The aircraft was waiting. The G-IV had arrived only two hours earlier after a direct flight from Tehran. The interior had been stripped of everything but two seats and
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a cot. Moudi felt the truck stop and turn and back up. Then the cargo door opened, dazzling them with the sun. Still the nurse, and still a compassionate one, Sister Maria Magdalena used her hand to shield the eyes of her colleague.
There were others there, of course. Two more nuns in protective garb were close by, and a priest, with yet more farther away. All were praying as some other lifted the patient by the plastic sheet and carried her slowly aboard the white-painted business jet. It took five careful minutes before she was firmly strapped in place, and the ground crewmen withdrew. Moudi gave his patient a careful look, checking pulse and blood pressure, the former rapid and the latter still dropping. That worried him. He needed her alive as long as possible. With that done, he waved to the flight crew and strapped into his own seat.
Sitting down, he took the time to look out his window, and Moudi was alarmed to see a TV camera pointed at the aircraft. At least they kept their distance, the doctor thought, as he heard the first engine spool up. Out the other window, he saw the cleanup crew respraying the truck. That was overly theatrical. Ebola, deadly as it was, appeared to be a delicate organism, soon killed by the ultraviolet of direct sunlight, vulnerable also to heat. That was why the search for the host was so frustrating. Something carried this dreadful “bug.” Ebola could not exist on its own, but whatever it was that provided a comfortable home to the virus, whatever it was that Ebola rewarded for the service by not harming it, whatever the living creature was that haunted the African continent like a shadow, was as yet undiscovered. The physician grunted. Once he’d hoped to discover that host and so make use of it, but that hope had always been in vain. Instead he had something almost as good. He had a living patient whose body was now breeding the pathogen, and while all previous victims of Ebola had been burned, or buried in soil soaked with chemicals, this one would have a very different fate. The aircraft started moving. Moudi checked his seat belt again and wished he could have something to drink.
Forward, the two pilots were wearing flight suits of protective nomex previously sprayed. Their face masks
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muffled their words, forcing repetition of their request for clearance, but finally the tower got things right, and the Gulfstream began its takeoff roll, rotating swiftly into the clean African sky, and heading north. The first leg of their trip would be 2,551 miles, and would last just over six hours.
Another, nearly identical G-IV had already landed at Benghazi, and now its crew was being briefed on emergency procedures.
“CANNIBALS.” HOLBROOK. S HOOK his head in temporary disbelief. He’d slept very late, having been up late the night before, watching all manner of talking heads on C-SPAN discuss the confusing situation with Congress after this Ryan guy’s speech. Not a bad speech, considering. He’d seen worse. All lies, of course, kind of like a TV show. Even the ones you liked, well, you just knew that they weren’t real, funny though they might be in ways intended and not. Some talented man had written the speech, with the purpose of getting just the right points across. The skill of those people was impressive. The Mountain Men had worked for years to develop a speech they could use to get people mobilized to their point of view. Tried and tried, but they just couldn’t ever get it right. It wasn’t that their beliefs had anything wrong with them, of course. They all knew that. The problem was packaging, and only the government and its ally, Hollywood, could afford the right people to develop the ideas that twisted the minds of the poor dumb bastards who didn’t really get it–that was the only possible conclusion.
But now there was discord in the enemy camp.
Ernie Brown, who’d driven over to wake his friend up, muted the TV. “I guess there just isn’t enough room for both of them in that there town, Pete.”
“You think one will be gone by sundown?” Holbrook asked.
“I wish.” The legal commentary they’d just watched on the CNN political hour had been as muddled as a nigger march on Washington to increase welfare. “Well, uh, gee, the Constitution doesn’t say what to do in a case like this.
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I suppose they could settle it with forty-fours on Pennsylvania Avenue at sundown,” Ernie added with a chuckle.
Pete turned his head and grinned. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”
“Too American.” Brown might have added that Ryan had actually been in a position like that once, or so the papers and TV said. Well, yeah, it was true. Both vaguely remembered the thing in London, and truth be told, they’d both been proud to see an American showing the Europeans how a gun is used–foreigners didn’t know dick about guns, did they? They were as bad as Hollywood. It was a shame Ryan had gone bad. What he’d said in his speech, that was why he’d entered the government–that’s what they all said. At least with that Kealty puke, he could fall back on family and stuff. They were all crooks and thieves, and that’s just how the guy was brought up, after all. At least he wasn’t a hypocrite about it. A high-class gypsy or … coyote? Yeah, that was right. Kealty was a lifetime political crook, and he was just being what he was. You couldn’t blame a coyote for crooning at the moon; he was just being himself, too. Of course, coyotes were pests. Local ranchers could kill all they wanted . . . Brown tilted his head. “Pete?”
“Yeah, Ernie?” Holbrook reached for the TV controller and was about to unmute it.
“We got a constitutional crisis, right?”
It was Holbrook’s turn to look. “Yeah, that’s what all the talking heads say.”
“And it just got worse, right?”
“The Kealty thing? Sure looks that way.” Pete set the controller down. Ernie was having another idea attack.
“What if, um .. .” Brown started and stopped, staring at the silent TV. It took time for his thoughts to form, Holbrook knew, though they were often worth waiting for.
THE 707 LANDED, finally, at Tehran-Mehrabad International Airport, well after midnight. The crew were zombies, having flown almost continuously for the past thirty-six hours, well over the cautious limits of civil aviation, abused all the more by the nature of their cargo, and
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in so foul a mood from it all that angry words had been traded during the long descent. But the aircraft touched down with a heavy thump, and with that came relief and embarrassment, which each of the three felt as they took a collective sigh. The pilot shook his head and rubbed his face with a tired hand, taxiing south, steering between the blue lights. This airport is also the site of Iranian military and air force headquarters. The aircraft completed its turn, reversing directions and heading for the spacious air force ramp area–though its markings were civil, the 707 actually belonged to the Iranian air force. Trucks were waiting there, the flight crew was glad to see. The aircraft stopped. The engineer switched off the engines. The pilot set the parking brakes. The three men turned inward.
“A long day, my friends,” the pilot said by way of apology.
“God willing, a long sleep to follow it,” the engineer– he’d been the main target of his captain’s temper–replied, accepting it. They were all too weary to sustain an argument in any case, and after a proper rest they wouldn’t remember the reasons for it anyway.
They removed their oxygen masks, to be greeted by the thick fetid smell of their cargo, and it was everything they could do not to vomit as the cargo door was opened in the rear. They couldn’t leave just yet. The aircraft was well and truly stuffed with cages, and short of climbing out the windows–which was too undignified–they’d have to await their freedom, rather like passengers at any international terminal.
Soldiers did the unloading, a process made all the more difficult by the fact that no one had warned their commander to issue gloves, as the Africans had done. Every cage had a wire handle at the top, but the African greens were every bit as testy as the men up front, clawing and scratching at the hands trying to lift them. Reactions differed among the soldiers. Some slapped at the cages, hoping to cow the monkeys into passivity. The smart ones removed their field jackets and used them as a buffer when they handled the cages. Soon a chain of men was established, and the cages were transferred, one at a time, to a series of trucks.