Page 46 of Hot Intent

The electronic sensor in his hand was of Russian make. It took him a minute to decipher the various buttons and the read-out, but once he understood it, he started down the hill with the device activated.

As they neared the factory, the sensor indicated trace amounts of ammonia in the air, but not in enough quantity to pose any kind of threat. The high hurricane fence around the plant had turned out not to be not so hurricane-proof, and its tangled ruins were easy to step over.

Deep silence enveloped the facility. Up close, more damage was apparent and they were able to duck into the main building through a hole in a wall. Some sort of bottling and labeling assembly line was trashed in front of them. It looked like the hull of a giant centipede.

“Sheesh, this place is creepy. I half-expect a zombie to pop out of the shadows,” Katie breathed.

He was too busy watching for possible threats to register such things. Something skittered in a corner, and he nearly shot a rat. He was grateful to see the rodent. It was tantamount to a canary in a mineshaft. The rat’s presence meant the air was probably safe to breathe throughout the factory.

What intrigued him most was how abandoned this place looked. Had the hurricane done all this damage? Or had the factory been decaying for a while before Giselle hit?

“This is the place with the dock, right?” he asked over his shoulder.

“That’s what our driver said. He said ships come in here regularly.”

Alex made his way to the ocean side of the building, and he and Katie shoved opened a big, sliding door facing this supposed dock. Unlike the decrepit facility behind them, this area looked relatively well cared for. The damage from the hurricane was serious, but there was very little rust or corrosion, and the mangled equipment looked reasonably modern.

A paved strip of concrete and a torn-up rail line must have been the main points of debarkation for cargo. The concrete and steel rails ran toward a cluster of buildings behind them. Asecond, smaller road seemed to pass beyond the fenced Zacara buildings. Frowning, he started to walk down it.

“Should we go ninja and be sneaky?” Katie breathed.

“Anyone in the area won’t expect us to be here. They won’t mask the noise of their presence.”

“So we’re just going to march down this road into the unknown?”

“Pretty much.” He wasn’t worried about what would come around the corner. He’d been trained to handle just about any eventuality on the fly.

The chemical sensor beeped a general warning, and he stopped to run a specific analysis. The electronic face identified the airborne chemical it sensed as “Unknown.” The parts per million displayed on the gauge were still very low, though, so he continued walking forward.

“Should we have gas masks or something?” Katie asked nervously.

“If the levels of unidentified gasses climb too much, we’ll go back. Wind’s at our backs, though, so we should be okay to proceed.” In fact, a stiff breeze was picking up, blowing onto shore. Given the time of day, there must be a front of some kind moving into the area. Rain was a pain in the ass, but it did make stealthy movement easy. Not to mention it tended to keep bad guys indoors.

He spied a dark lump on the side of the road ahead. Intuition and many hours in emergency rooms made him murmur to Katie, “Wait here.”

He moved ahead and knelt beside the dead soldier. The body looked like it had been here a few days. It was bloated and flies crawled on the exposed skin. But the signs of how this man died were still visible. Dried blood stained the corner of his mouth and had run from his nose, and the soldier’s hands clutched at his own throat as if he’d choked.

Alex photographed the soldier dispassionately with his cell phone before pulling out a scalpel and removing tissue samples from the man’s nasal cavity, his lungs, and his stomach lining. He finished by scraping dirt stained dark with blood from under the corpse into a plastic bag.

He waved Katie forward and moved on down the road with her. He paid very close attention to the face of the gauge in his hand. The road led inland a few hundred yards uphill into thick undergrowth. It stopped in front of a low mound of weeds.

“This is it?” Katie asked, looking around in confusion.

“Bunker,” he muttered, walking around to the side of the mound. Sure enough, a heavy-duty steel door was recessed into the side of the hill.

“Is this where they store the explosive furniture polish?” she asked dryly.

He smiled slightly. His gauge beeped, urgently this time. “I think we may have found the source of our chemical leak.

“And we would be leaving now, right?” Katie said, backing up already.

“Wind’s blowing steadily. As long as we stay upwind of this place, we should be okay.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“How are you at holding your breath?” he asked, studying the steel door, which, at a closer look, appeared heavily damaged.

“Not bad. I can go around two minutes.”

---