Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 Read online

  “No, Doctor. We didn’t expect to find any survivors. We’re here for something else. Are there others?” As cold as it may sound, I hoped there weren’t. We didn’t have the resources or time to mount a rescue mission for a bunch of scientists. I chided myself for the thought, but facts are facts.

  “I’m all that’s left.” She said, a sad expression crossing her face. “There were a few of us hiding. Six others, but there’s no food down here so they went up top a couple of days ago and never came back. I stayed behind, and when they didn’t return I took this weapon off one of our security guys who had died. I was hoping that was them when I heard the elevator.”

  I looked at her for a long minute, thinking about what she’d just told me. She didn’t look like she had missed many meals. Looked healthy and strong, but it was hard to tell. Underneath the blocky lab coat her ribs could be threatening to burst through her skin.

  “Can you take me with you?” She asked, eyes locked on mine.

  “Get in.” I said, stepping aside but keeping a hand on the door so it didn’t close on her. She hustled into the elevator, heels clicking on the hard floor, moving to the back wall and standing next to Martinez.

  “Watch the doors.” I barked to Scott and Martinez. “Doctor, lose the heels. They make too much noise. You know how to use that rifle?”

  “I was a country girl.” She answered, stepping out of her shoes and losing about three inches of height. “I know how to shoot.”

  “Fine. Keep the rifle. But do not fire that weapon unless one of us tells you. It’s not suppressed and will make a hell of a racket that will attract the infected.”

  There was another double ding as we came to a stop again, the doors opening onto another brightly lit hall. No one and nothing was waiting for us and Scott and Martinez moved into the opening, each of them blocking a door with a foot as they scanned both directions. When Scott called a soft “all clear”, they stepped fully into the hall and I followed with Dr. Monroe. The doors closed behind me and I turned to face our new companion.

  “Do you know where vault W is? Save us some time in having to search for it.”

  “It’s to our left. Vaults are alphabetical, going all the way to YY which is far to our right. What’s in there that you need? We don’t do bio or viral work here.” She was far from slow, and the look she gave when asking the question told me she had a good idea what we were after. Oh well. She’d find out soon enough.

  “SADMs.” I answered. She looked back at me with a blank expression. “Backpack sized nuclear weapons.”

  I didn’t know what type of reaction to expect. Would she immediately start protesting that we had no business taking the nukes? That it was wrong to even think about using them? Maybe she’d try to pull out the “you’re not authorized” card. But she didn’t do any of that. Instead, she thought about what I said for about two seconds, then turned and pointed down the hall.

  “That way.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. This is Martinez and Scott. I want you to stay right behind Martinez while we’re moving. And don’t forget what I said about not using that weapon unless one of us tells you.” She nodded and I led the way she had pointed.

  Martinez fell in behind me with Dr. Monroe on her heels, Scott bringing up the rear. The vaults were exactly that. Vaults. Heavy, steel doors with combination locks and stout, chrome wheels sticking out of a central bolt that operated the locking pins. They were also clearly marked, each door with a two foot tall label attached. I was glad that Captain Blanchard had been able to obtain the combo for our target. I didn’t think we had brought enough C-4 to blow one of these doors open.

  We passed vault EE and came to a four way intersection. Signs on each corner pointed the way and I turned left after peeking into the new hall to make sure there wasn’t a reception committee waiting for us. The first vault on our left was X, W a few feet farther on our right. The door was four feet wide and looked as substantial as anything I’d ever seen. From the outside it reminded me of the vault door in Fort Knox in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Except this one had two large combination dials. Shit. I only had one combination. I waved the doctor forward to where I was standing.

  “I have what I was told was the combo, but I only have one combo. What’s the deal?” I asked, waving my hand at the door.

  “You have the vault specific combination. There are a few vaults that require a second combination be dialed in by a facility administrator. Not surprising now that I know there are nuclear weapons in there.”

