Thirst for Justice

by David R. Boyd

  “Yes, sir. I spent almost three months in Africa earlier this year, working as a trauma surgeon for IMAF.”

  “A fine organization. Didn’t they win some award a few years back?”

  “That was actually a different organization. Same type of work though, providing free medical services.”

  “An honorable endeavor. Now whereabouts in Africa were you posted?”

  “The Democratic Republic of Congo.”

  “Jesus. Hell on Earth.”

  “In some ways Hell and in other ways Heaven. Have you been to Africa, senator?”

  “A few times. Egypt, South Africa, Kenya. Not the Congo. The folks who amaze me are the Masai. As fellow cattlemen, of course. Walking miles and miles in the blazing heat to find waterin’ holes and some decent grass to graze on.”

  The Senator rambled on. When he paused to take a breath and a pull on his cigar, Michael could hear the distinctive rumbling of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the big man’s chest. He leapt in. “Senator, the places you visited in Africa are in good shape compared to the Congo. As a physician, I was horrified by the poverty, the human suffering, the pointless deaths of young children. AIDS. Malaria. TB. Kids blown apart by land mines. Most of this misery is avoidable, if the resources were available.”

  “We pour more money into that bureaucratic black hole called the United Nations than any other nation in the world.”

  “And what about our low level of foreign aid?”

  The senator violently stubbed out his cigar. “Same damned thing. When you look at foreign aid as a percentage of our GDP, we’re at the bottom of the heap, with South Korea, Greece, and Portugal. But that’s because our economy is so huge. In terms of the actual George Washingtons leaving our country to lend a helping hand to poor countries, we’re number one.”

  “Number one? Really?”

  “Janine? Pull the numbers for Dr. MacDonald.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get them printed out.”

  Michael looked at Dom, who shrugged, a “don’t ask me” look. “All right, let’s not get bogged down in the numbers. The fact remains that whatever we’re doing, it’s not enough. There are hundreds of millions of people in Africa without clean drinking water. And millions of kids dying each year because of illnesses that we could easily prevent or treat. For pennies per child. We’re the richest nation in the world. The richest in the history of human society. Don’t we have a moral obligation to help those who are in desperate straits?”

  “Look, son. You remind me of a passage from the great book—‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.’ And personally, I agree with you.” The senator had been re-elected five times, and one of the reasons was his ability to agree convincingly with anyone on any issue. “Yes, we’re punching below our weight. But what am I supposed to do about it? If you’re asking me to push for increases in our foreign aid budget, I can’t do it. There are folks right here in Washington State who are starving, living in the streets, dying of preventable diseases. Maybe they don’t make campaign contributions, but they can still vote. They’re my constituents. Desperate people elsewhere, well, they don’t donate and they can’t vote.

  “America’s already running the biggest deficit of all time. Trillions of dollars. Should we raise our taxes so we can send more money overseas? Hard-working Americans just don’t see the sense in that. They want tax cuts, better health care, better education, and a military with the resources to get the job done.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Doctor. I’m just telling it like it is. The plain truth. Unvarnished. And nothing you or I can do will change it. Either you produce oil, purchase a lot of American goods and services, or have a nuclear weapons program. Otherwise you’re not on our radar screen.”

  “What about the Sustainable Development Goals that the world pledged to achieve? To reduce global poverty and hunger by half, to achieve universal access to clean water and primary education, to tackle global pandemics like AIDS, all by 2030. The U.S. signed on to those goals, right? But at the rate we’re going, the world will never make it. And yet we spend trillions of dollars on our military so we can knock countries backwards instead of moving them forward.”

  “I like your bullheadedness, but you don’t appear to be hearing me. You have to understand how the world works, not just how you want it to be, or think it ought to be. Change doesn’t happen overnight. It kind of flows along like a big ol’ river. You can build a dam and block it, although you have to let some water through or it’ll burst. You can divert it, so that it carves a new channel. You can contaminate it in a hundred different ways. But the one thing you cannot do is speed it up. Frankly, Doc, you’ve got a tougher challenge than the Greek fella, what was his name, Oedipus? Syphilis? The guy who was pushing the rock up the hill, and it kept steamrolling him.”

