by Paul Bishop
“We’ve all been in the Biodome. I have a theory that repeated exposure strengthens our immune systems. When you consider that the goop bonds with earth DNA, it’s all merely one big happy family, isn’t it?”
“That’s an interesting theory. I’ll wait to hear from you.”
Zeb watched her walk out the door before he retrieved his phone. He called the Montanas first.
Matt answered. “What?”
“Where are ya?”
“Relaxing poolside at the luxurious Four Seasons Khartoum.”
“I need you in the zone ASAP. We got the job I mentioned. How soon can you get up here? You and Shawn.”
“Up where?”
“METRO.”
“What does it pay?”
“Six figures each.”
“We’ll be there in six hours.”
Zeb was about to call Taki when the man materialized before him carrying a teacup. The slight Korean with long white hair and drooping mustache wore a white Moroccan shirt.
“I was about to call you.”
He set the cup on the table before him. “There’s no good jazz in town.”
“We have the assignment.” He opened his laptop and showed his companion the image. Taki sipped his tea.
“A blue tusk.”
“Dawn was here. She thinks Sewell is already on his way.”
“Are we tracking Sewell?”
“We’re doing our darndest.”
LeGac and Toynbee, both former Legionaries, arrived together. That’s where they’d met and had fought side by side ever since. Three hulking brutes and the tiny Taki sat around the table. A boy of twelve came to take their orders. Taki ordered an elmaraara platter featuring sheep's lungs, liver, and stomach, and peanut butter. The food came quickly and vanished as quickly, and they ordered another beer or vodka smuggled in through the Russian sector.
A kid in his twenties wearing camo fatigues, a campaign hat, and a holstered auto came up to the table with an Alfred E. Newman grin and freckles. He looked at Zeb.
“Mr. Zebulon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Larry Garretson. I heard you were looking for mercs.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Scuttlebutt. You know.”
“Well, I’m not at the moment, Larry, but thank you for asking.”
The kid looked around for a minute with a frozen grin. “Okay.”
He wandered off, clearly disappointed.
Zeb looked around the table. “Did anyone say anything about this?”
“Hell no,” Toynbee said. The squat Brit wore his hair in a mullet and worshiped rockabilly.
“All right. Toynbee, you’re in charge of transport. We’ll need fifty drones. You know where to go. The Montanas will be here in six hours. We depart at 0800. Get some sleep.”
“What about the Montanas?”
“They can sleep on the way.”
5
Wendell Porter, the Academy-Award winning director, came through with the top bid. Fifteen million, six hundred thousand dollars. Sewell’s team left Addis Ababa at 0200 Sunday morning, hopped up on khat and methamphetamines. They rode in three Humvees with two men in each. At the last minute, they had added Chester Wee, a former Omar Lee employee marked for death for refusing to execute a pregnant woman during the last Kenyan expedition.
The team leader wanted two men in each vehicle because, after hours of driving in the dark while hopped up on khat, you could see things and do crazy shit. He and Ndugu rode in the lead truck, heading northwest at fifty miles an hour. His selected route had been planned to refuel in Dinder National Park and again in Debre Marqos.
Sewell catnapped while Ndugu drove, singing “Tears Of A Clown” in a soulful baritone. He often talked about forming a band and had even auditioned his fellow team members. Only Bortz could hold a tune.
“We call ourselves the Blue Iguana.”
“Why the Blue Iguana?”
“I like the name. Will we wear suits?”
The leader looked up. “Do you think we need them?”
“I’d rather not.”
He slept fitfully and dreamed of his ex-wife Brigid, a bitch on wheels who’d tried to take him for everything he owned citing extreme mental cruelty and infidelity. Finally out of patience, he had left her hanging when he’d left the United States for the last time. He would never go back. Everything he wanted he could get in Africa at one-tenth of the price.
