“Thank you for your help. Perhaps someone will be back to speak with you.”
“I regret that I could not tell you more.” He was sincere enough about it. For five thousand dollars in cash, he thought he should do more. Not that he’d return any, of course.
The two men walked back toward the car. Chavez joined up, looking pensive, but not saying anything. As they approached, the cop and the attache shook hands. Then it was time for the Americans to leave. As the car pulled off, John looked back to see the dealer take the envelope from his pocket and extract a few bills to hand over to the friendly chief constable. That made sense, too.
“What did you learn?” the real colonel asked.
“No records,” John replied.
“It’s the way they do business here. There’s an export fee for those things, but the cops and the customs people usually have an–”
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“Arrangement,” John interrupted with a frown.
“That’s the word. Hey, my father came from Mississippi. They used to say down there that one term as county sheriff fixed a guy up for life, y’know?”
“Cages,” Ding said suddenly.
“Huh?” Clark asked.
“Didn’t you see, John, the cages! We seen ’em before, just like those–in Tehran, in the air force hangar.” He’d kept his distance in order to duplicate what he’d seen at Mehrabad. The relative size and proportions were the same. “Chicken coops or cages or whatever in a hangar with fighter planes, remember?”
“Shit!”
“One more indicator, Mr. C. Them coincidences are piling up, ‘mano. Where we goin’ next?”
“Khartoum.”
“I saw the movie.”
N EWS COVERAGE CONTINUED, but little else. Every network affiliate became more important as the “name” correspondents were trapped in their base offices of New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and the news devoted a great deal of time to visuals of National Guardsmen on the major interstate highways, blocking the roads physically with Hummers or medium trucks. No one really tried to run the blockades there. Food and medical supply trucks were allowed through, after each was inspected, and in a day or two, the drivers would be tested for Ebola antibodies, and given picture passes to make their way more efficiently. The truckers were playing ball.
It was different for other vehicles and other roads. Though most interstate highway traffic went on the major highways, there was not a state in the Union that didn’t have an extensive network of side roads that interconnected with those of neighboring states, and all of these had to be blocked, too. That took time to accomplish, and there were interviews of people who’d gotten across and thought it something of a joke, followed by learned commentary that this proved that the President’s
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order was impossible to implement completely, in addition to being wrong, stupid, and unconstitutional.
“It just isn’t possible,” one transportation expert said on the morning news.
But that hadn’t accounted for the fact that National Guardsmen lived in the country they guarded, and could read maps. They were also offended by the implied statement that they were fools. By noon on Wednesday there was a vehicle on every country road, crewed by men with rifles and wearing the chemical-protective suits that made them look like men (and women, though that was almost impossible to tell) from Mars.
On the side roads, if not the main ones, there were clashes. Some were mere words–my family is right over there, give a guy a break, okay? Sometimes the rule was enforced with a little common sense, after an identification check and a radio call. In other cases, the enforcement was literal, and here and there words were exchanged, some of them heated, and some of those escalated, and in two cases shots were fired, and in one of them a man was killed. Reported rapidly up the line, it was national news in two hours, and again commentators wondered at the wisdom of the President’s order. One of them laid the death on the front steps of the White House.
For the most part, even those most determined to make their way to their cross-border destinations saw the uniformed men with guns and decided that it wasn’t worth the risk.
The same applied to international borders. The Canadian military and police closed all border-crossing points. American citizens in Canada were asked to report to the nearest hospital for testing, and there they were detained, in a civilized way. Something similar happened in Europe, though there the treatment differed from one country to another. For the first time, it was the Mexican army which closed America’s southern border, in cooperation with U.S. authorities, this time against traffic mainly moving south.
Some local traffic was moving. Supermarkets and convenience stores allowed people in, mainly in small numbers, to purchase necessities. Pharmacies sold out of
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surgical masks. Many called local hardware and paint dealers to get protective masks made for other uses, and TV coverage helped there by telling people that such masks, sprayed with common household disinfectants, offered better protection against a virus than the Army’s chemical gear. But inevitably, some people overdid the spraying, and that resulted in allergic reactions, respiratory difficulties, and a few deaths.
Physicians all across the country were frantically busy. It was rapidly known that the initial presentation of Ebola was similar to flu symptoms, and any doctor could relate that people could think themselves into those. Telling the truly sick from the hypochondriac was rapidly becoming the most demanding of medical skills.
Despite it all, however, people dealt with it, watched their televisions, looked at one another, and wondered how much substance there was to the scare.
THAT WAS THE job of CDC and USAMRIID, aided by the FBI. There were now five hundred confirmed cases, each of which had been tied directly or indirectly to eighteen trade shows. That gave them”time references. It also identified four other trade shows from which no illnesses had as yet developed. All twenty-two had been visited by agents, all of whom learned that in every case the rubbish from the shows had long since been hauled off. There was some thought that the trash might be picked through, but USAMRIID waved the Bureau off, and said that identifying the distribution system would mean comparing the contents of thousands of tons of material, a task that simply was not possible, and might even be dangerous. The important discovery was the time window. That information was made public at once. Americans who had traveled out of the country prior to the start dates of the trade shows that were known to have been focal centers were not dangerous. That fact was made known to national health services worldwide, most of which tacked on from two days to a full week. From them, the information became global knowledge within a few hours. There was
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no stopping it, and there was no purpose in keeping the secret, even if it were possible to do so.
“WELL, THAT MEANS we’re all safe,” General Diggs told his staff at the morning conference. Fort Irwin was one of the most isolated encampments in America. There was only one way in and out, and that road was now blocked by a Bradley.
That wasn’t true of other military bases; the problem was global. A senior Army officer from the Pentagon had flown to Germany to hold a conference with V Corps headquarters, and two days later collapsed, in the process infecting a doctor and two nurses. The news had shaken NATO allies, who instantly quarantined American encampments that dated back to the 1940s. The news was also instantly on global TV. What was worse in the Pentagon was that nearly every base had a case, real or suspected. The effect on unit morale was horrific, and that information, also, was impossible to conceal. Transatlantic phone lines burned with worry headed in both directions.
THINGS WERE FRANTIC in Washington, too. The joint task force included members of all the intelligence services, plus FBI and the federal law-enforcement establishment. The President had given them a lot of power to use, and they intended to use it. The manifest of the lost Gulfstream business jet had started things moving in a new and unexpected direction, but that was the way of investigations.
In Savannah, Georgia, an FBI agent knocked on the door of the president of Gulfstream and handed him a surgical mask. The factory was shut down, as were most American businesses, but that executive order would be bent today. The president called his chief safety officer and told him to head in, along with the firm’s senior test pilot. Six FBI agents sat down with them for a lengthy chat. That soon evolved into a conference call. The most important
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immediate result was the discovery that the lost aircraft’s flight recorder hadn’t been recovered. That resulted in a call to the CO of USS Radford, who confirmed that his ship, now in drydock, had tracked the lost aircraft and then had searched for the sonar pings of the black box, but to no avail. The naval officer could not explain that. Gulf-stream’s chief test pilot explained that if the aircraft hit hard enough, the instrument could break despite its robust design. But it hadn’t been going all that fast, the Radford?, skipper remembered, and no debris had been found, either. As a result of that, the FA A and NTSB were called in and told to produce records instantly.