by Jon Land
“A Cuban,” Max noted. “I’m impressed, sir.”
Darby puffed away. “Maybe I’ll share one with you, when we got cause to celebrate something, other than the bullshit I’m not buying one little bit. I look into your eyes, you know what I see? A fuckload you’re not telling me. I’d like to kick your ass into the Mediterranean and dangle a life preserver on a fishing line over you until you smarten up. But I can’t afford to see you drown, not with the world catching fire and us needing every man who can wield a hose. And the fact is nobody in J-SOC,” he continued, referring to the Joint Special Operations Command, “can wield one as well as you. I don’t know how you pull your ass out of the shit you do, but I do know I can’t afford to lose a man I trust to get the job done more than I’ve ever trusted anyone in combat before. The whole Middle East is soaked in gasoline and this maniac Mohammed al-Qadir, together with his New Islamic Front cutthroats and psychopaths, is holding the match.” Darby regarded Max from as far back as his chair would allow. “How much you know about the fuckwad?”
“I know he’s a fuckwad, sir.”
“Stop playing with me, son.”
“I’ve seen the intel, Admiral.”
“How much?”
“All of it. Man makes bin Laden look like a choir boy and the head of ISIS al-Baghdadi like the man playing the piano.”
Darby’s eyes flashed like LED lights, as if he was determining how to proceed. “You listen up good to me, son, because I’m going to tell you only once how we’re going to play this. All communications are recorded, but funny thing, Commander. We had tech issues around the time you were in the air. Recording equipment went down for exactly three minutes. You hearing me here?”
“I am, sir.”
“So there’s no record of any mission abort or recall, no record of anything other than your original go order from stage point Charlie when your Black Hawks took to the air. We got nothing but radio silence, followed by marines, embassy personnel, and the ambassador herself, who would’ve otherwise been turned into terrorist bumper stickers coming home safe and sound. That’s the way it will be from this point forward. You copy?”
“Yes, sir.”
Darby rose stiffly. “Then stay frosty and be ready for the next call to arms, which you can expect soon,” he said and blew cigar smoke in Max’s face. “Close as you’ll come to smoking one today, son.”
Max stepped back and saluted.
Darby noticed the red, raw impressionistic design etched across his palm. “Looks like your hand got nicked in that firefight,” he said, after returning the salute.
Max tucked the hand away, as if embarrassed. “Just a birthmark, sir.”
“Glad to hear that, ’cause I can’t imagine getting a tattoo there. But right now you got the word trouble tattooed on your forehead. That means you’re going to take some forced leave.”
“For how long, sir?” Max asked.
“Indefinitely, son. Until the dust settles.”
Max stiffened, but remained silent. His hand with the strange birthmark was starting to ache now. It had always bothered him occasionally, when the adrenaline was pumping, but never anything like this.
“At least, that’s what we’ll call it, so Washington can pull its collective thumb out of its collective ass. We’ll call it indefinite ’cause that way I can recall you anytime I want. Like next week, tomorrow, or twenty minutes from now. We clear?”
Max stood before him, hoping the admiral wouldn’t notice the grimace of pain stretched across his features, even as the hand suddenly felt wet. He glanced down and saw the smear of blood coating his palm, thickening as he watched, and tightened his hand into a fist, hoping the admiral wouldn’t notice that either.
“Is that clear, son?”
“Clear, sir,” Max said.
“Then get your ass out of here before I change my mind and chew it off.”
Max saluted, droplets of blood trailing him all the way to the door.
* * *
Once in the hall he sopped up the blood in his handkerchief, then watched a fresh pool of red originating from the outlines of his birthmark’s impression. He remembered now how it had happened at times when he was a boy, how his father had wrapped it in silence while his mother looked on with fear filling her eyes, muttering quiet prayers and crossing herself over and over again. He’d never asked her why she was scared, and then the hand had stopped bleeding.
But now the bleeding was back, worse than ever, the pain stronger than ever, and he needed to finally pay a visit to the only person who might be able to tell him why.
THIRTEEN
George H. W. Bush
Moments after Max closed the door to Darby’s office behind him, the door leading into the admiral’s conference room opened and a man dressed in a dark suit and dress shirt without a tie glided through it, as if he were floating. The thin lighting was murky at best, well suited to his features that seemed to shift each time a different tone of light struck him, like he was liquid instead of solid. His skin was baby smooth and shiny, his face a translucent mask that glowed when the light struck him directly. Snug and form-fitting to account for why the man never smiled, or flashed anything but a blank expression at all.
“I don’t like you, son,” the admiral told him, shaking the illusion off, “and I don’t like the way you operate.”
The figure stopped far enough away from Darby’s desk to remain cloaked in formlessness, more like a holographic version of himself that might switch off at any time. “You watch the same drone footage of what went down on those embassy grounds as I did?”
“Combat does strange things to a man.”
The man looked down, then up again. “How many men you figure your boy killed inside the embassy compound?”
“I lost count.”
“And how much does that gun he stripped off its mount on the Black Hawk weigh?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Take a guess, Admiral.”
“Heavy.”
