ViraVax

by Bill Ransom

  “So,” El Indio said, rubbing his uncharacteristic day-old stubble, “you say we can’t assault them, and we can’t put a team inside. What do we do, then?”

  “We can assault them,” Rico said, and patted El Indio’s shoulder, “and we can put somebody inside. I’ve been there, I know the floor plan, I know the surveillance and I know how their security is trained. One person has a much better chance of getting inside than a team. But a team will assault the dam to draw them. We will also draw Garcia’s people.”

  El Indio snorted a laugh and shook out his hand in the gesture that the Costa Bravans used for “Hot, very hot.”

  “Then you will die in there,” El Indio said, “and we will accomplish nothing.”

  “So,” Rico said, his chin out, “if I can’t do it, launch your assault.”

  “What about diplomatic channels?” El Indio said. “We know the children are there. Can’t your government demand that ViraVax give them up?”

  Yolanda laughed at that one.

  “They would be fertilizer for beans by morning,” she said. “Or, worse yet, there would be a cursory inspection by one of the many in your embassy who are of the Children of Eden. Or Garcia himself, who is of their faith. They would look for nothing and find nothing. Your government would apologize; they have more pressing matters facing them at home. The children would remain. The infection of our people would continue. No, this is no place for diplomacy.”

  “You always were a warrior,” El Indio said.

  “And you the statesman,” she countered. “The Colonel is right. Someone has to get inside. Someone who knows the complex, someone who can fight. Our contact inside has neither of these advantages. In fact, she believes herself to be in danger as well, and she cannot get out.”

  “How often can you contact her?” Rico asked.

  “Twice a day, at the most,” she said.

  “I’ll give you some questions for her. Any answers would be helpful. Meanwhile, I have a plan. And you, warrior woman, you will get your fight.”

  Yolanda smiled, and the rest of the room lit up with smiles as well.

  Yes, he thought, it’s what we know best.

  Except for El Indio, who was one of the great negotiators of all time, they all preferred a good, tangible fight. But Rico well knew the diplomatic stalemate that inevitably occurred when negotiating with fundamentalist extremists of any stripe. They were right because their god said they were right, and there was no reasoning with that. This had been the lesson of the Crusades, westward expansion, the oil and messianic wars.

  “Only one thing we can do,” he began. “It helps that sundown begins their Sabbath. . . .”

  He felt good being a colonel again, even though he was briefing rebel forces. He indicated four positions on either side of the dam, and one in the center.

  “Security shacks,” he said. “The dam is their weak point, and they keep their best people here. In fifteen years, no one has attacked them, presumably because a ground attack through that terrain and jungle would be easily detected by their sensors and inefficient without heavy weapons. And they know that your forces have never attacked by air. Do you have anyone who jumps? Paracaidistas?”

  “Yes,” Tío spoke up. “I have jumped from the plane.”

  “And others?” Rico asked.

  “Perhaps twenty who have jumped one or two times. . . .”

  “Oye, Colonel!” a small man, Raimundo, spoke up. “All of us would jump into that nest without the silk.”

  General laughter rippled around the room.

  “I have witnessed the bravery and the ferocity of the Peace and Freedom brigades very closely for twenty years,” Rico told him. “And I believe you, compa. With twenty, we can take the continent. One person to blow their power. Their backup is a set of diesel generators, but it should draw them out nicely. They will be strung out, in the dark, the whole three kilometers from their fence to the dam.”

  “And what of the children?” Yolanda asked. “And our contact inside?”

  “That’s my job,” Rico said. “I’ll drop in first, alone, and get inside. We will agree on time enough to get in, find them and get out while you hit the generators and concentrate their security forces.”

  “And if you and the children are not out by that time?”

  Rico sighed, and massaged a cramp in the back of his neck.

  “If we’re not out by that time, we wouldn’t be coming out, anyway.”

  El Indio spoke up.

