Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  He took out his mobile phone and dialled the Hammersmith direct line.

  ‘This is Richter,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a clean-up crew with full facilities at this address as soon as you can make it.’ He gave the address of Johnson’s house. ‘There’ll be two bodies to shift – well, there’s only one at the moment but there’ll be two by the time the team gets here – and they’ll both need work. One’s a suicide. That’s the easy one, a self-administered injection. Maybe take him to wherever he lives and leave him in bed. Something like that. The other one kind of walked into one of my bullets so we’ll need something messy to cover it up. A road accident maybe. Got it? Okay, thanks.’

  He ended the call and looked across the room at Vernon, who was still staring in a somewhat bemused fashion at the slobbering heap that had previously been Professor Gregory Quine. Johnson – a man clearly far more used to be surrounded by dead bodies than a professor of biochemistry, had sat down in a well-used leather recliner and was looking over at Richter.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t been here and that bastard had pulled a gun on me, I might have had no choice but to take the needle. That or let myself get shot, I suppose. Either way, I’d have been dead. So, thanks.’

  ‘No problem. I don’t like loose ends. But it’s really all down to the prof here. If he hadn’t started digging we’d all be in a lot more trouble than we already are. But that’s another story.’

  Chapter 61

  USS Florida, SSGN-728

  Monday

  There had inevitably been a delay in analysing the content of the drums of Zeolite seized from the freighter in the Red Sea, mainly because of the time taken to get them to the places where scientists could examine them. And, once they were able to start their investigation, they had to take extreme care in their procedures. But once they got started, the results came quite quickly, and were unambiguous: the Zeolite contained enormous quantities of weaponised Anthrax. Discovering whether or not the bacteria had been modified to only attack people of Jewish descent would take a lot longer, and involve much more detailed analysis.

  But that didn’t really matter. The presence of that amount of Anthrax in all the drums so far checked was enough in itself to justify some kind of retaliatory action, and the delivery details of the load – they were to have been off-loaded at Haifa and then collected by regular trucks to be transported to one of the water softening plants in Israel – was enough to confirm the target.

  The USS Florida had been ordered in February 1975, launched in November 1981 and commissioned on 18 June 1983 with the designation SSBN-728, as an Ohio-class ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine. In July 2003 she entered the Naval Shipyard at Norfolk, Virginia, for her S8G PWR reactor to be refuelled, and for the boat to be converted to an SSGN – a cruise missile – submarine. She was re-designated accordingly and recommissioned at Mayport in Florida in May 2006.

  On 19 March 2011, as part of Operation Odyssey Dawn, the Florida became the first Ohio-class submarine ever to engage in combat operations when the boat fired 93 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan air defence targets to help create a no-fly zone over Libya and prevent Muammar Gaddafi from attacking rebel forces from the air. The normal war load carried by the boat amounted to 160 Tomahawks, costing around $2 million a pop, so that historic action had only used a little over half of the total armoury of the vessel.

  The captain, officers and crew of the Florida had no knowledge of the Iranian scheme, or the preliminary results of the examination carried out at Fort Detrick, or anything else relating the matter. And they didn’t need to know. They just knew they had a job to do, and once the coded signal had been received on the boat, together with the target coordinates, the crew simply set to work prepping the weapons and programming the route and destination the cruise missiles were to follow.

  It wouldn’t be anything like the attack on Libya. The coded operation order specified that only four missiles were to be used – a small number for a major assault but quite a lot for one single building. But Washington had wanted nothing left, to send a clear and unequivocal message to Tehran. And as each warhead contained 450 kilograms – 1,000 pounds – of high explosive, there were going to be no misunderstandings.

  The Tomahawk has a range of between 700 and 1,350 nautical miles, depending upon the type, the Block number, and the Florida was carrying the Block IV TLAM-E variants, each with a range of about 900 nautical miles. So the boat didn’t need to be anywhere near the target, which suited everyone on board. Zahedan is about 600 kilometres inland from the coast of Iran, or about 330 nautical miles, so the Florida took up a position more or less in the middle of the Arabian Sea, well off the coast of Oman, ascended to the correct depth for missile release and waited for the go signal.

  At just after 09:33 local time, the order to fire was given, and a precisely-determined series of events then took place on board the submarine, culminating in four cruise missiles being ripple-fired from the VLS – Vertical Launch System – on board.

  As soon as the firing was completed, the Florida dived deep and turned south-east to head back towards her regular patrol area.

  Chapter 62

  Zahedan, Iran

  Monday

  Saloun Talabani had returned to work that morning, along with all his staff, and the first thing he did was announce a meeting in the first-floor conference room at eleven. He wanted to wrap up any last matters relating to the Zeolite project and, more importantly, to outline the next task he had been set by Tehran, a much more ambitious project with a far wider scope.

  The Tomahawk is a subsonic missile, meaning that you can hear it coming. It travels at about 550 miles per hour, 480 knots, at an altitude of between 98 and 164 feet, and the four weapons fired from the Florida covered the roughly 740 nautical miles in a little over 90 minutes.

