The Gulf Conspiracy

FIVE

Dr Steven Dunbar, senior medical investigator with the Sci-Med Inspectorate, settled back into his seat on the British Airways shuttle flight and noted as he fastened his seat belt that the flight was almost full. He recognised a couple of faces passing by as belonging to those of Westminster politicians, one of whom he’d seen on television the night before being interviewed about the potential costs of another Gulf War. As with most conversations involving politicians, no straight answer had been forthcoming.

Steven had been called back from Scotland where he had been spending — or had hoped to spend — a long weekend with his young daughter, Jenny, who lived there with his sister — in-law and her husband and their own two children. Jenny had lived with them since Steven’s wife Lisa had died some four years before.

The summons had come in the form of a text message to his mobile phone from the duty officer at Sci-Med; it said simply that John Macmillan — the head of Sci-Med — required him back in London at his earliest convenience. Steven had managed to get himself on board the first plane to London from Glasgow Airport on Monday morning after having driven the sixty miles or so from the village of Glenvane in Dumfriesshire where Jenny lived.

‘Good weekend?’ enquired the passenger smelling strongly of aftershave who eased into the seat beside him. He was a fat, loose-jowled man with a ruddy complexion. He wore a striped business suit that was too small for him, as was the collar of the Bengal striped shirt that trapped his fleshy neck, causing it to bulge over. A heart attack waiting to happen, thought Steven.

‘Fine thanks,’ he replied, a bit surprised at the question coming from a complete stranger but assuming that this might well be normal for the Monday morning shuttle with many Scots who worked in London returning after spending the weekend at home. ‘You?’

‘Daughter got married,’ said the man. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune. Don’t like the bugger much but there’s not a lot you can do these days, is there? Kids are a law unto themselves. Do as they damn well please, whatever you say.’

‘Times change,’ said Steven.

‘Damn right they do. If I’d spoken to my father the way she speaks to me…’

It was a familiar theme that Steven had no wish to hear enlarged upon. He gave a sympathetic nod and pointedly turned to reading his newspaper. He was allowed to read in peace until a communal groan broke out an hour later when the captain announced that they were now in a circular holding pattern while waiting for permission to land at Heathrow.

‘The all-elusive “slot”,’ sighed the man in the seat beside him. ‘Heathrow’s version of the holy grail; If I had a fiver for every time I’ve circled Watford or West Drayton I’d be a bloody millionaire by now.’

They landed only ten minutes behind schedule and Steven took the Heathrow Express into Paddington and then a taxi to his flat where he stopped off to shower and change. He had gone to Scotland wearing casual gear — leather blouson and chinos — so he thought he would get into ‘uniform’ before seeing Macmillan. John Macmillan didn’t make a big issue of such things but he had let it be known that he subscribed to the sloppy dress = sloppy mind school of thought.

Now wearing a dark blue suit and Parachute Regiment tie, Steven glanced out of the window to check on the weather while lightly brushing the shoulders of his jacket. His flat on the third floor of an apartment block wasn’t quite on the waterside — he couldn’t afford that — but he could see the passing traffic on the Thames through a gap in the buildings opposite. Checking his watch, he went downstairs and walked the couple of blocks necessary to reach a main thoroughfare before hailing a taxi and asking to be taken to the Home Office.

Steven exchanged a few words with Rose Roberts, John Macmillan’s secretary, while he waited in the outer office for Macmillan to see him. As usual their conversation took the form of Rose asking after his daughter and he inquiring about her singing — Rose was a member of the South London Bach Choir. When the pleasantries finally petered out, Rose got on with her work and Steven took to idly looking out of the window at the world. It was something he’d done many times in the past while waiting to be briefed on a new assignment and he was aware that the feeling in his stomach was still the same — a mixture of anxiety and excitement. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was a feeling he had courted for most of his life if truth be told.

He had first experienced it in his youth when climbing in the mountains of the Lake District — he had been brought up in the small village of Glenridding on Ullswater. Youthful exuberance and a lack of forethought had on occasion taken him into situations it might have been wiser to avoid but he and his friends had learned much about themselves and each other on these occasions and Steven had been smitten with the buzz that danger brought with it. He had re-acquainted himself with it on many occasions when serving with the military and had noticed that it could become as addictive as a drug — something to which many fighter pilots and racing drivers would testify. There was something about being on the edge of disaster that heightened human senses to otherwise unattainable levels. As one fellow soldier had once put it, you don’t know what being alive is until you’re very nearly not.

But there were downsides to chasing the buzz. Not only was there the prospect of an early death but even if that was avoided, it could lead to an inability to ever fit in again to the nine-till-five existence of ‘normal’ life. This, in turn, could lead to marriage difficulties and even conflict with the law as Steven had seen happen to a number of ex-SAS colleagues.

