The Coward's Way of War (62 page)

He listened as the cleric on the platform outlined his crimes, including treason, murder and a number they’d made up for the occasion.  The crowd showed no sign of any feeling, apart from a handful who jeered at him, throwing small rocks towards his head.  He scanned what little he could see of the crowd, seeing the young male children who would be raised to laugh at such acts, assuming the Americans left them alive.  A number of them, he saw, were suffering from Henderson’s Disease.  The noise of an American aircraft echoed over the city as the executioner raised his axe to strike...

***

“
Over target,” the navigator reported.

“Bombs away,” the Weapons Officer said.  “Punch it!”

Mike didn't hesitate.  He rammed the jet forward as fast as it would go, gunning the engine for all that it was worth.  Behind them, the bombs fell towards their targets, towards the precise attitude – determined by their onboard sensors and links to GPS systems – where they would detonate.  It was counter-intuitive, but an airburst would do far more damage to the city than a groundburst...and it would be cleaner too.  Radioactive dust would not be a serious concern for the population.  The nukes would detonate simultaneously to avoid fratricide.

“Five seconds,” the Weapons Officer said.  “Four, three, two, one...”

***

Prince Ibrahim r
elaxed as the axe started to fall, smiling to himself, just before the world went white and he fell into darkness...

***

The two bombs detonated high over the city.  Bare microseconds after they began
their detonation sequence, a brilliant flash of blinding light flared out.  Anyone unlucky enough to be looking in the wrong direction without eye protection was instantly blinded as their optic nerves burned out.  It hardly mattered; microseconds later, a sheet of pure heat blazed out over the city, setting fire to everything that could burn.  Prince Ibrahim, his executioner and the watching crowd died before they knew what had hit them.  The blast wave, following the heat, roared out over the city.  The buildings, some built with little concern for health and safety, collapsed under the sheer force of the blast.  Over two million people died in the opening seconds of the blast.  Others survived, only to find themselves blinded, or trapped amidst the wreckage as the city burned.

Riyadh’s emergency services had always been a joke, even before the war had broken out and Prince Mukhtar had taken over.  Even if they had been up to American or European standards, they would have found restoring order and fighting the fires an impossible task.  Many of them had been killed or injured by the bombs, while the survivors had lost all ability to recover their damaged equipment or even to coordinate their efforts.  Although it took days for the fires to die down, Riyadh had been, to all intents and purposes, destroyed in the seconds following the blasts.

***

Doug pulled himself to his feet, heedless of the danger, and stared towards Riyadh.  The entire city was wrapped in smoke, pouring up from the ground and funnellin
g into the sky.  As he watched, the shape of a mushroom cloud became clear, a sight that no one had seen for years, perhaps decades.  Below the eerie cloud, he could see flames blazing up as the city burned.  It seemed impossible to believe that there were any survivors.

Burtis shook his head as he walked over to meet Doug.  “Once, years ago, I read this science-fiction story about a team recording a nuclear blast,” he said.  Under other circumstances, Doug would have teased him about a Marine actually reading a book, but somehow it didn't feel right, not under the mushroom cloud.  “They slowed the video down until they could see it second by second.  And, at one point, they could see an image of a devil’s head, laughing at them.”

“That wasn't what I was thinking,” Doug admitted.  He shook his head, not quite willing to admit to his innermost thoughts.  “I was thinking...”

He pointed a finger towards the burning city.  “We have made a desert upon this world and we have called it peace.”

When all is said and done, life endures, somehow.

-Lindsey Mann

New York, USA/Mannington VA, USA/Ghawar, Saudi Arabia

Day 120

The Secret Service had been horrified, but the President insisted, believing that she had a duty to lead the return to one of
the dead cities.  New York had exploded into gang warfare after the evacuation was complete and everyone who wanted to leave had left, yet the brief period of violence and anarchy had died away as the gangs ran out of food.  The SF teams the President had sent into the city, if only to record what was going on, had reported that the gangs had turned to cannibalism, with a consequent spread of other diseases.  Even those who were immune to Henderson’s Disease had died, leaving the city abandoned and empty.

The President felt a chill blowing through the air and pulled her jacket tighter around herself, knowing that it was only going to get colder.  Across the country, millions of Americans were living in conditions that would have shamed the Third World, or what the Third World had been before Henderson’s Disease had swept through it like a plague.  No one knew for sure how many had died overall, but the classified reports she’d read suggested that around two to three billion people – half of the global population – had died in the epidemic, either from Henderson’s Disease or the wars and chaos it had brought in its wake.  She knew that she had done the best she could, yet she felt as if she had failed.  New York and many other American cities lay empty, a silent testimony to the disaster.  Future historians would ask themselves, when considering where the blame truly lay, who was President at the time.  The President’s lips twitched humourlessly.  The buck truly stopped with her.

She caught sight of a gaggle of reporters and nodded to them, picking out some of the rising stars of the new media industry.  The political analysts were already talking about what the changes meant for the future, but the President had her own ideas.  The new swarm of online journalists and bloggers – the main news services had taken a beating during the epidemic, even though almost every American citizen was vaccinated now – would reshape the political landscape.  Her successor as President would find that the rules had changed, at least for a few years.  Who knew what the future would hold.

