Chapter 2 of White Devils

The helicopter comes in low over the trees, beating down through the air towards the river and the abandoned oil palm plantation and the dead.

Nicholas Hyde, buckled into a seat by the open door of the cabin, sees a cluster of huts and a ruined brick building tucked into the river's sun-silvered bend, and a handful of narrow fields scratched along the edge of close-packed ranks of gengineered dwarf oil palms, the oil palms marching away towards a straight horizon made misty by the swamp-forest's exhalations, all this tilting into the sky as the helicopter swings around. A shaft of sunlight sweeps through the cabin, dazzling Nick and lighting up the padded blue walls and the seats bolted along them, and the five Brazilian soldiers, the flight engineer, the government observer, the Caritas photographer, and Tremaine Thompson. One of the soldiers is standing by the door, her left arm casually hooked through a strap; she grins at Nick and points with her assault rifle at the long streamer of red smoke pouring from the plank-sided dugout canoe that's anchored in the middle of the river.

The helicopter hangs in the hot wet air, its ceramic twin turbine engines working hard as it turns through three hundred and sixty degrees. It's a twenty-year-old Bell 430i, with a fifteen-metre-diameter composite four-bladed rotor, auxiliary fuel tanks to extend its range, and an internal-load capacity of ten people or four thousand kilograms of cargo, leased by Obligate from the South African company that also supplied the two-person crew. When Nick asked why they were travelling to a hot scene in a helicopter with no armaments or surveillance gear, Tremaine Thompson told him that it was standard procedure: the Congolese Army has just two attack and six transport helicopters, all of them committed to patrolling areas still held by Loyalists, and in any case Obligate doesn't entirely trust the army -- many units were formerly loyal to Sergeant Samuel Nyibizo, switching sides only when it became clear that he was going to lose the civil war. "I won't deny the risk," Tremaine said, "but the local soldiers report that the area is clear, we have our boys from Brazil as back-up, and we'll do the job as quickly as possible, quick and dirty, in and out. You're going to learn a lot."

Nick watches as the red smoke is bent into a question mark by prop wash, wondering why the government soldiers who discovered the massacre are hanging about in the middle of the river. He's beginning to get a bad feeling about this quick and dirty in-and-out job. It's very hot inside the cabin. Sweat sheens his face, mats his close-cropped hair. He can feel sweat trickling down the skin of his chest and back, sweat soaking his feet and thin socks inside his neoprene boots. He's wearing an intercom headset and ear defenders, white nylon protective coveralls zipped tight over T-shirt and shorts and a spidersilk/fullerene flak vest, and an olive-drab webbing belt buckled over the coveralls, with a Glock-20 in a Rescomp secure holster behind his right hip. When he gave the pistol to Nick, Tremaine Thompson said that it was a nice weapon, accurate and virtually recoilless, with a floating breech that fires caseless seven-gram hollow-points, twenty in the clip. Nick thought the Glock was plasticky, underpowered and a lot lighter than the Mark 4 Browning 9mm High-Power he'd been issued in the British Army, and said that he was amazed Tremaine was so enthusiastic about guns, because he must have seen any number of people killed by them when he was working in Philadelphia. Tremaine said, "Yeah, and that's exactly why I carry one back home, to make sure I don't end up on the slab with a ticket on my toe", which in Nick's opinion is the USA in a nutshell. He's uncomfortably aware of the weapon, as if it's a prop for a role he's been forced to play without adequate preparation. During his two years in the army, he'd never needed to use a gun in anger, and he certainly doesn't want to start using one now.

Kites and buzzards rise up from half a dozen points along the edge of the river, tilt away above the dwarf oil palms. A ragged posse of wild dogs snarl and nip at each other as they flee down a track between the huts and the fields. A brace of black, tassel-eared bushpigs trot into the thorny brush that has grown up along the edge of the oil palm plantation. The animals leaving behind dark shapes on red dirt in front of the huts, at the margin of the fields, on a path trampled through a meadow of elephant grass.

Something terrible has happened down there, but it's not clear precisely how bad it is. The only information about the massacre is a terse message sent out on short-wave radio by the army patrol, which claimed to have discovered half a dozen bodies but failed to identify them or give any details about the manner of their death. The obvious assumption is that the dead are refugees from the other side of the Congo river, innocents murdered by one of the roving gangs of Loyalist soldiers -- after Obligate capped the wells of the Mboukou oilfield, the former boom town of Impfondo and the surrounding area in the north of the country has become a hotbed of pro-Loyalist sentiment and insurrection -- but Nick has been in-country long enough to know that nothing in Africa is ever obvious or simple. The dead could just as easily be poachers or smugglers on the losing side of some gang war, or casualties of a skirmish between Loyalist factions, or victims of an outbreak of some kind of swamp fever or the plastic disease.

Lieutenant Gomes, the leader of the squad of Brazilian soldiers, has been using his radio to speak to the Congolese soldiers in the dugout. Now he switches to the helicopter's intercom and says, "We go in," and jabs down a thumb emphatically.

