Z (20 page)

“Overhead imagery of the land to the east of here.” He pointed and explained the blue and red circles.

“You mean people are dead or dying in all those places?” Conner was stunned. “What are they doing about it?”

“They who?” Riley said, picking up the sixteen-page intelligence summary for the past twenty-four hours that had been sent along with photos.

“They!” Conner’s voice was sharp. “The people who thought of this whole thing. The people who make the decisions and give the orders! The people who are responsible!”

Riley’s voice was calm. “The people who are in charge are acting. That’s why we’re quarantined.” He pointed across to the AOB. He’d been watching it all morning. “That’s why the AOB is closing in on itself. You might not have noticed, but they haven’t let anyone in or out for the past six hours, other than when Tyron and Kieling came over here and your man Seeger went nuts. Everyone’s scared.

“As far as responsibility goes,” he continued, “I don’t think anyone is responsible. Seeger’s not too far off. This is an act of God, if you believe in God, that is.”

Riley watched Conner visibly try to calm herself down. “Do you?” she finally asked.

“Believe in God?”

“Believe that there is a greater plan. A greater power behind everything that happens.” She pointed at the imagery. “I just can’t accept that all these people dying is random. That it’s just the fates playing their hand. There has to be some reason.”

“Maybe there is a reason,” Riley replied. “I just don’t know what it is. I do believe there is some higher power, but I also know that inherent in that belief is the acceptance that I won’t know what that higher power is or what its designs are. So I can’t tell you the purpose behind this disease, Conner.” He paused. He wondered if he should follow Kieling’s lead and keep what he knew to himself or tell her.

“If it spread out there this quickly,” Conner said, tapping the imagery, “then we have it. We’re the walking dead.” She laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. “And my cameraman is off the deep end. At the very least this would be Pulitzer prize material, don’t you think? Reporter films own slow demise from viral outbreak during peacekeeping operation.”

“It’s not certain—” Riley began.

“Ah, ever the optimist,” Conner said. “That’s the second time today I’ve called you that. By the way, Dave, I don’t blame you for me being out here. It should be the other way around. You should be blaming me for dragging you all over the world the last year or so. You should have settled down somewhere. You certainly did enough for God and Country when you were in the service. I’m sorry you’re here.”

“I take responsibility for my own—” Riley began.

“Give me a break, Dave,” Conner said. “Just accept my apology, okay?”

“All right.”

“Thank you. Well, back to work on my own obituary. That’s a joke, Dave.” Conner turned and walked away.

Riley started to get up to follow, then stopped. They were all in the same boat and they could exchange sympathy all day long, but it wouldn’t do any good. He looked at the imagery. He was bothered by something. Something he’d said to Conner and something he’d read in the intelligence summary, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He flipped the cover sheet and began reading it one more time, but it was very hard to concentrate.

Luia River, Angola, 16 June

There was a distinct lack of aircraft flying, which bothered Quinn. Certainly, the Americans couldn’t have completely broken UNITA so quickly. There was nothing on the SNN broadcast, other than a report that the Americans had halted their deployment. That was curious, but not surprising. Perhaps they were having second thoughts.

The patrol was making good time. Quinn had originally planned on moving only at dark, but the lack of over-flights had changed that. They were moving along the east bank of the Luia, making large detours around the few villages that stood in their path.

The detours didn’t seem necessary. The countryside was deserted. The Americans had certainly done a good job of sending everyone to ground, Quinn figured.

Darkness was falling and he wanted to keep pushing on until at least midnight, take a short break, then continue. His reckoning was that they could sleep when they got back to the border.

Quinn pulled up his night vision goggles and switched them on. He had two of his men out front and one on each flank, twenty meters out. Trent and he were with Bentley, ten meters behind the point. The patrol crested a tall, grassy ridge and Quinn halted briefly to look around. He could see a long way in every direction and there was nothing. No lights, no fires, no sign of civilization. There were no running lights of aircraft anywhere in the sky. They could be the only people on the face of the planet, based on the information his senses were giving him.

Quinn glanced at Bentley’s back as the man passed by. Something was wrong with this whole deal. The mission, the terrain, the Americans. There was something happening. Fuck Skeleton, Quinn suddenly decided, giving in to his sixth sense. He’d learned long ago to trust his gut and it was screaming at him right now. Turn back!

Quinn took a step forward to halt his point man and was instantly blinded by a flash of light. A sharp crack of explosion reverberated in his ears and he felt a shock wave blow by, tumbling him to the ground. Quinn struggled to his feet, the goggles slowly adjusting back to normal, twisting his head, looking about.

