by Bobby Adair
“I got infected in Kapchorwa in Uganda a couple of months ago.”
“How do you know it was Ebola?”
Austin looked at the Marine, letting his face show all the stupidity it possibly could. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not.”
Austin sighed. He conveyed the briefest version of the Kapchorwa story he could summarize, topping off with his official diagnosis from both Dr. Littlefield and Dr. Mills.
An officer came up from several steps away. “Why are you here?”
Austin pointed at Mitch, who was answering questions of his own. “We’ve got some samples for the CDC.”
“You work for the CDC?”
Shaking his head, Austin said, “We’re in contact with a Dr. Wheeler at the CDC. The samples are from a less lethal strain of Ebola. They’re working on finding a way to get the samples picked up and flown back to Atlanta.”
One of the Marines cocked his head at the columns of smoke. “That’s not happening.”
The officer said, “We’ll put you in a quarantine room while we check out your story.”
Chapter 37
“Hey.”
Austin sat up, realizing he’d gone to sleep. The door of the small, dorm-style room was open. Mitch was silhouetted by the late-day sun shining through. “Hey.”
“Tired?”
Austin nodded. “I guess I passed out.”
“Not much rest driving here.”
“What time is it?” Austin rubbed the crusty crud out of his eyes and yawned.
“Pushing five.”
“Wow.” Austin glanced at the open door. “You get any sleep?”
“A little.”
It occurred to Austin the door was open. “They’re not guarding us anymore?”
Mitch shook his head and came inside.
“What’s the story?”
Mitch scooted a chair out from under a small writing desk and seated himself as he laid Austin’s holster and pistol on the desk. Beside the desk, Austin’s AK-47 was already leaning.
“The situation here is a little worse than we thought. They got hit harder by Ebola than Olivia told us. Maybe she had old info. They were down to a little more than ten-percent strength before they were attacked. Just over three hundred Marines plus a couple of hundred contractors and others. The Somalis came at them from the west gate. The jihadists across the airport tarmac. No wall on that side.”
Austin reached over and took the pistol, sliding it out of the holster, and checking that it was loaded. Camp Lemonnier wasn’t going to be as safe as he’d expected.
“I had to vouch for you on the weapons,” said Mitch.
“What’d you say?”
“That you were experienced. So don’t shoot anybody by accident.”
“Won’t happen.” Austin looked his AK-47 up and down. He’d grown an attachment to it. It felt like security. “You said they got hit pretty hard last night. What does that mean exactly? I mean besides everything being on fire?”
“Not everything,” Mitch corrected. “Lots, though. The Somalis’ goal, apparently, was to destroy the base and kill every American here. No surprise. They took out most of the conventional aircraft. Five transports. Four V-22s.”
“Those tilt-wing airplanes? The Ospreys?”
Mitch nodded. “They’ve got two left.”
Austin grimaced.
Mitch rubbed his hand over his forehead. “Nearly sixty dead and a hundred wounded from the attack. Our guys. I don’t know how many Somalis bought it, but you saw the bodies at the front gate. It’s like that everywhere in the camp. Nobody’s cleaned up yet.”
Austin shuddered. Even after all the dead he’d seen, bodies were sometimes hard to look at.
“Most of the surviving Somalis retreated into Balbala with the jihadists. Reinforcements are coming up from the south. The Marines have been expecting another attack all day. Now they’re thinking it’ll happen tonight.”
“How do they know where the Somalis are?”
Mitch looked upwards. “Our guys have four drones up right now. All the operational ones they’ve got left. Eight Hellfire missiles. They’ve got plenty of missiles but no way to land the drones and rearm if the base is under attack from the airport side. And it will be.”
“Can they use the missiles on the Somalis now?” asked Austin.
Mitch raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “In Balbala, no. Too many civilian casualties, though the argument has been made that most of the locals are probably dead and those still alive probably cleared out when the Somalis showed up. As for the ones coming up from the south, everybody here knows they’re hostile, but there’s no proof. That group hasn’t attacked yet. Not sure yet what’s going to happen with those guys.”
“They’re going to wait until they get attacked by all of them together?” Austin didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it. “We’ll get wiped out.”
“Not necessarily,” said Mitch. “Command wants to use the drones to take out the militia commanders if they can figure out who they are.”
“Can they? Will it make a difference?”
“I think so.” Mitch got off the chair and paced around the tight space. “That’s the business they’re in here. You know what this base does, right? They fly drones. They look for targets and in some cases, specific people, in places like Yemen, right across the Red Sea. Then they kill them.”
“What about the Ospreys?” Austin asked. “What can they do?”
“They aren’t gunships.”
Austin stood up and wrapped his belt around his waist. He bent over and picked up his AK-47 and hardened his heart for what he knew was coming. “I’m not a Marine, but I’ll do what I can.”
Mitch shook his head.
“Don’t tell me anything about what Olivia told you to do with me. The samples are important but what are we supposed to do, run away?”
“Sit down, Austin, and listen.” Mitch pointed at the bed. “We’re not going to run away, and it wouldn’t matter how much you wanted to stay. You’re not much better than useless with that AK-47. You’ve never even shot it, except for the elephant you told me about. All you’d be doing is making noise and shooting guys by luck. That is unless you’re a rifle prodigy. You’re not, are you?”
