Force Lines. Don Pendleton

were here.

      What remained to be seen was exactly who “they” were.

      The shorter version of the M-16, bought at a local gun show and modified by his own hand for fully automatic, was up and leading his charge a second before the light show hit the roof. Braking in midstride, he didn’t hear the familiar whirlwind of rotor wash until a few heartbeats later.

      Somehow he moved and found the gas mask at the edge of the desk, tugged it on. The suddenness and sheer audacity of the attack told him nothing less than black ops were hitting the roof, as he made out the running drumbeats of combat boots above. Squinting, he slipped the open nylon satchel around his shoulder, the bag stuffed with spare clips and an assortment of flash-bang, tear gas and fragmentation grenades he’d likewise recently collected across a state that had proved itself an arsenal that could just about match anything the United States armed forces had on hand. The rotor wash finally descended, full blast in his ears, providing nasty silent penetration, as it all but covered the enemy’s moves.

      At least by sound.

      Three, then four shadows, framed against the curtains and armed with subguns clearly nozzled with fat sound suppressors, were crouched and hustling down the deck when Hall hit the trigger and raked the moving silhouettes with a long burst of autofire. For an angry second, as the shadows dropped out of sight, he wondered if he’d only blasted out the windows, shredding fabric. A moment later failure was confirmed as the canister sailed into the study, trailing a fat dragon’s breath of billowing smoke.

      He turned about-face, moving for the open door, adjusted his body to hose down the visible armed breaching point to his left wing, thinking about cover, when he sensed their approach from the living room.

      Hall had to get the truth out to the world at large. It was something to fight for.

      And he would do it his way, the Jason Hall version.

      He determined the entertainment stand with stereo and giant speakers made for as respectable cover under the circumstances as he could hope for. He was delving into his war bag for a frag bomb, swinging his aim toward the living room and capping off three or four rounds when something speared deep into his left arm.

      He held on, shooting for the ceiling on the fall, bellowing out a curse even as he knew he was finished.

      It could have been two seconds or two hours, but he felt the mask ripped off, the weapon and war bag stripped away by angry hands.

      So much for his way.

      Shadows and voices swirled around him as Hall stared through the mist.

      “Where did you find it?”

      “Behind his Bible, where you said it would be, sir.”

      The CD. They knew, but somehow he’d already suspected as much. Given the sudden disappearance of the others, recalling before their vanishing acts their own dire predictions and suspicions, how all of them were aware what the defenders of national security were capable of…

      He was shuddering up on an elbow, ready to fire off a battery of questions when the fever seemed to balloon behind his eyes like a living fire, a sickness so sudden and shocking it was all he could do to manage to hold back the greasy spears of molten liquid ready to burst, one end to the other orifice. He fell on his back, outstretched in a sloppy crucifixion, a groan of pure misery floating away into the white light.

      They were still talking, when he made out a pair of black boots and matching pants, heard a lighter clacking, smelled the cigarette smoke. Something then rattled and was dumped on his chest. It was his rosary.

      “You’ve got about thirty minutes before what’s in your bloodstream burns out your brain, ten minutes, unfortunately, before you’re swimming in your own waste. Still, that’s plenty of time, Mr. Hall, pain and all the evil filth about to spill out of you aside, to say all five decades before the end.”

      Hall looked at his tormentor as a stream of smoke funneled his way from the hole of the mouth behind the black hood.

      “Who are we, you ask? You wouldn’t believe me, if I told you. Why are we here, you ask? Well, Mr. Hall, you should have kept your mouth shut, but a few of your jarhead buddies found that out the hard way, but I’m sure you’ve already figured out as much when you discovered your Web sites zapped then began your nightly armed recon around this stretch of Flathead Lake. Yes, you guessed correctly. You have been under constant surveillance. Okay, moving on. Instead of you accepting a chance to expiate your own guilt and treason, you turn down a reasonable offer to work for your country on a classified counter-bio warfare project, but you decided to stick to your lingering rebel nature. It wasn’t enough you came home from the first Gulf War and incited the whole of the U.S. Senate and Congress about what you thought you and a lot of other vets had fallen ill from over there.”

      “You’re going to kill me because I told the truth?”

      “The truth was, more or less, already out there, Mr. Hall. Pyridostygmine was supposed to have been a vaccine to prevent the effects of any nerve gas Saddam might have thrown at the troops. Then some snippy Congressman whose panties you got all twisted up did some investigating—or more to the point—had somebody else do the work for him, and he comes out claiming before God and the whole world to hear that somehow the vaccines were contaminated by the AIDS virus. Just to clue you in, the so-called Gulf War Syndrome bore, more to the truth, similarities to the West Nile virus, but the AIDs claim was what got the hue and cry sounded.”

      Bile squirted up Hall’s throat. The fog was thickening in his eyes, or had he been hit by another wave of smoke? He struggled for breath that felt like flames in his throat as he said, “We were used as guinea pigs.”

      “Maybe, maybe not. If you were test subjects, then let’s say it was for a just cause, being as Gulf One may have been the first time our troops were threatened by the mass deployment of chemical or biological weapons. In other words, our side needed to know something in order to engineer a preventive measure. Unfortunately, the experimental vaccine didn’t pan out as hoped. But, your mouth, that was strike one.”

      “Men who fought for this country died…”

      “Strike two was refusing the offer. Strike three was putting out on the Internet to all your former comrades-in-arms and any other conspiracy fruitbasket who would listen to what little you thought you knew but which, by your crusade, might have well placed national security at grave risk nonetheless.”

      “So I die. You can’t kill us all.”

      “And that would be you blustering it out until the bitter end?” The black hood chuckled. “Now then. What’s killing you, you ask? To my knowledge—which, I may add, in this particular field is extensive—there are fifty-one known toxic warfare agents.” He shrugged, smoked, then quickly added, “Actually there are sixty-five, but that’s when I count those agents not even those in the sanctified realm of U.S. intelligence know about between our side, the Russians, several Mideast terror orgs and North Korea. But that’s another story. Anyway, you have been stricken with, you guessed it, an experimental agent that is formed from the recombinant DNA of seven toxins. Botulin, anthrax and dioxin which, as you so boldly put out there, is an ingredient used in pesticide and which you believe was what caused GWS. But these are three of the seven you would be most familiar with, I’ll leave the others to your imagination.”

      Hall watched as the black-clad executioner rose, staring at his watch.

      “You have about twenty-five minutes now, Mr. Hall. Have a nice journey.”

      Hall watched the man as he stepped past before he was swallowed up into the white light.

      He wanted to be angry over this treason, murdered, no less, by agents of the very government he had fought and killed for, outraged, terrified he was minutes away from dying…

      But felt a calm peace settle over him. Still, this was no way for a warrior, he thought, to die, as he felt the first wave of white-hot pain knifing from head to toe. Still, there were those out there who knew something about the compound,