Chapter Thirty-seven

THIS IS THE unalloyed truth: without an effective vaccine, no country on earth could survive an orchestrated smallpox attack, not even a country of 310 million people which is responsible for over 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, which had enough nuclear armaments to destroy the planet a hundred times over and had produced more Nobel prizewinners in science and medicine than any other nation on earth. It would be as helpless in the face of Variola major as the three prisoners who were lying dead in their own fluids in the stone tomb.

But just one man, one virus – could it really be done? The Saracen knew it could and, surprisingly, so did Washington.

It was called Dark Winter.

That was the name of a bio-terror simulation conducted at Andrews Air Force Base in the spring of 2001. Years later, working in Lebanon, the Saracen had read a report into the exercise’s findings on the Internet. Even if he had never thought of weaponizing smallpox, the once-secret report would have certainly pointed him in the right direction.

Dark Winter postulated a smallpox attack on the United States in which one infected person entered a shopping mall in Oklahoma City. It then plotted the spread of the disease and projected the number of casualties. Thirteen days after the sole infectee entered the mall, the virus had spread to twenty-five states, infected hundreds of thousands of people, killed one third of them, overwhelmed the healthcare system, sent the economy into free fall and led to a more or less total collapse in social order. Naturally, the virus was indiscriminate in whom it attacked and cops, firefighters and health workers fell victim as fast as the population in general – probably faster – and looting and fires broke out unchecked. Hospitals were forced to lock and barricade their doors. The exercise was stopped early: nobody needed to learn any more.

All of those who read the report and participated in its production probably had the same thought – that was one infected person in a mall in Oklahoma City carrying a not particularly hot strain of the virus. Imagine the New York subway, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Superbowl.

And while the government eventually ordered the production and stockpiling of the vaccine, no real funding was given to finding a cure for the disease – the only certain way to consign smallpox to history and take it off the shelf of potential weapons. As many people have noted: generals are always fighting the last war, not the next one.

And what if there were twenty, a hundred, a thousand infected people? Although the Dark Winter report never made it specific, all the CIA analysts, bio-defence experts, epidemiologists and their endless computer simulations appeared to assume that the person in Oklahoma City was a suicide infectee – someone deliberately dosed with the virus and then let loose in America.

But to the Saracen, the use of suicide infectees – known as vectors to pathologists – was nonsense. While it might be possible in a refugee camp in Gaza to find young martyrs willing to walk into a café wearing bomb belts, killing yourself in one magnificent blast was very different from the slow agony of smallpox. Having worked alongside his wife in the camps, the Saracen knew no would-be warriors would find anything heroic in pus-filled blisters – even if you could get them through US Immigration in the post 9/11 world.

No, he had thought up something far more effective than any scenario imagined by the American experts. By his estimate, his plan would provide at least ten thousand vectors spread throughout the length and breadth of the far enemy.

The soft kill of America indeed.