The Gemini Effect

by Chuck Grossart

  The general paused. He knew what weapons the national security advisor was referring to. Old Russian weapons. Soviet, to be more accurate. Crated up and taken to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union to keep them out of the hands of the terrorists.

  Chemical weapons.

  Tons upon tons of the stuff.

  Over the last decade, they’d destroyed quite a bit of it, but had only made a dent in the overall inventory. It would take a couple of decades to dispose of it all properly.

  “We’re talking about using those ‘other weapons’ on American soil, Ms. Hruska. We don’t even know if they’d work against these things.”

  “But they might.”

  “Yes, they might. But I’m not ready to make that recommendation to the president. Not yet.”

  “We’re running out of time, General. We’ve lost Kansas City, we’re losing Omaha, and we’re going to lose four other major cities by sunrise—not to mention all the small towns and cities that have already been destroyed—and there’s no stopping it!” She paused. “The things should be entering Lincoln within the hour, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “General, you have a daughter going to school there, don’t you?”

  For a moment, Ray Smythe couldn’t believe his ears. “Excuse me?”

  “Your daughter attends the University of Nebraska. Correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do have a daughter there.” You bitch! How dare you bring her—

  “We have to try to save her, General.”

  “Just what the fuck do you want me to do, Ms. Hruska? Poison the entire midsection of the country just to save my daughter?”

  “No. I want you to take whatever actions necessary to save not just your daughter, but the sons and daughters of all the other people who will lose their children tonight if we’re not able to stop these things.”

  Ray Smythe imagined his commander in chief being compared to Saddam Hussein gassing his own country. The situation was entirely different, but he couldn’t get that vision out of his mind. He also couldn’t get his daughter’s face out of his mind, the face of a tiny baby he could hold in one arm. A little pig-tailed girl learning to ride a bike. Birthday parties. First date. Prom night. Heading off to college.

  “General, I want you to offer that option to the president.”

  “Ma’am, even if I did, and even if the president approved it, it would take time to—”

  “If you don’t suggest it, then I will.”

  Their discussion was interrupted by the general’s aide. “Sir, we’ve got reports of something happening in Minneapolis.”

  “Hold on, Ms. Hruska.” The general turned toward his aide. “Minneapolis?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s happening there, too. Started about thirty minutes ago. The 911 calls are starting to pour in from all over the city.”

  “That can’t be! None of the waves are anywhere near Minneapolis right now!”

  A young Army sergeant ran up to the aide and handed him a sheet of paper.

  “Oklahoma City. It’s happening in Oklahoma City, too, sir.”

  “What? There’s no way they could’ve gotten that far that fast without us knowing about it!”

  The aide took another sheet of paper. His hands were trembling.

  “Little Rock. They’re in Little Rock.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” the general mumbled to himself. “This can’t be happening.”

  On the screens arrayed on the walls of the NMCC, the faces of the president, vice president, SECDEF, secretary of Homeland Security, and national security advisor suddenly appeared. The video-teleconference had started.

  The president spoke. “General, what’s our current status on the ground?”

  General Smythe looked at the phone in his right hand—and then at the face of Jessie Hruska on the plasma screen on the wall—and placed the handset back in its cradle. He knew with a sudden clarity what he was going to recommend to his commander in chief. He cleared his throat.

  “Mr. President, we have some new developments.”

  CHAPTER 37

  The president couldn’t believe what he’d just heard: there were now three additional major American cities under attack! Three cities that hadn’t been evacuated at all—no preparation, no warning—because there hadn’t been a need to! He wearily scanned the population demographics that had been hurriedly provided by Hugo McIntyre.

  Minneapolis—nearly 340,000 people.

  St. Paul—one half of the famed Twin Cities—had a population of over 270,000 people. There were no reports from there yet, but the president knew they would come.

  Oklahoma City—well over 400,000 people.

  Little Rock—almost 184,000 people.

  Three cities—soon to be four when St. Paul was hit, which it almost certainly would be—with over one million American citizens under attack.

  “These cities are nowhere near the five existing waves. How in the living hell did these things get that far, that fast? And how did we miss it?”

  “Mr. President, we’re trying to ascertain that right now. We don’t know where they came from.” Ray Smythe was reeling from the new information flowing into the NMCC. He was trying to keep his thoughts focused on what was happening, but in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but think about his daughter stranded in traffic outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. A doomed city.

  The president’s voice boomed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want answers, and I want them yesterday! We’ve got three new waves attacking our citizens hundreds of miles away from the waves we’ve been tracking. ‘We don’t know where they came from’ is not a good answer! It’s absolutely unacceptable. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

  The yessirs came fast and furious.

  “Mr. President, I think we need to reconsider the possibility that this may be some sort of coordinated attack,” Hugo McIntyre said. “It doesn’t make sense that these things could’ve moved so quickly—traveled hundreds of miles—without us seeing them. Whatever caused this travesty to erupt in Kansas City must have been released in these three new cities as well.”