Steven had qualified as a doctor but had never practised medicine, deciding that he had no real vocation for it and not wishing to become a second rate practitioner if his heart wasn’t in it. Like many children of middle class parents, he’d done medicine at university in order to please them and perhaps ambitious schoolteachers as well — former pupil medical graduates always looked good on the school record. Unlike many before him, however, he had faced up to the problem before drifting too far into a career he wasn’t suited to. He completed medical school and served out his obligatory registration year as a hospital houseman before joining the army where, after basic training, he had served with the Parachute Regiment before being seconded to Special Forces.

As a tall, strong, naturally athletic man, military life had suited him down to the ground and he had enjoyed the challenge and camaraderie of it all. His service had taken him all over the globe and placed him in situations where his every faculty had been tested to the limit, something that most men would never experience throughout their entire lives. Although they might not realise it, these men would live and die without ever really knowing themselves. They might imagine that they were heroes; they might even end up singing ‘My Way’ down the pub and believing it, but, without ever having been tested, it simply wouldn’t be true.

Steven knew that the most unlikely people could turn to out be heroes under pressure and, conversely, those who’d been champions on the sports field could equally well prove to be craven cowards when life’s contests were played out for real and the stakes were infinitely higher.

Steven had been sad when it came time for him leave the army — the operational life of an SAS soldier not being much longer than that of a professional footballer. During his service he had become an expert in field medicine and had acquired many military skills but little to commend him or equip him for a life as a civilian other than his original medical degree. The prospect of life as an in-house physician with some large corporation had been looming when he had been rescued from what almost certainly would have been a life of structured boredom by John Macmillan, who had offered him the job of medical investigator with the Sci-Med Inspectorate.

Sci-Med was Macmillan’s brainchild: it operated as a small independent unit within the Home Office, its remit being to investigate potential problems and possible wrong-doing in the hi-tech worlds of science and medicine, areas where the police had little or no expertise. This was no reflection on them. These areas of modern life had just grown to be too complicated for the scrutiny of outside observers. Accordingly, the small team of investigators recruited to Sci-Med were graduates in either science or medicine and with a range of experience acquired in pursuing other careers before coming to Sci-Med — post-graduate degrees from the university of life, as Macmillan termed it.

From the outset, Steven had fitted in perfectly to Sci-Med. He found the job challenging, exciting — even if, on occasion, downright dangerous — but his background of having had to use his initiative while under great stress in the deserts of Iraq or the jungles of South America had served him well and he had proved himself over the intervening years to be the investigator that Macmillan would place most trust in.

For his part, Steven had the greatest respect for John Macmillan, who, on many occasions in the past, had needed to fight his corner against heavy odds in order to maintain the independence of the Inspectorate. It was inevitable from time to time that Sci-Med would come across something that perhaps another arm of government — often a far more powerful one — would rather be kept under wraps but Macmillan would not be swayed. In his book, truth was not to be compromised on any political altar. He was also unfailingly loyal to his people on the ground, something that Steven had cause to be grateful for on more than one occasion when he had trodden on the toes of the powerful.

Although John Macmillan did not behave like a Whitehall mandarin — in that he did not display any of the signs of Machiavellian philosophy that a life close to politics almost inevitably breeds — he did look like one. He was tall, erect, with swept-back silver hair and a smooth, unlined complexion that belied his years.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said, replacing the telephone as Steven entered. ‘Your colleague, Scott Jamieson’s, exposure of an incompetent surgical regime at that hospital down in Kent hasn’t exactly gone down well with the Department of Health.’

‘I didn’t suppose it would,’ said Steven.

‘Good God, the figures spoke for themselves,’ said Macmillan. ‘A blind butcher with a penknife could have achieved a higher success rate. If the management had faced up to this a couple of years ago the hospital wouldn’t have the press camped at their gate right now and there would be a lot more space left in the local cemetery. Why on earth didn’t his colleagues say something?’

‘Maybe they just didn’t want to see what was there in front of them,’ said Steven. ‘It’s a common enough phenomenon. Apart from that, whistle-blowing isn’t exactly encouraged in the medical profession. You can end up practising in New Zealand.’

‘Well, I can’t see any such conflict arising in this instance,’ said Macmillan, pushing a photograph across his desk towards Steven.

Steven picked up the A4 size print and grimaced at the sight of a man, lying spread-eagled, face-down beside a stretch of still water. Chequered tape at the scene suggested that a police photographer had taken it.

