"I think they're just trying to piss us off."
"Agreed." The captain flipped a mental coin. "Well, they're harassing the Orion. Let 'em know we see 'em," he ordered.
Two seconds later, the SPY search radar jacked up its power to four million watts, sent all of it down one degree of bearing at the inbound fighters, and increased the «dwell» on the targets, which meant they were being hit almost continuously. It was enough to peg the threat-detection gear they had to have aboard. Inside of twenty miles, it could even start damaging such equipment, depending on how delicate it was. That was called a "zorch," and the captain still had another two million watts of power up his sleeve. The joke was that if you really pissed off an Aegis, you might start producing two-headed kids.
"Kiddjust went to battle stations, sir," the officer of the deck reported.
"Good training time, isn't it?" Range to Raid-One was just over one hundred miles now. "Weps, light 'em up."
With that command, the ship's four SPG-51 target-illumination radars turned, sending pencil beams of X-band energy at the inbound fighters. These radars told the missiles how to find their targets. The Indian threat gear would pick that up, too. The fighters didn't change course or speed.
"Okay, that means we're not playing rough today. If they were of a mind to do something, they'd be maneuvering now," the captain told his crew. "You know, like turning the corner when you see a cop." Or they had ice water in their veins, which didn't seem likely.
"Going to eyeball the formation?" Weps asked.
"That's what I'd do. Take some pictures, see what's here," Kemper thought.
"A lot of things happening at once, sir."
"Yep," the captain agreed, watching the display. He lifted the growler phone.
"Bridge," the OOD answered.
"Tell your lookouts I want to know what they are. Photos, if possible. How's visibility topside?"
"Surface haze, not bad aloft, sir. I've got men on the Big Eyes now."
"Very well."
"They'll go past us to the north, turn left, and come down our port side," the captain predicted.
"Sir, Gonzo-Four reports a very close pass a few seconds ago," air control said.
"Tell him to stay cool."
"Aye, Cap'n." The situation developed quickly after that. The fighters circled COMEDY twice, never closer than five nautical miles. The Indian Harriers spent another fifteen minutes around the patrolling Orion, then had to return back to their carrier to refuel, and another day at sea continued with no shots fired and no overtly hostile acts, unless you counted the fighter play, and that was pretty routine. When all was settled down, the captain of USS Anzio turned to his communications officer.
"I need to talk to CmCLANT. Oh, Weps?" Kemper added.
"Yes, sir?"
"I want every combat system on this ship fully checked out."
"Sir, we just ran a full check twelve hours—"
"Right now, Weps," he emphasized quietly.
"AND THAT'S GOOD news?" Cathy asked.
"Doctor, that's real simple," Alexandre said in reply. "You watched some people die this morning. You will watch more die tomorrow, and that stinks. But thousands is better than millions, isn't it? I think this epidemic is going to burn out." He didn't add that it was somewhat easier for him. Cathy was an eye cutter. She wasn't used to dealing with death. He was infectious diseases, and he was used to it. Easier? Was that the word? "We'll know in a couple of days from statistical analysis of the cases."
The President nodded silently. Van Damm spoke for him: "What's the count going to be?"
"Less than ten thousand, according to the computer models at Reed and Detrick. Sir, I am not being cavalier about this. I'm saying that ten thousand is better than ten million."
"One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic," Ryan said finally.
"Yes, sir. I know that one." The good news didn't make Alexandre all that happy. But how else to tell people that a disaster was better than a catastrophe?
"Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin," SWORDSMAN told them. "He did have a way with words."
"You know who did it," Alex observed.
"What makes you say that?" Jack asked.
"You didn't react normally to what I told you, Mr. President."
"Doctor, I haven't done much of anything normally over the past few months. What does this mean about the no-travel order?"
"It means we leave it in place for at least another week. Our prediction is not carved in stone. The incubation period for the disease is somewhat variable. You don't send the fire trucks home as soon as the last flame disappears. You sit there and watch for another possible flare-up. That will happen here, too. What's worked to this point is that people are frightened to death. Because of that, personal interactions are minimized, and that's how you stop one of these things. We keep 'em that way. The new cases will be very circumscribed. We attack those like we did with smallpox. Identify the cases, test everyone with whom they've had contact, isolate the ones with antibodies, and see how they do. It's working, okay? Whoever did this miscalculated. The disease isn't anywhere near as contagious as they thought—or maybe the whole thing was just a psychological exercise. That's what bio-war is. The great plagues of the past really happened because people didn't know how diseases spread. They didn't know about microbes and fleas and contaminated water. We do. Everybody does, you learn it in health class in school. Hell, that's why we haven't had any medics infected. We've had lots of practice dealing with AIDS and hepatitis. The same precautions that work with those also work with this."
"How do we keep it from happening again?" van Damm asked.
"I told you that already. Funding. Basic research on the genetic side, and more focused work on the diseases we know about. There's no particular reason why we can't develop safe vaccines for Ebola and a lot of others."
"AIDS?" Ryan asked.
"That's a toughie. That virus is an agile little bastard. No attempt for a vaccine has even come close yet. No, on that side, basic genetic research to determine how the biologic mechanism works, and from that to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it—some sort of vaccine; that's what a vaccine is. But how to make it work, well, we haven't figured that one yet. We'd better. In twenty years, we might have to write Africa off. Hey," the Creole said, "I got kin over there, y'know?
"That's one way to keep it from happening again. You, Mr. President, are already working on the other way. Who was it?"
He didn't have to tell anybody how secret it was: "Iran. The Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei and his merry men."
Alexandre reverted to officer in the United States Army: "Sir, you can kill all of them you want, as far as I'm concerned."
IT WAS INTERESTING to see Mehrabad International Airport in daylight. Clark had never experienced Iran as a friendly country. Supposedly, before the fall of the Shah, the people had been friendly enough, but he hadn't made the trip soon enough for that. He'd come in covertly in 1979 and again in 1980, first to develop information for, and then to participate in, the attempt to rescue the hostages. There were no words to describe what it was like to be in a country in a revolutionary condition. His time on the ground in the Soviet Union had been far more comfortable. Enemy or not, Russia had always been a civilized country with lots of rules and citizens who broke them. But Iran had ignited like a dry forest in a lightning storm. "Death to America" had been a chant on everyone's lips, and that, he remembered, was about as scary as things got when you were in the middle of the mob singing i that song. One little mistake, just contacting an agent who'd been turned, would have been his death, rather a frightening thought to a man with young children, spook or no spook. Locally they shot some criminals, but spies they mostly hanged. It seemed a gratuitously cruel way to take a man's life.