The major returned, apparently unmoved by whatever he’d gone to look at in the concrete barrack room. I put the unlit cigarette into the side pocket of my cargo trousers.
“If you have a mask, Doctor, wear it. It’s hot inside.” He turned to Roberts. “You stay here.” Roberts nodded, thickening the moist tropical heat with a cloud of tobacco smoke.
I squatted down, unzipped the day bag and took out a simple face mask from the medical kit. I offered it to the major. He refused, holding up his handkerchief. So I put it on myself and then pulled on a pair of latex gloves. I shouldered the bag and reclipped the stethoscope around my neck. “You will not be needing that, Doctor,” the major said, and walked toward the building. I followed behind him and stepped into the pitch black of the unlit room.
The stench of decomposing flesh was overwhelming. The air was hot, and thick with flies. Blinded for a moment by swirls of color and shifting shapes that erupted in the darkness, I stopped still and waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom after the bright sunshine outside. Slowly, three bodies emerged from the darkness. They were only barely recognizable as human. One lay at my feet, just inside the door. The chest cavity had been ripped open completely, butterflied out to the sides. Lungs, a heart and yards of intestine littered the floor. Both arms were missing—one of which I could see was lying against the back wall. The neck and the lower jaw were intact, but the crown of the skull and the upper jaw were missing entirely. I looked at the major.
“We haven’t found it, the skull.” He didn’t offer anything else. I stepped over the cadaver, took a small LED torch out of my pocket and squatted down next to it. I realized I had trodden in a pool of congealed blood. Both thighs had been opened at the groin, the femoral arteries rent open. The genitals were missing. I went up and down the body with the torch carefully. The flesh was badly damaged, and decay had already set in, so it was hard to be sure, but there were no apparent signs of gunshot wounds or tearing from blast fragmentation. The muscle had been cut with a blade of some sort—with a bayonet, perhaps, or a machete. The wounds were too messy to say for certain. What was left of the man’s uniform clung to his corpse in dark, matted shreds.
I swept the torch beam across the floor to the severed arm against the wall. A single eyeball gleamed white on the black-red killing floor as the light from the LED rolled over it. I thought about Sonny Boy, and the grievous injuries I’d inflicted on him. The injuries along the arm were unmistakable: bite marks. Human bite marks deep into the flesh of the biceps. The thumb had been severed, connected to the wrist by a single tendon. The deltoid and the upper arm were ragged around the humerus, which was intact and looked as if it had been ripped out of the shoulder socket.
I stood up. The major was playing his own torch over the other two bodies. One was sat up against the same wall the arm rested against; it had been cleanly decapitated. The uniform and the rest of the body were more or less intact—except for a gaping hole in the abdomen, punched through the dead soldier’s fatigues, out of which the contents of his stomach had been drawn and had spilled into his lap. His rifle, an old British Army SLR, was still in his hand. Spent brass cartridge cases littered the floor.
The third body was torn in half. Blood, shit and rotting human sweetbread lay decomposing on the floor in a macabre slick of putrefying bodily fluids. The trachea appeared to have been bitten out. But the head was intact. I pointed the torch at his face. The major looked away then, and I saw why. More terrible than the stench of that human charnel house was the frozen look of utter, abject terror etched into the dead man’s features. Eyes wide open, mouth still formed into a ragged circle, screaming in terror or pain or both. Flies feasted on his tongue, buzzed in and out of his flared nostrils.
“His name is Musa Sesay.” The major’s voice started behind me. “I knew him. He was a good boy. A good soldier.” He stopped as abruptly as he had started. I said nothing.
I’ve seen a lot of dead people. And I’ve killed a lot of people up close. But I’d never seen anything like that—not in Syria’s torture chambers, or in the Colombian cartels’ killing rooms. It was as if some depraved scientist had created the essence of fear and given it a human face.
