EPILOGUE

CENTCOM, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Tuesday, March 12, 1991—4:00 P.M. (1300 GMT)

Forty minutes at one thousand degrees was finally up. The lab technician switched the machine off and turned to a small group of assembled officers who had witnessed the procedure.

“It’s done, and as you gentlemen saw, it was all in there. That eliminates the last of the deadliest human virus ever discovered, and I’m damned appreciative of that fact.” He took out his pen and leaned over a desk to sign the certification paper that had been drawn up, then stood and shook Colonel Richard Kerr’s hand.

“It was really that bad?” Kerr asked.

“You can’t imagine the suffering and destruction it could have caused, Colonel. You can’t begin to imagine. The tests we ran in just ten hours on lab animals were gruesome. We diluted it to one-five-hundred-thousandth of its original strength and it still killed a rhesus monkey within two hours.”

Kerr and Jon McCarthy of the National Security Agency walked together toward the security door lost in thought before Kerr broke the silence.

“We need to tell Dr. Hajek he’s off the hook before he shoots himself,” Kerr said. “How are you going to handle that little task, Jon?”

“Me?” McCarthy feigned amazement, but he had effectively caused the arrest of Dr. Hajek on suspicion of destroying government property, and it fell to him to undo the deed. He knew Hajek was waiting in his Riyadh hotel room in mental agony for the next shoe to drop.

“Yes, you,” Kerr echoed, grinning. “Poor guy. A lab assistant simply tries to follow the doctor’s orders to sterilize ‘everything’ and gets hold of the live samples by mistake, and we jump to the conclusion that Hajek’s guilty of sabotage.”

“He is,” McCarthy reminded Kerr. “At least guilty of sabotaging our attempts to send that sample home.”

“Hajek was right in one way, though,” Kerr added. “I don’t ever want anything that dangerous back in the States.”

“Well, it’s a moot point now,” McCarthy said.

“Is it? I mean, yes, this stuff is history, but what about the next time someone stumbles on a biological weapon and our side decides to take the Trojan Horse home? That’s what it might turn out to be, you know.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” McCarthy said.

“I mean, Jon, I hate it that we have to keep this whole thing secret. I understand why, and I know we have no choice, but it’s a damn dangerous shame. The people need to know what happened, and what could have happened.”

“Are you talking about what Dr. Abbas did, Richard, or about the virus itself?”

“Both. Abbas didn’t have to put everything on the line like that, and he certainly didn’t have to rescue our men. Even though he created that bug, he also made it possible to get rid of it. But he risked everything warning us, and what do we do? Keep it secret. I’m upset about the President sealing the record.”

McCarthy started chuckling again, as he had been doing off and on all day after getting the full report from Kuwait. “I just can’t believe that those two crazy colonels of ours flew a goddamned Hind right out from under Saddam’s nose! And neither of them had ever flown a chopper before. That’s what I’d like to publicize. Everybody in the Air Force would’ve gotten a kick out of that!”

Richard Kerr bade McCarthy good-bye and headed for the air base to catch a ride back to Dhahran, where Doug Harris and Will Westerman were about to be released from the hospital and debriefing. He would need to make arrangements for the Abbas family.

And as for Dr. Shakir Abbas himself, there was the matter of a funeral.

The tragedy of Dr. Abbas’s death had been compounded by the mysteries he had left behind. The stories of how he had retrieved the remaining canisters, how and where he had disposed of the first one, had died with him.

But at least the threat was over.

Western Iraqi Desert

Tuesday, March 12, 1991—5:45 P.M. (1445 GMT)

The sun dipped large and fiery orange toward the western rim of the desert, casting long shadows from a single Bedouin as he led his camel across a small wadi. The man moved slowly and with timeless deliberation as he thought of making camp and looked forward to his tea. He would rest somewhere on the other side.

He had topped the rim of the wadi when his camel stumbled, the beast’s rear hooves churning the sand of the wadi’s steep side as it struggled for footing. The man turned and hauled at the line, willing the camel up with prayers, oaths, and muscle.

When the camel had crested the wadi at last, the man set course for a point somewhere on the other side of the intrusive highway before him, ignoring a passing truck and the burned-out hulk of a smaller vehicle on his right.

Unseen behind him, a small rivulet of sand began falling steadily from the wall of the wadi, a tiny record of the camel’s momentary struggle, which grew to a trickle and continued unabated, even after the Bedouin and his camel had disappeared over the horizon. The sandfall persisted until at last it began to reveal something hard and shiny within the bank—something alien to the rhythms and substance of the desert.

A small metal canister rolled into the open then, and accelerated down the side of the wadi, tumbling across its floor before coming to rest in the middle—its polished silver surface reflecting the last dying rays of the setting sun.