Chapter Eleven
A li followed Max, Cornett , and the man whose son was sick out of the house and down a stone street strewn with rocky debris from explosions and gunfire.
Bull and Tom stayed behind. Tom was already starting IVs for the sick while Bull guarded their gear and watched Tom’s back.
She’d argued briefly with Max about the wisdom of making this house call. Briefly, but vehemently. His own mission parameters didn’t include caring for the sick. Not an hour had gone by in the village and he was violating his own orders.
It was also damned near impossible to guard a body in motion. They weren’t staying in the primary location—they were wandering through a village full of an unknown number of sick people, many of them armed with Russian-made rifles. Instead of the four of them together, they’d split up, making themselves far more vulnerable to attack.
Max had shut her down and told her the situation had changed. She disagreed. It hadn’t changed that much, but Max refused to listen to any other complaints.
Fine. She’d ream him out when the mission was over. One of the reasons why she was assigned to him was to give him sound advice regarding security.
Checking out a sick child was the humane thing to do, but it sure as hell wasn’t safe.
They entered another house, this one in poorer condition than the one they’d left. It had taken some hits from bullets and probably a grenade or two, leaving debris and rubble all around.
Two women backed themselves into a corner of what looked to be the kitchen while a parade of strange men went through their home. Well, mostly men. They probably thought she was a young man or teenage boy.
The rifle in her hands didn’t look at all out of place.
The men ahead of her entered a small, dark room. There wasn’t space for her, so she hovered in the doorway keeping an eye on them as well as the way out.
Max crouched next to the pallet on the floor with his stethoscope in his ears as he listened to a boy’s chest. The boy’s breathing was audible several feet away, sounding like popping bubbles as he struggled to take in air. His whole body looked involved in the effort, not just his diaphragm. She’d witnessed something like this during an advanced conditioning training event. One man had to drop out when he experienced one of the forms of altitude sickness where his lungs filled with fluid. Ali had ended her training to help get him down the mountain and she’d never forgotten the sound of his breathing—wet popping of air mixing with the fluid in his lungs.
This boy sounded just like him.
Max swabbed the boy’s nose and mouth, then pulled out a small handheld device, which he swiped across the kid’s forehead.
“How long has he been sick?” Max asked the boy’s father.
“Since yesterday. At first he had a fever, headache, and a cough. A few hours later, his cough turned red, and no matter how fast he breathed, he felt like he was drowning.”
“Your son has pneumonia and a high fever,” Max said. “He needs to be in a hospital.”
“We have no way to get to a hospital,” the man exclaimed, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Please help my son.”
Max didn’t say anything right away. He stared at the young man dying on the floor, then motioned for his father to follow him. “I don’t have the medicine or equipment he needs,” Max whispered urgently. “If you don’t take him to a hospital, he will die here.”
“Can you do anything to help him?” the man asked.
“I can give him fluids and some pain medicine, but that’s all I have.” Max shook his head. “I should have brought a pharmacy.”
He knelt next to the boy, got an IV started and hung a bag of saline on a nail in the wall above the boy’s head.
“This will help a little, but probably not enough,” Max said to the father. “When the bag is empty, pull the needle out of his arm, understand?”
The man had lost all color in his face. He nodded after a moment, then Max strode out of the house like the damn thing was on fire.
She didn’t blame him.
He’d come to this village thinking all he’d have to do was test for the pathogen. He forgot the first law of war.
No plan of operation extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder may have died in 1891, but his basic understanding of war was timeless.
Ali liked to put it this way: no matter what hell you’ve planned for, reality will be infinitely worse.
They reentered the hospital and Max went directly to the room where his equipment was mostly still inside the duffel bags. Cornett came to a stop next to Ali and watched him for a moment.
“We’re all going to die,” he said softly in English. “Aren’t we?”
Ali decided to answer him. “None of us gets out of life alive.”
He seemed to think about that for a minute, then he stiffened and turned to examine her face. “You’re a woman?”
She shook her head slowly. “I’m a weapon.” She angled her chin toward Max. “His weapon.” Then she decided to let Cornett in on another secret. “We weren’t told that the illness was so widespread. We expected a couple dozen sick and a handful dead, not all this.”
“So, we really are all going to die.”
