the upper atmosphere.

“Congratulations, Comrade President.”  Air Marshall Kuchenko
said from across the table, standing to address Barinov.  “With your permission,
I will have the technicians adjust our view so we can watch the next phase.”

Barinov nodded and Kuchenko turned and barked orders to
three Russian Air Force Captains seated at a side table laden with computers. 
A moment later the giant screen blinked, then displayed a single image.  They
were looking directly down onto Canada and the northern United States, the
extreme upper edge of the display showing the polar ice cap. 

Flying in formation over Canada, nearly into US airspace,
were 1,200 Sukhoi and Mig fighters, 200 aerial tankers for refueling, and 140
cargo planes.  Looking like toys on the display, everyone in the room knew that
the cargo planes were the massive Antonov AN-124 aircraft, loaded with troops, helicopters
and supplies for the invading army.  In 2001, Barinov had acquired the Antonov
aircraft manufacturing enterprise and had been building the massive planes,
capable of lifting nearly a quarter more weight than the venerable American
C-5A Galaxy, preparing for this day.  Every man in the invasion, as well as 75%
of the Russian population, had been vaccinated against the virus that had been
unleashed on the Americans.  He smiled as he watched his planes enter American
territory, unopposed.