The Viral Epiphany

by Richard McSheehy

  “I’m sure he doesn’t,” Dan replied. “He’ll be fine.” He was quiet for a few moments.

  “What is it?” Sheila asked.

  “It’s the vaccine,” he said looking at her, “we need to find a way to get it to the rest of the world. We can’t just take care of ourselves.”

  “I know, but what can we do? You already spoke to your friend at the U.S. CDC but they never called you back.”

  “Yes, but now the President is coming here to get the vaccine! It doesn’t make sense. Maybe I should call the CDC again.”

  Sheila placed his breakfast on the table and sat down across from him while he poured cups of coffee for each of them. As he placed the coffee pot back on the table he looked over at her and said, “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right, Dan. Give him a call!”

  Dan nodded and then without another word, he picked up his phone and dialed the number for Harry Field’s direct line at the CDC. Harry picked it up on the first ring. They exchanged very brief pleasantries and then Harry gave him the bad news: he wasn’t able to get permission to start production of the vaccine.

  “What?” Dan asked, “Don’t they realize it could save a lot of people’s lives?”

  “I’m sorry, Dan. They just said ‘No’,” he replied.

  Dan waited a moment before continuing and then said quietly, “Harry, you believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. But I don’t have the authority…”

  “Wait, Harry. Listen to me. You have to do something! This vaccine is already being mass-produced here. It will work; you have to trust me on this. The thing is that our manufacturers can only make enough for the Irish population, but with the capacity of the American pharmaceutical industry, why you could make enough for the entire world!”

  “Dan, you don’t understand how bad it is here. I don’t even have anyone to go to anymore,” Harry said, “Charles Goodfellow, the UNAPS guy the President appointed to oversee America’s defense against the disease, has simply disappeared. Then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff proclaimed he’s in charge, and now I just heard that he has died from the disease himself!”

  “So who’s in charge now?”

  “I have no idea! That’s just it! And no one seems to know where the President is, and the whole system is just collapsing around us!”

  Dan looked at Sheila in stunned silence. Life in Ireland had barely changed. Except for the quarantine around the Clonakilty area, pending the vaccine distribution, everything was almost normal. How could things have gotten so bad, so fast? he wondered. It’s almost like they’re in a different world over there. Then he thought of the President. “Harry, wait a minute! President Cranston is on his way here!”

  “What?”

  “Yes, he called me yesterday from a submarine named Seawolf. He wants me to give our vaccine to everyone on board!”

  “The President is going to take the vaccine himself?”

  “Yes!”

  Harry didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he replied, “OK, Dan. I’m with you. If your vaccine is good enough for the President it’s good enough for me and everyone else. I’m going to authorize production on my own. I’ll get our pharmaceutical companies to start production today!”

  Dan smiled when he heard the words, “Great!”

  “Can you send me the computer code for the vaccine fabrication?”

  “I’ll have it on the way in a few minutes.”

  “Good,” Harry said, “How long will it take to distribute the vaccine over there?”

  “The pharmaceutical companies will begin shipping the vaccine to over fifty distribution centers around the country very soon, probably by early next week. We think we can get everyone vaccinated within a month, maybe less.”

  “I think that’s where we will run into problems, Dan,” he said, “here and in other parts of the world. You can vaccinate people in Ireland fairly easily, but there are almost three hundred million people in America, and there are almost six billion in the world. We could never inoculate the majority of the people that way. Most of them will never have a chance to get the vaccine even if we manufacture enough of it.”

  “I know, Harry. I don’t have a simple solution for that. We just have to do what we can. It’s certainly better than doing nothing.” Dan replied.

  “I agree. OK, I’ll make sure we get production started today. We could probably make hundreds of millions of doses within a week, probably enough for everyone in the world within two weeks. We’ll just do the best we can.”

  Dan put down the phone and turned to Sheila. “They’re going to start vaccine production today!”

  “That’s great news!” she said. “I think it’s up to the Americans now, with their massive production capabilities. We’ve done what we can here.” She suddenly stood up and quickly walked over to the window. Outside, in the branches of an oak tree there was a group of birds, magpies that were jumping from branch to branch.

  “What is it Sheila?” Dan asked

  She turned back from the window and said, “I just remembered. I had a dream too.”

  Dan had seen that expression on her face before. “What was it? Did you see something?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed important, but I don’t understand it. Not all of it anyway.”

  “Tell it to me,” Dan said.

  She looked at him and smiled. “You haven’t even touched your breakfast! You start eating, OK? Then I’ll tell you.”

  “OK,” he said and quickly took a bite of the eggs with sausage. “Now, go ahead.”

  “I dreamed I was in some cold place, a place unknown to me,” she said. “It was dark: very, very dark. I tried to see but I couldn’t even see my own hand when I held it up in front of me. Yet, I knew, I could feel, that there was something in the darkness: something evil, and very strong, a malevolence that was darker than darkness, and it moved in utter silence. It was very frightening.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I have no idea, but there was more.”

