WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 373: Each One's Homeland (7)
──────
The toxin was produced when the Morgellons complex broke down under radiation. It had a formal name, but necrotoxin was the one more widely used by the public.
Medical radioactive substances, meanwhile, were used to kill lesions such as cancer cells. So there was no reason they could not destroy the Morgellons complex as well.
If the toxin produced that way could be refined, it would be far more useful for terrorism than living mutants. Toxin was not stopped by walls or barbed wire. It broke down over time. The frenzy of the poisoned did not last forever either. Many lives might be lost, but it offered more control than releasing mutants. Even in the worst case, no real infection would spread. The embers plotting this conspiracy were, in the end, people who feared the end too.
Anne searched through the hospital list, then connected to headquarters.
"It's me. Put the Director on. Yes. I know. It's urgent. Hurry."
With his sharp hearing, Gyeoul could tell the voice beyond the headset had changed. The direct report was brief. The FBI Director listened to the voice of a trusted supervisor, then answered.
「I'll confirm it.」
Click. The call ended.
Less than five minutes later, dozens of new symbols appeared on the map. The Intelligence Agency also provided assets. The joint task force of the Bureau, the Intelligence Agency, and local police targeted seven general hospitals. The unavoidable delay required to hit them all at once came to a little over twenty minutes. A covert blockade came first.
In this room, the most likely site among them had been brought up on the screen. It was a hospital in Alabama run by a patron of a religious foundation.
「Entry! Entry!」
Montgomery city police SWAT teams equipped with CBRN gear entered through four entrances at once. Even in old protective suits, they moved quickly. The screen shook constantly. Heavy breathing came with it, because they were borrowing the team members' sight. Anne watched with her left hand on her waist and her right fist pressed to her lips. She looked like she was holding down her nerves.
As people scattered screaming, hospital personnel were treated as suspects regardless of rank. Since martial law was in effect, warrants were unnecessary. They were cuffed and left where they were. Arrests and interrogations would be handled by the reinforcements that followed.
「This is Alpha Team. We will secure the radiation zone.」
It was the area that had to be searched first. In a deserted hallway, a breathless SWAT officer quietly, slowly tried the doorknob. Locked. A notice was posted on the metal door. Radiation therapy will be suspended for the time being due to equipment maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The officer stepped back and pressed against the wall. The others were tight against both sides of the corridor as well. The team leader nodded. Two officers attached plastic explosive to the door. The team leader raised his fingers. Three, two, one.
「Breach!」
Flash! The speaker spat out a distorted blast. In the smoke, the flash suppressors of automatic rifles flickered. It was not their side firing. The screen spun, then hit the floor with a thud and pointed at the ceiling. Anne closed her eyes for a moment, then pressed the keyboard and switched to another officer's view.
「Shots fired! Shots fired! We have wounded!」
SWAT officers fired back, screaming against the light ahead. Flashbangs burst in clusters, and the dark hallway blinked without pause. Of all places, the wounded officer had an artery in the neck torn open. Fatal bleeding spread into a dark red pool, and shell casings thick with gunsmoke clattered down over it.
The resistance died down in an instant. Their training had been different from the start. Perhaps they had posed as doctors when going in and out, because most of the enemies were wearing white coats.
What mattered was the gas masks they wore.
"Looks like we were right."
Anne muttered darkly. Hopefully they were not too late.
People who feared death were everywhere. Some of the enemy surrendered. The number grew the deeper the teams went. The SWAT officers handled the prisoners roughly. Their comrade shot in the neck had died in the end. If they had not been ordered to capture as many enemies alive as possible, there might have been more corpses.
A firefight broke out underground too. Three SWAT teams quickly suppressed the enemy despite taking losses and occupied the refrigerated morgue. Pale light washed over the officers' protective suits. Some of the suits had been damaged in the fight, but even if toxin was scattered, they would be fine as long as the gas masks stayed intact.
The space was lined with square refrigerator doors along the walls.
The commander gestured at one of them.
「Open it.」
An officer with a shotgun covered them while another grabbed the handle and pulled. The drawer slid open with a cold metallic rasp. The commander groaned. Oh, God. What the hell have these madmen done?
Inside the drawer, an ulcerated mutant slept in a state of Metabolic Suppression. It was hard to mistake it for a corpse. An ordinary corpse would not have been dressed in a restraint suit. How long had it endured the low temperature?
The commander ordered in a shaking voice.
「Close it. Preserve the scene until further orders.」
Mutants were also found in the radiation zone. The place deserved to be called a chemical weapons plant more than a medical facility. Multiple containers of medical radioactive substances had been opened and abandoned. The storage room where those containers were supposed to be had also been left wide open.
A mutant strapped to a bed shrieked at the SWAT officers.
「Kyaaaaaak!」
Clank, clank. Its flesh tore under its own strength, and contaminated blood and pus dripped beneath the bed. The mutant's bare skin was covered in swollen tumors.
How much time had the people who made that scene been given? Gyeoul considered the possibility that weaponized necrotoxin had already leaked.
'They'll have to announce it.'
For the U.S. government, the best-case scenario was recovering every bit of toxin before it could be released.
But that was far too optimistic.
The government had to warn people first instead. It would create even more chaos across the United States, but they could not let civilians be caught unaware. If people mistook it for a spreading plague, controlling the aftermath would only become harder. Letting the terrorists make the first move would be just as bad.
Agent Callahan, who had been communicating with headquarters, turned to Anne.
