by Ed Baldwin
When he felt the brush from behind, he knew it was time. Boyd stiffened and saw Bone move away. This was a club for regulars. Strangers were an event, and the highway being two miles away wasn’t an accident. Boyd understood Bone’s formal attire now. It was sort of official, like a referee. It was designed to keep things from getting out of hand. Someone could get killed.
“Oh. Sorry,” Bobby said, acting surprised.
They weren’t going to start with the big guy. Bobby was a bit under six feet and chunky. Of the six guys there, he looked to be the fourth-toughest. They were going to give someone else a chance to kick some ass before the big guy stepped in to finish it.
Boyd stood. They all stood. He stepped away from the bar, not wanting to get pinned there. Crank grinned, obviously feeling as good as Boyd felt.
Bobby telegraphed the punch a millennium before he threw it. First, he squeezed up his face in a grimace, then shifted his weight to his right foot and feinted with his left hand while drawing back his right. When he shifted to the left foot the punch came straight in. Boyd’s head retreated ahead of it, allowing it to just graze his jaw. He took two steps back to be in the center of the room.
Bobby was right with him, off-balance but coming with the right again, thinking Boyd was in full retreat. Boyd slipped to his right, and the punch bounced off the side of his head. The left was right behind it and hit Boyd square on the forehead.
Something clicked. The feeling was there. With the punch, the adrenaline kicked in at last. The rush was better than a climax. Bobby’s momentum carried him into Boyd and he grabbed for a bear hug. Boyd pushed him back and, when Bobby flailed a windmill right, Boyd flicked a left jab into his fat, wild-eyed face. The solid contact with bone felt wonderful. The right cross smashed Bobby’s cheekbone and he went down on his butt, dazed.
“Pickin’ on Bobby!” someone shouted.
The next two came at once. He slipped a right under another windmill punch and dropped the smaller one, but the other landed a solid punch that spun Boyd’s head around and staggered him back. He grabbed the guy by the shirt and pulled him close, enduring some body punches and savoring the free-flowing high. Pushing forward to the center of the room, he trapped the man’s hands between their bodies and pounded his face with a half-dozen fast jabs from close range, turning it into a pulpy mess. He dropped him and stood alone. Crank still had the pool cue as he strode across the space between them, tobacco-stained teeth bared in a gleeful, childlike grin.
*******
The pressure on his chest was not painful, just there. Then there was the beep-beep of a Road Runner cartoon, punctuated by whistles and insane laughter, followed by a wet kiss, sloppy, all over his face, and warm. It smelled like bacon.
The headache came when he opened his eyes. Sitting on his chest were two children. The 3-year-old, nude, flicked the channel changer between two cartoons while his 2-year-old brother, in a wet diaper, ate a piece of bacon and wrestled for control of the changer. The dog, a hound mix, licked Boyd’s face while Boyd lay on a black Naugahyde couch beneath the front picture window of a 14-foot-wide mobile home. Seeing his pants on the floor by the television, Boyd raised up to see blood on his boxer shorts, his only remaining garment.
“Oh. You’re alive,” a female voice came from behind him. He turned to see a woman in a faded cotton nightgown frying bacon in the kitchen. She was in her mid-to-late 20s, and her breasts jiggled freely as she scraped the frying pan to remove the bacon. Her long hair, shoulder length the night before, was tied in a simple knot behind her head. He remembered her as the waitress at the bar at the hotel in Sumter. He’d pulled those pink panties down sometime in a vague, misty past.
“When did I … uh,” he said, thickly. His mouth tasted worse than the dog’s.
“Oh, you showed up about 12. You came in here with a busted lip and a powerful need.” She laughed and shook her head, breaking an egg into the bacon grease.
She looked fresh and happy. Obviously not affected by whatever had made Boyd so ill, she moved quickly and efficiently around the kitchen.
“Did we, uh …”
“We sure did, baby,” she said with a smile, turning to face him. “You were great, till you got into that moonshine jar Billy Ray left over there. You better stick to fightin’ and lovin’ and leave the drinkin’ to Billy Ray.”
“Who’s Billy Ray?”
“My husband. Ex-husband, really. The divorce is final sometime next month. He lives with his mother. You like your eggs runny?”
An officer and a gentleman, he thought, as he surveyed the scene he had created. An open door across the living room showed a king-size bed with rumpled sheets. His jaw was simply sore, but his right hand was swollen and purple behind the little finger. The nude boy walked down the hall to the bedrooms in the back. The other one dug into a plate of grits and sugar with a side of bacon his mother had just placed on the floor in front of him. The dog looked alert for an opening on the bacon.
“This is Billy Ray’s weekend with the kids. I need to take them over to his mother’s before 9. Then we can get back to business.”
“Why 9?” he asked, just to say something. He didn’t feel like what she was planning.
“That’s when he usually comes to get 'em. Last thing I need is to have you and Billy Ray trying to see who can throw who out that picture window first.”
She laughed again and looked at him, shaking her head in disbelief. “Don’t know why I always get the ones with demons.”
