Final Epidemic (14 page)

“Ajax Cadre, prepare to deploy.”

The protective suits and masks they wore made everything more difficult. Though they had drilled in them many times before, it was never pleasant. They were hot, hard to move in, and limited one’s vision like a horse’s blinders.

In fact, the only thing less pleasant would have been to be without them,
Yuri thought, darkly.
Like those below.
He shook the black thoughts from his mind and focused on his flying.

He could see through the plastic windscreen and read the instrument panel; but unless he turned his head awkwardly, the copilot who sat behind him was out of vision’s field. Warrant Officer Josef Pelov, riding in the helicopter’s midline above and behind the primary pilot, might as well have been in Petrograd as far as Yuri was concerned. No matter. All Pelov had to do was trigger the spraying apparatus at the command and monitor its largely automatic operation.

The flight had linked up with the other squadrons now, and when he turned his head Yuri could see the line of helicopters stretching in precise formation to his right and left. Altitude was thirty meters, airspeed only high enough to provide sufficient control of the aircraft.

“Ajax Cadre, deploy at my mark,” the headphones
crackled, and a yellow ready light flashed on the dash: Pelov had heard, and was prepared.

No more than a dozen meters separated him from the helicopters on either side, demanding his full attention. Yuri kept his eyes level, forced himself to think of nothing but his flying. For that reason, the pilot did not see the small, almost palm-sized video camera that Pelov now raised to his goggled eye.

It had been an extravagance, a costly toy. When Josef Pelov had shown it to his family and told them what it had cost, they had been uniform in condemning his wastrel ways.

All except his brother-in-law, a former
Pravda
journalist who now freelanced for the various American news organs that maintained Moscow bureaus. He alone had shown respect and even suggested a few ways that the camera might pay for itself. Since then, Pelov and his sister’s husband had split the profits from the occasional snippet of video shot during select military operations.

But none had been like this one. The audacity of what he risked made Pelov’s hand tremble.

At the same instant, the words came: “Deploy weapon . . . mark.”

With the hand not holding the camera, he flipped up the safety shield and pressed the button it had covered. A red indicator light flashed on and glowed steadily, and a new vibration—so slight as to be almost unnoticed, had he not been listening for it—mingled with the rest of the helicopter’s din.

Atomized droplets hissed from the tubular spraying gear of a hundred aircraft.

Pelov twisted in his seat, the video camera silently recording.

Distanced by the viewfinder, Pelov could see it all happen objectively, even dispassionately. The spray itself was only visible for the brief instant when it flashed from the row of
aerosolizing nozzles. Then it became invisible, a lethal cloud of mist released into the warm summer air.

Pelov tracked downward, imaging the path of the deadly cloud as it trailed in the helicopters’ slipstreams. He held the moving shot for several seconds, then pressed the mini-button that operated the zoom lens. As if he were dropping toward them, the crowd mushroomed in his eye.

They fell as wheat under the scythe of an invisible hand—not singly, but as a rolling wave that trailed the shadows of the helicopters.

He imagined they screamed in their agony. The convulsions turned each figure into something clearly no longer human: a madly twisting creature tormented by some invisible fire that had ignited their flesh. Pelov ratcheted back, and the dying humanity he saw through his lens became a wider shot: a single writhing mass that tore at itself, an immense rag doll in the jaws of a particularly frenzied, though unseen, beast.

Pelov stared in terrified fascination at the scene below until Yuri’s voice blared in his ear.

“Acknowledge, please. We are ordered to prepare for another pass.”

“
Da,
Pilot Officer,” Pelov responded. With his gloved left hand, he pressed the switch that cut off the flow of the nerve gas and prepared to reset the arming system. The palm-sized video cam he slipped into the map pouch affixed to the aluminum bulkhead. He would risk it, he thought silently, risk recording at least one more pass over the streets of death below.

He was certain his brother-in-law—the one who freelanced for the Americans journalists—could help him find the highest bidder.

