“Hello, stranger!” Leslie shouted.
“Hey, beautiful.”
It brought a smile to Leslie’s face. Paul always could. Leslie could hear lots of background noise. Beeping. A woman on a loudspeaker. A series of choppy, harsh announcements in what sounded like Mandarin. Perhaps the motel lobby or an office.
“Where are you Paul?”
“I’m in an airplane hangar in Beijing.”
“Are you coming home? Mom said that you had some news.”
“Something’s up. I can’t verify exactly what, but the military is out in full force.”
“Aren’t they always?” Leslie asked.
“Not like this. They’re expelling all foreign journalists, me included. I’m scheduled to leave immediately on one of the big UN planes. For some reason they’re being turned around. China didn’t even let them offload their cargo.”
“That’s weird.”
“And the military. They’re all wearing biohazard suits.”
“Biohazard suits?”
“What’s going on, Paul?”
“I don’t know. I got a friend in Shandong Province near Rizhao on the Coast. He was sending me pictures and e-mails, but I haven’t heard from him in two days now. I think he’s been quarantined.”
“What were the pictures of?” Leslie asked.
News reports had been showing disease outbreaks in the tsunami-ravaged areas, but they were reporting malaria. The reports were fairly vague, and the video even more so, panned out as it was and heavily censored by the Chinese government.
Paul was whispering now.
“Rumors are small pox, but we have pictures of some of the dead who still have scars from their inoculation.”
Jake was now listening intently to Leslie’s side of the conversation as Paul continued.
“The last known case of small pox was in Somalia in ’77, I think. But whatever it is, the government’s pretty damn worried. The newspapers are downplaying the story, but they’re not fooling anyone. People are freaking out. One of the interpreters heard about something called mouse pox.”
“Mouse pox?” Leslie repeated.
When Jake heard those words, his blood ran cold. He raced to the kitchen and grabbed the extension.
“What did you say about mouse pox?” Jake asked.
Paul repeated what he’d told Leslie.
“Is that what they think?” Jake asked.
“It’s just unconfirmed rumors right now,” Paul said.
Leslie started to say something, but Jake interrupted her, something he had never done in all the years he’d known her.
“You get the hell out of there, Paul.”
“What’s the matter, Jake?”
“Get out of there!” he yelled. “This is one story you don’t want to cover.”
None of them had even heard Jake like that. Leslie and June were staring at him in the doorway of the kitchen, for the first time in their lives sensing fear in him.
“Jake, I’m being told to leave by a man with a gun. We’re going to Germany. Don’t worry. We’re just waiting for the plane to refuel.
“Good.” Jake lowered his voice, disappointed that he’d obviously scared the hell out of the girls, and probably Paul, as well. “Call us when you’re there.”
“We’ll book you a ticket home,” Leslie chimed in. “What airport are you flying into?”
“Cologne-Bonn. UN headquarters there. Then we should be able to get a flight out of Dusseldorf, or maybe even Bonn.”
“We’ll check.”
“Gotta go. Men with guns.”
“I love you.”
“Love y-”
Paul was gone. Or at least his connection was.
Leslie hung up the phone, a terrified look on her face. Jake went to her side.
“He’s going to be fine.”
“Men with guns?” Leslie asked.
“Honey, that’s just the Chinese way to get those damned reporters on the plane, show they mean business.”
Leslie wasn’t fooled by the seemingly innocent explanation.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“What the hell is mouse pox?”
Chapter 7
Robert Williams kept a journal from his senior year of high school until the day he died. Jotting down his thoughts was a habit he’d picked up his last year of English. It was a course he excelled at, and he had even flirted with the idea of becoming a journalist. It was fleeting.
For Robert there was only one career choice, one he would never regret. He entered the military in the faded footsteps of his father and his father before, but he never gave up his journals. Through illness, hard times, and war, he kept writing.
When he retired at fifty-five, his journals changed. They took on more of a satirical tone, displaying wit and humor, and an odd passion for the weather that Leslie and her mother insisted bordered on obsession. After a lifetime of carefully guarded structure it, seemed to be a harmless obsession.
Roberts was extremely well organized. So it was a simple task for Jake to find the relevant journals.
“Here we go. December 1978 to January 1979.” Jake got a chill just saying it out loud. The dates were ingrained in his memory.
“I don’t think I’ve ever read from this box,” June said, “There are just so many of them.”
The three of them sat in the basement, going through the boxes of journals, each one neatly labeled and containing equally neatly kept leather notebooks.
Jake leafed through January, scrutinizing its contents. Robert had written approximately ten pages per day during that month, very detailed. Other times, he would fill only three pages.
“What do you remember about that time, June?”
“Robert told me it was a simple precautionary quarantine in the Gap, but I knew he was worried about you.”
“Anything else?”
She paused slightly as her memory shuffled through slices of time so long ago. “I remember he was gone longer than I’d expected and when he came home, he was unusually quiet. But I knew he would come around. He always did. Oh God. He would never discuss the details of a sensitive mission.”
“It was quarantine, all right, but it was far from simple. Everyone in that quarantine area died.’
