Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 3 (24 page)

Looking like he’d aged a year, Colonel Holloway sat behind his desk looking across at Paul Cooper.  “Larry Dean died this morning.”

Paul ticked Larry off his private to-do list as he looked blankly at Colonel Holloway.  The blank look was easy.  Paul didn’t feel anything about Larry.  Not anymore.  In that late night moment in the infirmary after Larry confessed, or that’s to say blamed Heidi’s death on Jimmy and told a story of how heroically he’d argued to keep Heidi alive, Paul had hated him.  He’d wanted to smash Larry’s concussed skull with his fist until puzzle-piece bones and bleeding brains were smeared across the pillow.

Of course, Paul hadn’t done it.  Not that.

He stood for awhile with his fists clenched and his heart pounding to the rhythm of his rage.  He shook.  He fidgeted and held himself back.  It wasn’t that Paul was too good of a person to kill Larry.  At that moment, the most important thing to Paul was revenge.  Though in his head, the word sounded a lot like justice.  And justice for Larry required some suffering.

So Paul broke his promise to Larry.  He stuffed the dirty sock back in Larry’s mouth to keep him quiet and he pumped the rest of the Ebola-tainted blood into Larry’s broken body.  Through it, Larry struggled.  His eyes rattled in their sockets, crazy with fear. 

It was a satisfying experience to watch.  At first.

Then Paul’s humanity kicked in, and he felt bad for what he was doing, making another human—even Larry—suffer, even though at that moment all the distress was psychological.

Then Paul reminded himself what Larry had done.  He killed Heidi.  He and Jimmy.

Things got easy again.

Now, sitting in front of Colonel Holloway, knowing Larry was dead, Paul didn’t feel anything, not for Larry anyway.  He felt a pang of panic as he realized why Colonel Holloway was having this conversation with him.  Holloway suspected something.  Paul had done his deed in a room full of a hundred sleeping, miserable, delirious patients.  Potential witnesses all. 

“I didn’t realize his injuries were that bad,” said Paul.

“They were survivable.” Colonel Holloway leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.  He motioned to a seat on the other side of the desk.  “Why don’t you sit down?”

Paul looked at the chair, and he glanced at the door.

“Don’t worry about your quotas today.  I’ll talk to Captain Willard.”

“I wasn’t close to Larry.” Paul glanced at the door again.  “Thank you for telling me, though.” Paul took a step as if to leave.

“Sit.”

Paul pasted on a weak smile and reluctantly put himself in the chair.

Colonel Holloway put his feet on the floor again and scooted up to his desk.  “You heard the rumors, right?”

Paul shook his head.  It was easier to lie with a gesture than with words sometimes.

“He says you tortured him.”

Shaking his head, Paul chuckled.  “That’s ridiculous.”

“Some of the patients saw you in the ward that night.  At least, they saw a man in your uniform that matches your description.”

Paul said nothing.  He did nothing.  He hadn’t been asked a direct question and being on the defensive he decided that he was offering no information for free.

“We can go for a stroll through the ward if you like.  See if anyone recognizes you.”

So much for that strategy.  “I visited Larry when my shift was done.” In fact, it had been much later than that—late enough that Paul was sure only sleepy night shift guards were about.  “I was concerned.”

“Even though he tried to pull you off the ladder.”

Paul squirmed in his seat, feeling like the accused sophomore.  “I told Captain Willard what happened.  Larry was my coworker.  He snapped, I guess.  I wanted to check on him.”

“And torture him?”

“Was he tortured?” Paul put innocence all over his face, exaggerated innocence.  He wasn’t going to squirm.  If Colonel Holloway wanted to match wits, then Paul wasn’t going to back down.  “He didn’t look tortured when I saw him.”

Colonel Holloway shook his head.  “He says you filled him up with Ebola.”

Nodding, Paul knew Ebola didn’t kill that fast.  He decided to put the Colonel on the spot.  “But he didn’t die from Ebola, did he?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I didn’t infect him.  His story was obviously concocted.  What did he die of?”

“Staphylococcus.”

“That was quick.”

