Plague Zone

12

“Hold it.” Two men in containment suits stood in the next short hallway, blocking Deborah’s path. One of them held a submachine gun. The other carried a pistol and a walkie-talkie. Neither weapon was pointed directly at her, but the message was clear. These men were a quarantine point.

Mendelson and three others stood to the side, waiting nervously. “This isn’t right,” Mendelson said.

Cables lined the bare ceiling behind two fluorescent lights. Deborah’s boots scuffed on a rough patch where the concrete had fractured, been repaired, and cracked again. The entire hall had a slight sideways tilt. The air was rank with mold. Originally, these complexes had been sterile places, but there was some moisture leaking through the patch in the floor, and bacteria grew swiftly in the light and heat necessary to make the warrens habitable.

Behind her, the acetylene welder hissed. Its blue light flickered as more of her troops filed in behind her, craning their necks and bumping against each other. Emma said, “Why are we—?”

“Move over there,” said the man with the pistol.

It was exactly how Deborah would have organized things herself. Welding the doors wasn’t enough. The engineers also needed to be sure that everyone on this side was clean before they were allowed any farther.

What if they weren’t? That frightened her, but she covered the feeling with a brisk, impersonal thought. We did our job. Deborah holstered her pistol and swiped at her cheeks, embarrassed by the wetness on her face. “We’ll be okay,” she told her people, trying to help the men in the containment suits. It was important to keep everyone calm.

“You’re Reece,” the first man said suddenly.

Deborah nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said, not knowing his rank. She couldn’t even meet his gaze through the Plexiglas eyepieces in his hood.

“Good.” The man lifted his walkie-talkie and spoke loudly. It was a clumsy system, but his suit radio must not have been hooked into base communications. “We have Major Reece,” he said. “She looks okay.”

“Roger that,” the ‘talkie crackled.

What was happening?

“They think we’re infected,” Mendelson said.

“They just have to be sure,” Deborah said. “That’s all. We’ll be okay.”

She was ready to sacrifice herself if necessary. She had always been ready. There was honor in dying for the greater good, and the past two and a half years had only reinforced that belief in her.

“They need all the help they can get, and they’ll want these files,” she said, gesturing at the laptops and paperwork in their arms. The command center was too small for the hundreds of staffers necessary to receive and analyze NORTHCOM’s data streams, so they worked elsewhere in the warrens. Most of their information was regularly e-mailed inside, but they’d learned redundancy above all things. Paper files could be read even if a virus crashed the system.

The welder shut off. Boot steps sounded in the other hallway and Deborah flinched. Her self-control was eroding. What if the nanotech had sifted through the door before the engineers finished their seal? The plague wouldn’t affect those men, but they might be carrying traces of it on their suits. If so, as they walked into this hall, it would jump through Deborah’s people like wildfire…

One of the Navy officers spoke up. He must have been thinking the same thing, and he wanted to be sure the engineers knew what he was carrying. “I have three years of NSA intercepts on the Chinese LOGSTATs,” he said.

“I’ve got our SATCOM codes,” another man said.

“We’ll be fine,” Deborah told them.

“You’re bleeding,” Emma said, reaching for her, but she stopped short of taking Deborah’s arm, which filled Deborah with regret. They’d learned that touching each other was dangerous.

The engineers pushed into the crowded hall. Deborah heard them talking on their suit radios as they filed past, bearing their M4s and welding gear. “—get started,” the first man said, muffled.

Seconds passed.

No one was infected.

The last engineer through the door closed it behind him and the tension went out of the hallway.

“You must have hurt yourself when you fell,” Emma said, taking Deborah’s elbow at last. They both welcomed the distraction. Emma’s hands were skilled and light, gently investigating the bloody tear in Deborah’s sleeve.

Her forearm was scraped in two places. Strange. She hadn’t felt it. Deborah even smiled at the absurdity of a few cuts. It made her think of Band-Aids and her mother and a song Mom had sung when she was small and hurt herself, something about “oh green grow the rushes, oh.”

Emma smiled, too, not understanding but needing the human contact. Then their quiet moment was over.

“What are you doing!?” Mendelson yelled.

The engineers pulled at Deborah’s troops, herding them in the direction of the command center. “Down the hall! Down the hall!” one man shouted. They looked like they were preparing to burn the next door, but Deborah realized they were also disarming her soldiers.

