The Tide (Book 5): Iron Wind Read online

  The Tide:

  Iron Wind

  (The Tide Series Volume 5)

  Anthony J Melchiorri

  February, 2017

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Books by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Prologue

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  -12-

  -13-

  -14-

  -15-

  -16-

  -17-

  -18-

  -19-

  -20-

  -21-

  -22-

  -23-

  -24-

  -25-

  -26-

  -27-

  -28-

  -29-

  -30-

  -31-

  -32-

  -33-

  -34-

  -35-

  -36-

  -37-

  -38-

  -39-

  -40-

  -41-

  -42-

  -43-

  -44-

  -45-

  -46-

  -47-

  -48-

  -49-

  -Epilogue-

  Also by Anthony J Melchiorri

  About the Author

  Books by Anthony J Melchiorri

  The Tide Series

  The Tide (Book 1)

  Breakwater (Book 2)

  Salvage (Book 3)

  Deadrise (Book 4)

  Iron Wind (Book 5)

  The Eternal Frontier

  Eternal Frontier (Book 1)

  Edge of War (Coming 2017)

  Shattered Dawn (Coming 2017)

  Black Market DNA

  Enhancement (Book 1)

  Malignant (Book 2)

  Variant (Book 3)

  Fatal Injection

  Other Books

  The God Organ

  The Human Forged

  Darkness Evolved

  The Tide: Iron Wind

  Copyright © 2017 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: February 2017

  http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

  Cover Design: Eloise Knapp Design

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Prologue

  Seven Days After the Huntress’s Escape from the Chesapeake Bay

  Sun glinted off the low, rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Dominic Holland supposed the open sea wasn’t so different from the Sahara. It was unforgiving. Desolate. Nothing to drink for hundreds of miles. But to him, it was a second home. Maybe, if he was being honest, his first home. There was nothing left for him on land. General Kinsey’s people had ensured that when they’d left him and the Hunters for dead, then opened fire on his ship when he had taken the Huntress back from them.

  Dom had insisted that his crew avoid killing any of the Coast Guard who had pursued the ship. The decision had taken a toll on the Huntress, contributing to her current sorry state. But neither the ship nor its crew would let a few mechanical challenges stop them now. Below deck, engineers worked to patch the holes in the hull, bolting and welding temporary fixes. Others cleared the wreckage of the ship’s 57mm cannon. The damaged rocket-propelled grenade launcher had been fixed, and the engines had gotten them this far without incident.

  Dom’s daughter, Kara, gripped the deck rail next to him. Wind rushed over her, and her auburn hair danced across the scars covering her face. “How long are we going to just sit here, Dad?”

  “Aren’t you enjoying the vacation?” Dom asked. The crew had needed this brief respite for repairs and rest before they were ready to get going again. She was no different. His little girl was as much a battle-hardened veteran as any of his Hunters now.

  “As much as I like floating around in the middle of nowhere, I’m guessing we didn’t just come all the way out here to give up,” she said.

  “Giving up is the absolute last thing we’re going to do.” Dom leaned away from the rail and jerked his chin toward the hatch. “Come on.”

  With Kara following, he went down the ladders to the passageway and entered the medical bay.

  “Afternoon,” he said, nodding to Tammy and Rich Weaver, then Alex Li. They each offered warm smiles and soft hellos. The Weavers’ son, Connor, gave him an enthusiastic wave. Dom regretted taking the survivors from Boston to sea with them like this, now that the crew of the Huntress were fugitives, but he’d had no choice. They were still too weak to endure any extreme interrogation tactics like the ones used on Fort Detrick’s acting garrison commander Jacob Shepherd. Besides, between the three of them, they had nursing, clinical psychology, and research experience. They might prove useful yet—once they’d fully recovered from their near-death experience in Boston.

  Spencer Barrett dozed in another bed. He had finally received the medical attention he had so desperately needed for the dozens of Drooler acid burn wounds that had scorched his flesh. The other patient beds were empty.

  That emptiness reminded Dom of the two Hunters they’d lost. Both Ivan and Scott’s remains had been buried at sea. He bowed his head for a moment, silently thanking them for their sacrifice, before he knocked on the hatch to the laboratory. Dr. Lauren Winters waved them in.

  “How’s progress?” he asked.

  As always, Lauren was wearing a white lab coat and blue nitrile gloves. She held a vial in her gloved hand. “This is the first batch of the drug based on Kara’s FoldIt findings. We’re about to perform cell culture tests right now. If it works in those”—she indicated a few small plastic dishes in the biosafety cabinet—“we’ll have real proof that it can prevent an Oni Agent infection.”

  “Excellent,” Dom said. Then a thought crossed his mind. “You know what? Every nasty thing we’ve run into has been given a name. The Amanojaku Project, the Oni Agent, Skulls, Droolers, Goliaths. How about naming something good for once?”

  Lauren bobbed her head in agreement. “Something that inspires hope.”

  “What about Operation Phoenix,” Kara said. “This is our chance to rise from the ashes, right?”

