Covert Action

by Dick Couch

  “How is he, Grandmother?”

  “Not good, Benjamin. A man needs his sons around him, but now there is just you and David. He doesn’t seem to want to live anymore. It’s good that you have come. He will be glad to see you. You were always such a joy to him.”

  Benjamin Sata’s mother had died during childbirth, along with his infant sister. As the youngest of his siblings who lived, he was raised by his older sisters. His father had worked since he was twelve in the copper mines. Only after he had become too old to work had they moved from the Copper Belt in the north to Lusaka. Close to half a century in the mines had left him a mere shell of the big, wide-shouldered man Benjamin remembered as a boy. Benjamin watched as his brothers went off to the mines, but when it was his time to go, the copper mines in Zambia weren’t hiring, but the diamond mines in South Africa were. Two years of working the big hole in Kimberly were enough. Soldier’s pay was not as good as miner’s, but Benjamin knew in his heart he was an aboveground person. He joined the South African Army and went on to become a sergeant in the notorious 32nd Battalion, where he mastered the skills of a professional soldier. Following intermittent work with Sandline, he was hired as a park ranger in Kenya. It was there that he met Tomba, which ultimately led to his becoming a member of IFOR.

  In the Sata home, as with most African families, there were lots of kids—six girls and four boys. There would have been eleven had Benjamin’s younger sister survived. But now there were only two left, Benjamin and his brother David. His second oldest brother had been killed in a mining accident, and one of his sisters had died of meningitis. The other six had died of AIDS. His brothers and sisters left twelve orphaned children, all scattered about with grandparents and his father’s two sisters. In Zambia, as in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, a whole generation was vanishing; there were only the very old and the very young. Benjamin learned about AIDS in the army and was told that if he contracted the disease, he would be discharged. Now all the contract mercenary firms tested for HIV; if you were found positive for the virus, you could not work. His brother David had married a devout Baptist and found a job as a bank teller. Monogamy and celibacy were the only sure ways to avoid AIDS in Africa. Protected sex was not fashionable, even in the cities.

  Benjamin followed his grandmother into the cluttered living room, where his father sat in a wooden rocker with a quilt across his lap. Anderson Sata was barely sixty-five, but he looked much older. He was painfully thin, and his eyes seemed more deeply recessed in his skull than Benjamin remembered. Benjamin quietly approached the rocker, pulled a stool up next to the chair, and eased himself onto it. There he waited for his father to wake. Fifteen minutes later, the old man’s eyes fluttered open. He focused on Benjamin for a full minute before he spoke.

  “I see you, my son.”

  “And I see you, my father.” He lowered his eyes in a show of respect.

  Anderson Sata’s body was failing him, but his mind was sharp. “Is it safe for you to be here, my son?”

  His father well knew how his son made his living. He also knew his youngest son was the brightest and most capable of his ten children, and it pained him that he had chosen to become a soldier. Yet the money Benjamin sent home on a regular basis kept the household going, as Anderson Sata had no pension from the mines. David and his wife gave to their church, but not to the care of David’s father and grandmother. Yet upon their father’s death, the house would belong to David; he was the eldest, and that was the custom.

  Anderson Sata also understood that while his son was not a criminal, if the local police knew he was here, they would surely arrest and deport him. It was unlikely that anyone in the project where they lived would turn him in, but one could never be certain. What pained him most was that they would have to remain indoors while it was light, not sit on the porch and drink beer as he did with David. To sit in front of his home with his sons and grandsons, there for all to see, was all Anderson Sata had ever asked out of life—and now, all that was left to him.

  “I am safe enough, Father. Look, I brought you something, so you will know when it is time for tea and when it is time to eat.”

