Paths of Courage

by Mike Woodhams

  “Mr Talbot, we will follow the South American coastline until we reach the Windwards. If nothing transpires before that, we’ll turn for home.”

  Then, to the helmsman, “Maintain course and speed. Make your depth 400. Steady as she goes.”

  29

  Having entered the air-lock, using the commandeered badge, Grace nervously stepped out from the other side into what was undoubtedly a Level 2 area, with a series of changing rooms lining the rear wall. She knew for certain now that beyond these rooms would lie Level 3 and Level 4 – the hot zone. Choosing an unoccupied room marked “Females Only”, she stripped completely and pulled on a sterilized white cotton jumpsuit together with a white surgical cap and a pair of cotton socks laid neatly out on a shelf. The very cleanliness of this area told Grace the North Koreans had as much healthy respect for the lethal viruses they were dealing with as the British, which reassured her of the reliability of the protection she was about to use. She hid the Sig and holster together with the metal container for vials in her discarded clothing and left the cubical.

  At the end of the changing area, she stepped into a common shower-like compartment bathed in ultraviolet light and walked out through a door that led into a Level 3 area. The large rectangular room housed space suits hanging on wall hooks, together with other equipment necessary for a Level 4 entry. At the far end, beyond the stainless-steel sliding doors marked with a large biohazard symbol, she knew she would enter directly into the hot zone.

  Several people were busily changing in and out of space suits and thankfully ignored her entry. Grace moved over to a quiet corner and selected one of the blue suits that looked about her size; fortunately, none had an owner’s name and all appeared to be in relatively good condition. Nevertheless, she took time to inspect the areas prone to wear – around the buttocks, the armpits, the knees – to make doubly sure no holes were evident. Satisfied, she looked for and found an air regulator, surgical gloves and tape. She slid the gloves on, then, using the tape, proceeded to seal the jumpsuit joints at her wrists and ankles. She finally struggled into the space suit, ignoring the stale odour, before strapping the regulator to her back and making her way somewhat apprehensively towards the ominous doors leading into Level 4. Pressing a wall pad, the doors parted and she entered the air-lock decontamination chamber. The doors slid closed behind her and Grace knew she had now reached the point of no return. Several seconds later, she activated another wall pad opening the inner doors. Weak at the knees, panic welling up almost uncontrollably now, Grace had to summon every ounce of her courage to move forward into the hot zone.

  She stepped out into a small ante-room full of white rubber boots placed in pairs on the floor around the walls. She chose a pair her size, clambered into them and passed through a swinging door into a moderate-sized room with smooth white walls and ceiling. Curled blue air-lines hung down the centre and around the sides of the room. She plugged in the regulator and cool, dry air immediately flooded into her suit, pressurizing it with a roar, momentarily blocking out the chatter. Lining walls to the left and right were various-sized freezers, some opened, presently used by personnel carrying and storing laboratory and experimental materials. Did these freezers hold a super virus? The Koreans using them seemed very casual and somewhat less than security-minded, so possibly not. Since entering Level 2, she had yet to encounter a single guard.

  Grace moved to the end of the room and turned left into a much smaller open area, which led into a long gallery lined with four glass-fronted compartments down one side. Several personnel in space suits were looking through the glass panels; she quietly mingled in and slowly made her way down the gallery.

  In the first compartment, two men lay under subdued light on beds at the rear wearing only trousers. They were unmarked and appeared to be asleep. In the next, a lightly clothed woman and child cowered in one corner, their exposed flesh partly covered in waxy red blotches; large boils lined the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands. In the third compartment, a man lay naked on a central bed under a bright light, body studded from head to toes in small, bubble-like, dry blisters with hardly a gap between, some beginning to rupture and leak iridescent pus about his face and extremities. When she reached the last, Grace gasped in horror; for curled up in a foetal position on the bare concrete floor in the middle of the compartment were two naked human forms, both totally shrouded in a mass of blackened pus and scabs, skin almost stripped away from the bodies. Their eyes were severely bloodshot, intense and they stared pleadingly at the glass. Grace could not help but feel sickened and appalled at the plight of these two forms; their pain must have been beyond any that a human being could be expected to endure. From her experiments with monkeys, she could see these two unfortunate people were in the terminal stages of what appeared to be the smallpox virus as it was allowed to take its natural course without medication of any kind. She suspected these poor individuals in the four compartments were displaying the effects of the vaccine at varying dosage levels from the splicing of the human IL-4 gene into the virus DNA to create a super strain. She had undertaken similar experiments with monkeys at Porton, administering different dosage amounts of a trial vaccine simultaneously to several and testing the effect over a set period of time. If so, she guessed the two men in the first compartment had received the maximum dosage of a successful vaccine to have remained unscathed like they were and those in the fourth had received nothing at all. From the chatter she was picking up through the communication system her suspicions were soon confirmed. It took her a moment or two to recover from the shock at discovering that the North Koreans had actually created a super variola and possibly a successful vaccine to go with it. There had to be a vaccine. Almost overwhelmed by the horror of what she encountered and steeling herself to face the demon, she turned and headed back along the gallery to find the labs. The scientist in her was determined to find out how they had devised such a monster strain, then after that, to discover where the vaccine was kept.

