Dead Reckoning

by Tom Wright

  There was a knock at the door, and the Commander shot an annoyed look at his security officer. The beefy, bald security officer got up and answered the door. There was a minor argument at the door that I couldn’t hear, but a skinny engineer named Ned was allowed into the room. He rushed over to the communications manager and whispered in his ear.

  The communications manager, a chubby, balding, 60-something man called Sal said: “Sir, please excuse me,” and he hurriedly followed Ned out of the room.

  The Commander retained an air of irritation as he continued. “My decision is final! When Continental arrives, we’ll find out what the hell is going on.”

  The lone woman in the room, sitting across from the Commander, was the only one who had the courage to break the ensuing silence:

  “But if it’s true about the thirty days, there could already be infected people here.”

  “Understood,” said the commander, visibly pleased that the meeting had returned to useful business. “But we‘ll have to hope that isn’t the case and deal with it if it is. I have instructed the Chief Medical Officer to examine any personnel who have been off island within the last two weeks and, if necessary, quarantine them as well.” The commander looked at his Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Frank Pepperdine, as he spoke, and the Doctor nodded back in agreement.

  “As a further precaution, I have canceled all community events, and I recommend personnel stay in their quarters and away from other people until we determine if the virus has been able to infiltrate the base.”

  We all knew he was right. At times like those it fell squarely on his shoulders to protect the personnel and assets of his base from all invaders, whatever the origin, and completely closing the base off to the outside was his only sure way to isolate us from the threat.

  “Any other questions?” continued the Commander.

  There was no response.

  “Good. We will be meeting here every morning at zero-eight-hundred for a situation report. Leads from each area will brief me. Dismissed.”

  I was fully with Kate on this one now—I was becoming very concerned. There was no way I could get off the island, nor could they get home, and with comms down, I couldn’t even talk to her. Furthermore, from the response of the Commander, maybe the virus was actually worse than the media had portrayed it.

  After I exited the room, I walked halfway down the hall and stepped into a little alcove to wait for Jeff. As a contractor, the information I received was limited to “need to know,” but as an employee of the government and one of the range’s senior managers, Jeff heard everything.

  I leaned my head against the wall and took a few deep breaths to try to calm the panic I felt rising in me.

  As Jeff hurried by, I reached out and grabbed him. It gave him a start, but he immediately anticipated my line of questioning.

  “It’s worse than you think,” Jeff whispered. “He laid it on soft with that three months thing. Brass has been really talking more like six. He says they’ve been watching this simmer under the surface for about a week now, trying to head it off and hoping it wouldn’t explode. That’s why they are so quick to react, shut everything down. They’ve been collecting intel from around the world and planning a strategy. I think all our bases are doing this. It’s much worse overseas where they are right in the middle of millions of potential carriers. You know the last time we went to DEFCON 3?”

  I shrugged.

  “9/11. This is serious shit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this shit a week ago? We could have gotten on a plane,” I responded in a tone somewhere just above whisper and sounding more irritated than I meant to. “Or never let them go in the first place.”

  “I didn’t know it would happen this fast. Don’t you think I would have done something if I knew?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said with remorse, remembering that, like me, Jeff’s wife and kids were off island too. “I’m sorry about that. I’m just getting jumpy, that’s all.”

  “I get it, believe me.”

  Jeff shot quick looks both ways down the hall in which we were standing, and then he whispered: “Come with me. Something’s going on in Comms.”

  . . .

  We descended a flight of stairs and wound our way through myriad hallways and switchbacks. Finally we arrived at a fortified door. Numerous placards warned the unauthorized against attempted entry. There was another placard on the door which said “non-ionizing radiation hazard.” The symbol on it resembled those that indicated available Wi-Fi.

  Jeff reached down to enter the code to the cypher lock and then stopped and looked at me. “Turn around,” he said.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” I said angrily as I turned away.

