Z

by Bob Mayer

  The two men walked over and watched as a cover letter followed by imagery spooled out. Tyron picked up the cover letter and read it out loud to Kieling, who was examining the pictures.

  To Tyron/Kieling. From Colonel Martin. I’m sending you some of the pictures taken this evening by satellite and over flight. We’re looking at it here and trying to see some sort of pattern, but it doesn’t look good.

  The imagery analysts say that the places they’ve circled in blue indicate recent death. The bodies aren’t quite cooled to the surrounding terrain. Some of the deaths might be due to the recent air strikes, but we bounced the sites against the target lists and have ruled that out for the ones we circled. Of more concern are the sites where the body temperatures are higher than normal—by a significant amount, several degrees at least. We believe this thing is burning there. Those have been circled in red. Will send more when we know more. I’m trying to get to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Be careful.

  Tyron put down the message. “What is he referring to?” Kieling was staring at a photo, his face pale. Slowly he handed it to Tyron. There were a half-dozen sites circled in blue, about twice that number circled in red. The circles covered a wide swath of northeast Angola.

  The succeeding pictures showed close-ups of those sites. There were over a hundred cold bodies in one village, visible even through the roofs of the huts by the thermal scanner. In another, the disease hadn’t yet completed its deadly work and they could make out the fever burning among dozens of people.

  “It’s moving way too fast,” Kieling said. “We would have had word earlier if this thing was spreading normally. Like we did two years ago in Zaire.”

  “If it only takes six days—” Tyron began.

  “Even with six days from inception to crash,” Kieling cut in, “it’s still moving too fast. It’s got to be passed on quicker than blood contact to hit that many places and that many people that quickly. Notice that in the villages where people are feverish, it’s almost everyone who has a fever. Even X didn’t have anywhere close to that level of infection.”

  “Could it be airborne?” Tyron whispered, the very thought enough to make him wish he were very far away from here.

  “I never thought we’d see an airborne virus that killed this quickly. It doesn’t compute in the natural scale of things,” Kieling said. “But”—he shook his head—”but it’s got to be vectoring some way quicker than body fluid.”

  “What do you want to call it?” Tyron asked, eager to get a verbal handle on something they couldn’t comprehend scientifically.

  “Z”

  “What?” Tyron asked.

  “I said Z.”

  “Z?”

  “Well, it’s not X,” Kieling said. “And Y would be confusing. I vote for Z.” He looked back up. “And because Z is the last letter. The end. And this thing”—he tapped the picture—”it might just be the end if it burns as fast as it seems to be burning in these photos.”

  Chapter 12

  Angola-Zaire Border, 16 June

  “Flank and far security report in all clear,” Trent whispered, one finger pressing the earpiece from the small FM radio into his ear.

  Quinn nodded, watching through his binoculars the small clearing on the other side of the border. He wouldn’t have put it past Skeleton to arrange an ambush to wipe out both himself and his men. Now that things were changing in Angola, who knew which way the hurricane would blow? The job he had been doing for Skeleton for the last several years wasn’t exactly legal and would most certainly be embarrassing if it came under public scrutiny.

  They were lying in a shallow trench they’d dug the previous evening. Quinn had dismissed most of the patrol, keeping only four other men besides Trent. All people that he had worked with before and trusted, as well as you could trust anyone who was a mercenary. Which, Quinn had to admit to himself, wasn’t very far.

  There were other reasons for going light. Several of the men were ill and he didn’t want to be burdened by them. More importantly, he hoped he’d gotten rid of a possible spy. Finally, Quinn wanted to travel light to get his job over with as fast as possible. They’d put two of the men on the far side of the clearing and one on each flank to make sure nobody else moved in during the night.

  There was a distant noise, getting closer. Quinn recognized it—a car engine. Ten minutes after he first heard the sound, a Land Rover pulled into the clearing. The vehicle was covered in mud.

  “Long way from the nearest town,” Trent whispered. “They’ve been on the road awhile.”

  “Yeah.” Quinn had half expected a helicopter. Travel by vehicle was very difficult in this part of Africa. Maybe Skeleton had to be wary of the Americans’ no-fly rule this close to the border. Quinn considered that. But the SADF was involved in this Angolan operation, too, and Quinn knew Skeleton had pull there. He could have brought a chopper in if he had wanted to. The only reason not to was because Skeleton didn’t want anyone to know what was going on here, not even his people in the SADF.

  The Land Rover came to a halt and two white men armed with R4 assault rifles jumped out. A man in a dark blue jumpsuit exited more slowly from the front passenger seat. He began unloading several green cases from the back while looking about the clearing. The two guards moved ten feet from the vehicle and waited, weapons at the ready.

  “Professionals,” Trent muttered. “Skeleton’s boys. Why don’t they take this fellow in?”

  “We know the terrain,” Quinn replied, but it was a good question. Any adequate soldier with a map could navigate in terrain he hadn’t been in before. There were a lot of pieces that didn’t fit together here.

  The man in the blue suit was done. The two guards climbed back in the Land Rover and drove away. The man sat down on one of the cases and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Quinn waited until he could no longer hear the engine. He glanced at Trent.

