Born of War (8 page)

“F
artuun!”

Omar greeted his pregnant wife at the airport in Cairo with a smile and brief hug. Although it had been only a few days since he last saw her, she already seemed more pregnant than he had remembered.

The wife wanted a baby and a quiet world. But she was a true Muslim and followed her husband's orders to come to Egypt.

“Hello, Husband.”

“I have a room for us with friends.”

They took several buses to a neighborhood where others from Somalia lived. It was a small community that protected each other from the prying eyes of Egypt's police. He was in a Muslim world, but still was far from being safe. Egypt's military considered any outsider to be an instigator and a threat.

One evening after prayers they took a walk in the market. A café had a television in the corner. It was tuned in to CNN International. In a glance, he recognized a familiar face. He stopped. The television showed a picture from his high school yearbook of both Eddie and himself. He started to laugh.

“Daphne High School!” He could see himself walking the hallways in his Islamic clothes.

“Daphne.” He said the word aloud as he looked around at the much different world he was in.

The other students had worried about football and deer hunting, whereas Omar had worried about the fate of his religion.

“Allah knows all.”

Omar stood there and stared at the television even though he could not hear what was being said.

“My mother,” he spoke to himself.

“What is it?” his wife asked.

“Oh, nothing. I must understand that Allah, blessed be the great one, requires much of us.”

Omar thought back to his trips to Syria and the stories of his uncle. His uncle had spent time in the prisons because of his beliefs.

“You know, when my uncle was in prison the guards used to beat one prisoner a day.”

She looked up to her husband as he spoke. They continued to walk through the market heading back towards their apartment.

“When one prisoner was too sick to survive a beating, my uncle would volunteer to be beaten.” Omar had this crystal perfect vision of what was required of him as a Muslim. The West, with its drugs and barely clad women, had no direction. Omar had become convinced that a sacrifice had to be made and that he was the one to make such a sacrifice.

“They will remember me in Mobile.”

“Yes.”

She knew nothing of Mobile. He could have used the name of any town in America—Dallas or Chicago or Seattle. But to him, being known in Mobile meant much. He didn't care if he was branded a killer so much as he wanted to be known as a true believer. It was what the mosque thought of their two martyrs that counted. It was what Allah thought that mattered.

 

 

“With time, they will understand that being committed to something such as the path of Allah is far more important than anything they will ever accomplish in their lives.”

Death was simply a side note.

“I will get you situated with the other wives.”

He knew that she had a grandmother still living in Mogadishu and an aunt who lived in Kismayo. It was important to have names when he went through customs. He had to have a purpose for his journey.

“Do you want to go to your homeland?” he asked. She was born in Somalia, as was her father, her father's father, and so on for generations.

She had an immediate answer. “No!”

He knew that her world had been a simple one. She never lived in an apartment or a house with her own bedroom. His world in Mobile would have shocked her. He was middle class with a father who had a good job as a manager for the electric company and a mother who worked at a day care. A small bedroom just for him in their neighborhood of one-car-garage houses was a concept she couldn't understand, just like traveling to Somalia was not a part of her world. Her community did not stretch beyond her Somali neighborhood in Toronto. She had spent her entire life in a six-story apartment slum that contained only Somalis. No one in the building except her and one other neighbor spoke English. But her building was a comfortable world.

It was there in the market that he decided that she needed to return to Canada. The child would be born in that world, as was her wish. Her wishes disrespected him. Under the rule of his new world she would be whipped. In Egypt, it would not happen. If need be, Omar would take another wife in Somalia. But for now, he needed her name and connection to Somalia to complete his jihad.

“I must leave tomorrow.”

She had been expecting this.

“T
he director would like to see you.” The secretary's message was taped to his chair when he got back from the lab.

“Damn.” Paul Stewart guessed the call was coming; however, he did not like receiving it. The CDC had its world of politics and its world of scientists. It was no exception to organizations of its size.

He was happy in his lab worrying about the progression of certain diseases, the reawakening of smallpox and other puzzles needing to be figured out. Politics was not his game and the loss of his wife had made him less tolerant of small talk and egos.

He put on his lab coat and crossed over to the administration office and the director's inner sanctum.

“We are in trouble,” the director said.

Paul nodded his head.

“I am on the short list to be gone.”

Stewart had never had issues with this particular director. Misplacing the vials was a stupid mistake, but with time the odds of making a mistake were against them. There were too many vials and too many experiments that were put on trays or carts or on the move. It was like America's nuclear missile program. They both played with danger and sometime in the next several hundreds of years the odds would play out.

