Foxtrot dropped into another chair. “Forgive me if I don’t trip all over myself applauding their statement.”
Kilo snorted.
“At this point,” Doc said, “we’re probably closer to a viable vaccine than anyone else.”
The test serum the three doctors had formulated from Doc’s blood after his brush with a mutated and less lethal version of Kite seemed to be working. They’d tested it first on Doc’s partner, Tango, and on Pandora. The two had volunteered. Then they rolled it out on a limited basis to other members of the team. Results were promising, based on blood tests the scientists had been running on everyone given the serum.
But it wasn’t anything except a first step. It wouldn’t stop the worst Kite strains.
And it wasn’t enough of a breakthrough they could afford to let the scientists go public with their results yet, either.
Canuck had waited to contact her friend at the Seattle lab until they were reasonably certain the serum they had did work on the mutated Kite strain. It was visible proof of what she was doing, and her scientist friend had sworn to keep Canuck’s secret and help in any way she could.
Still, Canuck’s friend didn’t know about the rest of the team being in Seattle. She thought Canuck was there, alone, except for a couple of friends helping her to stay safe so she could continue her work.
And Canuck might have lied just a little and said the government wanted her to stay hidden because of people trying to kill her. Which, technically, wasn’t a lie if you considered General Arliss “the government.”
What the friend also didn’t know was that between Lima and Bubba, they’d easily hacked the lab’s security. After-hours, Canuck and Q, with a couple of Drunk Monkeys as backups and security, were going in and utilizing equipment they needed to run tests.
They limited those runs to no more than three times a week. So far, with success.
Meaning successfully using the facility. Unfortunately, they still hadn’t cracked the biological code to create a broadly effective vaccine that would stop the most lethal strains of Kite in its tracks.
“Do you think we’re going to kick this thing?” Foxtrot asked Doc.
“I don’t want to think any other way,” he said. “Especially after what I went through. That was a damn close call.” He’d been infected after accidentally slicing through his protective suit and cutting his leg on a piece of equipment in the RV that had housed their rolling lab.
Since arriving in Seattle, Ak and Annie, who were both mechanics, had completely stripped the RV’s interior down to the studs and retrofitted it with reinforced metal braces for stability and new insulated interior walls of polymer panels that could easily be disinfected. They’d also equipped their mobile lab with a more secure rack system to hold the coolers and other equipment in place while underway, and created a better mobile decontamination system to make it easier for personnel to get into and out of the RV with less chance of infecting anyone else. And they’d added a fire suppressant system, knowing how easy it would be for the vehicle to go up in flames.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
If—when—they had to bug out again, their rolling lab would actually be just that, something the scientists could keep using for their work without having to stop and pack everything up. They could simply move everything into the RV and get on the road.
They’d gotten lucky in LA. Lucky that the earthquake hadn’t completely flattened their safe house there and destroyed all the hard work and progress the scientists had achieved up to that point, and lucky that the RV hadn’t been damaged or destroyed during the earthquake or their evacuation.
Omega, their unit’s quartermaster, was already on the lookout for a better vehicle, a larger one, perhaps more secure, like a personnel carrier, which they could convert into a lab, or at least a backup lab.
“So why couldn’t you sleep, Doc?” Foxtrot asked. Considering Doc and Tango were a triad with Pandora, the last thing Foxtrot would have thought was that any of the three would have trouble sleeping.
Doc shrugged. “Just a feeling.”
He’d had to qualify for the SOTIF team’s physical requirements the same as the rest of them. He’d been pulled from military medical training just short of getting his MD.
That meant Foxtrot trusted Doc’s gut instincts the way he trusted Kilo’s. The way he’d trust the instincts of any of the men in their group.
“A bad feeling?” Kilo asked.
Doc stared out over the water for a moment. “Don’t know how to label it, exactly. Not really bad. Like maybe there are even bigger changes ahead.” He turned back to them. “Like we’re only halfway through this adventure, and there’s a shit-ton of stuff still to happen.”
“How are they coming on the vaccine?” Kilo asked.
“They’re working on it. You know the drill. They think they’ve nailed it down for the version I had, but it won’t do anything against the worst strains. They’re still trying to coax Dr. Chu into communicating with them and come out of hiding, but she won’t. She’s still feeding them data that she accumulates, and is apparently taking the data they’re giving her and processing it and posting her findings on it, but she must be scared to death.”
“Didn’t she have family?”
“A son,” Doc confirmed. “He’s about nine now. She’s divorced.”
“Here’s a stupid question,” Foxtrot said. “What happened to the boy’s father?”
Doc looked grim. “Q said she left him in Beijing when she went to North Korea for the project. Q’s wife and mother were watching her son for her while she was on-site with the rest of the team.”
“Protective mother,” Foxtrot said. “I can’t imagine her ever again willingly trusting what anyone says after what she went through.”
“Yeah, I know.” Doc pushed himself up out of his seat. “Bubba’s trying to locate her. He thought she was in South Africa for a while, but now he thinks she might have moved. She speaks five languages, so she can settle nearly anywhere in the world and make it.” He headed for the stairwell.
