Patient Zero

2.

A pillar of smoke rose three hundred feet above the smoking pit that still burned deep in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. British Army helicopters circled the vicinity and satellites were retasked to probe the region. Something had happened deep beneath the sands that no seismograph had predicted. There were known spots of deeply buried geothermal activity, but nothing like this had happened in over a hundred years. It would take years to uncover the cause.