THEY DIDN'T SEE IT coming, and it did get their attention. By dawn the next day, all three ground squadrons of the 10th Cavalry were fully deployed, while the fourth squadron, composed of attack helicopters, needed one more day to get up to speed. Kuwaiti regular officers—their standing army was still relatively small, with the ranks fleshed out by enthusiastic reservists—greeted their American counterparts with waving swords and embraces in front of the cameras, and serious, quiet conversation in the command tents. For his part, Colonel Magruder arranged for one of his squadrons to assemble in parade formation with standards flying. It was good for everyone's morale, and the fifty-two tanks massed together looked like the fist of an angry god. The UIR intelligence service expected something to happen, but not this, and not this fast.
"What is this?" Daryaei demanded, allowing his deadly rage to show for once. Ordinarily, it was enough that people knew it was hidden there, somewhere.
"It's a sham." After the initial shock, his chief of intelligence had taken the time to get a feel for the reality of the situation. "That is a regiment. Each of the six divisions in the Army of God has three—in two cases, four— brigades. And so, we are twenty to their one. Did you expect that the Americans would not respond at all? That is unrealistic. But here we see they have responded. With one regiment, moved in from Israel, and sent in the wrong place. With this they intend to frighten us."
"Go on." The dark eyes softened slightly, merely simmering rather than dangerously hostile.
"America cannot deploy its divisions from Europe. They are contaminated. The same is true of their heavy divisions in America. So we will face the Saudis first of all. It will be a great battle, which we shall win. The rump states will surrender to us, or be crushed—and then
Kuwait will stand alone, at the top of the Gulf, with its own forces and this American regiment, and then we shall see about that. They probably expect us to invade Kuwait first. We will not repeat that error, will we?"
"And if they reinforce the Saudis?"
"Again, they have the equipment for but one brigade in the Kingdom. The second is afloat. You talked to India about that, did you not?" It was so normal that he might have predicted it, the chief UIR spook thought behind outwardly cowed eyes. They always got nervous just before things started, as though expecting everyone to follow the script they'd written. The enemy was the enemy. He didn't always cooperate. "And I doubt they have the troops to move. Aircraft, perhaps, but there is no carrier within ten thousand kilometers, and aircraft, though they are an annoyance, can neither take nor hold ground."
"Thank you for making that clear." The old man's mood softened.
"AT LAST WE meet, Comrade Colonel," Golovko said to the CIA officer.
Clark had always wondered if he'd see the inside of KGB headquarters. He'd never quite expected to be offered drinks there in the Chairman's office. Early in the morning or not, he took a slug of the Starka-brand vodka. "Your hospitality is not what I was trained to expect, Comrade Chairman."
"We don't do that here anymore. Lefortovo Prison is more convenient." He paused, set down his glass, and switched back to tea. A drink with the man was mandatory, but it was early in the day. "I must ask. Was it you who brought Madam Gerasimov and the girl out?"
Clark nodded. There was nothing to be gained from lying to the man. "Yes, that was me."
"You are welcome to all three of them, Ivan… your father's name?"
"Timothy. I am Ivan Timofeyevich, Sergey Nikolay'ch."
"Ah." Golovko had a good laugh. "As hard as the Cold War was, my friend, it is good now, at the end of it, to see old enemies. Fifty years from now, when all of us are dead, historians will compare CIA records with ours, and they will decide who won the intelligence war. Have you any idea what they will decide?"
"You forget, I was a foot soldier, not a commander, for most of it."
"Our Major Scherenko was impressed with you and your young partner here. Your rescue of Koga was impressive. And now we will work together again. Have you been briefed in?"
For Chavez, who'd come to manhood watching Rambo movies, and whose early Army training had taught him to expect going head-to-head with the Soviets at any time, it was an experience which he wanted to ascribe to jet lag, though both CIA officers had noted how empty the corridors were for their passage. There was no sense letting them see faces they might remember in some other time and some other place.
