Threatcon Delta (35 page)

T
he choppers had landed in widely separated groups of five and the rotors had been turned off to protect the oncoming multitude from being assaulted with dust and foliage. Men were moving around the drop-down cargo hatches in the backs. Once again, organizationally, it reminded Kealey of the tsunami relief efforts he had witnessed in Indonesia. Crews moved purposefully but without haste, unloading crates on dollies and by hand, in teams, leaving the crates stacked behind each helicopter. The only difference was that no one was moving to unpack the cargo.

The prophet seemed to be making his way to the center of the three groups of helicopters. People followed behind and were now spread all around him as far as the light reached. They had stopped chanting and there was a general murmur. It sounded as though they were saying “manna.” That would figure. Most of them had probably come carrying very few supplies. They assumed—correctly, Kealey believed—that the helicopters were unloading food and drink.

A sudden night wind, strong and chilling, swept over them from the west, rushing toward the mountain.

The hand of God pushing us back?
Kealey couldn’t help but wonder. He wasn’t a religious man, but such thoughts were not only possible here, they were inevitable. It was no wonder the pilgrims believed in the holiness of the man who moved among them. Virtually all one had to do was look the part.

Kealey heard crowbars, then saw the bundles being pulled open by helicopter crew members. The prophet himself climbed onto a mound of earth from which he addressed the group. Kealey had no idea what he was saying, but the way he kept pointing all around him with the top of his staff, he was obviously urging the pilgrims to continue their journey with him.

As the fringes of the crowd began to cluster around the prophet and the choppers, the crewmen began passing out loaves of bread. They were yelling something in Arabic and, from the subsequent actions of the pilgrims, they had apparently been told to break some off and pass the rest back.

That was when it hit him.

The bakery fire,
Kealey thought.
If the food had been made there, contaminated there, they would have destroyed the place to cover any evidence.

Is that what this was about? Mass murder? The killing of—

People who had crossed the border illegally,
he thought.
The radical fringe of 777 making a statement.

Kealey looked down, thinking. If there were some kind of virus or bacterium in the food, how was he going to keep them from eating it?

He looked up. People had started to consume the loaves. They were going to eat it and follow the prophet, where? To Saudi Arabia? Israel? Other Arab nations when they all went home?

Did it matter?
A pandemic wouldn’t respect national borders.

Kealey slipped away, behind a slope of rock. He took out his phone and called Harper.

“They’re passing out bread,” Kealey said.

“Contaminated at the factory,” Harper said.

“No doubt. What do I do? These people will die.”

“If 777 is controlling this, we can’t ask the MFO to intervene,” he said. “The Egyptian officers will shoot us down. The most we can do is tell the neighboring countries to seal their borders—”

“I can’t accept that we’re helpless,” Kealey said. He was staring into the darkness, thinking, coming up against dead ends. “Can you post something on the websites that have been carrying videos? Maybe we can stop some of them from eating—”

“What would they believe, the photo of the dead monks?” Harper asked.

“It’s better than nothing,” Kealey said.

Harper agreed.

“What about that bakery fire?” Kealey asked.

“The fire department is still going through the ruins, but Gail says that fires like that, where there were gas ovens fueling it, are usually hot enough to incinerate microscopic residue of organic matter. If you can get us a sample of the bread, we can start working on an antidote.”

“Who knows when and how I can get back to Cairo,” Kealey said. “Dammit, is that the best we can do?”

“You know as well as I do that sometimes the best isn’t a helluva lot,” Harper said. “We didn’t set this timetable.”

“No, and I’ll get the damn bread,” Kealey said. “But there has to be something we can do. There
has
to.”

“You’re on-site. You tell me.”

“The goddamned Staff,” Kealey muttered. “If I had it—”

“Would it make any difference now?” Harper asked. “Would it part the masses and destroy the helicopters? We needed it hours ago, to plant doubt before the prophet came down.”

