“I have some data on an invasive virus that is likely global by now. I think it’s behind the outbreaks of insanity we’re seeing.”
David was silent for a long time. “Lisha, what do you know about Strain Delta?”
“Is that what you’re calling it?”
More silence followed. “Lisha, I don’t know what I can say.”
“I didn’t call you for help, I called to help you. I have a series of encrypted files I’ll send through this call, if you’ll initiate a link.”
“I can lose my job for doing that; we’re under lockdown. Fuck, I shouldn’t even be talking to you!”
“We’re going to lose the country if you don’t get on top of this quickly. Damn it, David, it’s in the food supply!”
“Only raw or undercooked fish,” he acknowledged. “We’re sending out an advisory on that as we speak.”
“No David, it’s working its way through the food chain. I’ve found it in everything from phytoplankton to shark. And cooking doesn’t kill it!”
“Of course it does. No Earthly organism can survive temperatures over 200 degrees!”
“Exactly, no Earthly organism.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “We can’t beat around the bush on this one, David. The virus is not terrestrial in origin, and you must know that. No terrestrial virus uses silicon binding at the molecular level. No terrestrial organism reproduces independently in three forms, then creates a fourth, completely different organism through some form of mitosis, if any two combine! And no damned terrestrial organism goes straight for the brain and tries to rearrange synaptic pathways.”
“Jesus Christ, Lisha, where did you hear all of this?”
“We had an outbreak at HAARP.”
“Oh, no. Bad?”
“Bad enough. I lost most of my staff. We kept one alive for testing. Then, a few hours ago, one of my staff caught some fish and decided sushi night sounded like a good idea. We lost three more, and we are observing one of them in my lab, right now as he loses his mind. David, please, let me send you this while I can.”
A second later he established a data link over the phone line. Lisha didn’t hesitate; she had the files compressed and ready to send. The second the line went active, she pushed transmit and sent them on their way. It took a couple minutes for the files to go through, but David must have read them as they arrived, because he spoke up halfway through.
“Lisha, are you sure about this temperature data?”
“We tested it a dozen different ways,” she replied. “The three non-infecting versions of the virus can survive temperatures over 300 degrees. The more dangerous one, the one that enjoys human brain tissue so much, is considerably more vulnerable. We’ve killed it at temps as low as 160 degrees, but that’s still higher than it is for any terrestrial infectious organisms. But, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“It can’t exist outside a living host. I don’t know why, but it died within 20 minutes, in any medium we tested it in. David, you need to test this with other organisms. All we have are rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs. The infectious version only catches in the guinea pigs. It restructures the brain, though not as aggressively as it does in human beings. I’ve seen reports about unusual behavior from higher order mammals. I’d get some monkeys, but the director has specifically forbidden that mode of research, and besides, I can’t get any of the suppliers on the phone.” Lisha didn’t say it, but she was afraid that, based on the stories relayed intermittently through the surviving media, civil authority was breaking down.
“I can’t thank you enough,” David said, once the last of the files transferred. “Better stay out there until this blows over.”
“Hadn’t planned on any shore leave,” she said.
“I’m going to jump the chain of command and change the directive on cooking. Good lord, that temperature is high enough to survive commercial pasteurization!”
“Yes it is,” she said.
“We can only use preserved foods,” he thought aloud. “If the virus is in the food supply, we’re going to have mass starvation, at the very least.”
“Only of those that avoid infection,” she pointed out. Lisha heard his phone ring.
“That’s my lab supervisor,” he told her, “I’m going to order a primate series. I’ll try to send you the results. I can’t share with anyone else…”
“I’ve already managed to get messages to associates in France, Australia, and Russia.”
“I see,” he said as the phone rang again. “Take care, Lisha.”
“You too, David.”
* * *
The Global Hawk drone flew along an anonymous section of border, relaying data to the U.S. Border Patrol Command Center in Laredo, TX. There, a team of 10 experts, mostly ex-military, fed the data to officials in charge of border interdiction. This was the much vaunted “virtual fence” that progressive politicians favored over a physical fence, as it was a kinder, gentler way to monitor the border. If they noticed a group violating the border, they could dispatch officers to intercept the group, or not, depending on the political winds.
The Global Hawk was nearing bingo fuel, at which they would bring it home for refueling and servicing, when an operator spotted something. The drone banked on its long sleek wings, and its powerful telescoping lenses focused, capturing images and relaying them via satellite to the command center.
“Lt. Colonel!” the watch officer yelled. “Mass incursion under way!”
The wall of the command center was a massive collection of LCD monitors, configured to be as many “windows” as necessary. Dozens of views routinely cycled on the wall depending on the current situation. A senior agent stepped into the command room and put on a headset. “Put it on the big screen,” he said. He loved doing that; it made him feel like Jean-Luc Picard.
The display wall split, and the large middle section showed the view from the first Global Hawk. It looked like a solid wall of army ants moving across the landscape. The room was usually abuzz with conversations between operators and field agents, but it fell completely silent. No one, not even the most jaded agent, had ever seen anything like this before. “What the fuck is that?!” someone yelled.
