He heard children crying, women sobbing. He saw a young girl in the distance take a few trundling steps as she emerged from under one of the flapping tents. Her tiny legs looked like burned twigs. Their skin and flesh had dwindled to a dry sheath, revealing the outline of bones and joints beneath. She sat on a sun-bleached patch of baked earth and rested, exhausted from the short burst of energy.
Kanfar was a wasteland. Whatever it had once been, it was a desolate, blasted husk of a town now. A trio of black birds hopped through the shimmering heat distortion in the distance. One of them spread its wings, and a buzzing cry pierced through the wind.
Vultures, waiting for their chance to feed.
Caine swallowed, then clenched his jaw. “What happened here?”
The wrinkled old woman gestured with the plate of food. Nena took the plate from her and stood next to him.
“You had to carry me the last couple of miles. We were both suffering from heat exhaustion, and your wound was infected. You had a high fever.”
“I don’t remember …” His voice faded to a hoarse whisper. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the devastation surrounding them.
“I’m not surprised. This woman's name is Napari. She took us in and found me some basic medical supplies. She says conditions were bad here before, even worse than Malakal. But, a few days ago, a rebel militia group attacked. Painted faces, white skulls. Ghost Jackals.”
“Takuba,” Caine muttered. “The Army of the Chosen.”
Nena pulled Caine back under the awning.
“Tom, they are sharing this food with us. It is all they have. Do you understand?”
Caine blinked and took the plate in his hands. He suddenly realized how hungry he was. He sat down next to Nena and began to shovel the paste into his mouth.
Nena gave him a relieved smile. “It is called asida. It’s made from wheat.”
Caine scooped more of the paste into his mouth. “Please, thank her for me.”
Nena spoke to the old woman, and she smiled. They continued to speak in low, hushed tones. Nena turned back to Caine.
“She says Takuba himself was here. They took your friend, Mr. Carter. They were looking for something, searching the ruins after the attack."
Caine nodded and continued eating. “The samples. And your test results.”
Nena coughed. “Do you think … they did all this? Because of ….” Her voice trailed off.
Footsteps approached the front of the shack. Caine looked up as a shadow crossed in front of the porch. A tall, muscular man stood before them. His left hand was severed at the wrist. Tattered, stained rags were wrapped around the stump as bandages.
“I know what they were looking for.” The man spoke English with a deep, powerful voice. His eyes traveled from Nena’s face to Caine’s. They squinted at him with a disdainful stare.
Caine stood up. “You knew what they wanted? Is it still here? Did you keep it hidden?”
The man glared at him, then looked away. “I did not know when they came. If I had … I would have gladly given it to them. Takuba and his jackals … they took my wife, my son. Girls from the village as well.”
Nena stood next to Caine. “You’re hurt. Did they …” She glanced at the man’s severed hand. He nodded, but said nothing.
“Who are you?” Caine asked. “This thing Takuba wanted, do you have it on you?”
The man shook his head. “No, but I can take you to it. My name is Nhial.”
Caine and Nena exchanged a worried glance. Caine set down his plate of food and looked up.
“Alright, Nhial … lead the way.”
Nhial led them on a meandering path through the decimated village. They circled around the rusted chassis of a bombed truck, then squeezed down a narrow, muddy alley between two abandoned tents. Finally, on the outskirts of the village, they came to another shack.
Like Nhial’s dwelling, this one had been left somewhat intact after the fighting. Nhial knocked on the door, an old, crooked slab of wood, fastened to the shack by two mismatched hinges.
“Talak … let us in.”
The door creaked open, dragging a path in the dirt and mud. An elderly East African man stood in the shadows, leaning against the door frame. His face was gaunt, and his beard and hair were gray as ash.
The man looked up at Caine and stared for a moment, then turned to Nena.
“Doctor Vasani, word has spread that you were back in Kanfar,” he said in English. “Please, come in.”
Nena smiled, ducked her head, and stepped into the tiny shack. Caine and Nhial followed.
The old man gestured to a small table and set down some clay cups. He spooned cold tea into the cups and served them to Nena and the others. “You have done much for the people of Kanfar, Doctor Vasani. I am ashamed that I have no food to offer you.”
Nena sipped the tea and smiled at him. “This is wonderful, thank you. Your name is Talak?”
The man nodded. “Yes. I was at Nhial’s home when the Army of the Chosen attacked. You friend, Mr. Carter, he told me you would be returning. He gave me something for you, told me to keep it safe.”
Nhial slammed his fist on the table. “You knew what those men were after the whole time?” he snapped. “While they took my wife and son, you scurried back here and hid the white man’s treasure from them! My family is gone because of you!”
Talak blinked. “I was a soldier once, Nhial. I am sorry for what happened to your family. But if what Mr. Galloway said was true, then many more lives are at stake."
“Who is Galloway?” Nena asked.
“Carter’s real name,” Caine answered. "He was undercover." He glanced at Talak. “He told you?”
The old man nodded. “He did. He also told me where he hid the case Takuba’s men were looking for. There is an old minefield, left from the second civil war, a few kilometers north of here. Galloway hid the case there. He made a map, a safe passageway through the unexploded mines. After the attack, I went back and retrieved it.”