  “The things they make in there, the diseases. Won’t they escape, too?”

  “It’s possible,” Rico said. “Certain of those elevator shafts, the maintenance perimeter and the conduit to the dam are open and risky. That’s why it’s better for one who knows the way than many who don’t. Besides, letting ViraVax continue what it’s doing is infinitely more risky, in my opinion.”

  “What will they do?” Yolanda asked.

  “At any sign of danger they’ll seal off completely,” Rico said, “shut down all outside support and stay put. Nothing and no one will get out of there.”

  “What if they release something deliberately?” El Indio asked.

  “They already have,” Rico admitted. “And they will continue to do so. Which is worse? But they will expect reinforcements from Garcia, so that will not be a first defense.”

  Yolanda nodded agreement. “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “Let’s finish this now.”

  “What about U.S. support?” El Indio asked. “When they hear that ViraVax is under attack, they will send your troops up there.”

  “True,” Rico said, “but our nearest troops are another contract station in Tegoose. They hire our advisors to train their people, but the Night School is an Agency strike force that takes an act of Congress to move. We contract a lot of our military movement through their shipping arm. It’s cheaper than keeping our own troops here when they’re needed so much at home. The ViraVax security are missionaries who get a draft exemption for their service. That way they don’t have to worry about fighting their neighbors back in the States.”

  “If they’re trying to hide something up there, they’ll wait until the last second to call for help,” El Indio said.

  “Remember, they have all those young-buck missionaries who rotate civil duties,” Rico said. “They might be green, but they’re fighting for their god.”

  Rico explained Casey’s Sabbath rituals and his scaled-down operations.

  “The missionaries and many of the Innocents attend several functions topside during Sabbath,” he said. “They take only bread and ice water and meet in a large, glassed-in structure that allows them to meditate on the jungle around them, a symbol of their goal—to return the earth to its Edenly state.

  “The rest of the Innocents usually remain in quarters, as do the few non-Gardeners among the staff.”

  “That’s our chance, yes?”

  “Yes. The elevator shafts will be our best bet. If we can hitch a ride on one, fine. We can scale the shaft if we have to.”

  “We will have to move very quickly, and with precision,” Yolanda said.

  Rico nodded, and returned to the battered keyboard.

  “Meanwhile,” he said, “there are still some favors owed me. I’m going to try to cash them in. And there is something else.”

  He watched the pathways that his fingers traced on the screen, rather than Yolanda’s eyes.

  “What else?”

  “Your bag of tricks, does it include Hypnosemide?”

  “The serum of truth?” she asked. “Yes, we have it. Why?”

  “When I am finished here, I want you to give it to me.” Rico said. “That way, even things that I’ve forgotten, you will know. And anything that they have blocked, I will know.”

  “But.” Yolanda protested, “that will take hours, and afterward you will not. . . ”

  “Afterward, I will not have to worry about any tricks or traps that they’ve planted in my brain or my body,” he said.<
br />
  Rico finished bleeding the dam’s schematics off the Agency’s web and diverted the file to print.

  He smiled Yolanda a cockeyed smile.

  “Before I blunder about asking for favors, I want us both to be sure who the friendlies are.” He took a deep breath, glanced at El Indio and said, “I owe you, I owe my son and I owe myself. Let’s get started on that Hypnosemide.”

  Chapter 26

  The couple who brought Sonja and Harry their meal looked to be in their teens, older than most deficientes that Sonja had noticed on the streets of La Libertad. Down syndrome babies seemed to be everywhere in Costa Brava these days. Her father had been liaison when the delegation from World Health came to study the phenomenon. Her father was the most accessible prime researcher, being the one ViraVax contractee who had off-compound privileges.

  Her father had told her about the ViraVax service staff, all brought in through the Church’s foster program. Most were Down syndrome, all of them trisomy twenty-one types. They came from a network of Gardener foster homes around the world, and they were fiercely loyal.

  Sonja remembered that her father had laughed.