  He handed his father a gold pocket watch, wound and set to the correct time. It cost what the average Zambian made in a year. Benjamin had purchased it with his IFOR signing bonus. He watched his father inspect the time-piece, as a broad smile slowly creased his weathered features. To hand a gift like this to his father in person was something he had wanted to do for many years. He was fortunate that the needs of his employer brought him to Lusaka. Even so he was not sure that he would be allowed to make a visit to his family. Nkosi Akheem had sent him ahead with specific instructions and duties. But he had talked it over with Tomba, and Tomba had told him to visit his father, then proceed with his IFOR taskings.

  That evening his grandmother killed a chicken, and they dined on mullet and hen. After it was dark, he took his father out onto the porch, and they sat and talked while his grandmother cleaned up after the meal. Just before midnight, he helped his father into bed and kissed him gently on the forehead. The gold watch lay open on the bedside table. Benjamin left as he had come, making his way back into Lusaka.

  Garrett Walker and Elvis Rosenblatt faced nearly twenty hours in the air between Honolulu and Mombasa, with a change of planes at Narita Airport in Tokyo. Their passports said they were John Naye and Greg Wood respectively, two Canadian tourists who shared a passion for photography, on their way to Zambia for a photo safari. Their documentation was prepared by Bill Owens and, like that carried by Benjamin Sata, impeccable. The two were booked in business class all the way except for the final jump from Mombasa to Lusaka. The long flight gave Garrett an opportunity to get to know Rosenblatt. They ate, drank, and spent time reading up on long-range photography. Both had top-of-the-line Nikon equipment. For Rosenblatt, it was a grand adventure—a chance to get away from the office, travel to a novel place, and chase bugs. The cloak-and-dagger aspect of the venture only added to the excitement. For Garrett, it was all business. His job was to make sure Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt was prepared and able to do his job when the time came.

  “I’ll have another scotch, rocks,” he told the flight attendant as his empty glass was collected. They were over the Indian Ocean and still two hours out of Mombasa. “How about you, Doc?”

  “Maybe a refill on the coffee,” Rosenblatt replied.

  Garrett was gratified to see that the doctor drank sparingly, and while he was something of a big kid in his exuberance about the trip, he was measured and professional when it came to talking about disease and pathogens. The attendant returned immediately with the scotch and the coffee.

  “So, pretend you are a bioterrorist,” Garrett said, sipping frugally at his drink, “and you’re at some makeshift lab in Africa. What kind of a bug would you be trying to grow to turn loose on some Western city?”

  “Interesting perspective,” Rosenblatt said. “But before we talk about bugs, let’s talk about the players in this game. I’m an investigator—a bug detective. I know the game, but I play defense. The guys that you said were missing also know the game, but they are offensive players. And they are some of the best offensive players. My training and experience are mostly with natural pathogens, but recently, with the emerging bioterror threat, we at the CDC have had to think about these offensive threats—unnatural, man-made threats. And that means we have to think like terrorists, which is not all that easy. Let me break this down for you. There are three basic threat areas: bacteria, toxins, and viruses. For simplicity, we’ll not consider HIV and some of the exotics like bovine spongiform. Now, do you want me to kill a lot of people, or just terrorize them?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Sure. Take the anthrax scare right after 9/11. Not that many people died, but it terrorized a nation—people were afraid to go to the mailbox. Some still are. Anthrax is a great terror weapon, but it’s not contagious, and it’s very hard to weaponize—to get the
spores small enough to stay airborne. That’s a problem, because it takes about twenty thousand anthrax spores to infect a person. As a terrorist, you have to personally infect every victim. If I have anthrax, I can’t hurt you. Now let’s say you could weaponize a hemorrhagic fever, like Ebola. Now you’ve got a real killer. It’s highly contagious, killing about seventy percent of those who contract the virus. It’s a horrible death. Of course, if you kill a lot of people, you also create a lot of terror.”

  Garrett considered this. “Okay, you’re in Africa, you’re in a good lab, and you want to kill a lot of people. How would you go about it?”

