As she leafed through folders of high-priority cases that had made it through the filtering processes, Roger entered the room. His face was pale, as if his usually rosy cheeks had been drained of blood.
“Twinkie, I’ve just gotten some news you’re going to want to hear.”
AUGUST 10TH, 11 A.M., SHOC, WHO HEADQUARTERS, GENEVA
Aeolus stood before a monitor in the SHOC, which displayed the flu’s spread. The number of cases and their locations had gone well past the point where he could keep them all in his head, and the map on the screen provided a good overview. Dots indicated singular cases, and circles showed multitudes. The color yellow indicated a possible case. Red was a confirmed case and black meant deaths. The circles sat within each other, yellow furthest out, red inside the yellow and black inside the red. The circles increased in size with a logarithmic scale as a function of the number of cases.
The red circle over Ternate now covered half the island. The situation there was hopeless. There wasn’t even a count of the infected or dead, just an estimate in the thousands, and it increased every day. The epidemic there would be over in a matter of weeks and thirty thousand or so people would be dead. The circle in Jakarta was still smaller than the one to the east, especially the inner black circle as it was still early and people had not yet started dying on a grand scale. They would though, and at the rate Jakarta’s circles were growing they would overtake the Maluku Islands within days.
There was, however, some good news. The quarantine in Kuala Lumpur had been mostly effective. Even though the number of infected were closing in on a hundred, the spread was much slower, thanks to the actions taken. One case had been confirmed outside Kuala Lumpur, but Rebecca was able to effectively isolate a large group of those who’d been in contact with the patient. With luck, it might hold. In Vietnam, there had been no further cases, neither suspected nor confirmed. Still, Aeolus wasn’t happy.
Richard, just off the phone from a call with the states, came up to Aeolus.
“Dr. Hughes, you look concerned.”
Kevin had explained how the map worked to Richard, who now pointed out: “The red dots seem well contained. Surely that’s good news? We don’t have the mass outbreaks through Southeast Asia you predicted. Why are you so worried, or is paranoia just a regular trait of your trade?”
“You see the scattered yellow dots in eastern India and northwest Thailand?” Aeolus answered. “These are rural areas. They don’t have the test yet and it will be another twenty-four to forty-eight hours until we know the situation there. Even if many of them turn out to be false alarms, there are still a lot. These yellow dots have been vetted by Rebecca, and they wouldn’t be on the map if they weren’t likely. She’s far too good for that. I can’t believe they’re all false, unless there’s some other infection raging there, but if that were true, we’d have heard of it. It just doesn’t make sense.
“But the amount of cases isn’t what worries me. What worries me is where they are. If we have a case in northern Thailand, how come we have none, not even suspected, in southern Thailand, closer to the Malaysian border? Something’s not right there. It doesn’t smell right.
“That said, you’re correct. In my profession we’re paid to be paranoid. It is indeed part of our trade.”
“Maybe it’s all just a coincidence?”
“Let’s hope so. Still, this map gives me that same uneasy feeling in my stomach that I usually associate with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
AUGUST 10TH, 6 P.M., FISHING VILLAGE, THREE MILES DOWNRIVER FROM HKA-U-IN, MAGWE PROVINCE, MYANMAR
Hlaing’s catch had been meager, which was why he was returning so much later than the other fishermen. He was hurrying, punting his boat with increased force towards the village. This made maintaining balance more difficult. Learning how to stand and steer the flat-keeled boat with nothing but a pole took years of training.
As he pulled his boat onto the beach, the usual cry of a lonely bird sounding over the marsh was cut off by gunshot. Hlaing jolted, and started running toward the village, crouching low in the shrubbery.
The sight that met him as he peeked out over a bush, into the village center, was exactly what he’d feared. There was the military, and in large numbers. The villagers were sitting in a line, the children wailing and the women weeping. At the end of the line lay his brother, motionless, with blood oozing from a hole in his forehead.
Why were they here? They hadn’t been this far out for almost a decade. The village was a quiet place, subsisting mainly on fishing and some pearl trading. They had done nothing to upset the military.
As a soldier aimed a flamethrower at one of the houses and set it on fire, Hlaing realized what was about to happen. They were going to destroy the entire village.
The images before his eyes moved in slow motion as the captain pointed his gun at the head of Hlaing’s wife and pulled the trigger. Hlaing’s heart stopped, but he managed to remain silent. But when the captain repeated the procedure, this time targeting Hlaing’s eldest son, he could not hold back his horror and screamed out loud.
The captain turned toward the sound and two soldiers started running in his direction.
Hlaing took off in a sprint, bullets ricocheting around him. He ran for his life, with great strength, but without aim. As the forest opened up and the beach stretched out before him, he realized it was over. He was exposed and there was nowhere to go.
