by Tom Clancy
“Mr. Ambassador, I remind you that we are a sovereign nation. Our armed forces operate under our law, and you keep reminding us that the sea is free for the innocent passage of all. Are you now telling me that your country wishes to deny us that right?”
“Not at all, Prime Minister. We merely find it curious that you are evidently staging so large an exercise.” He didn’t add, with your limited resources.
“Mr. Ambassador, no one likes to be bullied. Only a few months ago you falsely accused us of harboring aggressive intentions to a neighbor. You threatened our country. You actually staged an attack on our navy and damaged our ships. What have we done to merit such unfriendly acts?” she asked, leaning back in her chair.
Unfriendly acts was not a phrase used lightly, the Ambassador noted, and was not accidentally spoken here.
“Madam, there has been no such act. I would suggest that if there were misperceptions, perhaps they were mutual, and to prevent further such errors, I come here to ask a simple question. America makes no threats. We simply inquire as to the intentions of your naval forces.”
“And I have answered. We are conducting exercises.” A moment before, Williams noted, she had supposed that something was going on. Now she seemed more certain of it. “Nothing more.”
“Then my question is answered,” Williams commented with a benign smile. Jesus, but she thought she was clever. Williams had grown up in one of America’s most complex political environments, the Pennsylvania Democratic party, and had fought his way to the top of it. He’d met people like her before, just less sanctimonious. Lying was such a habit for political figures that they thought they could always get away with it. “Thank you, Prime Minister.”
THE ENGAGEMENT WAS a wipeout, the first such in this training rotation. Pretty bad timing, Hamm thought, watching the vehicle returning up the dirt roads. They’d headed into it just after the President’s announcement. They were Guardsmen, and they were far from home, and they were worried about their families. That had distracted them badly, since they hadn’t had time to let things settle down a little, to call home and make sure things were okay with Mom and Dad, or honey and the kids. And they’d paid for it, but professional soldier that he was, Hamm knew it wasn’t fair to mark this one down against the Carolina brigade. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the field. Realistic as the NTC was, it was still play. Nobody died here except by accident, while at home the real thing might well be taking place. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be with soldiers, was it?
CLARKAND CHAVEZ had their blood drawn by an Army medic who also ran the screening test. They watched it with morbid fascination, especially since the medic wore thick gloves and a mask.
“You’re both clean,” he told them, with a sigh of his own.
“Thanks, Sarge,” Chavez said. It was very real now. His dark Latino eyes were showing something other than relief. Like John, Domingo was putting on his mission face.
With that, they bundled into an official car for the drive to Andrews. The streets in the Washington metropolitan area were unusually empty. It made for a swift passage that didn’t assuage the sense of foreboding they both felt. Crossing one of the bridges, they stopped and had to wait for three other vehicles to pass a checkpoint. There was a National Guard Hummer in the middle of the eastbound lanes, and when Clark pulled up, he showed his CIA picture-pass.
“Agency,” he told the MP.
“Pass,” the Spec-4 replied.
“So, where we going, Mr. C.?”
“Africa, via the Azores.”
51
INVESTIGATIONS
THE MEETING WITH THE Senate leadership went predictably. Issuing them surgical masks had set the tone of the evening for them—again, van Damm’s idea. General Pickett had been to Hopkins to review procedures there, then flown back to give the main part of the briefing. The fifteen senators assembled in the East Room listened gravely, only their eyes showing above the masks.
“I’m not comfortable with your actions, Mr. President,” one of them said. Jack couldn’t tell which one.
“You think I am?” he replied. “If anybody has a better idea, let’s hear it. I have to go with the best medical advice. If this thing is as deadly as the general says, then any mistake could kill people in the thousands—even millions. If we err, we have to err on the side of caution.”
“But what about civil liberties?” another one demanded.
“Does any of those come before life?” Jack asked. “People, if anyone wants to give me a better option, I will listen—we have one of our experts here to help evaluate it. But I will not listen to objections that are not based on scientific fact. The Constitution and the law cannot anticipate every eventuality. In cases like this, we’re supposed to use our heads—”
“We’re supposed to be guided by principle!” It was the civil liberties Senator again.
“Fine, then let’s talk about it. If there’s a balance between what I have done and whatever else will keep the country moving—and safe!—let’s find it. I want options! Give me something I can use!” There followed a silence and a lot of crossed looks. Even that was hard. The senators were spaced out in their seating.
“Why did you have to move so fast?”
“People may be dying, you jackass!” another senator snarled at his good friend and distinguished colleague. He had to be one of the new crop, Jack thought. Someone who didn’t know the mantras yet.
“But what if you’re wrong?” a voice asked.
“Then you can hold your impeachment trial after the House indicts me,” Jack replied. “Then somebody else can make these decisions, and God help him. Senators, my wife is in Hopkins right now, and she’s going to take her turn treating these people. I don’t like that, either. I would like to have your support. It’s lonely standing up by myself like this, but whether you support your President or not, I have to do the best I can. I’ll say it one more time: if anybody here has a better idea, let’s hear it.”
