James Thompson
The Anthrax Protocol
To my soul mate of thirty-three years.
The bravest, most courageous person I know,
Terri Ann Thompson.
Prologue
Bernal Díaz del Castillo stumbles over some unseen object and falls. He lands on his hands and knees, his face mere inches from the pustule-covered body of one of his soldiers. “Aiyeee,” he cries, pushing the ghastly corpse away, scrambling over dusty soil to escape the stench of putrefying flesh.
The effort causes him to begin to cough again. He crawls on hands and knees in the dirt. A boiling tropical sun bakes his back while he coughs and retches, vomiting blood until he collapses, exhausted.
Scarlet tears, tinged with blood, fill his eyes and run down his cheeks, forming slender rivulets until they begin to clot in his coarse beard. Raising his head, he peers across a clearing surrounding the temple. The place is littered with bodies, lying where they fell. Indian workers lying next to and, in some cases, upon his soldiers like rotting flotsam on a grassy sea of heat, humidity, and death.
He rolls over on his back, momentarily blinded by the sun, and shakes his fist at a muggy blue sky. Muttering incoherently, he curses God for allowing this plague to decimate their command.
As he squeezes his eyes shut to block out a fiery furnace from above, his thoughts return to the preceding week when the terrible sickness began.
Hernán Cortés, supreme commander of Spanish forces in Mexico, had badly miscalculated the gentle nature of natives here. Upon their arrival in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city, Chief Montezuma welcomed them, believing them to be representatives of his pagan god, Quetzalcoatl. Hernán, too arrogant to use guile, took the Aztec chief prisoner. He thought to use Montezuma as a hostage to ensure the Indians’ good behavior. Hernán was supremely confident in his military judgment, and he ignored his lieutenants’ suggestions to go easy on the natives.
For a time it looked as if he was correct. Initially, the Indians were docile, almost friendly. Then his overconfidence betrayed him. Hernán left on a tour of surrounding villages looking for more gold and jewels to send back to Spain as proof of their expedition’s success. When he returned, thousands of Aztec tribesmen, stirred into action by shouting priests, accosted his soldiers and began rioting.
Hernán and Bernal had gone to Montezuma’s cell, finding him seriously ill. He was being guarded in a small stone room with a few of his favorite pets. When Hernán arrived, he found the chief slumped in a corner, near death. Montezuma could only be revived by pouring cold water on him, which also served to wash dried blood off his face and robes.
Again seeking to intimidate the Indians, Hernán dragged a chained, weakened Montezuma to a stone platform in front of the largest temple overlooking the city. He had one of the missionaries who had taken time to learn the Aztec language, Father Bernardino Sahagún, explain that he would have their chieftain killed if they did not disperse at once.
His threat, and Montezuma’s obvious illness, infuriated the Aztecs even more. They responded by hurling stones and pieces of wood at soldiers on the platform, wounding Chief Montezuma severely in the process when misguided rocks went astray. Everyplace on the chief’s body where he was struck by stones and sticks began to bleed copiously, inciting the villagers even further into a furor bordering on madness.
Finally, with the crowd out of control, Hernán withdrew, taking Montezuma back to his cell. The Indian leader looked as if he might not survive the night. He had a raging fever and blood was seeping from his eyes, nose, and mouth. He was coughing and vomiting blood and had dark, purple bruises on his skin. Hernán summoned Bernal and a squad of soldiers, instructing them to take the Aztec chieftain and his shrieking pet monkeys to a neighboring city, Tlateloco, and if Montezuma died, to have his corpse and his monkeys prepared for burial in the traditional Aztec way. He pulled Bernal aside and ordered him to entomb the emperor and his pets where none of his followers would find the bodies. Hernán knew he would be unable to control a full-scale revolt if the Indians discovered their leader was dead. He was already making plans to try to bribe the priests to convince the natives to follow his orders and to bring him more gold and jewels as an offering to the new gods from Spain.
Díaz struggles back to his hands and knees, thinking, Hernán has sentenced me to die in this pit of hell. He has gone back to Spain with boatloads of riches for the king, leaving the rest of us to perish from this hellish pestilence.
Too weak now to stand, he crawls a circuitous route, weaving among bodies rotting slowly in the tropical heat, toward the temple at the edge of the clearing. Sweat runs from his pores and drips on barren ground beneath him, even as fever chills cause him to shake and quiver in the jungle’s oppressive humidity. He must find shade, a cool place of refuge to await his inevitable death.
His journey seems to take hours, although it is only a distance of forty yards. Finally, his strength waning, he manages to push aside a reeking corpse blocking the entrance to Montezuma’s tomb and crawls into a tunnel carved through heavy blocks of stone. Laboriously, overwhelmed by increasing pains in his chest, he makes his way deeper into the shadows. The air grows noticeably cooler as he enters the shaft.
At the end of the passageway, when he reaches the entrance into the inner burial chamber, he stops and sits with his back propped against the rocks. He takes a journal from his waistband and rests, panting, with the diary in his lap. For a moment he wonders if he has time to complete his writings before death claims him as it has all the others.
The leather covering of the journal shakes and becomes slick with sweat from his trembling hands. Cooler air in the tunnel has exacerbated his chills and he spasms and quivers, muscles jerking in a continuous ague.
Leaning to one side, he empties his stomach in a gout of blood, scarlet liquid appearing black in the darkness. He chokes and begins to cough again, knifelike pain coursing through his lungs, making him dizzy.
After a moment the spasm passes and he is able to withdraw a sharpened piece of charcoal from his trousers to begin what he knows will be his final entries. He gave up on quill and ink two days earlier when constant tremors made his writing all but indecipherable.
As he opens his journal, he rests his head against the cool stones of the tunnel, letting them take the fever from his body.
He wonders how he, Hernán Cortés’s scribe, can be so cursed by God. He always says his prayers and gives his tithe to Mother Church — he doesn’t deserve to end his life in this miserable, stinking jungle.
Another sudden, hacking cough brings him upright and bends him over, pain exploding in his head and blinding him momentarily. He knows with certainty his time is very short. He must finish this final duty to his commander. A warning of the terrible curse Montezuma and his heathen gods have cast upon this place must be given to the others who will return from Spain. With a mighty effort, he wills his arm to obey him and he begins to write:
They are all dead. I am the last left alive. Hundreds of bodies lie where they fell, covered with sores, the hungry earth drinking their blood. At the end, they were too sick and weak to bury others, dying in agony from the plague our intervention has wrought.
The illness we first observed in Emperor Montezuma has now claimed every life in this village. It begins as a simple cough, with fever and chills. After a day or two it somehow passes, and the victim is thought to have recovered. This Black Plague seems to wait in the body to reappear, gathering or rebuilding its evil strength for a final assault to bring death to the sufferer. The illness returns rapidly. Victims become fevered and weak and begin to cough up blood. Even the mouth and eyes bleed until the sick are too weak to move, and they die in an agony too terrible to contemplate.