The Deep Zone

soldier just died and I need to pronounce his death to make his sure his family becomes eligible for what meager benefits the Army sees fit to pay parents for their dead enlisted-men sons, because if one bit of paperwork, just one tiny piece, is missing, well, they can kiss those benefits goodbye. But thank you for your concern.”

Stilwell hung up, shook her head. There was, of course, something else.

What’s your name, Sergeant?

Daniel, ma’am. Wyman.

Suppose one of these boys had been her Danny and it was another doctor? What would she expect of that one? The answer was obvious—to her, at least. The others still in here all wore the suits. They were volunteers, sergeants and corporals, nurses and lab techs and a couple of physician’s assistants who’d stayed to help, and she was glad they were protected. But for her, not being able to speak directly to these sick kids, to see them and touch them and hear their voices undistorted, was unthinkable.

Not long after Daniel Wyman died, Stilwell herself took up residence in the quarantined hospital, catnapping when she could on a cot, subsisting mostly on coffee and the microwavable meals normally given only to patients. She had been working for more than fifty hours now without really sleeping, and was beginning to feel the red, gritty edge of serious fatigue.

She had encountered that kind of exhaustion before, after medical school when she was interning and then doing her residency. There were times in those days when she had worked ninety hours straight. She was younger then, but she was not old now and knew she still had reserves of energy not yet tapped. She could keep going for quite a while.

But what then? she asked herself, pouring more thick, black coffee from the Bunn at the nurses’ station. And what was quite a while, anyway? She couldn’t go on forever, and she knew that full well. They could bring other Army doctors, but they would be strangers to the boys in the wards and, working in the space suits, would only make the soldiers feel even more diseased and alone, like dying lepers.

Well, she couldn’t do anything about that. But she could keep administering colistin, as long as the supplies kept coming in, and she could provide pain relief, and she could talk to them and hold their hands and reassure them.

And what about you, Dr. Stilwell? Do you really think you’ve got some kind of miraculous immunity to this thing?

I haven’t caught it yet, now have I?

It’s just a matter of time. You know that.

I don’t know any such thing. I think if I were going to get it, I would have by now.

Get real. It’s just taking longer because you’re a woman and women have stronger immune systems than men. That was one of the first things you learned in the infectious disease courses. Remember how all the women med students in the classes made faces and thumbed their noses at the men?

Maybe. Maybe not. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. Does it?

No. It doesn’t. What matters is them. And no goddamned fobbit is going to get between me and those soldiers.

Roger that, Major.

TWENTY

BARNARD NEVER SLEPT WELL IN THE MOTEL-LIKE ROOMS THAT were now standard issue in all agencies having anything to do with homeland security. Given his seniority, his was comfortable enough—double bed, private bath, color-chip hues—but it wasn’t home and there was no Lucianne, slim and warm, beside him.

He showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, had coffee, and headed downstairs to Delta 17. Lew Casey had called earlier that morning with guardedly good news. Too complicated to explain on the phone, he’d said; Barnard should come down to see for himself.

It was a trip most people would have dreaded, but what Barnard dreaded more were the seemingly endless periods between his all-too-infrequent visits to the BSL-4 labs. He had never stopped feeling the pull of the labs, especially the Fours, where the deadliest pathogens lived. There was nothing on earth like being in a lab with those things. Lion tamers might feel something akin to it, he’d once reflected, but even that would be less intense. You could see lions. And train them. You could not see or train monsters like Ebola Zaire… or ACE.

He passed through the first air lock and security point, then went to the clothing-and-supply station to pick up a fresh blue lab gown, shoe covers, rubber gloves, and a Level 3 biosafety respirator.

BARDA, like all facilities working with dangerous pathogens, was divided into containment levels. The first, uppermost level, where he now donned his lab attire, contained no dangerous laboratories or research facilities. It was mostly for screening and administration; even laboratories working with the most exotic microbes needed some help from a bureaucracy.

There were only two points of ingress and egress, one of which Barnard had come through today and on the earlier visit with Hallie. In a different elevator, Barnard descended past BARDA Levels 2 and 3 to the lowest, hottest, most tightly restricted area: Biosafety Level 4. Walking toward his final transition point, he felt familiar reactions. His respiration and pulse increased, his spatial awareness became more acute, his eyes and ears more vigilant.

Coming down here always made him think of Winston Churchill’s famous statement that nothing focused the mind more wonderfully than being shot at without effect. His own experience in Vietnam had shown that to be true—up to a point. Churchill had spent a few weeks being shot at, Barnard twenty-six months. At first, the exhilaration made it almost easy, but before long it soured into toxic despair.

At the end of his first tour, he had no intention of going back in-country. Stateside it would be, his body in one piece still and his mind, if not in one piece, at least not fragmented beyond reassembly. He spent a few days out-processing in Saigon, sleeping on clean sheets and drinking good Scotch and eating rare steaks with fresh green salads before heading back to the United States. He got sated on red meat by the second day, but the fresh vegetables, crisp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, crunchy carrots—of these he simply could not seem to devour enough. Nor the Scotch. On the third day, he slept late, showered for half an hour, ate a fine breakfast of bacon and five eggs and real toast. By the afternoon, he was sitting at the bar in Saigon’s InterContinental Hotel savoring his third double Chivas, neat.

Lined up at the bar on both sides of him were contractors with bodies like sides of beef and plump rear- echelon types who looked like sausages stuffed into their tailored uniforms. Many of the REMFs were with beautiful whores reeking of imitation Chanel No. 5. It was not yet three P.M. but sounded like late on New Year’s Eve, all of them drinking and howling and backslapping.

There was a long mirror behind the bar, cracked but still hanging, and he looked at himself in his clean uniform with its edged creases, deeply tanned, emaciated, hollow-eyed and yellow-toothed. At the beginning of his tour he had worn a size 18 collar—big football neck—but now his neck was scrawny, sprouting out of the uniform shirt collar like a straw in a glass. Except for the whores, he was the only underweight person in the bar.

He was surrounded by piggy faces and grinning mouths and jiggling bodies, bartenders shouting and the whores laughing, their voices so high it sounded like screaming, and he suddenly thought he would puke up the Chivas Regal right there on the bar top. His vision misted and it was hard not to draw the .45 Colt—worn against regulations here but the hell with them, he never went anywhere unarmed anymore—and start putting red holes in the white faces.

He got himself out of the hotel and to the nearest corner before he did puke. Passersby kept right on going without giving him a second glance. Puking-drunk Americans were as common as Saigon’s notorious cat-sized rats then.

The next day, sick but sober, he went to see the DEROS officer and indicated his desire to sign up for another tour in-country. The plump major stared at him for a long time from behind an opulent mahogany desk he had commandeered from a Saigon pol.