“Is that so? I thought you were too stubborn to give in to the Ebola, Nkadaru.”
Harper towered over the young man as she spoke. He’d sat up on his medical cot for the first time in days and was slowly feeding himself a small portion of moambe, a dish consisting of chicken made with cassava leaves, bananas, rice, and palm nuts. Harper had warned the villagers against serving the patients the recipe that included pepper sauce to avoid intestinal complications.
The young man looked up to Harper with sullen eyes. He was still weak but not on the brink of death, as he had been several days ago.
“My family needs me,” he whispered loud enough for all to hear. “They do not understand the goats.”
Harper laughed. “Nor do I, right?”
Nkadaru managed a smile and nodded as he took another bite of moambe. When Harper first arrived at the village, she had been escorted into the village by two Ford Ranger pickup trucks that had been retrofitted by the DRC military with machine guns on the roof. The drivers did not respect the villagers’ need to use the roadway to move their goats from one feeding pen to another.
Although Harper didn’t understand French, the official language of the country, she understood tone of voice. She sensed that the soldiers intended to clear the road of the goats one way or another. Against strict orders she’d received before they left Goma’s airport, she jumped out of the pickup and placed herself between Nkadaru’s goats and the threatening soldiers.
Despite being raised in rural Georgia, she had no experience with the animals that had a tendency to be as stubborn as mules if they wanted to be. She tried to push their backsides in an effort to move them out of the way. Most goats are friendly and social by nature, but some, especially Nkadaru’s, didn’t appreciate being told what to do.
One of them began to kick its rear legs at Harper, forcing her to fall backwards into the muddy ruts of the jungle road. While she was unsuccessful in moving the small herd out of the way, she was able to diffuse the standoff by creating a reason for all of the locals to get a good laugh at her expense.
Once the hilarity subsided, Nkadaru stood defiantly in the middle of the road. Like the goat who took a swipe at Harper, he too had a stubborn streak. After a moment, he succumbed and shooed his herd onto a jungle trail and out of the way.
After that, Harper and the young man developed a friendly relationship, which resulted in a mutual accord. She promised to protect his mother from the disease, and he promised to protect her from the mutineers. It was a promise he shouldn’t have made.
Chapter Three
Burungu
DR Congo
Africa
There were many times Harper thought about the way of living in these remote African villages compared to her life in Atlanta. When she was younger and began her career at the CDC, it sounded very elegant to be traveling the world, saving lives. Her Catholic upbringing instilled compassion in her, and her Georgetown University medical degree gave her the tools. It was her desire to save lives, not only for those who’d been afflicted with an infectious disease, but future generations who’d confront deadly contagions.
Her work was physically demanding as well as mentally and emotionally draining. In the DR Congo, it was made all the more difficult by the constant threat of violence courtesy of the mutineers.
The conflict initially took root in 2009 when the second in charge of the Tutsi rebel group entered into a peace agreement with the Congolese government. The agreement allowed for a ceasefire in exchange for Tutsi fighters being incorporated into the DR Congo’s armed forces and high levels of the country’s government.
It was a coupling destined for failure, as a parallel government was operating in the shadows by the rebels, who awaited their opportunity to strike. When the former Tutsi rebels rose up in armed conflict against the established, recognized government, war broke out. The rebels were labeled mutineers and chased out of Kinshasa.
For years, the mutineers fought a guerilla war against the people of the DR Congo. Armed by ISIS in an effort to create instability, they spent the better part of two decades conducting raids on villages and the outskirts of the cities.
For a while, the Americans moved into help the government, but changes in administrations lessened the U.S. appetite for intervention. As a result, the government was depleted of military resources. The mutineers resumed their massacres and abductions.
Despite the political instability the African nation had endured for decades, health care workers and epidemiologists like Dr. Harper Randolph were committed to fighting the disease. In the DR Congo, frequently the epicenter of the Ebola epidemic, creating informal clinics like the one in Burungu that were capable of treating viruses as dangerous as Ebola, as well as malaria and other common illnesses, was dangerous.
In other villages, the disruptions caused by the mutineers’ raids made it impossible to contain the outbreaks. Easily two-thirds of new infections could not be linked to existing cases because villagers would disappear and reemerge in another location.
That left Harper and the other epidemiologists in the conflict-stricken country racing to identify overlooked routes of infection. With each raid, the locals dispersed and the trust that had been built between the UN-sanctioned medical teams and the villages was lost. People became afraid of being associated with the foreign contingent as the mutineers blamed the outsiders for the raids. Some people with Ebola died without seeking medical help as a result, and those family members who cared for the dying contracted the disease. It was a vicious cycle that could only be resolved with the speed of their vaccination programs or peace between the Kinshasa government and the mutineers.
Thus far, neither Burungu or Harper had been placed in the line of fire between the mutineers and the Congolese army. Therefore, they were not assigned a contingent of blue helmets, the commonly used term referring to the UN peacekeeping forces.
Their sole armed protector was a seventy-year-old former soldier who sat vigilantly outside the hospital holding a Russian-made AKM automatic rifle in his right arm—the only one he had left since the mutineers had chopped off his left one.
Bedaya Jacques could not flee the village in the event the mutineers conducted a raid, as he was almost crippled. He’d been afflicted with malaria and recovered. He’d also contracted Ebola and recovered. He’d nearly bled to death after a mutineer chopped off his arm with a sword, but survived. His bony malnourished body revealed the wounds, but his mind kept the emotional scars hidden. He was a warrior in every sense of the word.
He’d adopted Burungu as his home when the villagers banded together to treat his wounds. He pledged his life to Harper when she saved him from Ebola. When a young villager found the AK-47 variant in the jungle miles away, Jacques agreed to be the sheriff of Burungu and Harper’s protector.
He sat stoically on top of a barrel, with his back leaning against the hospital wall. He rarely showed emotion. He didn’t speak English, nor did he care to. He did seem to understand basic commands given to him by Harper. The former bushman believed he had a solemn duty: protect the village that had adopted him and the American who saved him from the fever.
This was the world that Dr. Harper Randolph lived in when she was away from the vibrant metropolis of Atlanta, the quaintness of rural Georgia where she was raised, and the geopolitical dynamics of the most powerful city on the planet—Washington, DC.