  “I like it,” Lauren said.

  “Operation Phoenix it is,” Dom said. “I can’t think of anything better. Our ship is in shambles, half the crew is in bandages, and civilization as we know it is gone. But we haven’t given up. We’ll keep fighting back with every weapon we have. If that isn’t rising from the ashes, I don’t know what is.”

  Nearby, the rest of Lauren’s team worked at their cramped lab benches. Sean McConnelly was scrolling through data on a computer monitor while Divya Karnik prepared another cell culture. Sean appeared slightly boyish with the smattering of freckles across his face hinting at his Irish heritage. With her black hair tied back and the khaki shirt collar poking from under her lab coat, Divya looked like she may as well have just returned from one of her stin
ts serving in a makeshift medical office, treating patients in impoverished areas stricken with tropical diseases like Ebola and dengue that threatened to swell into epidemic proportions. Peter Mikos was hunched over a lab notebook, scribbling furiously. His dark hair, speckled with gray, had grown long and wild, and it whipped about as he wrote, making him look a bit like a Greek Einstein. Dom gestured to the new member of the medical team, who was peering over Peter’s shoulder. “I see you’ve found some additional help.”

  “Navid’s been great,” Lauren said. “I know he hasn’t even finished his PhD, but he has some ideas about how to design a delivery vehicle to make sure the, uh, Phoenix Compound permeates the blood-brain barrier.”

  As if sensing they were talking about him, Navid Ghasemi looked up. Bandages and splints still covered the hand that had been busted in Boston. He waved and then caught Kara’s eye. Blushing, he ducked his head and resumed comparing notes with Peter. Dom raised a brow, and Kara rolled her eyes.

  Interesting, he thought. He’d have to keep an eye on the young researcher. Then again, Kara was more than capable of taking care of herself.

  Satisfied with the team’s progress, Dom left the medical bay with Kara still acting as his shadow. The click of claws against the metal deck echoed down the corridor. Normally a sound like that set Dom’s nerves on fire and sent adrenaline surging through his vessels. But this time, he knew the noise belonged to a beast that was far friendlier than she was ferocious. He bent to scratch between Maggie’s ears. She jumped excitedly, determined to lick his face.

  “Down, Maggie!” Sadie said, grabbing the golden retriever’s collar.

  “Where are you two headed?” Dom asked.

  “Maggie’s getting cabin fever, so I’m taking her to the cargo hold to play catch.”

  “Don’t get into any trouble.” Dom tousled Sadie’s hair.

  She wrinkled her nose at him and ducked away, but Dom saw she was smiling. Bouncing a tennis ball against the deck, she led Maggie down the passageway and disappeared through the hatch to the cargo hold.

  “I’m going to join them,” Kara said.

  “Sounds good.” Dom smiled as he watched her jog to catch up with Sadie and Maggie. But as she disappeared into the cargo hold, her question still lingered on his mind: Where to now?

  He glanced at his smartwatch. It was almost time to meet Samantha Hamlin and Chao Li in the electronics workshop. He hoped to find an answer to Kara’s question. Samantha was wearing a pair of headphones, and from them, the tinny echoes of heavy metal music drifted. Chao was at his keyboard, squinting at a map of the world spread across several monitors. Meredith Webb stood at his shoulder. At the third desk, Adam Galloway’s Watchmen figures still stood vigil over his hibernating computer.

  The two comm specialists seemed so engrossed in their work they missed Dom’s entrance, but Meredith did not. She strode over to Dom with a grin on her face. Half her head had been shaved for surgery, giving her a punk-rock, warrior-goddess look. White bandages were wrapped around her temple. Lauren had tried to keep her in the medical bay, but as soon as Meredith could stand, she’d insisted on getting back to work.

  “You are not going to believe what these two found,” she said.

  Dom’s heart skipped a beat. “Did they locate Frank?” Every time Dom saw the Coast Guard helicopter on the helipad that had been left behind when they retook the ship, he was reminded that he’d failed to bring their pilot home.

  A glum expression replaced Meredith’s grin. “No, not yet. Commander Shepherd and Midshipman Kaufman are trying their connections at Kent. But so far, nothing.”

  “Damn,” Dom said.

  “We’ll find him,” she said. “I’m sure of it. After what Samantha and Chao have managed to do over the past few days, I have no doubt about it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “How’s it feel to be breaking out the old CIA skills?”

  Meredith huffed. “They’re hardly old. I was sleuthing around until the day of the outbreak.”

  Samantha took off her headphones and turned around, apparently noticing him for the first time. “Hey, Captain. What’s up?”

  He nodded a greeting at the techies. “Meredith tells me you’ve uncovered something I might be interested in. Let’s hear it.”

  “We were able to route into several government networks, thanks to the devices we confiscated from the Coasties before kicking their asses off our ship,” Chao said. “Their cybersecurity is pathetic, and Meredith helped us get through the CIA firewalls.”

  “Between the three of us,” Samantha said, “I think we found some deep shit.”

