White Plague (20 page)

DeBlieu said, “But it died out, you said?”

And Eddie said, “So did the black plague. First it appeared in 600 A.D. in Turkey. Then it came back in 1347, in Europe. Then it died out again. Then it returned in 1890, in China and India. Each time, millions died.”

“And now the Spanish flu is back,” I said.

Eddie said, “The White Plague.”

DeBlieu fell into a chair. For a moment nobody spoke. Then DeBlieu said, struggling with hope, “Well, we’ve got better medicines now, right? I mean, in 1918, doctors didn’t know a lot compared to now.”

“Right,” I said.

“Like those sprays and pills you’re treating patients with in the hangar. All new. Wasn’t even penicillin in 1918. So you can’t compare now and then.”

“Definitely,” Eddie said. “You’re right.”

“So this time,” DeBlieu said, fantasizing, “tell me that even if it’s the flu, this will be like other diseases that once were dangerous, but aren’t anymore. Polio. Cholera. Terrifying in the past, but now pretty much gone. You can beat it. That’s why you took the sick aboard. You have a whole arsenal of medicines. We’re just looking at something scary in the past.”

Eddie was expressionless. I sighed. What we faced downstairs from the lab represented precisely the prediction we’d made to the Defense Department that had brought me to the director’s attention five years ago. That a disease would erupt in the High North, not the Tropics.

I said, “I wish I could tell you that, Captain. But if we’re seeing bodies from Fort Riley, we’re dealing with the original strain. And we have no idea if people in the last hundred years have built up resistance to it, or whether, you know . . .”

Eddie added morosely, “Or whether we’re looking at an even more lethal mutation.”

DeBlieu argued doggedly, as if trying to change fact, “But if you’ve all been expecting it, why hasn’t anyone worked on it all these years?”

“How can you work on it when you don’t have samples of the original strain? Look, Captain, just in the last two years researchers have unearthed old corpses, flu victims, in Alaska, Russian Eskimo villages, trying to reconstruct the virus. It’s been controversial. Some scientists fear that could start an outbreak in itself. But the benefits were supposed to outweigh the risk, and truth is, some virus has been reconstructed, but not the original strain. Not what we have here.”

Eddie said, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck to the makeshift hospital ward in the hangar. “Now we’ll find out, I guess.”

DeBlieu, horrified, was reeling from the impact. He said, in a low, enraged voice, “You brought it onto
my ship
?”

“We didn’t know that’s what it was until five minutes ago. And we weren’t going to abandon U.S. sailors on the ice. Look, we keep watching the film,” I soothed. “Maybe there’s something here that tells us what to do. An antidote. Something
they
didn’t even know but
we’ll know
when we see it.”

“If they had an antidote, don’t you think they would have used it?” DeBlieu demanded, backing away.

“Maybe they didn’t know they had it. Maybe they only got seventy percent of the work done, but we can do the rest. Meanwhile, like you said, we’ve got new medicines. And we’ll try them. We’re using them right now.”

“Maybe,” DeBlieu repeated, as if the word, the doubt in the word “maybe,” represented an affront to his sense of right.

“Maybe is the best we can do,” I told him.

The enormity of the revelation seemed to suck air from the lab. DeBlieu absorbed the blow physically. He stood absolutely still, a vein throbbing on his forehead. He was an engineer by training, the commander entrusted with keeping the nation’s lone icebreaker safe. The competing pressures inside him had to be enormous—the responsibility to his crew, the training stressing rescue. DeBlieu stared down at the bits of film, as if the celluloid itself crawled with a mass of microbes.

I’d expected to see fear on his face. Or hardness. But not sadness. That was what entered the brown, intelligent eyes. “No, the best we can do, Colonel, is that I’m pulling my people from the hangar. I’m sorry about the patients. I’m sorry they’re sick. I have a different responsibility. You will remove every one of those patients and put them back on the ice,” he said.

Eddie said, “What ice? We’re past the tough ice. We’re closing on Barrow. What do you want us to do, put them in a life raft?”

DeBlieu stood straighter, moved back a step. “Do what you have to do,” he said with disconcerting decisiveness. “But get them off. Meanwhile, Colonel, I’m afraid I’m going to have to relieve you of command.”

