‘Zhukov?’ Monty asked. ‘Who the hell is he?’
Monty said, ‘Now you’re into my playground, doc. I can do the explaining.’
‘Go ahead.’
Adrianna watched the scarred face of her military man as he briefed them, not once looking at his laptop. She hated to admit playing favorites, but Monty was her favorite in her Tiger Team. Quiet, unassuming, smart and tough, with the look of a guy who could help deliver a baby in the morning, and in the afternoon break the neck of someone threatening the same newborn.
‘Munitions,’ Monty said. ‘Always been the challenge of effectively delivering the most potent firepower with the most economic delivery system. You’ve got the problem of having enough munitions slung underneath fighter- bomber wings and in bomb bays to do the job, especially if you’re flying over hundreds of miles of territory and your supply chain is thin. So here’s the deal. You get one big bomb but it’s really just a canister. That’s all. Drop it over your target site. Maybe a staging area for infantry. Or an air base. Anything with nice, exposed targets. The canister is dropped, falls to a predetermined altitude, and pops open. Inside are hundreds of bomblets, packed away in little clusters that spread out. Each cluster about the size of a beer can. And when they get close enough, the little beer cans pop open and a lot of bad guys are having a bad day. One canister is dropped, but you’re delivering munitions over a wide area. Lethal and effective as hell.’
Darren smiled. ‘Sounds like you serve in the Air Force, Monty.’
Monty said, ‘I’ll never tell, and you know it.’
Brian was impatient. ‘All right, you’re saying that this Russian, he came up with a way of using cluster bombs to deliver the anthrax?’
Victor shook his head. ‘Yes, but not in a mechanical sense. You see, Zhukov came up with an approach to cluster the anthrax spores using a membrane, about the thickness of a cell wall. And this membrane would last a number of seconds out in the open air before it decayed, releasing the anthrax spores. So you could have a release of respiratory anthrax from a rocket shell or a spraying device, and it would reach ground level before the spores were actually out in the open. Very elegant, very deadly. And what we did — well, the Clear Sky group, I mean — was to use Zhukov’s approach to come up with a delivery system for the anthrax vaccine. Same method, using the membrane system. Initial tests looked promising. Anyone exposed to the vaccine would generally just need one exposure.’
‘Good,’ Adrianna said. ‘We’ll rely on you to—’
‘But…but, Jesus, Adrianna!’ Victor’s voice raised a notch and she said, ‘Yes?’
His face was mottled white, as though a surge of anger was now raging through him. ‘You… I mean, all right, suppose we do have enough vaccine. That’s a possibility. Considering who we are and the blank check we carry around in our back pockets all the time, we may be able to make it happen. But you haven’t solved the delivery problem, not even close to it!’
‘It’s a problem, it’ll be solved,’ she said.
‘Do you have any idea? Do you? My God, the last mass immunization we had in this country was the swine flu fiasco, back in 1976.’
Nobody said anything. Adrianna paused, hoped someone would pick up the ball, and thankfully, it was her New York detective.
‘Going to need a history lesson there, pal. Most of us were pissing in our diapers back then. Go on.’
Victor wiped at his face with his right hand, ‘In 1976 — February, I think — there was an outbreak of a respiratory illness at Fort Dix in New Jersey. An Army recruit died, and autopsy results showed he died from a variation of swine flu. That got a lot of people’s attention. You see, a form of swine flu was believed to be the strain of influenza that broke out in 1918 and 1919. A lot of people died worldwide from that epidemic.’
Monty said, ‘Define “a lot”, doc.’
Victor’s voice was now calmer, and icier. ‘How does fifty to a hundred million people sound like?’
Brian said, ‘Sick? You mean, fifty to a hundred million people sick?’
‘Shit, no, not sick.
Adrianna’s mouth seemed dry. So many dead… She said, ‘Impossible. How could that many people have died without us knowing about it today? Something like that should be in all the history books.’
A sharp nod from Victor. ‘Of course. But something else was crowding out the news about the pandemic. The end of the First World War. Tens of millions had died in the trenches and elsewhere. What was another ten or fifty or a hundred million? Which is why the CDC back in ‘76 freaked, thinking that the swine flu that killed this soldier was just the tip of the iceberg. Old reports I saw, the estimate was that if there was a swine flu outbreak that year, by the end of 1976 there could be a million deaths in the United States alone. A million. So there was a crash program, announced by President Ford, to immunize everybody in the United States against swine flu.’
Brian said, ‘Sorry, doc, you’re gonna have to continue the history lesson here. I don’t remember this shit at all.’
‘Can’t see why you should — because it was a fiasco. It was supposed to be another Manhattan Project style of government management but those type of projects tend not to repeat themselves in terms of success, if you know what I mean. A global war against Nazis and Japanese militarists tends to focus one’s mind and efforts. Not the threat of a possible flu epidemic. Anyway, pharmaceutical companies were pressed into service to develop the vaccine. One company spent all their time developing the wrong vaccine and had to start over. Insurance companies said they wouldn’t pay out any claims against the pharmaceuticals. Congress had to step in to provide protection. The vaccine for children had to be administered in the two-dose system. Paperwork and administration was a nightmare. Then some elderly people started dying, the day they got the vaccine. And then it came out that people receiving the vaccine were at a greater risk of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome, a delightful and occasionally fatal form of paralysis. By the time it went down in flames, only a third of the population had been immunized, and the total cost reached almost a half-billion dollars. And there was no swine flu outbreak that year.’
‘Christ on a crutch,’ Monty said.
‘And another thing,’ Victor said, pressing on, ‘they had nine months to do it, and they still didn’t get it right. How in hell do you expect us to do the same thing in under a month?’
Adrianna was pleased at how calm her voice sounded, and felt a quick burst of pride — quickly suppressed- at how well she was doing. ‘Victor, what other choice do we have? Wait for the outbreaks to start in Chicago or Atlanta or DC? It will be too late by then. You know it.’
‘Another mass-immunization program… it can’t work,’ Victor said. ‘You know it can’t. Not in the space of time we have. Not to mention the media attention. Hell, the news medias’ focus on the program back in ‘76 crippled it. Back when there were only three major networks, no news cable channels. Can you imagine what it would be like now, today? With the cable news channels? The twenty-four/seven coverage? The cameras outside the clinics? The interviews with people who have a bad reaction from the immunization? The chat rooms? The weblogs? It would be a disaster before it even—’
Monty interrupted, ‘Not to mention that it would give the assholes with the anthrax an excuse to hit us now. Not wait until some special date on their fucked-up calendar.
Another pause in the conversations. It seemed like a moment had been reached, and Adrianna knew what it was. She had prepared for it, had practiced it, but still, it was hard, getting the words out.
‘Then…then what we’re talking about,’ she began, ‘is that perhaps the only option is to proceed with the immunization. But in private.’
There, she thought. It was out. From the looks on the faces of the other Tiger Team members, it was as though she had taken a baseball bat to the back of their heads. Darren, now looking even more pale, turned, stared
