Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller Read online

  “You sound scared,” said Rashid, looking back over his shoulder with a grin.

  “Worried is a better word.”

  Rashid laughed. “A billion people in Africa, and maybe a few thousand cases of Ebola ever, and you think you’re in trouble.”

  Put that way, it made Austin’s fear of Ebola embarrassing. Nevertheless, he said, “Ebola kills everybody who gets it.”

  Rashid laughed again. “Not everybody.”

  The boda rode up on a crest and the jungle thinned. They were well up on the north slope of Mt. Elgon. Below, Kapchorwa’s houses and huts seemed to grow out of the intersection of a few dirt roads—some short, some snaking off east or west. Paving for the roads hadn’t made it from the capital out to the distant districts yet. And the Kapchorwa District, bordered on the east by Kenya with its hundred thousand farmers, was just about as far from Kampala as one could get and still be in Uganda.

  The boda driver stopped and announced, “Here.”

  Austin stepped off the bike. “Thanks.”

  Rashid got off, hitched up his pants, and adjusted his man parts. “Next time, I’ll get my own boda.”

  “You do that, Rashid.” Austin reached into his pocket to pull out a few more shillings as a tip, but the boda driver was already hurrying to get back up the trail and apparently away from Kapchorwa. He flashed a white palm in a wave and smiled as he revved the whiny engine to speed back up the bumpy trail.

  Still thinking about the Ebola virus, Austin said, “He got out of here in a hurry.”

  Rashid watched the boda driver zip back up the trail, not seeming to care how quickly the boda left. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  Austin looked west toward the sun sinking over the brown and green plain. The smoke of a few fires drifted up and dissolved in the wind. They were too large to be cooking fires, but too small to be wild fires. Probably charcoal production. At least, that was the guess that Austin attached to forested spots in the distance that leaked smoldering gray into the sky. He stopped staring at the vista and started walking down the trail. Rashid went along.

  The small town of Kapchorwa, with its hundred or so dwellings, sheds, and businesses, seemed quiet. Looking down the slope, Austin didn’t see anyone moving around, nor did he hear the distant shrill sounds of children playing before dinner. He did smell peanuts roasting—groundnuts, to the locals—along with the savory smell of onions cooking. He realized he was hungry again.

  Down on the village’s main road, an overturned semi-tractor-trailer still lay as it had since rolling over during Austin’s first week of teaching. Every day since, when it wasn’t raining, village kids played on the overturned vehicle. And though no rain clouds were in the sky, the kids were absent.

  Halfway down the slope, they left the meandering trail and cut across a lush sweet potato field.

  They neared a house, mud-walled on a wooden frame under a tin roof rusted as red as wet clay. It stood alone among the crops. A rope draped with wrinkled clothes was strung from one corner of the house to a lone tree. Plastic tubs of different colors—all-purpose and dirty—leaned against the walls outside. From the deep shadows inside the open doorway of the hovel, a pair of silently wary eyes watched Austin and Rashid pass.

  Softly, Rashid said, “That man is frightened.”

  Austin looked back at Rashid. “Of us?”

  Rashid shook his head.

  “How do you know?” Austin asked.

  “Are you joking? You couldn’t see the fright in his eyes?”

  “I think you’re reading too much into it.”

  Rashid pointed down to the village. “Where is everybody?”

  Sarcastically, Austin answered, “Maybe Ebola killed them all.”

  Rashid ignored the comment and instead cut a path through the bushy sweet potatoes, heading toward Isaac Luwum’s whitewashed cinderblock house on the western edge of town.

  Chapter 4

  Isaac Luwum, their sponsor, maintained a hedge of unruly native plants around the edges of his front yard. Austin and Rashid hopped over the short hedge and tromped on the worn, patchy grass on their way to the open front door.

  “Benoit? Margaux?” Austin called as he stepped into the main room. It was unusual for no one to be home. “Isaac?”

