“The ambassador thinks they are,” Bretano told them.
“Admiral DeMarco, that equipment has to be delivered,” the President said, his own face coloring up.
“The Air Force is deploying to Saudi now. Two extra days and we can deal with it, but until then—”
“Admiral, call your relief.” Secretary Bretano looked down at his briefing folder. “Your services are not needed here anymore. We don’t have two days to bicker.”
That was actually a violation of protocol. The Joint Chiefs were presidential appointments, and while they were titularly military advisers to the Secretary of Defense and the President, supposedly only the latter could ask one to resign. Admiral DeMarco looked to Ryan’s place in the center of the conference table.
“Mr. President, I have to give you my best feel for this.”
“Admiral, we have fifteen thousand men standing in harm’s way. You can’t tell us that the Navy will not support them. You are relieved of duty effective now,” the President said. “Good day.” The other uniformed Chiefs glanced at one another. This hadn’t happened before. “How long before contact with the Indians?” Ryan asked, moving on.
“About twenty-four hours, sir.”
“Any way we can provide additional support?”
“There’s a submarine there also, loaded with torpedoes and missiles. She’s about fifty miles in advance of Anzio,” Jackson said, as a stunned admiral and his aide left the room. “We can speed her up. That risks detection, but the Indians aren’t all that swift on ASW. She would be an offensive weapon, sir. Submarines can’t defend passively. They sink ships.”
“I think the Indian Prime Minister and I need to have a little chat,” POTUS observed. “After we get through them, then what?”
“Well, then we have to transit the strait and make it up to the unloading ports.”
“That I can help you with,” the Air Force chief of staff promised. “We’ll have the F-16s in-country and in range for that part of the passage. The 366th Wing won’t be ready yet, but the boys from Israel will be.”
“We’re going to need that cover, General,” Jackson emphasized.
“Well, God damn, the Navy’s asking for help from us Air Scouts,” the Air Force said lightly, then turned serious. “We’ll kill every rag-head son of a bitch who gets in the air, Robby. Those forty-eight-16-Charlies are locked and cocked. As soon as you’re within a hundred miles of the Strait, you have a friend overhead.”
“Is it enough?” the President asked.
“Strictly speaking, no. The other side has four hundred top-of-the-line airplanes. When the 366th gets fully set up—in three days, minimum—we’ll have eighty fighters for air-to-air, but the Saudis aren’t bad. We have AWACS in place. Your tanks will fight under a neutral sky at worst, Mickey.” The general checked his watch. “They should be getting off right about now.”
THE FIRST FLIGHT of four F-15C fighter-interceptors rotated aloft together. Twenty minutes later, they formed up with their KC-135R tankers. There were six of them from their own wing, and others would join from the Montana and North and South Dakota Air National Guard, their home states as yet untouched by the epidemic. For most of the way to the Arabian Peninsula, they’d hold position ten miles from the lead commercial aircraft coming out of California. The flight path took them north to the Pole, then over the hump and south toward Russia, continuing over Eastern Europe. West of Cyprus, they would be joined by an Israeli escort, which would convey them as far as Jordan. From there on, the American Eagle fighters would be augmented by Saudi F-15s. They might make the first few arrivals covertly, the planning officers thought in their own commercial transports, but if the other side woke up, then there would be an air battle. The pilots in the lead Eagle flight really didn’t mind that very much. There was no extraneous chatter on the radios as they saw dawn to their right. It would be a flight of two dawns. The next one would be to their left.
“OKAY, LADIES AND gentlemen,” the public affairs officer told the fifteen assembled journalists. “Here’s the scoop. You have been called up for a military deployment. Sergeant Astor is now handing out consent forms. You will please sign them and hand them back.”
“What’s this?” one of them asked.
“You maybe want to try reading it?” the Marine colonel suggested from behind his mask.
“Blood test,” one muttered. “I guess so. But what about the rest?”
“Ma’am, those of you who sign the form will find out more. Those who do not will be driven home.” Curiosity won in every case. They all signed.
“Thank you.” The colonel examined all the forms. “Now if you will go through the door to your left, some Navy corpsmen are waiting for you.”
HE WAS PLEADING his own case. Though a member of the bar for thirty years, Ed Kealty had been in a court of law only as a spectator, though on many occasions he’d stood on the steps of a courthouse to make a speech or announcement. It was always dramatic, and so was this.
“May it please the court,” the former Vice President began, “I stand here to request summary judgment. My right to cross a state line has been violated by the executive order of the President. This is contrary to explicit constitutional guarantees, and also to Supreme Court precedent, to wit, the Lemuel Penn case, in which the Court ruled unanimously...”
Pat Martin sat beside the Solicitor General, who would speak for the government. There was a camera from Court TV to send the case up and down via satellite into homes across the nation. It was a strange scene. The judge, the court reporter, the bailiff, all the attorneys, the ten reporters, and four spectators were all wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves. All had just seen Ed Kealty make the greatest political miscalculation of his career, though none had grasped it yet. Martin had come in anticipation of that very fact.