I jerked up sharply.

He said, “My orders—as you know—were to relinquish control to you unless I felt there was a danger to the ship.”

“Captain, we don’t have time to argue over—”

“I agree completely. So we’ll find a stable area of ice, or even if we can’t, we will—no, sorry—
your Marines—
will remove the sick from the ship, unload them onto the ice, or rafts, along with whatever provisions will make them more comfortable. Medicines, tents, heating, whatever you need, if we have it, you’ll have it.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” I told him.

As if to punctuate the point, Del Grazo appeared suddenly in the doorway, looking disheveled, looking as if he was trying not to seem afraid. It wasn’t working.

“Colonel Rush, you better come. Clinton is really sick,” he said.

FIVE VOICES IN WASHINGTON

“Do you think Colonel Rush will watch the film?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” The director nodded. “He’s too dedicated not to do it, orders or not.”

It was dusk in Washington, and the lights remained off in the third-floor corner office of the four-story townhouse, diagonally across from the White House, on the north side of Lafayette Park. Outside, temperatures topped ninety-two degrees, and a gray, smoggy urban light—part sun, part rush-hour effluence—filtered in through mesh curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.

During prior administrations, lesser White House officials had occupied this building, Council for the Environment, Council on Safety in the Workplace.

But the current National Security Advisor, Dr. A. R. Klinghoff of Michigan State University, the “Kissinger of the twenty-first century,” as pundits called him, preferred the weathered but homey building to the more impersonal gray, massive, Eisenhower-era, ornate, too-hot-in-winter, too-air-conditioned-in-summer Executive Office Building across Pennsylvania Avenue.

Klinghoff was the youngest son of World War Two–era Viennese refugees, a professor and a civil lawyer, who fled the Nazis when Germany took over that country in 1938. He had grown up hearing dinner table stories of the bad things that happen when overt threats are ignored, and had made a career of predicting how to cope with them.

All five people present—they’d been at this discussion for more than eight hours—were old enough to remember a time when the view outside included cars moving on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, along an area now turned into a pedestrian mall shielded from truck bombers by concrete barriers. All here were acutely aware of the way the lockdown of official Washington had grown over the last two decades. Each person present had a responsibility relating to national security. Each had, in their own way, inherited the nation’s nightmares.

Admiral Bud “Red” Burgoyne was chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy. At fifty-six, he was florid-faced, bowlegged, with a pugilist’s nose on an oddly thin, fluid body. He had, at age seventeen, considered a career in dance. Instead, he’d enlisted, become a champion Navy middleweight boxer, used the footwork to dodge punches, and never looked back.

Judge Eileen Marcus—Homeland Security Secretary—had risen to national prominence after presiding over two New York–based terrorist trials. She was a widely respected jurist whose purview included the operation of the nation’s lone icebreaker. She was, at sixty-one, a grandmother of four, a painter of vintage rural railroad stations in her spare time, and a lover of saxophone jazz and crossword puzzles.

Also present was Nate Grady, who had served under two presidents of opposite parties as a media advisor. Grady, thirty-nine, had no use for extremists on the left or the right.
Time
magazine had called him “one of the last professional Washingtonians who speak from the center.” Having no social life, he lived in a two-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue, went home each night and ate takeout soup or Mexican food, and drove a fourteen-year-old Honda. Physically, he resembled consumer advocate Ralph Nader, tall, ascetic, boxy brown suits, rubber-soled shoes. He slept well each night, when sometimes, smiling, he dreamed of playing left field for the Boston Red Sox.

Klinghoff’s assistant National Security head, Dr. Joe Rush’s fifty-one-year-old boss, sat in a corner. Elias Pelfrey wore a box-cut pinstriped suit in dark blue, a white shirt, and a maroon tie. His brown curly hair was mat thick, cut short to control the wild part, and his quiet demeanor was enhanced by the limp from an old college football injury. He’d come close twice to being named National Security Advisor. He could hold his own with everyone in the group.

“The President wants a recommendation on protocol five,” said Klinghoff. “Hopefully unanimous, that we’ll stand behind if things go public.”

“Which they usually do,” said Grady.

The windows were quadruple strength, bullet- and soundproof. Adobe-colored coffee mugs cooled on tables. The art was Ansel Adams photos: Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons. Klinghoff and his wife were avid hikers during his rare vacations.