“Maybe,” she said, a little frustrated with his defeatist attitude. “But you’re still alive and so are we. As long as you’re breathing you can make a difference.”
“For a weapon, you sound awfully smart.”
“Every soldier has to face their mortality at some point.”
He straightened a little, walked into the room and said to Max in Arabic, “Can I offer you a sample?”
Max glanced at him and nodded. He pulled out more swabs and took one from Cornett’s nose and one from his throat.
“Where’s Tom?” he asked Bull in Arabic. Since anyone could be listening in, it was a smart choice.
“He’s trying to figure out who gets the IVs and who doesn’t.”
“Ask him to come back here. I need him to get some more samples for me.”
Bull headed off while Max pulled out a compact machine Ali’d seen but never used before. Max called it a Sandwich. It was some kind of analyzer that could identify a long list of bugs and viruses.
He did something with the swabs, turned the machine on, then pressed go.
“How long until you know?” Cornett asked.
“A few minutes. I haven’t heard you coughing.”
“No, but I had a fever last night.”
“The illness seems to progress quickly, so perhaps you don’t have it.”
Tom came back and Max handed him a handful of swabs. “Try to get samples from the most recently sick. They’re more likely to be contagious and have lots of whatever is making them sick in their mucus.
“Will do.” Tom left.
“Stone,” Max said quietly. “Would you mind having a look around to get an estimate of how many people there are in this village, both new and old residents?”
“Send Bull,” she said.
Max turned to look right at her. “You’re the better choice. You don’t look like a walking tank.”
“I can’t guard a body I’m not with,” she hissed at him under her breath.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he muttered, glaring at her.
Cornett spoke up. “I’d estimate between one and two thousand people. I don’t know how many sick, but a lot.” He glanced at Ali and added, “Your son should stay here. I’ll go for a walk and see how many sick there are.”
Max glanced at Ali, who shrugged.
Max nodded his assent and Cornett left.
No one spoke as the Sandwich did its thing. The house was quiet, the only noise was the sound of weak coughing from a variety of throats. Too few.
Tom came back in with some swabs and gave them to Max. “Half the people I checked are dead.”
Max stared at him like Tom had spoken a language he didn’t understand. “How many?”
“Fifteen.”
The machine beeped.
Everyone either took a step toward it or leaned forward to see what the results were.
“Both samples are positive for influenza,” Max reported. “No other infections.”
“If this is the flu, why are people dying so fast of pneumonia? Is this some kind of bird flu?” Tom asked.
“It’s possible. I have a piece of equipment here that will differentiate between specific flu variants, but it takes longer.” He glanced around. “And even if I know which variant it is, people aren’t dying of the flu specifically. They’re dying of the body’s response to the flu. It’s called a cytokine storm, an overreaction by the body’s immune system. We’re seeing one of the ways the immune system reacts. Your lungs fill up with fluid and you drown.”
“Can you stop it?”
“That is a matter of debate. Some physicians think you can prevent it if you know it’s coming, but most of the time you get no advance warning. You get no warning at all. Once it’s started, it’s almost impossible to reverse. The body has to survive the storm and hang on until the storm has played itself out. Most people don’t survive that long.”
“Is it like the SARS outbreak a few years ago?”
“Yes. Very much like that. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome can kill anyone, no matter how healthy they are before they get sick. In fact, the healthier you are, the stronger the immune response is. So, the strongest often die faster than someone whose immune system isn’t as healthy.”
Holy shit, this stuff was worse than she’d imagined. “So, there’s no way to help these people? No treatment?”
“If we had a vaccine for the specific flu strain, that would help prevent people from getting sick, but until we determine the exact variant, it’s unlikely that any vaccine we try would work. It would be like shooting at a target in the dark.”
“What’s our next move?”
“We start the other test. In the meantime, Bull, you contact the base and arrange to have food and medical supplies dropped.”
“Dropped?” Ali asked. “Why not trucked in? We could evacuate some of the sick to hospitals.”
“Until I know which flu we have here, I don’t want a bunch more new people coming or leaving the community. If this is something new, which is likely because the flu mutates so rapidly it’s almost always different than the last time you’ve seen it, I may be recommending a quarantine of the area.”
“I’m on it,” Bull said, stepping out of the room and pulling out his satellite-connected radio.
No escape route meant keeping Max safe just got a lot harder.
