Lieutenant General Marion Slade, a graduate of West Point, was the army’s “jack-of-all-trades.” If something had to be done, he saw that it was done; if something was needed that didn’t exist, he saw to it that it was invented; he was a military genius in the specialties of improvisation and elimination of red tape. His authority stemmed from the three silver stars on each shoulder as well as from his position as Chief of the Quartermaster Corps and adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in all matters related to military supply.
Brigadier General James J. Rahway was Commanding Officer of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He had a unique qualification that not even Max Schwartz possessed—significant personal experience in widespread epidemics. He had been the chief medical officer assigned to represent the United States in medical assistance programs during epidemics of smallpox in Pakistan, typhoid fever in Mexico, and typhus in Southeast Asia. He had been intimately involved in the World Health Organization’s successful efforts to stem the influenza pandemic of 1971. His performance in each of these situations was outstanding.
Warren C. Tracey had retired from the Army Medical Corps in 1968 to become civilian director of the army’s medical research program. By training an endocrinologist, he had in 1964 been assigned by mistake—the army was famous for mistakes in assignment—to an infectious disease research unit. Rather than waste his efforts complaining about the “system,” he had applied his knowledge of human glands to study their reaction to infection. He was the driving force behind the creation of a new subspecialty in the area of infectious diseases—the metabolism of infection. He was, perhaps, the most knowledgeable individual in the country about the metabolic response of the host to infectious illnesses. Just prior to leaving the laboratory to become an administrator, he had initiated a program to investigate methods of detecting infection before a person became overtly sick.
Roger Bergen was unknown to almost all of them. He was a direct representative of the President; he would keep the Commander-in-Chief informed of everything that happened in this room and its surroundings.
As each person around the table introduced himself, it was obvious why each was there.
Alex Kahn was about to rise to introduce himself, but Max Schwartz saved him the effort.
“Alex, excuse me. I would like to introduce you. Gentlemen, this is Dr. Alex Kahn, one of my ‘boys.’ Dr. Kahn is here because I need him. He’s an excellent physician and very knowledgeable in infectious diseases. When I tell you the reason for our meeting, you’ll understand why he’s here.”
Alex was sure he was having auditory hallucinations. Max Schwartz paid compliments about once every five years, and then always out of earshot of the subject of the compliment.
Max Schwartz continued. “Get comfortable, gentlemen. These may be your last moments of leisure for quite a while.” He lit a cigarette, loosened his tie, and sat down.
Several of the others—to Alex’s surprise, even the generals—removed their jackets. Roger Bergen poured coffee from an urn in the corner and passed the cups around the table. The break in the formalities gave the group more the appearance of men who had come together to work. This was the atmosphere Max Schwartz wanted. He took a final puff on his cigarette, crushed it out in the metal ashtray before him, exhaled slowly, and began.
“It is my opinion that we have been attacked with some sort of biological weapon, probably of bacterial origin. I fear that, whatever the agent is, it is sufficiently lethal to kill a million or more persons in he United States within the next two to three weeks if it is not stopped or if we cannot find a method of treating the illness it causes.”
He could not have been more direct or more concise.
Alex Kahn and General McKitridge had had at least some knowledge of what Max Schwartz would say. They watched the effect of his words as their meaning hit the others.
General Slade reacted with disbelief and anger. Standing up deliberately, he placed both fists on the table, knuckles down, and glared at the man who had just spoken. “Dr. Schwartz, when a man of your reputation makes an unfounded statement like that, he is either specifically interested in starting a national panic, or he has some ulterior motive in mind. I do not care to listen to any more of this nonsense. I have just come from Fort Meade; I stopped at the Pentagon on the way here. I did not see any evidence of plague in the streets. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” He turned to reach for his jacket, and his eyes suddenly caught those of McKitridge. “Mark, you said you knew what this was all about. Did you call me all the way out here to listen to one more person whose nose was out of joint because Detrick was closed and he wasn’t asked? You don’t really believe all this, do you?”
“Marion, sit down!” The voice carried all the weight of an extra star. Slade looked at his superior and sat down quietly.
“Marion—and all of you. I did not expect you to receive this news calmly. I did expect you to receive it with courtesy and to listen and think before you open your damned mouths to insult the only person among us who was astute enough to see what was in front of his nose. I apologize, Dr. Schwartz. Please go on.”
“I apologize also, Dr. Schwartz,” Slade interrupted. “I had no right to speak to you like that. Perhaps you should have been a little less direct. But with all due respect, I think you owe it to all of us to defend your remarks and back them up with good, solid facts. No one—not you, sir, not General McKitridge, not the President himself—has the privilege of making such a statement as you just did without substantiating it with fact!”
“You are absolutely right, General Slade; but let me make it very clear to all of you that we cannot afford the luxury of good manners right now. We’ve got to doubt, to question, to make each other prove what is said. We aren’t going to have the chance—or the time—to be anything but outspoken and direct. That’s why Alex and I are the only clinical infectious disease people here. If we need outside help at any time, we’ll get it fast. Right now, the fewer people involved the better. General McKitridge has spoken to the President about this. He’s asked me to take charge, and I agreed. For the present, I prefer to do it this way. If there are any objections, let’s get them over with now so we can go to work.”
