by Tom Clancy
Saleh had come from Iraq.
Sohaila had also come from Iraq.
Saleh had Ebola.
Sohaila showed symptoms of flu, or food poisoning, or—
But Ebola initially presented itself as flu ...
“My God,” MacGregor breathed. He rose from his desk and his notes and walked to her room. Along the way he got a syringe and some vacuum tubes. There was the usual whining from the child about a needle, but MacGregor had a good touch, and it was all over before she was able to start crying, which problem he left to her mother, who’d slept overnight in the room.
Why didn’t I run this test before? the young doctor raged at himself. Damn.
“THEY ARE NOT officially here,” the foreign ministry official told the health department official. “What exactly is the problem?”
“He seems to have Ebola virus.” That got the other man’s attention. His eyes blinked hard, and he leaned forward across his desk.
“Are you certain?”
“Quite,” the Sudanese physician confirmed with a nod. “I’ve seen the test data. The doctor on the case is Ian MacGregor, one of our British visitors. He’s actually a fine practitioner.”
“Has anyone been told?”
“No.” The doctor shook his head emphatically. “There is no cause to panic. The patient is fully isolated. The hospital staff know their business. We aresupposed to make the proper notifications to the World Health Organization, informing them of the case and—”
“You are certain there is no risk of an epidemic?”
“None. As I said, full isolation procedures are in place. Ebola is a dangerous disease, but we know how to deal with it,” the physician answered confidently.
“Then why must you notify the WHO?”
“In these cases, they dispatch a team to oversee the situation, to advise on procedures, and to look for the focal source of the infection so that—”
“This Saleh chap, he didn’t catch the disease here, did he?”
“Certainly not. If we had that problem here, I would know of it straightaway,” he assured his host.
“So, there is no danger of spreading the disease, and he brought it in with him, so there is no question that there is a public-health danger to our country?”
“Correct.”
“I see.” The official turned to look out the window. The presence of the former Iraqi officers in Sudan was still a secret, and it was in his country’s interest to make sure it stayed that way. Keeping secrets meant keeping secrets from everyone. He turned back. “You will not notify the World Health Organization. If the presence of this Iraqi in our country became widely known, it would be a diplomatic embarrassment for us.”
“That might be a problem. Dr. MacGregor is young and idealistic and—”
“You tell him. If he objects, I will have someone else speak to him,” the official said, with a raised eyebrow. Such warnings, properly delivered, rarely failed to get someone’s attention.
“As you wish.”
“Will this Saleh fellow survive?”
“Probably not. The mortality rate is roughly eight of ten, and his symptoms are advancing rapidly.”
“Any idea how he contracted the disease?”
“None. He denies ever having been in Africa before, but such people do not always speak the truth. I can speak with him further.”
“That would be useful.”
PRESIDENT EYES CONSERVATIVES FOR THE SUPREME COURT, the headline ran. The White House staff never sleeps, though this privilege is occasionally granted to POTUS. Copies of various papers arrived while the rest of the city slept, and staff workers would take one of the copies and scan it for items of particular interest to the government. Those stories would be clipped, pasted together, and photocopied for the Early Bird, an informal publication which allowed the powerful to find out what was happening or at least what the press thought was happening, which was sometimes true, sometimes false, and mainly in between.
“We got a major leak,” one of them said, using an X-Acto knife to cut out the story from the Washington Post.
“Look like it. Looks like it gets around, too,” her counterpart on the Times agreed.
An internal Justice Department document lists the judges being reviewed by the Ryan administration for possible nomination to fill the nine vacant seats on the Supreme Court.
Each of the jurists listed is a senior appeals court judge. The list is a highly conservative roster. Not a single judicial appointee from presidents Fowler or Durling is to be found on it.
Ordinarily such nominees are first submitted to a committee of the American Bar Association, but in this case the list was prepared internally by senior career officials at the Justice Department, overseen by Patrick J. Martin, a career prosecutor and chief of the Criminal Division.
“The press doesn’t like this.”
“Think that’s bad? Check this editorial out. Boy, they really responded fast to this one.”
THEY’D NEVER WORKED so hard on anything. The mission had turned into sixteen-hour days, not much beer in the evenings, hasty pre-cooked meals, and only a radio for entertainment. That had to be played loud at the moment. They had lead boiling. The rig was the same as that used by plumbers, a propane tank with a burner on top, like an inverted rocket being static-tested, and atop that was a metal pot filled with lead kept in a liquid state by the roaring flame. A ladle came with the pot and this was dipped, then poured into bullet molds. The latter were .58 caliber, 505-grain, made for muzzle-loading rifles, rather like what the original mountain men had carried west back in the 1820s. These had been ordered from catalogs. There were ten of the molds, with four cavities per mold.
