Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (23 page)

Salim’s commander put him at the southwestern
corner of the village, where circular grass-roofed huts fringed the
town. They would burn easily. The commander lit one of Salim’s
bundles and directed him to move along the edge of the town,
lighting each house as he went. Still in sight of the other
torchbearers, Salim struggled to light the first hut, then walked
quickly to the next one in the row. Before lighting the building,
he peered inside and thanked Allah it was empty.

He hurried to the next. Also empty.

At the fifth hut, the story changed. A man
lay on a blanket where a decrepit woman tended to him. The smell of
the disease was overpowering. The man would die. Looking at the
woman, Salim guessed she would quickly follow the man down that
dark road.

What kind of disease kills everybody?

Salim stood in the door with his torch
burning, contemplating that thought. Maybe that’s why they were
leaving all of a sudden. Maybe the disease was something other than
typhoid? Maybe it was something that
killed everybody
. If
that was the case, then it was a good thing they were getting out
of town before they became infected.

Infected?

Salim laid his palm on his forehead to check
for a fever. There was none. He had no symptoms of any kind. The
momentary fear passed.

With all doubt gone about what was going to
happen to the two wretches on the floor, Salim couldn’t burn the
hut with them inside. He couldn’t bypass the hut, either. To do
that would risk the wrath of his commander—a wrath that would
likely be his own death.

He closed his eyes, not believing that he was
doing it. In clear view of the woman sitting on the floor, Salim
raised his torch and lit the edge of the thatched roof. Her eyes
went wide, then dropped. She looked down at her man on the floor.
Her evolution through surprise, anger, hate, and despair disturbed
Salim in a way he couldn’t quite believe. How could people give up
so easily?

He let his torch fall to the dirt, ran
inside, dropped to a knee beside the man and lifted him, surprised
by how light he was. Hoping the woman would follow, he ran through
the door, past caring if anyone saw what he was doing. If he was
seen, he’d just keep running. He’d figure out how to make his own
way back to Denver at some point down the road.

No one was outside to witness his
transgression. Salim hurried across a wide dirt path with the woman
making every effort to keep up. Even though he was burdened with
carrying her stick figure of a husband, the disease was taking a
heavy toll on her. He crashed into a field of towering sugar cane,
pushing through the stalks, hoping the couple would be well hidden
inside. The woman struggled behind him—grunting, wheezing, and
pushing against the cane.

When Salim figured he was far enough in, he
stopped and looked back. He couldn’t see through the tall crop.
They were deep enough. The woman fell to her knees and emptied the
reddish-black contents of her stomach onto the ground.

“Sorry,” Salim told her as he lay the man in
the red dirt. “I’m so sorry.” Without looking back, he took off at
a sprint toward the burning village, already glowing orange in the
sky over the field.

Oily black smoked settled to the ground all
through the village. Gray smoke blew over his head. Night grew
darker in the sky as the fire grew up to meet it. Salim retrieved
his bundles of grass, lit one on the last hut he’d torched, and ran
onward. But instead of going on to several small buildings close to
the road, he instead took off across an open field, the shortest
distance to the hospital.

With the glow of the fire ruining everyone’s
night vision, he hoped no one would notice his sole lit torch
running across the field. Structures were going up in flames
through the town from east to west. He wasn’t the only one hurrying
through the task of burning.

He tripped, got a face full of dirt, and his
torch bounced across the rough ground in front of him. Thankfully,
the fall didn’t extinguish it. A thought crossed his mind that he
shouldn’t get up. His jihadist brothers were going to be in a hurry
to leave the burning township. They’d likely not even notice his
absence.

Rising up on his hands and knees and to his
feet, he knew the question of whether or not he got on one of those
trucks headed east wasn’t as important as getting to the hospital’s
back door before it was set ablaze.

Salim picked up his torch and ran.

As he approached the back of the hospital, he
saw he didn’t have much time. The other jihadists were past the
town’s central intersection and were working their way up the road
toward him.

