“Here’s another one,” Lionel said from a spot north of the others. “A young woman . . . or what’s left of her. These ants are all over the place.”
Mason heard a slight gasp from Lauren’s microphone and made a mental note to tell the others to be a little more careful in their descriptions of the bodies.
Shirley Cole’s voice broke through and interrupted him before he could see what effect the graphic descriptions had on Lauren.
“Here’s one more,” Shirley said over the helmet microphone as she stepped a few feet further into the jungle and away from Jakes and Elliot.
“All visible orifices evidence dried blood—the ears, nose, mouth, and tear ducts.” She pulled a knife from a scabbard on her waist and gently sliced open the clothes on the body.
She gently peeled the layers away, baring the nude body. “Hemorrhage also occurred in the anus and penis. It certainly looks like hemorrhagic shock all right. It’s hard to believe it could be anything else.” She chuckled low in her throat. “Hell, God help us all, but maybe Sam is right this time and the etiology is viral.”
She carefully stood up so as not to cut her Racal suit and put her knife away.
She turned to face him, her eyes wide behind the plastic face shield of her helmet.
“You were definitely right, Mason, when you said it looked like we had a hot zone on our hands. I’ll get tissue samples under my scope as soon as I can, but we’ll need the Cytotec lab for serology and blood chemistries. You may as well notify the guys at the Mexico City airport to head this way in the Sikorsky, and tell them not to drop the damn thing this time. A lousy fifty-dollar cable bolt cost CDC half a million last month when we were in Australia.”
Mason’s face flamed at the memory of the ass-chewing he’d received from the agency bean counters over that incident and he let go of Lauren’s arm, trying to ignore the shocked and frightened look on her face in response to the look on his.
He walked over to Joel Schumacher to give the order to call Mexico City.
Joel was setting up his computer and dish antenna and glanced up. “Should I try the cell, Mason, or wait for satellite uplink?” he asked.
Mason hadn’t considered it. A cell call might not be able to get through from Tlateloco since there were no towers within a hundred miles. They were definitely going to need to use the sat-phone or wait an hour for Joel to set up the satellite dish for a satellite uplink.
“Before we send for the lab, does anyone have any doubts?” he asked, moving in a circle to get a better look at his team members.
“None!” Sam Jakes said quickly. “We’ve got a hot one here and it could be damn near anything,” and then, forgetting the helmet mike would pick up even a whisper, muttered under his breath, “Though I know damn well it’s a virus.”
“I agree with Sam,” Shirley Cole said. “It’s most probably a virus of some sort causing hemorrhagic fever and shock, though I still maintain that from the written record of Díaz, it could still be anthrax, or some other form of zoonosis, a bacterial infection spread by and from animals.” She glared a challenge at Jakes, daring him to disagree. “That’d be my guess if the evidence of widespread hemorrhaging wasn’t so prevalent.”
“Anthrax is not transmittable from human to human!” Sam Jakes said with heavy sarcasm, his voice harsh with his customary lack of tact. “How the hell can you explain that little fact away, or have you forgotten your own freshman microbiology, Shirley?”
He shook his head as if he were talking to recalcitrant students. “It could just as easily be dengue or breakbone fever, spread by mosquitos, or hemorrhagic rabies from fruit bats, or . . .”
“Hemorrhagic viruses aren’t usually spread from animals to humans, Sam,” Suzanne said, forcing her voice to be patient. “At least, none that I’ve ever encountered before, and Díaz’s journal clearly states the disease began in the animals around the camp.”
“But . . .” Jakes began.
“Send for the lab,” Lionel said, cutting him off. “This shit could be damn near anything at this point! I vote we just run all of the tests for both viruses and bacteria and stop all this goddamn guessing and backbiting!”
Everyone gaped, not used to hearing the mild-mannered gentle giant speak so harshly.
He walked over to kneel over a decimated corpse with dried blood all over the face. “The only thing I’m fairly certain of is it’s not from a fungus or mycobacteria . . . at least not any that I know of could spread this fast or be fatal in such a short period of time as we see here, nor would they cause this much hemorrhaging.”
Mason left Joel to peer down at the corpse where Lionel was kneeling. If he’d needed any further convincing it wasn’t necessary now. The body of a young woman lay in a pool of dried blood. A swarm of black ants, so thick they covered her from head to toe, was feeding on her. All the signs of hemorrhagic shock were in evidence, a profusion of bleeding from every orifice.
“Send for the lab, Joel,” he said without looking around. “And notify CDC we’ve got an emergency hot zone of unknown proportions.”
Chapter 6
Mason Williams stood with his hands on his hips as he looked around the clearing, watching his team work. He took a deep breath. He was just about to put in motion events that would have a profound effect on Mexico—events that could not be undone once begun.
“Have them start the ball rolling with the Mexican government to get this area sealed off, and be sure you give this a Biohazard Level Four code. They’ll want to know if it’s airborne and we can’t give them an answer yet, so make certain the Mexican government understands how potentially dangerous this is. They have to give us a maximum perimeter until we give this bug a name and a source. No telling what the host will turn out to be, or even if it’s viral or bacterial, but it has to have something to do with unearthing Montezuma’s tomb or we’d have seen it here in Mexico before.”
