He stuck the unlit cigar in his mouth and flipped a switch on the console. An LCD began passing a decoded message across the screen in front of him and he was both surprised and alarmed by the message from one of his “moles” coming in during office hours — his spies usually reported late at night when they were most likely to be unobserved.
At the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, known as USAMRIID, the army’s secret facility for the study of biological and chemical weapons, it was business hours and there were dozens of officers and office personnel hanging around that weren’t in the loop about his spy network or the research he conducted in secret. It would be a disaster if any of them suspected what he was doing.
The message read:
Janus. Hot-bug in jungles of Mexico near Tlateloco looks very promising. Human-to-human transmission strong possibility. Over thirty dead. Signs of hemorrhagic shock in all victims. Reported three-to-seven-day incubation period. Will send samples when isolated. Watch how you handle this one — it sounds like it’s a definite Biohazard Level Four bug.
Blackman read the sign-off for Janus, drumming his fingers on a desk top. CDC’s Wildfire crew was heading to some remote part of Mexico with a hot zone and a bug his informant thought had strong possibilities. The colonel knew Mason Williams was no beginner despite his age and he wouldn’t have called for an intervention without definite cause.
This could be it, Blackman whispered to himself, his heart rate soaring in excitement. Thirty-plus victims probably meant an almost one hundred percent mortality rate, and a three-to-seven-days incubation period was more than promising, unless its host turned out to be some form of rare jungle beetle or mosquito, which would limit wartime usage.
The most promising news from Janus was the possibility of person-to-person transmission, which might make this bug as devastating as a nuclear bomb. Now, all he could do was wait for samples of the hot-bug and hope it had a real potential for biological weaponry.
Blackie, as he was called by his associates at Fort Detrick, sighed and turned to a computer screen to call up map files of Mexico to find Tlateloco. Coded coordinates had come with the message from Janus. None of this secrecy would be necessary if there were any cooperation between USAMRIID and the CDC. There couldn’t be, of course, simply because the research that Colonel Blackman was conducting at Fort Detrick violated an executive order from 1969, when President Nixon declared the United States would not conduct any additional studies of biological or chemical offensive weapons.
What was going on here could end careers if it were discovered, not the least of which would be ruining the career of Colonel Woodrow Blackman, with an almost certain court-martial and probably a lengthy prison sentence for defying a presidential edict.
He’d just have to make sure Janus was not discovered, at least not until he had his hands on this latest hot-bug if it was even half as deadly as Janus suspected. After all, Janus had just months earlier tipped him to the suspected morbillivirus infecting horses and handlers in Australia and New Zealand — a hot-bug his biological research team was still evaluating as the next great top secret offensive agent for the U.S. biological weapons arsenal.
Just a few miles from USAMRIID headquarters in Maryland, U.S. Congressman Michael O’Donnell was both frustrated and worried. He had real concerns about what was going on at Fort Detrick, having heard whispers in the Congressional cloakroom about ongoing germ warfare studies there, which might be in violation of a presidential order signed in 1969 forbidding just such research. As a freshman member of the House National Security Committee, Military Research and Development Subcommittee, he had been secretly looking into USAMRIID activities, fearing what might happen in his home state should a deadly biological agent escape Fort Detrick. The area surrounding the army base was densely populated and any kind of contagion could quickly spread from there across the entire United States with disastrous results.
But what really worried him was the chance that Colonel Blackman would find out about his interest in his activities, for Blackman had the reputation of being a very, very dangerous opponent. Blackman was known on the Hill as a blood-and-guts soldier, a patriot from the “old school” who still believed in the big Communist threat and a world takeover by some lunatic dictator like Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini or even some “towel-head” named Achmed.
Blackman lived in a world of his own, shrouded in secrecy, which he believed was necessary due to some poorly defined threat he insisted would come from Russia or Europe or China or the Middle East. He justified everything he did as a necessary part of patriotism, and as such was entirely unpredictable.
In fact, O’Donnell knew men who’d shown too much interest in Blackman’s career or activities who had been known to suddenly disappear — a fact that had O’Donnell looking over his shoulder more often than not.
He also knew that not even his status as a United States congressman would protect him if Colonel Blackman deemed him to be a threat. The man’s egomaniacal personality and hair-trigger temper coupled with the ability to “disappear” an enemy made him as dangerous as a cobra.
O’Donnell realized he was going to have to tread very carefully if he was to survive his quest to find out just what Blackman was up to. It’s not paranoia if they really are shooting at you, he reasoned.
Chapter 5
The hammering staccato of helicopter blades slicing through air was a constant drone in Dr. Mason Williams’s ears, annoying him and making his head throb in tune to the beat of the blades. The sound was magnified inside the cavernous Huey because the cargo doors were open so members of the team could lean out, hanging on for dear life, staring at the jungle tableau flashing below them.
But it was what Mason saw below the chopper that kept him from further irritation over the noise as their Mexican Army pilot hovered above an ancient vine-covered stone temple. Lauren had told him it had been built by the Aztecs in a small jungle opening over four hundred years ago and had been the site of hundreds or thousands of blood sacrifices to their sun god. But now after so many years sitting abandoned and forgotten in the wilderness, jungle foliage had reclaimed the area until its pyramid-like shape was now almost completely cloaked in cloying green vines, and bushes and trees were growing from cracks between the boulders making up its sides.
Mason turned from the temple and began counting bodies, the ones he could see from two hundred feet above the dig site at Tlateloco. Most of the crumpled shapes were in a cleared area surrounding the temple, though some could be seen partially obscured underneath nearby coppices of trees.
The corpses seemed to lie everywhere, some bloated by jungle heat, others partially eaten by scavengers. Tall grass and leafy vines made it difficult to be sure of the count — hurricane-force downdraft from the helicopter’s blades caused too much movement, turning jungle greenery into a swirling morass of wind-blown vegetation revealing a leg or an arm or a torso here and there. The constant agitation of the greenery made it impossible to tell if body parts were still connected to a corpse or to get any kind of accurate count of people who’d died here.
Jesus, Mason thought. The area below looks like a goddamned war zone. The way the dead bodies are splayed in contorted positions makes it look like they’ve been machine-gunned by some rampaging army. He shook his head at the horror, thinking that in a way they had been killed by a rampaging army — an army of viruses or bacteria intent on nothing less than massive death.