Covert Action

7 Forces in Place

Benjamin Sata moved along the back streets of Lusaka with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets and his head down. He had arrived that morning on a flight from Maputo, and it was now midafternoon. His soiled white shirt and scuffed shoes said that he was probably a laborer or an out-of-work miner. There were a great many of those in Lusaka. In his small knapsack he had a Mozambique passport and a work visa that identified him as Tilyenji Nkhoma, as well as some toilet articles, a change of clothes, and, stitched into the lining of the bag, a large sum of U.S. dollars and Zambian kwachas. As he made his way into the housing project, no one gave him a second look, but he was very aware of his surroundings. Unnoticed, he made his way through the suburb of Burma Road along Nzunga Avenue. He cut down a side street and stepped into an alley. Finally, he arrived at the back gate of a modest one-story home. Glancing around to make sure he was still unobserved, he slipped through the gate and stepped onto the back porch. The low growl of a small dog greeted him through the screen door.

“Hey, Kimba, it’s me, Benjamin,” he said quietly. “Don’t you remember me, girl?”

The dog sniffed him cautiously but conceded nothing.

“Who’s there? May I help you?” A shriveled, wizened black woman in a print smock approached the door. There was the patient, quiet dignity about her that was common to those few who reach advanced age in Africa. She was well into her eighties, but even she did not know exactly how old she was. Like the dog, she was alert and cautious.

“You may indeed, Grandmother,” Benjamin replied in Bemba, the language of his tribe. “May a weary traveler find shelter and a place by your fire?”

“Benjamin? Good Lord, is that you?”

“Yes, Grandmother. May I come in?”

She lifted the lock, and he quickly slipped inside. He stepped away from the door and stood looking back into the alley to make sure his arrival was unobserved. After a moment, he turned from the door to formally greet his grandmother, in the Bemba fashion. He was the youngest of her grandsons, but there were still proper greetings to be exchanged. This was not the first of his infrequent visits home, and as on the others, he would have to balance courtesy with vigilance. It was known that he had served in the South African Army, and that he had been an employee of Sandline and deployed with the mercenary force that Sandline sent to Papua New Guinea. While not technically a criminal, he was unwelcome in Zambia to the local authorities and especially the national army police. The Zambian army distrusted anyone who had served in the South African Army or a mercenary force.

“How is he, Grandmother?”

“Not good, Benjamin. A man needs his sons around him, but now there is just you and David. He doesn’t seem to want to live anymore. It’s good that you have come. He will be glad to see you. You were always such a joy to him.”

Benjamin Sata’s mother had died during childbirth, along with his infant sister. As the youngest of his siblings who lived, he was raised by his older sisters. His father had worked since he was twelve in the copper mines. Only after he had become too old to work had they moved from the Copper Belt in the north to Lusaka. Close to half a century in the mines had left him a mere shell of the big, wide-shouldered man Benjamin remembered as a boy. Benjamin watched as his brothers went off to the mines, but when it was his time to go, the copper mines in Zambia weren’t hiring, but the diamond mines in South Africa were. Two years of working the big hole in Kimberly were enough. Soldier’s pay was not as good as miner’s, but Benjamin knew in his heart he was an aboveground person. He joined the South African Army and went on to become a sergeant in the notorious 32nd Battalion, where he mastered the skills of a professional soldier. Following intermittent work with Sandline, he was hired as a park ranger in Kenya. It was there that he met Tomba, which ultimately led to his becoming a member of IFOR.

In the Sata home, as with most African families, there were lots of kids — six girls and four boys. There would have been eleven had Benjamin’s younger sister survived. But now there were only two left, Benjamin and his brother David. His second oldest brother had been killed in a mining accident, and one of his sisters had died of meningitis. The other six had died of AIDS. His brothers and sisters left twelve orphaned children, all scattered about with grandparents and his father’s two sisters. In Zambia, as in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, a whole generation was vanishing; there were only the very old and the very young. Benjamin learned about AIDS in the army and was told that if he contracted the disease, he would be discharged. Now all the contract mercenary firms tested for HIV; if you were found positive for the virus, you could not work. His brother David had married a devout Baptist and found a job as a bank teller. Monogamy and celibacy were the only sure ways to avoid AIDS in Africa. Protected sex was not fashionable, even in the cities.

Benjamin followed his grandmother into the cluttered living room, where his father sat in a wooden rocker with a quilt across his lap. Anderson Sata was barely sixty-five, but he looked much older. He was painfully thin, and his eyes seemed more deeply recessed in his skull than Benjamin remembered. Benjamin quietly approached the rocker, pulled a stool up next to the chair, and eased himself onto it. There he waited for his father to wake. Fifteen minutes later, the old man’s eyes fluttered open. He focused on Benjamin for a full minute before he spoke.

“I see you, my son.”

“And I see you, my father.” He lowered his eyes in a show of respect.

Anderson Sata’s body was failing him, but his mind was sharp. “Is it safe for you to be here, my son?”

His father well knew how his son made his living. He also knew his youngest son was the brightest and most capable of his ten children, and it pained him that he had chosen to become a soldier. Yet the money Benjamin sent home on a regular basis kept the household going, as Anderson Sata had no pension from the mines. David and his wife gave to their church, but not to the care of David’s father and grandmother. Yet upon their father’s death, the house would belong to David; he was the eldest, and that was the custom.

Anderson Sata also understood that while his son was not a criminal, if the local police knew he was here, they would surely arrest and deport him. It was unlikely that anyone in the project where they lived would turn him in, but one could never be certain. What pained him most was that they would have to remain indoors while it was light, not sit on the porch and drink beer as he did with David. To sit in front of his home with his sons and grandsons, there for all to see, was all Anderson Sata had ever asked out of life — and now, all that was left to him.

“I am safe enough, Father. Look, I brought you something, so you will know when it is time for tea and when it is time to eat.”

