Pandemic (24 page)

“Diver Two, get out of there,” the dive master said, his voice at last carrying a shred of urgency, a hint of emotion. “Exit immediately.”

“Topside … I’m stuck … oh my God, my visor is cracked, water is coming in, get me
help
, get someone down here—”

Another
crunch
far louder than the first, then, no sound at all.

The sideways view didn’t waver. The diver had been crushed, but her helmet camera remained on, continued to send signals up the umbilical to the
Brashear
far above.

Clarence sagged back in his chair. He felt cold, distant, as if it were all happening somewhere else. Two divers dead. Both ADSs destroyed.

And, worst of all, the artifact was still down there.

Murray hated the Situation Room, but at least that felt comfortable, felt
familiar
. The president’s private sitting room didn’t feel familiar at all. He’d been here twice before, both times to deliver bad news to former presidents; the kind of news that couldn’t wait until morning.

The room could have been in any house, really, any house of someone with money and status. Murray and Admiral Porter sat on a comfortable couch. Murray knew he looked wrinkled, disheveled — he’d been napping on a cot when the news had come in. His staff had brought him fresh clothes, but he’d done little more than throw them on. Porter, of course, looked neat and pressed, not a wrinkle on his uniform.

The sitting room was right next to the president’s bedroom. Blackmon seemed sleepy, which was no surprise — she’d been woken up only fifteen minutes earlier.

“An explosion,” she said. “What was the cause, Admiral?”

“Unknown at this time,” Porter said. “Possibly sabotage, a booby trap left by the infected crew of the
Los Angeles
.”

Blackmon’s tired eyes turned to Murray. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s a possibility, Madam President,” Murray said. “Once the
LA
’s engines blew, the infected crew could assume that sooner or later divers would come down to retrieve the artifact. Booby traps fit the mentality of the infected, to some degree, although the infected would be most interested in spreading the disease. The explosion was definitely internal, however, which does make crew sabotage the most-likely cause.”

He stood — slowly, his aching hips and a stabbing pain in his back keeping him from doing it otherwise — and handed the president a photo taken by one of the Blackfish UUVs. The front end of the
Los Angeles
had blown open like some cartoon cigar.

Blackmon studied it. “Admiral, would that destroy the artifact?”

“Possibly,” Porter said. “The last report from the diver said he had removed
it from the main, hardened storage locker. If that is accurate, it’s doubtful the smaller container holding the artifact itself could have withstood such an explosion.”

Blackmon set the picture in her lap. “When will we know for sure?”

“Another ADS is en route,” Porter said. “It will be at least twelve hours before we can get a person down there. The UUVs have scanned the area, but found no sign of the container. Considering the damage, that’s not surprising.”

She looked at the photo again. “Could it have been survivors? The
Los Angeles
also had one of those deep-sea suits, did it not? That, or someone in an air pocket? Or could the disease modify human biology enough for people to survive down there?”

Porter shook his head. “Not likely. At that depth, the pressure is twenty-eight times that of sea level — nitrogen narcosis would quickly kill anyone not locked into a sealed area or wearing an ADS. Those suits have at most forty-eight hours of life support, and the
Los Angeles
sank four days ago. Any normal human being in that crew is definitely dead.”

Porter looked at Murray to answer the final part of the question.

“The disease can change physiology, but not to that extent,” Murray said. “Pressure is still pressure, Madam President.”

She nodded. “All right. Now for the obvious question — could this have been a deliberate attack by foreign agents, allowing them to seize the artifact?”

Murray had known that question was coming. Truth be told, he wanted to hear the answer himself.

Porter thought carefully before responding.

“It’s absolutely a possibility, although less likely than the booby trap. Recon flights are out around the clock. Coast Guard ships have been called in to patrol the five-mile perimeter around the task force. It is highly doubtful any sub could swim undetected beneath that perimeter, and nothing on the surface could get past it unseen. The
Pinckney
reported no sonar sightings, nothing was detected by the UUVs and ROVS, and neither of the deceased divers reported anything unusual until they entered the nose cone.”

