“I just knew that you were going to wimp out,” Blake sneered. “Let me see if I can put this in perspective. Henderson’s Disease is not a natural variant of smallpox; someone created the disease with only one real purpose, its deployment as a biological weapon. That someone has to be a state, because only a state would have such resources. That state is compliant in the attack and must be destroyed.”
Jim clicked off the television and headed back to his chores, thinking hard. If nuclear war broke out, as it might once the terrorists and their sponsors were identified, what would happen then? He didn’t disagree with Blake that a nuclear response was necessary, yet would it not put the country in more danger?
Shaking his head, he went back to work.
Chapter Eleven
It remains necessary to minimise personal contact during the opening stages of an epidemic. Where possible, all personnel should use telephones, cell phones, computers and videoconferencing equipment to remain in touch, rather than face-to-face meetings. This is particularly important for the government, which must remain intact and operating in order to maintain the quarantine.
-Doctor Nicolas Awad
Washington DC, USA
Day 9
“The growing trend is leading to only one point, Madam President,” Gayle Freeman said. The Secretary of the Treasury looked worried, even on the White House’s state-of-the-art secure videoconferencing system. “We are looking at a total collapse of the economy within three weeks at the most.”
The President scowled. Her two predecessors had wrestled with the financial crisis caused by the collapse of several big-name banking companies on Wall Street, yet they had never had to face the complete collapse of the American economy. It wasn't a single financial storm, but a thousand minor cuts, each one bleeding the economy dry. The men and women who made America work – everyone from an engineer to a Hooters Waitress – were not showing up to work if they could avoid it. Her own orders had made that trend possible, yet the costs were staggeringly high. The country depended on its workforce to make it work and that workforce was refusing to work.
She couldn’t really blame them, of course. The CDC had released enough data on Henderson's Disease – at her encouragement, to be fair – to convince most workers to remain at home. Medical personnel had been carrying on anyway, including thousands who were not yet vaccinated, but almost every other profession was trying to remain at home. It was creating a knock-on effect that was staggeringly powerful and yet incredibly difficult to tackle; every person who missed work affected another person…thousands of businesses and corporations would be collapsing, were it not for the government’s efforts to keep them open. Every CEO in the country was screaming at his or her tame politicians for government money, yet there was very little to go around. The emergency services came first.
It didn’t help that global trade had almost completely collapsed. The President’s declaration of a state of emergency had been matched with other declarations from around the world, destroying the global balance of trade. With the country’s internal and external supply network collapsing, entire industries were failing, even the ones that seemed impregnable to chaos. Even if Henderson’s Disease were to be cured overnight, with everyone who was ill returning to work the following day, the economy would take years to recover. The value of the dollar had fallen so far that wags were already joking that it could be used to replace toilet paper.
And that was causing a massive social crisis. No matter what the far-left claimed, the ordinary Americans had enough to eat, under normal services. Now, with the dollar’s value falling, it became harder for the average American to find food for their families, if they could muster up the courage to head outside to the stores. The collapse of the internal supply network meant that there was a growing shortage of food to place on the table. It hadn’t exploded yet, but the President had seen some of the contingency plans and knew that it wouldn’t be long before riots started to break out. The starving population would come out onto the streets and wreak havoc.
“I understand,” the President said, tiredly. “Is there nothing we can do to delay it?”
“Producing and distributing enough vaccine to get everyone immune to the disease would help,” Gayle said. She rubbed her eyes. She had just finished a conference call with her counterparts in other countries, trying to get a global response together and failing miserably. The super-rich were moving their money around the world, trying to save it from being rendered valueless, or seized by an increasingly desperate government. “And the unions are getting in on the act.”
The President scowled. She disliked unions on general principles, a legacy from her early struggles with teaching unions. They seemed to exist only for the purpose of making it impossible to fire incompetent teachers and had such a heavy level of clout that, even as President, she had been unable to clip their wings. The teacher’s unions were probably already advising their members not to go to work, although that would be just a waste of time. The schools were shut down and would remain shut down for the foreseeable future.
“Hit me,” she said, tightly. “What are they complaining about now?”
“The medical unions want all of their members vaccinated before they catch the disease,” Gayle said. “We still haven’t managed to get to all of the medical professionals in the country and some of them have definitely caught the disease from their patients. Some of the leaders are already talking about going on strike if their demands are not met.”
“Are they mad?”
“From their point of view, they’re perfectly rational,” Gayle pointed out. “They want to have their members vaccinated before they catch the disease, so they’re just serving the interests of their workers. They’re claiming that morale is falling and that containment is failing.”
The President rubbed her eyes, wondering again why she’d wanted the job in the first place. “Tell them…tell them that we are vaccinating people as quickly as possible,” she said. It seemed that everything she did met opposition from well-meaning people. “Let me know what they say. We might have to take legal steps to prevent them from going on strike.”