  “Not ‘fiercely,’ “ he corrected. “Say, ‘extremely.’ I don’t think they would be fierce about anything.”

  The children were screened at various facilities, in the States and elsewhere, all run by the Children of Eden. These were children who would always be children, and therefore truly innocent in the eyes of the Church, neither pagan nor gentile.

  Nor human.

  “Maybe we can get these kids to help us,” Harry said. “They aren’t part of the religion, are they?”

  “We can try,” Sonja said. “They’re known for being loyal and stubborn, but we don’t have anything to lose.”

  “How did they get them all here, anyway?” Harry asked. “My dad didn’t talk about them much.”

  “The Gardeners run boarding schools for them,” she said. “After my dad died, I found a newspaper article in his things. It claimed that one of the orphanages was a place where children were raised like plants for their organs.”

  “I never heard about that,” Harry said. “What happened?”

  Sonja continued her pacing, each step in time with a beat from her pulse.

  “I tried to call the paper up on the networks,” she said. “They aren’t in business anymore.”

  Sonja thanked the Maya martyrs and the gods of Balaam that these innocents made up eighty percent of the work force at ViraVax.

  Maybe we can get them to help us, she thought.

  The children had looked so afraid of her and of Harry.

  If they’d do this to us, Sonja thought, I wonder what they do to those poor people?

  As she paced, Sonja wrung her memory for everything her father had told her about the ViraVax compound and its functions. She couldn’t remember much, most of it related to the lift pad and aircraft.

  A weekly chopper ferried her father from the compound to the embassy and back. Under cover of the early hours, a B/M-3 cargo shuttled daily between ViraVax and its airport warehouse, transporting supplies, equipment and VIPs.

  The airport warehouse also served as a hangar and, for fifteen meters underground, a bunker. She had flown within sight of the warehouse hundreds of times, getting in flight time, and on a few occasions she had seen the changing of the guard and crew.

  ViraVax and the Children of Eden owned the satellite taxiway that led from the runway to the warehouse, and they owned the kilometer square that it sat on. And under.

  The B/M-3 was a vertical takeoff and landing airplane—expensive, state-of-the-art and a breeze to fly. Not much trickier than her little Mariposa, both of them kites compared to a helicopter. She’d done three flights in the gimballed Boeing/Mitsubishi and three in one of the embassy’s old Hueys as a birthday present from her parents. She didn’t care if she ever got into another chopper, but she would love to get her hands on the B/M-3 again.

  Sonja put her lips to Harry’s ear, cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered, “I’ve flown their cargo plane. It comes and goes daily three a.m.”

  Harry nodded, and whispered back.

  “Great. Here’s the plan. I’ll get us past the biological field and the Missionary Rangers and on the pad at two fifty-nine. You fly us out.”

  She pinched him, encouraged by his humor, even if it was a little black.

  “And remember,” she added, “we can’t run or move fast or we’ll roll up into helpless, writhing jellyballs of pain.”

  “Why is it that those two and Mishwe get in here in spite of the virus hazard?” he asked.

  “Maybe there isn’t a hazard, for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe they’re vaccinated against whatever it is.”

  “I can’t imagine Mishwe allowing himself to be inoculated,” Harry said.

  “Chill,” Sonja said. “You know him so well. . . .”

  “If we’re that important to them, they don’t want us messed up,” he said.

  “So,” Sonja asked, “you claim there’s no virus?”

  She picked up the cup with the two pink pills, rolled them around, set them back down. This time she didn’t whisper.

  “What makes you so sure about these?” she asked. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “If I’m wrong, they’ll take care of it,” Harry said. “Nothing else makes sense.”

  Harry returned to his bunk, and Sonja had the feeling that he was hurting more than he wanted her to know.

  Isn’t this macho stuff ever going to die out?

  The hiss of incoming air was no longer scented, but pure and dry. Not cold, like the air-conditioning elsewhere, but pleasantly warm on her skin.

