Genocide of One: A Thriller (46 page)

The remaining three men, realizing there was a sniper, began to hustle back to the
jungle. Yeager was able to bring down two of them, but he ran out of ammo. As the
final blood-covered officer was racing into a grove of trees, a grenade Meyers had
launched landed right at his feet. The grenade exploded, sending hundreds of pieces
of shrapnel into him, and he collapsed like a limp rag.

Yeager leaned over the edge of the roof and yelled down. “Your leaders are dead! Run
away!”

The little soldiers all stopped and looked up at the voice.

Garrett yelled down Yeager’s message, translating it into Swahili.

The children came to their senses, picked up their rifles, and restarted their attack,
but Yeager and Garrett, lying low, continued to yell. “Your leaders are gone! You
won’t be killed! Run away right now!”

The firing tapered off and soon stopped completely. Yeager held up a signal mirror
that he pulled out of his pocket and checked out the square. The children looked back
at the jungle, saw the dead bodies of their leaders, exchanged looks and a few words,
then scattered in all directions.

It didn’t take long for the battlefield to be deserted. The children had abandoned
their weapons and run away.

Yeager checked again. “They’ve withdrawn!” he reported, and sat up. He felt woozy.

Akili, staring hard at Mick’s corpse, looked up at Yeager and smiled eerily. Yeager
felt he couldn’t take any more, and didn’t make the effort to try to delve into what
Akili was thinking. He silently lifted up the tiny body and handed him over to Pierce,
who had raced over from the north side.

The mercenaries pulled anything that could identify Mick from his backpack and divided
his food and ammunition.

“Don’t worry about it. This is war,” Garrett said, staring down at Mick’s body, trying
to console Yeager. “A total clusterfuck.”

Meyers nodded in agreement.

Yeager didn’t say anything, but he was grateful to them. He thought for a moment about
the Japanese man he’d killed. About this person named Mikihiko Kashiwabara, who had
come to the battlefield without a single photo of family or friends. A man who lived
a life filled with hatred, loved by no one.

“Let’s head out,” Meyers said, and ran across the roof. They lowered the ladder to
the ground and descended the north side of the church.

“I just had a message from the vehicle that’s waiting for us,” Pierce said. “The PKO
is heading back to base. They’ll pass us coming this way. They should be here soon.”

“What kind of vehicle is it?” Yeager asked.

“A Land Cruiser. Let’s wait a hundred meters from here, at the main road.”

With Yeager and Garrett taking point, Meyers bringing up the rear, and Pierce and
Akili in the middle, they headed east. About a hundred dead bodies of the children
lay in the square in front of the church. Yeager couldn’t hold it in any longer and
vomited.

Garrett looked back. “Let’s hurry,” he urged them, and started to speed up. Right
then he halted, as if he’d run right into a huge, heavy object, and gingerly held
his right side. He fell to his knees and collapsed forward.

Yeager lay facedown on the liquid he’d just vomited.
“Sniper at three o’clock,”
he yelled at Meyers through his headset.

It was in the direction of the body-littered square. Yeager aimed his assault rifle
and saw a boy, more dead than alive, stand up. He looked like he was drowning in a
sea of dead bodies. Garrett was facedown, groaning in pain.

“Hold on, Garrett. Meyers will be here soon,” Yeager said, trying to encourage him,
then turned back to the square.

The boy had probably been hit by an RPG, for his left arm was torn off and one eye
was crushed. He managed to hold up his AK-47 with the remaining arm, but his vacant
expression showed that he was steadily losing consciousness. He desperately continued
to fire, randomly spraying bullets.

Why? Yeager asked himself. Why do that child and I have to kill each other?

Despite the sporadic fire, Yeager ran over to Garrett and pulled him behind the wall
of a nearby house.

“Shit! It hurts!” Garrett gasped.

Yeager pulled off Garrett’s equipment, opened his battle fatigues, and checked the
wound. Blood was gushing out from his right ribs. The bullet was lodged near his liver.
The kinetic energy of the bullet had ripped apart all his organs.

Garrett’s face was deathly pale, his breathing shallow. Yeager placed his backpack
under Garrett’s legs to raise them, treating him for shock.

“Damn.” Garrett’s voice was husky. “I got shot by a kid.”

“It’s okay. It’s not a bad wound. Hang in there.”

When Yeager put pressure on the wound to try to stop the bleeding Garrett twisted
away in agony. Yeager pulled out a morphine needle from the medical kit and glanced
over at their medic. Meyers was stuck behind the church, shielding Pierce and Akili,
but finally started running toward Yeager.

