The Viral Epiphany (24 page)

Sam and Lenny stopped in their tracks.
 
Lenny slowly put his finger on the trigger of his gun and glanced sideways at Sam.
 
Sam nodded and did the same; then they slowly turned around. Ten members of the
Garda
Emergency Response Unit stood twenty feet away. Each of them wore black and navy blue colored, full body armor, and each carried a camouflage assault rifle. The rifles were all pointed directly at the two men.

“No guns, huh?” Lenny said as he immediately dropped his gun onto the slushy pavement.

Sam hesitated.
 
He didn’t want to be taken by these men. He knew what to expect.

“Don’t even think about it, lad,” the
Garda
captain shouted, “You’d be dead before you hit the ground. Just drop the gun – NOW!”
 
Sam dropped the gun.

           
It was after ten hours of extremely intensive questioning by
garda
detectives
,
using all the techniques of interrogation that had been developed during the long years of the “troubles”, that the two highly trained Omega agents broke down and confessed everything they knew about their operation as well as the Omega project.

Early next morning Dan was driven to the main
Garda
office in Cork City where he was to meet with the
Garda
chief.

           
“Professor Quinn,” Captain Roche said with a grin while he motioned him to a comfortable leather chair, “have a seat.
 
You seem to have made a few friends in Alaska, haven’t you?”

Twenty-Four

           
Like the softly yielding undulations of a sea goddess, the gently rolling waves of the blue Pacific Ocean sparkled in a warm caress of bright, yellow-white sunlight. Far out on the distant horizon, large tumbling breakers crashed silently in a line of white foam, while at the island’s sandy shore gentle wavelets lapped, languidly swishing along the sand, only to silently diminish and fade and then wash back to the sea.
 
The northeast tradewinds were strengthening and beginning to ruffle the shiny green fronds of coconut palms lining the shore, while occasionally, as the breezes swept over the deeper, almost indigo parts of the ocean, white specks of foam lifted up and flew free from the waves, if only for a brief moment.

While cumulus clouds marched in stately procession across a background of tropic, creamy blueness, underneath the sea’s restless surface another cloud – this one gray and fast – moved like a single living being as it swam from the depths towards the shore that the Hawaiians had long ago named Waikiki.
 
Led by the fastest male, the pod of bottle-nosed dolphins swam exuberantly, sometimes charging upward, breaking the surface of the water, and leaping high into the air where they would hang almost motionless for a split-second before rolling onto their side and falling, breeching in a bright splash of white seawater blossoms.

As soon as the male had performed the first breech the others in the pod followed and an underwater cacophony of splashes and gurgles and thuds made it almost impossible for the leader to hear the echoes of his own chirps and clicks.
 
That was of no concern, for this was the open ocean and the dolphin knew this area very well.
 
There were no underwater obstacles to fear and no shallow bottom to be concerned about.
 
If there were anything to fear it would only be the always-present possibility of something unknown, something large and swift, something terrible that might be lurking in the depths ahead.

Yet even the possibility of a dreaded tiger shark lying in wait did not worry the dolphin today.
 
The pod was large – more than thirty dolphins including the females and young - and it could easily surround and kill a prowling tiger shark.
 
It was the shark that should be afraid today.
 
Nevertheless, despite the lack of imminent danger to the pod, the lead male surfaced from time to time as the pod drew nearer to the shore.
 
He was looking for boats.
 
Not that he had any fear of the boats.
 
Indeed, it was the boats, fishing boats, tour boats, dive boats, all the boats of men, that were of interest.

The dolphins had always rendezvoused with the boats. When the sun rose completely above the eastern mountains the boats would come out - as they always did.
 
Some of the boats came out to play – these were the fast ones.
 
The leader knew that they liked to race, but it was the dolphins that always won the races, leaping in and out of the bow waves, and sometimes spinning in the air just to show their delight – not in winning, but in simply racing with their friends.

Other boats, fishing boats or even dive boats, had a different purpose. They were for food when food was scarce.
 
The men on board could always be counted on to toss a few fish to them, and while these may not be the best tasting - and they were certainly not the freshest fish - they did provide nourishment on a regular basis. The pod even escorted the huge cruise ships that traversed the harbor on some mornings.
 
These ships were sometimes bound for distant lands, or sometimes only to a nearby island.
 
Food rarely came from these ocean liners, but the pod swam with them for the sheer pleasure of riding the immense bow waves or swimming in the froth and turbulence of the powerful wake.

The lead male rested a moment on the surface and turned to glance at the sun that was climbing ever higher towards its zenith.
 
Then it dove under the surface and kicked its flukes darting forward and then turning towards the breakers that rolled onto the Waikiki shore.
 
Something seemed different today.
 
The boats were not here. The fast boats, the fishing boats, even the heavy, slow, rumbling ships were not here.
 
Where had they gone? He didn’t know.

A moment later he thought of something else.
 
Perhaps they could go nearer to shore and find the young boys and girls on their surfboards.
 
It was always fun to swim with them, riding a wave for a while and then popping out of the water a few feet ahead of the surfboard and then diving under again before the wave broke.
 
As the pod swam quietly into the shallower, light blue waters just beyond the break he surfaced again and looked towards the shore, but the surfers were gone too.
 
His distant vision was not good, but even so, he could see that the men who used to dot the shoreline and walk and play on the beach were also gone. The tall, white, glistening buildings still perched on the beach, the sailboats and yachts still rocked gently in the Ala Wai boat harbor, and the paddle boats and outrigger canoes were drawn up on the beach, but there were no men - no men to be seen anywhere.

With one last look back at the shore he suddenly flipped his tail, then he dove and turned and started kicking strongly out to sea.
 
The men were gone, the boats were gone.
 