So far, Ernie Brown thought, things were going well, especially on the security side. Fertilizer was not a controlled substance. Neither was diesel fuel. Neither was lead, and every purchase had been made at more than one place, so that no single acquisition was so large as to cause comment.
It was still time-consuming menial labor, but as Pete had remarked, Jim Bridger hadn’t come west by helicopter. No, he’d traveled the distance on horseback, doubtless with a packhorse or two, making maybe fifteen or twenty miles per day, then trapping his beaver one at a time, doing everything the hard way, the individual way, occasionally bumping into another of his kind and trading for jugged liquor or tobacco. So what they did was in the tradition of their kind. That was important.
The timing worked out nicely. Pete was doing the ladle work now, and from the time he poured into the first mold-set until he poured the last, the first set hardened enough that, when dipped in water and opened—the two-piece tool was like a pair of pliers—the minié-ball-type projectiles were fully formed and solid. These were tossed into an empty oil drum, and the molds replaced in their holders. Ernie collected the spilled lead and dumped it back in the pot so that none would be wasted.
The only hard part was getting the cement truck, but a search of local papers had found an auction sale for a contractor going out of business, and for a mere $21,000 they’d acquired a three-year-old vehicle with a Mack truck body, only 70,567.1 miles on the odometer, and in pretty good running shape. They’d driven that down at night, of course, and it was now parked in the barn, sitting twenty feet away, its headlights watching them like a pair of eyes.
The work was menial and repetitive, but even that helped. Hanging on the barn wall was a map of downtown Washington, and as Ernie stirred the lead, he turned to look at it, his brain churning over the flat paper image and his own mental picture. He knew all the distances, and distance was the prime factor. The Secret Service thought it was pretty smart. They’d closed off Pennsylvania Avenue for the very purpose of keeping bombs away from the President’s house. Well, hell, weren’t they smart. They’d overlooked only one little thing.
“BUT I HAVE TO,” MacGregor said. “We’re required to.”
“You will not,” the health department official told him. “It is not necessary. The Index Patient
brought the disease with him. You have initiated proper containment procedures. The staff are doing their job—you trained them well, Ian,” he added to assuage the heat of the moment. “It would be inconvenient for my country for this word to go out. I discussed it with the foreign ministry, and word will not go out. Is that clear?”
“But—”
“If you pursue this, we will have to ask you to leave the country.”
MacGregor flushed. He had a pale, northern complexion, and his face too easily showed his emotional state. This bastard could and would make another telephone call, and he would have a policeman—so they called them here, though they were decidedly not the civilized, friendly sort he’d known in Edinburgh—come to his house to tell him to pack his things for the ride to the airport. It had happened before to a Londoner who’d lectured a government official a little too harshly about AIDS dangers. And if he left, he’d be leaving patients behind, and that was his vulnerability, as the official knew, and as MacGregor knew that he knew. Young and dedicated, he looked after his patients as a doctor should, and leaving them to another’s care wasn’t something he could do easily, not here, not when there were just too few really competent physicians for the patient load.
“How is Patient Saleh?”
“I doubt he will survive.”
“That is unfortunate, but it cannot be helped. Do we have any idea how this man was exposed to the disease?”
The younger man flushed again. “No, and that’s the point!”
“I will speak to him myself.”
Bloody hard thing to do from three meters away, MacGregor thought. But he had other things to think about.
Sohaila had tested positive for antibodies also. But the little girl was getting better. Her temperature was down another half a degree. She’d stopped her GI bleeding. MacGregor had rerun a number of tests, and baselined others. Patient Sohaila’s liver function was nearly normal. He was certain she’d survive. Somehow she’d been exposed to Ebola, and somehow she’d defeated it—but without knowing the former, he could only guess at the reason for the latter. Part of him wondered if Sohaila and Saleh had been exposed in the same way—no, not exactly. As formidable as a child’s immune defenses were, they were not all that much more powerful than a healthy adult’s, and Saleh showed no underlying health problems. But the adult was surely dying while the child was going to live. Why?
What other factors had entered into the two cases? There was no Ebola outbreak in Iraq—there had never been such a thing, and in a populous country like that—didn’t Iraq have a bio-war program? Could they have had an outbreak and hushed it up? But, no, the government of that country was in turmoil. So said the SkyNews service he had at his apartment, and in such circumstances secrets like this could not be kept. There would be panic.
MacGregor was a doctor, not a detective. The physicians who could do both worked for the World Health Organization, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and at CDC in America. Not so much brighter than he as more experienced and differently trained.