‘Dr George Sebring,’ said Macmillan. ‘Thirty-eight years old, a lecturer in molecular biology at Leicester University. The police pulled his body from a canal three days ago after a man walking his dog found him lying in a reed bed. You know, I sometimes think that if people stopped walking their dogs the police might be out of a job. Dog-walkers seem to turn up more dead bodies than anyone else on the planet.

‘Good point,’ said Steven. ‘What’s our interest?’

‘Sebring joined the university ten years ago. Before that he worked at Porton Down.’

‘Our microbiological defence establishment,’ said Steven.

‘He was quite a high-flier but he suffered some sort of nervous breakdown in the early nineties and had to give up his job.’

‘Defending get too much for him?’ said Steven, tongue in cheek.

Macmillan, unsmiling, looked over his glasses at him and said, ‘There’s a school of thought that says if you go up against Goliath with a slingshot in the real world, you’ll end up with it inserted in your nether regions — sideways.’

‘Point taken,’ said Steven. ‘We have to be as bad as each other. Only the philosophy behind it varies.’

Once again Macmillan fixed Steven with a stony stare. ‘Sometimes I admire your idealism, Steven,’ he said. ‘At others…’ He let Steven fill in the blank and he responded with, ‘Sorry.’

‘At first the Leicester police didn’t see anything suspicious in Sebring’s death. They were inclined to treat it as suicide rather than an accident because of his medical history but his wife insisted that her husband had not been suicidal, although she did admit that he had appeared to be very troubled of late. She believed it had been an accident.’

‘So who was right?’

‘Neither,’ said Macmillan. ‘The police pathologist rained on everyone’s parade. Apparently he’s a young chap and new to the job, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you might say.’

Steven had difficulty in ascribing this description to any pathologist he personally had ever come across. Morose, cynical, alcoholic or even downright weird, yes, but bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

‘He established that Sebring did die of drowning,’ continued Macmillan, ‘but he then showed that the water in Sebring’s lungs was not canal water but Leicester tap water.’

‘So he was murdered?’

Macmillan nodded. ‘Drowned, probably in a domestic bathtub, and then dumped in the canal to make it look like an accident or suicide.’

‘Motive?’ asked Steven.

‘The police have drawn a blank. He seems to have been a popular lecturer with the students and a respected colleague among his peers. Everyone liked him.’

‘Except the man who held his head under the bath water until he drowned,’ said Steven.

‘Quite so,’ said Macmillan, managing to convey that he wouldn’t have put it so bluntly himself.

‘Did his wife say what had been troubling him?’ asked Steven.

‘Good question,’ said Macmillan. ‘She said a man came to see him a few weeks ago, an ex-soldier who’d served in the Gulf War. She thinks his name was Maclean, although she couldn’t swear to it but she is pretty certain he was Scots because of his accent. Apparently he knew Sebring when he worked at Porton Down.’

‘What was a soldier doing at Porton Down?’ asked Steven.

‘Something for you to find out,’ said Macmillan. ‘She said that Maclean seemed angry about what he called Gulf War sickness and seemed to be under the impression that her husband knew some secret — something that could help him in his campaign. Sebring wouldn’t tell her anything when he’d gone. She didn’t press him because she knew that his work at Porton was classified but she’s sure his change in behaviour stemmed from that day.’

‘So we have a dead scientist, an ex-soldier and maybe something that happened at the time of the Gulf War,’ said Steven. ‘That was quite a while ago.’

‘It’s beginning to look as though we might be about to fight it all over again,’ said Macmillan.

‘Pity they didn’t finish the job last time,’ said Steven.

‘As I remember, people were throwing up their hands in horror at the very idea of marching into Baghdad,’ said Macmillan. ‘Television pundits delighted in pointing out at every opportunity that the allied mandate was to free Kuwait, nothing more.’

‘I remember well enough,’ agreed Steven. ‘So what would you like me to do about Sebring?’

‘Have a root around, will you? The police have more or less admitted that they have nothing to go on although they are trying to find the mysterious Scotsman, Maclean. If Sebring’s death really had anything to do with his time at Porton and what he was working on there, the police are going to hit the wall. We might be able to help out and take it a stage further. See what you can come up with. Miss Roberts will give you what little information we have on Sebring.’

Rose Roberts looked up when Steven emerged from Macmillan’s office and held out a brown foolscap envelope. ‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Dr Sebring’s work at Porton was secret so we have to go through the usual channels to get information and that, as you know, might take time. If you think you really need to know what he was working on let me know and I’ll see what I can do to speed things along.

Steven accepted the envelope and said, ‘Thanks Rose; I think maybe we should start pushing about Sebring’s time at Porton right away. I’ve a feeling it might well be relevant.’

