Click.
The next shot was of the same camp. Clearly days later. Had to be days, because even in the brutal heat of the Sahara, bodies don’t bloat that much. They don’t warp and expand into grotesque parodies of the human form. Doc Holliday made a soft gagging sound. I walked over to the screen and stood looking at it for a long time.
Men and women. Children. Even the camels.
All of them dead.
Sprawled in the sand. Covered in blowflies. Mouths thrown wide, but if with screams or prayers to an unheeding god there was no way to tell. Fingers knotted into fists on stilled breasts, or clutching handfuls of sand, or entwined with those of children. Reaching to each other for help, for support, or to make sure that when the darkness took them, they fell together.
None of us spoke.
Click.
The next image was of a plane flying high above, leaving a double trail of silver-white vapor.
“That was taken by the Nat Geo reporter the same day the first oasis picture was taken,” said Peabody. “The other picture . . . well, that was forty-eight hours later.”
I turned.
“It doesn’t prove a connection,” I said.
“No, no . . . but . . .”
Click.
It was an aerial view of another oasis. A substantially bigger one, with many healthy palms, a big pen of goats, and a sophisticated building whose pitched roof was lined with solar panels. Several pickups and Jeeps were parked in the shade of an angled canopy, and beyond the house were several acres of land covered with sand-colored cloth tarps. But what caught my eye was what was behind the building. There, at the end of a short, flat stretch of hard-packed sand, was an aircraft. A small, tidy jet.
Sticking out from beneath its wings were large chemical tanks.
“That’s not proof,” I said.
“Show him the rest,” said Church.
Peabody nodded. “There are three other oases in the same area.”
Click.
The same jet, flying at a height of maybe four thousand feet, dragging white lines behind it.
Click.
Another camp. More tents. More trees. More bodies.
Click.
That jet again.
Click.
The third oasis. The third horror show.
Click.
Click.
Into the silence I said, “Tell me about the people who own that jet.”
2.
UNDISCLOSED LANDING ZONE
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
We had no idea what kind of tech our potential bad guys had. The days when a radar unit was some big obvious thing were long gone. Now that stuff was small, easily mounted on a Jeep or pickup.
So we did a HALO jump to get in.
High altitude, low open. That’s three of us—Top Sims, Bunny, and me—throwing ourselves out of a perfectly good airplane at thirty thousand feet. Wearing goggles and breathing bottled air, and falling six fucking miles before we deployed our chutes. Yes, I was an Airborne Ranger in the army. Yes, I’ve done scores of combat jumps. No, I have never liked a single one of them. I have a good game face, especially in front of my men, but inside, my nuts crawl up into my chest cavity before I’m out the door, and they do not descend until about half an hour after I’m on the ground.
We didn’t die, though, so . . . there’s that.
We gathered up our chutes and kicked sand over them. Bradley “Top” Sims is the oldest member of Havoc Team. Pushing fifty, but clearly made out of boiler plates and scrap iron. Dark brown skin, eyes that missed nothing, and a patchwork of earned scars all over his tough hide. Beside him was Harvey Rabbit—sadly, that’s his actual name. Everyone calls him Bunny. He’s six and a half feet of Orange County white boy with a surfer tan and more muscles than anyone reasonably needs. They were my right and left hands. We’d joined Church’s little gang of science geeks and shooters together. I trusted them more than anyone else I knew.
The equipment had landed a few hundred yards away, and we jogged over and uncrated three sound-suppressed dirt bikes. Very high-end stuff. Not as fast as regular motorcycles, their speed topping out at forty, but the engines purred like kittens. The cases were sand-colored and with the easterly wind blowing they’d be covered and invisible in a few hours. There were no markings of any kind on any of the gear we brought. No badges or rank insignias on our clothing. We were ghosts.
Top glanced at me, then up at the sky in the direction from which we’d come, and then down at the blowing sand. “World’s going to shit and we’re a long damn way from the fight,” he said.
It was true enough. The bioterrorists had already begun limited releases on towns in Europe, Asia, and North America. A weaponized version of the Shanghai flu in Duoyishu, a village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. A superstrain of tuberculosis in Otranto, Puglia. And a dreadfully hardy strain of Yersinia pestis in a Navajo village in New Mexico. Right now the death toll was low. Comparatively low, anyway. Seven hundred infected, with seventeen deaths. No one was actually encouraged by those numbers. None of us believed that the death toll was going to stay low.
The threats about these attacks had been coming in via anonymous snail mail, social media posts from dummy accounts, and emails sent from internet cafés and fake profiles. The first one we knew about was nine months ago, and it wasn’t taken seriously—except in retrospect. It was directed at the government of India and was filled with political and quasi-religious histrionics. All about how the current world is corrupt and that overpopulation is proof of a deliberate desire to pollute and destroy the world. The viewpoint of the group amounts to the belief that humanity has become a kind of thinking virus on the skin of the living earth. What was once a symbiotic relationship, back when humanity could be counted in the tens of thousands, has been thrown out of balance by industrialism and overpopulation. The group consider themselves to be the voice of reason.
