The Coward's Way of War

by Nuttall, Christopher

  He winced as they stepped into a room. The NYPD teams had turned it into a temporary morgue and placed the dead terrorists and nurses – as far as he knew, the Delta Force unit hadn’t lost a single man – into neat rows on the ground. None of them looked as if they had died easily, although some had clearly suffered more than others. Before Henderson’s Disease, the NYPD teams would have worked on the bodies for months, painstakingly recreating everything that had taken place since the terrorists attacked. Now, the bodies would be fingerprinted, briefly examined and sent down to the incinerator. There was no longer any time to treat them with dignity.

  Doctor McCoy said nothing as he examined the dead bodies one by one, looking for the telltale signs of Henderson’s Disease. Al followed his gaze, knowing what to look for and swearing out loud as he saw the first pockmarks on a number of faces. It struck him as absurd that the terrorists hadn’t realised what was happening to them, although he figured that they could have been dosing themselves with painkillers or hard drugs to keep themselves going. There was a new political movement afoot to decriminalise drugs – all illegal drugs – within the United States, just so the dying could die without so much pain, but Al suspected it wouldn’t get anywhere. Even if they succeeded in convincing the government to abolish the laws and the DEA, Henderson’s Disease was burning its way through Latin America. The drug lords would be dying of smallpox. The local governments weren't saying much, but the news had carried stories about major rioting in Mexico City and thousands of well-connected people fleeing the country before law and order – such as it was – broke down.

  “Seven were clearly infected,” McCoy said, as he stood up. “The others may well be infected – or were, before they died – but there’s no way to know without a blood test and we don’t have time to carry one out.”

  Al blinked. “You don’t think it’s wise to check?”

  “Under the circumstances,” Doctor McCoy reminded him, “the great surprise would be them not being infected.”

  “I see,” Al said. He looked around the filthy room, breathing carefully though his mouth. One whiff of the stench had been quite enough. The thought was chilling. He could fight men, armed and dangerous men, but he couldn’t even see Henderson’s Disease. The greatest enemy the United States had faced was a tiny germ floating in the air. The bright UV lights burning through the hospital were no reassurance. Henderson’s Disease could be lurking in any dark spot, ready to mug anyone who stepped inside.

  Doctor McCoy led him down to the basement, where the terrorists had stored the dead bodies. There were hundreds of them in varying stages of decay, for the terrorists hadn’t bothered to take any precautions, not even placing them in the freezer. A handful of men wearing protective suits were transporting them out of the hospital and into a van, which would transport the bodies to the incinerator. After they’d been moved, the entire hospital would have to be sterilised before it could be pressed back into service.

  “Bastards,” he said, as he caught sight of one of the bodies. Perhaps the teenage girl had been young and attractive at one point, but now her face was covered in pustules, marring her appearance. She no longer cared about her beauty, for she had died several days ago. The sight reminded him of his first girlfriend, a girl he’d dated back when he'd been fifteen and still thought fondly of, when he could be bothered to think of her at all. “What were they thinking?”

  “They believed that we had a cure,” Doctor McCoy said. The doctor sounded angry, biting out each word as he spoke. “Throughout history, no one has managed to produce a cure for smallpox. Smallpox is the most devastating disease in human history precisely because it cannot be cured. The best we can do, even with the mildest forms of smallpox, is take care of the patients and pray that they make it through the night. Even if they survive, they’re marked for life at best; blind and helpless at worst.

  “And once we believed that smallpox had been exterminated in the wild, we stopped vaccinating people against it, so Henderson’s Disease is burning its way through people who have no defence against it. If we had a cure, we would have used it by now, just to get the ill people back to work as quickly as possible. What the fuck were they thinking? No one in their right mind would risk using smallpox just to get rid of a minority, even if they really wanted to destroy that minority; the disease would spread from that minority into everyone else! What kind of moron believes that crap?”

  Al had no answer. The Black America Movement had been claiming, ever since the first outbreak, that Henderson’s Disease was being deliberately spread by the government, who had a cure for the disease. They’d presented no proof of their claims, but it did make a certain kind of sense; as Doctor McCoy had pointed out, using a biological weapon like Henderson’s Disease would be too risky unless the idiot deploying it had a cure. No one had bothered to point out that the government could have easily vaccinated most of the population – including the rich and powerful - long before it started to spread the disease, without anyone being any the wiser. The BAM and its leaders had believed their own lies and died chasing a cure that didn’t exist.

  “And now thousands more are going to die, because hundreds of medical personnel are tied up here,” Doctor McCoy added. “What were they thinking?”

  Al scowled. As the crisis had grown worse, all of the social glue holding the city together had started to melt. ‘Me and mine first’ was the default state of humanity, after all, and without civilisation people were starting to revert back to the law of the jungle. As long as people had had faith in the government, they could hold it together, but that faith had been destroyed by the Mayor. The BAM had merely wanted the vaccine distributed to their families and friends first. They’d gotten themselves killed trying. The ones who had been taken alive would be under sentence of death, a sentence carried out by Henderson’s Disease. How long would they last before the disease overwhelmed them and they died?

