Dnt wrry all gd here major mom gd shape 4 sure. c liked pitt—good P is a great school. no fshng 4 u tarpon sesn fll swng now dnt waste days bt u gys gtta eat how’s ur rnning?
She sent the email, fiddled with her earlobe waiting for the reply, looked around for a Butterfinger, saw none. Reminded herself to tell Doug to send another box. She was one of those fortunate people with a high-rpm metabolism that allowed her to eat anything she wanted and not gain weight. Keeping weight on was actually more of a problem. She didn’t pig out on Butterfingers, but one a day wouldn’t kill anyone.
Honey,
We’re not going out because one of the Scout Mercs needs an overhaul and both props need balancing. I’ll get my days in, don’t worry. I did 12 miles yesterday, still building the long slow distance base. The marathon’s not for another four weeks, should be just right by then. Hey, look, if I’m going to get the shopping done and be back in time to make dinner, I have to run. And don’t worry. I’ll pick up Butterfingers.
She laughed at that. They had been together long enough for them to read each other’s minds often, as he had just done. How long before they started to look like each other?
ok go 4 it.
i love you and miss you 247.
Lenny
She was about to hit the Send button when such a shot of adrenaline rushed through her that she gasped out loud. The commissary.
Oh God. She deleted “Lenny” and typed furiously.
do not repeat not go to commissary. stay away macdill. possible biohazard. shop civilian. Reply please.
She started to hit the Send button again, then stopped herself. I can’t say that. ACE info is top classified, close hold. The censors will pick it up and there will be fobbits all over me. Doug won’t get the message that way anyway.
As a physician, and a surgeon, and one who practiced in a combat area, Stilwell did not lose control easily. But now she recognized the signs of incipient panic in herself: hyperventilating, lightheadedness, shaking from adrenaline overload.
You don’t know that there’s any problem at MacDill.
But you don’t know that there is not, either.
You can’t let them go there. It’s not worth the risk. Just for groceries.
How to stop them?
She could feel Doug, halfway around the world, waiting for an email from her. If she made him wait too long, he might assume she’d had to break off for some emergency. She closed her eyes, tried to calm herself, forced her thoughts to become orderly. Then she thought of something.
Honey,
I would rather you shopped at Publix. From now on. Until I get home. They are donating 10% of profits to service families in need. Do you copy?
She sent the email, then shook her head. Do you copy? Lapsing into Armyspeak.
His reply came in seconds.
Hi Honey,
Sorry, no can do. Got those boat repairs coming and dough is tight. Plus saving for that vacation we’re taking when you get back. You know all that. But tell you what. I can shop on base and give 10% myself to that family fund and still come out ahead. Hey … have to go. I love you. Will try to call tomorrow. Or email.
LOVE U.
No. No. She typed furiously, all caps. Maybe she could catch him.
NO. YOY DINR UNDERSTNND. CANNOT GO TOI THE CONIMA]
She stopped. More haste, less speed. It was garbled. Panic was disrupting her motor skills. Doug would be gone already. And in a message like that, or like the one she might revise and send, the Army’s censoring software would detect excessive anomalies and route the email to a human reviewer. And then … there would be hell to pay. After this was over, there would be a hard sit-down with the fobbits called insects, partly because they came from Internal Security, the Army acronym for which was InSec. Partly, but not completely. The other reason was that they were slimy men roundly detested for a willingness to walk their careers forward over the backs of other soldiers. She could not let that happen. There was too much need here.
But Doug and Danny, going to the commissary? The thought just about cracked her professional discipline. She sat back, wrapped one arm around her chest, and shoved the knuckles of her right hand into her mouth.
A few minutes later, someone knocked, very softly, on the flimsy plywood door to her plywood closet of an office. She composed herself, steadied her voice.
“Come in.”
The door opened just wide enough for one of the nurses to poke her head in. A beautiful young black woman from Brooklyn. She remembered that much. But not the nurse’s name. She knew it, but could not remember it, and that was a bad sign. So she just smiled and waited.
“Ma’am, there’s a call for you.” Muffled voice from the Chemturion hood.
“Can you handle it for me, please? I just need a few minutes here to finish up some paperwork.”
“Ah, ma’am, I tried to take a message. But it’s a colonel, ma’am. Says he spoke to you about coming here. Said to get you ASAP.” The nurse’s face contracted around the word “ASAP,” as though she had just tasted something sour.
The fobbit. Damn. She had forgotten all about their conversation yesterday. No, the day before. Or had it been last week? She could not recall. But she did seem to remember that the colonel had said he would arrive on Thursday, which had come and gone. Today was Saturday. What the hell? Well, colonels didn’t make their schedules to suit majors. He was here and had to be dealt with. “All right, I’ll speak with him. Is he inside here someplace?”
“No, ma’am. He’s outside. I don’t think he wants to come in. Even with a suit on.”
“He actually has a suit on? Out there? Okay, no problem. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The beautiful nurse went away, leaving Stilwell’s door ajar. She got up, rubbed her hands over her face in an attempt to scrub away some of the fatigue, and walked to the nurses’ station, where the telephones were located.
