by Andy McNab
‘Yo, Sean!’ Kieran had clocked his presence and he waved him over with a big grin.
‘What the fuck’s happening?’ Sean demanded. ‘I was trying to get some kip and you dickheads let off.’
‘What’s happening? The pigs are happening!’ Kieran looked at him like he was a moron. ‘It’s a fucking liberty, but hey, make the most of it, right?’ He gazed over Sean’s shoulder, and his expression changed to delighted wonder. ‘All right! Dead pig! Dead pig!’
The others took up the cry. ‘Dead pig! Dead pig!’
An ambulance had pulled up outside the semicircle, and stretcher-bearers came out from between the vans to load Wolston up. He was under a thermal blanket, with an oxygen mask over his face. A paramedic held up a bag of clear liquid attached to a tube that disappeared beneath his blankets.
‘Dead pig!’
Sean clenched his fists and consciously fought the urge to strangle the little git. He kept quiet while everyone else celebrated what they thought was a fallen policeman. But he couldn’t help feeling a gush of relief that washed away fears he hadn’t allowed himself to think about, because Wolston was still alive. The platoon wasn’t about to lose its second member in two days.
‘One down, several hundred thousand fuckers to go!’ Kieran shouted.
Sean drew a breath to calm himself down. ‘You’re well spoiling?’ Even though he just wanted to walk away in disgust, he still needed to know their plans. Was Kieran going to start a fight? Or was it all just dick waving?
‘Too fucking right! But we’re not stupid. Some of them have got guns.’
‘Do you know what set them off? What got them here?’
‘Not a clue, mate.’ Kieran looked sideways at him. ‘Thought maybe you might know … That stuff you was looking out for – you reckon they found it?’
‘Could be.’ Sean had to agree, to keep up the pretence. ‘Something upset them. Expect it’ll be on the news.’
‘Mate, we guarantee we’re going to be on the fucking news! Too good a chance to miss.’
‘Well, take care,’ Sean said. ‘I’d hate to hear they found the body of a zitty white kid with a mag full of warning shots in the back.’
Kieran grinned. ‘I can look after myself. Take care, mate.’
They bumped knuckles and parted on what looked like good terms.
Now it was time to duck round the sides of the square without Kieran seeing and deliver his report to Dave.
Chapter 25
Friday 4 August, 02:30 BST
‘So you think it’s just high spirits?’ Dave asked when Sean had finished. They were back behind the cordon at the base of Wolsey.
‘I reckon so. As long as no one does anything stupid.’ Sean looked meaningfully at the nearest cop, who either didn’t hear him or chose not to.
‘I expect to have this lot withdrawn shortly,’ Dave said. ‘That should ease some tension. I’ve been waving my willy as much as I can at the police commissioner, but unfortunately he’s been waving his back, so we’ve both been waving them at the Home Secretary, who has finally decided that I have the biggest. Which puts me in a good enough mood to apologize to you.’ Sean cocked his head and looked at him. ‘The bio-mule scenario. It’s been at the back of our minds for a long time – if it could occur to us, then it would certainly occur to those who would wish us harm. And it would be a nightmare to guard against. Airport security today can stretch to full body scanning, checking passengers’ shoes, taking biometric readings, but the one thing it doesn’t do – yet – is take your temperature or analyse a blood sample. If Zara hadn’t already been on our system because of her conviction, which meant her fingerprints would have given her away, she and Girl X would have just swanned through Immigration at Heathrow, no problem, and no one would ever have guessed what was in their blood.
‘But as it is, the switched-airport scenario alerted us that something was going on. So we naturally paired it up with the Commonwealth Summit, which is the biggest security operation going on right now. And that meant we assumed a weapons-based scenario. A bio scenario would be too long-term – if the plotters were aiming at the Summit, they would use guns and explosives, not germs. So, to avoid distracting you, we didn’t tell you about our bio-mule worries and concentrated on finding weapons that go bang.’
And not a weapon that’s as silent as it gets, Sean thought. What noise does a germ make when it gets into your blood?
