by James Abel
“This is about Lionel, not me. One of our old guys!”
The pilot brought us down the runway past wrecked planes that had never been cleaned away—a sixty-year-old Air Manitoba Douglas that had dropped an engine, a vintage Fokker whose malaria-ridden pilot lost control during a shivering attack, a 1976 Tri-Star that had flown so long without maintenance that the port wing sheared off. The sides of the runway were a gauntlet of shattered steel, a mechanical graveyard, where planes went to die.
Eddie said, “Some guys get to your point, they put an M4 in their mouth. You hope someone else will do it.”
“The Hawiyes promised us a pass.”
“The Hawiyes promised? Black Hawk down? Copters blown up? Our guys . . . corpses . . . dragged through the streets, and crowds celebrating? Those guys promised?”
I snapped, “Then stay here, Dos.”
“Right. Like I’ll really do that.”
Private contractor soldiers with M16s patrolled the base to deter theft. The compounds were operated by Irish Relief, Red Crescent, Red Cross, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, World Without War, World for Christ.
The warehouse tents we rolled past contained tons of food, medicine, jerry cans for gasoline, clothing, soap, aspirin, and tax write-off donations from corporations: canned water from a Milwaukee beer company, crates of out-of-style trousers from a Minnesota clothing company, forty-year-old plastic eyeglass frames from Chicago, vegetarian cookbooks, donated baseball cards, toothpaste, art supplies, vitamin C pills, canned tuna fish, shoelaces. Antibiotics next to air fresheners. Syringes beside bathroom mats. One box filled with vital supplies, the next with something ridiculous.
“Eddie, this illness may be what we’re here to find. So get the plane. And don’t call Washington yet.”
Eddie and I have been buddies since college. He’s a savage fighter and a fiercely loyal friend and the annoying flip side of his faithfulness is his unshakable need to watch my back at all times.
“Yes, sir,” he snapped.
I hung up.
We powered down within view of hundreds of Turkana men and women around a bonfire, even during the day, jumping up and down and singing the same song that had kept me awake last night. The comely women wearing multicolored bead necklaces. The tall men holding long, thin, iron-barbed spears. Up and down, up and down, working themselves up. So many people that the piston-like pounding of bare feet raised a dust cloud.
The song, in my mind, served as an anthem for this upside-down place, revenge central, anarchy incarnate.
The four words were, Who stole my goat?
Big emergencies start small.
This has nothing to do with Karen, I’d insisted to Eddie. I know what I’m doing.
Sixty minutes later, we were in the air.
TWO
I grew up as far away from Africa as you can get, in the small Berkshire town of Smith Falls, Massachusetts, on a cracked two-lane rural road ten miles south of the Vermont line. We took for granted our small but well-stocked general store, our late-model cars that worked, and food so plentiful that health problems came from eating too much of it. We had solid roofs over our heads and schools that stayed open. We trusted the state cops who drove past each day, especially since some were our relatives. We resided in an area that magazines identified as a tourist destination, not a world trouble spot: the Berkshires, where you could take a road trip to see the bright red leaves in October, pick fresh apples, hear the Boston Symphony play outdoors at Tanglewood, dine in restaurants rated by the New York Times.
Not that I did that. I was a townie, and Smith Falls was an old mill town, where my ancestors—immigrant Welsh coal miner great-great-grandfather and his immigrant Norwegian peasant wife, who met on a steamer—worked at a textile mill. By World War Two, my family was making uniforms for the U.S. Army. By the Grenada invasion, the mills had closed, moved to Honduras, and Rush family members were the plumbers and carpenters for the second-home owners who showed up in the Berkshires each June, and went back to New York or Boston in September.
I found our calm life boring, our July Fourth parade, Christmas sing-alongs, and backyard barbeques stifling. Safety was for old people. The small homes, mowed lawns, and blink-of-an-eye main street felt suffocating. I thrilled to commercials showing U.S. Marines storming ashore to rescue Americans in trouble, guarding our nation against foreign attack. I wanted to be one of the few and the proud, so I studied hard and won an ROTC scholarship to the University of Massachusetts. After I left, I did not look back.