  “Sisyphus,” the chief of staff, Robert, chimed in.

  “Right. Sisyphus. What I’m saying is this: you have a big boulder to push and a high mountain to climb. American altruism is going through a tough patch right now.”

  As the senator prosed on, a whirlwind of images and thoughts blew through Michael’s mind in an incoherent, incomprehensible storm. The only unifying element was rage.

  Dom took advantage of Michael’s heated silence and leapt in with his own shopping list. “Let’s talk about something a little bit closer to home. Salmon.” Michael glared at Dom for shamelessly hijacking the agenda.

  Janine interrupted. “You’ve got five minutes. The senator has another meeting at eleven-thirty. Dr. MacDougall, I’ll go get your information.”

  “Five minutes is plenty.” Dom made a pitch for removing some old dams along tributaries of the Columbia River that were no longer serving any purpose but continued to block Pacific salmon from reaching their ancient spawning grounds.

  The senator listened halfheartedly, calculating the energy required of him in units of elbow grease against the vote-gaining potential, the horse swapping, the photo ops, and the possible backlash.

  Janine returned, bearing a plain manila file folder that she passed to Michael. “Levels of official development assistance for the twenty largest donor nations, going back a decade. We’re number one.”

  And then their time was up. Handshakes and platitudes all around. A couple of quick photographs. On autopilot, Michael managed to maintain a semblance of manners. Once he and Dom were safely out of the building, he erupted.

  Dom let Michael vent for a few minutes, then put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Welcome to the real world.”

  Michael did a double take. “The real world? This is fantasyland. And what was that tangent about salmon? How did that help?”

  “Just trying to save some fish and the old-growth ecosystems they depend on,” Dom said.

  “Save some fish? We’re supposed to be saving people!”

  “Hey, man, we’re all related. Part of Mother Earth.” Dom’s attempted levity failed to placate Michael. “Okay, let’s both give this some thought. We can talk about next steps during our run on Saturday. Do a long slow one so it’s easier to talk.”

  “All right. Sorry. I’m just frustrated.”

  Now there’s an understatement, Dom thought. His best friend seemed primed to explode.

  Chapter 9

  That night, Michael had another nightmare. In it, Maria was pregnant. He was delivering their child. The labor was long, complicated, painful. She gave birth to dozens of misshapen, undersized, and stillborn babies. He woke up drenched in sweat, wondering if it was an omen or whether it symbolized the failed birth of the Blue Drop Foundation.

  Nine months had passed and he’d been unable to persuade a single beverage corporation to express even a modicum of interest in his proposal. Nor did the American government have any interest in promoting the interests of the world’s poor. No amount of public protest, lobbying, inte
rnational humiliation, diplomacy, multilateral pressure, or litigation had made a difference in the past three decades. What hope was there that somebody would listen to a nobody like Michael?

  One night, lying awake in bed, obsessed with his failure, a dark and malignant idea arose, like the evil brother of the one that had jumpstarted the Blue Drop Foundation months ago.

  Only one avenue offered the potential for an ordinary individual to create a significant short-term shift in America’s national priorities. The powers that be could ignore the Blue Drop Foundation, but they could not ignore the threat of an attack on America. September 11 was irrefutable evidence of that. Terrorism provoked a response. A big response. What if he threatened to poison the drinking water supply of an American city? He’d heard media reports about the vulnerability of public infrastructure, the physical impossibility of protecting it all without creating a police state. He would have to figure out how to create a realistic, credible threat without actually harming anyone. He was still a doctor after all, bound by the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

  Part of Michael was horrified by his own wayward thoughts. Where had they come from? Was he willing to risk everything on such a wild gambit? Would he actually have the balls to go through with it? Would it actually make a difference? Part of him became obsessed by the idea.