The helicopter sinks through the air, its prop wash beating circles of tarnished silver into muddy water. The untidy mopheads of a line of unmodified oil palms flail in its wake; long grass is blown flat in a wide circle as it settles towards the ground as gingerly as a dowager testing her bathwater.

Nick dry-swallows. He can't kid himself that the cold fist in his gut and the metallic taste in his mouth, like a penny laid on his tongue, are due to mere exhaustion. This is the real deal, a whole-body flinch, a crawling anticipation. The muscular hum of the helicopter's turbines resonates deep in his belly; the steel plates of the floor vibrate under the cleats of his boots. He feels unsteady, ghostly, not at all ready for this.

Tremaine Thompson leans at Nick's shoulder. A Phillie Phanatic's cap jammed low on his shaved scalp, a bright glint in his eyes. He says, "You saw the soldiers?"

"I saw that they were in the middle of the river, nowhere near any of the bodies."

"My guess is, they camped on the other side of the river last night. Just in case the people who did this are lurking somewhere close."

"I also saw that they let dogs and birds get at the bodies," Nick says. "I don't think it's very likely they've done a full search."

"I don't think so either," Tremaine says. "Listen, Nick, we're going to work as fast as we can, but we're also going to do our best for these poor people. Stay frosty, okay?"

The helicopter touches down with a solid thump. The smell of baked dust is suddenly strong in the cabin. Lieutenant Gomes and his four soldiers pitch through the door, stubby assault rifles jerking this way and that as they fan out under the flickering shadow of the rotor blades. They're part of the contingent that Obligate hired from the Brazilian Army to manage its internal security. With their faces hidden by helmets and goggles, their jungle-camo flak vests strapped over segmented body armour that glistens black as beetle chitin, thick leather gloves, and harnesses and belts loaded with flares and grenades and spare clips, medipaks and water-bottles, they look like science-fictional invaders. Bulky robots or half-man, half-ant starship troopers.

Nick unbuckles his harness and shucks the ear defenders and intercom headset, pulls up the hood of his coveralls, checks the seals and airways of his three-way respirator mask.

Grant Twentyman, the sturdy, cheerful New Zealander who's Caritas Green Congo's official photographer, pauses at the door and tosses Nick a little canister. "Repellent," he says.

"Repellent?"

"Insect repellent. You'll need a double dose around fresh bodies."

Nick follows the photographer out of the helicopter. The soldiers break left and right. Two move towards the huts; Lieutenant Gomes leads the others at a brisk run around the tail boom of the helicopter, towards the river. Tremaine Thompson is climbing out of the helicopter's door ass-backwards. Grant Twentyman strolls away, taking a slow panoramic shot of the three intact huts and the charred circles where two more once stood, the brick building half-hidden by a secondary scrub of umbrella trees and straggly bushes, the fields and the edge of the oil palm plantation. The government observer, William Ndinga, trots after him, a nervous, wiry man in a black flak vest over jungle-camo blouse and trousers, the cuffs of his trousers tucked into his high-topped boots. His prized mirrorshades flash bright discs of sunlight as he looks around. His micropore mask hangs around his neck, vivid white against his matt-black skin.

There's a profound stillness in the hot air, broken only by the slowing throb of the helicopter's rotor blades.

Nick rubs lemon-scented insect repellent over his face and hands and wrists, then helps Tremaine Thompson carry a cool box down the narrow path cut through the elephant grass towards the river. Grant Twentyman and William Ndinga follow. Everyone treads carefully: Loyalists have been known to seed the area around a massacre with pop mines, deadly little things that, woken by the proximity of human-sized sources of heat, spring out of the ground and explode at waist height like the world's worst surprise. A hot breeze makes a sea noise in the tall dry grass. Insects chirp and sizzle and whine and saw. Somewhere in the distance, a bird is making a noise exactly like a hammer striking a metal pipe.

The grass abruptly gives way to a narrow track of trampled earth that wanders along the edge of the river to the strip of sand where the soldier's dugout has been hauled halfway out of the water. Blue-backed swallows and ordinary house-martins chase insects above the river's sun-struck silken slide. Four government soldiers in olive-drab fatigues, well-used Kalashnikovs slung across their backs, are smoking cigarettes and watching Lieutenant Gomes argue with their sergeant, a small man with a machine pistol in a plastic holster at his hip and a red beret folded under the shoulder tab of his blouse who shrugs sulkily as the lieutenant makes a short angry speech, jabbing a finger in the air for emphasis.

When Tremaine Thompson calls to him, the Brazilian soldier stalks over, his goggles dangling under his unshaven chin, his black eyes flashing with contemptuous anger. He says, "These people are no help. They come here and they find one big group of dead. They take pictures, then they go across the river and they make camp. That's it, they have done their job. They do not secure a perimeter, they make no attempt to search the area properly."

Tremaine says, "How many bodies are we talking about?"