  “I’ll bet Isaac is drinking with that cabbage farmer.” Rashid nodded toward the back of the house where Benoit and Margaux shared a room. “I’ll bet I know what they’re doing.” Rashid stopped to listen.

  “No. I don’t hear anything.” Austin crossed through the brightly painted, overly decorated living room, then glanced in the kitchen and through the windows on the back of the house. “She’s usually pretty noisy. You’d know already if they were doing it.”

  “Maybe they’re done and they went to sleep.”

  “Go knock on their door and see if they’re in there.” Austin went into the kitchen and poured some water from one of the jugs. He hollered, “We’re almost out of water and it’s your turn to boil.”

  “Nobody here,” Rashid called, his voice notching a few tones higher as he walked toward the living room. He was getting anxious.

  “This is weird.” Austin crossed the living room again, tossed his backpack on the worn old couch, and dropped down beside it.

  Rashid stood in the center of the living room and looked down at Austin. “Nobody is outside. Benoit and Margaux are gone—”

  “They’re not here.” Austin shook his head slowly and took another drink. “That doesn’t imply whatever you think you’re implying when you say gone. Maybe they got tired of doing it in the bedroom and are off in the jungle, pretending they’re horny monkeys or something.”

  “You don’t think this is weird?” Rashid asked.

  “You’re letting your imagination convince you that something was wrong,” said Austin. “You need to be cool, Rashid. It’s dinnertime. Everybody is at home eating.”

  Rashid replied, “That’s stupid. You know everybody doesn’t go inside and eat at exactly the same time.”

  “I know. I’m just saying that you’re getting worked up for no reason. It’s like all the business you told me on the way here from Mbale about there being a billion people in Africa and only a couple thousand cases of Ebola in recorded history was just some bullshit you were telling yourself so that you wouldn’t be scared.” Austin grinned. “Are you worried about Ebola, Rashid? You can tell me.”

  “It’s no wonder Najid doesn’t like Americans.”

  “Your brother doesn’t like us because we’re smartasses?” Austin laughed. “Or is it because now that he suffers the burden of counting all your father’s oil money he’s pissed because we won’t buy Priuses?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” said Austin. “Get a drink. Put your stuff on your bunk and we’ll go out and see what’s up. Cool?”

  Rashid kicked a stray pillow to demonstrate his frustration and headed toward the room he shared with Austin.

  Austin drank the rest of his water, stood up, and looked out at the street through the front window. Still, no one was out. It was weird. But he was sure there was an explanation. It could be fear over the Ebola rumors. The army had blocked the road. That would be enough to frighten the people of any town.

  Rashid came out of the room and went into the kitchen to get himself a cup of water. Some pots rattled as he looked for the kettle. “I could make some tea. Do you want any?”

  “Up to you. You want to go out and find out what’s going on first?”

  Austin heard Rashid set the teakettle on the counter. Then he didn’t hear anything. He looked back into the kitchen. Rashid’s head was down. He wasn’t moving. Austin asked, “Are you worried?”

  “Najid called me yesterday. He says all he sees on the news are stories about Ebola. I told him not to worry. Ebola is in West Africa. We’re in East Africa. But he kept telling me about all the hundreds of people who are dying and about how this is the worst outbreak ever.”

  Aus
tin raised his hands in frustration. “You convinced me that the odds of us getting Ebola are so astronomically small that I shouldn’t worry about it.”

  “That’s the same thing I told Najid.”

  “But?”

  “He worries. He told me to get on a plane and come home. He said he had a ticket waiting for me in Entebbe.”

  “When’s the flight?”

  “It was this morning. He said if I didn’t get on that plane, he’d come here and grab me by the ear, put me on a plane, and take me home. His worries are infecting me, I think.”

  “Look, Rashid, I don’t know much about Ebola. Somebody has to bleed on you or something. And I read it has a long incubation time.”

  “How do you know this?” Rashid asked.

