The Coward's Way of War (63 page)

Nicolas sat back in his chair, allowing the President’s words to roll over him, his mind elsewhere.  Henderson’s Disease had devastated Africa, marching down towards the Cape and slaughtering much of the population.  The survivors were locked in a series of brutal wars, struggling for survival as societies broke down, leaving tiny bands of humans isolated in a sea of death.  China had it worse; the Chinese Government had vanished somewhere in the ruins of Beijing, leaving six successor states to battle it out for supremacy,  And then there was the massive collapse of civilisation in India, Pakistan and Central Asia...the world would be a very long time recovering from Henderson’s Disease. 

He turned his mind back to the day when he’d been approached and offered a position within Project Wildfire.  Since then, biological warfare had dominated his mind, yet the scope of the crisis had shown him just how inadequate his imagination had been, back when the world was innocent and Smallpox was a forgotten nightmare.  They’d prepared, yet they hadn't prepared enough.  In hindsight, it had been foolish to discontinue the vaccination program, to allow the Russians to get away with maintaining a biological weapons stockpile, to disregard the possibility that some of the Russian biological weapons might fall into terrorist hands...it wasn't as if there hadn't been any warning.  The writing had been written on the wall for anyone who cared to read it.

And, worst of all, they’d done the best they could.  The government had responded quickly and efficiently, two words that were rarely used to describe governmental activities.  They’d sealed the cities, shut down interstate transport and started a vaccination program...yet they’d still lost nearly a third of the country, perhaps more.  No one knew for sure how many Americans had died in the crisis; indeed, they would probably never know.  If the government had delayed, if the military hadn’t reacted quickly, the crisis would have been incomparably worse.  It was no consolation.  A third of the country was dead.  Nearly half the world’s population was dead.  Plenty of countries had simply vanished off the map, their populations reduced to almost nothing by the disease and the social collapse.

He applauded, along with the others, as the President finished her speech.  She had done well, even though he knew that she was tormenting herself with the thoughts of the dead.  She had done well...and they had
still
lost a third of the country.  As he stood up to walk towards the transports for passage out of the ruined city, one thought kept echoing through his mind.

This was a disaster waiting to happen
...

***

“
Let us pray,” Reverend Gary Jordan intoned.

Jim bowed his head along with the congregation as they gave their thanks to God.  Mannington had survived the worst of the crisis relatively unscathed, although the handful of men in orange uniforms and chains were a chilling reminder that the world had changed in ways he had always believed impossible.  He’d been part of the posse that had defeated the would-be bandits, who had been given a flat choice between working off their debt to society or immediate execution.  The thought made him smile, even though he had been raised to believe that slavery was un-American; if nothing else, there was no longer any such thing as a soft approach to crime and criminals.  The remains of American society couldn't afford it.

Afterwards, he joined in the chatter between the men and women, while keeping a watchful eye on the children.  It wasn't often that all of the farm’s children, the ones who had fled the dying cities and joined their family near Mannington, were allowed to come to the town as a group, but it seemed that they were having fun.  Many of them, in the way that children did, had found new friends among the town’s children and the hundreds of refugee children who had been adopted into the town.  He smiled as he saw his eldest son talking earnestly with a girl about his own age, carefully looking away when his son glanced over in his direction.  The young man deserved to spend some time in the company of a pretty girl, even though Jim hoped they wouldn't go past first base, or maybe second.  The irony struck him a moment later and he chuckled; it wasn't as if he had
married
the mother of his children, was it?

He looked over towards the three refugee girls he’d adopted and was relieved to see that they were fitting in nicely.  The former babysitter’s family had been, finally, confirmed dead in the chaos that had gripped the final stages of the evacuation of New York City.  Jim and Linda had held her while she cried, and then promised her that she would always have a place with them, on the farm.  A week later, they had formally adopted her, a process that would have taken months, if not years, before the crisis.  Now, with a massive humanitarian crisis on its hands, the Federal Government had relaxed the rules various idiot bureaucrats had invented to make work for their idle hands.  It was a display of common sense that Jim hadn't expected from the government, although he had to admit that President Handley had done well.  She’d nuked Riyadh and shown the ragheads that America was not to be trifled with.

And besides, the girls’ father would be a fine addition to the farm, when he returned from Saudi Arabia.  Jim had already offered him a place.  It was the least he could do.

“I understand that you’re thinking about running for Mayor,” the Reverend said, as he wandered over to where Jim stood.  “Do you think you can win?”

Jim grinned.  “I have no idea,” he admitted.  Politically, there was a great deal that needed to be done...and, as one of the people who had prepared for a crisis, he had a surprising amount of respect from both the local and transient communities.  “But you know what?  I am going to have a great deal of fun trying.”

***

“
YOU ARE ORDERED TO TURN BACK,” Doug ordered, though the megaphone.  “THERE IS NO FOOD FOR YOU HERE.”

He watched as the weary line of refugees halted, staring at the American vehicles as if they couldn’t quite believe their eyes.  They were a pitiful sight; a handful of men, a slightly-larger number of women and quite a few children, looking as if they wouldn't see their next birthdays.  Doug watched dispassionately, unaffected by the refugees and their pleas, wondering if they would walk away or if he would have to open fire.  It might, a treacherous part of his mind whispered, be the kindest thing he could do.

