by Larry Baxter
"Absolutely not, sir," said Bartok, smiling broadly. "Caution is our middle name."
"I'll keep an eye on him, sir," said Bela. "He's just a kid. Sometimes he tends to get carried away. I will be a moderating influence. Mature. Responsible."
Gabor looked at the ceiling for guidance and found none.
Chapter 48
* * *
Yucatán Peninsula, November 27, 2010
Bela and Bartok flew over the jungle canopy in the ultralight aircraft at twenty-five mph—wingtip to wingtip—clearing the treetops by a dozen feet. Bela's plane was equipped with a wireless video camera and a GPS satellite navigation receiver to log position. Robert and Kiraly had fixed Bartok up with some hastily improvised flower harvesting gear. In the hotel, the botanist, Joyce Lord, watched a television monitor showing the camera's view and listened to Bela's spirited rendition of "Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen! Up in the Air, Upside Down!" The picture rotated through three-sixty degrees and stabilized again.
"Hold it!" she said. "Over to your right!"
"Aye, Captain." The view tilted sharply and swung obediently to the right and the sound track changed to the theme from Jaws.
"There! Just under you now. The tallest tree, there. Move in closer." As the camera swung low over the treetop, she said, "That looks good, I think I see dozens of blooms."
Bartok circled once and throttled down, unbuckling his seat belt and checking his helmet. "Incoming! Heavy flak! Losing number three! Abandon ship! Curse you, Red Baron!" Then he killed the engine, dived from his seat and fell twenty feet into the thick canopy of interlocking tree branches. He wore a harness and a backpack, and the mesh of nylon line attached to his harness soon entangled in the branches, bringing him up short. A hundred feet away the plane landed like a feather in the treetops.
Bartok looped a line around a large branch and cut away from the mesh, dropping through the green canopy, and hung suspended on twenty feet of line. "Roger, Akumal, contact!" he said into the microphone. "We have entry!"
The botanist's voice in his ear asked, "Can you point your camera at the flowers?"
"10-4, Akumal, commencing point camera on my mark. Mark." He swung the camera around in a full circle. He was surrounded by hundreds of blooms, a hundred fifty feet in the air.
"Yes!" said the botanist's excited voice. "There they are! All around you!"
"Roger that, confirm all around. Commencing extravehicular activity on my count. One." Bartok took a nylon line with a grapnel from his pack and slung it over a tree branch, swung to a new position, and repeated the process with a second grapnel. Then, pulling a empty pointed plastic two-gallon bottle from the pack, he grabbed the flowers and filled the bottle, jockeying himself around by pulling on the nylon lines, humming "Hooray for Hollywood" to himself.
"Hey, Joyce Lord," Bartok asked in a more normal tone.
"Yes?" asked the botanist.
"Can I smush the flowers, or should I keep 'em separate?"
"Smush is OK."
"Roger that, Akumal, confirm smush OK," he repeated. Then he reached a little too far for a bloom and lost a grapnel, swinging momentarily in a huge arc through the air. His Tarzan yell reverberated through the jungle.
"I didn't get that," asked Lord. "Are you still there?"
He began climbing the remaining rope to regain the treetops.
"Dropped the vine. But I'm still here, Jane."
"Joyce."
"Joyce. I've got about a gallon of flower mush, if that'll get you started."
A cheer from the distant room filled his ears.
"Send it on up," said Bela, circling in the other plane.
"Roger roger, 10-4, flowers coming on up." Bartok pulled a tiny gas cylinder and a deflated weather balloon from his pack and filled the balloon to a diameter of three feet. He played out the eighth-inch nylon line spliced to the balloon. The balloon disappeared through the leaves.
Bela's voice, again: "I see it. Tie off the bottle."
Bartok tied the line to the pointed end of his plastic flower bottle so it couldn't get hung up on a limb and added a piece of duct tape to make sure. He held the bottle upraised as Bela flew his plane's undercarriage into the balloon, deflating the balloon but picking up the looped end of the line in the metal hook that Kiraly had fitted to the plane. The bottle crashed through the leaves, and Bela hauled it in, flying with his knees.
