Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  It was an impressive display of aerial logistics, a proud moment for Russian military aviation—ifthere was a need to utilize it, of course. If no vaccine existed, or its location could not be provided by the shifts of interrogators working on the conspirators, it was all wasted effort. Initially, the oligarchs had proven either surprisingly resistant, or completely ignorant of Malenkov’s claims.

  Then one had broken down—Shenpeliski, himself a petrochemical tycoon, but one who sat on the board of at least two pharmaceutical conglomerates. He had provided several names, plausible all, and a cold-storage warehouse outside St. Petersburg where—he had insisted, loudly and with no small amount of desperation—proof of his statement waited in millions of refrigerated doses.

  Troops were now rushing toward the warehouse, and the interrogators tasked to question those whose names had been provided by Shenpeliski had been ordered to redouble their efforts. Something would happen very soon, one way or another, and not even a dozen more telephone calls from the White House could change the situation in the interim.

  For the moment,Putin told himself,restraint is the wise man’s policy. When I know for certain, I will inform the Americans. Not before.

  The telephone at his elbow rang again, loudly and insistently.

  Tallahassee, Florida

  The loud noises from outside the basement window shook Katie from the troubled stupor into which she had fallen. For a moment, she wondered if the voices had been part of the frightening dream, where she had found herself being pursued by demonic figures who grasped and tore at her as she ran. She could not escape them, and the terrible stench of their ruined bodies gagged her again.

  No,she decided.That was the dream, because this is the nightmare.

  She swallowed, wincing as she felt the burning of her vomit deep inside the rawness of her throat.

  Katie was sitting on the concrete floor, her back against the wall. J. L. lay quietly in her lap, her breathing ragged but for the moment regular.

  “Dammit, boy! Get that belt fed and locked. Do itnow !”

  It was the same voice that had torn through her dream. Gently, she disentangled herself from J. L., pushing the dirty afghan tight around her friend’s shoulders. Then, swaying dizzily from the fever, she pulled herself up to look out the casement.

  The red Air Jordan sneakers were still there, partially blocking her view of the heavy Dodge stakebed truck parked fifteen yards away. Several men moved in a shuffling gait around the vehicle, straining at the rope-handled wooden boxes they bore. In the bed of the truck, two other figures serviced what appeared to be a length of black pipe that pointed at a sharp angle into the air above their heads.

  Then they moved, and Katie saw the bulk of the heavy machine gun, a linked belt of ridiculously large cartridges dangling from it to a metal box affixed to its side. As she watched, one of the men moved to the back and seized two vertical handles. Almost at the same instant, three loud explosions pressured her ears; in the echoes, she heard the empty casings bounce against asphalt, bell-like in their pitch.

  “If they’d have had one a these big bastards at Waco”—the man slapped with hard affection at the weapon’s cocking handle—“well, damn. They’d ofcornholed them ATF fuckers, pure and simple!”

  Then the one manning the machine gun let loose a scream, or perhaps it was some kind of war cry—Katie did not know, nor did she care to. She covered her ears with her hands and slid down the cool stone of the basement wall. But even as she did, she heard the gunner shout to the others.

  “Here one comes, boys—Jesus. It’s a big ’un, too.”

  Then the firing began again, claps of spaced thunder that hammered and hammered and hammered against and into Katie’s head. It would not stop, not even when she began to scream, in protest and in terror.

  Tallahassee, Florida

  Altitude: 300 Feet

  “Thirty seconds.” The controls were sluggish now, and Sivigny debated for an instant whether to nudge the airspeed a fraction higher. He depressed the yoke almost imperceptibly, and felt the firmness return to the stick, ever so slightly.

  “Mayo, when I give the word, bring the throttles up to fifty percent,” he said, then twisted his head to emphasize his next words. “WhenI give the word, not before.”

  He noted Mayo’s nod, then turned back just in time to see the first of the tracers arching up to meet him. He barely had time to register that fact when the sound of the serial impacts—much louder than the previous ground fire hits, clamorous in a way that signaled their destructive power—rang through the fuselage.

  “That’s double-A,” he heard the crew chief in the intercom. “Antiaircraft fire, multiple hits aft—”

  And then another string rose to meet him, chewing through the aluminum skin before dancing sparks from the starboard engine cowling. The intercom went dead, sudden as a switch being flipped. At the same time, the yoke in his hand sagged as if lifeless. The aircraft shuddered, then dropped hard.

  “Secure for impact!” he had time to say, just before the ground mushroomed up to fill the cockpit windshield. There was a flash, vivid even in the daylight, and a roaring sound in Sivigny’s ears that was suddenly cut short.

  Washington, D.C.

  The President’s hand gripped the telephone receiver so hard that, even from across the room, Carson could see the knuckles turn suddenly white.

  “You’re sure?” The President’s voice was loud and unrestrained. “It’s confirmed?”

  He pointed to Carson almost imperiously, his index finger aiming like a pistol. Without removing the telephone from his ear, he shouted to his national security advisor.

  “They’ve got it. Good God, they have the vaccine. Abort the mission—now!”

