Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller

by Bobby Adair

  Eventually the truck arrived at another dust-covered road. The ride became smoother, and the truck moved faster. The tallest tip of Mt. Elgon started to glow pink in the early sun. They had to be east of the mountain then, back in Kenya, and morning was coming.

  Salim watched the mountain change as washes of morning color crept down the slopes. He thought of lava pouring out of the extinct volcano. The country on both sides of the road emerged from blackness, and Salim saw farm after farm after farm growing all manner of crops he couldn’t identify. In many ways, it reminded him of eastern Colorado with its rolling hills and plains covered with farms, pastures, and majestic mountains rising in the west.

  It wasn’t until he was shaken awake that he realized exhaustion had gotten the better of him, and he’d dozed off.

  “Wake up, brother. You can sleep on the plane.”

  “The plane?” Salim asked, realizing the truck’s engine was off. The truck was empty, and he could see his companions walking toward a dilapidated building.

  The Arab man pointed in the direction of the other men. “Follow them. You can wash off when you get inside. You’ll get new clothes.”

  “The plane?” Salim asked, realizing only then that his bag, his passport, and his billfold were gone.

  The man guessed the question. “Your things are inside.”

  Salim slowly stood, feeling the physical abuse he’d put himself through over the past days.

  “Hurry. Your plane leaves in thirty minutes.”

  “Okay,” Salim jumped down off the bed of the truck, wobbled on his knees, and followed the others toward the shabby building.

  Looking around in the dawn, it occurred to him that he hadn’t slept that long. Mt. Elgon still stood tall off toward the west. The surrounding land was mostly flat farmland with the exception of the rural airport and a few cobbled-together municipal buildings. A runway stretched off in two directions. A commuter plane sat on the tarmac, looking large enough to hold everyone in the truck and maybe a few more.

  Besides the building the men were being herded toward, only one other small building, with an array of oddly-shaped antennae on the roof, stood on the immediate property. A curved wall of square window panes faced the runway. It had to be the terminal.

  Perhaps this was the first real step on the way home to Denver.

  Once inside the building, Salim guessed it had to be a hanger, built to house two or three small private planes, which were absent. At one end, the other men from the truck were either naked and washing themselves with soap and a garden hose, or stripping and waiting their turn.

  Salim took his place in line, waiting as men hurried through their cleaning in front of him. Toward the far end of the hangar, a few tables with pants and shirts in various colors in Western styles lay on the table. On the floor leaning against a wall he spied his travel bag.

  It was the first thing he had to feel good about in days.

  Exactly thirty minutes after Salim rolled himself out of the bed of the truck, the commuter plane taxied down the runway and climbed into the thin Kenyan air. Some in the passenger cabin seemed to know each other and hushed conversations ensued. Salim contented himself to watch the houses and trees below shrink and merge into colored patterns with the other features on the ground.

  A man came up out of the rear of the plane, passing out bottles of water and food.

  Another man stood up at the front of the plane with a satchel he then handed to a guy on the first row. “Inside is an envelope with your name on it. Find your envelope and pass the bag to the next man. We will be landing in Nairobi in forty minutes. Some of you have flights leaving shortly after we arrive. You’ll find airline tickets and itineraries in your envelope with your information. You will also find credit cards in your name and cash in the currency of your country of origin. All of you have connecting flights and long layovers. You’ll each be traveling for most of the next two days.”

  The plane bounced through some turbulence and the speaker fell to the side, hitting roughly against the door. When he stood back up, embarrassed, he shrugged and smiled. A few of Salim’s compatriots chuckled softly. It was almost normal.

  The speaker straightened himself out and put his serious face back on. “While you are in each airport, walk around, learn what you can about the security, the layout, and look for weaknesses. Don’t write anything down that could be used as evidence to detain you. You each have a prepaid cell phone in your envelope. A phone number has been added to the contact list for someone called Mother. Mother will call you to give you instructions. If you need to call for questions, call Mother, but don’t make a habit of it. We know what your schedules are, so don’t worry if you find yourself coming to the end of your itinerary. We’ll contact you with instructions before that.”

  More turbulence but the speaker caught himself on a seat back and smiled confidently. “Otherwise, enjoy your Western lives. Eat at restaurants. Spend the money. Smile, just like holiday travelers. Talk with other passengers, get to know them. The hard part is behind you. From here forward, your main purpose is to fit back into the country you came from. Don’t spend any time worrying about when you will be called up for a mission. That day is far in the future.”

  Chapter 60

  Mitch spent the evening and the night in the hospital. His first impulse was to leave the doctors and aid workers there with their wounded man, pull some strings to get the Uganda People’s Defence Force in gear, and go back to the village that night. The more he thought about it, the more he came to believe whatever was going on up the road had to do with the Ebola outbreak. And as much as his intuition told him Ebola and terrorism were intersecting up that road, it was his task to find proof of that. He was a disgruntled, self-proclaimed embassy playboy, out to do his part in the War on Terror. The agency must have been taken by surprise to dump all of this in his lap.

