Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  moved his hand. He got one hand around it, and twisted it, and it came on.

  Light. This was progress.

  He moved his neck left and right. He saw bare concrete a few inches from his eyes. His face was flushed and sweating, engorged with blood from hanging upside down.

  That was when he got a shock. There was something dark and open behind his head. An opening! Twisting his head as far around as possible, he saw that it was a tight passage that went off into darkness. Wedging his flashlight around, he managed to get a view into the tunnel.

  Then he got another shock.

  He saw a large glass tube standing upright on the floor of the tunnel at the foot of a ladder. It was packed full of hexagons of viral glass. It was Cope's biological bomb.

  It was several feet from his head, and it contained enough viral glass to render areas of New York City and downwind lethally hot.

  He would have to try to disarm it. It must have a timer of some kind.

  This was going to be difficult, because he was hanging upside down in the shaft. He turned his body and jerked it, and twisted and hunched and struggled. He managed to slowly rotate his body. He was still hanging upside down, but he was facing the bomb. By wrenching his shoulders, he managed to get one hand through the opening. He would try to grab the bomb with his fingers and drag it toward him, where he could work on it. He reached his fingers out for the glass tube ... it was too far away. It was three feet away from his extended finger­tips.

  He moved his hand up to his waist, found his Leatherman Super Tool, and unfolded it to the pliers. Tried to grab the thing with his pliers.

  Nope. Totally hopeless. I need almost three feet. Three feet might as well be three light-years.

  At his waist he wore a pouch - he had used it to hold his minilight and his pocket protector. He got one hand up to it and unzipped it. The pocket protector fell out, scattering things. He said to himself: Think. A wise man can build gadgets in hell.

  He looked down at the stuff that had fallen from his pocket protector and he tapped his fingers around, taking inventory, and speaking out loud: 'Mechanical pencil. Small box of pencil leads. Goober or Raisinet, not sure which. My Fisher space pen, writes in zero gravity. Swab. Another swab. Another swab. Length of duct tape wrapped around a pencil stub. Ticket stub from a Redskins game. Half an Oreo cookie.'

  Nobody but a fool goes into a federal counterterrorism operation without duct tape. 'To build a sticky probe,' he said out loud.

  With his head twisted to see what he was doing, and working with one hand only, he pulled a strip of tape from the pencil stub, and he began taping the objects together, trying to make a long stick. He debated trying to remove his glove for better coordination but decided against it; too much virus around here.

  With one hand he began stripping small pieces of duct tape off the pencil. He taped the mechanical pencil to the Fisher space pen and the pencil stub, end to end, using strips of duct tape, making a kind of extended stick. A probe. Then he stripped the swabs from their wrapping paper, and taped them together, end to end. That made another stick. Next, he taped the swabs to the pencil­and-pen stick. What he had now was a long probe. The light, flexible, delicate end of the probe consisted of the three medical swabs, taped end to end. They flopped around, but they added length to his probe. He packed a small ball of tape to the soft tip of the leading swab,

  attaching it firmly to the swab with extra strips of tape. He was running desperately low on tape.

  He had built a sticky probe of the classical Caltech design, approximately two feet long, using junk from his pocket protector. Such probes are commonly used to remove nuts and washers and other parts that have gotten loose deep inside tangles of high-tech equipment. He gripped the probe with his Leatherman pliers - that lengthened the probe somewhat more. He reached out toward the bomb. Nope. It wasn't long enough by about five inches.

  'Damn, damn!' he said.

  Think. Use your God-given brain.

  'Jackass - your flashlight!' he blurted. Now he taped his Mini Maglite to the sticky probe, and then held that in the Leatherman pliers. He reached out. The tape ball touched the bomb. He let it sit for a moment, to allow the adhesive to bind to the glass of the cylinder. Then he pulled it toward him. The cylinder shifted and toppled over.

  It thudded on the concrete with a loud sound, and the glass broke, dumping out hexagons of virus. They poured out in a heap, skittered here and there, gleaming like fire opal in the light of the flashlight.

