by Tom Clancy
THE “LOST” G-IV landed just as the U.S. Navy helicopter reached the search area. The crew left the aircraft for refreshments while their business jet was fueled. As they watched, a Russian-made AN-10 “Cub” four-engine transport fired up its engines to participate in the search-and-rescue mission. The Libyans were cooperating now with such things, trying to rejoin the world community, and even their commanders didn’t know very much indeed, hardly anything at all—of what had gone on. Just a few phone calls had made the arrangements, and whoever had taken the call and cooperated knew only that two aircraft would be landing to fuel and move on. An hour later, they lifted off again for the three-hour flight to Damascus, Syria. It had been originally thought that they would fly right back to their home base in Switzerland, but the pilot had pointed out that two aircraft of the same ownership flying over the same spot at nearly the same time would cause questions. He turned the aircraft east during the climb-out.
Below to his left, in the Gulf of Sidra, they saw the flashing lights of aircraft, one of them a helicopter, they were surprised to note. People were burning fuel and spending time and all for nothing. That thought amused the pilot as he reached his cruising altitude and relaxed, letting the auto-pilot do the work for the remainder of a long day’s flying.
“ARE WE THERE yet?”
Moudi turned his head. He’d just changed the IV bottle for their patient. Inside his plastic helmet his face itched from his growing beard. He saw that Sister Maria Magdalena had the same crawly, unwashed feeling he had. Her first action on waking was to move her hands to her face, stopped short by the clear plastic.
“No, Sister, but soon. Please, rest yourself. I can do this.”
“No, no, you must be very tired, Dr. Moudi.” She started to rise.
“I am younger and better rested,” the physician replied with a raised hand. Next he replaced the morphine bottle with a fresh one. Jean Baptiste was, thankfully, still too heavily drugged to be a problem.
“What time is it?”
“Time for you to rest. You will attend your friend when we arrive, but then other doctors will be able to relieve me. Please, conserve your strength. You will need it.” Which was true enough.
The nun didn’t reply. Accustomed to following the orders of doctors, she turned her head, probably whispered a prayer, and allowed her eyes to close. When he was sure that she was back asleep, he moved forward.
“How much longer?”
“Forty minutes. We’ll land a little early. The winds have been good to us,” the co-pilot answered.
“So, before dawn?”
“Yes.”
“What is her problem?” the pilot asked, not turning, but sufficiently bored that he wanted to hear something new.
“You do not wish to know,” Moudi assured him.
“She will die, this woman?”
“Yes, and the aircraft must be completely disinfected before it is used again.”
“That’s what they told us.” The pilot shrugged, not knowing how frightened he should be of what he was carrying. Moudi did. The plastic sheet under his patient would now contain a pool of infected blood. They’d have to be extremely careful unloading her.
BADRAYN WAS GRATEFUL that he’d avoided alcohol. He was the most conscious man in the room. Ten hours, he thought, looking at his watch. Ten hours they’d talked and disputed like a bunch of old women in a market.
“He will agree to this?” the Guards commander asked.
“It is not unreasonable in the least,” Ali replied. Five senior mullahs would fly to Baghdad, offering themselves as hostage to—if not the goodwill, then the good word of their leader. It actually worked out better than the assembled generals knew, not that they really cared. With that settled, the general officers looked at one another, and one by one they nodded.
“We accept,” the same general said, speaking for the group. That hundreds of lesser officers would be left behind to face whatever music was in store for them was, after all, a small thing. The lengthy discussion hadn’t touched on that subject very much.
“I require a telephone,” Badrayn told them next. The intelligence chief led him to a side room. There had always been a direct line to Tehran. Even during hostilities there had been a communications link—that one via microwave tower. The next one was a fiber-optic cable whose transmissions could not be intercepted. Under the watchful eyes of the Iraqi officer he punched the numbers he’d memorized several days earlier.
“This is Yousif. I have news,” he told the voice which answered.
“Please wait,” was the reply.
DARYAEI DIDN’T ENJOY being awakened early any more than a normal person, the less so that he’d slept poorly over the last few days. When his bedside phone rang, he blinked his eyes for several rings before reaching to lift it.
“Yes?”
“This is Yousif. It is agreed. Five friends are required.”
All praise to Allah, for He is beneficent, Daryaei thought to himself. All the years of war and peace had come to fruition in this moment. No, no, that was premature. There was much yet to be done. But the most difficult thing was done now.
“When shall we begin?”
“As quickly as possible.”
“Thank you. I will not forget.” With that he came fully awake. This morning, the first in many years, he forgot his morning prayers. God would understand that His work must be done quickly.
HOW WEARY SHE must have been, Moudi thought. Both nuns started to wakefulness when the aircraft touched down. There came the usual jolting as the aircraft slowed, and a watery sound announced the fact that Jean Baptiste had indeed bled out as he’d expected. So, he’d gotten her here alive at least. Her eyes were open, though confused as an infant’s as she stared at the curving ceiling of the cabin. Maria Magdalena took a moment to look out the windows, but all she saw was an airport, and those appeared the same all over the world, particularly at night. In due course the aircraft stopped, and the door dropped open.
