The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Two

The mission had now been upgraded to Urgent. Ten fatalities. A large area surrounding Moosehead Lake remained under quarantine.

"That's the only runway, three thousand three meters," the pilot said through the headset. "It's over thirty years old. It was covered with land mines when we first moved in."

Austyn Newman looked out the small window at the rugged Afghan landscape. He believed the answer to the outbreak in Maine lay down here. Austyn had been assigned to this trip because he was specifically trained in countering biological attacks. This was his field of study, what he had trained for most of his career.

Matt Sutton, the agent accompanying him on this trip, was a senior intelligence officer in Homeland Security. Austyn had been able to tie the strand of bacteria they'd seen in Maine to a specific laboratory in prewar Iraq, but finding the suspect had been Matt's doing. Searching through CIA files, he'd somehow come up with the location and the name of the scientist who'd been in charge of the Iraq facility. He'd also been able to come up with a three-inch-thick file the CIA had gathered over the years on Dr. Rahaf Banaz.

Both of them reported to Faas Hanlon, the top intelligence officer at Homeland Security. The deputy director and Hanlon preferred to use small teams to handle different aspects of the investigation. Everyone worked together, and Hanlon insisted on having the latest information at all times; he never knew when the national security adviser or the president's office might be on the phone to him.

The airstrip cut a path in the middle of the rocky desert. There were some buildings, a few of them large enough to be hangars. Other structures spread out on the desert floor, some that looked to be under construction. At one end of the field below, a sea of tents and prefab housing covered two or three acres of ground. U.S. Army units.

"The Soviets built most of the permanent buildings, didn't they?" Matt Sutton asked the pilot.

"Yes, sir. The airbase played a real important role during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan back in the eighties," the pilot explained. "It was the regional base of operations for troops and supplies. It also was an initial staging point for Soviet forces at the beginning of their invasion, with a number of airborne divisions being deployed here permanently. Well, they thought it was permanent."

"They put a lot of work into it," Matt commented. "I'm surprised they didn't level the whole place before they left."

"They cleared out of here in a hurry," the pilot said with a shrug. "There was more than you see now. The Sovs threw up a lot of support buildings and base housing units. Most of them were destroyed by years of fighting between the various warring Afghan factions. We're now putting up some of our own buildings, over there. Being only twenty-five miles north of Kabul, this is a strategic place for us, too."

"What's the smoke I can see beyond that ridge?"

Austyn looked past his partner at the clouds of smoke rising above the pale, reddish-brown ridge of sand and rock.

"There's a makeshift refugee camp there. I'm told they're planning to move the whole camp to the far side of Bagram, away from the airbase."

"I heard there's a serious problem with land mines in this area."

The pilot nodded. "Something else the Sovs left behind. Every time we think we've got them all taken care of, another one goes off. An Afghan worker lost a leg to a mine last week. But that's not all. At the beginning of this week, an air force pilot I know found an unexploded, rocket-propelled grenade half buried just outside his… Hold on." He adjusted his headset and spoke to the air controller on the ground. In a moment he turned back to his passengers. "Looks like we're going to have to circle one more time."

There'd been too many casualties and there was no end in sight, Austyn thought. The Taliban was growing stronger in some sectors with every passing month. He looked at the landscape around the base and airstrip. NATO forces had moved in some thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan to take over areas of the country, but there were large sectors, like this one, that were still run primarily by U.S. troops.

The Brickyard was supposed to be about a half hour driving distance from this base. The existence of the classified facility, run by the Central Intelligence Agency and staffed by special army personnel, was officially denied by the U.S. government. It was what the media back home called a "black site." Austyn and Matt had been briefed on it three days ago. The prison, they were told explicitly, was used solely for the war on terror. At present, the agency was holding twenty-two prisoners — male and female — at this prison. None of the people here had been charged with crimes or convicted. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, these prisoners were ghosts. There was no record of them anywhere. And there never would be.

In the past, Austyn had never been too keen to know about facilities like this. He knew they existed, but even as a senior agent in the science and technology division of Homeland Security, he'd never interrogated a prisoner in his life. He didn't want to know how many black sites were around the world. He didn't want to think about the rights of these prisoners. He definitely didn't want to think about the possibility of an innocent person being held or tortured in such places. He wanted to believe that holding these people was a matter of national security. He knew — no matter what the media reported — that it was a rare occasion when abuses occurred. The agency did a better job overseas, as Homeland Security did stateside, of holding on to the right people than they got credit for.