A South Carolina Saturday morning, he thought, looking for his socks, feeling miserable and ashamed.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mission
“Chailland! Wing Commander wants you in his office right now,” the squadron operations officer said, hanging up the desk phone in the office he shared with Boyd. Boyd was just coming out of the men’s room where he’d been running cold water on his hand, hoping to minimize the swelling.
“What’d I do now?” Boyd asked, trying to sound cheerful, but feeling no pleasure in the nagging worry that Crank might still be comatose.
When Boyd walked into the wing commander’s office, the secretary smiled and motioned him toward the open door. He crossed the expanse of carpet smartly and was about to snap to attention and report when the brigadier general stood and spoke first.
“Come in, Boyd. Have a seat.” He motioned toward a chair to the side and sat back in his chair, looking across the shining, nearly empty desktop.
Boyd took the seat and looked down at the general’s desk to see his own personnel file there, open to his photo. The general, taller than Boyd but much thinner, was dressed in a flight suit, the stars on his shoulders clearly setting him apart from the average jock. He was relaxed, calm, almost mellow. He looked back down at the record he’d been reading.
“I was awakened at 5 this morning by a call that a major general was inbound from Andrews and due to land at 0800. Not having heard about the visit beforehand, I assumed I was to be fired and replaced.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair, enjoying his tale. “Then, about 7, he radioed the command post that his visit was classified and he wanted no DV greeting, just a crew bus to bring him here for a meeting with me at 8:30, and with you at 9.” Brigadier General Charles “Dunk” Wells looked at Boyd, waiting for a response.
“General Ferguson?” Boyd asked, knowing it could be no one else.
“Old friends? From another base perhaps?” Wells wanted to know who this guy was.
“No, sir,” Boyd said, straight-faced. He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to make his boss mad.
“Well, I thought this might be something interesting, so I had Ginny pull your personnel file. You are an extraordinary fellow. I hadn’t heard that before. You have an Air Force Cross, awarded last year. The citation says it was for valor of the highest order during peacetime, and the aircraft and location are classified.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen classified loc
ations, never a classified aircraft. Your flight record shows only T-37, T-38 and F-16. Did you fly anything else?”
“Yes, sir.” In his mind Boyd remembered the jolt and fire as the cannon shells hit the engine of the restored P-51 Mustang, and then the silence as he pushed the nose into a dive and, dead stick, began to gain on the attacker who’d assumed he was dead.
“I won’t ask. It must be some story. Apparently they want you to do it again, whatever it was. The general is waiting in the office across the hall. He said he wanted a few minutes with you and then lunch. He’s due to leave at 1400.”
The feeling was back. Ferguson was an admirer, but no friend. Boyd had a deal with Ferguson: Keep his mouth shut about what he knew and what he’d done the summer before, in exchange for a full three-year tour flying Falcons at Shaw followed by an assignment to Fighter Weapons School as faculty. He didn’t want or need anything funny with the promotions board, though they’d offered that. They had a fast track outlined that would have him with stars before he was 40, but Boyd had turned them down because it was mostly schools and Pentagon assignments. Boyd wanted to fly. He’d not expected to ever see Ferguson again.
“Yes, sir,” Boyd said, standing, then smiled at the general and added, “As soon as they say it’s OK, I’ll be glad to tell you all about it.” He knew they never would and that the details of one of the century’s most unusual adventures would be known only to him and a few other participants. He also knew that day in Texas had spawned the demon that had made him go to Bone’s Place.
He crossed the hall and opened the door.
“Boyd. Good to see you.”
Ferguson, dressed in a flight suit with two stars on the epaulets, told the lie with a warm sincere smile. He rose from the couch in the vice commander’s office and shook Boyd’s hand. In his other hand was a manila envelope filled with papers. Boyd closed the door behind him, trying to hide the wince of pain from the general’s firm grip on his recent boxer’s fracture.
“You’ve probably figured out that I’m here to offer you a job. It’s a temporary duty assignment, actually, for 180 days. Afterward, you’ll come back here and finish out your tour as we agreed.”
“I thought this secret, behind-closed-doors stuff was over,” Boyd said, sitting without being asked.
“The government is being run in accordance with the Constitution, if that’s what you’re asking about. As far as this assignment is concerned, we need somebody who can think on his feet. Someone who can take care of himself, keep quiet, and – ”
“ – who doesn’t have a family.” Boyd finished the sentence, cutting off the general who seemed about to make a speech.
“Yeah. That’s part of it, too. This is an uncertain world we live in.”
“I’ll take it.” Boyd said, feeling alive at the prospect of action.
“I thought you would. Your orders are already here.”
“What if I’d declined?”
Ferguson smiled knowingly and said, “Boyd, you’re a shooter, a born shooter. You need to be out in front. Out where the action starts. We planners and schemers need guys like you when the balloon goes up.”
“Is the balloon going up?”
“No. This is not a war. This is something else.”
Ferguson moved behind the vice commander’s desk and emptied the manila envelope, motioning for Boyd to follow and take the seat at the side. “I’ve got a new job. I’m the director of the Counter-Proliferation Task Force. We deal with weapons of mass destruction.”
“Nukes?”