Bodies behind the hospital were strewn in
piles large and small, with some from earlier cleanups laid next to
one another in neat rows. Salim touched his torch to the cloth that
wrapped the first body, near its feet. It had diesel fuel on it,
and after a little coaxing, it burst into flames that jumped
quickly to the adjacent bodies. Those burning bodies were the
cornerstones of the hope he needed to make his desperate plan work.
None of his comrades would come around to the back of the hospital
to light the bodies if they saw them in flames already.

Salim hurried past body after body, lighting
as he went. He reached the largest pile, lit it in several places,
and stepped back for a few seconds to watch the flames crawl with
red fingers across the crumpled cloth that wrapped them. He tossed
his torch to the top of the pile and ran to the hospital’s back
door. A half-dozen bodies were piled outside the door to prevent it
from opening. Salim grabbed the feet of the one on top and dragged
it out of the way. The second followed. He rolled a few more away
and pulled others far enough from the door that he was able to get
it open.

It was then that Salim realized he would need
to light those bodies, too. If he didn’t, anyone coming around to
check the backside of the building—not that it would happen, but it
could—would see the door unblocked. Burning bodies just outside the
door would keep it hidden.

Salim pulled one of the smaller grass bundles
from where he had it tucked in his belt, ran to the nearest fire
and lit it. He heard voices. The others were getting close.

Running back to the door as the sickly smell
of burning flesh mixed with the diesel and smoke, he quickly lit
the scattered bodies and flung the door open. The lantern light in
the room seemed dim compared to the conflagration outside. He cast
a fearful look at the front door and ran to the center of the room.
Patients who could were getting up on their hands and knees, panic
in their blood-red eyes. Some fell right back down. Others
slept—good for them. Many were too sick to have any awareness of
the flaming horror coming their way.

Salim saw immediately that the tidy Arab
boy’s cot was empty and the yellow HAZMAT doctor was gone. Austin
was getting up on shaky knees and looking out a window when Salim
arrived at his side. “Can you run?”

Austin looked at him as if he didn’t
understand.

“Can you—?”
To hell with it.
Salim
lifted Austin to his feet, and threw Austin’s arm over his
shoulder. As Austin tried to stand and struggled to walk, Salim was
forced to drag him toward the center aisle.

Austin pulled back and pointed at a box by
the tidy boy’s cot.

Medical supplies.

Salim managed to grab a cardboard flap on the
box then move as fast as he could toward the back door. Ambulatory
patients understood fear and urgency, and started to make their way
to the door, some shuffling slowly, most of those struggling to
stay upright, a few on hands and knees.

“Margaux?”

“What?” Salim asked.

Austin repeated, “Margaux.”

The white girl.

Damn.

“I’ll try.” Salim got Austin and the box
through the back door. Austin’s feet seemed to become more useful
once they were outside, moving quickly past the largest pile of
burning bodies. Austin stopped, jerked his arm away from Salim, and
stood on his own feet. “Margaux. Help her.”

“I can’t.”

“Please. The others.”

Salim slumped. Having succeeded in rescuing
Austin—a feat he didn’t expect to live through—he deflated. A
second rescue would surely fail.

“Take the box. Go to the trees.” Salim turned
and ran to the back door.

He didn’t see any of his brothers coming
around the side of the building, but a few of the sick villagers
had come out. “Run to the trees!” he commanded as he pushed past
another of the patients coming through the back door.

The situation inside the ward was chaos, for
as much that can be said about people who could barely muster the
energy to take care of the most basic necessities in the bucket
next to their beds. Several were trying to get the front door open.
Some were staring out of windows. Many were yelling some kind of
nonsense.

Mostly, they were just stinking and dying in
peaceful comas. The disease had made sure of that.

Back beside Austin’s cot, Salim dropped on
his knee beside the white girl. She was in terrible shape. Salim
had seen enough of the sick to know she was destined to die. He saw
her chest rise and fall, so she wasn’t dead already. He picked her
up, threw her over his shoulder, and started toward the back door.
A gush of hot liquid poured over his back as Margaux retched. Salim
cursed, knocked another patient aside, and made it to the back
door.

