“Under attack by whom?” I asked.
Chris looked miserable. “No one knows.”
“All the victims are still at Creech?”
“We modified the base hospital.” She nodded. “Rapid response team from Missoula flew in. FBI out of Vegas. Normal patients moved to an upper floor. The base closed to the public, personnel confined to quarters, Galilee sealed off. Only thirty people live there.”
Why is the blood work taking so long to come back?
Right now I’d keep exploring the one solid clue we had, which was: Whatever microbe we face contains leprosy DNA. So back to the thumb drive.
“Eddie, you said leprosy numbers fell in Europe in the 1600s, then shot up. What accounts for the initial drop?”
Chris suggested, “Could the contagion have evolved? A thousand years ago syphilis killed in months. Now, it takes twenty years if untreated. It evolved so human hosts could live longer. You think we’re seeing that here, Colonel?”
“No. Because leprosy never evolved,” I read. “An NYU team compared original strains with modern ones. Leprosy today is exactly the same as twelve hundred years ago.”
“Then what the hell do we have here? Mutant? Made? Or maybe it’s finally evolved.”
I spotted a black Chevy coming down the road from the direction of the base hospital. My heartbeat sped up. Outside, Chris answered another call and listened and her face tightened and I saw fear in the way she straightened up. She did not want me to hear whatever she was saying.
We’re infected.
But she was back in my ear. “Colonel, you two are clean.”
I started to relax. She added, “You’ll wear a mask in flight, take one last blood test in the air. That will be over twenty-four hours since exposure. If you’re good then, you can mix with other people. But we’re not waiting. I’m coming aboard. We’re taking off. Now.”
She had guts, I had to say that much. I thought about the fright on her face just before she got the news about me and Eddie. For an instant she’d looked like she cared about us. But I wasn’t going to be fooled twice. She’d been concerned for herself, probably, since she was going to fly with us.
I don’t give people two chances.
Then, while we flew, the news got worse.
As the jet crossed Tennessee, we learned — CDC confirmed — that the blood samples Eddie and I had taken from Somalia matched the organism out West. As we reached the Mississippi River, I was sleeping, exhausted after being awake for more than thirty hours. Eddie woke me to take a last blood sample. I gazed out as the hypo pricked me. After hunting diseases for years, I’d come to regard the atmosphere as filled with invisible pathways for contagion, plane routes, that instantly link places that centuries ago required months to reach. Now an outbreak in Guinea can reach Kansas in a day.
Below, the gritty urban centers of the East had dropped away, fields replaced streets, mountains replaced fields, and forests rose up and fell and finally the jet was landing in a Nevada valley. I saw dun-colored landscape. Sheer escarpments in the distance. I saw a two-lane highway devoid of traffic except for a military convoy converging on the base. Creech was a sprawling boxcar shape, inside of which the lone runway and its taxi lanes formed a gigantic cross from the air. I looked down on living quarters, administrative building, and hangars. Indian Springs — nearest big town — lay twenty miles off. Galilee was a mere dot a few miles from the base, and the town had a circle of vehicles surrounding it. Those would be quarantine troops.
As we got lower, I was surprised to spot a small crowd outside the gate, and dozens of cars and campers parked off the road in no particular configuration, and lower still, I saw the hand-painted protest signs, some so large they required two people to hold them up. Words flashed past as we landed.
DRONES KILL INNOCENT WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
DRONES MAKE ENEMIES.
GROUND THE DRONES OR REAP THE WHIRLWIND.
“You’re allowing civilian protestors to stay this close?” I asked, shocked.
Chris looked unhappy. “Moving them would have required a court order, explanations, and it would have replaced them with state police to block the road. Either way, civilians there. So we let it lie. They think the troops surrounding the base are on a drill,” she said.
Eddie asked, “Do prevailing winds move from inside the base toward the protestors?”
“Based on what you told us from Somalia, there was no spread due to wind.”
“Do the protestors know about the Galilee quarantine?”
“If they do,” said Chris. “They think it’s part of the drill, but sooner or later we’ll see YouTube videos.”
She sat two rows back, alone, wearing a Moldex HEPA surgical mask over her nose and mouth, just in case. But based on timelines, we were clean.
“None of the soldiers I see are in biosuits,” I said.
Her eyes scrunched into an expression that made her look fourteen, and worried. “Suits on the way. Personnel in the hospital and around Galilee have them. But we need more.”
Eddie said, “I have a feeling we’ll need a lot more than just suits. This whole thing is about to blow.”
In the United States, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids domestic counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military. Accordingly, we were met by two FBI agents from the Vegas Anti-Terror Rapid Deployment Team in a black Chevy. Dome light pulsing, we turned off the run-up area, and passed a lone parked drone baking in the sun, looking like a spindly, miniature 747. Domed cockpit shape. V-shaped fins in back, and propellers. No windows. It seemed small, toy-like, harmless. Then again, a microbe is small, too.
The base seemed deserted, but I knew it was filled with personnel locked in barracks, who’d watched us come in.
I felt Chris’s thigh against mine in the back of the vehicle. She pulled it away.
Special Agent Manny Vargas drove, and Special Agent Carrie LeHavre did the talking. She’d been ordered to hold nothing back. Both agents wore matching field clothes, neat T-shirts with the FBI logo in gold, khaki trousers, and surgical masks. Vargas was dark, short, moved crisply, and wore wire glasses. His fingernails on the wheel were slightly bitten. LeHarve was slim and shag blond and wore small pink pearl earrings and matching gloss. She handed me a zip-up folio, which, I saw, contained two dozen photos.
“Officers usually fly the drones in two-man teams. The top photo there, sir, those two men fell ill first; then a tech sergeant. Then people in town.”
In the shot, the officers wore olive drab zip-up flight suits and sat in adjoining, comfortable-looking brown leather high-backed chairs, flight displays before them, video screen above, whitish control board at knee level, toggle sticks for steering drones in between.
“Do the officers know the victims in town?”
“Captain Reyes’s girlfriend is sick. So yes.”
“Have the officers visited Galilee recently, or have townspeople been on the base?”
A sigh. “There’s a bar in Galilee where a lot of personnel hang out, especially on Friday nights. Flip side, five residents of Galilee work on base. Two carpenters. An electrician. And a couple of computer techs.”
“Great.” Eddie moaned. “That’s about a thousand possible routes of infection.”
So we start eliminating possibilities. I asked, starting a written checklist on my lap, “Anyone check the ventilation systems on base for microbes?”
I was thinking about Legionnaires’ disease, a fatal pneumonia that can break out at hotels, and spread inside old air circulation systems or even hot tub steam.