“I am not a clay doll,” Ayako said over her shoulder. “Please hold on.”
Quinn situated the leather satchel so it hung behind him and wrapped his arms around the woman’s waist. After sleeping with his face next to the Korean captain’s greasy pillow, he found the smell of strawberry shampoo and cigarettes that clung to Ayako’s damp clothes pleasantly intoxicating.
Quinn couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden as a passenger behind a female rider. Anatomy made for any number of problems in such an arrangement. Though far from fat, Ayako was a girl with plenty of roundness. It was difficult to know whether he should keep his arms high, under her heavy bust, or low and risk brushing the lap of her skirt. She was a short-coupled woman, leaving little margin for error. She planted both feet on the ground to steady the bike and solved the problem by positioning his arms high, around her ribs, so her breasts rested on his forearms.
She chuckled out loud, giving the bike gas. “I don’t meet many men who worry about where they touch me.”
“Nice scooter,” Quinn said as she got under way, hoping to move the conversation away from the subject of his manners.
Ayako slammed on the brakes, stopping so abruptly she threw Quinn’s weight forward, shoving her against the gas tank on the little bike. Her chest heaved against his arms.
“This is not a scooter,” she corrected, using informal, almost confrontational Japanese. He could hear her teeth grating as she spoke. “It is a motorbike.”
Quinn grimaced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“One straddles a motorbike. On a scooter, one keeps their legs together…” Softening immediately, she looked over her shoulder to give Quinn a coy wink. “I have never been so good at that.”
She laughed out loud at her own joke and gave the little motorbike enough gas that is sounded as if it might fly apart as they melded into the honk and grind of the morning traffic of Fukuoka City.
CHAPTER 39
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hunt shut the screen to his laptop computer and leaned back in his chair with a long sigh. He still wore his surgical scrubs. They were more comfortable than anything else in the up-and-down heat and cold of this miserable country.
In a fit of patriotism, he’d signed up for military service after 9/11. That also happened to be after he’d accumulated what his wife called roughly a bajillion dollars in medical school debt. The Air Force was happy to get a qualified doctor and, though they paid him with some parity to what a doc made in the civilian world, the school debts were still his. Frankly, until he’d been trapped in Afghanistan by this quarantine, the money he owed caused him more stress than the possibility of mortar attack or getting his foot blown off by a land mine if he stepped off the pavement on base.
He’d come into the military with an adventurous heart, thinking there was nowhere on earth that he wouldn’t want to visit on some level. One could learn something from every culture in every land. He still believed that, though the things one learned might just be to stay the hell away. Russia, the British Empire, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, had all tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan. America hadn’t really tried to conquer the place, just drive the Taliban out and rebuild it. But you had to want progress. You had to allow yourself to be rebuilt.
Hunt often thought how impossible it was to bomb a place back to the Stone Age when they were already there. Still, he had a job while he was here, and he did it well.
Behind him, two senior airmen stood over their lab duties, sterilizing hospital instruments and making certain crash carts were stocked with necessary supplies at the end of their shift.
Hunt didn’t know if the Skype chats with his wife made the time away from her easier or more difficult. In truth, it didn’t matter. The months ticked by, the kids passed milestones he’d never get to see, and the war dragged on — whether he missed his wife or not.
And now, they were telling him and everyone else in the godforsaken place that they had to stay indefinitely, at least until someone could figure out what was causing this new plague of boils. The young troops who’d been raised on video games had taken to calling the disease Epic Egypt or Pharaoh 2.0 and chanting “Let my people go” as they walked between their basic duties and the chow hall.
There had been three deaths on base so far — one soldier and two Afghan nationals who helped with road maintenance. The boils had been horrific enough, causing a near panic among the Afghani workforce, who saw it as a sign from Allah of some great sin. They’d been extra pissed when local mullahs banished them from their communities and sent them packing back to Bagram at the pointy end of a Kalashnikov.
At the insistence of the Afghan government, the base commander had put a hiatus on all traffic going outside the wire, leaving frontline troops not only denied their rotation home, but without a job of patrol while stuck in theater. Boredom had always been an issue at Bagram, but now, with fuses shortened by the lack of relief and this surprise imprisonment, tensions bordered on deadly. It was only a matter of time before someone — military, contractor, or Afghan — broke under pressure. Even the Kyrgyz barbers and massage girls were beginning to show signs of stress, wearing less makeup and not bothering to flirt for business.
In a show of sheer genius, the base commander had ordered photographs of the infected men, complete with their terrifying boils, to be placed in strategic locations so they could be seen by the maximum number of people. Instead of causing panic, as some feared the posters would, the grisly photographs served as reminders of why the dire orders were in place.
Though the sight of the boils was enough to induce another plague of chronic diarrhea and stomach tension, in the end, the pustules were only a symptom. All the deaths had been from respiratory distress. So far, the remaining infected were soldiers. One was on a ventilator and another was attached to a full-blown ECMO for heart-lung bypass. The other three sounded as if they had pneumonia. He only had one more ECMO unit, meaning the next person to get sickest was the one most likely to live the longest. Unless the military did some magic and brought him more units, the others would simply drown as fluid filled their lungs.
Hunt had gone over each patient’s chart a dozen times. The infected who’d made it stateside had all come from the 405th Civil Affairs Battalion based at Nellis. There had to be a connection there — but the sick who remained in Afghanistan appeared to be a hodgepodge of random units.
“There has to be something you all have in common,” Hunt said out loud. “Some little thing you share.”
“Colonel,” the older of the two Senior Airmen said from behind him. “Everything is in place. With your permission, we’d like to knock off in time to get a haircut.”
“You’re free to go,” Hunt said, smiling. The kid reminded him of his oldest son. “But your hair looks fine.”
“I know. But the girls are pretty.” The senior airman shrugged. “And it gives us something to do.”
Hunt tossed the last file on his desk and ran a hand through his own hair. He could do with a trim as well.
CHAPTER 40
Todd Elton sat on the hood of his black Chevy Silverado at the edge of the runway and watched the gray-green C-130 Hercules from the Nevada Air Guard’s 152 Airlift Wing come in low across the east desert. It continued north as if the pilots might have decided against stopping in such a plague-infested land, then, at the last minute, executed a lumbering turn to final approach nearly over the top of the hospital at the north end of town.