Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller

by Bobby Adair

  He tripped, got a face full of dirt, and his torch bounced across the rough ground in front of him. Thankfully, the fall didn’t extinguish it. A thought crossed his mind that he shouldn’t get up. His jihadist brothers were going to be in a hurry to leave the burning township. They’d likely not even notice his absence.

  Rising up on his hands and knees and to his feet, he knew the question of whether or not he got on one of those trucks headed east wasn’t as important as getting to the hospital’s back door before it was set ablaze.

  Salim picked up his torch and ran.

  As he approached the back of the hospital, he saw he didn’t have much time. The other jihadists were past the town’s central intersection and were working their way up the road toward him.

  Bodies behind the hospital were strewn in piles large and small, with some from earlier cleanups laid next to one another in neat rows. Salim touched his torch to the cloth that wrapped the first body, near its feet. It had diesel fuel on it, and after a little coaxing, it burst into flames that jumped quickly to the adjacent bodies. Those burning bodies were the cornerstones of the hope he needed to make his desperate plan work. None of his comrades would come around to the back of the hospital to light the bodies if they saw them in flames already.

  Salim hurried past body after body, lighting as he went. He reached the largest pile, lit it in several places, and stepped back for a few seconds to watch the flames crawl with red fingers across the crumpled cloth that wrapped them. He tossed his torch to the top of the pile and ran to the hospital’s back door. A half-dozen bodies were piled outside the door to prevent it from opening. Salim grabbed the feet of the one on top and dragged it out of the way. The second followed. He rolled a few more away and pulled others far enough from the door that he was able to get it open.

  It was then that Salim realized he would need to light those bodies, too. If he didn’t, anyone coming around to check the backside of the building—not that it would happen, but it could—would see the door unblocked. Burning bodies just outside the door would keep it hidden.

  Salim pulled one of the smaller grass bundles from where he had it tucked in his belt, ran to the nearest fire and lit it. He heard voices. The others were getting close.

  Running back to the door as the sickly smell of burning flesh mixed with the diesel and smoke, he quickly lit the scattered bodies and flung the door open. The lantern light in the room seemed dim compared to the conflagration outside. He cast a fearful look at the front door and ran to the center of the room. Patients who could were getting up on their hands and knees, panic in their blood-red eyes. Some fell right back down. Others slept—good for them. Many were too sick to have any awareness of the flaming horror coming their way.

  Salim saw immediately that the tidy Arab boy’s cot was empty and the yellow HAZMAT doctor was gone. Austin was getting up on shaky knees and looking out a window when Salim arrived at his side. “Can you run?”

  Austin looked at him as if he didn’t understand.

  “Can you—?” To hell with it. Salim lifted Austin to his feet, and threw Austin’s arm over his shoulder. As Austin tried to stand and struggled to walk, Salim was forced to drag him toward the center aisle.

  Austin pulled back and pointed at a box by the tidy boy’s cot.

  Medical supplies.

  Salim managed to grab a cardboard flap on the box then move as fast as he could toward the back door. Ambulatory patients understood fear and urgency, and started to make their way to the door, some shuffling slowly, most of those struggling to stay upright, a few on hands and knees.

  “Margaux?”

  “What?” Salim asked.

  Austin repeated, “Margaux.”

  The white girl.

  Damn.

  “I’ll try.” Salim got Austin and the box through the back door. Austin’s feet seemed to become more useful once they were outside, moving quickly past the largest pile of burning bodies. Austin stopped, jerked his arm away from Salim, and stood on his own feet. “Margaux. Help her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please. The others.”

  Salim slumped. Having succeeded in rescuing Austin—a feat he didn’t expect to live through—he deflated. A second rescue would surely fail.

  “Take the box. Go to the trees.” Salim turned and ran to the back door.

  He didn’t see any of his brothers coming around the side of the building, but a few of the sick villagers had come out. “Run to the trees!” he commanded as he pushed past another of the patients coming through the back door.

