Paths of Courage (15 page)

Grace hung nervously around the foyer outside the female ablutions, heart pounding, until a woman wearing a badge entered. She followed, checked that no one else was around then approached her. Taking a gamble, she explained casually that she was due to enter Level 2 and had mislaid her badge; could she possibly borrow hers? The woman stared at her, first in disbelief and then with growing suspicion. Grace knew at that instant she had lost the gamble and a flood of indecision engulfed her. She had to act – and quickly.

Grace lunged out, spun the shocked woman around and clamped a hand firmly over her mouth. Bundling the struggling Korean into a cubicle, she smashed her up against the rear wall and held her in a full arm lock with all the strength she could muster. Fearing it would not be enough to throttle the woman to death, Grace, on the verge of panic, raised her leg and snatched pistol from the holster strapped to calf. The Korean managed to half-turn, but before she could overwhelm her assailant, Grace slammed the suppressor nozzle hard against the woman's chest and shot her through the heart. Supporting the body, Grace stood for a moment trembling. She felt sick and fought hard to regain her composure. This was the second human being she had killed in a matter of days. She forced herself to become calm, plunging deep into her reserves.

When she did calm down, reality kicked in and her mind began to race: where could she hide the body? Blood was now blooming large on the Korean's clothing; luckily none had stained her own. Grace eased the woman to the floor, removed the badge and pinned it to her own lapel. She then left the cubicle in search of a place to dump the body. Through a door on the wall opposite, she found a narrow void housing drainage and ducting. Praying no one would enter the block, she dragged the Korean from the cubical, careful not to get blood on her clothes, and managed to dump the body inside the void. Nervous tension now worked overtime on her bladder. Not knowing when she would get the next opportunity, she relieved herself in the nearest cubicle, which helped to calm her before she hurried back out, just as two other women entered. Taking a grip on herself, Grace made straight for the doors at the end of the corridor.

“Contact! Bearing one-three-zero. Course three-one-five. Speed two-five. Range thirty miles. Translating.”

Captain Kamani and Lieutenant Zaha, in K449's control room, looked urgently up at the sonar screen displaying the data.

“She's heading straight for us!” exclaimed the XO, a slight edge to his voice.

“Reduce speed to five knots. Down fifteen. Take her to 600,” Kamani ordered calmly. The seabed below was at 650 feet.

K449 immediately tilted down 15 degrees to the horizontal and headed down.

“Must be American at that speed,” said the captain.

“Obviously not concerned at being heard.”

“Are we paying the penalty for the increase in speed, Lieutenant?”

“Captain – sonar. Translation positive. British Astute-class. Speed and course unchanged.”

Just then the Acoustic Intercept Alarm sounded.

“Captain – sonar. Active hit.”

“Ya Allah!
”
exclaimed the XO.

It was the captain's turn to show concern this time. “God will not help us, Lieutenant. We have to help ourselves here,” he said, outwardly calm, but inwardly feeling the fear grip his chest, knowing they had just been pinged by one of the infidel's latest hunter-killers. “We are paying, Lieutenant. Cut engines, cut engines. Free fall and lay to the bottom – all haste. Rig for silence.” He glanced urgently at the XO. “Just hope we can get there before they release a fish.”

*

On board
Ambush,
Captain Curtis and his second in command, Lieutenant Talbot, waited in the control room for the result of the active scan order. Then shortly:

“Captain – sonar. Faint contact, designate Sierra Three. Submerged. Bearing three-one-five, direct path. Range thirty miles.”

“Captain, aye. I knew it!” exclaimed Curtis. “Confirms earlier hit; proves something's out there, Bob.”

“A whale maybe? Large shoal of fish?”

“Unlikely at the range,” Curtis replied, grinning. “I hear what you're saying though.”

The XO smiled; fortunately, his captain had a good sense of humour.

“Captain – sonar. Translation?”

“Captain – sonar. Negative, sir. Contact lost.”

“Captain, aye,” Curtis replied, shaking off yet another disappointment. “Whatever it was has gone to ground or maybe you're right, Bob, could be purely natural phenomena.” However, instinct told him the sonar signals were more than just coastal noises. He turned to the electronic charts on the bench monitors, followed by the XO, and both men studied maps of the South American eastern seaboard.

A short while later, the captain looked up and said, “I've made up my mind; we'll remain on course, search the contact area and then move progressively up the coastline to latitude 15, north. If that was a sub we'll nail it eventually, I'm sure.”

“That's way up out of our search brief, Captain.”

