Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Echelon is a communications intercept programme operated jointly by the American National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, and with contributions from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It routinely monitors all telephone calls, emails and fax transmissions originating or terminating within its operating area, searching for specific words and phrases. Carnivore is a broadly equivalent programme, but run on a much smaller scale and operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

  Richter smiled back at him. ‘Sometimes open-source information proves just as valuable, Mike, and in this case I’ve no option but to rely on it because it’s all I’ve got. And you’re just a touch out of date anyway – the cutting-edge communications intercept programme now running is the National Reconnaissance Office’s Blue Crystal, not the National Security Agency’s Echelon.’

  ‘Blue Crystal? Never heard of it,’ O’Reilly replied.

  ‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ Richter said. ‘If you had, I’d have had to shoot you. Now, do you think you can find this bloody aircraft for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Finding needles in haystacks is our speciality. Let’s get going.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘He died of what?’ Inspector Lavat doubted the truth of what he’d just heard.

  ‘He drowned,’ Hardin repeated. ‘Aristides drowned in his own blood. The actual cause of death was respiratory failure as his lungs filled up with blood. This is a type of pulmonary oedema that’s often called Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS. It’s the commonest cause of death in patients suffering from an attack by an arenavirus like Venezuelan Haemorrhagic Fever, Brazilian Sabia Virus or Lassa Fever.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Lassa Fever,’ Lavat said, ‘but not the other two. So Aristides died of something like Lassa Fever – is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, or at least not Lassa or any of the other known arenaviruses, because those all act quite slowly. The victim first complains of a headache and muscle pains, which gradually get worse, then he gets feverish and starts vomiting, has diarrhoea and begins bleeding from the gums. Occasionally those affected suffer haemorrhages in the whites of the eyes. Their blood pressure falls dramatically, they go into shock, and in the later stages they suffer convulsions and lapse into unconsciousness.

  ‘In the final stages many display a massive swelling of the head and neck and decerebrate rigidity – a condition that freezes the body into a contorted posture as the higher brain functions are lost. Some suffer from encephalopathy – that’s an inflammation of the brain – and those who do usually lapse into a coma with severe convulsions.’

  ‘I’m a little out of date,’ Dr Gravas said, ‘but I think I’ve read about some kind of treatment for Lassa Fever.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hardin said, ‘there is a treatment now, though it’s still somewhat experimental, and the drug – it’s called ribavirin – must be administered as early as possible after the diagnosis has been made if treatment is going to be successful.’

  Gravas nodded slowly. ‘In this case,’ he said, ‘I doubt very much if ribavirin or anything else would have helped, given the sheer speed of the infection. In some ways,’ he added, ‘from what you’re saying it looks as if Aristides died from a hugely accelerated form of an arenavirus – what you might almost call a kind of “Galloping Lassa”?’

  Despite himself, Hardin smiled. ‘That’s not a bad way of putting it, Dr Gravas. He did die of ARDS, and although a lot of the classic symptoms of Lassa were absent in Aristides’s case, and the kind of severe bleeding he presented is rare, we can call it that for the moment.’

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  The Spook Two callsign hadn’t been Richter’s idea, but Mike O’Reilly had thought it amusing enough to suggest using it for communications on a discrete frequency between helicopter and ship, and Wings had raised no objections. If they had to talk to Soúda Bay or any outside controlling authority, they would instead use the aircraft’s side number.

  The transit to Andikíthira had taken only a few minutes in the Merlin flying at one hundred and forty knots and by ten-thirty local time the aircraft was in the hover just over a mile to the east of that tiny island. Andikíthira is arguably the most isolated speck of land in the Aegean and is inhabited by a population of about fifty people living mostly in the port of Potamos at its northern end.

  Potamos boasts one of almost everything: one policeman, one telephone, one doctor, one teacher and one monastery. But there’s no bank or post office, and the only way on or off the island is by a ship that stops there once a week on its journey to Crete from the much larger island of Kíthira, lying a few miles to the north-west. Running water and toilets are either scarce or unavailable, depending on the time of year. There is a café and a restaurant, and about ten rooms available for tourists sufficiently determined to spend time there.

  The island’s chief claim to fame is the celebrated ‘Andikíthira Mechanism’, which was pulled from the sea just off the island in 1901 and is now on permanent display in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The fragmentary remains of a highly complex object fabricated from bronze around two thousand years ago, it appears to have been designed as an astronomical clock, and is unique in that no equivalent device is known of until the time of the Renaissance. Hence it has been argued that this mechanism was the progenitor of all subsequent timepieces.

  None of this, however, was of the slightest interest to Richter, or to any of the other men aboard the Merlin. All they were concerned about was locating the wrecked aircraft as soon as possible.

  The pilot had used the flight control system to auto-transition the helicopter into the hover, and was now flying the aircraft hands-off, waiting for further instructions from Mike O’Reilly, who was the senior officer and therefore the aircraft captain. And O’Reilly wasn’t saying much presently because his entire attention was concentrated on the displays directly in front of him. Below the helicopter a cable snaked vertically downwards into the blue of the Aegean and at the end of it dangled a Flash lightweight folding acoustic dipping sonar from Thales Underwater Systems which was capable of searching depths down to two thousand feet. It was the data received from this sonar which O’Reilly was analysing.

