Born of War Page 19

  Parker looked out to see a twisting dirt-red river and several lit encampments. Each seemed to be separate from the others. A few lights lit the village of Ferfer. There looked to be a few thousand people in rows of structures that followed the main streets.

  The aircraft turned toward glow markers that signaled the landing zone. As it made the descent of the final hundred feet, the Osprey again shifted from one type of flight to another. The aircraft became a helicopter and started to settle slowly as its wheels sunk into the dirt. Despite a gentle rain, dust and small rocks were thrown about everywhere.

  “Let’s go.” The Marine in charge signaled the men to depart the aircraft without hesitation. It was clear that the Osprey meant to stay on the ground for as short a time as possible.

  Parker followed the line of men heading to a tent.

  Dr. Stewart is totally out of his element, Parker thought as he followed the man to the edge of the landing zone and the first tent. Another man, not in military camouflage but in a blue scrub suit, was standing at the entrance to the tent as well. He was covering his eyes with his sleeve.

  Stewart looked exhausted. Moncrief looked ready to roll.

  “God, we are back!” Moncrief said to Parker as the quiet resumed for a minute between Osprey landings.

  “Yeah.” Parker turned to watch the second aircraft hover and then land. Other Marines and two women dressed in loose-fitting cargo dress followed them out to the other side of the landing zone. The bird had barely touched down when its nose started to rise.

  “I need a weapon.” Moncrief’s first words would have been Parker’s if he didn’t already have something in his backpack.

  “I am sure that they can come up with something.”

  The two followed Dr. Stewart, who was led into the tent by his fellow CDC doctor.

  “Welcome to Africa.” Captain Tola extended his hand in the dim light of the tent. There was a makeshift table in the center of the room with a blowup of a satellite picture of the valley for miles in all directions. Marines sat on the sides in front of computer screens. Parker noticed that virtually all of the screens had images on them with a bold red TOP SECRET banner on the top.

  “You are Colonel William Parker?” Tola held out his hand.

  “Parker does fine.” He didn’t want the command to think that they had to entertain someone of high rank. He was basically there as a medical guinea pig ready to be poked and tested. And it appeared that his alias had not lasted long. He was no longer being referred to as Phillip Berks.

  Why did I do this? he wondered as he stood there amid a tent full of warriors with much to do. They were running combat patrols every night while he and Moncrief would look out over the land with a pair of NVGs. It was worse than being suited up for a football game and never coming off the bench.

  “He is the hope for all of us.” Paul Stewart said aloud. It would not take long for all of the camp to know why two civilians with no connection to the CDC or WHO, or even Doctors Without Borders, were there. “What is the report?”

  “The death count is at thirty. We are treating at least sixty more who we suspect are infected. Almost all right now are in the MSF encampment. WHO has issued a GAR and we are trying to stop any movement out of the area.” The GAR was the Global Alert and Response that first got word to Stewart. “It is still early but this has all the signs of an outbreak on the same scale as Ebola in Guinea. It is moving exponentially. Ebola went from sixty to six hundred to six thousand in a matter of weeks,” said the CDC doctor

  “What the hell have we gotten into?” Moncrief mumbled the words next to Parker.

  “I have two Marines who are sick,” Tola inserted the comment. “And we cannot take them out of here. We can’t take anyone who gets sick out of here.”

  The disease needed to be contained as much as possible.

  “I have another question.” Paul Stewart looked ready to collapse.

  “Doctor, we believe she is alive,” Tola said. “I took a patrol out last night and we found a wrapper from a piece of chewing gum. It was clearly a signal that she wanted us to find.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  As Omar and his guide headed west they ran into more and more fighters of Al Shabaab heading away from the sound of the artillery shells. The thud of the impact caused the ground to vibrate. At night he would see the flash of yellow explode in the distance, especially when they reached a higher point of land. During the early morning hours a cloud of smoke would follow the explosion. One shell out of ten caused a black trail to rise up into the sky, meaning that a vehicle had been hit. The black clouds would last for some time as the fuel burned off.

  “We need to head more north.” The guide pointed towards the distance. Somalia seemed to go on forever.

  “We need food,” Omar complained.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where we can get some?’

  “No.”

  The conversation was always short. They did stop for prayers, getting on their knees and pointing to the northeast. And in the middle of the day, the two would stop and seek cover under a tree.

  Chocolate. Omar became obsessed with the thought of the Baskin-Robbins that was down the street from where he went to college. A chocolate milkshake with dark chocolate ice cream.

  In the evenings, they often ran into a patrol. Each time they heard a noise, they stopped and lay on the ground behind a rock. They would start to call out so that the patrol would not be surprised. Once the two connected, the man with Omar would hug a member of the patrol and talk in a fast rattle of Swahili. It seemed the man had cousins across all of Al Shabaab.

  Sometimes the patrol had some biscuits and stopped to start a fire.

  “Must eat and move,” a member of the patrol would say. They would build a fire between several rocks, bring out a metal pot and another plastic liter jug of water, and put it to a boil. A man then took out a bag of rice and poured it into the pot. They shared one metal plate with each one having a corner of the plate for his portion.