He handed his father a gold pocket watch, wound and set to the correct time. It cost what the average Zambian made in a year. Benjamin had purchased it with his IFOR signing bonus. He watched his father inspect the time-piece, as a broad smile slowly creased his weathered features. To hand a gift like this to his father in person was something he had wanted to do for many years. He was fortunate that the needs of his employer brought him to Lusaka. Even so he was not sure that he would be allowed to make a visit to his family. Nkosi Akheem had sent him ahead with specific instructions and duties. But he had talked it over with Tomba, and Tomba had told him to visit his father, then proceed with his IFOR taskings.

That evening his grandmother killed a chicken, and they dined on mullet and hen. After it was dark, he took his father out onto the porch, and they sat and talked while his grandmother cleaned up after the meal. Just before midnight, he helped his father into bed and kissed him gently on the forehead. The gold watch lay open on the bedside table. Benjamin left as he had come, making his way back into Lusaka.

Garrett Walker and Elvis Rosenblatt faced nearly twenty hours in the air between Honolulu and Mombasa, with a change of planes at Narita Airport in Tokyo. Their passports said they were John Naye and Greg Wood respectively, two Canadian tourists who shared a passion for photography, on their way to Zambia for a photo safari. Their documentation was prepared by Bill Owens and, like that carried by Benjamin Sata, impeccable. The two were booked in business class all the way except for the final jump from Mombasa to Lusaka. The long flight gave Garrett an opportunity to get to know Rosenblatt. They ate, drank, and spent time reading up on long-range photography. Both had top-of-the-line Nikon equipment. For Rosenblatt, it was a grand adventure — a chance to get away from the office, travel to a novel place, and chase bugs. The cloak-and-dagger aspect of the venture only added to the excitement. For Garrett, it was all business. His job was to make sure Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt was prepared and able to do his job when the time came.

“I’ll have another scotch, rocks,” he told the flight attendant as his empty glass was collected. They were over the Indian Ocean and still two hours out of Mombasa. “How about you, Doc?”

“Maybe a refill on the coffee,” Rosenblatt replied.

Garrett was gratified to see that the doctor drank sparingly, and while he was something of a big kid in his exuberance about the trip, he was measured and professional when it came to talking about disease and pathogens. The attendant returned immediately with the scotch and the coffee.

“So, pretend you are a bioterrorist,” Garrett said, sipping frugally at his drink, “and you’re at some makeshift lab in Africa. What kind of a bug would you be trying to grow to turn loose on some Western city?”

“Interesting perspective,” Rosenblatt said. “But before we talk about bugs, let’s talk about the players in this game. I’m an investigator — a bug detective. I know the game, but I play defense. The guys that you said were missing also know the game, but they are offensive players. And they are some of the best offensive players. My training and experience are mostly with natural pathogens, but recently, with the emerging bioterror threat, we at the CDC have had to think about these offensive threats — unnatural, man-made threats. And that means we have to think like terrorists, which is not all that easy. Let me break this down for you. There are three basic threat areas: bacteria, toxins, and viruses. For simplicity, we’ll not consider HIV and some of the exotics like bovine spongiform. Now, do you want me to kill a lot of people, or just terrorize them?”

“There’s a difference?”

“Sure. Take the anthrax scare right after 9/11. Not that many people died, but it terrorized a nation — people were afraid to go to the mailbox. Some still are. Anthrax is a great terror weapon, but it’s not contagious, and it’s very hard to weaponize — to get the spores small enough to stay airborne. That’s a problem, because it takes about twenty thousand anthrax spores to infect a person. As a terrorist, you have to personally infect every victim. If I have anthrax, I can’t hurt you. Now let’s say you could weaponize a hemorrhagic fever, like Ebola. Now you’ve got a real killer. It’s highly contagious, killing about seventy percent of those who contract the virus. It’s a horrible death. Of course, if you kill a lot of people, you also create a lot of terror.”

Garrett considered this. “Okay, you’re in Africa, you’re in a good lab, and you want to kill a lot of people. How would you go about it?”

“If I were going to use a bacteria, I’d probably use inhalation anthrax or melioidosis. Melioidosis can be some pretty bad stuff. It’s rare and mostly confined to animals. Most cases found in humans are confined to Southeast Asia, Thailand, and northern Australia. If you can culture enough of the stuff and get it into an aerosol, you can kill a lot of people. It’s ninety percent fatal, and there is no known antidote. But it’s hard to transmit, and the bacteria doesn’t do well in colder climates. Anthrax, even though it isn’t contagious, is another good bacterial choice for an offensive player. And, as I said, you would have to somehow weaponize it — make it an aerosol — which takes some skill and some technology. If you could do that, you could also kill a lot of people. The nice thing about anthrax spores is that they last a long time, and if you have a refined aerosol process, you can keep them aloft long enough for people to breathe them. The Russians had lots of anthrax, tons of it in fact, and we have no idea what happened to most of it. Not sure you could decimate a population with anthrax, but you could sure kill a lot of people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve or at a football bowl game. A small explosive and a few pounds of weaponized anthrax, and you could rack up forty or fifty thousand — no problem.

“Then there are toxins. These are natural poisons, as opposed to man-made poisons, like VX nerve gas. There are numerous forms of botulinum, there’s ricin, and there’s mycotoxins. Ricin and mycotoxins are both good candidates — there is no antidote, and both are almost always fatal. But both have delivery problems. The nice thing about ricin is its availability; it’s made from castor beans. But getting it to a large number of people could be very difficult. Mycotoxins, and there are dozens of them, can be very effective in aerosol form. They can be synthesized from fungi. Just mix up a batch, find yourself a crop-spraying aircraft, fly over a crowd, like the New York Marathon or maybe a rock concert. Mycotoxins are what were supposedly released from an aircraft in the ‘yellow rain’ incidents in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. The incident in Afghanistan was probably a real one; the Soviets got pretty desperate right before they left. There have been mycotoxins in any number of military arsenals. If I were using a toxin and had a good source, I’d favor a mycotoxin.”

