"Oh, Christmas," she muttered.
"What is he doing in there?" Neil asked.
"Probably helping himself to their lunch. I'll get him," Haley offered, propping the front door open so her husband could take his load in. She started across to the other cottage.
"Hello," she called as she stopped close near the porch. She felt awkward about walking into their neighbors' place without anyone there. "Come out of there, Trouble."
"Mom, something really stinks over here," Bobby called up from the beach.
Haley turned and saw the two boys near the dock, walking around the neighbors' boats. Her husband was walking back down the path. He could handle it.
"Come on, Trouble!" she called more forcefully.
"Smells like a dead animal," Stevie called out. "I think something is dead under the canoe."
She took another look back. Neil was there. She could hear him moving the boys back.
"Trouble!" Haley called, stepping onto the first step of the porch.
Three pairs of sneakers and an assortment of flip-flops were next to the open door. A paperback book with its pages curled from the rain sat on one of the rocking chairs. There was a half glass of something that looked to be milk on the table between the chairs. A couple of flies were floating on top. A brownie next to it had become a feeding frenzy for ants.
Dread filled the pit of her stomach. She stepped hesitantly onto the porch.
"Trouble!" she called again.
The dog barked from inside. She stepped in. A foul smell she couldn't identify hit her senses. It smelled something like chicken that had gone bad, but not exactly. The layout of the cottage was similar to theirs. Trouble was sniffing and crying next to something on the bottom bunk. Suddenly, Haley realized that someone was sleeping there.
"Hello!" she called. The person wasn't moving. She covered her mouth and nose with her hands.
"Dad, is that an animal?" one of the boys asked loudly from the beach.
"Get back!" Neil's command was sharp.
Feeling faint, Haley looked back outside through the open door. Her husband had pushed the canoe over and let it go upright. It was rocking slightly. He and the boys were moving back and staring at something lying on the ground where the canoe had been.
"There's a collar on him," Bobby shouted, sounding very upset. "It has to be a dog."
Trouble barked and ran into the tiny bedroom off the living area. Haley's eyes had now adjusted to the dim light of the cottage, and her gaze followed the animal. As she saw what was attracting the dog, she felt her stomach heave.
A partially decomposed body lay stretched across the double bed.
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.