ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

  Perhaps most conspicuous – nearby, but outside the prison walls – was the giant white circus-tent-looking structure that Park and the sequencer had been hustled off to.

  “Biosciences complex,” Miller said. “Heart of the vaccine research effort. Well, it is now, anyway.”

  Ali turned back to face the British officer. She’d been looking out the blown-out windows of the Joint Operations Center (JOC), which took up most of the top level of the Strategic Headquarters (SHQ) – a large purpose-built structure that also sat on the Common, but backed up against the east walls of the inner prison, facing back in toward the open space. It also rose two stories over the prison walls themselves, so the west side looked down into the prison yards.

  Ali scanned the JOC now, seeing that Fick had stepped away to one of the tactical stations, reviewing something or other over the shoulder of the man who sat there. Over his head and behind she could see a very large digital tactical display that had been smashed to Hell and back. Off to one side of the big room were the shot-out glass walls of offices that looked like they’d belonged to senior commanders. On the carpet outside them she could see rich blood-stains. Ali had heard about the outbreak here. The facility had clearly been cleaned up. But they couldn’t hide the evidence of all that carnage.

  “Who’s in command?” Ali asked, finally.

  But before Miller could respond, three smartly dressed British officers strode in the door, moving with a purpose. They wore British Army combat dress uniforms with berets and side arms. But unlike the rest of the JOC staff, they had bergens slung on their backs. The leader, on whose chest Ali could see the crown and pip of a lieutenant colonel, buttonholed Miller.

  “Been looking for you,” he said.

  Miller turned to Ali, giving her a speak of the devil look. “Captains Hill and Sweeney,” he said. “And Lieutenant Colonel Ryder.” These were the Coldstream Guards officers from Wellington Barracks who, with their multiple tours and ops-center experience in Afghanistan, had appeared as relief for Jameson, just in time for him to stage his suicide mission to Moscow. And now Miller answered Ali’s question. “Colonel Ryder commands.”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “Our regiment’s deploying, and the lads going into action. We have to get back.”

  “Jesus,” said Miller. This obviously wasn’t their first unforeseen change of command, never mind their first setback, and after a second he hardly even looked surprised. “Sir,” he added.

  Ryder’s expression softened. “Honestly, chap, there’s not much fight left to run. It’s every man to the walls now.”

  Miller didn’t try to deny this. He couldn’t.

  Ali thought: So this is what it looks like when an entire military collapses.

  Ryder said, “I would feel better if we could hand over to someone of substantive rank.”

  “Major Khamsi here will take it.”

  This new voice was Fick’s. He was back. Ali gave him a sharp look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Major,” Ryder said, nodding at her, and seeming to notice her for the first time. He also clearly couldn’t work out who or what the hell she was. “What’s your regiment?”

  “USOC,” she answered, meaning the Unified Special Operations Command, the elite special-operations formation of the world’s only remaining military, and where Alpha had been detailed for all two years of the ZA.

  “Very well, then,” Ryder said, snapping her a salute.

  This seemed to solve the mystery of her irregular uniform, lack of rank or unit insignia, and general commando appearance. It also seemed to be good enough for him. USOC had been leading the fight since the start – and they’d definitely operated from a privileged place within the UK military structure.

  “We’re off, then,” Ryder said. “Best of luck to you all.” He and the two captains turned on their heels and exited.

  Ali shook her head sadly. Even in her pre-operator life as a helo pilot and officer with 1st Air Cav, she’d only held the rank of captain. Fick merely shrugged, and tossed his head at her bare assault suit. “What the hell do they know? Just go with it.”

  Ali thought again of Handon’s last words to her.

  And she went with it.

  Culture

  CentCom – Biosciences Complex

  “I’m not a biomedical researcher myself,” Lieutenant Colonel Nesbitt said to Park, looking agitated that the lab techs with their cart couldn’t move any faster across the uneven grass and dirt. Park moved alongside them, his trusty laptop satchel once again slung across his body.