“No!” she cried.

“Stay where you are,” said an engineer with a Beretta.

“Major Reece,” said another man. “You’re with me.”

“What?”

“Let’s go. They need you inside.”

“Inside the command center? What about the rest of my team!? These people are fine. You can see everyone’s fine!”

“They’ll be safe here.”

“That’s idiotic,” Deborah said coldly. “If there’s any risk of infection, I have it, too! You’ll be taking the same risk when you let me in!”

“I’m sorry, Major. Let’s go.”

I won‘t, she thought, glancing back at Emma’s blue-green eyes with a thrill of horror and shame. It wasn’t right. None of it was right. But she turned and followed the man in the containment suit.

Deborah had come too far to disobey orders now.

The command center stood separate from the rest of the complex. That was one reason why the corridors leading into it were cracking. The command center was a massively reinforced box seated upon forty steel coils, each one as tall as a man and weighing a quarter ton. These shock absorbers were bolted deep into the bedrock, whereas the rest of the complex was simply laid upon the cut, naked stone. They’d never had the resources for better, but the design they’d chosen by necessity also provided the center with an additional, last line of defense. There were only two passageways inside. Both were lined with explosives and could be destroyed to stop invaders or contagion.

A crude decon station had been set up in the main antechamber. Building it might have been what delayed the engineers from reaching Deborah’s group any sooner. She barely recognized the small room, which had been a simple, exposed cube with nothing more than an armed guard, a phone to the inside, and security cameras. Now it was crammed full of clear plastic in sheets and channels. The guard on the other side wore a containment suit just like the engineers.

“I’m sorry, ma‘am, I need you to strip,” said the engineer, pointing for her to walk into the maze of plastic. “There’ll be a new uniform for you on the other side.”

This was why her entire squad hadn’t been allowed to come. In fact, the engineer looked as if he intended to stay outside himself. The maze contained a flimsy shower stall with two tanks alongside it. They must be limited in the amount of water they could run. There were also at least three fans that would blow back into the complex.

It was a pointless effort. If she had nanotech in her blood, they could clean her skin and her hair until Jesus came back in a Ferrari and yet accomplish nothing. Deborah tried not to show her condescension or her disapproval, although she held tightly to these feelings as she removed her gun belt, her boots, and her uniform, wincing at the twinge in her arm. Nor could she stop herself from glancing at the nearest camera in the ceiling. Who was watching? Did it matter? She was mad at herself for reacting at all. People were dying. Taking off her clothes was nothing compared to what she’d already been asked to do, and yet Deborah hated the indignity of it.

She protected herself with her irritation as she removed her bra and underwear. The engineer had the courtesy to turn his head. The guard on the other side of the plastic did not. Fine. He was only a distorted shape to her, so he must not be able to see her clearly, either, especially inside his hood, although she expected to be freezing and humiliated when she reached the other side.

“Wash your hair first,” the guard called. “Now your body. Scrub your face, please. Now your, um, your front and your behind. Thank you, ma‘am. Turn off the water.”

Deborah was not allowed a towel. They probably hoped to whisk away any nanotech remaining on her skin as the water evaporated in the blast of the first fan, which the guard operated from his end. Then she walked into a second cell and he hit her again. Each section of the maze was blocked off with long flaps that fluttered backward while the fans were on, then closed again after the guard shut off the power.

When she finally emerged from the plastic, her mind was as cold and tight as her body. She ignored the guard except to nod when he gestured at a rack of uniforms sealed in bags. Deborah took the first Army kit she could find, only to discover it was too big in the waist and too short for her legs. She didn’t care. She wasn’t undressing again. “I’m ready,” she said.

Cradling his M4, the guard lifted the handset on the wall. “We’re clear,” he said.

The bolts in the door clicked like rifles.

They’d constructed an opaque white plastic tent on the inside of the door, so Deborah couldn’t see anything — but the voices were deafening. She knew the command center was no bigger than a single-family home, and the ceiling, floor, and three walls were bare concrete. Every sound echoed in the box.

“Major Reece?” An Air Force captain intercepted her as soon as the door was sealed by two USAF commandos who wore containment suits of their own, although both men had their hoods open. Their air tanks must be turned off, preserving their air. “This way,” the captain said, leading Deborah from the small tent.

