They decided Clay had died of natural causes; an unfortunate coincidence but not outside the bounds of plausibility. All sewn up nice and tight.
I didn’t have the answers but at least I’m clever enough to know when I’m not clever enough. In contrast, these were scientists with IQs far loftier than mine, but in a herd, with shit dripping from the fan, they were truly gormless.
The storm had intensified and the facility that had seemed so permanent that morning felt rickety in the gusts. Dash assured us there was no danger to X-Base itself, and I believed him – it had been designed to cope with those Antarctic winters – but the same couldn’t be said of the shaky outbuildings that had been erected in the compound. The tool shed looked dangerously close to blowing over, rocking crazily against the generator shed next door. This in turn was sturdier but taking a real pounding, and it worried me that while we were safely ensconced in our warm huts, our lifeline – the generator – was protected by a thin sheet of plywood.
I left the common room at the earliest possibility, on the pretence of going to the toilet. That’s where I headed, but not to use the facilities in that way. That lockable cubicle kept my secrets once again.
Demeter’s note had reminded me about my own note. I removed my trainer. The paper was creased flat, worn at the edges from a couple of hours’ walking.
At first I thought it might link to Demeter’s note, but the handwriting was different. Besides, this was helpfully signed.
John
Sorry I didn’t catch you! Heading back to Camp Vollum now, will find you later, but thought you’d want to know as soon as possible. Your sample contains anthrax – unknown strain. Related to Vollum 14578. Much more virulent than 1B. Similar effects but highly aggressive, rapid replication. Much enhanced virulence would cause illness far quicker than Vollum, hours instead of days. This aggression likely counteracts vaccine. I’m naming it the Gruinard strain.
Gruinard strain likely mutated from Vollum 1B-1942. Passed through indigenous wildlife, mutated over forty years.
Replication rate suggests death through massive organ failure would likely occur within two to five hours, no external signs other than distress.
I’m guessing your sample links to Andy Kyle – given what we know I’m pretty sure it’s what killed him.
Soil analysis shows it was taken from the area that’s now decontaminated, so this is likely a unique sample. Will talk to you when I come back later.
Ingrid X
I leaned back and closed my eyes. I hadn’t known Andy Kyle. Clay and Gambetta I couldn’t give two shits about. Ingrid though, that was different. She was entirely innocent, here to do her job. She didn’t care about any of this, wasn’t involved, just living her life. A lump began to crawl up my throat.
I opened my eyes, focused on the back of the stall door. There’d be time for sentimentality later, I knew all about storing things up, had to stay in the present.
A new, far more virulent strain of anthrax, here on the island – a more aggressive strain than anything previously known. This changed things. A new strain as aggressive as this would be valuable. If someone wanted a sample, without anyone finding out – wouldn’t that be a solid motive for murder?
It fell into place. Frustratingly, the killings had followed a classic pattern, based largely around covering up that one first murder – Kyle. It was running wildly out of control, a juggernaut with no brakes – and I was standing right in the middle of the road.
By finding the sample and asking Ingrid to analyse it, I was part of the pattern. In asking her to analyse the sample, I may have sealed her fate. What was certain was he’d tried to kill me once and failed – knowing I suspected something, could he really afford not to try again?
I flushed the note down the toilet.
Chapter Forty-one
The lounge was a sorry scene. Greenbow shivered in an armchair in the corner, pushed back against the wall, wide eyes darting, fingers twitching on the pistol. Alice jumped up from a sofa when I came in but all in all was managing to stay relatively composed, whereas Marie looked about to burst, rocking, tapping her feet on the floor. Dash slouched sideways on another sofa, feet up, staring at the ceiling. Hurley looked the most composed, hovering near the door, cradling a glass, except I reckoned his composure was due in part to the bottle of Stoli on the bookcase behind him.
The wind buffeted the base. Something hit one of the windows in the corridor, just a branch or something, but everyone jumped a foot in the air simultaneously, watching each other nervously.
Only six of us left.
