The DMZ

by Jeanete Windle

  “There it is!” Julie announced triumphantly.

  It was just as she’d hoped. Half a dozen canoes drawn up on the beach not a hundred meters beyond the bend. Better yet, they were on Rick and Julie’s side of the river, and even at this distance Julie could see above them on the bank the dried-leaf brown of thatched roofs among the green of leaves and palm fronds. The jungle here wasn’t the huge, liana-choked hardwoods through which Rick and Julie had traveled the first day, but the single-canopy scrub jungle of the river’s edge, no more than forty feet high. Above the treetops, a lazy black spiral promised human cooking fires and with them, human inhabitants.

  And yet …

  Julie had a clear view of the stretch of river downstream and studied the scene with sudden unease. A close-set row of stakes had been driven into the soft ground of the beach and riverbed to form a semicircle that ran out into the water around the beached canoes and back up to the bank again, providing the villagers a caiman-free zone for washing and bathing. Julie could see no sign of the normal daytime activities of a riverside village. No fishermen were sliding out the canoes. No women were scrubbing clothes at the river’s edge or hauling water in gourds up to their cooking areas. No children splashed in the river or scampered through the tree branches.

  And there were no voices. No children’s shrill playing or women calling to each other. Or the rhythmic pounding of the huge wooden pestles the Indian women used to grind corn and manioc, which could sound like a drumbeat from a distance.

  The beach, the village, the jungle itself was absolutely still.

  Julie wrinkled her forehead. “That’s odd! If that Indian was from this village, I really expected the elders would have someone out to check us over by now. Do you think we frightened them, and they’ve all gone into hiding?”

  Rick suddenly reached out to grab her arm. “Don’t move!”

  The unexpected harshness of his order froze Julie instantly. Rick’s narrowed gaze did not shift from the scene downriver as he gripped Julie’s arm, and confused, Julie, glancing up at him, realized that his focus was not on the beach but above it. As her eyes followed his, she gasped in revulsion.

  That lazy black spiral above the jungle canopy was not, as a first glance had misled her, the friendly smoke of cooking fires, but birds! Carrion birds, by their size. Hundreds of them, the swirling, dark cloud of their wings circling slowly upward above the treetops under which the village lay sheltered.

  “Oh, no! What is it?” she demanded in a horrified whisper.

  “I don’t know,” Rick said grimly.

  For the first time that day, he unslung the AK-47. Cradling it in combat position, he glanced at Julie. “Follow me! Keep quiet! And do exactly as I do!”

  This was not a time for objecting to that autocratic tone. Julie followed as Rick faded back into the cover of the jungle perimeter. It took almost an hour to cover those last hundred meters, as Julie stepped precisely at Rick’s heels, freezing each time he stopped to study the jungle around and above them before slipping forward to the next tree or patch of elephant ears or ferns. Rick no longer used the machete. If they couldn’t slip through the vegetation, they crawled under it on elbows and belly.

  This was the elite commando Rick was trained to be, and try though she might, Julie couldn’t match his pantherlike silence of movement. Once, when they were negotiating a fern patch, a twig snapped under her knee with a crack that was like an explosion in the silence, and Rick rounded on her with such savagery in his expression that Julie shrank back. His anger faded immediately as he took in her startled dismay. It was a sign of the tension that gripped them both.

  They saw no sign of human life, nor any life at all. Not a bird call or a scampering monkey, and for once Julie didn’t sense watching eyes upon them. After the first fifty meters, Rick dropped to his belly. Julie obeyed his impatient gesture to follow suit, and they covered the remainder of the distance even more cautiously, inching forward under constant cover of the underbrush. Julie could no longer see Rick’s expression, only the back of his head and sometimes just his boots slithering forward ahead of her. But she knew by the stiffening of his body lines when his senses caught the same anomaly that had been tugging at hers.

  It was a smell, and it had been growing almost imperceptibly for some time before Julie recognized it for what it was. A horrible, sickly sweet smell that caught at the back of Julie’s nostrils and intensified with each meter until she had to breathe through her mouth to keep from gagging. Julie had encountered that smell once before. In the ice-cold storeroom back at the San Ignacio airport. Only here it wasn’t disguised with formaldehyde, and it was far stronger. Julie’s heart began to race and her stomach to hurt.