There was screaming ahead. Quinn jogged forward, weapon at the ready. The screaming came from one of the men who had been at point. The man was lying on his side, hands holding the stumps of what had once been his legs, now gone from mid-thigh down. Blood squirted out through his fingers.

Quinn looked for the other man. There was a part of a torso about twenty feet away.

“Mine,” Trent said, pointing at a three-foot crater. “Antitank, from the sound and the pit. We’re lucky it wasn’t antipersonnel or we’d all be mush.”

“Lucky!” Bentley’s voice squeaked. “I was almost killed.”

Quinn knelt down to the wounded man, whose screams had descended to gasps of pain-filled breath. “Easy, mate, easy.” He shifted around to the side of the man, one hand on his shoulder. With the other he brought up the Sterling, out of the man’s sight, and, holding the muzzle less than an inch from his head, fired a round into his brain.

The flank security had come running in at the sound of the explosion and they all stood looking at the two dead men.

“Right,” Quinn said. At least he now knew why he had gotten spooked. He turned to the remaining members of his patrol. “No flank. You two take point. Let’s move.”

As they left behind the bodies, Trent moved over next to Quinn. “Well, another hundred grand for each of us now that Peterson and Dunnigan are dead,” Trent noted.

“I know,” Quinn repeated. He felt warm and his head was throbbing. This was all fucked up.

“You all right, sir?” Trent asked, peering in the dark.

“No.”

Cacolo, Angola, 16 June

Kieling tenderly wiped the blood off a little girl’s chin. He had a surgical mask on and wore two sets of gloves, as did the nuns, courtesy of one of the equipment cases he’d had packed on board the B-l. Too little too late.

He knew a lot about the progression of the virus now. At least its first seventy-two hours. And what he’d learned scared him. It was fast. Faster than anything he’d ever seen that was this deadly. It was violating the basic paradox of virus survival, killing so fast it should be inhibiting its own spread. But that didn’t appear to be the case, at least not from that imagery he’d seen earlier in the day.

Kieling still wasn’t sure about the vector, but he had one possibility: the rashes that were developing on the bodies of some of the victims. They looked like ropes of angry red crisscrossing the skin. Inside the red, pustules were forming and occasionally breaking. That might be when the virus got into the air, Kieling speculated.

“When will the others arrive?” Sister Angelina was behind him.

She had been on the ward ever since he’d arrived, never taking a break. He didn’t know what fueled her. He did know that she knew she had the virus. He’d seen her bend over and retch into a pan a few hours earlier. She’d glanced up at him and smiled, carefully wiping the foamy black matter from around her lips with a stained rag.

“They should be here in the morning,” he answered.

She put out a hand and touched him on the arm. “There are no others, are there?”

“There is some difficulty in transportation and entry requirements,” Kieling said. “What with the Americans and the Pan-African forces trying to get to Savimbi and UNITA. Things are a bit unusual, so it is taking longer than—”

“You’re with the American army, aren’t you?”

“I...” Kieling halted. Sister Angelina was looking at him, her face calm. “Yes.”

“There will be no others coming to help, will there? We’re on our own, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for being honest.” She looked down the row of beds, the sound of people vomiting and moaning in pain filling the air. “I need one more answer. Did your people cause this?”

Kieling blinked. “No.”

“I would not have believed that answer if you had not told me you were with the army. And if your army were not soon going to be suffering like these people are. And if you were not here among us without your suit. You have it also, don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

She pointed toward the door. “You’d better go back to your people and help them. Thank you for your help.”

Riley looked up as Kieling entered the tent. He had the imagery and intelligence printout spread out on a table in front of him, but he wasn’t looking at it. All it did was reinforce his feeling of impending doom. He’d faced death before but never in such a drawn out and certain fashion. Always before there’d been a chance, hope that he could beat the odds, and up until this he had. Conner was seated across from him. They hadn’t said a word for the past hour, each lost in their own thoughts.

“How bad is it?” Riley asked.

“It’s bad.” Kieling looked at him. “How are you feeling?”

“I have a headache,” Riley said.

Kieling’s gaze shifted to Conner. “And you?”

“The same,” she said. “And surprise, surprise, I’m running a slight fever. That was very slick of you and Comsky to decide whether we should know we were dying. Who made you God?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve made a lot of errors in judgment on this trip.” Kieling sat down on a folding chair next to Riley. “Seen Tyron?”

