Riley rubbed his forehead, now understanding what Conner had meant earlier.
“Shut him up!” Lome ordered Conner.
“You cannot stop the power of God!” Seeger yelled.
Conner grabbed her cameraman by the arm. “Come on, Mike. Let’s go talk about it.” She guided him away to one of the tents.
Riley was surprised when Kieling spoke. “He’s not too far wrong, you know.”
“What are you talking about?” Lome demanded.
“Well, he may have the source wrong. Maybe it’s not the wrath of God we’ve got here, but it certainly is the wrath of nature,” Kieling said. “Whatever this thing is, it’s nature’s defense against mankind’s incursions into places we never were before.”
“How did this thing start?” Riley asked, catching on to the idea that this wasn’t just a random occurrence. “You say it’s nature’s defense mechanism. What do you mean by that?”
“We’re tearing up the rain forest,” Kieling said, “and so far, most of the nastiest bugs we’ve seen—the two variants of Ebola and Marburg—have come out of the rain forest here in Africa. Humans have upset the ecological balance and these viruses are fighting back against humans to re-right the balance.”
“Oh, shit,” Lome said. “A damn enviro nut.”
“No,” Kieling said. “I just look at this clearly and from every perspective. If it can kill you, you’d damn well better try to understand it.”
“Are you saying this virus was always there in the forest and we came in and activated it?” Riley asked.
“This virus,” Kieling said, “is what we call an ‘emerging’ one. There are three ways viruses emerge: They jump from one species—which usually they are relatively benign in—to another, which they aren’t benign in; or the virus is a new evolution from another type of virus, a mutation, basically. Or it could have always existed and moves from a smaller population to a larger population. In the last case, this thing could have been killing humans out in the jungle for thousands of years, but now it’s moved out into the general population.”
“Is that possible?” Conner Young asked. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed?”
“Not necessarily,” Kieling said. “We’re now beginning to believe that the AIDS virus might have been around for quite a while. Cases as far back as forty years ago are now being uncovered. They just didn’t know what it was back there and called it something else. Plus, when people are killed deep in the jungle, it very rarely makes the news or even garners any attention.”
“Which do you think this thing is? How did it evolve?” Riley asked.
“I don’t know,” Kieling said. “To find that out I need patient zero.” He then went on to explain the concept of finding the first person with the disease.
“So you don’t think it was Ku?” Major Lindsay said when Kieling was done. Those people in that village probably had the disease before him and passed it on to him?”
“No, it’s not Ku. Ku was the beginning of the disease here in Cacolo,” Kieling said. “We’re going to have to head out into the bush to find where this thing came from.”
“Which brings up another point, Major Lindsay,” Tyron said. “Did any of your medics treat Ku? He had to have been very ill for several days before he crashed—died.”
“I’ll check on it,” Lindsay said.
“This is all very nice,” Sergeant Lome said, “but what do we do next, besides sit here and wait to see who gets sick?”
“We sent a plan back to the Pentagon,” Tyron said. “We need their approval to begin working on it. We also need to wait for word from USAMRIID on what we’re dealing with. There are too many unknowns right now.”
“I’ll tell you one thing we know for sure. We know it kills.” Lome turned and walked away.
“Let’s check on your aid facility,” Tyron said to Major Lindsay, and they headed toward the AOB.
Riley watched the others inside the fence slowly melt away and head back to the tents. He noticed that the second blue suitor, Kieling, was still there, watching everyone disperse.
“You seem to know more about this than the other fellow,” Riley said. He could barely make out Kieling’s face through the plastic faceplate.
“I’ve been in the field before,” Kieling said. “He hasn’t.”
“You collected blood and other samples from us earlier this morning,” Riley said, “but I noticed neither of you seemed too interested in knowing who we were.”
He waited and Kieling waited. Finally, Riley continued. “You don’t want to know us, do you? Because if we start coming down with this thing, you want to be able to stay scientifically detached, isn’t that right?”
Kieling still remained silent.
“Our medic, Comsky, told us that there is no cure for these types of viruses. If that’s so, then you’re here to contain this, aren’t you?”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s not good enough for us,” Riley said. “If you were on this side of the fence, would it be good enough for you?”
“No,” Kieling said. He turned to follow Tyron and Lindsay.
“Hey!” Riley called out.
Kieling paused and his mechanical voice echoed out. “Yes?”
“We’ll help you. We’ve got nothing to lose. Remember that.”
