Marc Cameron - National Security

“Drew!” The terror in a mother’s voice was unmistakable.

Samantha swallowed, trying to regain some semblance of composure. Her throat was on fire.

“Are you hearing this, Karen?” Northwest Captain Steve Holiday stared in dismay at his first officer as they listened to the flight attendants over the intercom. One passenger dead and four more were unconscious.

“Food poisoning?” Karen Banning said as she unfastened her seat belt. If it had been a terrorist incident, both pilots would have barricaded themselves behind the armored door of the flight deck. In a medical scare, it went without saying that she would check things out.

Captain Holiday reached behind his head and grabbed the oxygen mask. When alone at the controls, he was supposed to wear supplemental oxygen. His voice took on a detached, Darth Vader quality as he spoke through the mask.

“Be careful out there. Scoot back here to let me in on what’s going on. Follow protocol.” If Steve Holiday believed in anything, it was protocol. It drove his wife crazy.

The 747 was a spacious aircraft. It took the first officer three minutes to make her way through the upper-deck business class, negotiate the stairwell down to the main passenger compartment, size up the situation, and call back up to flight deck. To Holiday, each minute was an eternity.

Normally almost giddy, Karen’s voice was deadly somber as it crackled across the intercom. “You’re not going to like this, Steve….”

Her vivid description of the pandemonium in the rear of the aircraft hit Holiday like a straight jab to the nose. He ordered her back to the cockpit, where hours of training and well-established emergency procedures kicked into gear.

Holiday noted their position on the GPS-still five and a half hours from JFK-and called in a medical emergency via the satellite phone. He was told to stand by while a doctor was summoned.

When the doctor came on the line ten minutes later, Karen described what she’d seen like a child recounting a nightmare-coughing, fever, vomiting, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She looked across at Holiday, slight shoulders trembling as she spoke.

“It’s not isolated among a particular group of passengers?” the doctor mused, almost to himself.

“It is not,” Holiday snapped. He hated it when people talked to themselves when they should be talking to him. “This thing’s moving through my airplane like the plague. We haven’t been in the air four hours and already have five dead and…” Karen mouthed a number that surprised even him. “… and at least forty-two showing advanced symptoms.”

The doctor advised the pilots to use continued oxygen and have no more interaction with the passengers. With hardly a good-bye, he promised to make contact again in fifteen minutes and cut the connection.

Holiday gave a tight grin to his copilot. Blond, pert and almost elfin in appearance, Karen had always reminded him of his daughter. The sight of her trembling beside him broke his heart. She had to know she could still depend on him. “Chin up, kiddo. They’re probably trying to figure out what leper colony to divert us to.”

Thirty-four minutes after Captain Steve Holiday placed his initial call to FAA Flight Following, Dr. Megan Mahoney of the Centers for Disease Control found herself pulled from the a plush corner booth at The Dining Room in Buckhead, on the outskirts of downtown Atlanta, and escorted to an armored limousine that smelled faintly of cigar smoke. She had been on her first date in months, with a cardiologist from Emory University Hospital. He was a handsome enough man, but loved to hear himself talk. Megan had to admit she wasn’t disappointed at the interruption.

“I have to go,” she’d said as the two young, athletic-looking men wearing dark suits and dour expressions invited her to “please come along” with them. She’d shrugged and dropped her napkin on top of her lamb shank osso buco, which she was much sorrier to leave behind than the gabby cardiologist. “Duty calls.”

“They send secret agents to fetch you from dinner?” Her date had smirked. “Who are you, Batgirl?”

“Batgirl…” Megan had nodded at that, thinking of the hundred of bats she’d dissected under lantern light in dank forests around the world. “I suppose I am…”

Mahoney was a compact woman, barely five-three, but when she wasn’t peering through a microscope at deadly pathogens, she was at the gym or in the pool. She demanded the two agents show her their credentials-though they both gave the impression she would get in the tinted limo one way or another.

Inside, Megan found herself alone. A built-in webcam in a plasma screen on the teak table broadcast her image to representatives from Homeland Security, NORAD, and the White House. James Willis, the director of the CDC leaned across his deceptively uncluttered desk, making eye contact with her over the computer screen. He’d spent the last four days and nights working nonstop in Colorado. His face was drawn with fatigue and worry.

Megan straightened her shoulder-length hair-her father called the color claybank — in an effort to look more professional and tried to settle into the overly soft leather seat.

Each of the conference participants got their own portion of the split screen so all were visible to one another, even when they weren’t speaking. She recognized several of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level bureaucrats from too much time watching C-SPAN.

“She’s four hours and twenty-one minutes off the Eastern seaboard at her present speed and course,” General Brian Randall, United States Air Force, advised the group, as if Northwest Flight 2 was an enemy missile. LEDs blinked and flashed on a wall map behind him in USNORTHCOM’s version of a Larry King backdrop.

“Is that enough time to put a plan in order?” a frumpy woman from Homeland Security asked. “I’m not sure that’s enough time…” She wrung her hands on the oak table in front of her, as if squeezing out a washcloth.

“Depends on the plan,” said Army Lt. General Adam Norton. “French sources tell us their antiterror-ist units took down a lab a little over an hour ago near Roissy, an area adjacent to the Paris airport. They discovered the makings of what looks like an attempt at some kind of biological weapon.”

In the back seat of the limousine, Dr. Mahoney ran a hand down the front of her black cocktail dress and took in the information. Of course the government had plans in place for the quarantine of incoming aircraft, but every incident was different and required a slightly different protocol. She’d scanned the contents of a powder-blue folder from the seat beside her. As she spoke, she leaned into the microphone beside the plasma screen.

“Megan Mahoney with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” She possessed the well-coifed classiness of a CNN news anchor and, having grown up in Fulton County, the magnolia-soft drawl of a bona fide southern belle. “Forgive me, but I’m assuming you’ve put the DEOC on alert?” The CDC director’s Emergency Operations Center stood fully staffed and ready 24-7 to help support national health emergencies.

“For the time being, you are the DEOC.” Willis shook his head. “The White House wants this close hold-the fewer people made aware of it, the better. With everyone spooled up over the Colorado bombings, nerves are on edge, as you can imagine. Something like this could shut down the country.”

“Very well,” Mahoney sighed, knowing better than to argue with all the egos at the meeting. “The symptoms the pilot describes indicate a hemorrhagic virus-something like Marburg or Ebola-but we’ve never come across anything that acts this fast. Has anyone looked at the passenger manifest? This would make a lot more sense if a large group traveling together began to develop symptoms at the same-”