Catacombs

by John Farris

  Erika stopped and glanced up as the plane, throwing off needles of light, made another low pass over the mission buildings. Something, apparently, was obstructing the salt-pan landing strip half a mile downhill. A herd of zebu, cattle, or perhaps one of the thinning bands of topi seeking what was left of the brackish water in the Songwe River.

  By the stockade gate the masked soldiers slouching under dust-caked but still-green mango trees also looked up, shielding their eyes and making feeble jokes about the prowess of the bush pilot. But he was free to come and go and they were not. The soldiers were of tribes other than the Fipa or the Nyika, stationed far away from their own districts. They were afraid of the plague, but more afraid of running away.

  If they were caught, Colonel Ukumtara, a Masai whom they all feared, would personally shoot them.

  And few of the conscripted soldiers had any idea of how to make their ways home from the southern highlands, through empty hostile country which they knew to be populated by sorcerers, vampires, and werewolf hyenas.

  The hospital was a long, two-story building with high ceilings; it had been built in 1912, a few years after the end of the devastating Maji-Maji rebellion, during which the Germans had killed seventy-five thousand blacks and gained a firm hold on the southern tribal districts. Only about half of the original stucco remained on the brick walls, and a wooden gallery was in serious disrepair. There was an overhanging tin roof topped with thatch that had been riddled by rats.

  The rats had become so numerous and threatening as the mission population dwindled that a quartet of tough young tomcats recently had been flown in from Mbeya. They patrolled together, for their own safety, and had succeeded in driving the rats from the living and eating areas of the mission grounds. The ecology of Africa is exceptionally fragile, habitat and migratory patterns depending almost entirely on the erratic monsoons. It was now the season of the long rains in East Africa, but even in a good year this crescent of the Rukwa Valley received only about twenty inches of rainfall. This year, so far, there had been almost none; brief showers did little more than settle the laterite dust. With every humid drizzle, the sky seemed to bleed.

  For three weeks the hospital had been crowded with the seriously ill. Surrounding it, almost like a halo, was a corrupt, nauseating odor which Erika had become somewhat accustomed to: She had spent most of her time there since the outbreak of the fever. An abandoned school building nearby was now rapidly filling with blacks from the surrounding villages; in another day or two there would be no more room at the mission.

  Alice left her and went, fiat-footed, heavy in the haunch, toward the auxiliary ward, where a woman's despairing lulloo had interrupted Mme. Callas' passionate mezzo air. Already nearly one hundred fifty cases of the fever of unknown origin had been diagnosed. Sixteen patients, unresponsive to broad spectrum antibiotics and serums for known fevers such as Rift Valley and Congo, had died. A few victims, those under thirty years of age who had contracted the disease, seemed to be recovering. No children had been brought in as yet, and only two of the young soldiers assigned to the mission had been stricken, not seriously. The older you were the more deadly the fever.

  Raymond Poincarré had come out onto the gallery in his short-sleeved smock to drink a cup of fruit juice and smoke a strong cigarette. He was the only doctor the Tanzanian government had sent to them in this emergency. For nearly a month he had worked eighteen hours a day with a staff of native nurses from the Mbeya hospital to contain and attempt to identify the fever. His father was a Belgian, his mother had been a Fipa woman from the valley south of Muse. He'd been out of medical college for less than a year, but Erika thought he would become an outstanding doctor if he wasn't worked to death. His only fault, as she saw it, was a steadfast refusal to discuss or even acknowledge the fact of their involuntary sequestration.

  Poincarré looked at Erika as she negotiated the tilting, creaking stairs to the second floor. He had a high, light-brown forehead and wore gold-rimmed glasses, a miniature gold ring in the lobe of one ear. His face was too youthful to be lined, but these days it had fallen into a pucker of weariness, or resignation. He spoke to her in French, his voice still strained from laryngitis caused by the dust.

  "I'm sorry to get you up so soon; but he was asking for you."

  "Are you sure it's the fever?" Erika said, still in shock. "Chips has had malaria for many years–he could be having a flare-up in spite of the chloroquine."

