Mortal Threat Read online

  “Age is eleven. Name is Likika,” Kiram said in a calm voice. At nineteen years old, Kiram had grown up in the Mwanza orphanage. He had known Amanda since he was fourteen after her first summer volunteering to assist the war orphans like him.

  Amanda commanded, “Ready, lift.”

  She and Kiram lifted Likika onto a makeshift operating table. They were both wearing rubberized gloves, olive green U.S. Army chemical protective suits with charcoal liners and gas masks. Amanda’s initial research had been on finding a cure for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which they believed they had done. They had accumulated over ninety positive-to-negative seroconversions on orphans and truck drivers riddled with HIV. Those were substantial results for her clandestine CIA program called Project Nightingale . Because the two viruses shared a common multiplying protein mechanism known as TSG101, Amanda had experimented on one dying Ebola patient two months ago. He had lived. Soon, truck drivers began dropping off infected Ebola patients at the “miracle clinic,” hoping Amanda could save them. By her count, they had saved nine Ebola victims. She was eager to alert the CIA that the mysterious formula was ready for mass-market production.

  “Syringe,” Amanda said, holding out her hand. Kiram moved to her left as she stared at Likika, whose eyes were open wide as if she were astonished. The gas mask eyelets blocked some of Amanda’s peripheral vision, which caused her to grow impatient. “Talk to me, Kiram.”

  “Here, Miss Amanda,” Kiram said. He reappeared holding a clear syringe and three-inch needle. The tube was filled with a substance the color and texture of tar. Through the gas masks, their voices contained a tinny, muffled quality.

  “Need you to hold her, Kiram. If she’s still with us, this is going to hurt like hell,” Amanda said.

  “I understand,” Kiram said. He bent over Likika and gently held her by the shoulders while Amanda inserted the needle into her left shoulder, as if she were giving her a vaccination. Applying steady pressure to the plunger, she heard Kiram chant a native Swahili melody to Likika, who, as far as Amanda could tell, was unconscious and close to death.

  Having transitioned from only performing HIV vaccinations and cures to also conducting Ebola testing, Amanda was painfully aware that her Spartan facilities were inadequate. But how could she deny the victims the potential of a cure or prevention of disease? She couldn’t. While she was a Columbia University medical school student who’d spent the last five summer and winter breaks in Tanzania at this orphanage, she believed in the inverse of the Hippocratic oath. Instead of first, do no harm , Amanda’s maxim was first, help who you can .

  The needle puncturing Likika’s arm created a trickle of blood, which cut a path through the salt stains onto the operating table. Amanda focused on the black serum she was injecting through the hypodermic needle into the young girl’s system. As the plunger reached the bottom of the barrel, she was concerned that Likika hadn’t responded at all. She retracted the needle and immediately dumped the entire syringe in a hazardous waste container to her right.

  “Pulse?” she asked, looking back at Likika and placing an alcohol swab on the injection site. She carefully wiped at the blood.

  Kiram looked at Amanda and removed his glove.

  “Hook her up, Kiram. Don’t do that,” she implored.

  “It’s okay. I’m careful.” Kiram gingerly grabbed Likika’s wrist with his bare fingers and paused. Like HIV, Ebola could only be transmitted via contact with bodily fluids. But still , Amanda thought.

  Amanda counted the seconds, holding the gauze on the puncture site. Once she hit sixty, she asked, “Anything?”

  Kiram said nothing. His eyes were focused on the girl’s blank face.

  After another sixty seconds, Amanda took a deep breath, which was like breathing through a wet towel on a hot afternoon. “Come on, Likika. Work with us, honey,” she whispered.

  Kiram looked at Amanda.

  Likika jolted, as if prodded by a defibrillator. Her arm rose off the table, and then her body went still. Amanda’s pressure on the needle mark slipped with Likika’s sudden movement. A spray of blood shot out but didn’t appear to reach either of them. Slowly, Likika began to move. Amanda saw her blink. Likika turned her head and mumbled some words, which caused Kiram to smile.

  “What?” Amanda asked.

  “She said, ‘That hurts.’”

