Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (24 page)

Eventually, the houses and businesses thinned
out to farming country, and they drove past tea and cane fields
stretched over the plains and up the distant hills—lush greenery
growing in yellowish-red dirt. The countryside took on a sameness
as they sped along a paved four-lane highway. Houses, farms, trees,
hills… repeat.

A few hours into the drive, they stopped at a
roadside market. Stacks of crates and tables filled with all manner
of fruits and vegetables were displayed under the shade of sheets
of painted tin held up on wooden frames. Several farmers’ wives ran
the little market and collected money from the soldiers and doctors
as they meandered through and picked out a few things to eat.

At first Mitch worried about Ebola in the
fruit, but his knowledge of how the disease spread was woefully
thin. In the end, peer pressure and hunger pushed him to buy a few
mangos for the long ride.

After several hours on the road, they reached
Mbale. The army truck with its load of bored soldiers worked its
way through the slowly moving traffic, with the other vehicles
behind. It wasn’t until well after four o’clock that the caravan
drove north out of Mbale and toward the little collections of
farmhouses on the road to Kapchorwa.

Twice along the road, the doctors brought the
convoy to a halt at certain clumps of houses and huts so they could
get out and talk to residents about their health. When they got out
at each stop, the medical workers would put on surgical masks and
gloves. Mitch thought it wise to do the same. Those stops dragged
on past the point of boredom. Mitch wandered among the houses and
bushes, observing the people and looking for anything out of the
ordinary. It was clear early on that not one of the farmers was
going to admit to anything. Mitch spied several at the first stop
taking off across a cornfield. They didn’t want anything to do with
soldiers or doctors.

Some farmers stood far back inside their
houses and talked from there. Others who talked to the doctors
outside their huts kept a distance from them and denied that anyone
they knew or were related to was sick. Talk of Ebola was
everywhere, but the disease itself was always a rumor away in the
next tiny village up the road or around the bend.

They found no direct evidence of the disease.
But at each stop, Mitch grew more and more certain that it was
lurking nearby. He was careful to avoid touching anything or
anyone. He didn’t drink water at any place they stopped. Although
he was growing hungry with the dinner hour upon them, he made no
more purchases from roadside markets.

They passed the military roadblock, and what
they learned from the men there was no different than anything else
they’d heard or seen on their trip: rumors and worry.

With the army roadblock twenty or thirty
minutes behind them, it was starting to get dark. Mt. Elgon’s peak
and higher elevations glowed orange and red in the light of the
setting sun. Male cicadas started their distinctive nighttime song,
and nocturnal birds added their calls.

Mitch was staring at the colors slowly
changing on the mountainside, not paying any attention to what was
going on around him, when the driver slowed the vehicle in response
to the squeaking brakes of the military truck up ahead. The road
was dirt by then—they’d been off pavement since a few miles out of
Mbale—and a cloud of red grit surrounded them.

Mitch coughed and blinked the dust away as he
disembarked from the truck, not really curious about why they
stopped. It was more out of boredom as he looked for something to
do.

The doctors in the vehicle ahead—they were
all doctors to Mitch—were all out by then, with a few walking
forward, perhaps to relieve their own boredom. Mitch passed by one
of the doctors standing by the vehicle, “What’s up?”

“Don’t know.” The guy answered. “I was
asleep.”

The road dust was settling, more than a
little of it in Mitch’s hair and on his clothes. He walked up to
two doctors at the rear of the army truck—one man, one woman—who
were looking at a few felled trees blocking the road ahead. The
soldiers were standing by the trees, looking around, gesturing, and
assessing the situation. They knew they’d be tasked with clearing
the road and were talking it through.

“We’re here,” the female doctor said.

The man—soft, young, pale-skinned, and maybe
not even old enough to be a doctor—asked the woman in a high school
kid’s voice, “Why do you say that?”

She pointed at the trees down in the road.
“Villagers do this when they want to isolate themselves from
sickness, to keep it out.”

