Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘Observation?’ Evans replied. ‘The external exam.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hardin nodded. ‘Never forget, a pathologist spends most of his time just looking and examining, and that’s particularly important once you’re doing investigations out in the field. There may well be indicators on a body, on its clothing or in the surroundings, that you’d never get to see in a morgue, simply because in a normal autopsy absolutely all you’ve got to work with is the body itself. So tell me, what do you see?’

  Evans looked down at the table. ‘We have a white Caucasian male,’ he said, ‘aged about sixty-five to seventy, deeply suntanned over his whole body apart from the groin, where the skin is noticeably lighter. There are no apparent indications of external injury to the anterior surface of the body, but large quantities of blood are evident. The subject appears to have bled from eyes, ears, nose and mouth… and possibly from the penis.’

  ‘To save us turning the body over right now, Mark, Dr Gravas has already confirmed that he’s bled from the anus as well. OK, let’s get a couple of snaps. We’ll take pictures at each stage of the procedure: meaning right now; then after the external examination is complete; after the chest cavity has been opened, and a couple of shots of each organ as it’s removed.’

  Evans stepped around to the end of the trestle table, raised a Polaroid camera to take one picture of Aristides’s body from the feet up, then another from the head down, and finally one from each side, the camera whirring as each print was ejected. He put the prints and the camera back on a small chest of drawers and returned to the table.

  ‘Right,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ll clean him up now and then do a full external.’

  Evans picked up a plastic bucket half-full of water, which contained a couple of cloths that Hardin had found in Aristides’s kitchen. Wringing out one of them, Evans started to remove the heavily encrusted blood from the Greek’s body, the water in the bucket turning deep red almost immediately. Once the front of the corpse was clean, they turned it over and washed the back as well. Then they started the external.

  Working together, the two men carried out a minute examination, starting at the top of the Greek’s head and working down to the soles of his feet. They were looking for cuts, bruises, punctures, needle marks, abrasions or any other external injuries, in fact anything unusual, such as a swelling, discoloured skin or evidence of broken bones. Once they’d finished the anterior surface, they turned the body over and repeated the process on the posterior.

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said aloud, for the benefit of the tape recorder. ‘We can find no evidence of any recent external injury or trauma. There are several old scars, one badly healed, but none appears to have any bearing on the cause of death.

  ‘The unusual features are the signs of bleeding from all orifices. An initial inspection shows that bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth has been caused by seepage of blood from the smaller vessels. The eyes in particular are very red, and most of the veins in the eyeballs appear to have ruptured.’ He paused as Evans took three more pictures. ‘Right, I’ll open him up now.’

  Hardin took a scalpel firmly in his right hand, first checked that Evans was standing well clear of the table, then slid the blade into the tanned brown skin at Aristides’s right shoulder. He ran the blade diagonally across and down the chest until he reached the sternum, then shifted his stance slightly and continued to cut all the way down to the top of the pubic hair, skirting around the navel. Then he extracted the scalpel, inserted it in Aristides’s left shoulder and completed his initial Y-shaped incision.

  The scalpel had cut deep, slicing through the skin and subcutaneous fat, but had not penetrated far enough to reach the ribs, so Hardin bent forward and began deepening the incisions and cutting under the skin until he was able to reflect – or lay back – the three sections of skin and flesh and expose the ribcage. The upper section covered most of Aristides’s face.

  Evans took more pictures, then Hardin picked up his pair of lopping shears and severed all the ribs on both sides of the body until he was able to lift out the chest plate and the central part of the ribcage, exposing the contents of the abdomen. He passed the chest plate to Evans, who placed it on the floor beside him on a rubberized sheet Hardin had laid out for that purpose. Evans used the camera to take two more shots, and then Hardin began dictating his report again.

  ‘Initial incision completed, chest walls reflected, ribs cut and chest plate lifted away.’

  Only then did he and Evans lean forward and peer cautiously into the open red maw exposed before them.

