Chapter 6

To call them guards would be an exaggeration. They were four men in their late teens and early twenties with AK-47s slung over a shoulder. Two of them sat in their jeeps smoking cigarettes. One of them was trying to get his watch to work. And one of them was taking a piss on a utility pole.

The pisser saw some movement out of the corner of his eye and started yelling.

The other three fumbled their weapons as they swung them around to the fronts of their bodies so they could hold them in a significantly more menacing manner.

Unbuttoning the top button on her shirt, Dr. Cynthia Jones sauntered up to the men with a coy smile on her face. “Gentlemen, it’s so hot out here, don’t you think?”

None of the men spoke or understood English. And they had absolutely no idea what to make of the white woman coming toward them. She smiled and unbuttoned the second button. Behind the three guards clustered together, the pisser cursed his penis for taking so long to drain.

She unbuttoned the third button.

All three of the men lowered their weapons and stared at her. She was the whitest woman they’d ever seen except on television. And she was two buttons away from showing them her tits.

The pisser shook his penis as he turned and headed toward the show.

She unbuttoned the fourth button. This was it. The moment of truth. If her distraction didn’t work, she would be killed and the organization she believed in with all her heart would have to start from scratch. For the first time since she’d been in high school, Dr. Cynthia Jones wished she had bigger tits.

She squatted down fifteen feet in front of the men, pulled her shirt open, and exposed her perky, full, B-cup breasts to the men.

They stared at the pale, white, breasts with the red areolas, squinting to focus on where her nipples rose up in the middle.

Lawrence pulled the trigger.

A stream of yellow-hot bullets burst out of his MK-18 submachine gun.

The first bullets caught the man on Lawrence’s right and practically decapitated him. In one smooth motion, the deadly stream moved to the man in the middle, and finally, the one on the left. All three fell backwards from the sudden jolts to their bodies.

The pisser turned and ran for his AK.

Lawrence estimated he was too far away to try for a headshot so he settled on a burst to the man’s back. Every bullet punctured either the heart or lungs and knocked the young man forward. He was dead when his body hit the ground.

Jones started buttoning up her shirt as she turned around.

Lawrence jogged toward her with his submachine gun in one hand and the silver case in the other. He went by her without a second glance, past the three men he’d just killed, and got in one of the jeeps.

Jones stood up leaving the top two buttons open and walked toward the jeep. She looked down at the men she’d distracted so that her partner could kill them with a ruthless efficiency. She couldn’t help but feel conflicted.

Yes, she had seen first-hand the havoc the warlord’s men had wrought on the people of Berhanu. But even so, the dead men she was staring at were probably kidnapped years earlier after their families had been killed in front of them. She was positive they had also seen their friends killed during training for not following instructions.

This was exactly the sort of thing that could only be fixed by starting over. Of course, it would be painful in the beginning. But, to let things go on the way they were going was unacceptable.

The human race had evolved randomly, haphazardly, at the mercies of climate, geographical, and political variables for its entire existence. And, all things considered, it had gone about as well as could be expected. But, now, it was time for a change.

The next step in humanity’s existence would now be guided by people who had a vision. Leaders who had the advantage of learning from all of the mistakes made by those who had come before them. What would, at first, seem like the biggest cataclysm in the history of the human race would, in two or three generations, be seen as a blessing in disguise.

“Get your ass in the jeep!”

Lawrence’s screaming snapped Jones out of her trance. She ran the rest of the way and jumped into the jeep.

Lawrence raised his submachine gun and shot out two of the tires on the jeep next to his. “Buckle up.”

She looked around. “I don’t have a seatbelt.”

He looked. Neither did he. “Hang on tight.”

Lawrence slammed on the gas and aimed toward the barren paved road in front of him. There were no suburbs here. Farmland was on two other sides of the capital with the jungle a couple of hundred yards away on the third. Here, there was just the road and short, yellow, grass on either side for miles in every direction. There was a river a few miles to the right.

Lawrence checked the rear view mirror and saw no one was following them. He knew the more distance he could put between himself and his eventual pursuers, the greater his margin of error could be when it came time to get on the jet.