  "No, he's not malarial. It's a fulminating febrile sickness. Lymphadenopathy is evident. Time will tell." Poincarré didn't sound hopeful. The pitch of the airplane engine had changed as the pilot sought to land. He glanced from the descending aircraft to the livid hollows beneath her eyes. "They should have sent me a good supply of gamma globulin this time. I've asked for it nearly every day. For your safety I suggest that you have an injection. Why haven't you been eating? You mustn't lose any more weight. You'll surely collapse if you keep on at this pace–you were up all of last night."

  "I feel fine." In truth she had experienced dancing spots before her eyes, and palpitations, as a result of jumping too quickly out of bed. Erika blinked hotly at the frieze of lizards around the screen door, and heard someone groaning inside the ward. "Shouldn't we know what it is by now? You sent the blood and sputum samples to Mbeya over three weeks ago."

  He shrugged. "The laboratory there is primitive. The samples may have been mishandled; they often are. Or perhaps they were spoiled in transit to the virus lab in Dar."

  "This can't be an isolated outbreak; there must have been something like this fever before. There must be a vaccine."

  "I don't know, Erika. Mutations of deadly viruses are common in Africa. It takes a very long time to isolate the new strains and cultivate antiviruses. By the time that happens, the disease may run its course."

  "Leaving how many dead?" She was panting for breath. She leaned against the wall; the lizards rearranged themselves watchfully. "But that's it, isn't it? That's why the government can only spare us one doctor and a few nurses when what we really need are virologists, epidemiologists, a well-equipped field laboratory. Does USAID or the World Health Organization know what's happening in Ivututu? No. Because someone in power in this country will be bloody well pleased if every single member of the Chapman/Weller expedition dies here!"

  Whenever she touched on this sensitive subject, he pretended to have great difficulty in understanding her Swiss-accented French.

  "Virologists are scarce in East Africa. But I must admit I would welcome some help, if only for a few days." He dragged on his cigarette, then stubbed it out on the railing and pocketed what was left. "They'll be coming with the supplies soon enough; I want to be sure my requisition slips are in order. Even then it's a guessing game each time I open a parcel."

  Erika, her face flushed, turned without another word and went inside. They had received supplies on a steady basis, some of which were still in Red Cross crates airlifted to East Africa to combat health emergencies nearly a decade ago. They had ample fuel for the generators and more than enough food, but she knew she was right: No one in authority really cared that they were being slowly wiped out.

  Edith Esmond, an archaeologist from the University of Chicago, had been the first to sicken and then to die, her throat impassably swollen, her tongue black, her skullbones soft as a baby's. Then Brant Luradale, the expedition's photographer, and the epigrapher Evangelos Trimakis succumbed within a week after symptoms appeared. Each man was past fifty and Edith, a robust fifty-seven, had been the senior member of their group. Of the thirty-two nonnative members of Chapman/Weller, all alive and well six weeks ago, one was missing and unaccounted for–Jack Portline's murderer.-and seven were dead (their bodies, presumably on someone's orders, had immediately been packed in dry ice and removed, by military helicopter, from the mission; but Erika had no idea to where the bodies were taken, and Raymond Poincarré, if he knew, wouldn't talk).

  Twenty more of the explorers and scientists had fallen
ill. Paul Boneparth, a forty-six-year-old computer programmer, had been at the point of death for two days, then rallied. His symptoms had abated mysteriously, but his mind seemed to be gone. Of the four members of the expedition so far untouched by the bug, Erika at thirty-six was the oldest.

  In the high room dimmed by shutters where the sick lay sweltering, nearly naked, bronzy from fever like fallen pharaohs in temporary pyramids of net, she found another black nurse asleep sitting up, head pillowed against her chubby hands on the back of a metal chair. She had a lollipop secure in one cheek, and nursed it unconsciously between dragging snores. The victims of the fever announced their distress in mutters, rattles, and low groans. Those most badly off were in old-fashioned oxygen tents fed from tall, nipple-topped metal bottles. Buckets and bedpans wanted emptying, sheets changing; there was an acrid stench of insecticide and Lysol in the air. Erika's steps dragged as she searched the faces of friends for signs of improvement or further dissolution.