  They were nearly at the Biosciences complex, which loomed over them like some giant pasha’s desert tent. Park was impressed. As they approached it, though, he could see the building looked prefab and temporary. The walls weren’t plastic sheeting, but they definitely weren’t poured concrete, either.

  Nesbitt kept talking. “I am an MD, did my training at Queen Mary, University of London – then ran field hospitals in Afghanistan. Basically, my specialization is the organization of mobile medical ops. And my role here is operational – keep this place running, command the staff, get them, and now you, whatever you need to work. Keep you alive, if necessary.”

  Dr. Park turned his head to regard the uniformed woman beside him – and couldn’t help thinking of Lieutenant Commander Walker, who had run the hospital on the JFK. Whereas Walker had been Amazonian, tall and commanding, but by no means sexless, Nesbitt was blockier and somewhat genderless – just a soldier, really, every inch. And whereas Park knew Walker had ultimately been motivated by compassion, and duty of care to her patients – which was everyone on board the carrier – this officer seemed driven by order and efficiency.

  Park figured that was probably exactly what was needed.

  But then he remembered how LCDR Walker had fought to her last round, her last staff member, fought for every inch of deck in the hospital, all so Park could get away to safety.

  And so he could fulfill his own duty. To the world.

  “You okay?” Nesbitt asked.

  Park realized he’d stopped walking. Nesbitt was looking back at him, holding open the big double doors, which the two techs had just rolled the cart and sequencer through.

  “Yes,” he said, snapping to. “I just need to get to work.”

  It was time to finish this thing.

  * * *

  “Protein purification systems there,” Nesbitt said, pointing, and still walking fast. “Environmental test chambers, electrophysiology suite next to that. A few different protein purification systems. Mass spectrometry over there – ICP-MS, as well as GC-MS.”

  First up on Park’s tour of the complex were the lab facilities, which were down the hall behind a lobby and entrance area. These labs made what he’d had on the JFK look like a high-school chemistry classroom.

  “We’ve also got a much superior genome analyzer to yours,” she said, pointing to what Park could see was a top-of-the-line Illumina gene sequencer. His own, smaller, tabletop Ion PGM was being set up on a lab table beside it. “You’ve got the head start, of course, so we’ll definitely keep yours going. But we’re going to get a fresh virus sample loaded up in ours, race you, and see who wins.” She nodded back toward the lobby, and Park turned to see the bagged-up Patient Zero being carried in by two more personnel in lab smocks. They now had literally billions of samples of the first stage of the virus to sequence.

  “Seconds count,” Nesbitt said. “Obviously.”

  But Park was already walking over to an area that looked more like NASA mission control than mad-scientist lab. He instantly recognized it as a complete and extremely high-end bioinformatics computing cluster. And he knew it was here that he would complete his work, finalizing the vaccine. This was precisely what he needed to finish the job, and his heart thrummed with excitement.

  They were extremely close to victory.

  * * *

  “Bob Towson, Simon Park. Simon, Bob’s our head of fabrication.”

  Park was quic
kly being made to understand that he didn’t just have a billion virus samples and world-class lab facilities to work with. He also had a staff – a big one. Lab techs, assistants, analysts, a small team of virologists and immunologists, a gene-editing manager, lab manager, test specialist, fabricators, even two IT guys and an intern. There were well over fifty people working in there. And Park was getting introduced to a few at a time.

  “Presume we’re looking at a synthetic vaccine design?” Towson said, shaking Park’s hand.

  “Correct.”

  “As soon as it’s finalized, we can start fabricating it here at a very high rate.” He nodded at the high-tech and gleamingly clean assembly line behind him, in the big room just off a hallway past the main labs. “It’s all set up and ready to go.”

  Park nodded, impressed and excited. “Where can I see documentation on your fabrication process?”

  Towson tapped his temple and smiled. “All right up here.”