“Am I going to die here?” Garrett asked faintly. “God, I wish I had done something
good with my life.”

“You say that because you
are
a good person.”

“No…I transported lots of people to other countries to be tortured.… Syria and Uzbekistan—”

Yeager cut him off. “Not because you wanted to. You could have escaped by yourself
from this jungle. But you stayed with us because of my son, right?”

No response.

Garrett closed his eyes, stopped breathing, and lay there, a calm look on his face.

Yeager touched his carotid artery to check that his heart had stopped and tried CPR,
though he knew it was a lost cause. It was all Yeager could do to keep from asking
aloud if Garrett’s soul had heard his last words.

Meyers arrived, checked Garrett’s pulse and breathing, examined his pupils, and stopped
Yeager from massaging his heart. The young medic looked stricken. He helplessly shook
his head and announced the death of his comrade.

“Jesus,” Pierce muttered bitterly.

“What happened to the kid?” Yeager asked.

“He collapsed and hasn’t moved,” Meyers said. “I think he’s dead.”

The two of them stood there for a while, mouths closed in silent prayer, then Yeager
searched through Garrett’s backpack and extracted a photograph of a woman about Garrett’s
age and an envelope, probably a will. It said
TO JUDY
, and there was an address in northern Virginia. Yeager carefully placed it in his
pants pocket.

“Aren’t you going to bury him?” Pierce asked. “He helped save the Mbuti.”

There wasn’t a minute to lose, but Yeager couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Garrett’s
body exposed like that. He looked around, but the enemy had completely vanished.

“Let’s bury him,” Meyers said. “It shouldn’t take long if the three of us do it.”

Yeager nodded, and he and Meyers dragged the body off to the jungle. They dug a hole
with their folding entrenching tools, laid Garrett’s body inside, and noted the spot
on a map.

As they were about to shovel dirt over the body, Meyers and Pierce bowed, and each
said a short prayer. Yeager was watching the one person who didn’t seem sad. In Pierce’s
arms, Akili looked happy, as if he were fascinated by his first glimpse of a religious
ceremony.

Was that all the child was feeling? Yeager wondered. Was the dead body just an object
to him? He grabbed Akili’s chin. It felt just like a human child’s. Akili looked up
at him fearfully. Yeager turned the three-year-old’s head toward Garrett’s corpse.
“Listen carefully, Akili. I have no idea what you’re thinking or feeling. Maybe you
think we humans are a stupid race. But never forget this one person. He died trying
to save you. He sacrificed his most precious gift for you.”

Tears welled up in Akili’s eyes. Yeager remembered his own son’s face when he scolded
him. This was necessary discipline, he felt. “From now on you will carry Warren Garrett’s
life with you. Which means you have to live a good life like his. You understand what
I’m saying?”

Akili gave a tiny nod—as though if he didn’t, the mistreatment would continue.

“All right, then,” Yeager said, and let go. Akili still seemed frightened, so he patted
the boy’s huge head. Yeager turned to the other two. “Let’s blow this country.”

After they finished burying Garrett, the now-four-person group mustered what was left
of their energy and stamina and marched off into the jungle. The PKO force was already
back at its base in the south, and the remaining LRA soldiers and villagers had scattered
to the winds. As they moved steadily through the hushed jungle, next to a stream they
saw a mass of butterflies take flight in the sunlight filtering through the trees.
As if countless flowers were wildly dancing.

The world is this beautiful, Yeager thought. Though on the same planet there’s this
vermin called man.

Before they left the jungle Pierce took out his laptop and made sure the reconnaissance
satellite wasn’t observing them. “All clear,” he announced.

When they emerged onto the muddy main road a Land Cruiser parked to the south started
its engine and drove toward them. Admonishing himself not to let his guard down, Yeager
nevertheless couldn’t help but breathe a huge sigh of relief.

The large SUV came to a halt in front of them, and a young black man called out to
them from the driver’s side. “Are you Roger? British?”

“That’s right,” Pierce replied. “You’re Sanyu?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really happy to meet you, Sanyu.”

“Me, too,” Sanyu said cheerfully, but when he looked at the two men in battle fatigues
his face stiffened. And when he saw Akili in Pierce’s arms, his eyes grew wide.

“This child is ill,” Pierce explained. “I’ll tell you all the rest in time. More important,
do you have all the supplies on board?”

“Ah, yes,” the young man, lively again, said as he jumped out of the driver’s seat
and opened the door. The luggage compartment was piled high with boxes of food and
clothes.

The men took out a box of mineral water, went into the jungle, and washed their whole
bodies. They quickly shaved and changed clothes and now looked much more presentable.
They put an infant’s cap down low on Akili so it covered his odd-shaped head and eyes.

