Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 3 (18 page)

Paul slapped Larry on the cheek.

Larry stirred.

Paul slapped him a few more times.

Larry’s eyes opened.

“Hello, Larry.”

Larry choked and coughed at the sock stuffed in his mouth.

“That’s your sock, Larry.  You should do your laundry more often.  It stinks.”

Larry pushed the sock out of his mouth with his tongue and tried to holler.  Paul wadded up the sock and stuffed it back into Larry’s mouth.  Larry struggled against his restraints.

“Calm down.” Paul put a hand on Larry’s head and pushed it into the dirty pillow.

Larry’s yell was muffled by the sock.

“Got a headache?
I’m sorry.
” Of course, Paul wasn’t.  Larry knew it.  If felt good to say it.  Paul let off the pressure on Larry’s head.  “Do you know what happened to you?”

Larry glared.

“I’ll take the sock out of your mouth, but if you raise your voice…”

Larry didn’t respond.

Paul withdrew the damp sock.  Larry hollered, and Paul stuffed it back in.  Paul looked up and down the ward.  Nobody was paying them any attention.  Too many of the dying Ebola patients were making too many pained noises for Larry’s hollers to be noticed.  Paul sighed.  “You disappoint me, Larry.” He put his palm on the sock to keep it in place and pinched Larry’s nostrils together.

Larry’s eyes went wide, and his face stretched in panic.  He fought his restraints and tried to turn his head, but Paul pushed down and held Larry in place. 

After thirty seconds of torturing Larry, Paul pulled his hand away and let Larry suck air in through his nostrils.  “Don’t misbehave.”

Larry tried to glare, but only fear showed in his eyes.

“If I remove the sock again.  You need to keep a low voice.  Do you understand?”

Larry nodded.

“You’re not as dumb as everybody thinks.” Paul pulled the sock out of Larry’s mouth.

“I’m gonna kill you for this.”

“I’m sure you are.” Paul looked around.  “Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah.  You made me carry both those bags.  I lost my balance and tried to catch myself.  You kicked me down.”

“Gosh Larry, it didn’t seem that way to me.  Seems like you tried to pull me off the ladder.”

“You tried to kill me.  That’s what I told the doctor.”

“Seems like nobody believed you, Larry.  You’re tied to the bed, and I’m free.”

Larry pulled against his bonds again.

“Does your leg hurt? How about your arm?”

Larry didn’t answer.

“They say you’ve got a concussion, too.  That’s got to suck.”

Larry’s eyes focused on the IVs, one running into each arm.  He looked at Paul.  “What are you doing?”

Paul looked at the bag of blood hanging above Larry’s bed, slowly draining into Larry’s good arm.  From Larry’s broken arm, a clear plastic hose drained blood into a bag lying on the floor.  “I’m giving you a transfusion.”

“You can’t do that.  You’re not a doctor.”

“Yeah.” Paul almost laughed.  “I hope I don’t screw it up.” Paul pointed at the tube coming out of Larry’s broken arm.  “I’m taking your blood out.”

Larry protested and started to raise his voice.  Paul pushed the sock over his mouth.  “Now, now, Larry.  You remember the rules.”

Larry’s eyes were full of hate.

Paul nodded at the bag above Larry’s bed.  “Don’t worry.  You won’t bleed to death.  I’m putting different blood back in.”

Larry looked at the bag above his head.  “Why? Is this a medical procedure?”

“Sort of.  You see, Larry, I need you to answer some questions for me.  I’m pretty sure you’ll be reluctant, too, so I figured I’d give you an incentive.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m taking your blood out.” Paul pointed at the bag on the floor.  “I’m going to give it to the Ebola patients in here who look like they might die anyway.  I want them to have a chance.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I know, Larry.  That’s because you’re not a smart man.  I’m putting their blood back into you.  Blood chock-full of Ebola virions.”

Larry went white.

“Yeah, I know.  Frightening shit.” Paul gave Larry a gentle slap on the face.  “You’ve got immunity, I’m sure.  K probably.  At least, I hope you do, or you’re already fucked.  The thing is, and I don’t know any of this for sure, I’m guessing.  I’m not a doctor.  If you’ve got a healthy immune system pumping out antibodies of the right sort, you’ll probably be just fine after I pump a bag of Ebola-tainted blood into your system.  Your immune system will kill off all those nasty Ebola virions, and you probably won’t even notice…” Paul paused for effect.  “I guess.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I already am.  Here’s the scary part, Larry.” Paul reached down and picked up a few bags of warm blood off the floor.  “I’ve got enough down here to totally transfuse you.” That was probably a lie.  Paul didn’t know how much blood it would take to transfuse Larry.  He didn’t even know how much of the blood he poured into one arm would stay and how much would flow through Larry’s body and out through the plastic tube connected to the other arm.  “I don’t know how many of these bags I have to pump in before there are so many Ebola virions in you that they overwhelm whatever defenses you have.” Paul grimaced and looked at a nearby patient lying in bloody sheets, stinking of all the fluids that had leaked out of his body.  “Not a good way to go.  What do you think?”