  Eight or ten clicks later, the door opened and cool air wafted out. Jeff held his finger up to me and then stepped through the door and closed it without latching. I heard muffled conversation, and then the door cracked open again.

  “So nothing classified,” Jeff said as he opened the door the rest of the way and motioned me in.

  “I have a top secret clearance anyway, probably higher than yours,” I complained as I stepped into the darkened room.

  “Not for this area,” Jeff replied. “This area is SCI.” That stood for Secret Compartmentalized Information, which was indeed higher than my clearance.

  Ned and Sal sat at consoles that provided the vast majority of light to the room and listened to something with large headphones.

  Jeff tapped Sal on the shoulder and said: “Put it on speaker.”

  Jeff’s job was closely related to Sal’s, and I knew that they were well acquainted. I thought Sal was a weirdo, so I had never spoken to him.

  Sal pulled down his headphones and they settled down around the back of his neck. He pulled the cord from the console and beeping poured from the speaker. I immediately recognized it as Morse code, but I had no idea what it meant. At that moment, I noticed Ned furiously scribbling on a notepad.

  “What’s being transmitted?” Jeff asked.

  “We don’t know. It’s not English,” said Sal.

  Ned set his pencil down and slid his headphones down onto his neck. “That’s it, it’s repeating now.”

  Sal reached over and tuned to a different frequency. “Listen to this shit,” he said.

  A computerized voice came into focus as he tuned.

  This is K6AB9, transmitting from Phoenix, Arizona, at 10.150 megahertz. We have vacated the city and will begin transmitting from our bugout location a.s.a.p. Conditions are dire. Red plague running rampant. All public systems are down…assumed EMP. Strong static burst detected on all channels at 28May 1409 Zulu. This is K6AB9…..”

  “Jesus Christ!” Jeff exclaimed. “Is that for real?”

  “We don’t know,” said Ned. “Something has definitely happened, and it brought out all the whackos. It’s hard to tell what’s real from what’s not.”

  “That sounds legit. Who would know that?” Jeff replied.

  “Know what?” I asked. “Wouldn’t our radars have detected that?”

  All three of them turned to me and gave a look of disgust that seemed to ask: don’t you work on this range?

  Apparently remembering that I was not among the 90% of range workers with engineering backgrounds, Jeff said: “No they wouldn’t. The EMP signals that our radars can receive would be line-of-sight using a four-thirds earth model.”

  I had no idea what the four-thirds earth model was, but I understood line of sight. Weather radars, for example, couldn’t “see” over the horizon unless the beam was being bent by a temperature inversion in the atmosphere.

  “And most people wouldn’t know that you’d hear a burst of static on the lower frequencies.” “Have you actually talked with anyone?” Jeff asked, turning to Ned.

  “We haven’t been able to get anyone to respond,” he replied. “Everything we’ve heard so far has either been a recorded message, the ramblings of religious nutjobs, or not English.”

  �
��What about bases outside CONUS?”

  “None so far. Some of the messages indicated that there may have been multiple pulses. Perhaps in many locations worldwide. We just don’t know. We’re listening for more now.”

  Sal tuned the radio to another frequency to give us an example of one of the kooks. The guy slowly and steadily read the Bible. At the moment we tuned in, it sounded like he was in the middle of the book of Ezekiel.

  I was shell shocked. I began to feel dizzy.

  “Hey,” Sal exclaimed. “At least nobody’s talking about Nukes.”

  “Nukes?” I repeated to nobody in particular. I sat down in an empty chair.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Jeff said to me. He turned to Sal and Ned, “Are you guys going to keep at this?”

  “Yeah,” Sal said with an incredulous look. “I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

  Jeff and I rode silently to the housing area. It was a little out of his way, but Jeff escorted me to my quarters. I felt like I should make some parting comment as we approached my quarters, but just as I began to formulate a statement, Jeff peeled off and road quickly away.

