Mortal Threat Page 3

  And she knew they were close.

  She had learned to believe that good could triumph evil. It would not necessarily happen by itself, but in the end, with proper steerage, good wins . If she could escape the byzantine labyrinth in which her mother and grandmother had placed her, then anything was possible. She was neither optimist nor pessimist; perhaps she was a realist who believed the best would happen, or at least was possible.

  Her blond hair was bleached from years of swimming competitions. Freckles across the bridge of her nose darkened under the searing heat of the African sun despite bush hats and sunscreen. Luminescent green eyes, like her father’s, radiated her mood; they were brilliant emeralds when she was mad and changed to a green-tinted azure, like fiery diamonds, when she was intensely focused. She could dress to the nines in something trendy—say, a vintage Tracy Reese silk top matched with a pair of Gucci denim shorts. Or she could wear with authority the Humvee safari vest and Abercrombie and Fitch cut-off paratroops she had donned this morning.

  While not a member of Mensa, she had graduated pre-med at Columbia University with a 3.95 grade point average and had scored an impressive forty-two on her Medical College Admissions Test. One of only seventy-five applicants accepted out of the twenty-seven hundred who’d applied, the next year she had entered as a student in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her goal was to graduate and join Médicins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. She figured that a couple of years as an emergency room surgeon, coupled with her experience at the orphanage, would readily gain her admission into the elite organization. Her father was a Special Forces soldier, and this was her way of following in his footsteps. She would join the special forces of doctors, and she and Jake would find a way to make it work.

  Amanda was snapped from her introspection when Mumbato raced from the jungle onto the field, his soccer ball clutched in his arms. He was screaming something in his native Swahili tongue that even Amanda did not immediately recognize. Afriti! Afriti! Then: Damu! Damu! His wide eyes and open jaw were nearly frozen in fear. Amanda looked at Kiram, whose cocky grin disappeared when he saw and heard Mumbato.

  “What’s he saying, Kiram?”

  “He’s saying he saw the devil and blood. He’s scared. Wait here.” Kiram ran toward Mumbato, who stopped mid-field when Kiram approached him. The two teenagers spoke in their native tongue, Amanda only picking up on pieces of the conversation.

  Something about a dead man in the jungle.

  2

  “Take me to the body,” Amanda said.

  The three of them stood at the edge of the clearing. Amanda had immediately executed a well-rehearsed battle drill, as she had labeled it, and had Sharifa, an assistant, hide the children in the most secure building in the orphanage. She’d ensured she had accountability of everyone for whom she was responsible and then had contacted the village constabulary, called Askari. Now, two Askari wielding M16 rifles walked toward them as they prepared to confront the dead man in the jungle.

  “Miss Amanda, it’s a white man,” Mumbato said. “I think it’s the doctor.”

  “Take me there now,” Amanda directed. Her mind raced. Dr. King? It wasn’t possible .

  Amanda tucked her headphones into the top of her khaki fishing vest, the necklace still hanging loosely around her neck. She pushed her hair behind her ears as her determined face looked west toward the jungle. She set her jaw and began striding stubbornly across the dusty soccer field, her squad of Mumbato, Kiram, and the two Askari in tow.

  Mumbato, machete in hand, led through the forest, and in a few minutes, they arrived at a small clearing.

  “Here,” he said.

  Amanda kneeled next to the rapidly decomposing body of Dr. Arthur King. She had always found his name a cute play on words: King Arthur, Arthur King. Accordingly she had always called him King Arthur as a sign of affection. Every time she had traveled to his laboratory to compare notes, she would ask, “So where’s the round table and all those cute knights?”

  To which, Dr. Arthur King would respond, “You’ve got the cutest knight of all waiting for you in America.”

  Of course, he had been right when speaking of her husband, Jake, and the thought of Dr. King’s compassion and friendship caused a tear to well at the back of her eyes.

