Joe Ledger Read Online Free Page A

radiated heat. Her face was streaked with dirt and there was some blood crusted around her nose and the corner of her mouth.
    I looked at him.
    “These were relayed to us by the people we have seeded into a Swiss seismology team studying an underground explosion in the Helmand River Valley. We ran facial recognition on them and MindReader kicked out a ninety-seven percent confidence that this is Amirah.”
    My mouth went dry as dust.
    Holy shit.
    When I was brought into the DMS a month ago my first gig was to stop a team of terrorists who had a bioweapon that still gives me nightmares. I’m not kidding. Couple times a week I wake up with the shivers, cold sweat running down my skin, and clenched teeth that are the only things between a silent room and a gut-buster of a scream.
    There were three people behind that scheme. A British pharmaceutical mogul named Gault, a religious fanatic from Yemen called El Mujahid, and his wife, Amirah. She was the molecular biologist who conceived and created the Seif al Din pathogen. The Sword of the Faithful. They test-drove the pathogen with limited release in remote Afghani villages, trying out different strains until they had one that couldn’t be stopped. Seif al Din. An actual doomsday plague. El Mujahid brought it here, and Echo Team stopped him. But only just. If you factor in the dead Afghani villagers and the people killed here, the body count was north of twelve hundred. Even so, Mr. Church and his science geeks figured we caught a break. It could have been more. Could have been millions, even billions. It came down to that kind of a photo finish.
    Most of the victims turned into mindless killers whose metabolism had been so drastically altered by the plague that they could not think, had no personalities, didn’t react to pain, and were hard as balls to kill. The pathogen reduced most organ functions to such a minimal level that they appeared to be dead. Or…maybe they were dead. The scientists are still sorting it out. We called them “walkers.” A bad pun, short for “dead men walking.” The DMS science chief is a pop-culture geek. My guys in Echo Team called the infected by another name. Yeah. The “Z” word.
    And you wonder why I get night terrors. Six weeks ago I was a Baltimore cop doing scut work for Homeland. Sitting wiretaps, that sort of thing. Now I was top dog for a crew of first-team shooters. Do not ask me how one thing led to another, but here I am.
    I looked at the photos.
    Amirah.
    “The rumors of her demise have been greatly exaggerated,” I said.
    Church managed not to smile.
    “If you’re sending us then she hasn’t been apprehended.”
    “No,” he said. “Spotted only. I arranged for two Marine Recon squads to locate and detain.”
    “What if Amirah’s infected?”
    “I shared a limited amount of information with the appropriate officers in the chain of command, Captain. If anyone reports certain kinds of activity—from Amirah or anyone—then the whole area gets lit up.”
    “Lit up as in—”
    “A nuclear option falls within the parameters of ‘acceptable losses.’”
    “Can you at least wait until me and my guys reach minimum safe distance?”
    He didn’t smile. Neither did I.
    “You’ll be operating with an Executive Order, so you’ll have complete freedom of movement.”
    “You got the President to sign an order that fast?”
    He just looked at me.
    “What are my orders?”
    “Our primary concern is to determine if anyone infected with the Seif al Din pathogen is loose in Afghanistan.”
    “Yeah, that’ll be about as easy to establish as Bin Laden’s zip code.”
    “Do your best. We’ll be monitoring all news coming out of the area, military, civilian, and other. If there is even a peep, that intel will be routed to you and the clock will start.”
    “If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”
    “Noted.”
    “What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”
    “Amirah would be a prize catch,