“Freedom of travel is central to all of the freedoms established and protected by the Constitution. The President has neither constitutional nor statutory authority to deny this freedom to the citizens, most particularly not by the application of armed force, which has already resulted in the death of a citizen, and the wounding of several others. This is a simple point of law,” Kealty was saying, half an hour later, “and on behalf of myself and our fellow citizens, I beg the court to set this illegal order aside.” With that, Edward J. Kealty took his place.
“Your Honor,” the Solicitor General said, walking to the podium with the TV microphone, “as the complainant tells us, this is a most important case, but not one of great legal complexity at its foundation.
“The government cites Mr. Justice Holmes in the celebrated free speech case where he told us that the suspension of freedoms is permissible when the danger to the country as a whole is both real and present. The Constitution, Your Honor, is not a suicide pact. The crisis which the country faces today is deadly, as press reports have told us, and it is of a nature that the drafters could not have anticipated. In the late eighteenth century, I remind learned counsel, the nature of infectious disease was not yet known. But quarantining of ships at the time was both common and accepted. We have Jefferson’s embargo of foreign trade as a precedent, but most of all, Your Honor, we have common sense. We cannot sacrifice our citizens on the altar of legal theory ...”
Martin listened, rubbing his nose under the mask. It smelled as though a barrel of Lysol had been spilled in the room.
IT MIGHT HAVE been comical, but was not, when each of the fifteen reporters reacted the same way to the blood test. A blink. A sigh of relief. Each one stood and walked to the far side of the room, taking the opportunity to remove his or her mask. When the tests were complete, they were led into another briefing room.
“Okay, we have a bus outside to take you to Andrews. You will receive further information after you take off,” the PAO colonel told them.
“Wait a minute!” Tom Donner objected.
“Sir, that was on your consent form, remember?”
“YOU WERE RIGHT, John,” Alexandre said. Ep
idemiology was the medical profession’s version of accounting, and as that dull profession was vital to running a business, so the study of diseases and how they spread was actually the mother of modern medicine, when in the 1830s a French physician had determined that people who became ill died or recovered at the same rate whether they were treated or not. That awkward discovery had forced the medical community to study itself, to look for things that worked and things that did not, and along the way changed medicine from a trade into a scientific art.
The devil was always in the details. In this case, it might not be a devil at all, Alex realized.
There were now 3,451 Ebola cases in the country. That included those who had started dying, those who showed frank symptoms, and those who showed antibodies. The number by itself wasn’t large. Lower than AIDS deaths, lower by more than two orders of magnitude than cancer and heart disease. The statistical study, aided by FBI interviews and feedback from local physicians all over the country, had established 223 primary cases, all of them infected at trade shows, and all of whom had infected others who had in turn infected more. Though the incoming cases were still on the upslope, the rate was lower than that predicted by preexisting computer models ... and at Hopkins they’d had the first case of someone who showed antibodies, but no symptoms....
“There should have been more primary cases, Alex,” Pickett said. “We started seeing that last night. The first one who died, he flew from Phoenix to Dallas. The FBI got the flight records, and University of Texas tested everybody aboard, finished this morning. Only one shows antibodies, and he isn’t really symptomatic.”
“Risk factors?”
“Gingivitis. Bleeding gums,” General Pickett reported.
“It’s trying to be an aerosol ... but ...”
“That’s what I think, Alex. The secondary cases appear to be mostly intimate contact. Hugs, kisses, taking personal care of a loved one. If we’re right, this will peak in three days, and then it’ll stop. Along the way we’ll start seeing survivors.”
“We have one of those at Hopkins. She’s got the antibodies, but it didn’t get beyond the initial presentation.”
“We need to get Gus working on environmental degradation. He should be already.”
“Agreed. You call him. I’m doing some follow-ups down here.”
THE JUDGE WAS an old friend of Kealty. Martin wasn’t exactly sure how he’d fiddled with the docket in this particular district, but that didn’t matter now. The two presentations had taken about thirty minutes each. It was, as Kealty had said and the Solicitor General had agreed, a fundamentally simple point of law, though the practical applications of it led into all manner of complexity. It was also a matter of great urgency, as a result of which the judge reappeared from chambers after a mere hour’s contemplation. He would read his decision from his notes, and type up a full opinion later in the day.
“The Court,” he began, “is cognizant of the grave danger facing the country, and must sympathize with President Ryan’s sincerely felt duty to safeguard the lives of Americans in addition to their freedoms.
“However, the Court must acknowledge the fact that the Constitution is, and remains, the supreme law of the land. To violate that legal bulwark is a step that potentially sets a precedent with consequences so grave as to reach beyond the current crisis, and though the President is certainly acting under the best motives, this Court must vacate the executive order, trusting our citizens to act intelligently and prudently in the pursuit of their own safety. So ordered.”
“Your Honor.” The Solicitor General stood. “The government will and must appeal your ruling immediately to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond. We request a stay until the paperwork can be processed, later today.”
