Wildfire: A Post-Apocalyptic Pandemic Survival Thriller (The Hurst Chronicles Book 3)

by Robin Crumby

  “You mean the Russian biowarfare division? Not much. Just by reputation. I suppose we’ve all heard the stories.”

  “My long-held belief is that Iraq was not acting alone. The most likely partner was Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we know Iraq recruited dozens of their scientists. They went to the highest bidders. The US picked up a few high-profile names, people like Colonel Alibekov.”

  “Alibekov? Was he the one who defected?”

  “That’s right. He blew the whistle on the scale of the USSR’s weapons programmes during the Cold War. He was the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, worked there for many years. I got to sit in on one of his debriefing sessions. Incredible stuff. Happy to tell you over a pint sometime.”

  “I hear he’s something of a legend in some circles,” said Zed.

  “We knew from Alibekov that some of his team went to Iraq. The two countries shared an obsession with developing biological agents, weaponised versions of the plague virus and smallpox, for example.”

  “Surely smallpox was eradicated in the 1980s?”

  “Exactly, and that made the West vulnerable. All stocks of the vaccine had been run down. Smallpox had become a viable weapon again. The same was true of other pathogens. If their scientists could recreate something like the bubonic plague or Spanish flu, an outbreak could be devastating.”

  “What makes you so sure the Russians were helping Iraq?” asked Zed, leaning forward.

  “Remember perestroika? Towards the end of the Cold War when Gorbachev came to power, it was no longer feasible for Biopreparat to maintain the scale of their research programmes. Things had started to change not long after the Convention on Biological Weapons came into force in 1975. Reciprocal inspections between the Russians and Americans made it necessary to outsource some activities to overseas territories, beyond the reach of the inspectors. Iraq was definitely one of the partners they shortlisted.”

  “Why Iraq?”

  “Because Saddam shared Biopreparat’s ambition: to develop weapons of mass destruction and stockpile the vaccines needed to prevent such an attack happening on home soil.”

  “Interesting. We were always suspicious how Saddam was able to scale his programmes so quickly, to make breakthroughs that didn’t seem possible from a standing start. It didn’t seem to make sense. But colonel, if you don’t mind me asking, how do you know all this?”

  “I was stationed in Moscow for several years. Berlin before that. Last few years, I was at GCHQ.”

  “So you were a spy?”

  “Not really. I prefer the term military intelligence.” He smiled.

  Zed studied the colonel more closely, not sure whether to believe him or not. He had never met a real spy before. The colonel seemed amused by his curiosity.

  “Look, I’ll tell you about it another time.” He checked his watch. “Right now, I need you to concentrate on the body of evidence in front of you. I’ve called a meeting at 6pm. I want you to brief the others. Tell them what you’ve told me.”

  “Which bit?”

  “About Project Wildfire and Iraq’s weapon programmes. Keep it high level for now. By the way, I’d recommend you leave out the bits about Hitler, and Nazi wonder weapons.”

  Zed laughed, not entirely convinced that any of this was the right play. “I get the distinct impression they still think I’m some kind of conspiracy nut.”

  “No one is saying that any more. Things have changed. Confidentially, that US Navy Intelligence report Peterson showed us on the Chester proves that the Americans believed there was a credible threat against the West. Peterson’s convinced there’s more to Project Wildfire than meets the eye. I think Doctor Hardy and his team might be ready to listen to you. Remember, the Porton team are scientists. They’re comfortable dealing with empirical facts, not theories. To them, the concept of a weaponised flu virus is implausible on a number of levels.”

  “Believe me, they’re right to be sceptical. If I were in their shoes, I’d have a hard time believing all this. Until I can lay my hands on something in here that’s tangible,” said Zed, tapping the folder in front of him, “I’m never going to convince Doctor Hardy and the others. I’d rather keep my powder dry.”

