A Question of Intent Page 14

  "Rattler One, this is Rattler Four."

  "Go ahead, Four."

  "We've been showing an engine-warning light for the past couple of miles. Looks like we'll have to return to base."

  Jill mouthed a silent curse. Could anything else happen to delay tomorrow's run?

  "Roger, Four. I'll continue up the proposed course and confirm the prepositioning coordinates. Advise me when you get back to the site and determine what the problem is."

  "Will do."

  Squinting through her sunglasses, Jill eyed the slopes ahead. The proposed course would take Pegasus up the rock-strewn lower elevations, through the conifer-dusted higher reaches, and across a trickling stream. The same stream, in fact, that pooled to form a convenient trysting spot for the skinny-dipping lovers her troops had stumbled upon a few days ago. Jill smiled grimly at the memory and aimed her ATV at a barely discernible track at the base of the lower slope.

  "Hang on, Goof. This is going to be a rocky ride."

  As the vehicle rattled and bumped up the slope, she clenched her teeth so tight an ache started in her jaw and lanced into her skull. Her head was pounding by the time she reached the first prepositioning point at the five-thousand-foot elevation mark.

  She left the ATV idling while she climbed out to survey the location. The high elevation offered a panoramic view. Far below, the desert shimmered in the morning heat. Above, the achitigly blue sky stretched for endless miles. All around her, the thin air carried the scent of pine and juniper.

  The spot was perfect.

  Although they had no reason to suspect overhead satellite surveillance, the screen of pinon would provide some cover for the Humvee. They were everywhere, those dark-needled pines. Their reddish bark gave off a pungent, cedarlike odor that wrinkled Jill's nose. She knew the piñon's seeds were the stuff of life in New Mexico. Animals feasted on their rich nutrients, and humans consumed them in everything from salads to thick, chewy caramel clusters.

  Not just animals and humans, she saw when she turned to walk back to her vehicle. Reptiles, too, apparently.

  Gulping, Jill stopped dead. The snake was almost lost in the shade of the pinon a few feet from the parked ATV. It was smaller than the Western dia-mondback that had sunk its fangs into Sergeant Barnes. One of the black-tailed rattlers they'd been told to watch out for on the slopes, especially at higher elevations.

  This particular black-tail wasn't coiled to strike, she noted with heart-pounding relief. It lay stretched out in the dirt like a lazy gray S.

  Step by cautious step, Jill backed away from the driver's side of her vehicle. By the time she'd scrambled in the passenger side and crawled over the console into to her seat, she was swimming in a nervous sweat. Sincerely hoping the snake hadn't decided to crawl in with her, she unsnapped the flap on her holster.

  She wrapped her sweat-slick hand around the butt of her Beretta. Inch by cautious inch, she leaned out of the vehicle to check on the reptile. It was still there, stretched out under the pinon, unmoving. Only then did Jill notice the gnats swarming around its black, unblinking eyes. Her breath escaping on a wheeze, she flopped back against her seat.

  "It's dead, Goof. My heart's about to break the world record for beats per minute and the thing's dead."

  The incident left a chalky taste in her mouth. A quick swig from the water bottle she always carried as a precaution against the desert heat got rid of most of the dryness. Nevertheless, her hands shook when she put the vehicle in gear and aimed it up the slope again.

  The altitude was starting to get to her, Jill decided when she and Goofy had bumped up an additional thousand feet. She was steering around a stand of fragrant juniper when another possibility worked its way through the fuzz in her head.

  Maybe it wasn't the altitude causing these shakes. Maybe she'd caught the damned bug!

  She certainly had the sweats. Her mouth was as dry as two-day-old toast. She'd blamed the ache in her skull on the bone-jarring ride, but she'd made the ride before and never experienced this steady, throbbing pain.

  Grimly Jill angled the ATV onto a relatively level patch of dirt. Her head wasn't just pounding now, it was booming with all the sound and fury of an artillery barrage.

  "We'd better get down this mountain and hightail it back to base, Goof."