  “What else?” Dan asked as he felt a slight chill.

  “Suddenly, the darkness lifted and I was standing beside you on the seashore. I looked out over the ocean and I saw them.”

  “Who?

  Sheila looked out the window again and her voice became hushed. “ The birds. There were seven black and white birds, magpies. They flew high above us, and almost landed in a tree, but then, suddenly, as if they had changed their minds, they turned and flew north and disappeared over the horizon.” She looked at Dan, but he said nothing. She could tell that he was paying rapt attention now.

  “ As soon as the magpies had gone, the wild geese came.” she continued. “There were so many of them, all flying in V-shaped formations. One group after another they flew in over the ocean, all gray and black and making a raucous noise. Then, after the geese, there were swans, huge white swans. So many swans flying together in formation, like the geese. And they all flew over us, and I thought they were going to land here. But none of them landed in Ireland. They just flew so high above us. There must have been thousands of them.” She looked up at him and blinked and smiled. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know Sheila,” he said. “I thought you were the expert on dreams. But isn’t ‘Wild Geese’ a term that refers to the warriors of Ireland who left centuries ago?”

  “Yes, the Wild Geese tradition began when the last of the galloglas warriors who fought the English invasions in the sixteenth century left Ireland to join other armies and continue their fight against English domination. Legend has it that when the Wild Geese return Ireland will regain its independence.”

  “So maybe the dream is something about that?” Dan suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Sheila said after a moment’s thought. “I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t feel like that is what the dream is about. Besides, Ireland has already obtained its independence.”

  “OK,” Dan said, “So
what do the wild geese symbolize in your dream?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about the swans then?”

  “No idea,” she said shaking her head with a smile.

  “The magpies?”

  Sheila laughed. “That I do know. It’s an old symbol from Celtic mythology.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “In Celtic lore, if you saw seven magpies it meant that there was a secret that must never be told.”

  “What secret?”

  Sheila simply shook her head, “I can’t imagine, Dan.”

  Dan finished the last bite of his breakfast and picked up his coffee cup. “Well, Sheila. I think I like my dream better than yours.”

  She laughed heartily, “Me too!” she said and hugged him. Then she continued, “Maybe we should forget about our dreams for a while and send the computer code to the CDC!”

  “Good idea,” Dan said as he stood up from the table. “Let’s go!”

  Thirty-Five

  In April 1958, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey White submitted his thesis for a PhD in marine communications to the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. It was entitled “Long Distance Underwater Communication by Humpback Whales in the Northern Pacific Ocean”. He was barely granted his PhD and went on to serve an uneventful career in the submarine service. The thesis received little notice at the time and for many years it lay in the archives of the Naval Postgraduate School gathering more dust than attention. Then, in 1981 a Navy researcher at the SPAWAR complex in San Diego, California asked for a copy of the document. He was also interested in long-range underwater communication; however his interest lay in communication with submarines, and he thought he might learn something from the whales…

  Randy James, the communications officer aboard the SSN Seawolf, had never heard of Lieutenant Commander White, nor did he understand the physics of long distance sound propagation through the ocean. His function was to monitor his communication station and to send and receive messages as needed. He was counting the days until his tour of duty would be over and he could leave the Navy for a life back in New Jersey. Life at sea hadn’t been as glamorous as the recruiting posters had implied.

  At the present time, as the Seawolf churned its way towards Cork, with an estimated arrival in six more hours, he had little to do. The normal satellite communications cable and antenna that had been towed behind the submarine had been retracted because it would not operate well at these speeds. His active sonar was not in use either, in order to maintain the secrecy of their location. The submarine was racing through the deep at maximum possible speed, completely blind.

  Randy, however, was unconcerned about the lack of sensor information about what lay ahead. At a depth of three hundred feet, there was no danger of running into underwater ridges or other obstacles. The ocean floor here had already been thoroughly mapped and all that was required was an exact knowledge of the sub’s location. That had been secured via a GPS satellite fix the last time they had surfaced. They had then used the GPS data to update the submarine’s inertial navigation system. The submarine’s computers watched over the course of the boat at all times keeping it safe from collisions with inanimate objects. As far as living creatures, such as whales or seals are concerned, Randy thought, well, with us having a weight of over nine thousand tons, they had just better get out of the way.

  At this depth and speed, Randy’s only task was to monitor the Low Frequency Alert Channel. This was an emergency signaling channel that relied upon the principles of Very Low Frequency (VLF) sound wave propagation under water, and was based upon the pioneering work of Lt. Cmdr. White. As his thesis explained, sounds that are very much lower in frequency than the lowest range of human hearing had been found to travel over thousands of miles in the ocean and it was thought that humpback whales stayed in contact with each other in this way. The problem was that low frequency sound could not be used to carry much information. It was mostly useful to get someone’s attention, and that was how the Navy used it, albeit in very rare circumstances.

