Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (19 page)

“You’re doing your job. Eric gets paid to
make these calls.”

“And if I’m wrong?”

“You’re not wrong about anything. We collect
data and we analyze it—that’s what we do. We dig further into
things when they look like they might be important. This
looks
like it might be important. Maybe it is, maybe it
isn’t. Not every hole you dig has a diamond at the bottom. Eric
knows that. We’ll just keep pushing on until the data says we have
something or we don’t.” Barry raised an eyebrow and smiled.

Olivia felt no less anxious.

Najid stepped onto the patio and looked over
at the tiny free school halfway between the hospital and the main
school. Dr. Kassis had set up a primitive divider with sheets of
canvas from a farm truck. He’d doused the whole space with bleach,
and it became a clean zone. It was the only place in Kapchorwa
where any of them could remove their gear and take care of the
body’s necessities. The conditions in the schoolhouse weren’t much
better than the setup for the sick in the hospital or any of the
other overflowing buildings. A few cots gave them a place to take
turns sleeping. Not that Najid had slept. He’d been on his feet for
more hours than he cared to think about, but there would be time
for resting and sleeping later.

Nevertheless, Najid was thinking about going
to the clean room in the free school, removing his Tyvek suit,
gloves, goggles, and mask. It would feel so good to be out of the
hot, stinking suit.

The sound of gunfire from the west cut those
thoughts short.

Najid ran to one of the Range Rovers as the
two men who’d been standing guard in the center of town ran over.
Removing an AK-47 from the rear compartment, Najid motioned for the
others to get in. He had men stationed a quarter-mile to the west
of town who had been tasked to block the road. It wasn’t a far run,
but driving there would be faster than running and risking
overheating in the suits. Najid jumped into the passenger’s seat,
and one of his other men took the driver’s side and started the
engine.

Once the other guard got in the back seat,
the vehicle started to roll. Another of his men came running up to
the vehicle and Najid spoke in rushed Arabic, instructing him to
keep the others at their duties in the village. The Land Rover
accelerated along the dirt road through the tiny town throwing up a
plume of dust. By the time they passed the last house, the gunshots
had ceased.

Najid worried about what he’d find when he
reached his men at the roadblock. They were not experienced
soldiers. They’d been through a month or two of training in
Pakistan or Afghanistan, and perhaps even a little extra training
in Africa. If there had been a firefight, it had ended quickly,
with too few shots. And that was the point that worried him. His
men weren’t experienced enough to kill armed enemies so
quickly.

The road made a sudden, hairpin curve. The
driver cornered the Land Rover around the curve and bounced it
through a shallow riverbed with the skill of an experienced wadi
basher. Najid checked his weapon. The magazine was full. He moved
the lever on his AK-47 from safety to semi-auto, the position he
preferred when shooting. He put the weapon out of the window and
laid the muzzle over the mirror, ready to fire at any threat that
materialized ahead.

In the back seat, his man positioned himself
in the center, and pointed his muzzle up between the seats and out
through the windshield.

The road snaked through a few curves, finally
coming to a section that ran straight. Not too far in the distance,
a few vehicles sat in the middle of the road.

The driver slowed, and Najid commanded him to
stop. He flung his door open, jumped out, and raised his weapon to
his shoulder, using the door for whatever cover it provided. The
two men with him positioned themselves on the other side of the
Land Rover.

A man was jogging up the road toward the SUV
before the dust settled around them. He looked like one of the men
Najid had positioned at the roadblock. Down along the sights on his
rifle, Najid looked past the jogging man. He spotted what looked
like a half-dozen people lying on the shoulder. A few armed men
were visible around the vehicles and in the trees nearby.

Breathing heavily, the runner coming toward
them slowed, and raised his rifle over his head. He wasn’t wearing
protective gear. None of the men Najid left at the roadblocks wore
gear—they were expendable.

Certain of the runner’s identity, Najid waved
him closer. “Come.”

The man hurried over to stand on the other
side of the door.

“What happened?” Najid asked.

The runner pointed behind him. “Doctors. Aid
workers.”

