The Wreck Emerged

by Joseph Webers

  “Maybe closing it up in a bag allowed the vapors to accumulate. Let’s leave it open, go look at something else, then come back and see if the smell is still there.”

  “Good idea, Harper. Let’s go see what was on the page that the maintenance manual was opened to.”

  Harper found the page number he had written down and turned there. “Preparation for JATO Attachment,” he read. “What’s a JATO?”

  “That stands for ‘Jet Assist Take Off’. Basically, it’s a rocket motor they attach to a plane to help get it off the ground, because either the runway is too short or the plane is too heavy. MiGs don’t need much of a runway, but if they had two of those tanks filled with fuel, they might need the extra help. Look, there’s a grease smudge on this page, so it probably wasn’t opened to here merely at random.”

  “Let’s see what else this book has to offer.” Harper started to flip through the pages.

  “No, start at the front and turn to each page. Page one should tell us who published this and when, then we’ll look for grease marks and handwritten notes on each page. First, though, dangle it by its spine, and we’ll see if it tries to open to any specific pages.”

  He lifted the manual and gently shook it to loosen its pages. The pages separated in quite a few places, and Harper tore strips from a page in his notebook to mark each one. Then they started their exam from page one, where they found it was downloaded from the Internet. The pages Harper marked did not tell them any more than that normal maintenance was conducted. When they got to page 184, however, there was a small piece of paper that had gotten stuck to the page. On it were written in a single column, “Zeljava, Mostar, Dudhkundi, Bagdad, Hangzhou.”

  “Here’s an assignment for you, Harper. When we get back to the hotel, find out what these mean, and if possible, what they all have in common. Let’s go back now and check on that last drawer.”

  That last drawer had no remaining odor. It was full of manila file folders, with dividers between sets of folders. The first set had folders labeled Medtronic, Thermo Fisher Scientific, HCA Healthcare, Fresenius, Becton Dickenson, Stryker, Essilor Luxottica, Boston Scientific, Baxter International, and Labcorp. The second set were McKesson Corp, United Health Group, CVS Health, Ameri Source Bergen, Cardinal Health, Express Scripts Holdings, Anthem, and Kaiser Permanente. The third set were Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche, Pfizer, Sanofi, Merck & Co, Mankind Pharma Limited, and GlaxoSmithKline.

  The folders were filled with prospectuses, earnings statements, major office locations, and major clients. Most of the information appeared to have been downloaded from the Internet, and many of the pages had penciled annotations. The last set of folders was labeled US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and Japan, but all the folders were empty.

  “Wow! Harper, do you recognize these names?”

  “Not all of them, but it looks like the Who’s Who of the healthcare world. There’s something odd, though, that I can’t put my finger on.”

  “My exact thought. We need to think about this carefully.”

  Harvey came in just then, carrying a sheaf of papers. “You know what’s crazy? All fifteen at the compound and the two hackers are Americans, and all but the two hackers are ex-military. Why’d they have to come here? It seems it would have been a lot easier to do what they were doing at some airport overseas. It turns out there were only two hackers. The third person at this end was a translator. We, uh, they checked the customs stamps and all seventeen came to Brazil within two days of each other at the end of May.”

  JC and Harper quickly brought Harvey up to date on what they found.

  Harvey had a theory. “Perhaps whoever these folks are working for will use the nerve agent somehow to either extort the healthcare systems or to bankrupt them. I don’t get the MiGs, though. Who’d they get them from, and the ammunition? Why’d they use an American gun system when there’s already a gun system on the MiGs?”

  “I can answer that one,” JC said, “When the MiG fires a 6-30, the vibration and recoil might tear the aircraft apart. So a different gun system would be preferable. The Russians are famous for making their aircraft and weapon systems compatible with foreign weapons and ammunition while keeping us from being able to use their stuff. In other words, I think, but I’m not positive, they can put a GAU-8 in a MiG but we can’t put a 6-30 in an Air Force A-10 without severe modifications. That mix of lot numbers the Marines gave us might lead to whoever sold them the ammunition. My question is, why do all the healthcare brochures smell like curry?”

