by James Abel
“Here we go again,” Eddie said. “Something we ate?”
The lone, small figure of Chris Vekey stood outside the window, on the tarmac, looking up as she spoke via phone.
I tried to ignore my anger and concentrate on what she was saying, but the truth was, if Burke and Chris had been open with us earlier, we might have spotted something in Africa that would help us now. But they’d hidden facts, delayed giving information. Need to know was the curse of Washington, creating a perpetual catch-up race during crises, a drumbeat of too late.
Now Eddie and I saw leprosy up on our screens, on our thumb drive medical encyclopedias. Right side showed a rogue’s gallery of photos—faces eaten away, fingers nubs, feet stumps—going back to 1850.
Eddie said, “The facts don’t go with what we saw, One. You never get leprosy in groups.”
Chris’s voice in my ear said, “Now you do.”
“It doesn’t spread this fast. Normal germination after infection, one to three years. In extreme cases, six months. And it’s rarely fatal.”
Chris said, “This strain is.”
I broke in, flaring at her, “The admiral is fired, you say? He’s a good man! You’re our boss now?”
“Yes.”
My rage crested. We’d been lied to and we’d been threatened with death in Somalia. We’d been forced to undergo radio silence on the long ride home because our multimillion-dollar communication system was on the blink—they claimed. I’d misjudged this woman, I saw. I’d thought she was different than the backbiting social climbers that populated the capital, self-serving know-it-alls who talked piously of policies and manipulated them for personal gain.
Chris Vekey, I saw, had waited for an emergency to ally herself with Burke, to force a good man into retirement, just when the country needed him. Now she blithely expected Eddie and me to snap to and obey her, pliant as toy soldiers. But we weren’t that and had never been.
“Go to hell,” I said.
“What?”
“What you did to the admiral stinks.”
“Watch your temper,” she warned. Out on the tarmac, she was a stiff, glaring presence in a parka, her gamine face shocked, her voice snapping out in white smoky bursts.
I retorted that we were private contractors. We were retired from the service, here only because of private university ties. “Burke’s lapdog”—as I called her—could not tell us what to do.
She stared up at me with a stony expression. But Southern women don’t outmaneuver you with a bludgeon. They do it with a soft voice, a steel backbone. “Those Alabama girls can break the balls off a Rodin statue with a look,” Eddie once said, the truth of that made evident now.
“Colonel, for your information, once you signed on, you’re bound by your agreement. If you violate that, and leave, fine with me. I’ll make a phone call and where you’ll go is Leavenworth prison.”
I said nothing, fuming. It was true.
Chris said, “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Her gaze did not waver. The voice in my ear was molten steel. “You and I and Major Nakamura are going to wait for your test results. If your blood work is negative, you’re coming with me to Nevada to help track this thing. I want your eyes on the ground.”
“That would have been easier if you’d leveled with us from the start.”
“While on the job, you will function as effectively as if Admiral Galli remained in charge. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“You’ll ask the same questions you’d ask otherwise. You’ll make the same connections. We’re going to Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas. I’ll forget your rudeness this once, because loyalty is an admirable quality. You’ll give me one hundred percent or I’ll lock you away so fast you won’t know what hit you. Was there something else you wanted to say?”
“No.”
We broke contact. I went back to reading about leprosy. Eddie sat two feet away, grinning like an idiot.
“You sure told her,” he said. “No one pushes you around. You are one tough Marine, man. I must say, she may be Burke’s lapdog but she’s cute even when she bites.”
“Eddie, do me a favor. Shut up.”
—
The blood tests were late in coming.
Were we infected? Was the lab repeating the tests?
The tingling increased in the fingers of my right hand. I flexed them. Was feeling seeping back into them? I told myself, You’re imagining it. Just work.