  5

  10:30 A.M., TUESDAY MAY 29TH, BASE HOUSING, KWAJALEIN

  After a few hours of fitful, practically useless sleep, I awakened feeling just as tense and restless as when I had gone to bed. I grabbed the phone and dialed 99 in hopes of getting a line off island. Nothing happened. I clicked on the TV and found nothing but the roller, and it looked like nothing new had been posted.

  I grabbed a dirty shirt from the floor and pulled it on along with a pair of shorts that didn’t match. I ran my fingers through my hair and wiggled my toes into my flip-flops as I hurried out the door.

  At only 10:30 am, it was already sweltering under the tropical sun. In the tropics, day and night were almost evenly split year round, and since the sun was highest at noon, the period from late morning through early afternoon was always the hottest. That was the time when you’d usually find the Marshallese waiting out the heat under the shade of a palm tree. With our air conditioning and important jobs, we Americans hadn’t learned to appreciate a siesta like much of the rest of the world.

  I was already sweating profusely (a rolling boil, as I called it) as I peddled furiously past Jeff’s quarters; since his bike wasn’t in its rack, I didn’t even slow down. I blew by the EOC and made my way to the weather station. By the time I arrived, my shirt was soaked through.

  A couple of forecasters and an electronics technician were sitting around chatting in the operations area when I walked in. They informed me that all of our equipment was running fine; satellite images continued to come in (meaning the satellites were operating normally), our radar was fine, and all of our observational equipment was working nominally. We hadn’t received any weather model data from the national centers though, and the technicians had conducted tests on the communication lines and found them to be fine with the exception that no data flowed in from outside. Our data flowed out, to where we didn’t know, but nothing came back.

  Satisfied that everything was fine at work, I headed back toward the EOC. The route from the weather station back to the EOC took me headlong into the stiff trade winds. Winds blow from high pressure over the mid-latitudes toward low pressure near the equator, and thanks to the spin of the earth, the winds turn toward the right in the northern hemisphere. This creates a nearly constant belt of easterly trade winds, so-called because early traders sought to ride these favorable winds to far-away lands. While the wind had a cooling effect, the effort required to overcome the extra resistance more than canceled any benefit.

  I struggled slowly past a couple of women stopped on the roadside looking out over the ocean. I recognized one woman as the wife of the island chaplain, but I didn’t know the other. I overheard the chaplain’s wife comment about the need for prayer in times like these, how we need to pray for the plague to pass and spare our loved ones and how we also need to pray for the souls of those who’ve already died.

  I had a brief argument with her in which I asked why a god who doesn’t already know that I would wish for the safety of my loved ones is worthy of being prayed to, and why we shouldn’t be overjoyed by all that had been happening, since it’s all that god’s plan and, therefore, obviously perfect. We pissants are certainly not qualified to object to her god’s plan are we? Although the imaginary argument made me even more upset, I won, which I always do.

  I arrived at the EOC at the same moment as the Medical Officer, Dr. Frank Pepperdine, or Doctor Pepper, as we called him. He was my personal physician, and while we frequently played basketball together, we maintained a relationship more likened to acquaintances than friends. For it always seemed to me inappropriate to be friends with your doctor. A person simply does not want a friend to know his cholesterol number, weight, or what his colon looks like.

  In his mid-fifties, Dr. Pepper was a fine physical specimen and did not look a day over thirty. He could be seen running around the island every evening, and he obviously ate right. He had a full head of medium-length brown hair that would have been otherwise unbelievable in fullness and color at his age, were it not for his tight, wrinkle-free, bronze skin and perfect complexion. He had the enviable tall, slender body that allowed him to jog, play basketball, or engage in any other activity outside shirtless, without making other people uncomfortable.

  He went to UCLA, which, as part of my beloved Pac10, made him ok with me. After his wife died in a climbing accident, he took a job as a physician on Kwaj. Other than that, the only thing I knew about his career was that he had briefly worked at the CDC. He and his thirteen-year-old daughter arrived on the island on the same flight as Kate, the kids, and I had.

