Black Storm (34 page)

“Smallpox is different. It aerosols naturally. So instead of a limited infected population, what you have is an epidemic.”

She could see they didn't like that. God knows, she didn't like telling them.

“It couldn't be anthrax?” Lenson asked her. “You're sure?”

“No. It's inconsistent with the clinical manifestation I saw back in that tunnel. It could be camel pox, or some other member of the family. There are twenty or thirty different vertebrate poxviruses. But I doubt it. Most of those either don't affect humans or they manifest as a mild illness. That man's dying. The two others with him are dead. I'm not an expert on virus weapons. But I know smallpox had several clinical variants, due to differences in both strain virulence and host response. What he has looks like something they used to call hemorrhagic smallpox.”

She thought, but didn't add, that the hemorrhagic variant was both the rarest, the deadliest, and the most rapidly progressing. And she did not want to follow down that chain of reasoning, because it meant the virus had been engineered; deliberately increased in virulence, artificially selected to enhance lethality and leap easily from host to host.

And worst of all, it meant that someone had to have used human beings in that engineering. Helpless victims, sacrificed to breed the deadliest possible version of an already horrendous disease.

Lenson broke into her thoughts again. “The troops we stumbled over in the tunnel. How'd they get it?”

“I don't know. There could have been an accident loading the warheads. Or when it was shipped in here. Who knows? Anyway the material leaked somehow. They were infected. And I'd bet they're not the only ones.”

Gault said slowly, “You said it can spread from person to person.”

He'd understood, then. She nodded. “That's right,
Gunny. Variola major's extremely infectious.”

Blaisell leaned forward. His voice was suddenly angry, as if she'd just cheated him at poker. “What're you saying? You saying we got it now?”

“Not necessarily. But we've just been exposed.”

“We got shots. Back at ‘Ar‘ar.”

“For anthrax and botulism. I'm afraid they won't do us any good with this.”

“Can you give us antibiotics?” Gault said. “Out of your kit?”

“I'm sorry. Antibiotics don't kill viruses.”

Lenson said, “So now what happens?”

“You mean, to us? The first sign will be a fever. Then comes rigor, vomiting, headache, followed by the characteristic pox pustules. Followed by systemic toxicity, and either slow recovery or death.” She paused. “It's a nightmare virus. A cough can pass it. Your bedding's infected. Your clothes are infected. Just breathing in the same room, that's a reliable mode of transmission. Meaning, once it starts, we can't stop it or isolate it. All we can do is immunize around the edges and wait till it burns itself out.”

“Casualties?” Lenson asked softly.

“Released over a city?” she asked him. “A plume, on the wind? Classic variola kills forty percent of an unvaccinated population. The hemorrhagic variant's going to be higher. Much higher. I'd say, in the hundreds of thousands. Maybe in the millions.”

“And you're saying we'll get it?”

“That's right,” she said somberly. “Not all of us, probably. But there's no way to tell how many, or who.”

She took another deep breath, admitting the truth to herself as much as to them.

“But it's not just us, now. Because we can pass it on, even if we don't show the symptoms yet. Before we're even sick.

“Right now we may be walking biological weapons. Loaded with the most deadly disease that has ever existed on earth.”

They sat, backs propped against the walls, a few meters up the corridor. In the dim near-dark, each held his weapon across his lap, or upright, propped between dirty, toe-scraped boots. All but Nichols. Gault had left F.C. down-tunnel as an OP, to watch for roving guards, arrivals, deliveries, activity, anything they hadn't seen so far.

Dan dragged a hand down his face, feeling the buildup of dirt and sweat and camo paint like a viscous paste. He had enough beard to qualify as one of the Faithful. He couldn't believe how tired he felt. How unutterably, bone-wearily exhausted. He'd gone without sleep before. As a staff officer in the Med, as an exec escorting tankers during Operation Earnest Will, as a captain-in-all-but-name in the China Sea. It had been hard then, fighting the motion of a ship in a seaway, sometimes in storms; resisting the nervous exhaustion of day after night on watch, not to mention other anxieties…. But added to sleeplessness and fear this time was the sheer physical wear of marching under heavy rucks, crawling up and down through subterranean drains and ways. Hours of hard work and moments of terror, adrenaline surge followed by the burned-out emptiness of an exhausted body and a mind driven to the edge of sanity. The marines looked worn too, but it didn't seem to slow them down. They were hardened to it. He and Maddox weren't. Each time
he stopped moving now he had to fight the droop of his head, the slackening of his bruised sinews and exhausted muscles. He wanted sleep.

No. It had gone beyond that. The darkness in his heart had advanced, like a gangrenous infection that gained a little each day.

Sometimes he wanted to die.

But they'd reached their objective at last, and he wasn't a useless caboose anymore, following the troopies and trying his best to act like one. Now he had to be the engine. Had to make decisions, and make them stick, and those decisions had to be right.

He muttered hoarsely, “All right. First of all, we've got to figure out exactly where we are. Gunny. Can you get a reading off the GPS?”

Gault stirred. “I'll try. We're pretty far underground here.”

“How far? Anybody keep track?”

