The Widow's Strike (32 page)

W
e bounced into
the runway
and then were jerked forward as the MC-130’s turboprops reversed. After a brief taxi, the engines shut down and the ramp began to lower, the humid breath of Puerto Rico competing with the stale air from the blowers of the aircraft AC, causing fog to stream out of the vents. The sun had just crested the horizon, and it would have looked like a vacation photo, with the palm trees waving around and the ocean in the distance. Would have except for the loadmaster in an Air Force flight suit and the Coast Guard pilot on the tarmac waving us off, a not-so-subtle reminder of why we were here.

Vacation photo from Stephen King.

Knuckles pulled out his earplugs and said, “If I knew I’d be getting dropped into a ship full of walking dead, I would have just left you locked up.”

One of the doctors heard him and looked like he was going to throw up.

I said, “Cut the chatter. They’re nervous enough as it is. Get the kit offloaded. I’m going to find the coastie in charge of our helicopters.”

Decoy, Retro, and the rest of the team began offloading black bags that looked exactly like the bags of the five-man team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As far as the Air Force and Coast Guard knew, we were all members of the CDC. They’d get a shock if they opened one of our team bags, though. Probably would want to know what an H&K submachine gun had to do with viruses.

Everyone involved in this charade thought we were investigating some strange disease on a cruise ship. Including the crew of the ship itself. Nobody knew of the terrorist aboard, except for my team, the captain of the ship, and the real CDC crew, which is why they were nervous. From what I’d been told, each one of them had accomplished some pretty heroic stuff, from fighting Marburg and Ebola in Africa to the avian flu in Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, but mention a terrorist and everyone gets skittish.

After discovering the name of the carrier, it had taken very little work for Kurt to locate which cruise she was on, but we were still too late for the easy fix of simply telling the boat to wait for our arrival at the island of Sint Maarten.

It had left last night and had spent the last twelve hours steaming home to America, putting it out in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. From the captain we’d learned that nobody had become sick—yet—which had us breathing a sigh of relief. Analyzing what the carrier was trying to accomplish, it appeared she wanted to get the whole damn boat infected, but it wouldn’t do any good to have anyone showing the illness before it reached American shores. From what the CDC said, they’d never let it dock. So, she was waiting, knowing it took three days for the virus to appear. Which meant she was probably sneezing in the salad line right this very moment. Something that gave everyone pause, and why Knuckles had made the comment about “walking dead.”

Unless, of course, she’d been spitting in everyone’s food since she’d hit American shores and it hadn’t infected anyone. The doctors were arguing like crazy over how communicable she was, with some saying the vaccine was a hoax and she was just as deadly as anyone who contracted the disease, and others saying sneezing and spitting wouldn’t cut it—that she’d have to really slobber over something you put directly into your mouth for her to be contagious.

There was evidence supporting both sides, with six dead in New York after we knew she had been there, but
nobody
else
sick even though she’d driven the length of the Eastern Seaboard. Truthfully, I was shocked at the two sides, figuring this would have been a little bit of an open-and-shut discussion, like gravity. Drop a rock, and it falls to earth. Apparently, viruses don’t work that way, and doctors spend a great deal of time trying to find the reason as to why some become pandemics and others fade away. In the end, nobody knew what the truth was, so my team, along with our intrepid CDC crew, had been given my favorite order: Go figure it out.

I found the guy who’d been waving us off the MC-130 and was surprised to see he was a full colonel—or captain, in people-who-deal-with-water speak.

“I’m Captain Franke. Welcome to Air Station Borinquen.”

I shook his hand. “Pike Logan, Centers for Disease Control, and I don’t really have the time to enjoy your post. You got the word we were coming?”

“Yes. You need transport to a cruise ship, is that right?”

“Like yesterday.”

We walked into a hangar and he pointed at a group of sleek, orange and white helicopters, with a unique embedded tail rotor. “We’re tracking its location, and I’ve got four Dolphins, three fully mission capable.”

“Perfect. The boat has no landing pad, so we’ll need to rope in. These outfitted for that?”