‘How do you know they aren’t going to gatecrash the Summit and sneeze in someone’s face and give them Ebola?’ he asked.
Dave shook his head. ‘The timing is out. Kath Buckingham and Rachel Cooke – the false identities being used by Zara and Girl X – were only in Nigeria for a week, and whatever got pumped into them out there, there’s no known disease that would have had time to start showing symptoms – in other words, to make them infectious.’
‘But it’s brewing? Inside them?’
‘Oh, yes. They’re doubtless incubating the virus in their blood as we speak.’
Dave spoke so calmly that Sean stared at him to check he was getting this right. And then he saw the slight gleam of sweat on the guy’s upper lip, the deadness in the eyes. Dave was acting like he didn’t care, but it was merely a coping mechanism: in fact, he was absolutely fucking terrified. He had probably been thinking along the same lines as Sean: infection spreading through the capital at the speed of a cough.
‘Blood can be mixed with anticoagulant and stored under refrigeration for up to six weeks, so it can easily be transported in a cooler box,’ Dave went on. ‘As you saw. I believe Zara was giving blood, as often as was safe without draining her completely, and that her blood will be transfused into more volunteers – perhaps under the skilled supervision of Ste, whose medical training was kindly paid for by the taxpayer … Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?’
Dave’s eyes were glazing as he looked deeper into the nightmare scenario, but he suddenly remembered himself and again gave the smile that didn’t fool Sean for a second.
‘But it’s probably not Ebola. We’ve pulled up some research on the Sacred Cross Hospital, where the girls were in Lagos. It’s a biorepository for tropical diseases, which means they have strains of numerous viruses in storage, for research. So we asked them what they currently have on the shelves. They have all the bad boys, including Ebola – Zika, dengue, West Nile – but those all require mosquitoes for transmission. However, they also have a particularly virulent strain of Lassa fever, which is transmitted by inhaling contaminated particles of rat urine in the air, and by contact with body fluids. So that’s the likely contender.’
Sean thought over the very, very little he knew about diseases. ‘So what’s the – uh – incubation period?’
He remembered the MO using that phrase – the time it took between a bug getting into your body and the symptoms starting to show.
‘That may be our first break. Lassa fever apparently comes in four strains, with incubation periods of between six and twenty-one days, but some genius has now combined two of the strains to produce a fifth. I got all kinds of technobabble about combining RNA strands …’ He saw Sean’s blank look and quickly got to the point. ‘The new strain, which was in stock at the biorepository, is just as dangerous, transmitted through the air, including by coughing, and extremely infectious – about thirty per cent of exposed cases will become symptomatic – but it has a minimum incubation period of around twenty-one days. Which is why we aren’t all being quarantined right now. The girls weren’t in Nigeria for twenty-one days. If they were infected, then they’ll be dangerous, but they’re not dangerous yet.’
Sean thought back to the hidden camera showing Emma logging on to her computer … and the way she had suddenly folded double. ‘Emma was coughing.’
‘She was, but so do lots of people for lots of other reasons. But yes, we’re trying to find her, to bring her in – whether or not she’s Girl X. We’re done playing softly-softly. She’ll be quarantined, and then we’l
l see what happens. And believe me, if you’d gone ahead and had sex with her, you’d be in a quarantine suit yourself right now. Ah, just who I was waiting for …’
A small team of guys dressed in white overalls were climbing out of a plain van that had come through the blockade. The leader came hurrying over, while Sean reflected that he had never been so glad not to have got lucky. The newcomer had his white hood pushed back and a surgical mask pulled down around his neck.
‘You’re the one in charge?’ the newcomer asked brusquely. ‘Peter Mirzoyan, Biohazard Response.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Mirzoyan. Before we go on, could you please describe the symptoms of Lassa fever to Fusilier Harker?’
Mirzoyan shot Sean a surprised look, maybe wondering why a mere Fusilier got the special treatment. He rattled off the description.