  “I did a little bit of research before I came over,” said Austin. “I came across an underreported story about a small outbreak in Sierra Leone and that piqued my curiosity. Mostly what I wanted to know was what I could catch while I was here, and how I could avoid it.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  Austin said, “We left the village last week. Six days ago. There was no Ebola here when we left. If by some really bad luck somebody caught it from a monkey or whatever, it would be, like, one person. That’s it. There is no such thing as a whole village full of patient zeroes. So if somebody got it, their caregiver might get it, too. And so on, and so on. It could take a month or two before enough people get it for anybody but the local doctor to even notice.”

  Rashid didn’t say anything.

  Austin sat back down on the couch. “Take a deep breath. Make the tea. We’ll drink some. Then we’ll go. For all we know, Benoit and Margaux will come back while the water is coming to a boil and we can ask them what’s going on. If not, we’ll go over to the hospital and ask Dr. Littlefield. He’ll know.”

  Chapter 5

  At first, Salim hated Pakistan. Every single thing about it was unlike America. Of course, he expected that. But after living nineteen of his twenty years in a Denver suburb, and only one year in Hyderabad, the romantic idea of Pakistani life—the basis for his expectations—was nothing like the reality.

  From the moment he landed in Lahore and walked off the plane, it started. The air was pungent with the smell of curry, diesel fumes, a whole range of plant smells, and even a bit of rotting garbage. All the smells of a city that one gets used to and doesn’t even notice, until suddenly replaced by a whole different set of smells, becoming a constantly noticeable reminder of alien-ness.

  But that was just the first thing.

  The people spoke English with an accent that Salim had a hard time following. Of course, his parents spoke with a similar accent. However, they used good grammar in calm, slow, educated speech—not the rushed slang of people on the street.

  Salim’s accent was distinctly American, and that earned him suspicious glances from everyone he spoke to. His sense of alienation made the suspicion feel like hate. Back on that day, as he waited three hours for his tardy contact to come forward and collect him, he sulked near a ticket counter, trying to figure out how to turn his meager cash into a ticket back to Denver.

  In fact, he’d been looking at his watch as he sat there, and had picked the top of the upcoming hour as the time when he’d stop waiting and call his father to beg him for money to buy that ticket. But ten minutes before the hand reached twelve on the clock face, a man walked up to him. “Salim?” he asked.

  From there, Salim and his bag were hurried out of the airport, rushed into a taxi, and dropped off on a crowded street. He was hustled through block after block of pushing and shoving people, and finally trundled off in a rickety white van. Five others, silent young men with worried faces, shared the rear seats of the van with Salim. A driver and the man in charge sat in front.

  They spent the better part of two days heading north in the van, slowly navigating roads which were mostly rutted paths, wide enough for the van but not much more. It was hot. It was dusty. It was a miserable trip. When one of the frightened young men tried to strike up a conversation to pass the time, he was scolded so fiercely that no one in the van attempted to speak for the rest of the trip.

  On his second night in Pakistan, Salim and the other young men spent the night in a house that looked like the ones he’d seen on TV whenever soldiers were raiding villages in Afghanistan or drones were blowing them up in Pakistan. Pale stone walls with barren courtyards, the houses were all the sandy color of the surrounding dirt. And everywhere there were dirty, third-world people.

  The six shared a room for the night: four on bunks, two on the floor. One of the brave among them whispered a question, and after that a quiet conversation grew. One of Salim’s fellow travelers was from Canada, one from Florida. Two were from the UK, and another hailed from Germany. All were children of Muslim immigrants and had spent most—if not all—of their lives in their respective countries.

  The next day, Salim was put in the back of a dilapidated Japanese pickup with Jalal, a nineteen-year-old from London with a comically thick working-class English accent. They rode in the truck most of that day, along dirt roads that wound their way past mountain villages and a few towns. They whispered about where they might be—Pakistan or maybe Afghanistan. Though it could have been Tajikistan or China, for all they knew.