"No, mainly we've been gathering information." Golovko hit a button on his desk. "Is Bondarenko here?" A few seconds later, the door opened, revealing a senior Russian general officer. Both Americans stood. Clark read the medals and gave the man a hard look. Bondarenko did the same. The handshakes exchanged were wary, curious, and strangely warm. They were of an age, raised in one, growing into another.
"Gennady Iosefovich is chief of operations. Ivan Timofeyevich is a CIA spy," the Chairman explained. "As is his quiet young partner. Tell me, Clark, the plague, it comes from Iran?"
"Yes, that is certain."
"Then he is a barbarian, but a clever one. General?"
"Last night you moved your cavalry regiment from Israel to Kuwait," Bondarenko said. "They are fine troops, but the correlation of forces is adverse in the extreme. Your country cannot deploy large numbers of troops for at least two weeks. He will not give you two weeks. We estimate that the heavy divisions southeast of Baghdad will be ready to move in three days, four at the most. One day for the approach march to the border area, and then? Then we will see what their plan is."
"Any thoughts?"
"We have no more intelligence on this than you do," Golovko said. "Regrettably, most of our assets in the area have been shot, and the generals we befriended in the previous Iraqi regime have left the country."
"The high command of the army is Iranian, many were trained in Britain or America under the Shah as junior officers, and they survived the purges," Bondarenko said. "We have dossiers on many of them, and these are being transmitted to the Pentagon."
"That's very cordial of you."
"You bet," Ding observed. "If they dust us off, next they come north."
"Alliances, young man, do not occur for reasons of love, but from mutual interests," Golovko agreed.
"If you cannot deal with this maniac today, then we will have to deal with him in three years," Bondarenko said seriously. "Better today, I think, for all of us."
"We have offered our support to Foleyeva. She has accepted. When you learn your mission, let us know, and we will see what we can do."
SOME WOULD LAST longer than others. Some would last less. The first recorded death happened in Texas, a golf-equipment representative who expired due to heart complications three days after being admitted, one day after his wife entered the hospital with her own symptoms. Doctors interviewing her determined that she'd probably contracted the disease by cleaning up after her husband had vomited in the bathroom, not from any intimate contact, because he'd felt too ill even to kiss her after returning from Phoenix. Though seemingly an insignificant conclusion from obvious data, it was faxed to Atlanta, as the CDC had requested all possible information, however minor it might seem. It certainly seemed minor to the medical team in Dallas. The first death for them was both a relief and a horror. A relief because the man's condition toward the end was both hopeless and agonizing; a horror, because there would be others just as vile, only longer in coming.
The same thing happened six hours later in Baltimore. The Winnebago dealer had a preexisting GI complaint, peptic ulcer disease, which, though controlled by an over-the-counter medication, gave Ebola an easy target. His stomach lining disintegrated, and the patient rapidly bled out while unconscious with his massive dose of painkillers. This, too, came as something of a surprise to the attending physician and nurse. Soon thereafter more deaths started occurring nationwide. The media reported them, and the country's horror deepened. In the first series of cases, the husband died first, with the wife soon to follow. In many similar cases, children would be next.
It was more real for everyone now. For most, the crisis had seemed a distant event. Businesses and schools were closed, and travel was restricted, but the rest of it was a TV event, as things tended to be in Western countries. It was something you saw on a phosphor screen, a moving image augmented by sound, something both real and not. But now the word death was being used with some frequency. Photos of the victims appeared on the screens, in some cases home videos, and the moving pictures of people now dead, their private pasts revealed in moments of pleasure and relaxation, followed by the somber words of reporters who were themselves becoming as familiar as family members—it all entered the public consciousness with an immediacy that was as new and different as it was horrid. It was no longer the sort of nightmare from which one awoke. It was one which went on and on, seeming to grow, like the child's dream in which a black cloud entered a room, growing and growing, approaching despite all attempts at evasion, and you knew that if it touched you, you were lost.
