Z: The Final Countdown

by Bob Mayer

  “So you don’t have any idea what it is or how to treat it. Right?” Comsky said.

  “We hope that—” Tyron began but Mike Seeger’s voice cut in.

  “It is the wrath of God. He is punishing all of us for waging war. You must put down your weapons and accept that which you have brought upon yourself.”

  Riley rubbed his forehead, now understanding what Conner had meant earlier.

  “Shut him up!” Lome ordered Conner.

  “You cannot stop the power of God!” Seeger yelled.

  Conner grabbed her cameraman by the arm. “Come on, Mike. Let’s go talk about it.” She guided him away to one of the tents.

  Riley was surprised when Kieling spoke. “He’s not too far wrong, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lome demanded.

  “Well, he may have the source wrong. Maybe it’s not the wrath of God we’ve got here, but it certainly is the wrath of nature,” Kieling said. “Whatever this thing is, it’s nature’s defense against mankind’s incursions into places we never were before.”

  “How did this thing start?” Riley asked, catching on to the idea that this wasn’t just a random occurrence. “You say it’s nature’s defense mechanism. What do you mean by that?”

  “We’re tearing up the rain forest,” Kieling said, “and so far, most of the nastiest bugs we’ve seen—the two variants of Ebola and Marburg—have come out of the rain forest here in Africa. Humans have upset the ecological balance and these viruses are fighting back against humans to re-right the balance.”

  “Oh, shit,” Lome said. “A damn enviro nut.”

  “No,” Kieling said. “I just look at this clearly and from every perspective. If it can kill you, you’d damn well better try to understand it.”

  “Are you saying this virus was always there in the forest and we came in and activated it?” Riley asked.

  “This virus,” Kieling said, “is what we call an ‘emerging’ one. There are three ways viruses emerge: They jump from one species—which usually they are relatively benign in—to another, which they aren’t benign in; or the virus is a new evolution from another type of virus, a mutation, basically. Or it could have always existed and moves from a smaller population to a larger population. In the last case, this thing could have been killing humans out in the jungle for thousands of years, but now it’s moved out into the general population.”

  “Is that possible?” Conner Young asked. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed?”

  “Not necessarily,” Kieling said. “We’re now beginning to believe that the AIDS virus might have been around for quite a while. Cases as far back as forty years ago are now being uncovered. They just didn’t know what it was back there and called it something else. Plus, when people are killed deep in the jungle, it very rarely makes the news or even garners any attention.”

  “Which do you think this thing is? How did it evolve?” Riley asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kieling said. “To find that out I need patient zero.” He then went on to explain the concept of finding the first person with the disease.

  “So you don’t think it was Ku?” Major Lindsay said when Kieling was done. Those people in that village probably had the disease before him and passed it on to him?”

  “No, it’s not Ku. Ku was the beginning of the disease here in Cacolo,” Kieling said. “We’re going to have to head out into the bush to find where this thing came from.”

  “Which brings up another point, Major Lindsay,” Tyron said. “Did any of your medics treat Ku? He had to have been very ill for several days before he crashed—died.”

  “I’ll check on it,” Lindsay said.

  “This is all very nice,” Sergeant Lome said, “but what do we do next, besides sit here and wait to see who gets sick?”

  “We sent a plan back to the Pentagon,” Tyron said. “We need their approval to begin working on it. We also need to wait for word from USAMRIID on what we’re dealing with. There are too many unknowns right now.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing we know for sure. We know it kills.” Lome turned and walked away.

  “Let’s check on your aid facility,” Tyron said to Major Lindsay, and they headed toward the AOB.

  Riley watched the others inside the fence slowly melt away and head back to the tents. He noticed that the second blue suitor, Kieling, was still there, watching everyone disperse.

  “You seem to know more about this than the other fellow,” Riley said. He could barely make out Kieling’s face through the plastic faceplate.

  “I’ve been in the field before,” Kieling said. “He hasn’t.”

  “You collected blood and other samples from us earlier this morning,” Riley said, “but I noticed neither of you seemed too interested in knowing who we were.”

  He waited and Kieling waited. Finally, Riley continued. “You don’t want to know us, do you? Because if we start coming down with this thing, you want to be able to stay scientifically detached, isn’t that right?”

  Kieling still remained silent.

  “Our medic, Comsky, told us that there is no cure for these types of viruses. If that’s so, then you’re here to contain this, aren’t you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That’s not good enough for us,” Riley said. “If you were on this side of the fence, would it be good enough for you?”

  “No,” Kieling said. He turned to follow Tyron and Lindsay.

  “Hey!” Riley called out.

  Kieling paused and his mechanical voice echoed out. “Yes?”

  “We’ll help you. We’ve got nothing to lose. Remember that.”

  “I will.”

  Oshakati, Namibia, 16 June

  No further instructions had come during the night, and the freeze order was still in effect. General Nystroom had spent a sleepless night, worried about his scouts across the border in southern Angola. By now, his lead motorized elements should have been making linkups with those scouts. Instead, they were still sitting here in the desert. Add on top of that an order coming from Silvermine stopping all cross-border flights and it made for a very disturbing situation for Nystroom. He couldn’t send in choppers to get his men or to resupply them. The only way out was the same way they had gone in. By foot.

