CHAPTER 16
H
arvath was exhausted. So was Decker. He wanted to take a closer look at the burn pit, but now wasn’t the time. Not in the dark and the rain. It was time to get back to camp.
Shouldering their packs, they walked down to the river and returned the way they had come.
The rain made it difficult to talk, and it was probably for the best. Decker had already made going to the burn pit an issue. She wanted to go with him in the morning. Harvath had no idea what she had seen as a war correspondent, but he had strongly advised her against it. There were certain things that couldn’t be unseen. Once they were seared into your mind, they stayed there forever.
The additional reason he felt she should sit it out was that she had personal relationships with the people missing from the clinic. Based on what little he had seen, he knew the pit was going to be brutal.
Decker, though, had her mind made up. No matter how hard he might try to dissuade her, she intended to join him. There was no use fighting her on it and he let the subject drop.
When they entered the camp, they found the Brits, along with Jambo, sitting beneath a tarp slung between two trees and one of the Land Cruisers.
“How’d it go?” Ash asked.
“Not well,” Harvath replied. “We need to talk.”
The Brit motioned to the other Land Cruiser.
Inside, Harvath pulled his poncho off and threw it on the backseat.
Ash handed him a towel and asked, “What happened?”
“Someone hit the clinic.”
“Hit it how?”
“It looks like a team of shooters came in.”
The Brit stared at him. “The rebels? FRPI?”
“Not unless they travel with sanitation teams.”
“It was sanitized?”
Harvath nodded. “Right down to digging the slugs out of the wall and patching the holes.”
“It was a professional hit then.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
It didn’t make any sense. “It’s a charity clinic,” Ash replied. “Why would anyone waste those kinds of resources on it?”
Harvath shrugged. “No idea.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious.”
“No, you’re not,” the Brit stated. “You’ve been holding out on us since you arrived. I don’t believe for a second that you came to do some sort of assessment. You’re here to compile an after action report.”
Lying to people was part of Harvath’s job, but he hated doing it. Ash was completely correct. Harvath had been holding out on him. It was just the way things had to be done. At this point, though, he needed the man’s help more than he needed to keep any further secrets from him.
“Several days ago,” said Harvath, “CARE International received a video. It showed four gunmen entering the Matumaini Clinic and opening fire.”
“Who sent the video?”
“We don’t know.”
“Who took the video?”
“We don’t know.”
“When was it taken?”
“We don’t know that either.”
Ash narrowed his eyes in the semidarkness of the Land Cruiser and tried to read Harvath’s face. “What
do
you know?”
“What I just told you.”
“But you haven’t told me anything except that there were four gunmen. What did they look like? Were they black? White? Purple? How were they dressed?”
Harvath removed his phone, powered it on, and showed him the footage.
“Those are bloody biohazard suits.”
Harvath nodded and waited until Ash had watched the full clip.
“Play it again,” the Brit said.
Harvath did as he requested. When the video was over, he took his phone back.
Ash was not happy. “You and Decker went into the clinic, didn’t you?”
“Don’t worry,” Harvath said. “We wore protective gear.”
“What do you mean
don’t worry
? What the hell is going on here?”
“We don’t know.”
“You knew enough to bring protective gear with you,” the Brit said, adding, “That’s why you wanted us to wait here, isn’t it.”
Harvath nodded.
“And you never thought any of this was worth sharing?”
“I was under orders not to.”
“The hell you were.”
“I told you. We don’t know what’s going on here either,” Harvath emphasized. “The last thing CARE wants is a scandal.”
“
Scandal?
You’ve got a bloody international incident.”
Try selling that to the U.S. State Department
, Harvath thought to himself.
“Listen, mate, those shooters didn’t go in kitted up like that just to freak out the natives. There was something bad inside that clinic that they were very afraid of.”
“I agree.”
“So what was going on there? What would cause an armed team in biohazard suits to just show up?”
“No one on our side knows. It’s just a basic medical clinic, period. They don’t treat highly communicable diseases.”
“Apparently, somebody thought they did,” replied Ash. “And it was somebody serious because, according to you, after the wet work was done, they sent in a mop-up team to sterilize the scene.”
“So let’s narrow that down,” Harvath said.
“How do I know you’re not carrying whatever was in that clinic?”
“Because I told you, we wore protective gear.”
“You’ve told me a lot of things.”
He was pissed. Harvath would have been too if their positions had been switched.
“We wore full biohazard suits and followed the strictest decon procedures.”
“That’s what was in the packs? Not medical supplies.”
“Correct,” Harvath replied.
Ash shook his head.
“About that wet work team—” Harvath continued, but Ash held his hand up, interrupting him.
“Our fee has just doubled. And if I find out you have held anything else back, I’m going to double it again.”
