Lisa dropped low, remembering Ndaye’s warning about the duplicitous nature of some FARDC soldiers. Such apprehension had been proven all too true.
Monk already had his sidearm out. He aimed and fired two shots, striking the gunman in the chest. The other swung his rifle toward the threat and strafed wildly as he ran across the ward. Monk dropped flat and tried to return fire, but the spread of smoke quickly hid the soldier’s form. Blasts and screams followed in the fleeing man’s deadly wake.
Down on a knee, Lisa yanked her Beretta and swung her aim along the trail of stirred smoke. She caught the briefest muzzle flash in the pall, then fired in that direction, squeezing off four rounds. Afterward, her ears rang as she listened for any renewed rifle fire.
“C’mon,” Monk said and grabbed her arm, ready to get her to safety.
She shook free. While Lisa heard no more gun blasts, cries and moans rose all around the ward. She wasn’t about to abandon those here. She waited four full breaths to make sure there was no further attack, then turned to Monk.
“I have to help the wounded.”
“More gunmen could be on their way,” Monk warned.
“No,” she said. “I wager they’d be here by now. This was only a final gasp of whoever is trying to keep knowledge of this contagion bottled. Anyway, I don’t think that was the real intent in attacking the ward.”
The thumping bell beat of a helicopter passed over the hospital. The rotorwash swept through the shattered window and stirred the worst of the smoke. Through the haze, Lisa spotted the sprawled soldier and others laying on the floor or dropped into hiding.
The helicopter continued past, aiming in a concerning direction.
Lisa faced Monk. “Frank . . .”
12:22 P.M.
What the hell is that?
A strange tapping noise intruded on Frank’s concentration. He had been bent over his laptop as he readied his bioinformatic software. The PCR amplification was almost complete. One final run of the thermocyclers should produce an adequate sampling of the DNA code from the giant virus. He was anxious to complete this assay before Dr. Cummings returned from the hospital ward with samples from the afflicted children.
If they bear the same viral load . . .
He prayed he was right, so the culprit was properly and swiftly identified, but he also remained fearful for all the reasons he had delineated earlier. The genetics and biology of girus species were poorly understood. They carried thousands of genes never seen before, let alone understood.
He glanced to the corner of his laptop screen, where an image of a lone viral particle glowed, its icosahedral shape festooned by a fringe of proteinaceous spikes. A fear had been growing. He had studied several infected cells in both the Dorylus queen and her soldier. He had noted the cytoplasm of those cells was full of those same spikes, like the cast-off spines of a porcupine. Most of the discarded spikes had appeared bent or oddly twisted.
A frightening suspicion had begun to take hold of him.
“Or maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he whispered to himself.
He fought down his doubts, which he knew could be traced to old insecurities. Despite all he had accomplished, he could still remember the kid from the South Side in secondhand Jordans, huddled in a museum, memorizing scientific placards. Back in high school, he had seldom raised his hand in class, even when he was certain of the answer. It had been drilled into him to hide such knowledge or risk ridicule. Even his teachers would look at his six-foot-four frame and make assumptions about his intelligence. And despite his later accomplishments, he still felt too often like that high school kid who was hesitant to raise his hand.
He stared again at those misshapen proteins and pushed away those doubts.
I know I’m right.
Then the strange noise intruded again, drawing his attention away from the screen. The faint crystalline tapping was loud enough to be heard above the hum of the thermocyclers. Needing a distraction, he searched for the source. He spun his lab stool and recognized the noise was coming from the safety hood along the wall, where Benjie’s samples were still stored.
He stood and crossed to the station. He bent enough to examine the tray of glass tubes. He suspected the queen must be growing agitated from her confinement and sought a means to escape. Only the two-inch-long ant lay listlessly at the bottom of the tube, looking nearly dead, except for a slight shiver of its antennae.
Then what—
The tapping came again, arising from another of the tubes. Frank lifted the culprit. It held the pupa that Benjie had collected. The brown chitinous cocoon had been the size of a pistachio shell. Only now it had cracked open and lay discarded below. Above it, clinging to the tube’s glass side was a huge ant, easily an inch long. It seemed too large to have been crammed inside the pupa. Then again, maybe it was the pair of diaphanous wings across its back that added to this illusion. The wings buzzed and shook as vital fluids spread through tiny veins, further strengthening and extending their structure.
Benjie had already explained how the males of the Dorylus species sported such wings, but Frank hadn’t imagined them this big. The tapping against the glass drew his attention to the underside of the ant. He rotated the tube to better examine it.
As he did, he stared behind the scrabbling legs. A hooked barb extended from the pointed tip of the abdomen and stabbed at the glass. Small driblets of an oily green substance spattered the glass.
Frank knew what he was staring at.
“It’s a stinger.”
Benjie had failed to mention that the Dorylus species bore such a weapon. It was a lapse that Frank knew was not due to forgetfulness. As far as Frank knew, no ant species bore a stinger like a wasp or bee. He squinted and shook his head. Could it be some aberrant mutation, something driven by the viral infection?
“What the hell is going on?” he muttered.
At the other end of the ant, large pincers gnashed at the glass, leaving a smear of the same greenish substance. He feared that oil carried something far worse than a painful poison. He pictured the substance full of icosahedral viral particles. He returned his attention to the large wings and remembered the pattern of disease spread through the jungle, seeming to match the direction of the winds.
Maybe the virus wasn’t satisfied with simply being airborne, of being subject to the vagaries of the wind.
He stared at the buzzing behind glass.
Maybe it grew its own wings instead.
12:23 P.M.
Monk gunned the open-air military jeep and jolted away from the entrance of the hospital. In the rearview mirror, he spotted two FARDC guardsmen standing alongside Amir Lumbaa, hospital administrator. Monk had commandeered the vehicle from the men with the fervent support of the administrator, once a former FARDC corpsman himself. As Monk fled off, the trio of men dashed back into the hospital, ready to help protect the assaulted medical ward.
Praying Lisa remained safe, Monk concentrated on the black helicopter as it swept in a tight circle over the science building and settled into a hover over the roof. While Monk ran through the hospital, he had tried to raise Frank, to warn him of the threat. But there had been no answer. Either Frank was lost in his work, or the enemy was jamming communication.
Swearing under his breath, Monk aimed the jeep in a beeline toward the science building half a mile away. He kept the accelerator floored and raced across lawns, bounced over sidewalks, and shot along a stretch of dirt road. He kept one hand on the wheel and gripped his SIG Sauer P320 in the other. He tried pointing the weapon toward the helicopter through the open roof, but the bouncing vehicle threw off any aim. He could not risk a stray bullet shattering through one of the building’s windows and killing or wounding a student or faculty member.