Blowback

EIGHT

Within twenty minutes, the situation room was packed with bodies and the air was thick with tension. Based on an emerging terrorist threat, the White House had gone into full crash mode.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” called the president. “It appears we’ve got a lot to cover, and I’d like to get started, so if you’d all take your seats please.”

The attendees did as they were instructed, and as a subdued hush fell over the room, the president nodded at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hank Currutt.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” replied Currutt, who stood to address the room. “Two days ago, soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Third Arrowhead Brigade, Second Infantry Division Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Washington — now based in Mosul, Iraq — responded to a call that three Christian aid workers had failed to check in with their organization and had gone missing. Traveling to the remote village near the Syrian border where the workers had been based, the soldiers uncovered something the likes of which we have never seen before.

“To brief you on what exactly it is that they found, I’m going to turn the floor over to Colonel Michael Tranberg. For those of you not familiar with Colonel Tranberg, he is the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. I have asked him here because USAMRIID is the Department of Defense’s lead laboratory for developing medical countermeasures, vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic tools to protect U.S. troops from biological warfare agents and naturally occurring infectious diseases. After the CDC in Atlanta, USAMRIID houses the only other Biosafety Level Four laboratory in the entire country, which allows Colonel Tranberg’s team to study highly hazardous viruses in maximum biological containment. I think that’s about it introduction-wise. Colonel Tranberg?”

“Thank you, General Currutt,” said Tranberg, a tall, gray-haired man in his sixties. He picked up a digital remote from the conference table, pressed a button, and the two plasma monitors at the front of the room came to life with the revolving USAMRIID logo. “The footage you are about to view was shot a little over a week ago in northern Iraq by the aforementioned Christian humanitarian aid workers from a group called Mercy International out of Fresno, California. Three of Mercy International’s workers had been based in the remote village of Asalaam, about one hundred fifty kilometers southwest of Mosul. When they failed to check in with Mercy’s main Baghdad office, calls were made, and eventually soldiers from one of the U.S. Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Teams were sent to check up on them. It was these same soldiers who uncovered this footage. We’ve edited it down to the most important parts, but I have to warn you, it’s not easy to watch.”

Tranberg pressed another button on the remote and sat down.

Everyone in the room watched with rapt attention as a young female aid worker, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old, chronicled a strange flulike illness, which was sweeping through the village. By the second day, though, the woman, as well as her two colleagues, fell ill and quickly grew too sick to continue filming. “From this point on,” narrated Tranberg, “we believe it’s one of the villagers, maybe a local person who had been working with the aid workers, who continues the filming.”

The group watched as the video further chronicled the sickness spreading throughout the village. Those who were infected needed to be physically restrained. All of the patients eventually exhibited extremely aggressive behavior, with many trying to bite their caregivers, or anyone who came across their path. In many of the afflicted, a bizarre state of heightened sexuality was also observable. Many of them complained of severe insomnia and headaches. They were hypersensitive to odors, particularly garlic, and couldn’t stand to see their reflection in anything from a mirror to a bedpan. In addition, they seemed to suffer from hydrophobia and had to be completely nourished intravenously, and even then, the few IV bags the village had available had to be hidden beneath towels, as patients who saw anything even remotely resembling water would fly into a rage and their throats would swell up, making it impossible for them to breathe. They were hypersensitive to light, and their skin had taken on a very strange pallor. The presentation cut to the final footage of the aid workers in the end stages of the illness.

Everyone around the table watched in silence as the aid workers began convulsing. Soon a strange, dark fluid began to pour from their nostrils, and moments later they were dead.

In the background of the video, villagers who had not yet become infected recoiled in horror.

When the clip was over, the video footage was replaced once again by the spinning USAMRIID logos. For a moment, no one spoke. It was obvious from the faces around the table that the footage had scared the hell out of everyone, including the president.

Dr. Donna Vennett, the surgeon general and a family medicine physician by trade, was the first to speak. “What is it? Some sort of Ebola strain? Hemorrhagic fever?”

“No on both counts,” responded Tranberg. “This is not like anything we’ve seen before.”

“What was that substance running out of the nasal passages before the victims died?”

“That’s a mystery as well.”

“Well, what do we know?” said Steve Plaisier, secretary of Health and Human Services. “We’ve obviously been called here for a reason. Is there a chance we might see an outbreak of this thing in the U.S.?”

“There’s more than just a chance,” responded General Currutt. “We’re counting on it.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alan Driehaus cleared his throat and said, “Why?”

“Because the village of Asalaam wasn’t infected by chance. It was specifically targeted.”

“Intentional infection?” said Plaisier.

Currutt nodded his head.

“What makes you so sure?”

The general activated his own laptop and projected a series of photos via the monitors at the front of the room. “Not only were all communication lines into Asalaam taken out, but the handful of vehicles the villagers collectively owned had been sabotaged — tires slashed, things of that nature. No one was going anywhere. Someone wanted that village completely isolated.”

“Who?”

Now it was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency James Vaile’s turn to speak. “We have some parallel intelligence we think might answer part of that question. Over the last two months, a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative named Khalid Sheik Alomari has been sighted in Dubai, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Tehran, Rabat, Lahore, and Baghdad. And while he was in each of those cities, a highly respected Muslim scientist died. On the surface, all of the deaths appeared to be accidents or the result of natural causes. Originally, we thought that Alomari was doing the Middle East circuit to either fund-raise or coordinate a multicity attack. We had no idea until one of our analysts started connecting the dots that the man was there committing assassinations.”