Harper was right.
God damn it all.
He wanted to ask if Harper knew anything about what happened at the Sahara well, but thought better of it. If the deputy director had a hand in it, he wouldn’t admit it. More than likely someone let something slip to 777. They must have taken it; they had the resources.

“We’ll keep working on the problem here,” Harper said. “Let us know if you hear from the others.”

Kealey hung up. It was ridiculous, he thought as he set out to get some bread. It only just occurred to him that if the disease were airborne, he himself could be infected. Even now, he could see that the crewmen had turned the job over to pilgrims. The team was headed back to the helicopters. The prophet was still on the mound, making benedictory motions with his hands and with the staff.

Keeping the people there to kill them. Kealey wondered if he even knew. And if he didn’t, if he would believe.

Not that Kealey could communicate with him.

The American moved forward, feeling desperate and angry—at the situation but also at himself. There was a saying in special ops, “Failure is the solution you missed.”

He still had time.

He had to look harder.

H
e watched Kealey from the near edge of the crowd.

He had moved with the flow toward the front of the gathering, for that was where he was told Kealey would probably be. Possibly alone, if things went that way. The man had been shown a picture, told what Kealey would probably be wearing. He had been instructed to watch for someone who moved like a police officer determined to break up a brawl. He would not be chanting or praying or acting like anyone else. The man was advised to look for the glow of a sophisticated-looking cell phone, for that would most likely be his lifeline.

Even in the dark, the man had no trouble locating the American—who was, as expected, by himself. The man had followed him when he left the group to go alone to the advance section of the gathering. He had watched, waited, followed, moving as the American did. Together—though Kealey didn’t know it—they now threaded their separate ways toward the feet of the prophet.

He had been asked to stay near Ryan Kealey and, when the time came, to do what needed to be done.

The man was concerned about how he would know when that time was.

“I don’t know,” he’d been told.

That wasn’t the best answer but it was truly the only answer. Because it did not seem that Kealey himself knew what he was doing, where he was going.

Fortunately, the man was accustomed to improvisation.

And so he moved closer and then closer still, unobserved by the crowd or his subject until he was within just a few paces....

“I
’ve just spoken with the head of the El-Khabeya, Egyptian Military Intelligence,” Harper said to the others as he returned to the Underground. “I had to threaten all kinds of reprisals but I got what I needed. They were testing pneumonic plague at the 777 laboratories.”

“Lovely,” Gail Platte muttered.

“Tell me about the strain,” Harper said as he sat. His tone made it sound as if he were reluctant to hear.

“It shuts down the respiratory system,” she said. “It’s one of the most contagious bacteriological infections, the worse because it’s communicable by air or water.”

“Not bread?” Harper asked.

“The heat would destroy it,” Platte said.

“Is it always fatal?” Nesmith asked.

“Not if antibiotics are administered before exposure or shortly after the onset of symptoms, which usually surface in about twenty-four hours,” she told the others. “The problem is, the damn thing will outstrip the world’s ability to combat it. We don’t have enough drugs stockpiled anywhere.”

Harper said, “We’re not only looking at hundreds of thousands of dead in the first day—”

“Millions in two or three days,” Platte said without inflection.

“And infrastructures without workers, international travel halted, and the ripple effect from that,” George Nesmith added.

“At a minimum,” Platte said. “Because there won’t be enough health care professionals to go around, families will stay with each other, infect each other, and rot where they die. Just like in the old days.”

“What
possible
gain is there in that?” asked Harper.

“That’s the wrong question,” Nesmith said. “The people who did this are asking, ‘What is there to be lost?’ If you’re a secular nation surrounded by nonsecular enemies, if you have no real wealth, if you can’t control the constant blasts of insurrection within your own borders, what do you do? You export hell. They used the very porousness of the borders from which they felt threatened to set a plague loose on their enemies.”

“Real or potential,” Schuyler remarked.

“Do they know we know?” Platte asked.

“I haven’t received any updates from the Task Force commander,” Harper said.

“On the run?” Platte asked.