  She had worked closely with King Arthur over the past five years as part of her medical training. Necessarily, they had labored in secrecy in two laboratories. She had been King’s partner in the CIA’s Project Nightingale . King had mostly lived in the village as Amanda did, but he had spent about a third of his time at the backup facility near Lake Victoria, where he had focused on the Ebola cure once Amanda had experimented on that first patient.

  Mumbato and the other orphans were proof of the success of the natural remedy. Two years ago, their positive HIV blood draws had turned negative, and remained so today. Kiram had never tested positive but had appeared in the orphanage after the Rwanda bloodshed. Still, every day, they were obtaining positive-to-negative conversions. King Arthur had been a fundamental link in the discovery process. The elements of their contract were to work on these orphans, using them as experimental subjects. Amanda discussed with each child the risks involved. Yet to a person, they considered the chance that the formula might work was a far greater benefit than perhaps an accelerated death if it failed. And it was King Arthur who always received the funding and did the bulk of the research at his facility seventy miles away on the eastern side of Lake Victoria. For security, though, he wanted to do the testing at Amanda’s facility in this village near the Serengeti, away from civilization.

  “Someone is after the formula,” Amanda whispered to herself.

  Mumbato and Kiram, benefactors of the research and experimentation conducted by Amanda and her medical colleagues, knelt next to Amanda while the two Askari, perhaps ignorant to the significance of yet another dead body in the jungle, provided guard.

  “King Arthur. Good man,” Kiram said.

  Amanda turned and looked at her two protégés. She had lost a friend; to them, they had lost a man who had brought back comrades from death and given them hope for a future without disease. Certainly she had contributed to the work; however, it was Dr. King who had labored for so many years in the privacy of his laboratory in hopes of saving the thousands, if not millions, of HIV-positive parentless children and, now, even the victims of the budding Ebola outbreaks. He had eschewed the luxuries of the medical profession in America, and instead of joining an immunology practice there and easily making a half-million dollars per year, he chose to live in a small shack in Tanzania.

  To Amanda, King Arthur was a hero second only to her father, Zachary Garrett. And even then, they were heroes on the same scale, each fueled by their respective talents with a pure, driven desire to make a difference in the world.

  The two Askari suddenly turned at a noise in the brush a few feet away. They relaxed when they heard the child’s voice but kept their weapons ready. But Amanda tensed, leaning over the body to protect her from the sight of King Arthur’s bloodied body.

  “Miss Amanda!” she cried. “Come quick!”

  It was Shenia, a twelve-year-old girl, who also had been riddled with HIV until recently, when her test results had come back negative. She had transformed from anemic to healthy in a matter of two years.

  “Please, lower your weapons,” Amanda said. The Askari dropped the muzzles of their M16 rifles.

  Shenia appeared, her dark skin glistening with sweat. She wore a red scarf across her forehead, tied in the back into a carpenter’s knot. A potato sack with holes cut in the sleeves was draped over her shoulders.

  “Mzimu !” she said.

  Amanda placed her hands on Shenia’s shoulders, which were shaking with fear. Yet she had been brave enough to run into the jungle to seek help. Frustrated, Amanda turned to Kiram.

  “She’s saying she saw a ghost,” he said. “Mzimu .”

  “Where did you see this ghost, She
nia?” Amanda asked.

  Shenia tried to open her mouth, but no words formed, as if she were experiencing a seizure. Amanda had worked with the children on their English, and most had progressed nicely, but when the adrenaline flowed, they naturally gravitated back toward Swahili.

  “Calm down, honey,” Amanda said, holding her hand. “What’s happening?”

  “A bad man,” she finally said. “Burning village!”

  Amanda dipped her head, thinking. She believed she had so much to make up for since her selfish childhood days that she worked overtime, ensuring she didn’t waste a minute. She had once visualized herself as pulling a rope against a ratchet; with each tug, she locked in more gains for those she could help.

