Deadly Strain (Biological Response Team) (3 page)

Chapter Three

Rasker led her past the houses and into a partially fenced pasture. Over a small rise was a carcass. A cow, bloated to a grotesque size. A quick examination revealed none of the lesions evident on the human bodies.

“There are thirty of them,” Rasker said.

“Thirty?” She looked out over the field. Dead cows, their distended legs sticking out at unnatural angles, seemed to be everywhere.

An ice-cold rock settled in the pit of her stomach. “I don’t suppose you know when the cows started dying?”

“We’ll have to check to see if it was reported by the last patrol through here,” Sharp said, his voice so calm she knew he was anything but.

“You do that.” Her whole body shook. If the same disease had killed the cows and the people here, it would be her worse nightmare come to life. “You do that.”

* * *

He stared at Grace’s face for a moment. She looked like she was about to pass out. “What’s special about cows?”

“Any disease capable of jumping from one species of animal to another is dangerous. Rabies, malaria and bird flu are good examples. If the animal is a common one, the bug is easy to come into contact with and easily transmitted to people. Cows, aside from mad cow disease, are not common vectors, but they’re everywhere. They also represent a significant cost to buy and own, so people will hesitate to destroy them.”

“Yeah, I remember the mad cow scare. Maybe people won’t be so slow this time.”

A grimace came and went on her face, telling him she wasn’t just worried, she was terrified. He’d only seen that look on her face once before, the night he found Colonel Marshall talking to her outside of her quarters.

“Mad cow is a prion disease you can only get if you eat infected brain and nervous tissue,” she told him. “It can take weeks for infected persons to show symptoms. This disease appears much more contagious. It kills in hours. There’s no comparison. This agent has the potential to become an outbreak.”

She stopped, thinking so hard he could almost hear the gears in her head. “Okay, here’s what I need to happen as quickly as possible. First, I need samples taken from as many people in the village as possible. I also want samples taken from at least six of the cows. I’m going to run a cross section of the samples through the Sandwich to see if it can tell us what we’re dealing with. We also need to determine how the agent was introduced into this environment. How were the victims exposed to it? Decontamination can only occur after we’ve gotten all the answers.” As she spoke, her composure firmed up until she appeared as calm and composed as usual.

Hot damn, they had a plan. “Gotcha, Doc,” Sharp said. “Let’s get moving.”

He herded her back to their meeting point, and flashed a hand signal. Eight or nine soldiers jogged over.

The four guys from the A-Team formed up in front of them with an unconscious precision that spoke of years in the service. The other soldiers followed suit.

“How many teams?” he asked her.

“Four besides you and me. One to collect samples from the humans and one to collect from the cows. I need a team to collect water samples and the last team to collect samples from any of the food that’s been eaten. You and I will collect additional samples for the lab to investigate further.”

“Good plan.”

He and Leonard got the teams organized while Grace got the equipment ready. By the time he was done and the men were prepared to head out, she was ready to hand out sample kits to them.

The whole thing took about five minutes. Effective and efficient. Just the way he liked it.

Sharp shadowed Grace back to the first house as she took blood samples from every member of the family. Then they removed the clothing from one adult male and photographed his body, front and back. The lesions were visible head to toe, but were concentrated in the sweat regions under the arms, and around the neck and genitals.

He watched her hands and her face, especially when they examined the kids, but she was as calm and composed as ever.

She photographed the other members of the family, careful to maintain proper confidentiality and documentation with each photo. The army had developed procedures for just this sort of situation, with strict rules on how men, women and children could be treated after death.

She swabbed lesions on each of the other members of the family, as well.

Sharp was surprised at how consistent the lesions were.

Once Grace finished, she prepped the samples for testing in the Sandwich and started the process. The results were ready five minutes later.

She read it. Then read it again. Her gaze fastened on the ticker-tape paper the machine had spit out with a horror he could almost feel. Slowly, she raised it to lock with his.

She looked as shocked as someone who’d just been shot in the chest.

Fuck.

