Chimera

by Sonny Whitelaw

  Alarmed now, Judi flicked back through the web pages until her eyes came to rest on a virus shaped like a shepherd's crook. She read, 'The incubation period ranges from two days to three weeks, depending on the aetiology. Symptoms include: high fever, headache, muscle aches, stomach pain, fatigue, diarrhoea, sore throat, hiccups, rash, red and itchy eyes, vomiting blood, bloody diarrhoea…'

  Two days. No… No! It was impossible! Judi thrust her chair back, stood and stared at the screen as if it were contagious. Tom and the others had dengue. It had to be dengue! But as she pulled on a fresh gown, she noticed her hands were shaking. Taking a few deep breaths, she popped another couple of Panadol from the box, swallowed them dry and went to find Nate. They had to contact Port Vila again and…what? What were they going to tell Gene Marshall? That they had Ebola? The man would crucify them!

  Her back began to ache.

  -Chapter 13-

  Quantico

  Dispersal: Plus 61 hours

  "Jesus, Susan, how in hell did you predict this one?"

  Major Susan Broadwater fumbled for the bedside light. "Jake?"

  "Yeah," replied Jake Arnold from the CDC in Atlanta. "You asked me to call if anything came in. Well, I may have something."

  "What?" She finally found the switch, glad that she'd opted to stay at Quantico.

  "A WHO doctor down in Vanuatu."

  "Where?" Sitting up and squeezing her eyes against the invasion of light, Susan checked the time. Just past midnight. She'd had an hour's sleep. Not bad, under the circumstances.

  "Vanuatu. It's a South Pacific island nation between New Caledonia and Fiji, two hours flight from Brisbane, Australia."

  "An island?"

  "About eighty of 'em. This guy, Sturgess, is on the southernmost, called Mathew. It's in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere."

  Susan's mouth went dry. She pulled the covers back and got out of bed. "Vanuatu… British, French, Australian, New Zealand, or independent?"

  "Hell, I don't know. Look it up! Anyway, he's got some sort of outbreak going on. He initially suspected a flu virus that an eleven-year old boy brought down from the capital city by plane three days ago. Then the symptoms suggested haemorrhagic dengue. That doesn't add up because more than half the village is already down with it. One of his nurses thought it could be chicken pox because the rash was more pockmarked than dengue-like. But it's come on way too fast. And it's definitely haemorrhagic in nature."

  Normally Susan never jumped to conclusions, but her gut instinct said this was it.

  "The doctor," Jake continued, "is an epidemiologist. He sent a couple of digital images by email and it looks…well, thing is, the speed of the outbreak, the symptoms and simultaneous infection could indicate something more…insidious."

  "Thanks, Jake, I owe you." Susan juggled the phone while she dressed. The familiar tension banished any residual sleepiness. "Now listen to me. Communications with this island, what are they like?"

  "Sturgess said in his email that they have an unreliable radiotelephone service."

  "But he has email?" She was trying, and failing, to pull on her shoes with one hand.

  "There was a vulcanologist on the island. He left his laptop and satellite dish behind."

  "Was?" Her stomach crawled into a tight little knot.

  "Yeah." Jake's voice dropped. "Crap. I'd better find out when he left."

  "You do that. And email me everything you have on this WHO doctor, Sturgess, including the pictures he sent. And Jake? I do not want to see this on CNN over breakfast."

  "We stay in the loop, Susan. None of this national security bullshit. It could be a natural outbreak."

  "And you called me because?"

  She heard his deep sigh on the other end. "It's probably some tropical-"

  "Jake."

  "Take a look at the photos; more than half the village in three days? Shit, Susan, this is one scary bug."

  *

  When Jordan arrived in the situation room, she was surprised to see it alive with activity. Broadwater, McCabe, Brant, Wilson, and half a dozen field agents and technicians were already congregated around the large wall map of…she froze. Of all the places on the planet.

  Someone bumped into her.

  "Sorry," Commander Long said apologetically, and walked past.

  Brant looked over Jordan's shoulder. "Teena Giovanni?"