  Dom chuckled; Samantha was the one member of his crew who’d never quite grasped the formal address owed to her captain—and he wouldn’t have it any other way. “And exactly how deep does this shit go?”

  Chao clicked something on his computer, and a world map projected across the bulkhead. A spiderweb of colored lines spread from most major cities.

  “Each line signifies the direction of the outbreak,” Chao said. “We’ve identified several places where we think the Oni Agent was first introduced. We still don’t know why or how it was done, but we pieced this together from Sean’s epidemiological data.”

  Dom nodded thoughtfully. “This is good work,” he said.

  “We’re not done yet. Here’s where it gets interesting.” Chao zoomed in on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus. Each was now displayed in a separate box. Then, on the opposite side of the screen, he showed Washington, Beijing, London, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo. “Notice anything different?”

  Dom squinted. On the side with Washington, he saw straightforward waves of outbreak, like the ripples of a pebble thrown into a lake. It was an obvious trend of reported deaths, emergencies, infections, and news starting from those major cities and spreading through suburbia and beyond. On the Moscow side, the spread wasn’t as clean. Multiple remote cities and towns hundreds of miles from the Russian capital had reported massive deaths at the same time Moscow itself had declared a state of emergency. There were no clear-cut stages of the spreading pandemic. Instead, it looked more like someone had taken a giant shotgun and sprayed scattershot across the map.

  This isn’t right, Dom thought. “Where did Sean pull his epidemiological data?”

  “Mostly from government agencies or news reports,” Chao replied.

  “Either the Oni Agent outbreak spread differently in Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, or something very odd is going on,” Dom said. “I find it hard to believe those small villages miles outside Moscow and Baghdad were targeted at the same time as other major cities across the globe.”

  “That’s what we thought, too,” Meredith said.

  “The alternative is that some of these government reports and news stories were fabricated,” Dom said.

  “Completely made up,” Chao agreed.

  Dom followed this thought to its logical conclusion. “Which means someone was trying to throw people off their scent.”

  “Looks that way to me,” Meredith said. “At first I wasn’t ready to put on my tinfoil hat. I still wanted to know how David Lawson was involved in all this. My old boss was acting suspicious since before the outbreak.”

  Dom scratched the stubble along his chin. Lawson had tried to get Meredith off the case when it had first come across her desk. “You still think he might be a double agent?”

  “We started snooping down that route,” Samantha said. She took a swig of her energy drink and crushed the empty can. Dom wondered briefly how many cans she had left in her stockpile, and what would happen when she ran out. He didn’t want to be around when she did. “It seemed like David Lawson was suspect numero uno. He’s been around the CIA long enough that he could’ve been the one to move the Amanojaku Project undercover when the US stopped its bioweapons research programs.”

  “But by the looks on your faces, you don’t think Lawson was the mastermind behind this,” Dom said.

  “Yeah, not
so much,” Samantha replied. “Remember the memo that started this whole mess?”

  Dom nodded. He’d never forget that first ominous message regarding the International Biologics at Sea Laboratory. That was what had caused Meredith to send them to the IBSL in the first place. They’d never determined who had sent Meredith that message.

  Samantha’s eyes narrowed. “Lawson got one of those messages too.”

  “I need to see this.” Dom strode to her computer, and she twisted the monitor so he could view it.

  “This was sent to Lawson shortly before Meredith received her memo. It seemed to originate from the CIA director’s encrypted email address, which we now know to have been a fake trail.”

  CLASSIFIED: DAVID LAWSON: EYES ONLY

  CIA Officer Meredith Webb may be involved in abandoned biological weapons program and may be complicit with contracting organization informally identified as “Hunters.” Contractors operate out of stealth sea vessel, location unknown. Scientists aboard vessel. Technical personnel may or may not be operating under their own volition—potential hostage situation. Webb suspected of treason and/or seditious conspiracy.

  “Holy shit,” Dom said. His heart felt like it had dropped out of his chest and plummeted straight through the deck. “How in the hell did they get intel on us?”

  Meredith ran her hand through what was left of her red hair. “I don’t have a clue. We’ve been played. Lawson, me, all of us. We’ve been played big time.”

  “And we’re not the only ones,” Chao said. “A few days before the outbreak, five members of CIRO, the closest thing Japan has to a CIA, committed suicide, and three more were reported missing. Six people we suspected of being MI6 agents were murdered. The executive of France’s Directorate-General for External Security was arrested, and their minister of defense received a vote of no confidence. China’s minister of state security and twelve other officers in the ministry were executed. The list goes on.”

  “The only reason we didn’t hear about it sooner was because, well, the outbreak kind of put a stop to the media,” Samantha said.

  “This is insane,” Dom said. A sudden rage filled him, and he slammed his clenched fists on Samantha’s desk. “Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Russia. We’ve taken missions in all those countries. Everything was supposed to be completely covert, and we never got caught. So how were we found out? Do we have any idea who knew about our connection with Meredith?”