I married my college sweetheart. I thought my life was on track. What a fool I was.
Then one day during the first Iraq war, Eddie and I and other soldiers including nineteen-year-old Lionel Nash stepped down a long subterranean tunnel and into a world more terrifying than anything we’d imagined. We’d found a hidden lab, and in it were monkeys being infected with the world’s worst death agents: plague, anthrax, Ebola. The doctors had evacuated and left the animals cuffed to operating tables, or stuffed into cages, screaming and crying, substitutes for the human beings that Saddam’s planners hoped to one day infect.
When we emerged back into the sunlight, we were changed men. That lab sent Eddie and me to medical school on the Marine dime, and made us experts on toxins. The desert, the rocks and starkness, had excited Lionel Nash in a different way, sent him to school, made him a geologist.
Now was he leading us into a trap?
—
The deceptive thing about technology is the way it makes the world seem smaller. The world is not really smaller, but by eliminating mental distance, our devices deceive us into thinking the person on the other end is exactly like us. Somalia is sixteen hours from Washington, just like Minneapolis if you drive. So people who fly around the world begin to think that the difference is small between Washington and Somalia.
Hey, let’s all sit down and talk and we’ll see our differences are minor, and you’ll see things my way.
Big mistake.
“In other words, Colonel, you waited to alert your director until you thought it would be too late to stop you from going.” The man on my laptop screen sneered.
Eddie and I were the only passengers in a twelve-seat prop plane entering Somali airspace, but at the same time we were in a meeting in Washington, where it was 6 A.M. Something was wrong back there. My call had summoned the admiral from a meeting, but why was he in a meeting so early in the day? When I’d forwarded him the grainy photo Lionel Nash had sent, he’d put me on hold, and three minutes later I was startled to see the whole group.
Eddie leaned over and slipped me a note. Look at the water pitchers. They’re in the Situation Room.
In each square on-screen, looking back, was a tense-looking member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Bioterror Preparedness. I’d addressed the group a few times, during war games at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Rhode Island Avenue, designing scenarios—anthrax attack, food contamination, rail hit.
The committee met rarely, and these meetings, which were theoretical, never occurred before noon.
Frank Burke—glaring at me now—was the committee head, a high-profile presence in Washington and a study in contradictions, who “doesn’t like you, to say the least,” the admiral had told me. The Assistant Homeland Security Secretary was an ex–police commissioner of Dallas, a forty-seven-year-old ex-Congressman and tough fireplug with a unique background—off-the-charts IQ, forest ranger parents, Interpol experience, most decorated cop in Texas history. He often made the Post social pages, which covered his penchant for squiring around famous actresses, his leadership in Capitol Hill prayer meetings, his fancy dress boots, and his belief, reported in the Washington Post during confirmation hearings, that evolution was “just a theory that I don’t believe in. I believe in the Lord.”
Burke had tried to get our small unit moved from
the Defense Department to Homeland Security. He disapproved of having an ex-Coastie running a bioterror group. “You’re a sailor, not a warrior,” he’d told the admiral. He’d also tried to get my contract canceled, twice, and failed.
“You’re the kind of man I would have kicked off my police force,” he’d told me once, in a men’s room, during a war game break. “I saw your file. The real one. Some guys work for the right side for the wrong reasons. That’s you, Rush. You’ve tortured. You strangled someone. You deny it?”
“No.”
“Well, use my committee as cover to hurt people—even guilty ones—and I don’t care that the President protects you. I’ll bury you in Leavenworth and you’ll never get out. You’ll never even get a lawyer. You get it?”
Overhearing the remark, Eddie had said, “He’s honest at least.”
