by Hank Parker
After several minutes, Mariah signaled a halt. As they all rested, she asked them how they were doing.
“Could be better,” said Angus. “Never was much of a swimmer, even living in Hawaii as a kid. And I banged up my shoulder earlier. But don’t slow up for me. I won’t be that far behind.”
“We stay together,” said Mariah firmly. “Steady, even pace. Use your legs. Watch me.” She demonstrated a sidestroke and scissors kick.
They resumed swimming, taking frequent rest breaks. After an hour or so, they paused again to take stock. Curt could now see the hut, but it looked to be at least a half mile away and the sun was only a couple of degrees above the horizon. He figured there was no way they could make it to the hut before dark. His right shoulder and legs were burning. His left arm, the wounded one, was numb, useless, and he could see that it was bleeding again. He remembered something else: sharks were more active after sunset.
Curt glanced over at his companions. Mariah looked strong and neither was complaining, but Angus was gasping for breath and his face looked drawn and haggard. His mind began to gallop forward into darkness. Was this it? They’d survived gun battles, knife fights, a viral epidemic, he’d finally found two people he cared deeply about, one a long-lost son, and this was the end? He looked more closely at Mariah and saw fierce determination in her eyes. Her arm was wrapped around Angus and she was telling his son that they didn’t have far to go. He began to swim again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SEPTEMBER 6
(SEPTEMBER 7, PHILIPPINES TIME)
Bill Cothran leaned out of the open door of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and peered at the sea surface a hundred feet below. Besides himself, the copter carried a crew of four: pilot, copilot, and two rescue swimmers. The sun had set an hour earlier and darkness was closing in fast. They’d been searching for two hours already, ever since he’d been picked up on the small island by the task force contingent.
Cothran figured they’d have less than a half hour to find Curt, Mariah, and Angus without artificial light. They’d been searching in semicircular arcs emanating from where the inflatable had left the beach early that morning, and there was still a lot of ocean to cover out to the farthest radius the boat could have reached in that time. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. And after dark, finding something as small as an inflatable—or a body—would be all but impossible even with the single powerful searchlight installed on the helicopter.
One of the rescue swimmers shouted and pointed. Just ahead, on a shallow reef, Cothran could see a small structure. The helicopter swooped down. The structure materialized as a thatch-roofed hut on raised pilings. They moved in for a closer look.
At first, they saw no activity, no sign of life. As they debated whether to lower one of the swimmers to examine the hut more thoroughly, Cothran saw something floating near the shack. The pilot brought the copter down to a few yards above the sea surface. The floating object was a baseball cap.
* * *
It was well after dark. Though the night was clear, the moon had not yet risen and Curt could barely see his hands in front of his face. He wasn’t even sure they were still swimming in the right direction. Adding to the problem, Angus was no longer capable of swimming on his own. With his good arm, Curt had been trying to help Mariah pull his son along, but it had been very slow going and he was exhausted. Then something bumped his leg.
Curt forced himself not to recoil, not to betray his fear about what might have hit him. But he knew they had a decision to make. Keep swimming in what might turn out to be entirely the wrong direction until, utterly spent, they slipped below the sea surface, one by one? Or save their strength and slowly tread water, waiting for daylight, easy prey for circling sharks? Should he share his thoughts with Mariah? But if he betrayed his uncertainty, what would it do to her morale—and Angus’s?
Then Mariah spoke. “Rest break,” she said, rolling onto her back and floating motionless in the now calm sea. She pointed toward the sky. “I’ve been checking that constellation. We’re still moving in the right direction. Based on our swimming speed, I figure we should be at the hut in an hour or so.”
Curt thought she was being overly optimistic. Even if they made it to the reef, how would they ever find the hut? But he was grateful for Mariah’s swimming ability, for keeping their spirits up, and for her calming steadiness. Following her lead, he floated on his back, gulping in fresh drafts of cool marine air, his good arm propping up his son. Then he saw a bright light shining down on the water’s surface.
