Final Winter

by Brendan DuBois

  WHAM!

  WHAM!

  WHAM!

  There was screaming, loud screaming, and Aliyah realized it was her. She closed her mouth, found that she was on the concrete floor of the bunker. The floor was...something was wrong. It was tilted. It was still dark and there was a flare of light, as the father in the corner lit a cigarette lighter. Hassan was standing over her, his face a mix of concern and fear, and she got up. ‘I have to go, I have to go now!’

  ‘It’s not safe!’

  ‘I don’t care! I want my mama and papa, and I want them now!’

  Aliyah staggered over to the door, tried to get it open. It seemed jammed. She pulled and pulled, and something wrenched free. The sirens were still screaming. She ran up the stairs, knowing that Hassan was following her, not caring.

  Up and up she went, crying now, the sirens louder as she got closer to the surface. She broke free, out into the alley. Other sirens were sounding as well, ambulances and fire engines. She went out to the street, kept on running. The shelter. She would go to the shelter and find mama and papa and bury herself in their arms, and promise to be a good daughter, never again to leave their side, if only the sirens and shrieking would stop, if only it would be quiet and the war would stop and papa would work at saving sick children and mama would teach her French, and all would be safe and quiet and beautiful...

  The shelter. Where was the shelter?

  She ran up one block, and then took a left. More sirens from the distance, and then an ambulance shrieked by, and then another. She took another corner and—

  Smoke. Chaos. Aliyah brought both fists up to her head and beat at her ears.

  The shelter was across the street, but she could not get any closer. There were ambulances and fire trucks and masses of people, crowding in and around the structure. There was a barbed-wire fence around the concrete edifice, and people were tearing at it with their bare hands. A large plume of smoke was billowing from the rooftop, rising higher and higher into the night sky as if from a chimney venting the output of some horrible fire going on underneath the concrete and steel and—

  A group of men emerged from the crowd, carrying a stretcher. They were chanting and screaming, and each held a fist up in the air as their other hand held the frame. An Iraqi flag was draped over the burnt body, barely concealing it. And another stretcher emerged, and another, and Aliyah was on the ground, prostrate, beating her forehead against the asphalt, praying to her savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to save her and her mama and papa, and she stayed there all night long, as the hundreds of burnt bodies were dragged out of the destroyed shelter, her mama and papa among them, charred pieces of flesh and bone, and save for a distant aunt she was now all alone in the world, and when she finally stood up and saw the useless fire trucks still there in the morning, pouring water into the shelter, she was still sixteen, but she was no longer a young girl.

  Hassan held no interest for her anymore nor did much of anything else. Not even her Lord Jesus Christ, who had permitted the Americans to come here and kill her family.

  All that mattered now was revenge.

  Revenge to make the Americans pay for what they had done to her and papa and mama.

  And eventually that day, Aliyah returned home, and started to think and plan and work very, very hard.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the conference room, Adrianna Scott could feel the greasy chill of despair come over her Tiger Team, but she would not allow it to get out of hand. She looked around the room and said, ‘You know the weakness of scenarios. They assume the very best chances for our enemies, the very worst response by our agencies. But Final Winter was a war game. It was horrible. But it was just a game.’

  The police detective said, ‘A hell of a game, Adrianna. Jesus Christ, I thought weaponized anthrax was hard to produce, especially in quantity. Where the hell is this stuff coming from?’

  Adrianna said, ‘Darren?’

  The NSA man said, ‘Before the second Gulf War, the Secretary of State said that Iraq had produced hundreds of pounds of anthrax. Still hasn’t been found yet. Not hard to figure out that the stuff was either sold or given away before the Third Infantry Division plowed into Baghdad.’

  ‘Shit,’ Brian said.

  Adrianna said, ‘Monty, there’s no way to guarantee a one hundred percent success rate in sealing the borders or intercepting the teams. Correct?’

  A morose nod of the head. ‘You’ve got it.’

  She turned to Victor, determined to keep things moving. In her experience since being chosen to head this Tiger Team, she knew that some teams collapsed in inter-service rivalry, bitter fights over who had said what in a year-old memo between the CIA and the NSA, and some teams were so cautious that nothing happened, except for strategy and long-range planning sessions. But her team and her people were quickly earning a reputation for coming up with solutions and making the solutions work, and that was a reputation she was determined to maintain.

  ‘Victor, I’m afraid it’s going to be up to you and your folks.’

  Victor looked like a young rabbit, suddenly seeing a snake slither toward it. ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘The intelligence option and the military option are going to be of limited use,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘That leaves the public-health option.’

  ‘But I’ve told you already,’ he protested. ‘The typical vaccine regimen is three injections, spaced over a week. That and Cipro. I don’t see what else we can do.’

  There was a moment of silence, and then Monty spoke up. ‘What do you mean, typical?’

  ‘Just what I said. Typical.’

