The Coward's Way of War (4 page)

His radio buzzed again.  “My God,” the dispatcher said.  “Al, other teams are on their way as well.  The Feds are sending a team directly to your location.  They want you to remain exactly where you are.”

“Don’t worry,” Al growled.  He knew that he would have to go into quarantine, at least until the disease had been identified.  The order was completely unnecessary.  There was no way he could outrun infection now.  He looked back down at the girl and wondered if he was seeing his future.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

…
It is vitally important that all information relating to a biological attack is rapidly compiled and acted upon if the infection is to be outraced.  Towards this extent, Project Wildfire serves as a clearing house for information, one that remains unknown to the media.  Panic will only spread the disease further…

-Nicolas Awad

New York, USA

Day 5

Doctor Nicolas Awad had been sleeping when his secure cell phone began to ring.  The sound penetrated his head and snapped him awake, for he had been conditioned to awaken instantly when he heard that sound.  Cursing under his breath, aware of his wife’s irritation as she shifted beside him, he picked up the phone and dialled his security code into the device.  The secure phone could only have one user.

“Nicolas,” he said, as the line opened.  The NSA had devised the toughest encryption program on Earth for the Wildfire secure lines, knowing that if the Wildfire protocols ever had to be enacted, all hell was going to break loose.  “This had better be important.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor,” the duty officer said.  He didn’t sound intimidated by Nicolas’s voice, but he sounded badly shaken by…something.  “We’ve just received a FLASH message from Washington.  There’s been an incident.”

Nicolas felt his blood run cold.  He looked down at his wife’s dark skin and darker eyes and shivered.  Sabrina didn’t know much about his job, but she knew enough to scare her senseless, even to the point where she had urged him to transfer to a civilian post and start curing scraped knees and broken bones.  He wasn't
that
kind of doctor, yet he could definitely have found private practice, if he hadn’t been driven by his inner demons.  He pulled himself out of bed and walked naked into his study, a small room he used to write his papers.  It had the advantage of being private.  Sabrina knew not to bother him there.

“I see,” he said.  An incident could mean anything from a biological accident at the CDC Biosafety Level 4 storage site to an outright biological attack anywhere in the world.  Even if Iran or North Korea had been targeted, Wildfire would be involved; besides, biological attacks were no respecters of borders.  “What do we have so far?”

“There was an incident in New York, reported thirty minutes ago,” the duty officer explained.  “I’m emailing you what we have so far, which is very little.  There’s a car on its way to pick you up and transfer you to the red zone, where you will meet up with the mobile research lab and a security team.  The NYPD has primacy at the moment, but as soon as you and your team are in the area they will yield to you.”

“Understood,” Nicolas said.  The Wildfire Protocols ensured that the Wildfire team would get priority, once they got organised.  “I’ll get dressed now and wait for the car.”

He closed the phone and went back into the bedroom.  Sabrina was looking up at him nervously.  Her dark skin – a legacy from her Indian parents – had always contrasted oddly with Nicolas’s Arabic features, but he had never cared about that.  Sabrina was smart and tough, a teacher at one of New York’s more exclusive private schools.  They had been married five years and the charm had yet to wear off.

“They’re calling me in,” he explained, as he pulled on his work clothes.  They were carefully chosen to ensure that losing them – or having them burned after visiting an incident site – wouldn’t matter.  “You’d better go back to sleep.”

Sabrina leaned forward and kissed him on the nose.  “You’d better take care of yourself,” she said, as she held him tightly.  “Come back as soon as you can.”

Nicolas kissed her back.  “I will,” he said, knowing that that might be a long time.  Even if it was a false alarm, it would be hours – perhaps days – before he could return to his wife’s bed.  There would be endless reports to write, explaining that Wildfire wasn't responsible for the false alarm and that the millions of dollars spent on the false alert had been well spent.  It wouldn’t be the first time that Congress had tried to cut the budget, even though the director had explained patiently that Wildfire might be the only thing standing between the United States and a biological holocaust.  The Senators and Congressmen hadn’t wanted to know.  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The car that picked him up was an NYPD personnel transport, used mainly to move high-ranking police officers around the city in reasonable comfort.  Nicolas nodded to the driver as he sat down in the rear of the car and then opened his laptop as the car moved out of the driveway, siren howling.  The neighbours would probably complain about the racket – they had no idea what he did for a living – but Nicolas found it hard to care.  If the alarm was real, the neighbours would be glad enough of his services before too long.

He skimmed through the report quickly, swearing aloud once he reached the photographs.  The NYPD officer who had taken the snapshots hadn’t been qualified to take pictures of ill people, and his equipment hadn’t been the best, but he’d done a remarkably good job.  The poor girl’s skin – and the growing pustules and rashes – showed up clearly, suggesting that a nightmare many had thought dead had returned from the grave.  The symptoms suggested Smallpox, at least to some extent, although there were other diseases that had similar symptoms.  The thought didn’t please him.  There had been accidental outbreaks of some of the most virulent and feared diseases on Earth, but Smallpox – with only two official remaining repositories of the disease in existence – was almost certainly a biological attack.  The nightmare had finally come to life.  He discovered that he was hyperventilating and used a calming mantra to calm himself, forcing his mind to focus on the here and now.  Perhaps, if they were very lucky, they could nip this outbreak in the bud.

“Get someone to check with the CDC in Atlanta,” he ordered, activating the secure phone.  By now, most of the people in the smart mob that made up Project Wildfire would have been alerted and some of them would be heading into work.  Others would be waiting by their phones for orders, knowing that they might be summoned at any moment.  “I want them to ensure that all of their samples – not just Smallpox, all of them – are in place and secure.”