"We have lift-off, Houston," advised Bartok. Then he pulled out another bottle and began filling it.
"Comin' on in," said Bela. "I got a gallon of flower mush, and Bartok's working on another two gallons. I hope this stuff works. I hope the chopper gets here before his plane disappears into the trees."
Chapter 49
* * *
Akumal
Bela circled the compound in the float-equipped ultralight, touched down in the ocean, and ran the airplane up on the beach. The bottle containing the flowers was carried on the run up to the lab, to the waiting technicians. Ed Reines, the operator of the charge microscope, grabbed a sample and ran off to his lab.
In the hotel and in the equipment trailers in the parking lot, the production line was ready. They were going to try three preparations: a simple whole-flower purée for oral administration, a liquids-only oral preparation and a filter-sterilized fraction for oral and hypodermic injection. They had no idea what the active ingredients would be or what the appropriate dosage would be, so they prepared various dilutions down to one part in a thousand in saline solution in the hope that the needed dosage would be low.
Each preparation had a hastily assembled production line, the whole-flower preparation in a trailer and the two others in two of the large ground-floor hotel rooms. In each venue long tables were arrayed with equipment, with cardboard cartons of bottles and disposable hypodermics racked underneath. On the tables label stock was waiting in the paper trays of the computer printer to receive the final description of the contents. White-coated technicians worked the machines, spun the centrifuges, doled out the precious flowers carefully to each new process, cultured centrifuge fractions in agar, and brought samples to the second trailer to get an analysis with the gas chromatograph.
Robert ran from one lab to the next, following the progress. He was interrupted by Ed Reines, the charge microscope operator, wearing a wide grin and holding a piece of paper. "Look, sir!" he said, happily. "It's an exact match!"
Robert compared the images, the Tulum glyph and the flower's charge pattern. Identical. The flower was the one that Peloc had discovered and used as an antidote. He grabbed a surprised Ed Reines and hugged him, and ran back to try to speed up the already frantic activity in the labs.
Robert helped out on the production line as the flowers were diluted, strained, bottled in the rubber-cap hypodermic bottle and the fifty cc liquid bottle, pipetted into the disposable syringes, and labeled "BROMELIAD EXTRACT 1% EXPERIMENTAL not FDA approved."
Robert waited by the first table for the first syringes. He grabbed twelve and jogged over to the isolation trailer. Outside, the Mexican government had dispatched a hundred medical professionals and another hundred Guardia Nacional troops to the area. The hotel looked like a military base.
The paramedics working in the isolation trailer stopped Robert. "Sorry, Dr. Asher, you need a Racal suit."
"The respirator should work, if I'm careful. I'm in a hurry, I have the flower extract, the Maya cure."
"We'll help. Are the disposables set up with the correct dose?"
"We have no idea. They're set up with half a cc each, we hope that's overkill. There's a range of dilutions, also, marked on the syringes. Full dose to everybody, more dilute to the recent victims. Mark the dilution on their card."
They moved through the airlock. A nurse looked up in alarm, safe in her orange Racal suit, her brown eyes showing worry about his lack of correct precautions. Robert reassured her in his improving Spanish as he snapped on rubber gloves. They fanned out to administer the extract.
A dozen people�
�men, women and children—were on makeshift cots. Some had IV drips, all had EKG electrodes bandaged to their skin and blood pressure cuffs connected to a full rack of equipment with bright green oscilloscope displays showing cardiac activity profiles. Two patients had oxygen tubes taped to their nostrils.
Robert saw Pépé's card. His eyes were closed, forehead beaded with sweat, and he was breathing with great difficulty, mouth wide open and filled with a huge swollen tongue covered with pustules and with a color halfway between blood red and black. Robert swabbed the brown arm and administered the preparation.
Teresa lay in the next bed. She stirred restlessly in the soggy heat of the aluminum isolation trailer, fanned by the warm breeze from an ineffective air conditioner. She was not as involved as Pépé. Her eyes were tight shut and she was trying ineffectively to clear her throat. Her body was spasming with each exhalation.