The noise was impossible. More than fifty men and women spoke at the same time, few of them to each other. Most wore Air Force blue. There were also people in tan or camouflage or civilian clothes. Nearly everyone was gathered in four rows facing away from her. They stood or sat at overcrowded desks in a forest of display screens. Others shoved through the mob on errands from one station to another.

Larger flatscreens were mounted on the far wall. The smallest flickered and scrolled through aircraft counts. The other two were situation maps. In blue and white, one showed the outlines of the world’s continents overlaid with dense, busy symbols wherever there were known populations. The other screen was also a blue field with white lines denoting U.S., Canadian, and enemy borders in North America. Symbols and text blinked on the map in a hundred locations, mostly on the Russian and Chinese side.

Deborah stared as she followed the Air Force captain through the noise. Individual words leapt at her and then an Army officer crashed into her, too, rising from his chair. He didn’t stop to apologize or even glance back.

“Roger that,” another man said. “Can you confirm—”

“—to coordinates eight seven five—”

If she was reading the situation map correctly, things had grown worse since she’d heard any news. Winking dots showed the remaining elements of the U.S. — Canadian governments and military. There were very few. More than a dozen? As she watched, one of the dots in New Mexico froze and then dimmed, left on the screen like a gravestone. The map was crowded with static information in faint text. Only the blinking locations were uninfected, and Deborah realized Europe was also crippled. Less than twenty symbols pulsed among a film of dead, gray data, mostly in Britain and Germany. The marks on the rest of the continent were frozen. Gone. Farther east, India was equally silent.

My God, she thought. It’s so fast.

The whole world was falling to the nanotech. South America. The Middle East. There had never been many survivors in Africa, but even the few repopulated areas along its northern coasts looked to be infected.

The men and women in this box wouldn’t quit. They were too well trained. There was order in the noise — unmistakable purpose — and Deborah felt a small prick of defiance and grit. She drew up her chin, sharing their fire. Then she marched after the Air Force captain into the second row of desks, where she’d recognized Jason Caruso in the thick of the chaos.

Army general Caruso was young for his five stars and his role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Deborah believed he was still short of fifty. Brown hair, brown eyes, and an average build might have given Caruso a forgettable look, except that his mouth changed everything about him. His mouth was expressive even when he wasn’t speaking, creased with worry lines. Caruso had a lifelong habit of pursing his lips or holding a tight smile to one side like a smirk. Deborah supposed he would have been an awful poker player. He telegraphed every thought with his mouth, but among his own troops it was an advantage. Sometimes they reacted even before he spoke.

Caruso was shouting into a phone. Deborah couldn’t make out what he was saying. There were too many voices and a bronze-skinned woman at Deborah’s side was particularly strident, cupping her hand over the microphone stem of her headset. “Nà me, n y shì zài bào gào n de j dì de wen yì ma?” the woman said.

She was Chinese, Deborah realized, though her family might have been in America for generations. What must it have been like to wear an Asian face during the war?

The people in this row were translators or diplomats. Many of them were in civilian clothes, although this woman wore Army fatigues. Deborah glanced at her computer screen. It was an overlapping mess of open windows. From what Deborah could see, she had personnel files on Chinese nationals.

“W mén zài w mén de wèi xng shàng méi yu kàn dào rèn hé j xiàng,” the woman continued without inflection. She was loud but very calm, sounding neither angry nor frightened.

“Commandant, pouvez-vous faire décoller ces avions?” a man said in French. Deborah also heard Spanish, but the bulk of the chatter was in Mandarin. Was that significant?

“W xiàn zài gào sù n, w mén de wèi xng tú xiàng xin shì n de j dì wèi shòu yng xing,” the woman said as Deborah hesitated. Then she saw the Air Force captain gesture impatiently.

Deborah pushed into the clusters of people, patting at their shoulders or backs to make them aware of her. One man spoke Italian. The lilting flow of it made her think of Gustavo and his funny grin, but there wasn’t time to remember more. She’d made sense of the clatter of keyboards all around her. Each of the translators was paired with another person who transcribed their conversation into English, typing furiously. Some of the transcribers also muttered into their own headsets. They were collating data from all over the command center… and sending it where?

As she watched, one man stood up and pointed at the next row as if following an e-mail or a few words, making sure he gained another soldier’s attention. They were funneling information to one station, where other staffers were using that data to correct and maintain their situation maps. Deborah looked at the main display again, where occupied California was still densely packed with blinking symbols. The enemy seemed unaffected by the plague.