Murray wasn’t a naval expert, but Porter seemed confident in the measures taken.

Blackmon eased back in her chair. “So, sabotage,” she said. “That’s the most likely answer. But if something
did
get through our lines …”

She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

“Every agency is on alert,” Porter said. “Homeland, TSA, everyone. Not that this changes anything — they’ve been on alert since the
Los Angeles
went down.”

Murray had his doubts. Anyone talented enough,
resourceful
enough, to snatch an artifact from nine hundred feet down — right out from under the nose of the U.S. Navy — would have no problem getting past airport security, or just putting the thing on a truck and sending it to Mexico.

At any point on any path of transport, infection could occur.

“Well,” Blackmon said, “for once, I find myself rooting for sabotage.”

Murray couldn’t agree more.

Ten clear cells. Four empty. Six occupied.

Three new subjects. Margaret tried to think about them in those terms, as
subjects
. But unless Tim’s cellulase-secreting yeast acted like some kind of miracle cure, those men were death-row inmates.

She stood in the airlock that led from the lab space to the containment area. She looked through the door’s window, stared at the men in the cells. Clarence stood on her right, Tim on her left. They quietly waited for her to think things through.

Thirty hours since she and Clarence had landed on the
Carl Brashear
. Barely more than a day, and things were already collapsing.

The men in the clear cells weren’t alone — two positives had been found on the
Pinckney
, the infected men discovered because they opened fire on their shipmates, killing three and wounding two. Unlike the
Brashear
, however, the
Pinckney
had no containment facility: Captain Tubberville had ordered the immediate execution of the infected men and the incineration of their bodies.

Obviously, Petrovsky and Walker hadn’t been the only ones to come up from the
Los Angeles
. Others, or at least pieces of others, had floated to the surface, contagious flesh mingling with swimming survivors of the
Forrest Sherman
and the
Stratton
. Or could it have been something else? Maybe a gas-filled puffball corpse breaking the surface and then opening up to spill spores across the task force?

The cause almost didn’t matter: what mattered was that the task force had become infected. This was going to end in a giant fireball. The only real question was, would
anyone
get out alive?

“The killer, Orin Nagy, the test missed him,” Margaret said. “I didn’t think false-negatives were possible.”

“They’re not,” Tim said. “He must have found a way to skip his test, or use someone else’s blood.”

Margaret turned to Clarence. “Yasaka has strict procedures in place. How could someone dodge a test?”

“I don’t know the specifics,” he said, “but there’s hundreds of extra men on this ship. It’s very confused up top, no matter how disciplined Yasaka’s crew is. If someone smart tried hard enough, they could probably duck a test. Maybe even two.”

That didn’t make the cellulose test worthless, exactly, but not far from it.

“Maybe more are ducking it,” Margaret said. “There’s got to be another way to look at the task force’s population as a whole, try to get an idea of just how fucked we are.”

Tim raised a gloved hand. “I can get Yasaka to give me access to onboard medical records. I’ll set up a biosurveillance algorithm. Maybe there’s common symptoms reported early, before the infection reaches the stage where it’s detectable and then contagious. If there’s a spike in a certain symptom — say, headaches — we might get an idea of how many people are infected but not yet testable.”

Biosurveillance … she hadn’t thought of that. Maybe Tim’s background in bioinformatics could make a difference.

“Do it,” Margaret said. “But make sure your yeast cultures are the first priority. What’s the status of those?”

“Modified yeast is growing like wildfire,” Tim said. “Population-wise, we’re succeeding, but it remains to be seen if it has any impact.”

Tim didn’t sound jovial anymore. The light had faded from his eyes. He, too, was good at math, and math said he was standing in what would wind up being his tomb.

“We need to split your cultures,” Margaret said. “As soon as we’re finished here, give half to Clarence so he can ship it to Black Manitou.”

Tim didn’t answer right away. Margaret knew he could read between the lines, knew she was confirming his fears that they were all doomed.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess that makes sense.”

