The Ares Decision (17 page)

F
LYING INSECTS LOOKED LIKE
smoke in the headlights as Peter Howell eased the vehicle into a muddy ditch and then gunned it out again. Beyond the tiny circle of illumination, the darkness was as complete and unbroken as the bottom of the ocean.

Smith glanced into the backseat, where Sarie was stretched out with a limp hand resting on her rifle. She reminded him of Sophia in so many ways—the unrelenting enthusiasm for her work, the easy smile and sense of adventure.

What would his life have been like if she hadn’t died? Where would he be at that moment? Mowing the lawn? Carting their kids around in a minivan? Neither image was particularly easy to conjure.

When he faced forward again the bugs had relented enough to allow him to roll down the window and let in the warm, wet air.

“Ever wonder what you’ll do after all this, Peter?”

“After all what?”

“You know…When we’re too old to chase things through the jungle.”

Howell, visible in the light from the gauges, shook his head. “People like us don’t get to retire, Jon. One day we’re not as quick as we once were or we make a mistake, and that’s the end.”

Smith let out a long breath and sank deeper into the leather seat. “That’s a cheerful thought.”

Howell reached over and slapped his leg, a rare smile playing at his lips. “We’re not there yet, mate. I reckon we’ve got a few good fights left in us.”

Just ahead, an old fence constructed from local trees appeared and Smith pointed. “Could that be it?”

“Are we there?” Sarie said groggily, sitting upright and leaning forward between the seats.

“I’m not sure yet.”

Howell paralleled the fence, finally pulling up in front of a gate. Sarie jumped out before the car was completely stopped, stretching her cramped back before letting them through. There was no protest from either the latch or the hinges, and the road leading onto the property wasn’t overgrown. Maybe their luck was taking a turn for the better.

It was another ten minutes before a house appeared—an old, sprawling building with blooming flowers climbing faded walls. Sarie pulled the handle on her door, but Smith threw a hand back and stopped her. “Movement right.”

“I see it,” Howell responded, eyes darting to the rearview mirror. “Behind us, too. At least three. One machete, two rifles. Neither are automatic.”

“What? What’s going on?” Sarie said.

“Wait in the car,” Smith said as he eased his door open and got out. A security light on the porch came on, and he slowly raised an arm to shade his eyes. A moment later, a barefoot Caucasian man wearing jeans and a T-shirt came cautiously through the front door holding a shotgun.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I’m Dr. Jon Smith, from the United States.”

“And your friends?”

Smith glanced behind him, spotting the Africans Howell had seen in the glow of their taillights. Added to the ones hiding at the edges of the house, there were at least five guns on them. Howell and Sarie might survive if things went their way, but Smith knew he wouldn’t.

“My friend Peter Howell and Dr. Sarie van Keuren from the University of Cape Town.”

The man considered what he’d heard for a moment and then leaned his gun against one of the pillars supporting the porch.

“I’m sorry for the reception,” he said, extending a hand as he came down the stairs. “We don’t get many surprise visitors, and this part of Africa isn’t as peaceful as it used to be. I’m Noah Duernberg.”

“Good to meet you,” Smith said as the vehicle’s doors opened behind him. When he looked back, the Africans who had been covering them were already wandering off.

Duernberg invited them into the house and they gathered around a heavy kitchen table by the light of a kerosene lamp. “We have to make all our own electricity out here,” he explained. “So we shut everything down at night. The generators make an awful racket.”

He pulled a few bottles of beer from a cupboard and passed them out. They were warm but Smith popped the cap gratefully.

“Where are you headed?” Duernberg asked, settling onto a hand-hewn bench near the window.

“Here,” Smith said.

“Here? You mean this area? What—”

“I mean this farm.”

The man was obviously confused, so Smith continued. “Is it safe to assume that Dr. Lukas Duernberg is your father?”

