White Plague

by James Abel

  “Major Rush, we found a ladder in the reeds!”

  The Marines formed a cordon to protect Joe as he went up first, M4 ready. At the top he heard movement, but it was just a fat rat waddling down the slanting deck—owner, captain, crew.

  They all reached the deck without incident.

  Eddie let out an amazed breath, minutes later, when they opened the door of the former mess room.

  “Fuck me, One. That clerk told the truth.”

  A lab.

  The Marines roused two guards, teenage boys with AK-47s, asleep in a cabin where they’d been screwing. The stubs of two fat marijuana stogies lay on the deck beside them. The ship reeked of mold, hemp, sex, and piss.

  “Where are the other men?” the Marine translator—a Yemeni immigrant from Orange County, California—demanded.

  No answer.

  The translator aimed a .45 at the head of one of the teenagers. Joe lowered it when the bluff didn’t work.

  The Marines reported the rest of the ship empty, then took up defensive positions on deck, in case whoever worked there came back.

  “Major, they must have seen the copter,” the lieutenant in charge of the squad said. “I suggest we hurry.”

  “Where’d they go?” said Eddie.

  “Maybe they got invited across the lake for a Big Mac at the local Iranian Ministry of Intelligence Office. Maybe there’s a clue in our little lab.”

  “Someone’s done a pretty good job in the build-it-at-home league,” Eddie said admiringly, and uneasily, some minutes later.

  Joe eyed the “lab” by flashlight, danger ticking in his throat. The portholes had been welded over, so no outside light came in, no air could flow in or out. The fume hood and small vats were state of the art. Four large electric fans filled a jury-rigged anteroom, a sort of airlock welded between the cabin, and outer door to the passageway. The fans faced inward, to keep air from escaping. It was a primitive version of up-to-date biolabs. Air was never supposed to be able to escape those labs, in case something deadly got loose. Fort Detrick level fours had vacuum antechambers, air-sucking fans, and triple-sealed hinges. But the jury-rigged lab here used household fans from some desert bazaar. Add in rubber tubes, vacuum bottles, water hoses, bleach and water decontaminant, steel milk cans and pumps, and you got Dr. Frankenstein’s lab-in-a-ship.

  “Don’t try this at home, kids,” said Eddie. “Or you could wipe out your family.”

  “Whoever worked here had guts,” Joe said.

  “Maybe they don’t care. All those virgins waiting for them in heaven. I never understood what’s so great about virgins anyway. They thrash around and knee you in the groin,” Eddie said.

  “All women knee you in the groin.”

  There came, over the decrepit smells, whiffs of old alcohol and Lysol. Hanging in rusted steel lockers were chem suits, goggles, face masks, and on shelves, cardboard boxes filled with rubber gloves. There were three vintage Maytag refrigerators, but with no electricity on at the moment; whatever was inside would be moldy at best.

  “Open it.”

  Eddie, biomask on, reached for the tarnished handle. Inside were racks of empty test tubes, empty vacuum jars. Both other fridges were empty.

  Joe frowned. “That clerk said they had oil drums, made ’em into bombs.”

  There was a long wooden worktable, upon which a thick green ledger sat, except, when Joe opened it, it did not show rows of figures, but diagrams of oil drum bombs.

  “Where are those oil drums now? What’s in ’em?”

  “Maybe those prisoners will tell us, although they don’t exactly look like scientists. More like the dropouts hanging near the Taco Bell by my house, sniffing glue.”

  But then came—after months of frustration—one of those dumb luck moments that happen. Admiral Yamamoto’s plane gets shot down after Americans break the Japanese war code. A Union soldier in the Civil War finds a discarded cigar box containing General Lee’s secret orders, and the North wins the battle of Antietam. Two U.S. majors in Afghanistan find a ledger in an old desk. Flipping pages, they see lists of chemicals in English.

  Methylphosphonyl difluoride.

  Isopropyl alcohol.

  Isopropylamine.

  Eddie looked at Joe. “Oh no.”

  To bioexperts, those three chemicals were a signature.

