Z (14 page)

On the ground it looked like two solid lines of red came out of the sky and touched down. First on the pickup truck closest to them. Intermingled among the lines was the crump of a larger 105mm round.

In three seconds the truck, and the men around it, disappeared. The firing shifted and, one by one, the troops that had set the ambush had the tables turned on them. There was no escaping under the cover of trees, as the thermal targeting of the Spectre saw through the trees and the weaponry tore apart the foliage, destroying what was underneath.

It was all over in thirty seconds.

“We’re clear,” the helicopter pilot called out. “There’s a Chinook en route to our location to pick us up and sling-load this aircraft out.”

Riley put down the M-16 he’d been using. The adrenaline rush was wearing off. He could tell Conner was ecstatic. She had footage that would most certainly make people sit up and notice. Right now, she was talking into the camera, giving her after-action wrap-up.

Riley walked over to Comsky, who was looking down at what remained of Sergeant Ku. Little more than a red lump of flesh in a vaguely human form. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Comsky said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s like his body was just eaten up.” He was rubbing his hands together nervously. “I think he had some sort of disease. He didn’t look too good when he got on board the chopper.”

Comsky looked over at Conner and Seeger. “Hey, bring that camera over here.”

“What do you want?” Conner asked.

Comsky pointed at the body. “Take a close-up of him.”

Conner flinched. “Why?”

“Just do what I say,” Comsky said. He was searching through his aid kit. He pulled out a scalpel.

“What are you going to do?” Riley asked.

Sergeant Lome had walked over and he echoed Riley’s question. “What are you up to, Comsky?”

The medic was pulling on a new pair of gloves. “I don’t know what killed him, Top, but there’s people back in the States who might. We need to give them something to work with.” He looked up at Seeger. “Keep the camera on the body.” He placed the tip of the scalpel on the center of Ku’s chest.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Sergeant?” Lome demanded. “You can’t go around cutting people up!”

Comsky raised his eyebrows and looked up at his team sergeant. Top, he’s dead and he isn’t going to get any deader by me cutting him. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. This is important. Very important.”

Lome glanced around. Other than the pilots, he was the ranking man on the spot.

“We might have whatever killed Sergeant Ku,” Comsky said, thumping his chest. “That’s why it’s important that I do this. To try and get an idea of what it is.”

Lome hesitated, then nodded. “All right. Go ahead.”

Comsky slid the blade through flesh. Ku’s stomach was full of black blood with traces of internal tissue mixed in it. Comsky reached through the goo with his hand, pulling up dripping internal organs. Conner turned away, retching, the meager breakfast she’d had coming back up.

“His kidneys are gone,” Comsky said. He pulled something up. That’s his liver.” It was the color of urine and partly dissolved. Comsky put it back down on top of the mass of blood and guts that had been Sergeant Ku. He looked up at the camera. “I don’t know exactly what killed this man, but the people who might know are at Fort Detrick. Whoever’s looking at this tape back in the States, please get a copy to Fort Detrick.”

Comsky stood and pulled a poncho out of his rucksack. “Let’s bag him. Bag him tight. Then I suggest we clean up as best we can.”

Fort Detrick, Maryland, 15 June

A madman working in a wax museum could not have set a more fearsome scene. The bodies were twisted into grotesque shapes. Mouths were open; silent lips that would never know the passage of a final scream were pulled wide over fangs. Their chests had been opened, red blood frozen and caught hanging like threads of red.

The eyes were the worst. Black orbs staring aimlessly out, framed in red blood like cheap eyeliner that an epileptic makeup artist had applied.

Dan Tyron didn’t like dealing with frozen bodies. Not out of any sense of aesthetics, but because frozen objects have pointy parts and pointy parts make holes in gloves and flesh. And this frozen locker was hot. As hot as any place on earth. And hot plus a hole in the space suit he wore equaled dead.

Inside his suit, Tyron was a large man. He just barely made it inside the army’s weight standards every time his annual PT test rolled around, and that was only after careful dieting and some fudging by the unit first sergeant on both the scale and height recorded. The philosophy around this place was that they weren’t going to have one of their own separated from the army just because of some stupid rules that had nothing to do with a soldier’s capability to do his job.

Tyron had sandy blond hair and a wide, cheerful face that belied a man who was handling dead bodies. Very carefully, he rolled a cart under one of the monkeys. He pushed a button and the chain that had held the body up lowered it until its entire weight was on the cart. He then most carefully unfastened the meat hook that was jammed through the monkey’s back from the chain, leaving the implement in place.

He slowed his breathing. His faceplate was fogging up and the air inside his suit was getting stale. He rolled the cart out of the refrigerator room and shut the large steel door behind him. Then down the corridor to the necropsy room, where he plugged in the air hose for his suit to a wall socket. The familiar sound of the fresh air being pumped in filled his ears and the mask cleared. The sound was as comforting to him as the whine of a smoothly running engine was to a helicopter pilot. It meant his lifeline was working. He locked the wheels on the base of the cart so it wouldn’t move. Every action was slow and deliberate. He double-checked everything he did. This was not a place for mistakes.