  “All clear,” his top kick reported after checking on the FM radio with the security men.

  Quinn stood up. “What’s in the cases?” he called out.

  The man was startled by the sudden apparition. He stood, squinting. “Equipment.”

  “Step away from it,” Quinn ordered. When the man complied, he gave more orders. “Kneel down, forehead in the dirt.”

  “Is this really necessary?” the man asked. His accent was Afrikaner. A South African, which was to be expected.

  Now that he was closer, Quinn could see that the man appeared to be in his mid-forties with graying hair and tortoise-rim spectacles.

  The man’s skin was pale, indicating he had not spent much time in the outdoors. He was pudgy and Quinn felt an instant distaste for him.

  Quinn gestured with the muzzle of his Sterling and the man reluctantly got on his knees and bent over. Quinn walked forward and looked at the three hard plastic cases. They had locks on the opening snaps. He turned back to the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Bentley.”

  Keeping out of Quinn’s line of fire, Trent quickly frisked Bentley. No weapons.

  “You can stand up, Bentley,” Quinn said. “Open the cases.”

  “No,” Bentley said.

  Quinn closed the distance between the two men in a breath, jamming the muzzle of the Sterling into the soft skin under Bentley’s chin. “I didn’t fucking hear that. Say it again, asshole.”

  “I—I meant, I can’t,” Bentley stuttered. “I’m under orders. You aren’t authorized to see what’s in the cases.”

  “Bad answer,” Quinn said.

  “I can open one,” Bentley said. “I have to for us to get where we’re going.”

  Quinn glanced at Trent, who met the look and shrugged. Quinn removed the weapon. “Open what you can.”

  Bentley rubbed his sore chin as he spun the combination on one of the cases. He flipped open the lid and pulled out a laptop computer with several cables coming out the back. Next he took out a small folded-up satellite dish with tripod legs.

  “SATCOM?” Quinn
asked. It looked more sophisticated than the rig Trent carried in his rucksack.

  “Not quite,” Bentley said, unfolding the fans that made up the dish.

  Quinn stepped forward, bringing up the barrel of his submachine gun.

  “Don’t do that!” Bentley cried out. He glared at the soldier. “Do that again, I call this off and you can forget your bonus. Plus I tell Skeleton you blew this. You wouldn’t want him after you. Me and my equipment are more important here than you or any of your men. Is that clear?”

  Quinn stepped back and gritted his teeth. He waited as Bentley hooked up the computer to the satellite dish.

  “What I’ve got here,” Bentley said, “is a terrain map of Angola loaded in the computer. When I hit the enter key here, we get a kick burst up to a satellite, which activates the homing device in the object we’re looking for, which bounces back up and gives us a location.” With that, Bentley hit the enter key.

  Two seconds later there was a glowing dot on the electronic map. “That’s where I need you to take me,” Bentley said.

  Quinn looked at the screen. The dot was located in a narrow strip of land between the Luembe and Luia Rivers. Quinn pulled out his map case and looked at it, comparing it to the screen.

  “How long to get there?” Bentley asked, turning off the computer and beginning to repack it.

  “About forty kilometers,” Quinn said. “My men can make it in two days. Maybe less.”

  “Good.” Bentley snapped shut the case. “I’ll need help carrying this.”

  “Bring in the security,” Quinn ordered Trent. He turned back to Bentley. “Mind telling me what we’re looking for?”

  “Yes, I do mind,” Bentley said, shouldering his own small pack.

  Quinn smiled, but Bentley didn’t see it. Trent did see the smile and it sent a chill through him. He’d seen Quinn smile like that before and it meant trouble.

  National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, 16 June

  Tim Waker had the graveyard shift, courtesy of the rotating schedule his supervisor had set up. He hadn’t even gone home for the intervening time between his last shift and this one. His cat had enough food and water. Things here were starting to get more lively. Two minutes ago, something unusual had happened. Someone had bounced a signal off a GPS satellite and then received a back signal through the satellite.

  The signal would have been lost amid the dozens of satellite transmitters that were being used by American forces in the country except for two things. It was coming out of the edge of the Lunda Norte area, which Waker had coded the computer to pay more attention and the satellite uplink went to the GPS satellite instead of one of the NAVFLTSATCOM satellites that handled SATCOM traffic.

  GPS stood for “ground positioning system” and it was a series of satellites in fixed orbits that continuously emitted location information that could be downloaded by GPRs—ground positioning receivers. The transmission had been sent up in such a frequency and modulation that it piggybacked on top of the normal GPS transmission on the way back down both times.

  Waker looked at the data and made himself a cup of tea as he considered the brief burst. Why would someone do that? The first and most obvious reason was to hide both brief transmissions. But assuming it was the same people who had sent the previous messages: those had gone off a commercial SATCOM satellite and been coded, so that even if they were picked up they couldn’t be broken. Waker knew that even a one-second burst using modern encoding devices was enough to transmit a whole message, but maybe this one wasn’t a message. The key question was why the change to the GPS satellite?