‘Begin with fever and general weakness – victims might just think they’ve got the flu. After a few days – headache, sore throat, coughing, muscle pain, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea. Then they either get better, or it all gets worse and worse, progressing to severe dehydration, mental confusion and organ failure. At that point the lucky ones just go to bed, lapse into a coma and die. The unlucky ones – about a third – go on to start haemorrhaging in the stomach, intestines, kidneys, lungs, brain. Slow and painful. Then they die. But that is a very few – we’re talking a mortality rate of one per cent, though that can go higher in an epidemic.’
Sean mentally translated ‘mortality rate’ as ‘number of people who die’. One per cent? One in a hundred? Those were good odds.
Dave wasn’t letting go. ‘How much higher?’
Mirzoyan clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘In an epidemic – a massive number of cases all arising at once – I suppose it could get up to fifty per cent or so. Everyone’s infection reinforces everyone else’s. But that really is a worst-case scenario for a virus with a highly inflated reputation based solely on the unpleasantness of the symptoms …’
‘One last question. I happen to know that at least one official biorepository has samples of a strain with a thirty-per-cent infection rate and a twenty-one-day incubation period. What happens if that gets loose?’
Mirzoyan was obviously only putting up with Dave because he had been told to. Numbers rattled off his tongue like a politician talking about NHS funding.
‘Thirty per cent? Well, say one person develops symptoms. Thirty per cent of the people they then meet until they are contained, or dead, will develop symptoms themselves after twenty-one days. So if this person meets a hundred people on the day they become infectious, thirty of them will become infectious three weeks later. Thirty per cent of their contacts will then become infectious for as long as they are not contained – and so on.’
Thirty out of a hundred … Sean thought. Again, not so bad. Getting worse, but odds he was prepared to take.
‘And fifty per cent of them die,’ Dave added.
Mirzoyan shrugged. ‘As you say. So, the numbers over time are a simple GCSE maths problem. May we inspect the scene now?’
‘I think you’d better. It’s this way.’
Dave led Mirzoyan and his team away, giving Sean a last, lingering Think about it look as he went.
And Sean was thinking. Thirty out of a hundred? Maybe he didn’t have GCSE maths, but even he could see …
Hang on …
He frowned. The maths problem was scratching at his consciousness.
Then his eyes flew wide open.
Fucking hell!
Those thirty cases came from one infected person. But if every one of those infected people met a hundred people each – that was thirty times one hundred. So they would meet three thousand people between them. And if thirty per cent of them got infectious – that was, what? Nine hundred people.
And those nine hundred infectious cases each met a further hundred people – which made ninety thousand contacts. Even just thirty per cent of that was …
He was running out of fingers. It was a lot.
This was getting way scarier.
He tried to picture that number of patients suddenly being dumped on a creaking NHS. Only, the number would actually be way higher, because they wouldn’t all just neatly infect the set number of victims. Mirzoyan had said until they were contained. But how long would that take? They would just keep on doing it until they finally realized they had something worse than flu and got help. Or someone stopped them.
And even if only fifty per cent of them died … that was still way bigger than any terrorist strike so far that Sean was aware of.
And meanwhile panic would spread. One good front-page photo of someone vomiting blood, and the cities would be clearing. Every road and motorway gridlocked with cars heading out to the country.
Total breakdown of – well, everything.
Oh. Fucking. Hell!
A hand clapped hard on his shoulder and a familiar voice barked in his ear, ‘When you’re done staring into space, I understand we’re meant to be taking down the OP … But first I think we should fill each other in.’
With his thoughts still whirling with images of plague apocalypse, Sean found himself staring, baffled, at Sergeant Phil Adams.
‘We plonk down on the tarmac at Heathrow – next second I’m ordered to report to Knightsbridge barracks to hang around on standby.’ Adams was in mufti, like Sean. They were standing in the shadow of one of the pillars of Wolsey. ‘Then, out of the blue at oh stupid hundred hours, I get ordered to retrieve you two beauties and the gear.’ He cocked his head. ‘And you look like someone really just made your day. What’s going on?’