  “It’s only curiosity,” Michael told himself. “I just want to know how much information is out there.” Some nights he was up until three or four in the morning, unable to sleep, researching the unthinkable. Maria thought he was still working on the foundation, but he realized now that idea was at a dead end. Without the knowledge, ability, or resources to move things along, Michael was stuck.

  It took less than ten minutes of Google searches to learn how to create Ricin, the toxic nerve gas that had been used in several terrorist plots. All you needed was a handful of castor beans and access to a kitchen. There were thousands of websites describing other chemical and biological weapons. The advice offered was often contradictory, a testament to either the dubious quality of the information or the success of FBI counterintelligence programs. The former seemed more likely. Opinions were divided on the most effective means of delivering a biological or chemical attack. It seemed that the most potent weapons were those capable of aerial delivery, so that people breathing the air would become afflicted. Nerve gases, pesticides, anthrax, industrial chemicals, viruses, bacteria. Each of these deadly substances had been used or modified for use in modern warfare. It seemed only a matter of time before terrorists used them too.

  Michael wondered if some of the websites he’d visited were monitored by security and intelligence agencies. It seemed likely, and he was uncomfortable about the prospect of having his searches traced back to him. Although he hadn’t done anything illegal, yet, maybe it would be a good idea to do some of the woolier research from an internet café or one of the public computer labs at the university.

  He did some digging into the vulnerability of urban water supplies to contamination. Post–9/11, governments talked a lot about strengthening security measures at water reservoirs and treatment plants. Yet there were over 50,000 large community water systems in the USA, and an additional 100,000 systems serving smaller communities. Properly protecting them would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In the North Cascade Mountains east of Seattle lay the Chester Morse Reservoir, downstream from the headwaters of the Cedar River. North of the Cedar River lay the Tolt reservoir, on the south fork of the Tolt River. Water was sent westwards from both reservoirs in large pipelines, passing through filtration and chlorination plants en route to people’s homes in downtown Seattle and the suburbs. Both watersheds were reportedly protected by regular air and road patrols.

  A topographical map of the Cedar River watershed posted online showed that it was crisscrossed with dozens of old logging roads. “Mountain biking country,” Michael mused. He ordered a twenty-four- by thirty-six-inch copy of the map online, with free delivery.

  He was doing another advanced search about security at the Chester Morse Reservoir when his cellphone rang.

  “Michael MacDougall.”

  “Dr. MacDougall, it’s Simone Levesque from IMAF. How are you today?”

  “I’m fine,” Michael lied. “How are you?”

  “Swamped, to tell the truth. Have you heard the latest news from the Congo? Mount Nyiragongo near Goma erupted again, just like in 2002, burying a large swath of the town. The volcanic activity beneath Lake Kivu released a giant bubble of carbon dioxide during the night, suffocating hundreds of Congolese who were sleeping outside. Subsequent contamination of the lake has led to a cholera outbreak. To makes matters worse, Goma has had its first cases of Ebola. And the conflict in the Eastern Congo shows no signs of abating. We are very short of doctors.”

  “Oh” was all Michael could say. He had been hoping for this phone call, and dreading it, for months. Part of him hungered to return to the mind-numbing frenetic activity of aid medicine. Part of him was terrified by the consequences of returning to Africa. Would he ever be able to sleep? What if he encountered another roadblock? How would he respond when a child died in his care? How would Maria react?

  “We are hoping that you might consider another rotation. We wouldn’t normally ask this of you but we are in dire straits.”

  “How soon?”

  “Assuming you can pass a physical exam, as soon as you can get your affairs in order—visas, vaccinations, and so forth. We can take care of your air travel arrangements.”

  “Back to the Congo?”

  “Mali, the Sudan, and the Congo are all in crisis. In the circumstances, Dr. MacDougall, we would leave the choice open to you.”

