Cold Silence Read online

  I’d noted, into my neck mike, “Glazed eyes, stuffy nose, slight hoarseness.”

  Now my heart began pounding at her confession. “You started it, Kate? What do you mean?”

  “It was an accident!”

  “What kind of accident, Kate?”

  Wilderness Medicine 101. Always call a patient by their name. It helps keep them calm.

  Fresh tears ran down her cheeks, soaked a stained pillow. I saw in her face what I saw in my mirror back home on sleepless nights—self blame. This woman knows something, I knew.

  Kate blurted out, “I promised I wouldn’t tell!”

  Hassan is hearing this, I thought. He’s looking for an excuse to blame someone. Hassan will unleash those militia if he thinks someone here is killing his brother on purpose.

  But I gentled her. “Why don’t you tell me what you think you did. You can help everyone else if you tell.”

  “No! It’s too late!”

  I took her hand. It felt like a claw. In the glass covering her family photo was superimposed the reflected girl, head averted with shame.

  “Kate? Breathe. Slowly. You know, good people always blame themselves for things they have no control over. Why, I bet that’s the case here.”

  “It’s not fair. They’re dying and I only got it a little bit! I want to be dead!”

  “You don’t mean that. Tell me what happened.”

  Her voice fell to a whisper. But at least she kept speaking. “He was so attractive,” she said. “He made me feel wonderful.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tim’s from Oregon. His family owns a farm there. They grow apples. Sweet gala apples, he said.”

  Get to the point, I thought.

  “He said we’d live there when the project is up. He said I could probably get work at the university in Eugene. He said it’s a good place to . . . oh God . . . have a baby!”

  She broke out sobbing. The heat in my suit was rising. Sweat formed at my scalp and ran down my chin. It poured from my armpits. There was a sour smell in the suit. I cursed the designer of the thing.

  Kate said, “I slept with him! Had sex with him! I know it’s wrong! I promised the Lord not to have sex until I’m married but I thought . . . I mean . . . I didn’t . . . I mean . . .”

  I did not understand where she was going with this so I asked, “You caught something from this boy, you mean?”

  “No! It’s punishment! Affliction! God struck me down because I broke my vow. Sex without marriage is abomination!” Her face spun to me, blazing. “I know what this sickness is. It’s leprosy, out of the Bible! Right out of the Old Testament! Like God gave Naaman!”

  She started hyperventilating, but not from illness. I told her she was wrong. I said that her sex habits had nothing to do with the outbreak, although, for all I knew, that was one way it could spread. I told her that leprosy took a long time to take effect, and didn’t spread through groups. I did not tell her that I had no time for God, faith, or miracles. That to deny science is to deny truth. That faith is for fools.

  I smoothed her brow. There was still a possibility that she’d given me a clue, though. “Kate? Are you telling me that God gave you this disease and the others caught it from you? That you were the first to get it?”

  “I was bad! Bad! Bad! But I wasn’t the first, no. God struck down this whole camp because of me!”

  I heard Hassan exhale loudly in my earpiece. His breathing joined mine for a moment. At least, for an instant, we were in sync in frustration.

  “You people are all crazy,” Hassan said.

  —

  Person after person, and the answers were the same.

  “Fifteen-centimeter lesions,” Eddie recited as we worked together in the mess tent on the last two victims, a Somali cook and a Somali guide.

  “Erythematous plaque, with well-defined outer margins,” I said, scraping samples.

  “The center’s flat and clear, hairless. No pigment.”

  “Get bits of normal areas, Eddie.”

  “Look at the foot drop, One. The foot just dangles.”

  “Check the corneas.”

  Hassan’s low voice broke into our earpieces.

  “Are you finished? You have now worked for many hours. I think you have what you need.”

  “What we need is more help.”

  Eddie came close and nudged me. I looked through his face shield at his sweating countenance, and I knew he was telling me to open the tent flap. Something was wrong.

  When I glanced outside, I sensed the change. The ring of vehicles had drawn in closer. The clan men still stood by trucks, but their attitude had stiffened, even from a distance. The gunners had lowered the muzzles of their .50 calibers while we worked, but now they were aimed again.

  “Hassan, what’s going on out there?”

  “I think that you are finished, Doctor. Do you know for sure what has happened here?”

  “How can I know that yet?”

  “You took many photographs? Many samples?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will now leave the compound. You will bring your samples and photos. You will walk twenty feet toward us and then you will stop and strip.”

  “Hassan, I—”

  “Don’t interrupt! Just listen!”

  I heard, through my earpiece, the agitated sounds of men arguing. I heard Hassan snapping back something in Somali. I had no idea what it was, but I did have a feeling that the argument concerned the fate of Eddie and me.

  Hassan was back. “Do this now, Dr. Rush.”

  Eddie mouthed, Uh-oh.

  Hassan said soothingly, “You are in no danger yet. I promise this. But you will please do what I say.”

  There was really no choice. Eddie mouthed, Yeah, our pal, as we left the tent, walked past Lionel Nash, in the rain, and toward the opening in the thorn tree barrier. We both carried steel sample cases. We left all our drugs there. These people would need them.

