Kingdom of Bones, page 10
Tucker kicked enough to lunge up and latch his arms around the man’s torso. The soldier grabbed Tucker around the waist.
The river fell away under them, both as the helicopter lifted and as the course below plummeted in a frothing cascade over rocks and cliffs.
Tucker clung tightly, locked together with the soldier, who trembled from the exertion. Tucker hollered to the boy who still hung from his neck. “Climb, kid! Up my body!”
A rung lay just above Tucker’s head.
Toes dug into his back, gaining purchase on his belt. One arm loosened from his neck—then the boy scrambled nimbly upward. Once unburdened, Tucker freed an arm and quickly snatched the same rung.
In short order, he headed up after the boy. The soldier bent at the waist, and despite his exhaustion, he gripped the rungs, swung his legs around, and clambered up behind Tucker.
By now, they had risen above the mists. The ladder still swayed, buffeted by the winds, but they all made the ascent safely.
Tucker hauled himself inside, then helped the soldier. They all piled in and collapsed across the seats. The quarters were cramped. The Gazelle was normally a five-seater. With six aboard now—and a dog—they were pushing the helo’s design limits, but it was an infraction he could live with.
They all could.
Tucker stared over at the boy, who hugged his backpack to his chest.
“Guess you really wanted that,” he gasped out, brushing wet hair from his eyes. “What’s in there? Your homework?”
The boy ignored him, or maybe didn’t hear him due to the engine’s roaring. The kid stared warily at Kane. “He bite?”
Tucker sighed. “Only if I tell him to.”
His answer did not dim the fear in the lad’s eyes.
“Don’t worry.” He patted the kid’s knee. “He’s friendly.”
Until he’s not, Tucker added silently.
Frank leaned over enough to yell at Tucker. He pointed to the young man who had climbed the ladder ahead of everyone else. “You need to hear what he told me! About what happened at the camp!”
“Can it wait till we get to Kisangani?”
The engine noise made any communication difficult, especially when your ears were full of river water. Besides, they should be back at the airfield in twenty minutes. Plus, if there was anything important to share, there were others coming who were better suited to handle all of this.
Frank frowned at him. “No. You need to hear this now.”
Second
8
April 24, 6:05 A.M. CAT
Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo
We’re already too late . . .
A sense of impending doom spurred Gray across the campus of the University of Kisangani. During his years in the army, he had learned to trust his gut. He sensed matters were growing swiftly out of control. He searched around him, as if trying to identify what had set his nerves to jangling.
The sun rose brightly on a day swept clean by the night’s storms. Heavy clouds still hung in the sky, their edges dark with rain, misting in a few places, casting up rainbows over the brown expanse of the neighboring Congo River. The forecast promised a break in the monsoon storms, at least over the next few days.
He and the others had landed at the international airport an hour ago. Director Crowe had updated him on the status overnight, about an ambush at the U.N. relief camp and the rescue by Tucker Wayne of a few survivors. To investigate the attack, a FARDC unit of Congolese soldiers had flown out before dawn, leaving just as Gray and company had landed. Painter and Kat were monitoring the situation and would send word once they knew anything.
In the meantime, Gray’s team was headed to the university to establish a base of operations and to ready their group for their own investigations, both into the kidnapped medical team and into a possible contagion spreading through central Africa. He pictured that disease striking here, a city of nearly two million people, with more and more refugees arriving daily from outlying areas.
Kisangani sat at the confluence of the region’s watershed. It was here that all the major rivers and tributaries—the Lualaba, the Tshopo, and Lindi—merged to form the mighty Congo, the world’s deepest river, second only to the Amazon in volume. The jungle city had been established back in 1883 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, marking the farthest navigable point up the Congo. He named the place Stanley Fall Station, due to the huge series of waterfalls that blocked any further travel. He also chose this spot—which was later simply called Stanleyville—because anything flowing out of the vast jungle had to pass by here.
Which also meant if there was a disease spreading through this region, Kisangani was in its crosshairs.
“That should be the place,” Monk said, interrupting his worries. His teammate pointed a folded campus map toward the three-story beige brick building of The Faculty of Science.
It was where the team planned to set up operations. Tucker and Dr. Whitaker had arrived last night and were prepping a lab facility on site.
“At least the place doesn’t look so run-down,” Kowalski groused, plainly irritated at being roused so early with no time for breakfast.
They had rushed through a traffic-jammed town of decaying colonial buildings stained with soot or graffiti-scrawled. But there was also a vibrancy and colorful verve, especially around the central market anchored by a beautiful cathedral.
Lisa shaded her eyes as she studied their destination. “Don’t worry. The building was refurbished a couple years ago. Including adding a Biosafety Level 3 containment unit. Which we may need before this is over.”
“Considering what we might be facing,” Monk said, “I would be lots happier with a BSL-4 unit, something that can withstand the nastiest of bugs.”
Lisa tucked a few loose strands of blond hair behind an ear. “Dr. Whitaker expressed confidence about the resources here. Plus, he has a colleague in Gabon who promised access to a BSL-4 unit, if it proved necessary.”