  The peel-and-peek reactivated, showing a full-faced and sweating portrait of the dzee. Dark eyes glittered and stared from the screen directly into Sonja’s soul.

  “Your moment is nearly at hand,” Mishwe announced. “Soon everything will become clear. You are the Adam and Eve of the new Garden, a Garden which my sword, even now, purifies for your use.”

  As suddenly as the image had come, it disappeared. The peel became a window overlooking the topside grounds through a thick stand of foliage that added a voyeuristic feel to the scene. A line of deficientes, young men and women, shuffled towards another building. Sonja could only see the corner of it, but she could tell it was concrete, painted to look like a metal shop or barn.

  “What do you make of that?” Sonja asked, still staring at the screen.

  “He’s one crazy dzee,” Harry said. “We are in much deeper shit than we thought.”

  On-screen, two people in lab jackets accompanied the workers, one in front and one behind. No one appeared to be talking. They held hands like kindergarten kids and formed a double line. There was some shoving and pulling, but most of them went quietly to their afternoon chores. They seemed undaunted by the usual afternoon rain and the mud. One turned his moon face upward and caught raindrops on the pink platform of his tongue, and laughed. Sonja smiled.

  She knew that the scene was illusion, yet she imagined she heard the whine of the B/M-3 topside as it settled onto the pad.

  She motioned Harry to the screen. His movements were slow, painfully deliberate. Together they watched its final drop and the swirl of dust overhead.

  “Do you know this plane?” she asked.

  Harry nodded.

  “Vertical Vinnie,” he answered. “A Boeing/Mitsubishi VT-3. Also called a Bowel Movement-3. Copied after, and improved upon, the old British Harrier. Quieter, faster, more stable. Cargo or combat capacity.”

  Sonja remained silent, staring after the dissipating dust cloud. They could not see the landing site itself, nor the security around it. Their limited vantage allowed only the barest glimpse of three other buildings at the surface. Sonja knew that there were twelve buildings aboveground, and a small city beneath it.

  Ventilation ducts, maintenance passageways, service elevators.

/>   She thought there must be a hundred ways to move around the facility without resorting to the usual traffic areas, but she didn’t know any of them. She vowed to construct a map for Harry as soon as she could orient herself. Besides her father’s talk over the years, she had flown the outskirts of the compound several times and knew that she could recall the image accurately if she concentrated.

  She put her lips to his ear again, cupping her hands around them, and whispered.

  “Keep track of everything,” she said.

  “Why do you think they’re letting us see this?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it make better sense to keep us blind? I mean, look at how much we can see. . . .”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and we can’t get there. Maybe they just want us more comfortable. You know, some kind of psychology, like the pink room.”

  A scrap of paper caught in a dust devil whirled up, up and out of sight.

  “Looks so close,” he mumbled.

  Harry sighed, and something in that sigh frightened Sonja more than their circumstances. That sigh registered an enlightened resignation, and she knew it was the enemy.

  “They intend to keep us forever,” he said. “They don’t care what we see, we’re not leaving.”

  Sonja decided she would not pep-talk him now. Their monitors picked up his despair, his resignation.

  Good, she thought. Let them think we’re giving up. Between what he knows about security here and what I know about the layout and flying, we just might make it.

  Chapter 27

  Marte Chang looked up from her fistful of shipping invoices to the stainless-steel coolers, sealed and stacked at the loading dock. The numbers and dates matched, bringing the agonizing trail she had been following full circle. Mariposa had suspected, but now Marte Chang had the proof.

  “Body parts.”

  Marte barely vocalized the whisper. She blinked a couple of times quickly, but did not move, nor did she take her eyes from the plane. It could leave here, and she could not. She wondered, would she leave now, if she could, with enough evidence to shut ViraVax down? Or would she stay to the bitter end, theirs or hers, to sniff out every macabre project, every perpetrator?