  She shoved the gearshift into reverse and backed the ATV up. Or tried to. The level patch was too narrow for a complete turn. Blinking the sweat out of her burning eyes, she pushed the gearshift into drive again. Her boot pressed the accelerator.

  Too hard.

  Too fast.

  Jill's leg muscles had gone soft on her, as limp as wet paper. She struggled to lift her foot, missed the brake, hit the edge of the accelerator again. The ATV shot off the small ledge and went airborne.

  It landed with a thud that almost cracked Jill's jaw. She fought the wheel, the brake, the steeply angled slope that seemed determined to tip the vehicle end over end.

  A gnarled juniper clung to the rocks a little way to the left. Jill leaned on the wheel, sent the ATV straight at the tree. The spindly trunk bent almost to the ground, shuddered and held only long enough for Jill to throw herself out of the vehicle. She hit the ground and tumbled down the rocks in the ATV's crashing, careening wake.

  Frantically she scrabbled for a hold. Any hold. The rocks she grabbed at tore right out of her hand. Scratchy weeds came loose at the roots.

  She didn't see the jagged-edged finger of granite jutting out of the slope until the split second before she slammed into it.

  Chapter 14

  After a hot, soaking shower, Cody started for the clinic, intending to make his call to the Center for Disease Control. A growling stomach and the realization that he hadn't eaten in almost twenty-four hours had him detouring to the dining hall, where he spotted Kate Hargrave, Ed Santos, and Russ McIver.

  "Hey, Doc."

  Kate was wearing thigh-hugging black bicycle shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt over a sports bra. Still flushed from her morning run, the woman exuded a healthy—and very sensual—vitality. Cody appreciated the package. Any man with a half a drop of testosterone left in his body would. But his thoughts were on Kate's roommate as he joined the group.

  Jill should be well up in the mountains by now. They'd have to talk when she got back and had time to sort through the ugly revelations about his marriage. He couldn't believe he'd laid all that on her. He could only attribute it to his weariness and the impetus of Jack Conway's call.

  "Have a seat."

  Kate waved him to a chair. McIver was more formal. Mindful of Cody's superior rank, the marine stood. "Good morning, Commander."

  "'Morning, Mac."

  "I hear you have another patient," Ed Santos commented. "How is he?"

  "About as miserable as you were those first twenty-four hours."

  The test engineer shuddered. "Poor kid."

  "What's the latest on Colonel Thompson?" Kate asked.

  "They're going to keep him in CCU until they determine the extent of the damage to his heart muscle. After that, he'll face a medical review board to determine his fitness to stay on active duty."

  The confirmation that they'd lost one of their own cast a pall over the table. Hunching her sweat-sheened shoulders, Kate pushed her scrambled eggs around her plate with her fork.

  "The Air Force has already identified a replacement for Bill," she told the group. "A fighter pilot by the name of Dave Scott."

  Russ McIver's head whipped around. "Captain Dave Scott?"

  "I think that's his rank. Why? Do you know him?"

  "I know of him."

  Kate stopped playing with her eggs. "Okay, McIver, give. Tell us what you know."

  Mac opened his mouth, shut it again with a snap. To Kate's obvious disgust, all he would say was that Captain Scott had a reputation as one hell of a pilot in Special Operations circles. Excusing himself, the marine gathered his tray and left.

  "No wonder the guy gets Cari's back up," Kate muttered. "He wouldn
't bend if we hung a five-hundred-pound weight around his neck."

  Cody kept silent. He'd had plenty of time to form his own opinion of both the stiff-necked marine and the petite, dark-haired Coast Guard officer. When it came to bending, he hadn't seen any evidence Cari Dunn would give all that easily, either.

  As inevitably happened with any gathering of the test cadre, the conversation turned to the run scheduled for the following day. Again Cody kept silent. His pending call to the Center for Disease Control could well result in another delay. CDC might quarantine everyone on-site until the source of the mysterious virus was identified or the sudden outbreak of illness had run its course.