Pierce distributed counterfeit journalist credentials and fake passports to the men,
and they were ready to leave the country. “We’ll cross over into Uganda via Rutshuru,”
he explained.

“What about after that?” Meyers asked. “How do we get out of Africa?”

“I had several plans, but right now we’re back to square one. We don’t have as much
fighting power as we used to. But don’t worry—our ally in Japan will come up with
a plan.” By “fighting power,” he meant that two operatives had died.

Just to be sure, when they crossed over the Congo border the four of them would leave
Sanyu in the car and proceed on foot, detouring around the checkpoint. Until then,
Meyers drove, with Yeager beside him and the other three in the backseat. They set
off in the Land Cruiser.

As he watched the Ituri Forest pass by Yeager unconsciously wiped his right hand on
his pants. He still felt the sensation he’d had when he shot Mick, as if he’d been
splattered by his brains.

Since I came into this country have I done anything right? Yeager wondered. Have I
sunk to the level of the enemy we fought and killed one of my own out of egotism?
If Mick hadn’t attacked the child soldiers from the roof, we might have all been wiped
out. Mick had decided this was a battle for sheer survival, and wasn’t he the one
who made the right choice? Shouldn’t I apologize to Mick, who’d saved us from danger?
For forcing him to play the villain?

Bitter regret for his hatred of Mick was swelling up inside him. Regret for killing
Mick and abandoning his body. He felt an indelible sense of guilt he’d never get rid
of, and tears welled up in his eyes. The fragility of life, the nauseating nature
of man, the powerlessness of good saddened and disgusted him—as did he himself and
his own inability to judge right from wrong. Silently, he began to weep.

“Yeager,” Meyers said from the driver’s seat. The young medic’s voice was shaking.
“Suck it up. I’m holding it back myself.”

Yeager wiped away the tears and looked ahead again with watchful eyes, but now he
heard sobbing coming from the backseat. It was Pierce, as a wave of relief washed
over his frayed nerves. Akili began crying, too, his guardian’s tears inducing his
own. The large tears rolling out of his catlike eyes were proof that his feelings
were the same as those of humans. The fear of this complete Other that had haunted
Yeager abated a little.

Sanyu, the only one clueless about what was going on, looked puzzled. “Are all of
you all right?”

Realizing how silly they must look, the two mercenaries in the front seat were finally
able to laugh.

Kento stayed locked
away in the blacked-out room, barely eating or sleeping, continuing to work on the
drugs. He had no idea if it was day or night.

A week had passed since he’d begun the synthesis process. There had been no calls
from Poppy and thus no communication with the Congo, which let Kento focus solely
on his experiments. Once, as he crawled into his sleeping bag on the floor for a short
nap, an ominous thought crossed his mind. Maybe Jonathan Yeager and Nigel Pierce had
already died in Africa. Or did not hearing from them mean that they were all right?

The synthesis of the new drug had gone smoothly until yesterday. The starting materials
needed to make the two drugs—GIFT 1 and GIFT 2—had, through three separate reactions,
transformed themselves into intermediate products with completely different chemical
structures. When each reaction finished, Kento separated and refined the resulting
chemical compound and sent the materials over to Jeong-hoon at the university. In
the basement of the pharmacology building were nuclear magnetic resonance and X-ray
structural analysis equipment, and using these would tell them whether the product
was what they were after. Jeong-hoon messengered them by motorcycle a number of times
between Machida and the university in Kinshi-cho.

Between last night and today the synthesis process reached a critical juncture. In
the synthesis route for GIFT 1 there was a reaction Kento couldn’t find in a search
of academic articles, so he had to come up with the reagent and reaction conditions
on his own. Justin Yeager had less than ten days to live, and he knew he couldn’t
make a mistake. Before this, Kento had spent several days studying texts on reaction
mechanisms, racking his brain to come up with a promising experimental plan and put
it into practice. As he put the reagent and catalyst in the beaker his hands trembled
slightly. The reaction had taken twelve hours, so he separated the product in the
late afternoon and had Jeong-hoon messenger the reagent by motorcycle. Now he was
waiting for the results of the analysis.

As he prepared for the next reaction he felt a strange sense of elation. Trying reactions
that no one had ever done before, he was finally part of the world of organic synthesis.
The drug development he was involved in was more than enough to win several Nobel
Prizes, but he also felt the weight of those who had preceded him—as if he were building
on and being supported by the accumulated reactions performed by nameless earlier
scientists. Not only was he now able to join these predecessors but maybe someday
someone else would also use his reactions to create another new drug. For Kento this
was an exciting prospect.