"I have found five that way," Lieutenant Gomes says, and jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the elephant grass. "My men are checking them for booby traps. Also, there are two by the huts, more in the fields. I do not know the exact number yet -- my people have not finished their search. You have much work, I think."

Another trail through the elephant grass leads past the brick foundations of the plantation workers' barracks, where the red turrets of termite nests stand amongst sprawling cacti. The dead are a little way beyond these ruins, guarded by two of the Brazilian soldiers. An old man on his back, two women tumbled together, and two younger men who lie a couple of metres apart. Birds have been at their faces; they stare up at the sky with blind sockets black with dried blood.

The two soldiers talk briefly with Lieutenant Gomes, who says that it's safe to examine the bodies. Grant Twentyman straps on his respirator mask and begins to take full-length photographs of each body and close-ups of the faces and any visible wounds. William Ndinga kicks a stone in the direction of the body of the old man and says to no one in particular, "They come here, these people, they sneak into my country, they try and live where they are not allowed to live, and now they are punished for their trespasses."

"Stand well back, Mr Ndinga," Tremaine says. "There's blood all over the ground, in case you haven't noticed. If these poor people are refugees from the Dead Zone, they could be carrying God knows what diseases. You get just one drop of blood on you, and I'll ask you to leave your clothes here; you'll have to ride bare-ass naked back to civilization."

William Ndinga's mirrorshades flash full of sunlight as he turns to look at Tremaine. "I have a magic bullet, just like you. Also, I know what I'm doing. I study biology in the university in Brazzaville, and I go to Cuba to do postdoctoral work with Professor Tomás Ortís at Hermanos Almeijeiras in Havana. My PhD work was on the sequencing of the genetic code of the guinea worm, but I also worked on the wards. I have medical training. In Brazzaville, I helped nurse many afflicted with the Black Flu. I caught the plastic disease but I cured myself. Anyway, I am not here to touch the bodies. I am an observer only. Touching the bodies, that's your job."

"He's absolutely goddamned right," Tremaine says to Nick. "Let's get to work."

They start with the women. They measure the bodies and estimate age and weight and distinguishing features, roll fingertips on plastic cards, map and measure bite marks and deep abdominal wounds, pry open mouths so that Grant Twentyman can photograph the teeth. One woman is much older than the other; they could be mother and daughter. They have both been shot in the head at close range by a small-calibre handgun. Nick suggests that they were executed, and Tremaine shrugs and says it's possible. "But whoever did it smashed in their skulls and scooped out most of the brains afterward, and tore out most of their livers, too."

"This is bad," William Ndinga says. He has picked up a stick, and is using it to prod at the torn belly of one of the young men.

"Christ, man," Tremaine says, with equal measures of dismay and disgust. "Don't mess up the evidence."

William Ndinga tosses the stick into the tall grass. "Your evidence is already very badly messed up. Look for yourself. His liver is gone, just like the others."

Grant Twentyman says, "Animals got at the bodies, right? Wild dogs, pigs, Christ knows what."

"Ordinary animals did not do this," William Ndinga says. "It was Loyalists. They eat their victims -- it's well known. You must write this up and put it on your website, let the world know what the Loyalists do."

"These don't look like human bite marks," Tremaine Thompson says, as he roots in his equipment bag. "On the other hand, they don't look like they were made by dogs, either. Let's not assume anything until we know everything."

Nick helps Tremaine make casts of several of the bite marks with premixed dental plaster. They punch out little circles of skin for DNA sequencing, swipe the edges of wounds with sterile Q-tips, seal each set of samples in a Ziploc bag, set each bag in the rack inside the cool box. Nick feels a slight tremor in his fingers as he labels the bags, nothing to worry about. He's trying to think of this as a test, and he's determined to pass it, to fit in, but these bodies are very different from the waxy cadavers of the Medical School anatomy room. They're still very much human. He can't help noticing pathetic details: the torn hem of the younger woman's red and yellow flower-print dress; the bracelet of coarse hair around the older woman's bony wrist. It's very hot, and his close-fitting respirator mask, with its tinted visor that gives everything a sepia tinge, the underwater sucking sound it makes with each breath, and the smell of spoiling human meat penetrating its micropore filters, gives him a touch of claustrophobia. The monotonous metallic sound of the bird calling somewhere in the brush comes and goes like the beginning of a headache. Despite Grant Twentyman's insect repellent, sweat bees, the small black stingless kind, cluster on the scant margin of skin between the mask's seal and the tightly cinched hood of his coveralls. Mosquitoes sing their Doppler whines. And this close to the river there will be plenty of blackflies, the kind that bite and then lay an egg in the wound. That these days can give you something far worse than a bad itch and maggots under your skin.

Tremaine finds a toy beneath the body of the younger woman, a doll crudely carved from a piece of soft wood. He shows it to Lieutenant Gomes, who agrees to search the immediate area in case the child who owned the doll is still alive and hiding close by.

"It was probably eaten," William Ndinga says, and Tremaine Thompson tells him to help Lieutenant Gomes if he has nothing better to do, and asks Nick how he's doing.