  Jordan glanced back to see the bleary-eyed CIA librarian arriving. "Sir?" Giovanni longingly stared at Brant's cup.

  "Black?" he said.

  When Giovanni nodded, Brant handed her his coffee. Sipping it, the librarian contemplated the wall map. "Vanuatu."

  "Specifically, Mathew Island," replied Brant. "What's the geopolitical background?"

  Jordan's heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to explode. She grabbed the back of a nearby chair to steady herself.

  Staring myopically at the map, Giovanni said, "It's a chain of emergent volcanoes created by the Pacific and Australia-Indian tectonic plates pushing together. Although its volcanoes have been relatively quiet for fifty years, Ambae came to life a few months back, attracting the attention of vulcanologists worldwide. Mathew and Hunter Islands are the southernmost volcanoes. Strictly speaking they're not part of Vanuatu."

  Brant frowned. "Explain."

  Finishing her coffee, Giovanni placed the empty cup on the side table. Jordan stared at it, trying to focus on something, anything other than the sense of helpless terror threatening to overwhelm her.

  "Until 1980 the country was known as the New Hebrides," Giovanni continued. "The prior colonial government was of a uniquely schizophrenic nature: a joint British and French administration called the Condominium. It was less affectionately referred to as Pandemonium by the locals. The French and British consigned the islands to a brief footnote in their colonial history books. Americans know them only as a base for our Pacific campaign in the Second World War. Nobody else much cares. When they gained independence, the Anglophone Protestant government ditched the name New Hebrides along with planeloads of mostly Catholic French expatriates. It also claimed the two volcanic islands far to the south, Mathew and Hunter, as part of the new Republic. They didn't do this merely to tick off the French New Caledonian government, who also claim them, but to extend Vanuatu's exclusive economic zone by almost a third."

  "So is Mathew Island part of Vanuatu or New Caledonia?" Broadwater wanted to know.

  "The French are not letting them go. They like the idea of extending their territorial waters, economically and more importantly from our point of view, strategically. After years of diplomatic standoffs, Vanuatu and New Caledonia agreed to jointly administer them."

  "Population?" Broadwater pressed.

  Giovanni frowned. "I'll have to look it up, Major."

  "Hunter's uninhabited," Jordan replied, surprised and grateful that her voice was steady. She sat down at one of the desks, still not completely trusting her legs. "They're both worthless chunks of basalt. Mathew has a population of a hundred and fifty, tops."

  All eyes swung to her. "How do you know?" Brant demanded.

  Jordan shot him an odd look. Surely he was familiar with her file. "I was born in Vanuatu. Left when I was fourteen to attend boarding school in Australia. My parents bought a construction and hardware business there."

  Everyone began asking questions at once, but Brant's voice cut through. "What can you tell us?"

  First they tore her husband and son from her, and now they were taking her parents and childhood friends? What the hell had she done to piss off God this much?

  She jammed a lid on her emotions. This had nothing to do with God. "Hunter can only be accessed by sea, although there's no anchorage for anything bigger than a rowboat. Mathew Island has a runway of sorts, suitable for light aircraft only during the dry season. It's serviced by weekly flights from Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital. There's no wharf, but every three to four months a frontloading cargo barge sails down from Noumea. They bring in suppl
ies and take on copra and some sandalwood. Ni-Vanuatu citizens and French nationals don't require a visa or passport to visit Mathew and Hunter, however, every other nationality does. And shades of the old Condominium, that means dealing with two sets of bureaucracies. Apart from a couple of Peace Corps volunteers working in the clinic, no one much goes there except vulcanologists."

  "How often did you say there were flights?"

  "Generally, weekly, but that could change now that it's coming into the wet season."

  "Every Tuesday." Giovanni was sitting in front of a computer terminal. "They're sixteen hours ahead of us." She glanced at her watch. "That makes it Friday afternoon there, about 1740 hours."

  Brant ran his hand across his jaw. "The Peace Corps volunteers-American?"

  "Probably," replied Jordan. "Or Canadian."

  "Give me ten minutes," Giovanni said, and began typing.