  Joe saw, in his head, aerial photos of the Kurdish city of Halabja, with bodies, about five thousand of them, dead in streets, squares, alleys, stadiums. Bloody Friday, the locals still called it. Nineteen eighty-eight, 150 miles north of Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein’s gas shells rained down on the civilian population. Ten thousand injured. And thousands more to die in the coming days from vomiting and diarrhea, shortness of breath, convulsions, paralysis, from a gas that had been developed originally as a German pesticide.

  “Sarin,” said Joe.

  It was three hundred times more toxic than cyanide. In even a mild form, released by terrorists in the Tokyo subway, it killed fourteen commuters in 1995. It was possibly the deadliest chemical weapon in existence, and Joe, staring at the ledger, belly hollow, said, “What else is in that book?”

  The next page was about expenses, not sarin. Rice cost. Cheese cost, the Yemeni-born Marine translator said.

  “One book for everything. Keep turning.”

  “Whoa, call the porno squad,” said Eddie. “But tear out that top shot. Interesting position! Next!”

  Next page showed a diagram of a big circle with jagged lines around it, maybe mountains, and arrows pointing from left to right, and little x’s in the circle, and little y’s inside the jagged lines. Men? Tents? Trucks? Planes?

  “Who the hell is that?” Joe said at the next page.

  This time they were eyeing four photos of a swarthy, handsome, dark-haired and uniformed U.S. Army corporal, and Arabic writing underneath. In two shots, the corporal stood before a small, neat, clapboard home, with Mideastern-looking parents, and a younger boy who looked like him, brother probably. The proud soldier back home.

  In the next shot he was in Afghanistan, judging from the dun-colored desert and the rows of trucks in the rear.

  Joe asked the translator, “What does the writing say?”

  “It’s his name. Rana Amir Khan.”

  “Why is he in this book?” said Eddie.

  “I’m calling the director,” said Joe.

  Joe went out on deck, and powered up the sat phone. Sometimes the gizmos worked like magic. Sometimes, in seconds, your voice bounced off a sat and came down in Washington, and when you talked to the director’s secretary, her precancerous smoker’s voice came through as well as if she stood a foot away, shouting into a megaphone.

  “The director is in a meeting, Major.”

  “Get him out, now.”

  Rana Amir Khan turned out to be, records said, the oldest son of Pakistani immigrants living in Mankato, Minnesota, Joe knew by the time he was back in Kandahar. Rana had graduated with straight B’s from high school, then joined the Army Reserve, and was almost immediately sent overseas. When his tour was up, he was sent there again.

  Under “religion” in his application, he’d checked “Moslem.”

  “Plenty of fine U.S. soldiers are Moslems,” Eddie said.

  “Their pictures are not in the ledger,” Joe replied.

  They left the ship/lab in flames and brought back the prisoners. By the time they reached Kandahar, the director was back on the line, having read the riot act to his contacts at the National Security Agency. Emergency search warrants had been acquired. Army investigators headed toward Corporal Rana’s parents’ home, and were trying to locate Rana through the computer systems. It should have been simple.

  “There seems to be a snag,” the director said.

  That night the prisoners confirmed that whatever had been manufactured on the ship
had been trucked off. Neither man knew the destination. They’d not talked originally to the Yemeni translator, they said, not because they were uncooperative, but because they couldn’t understand his accent and they were terrified of being shot.

  “We loaded oil drums,” they told interrogators. “Then the Pakistani doctor went home. We were told to keep people away until someone came for us. That was two weeks ago.”

  At midnight the director forwarded to Joe a disturbing series of e-mails from Corporal Rana Amir Khan to a sister, the early ones, from the beginning of his deployment, happy and chatty, although complaining about being sent overseas, instead of attending college, the reason he’d joined the Reserves. Then, over time, the cheery quality degenerated. It started when other men in his platoon nicknamed Rana “Raghead.”

  “I laugh with them, but it infuriates me,” the corporal wrote. “I’m as good an American as they are. I do not think they are really joking.”

