The Virus (33 page)

They were two hundred yards from the camp and closing fast when hell broke loose. The jungle burst into flame on all sides. The fire roared through the trees with the force of a whirlwind. Pillars of smoke burst through the canopy of the forest to be tinged red in the dawn light.

“Jesus!” shouted McSharry. “What the hell is going on?” At that moment there broke out the weirdest and wildest ululations that any of them had ever heard or could have dreamed of.

What followed was confusion of the highest calibre. McSharry instantly ordered his men to make for their principal objective: the hut which, according to Stephanie, contained the stored serum. Firing from the hip as they ran, the Green Berets burst through into the clearing.

It was never clear to Kaplan who fired the shot that killed Frau Matthofer. As McSharry led his men towards the huts, a hail of bullets swept the clearing. Two of McSharry’s men went down. As the Green Berets returned the fire, the old woman herself was hit. She spun round and collapsed at the edge of the clearing. Stephanie knelt beside her, holding her hand. She seemed to be trying to comfort her.

As he crouched at the edge of the clearing, uncertain of what to do next, Kaplan was suddenly aware of another noise, a high-pitched gibbering and shrieking. He realized that the green monkeys themselves had been caught in the conflagration. He looked up as the flames closed in on the camp and saw them leaping desperately from tree to tree.

The action seemed to swirl around him. But he himself seemed to be a still point in a turning world. Almost detachedly, he watched McSharry’s men make for the hut which contained the serum. It’s too late, you poor sods, he thought. Too late. Even if you find it, you’ll never get it out.

As if on cue, the hut the men were heading for exploded with a bang. There was a great shower of glass and liquid which sprayed the trees of the forest.

“Hell,” Kaplan thought, “we won’t get any monkeys, and now we won’t get any serum either. The game is over, gentlemen.”

He realized that McSharry was beckoning to him frantically. The Green Berets had grouped at the far side of the clearing where the flames were thinnest. They had slung the wounded men on field stretchers.

“Are you coming, Kaplan?” McSharry shouted. “We’re leaving now.”

“No. I have something to do here. Wait for me if you can at the RV.”

Bent double, Kaplan ran back across the clearing to where Frau Matthofer lay. With McSharry’s withdrawal the hail of fire had ceased in the immediate vicinity. It was clear from the sounds of gunfire in the middle distance that the action had moved elsewhere. Whoever it was had ambushed them in the clearing was now attempting to impede the Green Berets’ departure. Kaplan had a minute of relative calm to examine the old woman. Propped up against a tree-root, she was still conscious but bleeding heavily from a wound in her side. Stephanie was trying, ineffectively, to bandage it.

Frau Matthofer groaned deeply as a wave of pain flooded through her. She lapsed into German.

“Ach! My monkeys. Do what you can for my monkeys.”

She closed her eyes so as not to see the engulfing flames; shut her ears so as not to hear the cries of the animals.

The blood had seeped through her clothes. Her face had gone very pale.

Kaplan looked at her. “I think she’s dead, Stephanie.”

Stephanie remained kneeling for a few moments beside the body in the jungle clearing. Her clothes were spattered with blood and her face was streaked with sweat and tears. When she rose to her feet, she said quietly: “She may after all be a hero of our time.”

Then, without discussion, Stephanie took charge.

“Quick,” she said, “come with me, I shall need help.”

She ran into the first hut, the hut from which Kaplan earlier that morning had seen her first emerge. Already the roof was smouldering and soon there would be flames.

They went inside. It was a primitive dwelling-place. A bed. A desk. Two chairs and a stove. Yet for fifteen years it had served as the home for one of nature’s twisted geniuses.

“Get the files,” Stephanie called. “They’re on the shelf by the bed. I’ll get the case.”

She stooped under the bed and pulled out a battered leather attaché-case. It was clearly of ancient vintage, having about it an air of solidity and craftsmanship. She grasped it firmly by the handle; stood up straight and looked around for the last time. Above her, the roof burst into flames.