  Returning to the freezer area, Grace followed a group of personnel pushing equipment trolleys down another corridor, which she hoped would lead to a laboratory. She guessed right and entered a bright, white-tiled, rectangular room some sixty-feet long by forty wide, full of space-suited people hunched over workstations on the end of air-hoses hanging from the ceiling. Through an opening at the far end, she could see glass-fronted cages housing naked humans. This definitely was a lab of some significance. If the super strain was to be found, it must surely be found here.

  Adrenaline pumping, Grace moved to one of the few empty workstations trying hard to appear as inconspicuous as possible. She pulled down an air-hose and plugged it into her regulator. She set about checking the workstation equipment and could tell straightaway it was configured for experimenting with the variola virus. She glanced sideways at the scientists working either side, her experienced eye telling her they were engaged in variola major testing. Grace prayed that the workstation was not designated to a specific person. So far she had remained unchallenged and could not believe the casualness of the security, but was thankful at the lack thereof.

  Her luck held. Not long after setting up the equipment, a suited technician pushing a stainless-steel trolley stopped beside Grace, looked at her and waited. On the trolley were two plastic racks: a blue rack holding several vials of white liquid and a red rack, immersed in water, holding twelve vials of pinkish, opalescent liquid, which Grace immediately recognized as melted smallpox seed. Could it be the super virus? She trembled at the thought, curbing her fear. The vials in water kept the contents at 37 degrees centigrade after removal from a liquid nitrogen bed in a home freezer. Grace guessed the technician expected her to help herself to the vials and she did so with extreme care. She guessed again that she was expected to conduct experiments with the contents like the rest of the occupants alongside her and at the other workstations. However, her experiment would have only one aim: to determine exactly what each of the vials contained. T
aking a vial from each rack and placing them in the holder alongside the electron microscope, she found herself wondering what strain the smallpox vial held: Harper, India-1, Bangladesh, Aralsk or Rahima? Or perhaps even some other unknown variola major? All, however, represented the most deadly of strains known to mankind, but an IL-4 smallpox combination would be the deadliest of them all.

  Dr Grace Seymour opened the smallpox vial, held it up to the light and tipped it gently. She then stared at the variola major to ensure it had fully melted. A sense of purpose coupled with professional calmness now overcame her nervousness as she reached for a pipette, removed some of the liquid and dribbled it into a Petri dish. She then placed the dish under the electron microscope.

  Peering into the scope, she examined the colour image. Instantly her expert eye recognized a genetically engineered super virus swimming before her. She examined closely the recombinant virus’s familiar DNA double-helix structure, wrapped in a membrane of grey, with shades of blue and pink along its edges. But what made the difference was the Interleukin-4 gene that she could see had been successfully spliced to the upper nucleotides, creating an extra layer of membrane, which she determined made it resistant to all known vaccines.

  Staggered by what she was seeing, Grace reached for the other vial, put some into a dish and placed it under the microscope. What she viewed floating in the liquid appeared to resemble unfamiliar bacterial cells with small rings of extra plasmids, or DNA, dotted within each of the cell structures. The DNA strands were mixed in with large amounts of cytokine molecules. To Grace this presented nothing special, but she would need time she didn’t have to determine the significance of the mix. She decided there was nothing to lose by adding the liquid to the super virus dish to see what happened. This she did and minutes later was absolutely stunned. She watched the white liquid rapidly devour the super virus until none of the variola remained in the dish. To have undeniable proof of what she and many other virologists around the world had been striving for rocked Grace to the very core. How can this be? How can a seemingly simple combination of bacterial cells and cytokines provide such a powerful antidote? Where the hell did those bacterial cells come from anyway? She had no time to speculate now; her mind raced. She had to find out where this vaccine was stored, grab what she could and then get the hell out of this place as fast as her legs would carry her.

  Suddenly, she was aware of somebody close by. She turned and came face-to-face with a female behind the clear plastic suit mask looking suspiciously at her.

  “Where is Comrade Yu Son today?” a high-pitched, authoritative voice came through the head communication system.

  Grace controlled her panic and replied calmly, gambling on the outcome. “She’s not on duty. I have just arrived here and was told to use her workstation until one is allocated.” She then quickly changed the subject in the hope of diverting the woman’s attention. “The one mil of vaccine I applied to the Interleukin smallpox sample had a very rapid effect. A lesser dosage would, in my opinion, have done the same. I am about to try to prove the theory.”

  The woman kept her eyes intently on Grace for what seemed a lifetime and then bent down to look through the microscope. Seconds later, she stood up again and smiled. Relief flooded Grace’s senses.

  “A very clean dish,” the woman said. “Good for you to have seen the obvious so soon. You do not have to test the theory. I have already done so and it works. All that remains now is to test it on our human subjects. I have requested four new specimens to be given lesser proportionate dosages and we will observe the effects,” she added matter-of-factly.

  Dispassionate bitch, thought Grace, desperately wanting to know from her what type of bacteria was being used, but afraid to ask for fear of exposure. She was sure every virologist in the room would know the make-up of the vaccine. “I look forward to monitoring the results,” she said, sick inside.