“Judging by the results, he must have been infected before he fell.  His blood was full of it.”

“Maybe he had a fever.” Paul leaned back and made himself comfortable, ready to pile manufactured speculation onto the story to muddy the waters of truth.  “Maybe he was delirious, and that’s why he was behaving erratically on the ladder.”

“You know what else they found in Larry’s blood?”

“Hemoglobin?” Sure, it was a smartass answer.  Paul couldn’t stop himself.

Colonel Holloway flashed a plastic smile then put a disappointed face on.  “Ebola.”

Paul’s initiative slipped away, and he searched for a response.  “The camp is full of Ebola.  The ward is full of Ebola patients.”

Colonel Holloway tapped his fingertips on the edge of his desk.  “So it is.”

Silence followed and lasted until Paul asked, “Why am I here? Really?”

Colonel Holloway closed the file on his desk and moved it to a pile of similar folders.  “Larry Dean.” He shook his head.  “He was a piece of work.”

Paul nodded but not too enthusiastically.

“I wonder what would happen if I called some MPs in here to take you out and interrogate you properly.”

Colonel Holloway’s words were intimating a threat, but his face was saying something else.  Paul took a chance on a change of direction.  “I’d deflect.”

“Deflect?” That brought a laugh from the Colonel. 

Paul took a deep breath and ran through one last round of quick thoughts on the subject and decided that a criminal Larry mixed in with a bunch of smuggling, corrupt officers would be plenty to muddy any investigation that might indeed ask enough questions to implicate Paul of murder.  He took the folded, wrinkled sheets of paper out of his pocket and laid them on the Colonel’s desk, leaving his hand over them.  “There are some things going on here that you need to be aware of.”

With nothing but growing nervousness to keep him company, Austin got out of the Ford twice and ran out of the garage to relieve himself on the landscaping beside the driveway.  “I give this gift to you, little plants.  One day soon the sprinkler system will stop working.  Then you’ll die.”

At least an hour had passed with nothing happening anywhere.  Not a single car had driven down the street.  Not a single discernable sound came from the compound at the end of the peninsula.  All Austin heard was the wind rustling the fronds of the tall palms in front of the house and waves gently lapping the sand on the beach.

He’d accepted that his role in Mitch’s plan was that of getaway driver.  As much as he hated to admit it, he felt relieved.  What use would Austin truly be in assassinating a terrorist and shooting it out with his soldiers? Austin eyed the other cars in the garage: a Mercedes sedan, a Mercedes SUV, and a Lexus.  Any one of those would be less ostentatious than the Ford.  No one would notice a Mercedes making a getaway on the streets of Dubai.

A firecracker popped.

That’s sort of what it sounded like.

But even as Austin made the comparison, he knew it wasn’t a firecracker.

Three more pops followed in rapid succession as Austin admitted to himself that the noise was gunfire.

Mitch’s plan had gone bad.

Automatic rifle shots blazed faster than Austin could count.

He closed his eyes for a second.  If he turned the key, if he drove toward Najid Almasi’s compound, he was probably going to die.  If he didn’t, Mitch would definitely die and Najid Almasi would get away. 

Austin cranked the starter.  The engine rumbled.  He shifted into gear and raced out of the driveway, leaning hard into a turn as he fishtailed onto the road.

Najid Almasi’s mansion was a few hundred yards ahead.

He accelerated.

A hundred yards.

The windshield shattered under the impact of bullets.

Austin turned the headlights on, flipped them to bright, and turned on the row of lights mounted to the roll bar.

He hoped he was on course, unable to see anything through the thick web of cracked glass.  Bullets pinged on the Ford’s bumper, hood, and fenders.

Austin leaned over to hide his body behind the dashboard and had a moment to wonder if he should be going faster or slower.  What if he hit the wall at fifty miles per hour, would the impact kill him, uselessly? He chanced it and mashed his foot to the floor.

The engine responded with a roar. 

The steering wheel pulled under the strain of power to the front wheels.

The truck crashed into the gate, throwing it off its hinge on one side.  Both gate and truck smashed into the car parked behind it.