There was no reason – there didn’t have to be.
 
He knew that sometimes things that have been part of everyday life simply disappear and are never seen again.
 
There was never an explanation, and he didn’t expect one.
 
That was the way of the ocean.
 
The dolphin led the pod further out to sea, around Kahala, and then began swimming strongly northwest away from Waikiki.
 
There would be a good-sized school of fish near the sandbars. There always was.
 
He wouldn’t go back to Waikiki tomorrow, and probably not the next day either.
 
Perhaps another time, perhaps not.
 
A brief sense of loss filled the mind of the dolphin as it swam ahead of the pod, but he knew that it would pass.

                       
           
           
*
         
           
*
         
           
*

A short distance inland from Waikiki beach, behind the row of gleaming hotels that lined the beach, all along Kalakaua Avenue, and all the way back to Ala Wai Boulevard there was an eerie silence.
 
Nothing was moving.
 
The once crowded streets were silent and empty, except for the occasional limo or taxi that was parked haphazardly on a sidewalk or simply left in the middle of the street, the doors still open.
 
The wide entrances of the hotels that opened onto the streets, built for throngs of tourists wearing bikinis and slippers, or wedding dresses and tuxedos, gaped silently.
 
Along Kalakaua Avenue, and along the small side streets, the shop windows, still full of T-shirts and Speedos, cameras and sunglasses, beckoned with rainbow-colored signs that said “Aloha!”, but there was no one to look, and there was darkness inside the stores.

Three miles away, the business district of downtown Honolulu was different.
 
It lacked the odd, unsettling peacefulness of Waikiki.
 
A column of smoke rose from the roof of the state legislature building.
 
The building’s roof had been designed resemble a Hawaiian volcano and now, ironically, a roiling black billow, sometimes punctuated with orange flames, curled its way upward and out of the peak. Smaller flames flickered nearby in the burnt out shells of the surrounding office buildings, testimony to the battle that had recently been waged here.
 
Military humvees and six wheel drive trucks were parked askew on the roads and sidewalks, even on the grass of the downtown park.
 
Barricades with concertina wire tops lay broken across the streets.
 
Wisps of white smoke still rose from gaping holes in the road, some over ten feet deep, where fighter-bombers had dropped their munitions on the rioting crowds.

It was not the bombs or bullets that had ended the struggle; however. Nor was it the fires or fences that brought silence to the agonized cries of the people who only wanted to leave when martial law had been declared and their airport and harbors had been closed.
 
The silence was the legacy of the disease that lurked everywhere the people had turned: in the doorways, on the food, in the hand of a friend, or on the lips of the beloved.
 
The dreaded disease had slipped through the windows on the gentle breezes and flowed in the water that ran in the brooks.
 
There had been no escape for any of the city dwellers or the tourists.
 
They still lay there, in the streets and buildings of Honolulu, while the pleasant, warm Hawaiian sun had risen and then set in the soft blue sky.
 
Soldier or civilian, Asian or white, young or old, bold, determined, frightened, lost, angry, or sad, it didn’t matter. One by one, whatever they did, wherever they hid, the disease came and found them until finally there were none left to fight and their differences no longer mattered.

It was only in the far hills and small villages that people still lived on the island of Oahu now. They had been saved by something they didn’t understand: the RMS distance, as calculated by the Omega mathematicians.
 
It had saved them, at least for a while.
 
The analysts at Omega had been precisely correct in their mathematical analysis of the disease’s propagation characteristics. Now the only hope for the few, widely separated survivors would be what the analysts had termed the “persistence factor”. How long could the virus survive in the environment before it too died?
 
Life or death for those hiding in the hills now was only a question of mathematics.

                       
           
           
*
         
           
*
         
           
*

It had been several days since Civil Defense headquarters in Honolulu had sent a report to the Centers for Disease Control. The last report had been very grim: the city was in flames, the people were rioting in the streets, and there was no way off the island.
 
Honolulu, no doubt because of its proximity to Asia and the large amount of Asians who went back and forth to Asia from the city, had been the worst hit American city by far.
 
The report indicated that total deaths had exceeded 350,000.
 
But that had been days ago and there had been no word since.

President Cranston sat back in his chair in the White House Situation Room and said nothing for several seconds after the CDC analyst had finished giving his report.

“What about the mainland?” President Cranston finally asked.

“So far, nothing close to Honolulu,” he replied. “New York City has had about 3,000 deaths, Boston about 1,000, Chicago over 2,000 and so forth.
 
It’s pretty much the same for all the major port cities.
 
It looks like these cities are about where Honolulu was a month or so ago.”

“Why is that?” asked the President.

“Almost certainly because many more carriers of the disease from Asia went to Honolulu rather than our other cities. However, the toll is beginning to rise in the mainland cities too.”

The President looked over once more at the wall-mounted video display and saw the image of Honolulu that had been transmitted from the CIA’s ultra-high resolution satellite.
 
“So that’s what we have to look forward too?”

“I can’t say, sir.
 
I do know that the CDC is looking at implementing some more radical isolation methods to try to contain outbreaks.
 
There have been several lessons learned from the Honolulu experience.”

President Cranston looked at the young analyst for a few seconds before replying, “Yes, but we still don’t have a cure or a vaccine yet, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“So it’s really just a matter of time then isn’t it?”

The CDC analyst only looked down at the tabletop without replying.
 
President Cranston stared at him as a range of emotions coursed through him.
 
Then several seconds later, he took a deep breath and exhaled deeply. Then he said with a trace of resignation in his voice, “Call your boss.
 
I need to meet with him.

“Yes, sir. I’ll call right now, sir.”

President Cranston turned back to his chief of staff, “Where is the
Seawolf
right now?”