Resurrection Day (48 page)

George Washington Hospital is off Dupont Circle, a five-minute drive from the White House. It was still dark when Kursk climbed out of the grey cab at the front entrance.

At reception, he was told to take the elevator to the second floor. Stepping out, he found the crowded glass-fronted waiting room down the hall. Clusters of tired and anxious-looking men and women, some with young children, paced the floor or sat on benches around the waiting-room walls, some drinking coffee or soft drinks dispensed from a machine in the corner.

Morgan was among them, sipping coffee from a plastic cup as he talked with a distraught-looking grey-haired man in his mid-fifties, whose eyes looked red from crying and lack of sleep. Kursk waved. Morgan saw him and came out, closing the door. 'You managed to get some rest?'

'A few hours,' Kursk replied. 'And you?'

'Not a wink.' Morgan took a mouthful of coffee, ran a hand tiredly over his face, then jerked a thumb towards the glass fronted room. 'Most of the folks in there have family injured in the blast. They've been waiting all night for news.'

Kursk glanced at the faces behind the glass. Husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of the dying and injured. Kursk could only imagine their anguish as they waited expectantly to hear the fate of their loved ones. 'How many dead?'

'Thirteen, last I heard, with ten missing.'

'And injured?'

'Over thirty, some of them critical. Most are Feds, apart from a couple of security guards from an office building across the street, a few civilian pedestrians, and the people in the restaurant.'

Morgan nodded back towards the waiting room. 'That guy I was talking to just now, his daughter's been in theatre all night. She's twenty-six, with the Bureau only a year. When the bomb exploded she was in one of the second-floor offices that face Tenth Street. The poor guy's up the walls. She's his only daughter, and the doctors aren't hopeful.'

Kursk glanced at the man. He was pacing the floor nervously, running a hand through his hair, his face a tight mask of worry, like so many of the others in the room. If it had been Nadia who had been injured, Kursk knew he'd be totally distraught. 'How is Collins?'

'Lucky to be alive. He's concussed, got a few deep cuts, some cracked ribs. They want to keep him in for observation. Murphy went in to see him. I left them just a couple of minutes ago.'

'And his friend?'

'They wheeled her out of theatre a couple of hours back. The word I got, she's going to be OK. But her little boy's still in a bad way. He's got serious chest injuries and internal bleeding. They've got a level-one trauma centre in the hospital — that's why they brought most of the injured here — and a top surgeon is working on him right now. But the last I heard, it doesn't look good. He mightn't pull through.'

Kursk was uneasy, hardly knowing what to say. 'Can I see Collins?'

Morgan finished his coffee, crumpled the cup, tossed it in a garbage bin. 'Better wait here, Alexei, and I'll go see if Murphy's finished talking with him.'

Eight miles away, a tired-looking General Bud Horton, wearing his pyjamas, a cotton dressing gown and a pair of scuffed leather slippers, was busy pouring himself a cup of piping hot Yemeni coffee in the kitchen of his home near Arlington, Virginia. The rich aroma of freshly brewed Arab coffee beans wafted around the room, and when Horton had finished pouring the treacly black liquid and had added two spoonfuls of white sugar — a luxury he allowed himself only at breakfast-time — he took his cup and moved into his wood-panelled study across the hall.

Pausing by his apple-wood desk, he stared out of the window at the pleasant, well-kept gardens. The house was a two-storey, detached, four-bedroom red-brick in a quiet, upper-middle-class neighbourhood, discreetly set back from the road and surrounded by tall Scots pines. It wasn't his family home — that was in Boston but a government-rented property provided for the use of himself and his wife while Horton was in Washington.

Always an early riser, he had woken at 6.30 a.m., despite the miserable two hours' rest he'd managed, having returned home from the Pentagon at 4 a.m. after issuing his orders for the entire withdrawal of US army, navy and air force personnel from the Middle East. As he sipped his coffee thoughtfully, Horton looked at the shelves filled with his treasured tomes: his books on modern warfare and military history, studies of every general and military campaigner worth his salt, from Alexander the Great to Caesar, Napoleon to Patton. There were other subjects, too, most to do with Arab history, language and culture, which were his lifelong passions.