“What can I do to help?”

“They want a well-respected scientist to be the point man on a reworking of our system.”

Dr. Stewart knew that it meant being on the surface. To find Paul Stewart before this at the CDC would have taken an inside job of espionage. He didn't appear to the public and, more important, to Congress. There was no upside with this new position.

But Stewart was the logical choice. He was a leader in his field and was considered the top mind in the study of meningitis in the world.

He also was famed for being a thorn in the side of the administration for years regarding the lapses he found in the labs.

“May I think about it?”

“Of course. Increase in pay and you will probably be sitting in this chair a year or two from now.”

Stewart wondered how long he could stall the process.

When he returned to his office there was another note taped to his chair.

“What now?” He looked at the calendar. He wasn't sure if it was a Monday or just seemed like one.

The note asked him to call his assistant. The young PhD had been recruited from Columbia. It was a job that Stewart had hoped his daughter would have applied for. But she wanted no part of working for her father no matter how much it would have placed her on the cutting edge.

“What's up?”

“You remember that strain of Neisseria meningitidis that was documented some time ago in Afghanistan?” Dr. Chang asked. “It was the one like the hypervirulent strain we found in China some time ago.”

“Yes.” He knew the specifics far more than he could even hint at. The one in Afghanistan was more aggressive than the one in China. It shared traits with the Ebola virus. It destroyed red blood cells and sent the victim into a state of septic shock in a matter of hours. In the Anhui province of China it had wiped out people like a tidal wave.

The one from Afghanistan was quicker and deadlier. A mountain cave had been found with virtually no survivors from a specific strain of the bacteria. He knew the strain earmarks. It matched the vial frozen in the refrigerator on the fifth floor of the very building they were in.

And Stewart also remembered the survivor. The lab had a sample that predated the Afghanistan breakout. It was the creator of the strain of Neisseria meningitidis that killed in Afghanistan. And now its sister had appeared.

“We had a slide come in from Yemen that looks similar.”

“Yemen?”

“Yes, sir, I will send it to you as an attachment.”

“Thanks.”

Stewart looked up his directory of the CDC on his computer. There was one person in particular that he was searching for. Enrico Hernandez was a part of the security service at the health organization. Stewart also wanted to see a blood sample from the survivor of that outbreak. Only Hernandez knew how to find William Parker.

J
ust as William Parker pulled back to his farmhouse, he heard a rumble in the distance. It was pitch black outside. The farmhouse had no light left on and he was miles from the road. The day had been long with the trip back from Mobile taking several hours. He had accomplished what he wanted and needed to do. The arrest was a diversion, but Parker had to see for himself what had happened at the school.

He turned off the lights to his truck and started to pull the tarp over the cab when he looked to the north.

The lodge was on a hill just above the Chattahoochee River and several miles south of Fort Benning. The base had grown larger with the addition of the Armor School, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and several military schools meant to teach Army officers at every level how to fight.

His farmhouse was also in line with the main runway at Lawson Field. Runways were numbered by the direction of the compass, and a runway's number was perfectly in line with that particular point. Runway 26 would be aligned with 260 degrees on the compass. An airplane or helicopter, particularly in darkness or rain, had to depend upon the alignment as it approached for landing.

The noise was not from an airplane landing.

He stood in the total darkness as he watched movement just above the tree line to the north. The noise indicated some object was heading south.

In combat, aircraft would not show their running lights. A rumble would be heard, without someone on the ground able to tell its direction, and then suddenly an object would appear.

William Parker observed, however, both movement and lights. A pair of lights was on two approaching aircraft with two reds on the right and two whites on the left. They were on the tips of the wings. Two C-17 cargo jets came in low, just above his tree line, causing the ground to rumble. He felt the wave of noise as it bounced off the wall of his house.

The aircraft were on a mission heading south. He looked back as they passed him by and headed directly towards the farm and its operation center.

Parker suddenly realized how much he missed it all.

B
ertok Genret watched as the flatbed container truck passed his Rover, then stopped just inside Yemen's border. The truck had made it across the country of Oman arriving on a short-haul bulk freighter that had crossed over from Iran. The first third of the trailer was stuffed with prayer rugs of a thousand different colors. They had the smell of an old mill although each was made in a mud or stone hut in the mountains of Iran.

“I will make a little profit on the side,” Genret thought as he patted the container while the driver took a break to go behind a rock. They would drop the load and then take the rugs back into Oman. Eventually they would sell in London or America or Canada.