  “And why are those brochures even here?” Harper added. “It doesn’t fit with the other three drawers. One drawer had first aid supplies and lots of bug spray, with a couple pair of used heavy-duty gloves on top. One drawer had records of all the barge movements, supply requests and receipts, and maintenance records of Bhatt’s forestry equipment. The last drawer had a money box with a couple hundred reais in small bills and coins, about fifty dollars worth.

  “I’m just thinking, I wonder if the gloves were in the fourth drawer all along, and were thrown into the other drawer to make room for the healthcare brochures. Maybe recently, since the curry smell hasn’t had time to completely disappear. Perhaps the records came from a place where curry is common and would not be noticed. Bhatt is from India, right?”

  The more they talked, the more they began to realize this place might be a decoy or a false trail. Harvey informed them the other MiG wing was not in any of the buildings or barges they searched. “Perhaps this place was set up to be expendable from the very beginning,” he said, “a place to sacrifice if necessary, when it had served its purpose.

  “There were no heavy hitters among the Rio Jari folks. We checked their passports against their military records and they were all mechanics, electricians, military police, and a few other military occupational specialties, and only a few had been out of the USA before this. In short, this is not an important place. Perhaps the hackers were put here because the leaders would know they would eventually be traced to here and not where the important things were happening.”

  “Harper could be right,” JC said. “Whoever is behind this could be trying to lead us on a wild goose chase, perhaps to point us in the wrong direction. Did you check Bhatt’s passport, to see where he was last and for how long? Oh, and has Bob heard from Rudy recently?”

  Harvey checked his sheaf of papers. “He got stamped into India last Friday evening, and arrived at São Luis Monday. With the time difference and a full day of travel, he was there only two days. Doesn’t look like a visit home. I don’t know about Rudy.”

  “Would it be possible to check his flight coming back here, to see what kind of baggage he might have had?”

  “Good idea. I’ll have ABIN look into that.”

  “In the meantime, we should take the healthcare threat at face value until proven otherwise. Harper and I will spend some time going through the files anyway. You never know what might turn up.”

  Harvey left with his driver after coordinating a pickup time with JC and Harper.

  121

  After the departure of the trawler from Emergent, it took four hours to load and board the Stallion, King One. This had included eating chow, collecting pocketfuls of manganese nodules as souvenirs, and completing driving tests for Marines who had not yet demonstrated their proficiency in operating their new vehicles.

  LtCol Washington had allowed the loading operation to proceed at a much more leisurely pace than when they left Camp Lejeune, not only because of the strenuous work the Marines had done over the past five days, but to allow the in-flight-refuel aircraft time to meet them at their rendezvous point.

  It was now 5 p.m. on Emergent, and it would be over two months before another human being set foot on the island.

  122

  At just after 3 p.m., Tom Faraday, in the clean room at the CIA lab, called Jeff Peterson, who had set up a temporary office on the first floor of the building. “Jeff, I have some good new
s and some bad news.”

  “Okay?”

  “The good news is we discovered the bad news, which I’ll tell you about in person.”

  It must be serious, Jeff thought, for him to drop his sesquipedalian affectations.

  On his way down the stairs, he texted Bob McGee, “There’s bad news. I’ll call you.”

  “We had an unanticipated deflagration cessation in the incinerator,” Tom said. “The reason eludes us. The overarching emergency control mechanism terminated the process immediately, but the incinerator filled with effluvia from the fire. We did a manual scrubbing starting at the outflow, at the precipitator, checking for the agent prior to each decontamination step. That’s the protocol. Everything was clean until we got to the first filter.”

  The fire went out, and smoke happened, Jeff told himself.