“And with the ammo pack?”
“Heavier. How’s that?”
Darby thought he saw the man smirk. “How’s this, Admiral? Max Borgia was seventeen when he enlisted.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s also not his real name.”
“And just how do you know that?”
“Let’s say I’ve been following this SEAL they call the Pope for a while now. Let’s say the fact that he scored the highest of any SEAL in BUD/S training history put him on my radar, and plenty that’s happened since has kept him there. Let’s say there are some oddities in his background that drew my attention.” The man studied the droplets of blood drying on the floor. “What he calls his birthmark, for example.”
“What else could it be?”
“What’s your security clearance, Admiral?”
“As high as yours, I imagine.”
“Don’t bet on that,” the man said. “And you’re not cleared to hear my theories on Max Borgia’s background and plenty more about him. Suffice it to say, I deemed him worthy of my department’s attention.”
“Want to give me some more details into that department?”
The man smirked. “Ask Langley.”
“I did. They said they’d get back to me.” Darby leaned forward. “You’re on this ship because of Max Borgia, aren’t you?”
“And you should be thanking me for that,” the man said, half winking. “After all, Max Borgia’s only serving in this man’s Navy today, because I allowed him to stay in it.”
“Then let me make something as absolutely clear as I can: This shit stops now. So whatever it is you’re slinging about Max Borgia won’t stick to these walls.” The admiral leaned forward, his chair creaking again. “You’re a ghost, Agent Man, about as CIA as my left nut. Max Borgia is under my command. That makes me his daddy, his granddaddy, and his mama all rolled into one. Know what, Agent Man? I don’t know who you are or what house you’re really haunting, but whatever you got on y
our mind, maybe you should take it up with J-SOC directly. They got an eight hundred number I can give you.”
The man started toward the door through which Max had just left. Then he stopped, looking back one last time at Darby and smirking again like a man hiding a winning lottery ticket in his wallet.
“You saw what he did at the embassy, Admiral, you saw the look in his eyes.”
“I saw what he did, and that’s all I needed to see.”
Darby thought the man might’ve flirted with a smile. “Then you missed the best part.”
“And what’s that, Casper?”
This time the smile broke through. “He enjoyed it.”
Darby pressed his cigar out in an ashtray. “Right now I’m thinking seriously of kicking you off my ship.”
“No need, Admiral, because I’m heading out now,” the man said.
“Anywhere special?”
“The Brazilian rainforest. And if I’m headed there, you can count on it being special indeed.”
FOURTEEN
London, England
“I know how difficult this must be for you,” Dr. Neal Van Royce, assistant director of the World Health Organization for Field Operations, said to Vicky, after the plane he’d dispatched to Atlanta had landed in London.
Vicky shrugged off his comment. “What can you tell me about what we’re facing?”
“Let’s just say the reported symptoms defy explanation.”
“That would explain the radio silence,” Vicky told him, brushing her long hair from her face only to have the warm breeze blow it right back. “Why no one’s uttering a word through the normal channels I checked en route.”
Van Royce, a short portly man with more mustache hair than the thin strands riding his scalp, stopped and regarded her closer. “Speaking of words, you’re so good to have come all this way. After all you’ve been through…” He shook his head. “What a horrible experience. I just can’t imagine.”
“Neither can I, sometimes. Still. Likely forever.”
She started to grope for more words, then gave up the effort. Thomas’s funeral had been the worst day of her life for a myriad of reasons. As a virologist specializing in epidemiology, her training and experience had taught her that life itself was something that lay within her control. Helping to resolve a potential epidemic or pandemic, at least stopping it in its tracks, was among the most vital and worthy acts any person could perform. But the tragedy had left her feeling powerless, nothing at all within her control after watching the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with die right in front of her.
The call from Van Royce at the reception following the funeral, she supposed, had saved her. The mission and mystery he’d alluded to instantly restored her purpose and, more, sense of self that the tragedy had torn away. The accident had stolen two lives, not one: her fiancé’s actual one and hers, at least figuratively. The pain became a great sucking wound vacuuming up her life and hope. How ironic that a person charged with saving the lives of millions felt helpless to preserve her own.
Today, though, found her back in the field, the only place she could at least try to leave her own tragedy behind. Vicky had risen to become one of the World Health Organization’s most promising experts in potential pandemics, specializing in the Middle East. The choice, and assignment, had been a natural outgrowth of her fluency in Arabic, thanks to being raised by a Lebanese nanny after her mother’s death in childbirth. A woman whose last name she’d ultimately taken as an adult to avoid any connection with the father she so despised. She had been fully bilingual for as long as she could remember, holding tightly to her adopted language until she went away to college. Even in the WHO, experts in her field who spoke Arabic were rare and that helped speed her ascent through the ranks there after a stint with the CDC. It also meant being dispatched to the Middle East on multiple occasions, often to war zones with little or no security to protect her and her mobile team.