Chapter Forty-two
Oxford University, 1937; the ear of a diseased cow arrives for post-mortem bacterial analysis, ending up in Canadian bacteriologist Roy Vollum’s (presumably gloved) hands. He identifies a particularly virulent form of bovine anthrax also deadly to humans, which becomes known as the Vollum strain. Like other forms of the disease, it’s more virulent when exposed to more hosts.
A sample of Vollum-14578 finds its way to Porton Down, where it’s passed through a series of monkeys, enhancing the virulence to create the Vollum-1B strain. This new strain is found to be highly aggressive.
It’s at this point, sometime around 1942, with this terrible anthrax strain isolated, that British research switches away from passively studying the feasibility of an enemy attack, onto planning a biological attack on Germany. Operation Vegetarian is born.
Like something from a science fiction film, scientists at Porton Down come up with a plan for a new kind of weapon, one with a high chance of success and high lethality without damage to German infrastructure, and without risking too many aircraft. Perfect.
As I’d found out, the best way to infect someone (assuming by ‘best’ you mean worst) is to get them to eat it. I’d already seen up close the effects of gastrointestinal infection. The problem for the scientists at Porton Down, then, is how to get Germans to eat a plate of Vollum-1B. Dropping infected strudel or bratwurst on major cities may arouse suspicion, but fortunately (or unfortunately for the Germans) the scientists think up something better.
There’s an oft-used phrase, something along the lines of ‘any civilised country is just three missed meals away from anarchy’. The proposed plan plays into that notion perfectly.
Cattle-feed cakes, developed at Porton Down, are to be dropped onto fields on the outskirts of cities. Anthrax bombs will be dropped over herds. Infected cows will be slaughtered shortly after to feed a hungry population. Tainted meat floods the food chain. As well as this, dairy herds are decimated, milk supplies contaminated. Hospitals and health services stretch to breaking point and collapse. Thousands of Germans die slowly and painfully from anthrax infection.
Then comes the coup de grâce. To stem the tide of bacteria, all milk and meat, infected or not, is destroyed to stop the spread of infection. War is already here, pestilence has swept through, now the third horseman arrives – famine, riding rampant, all grazing land rendered useless, entire herds slaughtered. What scarce food supplies remain are prioritised for the military. Villages, towns and cities across the Reich starve. Servicemen at the front learn of the plight of their loved ones dying back home. Will is broken. The country is destabilised, the military’s back broken from within.
All this has been achieved whilst leaving infrastructure intact.
Other than the huge irony that Hitler himself was a vegetarian, it was the perfect plan. The War Office gives the green light.
Preparations get underway. Linseed cakes are provided by a company in Blackburn, and a London-based soap manufacturer is contracted to process them into inch-sized pieces. By the middle of July 1942, 40,000 cakes are being produced per day. In a secret facility at Porton Down thirteen women with expertise in soap manufacture are recruited to inject the cakes with the anthrax spores.
Cube-shaped cardboard containers are produced at Porton Down for transport in modified RAF Lancaster, Halifax, and Stirling bombers, and drop sites are chosen in Oldenb
urg and Hanover. Aircraft returning from conventional bombing runs of Berlin fly over sixty miles of grazing land. In less than twenty minutes one bomber could rain 4,000 infected cakes down onto the fields. In one night just a dozen aircraft could cover enormous swathes of the north German countryside in deadly anthrax spores and no one would be any the wiser.
The cakes are in production and the date is set for 1944. Only one thing remains.
No one really knows how the anthrax will fare in the wild. Will it survive deployment long enough to be eaten? Can it be delivered by explosives, to disperse the spores even wider? Or would bombs destroy the anthrax? It all needs to be tested in the field, somewhere in secret.
A team from the Ministry of Defence and Porton Down arrive in Scotland in mid-1942 to scout possible test sites. The site has to be in an isolated, uninhabited area, easily sealed off from the public, and safe from civilian and spy eyes. Gruinard Island fits the bill perfectly. At that time inhabited only by sheep, it’s purchased from a farmer for £500 and immediately placed off limits to all. A team from Porton Down move in, and the island is designated ‘X-Base’ by the Ministry of Defence.
