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13 DAYS TO DIE
BY MATT MIKSA
DAY 13
CHAPTER ONE
Washington, DC, USA
President James Barlow plunged headlong into the Potomac, heavy stones tied around both wrists. The biting current pinched his sixty-five-year-old heart. Each beat thumped inside his skull as his brain fought to detach from its stem, squeeze through an ear canal, and float to the surface. Barlow’s bulging eyes watched the last bubble of oxygen burble from his throat. A final jerking gasp filled his lungs with freezing water, and the world went black.
Hypothermic suffocation. That’s what it felt like, apparently, in the moments before ordering a nuclear strike.
Instead of stone and sediment, mahogany paneling and ornate paintings of dead icons lined Barlow’s nightmare riverbed. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—their judgmental glowers immortalized in oily brushstrokes—had presided over more than one presidential drowning in the White House Situation Room. Their austere expressions dripped with disapproval.
Important-looking people surrounded the conference table. Nathan Sullivan, Barlow’s national security adviser, sat motionless except for the placid rise and fall of his barrel chest. It took a lot to rattle the old Cold Warrior; this wasn’t his first glimpse of the brink. Barlow remembered Sullivan’s blunt estimation: Powerful men take powerful action.Georgetown gentleman–speak for Bomb the bejesus out of ’em.
Allyson Cameron, director of VECTOR and Barlow’s longtime confidante, played the dove. She stressed nuance over audacity—the delicate prescription of a consummate spy. Only there was nothing delicate about Cameron. She was a pantsuited lioness, as bloodthirsty as the rest.
An hour of raucous debate had failed to produce a consensus. Probably because the intel is piss, Barlow thought. There were only two doors he could open. Behind one was a Nobel Peace Prize. Behind the other, a horned beast, grinning through pointed teeth. The Joint Chiefs, State, the CIA, everyone had made their positions clear—the Situation Room was no place for fence-sitters—but it didn’t matter what they thought. This was a presidential decision, his decision. Barlow’s next utterance would change the course of history. Would future generations remember him for his courage and resolve? Would they say he stopped a madman from slaughtering millions of innocent civilians? Or would they mark today, this moment, as the beginning of the horror? Barlow’s head screamed. He could feel his eyes swelling in their sockets, pulsing against nerve and bone.
The United Nations had refused to act, true to its legacy of impotence. There would be no international coalition, no NATO operation. If Barlow chose to intervene, the United States would go it alone. Again. He’d studied this possibility for weeks now, but it had always seemed unimaginable. A last-resort doomsday scenario.
The president squared his shoulders and reached for a boxy leather briefcase on the table. The case hadn’t left his side since Inauguration Day, but he’d never seen it unzipped before. No president had. Inside was a clunky keyboard. Barlow began typing a long, alphanumeric string of characters from memory. Somewhere in the rocky badlands of Montana, a U.S. Air Force general was about to receive an unthinkable command.
A digital timer mounted on the wall beside James Monroe flashed bright-red numbers. The countdown had begun. CERBERUS, the intercontinental ballistic missile launch system, would come online in exactly ten minutes. The preprogrammed delay was designed to prevent accidents. Or is it to give presidents a chance to back out? Soon enough, Barlow could give the final order to launch a battery of ICBMs powerful enough to obliterate an area the size of Virginia.
Barlow surveyed his team. The important-looking people, so animated with conviction just moments before, waited in silence, fixated on their leader. A few stared at the countdown clock. It was hard not to. But there were no trembling hands or glistening foreheads, only steely eyes and stoic jawlines—masks designed to obscure any number of political motives. Most were decades-old friends, yet Barlow didn’t trust any of them completely. On some level, they were all liars—this was Washington, after all—but what if one of them was something worse?
A traitor.
Barlow had his suspicions, his theories, but it was impossible to think clearly with the pressure building behind his forehead. He’d take another pill, calm the storm, work it out in his mind. He couldn’t allow paranoia to cloud his judgment. Not with so many lives hanging in the balance.
DAY 1
CHAPTER TWO
Dzongsar Village, Tibetan Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China
He scratched madly at the soil with purple-tipped fingers curled into claws. A fiery sting punctuated each desperate scrape. His hands hurt like hell. Two of his fingernails had fallen off, and bits of rock dug into the raw nail beds. Still, he didn’t let up.
The overnight downpour had turned Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo rain forest into a mucky bog, which had made it difficult for the man to find the right spot to dig. He’d rambled through the maze of spruce trees since sunrise. As he searched, the nearby river, surging with runoff from the storm, had whispered an evil incantation.
Now, crouched on all fours, he burrowed like a marmot. Scoopfuls of sodden earth piled up next to the growing divot. Finally, the man’s bloodied knuckles knocked against something hard and. hollow. He pushed into the wet soil, searching for the object’s edges. Surging adrenaline gave him a burst of energy. A few sharp tugs freed the object from the pit with a sucking sound. It was a metal container with a brown leather handle bolted to its lid and a nickel-plated lock on the front, like a banker’s strongbox. The man pawed at a key that dangled from a chain around his neck. As expected, it unlocked the box. He lifted the lid, fingers vibrating.