  “Can I call you back?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”

  Chapter 10

  Michael awoke before his alarm went off. It was still dark and he could hear rain pounding on the deck outside the bedroom. He slid stealthily out of bed. He was going for a long bike ride today, and maybe a run, depending on the access situation in the forests north of the Chester Morse Reservoir.

  He pulled on a battered pair of cycling shorts with a chamois added that gave a little extra cushion and reduced chafing. Over top he wore another pair of fast-dry shorts with an absurd number of pockets. A long-sleeve polypropylene shirt, a lightweight fleece, and a Gore-Tex windbreaker would keep the rest of him dry and warm.

  The night before he had swapped his super-skinny urban bike tires for a pair of hybrids that would be slightly slower on the highway but would offer more traction when he got onto the rough forest service roads north of the reservoir. He packed two peanut butter and jam bagels, two granola bars, two Fuji apples, and a chocolate bar into one pannier, along with spare tubes and a repair kit. He mixed up two bottles of lemon-lime Gatorade and filled his CamelBak with water. In the second pannier he put his topographical map, a compass, and a pair of binoculars.

  He ate a huge bowl of muesli and two sliced bananas for breakfast, washing it down with two glasses of orange juice. He wrote I love you on a post-it note and stuck it on the toaster where Maria would place a bagel in about an hour. He stepped onto the back porch, buckling his helmet. Despite the rain, the sky was suffused with tendrils of light as the sun rose, and the day appeared to have some potential for dry periods.

  Michael’s mountain bike was an ancient steed. He’d always believed that it was worth spending as much as you could afford on a bike because a high-quality one will last a long time. Despite some epic crashes, the Gary Fisher bicycle was still in good shape. He’d gone through a lot of brake pads, tires, and tubes, even replaced the wheels and derailleur, but the frame was the original.

  Michael clipped the panniers onto the rear rack and saddled up. He smiled, as he always did when first mounting the bike because several Christmases ago Maria had given him two new bike seats, ergonomicall
y designed to take pressure off certain parts of the male anatomy. One for his racing bike, one for his mountain bike. She’d been spooked by a news story about lower sperm counts and even sterility among men who rode too many miles on rigid bicycle seats.

  Michael hit the road, riding against the tide of morning commuters. Soon he was on the Mountains to Sound Greenway, a network of multi-use trails stretching over 100 miles from Puget Sound all the way to the west Cascades. He pedaled east along trails that ran parallel to Interstate 90, crossing the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge onto Mercer Island, and passing through Factoria, Eastgate, Lake Sammamish State Park, and Issaquah before reaching rural Washington. There was a long stretch of forests, mountains, and desert between here and Spokane. It was fantastic not having to ride on the highway on a rainy day, holding one’s breath as trucks roared past belching carcinogenic diesel fumes, and being drenched with sheets of dirty water. The trail wasn’t as direct, as it sometimes veered off to avoid private property or a natural obstacle like a wetland, but the safety and comfort were worth the trade-off, and the miles rolled by.

  He crossed the old wooden bridge over the Cedar River on 436th Ave. Southeast, known locally as the Cedar Falls Road. It was thirty miles, as the crow flies, from Seattle to the Chester Morse Reservoir. Michael knew he couldn’t cycle up the main road to the reservoir, where he would encounter a manned security gate and an extensive perimeter fence. The watershed was 90,000 acres though, and there was no way the whole area was fenced.

  The Cedar River valley had been carved by retreating glaciers thousands of years earlier, and 4,000-foot mountains rose up on both sides of the river. In decades past, a rat’s nest of logging roads had carved up the mountains, and exposed the forests to relentless rounds of clear-cutting. Seattle owned the entire watershed now, so the days of cut-and-run logging were over. But hundreds of miles of rough gravel roads remained, some melting back into the forest, others looking more like trails. Michael hoped he could use these to navigate his way to the north shore of the reservoir.