Outbreak

by Chris Ryan

  The noise of the rain against the corrugated-iron roof of Suliman's office was almost deafening.

  The moment they were inside, Ben looked around for the satellite phone. He found it soon enough, on a table in the corner. It sat in a hard, black flight case with a separate, bulky battery on the floor and a wire leading up the wall and through the roof – to the antenna, Ben assumed. The rest of the table was a mess of wires and plugs, and Ben realized he had absolutely no idea how the thing worked. 'Keep watch out of the window,' he told Halima. 'Let me know if anyone comes.' Then he turned his attention back to the phone.

  The handset was large and bulky, with a small LCD screen at the top. It was attached to the main body of the apparatus with a curling black wire, but there was no response from the buttons when Ben pushed them. He directed his attention to the battery and saw a red switch. He flicked it and the LCD screen burst into life.

  The number. With a sinking feeling, Ben realized he had put it in his back pocket, and since then he had not only been swimming but had also been totally soaked in the rains. Gingerly he felt for the card his dad had given him. It was still wet, so he pulled it out as gently as he could for fear of ripping it. Ben could hardly bear to look at the thing, so sure was he that it would be unreadable. He breathed out explosively when he realized that the phone number of his dad's office in Macclesfield was still legible. Sam Garner was the name of the guy Dad had told him to call, and when he spoke to him, he knew he would have to sound convincing. Very convincing.

  'There is a car coming up the road,' Halima told him, her voice tense. 'Hurry up.'

  Ben nodded efficiently, then dialled the number. He strained his ears to listen to the ringing tone; it wasn't easy above the pounding of the rain on the rooftop, and even when the tone arrived, it was weak and crackly, occasionally cutting out. Ben listened, silently praying for his call to be answered.

  Ring-ring.

  Ring-ring.

  It seemed interminable.

  Ring-ring.

  Ring-ring.

  'Pick up, pick up, pick up,' Ben whispered to himself.

  Ring-ring.

  'Sam Garner.'

  The man's voice sounded distant and distracted.

  Ben's mind went blank – how was he going to explain to this guy what was happening so many thousands of miles away? How could he make it clear how desperate the situation was? 'Mr Garner,' he said briskly, 'this is Ben Tracey. Russell Tracey's son.'

  There was a pause. 'Hello, Ben.' Garner sounded confused. 'Is everything OK? I thought Russell said you were going with him to Africa.'

  'I was. I mean, I am. That's where I'm calling from. You have to listen to me.'

  Silence.

  'Mr Garner, are you there? Can you hear me?'

  'You broke up for a minute there, Ben. It's not a good line. You sound worried – what's the matter?'

  And then the words came tumbling out of his mouth. 'Dad's ill. I think he might die.'

  'Ben,' Halima said urgently. 'There is somebody getting out of the Land Rover. I think it is Suliman. And there is someone on the road in front of him. I cannot see what they are doing – the rain is too bad.'

  But Ben was talking over her to Garner. 'We're in a tiny village called Udok in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and half the village is dying too. Dad thinks it's a virus – like Ebola, only worse, more contagious. The reservoir is down the mine he's been investigating. He thinks that if anyone gets in or out of the village, it could spread quickly. You have to get in touch with the authorities, make them seal the village. You have to let them know how important it is. Dad said you were the only person he knew who would understand. He told me to tell you it's a Code Red scenario.'

  By the time he had finished his piece, Ben's voice was cracking with exhaustion and emotion. He waited for a reply from Garner, but there was none.

  'Mr Garner? Mr Garner? '

  Ben felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach as his ear was filled with a continuous high-pitched tone. The line had gone down. He cursed the weather under his breath.

  'He is getting back into the car,' Halima said. 'We have to go.'

  'No,' Ben said, even as he dialled the number again. 'I got cut off. I don't think my message got through. I'm going to have to try again.'

  'Hurry up, Ben. He will be here any minute.'