“Request is denied. Court is adjourned.” The judge stood and left the bench without a further word. The room, of course, erupted.
“What does this mean?” the Court TV correspondent—himself a lawyer, who knew what it probably meant—said to Ed Kealty, his microphone extended, as reporters tended to do at the moment.
“It means that so-called President Ryan cannot break the law. I think I have shown here that the rule of law still exists in our country,” the politician replied. He was not being overtly smug.
“What does the government say?” the reporter asked the Solicitor General.
“Not very much. We will have papers filed with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before Judge Venable has his opinion drafted. The order of the court is not officially binding until it is written up, signed, and properly filed. We’ll have our appeal drafted first. The Fourth Circuit will stay the order ”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Martin took that on. “In that case, sir, the executive order will remain in place in the interest of public safety until the case can be argued in a more structured setting. But there is every reason to believe that the Fourth Circuit will stay the order. Judges are people of reality in addition to being people of the written word. There is one other thing, however.”
“Yes?” the reporter asked. Kealty was watching from ten feet away.
“The court has settled another important constitutional issue here. In referring to President Ryan by both his name and the title of his office, the court has settled the succession question raised by former Vice President Kealty. Further, the court said that that order was vacated. Had Mr. Ryan not been the President, the order would have been invalid and never legally binding, and the court could have stated that as well. Instead, the Court acted improperly on point, I believe, but properly in a procedural sense. Thank you. The Solicitor General and I have to get some paperwork done.”
It wasn’t often you shut reporters up. Shutting political figures up was harder still.
“Now, wait a minute!” Kealty shouted.
“You never were a very good lawyer, Ed,” Martin said on his way past.
“I THINK HE’S right,” Lorenz said. “Jesus, I sure hope he is.”
CDC laboratories had been frantically at work since the beginning, studying how the virus survived in the open. Environmental chambers were set up with differing values of temperature and humidity, and different light-intensity levels, and the data, incomprehensibly, kept telling them the same thing. The disease that had to be spreading by aerosol—wasn’t, or at most it was barely doing so. Its survival in the open, even under benign conditions, was measured in minutes.
“I wish I understood the warfare side of this a little better,” Lorenz went on after a moment’s thought.
“Two-two-three primary cases. That’s all. If there were more, we’d know by now. Eighteen confirmed sites, four additional trade shows that generated no hits. Why eighteen and not the other four?” Alex wondered. “What if they did hit all twenty-two, but four didn’t work?”
“On the basis of our experimental data, that’s a real possibility, Alex.” Lorenz was pulling on his pipe. “Our models now predict a total of eight thousand cases. We’re going to get survivors, and the numbers on that will alter the model somewhat. This quarantine stuff has scared the shit out of people. You know, I don’t think the travel ban really matters directly, but it scared people enough that they’re not interacting enough to—”
“Doctor, that’s the third good piece of news today,” Alexandre breathed. The first had been the woman at Hopkins. The second was Pickett’s analytical data. Now the third was Gus’s lab work and the logical conclusion it led to. “John always said that bio-war was more psychological than real.”
“John’s a smart doc, Alex. So are you, my friend.”
“Three days and we’ll know.”
“Agreed. Rattle some beads, Alex.”
“You can reach me through Reed for the time being.”
“I’m sleeping in the office, too.”
“See ya.” Alexandre punched off the speakerphone. Around him were six Army physicians, three from Walter Reed, three from USAMRIID. “Comments?” he asked them.
“Crazy situati
on,” a major observed with an exhausted smile. “It’s a psychological weapon, all right. Scares the hell out of everybody. But that works for us, too. And somebody goofed on the other side. I wonder how ...?”
Alex thought about that for a moment. Then he lifted the phone and dialed Johns Hopkins. “This is Dr. Alexandre,” he told the desk nurse on the medical floor. “I need to talk to Dr. Ryan, it’s very important ... okay, I’ll hold.” It took a few minutes. “Cathy? Alex here. I need to talk to your husband, and it’s better if you’re there, too. ... It’s damned important,” he told her a moment later.
55
COMMENCEMENT
TWO HUNDRED FILES meant two hundred birth certificates, two hundred driver’s licenses, houses or apartments, sets of credit cards, and all manner of other permutations to be checked out. It was inevitable that once such an investigation started, Special Agent Aref Raman would garner special attention from the three hundred FBI agents assigned to the case. But in fact every Secret Service employee who had regular access to the White House was on the immediate checklist. All across the country (the USSS draws personnel from as wide a field as any other government agency), agents did start with birth certificates and move on, also checking high-school yearbooks for graduation pictures to be compared with ID photos of all the agents. Three agents on the Detail turned out to be immigrants, some of whose exact personal details could not be easily checked. One was French-born, having come to America in his mother’s arms. Another hailed from Mexico, having actually come illegally with her parents; she’d later legitimatized her status and distinguished herself as a genius with the Technical Security Division—and a ferociously patriotic member of the team. That left “Jeff” Raman as an agent with some missing documentation, which was reasonably explained by his parents’ reported refugee status.
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