Sohaila. He had to manage her case, keep checking her blood. Could she still infect others? MacGregor had to check the literature on that. All he knew for sure was that one immune system was losing and another was winning. If he were to figure anything out, he had to stay on the case. Maybe later he could get the word out, but he had to stay here to accomplish anything.
Besides, before telling anyone, he had gotten the blood samples out to Pasteur and CDC. This strutting bureaucrat didn’t know that, and the phone calls, if they came, would come to this hospital and to MacGregor. He could get some word out. He could tell them what the political problem was. He could ask some questions, and relay others. He had to submit.
“As you wish, Doctor,” he told the official. “You will, of course, follow the necessary procedures.”
31
RIPPLES AND WAVES
THE PAYOFF WAS THIS morning, and again President Ryan suffered through the ordeal of makeup and hair spray.
“We should at least have a proper barber chair,” Jack observed while Mrs. Abbot did her duty. He’d just learned the day before that the presidential barber came to the Oval Office and did his job at the President’s swivel chair. That must be a real treat for the Secret Service, he thought, having a man with scissors and a straight razor an inch from his carotid artery. “Okay, Arnie, what do I do with Mr. Donner?”
“Number one, he asks any question he wants. That means you have to think about the answers.”
“I do try, Arnie,” Ryan observed with a frown.
“Emphasize the fact that you’re a citizen and not a politician. It might not matter to Donner, but it will matter to the people who watch the interview tonight,” van Damm advised. “Expect a hit on the court thing.”
“Who leaked that?” Ryan demanded crossly.
“We’ll never know, and trying to find out only makes you look like Nixon.”
“Why is it that no matter what I do, somebody—damn,” Ryan sighed as Mary Abbot finished with his hair. “I told George Winston that, didn’t I?”
“You’re learning. If you help some little old lady to cross the street, some feminist will say that it was condescending. If you don’t help her, the AARP will say you’re insensitive to the needs of the elderly. Throw in every other interest group there is. They all have agendas, Jack, and those agendas are a lot more important to them than you are. The idea is to offend as few people as possible. That’s different from offending nobody. Trying to do that offends everybody,” the chief of staff explained.
Ryan’s eyes went wide. “I got it! I’ll say something to piss everybody off—and then they’ll all love me.”
Arnie wasn’t buying: “And every joke you tell will piss somebody off. Why? Humor is always cruel to someone, and some people just don’t have a sense of humor to begin with.”
“In other words, there’s people out there who want to get mad at something, and I’m the highest-profile target.”
“You’re learning,” the chief of staff observed with a grim nod. He was worried about this one.
“WE HAVE MARITIME Pre-Positioning Ships at Diego Garcia,” Jackson said, touching the proper point on the map.
“How much is there?” Bretano asked.
“We just reconfigured the TOE—”
“What’s that?” SecDef asked.
“Table of Organization and Equipment.” General Michael Moore was the Army’s chief of staff. He’d commanded a brigade of the First Armored Division in the Persian Gulf War. “The load-out is enough for a little better than a brigade, a full-sized heavy Army brigade, along with all the consumables they need for a month’s combat operations. Added to that, we have some units set in Saudi Arabia. The equipment is almost all new, M1A2 main battle tanks, Bradleys, MLRS. The new artillery tracks will be shipped out in three months. The Saudis,” he added, “have been helping on the funding side. Some of the equipment is technically theirs, supposedly reserve equipment for their army, but we maintain it, and all we have to do is fly our people over to roll it out of the warehouses.”
“Who would go first, if they ask for help?”
“Depends,” Jackson answered. “Probably the first out would be an ACR—Armored Cavalry Regiment. In a real emergency, we’d airlift the personnel from the 10th ACR in the Negev Desert. That can be done in as little as a single day. For exercises, the 3rd ACR out of Texas or the 2nd out of Louisiana.”
“An ACR, Mr. Secretary, is a well-balanced brigade-sized formation. Lots of teeth, but not much tail. It can take care of itself, and people will think twice before taking it on,” Mickey Moore explained, adding, “Before they can deploy for a lengthy stay, however, they need a combat-support battalion—supply and repair troops.”
“We still have a carrier in the Indian Ocean—she’s at Diego now with the rest of the battle group to give the crews some shore leave,” Jackson went on. Which just about covered that atoll with sailors, but it was something. At least they could
have a beer or two, and stretch their legs and play softball. “We have an F-16 wing—well, most of one—in the Negev as well, as part of our commitment to Israeli security. That and the 10th Cav are pretty good. Their continuing mission is to train up the IDF, and it keeps them busy.”
“Soldiers love to train, Mr. Secretary. They’d rather do that than anything,” General Moore added.
