Ill Wind (24 page)

“What about airplanes, or ships?”

“Prometheus is fairly specific in attacking octane only,” said Iris. “I’ve got to go, there’s too much to do, too many people to contact. This is going to be rough.”

Todd was silent for a moment. “I’m at Alex’s place, and I’ve got to wait for the police and the coroner. I think . . . I think he’s been planning this. He asked me to take care of his horses a few days ago.” He hesitated. “How else do you need me to help?”

Her mind raced ahead, prioritizing which agencies to contact. She found her hands shaking—with excitement, or fear? She had too many things to do. “Uh, I have to get through to Oilstar management. There’s really no one I can depend on . .
. .”

“Do you need me down in Stanford?”

“Yeah, sure.” Her answer came too fast, and she realized that she
did
want him there, if nothing more than to provide comfort while she was trying to sort through this emergency. If only she had more time!

Then she focused on what he was saying and interrupted him. “No, wait, no telling how long any of our vehicles is going to last. You might have a hard time getting all the way down here.”

“You just start coordinating how we can go after this thing. I’ll worry about me,” Todd said. “And hey, if you need a contact at Oilstar, I’ll march right into Emma Branson’s office even if I have to knock over the receptionist. Don’t you take any grief from anyone either.”

 
“Do I usually?”

A pause, then a chuckle.
“No, I don’t think so.”

As she hung up Iris was already going over the details of what had to be done. If this was truly a plague, there had to be contingency plans at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Military Command Center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency—dozens of places that should be able to offer her guidance.

Francis Plerry. She had to go through him again. He wouldn’t be much help, but he could set a few wheels in motion. At the very least he should have access to the governor in Sacramento. Iris looked for her
rolodex
, found it behind her mammoth-sized
CRC Handbook
of chemical data, and fumbled though the white cards until she pulled out Plerry’s number. The first time she dialed she got a busy signal. Damn!

Picking up her cup of coffee, she took a big gulp that stung her tongue and dialed again. The ringing seemed to go on forever before a brusque female voice answered and put her on hold.

She reached for her coffee again. Seconds ticked away. How long would it take for the governor to impose a vehicle quarantine that would make the Med-fly incident look like a joke?

“Hello?”

“Mr. Plerry? This is Iris Shikozu, from Stanford—”

As she started to speak, the white
styrofoam
of her coffee cup turned spongy, as if melting. Then it sloughed over her fingers. Warm liquid splashed down her blouse. Iris jumped back, shaking her hand and staring at the cup.

The coffee wasn’t that hot. What could make the cup break down like that? Something that broke down styrofoam . . .
hydrocarbon polymers
. .
. .

She felt her knees turn watery.

Plerry’s voice came from the phone, now on the floor. “Hello, Dr. Shikozu? Are you all right?”

Iris stood transfixed, staring as the cup turned into
a frothy
white foam with a faint, muffled crackling sound in the puddle of coffee on the floor. She slid off the chair and fell to her knees. “Oh, no.”

“Dr. Shikozu?”

Iris dipped her fingers in the gooey remains of the cup and plucked at the white, fizzing strands. The Prometheus vector was no longer confined to direct physical contact.

The microbe now attacked petroleum plastics as well as gasoline.

And it was airborne.

PART II:

BREAKDOWN

Chapter 30

Navy Lieutenant Bobby Carron stepped out of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and craned his neck, looking into the crisp, cloudless sky.
A perfect day for flying.
In a few hours, he and his partner would be strapped into their identical A/F-18 fighters, blasting off from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the bleak California desert, and roaring across the country.

In the early morning light, Bobby stretched his arms to toss off the last remnants of sleep. The flat military base opened up to a panoramic view of the cracked, dry
lake bed
—”beautiful downtown China Lake”—that spread out undisturbed for miles, white and dazzling. Chemical plants around nearby Trona scooped and processed the powdery wastes, but the U.S. Navy had claimed a chunk of the desolate landscape for its own use.

Bobby felt rested and ready for the cross-country mission. He had a few hours until “wheels up,” but he had errands to run before his
week-long
absence from the base. The scheduled time was the latest they could leave and still be cleared all the way to Corpus Christie, Texas.
If they took off early, so much the better—more time for beach, surf, and babes.

Overhead, an experimental aircraft lit up its engines to break the 6 A.M. silence; flames shot out 20 feet behind the distant jet’s engines as afterburners kicked on.

A door opened down the hall. Bobby saw a head crowned with a shock of red hair. Bobby grinned. For once he wasn’t going to have trouble getting his buddy Ralph “Barfman” Petronfi out of bed. Ever since they had been roommates at the Naval Academy, Petronfi could sleep through anything—except on a flying day.

Bobby whistled. “Hey, Barfman.” Petronfi’s propensity for tossing his cookies while flying was legendary.

Barfman turned sleepy eyes to Bobby. “Hi, Rhino. Ready for the beach?”

“Soon as I clean up my jeep. Gotta grab some breakfast.”

“I’ll file a flight plan. Want to leave early?” Barfman said.

“If I can get everything done.”

“I’ll preflight us at the squadron.”

“That’s a rog.” Bobby ducked back into his quarters to pull on his gray flightsuit from the narrow closet, patting down his many pockets to check that each held its appropriate map, keys, wallet, pen, chewing gum. Bobby went out again, hiking to the Officer’s Club to gulp down a breakfast of eggs, warmed-over steak, and powdered orange drink—a breakfast high in protein so he wouldn’t need to take a crap during the day’s flight alone in a cramped cockpit. Barfman usually fasted before a long flight, which kept him from puking into his oxygen mask if they encountered any clear-air turbulence.