  Tallahassee, Florida

  The wall shook as if in an earthquake, and dust flew from the rafters above. A scream that pendulumed madly up and down the scale drowned out everything but its own feral cry, and a sudden dancing glare turned the casement glass into a blossom of molten colors.

  For a long moment, Katie had no comprehension of where she was or what was happening to her. The noise was deafening and the light blinding, and she wondered if she was already dead.

  Then the smell filled the room: an oily, smothering smokiness, followed by an intense wave of heat. It galvanized the young woman, making her scramble across the floor to a still-comatose J. L. Katie stood, locking her arms under J. L.’s, forcing her muscles to strain against the inert weight. She dragged her friend backward, away from the window that now pooled with dancing flames like mica on a furnace.

  Somehow, Katie wrestled J. L. up the stairway and outside. Here, the structure of the house shielded the pair from the inferno on the other side, a shadow from the radiant heat that crisped and smoked the grass and palmetto shrubs ten feet to the side. Then the wood framing of the house burst into flames, sending a rolling wave of thermal energy that reddened Katie’s face.

  We can’t stay here,Katie’s mind screamed at her sluggish body.

  But her body, racked by fever and ravaged by the viral assault, no longer listened. Katie sat hard, her bottom striking the ground with an impact that made her teeth click together audibly. It did not register; she was unable to move.

  The fire had now curled around the burning building and was crackling toward the two girls. Katie resigned herself to it, to dying in the inferno.

  Then two hands, clumsy in the gloves that encased them, grasped her upper arms. She looked up dully, seeing first the firefighter’s helmet and then the full-face plastic visor of his breathing apparatus. His helmet crest read:TALLAHASSEE F .D .

  Vaguely, she felt herself lifted up, a split second before the world went dark.

  Chapter 52

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  July 24

  “The first wave of Russian Sukhoi-35s are in the air,” Krewell said, trying hard not to sound as drained as he felt. It had been three hours since Putin’s troops had bur
st into the warehouse and confirmed the vaccine existed; since then, there had been a frenzy of activity on both sides of the Atlantic, with Krewell at its center.

  He sat in a White House conference room that was far too large for the number of occupants: Krewell and two other men. One of them was a White House communications technician manning the camera for this video teleconference. The other was Billy Carson, his attitude of outward calm belied by the ashtray at his elbow already half-filled with crumpled butts.

  The voice of the secretary of Health and Human Services came from the speaker phone at the center of the conference table; on the split-screen monitor mounted on the wall, HHS looked wan and frazzled.

  “Thank God they’re cooperating,” he said. “How much time do we have?”

  “ETA at Newark is two hours, twenty minutes,” Krewell answered. “Twenty-four fighters—a total of six million doses of vaccine, give or take. Another six Sukhoi fighters are on a direct route to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama with a million and a half doses on board.”

  “Eight million doses? Less?” It was the voice of the junior senator from Pennsylvania, his outrage—and, Krewell observed, his fear—clear and evident despite the distortion of the speaker. “There’s two hundred and eighty million Americans at risk, for God’s sake!”

  “We don’t have to vaccinate them all,” Krewell snapped. “Not immediately.”

  “Take it easy,” Krewell heard Carson mutter. Krewell took a deep breath; when he spoke, he was surprised to hear his voice sound almost reasonable.

  “We’ll use the Russian vaccine in a two-phase program—first, to inoculate people in a ring immediately outside the contagion zones. We’ll use them as containment, to wall off the virus from the rest of the country. If it can’t find any susceptible hosts, it can’t spread past the barrier rings. The second phase is more traditional: we send medical teams into northwest Florida and New York City to vaccinate everybody possible.”

  On the video screen, HHS looked doubtful.

  “You’re talking between eight and ten million persons inside New York alone,” he said.

  “We don’t need to inoculate them all,” Krewell repeated. “Just a high enough percentage of coverage to break the chain of contagion.”

  He scribbled for a moment on his notepad, then held it up for the video camera; obligingly, the technician zoomed close on it. Drawn large on the top sheet, perhaps a dozen circles were bunched together. One circle in their midst was bisected by a bold “X.”

  “The circles represent individuals,” Krewell said. “X indicates a person infected with the virus. If the other circles are unprotected, the virus is easily passed in sequence from one to the next. There’s no magic involved; it’s a chain, a classic disease-transmission model.”

  He filled in half of the circles, creating a random pattern of black spots on the page.

  “The filled-in circles are persons that are now immune, due to the vaccine,” he said. He drew a line from the infected “X” to one of black-filled circles. “A carrier comes into contact with this person, nothing happens. Same here, or here, or here.”

  He tapped one of the unfilled circles. “The virus has to find one ofthese before it can spread—and then it faces the same problem all over again. That’s herd immunity; ranchers have used it for decades. You take a percentage of the potential hosts out of the contagion chain, and that protects the rest.”

  “So now you’re down to maybe five million in the city, and what—another million or so in the Florida Quarantine Region?” HHS shook his head. “It’s still a hell of a big job, Dr. Krewell.”

  “There is precedent,” Krewell said. “Back in ’76, with the swine flu emergency. In the fifties, when the polio vaccine first became available. In the sixties, with the oral polio vaccine. In each case, you had millions of Americans standing in line to get the treatment.”