“Doc?” Sharp fit a thousand questions into one word.

“Anthrax,” she told him. “And for it to have acted this fast, it had to be weaponized. If it also killed the cows...” Her voice trailed off. “We have a treatment for anthrax,” he said. “Ciprofloxacin. We’re vaccinated for it, too.”

“Our military members are vaccinated, but the civilian population isn’t and I don’t know if the Afghan defense forces are vaccinated.”

He didn’t have to do any math in his head to know this was bad. This was a mostly agrarian society. People traveled to trade and buy goods all the time. “How long would it take to get the vaccine over here?”

* * *

Grace swallowed down a mouthful of bitter fear. “A day, maybe two, but we don’t have a lot of vaccine available to us here and there’s not much Cipro, either. If this spreads, it could get away from us fast.”

“Marshall needs a report.”

“A
very
preliminary one. There’s still a lot of work to be done before I’ll be comfortable giving him even a formal preliminary report.”

She walked toward Leonard and Bart and the sat phone, but before they could reach them, Rasker sprinted toward them.

More
bad news?

Sharp immediately brought his weapon up and began searching the surrounding hills for signs of the enemy.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Rasker.

He came to a skidding stop in front of her and said, “One of the members of the discovery patrol is sick.”

One word. That was all it took, one word to flood her system with adrenaline. “Define
sick
.”

“Sweating, fever and coughing up blood.”

Grace’s chest seized as everything inside her came to a sudden stop.
Holy shit
. “Are lesions visible?”

“No.” His tone said,
not yet
.

“Where is he?”

Rasker led her and Sharp, and they picked up Leonard as they passed the communication post, past a couple of houses and to a man in a face mask sitting on a rock. He was coughing, and when she got close she could see a fine spray of blood on the inside of his face plate. He looked up as she came to a stop and crouched in front of him.

It was the American patrol leader. The first one to find the dead. He’d gone inside two houses before putting on his breathing gear.

“Is your anthrax vaccine up-to-date?” she asked him.

He nodded and coughed again. More blood dotted the clear plastic.

“Is that what I’ve got, Doc?” he asked. “Anthrax?”

“Possibly. I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.” She put a hand on his arm. “But I’m going to find out.”

She turned to Leonard. “I want a tent set up at least one hundred yards away from the village and those cows, and
all
the members of the discovery patrol brought together so we can watch them for signs of disease.” She thought hard. What was their top priority? If this was a man-made biological weapon, were these soldiers or victims?

Her job right now wasn’t to play hospital; it was to detect disease, determine which one it was, provide answers to her chain of command and assist with decontamination. After all that was done, then she could hold the hands of the recovering. Or the dying.

The Sandwich was telling her the disease was bacterial, anthrax, but the physical presentation of symptoms was off. This disease progressed faster than any strain of anthrax she had ever heard of. It killed so damn quickly, she couldn’t be certain the results were accurate.

“I need to talk to my commander,” she told Sharp. “Stay here,” she ordered the sick man, “until the medical tent is set up.”

After the soldier nodded, she turned on her heel and strode toward Bart.

“Colonel Marshall?” Sharp asked, disbelief coloring his words.

She snorted. Like she’d ever ask Marshall for advice. “No,
my
commander. Colonel Maximillian.”

Sharp was silent for about three seconds, then he asked, “Is he good?”

She didn’t even have to think. “Yes.”

“Better than you?”

She nodded. “Yes.” She considered her next words very carefully. “Battling biological weapons is his life’s work. There’s no one I would rather have working with me on a case than Max.” She glanced at Sharp. “He’s the guy everyone calls
the
Iceman.”

“Everyone calls you
the
Icequeen,” Sharp told her.

“No,” Grace said. “That would be Max’s ex-wife. Coldest bitch I’ve ever met in my life.”

They reached Bart, who was talking to someone on the sat phone. He glanced at her, then at Sharp, raised an eyebrow and saluted.

Sharp shook his head.

Bart barked a “yes, sir” into the phone, then ended the call.

“Marshall?” Sharp asked.

