Immortality (8 page)

The United States Senator glanced at him, then turned away with a trace of fear in his eyes. McKafferty was a truly ugly man. He knew this and liked the power it gave him. He had gotten that look of fear from others all day long and all the days of his life. His face was large and quarter moon shaped on profile. A pair of jug ears stuck out rudely from below a peach fuzz of gray hair. His skin had a ruddy leather complexion from too much booze and fistfights.

There was a black and gold braided insignia on his jacket just below his shoulder. The emblem contained a cobra coiled around a sword with the letters BARDCOM below it. This was McKafferty’s command: Biological Armaments Research and Development Command.

“We should be reaching
The Zone
in a few more minutes,” said McKafferty.

Senator Kitridge nodded, then continued looking out his window. Their destination was out in the middle of the desert on property annexed by Nellis Air Force base more than two decades ago. This was BARDCOM’s primary facility. The site was so highly classified that it did not exist.

McKafferty had picked up the Senator at McCarrin Airport thirty minutes ago. The Senator had arrived in a Lear Jet owned by Caesar’s World. This was his third trip to Vegas this year. He was the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee and had oversight authority on McKafferty’s command.

Across the left windows, the peaks that ringed Las Vegas like a giant crater drifted past. McKafferty forced a smile at the Senator’s aide, a woman in her early twenties. She looked away also with that hint of fear he recognized as matter-of-factly as others noticed the weather or the temperature of their food. She’d have to be parked somewhere before he and the Senator finished their tour.

As
The Zone
came into view, McKafferty described it for the benefit of the passengers who were making their first tour. The structure looked like an octagonal concrete slab that had been dropped from the sky into the middle of endless sand. The structure measured eight hundred feet across with one story above ground and six below. The only markings were the white outlines of a helicopter pad on the roof. There were no roads. All supplies and personnel came by air. Ten thousand men and women were stationed there on permanent assignment; half were scientists, the other half soldiers. The facility was the size of a small town.

A coded message had come in a few minutes ago. The contents had left McKafferty distracted. He recited his welcome speech but his mind was on the Sea Wolf incident. The salvage operation had gone smoothly. A pair of deep submersibles had dropped down onto the sub. Luckily, it had settled onto a ledge that was only a thousand feet down. If the currents had been any stronger, the boat might have ended up in the bottom of a trench with its belly crushed like a cheap beer can, and the Navy would have never found out what had happened.

The crew had been evacuated. Ninety-eight percent of them were dead; three survived. The medical staff at BARDCOM had been unable to explain what had happened. The dead had been asphyxiated. Two crewmembers and a SEAL had survived without any signs of injury. What kind of hot agent could attack soldiers in a sealed environment like a sub? McKafferty was a man of conviction and honor, and with that came the ability to intuitively recognize things for what they were. He had no doubt that this event was an attack.

A satellite had picked up a garbled signal from Sea Wolf. One of the crew had apparently managed to launch a com-buoy but had no idea how to operate it. After the boat had failed to respond to a ULF alert signal, aircraft were dispatched for a look-see. The sub jockeys owed their lives to a half frozen SEAL lieutenant. After his air tanks were exhausted, the man had crawled up on an ice flow. When the search aircraft had shown up, he’d used plastic explosives to signal.

The SEAL had shown resourcefulness. McKafferty believed strongly in team initiative. For that very reason, he had used his political pull to bring the CDC on board. McKafferty was never fully confident in any one science team, so he had set the CDC up on a parallel competitive track with BARDCOM. He didn’t care which team won the race. He just needed to know what this hot agent was and how it worked and, most importantly, if it could be controlled. The problem was that he couldn’t let the folks at CDC in on the whole picture. Because of
need-to-know
security
,
this contest was being run with a handicap against the civilian side.

