Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (6 page)

“Just Najid.”

“Okay,” said Austin. “He’ll be here in a
while.”

“He shouldn’t come.”

“I know.” Austin shrugged. “Tell
him
that.”

“I will. Where is my phone?”

Austin leaned over Rashid and fetched the
phone. It was lying on the floor above Rashid’s head.

Rashid didn’t raise his hand to take the
phone from Austin, but instead stared up at Austin for a few long
moments. “Is it Ebola?”

“They’re not sure. Nurse Mary-Margaret said
it might be typhoid.”

“That’s great.”

Austin chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I
thought. I’ll bet you never thought you’d be happy to have
typhoid.”

“So they’re sure, then?”

Austin shook his head. “They don’t know yet.
They think because so many people got sick so fast, it can’t be
Ebola.”

“Why don’t they test?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they did but the results
aren’t back yet.”

Paul Cooper wasn’t the worrying type, not
even close to it. Neither did he wear rose-colored glasses. He saw
himself as a pragmatist. But one worry that did lurk in his little
closet of childhood bogeymen was Ebola. He was a kid with a paper
route when the 1976 outbreak hit the news. Every day when he folded
his papers prior to delivering them on his bike, he read the
headlines. He saw frightening stories of bleeding, suffering, and
of whole African villages wiped out. And an American media, in the
infancy of its sensationalist tendencies, taught him a new phrase
for fear—hemorrhagic fever.

In those days, nobody knew what caused Ebola.
Nobody knew how it was transmitted. There was speculation about
something in the water or the air—an old contagious evil that had
been hiding in the jungle’s damp shadows, awakened.

Paul clearly remembered sitting on the living
room floor one evening while his parents and grandparents watched
the TV with silent mouths and wide eyes. Ebola was the kind of
disease that scared the shit out of everybody.

But Africa was a far away place in those
days. The deepest jungles of Zaire were even further away. For a
disease that killed
everybody
, there seemed no way it could
make its way out of the jungle in a jeep on a rutted dirt road,
onto some bush pilot’s little plane, onto a commercial flight to
Europe, and eventually to America. The world wasn’t as thoroughly
interconnected by jets in those days as it was going to become.
Anyone unlucky enough to be carrying the Ebola virus in his blood
was likely never to make it out of the jungle alive.

Forty years later, things were different.
Anyone sitting in a thatch-roofed African hut infested with Ebola
could make his way out of the jungle and onto an airplane that
would drop him in any of America’s busiest airports within
twenty-four hours.

As paperboys do, Paul eventually finished
school. He went to college, married, had kids of his own, and
eventually got divorced; a regular kid who grew into a regular
American life. As life passed, that scary disease’s name came up
occasionally in the news, and just like that other scary word from
his childhood—thermonuclear war—it always caught his attention and
tugged at his fears.

So when the Ebola outbreak came up in the
news that summer, Paul was aware and felt a little remiss. The
disease had been spreading from Sierra Leone to Guinea and
Liberia—West African countries—for months before enough people had
died to make it newsworthy. By then, it was the largest Ebola
outbreak on record.

The kicker was that Austin, Paul’s son, was
already in Uganda for the summer.

Paul had been passively fretting over the
stories out of Africa for weeks, thinking about his son near some
little town named Mbale, close to the Kenyan border. Paul searched
his usual news websites for information. He surfed sites he’d never
heard of, groping for headlines. He researched the disease on
Wikipedia to fill the gaps in his media-based knowledge of the
disease. Through the process, his worry grew.

He checked a map program for the distance
between Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and Kampala, the capital
of Uganda. He sat back in his chair, astounded. A little relieved,
but astounded.

The distance from Los Angeles to New York in
a country with arguably the best transportation infrastructure in
the world was just under twenty-eight hundred miles. The distance
from Monrovia to Kampala was over four thousand. He had never
realized the tremendous scale of Africa.

How likely was it that anyone with the
disease could get himself from Monrovia to Kampala, let alone
Mbale, across thousands of miles of dirt roads—and a lot of them
had to be dirt roads—or even by airplane? Paul decided that chance
was small. Poor Africans weren’t as mobile as affluent Americans
and Europeans. Ebola was more likely to leap to London or New York
than it was to Uganda.