  With his options waning, he stayed in the hospital and befriended the woman who’d been near him when her coworker was shot. The woman, a Dr. Mills from Tampa, Florida, was young, dark-haired, and athletic—exactly the kind of girl he’d try to bed. But that wasn’t why he’d cozied up to her. If terrorists were up that road to Kapchorwa fiddling with a way to weaponize Ebola, he’d need help from at least one doctor in putting those pieces together.

  The wounded guy died sometime around three a.m., putting the doctors into a frenzy of heated arguments and phone calls. Mitch—by then on a first-name basis with the survivors—stayed on the fringes and nudged them to go back. He tried convincing them that they needed to find out what was so important up that road that it needed to be protected.

  In the end, he won. Not completely, but enough. Dr. Mills and another doctor named Simmons agreed to go back with Mitch, provided the army went first and secured the village. On that particular point, Mitch had been assured by his boss that the UPDF was heading up that road in force at sunup.

  So after sleeping too few hours, and eating something from a food vendor on the street, Mitch loaded his two doctors into a truck, along with his two men from the day before, and four more armed contractors in another vehicle which took the lead.

  Six menacing, quiet black men with guns made the doctors feel more secure. Knowing the army had gone ahead several hours earlier helped a lot with that feeling.

  Chapter 61

  When they finally drove into Kapchorwa, Dr. Mills quietly shuddered, “My God.”

  Everyone else in the truck was silent as they drove around an armored vehicle parked in the road with a man standing up through a hole in its roof behind a machine gun. Soldiers were milling around or searching through the remains of burned houses.

  At the intersection of two dirt roads that was the center of the tiny town, three military vehicles were parked. Four men who appeared to be the officers in charge stood engaged in discussion. Mitch had the driver stop the car near them. He got out with Dr. Mills in tow, skillfully handling the introductions, making it clear that he was the American Cultural
Attaché from Kampala, here to find a missing American college student, and that the doctors were present to search for signs of an Ebola outbreak.

  Mitch then asked what had happened. The soldiers had only secured the town a half hour earlier, killing nine Arab gunmen in the process. Aside from the obvious—that the place had been systematically burned—no one knew what had transpired or why.

  With a clear warning to Mitch and the doctors that the army couldn’t be responsible for their safety, the army officers went back to their business.

  Mitch turned toward Dr. Mills, seeing past her that his hired gunmen were out of the cars, casually holding their weapons, ready for whatever might come. Mitch looked around at the blackened walls and collapsed roofs. The whole place smelled of ash and smoke. He coughed. “I don’t know where to start. Any ideas?”

  Dr. Mills was looking up a road that seemed to point toward Mt. Elgon’s peak before curving to the east a few hundred meters up. She pointed. “I think that’s the hospital. You can still see most of the word painted on the front wall.”

  Mitch looked. Indeed she was right. Several of the letters were obscured by black burns and smoke stains. “Are you thinking that if there was an outbreak here, we’d see some evidence of it in the hospital?”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Mills confirmed.

  Mitch had four of his men head up to the hospital to make sure it was secure. “Let’s give them a moment.” He turned to address Dr. Mills. “Once they get up there, we’ll drive the trucks over.”

  She nodded. “After yesterday, that sounds fine to me.”

  While they waited, Dr. Mills added, “If you can look past the destruction and forget about how many dead there must be—”

  Mitch looked at Dr. Mills, “What?”

  She was shaking her head. “I was going to say, it’s beautiful here, but it was a stupid thought. It was beautiful here. Look at the houses, the huts, the buildings. Somebody systematically burned this whole town.”

  Mitch looked back at the charred structures. He looked up the street to see his hired gunmen checking inside houses and behind walls as they went. They were careful with their lives.

  “I can’t imagine how many died.” Dr. Mills apparently couldn’t stop thinking about the death toll. “How many people lived here, do you know?”

  “A thousand, maybe, but most of them probably ran off in the fields and the forests before the fire. People aren’t as helpless as they seem sometimes, and uneducated doesn’t mean stupid. They can still see trouble and know how to get away from it.” Mitch squinted up the street. His men were at the hospital, and one was waving for them to come. “I don’t think we’ll find as many dead as the destruction suggests.”

  They got back into the trucks and slowly rolled up the dirt road toward the hospital.

  The smell of ash took on a different character as they passed what looked like a school: three rectangular buildings arranged around a central courtyard, dirt worn by the running feet of playing children. Through the broken out windows, Mitch saw charred, misshapen chaos. Tables, shelves, books, ceiling supports, and a couple of soccer balls among other bits of rubble—or so it appeared.