He nodded. “Was. He’s been dead for years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“We didn’t really think we’d find anyone still living here,” Sarie said. “We couldn’t find any information on you and were just hoping to get something from the local people about where your family ended up.”

“My father saved one of Idi Amin’s children and he gave us this land. I think we’ve pretty much been forgotten—a few white people running a farm in the hinterland is the least of the government’s worries these days.”

“It must be hard with Bahame gaining power in the region,” Howell said.

The farmer nodded sadly. “My father built this house. We have a life here, friends, people who count on us for the bread on their table. But right now my wife and son are living in Kampala trying to find a country that will take us. It’s just too dangerous here now.”

“I understand what you’re going through,” Sarie said. “I grew up on a farm in Namibia and had to leave. I still think about it every day.”

Duernberg took a long pull from his beer. “Enough about things that are in God’s hands. What’s your interest in my family?”

Smith pulled out the document Star found mentioning his father’s suspicion about a parasitic infection. Duernberg’s eyes ran across it for a moment before he stood and went to the cupboard for another beer.

“You must have been pretty young when he was working on this,” Smith said.

“I was twelve.”

Smith’s brow furrowed. There was no date on the document. “You remember him talking about the parasite?”

“No,” Duernberg said, sitting again. “But I remember him contracting the disease and attacking my sister Leyna. And I remember using the rifle he’d given me for my birthday to kill him.”

Silence descended and Duernberg focused on a window turned into a mirror by the darkness outside.

“I’m sorry to come here and dredge this up,” Smith said finally.

“Our field hands burned his body and wanted to kill Leyna—they said the demons were growing inside her. We had to run for one of the outbuildings and barricade ourselves inside. They surrounded us and just sat there. After a while, Leyna started getting confused, irrational. Then she got angry. Eventually, I shot her too.”

Smith crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned against the wall behind him. There was still no hard physical evidence, but this was enough. It wasn’t mass hypnosis or drugs. It was biological and it was as dangerous as hell.

“I know this must be horrible for you, but is there anything else you can tell us about this illness?” Sarie said. “Did your father do any kind of experiments? Do you have any idea how he contracted the infection?”

Duernberg shook his head. “I was too young. But I have some things that might help you.”

J
ON SMITH REACHED INTO
the trunk and dug out an antique doll, complete with prairie dress and yellowing lace bonnet. He laid it carefully next to a pile of black-and-white photos, disintegrating clothing, and leather-bound books.

The temperature in Duernberg’s attic was well over a hundred and the heat was combining with lack of sleep to make his head feel like it was full of gauze. Howell had staged a strategic retreat an hour ago and was now snoring comfortably on a hammock stretched across the front porch.

“Anything?” he said, wiping the sweat from his face before it dripped on Lukas Duernberg’s medical school diploma.

Sarie, stripped down to a tank top and pair of shorts, was planted in the middle of the cramped space surrounded by the loose papers and notebooks they’d found.

“It’s hard not to get bogged down,” she said, tapping the bound volume in her hand. “This is a diary from the midthirties talking about his experience with persecution under the Nazis and his plan for getting his family out. I wonder if Noah’s planning on taking it with him when he leaves. Our library would go crazy for this stuff.”

“Yeah,” he said, digging another stack of papers from the bottom of the trunk and dropping them next to her. “But if I’m up here much longer, I’m gonna melt.”

“Americans…,” she said, setting aside the diary and opening a notebook filled with Lukas’s distinctive script. “All that air-conditioning has made you soft.”

Smith smirked and leaned over her, looking at the detailed drawings of local flora and struggling to read the caption. Having grown up in a former German colony, Sarie was faster and flipped the page.

He felt for Noah Duernberg. This part of Uganda was stunning, and to be forced to leave everything you knew, to have to try to build a new life in an unfamiliar place, was hard to imagine.

What made it so much more tragic, though, was how unnecessary it was. The farmland was fertile, the country was wall-to-wall with natural resources, and people seemed anxious to work. There was no reason that everyone in Uganda shouldn’t be living a safe, rewarding life.

