Fuck! Gino hissed.
I’ll take out as many of the cell as I can before I go down, Draden said, meaning it. He was going to make sure as many of them were dead as possible. Not because they’d infected him, but because they’d infected an entire village to use as a trap. Joe, someone has to find out where this is coming from.
I will, Joe promised.
Get the wounded out of here, there’s not much you can do for me. Some of those injuries were severe.
Damn it, Draden. That was Gino.
He didn’t feel as bad as they did. He didn’t have much of a future anyway. Just pissed I wasted all that time going to school instead of partying.
Yeah, ’cuz, you’re such a party animal, Malichai said with an attempt at sarcastic humor. His voice was tight. The feeling in his mind—sorrow.
Tell Nonny she’s the best. He should have told the old woman that himself. Wyatt Fontenot’s grandmother had taken the entire team into her home. She’d cared for them as she would her own. He hadn’t had that kind of affection from anyone since his foster mother had died when he was young. He hadn’t known anyone else was capable of loving others the way the woman he called mother had, until he met Nonny. He should have told her and he hadn’t, not once. He was surprised at the emotion welling up. Yeah, he should have told her. She’d mourn for him, and it shouldn’t have shocked him that his teammates would as well, but it did.
We can pick you up, take you back and try one of the treatments. I know they’re not sanctioned yet, but some have worked when a virus is detected early enough, Gino said.
We don’t know anything about this one yet and we can’t take the chance, you all know that. He objected because he could infect every one of them and, when they landed, every doctor and nurse waiting to help the wounded. He wasn’t having that on his conscience.
You have anywhere from a few days to twenty.
Joe, don’t make this worse. Get the hell out of here and make certain every single one of the wounded survive. Draden knew the virus was more fast-acting than that; at most he had two days.
There was the briefest of hesitations, but Joe was the commanding officer for a reason. He had to make the tough decisions. You have my word. Damn honor serving with you, Draden.
The others murmured similar sentiments. He didn’t reply. What was there to say? He had never considered himself a sentimental man—in fact, he tried not to feel much at all—but living in Louisiana with his GhostWalker team, emotions had crept in whether he wanted them to or not. He’d learned at a very early age that it was better to push feelings aside and use logic for every decision. Emotions fucked things up in ways that could be very, very bad.
Still there was Trap. The man was a genuine crazy-ass genius with Asperger’s. Super-high IQ and wealthy as all hell. Didn’t have a clue about social cues. Draden had been the one to clue him in as often as possible. Trap didn’t let many people in and neither did Draden, but they’d been there for each other.
Tell Trap he’s the best. He’ll do fine. Tell him . . . He broke off, shocked that he was choking up. He loved the man like a brother. Shit.
I got it, Joe said.
Draden let the forest close around him as the sound of the helicopter faded into the distance. He wasn’t worried about being alone. He was used to it. He’d been alone most of his life, even in the midst of a crowd. He could handle that, no problem. He began to move quickly toward the village of the dead. It was very small, only a few families, many related to one another. He was a very fast runner, but that would spread the virus through his bloodstream much quicker. Still, it might not be a bad idea just to get it over with. He played with that idea as he jogged, his animal senses flaring out to uncover anyone that might have been left behind to keep an eye on him.
He pulled up the facts about the village and region they’d been briefed on. The village’s name, Lupa Suku, meant Forgotten Tribe, and he thought it very apt from everything he’d read about them. The village was so remote it wasn’t even considered a subdistrict of Rambutan. He knew that driving southeast the thirty-four and some miles from Palembang to Rambutan, villages along the road were more and more scarce. Eventually that road became nothing more than a muddy broad path, lined on either side by trees and brush. A few cars and buses shared the road with bikes and animals until it disappeared.
So remote, Lupa Suku could only be reached by bike, boat or animals such as a domestic ox. During the wet season it was impossible to get any motorized vehicle through. Heavy items tended to get stuck in the thick mud, so it was necessary to move everything via water. Most used a small boat to access the village via the Banyuasin River.
According to the briefing given by the representative of the Indonesian government, primary trade consisted of fish and rice. There was a small copper mine that was kept a secret by the locals. The copper was mined by hand a little at a time as they had no modern machinery. The government had turned a blind eye, acting as though they knew nothing about that little mine or the fact that the villagers traded the copper to poachers who came to the area looking for exotic birds. Money meant little to the villagers, so they tended to barter for the things they needed.
Draden figured bartering was how the terrorists had introduced the virus. It was possible that the virus had occurred some other way, via bugs or animals, but he doubted it. The WHO had been trying to find a source, but the fact that the nearby terrorist cell had used the dead villagers for an ambush, killing nearly all the WHO doctors and their workers, tended to make him believe they were responsible.
The terrorist cell was well organized for being fairly new. Their job was to topple the government, and unlike others targeting police officers, they had chosen to undermine the people’s confidence in their government by introducing a hot virus. Draden and his team believed the village was their first large test. There had to have been other smaller experiments.