“At our discretion – the orders were specific.” Curtis paused to collect his thoughts. “Tell me, Lieutenant, if you were intending to attack a city in the British Isles or the American eastern seaboard, coming from the South Atlantic, what would be the course you would take?”

“Hug the coastline of either Africa or South America.”

“Mmm…” Curtis murmured softly, allowing a sense of uncertainty to enter his thoughts, then said, more to himself than to his XO, “Whichever way, they would have to cross lat 15, north, somewhere near the Windwards if heading for North America. If Britain is the target, they would come from the African western seaboard, up past the Verde Islands, Canaries and Portugal.”

“Alternatively,” offered the XO, “if the sub is following this coastline, which we suspect it might, they could break off at Recife and head straight up over the narrowest part of the Atlantic towards the Verdes, then to Britain, or if America is the target, and they're coming from Africa, roughly follow latitude 15 across the Atlantic to reach the Bahamas or the Florida coast.”

“A lot of ‘ifs' in there, Lieutenant, including mine,” said Curtis, uncertainty taking a firmer grip. What should he do? Although he worried Britain could be the target, his instincts were telling him that America was more likely, simply because it was the most powerful nation in the world and therefore a far more prestigious target for Islamic terrorist aggression.

Captain Curtis stared at the screens surrounding him, his mind calculating as he listened to the subdued noise of the control centre. The gentle hum of machinery and men quietly going about their business for Queen and country somehow soothed his nerves. Finally he decided to gamble and turned to his XO.

“Mr Talbot, we will follow the South American coastline until we reach the Windwards. If nothing transpires before that, we'll turn for home.”

Then, to the helmsman, “Maintain course and speed. Make your depth 400. Steady as she goes.”

Having entered the air-lock, using the commandeered badge, Grace nervously stepped out from the other side into what was undoubtedly a Level 2 area, with a series of changing rooms lining the rear wall. She knew for certain now that beyond these rooms would lie Level 3 and Level 4 – the hot zone. Choosing an unoccupied room marked “Females Only”, she stripped completely and pulled on a sterilized white cotton jumpsuit together with a white surgical cap and a pair of cotton socks laid neatly out on a shelf. The very cleanliness of this area told Grace the North Koreans had as much healthy respect for the lethal viruses they were dealing with as the British, which reassured her of the reliability of the protection she was about to use. She hid the Sig and holster together with the metal container for vials in her discarded clothing and left the cubical.

At the end of the changing area, she stepped into a common shower-like compartment bathed in ultraviolet light and walked out through a door that led into a Level 3 area. The large rectangular room housed space suits hanging on wall hooks, together with other equipment necessary for a Level 4 entry. At the far end, beyond the stainless-steel sliding doors marked with a large biohazard symbol, she knew she would enter directly into the hot zone.

Several people were busily changing in and out of space suits and thankfully ignored her entry. Grace moved over to a quiet corner and selected one of the blue suits that looked about her size; fortunately, none had an owner's name and all appeared to be in relatively good condition. Nevertheless, she took time to inspect the areas prone to wear – around the buttocks, the armpits, the knees – to make doubly sure no holes were evident. Satisfied, she looked for and found an air regulator, surgical gloves and tape. She slid the gloves on, then, using the tape, proceeded to seal the jumpsuit joints at her wrists and ankles. She finally struggled into the space suit, ignoring the stale odour, before strapping the regulator to her back and making her way somewhat apprehensively towards the ominous doors leading into Level 4. Pressing a wall pad, the doors parted and she entered the air-lock decontamination chamber. The doors slid closed behind her and Grace knew she had now reached the point of no return. Several seconds later, she activated another wall pad opening the inner doors. Weak at the knees, panic welling up almost uncontrollably now, Grace had to summon every ounce of her courage to move forward into the hot zone.

She stepped out into a small ante-room full of white rubber boots placed in pairs on the floor around the walls. She chose a pair her size, clambered into them and passed through a swinging door into a moderate-sized room with smooth white walls and ceiling. Curled blue air-lines hung down the centre and around the sides of the room. She plugged in the regulator and cool, dry air immediately flooded into her suit, pressurizing it with a roar, momentarily blocking out the chatter. Lining walls to the left and right were various-sized freezers, some opened, presently used by personnel carrying and storing laboratory and experimental materials. Did these freezers hold a super virus? The Koreans using them seemed very casual and somewhat less than security-minded, so possibly not. Since entering Level 2, she had yet to encounter a single guard.