  Stony-faced, Ben kept the handset to his ear. All he could hear was the continuous tone. He tried again. Same thing.

  'It's the weather,' he said almost to himself. 'Must be.'

  Who else could he call? Who else would take him seriously? His mum, of course. He felt his fingers instinctively dialling her number, but again he heard nothing but the incessant, high-pitched tone.

  Ben hadn't minded getting caught when there was a chance of him getting his message through, but now he suddenly realized he couldn't risk it. He turned to Halima. 'Come on, let's go. I'm going to have to try again another time. Let's get out of here before Suliman gets back.'

  He carefully placed the handset back into the flight case, and the two of them slipped back out into the pouring rain. Suliman's Land Rover was approaching, but the lie of the land was such that it was not pointing directly at them, so he and Halima remained unnoticed by the mine manager as they sprinted back to the cover of the trees.

  Seconds later, Suliman arrived at the hut. He parked the truck outside, then hurried in out of the rain, carelessly carrying his AK-47 and muttering under his breath at the stupidity of that idiotic man Abele. He was beginning to have second thoughts about his actions – maybe he should have just killed him when he had the chance. But Kruger had wanted suspicious deaths kept to a minimum, and who was he to argue with the man who was paying him so well?

  In his anger, he failed to see the wet footprints on the floor. And as he started stripping off his wet clothes, he failed to see two figures running as fast as they could down the road that led to the village.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As Ben and Halima hurtled down the road in the gushing rain, they didn't notice Abele, unconscious in the ditch by the side. Nobody noticed them either – there was no one about, as everyone was taking shelter from the elements. It was only when they reached the compound that they stopped, taking cover for a moment under a corrugated-iron canopy. Their sopping clothes stuck uncomfortably to their skin, and Ben felt the cold pain of physical exhaustion deep in his chest. The two of them stood there, breathless, and Ben found himself suddenly reluctant to go in. He surveyed the square in front of him. Through the pouring rain he could see, on the other side, a body lying on its back. It was on some sort of makeshift stretcher. 'Look,' he said to Halima, pointing in the direction of the body. 'They must have been taking him away to the burial site when the rains came.'

  Halima nodded mutely.

  Ben's edginess increased. 'We should go over there and move him out of the rain,' he said.

  'And what would that do, Ben?' Halima asked, giving him a piercing look.

  Ben shrugged. 'I don't know. I just thought…'

  But he stopped talking and looked down to his side, where Halima had taken his hand.

  'You are scared to go in to see your father because you fear what you will find there,' she observed.

  Ben winced slightly, and nodded his head. 'What if he's dead?' he asked plaintively.

  Halima gave him a sympathetic look. 'I understand,' she said. 'If you would rather I stayed out here…?'

  Ben thought about it for a second. 'No,' he said finally. They had been through a lot together, and for some reason he now drew a kind of comfort from her presence. 'No, come in. If you want to,' he added.

  He took a deep breath and led the way.

  From the doorway, he could see that his father had not moved in the time Ben had been away. He was still lying on the bed, deathly still. Ben felt suddenly sick; from here his father did not seem to be breathing. He exchanged a worried glance with Halima.

  And then there was a sound: a long, drawn
-out breath that seemed to last longer than any breath Ben had ever heard. It did not sound good, but at least it was a sign of life. He rushed to his father's bedside.

  'Dad?' Ben said tentatively, not wanting to shout but struggling to be heard above the sound of the rain. 'Dad, can you hear me?'

  For a few seconds there was no response, but then Russell's eyes flickered open. He almost seemed to recognize his son, but just when Ben was about to speak again, his father's eyes fell shut once more.

  Ben put his face in his hands. He couldn't bear to see his father this way.

  'Ben?'

  He looked up sharply. Russell's eyes were open again.

  'Ben,' he whispered hoarsely. 'Is that you?'

  Ben nodded.

  'Oh, thank God,' Russell murmured. 'Abele said you had disappeared.'

