Team Red

by David DeBatto

  On the television, a spokesman for the administration was talking about proposed federal legislation, the Project BioShield Act, committing $5.6 billion through the year 2013 to defend the nation against biowarfare. That included a $22.1-million-dollar grant to Colorado State University to build a 33,850-square-foot level 3 biosafety laboratory and $900 million to purchase 60 million doses of a new smallpox vaccine, Modified Vaccinia Ankarta or MVA, from the Acambic Corporation, a British biotech firm with U.S. offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge came on to say an effort was being made to coordinate responses to bioterrorism among the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health, focusing on early warning systems, decontamination systems, and improved distribution of antibiotics and vaccines.

  “In Iraq,” the newscaster concluded, “one of Saddam Hussein’s former scientists, Alaa Al-Saeed, told David Kay’s Survey Group that Saddam had extensive biological weapons programs, paying their research scientists as much as eight thousand dollars a month. Earlier this year, Danish troops discovered about one hundred 120mm shells containing a blistering agent, possibly mustard gas, near Qurnah, 250 miles southeast of Baghdad . . .”

  He was interrupted by a male nurse, a lieutenant with the name “Growhowski” stitched above his left breast, who told him the pain was a good sign—it meant his nerves were coming back online. He said the doctor would be with him shortly.

  DeLuca smiled to see his next visitors.

  Dan had a bandage on his cheek where he’d been cut but looked otherwise hale and healthy beneath his San Francisco Giants cap. Mack was in fatigues and a T-shirt. Hoolie’d brought Smoky with him. They gave him a gift they hoped would cheer him up, a red and white bumper sticker that had originally read NO WAR IN IRAQ, which someone had taken a scissors and altered, inverting a letter to make it read NOMAR IN IRAQ.

  “How’s your head?” Mack said. “They’re not made for breaking bulletproof windshields, you know.”

  “Now you tell me,” he said. “How’re your people back home? They watching the news?”

  “My mom’s a little freaked,” Vasquez said. “She’s a bit of a germ freak.”

  “Do you think Flight 1230 and Alf Wajeh are connected?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “My gut tells me they’re not. You don’t need a thousand guys to attack one airplane.”

  They filled DeLuca in on the progress they’d made since the Sinjar Jebel raid. Vasquez had been pressing Lebanese National Telephone to release the phone records of conversations between the Daura Foot and Mouth Disease facility and Moushabeck Shipping Ltd. The ship manifests for the four ships that sailed that week were due to arrive any day. MacKenzie had tracked down one of Al-Tariq’s former bodyguards, who had no idea whether Al-Tariq was alive or dead, but he did vaguely recall some sort of family secret that nobody was allowed to speak of. She’d located the hospital where Al-Tariq was born, but his birth records had been destroyed.

  “In the bombing?” DeLuca asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mack said. “I think they were destroyed a long long time ago. But get this—there was only one obstetrician at the hospital at the time, and he’s still alive. I’m going to talk to him in the next few days to see if he remembers anything. I’d be surprised if he did, but it’s a lead.”

  “Good work,” DeLuca said.

  “I talked to CID,” Dan said. “They said Ibrahim’s fingerprints were all over the monastery, but not the old man’s. No syringes, nothing. They’re still running the DNA but they don’t expect much. But guess who else they think was there? Probably in the truck we were chasing?”

  “Who?”

  “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Dan said, referring to the Jordanian militant believed to be the top Al Qaeda representative in Iraq and the man in charge of the most active and dangerous of all of the insurgent groups. “The twenty-five-million-dollar man. Not that I need the money, but that would have been sweet.”

  “What was Zarqawi doing there?” DeLuca asked.

  “Who the fuck knows?” Dan said. “Maybe Alf Wajeh and Al Qaeda are playing on the same team after all.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” DeLuca said.

  Mack looked concerned. DeLuca saw the expression on her face.

  “What?” he asked.