Grumbles about the federally imposed travel restrictions died the same day as the golfer in Texas and the recreational vehicle dealer in Maryland. Interpersonal contact, which had first been cut way back, then started to grow again, was restricted to the family-member level. People lived on telephones now. Long-distance lines were jammed with calls to ascertain the well-being of relatives and friends, to the point that AT&T, MCI, and the rest ran commercial messages requesting that such calls be kept short, and special-access lines were set aside for government and medical use. There was a true national panic now, though it was a quiet, personal one. There were no public demonstrations. Traffic on the streets was virtually nil in the major cities. People even stopped heading for supermarkets, and instead stayed at home, living out of cans or freezers for the time being.
Reporters, still moving around with their mobile cameras, reported on all that, and in doing so, they both increased the degree of tension, and contributed to its solution.
"IT'S WORKING," GENERAL Pickett said over the phone to his former subordinate in Baltimore.
"Where are you, John?" Alexandre asked.
"Dallas. It's working, Colonel. I need you to do something."
"What's that?"
"Stop playing practitioner. You have residents to do that. I have a working group at Walter Reed. Get the hell over there. You're too big an asset on the theoretical side to waste in a Racal suit doing sticks, Alex."
"John, this is my department now, and I have to lead my troops." It was a lesson well remembered from his time in green suits.
"Fine, your people know you care, Colonel. Now you can put the damned rifle down and start thinking like a goddamned commander. This battle's not going to be won in hospitals, is it?" Pickett asked more reasonably. "I have transport waiting for you. There should be a Hummer downstairs to bring you into Reed. Want me to reactivate you and make it an order?"
And he could do that, Alexandre knew. "Give me half an hour." The associate professor hung up the phone and looked down the corridor. Another body bag was being carried out of a room by some orderlies in plastic suits. There was a pride in being here. Even though he was losing patients and would lose more, he was here, being a doctor, doing his best, showing his staff that, yes, he was one of them, ministering to the sick, taking his chances in accordance with the oath he'd sworn at the age of twenty-six. When this was over, the entire team would look back on this with a feeling of solidarity. As horrible as it had been, they'd done the job—
"Damn," he swore. John Pickett was right. The battle was being fought here, but it wouldn't be won here. He told his chief assistant that he was heading down to the next floor, which was being run by Dean James.
There was an interesting case there. Female, thirty-nine, admitted two days earlier. Her common-law significant other was dying, and she was distraught, and her blood showed Ebola antibodies, and she'd presented the classic flu symptoms, but the disease hadn't gone further. It had, in fact, seemed to stop.
"What gives with this one?" Cathy Ryan was speculating with Dean James.
"Don't knock it, Cath," he responded tiredly.
"I'm not, Dave, but I want to know why. I interviewed her myself. She slept in the same bed with him two days before she brought him in—"
"Did they have sex?" Alex asked, entering the conversation.
"No, Alex, they didn't. I asked that. He didn't feel well enough. I think this one's going to survive." And that was a first for Baltimore.
"We keep her in for at least a week, Cathy."
"I know that, Dave, but this is the first one," SURGEON pointed out. "Something's different here. What is it? We have to know!"
"Chart?" Cathy handed it over to Alexandre.
He scanned it. Temperature down to 100.2, blood work… not normal, but… "What does she say, Cathy?" Alexandre asked, flipping back through some pages.
"How she says she feels, you mean? Panicked, frightened to death. Massive headaches, abdominal cramps—I think a lot of that is pure stress. Can't blame her, can we?"
"These values are all improving. Liver function blipped hard, but that stopped last night, and it's coming back…"
"That's what got my attention. She's fighting it off, Alex," Dr. Ryan said. "First one, I think we're going to win with her. But why? What's different? What can we learn from this? What can we apply to other patients?"
That turned the trick for Dr. Alexandre. John Pickett was right. He had to get to Reed.
"Dave, they want me in Washington right now."
"Go," the dean replied at once. "We're covered here. If you can help make sense of this, get yourself down there."