But nobody did, and it wasn’t their fault. As little time as he’d had to come to terms with the situation, they’d had less.
THE AIR FORCE had managed tropical uniforms for them out of the Andrews Post Exchange—a medium-sized department store—since their Washington clothes were a little too heavy for a tropical environment. It made for good cover, too. Clark wore the silver eagles of a colonel, and Chavez was a major, complete with silver pilot’s wings and ribbons donated by the flight crew of their VC-20B. There were, in fact, two sets of pilots. The backup crew was sleeping in the two most-forward passenger seats.
“Not bad for a retired E-6,” Ding noted, though the uniform didn’t fit all that well.
“Not bad for a retired E-7, either, and that’s ‘sir,’ to you, Major Chavez.”
“Three bags full, sir.” It was their only light moment. The military version of the Gulfstream business jet had a ton of communications gear, and a sergeant to run it. The documents coming over the equipment threatened to exhaust the on-board supply of paper as they passed over Cape Verde, inbound to Kinshasa.
“Second stop is Kenya, sir.” The communications sergeant was really an intelligence specialist. She read all the inbound traffic. “You have to see a man about some monkeys.”
Clark took the page—he was the colonel, after all—and read it, while Chavez figured out how the ribbons went on the blue uniform shirt. He decided he didn’t have to be too careful. It wasn’t as though the Air Force were really a military service—at least according to the Army in which he’d once served, where it was an article of faith.
“Check this out,” John said, handing the page over.
“That’s a lead, Mr. C.,” Ding observed at once. They traded a look. This was a pure intelligence mission, one of the few on which they’d been dispatched. They were tasked to gather vitally important information for their country, and nothing else. For now. Though they didn’t say so, neither would have objected to doing something more. Though both were field officers of
the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, both were also former combat soldiers (in Clark’s case, a former SEAL) who more often than not dropped into the DO’s paramilitary side, where they did things that the pure spooks regarded as a little too exciting. But often satisfying, Chavez told himself. Very satisfying. He was learning to control his temper—in fact, that part of his genetic heritage, as he called it now, had always been under tight control—but it didn’t stop him from thinking about finding whoever it was who had attacked his country, and then dealing with him as soldiers did.
“You know him better than I do, John. What’s he going to do?”
“Jack?” Clark shrugged. “That depends on what we get for him, Domingo. That’s our job, remember?”
“Yes, sir,” the younger man said seriously.
THE PRESIDENT DID not sleep well that night, though he told himself, and was told by others, that sleep was a prerequisite to making good decisions—and that, everyone emphasized, was his only real function. It was what the citizens expected him to do above all other things. He’d only had about six hours the previous day after an exhausting schedule of travel and speeches, but even so, sleep came hard. His staff and the staffs of many other federal agencies slept less, because, as sweeping as the executive orders were, they had to be implemented in a practical world, and that meant interpretation of the orders in the context of a living nation. A final complication was the fact that there was a problem with the two Chinas, who were thirteen hours ahead of Washington; another potential problem with India, ten hours ahead; and the Persian Gulf, eight hours ahead; in addition to the major crisis in America, which stretched across seven time zones all by itself, if one counted Hawaii—or even more if you added lingering possessions in the Pacific. Lying in bed on the residence floor of the White House, Ryan’s mind danced around the globe, finally wondering what part of the world wasn’t an area of some kind of concern. Around three he gave up the effort and rose, put on casual clothes and headed to the West Wing for the Signals Office, with members of the Detail in tow.
“What’s happening?” he asked the senior officer present. It was Major Charles Canon, USMC, who’d been the one to inform him of the Iraqi assassination ... which had seemed to start everything, he remembered. People started to jump to their feet. Jack waved them back into their seats. “As you were.”
“Busy night, sir. Sure you want to be up for all this?” the major asked.
“I don’t feel much like sleeping, Major,” Ryan replied. The three Service agents behind him made faces behind SWORDSMAN’s back. They knew better even if POTUS didn’t.
“Okay, Mr. President, we’re linked in now with CDC and USAMRIID communications lines, so we’re copying all their data. On the map there we have all the cases plotted.” Canon pointed. Someone had installed a new, large map of the United States mounted on a corkboard. Red pushpins obviously designated Ebola cases. There was a supply of black ones, too, whose import was all too obvious, though none were on the board yet. The pins were mainly clustered in eighteen cities now, with seemingly random singles and pairs spread all over the map. There were still a number of states untouched. Idaho, Alabama, both the Dakotas, even, strangely, Minnesota with its Mayo Clinic, were among the states so far protected by Ryan’s executive order—or chance, and how did one tell the difference? There were several computer printouts—the printers were all running now. Ryan picked one up. The victim-patients were listed alphabetically by name, by state, by city, and by occupation. Roughly fifteen percent of them were in the “maintenance custodial” category, and that was the largest statistical grouping other than “sales marketing.” This data came from the FBI and CDC, which were working together to study patterns of infection. Another printout showed suspected sites of infection, and that confirmed General Pickett’s statement that trade shows had been selected as primary targets.