He scowled as the car turned into the street and halted outside the police line.  The NYPD had thrown up a cordon and secured the area, keeping the entire apartment block firmly sealed.  Small units had sealed off other apartments, hopefully keeping people – and particularly the media – off the streets.  Nicolas doubted that that would last very long.  By now, people with cell phones and digital cameras – and the internet, of course – would be alerting reporters and trying to collect a reward for tipping them off.  It wouldn’t be long before the media descended in force.

“Nicolas,” Doctor Jim McCoy said, as he stepped out of the car and into the mobile biological research lab.  On the outside, it looked like a massive truck belonging to Wal-Mart; on the inside, it was a complete biological laboratory, duplicating the facilities at both CDC and USAMRIID.  The NYPD biological response team had brought up a set of secure ambulances as well, ensuring that the locals – who might well have been infected – could be moved into quarantine with the minimum of fuss.  “Thank God you’re here.”

“I wish I wasn't,” Nicolas growled.  Dawn was only starting to shimmer into existence, leaving him feeling tired and not a little wired.  “Come on, Jim; we’d better suit up and get in there before the media descends on us and starts putting us on TV.”

He led the way into the lab and donned the MOPP suit that had been put aside for him.  The Mission Oriented Protective Posture suit was designed to be used in a toxic environment, including nuclear, chemical and biological disaster scenes.  The suits that had been designed for Wildfire had been streamlined compared to the general issue suits used by the military, but they were still uncomfortable and had a tendency to overheat if worn for long periods.  Nicolas had boiled in one while in Alaska; he hated to think of what it must have been like to wear one in Iraq.  He checked McCoy’s suit and waited for McCoy to check his before they both stepped carefully out of the vehicle and into the building.  They had to be very careful, if only because a single tear in the suit could expose them to the disease.

Nicolas winced as some of the policemen stared at them with understandably hostile gazes.  The two residents of the apartment block who were in view – sitting on the ground with their hands cuffed behind their backs – looked as if they were staring at aliens, suddenly very aware of just how serious the whole situation actually was.  He averted his gaze and led the way upstairs, following the police line to the infected apartment.  The briefing had stated that no one had attempted to move Miss Henderson – Patient Zero, as she had been designated – but that couldn’t last.  They would have to transfer her out of the building and then sterilise the site.  Depending on what had actually happened, they might have to burn the entire building to the ground.

“In here,” Doctor McCoy said.  “Coming?”

The portable sensor at Nicolas’s belt began to vibrate alarmingly as they stepped through the door.  He glanced down at it and swore inwardly as two words – BIOLOGICAL HAZARD – blinked up on the small display.  The sensors were not always reliable – a news team in Iraq had once declared that they’d found Saddam’s collection of WMD when their commercial-issue sensors had identified something harmless as deadly poison – but they could be trusted to point out something that
should
be worrying.  The level of infection was alarmingly high.

“Doctors,” a cross voice said.  Nicolas looked towards a police nurse wearing lighter protective gear.  He winced again as he saw just how thin her protection actually was.  She would have to go into quarantine along with the rest of them.  “I trust that this will be quick?  Miss Henderson needs to get into a proper hospital.”

“It will be as quick as possible,” Nicolas assured her, as he studied the poor girl’s body.  The nurse had rigged up an IV and had started to feed the girl fluids, along with pain medication and stimulants.  Some people would have claimed that that would have contaminated the crime scene, but Nicolas knew that any nurse worthy of the name would have ignored any demands that she left well enough alone.  “We just need to check her apartment and take samples.”

The girl looked stronger than she had in the photos, but she was clearly still too weak to answer questions.  A team of FBI-trained researchers would be working on her case even now, getting her superiors out of bed to obtain her files – there would be no difficulty with a warrant under the Wildfire Protocols – and attempting to trace her every movement over the last few weeks.  Smallpox – if it was Smallpox – had an incubation period of twelve to fourteen days, although symptoms had been known to appear as early as seven days.  It was possible that they’d misidentified the disease and it was actually chickenpox or Contact Dermatitis, but looking at her, Nicolas suspected that they hadn’t been so lucky.

He pulled a small array of sampling tools out of his bag and started to work.  First, he drew blood samples – the girl moaned in pain as he used a needle to draw the blood out of her body – and then stool and urine samples.  Carefully, he scraped away some of her skin cells and removed one of the pustules, transferring all of the samples into a secure medical case.  The history of biological research included hundreds of doctors who had accidentally infected themselves with a deadly disease and even though Nicolas had been immunised against Smallpox, he could take nothing for granted.  It wasn't unknown for a new and deadly strain of a disease to be unaffected by the immunisation.

Beside him, Doctor McCoy took his own samples, duplicating Nicolas’s work.  If one of their instruments was contaminated, there would still be a proper set of samples.  Other Wildfire team members were moving into the apartment and starting to take samples from the air and all exposed surfaces, as well as the food in the fridge and sanitary facilities.  The entire apartment would eventually be bagged up and transferred to one of the classified research facilities, where it would all be analysed for clues as to how the outbreak had started and how far it might have spread.  He looked over at one of the unprotected policemen – an older man with a pose he recognised as being from the Marine Corps – and shuddered.  The retired Marine would have been immunised, of course, but there was no way to know if it would work.  The man might have been condemned to death just by walking through the door.