He heard the front door bang. The patients
trying to get out inadvertently kept the jihadists out front for
the last seconds he needed. He pushed through the back door and
slammed it closed behind him. Anybody still inside would have to
deal with their own fate. Salim knew several buckets of diesel were
sitting just inside the front doors, and he knew someone would open
those doors, kick the buckets over, and throw in a torch. The
diesel, the bedding, and the people would flame up in seconds.

The explosion of shrieks behind him told
Salim the fire inside had started. He didn’t look back.

Some things just seem to take forever, and
the greater the push to speed them up, the slower they seem to go.
Mitch sighed loudly and looked at his watch as he leaned against
the open door of the truck. He looked inside at the driver—a
Ugandan who shrugged, making it clear that it wasn’t his fault. Of
course it wasn’t. They both knew it.

One hundred and eighty miles from Kampala to
Kapchorwa. Getting there had grown into a fiasco of
wait-a-few-minutes
that turned into hour-long delays that
eventually burned off the whole morning. It was too late in the
evening after Mitch got off the call with his boss to head out the
night before. Everyone agreed on that. But the group of doctors
heading to the villages north of Mbale—into ground zero of the
Ebola rumors—wouldn’t go without an armed escort. Apparently two
attempts by the WHO to head up the road to those villages left a
single doctor unaccounted for, and another group of doctors and aid
workers, as well.

Everyone anticipated trouble up that way,
though nobody knew how that trouble would manifest itself.

Dripping with sweat in the sun, Mitch stood
impatient and bored, glaring at the doctors. Three of them were
standing in front of their vehicle that was parked behind his in a
makeshift caravan. Another truck, right behind theirs, carried more
people along with boxes of medical gear.

One of the doctors kept talking about
machete-wielding bandits he’d encountered during a stint in Rwanda.
He was certain the road north of Mbale held an ambush of just such
men. One of the doctors seemed to think the best way to assuage the
other doctors’ fears was to talk about how, during the 1976 Ebola
outbreak in Zaire, the area around the Ebola river—for which the
nasty little Filovirus was named—had turned into a veritable black
hole. No word, no communication of any kind came out.

Mitch didn’t care if it was the Bermuda
Triangle. He had a compact Glock in a holster on his belt,
thoroughly hidden by his baggy shirt. The man in the back seat—a
guy he’d used for security on more than one occasion—had an AK-47
standing on the floorboard beside him. Two more AK-47s were covered
under a blanket on the other side—one for Mitch and one for the
driver, who was also experienced at using it. Both carried
concealed handguns. Mitch preferred to work with experienced,
prepared men.

He also preferred to get things done. So
whether their escort from the Uganda People’s Defence Force—the
army—showed up or not, he was leaving at noon. The sound of a big
diesel engine caught his attention and he looked down the street.
As the dust cleared, a squad of Ugandan soldiers in a big flatbed
truck appeared, only a day late.

Driving through Kampala near noon left them
in more traffic than Mitch had wanted to deal with. At least with
the vehicle moving and the windows down, the breeze blowing in felt
nearly as cool as if the air conditioner was running. With the
elevation, the summer in Kampala wasn’t as hot as he’d imagined it
would be before he arrived nearly a year ago.

They passed modern buildings and houses, as
well as less affluent areas of town, and slums. The highway passed
Mandela National Stadium as they were leaving Kampala and stretched
into the smaller outlying towns. It occurred to Mitch how much the
country reminded him of the rural parts of the Deep South—Alabama
or Mississippi, maybe—where he could drive past a brightly colored
eight-pump gas station one moment, and in the next, past farm
shacks covered in flaking paint with rusting metal you-name-its in
the front yard. Where chickens ran loose among barefoot kids who
looked like they couldn’t care less when their next bath time
arrived, and weeds as tall as the kids grew wherever their feet
didn’t beat them down to bare dirt.