The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  “There’s always one other thing. You know how I feel—”

  “I think you’ll find this amusing,” the Chief of Staff said. “The Prime Minister wants to fly the Dormigen here himself. Apparently you’ve started quite a thing—this whole ‘flying west.’ ”

  The President smiled in genuine amusement. “Whatever makes him happy,” he said. They stood in silence for some time, appreciating the peace. “There is going to be a lull, while we wait for the Indian Dormigen,” the President told his Chief of Staff. “You should get some time with the family.”

  The Chief of Staff gave a short, sardonic laugh. “My daughter is failing trig. I think she’s doing it just to get back at me.”

  “Does anyone really need to know trigonometry?” the President asked.

  “Don’t tell her that,” the Chief of Staff replied, with a more mirthful laugh. “Dan’s been a saint.”

  “Don’t take that for granted.”

  “No.”

  Moments later a minivan arrived on the tarmac carrying the parents of the slain consular officer. They had traveled to Dover from a suburb of Detroit. Their son had been in the diplomatic corps for thirteen years, having done tours in Belgium, Ghana, Jordan, and then Saudi Arabia. The President walked purposefully toward the van. The Chief of Staff watched as he helped the couple out of the vehicle, hugging the mother and shaking hands with the father. She could see the President pointing toward the runway, presumably explaining that the plane carrying their son’s body would arrive shortly. A few minutes later another minivan arrived carrying the second family.

  83.

  OUR “WAR ROOM” WAS BUZZING WITH ACTIVITY WHEN THE NIH Director walked in shortly after daybreak. The large conference room had no windows; the fluorescent lights bathed the room in bright light, disguising any sense of what time it was. Most of the scientists and staff had been there all night. The pace of discovery was intoxicating; even those who had planned to leave found it hard to do so. I was on the phone with a science blogger, walking her through all that we had learned in the past twelve hours. “This place smells like a locker room,” the NIH Director said. The French camera crew, having tired of footage of slovenly people hunched over keyboards, eagerly turned their cameras on her.

  “Give her a little breathing room, please,” I told them. Giscard repeated my admonition in French (though I am certain they understood my instructions in English perfectly well).

  “It’s fine,” the NIH Director said. And then, more directly to the film crew, “You’ll want to get this.” Everyone who heard that curious remark stopped working and turned to the Director. She continued, “Could I have everyone’s attention, please?”

  The clicking of keyboards slowed and then stopped. The two camera operators sidled even closer. “I just received a call from the President’s Chief of Staff,” the Director said, projecting her voice across the room. “She informed me that the Indian Prime Minister has offered the United States five hundred thousand doses of Dormigen. That medicine will be on a plane bound for Washington shortly.” A loud cheer erupted in the room, but there were also a few sighs of disappointment. We were all relieved, obviously, but we were disappointed, too. We could have figured this thing out, I was thinking, as were many others. Perhaps sensing this emotion, the Director continued, “The Chief of Staff asked me to tell the people in this room one other thing.” She paused to put on her reading glasses and unfold an ordinary piece of copy paper on which she had scrawled several sentences. “This is an exact quote: ‘Our leverage in the negotiations came from the blistering pace of progress we were making on the virus. Without that, there would be no Dormigen on its way to the United States right now.’ The Chief of Staff asked me, on behalf of the President, to thank each and every one of you.” There were hearty cheers. The French film crew turned their cameras on the room to capture the reaction.

  After the Director left, our room was oddly still for several minutes. A few people, exhausted from the all-nighter, left to get real food or to go home for some sleep. But most of us did not want to leave. There was a unique bond in the room, holding us there together. The crisis may have passed, but the urge to figure out Capellaviridae had not. Less than fifteen minutes after the Director addressed the room, a group of biologists, a joint Northwestern–University of Chicago team, posted the most extraordinary finding yet: when the North American dust mite transmits Capellaviridae to humans, it also passes along an enzyme that destroys the older Capellaviridae viruses already in the body. “New Capellaviridae viruses get swapped out for the old ones, effectively,” they wrote in the What does this mean in plain English? section of our Google Doc. We recognized immediately that this could easily be the piece of the puzzle we had been waiting for.