There had been no attempt to occupy most of Saudi Arabia.  American forces had concentrated on occupying the oil wells and refineries – and, after Iran had finally gone under, extended their occupation to Iranian facilities – and abandoned the cities to their fate.  The Iraqis maintained their possession of a triangle of Mecca, Medina and Jeddah, but even they were reluctant to care for the refugees, even their fellow Muslims.  The remains of Saudi Arabia had gone down into civil war and mass slaughter; those Henderson’s Disease hadn’t killed had died in fighting between different tribes and religious movements.  Doug and the other Americans on occupation duty had very clear orders; they were not to provide any humanitarian aid to any refugees, unless the refugees were somehow useful.

Back to the east, several thousand Saudis and their families were cared for by the American military, in exchange for operating the oil wells.  A handful of others were kept in a brothel, a breach of regulations that the higher-ups tended to ignore.  There were even a handful of war brides, although any soldier who fell in love with a Saudi girl received the brunt of his comrades’ irritation.  It would be a long time before memories faded and Saudi Arabia – or whatever replaced the dead state – became accepted in the global community, just as Japan and Germany had needed years before their sins were forgiven, if not forgotten.

He watched as the refugees turned and tramped away into the desert, heading out in the desperate – and futile – hope of finding safety.  He knew that they wouldn't be so lucky. They would die out there, like – so many of their countrymen – paying the price for the sins of their leaders.  Doug knew no pity.  If they could argue that all of America should be held accountable for the sins of individual Americans, as many terrorists and their supporters had claimed, they could be treated in the exact same way.  The culture of compassion, of feeling their pain, no longer existed.

His wife’s face drifted in front of his mind’s eye, yet he could barely recall what she had looked like, before she had died.  They had finally told him the truth; she had died, barely a day after he had boarded the plane for Kuwait, and her body had been incinerated.  His daughters were safe, but he knew that they were forgetting their father. And, at times, he wondered if that was truly a bad thing.

He waited until the refugees had vanished in the heat haze, and then gave the order, sending the patrol back to the base.  There was work to be done in the desert called peace, all that remained of a once-great nation.  The country whose leaders had slaughtered nearly half of the world’s population was dead.

Good riddance
, he thought.

Near Moscow, Russia

Day 130

The vault was a marvel of Communist-era engineering, a Hero Project that had absorbed millions of rubles when Russian citizens starved, or found themselves condemned to live in unsafe accommodation.  It had been built under a dacha that had been created, officially, to serve as a hunting lodge for the well-connected Soviet citizens.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a much-reduced Russian Federation had not impeded the vault at all, for those who operated it knew that they would always be needed.

Director Olga Dmitriyevna Sedykh smiled to herself as she gazed upon the fruits of her labours.  The American inspectors hadn't even had a hint that the vault existed, despite probing questions and a careful examination of all the documents they’d been shown.  The Soviet Union, unlike the Americans, took security and compartmentalised systems seriously; indeed, very few people who worked for Biopreparat knew of its existence.  Thankfully, the treacherous doctor hadn't known about it, or she would have been singing like a canary to the Americans before they put her on trial for being an accomplice to genocide.  The vault had remained secure.

At the President’s direct order, Biopreparat’s entire array of equipment had been put to work manufacturing vaccine to ensure that Henderson’s Disease – as the Americans had called it – wouldn’t exterminate the Russian population.  Olga knew that his plans went far further, taking advantage of the opportunity to wage biological warfare on the enemies of Mother Russia.  The ethnic Russians would be immunised against Henderson’s Disease, but there would be no attempt to spread the vaccine down into the south, down into Georgia or Chechnya.  And then there was the Chinese...they were fighting a civil war amongst themselves, creating an opening for Russia. A resurgent Russia could expand far when all of its enemies were dead, slain by a disease long thought dead.

Her eyes scanned the shelves, seeking out the liquid nitrogen cooled freezers that held vials of disease, all banned by international treaty.  She saw a dozen versions of Smallpox, some in their natural state, others warped and twisted by Russian scientists and tested on human subjects.  There had always been plenty of people in the gulags to use as test subjects, people who would never be missed. There were vials of Bubonic Plague, Anthrax, Tularemia, Influenza, Brucellosis, Marburg and Ebola, even some modified versions of the AIDS virus.  Some had been designed to serve a tactical purpose, others were intended as a final gesture of defiance, a guarantee that if Mother Russia had to die in a nuclear war, her enemies would die with her.  They all looked so harmless to her eyes, yet she knew, looking upon the sleeping demons, that she was looking at enough weaponised diseases to kill the entire world, several times over. 

It wasn't just the diseases themselves that were deadly.  The Russians had captured notes and information from both the Nazi Death Camps and the Japanese bioweapons research program in China, Unit 773.  They had made good use of that windfall over the years, yet as the Soviet Union strove to develop more and more deadly biological weapons, they had expanded upon that store of knowledge.  The plans contained within the vault showed how to build a missile warhead capable of distributing virus over a target country, or how to operate a covert infection program that could bring a modern country to its knees.  If the Americans had even known that the vault existed, they would have demanded its destruction, yet they remained in ignorance.  The new treaties governing the safe disposal of the biological weapons stockpile would not be allowed to affect her operations.

Smiling, she turned and left the vault.  Behind her, the gleaming freezers and their deadly contents remained, cold and deadly.

Waiting.

The End?

[I wrote this book when I had access to my notes in the UK, but I have written this afterword from memory.  Any mistakes are my fault.]