Again they would travel in a truck. Four people came into the aircraft, all of them dressed in protective plastic. Moudi loosened the straps on his patient, waving the other nun to stay in place. Carefully, the four army medics lifted the sturdy plastic sheet by the corners and moved toward the door. As they did so, Moudi saw something drip onto the flat-folded seat which had served their patient as a bed. He shook it off. The flight crew had their orders, and the orders had been repeated often enough. When the patient was safely on the truck, Moudi and Maria Magdalena walked down the steps as well. Both removed their headgear, allowing themselves to breathe fresh, cool air. He took a canteen from one of the armed party around the aircraft and offered it to her, as he fetched another for himself. Both drained a full liter of water before entering the truck. Both were disoriented by the long flight, she the more so for not knowing where she really was. Moudi saw the 707 which had arrived shortly before with the monkeys, though he didn’t know that was the cargo.
“I’ve never seen Paris—well, except flying through, all these years,” she said, looking around before the back flap was dropped, cutting off the view.
A pity you never will.
16
THE IRAQI TRANSFER
A WHOLE LOT OF NOTHING here,” the pilot observed. The Seahawk was circling at a thousand feet, scanning the surface with a search radar acute enough to detect wreckage—it was designed to spot a submarine’s periscope—but finding not so much as a floating bottle of Perrier. Both also wore low-light goggles, and they should have turned up a slick of jet fuel from the oily shine, but that also was negative.
“Must have hit pretty hard not to leave anything,” the co-pilot replied over the intercom.
“Unless we’re looking in the wrong spot.” The pilot looked down at his tactical navigation system. They were in the right place. They were down to an hour’s fuel. Time to start thinking about landing back on Radford, which was now combing the search area herself. The searchlights looked theatrical in the pre
-dawn darkness, like something out of a World War II movie. A Libyan Cub was circling around, too, trying to be helpful but mainly being a pain in the ass.
“Anything at all?” the controller on Radford asked.
“Negative. Nothing, say again nothing, down there that we can see. One hour’s worth of gas here, over.”
“Copy one hour gas,” Radford acknowledged.
“Sir, the target’s last course was three-four-three, speed two-nine-zero knots, rate of descent three thousand foot per minute. If he ain’t in this footprint, I don’t know why,” a chief operations specialist said, tapping the chart. The captain sipped at his coffee and shrugged. Topside, the fire-and-rescue party was standing by. Two swimmers were in wetsuits, with a boat crew standing by the launch. There was a lookout posted for every set of binoculars aboard, looking for strobe lights or anything else, and sonar was listening for the high-frequency ping of the aircraft’s emergency locator. Those instruments were designed to survive a severe impact, were automatically activated when exposed to seawater, and had battery power to operate for several days. Radford’s sonar was sensitive enough to detect the damned thing from thirty miles away, and they were right over the impact zone predicted by the radar crew. Neither the ship nor her crew had ever done a rescue like this, but it was something for which they regularly drilled, and every procedure had been executed as perfectly as the CO could wish.
“USS Radford, USS Radford, this is Valetta Approach, over.”
The captain lifted the microphone. “Valetta, this is Radford.”
“Have you located anything, over?”
“Negative, Valetta. Our helo’s been all over the area, nothing to report yet.” They’d already queried Malta for corrected data on the aircraft’s last speed and heading, but it had dropped off the civilian radar even before departing the destroyer’s more precise coverage. On both ends of the radio link, men sighed. They all knew how this would play out now. The search would continue for a day, no more, no less, and nothing would be found, and that was that. A telex had already gone to the manufacturer, informing them that one of their aircraft was lost at sea. Gulfstream representatives would fly to Bern to go over maintenance records and other printed data on the aircraft, hoping to garner a clue, and probably finding nothing, and this whole case would go into the “unknown” column in somebody’s ledger book. But the game had to be played out, and, hell, it was still good training time for the crew of USS Radford. The crew would shrug it off. It wasn’t anyone they knew, however desirable and uplifting a successful rescue would have been.
IT WAS PROBABLY the smell that told her what was wrong. The drive from the airport had been brief. It was dark outside still, and when the truck stopped, both doctor and nurse were still suffering from the lengthy time in movement. They arrived, and the first business was to get Sister Jean Baptiste inside. Only then did both of them remove their plastic garb for the last time. Maria Magdalena smoothed her short hair and breathed heavily, finally taking the time to look around, then was surprised at what she saw. Moudi saw the confusion, and led her inside before she could comment on it.
That was when the smell hit them, a familiar African smell from the entry of the monkeys a few hours earlier, decidedly not something one would associate with Paris or a place as clean and orderly as the Pasteur Institute had to be. Next, Maria Magdalena looked around and realized that the signs on the walls were not in French. There was no way she could know what the situation was, there were merely grounds for confusion, to be followed by questions—and then, just as well, it was time, before the questions could be asked. A soldier appeared and took her arm and led her away, too uncomprehending still to say anything. She merely looked over her shoulder at an unshaven man in surgical greens, a sad look on his face giving greater substance to her confusion.