"Cathy, the most likely answer to your question is the simple one. Your ability to fight this thing off is inversely proportional to the number of particles that get into your system. Everybody thinks that just one strand can kill you. That's not true. Nothing's that dangerous. Ebola kills first of all by overpowering the immune system; then it goes to work on the organs. If she only got a small number of the little bastards, then her immune system fought the battle and won. Talk to her some more, Cathy. Every detail of her contact with her husband-whatever in the last week. I'll call you in a couple of hours. How are you guys doing?"
"Alex, if there's some hope in this," Dr. James replied, "then I think we can hack it."
Alexandre went back upstairs for decontamination. First his suit was thoroughly sprayed. Then he disrobed and changed into greens and a mask, took the «clean» elevator down to the lobby, and out the door.
"You Colonel Alexandre?" a sergeant asked.
"Yes."
The NCO saluted. "Follow me, sir. We got a Hummer and a driver for you. You want a jacket, sir? Kinda cool out."
"Thanks." He donned the rubberized chemical-warfare parka. They were so miserable to wear that it would surely keep him warm all the way down. A female Spec-4 was at the wheel. Alexandre got into the uncomfortable seat, buckled the belt, and turned to her. "Go!" Only then did he rethink what he'd told Ryan and James upstairs. His head shook as though to repel an insect. Pickett was right. Maybe.
"MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE, let us reexamine the data first. I even called Dr. Alexandre down from Hopkins to work with the group I set up at Reed. It's much too soon for any conclusions. Please, let us do our work."
"Okay, General," Ryan said angrily. "I'll be here. Damn," he swore after hanging up.
"We have other things to do, sir," Goodley pointed out.
"Yeah."
IT WAS STILL dark when it started in the Pacific Time Zone. At least getting the aircraft was easy. Jumbos from most of the major airlines were heading for Barstow, California, their flight crews screened for Ebola antibodies and passed by Army doctors with test kits which were just now coming on line. There were also modifications to the aircraft ventilation systems. At the National Training Center, soldiers were boarding buses. That was normal for the Blue Force, but not for the OpFor, whose families watched the uniformed soldiers leave their homes for the deployment. Little was known except that they were leaving. The destination was a secret for now; the soldiers would learn it only after lifting off for the sixteen-hour flights. Over ten thousand men and women meant forty flights, leaving at a rate of only four per hour from the rudimentary facilities in the high desert of California. If asked, the local public affairs officers would tell whoever called that the units at Fort Irwin were moving out to assist with the national quarantine. In Washington, a few reporters learned something else.
"THOMAS CONNER?" THE woman in the mask asked.
"That's right," the reporter answered crossly, pulled away from his breakfast table, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt.
"FBI. Would you come with me, sir? We have to talk to you about some things."
"Am I under arrest?" the TV personality demanded.
"Only if you want to be, Mr. Donner," the agent told him. "But I need you to come with me, right now. You won't need anything special, except your wallet and ID and stuff," she added, handing over a surgical mask in a plastic container.
"Fine. Give me a minute." The door closed, allowing Donner to kiss his wife, get a jacket, and change shoes. He emerged, put the mask on, and followed the agent to her car. "So what is this all about?"
"I'm just the limo service," she said, ending the morning's conversation. If he was too dumb to remember that he was a member of the press pool pre-selected for Pentagon operations, it wasn't her lookout.
"THE BIGGEST MISTAKE the Iraqis made in 1990 was logistics," Admiral Jackson explained, moving his pointer on the map. "Everybody thinks it's about guns and bombs. It isn't. It's about fuel and information. If you have enough fuel to keep moving, and you know what the other guy's doing, chances are you'll win." The slide changed on the screen next to the map. The pointer moved there next. "Here."
The satellite photos were clear. Every tank and BMP laager was accompanied by something else. A large collection of fuel bowsers. Artillery limbers were attached to their trucks. Blowups showed fuel drums attached to the rear decks of the T-80 tanks. Each contained fifty-five gallons of diesel. These greatly increased the tank's vulnerability to damage, but could be dropped off by flipping a switch inside the turret.