Though none of his science teams at BARDCOM had isolated any traces of chemical or biological agents, the team was leaning toward a chemical agent as the cause. They argued that the CDC’s finding of cut nerve fiber was extremely similar to the effects of a highly classified U.S. chemical weapon code named ZRX661. The computer models all indicated to the contrary, with high probability that this was a biological attack, not chemical. After all, it was damn impossible to smuggle and then release a chemical agent inside a U.S. Navy sub or an airtight dive suit. McKafferty agreed with the computers as he often did. People made too many mistakes due to vested interests fogging their logic. Machines didn’t have this problem. The helicopter touched down as a cloud of sand blew up around them like an abrasive curtain.

Kill Zones

Dr. Kathy Morrison was frayed to the point of confusing simple things. She could use a solid eight hours of sleep. A week had passed and she was still trying to gain her first insight into what was now rightly or wrongly being called an epidemic. A week ago it had been a village in Brazil, a village in Argentina, and a Navy diver. Now there were three additional sites: one in Chile and two more in Brazil. The death count had risen to almost six hundred. An EIS agent in Chile had coined a phrase to describe these sites as
kill zones
and the name had stuck. Kathy thought the phrase was appropriate.
Kill zone
brought up images of a war, and that’s exactly what this was... a violent, ugly war.

She had seen the worst types of epidemics that Mother Nature and man had so far devised. What was driving her to work almost twenty hours a day was the nagging doubt that this killer might not be a man-made chemical or natural biological, but something new and unimaginable; and if that was the case, all their calculations based on historical observations of epidemics spreading might as well be thrown out the window. For every kill zone they’d documented, there could be dozens of others they hadn’t yet found. The BVMC lab was now working with more than three hundred samples of bodily fluids and tissues. While the database was growing, the knowledgebase had increased by exactly zero.

Kathy walked into her boss’s office. Carl Green was usually an easy-going man, but in the center of this epidemic he was out of his element. He was a deputy director, not a military commander. At ten in the morning, his tie was already hanging loose around his neck. He looked haggard. His dark forehead was creased with worry lines. He was on the phone and waved Kathy to a vacant chair. She smelled tobacco on his clothes. A pack of Camels was on his desk. She knew he hadn’t smoked in years.

“Senator, please, I promised you a full report by the end of this week. Right now we have nothing to add. Yes, Sir, I will. Have you considered Dr. Morrison’s request to quarantine all goods and travel from South America? Yes, okay, I understand. No one wants the public scared with terrorist theories. Uhuh… The press blackout does make it difficult. Yes... yes... Good day, Sir.”

Kathy knew there was no political will to quarantine South America because of the questions such an action would raise. Maybe the bureaucrats were right; maybe a quarantine was an overreaction, but it was the safe thing to do. If this was a chemical agent being used, then a quarantine would make it harder to smuggle the agent into the country; and if this was a biological, then a quarantine would help to block its spread. Either way, humanity didn’t need another global scourge. We were doing quite well with AIDS and drug resistant TB and global warming and terrorism, thank you very much.

“So what have you got for me?” asked Green.

“I’ve registered a name for this set of symptoms, SAAC for South American Asphyxial Complex, and got it quietly listed in the CDC public records as a reportable disease.”

“Well that was important,” said Green. “Glad it’s been settled. Now can we get to a few minor details like what the hell is it and how do we stop it!”

Kathy’s fingers involuntarily tightened around the status report she’d brought. Carl was under pressure. It would only make things worse if she let this degrade into a shouting match. She wanted to tell him what he could do with this report. She stood up ready to leave. Carl’s eyes locked on hers. The tension in his face held then began to fade.

“Sit down,” he said. “Please go on with your report.”

Kathy hesitated. Carl picked up a pencil and began to fidget. The strain abated. She sat down, glanced at the summary page of her report and then began.

“There’s no disagreement from the entire research team on these three facts. One: all the deaths are caused by internal nerve fiber damage. Two: we haven’t found a single instance of trauma or cuts to the nerve bundles’ protective outer sheaths. Three: we’ve gotten no positive hits from all tests for toxins and pathogens.

“I’ve got part of the team trying an unconventional tactic to identify the cause by working forward instead of backward. They’re trying to reverse-engineer it by going through all the possible way to replicate this kind of damage. We’ve identified enzymes that can break down nerve tissue and leave chemical micro-cuts behind, but there’s no way an enzyme could have reached the nerve fibers without also damaging the surrounding protective sheaths. There’s also no way these cuts could have been done mechanically or by radiation.

