This Green Hell

SIXTEEN

Alex and Sam walked together in silence, listening to the chaotic commotion of the jungle all around them. It was still only mid-morning and the temperature hadn’t yet reached anywhere near its peak, but the humidity had already begun to climb as the evening’s moisture lifted into the air as a heavy vapour. The steam dragged with it all the smells of the jungle, from the living to the recently dead — rich, dark soil, heavily scented flowers, rotting plants and hidden carcasses. The cycle of life and death was speeded up here: animals and plants died brutally and quickly, and decomposed back into the earth just as rapidly.

Saqueo and Chaco weaved in and out of the foliage just in front of the HAWCs, keen to stay close since the boar attack. But the younger boy avoided even looking at Alex.

The communication stud in Alex’s ear pinged twice: headquarters. He held up a clenched fist and the HAWCs stopped immediately. Sam called to the two boys, and Michael Vargis caught on after bumping into Franks’s back.

Alex walked a few paces ahead. ‘Arcadian,’ he said.

The call was unexpected, which usually meant something new, something bad, or something worse. The studs only had a short range, and the communication satellite had to be focused to allow them to pick up a long-range transmission. Alex’s regular check-ins with headquarters were timed for when the communication bird was doing a sweep over the continent. Seeing this wasn’t a designated intersect time, Alex guessed Hammer deemed whatever information was coming to be critical.

As always, the colonel wasted no time on introductions or pleasantries. ‘Be advised, Arcadian, mining camp has entered an unexpected communications void. VELA is being rerouted and will be “eyes on” in approximately 260 minutes. No detonation heat signature, no prior communication warnings and no new hostile activity encountered — there’s a high probability the problem is technical. No other information until visuals. Over.’

‘Understood. Over.’

Alex exhaled and turned around to look at the team. All their eyes were upon him. He motioned to Sam, who immediately walked forward with eyebrows raised.

‘News, boss?’

‘The mining camp’s in blackout — they don’t know why.’ Alex’s eyes ranged over the jungle surrounding them. ‘But the Hammer wouldn’t rotate a VELA if he thought all was okay. We’re moving too slow, Uncle; we need to pick it up.’

Sam shook his head slowly. ‘We could, but they can’t. We’ll burn them out and then either have to carry them or leave them behind. We can drop the toy soldier, but we’ll need the CDC when we get there.’

Alex stared at the non-HAWCs for a moment, then swivelled to look at Chaco and Saqueo, then back into the jungle.

Sam must have guessed what he was thinking. ‘Boss, I reckon it’d be best if we didn’t split up right now — won’t do a lot of good if you get there hours before us. And if it is a biological outbreak, those bugs could be even tougher than you. You’re not helping anyone dead — think about that.’

Alex slowly turned back to Sam. ‘You’re right. Hammerson said he’d have visuals in a few hours — nothing we can do till then anyway.’ He nodded towards Michael and Maria Vargis. ‘Let’s grab their packs and push it up another gear.’ He squinted into the thick vegetation again and made a decision. ‘Let’s put the gauntlets on — I think we’re getting close. Inform Mak.’

‘You got it, boss.’ Sam walked back to update the HAWCs.

Alex turned back to the jungle and swore under his breath as he thought about Aimee. That girl sure knows how to find trouble.

Maria Vargis came up to him, wiping her hands together, then rubbing her face, ears and neck. She handed him the small plastic bottle she’d been holding under her arm. ‘Insect repellent — our own brand — CDC strength.’

‘Thanks,’ Alex said. He’d removed his torn sleeves after the boar attack and saw that she was frowning at the scar tissue that had formed over the top of injuries that were only hours old. She looked about to ask a question so he interrupted her.

‘Michael your only son?’

She nodded.

‘And where is Mr Vargis?’

‘Dead, I hope.’ She swore under her breath in Greek before changing the subject. ‘What’s this for?’ She pointed to the dark gauntlet that extended from the top of his armoured glove to just below his elbow.

‘Wild boar repellent — our own brand.’ He winked at her.

She mouthed okay with raised eyebrows, then motioned with her head at the bottle. ‘You should get your team to apply repellent every few hours. Believe me, in an equatorial rainforest environment, there are things that don’t care how big and tough you think you are. To them, you’re just a moving bag of food.’

‘Nice thought.’ Alex chuckled and slathered the lotion over his exposed skin. He knew she was right to be concerned about insects — they were very efficient parasites and disease carriers. In fact, he’d been wondering about them himself.

‘You think the disease in the drill camp may be spread by bugs?’ he asked. ‘That’s where it might have originated?’

