“Outlaw,” she said, using my combat call sign, “discharge the filter and load a new one, then do a new scan.” I did. Doc said, “Boys, this don’t make any goldarn sense at all. I don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt.”
“Talk to me, Doc,” I said. “Not feeling real comfy out here. Do you know what this thing is?”
“Well, I know what the sensors say it is, boys, but that don’t make a lick of sense,” complained Doc. “It’s reading as better than ninety percent sure this is coccidioidomycosis. Shorthand is cocci or valley fever.”
“We’re not in a valley, are we?” asked Top.
“Even if you were,” she said, “you’re not in the right valley. The other name for this is California fever.”
Top and I exchanged a look.
“Say again?” I said.
“Cocci is a mammalian fungal disease found in the southwestern US and northern Mexico. It has no damn reason at all to be killing people in the Sahara.”
“Then why are we looking at about forty dead people?”
“Because someone is out there playing mad scientist,” she said.
“Going out on a limb here,” said Bunny slowly, “but am I the only one wondering if somehow we stepped into a big steaming pile of that millenarian bullshit out here?”
“How?” asked Top. “Those Silentium fucknuts are all about overpopulation, and these folks here are the exact opposite of that. Ain’t many of them at all.”
“You’re right, Pappy,” said Doc, using his call sign. “The Toubou are at cultural subsistence-level population growth, especially that far into the sand.”
“But someone killed them with a disease from the States,” said Bunny. “What the actual fuck’s that about if it’s not connected?”
“You got me, sweet cheeks.” She paused. “Listen, whether or not it’s connected is only part of the problem, and not the biggest part. The fact that these people are dead at all makes my ass itch, because cocci is rarely fatal.”
“Looks pretty fucking fatal from where I’m standing,” I growled.
“Well, no shit,” she said in her mock-pleasant voice. Doc always sounded like she was asking for a cucumber sandwich at a church social, but that was all show. Inside she was as hard as any of us, and smarter than all of us. “Okay, the CliffsNotes version of the science is that cocci develops in certain ecological niches where you have hot summers and mild winters, and where there’s very little annual rainfall. It’s generally found in alkaline sandy soil. Not in pure-sand deserts where there is no rain worth talking about, because the fungus grows in the periods of wet weather, then dries out and is spread by arid winds. It’s called ‘grow and blow.’”
“We’re in an oasis,” said Top. “There’s got to be water under the sand here and where the other deaths occurred.”
“Sure,” she said, “but not enough to do this. The growing cycle is wrong, and the location is mighty damn wrong. Also . . . the infection cycle is way too fast. Infection of cocci requires time, and generally an already compromised immune system. It might—might—explain this quicker and more pervasive infection rate if every single one of the nomads in those three groups were already HIV positive. But that’s unlikely because these groups don’t have a lot of physical contact with urban centers in that part of Africa where HIV is rampant. Maybe five percent of people exposed to cocci contract it, and of that group less than five percent fail to recover. None of the known infected die this fast. No, no, no. This isn’t Mother Nature being a bitch. This is some true mad scientist bullshit here.”
I glanced up at the sky as if I could see the jet and its contrails, but all I saw were buzzards circling, waiting for us to leave.
“Doc,” I said, “put some people on this cocci stuff. Find out where samples can be obtained, and work out a scenario for how it might have been weaponized. Whether this is connected to the Silentium threat or not, if we can source this stuff, then we may have our first real lead.”
“Oh, honey bunny,” she said sweetly, “I’m already driving in that lane and calls are being made. Now get me some samples, and then go shoot some bad guys. I think we’ll all feel better if you do.”
Top opened the sample kit and we got to work. It did not take long, but it was an ugly task that left us feeling sick and stained and embarrassed to be part of the same species of biped as whoever did this. I glanced at Top, who was taking tissue samples from a little child. Unlike Bunny and me, Top was a parent. He’d already lost one child to war. He knew the pain of that. Just as he knew the fear. I could see a fever brightness in his eyes as he worked, and wondered how deep inside the heads of that child’s parents he’d gone. They all died together, but had the parents watched their little one sicken and die before the disease took them, too? Or had the kid cried out to them for help, for answers, for protection as he crawled to where they lay? In either case it was an abomination.
Top caught me watching him and for a moment we stared at each other, saying nothing. Saying everything that needed to be said.
We walked out to where Bunny waited with a pressure can of disinfectant. We stripped out of the hazmat suits, stuffed them in a bag, and emptied the rest of the germ killer into it before burying it. The BAMS unit and samples were wrapped in plastic and sealed with tape. I took a transport drone from the saddlebag of my bike, assembled it quickly, fitted the samples into its undercarriage, and launched it. Our support team would track its transponder and do a pickup while we continued the mission.
We got onto our bikes and left. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the vultures dropping down again. The temptation to shoot at them was strong, but no matter how unsavory their appetites or grisly their meals, they were not the villains of this piece.
4.
THE SAHARA
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
As the miles burned away, I thought about the faces of the Toubou people who lay rotting in the sun. Innocent folks, going about a way of life that probably hadn’t changed substantially in five or six thousand years. Good folks. Hardworking, uncomplicated, innocent of the cultural guile and corruption that was rife in the industrial parts of the world. Snuffed out.
Why?
As an experiment for some new kind of bioweapon? That was our leading theory, if this was the Silentium madmen. Had the Toubou lived on mineral-rich lands or good grazing pastures, there would be a different motivation. At least then you could build a plausible—if inexcusable—set of motives based on simple greed. But out here, in the vastness of the Sahara? The killers had to go out of their way to target them, which meant that it was a calculated evil or a specific cultural madness. A cult psychosis, like the Heaven’s Gate group who committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997, and the People’s Temple nearly twenty years before them in Jonestown. Millenarian groups date back hundreds of years, and not all of them are corrupt or completely insane. My lover, Junie Flynn, believes in what early twentieth-century psychic leader Edgar Cayce called inevitable “earth changes,” and there is a very real earth change movement within the post-hippie, post–New Age spiritual community. They’re very gentle people. Historians, however, lump them in with the more radical millenarians like the jackasses who wanted to kill most of the world.