Monkey Business

by Tymber Dalton

  When she finished that, she put on a fresh surgical face mask and headed down to the front desk in search of food. A few minutes later, and following a walk across the street to a pizza joint, she was back in her room and filling her stomach.

  She believed with all her soul that Dr. Phe Quong was still alive.

  And if he was, and he was here, she would find him.

  Three hours later, she’d finished her pizza and had read through all the information Mike had sent her. She knew she needed to try to sleep again, to kick-start her body into Australian time.

  After finding another TV station, this one a boring government channel with a news reader droning on about the latest goings-on in Australia’s parliament, she turned the volume down low enough it wouldn’t disturb her.

  Bunch of bozos. Probably as worthless as congress.

  She undressed and climbed under the covers and closed her eyes after setting the alarm to wake her at seven in the morning.

  It was journalists who’d found the terror cell responsible for the Paris bombing two years earlier. It was journalists who’d made the breakthrough in the anthrax attack on Los Angeles just a year ago, right before everything hit the fan with Kite.

  Not law enforcement. Not the military.

  Journalists. Like her, and like Mike.

  And she wanted to help make history.

  Hell, she wanted to help save history.

  Chapter Seven

  Tango wasn’t fond of the helo flights no matter how much he liked Victor. Victor being the Drunk Monkeys’ resident helo jockey. He could also fly small fixed-wing airplanes, a skill which had come in handy a few times, but he didn’t have ratings on larger fixed-wing transport aircraft.

  No matter, their unit had its own Exhart 850 helo, a massive double-rotor job that could carry up to forty SOBs and equipment.

  Six hours later, they were packed, loaded, and flying west across the South China Sea toward their home base in Manila. From there they’d be transported to Sydney via military transport plane. Then on a smaller local military helo to a US ship waiting just offshore from Melbourne, which would then take them ashore.

  It beat having to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft with a parachute, he supposed. Something he avoided doing whenever possible.

  He popped in a piece of gum and frantically started chewing.

  Doc sat across from him, propped up against his own ruck, a smile on his face.

  “What?” Tango grunted.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t bust my nuts.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  He glared at Doc before he pulled his floppy hat down further over his eyes. He could sleep in nearly any conditions.

  Except on an aircraft.

  He wasn’t sure he liked this assignment, although he liked it a hell of a lot better than their last one. He’d been itching to clear out of the Indochina area as soon as they’d landed there. It was only a matter of time before they ran into a large band of Kiters, and his predictions had been ass-on.

  Next time, they might not be so lucky.

  His gut instincts were that Dr. Li Kim might have been in the area, but cleared out long before they got there. If the doctor had any intentions of working on fixing this mess, he’d want to be somewhere with access to equipment.

  Not in the middle of a fucking jungle sweating his balls off.

  Tango wasn’t a doctor or a scientist, just a medic, but that was his educated guess.

  He didn’t have to look to know Doc still sat there, smiling at him. “When you think we’re gonna get some R and R?” Tango asked him.

  Doc let out a snort audible over the sound of the engines. “In your fucking dreams, buddy. Maybe if they come up with a vaccine.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” Tango hadn’t been home to Texas in six years. It’d been well over a year since their unit had more than a day’s worth of leave.

  Fortunately, none of them were married. That was actually a prerequisite to make it onto a SOTIF team. Unmarried, no kids. That way, their minds would be completely focused on the mission at hand. They’d been through some pretty hairy stuff over the years, mostly related to taking down terror cells and organizations.

  Piece of cake compared to what they were now going through with the Kite-related missions.

  In the rear of the cabin, Echo was listening to old Indian pop music on his player. Eyes closed, he’d apparently forgotten he wasn’t alone in the helo and was currently bobbing his head in time with the music, singing Hindi lyrics out loud that he didn’t even understand.

  Tango raised his hat and stared at the man before meeting Doc’s gaze.

  No, Doc mouthed. Leave him alone.

  While he wasn’t an inbred Texas hick who wanted to listen to nothing but country music, his nerves were already stretched to their limit by the flight.

  The last thing he wanted to do was listen to that music for another few hours into Manila.

  The second last thing he wanted to do was listen to Echo singing along with it, in addition to watching him dance in place to it.

  Doc took care of it, getting up and walking to the back of the cabin and kicking Echo’s foot. “Earbuds, asshole. The rest of us don’t want to listen to the best of Bollywood all the way there.”

  Not that there was a Bollywood anymore, the avian flu epidemic fifteen years ago more than halving the population of India. Rural regions, where populations were less dense, had survived far better than congested urban areas, with farmers and other agricultural interests now controlling the economy and the politics there. Meaning the tech giant had toppled as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune were now little more than ghost towns filled with concrete towers and miles of fiberoptic cables with no techs to man the deserted IT firms that had once ruled India’s economy from there.

  Echo looked up at Doc, then glanced at Tango. Instead of bitching, Echo dug a set of earbuds out of his pocket, plugged them into his player, and then inserted them in his ears after flipping Tango a bird.

