The 13 th tribe

[30]

Owen Letois rushed along the dirt road, a teenaged girl draped over his arms. Her blood soaked his shirt, splattered his bearded face. He passed rickety houses pieced together with discarded scraps of wood and sheet metal, and huts of timber and straw-most of them long abandoned.

Gunfire behind him made him look. The heart of the village was beyond a rise in the road, out of sight. He saw no fighters, only a few civilians fleeing in his direction, ducking with each burst of gunfire. Dongo was barely a pinprick on Central Africa’s Oubangui River, but it was the current flashpoint in the hostilities between the Enyele and Munzaya tribes over farming and fishing rights. The clash had been going on for years, and Owen suspected none of the militiamen understood or cared about the reason they fought; they were in it to avenge old grudges and recent atrocities, and because man’s darkest demons were opportunistic creatures.

The girl groaned, and Owen tried to ease the jostling she received in his arms. The blade had gone deep, cutting through the muscles of her shoulder and upper chest; it had probably broken her clavicle. He angled off the road and started up a grassy slope, aiming for the cinderblock clinic of Medecins Sans Frontieres-Doctors Without Borders.

Roos Mertens came out of the building and ran toward him. She was the only nurse who’d remained when MSF had evacuated the other physicians and staff. Owen was glad someone had stayed, and especially that she had; she was competent, compassionate, and professional.

“Prep a table,” Owen called out in Flemish, the colloquial Dutch of Roos’s Belgian hometown. “Fentanyl, Hespan, a subcutaneous suture kit…”

Roos held something up, and Owen recognized his private satellite phone. “It kept ringing,” she said. “I found it in your backpack. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head: he wasn’t worried about her invasion of his privacy or the call or anything but getting the girl stabilized.

“A man on the line,” Roos continued. “He says he must speak to you, an emergency.”

“ This is an emergency,” Owen said, irritation making his words harsher than he had intended. He gave her a weak smile to convey this, but fully intended to trudge right past her if she insisted on not helping. His left foot squished against a blood-soaked sock, and he realized that his entire left side, from where the girl’s shoulder bumped against his chest on down, was drenched as well. He quickened his gait and began a mental checklist of the equipment, instruments, and supplies he’d need for her surgery, pausing on each item to curse its disrepair or shortage or absence. The escalating violence that had driven out MSF, along with its flow of supplies, also increased the need for both.

As he approached, Roos waved the phone. “Doctor, he was very insistent. He said to tell you…” She hesitated, looked puzzled.

Owen barreled on.

“ Agag? ” she said.

He stopped. “What?”

“Agag. I don’t know if that’s his name or-”

“Give me the phone. Put it here.” He shrugged a shoulder, then pinched the phone between it and his cheek. Still talking to her, he said, “Get the QuikClot out of my belt pack, see what you can do.” In the field, there was nothing better than QuikClot for stopping blood flow. The gauze was impregnated with kaolin, which absorbed blood and accelerated the coagulation cascade. “Got a packet of gloves in there too.”

Switching to English, he said into the phone, “Who is this?”

“Creed… You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“How could I ever forget? Is it true-the Agag?”

“Do you think I’d say it if it weren’t?”

Even through the bad connection, Owen detected exhaustion, defeat, and fear. He glanced at Roos, packing the gauze into the girl’s wound. He dipped his arms, giving her better access, then he closed his eyes. “The Agag” meant a specific catastrophe that would make the horrors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo look like a Disney cartoon.

The man on the other end of the line said, “You told me you’d help. You said anytime. Are you still willing?”

“That depends,” Owen said. “You’ve… reconsidered?” He knew what the man was: just a man, cursed to be one forever. Several times Owen had tried to convince him to use his extraordinary lifespan and the wealth and knowledge that accompanied it for good instead of for the atrocities he’d been committing. He’d told him that when he changed his mind, Owen would help-whatever that entailed.

Creed explained his situation and why he needed Owen’s help.

“Are you all right?” Owen said.

