The Doomsday Box

by Herbie Brennan

  “Colonel Saltzman is dead,” said the woman beside her.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know any easy way to tell you this. The colonel is dead. Project Rainbow is now under the command of Brigadier General Tudor.”

  Opal stared at her, but the headgear made it impossible to read any expression. “Colonel Saltzman can’t be dead. I was speaking to him only hours ago.”

  “Miss Harrington, I’m Dr. Amory—that’s Major Helen Amory, Army Medical Corps, on assignment to Project Rainbow for the duration of the current emergency. Colonel—”

  “What current emergency?” Opal interrupted.

  “Miss Harrington, you and I will get on far better if you give me a chance to explain. Everyone here is cleared to hear what I have to say, and that may not be the case when we arrive, so I’d suggest you shut up and listen—okay?”

  Opal shut up and listened.

  “Miss Harrington,” said Helen Amory, “I don’t have the security clearance to know what Colonel Saltzman and his people were doing at Project Rainbow, but I’ve been told you and your friends were flown over from England to help. I also understand the CIA is involved here, as well as the army, maybe other agencies. Now, what I can tell you is this. Colonel Saltzman died just over an hour ago from a highly infectious disease. The disease is bacterial in origin, but resistant to our most powerful antibiotics. We tried seventeen of them on him, singly and in combination, and nothing touched his fever. We were still searching for an effective treatment when he died.”

  “He looked completely healthy when I saw him,” Opal said, wide-eyed.

  “It’s one of the most virulent illnesses I have ever seen. It’s also one of the most infectious. Two of the nurses who looked after Colonel Saltzman are now fighting for their lives. One of his military personnel—Captain Alison Woods—was with him when he collapsed. She is now showing early symptoms.”

  “I met Captain Woods,” Opal said. “She was in charge of security.”

  Dr. Amory glanced out the ambulance window, then turned back to Opal. “We’ve set up quarantine units in the old underground base. It’s only a matter of time before we find an antibiotic that works, of course, but in the meantime we must isolate everyone who’s been in contact with the disease.”

  “That’s where you’re taking me?” Opal said, half a question, half a statement.

  Helen Amory nodded. “Yes.”

  “I don’t feel ill,” Opal told her.

  “And hopefully you’ll stay that way. But it’s vital we keep this from spreading, and you and your friends were in contact with the colonel.”

  “So you’re bringing in the others as well?”

  Dr. Amory nodded again. “Yes.”

  “Will I be given treatment?” Opal asked.

  “Not unless you get ill. We’ve only managed to set up a few treatment units so far, and they’re all in use. The rest of the units are more like hospital wards, I’m afraid. Some of them were jail cells, dating from the time when Rainbow was first established. But we’ll make you as comfortable as possible and you’ll be fed army food, which isn’t nearly as bad as you’d imagine.”

  “How long will you keep me isolated?”

  “No more than a week,” Helen Amory told her. “Unless you show symptoms.”

  “A week?” Opal exploded. “I’m supposed to fly home tomorrow—later today.”

  “If you’re still symptom-free in forty-eight hours, it’s unlikely you’ve been infected, but we need to be sure. A week to be on the safe side.”

  The woman was wearing an isolation suit, Opal realized abruptly. The very air she was breathing was filtered to remove bacteria. Opal had seen something similar in a movie about germ warfare. “And if I do start to show symptoms . . . ?”

  Dr. Amory hesitated. “Hopefully we’ll have found a cure by then.”

  After a moment, Opal said, “Do you know what you’re dealing with yet? Some sort of superbug?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Helen Amory said drily. “We’re fairly certain Colonel Saltzman died of the Black Death.”

