Case: Black by James Savik - Part Two
Southaven, MS
30 Company, 3rd Platoon Headquarters
1722 CST
601-555-5555
“Hi Joey.”
“Sergeant Taylor?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Now that’s some real shit in the news. Very scary.”
“Yeah Joey it is. And I’m right here in the middle of it with the greenest bunch of kids you’ve ever seen. Remember when you said if I ever needed you, just call?”
“Where do you want me Sarge?”
“Can you get to Shelby?”
“Yeah.”
“Gear there, and hop one of the convoys coming north. I’ll be damned glad to see you.”
662-555-5555
“Something told me you would be calling Sarge.”
“Yeah Sean. I’m trying to put the band back together.”
“It’ll take me a while to get there from Biloxi.”
“No problem. They say we’ve got about 30 hours before the shit hits the fan.”
“Outstanding.”
601-555-5551
“What took you so long Sarge? I was getting worried.”
“Bill, where are you?”
“I’m at Shelby gearing up. I’ll be there before morning. Did you think I’d miss this?”
662-555-5155
“I figured that I’d be hearing from you Sarge. I’m on the way.”
“Thanks Bear, be sure and bring your waders. I’ve got a feeling this one is gonna get pretty deep before long.”
Sergeant Taylor put his phone back in its holster. Things were looking up.
FEMA Regional Command Post
Denver, CO
1820 CST
Agent McGrath found himself at a conference table surrounded by people from an alphabet soup of federal agencies. None had been briefed in about Pandora and as he told the long, sad tale of woe associated with the accursed virus, their faces showed many different stages of shock, horror and disbelief.
When he finally finished, the local FBI representative asked, “McGrath, is this something that you are cleared to be telling us?”
He answered, “The Director brought me in to brief you. I’m the one person in the country that has had the most experience with Pandora. All of your commands need to know as much as possible if we have a chance at containing this mess. At this point secrecy works against us. We have to let the first responders know what they are getting into. We’ve got to get past the culture of secrecy or it’s going to be a meat grinder out there.”
The station chief at Denver was an older gentleman named Stanton that had made his spurs fighting wild fires and the occasional earthquake. Killer viruses were not his bailiwick and he knew it.
Stanton said, “Homeland unlocked the Pandora files a few hours ago. I’m sorry to say that everything Agent McGrath has told us is true. I’ve brought in Doctor Ross here from the Air Force Academy. His specialty is epidemiology. He has seen the data and I’m going turn the floor over to him.”
Ross was a sturdy looking man in his fifties. He was certainly one of the best known epidemiologists in the country and McGrath remembered him from White Sands.
“I’ve never seen a more lethal virus. As far as we know, it’s 100% terminal and in two thirds of the cases, the victims get up pissed off and try their best to spread it around. It’s a nightmare scenario. The only upside of it is that it doesn’t spread very easily. I’m worried about the possibility of vector based spread via mosquitoes but that’s nothing compared to what has already happened. We’ve got thousands, maybe millions of citizens infected in our largest cities, we’re going to lose them all and there’s not a damn thing that we can do about it.”
Stanton asked, “What can we do?”
Ross laughed bitterly and said, “The only thing you can do is to try to contain it and think about it: they hit us on interstates during rush hour. It took hours to get the cordons in place. You can bet the ranch that it is already on both sides of our lines.”
Stanton paled and smack his forehead, “He’s right. The interstates! This bug could be all over the country by now.”
Texarkana, Arkansas
1840 CST
Pete Brenner parked his truck at the Interstate Lines Terminal company warehouse. Thanks to the damned Feds and their alert, the drive across Arkansas had taken all day. The check points and National Guard were all over the place by the time he rolled into Little Rock. Things didn’t get any better on I-30.
The office was closed so he got in his car and drove home.
At every intersection on the interstate, there was a road block and questions: where did you come from? Nashville. Did you stop anywhere? No. What are you carrying? Machine parts. Where are you headed? Texarkana.
