Our Hearts. Chapter Sixteen. Target Trajectory

The heat over the base hung motionless, thick and viscous as unsettled palm oil, drowning out both the cries of birds and the distant rumble of trucks from the Kato-Tombe mine. The air was heavy with ozone, rotting banana leaves, and damp cement.

Ilunga stood by the rusty rainwater cistern, leaning his shoulder against the rough iron. On his dark fingers, accustomed to the oily chill of a Kalashnikov bolt carrier, a pinch of dry tobacco crumbs clung. He kept his eyes fixed on Imani.

She sat on an overturned wooden crate of Czechoslovak grenades. Her nakedness was already hidden by a simple cotton shirt, but on her delicate collarbones and the dark, smooth skin of her neck, one could still sense the fresh, blood-engorged crescents—invisible to his eyes—imprints of Leo’s bites and nails. And she radiated that faintly perceptible, bitter scent of the tropical forest and burnt sugar, which Ilunga remembered from their very first night together in the village by the Lualaba River—eight years ago, before another war burned down their home, before the customary law droit coutumier turned into the powerless whispers of old men.

Ilunga looked at her not with male resentment, nor with jealousy—in the Katanga jungle, these feelings burned out first, giving way to pure survival instinct. He looked at her as a prophetess who had made a sacrifice to gods whose names were forbidden to be spoken aloud.

“Why him?” Ilunga asked.

His voice was muffled, low, and even, like the thumps of a wooden pestle mashing dry cassava. It held the detached pragmatism of a man assessing an unexpected breach in his defenses.

Imani did not raise her head. Her fingers casually stroked the thin copper bracelet on her left wrist—an ancient weave of her mother’s family, where every notch meant something.

“Perhaps he is the only one who can stop all this,” she answered.

The conversation between them was always built not from words, but from the pauses between words. From the way foliage rustled under a bare foot, how a palm tree’s shadow shifted, how the heart stopped before the first shot.

“How?” Ilunga crossed his arms over his chest. The dark veins on his forearms pulled taut like dry vines.

Imani closed her eyes for a moment. Behind her closed eyelids, the frantic celluloid reels from his delirium were still spinning, the Boston snow was falling, and the black bats hatched from his veins were beating against the walls of the concrete bunker.

“I don’t know,” she said calmly. “But the earth has accepted him. And he has accepted it.”

The massive wooden door of the bunker, sheathed in sheets of roofing iron, slid open with a drawn-out, creaking groan.

Ilunga quickly turned his head. Leo stepped out of the doorway onto the scorching clay of the courtyard.

The partisan’s honed eye noted everything: the nervous, slouching angularity of a white man terrified of stepping on a venomous snake or breathing contaminated air was gone. Leo stepped barefoot onto the hot dust with confident, fluid, heavy steps, as if the weight of his body had changed, acquiring a new density. Under the unbuttoned collar of his camouflage shirt, a pink net of fresh scars was visible on his chest, and on his right wrist gleamed clean, polished copper.

Leo stopped, squinting against the blinding tropical sun. Imani rose from the crate, walked over to a flat stump where a soot-blackened kettle sat, and poured a fragrant black brew into an enameled mug.

“Here, drink,” she handed him the coffee.

Leo took the mug. His fingers were steady, his nails no longer blue from hypoxia. He took a long, greedy gulp. The bitter, scalding liquid washed down his esophagus, and for a moment it seemed to him that he wasn’t drinking ordinary Arabica, but the liquid, molten earth of this land. That he didn’t just hear the noise of the jungle—he felt the vibration of the earth hundreds of meters away, as if his circulatory system had begun to operate like a low-frequency seismograph.

“How long was I out?” Leo asked. His words sounded unusually deep, devoid of their former shortness of breath.

“Almost two days,” Imani replied.

Leo flinched. The mug froze at his lips. Forty-eight hours. Two days subtracted from the calendar, from life, dissolved in a delirium where Alan Parker spliced light in an old cinema, and his own venous system bloomed with radioactive gardenias.

