Sitting down, he took the time to look out his window, and Moudi was alarmed to see a TV camera pointed at the aircraft. At least they kept their distance, the doctor thought, as he heard the first engine spool up. Out the other window, he saw the cleanup crew respraying the truck. That was overly theatrical. Ebola, deadly as it was, appeared to be a delicate organism, soon killed by the ultraviolet of direct sunlight, vulnerable also to heat. That was why the search for the host was so frustrating. Something carried this dreadful “bug.” Ebola could not exist on its own, but whatever it was that provided a comfortable home to the virus, whatever it was that Ebola rewarded for the service by not harming it, whatever the living creature was that haunted the African continent like a shadow, was as yet undiscovered. The physician grunted. Once he’d hoped to discover that host and so make use of it, but that hope had always been in vain. Instead he had something almost as good. He had a living patient whose body was now breeding the pathogen, and while all previous victims of Ebola had been burned, or buried in soil soaked with chemicals, this one would have a very different fate. The aircraft started moving. Moudi checked his seat belt again and wished he could have something to drink.
Forward, the two pilots were wearing flight suits of protective nomex previously sprayed. Their face masks muffled their words, forcing repetition of their request for clearance, but finally the tower got things right, and the Gulfstream began its takeoff roll, rotating swiftly into the clean African sky, and heading north. The first leg of their trip would be 2,551 miles, and would last just over six hours.
Another, nearly identical G-IV had already landed at Benghazi, and now its crew was being briefed on emergency procedures.
“CANNIBALS.” HOLBROOK SHOOK his head in temporary disbelief. He’d slept very late, having been up late the night before, watching all manner of talking heads on C-SPAN discuss the confusing situation with Congress after this Ryan guy’s speech. Not a bad speech, considering. He’d seen worse. All lies, of course, kind of like a TV show. Even the ones you liked, well, you just knew that they weren’t real, funny though they might be in ways intended and not. Some talented man had written the speech, with the purpose of getting just the right points across. The skill of those people was impressive. The Mountain Men had worked for years to develop a speech they could use to get people mobilized to their point of view. Tried and tried, but they just couldn’t ever get it right. It wasn’t that their beliefs had anything wrong with them, of course. They all knew that. The problem was packaging, and only the government and its ally, Hollywood, could afford the right people to develop the ideas that twisted the minds of the poor dumb bastards who didn’t really get it—that was the only possible conclusion.
But now there was discord in the enemy camp.
Ernie Brown, who’d driven over to wake his friend up, muted the TV. “I guess there just isn’t enough room for both of them in that there town, Pete.”
“You think one will be gone by sundown?” Holbrook asked.
“I wish.” The legal commentary they’d just watched on the CNN political hour had been as muddled as a nigger march on Washington to increase welfare. “Well, uh, gee, the Constitution doesn’t say what to do in a case like this. I suppose they could settle it with forty-fours on Pennsylvania Avenue at sundown,” Ernie added with a chuckle.
Pete turned his head and grinned. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”
“Too American.” Brown might have added that Ryan had actually been in a position like that once, or so the papers and TV said. Well, yeah, it was true. Both vaguely remembered the thing in London, and truth be told, they’d both been proud to see an American showing the Europeans how a gun is used—foreigners didn’t know dick about guns, did they? They were as bad as Hollywood. It was a shame Ryan had gone bad. What he’d said in his speech, that was why he’d entered the government—that’s what they all said. At least with that Kealty puke, he could fall back on family and stuff. They were all crooks and thieves, and that’s just how the guy was brought up, after all. At least he wasn’t a hypocrite about it. A high-class gypsy or ... coyote? Yeah, that was right. Kealty was a lifetime political crook, and he was just being what he was. You couldn’t blame a coyote for crooning at the moon; he was just being himself, too. Of course, coyotes were pests. Local ranchers could kill all they wanted... Brown tilted his head. “Pete?”