“The worst thing they’ve ever had down here is the food,” Sam grumbled, opening his case to take out a scalpel and a pack of glass slides and petri dishes. “I don’t see how anybody can eat the spicy shit without developing either cast-iron intestines or colon cancer.”
Lauren stepped over to where she could look into Mason’s face mask while she talked to him, even though everyone in the team could hear her as well. “Mason, Díaz’s journal said the disease started in the animals. If that was true here, how are we going to get wild animals to obey a quarantine perimeter?”
He shook his head and raised his hand as if to run it through his hair, which was impossible in a Racal suit. “We can’t, Lauren. That’s why we need a really large perimeter and we hope the infected animals, if they are indeed the vector, get sick and die before they travel across it.”
“Yeah, and we hope like hell it’s not transmitted by birds, like bird flu is,” Suzanne said. “If it is, then we’re toast and any hope we have of containing this son of a bitch is dead in the water.”
“Luckily, I think that possibility is almost nil,” Jakes chimed in. “If it were transmitted by birds, I think by now we’d have heard of more deaths spread out all through the jungle from here to Mexico City.”
Mason sighed deeply. “I hope you’re both correct and we are able to keep the disease within the perimeter.”
“Here’s two more,” Shirley announced, bending over. “It looks like a boy and a girl. They have their arms around each other like they lay down together. I suppose they knew they were dying and tried to comfort each other.”
“Are you writing a fucking book or are you going to get us some samples to look at?” Sam asked impatiently while carving slices of decaying flesh from his corpse.
Mason looked toward the Aztec temple, trying to ignore the bickering. He knew it was because of the tremendous stress of finding so many young people dead from a horrible disease of unknown origin. Even though his team members were consummate professionals, finding so many young bodies on the site was going to be very difficult for them and they w
ould all have to deal with it in their own ways.
He wondered what sort of killer had been unleashed when these archaeologists opened Montezuma’s hidden burial chamber. Was it viral or bacterial? A virus could not survive more than a few minutes outside a living host, making it harder to consider a viral source when Montezuma’s tomb had supposedly been sealed for hundreds of years.
While he was too pragmatic to believe in curses, he pondered the cause of so many unexplained deaths. If it had come from some source in the jungle, someone in medicine should have diagnosed it or reported its symptoms before now, prior to its sudden appearance at Tlateloco.
This was ultimately his Wildfire Team’s job, to identify microscopic monsters and to figure out how to stop them before they were able to cause widespread death and destruction.
Howard Carter hadn’t lived long enough to see what kind of demon he brought to the surface in Egypt. At the time no one understood invisible dangers, other than to blame “bad air” or “unhealthy humors” or “ancient curses” for unexplained illnesses.
Was the unearthing of Montezuma’s tomb the beginning of a far more lethal discovery? According to Dr. Sullivan, as many as thirty-two people may have perished here, if the entire archaeological team was found to have died, and that was not counting several Mexican laborers who were usually used for the heavy lifting and digging according to Lauren.
Mason turned around when he heard a soft groan. Lauren was bending over a body, reaching down to brush some of the ants off the face so she could make an identification.
He walked over and when he looked into her face he noticed a single tear coursing down her cheek.
“Are you okay?”
She looked at him and nodded. “Yes, I’m just saying good-bye to them as I make the IDs.” She hesitated and then she added, “When I come to one of the laborers, I’ll go through their clothing and see if I can find some sort of ID so we can at least give the Mexican government their names.”
He nodded his thanks for her extra effort and patted the arm of her Racal, trying to show her he understood how difficult this was for her, and then he turned and went to see how the other members of his team were making out.
He walked over to where Suzanne was kneeling to take samples from a body. When she finished and stood up he stretched his neck inside his helmet and looked into her eyes. “I’ve got a bad feeling on this one, Suzanne. I don’t rely on hunches or guesswork, but I can’t shake the sensation that we’re about to find something we hoped we would never see.”
“What’s that, boss?”
“A bug so hot that it will cause a pandemic that will spread across the North American continent like Grant going through Richmond—and will cause even more destruction than he did in his march across Georgia.”
After checking in with the other team members and finding no one needed his assistance, Mason walked over to the entrance to the temple and leaned his head into the stone door.
When he shined his flashlight into the darkness, he saw a four-foot-square tunnel carved into the wall of square stones. He eased in, bent down onto his knees, and crept slowly down into the tunnel opening.
He soon found it led into the bowels of the temple. He swept the walls and floor with his flashlight, making sure he didn’t crawl over anything sharp that would violate his suit.
Forty feet into the shaft he discovered a body. This was an older man, almost certainly Dr. Adams since all the other members of the archaeological team had been young students. A flip-top satellite cell phone lay between his legs and a leather-bound book rested on his lap, still held tightly in his hands.
Mason eased it out of his grasp and flashed his light on it, seeing that it was the original copy of Díaz’s journal. He gently placed it back in the man’s lap. He would leave the honor of taking it to Lauren—it was the least he could do.
