Arisen : Genesis (4 page)

Bob’s muscle didn’t turn to flab as he hit middle age, he just got cagier, transitioning straight from the military to the Agency. He seemed to find this work relaxing, spending a lot of time in his rack tearing through military history and politics on his e-book reader, and playing chess across the net on his laptop.

Dugan was smaller, lean and wiry, handsome with dark features and very intelligent eyes. He was actually even cagier than Bob, though he spent most of his acumen on his stock portfolio. Between the Naval Academy and SEAL training, he had acquired a masters degree in economics from the University of Virginia. In the teams, he gained a solid reputation as being tough, competent, and extremely brave. And reputation is
everything
in the teams.

Dugan seemed to take protecting Zack and Baxter as some kind of divinely sanctioned mission, which he’d literally be damned before failing at. Like it would be a black mark on his soul if anything happened to them. He also seemed to know a lot of beautiful women in lots of exotic places around the world, if one judged by peeking at his constant Skype sessions.

Zack knew these two would never say another word about what had happened today, not if he never brought it up. In their minds, they were literally just doing their jobs. Just a day’s work. Maybe an unusually lively and gratifying day’s work…

By the time Zack toweled, dressed, and squared himself away, the SEALs were both locked away in that team room of theirs – loading magazines, doing one-handed pull-ups, whatever it was they did in there. But Zack knew they were never more than a shout away.

Blessings counted
.

* * *

When he got back on station, Zack found his attention urgently drawn to some hour-old drone footage of a situation at an outlying regional clinic. He had earlier requested, and got, a tiny sliver of the linger time of one of their ISR platforms earmarked for keeping an eye on any social disruption from the most recent mini-outbreak that had just started to be reported locally. Since it was his big idea, it became his job to review and analyze the footage.

He called up the clip, moved to the first time marker, and zoomed into full-res. But even after a half-dozen viewings, it was unclear to him what was going on. A tussle of some kind. The drone had put its optics on this spot because UN aid workers had called for help, and evidently there were shots fired somewhere along the line, but the details were hazy.

Most likely it was just a smash-and-grab for drugs or med supplies. Maybe the clinic staff agreed to treat the enemy of the wrong militia leader. It happened – a lot, in fact. Worst case, as Zack figured it, would actually be a panic about this new bug – which didn’t even have a name yet, presumably because no one had managed to isolate it under a microscope. CDC and WHO claimed to have staff inbound. But they also had backed-up priorities, and curtailed funds, in this age of endless recession, just like everybody else.

Zack decided he had nothing to add to the dossier at this time, except to note that the clinic in question sat on the border of a wild west zone where two different militias, in addition to a-S, were known to operate. Government control out there was pretty notional. And security at outlying clinics was dodgy at the best of times.

Zack blinked twice, still staring at the video window, playing over and over. By now, he had a number of other calls on his attention. But this one wouldn’t stop nagging at the edge of his brain. Maybe it was his manhandling this morning by those Islamist slags, not to mention wading around in their bodily fluids, that had him feeling more personally concerned than before.

He flipped to the CDC to look for updates. Nothing new since last night – same short advisory, sketchy as hell. He let out a long breath, thought again about letting it go. Reports of a new mystery illness out of the African bush were by no means groundbreaking. Zack knew this region incubated killer bacteria and viruses nearly as well as it nourished armed assholes. But for some reason, he hadn’t been able to put it out of his head – not since the first whispered reports from their local HUMINT assets, followed by a collection of related but contradictory spot reports from CDC, via Langley, a couple of days ago.

He looked around the empty TOC, thin dust floating in the air, lights blinking dully on various molded plastic boxes. Baxter would be taking his afternoon break, resting up for the night shift. It was siesta time for the SEALs, too. There was no one there to judge him. And it was damn quiet, too – strangely little street noise for this time of day.