Whatever Austyn's feelings had been before, however, his involvement with places like the Brickyard prison had changed with the bacteria outbreak in Maine. How he'd felt before no longer mattered. Now he was glad that there was a place such as this, where they could find and question a suspect. The consequences of not learning more about the bacteria they were facing were potentially devastating.

"Over there." Matt motioned to something outside his window. 'That must be the Brickyard."

The military jet was now dropping through patches of cloud. Austyn looked where his partner was pointing. A cluster of buildings sat between a pair of hills some distance away from the base.

"I think you're right," Austyn agreed.

They'd been told that an abandoned brick-making factory had been converted for use as the prison. Austyn saw a military supply truck driving along a dirt road, away from the factory. A cloud of dust rose up in its wake. The countryside surrounding the prison was barren, a wasteland of pale rock and dirt and scrub foliage.

The jet started its descent to the runway. Austyn stuffed the files and pictures he'd taken out to review back into his briefcase.

"I guess we're as ready as we'll ever be," Matt commented.

The landing was smooth, and they shook hands with the pilot. As he stepped out of the plane, Austyn's first reaction was that the base looked a lot worse from the ground than it had from the air. The landscape and the tents and uniforms and the faces of the soldiers all blended in with the dust that covered everything.

A corporal met them at the plane, and Austyn listened to him as the escort walked them toward a nearby hangar. It had obviously rained that morning, but with the exception of some puddles, the sun had dried everything. The air was parched, but there was a heaviness in it that you felt deep down in your lungs. A military fuel truck driving along the runway raised more dust and made the air even more difficult to breathe.

Austyn noticed the looks they drew from soldiers they passed. He remembered what he'd heard about the lack of variety in the food here. The service personnel looked forward to any stash of food that visitors brought along. He regretted not having thought ahead.

He focused on two dust-covered Humvees racing along the concrete and pulling up a few yards from them. A woman with captain's bars on the collar of her field jacket climbed out.

"That's Captain Jane Adams," the corporal said as she approached them. "She's in charge of the facility you're going to."

Higher rank didn't spare the officer from the dust. She and the driver were covered with the same dirt as the vehicle they'd arrived in. Matt and Austyn were introduced to their host and hustled into the Humvee.

Captain Adams was barely over five feet tall, and thinly built, but she had an authority in her voice and a sharpness to her gaze that made her seem about six foot six.

Before leaving Washington, Austyn had been told of an ongoing internal investigation at the agency regarding prisoner handling at the Brickyard prison. In an effort to head off action by any oversight committee, there'd been a complete turnover of staff during the past year. Captain Adams was heading up the new crew.

As they left the camp, two more military vehicles joined them, one in front and one in the back, forming a caravan.

They passed through a number of security checkpoints before reaching the open road.

"We have to be careful," Adams told them. "We still have roving gangs of Taliban insurgents that pop up unexpectedly under our noses."

Both agents listened to the captain as she told them briefly about the base and the ancient city of Bagram and the locals. Much of what was being said was similar to what they'd heard from the pilot. Neither agent interrupted, though, and soon Adams was asking about news from stateside. It was clear that the lack of attention the country was giving to Afghanistan was a source of irritation for her.

Austyn pulled on his glasses. Even with the windows shut, they were eating their escort's dust. The slight discomfort they were experiencing, however, was nothing compared to what was going on outside.

The poverty was palpable. The drawn, worn faces of the few ragged Afghanis that they passed after coming through the checkpoints were clear indicators of their suffering. At one point a mob of kids playing in front of a corrugated steel shack started running after the cars, lining the road and chanting something in their native tongue. Many were missing arms and legs, hobbling on crutches behind the others. Austyn remembered what he'd heard about the land mines. The Afghani children formed the largest number of casualties. Outbreaks of a number of epidemics had also been taking their toll over the past few years.

The harsh landscape and the culture of survival here was fascinating to Austyn, but he knew he had to focus. When Captain Adams paused, he broke in with his questions.

"Captain, what have you been told about our visit here?"

