by Bobby Adair
Ebola K
A Terrorism Thriller
Book Three of the Ebola K Trilogy
By
Bobby Adair
http://www.bobbyadair.com
http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor
Cover Design & Layout
Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz
Editors & Technical Research
Kat Kramer
John Cummings
eBook & Print Layout
Kat Kramer – www.katkramer.com/publishing
Preface
This is the final book of the Ebola K trilogy. I’d originally planned to have published this book about a year ago, but it’s one of those books that takes a great deal of thought. For those you reading the series after December 2015, this wasn’t a problem. For the rest of you, thank you for your patience.
Relative to how long it takes me to write books in my other series, books two and three in the Ebola K series each took quite a bit longer. I don’t understand why—or at least not completely.
I am proud of these three books. I think they contain some of my best writing to date. And while I think my favorite chapters and scenes are probably in books one and two, I think book three is the best overall. It warms up through the first half and then races to a climactic finale. Hopefully, you’ll find it satisfying.
As usual, a great deal of research went into the book but most of the underlying concepts came out of research I’d done for books one and two. I should mention that I enjoy the research end of the creative process. Throughout my life I’ve read non-fiction as enthusiastically as I’ve read fiction. I still do.
One of the reasons I like non-fiction is that it provides me a window into understanding how people—both regular people and great people—respond to extraordinary situations. I think it’s under the unexpected and immense stress of life that people discover who they are and what they’re capable of. I find that process of discovery fascinating.
And I think that is the crux of humanity’s universal dilemma. I think only the rarest of people are all good or all bad. Most of us are a mix. Most of us are easily tempted into terrible choices. It is when we consciously have to work our way out of our bad decisions and weigh the costs and benefits of choosing the better angels of our nature and then take the hard path that we grow into better people.
Perhaps that’s why the theme comes up so frequently in my books. I love to toss my characters into the worst situations so that I can imagine what they’d do. Just as in real life, some rise to the occasion, many behave badly. The most interesting ones do both.
And as much as all of this can be said for the individual, it is true of societies and cultures and we fill our history books with the stories, inspirational or horrible, moon landing or holocaust. The capacity for both and everything in between lives within each of us.
And that is the rich palette from which I paint my fictional characters and cultures. I hope I’ve done it in in an entertaining and educational way that you can, for a while, both believe and feel.
Enjoy the book,
Bobby Adair
Previously, in Ebola K…
Book 1
Austin Cooper, an American teenager, has traveled to Uganda as a volunteer in a school for street kids, just as Ebola breaks out in Africa. He becomes stranded in a small town—Kapchorwa—while watching his friends and others become sick and die.
Back in Denver, his father (Paul) and stepmother (Heidi) are worried and dealing with their own Ebola fears. Paul stocks up with supplies, and they ready themselves for the inevitable. Eventually, contact with Austin becomes difficult, and Heidi sets out to track Austin down, pestering Mitch Peterson, a CIA operative in Uganda, housed at the US Embassy in Kampala.
Unbeknownst to the world, Najid Almasi has arranged to infect his jihadists with what’s now recognized as an airborne Ebola strain, sending them around the globe to infect others.
One of those jihadists is Salim Pitafi, an Pakistani American teenager from south Denver, who finds himself in over his head, and having second thoughts about his involvement with Najid’s sinister plan.
Book 2
Austin Cooper, left for dead by the terrorists, now finds himself in a country falling apart under the strain of a pestilence that is ravaging its population. He treks to Mbale in an attempt to find help for the sick remaining in Kapchorwa. Once arriving, he has the misfortune to come across a band of rebel militants taking advantage of the chaos. They kidnap him and take him to their jungle camp on the southern slope of Mt. Elgon. After seeing all the other hostages come to a bad end, Austin manages to infect the rebels with Ebola and escape into the jungle.
Paul Cooper, believing his son has died, becomes depressed. He starts hoarding food in anticipation of the coming epidemic. When he hears of an Ebola case in Dallas, he decides to go there and infect himself using the logic that he’ll get better care if he’s among the first Ebola patients in America. Through a series of illegal actions, Paul succeeds, becomes infected and goes back to Denver. He ends up in a hospital and survives. But as the pandemic gets a foothold in the country and people start to die by the hundreds of thousands, Paul’s secret is exposed. As a result, criminals murder Heidi and Paul has to bury her in a mass grave. Paul ends book two after being detained by the police because the antibodies in his blood have been nationalized.
Mitch Peterson, the CIA operative working at the embassy in Kampala is tasked with going to Kapchorwa to find out what he can about Najid Almasi and the Ebola epidemic. He pursues Najid across Kenya before finding himself abandoned in Nairobi, where he sees the worst of the Ebola epidemic as it destroys a city.
Najid Almasi’s terrorists spread across the globe, spreading Ebola, and the epidemic turns into a pandemic. People die by the millions. Najid’s risky investments turn a huge profit, but the Americans, wise to his plan, bomb his compound on the Red Sea. Luckily for Najid Almasi, he escapes. He’s injured and is forced to take refuge in Dubai.