In all his time at CIA, Ryan had studied all manner of theoretical attacks against his country. Somehow this sort had never made it to his desk. Biological warfare was beyond the pale. He’d spent thousands of hours thinking about nuclear attack. What we had, what they had, what targets, what casualties, the hundreds of possible targeting options selected for political, military, or economic factors, and for each option there was a range of possible outcomes depending on weather, time of year, time of day, and other variables until the result could be addressed only by computers, and even then the likely results were only expressions of probability calculations. He’d hated every moment of that, and rejoiced at the end of the Cold War and its constant, implied threat of megadeaths. He’d even lived through a crisis that might have led that far. The nightmares from that, he remembered ...
The President had never taken a course in government per se, just the usual political-science courses at Boston College in pursuit of his first degree in economics. Mainly he remembered the words of an aristocratic planter, written almost thirty years before his ascension to become the country’s third President: “... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.” That was the mission statement right there. The Constitution he’d sworn to Preserve, Protect, and Defend was itself designed to preserve, protect, and defend the lives and rights of the people out there, and he wasn’t supposed to be here going over lists of names and places and occupations of people, at least eighty percent of whom were going to die. They were entitled to their lives. They were entitled to their liberty. They were entitled to the pursuit—by which Jefferson had meant the vocation of, not the chase after—of happiness. Well, somebody was taking lives. Ryan had ordered the suspension of their liberty. Sure as hell not many were happy right now ...
“Here’s actually a little bit of good news, Mr. President.” Canon handed over the previous day’s election results. It startled Ryan. He’d allowed himself to forget about that. Someone had compiled a list of the winners by profession, and less than half of them were lawyers. Twenty-seven were physicians. Twenty-three were engineers. Nineteen were farmers. Eighteen were teachers. Fourteen were businessmen of one sort or another. Well, that was something, wasn’t it? Now he had about a third of a House of Representatives. How to get them to Washington, he wondered. They could not be impeded from that. The Constitution was explicit on that issue. While Pat Martin might argue that the suspension of interstate travel had never been argued before the high court, the Constitution mandated that members of the Congress could not be stopped from coming to a session except on cause of treason ... ? Something like that. Jack couldn’t remember exactly, but he knew that congressional immunity was a big deal.
Then a telex machine started chattering. An Army Spec-5 walked over to it.
“FLASH-traffic from State, from Ambassador Williams in India,” he announced.
“Let’s see.” Ryan walked over, too. It wasn’t good news. Neither was the next one from Taipei.
THE PHYSICIANS WERE working four-hour shifts. For every young resident there was a senior staff member. They were largely doing nurses’ work, and though they mainly were doing it well, they also knew that it wouldn’t matter all that much.
It was Cathy’s first time in a space suit. She’d operated on thirty or so AIDS patients for eye complications of their disease, but that hadn’t been terribly difficult. You used regular gloves, and the only real worry was the number of hands allowed in the surgical field, and for ophthalmic surgery that wasn’t nearly the problem it was for thoracic. You went a little slower, were a little more careful in your movements, but that was it, really. Not now. Now she was in a big, thick plastic bag, wearing a helmet whose clear faceplate often fogged from her breath, looking at patients who were going to die despite the attention of professor-rank physicians.
But they had to try anyway. She was looking down at the local Index Case, the Winnebago dealer whose wife was in the next room. There were two IVs running, one of fluids and electrolytes and morphine, the other o
f whole blood, both held rigidly in place so as not to damage the steel-vein interface. The only thing they could do was to support. It had once been thought that interferon might help, but that hadn’t worked. Antibiotics didn’t touch viral diseases, a fact which was not widely appreciated. There was nothing else, though a hundred people were now examining options in their labs. No one had ever taken the time with Ebola. CDC, the Army, and a few other labs across the world had done some work, but there hadn’t been the effort devoted to other diseases that raged through “civilized” countries. In America and Europe research priority went to diseases that killed many, or which attracted a lot of political attention, because the allocation of government research money was a political act, and for private funding it tracked with what rich or prominent person had been unlucky. Myasthenia gravis had killed Aristotle Onassis, and the resultant funding, while not fast enough to help the shipping magnate, had made significant progress almost overnight—largely luck, Dr. Ryan knew, but true even so, and a blessing to other victims. The same principle extended to oncology, where the funding for breast cancer, which attacked roughly one woman in ten, far outstripped research in prostate cancer, which afflicted roughly half of the male population. A huge amount went into childhood cancers, which were statistically quite rare—only twelve cases a year per hundred thousand kids—but what was more valuable than a child? Nobody objected to that; certainly she did not. It came down to minuscule funding for Ebola and other tropical diseases because they didn’t have a high profile in the countries which spent the money. That would change now, but not soon enough for the patients filling up the hospital.
The patient started gagging and turned to his right. Cathy grabbed the plastic trash can—emesis trays were too small and tended to spill—and held it for him. Bile and blood, she saw. Black blood. Dead blood. Blood full of the little crystalline “bricks” of Ebola virus. When he was done, she gave him a water container, the sort with a straw that gave a little bit of water from a squeeze. Just enough to wet his mouth.