Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Read Online Free Page A

any intel in the briefing.
    Simply, he was trying to judge what his guys had left in the tank.
    Everyone was exhausted, rubbed right down to the bone. Two years of frantic OPTEMPO and unrelenting missions had culminated in the bullet and Foxtrot festival that had been Chicago, followed by the heart-in-mouth street fight for that airstrip on Beaver Island, their WW2-vintage bomber only getting off the ground at the last possible second… and then all of them jumping out over the Stalingrad-style Battle of the JFK , where they’d somehow held off a surging tide of ten million dead, the whole mess unlike anything any of them had ever seen, or even had nightmares about…
    And then finding they’d escaped that, and gotten all the way across the Atlantic, only to be attacked out of a blue sky by the flagship battlecruiser of the entire Russian fleet, one of the most lethal ships that ever floated… then Juice and Ali and Homer all nearly buying it, slugging it out toe-to-toe on land, sea, and sky with hardman Spetsnaz killers who were almost as good as Alpha – and twice as brutal and remorseless…
    Basically, it had been a long damned deployment so far, to say the very least.
    Scanning faces, including the Marines, Handon saw that not one of them showed it – but he knew that virtually every part of them hurt. Even the areas of their bodies that weren’t wounded. Sure, they’d been shot, stabbed, blown up, swarm-attacked by packs of runners, and had Foxtrots jump on their heads. But they’d also HAHO jumped through a crashing storm into a knot of skyscrapers, fought a 360-degree street battle through thousands of dead, been dragged behind a speeding powerboat – or caught between it and a bigger one. They’d come down in crashing aircraft, had others crash down on their heads, dodged thermobaric missile strikes, chased mini-UAVs around the flight deck.
    Some of them had been peppered with bullet fragments by deadly Canadian and Russian snipers – guys who had killed hundreds, and knew how it was done. There’d been near-misses with anti-personnel IEDs, collapsing buildings, religious nutjob assassins, burning forests, exploding underground fuel tanks, that snaking trail of flaming aviation fuel that had nearly burned Gunny Fick to death. They’d been blown up by Zulu jihadis, winged by flaming Zulu machine gunners, stabbed, shot, and crossbowed by asshat wannabe pirates – not to mention lit up by their four-barreled 14.5mm anti-aircraft gun…
    When Handon added it all up, he figured it was a damned miracle anybody on either team could even walk at this point.
    But they could – and they were going to have to.
    They were all going to have to reach down one more time.
    And they were going to have to, finally, once and for all, get this shit done.
    * * *
    “I am aware that the further into the bush you go, the greater the risk to the team.”
    When Handon focused back on the room, he saw that Dr. Park had taken the lectern – their special briefing guest star.
    “But the closer we get to the original victim, the better our odds that the final vaccine will be universal. Patient Zero, the first victim, is the ideal. Every additional transmission past him slightly decreases the likely or statistical effectiveness of the vaccine. How low are we willing to go?”
    Judging from the silence in the room, the gravity of this had sunk in.
    Park resumed. “Since you’re starting at Camp Lemonnier, yes, an American soldier would be a good start. I gather the camp went down very early – plus we’d have something , a sample much earlier than the ones I have now. At the same time, anything you can find out about the origin of the virus is potentially helpful.”
    Graybeard raised his hand. “Is this a Zulu hunt – or a fact-finding mission?”
    Before Park could answer, Brady mocked up a whiny voice and interjected, “Is this gonna be a standup fight, sir, or another bug hunt?”
    Fick leaned forward. “You secure