“And what… what was that?” Leo looked Imani straight in the eye, trying to latch onto a comprehensible coordinate system—onto virology, onto enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays, onto shamanism, onto anything that had a name.

“Leo, wait,” Imani softly but unyieldingly placed her palm on his chest, barely touching the fabric of his shirt. “Right now, that doesn’t matter.”

She shifted a strict, demanding gaze to Ilunga. Don’t drag it out. Speak.

Ilunga sighed heavily, peeled himself away from the cistern, and stepped closer. His face once again turned into a frozen mask of baked Katanga clay.

“Mbul Benga is dead,” the partisan stated evenly.

Leo slowly lowered the mug.

“The miner? But Remi said… Sarah wrote in the report that his condition had stabilized. The dynamics were positive. Wasn’t he already getting up?”

“He came out of his tent yesterday afternoon,” Ilunga confirmed. “I saw it myself. Drank cassava broth. Talked to people. And tonight… He died suddenly. Just bled out. In ten minutes.”

Ilunga paused, looking somewhere over Leo’s head into the dense green of the jungle:

“The duty orderly ran out of the tent in tears. By morning, nothing was left of Benga’s internal organs but dark slime. The whole bed was soaked in a black, uncoagulating sludge. He was bleeding even from under his fingernails.”

He reached into the side pocket of his worn vest and pulled out a thick A4 file, folded in four. The documents were slightly permeated with the smell of gun oil and, for some reason, dried pepper.

“Dr. Huybrechts asked me to pass this on to you.”

Leo snatched the papers, immediately unfolding them. His professional eyes quickly scanned the first page: hematological parameters, D-dimer concentration graphs, rapid-PCR results.

“And the girls?” Leo snapped his head up. “The sisters from the village?”

“They are fine,” Ilunga replied. “No fever, no bruising. But just in case, Huybrechts moved them into strict quarantine. Into a separate, locked isolation ward.”

Leo looked closely at the second page. Sarah’s data was flawless and terrifying. The erythrocyte lysis graphs did not fit any standard curve.

He slowly lowered the papers. In his eyes, recently cloudy with fever, now stood a cold, mathematical clarity. His brain, rewired by the virus, instantly switched from a biological threat to a tactical one.

“What’s the word from the mine?” Leo asked, and his voice sounded detached, as if he were somewhere else entirely. “Diana’s mercenaries. Are they looking for us?”

Ilunga chuckled—shortly, only with the corners of his eyes, without parting his lips.

“Dragoș came to Bata Kolé yesterday,” the partisan replied, and a cold contempt slipped into his tone—the contempt of a man whose land had digested far worse conquerors. “In two Jeeps. Machine guns uncovered, barrels pointing at our backs. They herded the elders to the well. The Romanian shouted, spat saliva, promised to burn the crops and spill blood if the village didn’t hand over the American doctor and…” Ilunga shot a glance at Imani, “the witch.”

Imani did not react to the word at all, but her fingers squeezed the copper bracelet a little tighter.

“And what did they do?” Leo stepped a little closer.

“The elders? Kept silent, like stones in a dry riverbed,” Ilunga shrugged as if it were an everyday occurrence. “To them, Dragoș is just an ordinary evil spirit, a gust of rotten wind that will soon die down. While we remain. They were told nothing. The mercenaries spun their wheels in the dust, kicked some dogs, and drove back to their camp.”

“And the WHO hospital?” Leo’s fingers gripped the edges of the medical reports. “Are Sarah and the others safe? If Dragoș decides to pressure them…”

“The hospital doesn’t know where you are hiding,” Ilunga cut him off, raising a palm as if blocking the path to doubt. “I ordered my men to cut all direct contact. Dr. Huybrechts thinks you’ve gone deep into the jungle, toward the river. My guys only passed on to her what was safe to pass on, and took her papers. They’d rather swallow their own tongues than lead the mercenaries to this base. If Dragoș raids the WHO with a search, the doctors won’t be able to give you up even if they wanted to. No one knows the way here. Only the forest.”

Leo nodded, accepting this information as just another resolved variable in his deadly equation. They had little time left.