  “I don’t suppose you have that combination?” It was more a rhetorical question, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when she shook her head in the negative.

  I stood there looking at the door, thinking. Other than the combination dials and the big, chrome spoke wheel, the outside of the door was completely smooth. No hinges visible. The door itself was flush and tight in its frame, and I suspected it was probably at least a couple of feet thick. No way were we getting through that door by force.

  Giving up on the door, I started looking at the surrounding walls and ceilings. Was it possible? Would they really have installed multi-ton steel doors and left the walls un-armored? This was the US government we were talking about, so anything was possible.

  Waving everyone back, I aimed my rifle a couple of feet to the right of the door and fired two bursts into the wall. The walls weren’t soft drywall like in a normal office or home, rather smooth plaster over wooden laths. They had been built in a different era, and had been built tough and intended to last. But they couldn’t stand up to six rounds from an M4 rifle. The bullets punched through the shiny white surface, blasting chunks of plaster loose.

  Stepping up to the new hole, I unclipped the flashlight from my rifle’s rail and shined it into the wall. I could see the edge of the mounting frame for the vault door, welded to a steel I-beam, but beyond that there was nothing more than wood and plaster between me and the interior of the vault. I pulled out my Kukri and started hacking away at the wall, quickly breaking through the plaster and lath on the hall side. When I had a three foot wide by five foot tall section chopped out of the way I called Scott over.

  Behind the opening I had cut was wooden framing consisting of four by six timbers. Beyond them, the backside of the lath that finished the inside of the vault was clearly visible. I needed two of the vertical framing timbers out of my way and hacking through them with my 12 inch machete wasn’t a good option. Scott had some C-4 plastic explosive in his pack which I had him dig out for me, along with some detonators and a wireless trigger. The C-4 was in a long, ropelike tube, pre-formed to focus the energy of the explosion towards whatever surface to which it was attached. In other words, a shaped breaching charge.

  Cutting off four short lengths, I peeled the wax paper off the adhesive and placed some at the top and bottom of each of the two timbers. Next I inserted the detonators, then we all moved down the hall and around the corner. I activated the trigger, hitting the ‘fire’ button with my thumb. There was a sharp clap as the C-4 detonated, the wall I was leaning against vibrating for a moment. I looked around the corner, but all I could see was a cloud of dust filling the hallway.

  “This is an old building. How much asbestos you think just got blown into the air?” Scott asked, standing next to me looking at the dust cloud.

  “You’re little Mary Fucking Sunshine, aren’t you?” I turned my head and looked at him. Grinning, he went back to keeping watch on our rear.

  The ventilation in the hall was good, the dust cloud clearing quickly. One of the timbers had been neatly cut at each end and was lying across the floor. Shoving it out of the way with my foot, I looked in the hole and saw the other one still attached by less than an inch wide sliver of wood at the top. The bottom was swinging free so I grabbed and pulled. The splinter snapped, the big board crashing to the floor. I kicked it over next to the first one, drew my Kukri and started breaking through the damaged lath and plaster that formed the inside wall. Less than a minu
te later I stepped through the opening into the vault.

  31

  The vault was about the size of a large self-storage unit. Roughly 20 by 15 feet. Looking around with my flashlight I found a switch on the wall next to the inside of the massive door and flipped it on. Overhead fluorescent tubes buzzed to life, bathing the space in a cool light. Along the side wall of the room were five stacks of crates, each stack two high. The crates were three feet tall, about 18 inches across and deep. Using the blade of the Kukri, I pried one of them open and looked inside.

  There it was. An innocuous looking, oversized, olive drab, canvas backpack. Just like I remembered from training so many years ago. Reaching into the crate I tugged open a flap on the top of the pack. Under was a small, red LED screen. I had once been told the screens for the SADMs had been cannibalized from prototype Texas Instruments calculators the military was evaluating in the 60s, long before the first electronic calculators had come to market for the average consumer. Well, the average consumer that could afford a $300 device that did nothing more than four basic math functions when it was released in the very early 70s.

