The Zombie Game (21 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Aboard the
Royal Princess

Miami Harbor, Florida

6:31 a.m.

I heard Keyes’ voice. “Open up, Captain Courageous.”

I opened my eyes, not realizing I’d closed them in anticipation of the explosion. Keyes was standing in front of me. The bomb was still there, and the ship was intact. The coast guardsmen were now joined by half-a-dozen others. I sat down for a minute. “We’re friendlies,” I said to the growing group of confused boarders. “I assure you, we’re friendlies.”

Aboard the
Royal Princess

6:44 a.m.

Keyes was weak but walking upright. The guardsmen led us to the aft deck, where the team leader introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Anthony Johnson.

Dozens of Coast Guard and military vessels were patrolling the entire smoke-covered inlet. Jet fighters and helicopters were flying everywhere. I was amazed to see the American Airlines Arena just a hundred
yards away. Hundreds of police cars and firetrucks were parked everywhere, lights flashing.

Commander Johnson pointed to the throngs of people around the building, all looking at us. “This yacht’s navigation system was programmed to crash the boat through the barriers and hit land at precisely 6:30, when the Pope’s Mass was scheduled to begin.”

I nodded, looking out on the harmless-looking
Royal Princess
: “Nobody would suspect a luxury yacht in Miami harbor. They’d concentrate on the missiles and the nukes.”

Keyes asked to sit down. She looked tired.

The officers took us to the main salon.

After they’d left, she pulled out a wad of folded papers from her pocket. “Look what I found.”

“What is all this?”

“Paperwork for Coast Guard and Customs clearance for entry into the US. Farok took every step to ensure this boat was not stopped before it delivered the bomb to Miami. It lists you as boat owner and operator. They even have a valid-looking passport for me, even though I’m supposedly on a do-not-enter status with the US.”

“Farok must have friends in high places at Immigration.”

“Scary, isn’t it?” she said. “And they couldn’t have stolen my passport; I’ve never had one.”

I looked at her passport. In the photograph, she was wearing the same dress she’d worn on the
Ana Brigette
.

I looked at my passport. The photo in it was of me dressed in the fisherman’s shirt I’d bought in Miragoâne.

“I told you, Farok is clever,” she said. “But the boat registration for the
Royal Princess
citing you as the owner is also here. That means you actually own this yacht.”

“A lot of good that does me. I couldn’t afford the diesel fuel to drive it around the bay or the dock rental for a single day.”

“Look, here’s the Advance Notice of Arrival form, filed ninety-six hours ago. It shows the destination as this exact Miami dock,” she said. “This paper listing you and me as passengers on this boat was sent in four days ago. Did you know four days ago you’d be here?”

“No, I didn’t. But I guess it doesn’t matter. This was all done to make us look authentic. That’s why he didn’t want to hurt us or even make bruises. He wanted us to look healthy and normal in case the Coast Guard boarded. Between us looking normal and the fact that the explosions were going off in another part of the port, he figured we’d slip in unscathed.”

“And if they boarded, they wouldn’t see the bomb.” She stopped and thought. “But the zombie stuff ... That
had
to be an improvisation.”

“No. As zombies, we’d have been submissive to all that was done in his grand finale. And totally cooperative if the Coast Guard boarded and searched for contraband.”

She sat up and opened her eyes wide. “The money to Sanfia! It went to her a week ago!”

“The last piece of the puzzle: This was all planned well ahead of time. There was no last-minute fabrication.”

“That makes sense,” Keyes said. “But he couldn’t have known the Pope would get sick and spend extra days in Miami.”

I scratched my chin as I thought. And then it came to me. “Farok’s men talked about planning the attack around the Pope’s visit last Wednesday. How could Farok have known then that the Pope would be too sick to travel on Friday? He was perfectly fine on Wednesday. That means one thing: Farok has a spy in the Pope’s inner circle.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Aboard the
Royal Princess

Miami Harbor, Florida

6:48 am

COMMANDER JOHNSON’S MEN BROUGHT
coffee to Keyes and me. As I took my first sip, we heard the sound of helicopters and a heavy jolt as one of them landed on the stern of the
Royal Princess
.

