When he finished setting up new drips, he steeled himself to return to the clinic. A number of villagers were either asymptomatic or suffering only the earliest stages of the disease. If he could get them into a relatively clean environment, like the village nakamal -the open sided meetinghouse-and begin administering what he hoped might be prophylactic treatment, they stood a chance.
Sweat trickled down his back and under his arms. Even his groin was damp and itchy. Outside, came an astonishingly loud clap of thunder. Rain began to fall, not in measured drops this time, but a ferocious cascade that deluged the island. The Wet Season had arrived.
Nate opened the cottage door and ran through the deluge to the clinic, wishing he believed in God.
-Chapter 21-
En route to New Zealand
Dispersal: Plus 3 days
While a part of Jordan balked at Brant ordering her to Vanuatu, she knew that it would take months to unravel the connection between Oklahoma City and BW technology. Mathew Island was an evolving crime scene, mint fresh, and, despite her ignorance of BW technology, pathology in a hot zone was her area of expertise.
The military transport to New Zealand didn't provide the most luxurious facilities, but there were only fifteen passengers and over a hundred seats, giving everyone plenty of room to spread out, even sleep.
Broadwater was the designated team leader. With her came two USAMRIID microbiologists, a medical doctor and three enlisted men who provided 'technical support'. The size of the men implied they were more likely to provide physical support, but during the flight, Jordan learned that one of them was a graduate chemistry student while another had just been accepted into the Officer Training School. His expertise was biomedical engineering-specifically, the hardware used in Level 4 environments. Commander Long and three Marines, each one highly skilled in some aspect of weapons technology and biohazard cleanup, completed the military contingent. The remainder of the team included FBI technical staff, and an ex-UNSCOM weapon's inspector, who greeted McCabe liked a long lost brother.
Originally, Jordan had intended to use the flight to catch up on a thick pile of research papers. However, the conversations between team members proved considerably more educational, particularly when the topic turned to South Africa's BW programme.
"The South Africans got smart after Rhodesia," Long said. He was watching McCabe in a way that Jordan could only describe as calculating. "Just look at the Ebola outbreaks."
"Oh, come on," said Jordan, pulling a badly chewed pen from her mouth. "I concede that I'm on a vertical learning curve, but that's practically a backwards loop."
"Really?" Long's smile carried no trace of humour. "How convenient that bacterial shigella-bloody diarrhoea-appeared simultaneously, camouflaging Ebola symptoms."
If Jordan had learned nothing else these past days, it was not to assume anything when it came to BW. "Ebola and shigella are endemic in that part of Africa. Sporadic, isolated cases recur all the time. The Kikwit outbreak only spread because of unsound hospital practices."
"Again, you know that for a fact, Dr Spinner?" Long's soft drawl bore sinister undertones, as if he carried a dark, bitter secret that the rest of the world was better off not knowing. "Any sign of the carrier yet? The CDC's banking on its being a rodent, maybe a bat, but it kills mice doesn't it? So the rodent theory isn't panning out too well." He shrugged. "Wouldn't be the first time someone used the place as a proving ground for a BW. Hell, it's Africa, no one gives a damn."
Something tugged at Jordan's memory, something about anthrax. "Nass," she mumbled, frowning in concentration. "Didn't someone named Nass write a theory about anthrax?"
McCabe shot her a look of approval, while Broadwater said, "Dr Meryl Nass from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And it was a little more than a theory. In the late 1970s, the Apartheid South African military intelligence and the Rhodesian army worked together in a war that they believed would dictate the future of Africa as a whole. It was a racial war, a dirty war that used every underhanded trick in the book, including the deployment of anthrax and cholera as bioweapons."
"But anthrax is endemic in that part of Africa," Jordan objected.
Long shook his head. "Back then, Rhodesia had an excellent health care system and veterinary service. It reported an average of thirteen cases of bovine anthrax annually and no human cases. In 1980, at the height of the war, there were 10,738 human anthrax cases, and an unknown, virtually incalculable number of cattle infections."
Lips thinned in a knowing, bitter smile, Broadwater added, "No one figured out why until three years ago, when Nass researched the epidemiology of the outbreak. The anthrax spores managed to jump over vast tracts of commercial white - owned farms, without infecting a single animal or person, to go on to infect thousands of people and animals owned by tribal trust lands. Unusual epidemiology, wouldn't you say? Not only did it not pick on the white population, it left their animals alone. All this at a time when white Rhodesians were moving their cattle around the country whenever they wished, while the tribal owned cattle and people were almost prisoners on their land? When did anthrax learn racial selectivity?"
"Same goes for cholera," Long added. "We now know that the white-Rhodesian military distributed anthrax spores by seedcake to the starving cattle of Rhodesian tribal trust lands. Then they poisoned water systems with Vibrio cholerae . The anthrax was meant to kill cattle, the economic backbone of African villagers, to undermine the support structure of the black-Rhodesian guerrillas. Cholera was new to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, but it remained oddly confined to the Eastern districts, where the white government was having the worst guerrilla problems."
Jordan began flipping through her files, trying to locate the paper by Nass.