Away from the city, the barren landscape looked like the moon in star glow, the road little more than a set of ruts that stretched onward through the savanna and into the endless desert, winding through hills and dry gulches. Ndugu pulled over at six, the sun already beating down. It had taken them four hours to cover one hundred and fifty miles due to herds in the road or misdirection. Sewell had forbidden the use of cell phones or laptops for navigation. The Americans would pick that up in an instant. So would the Russians, Chinese, and Israelis, but only the Americans were capable of reacting quickly. In deference to their perimeter partner France, Israel took a softer view of the incursions. On paper, they fully supported the ban.
Ndugu parked in the yard of a rambling adobe brick general store. The owner and family lived in one section.
Sewell woke up baking in the shotgun seat. “Where are we?”
“Debre Marqos. I’m gassing up.”
The leader climbed out of the Hummer in search of a place to piss. Groggy and irritable, he went behind a crumbling adobe wall a hundred feet from the house as the other two Hummers pulled into the lot. Zulu Ken and Bortz stepped out of one and Dardeniz and Wee out of the other. Dardinez lit up while Zulu Ken joined Sewell to splash urine on the wall. Four sheep watched from an enclosure.
“I got cold Coca-Cola,” Ken said.
“I’ll take one of those.”
With Dardeniz staying in the yard to prevent theft, the other five entered the store. The windowless main room, lit by a fluorescent screwed into the wood ceiling, held a yard-sale-like display of tools, canned goods, camel and sheep tack, and used clothes with American designs and Chinese labels. A Just Do It! hat cost one Sudanese pound. You could see the sky through cracks between the ceiling slats. An ancient glass-door refrigerator that looked like it had been pulled from a seven-eleven twenty years before held an odd assortment of soft drinks, including one dust-covered can of Fanta for five pounds or one American dollar.
The proprietor looked like a ginseng root in a white robe as he grinned, gap-toothed, from behind a counter made of plywood sheets laid across sawhorses. He waved a bundle of khat.
“You need khat? Bottle water? I got. You need shirts?” He stooped behind a barricade of cardboard boxes and slapped an XXXL Hulk T-shirt on the counter. “I got.”
“Gas,” Sewell said. “We need gas.”
The man grinned. A little boy, no more than three, huddled in the doorway behind him and watched. “I got gas. Twelve pound a gallon.”
Three bucks was a bargain in the US but not so much in the Middle East. Sewell retrieved his wallet and fanned a bunch of twenties out on the counter. The sight of American money made the old man almost salivate.
“I give you ten pound a gallon, cash American.”
The proprietor produced an abacus.
Zulu Ken picked up a pair of used combat boots, squeaked, dropped them, and danced back as a huge spider crawled out and headed toward the wall. The old man laughed.
“Is only camel spider! They are harmless. You wait out front. We get gas.”
He appeared a moment later with a wheelbarrow in which a fifty-gallon drum stood awkwardly. A teenage boy followed with another fifty-gallon drum balanced precariously on a handcart. Sewell uncorked the barrel and sniffed.
“You realize that if this gas is bad and our engines break down, we’re coming back here.”
“No problem!” the proprietor declared. “You going to the Biodome?”
“What do you know about the Biodome?”
“Oh,
sir, everybody knows about the Biodome. Why else would anyone drive up there?” He held his hands up in a self-effacing manner. “Not our business. We don’t care who goes to the Biodome. May Allah bless your journey.”
They wheeled the barrels up a short concrete ramp that served as a loading dock and siphoned the gas into the vehicles via a plastic tube. The owner’s teenage son was happy to get it started and cleaned his palate with an orange Fanta.
They were ready to roll shortly thereafter and Sewell looked around. “Where’s Dardeniz?” He cupped his hands. “Dardinez!”
The big man jogged around the end of a dilapidated mud wall and fiddled with his belt. “Sorry, boss. I had to take a leak.”
They left the sunbaked city and headed northwest into a landscape of endless dry hills and barren stream beds. Sewell drove the lead vehicle with Ndugu.
“Who is this Wendell Porter?” the passenger asked.
“He’s a big shot movie director. Come on. Haven’t you heard of Bumps On A Log? Fiddle In The Middle? The Biscuit Bakers?”
“I am not much for the movies. When I was a little boy in Cape Town, I saw The Wild Bunch. It is the greatest movie ever made. What are these films about?”