  Lionel had helped out until the end, and his reserves of strength astounded me. Understanding what was about to happen, the former Marine half straightened and saluted.

  “Semper fi, sir,” said Lionel.

  “Semper fi, Lionel.”

  The rain made scratchy noises on my biosuit. My visor fogged. The respirator gurgled. At fifty yards between us, Hassan stepped out of the ragged circle of militia fighters and ordered us to halt.

  “Hoods off,” Hassan ordered. “I want to make sure it is you before I let you go. That you did not trade places with someone else.”

  The fresh air smelled of alkaline earth and saltwater and camel dung, of sweat and fresh rain and wet palm trees.

  “Strip. Everything. Now. But keep the microphones on.”

  Hassan stood alone, before his fighters, hand on the butt of his gun. Then a militia man ran up to him and handed him something black, and I froze. But it was not a gun, I saw as he raised the object to his face. It was binoculars.

  So! He wanted to see my face close up as we talked. Hassan would be too far away for me to see his features. In his binoculars, I’d be inches away. He could study my eyes.

  Hassan said, “I do not think you have previous knowledge of this thing, Doctor.”

  “Thank you.”

  He was making a decision. He said, “You have your samples and your photos. To bring back.”

  “Hassan,” I said, my heartbeat rising, “don’t hurt them.”

  “I will not.”

  “That’s your brother in there, you said. Your own brother. Your people, Hassan.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Dr. Rush?”

  I pleaded as the rain intensified, “All I’m asking for is a little time. Another plane lands. You keep your distance. You can’t be infected. The doctors wear protective suits and bring the right medicines
. They keep the sick from you. They help your brother. For God’s sake—”

  He cut me off. “‘For God’s sake’? This is an interesting notion. You think I do not believe in a God?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You think I am a barbarian. Life is cheap in Africa. Those Africans, those barbaric Somalis, have no respect for the lives of women and men. Is that it?”

  “That’s not it.” But he was right partially, and I was ashamed.

  “West Africa, Doctor. Ebola breaks out. A fatal disease. We can cure it, you doctors say. We take precautions. We know what we’re doing, you say. Ebola acts this way. It acts that way. It is a known quantity. And then suddenly a thousand are dead. And then four thousand. And then ten. And you doctors apologize because you did not really know at all, and you blame the unclean primitive Africans. Well, there are a thousand healthy people a few miles away from here. My people.”

  I said nothing. I stood in the heat and rain and felt drops running down my scalp and forehead and into my eyes.

  “Hassan the clan leader. Hassan and his cruel, harsh men. Hassan who thinks life means nothing. By the way, not everyone here agrees with my decision. They do not want to even let you go. You see?”

  “At least let me get the healthy ones out of here.”

  No answer.

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Go,” he said gently. “Go back to the plane. Fly away and tell them we didn’t start it. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do what is necessary. I’ll do the rest. Haven’t you figured out yet why I made you strip? I want to make sure you don’t carry out contagion on your clothes.”

  The guns seemed to lower, as if the metal itself knew there would be no carnage yet. The stillness was profound. We stripped and, naked, sluiced by rain, trudged back to the shot-up Land Rover. We needed to figure out what had happened, to understand this thing. Nakedness suited our condition. We were devoid of power in this particular hell.

  Eddie said, “I don’t want to leave, One.”

  Hassan’s voice replied, “I cannot control them for long. But it is up to you. That is the power of God. To offer men choices. Drive away while you are safe.”

  Eddie mouthed, Hell.

  Hassan watched our lips in his binoculars.

  “Just go,” he said.

  And thirty minutes later I watched our gape-mouthed pilot stare at our nakedness as we climbed into the plane and donned the clothes we’d discarded when we arrived. “Take off and circle back,” I told the pilot. “Stay high.”

  Risky, but I have to see what he’s going to do.

  We rolled down the dirt runway, to the ululations of the Somali women, who had turned away from our nakedness. They were showing grief, I knew now, timeless, human grief for the dead. The plane took to the air as I saw the first wispy spirals coming from the south. Then the smoke became a black column. We banked toward the research camp until I saw exactly what was happening.

  “Flame throwers,” breathed Eddie, horrified.

  Maybe they’d used the guns first. I hoped so. It would have been quicker and merciful. We’d been too far away to hear shots. But either way they were finishing it with flaming gasoline. Skinny militia fighters with canisters on their backs had circled the compound. Burning gasoline-covered tents and corpses, bonfiring the thorn tree barrier, creating heat so profound it convoluted the air and made our plane bounce. Orange flame spiraled toward heaven.

  “Go back to the base,” I told the pilot.

  “This is the worst thing I ever saw,” said Eddie.

  We did not speak for a while. We couldn’t. We kept seeing that fire in our heads. But at least we had samples. We had saved nail clippings and skin and blood from those who were now ashes. I forwarded the photos to D.C. I could only hope that, back at the base, our samples would give answers. And that the thing we’d just encountered was local, not contagious. A chemical. A gas. A freak accident.

  We never reached the base, though.

