by Tom Clancy
“So you really think this version might be airborne?”
“As you know, the Ebola Zaire Mayinga strain is named for a nurse who became infected despite all conventional protective measures. Patient Two”—he had decided it was easier not to speak her name—“was a skilled nurse with Ebola experience; she did not give any injections; and she didn’t know how she might have contracted the virus. Therefore, yes, I believe this is possible.”
“That would be very useful, Moudi,” the director whispered, so faintly that the junior physician had trouble hearing it. He heard it even so. The thought alone was loud enough. “We can test for it,” the older man added.
That would be easier on him, Moudi thought. At least he wouldn’t know those people by name. He wondered if he was right about the virus. Might Patient Two have made a mistake and forgotten it? But, no, he had examined her body for punctures, as had Sister Marin Magdalena, and it wasn’t as though she might have licked secretions from the young Benedict Mkusa, was it? So what did that have to mean? It meant that the Mayinga strain survived for a brief period of time in air, and that meant they had a potential weapon such as man had never before encountered, worse than nuclear weapons, worse than chemical weapons. They had a weapon which could reproduce itself and be spread by its own victims, one to another and another until the disease outbreak burned out in due course. It would burn out. All the outbreaks did. It had to burn out, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
Moudi’s hand came up to rub his chin, a contemplative gesture stopped short by the plastic mask. He didn’t know the answer to that one. In Zaire and the few other African countries afflicted by this odious disease, the outbreaks, frightening though they were, all did burn out—despite the ideal environmental conditions which protected and sustained the virus strands. But on the other side of that equation was the primitive nature of Zaire, the horrible roads and the absence of efficient transport. The disease killed people before they could get far. Ebola wiped out villages, but did little more. But nobody really knew what would happen in an advanced country. Theoretically, one could infect an aircraft, say an international flight into Kennedy. The travelers would leave one aircraft and fan out into others. Maybe they’d be able to spread the disease through coughs and sneezes immediately, or maybe not. It didn’t matter, really. Many of them would fly again in a few days, wondering if they had the flu, and then they’d be able to communicate the virus, and so infect more.
The question of how an epidemic spread was one of time and opportunity more than anything else. The more rapidly it got out from the focal center, and the more rapid the instrumentalities of travel, the farther a disease could spread laterally through a population. There were mathematical models, but they were all theoretical, dependent on a multitude of individual variables, each of which could affect the entire threat equation by at least one order of magnitude. To say the epidemic would die out in time was correct. The question was how fast? That would determine the number of people infected before protective measures took effect. One percent invasion of a society, or ten percent, or fifty percent? America wasn’t a provincial society. Everyone interacted with everyone else. A truly airborne virus with a three-day incubation period ... there was no model for that known to Moudi. The deadliest recent Zaireian outbreak in Kikwit had claimed fewer than three hundred lives, but it had started with one unfortunate woodcutter, then his family, then their neighbors. The trick, then, if you wanted to create a much wider outbreak, was to increase the number of index cases. If you could do that, the initial blossoming of Ebola Zaire Mayinga America could be so large as to invalidate conventional control measures. It would spread not from one man and one family, but from hundreds of individuals and families—or thousands? Then the next generational leap could involve hundreds of thousands. About this time, the Americans would realize that something evil was afoot, but there would be time for one more generational leap, and that would be an order of magnitude greater still, perhaps into the millions. At that point, medical facilities would be overwhelmed ...
... and there might be no stopping it at all. Nobody knew the possible consequences of a deliberate mass infection in a highly mobile society. The implications might be truly global. But probably not. Almost certainly not, Moudi judged, looking down at the glass culture trays behind thick wire-glass panels, through the plastic of his mask. The first generation of this disease had come from an unknown host and killed a young boy. The second generation had claimed but a single victim, due to fate and luck and his own competence as a physician. The third generation would grow before his eyes. How far that might spread was undetermined, but it was generations Four, Five, Six, and perhaps even Seven which would determine the fate of an entire country—which happened to be the enemy of his own.
It was easier now. Jean Baptiste had had a face and a voice and a life which had touched his own. He could not make that mistake again. She’d been an infidel, but a righteous one, and she was now with Allah, because Allah was truly merciful. He’d prayed for her soul, and surely Allah would hear his prayers. Few in America or elsewhere could possibly be as righteous as she had been, and he knew well that Americans hated his country and distrusted his religious faith. They might have names and faces, but he didn’t see them here and he never would, and they were all ten thousand kilometers away, and it was easy to switch the television off.
“Yes,” Moudi agreed. “Testing for it will be easy enough.”
“LOOK,” GEORGE WINSTON was telling a knot of three new senators, “if the federal government made cars, a Chevy pickup would cost eighty thousand dollars and have to stop every ten blocks to fill up the tank. You guys know business. So do I. We can do better.”
“It is really that bad?” the (alphabetically) senior senator from Connecticut asked.
