The helicopter banked, flew low over the dirt road, and found the airstrip, where a low-rise building glowed from the power of a generator. Peyton counted that as a good sign.
The moment they touched down, two dozen figures emerged from the building and ran toward them, rifles held at the ready.
Avery drew her sidearm.
Desmond saw it. “Let’s stay cool here. I’d say we’re outnumbered.”
The men surrounded the helicopter, shouting as they closed in. Peyton scrutinized them, expected to see Kenyan army uniforms. She didn’t. They were civilians. Dressed in dirty clothes.
One pulled the helicopter’s door open. The smell of body odor rushed in with the warm night air. Above, the helicopter’s main rotor roared. Wind pushed down.
Hands grabbed Peyton. They were rough, gouging into the muscles of her arms. Voices shouted in Swahili and another language she didn’t know—Somali, perhaps. Desmond kicked a man reaching for him, punched another. A rifle was pressed to his face, and he froze.
Peyton could hear Avery fighting too, screaming obscenities.
The men dragged Peyton out, onto the ground, then held her up for a tall black man to inspect. Behind her, she heard them grabbing Hannah.
“Don’t touch her!” she yelled, but the words were lost in the commotion.
Chapter 70
Peyton fought the men holding her as the helicopter’s rotors thundered overhead. It took four large men to subdue Desmond, but they finally brought him down. They held him on the ground, twisting his arms behind him, but still, he refused to cry out—or to stop fighting back.
The crowd of rifle-carrying militia parted, and a middle-aged black man hurried through. Whoever he was, he was in charge.
Peyton had seen him exactly once before: in a large room in Mandera, filled with dying people. He had lain in a corner then, sweat covering his body, three buckets beside him: one for feces, one for vomit, and one for urine.
That day, Peyton had given him a lifeline: a dose of ZMapp. She had hoped it might cure him.
It had.
Dr. Elim Kibet was vibrant now, his eyes full of life.
At the sight of Peyton, he yelled to one of the tall soldiers, who barked orders to his men.
Hands released Peyton as if she were a live electric wire. She fell forward, but Elim caught her and raised her up.
Over the dying roar of the rotors, he said, “Welcome to Dadaab, Dr. Shaw.”
On Elim’s orders, two medical technicians brought a rolling stretcher from the building and ushered Hannah inside to an operating room. The facility wasn’t high-tech, but it was clean and well supplied. For nearly an hour, Peyton and Elim stood over Hannah, operating. They removed dead tissue, disinfected the wound, and closed the gaping hole in Hannah’s shoulder. When they were done, Peyton stood there for a long moment, staring at Hannah, hooked to the IV antibiotics and pain medication.
The woman was infected with the Mandera virus, but Peyton thought she had a fighting chance now. And she was in good hands—hands that were being washed just a few feet away.
Seconds later Elim slipped out of the OR, leaving Peyton alone with Hannah.
The redheaded woman was all Peyton had left of the EIS team she’d taken to the village. She imagined those young agents lying there in their tan service khakis, dead, left alone in the arid, barren land for the animals to pick over. She imagined them being found, hands running over glassy, staring eyes, bodies being zipped up in bags. It was a nightmare for her—to see someone she had deployed come home like that. She thought about them as if they were her own family, her own kids.
Hannah was her only chance to save one of them.
Peyton had done everything she could for her. That made her feel a bit better, a little more hopeful, for the first time since Conner McClain’s men had raided the village.
The camps in Dadaab were sprawling settlements. There were several camps for refugees and a smaller camp for aid agencies. Peyton and Elim had performed the surgery in the aid agency camp.
During that time, there was not much for Desmond to do. With Avery at his side, he ventured out from the long, single-story building that housed the aid agencies, through a gate in a chain-link fence, and into the refugee camps.
It was good to stretch his legs. The more than two hours in the vibrating helicopter hadn’t done his bruised body any favors. Neither had the welcoming committee who had dragged him to the ground. Several of those men stood guard by the fence, and other armed men were scattered throughout the camp. They stood next to some of the larger buildings, which had been converted to hospitals. “Hospital” isn’t the right word, Desmond thought. They were more like convalescent camps—places where those who were expected to survive were held. The patients who were not faring as well were kept in open camps, lying on blankets and wood platforms.
Screams and moans of agony sounded from every direction. Up ahead a fire burned, consuming the bodies piled upon it. Trucks crisscrossed the camp, collecting bodies and distributing food, water, and medicine. Desmond could see that the refugees were fighting as hard as they could against the virus; he could also see that they were losing. This place was a biological meat grinder, almost too hideous for Desmond to watch.
I did this, he thought. In some way, he was responsible for what was happening here—what would soon be happening around the world.
In Berlin, he had been driven to discover who he was and what had happened to him. Now he had only one desire: to stop this. To save every life he could.
The look on Avery’s face told him she knew exactly what he was thinking.
“It’s not over yet, Des. We’ve got time to turn this around.”
Behind them, a man carrying an AK-47 approached.
“The doctors are out of surgery. They’ve asked for you.”