The Savage Dead (16 page)

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SAPD Officer Manuel Garza led Juan out to the parking garage and pointed at a patrol car. “That's mine,” he said.

Juan went to the front passenger door, but the cop stopped him.

“No,” he said. “You ride in the back.”

Garza gave him a challenging look, but Juan only shrugged and got in the back. It wasn't worth making an issue of it.

The officer had the car going before Juan even had a chance to find his seat belt. As soon as they cleared the parking garage, the officer hit his lights and sirens and smoked up the tires getting them through downtown traffic. He took a corner hard, throwing Juan into the door and then grinning into the rearview mirror.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“No problem,” Juan answered, still holding on to his patience, but only just.

The officer got them to US Highway 90 West and picked up speed. They shot by the other cars on the freeway, the police car heaving like a ship at sea over the uneven surface of the road. At one point, Juan glanced at the speedometer to see the car was topping 120 miles per hour, very close to the Crown Victoria's top speed. He almost said something, but Officer Garza was showing off. Anything he did say would only encourage Garza more.

Garza's attitude changed though when they turned into the main gates at Lackland Air Force Base. Traffic trying to enter the base had been directed to the curb. Armed Security Forces police were manning the gates with a fleet of police cars standing by and at least thirty soldiers with rifles flanking the gates.

“Whoa,” Garza said. “Is all this really for you?”

“Looks like it,” Juan said.

A Security Forces E7 with a rifle flagged them down. Officer Garza lowered his window and the airman leaned in, checking the backseat.

“Are you Special Agent Juan Perez?”

“I am.”

The airman spoke into his radio and then gestured to Officer Garza. “Follow those cars there.”

Their escort led them directly to the flight line, where a dozen F-16s waited in a silent row. “Oh, that is so cool,” Officer Garza said. “I see those things flying out of here all the time, but I've never been this close to them before. They're beautiful.”

“That they are,” Juan said. The patrol car's back doors wouldn't open. “Hey, you mind letting me out?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry.”

Garza got out and opened Juan's door. As Juan got out, Garza stared all around, his eyes shining with wonder.

“This is so cool,” he said. He turned his attention on Juan. “Hey, listen, about earlier . . .”

“Don't mention it,” Juan said. “Thanks for the ride.”

An aircrew chief and a man in a pilot's G-suit came over to them. The chief handed Juan a helmet. “See if that fits, sir. It needs to be snug but not uncomfortable.”

Juan tried it on and nodded.

“Excellent,” the man said. “This is Lt. Colonel Decker. You'll be flying with him today.”

Juan extended his hand. “Good to meet you, colonel.”

“You, too, Agent Perez. Are you ready to go? My orders are to get you to Truax Field ASAP.”

“Yes, sir, I'm ready.”

“Outstanding.” He pointed to a T-38 Talon standing by on the flight line. “That's us there.”

The aircrew leader tapped Juan on the shoulder and held out a parachute. The man tried to help him with it, but Juan didn't need it. He slipped into it easily and pulled the straps down snugly with a practiced motion.

“You've worn one of those before, I see,” said Decker.

“I've jumped out of a few planes in my day,” Juan said.

“Well, hopefully you won't be jumping out of this one.”

“Amen to that. Do I sit in the back?”

“Unless you know how to fly it, yeah. When you climb the ladder, you'll see a rail on the right side of the cockpit. You can hang your helmet on that while you get in.”

Juan climbed the ladder and hopped into the backseat. The cockpit was small, but at five-foot-nine and a hundred sixty pounds, Juan had little trouble fitting into it. The crew chief helped him strap in, threading his shoulder straps, crotch straps, and parachute key onto the lap belt.

“Pull that tongue over there on your right side and click it in here,” the chief said. “Good.” He pointed to the pull straps hanging off of Juan's chest. “Now tighten everything down.”

When he was snug in the harness, the crew chief handed him his helmet. Juan kept his hands out of the way as the man connected his oxygen hose and his communications gear. Then the crew chief tapped Juan's helmet. “You're all set,” he yelled. “Thumbs up if you're good to go.”

Juan stuck up both thumbs.

“Colonel Decker,” the crew chief said, yelling forward. “Package is tied down.”

“Roger that,” Decker answered.

Juan heard him going over his preflight inspection, checking switches and whatever else he was doing up there. Then the right engine spooled up and a moment later the left. Then Decker reached up and closed the canopy. The red lights on Juan's instrument panels went out. The cockpit began to pressurize and Juan felt it in his ears, like someone was stuffing cotton in them.

The next time Juan heard Decker's voice, it was through the earphones built into his helmet. “Agent Perez, we're about to take off. This is going to be rough so hang on. If the Gs get to you, just grit your teeth and tighten your ab muscles. If you pass out, don't worry, it's only temporary.”

“Great. Looking forward to it.”

“That's the spirit. Okay, hang on.”

Decker pointed them toward the runway, got the all clear from the tower, and let go of the brakes. A second later, a roar filled the cabin as Decker activated the afterburners and the plane lurched forward.

Riding in the police car had been unnerving. Officer Garza had deliberately thrown him around the backseat, trying to make a point. He'd brought the car up to its full speed for the same reason, and had almost succeeded in making Juan seasick.

But the police cruiser fell a good deal short of the performance envelope of the T-38 Talon, and when the plane started down the runway, Juan felt the acceleration all the way down his spine. The pressure was only the beginning though, for as soon as they lifted off the tarmac, Decker turned the airplane straight up and they took off like a rocket, the city spiraling away below them. Juan had seen pilots in Iraq and Afghanistan doing the same thing after takeoff. He'd been told it was to keep them from getting hit by surface-to-air missiles. It always looked like fun to him, from the ground. But sitting in the backseat, it was a different story. He felt his eyes rolling up into his head. He could barely breathe, and he wasn't sure if he passed out or not. It was hard to tell.

