Immortality (6 page)

Money had never been a motivation for Kathy. She became a doctor to help people. She’d decided to work for the CDC because no one was doing a more successful job wiping out the killer diseases. In her first year at the CDC, she’d worked as a rookie field agent for the EIS, Epidemiological Intelligence Service. She was sent to New York City where drug resistant tuberculosis was staging a comeback. EIS agents were the detectives of the medical community: they went into places where unknown killers were loose, tracked them down, and stopped them. No organization in the world was better at it. Working this job was the first time in her life that Kathy had felt whole. When she was on the trail of a disease, nothing else mattered, nothing else entered her mind. Her past was, for the moment, erased. What she did saved lives.

Kathy logged onto her computer. She clicked open a window and began to read her e-mail. The telephone rang. Dr. Jeffrey Renoir’s voice greeted her on the line. He was a friend and colleague who worked at the main CDC campus in Atlanta. She put on a headset and continued to go through her e-mail.

“I have a problem with a disease. I’d like to go it over with you,” said Jeffrey. “It’s a hot agent, maybe a new species jumper; and I can’t identify it. It fits no patterns in our database.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What we know of the early symptoms is limited because we haven’t found a living subject or witness. So far, it’s one hundred percent fatal. I have an EIS team in a Brazilian village ninety miles out of nowhere. They’ve sent me a couple of digitized pictures over a satellite link. It’s ugly stuff – people lying everywhere, babies, women, men. It looks like it hit so fast that people were dropping in mid-stride. There are sixty bodies, the whole damn village. There’s nothing left except dogs, livestock, and insects.”

Kathy was no longer looking at her e-mail. Her eyes were staring at a team photo on the wall; but in her mind, she was seeing images of what Jeffrey was describing, images reinforced by things she’d witnessed during a stint with an EIS team in Africa during an Ebola breakout. Her voice was tense.

“I’ve never,” she repeated, “never heard of a hot agent killing as fast or as completely as what you’re describing. Jeffrey, you don’t have a disease. You have a toxin. What’s the military like down there? Do they have any history with chemical weapons?”

“That’s what I’d thought, too. Believe me, I wouldn’t be bothering you if I hadn’t eliminated that possibility. We ran all the tests for chemical agents and came up with zero. Preliminary autopsy results indicate asphyxial deaths with secondary heart seizures – no signs of lung collapse, physical injury or fluid build up. These people just stopped breathing and their hearts quit. The only clue I’ve got is antibody counts that are through the roof, but nothing disease specific. The counts are uniformly raised across all antibody types.”

Kathy went down a mental decision tree. Respiratory arrest. Pulmonary infarction or edema could be fatal, but they were caused by long term circulatory problems or injury. She shook her head. Not relevant. Lack of fluid in the lungs was the important clue. It was impossible to have a fatal bacterial or viral assault on the respiratory system without massive fluid build up. An extreme reaction to a toxin was the only thing that made sense.

“Broad immune response can be a symptom of an allergic reaction,” she said. “People die from anaphylactic reactions to bee stings. I agree it’s rare for an allergic reaction to cause asphyxiation, but then we don’t know what kind of chemical you’re dealing with.”

“I’m telling you it’s not a chemical! Assays of blood chemistry and tissue samples show zero trace of foreign agents,” said Jeffrey.

“There’s no way this is a naturally occurring disease,” said Kathy. “How could an entire village succumb to the same pathogen at the same time? It’s not possible!”

“Kathy, if you’d just look at the reports. I went through the same thoughts you’re having and had the same doubts. A chemical potent enough to kill people would’ve killed the dogs and pigs too. It’s not a chemical weapon. Who on earth could have come up with one that kills this quickly and this selectively? I give the military mad scientists a lot of credit for their inventiveness, but not this time. This one scares the hell out of me because I’m convinced it’s of natural origin, and that means it could have come from anywhere and could be heading to anywhere.”

“Is the report on Secure-Net?” asked Kathy.

She heard some keyboard clattering over the phone.

“I just gave you access and e-mailed you the link.”