“Stilwell.”
“Major, this is Colonel Ribbesh.”
She had forgotten all about him. His voice sounded stiff and formal and distorted by his suit hood. Pissed off because some general ordered him to come out here, she thought. Now he’s going to pass it right on down the line. She wondered why he was wearing a biosafety suit, even though he was outside the unit.
“I had apprised you of my ETA, Major. There were some changes required. Did your staff apprise you?”
“No, Colonel.”
“That’s too bad. I instructed my staff to do so.”
I just bet you did, fobbit. Preemptive strike is called for here.
“Colonel, no disrespect, but I’ve got four more patients to see stat. Can this wait?”
“I’m afraid not. I understand you’ve declined to utilize a Bravo Sierra Lima-dash-Four unit.”
“Correct.”
“I think you should don one ASAP, Major. I know you’re aware that NBC regulations specifically state that all medical personnel in Level Four quarantine conditions shall be required to utilize Bravo Sierra Lima-dash-Four units at all times when in the presence of pathogens.”
“Thanks for your concern, Colonel, but no. Now I have to—”
“Major Stilwell, that wasn’t a request.” Colonel Ribbesh sounded like a teacher she’d had in seventh grade, a little man bitter as brine whose life purpose, it seemed, had been to make other people suffer. “It was an order. From a superior officer.”
She took a deep breath, fought her temper back down. “Colonel. These boys fight every day without magic suits. I can’t take care of them in one. And I’m sure you’re aware of Army General Order Seventeen, Section Four, Part b, which states that in situations pertaining to the health and welfare of military personnel, medical authority shall prevail over all other considerations. I have to go.”
Let it go right there, she told herself, but then it just came bubbling out. “See, a soldier just died and I need to pronounce his death to make his sure his family becomes eligible for what meager
benefits the Army sees fit to pay parents for their dead enlisted-men sons, because if one bit of paperwork, just one tiny piece, is missing, well, they can kiss those benefits goodbye. But thank you for your concern.”
Stilwell hung up, shook her head. There was, of course, something else.
What’s your name, Sergeant?
Daniel, ma’am. Wyman.
Suppose one of these boys had been her Danny and it was another doctor? What would she expect of that one? The answer was obvious—to her, at least. The others still in here all wore the suits. They were volunteers, sergeants and corporals, nurses and lab techs and a couple of physician’s assistants who’d stayed to help, and she was glad they were protected. But for her, not being able to speak directly to these sick kids, to see them and touch them and hear their voices undistorted, was unthinkable.
Not long after Daniel Wyman died, Stilwell herself took up residence in the quarantined hospital, catnapping when she could on a cot, subsisting mostly on coffee and the microwavable meals normally given only to patients. She had been working for more than fifty hours now without really sleeping, and was beginning to feel the red, gritty edge of serious fatigue.
She had encountered that kind of exhaustion before, after medical school when she was interning and then doing her residency. There were times in those days when she had worked ninety hours straight. She was younger then, but she was not old now and knew she still had reserves of energy not yet tapped. She could keep going for quite a while.
But what then? she asked herself, pouring more thick, black coffee from the Bunn at the nurses’ station. And what was quite a while, anyway? She couldn’t go on forever, and she knew that full well. They could bring other Army doctors, but they would be strangers to the boys in the wards and, working in the space suits, would only make the soldiers feel even more diseased and alone, like dying lepers.
Well, she couldn’t do anything about that. But she could keep administering colistin, as long as the supplies kept coming in, and she could provide pain relief, and she could talk to them and hold their hands and reassure them.
And what about you, Dr. Stilwell? Do you really think you’ve got some kind of miraculous immunity to this thing?
I haven’t caught it yet, now have I?
It’s just a matter of time. You know that.
I don’t know any such thing. I think if I were going to get it, I would have by now.
Get real. It’s just taking longer because you’re a woman and women have stronger immune systems than men. That was one of the first things you learned in the infectious disease courses. Remember how all the women med students in the classes made faces and thumbed their noses at the men?
Maybe. Maybe not. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. Does it?
No. It doesn’t. What matters is them. And no goddamned fobbit is going to get between me and those soldiers.
Roger that, Major.
BARNARD NEVER SLEPT WELL IN THE MOTEL-LIKE ROOMS THAT were now standard issue in all agencies having anything to do with homeland security. Given his seniority, his was comfortable enough—double bed, private bath, color-chip hues—but it wasn’t home and there was no Lucianne, slim and warm, beside him.
He showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, had coffee, and headed downstairs to Delta 17. Lew Casey had called earlier that morning with guardedly good news. Too complicated to explain on the phone, he’d said; Barnard should come down to see for himself.
It was a trip most people would have dreaded, but what Barnard dreaded more were the seemingly endless periods between his all-too-infrequent visits to the BSL-4 labs. He had never stopped feeling the pull of the labs, especially the Fours, where the deadliest pathogens lived. There was nothing on earth like being in a lab with those things. Lion tamers might feel something akin to it, he’d once reflected, but even that would be less intense. You could see lions. And train them. You could not see or train monsters like Ebola Zaire … or ACE.