  “If I were going to use a bacteria, I’d probably use inhalation anthrax or melioidosis. Melioidosis can be some pretty bad stuff. It’s rare and mostly confined to animals. Most cases found in humans are confined to Southeast Asia, Thailand, and northern Australia. If you can culture enough of the stuff and get it into an aerosol, you can kill a lot of people. It’s ninety percent fatal, and there is no known antidote. But it’s hard to transmit, and the bacteria doesn’t do well in colder climates. Anthrax, even though it isn’t contagious, is another good bacterial choice for an offensive player. And, as I said, you would have to somehow weaponize it—make it an aerosol—which takes some skill and some technology. If you could do that, you could also kill a lot of people. The nice thing about anthrax spores is that they last a long time, and if you have a refined aerosol process, you can keep them aloft long enough for people to breathe them. The Russians had lots of anthrax, tons of it in fact, and we have no idea what happened to most of it. Not sure you could decimate a population with anthrax, but you could sure kill a lot of people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve or at a football bowl game. A small explosive and a few pounds of weaponized anthrax, and you could rack up forty or fifty thousand—no problem.

  “Then there are toxins. These are natural poisons, as opposed to man-made poisons, like VX nerve gas. There are numerous forms of botulinum, there’s ricin, and there’s mycotoxins. Ricin and mycotoxins are both good candidates—there is no antidote, and both are almost always fatal. But both have delivery problems. The nice thing about ricin is its availability; it’s made from castor beans. But getting it to a large number of people could be very difficult. Mycotoxins, and there are dozens of them, can be very effective in aerosol form. They can be synthesized from fungi. Just mix up a batch, find yourself a crop-spraying aircraft, fly over a crowd, like the New York Marathon or maybe a rock concert. Mycotoxins are what were supposedly released from an aircraft in the ‘yellow rain’ incidents in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. The incident in Afghanistan was probably a real one; the Soviets got pretty desperate right before they left. There have been mycotoxins in any number of military arsenals. If I were using a toxin and had a good source, I’d favor a mycotoxin.”

  “So you’d be growing fungi to make a mycotoxin in your African lab?”

  “Now, did I say that? I said if I were going to use a toxin, I’d go with a mycotoxin. But why use a rusty knife when there is a shiny sharp scalpel available? I’m talking about a virus. Viruses are Cadillacs of microbial killing machines. We often don’t understand how they live, move, and even kill in nature, let alone if someone in a laboratory is helping them. Viruses have been the scourge of the last two centuries. The flu epidemic of 1918 probably killed thirty million people before it ran its course; HIV is well on its way to killing twenty million. Smallpox decimated the American Indians and all but annihilated several smaller, isolated cultures that had no natural immunity. The viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers are nasty little guys. Ebola is just one of the hemorrhagic fever viruses. Viruses were nasty, but over the years, we’ve pretty much gotten a handle on them. We have vaccinations against smallpox and tetanus, so they are controlled. Those we can’t control, like Ebola, are rare and, so far, geographically isolated. But then we began fooling around with genetic engineering. The mapping of the human genome was a huge step forward. With these techniques, and the emergence of nanotechnologies, we can modify genetic material and literally create new forms of life, or at least significantly modify existing forms of life. A team of biologists created a polio virus in the lab—from scratch. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was able to recreate the exact same strain of a flu virus that swept through North America and Western Europe in 1918. So you see, any of the existing nasty little viruses that we have controlled or are very rare could, through genetic manipulation, be made resistant to current vaccines or made more robust, so they are no longer rare. We are into the age of designer bio-weapons. We can make bugs that are immune to existing vaccines or that so depress the human immune system that a common cold could take you out. On the ugly end of the scenario, they have the ability to depopulate whole regions, even continents. It could make the bubonic plague seem like a case of the sniffles.”

  “Y’know, Elvis, you must be a conversational treasure at a dinner party. Keep this up, and I’m going to need another drink.”

  “Hey, you asked. Think it scares you? I’m supposed to be a key player on the first-team defense, and it scares the hell out of me.”