“But you were there?”
“I was, but at another site that truly was precautionary.”
Jake handed her the journal. It was bound in rust-colored leather, cracked and softened with age. She flipped through the pages with Leslie reading over her shoulder.
“It was mouse pox?” June asked a worried look on her face.
Jake closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing up his steel rimmed glasses. June couldn’t tell if he was soothing a headache or formulating an answer.
“Yes. You realize he just wanted to protect you. ”
June bowed her head, breaking Jake’s gaze. She understood yet was sometimes jealous at the relationship Robert and Jake shared. It was always them behind a protective wall with tiny windows and shutters that only they could open.
“The CIA was there? And he has a list of doctors.” Leslie said, pointing to the page over her mother’s shoulder.
Jake huddled in, reading. “He never told me the CIA was there.”
June cast a quick glance towards Jake. Another wall?
“Could they have this disease?” Leslie asked.
Jake considered this. “The biological weapons treaty was ratified around that time, but that would never stop those bastards.”
“How else would it show up in China after all these years?” Leslie asked.
“Wait a second, kiddo. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“C’mon, Jake. The only place smallpox exists is in Atlanta and Koltsovo. Were the Russians in Panama?”
“What if there was an accident at a lab somewhere?” June asked.
“Or somebody sold it to terrorists?”
“Hold on!” Jake said, a bit more ada
mantly than he intended. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Paul didn’t confirm this. It’s a rumor at this point, and even if those rumors turn out to be true, I’m not inclined to jump to terrorists unless they were unaware of what they had. This kills everyone. They wouldn’t be able to contain it. Let’s remember, there’s always the possibility it occurred naturally. It did in Panama.”
Leslie was very imaginative, and also very suspicious. Jake thought it verged, at times, on paranoia. But then, every good journalist is a little paranoid. It’s probably what made her good at her job.
“But what if they have a vaccine? They’ve had thirty-one years to develop one. And if it exists, maybe the same terrorist group would know to acquire both?”
Leslie’s theory was dark and terrifying. But as far as Jake was concerned, if it was mouse pox, it didn’t matter where it came from. They would all be dead, regardless.
Cassandra poked her head around the corner from the stairway. She was in her pajamas and house coat; her eyes were red and puffy.
“Mom.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Leslie hugged her and wiped her face. Cassandra’s chin was quivering and her hair was wet from soaking up her tears.
“Did Daddy leave China?”
Her voice was cracked and thin, her breath hitching as she cried. Leslie glanced at Jake as she answered.
“Yes honey.”
“The…The news!” she said in a stuttered wail.
The three adults looked at each other. June hurried over to the television. It was old and struggled to come into focus but eventually did.
Quarantine in China.
It was plastered across the screen on every channel.
Outbreak of a mysterious disease hits China. Travel bans. Nobody in or out of numerous countries across Asia.
Fragmented reports dragged across the screen.
Leslie felt anxious as a flash of heat and nausea tightened the knot that had continued to worry her since Paul’s call. Was he all right? Had he made it out?
Jake looked over at Leslie and could see the color drain from her face as she stared at the television with Cassandra crying into her chest.
Jesus, Jake thought to himself. He could see Leslie was fighting to hold back the tears as the news reports continued to hammer home.
“I talked to your Dad, Honey. He’s coming home,” Leslie whispered in Cassie’s ear as she tried to comfort her, perhaps not as convincingly as she would have liked. “He was on the plane headed to Germany. I bought him two tickets home from there.”
She looked over Cassie’s shoulder at Jake.
Leslie’s face hid nothing but tears and Jake could see that it wasn’t just Cassandra that needed convincing.
“Your father is coming home, Cass. Don’t you worry.”
Jake came over and rubbed her back while Leslie rocked her. Leslie gave Jake a grateful look and walked Cassandra back to her room, turned the television off and lay down with her to cuddle. Leslie ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair that was still damp from her tears. Leslie’s thoughts drifted to a future, veiled yet terrifying. She lay there in the dark, tears streaming down her cheeks as her daughter drifted off.
Leslie left her daughter. Jake and her mother had returned to the main floor and were sitting in their recliners, television on. Leslie flopped onto the couch and joined them in worried silence.
Leslie was the first to speak.
“If it’s mouse pox, what do we do?”
“Only one thing we can do. Gather supplies and run. Find someplace isolated,” Jake answered.
“We should contact the doctors on Robert’s list,” June said. “Maybe they can help us.”
Jake tilted his head in thought. “Yeah, maybe.”
“After Robert’s death, some men came to the house and went through his things.” June said.
“Why?” Leslie asked.
“They said they needed to make sure he didn’t bring home any confidential files.”
“Did they read the journals?” Jake asked.
“They never saw them. They were tucked away in the crawlspace in the basement.”
“They said they were from the military, but they weren’t wearing uniforms.”
Leslie looked at Jake, who was likely thinking the same thing, CIA.
“Jake, if this is mouse pox, how long do you think it would take to get here from China?” June asked.
