The Devil on Chardonnay (4 page)

“Can we talk here?”

Raybon thought about the new telephone that had just been installed, and then remembered the tax collector dropping by for his monthly baksheesh the week before, and  asking questions about rumors he’d heard that alcohol was being smuggled in Rabon’s aircraft.  The man knew very well Raybon smuggled alcohol, that was the whole reason to have the seaplane, and the whole reason the tax collector was there taking his monthly bribe.   Something was up.  Maybe it was just a way to ratchet up the bribe, maybe somebody else wanted in on the rum running racket, maybe.  Kenya is a Muslim country, and Mombasa is a mostly Arab town.  Muslims are touchy about alcohol, and Arabs live in a world of bribes, treachery and deception.  Any trouble, and Raybon would be the first to feel it.  

“Want a beer?”  Without waiting for an answer, Raybon opened a refrigerator and got out three Tuskers, the local brew.  He tossed one to Davann on the couch and walked out onto the deck overlooking the bay and leaned on his elbows looking down at the boats.  “I’m not flying anybody into the upper Nile Valley,” he said as Boyd closed the door behind him and stepped to the rail.

“OK,” Boyd said, blandly.

“The new CIA station chief blew her cover two months ago, the first week she was in Nairobi.  Everyone in Kenya knows who she is now, and she showed up here last month, in broad daylight wanting me to fly some ‘operatives’ into the upper Nile.”

“Touchy business.”

“Very.  Davann and I are hangin’ by a thread here.  Anything the local boss doesn’t like, and we’d be gone.  They only tolerate us here to appear to have a tourist industry.  Pretty place. Dangerous as hell.”

“Like I said, I’m Air Force, not CIA.”

“The Air Force has planes.”

“Not like yours.”

“What do you want?”

“It would take you away for a few weeks, maybe longer.”

Raybon thought that over for awhile.  He was sick of scraping by, living on the edge of the world, depending on a worn-out old airplane and a very tenuous smuggling business while watching Arabs plotting the second coming of the Caliphate, which would include Kenya, and not him.

 “I’m still listening,” he said. 

“And, I need to leave the day after tomorrow.”

*******

The big chip on Raybon’s shoulder began slowly to slip off with the lubrication of a couple more Tusker beers and Boyd’s brief tale of having dropped practice bombs in South Carolina only two days before, and his nearly nonstop flight to Kenya via London’s Heathrow.  They were rejoined by Davann and walked downstairs to the bar at the Mombasa Yacht Club.

 “I flew the 'handsome, high performance Lockheed C-130 Hercules,' ” Raybon said proudly, reciting the pilots’ somewhat lengthy description of their aircraft. 

“Nearly as old as the Albatross,” Boyd observed. 

“Not really.  The only thing that old is the original design.  The last C-130 I flew was the H model.  It was built in the late '90s.”

“Special ops?”

“Yeah, MC-130 H, Combat Talon.”

“Bet you’ve got some tales.”

Davann broke a big smile as the waitress, an attractive young woman with shiny black skin, brought another tray of frosty mugs to the table. 

Raybon nodded in the affirmative, took his beer and said nothing.  The MC-130 is designed to insert, supply and extract special operations combat troops – black ops.  He’d taken an oath to keep his tales to himself, and he was going to.  He didn’t need to beat his chest in front of this fighter jock.  There was an awkward silence.

“So, how’d you wind up here, in Kenya?”

Another half pint of Tusker slid down Raybon’s throat.  After a moment, he belched and took another generous sip.  Davann was whispering in the waitress’s ear, and they both giggled at some private joke.  Raybon leaned back in his chair and lifted his leg up to table level and pulled his pants leg up. 

“No pilot seats for one legged pilots,” he said, revealing an ornately carved wooden leg.

“Oh,” Boyd said.

“Me and Davann, with our limited employment opportunities, bought that old Albatross a couple years ago from an old Navy pilot who’d been running rum along the coast for 20 years.”

“So, now you fly tourists around.”

“Not really, we’re still runnin’ rum,” he said as he turned toward Davann and they both laughed.  “No money in tourists.  Hell, hardly any tourists,” they laughed again.  Their beers were gone. 

            “Davann, you learn to fly in the Marines?”  Boyd asked.  

“Naw,” Davann responded, looking at Raybon.  “My mentor’s sittin’ right here.”