Gray sighed.
That’ll have to do until we know more.
Still, he remembered his earlier ruminations about Sigma’s primary mission statement: To be there first. He considered Painter’s account of the attack and abductions at the U.N. camp. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Despite Sigma’s best efforts—
Someone got here ahead of us.
As Gray’s team reached the science building, a familiar figure opened the glass doors for them. “Looks like we’re putting the band back together,” Tucker said.
The Army Ranger’s partner edged out to greet them, too. Kane wagged a bushy tail and nosed Kowalski in the crotch.
The big man pushed the dog back. “Happy to see you, too, bud. Just not that happy.”
Hands were quickly shaken, and a furry flank patted.
Tucker waved them all inside. “Frank’s set up on the top floor. There’s a lot to catch you up on.”
He quickly led their party through the thirty-thousand-square-foot building. A few students looked quizzically at their passage, especially with the group accompanied by a dog. They climbed to the third floor. It was divided into various labs and workrooms. They crossed to a door that required a code to enter.
“We have this place to ourselves,” Tucker said as he tapped at the illuminated buttons. “Courtesy of the director’s pull.”
Tucker unlocked the door and led them into a large laboratory space with a row of windows that overlooked the river. It was clearly a biolab, equipped with centrifuges, microscopes, spectrophotometers, and chromatographs. Shelves of glassware lined three walls, except where a bank of tall stainless-steel refrigerators and freezers stood, along with a glass-fronted incubator.
Monk and Lisa studied the space with both curiosity and envy, especially the long table that split the room. Atop the worktable, a mad scientist’s jumble of equipment had been spread, including supplies, labeled reagents, and a laptop that glowed with bioinformatic software depicting a spinning DNA helix.
Lisa motioned to the screen. “That’s the NCBI’s GenBank, their genetic sequence database.”
So, clearly Dr. Whitaker’s setup.
Gray glanced to the left, to where a large window peered into a neighboring room. A tiny air lock, hung with biohazard suits on pegs, led into the chamber beyond, which had to be the facility’s containment unit.
Tucker led Gray’s group in the opposite direction, to where two figures stood in lab coats. The pair had been bent beside a safety hood along the far wall when Gray’s group had entered. Dr. Frank Whitaker nodded to them. The shorter young man next to him was Benjamin Frey, the grad student from the UK who had been working on a doctoral thesis when all hell broke loose in the jungle.
As Tucker made introductions, the student fidgeted, plainly discomfited by the presence of so many strangers.
Frank remained unfazed, though perhaps a touch wary. “We were just about to collect some test samples,” the veterinarian said. “It took me most of the night to unload my lab. I think I got maybe an hour’s sleep.”
Lisa shifted closer. “Test samples from what?” she asked. “I thought you never reached the campsite.”
Frank turned to the student. “Benjie here was able to gather a few specimens before the place was attacked. Let me show you.”
Gray and the others crowded closer to the safety hood.
Benjie hugged his arms around his chest. “I . . . I lost several specimens. Dropped them, or the tubes broke, but I managed to keep a few.”
Gray squinted at a trio of sampling tubes planted upright in a holder. Two looked empty, until a tiny reddish black mote scrambled up the side of one. The third held a large, segmented insect with a bulbous abdomen.
“I salvaged a few pupae, a driver soldier, and the colony queen,” Benjie explained.
Monk frowned. “Ants? I heard about the camp being overrun with them, but I don’t understand, what do ants have to do with the potential pathogen you’re hunting?”
“Maybe nothing,” Frank admitted. “But Benjie claims the ants were acting strange, overly aggressive. He also noted several different species of this genus traveling together in that raid. Which is also odd behavior. Then came the attack by the baboons. Such savagery is atypical for the species. So, it made me wonder if there could be a connection, something tying all of this together.”
“Between the ants and the debilitating malaise?” Monk asked.
Lisa offered support. “Insects are often disease vectors. Mosquitoes, flies, ticks, fleas. Dr. Whitaker is right. It’s certainly something to rule out.”
Frank nodded. “Besides, I have nothing else to test at the moment. At least such preliminary work will help me calibrate my equipment.”
Tucker interrupted, “Frank, you need to share what you told me earlier. But I don’t need to hear it again. You got my skin crawling as it is. In the meantime, Kane and I’ll fetch a couple others you should hear from. They’re napping in a neighboring room.”
Tucker headed to the door.
As the man exited, Gray faced the veterinarian. “What do you have to tell us?”
Frank frowned, his face lined with worry. “It concerns Disease X.”
6:28 A.M.
Monk leaned closer to the ant queen in the tube. He knew all about Disease X, a monster that all health experts feared. It was a theoretical disease pathogen that modern science had no preventative or cure against, one capable of spreading rapidly. After the last pandemic, epidemiologists were waiting for that other shoe to fall.
Could this outbreak be it?
He remembered Kat’s concern about the pattern of spread, of a pathogen possibly carried in the wind. If true, that would be a disaster unlike any other.
As Frank explained as much to the group, Monk studied the huge ant. It was as long as his thumb and looked dead. He reached a finger and tapped on the glass tube. The ant squirmed. Legs scratched and antennae waved, proving it yet lived.