“Rope? What do you mean?”

Uh-oh.

“You know, fast rope? Like Call of Duty?”

He looked at me like I was speaking Swahili. I gave up.

“How will we get on board the ship?”

He pointed at a basket and said, “You’ll get lowered in that.”

Boy, that’s going to be real speedy. Knuckles is going to shit.

Speaking of the devil, Knuckles and Jennifer walked up, with him asking, “Did I just hear what I thought I did?”

“Don’t even start. Get our kit loaded. Docs in one bird, our team in another. We’ll develop the situation first, then call them in.”

E
lina turned off
the small
television above her bed, sick of seeing the exact same movie for what could have been the tenth time. She closed the drapes to her stateroom and laid out the vest, staring at it.

It was time. Twelve o’clock.

She cinched it on, slowly ensuring everything was perfectly in place, taking much longer than was necessary. Satisfied at the fit, she joined the loose wires from the blasting cap to the detonator, ensured a solid connection, then slid the assembly into the Velcro fabric just underneath her left armpit, trapping it between her dress and the vest.

She sat on the bed, debating, then decided to call. She had earned one final meal with actual silverware, where she could drink from a glass instead of a water bottle.

And a final bit of companionship from another human being.

The man answered the phone, and she said, “You still want lunch?”

* * *

I saw the
ship in the distance, a speck that grew larger by the second. I could hear the pilot talking to the bridge, letting them know we were inbound and to slow the engines, making it easier to transfer us with the basket—what Knuckles now referred to as “putting on the training wheels.”

Even though it didn’t matter, I held up a finger and shouted, “One minute!”

Everyone else echoed the command, checking that their weapons were concealed and touching other pieces of kit. Knuckles just rolled his eyes.

We drew into a hover over a basketball court, four crew members below to assist in the transfer and others keeping a crowd off of the deck. Decoy and I went out first, and I had to admit I felt a little bit like a pussy as the basket lowered onto the deck, slow as molasses.

A full fifteen minutes later, we were assembled and the helo had pulled off enough to allow us to talk without a gale-force wind.

I pulled the captain aside, out of earshot, and said, “Room number?”

He gave it to me and said, “What are you going to do if she’s not there?”

“I’m going to find her.”

The primary plan was to go to her stateroom and see if she was inside. If she was, we were simply going to barricade the door, locking her in, then bring in CDC to assess any damage. She couldn’t get out through the miniature window of her room.

The captain said, “What should I be doing?”

“Nothing. Whatever you do, keep to the story you’ve been told. We get a panic on this boat and there’s not enough people on the island of Puerto Rico to contain it.”

He gave me several copies of a map of the boat and a passkey, then said, “Good luck.”

They left the deck and I handed out the maps. The place was a damn maze, and it was huge. “Man,” I said. “If she’s not in the room, we’re in real trouble.”

Decoy said, “I always hated ship takedowns. They are the fucking worst.”

Having done one or two during training I couldn’t have agreed more, but I had been ordered into it as a “force enhancer” because I was in the Army. Hearing him say it was ridiculous.

I said, “You’re a damn SEAL. This is what you do.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

I glanced at Knuckles, the other SEAL, and said, “I’ve never met a squid who hated boats more than him.”

I raised my voice. “Everyone, remember, we only have about thirty minutes of on-station time for the helos. We don’t find her in under thirty, and we’re stuck on the boat without the CDC help until they can do a revolution back to base for fuel. No change to the plan. Room first, then we start our search grid. Jennifer and I take the most likely, because she knows her on sight. Questions?”

Retro said, “We never finalized rules of engagement. I see her, what do you want me to do?”

I knew what he was asking. He could take her down with little effort, but he’d be dealing with a death machine. He wanted to know if he was supposed to risk his life. All it would take was her biting or spitting on him.

“Stay in pairs. You find her, get guns out. Screw the CDC cover. Get her on the ground. Be prepared for her to run—remember, she has nothing to lose. She tries, shoot to kill. But only as a last resort. You spill her blood, and that place becomes ground zero of virus land.”

