by Bobby Adair
Paul laughed.
The drainees looked at him.
Paul didn’t care. His focus drifted into a distance that wasn’t there and his thoughts sank back to over-analyze overly complicated ideas and under-reactive emotions.
“Hey.”
Startled by the voice that didn’t come from either volunteer, Paul looked up.
A soldier stood in the open doorway. “Colonel Holloway wants to see you.”
Paul blinked, not understanding. He understood the words, he wasn’t that lost in the nuances of his emotional processes, he didn’t understand the deviation from the course of routine behavior. He didn’t immediately guess why it was different, and that was worrisome. And those worries turned on the one event that he knew was different from all of his previous days in camp.
Action. Reaction.
Something had changed. Lots of somethings.
Paul had helped Rafael escape.
He’d had his tussle with Larry on the ladder.
He still had a folded letter that crumpled in his pocket every time he took a step. That letter didn’t belong there. That letter was a grenade that Paul couldn’t decide what to do with.
Maybe Paul’s life wasn’t as routine as he’d convinced himself. “When? Where?”
“As soon as possible.” The soldier turned.
“Wait.”
“What?”
Paul pointed at his two volunteers in the middle of their process. “What about them?”
The soldier looked. “Can someone take over for you?”
Paul shook his head. “Who?”
“Don’t you have a backup?”
“Are you kidding me?”
The soldier heaved an exasperated sigh.
“These guys will be done in a little while. Do you want to wait here until they finish up, and we get them back in their cages?”
The guard looked around and grimaced. He clearly didn’t like being down in the silos. Paul didn’t blame him. Dank rust, mold, and the constant fear of collapse were acquired tastes.
Paul said, “I can come up when I’m done. I think that’s the only option. I can’t leave these guys in the middle of the procedure.”
“Can’t you just turn the machines off, unplug them?”
“No.” Paul stood up. He didn’t know for sure. The blood was pumped out, processed, and pumped right back in. Maybe he could run the machines through a manual shutdown process. But he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to stall.
The soldier was not pleased.
“That’s all I can do. I can’t go right now. You can wait for me here, wait for me up top, or go tell the Colonel I’ll be there when I’m done. Or we can forget it all and I can go now. We can hope nothing happens to these volunteers while I’m gone.”
The guard frowned. “I’ll let Colonel Holloway know.”
“Good,” said Paul. “I’ll come after I finish up.”
The soldier stepped out into the hall. “Don’t make me come back down here for you.”
“Is it that urgent that I see the Colonel?”
“I follow orders. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what it’s about, then?”
“I follow orders.” The guard tapped his watch and walked off.
Chapter 68
Mitch nudged the boat onto the shallow, sandy bottom a few yards from the beach behind a three-story mansion. If they needed the boat later, they could still push it into deeper water.
Austin jumped off the bow and jogged over the sand and stopped by the trunk of a palm tree where the landscaped yard began. He raised his rifle and pointed it at the back of the dark house. No lights were on—as was the case with most of the houses they’d seen on the island. Austin saw no movement in the darkness behind the windows.
Mitch arrived at his side, rifle at the ready. In not much more than a whisper, he said, “I’ll lead. You hang back five or six paces. Don’t aim your gun at me. If somebody is inside, they’ll be more afraid of us than we will be of them.”
“I understand,” said Austin. “We don’t want to hurt anybody. Got it? Our targets are at the end of the road. Anybody inside this house is an innocent bystander.”
“I’m good with that. What if they shoot at us?”
“Let’s hope they miss.” Mitch turned around to look at Austin. “Let’s be honest. If the shooting starts, our plan is trashed. We’ll run away.”
“We have a plan?”
“I do,” answered Mitch. “It depends on surprise. Shooting will wake up Najid and his buddies. There are more of them than us.”
Austin understood.
“I’ll sneak up to the house, and I won’t go inside if I think anyone is here. If so, we’ll try the next house up the beach.” Mitch jogged across a patio and around a pool.
Austin followed.
Mitch looked inside, turned and knelt by the wall. He waved Austin to come close. He said, “This place is probably deserted.”
“Why?”
“There’s a dead guy on a couch inside,” said Mitch. “He’s sitting there with his head back, not covered up or anything.”
Nodding, Austin said, “You’re thinking somebody probably would have had him hauled off or at least covered him up if there was still someone here.”
“Exactly.” Mitch drilled Austin with a hard look. “But don’t assume that’s true until we’ve checked the whole house.”
Mitch jumped up, took up a spot in front of a door, and kicked.
The door flew open with a crash.
With the memory of the sound still reverberating in Austin’s ears, he followed Mitch in, careful to keep his M-16 up and pointed anywhere besides at Mitch.
Austin wasn’t three steps into the house when the smell overwhelmed him, and he gagged. He coughed and opened his mouth, hoping not to smell as much as he breathed.
The guy on the couch was sitting in a living room off the left. He was crawling with maggots and buzzing with flies. A dark puddle spread on the floor below him.
“Stay behind me,” Mitch whispered. “Stay quiet.”