  I timed it so that we would arrive at the door at the same time, and, after the obligatory cordial greeting, I jumped right to what was on my mind.

  “Have you heard anything new about the plague? Any idea what’s going on?”

  “I don’t have any magical lines of communication in my office. I know the same as you, Matt.”

  “But what did you hear before?” I asked as we began to ascend the stairs. “Maybe all this is overblown.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, to my dismay. “I think this is the big one—the one we’ve always feared in the medical world—an extinction event—Armageddon.”

  Normally, I appreciated his matter-of-fact approach. I could have used better bedside manner at that moment.

  “It has long been feared that some sort of ‘super bug’ would come along and wipe out mankind,” he continued. “I mean think about it. You’re a scientist, so you must know that it’s just a matter of time before natural evolution brings us something we can’t deal with. Viruses are constantly combining in nature via re-assortment and creating new viruses, most of which are no worse than their predecessors and die without causing any harm. And we’ve generally been able to stay ahead of the ones that survive, thanks to the wonders of modern chemistry. We figured that a superbug would happen naturally all by itself one day, but we didn’t count on somebody intentionally speeding the process up.”

  “What do you mean speeding up the process?” I asked as we reached the top of the stairs.

  He held his hand on the door but didn’t open it. “I’m pretty sure it was engineered. Somebody created it.”

  That bombshell left me speechless, so he answered a follow-up question that he must have come to expect. “I’m sure you’ve heard that it appears to be a combination of different viruses, one hemorrhagic and the other something like bird flu. We already knew that viruses can combine, and so this is not, in and of itself, exceptional. But what was not being said is that The Red Plague managed to retain the worst attributes of the component viruses. It is highly unlikely to have occurred naturally.”

  I stepped back as someone opened the door, nearly hitting me with it. Obviously uninterested in our conversation, the man scampered down the stairs. Dr. Pepper grabbed the door before it closed, but we remained i
n the doorway to finish our conversation.

  “What do you mean ‘worst attributes’?” I asked.

  “I never learned the exact particulars of the disease before we were cut off,” he said. “But let’s imagine that the component viruses were Ebola and bird flu. Either of those would be sufficient to kill the host long before there could be sufficient recombinations to produce a viable second supervirus. In other words, it’s practically unimaginable for any host to survive long enough with both viruses for them to be able to produce a third virus with the ability to spread. The Red Plague is as lethal and contagious as Ebola, but worst of all, it’s airborne like bird flu. It is just thought to be very unlikely to have occurred naturally. It must have been done in a laboratory.”

  “By who, though?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Take your pick.”

  He slipped through the door and began walking briskly down the hall.

  “So how long do you think it will take before this thing runs its course?” I asked, following closely behind. He slowed so that I came nearly level with him.

  “The bubonic plague took years to peter out, and we have many times the population now. We’ve also got the means to get from one place to anywhere else on the planet in less than a day. The incubation period of The Red Plague may be up to thirty days. Can you imagine how far this could have gotten in thirty days just by random encounters? Imagine that somebody has been planting it in order to speed up that process, and it could easily be everywhere by now. It’s probably going to test the immunities of each and every one of us. Well, with the possible exception of us. Assuming it isn’t already here, we are so isolated that we might be able to avoid it altogether.”

  “Yes, that’s wonderful,” I said sarcastically as he turned a corner and walked away from me.

  I found neither Commander Blaine nor Jeff at the EOC nor at their respective offices, so I decided to go down to the terminal and wait for Continental to arrive with answers. I rounded the corner to the waiting area and found what seemed like half the island waiting there. Some people talked quietly, but most just sat in the grandstand and waited. Except for the large crowd, everything seemed normal. The ground crew busily finished their preparations by moving luggage carts, testing the generator, and repositioning the stair truck. The ubiquitous trades tugged on palm fronds, and waves breaking on the reef sent a fine, briny mist across the area. A small child of a couple I knew in passing darted from the grandstand toward the perimeter road only to be snatched up by his brother in mid stride.