  Because fifteen minutes later, as we crossed back into Kenya, it got worse again, when the sat call came through.

  “We’re diverting you, Joe,” the admiral told us. “The State Department long-range Gulf Stream will meet you at Moi, in Nairobi. Those photos were awful.”

  “It’s in Israel?” I asked, remembering the words I’d heard before, about Galilee, from the Situation Room. “It’s spread? It’s out already?”

  There was shocked silence from the line, and I thought I felt raw emotion over space, bouncing up from the capital, gliding past burnt-up stars, directed back toward our pitching plane. “Israel, Joe? Why did you ask about Israel?”

  “Because we heard you over the line earlier when you said there was a problem in Galilee.”

  The admiral said quietly, “The audio was on?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Christ, those technical guys! Well, you’re right, Joe. It is in Galilee. You heard correctly. But not Galilee, Israel. Come home. It’s in Galilee, Nevada,” he said. “By the way, how are you two feeling?”

  “Us?” said Eddie.

  “Any tingling in your fingers?” the admiral asked, sounding concerned.

  FOUR

  The animals went crazy when Harlan turned on the light, emitting high-pitched cries of panic, clawing up against their wire mesh cages, bumping into each other in terror, staring out at him with tiny glazed eyes. He tried to soothe away their fear as they skittered and screamed. Normally, when calm, they sounded like cooing babies. Now they sounded like something from another world.

  —Shhh. Shhh. I’m not going to hurt you.

  It didn’t work, though. They recognized him, or rather, anything with two legs meant trouble, and they understood in the recesses of their primitive neuron passageways that even if they escaped pain at this particular moment, nothing good would come from association with him. Those things in the cages had brains the size of walnuts, DNA fifty million years old. Any analytical effort of which the smartest one—the Einstein of these creatures—might be capable might, at best, equal the thought power of a lumbering rhinoceros. They couldn’t add one plus one. The concept of “tomorrow” was beyond them. They’d stare at the red telephone as if it were a rock. But when it came to pain, they knew they were in trouble and their cage floors were creamy masses of piss and shit and emitted an acidic odor that took him back to the swamps where he’d grown up, hunted alligators and feral hogs, learned the truth about pain, trust, and the nature of life. It seemed like ten thousand years ago. He was forty-nine.

  —Calm down, you little guys!

  This time of night, 12 A.M., he was alone in the big lab two stories beneath the ground, the only one permitted access. Red light on. Air control system humming over the whimpering noises. Satellite shots of Jerusalem blown up on the walls; and close-ups from the old walled city; a narrow footpath, Via Dolorosa, “the way of suffering,” where Jesus walked to his crucifixion; the golden Dome of the Rock, from where Mohammed ascended on his white steed Baraq to heaven, to converse with God. And only a few hundred yards away, the site of Solomon’s Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant, given to Moses, came to rest for the Jews.

  One square mile, Harlan thought, filled with joy. Remove that mile of earth, and two thousand years of human history—its crossroads, its major figures, its legends and lies and consequences—would be different. Nothing . . . not countries, not customs, not even science and aspiration would be the same.

  Back to work.

  Abutting the corner dissection area was a holding cell, now empty, and a top-of-the-line Bosch steel freezer, which required a four-digit combination to enter. He walked in and the cold hit him. He felt himself being watched on closed circuit feed by the night duty guards in the computer center, where the tech team sent out tweets, feeds, e-mails, and alerts. It was twenty-five degrees in here. His breath frosted as he stamped
to keep warm, scanned the racks of medicines and blood and vials containing ground-up bits of animal intestine, brain, arterial scrapings. Other shelves were piled with supply cartons, blue stickers for stuff to be donated, yellow for vital, purple for transport over the coming weeks.

  —Ah, there you are!

  He took five small stoppered glass bottles filled with fluid the color of ten-year-old Dewar’s Scotch, his father’s old preferred drink, rocket fuel for paternal emotion at 2 A.M. From a cardboard box he removed twenty-one clean, freshly wrapped syringes in crinkly cellophane. He arranged the bottles on a silver tray in two circles, outer bottles for newbies, inner for everyone else. He was glad to leave the freezer, because he had always hated cold, even growing up. Unfortunately his orders had taken him here, to a cold place.

  Now he stopped as a new sound hit him. A harsh ringing from the red phone on the computer table, amid the open, glowing Dells. All other phones were black.

  It’s him, Harlan thought.

  He broke out in a sweat. He did not want to pick up the phone. His happiness had evaporated. Everyone fears something and Harlan was terrified of the thing on the other end of the phone. But he answered and heard the dreaded voice, rumbly, a master’s voice, soft as static, a voice that sounded merely curious on the surface but held—he knew from experience—a vast torment beneath.

  “Any news from Africa, Harlan?”

  “Not yet but any minute. I’m sure of it.”

  “You told me—ASSURED me—that you’d arrange things so it looks like everything started in Africa.”

  “I did. I did. I swear it. It will!”

  “You know what your problem is, Harlan? You’re too nice. Too easy on your people. You haven’t pushed your message with them. I’m disappointed in you.”