Protocol five, drawn up in 2007, was a top secret plan to be put into effect if ever a limited area inside the United States—an office building, a small town, a prison—any place smaller than two square miles—had been infected with deadly, contagious microorganisms.

“Only fast, surgical action may prevent global catastrophe,” the protocol read.

Activated by a button beneath Klinghoff’s desk was a voice-recording system. This is what it picked up.

BURGOYNE:
I advised you to order the film destroyed on the sub. But you preferred to save it.

KLINGHOFF:
We’ll continue our talk under the premise that Dr. Rush has seen it.

BURGOYNE:
Which is unfortunately more than I can say for us. Still, the idea of destroying our own people . . . There must be another way.

GRADY:
Would you rather they reach land? That the disease gets out? You saw the spread projections.

PELFREY:
How can it reach land if we stop the ship? You keep her offshore, see if the disease burns itself out, or we figure a way to kill it.

KLINGHOFF:
You know that’s misleading, Elias. You heard the CDC. They can
probably
decontaminate, but no one hundred percent certainty. They say if we put medical personnel aboard, they’d be at risk. They’re unsure whether healthy crew members—even months later—might be carriers. We all heard Dr. Graves say that noroviruses—that knocked out half of Washington last December—can live on surfaces; books, toilets. And you’ll recall the lab in Virginia where monkey Ebola broke out in 1990. A year later—after release from quarantine—two lab workers tested positive. Sheer luck made that strain harmless to humans. The entire building was destroyed.

PELFREY:
Oh, scientists never have one hundred percent certainty.

KLINGHOFF:
Because they know they can be surprised.

MARCUS:
If you would have listened to me two years ago, we could have avoided this. One icebreaker! I asked for more! Destroy that ship and it will end our ability to move around up there. The damn Russians have twenty icebreakers! If I had more icebreakers, one would have been close, would have reached the
Montana
early on.

BURGOYNE:
If the Navy had icebreakers, they’d be armed.

KLINGHOFF:
We’ll talk about that later. For now, I already explained, we can opt to try to decontaminate. Hydrogen chlorine gas in the vents. Foot-by-foot cleansing. Then testing. Lots of it, before sending her out again.

GRADY:
And what happens if the thing breaks out anyway? Listen to yourself. “Try” to decontaminate.

MARCUS:
Save the ship. Kill the crew.

GRADY:
Save millions of Americans onshore. That thing gets out, even a one percent lethality rate would kill four million people. We’ve got a twenty-five percent rate right now and it could go up.

MARCUS:
Disgusting!

GRADY:
Maybe you have a better idea. There’s simply no safe way to move so many infected and potentially sick to quarantine. Look, our group has commissioned two studies,
two
over the last six years, on decontaminating populated areas if worst comes to worst. All acknowledge the possibility of having to put the sick to sleep. And all recommend getting triaged people to isolation wards! But in this case that means transporting them hundreds of miles in planes or trucks that would have to be decontaminated or destroyed, putting new crews at risk, sending carriers into populated areas, to hospitals unequipped to handle so many isolation cases at the same time, so we’re talking multiple destinations. One sick person gets out, one truck breaks down, one fuckup, one fucking germ out, in a whole chain of events and it’s loose and
we did it.

PELFREY:
I’d like to point out that—

GRADY:
I’m not finished. What is your suggestion, sir? Put the sick on a barge? In four weeks that ocean will freeze over. The locals can walk out to it. Or ice crushes the barge. You can’t guard it, we’ve got no ships that withstand ice. So what to do? Tow the barge off? Where? No deepwater harbors! Tow it six hundred miles to Nome? You still get ice, in a bigger city. And let’s not forget the fall storms. A barge might not even make it.
And the whole thing on TV!
Look, when it comes to the Arctic, you knew there would be an emergency one day. You’re unprepared.

MARCUS:
Then bring them into Barrow. There’s an old Air Force base there, an Arctic research center.

