CHAPTER 37
H
arvath had no idea how the patient who had escaped the Ngoa facility had gotten out. With a ten-foot-high wall and a razor-wire fence, it wouldn’t have been easy. Did he stow away in a vehicle? Did he have help? Did he simply walk out the back gate when no one was looking? There was no way to know.
What Harvath did know was that as the crow flew, a healthy person could walk from the Ngoa facility to the Matumaini Clinic in a day. This guy, though, hadn’t been healthy. He was on death’s doorstep the minute he arrived at Matumaini. Did he steal a bicycle? Did a Good Samaritan come across him and help deliver him to the clinic?
That was probably an even more important question than how he got to the clinic. Anyone he came in contact with would have been exposed to the virus. Had Hendrik and his men reverse-engineered his route? They had murdered everyone at Matumaini as well as at the adjacent village to prevent the disease from spreading; what about anyone else he had come in contact with along the way?
Harvath made a mental note to make sure the question got transmitted to Vella and his interrogation team at the Solarium site in Malta.
Drawing his attention back to the video feeds, Harvath listened to a chorus of “Clear! Clear!” ringing out as the STAR team secured room after room of the Ngoa facility’s main building. All of them were empty.
Not only were they devoid of people, but they had been stripped clean of furniture, equipment, computers, everything. The only things left were the paint and light fixtures.
Like Matumaini, Harvath figured it had been bleach bombed as well. In fact, as this was alleged to be ground zero for the new, highly communicable strain of African Hemorrhagic Fever, they had probably taken bleach bombing to a completely new level.
Based on the building’s layout, there appeared to be two patient wings—likely one for men and one for women— communal bathrooms, showers, and a series of examination rooms. This wasn’t where any actual experiments on the virus would have been conducted.
On the far side of the compound, they discovered the lab— or at least what was left of it. The structure had been burned to the ground. All that remained was the charred hulk of some sort of walk-in freezer.
“That can’t be a Level 4 lab,” Colonel White said. “It’s too small.”
Level 4 was the highest, CDC-spec’d biocontainment safety level possible. It was reserved for the most dangerous and severely lethal pathogens researchers might come in contact with.
Harvath saw something on one of the team member’s helmet cams and asked McCollum to have MacDill back the man up and return to where he had just been.
“What do you see?” the General asked.
“Those depressions in the ground,” he replied, before looking over at Colonel White and asking, “What if the lab was mobile?”
“As in a trailer? Like the Iraqis allegedly had?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know how the hell you’d move one on the roads in Congo,” she stated, putting the word
roads
in air quotes. “And God help you if it flipped over.”
“But it could be done.”
“Positive pressure suits, a segregated air supply, showers, a UV light room—building a mobile Level 4 would be a ton of work, not to mention a ton of money.”
Something told Harvath expense wasn’t something Damien and the Plenary Panel worried about. “But it could be done,” he repeated.
“Seeing as how we’ve dropped some pretty high-tech shipping container expeditionary labs into war zones, anything is possible.”
The STAR team was reaching the threshold of how long they could stay in the suits before heatstroke began to set in. They needed to break
off and get to the decontamination showers they had set up back in the jungle.
Harvath had seen enough. The Ngoa facility was a bust. When Colonel White looked around the room and asked if anyone needed to see anything else, everyone shook their head. General McCollum notified the MacDill TOC that the STAR team could come off station and proceed to decon.
Once the team had exfiltrated the Ngoa facility and retreated into the jungle, President Porter opened the floor for discussion.
“Now what?” he asked, excusing himself for having to remove a handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose. “Anyone have any ideas?”
Harvath cleared his throat and looked at Colonel White. “How much of my debrief from Congo did you read?”
“The whole thing.”
He looked over at General McCollum, who nodded and said, “I did as well.”