A West Point graduate, he'd been a young captain and a graduate engineer when he first saw action in Vietnam in 1968, and had twice been wounded and twice decorated for bravery. When the war in South-East Asia ended he'd won rapid promotion that later saw him the youngest officer ever to command the 19th Combat Engineers Battalion. Later still came a year at the US Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, a doctorate in military studies, and his appointment as General Commanding the 101st Airborne Division; and then what he regarded at the time as the pinnacle of his military career — Operation Desert Storm. But it wasn't to be the pinnacle, for subsequently, to crown it all, came his appointment as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Leaving aside his flawless military qualifications, Bud Horton had no need to wonder why the President had chosen him as Chairman; he knew the answer instinctively.

The job was in Washington — which meant liaising with government departments, military chiefs and politicians — and required the delicate skills of the seasoned diplomat, which not every general had. But Horton had those skills in spades. They were in his genes — his father, long dead, had been a senior and much-respected State Department attache who'd spent most of his career in the Middle East. Somehow, Bud Horton had inherited his father's talent for diplomacy — he was a man who cultivated friendships easily, who had the innate ability to smooth ruffled feathers, broker deals and calm tensions.

Horton had also spent much of his young life in the Middle East. It was a part of the world his father had loved, and he'd inherited that same passion. The smell of the bazaar and the scorching heat of the desert were not alien to him. He looked behind him, put down his coffee, placed a hand on one of the pair of bronze Arab statues of Bedouin tribesmen on his study desk, given to him recently by his dear friend Wahib Farid, a Saudi minister. Bud Horton had been a pupil at the American School in Riyadh, where his father had served for eleven years, and spoke fluent Arabic — the only US general who'd served during Desert Storm who could do so — and counted among his many Arab friends a fair number of the Saudi intelligentsia and powerful palace officials, most of whom were his former school pals.

Those same connections had helped his government enormously during Desert Storm — easing frictions between the US and the Saudi royals and their military — and had no doubt aided Horton's career and led to his appointment as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He knew that many of his old Arab friends had mixed feelings about an American presence in the Gulf. And though they would rarely if ever voice their opinions in public, several of his closest friends would have agreed with the broad aims of a man like Abu Hasim: a Middle East free of any foreign military presence, the withdrawal of US support for Israel, and a solution to the decades-old question of a homeland for the Palestinians. Horton had his own strong feelings on each of those subjects — several of his intimate Arab friends knew where he stood — but in the military and around the conference tables in the White House he had wisely kept his opinions to himself. He checked his watch. He was expecting his private call from Saudi about now, and knew he'd have to be very careful what he said over the phone.

As he stood there, his hand caressing the cool, smooth bronze of the Bedou statue, the door opened behind him. Leila Horton was five years younger than her husband, the daughter of a Saudi diplomat, a woman with fine cheekbones and chiselled features who looked pretty even before she applied make-up. Bud Horton had fallen in love the moment he'd clapped eyes on her at a US embassy reception in Riyadh almost forty years ago, when he was a lanky nineteen-year-old. They had married five years later and she'd borne him two fine sons.

'Bud, you must hardly have slept. I heard you coming in about four.'

'I managed a couple of hours.' Horton kissed her forehead.

Leila touched his cheek with the back of her hand. 'It's that bad, my love?'

Her husband nodded. Leila Horton didn't enquire any further, but sensed his stress. 'When do you have to return to the White House?'

'Any time within the next hour. I'm expecting the call. You'll understand if I can't phone?'

'Of course, Bud. But if you can ... I'll be out all day, but you can get me on my cellphone.' His wife kissed him, left him to his thoughts. Horton turned back to the window, picked up his coffee, finished it in one swallow, put down the cup shakily. There were few secrets he kept from his wife, but this was one of them. There was no way that he could tell Leila the truth. All he could hope was that he played his cards right and that they both survived the days ahead. But his mind was still tortured by the same dread that he'd felt since all this began. What if it all went somehow wrong? What if the device went off by accident, hundreds of thousands of people were gassed to death, and Washington was reduced to a wasteland? He shivered. And then the phone rang.

On the sixth floor of 500 C Street, Federal Center Plaza, Patrick Tod O'Brien was in despair. Busy in his office all night, over a mile from the FBI Headquarters and unaware of the explosion, he swallowed the last dregs of his coffee, and put down his cup. The problem he'd been given by FEMA's Director seemed almost unsolvable. To start with, he'd broken down the scenario into pre-disaster and post-disaster.

