Don Pendleton - Silent Arsenal

They were makeshift laboratories, she knew, the men in space suits drawing blood from both villagers and soldiers alike who had fallen ill. What had happened here? If this was some testing ground for a biological weapon engineered in Yangon, surely the SLORC wouldn’t use their own soldiers as guinea pigs. And if she and her fighters remained in the area, would they, too, become stricken by whatever sickness appeared to claim the lives of victims within a matter of hours?

For more than two days now she had remained with her fighters, high up in the hills, hidden in the forest, an umbrella of mist of suspended clouds shielding them from the flock of helicopter gunships patrolling the skies. With mounting rage, she had watched the Barking Dogs gun down every man, woman and child of the three largest villages in the vicinity of where, she assumed, the blast had detonated. They dragged them out of their bamboo huts. They dumped bodies—some of which, she observed, were still moving—into pits dug out by heavy machinery flown in by still more giant transport helicopters. They poured gasoline over both the living and the dead, ignited mass graves with flamethrowers before soldiers moved on, torching every last hut, every living thing. The screams of victims burning alive still echoed in her head. The call of the murdered, she told herself, crying out for justice from the grave.

Demanding vengeance.

She looked away from the burning pit, the meandering space suits, the soldiers with flamethrowers burning down what few huts still stood, and searched the faces of her fighters. Beyond anger, she saw they were frightened, wondering, most likely, what horror had been unleashed on the Kachin.

“We will return to camp. We are going to need outside help,” she told them. “I know what has to be done.”

She turned away, shaking with fury, leading her fighters down the hill toward the river. Whatever was happening, they all knew there was far more to fear now than just the Barking Dogs.

“REPORT. AND DO NOT tell me you have no answers.”

General Nuyaung was still waving back Dr. Angkhu, working nervous surveillance around the space suit, taking in the commotion of soldiers hard at it, disposing of corpses. The filter mask staved off the fumes of burning flesh, but now that he was on the ground, smack in the middle of a contaminated zone, Nuyaung felt the fear rising. Bodies were still being hauled by soldiers from tents, dumped into a mass grave, men in space suits wandering in and out of the plastic tents, heavy machinery unearthing more mass graves. He spotted the bloody carcass of a tiger, a figure with leaking guts stretched out near the large bamboo hut. He saw Angkhu follow his stare, the doctor’s voice muffled by his helmet.

“Colonel Lingpau.”

“Speak up!”

“He was attacked,” Angkhu said, “this morning. It is most unusual, distressing to inform you this, but I would urge caution, especially at night. Three other tigers have been seen—”

“I do not care about that. A tiger can be shot! And why hasn’t Colonel Lingpau’s body been burned?”

“Major Kyin. He was uncertain whether you would desire…such a disposal of a fellow officer.”

Nuyaung bellowed at the closest group of soldiers to throw the colonel’s body and the tiger carcass into the fire.

“What are we faced with?” he shouted at Angkhu.

“I…we… Initial tests are inconclusive.”

“Inconclusive!”

“It is a filo or a thread virus. But it is unlike any virus we have ever seen. Its DNA appears a combination of smallpox, malaria, perhaps another genetically mutated virus—we are not certain. But whatever it is, it multiplies at an extreme rapid rate in a host. First symptoms of outbreak occur within two hours.”

“Is it airborne? Can you become infected by mere contact with a carrier?”

“For our purposes, I believe we would be better served if we could study this back in Yangon—”

“No one leaves here until I have answers. What about the refinery?”

“If you are asking if the refinery is contaminated, the answer is no. Viruses do not simply go away, they merely hide. A virus needs a live host.”

“Watch your tongue! I am not completely ignorant of the situation, Doctor. I sense you are holding something back. What is your expert opinion? How bad is it?”

“The virus, in my expert opinion, is a hybrid cross, created in a laboratory. It—”

Nuyaung gritted his teeth, waiting, the look in Angku’s eyes warning him he would not like the answer. “Speak!”

“I am afraid this particular virus, General, is one hundred percent fatal.”

NAHIRA MUHDU no longer prayed for deliverance from evil. God, she believed, knew the horror she was leaving behind, aware, too, of her needs. If she—and her only surviving family—were to survive the journey, reach safety inside the border of Kenya, then it was God’s will. She was too tired, so parched from thirst the tears had ceased flowing, too weak from hunger, even, to pray.

It had been…what? she wondered, feeling the blood squish in sandals worn down to ragged strands of leather, each yard earned over rock-stubbled broken ground shooting pain through every nerve ending. Three weeks? A month since she had set out on foot with the other villagers from Bhion and the vast surrounding southern plain?

They had been driven out by marauding rebel troops at war with the government of Addis Ababa, and the entire country appeared under assault by rebels and soldiers alike, men who were more like wild beasts than anything human. Killing. Burning. Looting. Raping. The horrors of a new war with Eritrea had spread from the north where Eritrean soldiers were invading the Tigray region. She had heard her country was losing the latest war with Eritrea, mauled Ethiopian troops falling back to the plains of the south, renegade soldiers taking what they wanted from defenseless villages so they could live to fight—or murder—another day.

Famine, drought and civil war were nothing new to Ethiopia, she knew, but the past six months had become a living hell, her country gone mad with violence and brutality, villages in flames from the Tigray to the Darod, reports of mass graves littering the countryside. Drought, then starvation and, finally, the invasion by Eritrea had unleashed anarchy, an evil, it seemed to her, that was much like an avalanche gathering momentum the longer it kept rolling.

And the evil of other men had found her. Remaining in her homeland was certain death. Small comfort, but she wasn’t alone in misery.

Her anger and grief had withered some the first week out of the village, exhaustion and hunger dampening raw emotion, but the memory of her husband, shot dead by the killers of the Free Ethiopian Order of Islam, was still fresh, as if it happened only minutes ago. What they hadn’t burned, they plundered, seizing every last grain of wheat, every handful of sorghum they could find. The horror of the past, the dreaded uncertainty of tomorrow, and she wondered if peace would simply come with her own death.

And they had been falling dead in greater numbers the past week.

Only yesterday had she buried in a shallow grave, dug by rock with the help of fellow refugees, two of her three sons, ages four and six. The weeping was over, only the ghosts from a life taken haunting her every step. So weary now, her fingers aching, the flesh raw and crusted with dried blood where she had clawed out the hard earth, there was nothing to do anymore but to keep moving, to keep hoping. There was a life to consider beyond her own, the tiny, emaciated frame of Izwhal, swathed in filthy rags, she determined, her final reason to live. She couldn’t recall the last time either of them had eaten.

Which was why the refugee camp of Barehda lit a flicker of hope inside her punished body, rubbery legs finding energy at the sight of the food lines near the massive transport plane. Her only thought that food might sustain life until God opened another door.