I trained the LED on the arm again. The bites were definitely made by human teeth. I recalled the frantic testimony of John, the pastor who’d witnessed the onslaught in Musala. “They are eating our souls,” he’d said. “The devil has come for us. Satan has come to eat us.” They may not have been devils, but whoever had butchered the soldiers was inhumane beyond reckoning. More than simply killed, the soldiers had been devoured.
I switched off the torch. Shafts of light spilled into the room through the constellation of bullet holes punched into the roof. They strafed the bodies but illuminated nothing. I turned to the major, who had lowered his handkerchief and was watching me intently. I took off my mask. Sweat leaked down my back, under my arms, into my eyes.
“So, tell me, Doctor,” he said, his expression hidden by shadows in the stinking gloom, “does this look like cholera to you?”
12
Fragments of sunshine surged and dissipated across the surface of the pool. An elderly Lebanese man swam gentle lengths in what was left of the morning cool. Two white women spread out on yellow sun loungers. Waiters in gleaming smocks hovered, observing the international flotsam and jetsam washed up on that tiny spit of land and sand jutting into the Atlantic.
When the wind changed, the salt tang of the ocean and chlorine whiff of the pool gave way to a heady scent of heat and decay that rolled down from the mountains and the forests that swept and climbed through the interior. Perched there, staring into the blue void of the ocean, I felt like I was sitting on the edge of the world while all the time feeling the hand of an invisible giant pushing hard against my back; the enormous, unseen pressure of the continent bore down, as if driving us all into the sea by sheer force of gravity, or history, or will.
When we had come back to Freetown from Kabala, I hadn’t checked in with London. Instead, after Roberts had dropped me off at the hotel, I’d sat drinking at the bar alone, thinking about the charnel house and what it meant.
When the major and I stepped back into the sunlight, he walked me, unspeaking, to a wattle-and-daub hut a little way off the dusty track that ran through the village. He motioned for me to enter. “It’s like this all the way to Musala,” he said, and waited outside in the midday heat while I went inside. I opened the rush door, bent down and ducked under the lintel into sweaty, buzzing darkness: the air was as dense with flies as it had been in the barrack room. The headless body of a baby lay turtlelike on its back by the fire grate. A young woman, its mother, lay next to it, her face missing, arms snapped. Her cloth skirts were piled up around her waist. The join of her thighs was a shredded mess of bone and gristle. Her genitals had been ripped apart so violently that part of her womb had been pulled out along with the small intestine. In a sagging gray amniotic sac, the beam of my torch picked out the tiny, pale corpse of an unborn child, curled up in a pool of thick black blood.
I’d seen enough.
All four soldiers billeted in the village had been killed—three in the barrack room, one manning the OP on the hill—along with all the women and children and elderly men. There were no survivors at the scene; every man of fighting age had been taken. There was no evidence of a firefight. Sure, the soldiers had opened fire. But in keeping with John’s voice mail, there was no evidence that they’d been fired on, or actually hit anything themselves. This “infection,” the major said, had bypassed Kabala but was ravaging the outlying villages. It was like trying to fence a river. Who knew where it would go next? The trail ended there: the unit that had rampaged through the countryside around Kabala had vanished, and the Sierra Leone Army, he said, was not ready to tackle the problem at the source in Musala—where I knew the entire local garrison had been wiped out.
“What,” I’d asked him, “is
the problem? The real problem. I mean, I understand what’s happening, but—”
“Do you, Doctor?” the major cut me off. “As we say in Salone, ‘The bird that knows is different from the bird that understands.’ These things you have seen here, they are not natural. We are walking through the shadow of the valley of death.” I studied him carefully and we faced each other, unspeaking, for a moment. Then he looked over his shoulder and continued quietly. “At times like this, it’s better for soldiers to think what they say and not say what they think.”
After all, the major told me, the army was under strict orders not to speak to the press—but as I was a doctor, he could talk to me without disobeying those orders. What I chose to do with what I’d seen, with what I thought I knew, was, he suggested, up to me. I supposed he wanted me to leak the news of what had happened—that an attack, and not a cholera epidemic, was to blame. He accompanied me and Roberts back to where his men had cut the Kabala road. No one spoke.
