The Valley of Shadows - eARC Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Valley of Shadows – eARC

  John Ringo and Mike Massa

  Look for the final version on November 6, 2018

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  The Valley of Shadows

  John Ringo and Mike Massa

  From his corner office on the forty-fourth floor of the Bank of the Americas tower on Wall Street, Tom Smith, global managing director for security, could see the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park—and a ravening zombie horde.

  Officially, Smith was paid to preserve the lives and fortunes of employees, billionaires, and other clients. And with an implacable virus that turned the infected into ravenous zombies tearing through the city, the country, and the world, his job just got a lot harder.

  Good thing Smith, late of the Australian special forces, isn’t a man to give up easily. But saving civilization is going to take more than the traditional banking toolbox of lawyers, guns, and money. Smith needs infected human spinal tissue to formulate a vaccine—and he needs it by the truckload. To get it, he will have to forge a shady alliance with both the politicians of the City of New York and some of its less savory entrepreneurs.

  But all of his back-alley dealing may amount to nothing if he can’t stave off the fast-moving disease as it sweeps across the planet, leaving billions dead in its wake. And if he fails, his only fallback is an incomplete plan to move enough personnel to safe havens and prepare to restart civilization.

  What’s more, there are others who have similar plans—and believe it or not, they’re even less charitable than a Wall Street investment banker. Sooner or later Smith will have to deal with them.

  But first he has to survive the Fall.

  BAEN BOOKS by JOHN RINGO

  BLACK TIDE RISING: Under a Graveyard Sky • To Sail a Darkling Sea • Islands of Rage and Hope • Strands of Sorrow • Black Tide Rising (with Gary Poole) • The Valley of Shadows (with Mike Massa)

  LEGACY OF THE ALDENATA: A Hymn Before Battle • Gust Front • When the Devil Dances • Hell’s Faire • The Hero (with Michael Z. Williamson) • Cally’s War (with Julie Cochrane) • Watch on the Rhine (with Tom Kratman) • Yellow Eyes (with Tom Kratman) • The Tuloriad (with Tom Kratman) • Sister Time (with Julie Cochrane) • Honor of the Clan (with Julie Cochrane) • Eye of the Storm

  MONSTER HUNTER MEMOIRS (with Larry Correia): Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge • Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners • Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints

  TROY RISING: Live Free or Die • Citadel • The Hot Gate

  COUNCIL WARS: There Will Be Dragons • Emerald Sea • Against the Tide • East of the Sun, West of the Moon

  PALADIN OF SHADOWS: Ghost • Kildar • Choosers of the Slain • Unto the Breach • A Deeper Blue • Tiger by the Tail (with Ryan Sear)

  SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES: Princess of Wands • Queen of Wands

  INTO THE LOOKING GLASS: Into the Looking Glass • Vorpal Blade (with Travis S. Taylor) • Manxome Foe (with Travis S. Taylor) • Claws that Catch (with Travis S. Taylor)

  EMPIRE OF MAN (with David Weber): March Upcountry and March to the Sea (collected in Empire of Man) • March to the Stars and We Few (collected in Throne of Stars)

  STANDALONE TITLES: The Last Centurion • Citizens (ed. with Brian M. Thomsen) • Von Neumann’s War (with Travis S. Taylor) • The Road to Damascus (with Linda Evans)

  To purchase these and all Baen Book titles in e-book format, please go to www.baen.com.

  The Valley of Shadows

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by John Ringo and Mike Massa

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8355-1

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First printing, November 2018

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  tk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Dedication

  As always

  For Captain Tamara Long, USAF

  Born: May 12, 1979

  Died: March 23, 2003, Afghanistan

  You fly with the angels now.

  Foreword

  The decline of our shared cultural literacy means that we live with many sayings whose origins aren’t widely remembered, even where documentation is easy to find. Good examples are legion—especially with regard to sayings rooted in the British maritime tradition. Some sayings go further back, far enough that even in the original Greek or Latin, there are disagreements on the finer points as to what the ancients really meant.

  One such saying revolved around the rarity of salt.

