Prime (3 page)

It was probably nothing, just centuries old
dust. Nevertheless, Katherine felt her pulse quicken. “Let’s get out of here.”

They negotiated the maze back to the entrance
where the rest of the team had
gathered,
eagerly
awaiting a report on their discoveries, but Katherine gestured for them to stay
back and called for a specimen kit.

Both of Han’s gloves were now almost
completely covered in the black film. Using forceps, she peeled them off his
hands and dropped them into a plastic bag, only then allowing herself a small
sigh of relief. Whatever the substance was, it was now safely sealed away.

“Dr. Geller!” It was Stafford. The graduate
student had been recording her activity with his video camera, but now he
seemed to have forgotten all about this task. He had one hand extended toward
her, and she saw the same black film on his gloves. But he wasn’t showing
her—he was pointing at her.
“Your face.”

She reached up reflexively but caught herself
before making contact. Not that it would have mattered; she knew what she would
find.
Damn it. This isn’t happening.

But it was. They’d been exposed to something
in the tomb.

“Isolation protocols,” she said, the words
barely getting past the lump in her throat. “Everyone stay back.”

There was an emergency wash station in the
lab tent; all three of them would need to be disinfected, their clothes and
shoes destroyed…

Suddenly, Han let out a choked gasp and
collapsed to the ground.

Katherine stared in disbelief at his
motionless form. Han’s cheeks bore several dark smudges and the rims of his
eyelids were encrusted with the black substance, but this wasn’t the cause of
his distress. The doctor’s skin was cyanotic; he was suffocating.

It wasn’t possible.
He couldn’t have inhaled it
, she thought.
He’s still wearing his mask, for God’s sake.

His
mask!

The filter cartridges on Han’s respirator
were weeping beads of a fluid that looked like crude oil. The substance had
clogged the filters; that was why he’d passed out.

She frantically ripped the mask away,
revealing the doctor’s blue-tinged lips but also a scattering of black
blemishes around his mouth and nose.

Han still wasn’t breathing.

Katherine discovered that she was also having
difficulty drawing breath, and against her better judgment, she removed her own
respirator. She was trying to figure out what to do next when a cry sounded
from the gaggle of onlookers.

Like some biblical miracle, the crowd parted,
the team members retreating in a panic from one of their own. A female
archaeologist—Katherine couldn’t remember her name—was gazing in stunned
disbelief at her hands, and even from a distance, Katherine could see that the
woman’s fingernails had turned completely black.

Then another shriek went up, and pandemonium
erupted.

My
God! What have we unleashed
?

Stafford abruptly fell to his knees and
pitched forward, face down and unmoving, but Katherine made no effort to loosen
his mask.

She felt a rattle in her lungs with her next
breath, like the beginnings of a chest cold.

Whatever
it is, it’s fast
.

Something about that realization soothed her.
Her fear receded, replaced by a calm that was clinical but at the same time,
almost reverential.

She had discovered something new, something
unique, and that was what she had lived for. So what if it killed her?

She unclipped the satellite telephone from
her belt and hit the redial button.

The call connected almost right away, but
there was a momentary delay as the signal traveled into space and then back
down to its destination. “Katherine? I wasn’t expecting you to call so early.”

She tried to answer, but there was no breath
in her lungs to form the words. Her only reply was a mewling sound that turned
into a coughing fit. Black phlegm sprayed across the backlit display of the
phone handset.

There was another maddening pause, and then
the tiny speaker erupted with a strident: “Katherine!”

Dark clouds gathered at the edge of her
vision, but the coughing spasm had cleared some of the fluid from her lungs.
She managed to draw a shallow breath and willed herself to speak one last time.

“Richard. I’ve found something.”

CIPHER

ONE

Iraq, 2006

They seemed to materialize out of thin air, like ghosts, or perhaps
more in keeping with the superstitions of the region, like
jinn
—spirits of smokeless fire that inhabit the space between earth
and heaven.

Not that there was anyone around to notice.

Even if the inhabitants of Ramadi had been
inclined to venture out after dark, a curfew was in effect and the streets were
patrolled by a combined force of United States military personnel and soldiers
of the newly reinvented Iraqi Army. At two a.m., anyone wandering the streets
was likely to be shot on sight.

The eight men who moved swiftly and
soundlessly through the night weren’t worried about being discovered. They had
timed their advance perfectly to avoid detection by the patrols, and it was
unlikely that anyone glancing out a window into the darkness would have been
able to distinguish them in their camouflaged uniforms with matching body armor
and helmets. Peering through the monochrome display of their PVS-14
night-vision devices, they advanced to the front of the target house and
assembled in groups of four on either side of the door, bunched together like
coiled serpents preparing to strike, which was more or less exactly what they
were.

The second man in formation to the right of
the door whispered into the lip microphone of his radio headset. “This is
Cipher Six.
By the numbers.
Last
chance.
Go or no-go?
Over.”

The replies crackled in the earpieces of the
headsets worn by all six men.

“Eagle-Eye One. Go.
Over.”

“Eagle-Eye Two.
Go.
Over.”

“Eagle-Eye Three.
Do it.
Over.”

“Cipher
Seven
, good
to go.
Over.”

Cipher Six, a man named Kevin Rainer—formally
Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Rainer, though no one had called him that since he
earned his
green beanie
—nodded, a
gesture that went unnoticed by the other seven men arrayed around the door. The
gesture
was
seen by the three sniper
teams—Eagle-Eye One, Two and Three—who watched over them all from a distance.

The Eagle-Eye snipers were literally able to
see through the walls of the house with their thermal scopes, verifying that only
two occupants were within, but heat signatures could reveal only so much. Were
the men wide awake but lying still on their beds? Would they be instantly alerted
to the presence of intruders and snatch up a handy AK-47 or activate the
detonator on an IED? Were they even the right men?