  “Released? Are you saying this is all part of a coordinated biological attack?”

  Ray Smythe spoke next. “Sir, the initial information we’ve received from the Vanguard team suggests the mutations were caused by a Soviet biological warfare agent called 1Z65. It doesn’t explain everything that’s happened, but they’re almost certain this agent has something to do with it.”

  “Could this Soviet agent have made it into terrorist hands?”

  “Doubtful, but it’s a possibility, Mr. President.” Tank took the next five minutes to explain the history of the 1Z65 agent. “The Soviets lost control of it when one of their scientists smuggled it out of the Soviet Union and brought it to us, and we had an accidental release as well. The Russians—and we—destroyed all remaining samples of the agent in the mid-1990s, sir.”

  “You mean all known samples.”

  The SECDEF sighed. “Yes, sir, all known samples.”

  Ray Smythe broke in from the NMCC. “Sir, we’ve got an update from Minneapolis. The animals are different from what we’ve seen so far. They’re birds, sir.”

  “Birds?” The president’s tone was incredulous. If the next thing he heard was that a truck full of teddy bears had come to life in San Francisco and had started eating people with a little sourdough bread on the side, he wouldn’t be surprised one little bit.

  “Yes, sir. Initial reports from Little Rock and Oklahoma City—and now St. Paul—are stating the same thing. Birds, Mr. President.”

  Visions of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller immediately filled the mind of every member of the president’s cabinet. Except this wasn’t a movie. No cheesy special effects. Real blood. Real death.

  “We could’ve missed them.” The vice president joine
d the discussion.

  “What do you mean, Allison?”

  “Mr. President, if the mutation has been passed to birds—which it’s obvious it has been—it could’ve happened last night, or the night before, and we’re only encountering them now. If it happened in the vicinity of Kansas City, they could’ve traveled that far. We have to assume they can travel at an increased rate of speed, just like the mutated creatures in the five existing waves. I don’t think we can assume this is a coordinated attack with complete certainty. This could be related to the initial mutations.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s a coordinated attack or not,” Jessie Hruska stated. “We can figure that out later. Right now, we have the five existing waves on the ground—and now three new waves in the air—that all need to be stopped. If they’re not, we’re going to lose millions of our people.”

  “The Vanguard team is trying to figure out exactly how to do that right now, Ms. Hruska.”

  “With all due respect, Madame Vice President, we don’t have the time to wait. We need to act now. Tonight. We need to discuss the other options available to us.” Jessie Hruska’s eyes flashed bright green, full of determination. “I think we all realize by now that conventional options are not working. General Smythe, do you agree?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He paused, finding it hard to believe he was about to suggest deploying chemical—and possibly nuclear—weapons on American soil. Weapons that would certainly kill thousands of innocent citizens . . . but, if successful, would save millions more. “Conventional weapons are not stopping them. We’re throwing everything at them that we can, and they’re still advancing. The ground forces, Mr. President, are being sacrificed; they don’t have a chance against these things. Not with these kinds of numbers. They just can’t stop them.”

  “What are you suggesting, General?” the president asked.

  “I agree with Ms. Hruska that we need to consider other options available to us. One, of course, is nuclear weapons . . . which I feel is an option of last resort, Mr. President.”

  “As do I, General. Your other option?”

  “Chemical weapons, Mr. President.”

  The president immediately turned to his SECDEF. “Tank, am I to understand we have chemical weapons in the inventory?” Once he’d assumed office, he’d been briefed on a number of things that only a president and a select few in government were allowed to know. Some of the things had made him wince. Others only became known after he had dug a little deeper and found the right career bureaucrat to pressure. It was an unfortunate—and natural—consequence of big government: some things passed from administration to administration, from president to president, without ever coming out in the open. He hoped chemical weapons weren’t one of them. The tone of his question suggested that heads were going to roll if he didn’t get the right answer.

  “No, sir. Not . . . exactly. We have ex-Soviet weapons in storage awaiting destruction. They could be brought to bear in minimal time, if we decide to do that.”

  “What kind of agents?”

  “Mostly nerve agents, Mr. President. There are some quantities of sarin, some VX, but the majority is soman.”

  Over the years the president had been briefed numerous times on enemy chemical capabilities—especially during his time in the Navy—and he knew soman well; it had made up the majority of the Soviet Union’s chemical warfare arsenal. It was a nasty nerve agent made by combining sarin with another chemical weapon known as lewisite—a blister agent. Also known as GD, soman had been initially developed as an insecticide in Nazi Germany in 1944. They found it worked just as well on people as it did on bugs. “Tank, correct me if I’m wrong, but soman has a very short lingering effect, right?”

  “Yes, sir. It doesn’t hang around very long.”

  “Where are we storing it?”

  “Sanbourne Army Depot in Utah, Mr. President.”

  “How quickly can we deploy it?”

  “Almost immediately, sir. Your predecessor directed that some of it be kept in ready-use status. Just in case.”

