Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

papers. She picked up a remote control and pointed it at the ceiling. The lights dimmed and a wall-size monitor flickered to life behind her. The screen briefly showed the symbol for the Joint Chiefs of Staff before flashing a warning that the following information was classified and listed dire consequences if the viewer didn’t take that warning seriously.

“I don’t need to tell you all that what we’re facing is incredibly dangerous, not just to us but to the world. Gentlemen, this is our real enemy,” she said and the screen changed to a microscopic image of what Cooper presumed to be the weaponized bug. To him, it looked like a hairy blob, floating in bubbles.

“Many of you will recognize this as the image that graced the cover of Time Magazine at the onset of The Great Pandemic. We are facing that same virus today, only I can confirm now it has been genetically modified to act as a weapon of mass destruction. Perhaps the greatest such weapon that has ever been devised and unleashed by mankind.”

Cooper and Charlie shared a look. Holy shit. Then Charlie blew him a mimed kiss. Cooper frowned and turned to the front.

“You’ve all seen the early casualty reports and I’m sure no one here needs a reminder of the chaos we all suffered through ten years ago. Well, gentlemen, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The infected numbers have risen across the country for the past three days at a steady rate and if the pattern holds true to ten years ago, we’ll see a sharp uptick in morbidity in just a few more days. We’re already seeing higher-than-average fatalities in hot zones.”

The screen changed to a huge map of the United States. “Hot Zones—Epicenters of Contagion” read the title at the top of the screen. On the map, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. were represented by blinking red dots.

Numbers appeared next to each dot—the number of cases was staggering. In Los Angeles alone there were reported over 100,000 people sick with the flu in the past week. Cooper blinked—a warning at the bottom of the screen indicated that the data was not complete for all secondary infection epicenters. The map was only listing the primary targets of the bio-weapon.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to say this, but it appears that there has been an antigen drift,” Brenda said.

There were a few whispered comments from audience.

Antigen drift.

The Pandemic years seemed like another lifetime away, but Cooper well remembered those two little words. During height of the crisis, the press had breathlessly exclaimed scientists had finally found a way to beat the dreaded virus—only to discover it had mutated slightly, allowing it to parry modern medicine’s counterpunch. The virologists had called it an antigen drift.

He had learned antigen drift was nothing really unusual—viruses do it all the time, especially influenza—but before the world could catch its breath, the drift had turned into a shift. The H5N1 Pandemic’s antigen shift had completely fooled the human immune system and threw the floodgates wide open. Infection rates skyrocketed, igniting a wildfire that roared to life around the entire planet. Wherever the Blue Flu went, death followed in its footsteps.

The antigen drift had been the tipping point—when the H5N1 crisis had surpassed the 1918 Spanish Flu as the single deadliest pandemic in all of recorded human history. After that, it would forever be known as The Pandemic.

And it had all started with those two little words: antigen drift.

“—reach the tipping point,” Brenda was saying, her face grim. Cooper suppressed a shiver. Tipping point. Another pair of words that brought back a lot of bad, bad memories.

“We can’t, of course, predict when that point will be, but I can assure you,” she continued, “it won’t be too long now. We’re seeing some major drifts in cultures taken from the Occupied Zone that aren’t being matched by what’s happening on the Eastern Seaboard.”

Movement at the head table caught her eye.

“We, ah…” she said, as Admiral Bennet stood and moved toward the podium.

“May I?” he asked.

“Of course, sir,” Brenda replied. She stepped aside.

The Admiral cleared his throat and appeared to be considering what to say. Cooper instinctively leaned forward a little. “I believe I may be able to shed a little more light on this situation. At his first cabinet meeting this afternoon, President Harris was briefed by the CIA concerning the North Korean invasion. I can’t tell you everything that was said, but I can tell you the North Koreans have managed to inoculate their marines with some sort of half-assed vaccine. At least that’s what the spooks told the President,” he said to a welcome round of chuckles from his audience.

“Seems the North Koreans have hit on the idea to whip-up some second-hand, cloned version of our old synthetic H5N1 vaccine—the stuff with a reduced shelf-life that we gave countries that weren’t exactly friendly to us. Well, they mixed it with methamphetamine. The combination seems to be giving their troops just enough of an edge to counteract the weaponized flu that’s saturated the West Coast. Our best guess is this mixture, unstable as it is, won’t be effective for very long—then the NKors are going to start getting sick and dropping whether we shoot them or not.”