"I'm fine."

"Then let's take a look at the men."

The three men have been eviscerated and badly bitten, and there are deep lacerations on their torsos and their arms. When Nick lifts the head of the old man, he feels pieces of bone move around beneath his fingers. The skull is like a broken vase held together by skin, and there's a ragged hole in the back where most of the brains have been scooped out.

Tremaine takes a look. "An animal didn't do this," he says. "Someone pounded on him after he was down. Did you notice the wounds on their arms?"

"Defence cuts. You think they were killed with machetes?"

"I'm not sure. The wounds are pretty ragged, and machetes usually make deep, clean slices. They could have been made by some kind of club with nails or spikes sticking through it."

Half a dozen red, brass-capped double-o shotgun cartridges are scattered on the ground, and Nick finds a clutch of .32 long rounds in the back pocket of the old man.

"This guy had a rifle," he says, "but where is it now?"

"The Loyalists took it," William Ndinga says. He's affecting a bored, sulky attitude, but when Tremaine Thompson tosses him a pair of Kevlar gloves he snaps them on and helps Nick and Tremaine and Grant Twentyman search along the edge of the tall dry grass. They turn up an ancient shotgun, its wooden stock freshly broken, and an empty clip from a .22 automatic, and find a trail smashed through the grass towards the edge of the plantation.

"That's where they took the child," William Ndinga says, turning a bent grass blade between finger and thumb. "You see here, the blood? It was already dead, I think."

Nick and Tremaine take samples of blood-spattered grass, and finish documenting the men. They're packing up everything when Lieutenant Gomes comes back down the trail and tells them that he has found another body. "Something strange. Like, I do not know the English. Like a macaco."

Tremaine has unfastened his respirator mask. He smiles at Nick, and says to Lieutenant Gomes, "You want us to take a look at a monkey?"

"A monkey, yes. A big monkey. A very strange monkey," Lieutenant Gomes says, very serious, anxious to convince them of the importance of his find. "It was shot dead. This way, come and see."

It's sprawled on its back in the long grass to one side of the trail, its arms and legs casually askew, like a pale starfish stranded by some strange tide. Most of the head has been vapourized by a close-range shotgun blast. Swarms of flies and ants are feeding on the long scatter of congealed blood and shreds of tissue.

"Un diable blanc," William Ndinga says, and crosses himself.

"It looks like a chimpanzee," Grant Twentyman says. His mask dangles at his neck, and now he pushes back the hood of his coveralls and rakes his fingers through his sweat-soaked blond hair. There's a swipe of green sunblock across his forehead, another down the blade of his nose. "A shaved albino chimpanzee someone took a serious dislike to."

"Chimpanzees are extinct in the wild," William Ndinga says. "Chimpanzees and gorillas, they catch our diseases and die. This thing is a white devil, probably made by gene hackers across the river."

"Bullshit," Grant Twentyman says. "People still poach chimps. I saw one just three months ago in a market in Burundi, skinned and butchered. Bush meat for some rich family's wedding."

"If it was butchered," William Ndinga says, "how do you know it was a chimpanzee? Maybe it was a child, did you think of that? Burundi is a very bad place. There are men that kill orphans and sell them as bush meat, it's well known."

"Bullshit," Grant Twentyman says again, but far less forcefully.

Tremaine Thompson looks at Nick. "You're the biologist. What do you think?"

Another of Tremaine's little challenges.

Nick says, "I'm pretty sure it isn't a chimpanzee."

"I think so too," Tremaine says. "I don't know much about apes, but this looks plain wrong."

The headless corpse is the size of an eight- or nine-year-old child, with child-sized male genitals but well-developed muscles, big flat hands and feet, and strong black claws instead of nails. It is quite hairless. There's a gristly ridged growth around its barrel chest, and irregular bony or cartilaginous plates under the pale skin of its arms and legs, slabs which slide around a little when Tremaine probes them.

Nick finds a half-dozen broken teeth in the bloody detritus in the grass. Tremaine picks them over, and says, "They all seem to be incisors or canines."

"That's what I thought."

They both get down on their knees and do a close search, collecting plenty of fragments of sharp-edged teeth, but failing to find any flat-topped molars or premolars. Tremaine sits back and looks up at the soldiers and says, "It has claws, a lot of sharp teeth, and a kind of internal body armour. Very definitely a shoo-in for weirdest corpse of the month."

"It was not alone," William Ndinga says. "Its friends killed those people and ate their livers and their brains. They took away a child, and ate it too."

"It's possible," Tremaine says. "When we get back I can see if any of the teeth we found make a match with the casts of the bite marks on the corpses."

"Strange things come across the big river," Lieutenant Gomes says.

"He's right," William Ndinga says. "It is very bad, on the other side of the Congo. Half their country is destroyed by rogue biotechnology, but they are so greedy that they let transnats come in and build more laboratories. There is much perverted science, many crimes against Nature. This is a very good example, if you want my opinion."

