The thunder of helicopter blades summons him from the insensate darkness. The rotor wash hurls dirt against the Plexiglas shield covering his face. He opens his eyes. With the light comes the pain, forcing him to close them again. He has to warn them, though. Before it’s too late. For them. For all of them.
He screams and opens his eyes. The visor is cracked and spotted with blood. He can barely see the vague black shape of the Sikorsky MH-60G Pave Hawk settling through the cloud of dust. It takes all of his remaining strength to push himself to his hands and knees.
The camouflage Tyvek fabric of his isolation suit is torn and stained black with dried blood, whether his or someone else’s, he can’t recall. He attempts to wipe the blood from his shield, but only manages to smear the dust. The congealed droplets are on the inside.
The impelled dirt strikes his bare skin like needles. He tastes dust, inhales it into lungs that feel like paper sacks full of broken glass. Coughs it out with a fresh spatter of dark blood. Again he screams, and through sheer force of will struggles to his feet.
The wind shoves him backward. The dirt whipped up from the rutted road makes it impossible to see clearly. Dark shapes litter the ground around him, human silhouettes barely glimpsed through the dust. The fabric of their tattered suits flags from their inert forms. The ground surrounding them is spattered black.
“Don’t…”
The word is barbed and rips past his lips, although even he can’t hear it. He tastes blood in his mouth, feels it dribble down his chin and neck.
His only thought is for the men in the helicopter. It’s too late for him and the others. Their fates were sealed the moment they stepped from the plane. These men still had a chance, though.
The landing gear hits the ground and the rotor slows with a high-pitched whine. The cloud of dust expands outward, buffets the ramshackle buildings to either side, further scouring what little paint remains to the bare, gray wood.
He waves his arms over his head in an attempt to get their attention. Loses his balance. Collapses to the ground before he even realizes he’s falling.
“Don’t… get…”
He rolls onto his back and stares through the brown haze into the blazing sun. He wants nothing more than to feel its warm caress on his face as he once more descends into darkness. He thinks of the men in the chopper, of their faceless wives and children half a world away, and struggles to stand.
The ferocious wind has waned. He can see the indistinct outlines of the pilot and copilot through the dust settling upon the Pave Hawk’s windshield. He waves his arm over his head. Prays they’ll see him in time.
He hears the thunk of the lock on the helicopter’s sliding door disengage.
“Don’t get out!” he shouts.
His voice reverberates in the quiet that falls upon the still town. He looks from one side of the street to the other. Glass glimmers from the rusted tin awnings beneath the broken second-story windows, through which he detects the faintest shifting of shadows.
It’s already too late.
“This video footage was sent to Doctors Without Borders by a Ugandan physician named Samuel Odongo,” Dr Maryann Reilly said. The inverted image of the computer monitor reflected from her glasses. As the Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, she was one of the most powerful people within the hierarchy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a role belied by the fact that she looked like a cross between an owl and a stork in a pantsuit. “It was routed through the State Department and the CDC on its way to us.”
“Where was it recorded?” Dr Alex Byrne asked. He was the chief pathologist of the Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch and in charge of outbreak investigations and surveillance. The primary role of the IDPB was determining the cause and process of pathogenesis – the origin and development of a new disease – by utilizing gross and microscopic examination, immunohistochemistry, and molecular evaluation. His responsibility was critical and time-sensitive. They needed to understand everything they possibly could about a potential outbreak if they hoped to have any chance of containing it.
“Sierra Leone. Six days ago.”
His mind raced as he watched the shaky footage. The quality was poor and suggested it was recorded on a cell phone. The voiceover was provided by a deep male voice and spoken in a language he neither recognized nor understood. Monkeys screeched in the background from the dense canopy of tropical trees surrounding a clearing, in the middle of which were several brown lumps with long fur.
The camera approached and zoomed in on one of the carcasses. Flies crawled on its face, into its nose, over its unblinking eyes. Its tongue protruded from its snout and its lips were drawn back from its bared canines. A mane of golden-brown fur grew from its forehead to its haunches.
“Papio papio,” the voice said, this time with a formal British accent. “The Guinea baboon.”
The camera moved from one animal to the next. They were all in the same condition. Based upon the level of desiccation, Byrne estimated they’d been dead for somewhere between 72 and 96 hours, although with the humidity in Western Africa, it could have been longer. The dead animals appeared skeletal, their fur brittle and their skin clinging to their bones.
“As you can clearly see, these primates appear malnourished and exhibit an advanced state of dehydration.” Odongo nudged the animal with his foot to demonstrate its underside. Its left flank peeled from the grass with a crackling sound. “There is no appreciable hypostasis, no postmortem pooling of blood in the tissues, as one would expect to find in any deceased mammal.”
“Are we working under the assumption that we’re dealing with a potentially mutated form of cholera?” Byrne asked. “That level of dehydration could easily have been caused by acute diarrhea.”
“Keep watching,” Reilly said. The expression on her face remained neutral, although she nervously clicked the nail of her middle finger with her thumb.
The monitor issued a burst of static as the doctor knelt beside the baboon. He rolled it onto its back with his gloved hand. Its legs were stiff and remained flexed at the joints.
“There is visible evidence of rigor mortis, proving conclusively that this animal has been deceased for less than twenty-four hours.”
“That can’t be right,” Byrne said. “Not unless it was exsanguinated prior to its death.”
“Shh.”
The camera wobbled. Something made a clattering sound. The hand appeared again, only this time holding a scalpel, which the doctor used to hack off fistfuls of the baboon’s mane until he cleared a patch of grayish-black skin on its throat. Its trachea and musculature protruded from its taut, brittle flesh. He cut a straight incision beside the animal’s windpipe and two more perpendicular to it, one at either end, and retracted the flaps. No blood welled to the surface, nor was there more than the faintest hint on the silver connective tissue.
“Is the animal’s skin intact?” Byrne asked. “What about the mucus membranes?”
The aperture of the camera zoomed in and out to focus on the incision.