 “We both got shot at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, just up the mountain from Kandahar.  I was flying a resupply mission out of Qatar.  It was a blizzard. Snow so thick you couldn’t see 10 feet.  We were scheduled in with some food and ammunition, and the C-130 can land anywhere, anytime, so we came in on instruments.  Problem was, it had snowed so much the usual security had broken down, and a Taliban sapper team got through the wire and was waiting at the end of the runway.  They couldn’t see us, but they could hear us coming.  As we passed, not 50 feet over their heads, they let fly with RPGs, and one hit the nose of the aircraft.  It killed my co-pilot and took off my leg and blew out the instrument panel.  I pushed the nose down, and we hit the runway hard, slid off and mired in the mud.  The aircraft caught fire.  The flight engineer pulled me out of the seat and down the stairs and threw me out into the snow.  The Taliban followed the skid marks firing in our general direction as they came.  The flight engineer and two loadmasters opened up with M-16s from the door of the aircraft to slow 'em down. I crawled away in the snow and tried to stop the blood spurting from my stump.  I should have had a tourniquet, but didn’t.”

            “I heard about that crash, not much detail in the news.”

“They didn’t want the Taliban to know how effective they’d been,” Raybon said, starting in on another Tusker.  “Just as I was about gone, 50-cal slugs started snapping over my head and a Humvee came plowing through the snow. There was Davann, standing in the back blazing away with the MA 2.”

“Ma Deuce to the rescue,” Davann said, holding up his beer and tapping mugs with Raybon.  “Taliban hate that 50 cal.”

“The bad guys dropped back, and Davann jumps down and runs over to me, puts his tourniquet on my leg, cinches it tight, and drags me back to the Humvee.  Then the ragheads shoot Davann in the butt.”

“Blew my fuckin’ ass off,” Davann said, indignant. 

“Even with his ass blown off, he pulled me into the back of the Humvee and got back on the 50 cal, standing on his good leg while the rest of the crew piled in and the driver hit the gas in reverse.  Next thing I knew, me and Davann were in the back of a C-17 headed to Germany.”

“That was three days,” Davann interjected.  “I don’t remember nothin’, either.”

“Then it was surgery and then more surgery, and then another C-17 ride across the Atlantic.   We asked them to keep us together, so we ended up at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda.  I got a new state-of-the-art bionic leg, and Davann got a titanium ass.”

“I got no ass.  What I got is a titanium hip with a ceramic cup where the ass bone used to be,” Davann said. 

“That didn’t look like a state of the art bionic leg to me,” Boyd said, pointing at Raybon’s leg.

“The wooden one is my party leg.”  They all laughed.  “Anyway, we go through the whole rehab process, then the medical boards, and finally they cashier us out and there we are standing on the street, no job, no prospects, just the VA.  So, I gave Davann the only thing I had to give the man who saved my life.  I taught him to fly.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Is It Out Now?

 The door opened a crack and the light from the hall fell across the little girl, still asleep after three hours.  He crept in and stood quietly, observing.  Her respirations were fast, shallow.  He put his hand gently on her forehead; burning with fever.  He retreated and opened the door a bit for more light.  Her left arm was thrown across her chest, and on the forearm was an irregular blotch that hadn’t been there three hours before.  He moved closer and took her wrist to find her pulse.

“No!”  Her eyes popped open as soon as he touched her, and she withdrew the arm as if she’d been pinched. 

Her eyes were bloodshot red; hemorrhagic, the worst he’d seen.

“No!”  She screamed again, and retreated to the head of the bed, her eyes focused on something behind him, something he didn’t see. 

He reached out to calm her and touched her arm again.

“Aeeyii!”  She screamed, louder and rolled to the side.  As she did, her bowels released and she fouled the bed.   

“Lien!  It’s me, Daddy.”  He smelled blood as he pulled the sheet back.

“Gurupph!”  She vomited blood in a thick stream over the side of the bed.

He pulled her shoulder to bring her back into the center of the bed and she vomited again, straight up.  His arm was covered in warm, hot, bright red blood.

“Lien!”

The child stiffened, her legs straightened out and her toes pointed.  She turned her gaze upward and to the right and the rapid respirations stopped.  Her arms stiffened and her fists clenched at her sides as she was wracked by a strong grand mal convulsion. 