* * *
Around 4:00 a.m. the following morning, a squad of three soldiers in camo fatigues, faces blackened, crouched in a tangle of twisted mangrove tree limbs and peered through night-vision binoculars at an inflatable dinghy approaching the shoreline of Sabah, Borneo. The boat carried two men. The sound of its engine echoed off the forest canopy, and soon it nosed against the muddy bank and came to a stop. A stocky man in the bow stepped out, carrying a case. His feet squelched in the thick mud. A thin man in the stern killed the engine, disembarked, and began to secure the boat to a tree.
Now, thought the squad leader, a young sergeant. He had the element of surprise. The intruders would be bogged down by the mud, slowing their reaction time. Their hands would be occupied by the bowline and case. Their weapons would probably be tucked away, in pockets or waistbands. And they’d take a few moments to locate him, even aided by the pale light of a waning gibbous moon filtering through the forest canopy. The sergeant had ordered his men to remain hidden in the trees, to keep their binoculars trained on the visitors, and to watch for sudden movements like a grab for a weapon. He stood, his pistol extended at arm’s length, and yelled, “Hands up!”
In the faint moonlight he saw the bow man suddenly duck behind the hull of the inflatable, a reaction he hadn’t anticipated. Now he could no longer see the man, couldn’t even tell where to aim his .45.
The soldier’s abrupt realization that he was about to be shot coincided exactly with his view of a bright muzzle flash at the boat. A microsecond later, he felt a searing pain in his side and a violent blow that spun him around and propelled him into a tree.
The other soldiers quickly returned fire. The stern man screamed and went down. Clutching the case and firing back over his shoulder, the bow man lurched out of the mud and darted into the forest as a hail of bullets shredded the leaves around him.
Ignoring his pain, the sergeant ordered his soldiers to disarm the downed man and pursue the other. While they were gone he checked his side. Minimal bleeding, superficial wound. What hurt more was his right shoulder, all out of kilter, probably dislocated when he’d hit the tree. He made himself as comfortable as possible, reloaded his weapon, and waited for his men to return. He could hear the wounded man moaning by the inflatable. Still alive. Maybe they could get some information out of him.
Minutes later, he heard noises coming through the forest. The other soldiers emerged. They had a briefcase with them, but no captive. They told the sergeant that they’d followed footsteps and broken limbs, then lost the trail at a stream bank. Chances were the fleeing man wouldn’t get too far, they said. The jungle was all but impenetrable. They’d tend to their squad leader and then resume the pursuit.
* * *
In a small cabin near Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest, just south of the New York border, Sally Parnell sat across from her sister, Frederica, at a worn Formica table in the kitchen. Her seven-year-old son, Bobby, was upstairs, asleep. At least he was supposed to be asleep. The previous evening she’d checked on him well after his bedtime and had found him reading under the bedcovers. She’d scolded him, of course, but was secretly glad that he seemed to have inherited Tony’s and her love of books.
She sipped from a cup of herbal tea and looked at her sister, saw worry in her eyes, and sensed that she wanted to say something. She knew Fredi well enough to
predict that she wouldn’t be able to contain her thoughts. “Okay, what is it?” she asked her.
“You know it’s not safe, even here,” her sister blurted out. Then she was silent, as if waiting for Sally to challenge her.
Sally wasn’t surprised by the remark. Fredi had always had a streak of paranoia. Usually Sally would humor her instead of arguing. Her sister was a naturally skilled debater and at least as well read as Sally, though her reading tastes differed from her own preference for classical literature. Mysteries and thrillers, often with some kind of conspiracy theme. But Fredi seemed genuinely worried, which in turn worried Sally, because, of all the places she and Bobby could be right now, she couldn’t imagine a safer one.
“What’s not safe?” Sally asked.
“Look,” said Fredi. “People are panicking. Rioting. Looting. Breaking into banks. There’s no more law and order. The police and National Guard can’t control the mobs. They’ve been concentrating resources on large towns and cities where they’re overwhelmed. No way can they afford to send forces to protect people in rural areas. And don’t kid yourself. It won’t take long for the yahoos to realize they’d have easy pickings in areas like this. Not even any neighbors. We’d be sitting ducks.”