  At the hospital, Mitch got out first and conferred with his man in charge. Reality was ready to prove wrong his calculation that there wouldn’t be that many dead. Even as the man told him what was inside, Mitch looked over the concrete front porch that stood level with his chest, and through the burned door. The hospital’s roof had not collapsed, though it had burned through in several sections, allowing sunlight to pour in on the blackened horror inside.

  Mitch understood the change in the smell as he saw the bodies, charred in a crust of black, contorted, with arms and legs sticking at angles as though the people had been frozen mid-task. Fingers were spread wide. Horror stretched petrified faces. And Dr. Mills was beside him, mouthing something about the barbarity. Her coworker, Simmons, fell to his knees, pulled his filter mask away from his face and retched on the pavement.

  Staring in through the doorway, view blocked only by metal hinges bolted to small pieces of a burnt wooden door, Mitch couldn’t begin to guess how many bodies lay inside. The whole village? Was that possible? He thought about the three school buildings and looked at them over his shoulder as he lifted a foot to the next of the steps. Were those shapes he’d seen through the windows of the school burnt bodies as well?

  Dr. Mills passed him on the way up the steps and waded into the ash-layered ward, careful not to disturb the dead. Mitch came in behind, noticing the ashes weren’t hot. Nothing smoldered.

  “My God,” Dr. Mills muttered.

  Mitch just shook his head.

  “Could they have been that afraid of the disease?” she questioned.

  After a moment of quiet thought, Mitch replied, “You think these people were dead before they were burned?”

  Shaking her head, Dr. Mills countered, “I think these people were burned alive.”

  Mitch looked at the countless dead. “How do you know?”

  “Look at them.” She pointed. “These people died in agony, trying to run, trying to escape. Dead people—that is, people who died prior to being burned—would not have been burned in these positions.”

  Mitch understood. “What about Ebola?”

  Dr. Mills walked further into the blackened ward, shaking her head. Mitch didn’t know if that was an answer to his question or an expression of despair at the brutality of man against man. He couldn’t bring himself to follow her through the room. He turned and went back out onto the front porch, then looked around at all the burned structures down the slopes.

  He looked at one of his men and motioned to the houses along the road up to the hospital. “When you guys were checking, were there burned bodies in those?”

  The man nodded. “Some.”

  Mitch shook his head, thinking of the scale of the massacre.

  One of the mercenaries came running around the corner of the building, speaking rapidly in a tongue Mitch didn’t understand. But he caught one familiar word: mzungu.

  The man standing beside Mitch turned toward him, pointing through the hospital. “They have found two whites near the trees.”

  They ran.

  Chapter 62

  Mitch knelt beside the boy. He was in his late teens, maybe early twenties, and in really bad shape. The girl lying a few feet away was clearly dead, though not burned. Her eyes were open. Blood had crusted around her mouth and nose. Her cotton blouse and pants were stained. Her mouth hung open, buzzing with flies and crawling with small insects. There was no hint of motion—she was gone—but the boy was at least breathing.

  Mitch touched a hand to his mask, making sure it still covered his mouth and nose. “Go get the doctor,” he told the man who’d come back with him. He put a gloved hand to the boy’s shoulder and shook.

  The boys red eyes snapped open and he coughed.

  Mitch told another of the men to get some water for the boy. He then turned his attention back to the young man. “Can you hear me?”

  The boy nodded, barely.

  Mitch asked, “Are you Austin Cooper, from Denver?”

  Austin tried to smile. His teeth were caked with blood and the remains from the last time he’d thrown up.

  “Can you talk?”

  Just then, the man arrived with a plastic bottle, half full of water.

  Austin croaked unintelligibly. Mitch took the bottle and poured some into the boy’s mouth. Austin closed his eyes and red-tinted tears flowed. He tried to speak again, but the words wouldn’t come. Mitch poured a little more water into his mouth.

  Dr. Mills came running up and dropped down at Austin’s other side. “Oh, my God,” she said. To one of the men, she instructed, “Go get Dr. Simmons.” She put a gloved hand on Austin’s face, and turned to Mitch. “He’s got a fever.”

  “Ebola?” There was fear in Mitch’s voice.

  She looked down at Austin. She looked at the girl. She looked a back up at Mitch and no
dded.

  “Can you tell me what happened here?” Mitch asked Austin.

  “Yes,” Austin answered in a raspy voice.

  The End

  Book 2 in the Ebola K Trilogy will be out in late autumn of 2014.

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  On that whole question of reviews…

  Every time a reader leaves a review, an aspiring author gets a new pencil.

  Yeah, I know that line sucks but I’ve been in front of my computer proofreading for something like fourteen hours straight trying to get this book published before midnight and I’m half brain-fried. Eh, maybe I’ll edit it out later with a better line. But, the whole point of this part is to beg for a moment of your time for a review.

  I know, the word review is kind of intimidating but don’t be intimidated. Any little bit of blabber qualifies. In fact, you can copy and paste this line, “This was the best book in the whole wide world!! It goes really well with the Ebola Virus Plush Toy here on Amazon!!”