“W mén xyào lián xì zhèng f què rèn shì fu x yào zuò ch fn yìng,” a man said in Mandarin, as another shouted, “Still nothing from Two Echo Two, sir!”

Deborah reached the knot surrounding the general. Another officer touched Caruso’s shoulder. He glanced back and forth among them, settled on Deborah, and said to the phone, “I will disregard those orders unless the secretary himself tells me otherwise. We’ve already waited too long.”

Her skin crawled with awe and dread at the reptilian focus in Caruso’s eyes. He had become one of the few remaining heads of state in allied North America. The weight on his soul must have been crushing, and yet that pressure was exactly what he’d trained for.

He didn’t like what he heard. “If your compound has been breached, I am in command,” he said. “Is the secretary alive?” Then: “Two minutes.” He passed the handset to a Navy officer seated nearby and said, “Keep them on the line. Give me the phone again in ninety seconds.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Major Reece,” he said, his jaw barely moving. Muscles bulged in his cheeks.

“Sir.” Deborah’s back was ramrod straight.

“Has she seen the photos?” Caruso asked, and another officer said, “I’m sorry, General. No. Over here.” He tugged at Deborah’s arm and she bent to look at one of the many computer screens.

Behind her, Caruso said, “Who else do we have online at Peterson?”

The other officer clicked through several windows and brought up two still photos. A white man. A dark woman. These pictures were grainy compared to the rest of the images in the room and Deborah thought, distantly, that both stills must have been pulled from security cameras. It was hard to think, because she felt as if she’d been shot.

The faces in the photos were full of the plague’s staring confusion. Their pupils were distorted and the man’s head hung sideways on his neck, his mouth slanting open.

But they’re supposed to be okay! Deborah thought.

All of the complexes in Grand Lake were set apart from each other because they’d been built at different times and because it had been thought best to spread their assets. Complex 3 was also specially retrofitted to make sure it was airtight because they believed it might become dangerous. Three was where Grand Lake maintained their nanotech labs. Those people should have been able to keep the new plague out as perfectly as they kept their own experiments inside.

The woman was Meghna Katechia, an Indian national who became the head of Grand Lake’s weapons program after the war. The man was Steve McCown, Katechia’s top assistant, who had worked with Ruth Goldman herself for a time.

“Can you confirm—” the officer began.

“Steve McCown and Meghna Katechia,” Deborah said. “Where are the others? Did we get out Laury or Aaron?”

“No. We think one of the civilians panicked and tried to run for it. Complex 3 was a total loss.”

In the next row, a translator bolted upright from her desk and shouted, “Sir! General Caruso, sir! I have a Russian field general calling on all frequencies for assistance from U.S. forces! He’s reporting widespread infections in California and says he’s also been cut off from mainland Russia!”

“Jesus Christ,” the Navy officer muttered, but Caruso turned to an Army colonel and said, “Get on that, John.” He waved to another man and called, “Where are our satellites?”

A double cross? Deborah wondered. The Chinese are attacking their friends, too. Why?

“I think he’s telling the truth, sir!” the translator shouted as the colonel pressed into the crowd to reach him, calling new orders to the entire group.

“Press the Europeans again,” the colonel said. “What do they know?”

Caruso turned back to Deborah. “Can you help us if we get some equipment out of the labs?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“If we can’t decontaminate the gear, we’ll put you in a suit and bring everything to a safe room. I’m willing to send men out there if you think you have any chance of giving us some information on this nanotech. Anything at all.”

Deborah stammered. “I — Sir.” She didn’t want to fail him, but she couldn’t lie. “I’m a physician. My involvement with the nanotech programs was negligible at best.”

“You know more than anyone else I’ve got,” Caruso said.

“General, I have the 35 on the phone again!” the Navy officer called, holding out a handset.

Caruso kept his eyes on Deborah. “You know how to operate their microscopes,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I’m sending a team to recover what we can.” Caruso gestured to two officers nearby. Both of them nodded. One picked up a phone. Without wasting another moment, Caruso pressed his own handset to his ear and said, “This is A6.”

He listened only an instant before his mouth twisted.

“Every minute there is more and more evidence that we know exactly where the nanotech originated,” he said. “Goldman was right.”

Ruth? Deborah thought. She’s alive!

