by Fritz Galt
Abu remembered the words of his brother, Rajiv, the researcher in America who had sent him the infected mosquitoes: A human subject will only last a few weeks.
“Our tiny mosquitoes have died tonight, as all martyrs must,” Abu said, to soften the blow. “But you will carry on another two to three weeks. Your septic blood will put paid to the infidels’ ambitions.”
“I’m not understanding you. Aren’t these insects lethal?”
“They are. But they have gifted you a great power. You can do in far more people than even these missiles. You will carry this disease to the far-flung corners of India.”
“Won’t they do you in, too, sahib?”
“Alas,” Abu said with a heavy sigh as he studied his untouched arms and legs. “It is Allah’s Will that I survive.”
But the real question in his mind was this: how would the world react to his full-scale biological attack, and would mankind survive?
Chapter 2
Former CIA operative Mick Pierce was shadow boxing under a palm tree in the Maldives when an excited shout carried up from the lagoon.
An islander had made a discovery.
Within seconds, the pristine beach was filled with brown fishermen descending from their grass huts. Their feet carried them swiftly under full-length calico sarongs. Square-shouldered with lean bellies, they flashed beautiful smiles as they ran toward the water’s edge.
Then they stopped abruptly and held their noses. Their smiles disappeared.
Mick watched them wade into the milky-white froth, some jabbing downward with pointed sticks. In their native language, they warned one another of each new wave.
A bloated corpse tumbled, limbs akimbo, and came to rest on the sand.
Mick squinted for a better look.
A woman’s body glistened under a torrid sun. Her deep brown skin had stretched tight over her bones. After several days adrift in salt water, her hair had thinned, leaving a pitted, burnt scalp. Her eyes had been pecked clean by scavenger birds.
Beyond the lagoon, brilliant sunlight played on the Indian Ocean. Women in brightly colored wraps stood up and held their hands over their faces.
More shouts, and two more bodies washed ashore.
Mick broke into a trot.
Tanned, muscular and bared to his waist, he dashed from the eastern end of the island toward the bodies. He ran with the graceful movement of his Native American forefathers, a black ponytail trailing behind him.
Halfway down the slope, he encountered Dr. Simon Yates, who stumbled from his open-air laboratory clutching a worn medical bag with one hand. With the other, he tugged his faded Bermuda shorts over his round belly.
From a distance, the recovered bodies resembled polished sculptures or mummified museum specimens. As he skidded to a stop beside them, Mick realized otherwise. They reeked.
“Jesus,” he said, turning away from the stench. “I’ll let you do the honors.”
Simon stared at the bodies for a long time.
Mick averted his gaze and studied the doctor. “I’m sure you’re more used to this sort of thing than I am.”
Simon removed his straw hat and scratched his shiny head. “Forensics isn’t my specialty,” he said with his Louisiana drawl. “And I’m nobody’s mortician.”
Two years earlier, the medical researcher had staggered drunk onto the beach like a shipwrecked soul. Since his arrival, the balmy surroundings had healed him as much as he healed others with his rudimentary medical practice.
“What’s it look like to you?” Mick asked.
“Could be anything. Exposure. Yesterday’s cyclone.”
Despite the grisly scene, summer cyclones had left behind a cornucopia of life on the atoll. Natives had already gathered coconuts into small pyramids. They had woven palm fronds into the walls of their huts. A musty smell emanated from newly thatched roofs. Glimmering raindrops fell from bamboo, palms and breadnut trees. Another successful monsoon season had come and gone, helping to sustain life through the upcoming dry tropical winter.
There was something incongruous about the bodies. “They must have floated a long way,” Mick said.
“How can you tell?”
“Their loincloths. They’re Koli fishermen from India’s west coast.”
“They say you know your India.”
Mick waved away a black cloud of flies. He could only take so much.
Funny how the doctor’s story was not unlike his own. Having failed to anticipate India’s nuclear tests earlier that year, Mick had become the pariah of Bombay’s consular community as well as the scapegoat at Langley. He had been so devastated, he had almost failed to notice his daughter’s health slipping away.