The senior agent turned and ran from the command center, entered the first office he reached, and closed and locked the door. He activated the room’s computer and inserted a thumb drive. The screen flashed and changed from the USBP logo to a simple blue screen with the prompt “Lockdown?” He typed “Y,” and pressed the “Enter” key.
His first task complete, he took a deep breath, then pulled a special wireless phone from his pocket and pressed a speed dial number. A moment later someone answered, “Director’s office.”
“Sector 9, Wildfire,” he spoke into the phone. “I say again, Wildfire.”
“Sector 9, acknowledged. Lockdown in effect?”
“Affirmative.”
“Monitor and stand by for orders. Director out.”
His orders complete, the agent put the phone back in his pocket and returned to the floor. His operators were already yelling about someone cutting outbound communications. He ordered them to continue monitoring all inbound data, and to record their observations. Two more Global Hawks spotted hordes moving north, and one passed over the Rio Grande and found it choked with bodies, with thousands of people climbing over the corpses. Another drone watched the destruction of Brownsville, Texas.
* * *
“The order is Hatchet. I repeat, the order is Hatchet.”
“Roger that, base, Hatchet.” The communications officer took the piece of paper and inserted it into the slot marked “Code Group.” Lights flashed, and a computer card appeared. He took the card, slid it into another slot, and one of a dozen miniature armored doors popped open. He removed the contents, three manila envelopes with red stripes, and climbed to the flight deck. “Orders, sir,” he told the captain. “Orders, ma’am,” he repeated and handed the copilot a set.
“Deliver the
other set to the ordnance officer,” the captain instructed as the comms officer headed aft. “Copilot, open your orders.”
“Roger that, opening orders.” The copilot’s eyes were sharp, her jaw set as she tore the special plasticized paper envelope open and removed a laminated card. On it was a word that matched the one printed on the envelope. Hatchet. “Confirm coded order Hatchet,” she said.
“Pilot confirms,” the pilot said. At the same time, they grasped the cards, split them along the perforations, and pulled them apart, revealing more paper cards inside. They removed the cards and compared the numbers against a list on their thigh boards. “Pilot shows strike package 21 Zulu.”
“Copilot confirms, 21 Zulu. Does the ordinance officer confirm?”
“Checking,” the man behind them replied. They heard his code card breaking. “Confirmed, 21 Zulu.”
“At least it isn’t nuclear,” the copilot hissed under her breath.
“Yet,” the pilot said. “Ordinance, follow weapons selection.”
“Roger. Captain, order reads strike package of all on-board precision guidance iron without release of air-launched cruise missiles. Coordinates as follows.” He read off a series of numbers; the pilot and copilot jotted them down as backup.
“Confirm package and coordinates,” both the pilot and copilot replied.
“Navigator, set course,” the copilot instructed.
“Turn to heading 226 and descend to flight level 250, sir.”
“Heading 226 and flight level 250,” she repeated. The captain nodded. He punched the information into his navigational system. When the target location came up, he sucked air through his teeth.
“Barney, you got eyes on the rest of the wing?” he asked their radar operator.
“Roger that, Skipper. All but four are turning to match our course.”
“Orders sir?” the copilot asked. He stared into her blue eyes and sighed. What else could he do? He’d known her for ten years. She was the copilot today because Major Lugo was down with kidney stones. Her plane sat on the field at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. If he didn’t go through with this, she would. “Begin the bomb run,” he instructed.
The B-52 descended until it was at 25,000 feet, racing along at 500 miles per hour. The crew readied the 60-year-old plane to do what it had done so many times before. It barely resembled the plane that had rolled off the Boeing assembly line in St. Louis so many years previously. They’d replaced its avionics three times; its engines twice. They’d replaced just about every rivet and bolt five times, and it had flown more miles than the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Its wings, once crowded with eight engines, now had four. They’d added four weapons pylons in the 1990s, replacing the other four engines. Each pylon carried ordnance. When the plane lumbered into the air 12 hours earlier, it had taken off with only one-third of a full fuel load, so it could carry more ordnance; it carried more bombs than four WWII B-29 bombers.
“Ordnance, we’re 10 miles out. Report,” the pilot called.
“I have ten distinct designators operating in the target zone. Selecting to spread out payload across all designators. Fire coordinator has acknowledged the fire mission. Approach looks nominal. One minute to release.”
The pilot glanced at the weapons control board to confirm the selections. There was a rotary magazine in the forward bomb bay which held five air-launched cruise missiles. That magazine was dark, and he was eternally grateful for that.
“Thirty seconds to drop,” the ordnance officer said.
“You have the bird,” the pilot told him, relinquishing control. For the last fateful seconds of the run, the bombardier would have control of the plane. He made a few minor adjustments before the entire craft began to shudder as dozens of bombs were electronically released.
“Bombs away,” the ordnance officer announced, returning control of the plane.
“Acknowledged,” the pilot said, “coming around to 110.”
“Roger that,” the copilot said, and the huge bomber banked around. They both looked out the windows and watched as their bombs joined those from the other planes in their flight. The bombs’ shells opened at low altitude, and released thousands of submunitions, which carpeted the city of Brownsville, Texas, with innumerable red flashes of destruction.