  “Look, we’re all on the same side. They’re just impatient for answers. I’ve told Doctor Hardy to shut up and listen. He needs to give you a fair hearing, suspend his disbelief. Just tell them what you’ve been telling me. Who knows, it might spark something, nudge their thinking in new directions, but keep it factual. Keep the wild theories to yourself, for now. I’ll see you in there at 6pm. That gives you about an hour.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, colonel. What about Biopreparat?”

  “That’s just between the two of us for now.” He winked.

  As the colonel closed the door behind him, Zed blew out his cheeks, thinking through what he could possibly pull together in just over an hour. He slumped back in his chair, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling, shaking his head. Despite the colonel’s encouragement, he had no doubt that Doctor Hardy would dismiss whatever he had to say. The scientists from Porton were so blinkered in their views, so wedded to their code. They suffered acutely from what he described as “not invented here” syndrome. He knew that he was asking them to take a leap of faith, to countenance another explanation for the worldwide pandemic. Yet, something about their intransigence made him suspicious.

  Zed was the first to admit that there were dozens of unanswered questions, some of them fundamental. If the outbreak was deliberate, then who launched the attack? What was the target and why? He was no virologist, but he had learned a fair bit about biological weapons during his time at the MoD.

  He had to assume that the Porton Down scientists knew more than he did about the virus. He knew they had electron microscopes and other state-of-the-art technology at their disposal. Chances were they already knew what they were dealing with. The CDC and WHO had been warning the West for years to prepare for the next pandemic. It just didn’t seem possible that something so deadly could have caught the world by surprise.

  Zed couldn’t prove it, not yet at least, but he remained convinced that the Millennial Virus bore the hallmarks of a biological weapon. It had been engineered for a single purpose: to destroy human life.

  He would love to get another look at the US Navy Intelligence report Lieutenant Peterson kept in that locked safe on board the Chester. From memory, it had referenced a Project Chuma, roughly translated as plague or pestilence. The report highlighted the activities of a rogue faction in the Russian military, suspected of providing technical assistance to Pyongyang. They had intercepted a communiqué suggesting they were working on a flu virus. Peterson confided that, at the time, no one had seriously believed there was a credible threat to national security, but in hindsight, it was hard to ignore.

  Zed was still puzzling over the link between Russia and Iraq. Was it possible that the Russians had relocated their bioweapons R&D to Iraq to avoid the attentions of the US inspectors?

  He leafed through a previous stack of documents until he found what he was looking for. It was a copy of a WHO report detailing an H1N1 outbreak in the seventies, which referred to an avian flu strain known as Russian flu. That particular strain had been dormant for nearly twenty years, frozen in time from the 1950s. It suggested an accidental breach or laboratory accident. It confirmed to Zed that the Russians had been running their own clandestine programme. Was it possible they had outsourced this particular Project Chuma to Iraq after all?

  Buried within the thousands of documents contained within the Porton archive, there had to be something that could help explain what had happened. Working on his own, there was a limit to what he could achieve. He would need to push himself harder. Prioritise the most likely avenues of research. Back his hunches. He just needed more time.

  His instinct was still telling him that what had happened in Iraq was vital. The colonel was playing his cards close to his chest. Perhaps he was trying to for
ce Zed’s hand. What choice did he have? Until he could be sure, his only option was to be economical with the truth.

  What seemed like a short while later, the colonel’s orderly arrived to escort Zed from his office. He grabbed a clutch of computer print-outs and stuffed them under his arm, suddenly flustered, feeling under-prepared.

  He followed the stiffly uniformed orderly up the stairs and to the end of a brightly lit corridor. It led to the executive conference suite, where an armed soldier waited outside. By the looks of things, Zed was the last to arrive. The meeting had already started without him.

  Chapter Seven

  “Ah, Mister Samuels, do come in. Have a seat. There’s one near the back,” said the colonel, gesturing towards the end of the long white table. “I hope you don’t mind, but we started without you.”