“Danno, go.”

The third operator in the stacked group on
the left side darted forward and knelt in front of the door. One gloved hand
came up to test the knob. It didn’t move, but Daniel Parker had been expecting
that; he would have been surprised if the door had opened on the first try. On
any other night, he might have blasted the door off its hinges with a shotgun,
used a shaped charge to blow out the latch plate or simply kicked the damn
thing down, but not tonight. This mission demanded a more subtle approach.

Parker took a lock-picking gun from a pouch
on his tactical vest and slid the metal pick into the keyhole. There was a
faint clicking noise as he worked the trigger lever, but a moment later the
cylinder rotated, allowing him to ease the door
open
a
crack. He slid a hand inside the gap, probing for trip wires or some other
booby trap. Finding nothing, he gave the door a push and then spun out of the
way, as Rainer’s team moved fluidly inside.

There was the briefest pause and then
Rainer’s voice whispered across the radio net.
“Room clear.
Move in, Jack.”

Parker fell into line behind his team leader,
Jack Sigler, as the second group filed into the house. All but one of the members
of the first group
were
spread out throughout the
front room in tactical positions. The remaining operator stood guard over a
figure that lay face down and motionless on a mattress in the corner, his hands
secured behind his back with flexi-cuffs.

Just as they had rehearsed dozens of
times…hundreds of times…Sigler’s team lined up on the corner of the hallway,
and at a gesture from their leader, each advanced into the unknown space
beyond. Sigler was the second man into the room, as was their protocol, and he
broke to the right. Parker, in the number three position, peeled left behind
the point man, Mark Adams. Another mattress was positioned along the far wall
right in front of Parker, and a bearded man lay sprawled out atop it, snoring
loudly.

Sigler and the fourth man in their stack,
Casey Bellows, visually scanned the rest of the room, while Adams moved
directly toward the sleeping man, with Parker close behind him. A narrow beam
of green-tinged light—invisible to the unaided eye—lanced from the AN/PAQ4
targeting laser mounted on the upper receiver of Adams’s suppressed Heckler &
Koch HK416 assault rifle. As seen through the night-vision devices each member
of the team wore, it appeared as a bright,
wavering
point on the supine man’s forehead.

The sleeper stirred and opened his eyes.

Adams froze in mid-step. Below the brilliant
spot of the laser, a pair of white dots appeared—the man’s pupils, fully
dilated and reflecting only the infrared spectrum of light—staring right back
at Parker.

Then the man rolled over onto his side,
facing the wall.

Parker didn’t exhale the breath he was
holding. Maybe the man was still asleep, maybe he was just playing possum;
either way, in another three seconds he would either be bound and gagged, or
bagged and tagged. Parker activated his own PAQ4, aiming at the back of the
man’s head, as Adams moved in for the capture. Before the man could even begin
to wake up, he was flipped onto his stomach. The flexi-cuffs were pulled tight
around his wrists and a strip of olive drab ‘100 mile an hour’ tape was slapped
over his mouth, to preemptively silence his uncomprehending protests and cries
of alarm.

Adams gave a thumbs-up signal, indicating
that the captive was under control, after which
Sigler’s
voice
whispered across the net: “Room secure.”

“Roger,” Rainer answered. “Cipher Seven, we
are ready for pick-up.
Over.”

Cipher Seven, Doug Pettit, who presently sat
behind the wheel of an up-armored M1151 HMMWV—a Humvee to the rest of the
world—idling quietly with no lights showing, half a mile away, replied immediately.
“Roger, Six. We’re on our way.”

“All right, boys,” Rainer said. “Clean up
time.”

A falsetto voice cooed in Parker’s earpiece:
“Knock, knock.
Housekeeping.”

It was probably Jesse Strickland, who styled
himself the team’s court jester. Someone groaned in response, but that was the
end of it. The team went to work. Parker lowered his assault rifle, leaving Adams
to look after the prisoner. He took a large green nylon pouch—a standard
military-use body bag—from a pocket. He held it open so that Sigler could begin
dropping stuff in. Everything but the furniture went into the bag: loose papers,
books, articles of clothing and even a collection of empty soda bottles. There
was no telling what might be worthwhile, and this was not the time or place to
make such judgments. There would be plenty of time to sort through it all later,
when they were back safely behind the wire.

Thirty seconds later, the eight men, along
with two captives and three bags full of what might or might not be important
evidence, hustled from the door of the house to a row of waiting Humvees.
Parker heaved his burden through the rear door of the fourth vehicle in line
and then climbed inside, slamming the heavy door shut and engaging the combat
locks. Sigler settled into the front passenger seat and secured his door.

There was another round of radio check-ins,
with each driver reporting their readiness, and then the convoy pulled away.
Despite being in armored vehicles, the team remained vigilant. The mission had
gone flawlessly to this point, but the last thing any of them wanted to do was
jinx things with a premature round of self-congratulation. It took only a
single roadside IED to ruin an otherwise perfect outing. They avoided the known
patrol routes, where insurgents most often targeted occupation forces, and
instead risked a course that led them through neighborhoods that were known to
be sympathetic to the opposition, reasoning—or rather hoping—that
Hajji
would be less likely to blow
things up on his own doorstep. Nevertheless, every man in the team knew that no
amount of preparation and planning could guarantee success; luck always played
a part.

This time, their luck held. Twenty minutes
later, they rolled under the arch that guarded the entrance to Camp Blue
Diamond. The mission had gone flawlessly. They had captured both of the al-Awda
couriers and gathered a ton of evidence, without firing a single shot…or being
fired at.

It was a great way to end their four-month
deployment to Iraq.