Grace moved to the end of the room and turned left into a much smaller open area, which led into a long gallery lined with four glass-fronted compartments down one side. Several personnel in space suits were looking through the glass panels; she quietly mingled in and slowly made her way down the gallery.

In the first compartment, two men lay under subdued light on beds at the rear wearing only trousers. They were unmarked and appeared to be asleep. In the next, a lightly clothed woman and child cowered in one corner, their exposed flesh partly covered in waxy red blotches; large boils lined the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands. In the third compartment, a man lay naked on a central bed under a bright light, body studded from head to toes in small, bubble-like, dry blisters with hardly a gap between, some beginning to rupture and leak iridescent pus about his face and extremities. When she reached the last, Grace gasped in horror; for curled up in a foetal position on the bare concrete floor in the middle of the compartment were two naked human forms, both totally shrouded in a mass of blackened pus and scabs, skin almost stripped away from the bodies. Their eyes were severely bloodshot, intense and they stared pleadingly at the glass. Grace could not help but feel sickened and appalled at the plight of these two forms; their pain must have been beyond any that a human being could be expected to endure. From her experiments with monkeys, she could see these two unfortunate people were in the terminal stages of what appeared to be the smallpox virus as it was allowed to take its natural course without medication of any kind. She suspected these poor individuals in the four compartments were displaying the effects of the vaccine at varying dosage levels from the splicing of the human IL-4 gene into the virus DNA to create a super strain. She had undertaken similar experiments with monkeys at Porton, administering different dosage amounts of a trial vaccine simultaneously to several and testing the effect over a set period of time. If so, she guessed the two men in the first compartment had received the maximum dosage of a successful vaccine to have remained unscathed like they were and those in the fourth had received nothing at all. From the chatter she was picking up through the communication system her suspicions were soon confirmed. It took her a moment or two to recover from the shock at discovering that the North Koreans had actually created a super variola and possibly a successful vaccine to go with it. There had to be a vaccine. Almost overwhelmed by the horror of what she encountered and steeling herself to face the demon, she turned and headed back along the gallery to find the labs. The scientist in her was determined to find out how they had devised such a monster strain, then after that, to discover where the vaccine was kept.

Returning to the freezer area, Grace followed a group of personnel pushing equipment trolleys down another corridor, which she hoped would lead to a laboratory. She guessed right and entered a bright, white-tiled, rectangular room some sixty-feet long by forty wide, full of space-suited people hunched over workstations on the end of air-hoses hanging from the ceiling. Through an opening at the far end, she could see glass-fronted cages housing naked humans. This definitely was a lab of some significance. If the super strain was to be found, it must surely be found here.

Adrenaline pumping, Grace moved to one of the few empty workstations trying hard to appear as inconspicuous as possible. She pulled down an air-hose and plugged it into her regulator. She set about checking the workstation equipment and could tell straightaway it was configured for experimenting with the variola virus. She glanced sideways at the scientists working either side, her experienced eye telling her they were engaged in variola major testing. Grace prayed that the workstation was not designated to a specific person. So far she had remained unchallenged and could not believe the casualness of the security, but was thankful at the lack thereof.

Her luck held. Not long after setting up the equipment, a suited technician pushing a stainless-steel trolley stopped beside Grace, looked at her and waited. On the trolley were two plastic racks: a blue rack holding several vials of white liquid and a red rack, immersed in water, holding twelve vials of pinkish, opalescent liquid, which Grace immediately recognized as melted smallpox seed.
Could it be the super virus?
She trembled at the thought, curbing her fear. The vials in water kept the contents at 37 degrees centigrade after removal from a liquid nitrogen bed in a home freezer. Grace guessed the technician expected her to help herself to the vials and she did so with extreme care. She guessed again that she was expected to conduct experiments with the contents like the rest of the occupants alongside her and at the other workstations. However, her experiment would have only one aim: to determine exactly what each of the vials contained. Taking a vial from each rack and placing them in the holder alongside the electron microscope, she found herself wondering what strain the smallpox vial held: Harper, India-1, Bangladesh, Aralsk or Rahima? Or perhaps even some other unknown variola major? All, however, represented the most deadly of strains known to mankind, but an IL-4 smallpox combination would be the deadliest of them all.

Dr Grace Seymour opened the smallpox vial, held it up to the light and tipped it gently. She then stared at the variola major to ensure it had fully melted. A sense of purpose coupled with professional calmness now overcame her nervousness as she reached for a pipette, removed some of the liquid and dribbled it into a Petri dish. She then placed the dish under the electron microscope.