Robert stood by her bed wearing gown, gloves, and respirator. Her eyes opened, unfocused, and he put a hand on her forehead. His own throat suddenly felt constricted in sympathy. This had to work—make this work, please make this work. If there is a God, we need him now. Please, I will never ask for anything else. Please. He swabbed her arm.
"I'm still here?" she asked.
"You're still here. Hang on for a few minutes, we've harvested the flower. Here's one for you."
He injected the preparation.
"Atta boy," she said, smiling, her eyes more alive. "Gonna fix us up, huh? Did you test it yet?"
"This is the test. This is the Maya cure."
"It'll work. Did you get enough for everybody?"
"Teresa, you are the loveliest woman in Mexico. And the most exciting. The most intelligent. The most caring. And when we get through this, I will personally get you anything in the world."
"Recording contract with Julio Iglesias?"
"Almost anything in the world. Are you comfortable, is there anything you need now?"
"OK," she coughed. "I'll trade the recording gig for dry sheets."
He worked the sheet replacement with the help of the nurse, touched her forehead again, and watched for a minute as she fell asleep, her breathing labored and noisy and her face beaded with perspiration.
* * *
In the isolation trailer, Robert and the technicians finished their ministrations and delegated a technician and the Mexican nurse to monitor vital signs. If the extract was going to work, they would expect some indication in two or three hours for the injections, maybe an hour longer for the oral doses.
On the way back to the hotel he found Miguel and embraced him.
"Is there hope?" Miguel asked.
"He is in the hands of God, and the hands of the Maya scientist who worked here twelve centuries ago. I have no right to say this, but I will. Officially, it is a thousand to one against, especially as the disease has progressed quite far with your son. I am not sure if he will fully recover, and we have no experience with anyone who recovered from the virus at this stage, so we cannot say what shape his organs will be in. But I think that he will live, he was fighting hard. I trust this Maya, this Peloc who showed us the cure."
"How long?"
"Hours, now, one way or the other. Stay here, we'll keep you informed."
"Graciàs a Dios," said Miguel, and sank to his knees in prayer.
* * *
They faced a phalanx of reporters in the hotel, their ranks increased to more than two dozen. "I say!" said a man with "Reuters" on his tape recorder. "Dr. Asher! Did we understand correctly? Have you indeed found the cure?"
"We translated the Maya writing," he said. "It said that the Maya cured a black-tongue disease in the year 850 with a tropical flower extract and it named the flower, a bromeliad. We harvested the flower and prepared a dilute extract that we have administered to twelve people in the Mexican medical trailer. There are literally a hundred things that could go wrong, the flower may have evolved in twelve centuries, it may not have been the flower itself but a particular local mold colony, we may have misinterpreted the cave writing, and the virus may have the same symptoms but not be the same virus at all."
CBS asked, "When will you know for sure?"
"Eight hours minimum, if the progress is equivalent to the course of similar viral infections. Two or three hours until we see the first upturn in the vital signs. Blood pressure, white blood cell count, and pulse will show changes if we're on the right track. Then a day or two for most symptoms to disappear. Then we do a final check for side effects. Don't forget, we're still long odds against. There are a lot of things that can go wrong."
NBC spoke next. "Suppose it works? There's almost twenty thousand people with the disease, and a thousand a day are dying. Do you have enough of these flowers?"
"We have a limited supply of flowers. We sent a helicopter into the forest a few hours ago, and fifty volunteers are being airlifted into the jungle canopy to do the harvesting. We have a way using helium balloons to pick up the flower extract—that's working well. But we have no idea if we have enough flowers until we find out how much we can dilute the extract and still have it medically active. If it is medically active."
"How do you find out what dilution works?"
"We try it. We prepared a thousand to one span of dilutions for the first victims in the truck."
A woman from Star magazine was horrified. "You mean some of those poor people might not get enough to cure them?"
"We gave dilute doses only to people in the early stages of the disease. If they show no improvement, we'll give them a larger dose. But this is all conjecture, most likely the flower extract will do nothing. It's much too soon to predict victory."