They contributed different guesses; the average seemed to be about forty feet. That sounded about right, and Dan got out his pad to compose the message. The shorter, the better. The less time it took to transmit, the harder it would be for the Iraqi Army's direction-finding stations to triangulate them. Something like
FLYING STONES LOCATED GRID SQUARE
such and such,
BUNKER SYSTEM FORTY FEET BELOW SURFACE, CONTENTS BIOWEAPONS SMALLPOX
. He regarded it and then scribbled over it. Tried
PROJECT
985
CONFIRMED BIOWEAPON SUSPECT ACTIVE AGENT SMALLPOX. BUNKER SYSTEM GRID SQUARE CONSISTS CONCRETE BUNKER SYSTEM
…. He cursed and scribbled that one out too, blinking, fighting exhaustion and the overwhelming desire to sleep.

A Tomahawk strike took time to design. The targeting facility had to program the flight path, actually tell the missile not just where to go, but how to get there, what radar-navigation marks to check and when and where it would pick them up. During the last seconds of flight, an electro-optical terminal-guidance system took over. It
compared the expected image from the target area with the actual infrared image it observed. If you had clear weather and a high-contrast target, you could actually tell the missile which window of a building to fly into.

But even after the mission was in the can, it took more time to transmit to the launching platform—in this case, the destroyers and subs in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. When he'd started with the program, in the early eighties, someone had to physically transport the tapes to the launching platform. Now they could download targeting data by satellite, but it still wasn't an instantaneous process.

He checked his watch, feeling the passing seconds like quicksand sucking at his legs. Because if Saddam's threat was real, the suited and masked troops Gault had seen were carrying out their launch preparations now.

Could he streamline the targeting process? He'd plotted missions to downtown Baghdad at the start of the air war. He remembered one used the river as a nav marker. Maybe they could use that profile, that already-plotted course. Tomahawks came in so low and fast he didn't think the AA battery would be a problem. The direction of flight would be in from the river. That would be good; the missile, flying only a hundred feet off the deck, would avoid the buildings behind them. But what if there were buildings in front…That depended…he was so fucking tired, his mind wouldn't work…first he had to make sure exactly where they were.

“I can't get GPS here,” Gault said, looking up from the set.

“Damn it. Okay, give me the map.”

The team leader flattened it on the powdery concrete. Blaisell positioned his flash, leaning to shield them. They worked from the toppled bridge and where the map showed the cable crossing. When they had it argued to an agreement, Dan shook his head slowly. Then looked up at Gault.

“What's ‘Building 61'?”

Gault flipped the map over. Ran his finger down the numbered list. “Al Mustashfa Al Humhuri. A ‘child welfare hospital,' it says here.”

“
Mustashfá
means hospital,” Sarsten put in.

“Thanks,” Dan said. He pushed what that meant aside for the moment. “Okay, a UTS grid coordinate? I want it down to ten meters.”

Gault read it out and he wrote it down. “Okay, that's where we are; one end of the complex. You said it extends southward, right? How far?”

“I couldn't see the end. At least a hundred meters.”

“You saw trucks. Right?”

“I saw what looked the rear end, yeah. Mud flaps and lights.”

Sarsten asked him, “Color?”

“Military green.”

The SAS said, “The Scuds will be on those trucks. They're TELs, transporter-erector-launchers. What we were trying to find out in the desert. Huge things, six big wheels, dual cabs. Carry the missile in the bed between.”

Gault said, “I didn't see anything that looked like a missile. Warheads, but no missiles. They could be in silos.”

Dan said, “Silos are possible, but I don't think likely. This whole installation strikes me as something they ginned up on short notice. This area was probably underground parking, or maybe an ambulance station. No, the sergeant here's probably right: they're on transporters. So there's got to be some way to get them up to ground level. Most likely, a ramp. With me so far?”

The gunny said, “Everything you say makes sense, Commander. But we haven't actually seen it.”

“We don't have to
see
it to know it's got to be there. You ID'd the goddamn warheads. That's enough.” He looked at the map again, noted the road between the hospital and the river; remembered palm trees bending in the dusk, a car moving along above the river. “Actually it's a great location. They don't need to go far. Just enough to
clear the buildings. They erect and launch and scoot back down here for a reload. Let's call the tunnel a hundred meters long. That'll give the targeters notice that it's an elongated rather than a point target.”

“You don't think if they hit one end of this thing, it would wipe out the rest?”

“Tomahawk doesn't have that big a warhead.”

“Can it go through forty feet of dirt?” Sarsten said.

Dan rubbed his face again, thinking about it. He didn't like the SAS man's tone, but he had a point. Saddam had located his last-ditch deterrent deep beneath a children's hospital. It was totally consistent with the way the guy had operated to date. Using Western hostages as human shields. Putting beaten-up, captured pilots on TV. Siting his surface-to-air missile batteries in residential neighborhoods.

He was getting a bad feeling. An effective Tomahawk strike would be difficult. Maybe impossible.