 
Bobby grabbed his nylon flight bag on the way to the mud-spattered jeep. He had packed the night before—swim trunks and two changes of jeans and cotton shirts. The Naval training base near the Texas beach was a favorite roost for cross-country crews, complete with surf and bikinis. Bobby had a nice life, flying every day, living on flight pay, no kids,
no
alimony. Once in a while he missed playing football, but flying made up for it.

Parked in the weedy gravel lot, his black jeep was plastered with muck from a weekend of four-wheeling around dry Owens Lake. He loved doing doughnuts out in the brackish standing water and spraying salt and powder in a rooster-tail behind him. He didn’t want to waste time washing the jeep right now, but he knew how much damage the alkali mud could do to his paint job. With a little time until the preflight briefing, Bobby decided to use the base’s self-service wash three blocks down the street.

Bouncing into the driver’s seat, he poked his keys into the ignition and tried to start the jeep. The engine barely turned over, and when it caught, the jeep rattled as if it were running low on gasoline. The gas tank read full; he had filled it up after returning late last night. Bobby frowned. He smelled a faint odor of rotten eggs.

Bobby nursed the chugging jeep along the street lined with old barracks buildings and a small BX. He parked in the service station lot crowded with the hodgepodge of other vehicles. He swung out of the jeep and jogged inside the station. A female captain and two men out of uniform stood in line at the service desk; another two women—wives of enlisted men—sat in chairs in the waiting area.

Bobby listened to the mechanic taking information from the first customer. The phone rang, but the attendant ignored it. Bobby glanced at his watch. The two women sitting in the plastic chairs looked impatient and surly, as if they had been here a long time. He sighed. He would have to leave the jeep here and walk the couple blocks to base operations for the flight. He regretted not being able to wash the mud off, but it was only a jeep, not a Jag. Jeeps were supposed to get dirty.

The service attendant looked harried. “Got five people ahead of you, Lieutenant,” he said with surprising courtesy. “Don’t know if we can get to it this morning.”

“Can I leave it? I’m gone for the week.”

The attendant shoved a triplicate repair sheet across the desk. “Sure. Fill it out on top and sign here.”

Bobby scribbled his name and details about the jeep. “Looks like you’re pretty busy. What’s up—two-for-one special?”

“You tell me. Started this morning. If I didn’t know better I’d think we got some of that bad batch of gasoline, but our gas comes from Bakersfield, not the San Francisco refineries.”

Bobby dug into his flight suit for the keys. He tossed them across the counter. “I’ll be back on the 9th.”

Outside, he retrieved his flight bag from the driver’s seat, pulled the canvas cover over the top of the jeep, and started walking down the street. The way his luck was going, Corpus Christi would probably be hit with a hurricane when he was halfway there, and he’d have to divert to Del Rio
instead.
. . .

Squadron headquarters was a long one-story building painted white to reflect the sun. The squadron mascot, a Tasmanian
Devil
with an arrow through its head, was painted on the cinder-block outside walls. Inside, photos of old F-4s taking off from a wooden-decked aircraft carrier, a lumbering P-3 flying patrol over the
ocean,
a pair of F-14 Tomcats launching missiles hung on the walls. At the end of the hall a set of doors led to the ready room, weather unit, orderly room, and the CO’s office.

Entering the preflight area, he saw Barfman in a gray flight suit hunched over a chest-high table, drawing with a red magic marker. Maps, computer listings, and Notes-To-Airmen covered the bulletin boards.

“Just finishing off the flight plan, Rhino,” Barfman said. “I want to go before the hunger pains start. Ready to head out?”

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “My jeep conked out on me, had to leave it at the service station.”

“From what I heard in the ready room, you’re lucky they even put your name on the waiting list. Base motorpool is backed up, and they’re refusing to take any more vehicles.”

The memory of that guy running out of gas in the Death Valley desert raced through Bobby’s head. “Is there some sabotage going on around here or what?”

“Yeah, it’s some new Commie secret weapon. Magically exchanges the engines of American-made cars with top-of-the-line North Korean jobs. That’s why everything’s breaking down.”

Bobby swung his flight bag to the foot of the table. “Thank you for explaining. Now let’s book out of here before they cancel our flight.”

“Hey, I’ve waited three months for this cross country. No way am I going to let a bad batch of gasoline put a hold on my vacation.” Barfman pushed a sheaf of lined papers over to Bobby, folding open to the right page. “Log in the flight plan and I’ll check with Weather.”

Bobby looked over the route Barfman had outlined in marker. They were set to make the trip with an intermediate stop at Nellis AFB in Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas. They probably could have stretched the hop to El Paso, but if they broke down, spending time in Las Vegas was preferable to the Texas border town any
day.
. . .

#

“Ah, Rhino, got a little problem here.” The sound of Barfman’s voice crackled through the white-noise roar of the jets.

It took Bobby a second to snap away from a daydream of sea breezes, warm sand, and a Gulf shrimp dinner. They were no more than an hour out of Las Vegas, heading across the blistered barren desert of central New Mexico. Cramped in the cockpit of his one-man fighter jet, Bobby bent to pick up the handset. He clicked the radio, using the frequency he and Barfman had agreed on.

“What’s up, Barfman?” He spotted his partner’s A/F-18 Hornet two miles ahead of him. Frosty white contrails streamed from the engine in the cold thin air.

“I show a faulty pump indicator. Doesn’t look good.”

“Try Emergency Repair Procedure number 1,” Bobby said.

“I already tapped the damned dial. It’s not a faulty reading.”

“How’s your flow rate?”

“Next to nothing. I got a sluggish response on the controls. Something’s not hooked up the way it should be.”

Bobby scanned his own instruments in the cockpit. Everything looked fine. “What do you think?”

“Well, I’d say I was running out of fuel—but we just tanked up at Nellis. Can you zoom up here and give me a once over? Is one of my tanks leaking?”