by Jeff Rovin
CHAPTER NINE
Headquarters Battalion, Fort Belvoir
November 11, 10:00 A.M.
There were nods and glances but no pleasantries as the three Black Wasp members entered Briefing Room A. Chase Williams was dressed in civvies and had not removed the blue windbreaker he wore on the walk over. He was standing behind the circular conference table.
Williams seemed, to Breen, to have lost weight. Not as much socializing as when he was doing something else, the major suspected. Williams was also paler, no surprise in the late fall. His clothes were sharply pressed and his shoes polished; he expected no less from former navy. But those were small things. The larger difference, big as a billboard, was the absence of fire. When Black Wasp had gone after Salehi, it was a crusade for Williams. Whatever this was, however vital, Breen already knew it was a job.
“Good to see you all again,” Williams said with amiable sincerity. “We are going to where the South African A330-200 Airbus went down this morning,” Williams said without preamble. “The Twelfth Aviation Command will Huey us to Langley and a USAFRICOM C-21 will get us to Air Force Station Port Elizabeth in about eighteen hours with four stops for refueling. Your passports will be onboard, along with local currency. NAVAF will take it from there. We do not yet know our precise destination, but it is likely the Prince Edward Islands. Briefing materials and updates will be sent en route.”
The United States Africa Command was based in Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, and had jurisdiction over the United States Naval Forces Africa. They were responsible for that continent and all points south, to and including Antarctica.
“We have reason to believe that the flight deck, at least, was taken down by an airborne germ of unknown origin or type,” Williams went on. “Satellite recon suggests a possible geologic component, not volcanic but also of indeterminate nature. If we have deduced that, then other powers have likely done the same. Our mission is to determine if such a toxic agent exists; if so, to secure it; and without starting a war, to prevent proliferation. Protective gear is being brought aboard the Huey, along with your go-bag gear.” He grinned at Rivette and Lee. “Minus what you already have on your persons.
“South Africa does not know the reason for our coming, but we will be arriving under cover from National Transportation Safety Board personnel who have been requested. Any questions, save them for the chopper. We are airborne,” he glanced at the wall clock, “at eleven thirty. See you all onboard.”
The group rose. Rivette took the bottle of water that had been set out.
Grace shook her head.
“Hey, it’s free,” the lance corporal said. “I don’t leave ‘free’ behind.”
Breen noticed that Williams had made his presentation without notes. The man was impressive. He had not been briefed by anyone. He had been living this since the crash.
“You walking over?” Breen asked Williams.
“To and from is the only exercise I’m going to get today,” he said.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Welcome it.”
The men followed the two younger Black Wasps back through the corridor. Williams had already pulled on sunglasses and a snapback ball cap that covered his close-cropped gray hair. To Breen, he was a man who did not want to be recognized. They did not speak until they were outside. Apparently, Williams also did not want to be heard.
“May I ask why you are joining us?” Breen asked.
“I’m used to being behind a desk,” Williams said. “But not working alone.”
Breen did not want to push. He was not even sure he wanted to help—if help were required. That was just the professor and defense attorney coming out, with a smattering of criminologist. He liked to know things.
“How have you been?” Williams asked. “I understand that being here was not part of the original plan.”
“It was not. Sacrifices had to be made.”
Breen’s tone was convival, but Williams saw past it.
“Military service,” the retired officer said. “As they used to say during the draft, ‘You can’t beat it.’”
That was the extent of their talk. Whatever Williams did not want to talk about was going to remain unrevealed.
The walk to the airfield took a brisk ten minutes, the sun taking the bite from the air. The ground crew had already loaded the UH-1N and the four passengers climbed in. They made sure everything they needed was onboard before giving the all clear. Each Black Wasp always had their weapons and either warm- or cold-weather gear packed in two cases each, ready to depart at any time.
The crew consisted of a pilot and copilot. Rivette, Lee, and Breen sat in the row of three forward-facing seats behind them, their bags at their feet. Williams took one of the two side-facing seats. By noon, the team was airborne on the C-21. The DLA kept a small fleet for clandestine missions. They were flown by retired air force pilots and paid for by whoever needed the ride. Williams had quickly realized that was the reason Op-Center remained a valuable commodity to any president. Still funded by Congress as if it were a fully functioning if downsized spy agency, it could pay its own way on missions like this. Transport had an eight-passenger capacity, but Black Wasp and its gear were the only occupants.
Each of the Black Wasps took their own seat.
Berry had sent Williams a briefing on the region and the status of the operation. Williams received the updates in a series of bullet points:
*Distressed yacht exploded 3:43 P.M. East African Time, South Indian Ocean. Likely self-inflicted.
*Dinghy departed area; satellite image attached. One occupant, bearing northeast.
*SA Civil Aviation Authority headed to Marion Island by surface ship.
*Foreign vessels and aircraft not approaching.