  ‘Goddamnit, Tyler,’ Evans muttered. ‘What the hell is that?’

  Réthymno, Crete

  In his hotel room, Murphy locked the door and jammed a chair underneath the handle as an added precaution, then opened the two packages in turn. He’d told Nicholson he’d need a rifle and a personal weapon, and he’d suggested using non-US manufactured arms, just in case he was forced to abandon them at the scene. As soon as Murphy opened the bigger package he realized that Nicholson had taken him precisely at his word.

  It contained a Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova sniper rifle in 7.62mm Soviet calibre, complete with a bipod rest. Externally similar to the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, the Dragunov has a greatly extended barrel giving it an overall length of just over four feet, a ten-round magazine only one-third the size of the standard Kalashnikov unit, and an unusual cut-out stock incorporating a pistol grip. Normally the weapon is equipped with either the PSO-1 telescopic sight or the NSPU-3 night sight, which incorporates an image-intensifier, but this one was fitted with an under-barrel laser sight of a make Murphy didn’t recognize, and a Bushnell telescopic sight. Belt and braces, he thought.

  Murphy hefted the weapon in his hands. It felt solid and familiar, which was unsurprising as he had used one of these twice in the past. He switched on the laser sight and, after checking that he was unobserved, aimed the rifle through the window at the building opposite. Clearly visible in the absolute centre of the sight was the tiny red spot, which showed where the laser marker was being projected. Whoever had sighted-in this rifle knew their trade.

  He laid the Dragunov aside, careful not to damage the box it had arrived in. He was going to have to transfer the weapon down to his car, and he could hardly walk through the hotel lobby carrying a four-foot sniper rifle in his hand.

  The second box contained a spare pistol magazine, twenty rounds of 7.62mm Soviet ammunition for the Dragunov, a box of fifty rounds of 9mm Parabellum bullets, and a pistol that Murphy at first didn’t recognize. It looked like a Ruger P85 but the hammer design was completely different, so it took Murphy a few moments to place it. It was a most unusual choice: a Daewoo DP51, manufactured in South Korea since 1993, and a good, reliable weapon.

  Murphy pressed the release on the left side of the butt and extracted the magazine, opened the box of ammunition and loaded thirteen rounds, then picked the spare magazine out of the box and loaded that as well. There was also a screw-on silencer for the pistol, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.

  With his personal weapon now loaded, Murphy smiled slightly. It would certainly be difficult to attribute the forthcoming assassinations of three CIA agents to any one nation, not if a Russian sniper rifle and a South Korean pistol were the weapons used. And probably the last nation that anyone might consider responsible would be America.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  Despite his confident assertions to Inspector Lavat, Richter hadn’t underestimated the magnitude of the task facing him. Trying to locate exactly where the Greek had been diving was going to take luck as well as determination, but he did have both a plan and a secret weapon – the Agusta Westland Merlin HM Mk 1 ASW helicopters carried by the Invincible. But first he had to talk to Simpson.

  The Merlin landed on three spot and the noise of the three jet engines diminished slightly as the pilot dropped the collective lever all the way down and the aircraft’s weight settled onto its landing gear. Flight De
ck personnel walked forward as soon as directed by the FDO and lashed the helicopter to the deck. Only then was the rear door of the Merlin slid open and the sole passenger – Richter – allowed to climb out.

  He walked across the Flight Deck, opened the door into the island and climbed the stairs up to Flyco. As he had expected, Roger Black was in the chair and controlling the deck, but Wings was standing behind him, gazing down as maintainers swarmed around the Merlin which now sat on the deck below, engines silent, rotors stationary and folded back into the parked position.

  ‘That was quick, Paul,’ said Commander (Air). ‘Is there anything you should be telling us?’

  ‘Possibly, sir,’ Richter replied. ‘But first could I have a word in private?’