A single shot cracked through the air, and
the soft young man crumpled.

Before Mitch could react, more shots
followed. The air was full of whizzing bullets and the sound of
automatic weapons fire. He dove behind the truck, dragging the
woman down with him into the dirt. Mitch was on his knee behind a
big rubber wheel with his compact Glock instinctively in his
outstretched hand, looking for targets that would be way too far
away to hit.

The soldiers ran back from the downed trees
and around behind the truck. A few jumped up inside and retrieved
their weapons, passing them quickly down to the others.

The gunfire still came. Mitch couldn’t find a
target.

The UPDF soldiers—armed and as organized as
they were going to be—took a defensive position behind the truck,
while leaning over and spraying off shots down the road.

The female doctor cried out and Mitch
realized she wasn’t behind the cover of the truck. She had gone
over to help the downed man. Mitch lowered his pistol and holstered
it. He leapt across the open ground between the truck and the man,
grabbed a handful of the wounded man’s shirt, and dragged him
behind the truck. The woman voiced her gratitude, but by then Mitch
was looking around, feeling vulnerable to an ambush from either
side.

The doctor began working fervently on her
downed coworker as he struggled to breathe, bleeding profusely from
a bullet hole in his chest.

Mitch caught the attention of a few of the
soldiers and pointed to the trees and bushes on both sides of the
road behind them. They caught his meaning right away. Mitch knelt
down beside the doctor. “Can he be moved?”

“He needs a hospital,” she shouted above the
gunfire.

Without much thought about his own safety,
Mitch shoved his arms beneath her patient and hoisted him up with a
grunt. “C’mon.” He charged as fast as he could move with the extra
weight of the incapacitated man.

Mitch lifted him inside the back door of the
doctors’ truck. His two escorts were immediately beside him with
weapons at the ready. Turning to address the woman, he shouted,
“Follow us. We’ll escort you back to Mbale. I know where the
hospital is there.” He ran back to his truck and jumped into the
driver’s seat.

His two men didn’t need to be told what to
do. They each took a seat inside and trained their weapons out a
window on either side. Moments later, they were racing back down
the road to Mbale, with the medical people following as closely
behind as speed and the dust allowed.

It had been a rough ride. After leaving
Kapchorwa in the back of a farm truck with guys who were dirty,
sweaty, and blackened with ash, they watched Kapchorwa’s flames
grow in the night sky. Over the course of enough miles, the flames
turned to a western glow in the darkness. There was only the rumble
of the engine, the rattle of the old truck, and the grunts of the
unnamed jihadists in the back with Salim. Each time the tires
rolled through a particularly big hole in the road, they’d all
bounce off the truck’s bed. Salim earned a new bruise with each
landing.

The sky slowly opened up to black and a
billion pinpricks of stars, most of which Salim had never seen.
Denver cast off too much light pollution for much of anything to be
visible in the night sky. The truck left the road after driving for
maybe an hour, earning Salim and his compatriots plenty more
bruises. The truck moved much too fast for safety—much less
comfort—across rough ground. Throughout what seemed like an
unending trip, none of them spoke. Mostly they stared with the
empty looks of men who’d done something that shamed their souls. To
fight America’s tyrannical, selfish policies by shooting at
soldiers in the field was one thing, but burning sick people in
their homes was another altogether.

Somewhere in the chaos of preparing for the
burning, Jalal had disappeared. Whether burned in the village,
beheaded for disobeying, or on another truck headed east, Salim
could only guess. To take his mind off of the atrocities in the
village, he spent a lot of time guessing what might have happened
to Jalal and imagining about how they might meet up again. At the
moment, Jalal was the only real friend he had. Well, perhaps Austin
was a friend. He’d risked his life to save Austin and the girl with
the weird French name he couldn’t remember.

Eventually the truck arrived at another
dust-covered road. The ride became smoother, and the truck moved
faster. The tallest tip of Mt. Elgon started to glow pink in the
early sun. They had to be east of the mountain then, back in Kenya,
and morning was coming.