Leave it to her sister to see the dark side of everything, Sally thought. She admitted to herself that Fredi might have a point if the cabin were closer to Philadelphia, where everything was going to hell. But way up here? “Come on, Fredi,” she said. “We’re two hundred miles from the quarantine zone.”
“And what would you do if you were trying to escape the epidemic and all the crap that’s come down with it? You’d get as far away as you could. Haven’t you heard about the battles at the borders? Panicked Americans determined to get out of the country, Mexican and Canadian border agents just as determined not to let them through.”
“You still haven’t said why they’d come around here,” said Sally, realizing that her voice sounded less confident than before, as if she was already conceding that her sister’s logic wasn’t as warped as she’d like to believe.
“Think about it,” said Fredi. “You’re trying to get away from a spreading, deadly disease, knowing that any day your town, your home, will fall into the quarantine zone, that even before that happens you’ll probably be loaded onto a train and shipped off to some desert military installation. Commerce has broken down, banks are closed, you can’t get money to buy necessities even if they were available, which in fact they’re not anymore in much of southeastern Pennsylvania. You’re prevented from leaving the country. The rest of the world isn’t even accepting flights coming in from the U.S. So where would you go? Sparsely populated rural America, where you’d have less chance of catching the disease, where when you’re forced to steal to survive, there’s not going to be law enforcement around to stop you. Look at a map. If you’re living near the epidemic, this part of Pennsylvania is the closest large, low-population rural area. Two hundred miles is nothing.”
Fredi paused, thrust her head forward, and looked directly at Sally. “They’ve already had home invasions in the county,” she said meaningfully.
Sally looked at her sister, who’d leaned back in the kitchen chair, silent again, shoulders slumped, as if the monologue had drained all her energy. Sally didn’t say anything for some time. It was pretty clear that Fredi, who’d never married, had always lived alone, was losing it, which was understandable given her isolation up here in this lonely cabin, the current situation, and her characteristic paranoid tendencies. She figured Fredi had been closely following the increasingly dire news about the spreading epidemic, and she’d had no one to talk with about it and had obviously let her imagination run wild. Still, Sally wasn’t quite ready to dismiss out of hand her sister’s fears, especially if that news about the home invasions was accurate.
Finally, she asked Fredi, “So what would you propose we do?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
SEPTEMBER 9
(SEPTEMBER 10, PHILIPPINES TIME)
Doctor Vector moved deliberately to the waiting immigration agent at London’s Heathrow Airport. He walked slowly, in part to appear calm and unhurried, in part to avoid breaking into a hacking cough, and mostly because of sheer exhaustion.
He handed a fake passport and a customs form to the official and waited, expressionless. After several seconds of scrutiny and a question about the purpose of the visit, the agent entered some data in a computer, stamped the passport, handed back the documents, and motioned to the next person in line.
Vector headed toward the exit. He knew that cameras were watching his every move, that, this being London, he would be under photographic surveillance nearly every minute he was in the city. It was only a matter of time before he was found. But he had one last thing to do before he died.
He carried only a small backpack and a plastic bag marked Duty Free that contained a bottle labeled Tanduay Rhum, for Export. Omar had come up with the idea of disguising the virus as liquor, and he’d had a contact inside the Kuala Lumpur duty-free shop who’d made the necessary arrangements to get the bottle aboard the plane. Vector’s pack also held a large, two-layer plastic container. The top held a dwindling supply of ribavirin pills. The bottom layer held something else.
Doctor Vector rounded a corner and saw a sea of people waiting for arriving passengers. He shouldered his way through them, exited through a pair of glass doors, and paused at the edge of a roadside curb. The coughing was coming on again and he couldn’t control it. For the better part of a minute, he hacked spasmodically into a handkerchief. When he finally stopped, the handkerchief was stained bright crimson. He tossed it into a nearby trash barrel and made a mental note to pick up a few packets of Kleenex, or whatever the British equivalent was. He flagged down a cab. Two more days, he told himself. He just needed to live two more days. Two days to lie low, to wait, to endlessly rehearse the plan in his mind, to visualize the satisfying outcome. He’d go over every detail in his mind and then review again, and again. He couldn’t afford a single mistake.