He hefted a dusty canvas sack onto the table, then took a step away. Caine opened the sack and slid out a silver metal case, followed by a manila folder bulging with papers. He dropped the bundle onto the table and opened the case. Several vials of liquid lay nestled in protective foam.
“It’s the samples!” Nena gasped. She flipped open the folder and examined the charts and papers inside. “These are the results of the tests I ran!”
Caine set down the case and slid it towards Nena. “Nhial, Talak … do either of you know where Takuba is now?”
The men glared at each other, then Nhial shook his head. “I do not. I tried to follow their tracks after they left, but I lost them west of here. They could be anywhere by now.”
Caine clenched his fingers into a fist but said nothing. He stood up from the table and walked towards the door. Nena grasped his arm as he passed, but her wide eyes did not look up from her papers.
“Tom, it’s going to take me some time to analyze the data here, but this looks bacteriological, not viral.”
“Knock yourself out,” he grunted. He pulled away and walked out the door. Nena looked up and followed him with her eyes. She stood up, but Talak reached out and touched her arm.
“Let him go, Doctor.”
“But he—”
“There are some paths a man must walk alone," the old man said.
“I don’t believe that,” she replied in a soft voice.
Talak held up one of the vials. He turned it around in the dim light, watching the reflection on the curved surface of the glass.
“That is because you are a doctor, a healer,” he said. “You fix what is broken, you heal people and take away their pain.”
He looked up at the door where Caine had exited. Beams of light fell through the gaps in the crooked frame.
“But there are some wounds that only heal when they are ready. For some men, to take away their pain is to remove their soul. And your Mr. Caine … he has the look of such a man."
Caine sat on a dry patch of land and surveyed the desolation around him. Tiny plumes of smoke rose from the cooking fires of the tents and shacks. The blood-red sun hung low on the horizon. The vultures, black shadows that hung suspended in the air, were silhouetted against the crimson and orange clouds. One by one, they peeled off and began to circle overhead.
Caine heard footsteps crunching on the sand behind him. His eyes remained locked on the horizon.
Nena sat down next to him. She rested her chin in her hand and stared at him.
He dragged his eyes to her face. She had changed out of her filthy clothes and draped her body in a colorful cotton sarong. The dress flapped and billowed in the hot breeze.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he answered. “I was thinking about that saying you told me, on the raft.”
“Is that why you came here? To wipe away the past?”
Caine looked away. One of the vultures cried out and swooped to the ground. It landed a few feet from a collapsed tent and paced back and forth on the ground. The inhabitants of the tent huddled under the scrap of cloth. They were too tired to shoo away the hunched, squawking bird.
“When we first met, in Sudan, you said Takuba was your responsibility,” Nena said, her voice soft and low. “What did you mean by that?”
Caine looked down at the ground. “A long time ago, I came here on a job. It was a joint operation, Sudan and the United States. They called it ‘normalizing relations’. We shared common interests.”
“So I was right. You are a soldier.”
Caine shook his head. “No, not then. Soldiers fight wars. They look their enemy in the eye when they pull the trigger. The men I killed that night … I stabbed them in the back.”
“Were you here to kill Takuba?”
“No. I was sent here to protect him. Back then, Takuba was working with South Sudan’s Vice President, and the SPLM rebels. Technically, the United States supported South Sudan’s independence. But somewhere along the way, the U.S. oil companies got cold feet. Between the human rights protests, and security concerns, most of them pulled out of the area. And I guess the powers that be realized they had just handed control of seventy-five percent of the region’s oil over to the Chinese.”
Nena ran her fingers through her hair and looked away. “Oil. It always comes back to the oil, here.”
“The Sudanese government in the north had intel my people needed; movements of radicalized terrorists, financing sources, that kind of thing. And of course, they weren't too keen on negotiating lower prices with South Sudan for the use of their pipelines. The Vice President offered them a bigger cut, if they helped oust the sitting President."
“So your country and mine joined in support of the rebels?”
Caine picked up a twig and dragged it through the dirt.
“Nothing that official. It never is. But certain parties close to both governments set up some introductions for the rebel forces. Arms dealers, weapons manufacturers, mercenaries. The meetings were held in secret, in Khartoum. Takuba was sent as the SPLM rebel’s representative. But there was a leak.”
“A leak to who?” she asked.
“The CIA had intel that someone in the VP’s inner circle leaked the meeting’s location to the President’s forces. They were planning to follow Takuba into the city, kill him and his contact before he could close the deal. The Sudanese government didn’t want to get its hands any dirtier than they already had. My partner and I were sent to deal with the assassins. Our orders were to follow them into the city and neutralize them before they got to Takuba. It was a close call … one of their snipers had Takuba in his sights. I was there. I … I stayed on mission.”
“Neutralize? You mean kill?”
Caine stared at her. “I knew what kind of man Takuba was. I had seen him kill, loot, and worse. I hesitated. I had my orders, but I knew the world would be better without Takuba in it. I froze up. I almost let the sniper take his shot. But I wasn’t strong enough. My training kicked in. I followed my orders. I slit two throats. I watched two men bleed out. And then I watched Takuba walk out of his arms deal, smiling.”
