The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

64

By the time Caroline Brock's helicopter was over Manhattan, the area of the bombing at 44th Street and Broadway had been cordoned off into a central area and an outer ring. Hazardous materials rescuers were working inside the cordon. Some of the critically injured were taken to a biohazard tent erected directly outside the entrance of the Helmsley Hotel on 42nd Street. There they were treated and tested. The hotel was being evacuated and turned into a quarantine hospital.

Those with minor injuries were led to the outer ring of the cordon where their wounds were examined. They had to discard their clothes. Stainless steel shower stalls were being set up for decontaminating hazard suits, equipment and people. Survivors and evacuees were showering and registering, then, after being vaccinated, they were allowed to leave.

Traffic between Fifth and Eighth avenues and between 39th and 46th streets was stopped and drivers were told to leave their vehicles so they could be decontaminated. They themselves had to line up to shower and leave their clothes to be incinerated.

Lines of Manhattan office workers, dressed uniformly in blue cotton pyjamas, wrapped in grey blankets and wearing green plastic sandals, filed out between the cars along pre-arranged routes, heading south and north along Broadway and east and west along 46th and 40th streets. On the way, they were vaccinated.

All health officials wore biohazard suits, their sleeves marked with the yellow three-lobed flower indicating danger. Those inside the cordon worked wearing breathing apparatus. As the situation came more under control, firemen and police ensured that people got undressed, showered, and were vaccinated and their clothes collected for disposal before they left their buildings. Then, floor by floor, the great buildings of Times Square were closed down, each room checked, swept and sealed with red and white plastic tape.

From the air, the carnage around the area of the bombing looked like a trap, dangerous and eerily different from the rest of Manhattan. Yet that too was changing by the second. As news spread, so the mood transformed.

Caroline brought the respirator over her head, clipped it down and pulled on her gloves. A secret service agent sealed the cuffs with tape. The pilot kept the helicopter steady in the strong winds that whipped around the buildings, making any landing in high-rise Manhattan difficult.

He brought the aircraft down on the roof of the newly built Citic Towers Hotel, dropped off Caroline and her two secret service agents and took off again immediately. A figure in a red biohazard spacesuit was waiting for her.

'John Pincher, Dr Brock. Special adviser to FEMA, and reporting directly to Tom Patton.' He held out a gloved hand to her. Caroline wanted to shout back a reply above the noise of the helicopter engines, but Pincher's voice through his respirator was calm and slow.

'Thanks for meeting me,' she answered.

'The hotel has been evacuated. Nothing you're going to see will be a pleasant sight.'

Pincher led them down a flight of stairs to where firemen held the lift.

'Anything left of the bomber?' asked Caroline.

'The head is pretty much intact. We hope to have an ID on him soon. Otherwise, bits of his jacket, a buckle — and we've found a brass battery connection.'

'We need to get the blood sample from the head to Fort Detrick right away. We might be dealing with a rogue strain of the variola major.'

'You mean, the vaccine—' muttered Pincher.

'Might not work. Correct,' said Caroline, cutting him off. 'Until we can find out exactly which strain we're dealing with.'

The lift stopped and the door opened. Caroline gasped and put one hand towards her mouth, forgetting that the hand was gloved and that her face was sealed off by a mask.

Laid out in the hotel lobby, row after row, stretching from the reception desk to the grand piano and in towards the bar, were the naked bodies of the wounded and of those who had just died, all mixed together, with troops armed with weapons watching over them. Hoses with shower heads were being used to spray over them. Where the hoses wouldn't reach, they were being drenched with buckets of disinfected water.

'Formaldehyde,' said Pincher. He shook his head. 'It's dreadful. It's humiliating. But it's necessary.'

They picked their way through towards the lobby door, where heavy-duty plastic sheeting had been put up to conceal what was happening inside.

'Are the ventilation ducts still operating?'

'They are,' said Pincher, lifting the sheeting to let Caroline through.

'Shut them down in all the buildings,' she said, pausing just for a moment at what she saw in front of her. 'We don't want air going in or out.'