"Gibson! The Director is asking for you!"
"Give it to me."
Anne took the headset.
"This is Gibson."
No time was wasted.
「There is a plan.」
The Director explained the White House contingency plan. The President wanted to bypass the middle chain of command and take direct control of combat forces near D.C. Preparations had already been made. Practical command would be handled through the White House underground command room and the National Security Advisor. They also wanted Lieutenant Colonel Han Gyeoul to join...
The core point was that they needed people they could trust no matter what happened.
"Yes. Yes... Yes, understood."
Anne absorbed the message quickly. Then she shifted her gaze slightly.
"You mean the Intelligence Agency agents?"
The four of them, including Talbot, wore awkward expressions. How many seconds did she look at them?
"Yes. You can trust them. I'll keep things under control here."
The FBI Director did not question Anne's judgment. It showed how much trust she had earned. Gyeoul felt that she had changed again from what he had seen off the San Francisco coast. It was as if she had grown through that wave-tossed night.
People changed. They could change. In a positive sense.
The call ended. An additional encrypted document came in from FBI headquarters. Anne read it quickly, frowned, reread the important parts a few more times, then destroyed the document. Then she looked back at Gyeoul with an expression that tried to hide her emotions.
"Come this way for a moment."
The fact that she moved away out of concern for other people's ears meant this was not ordinary. The Intelligence Agency agents and the Bureau's remaining two agents tactfully focused elsewhere. Anne glanced at them, then lowered her voice.
"Gyeoul. There's something you need to do."
"Tell me."
"What they want upstairs is a reserve force that can be deployed anywhere. A firefighter to put out the most urgent fires first. You also need to be able to make your own judgment if there are no orders or communication is cut off."
"Where do I go? Am I acting alone?"
"That isn't clear yet. First, you need to meet a Secret Service agent."
Gyeoul tilted his head inwardly. Why the Secret Service?
"They should be busy enough protecting the President. They're helping with my mission?"
"Not exactly."
Anne shook her head.
"I only just found out, but apparently there's a secret organization directly under the President, created for days like today. Its formal name is White Cell. It's dormant in normal times, but when a sudden crisis occurs, the members cooperate flexibly and carry out missions. They're mostly active-duty soldiers or soldiers discharged under cover. There are also some police and agents from other agencies."
"So I'm included in that too?"
"More or less."
"More or less?"
"To be exact, you'd be a temporary collaborator. I doubt there will be much difference, though."
In other words, the President had created a direct armed organization outside the Secret Service long ago, elite agents serving as relief pitchers were already active in the field, and Gyeoul would be joining them temporarily.
"I'll mark the coordinates."
Anne took Gyeoul's Net Warrior terminal and marked a location on the tactical map application. She also told him the frequency channel to use for communication. Then she let the emotion she had been holding back show.
"I have to stay here."
Gyeoul smiled.
"That's good. Better than worrying about each other, right?"
Anne sighed.
"...If you need anything, say it."
"Something I need."
Gyeoul turned his eyes to the situation map.
"If any news about the independent company comes in, could you tell me? If possible, of course."
"Of course. Anything else?"
"There's something I need to tell you before I go."
"What is it?"
"About General Schroeder and Major General Strickland."
Anne looked thrown by the unexpected names, and Gyeoul briefly told her what had happened so far. The satellite phone number General Schroeder had entrusted to him, how he had asked Major Strickland of Alamo 1 to put him in touch with her father, and even the bottle of brandy he had received at the hotel.
"I didn't know who I should trust. Anne was an exception, of course, but there was everything around you to think about. I didn't want to worry you for no reason either. Anyway, now that things have turned out this way, I'm leaving the judgment from here on to you and the White House."
They might learn something by monitoring the satellite phone, or they might try contacting Major General Strickland, who had likely prepared something. Either way, for Gyeoul, who was about to head outside, those choices might as well not exist.
"I'll go, then."
Anne caught Gyeoul as he turned away.
"Come back safe. Please."
"...That's what I plan to do."
Gyeoul smiled as he answered.
"I like being alive more than I used to."
He was about to hug her as a farewell when another voice cut in.
"Everyone!"
It was Kowalski, wearing a complicated expression.
"I'm sorry to interrupt the tender atmosphere, but I think you need to hear this! We're picking up signals like this all across D.C.!"
She turned up the console volume for everyone to hear.
[Static... ic... yote 6, Coyote 6, this is Entry 1. Landing zone confirmed... someone help me, please! We can't hold out any longer... chk... the song you're about to hear is Tony Bennett's The Autumn Waltz... It's a plague demon! Save me!... I repeat, Line Zulu, one Grumble, ordinary mutants roughly... get back and have a beer... report what your situation is... static...]
It was a pattern he had not heard in a long time.
"Trickster jamming?"
Could the force behind the conspiracy have even secured a cunning special mutant?
"Unfortunately, it's a copied signal."
Kowalski said it like a joke and tapped at the keyboard. She was comparing and analyzing the signal waveforms. The program showed that the signals caught around the city easily overlapped with one another.
"There's a matching file in the Department of Defense's database of collected Trickster signals too. Someone leaked it. They probably installed transmitters and things like that in advance. It would have been easier than bringing in weapons. They just had to disguise them as communications equipment."
"..."
"Should I call it impressive? The people who planned this... I really want to see their faces at least once."
Radio communications would be disrupted, and the entire city would fall into a vicious state of anarchy.
Gyeoul sensed a hard fight coming.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