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. The thought was a galling one. Most criminals were understandable, but terrorists were something else. Their beliefs were not based in logic and reason. “I just don’t know.”

  ***

  Doug waited impatiently outside the recovery centre, barely thinking about his responsibility to return to the FOB and report for duty. He was in danger of overstaying his time in New York and maybe even being marked down as AWOL, if not an outright deserter, but it no longer mattered to him. All that mattered was seeing Lindsey safe and sound. He could take her home, cook her a lovely meal from the frozen stores in the house and perhaps even spend the night with her. He was sure that the National Guard would be forgiving. No one had expected that they’d be fighting World War Three on the streets of New York.

  He folded his cell phone and put it back in his uniform pocket as a nurse waved to him. The babysitter was still taking care of the kids and racking up an awesome bill for her services, but somehow Doug didn’t care. He couldn’t have risked placing the children in a home, even one that was well-run, for that would increase their chances of catching Henderson’s Disease. Once he’d spoken to Lindsey, perhaps he could go see them, even if the doctors refused to let her go home for the night. The kids would be delighted to see him after so long in the company of their babysitter. They got on well with Stephanie Ash, although Karen – at eight years old – was starting to ask why she even needed a babysitter, but he was in danger of becoming a stranger to them. Part of the reason he’d transferred to the National Guard was because he didn’t want his kids to grow up with a largely absent father.

  Lindsey was sitting on the bed, wearing a shamefully immodest hospital gown. Doug ran towards her, unconcerned about her appearance, before he realised that something was dreadfully wrong. Lindsey was showing few overt signs of anything, but they’d been married long enough for him to be sensitive to her moods and she was…terrified. He’d never seen her scared before, not even when a pair of drunken louts had tried to break into the house, several years before. Lindsey just didn’t ge
t scared.

  She looked up and Doug stopped dead, unwilling to believe what he was seeing. He didn’t want to believe it, yet…there was no choice. It was real. It was something he had believed would never happen, not to him, not to his family. It could not be denied.

  On her face, marring the mature beauty she’d grown into, were the unmistakable signs of Henderson’s Disease.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  You Americans cannot understand just what happened to us when we lost the Cold War. Overnight, the entire country started to collapse. The most respected amongst us, those who had spent years building their positions, found themselves penniless and alone. Nuclear scientists were growing vegetables in their gardens, just to keep themselves alive; are you really surprised that some of them sold themselves to the highest bidder? The state, the all-powerful state that had looked after them and ensured that they wanted for nothing, was gone.

  - General (Minister of Defence) Igor Ivanovich Zaitsev

  Moscow, Russia

  Day 21

  The knock on the door came at precisely two in the morning, local time.

  Doctor Nadya Stepanova had been asleep after consuming much of a bottle of vodka, but the knock shocked her awake and sober. Anyone who had grown up in Moscow learned to fear the midnight knocks, when the security services came to hunt the enemies of the state. Unlike Americans, who had learned to mock their security services, Russians had no illusions about the power and efficiency of the FSB, successor to the feared and dreaded KGB. If the FSB took an interest in someone, the best that would happen would be an interrogation, followed by release into a kind of social isolation, where no one would dare associate with the victim for fear that they too would be targeted by the FSB. At worst, the unlucky victim would be taken away and never seen again.

  She pulled herself out of bed, reaching for a nightgown and pulling it on over her underwear. It was lucky that her boyfriend hadn’t chosen to stay the night, but he’d been called away by his superior and one didn’t question orders from one’s superiors, not in Russia. There were few jobs to go around and a person who was fired from one would be very lucky if they ever found another. Nadya knew men with advanced university degrees – real university degrees, not idiotic western concepts of social sciences – who were digging ditches and shovelling shit for a living. Even her position, once a position for life, was not secure. The knock on the door was proof of that.

  The door shook again as she walked towards it, composing herself as best as she could. She was sophisticated enough to know that the reason for the night time visit was to catch the suspect disorientated, yet even knowing that, she had to admit that it was working. Why had the FSB suddenly taken an interest in her? With the Americans swarming around everywhere, only one answer suggested itself, yet she was sure that she had covered her tracks. If the FSB had known what she’d done, she would have found herself their guest long before the Americans started shaking everything up.

  She unlatched the door and pulled it open, to find herself confronted with two men in dark coats. They showed no ID badges, but they didn’t have to, not with such an air of arrogance and certainty, the certainty that they could go where they liked and do what they wanted – whatever they wanted.

  The first man stepped forward, just enough to block the door. “Doctor Nadya Stepanova?”