‘I’ll get the application in to the MOD this afternoon and mark it top priority,’ said Rose Roberts. ‘I’ll let you know when we get something back but don’t hold your breath. They do like holding on to their secrets.’

Steven decided to spend what was left of the afternoon in the library. He needed to do some background reading on the Gulf War so that he had more of a feel for it. His knowledge at the moment was painfully thin. First though, he read through the file that Rose Roberts had put together on the dead man.

Sebring, the son of a Church of England vicar, had studied medical sciences at Edinburgh University, graduating with a first class degree in the summer of 1985 before moving to the University of Oxford where he had spent the next three years working for a D.Phil. on the cloning of viral pathogenesis genes. He started work as a post-doctoral research associate in the labs at Porton Down in January 1989 but left in June 1991 after suffering a nervous breakdown. He made a tentative return to work but decided to resign. He went on to make a complete recovery however, and was appointed to the teaching staff of Leicester University in October 1991 as a lecturer in molecular biology; had been there ever since. He was married to Jane Manson, a teacher, whom he met in 1993 and married in May 1994. They had no children although they had recently applied to be considered as adoptive parents. Steven copied both home and school addresses into his notebook.

He put away the file and started to work his way through a succession of articles on the Gulf War and issues arising from it. It wasn’t something that he had thought about in a long time, although he had been aware of an ongoing battle between government and war veterans over the existence or non-existence of Gulf War Syndrome. After a couple of hours he had to admit to having some sympathy with the establishment view that there could be no such thing. No one single condition could possibly have so many differing symptoms. On the other hand, he was taken aback at the sheer number of soldiers who had come down with illness after service in the Gulf — and the number of deaths among them was nothing short of alarming. He felt sure that there had to be some middle ground.

It seemed to him that the troops had been subjected to a number of different but nonetheless harmful factors, all of which had caused illness and which had combined in the minds of sufferers to give the impression of a syndrome linked to war service in the Gulf.

If nothing else, Steven felt that his appetite for knowledge had been whetted by his afternoon in the library. He resolved to continue his search for information at home on the internet. By nine in the evening he had amassed a pile of print-outs that would keep him going for the rest of the evening and probably through all of the following day.

Steven had downloaded documents from a wide variety of sources including official Ministry of Defence sites as well as those run by Gulf War veterans’ associations and from individuals who felt they had something to say on the subject, usually posting some personal experience of their time in the Gulf on the web. He noted that many of these personal depositions related to bad treatment or even a complete lack of treatment since returning home and falling ill.

Steven made notes as he went along, hoping that when he’d finished he would be able to put them together and gain a better understanding of claims and counter-claims and what lay behind them. It had gone four on the following afternoon before he felt ready to draw conclusions:-

Saddam had used both chemical and biological weapons against allied forces in the Gulf.

These weapons had been supplied to Iraq by the United States — probably the reason for the continued denial of the above by official sources as several websites had pointed out.

Many of the troops had reported adverse reaction to the vaccines they had been given. The Ministry of Defence had been less than candid about what the vaccines had contained, having declared some components to be ‘classified’ although there seemed to be disagreement about just how many ‘classified’ components there had been. The Surgeon General, Admiral Revel’s account to the Parliament’s Defence Committee seemed at variance with what the Ministry of Defence had replied in response to outside questioning.

The use of an antidote to nerve gas, pyridostigmine bromide, seemed to have been a mistake when Sarin was the gas being used by the Iraqis. An American website pointed out that this compound actually heightened the effects of the Sarin rather than countered them. Not only that, it was toxic in its own right and many troops had suffered accidental overdose through pill-popping instigated by feelings of panic when the sirens had gone off.

Individual tales of blunders and misunderstandings that had led to troops being exposed to unnecessary danger were legion.

It seemed likely to Steven that a number of allied troops had suffered the effects of Sarin nerve gas and/or its antidote. Many had reacted adversely to vaccines given to protect them against viruses and bacteria. Some had been subjected to attack by such biological agents. Some had been the victim of mistakes made by those in command and exposed unnecessarily to toxic compounds.

Satisfied with his work, Steven rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms in the air. He was stiff from sitting in the same position for so long and his eyes felt as if they had sand in them from staring at his computer screen, but it now seemed much clearer to him why Government and representatives of the Gulf War veterans had been at each other’s throats for so long. To him as an outside observer, it seemed probable that both parties were right in their assertions. There was indeed no such thing as Gulf War Syndrome but on the other hand a whole lot of troops had fallen ill because of their service there. The only thing that hadn’t become any clearer was why George Sebring had been murdered.