Austin was thrown against the dashboard.

The truck bounced so high and at such an angle, Austin thought it would roll.

Forward it went.

He saw flashes of color from a blow to his head.

The truck leveled on the ground, still rolling.

Austin was all right.  He guessed. 

He was half out of the seatbelt, and his head and shoulders were on the passenger side floorboard with his M-16 and a couple of magazines that had slipped out of his belt.

The truck hit the wall around the fountain and stopped.

Time to move.

Or time to die.

Austin shook his head to clear it.

He scooped up his magazines and his weapon.  He struggled to get himself up on the seat, unbuckled the seat belt, and unlatched the driver’s side door.  He was relieved that it hadn’t become jammed in the collision, and he kicked it open, leveling the M-16 out the side of the truck as he did so.

He fired a few preemptive rounds before he realized no terrorists were standing on that side of the truck.

He jumped out, stumbled, and rolled as the sound of gunfire banged and bullets hit the truck’s cab and fenders. 

He was scared out of his mind knowing that at any second terrorist bullets would shred his flesh.

Keeping down, he ran toward the tropical forest garden he’d seen the crown of from the other side of the wall.  Holding his weapon with both hands, shooting in the general direction of the house, he knew he was doing nothing except making noise.

Austin stopped shooting, ran a dozen more paces, and dropped to a knee on a paved path.  All around him grew shrubs of a dozen varieties—some short, some taller than him, palmettos, huge ceramic pots three feet tall with bunches of wild grass standing six or seven feet above the rim, and palm trees.  A layer of river stones the size of a fist covered the ground between the trees and shrubs.

The Ford’s horn blared.  The smashed car’s alarm whooped.  Lights from the truck’s roll bar array lit the upper-floor walls of the mansion.  It was the only thing Austin was able to see besides plants.  It was the only landmark.

Shots sounded again, Austin guessed from the other side of the property.

An Arabic voice shouted off to his right, in the general direction he’d left the truck in.  Austin only needed about a half-second to decide how to respond.  He sent half a dozen bullets that way.

He ran again, dropped to a knee, and fired a few shots in a different direction, at nothing at all that he could see.  It didn’t matter, though.  As Mitch had explained to him, his job wasn’t to kill anyone, which wasn’t likely to happen anyway.  One day on the rifle range wasn’t enough to give Austin anything close to the kind of skills he needed to be effective in a firefight.

Austin’s self-appointed job was to run, shoot, and run again.  With any luck, the terrorists would think he was three or four men instead of one.  If Austin kept moving fast enough, kept the terrorist occupied or even frightened about an attacking force, then maybe Mitch, with some real skill, could kill them.  Austin might even live through the attack. 

Guns fired into the garden.  Bullets hit trees and hit the wall twenty or thirty yards behind him, hidden by the foliage.

Austin fired again.  He ran.

Colonel Holloway took his time reading through Paul’s papers.  He didn’t ask questions.  He looked up from time to time, but his expression betrayed none of what he was thinking.  Afterward, he led Paul out of the office and across the compound.  They crossed the camp with two MPs walking behind.  Apart from ordering the two MPs to follow, the Colonel hadn’t said a word.

The sun was high in the sky by then.  Long gauze clouds left white smears across the blue.  Dead winter prairie grasses covered the surrounding rolls of hills in a tan color all the way down to Denver, ten miles distant in the valley below.  Beyond the city the snow-covered mountains stood tall along the western horizon. 

They walked toward the mountains.  More importantly, they walked toward the dilapidated chain-link fence that marked the border of the camp and the beginning of no man’s land within machine gun range.

Paul started to worry.

When Colonel pulled back a section of fence that had become disconnected or cut years past, Paul stood tall, looking for soldiers who were hidden out there somewhere.  “Has anyone tested the gunners yet? Has anyone been shot?”

“Not yet.” The Colonel motioned Paul through.

Paul didn’t move.

The Colonel nodded.  “Go ahead.”

“I’d rather not.”

The Colonel shrugged and stepped through the hole in the fence.  “Come on.”