“I have someone working on what we’re calling Jeffrey’s bite theory. His idea is that bacteria are nibbling away at the nerve fibers, using enzymes. There are bacteria that eat steel, so a little nerve tissue is nothing. The only problem is the clean, straight cuts. If bacteria were responsible, we would see molecular enzyme cuts everywhere, almost like snail-trails weaving around and between the nerve fibers.

“I’ve got the lab processing every bit of tissue and cellular material from two of the bodies. It’s a huge job. We’re doing visual inspection, DNA, and spectral analysis. We’re looking for anything that does not belong; but so far, nothing. The theory for a biological cause is supported by elevated immune system responses in all victims, but nothing disease specific. The theory for a chemical agent is supported by the fact that all deaths were nearly simultaneous. In the end, we still have almost nothing to go on. We’re no closer today than we were days ago when I found the micro-cuts.”

Kathy sighed and looked down at the desk. The room was silent for a while.

“How long?” asked Carl.

“How long for what?”

“Processing the two bodies bit by bit,” said Carl.

“About four months if we’re lucky, ten if we’re not.”

“Not good… What else have you got?”

“There’s something no one’s been willing to take a stab at explaining. There’s a well-defined boundary around some of the kill zones. It’s somewhat circular with a radius averaging a few hundred feet. Outside the perimeter, there are no deaths. On the inside, it’s hell’s picnic.”

Carl took an ashtray and lighter from his desk drawer. He shook a cigarette from a pack of Camels and lit it. The entire facility was non-smoking, even outside. Kathy thought about saying something about his health and then realized how petty it would sound.

“You were talking about the kill zone boundary,” said Carl.

“That’s right… The best example of this boundary was in Chile,” said Kathy. “Near a kill zone, a dozen villagers were fishing alongside a stream about four hundred feet from the village. They’d been fishing for a few hours when they heard a commotion – dogs barking, that sort of thing – and came running back to the village to find everyone there was dying. People were dropping around them, literally falling into their arms.

“Every one of the villagers by the stream were fine. They were tested and showed no signs of any toxins or biologicals. This means that we have an entire event measured in minutes or seconds, from exposure – to death – to an inert state that no longer kills. This makes everything including Ebola Zaire seem like a case of chicken pox.”

“None of the EIS agents have found a reservoir for a disease or toxin or any indication of how it’s transmitted or ingested. Hell, we don’t even know if this thing is a chemical or a disease. I had CDC Atlanta run our symptoms through that new AI diagnostic computer program of theirs.”

“What’s the name of that program again?” asked Carl.

Kathy’s thoughts went blank. Her brain felt strained. It took her a moment to remember the name.

“DTAVAS, Disease and Toxin Attack Vector Analysis System... Carl, you’re not going to believe what it came up with. The computer program indicated a sixty percent probability that we’re dealing with an insect-transmitted disease, with high probability of ticks or mosquitoes as the carrier.”

“Wouldn’t it be something if this did turn out to be insects?” said Carl.

Kathy leaned back in the chair. She closed her eyes for a moment. Her knee was bothering her for the first time in two days. She took a few aspirin from her pocket and swallowed them with coffee. Could it be insects? She picked up a photograph of the latest kill zone and stared at it. Hell’s picnic. None of these people died with a peaceful expression on their face.

“What about Chromatium bacteria found in the Navy diver?” asked Carl.

Kathy felt immediately frustrated. She suspected Carl would get around to that question again sooner or later, just not so soon. Jeffrey had come across that scrap of information in the reports she’d given him to read during his flight to South America. He’d called Carl and told him he was convinced there was a connection. He argued that there was no explanation for the Chromatium found in the scalp tissue of the diver, as if lacking an explanation was so damn unique right now. Everything in this case was lacking in the explanation department. Kathy felt that Chromatium was an interesting curiosity, but she was equally convinced that it was a total waste of time.