“Hey,” Kilo called out.
Doc turned.
“What aren’t you telling us?”
Doc fiddled with his rad counter. Finally, he said, “Bubba sent a message a little bit ago. Dr. Jean Reusseaux tried to turn himself in to French authorities in Paris. One of their cops, a young kid fresh off of working a riot, shot and killed him. Reusseaux was pulling his original passport out of his pocket and the kid thought he had a weapon.”
Foxtrot and Kilo froze. Foxtrot said it first. “Shit,” he whispered.
Doc nodded. “Yep. That means The List is now officially down to fourteen people. Unfortunately, it also means that other people now have confirmation at least one of The List was alive and well, meaning they’ll renew efforts to find the others. And we don’t know what evidence they’ll pull from whatever equipment Reusseaux had with him.” He disappeared into the stairwell.
“Told you it was weirdly quiet,” Kilo muttered.
“Shut up,” Foxtrot grumbled. The death of Dr. Reusseaux meant one less person they’d have to try to locate.
It also meant one less member of the team to solve the problem of a Kite vaccine.
Chapter Three
Captain Kyong Tran lounged in the shade of her C-160 Zeus transport plane, her back resting against the front landing gear. She’d been the captain of it for the past three years. Someone had dubbed it the Punchy Panda early in its career. A cartoon panda, dressed as a ninja, forever delivered a flying kick on its nose.
She’d weathered her fair share of good-natured ribbing over that, despite the fact that pandas were Chinese and she was half Vietnamese and a not quite half Korean, and born and raised in Boston. Her mom had been a first-generation American who grew up speaking fluent Vietnamese with several generations of her family living under the same roof. Three of her father’s grandparents, the Korean contingent, had made the trek from South Korea before having
kids. One of those had married an American serviceman who’d been stationed there.
Now thirty-four, Kyong had enlisted at eighteen and went straight to the Academy based on her grades, fast-tracked to earn her wings.
Being a pilot was all she’d ever wanted to do.
By god, she’d done it.
And now…
She took another bite of her protein bar. She’d spent the morning going through redundant systems checks, busywork more than necessary maintenance.
Anything to keep her mind off Lee, Maggie, and Darrel.
Through her mirrored shades she stared down the tarmac at the ragtag group of aircraft, fixed-wing and helos alike, arranged in what harried ground crews had attempted to turn into some semblance of order following the unexpected evacuation of El Segundo.
She slowly chewed her protein bar, taking inventory of the other aircraft parked on the flight line. With the biggest bird in the group, they’d put her at the farthest end, the easiest position for her to taxi it to the runway for takeoff if forced to make a fast getaway.
Again.
Considering what had happened at El Segundo, no one doubted that could always be a possibility.
For now, she was stuck in limbo and feeling more than a little sick at heart. She tried not to think about her flight crew, whom she’d been forced to leave at El Segundo during the clusterfuck of an evac nearly three weeks earlier.
When the entire flight line had been scrambled, she’d begged to wave off, to have a little more time. Her three crew members, two men and a woman, had ventured down to the base’s PX for some extra supplies. She’d originally been told they wouldn’t have to go wheels-up for at least twelve hours, and she hadn’t wanted to keep her crew idly sitting there, nervously twiddling their thumbs the whole time.
Lee Andrews. Maggie Porter. Darrel O’Connell.
At least none of them had next of kin she’d have to notify.
Hell, the PX was on the farking base. Not like they even had to leave the secure grounds. And no telling where their next assignment would be, or if they’d be able to hit a PX while there. They were supposed to be back in under two hours. What harm would it have done?
She still didn’t have the heart to look at their gear, their rucks and duffel bags still neatly stowed where they’d left them, in the crew’s personal storage area just behind the flight deck.
But El Segundo had been overrun. When the emergency order to takeoff had been given, the ground crews had yanked her chocks and disconnected her shore lines and static straps while the terrified tower controller had screamed orders at her over the radio to get her fucking bird in line and get it off the ground ASAP.
Screamed.
She’d flown around the world, in some of the worst conditions possible. She’d made runs with Coasties on old C-130s doing S&R during horrendous weather. She’d been in some of the tensest situations imaginable for a pilot, and while she’d heard the tight edge of stress over the com before, she’d never heard outright panic.
Especially not from a flight controller.
They’d launched the fixed wings at dangerously short takeoff intervals, sometimes two abreast when it was smaller birds or fighter jets, dirty air from the previous aircraft still swirling as she punched the throttles and took off as hard and fast as she could push it, another bird already crawling up her six before there was barely a foot of air between her and her landing gear. They’d even been using the older runway that was left over from LAX’s passenger jet days to get some of the shorter takeoff birds off the ground.
They’d told her to head for Edwards first, then changed her orders five minutes later, diverting her to McChord along with a slew of other aircraft. Which in a way had been a relief, because she would have hated landing with heavy tanks and would have had to swing over the Pacific and dump fuel due to the short hop over to Edwards.
But now…
Now, here she sat, in limbo. There’d been no further word from her unit’s commander, who might not have made it out of El Segundo before the base was overrun by rioters and Kiters and desperate people trying to escape both.