No one knew enough about what was going on to object.
Max Schwartz reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. As he unfolded it, the linear and longitudinal numbers and letters identified it as computer readout. He spread it on the table before him and ran the edge of his hand over it to smooth out the wrinkles.
“These figures were received from the Communicable Disease Center thirty-five minutes ago. In the past thirty hours 4,316 cases of pneumonia have been reported. Most of these have been classified as ‘staphylococcal pneumonia’ or ‘pneumonia, type unknown.’ All the patients have died; only fatal cases are reported so quickly, anyway. If we say as a conservative estimate that only one out of every ten cases is reported—that’s about average for most reportable diseases—we come up with the startling figure of about 45,000 cases of fatal pneumonia that have occurred in the United States in less than two days. Over the past two years, gentlemen, there were a total—a total, mind you—of 300,000 to 500,000 cases of fatal pneumonia per year.
“Even being conservative, I estimate that we are seeing more than fifteen times the usual number of cases of pneumonia. This means we could see over eight million cases in the coming year. But,” he paused, “this figure is based on an assumption that approximately the same number of cases will occur tomorrow as today; in other words, that the rate will be constant. The figures for the last thirty hours show that the rate is not constant. It is increasing. Now what can this mean? To me several things. First, the disease, whatever it is, may be communicable. A infects B; B infects C and D; and so forth. On the other hand, it could mean that the source of infection is continuing to increase in size; in other words, as the bug multiplies, more are around to infect more people. Although I hate compu
ters, I didn’t have enough time or paper to figure out the projected figures based on an increasing, rather than a constant, number of cases per day; so General McKitridge fed some of the crude data into the computer at the Pentagon so we could have some figures to give you.
“At this projected rate, gentlemen, there will be approximately 250,000 cases in a week, about three million in a month, and”—he stared hard at the group—“at this time next year there will be nobody alive in the United States! We shall have been wiped out.”
The silence in the room was absolute. At first, each of the six listeners merely stared ahead. Then one by one they turned and looked at each other. Each had heard the figures. Their validity had to be substantiated, but each asked himself, “What difference would it make if Schwartz were only half right? A fourth?”
The professor continued. “Now let’s get down to some basic questions. What could be going on? First, no natural disease I know attacks on such a scale. Would you agree, Dr. Rahway? Dr. Tracey?”
Both nodded their agreement.
“If it’s not a natural disease, what is it? Perhaps a laboratory accident. I checked briefly; none has occurred. Have your surveillance teams uncovered any accidents, Mark?”
“Not even a hint of one, Dr. Schwartz. We haven’t had too much time to check, but we’ve contacted all the major labs known to be working with ‘hot’ agents. No accidents. The safety checks at these kinds of places are pretty damned good, so it’s unlikely that even a very minor ‘spill’ would have gone unnoticed. It is possible that some ‘mongrel joint’ is playing with something, but there are very few even of these that aren’t monitored by government safety agencies nowadays. We’re in the process of checking into them and should have some word in a couple of hours.”
“Another possibility is that our store of biologic warfare agents is the source. Would you give us a report, Mark, to get the puzzled look off everyone’s face.” Max Schwartz again surrendered the floor to General McKitridge.
“Gentlemen, when Fort Detrick was closed in 1971, we were faced with the problem of what to do with our so-called ‘stockpile’ of weapons. Should we destroy all the ‘bugs’ as Dr. Schwartz likes to call them? In addition to the practical and logistical problems involved in doing so, there were two other aspects we had to consider. First, if we did destroy everything, we would essentially be stripping ourselves of all power in this area and would have to start over from scratch if the need for such a program arose at any time in the future. Second, the value of these microorganisms, not in dollars and cents, but with regard to potential usefulness in microbiologic research, was immeasurable. It was, therefore, decided by the President, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by the National Security Council that these organisms should be stored in a safe place, the identity of which would be known to only a handful of persons who needed to know to insure safety. The way the system is set up, no leak could occur without being detected. There has been none. Please continue, Dr. Schwartz.”
“I think, for the moment then, we must assume that my original premise is correct.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Schwartz.” General Slade looked around the table. “This is just not what I envisioned a biological warfare attack would be like. How about you, Jim? You’ve had experience with natural epidemics—could Dr. Schwartz be wrong? Could this be just some weird natural disease?”
Rahway just shrugged his shoulders. The look on his face suggested that at least he did not disagree with Dr. Schwartz.
“What did you expect it to be like?” asked Max Schwartz. “Purple gas being sprayed from silver rockets marked with skull and crossbones? Jet bombers dropping glass bombs filled with bubbling green fluid? Don’t be naive, General; if it were that way, even some dumb ‘shavetail’ fresh out of West Point would get the hint. How long do you think it would take your boss to push the button and release all those atomic missiles I’ve been paying for with my tax money? No enemy would take a chance on our ability to retaliate. The only way it could work would be if the enemy could mislead or confuse us. Their hope must be to kill or incapacitate us all before we recognize this as a biological warfare attack and before we identify our attacker and push the button. Our enemies know we won’t push that button if there’s one spark of doubt in our minds—too expensive for us.