His eyes fell on his lone hut. There, Mariah lay isolated from the rest of the crescent-shaped island.
“Does Mariah have what killed them?”
“Hard to tell.” Simon joined him away from the gathering. “I’d need an autopsy to establish the cause of death.”
Mick ran his hands through his thick, but graying hair. What a tussle he had had over Mariah’s tiny, comatose body. He had ended up wrenching her away from Natalie, her mother, in Bombay and taking her to the Maldive Islands. He wouldn’t wait for an autopsy to find out what wracked her body.
Mariah would have died had she remained in India. No doctor there could make a diagnosis. It was Dr. Simon Yates who had finally stabilized her.
Simon tilted his head toward the bodies. “Sure hope that’s not what your daughter has.” He gave a loud sigh. “Because the malaria may be far more lethal than we thought.”
The word “malaria” carried down to the water’s edge. The fishermen repeated it in local dialect. Reports of a recent outbreak on the Indian subcontinent had already left the villagers nervous.
“Let’s take a look at the little girl.”
Outside, the hut appeared primitive. Inside, high-tech medical equipment pumped and hissed.
Simon ordered several villagers to carry the bodies on their poles up to his laboratory. The outdoor lab consisted of a set of wooden tables under a Banyan tree fifty meters up the beach toward the island’s tourist resort.
“They think they’ll catch it,” Mick said.
“Pity. Malaria isn’t contagious. The World Health Organization eradicated all the mosquitoes from these islands years ago.”
They trudged in silence through the whispering sand. Fishermen dispersed behind them into the rainforest, leaving behind an empty beach and an outrigger on water that stretched taut over the lagoon.
Mick bent down to enter the hut. Inside, the scene was tranquil. Too tranquil for him.
Below the far window, an air tube ran into Mariah’s mouth and down her windpipe. An IV bag dripped into a needle that was jabbed into to her slender arm. A catheter drained off the young girl’s urine.
Her curly red hair was carefully combed. Her round face already showed some of her mother’s classically pretty features. Her eyelashes remained shut as if she were fast asleep. Dr. Yates had termed her condition “stable.” She was so stable, in fact, that she hadn’t moved, spoken, or reacted to external stimuli for over a month.
She didn’t react, but did she sense anything? She might have been listening to surf crashing against the windward side of the atoll. Or she might have been catching the sharp smell of the gasoline-powered generator chugging outside her window. Perhaps she concentrated on the methodical sweep of the housekeeper’s broom. She might have concentrated on her father’s approaching footsteps. Or she might have sensed nothing at all.
No one knew what damage her brain had suffered from the mysterious disease. No one might ever know. She was in a deep malarial coma.
Mick nodded at the thermometer in Simon’s hand. “What happens if she gets another fever?”
Simon rubbed the back of his neck. “One day, the parasite will wake up. Malaria hides in the liver and then bursts out to attack cells. I haven’t killed the parasites completely, just kept them at bay. If her tempera
ture shoots up, they have left their dormant stage. Unless we find a cure, she will have another acute attack soon.”
“She’s not strong enough.” Mick felt his heart beating uncontrollably. “How soon before another attack?”
Simon’s eyes shifted from the thermometer to Mariah’s placid face, then the blue autumn sky. “Most likely before Christmas.”
Natalie Pierce stood staring at the flat, rounded telephone. It was an archaic Indian model with a large rotary dial and layers of dust.
A warm breeze off the Arabian Sea fluttered giant jackfruit leaves and rustled stiff palm fronds just beyond her French doors. It ruffled the crepe curtains that had been pulled back to allow in light from the bleaching noonday sunlight.
Her long dupatta scarf draped gently over a sequined, rust-colored salwar kameez, a long tunic over baggy red pants tied with a drawstring around her thin waist. Anywhere but in a South Asian city like Bombay, the outfit would look like she was wearing oversized pajamas.