"No doubt about it. They're getting ready to move, probably within the week. We have the 10th Cavalry in place in Kuwait. We have the 11th and the First Brigade of the North Carolina National Guard moving now. That's all we can do for the moment. It won't be till Friday at the earliest that we can cut any more units loose from the quarantine."
"And that's public information," Ed Foley added.
"Essentially, we're deploying one division, a very heavy one, but only one," Jackson concluded. "The Kuwait military is fully in the field. The Saudis are spinning up, too."
"And the third brigade depends on getting the MPS ships past the Indian navy," Secretary Bretano pointed out.
"We can't do that," Admiral DeMarco informed them. "We don't have the combat power to fight our way through."
Jackson didn't reply to that. He couldn't. The acting Chief of Naval Operations was his senior, despite what he thought of him.
"Look, Brucie," Mickey Moore said, turning to look right at him, "my boys need those vehicles, or the Carolina Guard is gonna be facing an advancing enemy mechanized force with side arms. You blue-suits been telling us for years how ballsy those Aegis cruisers are. Put up or shut up, okay? By this time tomorrow, I'll have fifteen thousand soldiers at risk."
"Admiral Jackson," the President said. "You're Operations."
"Mr. President, without air cover—"
"Can we do it or can't we?" Ryan demanded.
"No," DeMarco replied. "I won't see ships wasted that way. Not without air cover."
"Robby, I want your best judgment on this," Secretary Bretano said.
"Okay." Jackson took a breath. "They have a total of about forty Harriers. Nice airplanes, but not really high-performance. The escorting force has a total of maybe thirty surface-to-surface missiles. We don't have to worry about a gunfight. Anzio currently carries seventy-five SAMs, fifteen Tomahawks, and eight harpoons. Kiddhas seventy SAMs, and eight Harpoons. O'Bannon isn't a SAM ship. She just has point-defense weapons, but she has Harpoons, too. The two frigates that just joined up have about twenty SAMs each. Theoretically, they can fight through."
"It's too dangerous, Jackson! You don't send a surface force against a carrier group by itself, ever!"
"What if we shoot first?" Ryan asked. That caused heads to turn.
"Mr. President." It was DeMarco again. "We don't do that. We're not even sure that they are hostile."
"The ambassador thinks they are," Bretano told them.
"Admiral DeMarco, that equipment has to be delivered," the President said, his own face coloring up.
"The Air Force is deploying to Saudi now. Two extra days and we can deal with it, but until then—"
"Admiral, call your relief." Secretary Bretano looked down at his briefing folder. "Your services are not needed here anymore. We don't have two days to bicker."
That was actually a violation of protocol. The Joint Chiefs were presidential appointments, and while they were titularly military advisers to the Secretary of Defense and the President, supposedly only the latter could ask one to resign. Admiral DeMarco looked to Ryan's place in the center of the conference table.
"Mr. President, I have to give you my best feel for this."
"Admiral, we have fifteen thousand men standing in harm's way. You can't tell us that the Navy will not support them. You are relieved of duty effective now," the President said. "Good day." The other uniformed Chiefs glanced at one another. This hadn't happened before. "How long before contact with the Indians?" Ryan asked, moving on.
"About twenty-four hours, sir."
"Any way we can provide additional support?"
"There's a submarine there also, loaded with torpedoes and missiles. She's about fifty miles in advance of Anzio," Jackson said, as a stunned admiral and his aide left the room. "We can speed her up. That risks detection, but the Indians aren't all that swift on ASW. She would be an offensive weapon, sir. Submarines can't defend passively. They sink ships."
"I think the Indian Prime Minister and I need to have a little chat," POTUS observed. "After we get through them, then what?"
"Well, then we have to transit the strait and make it up to the unloading ports."
"That I can help you with," the Air Force chief of staff promised. "We'll have the F-16s in-country and in range for that part of the passage. The 366th Wing won't be ready yet, but the boys from Israel will be."
"We're going to need that cover, General," Jackson emphasized.