Nena rested her hand on his shoulder. “Back in Malakal, I saw you hesitate as well. Those boys had guns, they could have killed you. But you did not give in to fear. You risked your life to spare them.
A bitter laugh hissed through Caine’s lips. “That night, we met up with Takuba’s forces and our Sudanese contact to debrief. Takuba’s men had already used the weapons to raid a village nearby. They were Dinka, the same tribe as South Sudan's President. Takuba killed all the men, and kidnapped the children. There was a girl … She was barely a teenager, maybe thirteen, fourteen years old. Takuba took her. I tried to stop him, I tried …”
“Tom,” Nena whispered. “You can't blame yourself. Men like Takuba …” her voice trailed off. She shuddered, despite the hot wind blowing across the plains. “They are monsters. I will never understand them. But they have always been with us. They are like a plague, or—”
“Or a curse,” Caine muttered. “Takuba killed the girl. Right in front of me. When I looked into her eyes … something in me snapped. I attacked him, I tried to kill him. My partner held me back, stopped Takuba’s men from gunning us all down.”
“Then he saved your life,” Nena said.
“As he pulled me away, Takuba told me that he was protected by evil spirits. And that he had put a curse on me.”
“Surely you do not believe in such things,” Nena chided him. Her dark hair fluttered around her face in the wind.
“No,” Caine admitted. “I don’t. But when I look back on everything, the years that followed, the things I’ve done …” He paused and looked at her. A shadow moved across his face as the vultures swooped overhead.
“The past hasn’t been so easy to wipe away. If I had stopped him, if I had let those men take their shot, maybe none of this would have ever happened. Maybe these people, those boys back in Malakal …"
They were silent for a few moments. Caine watched as another of the vultures landed on the ground. Its pink head and hooked beak pecked at the sand. It looked towards the inhabitants of the billowing tent and squawked with impatience.
Caine picked up a rock and tossed it at the bird. “Get the hell away from them,” he hissed.
The bird cocked its head and gave him an annoyed glance. It hopped up onto an overturned plastic bin and screeched in anger. The bin was a pale blue color, and Caine could make out some markings stenciled on the side, half-buried in the soft earth.
AHA … African Hunger Alliance.
He realized he had not had a chance to follow up on Rebecca’s lead.
Too busy sitting on your ass, throwing rocks at birds, he thought.
Time to get back to work.
He turned to Nena. “Did you find anything useful in the samples?”
She crossed her arms and gave him a concerned look. “Yes, but keep in mind, we only had time to run a few tests. Our clinic in Malakal was not designed for infectious disease research.”
“Is that what we’re dealing with here? A weaponized bacteria of some kind?”
She shook her head. “I’m honestly not sure. Mr. Car— I mean, Mr. Galloway, your friend, gave us two sets of samples. The vials in that case, and a small blood sample he said he got from an infected oil worker somewhere south of here.”
“You said the samples looked like some kind of bacteria?”
She nodded. “Yes, but the worker’s blood showed signs of viral infection. So at first, I thought the two samples might be unrelated.”
Caine narrowed his eyes. “And now?”
Nena’s brow furrowed. “Like I said, I can’t be sure. But I think we may be dealing with a bacteriophage here.”
“Something manmade?”
“In this case, yes. A bacteriophage is a virus that is capable of infecting and replicating within bacteria. In nature, they spread DN
A from one microbe to another, causing mutations in successive strains of bacteria. Things like spontaneous antibiotic immunity.”
“But you said these specimens don’t appear to be natural?”
“I’m not sure about the virus itself. But the bacteria samples they were inhabiting are definitely manmade. They had an unusually thick cell wall, and they appear to be hyper-thermophiles. They can survive in extremely high temperatures.”
“How hot are we talking here?” Caine asked.
“It varies. In the wild, thermophilic bacteria have been found near geo-thermal geysers, deep sea volcanic vents, even on the exterior of spacecraft. But the cell wall of this bacteria is unique. For my dissertation at Omdurman Medical School, I studied cells created by companies like Synthetic Genomics in California. They created an organism that was controlled by manmade DNA. It was designed to consume large amounts of hydrocarbons and then die off. It was cutting-edge technology, developed to clean oil spills and other chemical disasters.”
“Oil-eating bacteria … you said the infected blood sample was from an oil worker, right? Could these bacteria have come from an oil refinery?”
She nodded. “I think so. The cell walls are similar to the samples I viewed for my dissertation. These bacteria were definitely engineered to survive in crude oil. And their thermophilic properties mean they could even survive through the refining process. If that’s true, and the cell wall is eaten away during that process, it could release the virus inside. That could mean this bacteriophage is capable of infecting workers at the refineries.”
Caine stood up and dusted off his pants. He held out a hand to Nena.
“Come on,” he said. “This isn’t over yet.”
She took his hand and he pulled her up. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“You need to identify this virus, figure out if it really is a weapon of some kind.”
“There’s no way I can do that here. I need special equipment, a laboratory.”
Thomas Caine series Boxset Page 90