  Nystroom threw open the top hatch on his command vehicle and stood on the seat bottom, his head poking out. Small cooking fires burned here and there as his soldiers did what soldiers spent most of their time doing—waiting. But the scouts weren’t in a good place to be waiting.

  Nystroom radioed his operations officer. “Pull the scouts back.”

  “Sir, we—”

  “On my authority,” Nystroom cut in. “Something’s going wrong and I don’t want to leave those men out there. Notify me the second we get anything further from Silvermine. Send another request to them for the follow-on contingency plan referred to in last night’s message.”

  Pentagon, 16 June

  General Cummings blew into the room, a covey of aides at his side. “Sit down, gentlemen, sit down.”

  They were in the War Room, deep underneath the Pentagon. Outside the glassed-in conference room, electronic maps lined the walls and personnel manned the various stations. Inside the soundproofed enclosure, Colonel Martin pulled at the collar of his dress-green uniform.

  One of the many other colonels in the room was ready with a cup of coffee for the chairman, along with an introduction. “Sir, this is Colonel Martin, head of U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D.,” he said, spelling out the letters.

  Cummings put on a pair of reading glasses. “And what is U.S.— whatever you call it?” Cummings asked, flipping open a cover labeled “Top Secret” and scanning a report.

  The colonel looked at Martin, passing the verbal ball.

  “United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” Martin said.

  “Ah, yes, the fellows over at Fort Detrick.” Cummings looked up over his glasses. “Someone sick?”

  Mar
tin nodded. “Yes, sir.” He looked at a sergeant who manned a computer terminal. “Run the video, please.”

  The glass opposite Cummings became opaque and then the video of Ku dying and Comsky performing his field-expedient autopsy ran. Martin remained silent, letting the pictures speak for themselves. Following Ku’s autopsy, there were shots taken from the KH-12 and Aurora over-flight. General Cummings had seen enough of those types of photos before.

  When it was done, General Cummings looked over at Martin. “I assume that video was shot in Angola. Who was the man?”

  “A Sergeant Ku, MPLA, sir.”

  “And?” Cummings raised his eyebrows. “Very graphic, but is there a point to all this? I’ve seen people die before, Colonel, if you thought this was going to shock me.”

  “We believe Sergeant Ku died of a virus. A very lethal virus.”

  “How lethal?”

  “Based on similar viruses, we estimate a ninety percent kill of those infected.”

  “And the imagery?” Cummings asked. “The blue and red circles?”

  “Blue indicated dead,” Martin said. “Red those people who have a fever. One of the signs of infection is a high fever.”

  General Cummings put down the report. “How many of our people are infected?”

  “We don’t know, sir.”

  “You don’t know?” Cummings snapped off his glasses. “When was this video shot?”

  “Yesterday at—” Martin began, but Cummings cut him off.

  “Yesterday! Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”

  Martin pulled his tie loose and opened the top button on his shirt. “I tried to get through, sir, but this was the earliest your aides could get me in to—”

  “We authorized a B-l flight for his men,” one of Cummings’s colonels cut in. “And the imagery to check things out, to include an Aurora over-flight. The base camp where the people—”

  “Enough,” Cummings said. “How communicable is this virus?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Martin said. “We’ve quarantined the people who were exposed to this man, but we don’t know where else in Angola it will break out. As you could see from the imagery, it is burning across the countryside, but so far all the infected villages are inside rebel-controlled territory.”

  “Give me the worst-case scenario,” Cummings ordered.

  “Worst case is this is an airborne virus, like the flu. If that’s the situation, it’s already out of control in Angola and all we can do is hope to keep it from coming back over here to the States.”

  “The troops already in country?”

  “The disease will burn, uh, run through them.”

  “No antidote? Vaccine?”

  “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Martin said. “We’ve seen three viruses similar to this one before. There’s no cure or vaccine for them, so the chance of us developing a cure for this one, especially on short notice, is very remote.”

  Cummings spun in his seat. “What’s the deployment status on the Eighty-second?”

  Someone had that information ready. “Forty-one percent personnel, eighty-six on equipment. Ahead of schedule, sir.”

  “Get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. Stop the deployment immediately. Anything in the air, turn it around. Then get me General Scott on the SATCOM.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cummings spun back to Colonel Martin. “What else?”

  “As I tried to tell your aide last night, sir, I need support to get—”

  Cummings held up his right hand and Martin ground to a halt.

  “Colonel, my men screwed up.” Cummings’s voice was flat and level. “This should have been brought to my attention earlier. If this is as bad as you say, men are going to die because of that. I understand that. My staff will understand that. Now that you’ve brought it to our attention, this is our business, Colonel. What’s done is done. Clear?”

  A night of screaming into phones and pounding on desktops, trying to get to the chairman, fell away from Colonel Martin. “Clear, sir.”

  “I want you here with me through the rest of this. You think someone isn’t doing the right thing, you tell me right away. My priority is our people. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now. What do you need?”