Salim Pitafi flies from airport to airport as he becomes sicker and sicker. He is finally hospitalized in Dallas where he recovers from Ebola and comes to realize what a grave mistake he’s made in aligning himself with the terrorists. He decides he wants out and after he recovers, he embarks on a long trip back to his home in Denver. When he arrives, he finds his mother, father, and sister, all dead from Ebola.
Chapter 1
All the glass had shattered in the fire. A third of the roof had burned away or collapsed, leaving a path for the wind to blow through Kapchorwa’s only hospital. Leaves, tumbled and dragged by the gusts, left trails in the dust on the floor.
The concrete beneath had been stained by years of bare feet following a central aisle through the ward, coming and going between beds where the mundanely ill laid to get well. Patients who came later—their blood rendered unable to clot by the virus in their veins—left reddish-brown, puddle-shaped discolorations where the blood had pooled and soaked into the concrete. The nurses, doctors, and volunteers had been too fatigued, too overwhelmed. They cleaned what they could.
In those days hope still lived, fiercely gripped in the hearts of a few who refused to let it die.
Then Najid Almasi came with his busy band of jihadi murderers.
The hospital had been packed full back then with people who were dying and those who still had a small chance at survival. Najid’s men burned the hospital. The patients who were too weak to run from the flames succumbed to the smoke and died where they fell. Their bodies left smears of color on the floor where their flesh had simmered in the heat of the blaze.
Charcoal black streaks were the last colors added.
Having walked t
hrough the jungle for days after leaving the rebel camp, Austin stared at that hospital floor, examining the colors and textures, knowing the stories they told. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d left Dr. Littlefield, Dr. Mills, and the sick soldiers in Kapchorwa. A few months at least. Maybe three.
The hospital had been empty a long time and gave no clue as to when it was last used.
Outside in the red mud street, not a single human foot left a print. No truck tires dredged a pair of long ruts out of town.
Austin went outside and asked aloud for an answering word.
He yelled. He screamed.
No voice returned a sound.
Kapchorwa was dead, a place for ghosts and memories.
Austin searched behind the hospital for a line of fresh graves, the expected remains of the last people he’d seen in Kapchorwa, doctors Littlefield and Mills, and the sick soldiers. Nothing lay back there but heaps of the old dead—rotted, burned, eaten by scavengers, and scattered.
He walked through the remains of the town. All of the burned houses had aged a little during his absence, crumbling deeper into the red clay. The grasses and bushes between the dwellings and along their walls had grown taller. The jungle was creeping forward to take Kapchorwa back into its bosom, to absorb the bodies and fertilize the soil for a future generation of farmers who might one day come to till the land.
Farmers?
Austin didn’t have a bitter laugh. He didn’t have a pitiful thought. Numbness born of the harshness of everything and everywhere sapped the pain out of tomorrow’s hopelessness.
Tomorrow would have to see to its own needs.
Today’s living had only enough worry for its own hardship.
He heaved a big sigh and called out for a last time.
No response.
At that point, he’d have been surprised if someone had called back.
The sun was high enough in the sky that Austin didn’t think he needed to search for a place to camp. But he didn’t have a plan past Kapchorwa. Upon his arrival, he’d expected to find Dr. Littlefield in the burned-out hospital with a new bunch of soon-to-be-dead patients. He’d come to accept as he trekked from Mt. Elgon’s southern slopes to where Kapchorwa lay in the north that Kristin Mills, the doctor who’d saved his life, would have long since died. And he’d put aside the guilt he’d initially felt for failing her.
And that was it.
As much as his habits from a modern life in a relatively luxurious world urged him to indulge the guilt, to wallow in despair, he didn’t. Austin had become Africanized. At least that’s how he described it to himself. He wasn’t heartless. He wasn’t numb. He felt pain when it came. He felt grief for the dead. Then he let them go. He marched forward into each new day to make room for the next pain to come. And it would come.
A practical choice was needed next.
Austin looked at the hospital and saw through the open doors, past the blackened rafters and into the blue sky above. Most of the roof was still intact. In fact, the hospital was in better shape than almost any other building in Kapchorwa. It was still mostly clean. It would be a good place to spend the night and think about the next destination.
Until sunset, though, Austin had time to scavenge.
Chapter 2
Hadi looked at the screen of his computer as he sat in the chair opposite the couch Najid Almasi rested upon. Hadi didn’t need to read the data. He knew it. He’d watched the numbers grow from theoretical projections based on his dispersion algorithm into counts of real people and real deaths. Now the measure of the success he helped Najid achieve shamed him so much he couldn’t look another human in the eye when the numbers were on his lips. “The totals vary from locale to locale but it appears that forty-seven percent of the people on the planet have died from Ebola and ancillary causes. Nearly three-and-a-half billion. Ebola has infected another two billion.”
