The Changamwe Oil Refinery, which lay at the back of the island, just before one of the bridges to the mainland, was ablaze, belching smoke into the air. Its tanks and pipes would give the fire an almost endless source of fuel.

The fires were not the only problem. A dozen large cargo ships lay scuttled at the mouth of the bay, their rectangular metal cargo containers spilled into the water, the mountain of steel forming an impassable barrier.

“They’ve sealed the port,” Avery called over the headsets. “Could have been the Kenyans as an act of containment.”

“Or another nation,” Desmond said. “To protect themselves.” He peered out the window, his eyes narrowing. “They bombed the airport’s runway too.”

Peyton stared in awe at the city. From their vantage point, she could see one of the hospitals. A crowd was massed outside, hundreds of people trying to get in. Bodies lay in the streets, dying, trampled.

Mombasa was her worst nightmare: an uncontrolled outbreak in a major city, millions of people at the mercy of a pathogen with no cure and no treatment, all of them left to suffer and die. Peyton had dedicated her life to ensuring this very scene never became a reality. She had flown to Kenya to stop this. Yet now it was happening. She had failed. They—Conner McClain—had beaten her.

If this was happening in Mombasa, she wondered what Nairobi was like. What America was like.

In that moment, she set aside her fears about her own safety—and Hannah’s.

She needed a place to start, needed to know how long she’d been in captivity, how long the virus had been loose.

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Monday,” Avery replied.

That came as a shock. Peyton had flown to Nairobi the previous Sunday, a full week ago.

“What’s the status of the outbreak in Kenya?” she asked urgently.

“I don’t know,” Avery said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Peyton didn’t even try to hide her skepticism.

“Again, we were under a comms blackout. Any information about the outbreak was tightly guarded. People on that ship have families too. I’ve only heard rumors.”

“Such as?” Peyton was almost certain she was lying—or at best, keeping information from them.

“Such as, there are two hundred thousand dead in Kenya from the Mandera strain. Another half a million around the world have died from the precursor flu virus.”

Precursor. So what McClain had told her was true: the flu strain that Elliott had been tracking was the precursor for the Mandera virus; it mutated into the deadly hemorrhagic fever that had killed the two Americans, including Lucas Turner. Some part of her had hoped McClain was bluffing, posturing, to scare her. She almost didn’t want to know the answer to her next question.

“How many are infected?”

Avery was hesitant. “Hard to say. I’ve heard three billion. Maybe more.”