He passed through the first air lock and security point, then went to the clothing-and-supply station to pick up a fresh blue lab gown, shoe covers, rubber gloves, and a Level 3 biosafety respirator.
BARDA, like all facilities working with dangerous pathogens, was divided into containment levels. The first, uppermost level, where he now donned his lab attire, contained no dangerous laboratories or research facilities. It was mostly for screening and administration; even laboratories working with the most exotic microbes needed some help from a bureaucracy.
There were only two points of ingress and egress, one of which Barnard had come through today and on the earlier visit with Hallie. In a different elevator, Barnard descended past BARDA Levels 2 and 3 to the lowest, hottest, most tightly restricted area: Biosafety Level 4. Walking toward his final transition point, he felt familiar reactions. His respiration and pulse increased, his spatial awareness became more acute, his eyes and ears more vigilant.
Coming down here always made him think of Winston Churchill’s famous statement that nothing focused the mind more wonderfully than being shot at without effect. His own experience in Vietnam had shown that to be true—up to a point. Churchill had spent a few weeks being shot at, Barnard twenty-six months. At first, the exhilaration made it almost easy, but before long it soured into toxic despair.
At the end of his first tour, he had no intention of going back in-country. Stateside it would be, his body in one piece still and his mind, if not in one piece, at least not fragmented beyond reassembly. He spent a few days out-processing in Saigon, sleeping on clean sheets and drinking good Scotch and eating rare steaks with fresh green salads before heading back to the United States. He got sated on red meat by the second day, but the fresh vegetables, crisp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, crunchy carrots—of these he simply could not seem to devour enough. Nor the Scotch. On the third day, he slept late, showered for half an hour, ate a fine breakfast of bacon and five eggs and real toast. By the afternoon, he was sitting at the bar in Saigon’s InterContinental Hotel savoring his third double Chivas, neat.
Lined up at the bar on both sides of him were contractors with bodies like sides of beef and plump rear-echelon types who looked like sausages stuffed into their tailored uniforms. Many of the REMFs were with beautiful whores reeking of imitation Chanel No. 5. It was not yet three P.M. but sounded like late on New Year’s Eve, all of them drinking and howling and backslapping.
There was a long mirror behind the bar, cracked but still hanging, and he looked at himself in his clean uniform with its edged creases, deeply tanned, emaciated, hollow-eyed and yellow-toothed. At the beginning of his tour he had worn a size 18 collar—big football neck—but now his neck was scrawny, sprouting out of the uniform shirt collar like a straw in a glass. Except for the whores, he was the only underweight person in the bar.
He was surrounded by piggy faces and grinning mouths and jiggling bodies, bartenders shouting and the whores laughing, their voices so high it sounded like screaming, and he suddenly thought he would puke up the Chivas Regal right there on the bar top. His vision misted and it was hard not to draw the .45 Colt—worn against regulations here but the hell with them, he never went anywhere unarmed anymore—and start putting red holes in the white faces.
He got himself out of the hotel and to the nearest corner before he did puke. Passersby kept right on going without giving him a second glance. Puking-drunk Americans were as common as Saigon’s notorious cat-sized rats then.
The next day, sick but sober, he went to see the DEROS officer and indicated his desire to sign up for another tour in-country. The plump major stared at him for a long time from behind an opulent mahogany desk he had commandeered from a Saigon pol.
“Are you drunk, Brainard?”
He looked at the clock: just past eleven A.M.
“Barnard, sir. No, sir. Not anymore.”
“Drugs?”
“No, sir.”
The man lit a cigar, offered one to Barnard, who declined with roiling gut. “Yo
u’re a college grad?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’d you go?”
“University of Virginia, sir.”
“ROTC?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you want to do? Back in the world?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
“Not a military career, though?”
“No way in hell, sir. No disrespect.”
The major sat forward, his belly straining the buttons of his shirt, poked his cigar toward Barnard, and said angrily, “Then why in the hell do you want to go back in there? You don’t need to get your ticket punched for promotion. What are you thinking?”
Barnard understood the man’s outburst, didn’t take it personally—the rear-echelon major being made to feel bad.
“Don’t be an idiot, Brainard. You don’t have to go back.”
He was just twenty-three then and knew that he didn’t know many things. But this one he did. He could not go home while men he knew and cared about were still back there. His men. He might escape a death now by going home, but it would be a bad trade: good death with his men here for bad death at the end of a Smith & Wesson or rope back home.
“Yes, I do.” Barnard looked out the office’s floor-to-ceiling windows. He could not see the mountains or his men from here, but he could feel them. It was like standing waist-deep in an undertow.
“Sir.”
Earlier in his career at the CDC, he had spent years in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories dealing with the microbial world’s worst demons, group A strep, Yersinia pestis, anthrax, Ebola-Z, and others. As time went on and he was promoted out of the labs, he understood that with his experience he could better serve as a supervisor and, later, a director. But he was never entirely free of the same kind of guilt he’d felt that day in Saigon. It was as though he were attached to Four with a long elastic cord that stretched but never let go and relaxed only when he was back in there with his people and the demons.
The Deep Zone: A Novel Page 17