“So you’d be growing fungi to make a mycotoxin in your African lab?”

“Now, did I say that? I said if I were going to use a toxin, I’d go with a mycotoxin. But why use a rusty knife when there is a shiny sharp scalpel available? I’m talking about a virus. Viruses are Cadillacs of microbial killing machines. We often don’t understand how they live, move, and even kill in nature, let alone if someone in a laboratory is helping them. Viruses have been the scourge of the last two centuries. The flu epidemic of 1918 probably killed thirty million people before it ran its course; HIV is well on its way to killing twenty million. Smallpox decimated the American Indians and all but annihilated several smaller, isolated cultures that had no natural immunity. The viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers are nasty little guys. Ebola is just one of the hemorrhagic fever viruses. Viruses were nasty, but over the years, we’ve pretty much gotten a handle on them. We have vaccinations against smallpox and tetanus, so they are controlled. Those we can’t control, like Ebola, are rare and, so far, geographically isolated. But then we began fooling around with genetic engineering. The mapping of the human genome was a huge step forward. With these techniques, and the emergence of nanotechnologies, we can modify genetic material and literally create new forms of life, or at least significantly modify existing forms of life. A team of biologists created a polio virus in the lab — from scratch. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was able to recreate the exact same strain of a flu virus that swept through North America and Western Europe in 1918. So you see, any of the existing nasty little viruses that we have controlled or are very rare could, through genetic manipulation, be made resistant to current vaccines or made more robust, so they are no longer rare. We are into the age of designer bio-weapons. We can make bugs that are immune to existing vaccines or that so depress the human immune system that a common cold could take you out. On the ugly end of the scenario, they have the ability to depopulate whole regions, even continents. It could make the bubonic plague seem like a case of the sniffles.”

“Y’know, Elvis, you must be a conversational treasure at a dinner party. Keep this up, and I’m going to need another drink.”

“Hey, you asked. Think it scares you? I’m supposed to be a key player on the first-team defense, and it scares the hell out of me.”

The pilot announced that they were beginning their descent into Mombasa. There were thunderstorms in the area, so the attendants hurried through the cabin to collect glasses and trash. Garrett put his tray table up but held on to his drink.

“So, Doc, you’re in your lab in Zimbabwe. You want to kill a lot of people — a lot of Americans. How do you go about it? You’re on the offense now. Which bug are you going to go with?”

Rosenblatt pursed his lips. “Since it’s Africa and I have the right equipment, I think I’d go with viral hemorrhagic fever. Ebola is pretty elusive, so I’d probably try to get my hands on some common form of yellow fever or dengue fever, and then morph it into something resistant to current vaccines and give it a little more staying power in northern climates — maybe get some transmission medium other than the mosquito. Of course, you’d want to build in some human immune suppressant characteristics. If I had the ability to conduct human testing, I’d try to give the bug a higher transmission rate, perhaps even give it the ability to beat a HEPA filtration system. That way I’d be able to kill a lot of health-care workers and epidemiologists before they could figure it out, and without the caregivers and the epidemiologists, you can get to pandemic proportions in a hurry.”

“You could do that?”

“Probably. I can assure you that those virologists and microbiologists that you can’t find, if they are in a lab equipped for genetic engineering, sure as hell can. Look, Garrett, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. It’s serious shit — really serious shit.”

The aircraft began to buck and yaw as they slipped down into the dense, warm air coming off the African mainland. “Elvis, you’re one happy thought after another. You know, the idea of spending a week with you on a photo safari is rapidly becoming a bleak prospect.”

Rosenblatt grinned at him. “I’ll probably be a pain in the ass while we’re taking pictures of wildlife, but if we have to go on safari for some killer microbes, you’ll be glad I’m on your team.”

Garrett considered this and returned the grin. “You probably got that right.” He drained the last of his scotch as the 767 broke through the overcast and banked for the Mombasa airport.

François Meno sat in his office in the basement of the Makondo, reviewing the data on the last group of test subjects. This was taking longer than he had anticipated, but there was no way around it. Their pathogen was now a contagion and had to be handled with care. The specifications called for an infectious period of a week, and that had been done; the period between infection and the first symptoms was now ten days or more. An incubation period of two weeks with a highly contagious disease meant that the infection would spread that much further before anyone detected it. In a highly mobile, Western population, a contagion spread almost exponentially with time, if there were no symptoms of the disease to sound the alarm. The longer the incubation period, the harder it would be to check the reinfection rate. He smiled. This was a potent weapon, and he relished his part in creating such power. But the longer incubation period they had engineered now meant that it would take more time to check the transmission rate among their test population. He was beginning to experience an uneasiness about the necessary extended time to complete this project and close the operation down. He wanted to be away from here; they all did. Meno was deep in thought when a quiet knock sounded at his door.

“Entre,” he said with ill-concealed irritation.

“François, I hope I am not interrupting?”

Meno scowled and motioned him in. He did not particularly like Hans Lauda, but Lauda, he admitted, had allowed him to do his work and keep the distractions at this godforsaken place to a minimum. And Lauda had proved a master at deconfliction. Among the talented rogues assembled for this project, there were some monstrous egos. Lauda himself was not without ability and experience, but his main talent was to keep this hastily assembled team focused and on schedule.

“A minute of your time, if I may?” Meno’s German was much better than Lauda’s French, but Meno insisted on French unless it was unavoidable, or as in the case of the Russian team member, the accent was simply too atrocious.

“What can I do for you, Hans?”

“I wanted your opinion,” Lauda said diplomatically. He knew that the project was headed for success, in no small part because of this brilliant and volatile Frenchman. Lauda was there not only for his opinion but to also stroke Meno. “With the results of this most recently infected group, I think we will have taken this pathogen about as far as we need to, or about as far as we can without more research and testing, and a great deal more time. Unless there is something unforeseen that surfaces in these tests, I’d like to have Lyman and his team begin production on this last strain. What would be your opinion?”