  Amanda nodded. “Good. She felt it. That’s a good sign. Let’s move her to quarantine.”

  First, Amanda carefully placed a full bandage on the injection site of Likika’s arm. She used alcohol swabs to again clean the trickle of blood from her arm and the operating table. Kiram lifted the stretcher, and together they nursed Likika’s body onto the canvas. Amanda walked backward toward the makeshift quarantine area adjacent to the operating room. They had sealed off a separate section of the building with tarps and clear plastic sheeting used in construction. Amanda felt the cot with the back of her leg and pivoted to her left as Kiram moved to his right. They placed Likika on the cot and stood the stretcher on end in the quarantine room. They would give that a thorough cleaning later.

  As they quietly slipped from the room, Amanda watched Kiram pull the plastic sheet across the doorway.

  Which was when she saw the droplet of blood on his hand.

  “Kiram,” she said.

  “Yes, I know, Miss Amanda. I go wash my hand now.”

  “Now,” she ordered.

  Amanda knew that if Kiram did not have a cut or tear on his hand where Likika’s blood had splattered, then he would ninety-nine point nine percent most likely be okay.

  Most likely.

  She watched Kiram pour a purplish medical cleanser onto his hand. Amanda grabbed the bucket they had recently filled from the orphanage well. “Let me help you,” she said. She poured water over his hand and watched the purple liquid stream against his black skin. The blood droplet had mostly dried, so Amanda took a sponge to his hand and dabbed at the affected area. After three more applications of cleanser and flushes and dabs, Kiram smiled.

  “I’m good, Miss Amanda. No cuts on me.”

  “Put this on just in case,” she said. Still wearing her gloves, Amanda lightly taped a dry gauze pad that would absorb any remaining microscopic remnants of blood on his hand.

  “Thank you,” Kiram said. He looked at the plastic sheeting behind them.

  “Good wins,” he said like he did every time they saved someone even though the verdict remained undetermined.

  “Let’s pray that it does,” Amanda replied.

  “I’ll be out in a bit,” Kiram said.

  As she walked outside, Amanda removed her gloves and gas mask. She walked to her wooden hut in the center of the orphanage. Before entering, Amanda removed her protective clothing and changed the filters on her gas mask. She dumped everything in a sterilization bag on her porch. She cinched the bag shut and slipped it into a plastic trash bag. She would wash the ensemble at her first opportunity. She used the sink on her porch to wash her hands and face, then went around back and stood inside her jungle shower, stripping naked and then pulling the chain link to serve a trickle of water over her body. She used shampoo and soap to clean every pore of her body and then dried herself with a threadbare towel she had hanging on a cable. She reached in her window and grabbed a folded pair of shorts, underwear, and a T-shirt from a shelf, checked them for insects, and then dressed again. She dropped her soiled clothes in another plastic trash bag, cinched it, and walked around front, where she dropped it next to the other.

  Stepping inside her “home,” she spied her cot with a sleeping bag, a power strip wired to a generator she could hear purring in the dirt next to her shower, and two duffle bags—one for clothes and one filled with books and magazines. She traveled light. Looking to her left, she considered her computer and monitor that were connected to a satellite antenna on her roof.

  Exhaustion got the best of her, and she lay on the cot, grabbed a book from her entertainment duffle, and began flipping through
it. Anything to take her mind off the trauma of the last hour.

  Great, she thought, de Tocqueville. She read a few pages, laid the book on her bare stomach just below her already sweaty T-shirt, and let her mind drift. More than anything, mankind seeks freedom , she considered. Looking down at Democracy in America , de Tocqueville’s magnum opus, she found his writing pedestrian but still necessary. The search for escape from that which tyrannized, oppressed, or otherwise shackled the spirit defined the human existence. That was the “take away,” she thought in her med school vernacular.

  Whether it was the pilgrimage from the United Kingdom to the United States or the migration of so many millions of Africans to clinics where they prayed at empty altars for cures to the diseases that plagued their land, mankind sought to unleash itself from that which spiritually or physically constrained them. That was her take on it, anyway.