Fort Walton Beach, Florida
July 22

The spacesuited figure stood in the doorway, a stocky, bearlike form whose helmet had
R
.
PORTER
stenciled above the bubble of his faceplate.

“Dr. Mayer, I need your help for a moment.”

The voice was oddly muffled through the acrylic bubble. Without waiting for a reply, he was gone.

Carol Mayer looked up from the computer screen, a frown pulling lines on her face. Aside from the CDC team, which had its own priorities, she was the only physician still on site. When Porter had arrived from Atlanta, Carol had volunteered to stay at the Rossini-Evans Clinic, arguing to Porter that she would be needed for the occasional walk-in that somehow missed being directed to newly established primary triage locations. Spreading the infection, if indeed she carried it, was a moot point: in actuality, if still unofficially, anybody who entered the clinic was taken into custody for quarantine.

Carol had examined five or six people, the first few under the critical eye of the CDC official. Then, his judgment made, the CDC physician had turned to areas where his supervision was actually needed.

The clinic was too small to assign each physician his or
her own office; like the rest of the junior staff, Carol shared both the cubbyhole and the computer with two other doctors. Had this been a normal day, at least one of them would have been lurking over Carol’s shoulder in an unsubtle reminder that others might have a need for word processing or Med-Net data searches.

Today was not a normal day, nor had been the day before.

Had she needed any reminder of that, the sight of Porter and his field team from CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service would have proven sufficient. Since the first units had arrived, its number had swollen to more than a dozen; Porter himself had shown up only an hour or so after the first EIS technicians.

The Rossini-Evans Clinic was now being used as a headquarters—more accurately, a command center. From it, the CDC specialists were coordinating an expanding network of screening and evaluation, providing overall direction to what now threatened to turn into a quarantine of statewide proportions.

They had swept into the clinic the previous afternoon like an army of invading aliens—
and looked that way too,
Carol groused to herself,
with their Tyvek coveralls and damn Star Wars helmets.
What with the slight hiss of the HEPA-filtered air and the voice-deadening effect of their thick plastic visors, they even sounded a bit like Darth Vader.

The analogy brought a tight twist to her lips. Carol had been surprised to realize just how deep her resentment went. Of course she understood the reason for the protective gear; of course she wished that she too was sheathed head to foot in a sterilized-air, germ-free minienvironment. And of course she resented the forced change in her status from physician to—what?

Not patient,
she thought.
Maybe lab rat.

All this Carol knew, at least intellectually.

She also knew that it was not her intellect that drove her
anger; it was her emotions—specifically, her fear. She had to work hard to conceal it.

So she watched Ray Porter. From the moment he arrived, the man had been everywhere, never appearing to move hastily or without purpose. Carol had watched him supervise the lab setup, lean over another CDC physician to observe the exam, choreograph the doings of a dozen complex tasks.

Most impressively, Carol had seen him nod patiently inside his helmet, coolly waiting for an animated Sam Evans to run out of steam. Carol’s boss looked old enough to have been in med school with Pasteur. He had been a Navy combat surgeon with the Marines in Korea before establishing this clinic. He knew all the words, and permutations thereof, needed to express his outrage in stentorian tones. But Porter had simply waited him out, impervious to his heat, and proceeded with the task at hand. Carol, who had herself occasionally felt the sting of her boss’s displeasure, was grudgingly impressed.

The CDC field team, Carol had to admit, didn’t fool around. They were efficient past the point of rudeness and had simply commandeered the clinic when they arrived. They gathered up the entire clinic staff as well as the patients still in the waiting room. Then each subject was, politely but firmly, probed, swabbed, examined and categorized. Their various fluids were placed by double-gloved hands inside tightly sealed specimen vials. From there, they were carefully walked to the portable laboratory that had been set up in Evans’s private office, using his well-appointed wet bar for running water.