“I will.”
Oshakati, Namibia, 16 June
No further instructions had come during the night, and the freeze order was still in effect. General Nystroom had spent a sleepless night, worried about his scouts across the border in southern Angola. By now, his lead motorized elements should have been making linkups with those scouts. Instead, they were still sitting here in the desert. Add on top of that an order coming from Silvermine stopping all cross-border flights and it made for a very disturbing situation for Nystroom. He couldn’t send in choppers to get his men or to resupply them. The only way out was the same way they had gone in. By foot.
Nystroom threw open the top hatch on his command vehicle and stood on the seat bottom, his head poking out. Small cooking fires burned here and there as his soldiers did what soldiers spent most of their time doing—waiting. But the scouts weren’t in a good place to be waiting.
Nystroom radioed his operations officer. “Pull the scouts back.”
“Sir, we—”
“On my authority,” Nystroom cut in. “Something’s going wrong and I don’t want to leave those men out there. Notify me the second we get anything further from Silvermine. Send another request to them for the follow-on contingency plan referred to in last night’s message.”
Pentagon, 16 June
General Cummings blew into the room, a covey of aides at his side. “Sit down, gentlemen, sit down.”
They were in the War Room, deep underneath the Pentagon. Outside the glassed-in conference room, electronic maps lined the walls and personnel manned the various stations. Inside the soundproofed enclosure, Colonel Martin pulled at the collar of his dress-green uniform.
One of the many other colonels in the room was ready with a cup of coffee for the chairman, along with an introduction. “Sir, this is Colonel Martin, head of U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D.,” he said, spelling out the letters.
Cummings put on a pair of reading glasses. “And what is U.S.— whatever you call it?” Cummings asked, flipping open a cover labeled “Top Secret” and scanning a report.
The colonel looked at Martin, passing the verbal ball.
“United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” Martin said.
“Ah, yes, the fellows over at Fort Detrick.” Cummings looked up over his glasses. “Someone sick?”
Martin nodded. “Yes, sir.” He looked at a sergeant who manned a computer terminal. “Run the video, please.”
The glass opposite Cummings became opaque and then the video of Ku dying and Comsky performing his field-expedient autopsy ran. Martin remained silent, letting the pictures speak for themselves. Following Ku’s autopsy, there were shots taken from the KH-12 and Aurora over-flight. General Cummings had seen enough of those types of photos before.
When it was done, General Cummings looked over at Martin. “I assume that video was shot in Angola. Who was the man?”
“A Sergeant Ku, MPLA, sir.”
“And?” Cummings raised his eyebrows. “Very graphic, but is there a point to all this? I’ve seen people die before, Colonel, if you thought this was going to shock me.”
“We believe Sergeant Ku died of a virus. A very lethal virus.”
“How lethal?”
“Based on similar viruses, we estimate a ninety percent kill of those infected.”
“And the imagery?” Cummings asked. “The blue and red circles?”
“Blue indicated dead,” Martin said. “Red those people who have a fever. One of the signs of infection is a high fever.”
General Cummings put down the report. “How many of our people are infected?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know?” Cummings snapped off his glasses. “When was this video shot?”
“Yesterday at—” Martin began, but Cummings cut him off.
“Yesterday! Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”
Martin pulled his tie loose and opened the top button on his shirt. “I tried to get through, sir, but this was the earliest your aides could get me in to—”
“We authorized a B-l flight for his men,” one of Cummings’s colonels cut in. “And the imagery to check things out, to include an Aurora over-flight. The base camp where the people—”
“Enough,” Cummings said. “How communicable is this virus?”
“We don’t know yet,” Martin said. “We’ve quarantined the people who were exposed to this man, but we don’t know where else in Angola it will break out. As you could see from the imagery, it is burning across the countryside, but so far all the infected villages are inside rebel-controlled territory.”
“Give me the worst-case scenario,” Cummings ordered.
“Worst case is this is an airborne virus, like the flu. If that’s the situation, it’s already out of control in Angola and all we can do is hope to keep it from coming back over here to the States.”
“The troops already in country?”
“The disease will burn, uh, run through them.”
“No antidote? Vaccine?”
“We don’t even know what it is yet,” Martin said. “We’ve seen three viruses similar to this one before. There’s no cure or vaccine for them, so the chance of us developing a cure for this one, especially on short notice, is very remote.”
Cummings spun in his seat. “What’s the deployment status on the Eighty-second?”