"Whatever it is," Tremaine says, "I want it zipped into a body bag. It's coming back with us."

Lieutenant Gomes snaps an order; one of the soldiers trots off towards the helicopter. As Grant Twentyman videos the pale, headless corpse, stepping carefully around it, Nick says, "What about the other bodies?"

There's a moment of silence while the other men look at each other. Then Tremaine Thompson says, "We can't risk it, Nick. They could have been refugees from across the Congo, from the Dead Zone. The chance they could be carrying some kind of biowar disease is too great."

"But we're taking this thing back with us."

"Because we want to find out what it is," Tremaine says.

"Perhaps the government soldiers will bury the bodies," Lieutenant Gomes says, looking at William Ndinga.

"You know there is no time," the government observer says. Sweat beading along the edge of his hairline is attended by a dozen small, industrious black bees. "When you go, they go too."

"Bullshit," Nick says. "If you give me a shovel, I'll do it myself. It can't take long to dig a shallow grave."

"A shallow grave is no good," Tremaine Thompson says. "Animals will soon dig it up. And we don't even have time for that, Nick. We have to document the other bodies and scram."

"So that's what you meant by quick and dirty," Nick says. He can feel spots of angry heat burning on his cheeks.

"That's exactly what I meant," Tremaine says. "It's not good, it's not right, but there it is. Meanwhile, we're here to find out how these poor people died, and we still have to document the other bodies."

William Ndinga says, "This white devil was not alone. Its friends could be nearby. In my opinion, we should forget the other bodies and get on the helicopter and leave at once."

Lieutenant Gomes says, "For once he is right. This area, it is not secured. We do not know what is out there. We must finish very quickly."

"Listen to the man, Nick," Grant Twentyman says, taking one handle of the cool box as Tremaine takes the other. "The clock is ticking."

William Ndinga catches up with Nick as they walk back along the path through the tall elephant grass. "You are angry because you think we are not civilized," he says.

"Not at all," Nick says. It's true. He's more ashamed than angry; he knows that he should have kept quiet because he's the outsider here, because in Africa doing the right thing is never as simple as it seems.

William Ndinga is anxious to explain. "Leaving bodies to be eaten by animals isn't something civilized men should do," he says, "but sometimes it is not possible to be civilized, you understand? Maybe the soldiers come back in a few days, when they know the area is safe. But you cannot expect them to risk their lives."

"We don't even know if they were refugees," Nick says.

"Of course they were refugees," the government observer says. "You say, how does William Ndinga know this? I say, because of where they chose to live. Listen, you're a biologist, just like me. You know that two thousand years ago, when the climate was much drier, this was all grass plains, with forest only in the valleys and around the rivers. You know that two thousand years ago many people lived here."

"They grew oil palms. When I was working on the biodiversity surveys, we often found husks of Elaeis guineensis in stream beds deep in the forest."

"Exactly! Before the forest came, people could live here, they cultivated this land. You can still find raised terraces in the forest, places where people once grew crops. You can find pottery in sandbanks along the river. All of this is true, scientifically proven. But the climate changed, the rains came again, and the forests spread and the people vanished. One theory is that they simply moved somewhere else, but I think that they stayed and tried to make a living, until some kind of forest disease caused a catastrophic depopulation. It's well known that many forest animals harbour diseases that can spread to people. It's well known that haemorrhagic influenza, the Black Flu, came from a river valley in this very forest, just five hundred kilometres to the west, over the border in Gabon. A Japanese logging company started to cut down the trees there, and the workers got sick. They were taken to hospital, and the nurses and doctors and other patients got sick too, and very soon millions of people were dying, in Africa, everywhere in the world . . . How many people died from the Black Flu, in England?"

"A hundred and fifty thousand. Not as many, I know, as here."

"In my country, two million died. It was more than seventy per cent of the population. And in all of Africa, half a billion people died. People fled the cities because that was where the Black Flu was spreading fastest, but most of them ended up in refugee camps, and the Black Flu spread through the camps, too. And because a whole farming season was lost in most countries, many more died of famines, and of typhoid and plague and measles, and then there were the riots and the wars . . . All because people tried to exploit the forest. Because they went where they were not supposed to go. The only good in all this misery," William Ndinga says, repeating with relish a mordant observation that Nick has heard too many times before, "was that the Black Flu ended the Aids epidemic, because it killed almost everyone whose immune system was compromised by the HIV virus. But now we are at the beginning of a new age. We will rebuild our country in harmony with Nature. We will use science to understand Nature, not to subdue her. We will build good hospitals and provide clean water, and educate the people. We will control our population growth, we will use sustainable technology, we will live where we are meant to live, and we will conserve the forests for the good of all the world, as agreed with UNESCO."

There isn't any polite way for Nick to respond to this sudden, fierce outburst of naked propaganda. There's the sentiment, never overtly expressed but lurking just beneath the surface of Obligate's pro-Gaian philosophy, that haemorrhagic influenza was a blessing in disguise, a natural mechanism that in Africa has winnowed the human race to a sustainable level.

