I Am Pilgrim (36 page)

went suborbital, the blisters that had been forming on their limbs swept across their outer extremities and filled with pus, the nights became filled with hallucinatory dreams, their veins and capillaries started to burst, turning their skin black from haemorrhaging blood, forcing the flesh to split from their skeleton, their bodies expelling strange odours, and the pain got so bad that they screamed for two days until they probably died from exhaustion as much as anything else.

Every few hours, the Saracen’s face would appear at the window to check on the progress of his creation. What he saw, to his delight, was the results of a very hot virus indeed and, while he couldn’t be sure, it appeared to be a type of
Variola major
called haemorrhagic smallpox. Known among researchers as ‘Sledgehammer ’, it causes catastrophic bleeding in the body’s largest organ – the skin

– and is one hundred per cent fatal.
One hundred per cent
.

By the time the men had died, the woman herself was suffering from a rocketing temperature and

horrifying night sweats and she knew that she was now rapidly circling the drain. Late one night the

Saracen watched with satisfaction as she staggered to the basin to cool her burning face and found the first blisters on the back of her hand. In that moment, the Saracen knew that not only had he synthesized a red-hot virus which was highly infectious but the addition of the extra gene had also allowed it to crash through the best state-of-science vaccine. It was, without question or salvation, a terror weapon to end all terror weapons.

Because she had seen the future, both for herself and the unborn child with which she had already

fallen in love, she took it even harder than the men, and the Saracen resorted to gazing at the spectacular view, stuffing his ears with cotton and reciting the Qur ’an to drown out her cries.

When she finally bled out, he didn’t move. He wanted to savour the moment: the three bodies proved that he was now within reach of an event which terrorism experts have found so frightening

they have given it a special name. They call it the ‘soft kill’ of America.

Chapter Thirty-seven

THIS IS THE unalloyed truth: without an effective vaccine, no country on earth could survive an orchestrated smallpox attack, not even a country of 310 million people which is responsible for over 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, which had enough nuclear armaments to destroy the planet a hundred times over and had produced more Nobel prizewinners in science and medicine than any other nation on earth. It would be as helpless in the face of
Variola major
as the three prisoners who were lying dead in their own fluids in the stone tomb.

But just one man, one virus – could it really be done? The Saracen knew it could and, surprisingly,

so did Washington.

It was called Dark Winter.

That was the name of a bio-terror simulation conducted at Andrews Air Force Base in the spring of

2001. Years later, working in Lebanon, the Saracen had read a report into the exercise’s findings on the Internet. Even if he had never thought of weaponizing smallpox, the once-secret report would have certainly pointed him in the right direction.

Dark Winter postulated a smallpox attack on the United States in which one infected person entered

a shopping mall in Oklahoma City. It then plotted the spread of the disease and projected the number of casualties. Thirteen days after the sole infectee entered the mall, the virus had spread to twenty-five states, infected hundreds of thousands of people, killed one third of them, overwhelmed the healthcare system, sent the economy into free fall and led to a more or less total collapse in social order.

Naturally, the virus was indiscriminate in whom it attacked and cops, firefighters and health workers fell victim as fast as the population in general – probably faster – and looting and fires broke out unchecked. Hospitals were forced to lock and barricade their doors. The exercise was stopped early:

nobody needed to learn any more.

All of those who read the report and participated in its production probably had the same thought –

that was one infected person in a mall in Oklahoma City carrying a not particularly hot strain of the virus. Imagine the New York subway, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Superbowl.

And while the government eventually ordered the production and stockpiling of the vaccine, no real funding was given to finding a cure for the disease – the only certain way to consign smallpox to history and take it off the shelf of potential weapons. As many people have noted: generals are always fighting the last war, not the next one.

And what if there were twenty, a hundred, a thousand infected people? Although the Dark Winter report never made it specific, all the CIA analysts, bio-defence experts, epidemiologists and their endless computer simulations appeared to assume that the person in Oklahoma City was a suicide infectee – someone deliberately dosed with the virus and then let loose in America.

But to the Saracen, the use of suicide infectees – known as vectors to pathologists – was nonsense.

While it might be possible in a refugee camp in Gaza to find young martyrs willing to walk into a café wearing bomb belts, killing yourself in one magnificent blast was very different from the slow

agony of smallpox. Having worked alongside his wife in the camps, the Saracen knew no would-be

warriors would find anything heroic in pus-filled blisters – even if you could get them through US

Immigration in the post 9/11 world.

No, he had thought up something far more effective than any scenario imagined by the American

experts. By his estimate, his plan would provide at least
ten thousand
vectors spread throughout the

length and breadth of the far enemy.

The soft kill of America indeed.

Chapter Thirty-eight

THE SARACEN TOOK the cotton out of his ears and headed towards the village. At its edge, he stopped at a small cairn of stones he had placed there and counted every step as he walked forward. After nine

paces he moved hard to the left and avoided a buried landmine.

The whole village was booby-trapped – a task he had undertaken as soon as he had secured the prisoners in their stone tomb. Accompanied by his packhorses, he had set off along a maze of precipitous paths which led even higher into the towering mountains. After several wrong turns when

his memory failed him, he found – in a chaos of wind-torn boulders – the entrance to a complex of

caves.

The mountains were studded with such places – some natural, others hollowed out with dynamite –

all used by the
muj
during their protracted war with the Soviets. This one, an ammunition dump, was built by the Saracen and his comrades then abandoned on the day the war ended.