  “Because they want to know where something is,” Waker said out loud. But then why didn’t the people on the other end simply tell the first transmitters their location? The answer came to him as quickly as he formulated the question: because there was no one at the second site. It was all clicking now, and the more Waker considered it, the more his respect grew for whoever had thought of this. Using the GPS signal allowed the first transmitter to get a fix on the response, which was blindly broadcast up. And there was more. Maybe, just maybe, Waker thought, the second signal was very weak and needed the GPS signal to add to its power.

  “Most interesting,” he muttered as he summarized the information on his computer and emailed it into the Pentagon intelligence summary section. As the report flashed along the electronic highway, it fell in among hundreds of other summaries coming out of the vast octopus of intelligence agencies the United States fielded. And there it spooled, waiting to be correlated and even perhaps read.

  Cacolo, Angola, 16 June

  Riley stood at the wire, staring at the medical shelter that had appeared the previous night. The sun had been up for a while, but they had not seen the two men from USAMRIID since their dramatic arrival the previous evening. The soldiers of the AOB were keeping a conspicuous distance and from the time the helicopter had left carrying the samples, Riley had noticed a distinct lack of air traffic into the area.

  “Did you sleep?” Conner asked, appearing at his shoulder, with dark circles around her eyes.

  “Some,” Riley said.

  “What’s the trick? I didn’t get a minute of rest.”

  “It was more falling into unconsciousness than sleeping,” Riley said. “After a while the body can only take so much. Plus I try not to brood on things I can’t control.”

  Conner pointed at the shelter. “Like them?”

  “Them and this virus,” Riley said.

  “I’m worried about Seeger,” Conner said, changing the subject.

  Riley turned and looked at her. “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The door to the shelter was opening and the two men were coming out, dressed in their blue space suits. From the direction of the AOB a party of men were also coming, all wearing their military issue gas masks.

  “Looks like we have a meeting to attend,” Riley said. “Better get the others.”

  The internees gathered at the entrance to the wire while Major Lindsay and other representatives from the AOB—looking very uncomfortable in their protective masks—and the two men from USAMRIID stood just outside.

  Riley nudged Comsky. “Will those gas masks work on an airborne virus?”

  “I doubt it,” Comsky said, “but it’s better than nothing. You know the Russians used to issue their soldiers an ‘anti-radiation’ pill to be taken in case of nuclear attack, right?”

  “So, you’re saying the masks are more for morale than reality,” Riley replied.

  “Yeah, although they don’t do much for my morale,” Comsky said.

  Riley’s curse—and his gift—was an ability to project several moves ahead, and he saw trouble in the form of the three groups gathered here in three different states of protection. From those inside the wire who might already be the walking dead, to the AOB personnel in gas masks, to the USAMRIID people in full body suits with respirators. The other bad thing was that the people who understood the threat the best were also the best protected.

  Major Lindsay’s voice was muffled. “Nothing’s changed, other than we have to wear these damn things. Everything’s still on hold. No one comes in or goes out.”

  A mechanical voice echoed out and Riley guessed it came from the man with “Tyron” stenciled on his chest. “We’ve run tests. It’s not Ebola. It’s not Marburg. But we believe it is a virus.”

  “Do you know the vector?” Comsky asked.

  “Not for certain,” Kieling said. “But it is most likely body fluids. All the filo-viruses we’ve found before are transmitted through body fluids.”

  That made Riley wonder why the gas masks, then? Comsky had a point with the ‘placebo’ theory, but it didn’t totally connect. Simple surgical masks would have been more practical.

  “A filo-virus?” Comsky asked.

  “A ‘thread virus,’” Kieling said. “Most viruses are round. A filo is long. Looks like a jumbled string. Ebola’s a filo, as is Marburg.”

 
“So this is a cousin to Ebola?” Comsky asked.

  “We don’t know,” Kieling said. “We’re not even certain it’s a filo-virus. We have to wait for them to look at it through an electron microscope at Fort Detrick.”

  “Can you test us for it?” the medic persisted.

  “We’re working on that,” Kieling said.

  “We sent samples back to Fort Detrick,” Tyron piped up, searching for anything to say. “As Dr. Kieling said, they’ll have a better look at it and they have the proper equipment to work on it. All we could do here was test to see if it was something we’d seen before. This thing is an emerging virus.”

  “Emerging from where?” Riley asked.

  “We don’t know,” Kieling said.

  “What the fuck do you know?” Sergeant Lome demanded.

  “Easy, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Vickers called out. She was seated on a crate, her broken ankle sticking out straight with Comsky’s field expedient cast wrapped tightly about it.

  “So you don’t have any idea what it is or how to treat it. Right?” Comsky said.

  “We hope that—” Tyron began but Mike Seeger’s voice cut in.

  “It is the wrath of God. He is punishing all of us for waging war. You must put down your weapons and accept that which you have brought upon yourself.”

  Riley rubbed his forehead, now understanding what Conner had meant earlier.

  “Shut him up!” Lome ordered Conner.

  “You cannot stop the power of God!” Seeger yelled.

  Conner grabbed her cameraman by the arm. “Come on, Mike. Let’s go talk about it.” She guided him away to one of the tents.