A motorcycle pulled up outside, and he raised his head. Jeong-hoon had arrived. He
heard him bound up the outside staircase, and Kento went to the front door to greet
his friend.

“I got the results,” Jeong-hoon said as soon as he opened the door. Too impatient
to remove his shoes and come inside, Jeong-hoon stood there, lowered his backpack,
and yanked out a stack of printouts. They couldn’t use faxes, so all documents had
to be hand-delivered.

Kento went back into the room and eagerly read through the three types of results—analyses
of mass spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance.

The first sample seemed to be the compound they were looking for. Everything was consistent—not
just the molecular weight, mass, and atomic composition but also the functional group
shown by infrared spectrometry as well.

Keeping his impatience in check, he scanned the NMR chart. A straight line along the
horizontal axis intermittently peaked in several spots. This indicated there were
no impurities. It was clear there was a benzene ring present; the arrangement of protons
was also clear, and he could mentally picture the chemical structural formula that
would fit the analysis results. There was no discrepancy. No matter who interpreted
the results, only one structural formula could be derived from these readings. He
checked it many times to make sure there was no mistake. Kento raised a fist. “We
did it!”

“Fantastic!” Jeong-hoon, who had come into the room in the meantime, happily clapped
his hands.

“Three more reaction steps, and GIFT will be complete!”

Jeong-hoon was beaming from ear to ear. “My little present,” he said, holding out
a bag full of hamburgers and energy drinks.

Kento gratefully accepted the food. All he’d had these days was sweet rolls and ramen,
and he was tired of them. But there was something left to do before he unwrapped his
hamburger. Just to be absolutely sure, he checked the analysis results of the by-products.
And when he did, he found something surprising. A very different compound had been
synthesized, not what he’d anticipated. An unexpected reaction must have taken place
in the beaker.

Kento finally understood what Professor Sonoda, his adviser, had always told him:
check the side reactions. If you only are concerned about the main reaction, you might
overlook an unexpected discovery lurking in the background. In the university lab
it often happened that a grad student would go to report on his work, and only Professor
Sonoda would be excited while the grad student would stand there blankly. When Professor
Sonoda came across these unexpected phenomena he detected the presence of an unknown
reaction, which aroused his curiosity. Now Kento was feeling the same excitement as
his mentor, and he felt he’d taken a major step forward into the world of organic
synthesis.

“You look happy,” Jeong-hoon said, smiling. “Why don’t we eat?”

“You go ahead.” Kento walked back to the lab bench. “I need to get the next reaction
ready to go.”

“Can I help with anything?”

“Could you measure the mice’s oxygen saturation?”

“I’m on it.”

Jeong-hoon looked into the closet, pulse oximeter in hand. “Kento,” he called out.

Kento turned around. Jeong-hoon was pointing to a lifeless mouse in the cage. “One
of them’s dead.”

It was a transgenic mouse, one that had artificially been given PAECS. The tag on
the mouse’s ear read
4-05
. Kento looked through his lab notes at the graph showing arterial blood oxygen saturation,
which he recorded every six hours. Number 4-05 was the mouse whose symptoms were the
worst.

He had deliberately not given the lab animals names so he didn’t become attached to
them, but still Kento felt a heaviness inside. Silently apologizing to the little
creature, he noted
DEAD
at the end of the graph.

“I’ll take this to the university,” Jeong-hoon said, reluctantly pulling the dead
body out. Jeong-hoon, in a more theoretical field, wasn’t used to handling lab animals.
“If we extract the genes and insert CHO cells,” he said, referring to cells from a
Chinese hamster ovary, “we can make cells that can be used in the binding assay.”
They would put mutant GPR769 on the cell membrane so that the genes that caused the
illness manifested in those cells.

“You know how to do that?”

“No, but I’ll ask Doi. I’ll be careful when I ask, and I won’t use your name.”

“Treat him to a meal at the school cafeteria. That’s all it’ll take,” Kento said with
a laugh.

“There’s one more thing I’m concerned about, Kento.”

“What?”

“The two children we’re trying to help. Maika Kobayashi is in the university hospital,
and Justin Yeager’s in a hospital in Lisbon, right?”

“That’s right.” Kento had constantly been worried about Maika’s condition. He wasn’t
able to get the results of her tests, so he wasn’t sure if she was still alive, let
alone how long she had to live. Even if he had Jeong-hoon try to visit her, she was
in the ICU, and only close relatives were allowed in.

“The problem is Justin,” Jeong-hoon went on. “I looked into it, and mailing the drug
to Portugal would take, at the fastest, two days.”