“You said this Alomari was high-ranking,” stated Paul Jackson, the president’s National Security Advisor. “How high-ranking are we talking about?”

“Alomari is bin Laden’s protégé—handpicked to handle only the most sensitive assignments. It’s exceptionally concerning that we’ve attached him to what happened in Asalaam because Alomari’s main responsibility for al-Qaeda is to help conceptualize and orchestrate the most devastating attacks he can think of against the United States. He’s the only person in al-Qaeda said to hate America even more than bin Laden himself.”

“But how do we know Alomari and those dead scientists are connected to what happened in this village?” asked Secretary Driehaus.

“Because, besides probably being killed by Alomari, the scientists were all working on a highly secretive project for something called the Islamic Institute for Science and Technology in Bangladesh. Its mission statement is to improve the lives of Muslims worldwide through advancements in science and technology, but we’ve suspected for some time those aren’t their true marching orders.”

“Why is that?”

“They get paid lots of visits by scientists from Islamic countries we believe are involved with covert chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons programs. One of the institute’s directors, in fact, is especially fond of quoting Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of Japan’s bioweapons program during World War II. Ishii was the one who said that if a weapon is important enough to be prohibited, it must be worth having in one’s arsenal.”

The secretary of state, Jennifer Staley, replied, “Director Vaile, do we have any hard evidence connecting this institute with any covert weapons programs?”

“Yes, we do.”

“What’s the connection?”

“Jamal Mehmood.”

“Who is Jamal Mehmood?” asked Driehaus.

Vaile looked to the president, and when Rutledge nodded his head, Vaile explained, “He’s a Pakistani nuclear scientist. A couple of years ago, we found the schematics he designed for an anthrax-spreading device in an al-Qaeda training camp. The CIA was part of the team that helped track him down and detain him outside of Karachi. We were never able to substantiate his claims that the designs had been stolen.”

“I still don’t see the connection.”

“Both Mehmood and A.Q. Khan — the father of the Islamic bomb, who sold nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya — have not only been visiting professors but major fundraisers for the Islamic Institute for Science and Technology.”

The secretary of state held out her hands in front of her, as if balancing what she’d been listening to, and said, “So we have a serious mystery illness seen only in some remote Iraqi village on one hand and a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative who killed a bunch of scientists tied to some Islamic research group on the other. I’m still not seeing any connection here.”

General Currutt advanced to the next slide on his laptop and responded, “A few days before the people in Asalaam started becoming sick, Khalid Sheik Alomari was spotted crossing the Iraqi-Syrian border less than forty-five kilometers from the village. We believe Asalaam was a live test site for the virus.”

That was all it took. There wasn’t a single person in the situation room who could ignore the al-Qaeda link.

“So that’s it then,” said Jackson. “Al-Qaeda is now actively in the biowarfare game.”

Currutt brought up an organizational chart for al-Qaeda. Those who had been killed or captured had either a slash or a red X through their photo. “Unfortunately, it would seem so. We’ve inflicted such significant damage on them that they’re growing desperate. In a sense, we’ve forced them to branch out in drastic new directions, one of which happens to be in the realm of chemical and biological weapons. They’re using Iraq and Afghanistan as justification for employing whatever weapons they can get their hands on to drive us from all Muslim lands.”

“Jesus,” responded Driehaus. “Talk about blowback. Every single move we make, whether successful or not, seems to come back to bite us in the ass twice as hard.”

It was exactly what everyone around the table was thinking.

“The good we’re doing over there far outweighs the bad,” said the secretary of state.

“I hope so,” responded Driehaus, “but I have to be honest. I’m worried our losses may soon overshadow whatever gains we might make.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that for better or worse, I’m more concerned with the welfare of the American people than I am with the Iraqis or anyone else over in that part of the world.”

“So what? We’re supposed to just bury our heads in the sand and hope that the terrorism problem will just go away? Because we all know that’s not going to happen.”

“All right,” interjected the president. “I respect that we’ve got a wide range of opinions in the room, but let’s all try to settle down and focus on the matter at hand.”

After several moments of awkward silence, the surgeon general said, “I suppose that if we don’t know what we’re dealing with, it’s pointless to ask if there’s a cure.”

“Pretty much,” said Colonel Tranberg, relieved to get back on track.

“How about the fatality rate? What can you tell us about that?”

“Well, that all depends upon how you interpret the data. If you look at the village of Asalaam, one out of every two people died, which gives us a fifty percent fatality rate, which is extremely serious.”

“If the village is our only benchmark,” asked Plaisier, “then how else could you be looking at this?”

“We’re looking at the village, of course, but more importantly, we’re looking at the one out of every two villagers who died. You see, the area around Mosul is one of the largest Christian enclaves in the entire country. It isn’t unusual for Christians and Muslims to live side by side there. Asalaam was a perfect example of this. So perfect, in fact, that it was about fifty-two percent Muslim and forty-eight percent Christian.”

“And when you look at the deaths by religious affiliations?” asked the surgeon general.

Tranberg shook his head slowly. “Only the Muslims survived. If you weren’t Muslim, the illness was one hundred percent lethal.”