Harvardville Airport — Tarmac and Perimeter | October 4, 2005 | 14:47
The emergency hatch opened outward with the hydraulic assist and the manual override in sequence, which took four seconds, which was three seconds longer than Alen would have preferred.
He dropped onto the tarmac. The landing gear had partially deployed, which meant the fuselage was roughly level rather than inverted — the crash had been controlled enough for that much. Fire was establishing itself in the left engine cowling. Emergency slides were deploying on the main doors forward, which meant at least some of the crew had survived and were following protocol, which was good for the survivors and useful for his cover.
He stood up. Straightened his jacket. Began walking.
This was the technique for moving through chaos without drawing attention: you did not run. Running was the response of someone reacting. Walking, at the right pace, with the right body language — slightly dazed, oriented toward the perimeter rather than the crowd — read as a survivor self-evacuating, which was exactly what he was, in the narrowest technical sense.
Behind him, Kennedy would be at the main cabin doors — he had been moving forward when the impact came, so he would have impact-positioned on the forward section and would emerge from the primary evacuation point with the non-infected survivors. He would immediately begin triaging the situation. He was good at that. His file was extremely clear on that.
Alen reached the perimeter fence line at the cargo area boundary and stepped into the shadow of a freight container that had been left against the fence. He was out of the camera coverage here — he had mapped the airport's CCTV architecture from the WilPharma site survey that Section Q had provided, which had included the airport's layout because the airport was the likely insertion point for any operation targeting WilPharma.
He took thirty seconds.
He shed the outer layer of the Adam Stone suit — the jacket went first, folded and placed behind the container, where it would be found eventually and mean nothing to whoever found it. The tie. The pocket square. Under the business layer: a thin tactical harness, matte black, carrying the suppressed USP .45, two spare magazines, the Section Q decryption device, a trauma kit, and the data drive that the mission required him to fill.
He checked the USP. Chambered, safety on. He pulled on black nitrile gloves.
"Phantom is mobile," he said quietly, in the sub-vocal register that the mic at his throat would catch and his comms would transmit. "Airport is compromised. Confirmed T-Virus vector — pre-infected passengers, timed onset. Downing initiated this. Moving to primary objective."
The response in his earpiece was Briggs, from the operations room three thousand miles away and three floors underground: "Kennedy is on site, confirmed. His AUPIT cover is established. Harvardville emergency services are responding. You have a window before military cordon closes the perimeter. Move."
He moved.
* * *
The city between the airport and the WilPharma facility was emptying the way cities emptied when the emergency sirens were saying something specific rather than something general. People moving toward their homes or their cars, away from the airport, away from whatever the sirens meant. The streets in the industrial district were not empty but they were occupied by people in transit rather than people at rest, which meant he moved through them without being the anomaly he would have been if the streets had been calm.
WilPharma's headquarters was a glass tower with a service entrance on the east face that backed onto the loading dock for the research division's supply chain. The security architecture was standard corporate biometric with a secondary layer of magnetic lock on the restricted access points — better than most commercial facilities, not designed for the level of intrusion he was about to conduct.
He slapped the decryption device against the service entrance mag-lock.
The device ran its cycle — he had been told to expect forty-five seconds, which he used to conduct a final audio check of the surrounding area and confirm nobody was approaching the service entrance from either direction. Thirty-eight seconds. The lock released.
He entered.
"Phantom is on site," he said into the comms. "Going dark."
He did not speak again for forty-one minutes.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Chapter Twenty-Two follows...