  Months later, with the teasing worse, Rana Khan learned that his best friend was being discharged twenty-four hours before he would have been eligible for college tuition aid.

  “The Army did this on purpose,” Rana wrote. “They don’t mind getting us killed. But they mind paying our tuition if we don’t get killed. I think those bean counters prefer us to die, to save a few bucks.”

  He grew more bitter. Days turned to months. Rana felt trapped. He stopped referring to other soldiers as friends. He turned to religion for solace, quoting the Koran, but stopped going to the Army imam, as his hatred grew overt. By 2012, when the news broke that several Marines had burned Korans, and that a staff sergeant named Robert Bale had massacred seventeen innocent civilians, half of them children, in a small village near Rana’s base, the e-mails were unrecognizable as belonging to the same man who’d typed messages two years before.

  “Afghanistan is hell and we are the demons,” his last e-mail said two months ago. “I won’t be writing for a while. I’m on a special mission. Don’t worry. Much love.”

  Joe asked the director if Rana was on a special mission.

  “Not for us,” the director said. “Find him, fast.”

  “SNAFU, motto of the U.S. Army,” Eddie snapped twenty-seven hours later. “Situation normal, all fucked up.”

  It had taken that long to pin down Rana’s location, thanks to errors up and down the line, started when some half-illiterate or bored clerk had punched in a two-digit mistake in Rana’s computer file, “6” instead of “4” on the social security number, “l” instead of “r” on the name.

  “We have no Corporal Lana Khan stationed in all of Afghanistan,” a captain in personnel assured Joe.

  The mistakes followed their search like an electronic leprechaun. There was no soldier named “Rane” stationed at the air base at Nimruz, they were told.

  “Not Rane. Rana.”

  “Ah! Well, there’s a Sergeant ‘Hanna’ Khan at a supply depot near Kabul. And a Lieutenant Mohammed Rana from Orange County just shipped back to the States after a tour in Iraq.”

  “He’s a corporal, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Ohhhh! Yes! Why didn’t you say so! A Corporal Rana Khan is stationed seventeen miles from a base near an old lake in—”

  “My God, he was sitting half an hour from where we started out,” Eddie said, eyeing a clock on the wall, as if it were the timing device on a bomb.

  They flew back to Kunar Province, to the base, shared by Army and Marines, where the Army colonel in charge told them that yes, Rana was assigned there, but no, he was not actually on base at that moment. “He’s on his way back with a joint Army/Marine humanitarian mission to a refugee camp near the lake.”

  Joe and Eddie standing in an air-conditioned prefab Quonset hut, asking what humanitarian mission is that?

  “Hearts and minds, gentlemen. Win their hearts and minds and the province follows, that’s what I say.”

  “What mission, Colonel?”

  “Well, we had some extra turkey after Thanksgiving, and cranberry sauce, and we figured, donate it, with the usual fuel. Corporal Khan is a driver bringing in the food, hauling back the used oil drums.”

  Joe leaned forward, his heart quickening at the words “oil drums.” In his mind, he heard the prisoner back in Kandahar saying, “We loaded oil drums on trucks.”

  The colonel was a small, hard-looking man, crew cut, with pale blue eyes and sunken cheeks. His accent was Boston. His family, pictured on his desk, seemed to be sitting in stands at a high school football game. His pride in the humanitarian mission was evident. He explained, “They use generators at their hospital. If we don’t send fuel, they run out mid-month. The Army gives us more diesel than we can use.” He was interrupted by his phone.

  “Ah! The convoy is a few miles off, coming back now.”

  They ran for the base entrance and reached it in time to see the dust thrown up by the approaching convoy . . . Humvees in front and back, as armed escorts; nine tarp-topped cargo trucks in between.

  “Tell them to stop where they are, pull over,” Joe told the guard. He still hoped that the drums would be empty, and Rana would be just one more pissed-off but professional soldier. But he didn’t think that would be the case.

  The lead Humvee was a mile off. Three minutes away at the crawly twenty miles an hour they moved.

  “I said stop them!”