He looked at both of them, paused, and held their gaze. He closed his eyes, pinched his nose, and pushed up his glasses.
“If it’s really mouse pox, I’d say it’s already here.”
Chapter 8
They entered the plane, trudging up the incline of the aft cargo ramp, followed by the UN personnel. They passed countless skids of aid, strapped down on tracks of stainless steel floor rollers.
Paul could hear the whine and compression of the hydraulics as the cargo ramp closed behind them and the last thread of natural light collapsed into shadow. The plane’s cargo hold was dimly lit by a bank of small porthole windows and faint, but intermittent interior lights. Paul’s eyes adjusted to the low illumination and, he began to explore his surroundings. The interior was cluttered. Round duct work and yellow fiberglass insulation covered the ceiling. There was rudimentary face-to-face seating along the starboard side and hard plastic seats with a cloth net backrest.
The ground crew began to move the plane out of the hangar causing Paul to fall back against the netting, which did nothing to cushion the blow as his weight stretched the backing to the metal wall behind him.
“Not designed for comfort,” Dan whined. He’d taken a seat beside Paul, wincing at the thump as his friend fell backwards.
“I’d settle for coach, wedged between a couple of linebackers,” Paul said.
“Before their shower all gamey and shit,” Dan added, laughing.
Thunder roared as the four turbo-prop Allison T5-A15s powered up. Four thousand, three hundred horsepower, kicking like a mule. An unbearably loud mule.
After a short warm up and some shuffling around the taxi lanes, the massive plane punched down the runway. Its climb was surprisingly fast, roaring to a ceiling of 33,000 feet before leveling out. At cruising altitude, a mist formed in the cargo hold, blanketing the contents in the belly of the cargo hold.
“Is that normal?” Paul yelled, directing the question toward the guy he’d borrowed the phone from earlier.
He sat across from Paul and up three seats. He was lanky, with dirty blonde hair and a cleft chin. Paul hadn’t noticed before, but the guy barely looked out of his teens.
“It’s a combination of pressurization and the onboard air conditioning. No worries.”
His accent was Aussie, another thing Paul hadn’t noticed before. He could barely make out what the kid was saying.
If the UN personnel didn’t mind the thick mist, Paul wasn’t going to worry about it. After all, it was their plane. But it seemed like a good way to break what appeared to be a no fraternization rule.
“Pretty unusual, them not allowing you to drop your cargo?” Paul asked the kid, focused on his eyes.
“They don’t trust our cargo,” yelled another man with the UN group. He was about five seats away on the same side as Paul, leaning forward.
Paul watched the man’s eyes darting. He glanced across the aisle at another man at least twenty years his senior who gave him a look, after which the speaker dropped his head and melted back into the line like a scolded dog.
“These guys are media,” the older man yelled. Emphasis on media.
“Just making conversation. It’s a long flight,” Paul said.
“Yeah. One I didn’t want you guys on!”
The old guy’s face was the color of a pumpkin, which matched its shape. He looked angry as hell.
“I was just saying that you think they’d at least let you off-load the humanitarian aid. Save you some fuel.” Paul yelled. He knew he was pushing, but what else did he have to do?
But the guy wasn’t having any of it. “This flight is not going to be a platform for you guys to interview me or my men!”
But the Aussie suddenly chimed in.
“There has been an outbreak in the Shandong Province and they don’t want us going in there. It’s not safe!”
“Nathan!” yelled the older man.
Why is he sharing this? Paul wondered, but he wasn’t about to complain.
“How many dead from this and not the tsunami?” Dan jumped into the questioning.
“We don’t know,” the older man interjected. “The Chinese aren’t telling us anything!”
“Its mouse pox, isn’t it?” Paul asked.
“No,” the older guy said.
“How do you explain the photos of the dead with vaccination scars?” Dan asked.
“We think it’s a hoax. Mouse pox is mouse specific.”
“That’s bullshit! I didn’t even know what mouse pox was until I researched it,” Paul pressed harder.
“They haven’t determined the nature of the outbreak yet, and this interrogation is over!” yelled the older man, and this time he meant it. The two others clammed up, and then he looked right at Paul.
` He’s either nervous or a horrible liar, Paul thought.
It didn’t matter or change anything. The e-mails, pictures, interviews and speculation had filtered out of the affected province and everything led back to one rumor: Mouse pox.
There was a period of calm after that and everybody settled in. It was a long flight, twelve hours through several time zones, so Paul decided to try to get some sleep. He leaned his head back and forced himself to close his eyes.
The Hercules was an ungodly plane: uncomfortable, noisy, and absolutely unrelenting in its dedication to make sure every last passenger had the worst flying experience of his or her life.
Paul was in and out of sleep, each time feeling more dragged out and miserable than before he’d nodded off. The only decent rest came when they landed to refuel. Paul didn’t know where it was, and he didn’t care.
Hours later, the plane made a long, descending arc, readying for approach into Cologne-Bonn. Paul had never flown into Bonn before, so he got up to have a look out one of the small windows as they began their descent. No seat belt sign on this flight.
Playing God Page 5