"Well, God damn, the Navy's asking for help from us Air Scouts," the Air Force said lightly, then turned serious. "We'll kill every rag-head son of a bitch who gets in the air, Robby. Those forty-eight-16-Charlies are locked and cocked. As soon as you're within a hundred miles of the Strait, you have a friend overhead."
"Is it enough?" the President asked.
"Strictly speaking, no. The other side has four hundred top-of-the-line airplanes. When the 366th gets fully set up—in three days, minimum—we'll have eighty fighters for air-to-air, but the Saudis aren't bad. We have AW ACS in place. Your tanks will fight under a neutral sky at worst, Mickey." The general checked his watch. "They should be getting off right about now."
THE FIRST FLIGHT of four F-15C fighter-interceptors rotated aloft together. Twenty minutes later, they formed up with their KC-135R tankers. There were six of them from their own wing, and others would join from the Montana and North and South Dakota Air National Guard, their home states as yet untouched by the epidemic. For most of the way to the Arabian Peninsula, they'd hold position ten miles from the lead commercial aircraft coming out of California. The flight path took them north to the Pole, then over the hump and south toward Russia, continuing over Eastern Europe. West of Cyprus, they would be joined by an Israeli escort, which would convey them as far as Jordan. From there on, the American Eagle fighters would be augmented by Saudi F-15s. They might make the first few arrivals covertly, the planning officers thought in their own commercial transports, but if the other side woke up, then there would be an air battle. The pilots in the lead Eagle flight really didn't mind that very much.
There was no extraneous chatter on the radios as they saw dawn to their right. It would be a flight of two dawns. The next one would be to their left.
"OKAY, LADIES AND gentlemen," the public affairs officer told the fifteen assembled journalists. "Here's the scoop. You have been called up for a military deployment. Sergeant Astor is now handing out consent forms. You will please sign them and hand them back."
"What's this?" one of them asked.
"You maybe want to try reading it?" the Marine colonel suggested from behind his mask.
"Blood test," one muttered. "I guess so. But what about the rest?"
"Ma'am, those of you who sign the form will find out more. Those who do not will be driven home." Curiosity won in every case. They all signed.
"Thank you." The colonel examined all the forms. "Now if you will go through the door to your left, some Navy corpsmen are waiting for you."
HE WAS PLEADING his own case. Though a member of the bar for thirty years, Ed Kealty had been in a court of law only as a spectator, though on many occasions he'd stood on the steps of a courthouse to make a speech or announcement. It was always dramatic, and so was this.
"May it please the court," the former Vice President began, "I stand here to request summary judgment. My right to cross a state line has been violated by the executive order of the President. This is contrary to explicit constitutional guarantees, and also to Supreme Court precedent, to wit, the Lemuel Penn case, in which the Court ruled unanimously…"
Pat Martin sat beside the Solicitor General, who would speak for the government. There was a camera from Court TV to send the case up and down via satellite into homes across the nation. It was a strange scene. The judge, the court reporter, the bailiff, all the attorneys, the ten reporters, and four spectators were all wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves. All had just seen Ed Kealty make the greatest political miscalculation of his career, though none had grasped it yet. Martin had come in anticipation of that very fact.
"Freedom of travel is central to all of the freedoms established and protected by the Constitution. The President has neither constitutional nor statutory authority to deny this freedom to the citizens, most particularly not by the application of armed force, which has already resulted in the death of a citizen, and the wounding of several others. This is a simple point of law," Kealty was saying, half an hour later, "and on behalf of myself and our fellow citizens, I beg the court to set this illegal order aside." With that, Edward J. Kealty took his place.
"Your Honor," the Solicitor General said, walking to the podium with the TV microphone, "as the complainant tells us, this is a most important case, but not one of great legal complexity at its foundation.
