by Bobby Adair
The Colonel turned back toward the camp and started to walk.
Paul walked along beside him. “I’d like one favor, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d love to call my daughter and let her know I’m okay.” Paul shuddered as he thought about all that could have happened since he last talked to Olivia. “And I’d like to know if she’s okay.”
“Yes.” The Colonel smiled at Paul. “Of course. My cellphone is in my office. The network wasn’t up this morning when I had to make a call. If you can’t get through today, there’s always tomorrow.”
Chapter 78
They ran the boat ten or twenty miles out into the Persian Gulf at exhilarating, scary speeds before turning around.
Over the noise from the wind, Austin asked, “Where are we going? Since I’m driving, you should probably tell me.”
“Back to Dubai.”
“Okay?” Austin looked at Mitch, letting the next question ask itself.
Mitch laughed. “I’ve seen these boats on TV. I’ve never ridden in one. Always wanted to.”
Austin laughed too. “So we’re going this fast just for a thrill?”
Mitch smiled and nodded. “You can dial back the speed a few notches if you want. Wouldn’t want to hit a wave wrong and flip it. No sense getting killed now.”
“It’s pretty fun to drive. That’s for sure.” Austin reduced his speed by a third.
“You feel bad?” Mitch asked.
“About Najid?”
“Najid.” Mitch nodded. “Any of them.”
Austin shook his head. “Truth is, I’m kind of giddy. I didn’t expect to be alive right now. You?”
“I figured my odds were about even, once I saw how many guys Najid had.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“You killed six guys?”
“You killed one. I got the other five. Oh, and Najid, so yeah, six. But we did it together. You did a good job. I started to think for a minute there that the police were on the scene.”
“I’m glad it worked out.” Austin laughed. “Just like you planned.”
“I didn’t truly plan for you to have to come. Nice truck, by the way.”
“Yeah,” Austin agreed. “I didn’t expect to find that. I figured you sent me on an errand to keep me busy while you handled the job.”
“I did,” Mitch admitted. “I came up with that idea to ram the gates as a last resort. I didn’t think you’d actually have to do it. I’m glad you did, though. I was in a tight spot. You saved me.”
“Teamwork,” said Austin. “Where are we going, exactly?”
“To the American consulate. It’s right on the water. They’re expecting us. Well, sort of. They were our backup plan in case we couldn’t get out of the country and fly back to Lemonnier.”
“Okay.”
“It’s nice. You’ll like it. And we’ll have a nice boat to go tooling around in.” Mitch patted the dashboard. “I think we’ll be staying for awhile.”
“Is it safe?”
Mitch laughed. “As safe as any place.”
Chapter 79
“Hello?” Olivia didn’t recognize the number from the incoming call.
“Olivia?”
“Dad!” Olivia had known for some time that Paul had been taken to the East Denver Internment Center but with no communications from the camp’s detainees and requests for confirmation of residents stacked up in a bureaucracy somewhere along the way, Olivia didn’t know if her father was alive. She’d heard about the conditions in many of the camps. She’d read the data on mortality rates. Olivia smiled through her tears. “Are you in the camp?”
“East Denver Internment,” Paul confirmed.
“They have phones now?”
“The Colonel let me use his.”
Smiling, Olivia said, “You know you’re breaking three or four laws I can think of right off the top of my head.”
“I don’t care. I had to hear your voice. I had to know you were still okay. I had to let you know that I am, too. We’re all we have left now.” Paul sniffled. He hadn’t expected his emotions to get away from him. “But I guess we’re lucky, maybe.”
“We’re not all we have left, dad.”
Paul didn’t know what that meant.
“Austin is alive.”
“What?” Paul’s knees gave out and he dropped into the chair in front of Colonel Holloway’s desk. “What?”
“He’s in Dubai.”
“He’s really alive?” Paul couldn’t believe it. He started to cry.
“He’s fine. He caught Ebola, and he got better. He’s…” Olivia cried too. “He’s fine. I don’t know how soon we can get him back. Months. Maybe longer.”
“But he’s okay?” Paul struggled to get the words out. “He’s not in trouble?”
“No. Everything is fine. He’s at the consulate. It’s built on a canal. The way he describes it, it sounds like a resort. He’s there with another American, a diplomat from Kampala named Mitch Peterson.”
“I’m sure there’s a good story behind that.”