  Doc settled back into his position across the cabin from Tango. “Better?”

  Tango nodded and pulled his hat down again. “Thanks.”

  * * * *

  It was close to sundown when they landed in Manila, Victor setting the helo down as gently as a raw egg in its shell. He shut the engines off as everyone stirred and stretched.

  Tango sat up and breathed a sigh of relief before slowly climbing to his feet. “Load and unload,” he muttered as he reached for his rucksack.

  “We’re only going to be here for about four hours,” Papa advised them. “I suggest if you need anything, hit the quartermaster’s depot with Omega right now. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear any bitching later.”

  After Doc stuck everyone before they disembarked, Tango dumped his two rucksacks on the motorized cart one of the ground crew brought over for them to use. Then he followed Doc without question, knowing his partner would need help carrying supplies. Uni, their logistics specialist, would make sure their shit made it onto the transport.

  Tango kept up with Doc and Omega as they strode across the base toward the quartermaster’s depot. SOTIF teams pretty much had carte blanche in terms of supplies, being that they were two-legged weapons. They got gear, weapons, ammo—whatever they needed, when they needed it, without having to endure a bunch of bullshit paperwork to procure it in the process.

  One of the few perks of their dangerous job.

  Omega and Doc produced their lists at the same time as they stepped up to the quartermaster’s counter.

  The QM eyed them. “Who gets first dibs?”

  “I just need a few things,” Doc said. “Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  The QM glanced at Omega, who shrugged. “Sure.”

  He grabbed Doc’s list. “Be right back,” he said before disappearing into the bowels of the building.

  “What are you getting?” Omega asked. “I thought we were set?”

&nbs
p; “Test strips, for starters. Some other gear and supplies I want us to have. And, since we’re here, some meds we don’t have. Just in case.”

  Oscar and Yankee, twin brothers, walked through the door at the same time. “They closed?” they parroted.

  “Nope,” Tango drawled. “Take a number, boys.”

  Twenty minutes later, Tango and Doc were lugging several duffle bags of supplies back toward the tarmac. “Can I ask you something, Doc?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s with the po-clo?” Tango wasn’t an idiot. He knew what potassium chloride was used for, had heard about it now being standard issue on ships and aboard commercial and military aircraft.

  Doc stopped and turned to him, his voice low. “Don’t say a word.”

  “Does Papa know?”

  “It was his suggestion.”

  “What the hell?” He stared at his friend. “You expecting us to die out there?”

  “No, but look what happened. What if one of our guys had come back blue, okay? You want to be the one to put a bullet in his brain, or you want me to humanely put him out of his misery if it looks like he won’t get better?”

  Tango didn’t want to ponder either of those possibilities. “Fuck, man.”

  “You think I like this? I get to be the one who does it if it happens.”

  “I’d put a bullet through my own brain if I had it. I wouldn’t make someone else do it.”

  “Yeah, and splatter blood and gore and Kite virus all over the place and possibly infect others?”

  His face fell. “Shit.”

  “Exactly.” Doc started toward the tarmac again. “Not my favorite idea, either. But if one of our guys gets Kite and it looks like he’s either not going to shake it off, or he’ll be far worse off if he survives it, I’m not going to sit there with my thumb up my ass and watch it happen and not do something.”

  They’d seen the videos. End-stage Kite, if the person was still up and ambulatory—which they frequently weren’t—was horrific. A rabies-like madness took over, goading them to attack anyone they could reach.

  Also spreading the infection through blood and saliva, if they didn’t kill the person they were attacking.

  Even before that stage, victims infected with the virus displayed erratic and sometimes violent behavior.

  It was very rare for someone to survive the infection after the disease ravaged their system. Most of the survivors would have been better off dying from the initial infection. There were unconfirmed rumors that many “survivors” were in such a persistent vegetative state after Kite that they were humanely euthanized rather than place an increased burden on already overwhelmed health care professionals.

  Recently, there seemed to be two distinct presentations of Kite emerging, according to World Health Organization reports over the past couple of weeks. The first and most common being similar to rabies, and now a second, almost Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever that killed a person through internal bleeding before they could reach the violent stage.

  No one understood yet if this was a mutation or if there were other reasons why the virus would present itself in a different way in certain patients. At first, it’d been believed to be two separate diseases, until closer examination showed the viruses were nearly identical at a cellular level.

  Tango knew if he had a choice and came up blue, he’d take a shot of po-clo over the alternative.

  Chapter Eight

  Doc was glad to set foot on dry land again when they reached the Melbourne base before dawn that morning. Uni quickly procured them two open-bed solar hybrid-powered trucks, a minivan, and a car, into which they loaded their gear and themselves before speeding away.

  Papa rode shotgun in the cab of the lead truck. The information they had said the journalist was checked into a hotel in Melbourne. They had a prearranged safe house waiting for them, and that would be their first stop to dump equipment and plan search logistics.

  From there…

  Then it was Papa’s call. The twenty of them couldn’t go running around Melbourne in their camos and waving guns in the air.

