by Davis Bunn
One of the female team members glanced up and smirked. She said something, and the second female laughed softly. Otherwise no one paid Della any attention, until Bruno stepped over and pointed to the WHO initials printed on the chests. “The two white suits are yours. Bishop’s company supplies the World Health Organization operations in West Africa. That’s your cover. Our suits are blue with UN logos. United Nations troops oversee the southern Senegal conflict zones. If anybody other than Team Leader One and Two speaks to you, point to your IDs and say ‘WHO’—just those initials. Don’t say Bishop or your names. Keep your passport with you at all times. Your mic will be on the entire time you’re suited up. The instant I hear your voices, rest assured I’ll be on my way. So you wait. No matter what they say or how they threaten, you don’t say anything more.”
“But—”
“Hold that thought.” Bruno handed them two plastic collars shaped like unfinished circles. “This is your wireless comm-link. Fit them around your necks.” He showed them how his was positioned, with the earpiece dangling on a slender white cord. “The mic is located in the collar. Earpiece goes in your left ear.” Bruno waited until the receivers were in place, then said, “Test, test.”
“Loud and clear,” Theo said. Della jerked an angry nod.
“Test your mics.”
Theo said, “One, two.”
Della said, “I’m still waiting.”
When Bruno responded by walking away, Della’s face went crimson. Theo turned back and said quietly, “Did it occur to you that he might be doing us a favor?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Hazmat suits,” Theo said. “A thirty-year civil war. My brother buying me out of bankruptcy and flying me halfway around the world first class. Kenny pulling you away from whatever you were doing.”
Della touched her lips with her tongue. But she did not speak.
“Something bad is down there. Something so terrible that telling us just won’t work. Something urgent.” Theo glanced around and found both team leaders watching them. Their expressions were very grave, almost furious in their intent. Like they were finally willing to show him their game face. Because he got it. “We’d better go suit up.”
nine
Soon as they landed, the plane’s tail section descended, and Della entered a blood-red dawn. She felt her entire body compressed by a feeling of intense claustrophobia. The helmet was a circular tent with a clear plastic shield that stretched from ear to ear. Her oxygen tank was encased in a white nylon backpack that also contained a battery-operated A/C unit. The tape sealing her white plastic gloves to her wrists felt overly tight. She could hear the others breathing through the small receiver in her left ear. In her other ear, Della heard the plane’s massive propellers winding down. Smoke drifted in sullen clouds lit by the rising sun. She could smell nothing except the Windex used to clean her visor. The sense of being completely disconnected from the smoky terrain was disconcerting.
They gathered to one side of the open tail section while one of the crew eased the truck down the metal ramp. She and Theo stood at the center of the blue-suited security, all of whom faced outward.
Bruno searched the empty road and said, “Two, radio our contact. Tell him—”
“I see them, One,” a woman said. “Your three o’clock.”
Another team member asked, “One, do we off-load?”
“Hold on that.”
An open-top Jeep careened down a rutted trail and halted before them. A tall figure in a white hazmat suit shouted, “Dr. Bishop?”
“Here.”
“Avery Madison. Microbiologist.” His voice sounded muffled through the plastic helmets.
“Set your comm-link to channel seven,” Bruno ordered.
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I should have already . . .” He fumbled with a device at his belt, then Della heard him through her earpiece, “How’s that?”
“Five by five. Do we off-load your supplies?”
The man’s nervousness resonated inside Della’s head. “I don’t know.”
“What’s happened?”
“The army showed up about an hour and a half ago.” Della could see his larynx bob through the face shield. “They started burning the village on this side of the river.”
Bruno turned and stared at where smoke rose in great dark clouds, marring the sunrise. “How is it across the bridge?”
“Clear for now. But—”
“Where’s your lab?”
He pointed toward the sunrise. “The white tent over there. See the roof?”
“How many in your crew?”
“Two plus myself.”
“Radio the others. Tell them to drop everything and gather planeside.”
“Our work has reached a critical phase!”
“If they stay, they die.” Bruno pointed at the idling truck. “We take off in thirty minutes. They need to understand, we’re the last flight out of Dodge.”
The bridge was a single-lane steel structure from a far-distant era. Theo listened to the planks rattle beneath their truck as they eased slowly forward. He and Della sat in the rear hold, positioned across from each other. The canvas tarp had been pulled back, and the sky overhead was stained by cinders and drifting smoke. Theo’s plastic facepiece granted him a one-hundred-eighty-degree view, but he still found it constricting. Finally, he rose and positioned himself by the central stanchion, a curved steel bar over which the rear tarp would be stretched. It offered him a stable platform as he searched in every direction.
The river was a sullen brown stain beneath them, perhaps two hundred meters wide. Both banks held villages with ramshackle houses crammed along the waterfront. Most structures were built on rickety stilts and descended toward the water in stair-like stages. Boats of every make and design crowded the muddy shore. At several places along both banks, oil rigs stood like silently rusting birds. Only one was still pumping. Theo also spotted four old-fashioned drilling platforms. Pipes and equipment lay scattered in the muddy undergrowth.
