“How the hell?” Jinx asked. “When I checked on them a few hours ago they were sleepin’ like babies.”
Bear snorted. “Not hardly, Jinx. What you saw were two blankets rolled up and made to look like they were in bed asleep. Evidently our doctor is smarter than we gave him credit for and they have flown the coop and have at least several hours’ head start on us.”
He chuckled and shook his head, a wry grin on his face. “In addition, the good doctor and his lady friend are not slogging it through the jungle like our GPS monitor says, but they commandeered a village boat, sabotaged all the other boats, and are even now sailing downriver toward the coast.”
He looked around at his men, “Like I said, the doc isn’t as dumb as we thought he was.”
Blade gave a nasty laugh and snarled, “Well, our high and mighty leader has made the classic and unforgivable tactical mistake of underestimating the enemy.”
Bear glanced at him, smirked, and with a motion so quick the eye could not follow it, drew his KA-BAR assault knife and made a lightning-fast backhand motion across Blade’s throat.
The man dropped like a stone, with only a slight gurgling noise as blood gushed from his severed carotid arteries.
Bear calmly leaned over and wiped the blade clean on Blade’s jacket and replaced it in his scabbard.
“Now,” Bear asked, his eyes searching his teammates’, “any other questions?”
Jinx grinned and shrugged. “Just the one, boss. What the hell do we do now?”
“First thing we do is get on the horn to our leader and see about getting a chopper out here to pick us up and then to see if we can catch the good doctor before he gets back to civilization.”
Bear had no sooner spoken than the sat-phone on his belt vibrated, signaling an incoming call.
Bear glanced at the screen. “Well, speak of the devil.”
He flipped the phone open. “Bear here.”
He listened to angry squawking for a few seconds and then cut it off. “Shut the fuck up, Colonel! I know the doc is on the run and that we’re significantly behind him. What I want to know is what can you do about fixing the situation instead of whining like a little baby?”
There was silence on the phone for a moment and then a lower, more reasonable tone asked a question.
“What do I need?” Bear asked, raising his eyebrows and glancing at his teammates as if to say, “can you believe this asshole?” “The first thing is I want you to get a chopper headed this way from Mexico City, unless you’ve got one closer on a ship offshore somewhere?”
Bear listened again. “I know we’re out of range of a helicopter, but just do what I tell you and everything will be okay. Have that Mexican general you have in your pocket pull out one of the old Huey skids he has stored there and have him take all the armament off it and load it full of gasoline cans and a Zodiac riverboat. They should be able to get enough gas on there for them to make the trip here all right. Just send them to these coordinates,” and he read the GPS settings from the phone’s screen.
He listened again. “No, I don’t know if they’ll have enough fuel to make it back and I don’t give a shit, as long as they have enough to take me and my men down the river to the outskirts of that town the doc is heading for. They can drop us there on the bank and we’ll take it from there.”
The voice on the phone raised in volume and again Bear cut it off with an angry retort, “Colonel, I’m only going to tell you once more to shut the fuck up about the past or I’m going to come up there to Maryland and shove this phone up your ass!”
When there was silence, Bear said in a more conciliatory tone, “Once we have the specimens, we’ll contact you and by then you should have figured out some way to get us from the coast of Mexico back to Mexico City and then on to you with the specimens.”
With that, he hung up the phone without waiting for a reply. He turned to his men, “We’ve got a couple or three hours until the chopper will arrive, so let’s grab some shut-eye, ’cause I have a feeling once it gets here we’re gonna be balls to the wall until this clusterfuck is over.”
Dr. John Meeker stopped in the middle of the hallway of Houston Baptist Hospital and took a deep breath. He’d been going nonstop for close to thirty-six hours and there was no end in sight.
He glanced around at the dozens of stretchers that lined the halls, each occupied by a coughing, hacking patient except for those that had patients on them that had already expired, covered with sheets that more often than not had copious bloodstains on them. The nurses and attendants were so overworked that they hadn’t had time to even remove the bodies, the living sick that needed care being their first priority.
He shook his head. While in medical school he had an interest in medical history and had read Dr. Samuel Pepys’s diary of the Black Plague that swept the world in 1665 where it caused the death of a third of the entire world’s population. Though caused by a different organism, the results were markedly similar, with over ten thousand deaths per week being described in the city of London, England, alone during that hellish summer of horror.
As he stared around the hospital, Meeker thought that number would be paltry compared to what he was seeing today, and he knew that losing a third of the world’s population to this particular plague was entirely possible if no cure were found and found quickly.
He was startled from his reverie when a nurse leaning over a nearby stretcher groaned and fell to the floor.
He rushed to her side and was saddened to see her flushed face and feel her fevered brow. She had obviously come down with the illness she had been so gallantly treating.
He knelt and picked her up and began to carry her toward the nearby triage rooms, though he knew he’d not find any space for her there.
Just outside one of the rooms, he paused and rolled an obviously dead body off the stretcher onto the floor and placed the nurse gently down upon it. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to give this selfless servant of medicine his full attention right now.
“Nurse,” he bellowed over his shoulder.
A breathless young woman moved quickly to his side. “Yes, sir?”
“Get me an IV setup and some antibiotics for this patient stat!”
“Uh, I’ll try, sir, but I must warn you we are running dangerously low on both IV fluids and antibiotics.”
He stared down at her. “Then go up and down the hall and take them from anyone who is already dead or looks to be near death, and get someone to help you. It does no good to be giving IVs and antibiotics to dead patients.”
He whirled away from his patient and took out his cell phone. He dialed the number of the hospital administrator’s office. When he answered, Meeker practically yelled, “Mr. Sampson, where are my IV fluids and antibiotics? I told you this morning we were going to be running short, and now I’m told that we are completely out of both.”
Sampson answered, “Good Lord, man. I’m doing all that I can. I’ve called everybody in the book and there are just none of those supplies left in the city.”
Meeker’s shoulders slumped. “Then God help us,” he groaned, “’Cause the rider on the white horse named Death is galloping down these corridors and there is no one to stop him now.”
Chapter 35
After he’d made his phone call arranging for a transport ship to pick them up at the harbor at Tehuantepec, Mason and Motzi pushed the boat back out into the river current.
The river was wider here and the current slower and much less rough. Lauren turned around and leaned her back against the bow of the boat as she watched Mason paddling and guiding the craft into the center of the river.