"The Apocalypse Germ"

by Dave Eberhart

Copyright ©2002
ISBN: 0-87714-810-4 eBook edition
ISBN: 0-87714-298-X PB edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

THE AUTHOR

A native of Washington, Dave Eberhart earned a Bachelor of Art’s degree in Journalism from the American University.

Before getting underway in a writing career, however, he elected to serve as an officer in the United States Marine Corps.

After three years as a line officer, he was selected for the competitive Funded Excess Leave Law Program, graduating from the University of San Diego School of Law.

Following a varied career as a trial lawyer both in and out of the military, Mr. Eberhart returned to his first love of writing, and during a five year expatriate period, penned five novels while repeating the travels of author F. Scott Fitzgerald through Europe.

Following a stint as an editor with APB News Online in New York City, he became the veterans’ affairs editor and later the news editor of the domestic edition “Stars and Stripes,” the nation’s oldest military newspaper.

Presently, he is a writer and editor for NewsMax.com magazine and web site.

THE BOOK

Cape Tribulation, Daintree Region
Far North Queensland
Australia

In the novel that follows, my character is named J. E. B. Stuart Ashe. Jeb for short. My ghostwriter in the United States stubbornly maintains that all manly sons of the South be christened after slain Confederate generals. He also insists that no one would believe my story if it were told as a work of non-fiction.

He is right about the latter.

Those who stood on the cusp of the old twentieth century would have been, at best, incredulous if told of the ingenious killing and maiming tools that were to define the century: nuclear weapons, smart bombs, and the Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars.

Likewise, those entering the twenty-first century could not fathom the insidious machinery of destruction that haunts them. Even I, who held such a unique position in the government, had but a superficial understanding of the maniacal mischief that was already afoot in the opening weeks of the new century and millennium.

You may remember certain news stories. Ironically, they broke just as we were congratulating ourselves on the successful transition through the touted Y2K barrier. I have reproduced the Washington Post headlines because the Post was one of the papers I was reading then.

High-Profile Marine Unit Moving Here

Terrorist Response Team
Repositioning Near Capitol

Scientists Decode Layout
Of Human Genome

Fast-Moving Flu Clogs
Area Emergency Rooms

Interesting, perhaps even unsettling, but there is nothing new about the flu or terrorism. And the notion that an attack by fanatics might be directed at the seat of our government is a given. As for the news about the unscrambling of the human genome, it quickly disappeared from the radar. But for us in the special cadres quietly pulled from the ranks of federal agencies, such headlines riveted our attention.

These cadres formed an ultra-secret network that became known as the "Vector Force." I was volunteered—or, rather, commandeered—for the fledgling force from the Presidential Protection Detail of the US Secret Service. Like my counterparts recruited from the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the EPA, the DIA, the INS, the NSA, and any other acronym you might think of, I was told only as much as my "need to know" required.

I realize now that the intelligence imparted to us was very, very minimal. For instance, I understood fundamentally that a vector is an implement first used in gene therapy. Among other guises, a vector can take the form of a genetically engineered virus, which weasels its way into the heart of human cells and plays havoc with the complex arrangement of genes therein.

I was instructed that enemies could visit great harm upon the nation by harnessing this latest appliance of the modern medical arsenal. Vague rumors even filtered through our network that so-called "vector attacks" had already taken place. But, given the nature of the weapon, its destructiveness was played out on battlefields invisible but to the most powerful microscopes.

This was heady stuff, all right, but why yank me as the solitary recruit from the Secret Service? I could understand, for instance, the INS involvement: vector carriers would have to cross borders. But when I pressed my superiors, they told me simply that I been selected because I had the least seniority, a license to practice law, and had grown up near Richmond, Virginia.

There was one other very important consideration: the President of the United States wanted it so.

The assignment I pulled mystified me. I was detailed to live and work in Richmond, one hundred miles south of Washington, D.C. I was to labor undercover as an assistant commonwealth’s attorney for the city.

To this day I don’t know what strings were pulled to get me on board at the office of the city’s chief prosecutor. The irascible commonwealth’s attorney, as the district attorney is called there, accepted me on his staff as if my presence was something to be endured, like taxes or the federal census. He never once mentioned that I had grown up just south of the city in the suburban county of Chesterfield, or that my late father had briefly served as a member of the Richmond Bureau of Police.

In any event, my covert purpose was to keep my ear to the ground and learn all I could about a certain law firm: Brown, Dugan, and Weinstein, P.C. This was hardly, on its surface, a plum assignment for a spanking new, hard-charging "vector warrior."

But, as I learned, the President knew what he was about.

That’s as much as my author will let me tell you about the particulars of my story. My literary friend sees himself as the Nevil Shute of the new century. I, however, always interpreted On the Beach as offering nothing to mitigate mankind’s penchant for self-destruction. As horrifying as it is, my tale does evoke hope.

I composed this introduction while squinting alternately at my laptop’s screen and the restless blue waters of the Coral Sea. Behind where I sit with my toes buried in the warm sand, a magnificent tropical rainforest looms darkly. Its green wall crowds my narrow white ribbon of beach in the coastal lowlands of far-north Australia.

If life is, as they say, a beach, I guess you could say that I have found mine. I fervently hope that when you read the pages that follow, you will have also found your beach and your peace. If you have, then perhaps we are all safe.

Safe at last.

SAMPLE

World Leaf Tobacco
Richmond, Virginia

The tobacco conditioning unit was the size of a small garage: thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eighty inches high. Bolt-rimmed view ports with thick, nearly opaque glass pierced the steel loading and unloading doors at either end of the unit’s processing chamber. Coated with a dozen layers of glossy black paint, the half-century-old machine’s antique patina was reminiscent of a Civil War cannon.