  Now Adrianna saw the team members direct their gazes at Victor, who seemed to shrink some from the attention.

  Darren said, ‘All right, Victor. That’s the typical approach. What’s not typical?’

  Victor looked at each of their faces, and when it came to Adrianna there was a pleading quality in his expression. ‘Adrianna...it’s highly experimental. It hasn’t gone through the usual evaluation process and blind trials. The production line has been set up and there’s been some progress, but it’s at least—’

  Brian said, ‘What’s usual about this, pal? Tell me that. C’mon, spill what you’ve got. What’s going on down at the CDC?’

  Victor looked down at his screen. ‘All right. I’ll brief you. But I’m not going to be held responsible for anything that—’

  Adrianna tried to soothe him. ‘No, you won’t be held responsible, Victor. You know who holds the responsibility. So tell us what you’ve got.’

  Victor still looked miserable. His fingers gingerly worked the keyboard of his laptop. He seemed to be struggling against something and Adrianna knew what it was: the desperate horror of screwing up, with the stakes so high.

  Finally Victor said, ‘It’s been worked on since the first anthrax attacks, back in ‘01. Operational name is Clear Sky. Challenge was, just like now, goddamn it, how to maximize the immunization process for respiratory anthrax in the minimum amount of time. We had to get around the three-shot process. Wasn’t working. How the hell can you get millions of Americans lined up and processed when it takes three injections to immunize them? The logistics were a nightmare. Even the one-shot process was a hell of a challenge, too. Then the working group for Clear Sky went at it from a different angle. Used a genetically modified version of the respiratory-anthrax virus. Modified it so that when an individual is exposed, he or she runs a slight fever, maybe a bit of nausea, but then they’re immune. Immune up to five years.’

  He looked up from his laptop. ‘There you have it.’

  ‘Have what?’ Brian asked.

  Monty said, ‘Yeah. What the hell was the fuss all about?’ Victor had the expression of someone who couldn’t believe the morons he was spending time with. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a variety of the respiratory anthrax. You’re not immunized through injection. You’re immunized by breathing it in.’

  Brian sa
id, ‘The hell you say.’

  ‘The hell I do,’ Victor said.

  Adrianna said, ‘Is there enough?’

  ‘Enough what?’

  ‘Enough vaccine to do the job.’

  Victor shook his head. ‘Maybe. I can find out later today. I know the production has been underway for some time, just in case we...well, just in case. But there’s the biggest problem of all. Delivery. It’s not like we can set up shower stations or breathing tubes on subways or train cars. Only possible delivery system would be airborne.’

  Darren said, ‘Hasn’t it been looked at?’

  ‘Sure,’ Victor said. ‘But the challenge of using an airborne vaccine is—’

  Brian said, ‘Oh, right. Like you said earlier. About wide dispersal. Crop dusters and such wouldn’t work.’

  Victor shook his head. ‘That problem’s been solved.’

  Adrianna said, ‘How?’

  ‘Vladimir Zhukov.’

  ‘Zhukov?’ Monty asked. ‘Who the hell is he?’

  ‘Was he, we think,’ Victor said. ‘Nowadays, he’s gone missing, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Best report is that he got gunned down in Tashkent a couple of years ago for screwing some group out of money who thought they were getting smallpox viruses and ended up getting chickenpox instead. But during the bad old days of the USSR, he was head research scientist for the Kromksy Institute of Infectious Diseases, which was funded one hundred percent by the Red Army. Their own little biowarfare agency. They had the same challenge, too, of trying to weaponize respiratory anthrax because wind and air currents would cause such widespread dispersal that any attack would fail in the first few seconds. But Zhukov came up with a solution. Pretty goddamned elegant if you ask me. Way it works, it’s like cluster bombs. You take—’

  Monty said, ‘Now you’re into my playground, doc. I can do the explaining.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Adrianna watched the scarred face of her military man as he briefed them, not once looking at his laptop. She hated to admit playing favorites, but Monty was her favorite in her Tiger Team. Quiet, unassuming, smart and tough, with the look of a guy who could help deliver a baby in the morning, and in the afternoon break the neck of someone threatening the same newborn.

  ‘Munitions,’ Monty said. ‘Always been the challenge of effectively delivering the most potent firepower with the most economic delivery system. You’ve got the problem of having enough munitions slung underneath fighter-bomber wings and in bomb bays to do the job, especially if you’re flying over hundreds of miles of territory and your supply chain is thin. So here’s the deal. You get one big bomb but it’s really just a canister. That’s all. Drop it over your target site. Maybe a staging area for infantry. Or an air base. Anything with nice, exposed targets. The canister is dropped, falls to a predetermined altitude, and pops open. Inside are hundreds of bomblets, packed away in little clusters that spread out. Each cluster about the size of a beer can. And when they get close enough, the little beer cans pop open and a lot of bad guys are having a bad day. One canister is dropped, but you’re delivering munitions over a wide area. Lethal and effective as hell.’