  The pilot announced that they were beginning their descent into Mombasa. There were thunderstorms in the area, so the attendants hurried through the cabin to collect glasses and trash. Garrett put his tray table up but held on to his drink.

  “So, Doc, you’re in your lab in Zimbabwe. You want to kill a lot of people—a lot of Americans. How do you go about it? You’re on the offense now. Which bug are you going to go with?”

  Rosenblatt pursed his lips. “Since it’s Africa and I have the right equipment, I think I’d go with viral hemorrhagic fever. Ebola is pretty elusive, so I’d probably try to get my hands on some common form of yellow fever or dengue fever, and then morph it into something resistant to current vaccines and give it a little more staying power in northern climates—maybe get some transmission medium other than the mosquito. Of course, you’d want to build in some human immune suppressant characteristics. If I had the ability to conduct human testing, I’d try to give the bug a higher transmission rate, perhaps even give it the ability to beat a HEPA filtration system. That way I’d be able to kill a lot of health-care workers and epidemiologists before they could figure it out, and without the caregivers and the epidemiologists, you can get to pandemic proportions in a hurry.”

  “You could do that?”

  “Probably. I can assure you that those virologists and microbiologists that you can’t find, if they are in a lab equipped for genetic engineering, sure as hell can. Look, Garrett, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. It’s serious shit—really serious shit.”

  The aircraft began to buck and yaw as they slipped down into the dense, warm air coming off the African mainland. “Elvis, you’re one happy thought after another. You know, the idea of spending a week with you on a photo safari is rapidly becoming a bleak prospect.”

  Rosenblatt grinned at him. “I’ll probably be a pain in the ass while we’re taking pictures of wildlife, but if we have to go on safari for some killer microbes, you’ll be glad I’m on your team.”

  Garrett considered this and returned the grin. “You probably got that right.” He drained the last of his scotch as the 767 broke through the overcast and banked for the Mombasa airport.

  François Meno sat in his office in the basement of the Makondo, reviewing the data on the last group of test subjects. This was taking longer than he had anticipated, but there was no way around it. Their pathogen was now a contagion and had to be handled with care. The specifications called for an infectious period of a week, and that had been done; the period between infection and the first symptoms was now ten days or more. An incubation period of two weeks with a highly contagious disease meant that the infection would spread that much further before anyone detected it. In a highly mobile, Western population, a contagion spread almost exponentially with time, if there were no symptoms of the disease to sound the alarm. The longer the incubation period, the har
der it would be to check the reinfection rate. He smiled. This was a potent weapon, and he relished his part in creating such power. But the longer incubation period they had engineered now meant that it would take more time to check the transmission rate among their test population. He was beginning to experience an uneasiness about the necessary extended time to complete this project and close the operation down. He wanted to be away from here; they all did. Meno was deep in thought when a quiet knock sounded at his door.

  “Entre,” he said with ill-concealed irritation.

  “François, I hope I am not interrupting?”

  Meno scowled and motioned him in. He did not particularly like Hans Lauda, but Lauda, he admitted, had allowed him to do his work and keep the distractions at this godforsaken place to a minimum. And Lauda had proved a master at deconfliction. Among the talented rogues assembled for this project, there were some monstrous egos. Lauda himself was not without ability and experience, but his main talent was to keep this hastily assembled team focused and on schedule.

  “A minute of your time, if I may?” Meno’s German was much better than Lauda’s French, but Meno insisted on French unless it was unavoidable, or as in the case of the Russian team member, the accent was simply too atrocious.

  “What can I do for you, Hans?”

  “I wanted your opinion,” Lauda said diplomatically. He knew that the project was headed for success, in no small part because of this brilliant and volatile Frenchman. Lauda was there not only for his opinion but to also stroke Meno. “With the results of this most recently infected group, I think we will have taken this pathogen about as far as we need to, or about as far as we can without more research and testing, and a great deal more time. Unless there is something unforeseen that surfaces in these tests, I’d like to have Lyman and his team begin production on this last strain. What would be your opinion?”