“Let’s go.”

As they emerged from the hut, they realized that they had left it to the last possible minute. Already the grass in the clearing had ignited and burning trees had begun to crash to the ground. They could barely see through the smoke.

Neither of them ever forgot their escape from the inferno. If Stephanie had not already been familiar with the path down from the summit of Mount Lwungi, they would never have made it, even three hundred yards. And if Kodjo, against express instructions, had not made for the crest to look for his beloved Miss Stephanie as soon as he saw, from the village below, the forest burst into flames, they would never have succeeded in negotiating the rest of the way through the crashing timber and blazing foliage.

They heard the “monkey man” call as they fought their way out of the trap, with clothes smouldering and eyes half blinded with smoke.

“This way, Miss Stephanie, over here!”

They didn’t go down to the village. Instead, after Kaplan had explained the situation, Kodjo guided them behind the base of the blazing mountain towards the rendez-vous which McSharry had fixed earlier.

“McSharry should still be there,” Kaplan explained. “He’ll wait as long as he can.”

In the event, Kaplan was right. McSharry and his men were at the rendez-vous point.

McSharry was battle-stained but obviously delighted to see Kaplan. “Hell, I didn’t think you were going to make it.” He looked enquiringly in Stephanie’s direction.

“This is Stephanie Verusio,” Kaplan said, “and this is Kodjo.”

McSharry shook hands with both of them.

There were tears in Stephanie’s eyes as she said goodbye to Kodjo.

“We’ll meet again, Kodjo. Soon. I know we will. Give my best regards to Ngenzi-bwana.” Impulsively, she hugged the little man. Then he melted back into the jungle.

The plane came in low, skimming the trees. It touched down, bounced twice on the rough surface of the as yet uncompleted road, then, with a roar of reverse thrust engines, came to a halt in less than a hundred yards.

McSharry watched the landing with visible pride.

“That’s the very latest development in STOL,” he told Kaplan. “The U.S. Air Force used the basic concept of the Harrier jump-jet but expanded it to serve as a transport aircraft.”

Kaplan hardly heard what the other man was saying. It all seemed so irrelevant. He boarded the aircraft feeling exhausted, washed out. He hated to fail and yet, as he saw it, failure was the net result of the whole operation. What was more, the cost had not been negligible. Irma Matthofer had been killed and two of McSharry’s men had been wounded. He had administered first aid to them on the ground before the plane arrived. The toll, Kaplan knew, would certainly have been higher but for the fact that McSharry had decided to pull out as soon as it became clear that the store of serum had been destroyed.

He sat next to Stephanie at the front of the plane. The pilot taxied and took off in even less distance than it had taken him to land. The turbo-jet seemed to rise almost vertically above the canopy of the forest. They saw the smoke still pouring from the summit of Mount Lwungi.

“The fire will burn itself out,” said Stephanie. “It can’t go below the treeline.”

Kaplan looked out of the window as the plane pulled away to the north.

“They were waiting for us. They knew. That was the problem.” He sighed, feeling deeply depressed. They were heading back to the States with no better idea of how to deal with the Marburg problem than they had when they left. And now their time had almost run out.

He turned in his seat to look at Stephanie directly.

“But how the hell did you get back in there? How did you get close to the old woman?”

Stephanie looked at him. They had, literally, been through the fire together. It was time to tell him the whole story.

“When I had finished talking with you on the phone,” she began, “I couldn’t make up my mind what to do. I knew you had told me to get away and I also knew that this was probably what I ought to do. But somehow I couldn’t help thinking about Frau Matthofer. The few glimpses I had had of her fascinated me. Almost on the spur of the moment, I decided to go back in there. I wanted to see whether she would talk to me; I wanted to see whether I could get to know her. Above all, I wanted to find out what she was really up to. Somehow I had been involved in this whole business too long to be able to back out of it now just like that.”

“So that’s what you did?”

“Yes, that’s what I did. I left Bujumbura and went back to my German friends and told them my plan and they didn’t try to dissuade me.”