  'Excellent!' he said. The warhead material had spilled out, giving him access to the detonator.

  He could see a chunk of explosive in the center of the pile of virus. There was a blasting cap stuck in it, and what looked like a chip timer. He couldn't see the timer. Boy, this was crude. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to make a virus bomb, as long as you had the virus material.

  Then he saw movement and heard a sound. It was a rat, crouched and approaching the viral glass. It appeared to be about to eat some of the glass.

  'Get away! Stupid rat!'

  The rat looked at him, unafraid.

  He found the piece of Oreo cookie. Pushed it at the rat. 'Eat that.'

  The rat took it and waddled away.

  Now to disarm the explosive. He could see the chip timer. It was a laboratory timer, not unlike an electronic kitchen timer. He touched the sticky end of the probe to the timer, and it stuck there. Good. He dragged the sticky probe toward him gently, and slowly the timer came along, pulling the blasting cap and the chunk of detonator with it.

  He got the chip timer in his hand. Ahh! He sighed. He turned it over and looked at the numbers.

  They were running. Currently they said: 00.00.02. 'Yaaaaahhh!' he yelled, and he pulled the blasting cap out of the explosive and flung the cap away, down the tunnel.

  Whank!

  The cap had gone off somewhere down there. I wonder if it killed the rat, he thought.

  There was still a heap of viral glass lying by his face. But it was underground. It could be dealt with. There would be a biohazard cleanup. It would be a mess, but it might be manageable.

  Now I have to get my living body out of here.

  He had to rotate his body in the shaft. So he shifted his hips, jamming himself tighter in the shaft, twisting himself, and trying to crunch his body down. He got his head around enough to see into the angle more clearly. Then he got his head into the angle, into the tunnel full of hexagons of viral glass. He took a deep breath and let it out, his blowers still humming, still protecting him, he hoped - and got himself a little farther around the corner. By exhaling and pushing, he could slide along on his back.

  'Yes!'

  He propelled himself on his back out of the hole, and he stood up, his feet in viral glass. He checked his suit with the minilight. There didn't seem to be any holes or tears, though he wasn't sure. His Racal hood was still pressurized, and his filters were working, it seemed. He hoped he did not have any rips in the suit or cuts in his skin. I may be a walking dead man, he thought.

  There was a ladder. Cope had climbed down the ladder and left the bomb here. There was also a tunnel leading off horizontally. He had no idea where it led.

  Just then he heard gunfire - two shots. Faint. Coming down the tunnel. What was going on? It was a low tunnel. He hurried along it, hunched over, and came to a sheet of plywood across the tunnel. He pushed on it, and it popped and fell away into a large, dark, open space. 'Anybody there?' he said. He shone his light around and caught a glimpse of columns, a figure moving. 'Alice?' Suddenly a red light appeared on his chest. What was this?

  Then he heard Austen scream, 'No!'

  There was a roar in his ears and something slammed into his chest, driving him backward, with a sensation the likes of which he had never felt before. It was a bullet in his heart, and that was when it came to him that he had been shot and was dying.

  Austen had heard Hopkins say 'Anybody there?' as she was lying in darkness. At the same m
oment she saw the gleam of his flashlight. He was waving it around, trying to determine where he was, and she saw Cope, fixed, bent, writhing slowly, taking aim at the light. The laser touched Hopkins.

  When Cope fired into Hopkins she heard a smacking oof! The minilight flew away and rolled across the floor, throwing its beam around crazily. Cope fired again, and again, and again, using the laser to aim.

  Shrieking, she got to her feet and raced across the space and fell on Cope, knocking him off balance. She tore at him. She had a glimpse of Cobra's eyes glittering in the light of the minilight. Then she had his gun, and she aimed it at his face, and she shoved the barrel into his mouth. A red laser light reflected out of his mouth, and she saw the blisters. Their faces were inches apart.

  There was a clunking sound, and the lights in the tunnel came on.

  She was lying across Cope with his gun jammed into his mouth.