William Ndinga says, "That's why I know those people were refugees -- because only refugees and other criminals would try to live in a place so full of diseases. And not just natural diseases. Before the Black Flu, gene hackers came to Africa from all over the world, because weak governments were easily bribed to allow laboratories to work without any regulation. They created all kinds of problems we must now live with. The plastic disease, for instance, is very bad in the forest. If you live in here, and if you have no protection, you are certain to catch it. Even if you have a magic bullet, there is a ten per cent chance of infection."

"I know."

Nick's biosurvey team once stumbled across an old pygmy encampment in the deep forest, where the remains of several victims of the plastic disease lay intermingled under a collapsed shelter overgrown with flowering vines. All the flesh had rotted away, leaving bones cased in smooth chunks and tattered sheets of blackened polymer. The plastic disease is caused by a species of bacteria, transmitted by blackfly bites, that has acquired a gengineered plasmid, a little circlet of DNA carrying genes originally designed to make complex long-chain hydrocarbons in plant cells. The bacteria multiply avidly in human soft tissue, and in the last stages of the disease the victims are turned into grotesque living statues, paralysed by hard, knotty strings and lumps of polymer under their skin and muscles.

"It is everywhere in the forests," William Ndinga says, "and it is very bad in the farming country just now. I myself caught it. A nodule began to grow on my chest. A hard little lump, like a canker. I cut out the infected tissue and burned the wound with flaming alcohol. Then I gave myself a course of Floxapen. The real stuff, made in France, not the shit sold on the black market. I was lucky -- most strains of the plastic disease are resistant to antibiotics now."

Nick is impressed in spite of himself. He says, "You're a survivor."

"I'm the head man of my family. I have to survive. I have to work hard. I have many people to support, and now it is possible to make money again I want to buy magic bullets for all my family. I want to buy a Mercedes Benz. A cabriolet with a hydrogen cell and an electric motor driving each wheel. The latest model," William Ndinga says, and stops.

Nick and everyone else have stopped too. They have heard the sound of automatic gunfire, a small but distinct popping in the distance. A shared instinct makes them all crouch low. Nick reaches for the Glock holstered at his hip, then realizes that no one else has drawn their gun. There is nothing to see but the blank sky above the tall dry elephant grass on either side of the path, and the gunfire has already stopped.

Lieutenant Gomes speaks quickly into the microphone of his headset, then says, "One of my men saw something in the trees. They go to check it out."

"More white devils," William Ndinga says. "We should go, right away."

Grant Twentyman takes a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coveralls, shakes one loose, and bites on the filter. He says, "I bet it's wild dogs, waiting to get back to their meal," and flicks his lighter, touches the flame to the end of the cigarette.

Tremaine Thompson says, "We're here to do a job. I'd like to finish it."

Lieutenant Gomes takes off his helmet, blots sweat from his brow with the heel of his glove, puts the helmet back on. He says, "I think it is okay if you can do it very quickly. My men see nothing. This is just a scare, nothing more."

"We'll work fast," Tremaine says.

They load the cool box full of samples onto the helicopter. Nick drinks a litre of water straight down, pours another litre over his head.

Tremaine says, "We're halfway there, gentlemen," and asks Nick to document the two bodies by the huts while he and Grant Twentyman check out the bodies in the fields.

"No problem," Nick says.

"Good man," Tremaine says, and lays a hand on Nick's arm and lowers his voice. "This is pretty bad. I'm not surprised everyone is so jumpy."

"I think they were trying to get away," Nick says. "I think that when they knew they weren't going to make it, the men shot the women; perhaps they shot the kid too. To save them from something worse."

"We can't be sure of that," Tremaine says.

"We both saw what they were running away from. What do you think that thing is?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think it's gengineered?"

Tremaine Thompson passes the flat of his hand over his shaved scalp. "I don't think we've stumbled on some undiscovered species. I'm looking forward to seeing Bridget's expression when I ask her to autopsy it."

"They were brave people," Nick says. "I don't like leaving them here like this."

"Someone will come back to bury them, I'll make sure of it. Meanwhile, we'll document the rest of the bodies, do the best we can for them. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good man," Tremaine says again.

The two soldiers return, a green body bag sagging heavily between them. Tremaine fastens a biohazard seal around the double zip, and Nick helps him stow the bag in the helicopter's cabin. Then Tremaine and Grant Twentyman pull out another cool box and head past the huts, followed by William Ndinga and Lieutenant Gomes and one of the soldiers, all of them moving briskly, anxious to get the job done, while Nick and the other soldier, the young woman who smiled at him in the helicopter, carry a cool box over to the huts.

Two bodies lie on pounded red earth near the charred circles of the burnt-out huts, so close together that their heads are almost touching. Both corpses are those of young men; both are badly mutilated. Nick pulls on his respirator mask and a fresh pair of gloves, and sets to work. The same bite marks, the same severe damage to the heads. He finds a broken bone nearby, the thigh bone of some large animal. Its ball joint matches depressions in the skulls. No sign of knife or machete lacerations, no sign of gunshot wounds. These men were beaten and bitten to death. He thinks of the headless body, wonders how many friends it had.