Maria shook her head. ‘Down here, the percentage of insects that are haematophagous — blood drinkers — is a large part of the total biomass. Most of them inject an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing as they feed. A large grouping of warm-blooded mammals, like the campsite, will attract millions of biting and sucking organisms. So I would say, yes, they are my definite suspects for vector transmission. But do I think that’s where the disease came from?’ She sucked in a deep breath as though steeling herself for a distasteful thought. ‘No, I don’t think so. I hope I’m wrong, but I think this could be an incidence of something I have only seen once, via some CDC archival photographs.’

Alex’s eyes were on his team as Maria spoke: Sam had portioned most of the contents of Maria’s and Michael’s packs between the HAWCs and Captain Garmadia. He had set aside the heavier objects, and pointed to them and then to Alex when he saw him watching. Alex nodded; he would take those things himself.

Maria seemed to be thinking of a way to phrase what she wanted to say next. ‘If the information we have been sent by the scientist on site is accurate…’ She stopped and looked up at him. ‘Captain Hunter, do you know Dr Weir? Is she competent?’

Alex walked over to the pile of extra gear and started to incorporate it into his pack. ‘I know Aimee very well,’ he said without looking at Maria, ‘we’re old friends. She’s the best in the world at what she does.’

He felt Maria staring at him; he guessed she was probably smiling.

‘Well, of course she is,’ she said. ‘Okay, now I see why we need to hurry, yes?’

Alex didn’t answer; he wouldn’t be drawn on his and Aimee’s past relationship. Just the thought of her in danger made him want to charge ahead of the group and make sure she was safe. If she’s sick or in trouble, I’ll never forgive myself for taking so long to reach her. He felt his body surge forward of its own accord and had to consciously keep himself in check.

‘Hey!’ Maria was jogging to keep pace with him.

He slowed down slightly and allowed her to catch up, then spoke without turning. ‘Tell me where you saw the disease before.’

‘It’s rare, or we think it’s rare as we’ve only come across it once before — in the 1920s, when South Africa was digging extraordinarily deep mines to keep up its production of gold. But that one time was enough to scare a lot of people and put it straight onto our Bio-hazard Level 1 watch list — in fact, probably as our first inglorious member. The miners went down a long way — miles, in fact — and without all the fancy digging and drilling equipment we have today. Some of the mines were so deep they built donkey stables down there, and even installed beds so the men could sleep between shifts without going back to the surface. As they went deeper, the mines got hotter and the rocks became more pressurised. Did you know that at that depth stone can shatter like glass?’

Alex nodded, his eyes grim. ‘I know a little about working in caves.’

Maria searched his face for a moment then continued. ‘Well, they found more gold, and also diamonds, but also something else. The most famous mine at the time was the Egoli, the great Golden Well. They dug through into a cavern about two miles down that contained a type of stone never seen before, and the sedimentation striations above it were all crushed — as if the new stone had punched through the layers above it and come to rest where it was found. The men decided to take a look inside…and that’s when things went bad. According to the one remaining record, “the stone bled” where they dug into it, dripping a “tar-like substance that stung the eyes and stuck to the skin”. Within a few hours, there were instances of horrifying biocorrosion in both the humans and pack animals. Within a few days, twenty men were dead. Again going by what was said in that one remaining record, the men “just melted away and disappeared between the cracks in the rocks”. Whatever that tar-like substance was, it contained a biological residue that was inimical to living tissue.’ Maria shivered.

‘Jesus Christ. How did they cure it?’ Alex didn’t want to believe this may be the same thing that had closed down Aimee’s camp.

Maria looked at him, her face devoid of emotion. ‘They didn’t. They dynamited the mine and sealed it, with over one hundred men, or what was left of them, still below ground. The mine entrance was bulldozed over, and, to this day, the site is off limits to everyone. We don’t know what the hell that disease was; or if it even was a disease. It may just have been some exotic chemical enzyme that reacted with the salt or oxygen in the human bloodstream. There were no samples taken, and no evidence other than the mine manager’s written records and a few grainy black and white images of the victims, or what remained of them.’

Maria must have seen something in the set of Alex’s jaw. ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry, but I really hope that your friend isn’t competent. I hope that she’s made some mistakes in her assessment, and this is nothing more than another hantavirus emergence.’ She shrugged her shoulders and went on. ‘The information sent by Dr Weir about the organism’s characteristics immediately set off alarm bells. This potential microbe is on an international risk-assessment watch list for highly communicable diseases. Anything with that level of bio-lethality, anything that fast and transferable, is watched by a number of nations. The CDC watches the Congo, Zaire, Mozambique, the Green Asian Belt and the entire greater Amazon — mainly for the bleed-out viruses. But this type of infection is moving up on our radar because of the depth of new mines. Unfortunately, we may have just come across it again.’