Someone had that information ready. “Forty-one percent personnel, eighty-six on equipment. Ahead of schedule, sir.”
“Get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. Stop the deployment immediately. Anything in the air, turn it around. Then get me General Scott on the SATCOM.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cummings spun back to Colonel Martin. “What else?”
“As I tried to tell your aide last night, sir, I need support to get—”
Cummings held up his right hand and Martin ground to a halt.
“Colonel, my men screwed up.” Cummings’s voice was flat and level. “This should have been brought to my attention earlier. If this is as bad as you say, men are going to die because of that. I understand that. My staff will understand that. Now that you’ve brought it to our attention, this is our business, Colonel. What’s done is done. Clear?”
A night of screaming into phones and pounding on desktops, trying to get to the chairman, fell away from Colonel Martin. “Clear, sir.”
“I want you here with me through the rest of this. You think someone isn’t doing the right thing, you tell me right away. My priority is our people. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now. What do you need?”
Cacolo, Angola, 16 June
“Oh, Jesus,” Tyron said, staring at the Cacolo Mission Hospital. They’d confirmed in the morning that Ku had not received treatment from any of the American medics. The next logical step was to check out the local native medical infrastructure.
“It’s typical,” Kieling’s voice came out of the box on his suit. “Last time Ebola broke out in Zaire, it was the hospital where the first patient was treated that helped spread it so widely. The medical personnel always get the worst of it.”
Worst of it was a mild way of describing what the hospital looked like. There were sick all over the place. Nuns in blood-spattered robes ministered to them. And hospital—that was not what Tyron would call this place. There weren’t even the rudiments of medical technology in place.
“I am Sister Angelina.” A frail-looking old woman walked up to them. Her English had a heavy accent. She looked up and down at their suits. “I see you are a bit better prepared for this than we are. Thank God you got here so quickly.”
“We need to find out if you treated a man. A Sergeant Ku of the Angolan army,” Tyron said.
The nun stared at his plastic face-mask. “Who are you people? We sent out a request for help to the World Health Organization yesterday. You aren’t from WHO, are you?”
“No,” Kieling replied. “We’re from the CDC. America. I’m Dr. Kieling and this is Dr. Tyron. What’s the situation?”
“Over half my staff is down,” Sister Angelina said. “High fever, headaches, bloody diarrhea, vomiting, rashes. I am afraid we might have an outbreak of Ebola.”
“Sergeant Ku was the case that started it,” Kieling said. “We need to find out if he was treated here.”
Sister Angelina led them into a building. “I’ll show you the records. What day do you think he would have come in?” The Angolans gathered around, staring at the two men in the space suits.
“Anytime in the last seven days,” Kieling replied.
The nun flipped open a battered box that contained index cards, wrapped together with rubber bands. She began flipping through.
Tyron took the time to look around. Through a curtain made of a sheet, he could see a ward. There were bodies in the beds and several nuns moved among the people, ministering to them. He felt totally immersed in a different world. The nuns didn’t have the slightest form of protection, not even surgical masks.
“A Sergeant Ku,” Sister Angelina announced, holding up an index card, “was treated on the morning of the fourteenth. He claimed he was suffering from a venereal infection. He was given a shot of antibiotics.”
“Claimed he was suffering?” Tyron repeated. “Wasn’t he checked?”
Sister Angelina turned her wrinkled face toward Tyron. “Every morning we average between eighty and a hundred and twenty new patients. That’s in addition to those that fill our beds. I have nine sisters to minister to those people, and only four of my sisters are trained nurses. The rest learn as they go. We have no doctor. We send the more critical ones to Luanda on the military flight, if there is one.
“And your man Ku was a soldier. He asked for treatment for what he thought he had and we gave it to him.”
“How much sterilization do you—” Kieling began.
“One needle dipped in a bleach-and-water mixture,” she said. “We have very little equipment and must make everything we have go far beyond its expected usage.”
“Oh, God,” Tyron muttered.
“Where is Sergeant Ku?” Sister Angelina asked.
“Dead,” Kieling said.
Sister Angelina’s face betrayed no emotion. “How?”
“We don’t know.”
“Ebola?” She pointed toward the ward. “I was in Zaire in ‘95. This looks the same.”
“It’s not Ebola. At least not one of the known strains,” Kieling said.
“But it is a virus,” the nun replied. “Or else you would not be wearing those suits.”
“Yes,” Kieling confirmed. “It is a virus.”