“Yeah, Ernie?” Holbrook reached for the TV controller and was about to unmute it.
“We got a constitutional crisis, right?”
It was Holbrook’s turn to look. “Yeah, that’s what all the talking heads say.”
“And it just got worse, right?”
“The Kealty thing? Sure looks that way.” Pete set the controller down. Ernie was having another idea attack.
“What if, um ...” Brown started and stopped, staring at the silent TV. It took time for his thoughts to form, Holbrook knew, though they were often worth waiting for.
THE 707 LANDED, finally, at Tehran-Mehrabad International Airport, well after midnight. The crew were zombies, having flown almost continuously for the past thirty-six hours, well over the cautious limits of civil aviation, abused all the more by the nature of their cargo, and in so foul a mood from it all that angry words had been traded during the long descent. But the aircraft touched down with a heavy thump, and with that came relief and embarrassment, which each of the three felt as they took a collective sigh. The pilot shook his head and rubbed his face with a tired hand, taxiing south, steering between the blue lights. This airport is also the site of Iranian military and air force headquarters. The aircraft completed its turn, reversing directions and heading for the spacious air force ramp area-though its markings were civil, the 707 actually belonged to the Iranian air force. Trucks were waiting there, the flight crew was glad to see. The aircraft stopped. The engineer switched off the engines. The pilot set the parking brakes. The three men turned inward.
“A long day, my friends,” the pilot said by way of apology.
“God willing, a long sleep to follow it,” the engineer—he’ d been the main target of his captain’s temper—replied, accepting it. They were all too weary to sustain an argument in any case, and after a proper rest they wouldn’t remember the reasons for it anyway.
They removed their oxygen masks, to be greeted by the thick fetid smell of their cargo, and it was everything they could do not to vomit as the cargo door was opened in the rear. They couldn’t leave just yet. The aircraft was well and truly stuffed with cages, and short of climbing out the windows—which was too undignified—they’d have to await their freedom, rather like passengers at any international terminal.
Soldiers did the unloading, a process made all the more difficult by the fact that no one had warned their commander to issue gloves, as the Africans had done. Every cage had a wire handle at the top, but the African greens were every bit as testy as the men up front, clawing and scratching at the hands trying to lift them. Reactions differed among the soldiers. Some slapped at the cages, hoping to cow the monkeys into passivity. The smart ones removed their field jackets and used them as a buffer when they handled the cages. Soon a chain of men was established, and the cages were transferred, one at a time, to a series of trucks.
The procedure was noisy. It was barely fifty degrees in Tehran that night, far below what the monkeys were accustomed to, and that didn’t help their collective mood any more than anything else that had happened to them over the past few days. They responded to the newest trauma with screeches and howls that echoed across the ramp. Even people who’d never heard monkeys before would not mistake it for anything else, but that could not be helped. Finally it was done. The cabin door opened, and the crew had a chance to look at what had become of their once-spotless aircraft. It would be weeks before they got the smell out, they were sure, and just scrubbing it down would be an onerous task best not considered at the moment. Together they walked aft, then down the stairs and off to where their cars were parked.
The monkeys headed north in what for them was their third or fourth-and last journey by truck. It was a short one, up a divided highway, over a cloverleaf interchange built under the reign of the Shah, then west to Hasanabad. Here there was a farm, long since set aside for the same purpose which had occasioned the transport of the monkeys from Africa to Asia. The farm was state-owned, used as an experimental station to test new crops and fertilizers, and it had been hoped that the produce grown here would feed the new arrivals, but it was still winter and nothing was growing at the moment. Instead, several truckloads of dates from the southeastern region of the country had just arrived. The monkeys smelled them as their transport pulled up to the new three-story concrete building that would be their final home. It only agitated them all the more, since they’d had neither food nor water since leaving the continent of their birth, but at least it gave them the hope of a meal, and a tasty one at that, as a last meal is supposed to be.