“I vote we shoot them anyway, just to make sure,” grumbled the Commandant from the head table. A ragged cheer erupted from the assembled commanders that only stopped when Admiral Bennet raised both hands.

“Major,” Admiral Bennet said, stepping out of the way as Brenda once again took the podium.

“Well, either the weaponized strain of flu that was released in the U.S. is changing its own genetic code, or the vaccine strain the Koreans carry may be combining with the weaponized strain they released. Either way, it’s starting to mutate into something slightly different and we can’t be sure which way it’s going to jump.”

The screen behind her changed from the microscopic monster to a graph with different colored lines. Cooper saw one for young children, one for healthy adults in their prime, and one for the elderly. The curves and spikes didn’t mean much to Cooper, but there was an oddly familiar pattern. The line for kids was just a curve. So was that for the elderly. But the line for healthy adults made a distinct W pattern.

“This is the mortality graph from the Spanish Flu of 1918.” A laser pointer flared to life and she moved the dot to trace along the “W” line. “It was the first time in history that we noticed this particular pattern. The Spanish Flu had normal death-tolls among the very young and old—the two most vulnerable age groups in the population for any given flu season.”

The laser bobbed and weaved along the W. Cooper could tell she was nervous. Hell, he would be too, if he had to get up in front of this much brass and talk about something so frightening.

“This is the scary part. The W line you see here indicates the healthy adult population—ages 20-40 roughly—people who were naturally the most likely to either fight off the flu entirely, or to get sick and recover. That spike in the middle represents the large die-off that occurred in 1918 affecting the healthy adult population. It went against all medical knowledge at the time and was completely novel and utterly devastating.” The slide changed to another chart with different dates and similar shapes.

“This is the same chart, with data taken from The Great Pandemic. Notice the similarity? They’re very close, yet the mortality rates are much higher for the H5N1 virus as opposed to the 1918 flu, which was H1N1. The average curves are nearly identical, though. The Spanish Flu had a 2 to 4 percent mortality rate. Infected patients had a 97-percent chance—roughly—of surviving. The problem was, if you were in that 2 to 3 percent, you died and there was nothing anyone could do. And it happened fast. Death occurred in many cases less than 72 hours after first presenting with symptoms.”

The slide changed to a calendar. “It has been a week now since the first fatality that we can confirm was caused by this weaponized form of the Blue Flu.” The slide changed again showing what looked like a steep, exponential curve. “We are on the cusp of the initial spike. Despite what the current fatality reports are currently indicating, I would add at least 15 percent to those numbers, and that’s a conservative estimate.”

She waited for the murmuring to die down. “The reason I’m telling you all of this is because this form of the H5N1 Pandemic virus has been, as I said, genetically modified by the North Koreans to be even more lethal than the original version. The mutations we’ve found recently indicate that the virus—at least in samples from Los Angeles and Seattle—is somehow slipping past the body’s natural defense mechanisms. The human body doesn’t even recognize this thing as a threat.”

“You’re talking a stealth virus,” someone called out. A ripple of chuckles spread through the crowd.

Cooper felt his own patience wearing thin. Dr. Alston’s cheeks flushed. “Sir, if you’d like to continue making jokes, go ahead. But this ‘stealth virus’ has what we’re estimating to be a 10-percent mortality rate. The Spanish Flu killed roughly 100 million people worldwide in the span of a year—it had a 3-percent average mortality rate.” She took a breath and gripped the sides of the podium with white knuckles. “The Great Pandemic killed almost half a billion people around the planet with a 6-percent fatality rate. At 10 percent, we could be looking at death rates that would almost double what we saw 10 years ago.”

The room became as silent as a crypt.

“Gentlemen, I’m telling you this because you have to take measures now to protect and insulate your soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. We will not be able to fight the North Koreans—or any other threats—if a tenth of our war fighters are dead and the rest are recovering from a major illness.” She rubbed her temples and Cooper could see the frustration in her face.

The screen changed again, this time showing a picture of police officers wearing surgical masks during The Great