“I took morphine for the pain. Knocked me out flat on the plane. Used to be like popping a couple aspirins, you know? I must be getting old.” He laughed, but it was cold and hard, like ice cubes dropped in an empty glass.

“Where are you now?”

“Sinai… St. Catherine’s monestary.”

Owen wasn’t surprised. He’d been tracking the Tribe for years, trying to convince all of them, not just Creed, to amend their ways. The Tribe maintained relationships with people, organizations, places around the globe, and Owen had gone to all of them-the ones he knew about-to appeal for their help in stopping the Tribe’s activities. None of them-including the old man at St. Cath’s-wanted anything to do with him. Apparently they felt it was a sacred calling to protect the Tribe any way they could; what the immortals did was between them and God.

Creed continued: “Owen, either they’ll get me and the microchip or find a way to replace it-only Ben knows if that’s possible. I need you now. Promise me you’ll come now.”

“I’m on my way.”

Roos stripped off the gloves and retrieved the phone.

“I have to go,” he told her.

She looked stunned. “When?”

“Now, this second.”

“But, Doctor…” She indicated the girl in his arms.

“I’m taking her. You too. I’ll drop both of you off in Betou.” It was in neighboring Republic of Congo, where many refugees were now located. He started for the clinic. “We need to ABORh her.”

The ABORh card, designed for battlefield use, would type her blood in two minutes.

“And take blood with us. Pack a bag for yourself and one with everything we’ll need to stabilize her until we get to Betou. We should be there in fifty minutes on the outside.”

“Doctor, I really don’t think-”

He stopped her with a look. “I don’t have a choice, and I’m not leaving you here.” As if to punctuate his point, a fresh burst of sustained gunfire rang out from the town. He looked back at a thick column of black smoke rising from the other side of the hill, then sidestepped through the open door of the clinic. He laid the girl down on a table and stepped back. The gauze was already soaked through, but the flow out of the wound had diminished substantially. When he pressed his fingers to her neck, he felt a pulse in her carotid artery. It was weak, but any measurable pulse meant a blood pressure of at least sixty; he suspected that most of her blood loss was exiting from the wound and not leaking into her body cavity, a good sign.

He sighed and pushed his fingers into the rat’s nest that was his hair. Two days of walking through smoke, rolling in dirt, and being spattered by blood had taken their toll on his already shaggy and perpetually mussed hair. He took the phone from Roos and dropped it into a backpack, which he carried to the door.

“I’ll be back in ten.” He left and jogged around the building toward the jungle behind it. The stench of animal carcasses, fish entrails, and other refuse assailed him forty yards before he reached the offal-filled trench. The Dongo men he’d enlisted to help him keep visitors out of the forest had suggested it, and not a month had passed before it proved worthwhile: a group of soldiers from the Republic’s army looking for God-knew-what had ventured that way, caught a whiff, and turned around.

Owen arced around it and entered the forest. He pushed through a fencelike line of foliage and into the shadow of a dilapidated barn. One side angled in, and the crumbling roof drooped toward the ground, a collapse waiting to happen. In truth, Owen had forced the look and stabilized both the wall and roof in that precarious-looking position.

The clearing in front was hemmed in by tall trees. At one of these trees, he used a pocket knife to saw through a thick rope, which sprang away, pulled by a falling tree. The dead sapele tree in turn yanked away a wide rectangle of chain-link fence that had been foliated with vines and branches. The new gap was directly in front of the barn doors and opened onto a grassy field.

Moving to the side of the barn, he located the end of a square wooden beam eight inches from the front wall. Gripping it, he hefted back and tugged it out slowly. When ten feet of beam jutted from the barn, he stopped. The huge front doors were now effectively unlocked. When he pulled them open, sunlight fell on a monstrous pile of dried straw, leaves, and tree limbs. He reached into this mess and pulled. A section of shrimp netting and all the agriculture glued to it flowed toward him and fell to the ground. He did this five more times and stepped back.

Resting in the center of the barn, gleaming despite the dirt and dust, the bits of straw and leaves clinging to it, was a sleek white Cessna 501 corporate jet.