by JC Ryan
~~~
Raj was dispatched to create the PowerPoint, while Luke made arrangements to wake the President and give him the report as soon as it was ready. Daniel was standing by to be the spokesperson for this momentous occasion, knowing that Sarah had to get some rest and see the baby. He doubted if she would sleep until exhaustion overtook her. No one was sleeping well in Antarctica, except the support staff, who knew little of what was going on.
Meanwhile, research continued in the biology lab, and Daniel was pleased with the progress in combing the 10th Cycle library for any reference to the expedition that had found this valley.
The next thing to do was try to find any information in the archaeological site. Most likely, it would be found either in the hospital archives or in the library. Unfortunately, they had no diggers, so they would have to make do with who and what they did have. They wouldn’t even consider having the South Americans, who were no longer standing by in any case, come back. Aside from the additional virologist they’d requested, no other human being would be asked to make a one-way trip to camp. Even their supply runs would now have to be carried out by airdrop.
JR called together the support staff and scientists alike, except for Ben Epstein and Nyree, to inform them of the situation and solicit help with the digs.
“I want to assure you that if you are not already sick, you probably won’t be. Everyone here is carrying the active virus in our bloodstreams. We’ve determined that it isn’t likely to make you sick unless you’re of Middle Eastern ethnic origin. However, it means that we can’t leave here, not even when winter sets in. We need to find a cure before that, and before the people who have already left here infect too many more people outside.
“I expect all of the scientists to put themselves in Summers’ hands for assignment on one of the digs we’ll be pursuing in an effort to find some reference to this disease and how to stop it. Yes, that includes you, Malik. I know you’re Cyndi’s assistant, but now you’re a digger, just like the rest of us.
“I’d also like volunteers from the support staff. Some of you are sitting around with nothing much to do, since we don’t have fifty extra people to clean and do laundry for. I assure you there is no danger in what we’re asking you to do. Who’ll step forward?”
With some low discussion, everyone but the cook and his assistant stepped forward. That was just as well; they still had quite a few mouths to feed. JR named two janitors and a laundry worker to stay behind for support of the remaining group, and had the others follow Summers for a crash course in how to dig an archaeology site. At Summers’ insistence, because doing anything else would destroy the site forever, they were going to try to do it properly even though speed was of the essence.
Tomorrow, everyone but the skeleton crew in the camp would head for the center of the valley, hoping against hope to find the answers they so desperately needed.
~~~
Raj had worked fast. Within an hour, he had a beautiful PowerPoint presentation ready for Luke to convey to the White House, thence to the President’s computer. Daniel was standing by with his copy cued up. A Secret Service agent was tasked with waking the President.
Within minutes, President Harper’s face appeared in the video conference screen. Daniel wondered how he managed to look not only alert but also put together, his hair combed, a silk scarf wrapped under his robe, presumably to conceal his neck and pajamas.
“What’s this all about, Daniel?” he inquired mildly. For a man who’d been awakened at two in the morning, he was remarkably calm.
“Mr. President, I’m speaking to you from Antarctica. I’m afraid I have some bad news. I have the unenviable task of telling you of a critical threat to national security,” Daniel answered.
With that, Harper sat up straighter, a look of consternation on his face. “The hell you say. I think you’d better get on with it, Rossler.”
Daniel didn’t fail to note that Harper’s tone and mode of address were less friendly.
“Sir, if you’d have your aide turn on your computer monitor, we’ve prepared a presentation to make it easier to grasp the main points. After we go through it, if you have more questions, we’ll do our best to answer them.”
One by one, Daniel took Harper through the facts. Trained to hear out a report of this nature without interrupting, Harper nevertheless let out an oath of dismay when the projection of the numbers came up. Like many Presidents before him, Harper’s political persona concealed a sharp intelligence that allowed him to grasp the implications even before the slide changed. However, he remained silent as Daniel turned to the concerns about the political climate. Nodding his head, he agreed with each of the points they had prepared.
When Daniel was finished with the presentation, he remained silent. The President didn’t need to be invited to present questions. If he had any, they’d be forthcoming soon. Harper remained in intense thought for several minutes. At last he raised his head and looked Daniel in the eyes through the video screen. Daniel met the gaze forthrightly.
“On your honor, you swear that this was inadvertent on your part, the part of the Foundation.”
“Yes, sir.” Daniel didn’t add ‘how could you doubt it’. Right now, the President wasn’t his friend, he was the sole protector of the United States, and the person on whom the shit-storm would fall when this news was released.
“Even when you sent all those sick people home?”
“Yes, sir. We didn’t understand that the disease was so highly communicable at the time, and we didn’t have the resources to care for them. Besides, their families and governments were demanding their return. We had no choice. However, it was a grave error, and we will take full accountability for making it.”
