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Cold Silence (A Joe Rush Novel, Band 3) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 4: Joe Rush

Abel, James

 
9780425282984: Cold Silence (A Joe Rush Novel, Band 3)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0425282988 ISBN 13: 9780425282984
Verlag: Berkley, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

James Abel—author of the electrifying Joe Rush novels Protocol Zero and White Plague—unleashes another heart-stopping thriller in which bioterror might bring the world to its knees...

Ex-Marine doctor and bioterror expert Joe Rush receives a plea for help from a member of his old military unit who is currently working as a geologist in a chaotic region of Somalia.

Joe arrives on the scene to find an entire group of people showing the horrific symptoms of an ancient sickness that was once thought to be sent as punishment from Heaven. But before Joe can get hard evidence identifying the illness, a local warlord takes matters into his own hands—and the proof is gone, just as the illness breaks out back in the United States.

This outbreak is not a curse from God. It’s a well-coordinated, meticulously planned attack with a specific goal that could overturn global stability and kill millions. And the only one who can stop the downfall of civilization is Joe Rush...

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Abel is the pseudonym for Bob Reiss, an accomplished author and journalist who has written extensively about trouble spots and exotic locations around the world, including the Arctic, Somalia/Sudan, and the Amazon rain forest. He is the author of the Joe Rush novels, including Cold Silence, Protocol Zero and White Plague. He lives and works in New York City.

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One

Lionel Nash's plea for help went unanswered because I could not reach my ringing satellite phone. My hands were occupied, gripping the steel fuselage in back of a C-130 Hercules, to keep me from sliding out of the plane. One engine had failed but the other three held altitude. I was strapped by bungee cord to the wall, six hundred feet above southern Sudan, as the big transport went semivertical, nose up, rear ramp open. I heard, over ringing, the high-pitched scream of wind, and the prop engines. Through that open door, I glimpsed six thousand starving Dinkas below, waiting for our life-giving cargo of Kansas-grown grain to fall.

There had been some mechanical problems over the last couple of weeks when it came time to release food. I'd insisted, against Eddie's objections, on riding in back today to see if I could find the snag. It had been small. I'd fixed it. Drop the food and let's go home, I'd told the three-man crew up front.

The ringing stopped as we hit drop-angle. Not many people had my number. That the phone was ringing meant there was an emergency. In this part of the world, that could mean any number of things.

It could be a government attack on rebels. Disease. Aid workers injured. The whole continent is a basket case.

I was the only person in back; no seats here, just the steel cave, and centering it, a track on which sat wooden pallets piled with 110-pound burlap sacks, filled with sorghum. From the outside, our blue UN markings were supposed to protect us if Sudanese MiGs showed up. Sometimes precautions worked. Sometimes rebels or government troops shot at relief planes. Sometimes planes-rattletrap workhorses to start with-failed and fell to the savannah below.

The phone began ringing again.

Below, men, women, and children had been waiting for food for days, sitting on their haunches, a silent crowd an eighth of a mile deep. Some had walked a hundred miles to reach the huge field, an arbitrary rectangle of grass. Looking up at us was a sea of hungry faces smeared with chalky dung powder, natural protection against sand flies. Twelve thousand eyes watched this afternoon's lone contribution to the bucket brigade of aid planes feeding four hundred thousand Africans at the junction of Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan, amid drought last year, flooding this year, and a thirty-year-old civil war.

Gravity did the job. The bags began to slide down the track, sluggish at first, then faster, food going down a gullet. The palettes and sacks tumbled out to separate and drop like bombs toward the veldt, where UN food monitors kept the crowd and a crew of TV journalists from running onto the drop zone, for a better shot, or for the food.

Last week a news show host from Copenhagen had done just that, stupidly had run onto the field to be on camera when the sacks hit the ground. Too late, she realized the bags were falling directly toward her. She tried to run, but her high heels snagged and a bag smashed her legs, and Eddie and I helped to amputate them back at the base.