“Nukes, chemical, biological. Whenever one of the intelligence-gathering agencies comes across someone trying to buy, build or deploy such a weapon, they turn the case over to us. We’ve got the experts, and we’re empowered to act, if necessary.”
“Act?”
“It’s a task force; elements of all the services, the complete range of capabilities, from intelligence-gathering to deployment to kinetic response.”
“And I’m in the kinetic-response end of it?” Boyd asked, knowing it would be something else.
Ferguson chuckled. “Well, you sure brought the kinetic response last time, and at a time and a place nobody could have foreseen it would be needed. Like then, we don’t know what we’ve got here, so we’re going to put a shooter in charge from the get-go.”
“Prudent.”
“In January, the World Health Organization called us with the report of an outbreak of a rare disease that’s so dangerous our bio-warfare people don’t even like to talk about it,” Ferguson said as he dumped the contents of the manila envelope onto the desk. He picked up several 8X10 glossy photographs. “This guy, in the top picture there, died of it in less than three days.”
“Humph. I don’t want to go there.”
“No.” Ferguson said, leaning over and pulling reading glasses out of his flight suit pocket. “Look at the next picture.”
“Same guy, from a different angle,” Boyd said, seeing a nude black man with blotches and spots all over him and blood dripping from his nose and mouth. Then he added, “Still dead.”
“See that trickle of blood from his arm, the place where they take blood in a lab? Then, see the footprint there? Looks like a moon boot? The WHO guys said someone in protective gear left 20 people dead in this village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after drawing a lot of blood. See these other pictures?”
Ferguson took the other photographs and spread them on the desk, pointing out more moon-boot prints and other bodies.
“So?” “Boyd asked, stumped as to why they would want him for something like this.
“No one needs that virus for worthy purposes. Having it is like having a dozen nuclear weapons. Our bio people tell us there’s no way to even transport it safely, much less work with it in anything but the most sophisticated Level 4 containment lab. Someone is playing with Pandora’s Box.”
“Tell me where they are, and I’ll drop a Mark 82 into their jock strap,” Boyd said, leaning back, no longer looking at the gruesome pictures. He chuckled at the thought of a five hundred pound bomb in some guy’s jockstrap.
Ferguson didn’t laugh.
“Day before yesterday, someone sent a distress signal from a previously uninhabited island in the Seychelles. It said, ‘We are dying of a filovirus infection. Quarantine this place. We have made a terrible mistake.’ The Seychelles sent a patrol plane. Both of the buildings on the island were in flames, there were no signs of life.”
Boyd looked darkly at Ferguson, beginning to see what his role might be.
“You’ll be completely protected in a biohazard suit,” the general said. “They say it’s cumbersome, but not really uncomfortable. The rest of the team, for now, is an Army pathologist, one of the world’s experts, but we don’t know what he might find, or find and not recognize. We need somebody there who can, well, do something if it’s needed.”
“Why not send a Navy ship?”
“It’s the middle of the Indian Ocean, and the ships we have there are busy chasing pirates off Somalia.”
Boyd searched Ferguson’s face intently. He was being strung along here.
Ferguson looked up and caught Boyd’s gaze. “Uh, and they don’t want that on one of their ships.”
“Same with the Air Force I’ll bet.”
“Yes.”
“So, two expendables go to this place and look around.”
“Pretty much, yes. Gather some samples. Do autopsies if there are any bodies.”
“That would be the Army guy’s role.”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
Ferguson paused, looked away, taking his time in answering. “We want you to go to Diego Garcia for a few weeks, uh ...”
Long pause.
“It’s a … a kind of a hospital.”
“Quarantine?”
“Yes,” Ferguson said quickly, seemingly relieved not to have had to say that.
“If the Navy doesn’t want ‘that’ on one of their
ships, and the Air Force doesn’t want ‘that’ on one of their planes, how do I get from the middle of the Indian Ocean to Diego Garcia?”
“We’re working on a contract flight.”
“Yes, we seem to contract out the real shit jobs. Does the contractor know ‘that’ is going to be on his aircraft?”
“Ah, that would be your job, to explain all that, and to plan the mission.”
Boyd laughed, his head dropped back and he looked up at the ceiling, shoulders shaking. He was oblivious to the stern look he was getting from Ferguson. The laugh went on for three or four breaths before he stopped, still smiling, and looked again at Ferguson.
“I’ll bet I wasn’t the first guy to get a chance to go on this adventure.”
“It just came up yesterday. You’re the first.”
“OK. So, I go to the Seychelles, babysit an Army pathologist looking for bodies, pack 'em up in bags or something, then fly to Diego, hope I don’t get sick, and then what?”
“Take what you find and figure out who’s trying to do what. You’ll be in charge of the team. Contact me for whatever you need, but operate independently.”
“When do I leave?”
“Fourteen hundred. I’ll fly you back to D.C. in my C-21. We have you on a flight to Mombasa in the morning.”
“Oh, and what is this thing I’m looking for?”
“Ebola.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Packing up
Eight Ball emerged from beneath the porch as Boyd pulled up in a cloud of dust and jumped out of the truck. The big black Lab’s tail hit the wooden steps solidly three times as he stood expectantly, waiting for Boyd to offer his hand.