Carts rumbled along a pair of tracks, transporting bundles of tobacco strips into the machine’s belly. When activated by the solitary operator at a remote control panel, the heavy steel doors slid silently in and out of greasy slots in the cement floor. Locked closed, the doors sealed the chamber and its cargo of tobacco with a bang that echoed sharply off the brick walls of the plant.

With a push of the red button at the panel, the lone operator started pumps that devoured the stale, acrid air in the processor. The efficient machines reduced the pressure in the chamber in minutes to that existing at an altitude of ninety thousand feet, and the temperature of the rarefied air plummeted to a chilly forty degrees Fahrenheit.

Inside, running the length of the vault’s ceiling was a white cord. The drooping cord served as the lifeline for the worker who must enter the maw of the machine. In an emergency, a tug on the line broke the vacuum and flooded the chamber with air.

After the machine’s initial cycle sucked the air from every seam, the machine automatically triggered the next stage. Live steam screamed through vents into the chamber, the billowing jets of vapor flaring to temperatures of over three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The steam moistened the brittle leaves and drove the insect stowaways from their hiding places in the tobacco bundles.

Some of their parboiled bodies dropped through the steel-mesh bottom of the chamber’s hold and drizzled onto the foul floor of the pit beneath. Collecting in the trap, the diminutive exoskeletons would later be crunched by the rubber boots of the tenders who periodically removed the reeking residue.

Toma Yamashita sweated streams as he wrestled the last heavy cart along the tracks and into the conditioner. Except for the distinctive red tags, there was nothing to distinguish his special lot of tobacco from any other. He knew that the drones on any regular shift could have handled the project, but the last shift had punched out on the time clock.

Yamashita figured that their absence was no coincidence. The bastards were simply punishing him. His trespass against them was his brilliance. Brilliant people always made the unimaginative nervous and uneasy. History was full of geniuses that had been branded heretics and burned at the stake.

He grunted at the strain on his soft muscles and cursed as he glanced down at his dress slacks, ruined by contact with the filthy carts. When the order had come down to hustle this batch through there had been no opportunity to change from his business suit. The oversight was academic, however, for Toma had brought no work clothes. He had expected to supervise, not handle the loads himself. Overheated, he had left his jacket and necktie at the control panel.

For the past couple of days the diminutive Japanese-American had felt like death warmed over. The aspirin he took earlier had done nothing to relieve the general malaise that hour-by-hour seemed to grow worse. His arms and legs felt leaden. Each time he drew a deep breath there was a jolt of pain behind his sternum. Beads of salty sweat stung his eyes. When he reached up to smooth his hair, it was as damp as if he had stepped from a shower.

Coughing painfully, he tried to distract himself from his misery with thoughts of charging the expense of a new suit to his employer.

He was startled by a sound from outside the machine. Stopping his work and listening, he guessed that the shift foreman was making his final walk-through. He recalled the union man’s thick drawl.

"Ain’t got no special work order, mister. Got to let my boys go home."

He had pushed two machine loads through since that jolly exchange took place. This was his third. Toma appeased his anger by playing mental pictures of the primadonna foreman cut down in a hail of machine-gun rounds. He grinned at the image.

Surfacing from his fantasy, Toma noticed that one of the red tags had become detached from a pallet near the center of the machine. He walked between the two sets of parallel tracks and crouched down to retrieve and re-attach the tag. The already dim light in the machine became dimmer. Toma could barely see to thread the wire of the tag through the strapping on the bundle.

There was another noise, only this time the chamber shuddered. He sprang up, tearing the seat of his pants on the pallet behind him.

"Hey! Don’t close the fucking doors—I’m still in here!"

The yell provoked a coughing fit that robbed his burning lungs of air. In a panic he sidestepped down the narrow center aisle of the machine to the loading door. Standing on his toes to peer out the grimy porthole, he tried to see who was at the control panel, but it was just out of sight. He pounded on the steel with his fists and kicked with his shoes.

The machine lurched as the pumps began to whir and throb.

"Help! For Christ’s fucking sake! Help!" Toma’s throat was dry and the words emerged ragged and hoarse.

The air chilled rapidly. If the light were brighter, Toma might have noticed the flesh under his fingernails turning blue. In seconds the steam would come, swirling, burning clouds of it.

"Please, God! Please, God! Please, God!" he chanted, wringing his hands and shooting glances up at the steam vents as if they were the muzzles of loaded guns. Seeking a valve or switch, anything to keep the steam from coming, he raced around the outer periphery of the carts with their bulging cargoes of shredded leaves.

Nothing!

He returned to the cramped center aisle and saw the white cord overhead. Feeling enormous relief, he reached up and yanked hard. Nothing. He gave it another tug, this time literally hanging his weight from the line.

Nothing!

Unwilling to release the cord in case it sounded an alarm outside, he stripped off his belt with one hand and swung the buckle end over the line. Drawing the end through the buckle, he pulled it tight around the cord. The free end reached a packing strap on one of the bundles. He worried it through the strap far enough to maintain the pull on the cord.

It held!

The stinging runoff of sweat from his scalp nearly blinded him, and he mopped his face with the shoulder of his shirt. Satisfied that his jury-rig was holding, he sidled to the discharge door and peered through its view port.

No one!

He kicked the door. "Hey, in here! I’m in here!" Suddenly disoriented and confused, Toma began sobbing.

Ninety seconds after the air pressure in the chamber diminished to point-nine pounds per square inch and three and one-half minutes after he first heard the doors slam shut, Toma Yamashita was dead. His last thought was wonder at the loud pounding sound in his ears.

It was his heart.

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