  "Erika."

  They'd found another bed somewhere and put it at one end of the aisle, beneath the windows, then extended it with a bench, but still his ankles and feet protruded, creating a bulge in the netting. He was at an angle in the narrow bed, pillows behind his back; his eyes were half open. His shirt was unbuttoned, and his chest was bare and sweaty. The first thing she wanted to do was bathe him.

  "Oh, Chips."

  He licked his lips with a slow tongue. "Under the weather," he said, smiling. His breath was bad, he had vomited, his beard was still matted. He waved her away as she was about to part the netting and sit beside him–as if it made any difference now. Only children were ilombwe. There was no sure way to avoid the fever–she would get it in due course. Now that Chips was sick she didn't care; she would just as soon die with him. They had long been partners in expeditions–Chekiang, Titacaca, Palenque–but lovers for only a little more than a year.

  Instead of sitting, Erika brought him a drink, a can of cool Pepsi from the little kerosene refrigerator beside the single sink in the ward. He was able to sip some of it through a straw.

  Chips had in one hand a creased, faded color photo of a tall young man, beardless but in his father's image: Toby Chapman. From time to time Chips glanced at his son's face, and his own face softened–with longing, with love and despair.

  To distract him Erika said, "I've been wondering about this bug. If it's something we brought with us from the Catacombs, why did it take so long to incubate? Some of us would have fallen sick while we were still there."

  Chips nodded. "Deliberately introduced once we arrived in Ivututu."

  "By whom?"

  "The only one of us–who's missing." It was difficult for Chips to talk; to swallow. The Pepsi ran out of a corner of his mouth as he pulled at the straw. He stopped drinking and with clumsy fingers tucked the photograph of his son into a shirt pocket. His hand lingered over his heart but he looked sternly at her, all business.

  "Erika, my being laid up doesn't change anything–"

  "What? Oh, no, you're not serious!"

  "One of us . . . still has to get out of here. Get help. When I realized how sick I was, I . . . talked to Bob Connetta. Told him just what to do to the plane while he was helping to unload it. Tonight you'll have a chance to get out of here. Odds don't favor you, but you have to make it. You're a damned good pilot, my lady. Take Bobby with you. Head straight for Nairobi. North northeast from here, maybe six hundred miles. Piece of cake in that Bonanza."

  "Leave you?" she said, too loudly, outraged by the suggestion.

  "Only chance, Erika. Do what I tell you." He looked past her, at the rows of beds. "Have another, look at them. Help you to make up your mind. Seven dead. Maybe tomorrow it'll be Vinnie, or Lennart, or Tsutomu."

  Erika bowed her head; she was shaking again. She pressed her long hands together. Most of the time she wore surgical gloves, despite the inconvenience and the humidity; she knew what could result from even a minor cut or an unnoticed pinprick. Defying the conditions under which she worked, she had stayed scrupulously clean and tried to see that everyone else did the same, though the fresh-water supply was a trickle and it was necessary to throw a bucket of scrub water into the toilets to flush them into the overburdened drain fields.

  She was determined not to shake Chips' morale by demonstrating nerves in front of him. She looked up, smiling. But Chips wasn't watching her; he had put his Pepsi down and was straining to clear his throat. Her own chest ached in response to his efforts. A week ago, in a rage, he had struck Colonel Ukumtara, and had been placed in confinement in a windowless room behind the chapel. There his endurance had crumbled. Now he was very nearly helpless.

  "One thing . . . in our favor. The bloody colonel has relaxed now. He doesn't expect much of you, or any woman. He's bored . . . with this duty. His boys are careless."

  Erika ran a hand through her short haircut. "How would I get down to the plane after dark?"

  "We'll think of something."

  Chips was short of breath. She felt as if she were needlessly irritating him; he had placed his trust in her. She said, with a confidence she forced herself to feel, "I'll be back for all of you, darling, no later than tomorrow. After I've raised hell with the embassies and the news services."

  "We should be . . . front page all over the world. A bit shoddy and premature, considering the work still to be done. But necessary."