  He trembled. An arm lashed out, while the other bent suddenly, and his neck arched and lashed around. Lesch­Nyhan writhing. In the light of the fluorescent lamps he looked shrunken, pathetic. 'You killed him,' she whis­pered. She stood up slowly, keeping the Colt aimed near those eyes. The red spot trembled on his forehead. Her finger tightened.

  'Don't ... Alice.'

  She spun around. Hopkins was standing behind her, bent over, the wind knocked out of him. There were two bullet pocks in his armored vest. The other shots had missed him. He was holding what looked like a bunch of junk taped together.

  '... Arrest...' he choked. The bullets had given him a good thump, knocking the wind out of him.

  She shook her head.

  'You ... power,' Hopkins said, doubled over, looking at her.

  To Cope she said, 'You're under arrest.'

  Hopkins tried to straighten up, and coughed. 'Need to ... charge --'

  'You are charged with murder,' she said. Cope spoke. 'F.B.I. bitch.'

  'Try again, sir. I'm a public health doctor.'

  His eyes widened. His lips drew off his teeth, and his

  face rippled. Something she said may have triggered the seizure.

  There was a growing chatter of voices on their radio headsets, and then they heard sounds in the air, culminating with a rush of people running up the Second Avenue tunnel. It was Oscar Wirtz with the operational group.

  Simultaneously, a SWAT team of New York City police officers wearing respirators was moving down through the street hatch by the Manhattan Bridge, descending the stairs and ladders. You could hear the rattle of feet on steel gratings and the clink of their weapons.

  As the operations groups converged on the scene they saw what had happened. The suspect was down in some kind of seizure. Hopkins told them that the tunnel might be biologically hot, because a grenade had gone off, and there was viral glass in the area.

  'Where's Mark?' Hopkins asked.

  'He was behind us, Will,' Wirtz said.

  Just then they heard Littleberry. He was coming up the Second Avenue tunnel toward them. His voice sounded crackly on the radio, hard to understand. Then they heard him shout, 'Down! Get down! He left one back-' A flash ended his words.

  They saw the blast wave come up the tunnel toward them. The wave came from the bomb that Cope had left sitting beside a column near the hatchway. No one had noticed it except Littleberry. He had been trying to warn them when it detonated.

  The blast wave took the form of a meniscus, a thin, curved, bubble of powdered viral glass. It moved down the tunnel and passed over them and was gone. For an instant it showed them the face of Cobra virus in fully

  weaponized form. It filled the tunnel with a gray haze that was alive and aching to find blood.

  The echo of the blast died down, leaving the tunnel in complete silence.

  Cope turned his head and seemed to gaze down the tunnel.

  Hopkins went down on his knees.

  Austen knelt beside him. She placed her hand on his back. She saw the tears falling inside his faceplate. 'OUT! EVERYONE, OUT!' Oscar Wirtz was scream­ing. 'WE'VE GONE HOT!'

  They made their exit through the steel hatch at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, into a maelstrom of emergency lights near Chatham Square, in Chinatown. Moments earlier, the deep booming thud of the explosion, which had occurred some fifty feet underground, had alerted emergency crews. The streets were jammed with emer­gency vehicles. There were people wearing Tyvek suits and talking on cell phones - managers from the mayor's Emergency Management Office. Television crews were not being allowed to get anywhere near the action. The area was awash in halogen lights, the air full of the chatter of hand-held radios and the constant deafening flutter of a half-dozen helicopters hovering overhead. Frank Masaccio had called every emergency unit he could think of, and he was still yelling into his headset at the Command Center, calling all units to converge on the hatchway at the Manhattan Bridge.

  The Cobra Event had not been lost on New York City residents. Early-morning groups of onlookers were being pushed back by police officers. In the east over Brooklyn, a red thread of a cloud suggested that dawn was coming. There was no traffic on the Manhattan Bridge - the bridge had been blocked off - and most of the subway lines in lower Manhattan were out of service.