AUGUST 10TH LUNCHTIME, SHOC, WHO HEADQUARTERS, GENEVA
The conversation had turned to Richard’s many questions about the flu in general, the current strain in particular and the essence of effective epidemiological countermeasures. Aeolus had come to like Richard. At first, he’d thought it was absolute nonsense to let someone in who knew so little about what they were doing, and he found Richard’s questions supremely annoyed him. But the boy was a fast learner. His questions were getting better and more relevant. He’d had no academic education beyond college, but he had a good head. He also obviously had the president’s ear. Aeolus saw the value in having him in the WHO’s corner.
Aeolus was explaining how smallpox had been eradicated and why, in spite of all WHO’s efforts, they were nowhere close to making any similar progress with polio, when the speakerphone crackled to life. It was Mandy, informing Aeolus that Rebecca Summers was on the line from New Delhi. Aeolus told Mandy to put her through and Rebecca appeared on the video screen. Next to her stood a man in his mid-thirties with brown hair, sloppily dressed in a hunting green herringbone tweed jacket with patched elbows, and far too long sleeves, reaching beyond second knuckle of this thumb.
“Aeolus, I don’t believe you’ve met Roger Burton,” said Rebecca.
“No, I haven’t had the pleasure. So, you’re the journalist who made me famous?”
“Yes, indeed I am.”
“Well done, I must say. It was a most timely article. It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you. Next time, though, please get your facts right. I don’t speak Bahasa. The mere thought of me doing so is embarrassing to me.”
“Aeolus,” said Rebecca cutting him off, “Roger has something to tell you that I think you want to hear.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Well, Dr. Hughes,” Roger began, “as you know, Burma, or Myanmar as the junta refers to it, has always been a closed nation.”
“To say the least,” nodded Aeolus.
“And during the last two years it’s become even more so. The military have forced all foreign correspondents out of the country. International phone calls and the Internet have been shut down. They trade with other ‘rogue states’ and subsist on smuggling, primarily heroin, but also weapons and precious stones.”
“Yes…”
“The country is now so closed that no one knows what goes on inside its borders.”
“Yes…”
“Or rather, virtually no one. I worked there before the regime cracked down on journalists, and I still have some sources in the northern part of the country
– drug runners. Drug runners who’ve kept satellite phones without being discovered and so have means of contacting the outside world.”
“Mr. Burton, would you mind getting to the point?”
“Something terrible is happening in Burma at the moment.”
“When is it not?”
“The army is killing people in their thousands, initially only in the southern parts of the country but now all over. It’s wholesale slaughter of an unprecedented magnitude, even for this regime.”
“So, they’re toughening up on the opposition. Egregious violations of human rights are hardly rare in that parody of a nation. I’m sorry, Mr. Burton, but I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“The reason they’re killing these people isn’t because they’re the opposition, it’s because they’re sick. A terrible epidemic’s hit Burma and the military is fighting it by killing everyone who shows symptoms or who they think’s been in contact with someone infected.”
Roger was silent while Aeolus digested what he had just heard. His mind was racing, trying to find some reason for what this journalist had told him would not be true. He found none.
“Helvete!” cursed Aeolus, slamming his cane into the floor. “Helvete!”
“After all my efforts to build direct relations and establish networks of informers all over the world, of course this daughter of the devil shows up in the only country where I don’t have visibility. There must be thousands of infected by now. While we’ve spent our efforts quarantining individual cases in Malaysia and Vietnam, Burma has been a humongous 435,000 square mile Petri dish where the virus has enjoyed exponential growth for two weeks.
“How the hell could this happen? And how the hell could they have been so stupid not to tell us? I mean, this must be some sort of record, even for that moronic regime. And you have to ask yourself, if they could have handled the situation any worse? I mean, even if we disregard for a moment the fact that genocide is generally a bad idea, half of the people they’re killing won’t be infected. About three-fourths of the rest would have survived. And while they’re doing this, hundreds, if not thousands, of asymptomatic carriers are travelling around the country, fleeing in panic from the military pogroms. Hel-vete!”
He turned to Richard.
“This, Richard, is the explanation of the yellow dots. As you see they’re centered on ‘the Golden Triangle’ for drug smugglers. This is why we have cases in northern Thailand, but not in the southern parts. It traveled north from Burma.
“It’s difficult to see how this could be any worse. Even if the epidemic hadn’t spread out of Burma, which it clearly has, there’s absolutely no way to stop these people from traveling the 1000-year-old smuggling routes through India, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. They earn their living from bypassing the military and police efforts to stop their cross-border travel.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Hughes,” interrupted Richard, “but I don’t understand. How can there be so many infected? If we compare it to the other Southeast Asian countries, there should be a handful, maybe hundreds; not thousands.”
“Someone from Indonesia went to Burma, a not uncommon sea-route by the way, around the time of the third incident in Limbong, before we even had the first quarantine in place. It explains everything. And what’s worse is that all our actions so far have been completely in vain. There is no way we can save the Eurasian continent now. Absolutely no way! The quarantines we have are pointless. This changes everything.”