Every time they had let him through and had ordered him to go home non-stop.
Hump. Non-stop would be a lot easier if you soldier boys didn’t stop me at every exit.
He thought about getting some dinner but blew it off. He didn’t have any appetite. He also had headache and maybe even the start of a fever that he attributed to sitting in lines at roadblocks across half of Arkansas.
Brenner went home, waved at the neighbors and noticed the empty spot in the drive way where his ex-wife used to park.
He took two aspirin and collapsed into bed.
Camp Shelby
Hattiesburg, MS
July 16, 2016 1900CST
Bill Sherman had spent two hours at Shelby’s Administrative Headquarters getting Taylor’s team members paperwork jammed through the system. In peacetime such an exercise would take months. With a declared emergency, experienced soldiers were asked are you in shape? Yes? Draw your gear and fall in.
Sherman was on his way to being a lawyer but hadn’t quite made it quite yet. He day job was that of a Rankin county sheriff’s deputy. Ole Miss Law School was expensive and one semester on and two off to pay bills was slowing the process. Everyone that knew him just assumed that he would succeed: Sherman had the patience and self-discipline to stick with it.
The next member of Taylor’s old squad to arrive was Johnny Two-Eagles. Named Bear by his squaddies, the big hulking Choctaw from Neshoba county was a massive man. Bear never said much but if he did, it was worth listening to. No one had instincts like him except for maybe a real bear.
Sean Nash arrived in his old Toyota. Since the Big Sand, he had gone back into his family lands north of Biloxi and stayed there. Of the group, Nash had seen a little too much. They all had, but it showed on Nash: his hands still shook and he had that 1000 meter stare. He brought his own 50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle in a storm case and began the process of gearing up.
The last member of the team showed a short time later. Joey Bernardi parked his Nissan truck and went to find the rest of the group. Joey’s family had owned an Italian restaurant “under the hill” in Natchez for three generations. For many years that had been a marginal thing until the casinos moved in. Benardi’s was now quite simply the best restaurant in a booming casino town.
After getting everyone geared up, the four old friends ate at the base canteen and caught up on the past few years. None of them missed “the Big Sandbox” nor were they in love with the Army. This wasn’t Afghanistan or Iraq. There was no moral ambiguity. Their country was in serious trouble. This is what they had all signed on for.
Around eight o’clock the four veterans pulled out of the camp motor pool in a Humvee as part of one of the caravans heading north for the four and a half hour drive to Southaven.
Southaven General Hospital
Clinical Directors Office
1920 CST
The hospital had been jumping all day. The very first thing on Clinical Director Ellison’s agenda was to request an infectious disease specialist from University Medical Center in Jackson. Doctor Alex Jackson arrived by helicopter some hours later and they began to prepare for the unthinkable. Cases that could be discharged were sent home as soon as it could be arranged. Others were transferred.
There was an impromptu refresher on isolation techniques and four whole floors of the hospital were cleared for the anticipated emergency.
The imposition of martial law actually made things somewhat easier. There were none of the usual car crashes and construction accidents that kept the Emergency Department busy.
The problem that vexed Ellison and Jackson’s attempts to prepare was that they had no idea exactly what to prepare for. The staff looked at all of the bioterrorism material available on the Center for Disease Controls web site and tried to split the difference.
It wasn’t until well after six that the faxes and emailed documents started coming in. Their first sign of trouble was the information was not coming from CDC. It came from USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The information that they received was devastating.
Doctor Alex Jackson had studied a lot of viruses. In fact, he had seen the VEE virus under an electron microscope at Tulane and treated cases of encephalitis caused by West Nile and various other alphaviruses. From the information that he had seen, the name they had given this bug was absolutely accurate. Pandora was out of its box and it was loose in their neighborhood.
According to the information they had received, there was no course of treatment, no recommended meds and no positive clinical outcomes.