She watched shadows play over the handset. She let out a sigh and sank deeper into the rattan chair. She crossed her legs, and her hand fell lightly on her luggage.
She was leaving home.
She looked around the nearly empty apartment. She had spent the weekend packing up her family’s belongings. All that was left was a dusty apartment completely devoid of life.
The room of her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter had become a barren cell, having been antiseptically scrubbed, her furniture burned. The cheerfully odd assortment of masculine and frilly knick-knacks that once had adorned the master bedroom had been whisked away.
The creaky ceiling fan was switched off, no longer holding back the contrasting, abrasive fumes of Bombay traffic, damp and decaying masonry, sweating people, unwashed cows and the stagnant bay.
Her cook stacked pots and dishes in the kitchen, a faint echo of her former life.
Tears stung Natalie’s eyes as she recalled one particular evening when she had come home from work to find that Mick had sent the cook home and was attempting to prepare a manicotti dinner, with Mariah beside him stuffing the noodles. The dinner and the kitchen were a disaster, but the wine and lemonade were great, so they shared some good laughs around the table before packing Mariah off to bed.
Natalie had started to clean up the kitchen, but Mick had shut the door on it and pulled her onto the couch. There, they finished the wine together before sliding onto the silk Kashmir carpet and making love.
From a group of uniformed drivers huddled over newspapers on the street below, she heard the matter-of-fact voice of a cricket announcer on a tinny AM station. In a tree outside her balcony, a lone crow stood over its nest, cawing mechanically and staring her in the eye.
She turned away.
It was Monday, and she had spent her last half-day closing up her office and saying good-bye to her local staff. Her American colleagues had given her freshly cut roses, which now lay on their side by the entrance. She had no vase to display them and nobody but herself and her cook to admire them. The American officers had presented them to her in disapproving silence, without the ritual lengthy farewell speeches. She had abandoned the flowers the same way she had abandoned her family.
Smells began to waft from the kitchen as her cook chopped coriander for Natalie’s final meal. She couldn’t have wanted it less.
Her stomach tightened as the old woman tearfully brought out savory chicken curry and buttery dhal lentils poured over steaming rice.
Natalie forced a smile, but didn’t move to the table. The cook clasped her hands in a prayerful bow and backed from the room.
The dinner’s aroma didn’t mix well with the dull stench of regulation State Department insecticide.
She glanced around the empty seats at the dinner table.
One evening Mariah had skipped into the room, her face ruddy from play and excitement, and announced that she would marry Daddy as soon as dinner was over. After a brief family discussion, she agreed to marry her “Fwoggy” instead.
Mick would sit across the table from Natalie and look straight through her with his steel gray eyes, so handsome against his dark Pueblo Indian skin. The child of an Irish-American father and Pueblo mother, he was unique. He had a comfortable demeanor, a deep, resonating voice and a nice physique.
His secretive glances would promise her much attentiveness and inventiveness the coming night, and would spur her to put her thirty-five-year-old body through even more grueling aerobic workouts, especially those first few months after Mariah was born.
Her memories were painful enough without everyone telling her how wrong she was.
The only thing that would bring back, however briefly, her former Bombay life would be a telephone call. If she could only hear Mick on the phone, perhaps it would fill the room with all the humanity it lacked.
She could plainly hear the accusatory tone with which he had confronted her shortly before Mariah had lapsed into a coma. It had haunted her every hour of the past month, depriving her of sleep.
“Why did you buy only one adult plane ticket?” he had asked. “I’m going with you and Mariah to the Mayo Clinic.”
“I’m not going,” she had replied simply.
Mick had looked dumbfounded. “You’re not going to stick by your own daughter while she’s battling this disease?”
“I don’t feel that she should be flying anywhere in her present condition. I think we should wait for the doctor to arrive from the embassy.”
“Quit fooling yourself. If the doctor hasn’t materialized yet, he never will. You know that as well as I do.”