Max began pulling out items from one duffel bag, quickly putting them together onto a narrow work table. On it, he set other items that looked like some of the stuff she’d seen through the glass when he showed her his level-four lab.
“Tom,” Max said. “Are you finished putting IVs in?”
“No, I’ve got two people left.”
“Go ahead and get those started, then check on the first ones to see if their condition has improved any.”
“Okay. Can I have a few more pairs of gloves? These are my last ones.”
“In the duffel closest to the door.”
Tom stripped off his current pair, put a new pair on and took several more for his pockets.
“Son,” Max said in Arabic, looking right at Ali, “could you bring some water from the well?” He glanced at the Sandwich and she knew what he wanted to do.
Test the water from the well. If it was contaminated this was going to turn into one giant clusterfuck. She could understand why he asked her to do it—she looked less threatening than Bull or Tom—but could she leave Max and be reasonably sure he’d stay safe?
The house was solid. Tom was playing nurse and none of these sick people had the ability to attack anyone.
She said, “Okay, but under protest,” in a suitably quiet tone, and walked to the kitchen. She found a bucket tucked into a nook in the wall.
She picked it up and left.
There were a number of people walking around, old men and women, at least a dozen children, and some men, but no healthy young adults.
With all these new people arriving suddenly and throwing up tents, were they hiding in their homes?
She hoped so, because it wasn’t just the living that were making an appearance on the streets. There were bodies, wrapped in cloth, lying outside some of the houses.
Ali hurried past them, careful to keep her scarf up over her mask so no one realized she had medical supplies no one else in this place seemed to own.
The well wasn’t far from the house where Max and her team worked, about a three minute walk. It was busy. Two women waited in a short line behind a third who was already using the well. Ali got in line behind them.
They glanced at her, noted her rifle sticking out from under her poncho, and stepped back. The woman using the well waved Ali forward and instead of taking the water she’d scooped and hauled up, she put it in Ali’s bucket.
These women were used to putting men first, even young men. Was it the rifle that made them think she was a guy?
After a nod of thanks, she began her walk back to the house. There were only a few people out, a few kids, two women, and an old man. Not very many for midday. Had the news spread about the sickness? Were people staying home, hoping to avoid the sick?
She was two thirds of the way back to their quasi hospital when gunfire erupted behind her.
It had come from the area around the well. She hesitated. This wasn’t her fight, and she had a commitment to Max and her team. She’d taken a couple more steps when a man began yelling in Arabic, demanding to know where the Americans were.
Okay, maybe this was her fight.
A woman screamed, while another yelled back that they’d seen no Americans.
More shots echoed.
Extremists on the hunt for Americans were so not what they needed.
Ali set her bucket on the ground against the outer wall of a house and walked stealthily back to the well.
She crouched down behind a crumbling stone wall that might have been a small pen for chickens at one time, to take a good look at what was going on.
Was it a small, disorganized group or a larger, disciplined one?
A half-dozen men in traditional garb stood over the bodies of two women prone on the ground and one woman who was kneeling.
One of the men yelled at the kneeling woman, again demanding she tell him where the Americans were, specifically the American doctor.
Max. The bounty .
The extremist screamed at the woman again and she fell on her face, crying. The son of a bitch was going to murder her too. Ali could see it in the way he’d shifted his body weight forward, as if he were about to attack her with his bare hands.
Ali set the butt of her rifle into the hollow of her shoulder and settled into a kneeling shooting posture she could maintain for hours if she had to. She brought her head down and rested her chin on her knee.
The few people who had been between her and the well, blocking her shot, had disappeared. No one wanted to attract the attention of these men.
The woman wailed that she hadn’t seen any Americans, but that there were so many new people in the village, in the tents, that there could be foreigners anywhere.
The man punched the woman with a closed fist and she went down hard.
Ali sighted down her rifle, a clear shot to the man’s head.
Scuffing noises in the dirt behind her and a breath of warm air fanning over the back of her neck told her she wasn’t alone. She turned just far enough to see two little boys, the oldest no more than six years old, hiding behind her watching the scene by the well with wide, frightened eyes.
Holy shit. She’d trained in every type of shooting condition but this one.
Could she kill a man with two little kids watching?
What was her escape plan?
Could she make it with two kids in tow?