The Coward's Way of War

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Help,” the woman croaked. He wasn’t sure if she was even aware of their presence. She sounded delirious. “Please…help…”

  “We’ll help, I promise,” he said, although he suspected that it was a promise they would not be able to keep. “Rook, fetch her some water from the sink, and then…”

  His voice trailed off. Whatever had struck the girl wasn’t something mild, like the common cold or even the flu. It was something far more dangerous. There were procedures in place for dealing with a disease outbreak, but it would take time to get organised and God alone knew how far it would spread by then. If the two policemen were infected – and he’d touched her bare skin – they might spread it by their very presence. If only he knew what he was dealing with!

  “Here, sir,” Pearson said, passing him a glass of water. Al held it up to the girl’s mouth and she sipped slowly, seemingly unaware of her location. “Sir…”

  “Listen carefully,” Al ordered. “I want you to go down to the lobby and secure the doors. No one is to come in or go out of the building. Check with the janitor – if the building has a janitor – about how many other exits the building has and get him to seal them. No one comes in or out; do you understand?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Pearson said. He didn’t understand, not yet, that they might have both been infected. “What are you going to do here?”

  “Go,” Al snapped. Pearson left, leaving Al alone with the girl. She moaned as she finished the glass of water. Al wanted to move her, but he didn’t quite dare. She needed expert medical help as soon as possible. Grimly, he keyed his radio and began to report in. The dispatcher wouldn’t want to believe it – the emergency code he used had never been used outside of drills – but there was no choice. The entire building had to be sealed off and everyone else checked before they started to spread the disease further into New York.

  He hoped he was wrong; he prayed he was wrong, but he’d seen images back when he’d been in the Marines. There was a disease that matched the girl’s symptoms, one that humanity had attempted to exterminate fifty years ago. Perhaps he was overreacting, but somehow he suspected otherwise. If it truly was that disease, all hell would be out for noon.

  Al stood up and started to check through the apartment, hoping that the girl would survive long enough for doctors to stabilise her condition and hopefully allow her to answer questions. He wondered about giving her some medicine, but there was nothing in his medical kit that would do her any good…and besides, he didn’t know enough to be useful. The doctors would have to come quickly, yet it might take too long for them to arrive. The NBC team would be suiting up now – New York maintained a dedicated team for dealing with biological or chemical emergencies – but they wouldn’t be able to arrive until the area was sealed off, which would probably mean that the media would be all over them within an hour. The bastards would probably start a panic by broadcasting some half-heard rumour to the world.

  He found a set of papers in one of the girl’s drawers and read through them quickly. The girl’s name was Cally Henderson – the picture of her in happier times was unmistakable – and she worked as an air hostess. That suggested that she might have picked up the disease on one of her trips outside the USA, although he wasn’t sure where she might have picked up the disease he suspected. He studied her picture for a long moment and compared it to the sick girl, wincing inwardly. Cally had been young enough to be his daughter, pretty enough to attract men like flies to honey. Whatever she had done, he was sure that it wasn't enough to deserve such a horrible fate.

  There was no one else in the apartment; there was no boyfriend or flatmate. Even so, there were clearly two bedrooms in the apartment, both apparently occupied by women. He checked their drawers and found bras and panties, confirming his suspicion that Cally had had a flatmate. If she was somewhere else, the chances were that she’d been infected long before Cally realised that she was ill. Al cursed under his breath. He knew enough about how epidemics spread to know that the more widely spread the first infections; the further the disease could spread before modern medicine brought it under control.

  His radio buzzed. “Al, we have an emergency response team coming out to you now,” the dispatcher said. He was keeping his words vague, as procedure dictated. Some media moron was probably using a scanner to listen into the police band and would happily start a panic, just for the sake of claiming a scoop. “They want pictures ASAP.”

  Al cursed himself as he went back to look at Cally, pulling the tiny camera off his belt and holding it up, snapping shots from every conceivable angle. He should have thought of taking pictures, something he was sure his superiors would point out to him during his debriefing. Al felt a moment of pity for the girl as he pulled up her nightdress and snapped her bare body, wincing as he saw how the spots had formed on her breasts and down between her legs. Even if she survived, which he suspected was unlikely, she was going to be pockmarked for life. A once-pretty girl would have been transformed into a freak of nature.

  He keyed the camera, using it to upload the images into the police network. The emergency response team would get first look at them, but they’d also be passed on to the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta and USAMRIID, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Perhaps they’d tell him that he was overreacting and the girl had nothing more than a very virulent case of measles…no, he was deluding himself. Whatever the girl had, it was far nastier than anything mundane.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, to Cally. Her eyes were wide and staring, barely tracking his hand as he moved it in front of her eyes. It dawned on him that she was unable to stand the bright light, but there was nothing he could do about it except kneel beside her and cast his shadow over her face. “We’ll do our best to save you.”