  Chapter 12

  Danny, in Quarantine, Underground at Montauk

  Quarantine wasn’t as bad as Danny had expected. It was certainly a lot better than the nights he’d spent in the slammer during his bad-boy days. He had a private room, for one thing: comfy bed, little desk thing with a phone on it, chairs, flat-screen TV screwed into the wall. Nobody locked the door, for another. Thing was, the whole team was in quarantine, but isolation units were limited and they weren’t in quarantine from each other. No point really. They’d already been in close contact. If one had it, they all had it. So you could wander down the corridor and visit your friends if you liked, just so you didn’t try to leave the isolation unit. Leaving the isolation unit was something else. Wasn’t just a lockdown either: there were armed guards on every exit. Yanks weren’t shy when it came to lethal force. You had to admire them.

  He was lying on the comfy bed using the remote to channel surf when Michael slipped furtively through the door.

  “Knock?” Danny said.

  “Sorry,” Michael said, but gave no sign of going out again. He looked around for the nearest chair and sat in it. That’s what irritated Danny about Michael: too self-confident by half. “Can I talk to you?” Michael asked. When there was no immediate reaction, he added, “About . . . something?”

  Danny stared at him for a moment, then switched off the television and swung his feet off the bed onto the floor. About something? “Okay,” he said cautiously.

  “I’d like your advice,” Michael said in his polite Eton accent.

  “What about?” In the great scheme of things, something didn’t convey a lot of information. Danny felt wary and vaguely suspicious. People didn’t usually ask his advice. Especially African princes.

  Michael looked uncomfortable. “You know when you join the Project, they give you a physical?” He hesitated, then added, as if Danny mightn’t know what a physical was, “A medical examination?”

  Danny nodded. “Yeah.” The doctor who’d done his was cross-eyed with a hacking cough, a poor advertisement for his profession.

  “Is it to make sure you’re fit for the job, or do you think it’s just, you know, an insurance thing?”

  This was getting weird, Danny thought. “Bit of both, I expect. How should I know?” This had to be something to do with the plague, but when Michael decided to pussyfoot around a subject, he was a real expert. All the same, Michael was looking genuinely worried.

  “Did you tell them the truth?” Michael asked. “About your health?”

  Not just weird but downright bewildering. “No reason not to—I’m healthy as a horse. Tonsils as a kid, but that’s about it.”

  “Did you tell the doctor about your tonsils?”

  “Can’t remember,” Danny said honestly. “But if I did, it didn’t seem to worry him.”

  “Suppose it had been something more serious. Like . . . diabetes or”—he licked his lips nervously—“something else. Do you think they’d still have taken you on?”

  “You don’t have diabetes, do you?” Danny asked.

  “No, no,” said Michael quickly. “That was just an example. What I meant was, if you had a serious condition, would they still keep you on?”

  “Do you have a serious condition?” Danny pushed him. If he did, Danny couldn’t think what. Never so much as heard him sneeze. He’d seen Michael in the shower, and he was one of the fittest-looking blokes he knew.

  Michael flushed, then shook his head. “No, of course not. I was just wondering. You know . . . about Project policy.”

  “You’ve been with the Project a year longer than I have,” Danny told him. “You have to know more about policy than I do.” What was wrong with Michael? There had to be something, or he’d never have started this conversation. Maybe he was worried about getting sick and it had affected his brain. Danny opened his mouth to say something else, then shut it agai
n as Fuchsia came in, waving a book.

  “Boys,” Fuchsia said. “I’ve found what they’re all so worried about.”

  “I’d better go,” Michael muttered. He started to rise from his seat.

  “No, you stay,” Fuchsia told him. “I wanted to tell Danny, but we all need to know this.”

  Michael sat down again, warily. He gave a warning glance toward Danny, as if asking him not to mention what they’d been discussing, not that Danny knew what they had been discussing in the first place.

  Fuchsia said, “It’s the Black Death.”

  “What’s the Black Death?”

  “What they’re all worrying we might have. Opal told me. But the thing is, I’ve looked it up now.” She waved the book she was holding. “It was the most awful disease that broke out in the Middle Ages. Listen to this.” She flicked the book open and read, “‘The plague that raged all over the land consumed nine parts in ten of the men through England, scarcely leaving a tenth man alive.’ That was from the records of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society in 1883.”