  Wings looked somewhat startled, but nodded. ‘There’s nobody in the Bridge Mess at the moment. Would that do?’

  ‘Fine.’ Richter turned and led the way down the stairs. The Bridge Mess is a small dining room located directly below Flyco, and is only used to provide meals for officers who need to spend long periods of time on the bridge and, because of their duties, can’t leave it to go down to the Wardroom to eat. Typically, it’s used by Commander (Air), Lieutenant Commander (Flying) and the Air Staff Officer.

  Richter slid open the door and entered, Commander (Air) right behind him. The two men sat down facing each other across the table.

  ‘This is all very mysterious, Paul. What’s going on?’

  ‘At this moment, I’m not absolutely certain,’ Richter said, ‘but what I can tell you – for your ears only at the moment – is that there are two dead Greeks lying in a tiny village called Kandíra on the south coast of Crete. All the indications are that one of them found a sealed container somewhere which he took home and opened, with the help of the second Greek, his nephew. Within twelve hours both men were dead, killed by a really fast-acting pathogen.

  ‘That’s the overall picture, but there are several aspects of the situation that worry me. The Greek who found the container was a professional diver. Open-source information from a couple of Athens newspapers claim that he had found the wreck of an aircraft on the seabed somewhere near Crete. The obvious conclusion is that he found the container in that same wreck.’

  ‘When did he find this aircraft?’

  ‘No more than a day or two before he died, I think. That’s the first anomaly. What was a deadly pathogen doing in a wrecked aircraft lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean? According to the CDC expert who’s on the scene right now, whatever killed those two men so rapidly makes it far more lethal than any other known virus. And the fact that it was in a sealed container suggests that either it was being transported to a secure laboratory for investigation or it was heading the other way.’

  Commander (Air) nodded. ‘You’re suggesting it was some kind of biological weapon that had already been developed?’

  ‘Exactly, and whether it’s a natural agent or some kind of developed bioweapon is irrelevant – the essential fact is that this agent is lethal.

  ‘My next concern is that there’s been some third-party involvement in the situation. I’ve told you about a sealed container, but that was merely deduced by the CDC man because the item itself is missing. It seems that two unknown men entered both scenes to retrieve the evidence before the CDC expert got there.

  ‘My principal worry is that whoever retrieved it did so with the intention of using it somewhere else. We could be looking at some form of terrorist activity, and the men involved are clearly ruthless. They killed a police officer stationed outside the second property and dumped his body in a nearby ditch, along with those of two elderly villagers.’

  Wings’ intense expression turned to one of shock. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the killings obviously add a different dimension to the situation. What assistance do you want from us on the Invincible?’

  ‘Three things, sir. First, a secure communications channel so that I can talk to my section in London. Second, the use of a Merlin first thing tomorrow morning. I want to use its dunking sonar to try to locate the wrecked aircraft that the Greek found. Third, and assuming we manage to find this aircraft, the help of the ship’s diving officer to go down and investigate it.’

  Chapter 15

  Thursday

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  The two men stared down into Spiros Aristides’s chest cavity.

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot of blood in there,’ Evans said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Hardin shifted his gaze from the body to Evans’s face. ‘I’ve never encountered it, thank God, but I only know of one virus that can do this.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Variola.’ The single word cut across the room like a knife, stunning Evans.

  ‘Smallpox?’ he echoed, taking an inadvertent step backwards. ‘But that’s been eradicated, has been for years.’

  The last recorded victim of naturally occurring variola, the smallpox virus, was a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin who contracted the disease on 27 October 1977, and who survived. The last ever smallpox infection was reported about a year later, when three members of a family named Parker contracted the disease in Birmingham, England: two of them died. But this outbreak apparently occurred because of viral spores escaping from a small laboratory in the building where the first member of the Parker family to be infected – Janet, a medical photographer – worked. The researcher whose room had probably been the source of the infection was later found dying, an apparent suicide.

