I married my college sweetheart. I thought my life was on track. What a fool I was.
Then one day during the first Iraq war, Eddie and I and other soldiers including nineteen-year-old Lionel Nash stepped down a long subterranean tunnel and into a world more terrifying than anything we’d imagined. We’d found a hidden lab, and in it were monkeys being infected with the world’s worst death agents: plague, anthrax, Ebola. The doctors had evacuated and left the animals cuffed to operating tables, or stuffed into cages, screaming and crying, substitutes for the human beings that Saddam’s planners hoped to one day infect.
When we emerged back into the sunlight, we were changed men. That lab sent Eddie and me to medical school on the Marine dime, and made us experts on toxins. The desert, the rocks and starkness, had excited Lionel Nash in a different way, sent him to school, made him a geologist.
Now was he leading us into a trap?
The deceptive thing about technology is the way it makes the world seem smaller. The world is not really smaller, but by eliminating mental distance, our devices deceive us into thinking the person on the other end is exactly like us. Somalia is sixteen hours from Washington, just like Minneapolis if you drive. So people who fly around the world begin to think that the difference is small between Washington and Somalia.
Hey, let’s all sit down and talk and we’ll see our differences are minor, and you’ll see things my way.
Big mistake.
“In other words, Colonel, you waited to alert your director until you thought it would be too late to stop you from going.” The man on my laptop screen sneered.
Eddie and I were the only passengers in a twelve-seat prop plane entering Somali airspace, but at the same time we were in a meeting in Washington, where it was 6 A.M. Something was wrong back there. My call had summoned the admiral from a meeting, but why was he in a meeting so early in the day? When I’d forwarded him the grainy photo Lionel Nash had sent, he’d put me on hold, and three minutes later I was startled to see the whole group.
Eddie leaned over and slipped me a note. Look at the water pitchers. They’re in the Situation Room.
In each square on-screen, looking back, was a tense-looking member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Bioterror Preparedness. I’d addressed the group a few times, during war games at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Rhode Island Avenue, designing scenarios — anthrax attack, food contamination, rail hit.
The committee met rarely, and these meetings, which were theoretical, never occurred before noon.
Frank Burke — glaring at me now — was the committee head, a high-profile presence in Washington and a study in contradictions, who “doesn’t like you, to say the least,” the admiral had told me. The Assistant Homeland Security Secretary was an ex — police commissioner of Dallas, a forty-seven-year-old ex-Congressman and tough fireplug with a unique background — off-the-charts IQ, forest ranger parents, Interpol experience, most decorated cop in Texas history. He often made the Post social pages, which covered his penchant for squiring around famous actresses, his leadership in Capitol Hill prayer meetings, his fancy dress boots, and his belief, reported in the Washington Post during confirmation hearings, that evolution was “just a theory that I don’t believe in. I believe in the Lord.”
Burke had tried to get our small unit moved from the Defense Department to Homeland Security. He disapproved of having an ex-Coastie running a bioterror group. “You’re a sailor, not a warrior,” he’d told the admiral. He’d also tried to get my contract canceled, twice, and failed.
“You’re the kind of man I would have kicked off my police force,” he’d told me once, in a men’s room, during a war game break. “I saw your file. The real one. Some guys work for the right side for the wrong reasons. That’s you, Rush. You’ve tortured. You strangled someone. You deny it?”
“No.”
“Well, use my committee as cover to hurt people — even guilty ones — and I don’t care that the President protects you. I’ll bury you in Leavenworth and you’ll never get out. You’ll never even get a lawyer. You get it?”
Overhearing the remark, Eddie had said, “He’s honest at least.”
Frank Burke was the probable heir of the agency when the current head’s resignation took effect a month from now. He was shorter than average, but had the presence of a large man — with broad shoulders; a powerful-looking shaved head; a fancy handlebar mustache, jet-black and not dyed; and an aggressive walk. He was a compulsive consumer of lime-flavored hard candies. It was as if they exercised his jaw.
“I went in right away because I thought speed essential, sir,” I lied to Burke now.
Burke made a mocking sound in his throat.
The instrument panel told me that our plane had crossed into Somali airspace, but no markings below indicated this. No troops or fences. No roads or villages. The savannah looked the same down there — soaked and misty — as it had five minutes ago. There were some thorn trees. We passed over a large lake churned up by a herd of pinkish animals — hippos. There was the sense of rushing into a vacuum, being sucked — or suckered — forward by fate.
I said, “Sir, if the committee is in session, is there a problem at home?”
“Not your concern.”
“Sir,” I persisted, aware that the admiral was trying, with his eyes, to get me to shut up, “I’m unclear why an incident in Africa concerns the bioterror committee. Is there something I need to know?”
“No.”
“Are you ordering me to turn around?”
Burke tended to consider himself the smartest guy in the room, which, I had to admit, he often was. And the committee — set up after a sarin scare in Sacramento two years ago — was an interagency group with a direct line to the President in the event of a bioterror incident, but at home, not abroad.
Burke told me now, “We could have sent in drones to look the place over before you put yourself in jeopardy.”
The pilot of our small twin-engine 1978 Cessna 421 Eagle, was named Farhan, which, in Somali, means “happy,” which he was not. Our Doppler radar screen glowed bright red, which meant bad rain and wind ahead, and the plane began pitching violently as a sudden storm pummeled us at fifteen thousand feet. The ground disappeared.
“Drones won’t work, Frank. Cloud cover,” said Admiral Galli, on Burke’s left. Trim and weathered, the hero of the most recent Gulf oil spill had sparse gray hair, youthful clear blue eyes, and a deceptively calm manner. He, too, was furious that I’d not called him right away. But he wouldn’t mention this in front of the others. He’s that way.
To Galli’s left, on-screen, was Chris Vekey, thirty-four, from Emergency Preparedness. The former major in the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service was a public health expert whose job in the event of a bio-attack was to help coordinate containment. She was a petite, voluptuous brunette with blue-black hair cut to the neck, framing a cupid face. Mouth a lovely bow. Part Irish, part Cherokee. She’d formerly tracked TB outbreaks in low-income Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods, then joined the Gates Foundation Africa anti-malaria effort, then rejoined government. An ex-teenage mom from Alabama, she’d been stripped of her high school valedictorian title when she became pregnant. She never revealed the father’s identity. She worked her way through Auburn U, then Yale School of Public Health. She was still single, soft-spoken but tough, and Burke had an avuncular weakness for her because, like him, she’d come up the hard way. She was the most intoxicating-smelling woman I’d ever met. She and her teenage daughter lived in a converted spice warehouse in Northwest D.C. The odors had permeated their apartment. She smelled of cinnamon, vanilla, tropical islands. Between her gorgeous face, fit body, and smell, she turned heads wherever she went. You could sense the animal inside her. It made her gray business attire seem as sexy as bathing suits, Eddie said.