From Filth & Mud

by J. Manuel

  “We’ve got about five minutes before we come under fire, so load up quickly!” John shouted to Jacob, as he sprinted toward the Conex boxes at the end of the pier. Jacob and his teams sprinted in suit and jumped aboard the waiting Zodiacs by the time the first of the militia’s trucks opened fire on the docks. The docks were soon peppered with heavy machine-gun fire from truck-mounted, anti-aircraft guns, which instantly immolated the abandoned SUVs.

  Six Zodiacs revved away at full throttle and opened fire on the docks from the water. Rounds impacted around Jacob’s Zodiac, sending spikes of water pluming into the sky. Tracers bounced by and disappeared into the banks of the widening river. The Zodiacs were soon out of the range of the anti-aircraft guns, but the crews remained alert as they carved their way down river through the brackish waters of the Shatt’s mouth and into the Gulf.

  - - - - - - -

  It had been an hour since they had made it back aboard the Jonah, and they were now relatively safe in the deeper waters of the Persian Gulf. Jacob had escorted Monte-Alban to his quarters and had seen to it that he was fed and cared for. After the doctor had calmed and rested a bit, Jacob renewed his questioning.

  “Doctor, so what did you mean that it was a weapon?”

  Monte-Alban sunk his face into his hands and rubbed his eyes and temples vigorously as if to wipe them clear of a haunting memory.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be a weapon. It was supposed to be a novel, treatment-delivery mechanism. The project is called Lilith, after Adam’s first wife: the true, first mother of humanity. My good friend Dr. William LaPierre and I were working on a way to target therapies to the specific problem areas in the body, the benefit of which would be efficient delivery of treatments without causing collateral damage to healthy cells. Dr. LaPierre had recently lost his wife to pancreatic cancer, and he decided that our goal would be to target cancer. Of course he chose the most difficult and some say most inevitable disease. The inevitability comes from simple statistical math. There are approximately 37.2 trillion cells in the adult human body, each of varying types, shapes, sizes, functions, and life spans. Each cell carries the distinct DNA code that makes you who you are.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of this, Jacob, but every day that you live, billions of cells all over your body are splitting and recreating themselves, keeping you alive. Each time a cell splits through the process of mitosis, an exact copy of the cell is made. One cell turns to two, two to four, four to eight, and so on exponentially. Now each time the cell divides, there is a slight chance that the resulting cell will carry a gene mutation. It’s just statistics. Once in a while and for whatever reason, the DNA will become corrupted by a bad transcription. Most times, the resulting mutation is harmless and does not even affect the cell’s function. Other times, the mutation might directly affect that cell’s function and that cell will simply die, or will be eaten by macrophages, which are specific white blood cells of your immune system. Think of macrophages as the garbage men of your system. These little Pacman-like cells eat foreign bodies and most mutated cells, and they do this constantly because of the number of cells that are replicating within your body at any given time.

  “Sometimes the problem is a bit more serious. The mutation can cause the newly formed cell to experience unregulated mitosis, and the cell begins to uncontrollably multiply, abandoning all other functions. This is the genesis of a tumor. Once this occurs, it is very difficult for your body to fight the cancer because the cancer is coded in your own DNA. It’s a wolf in your clothing, and it eats you from the inside out. Your immune system can’t detect it, so it goes about its business, like Greeks inside a wooden horse. What’s worse is that this horse spreads throughout your body and begins to affect all of your vital functions, stealing your nutrients and wreaking havoc; its only drive: to metastasize and reproduce.

  “Cancer is a uniquely complex disease. It is not one disease, but you could say that it is a spectrum of diseases with the same terminal effect. Its complexity began to first crystallize when hundreds of scientists from across the globe joined forces to map the genome of cancer in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The compilation of their work is the Cancer Genome Atlas, a detailed and comprehensive genetic road map of all of the known cancers. What they discovered crushed the hopes of many scientists who believed that cancer would be wiped out by the middle of the 21st Century. They found that there are approximately two hundred genes that carry cancer-causing mutations. We call these ‘oncogenes’. Prior to this discovery, it was thought that cancer might be caused by a mutation in a specific gene, where one type of mutation corresponds to one type of cancer, a straight cause-and-effect relationship. What they found was that it required far more gene mutations, in combination, to create one type of cancer and hence the resulting complexity.