“He’s hiding out in the habitat,” Riley said. “I went by there an hour ago and he said they had nothing new from Fort Detrick. He just yelled through the door. Didn’t even bother to suit up.”

“It will take time for the vector experiments to work,” Kieling said. “Time we don’t have, because we’re already ahead of them time-wise if we’re infected.” He rubbed the stubble of his beard. “You know, Sister Angelina at the hospital asked me an interesting question, and I was thinking about it the entire way back here.”

“What was that?” Riley asked. He’d taken aspirin, but there was no change. His head throbbed and he felt warm.

“She asked if we’d started this virus.”

“You mean biological warfare?” Riley asked.

“Yes.”

“Did we?” Conner asked.

“You’re joking, right?” Kieling said.

“No, she’s not,” Riley replied. “I’ve seen our government do things that are on a par with this.”

“Kill people like this?” Kieling said. “Why?”

“To test a weapon maybe,” Riley said. “Let me tell you a little story.”

With that, Riley launched into the story of his encounter with the Synbats—synthetic battle forms—in the woods of Tennessee three years ago. Creatures that were designed under government contract to replace the infantryman. Except the experiment had gone terribly wrong and the Synbats had escaped and gone on a killing rampage. Riley and his Special Forces team, with the aid of a Chicago police officer, had finally cornered them in tunnels under the streets of Chicago and wiped them out by flooding the entire system.

“So don’t tell me that our government isn’t capable of something like this,” Riley concluded.

“You never told me about any of that!” Conner exclaimed when he was done.

“I couldn’t,” Riley said. “It was classified.”

“What a story. After all we went through in Antarctica, you couldn’t tell me—” she began, but stopped as a thought struck her. “So why’d you tell me now?”

“The answer is obvious,” Riley said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Do you think the U.S. government could really be behind this?” Conner asked, turning to Kieling.

“No,” he answered.

“Why?” Conner asked.

“Maybe the government is capable of doing such a thing, but I’d know if they did this specific thing,” he said. “There aren’t that many people in the field of epidemiology back in the States—I’d know if someone in the U.S. did this,” he repeated.

Conner turned to Riley. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think our government did it. Not because I know anything about the manufacture of something like it, but because it serves no purpose letting it loose here, especially in the middle of this deployment.”

“How about the rebels?” Conner asked. “Could Savimbi have gotten ahold of some biological weapon and unleashed it? Maybe from the Russians?”

Kieling considered that. “Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s killing more Angolans than anyone else.”

“UNITA would have let it loose in Luanda,” Riley noted, “if they wanted to have maximum effect. Not out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of their own terrain.”

“It’s not the middle of nowhere,” Conner corrected him. “It’s the middle of one of the largest diamond-mining areas in the world.”

“And?” Kieling said.

“And...” Conner bit her lip. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Wait a second,” Riley said. “There’s something in here.” He grabbed the intelligence summary. He flipped through. “Yeah, here it is. NSA picked up some SATCOM transmissions out of the Lunda Norte region. Top-of-the-line stuff, but it wasn’t ours. And it wasn’t the rebels’. The communication was going out of the country.”

Riley scattered the photos and uncovered the map underneath. “There’s someone out there. Transmitting and getting messages back.”

“So what?” Kieling said.

“Wait a second.” Riley tapped his forehead, trying to conjure up a memory through the throb of pain. There’s something else.” He ran his finger down the page, then the next. “Yeah, here it is. Earlier today at zero seven thirty Zulu time someone piggybacked a GPS—ground-positioning-satellite—signal.”

“And?” Kieling asked.

“And someone has to have very good gear to do that and,” Riley continued, looking at the report, “the NSA analyst thinks that the whole thing was designed for whoever broadcast the first signal to find something on the return piggyback.”

“Find what?” Conner asked.

“Something out there,” Riley said, tapping the map. The three of them sat silent for a little while, considering the information.

“You mentioned top-of-the-line equipment,” Conner said.

“Yeah,” Riley said.

“That takes money. And this”—she pointed at the area Riley had indicated on the map—“is the center of the diamond area.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” Kieling demanded.

“Just listen to me,” Conner said. “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but none of this does. I never told you one of the main reasons I went along with your idea about coming out to this area, Dave.”

Kieling rubbed his forehead. “Are we going to play true confession all night?”

“Got something better to do?” Conner countered. “Can you come up with a cure for this thing in the next couple of days?”