Gayle broke the connection, leaving the President alone in the Oval Office. The White House itself was nearly deserted, with everyone who wasn't essential to the smooth functioning of the building sent home for the duration of the emergency. Half of the government had been dispersed around the country, while both Congress and the Senate had been spread out for safety. She looked down at the photo of her husband on the desk and wondered, just for a moment, what he would have done in such a crisis. He had always favoured the most direct route possible.
“Madam President,” her assistant said. “Doctor Awad is requesting a personal meeting.”
“Good,” the President said. Perhaps he could shed some light on the problem. “Have him sent into the office at once.”
***
The Secret Service, Nicolas was amused to note, had turned the White House into a giant quarantine zone. A group of armed guards had inspected him as he arrived, insisting that he stripped naked, passed through a chemical mist and UV lights, before giving him an ill-fitting suit to wear. His briefing notes were, luckily, on a memory stick; it was inserted into a White House computer and the files were transferred onto a secure server. A blood sample was taken from his arm and run through a sensor, leaving him to wait until the doctor finally cleared him to go into the building. The precautions seemed excessive, but Nicolas knew better. They were desperately needed, if only to ensure that the government remained intact.
“Madam President,” he said, as he was shown into the Oval Office. His new suit chafed uncomfortably against his body, forcing him to struggle to keep his discomfort from showing openly. “I apologise for disturbing you.”
The President looked up at him. Her eyes were very tired. “Give me some good news,” she said. “Do we at least have someone to blame yet?”
“I think we have part of the pu
zzle,” Nicolas said, as he took the seat in front of the desk. “I believe that we now have a very good idea of where the disease actually came from, although we don’t know how it was actually deployed.”
He took the remote control from the desk and activated the plasma screen, showing an image of the smallpox virus. “Back in the 1970s, there was an outbreak of smallpox in India, one caused by a particularly virulent strain. The Russians dispatched a team of researchers to India, who eventually managed to secure samples of the virus and transport it back to Russia. This strain was eventually codenamed India-1. We do not have any direct samples of India-1, but we do have similar strains and we believe that Henderson’s Disease is directly related to India-1. Of course, all forms of smallpox are related, but India-1 is particularly worrying for several reasons.
“The Soviet Union’s commitment to eradicating smallpox was genuine, but not for the reasons they claimed,” he continued. “Their biological warfare experts believed, correctly, that a world without smallpox would eventually no longer be immune to smallpox and that, if they developed a form that could be used as a weapon, they would be able to exterminate vast numbers of people in a relatively short space of time. Unknown to us, at least until the Russians suffered a number of high-profile defections, the Russians proceeded to not only stockpile the virus, but also to modify it. Their overall aim was to create a strain that would be unimpeded by the vaccine.”
“My God,” the President breathed. “Were they out of their minds?”
“They believed that they could get away with it,” Nicolas admitted. “I must admit that they were right. The international treaties against the development of biological weapons were nothing more than pieces of paper to them. They played a shell game with inspectors, concealing a military program under a civilian program, carefully hiding just how far they'd come. What little we did pick up on was fumbled; we didn’t challenge them or pressure them into coming completely clean. If it hadn’t been for the defectors, we would have known nothing about the sheer scale of their program.
“By the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians had stockpiled enough smallpox to wipe out the entire population of the world several times over. They had also stockpiled diseases like Ebola, although they were less successful in turning them into weapons. From what we heard, they successfully managed to create diseases that combined the worst of two separate diseases, or ones that had fantastically long incubation periods. They had a number of accidents, yet they just carried on. The KGB cleaned up and silenced everyone involved in the disasters.”
He shook his head. “The Russians were never very good at paying the menial staffers,” he added. “One of their idiots somehow managed to forget to replace a filter at one of their biological research labs. A few thousand spores of anthrax got out and into the air, causing several hundred people to become ill. None of the local doctors knew about the biological lab, so they had no idea what they were dealing with at first. By the time the authorities figured out the truth, it had spread far further than they realised. Hundreds of people died.
“A few years later, one of their researchers managed to inject himself with one of the worst diseases in the world. The poor bastard was shunted into a quarantine ward and questioned incessantly on his condition as he faded away into death. They took samples of the disease from his dying body, named it after him, and turned it into a weapon. We’ve had accidents ourselves, but nothing quite that bad. There are even reports of worse accidents that were so comprehensively covered up that we only heard whispered rumours, if that.
“When the Soviet Union collapsed, thousands of trained and experienced scientists found themselves unemployed. We know that some of them made their way to the Middle East, where they worked with Iraqi and Iranian scientists on biological weapons. The Israelis assassinated several of them in the years prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Others reached China, or India, or North Korea. There are persistent rumours that some of them were even employed by transnational terrorist groups.”