Clarence cleared his throat. “I assume sooner is better than later?”

“Yesterday was already a week too late,” Margaret said. “Get ahold of Murray, make it happen. Right now, Tim’s cultures are the most valuable thing on the planet.”

“Will do,” Clarence said. “What about those new crawlers you injected
into Edmund? The hydras. Do we need to get those to Black Manitou as well?”

Margaret looked into the containment area again, toward the cell that held Edmund.

“We’ll find out soon,” she said. “I’m going to take samples from him right now, see if the hydras replicated.”

Aside from Tim’s yeast, the hydras were the only other real hope. The yeast would live in the intestine, secreting cellulase into the bloodstream, cellulase that would, hopefully, melt any infection. But Tim’s yeast wouldn’t survive in there indefinitely: normal gut flora would outcompete it, the very nature of the gut itself would kill it, and so on. To maintain effectiveness as an inoculant, people would have to ingest regular doses of the stuff.

Hydras, on the other hand, reproduced on their own. Like the crawlers, they hijacked stem cells, made those stem cells produce more hydras. As far as Margaret could tell, hydras would provide
permanent
immunity from the infection — no booster doses needed.

But with that possibly permanent immunity came a larger problem: Margaret still had no idea what else the hydras might do. Using them might very well be trading the devil she knew for the one that she didn’t.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get in there.”

She opened the airlock door and stepped into the containment area. Four hospital-gown-clad captives looked at her.

Clark was still sedated and strapped to his bunk. Triangles were beginning to show; pale blue shapes beneath his white skin.

Edmund, of course, wasn’t ever getting up again.

Cantrell stared out, eyes only for her. She’d done nothing to the man, but he couldn’t hide his hate for her. She didn’t know why and didn’t have time to worry about it.

Margaret looked at the three new men.

Men
? Of course they were men, although two of them looked like boys. Especially the one who cried silently, tears wetting his young cheeks.

He was in the cell next to Edmund. How old was this boy? Nineteen? Maybe twenty, tops? Had Margaret made different choices in her life, he was young enough to be her son, just like Candice Walker was young enough to have been her daughter.

Margaret closed her eyes briefly, gathered herself. There was no time for those thoughts.

“Clarence, which one was the killer?”

Clarence pointed his gloved hand at a thick-chested man in the second cell in the left row, the one just past the prone Clark.

“Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy,” Clarence said. “Killed two men with a pipe wrench. They were trying to give him the cellulose test.”

Nagy stood ramrod straight, fists at his sides, staring out at Margaret with rage-filled eyes and a smile that promised pain. He had a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. Blood trickled from a purple welt on his forehead. His gown’s short sleeves revealed arms knotted with long muscles, skin dotted with faded tattoos. He looked like a navy man from a ’60s movie.

He didn’t seem to notice the wound on his head. Margaret felt fear just looking at the man, at meeting his dead, psychotic stare.

“We’ll need to put him under and dress his wound,” she said, then gestured to the crying boy. “And him?”

“Conroy Austin,” Clarence said. “The last one is Lionel Chappas. Both of them were found on the same testing sweep that triggered Nagy’s attack.”

She turned to Tim. “Is the outbreak just on the
Pinckney
and the
Brashear
? Any infected on the other two ships?”

He shook his head. “The
Truxtun
and the
Coronado
haven’t reported any positive results. That’s not surprising for the
Coronado
, though — the crew and the SEALs onboard haven’t been allowed to interact with anyone at any point. They weren’t even allowed to help rescue people after the battle. The task force has upped the cellulose testing schedule to every two hours. Captain Yasaka reported that there are new deliveries of testing kits being flown here to make sure we don’t run out.”

The
Pinckney
had 380 crewmembers. That ship alone now required forty-five hundred tests a
day
. That would wreak havoc on the crew’s sleep, causing people to be tired, irritable … sloppy. But if the increased testing caught any other infected personnel before they became contagious, then maybe there was still a chance.