“Leprosy,” I read out loud, “was so common in medieval Europe that one out of thirty people suffered from it. In extreme cases it killed, usually by blocking nerves, or causing gangrene or infection. Or victims had no feeling, so they cut or hurt themselves without even knowing it. Listen to this, Eddie. Until recently, it was believed that leprosy victims lost fingers or toes to the disease, but it turns out they’d accidentally damage themselves because they lacked feeling. In India, leprosy sufferers have lost their fingers and toes to rats.”
“Rats?”
“Yeah. The rats ate them while they slept. They felt nothing.”
But it wasn’t just symptoms up on-screen, but the horrible social aspects. The separating disease, it was called. Throughout history, lepers had been shunned, forced from homes and families, called witches, hounded from villages, locked away in filthy hospitals, feared and stigmatized. I saw a shot of a leper hospital in Jerusalem, 1843, and another, hidden away in the swamps of Louisiana, and a leprosarium on the outskirts of London . . . virtual prisons for people who had done nothing wrong except fall ill.
Eddie read, “Some scientists think the Crusaders brought leprosy back to Europe from the Middle East. Some say it’s the other way around. Either way, by 1300, hundreds of muddy French and Italian villages were filled with figures in dirty shrouds, wrapped in rags, tormented, hungry, and sick. By law they had to carry a bell, warning all in their paths that they were coming. Chanting, ‘Unclean.’”
Eddie shook his head. “I was sure this thing was going to be chemical, One. Toxic chemical. Not this.”
“Fifteen hundred years before Christ, Egyptian doctors recorded cases,” I read. “In ancient Greece, Hippocrates treated sores and destroyed flesh. The first medically proven case of leprosy was confirmed in 2009, from fifty years before Christ! A Yale team dug up a skeleton near Haifa, and radiocarbon-dated it. Perfect DNA match.”
“Says here ninety-five percent of people have natural immunity to leprosy, One. But over half the people in that camp caught it. So does the infection spread because of the other part of the chimera, the second part of the mix?”
Question after question. “Says you can’t grow it in a lab, Eddie. Natural spread, you think?”
“Plus, if thirty percent of Europe had it at one time, what made it die out? Wait! It didn’t die out. Numbers dropped in the 1600s, but shot up again two centuries later, mostly in England and Norway.”
“Why those countries?” I asked. Is this a clue?
I read, “England and Norway were seafaring nations carrying on trade with India. Sailors brought it back. Then, in 1873 a Norwegian scientist, Armauer Hansen, ID’d the bug. That’s why leprosy is called Hansen’s disease today.”
Eddie looked up. “I’d rather have a ball team named for me. The Nakamura Angels!”
“Still two million cases in the world today,” Chris said outside, stamping her feet to keep warm.
“Two hundred thousand new cases a year.”
“But only a few in the U.S., and most of those are immigrants from Mexico,” said Chris. “Hey! Get this! The only other creature on the planet that carries leprosy is an armadillo. You can catch leprosy from eating their meat.”
I envisioned the odd-looking creature, “hillbilly speed bumps,” in parts of the South. An armor-plated, semiblind insect eater, a remnant
left over from the dinosaur era.
Eddie scratched his head. “Hey, Chris, about those victims in Nevada? Did any of them visit Mexico recently?”
“We’ll ask. Look, Creech is the major operational center running Air Force drones overseas. Our attacks against Al Qaeda leadership, the Taliban, Somalia . . . the boys and girls who control those drones do it from Creech.”
“That doesn’t sound like coincidence.”
She nodded. “Couple of drone pilots came into the base hospital. Then a mechanic and a pilot’s girlfriend. All deteriorating fast. The docs thought at first they suffered from some crazy fasciitis . . .”
“Flesh-eating bacteria,” Eddie said, referring to the staph infections that could kill in a day, bacteria that got into open cuts then traveled through the fat layers connecting cells. The microbe had started out as fairly innocent, I knew. It caused nothing more serious than pimples or boils. Penicillin killed it. But in the 1950s, a new strain appeared. Its toxins caused tissue to deteriorate, and it wiped out red blood cells. That penicillin-resistant strain killed by brain abscess. It could enter the body through the tiniest cut, then spread so fast it could kill a healthy person—in extreme cases—in a day.