It took only a few minutes for Mitch to lead Austin through the house. They found three other bodies, all women. No living person had been inside in quite some time. Mitch led Austin upstairs until they came to a doorway onto the roof, an observation deck with a handful of chairs.
Mitch knelt beside the wall surrounding the deck and looked down the road toward the end of the frond.
Austin peered into the silvery, dim light cast by the moon.
“If Khouri’s right, Najid is holed up down there at the end.”
The mansion built on the piece of property at the end of the frond was larger than any of the other houses on either side of the road. A very tall wall stretched across the tip of the frond, separating the property from all others. The driveway passed through the center of the wall but was blocked by a gate twenty-feet wide made of black steel cut in a palm frond motif. A dark-colored car was parked sideways across the driveway just inside the gate. Behind the car, in a courtyard in front of the enormous mansion, stood a fountain bigger than most community swimming pools. Standing above the wall on both sides of the gate, palms and other trees and shrubs grew tall and dense. It looked like the wall held back a jungle.
Mitch sat down and leaned against the wall. He handed Austin a set of car keys.
“What are these?”
“I picked them up when we were going through the house. They’re for that silver Audi in the garage.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“If something happens to me or the plan goes to hell, use the car to get away. If the boat is easier, it doesn’t need keys anymore. Just start it up and go.”
Shaking his head, Austin said. “I’m in it. We’ll succeed or…”
“Don’t get heroic.” Mitch paused. “I know what I said before we came here.”
“I meant what I said.” Austin leveled a serious stare at Mitch. “Najid Almasi needs
to die. Just tell me what to do.”
“Fine,” said Mitch. “Leave the keys in the car. It’ll be a backup escape plan. Even if we kill Najid, we might still need it.”
“Okay. What’s the plan?”
It took about five minutes for Mitch to lay it out.
“Are you serious? That’s it?”
“We don’t have a lot of options here. As a matter of fact, if when I get up there and if there are too many of Najid Almasi’s men hanging around, we’ll back out of this and try to find a better way. We’re not going to get ourselves killed for nothing. I’ll only go in if we have a chance to succeed.”
“I can live with that.”
“Let’s hope so.”
Chapter 69
Austin had just finished clearing his third house. The first two both had rotting bodies inside. In the second, most of the dead were children. Thankfully, the third house held nothing but clean furniture and stale air. When he checked the garage, he found a vehicle that surpassed his expectations. It was a big four-wheel-drive Ford pickup with huge tires, a brush guard, and a roll cage with extra lights attached on the bar above the cab. He’d never have expected to see such a vehicle in the Middle East.
When he headed back to the house to search for the keys, he noticed framed photographs on the wall. Most contained a middle-aged man smiling in front of or inside the big Ford or a few other vehicles. All had been taken out in the desert. Several were action shots showing vehicles tearing up and down the dunes with sand flying. One even showed the big Ford going airborne as it came over the crest of a sandy dune.
Thank God for wadi bashing. That’s what they called it, the sport of running their four-wheel drive vehicles through the sand and gulches, probably being a little bit crazy and a little bit stupid. All in good fun.
Austin found the keys for the Ford inside the house. Then he went through a procedure, checking that he knew how to operate the truck’s lights and that they all worked. He checked that the Ford had gas. He took the risk of starting it up inside the garage. Thankfully, it didn’t rumble at a ridiculous level of noise. He turned it off immediately. He didn’t want to be so loud as to alert Najid Almasi’s men down in the compound.
Once Austin felt good with the truck, he engaged the garage door opener and slowly lifted the door. Then, thinking it would help, he opened the other three doors on the four-car garage. He climbed into the cab, thanked God again for the four-point restraint system—a lap belt and shoulder straps. The owner of the truck was safety-minded.
Then Austin thought a little more about it, and only latched the lap belt. He didn’t want to be held in an upright position. If he had to use the pickup as Mitch’s simple plan required, he couldn’t sit up straight in the cab. He had to risk the collision with just the lap belt.
He listened.
That’s what Mitch had instructed him to do. Get a big, sturdy vehicle and wait for the sound of gunshots.
According to Mitch’s plan, gunshots were a bad thing. When Austin heard them, he was supposed to rev up the engine on whatever vehicle he found, race it up the street, and ram it through the gates. Then jump out, find cover, and pop off as many of the M-16’s rounds as he could.
The gunshots, if Austin heard them, meant that Mitch had been discovered. Discovery equated with failure. Austin would have to make a choice in that moment. Do nothing and escape, or ram the car through the gate in hopes of causing a big enough distraction that Mitch might still be able to kill Najid.
It was accepted that if things went that far, then both Austin and Mitch were likely to die.
That was Mitch’s simple plan.
Austin hated it. It was a terrible plan. But Mitch was the CIA guy. Mitch seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
Austin continued to listen. He mulled the bad plan.
He came to the realization that he wasn’t part of the plan at all.
Mitch was too smart to come up with such a silly, Rambo scheme. Mitch, somewhere along the way, had to have realized that Austin was more of a liability than an asset. Mitch had concluded, but kept to himself, that Austin’s amateur participation would likely be the cause of failure. So Mitch had made up a fictitious version of the plan and sent Austin down the street, waiting for a contingency to arise that wouldn’t.
