Black Storm (8 page)

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sports. You into anything physical? Tennis, maybe soccer after work?”

She hesitated. Glanced at Eitzler, whose expression said,
I'm as puzzled as you are
. So she told the marine, “I don't have time for organized sports. I ride my bike around Frederick. Last year I got into rock climbing.”

“Rock climbing?” That seemed to intrigue him.

“Yeah. I've been out to Seneca Rocks in West Virginia, and the New River Gorge. I'd like to do Mount Rainier someday.”

Paulik asked Eitzler, “Can the major and I talk privately, sir?”

“Uh…sure. I was just going over to the physical therapy tent.” She caught his curious backward glance, then the door closed.

She'd looked levelly at Paulik as he explained, and then, when she understood at last what he was asking her to do, had to sit down on the sofa. Her hand trembled as she stirred the coffee. Then she'd looked up, and said to the heavyset marine, “Did you know I went to school with Fayzah Al-Syori?”

 

SHE'D MET
Fayzah, a rather mousy-looking brunette, at Ohio State. They'd worked under Dr. Richard Andrews isolating pyrogenic protein toxins derived from
Staphylococcus aureus
. The Iraqi spoke English with a British accent; said she'd done her undergraduate work at East Anglia. They'd gone to lunch together, to the library, done lab work together.

Maureen had gone to Fayzah's apartment once, which she shared with another Iraqi woman whose name she couldn't recall—Sela, something like that. Her brother, Fayzah said, had died in the Iran-Iraq war. “He was a hero. We are proud of him. He died for Saddam Hussein and the Arab people,” she had remarked, hugging the girl. Something Maureen hadn't thought about twice at the time.

She hadn't thought much about it at all, really. Al-Syori seemed nice; gentle and self-effacing. She worked hard, but the projects she proposed were copies of previously done research. She seemed ordinary, a bit of a plodder, except when the results did not match the graphs. Then she'd cry and curse. Once she'd asked Maureen if she thought she was good enough to be in research. She'd replied reassuringly—thinking that not everyone could be a genius—till a shy smile had dawned through the tears, and Fayzah had kissed her. When they got a good mark on their project, Fayzah had given her a box gift-wrapped in gold foil.

She could still taste the sticky sweetness of those Iraqi dates.

 

HAVE YOU
seen her since?”

“Two or three years ago…at the ICAAC; that's the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy meeting in Atlanta. That's a huge convention, college profs, CDC people. We said hi, that was all. She said she had a job in Iraq. I never thought it would be anything like…like what the magazines say.”

“What do they say? We don't get to read many magazines where I work.”

“Well, that she's the brains behind Saddam's biological warfare program. That she weaponized botulinum toxin and anthrax. Tested them on Iranian prisoners of war. Organized mass production…it's hard to believe.”

“You don't think she could do something like that?”

“That's not what I meant. I think…what I mean is, it's hard to think someone you used to share pizzas with could…She's not a brilliant researcher, but none of this is original work. It's engineering, taking the lab processes and scaling them up. She admired Saddam Hussein. She and her roommate had a big poster of him in their apart
ment.” Maureen sighed. “I have to say…maybe she could.”

Paulik cleared his throat. “Let me say one thing up front, Doctor. I'm not a fan of women in the military. But they told me you were the best in the theater.”

“I'll try not to take that personally. I know I'm not a combat-arms type. But if you think there's a possibility of…then of course I'll advise your men. Just tell me where to go and what you want me to do.”

And Paulik had said, “We're taking you to ‘Ar‘ar.”

 

SHE'D MET
Curtis at an art show one of the microbiologists at Fort Detrick had dragged her to. He was an exhibitor, a glassworker. Not cute animals, but the most ethereal, exquisite collector glassware she'd ever seen. He used exotic metals to give his pieces a shimmering play of color, like cast rainbows. He was divorced, but not recently; he seemed to have the flower-to-flower syndrome out of his system. His day job was business development manager for the city of Frederick. They'd dated for a year, then rented a townhouse at Colonial Village in Walkersville. Then one day she'd run one of the tests that were just then appearing in the drugstores and found she was pregnant. But Curtis was nice and Curtis was funny; he was no Mickey with his grass and drums. So she'd told him, and he said that was terrific, he'd always wanted a family. They'd set a date for the wedding when she caught her experiment.

That was what they called it, catching your experiment. She'd been working with mice, looking at serum complement effects on O-polysaccharide side chains. Usually lysis didn't do too well against the smooth strains, but someone in the literature had mentioned that treatment with IFN-;
in vitro inhibited intracellular replication, and she'd wondered if there was any reinforcing effect.

She worked in Building 1425. Green-painted cinder-block corridors, gray slick painted concrete floors, lit by greenish fluorescents that had been new when
The Brady Bunch
debuted. Heavy sealed steel doors with pressure readouts led to the biosafety level suites, close warrens of lab rooms, autoclaves, sample refrigerators, ultraviolet rooms.

She'd been working at BL-3, one level below maximum biocontainment. Biosafety Level Three was for deadly pathogens, but diseases you could treat with antibiotics if someone screwed up. A tiny room, fifteen by twelve, with white glossy walls and containment hoods and cages for the guinea pigs.

After the first thousand there was nothing even faintly cute about guinea pigs. They bit and they scratched. They didn't want to be part of the march of science. One of her nightmares was sticking the needle right through one of the wiggling little bastards into her hand. It happened. You got tired, you got scared, you got clumsy.

But what had actually gone wrong was that one of the centrifuges shorted out and caught fire. Not a big deal, unplug it, but two liters of toluene had been sitting beside it and when the solvent caught fire and exploded, everything else in the lab had too. During the confusion her brucella cultures—large thick flasks swarming with microbes—had overturned, smashing to the floor and throwing invisible particles packed with bacteria into the air. Brucellosis was easy to catch; a few panicked breaths were enough.