“Dr. Mendenhall, I take it you treated all the cases that originated there at your base?”
Rebecca, not really expecting to be addressed by the President of the United States, stammered, “Y…yes, Sir. Mr. President.”
JR squeezed her hand surreptitiously and Daniel nodded at her encouragingly, so it was with more confidence that she answered his follow-up questions. “Yes, I believe the projections to be reasonable, if not optimistic. No, I found nothing that would halt the illness, nor have the Middle Eastern physicians I’ve spoken to. No, sir, we had no choice but to send the sick ones home, given the demands of their families and governments. Yes, it is indeed terrible, sir.”
“Very well. I’m going to have to call in the National Security Council, and some of them may have questions for you. Will you be available?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll stand by. The rest of the group is going back into the valley to see if we can find some answers.”
“Good. I have no doubt I’ll be talking to you soon, Daniel. Thank you for getting this to me as soon as you could.”
Daniel was grateful to hear his given name on the lips of the President again. He still felt accountable for the disaster at hand, but the President had given him the gift of understanding that it had been unavoidable. If the rest of the world were as understanding, Daniel could face death if necessary. It was the loss of respect that would grieve him, and the stigma that would follow Sarah and little Nick.
Chapter 20 - This is what we’re going to do
Despite the early hour, Harper convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council. Everyone was somewhat used to being called in the middle of the night, but what the President had to tell them was going to be a shock to rival any since the inception of the Council in 1947. In twos and threes, the members entered the conference room and sat in their usual places, waiting without speculation for an explanation of why they’d been called in.
The Council consisted of the President as its chair, the Vice-President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor and the Secretary of the Treasury. In addition, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was present as the statutory military advisor to the Council, the Director of National Intelligence as the advisor in that capa
city. Although Harper didn’t immediately see a role in this matter for him, The Director of National Drug Control Policy, as a statuary advisor to the Council, was also present.
Due to the widespread consequences of this particular situation, the President had also invited, if a command order could be considered an invitation, his Chief of Staff, his Counsel and his Assistant for Economic Policy, along with the Attorney General, the Director of the CIA, the Director of Homeland Security and the Director of the CDC.
This formidable group wielded power of awe-inspiring proportions, and their advice and decisions would shape the official response of the United States to the crisis, which until this moment, no one had known of but the CDC. Thus, the wrath of the President for having been informed by a private citizen rather than the director of that agency fell upon the hapless man. Taken by surprise, he could only say that his department had not confirmed the assumptions of the Rossler Foundation scientists.
“I’ll expect your resignation when this crisis is over. For now, you’d better get your department in gear. You’re dismissed, but report back here in six hours to tell me what progress you’ve made. I may have more information for you by that time, but I assume the Rosslers are reporting to you directly.”
“To one of my department heads, actually,” said the man, sealing his fate. The President hated any supposed leader who threw his juniors under the bus or passed the buck. If Harper hadn’t already demanded his resignation, he would have done so now. Instead, he turned his attention to the Secretary of State, who had hurriedly called in her foreign policy advisors for the Middle East. They would arrive shortly. She asked to defer that discussion until that time.
Harper nodded, then gazed at his Assistant for Economic Policy. “What’s this going to do to the stock market?” he inquired, with deceptive mildness.
“There’s no way to project for sure, but I think we can all agree that it’s likely to plummet. I’d advise that we get in touch with Securities and Exchange and have them suspend trading immediately.”
“That would mean we would have to also immediately make a public announcement. Are we ready to do that?”
Homeland Security spoke up, since the appropriate responder had already been summarily dismissed. “Mr. President, we’re going to have to do that very soon anyway. From what you’ve told us, we need to institute quarantines. The only way to do that effectively is to let the public know what’s going on. I agree it’s going to cause panic, but I don’t see a way to avoid that. We’ll have to activate National Guard units to maintain civil order, and we’ll have to put all doctors under some sort of official control.”
“All right. Just a moment.” The President took a moment to call in the Press Secretary. When he arrived, they’d have to bring him up to speed and get him working on a speech for the President to present to the nation.
Defense, NS, HS and the Chairman of JCS had been talking quietly amongst themselves while the President called the Press Secretary. They were hammering out who would be responsible for what aspect of the response even before the foreign policy advisors arrived. There was no question in any of their minds that there would be rioting in the streets as soon as the President imposed quarantines.
Contrary to Harper’s intent, which was to quarantine people carrying the virus, these men had assumed that there would be a nationwide quarantine of any person of Middle Eastern descent. The precedent had been set in World War II with the internment of Japanese-Americans. That history had harshly judged that decision was immaterial to them.
By the time the foreign policy advisors arrived and the Secretary of State had informed them of the crisis and received their input, almost everything else was in place. It was time for everyone to take up the question of what the Middle East would do.