“Stay here,” Leo tossed back, pivoting on the thick soles of his army boots. “I need to check something.”

“Leo, you need to eat first!” Imani called after him, taking a step forward. “You haven’t eaten anything for two days!”

“Later. Afterwards,” he replied without turning around.

The bunker door slammed shut, dully cutting off the noise of the tropical day.

The improvised laboratory smelled of isopropyl alcohol, acrid phenol, and heated ozone from the portable MinION genomic sequencer quietly buzzing on the edge of the oak table. The glaucous light of a fluorescent lamp sliced through the gloom.

Leo sat down on the wooden chair. His movements were economical and hyper-precise, as if controlled by an alien, perfect mechanism.

Tourniquet on the left forearm. The cold click of a sterile needle. Venous blood quickly filled the vacutainer.

Leo held the test tube up to the light. The blood was a dark ruby, of natural density. No tarry thickness, no black cinnabar. He placed a drop on a slide, covered it with a coverslip, and slipped it into the light microscope.

A perfect cosmos opened in the eyepiece: the biconcave discs of erythrocytes floated in the transparent plasma like smooth golden coins. No pearlescent structures. No thorium microcrystals. The leukocytes were calm.

Then he ran the rapid PCR test on the MinION. Twenty minutes later, the monitor displayed the result: Ebola Filovirus Katanga strain – undetectable. The viral load had dropped below the detection threshold.

Leo laid out all his available data on the table, turning the oak surface into a complex semiotic map of a catastrophe, a palimpsest of medical records and espionage reports.

On the left—the diary entries of the deceased Belgian biologist Maurice and the autopsy protocols of the hunter Kasongo Mpala (from chapter 3). In the center—the medical charts of the miner Mbul Benga and the sisters from the village, sent by Sarah Huybrechts. On the right—his own test results and genomic maps of the filovirus isolated from the fruit bats from the Southbridge Security mercenary camp.

Leo began to construct the phylogenetic tree of the pathogen, reading the symptoms like the characters of an ancient, half-forgotten alphabet.

1. Kasongo Mpala (hunter): Found Maurice in the forest. Infected with the wild strain. The virus acted like a classic, crude killer. Zero genomic shift. Lightning-fast collapse of the vascular bed. Death in 48 hours.
2. Maurice Brunet (biologist): Infection site unknown. In him, the virus reacted with the high radiation of the Katanga pitchblende. The first mutation occurred—the virus tried to rebuild Maurice’s aorta, creating pearlescent nodules to accumulate isotopes, but the human body couldn’t withstand such a load. Maurice died of a systemic hydraulic shock.
3. Fruit bats from the Southbridge camp: Stable, centuries-old symbiosis. Immortal bioreactors. The virus lives in their tissues without killing the host, using them as an ideal reservoir.
4. Mbul Benga (miner): The most terrifying variant. Infected by the hunter. In him, the virus tried to take the path of “symbiosis”—it slowed the pulse, lowered the temperature, gave the man a false remission. The virus “tested” the host, trying to integrate into his DNA (a genomic shift of 0.4%). But when Benga’s immune system tried to reject the alien material, the pathogen instantly dropped its adaptive settings. A reverse explosion back to its primordial, hemorrhagic form occurred. Overexpression of lysis enzymes—and the man literally dissolved from the inside out in a matter of minutes.
5. Sisters from Bata Kolé: Complete, instantaneous integration. Genomic shift 0.3%. The virus didn’t kill them and didn’t lay dormant—it dissolved into their metabolism, turning them into asymptomatic carriers.
6. Himself (Leo Gonzalez): Stable integration through alchemical and biological shock. Genomic shift 0.2%. The virus reconfigured his cardiovascular system, fusing two hearts into one, and fell asleep, turning Leo into the same ideal, immortal reservoir as the bats.

Leo leaned back in his chair and squeezed his eyes shut.

The picture came together with chilling, mathematical precision.

