Carter shook his head. “This thing sounds like a biological version of what they were trying to do with the neutron bomb. A weapon that would kill the enemy but leave the infrastructure intact.”

“You mean they infect an entire town’s water supply or maybe an enemy bunker or base’s water and then just wait for everyone to die before they sweep in and claim everything for themselves?” Burke asked.

“Precisely.”

Burke said, “Do you realize the number of people a terrorist could kill with that type of self-replicating pathogen?”

“My team is the best, and they’re doing all they can, but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough,” Lt. Col. Dangbar said.

“Is the manager, Yarborough, coherent at all?” Burke asked. “I’d like to speak with him.”

Carter looked over with a question in his eyes, and Burke added, “He spent some time alone with the lead mercenary. I’d like to know what was said.”

“Sure. I think he can still speak,” Dangbar replied. “We’ve got them all on morphine for the pain, so he may be out of it in more ways than one. We’ll just need to get you suited up.”

Burke’s chest suddenly felt very tight. “In one of those things?” he asked.

Chapter 80

The hazmat suit made Burke feel like an astronaut, boldly going where no man had gone before. Except that he really didn’t want to boldly go. The whole thing made him feel extremely claustrophobic, even though he usually never had problems with tight spaces. He fought back the waves of panic and tried to maintain a controlled level of breathing, but thoughts about rips in his suit and bleeding out of every orifice until death made it hard to keep calm and carry on. The arms of the suit felt like sandpaper against his skin and face, and he kept balling his fists to keep from reaching up and tearing it away.

Dangbar gave him a thumbs up as they finished the preparations, and Burke shakily returned the gesture. Then he entered a portable pneumatic decontamination shower where he was sprayed with some type of high-pressure gas meant to neutralize any hazardous substances, radioactivity, or dangerous pathogens. Dangbar led him down a plastic hallway to Quentin Yarborough’s private bubble. Dangbar opened the seal for Burke and said, over the suit’s radio, “I’ll wait for you here.”

Burke nodded and entered the plastic room, which beeped and hummed with all kinds of equipment that he’d seen before in hospitals, except that many of the machines were smaller and more portable.

Approaching the bed, Burke lost his breath at the sight of what Quentin Yarborough had become. The white of the man’s eye had been replaced with a blood red. Multiple petechiae—red and purple spots caused by bleeding into the skin—covered his ashen face. Trails of blood trickled from his eye, nose, ears, and mouth. Burke closed his own eyes, fighting back tears. How could anyone do this to any other living creature, let alone another human being?