"You won't find much," Long added. "But when we get back, if you ask Wilson real nicely, he might let you look at the CIA files on Lieutenant Major Albrecht Tissot, better known as Dr Death, who ran South Africa's Project Coast- Jota in Afrikaans-a biological weapons research project at the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories outside Pretoria. Jota specialized in assassinations using toxins and poisons, but it also researched Ebola, Marburg and other African haemorrhagic fevers, obligingly mailed to them by the CDC, and our old friends, the American Type Culture Centre."
"The same place that mailed Gary Wade Benson Bubonic Plague," McCabe reminded her.
"We Yanks just love giving this sort of stuff to anyone who asks," Long muttered.
"The South Africans weren't interested in showing off," McCabe said. "On the contrary. Project Jota 's aim was to infect entire populations with virtually untraceable diseases because these diseases were either endemic or occasionally appeared in the country-just as they'd done so successfully in Zimbabwe with anthrax and cholera."
"But that doesn't proved Ebola was a bioweapon-"
Jordan faltered when Long leaned forward, pinned her with his dark eyes, and said, "Forget all those textbooks and papers you're reading, and go have a close look at how Ebola spread along the Zambezi River in 1976. The serological epidemiology doesn't make sense. Then check Dave Wilson's files again, and you'll discover something very interesting. Albrecht Tissot was in Zaire several weeks before the outbreak. And he was back there again before-and during-the last outbreak. The index case has now been established: Gaspard Menga. But I'll bet you a dime to a dollar that despite collecting eighteen thousand animal samples and thirty thousand insects from a jungle that has virtually no wildlife left, the CDC won't source the carrier. Like I said, it was an experiment in an outdoor laboratory. A lie wrapped within the truth. Like anthrax, Ebola is endemic in these areas."
McCabe left his seat and headed forward. Jordan assumed he was going to the bathroom, until Long exchanged a look with Broadwater. The naval commander walked away.
The major also stood and went to leave, until Jordan said, "People have a hard time talking about Oklahoma when I'm around. It's like I'm carrying this gigantic placard that says, 'emotionally fragile, handle with
extreme care." Smiling self-consciously she ran her hand over the stubble on her head, adding, "I can't blame them, I'm not exactly hiding the sign. But in a few months, when it grows back, maybe it'll be a little less obvious." She glanced in the direction that McCabe had vanished. "Sometimes the signs are invisible, but they're just as big."
Staring at her a moment, Broadwater went forward, presumably after McCabe.
The spirit of interagency cooperation was full of undercurrents. Jordan had no idea what the different layers meant, and she didn't much care, as long as they didn't interfere with the investigation.
"Ever been to a hot zone before, Doctor?" Standing in the aisle was Major Broadwater with two cups of coffee.
Moving her files so that Broadwater could sit beside her, Jordan replied, "I assisted in autopsying Hanta victims, Major. Several times. It's what got me interested in pathology."
"Good. This is not the trip to be finding out you can't deal with it. And call me Susan." She paused and sipped her coffee. "He crawled around inside yet?"
"What do you mean?" Jordan shot her a wary look. There was something about McCabe that bothered her. Hell, there was a lot about the agent that bothered her. Young, remarkably good looking, and moving with the grace of an athlete, he nevertheless seemed…older somehow. Whatever he'd seen in Zaire, it ran deep.
"Don't let it bug you, he does it to everyone," replied Susan. "Josh doesn't mean to be rude. It's just that he lacks the patience for social niceties-like not profiling everyone he meets."
"You've known him a while, I take it?"
"Family thing. About four generations worth. His father broke New England ranks when he married an Egyptian doctor. My father did the same when he married into Spanish aristocracy."
Jordan would have placed Susan Broadwater in her early thirties, but she had the beautiful, ageless face of her mother's forebears. She could easily have been five years younger, or ten years older.
"Josh was always a serious kid," Susan continued. "Too bright for his own good, too impatient with his teachers. His mother tempered that but when she died…" Her eyes filled with regret. "I had plenty to say about that to his father, Robert, but Rob was, in his own way, a singularly stubborn man. According to him Josh was fine. Both the McCabe boys had grown up in Africa, and had seen things that would have made the most resilient Western doctor run screaming. Josh had been alone in villages before. This time, he was fourteen, almost fifteen years old, practically a man. He'd deal with it."
Before Jordan could ask her to elaborate, Susan added, "Robert and Jasmine McCabe were renowned epidemiologists. They wrote the definitive papers on Lassa fever. The boys travelled everywhere with them when they were younger. When it was time for school, they were sent to live with Jasmine's family in Cairo, the later, an exclusive boarding school in Boston.
"Long, ugly story cut short, Josh came down with Ebola when he and his brother went to visit his parents while they were in Zaire. Jasmine caught the disease while nursing Josh, and died. Josh had to cremate her because it was the middle of the hot season and most of the villagers were dead or dying. Then he had to wait three weeks, more or less alone, until his father and brother returned from up north, because by then Ebola was breaking out all over the country. Transport had ground to a halt and communications were non-existent. The government..." Susan's face screwed up. "You know the story. No one wanted to go near the place. His father didn't exactly blame Josh for his mother's death, but for a whole bunch of reasons I'm not going to go into, that's not the way Josh sees it."