A part of Meno wanted to continue the work, even though he was anxious to get out of this hellhole. The power that he felt in the art of genetic manipulation of a virus had a definite hold on him. It was God-like. They had altered their virus so that no known vaccine would be effective in controlling the disease. They had also engineered it for a longer incubation period — no small feat when dealing with this particular pathogen. With more time, he could make it a truly super disease, one that effectively suppressed the victim’s immune system, like the HIV virus. Or he could give his virus the ability to quickly mutate so as to defend itself against the battery of drugs that would surely be thrown at it. Some of the best pathologists and epidemiologists in the world would be called in to stop his creation. Meno smiled at the thought. Some of them were clever, but not as clever as himself. It would be very interesting if he just had a little more time to build a disease that reflected his full range of talent.

Meno was a Frenchman. The French were superior, and he considered himself all that, and more. As the handsome only son of a prominent Parisian physician, he had enjoyed privilege and all the pleasures of Paris. At seventeen, he was sent to the Sorbonne in Geneva, where it was discovered that he was something of a prodigy in mathematics. Encouraged by his father, he had taken a degree in medicine, but he had no intention of ever becoming a healer. After school he spent a year in Nice, where he became a society favorite on the French Riviera. That ended with an expensive paternity suit by a wealthy New York socialite who had brought her sixteen-year-old daughter to Monaco for her coming-out. Back in Paris, and with the help of his father, he won an appointment at the Pasteur Institute. There, for the better part of five years, he distinguished himself as both brilliant and extremely difficult to work with. His job at the Institute was not unlike that of Elvis Rosenblatt at the CDC. When he was not offending his colleagues or some senior research fellow, he was capable of brilliant research. His specialty quickly became tropical disease, and he was considered one of the Institute’s leading specialists on the subject. François Meno was just thirty when his father died of a massive stroke in the arms of his mistress. His father, as it turned out, had far more debts than assets, so François was suddenly made to balance a practiced, extravagant lifestyle with his less-than-generous salary from the Pasteur Institute.

François Meno’s understanding of World War II came solely from those in his liberal and medical circles. He was aware only of the shame it had brought to France. From his perspective, the France of his parents’ era had been humiliated by the Germans, and now his France was being continually humiliated by the Americans — the Americans and their toady surrogates in Europe, the British. It appeared to him that the influence of the United States was heaping one indignity after another on France. The massive oil reserves in Iraq had been largely under contract and the control of TotalFinaElf, the French oil consortium. Had the Americans not interfered, those resources would still be under French control. Energy was the key to national prosperity and influence, and that had been taken away by the Americans’ unilateral intervention in Iraq. Meno hated Americans, much as he hated the narrow-minded, politically driven bureaucracy at the Pasteur Institute.

In the summer of 2004, the juxtaposition of two events drove Meno from the Institute. The first was the appointment of a woman as his department head. In his opinion, she was a large, bovine creature, physically unattractive and his intellectual inferior. That she was a competent, proven administrator was beside the point. The second came when they instituted the practice of random drug testing. Meno ran with a crowd of recreational drug users, and he felt that what he did when he was away from the Institute was his own affair. If he had been smart, he would have simply resigned and, like his father, entered private practice, where the compensation was more in keeping with his habits and lifestyle. Instead, he devised a vitamin-rich herbal drink that masked any drug residue in his system. He might have continued to deceive the inspectors, but he couldn’t resist bragging to one of the lab techs about his ability to fool the system. His new department head, who was not as dumb as Meno thought, managed to get her hands on his drug-masking concoction, and the drug screening procedures were altered accordingly. One Monday morning, François Meno tested positive for cocaine and was summarily dismissed from the Institute. The fact that this woman had beat him at his own game infuriated him. His only consolation, both financially and personally, was that he was able to sell his formula to an American consulting firm that specialized in advising professional athletes on how to avoid detection in the use of performance-enhancement drugs. The proceeds got him back on the Riviera for the summer, and in the company of bored, wealthy women. He was essentially living as a kept man when he received a call from Helmut Klan in September. They met, and Klan had only one question for him: Was he interested in a genetic engineering project that would pay him a great deal of money? He didn’t have to tell Meno that it was illegal. Meno knew it instinctively.

Meno regarded Lauda across his desk. As much as he would love to take this virus a step further, he, like the others, was tired of Africa and the isolation. And he was also anxious to take his money and get back to the good life in the south of France.

“I think what we have will achieve our goals quite nicely, and I can’t imagine that these final tests would cause us to alter the product. These are simply confirmation tests. Tell Lyman to begin his cultures.”

Lauda left Meno’s office and set off down the long central corridor. On one side were the laboratories, and on the other were the isolation chambers where the wretched test subjects spent their final days. With some care and thought, the isolation wards had been soundproofed so that the researchers did not have to hear the agonized screams of the infected. A strange thing, Lauda mused, it was not so much the sight as the sounds of suffering that affected the staff. He wondered if that were true of those who presided over the Holocaust, or if it was just a peculiarity of this particular research cadre. No matter, he concluded; they would be finished very soon. He did not know the ultimate destination of their product, whether it was for blackmail or actual use. It didn’t matter. That was none of his concern, he concluded, just as it had not concerned I.G. Farben what Hitler did with the Zyklon-B gas that Farben had developed.

Lauda did find it interesting that the senior members of the medical research team all seemed to share a dislike of America, and a great need for money. He often wondered if they had been selected for just those reasons. Yet they all somehow focused on their resentment of America as the primary reason for their participation in the project. That was a lot of idealism, Lauda mused, since each of them was being paid $1 million U.S. for a few months’ work in this remote laboratory. He, Lauda, was not so inclined to use ideology as a crutch, but then he was being paid closer to $1.5 million for his part in this venture.