  “Sir, there have been ambushes . . . It’s a bad idea to stop in the open. Sir, I need to check with the captain.”

  “There isn’t time!”

  There was a delay in reaching the captain.

  Plus, Joe, a visiting Marine major, had no authority to order an Army guard what to do.

  The “front gate” was actually just an opening in the Hesco barriers and concentric rolls of concertina wire surrounding the base; the sandbag guard post housed two, and there was a .50-caliber M2 machine gun there. Entering vehicles had to thread a zigzag maze of concrete-filled oil drum bomb barriers. After passing through a second checkpoint, and searched, they could proceed into the thousand-acre base, which housed two thousand troops, tents, prefabs, warehouses, and gym.

  A stiff wind blew at the base from the direction in which the convoy was approaching.

  The guard told Joe, still holding for the captain, “You’d think the wind would let up, but it don’t.”

  Joe, looking around, fixed on the M2. It was to be used against truck or car bombers, if one was coming, and you knew it, which was, he knew, rarely the case.

  Joe walked into the post, to get close to the M2 on its tripod. Neither guard tried to stop him.

  The trucks were now a half mile from the base.

  The guard reached the captain finally and, after receiving orders, was on his radio telling the trucks to pull over. Almost instantly, all Humvees and all the trucks except one did exactly that.

  The truck that had not pulled over passed by the pulled-over vehicles, and kept heading for the front gate.

  In his binoculars, Joe had a view of the driver for an instant, through the windshield. It was Rana Khan. There was a passenger, but the passenger was slumped in his seat. The other passengers would be in back, with the oil drums.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  The gate guards seemed confused.

  A voice on the unit radio, Khan, said, over static, “I’ve got a wounded man here.”

  “Fire,” Joe repeated. At least neither guard was trying to stop him.

  The voice said, “Code one! Code one! He needs medical attention.”

  “Sir, there are Marines on that truck, too,” a guard explained, as if this would make Joe countermand the order.

  Joe grabbed the man’s radio. “Pull over or we will fire!”

  Suddenly Khan began chanting, “There is no God except Allah the generous and patient. There is no God except Allah the Almighty and all-wise . . .”

/>   The truck, a hundred yards away, accelerated.

  “Oh, Allah, pardon my sins . . .”

  Joe shouted for the guards to run. The wind was coming sideways. He knew that even a drop of sarin on the skin could start the reaction.

  He held the twin grips on the M2 and fired, heard the heavy BANGBANGBANG of the weapon and felt the recoil in his shoulders and arms. The guards were scattering. The oncoming windshield shattered but the truck was armored. Joe swung the muzzle and tracked the truck and kept firing.

  Khan sang, “Allah be merciful and . . .”

  The truck exploded.

  One second it was hurtling toward them, the next a thousand hot pieces of steel blew out and up and scattered in a mushroom pattern over the desert floor. There came a rain of machine parts on the spot where the guards had stood. The truck had been two hundred feet from the gate. There must have been explosives in there. The wind was like artillery. Someone screamed at the men running toward the wreckage, to help, but Joe screamed at them to get away.

  He’d been so preoccupied with the shooting that he’d not seen the goatherd, fifty yards from the explosion—side of the road, man and flock, and the man was suddenly engulfed by a cloud, his hand going to his throat, a man on his knees, animals falling sideways, a man convulsing like an epileptic, while the skinny goat legs waved and went still. The truth sinking in to the Army guys.

  “Holy shit, sir. What . . . what’s the cloud . . . what’s . . .”

  And Joe, on his knees, knowing he’d just killed eight innocent Marines, not just Rana Khan, answered, “Sarin.”

  That part was hushed up. The guards were sworn to secrecy, threatened with prison if they talked. No one wanted the other troops or the American public to know how close the attack had come to success, or that a U.S. soldier had facilitated it. No one, the director explained, wanted Congress to restart the debate about pulling out. The Pakistani professor who made the sarin had been “dealt with.” Corporal Khan’s parents got a letter saying their son died “in an accident.” So let’s put it to rest.