Peering into the scope, she examined the colour image. Instantly her expert eye recognized a genetically engineered super virus swimming before her. She examined closely the recombinant virus's familiar DNA double-helix structure, wrapped in a membrane of grey, with shades of blue and pink along its edges. But what made the difference was the Interleukin-4 gene that she could see had been successfully spliced to the upper nucleotides, creating an extra layer of membrane, which she determined made it resistant to all known vaccines.

Staggered by what she was seeing, Grace reached for the other vial, put some into a dish and placed it under the microscope. What she viewed floating in the liquid appeared to resemble unfamiliar bacterial cells with small rings of extra plasmids, or DNA, dotted within each of the cell structures. The DNA strands were mixed in with large amounts of cytokine molecules. To Grace this presented nothing special, but she would need time she didn't have to determine the significance of the mix. She decided there was nothing to lose by adding the liquid to the super virus dish to see what happened. This she did and minutes later was absolutely stunned. She watched the white liquid rapidly devour the super virus until none of the variola remained in the dish. To have undeniable proof of what she and many other virologists around the world had been striving for rocked Grace to the very core.
How can this be? How can a seemingly simple combination of bacterial cells and cytokines provide such a powerful antidote? Where the hell did those bacterial cells come from anyway?
She had no time to speculate now; her mind raced. She had to find out where this vaccine was stored, grab what she could and then get the hell out of this place as fast as her legs would carry her.

Suddenly, she was aware of somebody close by. She turned and came face-to-face with a female behind the clear plastic suit mask looking suspiciously at her.

“Where is Comrade Yu Son today?” a high-pitched, authoritative voice came through the head communication system.

Grace controlled her panic and replied calmly, gambling on the outcome. “She's not on duty. I have just arrived here and was told to use her workstation until one is allocated.” She then quickly changed the subject in the hope of diverting the woman's attention. “The one mil of vaccine I applied to the Interleukin smallpox sample had a very rapid effect. A lesser dosage would, in my opinion, have done the same. I am about to try to prove the theory.”

The woman kept her eyes intently on Grace for what seemed a lifetime and then bent down to look through the microscope. Seconds later, she stood up again and smiled. Relief flooded Grace's senses.

“A very clean dish,” the woman said. “Good for you to have seen the obvious so soon. You do not have to test the theory. I have already done so and it works. All that remains now is to test it on our human subjects. I have requested four new specimens to be given lesser proportionate dosages and we will observe the effects,” she added matter-of-factly.

Dispassionate bitch
, thought Grace, desperately wanting to know from her what type of bacteria was being used, but afraid to ask for fear of exposure. She was sure every virologist in the room would know the make-up of the vaccine. “I look forward to monitoring the results,” she said, sick inside.

The woman stared at Grace, then asked, “Where were you before this posting?”

Grace did not hesitate; she had done her homework for just this situation and replied confidently, “Camp 22, Haengyong. I was there for one year.” She referred to the notorious labour camp in the northeast of the country where some 55,000 prisoners, including women and children, toiled each day to produce goods for sale in foreign lands and where over twenty-five percent of the inmate population die every year from overwork, but mostly from the testing of biological and chemical agents.

The woman nodded. “And before that?”

“Chongju – two years.” This was a facility where biological agents were weaponized.

“Did you work with Professor Park Ung Gul?”

Grace's mind raced; the woman was probing. Grace did not recall a professor of that name when running over the names of senior virologists that were shown to her.

She took a chance. “I do not recall a professor of that name when I was there. Perhaps before that?”

The woman smiled, nodding at the same time, then proceeded in a casual way to question Grace on technical aspects of the IL-4 gene and the various variola major strains until she appeared satisfied that Grace knew what she was talking about. Nodding again, the woman seemed to lose interest and began to turn away.

Grace took another big risk. “As I am new here, could you tell me where the vaccine is stored? I will return the vial on my way out.”

Turning back, the woman answered sharply, “Technicians will do that – leave it.” Then she hesitated. “On second thought, I will show you; you may be called to experiment at unusual hours when they are not here. Follow me.”

Grace unhooked the air-hose and duly obliged, unable to believe her luck. Just how much longer could it last?

In Level 0, Ryder waited anxiously. Grace had entered Level 1 over two hours ago. Hanging around the airlock was beginning to attract suspicious glances, so much so, that he and the other two men were forced to split up and leave the corridor altogether for short periods before re-entering singly at various intervals. If she wasn't out within the next hour he decided they would go in.