James Rouch - Plague Bomb

‘I did this morning. Regulations…’

‘Just tell me the position. Is everyone fully equipped for operating under those sort of conditions?’

‘No.’ It took an effort, went against his nature and training, but Hyde answered in the same abrupt manner the officer used. ‘What do we need?’

‘Eye pieces for the respirators, gauntlets, filter pads… It’s this work we’ve been on. We haven’t been using the suits but they’ve been taking a battering all the same.’ Bugger the major, he wasn’t a bloody telex, he’d tell it his way. He wasn’t about to leave a damn Yank officer with the impression he’d been neglecting his duty. ‘Being carted about, thrown in and out of transports… That microparticle-proof material can’t take it for any length of time. I’ve put in for replacement items, but officially we’ve been non-combatant for a month, we’re right at the bottom of the priority list.’

‘There’s no time to go back and find a dump, requisition what we need. We’ll have to patch and make do with what we’ve got, take our chances.’

‘You can count me out then.’ Burke had been listening with growing unease. ‘I’ve had to drive you lot into some bleeding stupid and dangerous messes, but I’ve never been expected to drive to me own funeral before. With the tear I’ve got in the hood of my suit I won’t last above an hour.’

‘Another word and you’re on a charge.’

Burke declined to be put off by the NCO’s threat. ‘So what? Order me in there and I won’t be around to serve any time in the glasshouse. Damn it, all around here there’s masses of places where the bloody Ruskies have dumped loads of chemical shit or bugs on other poor cruds. At least some of them must have had the right gear in good nick. If they copped a dose and tucked up their toes what ruddy chance do you think I’ve got?’

‘Say that again?’

He pushed his luck past the limit with the sergeant, but Burke felt rather differently about trying the same thing with the major. ‘Well… I was just saying

Rummaging in his map case, Revell wasn’t listening. He sought something he’d thought they’d not be needing anymore, certainly not for a while and with luck never again. Pushed right to the bottom, the crumpling had not helped the grease and dirt stained special salvage map’s clarity.

In seemingly haphazard fashion various colour coded symbols had been superimposed on the snaking contour lines, roads, towns and villages. Some were grouped close together, other stood in total isolation. Having overcome the chart’s almost wilful attempts to defeat his efforts to fold it the way he wanted, Revell finally managed to bring the sheet to sensible proportions with their present location roughly at the centre of the exposed portion.

The map had been given to him on the day they’d commenced their unpopular salvage work. Only a handful of symbols had been added to it since then, those marking the sites of the depredations of the raiding Russian battle group.

Each blob of colour indicated the location of a past skirmish or battle, or where, in one of the rare air strikes in this part of the Zone, a convoy or mobile workshop or salvage detail had fallen prey to attack by fighter bombers seeking targets of opportunity.

The eastern edge of the map was shaded lime green, marking the boundary of the contaminated territory for which the civilians were heading. A faint echo of that bilious colour surrounded some of the symbols elsewhere, including that closest to them.

‘Look this one up, will you, sergeant.’

It took Hyde a moment to find the relevant entry in the notes. As a possible candidate for salvage work the site was graded so low as to be near the bottom of the last page of the glossary. The information was cryptically brief, dismissing lives and events in three short sentences. Practice made it possible for him to garner more from those few lines than an inexperienced person would have thought possible.

‘Not a nice one, Major. Cordoned area, suspected biological attack. A road gang, pioneers, went down without warning, to a man. Couple of field ambulances went in to mop up and they got clobbered to by whatever it was. Decontamination team followed, and when they went off the air the area was quaran-tined until it could be investigated.’

Their NCO was right, it wasn’t a nice one, not nice at all. So many ghastly new strains of bacteria and virus were being employed by the Russians to keep NATO on the hop that it was becoming possible to believe anything. Only a few months before, stories about a super bug capable of killing near instantly, even of finding a way to attack and destroy men as experienced and protected and prepared as medical and decontamination crews would have been utterly unthinkable, now it wasn’t. And the isolated use of a new strain wasn’t improbable either. The Russians’ near indiscriminate use of chemical and biological weapons, even those whose potential lethality and risk was largely unknown, had brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘field trials.’

It was a combination of the few vehicles involved, and the dangers attached to their recovery that prompted the site being classified so low in the list of priorities, but Revell saw the date of the incident when he glanced at the entry, and that changed a mind he’d thought already made up.

‘This was four months back. If it is a bug, and there’s no proof it is, then there’s a fair chance it’ll be neutralized by this time, otherwise the area would have expanded. The automatic sensors would have spotted it. A lot of the newer stuff has a short life. We’ll have to take the chance. We need the equipment those trucks and ambulances will have on board.’ Leaning forward he pressed the engine starter button, and motioned Burke to drive, propping the map beside him. ‘That’s where we’re going first.’

‘Oh that’s just fucking great, I get the chance to practice dying before having a go at the real thing.’ Though he spoke aloud, Burke took the precaution of switching off his throat microphone first, and the words were lost among the loud mechanical noises from the APCs engine, transmission and tracks as it accelerated.

Enough of the rest of the squad had overheard or been listening to the discussion for word to spread quickly. Without word having to be passed they began to put on the drab coloured NBC suits and overshoes, pulling the draw strings tight at cuff and ankle. For the moment they left off the more restricting respirators, gloves and hoods, those of them who had them, but they kept them near, very near.

Resuming his place in the command cupola, next to their turret gunner, Revell kept watch as they entered close country. The road was hemmed in by dense forest on either side. Branches that overhung the road made a gloomy tunnel, at times making it so dark that he was tempted to turn on their white searchlight.

It needed little to prompt the imagination to run riot, conjure horrors, unseen dangers among the forbidding ranks of close set oaks and elms. At first Revell had been prepared to keep an open mind, heavily tempered by scepticism, on the question of what had killed the pioneers and their would-be rescuers. It could be that the information was no more than fanciful embroidery on an already embellished report that was perhaps in itself only cobbled together snippets from alarmist sources, but as they drove on he had to strive to keep the dictates of his common sense predominating over flights of fancy.

Damn it, it could be accurate. If the Russians had a super bug that could act so fast with one hundred percent fatal results, then they would not have confined its use to a single instance, and that against an unimportant road maintenance unit. But weird things happened in this war, and went on happening. And so did mistakes and gross errors of judgment, like the one that had led to the saturation use of chemical and biological munitions that had created the vast contaminated area the civilians were heading for.