Stunned by the revelation, Jordan shot her a sceptical look. Almost half the victims of Ebola survived, but ninety percent of them suffered some permanent scarring to organs. How in hell had McCabe passed the FBI physical-or psychological-exams?
"Oh, he had Ebola, all right," Susan said, meeting her look. "He was one of those few percent whose immune system kicks in fast enough to beat the virus without so much as a saline drip. Not that he had an easy time of it, but he came out of it with nothing but a well-developed set of antibodies. Physically, he was fine."
"But psychologically…" Jordan didn't have to imagine what the experience would have done to a child, especially one left alone in the middle of a village where everyone was crashing and bleeding out-while the outside world was too terrified to help.
"Josh grew up in Africa, Dr Spinner. As I said, he saw things that, well… Doesn't matter. Point is, he's an FBI agent. Incipient basket cases don't get given a gun and a badge. It's just that he has very personal reasons for hating Ebola."
"For hating it so much, he's well informed."
"Josh's antipathy towards his family's chosen profession is well-known." Susan's face hardened. "He mastered the art of hiding his emotions long ago. Now it's a profession."
Suspecting the relationship between Susan and McCabe-or his father, or perhaps both-had been a little more intimate, Jordan said, "And you're telling me all this, because?"
"Because it's easy to dislike Josh, hard to deal with what I've heard some describe as intellectual arrogance, and impossible to get close too him. He lives in his own world and views other people as tools. If they can't help him, he has no interest in them. And has a lot of interest in you."
"That's a little harsh, isn't it? I mean he has friends, like you."
"We were close, once, until I began working with his father. The one thing Josh does have is an overdeveloped sense of loyalty to those whom life has dealt a crappy hand. Comes from living in a village that burned ninety percent of its population-mostly women and children-while the world abandoned it. Don't mistake that for pity," Susan added. "It's empathy. Josh has no time for those who let personal demons hobble them."
Jordan suddenly realised that the conversation wasn't about McCabe but herself. "You're telling me this because you think I'm hobbled."
Downing the last of her coffee, Susan looked around the aircraft. "Everyone here knows one another and has worked with dangerous pathogens in the field. It's an oddly eclectic little community, Dr Spinner, one that normally excludes the well-known names in the CDC because we deal with bioweapons; something the public is better off not knowing about. This is not the first time this sort of response group has been assembled. Many of these people cut their teeth in Iran and northern Iraq. And every one of them knows each other's background, what makes 'em tick.
"Don't take Josh' eccentricities personally. He's not like you and me. He's not fascinated by this bug. But even if he hates it, hates the family business, as he puts it, it won't stop him from doing his job, especially because he understands better than most what Nathaniel Sturgess is going through." Susan unbuckled her seat belt, and stood. "I don't expect your recent loss will get in your way, either."
"Thank you," Jordan said sincerely. "I appreciate that. And it's Jordan. I never did get used to being called 'Doctor'."
When Susan left, Jordan looked out the window to the marshmallow clouds. Joshua McCabe had been only fourteen years old. For the first time since Oklahoma, the fog of her own pain and grief seemed marginally less cloying.
-Chapter 22-
Los Angeles International Airport
Dispersal: Plus 3 days
United Airlines Flight 706 had parked at the end of a taxiway, and passengers had been informed that there was a small problem regarding quarantine. When a heavily armed SWAT team surrounded the aircraft, the captain assured everyone that it was just a precautionary measure. The scenario might have been straight out of a movie, but in fact it was a well-rehearsed operational procedure that had evolved in response to terror bugs like Ebola.
Tension permeated the aircraft like a bad smell, and the free drinks only added to the passengers' growing belligerence. The captain didn't explain the nature of the quarantine, however one of the flight crew must have heard, or been overhead, because the dreaded word Ebola erupted. It spread through the length the 747 in at a speed that defied Einsteinian physics.
This wasn't like a hijacking.
Passengers weren't obliged to quietly cower in their seats. Instead they were hostage to the unknown, an ill-defined entity too small to see even with the aid of a microscope. Things on board began to turn nasty, and a panicked business class passenger managed to wrestle open one of the doors. He was confronted by several space-suited figures.
The panic that followed, thought Mike Warner, was nothing to what might have happened if the passengers had been told the truth. Holding tight to Katie's shaking hand, he stayed seated. It was impossible not to feel guilty.
The captain and the engineer arrived from the front of the aircraft with a second team, all of whom were dressed in the same bulky space suits, and all of whom were armed. "Okay, everyone, please!" called the captain. "We'll have you out of here in a few minutes. But please, you must calm down, first."
It took several more minutes and some strong-arm tactics before something approximating calm was restored. The new arrivals cleared a path between Mike and the open hatch and then indicated that he and Katie should stand and come with them.
Nearby passengers, including the one who'd opened the hatch shot them a suspicious glare.
"To ensure that any possible cross infection is contained," said one of the space-suited figures loudly. "Until we can trace the source, we're going to separate people into different groups. Those who joined this aircraft from a connecting flight will be kept separate to those whose original point of embarkation was Fiji."
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