“Bumps On A Log is a searing indictment of America’s racist past,” he recited as if by rote. When he wasn’t working, he watched movies obsessively. “Fiddle In The Middle is a heartwarming coming-of-age story about a teenage boy who transitions to female and wins the Olympic Women’s hundred-meter dash. The Biscuit Bakers is a riotous comedy about a buffoonish Republican President.”
“I have never heard of any of them.”
“You ain’t missed much.”
“Can we get music in here?”
Sewell swept his hand across the minimal dash. “Do you see a radio or a CD player?”
Ndugu cleared his throat and began to sing “Soulful Shack.”
6
From five miles away, the Biodome appeared as a hazy green dome, a mirage surrounded by a twelve-foot wall clearly visible in the still desert air. Wall Two was twenty miles behind them. It was fifty miles in diameter with the Biodome at its center, but the jungle continued to expand and now covered two hundred and fifty square miles and rapidly approached the first containment.
Two Humvees and a six-wheeled Caiman rumbled toward it from twelve o’clock—the American sector—and created great plumes of dun-colored dust that hung in the air. Zeb and Jean rode in the first Hummer, LeGac, and Taki in the second, and the Montanas and Toynbee in the big Caiman, jamming to the SOS Band via the Montanas’ phone-adaptive boombox. Zeb could hear it in the front vehicle. His passenger pointed toward the east, where a dark smudge had appeared on the horizon beyond the second containment wall.
The Montana brothers wore cowboy hats. Shawn wore a Bowie with a twelve-inch blade in a scabbard on his calf. He called it his Texas toad-sticker.
“Look at that.”
His gaze followed her finger. “What?”
“That brown tint creeping up. It could be a haboob.”
“Shit,” he said and pounded the wheel.
“No,” Jean responded. She was a petite woman with a butch cut and a tribal tat covering half her face. Her desert camos were too large and the somewhat high-concept hat repelled infrared. “This is good. I’m excited. I can’t wait to see how it impacts the Biodome.”
She had been to the Biodome briefly the previous year but it had been a day trip and barely scratched the surface. As far as she knew, Zebulon was the first person to bring a xenobiologist. She had a degree in climatology as well. If the Biodome could ignore the Sahara, perhaps it could shrug a haboob off. It was worth studying. Was there something in the Biodome’s unique atmosphere that held together like a force field? He had tested the Biodome by inhaling deeply, passing through the barrier, and exhaling to see if he felt any different. To see if the Biodome hung onto its air, he’d brought air out, but any attempt to run a tube from it to a nearby lab failed. An invisible barrier at the perimeter kept the air inside. When they ran a cable, something invariably crawled up out of the sand and cut it.
Jean whipped out a pair of binoculars, lowered the window, and stared. “That thing is gonna hit in the next couple of hours.”
“Are you sure you want to be in the Biodome when it does?”
“You bet your ass I do.”
She took a pack of Gauloise she’d picked up at METRO and lit up. When she extended the pack to Zeb, he waved it away. The air conditioning was on but the heat from Jean’s open window was like a furnace blast. It was one hundred and ten outside.
“Put it out, Jean.”
With an irritated grimace, she inhaled, flicked the cig into the desert, and closed the window. It blew his mind that a climatologist would do that to her own lungs. His walkie-talkie beeped on the floor beneath his legs. They used old-fashioned walkie-talkies with limited range to avoid scrutiny. He picked it up and handed it to her.
“This is Zeb’s secretary, Jean Jan Jean.” She listened for a minute and handed the talkie to Zeb. “You take it. There’s nothing to hit out here anyway.”
It was Dawn. “Sewell went through Debre Marqos four hours ago. He’ll be at Wall Two in eight hours.”
They’d be at the Biodome in minutes but getting in position to intercept Sewell at five o’clock could take hours. They had no idea how long it would take to traverse the Biodome, whose landscape was in constant flux.
“Thanks, Dawn. We’re almost at the dome.”
Zeb stopped and waited for the others to catch up, Antoine and Taki on the left, Toynbee and the Montana brothers on the right. They spoke through open windows.