  “We have more bad news. We were thinking we’d wait until you were feeling better. Jimmy. The cook. IED,” Vasquez said, the acronym standing for Improvised Explosive Device, a generic term to describe the roadside bombs left to explode in the hands of whoever came across them. “They left it under a dog, man. The dog had a broken leg, they broke his leg, and when Jimmy went to help it, they blew it up with a garage-door opener.”

  DeLuca took the news hard. He remembered a really nice kid, with a sort of doomed feeling about him, a kid who was too good to be true, too optimistic and unjaded to last very long, in a war that swallowed the innocent whole.

  “What about the other thing?” DeLuca said. “For Abu Waid?”

  “Adnan says it’s scheduled for tomorrow morning,” Dan said. “Car bombing at ‘Counterintelligence Headquarters’ in Baghdad. We expect sixteen wounded and eight dead. We’re going to leak a couple of fake bios with fake relatives back home for the reporters to talk to, and we got two guys who’re going to dress up in bandages and fake blood and whatever for the cameras. Adnan says the people he’s been talking to are quite pleased. We told him you’d probably want to debrief him, as soon as you were feeling better.”

  “Good work,” DeLuca said.

  They made their goodbyes and exited, promising to keep him posted, and then MacKenzie came back with one more thing she felt she needed to say.

  “We wanted to be up front about this,” she told him, “but Dan and I wanted you to know that we . . . seem to be getting involved. Romantically. This is strictly off-duty, but we thought you should hear it from us. Scuttlebutt being what it is.”

  “Just be careful,” DeLuca said. Had Dan told her about his fiancée? It was none of his business.

  “We are,” she said. “It’s not even . . . I mean, it is what it is. But it’s probably nothing more than that. I mean, who knows, right?”

  “Who knows?” DeLuca agreed.

  DeLuca’s doctor arrived a few minutes later. Scottie was with him. The doctor, a Captain Thomas, asked Scott to wait outside a moment while he examined his patient. He adjusted the steel brace that stabilized DeLuca’s head, checked the IV drips (currently Percocet and a muscle relaxant), and he prodded DeLuca in various parts of his body, his toes, hands, thighs, asking him if he felt anything, and each time DeLuca was happy to report that he did. He could bend his hands at the wrist but was having trouble raising his arms or lifting his legs, movement that would come with time, the doctor assured him.

  “What’s your pain level? Scale of one to ten?” Captain Thomas asked him.

  “I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “Up and down. Between five and nine, maybe. What’s going on in my neck?”

  “You had a concussion. Are you having any memory problems?”

  “I can still remember my first wife,” DeLuca said.

  “When you get better, we’ll hit you on the head again and see if we can take care of that,” Dr. Thomas said. He told DeLuca he had swelling in his second, third, and fourth cervical vertebrae, and that was pressing on a nerve or two. When the swelling went down, they’d be able to tell if there were any ruptured disks or permanent nerve damage.

  “So it’s like whiplash or something?” he asked.

  “Yup,” the doctor said. “Weapons-grade whiplash. Oh yeah—you took a round in the side, but we sewed that up for you.”

  “I got shot?” DeLuca said.

  “Right below your flak jacket,” Dr. Thomas said. He handed DeLuca a patient-controlled flow regulator, similar to the one that had been hooked up to Hassan Al-Tariq. “This will let you control your
own pain meds. Click click, but don’t get carried away. Have you ever been addicted to anything?”

  “Just doughnuts,” DeLuca said. “But I’m Atkins now.”

  “I’ll send in your son.”

  Scott was carrying something in his hand, a three-day-old copy of the Boston Globe, but it was the real thing, not a printout off the Internet. He said he thought his father might want to read it, whenever he was feeling better.

  “I brought your phone, too,” he said, setting it on the stand next to the bed. “In case maybe you wanted to call home.”

  “Have you talked to your mother?” DeLuca asked.

  “Not about you,” Scott said. “But about this flight out of Manila, yeah. She’s pretty casual about it, I think, but she’s seen orange and red alerts come and go. She says Kamel is doing really well. She sees him pretty much every day. He’s not walking yet but she thinks he will be pretty soon.”

  “I’ll call Omar and tell him,” DeLuca said. “I’ll call your mother, too.”