  Despite the risk, he reached out and took her hand in his, squeezing it gently. After a moment, she squeezed back, her face twisting into a faint smile. Al couldn’t imagine what had happened over the last couple of days. Had she thought that she had nothing more serious than the flu, or had she just woken up and discovered that she was covered in spots…or had she lost awareness before the disease really took hold? There was no way to know. He heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs and hoped – prayed – that the emergency response team was on its way. Cally needed help desperately.

  His radio buzzed again. “My God,” the dispatcher said. “Al, other teams are on their way as well. The Feds are sending a team directly to your location. They want you to remain exactly where you are.”

  “Don’t worry,” Al growled. He knew that he would have to go into quarantine, at least until the disease had been identified. The order was completely unnecessary. There was no way he could outrun infection now. He looked back down at the girl and wondered if he was seeing his future. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Chapter Three

  …It is vitally important that all information relating to a biological attack is rapidly compiled and acted upon if the infection is to be outraced. Towards this extent, Project Wildfire serves as a clearing house for information, one that remains unknown to the media. Panic will only spread the disease further…

  -Nicolas Awad

  New York, USA

  Day 5

  Doctor Nicolas Awad had been sleeping when his secure cell phone began to ring. The sound penetrated his head and snapped him awake, for he had been conditioned to awaken instantly when he heard that sound. Cursing under his breath, aware of his wife’s irritation as she shifted beside him, he picked up the phone and dialled his security code into the device. The secure phone could only have one user.

  “Nicolas,” he said, as the line opened. The NSA had devised the toughest encryption program on Earth for the Wildfire secure lines, knowing that if the Wildfire protocols ever had to be enacted, all hell was going to break loose. “This had better be important.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor,” the duty officer said. He didn’t sound intimidated by Nicola
s’s voice, but he sounded badly shaken by…something. “We’ve just received a FLASH message from Washington. There’s been an incident.”

  Nicolas felt his blood run cold. He looked down at his wife’s dark skin and darker eyes and shivered. Sabrina didn’t know much about his job, but she knew enough to scare her senseless, even to the point where she had urged him to transfer to a civilian post and start curing scraped knees and broken bones. He wasn't that kind of doctor, yet he could definitely have found private practice, if he hadn’t been driven by his inner demons. He pulled himself out of bed and walked naked into his study, a small room he used to write his papers. It had the advantage of being private. Sabrina knew not to bother him there.

  “I see,” he said. An incident could mean anything from a biological accident at the CDC Biosafety Level 4 storage site to an outright biological attack anywhere in the world. Even if Iran or North Korea had been targeted, Wildfire would be involved; besides, biological attacks were no respecters of borders. “What do we have so far?”

  “There was an incident in New York, reported thirty minutes ago,” the duty officer explained. “I’m emailing you what we have so far, which is very little. There’s a car on its way to pick you up and transfer you to the red zone, where you will meet up with the mobile research lab and a security team. The NYPD has primacy at the moment, but as soon as you and your team are in the area they will yield to you.”

  “Understood,” Nicolas said. The Wildfire Protocols ensured that the Wildfire team would get priority, once they got organised. “I’ll get dressed now and wait for the car.”

  He closed the phone and went back into the bedroom. Sabrina was looking up at him nervously. Her dark skin – a legacy from her Indian parents – had always contrasted oddly with Nicolas’s Arabic features, but he had never cared about that. Sabrina was smart and tough, a teacher at one of New York’s more exclusive private schools. They had been married five years and the charm had yet to wear off.

  “They’re calling me in,” he explained, as he pulled on his work clothes. They were carefully chosen to ensure that losing them – or having them burned after visiting an incident site – wouldn’t matter. “You’d better go back to sleep.”

  Sabrina leaned forward and kissed him on the nose. “You’d better take care of yourself,” she said, as she held him tightly. “Come back as soon as you can.”

  Nicolas kissed her back. “I will,” he said, knowing that that might be a long time. Even if it was a false alarm, it would be hours – perhaps days – before he could return to his wife’s bed. There would be endless reports to write, explaining that Wildfire wasn't responsible for the false alarm and that the millions of dollars spent on the false alert had been well spent. It wouldn’t be the first time that Congress had tried to cut the budget, even though the director had explained patiently that Wildfire might be the only thing standing between the United States and a biological holocaust. The Senators and Congressmen hadn’t wanted to know. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The car that picked him up was an NYPD personnel transport, used mainly to move high-ranking police officers around the city in reasonable comfort. Nicolas nodded to the driver as he sat down in the rear of the car and then opened his laptop as the car moved out of the driveway, siren howling. The neighbours would probably complain about the racket – they had no idea what he did for a living – but Nicolas found it hard to care. If the alarm was real, the neighbours would be glad enough of his services before too long.