He knew Lydia Ryan and Bob McGee, as well as the President, had read theirs, so that meant everyone in the room was up to speed. He also knew that they had been made aware of the patients who had bled out in Chicago, Houston, and Detroit. It had been one of the reasons Colonel White had moved to push up the Ngoa operation.
Harvath filled them in on what they had learned about the patients and their travel histories. He then laid out his theory about the Hajj and how the virus might have been introduced.
“What kind of protocol do we even have for something like this?” President Porter asked, fishing his handkerchief back out.
“It’s Federal, not military,” McCollum responded.
“CDC, NIH, FEMA,” White added, “all coordinated from DHS.”
Out of an abundance of caution, White had not been told that right now, all of those organizations were suspect, and were being purposefully cut out of the loop by the White House.
“Let’s say something happened,” CIA Director McGee replied, fixing his eyes on White, “and DHS was unable to get spun up in time, how would you want to see things unfold?”
“Why wouldn’t DHS, or more importantly FEMA or CDC or NIH be able to respond in a timely manner?” she asked.
“Just answer my question.”
“Is this a drill?”
“No,” the President replied. “This isn’t a drill. Please answer.”
“We’d want to know as much about this strain of African Hemorrhagic Fever as possible. We’d need samples. We’d need them from any newly diagnosed patients here, but if this thing did start in Congo, I’d like to get samples from there too.
“Ideally, I’d want the samples taken at the Matumaini Clinic from patient zero. I’d want anything you could get from that sick rebel commander, as well as samples from that Matumaini Clinic worker and his son who transported patient zero’s samples and was there when the rebel commander was exposed. That’s just for starters.”
President Porter looked at Harvath. “On the Congo end of things, how doable is that list?”
“Provided the rebels are where we left them, I could give the STAR team coordinates and they could go in to get samples from the commander’s corpse. We left him in the jungle, though, so his bones might be picked clean by now.”
“We’ll take that chance,” said Colonel White.
“And the rest of it?” Porter asked.
“When we left Bunia with Dr. Decker, Leonce and Pepsy said they intended to stay there. There was nothing left for them in their village.”
“Could we find them?”
“I have someone who could track them down,” said Harvath, thinking of Jambo.
“Which just leaves us with recovering the patient zero samples from the WHO offices in Kinshasa,” stated White. “Do you have somebody who could do that?”
Jessica Decker was back in Kinshasa, but he didn’t believe for a minute that she would cooperate, much less that she could pull it off on her own.
Needless to say, he did know someone, and he nodded.
“We have an experienced team in-country we can use,” Harvath replied.
“Extremis?” Carlton asked, referring to Ash and the three other SAS men.
He nodded once more.
“But do they know how to handle samples?” White inquired. “How to package them for transport? Will they even know how to locate them in the Kinshasa office?”
All good questions, the answers to which were
no
. Ash and his men, as far he knew, didn’t have applicable experience in handling highly lethal pathogens. He shook his head.
“Colonel,” Porter said. “How soon can you get someone from the STAR team to Kinshasa to supervise?”
“I can task one of them immediately, but it’ll all come down to transport.”
“And Extremis?” the President asked, looking at Harvath.
“Same answer.”
“What about samples from the U.S. patients?” said Lydia Ryan.
“Normally, I’d say that wouldn’t be a problem,” White replied. “We have a good working relationship with the CDC. With something like this, they’d want as much help as they can get. But we began this discussion with Director McGee asking me what USAMRIID would do if the CDC couldn’t respond.”
McGee looked at the President, then at her. “Ask the CDC for the samples, just as you normally would in a situation like this. If you get any pushback, let us know and we’ll take care of it.”
“If this is some kind of terrorist attack,” she stated, “why are we not telling them?”
“There are additional National Security issues involved,” McCollum replied as he closed his briefing book. He had been read in on the full scope of the situation before White had arrived and that was all he said.
White was a highly skilled scientist, but she was also a soldier and a professional who respected the chain of command. “Understood,” she responded.