  Zed squeezed along the wall behind a row of scientists and senior staff members, depositing himself in the only empty seat. It was a full house. He smiled weakly at Doctor Hardy who sat opposite. Hardy ignored him, staring blankly at the clock on the wall above him, watching the seconds tick by. From his body language, Zed could tell there was somewhere else Hardy would rather be.

  For the first ten minutes, Zed listened disinterestedly to the base commander running through housekeeping items, enhanced security checks and new team members arriving from Southampton hospital. When the room suddenly fell silent, Zed realised everyone was looking at him.

  “Mr Samuels? When you’re ready. The floor is yours.”

  He got to his feet, nervously grasping the back of his chair, trying to remember what he had planned to say.

  “Thank you. Well, as you know, I’ve spent the last week working through the Project Wildfire archive that was recovered from Porton Down.”

  “I’m sorry, Wildfire?” asked one of the senior staffers, removing his glasses. He was a grey-haired officer Zed had never met before.

  “Yes, Project Wildfire was a DSTL research programme, born out of the second Iraq War, set up to determine whether it was feasible to weaponise a flu virus and the means by which this country could defend itself. We believed that Iraq was on the brink of some interesting breakthroughs in this field.”

  “The expert view was that the threat was negligible,” cautioned the doctor. “Our own Common Cold Research Unit near Salisbury spent decades investigating strains of the influenza virus in the hope of developing a vaccine. Their counterparts at Porton assessed the future threat from a weaponised flu virus. It simply couldn’t be done, by us or by anyone else for that matter.”

  “That was the opinion of the Minister of Defence at the time,” agreed Zed. “For so many reasons, the UK and American teams dismissed these ideas as unworkable, and Project Wildfire was mothballed, its funding cancelled. In reality, the programme simply went underground and off the DSTL books.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Zed could see the doctor shaking his head in disbelief, but he chose to ignore him.

  “Believe you me, Iraq was not alone,” continued Zed. “The intelligence reports I’ve seen suggest that other countries had their own parallel research programmes. The US, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Iraq and others. For several years, when I was a contractor working for the MoD and DSTL, some of that based at Porton Down—”

  “Why are we wasting so much time on Iraq?” interrupted the doctor. “Russia or North Korea were far more likely candidates.”

  “Look, as we all know, throughout the eighties and nineties, Iraq developed one of the world’s largest biological and chemical weapons programmes. Saddam was obsessed. He used his oil wealth to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, drafting in the best minds and the latest technology.”

  “And you really think it’s credible that Iraq could have succeeded where so many others had failed?” asked one of the scientists, barely concealing his derision.

  Zed held up a finger to acknowledge the question but refused to be thrown off his stream of thought.

  “I spent the best part of a decade investigating Iraqi weapons programmes. The more I look, the more clues I’m finding. Are you familiar with the work of Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi?”

  “You mean the legendary Doctor Germ?” sneered Doctor Hardy.

  There was a stifled laugh from the far end of the table.

  “Sorry, perhaps you can remind us all who this Doctor Germ was and why you think he is so important?” said the grey-haired officer.

  “Certainly, but ‘he’ is actually a ‘she’. Taha al-Azawi was an Iraqi-born microbiologist who did her PhD on plant toxins right here in this country at the University of East Anglia’s School of Biological Studies. She was a brilliant scientist. Unmarried, no children, both of which were extremely unusual for a thirty-something Arab woman.”

  “Was she the same Doctor Germ who was name-checked in the infamous ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that justified the second Iraq War? The one that made the claim about Saddam’s WMDs being ready to launch in forty-five minutes?”

  “So, that’s where I know her from,” interjected the grey-haired officer.

  “I believe she is key to all this. She had over fifty virologists and computer scientists running simulations at the bioweapons facility at al-Hakam. Our informant suggested they might have been modelling a large-scale pandemic.”

  “Wait, so you’re saying that despite all the sanctions and UN resolutions and inspections, Iraq still managed to keep all this secret from the West?”

  “It would appear so. The MoD team I was working with got drafted in to support the United Nations inspectors following the embarrassing revelation that the UK had been supplying Iraq with some of the equipment and technology used to produce biological weapons.”