“No.  No.  No.”

“Don’t panic, Larry.  You have a way out of this.”

Larry started to shiver.  His eyes glassed over with tears.  “Please.”

“I want you to tell me some stories, Larry—stories about what you did before you got your job here.  I want to hear stories about you and Jimmy and about all the people you got plasma from before you came here. 
That’s
what I want to know.  And when you’ve convinced me that all the stories you’re telling me are true, I’ll stop transfusing your blood.  Keep one thing in mind, though, the sooner you convince me, the sooner I’ll stop transfusing.  Now, talk.”

Car engines were revving somewhere in the distance.  The machine gun fire was tapering off but getting closer.  Something in the burning wreckage of the Osprey and the fuel truck exploded.  A pool of flaming gasoline spread a hundred feet around the aircraft, and Austin knew that everyone who’d been inside was dead.

In the car Austin had been about to get inside, a blackened body burned.  Another body lay just outside the open driver’s door, rifle on the ground just out of reach.

Thirty seconds into the attack, Austin and Mitch were the only two of the squad of Marines and CIA assassins still alive.

Well off the smooth tarmac, Austin ran after Mitch toward long rows of shipping containers in the construction yard.  Austin twisted an ankle in a tire rut and fell, rolled, and got back to his feet without losing much momentum.

Mitch got to one of the metal shipping containers and concealed himself at a corner.  He shoved the M-16 into Austin’s hands, aimed his weapon across the runway, and fired.

Austin raised his rifle as he knelt beside Mitch and looked for a target.

A pickup with several men rolled through the light cast by the Osprey’s burning wreck.  Austin pulled the trigger, heard the rifle shoot, felt it buck, but saw no effect.

A second later, the pickup burst in an explosion that dwarfed the fire consuming the Osprey.

An F-16’s engine roared as it tore through the darkness, trailing a conical blue flame.  Another F-16 fired a missile, and another vehicle exploded.

Attackers fired their machine guns at the sky.  Others ran around the burning wreckage.

A pickup loaded with armed men drove toward Mitch and Austin.

Mitch shot a dozen rounds and spun.  “We gotta go.”

Austin followed Mitch into the darkness, running through the maze of buildings, containers, and equipment.

Car engines raced, and metal rattled as the pursuers drove across the rough ground between the runway and the construction yard.

Mitch changed directions.  Austin struggled to keep up.

The jihadists—that’s what Austin thought of them—were in the construction yard.  Headlights shined through metal and cast jagged shadows.  Men shouted in Arabic.  Many were on foot and spreading out.

Mitch led Austin further and further.

The jets made another pass over the runway leaving explosions in their wake.

Mitch changed directions again, and moments later, he and Austin were standing at the corner of a temporary dorm complex built to house workers.  They were facing the direction of the runway again but were well past the end. 

Out in the open space in front of them vehicles burned, but at least a half-dozen men stood in the light, facing the construction yard, weapons at the ready.

“Damn.” Mitch looked back and forth.

“What?”

Mitch pointed across the hundreds of yards of open ground.  “The highway, the golf course, and the beach are over there.”

Austin looked at the darkness past the illuminating fires.  He understood.  There’s no way they could get across.  The launch from the destroyer, an escape from the deadly trouble that had found them, was out of reach. 

“The samples were in the car.” Austin looked back the way they’d come.  “We’re no use to the Navy now.”

Mitch looked at Austin, reappraising him as he did.

“We need to get out of here.”

Mitch turned and ran back into the construction yard.

They avoided the gunmen in the construction area and made it over a newly paved road and into a highway cloverleaf where the only cars present were those abandoned by their owners.  Some had the bodies still inside.

Cattycorner across the highway interchange, they ran into a deep wadi over ground that was too rough for vehicles to follow.  Feeling a little bit safe, they started to jog at a sustainable pace.  They had to spread some distance between themselves and their pursuers and couldn’t sprint forever.

Working their way along a highway running east toward downtown Muscat, they stayed behind what little cover was available.  Along the way, Austin kept watch for—but never saw—a police vehicle.  Neither did he see any military vehicles racing toward the under-construction airport.  In fact, he only saw one car rolling cautiously along in the same direction they were moving.

Mitch and Austin passed the familiar golden arches of a McDonald’s sign that sat attached to a Shell gas station.  They risked a highway crossing to get to what looked like better cover in an industrial company’s storage yard for drilling equipment.  Once amongst the equipment, Mitch relaxed a little and Austin breathed easier.

“Who were those guys?”

Mitch’s face showed a flash of anger.  “I don’t know.”

“Guesses?”

Mitch shook his head.  “Only guesses that don’t make sense.”

“Terrorists, right?”

“They could be local isolationist militia.  Definitely not government.  The F-16s made that clear.  Those were Omani Royal Air Force.  They were our escorts in Omani airspace.  They were trying to defend us.”