  For all that early civilizations often bordered salt water, pure concentrated mineral salt was rare. Prior to the advent of canning and refrigeration, salt was also critical for food preparation and preservation. Poorly preserved food meant poisoning or death. The inability to safely store food could mean famine. Salt was so valuable that during the Phoenician period it was accepted as currency, alongside gold and silver, remaining precious into the Roman era. Moving this salt required good roads and reliable soldiers. A network of special roads was built to secure and rapidly move salt into the Roman Empire. Guarded and often built by Roman soldiers, the Via Salarium drew its name from the trade it carried: salt. Pliny the Elder recorded in his work The Natural History that Roman soldiers were often paid in salt, giving rise to the term that we use today, “salary.” The financial resources used by a commander to operate his military forces in a given theater of operations, whether he was garrisoning or expanding territory, were known as Salarium. They included both specie and salt, and these were used to pay for the business costs of the units under the general’s control.

  As with any business venture (and war was Rome’s most profitable business), there were always problems. Sometimes soldiers found that they were serving under a dishonest, politically optimistic or just plain idiot of a general (See: The Battle of Cannae). But whether legionnaire, centurion or tribune, once you joined the legio, you agreed to follow all orders and remain loyal to your commanders for the duration of the campaign, whether successful or disastrous. You were being paid to do the job to the best of your ability even unto death. Soldiers might rationalize their desire to be somewhere else, or working for someone else, but if you “took the salt,” you were committed, come hell or high water.

  A legionnaire who stood by his commitment and honored the bargain was said to be “worth his salt.” That legionnaire placed his honor,
in the form of his commitment to his word, above all other considerations.

  Today, soldiers who transition to civilian life bring with them concepts about personal honor and commitment which though not unknown outside the ranks, are not as common as they are inside the military. They tend to take the matter of promises to their employer and to themselves very seriously. Accepting “the salt” is still a thing, and seeing a veteran “stick” with a firm even when things start to slide is pretty common.

  What does it take to make him reconsider?

  Prologue

  They took care to periodically lock a school child’s bicycle to a post along the executive’s predictable commute route. After a while, the careful security sweep along the route simply noted it as an expected, unremarkable part of the environment. Then the attackers hid the bomb in a knapsack hung on the back of the bike.

  The explosively formed projectile was triggered by an infrared detection beam that counted past the lead security car, which in response to threats had been added to the detail a week earlier. The charge calculation took into account the armor placement on the hardened Mercedes sedan and successfully penetrated just below the thickest protective belt, perfectly breaching the rear passenger compartment. The blast threw the car off course, starting a fire that would eventually consume the vehicle. Not that it mattered.

  The terrorists knew their target. They calculated the timing to a hair. Their patient, thorough intelligence knew all about the escort vehicles and the Mercedes’s armor. Alfred Herrhausen, then the Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank A.G., died on the scene from blast and fragmentation wounds created by a bomb exquisitely tailored just for him.

  It didn’t matter whether the bomb belonged to the last active terror cell of the Red Army Faction striking against a hated symbol of capitalism or to the East German Stasi trying to delay national reunification or to some other attacker. The shockwaves that Herrhausen’s death sent not just throughout Germany, but through the banking industry in general, were severe. Banks had long known that everybody wanted what they held—but a sophisticated bomb attack using infrared trigger beams and explosively formed penetrators and backed by painstaking research was beyond their ken. Rather suddenly, the traditional answer to filling banking security leadership roles with retired cops didn’t seem like quite enough. The 1989 attack that killed Herrhausen had another victim. The old school of financial services security died that day too. Its death just took a little while longer to register.

  Bankers have money and brains, and can apply both in their own self-interest when appropriately motivated. The best bankers learn to make their decisions ahead of any curve. So it was that, upon learning that the chairman of one of the largest banks had been killed despite the strongest precautions then in existence, the boards of the top investment banks considered alternatives in security. Shortly afterward, their recruiters received new orders.

  Options weren’t deep, but only a few years before, the British Special Air Service, or SAS, commandos had led the recapture of the Falkland Islands. Later, some Iraqi commandos made the professional acquaintance of those same gentlemen during a “dinner party” at the Iranian Embassy in London. Soon after that, the U.S. and U.K. Special Operations units were getting publicity during Desert Storm.

  The time seemed right to do a little poaching, banker style.

  They didn’t know just how well it was going to pay off.

  CHAPTER ONE

  May 15th

  Bank of the Americas Global Headquarters

  Manhattan, New York

  “How the hell did you not see anything until now?”

  Tom Smith was pissed.