I went out on deck to see what was happening. It was a party of HAZMAT technicians dressed in white plastic suits and thick face visors.

The leader of the group walked up and said in a nasty tone, “Where’s the bomb?”

“It went off at 6:30.”

He reached out and grabbed my shirt. “Cut the crap, wise guy.”

“Okay, okay,” I said hoarsely. “It’s in the fore cabin, but you guys are twenty minutes late.”

He pushed me aside and led the charge to the front cabin. I walked behind the group, and as we reached the room, the leader stopped and held his hand back. “Wow! What a load.” He twisted his head to the side as he spoke into a microphone on the side of his helmet. “Get as many HAZMAT people out here as you can, ASAP. ”

The helicopter that delivered the HAZMAT team lifted away, and a second helicopter landed in its place.

EPILOGUE

THE POSTAL SERVICE DELIVERED
a copy of the
Jackson City Daily Chronicle
. There was a front-page article about me and my work on the
Ana Brigette
in Haiti. It occupied most of the front page and showed a photograph of me doing surgery on the hospital ship ... before it was destroyed by missiles. It nicely failed to mention that the missiles had been fired by US Navy jets. The article also told of my annual charitable work in Cartersville, West Virginia, and at the mental facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. It didn’t mention the loss of my medical license and the fight against ISIS in North Carolina or that I’d whipped Farok—again—in Haiti.

I don’t like a lot of publicity, which most doctors do, but it was a nice article. When I returned as Hospital Administrator in a couple weeks, it would be positive for my medical career, however long I could keep that job.

The best part was that Keyes was authorized to return to the US. Although she would be in witness protection, I could see her on a regular basis.

Jakjak was relocated to Jackson City, North Carolina. He and Lars Paulissen survived in the free-fall lifeboat and were picked up by the US Coast Guard. Jakjak would soon start work in the hospital where I’m the administrator, temporarily, at least, until my medical license is restored. Then, I plan to find a place for him in my medical office.

Tomas Duran called and offered me a permanent job at his hospital in Léogâne. He told me that both he and his father were released with no repercussions and Julien was back to work as Haiti’s Minister of Finance. Tomas was also happy to report that his stepmother, Ingrid Duran, and Police Chief Conrad were together—in the same jail, anyway.

Lars Paulissen was a patient in Tomas’ hospital, treated for a fractured hip, broken arm, and ruptured spleen.

Unfortunately, Sanfia has continued as leader of her Vodoun society.

The yacht title that Farok created so his boat would clear U.S. Customs for entry into the United States was valid. The papers showed it was transferred from Jacob Abrams to me the same day the
Ana Brigette
was hijacked. As Keyes and I’d deduced, Farok had made a lot of preparations. None of it was by happenstance. He’d programmed it all, except the ending.

To all the people who questioned me after our little episode on the
Royal Princess
, I told them one thing: In order for Farok to have made his plans before the sudden illness of the Pope, he had to have spies in the Vatican. And one of those spies was no doubt a physician or pharmacist, someone so capable with drugs that he or she could make the Pope seriously, but temporarily, ill—just as Sanfia does with her zombie potions.

The
Royal Princess
will be legally mine once the feds finish with it, probably in a few months. My plans for it? To put a “For Sale” sign on it. Immediately. As I said, I couldn’t afford to pay for a day of dock fees, let alone for the fuel it would take to go even a mile.

I’m also happy to say that I’m free of my bad habits, Jack Daniels and Sobranie Blacks. With Keyes’ help, I’ve even eliminated profanities from my vocabulary. Well, most of them, anyway. So I’ll pass my mother-in-law’s tests and become a father to my kids again. God, I’ve missed them.

But the idea of a spy in the Pope’s inner circle still bothers me, and I have a feeling I haven’t heard the last of that little issue.

Author’s Postscript

I’VE LONG BEEN INTRIGUED
by zombies. They are such a common subject of books, movies, and TV shows. I’ve often wondered if these monsters exist in reality. Are they just figments of the writers’ imaginations, like Dracula and Frankenstein? Or is there a scientific explanation for the zombie phenomenon?

