by Jeff Rovin
“We are now. But it’s the South Indian Ocean. There’s a lot of shipping. We’ll filter by proximity and those known to have dinghies—which will also be a lot. Seems like it’s got to tie in with the plane, but how?”
“A local Earth event perhaps.”
“What do you mean?” Berry asked.
“There was a NASA report about ground glow close to the flight path, so I called a sedimentologist at my alma mater,” Williams said.
“Sediment? As in a doctor of dirt?”
“That’s right.”
“C’mon, Chase—”
“Matt, I’m looking for answers too, so just hear me out,” Williams said.
“Sure. Sorry. Got to look under every rock.”
Williams let the dig pass. “Dr. Goodman told me that the island is made of ancient stone and organic matter, including meteors from the moon and Mars—”
“Oh, Christ,” Berry said. “I need something solid and you give me ETs? I’m checking those boat-grabs you sent me but Harward’s on the warpath protecting Midkiff’s legacy. Don’t ask me to sell them space germs—”
“Okay, forget that part for now. Let’s just say it’s a bug that’s airborne and instantly fatal. Goodman said a lot of the substrata in that island group has been locked in tight for up to a couple hundred million years. No living species would have seen anything like it. And hell, let’s not forget outer space. Now that I think of it, we quarantined our moon walkers when they came back to Earth in case they were contaminated—”
“And they weren’t,” Berry said.
“Fine, but reasonable scientists were concerned about the possibility, and we should be too. Because if something is loose, something that was hibernating in the cold—”
“Yeah, we already know the rest.”
“It’s also something that rose thirty-five thousand feet on what Goodman thinks may be helium gas, and it may still be following the currents in our upper atmosphere.”
“Hewlett already informed the Federal Aviation Administration to reroute aircraft.”
Abraham Hewlett was the secretary of Homeland Security, a highly influential advisor to the president.
“I’m assuming we weren’t the only ones listening to that distress call?” Williams said.
“Very unlikely.”
“So we should probably be talking with the Russians and the Chinese to contain whatever it is. That includes the crash site, when we know where that is.”
Berry sighed. “The secretary of state called from Japan and urged caution on that, and Midkiff agrees.”
“Because?”
“You understand that not everyone will want to kill the thing,” Berry said. “Dr. Rajini also pointed out that many microbes cannot survive for very long without a host.”
Dr. Shahrukh Rajini was the president’s science advisor. Williams liked her. She put facts before politics in both senses of the phrase.
“Bottom line, we’re going to let that play out,” Berry said. “The Vinson has a fix, and so, we guess, do the Russian and Chinese ships in the region. And by the way, the navy is not rushing in, and I don’t think anyone else will either.”
“I suppose that’s wise, if not solution-oriented.”
“I said ‘rushing,’” Berry said.
“Meaning?” Williams asked.
“This could affect you,” Berry said unhappily. “If you and the two doctors are right, and this is a virus or bacteria, we are going to want a sample.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Teri Wheel, South Indian Sea
November 11, 3:21 P.M., South Africa Standard Time
It was either by divine providence or accident that Katinka Kettle had survived.
Possibly both.
The twenty-five-year-old gemologist—“our special guest,” Foster respectfully called her when sending her on these journeys—was not a devout Pentecostal. Her mother had been and her father was somewhat, enough so that she believed in God and Jesus Christ and that she belonged to their holy family. So maybe those great, benign, salvaging figures had a hand in this.
But there was also the possibility that it was dumb luck. Katinka had intended to wear an ordinary surgical mask while examining the first of the three core samples she had collected from Ship Rock on Prince Edward Island. That was how she typically worked with Claude Foster and his Mineral Exploration and Acquisition Survey Enterprises. In most cases, MEASE went—without permission—to protected public lands in search of small supplies of diamonds. Typically, the yield was small but worth harvesting for markets that were not big cities or resorts. These would be extracted in darkness, in rain or dust storms, under conditions when no one was likely to notice them. If gems were discovered, either officials were bribed or clandestine digs were executed at night with armed security. These geographically separated teams were former members of death squads who had killed anti-apartheid activists and dissidents. The crew of the Teri Wheel had been comprised of several of these people. Adanna had been the worst of them. She had wanted to shoot the patrol helicopter and its black pilot down instead of hiding.
“No one will find out it was us and maybe they won’t even bother looking,” she had said.
Katinka had learned to operate every van, jeep, dinghy, autogyro, and small plane they had traveled in. Just to be sure she could get away from them in the event of a general mutiny. The team members were, nearly to a one, sociopaths. The sole exception was her lover Dawid, who worked as a security supervisor for the Pebble-Holmes Diamond Consortium of Durban. He was the one who fed them information about potential mining sites. He was now the director of a former prison that had been converted into a museum of apartheid-era atrocities. It provided a perfect cover for his other activities.