  Not even the Aussies would tolerate that kind of bullshit, and they were pretty much batcrap crazy to start with, especially after years of battling militant terrorists on their home soil. Which was the reason everyone had been so shocked over the airport bombing in Melbourne just before Christmas. The Australian government and people took a pretty dim view about that kind of nonsense. The Australian military and law enforcement agencies had taken great pains to aggressively infiltrate and quash those kinds of militant organizations over the past few decades before the terror cells could grow to that point.

  They’d somehow missed one.

  After reaching their safe house and unloading, Papa quickly handed out orders while going over maps with them. “Doc, Tango, you two head up grabbing the reporter with Quack and Lima in the minivan.” He pointed to a spot near the safe house on the map. “Take the reporter to here and hold her after you grab her. Wait there until I give you an all-clear. Alpha, you and Roscoe and Niner take the car and find out where the Quongs are. When you find the Quongs, stay there and phone in.” He handed out burner cells that would work in Australia. They went through them like candy some missions.

  “Why do we have to go?” Doc asked.

  “Because she’s going to be pissed off when you grab her,” Papa said. “She’ll need a stick test. And you’ll be able to reason with her about why she needs to calm down. And if that doesn’t work, tranq her ass.”

  Doc felt a chill settle over him. “We’re not liquidating her, are we?”

  “Not our orders. But we can’t let her get in the way of our mission, either. I’d prefer keeping her safe until we get Quong out of here and we’re on our way.”

  Doc relaxed a little. He didn’t like the idea of having to kill innocent civvies. “Got it.”

  “Uni, Omega, you two arrange another safe house we can use for the family. We’ll want to move them ASAP. If one reporter could locate them, others might follow.”

  “On it,” Omega said. They left to make the arrangements.

  “Okay,” Papa said. “You have your orders. Jeans, not uniforms, and concealed sidearms. Quick and quiet. Let’s move.”

  * * * *

  Between her nerves, excitement, and the havoc wreaked on her system by jet lag and the time difference, Celia didn’t get as much sleep as she’d wanted. But by eight the next morning, she was armed with a face mask, laptop, tablet, sat-phone, and all the information Mike had provided to her.

  She also had a digital camera that would take both stills and video. When she found the doctor, she would document everything.

  She didn’t let herself contemplate the possibility that she might not find him.

  She ate breakfast in the small coffee shop in the hotel’s lobby, hot tea and cold cereal and fresh fruit. While she ate, she again perused the information Mike had sent her, which she’d put on her tablet to access more easily while out and about. Cross-referencing that with a local map, she carefully planned her route, wanting one less stressor to distract her.

  Hopefully, Dr. Quong wouldn’t react violently when she confronted him.

  Maybe I should have thought about that before.

  Not that there was much she could do to defend herself if he did.

  There’s a lot of stuff I should have thought out a little more carefully, come to think about it.

  Better to travel to Australia and maybe make a difference in the world than to sit back in Chicago and wait for the possibility of someone, somewhere, getting off their asses and sifting through all the data.

  She flipped to the photos app on her tablet and looked at a picture of her nephew and niece. Emily and Roger were adorable. And at the rate she was going, likely the closest she’d ever get to kids of her own.

  This is why I’m doing this. So they have a chance to make it to adulthood.

  And no matter how difficult her journey, she wouldn’t for
get that, or them.

  * * * *

  At least the weather had cleared a little. While still overcast and chilly, it wasn’t raining today. Celia had brought her jacket just in case, glad to have it.

  Following the map, she cautiously pulled out onto the road, careful not to turn into the wrong lane. Her destination was a grocery store in a small suburb just to the north of town. The prepaid cards had been repeatedly used at the market over the past few months, in a relatively predictable pattern.

  Likely where they were doing their regular shopping, if she had to guess.

  That meant wherever they were staying was probably in the immediate area. Based on how often they were making purchases, if Celia had to, she could stake out the place and wait for someone to arrive who matched one of the passport photos she had.

  It was her only plan at the moment. She just hoped she didn’t run out of time.

  There’d been a report that morning on the news of another large Kite outbreak in Vietnam. Health officials were pulling out of the area and letting the military handle it from that point on. That entire area was unstable. It wouldn’t take much longer for refugees to start flooding south, and then find boats to take them even farther.

  Australia’s government knew it had a bull’s-eye painted squarely across its landscape. It wasn’t a matter of if widespread Kite infections would reach its shores, it was a matter of when. Yes, controlling who arrived on airplanes and commercial and passenger vessels was great, but not even the military could patrol their thousands of miles of coastlines.

  And it would only take one infected Kite patient getting loose in a highly populated area to spread the disease like wildfire.

  Celia hoped to be off the continent and on her way back to the US well before that happened.

  It took her nearly thirty minutes to make her way to the store. After finding a parking space and turning off the ignition, she sat there and went through her information one more time. The store wasn’t as small as she’d hoped it’d be, but it wasn’t as large as some of the supermarkets in Chicago, either. So that, at least, worked in her favor.