Austin smiled. “I suppose I could be.”
“Back to reality, Austin.”
It was nice to hope.
“We had a long meeting while you were sleeping,” said Mitch. “Here’s what’s going to happen. There are a couple of CIA guys here. One analyst who won’t do us any good but he got my identity verified. We’ve got an operational guy named Marty. Me and Marty are taking a small team of six Marines and two contractors to Muscat. The Osprey doesn’t have the range to get us there, but they can arrange a refuel stop in Salalah if no one gets off the plane. We’ve got permission for that and the details are being worked out.”
“I’m lost already,” said Austin. “Where’s Salalah?”
“About fifty miles past the Yemeni border inside of Oman. That’s the halfway point or thereabouts. Then it’s on to Muscat.”
Austin tried to picture it all in his head. He had a poor grasp of geography in this part of the world. “Why Muscat? Sorry. I don’t know where that is.”
“The Persian Gulf turns into the Gulf of Oman before it dumps into the Arabian Sea. Muscat is right there at the end on the Gulf of Oman. A little farther up, at the really narrow part where the Persian Gulf gets pinched between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran, is Dubai.”
“Okay.” Austin raised his palms and said, “Are you talking about the samples here?”
“Sorry,” said Mitch. “It’s been a hectic day. Of course, you weren’t in any of the meetings. This is about the samples, and it’s about Najid Almasi. We have some intel on where he is, in Dubai. We’re going there—me, the Marines, Marty, and the contractors. We’re going to kill him.”
Chapter 38
“You’ve got my attention,” sai
d Austin.
“It’s maybe a couple of hundred miles across land from Muscat to Dubai. If we can get to Muscat, we can get land transportation to sneak into Dubai and take out Almasi. He’ll be a danger to the world as long as he’s alive. That’s the thinking. Our contacts at Langley agree. Marty and his analyst agree. The Marines here agree. It needs to be done. He’s a threat.”
“Why not send a drone?” Austin asked. “Hell, I’m sure we’ve got plenty of cruise missiles.”
“Tried that.” Mitch smiled. “Not that the failed attempt made him invincible, he got lucky. The thing is, we had permission from the Saudis to bomb Almasi’s compound. We don’t have permission to do anything like that in Dubai.”
“Does it matter?” Austin asked. “What’s the worst Dubai is going to do?”
“Not my decision,” said Mitch. “It’s not just the politics we’re talking here. We have old intel on Almasi. In his Red Sea compound, we had near real-time satellite feeds. We knew he was there. Now, we only have deductions.”
“He might not be there, then.”
“That’s right. We’re not going to bomb a house in Dubai and risk innocent lives not knowing for sure that Almasi is there. That’s why we’re going in the old-fashioned way.”
Austin heaved a big breath and looked down at his AK-47.
“Don’t get excited cowboy.” Mitch laughed. “You won’t be coming along for that.”
Austin knew he’d be a liability on such a mission. He had no training, not one iota of it. Still, he wanted to see Najid Almasi dead. “Okay. What do I do when all of this is going on?”
“You’re coming with us. You’ll bring the samples. Everybody agrees that’s a top priority. There’s a Navy missile destroyer in the Gulf of Oman right now. While the Osprey is refueling in Muscat, we’ll accompany you to the coast; it’s close to the airport, maybe a quarter mile from the end of the runway. Someone from the destroyer will bring a launch and meet us on the beach to take the samples.”
“The samples.” Austin noted that Mitch had only said the samples.
Mitch nodded. “Olivia reached the end of her influence. There’s only so far you can stretch an analyst title. Know what I mean? “
“Yeah.”
“She’s going to keep trying, calling people and seeing if she can convince somebody in Washington to pull some strings to get you on board.”
“Okay.”
“The Navy is trying to keep everything at sea. As long as the ships are out, they’re not at risk. Bringing you or the samples on board might cost them a ship, but it’s easier to wrap a cooler in six layers of Hefty bags than it is a person.”
“Hefty bags.” Austin laughed. “Tell me they’re more sophisticated than that.”
“I was just making that up. I don’t know what they do, but you get my point, right?”
“Yeah.”
“If Olivia can wrangle it,” said Mitch, “we’ll get you onboard. If not, we’ll bring you back to the airport and put you on the Osprey. When we finish with Almasi, we’ll arrange for a pickup and all of us will fly back here.”
“With a stop in Salalah to refuel on the way back?”
“Exactly.”
“When do we go?” asked Austin.
“Unfortunately, we can’t go right now. We’re still working out the logistics. Every aspect of international relations is harder now because most of the people who communicated from one country to the next are dead. It all takes longer. So if the Somalis and jihadists don’t kill everyone tonight, and we get everything finalized with the Omanis, we’ll head out tomorrow afternoon.”
Chapter 39
Tired and angry, Paul stared at the book in his lap. It wasn’t one that he’d have ever picked up at the bookstore. He didn’t like the cover. He didn’t know the author. It wasn’t his genre. It was, however, available. He’d traded his previous book and a tin of Army rations to the guard who’d decided to make his black market living in the books-for-rent business. Because that’s effectively what it was. One tin of rations to read the book.