Certainly, the fact that people have been unintentionally buried prematurely has been well recorded in history. A number of physiological occurrences—like the absence of a palpable pulse, heartbeat, and perceptible breathing—can lead, and have led, to the misdiagnosis of death. Just last week, a “dead man” in Mississippi awakened in a body bag, waiting his embalming. But can another individual control the circumstances altering the usual parameters of life in a selected person so that the victim is judged by standard medical observations to be dead? Could the “corpse” then be administered drugs that would restore consciousness and in so doing create the “living dead”?

I have been a basic scientific researcher since 1967, working in labs at Vanderbilt, Duke, and the University of Louisville before entering private practice and continuing, in off-hours, to do research on perplexing surgical problems until 1990. Strict protocols must be used to ensure that the results are accurately proven by the condition of the experiment—hence, the scientific method.

With my interest in zombies, I’ve been an avid reader of books on the subject and was delightfully surprised, in 1985, to read
The Serpent and the Rainbow.
The book was written by ethnobotanist/anthropologist Wade Davis, who’d done exhaustive research on the “zombie phenomenon.” I read many times his story of discovering two individuals in Haiti who’d both been pronounced dead and buried and then exhumed and found to be alive and functional. Davis employed the scientific method in his investigations. He explored the nature of the deaths, the drugs used by
bokors
and
houngans
to first make their victims die and then recover them, and the social background of the societies that subjected people to “zombification.”

My son, Glenn Jr., is also an ethnobotanist/anthropologist, and he well knows the integrity of Davis. The researcher was credible, his method of investigation was thorough, and his conclusions logically followed the findings of his study.

Some readers of Davis’s work have questioned that only two subjects were evaluated. To this I quote a professor of mine in medical school, who once paraphrased one of the greats of medical history, Sir William Osler. “If you thoroughly know one patient, you know medicine.” This quote has stuck with me over the years, and I feel it rings true with research. A hundred subjects are not necessary if you have proven your hypothesis in but one individual.

A good reason for the limited number of subjects in Davis’s book is the veil of secrecy that surrounds the “zombie phenomenon.” The society that produces a zombie is pledged to absolute confidentiality. That Davis was able to enter the social cover of the “zombie culture” is a tribute to his skills in gaining the confidence of its leaders. This enabled his successful interviews with people within the Vodoun society as well as his recovery of drugs attributed to the creation of zombies in Haiti.

Wade Davis’s second book,
Passage of Darknes
s
: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
, published in 1988, further explores the
Bizango
societies that create zombies. He penetrated the secret societies that control zombies, and catalogued the misdeeds of subjects whose punishment was zombification. Wade Davis’s story is not of evil men inflicting harm on good village citizens but of social leaders who judge the wrongdoing of their people and render punishment, sometimes by making them zombies.

My approach to zombies stays away from the typical Hollywood prototype as presented in films such as
The Night of the Living Dead
. My fictional depiction of zombies follows the Wade Davis concept of zombies, one I see as scientifically acceptable. Zombies are real. And I hope that Benoit and Shaza are as real in your mind as they are in mine.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Richard Krevolin,
my editor and friend who worked with me from the inception of this book.

My heartfelt gratitude to John Haslett,
who gave up his valuable time from writing his own best selling books to edit
The Zombie Game
and the book that preceded this,
The Missile Game
. I’ve learned a lot from him that will help me in my future writing.

And, to John Haslett’s lovely wife, Annie Biggs
for the cover, interior, and brand design.

Hats off to Lt. Col. Mary M. Klote, MD
who at a writing seminar saw a future for Jakjak and saved him from death in an early version of Chapter 5. Jakjak lives! For books to come!

Colleen Sell
made valuable contributions in the editing and
Ana Mango’s
artistic genius greatly benefited the current cover.

Jim Williams,
my friend for 40 years and medical illustrator for all my many scientific articles, came to my assistance in the cover design whenever I called (many times in the middle of the night).

Sons Glenn Jr. and Barclay
resurrected this book from half a dozen computer crashes. They recommended I take computer classes (which I really don’t need with them to back me up).

And special thanks to Phillip Greasley, Retired Lieutenant Col. USAF,
for his technical advice on the air combat scenes. His introduction of Tech Sergeant Cimarron gave a face and personality to mundane military transmissions. I see a future for him in writing his own novels.