  The situation inside the ward was chaos, for as much that can be said about people who could barely muster the energy to take care of the most basic necessities in the bucket next to their beds. Several were trying to get the front door open. Some were staring out of windows. Many were yelling some kind of nonsense.

  Mostly, they were just stinking and dying in peaceful comas. The disease had made sure of that.

  Back beside Austin’s cot, Salim dropped on his knee beside the white girl. She was in terrible shape. Salim had seen enough of the sick to know she was destined to die. He saw her chest rise and fall, so she wasn’t dead already. He picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and started toward the back door. A gush of hot liquid poured over his back as Margaux retched. Salim cursed, knocked another patient aside, and made it to the back door.

  He heard the front door bang. The patients trying to get out inadvertently kept the jihadists out front for the last seconds he needed. He pushed through the back door and slammed it closed behind him. Anybody still inside would have to deal with their own fate. Salim knew several buckets of diesel were sitting just inside the front doors, and he knew someone would open those doors, kick the buckets over, and throw in a torch. The diesel, the bedding, and the people would flame up in seconds.

  The explosion of shrieks behind him told Salim the fire inside had started. He didn’t look back.

  Chapter 57

  Some things just seem to take forever, and the greater the push to speed them up, the slower they seem to go. Mitch sighed loudly and looked at his watch as he leaned against the open door of the truck. He looked inside at the driver—a Ugandan who shrugged, making it clear that it wasn’t his fault. Of course it wasn’t. They both knew it.

  One hundred and eighty miles from Kampala to Kapchorwa. Getting there had grown into a fiasco of wait-a-few-minutes that turned into hour-long delays that eventually burned off the whole morning. It was too late in the evening after Mitch got off the call with his boss to head out the night before. Everyone agreed on that. But the group of doctors heading to the villages north of Mbale—into ground zero of the Ebola rumors—wouldn’t go without an armed escort. Apparently two attempts by the WHO to head up the road to those villages left a single doctor unaccounted for, and another group of doctors and aid workers, as well.

  Everyone anticipated trouble up that way, though nobody knew how that trouble would manifest itself.

  Dripping with sweat in the sun, Mitch stood impatient and bored, glaring at the doctors. Three of them were standing in front of their vehicle that was parked behind his in a makeshift caravan. Another truck, right behind theirs, carried more people along with boxes of medical gear.

  One of the doctors kept talking about machete-wielding bandits he’d encountered during a stint in Rwanda. He was certain the road north of Mbale held an ambush of just such men. One of the doctors seemed to think the best way to assuage the other doctors’ fears was to talk about how, during the 1976 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, the area around the Ebola river—for which the nasty little Filovirus was named—had turned into a veritable black hole. No word, no communication of any kind came out.

  Mitch didn’t care if it was the Bermuda Triangle. He had a compact Glock in a holster on his belt, thoroughly hidden by his baggy shirt. The man in the back seat—a guy he’d used for security on more than one occasion—had an AK-47 standing on the floorboard beside him. Two more AK-47s
were covered under a blanket on the other side—one for Mitch and one for the driver, who was also experienced at using it. Both carried concealed handguns. Mitch preferred to work with experienced, prepared men.

  He also preferred to get things done. So whether their escort from the Uganda People’s Defence Force—the army—showed up or not, he was leaving at noon. The sound of a big diesel engine caught his attention and he looked down the street. As the dust cleared, a squad of Ugandan soldiers in a big flatbed truck appeared, only a day late.

  Chapter 58

  Driving through Kampala near noon left them in more traffic than Mitch had wanted to deal with. At least with the vehicle moving and the windows down, the breeze blowing in felt nearly as cool as if the air conditioner was running. With the elevation, the summer in Kampala wasn’t as hot as he’d imagined it would be before he arrived nearly a year ago.