The WHO had arranged for a car, a large SUV, to be waiting for them with a driver when they landed in Amman, prepacked with all the equipment they may, or may not, need. Remote villages tended to have very little in terms of modern diagnostic capabilities. They had caught a break, though, with the fact that this particular village boasted a working clinic operated by Doctors Without Borders. Still, better to be safe than sorry, and the SUV contained blood and DNA analyzers, along with a collapsible X-ray machine and portable MRI that was almost as accurate as the full-scale model.
The Jordanian village of Amalla, set against the foot of the Abarim mountain range, was, typically, steeped in poverty. Dominated by cheap clapboard shacks squeezed up against each other, nestled about a patchwork of ruddy streets and parched land. More shacks had been added in scattershot fashion to accommodate any number of Iraqi and Syrian refugees, and that kind of overcrowding was a recipe for disaster, providing the easiest route for a potential pathogen to spread.
“I expected a formal briefing from headquarters, while we were in the air from London,” she told Van Royce.
“That would’ve meant using the Internet and we’re dark on this. I told you that.”
“Yes, you did. But not why. Still.”
Van Royce’s expression was flat and grim. “That you need to see for yourself.”
FIFTEEN
Amalla, Jordan
Only a single doctor, Van Royce explained, remained at the Amalla clinic, the other personnel from the Doctors Without Borders organization having fled when it became clear they might be dealing with something far beyond both their capabilities and intentions when they volunteered to serve the organization. That doctor’s reporting had become increasingly cryptic and scattershot, and then, perhaps half a day before, had stopped entirely.
“So we can’t even be sure that the one doctor is still there,” Van Royce told her.
“Or,” Vicky offered, the grimness of her tone completing the thought for her.
Van Royce chose to ignore her insinuation. “Fortunately,” he said instead, “the doctor who remained on site has some experience in the field of potential pathogens. That means he should be familiar with the proper procedures to follow, enacting a protocol intended to lessen the ability of the potential pathogen to spread outside this limited, isolated area.”
That was the one positive here, since the WHO was normally not cast in the role of first responders. That task was normally left to local authorities, even in the African subcontinent where disease so flourished. So many potential pathogens owed their origins to issues of sanitation. Unclean water, raw sewage, insect-riddled crops. Ebola, for example, owed the vast bulk of its spread to the primitive way corpses were handled and readied for burial.
The regional clinic erected by Doctors Without Borders in Amalla was a simple one-story concrete slab with horizontal windows mounted high to avoid injury to patients in the event the glass was shattered by a bomb blast nearby. Dr. Pierre Robelais was smoking a cigarette outside when Vicky and Van Royce pulled up in the SUV, the sight of a medical professional in full scrubs greeted by both of them with great relief, since they’d both feared the worst.
“Forgoing protective gear?” Van Royce asked Robelais, shifting about in his own bulky suit, after introductions had been exchanged.
Robelais, a tall, gaunt man with a thick black beard, shrugged. “I had close contact with the first six patients well before we began to suspect the involvement of a pathogen. In this part of the world, we’re used to rolling the dice.”
“You said the first six patients,” Vicky noted.
“We’ve had eight more cases, fourteen in all now.” He flicked his cigarette aside. “Let me show you.”
* * *
The first thing Vicky noticed upon entering the bunker-like clinic in full biohazard gear alongside Van Royce were beds squeezed into makeshift cubicles divided by what looked like bedsheets strung across clotheslines in what had been a waiting room.
“These are the most recent eight patients,” Robelais
explained. “We’ve divided the other six among the four examination rooms and kept only the lab free.”
“What about support personnel?” Van Royce wondered.
“They left with the other two doctors rotating in and out of here. Not what they signed up for, I believe is how they put it. Right now I’ve got three volunteers, a trio of women who live in the village. Three’s all I can handle because that’s all the hazmat suits I had on hand.”
“We have an extra one we can give you,” Vicky told him.
“Too late for that.”
“Procedure, Doctor. I’ll go out to the car and get it for you.”
* * *
While Robelais donned his biohazard suit, Vicky absorbed more of the scene, struck by what she heard:
Coughing, sneezing, retching, moaning, vomiting …
The most dangerous pandemics threatening the world were remarkably similar from a symptomatic standpoint. Distinctions, of course, were always present but almost invariably the most lethal pathogens produced the same response in the body.
“I’d like to start with the first recorded patient,” Vicky told Robelais, when he reappeared wearing the protective suit. “Establish a symptomatic baseline for what we’re looking at.”
“Right this way, then,” he said in French-accented English, leading her down the hall to the first room on the right. “The first patient we treated is in here.”
* * *
Vicky had examined almost as many cadavers as she had infected living victims, and her first impression of what greeted her in the exam room was that the victim was a combination of the two. Her initial, visual examination, something she relied on intuitively far more than most in her field, was of a corpse with the first signs of rigor mortis beginning to set in.
Before she proceeded any further, Vicky jogged her phone to the audio record function and tested the levels to make sure no observation, no matter how casual, was lost. Then she checked the Apple Watch Thomas had given her that she’d barely taken off since the accident, in order to note the time for the record. Sometimes in her field, the simplest clue proved the most important, and if that clue were to be casually discarded, both valuable time and more lives could be lost.