  “Speaking of Omar,” Scott said, “I have something for you. They’re investigating the raid on his house. Couple soldiers complained to their chaplain that they were ordered to fire on a white flag. The chaplain convinced them to go to their company commander, and now they’re being court-martialed for the shooting. JAG asked IMINT if we had any pictures.”

  He reached into his briefcase and took out a sleeve of photographs, which he showed to his father, one by one. In the pictures, DeLuca could clearly see the Hadid house, and the garden where Specialist Ciccarelli had fallen, and in the driveway, Ali Hadid waving a white flag, and in the next picture, Hadid bloodied on the ground.

  “Reicken is saying he wants to make sure those responsible are brought to account, but you know what that means.” It had been DeLuca’s experience that whenever a commander facing an investigation said he wanted to make sure those responsible were “brought to account,” what he meant was, he was going to stop the buck before it got to him. Scapegoating was the military’s dirty secret, except that it happened so often that it was hardly a secret anymore.

  “Hmm,” DeLuca said. “Do they think they can tie it to Reicken?”

  “The captain on the ground says he called the post,” Scott said. “Reicken says he wasn’t informed.”

  “These are for me?” DeLuca asked. His son nodded.

  “I was wondering what else you thought I should do with them,” Scott said.

  “Send copies to Captain Martin in General LeDoux’s office, and we’ll strategize from there,” DeLuca said.

  “I got something else you’re not going to like,” Scott said. “Last night, Delta Force kicked in a house we’ve been watching near Biyara, which was Ansar al-Islam before the war and probably still is. The town is half sheep and sweatshops with little girls tying knots in rugs, and then there’s one house using enough electricity to light up Fenway Park. They got away, but they left their toys behind. They had G5s and scanners and 2,400-dpi laser color printers and exotic papers with watermarks and buried ultraviolet security threads and the whole nine yards, and on the one hard drive they didn’t erase completely, we found templates for false identification papers. All kinds. Passports, driver’s licenses, business cards, security passes, corporate IDs, the works. Judging from the equipment and the software they had, the IDs they were generating were probably first rate. Good enough to fool the people taking IDs at airports, anyway.”

  “No master list of false identities, I suppose? That would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would,” Scott said.

  “Any sense of how long they’d been operating?”

  “Six months,” Scott said. “Maybe longer.”

  “Ties to Alf Wajeh?”

  “The car Ibrahim Al-Tariq was driving in Sanandaj was also photographed at the house in Biyara. But that just connects the car—not necessarily him.”

  “But probably him.”

  “Probably him.”

  DeLuca wondered why there were no photographs of Mohammed Al-Tariq himself. How could he stay hidden for so long? It felt like he was chasing a phantom, sometimes. Maybe everything was still the way it looked before—Al-Tariq was dead, and there was no plot, no Thousand Faces of Allah, no Lanatullah.

  “Knock knock,” he heard a voice at the door say. He turned to see a tall man in DCUs, over which he wore a white doctor’s coat, and he had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He was in his fifties, balding, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. “I’m Major Kaplan. I was told you wanted to see me.”

  “I’ll leave you alone, then,” Scott said, rising to go.

  “Stay, stay,” DeLuca said. “Major, this is my son, Lieutenant Scott DeLuca, just visiting his old man. Down from Kirkuk.”

  “Lieutenant,” Kaplan said, shaking Scott’s hand rather than saluting. “Your dad is one tough old bird, but you probably already knew that. Not many guys who go through the windshield of a Humvee live to tell about it.”

  “It had a crack in it,” DeLuca said.

  “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  “Have you got a few minutes to answer some questions?” DeLuca asked. “I know you’re busy.” Kaplan shrugged. “Have you been watching the news? This flight out of the Philippines?”

  “I haven’t been watching the news, but I’ve been briefed,” Kaplan said. “What about it?”

  “Is it what they’re saying it is? Bioterrorism?”

  “No, it’s not,” Kaplan said. “It’s bird flu. Same thing that came out of Hong Kong four months ago and Beijing seven months ago.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Positive,” Kaplan said. “I think twenty or thirty people have already fully recovered. Don’t get me wrong, this thing kills people, but it’s not BW.”