Cringing with distaste, Monk closed his fist and withdrew his arm.
The student who had collected the queen noted his attention and sidled up next to him. “If . . . if I may ask,” Benjie said with a clear wince of apology, “when did you lose your hand?”
Monk glanced down to his balled fist. The kid had keen eyes. Few people even noted his prosthesis. “A few years back.”
The hand was a bit of high-tech DARPA engineering, crafted to be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Even he forgot about it most of the time. Then again, it was the latest military tech. A small dime-sized microelectrode had been wired into his somatosensory cortex, allowing him to control his new neuroprosthesis by thought alone, even “feel” what it touched. In fact, the lab-grown skin was far more sensitive than his real flesh.
And that wasn’t all.
Monk reached to his wrist and unsnapped the cuff, which was held in place by magnetized contact points. He placed the prosthesis on the safety hood’s tabletop. He willed the hand to lift atop its fingertips and crawl toward the kid. It was a parlor trick that unnerved most people.
Benjie simply leaned closer. “Wireless biofeedback. Neat.”
Monk reattached his prosthesis, both impressed by the young man and slightly disappointed that his trick hadn’t bothered the guy in the least.
Kids these days . . .
Benjie shifted his attention back to his specimens. “Did you know the biomass of the world’s ants is equal to our own? Which means they take up as much of the globe as we do.”
Monk adjusted to this abrupt change in subject. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“And they’re far craftier than most imagine. Take leaf-cutter ants, who act like little farmers. They grow mushrooms by excreting antibiotics that help spread their fungi. And most ant species can navigate the earth by using its magnetic field. In fact, insects have midbrains not unlike our own—especially large queens like this—which gives them a sense of self, including their own complex, emotional world.”
“Insects have emotions?” Monk remembered the short brief that Director Crowe had passed on about the kid. Benjie was at the low end of the autistic spectrum. Monk wondered if that was the source for Benjie’s interest in the emotional world around him.
“That’s right,” Benjie insisted. “Insects have rudimentary emotions. There’s no doubt they have a fear response. And get angry.” The kid glanced over. “Ever shake a hornet’s nest?”
“Point taken.”
“They also display a level of empathy, too.”
“Empathy? Really?”
Monk studied Benjie’s silhouette as the young man squinted at the ant queen. Many people believed that those with ASD lacked empathy, but that wasn’t true. It was more about a difficulty in interpreting emotional responses around them. He imagined it was an ongoing hardship for the kid.
Benjie nodded. “Matabele ants—which are related to these driver ants—will carry their injured off the battlefield after a raid. They then nurse their wounded until they get better. In fact, researchers are coming to believe that such a complex inner world is one of the reasons insects developed such amazing survival strategies.”
Monk sensed the kid was coming to a point.
Benjie touched the tube holding the queen. “So, don’t underestimate them.” He glanced to Monk. “I’m with Dr. Whitaker. They’re all a part of this somehow.”
Monk straightened, recognizing the roundabout way the kid had come to state his case. He glanced over to Dr. Whitaker, who was clearly struggling to do the same—with far more frustration.
From the way he was rubbing at a knot between his brows, Lisa was definitely challenging him. She could wring information out of a rock, if she thought it might help her solve a problem.
Welcome to my world, bub.
6:32 A.M.
Lisa frowned at Frank Whitaker, sensing the man had little tolerance for their interference, especially from strangers, and maybe more so from a woman. He spent too much time speaking at Gray, attending to his questions.
The wildlife veterinarian was clearly sharp, but he had his blind spots, some ingrained prejudices, likely fostered from his years in the army, which was already a boys’ club—not that the academic world was much better. She had been battling such chauvinism since med school. But it was a fight she refused to give up.
It also didn’t help matters that Dr. Whitaker was a field researcher, one accustomed to working solo, with little or no oversight.
Not this time.
She pressed him. “Dr. Whitaker, why are you so convinced we might be dealing with a Disease X scenario here?”
Frank sighed heavily.
She lifted a hand. “I’m not saying we’re not. I’m asking for you to share your insight.”
Frank turned toward the windows and waved past the Congo. “Because of that. The jungle. The world frets about biological warfare, of a weaponized strain being released or escaping a military lab. But rain forests are Mother Nature’s most insidious biolabs. In such environments, the competition for resources is intense, with a near-infinite number of species—vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, and microbes—all vying to survive. This struggle fosters an ongoing chemical and biological war, one far more intense than any battlefield. To wage that war, Mother Nature experiments with evolution, playing with bodily shapes and sizes. And that’s only on the surface. It occurs even more intensely at the microscopic level. There she forges her deadliest microbial weaponry. And at some point, Mother Nature will inevitably turn that arsenal on us. And when she does, the weapon she will choose will be a virus.”
“Why a virus?” Lisa asked.
“It’s a numbers game, Dr. Cummings. Viruses are a millionfold more plentiful than all the stars in the universe. Making them the most abundant life-form on the planet. That’s if you can even call them living.”