Behind them, soldiers stood along the riverfront and observed their progress. A pair of bulldozers worked in tandem, pushing mounds of dirt toward a space at the center of the village. Theo heard a hushed metallic roar and saw flames shoot up from several points. A man carrying a bullhorn emerged from between two houses and glared in their direction.
Ahead of them, on the river’s opposite bank, there was no movement whatsoever.
Avery pointed back to where soldiers approached a white-roofed canvas structure. “Can’t you do anything to protect my work?”
“You know the answer to that.” Bruno was seated by the tailgate, a semiautomatic rifle pointed down at his feet. Team Leader Two rode in the cab’s passenger seat.
Theo asked the scientist, “How long have you been here?”
“I arrived two days ago.” Avery’s voice shook slightly. Theo thought the man looked beyond exhausted. “No, three. The others landed yesterday.”
Della’s former anger was gone now. “What is going on here?”
“Plague,” Theo guessed. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I wish it were that simple.” Avery tried to wipe his face, then jerked his gloved hand away from the plastic visor. “Last week I was working at our main Baltimore lab when a friend with the WHO sent me an alert about rumors trickling out of West Africa. How an unknown disease had possibly struck several places along the West African coast. No one was certain of anything, so this alert came through unofficial channels. In our line of work, reports like this arrive from time to time. Usually involving a region that’s impossible to reach. I filed a summary note, standard ops when something surfaces. Only that night I was woken up by my company’s CEO, who ordered me to drop everything and travel here.”
Della muttered, “This is making no sense at all.”
“I didn’t have time to apply for a visa,” Avery went on. “Which turns out to be a good thing, if those soldiers are any indication of the official wel
come I might have received. My company arranged for a research vessel to bring me north. And we found the fishing boats. Nineteen in all. Just floating in the Atlantic. Everybody on board was dead.”
Della asked, “How many survivors?”
“None. Not in the boats, not here in these two villages. Humans and animals alike.” Avery tried to wipe his face a second time. “No one has seen anything like this. The infection rate is total. The survival rate is nil.”
“What killed them?”
Avery pointed ahead of them. “This side of the river, it was chest infections mostly.”
“You’re saying they died of a cold?”
“Or flu. Right.” Avery pointed back to where the soldier with a bullhorn still watched them. “Back there it was the measles.”
The news silenced the truck. They drove down one rutted track after another. Most of the shacks they passed were tin-roofed with wide front verandas holding flat pallets on concrete blocks, wide enough for entire families to sprawl or sleep. Cooking stoves were oil barrels with segments cut out so that fires could be stoked by people who were no longer there. They passed a side yard with an empty animal pen and chicken coop. A single shoe at the base of the steps leading into a house. A headdress trampled into the earth.
A bird flew overhead.
“Stop the truck!” Avery scrambled down before the vehicle had braked to a halt. Bruno signaled, and one of his team followed, weapon at the ready. Avery spun in a slow circle, his face craned upward as he watched the bird fly away. “What’s the time?”
Bruno pulled out his communicator, checked the face. “Three thirty-seven local.” Once the bird had vanished into the waving heat, he said, “Let’s move.”
Avery reluctantly allowed the soldier to turn him around and help him back into the truck. “Assuming the disease was airborne, we now have concrete evidence of closure.”
Theo said, “You’re not talking about the cold. Or measles. Are you?”
“Of course not.” Avery continued to search the sky overhead. “We’re thinking a cross-species virus that eliminates the immune system of any host organization it invades. Whatever illness arrives next is fatal. One of our first subjects was an otherwise healthy male, late twenties or early thirties, felled by septicemia. The only wound we could find was a fish spine in his thumb.”
“Where are you taking us?” Della asked.
Bruno said, “The beach.”
“To control the spread of any disease, we must first identify the carrier. How it spreads. Up ahead is the only possible answer I’ve uncovered so far.” Avery pointed upward. “Another bird. That’s good. Very good. Means the disease’s life cycle outside a host might be limited to a few days at most.”
“What I don’t understand is my brother’s involvement in this,” Theo said.
“Who is your brother?”
“No names,” Bruno said.
Theo replied, “Your boss, the man who called you.”
Avery turned his entire body and stared at Theo.
“I agree,” Della said. “Another killer bug erupts in Africa. Why is he so worried?”
Avery nodded. “He hasn’t said. But I can guess.”
“Do. Please.”
“Not now,” Bruno said. “We check this out, we hurry back to the plane, we get out safely. Then we guess.”
The road left the town and passed through a strip of dusty wasteland. A few stumpy palmettos dotted the landscape. Three hundred meters later, they arrived at the beach. There by the river mouth the shore was colored a pale gray. Far in the distance the vista became idyllic, with shimmering gold sand and crystal blue waters. Tall imperial palms formed a living canopy that framed the beach. A few shacks had been built of driftwood and palm fronds.
“Here.” Avery pointed ahead and to his left, where the river joined with the Atlantic. “This is what I wanted you to see.”