After thanking General McCollum and Colonel White for their attendance, the President excused them from the Situation Room. He then turned to the remaining attendees and asked for a domestic update.
Carlton and McGee gave the President a quick rundown, hitting the high points and answering the handful of questions that were raised. The longer they sat in the Situation Room, the worse the Commander in Chief looked.
“Are you feeling okay, Mr. President?” Carlton finally asked.
“I’m fine,” Porter replied, coughing briefly to clear his chest. “What about those letters
MC
that Damien wrote in relation to their plan for the United States? Have we figured that out yet?”
“No, sir,” McGee said. “We’re still working on that.”
“Well, work faster. I want another update in two hours. And by
update
, I mean
progress
. Is that understood?”
Around the conference table, everyone nodded and replied, “Yes, Mr. President.”
As the President stood, the rest of the room stood, and Harvath pressed his luck. “Mr. President, one last thing, if I may, sir?”
Porter didn’t look happy, but he nodded.
“Sir,” Harvath continued. “I know when it was originally presented, you tabled any talk of taking Damien into custody.”
“You mean
rendering
him,” the President clarified.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know why I tabled it?”
“I think I have an idea, sir.”
“Well allow me to clarify it for you,” Porter retorted. “Pierre Damien is an American citizen currently on U.S. soil. He is also a citizen of Canada, which is an important American ally. Damien is also a diplomat, an Under-Secretary-General with the United Nations no less. He’s a wealthy and powerful man with a lot of wealthy and powerful friends.”
“I understand, sir, it’s just—”
The President cut him off. “Don’t interrupt me.”
Never before had Harvath been chastised by Porter. He regretted interrupting him immediately.
“Any corners you may have to cut from time to time downrange, or things you may have do in the name of expediency, become considerably more complicated when the recipient of those measures is an American citizen. Place that citizen on U.S. soil, and the complication factor skyrockets so high that God himself couldn’t even reach it.”
Porter took a moment to catch his breath and look around the table before returning to Harvath. “Making a case is like laying bricks, and you don’t have enough of them. You have the slaughter of workers at a medical clinic and a village in a part of Africa most Americans know nothing
about. It’s horrific, I’ll give you that, but the only thing you have tying it to Pierre Damien is the word of some mercenary whom you subjected to waterboarding and then rendered to Malta without any authorization whatsoever.
“That’s it. That’s all you have. And that means that’s all
I
have. That’s all my Attorney General would have. It doesn’t matter who was seen coming out of his house. He, like every other American, has a right to free association.
“Do I enjoy his anti-American rhetoric? No, but he also has a right to freedom of speech, along with a long list of other rights guaranteed to him in the Constitution, a document that I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend.
“So when you ask me if you can render an American citizen, from American soil, for a crime he allegedly orchestrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, based upon a statement coerced from a non-U.S. citizen under unauthorized, harsh interrogation, my answer is not only no, it’s
hell no
.
“Does that clarify my position for you?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Paul Porter looked around the table one last time. Everyone else nodded, and with that, he exited the Situation Room.
Harvath, Carlton, Ryan, and McGee sat for a moment in stunned silence until McGee said, “That went well.”
Carlton shook his head. “You never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.”
Harvath didn’t want to be disrespectful to the Old Man, but he couldn’t hold his tongue. “It needed to be asked.”
“No it didn’t, at least not directly. You know better. He’s the President of the United States. He doesn’t mind a little coloring outside the lines, but there are certain things that you have to be very delicate about raising. And there are most definitely things that cannot be put to him point-blank.”
Harvath glanced at Ryan. There were times where she seemed to understand him better than either of their bosses. “It all comes down to bricks, right?”
“What?”
“The President told you. You don’t have enough bricks. He wants you to build the thickest, highest wall you can. Something Damien will never be able to scale. I didn’t hear POTUS say stop. I just heard him say that for the time being, you can’t choke any of your bricks out of Pierre Damien directly.”