  It was the smell of death. Human death.

  Ahead of her, Rick stopped moving forward. Through the wide leaves of a palmlike plant that sheltered his head and shoulders, Julie glimpsed the hot yellow of sunlight falling through some opening in the jungle canopy. He lay there, his head raised, watching for so long that Julie began to stir impatiently before repressing the movement.

  Rick turned his head to glance over his shoulder at Julie, and her heart almost stopped at the expression she glimpsed there—so cold and hard and dangerous, she wouldn’t have recognized the companion with whom she had walked and lived and talked these last days. Obeying the jerk of his head, Julie slithered forward to stretch out beside him.

  At first glance, the village was as quiet and serene as the jungle behind them had been. A dozen bamboo huts nestled back under the shade of trees around a clearing that served as a common meeting and working area for the villagers. Under the nearest tree stood a large tacu, the concave wooden mortar in which the Indian women ground their flour. The pestles for pounding the corn or manioc lay on the ground beside it. A pile of fifty-kilo sacks of rice were heaped on a scaffolding of bamboo under an open thatched shelter just beyond.

  In front of one of the huts lay a fishing net freshly woven from lianas, the machete that had chopped them down still shiny-new on the ground beside it. The sooty pit of a community campfire was cold and black in the center of the clearing without even a lingering thread of smoke rising from it.

  It all looked eminently peaceful—and empty.

  Then Julie saw the body. It lay facedown in the dirt between two of the huts, just far enough back under the branches of a citrus tree that she hadn’t seen it at first glance. It was an adult—male by the loincloth, though the thick black braid could have belonged to either sex—and it hadn’t been there long because it was still intact. Or so Julie assumed until it moved so suddenly she thought the person was still alive. Crawling out from under the chest, a small rodent scampered away.

  Swallowing down bile, Julie averted her eyes. But what she saw next was even worse. A writhing, seething mass of wings and beaks and vicious claws. The birds—a few of them still rising in the spiraling cloud Julie had mistaken for the smoke of a cook fire. They swarmed over a large mound just outside the perimeter of the village green. And they were feeding silently, greedily.

  The sound from Julie’s throat was enough to make the birds rise with a thunder of wings, and as they fluttered upward through the tree branches, Julie saw with fresh horror and revulsion what they had hidden.

  An open grave.

  Bodies were piled there—lots of them. And they weren’t all grown men like the one lying under the trees. Although what the birds had done to them would make identification impossible, Julie saw torn shapes that were too slight to be male—or adult. Children. Even babies.

  “A massacre?”

  Beside her, Rick shook his head, and the cold harshness of his expression didn’t ease as he glanced down at her. “Not a massacre. There’s no blood.”

  The birds were already spiraling down, but Julie could see that Rick was right. The bodies, piled up in the open grave like so much firewood, had been so damaged that Julie had to swallow down another rush of acid in her throat. But there were no outward signs of v
iolence inflicted on these people. No gunshots or visible wounds. Nor was there any of the blood spilled out into the dusty, trampled earth that would have marked the San Ignacio massacre and so many others in this country.

  In fact, now that she was looking more closely, Julie could see that there had been some initial attempt at burial, a pit under that mound that had been at least partially filled in with dirt before digging animals disturbed it.

  Clearly, the earliest victims of whatever had attacked this community had received some semblance of funeral rites until the remaining villagers had become too weak to do more than drag the dead to the pit and toss them in. Even the dead man under the tree looked as though he had simply pitched forward in his tracks.

  “Disease?” Julie asked, and her mind went instantly to the cholera epidemic that had claimed her parents and so many others. Few knew better than she how illness could rampage through one of these villages whose occupants had no natural immunities or medical attention.

  Other signs around the clearing supported that theory. The dark head and sprawled torso of someone who had fallen in the doorway of a hut off to her right. Another body that had been abandoned just short of the burial pit.