“You wouldn’t believe.” Olivia collected herself and said, “I can get you his phone number.”
Paul cried some more, unable to hold back all the grief suddenly washed away. “That’d be good.”
“Why are you calling now? Are they letting you out?”
“No. I mean they said I could go home and stay under house arrest as long as I showed up for my donations.”
“That won’t last much longer. Maybe three or four more months. At least the mandatory donations.”
“I’m staying in the detention center.”
“Why?”
“I want to help, Olivia. I just want to help. There are a lot of sick people here, and I guess a lot still out there. I want to do my part.”
“Now you sound like Austin.”
“There are worse things than that.”
Chapter 80
The swells were two meters from trough to peak and had been rolling the eighty-foot fishing boat for over an hour. A cold wind was blowing out of the dark sky to the north, and the smell of rain was in the air. If not for the twenty kilos of gold in the ship’s hold and the promise of ten nuclear warheads—each 1.5 megatons, each a hundred times more powerful than the bomb the Americans dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II—Hadi would have stayed ashore and tried for a trade on another day in calmer weather.
Every day’s delay was a gamble. The Americans were playing the game too, searching for Najid Almasi, hoping to kill him, likely knowing he was planning the same for them.
The secondary problem was the leveling out of the mortality rate. With sixty or seventy percent of the global population already dead, the mortality rate in the more advanced countries was trending toward ten percent. That was bad.
The only way to fix that and to get the death rates in line with those in the less-developed countries—most of Africa, most of the Arab world and Central Asia, which was running well over ninety-percent—was to destabilize the fragile governmental systems in place. That would free Ebola to do the rest of its work. Short that, Najid’s plan had killed billions needlessly and backfired catastrophically on his own people.
From his spot, standing in the bow, holding on to a rail, feeling the boat heave up and down and roll back and forth, Hadi eyed the sea in front of the ship, praying he’d see the Russians’ boat materialize out of the mist. He needed these Russians to be real. All of his people needed it.
So he stared and held on. Alone.
All of his men, most of Najid’s soldiers, were tucked inside the boat, keeping themselves warm, keeping their weapons dry. Readying themselves just in case. They also knew the stakes.
Time passed slowly as the gray sky changed shades with the thickness of the cloud blanket above, and the angle of the sun coming down. Squalls washed over the ship. The wind kicked up and blew the tips of the waves in a stinging spray. Then the showers passed, and th
e winds settled some. And the fishing trawler pushed on.
It was late in the day. It had to be by then. Hadi’s knees were sore from standing. His hands were cramped from gripping the icy metal rail. His face was numb from the cold.
He saw it.
The gray-black form of a ship coming toward them. No running lights on.
Hadi smiled and felt a weight fall away from his shoulders. He turned and waved at the pilothouse. Inside, the captain waved back. Moments later, his men filed out onto the deck. They looked ready for a fight. That was exactly as Hadi wanted them to be seen, ready to kill. Intimidation would go a long way to keeping his new Russian business partners honest. Hadi was sad the world worked that way, but there was nothing to be done about it except to show strength and the make the price of deception too high to bear.
It took nearly an hour for the two ships to find a place in the waves where they could cruise forward on parallel tracks, slow enough to get their business done, but not so slow as to surrender themselves to the waves.
As had been arranged prior, the Russians sent three men in a semi-inflatable boat that cut through the water under the power of an engine that whined in a rhythm of its bow busting through each peek. The boat’s skipper pulled it alongside Hadi’s hired fishing boat with so much skill that he didn’t have to tie off. The two passengers climbed out and were helped into the fishing boat by several of Hadi’s men.
Hadi met the men on deck, exchanged curt pleasantries, and hurried out of the weather.
The gold was stacked in small, heavy boxes on the floor of the fishing boat’s galley. One of the Russians went to work opening the boxes and doing whatever test satisfied him in determining that the gold was real. Not much was said during the exchange.
When it was done, the tester gave the other Russian a verbal report that consisted of less than a dozen words. The Russian in charge looked at Hadi and said, “We are satisfied. Come, we shall inspect the warheads.”
Hadi followed. His scientist with his instruments came behind.
The ride across the waves in the semi-inflatable was frightening.
The Russian boat was ominous and odd looking with large crates on the deck in various places.