  “Of these oncogenes, there are twelve different combinations of a core group of genes that most cancers carry. Their discovery was crucial because—here is another bit of bad news about cancer—it evolves. What this means is that a specific cancer has multiple pathways it can take to evolve when attacked by medical treatments. In effect, the cancer can morph into a different version of itself if the old version is no longer viable, a sort of artificially stimulated natural selection process.

  “The Dirty Dozen, as I call them, helped researchers understand that there is commonality to the distinct forms of cancer. I began to work on targeting several pathways at a time, thinking that we might be able to shut down the ability of cancer to reproduce itself, and in doing so, the existing cancer cells would reach the end of their life span and simply die off. Its complexity is in fact its Achilles heel!

  “Jacob, you are a military man, so you understand how to fight. How would you attack a large complex enemy?” Manny’s eyes were intense as if he were inquiring of a first-year medical student.

  Jacob played along intrigued with the doctor’s lecture. “Of course I would study the enemy, taking note of its numbers, strengths, supply lines, possible weaknesses, and ambush points. Then I would test its reactions by taking pot-shots at its patrols and setting up ambushes on its supply lines.”

  “Very well, that is exactly what we intended to do with Lilith: targeting the cancer and simultaneously targeting its known permutations by cutting off its enzymatic activity and attacking the likely genetic pathways. However, I wanted to take it a step further. What if we could create not one Lilith but an entire army of Liliths that would infiltrate the cancer? These would act as synthetic immune cells, primed to target only cancer cells, like a virus but one that didn’t damage healthy cells. What if I could hijack the hypermitotic reproduction of cancer itself to make more Lilicytes, just like a virus hijacks healthy cells to make copies of itself? So I used a virus, the most virulent known: measles!”

  “Measles?! You mean what we’ve eradicated with a simple vaccine, except of course in yuppie California?”

  “Don’t underestimate measles, Jacob, it is in fact a seriously infectious bug, and it ravaged children, killing some 2.6 million in 1980 before the vaccine became widespread. Some 150,000 people still die of it today. It’s not trendy, but it’s a killer nonetheless.

  “Well, I was able to successfully harness the protein coat of the measles virus and make some tweaks to it so that it functioned as a skeleton key to all of the known cancer cell types. You see, every virus needs to permeate the cell membrane, which is the protective layer of the cell. The membrane has locked doors that allow specific traffic in and out. These doors require specific keys to open their locks. Once inside, the virus injects its DNA, or RNA in some cases, and the cell uses its enzymes to transcribe the code. The end result was that Lilith was able to infiltrate every known cancer cell type, embed its genetic code to hijack the cell into creating Lilicytes, and stop the mutation defense. At least that is what Dr. LaPierre and I hoped until we found something completely unexpected. Lilith herself proved to be too good at replicating, and she was deadly.

  “We tried to fix
her, but we eventually had no choice but to voice our concerns about the data that we had collected from the human cell analogs and from the rodent testing, but we were rebuffed. Dr. LaPierre was pressured into moving the tests up the evolutionary ladder. We kept running into the same problem in every trial. Our initial thought was that Lilith would burn herself out given the rapidness of her attack on cancer cells. The host would remain infected with Lilith for two weeks until she had coursed through the host’s supply of cancer, and then she would simply pass through the system. This just required that we isolate the patients for the duration of the treatment, so that we could remove the Lilicytes once the patients were cancer free.

  “However, we felt our first pangs of despair when we noticed that Lilith’s persistence in the patients was getting longer from an average of two weeks to closer to three weeks. It was then that we began trying to create a way to stop Lilith.”

  Jacob shook his head in disbelief. “So your cancer cure is a death sentence?”

  “The road to hell, Jacob…” Monte-Alban looked like a sorrowful father attempting to make amends for his evil child. “I’m afraid that we created a synthetic, super virus with infinite adaptability and no known way of stopping it.”