They lose no time shipping in troops to assist with tethering unlucky sheep to lines across the island, or caging them in wooden crates with their heads exposed. Devices are exploded on the top of poles upwind of the animals, simulating bomb blasts. These test both the dispersal of anthrax, and that it remains virulent after the heat and pressure of a bomb blast. Needless to say it does, and all the sheep are dead within a few days.
Anthrax has been successfully weaponised for the first time, with proof that the laced cakes and anthrax bombs will be effective if dropped across Germany. No doubt some morbid bastards are rubbing their hands in glee as the deadline approaches, anticipating the effects of all that research finally put to use.
But that was that; thankfully for Germany the order is never given. I’d love to think a British sense of fair play fed into the decision, though I know that thinking is extremely wishful. Other than the moral implications there was a huge drawback, which became immediately apparent and was the reason we were here, in a sealed base, nearly eighty years later. Marie had impressed on me the hardiness of the anthrax spores. For decades after the tests a rusting sign on the beach on the mainland had declared Gruinard Island a no-go area, by order of the government. Those spores of Vollum-1B that were grown at Porton Down and dispersed across the island were still just as deadly, rendering Gruinard Island inhospitable for humans and animals alike. Finally bowing to pressure, a team moved in and the island was decontaminated in the mid-Eighties. It was officially declared anthrax-free in 1990, but some of those spores had been far hardier than expected. The wildlife returned and, as Ingrid had proved, the spores had passed through generations of rats or birds or whatever other unfortunate beast had happened upon them, mutating over the years outside the confines of a laboratory. These mutant spores had survived the decontamination procedures, sleeping quietly under the dirt for years until a storm had brought them to the surface, to sit in the grass and be eaten by the reintroduced sheep. Thanks to the island’s history, a recent outbreak was reported to the right people straight away, setting alarm bells ringing. A team had headed to the island immediately and tests confirmed the worst: it was teeming with anthrax still, after all this time and after the previous decontamination.
Just as the Vollum-1B strain had been created in the first place, by passing the already virulent Vollum strain through a series of monkeys, much of the anthrax here had passed through indigenous wildlife – but these spores had survived and mutated in ways that couldn’t be synthesised in a lab at Porton Down. Almost eighty years of mutations had made Gruinard a unique petri dish.
Here had grown, by accident, a super-anthrax capable of infecting and killing its host in a matter of hours, worth more than plutonium for any government research department. These days, Western democracies’ hands are tied by conventions written in Geneva, but of course that didn’t make it worth any less. Where did the Novichok come from that poisoned people in Salisbury and Amesbury? And more to the point, how did the UK identify it? Chemical and biological weapons are the great leveller against the superpowers, so while East and West rattle their sabres against their use in places like Iraq and Syria, research continues in secret, because you can only defend yourself from this sort of stuff if you know how it works.
I figured it was this hypocrisy that actually pushed the value of a sample higher. If elements within a ‘civilised’ country could get their hands on this unique superweapon in guaranteed secrecy – without even their allies and perhaps their own governments finding out – well wouldn’t that be worth even more? Wouldn’t that be worth killing for?
I couldn’t let the Gruinard strain get out.
Chapter Forty-three
We talked for a while about the island, its history, piling facts on top of the stuff I’d read in the briefing pack. I was now convinced that this was the true reason for the murders. This was the reason Andy Kyle was killed, the reason Viktor Demeter had left, and the reason he’d killed again to get the sample away from the island. Some of the same unanswered questions remained, but at least I was satisfied with the motive.
Turning from the others, I dug around in my pocket, pulling out the object I’d found hidden up under the pipes in the crawl space of the radio room. I turned it over in my hands, tipping it up, letting the glare of the fluorescent lights reflect off it. I added a new question to the many others.