Several days after that exchange, all expression had faded from Mariah’s face. She lay in a coma. As Mick was preparing to leave with Mariah, they had received another blow. The U.S. Government would not allow people with unknown, potentially communicable diseases to enter America.
Natalie had felt enormous relief that Mariah would stay with her in Bombay. The American regulation gave her a new chance with her daughter. However, under heightened threats of terrorism at the time, American doctors were advised not to fly down from New Delhi to Bombay. So Mick made other plans to evacuate Mariah. He would take her to the Maldive Islands, where he pinned his hopes on some sort of malaria quack.
At first, she had refused to let her daughter go. “You’re taking my only child away from me,” she had insisted, letting the full burden of guilt fall on Mick’s conscience.
“Why are you making me out to be the villain?” he had asked. “You’re abandoning her. She needs the most advanced medical care she can get. Why don’t you come with us?”
“Don’t make me tell you why, and don’t push a guilt trip on me,” she had said, bracing to stand by her decision not to leave Bombay. “I know that since I’m the female of the species I should be taking care of her, but circumstances won’t allow me to leave, so don’t stand there with your jaw on the floor and blame me for this whole damned mess. She got sick, and you’re well qualified to take care of her.”
“But you’re her mother.”
“Yeah, and you’re her dad, and if you hadn’t gone and left your job, you’d understand much better what’s behind all of this.”
“Well, you didn’t exactly prevent me from resigning.”
“That’s because you didn’t give me a chance. You acted on your own.”
“Without much support from my family.”
She shrugged. Then from some terrible place deep in her heart, she had said, “If you hadn’t botched your job, I would be able to be there to nurse my sick child back to health.”
“So,” he said, sucking in his breath. “You’re cleaning up the mess I left behind.”
“Something like that.”
Damn her honesty. Her words had hurt Mick deeply, and she knew it as soon as she had said it. But he had relinquished his security clearance, and she couldn’t tell him everything she knew. She had had to make him understand, if obliquely, and however cruelly, how important it was to t
he U.S. Government, and even to the world, that she remained in India.
Her slender fingers toyed with the telephone cord as if she were running her hands down her husband’s thick, shiny ponytail or gathering together her daughter’s red locks for a barrette.
Like watching a ghost passing through the room, she remembered how tempting Mick had looked padding around the apartment barefoot, in his clingy flannel drawstring pajamas.
Then the image faded. She couldn’t bring herself to call him.
The past month had been the worst of her life, and now she was incapable of the simple, natural act of calling her husband.
Staring at the dusty phone, she realized that only a call from Mick could bring back her former life.
Abu Khan enjoyed the pleasant sunshine until the wind blew.
A brisk afternoon breeze swept through the forested mountainside northwest of Jammu City, the wintertime capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. Standing exposed on a knoll above his jungle encampment, Abu Mohammed Ali Khan knew that the cold he felt was not entirely due to an early winter chill. He had laid a blanket of death over the entire country.
It had been a brief and interesting autumn since he had stepped gingerly through the rubble in Afghanistan and departed for Indian soil. That last night in Afghanistan had been filled with horrific, almost unimaginable, destruction, through which he had seen a ray of hope. He relaxed, cast a glance over the forested valley and recalled in vivid detail the similar commanding view four weeks earlier in which inspiration had come to him.
He had rounded up the mosquitoes’ unintended victims. The youths had eventually come to see the glory in his leaving them at Peshawar’s airport in Pakistan with tickets for various Indian destinations. In India, local mosquitoes took over Abu’s project and spread the infected blood from arm to arm, from one town to the next.
Over the past two months, having satisfactorily completed their assignment, Abu’s martyrs had all succumbed to fevers, chills, comas and death.
So as not to risk exposure, he had traveled separately to deliver pints of their disease-ridden blood to any clinic, hospital, or blood bank that wanted free blood. Most Indian doctors didn’t screen blood for malaria and unknowingly administered it during routine blood transfusions. The malaria had quickly spread from one hospital to the next through India’s blood supply.