Fasciitis was the nightmare hospital infection. You could pick it up in an ER, but unfortunate victims have also contracted it after swimming in the ocean, or falling on a dance floor. Some survivors lived only because doctors amputated their limbs to stop the spread of the infection.
I said, “But you don’t get fasciitis in groups either.”
“I know. I’m just telling you what doctors initially thought. An ambulance was set to transport victims to Vegas. Better facilities there. But then two more people came down with it. Civilians in Galilee. Then another airman.”
“Did they all get moved to Vegas?”
She shook her head. “RDS,” she said, shorthand for rapidly developing situation. “At that point, judgment call. The base commander called D.C. No one knew if we had something contagious. The idea of bringing seven possible high-infection cases into a major metropolitan area didn’t work, and Vegas doesn’t have level four wards.”
“Montana’s got one in Missoula,” I said, remembering that federal dollars built a unit at Saint Patrick Hospital there, in case staffers from the Rocky Mountain Lab in Hamilton ever came down with the deadly diseases they worked with, like Ebola.
Chris nodded. “Missoula was the call. But then more patients started coming in, and we found others in the barracks. Missoula can handle four. We had more. At that point it was clear that we might be under attack. That’s why, when you called from Africa, the committee was already in session, trying to figure out what to do.”
“Under attack by whom?” I asked.
Chris looked miserable. “No one knows.”
“All the victims are still at Creech?”
“We modified the base hospital.” She nodded. “Rapid response team from Missoula flew in. FBI out of Vegas. Normal patients moved to an upper floor. The base closed to the public, personnel confined to quarters, Galilee sealed off. Only thirty people live there.”
Why is the blood work taking so long to come back?
Right now I’d keep exploring the one solid clue we had, which was: Whatever microbe we face contains leprosy DNA. So back to the thumb drive.
“Eddie, you said leprosy numbers fell in Europe in the 1600s, then shot up. What accounts for the initial drop?”
Chris suggested, “Could the contagion have evolved? A thousand years ago syphilis killed in months. Now, it takes twenty years if untreated. It evolved so human hosts could live longer. You think we’re seeing that here, Colonel?”
“No. Because leprosy never evolved,” I read. “An NYU team compared original strains with modern ones. Leprosy today is exactly the same as twelve hundred years ago.”
“Then what the hell do we have here? Mutant? Made? Or maybe it’s finally evolved.”
I spotted a black Chevy coming down the road from the direction of the base hospital. My heartbeat sped up. Outside, Chris answered another call and listened and her face tightened and I saw fear in the way she straightened up. She did not want me to hear whatever she was saying.
We’re infected.
But she was back in my ear. “Colonel, you two are clean.”
I started to relax. She added, “You’ll wear a mask in flight, take one last blood test in the air. That will be over twenty-four hours since exposure. If you’re good then, you can mix with other people. But we’re not waiting. I’m coming aboard. We’re taking off. Now.”
She had guts, I had to say that much. I thought about the fright on her face just before she got the news about me and Eddie. For an instant she’d looked like she cared about us. But I wasn’t going to be fooled twice. She’d been concerned for herself, probably, since she was going to fly with us.
I don’t give people two chances.
Then, while we flew, the news got worse.
—
As the jet crossed Tennessee, we learned—CDC confirmed—that the blood samples Eddie and I had taken from Somalia matched the organism out West. As we reached the Mississippi River, I was sleeping, exhausted after being awake for more than thirty hours. Eddie woke me to take a last blood sample. I gazed out as the hypo pricked me. After hunting diseases for years, I’d come to regard the atmosphere as filled with invisible pathways for contagion, plane routes, that instantly link places that centuries ago required months to reach. Now an outbreak in Guinea can reach Kansas in a day.