  Frustrated all over again at his inability to find the source, Cody finished his breakfast and made his way to the clinic. A call to the central switchboard got him a secure line and a patch through to Dr. John Long. The head of the CDC greeted him with one of his legendary foghorn bellows.

  "Richardson! Why haven't I seen your ugly mug at staff meetings in the past few weeks?"

  "I'm working a special project."

  "That must be the reason my folks can't blast anything of NIH."

  "I don't run the entire National Institute of Health," Cody reminded him mildly. "Only one department."

  "Yeah, well, your department is usually the most cooperative, but I have to tell you we've been getting nothing but flack on that report about the global re-indicators of tuberculosis."

  "I'll make a call. In return, I need a favor from you, John."

  "You got it."

  "Did you happen to see a notification of a new strain of flavivirus filed by Dr. Sylvia Nez?"

  "Are you working with Sylvia? You lucky dog! That woman is every sex-starved research scientist's fantasy come to life. Brilliant and hot!"

  "The report, John. Did you see it?"

  "I saw it. Another addition to the bad bug book. We seem to be getting a lot of them these days."

  Smiling, Cody recalled Jill's skepticism when he'd tossed out the nickname for the Food and Drug Administration's Handbook on Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins.

  "Dr. Nez reported the virus," Long continued, all business now, "but indicated only limited incidence. A single isolated case, as I recall."

  "We're up to four now and still counting."

  "Have you reported them in system?"

  "Not yet."

  "Why?"

  Cody hesitated. Even with Captain Westfall's concurrence and the knowledge that John had received special security briefings, he still had to dance around any mention of Pegasus.

  "All the infected personnel were confined to a restricted area."

  "No contact with communities or personnel outside that area?"

  "Limited contact."

  Cody, Jill and Bill Thompson had all made trips to Albuquerque. Then there was the run-in Jill and her MPs had with the two skinny-dippers up in the mountains.

  Damn! With Bill's heart attack and the two subsequent cases piled right on top of the air evac, Cody had forgotten about that little incident. An unhappy rumble over the phone jerked his attention back to the head of the CDC.

  "Not good," John was saying. "Not good at all. It's imperative we make the surrounding communities aware of the appearance of a new strain of virus, along with its toxicology and potential for widespread infection."

  "I agree. Thai's why I contacted you. Before we input a sanitized version of the data, though, I want to make one more call."

  "Make it and get right back to me."

  "I will."

  It took Cody only a few minutes to get the names and phone numbers of the illicit lovers, another ten to track them both down. The sheriff's son-in-law grudgingly reported no fever, no dizziness, no achy joints either before or after his dip in the pool. His girlfriend, however, had been sick as a dog.

  "I was so weak and dizzy my mother had to drive me to the E.R.," she informed Cody when he reached her at the county hospital. She'd been admitted less than twenty-four hours after her tryst in the mountains.

  "The docs still don't know what hit me."

  "I do."

  "What?"

  "It's a new strain of virus."

  "A virus?" The woman's voice took on an edge of alarm. "It's not, like, terminal is it?"

  "It doesn't appear to be if the patient receives timely treatment, which you did. I've got the name of your admitting physician. I'll give him a call and advise him to run some tests just to be sure."

  Cody contacted the physician and told him to check the CDC database for the data Dr. Nez had input into the system. He also requested the doc report this case and additional ones to his local CDC officer immediately.

  "I will, Dr.... What did you say your name was again?"

  "Richardson. Cody Richardson. I'm with the Public Health Service," he repeated with deliberate vagueness.

  He was back on the line with John Long within moments.

  "We've got another patient. This one's a civilian. Her physician promised to advise CDC of her symptoms immediately. You can use her case as a means to spread the word to the surrounding communities."

  "That works."

  Cody hung up and blew out a long breath. They'd dodged that bullet. For a while, anyway, they could sit on the fact that four personnel from the Pegasus site had been infected with this vicious little bug.

  He didn't find out a fifth troop had gone down until he searched out Captain Westfall.