  They passed modern buildings and houses, as well as less affluent areas of town, and slums. The highway passed Mandela National Stadium as they were leaving Kampala and stretched into the smaller outlying towns. It occurred to Mitch how much the country reminded him of the rural parts of the Deep South—Alabama or Mississippi, maybe—where he could drive past a brightly colored eight-pump gas station one moment, and in the next, past farm shacks covered in flaking paint with rusting metal you-name-its in the front yard. Where chickens ran loose among barefoot kids who looked like they couldn’t care less when their next bath time arrived, and weeds as tall as the kids grew wherever their feet didn’t beat them down to bare dirt.

  Eventually, the houses and businesses thinned out to farming country, and they drove past tea and cane fields stretched over the plains and up the distant hills—lush greenery growing in yellowish-red dirt. The countryside took on a sameness as they sped along a paved four-lane highway. Houses, farms, trees, hills… repeat.

  A few hours into the drive, they stopped at a roadside market. Stacks of crates and tables filled with all manner of fruits and vegetables were displayed under the shade of sheets of painted tin held up on wooden frames. Several farmers’ wives ran the little market and collected money from the soldiers and doctors as they meandered through and picked out a few things to eat.

  At first Mitch worried about Ebola in the fruit, but his knowledge of how the disease spread was woefully thin. In the end, peer pressure and hunger pushed him to buy a few mangos for the long ride.

  After several hours on the road, they reached Mbale. The army truck with its load of bored soldiers worked its way through the slowly moving traffic, with the other vehicles behind. It wasn’t until well after four o’clock that the caravan drove north out of Mbale and toward the little collections of farmhouses on the road to Kapchorwa.

  Twice along the road, the doctors brought the convoy to a halt at certain clumps of houses and huts so they could get out and talk to residents about their health. When they got out at each stop, the medical workers would put on surgical masks and gloves. Mitch thought it wise to do the same. Those stops dragged on past the point of boredom. Mitch wandered among the houses and bushes, observing the people and looking for anything out of the ordinary. It was clear early on that not one of the farmers was going to admit to anything. Mitch spied several at the first stop taking off across a cornfield. They didn’t want anything to do with soldiers or doctors.

  Some farmers stood far back inside their houses and talked from there. Others who talked to the doctors outside their huts kept a distance from them and denied that anyone they knew or were related to was sick. Talk of Ebola was everywhere, but the disease itself was always a rumor away in the next tiny village up the road or around the bend.

  They found no direct evidence of the disease. But at each stop, Mitch grew more and more certain that it was lurking nearby. He was careful to avoid touching anything or anyone. He didn’t drink water at any place they stopped. Although he was growing hungry with the dinner hour upon them, he made no more purchases from roadside markets.

  They passed the military roadblock, and what they learned from the men there was no different than anything else they’d heard or seen on their trip: rumors and worry.

  With the army roadblock twenty or thirty minutes behind them, it was starting to get dark. Mt. Elgon’s peak and higher elevations glowed orange and red in the light of the setting sun. Male cicadas started their distinctive nighttime song, and nocturnal birds added their calls.

  Mitch was staring at the colors slowly changing on the mountainside, not paying any attention to what was going on around him, when the driver slowed the vehicle in response to the squeaking brakes of the military truck up ahead. The road was dirt by then—they’d been off pavement since a few miles out of Mbale—and a cloud of red grit surrounded them.

  Mitch coughed and blinked the dust away as he disembarked from the truck, not really curious about why they stopped. It was more out of boredom as he looked for something to do.

  The doctors in the vehicle ahead—they were all doctors to Mitch—were all out by then, with a few walking forward, perhaps to relieve their own boredom. Mitch passed by one of the doctors standing by the vehicle, “What’s up?”

  “Don’t know.” The guy answered. “I was asleep.”

  The road dust was settling, more than a little of it in Mitch’s hair and on his clothes. He walked up to two doctors at the rear of the army truck—one man, one woman—who were looking at a few felled trees blocking the road ahead. The soldiers were standing by the trees, looking around, gesturing, and assessing the situation. They knew they’d be tasked with clearing the road and were talking it through.