  "What about the doctor?" Wilson asked. "If American citizens are in any danger, we can get the State Department involved."

  "I have his email address," Broadwater was leaning over a computer. "No wait, it's not Sturgess'. He's using the address of the guy who owns the computer."

  "Sturgess? Nate Sturgess?" Jordan demanded, feeling a surge of hope. She stood and went across to stare over Susan's shoulder. "He's a Kiwi-New Zealander. Nate's a good guy, and a great doctor."

  "Spinner, don't go anywhere, we're going to need you." Brant pointed to two newly arrived agents. "I want background checks and the current location of every expatriate who's been on that island in the last six months. And I want them an hour ago!" Walking back to the map, he said to McCabe, "Isolated, limited access and communications, minimal population. Fits your profile."

  "Yeah." McCabe downed the last of his coffee. "Poor bastards."

  Broadwater shot him a swift look. Concern-or was it sympathy-crossed the Major's face. She stood and placed a hand on the agent's shoulder. His lips screwed up in a bitter smile, then he crumpled the paper cup, tossed it into a bin, and walked out of the room.

  Despite her preoccupation, Jordan wondered about that odd little exchange, until she remembered that McCabe had been in Zaire. She turned to the map. How many more lives were about to be torn apart?

  -Chapter 14-

  Mathew Island

  Dispersal: Plus 62 hours

  "I am not out of my fucking mind!" Nate yelled into the radiotelephone. "You've got to isolate anyone who's been in contact with Mike Warner, Katie Wood, and Gary Teocle, including everyone at the airport and on board the Vila-Fiji flight. Also stop Mike and Katie from leaving Fiji. And for God's sake, those blood samples you got off him, I…I'm not even sure they should be opened and examined in the hospital."

  "Unless we do that, there's no way we can tell what it is!" retorted Gene Marshall, just as angrily. "And there is no way I'm going off half-cocked because you've got some hornet up your ass-"

  "Listen, dammit. If it's a virus there's no way you're going to see it. You'd need to test for malaria and dengue of course, but you'd have to do an ELISA-"

  "A whata?" Marshall whined.

  "Antigen-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay testing, it's a polymerase chain reaction to test for Ebola-although this thing looks more and more like some form of virulent haemorrhagic smallpox. Look, you can't do it, so I've addressed one set of samples to the Louis Pasteur Institute and another to the CDC. Right now the critical thing is to isolate everyone who's been in contact with it. And don't forget Aneityum Island; the chopper refuelled there, and they have cruise ships stopping in their so-called Mystery Island every other week."

  Marshall's tone abruptly turned condescending. "Calm down Nate. You're overworked and you're obviously overreacting."

  "I am calm!" Sturgess shouted. "Ten minutes before I called you I was panicking, now I'm as fucking calm as an economy-sized bottle of Valium! There are one hundred and forty seven people on this island. Twenty-four hours ago I had eighteen people with symptoms. Twelve hours ago, twenty-two that I knew of. I've just spent the afternoon doing a hut-to-hut search. Near as I can figure, there are eighty-three either ill or unaccounted for, which means they could be lying sick up in the gardens or on the north side of the island. And the symptoms are either a haemorrhagic form of smallpox or Ebola that's morphed into some goddamned pox like disease-"

  "You've been hit with nothing more than a particularly virulent strain of haemorrhagic dengue-"

  "Don't patronize me, Gene. I know haemorrhagic dengue better than just about any other doctor on the planet! This is not dengue. And it hasn't hit in a normal infectious pattern-it's knocked out half the population in a terrifyingly short period of time, as if…as if they all caught it from a single source within hours of one another. As for the aetiology, it had to have been inhaled; there is no way it could have spread this fast otherwise. Are you absolutely sure no one in Vila has these symptoms; these bleeding pockmarks?"

  "Of course they have!" Marshall snapped. "We've had eight more cases of haemorrhagic dengue since yesterday. Why the bloody hell do you think we sent you down there in the first place?"