  He found the captain in the hangar. Like the proud owner of a Thoroughbred, the naval officer was gliding a hand along the smooth, sleek skin of the steed he hoped to race the following morning.

  He glanced up at the sound of footsteps. His lean face relaxed into a rueful smile at being caught in a show of affection for a mere machine.

  "The maintenance crews wired him up to the black boxes first thing this morning and checked every system," he said, giving the radar-evading composite fuselage a final pat. "He's all ready to run."

  "Good."

  "Assuming no more of our team comes down sick," the captain added, his penetrating gray eyes narrowed on Cody's face, "and you don't tell me we've all been tagged as disease carriers and confined to the site."

  "Not yet. We may have our first reported case in the local community."

  Briefly, he ran through his series of phone calls. Like Cody, the captain breathed a sigh of relief that they didn't have to go public with the events occurring at the Pegasus site.

  Yet.

  "This woman became infected within twenty-four hours of entering the restricted area," he warned.

  "Which means she picked it up here."

  "In all likelihood. But I still don't have a clue where or how. Apparently, she and her boyfriend drove separate cars to a rendezvous point a few miles from the White Sand spur, then went up into the mountains together."

  "Major Bradshaw responded to the scene and interviewed the couple, didn't she? Maybe she can shed some light on their movements."

  "Maybe."

  Sliding the flat, palm-size communicator out of his shirt pocket, Cody pressed the code for the chief of security. Jill didn't answer his page.

  He tried again, holding the single key down until the small device beeped loudly, indicating the signal had gone through Still no answer.

  Frowning, he pressed the button for the MP Control Desk.

  "Rattler Control."

  "This is Commander Richardson. I'm trying to contact Major Bradshaw but get no response."

  "Hold on, sir. She's still up in the mountains. The gullies and rock outcroppings may be blocking your signal. We'll raise her on our channel. We have a direct satellite link."

  Cody stared at the hangar's white-painted concrete floor until Rattler Control came back on.

  "The major doesn't respond, sir."

  "When was the last time she checked in?"

  "About forty minutes ago, according to the log. We require our patrols to check in once every hour, but the major usually doesn't go that lo
ng without someone needing to speak with her." A guarded note entered the controller's voice. "We'll keep trying to contact her, sir. In the meantime, I'll..."

  He broke off, leaving Cody straining to hear the faint, static-filled transmission coming into the Control Center.

  "Major Bradshaw's responding, sir! At least, I think she is. "

  "What do you mean, you think she is?"

  "She didn't ID herself and her words are all slurred."

  "Keep her on the line! I'll be right there." He snapped his device shut. "It's Jill. Something's wrong."

  He was running for the hangar door before the words were out. Westfall pounded right behind him. Together they burst out of the hangar and raced across the compound to the modular unit housing Rattler Control.

  A small contingent of MPs had gathered in the Control Center by the time Cody and the captain entered it. The soldiers edged aside to give them access, but hovered close to listen to the ensuing exchange.

  "Rattler One, this is Rattler Control. I have Doc Richardson here with me. Do you read me, Rattler One?" The lanky Oklahoman gripped the mike. "Please acknowledge, Rattler One."

  The response came in dazed and whisper soft. "Cody? You...there?"

  He leaned forward, his chest tight. Jill wouldn't break military protocol and call him by his first name with her troops listening in without damned good reason.

  "I'm here. We're having trouble hearing you, Rattler One. Are you in distress?"

  "Hot. I'm...hot."

  "Are you saying you have a fever?"

  "Burning up."

  He glanced up, met Westfall's grim gaze. The Pegasus virus had struck again.

  "And all. .this damned...blood." The ragged whisper cut through the Control Center. "In my...eyes."

  Cody's insides went ice-cold. "Why do you have blood in your eyes? Jill? Why is there blood in your eyes?"

  "Fell. Hit my head. Rock. I'm so...tired, Cody. So sleepy."

  "Jill! Listen to me. It sounds as though you might have sustained a concussion."

  Compounded by the onset of a sudden high fever, the combination could be deadly. He fought the panic clawing at his gut and kept his tone calm.