God of War

by Jeff Rovin

  He told her that his plan had come about because of events more than four thousand miles away. A year earlier, in 2007, the United States and Iraq had signed a status of forces agreement that required American troops to withdraw from Iraq in two years. In a rare show of internal accord, the South African administrative capital in Pretoria, the legislative capital in Cape Town, and the judicial capital in Bloemfontain were all concerned about warlords and renegades throughout the region suddenly having access to stockpiles of biological weapons.

  The Military Health Service was charged—not by the then minister of health but by the commander in chief of the South African National Defence Force—with establishing a group of scientists to seek cures to diseases suspected of being weaponized. Chief among these were anthrax and Ebola. Because of his training and fieldwork, Raeburn was placed in command.

  “Someone in Pretoria possessed a dark sense of humor or self-importance, possibly both, when they named the program,” Raeburn told Niekerk.

  It was called the Bio-Weapons and Necrotic Actinism Program. “BWANA” was East African for “master.”

  Barbara Niekerk was surprised by two things. First, that she knew nothing about the program. Second, that the military had managed to keep a secret.

  “But you’re not telling me all of this out of fellowship and school loyalty,” she had said over dinner.

  “No,” he had said. “I’ve stumbled upon something that requires a separate research group—and funding.”

  “Something you cannot share with the military, your superiors?” she had asked.

  “It’s a domestic matter and a potentially explosive one. It is specifically on the list of diseases the military was not asked to … ‘solve,’ was the word used in the written order. It was actually footnoted as, ‘This is a problem that falls squarely and solely under the jurisdiction of the Public Service and Administration Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria.”

  “AIDS?” Niekerk had asked.

  Raeburn had nodded. “We may have found a cure.”

  “Not a vaccine,” she clarified.

  “No. I think we have created something to extract the virus itself. We engineered it from Campylobacter jejuni, which is drawn to cold. We believe we can ‘train it,’ if you will, to grab the virus and depart a feverish body.”

  Niekerk was flabbergasted, momentarily mute, impressed, proud, hopeful, and scared for her classmate’s breach of the chain of command.

  “You could go to prison for life,” she had pointed out after recovering slightly.

  “At least I will still have a life,” he had replied. “And a soul. If I don’t do this, or at least try—”

  Niekerk said she understood. She did not have to consider the proposal. She told him that she would pull money from a discretionary fund. Two days later, answering only to Raeburn, BWANA had a pocket team working on the problem.

  Six months later—having had little communication—Raeburn and Niekerk had another dinner.

  “There is good news and bad news,” he had told his sponsor.

  The good news was that they had indeed come up with a bacterium capable of clearing the AIDS virus from patients in 100 percent of cases.

  “It was actually an easy find,” he had told her. “We snare the virus with a bacterium that is, in effect, vulnerable to white blood cells. It is also heat sensitive and seeks to get out via feverish perspiration and urine. When it leaves, it takes the AIDS virus with it. We call it the Exodus bug.”

  “That has a hopeful sound.”

  “It does, I suppose. It could also suggest the Lord who smiteth, a God of war. Unfortunately, it isn’t the reason we chose the name.”

  “The bad news.”

  “Early on, we had to deal with the white blood cells killing individual Exodus bugs before they could complete the journey. That set the AIDS virus free—the process was worthless. We had to aggregate them—essentially, get the bugs to reproduce swiftly and cluster around each virus. White blood cells come en masse but the bacteria learned—blunt survival, of course, not thought—they learned to form layers to finish the trip to the promised land.”

  Niekerk had eyed the doctor. “The bad news is the tenacity of the white blood cells,” she had said. “You rid the body of an immune-suppressing virus … but you take the body’s only defenses with it.”

  “That’s part of the bad news,” Raeburn had agreed. “The white blood cells cling to their prey all the way out. Virtually any infection can kill the patient. We’ve simply reinvented the AIDS problem.”

  “Well, you didn’t quite do that, did you?” Niekerk said. “In time, the white blood cells will repopulate and the patient will survive.”

  “Correct.”

  “I see. The rest of the bad news is the caveat. Each patient must live in a sterile environment for weeks … maybe months,” Niekerk had said. She had smirked. “A single human life is beyond evaluation yet the cost per person would be unthinkable.”

  “I’m sorry,” Raeburn had told her.

  Niekerk told him what he already knew: the solution was profoundly admirable but impossible. The government already spent 15 percent of its annual budget on health care. This program would have trebled that. Raeburn asked for an extension of the project with a scaled-down staff to try and find a way to hide the Exodus bug from white blood cells.

  But the money had run out. Permission was regrettably denied.

  “And Gray,” she had said, “you’re a man with a conscience. But if you seek to go out of country with this, they will hang you. In time, you may find a solution.”

  “You know the damn thing?” he had said. “The bug loses mobility in the air rather quickly and dies without a host. Sixty minutes at the most. It can’t harm the patient, then.”

  “Just everything else in the air,” she lamented.

  Enter then-Major General Tobias Krummeck.