  Similarly, she thought about her patients. Preparing and delivering the cure to a young child was always an emotional event. Each time, she thought, what if it doesn’t work? But it always did. Freedom from disease was perhaps as important as political or religious freedom, she considered. Ever since Kiram and her other able helper, Mumbato, had brought the black paste from what they called, Mahali , or The Place , the same serum had been effective in patients positive for Ebola and AIDS. The two nineteen-year-olds refused to disclose the location of the active ingredient in her serum, claiming they feared for her safety. Yet Amanda’s patience was wearing thin, as she needed to know so that they could go into mass production to stem the viral tide.

  For their part, the boys assured her that their only limitation was how much they could carry in one trip, which took two days. As the Ebola outbreak worsened on the west side of the continent, she had experimented with the new recipe and achieved encouraging results. She prayed for the same with Likika. Where HIV was a stealthy, indirect attack on the immune system, Ebola was a bold frontal assault that killed rapidly. The common intersection was that both viruses used a protein called TSG101 to hold open the host cell door so that the virus could multiply and emerge, like invaders from a Trojan Horse. Her serum shut that trap door, forcing the virus to ultimately smother and die.

  She plugged her iPhone earphones in and listened to some old Rolling Stones tunes as she dropped de Tocqueville and now thumbed through a People magazine from last year. She drifted off briefly into sleep and then awoke. She heard the children on the soccer field. Curious that she had not heard from her husband, Jake Devereaux, for two days, she used her phone to tap out a quick email to him:

  Hi, love. I miss you and wish you were with me. We solved another puzzle today. Keep praying. I love you, all ways and always. A .

  Amanda stood from her wooden frame bed and walked outside. Solved another puzzle. That was her code for saved another human being . Project Nightingale was a top secret mission, and she had to be circumspect, even with her husband. The Tanzanian heat slapped her in the face as she walked the short distance to the patch of dirt that doubled as a soccer field. She saw the orphans kicking the new ball that she had brought them for Christmas this year. Kiram was jogging past her to the field and smiled as he held up his bandaged hand.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “You scare me, you know?” Amanda said, half joking. Having experienced so many close calls with Kiram and Mumbato, Amanda and the boys had developed a gallows humor among themselves.

  “Miss Amanda, why you always on white phone?” he asked, laughing and changing the subject.

  “Gotta keep in touch with my peeps,” she said, patting her safari vest pocket.

  “Never see me using one of those. Black magic.” He showed her a toothy grin of crooked teeth.

  “Get out on the field, K-boy,” she teased.

  “No longer boy. Big man now,” he called over his shoulders and then flexed his muscles, showing her a broad, bare back that was as cut as any weight lifter on the cover of Muscle magazine.

  She watched him immediately get into the game, steal the ball, and then nurse it past a few of the other boys from the orphanage as they chased him. His mahogany-black chest was sinewy as he rolled the ball along the dirt patch that doubled as a soccer field. He cast a glance in her direction directly before flipping the ball up using his right heel and left toe. The ball arched behind him and then over his head. He nudged it gently with his head past the last defender, spun to his right, and then rifled the ball into the worn net. The ball shot through a hole in the webbing and flew deep into the Tanzanian jungle that abruptly began where the dirt field ended.

  Situated between massive Lake Victoria on the west and the Serengeti Plain on the east, the orphanage was on the eastern edge of the Mwanza Province. Tectonic faults riddled the terrain, which gave way to the windswept Serengeti a few miles in the distance. Pockets of dense foliage and African acacia trees spotted the low areas where condensation collected. Mount Kilimanjaro could be seen in the distance on a clear, cloudless day.

  “Not again!” Amanda laughed, clapping her hands.

  Meanwhile, Kiram was running with his hands in the air, the triumphant smile on his face beaming as he screamed, “Goallll!”

  “Go get the ball, Kiram!” Mumbato yelled, standing there with his hands on his hips, an aggressive pose, sweat pouring down his dark face and wide nose as the sauna that was Tanzania in January enveloped them. Mumbato was wearing a yellow and green mesh soccer shirt with black shorts and remained standing in the middle of the field. The two boys had their moments, yet mostly they got along just fine. For the past year, as the boys had begun to sprout into young men, she had witnessed what she called a “testosterone duel” between Kiram and Mumbato. They were her two most able helpers with the program, and if the time came that she ever needed assistance, she knew she could trust both of them.