Najid looked at the bodies.

“They are dead.” After speaking, the runner
focused on Najid’s masked face, looking for some reaction.

Najid nodded. Those were his orders to the
men he’d left at the roadblocks—kill anyone attempting to enter the
village. “Did any escape?”

“No.”

Najid pointed toward where the ambush had
taken place. To his driver he motioned, “Let’s go.”

All four men got into the Land Rover and
drove up to where the other vehicles were parked. Najid got out.
All the men watched him, waiting for his commands. He walked over
to the edge of the dirt road and looked at seven people laying face
down, each with at least one bullet hole in his body—mostly to the
head, some in the back.

Najid looked around. The doctors appeared to
have lain down, expecting perhaps to be robbed, not executed.

He turned and looked through a window into
the back of the first vehicle. Boxes of medical supplies and some
cases with scraped paint and worn edges were stacked. Those medical
supplies could have come in handy for the sick townsfolk, but the
arrival of the doctors occurred earlier than Najid had hoped. That
pushed up Najid’s timeline. The townsfolk had fulfilled their
purpose of infecting his young, western jihadists. Now, the
townsfolk were expendable.

To the men in the HAZMAT suits, he pointed at
the doctors’ vehicles and said, “Take them to the village.” To the
men on the roadblock, he pointed at the bodies and said, “Drag them
into the jungle. Stay ready. Others will come.”

Najid walked up to the man in charge of the
roadblock. “Did any of them have radios or telephones?”

“Yes,” the man answered.

“Did they call for help?”

“I don’t think so,” replied the man.

“Where are the devices?”

The man pointed to a spot on the road near
the rear of the first vehicle. “Smashed.”

Najid looked over toward the broken pieces of
electronics scattered in the dirt. “Good.”

The gunshots startled Salim. He looked across
the sick and the dying on the floor of the ward. Jalal was looking
back at him, frozen. He’d heard the shots, too. Salim slowly looked
down at his water pail and cup as if to say, “What do I do with
this when we get attacked?”

Jalal shrugged.

Salim heard some shouting outside and the
sound of a car speeding off. He looked back down at his pail. It
wasn’t empty, not nearly. He motioned to Jalal—it was time for an
early refill. He stepped over a woman whose eyes were rolling back
as she seemed to go into seizures—gurgling, choking on something in
her throat. Salim glanced over toward the Tyvek-covered man tending
to the boy. He had to be a doctor or a nurse, but he didn’t even
look up. Salim looked down at the woman. She was just another one
dying.

With a shame in his heart that would surely
disappoint his instructors from the past few months, he glanced
back at the woman as he slowly headed for the door, seriously
wondering if he’d died and gone to hell.

Jalal was out the door first and already
going down the stairs when Salim let the door slam shut as he
hurried down to walk beside him. “What do you think?”

“How many shots did you hear?”

Salim wasn’t counting. “Five? Ten? I don’t
know.”

“Did it sound like a gun battle to you?”

Salim shook his head. “No. I didn’t hear any
automatic weapons. Single shots, mostly.”

“Mostly,” Jalal agreed.

When they got to the communal well a hundred
meters down the road from the hospital, Salim hung his pail on the
hook under the pump and went to work slowly raising the handle,
then slowly pushing back down. He watched the stream of cool water
fall into the pail. Anything to keep his mind off the horrifically
dying and their blood-red, lifeless, zombie eyes.

“Jalal, I can’t keep doing this.”

Jalal looked down the road and squinted, as
though he might be able to divine some information from the cane
field, far down where the road curved. “They won’t keep us here
much longer, I think.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Salim, wiping
sweat from his brow.

“They don’t want us to catch what is killing
these people.”

“What if we already have it?” It was the
first time Salim had that thought, and it frightened him.

“If we were in danger of contracting the
disease, we wouldn’t be here.” Jalal nodded up and down the road.
“Look how many of us are in the village. Why would they bring us in
and train us, just to catch a disease and die while we’re trying to
create a cover before going back to the states?”

Salim stopped pumping and looked around at
what he could see of the village. “How many of us do you think are
here?”