This Ebola strain was not a banal pathogen. It was a living evolutionary machine, possessing a strange, almost conscious flexibility. It was looking for a way out. It was testing human material. If the host was weak or resisted, the virus turned into an absolute hemorrhagic weapon with 100 percent lethality, tearing the host apart to escape into the environment as an aerosol and bloody dust.

And all these threads, all these mutated RNA chains led to a single geographic point.

To the sealed adit on the territory of the Southbridge Security camp. To that very crimson, radioactive puddle of cinnabar oozing from beneath the cave-in.

When Leo came out of the bunker, the sun had already crossed its zenith, casting long, predatory shadows from the trees.

A plate already sat on the wooden table dug into the ground. Imani silently watched him. In the bowl: hot rice, chunks of stewed wild boar meat in a thick peanut sauce, and fried green plantains.

“Eat,” Imani said shortly, pushing the bowl and an aluminum army spoon toward him.

Ilunga sat opposite him on a stool, unhurriedly wiping the bolt carrier of his assault rifle with a rag.

Leo sat down. He picked up the spoon and began to eat. He swallowed the first two bites without tasting them—his stomach, tormented by two days of hunger, contracted in a spasm. But with each new swallow, a cold, calibrated mental clarity returned to him.

He chewed another piece of meat, washed it down with water from a clay jug, laid his spoon on the edge of the plate, and raised his eyes.

“We have to destroy everything,” Leo said. His voice sounded even, devoid of emotion, like a surgeon reading out a diagnosis. “Burn it all down.”

Imani froze with the jug in her hands.

“What?” she asked quietly.

“The Southbridge Security camp,” Leo shifted his gaze from her to Ilunga. “The source of the virus is there. In that adit. In the barracks. And it doesn’t behave like regular Ebola. It tests its hosts. Do you understand? If it realizes it can’t create a stable symbiosis with most humans, it will drop its settings. It will turn into a super-pathogen. Into an airborne hemorrhagic fever. It will break out like Covid, only it will kill everyone it touches.”

Ilunga carefully laid aside the rag, took the bolt, and with a click, slotted it into the receiver.

“Is it dangerous?” the partisan asked.

“It’s the end,” Leo replied. “First Bata Kolé and all the Kato-Tombe miners will die out. Then Lubumbashi. And a couple of weeks later, the virus will fly on a commercial jet from Kinshasa to Brussels and Paris. Millions will die.”

Ilunga looked at the American with narrowed eyes.

“And how do you propose to ‘burn it all down’, Doctor?” a dry, bitter irony slipped into the partisan’s voice. “My people are fourteen men with rusty Kalashnikovs and two RPG-7 grenade launchers. Southbridge’s mercenaries are thirty professionals in heavy armor, fortified pillboxes, heavy machine guns, and thermal imagers. We won’t even get within grenade-throwing distance of their fence.”

Leo put another spoonful of rice in his mouth, chewed unhurriedly, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Not us,” he replied. “The ‘Company’.”

Ilunga frowned, ignorance reflecting in his eyes. He clearly didn’t understand the term.

Imani lowered the jug to the table. The copper bracelet on her wrist clinked softly against the enamel. She looked at her husband, then shifted a long, stern gaze to Leo.

“The CIA,” Imani said quietly and distinctly.

Ilunga froze. His fingers, resting on the wooden stock of the assault rifle, instantly tensed.

Imani faltered slightly, her pupils clouding over for a moment, as if she were peering back into the feverish haze from the distant past:

“I saw… I heard everything when you were delirious, Leo. The voices. The training ground in Virginia. The gunshots. About your father.”

Ilunga slowly leaned forward. His tired face, crisscrossed with fine scars, became as impenetrable as basalt.

“So, you work for the CIA… Doctor?” the partisan’s voice dropped to a dangerous, growling whisper.

Leo nodded affirmatively, continuing to chew and look the partisan straight in the eye. There was no fear, no attempt to justify himself in his behavior.

“Do they have anything to do with the virus?” Ilunga asked, the barrel of the assault rifle swaying slightly in his hand. “Did they bring it here?”

Leo stopped chewing. He put down his spoon, straightened his back, and placed both palms on the table.