And that gave Paul comfort. Austin was as
safe from Ebola in Mbale as he was in Denver.

It was after the networks reported the story
of two Ebola-infected doctors being flown from West Africa to
Atlanta that Paul’s concern ratcheted up again.

Bringing Ebola to America on purpose. What
the fuck kind of craziness was that?

Paul put serious thought into driving down to
the wholesale club and loading his truck with rice, beans, and
peanut butter, or whatever the hell preppers stored in their
basements. But he didn’t. Instead, he vented his concerns in an
evening of ranting on various Internet forums.

Now, Paul Cooper was sitting in his cubicle
staring at a spreadsheet full of esoteric formulae when his phone
chirped with an incoming text message. Heidi, with her own fears
growing, told him that a traveler returning from West Africa had
been hospitalized in New York and was being tested for Ebola.

“Shit.”

Someone in the next cubicle said, “Huh?”

Paul didn’t respond. He was thinking about
what would happen if the Ebola virus got a foothold in America.

He’d read enough about Ebola to know it
spread through the transfer of bodily fluids or maybe just by skin
touching skin. That was a big maybe to bet one’s life on. He also
read enough to know that the idiosyncrasies of many African
cultures left them susceptible to the disease, as it wasn’t
uncommon for them to use their bare hands when tending to their
sick or handling the dead.

He’d also seen a graph emailed to him by his
daughter that showed the growth in the number of Ebola cases and
the number of deaths. To Paul, it looked like an exponential curve.
That curve made him afraid the West African outbreak might be due
to an airborne strain of the virus. That, of course, flew in the
face of what every single doctor or medical body said. Still, he
had his fear, and fears aren’t always rational.

One thing he did know, fear or not, was that
an airborne strain of Ebola would devastate the world.

So with that fear in mind, he returned to one
important question: what the hell do Doomsday Preppers keep in
their basements, and how much of it would he need?

He’d seen magazine ads for post-apocalyptic
meal kits, a kind of civilian version of MREs. They were really
expensive, and would probably be impossible to get with Ebola
epidemics in the news. Paul was sure every prepper in the country
was topping off their own supplies.

But the problem wasn’t that hard to figure
out. People with a lot less education had been feeding themselves
for millennia before Paul was born. The question became for how
long would he need to prepare? A month? A year?

Would that really be necessary?

Paul closed the spreadsheets he’d been
working on and opened up a browser. He knew that in a pinch, he
could get by on fifteen hundred calories a day. Twenty-five hundred
would be better, but a few months on rations wouldn’t be a bad way
to lose those extra pounds that had accumulated around his waist
over the decades. He searched for the number of calories in a pound
of pinto beans, a pound of rice, and a pound of cooking oil.

A quick calculation told him that a
fifty-pound bag of rice would be enough to keep him and Heidi on
subsistence rations for three weeks. Not yummy—not by any means—but
a fifty-pound bag of rice was cheap insurance. Throw in a
fifty-pound bag of beans and maybe a five-gallon jug of cooking
oil, add that to what was in the pantry on any given day, and he
and Heidi would be good for three months on less than a hundred
dollars. He’d dump the food in the back of the basement and it
would keep forever—at least forever enough.

Extrapolating from there, four or five
hundred dollars might be enough to keep them in boring food for a
year. That left the problem of what to do about water. But those
were thoughts for another day. One step at a time.

Paul got up from his desk. It was three
o’clock. To hell with it. He crossed the aisle and leaned into his
coworker’s cubicle. “Hey, I’m heading out early.”

“Okay.”

Paul stepped back into his cubicle and packed
up his laptop. Five minutes later, he was in his truck. Ten minutes
after that, he was driving into a Costco parking lot, feeling
frightened, self conscious, and silly all at the same time. But as
silly as the whole exercise felt, he kept telling himself that a
hundred bucks was a small price to pay to take the worry off his
mind.

