Joe Ledger Read Online Free Page B

Captain. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The Vice President thinks she would be a great asset to our own bioweapons programs.”
    “And is that what you want?”
    He told me what he wanted.
     
    Chap. 3
     
    The Helmand River Valley
    Sixty-one Hours Ago
     
    We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT—Small Kill Team—operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.
    Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed.
    “Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pickup point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”
    He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.
    The six of us went into the desert, split into two teams and heading into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.
    Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool. This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind—sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.
    “Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”
    Bob Faraday—a big moose of a guy whose call sign was Slim—ran point. It was getting dark fast, and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt from under rocks and rise from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread to join the ocean of shadows that was night.
    Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.
    As we ran up behind him, I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.
    I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.
    The dark objects were people.
    Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race and even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.
    “There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab?” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”
    “Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.
    Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”
    “Even so,” said Bunny.
    We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.
    The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”
    “Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.
    There was a long pause.
    And it got longer.
    I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”
    Two long damn seconds.
    “Cowboy to Jukebox, do you copy?”
    That’s when we heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire. And the screams.
    We ran.
    “Night vision!” I snapped, and we flipped the units into place as the black landscape suddenly transformed into a thousand shades of luminescent green. We were all carrying ALICE packs with about fifty pounds of gear—most of it stuff that’ll