  “Yes,” Nadya said. There was no point in denying it. They would know who she was, merely by checking her record. “Why…”

  One of the men grabbed her, spun her around and pushed her face-first into the wall. Before she could react, he cuffed her hands behind her back and searched her roughly, running his fingers over her entire body. Nadya gasped in pain as he checked her panties, before placing one hand firmly on her back to keep her where he wanted her. The other man, ignoring her and her captor, started to check the remainder of the apartment, carrying out a brief search.

  “Doctor, you are under arrest in the name of state security,” her captor said. He took her by the arm and pulled her out of the door and down the stairs. Nadya wanted to ask, at least, that they would lock her door, but she knew better than to say anything. Her ordeal was only just beginning…and, if they knew the truth, she would never see her apartment again. She just hoped that her boyfriend wouldn’t be caught up in the dragnet with her.

  ***

  Nicolas watched with as much dispassion as he could muster as the Russian scientist was frogmarched into the detention chamber. Doctor Nadya Stepanova was a young brunette with a pretty face, although it was too sharp to be called beautiful by American standards. She wore only the tattered remains of a nightgown, lending her an air of vulnerability that the presence of two burly men in black coats only intensified. Nicolas felt a twinge of guilt as she was forced into a chair, but he pushed it aside with an effort. If the pretty doctor was guilty, she was directly responsible for the deaths of over three thousand Americans and God alone knew how many outside the United States. If the US Government didn’t execute her, her own government – which was dealing with an epidemic itself – certainly would.

  He shook his head in awe. It had shocked him when they had started digging into the Russian archives and discovered just how far the Russians had progressed in unlocking the potential of biological warfare. Henderson’s Disease was actually one of the milder forms of biological weapon the Russians had created, as impossible as that seemed. There were diseases that were specifically targeted on Chinese people, or Arabs; diseases that had long incubation periods and diseases that could be used as a tactical weapon. It reminded him of an odd report from the Russian occupation of Groznyy, a suggestion that a number of resistance fighters had suddenly become ill and died. Had the Russians deployed a biological weapon against the insurgents?

  The Russians didn’t know it, but the United States had taken far more information than they had believed possible. The Russian computers were at least a decade behind the best America could produce and NSA’s hackers had laughed at their encryption protocols. Nicolas himself had slotted what looked like a standard USB memory stick into one of the computers, knowing that the device – a microburst transmitter – was actually linked to Fort Meade. The hackers had slipped into the computers, copied every terabyte of data into memory cores in the states and sent it for analysis. By the time the inspection finished, they would know everything about the Russian program. Shutting it down, on the other hand, wouldn’t be easy.

  He looked across at General Zaitsev, who was watching the FSB men as they manhandled the female doctor. Zaitsev had cooperated completely, as far as Nicolas could tell, but it would be easy for the Russians to conceal at least part of their program from prying eyes. What Nicolas had seen had terrified him, terrified him enough to suggest that the United States force the Russians to disarm, even if there was a threat of nuclear war. He doubted the President would agree, unless some of the nastier bugs got loose…and then it would be too late. The Russians had created and stored enough weapons to wipe out the entire human race, several times over.

  And their level of security was not high. Some of the facilities had secure storage rooms comparable to the CDC in Atlanta, but others were barely guarded, vulnerable to terrorist attack or insurgents from the south. Combined with a dazzling array of deployment methods, from tiny hidden aerosols to missile warheads that preserved the bugs and protected them from the heat of re-entry, the Russians had a biological weapon for every possible contingency. The only one they didn’t seem to have prepared for was one of their weapons getting out of their hands and being deployed by terrorists against the United States. They hadn’t even bothered to build up a significant supply of vaccine.

  It was that, Nicolas knew, that would make the difference between successfully surviving the pandemic and losing an entire country. The United States had enough immunised people to keep society ticking over, as had Europe and some of the more advanced states. The Third World, on the other hand, was not so lucky. Henderson’s Disease had been reported in
Africa, East Asia and Indonesia. Wherever it touched, it brought death and social collapse. Even if there had been enough vaccine on hand to inoculate the entire population of the world, the logistics would have precluded getting it to everyone before it was too late. No matter what they did, as he’d told the President, people were going to die.

  “Doctor,” the interrogator said, “we know what you have done. We have traced the lost sample to you. We have traced the money to you. We know that you are guilty. Your only hope of survival lies in doing your patriotic duty and cooperating with us to limit the damage. If you do not cooperate, you will not enjoy the consequences.”

  Nicolas frowned. Combining Russian and American investigation tactics had paid off, although he knew that most of the evidence they had gathered was circumstantial. The Russians didn’t give a damn about due process, not with the might of America's military machine pointed right at their heartland and, once they had a number of suspects, had started interrogating them with brutal efficiency. Even so, the interrogator was exaggerating; statistically, there was a very good chance that they’d got the wrong person.