“I’ll have to call back to the States to get approval for that.”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” Ash stated. “You hired us under false pretenses and watered down the scope. The fee is double, or we pack up and drive you back to Bunia right now. Which is it?”
Harvath didn’t like having his balls busted, but the man was within his rights. He agreed to the increased fee. Then, he steered him back to his previous question. “Narrow down for me who might have sent in a wet work team and followed it up with cleaners.”
“
Narrow
it down? It could have been any foreign intelligence service in the first world, or from the second for that matter. How do you narrow
that
down?”
“Let’s start with how many of them are operating in Congo.”
“If they’re smart, all of them are. Congo’s untapped mineral resources alone are valued at over twenty-four trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the U.S. and Europe combined.”
“But what nations specifically would you be focused on?” Harvath asked.
Ash thought about it. “You’ve got everyone from the Australians to the Swiss running a mining operation here. That includes the Chinese and Japanese as well. Even the Moroccans have established a presence.”
“But whose intelligence service would send out a wet work team?”
The Brit shook his head. “The question isn’t who, but rather
why
? As in, why would any foreign intelligence service give two whits about some medical clinic in the middle of nowhere?”
His point was well taken. It was the same question Harvath had been asking himself since seeing the clinic. But perhaps it wasn’t the question that was wrong. Maybe, it was how he was asking it.
“Let’s back up and start again,” Harvath stated. “
Why
would anyone send a wet work team into a medical clinic in the first place?”
“That seems fairly obvious,” Ash replied. “To make sure that someone, or
something
, never got out of there. And based on how those shooters were suited up, I’ll bet they were after someone who was infected.”
Harvath concurred. “So let’s assume for a minute that they were trying to contain something. Why not just quarantine the clinic? Why go in shooting?”
Ash paused again and thought about the question. Finally, he said, “Because whatever they have, it’s
beyond
bad.”
“Even if it were beyond bad,” Harvath replied, “you quarantine the victims and make them as comfortable as possible. You don’t kill them.”
“So what’s the answer then?”
“I don’t know,” he said as he reached up and ground his thumbs into his temples. This entire clusterfuck of an assignment was turning into one big headache.
After thinking about it some more, Ash attempted to come at it from another angle.
“Do you have any clue what they did with the bodies?”
Harvath nodded. “That’s the next thing we need to discuss.”
CHAPTER 17
F
RIDAY
B
y the time Decker was awake and out of her hammock, Harvath had already gone. He had taken Ash and Mick with him.
While Jambo and the Brute Squad broke down the camp, Harvath and the two other Brits proceeded to the pit on foot. They wanted to establish a perimeter before calling in the rest of the team.
The rain had stopped overnight and when the first pale streaks of dawn began to paint the sky, it looked as if it would be a halfway decent morning. Harvath wanted to take it as a good omen, but he knew better than to put his trust in that kind of thing. Rain or shine, this was still Congo.
Per Ash’s request, they had given the clinic a healthy berth on their hike in. They had stopped to survey it at a distance from the jungle, but only for a moment, and then had pushed on.
As soon as they neared the pit, they could smell the jet fuel. While it wasn’t as strong as it had been the night before for Harvath, it was still unmistakable.
They worked their way around the pit and conducted a preliminary reconnaissance in the semidarkness. None of them spoke. They all knew what this place was. You could feel it.
Ash sent Mick out to the road as a lookout and then called in the rest of the team.
The sun was just beginning to pierce the trees when the white Land Cruisers rolled up.
Decker stepped out of LC1 wrapped in a fleece and holding a coffee cup. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail. She arched her shoulders and lazily looked around as if she had just shown up for a 5K and was searching for the sign-in table.
Then, the odor of jet fuel found its way into her nose and her demeanor completely changed. Her eyes found Harvath’s as he walked over to her.
“We’ll have good light in about ten more minutes,” he said. “You can still opt out of this. I’ll have them move the vehicles back and one of the guys will stay with you.”
Decker shook her head. “I want to do this. I have to.”
Harvath wasn’t going to fight with her. “Okay.”
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
“Jet fuel.”
“Did they use it to burn the bodies?”
“Probably.”
Closing her eyes, she leaned into him and placed her head against his shoulder. “Seeing death up close never gets any easier, does it?”
It was one of the first purely human glimpses he had seen of her. “No,” he replied. “It doesn’t.”
He knew the Brits were watching, and he didn’t care.
Like most pure moments, though, this one was fleeting. Decker straightened up, turned her back on him and walked around to the other side of the Land Cruiser to drink her coffee and watch the sunrise.
Harvath removed his Toughbook laptop, placed it on the backseat, and turned it on. He had already uploaded the video footage from the clinic and had composed a brief SITREP for the Old Man. Now that he had an unimpeded view of the sky, he wanted to transmit it back to the States.