  There was no point, Ben thought, explaining where he had been. 'I'm here now. You need water,' he told his dad, looking around and seeing his bottle of water where he had left it. He held it to his dad's lips, and his father seemed to derive some relief from the liquid, though he appeared to have lost the ability to swallow and the water did little more than sluice out from around the side of his parched and bleeding lips.

  'Did you call Sam?' Russell asked.

  'I tried to, Dad. I spoke to him, but I'm not sure the message got through. The line was bad – I'm going to have to try again, but Suliman is in his office now and I'll have to think of a way to lure him out.'

  Russell coughed weakly. 'Never mind that now,' he said. 'Where's Abele?'

  'I don't know. I haven't seen him.'

  'He was here,' Russell breathed. 'I don't know when – maybe yesterday. He told me that…' Again he dissolved into a fit of coughing before he could continue speaking. 'He told me that they are bringing workers in from the nearest village.'

  Ben blinked as the implications of that news hit home. This was exactly what they wanted to avoid.

  'It's starting, Ben.' His father seemed to echo his thoughts. 'It will only take one of those people to return to their home carrying the virus, and nobody will be able to stop it spreading. You have to make sure it doesn't happen.'

  'How am I supposed to-?' Ben started to ask, but he cut himself short as his father emitted another of those deathly rattles from his lungs. 'Dad, are you OK?' he asked urgently.

  But there was no reply. Russell Tracey had slipped once more into unconsciousness.

  Ben bit his lip. All he wanted to do was to stay here, to look after his father. But that was not what his father had urged him to do. Gradually he became aware that the noise of the rain hammering on the roof had stopped, and Halima had approached and was standing just behind him. 'What should we do?' she asked.

  Ben closed his eyes and breathed deeply and slowly in an attempt to regain his composure. 'Where is the next village?' he asked quietly.

  'West of here,' Halima said. 'On the road Suliman took with us.'

  'Is that the only road in?'

  Halima nodded.

  'And how far away is it?'

  'Half a day's drive. Maybe a day because of the rains.'

  'OK. There might still be time.' He chewed thoughtfully on the nail of his right thumb. 'I've got an idea,' he said. 'This is what we're going to do…'

  Four thousand miles away, the same sun that was once more emerging over the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was also beating down on the city of Macclesfield in Cheshire. Sam Garner, a bearded, bespectacled man in his mid-forties wearing a rather unfashionable short-sleeved shirt and a tie with soup stains down it, was glad of the air conditioning in his offices; but he was deeply concerned by the phone call he had just received. He had never met Russell Tracey's son, and didn't know if he was the sort of kid to pull practical jokes. But if his father was anything to go by, somehow he doubted it.

  Sam had called the operator to try and trace where the call had come from, but there was nothing she could do to help. The more he thought about it, the more firmly he decided he had to take it seriously. It was too outlandish for a kid to make up, surely, and Ben had sounded genuinely fearful. But who should he call and who would listen and, even more importantly, be able to act on such meagre information? He twiddled with his pencil and tried to think things through calmly and logically. Sam Garner had seen the effects of the Ebola virus firsthand. He'd researched a small outbreak in the Central African Republic about three years ago, and he remembered thinking how much worse these diseases were in real life than in academic study. The people he had seen dying of the virus had ended their lives in terrible pain. At the time he remembered being thankful that you could only catch Ebola if you came into contact with the bodily fluids of infected sufferers. Humans had never caught it through airborne transmission, though monkeys possibly had. A slight mutation, and Ebola could turn into a health threat the like of which the world had never seen.

  It had become something of an obsession of Sam's. There was no doubting that there were millions of organisms out there unknown to modern science, microscopic bacteria and viruses living in tiny undiscovered colonies with their own quirks and characteristics. You didn't need to be an amazing scientist to work out that with so many millions of possibilities, it was not only likely that someone someday would stumble across a new virus as invasive as Ebola but much more contagious. It was inevitable. Sam had even developed his own system of grading virus threats.

