Thomas Prescott Superpack (95 page)

“How did you get it?”

“I gave them your clock,” he said attempting to smile. “Sorry.”

“What about the two boys?”

He shook his head. “They are not here.” He explained how he had shown the pictures to many people in the village. The boys in the photo did not live there. Neither did the girl. The girl that Gina had brought back was different than the girl in the picture, though Timon could see how the deep dimples had fooled her.

ROAD TO PTUTSI

11:01 a.m.

The scenery in South Africa was far different from both Kenya and Mozambique. Here there were rolling hills of green grass, lush forest, and open plains. The only wildlife we passed was a herd of buffalo. Twice we saw signs for diamond mines. When we were within 50 meters of the village, the pavement vanished and the bands of Africans began. Large groups of tattered, weak, and bone-thin individuals, walking alongside the road. It was bittersweet to watch them. Knowing they had hope in their hearts, that they would arrive at the village by day’s end or the following day only to find the promised medical aid had not come. Or worse, that the village had been wiped off the face of the Earth completely. But these people would not die today. Maybe tomorrow. But not today.

Every so often we would pass another car, but for the most part, as we zoomed along at 90
kph, we were the only vehicle on the road.

“Turn here.” Lacy pointed to a dirt road splitting the landscape of undulating green. “You need to stay on that road for the next twenty kilometers. It should take us directly to the village.”

The badly maintained dirt road was the width of two cars, the clock on the dash, 11:15 a.m., bouncing wildly up and down.

We had 45 minutes to traverse the 20 kilometers to the village, find some beacon, and destroy it. The fastest the bus could safely go on the bumbling road was about 30 kph, which would put us at the village at roughly 11:30.

That was cutting it close.

“Hold on,” I shouted. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

I pushed the Jeep to 40, then 50. At 50 kph, it felt as though we were on some medieval rollercoaster.

“Slow down,” Lacy shouted. “There’s a car coming.”

Indeed there was. A quarter mile up the road, a Jeep was kicking up plumes of dirt. They were going as fast, if not even faster, than I was going. I pulled over onto what could be deemed the shoulder, where the dirt road met the beginnings of the thick pasture.

The Jeep was within a hundred yards when it began to slow, then stopped parallel with us. It took a moment for the wind to whisk away the dust, and then I was left staring down into the amber eyes of a windblown, yet remarkably attractive woman. There was an African man in the passenger seat whose face looked like a three-week-old pumpkin holding a little black girl sitting in his lap.

The woman appeared on edge. Like she hated to stop, but something had forced her foot to slam on the brakes. Maybe it was our white faces. Probably.

“Where are you guys going?” she yelled over the thrum of the two engines.

“The village up ahead.”

“There’s a barricade set up. They aren’t letting anyone in. And for good reason. No help is coming.”

“How do you know this?”

“I just do. I’d turn around and head back the way you came.”

I saw her moving her hand around on the stick shift, she was ready to get moving herself. “We can’t. If we don’t make it into that village, I can promise you every last one of those people will be dead in half an hour.”

“AIDS doesn’t kill that fast,” she scoffed.

“By a missile.”

“What do you mean?”

My instincts told me this woman might have some insider knowledge of the village, which was why I was willing to waste another thirty seconds of precious time on her. Time I would have to make up by driving 100 kph. “Long story short, the promise of AIDS relief to the village was a ruse to get as many sick people together as possible so that they could be wiped out.”

“Wiped out?”

“Genocide. The slate cleaned. A quarter of a million cases of AIDS simply wiped off the map.”

“And who exactly would do such a thing?”

“I don’t have time for details. A missile is going to hit the village in exactly thirty-seven minutes. And if we don’t find some beacon or transponder thing that tells this missile where to go, then all those people are going to be vaporized.”

She leaned her head out the door. “Did you say
beacon
?”

I nodded, then asked, “Who are you?”

“Gina Brady. I’m a doctor with the World Health Organization. I was sent to the village by some higher-ups in Washington.”

“To find the three kids?” Lacy asked.

“How did you know that?”

I said, “We were on the ship.”

“The cruise ship hijacked by pirates?”

“That’s the one.”

“Holy shit.”

She jumped out of her Jeep and said some words to the African man. He nodded. She grabbed her backpack from the back of the Jeep, then ran around and jumped on the bus. She knelt down next to me and said, “I think I know where this beacon thing is.”

I rammed the bus in to gear and eased back on the road.

Lacy spent the next five minutes detailing the hostage situation all the way down to the ship exploding.

Gina was leaning forward in the first row. I couldn’t help but notice she had a nice profile. She said, “Fifty people died? That’s horrible.”

“That’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in twenty-nine minutes. Now tell me why you think you know where this beacon is.”

She described how she’d entered the village, found the small girl, then had the run in with the guards and had been locked in one of the huts. She’d seen a flashing red tube tucked into the side of the hut. She’d thought it weird at the time, like finding the fossil of a dinosaur with the imprint of a cell phone in its hand. The technology didn’t fit the environment.

“That sounds like it might be it,” I said.

Gina began rummaging around in her backpack, then she came out with a sleek phone. She dialed a number and pressed the phone to her ear. Whoever she was trying to call didn’t answer. She left a message that the village of Ptutsi needed to be evacuated as quickly as possible.

I thought about telling her the evacuation of a quarter of a million people would take hours. We had minutes.