  Raeburn was surprised but not shocked to learn that ever since BWANA had been established, the intelligence officer had a team following and eavesdropping on Raeburn. In a government of widely divided loyalties, no one with access to potential war and anti-war matériel could be entirely trusted.

  Krummeck had summoned Raeburn and funded a continuation of his research. When Raeburn had reasonably asked why, Krummeck had answered that if a cure were not found, not just this government but the entire system of government in South Africa might fall.

  “People can be bludgeoned into giving up smoking, even narcotics, but not sex,” he had said. “There is a faction in the South African Communist Party that wants to arrange ‘chance’ encounters with young, infected men and women with susceptible leaders to take them down. This must not be.”

  Raeburn was impressed with the levels of Krummeck’s penetration into the SACP inner circle, and said so.

  “Not how it happened,” he had said. “I was a target.”

  Work on the Exodus bug continued for a year. Raeburn was the only researcher on the project. The results were worse than before.

  “To strengthen each bacterium means they survive ejection from the body,” the exhausted doctor had said at the end of it. “Inhaled, it immediately draws white blood cells to it, causing congestion that instantly collapses arterial walls.”

  “A formidable weapon,” Krummeck had observed.

  Raeburn had been instantly electrified by that remark—and the pensive, unfrightened expression that came with it. He did not know, at that moment, sitting in Krummeck’s office, if that had been the real motivation for the continued research. Not a bug but a potential Exodus plague to unleash against the opposition.

  “Sir,” Raeburn had replied with unutterable caution, “this thing is murderous on a level we cannot even conceive. Instantly lethal and ungovernable. It can’t survive more than an hour in the air, but think of a city. A dense population would be devastated, urban centers would suffer hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties within hours.”

  “I understand, truly. You gave
it a try. You’re sure that further research won’t—”

  “Help? If by ‘help’ you mean finding a better way to kill millions in a matter of days, that’s what we are looking at, sir. We have to erase everything. I am going to destroy all the research.”

  “I see. How do you safely dispose of the bacterium itself? It seeks a cold environment, you’ve explained—fire, then? Immolate it?”

  “That will work, in theory, but if even one germ survives it can seek a host and replicate. At that size, we cannot be sure. No, better to put it in an environment where we know it will wish to stay. A freezer, perhaps.”

  “No,” Krummeck had said. “We do not want it where a rogue officer or agent can stumble upon it. We must treat this like radioactive waste. Dispose of it, inter it, but in cold.”

  Raeburn had then conceived of his plan for a secret subantarctic burial. The bacteria were encapsulated. The program was killed.

  But apparently not the bugs.

  * * *

  Raeburn stopped remembering. He had gotten good at that over the intervening years. And the team that had accompanied him on the mission to Prince Edward had not known what they were handling.

  If in fact the bug had been responsible for the felling of the commercial aircraft, Raeburn was sorry. But this was not the time to affix blame or to find explanation for the bacterium’s survival.

  “We have to quarantine and destroy at least the source,” Krummeck said, coming out of his silence with the obvious.

  “I suggest napalm,” Raeburn said.

  The general actually laughed. “That’s a solution, of course. And with civilian authorities on the way to Marion Island, they will of course not notice a firestorm on Prince Edward.”

  “General, this is the Exodus plague we once discussed! This is not a time to consider—”

  “Our careers? Prison? Try this thought, Doctor. Who but you can possibly fix the problem? Do you imagine that, once arrested, you will have access to a laboratory in a timely fashion?”

  The general was correct about that. And it did not solve all their problems. There were still samples at 35,000 feet. The cold and thinness of the air might enable them to survive longer than an hour.

  “All right,” Raeburn said. “I hear that.”

  “Good. What about the wreck? Is there any chance of the bacteria having survived?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Even in bodies?”

  “If the flame did not destroy them, the heat, reaching about fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, would have killed them.”

  “Then we have some time before outside medics autopsy whatever remains,” Krummeck said. “We need eyes on the site. You say there’s a navy helicopter on Prince Edward? Can the fuel be used to incinerate the bug?”

  “Yes, but if the block is only fractionally split it can also open the vent wider.”

  “Christ, Raeburn. Christ. We can’t have an amateur fumbling around out there. You’ll have to go.”

  Raeburn had been circling, unhappily, that same conclusion. “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are you?” Krummeck asked.

  “My office at Saldanha Bay.”

  “The training facility?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take—I don’t know. Take whatever equipment you can get together.”

  “I’ll need explosives if the pit has been exposed.”

  “Thermite grenades?”

  “That seems the most expedient way to close it, for now.”

  “Very well. I’ll have a helicopter there to meet them, designated as MAP-14. Special team—as last time. After that, you are not to contact me again unless it is with an all-clear alert. Is that understood?”

  “Is that an order, General?”

  “It is emphatically an order,” Krummeck replied. “I will clear it with Environmental Management. Good luck,” he added, and hung up.

  Raeburn was not surprised or especially disappointed by the general’s moderate, largely hands-off reaction. The South African Environmental Management people would not interfere because of the civilian crash. And it made sense for Raeburn to go to the island—even if Military Assistance Program-14 designated this as a civilian assist project, and to the wrong island.