Not yet, Williams thought. No one wants to leave a state-of-the-art military vessel with a dead crew in open waters. Unlike Black Wasp, they were waiting for more information before venturing into the region. Or perhaps, like Black Wasp, they had their own special ops teams preparing to launch.
There was a primer on the history and geopolitics of the region, which all of the team members had received. Williams remembered all of it from his studies at Tufts and the world-changing events that followed.
Apartheid—Afrikaans for “apart” and “hood”—was a policy of racial segregation established by the white minority of South Africa in 1948. Roughly 80 percent of the population were people of color, including those of Indian and Pakistani descent. They were forbidden from living or operating businesses in white areas, or even interacting with white citizens. Jobs that could be held were restricted, and their political interests were represented by whites. The national tongue was the Afrikaans language, also known as Cape Dutch, after the seventeenth-century Dutch, German, and French colonists.
Slowly, the international community was roused against apartheid, culminating in the United States and the United Kingdom imposing sanctions in 1985. Laws were slowly, reluctantly relaxed until they were ended in 1990–91. Though the regulations were no longer on the books, they remained in the hearts of many locals. Centuries of conditioning and a sense of ancient roots, particularly among the proud Boers, the descendants of the Dutch, died hard and often not at all.
Williams wondered how much of this history was known to young Jaz Rivette and how he would take to it. The young man seemed to be engrossed in his reading.
The Prince Edward Islands were discovered by Dutch sailors in 1663 and attempts to go ashore were made by the French a century later. Marion took its name from the surname of the French captain. The British seaman Captain James Cook named the other island, and the group, after the son of George III. The islands were visited largely by sealers, who continued to hunt through the early twentieth century. The islands were annexed by South Africa in 1947–48 and became a nature preserve in 2003.
When everyone had had a chance to digest the material, Breen put himself into the seat across the aisle from Williams.
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“Do you remember the dustup about South Africa and AIDS in the mid-1980s?” the major asked.
“I do.” He smiled. “You weren’t born then.”
Breen’s mouth twisted. “No. But I studied a variety of legal claims—both slander and libel—in which government officials and scientists were charged with having created the virus in order to eliminate the non-white population.”
“You understand I was teasing you just now.”
“I do. I—This was a hot-button topic, had its own course, because a number of the individuals were high-ranking military figures. The idea was that, as future military officers, attorneys would be faced with similar cases. All of which is beside the point. The legal claims spurred a crash program in South Africa into tracing the origin of HIV. The conclusion among researchers on point at the navy’s Military Health Service was that HIV was the mutation of a chimpanzee virus that originated in Cameroon and jumped to humans through hunters or vendors handling monkey meat meant for consumption. That finding was not without precedent. Both Ebola and Marburg originated in monkeys and passed to humans. Subsequent genetic studies placed the first mutation into HIV around 1910, when African colonists established the first large cities. This created a fertile incubation and mutation environment for the virus.
“The bottom line is that the cases against the military were dismissed,” Breen said. “But I am wondering if any of your sources can tell us what happened to the navy’s bio-research program.”
“I can ask, but what reason would South Africa have to conduct that kind of research?” Williams asked.
“The cynic in me says that they’d already been investigated—why not go ahead with exactly what they were accused of? There were citizens of South Africa who were passionate about not ending apartheid.”
“And why the navy?” Williams asked.
“It had a history of being white,” Breen replied. “When people think of South African land forces, the Zulus are still the standard-bearers for heroism and tactics.”
“All right, I’ll look into it. What I’m going to be asked, then, is do I have any reason to believe this may be true? Because if so, there’s a very large implication—”
“That someone released something that may or may not have been created,” Breen said. “Yes, that’s a big statement and long reach. But there’s a strong Afrikaner Resistance Movement, partly in response to the pendulum swing of lawlessness and land seizure against whites, and it seems prudent to rule anything like that out at the start.”
“I buy that,” Williams said. “And I’ll be interested to see if the South Africans are looking into it. That would be an investigation fraught with peril, home terror attacking an essential hub of transportation and commerce.”
“Peril for more than just the South Africans,” Breen pointed out as he went back to his seat.
Williams had gotten so accustomed to considering big-picture plays at Op-Center that he did not see that microcosm. It was Black Wasp that would be on the ground looking out for American interests. Unlike the pursuit of Salehi, this mission did not presently have definition or an objective.
Twenty-four hours from now, we may be pursuing some genocidal biologist through the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, he thought.
Williams used his secure uplink to transmit the request to his computer at the DLA. Berry would be pinged to access the request there. Within the half hour, he received a call from Berry.
“Ten minutes ago, South Africa’s minister of health, Barbara Niekerk, sent a private, not government, e-mail to the Australian minister of health, Bryan Cocquerel, urging him to ban flights from the Great Victoria Desert and Great Australian Bight.”
Williams was not surprised that U.S. intelligence was monitoring private as well as government e-mails. Other nations did the same to Washington. He looked at a map.