Pre-disaster, before the chemical attack actually took place, and knowing it was likely to happen, there would usually have been a lot FEMA could do. You rarely had the good fortune to know exactly when a disaster was going to strike — advance warning of maybe hours or a day or two at most with hurricanes, floods, or snowstorms, if you were lucky. Though with nature at the helm, things were always unpredictable: with earthquakes and tornadoes, they just hit, and you suffered the consequences. But properly forewarned, O'Brien could call on massive resources in FEMA's ten regional offices and get them to wherever the hell the calamity was going to strike.

And the National Emergency Response Team, ERT-N, a group of first-responding managers with a variety of expertise, could organise for specialist equipment, and whatever expert manpower was needed, to be rushed in. Positioning themselves close to the disaster zone, the experts would be ready to carry out their assigned tasks before disaster happened: sealing off and evacuating the area, liaising with the emergency services — fire and police departments, hospitals and emergency medical teams, and with the FBI, National Guard and any government agency they deemed appropriate.

But O'Brien was faced with serious problems — caused by two limiting conditions which had been outlined by his Director. One was that the actual threat could not be made public before the nerve-gas attack — thus giving no chance of moving potential victims as far away from the danger zone as possible. The second, an adjunct of the first, was that the emergency services must absolutely not be in evidence before the attack. They had to be close enough to react quickly — but they'd have to stand off, away from DC, until the nerve-gas device exploded and scattered its deadly load.

O'Brien hadn't questioned the two conditions, that wasn't his job, but they were sure as hell causing him a set of nightmarish problems. The vital period after a chemical attack — called the 'Golden Hour' — is the first sixty minutes, when you're trying to turn victims into patients. If you had to wait on the sidelines before an evacuation could get under way, if the city streets were clogged with dead and dying trapped in automobiles and buses, if the pavements and roads were littered with corpses and casualties, then your job was made infinitely more difficult. Emergency services couldn't just drive over the bodies of men, women and children lying in the streets or in vehicles; they'd have to clear away the dead, tend to and remove survivors. It would be a slow process, made worse by the fact that all emergency personnel working anywhere near the disaster zone would have to wear bulky, heavy-duty chemical protection suits and carry oxygen packs on their backs, which would slow their movements. Had he even any guarantee the suits would work? To move heavy buses, trucks and cars out of the path of the emergency crews, you'd also need an operation involving maybe hundreds of tanks and tow trucks. And because you couldn't get your emergency crews in quickly enough, then a lot more patients were going to wind up victims.

O'Brien felt frustrated. The conditions the Director had outlined meant that, pre-disaster, there was very little you could do. Except sit on the sidelines a safe distance away twiddling your thumbs, waiting for all hell to break loose, and hundreds of thousands of people to die. If that wasn't bad enough, then dealing with the post-disaster response, after the nerve-gas device went off, was a logistical nightmare.

Warning people once the attack happened wasn't the problem. Using FEMA's Emergency Alert System, O'Brien could plug into every major TV and radio station across America with pre-prepared event tapes. In the District, radio programmes could be interrupted and scrolled messages would appear across TV screens, advising people of the attack and telling them what precautions to take — seek deep shelter, or get out of the city. And Washington, like every major American city, had an extreme weather alert system — sirens placed strategically throughout the capital which warned people of approaching bad weather. People were accustomed to hearing the sirens going off — when hostile weather was imminent, and during monthly tests, carried out on the last Wednesday of every month. The sirens could also be used to alert the District to the attack. If the weather forecast wasn't extreme, then people hearing the sirens would have one of three reactions. They'd think it was either a test, or a malfunction, or they'd wonder what the hell was going on, and hopefully be wise enough to find out quickly what was happening and take cover.

But on a normal work day, with two million people in the District, if the device went off, killing three hundred thousand people, O'Brien would still be left with the daunting problem of what to advise the remaining one and a half million survivors and two hundred thousand injured to do. Not all of them could or would flee the city. They might not be physically able because of clogged streets, injured family members, or sheer panic, which always played a big part in survivors' reactions. O'Brien imagined an average District family unit — one like his own — which might with luck survive the attack. Father, mother, two small kids. Gripped by terror, fearful for the safety of their children, facing clogged roads and mass hysteria on the routes out of DC, the parents might decide that the best course was to seek shelter. Or they might have loved ones who were injured victims — his wife had elderly parents two blocks from their home in Georgetown — whom they might choose to stay with and help.