THE GULFSTREAM U-IV touched down at Benghazi exactly on its flight plan. It had actually been as pleasant a journey as was possible under the circumstances. Even the normally roiled air over the central Sahara had been calm, making for a smooth ride. Sister Jean Baptiste had remained unconscious for most of the flight, drifting into semi-awareness only a few times, and soon drifting back out again, actually more comfortable than the other four people aboard, whose protective garb prevented even a sip of water.
The doors never opened on the aircraft. Instead fuel trucks pulled up and their drivers dismounted to attach hoses to the caps in the long white wings. Dr. Moudi was still tensely awake. Sister Maria Magdalena was dozing. She was as old as the patient, and had scarcely slept in days, devoted as she was to her colleague. It was too bad, Moudi thought, frowning as he looked out the window. It was unjust. He didn’t have it in his heart to hate these people anymore. He’d felt that way once. He’d thought all Westerners were enemies of his country, but these two were not. Their home country was essentially neutral toward his. They were not the animistic pagans of Africa, ignorant and uncaring of the true God. They’d devoted their lives to service in His name, and both had surprised him by showing respect for his personal prayers and devotions. More than anything, he respected their belief that faith was a path to progress rather than acceptance of preordained destiny, an idea not totally congruent with his Islamic beliefs, but not exactly contrary to them either. Maria Magdalena had a rosary in her hands—disinfected—which she used to organize her prayers to Mary, mother of Jesus the prophet, venerated as thoroughly in the Koran as in her own abbreviated scriptures, and as fine a model for women to follow as any woman who had ever lived ...
Moudi snapped his head away from them to look outside. He couldn’t allow such thoughts. He had a task, and here were the instruments of that task, one’s fate assigned by Allah, and the other’s chosen by herself—and that was that. The task was without, not within, not one of his making, a fact made clear when the fuel trucks pulled away and the engines started up again. The flight crew was in a hurry, and so was he, the better to get the troublesome part of his mission behind, and the mechanical part begun. There was reason to rejoice. All those years among pagans, living in tropical heat, not a mosque within miles of his abode. Miserable, often tainted food, always wondering if it was clean or unclean, and never really being sure. That was behind him. What lay before was service to his God and his country.
Two aircraft, not one, taxied off to the main north-south runway, jostling as they did so on concrete slabs made uneven by the murderous desert heat of summer and the surprising cold of winter nights. The first of them was not Moudi’s. That G-IV, outwardly identical in every way but a single digit’s difference on the tail code, streaked down the runway and lifted off due north. His aircraft duplicated the takeoff roll, but as soon as the wheels were up, this G-IV turned right for a southeasterly heading toward Sudan, a lonely aircraft in a lonely desert night.
The first turned slightly west, and entered the normal international air corridor for the French coast. In due course, it would pass near the island of Malta, where a radar station existed to serve the needs of the airport at Valetta and also to perform traffic-control duties for the central Mediterranean. The crew of this aircraft were all air force types who customarily flew political and business luminaries from point to point, which was safe, well paid, and boring. Tonight would be different. The co-pilot had his eyes fixed jointly on his knee chart and the GPS navigation system. Two hundred miles short of Malta, at a cruising altitude of 39,000 feet, he took the nod from the pilot and flipped the radar transponder setting to 7711.
“VALETTA APPROACH. VALETTA Approach, this is November-Juliet-Alpha, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
The controller at Valetta immediately noted the triple-bogie signature on his scope. It was a quiet watch at the traffic-control center, the normally sparse air traffic to monitor, and this night was as routine as any other-he keyed his microphone at once as his other hand waved for his supervisor.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, are you declaring an emergency, sir?”
“Valetta, Juliet-Alpha, affirmative. We are medical evacuation flight inbound Paris from Zaire. We just lost number-two engine and we have electrical problems, stand by—”
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, standing by, sir.” The scope showed the aircraft’s altitude as 390, then 380, then 370. “Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, I show you losing altitude.”