Doctor Rex Jackson set himself to the task of creating a clinical protocol for the unknown. Over a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee Jackson, the hospital’s chief pharmacist and six senior clinicians sat down to map out a strategy for treating Pandora.
Fort Detrick, Maryland
Virology Division Lab
2035EST/1935CST
Dr. Frank Liao watched the screen of his scanning electron microscope as the computers assembled the images on his monitor. The samples from the Montross Park crash site in DC had been delivered to USAMRIID Labs after the FBI Labs at Quantico had confirmed that they were dealing with a pathogen.
The huge nano-tech containers appeared as small planets surrounded by virus particles. Liao studied the containers carefully. What they were and where they came from was every bit as big a mystery as the virus itself.
He scanned the sample and found a few they were broken. They appeared to be a thin membrane that contained thousands of the tiny virus particles. While the containers were definitely not the high tech nanotechnology that was first assumed, they were still exceptionally sophisticated. Alphaviruses did not fare well in the open air. Were they encapsulated for delivery? Liao didn’t have a clue how that might be accomplished.
He made a pictorial three dimensional study of the viral delivery capsules and then turned his attention to the tiny viral particles and began to zoom in.
The scanning electron microscope (SEM) did not capture images as most people understand them. It fired a tight beam of electrons and translated the attenuation of the beam to a rectangular array called a raster. The rasters individual bits are re-assembled to create the image.
It was usually very difficult to find and identify viruses in the wild. The microscopic landscape at this scale could be pretty wild. That was not the case for this sample. It only took a few minutes to get good, solid images of the Pandora virus.
Superficially, Pandora looked quite a lot like its progenitor virus Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis or VEE. It appeared as a sphere with a rough, irregular surface. As the focus tightened and more detail became available, there were obvious differences.
Pandora had spike-like structures that Liao recognized as the receptor sites the virus used to latch onto the membranes of host cells. This was a distinct departure from the typical Alphaviruses. Pandora’s shell also showed subtle differences from the VEE reference strain. Those differences are what make Pandora a different animal. To learn more the lab would have to sequence the little beast.
He carefully began taking a series of images so that he could map Pandora in three dimensions and then took a series of images of other viral particles to judge how much variation there was between them.
When Liao was finished, he organized the images into a database, captioned them and added notes. He then sent it to the labs email list and decided it was time for a break.
The labs cafeteria had a build-your-own sandwich/salad bar so he made a combination BLT/turkey creation on wheat bread and had a seat. The flat screen television on the wall was set to CNN with the volume off and the closed captioning turned off. There were eerie pictures of empty and quiet cities. There were also interviews of people, carefully wearing masks, denouncing the imposition of martial law. Before he was done with his plate Dr. Wells and his squad of graduate students entered the cafeteria and began their own orderly assault on the sandwich/salad bar.
Liao said, “Philip. How goes the sequencing?”
Dr. Wells sat at the opposite side of Liao’s table and said, “The computer is chewing on it now. With any luck we’ll have it mapped in the next few hours. I saw your images. The Pandora bug has some peculiar features for an Alphavirus.”
Liao said, “I want to see how it stacks up against the VEE reference strain and the one that we have from White Sands.”
Wells took a sip of coffee and asked, “What are you thinking?”
Liao said, “This bug was created using fairly primitive gene splicing techniques back in the eighties. RNA viruses are unstable to start with. I am betting this one is going to mutate on us in a few generations.”
Wells graduate students gathered around the table. A young lady with a distinct Australian accent said, “We’re assuming that Pandora is a group IV virus according to the Baltimore scale?”
Liao paused considering his coffee. He finally said, “While that may be the case with VEE, we can’t make any assumptions about Pandora because of the modifications made to the base strain. There may even be further modifications since White Sands incident. We’re just going to have to take it one step at a time. We can’t afford to make any mistakes with this one. There’s too much riding on it.”
Dr. Wells looked at his grad students and said with a stern voice, “There has already been one lab accident with this beastie. I’m expecting everyone to be very, very careful with this one.”