More politically sensitive than a new outbreak of Ebola, even the rumor of a rebel resurgence could be enough to topple the government. So the authorities had settled on “cholera” to explain why it was no longer possible to travel to the far north. I didn’t press him on what exactly he meant by “unnatural.” It takes faith to engage with faith. One man’s devil is another man’s rebel. Whatever the actual “problem” in Kabala, the cholera lie would at best survive the weekend. Both of us wanted to know what we were up against.
“I cannot fight something if it does not exist,” he’d told me as we parted.
Roberts saw the blackened blood on my boots and asked quietly what I’d seen. I told him he was lucky to have stayed outside and that it was people, and not cholera, or Ebola, that had done the killing. He stared hard at the road as we drove back to Freetown, no doubt thinking about the past; I stared into the bush, thinking about the future and the imminent threat of ambush. But no attack came, and conversation between us dried up. I couldn’t tell him that what I’d seen was likely proof of what Mason, King and Rhodes had impressed upon me in London: that a new, Russian-backed rebel force was up and running—and heading south. What none of them apparently realized—or at least hadn’t briefed me on—was that their tactics made the activities of the rebels in the last war look positively restrained. That the major was reaching to the Psalms and a supernatural explanation was understandable. You can’t name what you don’t know, and the face of his trooper frozen in horror was beyond anything either of us had experienced.
If the methods the rebels had used to wipe out that village were being applied in occupied Musala—and other towns—the consequences would be horrific. Roberts’s grandfather would not have survived.
Sonny Boy had been deeply disturbed, actually driven mad, by something he’d encountered in-country. For days I’d wondered what that something could have been. After shining my torch on the face of that dead squaddie, I felt one step closer to finding out. Before it was too late, I needed to discover what had frozen his face in mortal terror. I had no desire either to be transfixed like that myself or to be consigned to a “research facility,” like Sonny Boy had been.
I couldn’t ask Sonny Boy, of course. But if I could find Micky, the American he’d been hanging around with in Freetown, I might get closer to the truth of what was happening up north. One thing was certain: London didn’t know, or didn’t want me to know, that not only didn’t it look like an ordinary rebel insurgency; it didn’t look like a rebel insurgency at all. The fact that they’d hit rural villages but bypassed Kabala suggested they were probably traveling light—raiding for recruits at the end of their operational range. Taking Musala made more sense: it was the nearest town to their base and gave them access to the Mong River, if that was important to them. But rebels—all rebels, even psychopaths like the old RUF—need at least some of the people to support them. In the civil war Makeni had been full of civilians getting on with whatever life they could manage under RUF control. No civilians meant no food, no shelter and no workforce for a rebel army. Wiping out everything in your path might be desirable in a fully mechanized war; in an insurgency it was madness.
* * *
• • •
THE WOMEN ADJUSTED themselves on the loungers simultaneously: synchronized sunbathing. The elderly Lebanese continued his laps of the pool. I lit a Marlboro and remembered the cigarette butt I’d found in the village. I fished it out of my pocket and turned it over in my fingertips. Stolichnaya vodka is sold the world over. Prima Stolichnaya cigarettes are nearly impossible to find outside of Russia.
London had been right about the Russians at least. I was under strict instructions not to kill any. After what I’d seen, I wasn’t sure whether that was an order I’d be obeying. What troubled me was that, even for Spetsnaz and rebels like the RUF, the horror show they’d left behind wasn’t just macabre; it was incredibly physically demanding. Hacking off an arm, or cutting open a vagina: easy; tearing out lumps of flesh or limbs from sockets with your bare hands: almost impossible. The Sierra Leone Army major was right about one thing: violence like that is not natural.
It was time to start searching for Sonny Boy’s American friend. I dropped the cigarette end into the ashtray, picked up my local phone and connected to the Tor browser. So far this job had demanded more of me as a sleuth than as a sniper. That wasn’t normal. But the more detail I could gather about what trouble I was getting into, the more likely I’d be able to get out of it, too.