“Lyman,” he said in German as he entered the office of Lyman Hotch, the team’s pathologist. Lyman was the only one who habitually left the door to his office open, as if he somehow knew better than the others that the deadly virus they were perfecting could just as easily find its way through a closed door. “I believe it is time for you to begin farming the most recent strain of our virus. I’m on my way to see Helmut about the final production details, but I believe that you can now begin your cultures.”

“Does that meet with the approval of Himself?” Meno’s personality was no less abrasive to the research team at the Makondo than it had been to his coworkers at the Pasteur Institute.

Lauda grinned. “As a matter of fact, it does, so the sooner you are able to make what we need, the sooner we can leave this garden spot and return to the congestion and pollution of some overcrowded city.”

“Jawohl, Herr Lauda,” Hotch replied. He rose and, tossing an explicit pornographic magazine on the desk, donned his lab coat.

Elvis Rosenblatt had been a little off the mark, but not by much. The Makondo team had in fact developed a virus that was hemorrhagic in nature. Their virus was resistant to all known vaccine stocks, and designed with a much higher mortality rate than in its naturally occurring form. Oddly enough, it was a deadly disease that had been entirely eradicated by modern medical science — the last case on record in the United States was in 1949, and the last documented in the world was in Somalia in 1977: smallpox. The disease had been effectively wiped out by vaccine. So complete was the eradication of smallpox that vaccination was no longer necessary. Older Americans still bore the small, circular smallpox vaccination scars, but it was rare for anyone under forty to have one; smallpox simply did not exist in the general population. Only small quantities of the pathogen had been retained by the Soviet Union and the United States, just enough for medical research and antibody testing should there ever be another outbreak of the disease. Those held by the United States were in a secure facility at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, while those formally held by the Soviet Union were thought to have been destroyed in the transition that led to the formation of the Russian Republic. Most had been, but one of the vials of the disease had fallen into private hands. This one individual had been contacted by Dimitri Muschovia and persuaded, for $16 million, to surrender the deadly vial.

The Soviets had done half of the work for Helmut Klan’s team. This particular vial of smallpox contained an enhancement of the more prevalent smallpox, variola major. At one time there were more than fourteen thousand scientists and clinicians working in the Soviet bio-weapons effort. They had isolated and refined a particularly deadly naturally occurring strain of smallpox — hemorrhagic smallpox. The eradicated variola major strain of smallpox was 30 percent fatal; hemorrhagic smallpox was 99 percent fatal. So really, all the Makondo team had to do was to genetically alter this strain of pox so it was immune to the highly effective stocks of smallpox vaccine that were kept on hand. They also engineered their virus to extend the incubation period and to make it a little more contagious. Normal variola major was most contagious at the onset of the rash, when the infected person was usually very sick and immobile. Someone infected with the Makondo-developed strain of this pox was highly contagious during the final ten days of the extended incubation period, when the carrier was still freely moving about and had yet to exhibit any symptoms of the disease. What Klan and his team had developed was a depopulation agent perfectly suited to thrive in a Western, urban society. It would frustrate and confuse the epidemiologists who would have to deal with it until the pandemic was completely out of control.

It took Garrett Walker, aka John Naye, close to five minutes to negotiate the fare for himself and Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt, aka Greg Wood, from the airport to the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Lusaka. English was the official language of Zambia, spoken by almost everyone in the capital. The negotiation took longer than needed, since Garrett felt that there was nothing like a good bargaining session to get the feel of the people, even though price was not really an issue. Garrett used a few words of Swahili that the cabdriver seemed to understand, which finally got them to a mutual agreement on the fare. Swahili, like Zulu, Shona, and close to five hundred other languages, was of the Bantu language family. Garrett learned that their driver was Lozi, and from the large cross that hung from the rearview mirror, he assumed that he was Christian. More than half of Zambians were Christian, while something less than half were Muslim and Hindu. With their business concluded, they made the twelve-mile, forty-minute drive from the airport to the Intercontinental with a running commentary on current events in Lusaka. Elvis Rosenblatt observed the squalid approach to the city without comment.

They checked into their rooms, which were clean and modern, even by Western standards, then met on the terrace at the entrance of the Savannah Grill. They had gained a day and lost some six hours during the trip from Hawaii. When going west, Garrett always did his best to stay awake, then retire early evening, local time. It was now 7:00 P.M., so a good night’s sleep would hopefully wash out most of their jet lag. When the menus arrived, Garrett chose some native dish that he had never heard of, while Rosenblatt simply told the waiter to bring him the closest thing they had to a cheeseburger. Both ordered the best scotch in the house. While they waited for their food, Garrett’s Iridium satellite phone vibrated against his hip with a soft purr.

He snapped the phone open. “Yes?” He listened for a moment, then said, “We’re on the ground and on schedule. The day after tomorrow we’ll be on the Zambezi as planned, or we can stay in Lusaka another day…. Tomorrow? That’s good to hear…and have you heard from AKR?…Don’t worry, he’ll be checking in soon…. Thanks, Janet; we’ll talk tomorrow after I’ve spoken with Benjamin…. Good luck to you as well…. Good-bye.”

“E.T. phone home?”

“Something like that. The rest of the team will be airborne tomorrow and are scheduled to arrive just after dark. If all goes well, they will leave the following morning, shortly before we leave for the Zambezi. Steven Fagan will be here early tomorrow to do the advance work at the airport.” Garrett hesitated, not wanting to withhold needed information from Rosenblatt, but reluctant to tell him everything about their cover story. “Elvis, we plan to stage our people out of a vacant hangar at the airport. We will be using the cover of two NGOs to stage men and equipment. We have a proprietary relationship with one of these NGOs. The other knows only that we have deep pockets and that we will help to ferry some well-drilling equipment into the bush for them. Many of these NGOs operate on a shoestring and are glad for any financial or material assistance that they can get. However, the NGO that we work directly with does not have that problem. Our initial objective is to get our men and support equipment, along with your medical equipment, to Lusaka and safely in our hangar. Then we will take up the problem of getting across the Zambezi and to our objective in Zimbabwe. It might look like we’re making this up as we go, but that’s not the case. You haven’t had the pleasure of meeting our operational planner, but she is one of the best in the business. She and her team of planners have been working the issues of getting across the border into Zimbabwe and the mechanics of approaching the target. When it comes to breaking into the laboratory proper, she is going to want your help as to how to safely go about it. But that’s still a few days off. For now the drill is to get our people, equipment, and air assets in place at the airport. That done, we will move out into the bush as quickly as possible.”

