“Mr. President, we have some new developments.”
CHAPTER 37
The president couldn’t believe what he’d just heard: there were now three additional major American cities under attack! Three cities that hadn’t been evacuated at all — no preparation, no warning — because there hadn’t been a need to! He wearily scanned the population demographics that had been hurriedly provided by Hugo McIntyre.
Minneapolis — nearly 340,000 people.
St. Paul — one half of the famed Twin Cities — had a population of over 270,000 people. There were no reports from there yet, but the president knew they would come.
Oklahoma City — well over 400,000 people.
Little Rock — almost 184,000 people.
Three cities — soon to be four when St. Paul was hit, which it almost certainly would be — with over one million American citizens under attack.
“These cities are nowhere near the five existing waves. How in the living hell did these things get that far, that fast? And how did we miss it?”
“Mr. President, we’re trying to ascertain that right now. We don’t know where they came from.” Ray Smythe was reeling from the new information flowing into the NMCC. He was trying to keep his thoughts focused on what was happening, but in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but think about his daughter stranded in traffic outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. A doomed city.
The president’s voice boomed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want answers, and I want them yesterday! We’ve got three new waves attacking our citizens hundreds of miles away from the waves we’ve been tracking. ‘We don’t know where they came from’ is not a good answer! It’s absolutely unacceptable. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
The yessirs came fast and furious.
“Mr. President, I think we need to reconsider the possibility that this may be some sort of coordinated attack,” Hugo McIntyre said. “It doesn’t make sense that these things could’ve moved so quickly — traveled hundreds of miles — without us seeing them. Whatever caused this travesty to erupt in Kansas City must have been released in these three new cities as well.”
“Released? Are you saying this is all part of a coordinated biological attack?”
Ray Smythe spoke next. “Sir, the initial information we’ve received from the Vanguard team suggests the mutations were caused by a Soviet biological warfare agent called 1Z65. It doesn’t explain everything that’s happened, but they’re almost certain this agent has something to do with it.”
“Could this Soviet agent have made it into terrorist hands?”
“Doubtful, but it’s a possibility, Mr. President.” Tank took the next five minutes to explain the history of the 1Z65 agent. “The Soviets lost control of it when one of their scientists smuggled it out of the Soviet Union and brought it to us, and we had an accidental release as well. The Russians — and we — destroyed all remaining samples of the agent in the mid-1990s, sir.”
“You mean all known samples.”
The SECDEF sighed. “Yes, sir, all known samples.”
Ray Smythe broke in from the NMCC. “Sir, we’ve got an update from Minneapolis. The animals are different from what we’ve seen so far. They’re birds, sir.”
“Birds?” The president’s tone was incredulous. If the next thing he heard was that a truck full of teddy bears had come to life in San Francisco and had started eating people with a little sourdough bread on the side, he wouldn’t be surprised one little bit.
“Yes, sir. Initial reports from Little Rock and Oklahoma City — and now St. Paul — are stating the same thing. Birds, Mr. President.”
Visions of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller immediately filled the mind of every member of the president’s cabinet. Except this wasn’t a movie. No cheesy special effects. Real blood. Real death.
“We could’ve missed them.” The vice president joined the discussion.
“What do you mean, Allison?”
“Mr. President, if the mutation has been passed to birds — which it’s obvious it has been — it could’ve happened last night, or the night before, and we’re only encountering them now. If it happened in the vicinity of Kansas City, they could’ve traveled that far. We have to assume they can travel at an increased rate of speed, just like the mutated creatures in the five existing waves. I don’t think we can assume this is a coordinated attack with complete certainty. This could be related to the initial mutations.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a coordinated attack or not,” Jessie Hruska stated. “We can figure that out later. Right now, we have the five existing waves on the ground — and now three new waves in the air — that all need to be stopped. If they’re not, we’re going to lose millions of our people.”
“The Vanguard team is trying to figure out exactly how to do that right now, Ms. Hruska.”
“With all due respect, Madame Vice President, we don’t have the time to wait. We need to act now. Tonight. We need to discuss the other options available to us.” Jessie Hruska’s eyes flashed bright green, full of determination. “I think we all realize by now that conventional options are not working. General Smythe, do you agree?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He paused, finding it hard to believe he was about to suggest deploying chemical — and possibly nuclear — weapons on American soil. Weapons that would certainly kill thousands of innocent citizens… but, if successful, would save millions more. “Conventional weapons are not stopping them. We’re throwing everything at them that we can, and they’re still advancing. The ground forces, Mr. President, are being sacrificed; they don’t have a chance against these things. Not with these kinds of numbers. They just can’t stop them.”
“What are you suggesting, General?” the president asked.
“I agree with Ms. Hruska that we need to consider other options available to us. One, of course, is nuclear weapons… which I feel is an option of last resort, Mr. President.”
“As do I, General. Your other option?”
“Chemical weapons, Mr. President.”
The president immediately turned to his SECDEF. “Tank, am I to understand we have chemical weapons in the inventory?” Once he’d assumed office, he’d been briefed on a number of things that only a president and a select few in government were allowed to know. Some of the things had made him wince. Others only became known after he had dug a little deeper and found the right career bureaucrat to pressure. It was an unfortunate — and natural — consequence of big government: some things passed from administration to administration, from president to president, without ever coming out in the open. He hoped chemical weapons weren’t one of them. The tone of his question suggested that heads were going to roll if he didn’t get the right answer.
“No, sir. Not… exactly. We have ex-Soviet weapons in storage awaiting destruction. They could be brought to bear in minimal time, if we decide to do that.”
“What kind of agents?”
“Mostly nerve agents, Mr. President. There are some quantities of sarin, some VX, but the majority is soman.”
Over the years the president had been briefed numerous times on enemy chemical capabilities — especially during his time in the Navy — and he knew soman well; it had made up the majority of the Soviet Union’s chemical warfare arsenal. It was a nasty nerve agent made by combining sarin with another chemical weapon known as lewisite — a blister agent. Also known as GD, soman had been initially developed as an insecticide in Nazi Germany in 1944. They found it worked just as well on people as it did on bugs. “Tank, correct me if I’m wrong, but soman has a very short lingering effect, right?”