they'd infected him, but because they'd infected an entire village to use as a trap. Joe, someone has to find out where this is come from.
I will, Joe promised.
Get the wounded out of here, there's not much you can do for me. Some of those injuries were severe.
Damn it, Draden. That was Gino.
He didn't feel as bad as they did. He didn't have much of a future anyway. Just pissed I wasted all that time going to school instead of partying.
Yeah, 'cuz you're such a party animal, Malichai said with an attempt at sarcastic humor. His voice was tight. The feeling in his mind—sorrow.
Tell Nonny she's the best. He should have told the old woman himself. Wyat Fontenot's grandmother had taken the entire team into her home. She'd cared for them as she would her own. He hadn't had that kind of affection from anyone since his foster mother died when he was young. He hadn't known anyone else was capable of loving others the way the woman he called mother had, until he met Nonny. He shouldn't have told her and he hadn't not once.
Draden let the forest close around him as the sound of the helicopter faded into the distance. He wasn't worried about being alone. He was used to it. He'd been alone most of his life, even in the midst of a crowd. He could handle that, no problem. He began to move quickly toward the village of the dead. It was very small, only a few families, many related to one another. He was a very fast runner, but that would spread the virus through his bloodstream much quicker. Still, it might not be a bad idea just to get over with. He played with that idea as he jogged, his animal senses flaring out to uncover anyone that might have been left behind to keep an eye on him.
He pulled up the facts about the village and region the'd been briefed on. The village's name, Lupa Suku, meant Forgotten Tribe, and he thought it very apt from everything he'd read about them. The village was so remote it wasn't even considered a subsdistrict of Rambutan. He knew that driving southeast the thirty-four and some miles from Palembang to Rambutan, villages along the road were more and more scarce. Eventually that road became nothing more than a muddy borad path, lined on either side by trees and brush. A few cars and buses shared the road with bikes and animals until it disappeared.
So remote, Lupa Suku could only be reached by bike, boat or animals as such as domestic ox. During the wet season it was impossible to get any motorized vehicle through. Heavy items tended to get stuck in the thick mud, so it was necessary to move everything via water. Most used a small boat to access the village via Banyasin River.
According to the briefing given by the representative of the Indonesian government, primary trade considered of fish and rice. There was a small copper mine that was kept a secret by the locals. The copper was mined by hand a little at a timeas they had no modern machinery. The government had turned a blind eye, acting as thought they knew nothing about that little mine or the fact that the villagers traded the copper to poachers who came to the area looking for exotic birds. Money mean little to the villagers, so they tended to barter for things they needed.
Draden figured bartering was how the terrorists had introduced the virus. It was possible that the virus had occured some other way, via bugs or animals, but he doubted that the nearby terrorist cell had used the dead villagers for an ambush, killing nearly all the WHO doctors and their workers, tended to make him believe they were responsible.
The terrorist cell was well organized for being fairly new. Their job was to topple the government, and unlike others targeting police officers, they had chosen to unermine the people's confidence in their government by introducing a hot virus. Draden and his team believed the village was their first large test. There had to have been other smaller experiments.
Lupa Suku was the perfect village to test the virus on. The people preferred to do their trading via boat and didn't allow outsiders to come to their village without a good reason or an invitation. They were secretive, mostly, the government thought, because they had the copper mine and didn't want outsiders to know about