“No,” Leo answered firmly. “Langley has no idea what was found in the Kato-Tombe mine. The Agency is interested in something else entirely. Smuggling. IC Waze and their shell companies are suspected of illegal mining and illegal export of unrefined uranium on an industrial scale. They are selling it to third countries—to Iran or North Korea. My task was singular: to find and secure evidence.”

“And what will your ‘Company’ do if you give them the evidence?” Ilunga asked.

“They will strike,” Leo replied.

“A strike? Here?” Imani threw up her hands.

“Not far from the coast, in the international waters of the Gulf of Guinea,  a U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer is stationed,” Leo spoke in the dry, protocol-heavy language of Langley briefings. “On board are Tomahawk cruise missiles with concrete- penetrating and thermobaric warheads. If I transmit the exact coordinates and confirmation of the presence of high-grade uranium ore, they will launch a precision strike.”

And in that moment he tasted the familiar flavor of Virginia cordite on his lips again. High-quality American steel, flying low over the Gulf of Guinea, was to be the only scalpel capable of cauterizing this ancient ulcer. This was the cold mathematics of the Pentagon, where no room was left for poetry.

Leo swept his gaze over them both:

“The missiles will destroy Southbridge headquarters, seal and collapse the adit with hundreds of tons of rock, and the thermal explosion will scorch everything inside at a temperature of three thousand degrees. The virus will be physically eradicated.”

“But won’t people die?” Imani asked quietly, with pain. “There are workers there. There are ordinary Congolese from the lower shifts…”

“Only those who are directly on the base’s territory at the moment of the strike will die,” Leo answered calmly. But for a second, the voice of his father-instructor from the Camp Peary training ground broke through in his tone. “The strikes will be high-precision. It will not affect civilians in the surrounding villages or the mine itself.”

Pausing, he held the heavy silence and added:

“Otherwise, Imani, in a month, half of Africa will die out. Millions will perish.”

Ilunga looked at Leo for a long time. The complex, agonizing work of thought was reflected in his eyes. The partisan, who had spent his whole life fighting with rusty iron in the mud and jungles, was trying to comprehend this terrifying, god-like ease with which white men could call down fire from the heavens from an ocean thousands of kilometers away. He looked at his own hands, fiddling with the bolt carrier. Next to what the American was offering, his assault rifle seemed no more menacing than a child’s slingshot.

Ilunga raised his gaze to Imani. That unspoken, years-long experience of understanding each other told: she gave a barely perceptible nod.

The partisan leaned his elbows on the table, bringing his face closer to Leo’s.

“Leo,” Ilunga asked. “What kind of evidence is needed? For your destroyer to fire?”

“Ore,” Leo pulled the folded page from Maurice’s diary out of his shirt pocket. “Ore with an anomalously high concentration of uranium-235 and specific thorium isotopes. I need a physical sample from the vein. A photograph of the spectral analysis and exact GPS coordinates of the seam outcrop. And this vein is here somewhere. Not in the mine itself, but nearby.”

Ilunga and Imani exchanged glances again.

“We need to talk to Mulenga,” Ilunga said, turning to his wife.

“With whom?” Leo frowned.

“Kapya Mulenga,” Imani answered. “The old shaman. The same sorcerer who cursed you by the maize fields when we returned.”

“The old man remembers these hills from before the Israelis came here with geological maps,” Ilunga added, chambering a round with a click and putting the rifle on safety. “He knows where the old tailings are. He knows where the ground ‘glows at night’ and where people’s teeth fall out. If there’s a pitchblende outcrop somewhere on the surface—Mulenga knows about it.”

“His father worked with my great-grandfather,” Imani added.

Leo looked at them, at this pair bound by the place and a shared past, and rose from the table. His meal was finished. Inside his chest, steadily, deeply, and powerfully, pumping enriched blood through renewed vessels, beat the single, unbending piston of a new heart.

“Alright,” Leo agreed, buttoning his khaki shirt. “Then we go to him.”

Chapter Seventeen. Bone of the Earth →
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