The body’s facial features were frozen in a rictus of agony. Dried blood covered his cheeks and lips and neck.
“Hemorrhagic shock,” Mason whispered. “It got every one of them, whatever the hell this is . . .”
He carefully stepped over Adams’s outstretched legs and moved deeper into the stone-walled tunnel. After he’d gone only a few feet, he encountered a giant slab of rock pulled away from the entrance to a dark inner chamber.
Out of simple curiosity, he edged through the opening and noticed the ceiling had receded and the room was a good fifteen feet high and almost twenty feet deep. He stood, relieving the pressure on his aching knees, and moved the beam of his flashlight over a scene taken from the pages of ancient history.
A shriveled corpse lay upon a stone altar, arms folded over its chest, preserved by some primitive mummification method, which along with the airtight seal of the tomb had prevented most decomposition of the skin.
Surrounding the altar were clay urns and piles of deteriorated cloth, possibly robes or garments worn by an Aztec king.
“Montezuma,” Mason said softly, mouthing the name rather than actually speaking it aloud.
The remains of two mummified monkeys lay curled in fetal positions near Montezuma’s feet. As he leaned down to look at them more closely, he noticed one was wearing a deerskin collar embedded with precious emeralds and rubies with beaten silver bands while the other’s neck was bare.
He straightened up and looked around the chamber again. Standing in a burial tomb from the 1500s, Mason felt he understood the excitement Dr. Adams and his team members must have experienced when they entered this room. How could they have known this was also potentially a time bomb, waiting for centuries to explode?
He passed his flashlight over a few more relics and backed away, moving toward a square of daylight at the end of the shaft. More than history had been uncovered here, he told himself as he stepped around the corpse of Dr. Adams to begin the serious work of finding out what caused so many sudden deaths.
In the pit of his stomach he felt more than uneasiness, as though what brought him here would forever change mankind’s view of epidemic disease in ways even he, with all his medical training, couldn’t begin to comprehend.
When he emerged in the bright sunlight he saw his team members intent upon their specialized tasks and briefly, he felt better. He had some of the best men and women in their respective fields, a crack medical investigative force despite their personal differences.
Mason smiled grimly. If anyone could find out what caused these deaths at Tlateloco, his Wildfire Team stood the best possible chance.
He started back across the clearing with his flashlight to add his own specialty, bacteriology, to the effort. Walking past rotting corpses, he wondered about Lauren Sullivan and the advisability of bringing her along. So far she was showing toughness he hadn’t expected her to possess. Hopefully, she would continue to hold up under the extreme pressure of the gory job he’d given her to do.
What he hadn’t told her was the primary reason identification of the bodies had to take place in Tlateloco. If this were truly an extremely contagious epidemic, as it appeared to be now, the remains of every student archaeologist and staff member and laborer would have to be burned in place—destroyed completely to keep the germ from spreading, whatever it was. The risks of sending the bodies home for burial were simply too great.
And he didn’t want to even consider the potential political and scientific outcry he would have to overcome if he had to advocate fuel bombing the entire site and destroying those precious archaeological relics in the tomb.
He chuckled to himself, thinking about what a shit-storm that would be.
He paused for a moment, glancing around the clearing at bodies lying everywhere, his team covering them with black plastic sheets to prevent further scavenging by predators. He was reminded of old newsreels from the Vietnam War of fire zones containing corpses of young American servicemen lying like stacked cordwood, awaiting transport back to the States.
His lips tightened when he reasoned that these young archaeologists also died in a war
, though their killer wasn’t foreign soldiers but some microscopic assassin even more deadly.
He pushed the grisly images from his mind and offered a silent prayer, knowing if his team was not successful here they could be looking at a death toll far greater than what America suffered in Southeast Asia or even World War II . . . an epidemic of potentially limitless proportions.
He didn’t want to even contemplate what would happen if the hot-bug that had caused one hundred percent mortality in this site were to escape the jungle and travel to civilization without a cure having been found.
As he strode toward a tent roof Lionel and Joel had erected over various pieces of laboratory equipment resting on folding aluminum tables, he was suddenly distracted by a moving shadow in the jungle off to his right.
At first he thought it might be an animal, until a closer look revealed a half-naked boy with pronounced Indian facial features looking over his shoulder at the men in orange space suits while running deeper into the forest.
“Son of a bitch!” Mason cried, pointing to the place where he saw the boy disappear. “Someone just ran into those trees,” He yelled, starting to run after him. He knew that if the boy had been exposed to this disease, whatever the hell it is, he could spread it all over this part of Mexico.
The other members of the team turned and looked at Mason, but they were too late to see the fleeing figure as it disappeared into the brush.
Chapter 7
As she identified more and more of her friends’ bodies, Lauren became increasingly unsteady on her feet, breathing in short bursts despite Dr. Williams’s warnings. Her battery-operated air supply hummed loudly in her ears, buzzing like a swarm of angry bees. The harsh noise combined with the claustrophobic feel of her hood and the rubbery smell of filtered air made her feel queasy, nauseated.
The Anthrax Protocol Page 6