Their “reasonable” suggestion, sent via email to the heads of state of the fifty most populous countries, was for the leaders to initiate a lottery to pick ninety percent of their populations and systematically euthanize them. Failure to do so would result in the group launching a program of bioweapon releases. How they planned to do that, and where they would get these bioweapons, was something we were working on figuring out.
The limited releases were incentives. Kicks in the ass.
That’s why everyone with a gun was out hunting these freaks.
All we had for the group was a name—Silentium. Latin for “silence,” which didn’t tell us much. However, from the rhetoric in their messages it was pretty clear they were some kind of millenarian cult. Their rants were all about how mankind was corrupt and how a new age was going to dawn after the manufactured cleansing program. There were going to be seven years of violence, struggle, and death before the population was whittled down to a number in harmony with the earth.
Funny how these groups present a model of a societal golden ideal that is any rational person’s concept of a dystopia.
And the three of us seemed to be in the wrong damn place for the fight. Church said this was worth doing, and I had to take him at his word. But it felt like we were throwing punches at the wrong chins out here. Top and Bunny and I shared a long look, each of us knowing what was in the others’ hearts.
“Let’s get it done,” I said, “so we can go back to the war.”
The target was twenty-nine miles south by east from the LZ. We saddled up without a word and were gone.
3.
FINGER OF GOD OASIS
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
As we drove, we each reviewed the intel. Details were sent to the left lenses of our Google Scout glasses, a proprietary bit of tech designed for Mr. Church by one of his friends in the industry.
“We tracked down two of the people involved,” he said. “Bongani Jiba, a woman from the Xhosa tribe, and Thabo Mahao, a man from the Sotho people. Jiba graduated from the University of Cape Town. Top of her class. Mahao earned a PhD in engineering from Stellenbosch University, having gone through school on a series of scholarships. Both of them are brilliant. Mahao’s family were carpet merchants and the Jiba family were bakers. No known political connections.”
“Anything suggesting they might be with this Silentium cult?”
“Nope. Not a whiff of that. No religious affiliation of any weight. No criminal records. And no clear connection between them.”
“Two black twentysomethings with advanced degrees from white-dominated schools,” mused Top. “Could have been radicalized on campus.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Bunny, “but radicalized to do what? The Toubou were black, too. And poor as balls. What’s the win in killing them?”
“To be determined,” I said. “What else do you have, Bug?”
“Nothing. The facility you guys are heading to is on a patch of ground leased by the government of Chad to the dummy corporation. We can track some money exchanges, but it’s from the government side. Cash deposits, so that’s a dead end. All of the equipment must have been trucked in by private companies, or they did it themselves, because there’s no record.”
“What about the plane?”
“It’s a ONE Aviation Eclipse 550,” said Bug. “A light commercial jet. Cheap. About three mil. Top speed of four thirty. Fifteen-hundred-mile range, crew of one or two, with room for up to five passengers. Weighs thirty-six hundred empty and has a max takeoff weight of six thousand.”
“Doesn’t leave a lot for payload,” said Bunny, “’specially if they’re carrying full tanks of liquid. Water’s eight pounds a gallon, and those look like fifty-five-gallon drums under the wings. That’s another nine hundred pounds.”
“So,” said Top, “figure a pilot and a tech, plus the payload. Everything else stripped out.”
“Sounds right,” I said. “Bug, can we pin down who might have bought it?”
“Working on that. They only made thirty-three of them before they stopped production in 2017. I have someone running down ownership. Not a successful model, though, and a lot of them have gone to second or third owners. Get me some numbers off the engine house or tail and I’ll get you some names.”
“Roger that.”
The photos of the oases and the compound where the jet was parked were taken by Buzz Clark, a seasoned photojournalist whose articles on African tribal cultures had won him three Pulitzers over the twenty-five years of his career. He was a pragmatic guy, by all accounts, and wasn’t the type to merely be a witness to events but instead took some action when there was a need. Clark was discreet about it, though, because he didn’t want to lose credibility with local contacts. That said, when warlords in Somalia were hijacking shipments of vaccines for a TB outbreak, he made a call. When he caught wind of a sex trafficking ring smuggling tween girls out of Malawi, he sent an email. He was stand-up. A lot of reporters won’t for fear of ending a story they want to follow.
Clark contacted a buddy in the WHO, who contacted someone who contacted Peabody, who—despite my personal and totally unfounded dislike of him—contacted Church. Clark was nobody’s idea of a ranting conspiracy theorist, so we all took him more seriously than we would virtually anyone else.