  Hardin nodded at Evans. ‘But this isn’t smallpox, unless it’s a completely unknown strain,’ he said, gesturing at the body. ‘No pustules, no sign of any damage to the skin at all. No, this is something very different.’

  But there was no denying the truth of what Evans had said. Normally, the chest cavity of a corpse being autopsied contains virtually no blood, and what there is almost invariably results from the gross assault on the body carried out by the pathologist when opening up the cavity itself. All of the organs there contain blood, of course, but the cavity itself should contain none.

  Inside Spiros Aristides’s opened-up chest there was blood visible everywhere.

  ‘Right,’ Hardin said. ‘The cavity appears to contain at least one pint of blood, and it is still fairly fluid. This long after death it should have clotted, which suggests we might be dealing with some kind of haemorrhagic fever virus that has attacked the platelets. On initial external examination the organs appear normal.’

  ‘Should we take a sample of blood from here for bacterial examination?’ Evans asked.

  Hardin nodded. ‘Yes. I don’t yet know where all this blood came from, so a sample might help. If it came from the heart or the lungs, there’s a good chance of contamination by various kinds of airborne bacteria, so take a sample from the femoral artery as well, if you can, for comparison.’

  Evans nodded, easily filled a syringe with blood from the Greek’s abdomen, then parted Aristides’s legs so that he could reach the site of the femoral artery in the groin. He mounted a needle on a forty-millilitre syringe and slid it into the artery. As he eased the plunger out he was rewarded by a small amount of deep red liquid. Removing the lids from two small containers of brown blood-culture liquid, he injected the blood samples into them and carefully labelled each one correctly. If there were any bacteria present in the blood they would develop inside the containers, thus enabling them to be observed and identified.

  Once Evans had finished his bit, Hardin selected another scalpel and reached into the chest cavity. ‘I’m now removing the heart,’ he said to the tape recorder. He began severing the arteries and veins that surrounded it, then cut away the supporting membrane. He pulled the vital organ free, studied it for a few moments and then handed it carefully to Evans. Beside the younger man a selection of large stainless-steel bowls stood ready on the sideboard, and he placed the heart into one of them for dissection later.

  ‘The heart appears norm
al on external examination. I’m next removing the lungs,’ Hardin continued, then reached back into Aristides’s chest cavity, cutting carefully with the scalpel until he could free them. ‘They’re heavy,’ he said, as he picked them up using both hands. ‘Five gets you ten they’re oedematous – full of blood,’ he added as he passed them across to Evans who was already holding out a steel dish ready to receive them.

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘we’ll look at those later. Now we come to the smelly bit – the small intestine.’

  Coiled and convoluted, the small intestine is held in place by the mesenteric membrane, itself a part of the peritoneum, the skin which lines the abdomen in all vertebrate animals. Hardin cut away the membranes securing the small intestine to the abdomen, then severed both ends of it. Immediately a pungent odour filled the room which both men could smell even through their Racal hoods, and a grey goo – called chyme and consisting of partially digested food – began oozing out of the lower end of the intestine.

  Evans looked down at the chyme as Hardin wrestled the coils into the large steel dish he was holding. ‘Is it my imagination, Tyler, or is this chyme darker than usual?’

  Hardin stopped and looked closely at the severed end of the intestine. ‘It varies from individual to individual and a lot depends on diet, but you could be right. We’ll wash it out later and take some samples for toxicological examination.’

  Hardin started working on the liver next, using his scalpel to separate it from its various blood vessels, and placed it in a steel dish. ‘More smells,’ he said, as he turned to the membranes supporting the stomach and large bowel. He removed the stomach first, then cut through the rest of the membrane supporting the large bowel, severing the end of the rectum as close as possible to the anus, and also cut away the urethra and bladder. All these pelvic organs Hardin removed together, then used his scalpel to separate them. The bladder and urethra he placed in one steel bowl, and the large bowel into another one.