  “Do they know?” Giscard asked no one in particular, his distinctive voice rising above the clatter in the room.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do they know we have the Dormigen?”

  “I’m not sure it matters,” I replied. That reading of the situation turned out to be broadly correct. Our site had more meaningful posts over the next twenty-four hours than we had in the first twenty-four.

  84.

  THE INDIAN DORMIGEN PLEDGE SET IN MOTION A FLURRY OF logistical activity. The NIH was worried about Dormigen shortages in rural areas, even with the arrival of the Indian doses. It would be roughly thirty-six hours before the new Dormigen arrived on the East Coast, and then at least another twenty-four hours before it could be distributed to all parts of the country. Deep in the bowels of Homeland Security, some nameless bureaucrat opened up the electronic equivalent of a binder: Pandemic Drug Distribution. There were other such “binders”: bioterror evacuation, and nuclear accidents, and dirty bombs. The people who prepared these binders went home at night hoping that nothing they ever did would be relevant.

  But on this day, the “binder” came off the shelf. Once the Indian Prime Minister’s plane touched down in D.C., the U.S. Air Force would take the lead in moving the Dormigen to the major metropolitan areas. From there, National Guard units would ferry it to more remote areas with the assistance of private couriers, as necessary. There had been simulations of this exercise before; now the contingency plan was set in motion for real. The Air Force began flying a massive fleet of cargo planes to airports in and around Washington, D.C. National Guard units in all fifty states were called up for duty. National Guard trucks and planes, with their respective drivers and pilots, were assembling near airports in the major cities. The maps and routes had already been drawn up. It was all in the binder.

  The planning on the India side was more ad hoc. The Prime Minister requisitioned an Air India 747 cargo plane to make his historic flight and requested that the aging plane be repainted for the occasion. When he was told that a 747 could not be painted in twenty-four hours, he settled for having enormous Indian and American flags painted on the tail and fuselage. The hulking 747, a beautiful plane under normal circumstances, looked appropriately majestic for the PM’s mission. The U.S. Embassy was testing samples of the Dormigen as it was loaded on the plane. This request had come from the CDC in Washington, where there was some fear that a high proportion of the Indian Dormigen might be counterfeit or expired.

  Nearly all attention in India was now focused on the Prime Minister’s “toilets and televisions” initiative. “I assume you’re joking,” the Secretary of State had said when an aide hustled into her temporary office at the embassy and described the program.

  “Nope. Fifteen thousand villages in forty-eight hours,” the aide said. “That’s the plan.”

  Less than an hour earlier, the Indian Prime Minister had announced a plan to furnish fifteen thousand villages with a sanitary latrine, a television with a satellite dish, and a solar panel that would generate sufficient electricity to power the television. The Prime Minister proclaimed, “In the middle of the twenty-first century, no Indian village should be without a clean, sanitary toilet. And no village should be cut off
from the rest of the country.” He bypassed the legendary Indian bureaucracy and enlisted the Army to carry out his edict. A public school teacher in each of the designated villages was recalled to the nearest population center, where he or she was paired with a small contingent of soldiers who would return to the village—often hiking for hours to remote places with no road access—to dig the latrine and install the solar panel and television.

  The Prime Minister called the program “Technology for India” or something like that; within a few hours, even he was referring to it as “toilets and televisions.” His political opponents went ballistic, declaring the obvious: the PM wanted to ensure that even the smallest village (where voter turnout tended to be quite high) would be able to witness his heroic journey to the U.S. At first the Prime Minister’s lackeys tried to argue that the program’s timing was coincidental. Eventually that charade became impossible to maintain, since every village participating in the program was given a single sheet of paper with a description of three things in the simplest possible language: (1) instructions for the television; (2) an explanation of how and why using the latrine could prevent the spread of disease; and (3) a description of the PM’s flight to America, including a photo of him posing in front of the 747 and its enormous Indian and American flags.