  Below the screen was a small, mechanical keypad that looked like it had been stolen from an old touch tone phone of the same era, next to that a brass lock. The device required a key to enable it before a user could select the yield of the detonation and set the countdown timer with the keypad. The lock had three positions; off, enable, and activate. To use the bomb I’d need to turn the lock to enable, punch in the number of minutes until detonation, then turn the lock to activate which would start the countdown. An extremely simple system. No command authority codes required. As long as you had the key, you were a nuclear power unto yourself.

  The key was going to be the next hurdle. These devices might be old technology, but they had been constructed so that if you opened them up and tried to bypass the key, the trigger that fired the bomb would be permanently disabled. That was pretty much the limit of the security built into them. Of course, there was also the possibility that the batteries were dead. We were banking on the probability that the devices had been maintained since they were sitting in storage at the lab where they had been built, but until I could get my hands on the keys there was no way to know.

  Each bomb had its own unique key, and the inventory records showed the keys were locked in a vault XX which I now knew was at the opposite end of this level. If I hadn’t spent time in the military I would have been shocked at the minimal security measures being taken to protect nuclear weapons. Chain link fencing, mine fields and a few armed guards wouldn’t stop a well-trained team determined to reach the vaults. I used to be friends with a SEAL whose team was tasked with testing the Navy’s security.

  On several occasions they had managed to penetrate a variety of environments; armories, submarines, aircraft carriers, and walk right up to nuclear warheads. They had left large, round, yellow smiley face stickers on each device they had successfully accessed. Needless to say, they weren’t too popular with the Naval commanders in charge of the facilities they had breached. What had always frightened me was the thought that if it was that easy in the US, where we actually paid attention to security and had well trained guards, what was it like in places like India or Pakistan?

  The sound of a suppressed rifle firing in the hallway brought me back to the moment and I stepped to the hole in the wall. Martinez was right outside the opening, rifle pointed back toward the elevators, a small wisp of smoke rising from the suppressor screwed onto the end of her barrel. She saw me out of her peripheral vision, but didn’t turn her head.

  “Two males.” She simply said.

  “OK, I’m coming out.” I said over the radio. “We’re going to move to the next vault to get the keys before we hump these things upstairs.” Perhaps I should have retrieved the keys first, but I had wanted to make sure the SADMs were actually here before I bothered with them. Now that I knew they were, they could sit right where they were until I had the keys securely in my possession.

  Martinez moved a couple of feet to give me room to step out. Down the hall were the two infected she had killed. Scott was maintaining watch in the other direction and the doctor was between them, huddled against the wall. At least she had her rifle up and across her chest. I reminded her not to fire unless told, then headed for the other vault. The rest of my small team fell in behind me.

  I shot another male as we moved to the far side of the level. He had stepped out of a maintenance closet with an open door as I approached, snarling and lunging in my direction. Dr. Monroe had let out a small cry just as I pulled the trigger, coming forward to stand next to me when the infected fell dead to the floor.

  “Know him?” I asked in a quiet voice, rifle trained on the dark doorway he had just come through.

  “That’s Dr. Ben-Jarvis.” She said. “He’s the assistant director of the facility.”

  I glanced down at the body and noted the key card hanging from a lanyard around the man’s neck. Moving past the body I cleared the small closet then pointed at the key card and whispered for Martinez to take it. She bent down and sliced the lanyard with her dagger, slipping the card into a pocket on her vest. We kept moving, turning several corners in what was quickly becoming a maze, finally coming to vault XX. It was the same set up as the first vault we had breached, including the dual combination dials on the heavy, steel door. I repeated the process I’d used to breach the first one and a few minutes later squeezed through the ragged hole in the wall.