  “If you recall,” Tom continued, “the agent decomposes quickly in air. We supply extra oxygen to the incinerator, so it should all have disappeared even more expeditiously. But when we examined the residue at the first filter, it was still there. A half hour later, the agent had lost none of the efficacy it had exhibited at the filter. We isolated it from its environment and have been ascertaining its propensity for neurologic interdiction ever since.”

  Jeff looked at his watch. It was half past three. “What time was the flame-out?”

  “About 9:30 this morning. To make a long story short, the agent attached itself to the ash in the smoke and the oxygen no longer could disintegrate it. Nor could moisture in the air. The agent would release from its host when in water but would need unbound oxygen to destroy it.”

  Tom always became even more incomprehensible when excited, Jeff knew, so he tried to calm him down. “Whoa! What host are you talking about? Please tell me all this in plain English.”

  “Sorry! This is a nerve agent, which acts by preventing muscles from relaxing once they tighten.” Tom started at the beginning, to force himself to put everything in layman’s terms. “You breathe it in, it releases in your lungs, and your heart pumps it from your lungs back to your heart, then to other parts of your body, where it attacks the nerves.

  “When the nerve agent is by itself, it quickly disintegrates in the presence of oxygen. However, we found that the nerve agent readily attached to the smoke particles, which protected it from being destroyed by the oxygen. Once it got wet, like when it’s in the lungs, it would release from the ash. We wondered what other micro-particles would make it behave this way, so we explored different substances and they all worked the same. We tried wood smoke, smoke from burning oil, aerosols like spray paint, and dust like you’d find in a dust storm. In every case, we would have to burn it to destroy it.”

  “How long do you think it could last?”

  “I don’t know, Jeff. Several months or more if it were kept dry.”

  “That would be disastrous if the agent were released in a dusty or polluted area.”

  “Yes, then it might get into the upper atmosphere and affect the whole world. Not just humans, either. Any animals that have muscles.”

  Jeff shuddered at the thought of these chemicals in the hands of terrorists. “Do you have more to do here or are you satisfied?”

  “Nothing else to do except clean up.”

  “Help me write this up. Then you can go. I’m not going to send it to everyone yet, but at least Bob needs to know.”

  At 5:30 p.m., Bob McGee got the report and shuddered too, as he had done earlier when Jeff called him. As did Jon Whitaker, FBI WMD Directorate, Captain Palova, US Navy, and later, Phil Henry, FBI National Security Branch.

  123

  After an hour and a half of looking through brochures and other literature, JC could tell Harper was beginning to get a little restless. “Welcome to real detective work!”

  “Yeah, I know. The notations I’m seeing aren’t making much sense. Mostly just numbers in random places. I’m looking for a pattern but I’m not seeing any.”

  Five minutes later, about three quarters of the way through the third set of file folders, JC found the remains of a pad of paper. “Get me a pencil, Harper. There was something written on the sheet above this that was torn off.”

  Harper came back with a big fat carpenter’s pencil. “The widest one I could find.”

  “I’ll let you do the honors,” JC told him, “Really lightly, just barely touching the paper. But you probably knew that already.”

  “Yes, I saw it in the movies!”

  Slowly, words appeared on the paper, all the way down to the bottom. When he finished, Harper read them off to JC, who wrote them down. “Gwalior, Allahabad, Raipur, Ludhiana, Kanpur, Khanna, Xingtai, Baoding, Hengshui, Tangshan, Tetovo, Skopje, Naples, Tirana, Turin, Bakersfield, Long Beach, Visalia, Hanford, Madera.”

  “I wonder if it means anything, and if so, what? While you’re working on your short list, Harper, I’ll take a look at this one.”

  “Sure. Just out of curiosity, what folder was that in?”

  JC had the folder open in front of him. “Mankind Pharma Limited. An Indian company. What’s interesting is these downloads are dated in May 2019, about a month ago, whereas all the others are at least a year old.”

  “I noticed the ones I’ve checked are all a year old, also.”