Empty.
Exhausted, the man rested on his knees, head thrown back, eyes bulging. Midmorning sunlight blinked through the dense forest canopy. Branches shuddered in the breeze, and their gentle swirling motion made him dizzy. Fatigue crashed over his body. He barked a lung-busting cough, as he had repeatedly throughout the night. This time he hacked so violently that a piece of his tongue sloughed off. His saliva tasted ferrous—the flavor of fresh blood. Swallowing felt like thumbtacks pricking his esophagus. Medicine wasn’t an option. He’d accepted that.
Still, the man sobbed quietly, afraid of what was happening to his body. He couldn’t remember when it had started or how he’d gotten sick. He didn’t know why purple-black bruises covered his arms and legs. Everything blurred.
Hunched over the pit, he struggled to remember what he was supposed to do next, until a wave of nausea momentarily cleared his foggy brain. He rummaged through the canvas rucksack slung over his shoulder and gripped a small item. Earlier that morning, he’d double-wrapped it in plastic zip bags to keep it dry. He delicately placed the bundle in the strongbox, which he relocked and lowered back into its tiny grave. Sweeping dirt and leaves over the hole, he reburied the metal container with the cursed object now locked inside. It felt good to be rid of it.
Standing was a struggle. The man wanted to lie down, listen to the river’s evil whispers, allow his broken body to return to the earth. He knew that would put others at risk—people who counted on him to finish the job. People like HELMSMAN, who didn’t accept failure.
So instead, he rose to his feet and staggered toward the forest’s edge. A few yards away, there would be a rock formation, and then a clearing, and across the clearing, a small village. He doddered a few more steps, then paused to lean against a tree for balance. He’d almost forgotten; there was something else he was supposed to do.
His bloodshot eyes searched the ground for something sharp. A rock, maybe.
Nothing.
The key swayed from the chain around his neck. Yes, it could work. He lifted the chain over his head, smearing his collar with mud. The key felt too heavy for its size.
The man brushed his fingertips across the rough tree bark, like a blind man reading braille, and landed on a deep vertical gouge—about six inches long—carved into the trunk. The gash oozed sap like a fresh wound. It took his last ounce of energy to press the key’s jagged metal teeth into the wood. He carefully etched a horizontal groove to intersect the existing line, making a cross. It felt like marking his own grave.
When he was finished, his cloudy eyes fixed on the strange key in his right hand. The man couldn’t remember what it opened. Nothing made sense. He was dehydrated. Drinking something would help. He craved the soothing heat of Grandmother’s green tea.
He came upon a stone wall made of large boulders stacked high above his head. The rock formation. Almost there. He’d never be able to climb over the wall; his legs scarcely had the power to support his own body weight. A few paces away, sunlight squeezed through a narrow crevice in the stone. He could probably fit. He wedged his body into the cleft, feeling the rough edges of the rock scrape his skin and press on his rib cage. Some of the large pieces wobbled in their settings. He imagined the entire wall would collapse and crush him.
Finally, the man tumbled into the long grass on the other side of the stone barrier. His hands were empty. He’d dropped the key somewhere, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need it anymore.
The sun forced the man’s pupils into pinheads, his eyelids into slits. He could barely see the image painted on the front of the rock formation. Dazzling golden strokes, iridescent in the bright light, protruded from a luminous spindle rimmed by a yellow circle. It looked like the steering wheel of an old ship—a bizarre image to encounter in the landlocked highlands of Tibet. Then again, maybe it was proof of a greater power at work.
The man smiled weakly. Even now, his mind churning and swirling, his course had been true. He’d made it to Dzongsar Village. HELMSMAN would be pleased.
***
Investigators crawled over the area days later. They interviewed the locals, but no one reported seeing a hobbling figure emerge from the damp rain forest just after breakfast. No one had noticed him zigzagging across the clearing, stumbling like a horror-movie zombie toward the village.
One woman, however, remembered how she’d gasped when the haggard stranger entered her family’s teahouse and flopped into an empty chair. Delirious and filthy, the man had looked more dead than alive. His eyes had inflated like overripe grapes, she said.
Shocked by the man’s crumpled body, the teahouse woman had grabbed a girl’s small hand and dragged her into the kitchen. She’d returned minutes later holding a steaming cup of tea, which she placed in front of the zombie man. That’s when a drop of blood fell from the sick man’s nose and landed in his cup. The crimson bead diffused into the hot liquid. It had worried the woman greatly, she told the investigators, but not as much as what happened next.
Zombie Man had begun trembling, which intensified into violent thrashing just before he lurched forward and spewed a torrent of vomit. An acrid mixture of bile and thick black blood covered the table (she showed them the stains), and Zombie Man’s cup overflowed with the dark viscous discharge. Bloody spatter stippled the teahouse woman’s blouse and neck. She darted to the doorway and shouted into the street, hoping someone would hear her terrified cry.
That day had destroyed her life. A suffering man had come to her doorstep and she had welcomed him. How could she have known? It wasn’t her fault, the devastation that came after. That was how she explained it to the investigators, praying they believed her.