  Every seat in the conference room – a somewhat grand title for a fairly small space – was occupied when Saloun Talabani stood up from his place at the head of the table to begin his briefing.

  ‘Thank you all for coming, and I hope you all took the opportunity to spend a few days with your families last week.’

  Nods and smiles from most of the people in the room suggested that they had.

  ‘That’s good. I can tell you that I’ve received permission from Tehran to explain a little about the project that we worked on here over the last four years, but what I say must not leave this room. Do not even tell your own families about it. And I’m only providing this information so that you’ll understand how important our operation here in Zahedan is to our nation. You will not be surprised to hear that we have been given another job by our masters. This is an even more important and difficult task, but I have no doubt that we will succeed, just as we did this time.

  ‘Now, the work we have just finished will never make the headlines, but its effects certainly will. The bacteria that we cultivated and modified here were specifically tailored to affect only one particular group of people. Those of you involved in the genetic manipulation of the bacteria will already know that, but the rest of you should not have been aware of it. At least, I hope you weren’t.’

  A couple of people laughed, and several others smiled. Talabani’s security precautions with the building and organisation were rigorously applied.

  ‘You will probably not be surprised to learn that our targets were the Zionists, the Jews, the scum of the Earth. The bacteria will be delivered to Israel within hours, if they are not already there, and will be fed into the country’s water supply over the next few days, most probably. So watch the news, because you can expect to see reports of mass casualties in Israel within hours of the bacteria entering the water system.’

  ‘What level of deaths do you expect?’ one of the seated scientists asked.

  ‘I think the word substantial would cover it,’ Talabani replied. ‘There are too many variables to even suggest a figure, but if I had to guess I would say several hundred thousand deaths at a minimum, pe
rhaps a total even in the millions. Once it’s in the water supply, almost every Jew can expect to be exposed to it because nobody can avoid contact with water. That’s the beauty of the scheme, of what we were able to achieve.’

  ‘Won’t there be retaliation by Israel?’

  ‘Against whom? We have left no traces of our involvement in this. It will appear to have been an unusual but a natural mutation of the bacterium that will unfortunately affect the Jews more than any other race. Without proof, there will be nothing the Israelis can do. And the delivery records will show clearly that the Zeolite was sourced in Jordan, so if there is any retaliation it will not be against us.’

  Talabani was suddenly aware of an increasingly loud droning sound from somewhere outside the building, something like the noise a low-flying aircraft would make. He ignored it.

  ‘And in any case,’ he went on, ‘neither the Jews nor the Americans would dare take any precipitate action against us here in Iran. We have scored a major victory in our struggle against the forces of Zionism and—’

  Before Talabani could finish the sentence, the first of the incoming Tomahawk missiles smashed in through the window at the side of the conference room and a millisecond later the warhead detonated.

  The crashing detonation of one thousand pounds of high explosive was followed under half a minute later by the sequenced explosions of the other three warheads. Talabani and all of his staff members were immediately vaporised, along with the building itself.

  In less than thirty seconds, the entire site had been turned from a very expensive and fully operational BioSafety Level 4 laboratory, a contained biological storage facility and associated offices and facilities into a six-foot deep crater filled with rubble, shattered reinforced concrete, bits of machinery and other unidentifiable debris, the whole overlaid by a thin smear of organic remains. Luckily for the innocent citizens of Zahedan, most of the lethal bacteria held in the fridges and freezers were incinerated by the almost simultaneous blasts. But over the next year or so nearly two dozen men and women in the city would die quick but painful deaths, their causes unknown to the local doctors. So not everything in the building perished in the blasts.

  That was unfortunate, but in matters of this sort there are very rarely any truly innocent bystanders.

  * * *

  Three days after the blasts had wrecked the building, a team of VAJA officers and a handful of specialists arrived to pick over the remains, looking for someone to blame as much as anything, but also to assess the damage, to see what could be salvaged and how quickly the laboratory could be put back into operation.

  Their report, when it reached Tehran, made bleak and uncomfortable reading. If they wanted to start the process going again, they would need a brand new site, a brand new building, brand new equipment and, inevitably, brand new scientists to do the work. And, the report concluded in its recommendations, whatever site was chosen needed to be a long way further north than Zahedan had been, to avoid the Americans – the corrupt defenders and partners in crime of Zionism – doing the same thing again. The report recommended choosing somewhere like Bojnurd, near the border with Turkmenistan. That wasn’t too big a town, and it had got an airport. More importantly, it was well outside the maximum range of every cruise missile in America’s armoury, unless the submarine was virtually beached on the Iranian coast, or so VAJA believed. Though of course there were other ways that destruction could be delivered from the skies to any location on the planet if the Americans so wished.

  Two weeks later, Iranian newspapers and television programmes announced the destruction of the building in Zahedan. They stated that the cause had been an undetected gas leak that had occurred while it had been unoccupied for the previous week, and that the explosion had been triggered by an electrical short circuit shortly after the staff had returned to work.