The voice in his headphones changed. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Both engines out, both engines out. Attempting restart. This is Juliet-Alpha.”
“Your direct penetration course Valetta is three-four-three, say again, direct vector Valetta three-four-three. We are standing by, sir.”
A terse, clipped “Roger” was all the controller got back. The altitude readout was 330 now.
“What’s happening?” the supervisor asked.
“He says both engines out, he’s dropping rapidly.” A computer screen showed the aircraft to be a Gulfstream, and the flight plan was confirmed.
“It glides well,” the supervisor offered optimistically; 310, they both saw. The G-IV didn’t glide all that well, however.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta.”
Nothing.
“Juliet-Alpha, this is Valetta Approach.”
“What else is—” The supervisor checked the screen himself. No other aircraft in the area, and all one could do was watch anyway.
THE BETTER TO simulate the in-flight emergency, the pilot throttled his engines back to idle. The tendency was to ham things up, but they wouldn’t. In fact, they’d say nothing else at all. He pushed the yoke farther forward to increase his rate of descent, then turned to port as though angling toward Malta. That should make the tower people feel good, he thought, passing through 25,000 feet. It actually felt good. He’d been a fighter pilot for his country once, and missed the delightful feelings you got from yanking and banking an airplane around the sky. A descent of this speed would have his passengers white-faced and panicking. For the pilot it just felt like what flying was supposed to be.
“HE MUST BE very heavy,” the supervisor said.
“Cleared into Paris De Gaulle.” The controller shrugged and grimaced. “Just topped off in Benghazi.”
“Bad fuel?” The answer was merely another shrug.
It was like watching death on television, all the more horrible that the alpha-numeric blip’s altitude digits were clicking down like the symbols on a slot machine.
The supervisor lifted a phone. “Call the Libyans. Ask if they can get a rescue aircraft up. We have an aircraft about to go down in the Gulf of Sidra.”
“Valetta Approach, this is USS Radford, do you copy, over.”
“Radford, Valetta.”
“WE HAVE YOUR contact on radar. Looks like he’s coming down hard.” The voice was that of a junior-grade lieutenant who had the CIC duty this night. Radford was an aging Spruance-class destroyer heading for Naples after an exercise with the Egyptian navy. Along the way she had orders
to enter the Gulf of Sidra to proclaim freedom-of-navigation rights, an exercise which was almost as old as the ship herself. Once the source of considerable excitement, and two pitched air-sea battles in the 1980s, it was now boringly routine, else Radford wouldn’t be going it alone. Boring enough that the CIC crewmen were monitoring civilian radio freqs to relieve their torpor. “Contact is eight-zero miles west of us. We are tracking.”
“Can you respond to a rescue request?”
“Valetta, I just woke the captain up. Give us a few to get organized here, but we can make a try for it, over.”
“Dropping like a rock,” the petty officer on the main scope reported. “Better pull out soon, fella.”
“Target is a Gulf-Four business jet. We show him one-six-thousand and descending rapidly,” Valetta advised.
“Thank you, that’s about what we have. We are standing by.”
“What gives?” the captain asked, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt. The report didn’t take long. “Okay, get the rotor heads woke up.” Next the commander lifted a growler phone. “Bridge, CIC, captain speaking. All ahead full, come right to new course—”
“Two-seven-five, sir,” the radar man advised. “Target is two-seven-five and eighty-three miles.”
“New course two-seven-five.”
“Aye, sir. Coming right to two-seven-five, all ahead full, aye,” the officer of the deck acknowledged. On the bridge the quartermaster of the watch pushed down the direct engine-control handles, dumping additional fuel into the big GE jet-turbines. Radford shuddered a bit, then settled at the stern as she began to accelerate up from eighteen knots. The captain looked around the capacious combat information center. The crewmen were alert, a few shaking their heads to come fully awake. The radarmen were adjusting their instruments. On the main scope, the display changed, the better to lock in the descending aircraft.