News Talk 100
Memphis, TN
2045 CST
Mike at night: “This is Mike at Night on News Talk 100 in Memphis and the topic of the day is martial law.”
“For years now we’ve been hearing talk about FEMA Camps, the New World Order and black helicopters. After the events of today, one has to wonder.”
“Let’s see: they say that drones flew over a number of our biggest cities and dumped a bio-chemical agent on us at what… about seven thirty this morning.”
“Less than an hour and a half, President Harrison declared martial law and basically pad-locks the country. Anyone that has followed Harrison’s political career at all knows he’s incapable of making any decision more consequential than today’s shirt in a month, much less ninety minutes.”
“We know that our own city is surrounded by a cordon of armed National Guardsmen and a strict quarantine is in place.”
“Just this evening we have been told a cock and bull story about an old Soviet bioweapon so hideous that even the Soviets decided that it was too dangerous to use.”
“So… what do you think Memphis? We’re going to the phones. Fred from Germantown, you’re on the air.”
“Hi Mike I’ve only got one question: who do we know that flies drones?”
Mike at night: “Thanks Fred. That’s an interesting question. Now let’s go to Terrell in Cordova.”
“Thanks for taking my call Mike. How many lies have they told about this thing over the years? How many bodies have piled up because of it and they expect us to believe them now?”
Mike at night: “That’s another good question Terrell. We’ve been lying about this for years but now we pinkie promise that we’re telling the truth? It’s getting so deep that I would stop by our sponsor Hawkins Sporting Goods and pick up some waders but the store is closed because of the quarantine and the National Goonsquad out there might shoot me. OK Stan in Carrollton, you’re on the air.”
“Hi Mike. It’s got to be the Chinese. They are germ crazy after what the Japs did to them during WWII. Do a web search on Unit 731. They used that stuff on our troops in Korea.”
Mike at night: ”I’m not buying it Stan. Why would the Chinese do this to us? Sure, we owe them money but the loan sharks just beat you up. Dead people don’t pay their bills. Ross from Southaven. How is our resident Neo-con tonight?”
“It has to be Iran. They hate out guts and try to screw us over every chance they get. They hate us worse than they hated Iraq and they fought a decade long war with poison gas just so they could screw with us there. They hate us more than they hate the Pashtuns so they could screw with us in Afghanistan.”
Mike at night: “I’m not buying that one either. Over the years Iran has been very careful to go just so far but not far enough for the Great Satan to pound them into smoldering junk. I don’t believe that they would stick the Ayatollah’s neck that far out. Rick on the South side, you’re on the air.”
“I think it was the Heebs. It’s a false-flag thing to get us to nuke the rag-heads for them.”
Mike at night: “Don’t you have an important Klan meeting to go to or something? Vic in Mid-town, you’re on the air.”
“Do we even know if anybody is sick?”
Mike at night: “The official word on this bug is that it has an incubation period of about 12 hours or so… I’m guessing that we’re going to find out pretty soon. Roger from Bartlett, you are on the air.”
“This is General Roger Scarborough of the Tennessee National Guard. How are you tonight Mike?”
Mike at night: “General… I’m surprised to hear from you.”
“I’m sure that you are. I thought it might be useful to hear from somebody that’s not talking out of his ass tonight. I’ll give you a scoop right here: hospitals started seeing people with symptoms of the Pandora virus around 6:00 tonight. The symptoms are fever, a loss of appetite and a headache. As much as I would like to tell you that this is a farce, I can’t do it.”
Mike at night: “General… sir… Do you want us to shut down?”
“No Mike. We need the media to keep people informed. However, some of the rather interesting theories we are hearing tonight aren’t that helpful. At the moment the barn is on fire. Once we put it out, we can figure out which cow kicked over the lantern.”
Mike at night: “How do you answer the drone question General?”