  The managing director for Security and Emergency Response at Bank of the Americas, and late of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, had been recruited as a straight-up protective-detail agent by Barclays in the Sydney office. Despite the cultural hindrance of a profile fit enough to prompt the secretary pool at the bank to joke that Clark Kent worked for the Bank, not the paper, he leveraged his ability to rapidly adapt to new and potentially hostile cultures, like those found in parts of the third world or really competitive banks. His attention to detail and discretion had caught the eye of the local managing director and he found himself bumped into the occasional broader duties. After some seasoning in Singapore, he was poached by BotA and eventually promoted into his current role—and his current headache.

  His job was a lot less glamorous than most imagined. The number one role of the BotA Security and Emergency Response (SER) team was to keep the bank trading as long as the market stayed open. The nightmare scenario for any bank wasn’t a robbery, or a kidnapping, or even a bombing. Though unpleasant, those sorts of events were, if not routine, at least well understood. No, true horror would be to be excluded from the market while everyone else was still in it. One of the banks in the World Trade Center had been a leading clearance house for euro-based trades and temporarily ceded the position to another bank as it relocated its operations to a new building after 9/11. It never regained the market and died, not because it lost physical infrastructure and staff to terrorists, but because the competitors scented blood and made a meal of their injured peer.

  Sharks are like that. Banks are smart sharks, the scariest of them all.

  To that end, Tom’s current employer didn’t just set up the traditional doormen and access control, or “Guards and Cards,” security division. Tom oversaw the usual Executive Protection and Building Security, but also directed a bigger team. The Anti-Fraud division fought wire fraud and protected high-value digital payments, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity operated redundant, hardened trading floors and data centers, and the Protective Intelligence, or PI, team, looked deep into their crystal ball to predict what might be coming next.

  They didn’t seem to be doing a very good job.

  “We set up the Vietnamese wet market network,” Tom continued somewhat more mildly. “We have hooks into the CDC and the WHO, and you convinced me to fund permanent networks in North Africa and equatorial America. So, tell me, Paul, why has exactly none of this expensive early warning paid off?”

  Tom looked up from the Daily Intel Brief that PI released before the market opened every day.

  No one likes to be on the carpet and Paul Rune was no exception. As ambitious as he was intelligent, the fit and aspiring VP ran the PI team, having left a senior analyst position at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to give investment banking a go. It paid much better, but like a lot of intel types, he was an information junky. Bank of the Americas funded information access nearly as well as his old job, so he never regretted the move to industry. Usually.

  At the moment he was explaining a possible intel failure in front of his direct report whose nickname was “Thomas the Train Engine,” in part due to his drive to get things done. Also, he was quite large. And at the moment just a tad scary.

  Swallowing, Paul made his case.

  “Boss, we watched all the leading indicators,” Paul said. “I have been tracking the overnight swings in live poultry, not just in Vietnam and Korea, but anywhere there is a wet market for the last thirty-six months.”

  “Wet market,” referring to the “buy it live, take it home butchered” approach, was still the way of shopping for food in much of the world. Also, a really good way to spread disease.

  “We have been getting ready for the monsoon season in Asia, so we have a special watch right now,” Paul continued. “No way is this an avian flu variant that hopped the species barrier somewhere in Asia. No way in hell. We would have seen prices fall off a cliff as local farmers start dumping their birds. The network functions as advertised.”

  “Apparently not this time,” Tom said, crossing his arms. “The first warning—nonexclusive, mind you—that we have is that there are active cases of,” he consulted the brief, “‘potentially fatal, nonspecific flu with similarities to avian influenza’ and that comes from outside the bank. Six cases, including one f
atality in Shanghai. Unconfirmed reports of more in three other cities in Asia. Anything else in Asia from last night?”

  “Nothing yet,” Paul said, squaring his shoulders. “I already sent the order to the Asia-Pacific center to disperse the Tamiflu to avoid local government seizure. The Tokyo and Shanghai bourses closed normally. The LSE has been open for three hours and nothing has twitched. We have a good network in the Gulf and eastern Europe, but nothing so far. And, Boss, we wouldn’t have even this much warning if I hadn’t recruited that analyst in Taiwan last year.”

  “Duly noted,” Tom said drily, “that you were doing your job. But good job on getting the antivirals out right away. Let’s assume that this is just an isolated incident. If there is more, update me ASAP. I’m going to let the chief risk officer know right away. He can decide if this is worth the CEO’s time or not.”

  “Boss, another thing.” Paul wasn’t done, yet. “If we know, you can bet CDC, NIH, USAMRIID and the rest of the usual suspects are already on it. If any release a statement, it could become too late to exercise the first steps for Plan Zeus.”