Black Death Reprise

The steady sound of the Bell’s blades could be heard when the truck was ten yards or so from the exit. Bolan’s assessments of his enemy’s positioning and intended tactics had apparently both been correct, and he took a deep breath, letting it out slowly to steady himself.

As the pickup moved through the exit into the dark night, he noticed an area on the highway roughly fifty yards outside the tunnel that was illuminated by a powerful spotlight mounted on the chopper’s underside. Before they reached that spot, Bolan realized, he’d have to fire the LAW’s missile.

The instant his line of vision cleared the edge of the tunnel, allowing him to see the sky, Bolan placed the hovering Bell 206 into the center of the reticle’s V sight. The helicopter was low, perhaps no more than two hundred feet off the ground, when he depressed the trigger bar and felt the missile on his shoulder come to life. With an eardrum-aching whoosh and a backblast of fire and hot gases, the high-explosive armor-piercing warhead zipped out the front of the LAW, crashing straight into the belly of the hovering aircraft.

Before the gunner had time to squeeze even one round from his gun, the helicopter exploded in a fireball that illuminated the countryside in orange light. Resembling an outer-space creature in a poorly produced science-fiction movie, the mangled mass of burning machinery tumbled onto the top of the tunnel exit, where it balanced for a moment before crashing onto the highway.

The thunderous sounds of two secondary explosions that scattered pieces of sizzling helicopter metal across both travel lanes echoed across the rolling terrain. With the echo of the blast ringing in his ears, Bolan reached into a pouch on his web belt, withdrew a cell phone, and speed-dialed a secure number.

“Yes?” Hal Brognola answered an ocean away, the sleep in his voice reminding Bolan that in the nation’s capital, people had been in bed for only a few hours.

“Customs,” Bolan said. “Three minutes. Not the Turbo. Blue pickup truck, two passengers.”

“Good job, Striker,” Brognola replied.

He hung up without another word. There would be plenty of time for talk when they got to Stony Man Farm.

3

Less than twenty-four hours after returning from his mission to L’Abbaye de Raphael in Bayonne, Mack Bolan sat with Hal Brognola at a conference table in the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Also with them was Aaron Kurtzman’s cybernetics team, consisting of the methodical, common sense Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers, a distinguished former college professor who brought an academic, facts-based approach to research, and Akira Tokaido, a natural hacker whose innate skills could have enabled him to be one of the best professional gamers in the world had he not chosen instead to serve his country as a member of the Stony Man team. Together, they were a case study for synergy, often arriving at solutions via insights far greater than the sum of the supporting data.

“Nice job on the schematics,” Bolan said across the table to Tokaido.

Tokaido acknowledged the compliment by snapping his bubble gum three times in rapid succession before replying derisively, “They were just 3-D.”

From more than six feet away, Bolan could hear a tinny percussive sound coming from the young man’s high-fidelity earbuds, and wondered for more than the hundredth time how he could hear and respond to normal conversation amid the racket accosting his eardrums from the MP3 player he carried in his shirt pocket.

“Zagorski has been debriefed?” Bolan asked Brognola, who was dressed in a navy blue suit with a button-down white shirt starched so heavily it looked as if it could be made of cardboard.

“Yes. But let’s wait until Kurtzman gets here.”

As if on cue, the doors to the elevator built into the corner of the room slid open, and Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, appeared, followed by Aaron Kurtzman, who wheeled himself to his place at the head of the conference table. As Price slid into a vacant seat next to Tokaido, Kurtzman took his oversize mug of steaming coffee and placed it on the table in front of him.

“Hal, Zagorski’s debrief,” he said without wasting any words on greetings.

“It’s not good,” the big Fed replied. “As we suspected, the Order of Raphael is definitely working to develop a bioweapon. In the three years between 1345 and 1348, the Black Death wiped out somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of Europe’s population. Zagorski thinks the Order actually stored blood taken from plague victims during the fourteenth century in wine bottles in one of their cellars. They began those experiments that caught the attention of Sentinelles hoping to resurrect the disease, but the blood was too old. They decided instead to create a modern pandemic from scratch.”

“Motivation?” Bolan asked.

“I can answer that,” Price spoke up. In addition to the skills she brought to her management responsibilities, the former model with honey-blond hair was an adept researcher. She was knowledgeable and incisive, but even she admitted that her mind lacked that special ability to make the type of quantum leaps the cybernetics team often achieved when they pooled their mental resources.

“The Order dates all the way back to before the Crusades,” Price said. “When Pope Clement moved the papal seat to Avignon and it looked like there would be a schism with Rome, L’Abbaye de Raphael, along with all the other French monasteries, became more prominent in Church affairs. They’re mentioned in many medieval documents, but it’s hard to tell where truth leaves off and a rather incredible legend begins. Some believe that the Order’s calling was to help enforce God’s punishments on man.”

When Price paused for a moment, Wethers said, “Vigilante monks killing sinners?” His voice held a note of skepticism.

He placed the ivory stem of a briar pipe between his teeth and leaned back in his chair, taking on a pose multitudes of students had observed whenever the African-American professor assumed what he called his Socratic mode of teaching.

“Not exactly,” Price answered. “More like facilitators. The Old Testament is very explicit concerning God’s quid pro quo relationship with his Chosen People. Sinning gets out of control, and He sends a flood, choosing Noah to work with Him to punish mankind. Avenging angels are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorra. Moses is tasked to impose a forty-year cleansing march onto the doubting children of Israel. The legend is that the Order of Raphael was chosen to help spread the plague throughout Europe. Supposedly, a task force called the Forty Martyrs infected themselves and went on their way, spreading the disease along with God’s gospel. In those times, monks and priests were one of few groups allowed free travel across international borders.”

“Why forty?” Delahunt, ever the addict for attention to detail, asked.

“One for each lash Jesus received. But they weren’t all dispatched at once. The story goes that the Order sent them out in pairs and trios over a three-year period when the plague devastated European populations the Order’s abbot constantly watched for a sign telling him when to deploy the final couriers of death, steadfastly believing God would let him know. The plague ended up manifesting itself in three variants—bubonic, with black tumors and death within two weeks, pneumatic, zeroing in on the respiratory system, spread merely by breathing on someone and fatal in days, and finally, the septicemic version, of which the initial symptom was a violent vomiting of blood with death occurring within hours. The appearance of the third mutation, interpreted by the Order’s abbot to symbolize the Trinity, was his signal to deploy the last group. The plague died out shortly thereafter.”

“Are you saying that the explanation we learned in school, that the Black Death was spread by fleas carried on rats, is false?” Bolan asked.

“I’m just telling you what the legend is, Striker,” Price said.

“Why did the plague stop spreading? Rats didn’t change their travel patterns,” Tokaido asked.

“Darwinian natural selection,” Wethers answered in his authoritarian voice. “People possessing a natural resistance survived, and as those contracting the disease died, potential victims became fewer and fewer. Almost half the population in some places was wiped out.”

“In Europe,” Tokaido countered. “Rats didn’t migrate off the continent?” He snapped his gum and added, “Probability of the legend being fact is not zero.”

“Akira’s right,” Delahunt said. “Assume the Order was the breakout epicenter, targeting only the Christian world for God’s punishment. They stop sending couriers and the disease dies out. Coincidence? There must have been susceptible people in places like the Ottoman Empire, which bordered the continent. Why was the disease confined almost exclusively to Europe?”

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