  She heard a rustle of movement inside the hut just beyond the tacu. The rustle shifted to a soft scuffling, then the clatter of a small object tipping over. Someone trying desperately, perhaps, to rise from a sleeping pallet and stagger outside for help. Maybe even a child?

  “Rick!” she whispered urgently. “There’s someone alive in there! There must be survivors. We’ve got to help them!”

  Instinctively, she was rising to her feet, and it roused both shock and anger when Rick yanked her back down with a steel grip on her wrist.

  “Don’t go out there, Julie!” he ordered, and his command was as cold and hard and deadly as his expression. “They’re all dead. Look!”

  The rustle of movement inside the hut exploded through the doorway to become a gaggle of chickens that had been rooting around inside the hut. A buzzard fluttered out after them, and Julie’s stomach heaved again as she realized what that hut must contain.

  Then she realized that Rick wasn’t referring to the hut. His grim attention was on the tacu, and as Julie followed the direction of his eyes, she caught the glint of metal, half-hidden behind the wooden base of the mortar.

  Releasing Julie’s wrist, Rick reached to break off one of the palm-like plants under which they lay. Rising to a crouch, he used the long stem to roll the metallic object into view. It was a stainless-steel flask, brightly polished, like a quart thermos, only much smaller. More the size of a mousse or hair-spray can. On the side of the flask were markings, graceful, flowing in line. Julie couldn’t decipher them. In this remote Indian village, the flask was as out of place as a computer keyboard would be.

  Then Julie saw what lay beside the flask. It was just a coconut, like those bunched at the top of a palm on the far side of the clearing. But this coconut had its hairy fibrous cover scraped away everywhere but the top, and on the resulting smooth surface had been carved crude eyes, a nose, and a mouth. A toy made by some Indian parents for their child. An image sprang to Julie’s mind of a little girl dropping that primitive doll to reach for the shiny new toy she’d discovered.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “The answer to our questions,” Rick answered, and his voice was no less bleak as he dropped the stem and rose swiftly to his feet. Reaching down a hand, he pulled Julie to hers. “Let’s get out of here, now!”

  Rick made no further attempt at stealth as they retreated from the village, striding so fast through the brush under which they had belly-crawled that Julie was almost running to keep up. He didn’t pause until they were back at the avocado tree.

  Squatting down on his heels under the overhanging branches, Rick stared out over the muddy water, his lean face grim with concentration. Julie, who had never mastered the hunkered-down crouch that seemed to be an integral part of guerrilla training, sank down cross-legged beside him. His silence dragged out unbearably, but there was something still so cold and dangerous in his tight expression that Julie didn’t have the courage to interrupt his thoughts.

  At last his breath left him in a sigh. Without shifting his focus from the muddy surface of the river, he said quietly, “That Indian we saw. He wasn’t from that village. Not if he’s still alive!”

  He made the statement distantly, not as though he were speaking to Julie, but as though he were mentally putting puzzle pieces together. Julie jumped on the broken silence. “How can be you so sure? What is it, Rick?”

  Rick turned his head from the river to glance at Julie, but didn’t seem to see her. “Biological warfare.”

  The terse statement hit Julie like a blow. “But—how can you say that? How do you know it isn’t plague? I’ve seen villages wiped out like that before. It could be yellow fever or … or cholera!” She broke off, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s that metal canister, isn’t it?”

  Rick nodded, and a deep weariness replaced his dangerous look. He seemed suddenly older than his years. “Yes, I recognized it. It’s an aerosol spray device for releasing small amounts of fluid or spores into the atmosphere. Used in bio-warfare experiments to test airborne viruses or chemical agents.”

  His glance flicked to Julie again. “And the writing on the side is Arabic.”

  “Arabic?” Julie gasped as the significance sunk in. “The musulmanes. Oh, no, Rick!”

  Getting up from her cross-legged position, she moved in front of him. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “Then—this is what you were looking for? This is what Comandante Aguilera and his people are hiding out here in the demilitarized zone? All those poor people!” Julie’s breath caught in sudden realization. “The environmentalists—do you think what killed the villagers killed them?”

