Ride of the Valkyries

by Stuart Slade

  Only, it hadn't happened. Yesterday, he'd had an emergency call from the hangars. He'd hurried over and seen what was happening for himself. On the first patients who'd contracted the disease the blisters and pustules were starting merge together into super-pustules, large sheets of infection that covered the whole body. Even as Pellatiere had watched, the advancing edge of the lesions reached another pustule and the border between them had broken down, the individual pustule loosing its identity in the cloud that was covering the man's skin. That was when Pellatiere had finally known the true identity of his enemy, it was not variola minoris, it was variola majoris. Confluent Smallpox. A disease whose mortality was rarely less than 40 percent.

  Overnight, the variola majoris had continued to flay its victims alive. The sheets of infection had started to detach the outer layers of skin from the underlying flesh, which itself was rotting and dying. The textbooks told of the fate of those who contracted this form of smallpox. Even if they survived, they would be hideously mutilated. The mercy was that variola majoris was not very infectious; only a tiny proportion of smallpox victims progressed to suffer from it. That had been Pellatiere's hope. It hadn't lasted long. By the end of the day, all the victims had progressed to the confluent smallpox stage. Now, he was writing that report up and had to put into words the grim conclusions.

  He was saved from writing those words by the sound of his telephone. A message from the treatment hangars. It was the one he had been dreading; an urgent request to come down, right away. Overnight, the situation had become even worse.

  When he got to the hangar, it took Pellatiere just one look to understand that there was no hope. There would be no cures, no survivors. If a person caught this disease they would certainly die. The areas between the sheets of confluent pustules had turned charred and black with internal bleeding. Already, one of the victims was showing the dreadful symptoms of hemorrhagic smallpox, the whites of his eyes were turning a deep red. Pellatiere knew that the same bleeding had already begun in the internal organs. For these victims, death was inevitable. It might occur from loss of blood or by other causes such as brain hemorrhage. It might occur by dehydration from loss of fluid. Probably it would occur from both, and from many other reasons as the disease lead to multi-organ failure. For this was hemorrhagic smallpox and its mortality was 96 percent.

  Pellatiere knew what was wrong. All the textbooks said that Confluent Smallpox and Hemorrhagic Smallpox were mutually exclusive; the development of one automatically prohibited against the other. Just as in the old days, cowpox had provided immunity against smallpox. Yet these victims were developing both. Something that had never been noted before. Grimly, Pellatiere thought that the discovery should get him published in the most prestigious and noted medical journals. Quite an achievement for an obscure and inconsequential Air Force Doctor. It didn't matter though. Pellatiere knew that because he had a headache and his back ached. And, that morning, he had started to run a temperature.

  As he left the hangar, one of the nurses stopped him. Her eyes were bright and her face flushed, she too had the disease. "Doctor, we've been talking, the nurses I mean. We all think, we don't want to die looking like that. Please, once its certain, can some arrangement be made? Something, please?"

  Pellatiere nodded. The base had plenty of morphine and he would write the nurses a prescription for a ‘pain killing' dose that would certainly end their suffering. He said nothing but bowed his head in agreement. Then he went back to his office to phone the news in.

  Again, he hadn't been the first. All the affected areas were showing the same symptoms, all had the same prognosis. The good news was that the disease wasn't spreading that fast; it seemed to require personal contact for transmission. That was good. The base was isolated from the communities nearby and the long war against the Caliphate terrorists had cut down travel.

  Pellatiere spoke for almost an hour, carefully relaying symptoms, observations, physical measurements, how the disease had spread across the body of its victims, the exact time it had taken them to develop each stage. He'd had blood, tissue, every sample he could think of prepared and packaged in a box. That container had gone through the most rigorous sterilization procedures he could think of. It was being left by the air base gate so that it could be collected by specialized hazardous materials teams. Pellatiere almost laughed, he could win a good deal of money by betting those who collected the box would be wearing isolation suits that made the American space suits look positively permeable. He didn't though. The thought of laughing brought on a fit of coughing.