“But who is the miserable son of a bitch who started this? Russia? Red China? Our other ‘good friends’ in Asia? Somehow I don’t think any of them is that dumb—or brave enough to play this kind of game. I think it has to be somebody we wouldn’t suspect, somebody who hasn’t got as much to lose. What do you think, Mark?”
“I think you missed your calling, Dr. Schwartz. You should have been a general—or a politician.”
The break in the tension was welcome.
A little over two hours later, a messenger brought the next report from the Communicable Disease Center to Max Schwartz and handed a sealed envelope to General McKitridge.
Both men silently scanned the computer printouts and frowned.
Dr. Schwartz spoke first. “Latest total reported, 6,813 cases. That’s a hell of a lot of fatal pneumonia in less than two days. The slope of that curve is increasing faster than we had anticipated.” He looked over at the paper McKitridge held. “Anything we should know about?”
“Well, Max, I’m afraid you’re right. After you called me this morning, I got hold of CDC’s latest statistics and gave them to Jerry Busch, our computer analyst. He went over them with one of the epidemiology boys and then programmed a set of equations. To make a long story short, the behavior of whatever we’re seeing is unlike that of any natural disease in its memory bank.” He paused. “That’s not all. Busch got the clue, so he crisscrossed the tapes, or whatever he does with that mechanical brain, and fed it some data gathered at Detrick during its heyday. The present data compared well with project DADA-68-X542TS. That ‘TS’ stands for ‘Top Secret,’ so we had to get clearance to break the code. That project was a series of mock-up field tests to evaluate a bacterial warfare agent. Got to hand it to you, Max. You’re better and faster than a computer.”
McKitridge looked around the room. “Well, gentlemen, anybody got any doubts left?” There were none. What the professor had suspected was horribly true.
“We can indulge in self-pity later. Let’s check our assignments again and get to work fast.” Max Schwartz scanned his list.
“Marion, you’re going to get things going. Right?”
“Right! In a couple of hours we’ll have communications to all the major cities involved, CDC, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the White House. We’ll have a line to feed data to the computer here at Detrick and one to Reed in case we need theirs. We’ll have fast helicopter service to Andrews and supersonic jets from there to transport anything needed. I’ll have sleeping quarters set up in the old bachelor officers’ quarters for all of us and any extra personnel we may need. We can use the dining facilities here on post. All the lab equipment you need and more is right here; no problem. Anything else?”
“No, that’s fine. General Rahway, are you set? With your knowledge of epidemics, you should be a great help.”
Rahway looked at his notes. “I’ve got all my stuff at Reed, so I’ll start in Washington to try to protect some top level and critical government people. I plan to get twenty teams out in the next few hours with a physician and an epidemiologist on each; I’ll try to send a bacteriologist to join them later. We’ll start with the largest cities, but we’ll try to get a team to every trouble spot as soon as we can. One problem is that we may be crippled by the loss of essential personnel. We’ll have to keep in touch.”
“Warren, what about you? Can you set up your screening tests and evaluate from here?”
“I’ll stay; it’ll be like old times for me.” Tracey spoke with a slow, soft drawl that reflected his Midwest birthplace. “Marion can have blood samples flown in, and we’ll run them here. All the equipment is probably stored in my old lab
anyway.
“Marion, can you send me about six lab technicians?”
Tracey turned to the general. “And a good top sergeant as a supervisor?”
“This afternoon, Warren. By the way, Dr. Schwartz, I’ll send you whomever the Chief of Bacteriology from Reed can spare to help you out. Is that all right with you, Jim?”
General Rahway nodded. “But I’d like to save some hospital personnel to work on the cultures that come into Reed and for the epidemiology teams.” He paused. “Say, why don’t you get Sam Ross? He’s the best diagnostic bacteriologist we ever had. He retired last year, but he’s living over in Rockville.”
“Good idea. I’ll have him out to you soon as possible.” Slade made another note on his clipboard.
“And you, Roger, will brief the President. Be very frank with him. We may need his help at a moment’s notice. Tell him General McKitridge will personally keep him informed. Dr. Kahn and I will remain here and take a careful look at what cultures we have so far. I’ve arranged to have random specimens sent here from at least a dozen major hospitals. The only chance we have is to isolate and identify this damned bug. If we can, we should have enough drugs in our armamentarium of antimicrobial agents to find one or a combination that should work. If not, we can get some of the super-chemists at one of the drug companies to invent one for us.”
“I’ll be commuting between here and the Pentagon, Max.” McKitridge gathered his papers and stood up. “I’ll arrange to have every bit of epidemiologic data teletyped directly to you. I’ll be back in a few hours, after I’ve gone over the situation with the Joint Chiefs. Maybe they can figure out why all this is happening and pinpoint the enemy; they’re much more up to date on the minute-to-minute changes in the international situation than I am.”
“Max, I have a question,” General Slade interjected. “Is there anything we can take—penicillin or something—to prevent our getting sick? Should we wear protective clothing?”
The 11th Plague Page 6