"The government cites Mr. Justice Holmes in the celebrated free speech case where he told us that the suspension of freedoms is permissible when the danger to the country as a whole is both real and present. The Constitution, Your Honor, is not a suicide pact. The crisis which the country faces today is deadly, as press reports have told us, and it is of a nature that the drafters could not have anticipated. In the late eighteenth century, I remind learned counsel, the nature of infectious disease was not yet known. But quarantining of ships at the time was both common and accepted. We have Jefferson's embargo of foreign trade as a precedent, but most of all, Your Honor, we have common sense. We cannot sacrifice our citizens on the altar of legal theory…"
Martin listened, rubbing his nose under the mask. It smelled as though a barrel of Lysol had been spilled in the room.
IT MIGHT HAVE been comical, but was not, when each of the fifteen reporters reacted the same way to the blood test. A blink. A sigh of relief. Each one stood and walked to the far side of the room, taking the opportunity to remove his or her mask. When the tests were complete, they were led into another briefing room.
"Okay, we have a bus outside to take you to Andrews. You will receive further information after you take off," the PAO colonel told them.
"Wait a minute!" Tom Donner objected.
"Sir, that was on your consent form, remember?"
"YOU WERE RIGHT, John," Alexandre said. Epidemiology was the medical profession's version of accounting, and as that dull profession was vital to running a business, so the study of diseases and how they spread was actually the mother of modern medicine, when in the 1830s a French physician had determined that people who became ill died or recovered at the same rate whether they were treated or not. That awkward discovery had forced the medical community to study itself, to look for things that worked and things that did not, and along the way changed medicine from a trade into a scientific art.
The devil was always in the details. In this case, it might not be a devil at all, Alex realized.
There were now 3,451 Ebola cases in the country. That included those who had started dying, those who showed frank symptoms, and those who showed antibodies. The number by itself wasn't large. Lower than AIDS deaths, lower by more than two orders of magnitude than cancer and heart disease. The statistical study, aided by FBI interviews and feedback from local physicians all over the country, had established 223 primary cases, all of them infected at trade shows, and all of whom had infected others who had in turn infected more. Though the incoming cases were still on the upslope, the rate was lower than that predicted by preexisting computer models… and at Hop-kins they'd had the first case of someone who showed antibodies, but no symptoms….
"There should have been more primary cases, Alex," Pickett said. "We started seeing that last night. The first one who died, he flew from Phoenix to Dallas. The FBI got the flight records, and University of Texas tested everybody aboard, finished this morning. Only one shows antibodies, and he isn't really symptomatic."
"Risk factors?"
"Gingivitis. Bleeding gums," General Pickett reported.
"It's trying to be an aerosol… but…"
"That's what I think, Alex. The secondary cases appear to be mostly intimate contact. Hugs, kisses, taking personal care of a loved one. If we're right, this will peak in three days, and then it'll stop. Along the way we'll start seeing survivors."
"We have one of those at Hopkins. She's got the antibodies, but it didn't get beyond the initial presentation."
"We need to get Gus working on environmental degradation. He should be already."
"Agreed. You call him. I'm doing some follow-ups down here."
THE JUDGE WAS an old friend of Kealty. Martin wasn't exactly sure how he'd fiddled with the docket in this particular district, but that didn't matter now. The two presentations had taken about thirty minutes each. It was, as Kealty had said and the Solicitor General had agreed, a fundamentally simple point of law, though the practical applications of it led into all manner of complexity. It was also a matter of great urgency, as a result of which the judge reappeared from chambers after a mere hour's contemplation. He would read his decision from his notes, and type up a full opinion later in the day.
"The Court," he began, "is cognizant of the grave danger facing the country, and must sympathize with President Ryan's sincerely felt duty to safeguard the lives of Americans in addition to their freedoms.
"However, the Court must acknowledge the fact that the Constitution is, and remains, the supreme law of the land. To violate that legal bulwark is a step that potentially sets a precedent with consequences so grave as to reach beyond the current crisis, and though the President is certainly acting under the best motives, this Court must vacate the executive order, trusting our citizens to act intelligently and prudently in the pursuit of their own safety. So ordered."
"Your Honor." The Solicitor General stood. "The government will and must appeal your ruling immediately to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond. We request a stay until the paperwork can be processed, later today."