  ‘Anything yet?’ Richter leaned closer to Sobs in the cramped rear compartment, still trying to get used to the slight warble in his voice caused by the throat microphone.

  He had spent nearly a thousand hours flying Sea Kings before he had made the jump sideways to train on Sea Harriers, but he had always sat in one of the front seats, so what went on in the aircraft’s darkened rear compartment was a complete mystery to him. Essentially, the observer in the back of a Merlin fights the aircraft. He tells the pilot where to go and what to do when he gets there, and not for nothing are ASW helicopter pilots referred to as ‘taxi drivers’. That was one reason why Richter himself had switched to fixed wing: he had quickly got tired of sitting twiddling his thumbs and looking out at different-coloured bits of various oceans while the guys in the back had all the fun.

  O’Reilly dragged his eyes away from the display and began hoisting the sonar body from the water. He glanced sideways at Richter. ‘Yes, there’s quite a lot of stuff down there, but we can eliminate most of it for reasons that I won’t bore you with. I’ve marked three contacts that I’d like to have another look at, but first we should do a general survey of all the waters around the island.’ O’Reilly checked to make sure that the sonar body was inboard. ‘Pilot, jump three five zero, distance two thousand yards.’

  ‘Roger that,’ another voice spoke on the intercom, and Richter sensed the increasing vibration as the pilot wound on the power and the Merlin began to climb out of its hover.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  It became obvious fairly quickly that Krywald was not a natural sailor. The water in th
e harbour was almost flat calm, but outside the protection afforded by the jetties it became fairly choppy. By the time they were a mile or so off-shore Krywald was looking distinctly green, his eyes fixed determinedly on the distant horizon and his replies faint monosyllables to anything either of the other two men said.

  Elias wasn’t drawn to Krywald, but he sympathized with him. The gulf that exists between somebody who is seasick and someone who isn’t is enormous. It’s said that there are two stages in the condition: in the first you’re afraid you’re going to die, but in the second you’re afraid you’re not going to die. And the only truly infallible cure for mal de mer is to go and sit under a tree.

  But they were now a long way from anywhere Krywald was likely to find a tree. Elias glanced back over his shoulder towards the rocky outline of Crete, around eighteen miles distant and still just visible through a slight heat haze, then gazed ahead at the open water.

  Before starting up the engine back at Chóra Sfakia harbour, Elias had taken the only chart he could find in the boat and marked on it the co-ordinates ‘McCready’ had supplied to Krywald. The position indicated was pretty much mid-way between the two islands of Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, so Elias didn’t think they’d have any trouble finding it. They were even then passing abeam Gavdopoúla, the smaller and more northerly of the two islands, so the chart was now almost superfluous. Elias realized he could navigate the rest of the way just by using his eyes.

  On the chart itself, which lay on the wooden bench seat in front of him, Elias had placed one of the two GPS units that Krywald had supplied. As he gazed down at the squat black box, which looked something like an over-sized mobile telephone, he noticed the co-ordinates in the display change. The boat was moving steadily south-south-west at about eight knots: Elias glanced at his watch and calculated that they should reach the dive site within about thirty minutes.

  In fact, this estimate was slightly pessimistic, and just under twenty-two minutes later Stein headed to the bow of the boat to toss the concrete block serving as an anchor over the side. Elias watched as the rope vanished over the gunwale, waiting for the tell-tale slackness that would signify that the anchor had reached the seabed, then instructed Stein to cleat the rope down and switched off the engine.

  The open boat swung gently around in a circle, its bow now secured by the anchor rope. Elias checked the GPS once again, cross-checking it with the co-ordinates provided, then pulled off his shirt and shorts to reveal a pair of black swimming trunks. He next attached the lead weight to the end of the polypropylene rope and measured out lengths of it using an old diver’s trick – from the average man’s left shoulder to his outstretched right hand was about three feet or one metre.

  Using this crude but surprisingly accurate method, he identified the depths at which he wanted the four extra aqualung cylinders to be located, and swiftly secured them in turn to the rope. He then lowered the weight, the rope and the cylinders over the side and tied down the rope securely to a set of cleats on the port-side gunwale. It was crucial to his own survival that the compressed-air cylinders were located at the correct depths, so he took extra care in paying out exactly the right amount of rope before securing it.

  Ten minutes later Elias zipped up the jacket of his wetsuit, shrugged the aqualung onto his back, secured the weight belt around his waist and checked all his equipment twice, from the knife strapped to the calf of his right leg to the mask pushed up to rest on his forehead. Then he turned to Stein. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said.