  And now, with the orphanage under apparent attack, it was as if someone had released the flywheel and the rope was whipping wildly backward through her hands, burning them as she tried to get control. With that image, Amanda looked down at her hands. Then, she quit feeling sorry for herself and refocused.

  “Mumbato, please stay here with one of the Askari and move Dr. King’s body to the village. Kiram, you come with me.”

  She pulled on the arm of one of the constabularies while Mumbato grabbed the other. Soon, Amanda, Shenia, Kiram, and the armed guard were moving back toward the ghost who was destroying the village.

  If the village was under attack, Amanda suspected the worst had happened: someone had learned of the formula for the cure and was trying to steal it. She knew the value of what she had developed and its lucrative potential. Carpetbaggers would kill for the formula. After all their work to cure disease in the people she had come to know and love, Amanda sensed that their entire operation could now fall prey to violent criminals.

  Running, she thought of Jake and her father. She could desperately use an encouraging word from either or both of them right now. Briefly, she wondered if she would ever see them again.

  ***

  Second Lieutenant Jake Devereaux’s mind swooned with the seemingly endless yaw of the C-17 Globemaster aircraft. One moment he was dreaming about his beautiful, new bride, Amanda, and the next he was painfully aware of the weapons case wedged against his legs from his paratrooper stick buddy, Sergeant First Class Willie Mack.

  He shook his head to clear the cobwebs as he nudged the gun away from him with his knee. One hundred of America’s finest paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were crammed into the hulking jet with six other C-17s following. Jake looked at his watch and realized they had been in the air for over four hours. The sway he was feeling was from the aerial refueling they were conducting en route to their drop zone in Al-Qaim, Iraq, along the Syrian border.

  Jake was a platoon leader in the airborne and considered himself lucky to have been on Division Ready Force One when the president had made the call to send troops to secure the Special Forces base in Iraq. While he wasn’t a foreign policy master, Jake thought that defending against thirty thousand Islamic State, or ISIS, zealots was going to require a lot more than seven hundred paratroopers, as good as they were.

  Their drop time was near 2 a.m. Iraq time, and he knew that he and his men had a few hours to get some rest. As soon as they jumped, they would be all business. So he laid his head against the red netting and thought about Amanda.

  3

  Marrakesh, Morocco

  Moroccan media mogul Zhor Rhazziq looked at his phone as it pinged with a text message from his informant near Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  Seven birds are flying .

  To Rhazziq that meant a battalion of paratroopers were headed to Iraq or Syria. He logged the information in the back of his mind as he stood in one of his many studios in Marrakesh. However, the more pressing situation at the moment was what he was seeing on the giant plasma television screen, which was showing real time footage of the burning orphanage in Tanzania. As the primary competitor to Beckwith Media, Al Rhazziq Media dominated the Northern Tier of Africa, most of the Middle East, and parts of Southern Europe.

  With the orphanage attack as his trigger, Rhazziq nodded to his friend, Dr. Hawan Quizmahel, who stood in front of a television camera with an indistinct blue tarp and AK-47 assault rifle as his background. The doctor began speaking.

  “I say to all of our African brothers who can hear me over the radio and the television and by any other means that I have discovered a cure for your dreaded diseases, AIDS and Ebola. As you know better than the Zionists, one African dies every ten seconds of AIDS and one African contracts HIV every fifteen seconds. Thirty-five million Africans have died from the disease, and another ninety million are dying a slow death from HIV infection. That is nearly one half the population of the African continent.