“May I speak to Michael, please?”
A bright young Californian assured me she would put me through.
“And who may I say is calling?”
“Colonel Smith, from the WHO.”
“One moment, Mr., er, Colonel Smith?” Her voice rose in an irritating West Coast half question. Definitely Californian. I stared at the swimming pool, unfocused, still shaking off the buzz of the Valium from the night before. The line clicked, and then hummed gently for a few seconds with a synthesized rendition of “Purple Haze.” The line clicked again. “I’m sorry, Colonel Smith, sir, did you say ‘Michael’?” I confirmed that I had. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but we don’t actually have a Michael working here?”
“Sure you do. Micky, you know? This is USAID, right?”
“Yes, this is USAID, sir. But, er, I’m really sorry, sir. We don’t have a Michael in the office?”
“No, miss, I’m sorry to have bothered you. He was here, what, three or four weeks ago? He must have gone back stateside. I’ll try his cell phone.” There was a long pause. “Hello?”
“I, er, it’s just I don’t believe we’ve ever had anyone here with that name, sir.”
I hung up.
So there was no Micky at the Sierra Leone office of the US government’s aid agency. But Juliet had definitely said he’d worked at USAID. I kept calling. No Micky—or Michael, or Misha, or Mícheál—in their Guinea or Liberia offices, either—and nothing obvious on the web. Then I tried different US agencies. Still nothing. Michael, it seemed, was not a popular name in US agency circles. There were no relevant public listings at the US embassy—neither in Sierra Leone nor along the coast.
Hot coffee arrived on a silver tray. The ashtray was refreshed. Ice water was poured into a tall glass sweating condensation. It was almost like being on holiday.
The one detail stressed most by Mason, and, in a rare moment of unity, agreed to by King, was that there must be no US involvement in the operation. And yet apparently Sonny Boy had been running with the Yanks—or at least a Yank.
Not having the Americans on board came at a cost. Not having their intelligence slowed me down. Not having their firepower limited my options. There was no obvious benefit to not having the CIA stick its nose in. The Agency had assets and manpower. I was here unsupported and alone.
Almost alone.
Roberts sat down at the table I’d camped out at, shaded by a huge, square
sun umbrella. He poured himself a coffee before the white-smocked waiter could reach him and looked around.
“This is mental,” he said, evidently impressed.
“No, it’s a swimming pool.”
“I mean sitting here, you know? I haven’t been inside since the evacuation in ’ninety-nine.” He sized up the two sunbathing women, who turned in perfect coordination onto their backs. “Nice presidents.”
“You’ve cheered up. I expect they’ve tarted it up a bit since the rebels tried to book in.” I nudged the packet of cigarettes toward him. “Amazing they got this far.”
“They spread everywhere, man. Uptown, downtown, through the countryside. Just like Ebola. You don’t understand—they were like a fucking virus, bruv, a disease. You could only control it when you took out Makeni. That was their brain, their center.”
I stood up abruptly, still holding my phone, thumbing the keys.
“Roberts, you are a genius.”
“Of course.” He nodded, with a confused frown. I stepped out of earshot and into the heat of the sun.
“This is the Centers for Disease Control, Freetown office. How may I direct your call?”
“May I speak to Micky, please? It’s Colonel Smith here at the WHO.”
Pause. Exhale.
“I’m afraid . . .”
“Miss, we have an inbound Class Six biohazard to FNA,” I interrupted her, “ETA twelve hundred. I’m with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.”
Pause. Inhale.
“Micky . . . the professor,” she corrected herself, “is returning to Freetown from Makeni this morning, Colonel Smith. Y’all can try his personal cell phone. He should be landing at the Aberdeen helipad anytime now.” She was all singsong vowels and slurred consonants. A Southerner for sure, from Atlanta most likely, she couldn’t be too helpful. I gratefully accepted her offer of his phone number and declined that of further assistance.
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