  ‘I know you don’t, but it’s really very simple. Once you’ve found the aircraft, all you need do is position these charges, activate the detonators, and get back up to the boat. Then we’re out of here and on our way back to the States.’ Stein bent down and opened the neck of the rucksack he’d placed on the seat beside him. He pulled out a plastic-covered packet and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘This is what’s called an M118 Composition Block Demolition Charge,’ Stein explained. ‘Usually they contain four half-pound sheets of C4 plastic explosive, and they’re normally used as cutting charges to slice through steel bridge supports, building girders or metal beams, that kind of thing. These are a bit bigger in fact, each containing about six kilos of plastic, because we don’t want anything left intact down there.’

  Elias looked uneasily at the packet as Stein offered it to him. ‘How stable is it?’

  ‘Very,’ Stein replied. ‘Watch this.’

  He hefted the package of explosive in his hand a couple of times, then smashed it down on the wooden bench with all the force he could muster. The explosive flattened out slightly, but otherwise didn’t react in any way. Elias had instinctively crouched down low in the stern of the boat, but gradually eased himself back to an upright position.

  ‘You can hit this stuff with a hammer or even fire a bullet into it, and it still won’t do a goddamn thing,’ Stein continued. ‘You have to use a detonator. Good reaction time there, though it wouldn’t have done you any good. If this baby had gone off you could use the biggest bit left of this boat as a toothpick.’

  ‘Christ,’ Elias said. ‘Don’t do things like that. What’s this C4 stuff made of anyway?’

  ‘Basically, it’s RDX,’ Stein said, ‘with a polyisobutene plasticizer added. The C4 looks like uncooked pastry, and you can perfectly safely mould it into pretty much any shape you want, which is why the military use it so frequently. It’s got a shelf-life of years, and it’s cheap, reliable and goes off with a hell of a bang.’

  ‘And underwater?’ Elias asked. ‘Is it waterproof, or what?’

  Stein nodded. ‘Water doesn’t affect it at all. Now the detonators are real easy.’

  He reached again into the rucksack and pulled out a plastic box about the size and shape of a child’s pencil case. He opened this and pulled out a long thin object, itself similar in size to a pencil. ‘This is a three-hour detonator,’ he explained. ‘Normally C4 is triggered by an electrical detonator powered by some kind of battery or current generator, but in these circumstances we obviously can’t go that route.

  ‘This detonator has a battery installed at the end you insert into the explosive, with two contacts that will actually carry the current. All you have to do is snap the end off each detonator, right here where the metal is pinched in. That allows sea water to seep inside and starts a chemical reaction which slowly eats away at a membrane about halfway down the detonator itself. Behind that membrane is a water-activated switch: once the membrane’s pierced, the switch completes the circuit to connect the battery, and everything goes bang.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  There was little that Inspector Lavat could usefully do to assist Hardin and his team in their search for the hot agent: police work had no place in the purely medical and epidemiological investigation of the two deaths. Though he realized that the investigations were inextricably linked, he was far more concerned with the murder of his own officer, and he frankly wasn’t sure how best to identify the killers.

  As a routine precaution, he had instituted a watch at all ferry ports and all three airports on the island, but the description his cordon police officer had provided was so vague as to be almost useless. The man was over at headquarters in Irakleío, trying to help build up a photofit picture of at least one of the two suspects, but Lavat wasn’t optimistic about the likely result of that.

  The roadblocks were still in place, although village residents were now being allowed to move into and out of Kandíra. All outsiders were still being refused entry. Lavat had just completed a tour of the perimeter of the village, checking that his officers were still manning the cordon and that they had an adequate supply of drinking water at their posts. Then, because it was, even by Cretan standards, a very hot day, he’d himself taken shelter from the sun in one of the tents erected near the main road entering the village.

  He was sitting with his second glass of water when Theodore Gravas appeared at the entrance flap. Twenty minutes earlier they’d both stood
at the barrier to watch as the light grey Merlin sent from the Invincible had lifted off from some waste ground outside the village – bound for the laboratory in Irakleío with the organ samples Hardin had extracted from Spiros Aristides’s body.

  ‘Found anything yet?’ Lavat asked, as Gravas sat down on the other side of the table.

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I’ve just been talking to Hardin. They’ve found nothing in Spiros’s house so far. They’ve taken swabs from the floors, doors, walls and so on, but the Americans seem to believe the causative agent either wasn’t there to be found or it’s been dissipated since and is now so scattered that they won’t be able to find it.’

  ‘So what’s their next move?’

  ‘Hardin’s people have just started on Nico’s apartment. Since that scene hasn’t had the same amount of traffic as Spiros’s house they may get lucky there. Otherwise, our best bet to find the agent is in the blood and tissues of its victims, so we’ll have to wait and see what Irakleío can uncover.’

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  The second location O’Reilly directed the pilot to lay almost directly north of Andikíthira and around two miles off-shore. Here again, he lowered the sonar body into the water and began an active sweep of the seabed below them and further around the eastern and northern coasts of the small island.

  Metallic objects, especially large metallic objects, are not uncommonly found on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. This area was a birthplace of civilization and was always the principal route for commerce between Europe and North Africa, besides being the location of several naval and air battles in the wars of the twentieth and previous centuries. And shallow waters – in oceanographic terms the Mediterranean is considered a shallow sea – are often the scene of the most violent storms, which have claimed numerous victims over the years.