The Ares Decision

24

Sarie van Keuren tossed a bungee cord over the crate of field equipment and Smith caught it, securing the hook to a hole rusted in the top of the cab.

“I think that’ll get us to Kampala,” he said, and the driver leaned through the open window, head bobbing in an energetic nod.

“No problem.”

Those seemed to be his only two words of English, but with the right inflection and expression, they could communicate just about any point.

Smith climbed into the front passenger’s seat, pulling his pack onto his lap before repeatedly slamming the tiny car’s door in an effort to get it to stay closed. “Peter! Let’s roll.”

Howell was standing on the sidewalk staring up at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, hands jammed in the pockets of his faded jeans despite the heat and humidity. The original terminal building was gone now, but the airport was still something of a shrine for the men who served in the world’s special forces.

In 1976, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a plane ferrying 250 passengers from Tel Aviv to Paris, forcing the pilot to land in Idi Amin — controlled Uganda. After releasing some of the passengers, they’d threatened to kill their remaining hostages if a number of their imprisoned compatriots weren’t set free.

When it became clear that peaceful negotiations were going nowhere — due in no small part to Amin’s support of the hijackers — the Israelis began planning a rescue mission.

Operation Thunderbolt was carried out by one hundred elite commandos and took only an hour and a half to complete. When the dust settled, all but three of the hostages had been rescued and all the hijackers, as well as forty-five Ugandan troops, were dead.

It had been a very public demonstration of what a well-trained force could accomplish and had made that little airport a household name all over the world.

“Peter!” Sarie called, wrestling her pack into the backseat and then squeezing in next to it. “What are you looking at? Meter’s running!”

Her voice snapped him out of his trance and he slipped in next to her.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Of course I am, my dear. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Smith shot a quick glance back but then just settled into the vinyl-and-duct-tape seat as the cab shot into traffic. He watched the verdant hills dotted with houses pass by for a few minutes but found it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. The drive to their hotel in the capital city wouldn’t take much more than a half hour, but he might as well put the time to good use. Unless he missed his guess, opportunities for sleep were going to be scarce over the next couple of weeks.

Sarie’s phone rang and he half monitored her circumspect questioning of the German parasitologist she’d left a message for earlier that day. When the inevitable disappointment became audible in her voice, he shifted his attention back to the monotonous drone of the engine. It seemed that Star had once again been right — whatever this phenomenon turned out to be, the two lousy pages she turned up were the entire body of knowledge on it.

Despite his exhaustion, Smith’s mind refused to shut down, instead churning through an ever-lengthening list of problems and unknowns.

Dealing with deadly diseases in the field was dangerous enough when you had iron-fisted control over every variable. Normally, he’d know more or less what pathogen he was dealing with, his patients would be grateful for his presence, and he would be leading a large team of highly trained specialists wielding multimillion-dollar equipment.

To say that his current situation wasn’t optimal would be the understatement of the century. His protective equipment consisted of some surgical gloves and masks raided from Sarie’s basement. He had virtually no knowledge of the pathogen they were after or, frankly, if it even existed. He had only guesses as to how it spread and no clue how it attacked its victims. And his patients, far from offering their thanks with donations of farm animals like they had last time he’d worked in Africa, were likely to try to tear him apart.

Then there was Caleb Bahame — a man who had brought the technological innovation of the jeep to the old tradition of drawing and quartering. A man who wasn’t going to be happy about three white people wandering around in his backyard asking questions…

The sudden blast of a car horn caused Smith to jerk upright in his seat. He squinted into the powerful sun, confused for a moment as to where he was. Ahead, tall concrete buildings broke up the outline of green hills, creating a vaguely Soviet skyline that overpowered the red roofs and whitewashed walls of colonial-era structures.

Kampala was a tidy and surprisingly attractive city at odds with its history of political turmoil, military dictatorships, and now Caleb Bahame. It was a deeply unfair but common story in this part of the world: just when the populace was about to get out from under — just when hope began to dispel fear and desperation — someone rose with a ragtag force and some murky motivation for destroying it all.

“Take your next left,” Howell said, reaching up between the seats and tapping their driver on the shoulder.

The Ugandan seemed confused and pointed through the cracked windshield at the approaching city. “No problem. Hotel.”

“Not the bloody hotel,” Howell said more forcefully. “Do it. Turn there.”

“No! Problem! Bad place.”

Smith twisted around in his seat but was grateful when Sarie spoke first. “What’s going on, Peter? I thought you’d never been to Uganda.”

Her naïve openness was not only engaging but useful. Smith really couldn’t ask questions — particularly in light of the fact that he had Howell on a mission for an organization the Brit didn’t even know existed.

“I said here!” Howell said, pulling himself between the seats and grabbing the wheel. The taxi careened onto a dirt side road violently enough to slam Smith into the poorly latched door. He grabbed for the dash and barely managed to keep from falling out.

“What the hell, Peter?” he said, starting the process of trying to get the door closed again.

“I thought we’d take in the sights.”

Howell passed three one-hundred-dollar bills to the driver, who didn’t seem to know whether to be more afraid of the man in the backseat or what lay ahead. The cash broke the tie.

Smith managed to get the door latched again and twisted around to the degree the pack on his lap would allow. The fact that Howell hadn’t told him about his history in Uganda didn’t particularly bother him — their entire relationship was built on secrets. What did bother him, though, was that the normally squared-away SAS man had turned erratic and moody.

He’d never had reason to question Howell’s judgment before and he wasn’t anxious to start, but there was something wrong here. How much rope should he give his old friend before he yanked back?

As they approached a ramshackle township, the driver began talking irritably in his native language, obviously trying to convince himself of something. They’d closed to within about two hundred yards of the first building, a leaning shack built from corrugated tin and wire, when the African slammed on the brakes. “We go no more!”

Howell stepped calmly from the car and yanked the driver’s door open, pulling the frightened man out into the road.

“Back in a jif,” he said, sliding behind the wheel and launching the car forward again.

“Peter,” Sarie said as they wound through the dense shacks, eliciting perplexed stares from the pedestrians hurrying out of the way. “I’m from this part of the world and I’m telling you we shouldn’t be here. We aren’t welcome.”

He didn’t respond, and Smith felt her hand light on his shoulder, a clear signal that she wanted him to intervene. But for one of the first times in his life, he wasn’t sure what to do. He’d be dead five times over if it weren’t for Peter Howell.

The farther they penetrated, the more the township changed in character. Women and children evident at the outer edges were gone now, replaced by increasingly well-armed men. A pickup with a mounted machine gun crossed in front of them and the shirtless man standing in the bed swung the gun in their direction but didn’t have time to decide whether or not to pull the trigger before he disappeared around a corner.

“Okay, that’s far enough, Peter,” Smith said, grabbing the shifter and pulling it into neutral. “Either you tell us what we’re doing, or we turn around and get the hell out of here.”

The Brit just thumbed into the backseat, where Sarie was on her knees watching the crowd close in behind them. Unlike the machine gunner, they’d had time to think about the strangers in their midst and were well on their way to a decision that wasn’t going to go well for anyone.