The initial examinations had taken almost two hours, and waiting for the lab results about the same. To all of this, for the most part, the patients and staff had submitted meekly.

The trouble began afterward, late in the day, when they found out they would not be allowed to leave—at least, not for their homes.

Carol had noticed the vehicles’ arrival some time before:
several large yellow vans with
RYDER
emblazoned on the side, the drivers also dressed in anticontamination gear. The vans idled at the curb, presumably to allow the air conditioning to mitigate the Florida heat, but also suitable for speedy departure.

Finally, Porter had explained the drill.

“My name is Dr. Porter, and I’m a physician with the Centers for Disease Control. I want to thank all of you for your cooperation,” Porter had said, as if he were addressing a Rotary Club meeting. “I have some news that I’m afraid you will not enjoy.”

Around the waiting room, people had turned to look at one another. Some of the faces were puzzled, confused; others looked combative.

“Until we know more about the nature of this illness, we cannot risk your health, or that of the public. Those of you without symptoms—this, I want to reassure you, includes most of you—will be temporarily taken to a place we’ve leased for you.” Porter carefully had not called it an isolation center. “A Ramada Inn, located not quite on the beach. There is a pool, all the amenities. After a period of a few days, my hope is you could all go home.”

There had been silence for a moment, then a murmur that rose in volume. Above the buzz came a male voice.

“The
hell
with that. What about my kids—and my job? I run a charter fishing boat, and this is when I earn out for the whole year!”

Porter had raised a hand placatingly.

“Sir, your family will be allowed to join you. As for your business, the government will reimburse you for any lost income you may incur. That goes for all of you here.”

The physician had paused to let that sink in.

He then continued. “A few of you are experiencing elevated temperature, some level of inflammation or respiratory distress. We need to transport you to a mobile treatment facility so we can keep you under observation and, if
necessary, provide medical treatment. One has been set up at Fort Walton High School, in the stadium there.”

A heavyset woman, her face flushed, had raised her hand as if she were in a classroom.

“What do we have?” she had asked, her voice husky and congested. “Are we going to be all right?”

“You know we would not be here, wearing all this”—Porter had gestured down at his spacesuit—“if we felt that the situation was not potentially serious. We believe it is a form of the flu, but as for how contagious it is, or how severe an illness it might cause . . .”

He had paused, and his helmet had moved slightly as he shook his head inside it. “Right now, we just don’t know.”

The man who had spoken earlier, the charter-boat owner, looked aghast.

“You don’t know?” His voice had been loud, infuriated. “You want to lock all of us up, along with our families—no, you listen to
me
! You wear those damn things so you don’t have to breathe the same air, and you say you don’t know how bad it is?”

He had looked around at the others.

“Stay if you want,” he had said. “He’s lying. I’m getting away from here.”

He then pushed past to the doorway and stepped through. Neither Porter nor any member of his team had moved to stop him.

But outside the glass of the entry door, two previously unseen figures had converged on either side of the fisherman. They were dressed in olive exposure suits and wore military helmets over the gas masks that covered their faces. The civilian had snatched his arm from the gloved hand that gripped it and cocked his fist. Before he could swing, the soldier’s twin had moved.

To the others watching from inside, it had appeared that the second soldier merely jabbed a closed hand into the
fisherman’s chest. But the effect was extraordinarily out of proportion to the apparent action.

The fisherman’s entire body had stiffened, and his head had arched back so abruptly that the tendons in his neck were stretched tight. He had stood frozen for a long moment, eyes clamped shut and his lips in a rictus that showed his tightly clenched teeth almost to the jawline.

Then the soldier had withdrawn the military-strength hand stunner. Had not both men supported him, the fisherman would have collapsed to the ground.

Porter had said nothing, allowing those in the clinic to focus their full attention as the soldiers half dragged the inert figure to one of the waiting vans. Then, other soldiers who had waited unseen moved into position along the walkway. In addition to the full chemical-bio protective gear, each wore a sidearm holstered within easy reach.