Rikki, who hadn’t spoken much since the explosion, asked from the backseat, “Does that phone have internet capability.”

Gina looked at the phone, then Rikki, “I think so.”

“Can I see it?”

Gina shrugged and handed over the phone.

I asked over my shoulder, “What are we going to do?”

Rikki smiled. “I’m going to get my father’s money back.”

I’d given Rikki the piece of paper Ganju had slipped me as well as the small electronic device. On the slip of paper were a web address, an account number, and two 20-digit passwords.

“Uh-oh.”

I turned to Lacy, then gazed ahead. A half mile away was a massive roadblock. A quickly-assembled chain link fence that stretched across the road and well into the pastureland on both sides. There were two hummers parked on the road, making it impassable. Thirty armed soldiers were either standing near the fence, or sitting in the back of one of the hummers.

I told everybody to hold on.

When we were a long par three away from the hummers, I yanked the wheel to the right, sending the bus off the road and into the long grass. The small incline sent the bus airborne for a split second before it came crashing down. I could see the soldiers jumping from their Hummers, their weapons coming up as they did so.

“Get down,” I yelled.

The bus closed in on the fence quickly. Fifty yards. Thirty. Ten. I braced myself for impact as the bus collided with the steel fence.

A crunching sound filled my ears, then I looked up. The bus was fit as a fiddle, save for the thirty feet of metal fencing it was dragging behind it. After a hundred yards, the bus broke free of the fence’s clutches, leaving it behind for the scurrying soldiers.

The beginnings of the African camps were less than a hundred yards away and Lacy leaned over and repeatedly honked the horn. As we closed in on the thicket of black, the sick and weak slowly made their way out of the path of the large vehicle. As we moved through the masses of people, at right around four miles per hour, they stared. Some clapped. Surely, these people thought we were here to help them; the first of many buses that would soon arrive and whisk them away from the hand of death. We reached the top of a hill and I slowed. The village was at the bottom of a hill, surrounded by rolling green hills on all sides. And every inch, as far as the eye could see, looked to be covered in tiny black ants. I had never seen so many people. Probably a square mile of people stacked one on top of the other.

“Oh my God,” exclaimed Lacy.

I pushed the bus over the hill’s precipice. The Africans reluctantly moved out of the way. I looked at the dash. 11:38.

Slowly, methodically, we moved down the hill. I had long since put the bus in neutral and was simply easing up on the brake, which would send the bus rolling forward ten feet. The bus slid a couple times and several times I thought I had steamrolled a group of sick who were too weary to move, but each time the Africans were pulled from harm’s way before the bus could crush them.

It took us seven minutes to move down the hill. We parked near the entrance to the village. I looked at the dash. 11:44.

16 minutes.

“You guys stay here,” I said. “Gina you come with me.”

Gina and I ran through the entrance. She said, “There are usually two guards at the entrance. They are probably looking for me right now.”

I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.

Gina yelled, “This way.”

I followed.

We ran for several hundred yards, passing hut after hut after hut. Some of the villagers stared as we ran. Others didn’t even look up, two white people darting through their village, evidently of little concern to them.

Gina approached a large hut. An enormous boulder was rolled in front of what looked to be an entrance. Gina said, “Help me move this.”

It took the two of us nearly thirty seconds to roll the boulder from the entrance. She ducked into the hut and I followed. It was the size of an apartment living room. The air was warm and humid. There were three cots. Two of the beds were occupied by African men. One lay on his side. The other had his knees pulled to his chest. Both men had their eyes closed.

Gina said, “This is where they kept me prisoner.”

“Quaint.”

She went to the far edge of the hut and began clawing at the thick hatch that made up the side-wall. I guessed she stumbled on the beacon when she’d been testing to see how secure the walls were. I thumped my fist against the side. It hardly made a sound. The concoction of mud and thatch was roughly the same as brick. I mean it wouldn’t take 20 years to break out like it took the guy in
Shawshank Redemption
, but it would be no simple task.

Gina said, “It’s not here.”

I joined her at the wall. I began peeling back layers of the thick hatch. I asked, “How big is it?”

“It looks like a roll of Lifesavers.”

Right.

“Are you sure it was right here?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

I wondered how many minutes had gone by since we’d left the bus. Three? Four. I guessed we had twelve minutes to find and destroy this thing.

We went over the wall a third time. Nothing.

“I swear it was here.”

“Were these two other guys here when you were here?”

“Yeah.”

I was thinking maybe one of these guys saw Gina messing with the beacon, and when she left, their curiosity got the better of them. I took a couple steps and surveyed the man on his side. He looked dead. I stared at his chest. It wasn’t moving. He was dead.

I made my way towards the second man. His chest moved in and out, his hands were cradled together in front of his knees. I leaned down so I could get a closer look at his hands. A soft light was resonating through the gaps in his fingers. A soft red light.

“Found it.”

“What are you waiting for?”

Good question. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to touch the seven-eighths dead African man with gangrenous sores all over his body, it’s that I didn’t even want to
think
about touching him. Gina pushed me to the side and grabbed the man’s hands.

The man’s eyes opened.

Gina screamed.

I screamed.

The man screamed.

The man rolled over on his side and I could see the beacon clutched in his right hand. Gina jumped on top of him and tried wrestling the beacon from his grip. It didn’t work. The man continued to shriek. It sounded like a garbage disposal with a spoon in it.