Tyron pulled extra-large surgical gloves over the space-suit gloves, then glanced at the other occupant of the room and pointed at the monkey. “On three.”

The other person had the name “Spencer” stenciled on the chest and a woman’s voice echoed him over the radio to confirm she understood. “On three.”

“One.” Tyron and Spencer each grabbed one end of the monkey. “Two. Three.” They smoothly lifted the body and placed it on an operating table, handling it as delicately as they would a bomb, which in effect it could be considered. The monkey was dead, but there were things inside it that existed in a netherworld between life and death, waiting for other living flesh to devour just as they had devoured the monkey’s.

“It’ll take a couple of hours to defrost,” Tyron said. “We’ll do the cutting on this one at thirteen hundred.”

“All right,” Spencer acknowledged.

He turned to the other table, where a second monkey lay. They had taken it out of the freezer the previous evening. Tyron picked up a scalpel and handed it to Spencer. “Welcome to level four. Your first patient, Doctor.”

He couldn’t see Spencer’s face as she bent over the corpse. “Thank you, Doctor.” She pressed the blade into the monkey’s stomach and sliced. The interior cavity was full of congealed blood.

Spencer watched his subordinate as she worked, making sure that she was noting all key abnormalities, although most were not hard to spot. The kidneys were totally gone. The liver was yellow and part of it had dissolved.

He took the samples she was cutting off and placed them onto glass slides. The only glass allowed on level four. When she indicated, he took a pair of large clamps and cracked open the monkey’s chest, holding open the rib cage for her to work in there.

There was a crackling noise in the air and Spencer was startled. She froze and looked at Tyron, trying to guess what the cause was. “Voice box,” he mouthed to her, looking up at the ceiling. She looked relieved. Any break in the routine was scary down here.

What the hell do they want? Tyron thought. The speaker crackled again and this time he recognized the voice of the USAMRIID— the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases—commander, Colonel Martin.

“Dan, we have a development in Angola.”

A development, Tyron thought, his pulse skipping a beat. Something was hot there. He remembered seeing the news on SNN about the UN/Pan-African mission into Angola. Something about the 82d Airborne deploying.

“I need you to look at something,” Martin’s voice continued. “ASAP.”

Tyron unplugged his air hose and moved to the air lock. He stepped in. His mask was fogging badly. “Got to have control,” he whispered to himself, slowing his breathing. The lock cycled and he stepped through. He ripped off his boots, then stepped into the next chamber. He pulled a chain and the suit was hosed down. He waited impatiently as the shower ran through its sequence. There was no way to make it go quicker. Not if it was going to ensure that all viruses that might be on his suit were gone.

A development. The word echoed through Tyron’s consciousness. He was coming out of one of only two biohazard level four labs in the country. The other one was at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta. The people who worked at both USAMRIID and CDC around level four agents knew that a development usually meant someone had died and that more people were going to die unless they intervened quickly and effectively.

It was obvious to most people why the CDC had such an interest in disease. It was less obvious why the army had one, except to students of military history. Even in the relatively modern times of the last century, in war more soldiers died of disease than in battle. Whenever masses of men gathered together, pestilence was never far away. Also, biological and chemical agents had been used before as weapons of war and they would be used again. USAMRIID’s job was to try and stay one step ahead.

The shower finally shut down. Tyron walked into the staging area and took off his suit. He rapidly threw on his Class B uniform and went to the elevator, still tucking the light-green shirt in.

The door opened and he rode it up to ground level. When the elevator opened, Colonel Martin was standing there waiting, dressed in sweatpants and a faded green surgical shirt—his normal work uniform. “This way,” Martin said. They went directly to his office. Four other people were gathered there: the other top experts in the office on bio-agents.

“We’ve already seen this once,” Martin said, pointing at the TV. He picked up the remote and turned the VCR/TV on.

“What is this?” Tyron asked as the screen showed a crashed helicopter and people shooting.

Colonel Martin had all the information on a classified fax that he read from. “A Navy F-18 Hornet was shot down over northeast Angola at eleven twelve hours today, Greenwich Mean Time. This helicopter was sent to recover the pilot. It, too, was shot down at approximately eleven twenty-three hours.”

The camera panned over to two men leaning over a supine figure. It closed in and Tyron leaned forward to see. The man was vomiting blood and in convulsions. There was a breathing tube stuck in his throat and blood coming out of the eyes. He watched one of the men trying to get an IV going only to have blood pour out of the needle punctures. Tyron recognized the symptoms, but he’d never before seen them in a human, only in monkeys. “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

“That was our conclusion,” Colonel Martin remarked dryly.

He continued to watch as the man died. Then the scene cut to the medic who had been working on the man cutting him open.

“His kidneys are gone,” the medic said. “That’s his liver.” The medic turned to face the camera. “I don’t know exactly what killed this man, but the people who might know are at Fort Detrick. Whoever’s looking at this tape back in the States, please get a copy to Fort Detrick.”

The tape went blank.

Tyron looked around the room and then focused on one man. “Ebola?”