Brucellosis caused contagious abortion in cattle, sheep, goats, and other ruminants. In human beings too. Rifampin and doxycycline doused it, but it hadn't saved the fetus.

Curt had come to see her. He held her hand for a while, then said, “City's going to be announcing something big in the morning. Hoffman-LaRoche is coming to town.”

“You landed them. Terrific.”

“A major facility. Biotech. The latest stuff.”

“Fantastic. I'm so glad, Wayne.”

He'd smiled then, his Sales Face, and she'd seen even through her own pain and disappointment that he wanted something. “I talked to the human resources people, and the site negotiators, and they said they'll need developmental staff. New drugs. Gene sequencing. They were way over my head! But I told them about you, and they're interested.
Very
interested.”

She'd frowned, not understanding. “In what? In me? Curt, I have a job.”

“You have a job, sure. But now you see how dangerous it is. Okay? Are we on the same channel here?”

She'd struggled up on her elbows. “Honey, listen. There are some nasty things out there, being developed by some very nasty people. If one of them decides to use them, I want us to have another option than dying.”

“You've done your time. Let somebody else take a risk once in a while. Go with Hoffman-LaRoche. Make some money, for a change.” He'd argued with her, trying to make her see, and she realized he was really worried, he wanted the best for her. That was what had made it so damn tough to say that she was where she wanted to be and where she'd stay. Till finally he'd said that if she wouldn't, he didn't think they were really meant to be together.

Since then she'd stopped trying. Took up kayaking and then rock climbing, but though there were guys there, some of them seriously attractive, they seemed self-obsessed and afraid of her, somehow, when she told them what she did. So finally she bought a kitten and tried to resign herself to living alone.

 

THAT AFTERNOON
Sergeant Zeitner and a wordless Saudi escort drove her and the naval officer, Lenson, north of camp. Two huge rocks rose out of the desert, like cloned Gibraltars. When the road ended, the assistant team leader pulled out a rifle case and a saggingly heavy can
vas bag. They walked between the rocks—as she neared she saw how massive they were, the highest elevations for many miles—and came out on a gravel plain cut by worn paths. The ground twinkled as they neared, and she saw when they came up to the line that it was spent brass.

Zeitner held up a short-barreled black gun with a long magazine. “The MP5-N Heckler and Koch nine-millimeter submachine gun is our main weapon in the close-quarters battle environment. It weighs 7.44 pounds with a full thirty-round magazine. It fires nine-millimeter ammunition at an effective rate of eight hundred rounds per minute. The unit replacement cost is eight hundred ninety-four dollars.”

She grinned. “Do we have to pay if we break it?”

“No ma'am, not if it's rendered inoperative in normal service use.” Not a hint of a smile. “The MP5 fires from a closed and locked bolt in either automatic or semiautomatic modes. It is recoil operated and has a delayed roller locked bolt system, a retractable butt stock, a removable suppressor, and an integral flashlight in the forward hand-guard.” Zeitner tossed it to her. “First we'll fieldstrip, then fire single shots; then bursts; then we'll strip again and clean.”

Forcing the stubby cartridges into the magazine, she had a flashback to the one time she'd fired a gun before: the pistol familiarization in the abbreviated military course the army put its doctors through. This thing was heavier, steel and black plastic, short and ugly as a piece of pipe. Zeitner screwed another tube into the muzzle. “I thought silencers were illegal,” she said.

“Common misconception. Law of war permits suppressors.” He left them standing there and walked out a few yards and placed empty plastic water bottles at various distances. He showed her how to insert the magazine, how the safety and fire selector switches worked. Halfway through his explanation the gun went off, startling them both. “This trigger's too sensitive,” she said.

“Just take it easy,” Zeitner said. He backed off and gave her room.

She fired the full magazine of thirty rounds, one shot at a time. The suppressor didn't make it completely silent. It sounded like the noise a lawnmower made when you pulled the cord and it didn't start. She reloaded and thumbed the selector all the way down and fired the second magazine in short bursts. The muzzle tried to climb, but she could hold it more or less on target. The plastic bottles began jumping as she hit them. She was starting to have fun when Zeitner took the gun away from her. He took Lenson through the same drill, then showed them how to clear jams; how to do a quick magazine change; how to mount and dismount the suppressor and the flashlight, and last, how to tape the weapon in order to break up its outline. Then they fired some more. This time the target bounced almost every time she pulled the trigger.

“Feel comfortable with it?” Zeitner asked. She nodded. She didn't find the weapon that intimidating now, though she was still wary of it.

What she didn't like was what he took out of the canvas bag next: a grenade. “Oh no,” she said. “I'm not touching one of those.”

“Oh yes you are.”

“Oh no I'm not.”

An impasse. They glared at each other. Finally Lenson said, “Well, show me, Sergeant. The major can watch. She's not going, anyway, right?”

The marine didn't look happy about it, but finally nodded. She stood back, observing, hitting the gravel with her hands over her head after Lenson pitched. The explosion shuddered the ground. But she refused again when Zeitner gave her a last chance. She couldn't really say why. The gun was enough, that was all. Anyway, she needed to get back to Rafhā'. The bombing had been going on for four weeks now. Ramadan, the holy season,
was coming up. She had the feeling the offensive was getting ready to roll.

At last Zeitner looked at the dimming sky. “That's all we can do here,” he said. “Let's get back. Clean the weapons and see if there's any news.” He looked at her and added grudgingly, “You shot all right. You got a good eye.”