The sharing of books—the paper kind—was banned by state law. Everyone feared the Ebola virus could live forever on a porous surface, but it couldn’t. Laws had been made in a hurry on hunches and rumor. Who knew how many of the laws did more bad than good?
Paul sure didn’t.
What he did know was that he was bored and books provided entertainment. He knew he’d come to despise every authority that lorded its rules over the smallest details of his life. So whether he liked the books or not, he traded for them. They were an expression of his rebellion against his new masters.
And then there was the argument he’d had with his new friend, knucklehead Larry. As had become his new habit, Paul hauled half the load of contraband plasma up the hundred-foot ladder, following Larry to the surface every evening. The last time up, Larry had taken Paul’s bag and proceeded into a vein-bulging rant of accusations and flying spittle. Something about ratting him out to Captain Willard and fucking everything up.
Larry, not the most articulate of men, lost his ability to construct a cohesive point during his diatribe. When Paul decided it was going to come to blows, he prepared himself to preemptively punch Larry in the throat, a way to bring the fight to a quick close. Before that happened, Larry surprised him by turning and stomping toward the warehouse.
Paul stood in the dark trying to sort out the accusations, wondering what he’d been guilty of. Had he not kept his contraband plasma bags hidden in his lab well enough? Had he slipped up and said something to one of the guards? Paul didn’t think so. The only thing he was sure of was that Larry was going to drop a larger load of empty bags in his lab overnight, and Paul had damn well better fill every bag, or he’d be sorry. They were no longer in the business of helping those sick kids, except for the extra bags Larry could steal from the stash of contraband bags. They were now in the business of enriching a cabal of corrupt officers.
Everything about this camp, everything about the world stank of corruption, of people tossing their ethics aside to get a better spot in line for a cure. It disgusted Paul so much he didn’t even think about the path he’d taken to immunity, getting himself first in line in all of Denver.
Of course, that thought nagged at the edges of his conscious mind only to be pushed away as he stared at the pages of his book, not reading, not even thinking about the content. He ignored the sounds in his clinic. He ignored the volunteers on their beds, connected to the machines. All he had any interest in were dark thoughts that needed every bit of his attention.
It was the panicked hollering of one of the three volunteers that finally snapped Paul out of his trance.
When Paul looked up, all three machines were chirping and one was making another noise, a cyclic, muffled grind. The girl in the middle was trying to lift a restrained hand to point to her right. She was shouting fast, frightened words. The guy to her left was trying to sit up to see. The woman on her far right was lying on her bed, mouth agape, eyes wide and staring at nothing. Her skin was translucent white in a way that punched Paul with a painful familiarity he couldn’t quite grasp.
Then he saw the wide pool of crimson beneath her bed. He saw blood pulsing out of the seams in the plasmapheresis machine’s plastic housing.
The woman was bleeding out.
The machines chirped on.
The grinding one was sounding alarms Paul had never heard before.
The woman in the center cot screamed at Paul to do something.
Paul didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what was happening.
He ran to the door and swung it open. “Guards!”
He sprang across the room. He reached down and yanked the plug out of the wall to stop the grinding, chirping, dripping machine. He pulled the pencil-thin plastic tube and the needle in the woman’s arm pulled free, taking the tape with it. The needle left a hole, small but seeming to gape with gurgles of blood pumping out in heartbeat
regularity. Paul took some cotton pads from his pocket and pressed them to the holes in the woman’s arm, then taped them in place.
“Shit!” Paul had no idea what to do next to help the woman.
A guard came into the room and shouted something. A doctor was on the way.
He looked down at the woman’s face. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing. He couldn’t feel a pulse in her wrist. But the blood had been a weak, pulsing fountain. He ran through in his mind what he’d done when he hooked her up. Sure, he’d tried several times to find the vein; he’d poked her three, four times? He didn’t know.
Could that have had anything to do with the malfunction?
Paul was on the verge of panic, driven by a life on the precarious edge of death and a pending guilt he didn’t want to bear.
Paul didn’t want another death on his conscience.
He looked at the woman’s face again. He stared, willing her to life. But he saw a hint of something else. All he saw was familiar, dead, bloodless flesh he’d seen once before, the day when he’d come home and found Heidi dead in the dining room.
Chapter 40
The problem, Najid thought, as he listened to the man on the other end of the telephone, was that Ebola had made the men of government a fluid rather than static problem. Dubai was handling it better than most countries. The Sheikh had declared early in the epidemic that every civil servant—every official—have a list five men long of replacements, the line of succession. When the top man fell ill, the next in line would step up and fill in at the end of the line with his choice for successor. When vacancies came up in the middle of the list, he’d fill in from the end.
Of course, much infighting followed, the more important the positions. And few men who were experienced in their positions stayed there. They died just as quickly as everyone else, leaving inexperience and incompetence in their wake. So while much of Dubai’s government appeared to be intact, it was nothing more than a mask over a bureaucracy growing more ineffective by the day.
The problem was the same across the UAE and Oman. They’d adopted the same solution.