directly below Flyco, and is only used to provide meals for officers who need to spend long periods of time on the bridge and, because of their duties, can’t leave it to go down to the Wardroom to eat. Typically, it’s used by Commander (Air), Lieutenant Commander (Flying) and the Air Staff Officer.
Richter slid open the door and entered, Commander (Air) right behind him. The two men sat down facing each other across the table.
‘This is all very mysterious, Paul. What’s going on?’
‘At this moment, I’m not absolutely certain,’ Richter said, ‘but what I can tell you – for your ears only at the moment – is that there are two dead Greeks lying in a tiny village called Kandira on the south coast of Crete. All the indications are that one of them found a sealed container somewhere which he took home and opened, with the help of the second Greek, his nephew. Within twelve hours both men were dead, killed by a really fast-acting pathogen.
‘That’s the overall picture, but there are several aspects of the situation that worry me. The Greek who found the container was a professional diver. Open-source information from a couple of Athens newspapers claim that he had found the wreck of an aircraft on the seabed somewhere near Crete. The obvious conclusion is that he found the container in that same wreck.’
‘When did he find this aircraft?’
‘No more than a day or two before he died, I think. That’s the first anomaly. What was a deadly pathogen doing in a wrecked aircraft lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean? According to the CDC expert who’s on the scene right now, whatever killed those two men so rapidly makes it far more lethal than any other known virus. And the fact that it was in a sealed container suggests that either it was being transported to a secure laboratory for investigation or it was heading the other way.’
Commander (Air) nodded. ‘You’re suggesting it was some kind of biological weapon that had already been developed?’
‘Exactly, and whether it’s a natural agent or some kind of developed bioweapon is irrelevant – the essential fact is that this agent is lethal.
‘My next concern is that there’s been some third-party involvement in the situation. I’ve told you about a sealed container, but that was merely deduced by the CDC man because the item itself is missing. It seems that two unknown men entered both scenes to retrieve the evidence before the CDC expert got there.
‘My principal worry is that whoever retrieved it did so with the intention of using it somewhere else. We could be looking at some form of terrorist activity, and the men involved are clearly ruthless. They killed a police officer stationed outside the second property and dumped his body in a nearby ditch, along with those of two elderly villagers.’
Wings’ intense expression turned to one of shock. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the killings obviously add a different dimension to the situation. What assistance do you want from us on the
‘Three things, sir. First, a secure communications channel so that I can talk to my section in London. Second, the use of a Merlin first thing tomorrow morning. I want to use its dunking sonar to try to locate the wrecked aircraft that the Greek found. Third, and assuming we manage to find this aircraft, the help of the ship’s diving officer to go down and investigate it.’
Chapter 15
Thursday
The two men stared down into Spiros Aristides’s chest cavity.
‘There’s a hell of a lot of blood in there,’ Evans said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
‘Me neither.’ Hardin shifted his gaze from the body to Evans’s face. ‘I’ve never encountered it, thank God, but I only know of one virus that can do this.’
‘Which is?’
‘Variola.’ The single word cut across the room like a knife, stunning Evans.
‘Smallpox?’ he echoed, taking an inadvertent step backwards. ‘But that’s been eradicated, has been for years.’
The last recorded victim of naturally occurring variola, the smallpox virus, was a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin who contracted the disease on 27 October 1977, and who survived. The last ever smallpox infection was reported about a year later, when three members of a family named Parker contracted the disease in Birmingham, England: two of them died. But this outbreak apparently occurred because of viral spores escaping from a small laboratory in the building where the first member of the Parker family to be infected – Janet, a medical photographer – worked. The researcher whose room had probably been the source of the infection was later found dying, an apparent suicide.
Hardin nodded at Evans. ‘But this isn’t smallpox, unless it’s a completely unknown strain,’ he said, gesturing at the body. ‘No pustules, no sign of any damage to the skin at all. No, this is something very different.’
But there was no denying the truth of what Evans had said. Normally, the chest cavity of a corpse being autopsied contains virtually no blood, and what there is almost invariably results from the gross assault on the body carried out by the pathologist when opening up the cavity itself. All of the organs there contain blood, of course, but the cavity itself should contain none.
Inside Spiros Aristides’s opened-up chest there was blood visible everywhere.
‘Right,’ Hardin said. ‘The cavity appears to contain at least one pint of blood, and it is still fairly fluid. This long after death it should have clotted, which suggests we might be dealing with some kind of haemorrhagic fever virus that has attacked the platelets. On initial external examination the organs appear normal.’
‘Should we take a sample of blood from here for bacterial examination?’ Evans asked.
Hardin nodded. ‘Yes. I don’t yet know where all this blood came from, so a sample might help. If it came from the heart or the lungs, there’s a good chance of contamination by various kinds of airborne bacteria, so take a sample from the femoral artery as well, if you can, for comparison.’
Evans nodded, easily filled a syringe with blood from the Greek’s abdomen, then parted Aristides’s legs so that he could reach the site of the femoral artery in the groin. He mounted a needle on a forty-millilitre syringe and slid it into the artery. As he eased the plunger out he was rewarded by a small amount of deep red liquid. Removing the lids from two small containers of brown blood-culture liquid, he injected the blood samples into them and carefully labelled each one correctly. If there were any bacteria present in the blood they would develop inside the containers, thus enabling them to be observed and identified.
Once Evans had finished his bit, Hardin selected another scalpel and reached into the chest cavity. ‘I’m now removing the heart,’ he said to the tape recorder. He began severing the arteries and veins that surrounded it, then cut away the supporting membrane. He pulled the vital organ free, studied it for a few moments and then handed it carefully to Evans. Beside the younger man a selection of large stainless-steel bowls stood ready on the sideboard, and he placed the heart into one of them for dissection later.
‘The heart appears normal on external examination. I’m next removing the lungs,’ Hardin continued, then reached back into Aristides’s chest cavity, cutting carefully with the scalpel until he could free them. ‘They’re heavy,’ he said, as he picked them up using both hands. ‘Five gets you ten they’re oedematous – full of blood,’ he added as he passed them across to Evans who was already holding out a steel dish ready to receive them.
‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘we’ll look at those later. Now we come to the smelly bit – the small intestine.’
Coiled and convoluted, the small intestine is held in place by the mesenteric membrane, itself a part of the peritoneum, the skin which lines the abdomen in all vertebrate animals. Hardin cut away the membranes securing the small intestine to the abdomen, then severed both ends of it. Immediately a pungent odour filled the room which both men could smell even through their Racal hoods, and a grey goo – called chyme and consisting of partially digested food – began oozing out of the lower end of the intestine.
Evans looked down at the chyme as Hardin wrestled the coils into the large steel dish he was holding. ‘Is it my imagination, Tyler, or is this chyme darker than usual?’
Hardin stopped and looked closely at the severed end of the intestine. ‘It varies from individual to individual and a lot depends on diet, but you could be right. We’ll wash it out later and take some samples for toxicological