Like some sick sort of replay of the fall of Saigon from a hundred and fifty or so years earlier.
The fall of El Segundo.
With Kiters.
As she’d gone wheels-up and circled around the base, the state-of-the-art airfield the military had built twenty years earlier after the US government took over a chunk of property between the original base and the old LAX complex, she’d spotted helos plucking personnel from the roofs of buildings while countless thousands of people had swarmed the grounds, spreading across the base like killer ants.
Then she’d climbed above the smoke ceiling and had lost sight of the grounds entirely.
No one had been able to tell her if her crew had survived and made it to Edwards or some other base. Apparently the military had more important things to worry about.
Blowing up Barstow seemed to be one of those things, although it was something no one would speak openly about.
When she’d tried to locate her commander again that very morning, no one had been able to tell her what his official status was. As with her flight crew, he was apparently MIA for now. With all the other shit going down in LA, no one had time for her, one orphaned pilot and her plane, now stuck out in Washington State.
What a farking mess.
She spotted a Jeep heading down the tarmac, dust gently rolling in its wake, not slowing until it arrived at the Panda. The driver pulled up and stopped in the shade of one of the transport plane’s enormous wings.
The driver shut the engine off. Master Sergeant Malcom Kensey was the man who kept McChord’s flight line smoothly humming, greasing the wheels, literally and figuratively, trying his best to run interference for flight and maintenance crews with the brass who were clueless as to how things really worked down on the tarmac. A grizzled veteran with over thirty years in, he’d probably forgotten more about aircraft maintenance and flight components than many young mechanics had ever learned.
He chewed on a toothpick. He’d been trying to quit smoking, both for health and financial reasons, and had probably chewed the equivalent of three large redwoods in toothpicks over the past couple of weeks she’d been there. It was a relief to see he’d switched over to those, however, versus the cigarettes he used to smoke when she and her crew had been stationed here for several months a couple of years earlier while the Panda underwent repairs and maintenance.
“How you doing, K?” he asked, his voice sounding not quite as gravelly as it once had.
Despite their differences in rank, he liked her, and when they were alone there were no formalities between then.
She shrugged. “No word, huh?”
He rested his arms on the steering wheel and looked down into his lap. “I called all around, pulled every string I could. If they made it out and registered, they’re not showing up anywhere. I’m sorry.” Only then did he raise his gaze, his own sunglasses hiding his blue eyes and the deep lines etched in the corners of them from years squinting against the sun beating off the McChord tarmac.
She fought back the prickle of tears. She wouldn’t cry. She was a fucking captain, for chrissake. Captains didn’t cry. Captains didn’t lose their cool. That was what got people killed.
“I appreciate it, Mal.”
“I have a friend at Edwards. Runs drones, satellite surveillance, that sort of thing. Obviously, he’s been swamped, but he was finally able to do me a favor this morning. He diverted a drone to buzz El Segundo. He also pulled up aerial pics from the afternoon of the evac. The PX…” He spit out the toothpick and pulled a fresh one from his pocket.
“Just say it, please.” Weary to her bones, she’d rather hear the unvarnished truth than he drag the process out in a well-meant attempt to spare her feelings and cushion the blow.
“It went first, being one of the buildings closest to the gates. When the mobs flooded the gates and started breaking d
own the fences, it was one of the first buildings overrun. The buildings were burned, any aircraft that didn’t make it off the ground, looks like they trashed those, too. Then the earthquake…” He coughed. “Looks like the tsunami made it that far inland. There’s nothing recognizable at the base now. Even the tower came down. I’m sorry, K. Damned sorry.”
She leaned her head back against the landing gear wheel, eyes closed. She’d second-guessed her decision, her judgment, countless times since that day. It felt like an eternity to her.
The only plus was it had helped her sweep away her pain and anger at her older brother for his stupid suicide by OD’ing on drugs eight weeks ago.
“Colonel Yasco show up yet?” She already knew that answer from her attempts that morning, but hoped maybe Mal had connections she didn’t, perhaps had found out something that had escaped her.
Mal looked around, the toothpick dancing between his lips as he tried to focus everywhere except on her. “Nope.”
She finished her protein bar and balled the wrapper in her hand. “So I’m still an orphan, huh?” she tried to joke. “No one else checked in from my squad?”
There had been four helos and three other planes in their support wing. That wasn’t counting the rest of their unit, which had been down south on a supply run. She’d been closest to the taxiway, but surely at least someone else besides her in her unit had scrambled and lifted off?
He finally focused his attention on her again. “Everything’s a massive shit sandwich down there, K. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not good. I don’t have any revised orders for you or the Panda. Haven’t located anyone else from your unit. If you want my honest opinion? Keep your head low. The last thing you want is to be shipped back down to that mess. Enjoy the break. Do retrofits, if you want. Hell, I’ll assign some guys to help you out. Spend time in the flight sim here. We’ve got guys twiddling their thumbs with some of their birds. Grab some extra hours in the helos or other fixed wings. Add to your logged hours.”
What he left unsaid hung in the still summer air between them.