  "If only we'd been allowed to keep something, some scrap of proof of what we've found in the Catacombs. A photo, a latex mold, a single bloodstone." Erika thought of the cat people in their transparent tombs, alone once more, waiting, as they had waited for a hundred centuries, still guarding their hoard of red diamonds–a hoard now reduced, perhaps critically, by as many as fifty stones. She shuddered. Once she had savored the impact she anticipated their find would have on the world. Now she could only shrug, feeling defeated. "There'll be outraged cries of hoax."

  "Muted skepticism, perhaps," Chips said, trying to encourage her. "But your credentials demand respect. Publicity is what we must have now, an uproar of . . . volcanic proportions."

  Erika flinched.

  "Sorry. Bad choice of words. Almost no time left, if we're right in our assumptions about the bloody mountain. So . . . over the wall with you, and God bless."

  He jackknifed in a fit of coughing, but Erika for once was oblivious to his distress; she had heard the creak of boards outside and glanced at the half-shuttered window only a few feet away, beyond which the afternoon blazed with the volatile whiteness of tropic sun. In that blaze something dark momentarily floated, like a gourd-shaped spot of eclipse. Creak, creak. A thoughtful tread. Light was reflected in a thin arc from the spectacles of Dr. Raymond Poincarré, as if he had glanced at her in passing. They had kept their voices low, but he was too close not to have overheard.

  For a few moments Erika nearly panicked. These past weeks she had worked closely with Raymond to save the lives of her friends and associates, and she could never question his dedication to them. On a personal level he was almost aloof, but he had shown flashes of interest in her. His mother was dead, his father was a rummy who was in the monkey business in the highlands of Iringa. Raymond owed his career to his sponsor, Dr. Robeson Kumenyere, who held no cabinet post but exerted a major influence on the destinies of this rigidly structured socialist country. At the mission Raymond shared, or was forced to share, quarters with Colonel Ukumtara, who had a primitive faith that the presence of the doctor helped to keep the fever from visiting him.

  Perhaps Raymond was afraid that if she escaped, the government would charge him as well as the colonel with the responsibility. He was a young man, and he knew that the jails of his country held more political prisoners than South Africa's jails. But he also knew what was going to happen at the mission if more help wasn't forthcoming. Before the fever burned itself out in this isolated valley, hundreds might be dead.

  There was only one way to proceed: She had to confront him at once, try to reason wit
h him, put him to a test of loyalties.

  Erika went quickly outside, but Raymond had already gone down the steps and called for a Land-Rover that was parked near the gate.

  "Raymond!"

  The first time he pretended not to hear her; along the path that circled the yard the Land-Rover came grinding to pick him up. She called again. This time he looked back, silently. Erika could not tell much from his expression except that he seemed withdrawn, troubled. He swung aboard and dropped into the nearside seat of the Rover, and Erika helplessly watched him go. Outside the stockade the Rover took the track down to the landing strip, where the plane from Mbeya was being unloaded.

  She knew then he had made his choice: a lingering death for those who were left from the Chapman/Weller expedition.

  Chapter 2

  CHANVAI,

  Momela Lakes, Tanzania

  April 29

  As the Boeing 707 banked gently right and the Chinese captain began his final descent to the airport on the Sanya Juu plains, the glare of the lowering sun on the window awakened Len Atterbury. He looked up and saw the mountain.

  "Hey, Dad–is that Kilimanjaro?"

  Morgan Atterbury put aside his three-day-old copy of The Guardian and took off his reading glasses. In the front of the VIP compartment of the plane, which belonged to the Republic of Tanzania, a typewriter was clacking. Ron Burgess, Morgan's senior administrative assistant at D.O.D., an indispensable man even when the secretary took a brief holiday, was making the best of the unorthodox and (he probably thought) tacky, arrangements. In Tanzania, working with the small U.S. embassy staff, Ron would have to establish a rapid communications link with the Pentagon, to keep Morgan informed whenever the brass decided something important was breaking around the world. Ron was bent over his machine like a nearsighted stork in a fish pool, typing with three fingers. The advent of some spectacular scenery outside intrigued him not at all.