but a few of your jarhead buddies found that out the hard way, but I’m sure you’ve already figured out as much when you discovered your Web sites zapped then began your nightly armed recon around this stretch of Flathead Lake. Yes, you guessed correctly. You have been under constant surveillance. Okay, moving on. Instead of you accepting a chance to expiate your own guilt and treason, you turn down a reasonable offer to work for your country on a classified counter-bio warfare project, but you decided to stick to your lingering rebel nature. It wasn’t enough you came home from the first Gulf War and incited the whole of the U.S. Senate and Congress about what you thought you and a lot of other vets had fallen ill from over there.”
“You’re going to kill me because I told the truth?”
“The truth was, more or less, already out there, Mr. Hall. Pyridostygmine was supposed to have been a vaccine to prevent the effects of any nerve gas Saddam might have thrown at the troops. Then some snippy Congressman whose panties you got all twisted up did some investigating—or more to the point—had somebody else do the work for him, and he comes out claiming before God and the whole world to hear that somehow the vaccines were contaminated by the AIDS virus. Just to clue you in, the so-called Gulf War Syndrome bore, more to the truth, similarities to the West Nile virus, but the AIDs claim was what got the hue and cry sounded.”
Bile squirted up Hall’s throat. The fog was thickening in his eyes, or had he been hit by another wave of smoke? He struggled for breath that felt like flames in his throat as he said, “We were used as guinea pigs.”
“Maybe, maybe not. If you were test subjects, then let’s say it was for a just cause, being as Gulf One may have been the first time our troops were threatened by the mass deployment of chemical or biological weapons. In other words, our side needed to know something in order to engineer a preventive measure. Unfortunately, the experimental vaccine didn’t pan out as hoped. But, your mouth, that was strike one.”
“Men who fought for this country died…”
“Strike two was refusing the offer. Strike three was putting out on the Internet to all your former comrades-in-arms and any other conspiracy fruitbasket who would listen to what little you thought you knew but which, by your crusade, might have well placed national security at grave risk nonetheless.”
“So I die. You can’t kill us all.”
“And that would be you blustering it out until the bitter end?” The black hood chuckled. “Now then. What’s killing you, you ask? To my knowledge—which, I may add, in this particular field is extensive—there are fifty-one known toxic warfare agents.” He shrugged, smoked, then quickly added, “Actually there are sixty-five, but that’s when I count those agents not even those in the sanctified realm of U.S. intelligence know about between our side, the Russians, several Mideast terror orgs and North Korea. But that’s another story. Anyway, you have been stricken with, you guessed it, an experimental agent that is formed from the recombinant DNA of seven toxins. Botulin, anthrax and dioxin which, as you so boldly put out there, is an ingredient used in pesticide and which you believe was what caused GWS. But these are three of the seven you would be most familiar with, I’ll leave the others to your imagination.”
Hall watched as the black-clad executioner rose, staring at his watch.
“You have about twenty-five minutes now, Mr. Hall. Have a nice journey.”
Hall watched the man as he stepped past before he was swallowed up into the white light.
He wanted to be angry over this treason, murdered, no less, by agents of the very government he had fought and killed for, outraged, terrified he was minutes away from dying…
But felt a calm peace settle over him. Still, this was no way for a warrior, he thought, to die, as he felt the first wave of white-hot pain knifing from head to toe. Still, there were those out there who knew something about the compound, who believed, and whom, he was sure, could count on to spread the truth. Or would they? Were there any even left to talk?
CHAPTER ONE
“What in the name of…”
Benjamin Dekel collapsed into the wall, aware that God had nothing to do with why he was about to die, had nothing to do with why he was burning up with maybe a 104 degree temperature, and climbing. Or why the pain in his chest was turning to a clenching fire that was seconds away from squeezing off the last bit of air to his lungs. Or why every last drop of bodily waste and liquefied organs was set to burst from both ends as his stomach and bowels caught fire. He was verging, he knew, on the edges of what they called “the liquid state.”
Complete internal organ meltdown, followed by paralysis.
His voice struck his ears from a great distance as he heard himself croaking, “Help…someone…”
There was no answer, and he knew there was little time left now, perhaps down to a mere few minutes, since when the pain and nausea had finally driven him out of a deep sleep and he had heaved himself off the cot. And even if he reached the vault in what was called the Gold Room he was far from certain the Trivalent antitoxin derivative could be administered in time through the 20 ml IV vial, much less combat the effects of the hybrid strain he himself had taken part in creating.
With a sudden viciousness, he cursed the very day he’d quit Fort Detrick and accepted this post in what would now not only prove the middle of nowhere, but would be his final resting place. More money, they’d pledged, and delivered that much, and with talk among his colleagues about the possibility of a Nobel Prize…
His vision, he discovered, as predicted during the early stages of testing on African monkeys, was the first of the senses to start collapsing. Within moments, after the initial onslaught of the fractured maze with gray light webbed around narrowing peripheral vision, total blindness would descend. That would prove the least of his concerns, he knew, though it somehow might prove a blessing in disguise.
He stumbled, limbs turning quickly to boneless rubbery appendages, into the main corridor, gasping for breath, like the drowning man he knew he was. The stark white of the concrete walls seemed to drive hot needles through raw eyeballs, and served only to inflame the fire in his brain. Alternately hugging and sliding down the wall, it occurred to him one of several scenarios had taken place. The agent had either been accidentally released from the Hot Zone—the Black Room—or this was an act of sabotage. The contagion, he knew, could be spread by food, water and air. And he could have been infected as far back as six to eight weeks for all he knew. For that was just one of the insidious natures of the pathogenic mycoplasma they’d spliced and engineered into the whole hellish concoction. It laid dormant, evading the human immune system as the man-made bomb hid—no, vanished—deep inside cell nuclei, the lab-bred microbe near impossible to detect and diagnose as it ticked away, biding its time until it decided when it would strike. Then there was the other batch, able to act within minutes…
Which one?
It didn’t matter, as he cursed himself for even entertaining such a foolish thought, as if that alone could bolster vain hope.
Beyond the terror of knowing he was dying on his feet, Dekel felt the strange vast emptiness stretching out before and behind him. In fact, nothing seemed to move, no sound anywhere, but that could just be his senses on the verge of meltdown as his brain became nothing short of microwaved jelly. Still, near forty personnel between the science staff, security and management and yet someone by now should have appeared. Or…
Were they, too, dying? Or already dead?
The