“It seemed like they were waiting for us.  The terrorists, I mean.” Austin peeked around a corner of a storage container to see up and down a dirt roadway through the yard.  “It seemed like an ambush.”

Mitch took a hard look into the darkness behind them.  “Yeah.”

“If that’s what it was, then why? That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mitch ran across the dirt road with Austin in tow, and they passed into the deep shadows between massive pieces of oil drilling equipment.  “We had to have permission to refuel in Oman.  Somebody in the Omani government told somebody something.  The somebody they told didn’t want us here.”

“To the point of trying to kill us?” Austin’s voice rose on a wave of his frustration.  “That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense to me.  Even after everything that’s happened, are there so many people in the Middle East who hate Americans that a rumor from somebody’s cousin is enough to stir up a bunch of armed bandits to wait at a deserted airport in the middle of the night with RPGs and machine guns? I mean, dammit, this doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I know.” Mitch stopped and squatted between two large steel legs that supported a structure of something Austin had no hope of identifying. 

Austin knelt beside Mitch.  “You want to give me the rest of my ammunition now?”

Mitch dug into his bag.  He handed Austin a couple of magazines.  “I’ve got more when you need it.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts.  “I don’t have any evidence to back this up but you know what my gut tells me?”

“What?”

Mitch looked around at the shadows as though he was uncomfortable with the thoughts troubling him.  “The Middle East is full of jihadist networks.  Probably one of them got wind that Marines had gotten permission to land in Muscat under extraordinary circumstances.  The fact that American Marines would want to land in Muscat right now would be enough to send anybody into wondering why.  Everyone in the neighborhood on America’s shit list would think the Marines might be coming for them.  That would engender the kind of response we saw tonight.”

“But in Oman?” Austin asked.  “I thought Oman was moderate.  Are there terrorist groups here?”

“The borders for the UAE are just on the other side of the mountains.”

“The UAE is moderate as well.” Austin put a full magazine into his M-16, tucked one into a big pocket in his pants and put two more full ones and a partial in his bag.  “Tell me what you
really
think.”

Mitch pointed northwest.  “Dubai is a hundred miles that way.”

“You think Najid Almasi orchestrated this?” Austin was astonished.  “You think he has an intelligence network capable of finding that Americans are in the country next door and are coming to kill him?”

“The intelligence network part isn’t a stretch,” said Mitch.  “Neither are his capabilities.  Look what he did to the world.  He’s not the kind of man you underestimate.”

“Najid Almasi just tried to kill us.” Austin sat down in the sand and felt like he’d been punched in the chest.  More to himself than Mitch, he muttered, “Won’t he ever be satisfied? Does he have to kill
everybody
?”

“Don’t think of it personally.” Mitch stood up and looked around again.  “We don’t know if it was Najid Almasi but if it was, he was defending himself from American soldiers in the neighborhood.  And he was defending whatever he has planned next.”

Austin got to his feet.  “Wait.  What? You think he has something coming next?”

Mitch turned and looked at Austin with eyes as hard as Austin had yet seen.  “Najid Almasi spread Ebola around the world to benefit Arabs.  Arab and Muslim nations have taken the brunt of the pandemic.  You’ve seen what I’ve seen.  Hell, look around.  Besides the terrorists who attacked us, and that one car on the highway, we haven’t seen a single living person since we landed.  Nearly all of them are dead.  It’s exactly what we saw in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.  What did that guy at the gas station say?”

“Abasi?” Austin confirmed.

“Yeah, him.  He said one or two in a hundred survived.” Mitch waved a hand at the darkness.  “Over a million people used to live in Muscat.  Maybe only ten thousand live here now, and things could get worse.  Starvation, water shortages, other diseases, and war.  It’ll all come to places like this.  People with twisted ideals will see this as an opportunity to seize land and power.  More will die.”

Austin didn’t want to believe, but he did.  He wanted to think people—most people—were better than that.  He pushed those thoughts out of his mind.  He knew better.  The world had plenty of machine gun-toting hatemongers fomenting war.

Why did hate have to be so easy?

“Things aren’t as bad in America,” said Mitch.  “Two-thirds are dead or something like that.  You and I know it.  And if
we
know it, Almasi probably knows it too.  If so, you can bet your ass he’s planning something more.  His Ebola plan succeeded, but it cost him more than it cost us.  He lost.  I don’t believe Najid Almasi is a man who will accept defeat.”

Austin thought of the Napoleonic man he’d seen in Kapchorwa.  “No, he won’t.”

Nodding his head with his eyes fixed on nothing, Mitch seemed to accept the infallible truth of his hunch.  “I’m going to find you a place to stay in Muscat.  They’ve got some pretty good hotels around here if we can find one still open.  I’ll check you in and leave you my satellite phone so you can call Olivia.  I’m going to continue with the mission.”

“What? On your own?”

“I’m going to kill Najid Almasi.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not.”

Mitch laughed.  “It’s nice of you to try and talk me out of something you think is stupid but I—”

“I’m not talking you out if it,” Austin told him.  “I’m going with you.”