  The he thought of something else. At the end of his recital, he added one thought prompted by the conversation with the nurse. "I've seen the way these people are dying. It would be kinder if you asked the Americans to drop a bomb on us." There had been silence at the other end of the telephone. Then a voice had said very gently, very kindly. "That is not possible, my brave friend. But you must do what you must to ease the suffering of those afflicted."

  A county road, Somewhere in the New Jersey swamps.

  Agent Mike Delgado pulled his government-issue Studebaker alongside the Lincoln limousine. These meetings were getting to be quite routine now, although he'd never met Lansky again. Mostly, they were messengers with information from the Cuban "Government." This time, though, the limousine meant somebody more important. Delgado felt a flare of resentment. The Studebaker was a mid-range sedan, not a cheap economy model like the Nash, but why should a bunch of gangsters drive around in luxury limousines while I get a family sedan? One of the penalties of being honest I guess. He got out of the car. One thing, the Studebaker was front-wheel drive; an unusual feature in cars of its type. The police and FBI were sticking with their rear-wheel drive Fords and Chevvies. The Secret Service had decided to test Studebaker's claim that front wheel drive made the car a lot easier to handle in snow and wet. After all, the Secret Service followed people around, it didn't chase them. Not very often anyway.

  There were two mob gunmen waiting for him. They patted him down, removing the Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolver with an only-slightly exaggerated expression of disgust. They carried fast-firing semi-automatic pistols, either M1911s or Czech Model 50s, depending on their opinions in the velocity versus bullet weight argument. The Czechs were moving fast in the small arms world. Their Tokarev 7.62 Magnum Skorpion machine pistol was a deadly piece of kit. almost as good, some said, as the Australian Robow. Then, relieved of his revolver, he got into the back of the limousine. John Gotti was waiting for him.

  "Good evening Mister Gotti. I thought you preferred Packards to Lincolns?"

  Gotti smiled at the gambit. ‘See how good our files on you are' was the clear message. "Agent Delgado, thank you for coming. This is Decavalcante Family country so I advised them I was on their turf and they kindly loaned me this limo. Your grandfather must have told you about courtesy between Families from his time with Moran back in the old days.'* And there's my trump thought Gotti ‘and we know all about you too ‘.

  Delgado smiled at the reference. "Gramps did tell us kids a lot, yes. Mostly when teaching us to shoot. He told us that if we made our living with guns, the best we could hope for was to end up like him. He took a bullet in the flipper in some shoot-out in a Chicago bar. Smashed his shoulder so badly his right arm never worked again. Just withered and he had to learn to do everything with his left."

  Gotti smiled with remarkably little sympathy. "Tough break."

  "Gramps didn't think so. See he was in hospital for five months while the docs took splinters of shoulder joint and bits of lead bullet out of him. During that time, Capone's boys caught Moran's men in a garage and machine-gunned the hell out of them. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. If Gramps hadn't been in hospital, he'd have been in that garage too so he reckoned he'd paid for his life with his arm. He got religion after that, went the whole way, got ordained and everything." Delgado's voice softened at the memory of his much-loved grandfather. "Anyway, Mister Gotti, you have news fo
r us?"

  "We caught a rat. Never mind who but it had a lot of access to good information and stole all of it. Sent it to its cousin who's a coke supplier down in Colombia.

  "Look, here's what we know. The cartel its cousin worked for was supplied with a huge amount of pretty much pure heroin, we're talking tons of the stuff. They planned to use it to set up an undercover drug ring in Cuba. See, the way they thought was this. There's no law against selling drugs in Cuba, no problem with supply. As long as the sellers kick back up the family chain, they can do what they want. That means the prices are pretty low. Now with prices being low in Cuba, that depresses the price here on the mainland. So, the Colombia Cartel wanted to take down Cuba, have the drug trade there made illegal like it is here and that would send the price of their H and Coke skywards. Hence spraying the Senate. That's confirmed now."

  "So the Caliphate just gave a bunch of South American drug lords a few tons of heroin. All due respect Mister Gotti. ..."

  "John."