No reason but the inherent darkness of human nature—something that was particularly easy to remember when sitting in Bahame country surrounded by Nazi memorabilia.

“Wait a minute…”

Smith slid in next to Sarie. “Do you have something?”

“I don’t know,” she said, spreading the papers out across the wood floor and pawing through them. “Yes! Right here—a parasite that causes a violent rage and bleeding from the hair. It says that the locals are familiar with it and think it’s a form of demonic possession. It flared up in a village forty kilometers away and appears to have had a one hundred percent mortality rate. None of the locals would go anywhere near the place because they believed they could be tainted by the evil. But Duernberg managed to find it on his own. He describes it as looking like a war zone. Burned-out huts, decaying bodies lying where they fell…”

She went silent for a moment, searching for the next relevant entry. “Okay, this is dated a week later. He corrects himself and says that mortality from the infection wasn’t a hundred percent—not even close.”

“So some of the villagers survived?”

“I said the
infection
didn’t get them. Apparently, the ones who got away were killed and burned by the surrounding tribes.”

“Like Noah’s family.”

“Exactly. It says there are stories of this phenomenon going back for hundreds of years—maybe thousands. It’s likely that the traditions of isolating, killing, and burning people you suspected could be possessed arose over time because they worked.”

“A primitive quarantine procedure,” Smith agreed.

She continued her search through the papers, finally snatching one from a pile to her right. “Jon! Look at this.”

He leaned closer and examined a neatly drawn map with the house they were in at one corner.

“He talks about a cave system and the fact that he thinks the parasite is dormant in an animal that lives in it. He did some exploring and took samples of some of the insects, reptiles, and mammals there.”

“Did he find what he was looking for?”

She flipped over the next page and then another and another. They were all blank. “Apparently so.”

Smith descended the stairs and went out on the front porch, passing Howell and walking another fifty yards before digging out his sat phone. Fred Klein picked up on the first ring.

“Jon. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. We’ve got something.”

“Go ahead.”

“We’re at Duernberg’s farm going through his diaries and it turns out he believed the infection was centered on a series of caves about twenty miles northeast of here. We’re going to head over there at first light to see if we can get some samples.”

“Is that safe?”

Smith laughed quietly, mindful of the people sleeping around him. “Other than Bahame’s guerrillas, an unexplored and probably unstable cave network, lions, hippos, and the infection itself, it should be a piece of cake.”

Klein ignored his comment. “So you think Duernberg could be right?”

“It makes sense based on what little we know. Years could go by with no flare-up; then someone wanders into one of those caves for whatever reason and comes into contact with a carrier. Look, you need to call Billy Rendell at CDC and get him started thinking about this. If the infection does get out, we need a containment plan and he’s the best in the business.”

“Rendell,” Klein repeated. “Can he be trusted?”

“Billy knows how to keep things quiet. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I just have to worry about you.”

“Yeah. Look, Fred. If you don’t hear from us in a couple days, we’ve had problems and you’re going to have to consider escalating this thing—sending a military force to create a perimeter and a fully equipped team to go into those caves.”

“I understand, Jon. But we’re in a delicate position—not only with the Iranians and Africans, but with Covert-One itself. It’s safe to say that the CIA suspects there’s a new player in town and we have to be very careful about tipping our hand.”

“If this thing gets out, Fred, that’s going to be the least of our problems.”

“I’m meeting with the president tomorrow. I’ll fill him in and give him your recommendation. But American credibility isn’t that great when it comes to Middle East intel right now—at home or abroad. If we want to come down on the Iranians or send a significant force into Africa, we need something concrete. And then there’s the time it’s going to take to ramp up that kind of operation…”

“I know, Fred. But I can’t stop thinking about that video and extrapolating it out to somewhere like New York or London.”

“Yeah,” he responded quietly. “Me too.”