  Park frowned. He was a big believer that everything should be documented. But maybe there wasn’t time for everything – this was a sprint for survival. He turned to Nesbitt. “After the doses of vaccine are fabricated – what happens to them then?”

  Nesbitt smiled, for the first time since Park had met her.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  * * *

  A great mass of dry air hit Park in the face as he stepped inside, and a cavernous space opened up to either side, and particularly above. Belatedly, he got why the Bio complex was so big. This was the warehouse in the back – and from one side to the other, twenty-foot-tall shelving units disappeared in converging rows and aisles all the way to the unseen rear. On the shelves were stacks of thousands of identical boxes, with big crisp text printed on them.

  “Twenty-five million vaccination kits,” Nesbitt said. “Each has single-use syringes, alcohol wipes, and pre-printed instructions. All that needs doing is to fill the syringes.”

  Park frowned. “Why twenty-five million? I thought there were fifty million survivors in Britain?”

  Nesbitt’s expression reverted to its normal severity. “You will have noticed where industrial civilization more or less packed it up. This was the best we could manage. And it required a massive mobilization of resources, a Herculean effort. Anyway, it’s a start.”

  Left unmentioned by both of them was the outbreak in process, raging all around them outside the walls of London. Another couple of days, and the living population of the British Isles might actually be cut in half.

  “Herr Doktor Motherfucking Park…” The voice that spoke into the dry air of the warehouse was thick with a Slavic accent, drenched in cynicism – and yet somehow tinged with affection, or maybe relief. “Is this place great or what? Like Gustavo’s meth lab underneath the laundromat. You’re a little late to the party, but you can still be Jesse to my Walter White.”

  Park spun in the dim light to face back to the doorway. In it stood a trim and compact man with clunky glasses and a van Dyke beard.

  Oleg Aliyev. The Kazakh.

  * * *

  “What’s the incubation time of this thing?” Park asked him.

  “Fast. Really fast – thirty to sixty minutes.”

  Park whistled. He was looking down through thick glass into the interior of a culturing table. Inside, smeared upon four dozen Petri dishes, Aliyev’s zombie-killing Meningitis Z (MZ) was growing.

  “And the transmission mechanism? Will it go airborne?”

  Aliyev nodded. “It seems to, yes. My testing indicates the pathogen multiplies extremely rapidly in the subject’s brainstem after infection. Also, you know zombies – never shy about shoving and pawing at one another to get through to the living. I expect that once this bug gets going, it will torch through their population like strep at a Taylor Swift concert.”

  “Or freshman dorm flu,” Park said, smiling.

  “Yes. As I said before.” Aliyev well remembered their radio call, when Park had been on an American nuclear supercarrier, and Aliyev had been trapped inside a Russian tank, buried in dead Russian soldiers in the middle of Red Square.

  “So that’s the good news,” Aliyev said. “MZ totally incapacitates, and then utterly destroys, zombies.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “It almost certainly totally kills living people, too. Meningitis is seriously nasty shit.”

  Park knew it well. “So it’s zoonotic to the living? It will transmit across?”

  “I don’t actually know,” Aliyev said. “Haven’t tested it on the living, for probably obvious reasons.” He moved to a second culturing table. “But the other good news is I’ve got a vaccine for MZ, which we can bundle up and distribute with your Hargeisa vaccine. But the other fucking bad news is it’s not a synthetic vaccine like yours, so cannot be mass-fabricated. We can only culture it from the bacterial sample. Which is slower than death.”

  Park exhaled and looked back to the first table. “And also just like the MZ itself. A bacterial culture.”

  “Exactly.” Aliyev regarded the tiny little dollops of his pet pathogen as they grew, like embryos of his children, trying to mature into full-grown and fearsome warriors. “Right now we’ve only got a very small amount, and we’re only getting more at a snail’s pace. So however we weaponize this stuff – we’re going to have to make it count.”

  Park looked up Aliyev. “Does MZ work on runners?”