Hundreds of drying racks built of driftwood and rusting metal lined the area where the road emerged from the brush. Beyond them lay dozens of ancient fishing vessels, mostly wood, but a few of stained fiberglass and even a couple of flat-bottom steel landing craft. But what gripped Theo’s attention were the racks. Instead of holding fishing nets or lines of fish, row after row supported clumps of black vegetation. “What are they drying?”
“A species of seaweed. We’ve taken samples. Lots of them.”
“Why are they drying it?”
“Exactly.” Avery’s nod rocked his entire upper body. “There’s only one explanation for so many racks holding seaweed. They’re eating it.”
“Is that normal?”
“Absolutely not. Most varieties of seaweed indigenous to Africa’s Atlantic coast contain chemicals that are noxious to the human system. It won’t kill you, but it will certainly make you ill. There is no record of any southern Senegalese tribe eating seaweed except in periods of extreme famine.”
Bruno cut in with, “We need to be heading back.”
Avery might as well not have heard him. The scientist was in his element now. “Pollution and overfishing have seriously depleted local catches. So it’s natural they would go after any available source of either vitamins or protein. And this new variety of seaweed shows a remarkably high content of both.” He pointed to the shadows cast by palm trees lining the beach. “Over there, see those clay mounds?”
Theo studied the small conical structures. “They look like baking ovens.”
“Which is precisely what they are. The town behind us and the one on the opposite bank are built mostly with bricks made from river mud and fired in these kilns. Only now they all contain bricks of seaweed.”
Theo struggled to construct a logical chain from what he was hearing. “So they are baking seaweed like bread and selling it to other towns?”
“All up and down the coast, and inland via the river.” Avery held up a blue-gloved hand, stopping Theo’s next comment. “Nowhere else around here has reported any such illnesses.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’ve checked as much as we could. Communications are—”
Avery’s response was cut short by a low carrumph, a sound Theo felt as much in his chest as actually heard.
From the river’s other side, a column of smoke rose lazily into the sky. Theo thought it was located close to the white-roofed lab. Only he couldn’t see the lab now to be certain.
Then the air was punctured by the staccato beats of machine guns. Silence. Then gunfire again.
Bruno’s voice was as sharp as the gunfire. “Back to the plane! Now!”
ten
They sped back down the rutted road. The truck’s engine raced as the driver held to a bone-jarring pace. Theo and Avery and Della kept two-fisted grips on the railings intended to hold the canvas cover in place. The road was lined with dusty palms and head-high shrubbery. Through a cut in the growth, Theo thought he saw a second plume of smoke rising from the other town. Or the lab.
A new laconic voice clicked into Theo’s earpiece. “One, this is Pilot.”
“Go, Pilot. This is One.”
The voice was smooth, calm. The sound of hammering metal could be heard in the background. “We’re taking fire.”
Then Team Leader Two’s voice came through Theo’s earpiece, “One, the bridge is blocked.”
Theo rose with Bruno and almost bounced out of the truck. He saw a tank had pulled forward until its front end filled the bridge’s far side. Its turret aimed at whatever might dare to cross.
Bruno’s voice remained as calm as the pilot’s, like two bored men discussing the weather. “Pilot, are all lab crew loaded?”
“Roger that. Hang on.” A pause, then, “One, we have three trucks of militia headed our way.”
“This is One. You are cleared for takeoff.”
“You sure about that, One? I hate to leave a mate behind.”
“That is an order, Pilot. Go now.”
“Roger that. Good hunting, One. Pilot out.”
Bruno’s
voice showed no concern whatsoever as he ordered, “Back to the beach.”
Della heard Avery protest, “You can’t be serious!”
Avery Madison’s words shuddered from the truck’s jouncing ride. Up ahead, the green opened where the jungle met the shore. The brilliant sunlight reflected off the sweat misting Avery’s visor.
Bruno asked, “The craft that brought you and your crew are still on the beach, correct?”
“Sure, but they’re just a dinghy and an inflatable!”
“That should be enough to hold us,” Bruno replied. “Where are they stored?”
“A lean-to we found empty . . . I don’t even know if they’ve got gas.”
“Everybody keep an eye out for fuel canisters.” They exploded into the clearing, and the truck rammed down a sandy track laid out by fishermen. “Where are your boats, Avery?”
He rose slightly from the bench. “Down on the left. But where can we go with them?”
Theo said, “Looks like there are fuel canisters stored under the netting up by the tree line.”
To Della, Theo’s voice sounded almost as calm as Bruno. She wondered if it was a lie, or if he really wasn’t captured by the fear she and Avery clearly felt. “Good eyes. Two, take your team. Go.”
The huge man and three others dropped from the truck. If they felt clumsy inside the hazmat suits, they did not show it.
The truck continued to lumber down the rutted trail. They passed several dozen drying frames, all of them covered in the same black goop. Theo asked, “Where are the fish?”
“They probably landed what came easiest, like the scientist said,” Bruno replied. “What sold, and what fed their families.”
Theo said, “There has to be a connection between the seaweed and this illness.”
Bruno nodded. “Makes sense to me.”
Della could scarcely take in the way these two men spoke, as if the hammering, booming noise behind them were only a thunderstorm.
The plane zoomed overhead. One wing trailed smoke. “One, this is Pilot.”