“Can you help us?” Angelina asked.
“We have to track down the source,” Kieling said. “I’ll have them send you some equipment. Gowns, masks. That will help.”
“If it isn’t already too late,” Sister Angelina said.
To that, the men from USAMRIID had no answer.
“We would like to look at some of your patients,” Kieling said.
“You will scare them,” Angelina said. “You have already started a panic in town by coming here in those suits. It tells everyone that you are so afraid of something you will wear that. None of the people here are wearing a safe suit, so that means they should be scared, correct?”
“Correct,” Kieling said.
“Too late to worry about all that,” the nun said. “You’re here.” Sister Angelina pointed to the ward. “Follow me.”
They moved through the archway, careful not to scrape their suits on either side. There were fourteen people in the beds.
“My native support left when they first feared this was a virus,” Sister Angelina explained as they moved. “All that is left are my Sisters.”
Tyron knew that also meant the native support workers might have run away with the disease in their system. This was the horrifying danger of trying to contain an epidemic. Nobody wanted to hang around in the area where the sickness had taken root, but by running they spread it to new areas.
They walked down the aisle. Tyron was glad that he had the backpack. The smell must be horrendous. The overworked nuns were trying their best, but the soiled sheets from vomiting and diarrhea could only be replaced so often.
They’d seen Ku’s body, but at the point at which the virus had been at full amplification, having taken over the host completely. Here they could see what it did to flesh prior to death.
“The rashes,” Kieling said briefly.
Tyron had noted that too. Streaks of postulant red cut across the skin of most of the victims. He leaned over one bed. Blood was seeping out from the child’s eyes, nose, and ears. The eyes were looking at him, wide open, rimmed in red, fear and pain evident.
Kieling glanced about. There were no IVs or any other signs of modern medical procedures in sight. Just nuns in their habits, using what they had to comfort the people, wiping sweat and blood from ravaged flesh. Giving aspirin for the sickness and pain.
“We have to go,” Kieling said, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Will you help?” Sister Angelina asked.
“We’ll get you some help,” Kieling promised.
The two men walked back out of the infirmary, onto the dusty street. A crowd had gathered, and the people stepped back from the two men in their suits. A woman began wailing and Tyron increased his pace.
“We know Ku had it and we know the day he came here,” Kieling said. “We just got a look at the symptoms. We need to come back and get an idea of the timeline of this thing. Interview some of the patients that are coherent. This is a good break.”
“A good break?” Tyron repeated incredulously. “They reused the same damn needle they shot Ku up with and infected God knows how many people, and you call it a break?”
“I didn’t start this disease,” Kieling said. “And I didn’t tell these people to use that needle like they did. It’s what’s done all over this continent where they spend more money in a day on bullets than on medicine in a year. We didn’t create this situation, Tyron, so stop taking everything so fucking personally.
“It is a break because we know the date and approximate time some of these people were infected. We have the cases here and can look at them more closely. That rash was unique. Ebola causes a rash, but not like the one those cases had.
“We can see the progression of this thing and also find out how those infected caught it. The needle? Blood? Air vector? We get those answers here.”
“Shouldn’t we get Major Lindsay to quarantine the hospital?”
“You saw the imagery. It’s spread far beyond the hospital,” Kieling said. “But we’ll tell him. Remember, though, that the hospital is an Angolan problem. Not Major Lindsay’s.”
“Why’d you lie to her?” Tyron asked as they decontaminated outside their shelter. He felt overwhelmed. There was too much going on and too many things to deal with at once.
“About what?” Kieling replied. “I told her the truth. We don’t know what this thing is.”
“About being from the CDC?”
“To give her some hope,” Kieling said. “Besides, the people who do this work like Sister Angelina—they don’t like the military—anybody’s military. They hate the military because they have to see and try to save the end result of all the civilians who get maimed and shot and killed in all the wars here. She might not have cooperated with us if she’d known we were from the army.”
“What about the vector? We think there’s a possibility it is airborne, but you told her it—”
“I know what I told her. What good would it do if I told her it might be airborne? There’s nothing they can do.”
“But she’ll find out you lied. You shouldn’t have—”
“Did you see her eyes?” Kieling cut in. “Her neck? She’s got it, Tyron. She’ll be dead soon. So don’t worry about what’s going to happen in two days. Worry about now.”
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, 16 June
“What do we have?” the chief coroner of the casualty identification center at Andrews Air Force Base asked as he suited up.