  “But what about what you said about it burning itself out once it runs out of cancer cells to infect?”

  “I’m afraid it evolved itself out of that predicament. Lilith, as she is currently mutated, has adapted to locate itself within neurons, specifically those located in the cerebrum’s temporal lobe region, which acts as the processing center for speech, memory, and auditory stimuli. If there is a silver lining in all of this is that infection in this area by Lilith proves fatal for the host within 24 to 48 hours.”

  “But I thought you said that you had perfected the cure? That it was no longer dangerous?”

  “Yes. Well, I built on the work that a young, research assistant showed Dr. LaPierre. The Lilicytes from that strain were not as virulent as the original Lilicytes, or the second generation, but they still attacked the cancer nonetheless, and they didn’t exhibit the deadly side effect, at least not for a month.”

  “So what good is that, besides the fact that you get an extra month to live?”

  “Well, Isaac, the research assistant, came up with the ingenious idea to neutralize the new Lilicyte strain by giving the children a heavy dose of the measles vaccine immediately after cancer remission was complete. He theorized that because the new strain of Lilicytes took about a month to form their colony, that this would give enough time for a measles vaccine to jump-start the immune system against the Lilicytes, which share the measles protein coat. And it worked! The cancer was gone, and the Lilicytes were destroyed by the body’s immune system.

  “But it is all gone now. The Chinese destroyed every trace of the cure. They wanted the weapon. The cure was a threat to their weapon because it showed their weapon’s vulnerabilities. And now all that remains is the weapon.”

  Jacob stared at the despaired doctor incredulously. “So what you are telling me is that Lilith is an undetectable biosynthetic weapon capable of killing a healthy person within 24 to 48 hours from what appears to be a massive stroke, and it is capable of reproducing itself like a biological agent, and it has the infectious capability of measles? And as if that isn’t bad enough, your employer has decided to sell this biosynthetic weapon to the Chinese?!”

  Monte-Alban crumpled to the ground and heaved the few contents of his stomach, retching in disgust at his own creation. He had become death, the destroyer of worlds.

  - - - - - - -

  Jacob showed himself into John’s quarters and slammed the hatch behind him. John was already three sheets to the wind, halfway through his Johnnie Walker bottle.

  “Did you know what Monte-Alban was going to tell me?”

  John nodded bleary-eyed, “Yup.”

  “Is it true?”

  “What part?”

  “All of it, John!”

  “Yup,” John savored the next whiskey glass.

  “So Eckert’s an arms dealer, and XPS is a mercenary arm of his business?”

  “You forgot major drug manufacturer and worldwide distributer. Oh, and your nagging feeling about spook shit is also true.” John raised his glass for a mock toast and slammed it back with a wince.

  “And the cure? I’m guessing that’s what Monte-Alban was hiding. What happens to that?”

  “Happened, Jacob. It’s done. There’s no record of it anymore.” John raised Jacob’s empty daypack out from behind his desk. “I didn’t do it, I promise. Ship security conducted a contraband search while you were talking to the good doctor. I’m guessing it went missing then.”

  Jacob didn’t know whether or not to believe his friend until he offered the following, “Listen real close, Jacob. Jak is coming for Monte-Alban and for the cure. We’ve been ordered to rendezvous with the Chinese in Manama. I’m guessing we’ll be handing the doctor over to them there. You two and the cure can’t be there.”

  “How do you suppose we work that out?”

  John removed a cell phone from his breast pocket and tossed it to him. “Take your team and a Zodiac tonight and hightail it to Manama before the Jonah gets there. Call Tovarich on the number listed on the phone once you arrive in Manama. There will be a jet waiting for you at the airfield there.”

  “Should I bother asking who Tovarich is?”

  John shook his head and drank the final shot of whiskey. He wasn’t about to tell his best friend that his wife and kids were in grave danger, Jacob had enough to worry about now. Besides, he would get to them if it was the last thing he did. He’d done so much bad over the last few years, and even though this wouldn’t make up for it, he hoped that it would start tilting the scales back in the other direction.

  “Thanks, John.”