“All of the drones in the attack were a French build model designed to be a crop duster. They are sold all over the 3rd world but not here in the United States. Needless to say, the US military doesn’t do a whole lot of crop dusting.”
Mike at night: “After so many revelations of lies that have been told, how can we trust the government?”
“Mike- I live in Bartlett. My soldiers are from all over Tennessee. We aren’t the new world order. We’re your neighbors and we’ve got a big problem on our hands. Don’t trust the government. Trust the citizen soldiers. I guarantee you not as a General or federal vassal but as a neighbor: if there are any shenanigans going on and we find out about it, we will roast someone over a slow fire.”
Mike at night: “Uhhh… we’re getting close to the top of the hour General. If you think that you have symptoms, what should you do?”
“Call 911. That will work. There is also a toll free number that we will be publishing soon for that purpose.”
Mike at night: “General, the prognosis for this virus is very grim. Why should people trust the government to treat them?”
“Doctors are working to find a treatment for this bug. With treatment, you just might stand a chance. Without it, you have no chance.”
Mike at night: “Thank you General Scarborough. Now we break for the national news.”
Southaven General Hospital
Screening Area
2010 CST
Dr. Ralph Wiggins was a GP working in one of the local minor medical care clinics. On most days he saw flu, chicken pox, skinned knees and twisted ankles. He had volunteered with a number of the clinics staff members to take up the desperate call of volunteers. In his opinion, Southaven General had done an excellent job of getting things organized.
The National Guard had put together a Mobile Army Hospital Unit in one of the hospitals parking lots. It was composed of a mix of mobile buildings and tents. The Guard unit associated with it had arrived earlier in the afternoon and the whole thing was erected in a little more than an hour. Their intention was to use it as a screening facility for the hospital proper. People who were showing symptoms would have blood work done and if they were indeed infected with Pandora.
There were four queues of breath-mask clad patients leading to the screening exams and four groups of doctors and nurses to perform them. So far they had only seen a trickle of patients and none of them were very happy to be there.
A bio-warfare alert drove hypochondriacs absolutely crazy. So far he had seen people complaining of Ebola, anthrax and plague symptoms. Needless to say, none of them were seriously ill unless you counted being scared out of their wits. Several people had been admitted and the staff expected that number to begin to rise sharply in the next few hours.
Wiggins immediately recognized the next patient. Bobby Hill was one of his regulars at the clinic. Bobby was an impossibly tall, thin and awkward middle school kid that Wiggins saw on a far too regular basis. He was a polite, good looking kid but accident prone as he often seemed to trip over his own size 12 feet. The kid was obviously frightened and seemed to be taken aback by the sight of a bunch of masked and gloved strangers.
Wiggins said, “Hi Bobby. How are you feeling?”
The kid recognized his doctor’s voice and seemed to relax a little. “I’m not feeling so good doc. I’ve got a fever, sore throat and all I want to do is sleep.”
The attending nurse put a thermometer in the boy’s mouth and Doctor Wiggins examined the glands in his neck. They were quite tender and the boy winced as the doctor examined them.
Wiggins asked, “You play soccer with Chad Renfro and Sammy Lowe?”
The boy said, “Well yeah, how did you know?”
The doctor said, “Lucky guess. I’ve recently treated them both for Mono. It has been going around your team.”
The boy looked dumbfounded and asked, “Mono?”
“Mononucleosis. Oh you’ll feel like crap for a while but you’ll get over it. It’s common in kids your age.”
Bobby stuttered, “You mean…”
Doctor Wiggins said, “You’re OK. Look up Mono on the net. It will tell you what to do which is pretty much sleep it off. Take Tylenol for the discomfort and you’ll be just fine. Call my office if you have any stomach pain.”
Tears bubbled up in the boys eyes and Wiggins gave him a one armed hug.
He said, “Thanks Doc” and was ushered out the exit for people who were going home.
His nurse said, “That’s a relief.”
Wiggins said, “Ever seen anybody that glad to get a diagnosis of Mono?”