They might as well have asked JR. Every point he’d made and had inserted into the presentation was brought up by the experts. Anti-American sentiment in Middle Eastern countries was already at an all-time high, fueled by the modernization brought by world-wide dissemination of American culture and American innovation.
Traditional leaders could see their influence being undermined by the internet, expanded world travel and a secularization of their constituents. Radical leaders responded with hatred and violence, sparking a military backlash, which ratcheted up the distrust and dislike for the invading power even further. Even nominal allies like Saudi Arabia had over ninety percent unfavorable ratings of the United States. The strong support of Israel by the US wasn’t helping the situation, either.
The bottom line was that the experts agreed—when the crisis reached the proportions the projections showed in the next couple of weeks, with nearly fifty thousand dead or dying of a virus that only attacked Middle Easterners, the radical response would be explosive. Even more important, it would take only a month more to wipe out virtually the entire population of those countries. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ventured the question that several others of the same opinion were hesitant to.
“Why would we not just let this thing run its course? These people have been a thorn in our sides for decades. Give it a couple or three weeks and they won’t be able to give us any trouble. Problem solved.”
Harper, his Secretary of State and her staff, along with several others openly gaped at the man. Could he really have just proposed genocide as a solution? Harper’s stomach roiled, repulsed at the thought. He was going to have to call for another resignation. He’d be lucky if he even had a government by the time this was resolved. His weary voice took on a ring of leadership and power as he answered.
“We will not just let it run its course because that isn’t the right thing to do. That option would be as evil as what they’re going to accuse us of. We unleashed this thing, indirectly as it might have been. I will not stand by idly and watch while fellow human beings need my help. That is not the America I serve. Besides, do you really believe you can stand in a burning forest without getting scorched? We must stop it, at all costs. And, we have a moral obligation to offer our help, our all-out efforts, to the countries affected, whether or not they are our enemies.”
Most of the room burst into applause, as the Press Secretary hastily wrote down the words. They would form the core of the President’s public speech wherein he announced his government’s response to the crisis.
After hours of meetings, everyone had a task to accomplish. The President wanted control of the airwaves at noon Eastern, and his speech had to be ready. His advisors scattered, Harper called Daniel.
“This is what we’re going to do…”
~~~
One piece of the big picture was deliberately left out of Harper’s return call to Daniel. It wasn’t because he didn’t trust Daniel—he did—but it was top secret and couldn’t be revealed. In fact, Harper had been reluctant to approve it, particularly after his top military adviser expressed his desire for a permanent solution to what he inelegantly called ‘the Arab problem’. Placing such power in the hands of a bigot wasn’t his first choice, but at the urging not only of the military, but also of the foreign policy advisers and the Secretary of state, he signed off on it, knowing that doing so made him complicit in an international crime.
The idea was to place a number of satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the region. The spy satellites he had no problem with, nor with the increased communications capability. However, those with laser anti-missile capabilities, a modernization of the old Star Wars plan from the Reagan years, gave him pause. He was reasonably certain that those were a violation of international treaties forbidding the weaponization of space.
His advisers’ assurances that everyone else was doing it and had been for years just made him weary. What good were treaties if even the good guys violated them? He was still smarting from the humiliation of having to admit to a US biological warfare program of which he’d known nothing beforehand.
Almost the last straw was the military’s insistence on deploying some satellites w
ith nuclear strike capability. There was no hedging about this certainty. It was a clear violation of treaty. It was also touted as the first line of defense if diplomacy went south, as it was very likely to do.
Not only would Daniel and his group not hear of it, neither would any of the Allies. It was strictly “Need to Know”, and no one needed to know that the US had just joined the ranks of criminal regimes. God willing, it wouldn’t come to a pass where the weapons were needed, but if they were, better to have them than not. With his logic clearly in mind, Harper gave the okay and the birds were soon on their way to roost in the skies above the Middle East.
~~~
Before Harper went public, he owed his allies a heads-up. And before any other, he owed Israel advance warning. There was no hope of keeping what was coming a secret, though of course he wouldn’t publicly speculate on the Muslim response. The proper way to do it was through the UN Security Council, and that would come as soon as possible. But, not everyone on the Security Council was an ally. He’d get his ducks in a row first. There was simply no time to delay his press conference, not if he hoped to contain the virus that was already reported to be within his borders. According to a call that had just come in from the CDC, there were twenty-one known cases. He had to get them, and anyone they might have exposed, quarantined at once.
Harper reflected that there were silver linings to almost every cloud. The fact that he was a lame-duck president was the silver lining to this one. He could act without thought to the political repercussions. Sure, his party might suffer, but that couldn’t be helped. At least he would know that his actions were free of thoughts of the next Presidential campaign, a little over two years hence.