“I doubt it,” Harper said. “I’m guessing he left to join his men. The MK director agreed to keep this under his hat until he could reach unaffiliated MFO units and get them to the scene.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the 777 boys are going to be where the action is,” Nesmith said. “People dropping dead in the desert or on their homeward journey—which is where I’m sure the prophet will send them at once—is going to get a lot of press and they’ll want to show who is in control.”

“And when the diseases erupt?” Platte asked.

“The plotters will be manning the front lines, organizing people, since they’ve been inoculated,” Nesmith said. “They’ll come out of this heroes, while one of the pilgrims gets blamed for bringing the disease into the group.”

“What happens to the prophet?” Harper asked.

“He’s done his job,” Nesmith said. “He dies and becomes a martyr, where he’s much more useful. If he
is
one of the monks, I’m betting they didn’t tell him that part. They probably kept him up in that cave where Adjo first videoed him, possibly convinced of his own sanctimony.”

“I wonder why they didn’t ask this Lieutenant Adjo to get involved,” Platte said.

“He doesn’t sound like he’d have gone along with it,” Harper said. His hand was on the phone. He was trying to think of what to tell Kealey.

“Sedition isn’t a team sport,” Nesmith replied. “The fewer people who are involved, the less the chance of a leak. I’m guessing even the chopper crews don’t know what they’re involved with.”

“Everyone exposed,” Platte said, “everyone a carrier.”

Nesmith frowned. “There’s something I don’t get. The enemy is expecting to transmit this by air, correct?”

Platte nodded.

“So what does the bread have to do with it?” he asked. “I mean, we’ve allowed that the bakery fire was related to this operation somehow.”

“The fire was to destroy evidence,” Harper said.

“Of what?” Nesmith asked. “The microbe’s gestation?”

Platte nodded.

“But you said the ovens would have destroyed the effectiveness of this particular bacterium,” Harper said.

“Maybe they sprinkled it on afterward,” Schuyler submitted.

“No,” Nesmith told him. “That’d leave a trail of the stuff through Sharm el-Sheikh. Bread wrappers aren’t hazmat containers. They’d poison their own people.”

“You’re missing the point,” Platte said. “The bread is beside the point.”

“You lost me,” Harper said.

“Many large bakeries use DAFS—Dissolved Air Flotation Systems—to keep bacteria-breeding yeast out of public sewer systems. The DAFS float the host medium, the insoluble matter, to the surface of a tub where it can be skimmed off and disposed of,” Platte explained.

“That’s where this particular bacterium was grown, then?” Harper asked. “Using regular baker’s yeast?”

“It’s brilliant,” Platte said. “What ferments carbohydrates in baking is the perfect medium for binary fission to create lots of little bacteria in secret.”

“Then why give out bread?” Schuyler asked.

“Multipurposing,” Nesmith said gravely.

“To get people to cluster,” Harper said, picking up the thought that Nesmith was unwilling to finish.

“The militants are probably going to release the airborne toxin from the helicopters, most likely when they take off,” Nesmith went on. “That will keep the crewmen safe.”

Harper said, “The good news, then, is we’ve still got time. I’ll get on the horn to the MFO and see what they can whip up to keep the choppers grounded.”

“You can’t use other choppers,” Nesmith pointed out, checking his computer screen. “I just checked the MESAT-6.”

“What does that mean?” Platte asked.

“According to our Middle Eastern weather satellite, the wind is blowing toward the mountain,” Nesmith told her. “If the MFO tries to pin them down from above, or even surrounds the area with vehicles, 777 can still release the toxins.”

“If they’re to be stopped, it has to be by infiltration,” Harper said. “And it has to be quick.”

“Not the kind of drill the MFO does conscientiously,” Nesmith pointed out as he scrolled through the phone book.

Harper was outwardly unemotional. “I’ll tell Ryan. Gail, you’d better notify our people at the embassy in Cairo to be prepared for what’s coming—and to make sure they have antibiotics for themselves and for our guys when they come in.”

Platte nodded and e-mailed their liaison at the consulate. No one said what was on everyone’s minds:

If
they come in.