He glanced down at the speedometer and saw he was approaching a hundred kilometers-per-hour. After so many years of driving with seatbelts and airbags, the thought of going approximately sixty miles-an-hour without them made him a little uncomfortable. Not having doors didn’t help.

“Hold the wheel,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“I have to get the phone.”

“I’ll get the phone!”

“You hold tight--”

She’d already unzipped the side pocket of his backpack, still on his back. He checked his side mirror, saw no one was coming, and slowed down to eighty kilometers-per-hour. She pulled the satellite phone out and handed it to him.

He took it without thanking her and pushed the second number. The phone dialed. He waited one ring then the line picked up. “It’s me. There’s a concrete road on the eastern part of the town with a jeep on it. I need you to come in from behind us and drop down in front of us.”

He listened to his pilot on the other end and beeped off the phone. He gave her the phone and accelerated.

Jones put the phone back in the pocket. When she saw he wasn’t going to say anything she said, “What did he say?”

“Two minutes.”

She looked around. She didn’t see the case. She started to panic. More than that, she started to feel genuine terror. She screamed, “Where’s the case?”

“I’m sitting on it.”

She looked down at his butt and couldn’t see it. “Where?”

He leaned to the side. There, under his butt and embedded into the seat cushion was the silver case.

She exhaled and put one of her hands on her forehead to calm herself. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I thought we lost it.”

“Oh, come on, give me some credit. I think the best is a little more competent than that.”

She laughed. It went from discrete to hysterical. If he only knew how competent she was. And what she was doing.

Lawrence glanced back in his side mirror. This time he saw some sort of movement behind him. It was too far away for him to get a good look, but it didn’t matter. Whatever movement there was, unless it was a jet landing on the road in front of him, was by definition, bad. He stepped on the gas pedal.

The sudden acceleration caused Jones to stop laughing. She turned, saw the look on his face, and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Something’s behind us.”

She turned to look. “What?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just hang on tighter.”

She spread her feet on the floorboard, pushed herself harder into the seat, and gripped the underside of her seat cushion as hard as she could. How the hell could anyone sell a vehicle without doors?

They heard the jet before they could see it. Lawrence didn’t need to look up in the sky behind him to know who it was. He just kept his eyes on the smooth road in front of him. Yes, it was only two and half lanes wide but there weren’t any potholes, cracks, or other things that might mess up the jet’s landing gear.

He glanced back in his rear view mirror and saw two jeeps way behind him. He looked down at his speedometer and saw he was going a hundred ten kilometers-per-hour. Whoever was chasing him would have to drive too fast to be able to catch him any time soon. Now all he had to do was wait for the pilot to find a part of the road that was straight for a long enough distance to both land and take off.

The sound of the jet got louder as it approached. When the shadow flew over the jeep, Lawrence eased his foot off the gas pedal. He didn’t want to get caught up in the super-heated backwash of the jet’s engines.

The jet’s rear wheels bounced off the road twice then landed for good on the third try. The front wheels landed on the first attempt. The jet’s engine started revving down and it began slowing.

The stolen jeep was a hundred yards behind the plane.

“We’ll stop behind it.” Lawrence said. “You need to jump out, run around the left wing, and go to the door.”

“Where are you going to be?”

“I have to do something important but I’ll be right behind you.”

“What the hell is so important that you can’t come with me? This is the escape part of the escape!”

“I’m not staying behind; I need to do something. It’ll take two seconds. Then we’ll go.”

She couldn’t imagine what he thought he needed to do but she nodded her head. “Okay. Should I take the case or will you?”

“You.”

The jet had almost come to a stop fifty yards up the road. Lawrence checked his rear view mirror one last time and started slowing down. When he got to about ten yards from his ride, he stepped on the brake and turned the wheel so the jeep was sideways.

He stood up in the jeep. Jones reached over and grabbed the case by the handle.

When he saw she had a firm grip on it, he said, “Go!”

Jones jumped out with the case in her hands. She ran as fast as she could around the jet’s left wing and went to the door near the cockpit. The door opened and unfolded down. Stairs appeared on the inside of the door to take her into the plane.

