by Jon Land
The translator, Jimenez assumed, as he watched the ensign step right up to the glass, waiting for the intelligence officer to nod before beginning.
“What’s your name?” the ensign asked the man behind the glass in Arabic.
The man on the other side of the glass swallowed hard, Jimenez being fluent enough in Arabic to not need to listen to the ensign’s translation into English. “Masul.”
“And this is your wife and child, Masul?”
The man nodded.
“And the name of your village?”
Another swallow, Masul seeming to struggle through the motion this time. “El Mady.”
“What happened in El Mady?”
“It all started with her, when she came.”
“Who?”
“The little girl, a refugee, we thought.”
Jimenez felt his insides seize up. His heart skipped a beat.
“Describe this little girl,” Jimenez heard the translator say in Arabic.
“She was blind. Nobody knew where she came from. My son spotted her,” Masul said, trying to cant his body to gaze back toward the boy, but the confines of the hospital bed wouldn’t let him. “He said he saw her wandering through the village, but we couldn’t find her. Then someone else spotted her too. And someone else. We all looked for her, believing her to be an orphan from a nearby besieged village, but she was nowhere to be found.” Masul’s eyes bulged. He looked suddenly terrified. “Our village was peaceful! We had done what we needed to do, made our deal with the devil. But still she came. Still, she … A demon, that’s what she was, a demon sent by the devil to punish us, even though we’d done nothing wrong!”
Masul’s voice choked up. He suddenly seemed to be short of breath, taking a few moments to settle himself.
“And then Assawi returned from Lebanon,” the man continued.
Red stepped up close to the ensign, bristling as he pointed toward Masul. “Did he say Assawi? Hanan Assawi?”
The man on other side of the glass must’ve heard Red because he nodded. “Yes, Hanan Assawi.”
“Operational commander of the New Islamic Front. One of al-Qadir’s most trusted lieutenants,” the intelligence officer said, addressing Red before returning his attention to the ensign. “Ask him about Lebanon.”
The ensign did, Jimenez listening to him translate Masul’s answer this time. “He says he doesn’t know what Assawi was doing there. He said it was a mission for the Front, as he calls it. He said the Front chose their village as one of their bases, moved personnel in and displaced residents from their homes. Those who protested, he says, were beheaded or tortured. The rest, like him, became virtual slaves.”
“Ask him what happened when Assawi returned,” Red interjected.
Again, the ensign waited for the answer and then translated, panic spreading over Masul’s expression, as his words moved a few beats ahead of the translated portion. “He says Assawi wasn’t right when he returned, that he seemed ill and angry, more angry than usual. His eyes were red and he was bleeding from the nose, and looked very pale and sick. Masul says he saw him at the river, where Assawi came to collect his clothes the women of the village were washing for him. Then Masul noticed a figure standing on the other side of the river. It was that little girl they’d been looking for, he says, just standing there and watching. She looked at him, before turning to Assawi, and Masul says he felt a chill like nothing he’d ever felt before. He says it left him shaking from cold in the blazing hot sun. Assawi kept looking at her, and Masul says he could tell she was staring back at him. Then Assawi waded into the shallows, out toward her on the other side.
“The little girl was standing there, staring at him,” the ensign continued, translating the words as quickly as he could, “no longer acknowledging anyone else. And he kept walking toward her through the water. Assawi’s nose was dripping blood. Masul says he remembers him wiping it with his sleeve; the flecks of it he cast into the air looked like mist. And then Assawi went under and never came back up. Masul said he didn’t dive in to rescue him because he can’t swim, but others plunged into the water and came up empty. They couldn’t find his body, and by the time they gave up, the little girl was gone.”
“Son of a bitch must’ve brought the infection back with him from the facility in Lebanon,” Admiral Darby said, shaking his head. “They were concocting God knows what there, right under our goddamn noses. And whatever it is, Assawi must’ve contaminated this town of El Mady with it.”
“Others in the village took sick soon after,” Jimenez listened to Masul continue. “And then the sick got sicker and sicker. They began to bleed from everywhere, and then their skin turned gray, hardened to feel more like wood. And when the skin that felt like wood was gone, they turned into monsters that killed and killed and killed, and the ones they killed became like them, and, and—”
The man’s voice dissolved into sobs that left his face soaked with tears, choking up. By that point, Jimenez’s mind was back in Brazil, where he’d encountered the little blind girl himself.
“Your God is not here.”
Spoken as if she knew those were virtually the same words spoken to him years before in Nigeria by Cambridge.
Because she had, she had known.
“Tell me more about the little girl,” Jimenez said in Arabic, no longer able to contain himself, approaching the glass.
Both Red and the intelligence officer swung his way, but didn’t intervene.
“We had never seen her before,” Masul responded. “We don’t know where she came from. Then she went away. After Assawi drowned, and our people began taking sick, she went away, and we never saw her again. I took my family and fled at the first sign, never able to get the little girl’s stare out of my mind. She seemed to see right through me, even though she was blind.”