Frank Burke was the probable heir of the agency when the current head’s resignation took effect a month from now. He was shorter than average, but had the presence of a large man—with broad shoulders; a powerful-looking shaved head; a fancy handlebar mustache, jet-black and not dyed; and an aggressive walk. He was a compulsive consumer of lime-flavored hard candies. It was as if they exercised his jaw.
“I went in right away because I thought speed essential, sir,” I lied to Burke now.
Burke made a mocking sound in his throat.
The instrument panel told me that our plane had crossed into Somali airspace, but no markings below indicated this. No troops or fences. No roads or villages. The savannah looked the same down there—soaked and misty—as it had five minutes ago. There were some thorn trees. We passed over a large lake churned up by a herd of pinkish animals—hippos. There was the sense of rushing into a vacuum, being sucked—or suckered—forward by fate.
I said, “Sir, if the committee is in session, is there a problem at home?”
“Not your concern.”
“Sir,” I persisted, aware that the admiral was trying, with his eyes, to get me to shut up, “I’m unclear why an incident in Africa concerns the bioterror committee. Is there something I need to know?”
“No.”
“Are you ordering me to turn around?”
Burke tended to consider himself the smartest guy in the room, which, I had to admit, he often was. And the committee—set up after a sarin scare in Sacramento two years ago—was an interagency group with a direct line to the President in the event of a bioterror incident, but at home, not abroad.
Burke told me now, “We could have sent in drones to look the place over before you put yourself in jeopardy.”
The pilot of our small twin-engine 1978 Cessna 421 Eagle, was named Farhan, which, in Somali, means “happy,” which he was not. Our Doppler radar screen glowed bright red, which meant bad rain and wind ahead, and the plane began pitching violently as a sudden storm pummeled us at fifteen thousand feet. The ground disappeared.
“Drones won’t work, Frank. Cloud cover,” said Admiral Galli, on Burke’s left. Trim and weathered, the hero of the most recent Gulf oil spill had sparse gray hair, youthful clear blue eyes, and a deceptively calm manner. He, too, was furious that I’d not called him right away. But he wouldn’t mention this in front of the others. He’s that way.
To Galli’s left, on-screen, was Chris Vekey, thirty-four, from Emergency Preparedness. The former major in the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service was a public health expert whose job in the event of a bio-attack was to help coordinate containment. She was a petite, voluptuous brunette with blue-black hair cut to the neck, framing a cupid face. Mouth a lovely bow. Part Irish, part Cherokee. She’d formerly tracked TB outbreaks in low-income Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods, then joined the Gates Foundation Africa anti-malaria effort, then rejoined government. An ex-teenage mom from Alabama, she’d been stripped of her high school valedictorian title when she became pregnant. She never revealed the father’s identity. She worked her way through Auburn U, then Yale School of Public Health. She was still single, soft-spoken but tough, and Burke had an avuncular weakness for her because, like him, she’d come up the hard way. She was the most intoxicating-smelling woman I’d ever met. She and her teenage daughter lived in a converted spice warehouse in Northwest D.C. The odors had permeated their apartment. She smelled of cinnamon, vanilla, tropical islands. Between her gorgeous face, fit body, and smell, she turned heads wherever she went. You could sense the animal inside her. It made her gray business attire seem as sexy as bathing suits, Eddie said.
“She has a crush on you, One,” Eddie would say. “I like her.”
“Me, too, but not in that way.” This was a lie. I was strongly drawn to her. I would never act on it.
“All guys like her in that way.”
“Then talk to them.”
Chris broke in. “Colonel Rush has to go in and you know it, Frank. We have Americans on the ground who need help.”
“Chris, you have a big heart.” Burke sighed, but he didn’t tell me to turn around. He was probably realizing that since I’d gone in without permission, I’d be blamed if things went sour. He’d get credit if they worked. If he stopped me, and U.S. scientists died, Frank would be on the hot seat. Frank would have to explain the lapse. Not me.
His slow smile told me that he did not appreciate being manipulated. I couldn’t care less. I was still trying to understand why the committee was in session.