“Helicopter crash victims,” his assistant said. “The Pentagon wants to see if we can’t find the body of Jonas Savimbi among that mess. Classified top secret and all that good stuff.”
“Oh, Christ,” the chief coroner said as he entered the mortuary room. Body parts were laid out on tables. He wasn’t upset about the gory scene, rather it was the number and condition of the parts that dismayed him.
“We figure we have eleven or twelve cases,” the assistant said.
“What do we have on Savimbi? Dental? Fingerprints? DNA?”
“We have dental and finger. No DNA.”
The chief coroner sighed. “Well, we’ve got a long day ahead of us. Let’s get going.”
Luanda, Angola, 16 June
“Yes, sir, I’ll take care of all of that,” General Scott said into the secure satellite phone. “Cacolo is already isolated and I’ll freeze everybody else in country.”
“I’m going to the president,” General Cummings’s voice rang in Scott’s ear. “It’ll be up to him to decide how to handle this publicly. For now, we’re going with a complete blackout.”
“Yes, sir.” General Scott watched a fly buzzing around his command complex. They’d appropriated an entire abandoned office building in downtown Luanda as division headquarters. Remembering the lesson of Beirut, all entrances into the building were blocked off and heavily fortified.
But the fly got in here, Scott thought. And this virus, whatever it was, was much smaller than the fly. The veteran infantryman felt fear. Not personal fear, but fear for his beloved division. “What about SOCOM’s people?” Scott asked, referring to the troops working for the Special Operations Command.
“I’m putting every swinging dick on the ground there under your direct command,” General Cummings replied. “I’ll talk to Richard about it right after I get off with you.”
Scott knew that “Richard” referred to Admiral Richard Peters, the JTF commander in chief, aboard a navy ship off the coast. The man in charge of all the forces involved in this operation.
“That will include the other services too,” Cummings’s voice continued. “You’re the ranking man on the ground and I want you to make the decisions.”
“Yes, sir.” The fly had landed on the map table and was crossing the acetate overlay that showed all force dispositions in Angola.
“Good luck. Out here.”
Scott slowly put the phone down and looked at his waiting staff. What he did know was vastly overwhelmed by what he did not know, but at the least, he had his orders. “Gentlemen, the situation has changed and we have a new priority.”
Cacolo, Angola, 16 June
Kieling threw down the latest fax from Fort Detrick. “They’re still working on the sample, trying to isolate the virus.”
Tyron was looking over the imagery again. “This isn’t right,” he said. “This virus is moving so quickly, yet it’s also so deadly. It doesn’t add up.”
Kieling agreed with that. “The vector has got to be something quicker than body fluids. But it still doesn’t have to be airborne. Maybe it’s a nonhuman carrier. For all we know this could be getting spread by mosquitoes like malaria and we’re looking in the wrong place altogether.”
“Rodents?” Tyron offered. He knew Kieling was familiar with the Hanta virus that had appeared in the American Southwest in 1993 and killed more than fifty people. The virus’s vector had puzzled scientists from the CDC and USAMRIID until they tracked it down to mice. Finding that source had allowed them to focus on stopping the spread, although there still wasn’t an effective vaccine against it.
“We’ll have to go back to the hospital,” Kieling said. “Interview the people there. They are the only known cases we have, other than these villages in the imagery, and I don’t think we want to go out there yet.
“We need to check their history. Where they were. Did they touch anyone who looked sick? Were they bitten by anything? What did they eat before they got sick? The whole regimen.”
Tyron looked over at the entrance. He dreaded the thought of suiting up again. Of going out among people who stared at him, protected in his suit, with fear in their eyes. Of going out into a world where death might be as close as a mosquito bite. In his mind, the Kevlar walls of the habitat were growing thicker with each passing hour.
“First, temperature,” Kieling said, holding up an electronic thermometer. They duly took each other’s temperature. The routine was to ensure they caught as early as possible any chance of onset of a fever. A sign they might have been exposed to a virus. Both were normal.
Tyron followed Kieling into the entryway, sealing the door behind himself. They pulled on their suits, sealing gloves to sleeves and boots to pants with rolls of tape.
“Let’s stop by the isolation compound first,” Kieling said as he opened the outer door. “I want to see if any of the people there have symptoms. They were exposed yesterday morning. Today’s day three for the people we saw at the hospital; day two for the people in the ISO compound. We should be seeing the first signs, if any of them are infected.”