“I can show you the comparative-productivity numbers. If Detroit ran this way, we’d all be driving Japanese cars,” Winston replied, jabbing his finger into the man’s chest, and reminding himself to get rid of his Mercedes 500SEL, or at least garage it for a while.
“It’s like having one cop car to cover East L.A.,” Tony Bretano was saying to five more, two of them from California. “I don’t have the forces I need to cover one MRC. That’s major regional conflict,” he explained to the new people and their spouses. “And we’re supposed to—on paper, I mean—we’re supposed to be able to cover two of them at the same time, plus a peacekeeping mission somewhere else. Okay? Now, what I need at Defense is a chance to reconfigure our forces so that the shooters are the most important, and the rest of the outfit supports them, not the other way around. Accountants and lawyers are useful, but we have enough of them at Treasury and Justice. My side of the government, we’re the cops, and I don’t have enough cops on the street.”
“But how do we pay for that?” Colorado the younger asked. The senior senator from the Rocky Mountain State had been at a fund-raiser in Golden that night.
“The Pentagon isn’t a jobs program. We have to remember that. Now, next week I’ll have a full assessment of what we need, and then I’m going to come to the Hill, and together we’ll figure how to make that happen at the least possible cost.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Arnie van Damm said quietly, passing behind Ryan’s back. “Let them do it for you. You just stay pleasant.”
“What you said was right, Mr. President,” the new senator from Ohio professed to believe, sipping a bourbon and water now that the cameras were off. “You know, once in school, I did a little history paper on Cincinnatus, and...”
“Well, all we have to do is remember to put the country first,” Jack told him.
“How do you manage to do your job and—I mean,” the wife of the senior senator from Wisconsin explained, “you still do your surgery?”
“And teaching, which is even more important,” Cathy said with a nod, wishing she were upstairs and doing her patient notes. Well, there was the helicopter ride in tomorrow. “I will never stop doing my w
ork. I give blind people their sight back. Sometimes I take the bandages off myself, and the look on their faces is the best thing in the world. The best,” she repeated.
“Even better than me, honey?” Jack asked, placing his arm around her shoulder. This might even be working, he thought. Charm them, Arnie and Callie had told him.
THE PROCESS HAD already started. The colonel assigned to guard the five mullahs had followed them into the mosque, where, moved by the moment, he’d worshiped with them. At the conclusion of the devotions, the senior of their number had spoken to him, quietly and politely, touching on a favored passage in the Holy Koran, so as to establish some common ground. It brought to the colonel a memory of his youth and his own father, a devout and honorable man. It was the usual thing in dealing with people, no matter the place or the culture. You got them talking, read their words, and chose the proper path for continuing the conversation. The mullah, a member of the Iranian clergy for over forty years, had counseled people on their faith and on their troubles for all that time, and so it was not hard for him to establish a rapport with his captor, a man supposedly sworn to kill him and his four colleagues should those orders arrive from his superiors. But in picking a man deemed faithful, the departing generals had chosen a little too wisely, because men who display true loyalty are men of thoughts and principles, and such men are ever vulnerable to ideas demonstrably better than those to which they adhere. There could be no real contest. Islam was a religion with a long and honorable history, neither of which attribute attached to the dying regime which the colonel had sworn to uphold.
“It must have been a hard thing, fighting in the swamps,” the mullah told him a few minutes later, as the conversation turned to relations between the two Islamic countries.
“War is evil. I never took pleasure in killing,” the colonel admitted. It was rather like being a Catholic in the confessional, and all at once the man’s eyes teared up, and he related some of the things he’d done over the years. He could see now that while he’d never taken such pleasure, he had hardened his heart to it, finally not distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, the just from the corrupt, and done what he’d been told because he’d been told, not because it had been in any way the right thing to do. He saw that now.
“Man falls often, but through the words of the Prophet we may always find our way back to a merciful God. Men are forgetful of their duties, but Allah is never forgetful of His.” The mullah touched the officer’s arm. “I think your prayers are not finished this day. Together we will pray to Allah, and together we will find peace for your soul.”
After that, it had been very easy indeed. On learning that the generals were even now leaving the country, the colonel had two good reasons for cooperating. He had no wish to die. He was quite willing to follow the will of his God in order to stay alive and serve. In demonstration of his devotion, he assembled two companies of soldiers to meet with the mullahs and get their orders. It was very easy for the soldiers. All they had to do was follow the orders of their officers. To do anything else was a thought that never occurred to any of them.
It was now dawn in Baghdad, and at a score of large houses, doors were kicked in. Some occupants they found awake. Some were drunkenly asleep. Some were packed to leave and trying to figure a place to go and a way to get there. All were a little too late in their understanding of what was going on around them, in a place where a minute’s error was the difference between prosperous life and violent death. Few resisted, and the one man who came closest to doing so successfully was cut nearly in half by a twenty-round burst from an AK-47, along with his wife. Mostly they were led barefoot from their homes into waiting trucks, heads down to the sidewalk, knowing the way this particular drama would end for them.
