Toxic Game (GhostWalkers 15)

Tell Trap and Wyatt I’ll leave behind a recording. Don’t know if they can use whatever I find, but they should be able to remotely access my recorder without touching the device.

I’m sorry, man. Trap and Wyatt may have ideas.

Draden knew, just from the earlier reports, that their ideas would be too late. The virus acted too fast. He would be dead before Joe had time to make it back to the States.

I’ll torch the village. He hoped he’d get that done fast so he could hunt the terrorists who were infecting people and then using them as bait to kill more. He wanted to kill as many of the bastards as possible before the virus took hold and left him too sick to go after them.

He could hear the chopper circling back around a second time. Hope you didn’t put a gun to their heads. He injected humor he wasn’t really feeling into his voice.

Maybe if we get you back we can find the treatment before it’s too late, Malichai said.

Too fast acting. Can’t chance infecting all of you. We all signed up for a one-way ticket when we joined the GhostWalkers. It’s just my turn.

Fuck! Gino hissed.

I’ll take out as many of the cell as I can before I go down, Draden said, meaning it. He was going to make sure as many of them were dead as possible. Not because they’d infected him, but because they’d infected an entire village to use as a trap. Joe, someone has to find out where this is coming from.

I will, Joe promised.

Get the wounded out of here, there’s not much you can do for me. Some of those injuries were severe.

Damn it, Draden. That was Gino.

He didn’t feel as bad as they did. He didn’t have much of a future anyway. Just pissed I wasted all that time going to school instead of partying.

Yeah, cuz you’re such a party animal, Malichai said with an attempt at sarcastic humor. His voice was tight. The feeling in his mind—sorrow.

Tell Nonny she’s the best. He should have told the old woman that himself. Wyatt Fontenot’s grandmother had taken the entire team into her home. She’d cared for them as she would her own. He hadn’t had that kind of affection from anyone since his foster mother had died when he was so young. He hadn’t known anyone else was capable of loving others the way the woman he called mother had until he met Nonny. He should have told her, and he hadn’t, not once. He was surprised at the emotion welling up. Yeah, he should have told her. She’d mourn for him, and it shouldn’t have shocked him that his teammates would as well, but it did.

We can pick you up, take you back and try one of the treatments. I know they’re not sanctioned yet, but some have worked when a virus is detected early enough, Gino said.

We don’t know anything about this one yet and we can’t take the chance, you all know that, he objected, because he could infect every one of them and when they landed, every doctor and nurse waiting to help the wounded. He wasn’t having that on his conscience.

You have anywhere from a few days to twenty.

Joe, don’t make this worse. Get the hell out of here and make certain every single one of the wounded survives.

There was the briefest of hesitations, but Joe was the commanding officer for a reason. He had to make the tough decisions. You have my word. Damn honor serving with you, Draden.

The others murmured similar sentiments. He didn’t reply. What was there to say? He had never considered himself a sentimental man. In fact, he tried not to feel much at all, but living in Louisiana with his GhostWalker Team, emotions had crept in whether he wanted them to or not. He’d learned at a very early age that it was better to push feelings aside and use logic for every decision. Emotions fucked things up in ways that could be very, very bad.

Still, there was Trap. The man was a genuine crazy-ass genius with Asperger’s. Super-high IQ and wealthy as all hell. Didn’t have a clue about social cues. Draden had been the one to clue him in as often as possible. Trap didn’t let many people in and neither did Draden, but they’d been there for each other.

Tell Trap he’s the best. He’ll do fine. Tell him— He broke off, shocked that he was choking up. He loved the man like a brother. Shit.

I got it, Joe said.

Draden let the forest close around him as the sound of the helicopter faded into the distance. He wasn’t worried about being alone. He was used to it. He’d been alone most of his life, even in the midst of a crowd. He could handle that, no problem. He began to move fast toward the village of the dead. It was very small, only a few families, many related to one another. He was a very fast runner, but that would spread the virus through his bloodstream much quicker. Still, it might not be a bad idea just to get it over with. He played with that idea as he jogged, his animal senses flaring out to uncover anyone that might have been left behind to keep an eye on him.

He pulled up the facts about the village and region they’d been briefed on. The village’s name, Lupa Suku, meant Forgotten Tribe and he thought it very apt from everything he’d read about them. The village was so remote, it wasn’t even considered a sub-district of Rambutan. He knew that driving southeast from Palembang the thirty-four and some miles to Rambutan, villages along the road were more and more scarce. Eventually, that road became nothing more than a muddy broad path lined on either side by trees and brush. A few cars and buses shared the road with bikes and animals until it disappeared.

So remote, Lupa Suku could only be reached by bike, boat or animals such as a domestic ox. It was impossible during the wet season to get any motorized vehicle through. Heavy items tended to get stuck in the thick mud, so it was necessary to move everything via water. Most used a small boat to access the village via the Banyuasin River.

According to the briefing given by the representative of the Indonesian government, primary trade consisted of fish and rice. There was a small copper mine that was kept a secret by the locals. The copper was mined by hand a little at a time as they had no modern machinery. The government had turned a blind eye, acting as though they knew nothing about that little mine or the fact that the villagers traded the copper to poachers who came to the area looking for exotic birds. Money meant little to the villagers, so they tended to barter for the things they needed.

Draden figured bartering was how the terrorists had introduced the virus. It was possible that the virus had occurred some other way, via bugs or animals, but he doubted it. The WHO had been trying to find a source, but the fact that the nearby terrorist cell had used the dead villagers for an ambush, killing nearly all the WHO doctors and their workers, tended to make him believe they were responsible.

The terrorist cell was organized for being fairly new. Their job was to topple the government and unlike others targeting police officer

s, they had chosen to undermine the people’s confidence in their government by introducing a hot virus. Draden and his team believed the village was their first large test. There had to have been other smaller experiments.

Lupa Suku was the perfect village to test the virus on. The people preferred to do their trading via boat, didn’t allow outsiders to come to their village without a good reason or an invitation. They were secretive, mostly, the government thought, because they had the copper mine and didn’t want outsiders to know about it. They were very self-sufficient and lived in accord with the animals in the forest. Very peaceful, they used their weapons only for protection.

During the times of the year when the rain made it very difficult to travel, the tribe went weeks without being seen by others. Lupa Suku was located a quarter mile inland of the river and couldn’t be seen by passersby traveling on the water, which, again, made them a perfect target. The village kept boats docked and a sentry to watch over the area and call out should there be trouble. A virus would go unseen by the sentry.

Draden moved through the forest with confidence. He knew at least one or two of the MSS would have been left behind to observe him and tell the others what he was up to. He intended to burn the village and then go hunting them. He would kill as many as possible, leaving one alive to follow back to the main MSS village.

Trap and Wyatt, like Draden, were very familiar with hemorrhagic viruses. All three had worked on combining antibodies to target specific strains of Ebola. The antibodies had successfully saved monkeys that had been infected within twenty-four hours, but as the disease progressed, the success rate had dwindled. They had been in discussions, long into the nights, on how to raise those chances for those who were in the more advanced stages of the diseases.

From his studies into most hot viruses, Draden knew he didn’t have long before he would be feeling the effects. His death would be a horrible one. He had a gun, and he was going out that way for sure. He just had to make certain he didn’t wait so long that his body was too ravaged by the disease to be able to make the rational decision to use a bullet. He’d seen the effects of hemorrhagic viruses on a human being and his mind shied away from his gruesome future.