"The information has been trickling down too slowly for my liking, but I understand there's been a biological attack in the U.S."

"I hope you were also told that this is classified information," Matt responded. "Unlike the anthrax scare of few years ago, none of the details have been officially released to the press or public."

"Yes, sir. I understand," Adams answered, motioning to the driver. "Sergeant Powell here has all the necessary clearances, but it's up to you what you care to tell us. In fact, no one else at our station has been briefed in any way about the purpose of your visit."

"Begging your pardon, sirs," Sergeant Powell told them, looking in the mirror. "You should know that the secrecy has started a lot of speculation. Everyone working at the Brickyard thinks you're part of that congressional committee focusing on the detention facilities."

"I can live with that," Austyn replied. "About this prisoner. What can you tell me that's not in the files?"

"I don't really know what is and what isn't in the files that were passed on to you," Captain Adams told him. "Rahaf Banaz is thirty-five years old and a Kurd. Why she was working for Saddam's regime is still a mystery. She was captured after the marines raided a laboratory in the eastern Diyala region in Iraq back in 2003. She was moved around to different black sites in Iraq, Turkey, Romania and Latvia, and then brought here eight months ago."

Austyn had read about the moves. Dr. Banaz was well known enough in the international research community that there had been a lot of squawk about her whereabouts.

The U.S. response from the very start was that she'd been killed in the attack when they'd raided her laboratory.

"How has she been treated?" Matt asked.

Captain Adams shrugged. "Off and on solitary confinement. There have been no interrogations for quite some time. None since her arrival here. And there's certainly been no abuse," she added defensively.

"And her cooperation level?" Austyn asked.

"Nonexistent." The captain turned around in her seat. "She never complains. She doesn't speak. In fact, she doesn't respond to anything at all. She has moved into a zone that we see some prisoners go into once they've lost any hope of freedom. Four times since she arrived here eight months ago, she's gone on a hunger strike. Each time, we had to move her to the medical facility at Bagram, hook her up to tubes and force-feed her. But I was told when she arrived not to conduct any more interrogations of her, for the time being."

"Why do you think you were given that order?" Matt asked.

She shrugged again. "I assumed that we had what we needed — that final disposition of her case would be coming down."

"What do you mean?" Austyn asked, alarmed.

"This woman was a scientist in Saddam Hussein's biological warfare program. Our people have collected tons of samples and evidence at the site where she was captured. She was the sole survivor of the air attack. So what are we going to ask? What's she going to confess to? We already know what she was working on. And as far as other facilities like the one she was found in, she was the nuts-and-bolts person — the actual scientist — and that was her lab. She wasn't administering any other labs. That much she told her captors at the time of her arrest, and our evidence has confirmed that," Adams explained. "Our understanding is that she is being kept here until it's time to move her again to some other facility… permanently."

Austyn looked out the window of the jeep at the stark countryside. Dust, rocky hills and more dust. Every now and then a lone tree had sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It occurred to him that Rahaf Banaz was one of those lone trees. The difference was that she'd been uprooted from the dry rocky terrain of her native Kurdish Iraq and dropped inside the walls of one prison and then another, probably for the rest of her life.

He tried to shake the image. Thoughts like that wouldn't help him get his job done here. She was a ghost because of her own choices, and there were American lives that could be saved if he stayed focused on his task.

"The intelligence information that was passed down to us indicated that the strain of bacteria found in the U.S. seems to match what the prisoner was working on," Captain Adams told them.

"That's correct," Austyn replied, turning his attention back to the occupants of the vehicle. "But considering how long she's been in American hands, we can't accuse her of having a direct connection with any attack."

"What we're hoping to gain is information," Matt continued. "We'd like to find out who else might have had access to her research back then. Who was working with her, besides the scientists we know are dead. We want her cooperation."

"Good luck."

"Even more important, we hope she'll tell us how to produce an antidote."

Captain Adams turned more fully around to face them. "There's none?"

"No," Austyn said. "Not yet. That's why we're here. Dr. Banaz may be the one with the key." He wanted to be hopeful. He wanted to think that their trip might be as simple as asking her the questions, and the scientist offering them all the answers. He wasn't foolish enough to think it would really happen, but it certainly was worth hoping for.