When Nick has finished, he bums a cigarette from the soldier. She is standing upwind of the bodies, half watching a little solar-powered TV set on a stump outside the doorway of one of the huts. The TV, connected to a mesh aerial pegged to the wattle-and-daub wall of the hut, is showing an episode of a hospital soap. A woman in a smart suit is telling a woman in a nurse's uniform about the benefits of having a career instead of a baby. The military dictatorship distributed tens of thousands of these TVs, tuned exclusively to the official station; now Obligate pumps its own propaganda through them.

Nick pulls down his mask, scratches vigorously under his chin and behind his ears, and lights his cigarette, maybe the fiftieth or the hundredth since he gave up after his heart attack. The young woman has some English, and asks him if he's from London.

"All my life, I want to visit London."

She's stocky but cute, with heavy black eyebrows that almost meet above her lustrous brown eyes, and Nick is pretty sure that she's flirting with him. "London is nice," he says, "but I actually grew up in the country. If you want to see the real England, that's where you should go."

"Maybe you take me there," the soldier says, "some time when this is over."

Her name is Isabel Fonesca. She is from Sao Paulo, the youngest daughter of a middle-class family, her father a manager of a textile mill in one of the city's industrial satellites. She tells Nick that she is the rebel of the family; she joined the army because she did not want to follow the same path as her three sisters -- university, marriage, children. Like many young people, the Black Flu made her aware of how lightly she held on to life, and therefore how precious it was. She does not want to take anything for granted, she says. She wants adventure; she wants to see the world.

Nick tells her that he joined up for much the same reasons as she did, and Isabel says, "You were in the English Army?"

"The British Army, sure."

"Where did you see action?"

"I wasn't a rough tough straight-shooting front-line infantry soldier like you. I had two years' medical training before I joined up, so naturally they put me to work in an ordnance depot. I was one of the guys who make sure you get the weapons, the right calibre ammunition, spare parts . . . "

A year in the big depot outside Reading, off the M4. First running one of the electric fork-lifts in a brightly lit warehouse full of guns and ammunition and the smell of gun oil; then, after he got his corporal's stripe, working in the logistical section. Taking one day off each week to work towards the electronics qualification that would get him out of there.

Nick says, "One time I was in Albania with the peacekeeping force for a couple of months. That was the closest to any action that I ever got."

"Until now."

"Good point."

"But you are not now in the army. Why did you leave? You were unhappy because you thought you should have been a medic?"

"Actually, I think they should have put me in the regimental band. I played flute in the school orchestra, and in combat band members become stretcher-bearers. As for why I left, I caught a heart attack. It was a viral infection, a terrorist weapon."

The well-used lie, a close cousin to the truth, comes easily to him, but still he feels a tiny pang of guilt.

"You like the army," Isabel says. "You miss it."

"Yeah, I liked it. You knew exactly who you had to be, what you had to do . . . " The conversation has definitely veered in the wrong direction. Nick drops his cigarette butt, grinds it under his heel. "It was a long time ago. I like here, too. I like it a lot."

Isabel says, "You like Brazzaville? So do I. Plenty bars, plenty good music . . . And they like soldiers. They like us. I get plenty free drinks in those bars. You too, if I tell them you are English soldier. Sammy's Bar, I go there a lot. Stop by and ask for Isabel Fonesca -- you might not recognize me without combat gear."

She's a soldier; she's sounding him out, looking for some action to fill the time when she isn't being a soldier. It doesn't mean anything more than that.

Nick says, "Maybe I will. But right now I think I should check the huts."

"Already we look. Nothing there."

"I guess they all tried to run. Did you find out how the fire started?"

"They have a thing for making strong drink . . . "

"A still."

"For sure, a still. So, they are boiling up palm wine or whatever to make it stronger, it gets knocked over, and boom!" Isabel flicks up a hand. Her fingernails are trimmed close, but painted silver. "It sets fire to the hut. We look in the ashes, we look in the huts, we don't find any bodies. We are almost finished here I think. This evening I will be drinking cold beer in Sammy's."

"What about the brick building?" Nick says. "Did you look in there?"

####

It's a long shed much obscured by ferns that have prospered in its courses of rotten mortar. A dead woman lies just inside the doorway, a bloody wedge bitten out of her throat. Isabel Fonesca watches quietly as Nick documents the body. When he has finished, she steps over the dead woman and leads the way into the ruined building.

Half a dozen shafts of sunlight swarming with dust motes slant through holes in the plastic sheeting of the roof. Nick and Isabel shine their flashlights into shadowy corners. Bats hanging upside down from the roof girders shift the bony membranes of their wings, just as children, disturbed in their sleep, will stir and pull blankets over their heads. Candy-coloured cockroaches as big as mice scatter across soft heaps of guano. A gecko clings to the rough brick wall above a wooden workbench brittle with rot and termites. A broken sheet of corrugated plastic leans against the workbench, and Nick hears something moving behind it.

