CNN showed the smoking rubble the next day and blamed it on mortars and rockets is because the Marine commander onsite ordered a C130 gunship to rain fire on his own position. He knew the ambassador was already dead and he had watched one of his men turn in the three-hour battle. That Marine captain stopped the spread,” Sean said. He paused to take another huge gulp of his energy drink. And went on to explain what they had found.
“We aren’t sure where it comes from, but we know that Al Qaeda found a way to make a weapon out of it. The nerds at the CDC call it primalis rabia or primal rage. It affects the brain, somehow protects it. You can stop the heart. You can shoot them through the lungs and the brain will still function for hours. It spreads through blood. A spit in the eye won’t do it, but get infected fluids into your blood and you’re screwed. Once a victim is infected, he slips into a coma, and then gets a fever. The heat of the fever seems to cause irreversible brain damage, then for reasons they can’t figure out yet, the brain reboots. When the victim wakes up, they are feral.
“The longer the person is infected, the harder they are to bring down. Recently infected ones can still be killed with a shot to the heart. Those infected for over forty-eight hours—-good luck, only extreme trauma to the body seems to bother them. After ninety-six hours, the brain is fully protected and nothing will kill them but a critical brain hit. They move in packs like wolves and they will attack on sight.
“The attack in Yemen put them on our radar. But we still didn’t know how to react until twelve days ago. A man code-named Asim walked into a field office in Pakistan. He said that there was a major global attack planned by the Sons of Bin Laden. Asim carried a special ink pen, but instead of ink it contained the virus. It was a brutal method of transmission. All you do is stab yourself with the pen, click the button, and bam! You’re infected. In the lab it took anywhere from two to six hours for the victims to reboot. Asim said there were over one hundred pens made and distributed globally. He only knew the locations of those in his cell and he gave them up. He was supposed to walk into a crowded mosque in Karachi, infect himself, and then wait for it to take hold. Asim came to us instead.”
“What happened next?” Brad asked.
Sean continued, “Well, my team was sent into Teremez. Asim had fingered two members of his cell who had orders to infect themselves simultaneously on different edges of the city. One tango at the airport and another tango at a popular park. We set up and staked out both locations, but things got difficult; things went wrong. I went with Brooks to the park; we watched for Tango One all afternoon. We had a good description of him but everyone that day seemed to look alike. Toward the end of the day, we spotted a suspect and took him down in a men’s room. We found the pen on him. Tango One didn’t want to answer our questions. We needed to know how to find Tango Two. He didn’t want to cooperate so we quickly eliminated him from the equation and turned our attention to the airport.
“The rest of my guys were set up in the international terminal. They just had too many suspects. They tried to find people sleeping or in the coma phase, but no dice. It happened quickly and without warning. In the smaller terminal Tango Two went crazy. They heard it over their police scanners. The local police were responding and by the time my men got there, they had already put down Tango Two.
“But therein lay the problem. Tango Two managed to scratch, bite, and claw a number of people before he went down. We didn’t even know how many because a number of them fled or went home after the incident. The Uzbek police thought they were dealing with just another insane person and didn’t buy our story. Even when we notified Interpol they didn’t care to listen. The Uzbeks were more concerned about
“We aren’t sure where it comes from, but we know that Al Qaeda found a way to make a weapon out of it. The nerds at the CDC call it primalis rabia or primal rage. It affects the brain, somehow protects it. You can stop the heart. You can shoot them through the lungs and the brain will still function for hours. It spreads through blood. A spit in the eye won’t do it, but get infected fluids into your blood and you’re screwed. Once a victim is infected, he slips into a coma, and then gets a fever. The heat of the fever seems to cause irreversible brain damage, then for reasons they can’t figure out yet, the brain reboots. When the victim wakes up, they are feral.
“The longer the person is infected, the harder they are to bring down. Recently infected ones can still be killed with a shot to the heart. Those infected for over forty-eight hours—-good luck, only extreme trauma to the body seems to bother them. After ninety-six hours, the brain is fully protected and nothing will kill them but a critical brain hit. They move in packs like wolves and they will attack on sight.
“The attack in Yemen put them on our radar. But we still didn’t know how to react until twelve days ago. A man code-named Asim walked into a field office in Pakistan. He said that there was a major global attack planned by the Sons of Bin Laden. Asim carried a special ink pen, but instead of ink it contained the virus. It was a brutal method of transmission. All you do is stab yourself with the pen, click the button, and bam! You’re infected. In the lab it took anywhere from two to six hours for the victims to reboot. Asim said there were over one hundred pens made and distributed globally. He only knew the locations of those in his cell and he gave them up. He was supposed to walk into a crowded mosque in Karachi, infect himself, and then wait for it to take hold. Asim came to us instead.”
“What happened next?” Brad asked.
Sean continued, “Well, my team was sent into Teremez. Asim had fingered two members of his cell who had orders to infect themselves simultaneously on different edges of the city. One tango at the airport and another tango at a popular park. We set up and staked out both locations, but things got difficult; things went wrong. I went with Brooks to the park; we watched for Tango One all afternoon. We had a good description of him but everyone that day seemed to look alike. Toward the end of the day, we spotted a suspect and took him down in a men’s room. We found the pen on him. Tango One didn’t want to answer our questions. We needed to know how to find Tango Two. He didn’t want to cooperate so we quickly eliminated him from the equation and turned our attention to the airport.
“The rest of my guys were set up in the international terminal. They just had too many suspects. They tried to find people sleeping or in the coma phase, but no dice. It happened quickly and without warning. In the smaller terminal Tango Two went crazy. They heard it over their police scanners. The local police were responding and by the time my men got there, they had already put down Tango Two.
“But therein lay the problem. Tango Two managed to scratch, bite, and claw a number of people before he went down. We didn’t even know how many because a number of them fled or went home after the incident. The Uzbek police thought they were dealing with just another insane person and didn’t buy our story. Even when we notified Interpol they didn’t care to listen. The Uzbeks were more concerned about
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