“A reasonable precaution, given the easterlies from the crash location. That would be ground zero.”
“Agreed,” Berry said. “It’s what she said after that which got our attention. She wrote, ‘Will advise when hold may be lifted.’”
“She knows something,” Williams said.
“Seems like it,” Berry replied. “Find out what it is.”
CHAPTER TEN
Pretoria, South Africa
November 11, 5:27 P.M.
General Tobias Krummeck, chief intelligence officer of the South African National Defence Force, woke with a start when the smartphone played the nineteenth-century hymn “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”—“Lord Bless Africa.” He picked up the phone and squinted at the time then looked at the caller ID. Only the number had come up. It was local but he did not recognize it.
He got off the bed where he and his wife had just exhausted themselves for the better part of an hour, and headed toward the adjoining bathroom as he tapped the Answer icon.
“What is it?” Krummeck said thickly from under his woolly white mustache.
“General, it’s Raeburn.”
It took another moment for the name to bore through the remnants of sleep. Krummeck was instantly awake.
“Hold,” the senior officer said.
There were not many things that the medical officer could be calling about. It had been at least a year since they had spoken last, a chance encounter at a cocktail reception for veterans of the first and second battles of El Alamein. The men had said very little and barely looked at one another. Like illicit lovers, each was a little afraid of the secret they shared.
The general shut the bathroom door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and pulled a bathrobe from its hook behind the door. He threw it over his stooped shoulders, suddenly very chilly.
“What is it?” the old soldier asked as he sat.
“We appear to have had a containment leak, sir.”
Tinnitus and an echo in the bathroom made the general mistrust what he had heard. He asked the caller to repeat it. He had heard correctly.
“What happened?” the general demanded. Though the words were calm, it took effort to get them out.
The general had been asleep and had missed the news of the jetliner crash. Raeburn brought him up to date. The senior officer sat like something broken, helpless and still. The horror of it all—and the dread of what might follow—sank into his soul even as his brain was still wrestling with it.
“Still active?” Krummeck said when Raeburn was finished. “In that cold? And a leak. How are these things possible, dammit?”
“Corrosive salt water, an underwater geologic event, possibly currents knocking the canister against the wall—”
“You’re talking about five inches of steel-reinforced concrete!”
“Sir, I told you at the time that all the bug needed to escape was a vent four micrometers wide—”
“You also told me it would be—the words you used were ‘contentedly inert in the cold’!”
“Sir, I’ve been thinking about that. The truth is I’ve never stopped thinking about it. We engineered the bacterium to seek a specific target, one that was itself evolving. Maybe the mutagenic properties we built in were more versatile than we imagined. We did not exactly run exhaustive exit-strategy tests when we aborted.”
No, Krummeck had to admit. The goal was to get rid of it as soon as possible. The military and political situation was too volatile.
“All right, let me think a moment,” the general said. “Survival in the air,” he said. “What about that?”
“One hour maximum but, again, we don’t know what may have changed. We are talking about many, many generations of bacterial life having passed.”
While the general thought, Dr. Raeburn sat in his small office listening to the silence of indecision, looking into the past. He was not ashamed about what they had done. But by his soul, he regretted the mix of eagerness followed by urgency that had brought them here.…
* * *
Just over a dozen years ago, Raeburn’s nation was in chaos. Migration, illegal and legal, had strained Sou
th Africa’s infrastructure. The system was already stressed by the AIDS pandemic and the lingering resentment and petty political vengeance on both sides that followed the end of apartheid. Riots killed hundreds and displaced over one hundred thousand.
A specialist in communicable diseases, Raeburn thought he might have a solution to one of those problems.
The military was a microcosm of the split and combative civil government. The old guard sought a resurgence, rising leaders sought to crush it. There was no middle ground to either side. Because of that, the medical officer had circumvented navy channels with his idea—and, thus, went off the radar.
Raeburn had requested, and easily secured, a meeting with Minister of Health Barbara Niekerk. The pulmonologist had been a fellow student at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape Province. Raeburn knew her to be a person of conscience and suspected she would sidestep protocol for peace.
“It will be good to see you,” she had told him, “but understand that two white doctors, even when they are helping the black population, will be perceived as throwbacks.”
Raeburn did not doubt the truth of that. He also did not care. It was one of those reactionary, ultimately fatal idiocies for which he had no time or patience.
When they met for dinner, just old schoolmates, what Raeburn had to say surprised her. Sitting in a quiet corner of a quiet restaurant, he began by asking her security clearance.
“Level Two,” she had replied, surprised.
“Higher than mine,” he had replied, then smiled. “There is nothing I’m about to tell you that you cannot know.”
“About the state of medicine in our own nation?”
“That’s right,” he had replied.
She had asked, only half-joking, “Because I am white, because I am a woman, or both?”
“Remember when pendulums only swung from side to side?” he asked. “We live in a complex society.”
Now she was surprised and mildly offended, but also intrigued. “Go on.”