Lawrence backed the jeep up a few feet, spun the wheel to aim the jeep toward whoever was pursuing him, and stepped on the gas. He got it up to about twenty kilometers and jumped out.

He bent his knees, tucked his chin, and pulled his arms in toward his body to do a little roll but it was more out of training reflex than necessity. When he looked up, he saw the jeep was already pulling to the left.

Lawrence jumped to his feet and ran back toward the jet. When he reached the left wing, he dropped down beneath it and rolled over and over until he’d made it across and reached a spot a few feet away from the stairs. He popped up, ran to the stairs, and took them two at a time. Three hops later, he was in the plane.

He turned around and reached out for handle to the cord on the stairs. He pulled. The stairs folded and collapsed into the plane. The bottom underside of the stairs was now the door on the outside of the jet.

Lawrence looked over his shoulder and saw the silver case in a seat next to Dr. Jones. He took a breath and yelled, “I’m in, let’s go!”

The four rebels in two jeeps had heard gunfire from their post a few hundred meters away when they had been trying to secure the power plant. They had jumped in their jeeps and gone to where their comrades had been deployed. They found them dead and one of the jeeps missing so they went after it.

The pursuers had been focusing their attention on the plane that had landed on the road about a kilometer in front of them. And then the jeep they had been chasing after started on the road toward them. Yes, it was going at a snail’s pace but it was also taking up about half the room on the road.

The rebels in the oncoming lane slowed down first. The jeep had started in their lane but was now more than halfway into the other lane but because it was going so slow, they would hit it before it went into the other lane completely.

The rebels in the outgoing lane slowed down even more. The approaching jeep would hit them if it didn’t turn and there was no driver inside to turn it. They slowed down hard enough to wait for the other jeep to go by them, then pulled in behind it ready to drive off the other side of the road if needed.

The jet’s pilot pushed the jet up the road. He wasn’t sure how far back the rebels, soldiers, or whoever they were, were, but if he wasn’t going fast enough to take-off, it wouldn’t matter. After a few more seconds of acceleration, he pulled back on the controls and the jet’s nose lifted.

The silver case started to slide in its seat. Jones put her hand on top and kept it still. She leaned forward to try to counter the leaning back of the plane but she wasn’t worried. Even the increase in the air pressure that made her ears hurt wasn’t too much of a nuisance.

She was coming to terms with what was about to happen. With what she was about to do. Getting the virus wasn’t the only reason she’d gone to Africa. And she was proud of all the people she’d been able to help. But almost all of them would be dead in the next few months.

Jones tried not to think about it but it was unavoidable. Before the human race could be set on its new course, it had to first be disengaged from its present one. And that disengagement would not be an easy one. It would be brutal, hard, and painful. But it was also necessary because the course it was currently on was unsustainable both for it and for all of the other species it shared the planet with.

Lawrence sat in his seat and relaxed as the plane straightened out and made a turn. He felt a source of pride at everything he’d been able to accomplish in… he checked his watch… less than five hours.

He looked out the window and saw one of the men who’d been pursuing him running after the jeep he’d turned loose. Lawrence had thought about shooting the tires or engine block out of spite but the truth was he wasn’t an especially spiteful man. He was there to do a job. Those men were there to do a job. He was better at his job than they were at theirs. Nothing to be spiteful about, really.

Lawrence looked at Dr. Jones and saw her wipe a tear away. She’d caught him looking at her and was embarrassed.

“It’s okay, Doc. We’ll be fine,” he said.

“I’m sure we will,” she said trying to smile. “Let’s call Miles.”

He slid his backpack off his back and unzipped the side pocket. He took the phone out and pushed the top button. One ring later, the line on the other end picked up. “Mr. Devlin. I have secured both the package and the doctor.”

Devlin smiled at the good news. “Well done. Did you have any problems?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

“I’d like to speak to the doctor.”

“Sure. Hang on.” Lawrence went over to Jones and handed her the phone. “Tell him you’re unharmed.”

She took the phone. “Miles. Hi, I’m fine.”

“Excellent,” Devlin said. “And you’re sure we have absolutely everything we will need?”

“Yes, Miles, we have everything we will need. Nothing is going to stop us now. Nothing.”