“Yeah, he wants a report so he can decontaminate the village, pronto. He gave us another thirty minutes to finish up before he sends in a cleanup crew.”

“He can’t do that,” Grace protested. “Not until I’ve determined the agent.”

“He seems to think he can.”

“What’s he planning to do?” she asked, not bothering to hide her derision. “Bomb the place?”

“Something like that.”

Grace mentally demoted Marshall to useless fuck. “Until I locate the source of the agent, we can’t decontaminate anything.” She looked at Sharp and Bart for support.

They looked back at her. Expressionless.

Men.

“Give me the phone.”

She must have sounded as irritated as she felt because Bart handed it over, then raised his hands as if washing them of the entire situation.

Grace punched in her commanding officer’s direct phone number.

He answered on the first ring. “Max.”

“Dr. Samuels here, sir. I’m at the site of the release of a probable anthrax attack. I believe
weaponized
anthrax was released here, sir, but I haven’t figured out how it was introduced into this environment. Plus, it’s killing people in hours, Max,
hours
. Not days. And if the death rate is as high as I think it is, this could be a worst-case-scenario weapon.”

“Slow down, Grace,” Max ordered. “What’s got you in a panic? Our procedures can deal with this.”

“I need someone to talk Forward Operating Base Commander Marshall out of
cleaning
the site in approximately thirty minutes. I’ve also just discovered we have a possible secondary infection.”

“Secondary?”

“I won’t know until I take samples from one of the soldiers who found the bodies and have them analyzed. He may have been infected by the same spores as the dead villagers.”

“How many dead?”

“Sixty-eight.”

“How many alive?”

“None.” An impenetrable silence followed the word.

Finally, Max asked in an incredulous tone, “None?”

Grace swallowed to wet a throat gone dry. “Yes, sir. Like I said, it took less than seventeen hours for the infection to run its course. There’s also a possibility the strain killed thirty cows at the same time it was killing people.”

He swore. “I’ve never heard of a naturally occurring anthrax doing that within the time frame. Someone designed a nightmare.”

“That’s my feeling, as well, sir. Orders?”

“I’ll get in touch with Colonel Marshall and tell him to stand down on his cleanup plans. We can’t afford to do that until after we know
exactly
what we’re dealing with, and we discover if this secondary infection is even the same contagion. This anthrax is too virulent, too deadly to skimp on confirming the identity of the pathogen and how it’s being transmitted. If we’re dealing with anthrax spores, they’re airborne. If their creator releases them in a densely populated area, we’d be looking a major disaster. It might only be another six to twelve hours to wait, but those are valuable hours to us. Have you got samples collected for lab verification?”

“Almost done. I just need to check on the discovery patrol members and get samples from them.”

“Good work. Do that, then get in a helicopter and get them to me as fast as you can. I’ll talk to Marshall and have him stand down his cleaning crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anyone not involved in bringing the samples needs to stay in that village. No one else is allowed in or out.”

“I’ll order the quarantine.”

She ended the call and turned to the waiting men. “I’ve got orders from Colonel Maximillian to examine the discovery patrol and collect samples from them. Once that’s done, I need to get the samples to Max as fast as possible. This area is not to be decontaminated until we’re sure we know what we’ve got here. He’s as worried as I am about how fast this infection progresses and the possibility it’s crossed the species barrier. This is a unique pathogen that is already a devastating weapon. If we don’t do this right, we could make things infinitely worse.”

It took a couple of seconds for anyone to respond. “Marshall won’t like it,” Sharp finally said.

“He doesn’t have to. Colonel Maximillian is in charge of this situation now.” She turned to Leonard. “I’m going to check in on the patrol. Can you and Bart contact the base and let them know they have to wait until Colonel Maximillian gives the word before any decontamination can begin?”

“What do you want us to say if Marshall insists on talking to you?” Leonard asked.

He probably would. “I don’t have time for long explanations, but if he wants a short report from me directly, he can have one after I’ve finished with the discovery patrol.” She walked away.