“Traitors,” she said, her voice an anguished growl. “Soldiers all over the camp just opened fire, without warning, killing their commanding officers, their friends, anyone. It was coordinated, sir. They planned it. I don’t know why. I barricaded myself in medical, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last.” I could hear the staccato bursts of automatic weapons in the background. “What should I do, sir?”
“I’m not an officer,” I said, weakly.
“You said you were HQ!”
“I’m just an analyst.” I stared at the screen, numb, as another Hellfire turned the camp’s command building into burning rubble. I could see the blurry forms of men running from the blast. The woman on the phone with me disconnected the call, but I kept it to my ear, imagining I could hear the screams. Shaunessy shouted into a headset, telling the brass on the floor above us what was happening. “I don’t know what you should do,” I said into the dead phone. “I just don’t know.”
The drone’s wide-angle lens gave us a clear view of the camp as five-hundred-pound bombs fell from the sky by the dozens. We found out later that a single B-52H from the 11th Bomb Squadron had failed to release any ordnance on the attack on Val de Cans. Instead, it returned to São Luis and dropped its entire load of eighty-one bombs and twenty cruise missiles on the US camp before flying straight into the ocean.
Of the three thousand soldiers stationed at São Luis, less than two hundred survived.
The combination of shock and exhaustion made my head spin. I felt like a fog was creeping around the edge of my vision. I kept seeing the bombs fall, the military tents erupt into gray clouds of smoke. When I stumbled upstairs to find Melody, she grabbed me by both arms and stared me down until my vision cleared and I looked her in the eye. “Get your brother on the phone. Talk to your father, to the doctors who treated him, anyone you can find. We need to be able to test for this thing. Something simple we can do for thousands of soldiers in the field. That or we need a cure.”
“My brother and father are infected,” I said. “They’ll be just like the traitors in São Luis. We can’t tell them anything, or trust anything they tell us.”
“Your brother has answers we need. If not him, then maybe his university. Somebody. We need to know how this thing works, how it spreads, and how to know who’s infected and who isn’t.”
“Okay. I’m on it,” I said.
I found a free phone out in the big room and made the call. My mother picked up halfway through the first ring. “Neil?” Her voice sounded tinny, and there was a faint echo on the line.
“I need to talk to Paul,” I said. “Is he there?”
She said something I couldn’t make out.
I cupped my hand over my other ear, trying to block out the bustle and conversation of the office around me. “What?”
“I said he’s missing!”
“Who is? Paul?”
“Both of them.” Her voice shook with emotion. “They walked out of here together, shortly after you called. When I got back, his room was empty. Neil, you have to come home. Your father’s gone.”
CHAPTER 20
“I had no way to call you,” my mom said, her voice shaking, verging on tears. “The doctors didn’t discharge him. Nobody even saw them go. I have no idea where they went.”
My mind raced. I was still reeling from the attack on São Luis, and the world of Glen Burnie, Maryland, seemed impossibly distant. “Did you call the police?”
“They left a note, Neil. A tiny scribbled note on a hospital pad saying that they had important things to do and hoped I would understand.” Mom started crying, her tears making her stammer. “The police say there’s nothing they can do. That two adult men are free to make their own choices.”
“But Dad’s sick. He needs care. That’s like kidnapping.”
I could almost hear her helpless shrug. “He’s not sick anymore. And he doesn’t owe me anything. Apparently he doesn’t need me anymore.”
“That’s nonsense. He had a few hours of lucidity. We don’t know if it will last. We don’t know how complete it was. He’s out there somewhere with Paul, and what does he remember of the last few years? Is he forming new memories now? We don’t know, and I don’t think we can just assume he’s safe. Certainly not because Paul is with him.”
“I’m so worried for them,” she said. “For both of them. Where could they have gone?”
South America might be coming apart at the seams, but my responsibility to my family came first. Somebody else would have to save the world. “I’m coming home, Mom,” I said. “I’ll be on the first plane out of here.”
The first plane turned out to be one of a fleet of C-130Js making daily runs to and from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Melody made no objection to me leaving; in fact, she encouraged it, with the idea that Paul’s research and knowledge might be the key to everything. Most of the military planes were coming in, not going out, and São Paulo’s three commercial airports had been shut down except for critical travel. The Brazilian air force had taken complete control of Guarulhos International for military purposes. That left the C-130s.
They strapped me to a paratrooper jump seat on the wall of the aircraft’s forty-one-foot cargo bay. The Super Hercules, as the plane was called, was known for its incredible carrying capacity and range, but it was not designed for creature comforts. It was loud and cold and vibrated violently enough that my teeth hurt. My seat was made of metal framing and canvas webbing, not much more than a camping chair that pulled down from the side of the aircraft.
By an hour in, I felt battered and sore. After two hours, I was starting to talk to myself over the din, which was loud enough to give me a headache, even though the pilot had given me a pair of earplugs. And it wasn’t until we hit the three hour mark that I worked up enough courage to visit what passed for a toilet, which the pilot had referred to as the “honeypot” when showing me my seat. When we finally landed at Eglin eight hours later, I thought that if someone threatened me at gunpoint to get back in the plane, I just might choose the bullet.
When I boarded the commercial flight to Maryland, the cramped economy class seat felt like luxury. It even provided an in-flight phone, which I wasted no time putting to use. I called the University of Maryland first, where the provost told me Paul had failed to show up for his classes that week. I called his apartment building and spoke to the landlord, who informed me that he didn’t keep track of his tenants’ comings and goings, and he wouldn’t give out information to anyone but the police even if he did. I thought about telling him I was NSA and threatening him a bit, but I didn’t think that would change his mind. And it was probably illegal.
I tried the police instead but got a similar runaround. Their policy, the duty officer informed me, was to consider each missing person report on a case-by-case basis and determine the duration and intensity of the search accordingly. In the case of my father, there was every indication that he had left willingly and without coercion, and he had left behind a record of his intention to leave in the form of a note.
“But he has Alzheimer’s,” I said. “He can’t just leave. It’s not safe.”
“According to the file, he left with a legal caregiver.”
“He wasn’t even discharged from the hospital. My brother just took him, and nobody knows where they are.”
“Sir, I’ll tell you what I can do. I can put you in touch with the officer who made the report. I can also recommend that you contact the hospital or Mr. Johns’s physician. If they can confirm that he is at medical risk, that will raise the priority of his case.”