  Chapter 13

  Cacolo, Angola, 16 June

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tyron said, staring at the Cacolo Mission Hospital. They’d confirmed in the morning that Ku had not received treatment from any of the American medics. The next logical step was to check out the local native medical infrastructure.

  “It’s typical,” Kieling’s voice came out of the box on his suit. “Last time Ebola broke out in Zaire, it was the hospital where the first patient was treated that helped spread it so widely. The medical personnel always get the worst of it.”

  Worst of it was a mild way of describing what the hospital looked like. There were sick all over the place. Nuns in blood-spattered robes ministered to them. And hospital—that was not what Tyron would call this place. There weren’t even the rudiments of medical technology in place.

  “I am Sister Angelina.” A frail-looking old woman walked up to them. Her English had a heavy accent. She looked up and down at their suits. “I see you are a bit better prepared for this than we are. Thank God you got here so quickly.”

  “We need to find out if you treated a man. A Sergeant Ku of the Angolan army,” Tyron said.

  The nun stared at his plastic face-mask. “Who are you people? We sent out a request for help to the World Health Organization yesterday. You aren’t from WHO, are you?”

  “No,” Kieling replied. “We’re from the CDC. America. I’m Dr. Kieling and this is Dr. Tyron. What’s the situation?”

  “Over half my staff is down,” Sister Angelina said. “High fever, headaches, bloody diarrhea, vomiting, rashes. I am afraid we might have an outbreak of Ebola.”

  “Sergeant Ku was the case that started it,” Kieling said. “We need to find out if he was treated here.”

  Sister Angelina led them into a building. “I’ll show you the records. What day do you think he would have come in?” The Angolans gathered around, staring at the two men in the space suits.

  “Anytime in the last seven days,” Kieling replied.

  The nun flipped open a battered box that contained index cards, wrapped together with rubber bands. She began flipping through.

  Tyron took the time to look around. Through a curtain made of a sheet, he could see a ward. There were bodies in the beds and several nuns moved among the people, ministering to them. He felt totally immersed in a different world. The nuns didn’t have the slightest form of protection, not even surgical masks.

  “A Sergeant Ku,” Sister Angelina announced, holding up an index card, “was treated on the morning of the fourteenth. He claimed he was suffering from a venereal infection. He was given a shot of antibiotics.”

  “Claimed he was suffering?” Tyron repeated. “Wasn’t he checked?”

  Sister Angelina turned her wrinkled face toward Tyron. “Every morning we average between eighty and a hundred and twenty new patients. That’s in addition to those that fill our beds. I have nine sisters to minister to those people, and only four of my sisters are trained nurses. The rest learn as they go. We have no doctor. We send the more critical ones to Luanda on the military flight, if there is one.

  “And your man Ku was a soldier. He asked for treatment for what he thought he had and we gave it to him.”

  “How much sterilization do you—” Kieling began.

  “One needle dipped in a bleach-and-water mixture,” she said. “We have very little equipment and must make everything we have go far beyond its expected usage.”

  “Oh, God,” Tyron muttered.

  “Where is Sergeant Ku?” Sister Angelina asked.

  “Dead,” Kieling said.

  Sister Angelina’s face betrayed no emotion. “How?”

  “We don’t know.”

&n
bsp; “Ebola?” She pointed toward the ward. “I was in Zaire in ‘95. This looks the same.”

  “It’s not Ebola. At least not one of the known strains,” Kieling said.

  “But it is a virus,” the nun replied. “Or else you would not be wearing those suits.”

  “Yes,” Kieling confirmed. “It is a virus.”

  “Can you help us?” Angelina asked.

  “We have to track down the source,” Kieling said. “I’ll have them send you some equipment. Gowns, masks. That will help.”

  “If it isn’t already too late,” Sister Angelina said.

  To that, the men from USAMRIID had no answer.

  “We would like to look at some of your patients,” Kieling said.

  “You will scare them,” Angelina said. “You have already started a panic in town by coming here in those suits. It tells everyone that you are so afraid of something you will wear that. None of the people here are wearing a safe suit, so that means they should be scared, correct?”

  “Correct,” Kieling said.

  “Too late to worry about all that,” the nun said. “You’re here.” Sister Angelina pointed to the ward. “Follow me.”

  They moved through the archway, careful not to scrape their suits on either side. There were fourteen people in the beds.

  “My native support left when they first feared this was a virus,” Sister Angelina explained as they moved. “All that is left are my Sisters.”

  Tyron knew that also meant the native support workers might have run away with the disease in their system. This was the horrifying danger of trying to contain an epidemic. Nobody wanted to hang around in the area where the sickness had taken root, but by running they spread it to new areas.

  They walked down the aisle. Tyron was glad that he had the backpack. The smell must be horrendous. The overworked nuns were trying their best, but the soiled sheets from vomiting and diarrhea could only be replaced so often.

  They’d seen Ku’s body, but at the point at which the virus had been at full amplification, having taken over the host completely. Here they could see what it did to flesh prior to death.