“And then what?”

“I climbed back up the hill and found Frau Matthofer.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Kaplan was silent for a few moments. He was amazed by the girl’s courage and intrepidness. When she went back up the mountain, she could have had no idea of what might happen to her there.

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yes I talked to her. I spent the whole of one night talking to her and much of the next day.” Stephanie warmed to her story. “You know, once she had got over the surprise, I think she was glad to see another human face. A white face. Someone from her own background. Someone she could communicate with. I think those long years of solitude in the jungle had taken their toll. She was desperate for company.

“Of course she was nervous at first. Very nervous. Wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. I didn’t say much. I told her the truth as far as I could. I said I had been visiting Burundi as a tourist, had been staying with some German friends nearby and that when I had learned that she was in the neighbourhood I had been fascinated by her story and had decided to visit her and say hello.”

“Did she swallow that?”

“I think she did. Above all, I tried to win her confidence and I succeeded. The first night we sat talking she poured out her life story. I think you know some of it.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“She told me that in the latter part of the 1960s she had been in charge of the toxicological unit of the medical school at Marburg University and that she had been doing research into cholera. She said that in 1967 there had been a scandal, that several of her students had become infected and had died as a result of a new disease more dangerous than any known to man. As a result of the scandal she had had to flee from Germany and had come to Africa.”

“Did she tell you what the disease was called?”

“She said that at the time she left Germany, no scientific name had been given to it. Later on, she said she learned it had been named the Marburg disease. She described her original programme of work at Marburg in purely scientific and toxicological terms.”

“That’s probably what it was at the beginning. My guess is that Irma Matthofer didn’t become a fully active Soviet agent until after the 1967 outbreak when the Russians realized the incredible potential in terms of biological warfare of the Marburg virus. They probably helped her flee Germany and certainly helped her continue her work in Burundi. Did she admit the link between those two phases of her life?”

“Yes, she did. She explained that she had come to Africa so as to be near her source of raw material, as it were. She told me an amazing story of how she had tracked down the tribe of green monkeys. She didn’t at the beginning have much information to go on. She knew the green monkeys came from Burundi but she wasn’t exactly sure where. So she worked through what she described as ‘a Belgian company specializing in animal operations’.”

Kaplan nodded. “That will have been Philippe Vincennes’ network. And did she say that the same Belgian company helped her with the export of animals and serum once her operation was under way?”

“Not in so many words. But she implied it. She also said — I think this was on the following day when we were continuing her discussion — that her usefulness had come to an end. Apparently the operation was closing down; the last shipments had been made; they were in the cleaning-up phase.”

“What was to happen to her?”

“She didn’t say. But I could sense that she felt very bitter. She had given fifteen or twenty years of her life to a particular cause. And then it seemed she was simply to be thrown on the scrap-heap.”

“Still without mentioning her basic affiliations?”

“No, still no word of that. I was left to understand that she worked for or with powers unseen.”

Kaplan once more lapsed into silence. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.

They sat there side by side. Throughout the conversation Stephanie had rested her hand on the old leather briefcase. She had not let it out of her sight since she had first taken possession of it back in the clearing in the jungle.

Glancing at the back of Stephanie’s hand as she fingered the leather, Kaplan noted three short scratch marks.

“You’ve scratched yourself, I see.” He pointed to the marks.

“No, that’s not a scratch!”

“What is it?”

“It’s a vaccination mark! The first thing the old woman did, once we got talking and she began to trust me, was to vaccinate me. Apparently, with this particular vaccination, the back of the hand is the best place.”

Kaplan was about to engage in a technical discussion of the merits or otherwise of the back of the hand as a place for vaccination as opposed to say, the upper arm or the buttock, when he suddenly understood the full implications of what he had just heard.

He jumped in his seat and was only restrained by the seat-belt which he had left fastened.

“Vaccination? Did you say ‘vaccination’?”

Stephanie smiled. “I did.”

“But I don’t understand. . . !” Kaplan began to splutter incoherently.