Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

Victor looked down at his screen. ‘All right. I’ll brief you. But I’m not going to be held responsible for anything that—’

Adrianna tried to soothe him. ‘No, you won’t be held responsible, Victor. You know who holds the responsibility. So tell us what you’ve got.’

Victor still looked miserable. His fingers gingerly worked the keyboard of his laptop. He seemed to be struggling against something and Adrianna knew what it was: the desperate horror of screwing up, with the stakes so high.

Finally Victor said, ‘It’s been worked on since the first anthrax attacks, back in ‘01. Operational name is Clear Sky. Challenge was, just like now, goddamn it, how to maximize the immunization process for respiratory anthrax in the minimum amount of time. We had to get around the three-shot process. Wasn’t working. How the hell can you get millions of Americans lined up and processed when it takes three injections to immunize them? The logistics were a nightmare. Even the one-shot process was a hell of a challenge, too. Then the working group for Clear Sky went at it from a different angle. Used a genetically modified version of the respiratory-anthrax virus. Modified it so that when an individual is exposed, he or she runs a slight fever, maybe a bit of nausea, but then they’re immune. Immune up to five years.’

He looked up from his laptop. ‘There you have it.’

‘Have what?’ Brian asked.

Monty said, ‘Yeah. What the hell was the fuss all about?’ Victor had the expression of someone who couldn’t believe the morons he was spending time with. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a variety of the respiratory anthrax. You’re not immunized through injection. You’re immunized by breathing it in.’

Brian said, ‘The hell you say.’

‘The hell I do,’ Victor said.

Adrianna said, ‘Is there enough?’

‘Enough what?’

‘Enough vaccine to do the job.’

Victor shook his head. ‘Maybe. I can find out later today. I know the production has been underway for some time, just in case we…well, just in case. But there’s the biggest problem of all. Delivery. It’s not like we can set up shower stations or breathing tubes on subways or train cars. Only possible delivery system would be airborne.’

Darren said, ‘Hasn’t it been looked at?’

‘Sure,’ Victor said. ‘But the challenge of using an airborne vaccine is—’

Brian said, ‘Oh, right. Like you said earlier. About wide dispersal. Crop dusters and such wouldn’t work.’

Victor shook his head. ‘That problem’s been solved.’

Adrianna said, ‘How?’

‘Vladimir Zhukov.’

‘Zhukov?’ Monty asked. ‘Who the hell is he?’

‘Was he, we think,’ Victor said. ‘Nowadays, he’s gone missing, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Best report is that he got gunned down in Tashkent a couple of years ago for screwing some group out of money who thought they were getting smallpox viruses and ended up getting chickenpox instead. But during the bad old days of the USSR, he was head research scientist for the Kromksy Institute of Infectious Diseases, which was funded one hundred percent by the Red Army. Their own little biowarfare agency. They had the same challenge, too, of trying to weaponize respiratory anthrax because wind and air currents would cause such widespread dispersal that any attack would fail in the first few seconds. But Zhukov came up with a solution. Pretty goddamned elegant if you ask me. Way it works, it’s like cluster bombs. You take—’

Monty said, ‘Now you’re into my playground, doc. I can do the explaining.’

‘Go ahead.’

Adrianna watched the scarred face of her military man as he briefed them, not once looking at his laptop. She hated to admit playing favorites, but Monty was her favorite in her Tiger Team. Quiet, unassuming, smart and tough, with the look of a guy who could help deliver a baby in the morning, and in the afternoon break the neck of someone threatening the same newborn.

‘Munitions,’ Monty said. ‘Always been the challenge of effectively delivering the most potent firepower with the most economic delivery system. You’ve got the problem of having enough munitions slung underneath fighter-bomber wings and in bomb bays to do the job, especially if you’re flying over hundreds of miles of territory and your supply chain is thin. So here’s the deal. You get one big bomb but it’s really just a canister. That’s all. Drop it over your target site. Maybe a staging area for infantry. Or an air base. Anything with nice, exposed targets. The canister is dropped, falls to a predetermined altitude, and pops open. Inside are hundreds of bomblets, packed away in little clusters that spread out. Each cluster about the size of a beer can. And when they get close enough, the little beer cans pop open and a lot of bad guys are having a bad day. One canister is dropped, but you’re delivering munitions over a wide area. Lethal and effective as hell.’

Darren smiled. ‘Sounds like you serve in the Air Force, Monty.’

Monty said, ‘I’ll never tell, and you know it.’

Brian was impatient. ‘All right, you’re saying that this Russian, he came up with a way of using cluster bombs to deliver the anthrax?’

Victor shook his head. ‘Yes, but not in a mechanical sense. You see, Zhukov came up with an approach to cluster the anthrax spores using a membrane, about the thickness of a cell wall. And this membrane would last a number of seconds out in the open air before it decayed, releasing the anthrax spores. So you could have a release of respiratory anthrax from a rocket shell or a spraying device, and it would reach ground level before the spores were actually out in the open. Very elegant, very deadly. And what we did — well, the Clear Sky group, I mean — was to use Zhukov’s approach to come up with a delivery system for the anthrax vaccine. Same method, using the membrane system. Initial tests looked promising. Anyone exposed to the vaccine would generally just need one exposure.’

‘Good,’ Adrianna said. ‘We’ll rely on you to—’

‘But…but, Jesus, Adrianna!’ Victor’s voice raised a notch and she said, ‘Yes?’

His face was mottled white, as though a surge of anger was now raging through him. ‘You… I mean, all right, suppose we do have enough vaccine. That’s a possibility. Considering who we are and the blank check we carry around in our back pockets all the time, we may be able to make it happen. But you haven’t solved the delivery problem, not even close to it!’

‘It’s a problem, it’ll be solved,’ she said.

‘Do you have any idea? Do you? My God, the last mass immunization we had in this country was the swine flu fiasco, back in 1976.’

Nobody said anything. Adrianna paused, hoped someone would pick up the ball, and thankfully, it was her New York detective.

‘Going to need a history lesson there, pal. Most of us were pissing in our diapers back then. Go on.’

Victor wiped at his face with his right hand, ‘In 1976 — February, I think — there was an outbreak of a respiratory illness at Fort Dix in New Jersey. An Army recruit died, and autopsy results showed he died from a variation of swine flu. That got a lot of people’s attention. You see, a form of swine flu was believed to be the strain of influenza that broke out in 1918 and 1919. A lot of people died worldwide from that epidemic.’

Monty said, ‘Define “a lot”, doc.’

Victor’s voice was now calmer, and icier. ‘How does fifty to a hundred million people sound like?’

Brian said, ‘Sick? You mean, fifty to a hundred million people sick?’

‘Shit, no, not sick. Dead. Fifty to a hundred million people dead. Worldwide. In the space of a year.’