Genret looked at his watch.

It would be dark soon.

They would reach the small fishing village on the far coast of Yemen just after midnight. A fishing boat rigged to serve as the “mother” boat for several skiffs had its hull emptied for some special cargo. Genret had done this run several times. The missile was contained in several crates marked as coming from Iran. A freighter steaming directly to a port in Somalia had shipped a harmless-looking truck carriage. The carriage would transport the missile to the launch site. It would take a very close inspection to realize that the carriage was a weapons transport.

Because Genret was a transport officer on this trip, he didn't worry about the fee. It would be collected later.

 

 

Switzerland had changed somewhat with the increase in terrorism; however, there were still ways fees could be paid that allowed bankers to look the other way. Not everything could be paid in gold coins, and sometimes coins needed to be exchanged for currency. A friendly banker helped that process. His biggest fear was that Faud would have someone rob him once he received his gold. But it would only recycle the money, and Faud would lose a dependable dealer. Far worse, the other dealers would get word that Faud was not to be trusted.

The truck pulled into the village on the Yemen coast just past one in the morning. Genret parked his Rover on the other side of town and walked a mile to a road crossing. There, the truck picked him up and took him down to the rocky beach.

“This will be a bitch,” he thought, as the truck backed up the beach as far as it could.

“Clouds, perfect.” He looked up at the dark sky. Yemen had a constant patrol of Predators and satellites over its land. They were mostly concentrated on the capital and to the north.

“Let's move.”

His workers pulled the rugs out, placing them on a large, flat rock near the shoreline. Then three men climbed in and slid the first crate out of the truck and onto the backs of several others. They carried the crate to a small fishing boat and then rowed out to the mother ship. There, they used a hoist to pull the crate onto the deck. Each would be paid more than they could make fishing in a month. Each suspected what they were carrying were boxes of RPGs going across the Gulf.

Just before dawn, the mother ship would pull out of the harbor with the other fishing dinghies tied in line to its back. They would pass the big freighters coming in and going out of the Suez Canal, making sure not to get too close to any one ship. The captain would move in a slow and deliberate manner, and when on the other side of the sea highway, he would disperse the smaller fishing boats. They would catch a load of fish and then, as darkness neared, head into the shelter of the harbor in Somalia.

Al Shebaab's territory didn't extend that far north; however, moneys were paid for a pass on this one occasion. Musa would meet the boat as it started to carry the load, crate by crate, to the shoreline of Somalia.

It was a pitch-black night with a cloudy overcast. The new moon provided no light. The trucks moved south with little notice.

 

 

“Attention on deck!”

Everyone stood as the admiral entered the conference room of the U.S. Naval Central Command's operations center.

“Carry on.”

He looked at the single door, and with his glance a guard shut it. Another guard was on the outside to make sure that no one casually walked into the admiral's talk.

“We have heard for some time of the Dong Feng.” The missile was well known to everyone in the room and those who served on Navy ships. The carriers particularly knew of the technology behind it.

“We are not sure that they have yet gained the capability of catching up with a fast-moving target.”

The admiral was talking of the intelligence reports that it might take another ten years to perfect the missile. The weapon was such a game changer, however, that the Navy had started to institute plans, particularly in the Pacific, to disperse the forces in case of attack.

“We know that Iran is reverse engineering the missile with the help of the Chinese, and they have tested one. And you know of the
Zumwalt
.”

There were whispers among the officers and senior enlisted as a photo of the ship appeared on the admiral's PowerPoint. DDG-1000 was a completely different form of a ship. She was a ghost ship. She had been built from the keel up to be a stealth destroyer. The ship seemed to have been pulled from the pages of a Jules Verne novel. There were no sharp edges or visible railings. She appeared to be wrapped in a gray thin material that changed her shape entirely. Her tumblehome hull had an inverted, tapered bow that pointed aft, causing her to slice through the water like a ghost. She was made for silence. She stood out for the ability of not being seen.

“The
Zumwalt
is heading our way. She will stay out of the Persian Gulf but will do her sea trials to the south, near the Gulf of Aden.”

A ship of such size could not be kept a secret. As she passed any other vessel or merchant ship, the crews would be pulled up on deck to see the strange new sight.

“With ISIS fighting to our north, others may wish to take advantage of our attention being distracted. We will need to keep an eye on everything, particularly as North Africa remains unstable and our friends continue to try and link up with each other.”

NavCent did have a full plate. And events were leading it towards deeper waters.