Mitch was going in to assassinate Najid Almasi on his own and was perfectly confident in his abilities to get it done.
That had to be the truth of what was happening.
Austin looked out over the hood of the big Ford and wondered if he should do anything at that moment. Should he take matters into his own hands?
Chapter 70
Looking like he’d aged a year, Colonel Holloway sat behind his desk looking across at Paul Cooper. “Larry Dean died this morning.”
Paul ticked Larry off his private to-do list as he looked blankly at Colonel Holloway. The blank look was easy. Paul didn’t feel anything about Larry. Not anymore. In that late night moment in the infirmary after Larry confessed, or that’s to say blamed Heidi’s death on Jimmy and told a story of how heroically he’d argued to keep Heidi alive, Paul had hated him. He’d wanted to smash Larry’s concussed skull with his fist until puzzle-piece bones and bleeding brains were smeared across the pillow.
Of course, Paul hadn’t done it. Not that.
He stood for awhile with his fists clenched and his heart pounding to the rhythm of his rage. He shook. He fidgeted and held himself back. It wasn’t that Paul was too good of a person to kill Larry. At that moment, the most important thing to Paul was revenge. Though in his head, the word sounded a lot like justice. And justice for Larry required some suffering.
So Paul broke his promise to Larry. He stuffed the dirty sock back in Larry’s mouth to keep him quiet and he pumped the rest of the Ebola-tainted blood into Larry’s broken body. Through it, Larry struggled. His eyes rattled in their sockets, crazy with fear.
It was a satisfying experience to watch. At first.
Then Paul’s humanity kicked in, and he felt bad for what he was doing, making another human—even Larry—suffer, even though at that moment all the distress was psychological.
Then Paul reminded himself what Larry had done. He killed Heidi. He and Jimmy.
Things got easy again.
Now, sitting in front of Colonel Holloway, knowing Larry was dead, Paul didn’t feel anything, not for Larry anyway. He felt a pang of panic as he realized why Colonel Holloway was having this conversation with him. Holloway suspected something. Paul had done his deed in a room full of a hundred sleeping, miserable, delirious patients. Potential witnesses all.
“I didn’t realize his injuries were that bad,” said Paul.
“They were survivable.” Colonel Holloway leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He motioned to a seat on the other side of the desk. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Paul looked at the chair, and he glanced at the door.
“Don’t worry about your quotas today. I’ll talk to Captain Willard.”
“I wasn’t close to Larry.” Paul glanced at the door again. “Thank you for telling me, though.” Paul took a step as if to leave.
“Sit.”
Paul pasted on a weak smile and reluctantly put himself in the chair.
Colonel Holloway put his feet on the floor again and scooted up to his desk. “You heard the rumors, right?”
Paul shook his head. It was easier to lie with a gesture than with words sometimes.
“He says you tortured him.”
Shaking his head, Paul chuckled. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Some of the patients saw you in the ward that night. At least, they saw a man in your uniform that matches your description.”
Paul said nothing. He did nothing. He hadn’t been asked a direct question and being on the defensive he decided that he was offering no information for free.
“We can go for a stroll through the ward if you like. See if anyone recognizes you.”
So much for that
strategy. “I visited Larry when my shift was done.” In fact, it had been much later than that—late enough that Paul was sure only sleepy night shift guards were about. “I was concerned.”
“Even though he tried to pull you off the ladder.”
Paul squirmed in his seat, feeling like the accused sophomore. “I told Captain Willard what happened. Larry was my coworker. He snapped, I guess. I wanted to check on him.”
“And torture him?”
“Was he tortured?” Paul put innocence all over his face, exaggerated innocence. He wasn’t going to squirm. If Colonel Holloway wanted to match wits, then Paul wasn’t going to back down. “He didn’t look tortured when I saw him.”
Colonel Holloway shook his head. “He says you filled him up with Ebola.”
Nodding, Paul knew Ebola didn’t kill that fast. He decided to put the Colonel on the spot. “But he didn’t die from Ebola, did he?”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I didn’t infect him. His story was obviously concocted. What did he die of?”
“Staphylococcus.”
“That was quick.”
“Judging by the results, he must have been infected before he fell. His blood was full of it.”
“Maybe he had a fever.” Paul leaned back and made himself comfortable, ready to pile manufactured speculation onto the story to muddy the waters of truth. “Maybe he was delirious, and that’s why he was behaving erratically on the ladder.”
“You know what else they found in Larry’s blood?”
“Hemoglobin?” Sure, it was a smartass answer. Paul couldn’t stop himself.
Colonel Holloway flashed a plastic smile then put a disappointed face on. “Ebola.”
Paul’s initiative slipped away, and he searched for a response. “The camp is full of Ebola. The ward is full of Ebola patients.”
Colonel Holloway tapped his fingertips on the edge of his desk. “So it is.”
Silence followed and lasted until Paul asked, “Why am I here? Really?”
Colonel Holloway closed the file on his desk and moved it to a pile of similar folders. “Larry Dean.” He shook his head. “He was a piece of work.”