  “Ray, I want you to make preparations to—” The president stopped when he saw that his chairman of the Joint Chiefs was no longer looking at him from the plasma screen. His face had been replaced by an Air Force colonel’s.

  “Sir, this is Colonel Jerry Taggart. I’m General Smythe’s aide.”

  “Where the hell is General Smythe?”

  “Mr. President, the general just received a phone call from his daughter. She’s stuck in traffic outside of Lincoln.” He paused. “Lincoln is being hit right now, sir.”

  For a moment, the president didn’t know what to say. He’d watched the numbers build on the status boards—hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of his citizens had either died or were soon to die—but it hadn’t been personal yet. Her name was Laura.

  He’d met the general’s daughter on a number of occasions. He remembered her as an attractive young lady, ready to take on the world as she prepared to leave Washington, DC, for the University of Nebraska. Andrew knew she probably wouldn’t survive to see morning.

  “Colonel Taggart, please tell the general . . .” For one of the few times in his life, Andrew couldn’t find the words he so desperately wanted to say. They were stuck in his throat.

  “I understand, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.” The president cleared his throat. “Here are your orders. I want you to make immediate preparations to employ the soman nerve agent weapons against the ground waves. You will stand by for execution orders from me. Is that clear?”

  “Clear, Mr. President.”

  The president turned his attentions to the rest of his cabinet. “If we use this agent, I need to know what the effects will be on the surrounding population. I want to know weather effects, I want to know duration, and I want to know expected casualties. Brief me in an hour.”

  Jessie smiled as she left the situation room—General Smythe had come through for her after all! Using his doomed daughter as a motivator had worked brilliantly, just as she’d hoped it would. She hurried to her office. She had work to do.

  CHAPTER 38

  General Rammes hung up the phone and hurried over to Carolyn and Colonel Hoffman, both huddled over one of the rat-thing’s bodies in its thick Plexiglas container, slowly cutting into the body to discover its secrets. His voice startled them.

  “We’ve got a live one.”

  “They captured one alive?” Carolyn said.

  “It’s fifteen minutes out right now. They’ll bring it down as soon as they land.”

  “Humanoid or animal?”

  “Animal.” He looked at the creature in the container, now fully splayed open from the neck to the lower abdomen. “Like this one. One of the rats.”

  “That’s awesome!”

  Awesome? Garrett was a little surprised at the enthusiasm in Carolyn’s voice. Scientists can be so weird sometimes.

  “They captured it about ten miles north of Omaha,” Rammes explained. “Still had a chunk of casing stuck to it, so it couldn’t move as quickly as the others. It was a straggler.”

  “How’d they capture it?” Garrett asked, amazed that anyone would have the cojones to get anywhere near one of the things without blowing the living hell out of it. Or the luck to avoid getting eaten first.

  “Special Forces.”

  Those two words were all the explanation Garrett needed. Those guys had balls big enough to handle anything, including a mutated rat with a taste for human flesh.

  “They jumped on the thing with a steel ammo box.” Rammes smiled, glad that guys like that were on our side. “They drove it to Offutt—before it was overrun—and put the box in the backseat of a Strike Eagle. It’s been on its way here—at Mach 2—for the last thirty minutes. Barely got out in time.”

  “Omaha is being attacked?” Carolyn’s heart sank. Alth
ough it had been hours, she felt as if she’d just left there.

  “Yes. Looks like Lincoln is going to get hit any minute, as well. They’re heading west awfully damned fast,” Rammes said.

  “My God.” Carolyn was afraid to ask if any of the people still in the city had managed to escape. So she didn’t.

  “General Smythe informed me the president has ordered preparations to use chemical weapons against the creatures. Some of the old Soviet crap we’re keeping over at Sanbourne Depot. Soman.”

  “Soman? We don’t even know what kind of effect it will have on the creatures, General! These things are built to mutate rapidly against any kind of threat. The Russians discovered it when they were playing with Gemini. They might just adapt to it and—”

  “The other option discussed was nuclear weapons, Carolyn.”

  The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.

  “They’re considering nukes? On our own soil?”

  “Conventional weapons are having little effect, Colonel, like you saw for yourself. To make matters worse, we’ve now got three more major cities under attack, four if you count St. Paul. Minneapolis, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City.”

  “How can that be, sir? The waves are nowhere near any of those cities.”

  “Birds, Colonel. Giant flocks of the things.”

  Carolyn immediately understood the gravity of the situation they now faced. If the mutation had spread to birds, the expansion of the creatures might be impossible to control. The thought chilled her. The excitement she’d felt learning that they were going to be able to examine one of the things alive quickly vanished, replaced by an indescribable feeling of dread.

  They could spread incredibly fast now—multiplying every twenty-four hours, doubling in number—attacking every population center in the United States. Next would come Canada. Mexico. Fly to Central and South America. Fly across the Bering Strait to Russia. Fly south to population-rich Southeast Asia—China, Japan, Korea. Fly west to India, through the Middle East. Fly south toward Africa. Fly north toward Europe.