  With so little to do, Randy sat at his duty station and tried to read the best seller he had picked up in New London. However, while he would normally have become deeply engrossed in the novel by now, he was finding it hard to concentrate. No one else had died from Asian Fever, yet everyone on the boat was very tense. They all pondered the same question: Who will be next? Randy wondered if he would have any warning at all if he were the one, and he secretly checked his pulse rate. For some reason his anxiety level didn’t decrease although he counted a normal resting pulse of 68.

  He had taken a deep breath and resolved to pay attention to his book when he heard an insistent beep coming from his console. There were two short beeps followed by a long beep, and then the sequence repeated itself every few seconds. He looked in surprise for confirmation at his button indicator display and saw the illuminated VLF button was flashing alternately red and then white. He had never seen a VLF message indication occur while on duty, except during training simulations. He frowned slightly as he watched the light blink on and off, trying to decide whether to report it. Probably a malfunction, he said to himself and he pressed the reset button. The beeping and flashing lights stopped – for about two seconds; then they began again.

  “Captain!” he called out as soon as they had restarted, “We’re being pinged by a VLF boom box!”

  Captain Andrews quickly came over, stood behind his communications officer, and listened to the repeated sequence of two short beeps and one long beep. “That’s us!” he exclaimed, “Seawolf is hull number twenty one.” He turned to the helmsman and gave the quick order, “Helm! Reduce speed to half. Maintain heading.” Then turning back to the communications officer he said, “Comm., deploy the SATCOM antenna.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the two men responded simultaneously as the submarine began to rapidly slow. A moment later a whooshing sound could be heard as the satellite communications antenna was released and the inflatable balloon to which it was attached raced upward to the surface. Less than a minute later the external communications receiver board lit up. An incoming FLASH priority message was being received. Randy set the printer to ON and twenty seconds later he handed the printout to Captain Andrews.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET

  PRIORITY: FLASH

  TO: CMDR SSN SEAWOLF

  SUBJECT: URGENT COMMUNICATIONS REQUIREMENT

  UPON RECEIPT THIS MESSAGE HAVE PRESIDENT CRANSTON CONTACT OMEGA HEADQUARTERS VIA SECURE VOICE.

  BRIG. GENERAL JOHN L. BAKER SENDS.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Captain Andrews held the message tightly and, his heart skipping a beat, quickly walked to the President’s stateroom. This was the first time in his command of the Seawolf that he had been pinged by the VLF system and this urgent communications request seemed ominous. Everything must be going to hell on the mainland, he thought.

  “Sir,” he said when the President came to the door. “Some organization called Omega wants you to contact them. It says it’s urgent.” President Cranston took the message from the Captain and read it quickly.

  “Come in, Captain,” he said. “Grace, I have to call Omega headquarters. They say it’s urgent.” Grace looked up from the book she was reading. She looked much more relaxed than at any time since she had come on the boat. She nodded and smiled slightly but didn’t say anything.

  Without another word the President turned away from Grace, selected the speakerphone option, and dialed the number for General Baker. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Brigadier General Baker, Omega headquarters,” he said as he answered the secure voice call.

  “General, this is President Cranston. What’s happening? Why do you need to speak to me?”

&nb
sp; “Sir, things are going very badly - very, very badly. Our latest satellite data, plus whatever reports we are getting from various ground resources, indicate that Asian Fever is now spreading uncontrollably. Some cities, such as San Francisco, are very hard hit. Now it looks like Los Angeles is beginning to suffer heavy losses.”

  “What about other cities?” the President asked. “What about the east coast?”

  “It’s not as bad there yet. But our projections indicate that it’s only a matter of time for them too. The disease seems to be firmly rooted in cities that have populations of 200,000 or more. Not only here. It’s all over the world. The situation is dire; there’s no other word for it.”

  President Cranston thought about this for a minute before replying. “Tell me about the rest of the world. How does it compare with the U.S.?”

  “As you already know, sir, Asia is fully involved. That’s where the disease started and we expect the casualty rate is over fifty percent at this time. The disease appeared later in Europe and they’re about the same as the U.S. However, a couple of cites there…let’s see…Paris and London, have significant Asian populations so it seems that the disease got there early. They’re experiencing heavy losses now.”

  President Cranston looked over at Grace and he could see that she was now listening intently to the conversation. “I see. What about the other continents? Africa, South America, Australia?”

  “It’s the same thing everywhere, sir. Sir, we are now at a turning point for the survival of the human race.”

  “What do you mean?” the President asked as his eyes showed the shock of hearing the reality of these words.

  “The people are really beginning to panic, sir. It won’t be long before they start abandoning the cities in huge numbers, trying to get away from the disease. But the problem is that they themselves are the carriers of the disease. If that happens, our mathematicians project, and as you know we have the very best mathematicians in the country, that we, as a race, will face extinction. There will be no place on earth that will be safe. No place.”