  “It broke out in 1883?” Danny asked.

  “No, silly,” Fuchsia said. “They’re an archaeological society. They were reporting on old findings. But imagine nine people in ten wiped out! That’s worse than those awful African diseases like Ebola that everybody’s frightened of.” She waved the book at them again. “It broke out in China in thirteen-something and spread to Europe a couple of years later. They called it the blue sickness then. People used to catch it in the morning, and by the afternoon they were dead. It was totally the fastest disease ever.”

  “Yes, but that was before antibiotics,” Danny said. “They can cure it now, can’t they?”

  “That’s the thing,” Fuchsia told him. “They used to think it was bubonic plague, which is pretty nasty and fast and deadly, but this book says scientists aren’t so sure anymore. It broke out a few more times, the last of them in sixteen-something, then just sort of disappeared. So if it wasn’t bubonic plague, it’s a whole new disease we’ve never tried antibiotics on, so they might work or they might not. And even if they did work, you’d have to move really, really fast and watch people, because if they caught it at night or something, they’d be dead before you’d think of giving them the pill. The early symptoms don’t look serious, you see. The first thing that happens is you sneeze. Who’d think twice about that?” Her eyes were gleaming. “They made up a rhyme about it. You’ll never guess what it was. . . .”

  Michael said politely, “What was it?”

  “‘Ring a ring of roses, a pocketful of posies, a-tissue, a-tissue, we all fall down!’” She looked from one face to the other. “The old nursery rhyme is actually a plague song.”

  Opal came in then. All the color had drained from her face, and there was a frightened, haunted look in her eyes. “They’re dead,” she said. “Everybody’s dead.”

  Chapter 13

  Danny, in Quarantine, Underground at Montauk

  They ran together up the corridor, all four of them, to the entrance of their quarantine wing. Through the glass doors at the end they could see the bodies of their guards. One man was slumped with his back against a wall, head forward as if sleeping. The other was prostrate on the floor, his body bloated, sightless eyes staring upward at the ceiling. The skin of both men had taken on a bluish tinge, and there were swellings on their necks. It took only the briefest glance to confirm they were dead.

  “Is it just the guards?” Michael asked, staring through the glass.

  “No,” Opal said. “There are other bodies just around the corner. I think everybody’s dead.”

  “How do you know?” Danny asked.

  “I went to look.”

  Michael said, “How did you get out?”

  “The doors aren’t locked anymore,” Opal told him.

  “How come?” Danny asked, frowning.

  Without warning, Opal burst into tears. “I don’t know. Does it matter? Look at them—they’re dead! They were infected by whatever killed the colonel, and now they’re dead.”

  Michael put his arms around her. “It’s all right,” he murmured.

  “It’s not all right!” Opal sobbed. “There are more bodies in the corridors. Doctors and nurses and . . . people, just people; and they look much worse than those two. And they all have this awful, terrified look on their faces.”

  “You went out and saw them?” Danny asked.

  Opal pulled away from Michael and Fuchsia to round on him. “I didn’t touch any of them, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t have the disease.”

  “I was just thinking how brave you were,” Danny told her.

  Fuchsia said, “Of course you don’t have the disease. None of us has it.”

  Opal stopped glaring at Danny to turn to Fuchsia. “Why do you think that?”

  “It’s what I was reading,” Fuchsia explained. “The Black Death is terribly dangerous and you can catch it off somebody if they so much as breathe on you, but some people are naturally immune.”

  “You think we might be?” Michael asked.

  “I think we must be,” Fuchsia told him. “If we weren’t immune, we’d be dead by now.” She gave a weak version of her powerful smile. “It says in the book that anybody who came in contact with a plague victim would show symptoms within a few hours. Nearly everybody dies. In the Middle Ages there were putrefying corpses everywhere.” She glanced through the glass doors. “Like those two.”

  “Are you sure we haven’t been infected?” Danny asked.

  “Hope not,” Fuchsia said.