"My communication mentioned a bacteria that produces some kind of flesh-eating disease," Adams said. From her expression, it was obvious that even her years of tough military training didn't offer protection from imagining how horrific a death this could be.

"Necrotizing fasciitis. In extreme circumstances and without medical attention, the flesh-eating disease can claim a life in twelve to twenty-four hours," Austyn explained. "But what we're dealing with now is a super-microbe. The bacteria we've seen in Maine is much worse than anything the medical community has had to deal with in the past."

"That bad?" Captain Adams asked incredulously.

"What we know… what we've seen… is that there are no external wounds, no warning signs. Once contracted, this super-microbe eats away at the internal organs of its victim," Austyn told her. "The disease actually consumes its victim from the inside out. Septic shock and death can occur in less than an hour."

The silence in the Humvee was unbroken for a few minutes. He realized the gravity of the situation hadn't hit the two people riding in front until now.

"And how contagious is it? How does it spread?" Captain Adams asked.

"Very contagious. But as far as how it spreads… there's a lot we don't know," Matt explained. "Two families — seven people and their pets — were found in advanced stages of decay in Maine by the owner of the property, who radioed in for help. Unfortunately, he and the two emergency personnel who arrived on the scene contracted the disease at the site. An additional emergency group, already on their way, suspected a disaster and called in for more help."

"We're assuming the disease spreads primarily by contact, but we don't know. It's possible that normal protective gear won't stop the microbe. Insects or even airborne particles may also spread the disease, manifesting themselves in the body of a potential victim," Austyn said, continuing where his partner stopped. "In short, there's too much that we don't know. We have no idea if those ten casualties are all we're dealing with. We have no clue how the first family contracted the bacteria. Maybe they brought it in from some other part of the country, and we're focusing our attention on the wrong source. We don't know if there's an incubation period for the germ in the body before it becomes active."

He could go on and explain everything that he didn't know, but that would take forever. They had hundreds of questions — but that was why they were here.

"How were you ever able to tie this to what was found in Dr. Banaz's laboratory in Iraq?" Captain Adams asked.

"The computers in Washington showed a match in the DNA sequence of this super-microbe to what was in Banaz's lab in Iraq," Matt told them. "A database of billions of combinations, and that's the only match we have identified so far."

Captain Adams adjusted the glasses on the rim of her nose. Her struggle with the information she'd received was obvious in her fisted hands and tight jaw muscles. 'There are fifty-two soldiers living in close quarters at the Brickyard. There are thousands of troops stationed in or traveling through Bagram Airbase. I don't want to sound paranoid, but we're very exposed," she said. "Have either of you had any contact with those bodies?"

Austyn perfectly understood her concern. "No, the island has been quarantined."

"How about the samples, the DNA sequence? How was all this collected and tested?" she persisted.

"The protective gear was upgraded to the levels NASA uses in space. The sanitation techniques used are similar to what we use with nuclear spills. We've had no new report of the disease since the initial outbreak," Austyn told her.

Captain Adams didn't look very relieved. She turned around and stared straight ahead.

Austyn had seen the same reluctance back in U.S. The professionals that had finally traveled to the small island to monitor a sample collection had drawn the short straw. Though Austyn and Matt weren't allowed to be part of the on-site investigation, neither had been terribly disappointed. There was so much that they didn't know about the microbe. Despite all the precautions, there was no guarantee that an outbreak might not happen right now.

"In your opinion, do you think Dr. Banaz will cooperate once we tell her what's going on?" Matt asked.

"Are you prepared to offer her a deal?" Captain Adams asked.

"We've come prepared to negotiate," Austyn answered. "We'll do whatever it takes."

The satellite phone attached to the front dashboard came to life. The driver answered it and passed it along to his superior. Captain Adams said very little, but listened intently. Austyn could tell from the tightening of her shoulders that the message was not to her liking. Still, he turned his attention back to the road as the Humvee hit a large pothole. The landscape was beginning to change. The rocks were now interspersed with clumps of greenery. From what he'd seen from above, he suspected they were near their destination.

Captain Adams turned around in his seat to look at them once she'd ended the call. She made no explanations.

"About the prisoner," she said. "You can negotiate with someone who's responsive, who wants something, a person who values life. But as I told you before, your Dr. Banaz is past all that. This woman has lost all hope."