the perfect size and shape for bullet-wound battle dressings, and now every combat soldier carried some. The tampon in Bighawk’s abdomen had stopped serious bleeding from that wound site and had also occluded the breach in his colon. Stilwell had explained that, and Bighawk had thought about it for a second. “So it kept the stuffing in the sausage.”
She’d laughed. “An unscientific but perfectly accurate description, Sergeant.”
That was the good news. The bad was that twenty-four hours after being wheeled in, Bighawk began to show the first signs of ACE infection: spiking temperature, dropping blood pressure, searing sore throat, generalized pain. Lesions appeared about six hours after that, and now, a day later, the raw, red patches were spreading. Colistin was slowing ACE’s burn through the young soldier, but not stopping it.
Stilwell walked quietly to his bedside. Bighawk was sleeping, thank goodness, the IV ketamine still working. She watched, listened to, and timed his respiration, took his pulse—still strong and regular—and felt his forehead. The fever was up. She’d use a digital thermometer, of course, but she remembered exactly how warm his forehead had felt four hours earlier, and it was definitely hotter now.
Bighawk’s eyes opened, drooped, opened again. “Mom?” He blinked, looked at her from far away in a ketamine haze, yawned, then grimaced because that motion stretched one of the lesions on his left cheek. Relaxing again, he smiled up at Stilwell, reached for her hand. “Mom? What’re you doin’?” He dozed off.
“About your mom, right?”
His eyebrows went up. “How’d you know that?”
“We doctors have secret powers, Sergeant. We can read minds.”
He chuckled. “You’re kiddin’, I know, Doc. Must’ve been talkin’ in my sleep. But we Sioux know medicine people
He closed his eyes, coughed, and Stilwell heard the pneumonic rattle in his chest.
“So how’m I doin’, Doc?”
Bighawk kept a brave face, but she could see the fear in his eyes.
“You’re doing, Sergeant. That antibiotic I told you about is retarding the bacteria’s spread.”
“But you got no cure for it, right?”
“Not now we don’t. But every lab and scientist at the government’s disposal is working around the clock. They’ll find one. Trust me.”
“I do trust you, ma’am. Not much else, but you for sure.”
Bighawk’s words were like a lance through Stilwell’s chest. She was the only thing standing between this good young man and a slow, agonizing death, and despite her reassurance, Stilwell was not at all certain that the government could find a cure for ACE. She wasn’t at all certain of anything just now.
Two hours later, groggy with fatigue but needing to do one more thing, she went to her cubbyhole office, closed the door, and booted up her laptop. She wanted to write an email before catching an hour’s sleep. She had written one to her husband and son during her last break. She wrote in time-saving email pidgin:
Hey ther hows it going Vry cool here and little rain. sorry not been in bttr tuch bt crazy bsy jst now Wld love 2 hear frm u talked to momdad? Shoot me an eml catch me up
It wasn’t much but she had learned, through long experience, what would slip through the censors’ nets. No mention of combat, no specific locations, nothing about casualties or material shortages or morale problems. Just Chatty Cathy stuff. But at least it was something, and maybe her sister would answer this time. It had been a long time since Mary had answered one of her emails, but Stilwell was not the kind to quit trying. She hit the Save button and put this email into her Outbox folder with the others she’d been writing, but could not send, since the ACE horror had begun.
TWELVE
ON THE MORNING OF THE DAY HALLIE AND HER TEAM BOARDED their flight from Andrews to Reynosa, Don Barnard poured coffee in Lew Casey’s office. Barnard took his coffee black and strong, and still he grimaced when he took a sip.
“Toxic sludge,” he said.
Casey, wearing wrinkled chinos, battered loafers, and a plaid shirt with no tie, raised his own cup in a toast. “Navy coffee. Keeps the brain sharp.” Barnard knew about Casey’s affinity for “Navy coffee.” He had gone to Annapolis, done his five years on active, and realized he loved microbiology more than nuclear engineering. Resigned from the Navy, got his PhD, tried private enterprise long enough to dislike it intensely, and came to CDC, where he had been now for more than twenty years. He and Barnard had worked together for most of that time. Toward each other they behaved more like brothers than like supervisor and subordinate. “The hours you’ve got us working, we need it.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” Barnard took out his cold pipe, fiddled, put it back in his vest pocket. “We’re stretched thin. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But we are probably the best hope for stopping this thing.”
Casey waved the apology away. “It’s not often I get the chance to beat up on you a little.”
“How are
“I’m one of those people who hate to sleep, sir. I can’t stand wasting all those hours unconscious. So thank you for asking, but I’m doing fine.”
Flemmer had called him “sir” during their first meeting, and he had waved the honorific aside with a laugh. She had blushed, giving him the impression, which time had done nothing to diminish, that she was unusually shy. “I’m sorry. It’s a hard habit to break. My parents were big on proper manners, sir,” she had said, flinching as she helplessly pronounced that last “sir.” Barnard, raised in Virginia himself, knew that some southern parents still brought their children up the old way, which included respect for elders and for courtesy, as well—all in all, not such a bad thing. An upbringing like that could make the use of “sir” and “ma’am” virtually reflexive.
“I understand,” he had told her and then, curious, had asked, “Were you raised in the South, by any chance?”
“Well, sort of, sir. Southern Oklahoma.”
“Close enough.” Barnard had smiled, and that was how they had left it.
Evvie Flemmer was one of Casey’s best research scientists. Perhaps even the best who had worked for him, he had told Barnard. She was short and a bit stout and her wardrobe, as far as Barnard had been able to tell, was exclusively J. C. Penney. Today she wore a brown dress whose hem hung below her knees. Her legs dropped without a single curve into the practical black flats she wore every day. She used no makeup and kept her brown hair in a short blunt cut, easy to wash, easy to dry. She rarely smiled and Barnard had never heard her laugh, but neither was she openly angry or cynical. Just very, very serious, was how he eventually came to think of her.
Barnard knew that Flemmer was thirty-eight years old, single, and lived alone. She was brown-eyed and pale-skinned, not from Irish heredity, like Casey, but from spending virtually every waking hour in BARDA’s laboratories. In all his time in government, Barnard had encountered only one or two scientists more dedicated to their work, and those people had not been paradigms of mental health.
In fact, a few months after she arrived, Barnard grew concerned over her endless hours in the labs and said something to Casey about her life outside BARDA. Casey shrugged. “What life?” Then he added, “I worried a bit at