She'd been airlifted home, a twenty-five-year-old blond beauty who had only weeks before appeared in Scandinavian magazine ads, and now would be fitted with artificial legs, who had considered Africa a form of entertainment or career advancement, and had come to see that it represented a more basic role than that.

What happens here threatens the world.

The ringing started up again as the plane stabilized and the remaining inboard port engine coughed. We limped toward home. I answered and went still, shocked when I heard who was calling. I'd thought today's mission was over. But what was starting would turn my world-the whole world-upside down.

My name is Joe Rush and I’m a medical doctor, all right, but also a retired Marine colonel who occasionally goes back on duty to do jobs for my old unit in D.C. My records have been sheep dipped, given selective truths. Kid from a Massachusetts town, that part is true, as is the ROTC training and Parris Island and later assignments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq. Marksman, the file says, capable of running a field op. True. Forty-one years old. Divorced by a wife who got tired of secrecy. I live alone now in the town where I grew up and I advise the Wilderness Medicine group at Harvard two days a week on medical work in “difficult” areas of the world. The file looks complete, to an outsider.

But the death of my fiancée eighteen months ago isn't there, nor is the fact that, when summoned, I still run a two-man bioterror team comprised of myself and my best friend, Major Edward Nakamura. My secrets from even my bosses are certainly not there either. That I wake sometimes from dreams of strangling one man and watching another die, frothing at the mouth, in a foreign private hospital, run by a foreign security service. Sometimes when I open my eyes from those dreams, I feel a presence in the room. Not a consciousness. Not a ghost. I don't believe in that. So I'm unsure what is there, in the room with me. Memory? Blame? Rage? Regret?

My feeling when I lie awake those nights in my isolated home in Massachusetts, and wait for dawn, is complicated. It's not guilt. I did what had to be done. Not fear, because I don't care if something beyond our earthly comprehension is really there. "It's vigilance," Eddie once said. "You concentrate on what you need to do to protect others."

But Eddie is an optimist. He always thinks things will turn out right.

Once waking, I thought I saw a small green glow in the corner of my bedroom. But later I decided I probably didn't see it. Or it was the reflection of a headlight passing on the dirt road. Or an afterimage from rubbing my eyes. I'm a doctor. I'm a scientist. I hunt diseases and believe in facts. I don't believe in little glowing lights. Or in religion. Or certainly, anymore, in a benevolent God.

Wilderness Medicine is in the file, too, and it was the official reason that Eddie and I were in Africa, thanks to a secret agreement our director-back in Foggy Bottom-made with Harvard. Wilderness Medicine is a new field, the art of getting fast care to patients in remote parts of the earth. Sometimes they are explorers or adventurers who have been injured in the Amazon, or the Arctic, or the deep sandstone canyons of Utah. A sea snake-bitten National Geographic photographer in Micronesia. A farmer dying from a new, resistant malaria in Peru. WM patients tend to be the very rich, who use the wilderness as playgrounds, or the very poor, who lack even basic medical knowledge or care.

"But Wilderness Medicine also includes disaster relief, rapid response to hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, outbreaks," Admiral Galli, the director, had explained when the agreement was signed. "Officially, you're going to Africa as relief doctors. You'll work out of the giant aid base in northern Kenya. You'll treat locals and aid workers. Vaccinations. Health classes. Diet. You'll be based at the junction of three countries."

"And unofficially?" I'd asked as the three of us sat in Galli's townhouse office, walking distance from the White House, where we mapped outbreak games or war or terror scenarios like the one that had brought us to Africa.

The admiral frowned. He's a small man, sixtyish, a former Coast Guard hero. We've been through so much that we sometimes address each other more like friends. He's one of the few people left in Washington Eddie and I trust.

"Joe, there have been some disturbing reports coming out of East Africa."

"What reports?"

"For two decades we've anticipated that if a bio-attack comes on U.S. soil, it will be in some recognizable form. Anthrax. Ricin. Bad stuff, but at least a form we know."

I felt a chill. "Something new has appeared?"

"Threats, Joe. CIA warning. That an Islamic splinter group is...

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Verlag
Berkley
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0425282988
ISBN 13 
9780425282984
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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