Powering up his Iridium WiFi cube, he set it on the roof of the SUV and angled its antenna. While it searched for satellites, he also powered up his phone to see if he had received any texts.
Once the cube was connected, he watched for the message icon to light up on his phone. It didn’t. Turning it off, he focused his mind on business.
He had broken the video up into pieces to make it easier to transmit. Pulling up the string of encrypted emails, he hit
send
and then grabbed his video camera. The sun was strong enough now to begin seeing the pit.
Finished with her coffee, Decker pulled a box of high-end surgical masks out of her bag and offered them around. Everyone accepted one of the disposable respirators, even Jambo and the Brute Squad who would be staying with the vehicles and securing the road. There was no telling what was in the pit or suspended in the atmosphere around it.
Harvath doubted anything could have survived a jet fuel–assisted fire, but he knew that the remaining smoke and ash could present a whole host of health problems and so fitted his mask over his mouth and nose.
Turning the video camera on, he documented the tire tracks and tread marks leading to and from the pit. While a lot of it was nothing more than puddles of red mud, there was enough there to show what type of equipment had come through.
When he had what he needed, he joined Decker and they walked with Ash and Mick out toward the pit.
It was a solemn procession. No one spoke. With the sun up, they could see the occasional wisp of smoke rising into the air in front of them.
But with all of the rain, how was that even possible?
The horrific answer became clear soon enough.
Like most of the terrain they had been through, the area surrounding the clinic was mostly sloped. The same could be said for where the staff disposed of their trash. It was a narrow, level strip at the base of a steep, nearby hill. But it was what had been done with the hill that turned their stomachs.
Even through their masks, the smell of jet fuel was now overpowering. Harvath took one look at everything and knew why.
A bulldozer had definitely been brought in, but not to bury bodies. It had been brought in to engineer a grisly crematorium.
A huge chunk had been ripped out of the bottom of the hill to create the oven. With Decker following behind, Harvath climbed to the top and let his nose be his guide. It didn’t take long to find the empty fuel barrels hidden beneath a makeshift blind. Each one had been punctured with a small hole.
Several yards away he uncovered the air shaft and knew exactly what he was looking at. He also knew why the satellite image had looked off to him.
“What is all of this?” Decker asked as he recorded it.
“A giant rocket stove.”
“What’s a rocket stove?”
Harvath pointed to the shaft and then at the barrels. “Oxygen would have been sucked in from the base of the hill and drawn up through this shaft. Those punctured barrels of jet fuel would have continued to drip-feed the fire.
“The stronger the fire got, the more oxygen would have been sucked in. And the more oxygen that got sucked in, the hotter the fire would have raged. The temperature would have been amazing; total combustion of almost anything placed down there.”
“Including bodies?”
“If they stacked them right.”
Decker suddenly didn’t feel so well.
Harvath noticed that her color was off. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “It’s the jet fuel. Can we walk back down?”
“Of course,” he replied, offering her his arm.
Decker accepted it, but let go halfway when the trail became too narrow for them to walk side by side.
At the bottom, Ash and Mick were studying something at the edge of the pit.
As he saw the Americans approach, Ash raised his hand for them to stop.
“You don’t want to see this,” he warned.
“See what?” Decker replied, undeterred.
Mick turned and gently tried to block her, but she nudged him out of the way.
She took one look and came charging back past Harvath with her hand over her mask. Seconds later, she was in the brush vomiting.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she waved him off.
He looked over at Ash who motioned for him to come see what they had found. Harvath knew it wasn’t going to be good.
The men stepped aside as he joined them. On the ground at their feet were the skulls of three small children. Beyond was a jumble of bones, also small.
While any loss of innocent life was lamentable, the loss of children was doubly so.
Though he didn’t want to, Harvath raised the video camera and recorded everything. There was one thing that still didn’t make sense—the size of the pit. If you were just going to murder the people at the clinic, why did this have to be so big? It didn’t make any sense.
He was taking close-up shots when Mick asked, “What happened to Dr. Decker?”
Harvath paused the camera and looked around. He didn’t see her either.
“Maybe she went to get a fresh mask,” said Ash. “Or a toothbrush.”
She probably just needed a break,
thought Harvath. This was hard for anyone to handle.
“I’ll go look for her,” he said, handing the camera to Mick.
“Don’t go too far,” Ash warned.
Stepping away from the pit, Harvath looked uphill toward where the fuel barrels were. He doubted she had gone back up there, but he climbed the hill just to make sure. There was no trace of her.
She must have gone back to the vehicles. Walking back down the trail, he got to the bottom and headed back toward the Land Cruisers.
But as he got closer and could see everybody but Decker, his internal alarm system started to go off.
When Jambo, Simon, and Eddie all confirmed that they hadn’t seen her, he radioed Ash and Mick and made his concern official.