Salim watched the mountain change as washes
of morning color crept down the slopes. He thought of lava pouring
out of the extinct volcano. The country on both sides of the road
emerged from blackness, and Salim saw farm after farm after farm
growing all manner of crops he couldn’t identify. In many ways, it
reminded him of eastern Colorado with its rolling hills and plains
covered with farms, pastures, and majestic mountains rising in the
west.

It wasn’t until he was shaken awake that he
realized exhaustion had gotten the better of him, and he’d dozed
off.

“Wake up, brother. You can sleep on the
plane.”

“The plane?” Salim asked, realizing the
truck’s engine was off. The truck was empty, and he could see his
companions walking toward a dilapidated building.

The Arab man pointed in the direction of the
other men. “Follow them. You can wash off when you get inside.
You’ll get new clothes.”

“The plane?” Salim asked, realizing only then
that his bag, his passport, and his billfold were gone.

The man guessed the question. “Your things
are inside.”

Salim slowly stood, feeling the physical
abuse he’d put himself through over the past days.

“Hurry. Your plane leaves in thirty
minutes.”

“Okay,” Salim jumped down off the bed of the
truck, wobbled on his knees, and followed the others toward the
shabby building.

Looking around in the dawn, it occurred to
him that he hadn’t slept that long. Mt. Elgon still stood tall off
toward the west. The surrounding land was mostly flat farmland with
the exception of the rural airport and a few cobbled-together
municipal buildings. A runway stretched off in two directions. A
commuter plane sat on the tarmac, looking large enough to hold
everyone in the truck and maybe a few more.

Besides the building the men were being
herded toward, only one other small building, with an array of
oddly-shaped antennae on the roof, stood on the immediate property.
A curved wall of square window panes faced the runway. It had to be
the terminal.

Perhaps this was the first real step on the
way home to Denver.

Once inside the building, Salim guessed it
had to be a hanger, built to house two or three small private
planes, which were absent. At one end, the other men from the truck
were either naked and washing themselves with soap and a garden
hose, or stripping and waiting their turn.

Salim took his place in line, waiting as men
hurried through their cleaning in front of him. Toward the far end
of the hangar, a few tables with pants and shirts in various colors
in Western styles lay on the table. On the floor leaning against a
wall he spied his travel bag.

It was the first thing he had to feel good
about in days.

Exactly thirty minutes after Salim rolled
himself out of the bed of the truck, the commuter plane taxied down
the runway and climbed into the thin Kenyan air. Some in the
passenger cabin seemed to know each other and hushed conversations
ensued. Salim contented himself to watch the houses and trees below
shrink and merge into colored patterns with the other features on
the ground.

A man came up out of the rear of the plane,
passing out bottles of water and food.

Another man stood up at the front of the
plane with a satchel he then handed to a guy on the first row.
“Inside is an envelope with your name on it. Find your envelope and
pass the bag to the next man. We will be landing in Nairobi in
forty minutes. Some of you have flights leaving shortly after we
arrive. You’ll find airline tickets and itineraries in your
envelope with your information. You will also find credit cards in
your name and cash in the currency of your country of origin. All
of you have connecting flights and long layovers. You’ll each be
traveling for most of the next two days.”

The plane bounced through some turbulence and
the speaker fell to the side, hitting roughly against the door.
When he stood back up, embarrassed, he shrugged and smiled. A few
of Salim’s compatriots chuckled softly. It was almost normal.

The speaker straightened himself out and put
his serious face back on. “While you are in each airport, walk
around, learn what you can about the security, the layout, and look
for weaknesses. Don’t write anything down that could be used as
evidence to detain you. You each have a prepaid cell phone in your
envelope. A phone number has been added to the contact list for
someone called Mother. Mother will call you to give you
instructions. If you need to call for questions, call Mother, but
don’t make a habit of it. We know what your schedules are, so don’t
worry if you find yourself coming to the end of your itinerary.
We’ll contact you with instructions before that.”