The admiral asked me now, “Do you have more photos?”
“No, sir.”
“Dr. Nash’s face looks swollen, but you can’t see features,” said Chris thoughtfully.
“It’s not the same thing,” insisted Frank Burke.
I thought, The same thing as what?
“Well, it certainly looks swollen the same way,” said the next face in line, Dr. Colonel Wilbur Gaines, from Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the Army had its bioterror labs. Gaines, the top-left-hand face, headed disease tracking and was in his late forties, with light brown skin, thick short hair, and round, clear reading glasses on a red string around his neck. He got along well with Burke.
“I agree it is a stretch, Frank, but we need a better photo.”
Burke said, “Can we blow this shot up, make it clearer?”
“No.”
“Can we ask the sender to resend?”
“I can try.”
Left to right, box to box, as in a high school yearbook, I saw Ray Havlicek, FBI, Chris’s ex-boyfriend, who still carried a torch for her and would head up domestic investigations in the event of attack; Celia St. Johns, CIA, in a tent dress, a sixty-two-year-old onetime Cold War Mata Hari, who looked more like a bag lady these days, and, who, considering her appearance—brown tent dresses, wet wool smell, mustard stains, stringy matted gray hair—had to be really good at her job, or know secrets, to still represent her agency at this high level.
Next was Lester Ormand, FEMA, emergency food and med-aid, a natty man who looked more like a Wall Street lawyer, and Carla Vasquez, forty-nine, White House liaison with governors of all states. Carla was a third cousin to the vice president, and a former big fund-raiser from Miami.
“Perfect social life for you,” Eddie liked to say. “All work. At least someone calls out for food.”
If Chris spoke for compassion, the next speaker represented urgency. Ray Havlicek, forty-nine, was an ex–college sprinter from the University of North Carolina, still lean and fit, the son of an FBI agent who had arrested Rajneeshee cult members for carrying out a food poisoning attack in Dalles, Oregon, in 1984. Ray had led the team that stopped Madyan Al Onazy’s 2009 smallpox attack on a Saudi Airlines 747 on its way to Dulles Airport. That midair fight and arrest remained classified. Ray was a heavyweight and I respected him. I had a feeling he’d been a jealous boyfriend when he’d dated Chris. It was still in his eyes.
“I agree with Chris. Dr. Rush must go in,” he said.
To his left, inside
his square, was impassive-looking Air Force Major General Wayne Homza, whose career I’d almost wrecked a year ago, by proving him wrong during an outbreak, and then resurrected it, by ending a threat with minimal loss of life. Homza had been grateful, but some people can’t sustain that emotion. Thanks becomes resentment. These days he was making a professional comeback. Homza was the only officer in the United States with experience quarantining a U.S. town. His learning curve had been steep. But his experience in Alaska had made him the Pentagon’s choice when it came to war games involving quarantines, blockades, transport shutdowns, or evacuation protocols.
Homza said suspiciously, “What interests me is how this alleged former Marine of yours knew you were in Africa, yet never contacted you before.”
“I wondered that, too. I confirmed his identity.”
Homza shook his head. “I think it’s a trap.”
Gaines said, with visible urgency, “Either way, in light of our other problem—”
Burke cut him off swiftly. “Dr. Gaines!”
Gaines fell silent, but looked troubled.
Vekey said, “There’s no way to know what happened until Dr. Rush gets there.”
Burke shook his head. “He should have gotten more photos.”
“I suggest that we wait for clouds to lift, then try for a sat shot, confirm the situation.”
“Wait? But if this thing turns out to be the same as—”
“We’ll discuss that later.”
The funny thing about teleconferences—they change the way you read faces. On-screen, Burke’s eyes flashed left, toward Chris. But in reality, the person sitting beside him could have been anyone. There was no way to read expressions, not without them in front of me for real.
Gaines said, “Can you hear me, Dr. Rush?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Please list the symptoms.”