  Jacob left John’s quarters with heightened paranoia. Besides John, Doug and Tim were the only ones who he trusted. He would take them on the Zodiac and leave the others behind. Jacob walked out to the rear deck, stopping just shy of the exterior hatch. He reached into his cargo pocket and removed a small, titanium vial. He thumbed the button on top, which released a short, thick gauge needle at the vial’s bottom. He closed his eyes and prayed that his hunch was right and drove the needle into his thigh. After a moment, he exited to the fantail of the ship. He was hyperventilating. The nausea was overwhelming. He was holding onto the last thread of hope, but it was unraveling fast.

  Doug and Tim were smoking on the fantail. They too needed to escape the confines of the ship. Tim leaned against a Zodiac mooring and took a slow drag of his vaporizer as he fixated on the starry night sky. The pungent smell of marijuana hung in the humid, Persian Gulf air.

  “You see that, Doug?” he said, pointing his rifle toward the night sky and toggling its AN/PEQ-15 laser illuminator. Doug flipped his night-vision goggles down onto his eyes and followed the now visible, yellow beam of laser light toward the night sky.

  “Okay, what am I looking for?”

  “Well, just about there where the laser goes out of focus… From the moon, go out a few inches at a 30-degree angle or so. That star you see there, that’s Jupiter.”

  “That’s where we’ll find aliens?” Doug was sure that Tim was full of shit. It definitely sounded like more of Tim’s stoner talk.

  “What the hell are you two yapping about?”

  Doug peered out of the corner of his night-vision toward Jacob. “Looks like Tim here has been hitting too much of that sticky. He’s talking about Martians from Jupiter.”

  “Jovians, though Europeans to be precise,” Tim corrected, his voice calmer than usual, his words mellowed by the vapor that he’d just exhaled. His glassy eyes reflected the faint glow of the night-vision.

  “Exactly, some bullshit, huh?”

  Tim harnessed his familiar lecturing tone: “Jupiter the gas giant and its four Galilean moons, Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Callisto. The four moons were named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei wh
o discovered them while peering at the heavens through his telescope in 1610. They were the first celestial bodies discovered to revolve around another planet in the solar system. This led Galileo to come to the heretical theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe, which challenged the Catholic Church’s and the generally established astronomical Ptolemaic Model.”

  “Tim you are losing Doug here and me frankly; what’s your point?”

  “Doug and I were out here when he mentioned the glowing wake behind the ship. I told him that it was bioluminescent plankton that glows when it is agitated by the churning water as we pass through it. I was just pointing out that Europa might be the first world where we find alien life outside of our planet. Europa has a large ocean that contains more water than Earth; a lot more, about 2 to 3 times the volume. Now the problem is that we would have to dig deep down under miles of ice to access the ocean. And in a world of darkness like that—I would imagine—that although their genetic composition would be different, Europeans might resemble the very same glowing plankton that we churn through so dismissively here in the Gulf.”

  Jacob half expected Tim to finish with ‘Duuuude!’

  Doug peered down at Jacob again. “See what I was saying? Little green men from Jupiter. Ain’t that some shit?!” Doug pulled off his night-vision and handed it to Jacob to take a look.

  Jacob looked through the lenses out into an undulating see of darkness; the crest of the waves flickered in and out of existence as they temporarily reflected the light of the crisp full moon, which loomed large over the calm waters of the Gulf. He then raised his gaze into the eternal abyss now bathed in a light-green hue by the photosensitive detectors of the night-vision device. The night twinkled and shimmered with all manner of natural and man-made light. The moon was so bright that it nearly cut out the night vision. The stars now joined by many of their previously unseen celestial kin conquered the sky, leaving almost no portion of it devoid of twinkling light. Intermittently one of them would descend from the heavens and streak across the Persian sky. In that instant, he was transported back to the genesis of civilization when the life-giving waters of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates bathed the land in bounty, then met to spawn the Shatt Al-Arab. Here, he now stood. This was the very sky under which all of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs had lived, loved, and died for generations back to the garden of Adam, Eve, and Lilith, before her. He shuttered.