There were two varieties of the deadly Ebola virus: Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire. Zaire had a kill ratio of 90 percent of those infected, the Sudan variety not too far behind. It might not be a virus, Tyron hoped. It might be nothing—but he knew nothing didn’t kill like that. It had to be something.

“Maybe,” the man replied. He was dressed casually in cutoff jean shorts and T-shirt. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties but Tyron knew that Michael Kieling was only twenty-nine. He’d had a tough life. He had black hair hanging down to his collar, and framing his face was the outline of a two-day beard—Tyron wondered how Kieling always managed to look forty-eight hours from his last shave.

Kieling was the resident genius on level four bio-agents at USAMRIID. He had a PhD in epidemiology and four years’ experience in the field. “Could be Marburg, but I don’t think so. He has those welts, but they don’t seem to be the same as Marburg lesions. It’s hard to tell from this feed,” Kieling continued. “Plus he has his hair.” Marburg virus usually caused the victim’s hair to fall out. Just like radiation poisoning.

“Who’s the case?” Tyron asked, realizing he was no longer referring to the victim as a person.

“An Angolan native,” Martin said. “We don’t have anything on him yet, except that he was assigned to the American Special Forces as an adviser.”

“So he was on the helicopter?” Tyron asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are those people now?”

“They’re returning to a camp at Cacolo. A town in northeast Angola,” Martin said.

“How’d we get the video?” Tyron asked.

“An SNN crew was also on the bird. Their feed goes through military satellites, downlinks at the Pentagon, where the censors take a look. They saw this and someone with a few brains gave us a call.”

“This is out on the news?” Tyron was stunned.

Martin shook his head. “No. They’re holding it at the Pentagon.”

Tyron turned back to the screen. “Are they quarantined at Cacolo?”

Kieling laughed. “Come on, man, get real. We just saw this. They don’t have a clue over there, although whomever that medic was who did the quick autopsy for our benefit, he’s smart. He definitely has a good idea what he’s got there. The brass at the Pentagon don’t know. The only ones who really know right now is us. And from this, well, we really don’t know too much either.”

Kieling could speak like that, Tyron knew. He was a civilian on contract with USAMRIID. Inside the tight community of scientists who dealt with deadly infectious diseases, Kieling was known as a virus cowboy. Someone who traveled around the world looking for microscopic bugs that killed. Corralled them. Brought them back to level four. Then tried to take them apart to find a way to beat them.

Tyron backed the tape up to a picture of the man just after he died. “Have you ever seen this before?” Tyron asked, aware that Colonel Martin was watching him carefully. Martin wasn’t an epidemiologist. He was a regular army doctor, sent here to over watch the bunch of scientists and doctors to make sure they could still remember how to put on the uniform and salute and to remind them every once in a while who paid their salary. Except of course, as it turned out, Martin had been absorbed by the Institute rather than the opposite happening, hence his casual outfit. Regardless, Tyron knew, as the ranking army epidemiologist, this was his problem to make decisions about.

Kieling looked at the screen. “I can’t see a damn thing on that other than they had a crash-and-burn.”

A crash-and-burn was the Institute’s term for the final stages of a victim carrying a deadly agent. The bug had taken over the body and consumed it and was ready to move on, having killed its host.

“Could it be X?” Tyron asked, referring to the fourth of the deadly filo-viruses to come out of Africa.

“Don’t know.” Kieling scratched his chin. “Only way we’re going to find out is to go there.”

“I’ll contact the Pentagon,” Colonel Martin said. “I’ll have them hold the footage indefinitely and close down Cacolo.” He pointed at Tyron, then Kieling. “I’ll get you a plane. Be ready to move in an hour.”

Angola-Zaire Border, 15 June

“That’s the spot,” Trent said.

Quinn looked at the border crossing. The rest of the mercenaries were farther back, hidden in some low ground. There was only the faint impression of a trail cutting across the ground. No border post. No sign that there even was an international border.

“We’ll keep surveillance on it,” Quinn said. “I wouldn’t put it past Skeleton or some of those ghouls who work for him to have a trap set for us now that they no longer need us here to work the rebels or diamonds.”

Trent turned to him. “You think he’d do that?”

Quinn shrugged. The less said about what’s been going on in this country, the better, would be their outlook on things, I suppose. We haven’t exactly been legal here.”

Trent glanced toward where the other men were. “Some of the men are jumpy. They’ve seen the jets. They know the Yanks are here. They want to get out before we run into something we can’t handle. And six are sick. Killibrew is in real bad shape. He’s throwing up blood.”

Quinn had been thinking about that. “All right. I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s better for us to go small. The rebels got more to worry about right now than us, and this big a group is sure to catch some American interest. Let those go who want to and get rid of all that are sick. They can go to a clinic in Zaire and get treated.” Quinn checked his map. “Here. At Sandoa there’s some of those international aid people running a clinic. Tell them to go there. We’ll keep about four good men who you trust and who want some extra money.” He looked about. “Also, if we do have a tick from Skeleton, let’s hope we’re getting rid of him.”