Since then, though, Clark had gone off the radar. He was supposed to be our man on the ground, but he hadn’t responded to the last few attempts to reach him. None of us felt good about that.
The three of us drove on and reached the oasis called the Finger of God. A bunch of buzzards took reluctant flight, circling high above us as we parked and dismounted. We stopped upwind from the oasis and unpacked the backpack Bunny wore. In it were two lightweight hazmat suits, which Top and I pulled on. Bunny took a roll of duct tape and sealed our wrists and ankles. Then Top removed other items from the pack, including a BAMS unit, which he handed to me. He took a biological sample collection kit, and together we moved off, leaving Bunny well behind to guard our backs.
As we approached the bodies, I switched the BAMS unit on and began waving it around. The device was a bioaerosol mass spectrometer. It had a vacuum function that drew in ambient air and hit it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells were identified and assigned color codes. Most of the BAMS units on either the commercial or government markets were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density. This version had been designed by Dr. William Hu, the former head of the DMS Integrated Sciences Division, and then seriously upgraded by Doc Holliday. If everything was copacetic, the little lights would stay a comforting green.
They were green until I got about four feet from the body of an adult woman, and then the lights all flashed red.
“Fuck me,” I said.
Top stood next to me as I passed the unit over the body in order to capture as much of whatever was triggering the BAMS sensors. It was uplinked to a satellite and sent data to Doc Holliday all the way the hell back in Greece. I heard her gasp as if she stood between me and Top.
“Outlaw,” she said, using my combat call sign, “discharge the filter and load a new one, then do a new scan.” I did. Doc said, “Boys, this don’t make any goldarn sense at all. I don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt.”
“Talk to me, Doc,” I said. “Not feeling real comfy out here. Do you know what this thing is?”
“Well, I know what the sensors say it is, boys, but that don’t make a lick of sense,” complained Doc. “It’s reading as better than ninety percent sure this is coccidioidomycosis. Shorthand is cocci or valley fever.”
“We’re not in a valley, are we?” asked Top.
“Even if you were,” she said, “you’re not in the right valley. The other name for this is California fever.”
Top and I exchanged a look.
“Say again?” I said.
“Cocci is a mammalian fungal disease found in the southwestern US and northern Mexico. It has no damn reason at all to be killing people in the Sahara.”
“Then why are we looking at about forty dead people?”
“Because someone is out there playing mad scientist,” she said.
“Going out on a limb here,” said Bunny slowly, “but am I the only one wondering if somehow we stepped into a big steaming pile of that millenarian bullshit out here?”
“How?” asked Top. “Those Silentium fucknuts are all about overpopulation, and these folks here are the exact opposite of that. Ain’t many of them at all.”
“You’re right, Pappy,” said Doc, using his call sign. “The Toubou are at cultural subsistence-level population growth, especially that far into the sand.”
“But someone killed them with a disease from the States,” said Bunny. “What the actual fuck’s that about if it’s not connected?”
“You got me, sweet cheeks.” She paused. “Listen, whether or not it’s connected is only part of the problem, and not the biggest part. The fact that these people are dead at all makes my ass itch, because cocci is rarely fatal.”
“Looks pretty fu
cking fatal from where I’m standing,” I growled.
“Well, no shit,” she said in her mock-pleasant voice. Doc always sounded like she was asking for a cucumber sandwich at a church social, but that was all show. Inside she was as hard as any of us, and smarter than all of us. “Okay, the CliffsNotes version of the science is that cocci develops in certain ecological niches where you have hot summers and mild winters, and where there’s very little annual rainfall. It’s generally found in alkaline sandy soil. Not in pure-sand deserts where there is no rain worth talking about, because the fungus grows in the periods of wet weather, then dries out and is spread by arid winds. It’s called ‘grow and blow.’”
“We’re in an oasis,” said Top. “There’s got to be water under the sand here and where the other deaths occurred.”
“Sure,” she said, “but not enough to do this. The growing cycle is wrong, and the location is mighty damn wrong. Also . . . the infection cycle is way too fast. Infection of cocci requires time, and generally an already compromised immune system. It might—might—explain this quicker and more pervasive infection rate if every single one of the nomads in those three groups were already HIV positive. But that’s unlikely because these groups don’t have a lot of physical contact with urban centers in that part of Africa where HIV is rampant. Maybe five percent of people exposed to cocci contract it, and of that group less than five percent fail to recover. None of the known infected die this fast. No, no, no. This isn’t Mother Nature being a bitch. This is some true mad scientist bullshit here.”
I glanced up at the sky as if I could see the jet and its contrails, but all I saw were buzzards circling, waiting for us to leave.
“Doc,” I said, “put some people on this cocci stuff. Find out where samples can be obtained, and work out a scenario for how it might have been weaponized. Whether this is connected to the Silentium threat or not, if we can source this stuff, then we may have our first real lead.”
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