She stepped around in front of him, forcing him to stop. ‘This is critical for both of us — the CDC and the military. You see, we need to understand the disease before we can safeguard against it. But there are other interested parties…Well, you can imagine what would happen if you inserted some of that microbe into a detonating warhead over a densely populated city.’

Alex nodded. ‘I can assure you, I’m not down here to try to find a new weapon, Maria. And I think you’re pretty confident that the Paraguayans drilled this infection up to the surface, and that’s what’s responsible for the quarantine.’

She held his eyes for a moment longer, then gave another shrug of her shoulders, stepped out of his path and walked alongside him again. ‘Unfortunately, that is what I believe, Captain Hunter. Planet Earth has plenty of secrets — hidden in dense jungles, in deep waters, and buried far under the earth. We just keep tripping over them and tearing them out. The Paraguayan site is a fairly deep drill, over a mile, so it fits the historical profile. The images Dr Weir sent were the first we’ve actually seen of the microbe’s physical profile. The accompanying descriptions of the total cellular destruction and necrotising effects on human tissue, its transmission rate…yes, at this stage I have little reason to doubt.’

Maria nodded, apparently more to herself than to Alex. ‘You know, these diseases are usually old. Primordial really. They should never meet us, and they infect humans only by accident. But when they do, their effect on life is usually devastating. It’s strange; it’s like they don’t belong on our world at all.’ Maria’s eyes looked to carry the fatigue of experience when she spoke.

Alex felt the knot in his stomach grow tighter. ‘With our current medical technology, can it be stopped, or cured?’

‘Stopped? Yes, probably. I’m here to see to that, and to ensure it never makes it to the wider population. But cured, inoculated against, denatured, attenuated…?’ She stopped and searched Alex’s face for a few moments, her lips compressed as if she was fighting to keep a secret. After another long moment, she said in a hushed voice, ‘Have you heard of the Ten Protocols, Captain Hunter?’

Alex’s brow furrowed and he shook his head. ‘No.’

‘I’m not surprised. Your commanding officer probably doesn’t even know about them. Hell, not even my son is authorised for that level of information clearance and he works closely with me.’ She drew in a long breath as if deciding where to start. ‘There are real threats to our way of life. Not just the guys across the water building a bigger or dirtier bomb, but sometimes from the very planet itself. There are terrestrial threats, and sometimes even extraterrestrial threats.’

She looked over her shoulder to see where everyone else was, before going on.

‘In the mid-1950s, a small asteroid fell to Earth off the coast of Japan, just a mile out from a small fishing town called Minamata. Within a few weeks, the population had developed physical deformities, retardation and eventually full cellular mutation. The public story was that a chemical factory had polluted the region’s waterways with heavy metals, but that was a cover story to buy time. Japan, with the assistance of the United States, sterilised over fifty miles of ocean. It worked…that time. Whatever it was that came down in that meteorite, and somehow leaked out, was cauterised, for good. After that, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council developed a secret set of rules — a blueprint to deal with extraordinary threats to the human race. They’re called the Ten Protocols, and are known only to prime ministers and presidents and anyone at the rank of three-star general or above. The only one I know about is Protocol 9, which deals with extra-, intra- and interterrestrial biological threats.’

Wheels within wheels, thought Alex. ‘And what do these protocols mean for our mission down here, Maria?’

Maria’s jaw tightened and she donned a more businesslike persona. ‘My job is to review the situation and provide a risk assessment on the contagion. If the bio-hazard represents a threat to a populated area, any populated area, and is deemed intractable, uncontrollable, hopeless, then…’ She stopped and swallowed.

Alex waited for her to go on.

‘Then…total evacuation and total human isolation,’ she finished. ‘Miles of forest classed as a no-go area for a generation.’

‘That’s it?’ He looked hard at her and saw that her eyes were watering. Something about all this didn’t feel right.

‘Yes. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, so these people aren’t deprived of a chunk of their land.’

Alex grunted and gave a small nod.

He walked in silence for a while, his mind turning over what she’d said. No-go zones were notoriously hard to enforce — more so in a third-world environment. He’d leave it for now…but still…it just didn’t sound right.

He had one more question. ‘Could the quarantine order be responsible for the camp’s communication blackout?’

She made a face. ‘I can see why a blackout might be ordered or requested in certain circumstances, but as we’re still in an investigatory stage and all information is vital…’ She rocked her head from side to side, as if mulling it over. ‘No, if I were a betting person, I’d put my money on a technical malfunction or something a lot bigger than a microbe…maybe with two legs.’

‘I agree,’ Alex said. ‘I think we both need to get there as quickly as possible. Can you manage?’ He looked down at her and smiled.

Maria wiped her nose and winked at him. ‘Anything you can do…’