Ebola infected them? Yes, but only with Hadi’s help.
“Fewer are sick than have died?” Najid seemed disappointed.
Hadi nodded to confirm that he’d conveyed the numbers correctly. Sitting in the large living room of one of the upper-floor apartments in his wife’s cousin’s compound, the luxury and cleanliness almost made talk of all those bloody deaths abstract. But only almost. Hadi looked through the wall of windows, seeing a few man-made white sand islands sprinkled across a perfectly blue sea. The sea didn’t care that the number of corpses in some state of decomposition would soon exceed the number of humans still alive.
Hadi hoped to steer the conversation away from the numbers and into the interesting epidemiological science. “This airborne strain of Ebola is extremely infectious. Humans have little or no immunity to it. The method we chose for spreading the infection produced a growing wave of carriers who washed through the global population before most people had any understanding of what was happening. Subsequently, the number of sick overwhelmed every medical system in the world. The disease rapidly worked its way through the population of susceptible individuals, using up its fuel just as a fire burns through wood. It was an inevitable eventuality.”
“What can we expect next?” Najid sat up straighter on his couch, careful with his healing leg.
“The survivors self isolate.” Of course they would. Hadi hadn’t needed to read dozens of texts on the spread of disease to know that. “They take precautions. Individuals hide in their homes. They don’t risk contact with one another. At the international level, countries close off their borders. Travel stops. Commerce stops. The disease loses its ability to spread.”
Najid rubbed his beard and frowned. “Are the Western countries suffering more than the rest of us?”
Hadi shook his head. “There are variations in the data, but we’ve so effectively spread the disease across the globe that no population went uninfected.”
“Arab countries?”
“Even us.” Hadi felt especially troubled by the price his Arab brothers were paying. “We did not use our martyrs to target Arab countries, but our methodology was universally effective. The infection rates vary from country to country and from region to region, but all follow similar trends. Perhaps classes of trends would be a better way to describe what I’m seeing.”
That concerned Najid. “Explain this to me.”
“I must preface this with the fact that not all countries provide data. Some countries, it seems, have ceased to exist for all practical purposes. For those hit the hardest, current death rates can only be extrapolated from data that is weeks—or even a month—old. Kenya, for instance, and other East African countries, have death tolls in excess of ninety percent. And still more people die. Data trickles out of China and is mixed with disinformation. It is difficult to tell how many are dead there. In India, the densely populated cities approach a one-hundred-percent infection rate as the percentage of survivors dips toward zero. Rural areas are doing better, but not by much.
Many countries have managed to slow their infection rates and it is difficult to tell if they will continue a trend toward one-hundred-percent infection. The rate in some countries is falling off fast enough it is conceivable a significant portion of the population might never become infected.”
“Are any of those Western countries?” The edge in Najid’s voice was expected.
Hadi reluctantly proceeded. “Canada, Norway, and Iceland have the lowest portion of infected population and the most steeply declining rate of infection. It’s possible that in each of these countries less than half the population will become infected during the first twelve months of the epidemic. Beyond that, the infection rate might be low enough to manage. In the interim, curative therapies are being developed to increase the survival rate and every lab in the world not working on a remedy is working on a vaccine.”
“What of America?”
“They were slow to react.” Hadi didn’t want to give Najid this information. “Their solutions were hindered by political infighting, gamesmanship, and blame-wielding. The hat
red their political parties have for one another worked to our advantage. At first.”
“And now?”
“They’ve all but bypassed their democratic institutions, and the President—or whoever is in that role at the moment—has assumed totalitarian powers, implementing preventive measures and programs. They are close to the median in terms of global infection rates and death rates.”
“Over forty-six percent of Americans are dead?”
“One hundred and forty million,” Hadi clarified.
After news of the trends, the concrete number put a smile of perverse glee on Najid’s face, but the smile quickly turned back to his intense grimace. “Tell me about these preventive measures in the United States?”
“In prevention they mostly do what others are doing but their survival rates are reversing.”
“They have a cure?” The words tumbled furiously out of Najid’s mouth. “They aren’t sharing it with the world?”
“Vaccines are being tested with some success in France, the United States, and in the UK. What seems to be the most effective is a solution you came to long ago, that of taking a portion of your brother’s blood—should he have survived—and hoping the antibodies would save your life. The Americans are instituting a system to harvest blood serum from Ebola survivors. Some survivors comply. Those who don’t are put into concentration camps and milked like goats for their blood. The zeal with which they’ve rolled this program out is the reason for their declining mortality rate.”
“That is not good,” Najid groaned, and rearranged himself on his couch. “I imagine the future—a hundred million surviving Americans, all with fresh memories of disease and lost loved ones in their hearts—will be a future of murdering every person on the planet they have a reason to fear. They’ve already bombed my compound on the Red Sea. They know it is I who brought the Ebola terror to their shores. If America survives as an entity with their lethal weapons intact, their hateful revenge might kill every one of us.