If Demeter had tested this new strain on Kyle, then orchestrated this mess to smuggle the priceless sample off the island, unique because that area had now been decontaminated – if he’d perpetrated a series of murders to cover up his crime and make good his escape – why on earth was I holding that unique sample in my hand?
Chapter Forty-four
‘Unlike some other bioengineered mutations, the original Vollum strain is reliably aggressive,’ said Marie. ‘It’s so bad they still use it today to test vaccines.’
We were sitting around the common room, talking it out, trying to make sense of everything that’d happened. I hadn’t mentioned Ingrid’s note, or the test tube.
‘It’s what the Iraqis had in the Gulf War,’ said Alice.
‘Marie mentioned Gulf War Syndrome earlier,’ I said.
Greenbow nodded. ‘One of the causes was the anthrax vaccinations we were given. Bloody nasty stuff.’
Alice continued. ‘No stockpiles were ever found, of course, but they took plenty of samples from dump sites and found hits for the Vollum strain.’
‘Hence why we’re here, eighty years later?’ said Hurley.
‘Exactly, it’s ridiculously difficult to get rid of. You know about the Dark Harvest incident?’ asked Alice.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Dash.
Alice explained, with Greenbow chipping in the odd faintly right-wing grumble. In the early Eighties a militant Scottish group known as the Dark Harvest Commando had demanded the government decontaminate Gruinard Island. They’d bypassed security and left a container of soil right outside the gates of Porton Down, and a second package outside a hotel in Blackpool (not a typical terrorist target, but the Conservative Party conference happened to be underway there). The first sample had been found to contain anthrax. The second hadn’t, but was still confirmed to be soil dug up from the island. Cleaning up the island made sense. Discounting the obvious ethical arguments of leaving this patch of Scotland forever contaminated (which, to be honest, I can’t believe Thatcher’s government gave a shit about), such a huge stockpile of lethal anthrax spores sitting a stone’s throw from the coast of mainland Britain was never a good idea. Apart from the danger of contamination, there were other things to think about, as the Dark Harvest Commando had pointed out. Anyone who wanted to get their hands on large quantities of military-grade bioweapon simply needed a rowing boat and a bucket and spade.
‘It’s just the same now,’ explained Alice. �
�The Russians were after the anthrax as well as wanting Demeter back. A nice source sample of Vollum strain, they used him to get it, two birds, one stone.’
‘And was he involved in planning the operation?’ I asked.
‘Clay sent the two of us up here six months ago to run preliminary tests, just a day. We collected samples and took them back.’
‘And what did the samples show?’
‘That the island was actually more contaminated than in the Forties.’
‘You think Demeter’s been planning this all along?’ asked Hurley. ‘The Russians got in touch a while ago, threatened his son. He got the wheels moving…’
‘He used his influence with Clay,’ Greenbow cut in, ‘to set the dates and make sure he was on the team. Cunning bastard.’
‘Exactly,’ Hurley continued. ‘For him, the whole trip was a means to get away from the UK and get in the good books with Russia.’ Hurley looked pleased with himself.
There was a minute as we mulled over the ideas. I wondered who’d handled the samples left in the Dark Harvest incident, whether they’d showed any signs of mutated strains. Had Demeter been in the labs at Porton Down then? He came across in the Eighties – it was feasible.
Dash broke the silence. ‘Shouldn’t we be focusing on getting off the island ourselves?’
‘Why?’ Marie asked.
He turned to her, sofa squeaking in protest. ‘Our numbers are dwindling, and I’d rather leave before they dwindle down to me.’
There were nods of agreement, but I’d already considered this, had been waiting for it.
‘We should stay put, we’re safer in here,’ I said.
‘We need to report the murders,’ said Greenbow. ‘And Demeter’s defection. They could still catch him.’
‘You forget Demeter smashed the radios?’ said Dash.
‘Well what the bloody hell do you suggest?’ Greenbow stood to reinforce his authority, but looked unsure of his next move, simply standing next to his chair gripping the seat back. ‘We need to do something.’
Anthrax Island Page 16