  Code Green: no threat.

  Code Amber: discovery of reservoir and suspected threat to human life.

  Code Red: widespread infection and threat of major epidemic.

  Sometimes Sam's colleagues made fun of him and the way he had taken to lobbying governments and NGOs, getting up on his soapbox and arguing the need for more funding in this arena; but Sam didn't care. He knew what he thought, and he knew one day he would be vindicated in some horrific way.

  Perhaps that day had come. Or perhaps Russell Tracey and the villagers of this unheard-of place in the DRC had succumbed to something totally different. All Sam knew was that what Ben had described was perfectly possible, if unthinkable, and that Russell Tracey was not the sort of man to overstate his case. If Russell thought this was a Code Red situation, it probably was.

  But his thought processes simply led him back to square one: who would be the best person to notify? Who might act promptly based on no real data? But if this really was a Code Red…

  He had an idea. Clearing an unruly pile of papers from his desk with a sudden sweep of his arm, he pulled the keyboard of his computer towards him and directed his Internet browser to a search engine with a light tap of his fingers. Within seconds he had directed himself to the United Nations website. His eyes scanned quickly over the screen until he saw the link he was looking for: 'PEACE & SECURITY'. He navigated to the peacekeeping section of the website, then found the link for 'CURRENT OPERATIONS'. A drop-down menu directed him to ' AFRICA ' and then 'MONUC (DEM. REP. OF THE CONGO)'. A few clicks later, he found himself scribbling down the number of the main office in Kinshasa of the UN Mission in the DRC.

  Then he stopped.

  What were they going to think, these people, when he phoned them out of the blue to alert them to a deadly virus in an unheard-of backwater of the country? What would he think, if someone he had never heard of called him up to say that half the population of Britain might die if he didn't quarantine Macclesfield? If ever there was a long shot, this was it. Sam Garner knew he was going to have to be very convincing.

  He dialled the number.

  'Oui, bonjour,' a woman's voice answered almost immediately.

  'Do you speak English?'

  'Yes, sir, a little.'

  'Good.' Sam spoke slowly and clearly. 'My name is Dr Sam Garner. I'm calling from England and I am a specialist in infectious diseases. You're going to have to listen to me incredibly carefully…'

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  'When will you be coming home, Daddy?'

  The thin child who looked up at her equally e
maciated father was eight years old, with large dark eyes and tightly curled hair. She didn't want her father to leave.

  'In two weeks,' he said gruffly, softening only when he saw the tears welling up in his daughter's eyes. He knelt down and took her hand. 'The men say there is work in the next village. When I come back, I will have a little money. Enough, maybe, to buy some meat for us. You must look after your mother while I am gone. Do you think you can do that for me?'

  The little girl nodded bravely. Her father smiled at her, stroked the side of her head, then stood up. His wife was standing in the corner of the hut, obscured somewhat by the shadows. He nodded cursorily at her, then left.

  Outside, the minibus was waiting. It was an old bus, like every vehicle the man had ever seen, with rust patches and mismatched wheels. And it was almost full. He hurried towards it, not wanting to risk missing his seat. The smiling men who had flown in from Kinshasa the previous day had told him that this was a limited opportunity for work, that if they wanted to earn some of the money that was available, they needed to sign up now and leave tomorrow. Little did anyone know that they would be back to transport another busload of workers as soon as possible.

  Quietly the man took his place at the front of the bus. It was hot and smelly, and filled with men who, like him, had faces that reflected the hardship of their lives, yet now showed hope that they might be able to earn the money they so desperately needed to support their families.

  That had been this morning. They'd expected to be in Udok by lunchtime, but the rains had come, holding them up. Now they trundled along slowly, all of them anxious to be at their destination.

  None of them, of course, had heard the rumours. There were no televisions in this part of the world, no newspapers. Half the men in the minibus did not even know the name of the village they were going to.

  And none of them knew what they were letting themselves in for…