Lupa Suku was the perfect village to test the virus on. The people preferred to do their trading via boat and didn’t allow outsiders to come to their village without a good reason or an invitation. They were secretive, mostly, the government thought, because they had the copper mine and didn’t want outsiders to know about it. They were very self-sufficient and lived in accord with the animals in the forest. Very peaceful, they used their weapons only for protection.
During the times of the year when the rain made it very difficult to travel, the tribe went weeks without being seen by others. Lupa Suku was located a quarter mile inland of the river and couldn’t be seen by passersby traveling on the water, which, again, made them a perfect target. The village kept boats docked and a sentry to watch over the area and call out should there be trouble. A virus would go unseen by the sentry.
Draden moved through the forest with confidence. He knew at least one or two of the MSS would have been left behind to observe him and tell the others what he was up to. He intended to burn the village and then start hunting them. He would kill as many as possible, leaving one alive to follow back to the main MSS village.
Trap and Wyatt, like Draden, were very familiar with hemorrhagic viruses. All three had worked on combining antibodies to target specific strains of Ebola. The antibodies had successfully saved monkeys that had been infected within twenty-four hours, but as the disease progressed, the success rate had dwindled. They had discussions, long into the nights, about how to raise the chances for those who were in the more advanced stages of the diseases.
From his studies into most hot viruses, Draden knew he didn’t have long before he would be feeling the effects. His death would be a horrible one. He had a gun, and he was going out that way for sure. He just had to make certain he didn’t wait so long that his body was too ravaged by the disease to be able to make the rational decision to use a bullet. He’d seen the effects of hemorrhagic viruses on a human being and his mind shied away from his gruesome future.
Eve
n so, he picked up the pace, winding his way along the narrow animal trails he found leading from the forest toward Lupa Suku. He knew he had to be cautious, traveling fast the way he was. There were other dangers in the forest besides the MSS.
There were only about five hundred Sumatran tigers left and one of them had chosen the area around the village to make his territory. The people of the village considered it an honor and lived in harmony with the big cat. According to the reports Draden had read, the tiger had showed up when a palm mill threatened its former habitat, and the peat swamp nearby had lured the endangered animal to claim new territory. The village made an agreement with the local poachers to leave the tiger alone in exchange for trading their copper exclusively with them. Even with that agreement in place, traps were set by poachers looking for tigers or other rare animals. Draden couldn’t afford to be caught in one of them.
Heavy vegetation surrounded Lupa Suku. Tall dipterocarp trees joined at the top to gather into a canopy, providing shade. Climbing their trunks were woody, thick-stemmed lianas and dozens of species of epiphytes. Orchids and ferns also lived on the trunks and derived their nourishment from the air.
The exotic plants and vines were surprisingly colorful; flowers were everywhere. Several trees and brush held the colored flowers up and out to grasp at the sun’s rays. Cicada trees lined a path from the water to the inland village, and more trees formed a barrier to the peat swamp, the flowers threatening to blossom at any moment.
Draden drank in his surroundings with both appreciation and sorrow. The beautiful path led to a village that should have been thriving. Instead, it was now a path to certain death. The stench was unbelievable. The WHO camp had been set up a distance away from Lupa Suku, but still within sight. He could see that members of the MSS had ransacked the camp after killing the workers and doctors. Some lay dead in their hazmat suits. He went right past their camp and entered the village.
It was eerily silent. A pit had been dug and the bodies had already been placed inside for cremation. Even the fuel was sitting there in cans. It would burn hot and fast. Draden made a quick circuit of the village to make certain no bodies had been left behind before he doused all buildings with the accelerant, and then he doused the bodies in the pit. He lit the entire thing on fire and then backed away from the terrible heat.
He was fortunate that it wasn’t raining, although the forest around Lupa Suku was saturated. He moved deeper into the forest, away from the flames shooting into the air, going farther inland so that the sentries the MSS had left behind would have to actively search for him.
He covered his passing through the peat swamp, using trees to travel in rather than making his way across the wet ground. He found a nice place to wait—the branches of a hardwood tree. Around him were aromatic spice trees, but this one had a nice crotch where several branches met at the main trunk, providing him with a semicomfortable place to rest.
Draden remained very still and quiet so that all around him the insects and rodents in the forest once more became active. They made for good sentries. He drank water he’d retrieved from one of the fallen Rangers’ packs while he studied the forest around him. Fig trees were abundant, mass producing enough fruit twice a year to feed many of the forest’s inhabitants, including the endangered helmeted hornbill. The forests were rich in valuable hardwood and he saw the evidence of that all around him. The tree he’d chosen was in the middle of a grove of exotic fruit trees that attracted a tremendous amount of wildlife.
Draden took his time studying the layout of the forest floor. Once the members of the MSS came, he would have to move fast, kill most and then track one back to their nest. He wanted to know where every trap might be so he didn’t get caught in one. After mapping out the forest floor in every direction as far as he could see, he marked the places he thought a trap would most likely be set.
He closed his eyes and studied the effects of the virus on his body. He could find none. His guess was, going off incubation for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, he had two to twenty-one days to find the home of the MSS terrorists and kill them. As far as he was concerned, that gave him plenty of time to get his job done.