  This vault was much larger, at least 30 feet wide by more than 50 feet deep, and was nearly full of stacked crates of all different sizes. The ones closest to me were stenciled with black spray paint, and the most current date I saw was January of 1964. In the back, my light played across a wooden crate large enough for both Scott and I to stand comfortably inside at the same time. On the face of the crate was a faded but clearly recognizable black swastika. What I wouldn’t give to open that up and see what piece of technology we’d captured from the Nazis and brought to Los Alamos for evaluation, but I wasn’t here to sight see.

  Where the hell would they store the keys? I scanned with my rifle mounted flashlight and spotted a small safe set in the wall immediately adjacent to the main door. Walking over I dug out the paper Captain Blanchard had given me, but there wasn’t any notation of a safe or what the combination might be.

  Shrugging out of my pack, I dug out two small chunks of C-4 and molded them around each of the safe door’s exterior hinges. Inserting detonators, I climbed back out through the hole I’d cut in the wall and moved away from the opening.

  “Fire in the hole!” I warned the rest of the team a moment before pressing the trigger.

  There was a loud crump from inside the vault. I felt the vibrations in my feet and dust drifted down from the ceiling. Back in the vault I found the door to the safe completely blown off its hinges and lying on the floor. Shoving it aside with my boot I looked inside. Two stacks of small, black boxes waited for me. Grabbing one of them off the top I opened it and looked inside. A large, tarnished brass key was securely held in a foam cutout, a five digit number clearly stamped across it. I knew that number would correspond to one of the SADMs in the other vault.

  Scooping all of the boxes into my pack, I took another look around the vault before leaving. All of the crates were stenciled with an inventory code and a date which I assumed was the date they were packed. Still seeing nothing less than 50 years old, I shouldered the pack and went back to the hallway. Martinez and Scott were keeping watch, both of them on a knee with their rifles up and ready. Dr. Monroe stood peering into the dark vault, waiting for me.

  “Find what you needed?” She asked, stepping aside as I pushed through the hole.

  “Good to go.” I said, answering her and letting the team know it was time to move.

  “What are you going to do with those bombs?” The doctor asked. I paused a moment to look at her, trying to determine if I was about to have a problem. I couldn’t
read her expression.

  “Not now, Doctor.” I replied. “We need to get out of here.” I started leading the way back to the first vault.

  We reached it without encountering any more infected. I took a moment to shine my light through the hole in the wall to make sure there weren’t any surprises waiting, then turned to my team.

  “Martinez, you’re on guard. Have the doctor watch your back. Scott and I are going to hump these to the elevator.” When Martinez nodded and grabbed the doctor’s arm to give her instructions, Scott and I moved into the vault.

  Each device weighed 98 pounds with its pack. The crate probably added another 15 or 20, so we took a few minutes and quickly uncrated all of the bombs. Picking one at random, I pulled its top flap open and read the code stamped into the brass under the keyhole. It only took a moment to find the corresponding key. I wanted to make sure these things were ready to go before we carried all of them up to the waiting MRAP.

  Matching key in hand, I inserted it into the lock, took a deep breath and turned it ninety degrees to the right to enable the trigger. There was a loud click from the mechanical lock, then a faint high pitched whine from the primitive electronics within. The LED screen lit up after a long moment that seemed even longer than it was, displaying three zeroes. Now came a two-step process. First, set the yield from 0.1 up to 1.0 which represented kilotons of explosive force, with 1.0 equaling 1,000 tons of TNT. Next the timer could be set for a maximum of 999 minutes, or just over 16 and half hours. Sounds like plenty of time to get away, but making a successful and stealthy getaway is not a fast process.

  I was holding my breath and when I glanced up at Scott I could see he was too. We were one button press and one key turn away from detonating a nuclear bomb. Not a trivial thing. Still not breathing, I turned the key back to the left and the display went dark when the lock clicked into place. Both of us let out a long sigh as I returned the key to the cutout in its box, placing the box back in my pack. The first random test passed, I decided we’d assume the rest were operational and get the hell out of there without testing them.