Katinka had done calculations on her own. Foster found and discovered a sufficient number of diamonds every year to pay very handsomely, in cash, but probably not enough to afford and maintain a fleet of exotic search vehicles including a helicopter, a jet—and this fifty-eight-foot-long yacht. From snippets of talk she had heard at his East London headquarters and among the various teams, she suspected that he was involved in other illegal operations, including arms smuggling. It was not to say whether he was right or wrong. To the north, in Mozambique, the National Resistance rebels were no more or less bloody than the government forces that committed random executions and rapes. Their actions caused a massive refugee crisis in neighboring Malawi.
No one was clean.
Foster’s other activities were not her concern and, since she knew little about them, they did not bother her. She liked her life and her lifestyle. She also liked her prospects. They depended entirely on her skill and determination.
And she liked Claude Foster. She admired, even envied his confidence, respected and trusted his sharp intuition. It was a barometer that had never failed them, not in any major way. He was creative in that way, an artist.
The fieldwork Katinka did, sometimes in a van, sometimes in a tent, occasionally at sea, was fairly straightforward. Scientifically, it was similar to the prospecting she had done with the University of South Africa to obtain her master’s degree. Rock samples or mineral cores were examined and diamonds, sapphires, and rubies were either found or not.
The difference was that her work then was legal. Her work here was not. But growing up poor in Cape Town, she had learned at a young age that poverty was for someone else. She had pursued this career because scientists who worked with gemstones were guaranteed a good living. Scientists who did so without the oversight of the Department of Public Enterprises became wealthy.
Katinka Kettle wanted to be rich. Every time she went on a new sampling mission for Foster, the prospect of a big strike was always there. And when she returned, she always felt closer to her employer. He, too, longed for bigger and bigger strikes; hoping ultimately, as he often told her, “the biggest.” He praised her work, he seemed to respect her, and she found in him the strength to overcome her own innately timid na
ture.
She had dreamed about that after taking a long sleep after the expedition. Prince Edward Island, at night, in the cold and wind, was not conducive to comfort. The earth had been hard and progress with fluorosulfuric acid and the hand-turned auger had been miserably slow. She had done the drilling herself: masked against the dust as always, like the other members of the party, she judged the ground as much by what she felt through the metal-and-wood tool as by what she saw in the dim, dim light.
Tonight, after resting, she had gone to her station, taken a clean lab coat from the locker, and sat on a stool beside the small worktable. When she removed the plastic, non-rotating core from the steel housing, Katinka saw a great deal of very fine powdered halite—more than she had expected. The mineral was undoubtedly crushed ages before by the movement of ice or by tectonic activity, perhaps both. Even this finely granular in a wind-battered environment, the particles were held firmly in place by the frozen ground.
That was the reason she’d used the half-mask respirator before transferring the materials to the portable crush cell apparatus for analysis. She was actually grateful for the sound of her own breathing in her ears. It drowned out the often raucous activities of six of the other eleven persons onboard. The remaining five crew members were sober-tempered members of the security team. They rarely smiled, let alone partied.
“And now they’re dead,” she said to herself. Talking aloud was a habit she had acquired working alone in the field. Her father once said she enjoyed the company. He should know. He did the same thing fixing cars.
Katinka had heard the first loud cries over her breathing apparatus. Her first thought was that the South African Navy had boarded them. She replaced the core in the container and sealed it. Then she moved to a small electronic panel at the right side of the table, just beneath a porthole. In that eventuality, she had a standing order from Foster to destroy the contents of the lab. That would be accomplished by activating a chute in the lab table that opened directly into the hull and the sea. After showing her how it worked, Foster joked, “Only dead bodies float.”
After a few moments it became clear to the woman that the sounds were pain, not panic. Moving tentatively, and slowly undoing the elastic strap of her mask as she walked, Katinka left the small white room with its bright fluorescent lights and went to the darker wood-paneled corridor to see what was going on. She stopped sharply and froze, startled to see a body clawing toward her on the carpet. It was Adanna, one of the security team members. The woman’s wide, strong face was contorted into something pinched and sallow, the mouth leaving behind a slime-like trail of brownish blood. Adanna crawled over the fluid, smearing the trail. She was apparently headed for the infirmary in the next room over, her wide eyes moving up toward the gemologist, searching for assistance.
Katinka stopped fussing with the mask strap. She pulled it tight again and thrust her arms straight down by her side, away from the mask. She looked from Adanna to her left. Their medic, “The Major,” who formerly served with the Seventh Medical Battalion Group of the South African Military Health Service. He was lying faceup, his chest covered in red. A medical mask was clutched in his hand.
The infirmary and the lab shared ventilation systems with the rest of the ship. But the air moved from fore to aft—from her station to his.
Katinka’s breath came more rapidly, fearfully. Over it she could hear the cries of others. She followed the sounds, stepping around Adanna, and saw five members of the crew in the large galley. All were dead or dying, sprawled wherever their knees had given out. Blood and chunks of viscera everywhere upon and around them. In the rear of the yacht, the relief radioman, Botha, lay sprawled in a ghastly puddle.
She noticed, then, that the boat had slowed.
“No, I don’t hear the engines,” she muttered. “It’s drifting.”