“Two days?”

Kento realized he’d overlooked something critical. He’d always thought that the American
who would visit him would be Jonathan Yeager, and he’d just hand over the drug to
him. Even if they completed the drug before the deadline, the time it took to get
it to Justin would make it too late. Now that all communications with the Congo had
ceased, he was starting to doubt that Yeager would even show up. A terrible scenario
crossed his mind again—that Yeager had been killed in battle.

“If we mail it we’ll have to move the deadline up two days.”

Jeong-hoon nodded. “That means we only have seven days left.”

Kento thought about the remaining reaction, and the binding assay and pharmacological
tests on the mice, and felt the blood draining out of his head.

“We have to speed things up.”

“The fast chromatography machine I ordered will be here tomorrow,” Kento said, trying
to be hopeful. He’d paid 1.5 million yen for the used machine. “That should reduce
the time by quite a lot.”

“By how much?”

“Eighteen hours.”

“That still leaves us thirty hours short.”

They looked at each other, silently trying to come up with a plan.

“Worst case,” Kento said, “after the drug’s synthesized we’ll have to send it off
without any verification process.”

“Without even a minimal check? Then we can’t verify if GIFT’s projection is correct.”

“But if we don’t make it in time…” Kento swallowed back the rest of the sentence.

The dead mouse lay on the edge of the lab table. If the new drug didn’t arrive in
time in Lisbon, Justin Yeager would suffer the same fate as this tiny animal.

After the fighting in the eastern Congo, twenty kilometers north of Butembo, Nous
and the others vanished from Operation Nemesis’s surveillance network.

What had happened to them in the battle ten days earlier?

Rubens sat down at his seat in the operations center and studied the last report from
MONUC, the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The report had a photo attached, and when he looked at it Rubens knew right away who
it was: Mikihiko Kashiwabara.

The operation he’d formulated finally had its first casualty.

Rubens looked up from the document and gazed vacantly around the operations center,
trying to control the confused feelings swirling around inside him.

Why did the Japanese mercenary die? If the autopsy was correct, there was a high possibility
he wasn’t killed by the enemy but by his own men. And not friendly fire, but an execution.
Maybe Mikihiko Kashiwabara had screwed up and put his people in danger.

Whatever the truth, the fact remained that Rubens had now joined the ranks of those
who killed. And if Yeager and the others killed the young soldiers to protect themselves,
then Rubens might be responsible for those deaths as well. But maybe he shouldn’t
think that way. Wasn’t he merely a cog in the machine that was Operation Nemesis?
Maybe the real murderer was the one who called the shots, President Burns.

Rubens brushed that speculation aside. Nous had escaped from a desperate situation.
Right after the battle at Manjoa village, their reconnaissance satellite had detected
an SUV racing away from the scene. The vehicle was last seen entering Butembo, a town
of some two hundred thousand people, and then it disappeared. And over the last ten
days they’d had no clues as to Nous’s whereabouts.

If only this situation could continue. Rubens could only hope. If it did, Operation
Nemesis would die out spontaneously.

“Arthur.” Eldridge was standing in front of his desk. Above the loosened tie his face
was weary. On the verge of success, they’d let Nous escape, and Eldridge, on whom
all the authority for the operation had devolved, was now constantly seeking Rubens’s
advice. Exactly as Holland, the CIA director, had predicted.

“Where are they headed? Any idea? Even a guess.”

“At this stage I really couldn’t say.” He wanted nothing more than to confuse Eldridge
and let Nous escape to someplace safe, but he had no information to base any decision
on. “There’s no trace of the vehicle containing Yeager and the others crossing stations
in either Uganda or Rwanda.”

“But it makes sense, right, to assume they left the Congo?” Eldridge said. “If they
did, they could only be heading north or east.”

“Why do you say that?”

Eldridge pointed to a screen on which there was a map of Africa. “Ships from Pierce
Shipping are heading to Egypt and Kenya. That’s their only means of transport. If
they head elsewhere it’ll be much harder for them to escape from Africa.”

“The CIA has Alexandria and Mombasa under surveillance. And Nous must know that. I
don’t think he’s going to head into a danger zone.”

“But then there’s no other place they can go. They’ve been designated terrorists.
They can’t pass through international airports or port facilities in Africa.”

Eldridge was right. And Yeager’s group had one more obstacle. Even if they had made
phony passports and disguised themselves, they still wouldn’t be able to hide Nous.
If they chartered a private plane, there would be a baggage inspection when they boarded.
They couldn’t try to sneak the three-year-old in their carry-on luggage.