  Late that day, with the temperatures dipping near freezing, they arrived at their new home and training center, a complex of buildings that looked to have grown up out of the dirt. Indoor plumbing was a luxury left hundreds, if not thousands of miles behind. Comfortable, bug-free mattresses were replaced with cots made of blankets over sticks lashed together. The kitchen was an outdoor cook’s fire. It was camping, only instead of a tent Salim slept between stone walls under a leaky roof.

  Chapter 6

  Two months in, Salim had gotten used to the thin air, the cold nights, the simple meals, and Spartan life. They trained six days a week, usually four at a time under their two instructors on marksmanship, ambush, shooting from a moving vehicle, physical conditioning, and a host of other skills that any good jihadist might need.

  With six trainees in the camp, two would take the rotating duty of drone watch while the other four trained. Keeping out of sight when drones were overhead kept them out of the crosshairs when America’s politicians needed to boost their popularity with news feeds of exploding Muslims.

  Salim scanned the sky. “I hate watching for drones.”

  “It’s an easy day.” Jalal handed the binoculars to Salim, “It’s your turn.”

  Salim lifted them to his eyes and looked at several high, wispy clouds off to the west, thinking that maybe he saw a bright spot up there. “Has anyone ever seen a drone?”

  “Dhakwan saw one last week,” said Jalal. “You knew that. I was there when he told you.”

  “He saw something,” said Salim, finding himself asking why every single thing said by anybody needed to be taken on faith.

  “It was a drone.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a passenger jet or something else?” Salim asked.

  Jalal pointed to the south. “Dhakwan said it was in the sky that way. They say there are five or six camps near the base of that mountain.”

  “We’re not supposed to know where the other camps are.” Salim shook his head and looked at the mountain, curiosity making him wonder if he could see the camps.

  Jalal chuckled. “If the CIA catches me and tortures me what will I tell them? The camps are at the base of a mountain? Which mountain, they’d ask. What could I say? I still don’t know where we are.”

  Salim said, “You better learn something to tell them when they torture you because you know they won’t stop until you do.”

  “I know as much as you,” Jalal said, “which is nothing.”

  They both laughed and didn’t worry about being scolded for it. A few hundred meters to the east of the compound, the two instructors and the trainees were sitting in the back of an SUV with the rear door open, shootin
g at targets nailed to trees and making too much noise.

  Jalal said, “The only thing we see besides mountains and sky are the other trainees and our instructors. We don’t even know their real names.”

  “Be thankful you don’t.”

  “We see the truck that brought us here driven by a no-name man with a beard, dressed like every other peasant we saw on the road. He comes now and again. He drops off food and sometimes ammunition. That’s everything I know.”

  Salim looked at another far away spot in the sky. It turned out to be a bird. “Do you think we’ll get killed by a drone in our sleep one day?”

  “Does it matter how we die as long as it’s not running away like a coward?”

  “I suppose not,” Salim mused.

  “It only matters that we die for jihad, to stop things like this.” Jalal pointed at the sky. “I don’t know what you heard in America—your news is little better than propaganda—but drones kill more innocents than combatants.”

  “We hear about some of that on the news.” Salim lowered the binoculars. Holding them up too long made his arms tired. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

  “It’s the main reason I’m here. Rich countries think they can murder Muslims who have no money, and nobody will care. It’s wrong.”

  Salim nodded and the two sat in silence for a long time after that, scanning the sky both with and without the binoculars.

  “What do you think we’ll do?” Jalal asked.

  Salim shrugged. “We spend a lot of time training with the RPGs.”

  “I hope it’s not a bomb vest. I don’t mind dying, but I want to die fighting. The thought of blowing myself up to kill people is unsatisfying.”

  “Unsatisfying?” Salim gave Jalal a sidelong glance. “What does that mean?”

  “I want to see the results of my work, at least some of it,” answered Jalal. “If you wear a vest, you press a button, and then you’re in heaven. You don’t even feel pain. You’re just gone.”

  “You want to see Americans die before you go?” Salim asked.