  “What is the American saying, Miss Amanda? Losers walk?” Kiram laughed as he came jogging toward Amanda.

  “Nobody’s a loser here, Kiram, remember?”

  “Okay, no losers. But he still walks into the jungle to get the ball.”

  Amanda had learned the local dialect but had mentored the children over the last five years to learn English. And so now they spoke with an African lilt to their English words sounding not unlike a Caribbean accent.

  Kiram and Mumbato stood barely taller than Amanda in her Humvee-brand khaki vest and cut-off paratroop pants. Her skin was deeply tanned from nearly five years of mission work. After her high school graduation, she had spent five consecutive summer and winter breaks here in Tanzania. In her first year of a combined medical and PhD program, Columbia had agreed to give her credit for her service in the orphanage. Her thesis being the intersection of virulent pathogens, her faculty had begrudgingly allowed Amanda to gain course credit for her time in Tanzania. Of course, her faculty advisor had no idea that Amanda’s uncle, CIA operative Matt Garrett, had recruited her into Project Nightingale . Amanda was more than happy to accept the position and the funding provided by her uncle’s organization.

  Directly after her graduation from Columbia University pre-med, she had married Jake, her high school sweetheart, in the Citadel chapel. Jake and Amanda’s wedding had been the first of his class after graduation. Now, Jake was at Fort Bragg serving as a paratrooper platoon leader, having endured Infantry Officer Basic Course, Airborne School, and Ranger Training. Until they could live together again in a few years, while they each built their own professional foundations, they had agreed to settle for irregular visits and daily communication by email and Skype.

  “So who gets the ball?” Kiram asked impatiently.

  “Why do you need me to make the decision?” Amanda smiled. She put her hands on her hips and put on her best poker face for her two teenagers. “For the past five years, we’ve been trying to teach all of you to make your own decisions. Good decisions,” she emphasized.

  Kiram laughed again. “But Miss Amanda, going into the jungle is not a good decision.”

  “Then don’t
kick the soccer ball in there anymore.”

  She recalled with fondness how just five years ago, Kiram had drawn a picture of her father, who, at the time, she’d believed was dead, killed in Afghanistan. Kiram had sketched a coal caricature better than any Virginia Beach boardwalk artist, conjuring her father’s image exactly. But it hadn’t been a psychic vision on Kiram’s part. Suddenly, her father had been behind her. She had turned, closing her eyes, when she’d heard the words, her father’s words: “We’re good to go, baby girl.”

  Framed by the wandering river behind him, her father had stood tall, his arm in a sling. He had been leaning against a walking stick. Her uncle, Matt, and her psychologist, Riley Dwyer, had been with him.

  She remembered running to him, hugging him so tightly, and crying. The years of confusion and estrangement had floated away with the sneaky-swift river. Her mother and grandmother now in prison for their crimes, all she had left, and all she had wanted, was her father. And now she had Jake, with whom she planned a long life and large family.

  The images raced back to her as she watched Mumbato, with a scowl on his face, step carefully into the dense underbrush, behind the same curtain from which her father had reappeared those five years ago. She turned and looked at the river flowing behind her. The stump where Kiram had roughed out the sketch of her father was still there as well. Waiting for Mumbato to reemerge from the dense foliage gave her a moment to consider the past five years. How much progress had she and Dr. Arthur King made in this village? Was her mission accomplishing their goal of finding a cure and vaccine for the relentless diseases of this plagued land? Or was this a black hole that sucked away energy and resources in a hopeless spiral of despair as evidenced by Ebola rates doubling every twenty-four hours?

  She hoped not. Her optimism burned brightly at the notion of Kiram and Mumbato one day becoming doctors for their people. Already, both teenagers had shown incredible aptitude in the field of medicine. She thought that if she could make a difference with just a few of these children, then there was a chance, because there were others out there equally pure-hearted and driven to help. And if she could verify that she and Dr. King really had found cures for Ebola and HIV, maybe she could be content with having done her part.