She turned to face Pincher, knowing that her brusque instructions were a facade to cover her emotions. Her eyes were watery, yet she couldn't wipe the moisture away.

'I know it means the heating. But turn it off. Find them blankets. Until we've got an all-clear.'

The site of the explosion was not as dreadful as the scene inside the hotel. It seemed uncannily less man-made — the act of just one individual, not of an institution. She was amazed at how swiftly America could mobilize. It was less than two hours since the attack, and here was a cordon with order inside it. The bodies of those killed instantly lay where they had fallen with yellow tags tied to their left ankles. If limbs had been severed, they were individually tagged, too. New York Police Department photographers moved easily around FBI forensic agents, firemen and others who were slowly clearing dangerous debris while being careful not to destroy evidence.

'Fifty-eight dead,' said Pincher. 'Two hundred and thirty injured. We reckon about another fifty won't make it.'

She could feel the edge in his voice. The bomb had not been that big. The lower windows of the buildings around Times Square itself were shattered. Firemen hosed down cars that had piled up, but they had not been flung in the air, as would have happened with a more powerful explosion. The electricity remained on, with the neon signs working as if the world was still a safe place. Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Panasonic, McDonald's had all survived. Even the red news electronic display ran unbothered by the death beneath it.

'US marines land in North Korea. Heavy fighting across DMZ. Seoul in flames. Bioterror scare.' Caroline stopped looking before it came round to the suicide attack in Times Square.

'I need to get the sample, take a look, then I need to be choppered to Fort Detrick. We need one sample to go there and another to go to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.'

While Pincher repeated her command into his radio, Caroline ran the implications through her mind. If a week went by before symptoms appeared, it would mean the IL-4/variola major strain might not be as lethal as she feared. But it was a big 'if'. Very big.

There was an uncanny discrepancy between the smallness of the explosion and the marshalled enthusiasm of the rescue teams going about their work. They were resolute, almost embracing the task, as if they were back at Ground Zero. There was a great American optimism about what they were doing, a belief that once it was cleared, however long it took, and once the grieving was over, life would go back to normal.

Caroline walked forward and stepped over a leg with a yellow plastic sandal still on the foot. A paperback novel lay pushed up against the edge of the pavement, squashed and burnt, but with the cover still somehow intact. Three cabs had concertinaed into each other, their yellow paint stripped off in the heat.

Where the bomber had stood was a small crater. The explosion had ripped through the paving slab and cracked a pipe where water was dribbling out, creating an oily black pool which oozed on to the pavement. A body lay there, a pedestrian close enough to die but far enough away for the body to stay intact. It was covered with a thin layer of dust and debris. A flashlight beam lit the corpse's face. She was young, her face purposeful and pretty, with no fear there at all.

'Excuse me, ma'am,' said a voice behind Caroline. She shifted to one side, as two firemen knelt down to try to look inside the crater and stem the water flow without disturbing the body.

'Get back. Everyone, just keep back.' Another voice, and Caroline glanced over and saw police linking arms as a crowd of onlookers stumbled in the crush to get a better view. How strange that everyone was so caught up in the experience. They were detached and curious, because the tragedy had not directly affected them. For a moment the rescuers and onlookers were liberated from dreary routine. Whether inside or outside the cordon they were confronted with the evidence of evil, which gave value to their own purpose. Here was the underbelly of war, the dark fascination that drew people to it time after time.

Caroline stepped over a complete corpse, the top of the beige raincoat it was wearing unscathed, but the collar lying in a pool of dark coagulating blood. The rest of the body was charred and shrivelled, reminding her of some of the photographs from Delhi.

But this was not Delhi. It was a single small suicide bomb — and initial traces of variola major. That was what nagged at Caroline more than anything. In the Wake Island missile the capsules had drifted down on a fixed propeller, limiting the trauma experienced by the virus and enabling it to survive. No explosives had been detected. So the Times Square bomb had not been a method of distribution, she concluded, just a signal of terror.