So Sean gave Adams a brief report of everything he had just got from Dave and Mirzoyan. Adams’s face went hard and expressionless, which was what it always did when he got really bad news.
‘But the girls aren’t infectious yet?’
‘Dave says they aren’t.’
Adams abruptly became businesslike. ‘Then let’s get the fuck out of Dodge before that changes. Take me to the OP – sorry, am I keeping you up, Fusilier Harker?’
A mighty yawn had stretched Sean’s face.
‘Sorry, Sergeant, long day. We’re on the fourth level of Gladstone over there – but I’d better take you a roundabout route.’ He poked his head round one of the vans to take a look at Kieran’s crowd, over on the far side. ‘That lot don’t take kindly to authority figures and, no offence, you look … authority. Even when you’re trying to be a civvy.’
‘Lead on by whatever route seems best. But first …’ He put out a hand to touch Sean’s elbow. It was the mate-iest thing he had ever done and Sean stared at him in disbelief.
Adams’s voice was low and his eyes were hard. ‘How did Wolston go down? Give me all the details.’
Sean bit his lip. He hadn’t told Dave the full details. He hadn’t even told Mitra. The old instincts were still there: You do not grass on a mate.
Adams clocked his hesitation. ‘I can make it an order, Fusilier.’
It took a conscious act of will for Sean to remind himself that this was not grassing. This was reporting. And the purpose of a good report was to benefit everyone. He took the plunge. He would trust Adams with his life, and the sergeant knew more secrets about him than anyone else outside the Security Service. So he trusted Adams with this one, starting with him and Wolston cornered by a gunman in an alcove underground, all the way up to Wolston’s little seizure. How he had just stood there with the knife that could have been a game-changer, and not done anything with it.
Adams gazed at him thoughtfully while Sean pressed on.
‘And it’s happened before. We didn’t say, but … at the airport …’
He described Wolston’s momentary brain freeze before suddenly coming back to life and giving orders for dealing with the three gunmen. Adams’s eyes grew colder. Sean wasn’t sure if it was because of Wolston’s actions, or because he was basically admitting to making an incomplete report the first time round.
But
he was committed now. It was just tumbling out.
‘And then – you remember when we were chasing those kids in the Wolf and he ordered an abort – I didn’t think any more of it then, but now I wonder—’
‘Enough.’ Adams gazed into the night and breathed out. ‘Shit.’
Sean didn’t press him. He guessed Adams would say something more when he was ready. Sure enough:
‘It happens, Harker, to the best of us. It’s burn-out.’ A pause. ‘I’m not a doctor, I have no professional opinion to give – but I’d lay odds on that being the case.’
‘Burn-out of what?’ Sean asked. ‘I mean, I know he’s not a coward – it can’t be courage—’
‘Damn right it isn’t!’ Adams said. ‘No. Not courage. It’s … everything. Most people get by on about eighty per cent of the basic quota of nerves and energy that God gave them. That leaves them twenty per cent to call on when needed. But on top of that, inside most people there’s always an emergency reserve. The army teaches you to go up to the full one hundred per cent, and then to call on reserves if you have to go beyond.’ He sighed. ‘But it also then gives you plenty of time to replenish for the next incident. Only some people burn up the hundred per cent and never give themselves a chance to refill, so they go about their basic existence on reserves. It means they have incredibly little extra to call on when the shit goes down, and they can freeze up at almost any time. And that, I think, is what probably happened to Wolston in Afghanistan. Shit, it damn near happened to me, but I had the sense to come down with PTSD before it got really bad. People noticed and they pulled me out. But Wolston’s tougher than that, so he was able to just keep going until … he couldn’t.’
He clicked his tongue. ‘Getting plugged could be the best thing that ever happened to him. With the right treatment he might even be able to return to service rather than be invalided out. Meanwhile we pity him, but we don’t condemn. Right?’ He looked Sean straight in the eye, and Sean gratefully returned the favour.