  The new toilets turned out to be perfect insulation against charges of political opportunism; public health officials reckoned they would save thousands of lives in the long run. The solar panels, too, would be beneficial, as they could be used for other village functions, such as charging mobile phones and powering lights so students could study at night. In the end, the PM’s opponents argued that if the program was so beneficial, he should have done it earlier—hardly a searing indictment. The most creative claim was that Pakistan would invade India while the Army was busy digging toilets in remote parts of the country. The Prime Minister, never one to shy away from adding more frosting to his own cake, phoned the Pakistani Prime Minister and asked him to do his best to deter any border provocations that might jeopardize the assistance plan for their mutual ally, the United States. We have no record of the Pakistani PM’s response; we do know that Pakistan did not invade India while its Army was digging toilets.

  It took about nineteen hours to gather the Dormigen in Delhi and load the 747 (plenty of time for the paint to dry on the large Indian and American flags on the fuselage and tail). The plane was scheduled to depart around six p.m. Delhi time. A small diplomatic contingent was invited for a departure ceremony. Takeoff was pushed back to eight p.m. and then nine; the Prime Minister’s spokesperson did not offer a reason. The President phoned the Secretary of State to ask about the delay. “It’s never too late for them to ask for the F-80,” he said. “They’ve got us over a barrel now.”

  “I don’t think the Prime Minister would do that,” the Secretary of State assured him.

  “We don’t have a big buffer here. Tell them we need that plane in the air,” the President insisted.

  “I’ve made that abundantly clear,” the Secretary of State replied. “If I were to guess, the PM is stalling for time so more televisions can get to the villages.”

  “You can’t make this shit up,” the President muttered.

  The departure was postponed once again, this time until seven the following morning, putatively because of a mechanical issue with the plane. The U.S. Ambassador called Sumer Patel to implore the Indians to get the flight in the air. “Don’t worry,” Patel said. “The seven o’clock departure is firm.”

  “You think the mechanical issue will be resolved by then, do you?” the Ambassador asked sarcastically.

  Patel laughed. “The Prime Minister wants ten thousand televisions installed before he takes off, and another five thousand in operation before he refuels in Germany,” he explained.

  The U.S. Ambassador did not know how to respond. Finally, he said, “We have absolutely no cushion. You realize what’s at stake here?”

  “Of course I do,” Patel bristled. “And so does the Prime Minister. You’ll get your Dormigen. Just let him have what he wants.”

  85.

  THE DELAYS IN NEW DELHI NOW PUT THE DORMIGEN DISTRIBUTION plans in the U.S. in jeopardy. An Air Force logistics officer arrived at the White House to brief the President on the disruption. She was a stocky woman with close-cropped hair who stood at rigid attention after the Chief of Staff ushered her into the Oval Office. The President was finishing a call with the Mexican President, who had called to express his displeasure with an immigration bill making its way through Congress. The President motioned the Air Force officer to a seat, but she remained standing. “I can’t promise you I’m going to veto it—that would be unwise—but I can tell you that I think it’s a lousy bill and I don’t think it has enough votes in the Senate,” the American President told his Mexican counterpart. He then listened for what appeared to be an excessively long time.

  “Lots of translation,” the Chief of Staff explained to the Air Force officer.

  “I appreciate your thoughts on this,” the President said in a tone meant to wrap up the call. He waited for assorted pleasantries to be translated, said goodbye, and then hung up. He looked at the Chief of Staff plaintively and said, “This isn’t on the schedule.”

  “We’ve run into a snafu with the logistics for the Dormigen distribution,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Why can’t we get that goddamn plane in the air?” the President snapped. The Chief of Staff nodded to the Air Force officer, inviting her to speak.