As cities began to go dark across the country, military units received conflicting orders. Some, told to help civilians evacuate, got caught in the infectious outbreaks. Others, told to cut off the spread by interdicting travel routes out of cities, sealed the fates of hundreds of thousands. That lasted until the hordes of infected, with blood dripping from their lips, rushed out of the cities to attack the horrified National Guard units. Plans designed to control pandemic outbreaks of terrestrial diseases were useless against a plague already seeded in the food chain, the air, and the water. Especially one spread by the bite of any infected animal more than a few pounds in size.
Officials began to believe the only way to survive was to run, hide, and wait, so they put evacuation plans into effect.
Near Lexington, Kentucky, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, one particularly well-stocked enclave sported dozens of armed guards and a warehouse full of supplies. It had the additional advantage of being completely off the grid. Each living area had a Jacuzzi fed by a closed-cycle water system. The enclave had a world-renowned chef on staff who arrived hours before his guests. He’d fully stocked his larder in advance, but he stopped in town and picked up a case of Atlantic Bluefin tuna, caught the day before, so he could serve a welcoming meal of rare tuna steak with dill sauce and arugula salad to his guests. Infected guests and staff, hungry for more, met the enclave’s late arrivals.
Many government bunkers fared better as their food supplies consisted of frozen and canned goods, laid in well in advance of the outbreak. Bunkers where evacuees brought in fresh food suffered a fate similar to the Lexington enclave.
In the afternoon, the CDC finally sent out a carefully-worded and politically-correct advisory about Strain Delta’s contamination of all fresh foods. They told people to avoid fresh meat. If they had to eat it, they should cook it until it was nearly charred as the virus precursors could survive temperatures up to almost 300 degrees Fahrenheit. All dairy was off limits. They included a list of items in halal and kosher diets. Unfortunately, by the time the announcement went out, most news services were only broadcasting repeated warnings for people to stay in their homes and avoid anyone who appeared to be infected. The CDC announcement was news, but it went out on very few channels.
The only ones who successfully heard the details, including vectors and details of the virus, were the U.S. military units capable of listening and ham radio operators. The latter passed the message far and wide as quickly as they could. They grasped at the possibility of stopping the lightning spread of Strain Delta, like a drowning man grasps a rope. Most who heard, didn’t believe what they were hearing.
* * * * *
Chapter 23
Monday, April 23, Evening
Andrew returned to consciousness and immediately wished someone would knock him out again. Along with awareness came a wave of pain and nausea that made him groan and clench his eyes shut. Everything hurt from his head to his toes. He tasted blood. Finally, he forced his eyes open.
Blood blurred the vision in one eye. He looked around at the shattered glass and instruments.
“Oh, right,” he groaned. “I crashed another damn plane.”
Andrew could hear sounds behind him; someone moved in the rear of the plane. He smelled smoke, and that’s what finally got him to move.
Shortly after the successful Spectre mission against the zombie horde attacking the farmhouse, they lost most of their engines. Landing wasn’t the issue—gravity took care of that. The problem was surviving the experience. He deployed the AC-130’s flaps and dropped into a glide as smooth as he could manage, while desperately searching for a clear space to land.
“What’s happening?!” Chris yelle
d from the back.
“We’re crashing,” Andrew yelled back.
A low hill loomed ahead of them, and Andrew jammed the throttles forward. The good engine screamed to 110 percent power, but the smoking one exploded into flames. They cleared the hill by a few yards, skimming several treetops. The bottom of the valley, a couple of miles ahead, was as good as they were going to get. He remembered lining up and dropping the gear.
“Brace for impact!” he screamed as the plane’s undercarriage thudded onto hard-packed sand and miniature boulders. He swept the master fuel cutoff, just as the nose of the plane hit a particularly big boulder, and his head hit the yoke.
“Anyone alive back there?” he asked as he slowly extricated himself from behind the control yoke. The only thing that felt broken was his head, but it was only a cut over his left eye and a mild concussion. The restraints had saved his life.
“Some of us are,” Chris called from the rear. Andrew glanced at the copilot seat where he’d last seen Chris and found it empty.
Andrew shuffled toward the rear of the cockpit. The plane was sitting nose-down at a 20-degree angle, forcing him to climb toward the cockpit door.
He pushed through it and found the rear of the plane in worse shape than the front. The crash sheared the plane almost in half, just behind the wing. Only Chris and the gunner, Wade, had worn restraints; everyone else had been at the mercy of the crash. Bright red, dripping gore splashed one whole side of the fuselage. Through the hole, he could see broken terrain, scattered airplane parts, and boulders. A part of the plane was burning; luckily, it wasn’t the part they were in. No one was moving.
“Is he alive?” Andrew asked, pointing a shaky finger at Wade, who was slumped over the control console.
Chris knelt next to a body pinned under the rear of the massive breech of the 155mm gun. He tried to find a pulse, but failed. Judging by the amount of blood around the body, Andrew knew it was a wasted effort.
Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die Page 32