“So we have aircraft?”

“We do. A special C-130 from Bahrain will bring in most of the men and equipment. Two Bell Jet Rangers will be here as well. All three aircraft will be available to us. When we’re not using them, they’ll be tasked with a variety of humanitarian and community support duties to support our cover story. And candidly, they will do a lot of good when they’re not working for us.”

“Transport aircraft. Helicopters,” Rosenblatt replied. “You must have backing with some very deep pockets. You sure Uncle Sam isn’t paying for this?”

Garrett smiled. “Elvis, I may not be able to tell you everything, but I wouldn’t lie to you. We are privately funded. This also includes the use of commercial communications satellites with dedicated, secure comm channels. As a matter of fact, you’re our biggest security risk.”

“Me!”

“That’s right. A secret government-sponsored operation is almost an oxymoron. Money and people on the government payroll are hard to conceal or lie about. We didn’t want to be in the business of dodging GAO inquiries or misleading congressional oversight committees, so we are a private organization — one that is only known to very few in the government. You are our only government employee, so we’re going to take good care of you.”

“I should hope so,” Rosenblatt said. “But if I’m such a liability, why didn’t you just hire some microbiologist from Johns Hopkins?”

“You’re unique. No one has your experience in dealing with disease. Your security clearance has allowed you to see things in the lab that few civilian researchers have access to. And there’s no one with your background even at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. You da man, Elvis.”

Their food arrived, and they ate in companionable silence. “How was the burger?” Garrett asked after the waiter cleared the table.

“Well, for my first Zambian cheeseburger, it was okay. The quality of its cheeseburger says a lot about the culture of a nation.” He glanced around the restaurant. “For me, it’s a leading indicator. How was your…whatever it was?”

“I have no idea what it was, but it was delicious.”

Rosenblatt sipped the last of his drink, trying to imagine just where they might be in another week. It was exciting, and somewhat scary. “Who is Benjamin, if I’m allowed to ask?”

“Benjamin Sata is one of our African retainers. His family lives on the outskirts of Lusaka. He arrived yesterday and is looking into a few things to help with the planning effort. There will probably be a need for some local arrangements, and he can do that without attracting attention.”

Rosenblatt nodded and took the last of his drink in a single swallow. “I’m bushed. Think I’ll turn in.”

Garrett signed John Naye’s name to the bill and walked back to the lobby with Rosenblatt. The concierge greeted them by name. John Naye and Greg Wood were important guests, as were all Western businessmen on holiday. Were someone to check on them, they would learn that the two were employed by a Toronto-based commercial real estate firm that did business across Canada. They were here to photograph wild animals, and their passports and visas were in perfect order. By Intercontinental Hotel standards, they were wealthy, but not super wealthy. Rosenblatt headed for the bank of elevators, but Garrett held back.

“Not coming?”

“Think I’ll take a walk. See you in the morning.”

“In the morning, then.”

Garrett made the three-mile round-trip to the shopping district at a leisurely pace. He had never been in southern Africa, and he wanted to get the feel of it, even though Lusaka, in many ways, was just another big city. Yet each city had its own flavor — its own ripe blend of smells. For most, the odor was noxious; for Garrett it was simply a whiff of life. Zambia was a nation the size of Western Europe and, with eleven million people, the least densely populated nation in Africa. The population was concentrated in two areas — Lusaka and the Copper Belt, which ran across the northern part of the country along the Zambian-Congo border. That left large tracts of relatively uninhabited land in the central and southern plains. There were two main industries in Zambia: mining and tourism. Tourism centered around the game parks and Victoria Falls. From what Garrett had read, Zambia had done better than most in protecting its wildlife, which was the key to its tourist trade.

Garrett also needed to walk off his frustrations. For the first time, either as a Navy SEAL or as an employee with IFOR, he was relegated to a support role. Usually he was at the forefront of the action. He fully understood the reason; he was a white man, and white men simply don’t move well in sub-Saharan Africa, where, outside South Africa, whites accounted for just over 1 percent of the population. There were only so many ways a white man could move about. Even with a good cover story, he would stand out due to the color of his skin. AKR was right; this was a job for Africans, at least in the initial stages of the operation.

His job for now was to babysit Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt. The fact that Rosenblatt would more than likely be a key player in the operation did not make his assignment any easier. And the task would not be a simple one. He was to see that Rosenblatt and his equipment got where they were needed, when they were needed. Presumably, that would be when any of the fighting that took place would be over. Given what they might be dealing with, the dangerous part could be only beginning after the guns fell silent.

Garrett got back to his room a little after 11:00 P.M. As in all modern hotels, his room was equipped with high-speed Internet access. He broke out his laptop and tapped in the privacy code to turn it on. Then he engaged the cryptographic circuitry. He logged onto the IFOR site and began to download message traffic from Janet and Steven. There was even a message for him from AKR.