  He skimmed through the report quickly, swearing aloud once he reached the photographs. The NYPD officer who had taken the snapshots hadn’t been qualified to take pictures of ill people, and his equipment hadn’t been the best, but he’d done a remarkably good job. The poor girl’s skin – and the growing pustules and rashes – showed up clearly, suggesting that a nightmare many had thought dead had returned from the grave. The symptoms suggested Smallpox, at least to some extent, although there were other diseases that had similar symptoms. The thought didn’t please him. There had been accidental outbreaks of some of the most virulent and feared diseases on Earth, but Smallpox – with only two official remaining repositories of the disease in existence – was almost certainly a biological attack. The nightmare had finally come to life. He discovered that he was hyperventilating and used a calming mantra to calm himself, forcing his mind to focus on the here and now. Perhaps, if they were very lucky, they could nip this outbreak in the bud.

  “Get someone to check with the CDC in Atlanta,” he ordered, activating the secure phone. By now, most of the people in the smart mob that made up Project Wildfire would have been alerted and some of them would be heading into work. Others would be waiting by their phones for orders, knowing that they might be summoned at any moment. “I want them to ensure that all of their samples – not just Smallpox, all of them – are in place and secure.”

  He scowled as the car turned into the street and halted outside the police line. The NYPD had thrown up a cordon and secured the area, keeping the entire apartment block firmly sealed. Small units had sealed off other apartments, hopefully keeping people – and particularly the media – off the streets. Nicolas doubted that that would last very long. By now, people with cell phones and digital cameras – and the internet, of course – would be alerting reporters and trying to collect a reward for tipping them off. It wouldn’t be long before the media descended in force.

  “Nicolas,” Doctor Jim McCoy said, as he stepped out of the car and into the mobile biological research lab. On the outside, it looked like a massive truck belonging to Wal-Mart; on the inside, it was a complete biological laboratory, duplicating the facilities at both CDC and USAMRIID. The NYPD biological response team had brought up a set of secure ambulances as well, ensuring that the locals – who might well have been infected – could be moved into quarantine with the minimum of fuss. “Thank God you’re here.”

  “I wish I wasn't,” Nicolas growled. Dawn was only starting to shimmer into existence, leaving him feeling tired and not a little wired. “Come on, Jim; we’d better suit up and get in there before the media descends on us and starts putting us on TV.”

  He led the way into the lab and donned the MOPP suit that had been put aside for him. The Mission Oriented Protective Posture suit was designed to be used in a toxic environment, including nuclear, chemical and biological disaster scenes. The suits that had been designed for Wildfire had been streamlined compared to the general issue suits used by the military, but they were still uncomfortable and had a tendency to overheat if worn for long periods. Nicolas had boiled in one while in Alaska; he hated to think of what it must have been like to wear one in Iraq. He checked McCoy’s suit and waited for McCoy to check his before they both stepped carefully out of the vehicle and into the building. They had to be very careful, if only because a single tear in the suit could expose them to the disease.

  Nicolas winced as some of the policemen stared at them with understandably hostile gazes. The two residents of the apartment block who were in view – sitting on the ground with their hands cuffed behind their backs – looked as if they were staring at aliens, suddenly very aware of just how serious the whole situation actually was. He averted his gaze and led the way upstairs, following the police line to the infected apartment. The briefing had stated that no one had attempted to move Miss Henderson – Patient Zero, as she had been designated – but that couldn’t last. They would have to transfer her out of the building and then sterilise the site. Depending on what had actually happened, they might have to burn the entire building to the ground.

  “In here,” Doctor McCoy said. “Coming?”

  The portable sensor at Nicolas’s belt began to vibrate alarmingly as they stepped through the door. He glanced down at it and swore inwardly as two words – BIOLOGICAL HAZARD – blinked up on the small display. The sensors were not always reliable – a news team in Iraq had once declared that they’d found Saddam’s collection of WMD when their commer
cial-issue sensors had identified something harmless as deadly poison – but they could be trusted to point out something that should be worrying. The level of infection was alarmingly high.

  “Doctors,” a cross voice said. Nicolas looked towards a police nurse wearing lighter protective gear. He winced again as he saw just how thin her protection actually was. She would have to go into quarantine along with the rest of them. “I trust that this will be quick? Miss Henderson needs to get into a proper hospital.”

  “It will be as quick as possible,” Nicolas assured her, as he studied the poor girl’s body. The nurse had rigged up an IV and had started to feed the girl fluids, along with pain medication and stimulants. Some people would have claimed that that would have contaminated the crime scene, but Nicolas knew that any nurse worthy of the name would have ignored any demands that she left well enough alone. “We just need to check her apartment and take samples.”

  The girl looked stronger than she had in the photos, but she was clearly still too weak to answer questions. A team of FBI-trained researchers would be working on her case even now, getting her superiors out of bed to obtain her files – there would be no difficulty with a warrant under the Wildfire Protocols – and attempting to trace her every movement over the last few weeks. Smallpox – if it was Smallpox – had an incubation period of twelve to fourteen days, although symptoms had been known to appear as early as seven days. It was possible that they’d misidentified the disease and it was actually chickenpox or Contact Dermatitis, but looking at her, Nicolas suspected that they hadn’t been so lucky.