  They went back to their searching, not finding anything of any intelligence interest, in spite of their piles of notes. Presently, Harvey came back and they all went to dinner at the hotel. Over dinner, they showed Harvey the lists, but he could offer no immediate help. “I’m clueless,” he said, “but we have folks back home who might be able to help.”

  124

  Several hours before the fireworks were to start, Matt answered his doorbell to find six women of various ages crowding around his porch. Gert holding Madeline’s hand, Lisa strolling Danielle, and Maggie strolling Jenny. His eyes lit up with delight as he ushered them in.

  Maggie couldn’t wait. “I give you an A-plus already, only because they don’t have a grade higher than that!”

  “Wow, you two must have really hit it off! Tell me, why do I get such a good score so soon?”

  “She’s like my twin. You knew that already, didn’t you?”

  “I was delighted when I heard she would be here. There’s a lot you can learn from her you could never get from me.”

  “Yes, that’s happening already. Especially with Jenny.”

  “How’s our Jenny liking the Midwest?”

  “Fine, but I need to change her. Do you have any old rags, a zipper bag, and a pair of scissors? Oh, wait, I think I brought a nappy.”

  “Gert,” Matt said, “could you show Maggie the bathroom, and help her? I want to talk to Lisa a minute.”

  When they had gone, he said, “Lisa, Maggie’s facing a crucial test when she gets home, her mom. She has no idea how to relate well with her. Before last Friday, they were always at odds. You don’t have to teach her, just be a good example. She is very observant and catches on quick. Don’t let her know I told you, so in case she wants to know what we talked about, she likes petunias, crosswords, and Moon Pies.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  “How is Bill these days?”

  They were talking about her husband Bill, when Maggie and Gert came back. After Matt gave them a quick tour of the house and his garden, they walked back to the house. He chatted with Gert. Maggie and Lisa lagged behind, carrying their infants.

  “Are you disappointed,” Lisa asked Maggie, “that Matt doesn’t have any petunias in his garden?”

  “To tell the truth, I’m glad he doesn’t have any.”

  “Oh?”

  “No petunias makes his petunia dream more believable. If he had petunias in the garden, he might have thought he was simply dreaming about his garden. I don’t need any more proof his dreams were from God, but somebody else might.”

  They had a bite to eat. As they were walking to the park to see the fireworks, Matt said to Maggie, “Bob McGee called me this morning. I wondered why he was w
orking on the holiday, but I sensed a greater urgency in his voice than we heard on Tuesday. Something’s up, something soon. He didn’t say what, but he did tell me they got the river water test results back, and guess what they found?”

  “I don’t have to guess. They found pure drinking water.”

  “Yep. He said we could bottle it and sell it.” He kicked a soccer ball back to a group of boys who had accidently sent it bouncing off Jenny’s stroller. “I also got an email from Mr. Clark at the State Department. He attached a copy of the draft he sent our lawyer. I’d like you to read it. Do you want me to forward it to you or print you a copy?”

  “Oh, Matt,” she replied, “I’m a school teacher. What do I know about such things? Just do what you think is best. You’re a businessman. I trust you.”

  “Maggie, you’re not doing this for just you! Think of it this way. You’re doing it for all of England. You keep telling me you’re not interested in The Boy. You’d like me to just have the whole thing. If you had your way, you’d let me have your share.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Then The Boy would become a completely American territory. But you and Jenny are my only living descendants. You and whatever family you have will inherit the whole island one day. I want you to have a say in how this all works out.”

  Maggie sighed; her new life was becoming complicated. “Okay. Print me out a copy.”

  “You can pick it up when you come tomorrow. I’ll send it to you too.” He noticed her droopy eyelids. “You seem tired. I bet you stayed up all night telling Gert and Lisa our story.”

  She perked up and smiled. “Yes, it was great. We didn’t get to bed until two. Then up for a five o’clock feeding.”

  “One other thing. Larry Williams is coming Saturday afternoon. I want you to meet him.”