Son of Cerberus (The Unusual Operations Division Book 2) by Jacob Hammes Page A

to Marcus, David, and Brenda to figure out what was happening with the mystery weapon. He was only optimistic that it might help them to transport the thing.
    He was waiting for someone to come down and speak with him when he heard the very faint booms of what he thought to be doors slamming. In a matter of seconds, he heard the bustle of worried men and women as they piled out into hallways to see what was going on. Just second later, alarms and claxons started urging people to the nearest exits.
    It simply wasn’t possible something was happening in the hospital that would force an evacuation that didn’t coincide with the UOD’s presence. Taking the bangs he heard as warnings, he, too, made for the nearest exit. Once on his way, he queued up his radio and started jabbering away.
    “Cynthia, Stephen—you guys alright?”
    “Barely,” Cynthia came back almost instantly. “Some assholes tried to kill us. They’d have gotten away with it, too, but one of them was clumsy. From the looks of it, one of them might get away. The other is lying in a pool of her own blood.”
    “Were you shooting at them up there?”
    “Hell yes, she was,” Stephen sounded angry. “She about blew my eardrums clean out of my head. Anyway, the police showed up and finished it for us. I’d stay away from the exits downstairs, though; the whole group might be coming your way.”
    “Well tell me what this guy looks like and maybe I can stop him?”
    “A blond dude that’s probably around twenty five,” Cynthia said. A bit of anger had found its way into her voice. “He’s wearing a black collared shirt, but you should be able to tell who he is from that blond hair. They killed two innocent people up here. If you see the man, just shoot him.”
    Henry, for all his skill as an agent and otherwise, could not have done anything to stop the man. He could, however, see the escaping assailant as he exited through a door just two hundred yards away, but it was over the heads of a hundred or more moving doctors, nurses, patients, and other staff. From his vantage point on a bench, he knew he would never be able to squeeze off a round without hurting an innocent bystander. All he could do was suck his teeth and hope the police were after the suspect, too.

Chapter 6
     
    Marcus didn’t know what to expect as they moved toward the hazard-tape warning circle. The police officer responsible for pulling the girl off the boat had been taken to a hospital, too. His description was one of horror. Apparently the boat got worse and worse the longer he stayed on it. The little girl had grown horrid appendages before his eyes, bug-like in nature. She had screamed something he could never begin to comprehend before he just made the decision to pick her up and pull her off.
    Once outside the circle he had simply passed out along with the girl.
    Since then, the only people who had even attempted to approach the ship did so to put the yellow hazard-tape up. They found that going as far as the police officer had gone was not only impossible, but might very well kill them. No one wanted to risk their lives for such a thing.
    Marcus and his team were the last bastion of hope to get the box shut off, or pull it off the boat, before the Coast Guard hauled the entire ship out to sea and blew it sky high. Dressed in full hazmat suits, they approached the tape cautiously. If they were going to experience some psychotic dreams, they wanted to do it as close to one another as possible. This way, perhaps they could talk themselves through it.
    As a precaution, the woman who had greeted them held onto their weapons before letting them into the hazmat suits.
    The vast amount of sensors the team had brought proved to them they were in over their head. The spectrum analyzer told them they were receiving strong signals across a broad range of frequencies, which didn’t match anything they had ever seen before. The Geiger counter remained silent, as did the EMF detectors, yet