  “Well, hold on a minute,” interrupted the colonel. “The UK was certainly not the only one. France, Germany and the US were also implicated. We all unwittingly supplied critical technology to pharmaceutical production sites in Iraq. Everyone was hoodwinked into thinking it was for industrial use.”

  “How was the West that gullible? Why did no one put two and two together?” asked the grey-haired officer.

  “It all comes down to so-called dual-use technology. With nuclear programmes where large plants are required to produce fissile materials, they’re fairly easy to detect via satellite imagery. But as the team from Porton Down well know, bacteria and viruses are produced in the same way as everyday vaccines and antibiotics. That means that legitimate laboratories, breweries, dairies, even distilleries can be deployed to produce either. Hence dual-use,” explained the colonel.

  Zed took over. “Dual-use made the job of the international monitor extremely difficult. The Iraqi authorities were playing an elaborate game of ‘hide the ball’ with the UNSCOM team. UN resolution 687 mandated the destruction of all chemical and biological weapons. But how does one judge the purpose of a facility, whether it’s being used for innocent, legal purposes or something more sinister?

  “Back in the seventies and eighties, it used to be fairly straightforward to identify bioweapons plants from the large stainless steel or glass fermenters they used. Nowadays everything is about a hundred times smaller. Continuous-flow and computer controlled. The need to hold huge stockpiles is a thing of the past. Pathogens can be mass-produced relatively quickly now.

  “Look, on paper, the UN team in Iraq had unlimited access to inspect whatever they chose. In practice, they were met with resistance, denial, and obstruction at every turn. Their teams were often delayed just long enough for facilities to be cleared of any incriminating evidence. In the end, the only way to be sure that Iraq was developing biological weapons was via covert surveillance. They had to find people on the inside who could help them get to the truth. Weapons programmes were too easy to conceal.”

  “So what makes you think this Doctor Germ is key to all this?”

  “She ran the whole thing. Taha was secretly recruited by Saddam during her time at East Anglia University to become the Chief Production Officer at al-Hakam, the top-secret biow
eapons facility just outside Baghdad. Saddam was obsessed with destroying his enemies. He tasked Taha al-Azawi with stockpiling a range of biological and chemical agents. Nothing was off limits. Anthrax, ricin, foot and mouth disease, smallpox. The UN estimated that more than 22,000 Irani prisoners were used for human experiments in the 1980s and 1990s. This scale of war crime was unprecedented since the atrocities of Auschwitz or Dachau.”

  Zed paused, his throat dry. He took a drink of water, his hand shaking with adrenaline.

  “Years later, after the invasion of Iraq, Taha was captured and interrogated. Some of the audio files and transcripts of those conversations were found on the data drives from Porton Down. Hearing her voice was chilling. She stonewalled, denied everything. Only when she was confronted with incontrovertible evidence did she finally admit that they had multiple biowarfare divisions producing anthrax, ricin, plague virus, even smallpox.”

  “So you’re really suggesting Taha’s team might have created the Millennial Virus and launched an attack against the West?” interrupted Doctor Hardy, rubbing his tired eyes. “And I suppose you have at least some shred of evidence to back that up?”

  “Look, what you have to realise is that by the time we got there the Iraqis had destroyed much of the evidence. What remained was at best fragmentary. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. The inspection team weren’t sure what they were looking for. At first, all they had were eyewitness reports that heightened their suspicions. They knew they weren’t seeing the big picture. Admittedly, the physical evidence was at best flimsy.”

  “Flimsy? You could say that again!”

  “But we should not be too quick to discount the possibility of an industrial accident or leak. None of us has forgotten what happened with the foot and mouth outbreak, doctor,” Zed fired back, to the embarrassment of the scientists. “What was the official explanation? A missing vial from Porton Down? Or at least that’s what I heard.”

  Again, there was a restlessness in the room. Zed suspected many of the Porton team knew far more than they were letting on.