Darkness at Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

room was deserted except for Mike, Montgomery, Dr. Samuels and Dr. Lucy Merritt.
    “Dr. Samuels.” Montgomery’s face had turned grim again, deep brackets around his mouth, nostrils white with tension. “What else can you tell us, positing a weaponized HFV, based on what we’ve seen?”
    There were now only the four of them in the room. Montgomery had touched a button that switched the screen off and raised the lights. He and Lucy Merritt were sitting together on one side of the enormous table and Mike and Dr. Samuels were on the opposite side, a few chairs apart. Mike swiveled in his chair to see Dr. Samuels better.
    Dr. Samuels was looking as grim as Montgomery was. “Well, there are a lot of considerations to be made. First of all, whatever lab mutation has occurred, I’m assuming that the incubation period has been shortened.”
    Montgomery nodded. “To a couple of hours, as best we can reconstruct.”
    Dr. Samuels winced. “Okay. If the virus has been mutated to be faster and even more deadly, that’s horrible news. In an unaltered form the mortality rate is 89 percent, as I said. So any tweaking would bring it close to a 100 percent mortality rate, which more or less rules out any hospital or medical care at all, as the medical staff will be infected as well. The disease will run its course until everyone is dead. And of course they’d have worked on the medium of contagion. Airborne, you said. So it could be spread by people, by canisters loosed by airplanes, crop dusters . . . you name it. But horrible as all that is, there’s another aspect that’s terrifying. Unless you’re a complete maniac—and though, unfortunately, there are plenty of those around, luckily they tend to be scarce in the scientific community—you don’t create a Doomsday Disease that can’t be contained. Because you can’t be assured the disease won’t decimate your own population. It’s a little like Cold War MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. No one wanted to risk it. They’d created something so horrible it was guaranteed to come back to bite them in the ass if unleashed. However . . . ” He shot an index finger at the monitor. “Can we see that last bit again? The one where it looks like the man disappeared? That’s it. Now please fast forward.”
    The monitor sprang to life, the images crisp and crystal clear. The man lay facedown in the snow, a spreading pool of blood around him and then that astonishing vanishing trick.
    “Thank God my mind doesn’t work that way,” Dr. Samuels said. “But someone’s does. What you’ve just seen unlocks the key to use of highly virulent bioengineered diseases.”
    “Please explain, Doctor,” Montgomery said quietly.
    Mike shot a glance at Lucy Merritt, who was looking between the doctor and the screen, face pale. She’d caught on, too.
    “Some lab has figured out the perfect off switch. What I said earlier wasn’t quite true, it was for public consumption. The fact of the matter is, the Soviet Union did actually manage to weaponize a form of HFV that they were going to deploy in Chechnya. But then some scientist said whoa, think it through. Not only would the soldiers fighting there be infected—though my understanding of the Soviet Union is that that wouldn’t have been a major deterrent—but they could never stop the contagion at the border. It would inevitably slip over into Russia and never stop, and not even the Soviets wanted to wipe out their entire population. Most country borders are lines drawn in the sand, not natural borders. And even where there are natural borders, an airborne virus can ride the winds over mountains and cross rivers.
    “Another major deterrent to killing off a population if you want to occupy their land is getting rid of the bodies. Humans are many things, but in essence we’re just meat. Killing off a nation of hundreds of millions in one fell swoop leaves millions of tons of dead and decaying meat on the ground that’s hard to dispose