There was no point going to the bridge. Whatever this was must have reached there. Captain Van Rooyen was a careful man. As soon as a problem arose, he would have ordered the Teri Wheel—named for his wife—to stop and gone to investigate.
She thought she heard a voice in the radio room, but there was no reason to stay. Something deadly was about and only her mask had protected her.
But from what?
Whatever it was, she did not want to risk the mask failing. It had fine-particle filtration but she was still breathing the ship’s air.
Adanna managed to push off the floor and get to her knees. Blood ran in a steady flow over her lower lip as she went thumping down the hallway, toward the sound of the voice—Johan Krog, most likely. He would be calling Foster.
Until he, too, was dead.
Katinka returned to the lab and shut the door. As much as possible, she wanted to block the sounds and sights of a miserable death. She had to think.
Everyone had been masked at the island, but not here. The drilling had uncovered something lethal and the core she had opened was the likely source. It was not a gas. Nothing that concentrated could spread so far. Radiation would have killed her as well. It had to be biological.
She stood at her lab table trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened. They had come here for diamonds. They had found something more valuable than that. Instant, invisible mass murder. And only she and Foster knew where it came from.
First, she had to cover their route, their deeds, completely. Then she had to get to East London with the samples.
Katinka took a portable burner from the table. Usually, she used it to identify unknown minerals, grinding them with a mortar and pestle, exposing them to the burner, and examining the color of the flame. Now, she took a beaker and filled it with chlorine trifluoride. When exposed to fire, the chemical would destroy the glass and ignite everything it touched.
The woman pulled her personal backpack from under the lab table. She did not want to go to her cabin for her coat, and donned a sweatshirt she kept in a locker. Placing the core samples inside, Katinka slung the bag over one shoulder. Then she turned the burner on its side, lit the flame, and set the ClF3 two inches beyond.
She had about five minutes before the chemical heated sufficiently to break the beaker.
Running through the corridor, careful not to skid on the wide puddle of Botha’s blood, the gemologist made her way to the stairs and up to the main deck. The motorized dinghy was moored astern. Katinka knew how to work the dinghy though she did not know how far it would take her—or how long it would take to get home. All she knew was that she had to get off the Teri Wheel. She would contact Foster once she was away.
For that purpose, there was the autogyro. Parked at the wide stern, the swift, tiny craft was used by the captain to pay quick visits to Foster when it was too risky for anything but face-to-face contact—or when he had to deliver the occasional strike of uncut gems. Big ones, not dust. Katinka’s fear of the crew had paid off since she knew how to fly the craft.
The curtains in the galley were drawn, no light emerging, and Katinka had to negotiate the deck largely by feel. She started to fear that she would not get away in time. The coated wood under her feet was slick with sea and the winds were pushing against her.
Finally reaching the pushpit railing, Katinka ran to the autogyro and started it up. Her breath was coming fast again. She saw a dull orange light blossom across the sea on the portside of the yacht.
The fire had begun.
The autogyro had a two-minute start-up time. She checked the compass as the two rotors began to turn, one above and one pinned to the back of the cockpit, forward the tail section. Above all things, she did not want to go back to Prince Edward. Not if whatever this was had started there and was still loose.
“Northwest,” she said aloud, forcing herself to focus as she watched the digital needle.
The woman settled into the seat and, her palms cold and slippery, she lifted off from the deck. Less than five minutes later the arrowhead-shaped red vessel was zipping low across the ruddy, restless water, away from the Teri Wheel.
&nbs
p; Then, with an enormous, puffball flash that was sure to be seen in Port Elizabeth, the yacht exploded. The sound and shock wave reached her moments later, rocking the aircraft and even warming the cabin with its ferocious heat.
But she had survived.
Katinka flew on at an aggressive speed, hoping the flame and heat had destroyed any biology that was alive onboard. If any had survived on the smoke, it would likely be borne aloft and not toward any population centers.
Again, she thought of the plane crash. She flicked on her smartphone and looked at the news.
There it was, the only headline. A commercial jetliner had gone down, cause unknown, no cries of distress, no hint of danger—
Sweet Lord Jesus.
If there had been a cause and effect, Katinka felt no guilt. The Earth, its bounty and its dangers, its riches and its poisons, were not for humans to control or contain. With one exception, everything, even life, was on loan. The exception was the soul, and if she committed a sin against God she would repent. She did not hold human law to the same standard.
She saw, reflected in the glass dome of the cockpit, flaming pieces of the yacht throw off steam as they returned to the sea. She had survived that too, well beyond the tumbling, burning shards.
It is time, she decided.
With the shoulder bag on the passenger seat, Katinka kept her left hand on the controls, tucked the phone up her left sleeve for now, and put her right hand behind her head. She found the plastic latch on the elastic band.
She felt like she did, once, before stealing a banana from a food stand. That, too, had gone up a sleeve. There had been a moment of fear and hesitation followed by action.
You have to do this, she told herself.
Her fingers pressed the catch and the mask dropped on top of the bag. She inhaled deeply. She smelled the salt air. She did not want to think of death, a horrible death, and had resolved only that if she felt sick she would throw herself into the sea and drown.
