Bobby Adair - Ebola K

A man came up out of the rear of the plane, passing out bottles of water and food.

Another man stood up at the front of the plane with a satchel he then handed to a guy on the first row. “Inside is an envelope with your name on it. Find your envelope and pass the bag to the next man. We will be landing in Nairobi in forty minutes. Some of you have flights leaving shortly after we arrive. You’ll find airline tickets and itineraries in your envelope with your information. You will also find credit cards in your name and cash in the currency of your country of origin. All of you have connecting flights and long layovers. You’ll each be traveling for most of the next two days.”

The plane bounced through some turbulence and the speaker fell to the side, hitting roughly against the door. When he stood back up, embarrassed, he shrugged and smiled. A few of Salim’s compatriots chuckled softly. It was almost normal.

The speaker straightened himself out and put his serious face back on. “While you are in each airport, walk around, learn what you can about the security, the layout, and look for weaknesses. Don’t write anything down that could be used as evidence to detain you. You each have a prepaid cell phone in your envelope. A phone number has been added to the contact list for someone called Mother. Mother will call you to give you instructions. If you need to call for questions, call Mother, but don’t make a habit of it. We know what your schedules are, so don’t worry if you find yourself coming to the end of your itinerary. We’ll contact you with instructions before that.”

More turbulence but the speaker caught himself on a seat back and smiled confidently. “Otherwise, enjoy your Western lives. Eat at restaurants. Spend the money. Smile, just like holiday travelers. Talk with other passengers, get to know them. The hard part is behind you. From here forward, your main purpose is to fit back into the country you came from. Don’t spend any time worrying about when you will be called up for a mission. That day is far in the future.”

Mitch spent the evening and the night in the hospital. His first impulse was to leave the doctors and aid workers there with their wounded man, pull some strings to get the Uganda People’s Defence Force in gear, and go back to the village that night. The more he thought about it, the more he came to believe whatever was going on up the road had to do with the Ebola outbreak. And as much as his intuition told him Ebola and terrorism were intersecting up that road, it was his task to find proof of that. He was a disgruntled, self-proclaimed embassy playboy, out to do his part in the War on Terror. The agency must have been taken by surprise to dump all of this in his lap.

With his options waning, he stayed in the hospital and befriended the woman who’d been near him when her coworker was shot. The woman, a Dr. Mills from Tampa, Florida, was young, dark-haired, and athletic—exactly the kind of girl he’d try to bed. But that wasn’t why he’d cozied up to her. If terrorists were up that road to Kapchorwa fiddling with a way to weaponize Ebola, he’d need help from at least one doctor in putting those pieces together.

The wounded guy died sometime around three a.m., putting the doctors into a frenzy of heated arguments and phone calls. Mitch—by then on a first-name basis with the survivors—stayed on the fringes and nudged them to go back. He tried convincing them that they needed to find out what was so important up that road that it needed to be protected.

In the end, he won. Not completely, but enough. Dr. Mills and another doctor named Simmons agreed to go back with Mitch, provided the army went first and secured the village. On that particular point, Mitch had been assured by his boss that the UPDF was heading up that road in force at sunup.

So after sleeping too few hours, and eating something from a food vendor on the street, Mitch loaded his two doctors into a truck, along with his two men from the day before, and four more armed contractors in another vehicle which took the lead.

Six menacing, quiet black men with guns made the doctors feel more secure. Knowing the army had gone ahead several hours earlier helped a lot with that feeling.

When they finally drove into Kapchorwa, Dr. Mills quietly shuddered, “My God.”

Everyone else in the truck was silent as they drove around an armored vehicle parked in the road with a man standing up through a hole in its roof behind a machine gun. Soldiers were milling around or searching through the remains of burned houses.

At the intersection of two dirt roads that was the center of the tiny town, three military vehicles were parked. Four men who appeared to be the officers in charge stood engaged in discussion. Mitch had the driver stop the car near them. He got out with Dr. Mills in tow, skillfully handling the introductions, making it clear that he was the American Cultural Attaché from Kampala, here to find a missing American college student, and that the doctors were present to search for signs of an Ebola outbreak.

Mitch then asked what had happened. The soldiers had only secured the town a half hour earlier, killing nine Arab gunmen in the process. Aside from the obvious—that the place had been systematically burned—no one knew what had transpired or why.

With a clear warning to Mitch and the doctors that the army couldn’t be responsible for their safety, the army officers went back to their business.

Mitch turned toward Dr. Mills, seeing past her that his hired gunmen were out of the cars, casually holding their weapons, ready for whatever might come. Mitch looked around at the blackened walls and collapsed roofs. The whole place smelled of ash and smoke. He coughed. “I don’t know where to start. Any ideas?”

Dr. Mills was looking up a road that seemed to point toward Mt. Elgon’s peak before curving to the east a few hundred meters up. She pointed. “I think that’s the hospital. You can still see most of the word painted on the front wall.”

Mitch looked. Indeed she was right. Several of the letters were obscured by black burns and smoke stains. “Are you thinking that if there was an outbreak here, we’d see some evidence of it in the hospital?”

“Exactly,” Dr. Mills confirmed.

Mitch had four of his men head up to the hospital to make sure it was secure. “Let’s give them a moment.” He turned to address Dr. Mills. “Once they get up there, we’ll drive the trucks over.”

She nodded. “After yesterday, that sounds fine to me.”

While they waited, Dr. Mills added, “If you can look past the destruction and forget about how many dead there must be—”

Mitch looked at Dr. Mills, “What?”

She was shaking her head. “I was going to say, it’s beautiful here, but it was a stupid thought. It was beautiful here. Look at the houses, the huts, the buildings. Somebody systematically burned this whole town.”

Mitch looked back at the charred structures. He looked up the street to see his hired gunmen checking inside houses and behind walls as they went. They were careful with their lives.

“I can’t imagine how many died.” Dr. Mills apparently couldn’t stop thinking about the death toll. “How many people lived here, do you know?”

“A thousand, maybe, but most of them probably ran off in the fields and the forests before the fire. People aren’t as helpless as they seem sometimes, and uneducated doesn’t mean stupid. They can still see trouble and know how to get away from it.” Mitch squinted up the street. His men were at the hospital, and one was waving for them to come. “I don’t think we’ll find as many dead as the destruction suggests.”