  Aliyev took his point. The dead had evolved – he’d been introduced to that fact rather pointedly, while running flat-out in circles around Red Square, trying to save his worthless life. “Haven’t tested it. But I don’t see why it shouldn’t.”

  Park paused. “How about Foxtrots?”

  Aliyev looked totally blank. “What the fuck are Foxtrots?”

  Park’s look said: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

  And Aliyev’s disbelieving one back said: It gets WORSE?

  * * *

  “You the Kazakh dude?”

  Park and Aliyev looked up from where they sat reviewing the Hargeisa vaccine design documents on Park’s laptop – and just across from where both sequencers silently churned and analyzed the DNA of the virus, while the two scientists maintained their quiet vigil. Approaching from behind them was one of the CentCom soldiers, a Royal Military Policeman (RMP) in a red beret. Park had noticed several of them standing post outside and around the lab complex, a reassuring presence. This one, like the others, was carrying a rifle – but also holding a big black autoloading shotgun.

  Aliyev’s eyes went wide like a candle-lit cake had just been brought out on his fifth birthday. “My motherfucking Benelli!” He greedily took possession of the weapon. “Where’d you get it?”

  “From the Royal Marines, right before they took off. Evidently one of them grabbed it from the next room over, same time they grabbed you.”

  Aliyev’s eyes narrowed. “So why am I only getting it back now?”

  The RMP shrugged. “Because it’s a bloody beautiful weapon. The bloke who had it was going to keep it, take it into the fight in the north. But his commander saw it, found out it was yours, and said he had to give it back. It’s back.”

  The soldier turned and left.

  Aliyev rose and moved to a corner of the lab, where Park now saw there was a dusty but big and technical-looking black backpack. Aliyev dug into it and came out with a box of shotgun shells. As he walked back, Park noticed the soles of his boots were flapping, barely hanging on. “What the hell happened there?”

  Aliyev sat down. “Minor lab mishap. Don’t ask.”

  Park looked down at his own U.S. Navy issue Durashok boots – to which he had become devoted after they’d saved his life belowdecks with Sarah Cameron. “If we were still on the carrier, I could have got you a pair of these. They’re amazing.”

  “Good for the carrier.” Aliyev sat down and started reloading the shotgun from the box of shells. When the tube magazine was full, he topped up the side-saddle shell carrier on the stock. And then he
shoved a dozen more shells in his pockets.

  Park frowned. “You think you’re going to need that here?”

  “You haven’t seen what I have.”

  Park slightly doubted that whatever Aliyev had been through was worse than what he had. He sure hoped not. And as images of the myriad horrors he’d survived to get to this point in their journey flashed back through his mind, he went back over to his laptop satchel – and he dug out that crowbar, which he had placed inside before exiting the plane.

  Aliyev snorted dismissively. “What in God’s name is that?”

  “Let’s call it my lucky crowbar.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are – Gordon Freeman?”

  Park rolled his eyes. He’d already heard that joke, from Fick. But then he squinted at Aliyev’s spiky hair, clunky black eyeglasses, and van Dyke beard. “Jesus, you’re the one who looks exactly like him.”

  “Fair point.” Aliyev finished his loading operation, checked the safety on the shottie, then went over and propped it carefully in the corner beside the bug-out bag. He seemed happy in his dual identity of super-scientist – and post-Apocalyptic badass. Returning, he looked askance once more at the crowbar. “Well, good luck to you. Hope you survive the goddamned head crabs.”

  * * *

  Barely ten minutes later, as the pair sat in silence, engrossed in work, a crisp beeping noise sounded across the air of the lab. Park and Aliyev looked over at it, then in at each other – and then slipped and fell like a comedy duo as they scrabbled across the tile floor toward the two gene sequencers. It was Park’s, the smaller one, making the noise, and they could both see a bright green light glowing on its panel.

  The two men swiveled their heads and locked eyes.