  The woman stared at Grace, then asked, “Where were you before this posting?”

  Grace did not hesitate; she had done her homework for just this situation and replied confidently, “Camp 22, Haengyong. I was there for one year.” She referred to the notorious labour camp in the northeast of the country where some 55,000 prisoners, including women and children, toiled each day to produce goods for sale in foreign lands and where over twenty-five percent of the inmate population die every year from overwork, but mostly from the testing of biological and chemical agents.

  The woman nodded. “And before that?”

  “Chongju – two years.” This was a facility where biological agents were weaponized.

  “Did you work with Professor Park Ung Gul?”

  Grace’s mind raced; the woman was probing. Grace did not recall a professor of that name when running over the names of senior virologists that were shown to her.

  She took a chance. “I do not recall a professor of that name when I was there. Perhaps before that?”

  The woman smiled, nodding at the same time, then proceeded in a casual way to question Grace on technical aspects of the IL-4 gene and the various variola major strains until she appeared satisfied that Grace knew what she was talking about. Nodding again, the woman seemed to lose interest and began to turn away.

  Grace took another big risk. “As I am new here, could you tell me where the vaccine is stored? I will return the vial on my way out.”

  Turning back, the woman answered sharply, “Technicians will do that – leave it.” Then she hesitated. “On second thought, I will show you; you may be called to experiment at unusual hours when they are not here. Follow me.”

  Grace unhooked the air-hose and duly obliged, unable to believe her luck. Just how much longer could it last?

  In Level 0, Ryder waited anxiously. Grace had entered Level 1 over two hours ago. Hanging around the airlock was beginning to attract suspicious glances, so much so, that he and the other two men were forced to split up and leave the corridor altogether for short periods before re-entering singly at various intervals. If she wasn’t out within the next hour he decided they would go in.

  Grace followed the woman along the corridor to where the freezers were kept at the entrance to Level 4. When they arrived, the virologist pointed out the large liquid nitrogen freezers in which the super virus was stored and watched as a technician lifted the circular lid of the waist-high, drum-shaped unit, emitting a cloud of white vapour, which poured down the side of the drum and onto the concrete floor. The technician carefully removed a rack of vials from a trolley and placed it inside. Less than a minute later, the lid was replaced to avoid the reservoir of nitrogen in the bottom from heating up and creating a fog-like atmosphere in the room.

  “Does that hold the entire stocks of IL-4 smallpox here?” Grace asked innocently, wanting to find out if more was stored elsewhere, while glancing around to see if a furnace was nearby. There wasn’t.

  “Yes, this is the only place where it is manufactured. Once it is full, the contents are sent to Chongju for weaponization,” replied the virologist, guiding Grace away.

  She decided it would be futile to attempt to find a furnace and empty the contents of the freezer into it – firstly, because there were too many vials; and secondly, a furnace could be some distance away making it impossible to transport the freezer contents without discovery. Her priority now: to get out with a vaccine.

  Expecting to be shown another freezer, or at least a refrigerator holding the vaccine, Grace was surprised and greatly relieved when the woman opened a door close to the air-lock and both entered a smaller workroom that housed lab testing equipment on one side and shelves containing an assortment of vials on the other, next to a stainless-steel bench and sink unit. At the sink stood a technician siphoning liquid from the racked vials into small stainless-steel tubular containers. The containers, explained the woman, held stocks of the vaccine for experimental purposes and were vacuum-designed to maintain the potency of the vaccine for up to three weeks without refrigeration. She added that this was necessary to inoc
ulate the population in the more remote regions of the north. Manufacturing for mass use, she said, was carried out in Pyongyang. Grace eyed the six-inch long, two-inch diameter tubes and wondered just how she was going to steal one, or maybe two, and get them out. She worried too if they would have sufficient time to get back to the sub and to a refrigerator. The virologist showed her how to siphon off the liquid into the vials, excused herself, then left.

  Grace went out shortly after and milled around in the freezer area with other personnel until the technician came out of the room pushing a trolley of vials. Grace sidled back into the room, took two tubes from the rack, checked that they held the vaccine and, with adrenaline pumping, left and headed straight for the exit. Unsuccessfully attempting to conceal the containers in the palms of her hands, she unplugged the air-hose and entered the small ante room. Here she removed boots and pushed the air-lock operating pad praying no one was coming through or waiting on the other side.

  The air-lock decontamination doors slid open – the room was empty. She stepped in, turned on the shower with difficulty and hoped it was Lysol spraying the space suit clean. One minute later, she exited the chamber and went back into the common changing area. Thankfully only a handful of people were there, all on the far side. She clambered out of the suit, removed her gloves, tape and socks and binned them, wrapping the tubes in a surgical cap before heading for the female locker room, her heart in her mouth.

  Grace entered the Level 2 decon chamber, stood under the ultraviolet light for several seconds, trembling with stress, then hurried to the locker where she quickly changed back into the uniform with the yellow badge and strapped the holster with gun back onto her calf. The vials were too big for the metal container she had brought so she placed the two tubes in breast pockets of the jacket, put on the medical smock and cap and headed for the exit.