  “There weren’t riots going on at those times.” The senator’s voice was pitched higher, tighter than Krewell remembered; he stifled the automatic retort. Instead of responding to the politician, he spoke directly to HHS.

  “Operationally, it’s a matter of organization and logistics. Fortunately, New York has an existing emergency response plan that divides the city into manageable areas—based, they tell me, on voting precincts. We’ll use soldiers to set up security and deal with crowd control—Swede Brandt has been authorized to use whatever degree of force is necessary. The actual vaccination is a fast, simple process. Hell, you don’t need a physician to handle a pneumatic needle or a hypodermic.”

  Carson spoke for the first time. “Where possible, we will use doctors and nurses from the city hospitals to supervise. General Brandt has informed the President that he can field almost two hundred Army medics. That’s in addition to the several thousand paramedics and EMTs that can be mobilized from inside the city itself. We can set up more than a thousand inoculation stations, spread among the boroughs. In Florida, we’ll do the same at armories and high schools. Whenever possible, we’re using the existing local emergency reaction plans; there’s a mass vaccination component in all of them.”

  “How long?” HHS’s voice was blunt.

  Krewell shrugged. “Six hours to mobilize and get the word to the populace. After that, it’s a matter of cycling people through.” He was silent for a moment, once again doing the math. “Within twelve hours, we should have enough patients processed to establish the herd immunity scenario—in Florida, maybe sooner.”

  “This will work, Dr. Krewell?” asked HHS.

  Before Krewell could respond, Carson answered.

  “It will,” the national security advisor said. “It has to.”

  Maxwell AFB

  The Sukhoi fighters touched down one by one, ninety seconds apart. The flight leader was Gregori Stipilanov, a colonel who had earned his wings long enough before to find landing at an American Air Force base incredible, if also wryly amusing.

  Stipilanov would have preferred something more showy—perhaps a simultaneous landing in twin echelons of three planes each, a tricky maneuver designed to demonstrate the verve and proficiency of Russian pilots. But that would have been irresponsible, he admitted to himself, particularly given the critical importance of the cargo they were delivering.

  The Air Force ground crew that met his flight rode in closed Humvees, and so it was not until he had powered down on the concrete apron that he noticed anything unusual about his hosts’ appearance. The Americans who swarmed out to place chocks around the Su-35’s landing gear moved awkwardly, clumsy in the bulk of olive-drab exposure suits.

  A moment later, Stipilanov raised his canopy at the gesture of a spacesuited crew chief, who helped him disentangle himself from the straps and hoses of the cockpit.

  “You take no chances, yes?” Stipilanov said pleasantly, in an accent that made the American airman smile behind his acrylic faceplate.

  “It ain’t nuthin’ personal, Colonel.” The voice, which carried undertones of kudzu and red clay, was muffled by the full-face protection.

  Stipilanov saw the American’s eyes look at the rear of the cockpit, a space usually occupied by a weapons officer. Instead, a bubble-wrapped bulk was wedged tight, similar to the cardboard boxes now being removed from the cargo compartment in the fuselage. The exercise was being repeated at each of the six Sukhoi fighters parked on the apron. Already, the first pallets of vaccine were being rushed by Humvee toward what Stipilanov assumed was a medical center.

  “Welcome to Maxwell AFB, sir,” Stipilanov heard, the Southern accent humorous to his ears. “You don’t mind me sayin’—we’re surely glad as hell to see you guys.”

  Chapter 53

  Washington, D.C.

  July 24

  The digital feed into the HHS’s Crisis Management Office made the audio sound lifelike—almost, Andi Wheelwright thought, as if Frank Ellis were standing next to her desk here in Washington. She even nodded, before realizing that he was somewhere in Montana and unable to see her ass
ent.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I have the report on the screen now. It’s confirmed, Mr. Ellis. It was Dr. Casey’s daughter.” On the monitor before her, under a large-font heading that readTALLAHASSEE CONTAGION /SITE ECHO, several columns of names had scrolled past before stopping. Now, highlighted, was the name she had called for in her file search.

  Ellis’s voice came over the line again, and Andi could hear the effort it took him to keep it calm and even.

  “Are you going to tell him, or should I?”

  Andi Wheelwright stiffened, but her voice was equally professional in reply.

  “I suggest that you deal with your own responsibilities, Agent Ellis,” she said. “We will determine when Dr. Casey should be informed of . . . this development.”

  “The man deserves to know that—”

  Andi flared. “This crisis isn’t over, Agent Ellis. Dr. Casey is an asset we may need. Could you function effectively, given the same situation?”

  There was silence on the audio feed. Then Andi spoke.

  “I’ll bump this up the line for a decision,” she said. “That’s all I can promise.”

  “That’s pretty cold-blooded, in my opinion,” Ellis said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Given the circumstances, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Chapter 54

  Washington, D.C.

  July 24

  “Mr. President, there is news,” Krewell said. Across the expansive desk, the President’s eyes snapped open and he straightened in his chair. At the same time, Billy Carson stirred in the leather chair where he too had been unable to fend off the exhaustion that had become a palpable presence in the Oval Office.