  He went to a locker and removed six hazmat masks: two for the men on Marion, two for the flight crew, one for him, one spare. They were from the same shipment he had used when he initially developed the Exodus bug. The expiration date on the seals was just a month away. That meant the vulcanized rubber was within six or seven weeks of shrinking to unreliability.

  Given the size of the bacterium, that was not optimal. But that was the best they could get right now. Placing the masks in a pair of aluminum carrying cases, and getting his cold-weather gear from an adjoining locker, a tired Gray Raeburn filled two backpacks with medical supplies and grabbed his microscope case. Then, his arms awkwardly full, he headed through the corridors to the small helipad not far from the science facilities.

  He was about to leave when his phone chimed.

  “Shit,” he said, rejecting the call and hurrying out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  East London, South Africa

  November 11, 7:02 P.M.

  Nahoon Beach is a miles-long stretch of sand with spectacular waves that caught the fading light.

  Cold and weary from her shoulders to her soul, Katinka watched as the silhouette of the southern bluff cut a dark, familiar shape against the twilight sky.

  The beach was deserted at this hour, in this season. She swept in like a battle-worn Valkyrie, the vessel caught in a sudden wind that caused her to turn suddenly toward her left. A soft landing was out of the question. She needed to set down. She did so with a spine-jarring thump.

  Though exhausted, Katinka did not linger. The police would find and wonder about the autogyro, and would contact MEASE—but not before she reached him. Tourists and tourist helicopters frequented the area and no one would bother reporting one that had landed on the beach.

  The wind was strong but not as biting as it had been farther south. She lived a short walk past Beach Road, on quiet, modest suburban Plymouth Drive. She owned a small cottage in this flat landscape dotted with closely built homes and shielded from sun and wind by palm trees and sturdier oaks.

  She had grown up in a mud hut with a thatched roof not far from here, raised by a single father who still worked as an automobile mechanic. His endless hours of hard work—and a certain skill for dice, which frequently cost him protection money from the local police which just as frequently wiped out his winnings—put her through school and she longed to return that love and kindness. Though she cherished her comfortable retreat it was not where she wanted to spend the rest of her life. There were mansions in Cape Town, Western Cape. Foster had a place on Val Du Lac, Franschhoek. It wasn’t one of the bigger mansions but it was comfortable. That was where she yearned to be. Perhaps when he moved up, she would have earned enough to move in.

  You can always hope, she thought.

  Though there was a ceiling to her dreams. She sometimes fancied—usually while chopping or dissolving rock, away from any distractions—that Foster would one day realize what a bright, eager, intelligent woman she was and they could be more than boss and worker. But he had shown no interest in her or any woman, save for those models he occasionally dated. Katinka did not want to know about them. They were the enemy.

  The families all knew her but the location was about more than any of that. From here, she was able to walk to the less thunderous sections of Nahoon, near the estuary of the river, where the dinghy from the Teri Wheel would always meet her. She could also ride her motor scooter to the MEASE office, where she would be driven to whatever site she was to work on or else to the helipad.

  There was another reason for living here. Katinka knew her way in the dark. Given the work she did, that was essential. Foster was insistent on that and on other clandestine skills, such as saying as little as possible on phone ca
lls or in texts or e-mails.

  The house consisted of a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom with a shower. There was a shed out back on the small lot where she kept her scooter and garden supplies. She turned up the heater in the shed and let the water tank warm before stepping in. It held enough for five minutes of a modest stream. The woman did not want to waste a moment of warmth.

  After plugging in her near-dead cell phone, Katinka took off her clothes, checked for blood spatters. There were none. Her exit had been careful. Most of the crew had DNA on file as part of their criminal records. She was a MEASE employee. If investigators came to question her, there was nothing to connect her to the boat. That done, she stood in the fine spray and considered her plan. She had told Foster that core samples were recovered. That meant either lying about the total or telling him the truth: that she was keeping one.

  She would lie. If he ever found out, it would not go well. When it came to honesty it, like loyalty, had to be absolute.

  The sun was just beginning to emerge from the sea as Katinka snatched up her phone and stepped in the wood-fenced backyard. She was dressed in a warm wool coat and fur-lined boots. She had transferred the two samples to a backpack and carried the third.

  She went to the large shed out back. Katinka had it built with the expectation that one day she would own a motorboat and store it here. There had not, as yet, been time for that. She blamed it on what she called “the hustle.” It was a disease, and she knew it, but there was no avoiding it. Growing up, anyone who was poor and found a way out was also a victim: the fear that if you ever stopped hustling, you would slide back to poverty. And then it would be worse because there had been a path out. She kept promising herself she would get the boat “tomorrow.” Yet each tomorrow was the same as every yesterday.

  The hustle.

  There are worse habits than working, she told herself whenever she saw this big empty space. If nothing else, the shed was a reminder that there was a reason for working so hard.

  Katinka tugged the string of the bare overhead light. Her Sym Blaze 200 motor scooter had a platform on back with a case for holding rock samples. She put the two samples inside, still in the backpack to cushion them from being knocked about. She looked for a place to hide the other container.