“No!”  He awoke with a start and, still in the dream, tried to stand.  He rolled off the pallet of medical equipment he’d been sleeping on and fell 5 feet into the web seating at the side of the aircraft.  “No! Lien!”  He rolled off the web seat onto the floor and struggled there to rise between the seat and the pallet.  Consciousness returned and he stood, and then sat back on the seat. 

Col. Joe Smith, director of Medical Product Development at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), shaking and drenched with sweat, looked around the cargo bay of the Air Force KC-135 aircraft to see whether any of the crew had seen his loss of control.  The boom operator and loadmaster were asleep on web seats near the front of the aircraft, and nobody was visible up the steps to the cockpit.  He stood and moved his torso gingerly. Nothing broken.  Damned Ambien. He’d taken a 10 mg tablet and climbed to the top of the pallet to be near the heat vents at the top of the cargo bay as they’d crossed the Alps after stopping for gas at Ramstein, Germany.  The old tankers are notoriously cold on long flights.  The Ambien had worn off, and he’d had a rebound bad dream. It’s in the product literature, he told himself.

The image of his 3-year-old daughter Lien returned.  He knew she was safe back in Maryland with his wife and her big brother. He’d kissed her goodbye not 48 hours before, but the tightness in his chest remained. 

He hadn’t wanted to go on this mission, yet he’d been on Ebola’s trail his whole career and was determined to find a way to stop it before he retired.  He’d been a pathology resident at Walter Reed when an outbreak occurred in a Reston, Va., monkey lab.  For a few weeks, they thought the mysterious scourge of the Congo basin might get out into the nation’s capital, but it turned out to be a much less dangerous new strain, a mutation.  The wild strain popped up in Kikwit, Zaire, in 1995, and he’d been sent there by the Army as a hotshot young pathologist and viral researcher.  He’d seen more than 50 cases of Ebola there. It was the wild strain from the jungle, and 92 percent fatal.  It stopped only after it killed nearly everyone exposed to it.

Joe Smith made his way forward and got some coffee from the kitchenette beneath the cockpit.  The plane, a modified Boeing 707, can carry 200,000 pounds of fuel, and/or six pallets of cargo.  Built for long, grueling missions, it has a boom at the rear for delivering fuel to other aircraft in flight, two bunks in the cockpit, a flush toilet, and a kitchen comparable to that found on airliners.  On either side of the cargo bay are 65 nylon web seats, folded up now, as Smith was the only passenger. He walked by his two pallets strapped to the floor of the cargo bay to the rear of the aircraft and climbed down into the boom operator’s station where he could lie on his stomach and look straight down through the refueling station. 

“It’s down there,” he said to himself, watching the dark jungle of the Congo basin slide slowly by, 35,000 feet below.  He’d seen the western parts of it during several visits, but the northeastern corner, where South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo come together near the headwaters of the White Nile is the deepest, darkest, most inaccessible part of it, and the likely home base of the world’s most dangerous virus.  He ticked off the known outbreaks since Ebola was first described in 1976; Juba, Sudan, Yambuku, Congo, Nzara, Sudan, Gabon, Gulu, Uganda, Kikwit, Congo and several recent outbreaks in the Kasai Occidental District in the Congo.  They all made a circle around that jungle down there.

It was a mystery.  If Ebola killed people so fast that epidemics burned out before they could spread to the greater population, and if it did the same thing to the monkeys that infected the people, then where did the monkeys get it?  A virus dies when its host dies. So where did this virus live between outbreaks?  And how long has this game been going on?  Just because medical science “discovers” a disease doesn’t mean it’s new.  Has Ebola been living in that jungle down there for millennia, breaking out every few years to wipe out primates – monkeys and people – that get too close and then retreating back into some cave or animal reservoir?  What’s it protecting?  What’s it waiting for?  Is it out now?

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Island

The corpse sat on the rocks, looking out to sea with vacant eye sockets.  The gulls had eaten his eyes, lips and ears, leaving a skeletal, phantomlike grin.  Bird droppings smattered on his blue shirt.

“Suppose that’s the guy who radioed the alarm?”  Boyd asked, his voice muffled by the protective suit.  “Told the world to stay away and then came out here to see if anybody would come?”

Joe mumbled something Boyd couldn’t hear as he bent over and cut the buttons off of the shirt with surgical scissors.  He pulled open the shirt to expose the chest.  Blood had run down from his face and dried in the blond chest hairs, protected from the gulls.  There were dark blotches, two or three inches across, on his chest and abdomen.