"Request is denied. Court is adjourned." The judge stood and left the bench without a further word. The room, of course, erupted.
"What does this mean?" the Court 7T correspondent— himself a lawyer, who knew what it probably meant— said to Ed Kealty, his microphone extended, as reporters tended to do at the moment.
"It means that so-called President Ryan cannot break the law. I think I have shown here that the rule of law still exists in our country," the politician replied. He was not being overtly smug.
"What does the government say?" the reporter asked the Solicitor General.
"Not very much. We will have papers filed with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before Judge Venable has his opinion drafted. The order of the court is not officially binding until it is written up, signed, and properly filed. We'll have our appeal drafted first. The Fourth Circuit will stay the order—"
"And if it doesn't?"
Martin took that on. "In that case, sir, the executive order will remain in place in the interest of public safety until the case can be argued in a more structured setting. But there is every reason to believe that the Fourth Circuit will stay the order. Judges are people of reality in addition to being people of the written word. There is one other thing, however."
"Yes?" the reporter asked. Kealty was watching from ten feet away.
"The court has settled another important constitutional issue here. In referring to President Ryan by both his name and the title of his office, the court has settled the succession question raised by former Vice President Kealty. Further, the court said that that order was vacated. Had Mr. Ryan not been the President, the order would have'been invalid and never legally binding, and the court could have stated that as well. Instead, the Court acted improperly on point, I believe, but properly in a procedural sense. Thank you. The Solicitor General and I have to get some paperwork done."
It wasn't often you shut reporters up. Shutting political figures up was harder still.
"Now, wait a minute!" Kealty shouted.
"You never were a very good lawyer, Ed," Martin said on his way past.
"I THINK HE'S right," Lorenz said. "Jesus, I sure hope he is."
CDC laboratories had been frantically at work since the beginning, studying how the virus survived in the open. Environmental chambers were set up with differing values of temperature and humidity, and different light-intensity levels, and the data, incomprehensibly, kept telling them the same thing. The disease that had to be spreading by aerosol—wasn't, or at most it was barely doing so. Its survival in the open, even under benign conditions, was measured in minutes.
"I wish I understood the warfare side of this a little better," Lorenz went on after a moment's thought.
"Two-two-three primary cases. That's all. If there were more, we'd know by now. Eighteen confirmed sites, four additional trade shows that generated no hits. Why eighteen and not the other four?" Alex wondered. "What if they did hit all twenty-two, but four didn't work?"
"On the basis of our experimental data, that's a real possibility, Alex." Lorenz was pulling on his pipe. "Our models now predict a total of eight thousand cases. We're going to get survivors, and the numbers on that will alter the model somewhat. This quarantine stuff has scared the shit out of people. You know, I don't think the travel ban really matters directly, but it scared people enough that they're not interacting enough to—"
"Doctor, that's the third good piece of news today," Alexandre breathed. The first had been the woman at Hopkins. The second was Pickett's analytical data. Now the third was Gus's lab work and the logical conclusion it led to. "John always said that bio-war was more psychological than real."
"John's a smart doc, Alex. So are you, my friend."
"Three days and we'll know."
"Agreed. Rattle some beads, Alex."
"You can reach me through Reed for the time being."
"I'm sleeping in the office, too."
"See ya." Alexandre punched off the speakerphone. Around him were six Army physicians, three from Walter Reed, three from USAMRIID. "Comments?" he asked them.
"Crazy situation," a major observed with an exhausted smile. "It's a psychological weapon, all right. Scares the hell out of everybody. But that works for us, too. And somebody goofed on the other side. I wonder how…?"
Alex thought about that for a moment. Then he lifted the phone and dialed Johns Hopkins. "This is Dr. Alexandre," he told the desk nurse on the medical floor. "I need to talk to Dr. Ryan, it's very important… okay, I'll hold." It took a few minutes. "Cathy? Alex here. I need to talk to your husband, and it's better if you're there, too…. It's damned important," he told her a moment later.