* * *
“So you have some news?” said Curt as he, Mariah, and Angus met with Cothran at the task force headquarters in Jolo. They’d spent the last two days recuperating there, but were now mostly strong enough to continue the hunt. Earlier Cothran had told them that Omar had been killed in a task force ambush in Borneo, but that Hoffman had gotten away. He’d added that they’d recovered the briefcase but it looked like one bottle was missing.
Cothran nodded. “We sent Hoffman’s photo to every major airport in Southeast Asia, the U.S., and Europe. Got a hit in London this morning, UK time. Gate agent remembered the guy was carrying a bag from duty free.”
“Chances are that’s the missing virus bottle,” said Mariah. “Disguised as rum. He must have had inside help.”
“Sounds logical,” said Cothran. “The UK authorities found video of him leaving the airport and boarding a taxi. Picked up his image again near St. James’s Park, then lost him. They’re still looking. Posted copies of the photo everywhere and put his image on TV. And they’re broadcasting an announcement asking the public to be alert for any suspicious activities.”
“They should put out the info that the guy’s sick,” said Mariah. “People should be aware that he might be coughing. And they should keep their distance.”
“Today’s the ninth, London time,” said Curt. “If he’s planning a 9/11 release, he’ll probably stay undercover until then. Let’s hope the UK authorities are vigilant.”
As she listened to Cothran, Mariah studied Angus. It was hard to believe that it was only a week ago that he’d been captured in Manila. But he did seem strong and confident. And it seemed like he couldn’t take his eyes off Curt.
* * *
Doctor Vector sat in a dark far corner of the Ploughshare, a small pub in the Westminster section of London, near St. James’s Park. He’d chosen this tavern in pa
rt because of its location, only minutes away from the Eye, but mostly because it was a bit off the beaten track, even for this bustling part of the city, and tended to have fewer visitors than a more popular pub like the Feathers. He’d weighed the advantages of going to a busier place, where he could get lost in the crowd, against the likelihood that law enforcement would be carefully watching the better-known establishments. Not that they wouldn’t be watching everywhere, he thought, but other than a security camera outside the front door, he hadn’t seen any signs of electronic surveillance here.
Still, he kept a close watch on the entrance as he picked at a shepherd’s pie, his first meal since Borneo. He had no appetite. In fact, even the sight of food made him feel like gagging, but he knew he needed to eat, needed all the strength he could muster—at least for the next two days.
He’d scrutinized the building on the way in, noting where the exits were, rehearsing routes of escape. The kitchen door was right behind his booth. Before he’d entered, he’d located the external entrance to the kitchen, in an alley, where food was delivered and garbage removed. He’d need a rapid exit if he was discovered. He knew he couldn’t move fast with this damnable sickness. But his preparation should allow him to slip out before any suspecting authorities could grab him.
As he chewed another mouthful of food, he saw the front door open. Two men stepped into the pub, both medium height, wearing Manchester United football jerseys. It was immediately obvious to Vector that these weren’t football fans stopping by for a few pints while they watched the game on the pub telly. These guys were broad-shouldered and lean-waisted. One was square-jawed with a large head and a thick neck. The other was thinner with an aquiline face and nervous, darting eyes. Vector could make out slight bulges at their waists under their loose-fitting jerseys. The men didn’t head to a vacant table. They paused in the doorway, their eyes flicking around the room. Vector quickly ruled out MI5 or MI6. Those agents wouldn’t dress like these guys, wouldn’t be so obvious, would know better than to stand right in the front door and scope out the room. The guys who just walked in were almost certainly undercover metropolitan police, no doubt tough enough but without the range of skills of MI5 and 6 agents. And that gave him a distinct advantage.