Akheem and Tomba had been in Johannesburg for almost two days. Johannesburg, or Joburg as the mercs called it, was the mercenary capital of the world, even though section 2 of the South African Foreign Military Assistance Act forbade the hiring of mercenaries in what amounted to a constitutional ban on mercenary recruitment. There were two reasons for this. The first was the availability of the right kind of talent. Most mercenary requirements arose in Africa or other equatorial areas, where black men could move easily and fight under the harsh conditions often found there. The transition from white to black rule in South Africa had also put a great many superbly trained black troops out of work. The second was that South Africa was one African nation where whites comprised a sizeable minority, and a white man could move about easily and conduct business. The private military companies that hired mercenaries were basically color-blind. They paid for experience and reliability, but most PMCs were themselves corporations based in Western nations with largely white management and recruiters. And, as with seasonal farm labor in the United States, it was often hard to get whites to do the work; former black South African regulars not only were willing to put their guns out for hire but did as they were told and asked few questions. Many white soldiers of fortune were outcasts or expatriates, and usually came with a lot of baggage.

AKR and Tomba had taken a room in a nondescript motel a few miles from the airport. They entered South Africa from Nairobi with British passports and visas that said they were travel agents. An impressive pair in their pleated trousers, sport coats, and turtlenecks, they might have been taken for two professional athletes in the United States. Once through customs and checked into the motel room, Tomba set about to change their image. AKR had already shed his dreadlocks and the Rastafarian look that had served him so well in the Caribbean. Both of them changed into short-sleeved white shirts, dark trousers, and low-cut leather walking shoes. They were still two tall, handsome black men, but now they had the look of two off-duty security guards.

“So now what’s next?” Akheem asked as they pulled out of the motel in their rental car.

“Now, my brother, we seek employment.”

Tomba drove them to a restaurant between Johannesburg and Pretoria called the Wildebeest, a large, busy establishment that specialized in beef and wild game. They slipped into the adjoining cocktail lounge and took a small table in the corner. The lounge was barely half full. Both ordered beer. Horned animal heads adorned the walls of the dimly lit interior, and the clientele seemed to be equally balanced between black and white. The room was heavy with cigarette smoke. They had barely waited fifteen minutes when a white man, dressed much as they were, approached.

“G’day, gentlemen,” he said with an easy smile. “May I join you?”

“There is always room at our table for one more,” Tomba replied.

The man set his own beer on the table and slid into an empty chair. He had a ruddy complexion and unruly brown hair. AKR noticed that he smiled with his mouth, not with his eyes, and that he had huge hands and forearms, with tattoos of dragons buried under the forearm hair. He reached one of his massive paws across the table.

“Tomba, it is good to see you again. How long has it been, three — four years?” His accent was that of an Australian stockman. Tomba took the outstretched hand.

“Perhaps four. And I would like you to meet Samuel. Samuel, this is Irish. I’m not sure if that is his real name, but it is what he is called. Perhaps it is his nom de guerre.”

“Too right,” Irish said with a chuckle as he took AKR’s hand in a crushing grasp. “Happy t’ meet ya, Samuel. Are you Turkana as well?”

“My roots are Masai, but I have not been back to Kenya for a while.”

Irish studied AKR a moment, as if trying to catalog him, and turned his attention back to Tomba.

“I was delighted t’ get yer call, and t’ hear that you might be looking for work,” he said carefully. “I was given to understand that you had found work with an American security firm. Is that no longer the case?”

“It was a contract to train some people for executive protection duty in African cities. The Americans are deeply engaged in security considerations right now, as you can imagine. It was a short contract, and work there is completed.” Tomba’s explanation had a final tone. Now he leaned forward to address the Aussie. “And I am given to understand, Irish, that you are no longer with Sandline but represent a new organization. Can you tell me about it?”

Irish glanced at AKR, and Akheem sensed that the man would have been more comfortable discussing this one-on-one with Tomba. Tomba was known and respected by those who hire professional soldiers, and in the closed fraternity of mercenaries, he had the respect of others who hired themselves out as professional soldiers. Reputation was everything in the mercenary trade.

Sensing his reluctance, Tomba continued. “You may speak freely in front of my brother Samuel. I can vouch for his discretion as well as his ability as a fighter.”

Irish again forced a smile. “Very well, then. I’m now working for Northbridge Services Group out of the UK, and we have ongoing requirements for experienced men. We do a number of things — demilitarization of warring factions, mine clearance, and counterterror operations — standard fare. It’s a good firm. We pay the going PMC wage and, for supervisory personnel like yourself, a generous bonus.” He chuckled again, and this time it seemed genuine. “And for the most part, our operations have the blessing of the Pommy foreign secretary.”

“Forgive me for questioning you,” Tomba said pleasantly, “but that didn’t seem to be the case in Ivory Coast.”

Irish took on a deeper shade of red. “True, but I think his lordship, Mr. Jackie Straw, was forced t’ say what he did for political reasons. Our firm was on solid ground going into Ivory Coast, and those buggers at Whitehall knew that.”

“I understand,” Tomba said neutrally, but he had put Irish on notice that he knew of Northbridge and their activities. In fact, few PMCs did things without government approval, both from the host nation where the work was done and from the resident nation of the PMC. Great Britain was one of the more lenient western nations regarding mercenary activity. After all, had they not used Gurkhas for close to two hundred years?

“Samuel and I may be looking for work,” Tomba continued, “but we would prefer to stay out of West Africa. Are there other areas where our services might be needed?”

They talked for another half hour. Tomba indicated that they might be available later in the spring, and Irish replied that there were a number of contract negotiations in the works that could result in a hire. Irish’s job, as Tomba well knew, was to stay close to the mercenary community and to know who was available. Experienced, reliable retainers were the key to a successful private military contract. Tomba gave Irish a piece of paper with an international cell phone number, and Irish gave him a card with phone, telex, fax, and e-mail contacts. Soon the talk drifted to past wars and some of the colorful, dysfunctional expatriates who called themselves soldiers of fortune. As they were about to leave, Tomba paused and, almost as an afterthought, turned to Irish.

“I was told something a few weeks back by a friend from the 32nd Battalion. It made little sense to me, but perhaps you may know something of it. It seems that someone was recruiting for a force to return to Zimbabwe. Is someone thinking about mounting an insurgency against Mugabe?”