“We need to communicate this to the WHO team in the field,” Red said to Admiral Darby. “This village is where the spread began. It started with Assawi.”
“I’m not sending civilians anywhere without protection,” Darby told him. “I’ve got three SEAL units prepping now.”
“How long before they can reach western Iraq, to whatever’s left of El Mady?”
“Six hours, once the Team Six commander is aboard this ship.”
The admiral’s assistant hurried over and whispered something in his ear.
“Make that six hours period,” Darby announced. “He just landed.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Northern Israel
While awaiting the all clear for transport to Iraq from the Israeli military base where she was currently hunkered down, Vicky busied herself with what the latest report from the George H. W. Bush added to the picture she was already forming. Specifically, the fact that the infected facility in southern Lebanon, by all indications, had been set up and operated by someone fronting a ruthless terrorist operation. Clearly they’d been developing something that went horribly wrong, the infection just beginning to spread when one of the terrorist group’s commanders paid a visit to the facility. He’d brought what Neal Van Royce had called Medusa back with him to a village in western Iraq.
The infected man had, by all accounts, drowned himself in the river that supplied the village with its water. Mere days later, the entire village was infected.
Water …
Vicky had already turned her attention to the means by which the pathogen spread, a task complicated by the apparent random assemblage of afflicted zones. And the notion of water as the potential means by which Medusa was spreading led to a series of calls, one after another, with civil engineers across the Middle East. As a result, a map of the region displayed on her laptop screen became a smorgasbord of random pinpricks, with no discernible linkages, at least not aboveground.
According to the various experts made available to her by governments throughout the region, there were two major types of aquifers supplying the vast majority of the Middle East’s water supply. Along river valleys and beneath the plai
ns, there were shallow alluvial aquifers. These were generally unconfined, small in area, and had water tables that responded rapidly to local precipitation conditions, as was the case in the village of El Mady. The second type were deep rock aquifers of sedimentary origin, usually sandstone and limestone, containing water supplies that could be thousands of years old and extended over thousands of square miles.
Studying the map that had resulted from her collating all the data she’d accumulated from nine different water supply experts, Vicky could see that the Harh el Kabir aquifer supplied water to southern Lebanon, where the former bio-weapons facility had been located. The village in Jordan she visited first got its water from the Bazalt-Azraq aquifer, while the doomed village in Egypt’s north Sinai was supplied by the Great Western aquifer. But these three aquifers were actually unified by a deeper underground alluvial pool so far beneath the surface that its very existence had remained under dispute, until the Saudis laid out plans to base a large-scale, deep sandstone aquifer development project on its huge untapped resources.
So if Medusa was a waterborne pathogen, as opposed to air, the mish-mash of dots on Vicky’s screen, representing infected areas, made perfect sense. Although she’d never encountered one on this level, there were ample precedents to support the possibility; typhoid, for example, or dysentery. There were even theories that the bubonic plague had spread that way, after the bodies of rats infected with the pestilence were dumped in the rivers.
Overwhelmed and frightened by the vast array of material she’d collected, Vicky imagined the pathogen feeding off the molecules of standard H2O to divide and replicate on the order of something like ten parts per million. That meant a single drop was capable of infecting every single person exposed to a defined water source.
Vicky hadn’t had the opportunity to test the water supplies in any of the sites she’d visited so far. And that made a visit to El Mady, where Medusa had first migrated from its origins in southern Lebanon, all the more vital. She needed to test the water samples there. She needed to compare what she found in them to the meager data she’d managed to accumulate on Medusa from her analysis of the tissue harvested from the two patients she’d examined up close and personal.
Toward that end, Vicky was waiting for the Israeli officer in direct communication with the George H. W. Bush to give her the word it was time to depart for Iraq. She’d been told a protective force was being assembled for her and the CDC team she’d be rendezvousing with at a base in Turkey, before moving on to the virtual wasteland controlled almost in total by Mohammed al-Qadir and his New Islamic Front.
Vicky heard a knock on the door, but didn’t register it, until the door opened and an Israeli officer poked his head in.
“It’s time,” he said. “We have the Go.”
SIXTY-SIX
Western Iraq
Mohammed al-Qadir walked the desert grounds layered over the New Islamic Front headquarters that had been serving as his base of operations, feeling the scorching sun bake his skin. He found something as simple as fresh air to be incredibly refreshing, given the subterranean hideout in which the recirculated air felt stale and dry. Climate controls could only do so much, and the air always felt damp and spoiled.
He was expecting a call any moment on the satellite phone tucked inside an inner pocket of his robes, currently billowing in the breeze. That breeze carried something else with it, not a smell so much as a feeling he couldn’t describe in rational terms. As if something was happening in the world around him and this was residue of that. Because …
Al-Qadir’s mind drifted briefly, then snapped back in tune.
Because something was coming.