A guy checked his membership card and rolled
an enormous basket in front of him, wide enough to sit a few adults
snuggly inside. Paul accepted the basket and pushed it down a long
corridor of boxes stacked twice as tall as him, each with a
ten-square-foot full-color picture of the flat panel television
inside.

As Paul looked at the warehouse shelves,
stacked forty feet high in rows past the flat panel gauntlet, he
realized there was probably enough food in the building to keep him
alive for the rest of his life. At the same time, he wondered—when
society faltered under the strain of a real epidemic—whether
looters coming to steal food would first grab a giant
high-definition television or if they’d pick up a case of baby food
instead. And those that carted a television out in one of these
enormous baskets, would they do it because they were too stupid to
take the food, or because they were too optimistic to think they’d
need it?

Paul exited the flat panel cave and passed
into a labyrinth of tables piled high with folded clothing. Once
through that, he turned down the first of the food aisles looking
for inexpensive calories. Instead, the aisle was full of snack
crackers of every flavor imaginable, in boxes and plastic jugs each
big enough to feed him and Heidi for a few days. But twenty dollars
for two days’ worth of snack crackers was a high price compared to
a fifty-pound bag of rice that could feed them for three weeks.

Nevertheless, self-consciousness was setting
in. He wanted the rice, beans, and oil, but he didn’t want to look
like an Ebola-fearing prepper, even if that was exactly what he
was. So a giant-sized box of granola bars found its way into the
basket. They were expensive calories, but a granola bar every other
day would add a little variety to a diet of rice and beans. It
would also be a distracting snack food when the cashier scrutinized
his purchase. His feeling of silliness was setting in, and he was
pretty sure the cashier was going to ask him why he needed food in
such bulk.

He found the rice two aisles over. A
fifty-pound bag of sugar made it into the basket—everything tastes
good with sugar on it—along with a five-gallon jug of cooking oil.
A double pack of large peanut butter jars joined all of that along
with a gallon of honey, four pounds of salt, and a case of Cokes.
No beans, though.

He made several circuits of the store looking
for the beans. There were none to be found.

He picked up a jug of bleach, recalling from
his Boy Scout days that a capful in some measure of water would
render it drinkable. He didn’t know if boiling would become
necessary, or even doable. The bleach would give he and Heidi
access to water sources that might otherwise be unusable.

Once in line at the cashier, his
self-consciousness made him look around nervously, especially when
he compared his load with the mixed greens, a bottle of wine,
salmon, some fresh cut flowers, and a bag of apples being bought by
the woman in front of him. She was planning on cooking a nice
dinner and plying some guy with enough wine to make her wrinkles
invisible so she could get him into bed.

The cashier rang up the woman and sent her on
her way.

To Paul’s relief, when his turn arrived to
check out, neither the cashier nor her helper commented on his
obvious Doomsday Prepper hoard. A few minutes later, the hoard was
stashed in the back of his truck and he was driving home, wondering
how he was going to explain fifty-pound bags of dry goods to
Heidi.

Getting the four-wheel drive vehicles
undetected over the Ugandan border from Kenya was as easy as it was
in any other part of the Third World. Najid Almasi and his men
hadn’t seen anything but shrubs, trees, animals, and farms since
heading east across the road north of Kitale. They crossed the
border far from any roads and far from any towns. No bribes needed
to be paid.

More importantly, no questions needed to be
asked. No witnesses needed to be paid extra to hold their tongues
about eight armed Arab men who’d crossed the border—once into
Uganda and once back out—with a sick young man riding along.

Having successfully crossed into Uganda on
their way to Kapchorwa, they stopped their Land Rovers in the
middle of the dirt road and they all got out.

One of the men took several boxes out of the
back of Najid’s Land Rover, opened them, and started passing out
plastic-wrapped packets. Each of the eight men received one yellow
Tyvek suit, a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, goggles, a
chemical protective hood, and a surgical mask. The men donned the
gear. It was hot, suffocating equipment in the humid East African
sun, but it was necessary, given the dangers ahead. They loaded
back into the vehicles, and with air conditioners running at
maximum, they drove the last few miles into Kapchorwa.