  "Thank you, I'm Mike. All due respect John, that doesn't sound like them. There's more to this than that."

  "Of course. But our rat didn't know what. Believe me. it would have told us if it had known. All it knew was that the heroin was payment in advance for services about to be rendered. What those services were the rat didn't know. If it had known, it would have told us, believe me on that."

  "I suppose this rat is dead?" Delgado had mixed feelings about that. Anti-mob operations on the mainland depended heavily on informers and the FBI cultivated them, treated them as heroes. That was the FBI and Delgado was USSS. This informer, this rat, was part of a scheme that had caused an attack on the Senate, probably something much nastier than that. He was also aware that the Mob had very strong opinions on rats also; ones that caused them to be markedly unforgiving to the ones they caught.

  "Nah, it's still alive, we got it on ice for a while." Gotti's grin was fearful to see. The last time he'd seen the rat, she had been hanging upside down in the cold storage unit of a meat processing plant. The treatment she had received had left her almost unrecognizable as the woman who had been Lanski's secretary but he didn't intend to tell Delgado that. The Secret Service had such tender susceptibilities concerning the rights of suspects.

  ‘if you want to talk to it, you can come over to Cuba. Be our guest, take the chance to play the tables a little, bring your wife if you like. What we need from you is this. You and the Feds must have better files on the syndicates down in Colombia than we do. Our relations with them are strictly business. If you can link up the rat and its cousin with their boss, maybe you can pick him up and find out what he did to earn all that H."

  Delgado thought it over. "We can probably do that, or at least the FBI can. They'll need the fingerprints of your rat though; that way if it's ever been printed over here we can make the links. Can you send them over?"

  Gotti's grin grew even more fearsome. "Brought them with me Mike." He took out a box and handed it over. Delgado opened it, went white and gulped. Inside, packed in a plastic bag surrounded by ice, were eight neatly-severed fingers and two thumbs. All obviously female. Gotti shook his head sadly. Secret Service agents definitely had far too tender susceptibilities. "Fingerprints still attached to the fingers. Sorry about that Mike, but taking fingerprints makes us nervous. Bad associations and all that. There just ain't a fingerprint kit in all of Cuba."

  Pilot's Mess. Dromodevo Fighter Base, Moscow, Russia. "

  One! Two! Three! GO!"

  The sled was made from the outer wing section of a Ta-152H, smoothed off and polished. The rider sat towards the back, holding two ropes attached to the wingtip end. The stairway in the mess had a long, straight down section, running from the third floor. Before it reached the end, it had a landing and a 90 degree bend. If the sled rider jerked his control ropes at exactly the right time, he could lift the nose of the sled enough to transfer from the stairs to the landing without disaster. Lift too late and the sled's nose would dig in, sending the rider cartwheeling across the floor. When they regained consciousness, they would be expected to stand drinks for the Mess. If they pulled the ropes unevenly, the sled would spin out of control. Then, the rider would have the choice of jumping off or staying with it. Either way would cost a round of drinks. However, if they did it just right, the sled would slide across the landing, off the other side, and land on the bar underneath. That got the rider free drinks from the Mess.

  Major C.J. O'Seven couldn't help but feel it was a very Russian game somehow.

  The sled rider, a MiG-21 pilot, had made a mistake. He'd jerked the nose of the sled too high and lost too much speed in the transition from stairs to landing. As a result, when he'd launched from the landing, he hadn't quite enough speed to make the bar and had hit the end of it, catapulting him onto the floor. He rose, dazed from the impact. A considerate comrade, O'Seven couldn't see whether he was American or Russian, dumped a pitcher of iced water over him. Then everybody closed in on the bar for their free drink. Behind them, the sled was being carried to back to the top of the stairs for the next rider.

  "Our friends in the MiG-21s don't seem to be doing too well this time around."

  "Hello Paul! I see the sawbones let you out at last. Clean bill of health I assume?"

  "Indeed. They say apart from some minor abnormalities in my blood chemistry, perhaps due to growing up in the famine of the 1930s, I am remarkably fit for my age. Fit enough to continue flying fighters for a while anyway. How have things gone in my absence? Has the Rodina survived?"