  “In the same way, Ebola threatens to kill the entire western region of the continent. Every minute, another African is infected with Ebola. These are weapons of mass destruction brought to you by the Zionists. Islamic State scientists and doctors, including those in ISIS, began experimenting many years ago to find a way to help the people that the infidels have left behind. They treated you as their slaves, and now they have abandoned you in your time of greatest need. Over fifty percent of our continent’s population is suffering from these terrible viruses, yet where is the wealthiest nation on earth? Where are the others who can marshal the resources to help you? They are nowhere to be found. Worse, they use the Ebola affliction to send armed invaders to your countries. They use you for their own materialistic and imperial purposes to fund their crusade against Muslims. They only come to you to help now that they fear the far-reaching spread of the Islamic State’s good work. As we promised, we have used the money from our leadership and your support to work diligently to find the cure to the Ebola and human immunodeficiency viruses that plague your people. We have good news for our African brothers and sisters today. We have found the cures. Africa will soon be out from under the grip of both plagues that have taken the good lives of your family and friends for decades. Soon, we will begin mass production of these formulas so that they are easily ingestible or otherwise introduced to the suffering subject’s body. We will establish outreach clinics in your most remote regions, and we will provide the cures and vaccines free, of our own goodwill. Rest assured, the Islamic State and ISIS seek to bring medical relief and unity to the African continent, God willing, and to rid the world of these Zionist viruses spread by their immoral ways.”

  Rhazziq watched Quizmahel remove the small, black foam-covered microphone from his white tunic and walk toward him. He left the AK-47 leaning against the blue tarp. He wouldn’t need it where he was going, Rhazziq thought.

  “Your words will live beyond our lifetime, Doctor,” Rhazziq said.

  “Inshalla .” God willing , he said. “Is there any progress on finding the American formula?”

  “Soon, very soon,” said Rhazziq.

  They had better find it soon , Rhazziq thought, as he had just directed the doctor to tell the world he had the cure, when, in fact, they possessed no such thing. Though he had taken the necessary steps to secure the recipe.

  In addition to being a wealthy media tycoon, Rhazziq was also the diaspora leader of the Islamic State, which was a broader transnational entity than ISIS, making ISIS a subset of Rhazziq’s organization. Rhazziq’s goal was to dominate the Northern Tier of Africa and link it to the burgeoning ISIS movement in Syria and Iraq. Like a pincer movement, the Northern Tier fighters would connect with those on the Arabian Peninsula to crush the American coalition invaders. Then, a true caliphate would provide sanctuary for terrorists to slowly bleed the Western world of its treasure, both human and financial.

  “Rhazziq, my brother,” said Quizmahel. They hugged.

  “I will miss you, my friend,” Rhazziq replied.

  “I am ready to be martyred,” Quizmahel affirmed. “But you are too valuable to be near my broadcast. Please, you must leave, Rhazziq.”

  “Morocco is my home. But I will go upstairs as you walk outside and rise to the holy place where we will one
day meet again. Your announcement will further strengthen the caliphate. All Muslims will follow those, such as you, who are leading the way.”

  “Inshallah .” God Willing .

  “Go in peace, my friend.”

  He hugged Quizmahel one last time. He watched his friend step outside into the teeming streets of Morocco’s Red City. Shimmering waves of heat rose from the mud street of this Marrakesh Souk el Kebir, leather market, like the hypnotic sway of a tamed cobra rising from a basket. Out of the corner of his eye, Rhazziq saw the rooftop sniper and flinched as he visualized the man squeezing the American-made .50-caliber weapon’s trigger.

  But no shot came immediately. This momentary lapse gave him time to cycle through his Koranic verses and to visualize the virgins who awaited his friend. Quizmahel had cancer and had been given less than a year to live. It had been Rhazziq’s idea for his friend to martyr himself and stage the assassination. The time had come.

  Rhazziq had once met the American president, Jamal Barkum, after his election in 2012. The president had visited several African nations to better understand the culture and seek understanding between the West and the Arabic populations in Africa and the Middle East. He believed the man to be an Arabic sympathizer and wondered how he would react to Quizmahel’s murder, if at all. Regardless, the true targets for his operation were the people of Africa. He needed fresh manpower to fight.

  Just like those who had hijacked the airplanes on 9-11 had altered the course of history, so would Rhazziq. He knew his plan was massive, something he called The Greatest Mind Game in History. He had one major goal: to establish the caliphate. The best way to accomplish that goal was to keep America at bay.