Tomahawk was an air-breathing missile, like a miniature aircraft. It didn't dead-drop like a bomb, it flew in at an angle. You could select an up-and-over approach, but that only steepened the angle, didn't make it straight down. The warhead had been developed for use against ships. It would go through the armor of a Kynda-class cruiser, it would penetrate several feet of concrete, but it wouldn't burrow down through dirt. It was really at its best against aboveground buildings, aircraft shelters and so forth.

Tasked with eliminating Saddam's underground command bunkers, the air force had hastily pasted together a penetrating bomb. It might punch through forty feet of soil and however much concrete was in that arched overhead. But bunker busters had to fall vertically, gathering the kinetic energy to penetrate. He couldn't see Schwarzkopf signing off on dropping one through a children's hospital. Not after the uproar over the Amiriya shelter attack.

He saw Sarsten's sardonic glare, and dropped his eyes. Still trying to goad his reluctant brain into something resembling coherent thought.

“You can't bomb it,” Maddox said in a low voice. He started.

“What?”

“You're coming to the same conclusion I came to. If you bomb this facility, you'll spread the virus all over the city. I saw the map. There are residential neighborhoods all around us.”

“So what?” said Sarsten. “Give Saddam a taste of his own medicine.”

She told him contemptuously, “I'm not talking about him. I guarantee you, whatever this is,
he's
been immunized against it. We're talking about innocent people. Kids.”

“
Raghead
kids,” said Blaisell.

“That's enough, marine,” Gault said sharply.

A stir down the tunnel, a movement in the shadows. Weapons whipped around. It was Nichols. He murmured, “Troops. Coming this way.”

“Side tunnel,” said Gault, and they moved quickly off into the shadows. They waited there for several minutes, but nothing happened. No one came.

Dan was conscious of the minutes passing, time bleeding away. He took the penciled scrap of his message out again and reread it. He was sweating again. He was remembering what Admiral Kinnear had offered him.

Desert Moonlight.

A two-hundred-kiloton W-80 nuclear weapon, on call.

He held the scrap of paper, trying to steady down, trying to think it through. Kinnear wouldn't have given him a nuke on call unless he thought it might be needed. Unless he thought Dan might face a situation like this. But was it even sane, to think about using a nuclear weapon in downtown Baghdad?

Then he thought, Was it sane to think about unleashing
the deadliest disease in human history? And not just on Israel—what Dr. Maddox said made it clear the thing would spread far beyond whatever its original target was.

So that no, Saddam Hussein was not sane, not in the Western meaning of the word. Deterrence theory had always presupposed a rational actor. Saddam acted by a different code. One that could wipe out a nation as cold-bloodedly as he killed his own associates. One that could use sick children, like the ones in the hospital above them now, as human shields.

A nuke would trump Saddam's ace. It might even sterilize the horror he'd loaded into the warheads a few meters away. But a nuclear detonation, even below-ground, would cause enormous collateral damage in the middle of a city. Would vaporize the hospital and everyone in it.

They'd be playing Saddam's game. And precisely at his moral level.

It's not your decision,
he told himself desperately. The paper trembled in his hands.
Kinnear told you that. It's a recommendation, not a release. They'll make the decision. Not you
.

But he knew that whatever his mind told him, the responsibility was his. If he'd learned anything from his career, the disasters and setbacks and sometimes the equivocal shadowy half victories, he'd learned that. Orders from above didn't exculpate a man. Policy didn't exculpate a man. Passing the buck didn't exculpate a man. Like an infection, responsibility stayed with you even as you handed it on.

The responsibility was his.

 

GAULT DIDN'T
like what he was seeing. The commander had looked bad since they'd rescued him. Now his hands were shaking. The gunny stood and said in a low voice, “Sir? Let's you and me and the doctor go talk this out.”

He raised his eyebrows at Maddox. And after a moment she stood too, and they went around the corner a few steps. He reached out with both hands to their shoulders and pulled their heads in to his. Murmured, standing there, “We need a decision, sir. Right now.”

“What's your call, Gunny?”

“Haul ass, ASAP. Before somebody decides to come back and check on their casualties, the guys in the tunnel here. Or brings in the next one. Get back across the river and do our transmission. Let Higher know what we found.”

Maddox said, “It's not that simple, Gunny. The commander's problem is that we can't just leave and report this.”

Gault looked at her. She looked exhausted, eyes hollow, hair matted with dirt and dried mud. “Why not?”

“Because it does no good if we do. They can't bomb it.”

He stared at her. “Sure they can. Or he can call in a missile strike.”

“No, he can't. I told you how serious this is. Smallpox doesn't exist in nature anymore. Human beings were the only reservoir. A thousand years ago, we had natural resistance, those who didn't die from it. Contracted from low-level infections, exposure to the less virulent strains. A hundred years ago, we used to inoculate. But now we're vulnerable. We're
all
vulnerable. We can't take the risk of spreading a plume of the pathogens across the city. Because the disease won't stay here.”

Gault watched the commander. Lenson didn't seem to agree with her, but he didn't say he disagreed either. After a moment he started talking about how it might not be possible to destroy it anyway, plume or no; since the facility was buried, and beneath a hospital, he wasn't sure either a Tomahawk or an air strike could wipe it out.