Lieutenant Paul ‘PJ’ Orton was a confident man. His entire life was based on an inner foundation of stone. He could walk into a village of hostiles and survive simply because he knew he would. His theory had been proven in dozens of secret conflicts around the globe.

PJ was the team leader of a Navy SEAL special ops group. Currently he was missioned to a hunter-killer sub named Sea Wolf. They were somewhere off the coast of Argentina under the Antarctic ice cap. The water temperature was lethal. Direct exposure could kill a healthy man before he could swim a hundred feet. High salt content was the only thing that kept the sea from turning into solid ice.

PJ and his team were here to conduct top secret tests for Project Gail using an experimental diving system designed for super-chilled waters. Project Gail was a classified plan to use ice floes as a weapon of blockade. The SEAL team’s task was to conduct placement and detonation runs, using plastic explosives to simulate the tactical nukes called for in the actual implementation plan. Project Gail was a strategy based on using tactical nukes to create massive flows of icebergs to choke off sea traffic through the straits at the tip of South America and South Africa.

The Captain of the boat walked into the ready room while PJ was briefing his men. A visit by the captain was unusual. Their eyes met. Captain Bradford’s expression was rigid. When the mission requirements had been transmitted on board the other day, PJ had gotten an earful from Bradford. The man didn’t like taking his boat under the treacherous Antarctic ice of this region. The bottom was nothing but rocky peaks that jutted up thousands of feet from deep water while, at the same time, broken ice floes reached down from the surface like drifting mountains. Bradford had complained that navigating these canyons was like sailing into the maw of a huge animal while it slowly ground its teeth.

A sailor entered the ready room and handed Bradford a slip of paper.

“We’ve reached station,” said Bradford. “Lieutenant, get your men wet.”

The first thing PJ noticed as he exited the airlock was the water. There were no currents and it was clearer than anywhere he’d dived before. Rays of sunlight were slashing through it from cracks in the overhead ice. He adjusted a knob on his chest plate. A tiny stream of bubbles scrambled toward the surface. His buoyancy decreased. The automatic depth control was venting air. The device clicked off at 30 fathoms. PJ hovered weightless a dozen feet above and to the side of a narrow shelf of rock. He could see a few shrimp and crabs clinging to the rocks. The shelf itself stuck out from the top of a stone peak as if it were the remaining span of a long ago crumbled bridge.

Above him and to the right was the bluish-gray hull of the leviathan that was their submarine. Underneath PJ and the sub was an endless void. He could feel the depth pulling on his body. Below his feet, a trench reached down for miles into the blackness of the earth. He was literally floating alongside the top of a chain of submerged mountains. He could easily imagine something unknown sweeping up from the depths and devouring him and his men. No one would ever know what had happened. The captain had been right. This area was like the mouth of a giant monster. PJ’s men joined up with him. They were able to communicate amongst themselves and the boat with voice-scrambled hydrophones.

“Hey, PJ,” radioed one of his men. “I feel as warm as if I’d peed in my suit.”

There was laughter...

“Shut up, Whale!” snapped PJ.

It wasn’t until Whale had mentioned warmth that PJ noticed how comfortable he was and how uncomfortable he should have felt. This coldwater gear worked better than anything he’d tried before. The suit was as thick as standard coldwater latex, but inside its layers was a secret. There were thousands of tiny capillary tubes webbed into the material. Within the tubes circulated an anti-freeze mix that had been heated in a chemical reaction chamber. The solid fuel was a classified mix of acids and metal salts good for five hours of operation. The entire suit was airtight, including a full helmet similar to that worn by astronauts.

A vast school of fish swam into view just a few yards below his feet. There had to be millions of them. They were two inches long and the color of silver. They changed direction in perfect synchronization, zigzagging to the commands of an invisible director. The beginning and end of the school were lost in the natural blurring effects of the water; at a distance of twenty feet, small objects like these fish became invisible.

“Okay, girls,” said PJ. “It’s time for a little exercise. We’re going to conduct a live explosives drill. Let’s make believe that chunk of free ice is part of the Antarctic ice shelf.”