  At the Command Center in the Federal Building, and at SIOC in Washington, a feeling was spreading that the situation was still dicey but might possibly be manage­able. Fragmentary reports were coming in. A bomb had gone off, but the explosion had occurred underground in an abandoned tunnel, and an attempt would be made to keep the dust from the bomb contained in the tunnel. The reports were broken, confused, sometimes contradic­tory, coming from different places, but some things were beginning to emerge. Frank Masaccio listened to his headset. He said: 'He's what? The subject is under arrest? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? Who made the arrest?' He suddenly leaped to his feet. 'Austen made the arrest? Are you kidding me?'

  Hopkins and Austen stumbled across tangles of fire hoses. She kept one arm around his waist, almost holding him up. The two of them were still dressed in their space suits, but no one paid much attention to them, because many people were wearing protective clothing, and no one knew who was who. Fire Depart­ment personnel swarmed around, putting on green chemical-hazard suits, shouting amid a crackle of radios. Crews from the New York City Fire Department began placing sheets of plastic tarpaulin over a half-dozen air vents that led to the underground structures of the Second Avenue tunnel complex. It was presumed that virus. particles would even now be flowing out of these vents. As soon as the tarps were laid down, the emergency crews began piling mats of fiberglass batting on top of them, and then fire trucks began pumping water mixed with bleach onto the batting, soaking the fiberglass with liquids that would kill a virus. Then the Fire Department's HEPA trucks moved in. They would eventually begin pumping air out of the Second Avenue tunnel, passing it through large, truck-sized filters.

  Hopkins and Austen made their way over to a Fire Department truck that was bathed in lights. It was the New York City human-decontamination truck.

  'Go ahead, Will,' Austen said.

  He climbed inside the truck and closed the door. He stood in a decon chamber. A chemical spray went on. The chemicals bathed the outside of his suit. Finally the sprays stopped. Then he removed all of his gear, piling the helmet and filters and suit and boots and everything else into a biohazard disposal bag, until he was standing naked in the decon chamber. A water spray went on. It was a hot shower. He washed his body twice, the first time with a bleach solution, the second time with water and disinfecting soap. Whether any particles had been trapped in his lungs during the operation was something that would not be known for several days. He went through a door into the decon truck's change room. There, Fire Department people gave him a blue sweat suit to wear. It was marked with the letters N.Y.F.D.

  Austen entered the truck and followed the same procedure.

  Cope had been brought up by some of the Reachdeep ninjas. He was tied to a chair they had found in one of the emp
ty rooms. They had lashed him to it with nylon rope, to control the biting and the thrashing. He was lifted up through the hatchway by the Manhattan Bridge. The chair was placed on the ground, the ropes were cut away, and he was lifted onto a gurney under bright lights. He seemed to be conscious but did not speak.

  The gurney was loaded into an ambulance that screamed to the Wall Street Heliport, where a medevac helicopter lofted him to Governors Island. On the island, he made no statement to federal investigators. He died in the Medical Management Unit four hours later.

  In the classified after-action report, the experts generally agreed that New York City had been very lucky. Fire trucks poured chemicals and water into the tunnels all day, and the air vents were piled with batting soaked with chemicals. Meanwhile, the HEPA filter trucks - they were essentially vacuum cleaners on wheels - drew air out of the tunnel system and passed it through filters. The filters accumulated stray particles of Cobra, and the air was discharged into the city.

  In the end, fourteen citizens contracted Cobra virus infections at scattered locations around New York, for, inevitably, some particles escaped the chemicals and filters, and ultimately found a human lung. The fourteen cases were scattered across the Lower East Side and into Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the plume of cases went as far out into Queens as Forest Hills. It created an epidemiological nightmare for the Centers for Disease Control. Almost all of the resources of that agency were used in tracing and managing the fourteen cases of Cobra that occurred following the blast in the tunnel. All active cases of Cobra were flown to Governors Island for treatment in the Army unit.

  Five emergency workers who had been at the scene also came down with Cobra virus infection. They were mainly Fire Department people who had worked near the tunnel vents, who had laid down the tarps and fiberglass material, but who, in the chaos, had not had time to put on breathing masks. The number of deaths among emergency workers - just five - was considered miraculous. Many experts had been expecting the city's emergency personnel to be decimated during the Cobra Event.