Star magazine spoke again. "Your associate, Doctor Welles, we understand she has the virus. Can you confirm that?"
"She is sick, yes, early stages. She has received the preparation."
"Can you handle production and distribution?" asked RadioGrafica de Mexico.
"We can have dosage for fifty thousand people bottled in two to four hours, if the dilute doses work, and a military jet is standing by in Cancún," said Robert.
Art Baker spoke in Robert's ear. "There is a Federale, a Colonel Muñoz, in a fast car waiting outside to make the run to Cancún. He says he used to race in the Daytona 500 before he became a policeman. His men are stationed between here and Cancún ready to stop other traffic. He will be accompanied by a man in mechanic's coveralls who says he can change a tire on a Lamborghini in less than a minute. He estimates fifteen minutes for the trip."
"Lord save us all," said Robert. "You couldn't get a helicopter?"
"There were none in Cancún, and ours is two hours out," responded Baker.
"This mechanic," asked Robert, "is he a short bald guy? Smoking a cigar?"
"That's him."
"Lord save us all," said Robert, again.
The next two hours dragged by. The translators, for form's sake, were finishing up the details and dotting the i's. Robert talked with Dr. Teppin on the big videoconference screen in the corner, updating him on the progress, and Dr. Teppin gave him the latest statistics from Texas. They were not good—same story again—a rainstorm had left the air with high humidity and the virus had jumped the latest isolation barrier. The medical team had retreated with more losses.
With the collapsing bureaucracy, Teppin's contact in Houston had not been able to locate Robert's daughter.
Finally Robert couldn't stand the charged atmosphere and retreated to the isolation truck with a clipboard and a pencil. He stood by Teresa's bed, watching her sleep. Her vital signs were unchanged but her breath was becoming labored.
He entered her numbers, plotting blood pressure, pulse rate, arterial blood gases, and core temperature, and repeated the exercise with the other victims. The plot lines were all a little jagged but showed no clear trend. He took the portable videoconference camera with him and called up the display screen in the hotel's large ballroom so the reporters and technicians could also follow the progress of the graphs
. As each new measurement was made, he would add a pencil tick and connect the line. The reporters learned about acidosis, carbon dioxide partial pressure, and the significance of rising blood pressure.
For the next hour, a tense silence settled on the little community as more and more people gathered in the ballroom and watched the screen, including Miguel and the other Maya who were invited from the parking lot. The dots marched relentlessly horizontal, with perhaps a slight downward trend—the disease was still winning the fight. Robert thought of all the preparation—the hope, the condemned victims in Texas, Teresa with her trust and courage—and a numbness overtook him.
Then an up tick happened. Blood Ph edged upwards from seven point two to seven point two five. PO2, the concentration of oxygen in the blood, improved a fraction. Or was it just a random occurrence? Everyone edged forward and the silence deepened. Another slight improvement. And then another.
In the ballroom, it felt as if everyone was holding his breath. Robert, in the trailer, could not dare hope yet. The respiration and cardiac data was interesting, but the white blood cell counts would tell the story and these were being taken only every fifteen minutes. Another up tick, but then a down tick. Nobody spoke. Ten minutes passed. Another up tick. And then a white blood cell count: better. And fifteen minutes later, another: much better. Then PO2 and Ph moved in the good direction. Robert felt the huge vise that had clamped his chest for the last four hours slowly releasing. He closed his eyes and said softly, "Thank you, thank you."
In the ballroom, researchers and reporters and technicians and accountants looked away from the upward lines on the screen to each other's tense faces: Was this it? Was this good enough? When would anyone break the silence? Now? Now? Robert added one more dot and drew a steep upward curve through it with a slash of his pencil.
"Yes!" screamed a doctor. "All Right!" yelled a technician. Everyone let out the compressed emotion of the last weeks in a celebration that rocked the hotel and was seen and heard through the live network satellite feeds on every television channel and on every radio band. The reporters felt no need to comment, the upward curve of the graph and the hoarse voices of the researchers told the story.