"Probably a rat," Isabel says, but holds her rifle steady while Nick eases back the plastic sheet and shines his torch under the bench.

The baby, a naked boy child on a folded cloth, jerks his fists in the torch's glare and starts to whimper.

Nick feels a cool calm roll down from the top of his head. The baby is no more than three or four weeks old. He is badly dehydrated and in ketosis, his breath quick and faint and smelling of pear drops, his mouth and nose crusted with white matter. His skin is freckled with insect bites and his bottom smeared with dried, spicy orange baby-shit, but his pulse is firm, and no bones seem to be broken.

Nick lifts him up, and almost at the same moment gunfire starts up outside: rapid, sustained bursts interspersed with single shots. Nick and Isabel look at each other.

"Take him to the helicopter," Isabel says.

She turns and jogs out of the door into the sunlight, and something lithe and pale and quick smashes into her. Her assault rifle sprays a spasmodic burst into the red dirt as she falls under the weight of her attacker, which wraps its arms around her head and works its face between the rim of her helmet and the collar of her flak vest. As Nick runs forward, the white thing rears back to show him its bloody face, a chunk of meat caught between teeth like nails hammered into its wide lipless mouth, and Nick fires three quick shots, firing one-handed because he's holding the baby, no kick to the Glock at all, and the thing flies backwards, a bloody star blown into the keg of its chest. Nick steps towards it through the drift of blue gunsmoke, the Glock extended in one hand, the other cradling the baby to his chest, his heart pounding, thinking that it's as if one of the gargoyles from the square tower of the Saxon church next to his mother's house has come to life. It's still moving, three rounds to the chest and it's still alive. It glares at Nick and pushes up in a sudden smooth rush, and he shoots it in the face and shoots it again as it collapses at his feet, blood and brains spattering him to the waist.

The baby starts to cry, a feeble whining hiccough, his face like a clenched fist against the white nylon of Nick's coveralls. In one direction, the helicopter's rotor blades are beginning to turn above the tall elephant grass; in the other, several hundred metres away, figures are moving out of the scrub along the edge of the oil palms, pale figures smaller than men, moving very quickly. Nick sees a little knot of them all over someone struggling on the ground, sees Grant Twentyman swing his video camera in a desperate attempt to keep two more at bay. One of the soldiers is firing quick controlled bursts as he steps backwards. An orange muzzle flash flickers under the dense-knit canopy of the dwarf oil palms -- something is shooting back.

Isabel Fonesca lies face down and still. Her helmet has come off and her lustrous black hair has spilled free of its net. Blood is pooling rapidly around her head and shoulders. It is soaking into her flak vest. When Nick rolls her over, her head tips back to show the massive wound in her neck. Nick gets blood all over his hand when he brushes back her hair and tries and fails to find her pulse behind her ear.

Something is running headlong towards him and he jerks up and then lowers the pistol because it is William Ndinga, blouse pulled from his belt, mirrorshades gone.

"All dead," he yells, and runs straight past, towards the helicopter.

Nick sees that he is right. Grant Twentyman is down, the soldier is down, and quick pale-skinned figures are scampering towards him, not pausing at all when he fires off three quick shots. One of them is dragging an assault rifle. Nick turns and runs, clamping the baby tightly to his chest, forcing himself not to look back, chasing after William Ndinga through air so packed with wet heat it's like running in the bad dream everyone has. Running headlong towards the throbbing noise of the helicopter. Screaming because he sees its tail boom tip up as it begins to rise. A hurricane full of dust and chaff blows around him. The flight engineer squats at the open door in his orange flight suit and white helmet, one hand clutching a strap, the other reaching for the baby as Nick holds it above his head, making a grab for it and missing as for a heart-stopping moment the helicopter rises higher. Then it settles back with a solid thump, and Nick can hand the baby to the flight engineer and haul himself through the door and collapse against the hot steel plates of the floor. He lies there, gasping with relief, clutching the Glock in a death grip, as the helicopter goes straight up, faster than an express elevator.

After a few moments, Nick manages to sit up and brace himself against a seat. He sees figures dancing in triumph or rage on the flattened circle the helicopter has left in the elephant grass, pale figures running towards the river, where the outboard motor of the government soldiers' dugout canoe is making a wide creamy wake in brown water. Then the helicopter makes a steep turn, and sky and sunlight fill the door.

While Nick settles the baby on clean towels folded on one of the seats, the flight engineer checks the pictures he took with his phone. He's pleased that he had the presence of mind to keep taking pictures as the government observer and Nick ran for the helicopter. He has half a dozen dubiously fuzzy long-range shots of the soldiers going down, but far better than any of those is the good, clear picture he took after hauling William Ndinga aboard, the picture of Nicholas Hyde standing resolute amidst whirling dust, offering the baby to the sky.

Next extract

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