Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(26)

Twenty-three of the ninety-seven members of her special CIA class had been women. Of those, she had been the only woman to graduate, along with forty-two of her male classmates. The only sign she had noticed that was different from that given to the graduating men was a slight nod from one of the ranger instructors as she had received her ranger tab. It had been the slightest of movements, but one that had meant the world to her at the time, something that said, "You did good, Ranger."

Putting one foot in front of the other was what being a ranger was all about. When everyone else quit, they didn't. They didn't at Point Du Hoc in World War II and hadn't from then through Somalia to now. And although she would never be a part of a real ranger unit, Janet wasn't about to let mere pain and fatigue drive her to quit either. She would never have a uniform to wear it on, but that ranger tab felt like it had been branded onto her left shoulder, and the force of that brand pulled her onward toward the rally point and Jack.

As night descended, Janet dispersed the rest of the doggie meatballs, unconsciously dropping the baggie that had contained them along the trail. She was no longer sure how much farther she needed to go. Sickness leached its way into her very soul, a weakness that spread to her uninjured limbs, making them weak as a kitten.

Exactly when she had stopped walking and started crawling, Janet could not recall. But with each lurch forward it became clearer that she was not going to make it. Still she could not quit. She was going to die, but she would die trying to get to the spot where Jack had told her to go.

It seemed that she had merely blinked her eyes, but then she found herself staring up at the star-filled sky. Somehow, she had passed out and rolled over onto her back. For several seconds, Janet struggled to rise. She barely managed to raise her head before collapsing back to the ground.

Suddenly, he was there. Jack's face was illuminated in the red glow of his hooded flashlight as he examined her body. A sharp pain surged through her injured thigh as Jack replaced her pressure bandage with one of his own making. Then his face was back, leaning in close.

"Stay awake until I get back. Don't you go to sleep on me. Got it?"

Janet did her best to smile up at him. "Got it."

As he stared down at her, she saw it, that red flicker of flame that leaped deep within his pupils.

Then Jack turned his head back toward her pursuers. As he disappeared along her back trail, Janet finally managed that smile. Her hunters had just become the hunted. In the midst of the dark night, a deeper darkness was coming for them—and they didn't even know it.





23


Jim "Tall Bear" Pino hadn't been back up this way in a long, long time. As the bottom of the Cherokee dragged over the rocks, he remembered why. What qualified as a road up on this corner of the reservation would have been proud to be called a goat trail in other parts of the world. Last monsoon season's rains hadn’t improved them. The only reason he was here now was the dream.

Last night his grandmother had walked with him in his dream, and it was into this steep canyon country that she had led him. She had not spoken a word, and as Tall Bear had watched her move through the canyon, her long gray hair hanging over ceremonial buckskin garments, a great feeling of dread had consumed him.

Suddenly, the old woman had stopped, her arm sweeping out before her. Everywhere he had looked, the Navajo people he had known all his life lay naked, their hands and feet staked to the ground atop massive ant mounds. But the things that had crawled over their bodies and into long cuts that had been opened in their flesh weren't ants. They were something else, something that swarmed into the cuts by the thousands. And as those tiny things had burrowed deep inside their bodies, his people had screamed their lungs out.

Tall Bear had awakened soaked in sweat. He had little doubt about the nature of what he had seen in the dream. Those tiny crawling machines were the same things that his friend Dr. Eddy Oneta had showed him under the microscope when he had examined the Copenhagen can full of blood from the truck murder scene.

Most people would have thought the dream was only the result of that shocking revelation combined with news of the botched FBI raids yesterday in Los Alamos, but not Tall Bear. Over the years, he had been subjected to only a handful of such incredibly detailed dreams, and in every case, the special dreams had presaged some terrible event. He no longer ignored their warnings.

In the dream, his grandmother had been pointing to something in the distance beyond the screaming Navajos. He had awakened before he could identify what she was trying to show him, but the answer was out here in these rugged canyons. Of that, he was certain.

Across the distant hills to the southwest of the reservation, a huge plume of smoke rose up into the sky, the result of the forest fire that raged in the canyons near Los Alamos. Damn. Whoever the FBI had been after in Los Alamos had kicked their ass—big time.

CNN had run with the story around the clock, calling it the worst disaster in FBI history. By the end of the night, the extent of the damage had become all too clear. A total of twenty-two FBI and ATF agents had been killed with several others injured. A number of civilians had also been injured during the running gun battles that had started near Fuller Lodge and soon spread to the canyons beyond town. To top off the disaster, a major forest fire had been started intentionally by the fugitives during their escape.

Worse, from the FBI perspective, the killers had escaped, although one of them, a woman, had apparently been injured. Now, the largest domestic manhunt in US history was being seriously hampered by the rapidly spreading forest fire, which also posed a serious threat to the towns of Los Alamos and White Rock. The only law enforcement bright spot had been the success of the raid in Santa Fe, which had killed two more members of what was being called a team of rogue mercenary agents affiliated with the deceased former NSA director, Admiral Jonathan Riles.