The Athens Solution: A Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

burning?”
    “I don’t think it was trash.”
    Beaman looked from one man to the other, and the volume of his voice dropped. “Do you think they were burning bodies ?”
    The Old Man switched off the satellite footage. “It could be anything.”
    “But what if it is bodies?” he replied. “What if those are women and children? Our staff and patients?” He shifted his gaze to Harvath and asked, “If it’s not trash, what is it?”
    Harvath had been to more war-ravaged areas than he cared to remember. He had seen things beyond horrible. The worth of a culture, in his opinion, could be boiled down to one thing—how well that culture took care of its weakest members, particularly its women and children.
    The satellite image of the burn pit brought back a flood of memories, none of them pleasant, none of them things he wanted to remember. Something about it, though, was odd. He tried to put his finger on it and when he couldn’t, he relegated it to the back of his mind.
    “Mr. Carlton is right,” Harvath conceded. “It could be anything.”
    For a moment, Beaman didn’t know how to respond. “But we all agree, it probably wasn’t trash.”
    Harvath looked to the Old Man, then back at Beaman, and nodded.
    An uncomfortable silence fell over the conference room. Finally, Beaman broke it. “Mr. Harvath, I want to find out what happened. Scratch that,” he said, correcting himself. “I have to find out what happened. I owe it to those people, to all of my people. If this had happened to a team you were responsible for, I don’t doubt that you’d feel the same way.”
    Harvath began to understand where this was headed. Beaman wanted him to lead the operation.
    If their places were reversed, of course Harvath would want to know what had happened to his team. But this wasn’t about a team of his. This was about Beaman’s people, and there was a lot more to this story. It wasn’t as simple as flying over and figuring out what had happened.
    Congo was the world’s deadliest conflict zone. Five and a half million dead in less than twenty years. Invasions from neighboring countries, wars, political instability—it was like a match factory, if match factories also stored buckets of gasoline and hung lit sparklers from the ceiling. Calling it unstable was too generous by half.
    The danger and instability of the region were just two of the many problems Harvath saw with this situation. There was also a host of unanswered questions. No one even knew who had sent the video to CARE and worse still, no one could explain why the gunmen entering the clinic had been wearing biohazard suits.
    According to Beaman, Matumaini was a small family medicine clinic. They didn’t treat highly communicable illnesses. They didn’t have the capacity. The furthest they went was performing minor surgeries. If something exotic or unusual walked in their door, they knew to call for help.
    But as far as Beaman, or anyone at CARE knew, no such call had gone out.
    Harvath didn’t like it any of it. He hated loose ends. There were too many things stacked one upon another that didn’t make sense.
    Beaman was also running out of time. The longer it took to get a team over to Congo, the colder the trail would become. If something wasn’t done soon, they might never know what happened and who was responsible.
    Once again, a rush of unpleasant images moved across the screen of his mind’s eye. The scenes of families were the hardest to stomach. He had witnessed what monsters could do. He knew what monsters continued to do when not stopped. In this case, the monsters embodied an amplified evil. They had preyed not only on the sick and infirm, but also upon those who had helped to care for them.
    His mind then drifted to his trip to New England, but only as an afterthought. He had already decided what he was going to do. What he told himself he had to do. The Carlton Group didn’t have anyone else who could take on this kind of assignment with