“You okay, Agent Perez?” Decker asked, and Juan figured that he must have passed out, judging from the humor in the man's voice.

“Yeah, right as rain,” Juan said, a little shakily.

“Outstanding. It gets smoother from here on out.”

Juan was still trying to catch his breath. Eventually, he managed to say, “Okay. That's fine.”

Decker laughed. “Okay, then. Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

 

 

They touched down at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi less than thirty minutes later, a little after ten o'clock in the morning. It was an overcast day for Corpus Christi, but still hot, and the smells of the Gulf and the sand and the gas fumes from the airplanes were almost overpowering. They had a car waiting for him. A Navy lieutenant came up to him from the car and said, “Are you Special Agent Perez?”

“I am.”

“This way, sir. Commander Sanger is waiting for you.”

Juan waved at Decker, and then followed the young lieutenant to the waiting car. The installation was a sprawling complex of cracked concrete airfields broken up by palm trees and air hangars. Built in 1941 to train naval aviators, its mission had expanded over the years to include training for the Marines, Air Force, and the Coast Guard, not to mention air force pilots from allied nations around the world. As a result, the buildings they passed carried an odd assortment of affiliations ranging from Navy, Air Force, the Marines, even, Juan was glad to see, a few for the Army.

“This is us up here, sir,” said the lieutenant, pointing to what appeared to be a worn-down World War II hangar. There were no signs to indicate what was inside, just weeds around the foundation and peeling paint on the walls.

The lieutenant led Juan inside through a side door and Juan was surprised to see that much of the hangar had been converted to office cubicles. There had to be a hundred people in here at least.

“Looks like the drone program's expanded a lot since I was in,” Juan said.

“When did you get out?”

“About twelve years ago.”

“Yep,” the lieutenant said. “The program would have been just getting started then. These days, we fly missions all around the world.”

“All controlled from right here?”

“Everything in our group, yes, sir. That's about three thousand missions a year, mainly over Latin America, but we control some of the missions flying over Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf here as well. Ah, this is Commander Sanger here.”

Glen Sanger was short and slight of build, with bad acne scars on his cheeks, and Juan's first impression was that he was looking at a NASA flight engineer rather than a commander in the U.S. Navy. His handshake was a limp fish and for a moment Juan thought he was going to have to wade through a bunch of nerdspeak to get the information he needed, but there was a trace of a West Texas twang in Sanger's accent. It was subdued by a college education, but still there. And he was surprisingly direct.

“Agent Perez, what kind of horror show are you running?”

“Excuse me?” Juan said.

“I'm talking about what's happening on that ship. What in the hell is going on out there?”

“I thought that's what you were supposed to tell me, commander. What have you seen?”

Sanger looked past Juan to his young lieutenant. “You didn't brief him?”

“No, sir,” the lieutenant said. “I haven't said anything to him about it. I thought you'd want to do that.”

Juan turned his attention back to Sanger. “Well?” he asked.

“It'd be easier to show you.”

Sanger led him to a cubicle where a big biker-looking guy with graying black hair sat in front of a bank of computer monitors. The Predators had just come into play during Juan's final days in Delta Force, and he remembered watching video feed from some of the first generation Predators they'd used while supporting CIA operations in Latin America. The Predator feeds were almost always grainy and poorly focused. And there was a choppiness to them that could give you motion sickness if you stared at them too long. Those early drones were severely limited in both range and time over target. They could usually manage a four-hundred-and-fifty mile outbound journey, remain over a target for twelve to fourteen hours, and then return. Good, but not great.

He'd been told that the drones had made significant improvement since then, both in terms of the intel they returned and their time over target capabilities. The current generation of drones, from what he'd been told, could stay over a target area for upwards of forty hours, and that after making an outbound trip of seven hundred and fifty miles or more. And from what he was seeing on the monitors, there was no doubt the quality of intel had improved even more than he'd been led to believe.

He leaned forward, studying the screen.

What he saw was an immense cruise ship, dead in the water, leaking smoke from half a dozen places along its length. He could see a few shapes moving along the deck, but couldn't make them out.

He pointed to one of the forms. “Can you get me a close-up of that?” he asked.

“Sure,” the biker guy said.

The feed zoomed in on the figure. “Oh, God,” Juan said. The man in the center of the monitor was hobbling down the deck on a leg that looked like it had been stripped of the flesh down to the bone. Juan could barely tell the color of the man's clothes because they were so stained with blood. But his face was what surprised Juan the most. There was no emotion there, no pain. He just trundled on down the deck, oblivious to the world, and even to his own misery.

“What in the hell is going on?” Commander Sanger asked. “You tell me, Agent Perez, what the hell is that?”

“Something you'll wish you'd never seen,” Juan said.

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number that put him through to Mr. Crouch.

After two rings, it was picked up.

“Mr. Crouch, this is Agent Perez.”

“Go ahead.”

“I'm watching the drone feed now. The ship is infected, sir.”

“Okay, stand by.”

Juan stood there, watching the burning wreck of the
Gulf Queen
and the living dead wandering her decks for four minutes. No one in the room spoke. They all stood staring at Juan, waiting, hoping to hear what was being said on the other end of the phone.

After almost four minutes, Mr. Crouch returned.

“I've arranged with SOCOM to send a detail your way. We have a Delta Force unit working on an oil rig hostage recapture drill out at Hurlburt Air Base. I'm diverting them your way.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

There was a weighty pause before Mr. Crouch answered.

“Listen, Juan . . .”