  Darren smiled. ‘Sounds like you serve in the Air Force, Monty.’

  Monty said, ‘I’ll never tell, and you know it.’

  Brian was impatient. ‘All right, you’re saying that this Russian, he came up with a way of using cluster bombs to deliver the anthrax?’

  Victor shook his head. ‘Yes, but not in a mechanical sense. You see, Zhukov came up with an approach to cluster the anthrax spores using a membrane, about the thickness of a cell wall. And this membrane would last a number of seconds out in the open air before it decayed, releasing the anthrax spores. So you could have a release of respiratory anthrax from a rocket shell or a spraying device, and it would reach ground level before the spores were actually out in the open. Very elegant, very deadly. And what we did - well, the Clear Sky group, I mean - was to use Zhukov’s approach to come up with a delivery system for the anthrax vaccine. Same method, using the membrane system. Initial tests looked promising. Anyone exposed to the vaccine would generally just need one exposure.’

  ‘Good,’ Adrianna said. ‘We’ll rely on you to—’

  ‘But...but, Jesus, Adrianna!’ Victor’s voice raised a notch and she said, ‘Yes?’

  His face was mottled white, as though a surge of anger was now raging through him. ‘You ... I mean, all right, suppose we do have enough vaccine. That’s a possibility. Considering who we are and the blank check we carry around in our back pockets all the time, we may be able to make it happen. But you haven’t solved the delivery problem, not even close to it!’

  ‘It’s a problem, it’ll be solved,’ she said.

  ‘Do you have any idea? Do you? My God, the last mass immunization we had in this country was the swine flu fiasco, back in 1976.’

  Nobody said anything. Adrianna paused, hoped someone would pick up the ball, and thankfully, it was her New York detective.

  ‘Going to need a history lesson there, pal. Most of us were pissing in our diapers back then. Go on.’

  Victor wiped at his face with his right hand, ‘In 1976 - February, I think - there was an outbreak of a respiratory illness at Fort Dix in New Jersey. An Army recruit died, and autopsy results showed he died from a variation of swine flu. That got a lot of people’s attention. You see, a form of swine flu was believed to be the strain of influenza that broke out in 1918 and 1919. A lot of people died worldwide from that epidemic.’

  Monty said, ‘Define “a lot”, doc.’

  Victor’s voice was now calmer, and icier. ‘How does fifty to a hundred million people sound like?’

  Brian said, ‘Sick? You mean, fifty to a hundred million people sick?’

  ‘Shit, no, not sick. Dead. Fifty to a hundred million people dead. Worldwide. In the space of a year.’

  Adrianna’s mouth seemed dry. So many dead ... She said, ‘Impossible. How could that many people have died without us knowing about it today? Something like that should be in all the history books.’

  A sharp nod from Victor. ‘Of course. But something else was crowding out the news about the pandemic. The end of the First World War. Tens of millions had died in the trenches and elsewhere. What was another ten or fifty or a hundred million? Which is why the CDC back in ‘76 freaked, thinking that the swine flu that killed this soldier was just the tip of the iceberg. Old reports I saw, the estimate was that if there was a swine flu outbreak that year, by the end of 1976 there could be a million deaths in the United States alone. A million. So there was a crash program, announced by President Ford, to immunize everybody in the United States against swine flu.’

  Brian said, ‘Sorry, doc, you’re gonna have to continue the history lesson here. I don’t remember this shit at all.’

  ‘Can’t see why you should - because it was a fiasco. It was supposed to be another Manhattan Project style of government management but those type of projects tend not to repeat themselves in terms of success, if you know what I mean. A global war against Nazis and Japanese militarists tends to focus one’s mind and efforts. Not the threat of a possible flu epidemic. Anyway, pharmaceutical companies were pressed into service to develop the vaccine. One company spent all their time developing the wrong vaccine and had to start over. Insurance companies said they wouldn’t pay out any claims against the pharmaceuticals. Congress had to step in to provide protection. The vaccine for children had to be administered in the two-dose system. Paperwork and administration was a nightmare. Then some elderly people started dying, the day they got the vaccine. And then it came out that people receiving the vaccine were at a greater risk of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome, a delightful and occasionally fatal form of paralysis. By the time it went down in flames, only a third of the population had been immunized, and the total cost reached almost a half-billion dollars. And there was no swine flu outbreak that year.’

  ‘Christ on a crutch,’ Monty said.

&
nbsp; ‘And another thing,’ Victor said, pressing on, ‘they had nine months to do it, and they still didn’t get it right. How in hell do you expect us to do the same thing in under a month?’

  Adrianna was pleased at how calm her voice sounded, and felt a quick burst of pride - quickly suppressed- at how well she was doing. ‘Victor, what other choice do we have? Wait for the outbreaks to start in Chicago or Atlanta or DC? It will be too late by then. You know it.’