  The building, the reports stated, had been a manufacturing plant for fire extinguishing equipment.

  Chapter 63

  Washington

  Wednesday

  Paul Henry III had worked in the service of his country for over two decades and had risen to a position of some authority in the State Department. Not at the very top, but close enough to it so that when he said something, people tended to listen. Over his career, he had also cultivated people who were more than acquaintances but a little less than friends, people who worked in the embassies and consulates of dozens of other nations. He was a man, in short, with his finger on the pulse.

  So when a senior Israeli diplomat, a man who used the name Josef Levy but whose birth certificate displayed a name that was nothing like that, received a call from Henry to meet for a drink – ‘somewhere quiet and away from the usual herd, Josef’ he had said – Levy was unsurprised but also intrigued. The request for a meeting probably meant that Henry had some useful or even scandalous piece of information he wanted passed on, and Levy knew from past experience that these unofficial meetings often bore fruit.

  That same afternoon, because Henry had at least implied that the matter was somewhat urgent, the two men walked into the Indigo Landing restaurant only about five minutes apart. The eatery was at the Washington Sailing Marina at Dangerfield Island on what most people thought was the wrong side of the Potomac, and it was in almost every single way exactly the kind of place that diplomats would never normally visit. And that was the point, of course.

  They took a table at the back away from the handful of other diners, most of whom were presumably sailing enthusiasts of some sort, judging by their dress. They ordered a light meal each and coffee and, for several minutes, Paul Henry III just shared some innocuous gossip about Foggy Bottom and some of the people he worked with or had encountered over the past month or so. It was even possible, Levy thought as he listened to the rather dull monologue, that some of what Henry was telling him might even be true. But it was, he guessed, only the appetiser, so to speak, and what he was really interested in was the main course.

  And finally Henry worked his way round to it, though at first Levy thought it was just another diversion, because he started talking about water. That was pretty much the least likely subject he had expected the American to raise, and for a few minutes he listened in silence as Henry suggested that America was contemplating initiating a number of water reclamation schemes and even thinking about building some trial desalination plants to turn seawater into fresh. Then he wandered off down another conversational byway and talked about the problems caused to domestic equipment by water that was too hard because of various calcium compounds.

  That was when Levy briefly thought Henry had lost it, but he immediately realised that wasn’t the case at all. The meal, as it were, had just been served. His problem was that he didn’t really recognise the main course. But clearly what Henry wanted to talk about, in his usual indirect and circuitous manner, was water. Or perhaps something to do with water. Specifically, hard water.

  Which made no obvious sense. But Levy was a spy, a professional intelligence agent, so he picked up the thread and ran with it. And as he started speaking, he realised that his companion was probably not actually talking about America at all – as far as Levy knew, the States had no particularly pressing water problems – but Israel certainly had.

  Henry, he guessed, was being even more obtuse than usual, but obviously he had something particularly pressing that he wanted to convey without actually coming out with it, because that wasn’t how the dance was done.

  ‘Hard water,’ Levy said. ‘We have a bit of a problem with that back in Israel, I think, though this is not a subject I know too much about.’

  Henry nodded, as if pleased that he and Levy were finally on the same page.

  ‘We’ve looked at different types of water softening technologies over here,’ he said, ‘and how they work. Interestingly,’ he added, leaning forward slightly, a physical tic that he knew Levy would notice, ‘we did find out something we didn’t expect. You’ve probably never heard of Zeolite – I know I hadn�
�t until this week – but it’s a very common substance used in water softening plants. And we found it could quite easily be contaminated. Dangerously or even lethally contaminated. Might be worth your while looking to see what you use back at home, and maybe put some checking protocols in place. You know, set up a scanning system for the plants. Analyse the chemicals, that kind of thing, and maybe hike the physical security you have in place as well, just in case there’s any chance of local contamination.’

  Levy nodded, recognising the message and the implications, and already mentally composing the report he’d be sending to Tel Aviv that evening.

  ‘You said this Zeolite substance could be contaminated,’ he said. ‘Do you know where the contaminant you encountered came from?’

  That, the Israeli felt, was probably the crux of the matter.

  ‘Not exactly, no. Our research suggests it possibly originated in one of the drier and hotter regions of the world. But also, strangely,’ he added with a slight smile, ‘from a place that’s something of a contradiction, a very dry country with an unmistakable connection to the most obvious possible source of water. You might even say it’s all in the name.’ Henry gave a brief laugh, then instantly changed the subject. ‘So how are Elisbeth and the children, Josef?’

  Levy answered mechanically, switching to conversational autopilot while he tried to make sense of Henry’s enigmatic remarks.

  A very dry country with an unmistakable connection to the most obvious possible source of water. That was what the American had said. And it was all in the name. The source of water could be anything: the oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds, reservoirs, even the polar ice caps, or just plain old rain. And as his mind formed that last word, he suddenly put it together. Of course it was all in the name. It was an anagram.