He scowled. “The irony was that when we pressed the Russians to take greater care of their scientists and prevent them from going to work for terrorists, they cut off any chance of further defections at the same time,” he concluded. “The truth, Madam President, is that we don’t know just what is going on inside the Russian biological warfare program. It is quite possible that Henderson’s Disease came out of Russia.”
The President considered it for a long moment. “Are you sure that the Russians are involved?”
“Henderson’s Disease is a modified form of smallpox,” Nicolas confirmed. “It also had to reach the terrorists fairly recently, or we would have seen it before now. The Russians are the only known state with the capability to produce something like Henderson’s Disease, so…they are at least the source of the disease, even if it wasn't their choice to launch the attack. I still think that terrorists carried out the first infection.”
“They have to be mad,” the President said, again. “Don’t they know that we would retaliate?”
“I think so,” Nicolas said. “I suspect that we will discover that Henderson’s Disease came from a sample that went walkabout a few years ago.”
“And the Russians will not want to cooperate,” the President said. Her tone was icy cold. “They will cooperate or else. The mood on the streets is ugly, Doctor; if the Russians receive the blame for this attack, the entire American population will support a war with them in revenge. I want you to draw up a list of answers we need from the Russians and put together a team that can inspect the Russian facilities. I want people who know what they’re talking about and who won’t allow the Russians to deflect them.”
Nicolas nodded. He’d read the reports from the brief inspection phase and one thing stood out. The Russians had worked desperately to delay and distract the inspectors, using everything from elaborate meals and heavy drinking to manufactured delays and breakdowns. Even so, the researchers had uncovered many alarming details, ones that had been rapidly denied by the Russians. Their biological program had been officially shut down more than any other known biological program, even Saddam’s WMD research project. No one in Wildfire’s research community believed the Russian denials any longer.
“I want you to head the team personally,” the President continued. “You are to ensure that the Russians give you complete access to anyone and everyone you consider worth questioning. At the slightest hint of stonewalling, you are to pull your team out and we will go to war. The troops we base in Europe are already on alert” – the bases had been quarantined by the European authorities, Nicolas knew – “and I'm sure that we won’t have any problems getting cooperation from the Europeans. You have to make it clear to the Russians; they come clean, completely clean, or they face the entire might of NATO.”
Nicolas frowned. It was outside his bailiwick, but…
“Madam President,” he asked. “Will the Europeans cooperate?”
“We had an emergency FLASH message from Paris a few hours ago,” the President said. “The first case of Henderson’s Disease has been reported in France. If it’s there…”
Nicolas followed her logic. The European borders had been effectively non-existent for years. By the time the first Frenchman became obviously ill, the disease could have spread across most of Europe and into Russia. There lay the true danger of biological weapons, for anyone careful enough to see; biological weapons knew no borders or allied forces. The disease the Russians had created – assuming that he was right – would come back at them full force. The world was so integrated that even large islands like Britain and Australia wouldn’t be safe. The enemy was already within the walls.
“It could be everywhere,” he concluded. Patient Zero had been to Mexico, yet they’d heard nothing from the Mexican Government. Perhaps that wasn't so surprising. Mexico was locked in what was effectively a civil war between the Government and the drug cartels, so little matters like a disease that could exterminate most of the Mex
ican population were somehow unimportant. He couldn’t understand how anyone could be so short-sighted. It almost made him believe the claim that the disease had been released by ecological terrorists, convinced that the world would be a better place without the human race. “It could be all around the world by now.”
He shook his head. “It will be all around the world by now.”
America and Europe had, despite endless grumbling, excellent public health services. Henderson’s Disease was virulent, but it could be countered, even though he knew that tens of thousands – at least – were going to die. Outside the West, it was going to be a great deal worse; the poor peasant populations of China, Africa and India were going to become infected and die in their millions. The Middle East wouldn’t be much better off. Outside Israel, there was no focused vaccination program and the public health services were notoriously unreliable when forced to cope with emergencies. All hell was going to break loose.
They’re going to blame it on us, he thought, dryly. Already, the crackpots were coming out of the woodwork, spreading lies and half-true rumours across the world. Henderson’s Disease was the white man’s plot to exterminate the blacks, it was an American plot to exterminate the Arabs, it was a Chinese plot to exterminate America, it was an Arab plot to exterminate the Jews…it was even supposed to be the softening-up blow for an alien invasion fleet, waiting high above the atmosphere for the human race to drop dead. There seemed to be no limit to the absurd rumours…and no limit to the number of people prepared to believe them. So far, relatively little violence had materialised, but that wouldn’t last. Fear could drive people into doing stupid things.
The Coward's Way of War Page 11