  “You haven’t,” said a cool voice behind them.

  Chapter 14

  Carradine, the Meeting Room, Montauk Underground Complex

  It was almost funny, as if they were having a routine meeting like they did back in the old days. Except then the participants were mostly middle-aged. Here, Opal and Michael sat at one side of the table, Danny and Fuchsia at the other, while Carradine was at the head, middle-aged himself now. He felt ten years older than he had when he’d last seen them. In the mirror this morning, his skin was gray, his face taut with strain.

  “You aren’t going to die,” Carradine said. He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a weak smile. “At least not from the disease.” Michael opened his mouth, probably to ask for an explanation, but Carradine went on tiredly, “I’m sorry you had to . . . had to . . .” He let the sentence trail. What had happened was ghastly. What was worse was that his Project team was involved and about to get a lot more so, but he could see no way out of it. Which didn’t mean he had to like it—they were only kids, for God’s sake. Astral missions were one thing, but this . . . He collected his strength. “I’m sorry you had to see the bodies, find out this way what has happened. I should have been here to look out for you, but . . .”

  But the whole thing had run out of control within hours, in spite of everything he’d tried to do to stop it. The trouble was, it had all sounded so far-fetched, like some second-rate disaster movie. Nobody took his demands for quarantine seriously until people started dying, and by then it was too late to save the base. And by the time the quarantine was imposed, he knew for certain there were one or two people who’d left Montauk. Nobody knew whether they’d contracted the disease or not, but if they had, the epidemic could go global within days, given the speed of modern air travel. He shrugged, paused, then said aloud, “This might easily turn into a worldwide crisis.”

  “Why aren’t we going to die, Mr. Carradine?” Michael asked quietly.

  He liked Michael. The boy never panicked, never made a fuss. “You’ve been vaccinated,” Carradine told him. “So have I.”

  “Against bubonic plague?” Opal frowned. “I didn’t think there was a vaccine.”

  “There is, as a matter of fact, but what we have here isn’t bubonic plague.”

  They looked at him expectantly, and Fuchsia said, “So the Black Death wasn’t bubonic plague?” She was the sharpest one of al
l, however she came across. If they could just find a way to switch on her talent fully, she’d be the best asset the Project had ever had.

  “It isn’t the Black Death either,” Carradine told her.

  “Then what is it?” Michael asked.

  “It’s complicated,” Carradine said.

  Fuchsia, who had a knack for getting to the heart of things, said, “Mr. Carradine, did you work on the original Montauk project—Project Rainbow?”

  It was almost a relief to say yes. “It was back in the eighties,” Carradine told them. “Not long after I joined the CIA as a young man. I was given the option of transfer to Montauk. They were short on details about what was going on here—need-to-know and all that—but it was obviously an important assignment, and I thought it would be good for my career, so I said yes. Even after I went to Montauk, it was nearly three months before I discovered they were involved in germ warfare.”

  There was a long moment’s silence in the room before Danny exclaimed, “Bloody hell!”

  “I thought biological warfare was outlawed,” Opal said.

  Carradine shrugged. “There was a Geneva Protocol as long ago as 1925 that banned the use of biological agents in warfare, but it didn’t stop the Japanese from using them in China during World War Two. Then in 1972 America and the Soviets both signed the Biological Weapons Convention. That was a treaty prohibiting all biological weapons outright: production, stockpiling, or development. It also required the destruction of existing stockpiles. The trouble was, it was a treaty without teeth. No provision for inspection, no penalties for breaking it. The Soviets had had an active bioweapons program for years and so, frankly, had we. The difference was, we stopped ours after the treaty, and they didn’t. They were still running theirs when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.”

  “But we didn’t really stop ours, did we?” Opal asked mildly. “The American program, I mean.”

  Carradine sighed. “We did for a time. President Nixon held to the letter of the treaty for maybe a year, eighteen months. We even destroyed some of our stockpiles. But then the intelligence services began to accumulate evidence the Soviets were ignoring the agreement. What else could we do?”