“Hell, I don’t even know what this thing is,” Kieling admitted. He threw a hand up in the air and settled back on his seat. “Go ahead.”

“Has either of you ever heard of the Van Wyks cartel?”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “They’re a diamond cartel.”

“The diamond cartel,” Conner corrected. “The one and only.”

“What does—” Kieling began, but halted at Conner’s glare.

“Let’s put one and one together and come up with two,” Conner said. “Dave says that these transmissions are from expensive equipment. They’re being made in the region of Angola known for its diamond mines. To me that adds up to the Van Wyks cartel.”

Despite the situation, Riley had to smile. He’d seen Conner in this mode before. When she investigated a subject, she left no stone unturned and she committed facts, and rumors, to memory, to be plucked out when required. Of course, Riley noted—as Conner flipped open the lid—she also had her laptop with the information the researchers in the SNN data bank dredged up for her.

“Okay, so maybe it is the Van Wyks,” Riley said. “Tell me more about them.”

“The Van Wyks empire makes OPEC look like a misguided and inept baby, yet it’s managed to stay out of public scrutiny for more than a century. The history of the Van Wyks really starts in 1867, when a boy discovered a diamond on the bank of the Orange River in South Africa. That began the African version of the great gold rush.

“And one fact that is very rarely mentioned is that the battles between the British and the Afrikaners over the next several decades, and the Boer War, had as much to do with control of this wealth as political freedom. Keep in mind, as I tell you this history, the number of people who have died over the past hundred and thirty years in this area, and then think about the present situation.

“Pieter Van Wyks the First, the patriarch of the Van Wyks family, was the first person who understood the new development clearly. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, pretty much the only source of diamonds was South Africa. Van Wyks gobbled up all the mines. Some he bought legally, others he just took when the owners wouldn’t sell. Apartheid, besides being a racial instrument, also needs to be looked at through the lens of supplying workers to mines—both diamond and gold.”

Conner had been working her computer while speaking. She looked down. “The Big Hole at Kimberly, one of the most infamous diamond mines, was the largest man-made excavation in the world—covering over twelve acres and going two hundred and thirty feet deep. It took almost four thousand workers to keep it going. And you don’t have a hefty overhead eating into your profit if you don’t have to pay all those workers. But the most amazing thing Van Wyks did was invent a market that his family has never relinquished.”

“Invent?” Riley asked.

“If the Van Wyks cartel did not control eighty percent of the world’s diamond market and fix the price by regulating supply, diamonds would probably cost one fifth what they currently do,” Conner said.

“I thought that diamonds were rare,” Kieling said, “and that’s why they cost so much.”

“Certainly diamonds aren’t plentiful,” Conner said, “but they aren’t that rare. If you controlled eighty percent of the supply of anything, you could control the price on the international market. Particularly if you’d been doing so for over a century.

“This is an organization that doesn’t care about borders or the international situation. It cares only about profit and propagating itself. Estimated sales of Van Wyks’s diamonds last year was three point two billion in U.S. dollars. It controls, at least as far has been uncovered so far, at least six hundred various corporations and employs almost a million people around the world.”

“Jesus,” Kieling muttered. “That’s bigger than many countries.”

“And the Van Wyks don’t like competition,” Conner added. “Here in Angola—since it concerns our present situation—it’s estimated that they’ve spent fifty million dollars a year buying black market diamonds to keep them from hitting the outside world. It is also claimed that they hire mercenaries to try and block UNITA from getting the diamonds across the border to Zaire, paying a bounty for every dead rebel.”

“Maybe these transmissions are coming from one of those mercenary groups,” Riley said. “I talked to some people in the know before we came over here, and the word on the international merk market is that there’s good money to be made in Angola, either working for Van Wyks, the MPLA government, or UNITA.”

“Right,” Conner said. “The Van Wyks will use any means to further their cause. In World War II, the United States placed a large order with Van Wyks for industrial diamonds. Afraid that those diamonds would create a glut after the war and cause prices to go down, Van Wyks refused. The company claimed that its London vaults had been bombed shut. Despite the greatest pressure from the Allies, the Van Wyks cartel only released a low percentage of what had been requested. There were also rumors—never proved—that at the same time the Van Wyks were supplying the Nazis with industrial diamonds at highly inflated prices through intermediaries in Switzerland.

“But it was after the Second World War that the most interesting alliance occurred. For over fifty years, it has been a poorly kept secret that the Van Wyks cartel has been buying out the Siberian diamond mines. This despite the South African government banning the Communist party and the Russians training ANC guerrillas.