Times Square felt eerie to her, even though she had only visited once before, during her campaign tour of America.  It was almost deserted, apart from the reporters, her security detail and a handful of politicians who hoped to be seen with the President.  New York remained under quarantine, although the remains of the City Government were working with the military to recover items of value from the remains of the city.  The once-famous location was pitted with damage from the fighting.  The bodies, what remained of them, had been transported to the incinerators and unceremoniously reduced to ash.  No one had even recorded their names.

She took a breath as she stepped up onto the podium, wincing slightly at the strange smell.  The city felt as if it were decaying, as if it were a disused movie set abandoned and allowed to collapse into rubble.  New York had picked itself up and recovered after terrorists had slammed a pair of aircraft into the Twin Towers, but this...this was different.  The most optimistic projections the President had seen suggested that it would be years before New York could be resettled, although it was possible that American determination and capitalism would find a way. Perhaps, if there was a profit in it...

The President cleared her throat as she stood in front of the reporters, gazing past them towards the ruins of the city.  “Many years ago,” she began, “our ancestors purchased this land from the natives...”

***

Mi
ja watched with detached interest as the President spoke, extolling the virtues of the American Way and promising that the Federal Government would do everything in its power to ensure that the dispossessed American citizens would be able to return to their homes as soon as possible.  She hoped that the President was right, but she doubted it, for she’d seen some of the refugee camps.  Many people had chosen to abandon them and set up elsewhere, signing on with farm work teams or other forms of heavy labour, yet others were just sitting there, demanding that the government feed and clothe them.  The demographics of the country had been permanently altered.

“There are those who say that we overreacted to the crisis,” the President said.  “The scene before us tells us the truth, we acted with remarkable restraint.”

There was no way to disagree, Mija knew.  After she’d been detached from the invasion and occupation force in Saudi Arabia, she’d made her way home via Israel, Europe and Iceland.  The Israelis were, she suspected, not too unhappy at the final outcome, for much of the Arab world was dead.  The Palestinian crisis, the never-ending and insolvable problem, had been solved.  The West Bank and Gaza had been depopulated by Henderson’s Disease.  It was possible that Egypt and even Syria would pull themselves together eventually, but for the moment they posed no threat to anyone, except perhaps their own people.  Henderson’s Disease had returned much of the Middle East to the desert.

Europe was a greater mess, although Henderson’s Disease had terminated the unrest and insurgencies with brutal efficiency.  France and Germany had put down the insurgencies in their territories with considerable force, isolating the pockets of hostile forces and waiting for Henderson’s Disease to exterminate their opposition.  Britain had managed to keep a lid on the worst of the uprisings, but it seemed that very few of the insurgents – very few disloyal ethnic minorities – had been given the vaccine.  The Netherlands, Spain and Denmark had collapsed into complete chaos, at least until a joint Franco-German force had entered the Netherlands and put down the insurgencies.  The Caliphate of Holland had lasted only as long as it took for Henderson’s Disease to exterminate the Caliph and his followers.

The memory made her scowl.  The Europeans had collapsed into a kind of fascism, with their governments ruling with iron hands.  The long-term effects would be bad, she was sure, even though such controls had been necessary to prevent Henderson’s Disease from spreading further.  She’d been glad to leave the remains of the European Dream for Iceland, where Henderson’s Disease had barely managed to reach.  The Icelandic Government had managed to vaccinate much of the population before the disease tore through their country as it had so many other countries.  They’d been lucky.  They had barely been touched by the disease.

She touched her press badge as the President kept speaking.  After her reporting from Saudi Arabia, her name carried weight, enough to open doors for her everywhere.  The truth, however, was that she no longer wanted to report on people’s misery; she no longer wanted to be a media ghoul.  She wanted to report on how people were coping and improving their lives...and rebuilding the country.  With all the changes sweeping through the media world, she might just get her wish.

***

“
We must ensure that the disaster, the use of a biological weapon by terrorists, can never happen again,” the President said.  Nicolas listened dispassionately, knowing what she was going to say.  “The United States must remain committed to banning research into biological weapons, using all necessary means to prevent their spread.”

He shook his head as the President’s words echoed in the deserted city.  The whole crisis had been a disaster waiting to happen.  Once Smallpox vaccinations had been discontinued, the population – the newborn – had been unable to resist the disease, once the terrorists had released it back into the global ecosystem.  Nicolas had read the classified reports and seen the models attempting to predict the future; they painted a dismal picture, one where Henderson’s Disease continued to menace the human race for years to come.

The President meant every word she said – and she would enjoy the support of most of the global population, what was left of it – yet he knew better than to think that the threat of biological weapons would vanish in the next few years.  There were too many unanswered questions about the Russian stockpile...or, for that matter, what China, Iran or North Korea might have accomplished on their own.  There was a whole series of unanswered questions surrounding an outbreak of diseases in Northern Iran, including some that shouldn't have appeared in the Middle East, while North Korea remained as isolated and insular as ever.  The United States would have to threaten war to force the other nations to comply with a comprehensive ban, yet even America would find that hard.  The only other alternative was to create and maintain a defensive program, but it was hard, in biological warfare, to separate an offensive program from a defensive program.  The rest of the world could, justly, cry foul.