Contagious Page 119

Gitsh, Marcus and Dan all traded looks, then nodded. None of them doubted for a second that Clarence would kill Sanchez if it came to that. Margaret wondered if she’d saved her patient or only delayed his execution.

“Margaret and I will suit up,” Clarence said. “When we’re done, you guys do the same. I want everyone sealed up nice and safe. Dan, you stay in here and keep an eye on the news. Holler if there’s anything major we need to know about. Gitsh, Marcus, you take up positions at the front and back of the trailers. Watch for trouble. You see anything fishy, call it out over the comm system. Do not engage without the rest of us, got it?”

Gitsh and Marcus nodded.

“Come on, Doctor Montoya,” Clarence said. “Let’s get to work on your patient.”

12:30 P.M.: A City Paralyzed

The cacophony of a dozen animated phone conversations filled the Situation Room. Satellite images of Detroit lit up the main screen. Other monitors showed live feeds from news cameras and tactical maps dotted with unit symbols. One screen showed two tallies: one for dead, one for wounded.

The top of every screen showed a countdown: forty-five minutes and fifteen seconds, the time remaining before the clock struck 1:15 P.M.

President John Gutierrez sat at the end of the table, his face an expressionless mask. He looked at the monitors one by one, then circled back again. Murray was sweating like a pig, damn near hyperventilating, and Gutierrez sat there looking calm, collected—like a leader.

The unflappable Vanessa Colburn wasn’t sweating at all. She worked the phones, quietly offering advice to Gutierrez, but only when he asked for it. As Murray’s World of Secrets crumbled around him, he started to wonder if maybe she wasn’t the political vampire he’d made her out to be. For the first time, Murray wondered if his way was wrong and Vanessa was right for wanting him out.

General Cooper had a phone pressed to each ear. He nodded once, then put a phone on each shoulder and called out to the room.

“A military convoy has been spotted heading south on I-75,” he said. “Seven vehicles, including two troop trucks. Around sixty men. I’ve got a squadron of Apaches moving to a good kill point.”

“On a highway?” Gutierrez said. “What kind of civilian damage will we face?”

“Moderate,” General Cooper said. “But a hell of a lot less than if those two platoons get off the road and into the countryside.”

“Do it,” Gutierrez said.

No hesitation. This guy might turn out to be okay after all. Murray certainly hoped so, because it was high time to pass the baton to the next generation. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. It was one thing to go Cold War or cross swords with the Iranians, but Ogden’s men were tearing Detroit to pieces.

Detroit.

Eight Mile Road passed over every major highway to the north of the city. At each interchange a massive pileup blocked the roads. Hundreds of cars, some burning, along with the sprawled bodies of people who had been gunned down trying to escape on foot. Ogden’s men had also hit the major arteries on the west side: the I-96 and I-94 interchange, the interchange of I-96 and I-75. Surface roads were the only way in and out of the city, and those were choked with traffic from panicked citizens trying to escape the burning buildings and the random automatic-weapons fire that hit every few minutes. The citywide traffic jams had the Detroit police scattered and disorganized. When isolated police units did encounter Ogden’s gunmen, the gunmen either cut them down or blew up the cop cruisers with shoulder-launched rockets.

Ogden hadn’t stopped with the roads.

Fire poured from the top ten floors of the Renaissance Center’s middle tower. A westerly wind carried the thick, heavy black smoke plume across the city in the direction of Ann Arbor. The Fisher Building and the Penobscot Building were also in flames—three of the city’s tallest skyscrapers burning out of control. Firefighters were working on those blazes as well as a half dozen raging infernos caused by the crash of Northwest Flight 2961.

Two burning wrecks blocked the runways of Detroit Metro Airport. The main air-control tower was destroyed. Random gunfire. Hundreds dead. Airport security hadn’t found the attackers, which meant they were still out there. Some witnesses estimated five gunmen, others claimed ten or even twenty.

The smaller Detroit City Airport? Same deal—blocked runways, burning wrecks, tower destroyed. Totally out of commission.

The attack was less than forty minutes old, yet Ogden had taken out the airports, clogged the roads and tied up every cop, firefighter and paramedic.

“Look at this,” Gutierrez said. “Look at what’s happening. How many men does Ogden have in Detroit?”

“Maybe sixty,” Murray said. “We’re not sure.”

“Sixty men,” Gutierrez said. “Two platoons and he’s paralyzed a major city. What happens to America if the contagion spreads to six hundred people? Six thousand? We have to bottle this up here. We can’t let it get out.”

Murray looked at the screens and cursed Charlie Ogden. That man knew exactly what he was doing. All that would end when the five C-17s came in from Fort Bragg. Those planes carried two full companies, plus vehicles and heavy weapons. Ogden’s party was about to come to an end.

“General Cooper, we need an airport,” Murray said. “We have to assume that Ogden will take out anything that comes near DTW.”

“Goddamit!”

The room fell silent as all eyes turned to General Luis Monroe. The normally soft-spoken, God-fearing Monroe had just cursed at the top of his lungs. He held a phone with both hands, squeezing it as if it were the cause of all this misery.

“The C-17s,” he said. “Two of them just went down. There were reports of automatic-weapons fire in the cargo sections, where the troops were. Some explosions, possibly grenades. We’ve lost most of Zulu and Yankee companies, plus the crews. At least two hundred men.”

Chapter end