The semi-inflatable pulled up next to the Russian ship. With clumsiness that showed their inexperience on the sea, Hadi and his scientist made their way onto the vessel. The two Russian inspectors followed, and the skipper of the small, fast boat pulled away, quickly losing himself in the waves to the stern of the Russian ship. Hadi and his scientist were led through a hatch, down steeply sloping rusty stairs, and into a dimly lit hold. At the center of the hold were the cone-shaped warheads, secured on pallets, looking exactly as expected.
Hadi looked at his scientist. The man gave him a nod. Everything was good.
The scientist sat his case of instruments down and opened it up. He removed a device and immediately went to work. He ran something up and down the length of several of the cones, looking more and more frustrated as he did, but he said nothing. Afterward, he stood and stared at the warheads for a solid minute with no expression on his face. Hadi looked on nervously, and the Russians watched with hard, unreadable faces.
The scientist looked around and then proceeded to perform closer inspections and work with other instruments. When it was all done, he stood up, smiled broadly, and in the most animated way Hadi had ever seen the man, told him all was good. They should proceed with the transaction.
Hadi and the Russians talked logistics for a moment. Hadi and his scientist would return to his rented fishing boat. They’d load batches of gold into the semi-inflatable and send it over to the Russian vessel. The Russians, using one of the booms on their ship would offload one warhead, which would be transported across the waves to be loaded onto Hadi’s vessel. They’d repeat until all gold and all warheads were transferred.
As Hadi rode in the semi-inflatable across the gap between the vessels, Hadi grinned, not caring about the rough water and the cold wind. He was on the verge of success. Then his scientist leaned close and said, “Those were fake.”
“Fake?” Hadi’s voice got away from him in his surprise.
The scientist nodded. “I didn’t want to say anything while we were on their boat. I didn’t trust the thieving Russians not to murder us when exposed.”
Hadi simply nodded as his anger grew and alternatives raced through his mind. Did these Russians think they could get away with giving him fakes? Would they sell the real ones? If so, for how much? Or did they even have real ones? Had they been deceiving Hadi the whole time?
Once he climbed on board his own boat with his scientist, he called to one of his men to go and alert the captain that it was time to make haste back to port. Hadi turned and glared at the Russians across the expanse of the waves.
The skipper of the semi-inflatable took off across the water and as Hadi watched, realized that the man was steering the boat with one hand—a dangerous proposition in the rough seas—and talking on a radio with the other. As he stood and watched, trying to figure what could be so important that it needed to be radioed rather than told in person after only a few more minutes, Hadi saw something change on the deck of the Russian vessel. Those crates that had been lined on the deck seemed to collapse as the sides and front fell away. They were crew-served machineguns with wide barrels. They erupted in flame as Hadi looked at them. Large caliber rounds tore through his men, through the fishing boat’s hull, through the superstructure. They tore through Hadi’s chest just as he thought to tell his men to fire.
He fell into the dark waters of the Caspian Sea feeling like a fool, dying as he sank.
The End
This is the final installment of Ebola K, so that’s all! A milestone in my writing career as I actually finish a series. It’s a good thing, really, as it frees me up to start something completely new. Stay tuned…I have a couple of new projects in the works!
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Do you have a moment for a review?
Ebola K, Book 3 was another extremely emotional book to write, and a complex project to undertake. If you have a moment, I would be forever indebted if you could give any feedback on the site where you purchased the book. As an indie author, the visibility of my books is very much tied to the ratings and reviews, and for that reason we solicit your feedback a little more aggressively than the big box stores and publishers. We also really care about what you have to say, and look to that feedback when thinking about new and exciting things to write for you.
I also appreciate any input on typos…we have a special page on the website where we collect any mistakes so we can respond quickly and republish. I’d appreciate the opportunity to fix it before it goes into a review. Kat, my typo wrangler, is really good at getting most errors fixed within the first day or two after publishing.
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Oh yeah, I almost forgot. PLEASE, leave a review on the website where you bought the book. My landlord likes it when I pay my rent on time. Reviews (especially the good ones) help make that happen.
Again, thanks for reading! – Bobby
Other Books by Bobby Adair
Horror & Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Slow Burn (Series)
Slow Burn Box Set 1-3
Sci-Fi/Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
The Last Survivors (Series, collaboration with T.W. Piperbrook)
T
he Last Survivors, Book 1
Text copyright © 2015, Bobby L. Adair
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.