GRADY:
Ha! Barrow’s got a population of five thousand Eskimos, voters and veterans, and I’ll remind you that indigenous people were the most susceptible to flu in 1918. Whole villages perished. The base is not equipped for quarantine. Crews moving the sick would be at risk. The Quonset huts are eighty years old and would need to be fixed up. Costs in the Arctic are quadruple, so you’re saying we do a
rush job
and then cross our fingers that precautions are adequate? That the most deadly disease ever to hit mankind—stewing only one mile from a populated area—doesn’t get out? You think those people in town are going to stay quiet? You think Alaska’s senators are going to shut up?

[The tape records Grady making a sound of disgust.]

KLINGHOFF:
Eileen, we’d have a disaster on our hands.

MARCUS:
And murdering two hundred American sailors and Marines, you don’t call that a disaster?

PELFREY:
You don’t have the corner on compassion, Eileen. Those are my guys up there, too.

GRADY:
A calamity, awful, terrible, but let’s discuss how to limit damage. Scenario A: The White House learned there was a fatal, highly contagious disease on board. After quarantining the ship, the President decided—in consultation with the nation’s foremost infectious disease experts—that in the interest of American families, the valiant crew—on death’s door—was put to sleep. We bring her into U.S. waters. We transfer the crew to a barge, tell ’em they’re going ashore. We put ’em to sleep peacefully, spray them. Figure out about the ship after.

MARCUS:
Gas ’em like Auschwitz.

GRADY:
I resent that. Every person in this room has known for years that we might one day face an outbreak. Now it’s real. You didn’t have a problem endorsing conclusions when they were theoretical, Eileen. Auschwitz?
Those
people suffered. I’m saying we put our people to sleep. We might even consider announcing that the disease may have been introduced by an enemy. We’ll hunt down the people who did this. We will not rest until our dead are avenged. The President takes control, out of the gate. And we triple decontaminate the icebreaker. Of course, once there’s a potential enemy out there, terrorists, Congress goes nuts. Every governor. Every mayor. Every senator. Every damn candidate for any office in fifty states.
What do you mean, terrorists have a disease weapon? How did they get it?

KLINGHOFF:
I don’t think I like that can of worms.

BURGOYNE:
Well, this scenario of yours assumes the crew will just go along. You tell them to hand over weapons. May I remind you there are twenty-five Marines aboard, who can easily blow a copter out of the sky. If they have any idea what you’re up to, you’ll have one hell of a fight.

GRADY:
Okay, then, scenario B: We send her to the bottom. An accident. Like the submarine
Thresher
. One spread of torpedoes or missiles could do it. No one aboard would know what hit them. They’re cut off. A tragedy. But if we’re going to do it, we do it
now!

PELFREY:
Why can’t we just leave the ship alone, see if Dr. Rush makes progress? The
Montana
is quarantined at the moment so the illness can’t spread, for God’s sake.

MARCUS:
I agree. Drop supplies. Or ask for medical volunteers, I’m sure many doctors would help, even knowing the risk. We show compassion. We save as many as we can. After the disease burns through, we keep the survivors in isolation, make sure they’re clean. That’s America! That’s the difference between us and . . . those other people.

KLINGHOFF:
That doesn’t sound so bad to me.

GRADY:
Sure, it sounds fine at first, benevolent, except . . . first, we just said the survivors may not be clean, and second, let’s put it in perspective. Remember President Jimmy Carter and Iran? You’ve got fifty-two American hostages taken. Instead of going in, attacking, endangering lives, Carter holds off, he’s the humanitarian President. He wants to avoid needless death. But what happens? The second the press knows, it becomes the lead story every night. You think this won’t be the same?
DEATH SHIP, DAY ONE! DEATH SHIP, DAY EIGHTY!
Roll call of the dead, on every screen in the world. Photos. Interviews with families. Congress demands an investigation, and someone digs up the other part. Washington at a standstill. The Russia treaty? The health initiative? Good luck! And when you finally decide to take action, we’re in court, blocked. Too late.

KLINGHOFF:
Hmmmmm.

MARCUS:
May I remind you that all the Iranian hostages got out without a single death in the end?

GRADY:
There was one death, and it was that Presidency. Tell me, what happens if Colonel Rush, who already disobeyed orders if he watched the film, has the Marines fight back? Or maybe someone on board gets on the Internet, blogs, or the film gets out. Oh, that would be us taking control, all right. The whole thing on YouTube.