O'Brien had projected that at least a million people would manage to flee DC. It meant clogged roads and mass hysteria in the District and on the periphery — no way of avoiding that. But those fleeing would have to be kept moving in an orderly fashion on the roads and freeways — more difficult than might be imagined when survivors were still in panic mode. It also meant that field hospitals would have to be set up as close to the city as was safely possible, and medical teams, food, shelter and requisites — tents, cots, blankets — energy resources and decontamination areas would have to be on hand to provide for one million people or more. It was an awesome task.

And it still left the problem of trying to help another half million survivors and two hundred thousand injured who'd have to seek shelter and take their chances in DC. The longer they stayed out in the open, the greater the chance that they'd inhale minute particles of nerve agent, carried on the air, blown by winds, or lingering on the clothing and bodies of the dead. They'd have to find secure shelter quickly.

But where in God's name could almost three-quarters of a million people find secure shelter?

O'Brien rose from his desk in dismay and crossed to the DC wall map. Amazingly, despite decades of Cold War and the threat of nuclear conflict, there were no public fallout shelters in the capital. Not one that O'Brien knew of — apart from the rumour of a shelter deep in the bowels of the White House. FEMA's DC staff could be moved safely outside the capital to oversee the disaster before it happened, but for ordinary citizens, it was a case of finding whatever deep hole they could crawl into — and praying.

But there was a subway system.

Marked with blue dots on the map were the District's thirty-two underground stations. Many were deep enough below ground to act as shelters. Minute chemical particles would be ingested into some of the stations, but not all would be contaminated, and O'Brien figured that the stay-behind survivors would have their best chance of remaining alive if they were instructed to head deep into the subway. But that posed yet another problem.

Survivors of the attack might not be reached for days, or longer. Which meant that food, water supplies and vital medical equipment would have to be secretly laid in. (How in God's name did you keep something like that secret? Subway workers and the personnel used to lay in the supplies would ask questions.)

Novichok also had a long footprint — four months or more — so gas particles would linger in the atmosphere, on water, on streets and buildings. The all-clear signalling that it was safe to move about the city wouldn't be given for a long time.

Which meant emergency search teams wearing protective chemical gear would have to go down into the bowels of the underground to rescue survivors. And once they'd been found, they have to get them into heavy-duty decontamination suits the living, the sick, people with disabilities — move them above ground, and transport them out of the city to field hospitals and decontamination units. And so as not to clog up or overwhelm the field hospitals, aircraft would be needed to fly excess victims out to other cities for medical treatment. Rescue would be a slow, hazardous process.

Apart from the fact that O'Brien knew with chilling certainty that it would be impossible to procure the hundreds of thousands of decontamination suits that would be needed, there was another big dilemma.

Part of his difficulty, as in every disaster emergency, was getting responders and resources close enough to the problem, but not so close that they were a part of the problem: causing bottlenecks, congestion, adding to the chaos. In a situation like this, the rule was, you hit the disaster from the outside: drew, say, three concentric rings from the centre and worked your way in, circle after circle, dealing with the outer areas first, tidying up as you went, tending to the sick and injured and moving them out beyond the circles as quickly as possible, so that there were no bottlenecks to hold up progress. That was the rule. But in a situation like this all rules might be unworkable.

The reason: Washington was no ordinary city.

The White House, Congress, Senate and vital government agencies and departments were scattered all over the District. O'Brien foresaw there might be a need to prioritise the evacuation of these first. Their personnel might have to be put top of any rescue list, for reasons of national security. And high-priority papers, files and items vital to government would need to be secured and removed.

But maybe the biggest problem remained, and O'Brien had been leaving it until last. His head ached as he crossed over to the other wall and examined the US map. He focused again on DC. The damage figures projected two hundred thousand survivors, many with serious nerve-gas damage, and three hundred thousand dead.

Big question: how in hell do you dispose of three hundred thousand corpses?