  “Why aren’t they saying so?” DeLuca asked.

  “Politics,” Kaplan said. “That’s a personal opinion, not a medical one. They had guard units taking over airports and government troops assuming the role of law enforcement, so I think they have to keep the scare going for a few more days to justify that. Which, in my opinion, is utterly immoral, because the next time when we really do need to sound the alert, people are going to think it’s just another false alarm. But don’t get me started.”

  “You worked out of Johns Hopkins, stateside, right?” DeLuca asked. Kaplan nodded. “My agent Dan told me. He talked to you a while back, about interleukin-4 and the Current Protocols in Molecular Biology stuff. He said you were part of a program, studying bioterrorism.”

  “I worked closely with Don Henderson at the School of Public Health,” Kaplan said. “And then the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. We did a lot of BW event planning. I was also a consultant to UNSCOM, until Saddam kicked us out in 1997.”

  “So you’re aware of who we’re looking for and what we’re dealing with,” DeLuca said, “from what Dan told you?”

  “I’m aware,” Kaplan said. “It’s been a topic of discussion among myself and some of my colleagues.”

  “And you think it’s smallpox?”

  “I don’t see what else it could be,” Kaplan said.

  “They were working on camel pox at Al Manal,” DeLuca said.

  “That’s just a proxy,” Kaplan said. “You work on something that won’t kill you, until you get the procedures down, and then you move them over to something more lethal. And smallpox is about as lethal as it gets. There’ve been estimates that D. A. Henderson’s work toward eradication has saved as many as fifty million lives, not that the Nobel people seem to care. I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘Demon in the Freezer.’”

  “And we know he had this?” DeLuca asked. “Is this what Rihab Taha and Hazem Ali and the others were working with?”

  “The answer is probably,” Kaplan said. “Based on what Hussein Kamel told us when he defected and what UNSCOM turned up before Saddam stopped the inspections, we know he had 8,500 liters of anthrax, 20,000 liters of botulinum, 2
,200 liters of aflatoxin, plus ricin, mycotoxins, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis virus, rotavirus, and smallpox. Plus a variety of delivery systems. Though smallpox has its own built-in delivery system. It’s one of the world’s most infectious agents. It just keeps on coming. I just read a statement from a guy at Los Alamos who said he thought a smallpox attack could be controlled by early detection and targeted vaccinations. I read that and thought—what planet is this guy living on?”

  “So what would happen?” DeLuca asked. “Suppose somebody sets off a smallpox bomb somewhere . . .”

  “It doesn’t have to be a bomb,” Kaplan said. “Let me walk you through it, because these are exactly the studies we did at Johns Hopkins, in a variety of scenarios, most recently one called ‘Dark Winter’ that we ran at Andrews Air Force Base in 2001. We crunched the numbers in all kinds of ways and we kept coming up with the same results.”

  “Okay,” DeLuca said. “I’m listening.”

  “So, suppose somebody gets hold of a research sample of variola major. Just basic plain old variola major, last seen on this earth in 1977 in Yugoslavia, but kept since then in cryogenic suspension inside isolation chambers inside maximum security laboratories at the CDC in Atlanta and at the Russian State Centre for Research of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk. We know the Russians had twenty thousand tons of smallpox in stock at one point, and considering you don’t need more than an amount equal to the amount of ink in an average fountain pen to start your own epidemic, let’s just assume it’s fair to say nobody is going to be able to account for all those twenty thousand tons of smallpox. Somebody could easily have gotten some and sold it to somebody else.”

  DeLuca thought of the Russian-looking man Ibrahim Al-Tariq had been having lunch with in Sanandaj.

  “Remember, too,” Kaplan continued, “we live in a world where nobody under twenty-five years of age has been vaccinated for smallpox, and anyone over twenty-five would have very little residual immunity. The United States has 250 million people and an extremely sophisticated medical infrastructure, and we still have only enough vaccine to vaccinate between six and seven million people. Globally there’s maybe one dose of vaccine in existence for every twelve million people. And some of that is too old to use.”