Below, the gritty urban centers of the East had dropped away, fields replaced streets, mountains replaced fields, and forests rose up and fell and finally the jet was landing in a Nevada valley. I saw dun-colored landscape. Sheer escarpments in the distance. I saw a two-lane highway devoid of traffic except for a military convoy converging on the base. Creech was a sprawling boxcar shape, inside of which the lone runway and its taxi lanes formed a gigantic cross from the air. I looked down on living quarters, administrative building, and hangars. Indian Springs—nearest big town—lay twenty miles off. Galilee was a mere dot a few miles from the base, and the town had a circle of vehicles surrounding it. Those would be quarantine troops.
As we got lower, I was surprised to spot a small crowd outside the gate, and dozens of cars and campers parked off the road in no particular configuration, and lower still, I saw the hand-painted protest signs, some so large they required two people to hold them up. Words flashed past as we landed.
DRONES KILL INNOCENT WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
DRONES MAKE ENEMIES.
GROUND THE DRONES OR REAP THE WHIRLWIND.
“You’re allowing civilian protestors to stay this close?” I asked, shocked.
Chris looked unhappy. “Moving them would have required a court order, explanations, and it would have replaced them with state police to block the road. Either way, civilians there. So we let it lie. They think the troops surrounding the base are on a drill,” she said.
Eddie asked, “Do prevailing winds move from inside the base toward the protestors?”
“Based on what you told us from Somalia, there was no spread due to wind.”
“Do the protestors know about the Galilee quarantine?”
“If they do,” said Chris. “They think it’s part of the drill, but sooner or later we’ll see YouTube videos.”
She sat two rows back, alone, wearing a Moldex HEPA surgical mask over her nose and mouth, just in case. But based on timelines, we were clean.
“None of the soldiers I see are in biosuits,” I said.
Her eyes scrunched into an expression that made her look fourteen, and worried. “Suits on the way. Personnel in the hospital and around Galilee have them. But we need more.”
Eddie said, “I have a feeling we’ll need a lot more than just suits. This whole thing is about to blow.”
In the United States, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids domestic counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military. Accordingly, we were met by two FBI agents from the Vegas Anti-Terror Rapid Deployment Team in a black Chevy. Dome light pulsing, we turned off the run-up area, and passed a lone parked drone baking in the sun, looking like a spindly, miniature 747. Domed cockpit shape. V-shaped fins in back, and propellers. No windows. It seemed small, toy-like, harmless. Then again, a microbe is small, too.
The base seemed deserted, but I knew it was filled with personnel locked in barracks, who’d watched us come in.
I felt Chris’s thigh against mine in the back of the vehicle. She pulled it away.
Special Agent Manny Vargas drove, and Special Agent Carrie LeHavre did the talking. She’d been ordered to hold nothing back. Both agents wore matching field clothes, neat T-shirts with the FBI logo in gold, khaki trousers, and surgical masks. Vargas was dark, short, moved crisply, and wore wire glasses. His fingernails on the wheel were slightly bitten. LeHarve was slim and shag blond and wore small pink pearl earrings and matching gloss. She handed me a zip-up folio, which, I saw, contained two dozen photos.
“Officers usually fly the drones in two-man teams. The top photo there, sir, those two men fell ill first; then a tech sergeant. Then people in town.”
In the shot, the officers wore olive drab zip-up flight suits and sat in adjoining, comfortable-looking brown leather high-backed chairs, flight displays before them, video screen above, whitish control board at knee level, toggle sticks for steering drones in between.
“Do the officers know the victims in town?”
“Captain Reyes’s girlfriend is sick. So yes.”
“Have the officers visited Galilee recently, or have townspeople been on the base?”
A sigh. “There’s a bar in Galilee where a lot of personnel hang out, especially on Friday nights. Flip side, five residents of Galilee work on base. Two carpenters. An electrician. And a couple of computer techs.”