THESE TACTICAL RADIO nets were not encrypted, and the faint VHF signals were monitored, this time at STORM TRACK, which was closer to Baghdad. Names were spoken, more than once in every case as the pickup teams reported back to their dispatchers, which made life easy for the ELINT teams close to the border and at King Khalid Military City. The watch officers called in their supervisors, and CRITIC-priority dispatches were shot off via satellite.
RYAN HAD JUST walked the last of the new senators to the door when Andrea Price walked up.
“My shoes are killing me, and I have a procedure at—” Cathy stopped talking.
“FLASH Traffic coming in now, sir.”
“Iraq?” Jack asked.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The President kissed his wife. “I’ll be up in a little while.”
Cathy had no choice but to nod and head to the elevator, where one of the ushers was waiting to take the First Couple upstairs. The kids would already be in bed. Their homework was all done, probably in some cases with the help of their bodyguards. Jack turned right, trotted down the stairs, then right again, left to get outside of the building, then back inside the West Wing and the Situation Room.
“Talk to me,” the President commanded.
“It’s started,” Ed Foley’s face said on the wall-mounted TV. And all they could do was watch.
IRAQI NATIONAL TELEVISION greeted a new day and a new reality. This was clear when the newsreaders commenced their daily presentation with an invocation of Allah’s name, not for the first time, but never with this degree of fervor. “Gimme that ol’ time religion, it’s good enough for me—now,” observed the chief master sergeant at PALM BOWL, because the transmission was national, and repeated from the transmitters in nearby Basra. He turned and waved. “Major Sabah?”
“Yes, Chief, yes,” the Kuwaiti officer replied with a nod as he came over. He hadn’t had much in the way of doubt before. His superiors had expressed reservations. They always did, they were never quite as close to the pulse of their enemy as the major was, thinking politics instead of ideas. He checked his watch. They’d be in their offices in two hours after the normal morning routine, and that didn’t matter now. Hurrying wouldn’t change anything. The dam had broken, and the water would spill out. The time to stop it had passed, assuming that such a chance had ever existed.
The Iraqi military had taken over, the TV news broadcast said. This was announced as though the situation were unique. A council of revolutionary justice had been formed. Those guilty of crimes against the people (a good catchall term which meant very little but was understood by all) were being arrested, and would face the judgment of their countrymen. The nation needed calm most of all, the TV told them. Today would be a national holiday. Only those in essential public-service jobs were expected to go to work. For the rest of the country’s citizens, it was advised that they consider this a day of prayer and reconciliation. For the rest of the world, the new regime promised peace. The rest of the world would have all day to think about that.
DARYAEI HAD ALREADY done a good deal of thinking about it. He’d managed three hours of sleep before awakening for morning prayers. He found that as he aged he needed less and less. Perhaps the body understood that, with little time remaining, there was no longer time for rest, though there was for dreams, and he’d dreamed of lions in the early hours of this day. Dead lions. The lion had also been the symbol of the Shah’s regime, and truly Badrayn had been correct. Lions could be killed. The real ones had once been native to Iran—Persia, in the old style—and had been hunted down to extinction in classical times. The symbolic ones, the Pahlavi dynasty, had similarly been eradicated with a combination of patience and ruthlessness. He’d played a role in that. It hadn’t always been pretty. He’d ordered and supervised an atrocity, the fire-bombing of a crowded theater filled with people more interested in Western decadence than their Islamic faith. Hundreds had died horribly, but—but it had been necessary, a needed part of the campaign to bring his country and his people back to the True Path, and while he regretted that particular incident, and regularly prayed in atonement for the lives taken, no, he didn’t regret it. He was an instrument of the Faith, and the Holy Koran itself told of the need for war, H
oly War, in defense of the Faith.
Another gift of Persia (some said India) to the world was the game of chess, which he had learned as a child. The very word for the end of the game, checkmate, came from the Persian shah mat—“the king is dead”—something he had himself helped to achieve in real life, and while Daryaei had long since stopped playing mere games, he remembered that a good player thought not move by move, but four, or even more, moves ahead. One problem with chess, as with life, was that the next move could sometimes be seen, especially when the other player was skilled—to assume him to be anything else could be dangerous. But by playing ahead, it was far more difficult to see what was coming, until the very end, at which point the opponent could see clearly but, maneuvered out of position, depleted of his players, power, and options, he had no choice but to resign the game. Such had been the case in Iraq until this morning. The other player—actually, many of them—had resigned and run away, and Daryaei had been pleased to allow it. It was even more delicious when the other player could not run, but the point was winning, not satisfaction, and winning meant thinking farther and faster than the other player, so that the next move was a surprise, so that the other player was harried and confused, would be forced to take time to react, and in a chess match, as in life, time was limited. It was all a thing of the mind, not the body.