Something that was beyond even his control, and yet capable of helping him fulfill his vision. So many others before him had sought this same destiny, only to fail, often miserably. Not him. Al-Qadir had realized the movement he’d unleashed had taken on a very real life of its own, after dispatching two of his most trusted lieutenants to look into the progress being made at the facility in southern Lebanon. The report they’d furnished had been routine, but not the fates they’d suffered in the wake of issuing it.
By all accounts, they’d taken sick around the same time. All contact had been lost with the village of El Mady, where his commander Assawi was based, while he’d had the other transported to the Front base in Syria, still alive for the time being. That man had been transformed into something most would see as monstrous, but that al-Qadir saw as blessed. Because in that transformation, he realized, a pathogen far different from what he’d intended to release was now spreading through the Middle East. Maybe the air carried some vague hint of that pestilence and all the death it was destined to leave in its wake. Maybe that was what he was sensing.
Because something is coming.
As a boy, he’d witnessed the murder of his parents, at the hands of Soviet troops. They might have killed him as well, if he hadn’t had the sense of mind to hide under their blood-soaked, bullet-riddled bodies. He’d stayed there for hours, until he was found by officials inspecting the countryside after the series of Soviet raids had crushed the country’s spirit.
From that point, time became a blur. He’d just turned seven when he was taken to London to meet his new family, devout Catholics who’d tried to convert him to the ways of a different God, Jesus Christ. Going to church with them, squeezing their hands with a contented smile plastered over his face, was al-Qadir’s first experience with wearing the mask he ultimately became very adept at donning. He’d learned in those early years the importance of appearances and how easy it was to manipulate the opinions of others.
He’d let them baptize him, made himself flourish in a school taught by priests and nuns. Then, years later, he’d burned down a church with his adoptive parents inside, among other worshippers to a false God. The Russian soldier who had raped his mother before killing her, after all, had worn a crucifix dangling from a chain round his neck. For years, until the day he watched that church burn, al-Qadir had visualized himself strangling that soldier with his own chain.
Strange that he honestly couldn’t remember his Christian name from those days, any more than he could remember the Halloween costumes he’d worn as a child. The name too was nothing more than a costume, to be discarded and forgotten when the time was right. He’d entered the army and then Special Air Service under his real name, though he thought of that version of himself as “Cambridge,” the name he used in missions.
Nigeria was the tipping point. Nigeria was when he’d tucked all the costumes away in a metaphorical closet to become the man he’d always been meant to be. He wasn’t sure how or when he’d actually realized it. Something about the oddities surrounding a meteor strike that apparently wasn’t, all the mumbo jumbo Professor Jimenez kept spouting about the unprecedented nature of what they were facing. Tribes indigenous to the area had been wiped out by whatever carved a crater out of the jungle. Animal carcasses sent floating down the rivers, birds falling out of the sky, fish washing up on shore.
To this day, al-Qadir still didn’t fully comprehend the role being bitten by a snake had played in all this. He knew only that a fever had followed for days, the bite giving way to a festering sore that smelled of something worse than death. In his feverish state, he thought he felt something different about his blood, about the way it coursed through his veins. Even after the fever had passed, though, he continued to feel different than he ever had before, as if the man he’d been up until then was gone, and someone else had taken his place. And then fate had delivered unto al-Qadir the man who would become his partner in an effort to remake the world, each man with their own motives that could best be achieved mutually, the two of them serving each other’s ends.
“Cambridge” had been nothing more than another costume, to be shed with all the others. So al-Qadir felt nothing when he killed the SAS troops with whom he served, because they were only an extension of the same costume. The Maitatsine rebels, who’d eventually evolv
e into Boko Haram, had helped open the door that was always destined to someday be before him, and the samples and notebook he’d taken from Jimenez held the means to realize his vision for the future.
But something had gone wrong or, more accurately, right.
And now something was coming.
The satellite phone rang and al-Qadir jerked it from his robes, the voice on the other end of the line coming in crystal clear without the layers of shale and limestone to impede it.
“God has smiled on us,” the voice reported. “‘For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.’”
His mention of serpents made al-Qadir think of the snake biting him at the outset of his becoming. The wound had festered for months, welcomed for the symbol of the great awakening he had experienced. That bite had left its permanent mark on him that remained to this day, never understood until these recent events had made al-Qadir see it as the harbinger it must’ve been, assuring his place in the new world that was dawning.
“The serpents have been unleashed by our hands with His guidance,” the voice on the other end of the line continued. “The Middle East will soon be overrun, the entire world to follow. Just as we hoped from the beginning.”
“We have His intervention and stern hand to thank for this,” al-Qadir told him, “not our own measly efforts which had been intended to produce something else entirely.”
“But we never knew what those samples from Nigeria were really going to produce, did we? All the time we thought we were in control, doing God’s true work, when we were no more than thoughtless vessels doing His bidding instead. And right now He bids us to impede any efforts undertaken by the World Health Organization to thwart our intentions. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Leave the World Health Organization to me,” al-Qadir said, grasping his arm on the side where he’d been bitten all those years ago.