By the beam of a flashlight he made his way into the deepest cavern. The light swept across the walls, revealing boxes of mines, grenades, mortars and other ordnance, which had sat untouched for

so many years. Nearly all of it had been supplied by the CIA, so it was good quality – none of that

Soviet or Pakistani crap – and the thin mountain air had preserved it better than any underground bunker.

The Saracen found what he needed, transferred it into grey ammo boxes and a dozen wooden barrels and returned to the village. All that afternoon and late into the night he rigged improvised explosive devices and booby traps along the alleys and throughout the ruined buildings. The reason

was simple: unlike his attitude to the Soviets, he had respect for the US forces and many of their allies.

Ever since he had devised the human trial he had known that UN troops would be searching for the

prisoners – with growing determination when they received no ransom demand – and though he believed they would never come to a wrecked village as remote as this, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Now, with his mission almost at an end, he had to follow his secret signs carefully to avoid tripping an unseen wire or opening the wrong door. One mistake and he would join the Italian woman and her

two friends in the choir invisible.

He made it back to the kitchen, fed the horses, cooked his dinner and slept better than he had in months. He woke with the dawn and, after the ritual washing and prayers, set about moving out. He

had already dug a large pit behind the village headman’s house and now he filled it with bags of the quicklime he had carried with him specifically for the purpose. The chemical would destroy the bodies and so degrade any other material thrown into the pit that no forensic specialist in the world would be able to find a clue about what had happened in that lonely and evil place.

Dressed in his bio-hazard suit, with one of his last tanks of oxygen strapped to his back, he used a hand bit to drill a small hole in the heavy wooden door. He slid a plastic tube with a small nozzle attached to the end of it through the hole, put the other end into a large container of Lysol and used a foot-operated pump to spray gallons of the disinfectant over the bodies and the interior of the cell.

When he felt he had covered as much as possible, he swapped out the disinfectant for an old military can full of gasoline. He sprayed the fuel inside, dousing the bodies, the straw, the wooden beams, and the stone itself. He pulled out the plastic tube and filled the hole with a gasoline-soaked rag, put a match to it and moved back fast to safety.

He had been in two minds about torching the cell in order to help sterilize it, afraid that the smoke would attract attention, but the day was clear and bright and he was confident that the timber inside was so old that it would burn fast and clean. He was right about that, but he was astonished by the ferocity of the fire – as if nature itself were offended by what had been done within its walls.

Once the flames were out, he extinguished the embers with more Lysol and, still wearing his bio-

hazard equipment, used the horses, coils of rope and several meat hooks to haul the charred bodies

into the pit. They were closely followed by everything else that had been touched or used by any of

them during their stay – plates, utensils, syringes, the burnt remnants of the saddle blankets. Still in the suit, he showered himself in disinfectant, stripped naked, showered himself again in the Lysol, dressed and tossed the suit into the quicklime.

It was dusk, and he’d almost finished refilling the grave when he went back to the kitchen to get the last two bags of lime to spread around the top of the pit in order to deter any wild animals.

Inside, the horses were waiting, ready to be saddled, and the solitude and silence of the high mountains was almost oppressive. Even the wind had dropped to a whisper.

He didn’t hear a thing, and he would never have had any warning of the shit that was coming in at

over two hundred miles an hour – except for the horses.

Chapter Thirty-nine

THE SOVIETS HAD started it, and the UN and US troops had followed: all the assault helicopters in Afghanistan were fitted with silenced rotors and engines. It meant you didn’t hear them until they were right on top of you.

At least humans didn’t. The
muj
, however, had realized the horses were different and, long ago, they had learned to read their ponies’ behaviour as if their lives depended on it.

The Saracen, lifting the bags of lime on to his shoulder, heard two of the ponies snicker and turned to look. It had been years since he had seen horses act in that way, but it might as well have been yesterday. Helicopters were coming!

He dropped the bags, grabbed his AK-47 and a backpack containing his passport, money and medical equipment, untied the horses, whacked them on the rump and sent them bolting into the falling night. He knew they would make their way down to the valleys below, where the villagers who

found the eight prized mountain ponies – worth the equivalent of one large Hino truck – wouldn’t jeopardize their good fortune by reporting it to anyone.

Two minutes later, three UN choppers, with twenty Australian troops aboard, landed – alerted by a

report from a satellite that was using thermal imaging to scan remote areas for the abductees.

Ironically, it was the virus and not the fire which had sent up a red flag. Because of the high fever which accompanies smallpox, the analysts interpreting the satellite images looked at the thermal footprint captured a day previously and did not even consider that it could have been generated by three people. More like eight, which was about the size of the group they were hunting. It never occurred to anyone – not the analysts, nor the CIA agents at Alec Station handling the recovery operation, nor anyone else at the agency – that a single man could be in control of three prisoners.

Kidnappings didn’t work like that.

Consequently, when the Australian troops scrambled out of the choppers expecting to find a small

group of Taliban or a caravan of drug runners, they had planned for at least five potential hostiles and the possibility of crossfire slowed them down considerably. So did the first improvised explosive device.

When two of the privates, following correct procedure, came to a doorway into a house on the edge of the village, they stepped to either side of it and kicked it open, triggering two large landmines attached to the back of it. That explosion severed a wire disguised to look like an old laundry line stretched across the alleyway, detonating a mortar bomb behind them. The two privates had found their crossfire – they never had a chance.