More than that, it sounded as though Ruth was working on their side again, which made Deborah happier than she would have expected.

“Where is the secretary?” Caruso asked. “If he cannot personally verify his whereabouts, I am in command.” Then: “I am in command.” He pointed to an officer seated at the computers and said, “Emergency action message. Authenticate our status as Kaleidoscope.”

“This is Wild Fire with an EAM for all units,” the man said into his headset. “I repeat, this is Wild Fire with an Emergency Action Message for all units. Prepare to copy message.”

Caruso gestured to a different station. “Try to get me a direct line to the Chinese premier or anyone in their civilian government in California,” he said. “We’ll make one more effort to call them off.”

“Juliet Victor Bravo Golf Whiskey Golf November Delta. I repeat, Juliet Victor Bravo Golf Whiskey Golf November Delta,” the other man said, and Deborah felt her skin crawl again, because she knew what Caruso was doing.

After the war, they’d dispersed their civilian and military hierarchies as far as they were able. They could have returned to D.C., for example, but it was two thousand miles from the Rockies. The logistics would have been daunting. Even if they’d beefed up local defenses, D.C. would be alone, so the great majority of American and Canadian forces stayed along the Continental Divide, not only to save their strength but to remain massed against the enemy in California.

Fortunately, the Rockies stretched through eight states and one Canadian Province. Only the president, some military staffers, and a few of their irregularly elected congressmen were in Missoula. The rest of the top members of the U.S. leadership were scattered across the Divide to prevent them from ever being killed by one surgical strike. Their command systems were equally redundant.

Peterson AFB, on the east side of the Rockies, had been restored as one of their largest air bases. Years ago, Peterson had served as the new center for NORAD after the famous old tunnels beneath Cheyenne Mountain were mothballed, and the infrastructure at Peterson was too valuable to ignore even if it had taken some fallout. Unfortunately, because Peterson was also home to multiple air wings, it was a surface base. A few of its buildings could be sealed against biological threats or nanotechnology, but Deborah guessed now that Peterson was no better off than the mountaintops above Grand Lake.

If the secretary of defense was in Peterson, he could be lost like the president and the VP, either infected or hurt or cut off. From what she’d heard, the SecDef must have insisted that Caruso stay his hand until they were positive who’d created the new plague, but Caruso was usurping the SecDef in the succession of command for America’s nuclear arsenal.

It’s come to this, Deborah thought.

A profound sense of reality washed over her. She felt the bagginess of her uniform and breathed in the tense, acrid smell of the men and women who filled this box. Every choice they made now was as large as the world.

“Sir, I’m sorry,” she said, trying to interrupt.

There was a new fear coiling in her chest. She knew General Caruso from the war. The American side hadn’t had many advantages, and he’d seen little except defeat. He had been an advocate of using Ruth’s skills to commit genocide against the Russians and the Chinese, and Deborah wondered if he’d finally seen his chance.

“Sir, you’re in contact with Ruth Goldman?” she asked. “We need her — not me. She can tell us what’s happening.”

“You’re all we’ve got, Major.”

“What about Ruth?”

“Sir, I have the assistant secretary of defense on the horn!” called the Navy officer.

“Disconnect that line,” Caruso said. His lips pressed together like knives. Then he turned to a woman at another desk and said, “I want an open broadcast to all Chinese forces. They will stop their attack immediately or we’ll hit Los Angeles.”

What if Ruth is dead? Deborah wondered. Infected? She knew she wouldn’t be able to provide more than the slightest information about the mind plague herself. Caruso’s choice might be the only way. The U.S. had lost control of most of its silos during the plague year, because while those underground holes were well sealed, their oxygen was only meant to last a few days. Only an extremely limited number of crews had managed to wait it out after being equipped with precious supplies and air compressors that allowed them to create the low air densities necessary to destroy the machine plague.

With the vaccine, however, the USAF had retaken those silos, and now they had thousands of Minuteman and Titan missiles on hand — plenty to eradicate mainland China if Caruso gave the order.

You have to believe he’s right, Deborah told herself, like she’d always told herself. But her doubt was heavy inside her. She glanced up at the situation maps again, desperate to see some shred of hope. Instead, the dots in Russian-occupied California were turning into ghosts, static and dim, leaving only the Chinese zones in the southern half of the state untouched, like a safe zone or an epicenter.

North America teetered on the brink of nuclear war.