Chapter 54

Briggs was waiting for Mac in front of what looked like an old-fashioned log cabin set back in the woods above Pe‘epe‘e Falls Road, at least a mile past any lights Mac had seen as he slowly drove along a dirt road just wide enough for his jeep.

There were soldiers there, also in suits, training powerful flashlights on the area in front of the cabin.

Mac could see immediately that the shrubs the locals called Hawaiian cotton had turned black, like they'd suffered some kind of internal oil spill. The banyan trees on either side of the front door had also turned black and begun to wither; the branches were as thin as matchsticks. It smelled like a forest fire, except there was no smoke from the woods surrounding the cabin. There was only the scorched earth all around them.

"Follow me," Briggs said.

Battery-powered Nomad scene lights illuminated the single room, just some chairs set around an old butcher-block table covered with beer cans and empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.

The three dead men were on the floor, all of them with eyes and mouths open, as if they had died gasping for breath.

That wasn't the worst part.

Their faces and necks and arms and hands and feet had turned as black as the shrubs and trees outside. The dead men looked as if the jeans and T-shirts they'd been wearing were burned off their bodies in a fire.

Except there were no signs of fire in the old wooden cabin.

Mac wanted to look away from the bodies but could not. His eyes kept shifting from one to another. He could hear his breathing getting faster and shallower inside his mask. He was afraid he might be sick.

"We got a call about an hour ago," Briggs said, staring at the bodies himself.

"From who?" Mac asked.

Either Briggs was lost in his own thoughts about the scene around them and didn't hear him or he was just ignoring the question.

"What the hell happened here?" Mac asked.

"Black death," Briggs said.

He paused, then added, "In all ways."

He told Mac about the dead body in the Ice Tube belonging to Sergeant Tommy Lalakuni, and the rip in his protective suit, and how he had died the way these men had obviously died. The remnants of their clothes already looked like ash at the bottom of a grill, like what they had seen outside underneath the bushes and trees.

"Looks like this was some kind of crash pad," Briggs said.

"Crash-and-burn pad," Mac said quietly.

He did not want to be in this room near these bodies. The urge to flee was overpowering; the smell became stronger, even though he was wearing his mask. He wanted to be outside right now. But Briggs wasn't leaving, so neither was he.

"Do you have any idea who these men are?" Mac asked.

"Ours," Colonel James Briggs said. "They were on the cleanup crew at the Ice Tube." He paused. "And then they didn't go through the proper protocols for cleaning themselves up as they were ordered to do."

Mac turned back to the bodies, which seemed to have gotten blacker as he and Briggs stood there.

Mac said, "When General Rivers came out of the cave, he said the spill had been contained."

"He thought it had been," Briggs said. "That was before he knew about the body inside the cave."

Then Briggs quietly said, "I've seen pictures from Vietnam. This is what napalm did."

They finally went back outside. One of the trees that had still been standing when Mac arrived was gone, reduced to a pile of ash. In the cool night air, Mac could see a faint steam lifting off the shrubs as they began to collapse in on themselves.

Briggs said there was another soldier, this one still alive, at the infirmary, currently under quarantine and armed guard until they could move him to the hospital in Hilo. He had come back from the Ice Tube and then snuck off the base without being scrubbed down and checked by radiation monitors and before he knew what had happened to Sergeant Lalakuni.

"So it turns out that this sergeant of ours wasn't the only one," Briggs said. "These three must have gotten past security too. Maybe they thought they needed to have a few… one of them tried to call the base when they… when they realized what was happening to them."

"Could there be any others?" Mac said.

Briggs hesitated. Mac didn't like that at all.

"We don't know," Briggs said, staring at the ground.

"How the fuck can you not know?"Mac shouted.

"Because we don't," Briggs said. He looked at Mac. "This is what we're up against if what's in those canisters gets out," Briggs said.

"A plague that could be running through Hilo right now," Mac said.

Briggs nodded.

"Whatever you need to do to protect that cave, whatever you and your people think you're doing, you need to do more," Mac said. Then: "Does Rivers know about this?"

"He's the one who told me to call you," Briggs said.

"I need to get to work," Mac said.

Mac and General Rivers weren't scheduled to meet until six a.m., but it had to happen sooner than that. It wasn't easy to run in a hazmat suit, but Mac managed to stay upright as he went down the road to his jeep. He grabbed his phone, called Rivers, and told the general he'd see him in his office after he'd scrubbed himself down.

"That sounded like an order," Rivers said.

"Only because it was."

"You're still working for the army," Rivers said.

"And how's that working out for me so far?"