“I’d say a hundred,” replied Jalal.

“A hundred? Do you really think that
many?”

“I don’t know. There are a lot of us.”

Salim pulled his pail down and Jalal hung his
on the hook, taking his place at the pump.

Jalal, it turned out, had a talent for
appearing to be working hard on the pump while delivering almost no
water to the bucket. Salim silently thanked him for his theatrics
and took the time to rest and let his mind drift off to oblivion.
He didn’t want to think about anything. He didn’t want to see or
smell or touch anything else. He just wanted to leave.

A Land Rover—one of the two dusty new ones
that had been parked by the hospital—came speeding up the dirt
road.

Salim observed, “Either that was quick, or
we’ve been out here a long time.”

“Who cares?” Jalal took his pail off the
hook, and the two started their slow walk back toward the hospital
building.

The driver of the Land Rover got out,
hurrying with weapon in hand into the hospital.

When Salim and Jalal had crossed half the
distance to the steps, the HAZMAT guy with the AK-47 came out with
the tidy kid’s attendant. They stopped on the porch and started
talking.

Jalal hesitated. “Slow down. Let them
talk.”

Salim pointed to the old hospital building
off to the left of the new one. “Let’s do that one next.”

Jalal answered by altering his course a
little to the left. However, when they were within a car’s length
of the new hospital’s front porch, one of the men on the porch
commanded, “You, there.”

Jalal stopped in his tracks. Salim turned and
saw the HAZMAT men looking at them. One was pointing at him—it was
the one who had heard Austin say the name, Sam.

The pointing finger skewered Salim’s guilty,
apostate thoughts, bleeding out their despair. He knew he was
caught, and though exposure was tantamount to death, the shame of
being caught was wholly consuming. With eyes unable to look at his
accuser, he shuffled through the road dust toward the porch stairs
with Jalal on his heels.

Salim knew the tidy Arab boy’s yellow clad
attendant had ratted him out. Nothing had been said at that moment,
but at the time there was no man nearby with a gun. But now there
he stood on the porch, beside that plastic-covered rooster of a
strutting, barking little man.

Salim twitched his face into a tired,
innocent guise and went to work on his lie—
the white American
kid was delirious
. It was that simple.

Salim repeated the lie in his head.
No!
He’d start with ignorance. The incident was so
insignificant that it was hardly worth remembering. Who gave a care
about the dying utterances of a delirious boy? What did the boy
even say? Salim hadn’t even understood him.

Oh, the power of a well-spoken lie, from a
face stretched in innocence, the essence of hope.

“Dump those water buckets,” said the rooster
man, who gestured with a recently acquired AK-47.

Salim looked up and responded by emptying his
water into the dirt. Jalal did the same.

The man with the weapon pointed toward the
edge of town. “Down there, past that white-walled building, you’ll
see a rusty tank raised on a metal framework. See if it contains
diesel fuel. Let me know how much is inside. Go quickly.”

Salim bit his cheek, tasting the warm salt of
his own blood. Anything to hide the unexpected joy that comes from
sidestepping despair. A grin would have raised a question that he
wouldn’t be able to answer. He turned on eager feet and took off at
his fastest run.

The nice thing about conference room D-3 was
the window, which provided a view of open fields, tall loblolly
pines, and sky. Because of the way the building curved back on
itself—like an apostrophe with an extra leg—the mirrored glass
walls of the cafeteria and another wing of the building were
visible.

Rain falling from the overcast sky made
Olivia Cooper think about the only thing she didn’t like about her
job. The NSA’s Whitelaw building at Fort Gordon lacked windows. Or
that’s to say, the windows were there, but they offered views into
offices and conference rooms. From the cubes, situated mostly in
the center of the building, they couldn’t be seen. Days
passed—mostly in winter—when she was absorbed in a project, coming
in early, having lunch at her desk, and even staying a little bit
late, when she wouldn’t see the light of day. There was one stretch
during the previous winter when she’d worked six consecutive days
without seeing the sun. That particular week, they’d worked on
Saturday as they had for many Saturdays over those months.