He decided to give the matter a few more minutes, and have a poke around State, Agency, NSA, CDC, and WHO systems, see if anyone in the know really knew anything. But there was nothing new in any of them. Nor in any of the intel feeds, nor the Agency Threat Matrix Board. This was a little surprising, as public health and epidemiology were increasingly seen as national security issues. In this age of frictionless international mass transit, a crippling attack on the homeland could fly coach into JFK and be inflicting mass casualties before anyone knew anything was going on.

The earliest reports on this new one were strange, and contradictory. One made it sound simply like a new, or maybe even old, strain of influenza: chills, fever, bad headache. Another one seemed to hint at good old hemorrhagic fever – conspicuous bleeding was involved. Though that may have just been some bush doctor trying to cure a patient by bleeding him; or else a delirious patient falling into something sharp. A third report made it sound like rabies, or something related – strange behavioral stuff, aggression, attacking medical personnel…

The only way they even knew, or thought, it was all related was that it was coming out of the same bit of bush in Somaliland.

Rabies…
Zack remembered that he had declined his rabies vaccination before his most recent posting. The consulting travel doctor at Langley routinely jabbed the shit out of him: inoculations for cholera, yellow fever, hep A and B, typhoid fever, polio. All of those were endemic to East Africa, and thus resulted in a whole tray of glistening needles for Zack his first time out; and boosters periodically after. But, as the rabies vaccine is understood to be painful, expensive, and not very effective (if you’re bit, having been vaccinated just means a slightly shorter and less painful course of injections), the doctor gave him the option, and Zack opted out.

He pulled his hands from the keyboard to his lap, took a deep breath and let his shoulders slump. He let his perfect posture, and hyper-professional mask, slip for a few minutes. He tapped a pen on his console, regarding it. Maybe he was just obsessing about this stuff, over-attuned to it. And it wasn’t clear what he could do about it.

Like everything else,
he thought,
it is, emphatically, what it is…

Virus

But if he was over-attuned to this stuff, it was for the reason that he came from, and had come back to, and it seemed now could never get the fuck out of, the Horn of Africa. This was a region that had been cradle to the world’s most successful and devastating bacteria and viruses since the beginning of time – every bit as much as it had been cradle to humanity. Typhus, smallpox, schistosomiasis, pneumonic and bubonic plagues, all of these historical horrors had originated in East Africa.

And only some of them were historical. Salk and his followers had beaten bacteriological infections into submission, with penicillin and its many follow-on antibiotic agents.

But viruses… oh, viruses have our number – and always have. And Zack knew that number may yet come up. No viral infection has ever been cured. The best medical science can do is to help prop up a patient’s immune system as it battles to defend itself. Generally, either the virus kills the patient, or else it reaches an uneasy
detente
with the host body. And then it hangs around –
for ever
, like herpes. Exactly like herpes, in fact, which is another incurable virus.

With the benefits of an Ivy League education, Zack knew the word virus comes from the Latin for “poison.” He also knew from his studies that viruses are invisible under most microscopes – and that their existence was unsuspected until the late nineteenth century, when a then-unknown Russian microbiologist found an infectious agent passing through filters that blocked bacteria.

Almost another fifty years passed before the first virus was actually gazed upon, under an electron microscope – which had been invented precisely for the purpose. A German electrical engineer and inventor came home to find his two-year-old son struck by polio. He swore to find or invent a way to see the virus that caused it. He did.

Viruses occupy a strange shadowland between the living and the dead. They consist only of a protein shell and a sequence of DNA or RNA – much simpler, structurally, than bacteria. But they are capable of wreaking extreme havoc on biological systems of much higher complexity than themselves.

They are normally inert, and perk up only to fasten onto the cells of another organism. (Go ahead and picture the scene in
Aliens
where the walls come to life.) These aliens in the body then hijack the nucleus and functions of host cells, and put them to work doing their bidding, including reproduction. Not all viruses kill their hosts – to do so is not always adaptive. But, when they do kill, they often combine horrifying virulence with menacingly high levels of contagiousness.