Irish smiled ruefully as he leaned closer and spoke in a low voice. “If they are, they couldn’t have chosen a worse bugger to lead it. From what I hear, Claude Renaud hired between fifty and sixty men for some job in Zimbabwe or Mozambique. A good many of them were from the 32nd along with a handful of white expats.”

AKR felt Tomba stiffen at the mention of Claude Renaud, but he quickly recovered. “Renaud?” Tomba managed. “But who would hire a man of his reputation?”

“Who indeed,” Irish replied. “Certainly no legitimate government or mining consortium, and most of the white farmers have quit the country. Perhaps it was Mugabe himself. Then he can claim the colonial powers are still picking on him. What a bloody cockup he’s made of that country. The Pommies should never have let him make himself president-for-life in that poor nation. It’s their fault, mind you. As I recall, you served in the Rhodesian Army, didn’t you, Tomba?”

“I did,” Tomba said, regaining his composure, “but that was a long time ago, and I was a very young and foolish man.” He rose and offered Irish his hand. “Thank you for speaking with us. Please keep us in mind if there is work you can send our way.”

The lounge was now almost full. They left Irish at the table and threaded their way through the tables to the door.

“This Renaud is our man, is he not?” AKR said as soon as they were in the parking lot. He spoke carefully, as there was a murderous look on Tomba’s normally tranquil features.

“He is,” Tomba replied. “How soon can we be on a flight to Lusaka?”

Pavel Zelinkow had been out late the previous evening to the theater, but up very early that morning. There was a great deal to do. The previous afternoon he had taken a call from Helmut Klan in Zimbabwe. The development and testing of the product were nearly complete, and they were now about to enter the production phase. As Zelinkow understood it, growing the smallpox virus they needed was a relatively simple task compared with what they had done in the genetic modification and testing process. They were now only days from having the final test results. Those results would validate the pathogen they were already starting to produce. When they had their disease, they could begin to close down the Makondo project. And then he would be free to complete his final task: shipping the product to the location specified by the people who hired him — and to the man who would use the pathogen. Now that the African end of the project was in its last few days, it meant another trip to Tehran. His only consolation was that it would be his last, at least for a while.

Closing down the Makondo operation would be a big relief. It had not been difficult to bribe those in Harare to cooperate, but that kind of money only bought so much time. The sooner the product was out of Africa, the better. An undertaking such as this meant opening doors to get things done. To conclude the operation, he would have to close those same doors, carefully wiping his fingerprints off each handle and latch. He had just booked his flight from Rome to Tehran through Cairo when one of his lines rang. He checked the caller ID, but it registered a blank.

“Yes,” he said cautiously.

“Good morning, Pavel Zelinkow. I hope I am not disturbing you at this early hour.”

“Not at all, Boris Zhirinonovich,” Zelinkow replied warmly, relieved and gladdened to hear the old man’s thick Russian. “I can think of no better way to start my day than to hear your voice.”

“You are much too kind to an old apparatchik. Pavel, how secure is the connection at your end?”

“As secure as that where you are,” he replied. He did not want to offend his former mentor by saying that his communication suite was far more state-of-the-art than anything in Moscow. Technology and high-speed encryption had made secure communications commonplace in corporate practice. There were no longer the delays and voice distortions of the past.

“Very good, but nonetheless, I will be brief. There is, it seems, a covert organization in America that was responsible for the recovery of the two stolen Pakistani nuclear weapons. This is a deduction our people have made, since it appears that no one in or associated with U.S. military or Western intelligence services seems to have been involved. Yet we have it on authority from a number of sources that it did happen with American knowledge and limited American military support. It appears that this organization is not sponsored or funded by the U.S. government, or we would have more information on it. Our sources close to American intelligence confirm that this is neither a military special operations unit nor a part of the CIA Special Activities Division. It would seem that it is some kind of corporate security element that operates with very limited official contact, and probably with complete denial of the U.S. government.” Zelinkow heard the older man chuckle. “Perhaps this is what makes them so dangerous; there is no collateral political damage to fear from their actions or overzealousness.

“At any rate, we understand that they may be active and again have operatives in the field. I wish I had more for you, but that is all we know. One would think that they are able to move assets and people in ways we used to do in the heyday of the Ninth Directorate. If I learn any more, I will contact you…. Are you still there?”

“Yes, yes, I am here. I was just absorbing all that you have told me. Boris Zhirinonovich, may I ask you for a favor?”

“Certainly, Pavel, you may ask.” Again the chuckle. “And I will do what I can for you.”

“Could you ask our residents in sub-Saharan Africa to let you know if they have any unusual activity in their capitals, something out of the ordinary in the way of nonmilitary activity that could be used to support a military operation?”

“Our reporting assets in that region are not what they once were, but we have a few options. And there are men not unlike yourself who occasionally make inquiries for us. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you be careful, Pavel.”

“Da, I will be careful, and thank you for your assistance.”

Zelinkow rang off and sat looking at the dawn that was just beginning to reach out over the Mediterranean. He felt a sudden chill and, without thinking, reached out and cradled the cup of espresso for warmth. The instincts that he had refined to almost a sixth sense in KGB’s Ninth Directorate under Zhirinon now screamed at him. Something was not right. Zelinkow did not know who or what, but some force or entity was out there, and somehow he knew it was stalking him. They had surprised him in Iran and Afghanistan, and he was resolved not to let that happen again. He turned the matter over in his mind for five minutes while finishing his espresso. Time, always his enemy, was now becoming very dangerous. Then he made two calls. The first was to Helmut Klan. Zelinkow instructed his project director to conclude the project with all haste and to put his security detachment on full alert. With no further need to range out into the countryside to procure test subjects, they could be pulled in for added security around the hotel complex. His second call was to move up the date and time of his flight from Rome to Tehran.