  Omar would talk religion as his guide relayed his words on to the others.

  “We must obey what Allah says.” Omar was strict in his interpretation.

  They listened to the white man with a look of bewilderment on their faces. The men lived in a dark world where a television was a foreign object. Its images, always images, of an unimaginable world. It was when Omar and his guide met the second patrol on the road to Baydhabo that they learned more of the two prisoners.

  “Yes, we have heard of two white people. A man and a woman.”

  “Where?”

  “North of here.” The man pointed off across a long stretch of sand, rocks, bush, and a scattering of trees.

  “Allah be praised.” Omar pulled out a map and unfolded it.

  The man could not read.

  “What village were they near?” he asked his guide.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  Omar became frustrated. He swung his AK-47 from one shoulder to the other.

  “Was it by water?”

  Again the question was changed into a string of words that climbed and sunk with a variety of sounds.

  “Near the Shebelle.”

  “The river?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it is a long river.” Omar needed more details.

  “Tayeeglow.”

  “Tayeeglow?” Omar looked at the map. There was a town thirty kilometers to their northeast with the name of Tayeeglow. “But it is not on the Shebelle.”

  “Yes, but it is on the way to the Shebelle.”

  Omar and his guide stopped to sleep below two trees that night.

  “We sleep in the tree.” The guide pointed to two large branches that extended out from the trunk.

  A quiet had descended as they continued to head north and east. It seemed the fighting was off to the west.

  “Why in the tree?” Omar asked. The risk of lions and baboons was constant but they could make a small fire and the smoke and fl
ames would keep the predators at bay.

  “See.” The guide pointed to the ground. A line of large black ants led to a battlefield where one army of ants was waging war with another. A stream of red ones was moving in the opposite direction. Omar had already learned that the small red ones were more dangerous.

  “I had a friend once.” Omar’s mind went back to Mobile. “He had a boat and the gas can exploded.” The ants had a path that they followed as willed by Allah just as Omar’s friend’s life was willed by Allah.

  The boy was given use of a duckboat that they used to travel the back nooks of the bay. It was meant for shallow water and had a flat bottom. They snuck cans of Budweiser from the ice cooler that was on his father’s truck and stole packs of Marlboro cigarettes.

  Omar was not with his friend the time that the cigarette dropped into the bottom of the boat where the fuel had leaked. He did visit him at the burn unit in Mobile. The friend died soon thereafter. It was another brick in the wall of why he had a special path. If Allah had wanted it, Omar would have been on that boat that day.

  “We will sleep in the tree.” Omar agreed with the guide’s advice. “It is Allah’s wishes.”

  “No ants in the tree.”

  “Yes. No ants, brother.”

  Omar used his long black turban to tie himself to the tree trunk. He hung his rifle from a nearby branch. He would drift away for a few minutes thinking of his wife and child and then start to roll off the branch. It seemed that whenever he started to roll he let out a noise that woke him up.

  By early morning he could barely keep his eyes open. The dim light was like a dose of morphine. He fell asleep sitting erect. And then the hot sun started to penetrate through the small leaves of the tree.

  Finally Omar awoke, rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, and felt the sweat from a short deep sleep. He swung his legs across the branch.

  “Our prayers.” He mumbled the words. There was no answer.

  “Hey,” he called out again as he looked around the trunk of the tree. There was complete silence. It was then that he realized that the guide was gone.

  Omar climbed down and headed northeast. He was learning to survive. Soon he would achieve what he wanted. Along the way he would become the most wanted man in the free world and he would not even know it. Someone else would help him reach his goal.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “Colonel Parker, Dr. Stewart needs you.” The nurse had on a white plastic bio suit with the hood pulled down around her neck.

  “Yes.” Parker had been taking advantage of the opportunity to sleep. I may need this later on. He had a gut instinct that a reserve would be needed. Once he had that extra sleep, Parker could go for days on adrenaline alone.

  “What time is it?” He pulled on his camouflage jacket as he looked at the tactical watch he wore. It showed 3:00.

  “Three a.m.?”

  “Yes, sir. He needs you now.”

  Parker followed her across the compound to the CDC tents. A strip of yellow plastic marked the “do not cross” area and encircled three tents that were interlinked and sealed. Plastic tunnels led from one tent to another and to another. Generators ran continuously, one for each tent. He followed her to the regular canvas tent on the far end that was lit with two lightbulbs strung on a wire. In the dim light he saw a metal sink with pink plastic bottles and water that would run when she flipped a switch.

  “Scrub!” She barked the order like a trauma nurse who was used to handling gunshot wounds at an emergency room. Her voice and manners indicated that the woman, who stood barely to his chest, was a pit bull dog when it came to taking care of the patient.

  “How did you get here?” he asked as he took off the jacket and scrubbed from his elbows down to his hands. The water was warm. It had been brought in by the 24/7 run of Sea Stallion helicopters supporting the base.

  “Got tired of the boring life of an emergency room.”