  “We’re here,” the female doctor said.

  The man—soft, young, pale-skinned, and maybe not even old enough to be a doctor—asked the woman in a high school kid’s voice, “Why do you say that?”

  She pointed at the trees down in the road. “Villagers do this when they want to isolate themselves from sickness, to keep it out.”

  A single shot cracked through the air, and the soft young man crumpled.

  Before Mitch could react, more shots followed. The air was full of whizzing bullets and the sound of automatic weapons fire. He dove behind the truck, dragging the woman down with him into the dirt. Mitch was on his knee behind a big rubber wheel with his compact Glock instinctively in his outstretched hand, looking for targets that would be way too far away to hit.

  The soldiers ran back from the downed trees and around behind the truck. A few jumped up inside and retrieved their weapons, passing them quickly down to the others.

  The gunfire still came. Mitch couldn’t find a target.

  The UPDF soldiers—armed and as organized as they were going to be—took a defensive position behind the truck, while leaning over and spraying off shots down the road.

  The female doctor cried out and Mitch realized she wasn’t behind the cover of the truck. She had gone over to help the downed man. Mitch lowered his pistol and holstered it. He leapt across the open ground between the truck and the man, grabbed a handful of the wounded man’s shirt, and dragged him behind the truck. The woman voiced her gratitude, but by then Mitch was looking around, feeling vulnerable to an ambush from either side.

  The doctor began working fervently on her downed coworker as he struggled to breathe, bleeding profusely from a bullet hole in his chest.

  Mitch caught the attention of a few of the soldiers and pointed to the trees and bushes on both sides of the road behind them. They caught his meaning right away. Mitch knelt down beside the doctor. “Can he be moved?”

  “He needs a hospital,” she shouted above the gunfire.

  Without much thought about his own safety, Mitch shoved his arms beneath her patient and hoisted him up with a grunt. “C’mon.” He charged as fast as he could move with the extra weight of the incapacitated man.

  Mitch lifted him inside the back door of the doctors’ truck. His two escorts were immediately beside him with weapons at the ready. Turning to address the woman, he shouted, “F
ollow us. We’ll escort you back to Mbale. I know where the hospital is there.” He ran back to his truck and jumped into the driver’s seat.

  His two men didn’t need to be told what to do. They each took a seat inside and trained their weapons out a window on either side. Moments later, they were racing back down the road to Mbale, with the medical people following as closely behind as speed and the dust allowed.

  Chapter 59

  It had been a rough ride. After leaving Kapchorwa in the back of a farm truck with guys who were dirty, sweaty, and blackened with ash, they watched Kapchorwa’s flames grow in the night sky. Over the course of enough miles, the flames turned to a western glow in the darkness. There was only the rumble of the engine, the rattle of the old truck, and the grunts of the unnamed jihadists in the back with Salim. Each time the tires rolled through a particularly big hole in the road, they’d all bounce off the truck’s bed. Salim earned a new bruise with each landing.

  The sky slowly opened up to black and a billion pinpricks of stars, most of which Salim had never seen. Denver cast off too much light pollution for much of anything to be visible in the night sky. The truck left the road after driving for maybe an hour, earning Salim and his compatriots plenty more bruises. The truck moved much too fast for safety—much less comfort—across rough ground. Throughout what seemed like an unending trip, none of them spoke. Mostly they stared with the empty looks of men who’d done something that shamed their souls. To fight America’s tyrannical, selfish policies by shooting at soldiers in the field was one thing, but burning sick people in their homes was another altogether.

  Somewhere in the chaos of preparing for the burning, Jalal had disappeared. Whether burned in the village, beheaded for disobeying, or on another truck headed east, Salim could only guess. To take his mind off of the atrocities in the village, he spent a lot of time guessing what might have happened to Jalal and imagining about how they might meet up again. At the moment, Jalal was the only real friend he had. Well, perhaps Austin was a friend. He’d risked his life to save Austin and the girl with the weird French name he couldn’t remember.