One need only think of the common cold, which is caused by more than a hundred known viruses, and which can be transmitted merely by standing near someone coughing on the subway. And then think of HIV/AIDS, which ravages immune systems, and ultimately causes whole bodies to waste away and shut down. And the only reason we don’t have a virus that can be caught like a cold, but that does damage like AIDS, is… happenstance.

Actually, as Zack, and most anyone in East Africa, can tell you, we do have a virus like that – several in fact: filoviruses such as Marburg, Ebola, Lassa Fever, and Machupo (Bolivian hemorrhagic fever). The very names of these foment panic and terror – and should. They are all incurable, can’t be vaccinated against, and strike victims like a wall of hammers. They literally liquefy the body’s organs, and cause uncontrollable bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes, and anus – and ultimately the skin itself. By some poorly understood process, they prevent the blood from clotting. Before the end, every inch of the victim is covered with blood. Also not to be forgotten are the shuddering bouts of black diarrhea.

Hemorrhagic fevers also have a mortality rate of 70–90% – which would be a good thing, if they killed you quickly.

But it’s still happenstance that there has never been a major outbreak of any of these in the west. But these night terrors, the hemorrhagic fevers, do pop up periodically – in Africa. As well, previously unknown new viruses appear all the time, almost always without warning. And known viruses that were previously harmless to humans can morph into serial killers overnight.

So Zack’s job is to fight the global war on terror (or GWOT). But he’s increasingly convinced it’s going to be a virus that gets us in the end. He’d take a suitcase nuke in midtown Manhattan over a raging global pandemic, ten times out of ten. At least the damage from the nuke can be contained. But, then again, terror and pandemics are not exclusive. And that’s a big reason Zack knows so much about this stuff – because of the threat of bio-terror.
Hang around
, he’d tell you.
It’s probably going to get a lot worse.

Even as Zack was mulling this over in the TOC, he could hear another ambulance warbling weakly down the main drag, four blocks over. He couldn’t peek out of the blacked-out and bar-covered windows, but if he could, he was pretty sure he’d see another clapped-out regional medical transport coming in from the bush. Heading for Edna Adan University Hospital, the only half-decent medical facility in all of Somaliland.

At some point, he realized, one or more of the members of his team was going to have to make an expedition down there. To find out what the hell was actually going on. Because their job wasn’t really to consume intel reports.

It was to produce them.

* * *

While he was on station, another thing he was going to have to decide on was whether to file a report about that morning’s 19-minute wild ride – about his abduction. On the one hand, he knew it would be a no-fail ticket out of there for a few weeks. They’d definitely pull his operational status. There was a whole protocol around that kind of thing. And the work they did was kind of sensitive – it wouldn’t do to have operational personnel with PTSD, mental breakdowns, shooting sprees, etc.

On the other hand… he couldn’t just leave. He knew he couldn’t abandon the other three men at his station – nor, to a lesser extent, all the others in the region who depended on his support from there. Anyone who has ever served shoulder-to-shoulder with other men and women in harm’s way will not need this explained to them. For anyone who hasn’t served, explaining won’t help. That’s a cliche, but so’s this:

This safehouse, and his team within it, was the closest Zack had ever felt to belonging somewhere.

In honest moments, he knew that was why he really stayed. It was the exact opposite of what had driven him away from East Africa in the first place: the sense of not belonging there. At times, the massive tension between these two forces, pushing and pulling, threatened to tear him apart.

On the third hand, he also knew that sitting on or actively covering up an event like his kidnapping could be cause for major sanction, if not dismissal. But he also knew that Langley, and Bragg, and Foggy Bottom, had all got so much riding on him being there, they’d almost certainly let it slide. He’d probably need to account for the lost phone, and the lost handgun, as well as the tablet, at some point. But those weren’t even rounding errors in their budget.

And why the gun, anyway, if he was just an analyst? Because this was HOA. Even the cooks went armed when they went outside the wire.