The team’s humor wilted at my statement, all realizing how deadly this had become. Unlike the CDC doctors, we were used to the threat of conventional attacks. What frightened them was old hat to us. Facing a mindless virus that would rip a body apart from the inside out scared all of us more than anything we had ever seen.

Knuckles said, “That happens, what are our odds of getting out clean? No bullshit. You’re the guy that talked to the doctor who made this thing.”

I took a breath and let it out. “I don’t know. We’ve been vaccinated, but the doctor never got to test the version we used. He seemed to think it would work, but there’s really no way to tell. We’ve all been pumped full of Tamiflu, and that’s supposed to help. The doctor couldn’t predict, but he did say he thought we’d be good as long as we didn’t get any bodily fluids on us.”

Nobody said anything for a second, then Retro whispered, “Head shots only. Stop her in her tracks.”

* * *

Elina met him
in the aft dining room on the lobby level, her first time there. In fact, her first time in any of the multitude of restaurants on the boat, and she was enjoying it immensely. The thought of eating with real silverware on a real plate, drinking out of a real glass, was almost overwhelming, causing her to forget for a moment what was to come.

After leaving her room, strangely giddy at the prospect of talking to someone, she’d had a little bit of a delay as the ship stopped its forward movement and prevented any travel from bow to stern. She’d asked what was going on and had been told someone very sick was being flown off of the boat by helicopter. She’d nodded, wondering if somehow she’d slipped up.

Eventually, she’d made it to the dining room and was met by her suitor, now wearing a coat and tie and looking somewhat decent. Even attractive. He pulled out her chair and she sat down, saying, “I didn’t know they even had restaurants like this on the boat.”

“Yeah, it’s the best place to come because you have to wear regular clothes and they take your order. Most on a cruise don’t want to waste their time, so they all go to the hog-trough buffet on the Lido deck. That place is always jam-packed.”

Elina filed that away. She said, “You never told me your name.”

“It’s Jared. Jared Bonaparte. I’m from Louisiana. What about you?”

“I’m Elina. I live in Latvia. You know it?”

He surprised her. “Yeah, actually I do. I was in the Army in the eighties. I served in Berlin. After the wall fell, my buddies and I traveled around over there, hitting up all the new countries that used to be the Soviet Union. We never made it to Latvia, but I know where it is.”

She said, “You went to Prague, didn’t you?”

He laughed and said, “I did. How did you know?”

“That’s where all the westerners go. Have you ever heard of Chechnya?”

The waiter arrived, interrupting the conversation. Elina showed confusion, and Jared helped her out. “Order whatever is on the menu. It’s free. Part of your ticket.”

She did so, and the man left.

He said, “You were asking about Chechnya, and yeah, I’ve heard of it. Sometimes I wonder about where the world is going. I ‘fought,’ if you can call it that, against the Soviet Union, and now they’re our friends, but they’re doing the same damn things they did when they were our enemies.”

She took that in and said, “But they’re all Muslims.”

He looked at her in confusion and said, “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

She felt her foundation shift. The reason for the attack beginning to slide. She said, “Jared, whatever you do, after today, go to your room and stay there. Leave here and get enough bottled water to last until you dock. No matter what anyone says, don’t open your door.”

“What are you talking about? Are you nuts? Muslims, hide in the room—really?”

He was looking at her like she was insane, and she realized how ridiculous she sounded. She reached across and put her hand over his, saying, “Sorry. It has been a rough couple of months for me. And I don’t speak English that well.”

He relaxed, and Elina pulled her hand away. He said, “I know what you mean. I just got divorced after twenty years. Wife was sleeping around on me. Completely shattered my entire life.”

She started to respond when she saw a woman enter the dining room with a man, both searching about as if trying to find someone who was waiting on them. The female looked vaguely familiar.

She searched her memory, then felt a jolt of fear straight to her core. The woman’s hair had a different color and was shorter, but there was no doubt.

It was her pursuer from Macau.