We’d been radio silent for nearly a week because Echo Team had crossed the North Korean border to find a factory where they were developing a new kind of DSRV that could transport high-yield nukes right into American harbors. Intel from Japanese, South Korean, and American spies agreed that these deep-water vehicles were invisible to our best sonar. My boss, Mr. Church, took ownership of the case away from the U.S. JSOC people and put my Rogue Team International into play. I took Top and Bunny with me because I needed brains and muscles for a situation where lack of numbers would work better than a crowd scene. Because we operate outside of American law—we don’t even return the president’s emails most of the time—if we make a mess, then it’s all on us. The U.N. Security Council knew about us, but only off the record. No one else knows we exist, which is kind of the idea. Covert ops, you dig?
We found the base and discovered that the North Korean DSRV program was only days away from launching. That is some scary shit right there. Ten mini-subs armed with single-use missile launchers, each capable of carrying one fifty-megaton nuke. We hacked their network and identified all ten targets. New York, Los Angeles, Port of New Savannah, Port of Seattle, Port of Virginia, Port of Houston, the naval base in San Diego, as well as the Jebel Ali port in Dubai, Busan in South Korea, and Tokyo Harbor. And there were twenty-eight more of the machines in various stages of construction.
When we left, there was a smoking crater where the factory had been and a tapeworm in their computer system that did irreparable damage to their research databases. We made sure we were in the air, hitching a ride with the air force, before we switched our radios back on. And that’s when we all got kicked in the nuts. The world we just saved was already dying, and we were too late to do much of anything about it.
— 3 —
The devil slipped the leash in a small nobody-gives-a-fuck town in western Pennsylvania.
The devil’s name was Lucifer 113. One of those old Cold War bioweapons people created to kill everyone if their side lost. A doomsday weapon.
People, as I’ve said way too many times, are assholes. Not all of them, but enough of them. Especially the kind of entitled asshole who thinks the world is his bitch and—because he’s a jealous, childish and petty asshole—he’d rather burn it down than let anyone share. Maybe I’m mixing a metaphor. Don’t know, don’t care.
Military intel divisions—especially SpecOps teams—are always calm, cool and collected. There could be missiles inbound and they’d sound like they’re giving color commentary on a golf match. That wasn’t what we were hearing on the military channels. What we heard were screams. And weeping. And prayers. The story came out broken and jagged and it left us bleeding.
Dr. Herman Volker had been a young and brilliant bioweapons developer in the last few years of the Soviet Union. Some CIA spooks cultivated him as an asset, turned him and eventually brought him to the U.S. to help us develop a response to the weapons he’d helped create. That weapon, Lucifer, was based on parasites rather than something as fragile as a virus. These parasites were the ones you sometimes saw in internet news stories called “zombie wasps” or “zombie ants.” Volker and his team found a way to use them to create a real motherfucker of a bioweapon that rewired the human brain so that higher reasoning was gone and a lot of what they considered less important body functions were allowed to go idle. At the same time the parasites drove the hosts to spread their larvae through bites, and the weapon supported this by amping up aggression.