“What is this? Who is she?” the director of the project asked.
“It is a rule of their religion that they cannot travel alone. To protect their chastity,” Moudi explained. “Otherwise I could not have come here with our patient.”
“She is still alive?” He hadn’t been there for the arrival.
Moudi nodded. “Yes, we should be able to keep her going another three days, maybe four,” he thought.
“And the other?”
Moudi dodged: “That is not for me to say.”
“We could always have another—”
“No! That would be barbaric,” Moudi protested. “Such things are hateful to God.”
“And what we plan to do is not?” the director asked. Clearly Moudi had been in the bush for too long. But it wasn’t worth fighting over. One fully infected Ebola patient was all they needed. “Get cleaned up and we will go up to see her.”
Moudi headed off to the doctors’ lounge on the second floor. The facility was actually more private than its Western counterparts, as people in this part of the world had higher standards of body modesty. The plastic suit, he saw with some surprise, had survived the trip without a single tear. He dumped it in a large plastic bin before heading into a shower whose hot water was supplemented with chemicals—he hardly noticed the smell anymore—and there he enjoyed five minutes of sanitary bliss. On the flight he’d wondered if he would ever be clean again. In the shower now, his mind asked a similar question, but more quietly. He emerged to don fresh greens fresh everything, in fact—and to complete his normally fastidious routine. A medical orderly had placed a brand-new suit in the lounge for him, this one a blue American Racal fresh out of its box, which he put on before heading out into the corridor. The director, similarly dressed, was waiting for him, and together they walked down toward the suite of treatment rooms.
There were only four of them, behind sealed, guarded doors. The Iranian army ran this facility. The doctors were military physicians, and the orderlies all men with battlefield experience. Security was tight, as one would expect. Moudi and the director had cleared security on the first floor, however, and the guard at the post touched the buttons to open the doors into the air lock. These opened with a hiss of hydraulics to reveal a second set, and they could see that smoke from the soldier’s cigarette was sucked into the secure area. Good. The air system was working properly. Both men had a strange prejudice against their own countrymen. It would have been preferable for this entire facility to have been built by foreign engineers—Germans were popular in the Middle East for such things—but Iraq had made that mistake to its sorrow. The orderly Germans kept plans of everything they built, as a result of which so many of their projects had been bombed to dust. And so while a lot of the building’s hardware had been bought elsewhere, the facility had been constructed locally. Their very lives depended on the exact performance of every subsystem here, but that could not be helped now. The inner doors would not open unless the outer ones were locked tight. That worked. The director activated them, and they proceeded.
Sister Jean Baptiste was in the last room on the right. Three medical orderlies were in with her. They’d already cut off all her clothing, revealing a death in progress. The soldiers were repulsed by what they saw, her condition more terrible than any battlefield injury. Quickly, they cleaned off her body, then covered it, respectful of the woman’s modesty as their culture insisted. The director looked at the morphine drip and immediately turned it back by a third.
“We want to keep her alive as long as possible,” he explained.
“The pain from this—”
“Cannot be helped,” he responded coldly. He thought to reproach Moudi, but stopped himself. He was a physician, too, and knew that it was hard to regard one’s patient with harshness. Elderly Caucasian female, he saw, stuporous from the morphine, respiration too slow for his liking. The orderlies attached leads for the electrocardiograph, and he was surprised at how well her heart was working. Good. Blood pressure was low, as expected, and he ordered two units of whole blood to be hung on the IV tree. The more blood the better.
The orderlies were well drilled. Everything that had co
me in with the patient had already been bagged, then double-bagged. One of their number carried the bundle out of the room and off to the gas-fired incinerator which would leave behind nothing but sterilized ashes. The main issue here was management of the virus. The patient was their culture dish. Previously, such victims had had a few cc’s of blood drawn for analysis, and the patient in due course would die, and the body was either burned or sprayed and buried in chemically treated ground. Not this time. He would have in his control, in due course, the largest quantity of the virus ever seen, and from that he would grow more, all virulent, all powerful. He turned.
“So, Moudi, how did she contract it?”
“She was treating the Index Patient.”
“The Negro boy?” the director asked, standing in the corner.
Moudi nodded. “Yes.”
“What did she do wrong?”
“We never found out. I asked her when she was still lucid. She never gave the boy an injection, and Sister was always very careful with ‘sharps.’ She’s an experienced nurse,” Moudi reported mechanically. He really was too tired to do much of anything but report what he knew, and that, the director thought, was just fine. “She worked with Ebola before, at Kikwit and other places. She taught procedures to staff.”
“Aerosol transmission?” the director asked. It was too much to hope for.
“CDC believes that this is the Ebola Mayinga sub-type. You will recall that this strain is named for a nurse who contracted the disease through unknown means.”
That statement made the director look hard into Moudi’s eyes. “You’re quite sure of what you said?”