  “Too boring? An emergency room?”

  “Here, put this suit on.”

  She is unaware that I am the only one here who doesn’t need this suit.

  He suited up and went through a zipped and sealed first chamber to find Paul Stewart looking at a computer screen blowup of the virus. It had a loop to it like a twisted donut but with small spikes on the ends similar to the bristles of a new beard.

  “Hey.”

  “The nurse called me Parker.”

  “I am sorry. They are all good and they all have TS’s.” The top-secret clearance cost the CDC, via the FBI, more than $100,000 per background check. At the CDC, only one out of five made the cut unless they were well published and had unique knowledge necessary to the organization. Those few scientists who had the knowledge unique to a disease but not the ability to get a top-secret clearance were allowed in, but were constantly on the watch list. They never had the access that the few others with top-secret clearances did.

  “What’s up?”

  “We have two Marines that are sick.”

  “I heard.”

  “One is from California.”

  Parker was waiting for a pitch. The doctor hadn’t gotten him up in the middle of the night to socialize.

  “You’ve got blood typing of the Marine?”

  The lab technicians had taken blood samples, DNA swabs and even chest X-rays.

  “Yes, we do; yes, we do.” Stewart was hesitating.

  “And?”

  “I would like to do a transfusion. You and the Marine share the same blood type.”

  “O positive?” Parker knew his type. It was a part of combat that he had written it with markers on the top of his boot and taped it on the side of his pants. If a medic got you transported in time from something bad, he and other combat veterans knew that it was important to not lose a minute on the typing of blood. The final lace of his boot had strung into it a metal dog tag that had been printed with “O positive.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So the transfusion might give him a chance?”

  “I think so. It might buy us some time. His friend was not O positive.”

  It was clear what had happened to the other Marine during the night.

  “Dr. Stewart? You didn’t bring me to Africa just to do blood typing or transfusions, did you?”

  Stewart looked embarrassed.

  “You had one transfusion in mind. A last-ditch effort if the others didn’t work.”

  Stewart turned back to the computer screen. He didn’t have a poker face.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The van sped north on Interstate 95 leaving the Richmond area behind after Wassef picked up the FedEx box of money. Well north of the city, he took an exit where there was only a Chevron gas station on a side country road. After passing the gas station, the road twisted to the right and into the darkness. He traveled on it for several minutes not seeing anything, not even a farmhouse. He drove another five miles or so until he came to a dirt road that intersected with the highway. It was obviously rarely used, as the branches of nearby trees pushed out from the sides, giving it the appearance of a path more than a road. Wassef turned the lights off and pulled the van onto the road, drove a hundred yards, slowly backed it up under a tree, and turned the wheel. When finished, it was below the branch of an oak that was nearly as wide as the door to the van and pointed out towards the county highway.

  Allah, prepare me for this journey. Wassef sat in the still silence and dark. He had a sheet of paper that had his scrawl on it. He could not read it in the darkness without a flashlight and he would not turn one on. He knew what was written on the paper, which was all that counted.

  The country road remained silent and dark. There had been no rain in days so the road was dusty and dry. He could feel the dust as he sat in the van not moving. He could smell the van, and the oil, and gas. He remained still. A car door could be heard. A light was seen. He continued to sit there in the dark.

  A car’s lights followed the road in the distance. It originated in the opp
osite direction from where he had come. He watched as the lights moved and turned with the curves of the road. He sat up like a cat that had suddenly seen a mouse. The car moved down the road and off into the distance. It never slowed down nor seemed to care about what was off to the sides in the darkness. It confirmed that he had not been followed.

  Probably a carpenter going to work, Wassef thought as he sat there. He could feel the smooth cool steering wheel under his hand. The man probably drives the eighty miles or so into Washington each and every day. He lives in a single-wide trailer on land he rents, and drives the miles so he can live in the forest at night. He probably hates the city.

  The thought randomly went through his mind as he sat there in the darkness.

  As it neared first light, he realized that for a moment he had fallen asleep.

  Allah, forgive me. He had promised himself not to fall asleep. He wiggled to the back of the van, quietly, without opening the door or making a sound. Wassef had a bucket and bottle of water, which he used to wash himself. And then he pulled out his prayer rug and turned it towards the east in the small space he had in the van. It was to be his last prayer. He took his time and slowly whispered the words.

  As he climbed back into the driver’s seat, he looked at the FedEx box next to him, lifted it, and saw the kitchen knife under it. He had followed orders well. There were to be no other weapons, as the purchase of weapons left a trail. The knife was all that he needed.

  He pulled the van out onto the paved road and headed back towards the gas station. As he passed it, he made a point of turning the left blinker on and heading south. If there were eyes at the station, it was important that they saw a van heading south and not north. He rode the next few miles to the south, took the exit, and pulled into a BP station. The van was nearly empty of gas but he only put $42 of gas into it. He paid with a twenty, two tens, and two one-dollar bills. Everything was planned so as to reveal little to suspecting eyes. He bought two Red Bulls and a bag of Lay’s Potato Chips.