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smile.
    “Plasmodium falciparum,” he decreed. The father leaned forward with a puzzled frown. His English was good, but not that good. “It is a variant of malaria, but alas resistant to all the chloroquine-based drugs such as those prescribed by my good colleague Dr. Svoboda.”
    Dr. Moi administered an intravenous injection of a strong broad-spectrum antibiotic. It seemed to work. At first. After a week, when the drug course ceased, the condition returned. By now the mother was hysterical. Denouncing all forms of foreign medicine, she insisted she and her son be flown back to Moscow and the ambassador agreed.
    Once there, the boy was admitted to the exclusive KGB clinic. This was possible because Second Secretary (Trade) Nikolai Turkin was in fact Major Turkin of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
    The clinic was good, and it had a fine tropical medicine department, because KGB men can be posted all over the world. Because of the intractable nature of the small boy’s case, it went right to the departmental head, Professor Glazunov. He read both the files from Nairobi and ordered a series of CT and ultrasound scans then the last word in technology unavailable just about anywhere else in the USSR.
    The scans worried him badly. They revealed a series developing internal abscesses on various organs inside the boy. When he asked Mrs. Turkin into his office his face was grave.
    “I know what it is, at least I am sure I do, but it cannot be treated. With heavy use of antibiotics your boy may survive a month. More unlikely I am very sorry.”
    The weeping mother was escorted out. A sympathetic assistant explained to her what had been found. It was a rare disease called melioidosis, very uncommon indeed in Africa but more common in Southeast Asia. It was the Americans who had identified it during the Vietnam war.
    U.S. helicopter pilots had been the first to produce symptoms of a new and usually fatal illness. Research discovered that their rotor blades, hovering over the rice paddies, whipped up a fine aerosol spray of paddy water that some of them had breathed in. The bacillus, resistant to all known antibiotics, was in the water. The Russians knew this because although they shared none of their own discoveries at that time, they were like a sponge when it came to absorbing Western knowledge. Professor Glazunov would automatically receive every single Western technical publication in his field.
    In a long telephone call punctuated by sobbing, Mrs. Turkin told her husband their son was going to die. From melioidosis. Major Turkin wrote it down. Then he went to see his superior, the KGB Head of Station, Colonel Kuliev. He was sympathetic but adamant.
    “Intervene with the Americans? Are you crazy?”
    “Comrade Colonel, if the Yanks have identified it, and seven years ago at that, they may have something for it.”
    “But we can’t ask them that,” protested the colonel. “There is a question of national prestige here.”
    “There is a question of my son’s life here,” shouted the major.
    “That is enough. Consider yourself dismissed.”
    Taking his career in his hands Turkin went to the ambassador. The diplomat was not a cruel man but he too could not be moved.
    “Interventions between our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Department are rare and confined to matters of state,” he told the young officer. “By the way, does Colonel Kuliev know you are here?”
    “No, Comrade Ambassador.”
    “Then for the sake of your future prospects, I shall not tell him. And neither will you. But the answer is no.”
    “If I were a member of the Politburo …” Turkin began.
    “But you are not. You are a junior major of thirty-two serving his country in the middle of Kenya. I am sorry for your boy, but there is nothing that can be done.”
    As he went down the stairs Nikolai Turkin reflected bitterly that First Secretary Yuri Andropov was daily being kept alive by medications flown in from London. Then he