  “I don’t know,” Rick said tiredly. “The medical team dismissed it as a tropical fever or flu. But there are bio-weapons that fit into those parameters. It would certainly explain Aguilera’s sudden reluctance to allow any serious lab testing.”

  He broke off to look keenly at Julie. “How much do you know about biological warfare?”

  Julie shrugged. “You can’t follow the news these days without knowing something about it. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had biological and chemical weapons programs during the Cold War, but they’ve supposedly dismantled them under treaties banning such weapons. There are rumors of other nations, some of them unfriendly to the U.S., suspected of trying to develop those kinds of weapons.”

  “Not just suspected,” Rick said. “Actually, there are at least a dozen nations we know of with bio-weapons programs. And the majority of them, unfortunately, aren’t entirely friendly to U.S. interests. Nations like China, North Korea, and some of the hard-line Middle East regimes—Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya.”

  “Muslim countries,” Julie recognized with dread. “Then—you think one of those countries is supplying the guerrillas with bio-weapons?”

  “Not just one!” Rick’s tone was grim. “I know exactly where that canister came from. I was eighteen and barely out of basic training when my unit was deployed to the Persian Gulf. We were responsible for dismantling some of Hussein’s biochemical warfare stockpile after the war. I don’t read Arabic, but we learned that bit really fast. ‘The Lightning Bolt of Allah’! It was stenciled all over his bio-weapons program, including warheads filled with the stuff. Hussein’s little joke—terror from the sky and all that. We knew then we hadn’t got it all—or even most of it. Army intelligence estimated that Iraq stockpiled eighty-five thousand liters of anthrax alone—enough to wipe out every person on the planet. Then there was the smallpox. Butulinum toxin. Others.”

  “Anthrax?” Julie grabbed at one of his litanies of horror. “You mean, the cow disease all those people died from after the World Trade Center attacks?”

  Any American would have had to be comatose to miss all the news coverage during those months. Someone�
��one of the al-Qaida terrorists connected to the World Trade Center attacks, a mad scientist, a disgruntled lab worker—no one had yet figured it out—had slipped small amounts of anthrax spores into envelopes and mailed them to prominent politicians and media figures. More than a dozen people had been contaminated by the disease. Five had died.

  Julie mentally reviewed what she remembered from the news coverage at that time. In its natural form, anthrax was rarely fatal. It was caused by contact with contaminated cattle or their waste and resulted in skin lesions and flu-like symptoms. A strong course of antibiotics was usually enough to take care of it. But dried and milled properly, the anthrax spores could be used to induce a more deadly form of the disease—inhalation anthrax. Inhaled into the lungs, even a few spores would immediately begin multiplying in the damp environment, producing within days flu-like symptoms and shortness of breath. By the time the victims realized they had more than the flu, it was too late for antibiotics. Another day or two, and almost all of those exposed would be dead of acute respiratory failure.

  “That’s exactly it,” Rick nodded. “Personally, I’m betting it was anthrax in that canister. I took a good look at those bodies. They weren’t disfigured, so it wasn’t smallpox. And butulinum toxin is food-borne—you have to ingest it. Whatever was in that aerosol can was designed to be released into the air. Anthrax matches the symptoms of flu and pneumonia the medical team identified in John and the others.”

  Julie’s face was white with horror. “But it’s been more than ten years since the Gulf War. Surely germs wouldn’t stay alive that long!”

  “You saw the village. Anthrax, for one, if properly stored, will keep twenty-five years or longer,” Rick answered. “It wouldn’t take much. There were only a few milligrams in those envelopes they found. Our own military experts estimate that as few as a hundred kilos dumped from a plane over Washington, D.C., on a windy day could kill between one and three million people. Taking out that village would require only a fraction of a teaspoon released into the air. In fact, if you have the guts for mass murder, it’s the perfect weapon. No mess, no destruction of property. Even better—or worse, depending on what side of the equation you’re on—no one would even know there had been an attack until symptoms started cropping up a week or more down the road, by which time your terrorist would be long gone.”