Aeolus dropped into the closest chair. The room was silent. Everyone stared at him, waiting for a cue as he laid his cane on the table, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and gazed at the ceiling, taking deep slow breaths. It took him almost a minute to focus his thoughts and find that drive, deep inside him, that had always allowed him to rise to any challenge, yield to no obstacle and attack even the most insurmountable problem with an unceasing stream of energy.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mr. Burton. Usually I’d ask you to hold a story like this to avoid panic, but we’re beyond that point. Print what you feel you must.”
Aeolus disconnected the call, then clicked back to Mandy and erupted:
“Get everyone in the SHOC right now. And I mean everyone. Right now!”
Aeolus studied the cane’s handle. The time for offense was over. It was time to switch to defense.
It took five minutes to get everyone gathered. It took another three minutes for Aeolus to explain the situation. It took an additional minute for it to sink in, and then the room was quiet, the group caught in moment of stasis, while everyone was looking at Aeolus for leadership.
Aeolus spoke slowly: “As you can see, we’re now in a very different situation. The ambition of quarantining whole countries has now, with a few exceptions, at least for the Eurasian and African continents, become totally unrealistic. Instead, we have to search for micro-areas we can protect.
“We have to determine which cities can be isolated effectively. We have to understand what contiguous areas have geographical chokepoints where we can stop the inflow of people. I want to get everyone on this. Everyone. We need to work with others. National geographic societies should be helpful. And speak to Hank Wiley. The guys at Fort Detrick must have run simulations on this, at least for the NATO countries. I need you to put together a ranked list based on potential lives saved versus effort required to quarantine, as fast as humanly possible. If we can save the larger European cities or Russian areas enclosed by mountains, we might still be able to save a lot of people, a hundred million or so.”
He took a breath.
“That’s our first priority – Kevin and Ed will take the lead. Walt, I want you to help with figuring out what non-WHO resources can be of help, and use Stan to pull them in. After all, this is more of an exercise in geography and paramilitary planning than one of medicine.
“Our second priority is to buy time. If we can delay the spread a week, or maybe two, we can give Yelena the space she needs to develop a rapid test.”
He saw some skeptical faces.
“Don’t look at me like that. She can do it. I know she can!
“With a rapid test, enforcing quarantines will be easier and they’ll be more sustainable in the longer term. The way we buy time is by limiting travel as much as we can. I’m talking about stopping international flights, as well as domestic. I’m talking about shutting down highways and border-crossings, between countries and within. I’ll take the lead on this.
“Our third priority, although it might turn out to be the most important, is to get the American continents isolated. This is the most difficult task, but the one with the highest potential for saving lives. I’ve tried to make this happen already. I’ve exhausted my bag of tricks.”
He turned to Richard again.
“I’m asking you, Richard, to help us with this. I think you have learned enough by now to understand the gravity of our current situation. It’s clear the president listens to you, and I want you to tell us what you need to convince him. What proof, analysis, instructions, understanding, forecasts or expert opinions are required for you to make that recommendation? And once you do, I swear to God, we’ll put every resource at our disposal to work on it.”
He looked around at his staff.
“I know what you all think and feel right now. And you are right. This is a disaster - a disaster of biblical proportions. We’ve just lost a hundred million lives, at least. That said, there are still hundreds of millions to be saved. And we cannot – we will not – give up. This is not over. Pick yourself up. Call on what energy you have left, and let’s get to work.”
AUGUST 11TH, MORNING, AEOLUS’S SUITE, WHO REGIONAL OFFICE, 22, SHAM NATH MARG, NEW DELHI
Rebecca woke up with her arm around Roger, her head resting on his chest. She still couldn’t believe their room. The ceiling was fourteen feet high. The bed, king-size at least, was made up with smooth Egyptian cotton sheets. The dark-brown wood furniture, she’d been told, w
as all Victorian original. There was an abundance of fresh flowers, mostly lilies, her favorite, although she couldn’t understand how the butler had figured that out. The room was what she imagined a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria would look like. It was Aeolus’s personal room at the combined offices of WHO New Delhi and the Indian National Centre for Disease Control.
As part of his project to raise the standard of the WHO’s local infrastructure, Aeolus had pushed for refurbishment of the regional offices. He insisted they have the capability to be completely self-contained for a period of up to six months so that the staff could continue working, no matter what epidemic was on the loose outside.
The sites had been rebuilt, not only as a place for people to work, but to live. There were sleeping barracks, a mess with a sufficient supply of food and water, self-generated electricity and support staff – everything required for the office to function in total isolation. Nowhere was this more important than in New Delhi, where the density of the population would make it impossible to prevent the staff from getting infected on their way to and from the office.
Obviously, the WHO budget was not created to pay for the indulgences of Aeolus’s private residence. He’d paid for that himself. Say what you want about the man, but he knew how to live in style.
She called the butler for coffee and the wonderful truffle-sprinkled Eggs Benedict she’d become addicted to. She woke Roger with a gentle nudge.
As they chatted and read the newspaper, ironed flat by the butler, they couldn’t have been further removed from the calamity surrounding them. They were more like a couple on a honeymoon than two people in the midst of the battle against humanity’s greatest enemy in a century.
The Nightmare Scenario Page 21