  " You didn't send me," Nate reminded him. "Now, for God's sake, get those blood samples to Noumea and Auckland, so they can make the connecting flights out. I've already contacted Brussels and the CDC in Atlanta-"

  "You did what ?" Marshall's voice cracked. "How? What did you tell them? If the media get hold of this, do you have any idea what it will do to tourism? You had absolutely no authority to bypass me and…and the Minister!"

  Thank you Mike , thought Nate for the tenth time that afternoon. "Remember, I have Internet access," he replied calmly.

  "I absolutely forbid you to contact anyone again!" Marshall spluttered. "You can't go round screaming that the sky is falling without evidence. Notification has to go through the proper channels-after we've done the blood tests and ascertained what's really happening down there. I'm calling the CDC and informing them that you have vastly overstepped your authority. Then I'm calling your superior in Noumea and submitting a formal complaint regarding your obvious incompetence. You've finally lost it, mate. You're finished!"

  Nate's nostrils flared in disgust. He'd spent ten minutes quietly trying to explain the symptoms to Marshall, but the damned… administrator was fixated on haemorrhagic dengue, refusing to entertain the possibility that anything was seriously wrong. "Don't you get it? Dengue is masking this disease. You have an ethical responsibility that outweighs political considerations. This is not your garden-variety haemorrhagic fever. This is something far more sinister, and unless you isolate everyone who has been in contact with it, I will make absolutely certain that you are personally held responsible for further outbreaks."

  The line started to fail and before either had a chance to add anything, it went dead. Nate stared at the radiotelephone. Was it his fault? Had he alienated Marshall so much that the man refused to listen to reason? But the photos of Tom Kaleo's stomach and face glared at him from the computer desktop. Even a fool like Marshall must see that something very bad was happening on Mathew Island.

  -Chapter 15-

  Nadi Airport, Fiji

  Dispersal: Plus 62 hours

  Katie Wood stood under the stinging needles of her first hot shower in over a year. She'd never much liked baths. The bubbling springs on Mathew Island were sure better than cold showers for scrubbing off the pervasive volcanic ash, but nothing had removed the unending stench of rotten eggs. Finally, her hair felt clean, she smelled clean and soon she would be back in an air-conditioned plane-business class, no less!

  They'd made the Air Pacific flight from Port Vila to Fiji only because bad weather in Vila had delayed departure by an hour. Then, when Mike had been checking with the ticket desk in Nadi, two business class seats on an evening flight to LA had become available. Katie had procrastinated; she couldn't afford the upgrade. Mike had tossed his gold Visa card across the counter and told her it was an early Christmas present, conditional on her letting him buy her dinner
in Seattle.

  The door of the cubicle beside hers clattered open. She'd better hurry. Their flight was due to board soon. But part way through drying herself, Katie paused. What was she doing-really? She liked Mike, but she still wasn't sure about a relationship. After her husband had died, with the kids now grown and doing their own thing, she'd wanted to feel useful. The Peace Corps had given her that. It hadn't been her intention to isolate herself from the rest of the world, but the relatively uncomplicated life on Mathew Island had been just what she'd needed.

  Mike Warner had sat beside her on her very first flight to Mathew Island, three years earlier. Back then, her loss had been too raw, her emotions too brittle for more than polite chitchat. He'd returned to the island several times in the intervening years. Katie had finally come to accept what everyone kept telling her. Mike's interest in Mathew Island had as much to do with her as the volcano. She didn't want to lead him on, but now that she'd left Mathew, she was anxious to return to Seattle to see her friends and family, and decide what she really wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  The silky feel of the dress she'd bought in the Duty Free shop brought a smile to Katie's face. The clothes she'd worn on the helicopter were dusty and smelled of the volcano. She bundled them together and tossed them into a refuse bin-but not before ash drifted from one of the pockets and caught in the mucous lining in her nostrils.

  While most of the original virus had long since been decimated by UV light, a few particles had lodged in more obscure, dark places, like the microscopic cracks on volcanic dust. By wearing a pair of overalls during the helicopter flight to Vila, Katie had inadvertently given refuge to several thousand chimera particles that had lodged inside the ash, within the folds of her blouse.