  "We've flown 96 profile missions against Moscow in the last fifteen days, 60 by us, 36 by the 35th out of McDill. Zero losses to the air defense missiles, the Tu-128s got close a couple of times and the MiG-25s scored twice. You're right about the 21s, they didn't even register. They're useful enough against aircraft in the B-52 class but against our B-70s? They're out of their league."

  Lazaruski nodded thoughtfully. The single-engined MiG-21 had been designed with aircraft in the size and weight class of the Chipanese Frank in mind. It was a good point defense interceptor but its speed and performance were optimized for intercepting the turboprop powered Chipanese bomber. "I think we've seen the last of the single-engined fighters, they just don't have the power or the load capacity."

  "I wouldn't be too sure Paul. We've got the F-116 coming down the pike. That's a souped-up F-104. The prototype won't be flying for years though."

  "I have seen the drawings of the F-116 and there was a model shown here. It is much money to spend for such a limited aircraft."

  "It's for the Air National Guard; part-time pilots flying for their own cities. So it has to be simple yet capable and that's a hard thing to achieve. But the threat might be changing a little. Have you read about the Harrys operating down in the South China Sea?"

  "They have done well, I will give you that. The Chimps are behaving quite unusually; they are playing the political game as well as they have played the military one. I do not think, though, that their Harrys would last too long over land. Too many missiles, too many shoulders to fire them from."

  O'Seven nodded in agreement. That was the problem. The low-flying rampages of fighter-bombers in the last years of the Second World War had focused everybody's eyes on the threat they posed. Which was fair since that threat was a devastating one. One result had been predictable. Every army now had radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns added to its order of battle and never went anywhere without them. The other had been less easily foreseen, the evolution of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that were simple enough and cheap enough to be handed out like rounds of ammunition. It was an exaggeration to say every solder carried one, but it wasn't that much of one.

  Low level penetration had been tried post-war at Red Sun and it had been a catastrophe. Losses were simply too heavy to be contemplated. Not just losses from the defenses either. Flying low and fast through broken terrain was dangerous. More than enough aircraft had crashed to show that clearly. Shoulder-fir
ed anti-aircraft missiles were effective up to 8,000 feet. The individual chance of a hit wasn't great but with enough being fired, the losses mounted up too fast. In the eyes of the USAF, the sky was closed below 8,000 feet over land. Their attention had turned to getting pinpoint accuracy for bombs dropped from above that level.

  "Seejay, how did your DAMS system work out anyway?"

  O'Seven thought carefully. "We're still exploring what it can do. On an individual aircraft basis, we can defend against any type of SAM coming up in our frontal arc and, of course, we really don't have to worry about them coming from behind. Of course, DAMS doesn't just work for the individual aircraft; the datalinks exchange information between all the time so there's a pooled operational picture to draw on. When we have RB-58s out front to help us out, that'll be even more so. We'll know what is where before we stick our head in."

  "You hope." Lazaruski chuckled, thinking about the maze of dummy transmitters and decoys that surrounded every Russian surface-to-air missile battery. "Who's that doing the ride?"

  O"Seven looked at the top of the stairs where a light blue suit was taking its place on the sled. "That's Captain Mike Yates, he flies Shield Maiden in the 35th. He pinched the best electronics crew chief I ever had, when the 35th switched from B-52s to B-70s we sent cadres of technicians down to help them over. We didn't get many of them back."

  "And this surprised you?" Lazaruski was amused. There was constant competition between units to steal good technicians and maintenance staff from each other. There were dark rumors that any particularly able American engineers or technicians who went on TDY to Russia found themselves surrounded by officially-encouraged Natashas who were well aware, as were the Russian armed forces, that an American man marrying a Russian woman would find his duty station in Russia made permanent. As in career-long. A dark rumor, much denied, but it caused American units to be very careful who they sent to Russia on TDY. Even now, almost thirty years after the end of World War Two, the gender gap in Russia was a serious social problem.