“Sewell’s on his way. He’ll reach the zone in eight hours. We stop inside the perimeter and take a look, then we’ll decide how to proceed. We can circle the perimeter, which would be safer, or cut across the middle, which would be faster.”
Within minutes, they pulled up at the bizarre shimmering barrier that marked the Biodome’s outer limits. It was dome-like but not a dome, as people and things could easily pass through. Again, Zeb stopped.
“I’ll go through. Wait a minute and follow.”
His vehicle—outfitted with an air horn above the windshield—pierced the wall, which rendered things on the outside hazy as if seen through cataracts. The Humvee rolled from barren sand to lush green savanna, the kudzu everywhere, stands of rainforest, and even ponds formed by scudding clouds. The top of the dome hovered six hundred feet above the surface, giving it a flattened, elongated appearance from outside. The Biodome now encompassed four hundred and eighty square miles, expanding minutely twenty-four-seven.
Zeb parked and got out, overwhelmed by the sudden humidity and lush, tropical smell. Jean exited, her hands on her hips, and inhaled deeply, her eyes shut in ecstasy. He walked to the barrier—which was vertical for all practical purposes—and looked out at the two dun-colored vehicles waiting outside. They shimmered in the desert heat, their windows shut and AC on. He inserted his index finger through the barrier and felt the dry heat immediately before he pushed his hand through and made a “come on” gesture.
The vehicles advanced, first the Humvee, then the Caiman. The large troop transport could carry ten and was stuffed with electronics, weapons, drones, and survival gear. They parked on the savanna and flattened the kudzu with enormous tires. Everyone exited, drew the fragrant air deep into their lungs, and gawked like tourists entering Notre Dame.
“There’s no map,” Zeb said. “We’ll cut directly across and hope for the best.”
“I’ll get a drone up,” Toynbee said. “Let us know what’s happening.”
Zeb stuffed his sunglasses in his breast pocket. “Something will simply jump up and knock it down.”
“That’s why I brought fifty.”
He grinned. “All right.”
While Toynbee unboxed a mechanical, Jean smoked a cigarette and they broke out a cooler filled with ice-cold Coca-Cola and tilted back. Toynbee launched a green plasti
c four-rotor drone the size of a dinner plate off the hood of the truck. Zeb watched the view on the man’s flat-screen monitor as the drone ascended through mist and foliage until it broke through the tree canopy at sixty meters. It was above most of the tree line, but closer to the center, the massive trunks rose into a towering green peak that resembled a cassowary helmet.
Toynbee linked the visual feed to the flat-screen monitors retro-fitted into the Humvees. They all carried wrist screens. Shawn Montana took the Caiman’s wheel, Matthew in shotgun, and Toynbee sprawled on the vinyl bench seat behind them, his monitor on his belly and the windows and back gate open to admit a warm but not unpleasant breeze.
Zeb led at a slow pace and the vehicles crawled over fallen tree limbs. How had they fallen? The oldest trees in the Biodome were five years old. What killed them? Was it something it brought with it or was it something in the sand? Had some animal knocked them over? He had no way of knowing how many other teams were currently inside, as each sector kept this a closely guarded secret and the Biodome’s atmosphere distorted electronic transmissions. They traveled with the walkies on for short-range radio transmissions so all the trucks were linked. No one spoke for a long while and they progressed perhaps a mile into the green.
“Uh-oh,” Toynbee said.
7
Team Sewell rolled through the night, napped when they could, and otherwise, chain-smoked, chewed khat, and drank bottled water. They entered the outskirts of Khartoum at dawn and drove toward the city center on Madani Street past sand-colored high-rises and dilapidated warehouses. There was a mosque on every corner and the Blue Nile on their right was visible through block after block of box-like structures. The hive-shaped Corinthia came into view, but they had no time to stay at the five-star hotel. They rolled through town in fits and starts and were continually forced to stop for jammed intersections, detours, and endless pedestrians crossing the street like refugees.
“Does it bother you—your sons?” Zulu Ken said.