PJ dialed up a new depth adjustment. A measured amount of air was shunted from his tank into a buoyancy vest. Like a mini-submarine, he rose to meet the ice. PJ’s part of the mission was to observe the dexterity of his men using the new suits. He watched them from a few feet away. The water changed in tint as sunlight took different angles through the slowly shifting ice.

PJ was distracted when he noticed the school of tiny fish had swum up higher in the water. The entire school had returned to within a few yards from his feet. Maybe they were attracted to something about the new diving suits – the sound or the color? At different spots, single fish broke synchronization and collided into other fish, causing tiny areas of confusion inside the larger school. PJ maneuvered closer to the school to get a better look. This was odd behavior. He’d never seen anything like this in two decades underwater. After each collision, the culprit fish fluttered around a bit then caught back up with the synchronization of the school, effectively vanishing from view. The entire mass of fish seemed to be changing course, moving off toward the sub.

PJ turned toward his men. The water near his men was filled with tiny bubbles. For a moment, nothing odd registered. Then PJ realized none of his men were moving. They just hung there in neutral buoyancy. Thousands of two-inch fish darted past him on all sides. The school had reversed course and was moving by him like a blizzard of sequins. His mind snapped into action. His men! Instinctively, he was swimming toward them. He could tell by the limp drifting of their arms and legs that they were unconscious or dead. Something had to be going seriously wrong with the experimental suits. He radioed for help.

“Mayday, Mayday, Sea Wolf, this is PJ. I am declaring a mission scrub. I need help. My men are HIA – Over…”

There was no reply. He reached the first of his men. It was Whale. PJ grabbed him by the vest and lifted his faceplate into view. Whale’s lips were a vivid blue. The capillaries in his eyes had ruptured. PJ knew the symptoms. He was dead from lack of oxygen. PJ checked Whale’s gauges and tanks. Everything appeared to be working fine.

“Sea Wolf, this is PJ... Mayday, mayday! Answer me, over.”

Still, no reply. The com must have failed. What was going on with this equipment? Every major system bugging out at the same time was impossible.

There was a metallic popping sound. PJ looked up toward the boat. It was moving. The hull was slowly drifting lower as tiny streams of bubbles vented from its sides. The air volume wasn’t enough to be a response to a flood command; it was more like ballast adjustments used to trim a boat.

PJ swam to the next closest man. He was also dead. There was a tint of blood drifting from shredded fingertips. It looked like the man had died while trying to tear his helmet off.

A shadow moved across PJ. He turned around. The Sea Wolf was drifting lower; starting to nose down. His eye grew wide as the leviathan moved past him and into the void. The boat’s downward momentum was increasing. This was not a controlled maneuver. The boat was dead. In less than a minute it had vanished into the endless black. The suits, the boat – what kind of colossal equipment fuckup was this?

PJ heard the horrible groaning of a hull scraping against rocky peaks. He imagined what it would be like to die in that disabled boat; then a thought grabbed him and shook him back into the present. He was stranded. PJ closed his eyes then opened them. Nothing changed. He was still in the water and the submarine was lost. He was going to die. His unfailing confidence was gone. No amount of SEAL training could help him survive this. Once he ran out of air, all that was waiting for him topside was the subzero weather of an ice flow.

The shower was warm heaven. Kathy sluiced the soap from her body. She felt human again. Her ritual of waking was never complete until her shower. She’d been known to wander like a ghost for hours until revived by warm water.

The phone started ringing. At first she decided to let it go, but there was something about how it continued ringing that worried her. She grabbed a towel and padded across the bedroom. The phone stopped just as she reached it. She walked back into the bathroom and started to towel her hair. The phone started ringing again.

“Hello,” she said.

“It’s Jeffrey.”

His voice sounded disturbed. Tolstoy was licking water off her toes. She barely noticed the small rough tongue.

“It’s happened again,” said Jeffrey. “Eighty-two dead, the whole scenario. Déjà vu.”

“How close to the first site?” asked Kathy.

“That’s what’s spooked me. Try almost a thousand miles. We’re not even talking Brazil. It’s a fishing village in Cabo San Diego, an island off the southern tip of Argentina.”