  “Sir,” she began nervously, “even if that plane takes off right now, we are bumping up against the time we need to deliver the Dormigen to all the specified hospitals and clinics.”

  “How long do you need?” the President asked.

  “Our plan requires thirty-six hours from the moment the Prime Minister’s plane touches down in Washington.”

  “I was told twenty-four hours,” he said angrily.

  “That’s to reach ninety-five percent of the population, sir,” the officer explained. “That’s typically how the logistical people—”

  “Thirty-six hours?” the President exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? Are you delivering this stuff on bicycles?”

  “No, sir.”

  “When is the Prime Minister’s plane supposed to take off?” the President asked the Chief of Staff.

  “Now they’re saying seven a.m. Delhi time,” she answered.

  “And that’s for real?”

  “The Ambassador says it’s firm,” the Chief of Staff replied.

  The President turned to the Air Force officer. “So what are our options?”

  “I’ve prepared three plans,” she answered, holding a briefing book out to the President.

  “I don’t have time for the bad ideas,” he said sharply. “Just tell me what you think we should do. What’s the best option?”

  “Yes, sir. If we act reasonably soon, we won’t have a problem, but we have to change the sequencing of the plan.”

  “What does that mean?” the President asked.

  “I think she was about to explain that,” the Chief of Staff said, trying to calm the President.

  The Air Force officer continued, “We can take the Dormigen we have now and begin moving it immediately to more distant areas. Then when the relief shipment comes from Delhi it can be distributed relatively quickly to the major population centers. We would just turn the plan on its head, so that the shipments to our far-flung areas can happen before—”

  “I understand,” the President said.

  “That’s clever,” the Chief of Staff added.

  “It buys us a lot of time,” the Air Force officer suggested.

  The President nodded in acknowledgment. He was calmer now that there was a feasible option on the table. He began thinking out loud. “That’s asking a lot: hospitals have to give up a dwindling supply of Dormigen for the promise of a replacement that’s still sitting on a runway in Delhi.”

  “Do we even hav
e that authority?” the Chief of Staff asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the Air Force officer said confidently. “I’ve consulted with the legal counsel at Homeland Security. The President has the necessary authority to set the plan in motion.”

  The President was still talking mostly to himself. “What if they don’t give it up? I don’t want to be in a situation where federal marshals are wrestling Dormigen away from doctors and nurses.”

  “Mr. President, if we go with this option, we’ll have a cushion again,” the Air Force officer said, gaining confidence. “We can afford to wait until the plane is aloft.”

  “Assuming it takes off at seven,” the President said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  The Chief of Staff offered, “Everyone would be much more willing to pass along their Dormigen if they were confident the replacement was in the air and on its way to the U.S.”

  “I agree,” the President said. “Let’s do that. And, for God’s sake—”

  “I will call the Prime Minister’s office and tell them to get the plane in the air,” the Chief of Staff assured the President, finishing his thought.

  86.

  THE SEVEN A.M. DEPARTURE WAS IN FACT FIRM. A SMALL group of diplomats assembled on the tarmac. The Prime Minister, dressed in his former military flight uniform, shook hands with each of the assembled officials. As a military band played the Indian national anthem, he climbed the stairs to the hulking 747 with his wife and two children. The Prime Minister’s family disappeared into the plane. The Prime Minister paused at the top of the stairs, and as the band finished, he turned and briskly saluted the assembled guests (and, of course, the hundreds of millions of Indians watching on television). The door to the jet was closed and moments later the plane was aloft. Flying west.

  It was nine-thirty p.m. on the East Coast of the United States; the major news channels all cut away from their normal programming to cover the takeoff. The President watched the dramatic departure in his study in the family quarters of the White House with the Majority Leader, the Strategist, and the Chief of Staff. They broke into spontaneous applause as the 747 left the ground. The news channels cut to the Seattle hospital where doctors reported that Cecelia Dodds was “responding to Dormigen” and had been upgraded from critical to serious condition.