‘So we have a dead scientist, an ex-soldier and maybe something that happened at the time of the Gulf War,’ said Steven. ‘That was quite a while ago.’
‘It’s beginning to look as though we might be about to fight it all over again,’ said Macmillan.
‘Pity they didn’t finish the job last time,’ said Steven.
‘As I remember, people were throwing up their hands in horror at the very idea of marching into Baghdad,’ said Macmillan. ‘Television pundits delighted in pointing out at every opportunity that the allied mandate was to free Kuwait, nothing more.’
‘I remember well enough,’ agreed Steven. ‘So what would you like me to do about Sebring?’
‘Have a root around, will you? The police have more or less admitted that they have nothing to go on although they are trying to find the mysterious Scotsman, Maclean. If Sebring’s death really had anything to do with his time at Porton and what he was working on there, the police are going to hit the wall. We might be able to help out and take it a stage further. See what you can come up with. Miss Roberts will give you what little information we have on Sebring.’
Rose Roberts looked up when Steven emerged from Macmillan’s office and held out a brown foolscap envelope. ‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Dr Sebring’s work at Porton was secret so we have to go through the usual channels to get information and that, as you know, might take time. If you think you really need to know what he was working on let me know and I’ll see what I can do to speed things along.
Steven accepted the envelope and said, ‘Thanks Rose; I think maybe we should start pushing about Sebring’s time at Porton right away. I’ve a feeling it might well be relevant.’
‘I’ll get the application in to the MOD this afternoon and mark it top priority,’ said Rose Roberts. ‘I’ll let you know when we get something back but don’t hold your breath. They do like holding on to their secrets.’
Steven decided to spend what was left of the afternoon in the library. He needed to do some background reading on the Gulf War so that he had more of a feel for it. His knowledge at the moment was painfully thin. First though, he read through the file that Rose Roberts had put together on the dead man.
Sebring, the son of a Church of England vicar, had studied medical sciences at Edinburgh University, graduating with a first class degree in the summer of 1985 before moving to the University of Oxford where he had spent the next three years working for a D.Phil. on the cloning of viral pathogenesis genes. He started work as a post-doctoral research associate in the labs at Porton Down in January 1989 but left in June 1991 after suffering a nervous breakdown. He made a tentative return to work but decided to resign. He went on to make a complete recovery however, and was appointed to the teaching staff of Leicester University in October 1991 as a lecturer in molecular biology; had been there ever since. He was married to Jane Manson, a teacher, whom he met in 1993 and married in May 1994. They had no children although they had recently applied to be considered as adoptive parents. Steven copied both home and school addresses into his notebook.
He put away the file and started to work his way through a succession of articles on the Gulf War and issues arising from it. It wasn’t something that he had thought about in a long time, although he had been aware of an ongoing battle between government and war veterans over the existence or non-existence of Gulf War Syndrome. After a couple of hours he had to admit to having some sympathy with the establishment view that there could be no such thing. No one single condition could possibly have so many differing symptoms. On the other hand, he was taken aback at the sheer number of soldiers who had come down with illness after service in the Gulf — and the number of deaths among them was nothing short of alarming. He felt sure that there had to be some middle ground.
It seemed to him that the troops had been subjected to a number of different but nonetheless harmful factors, all of which had caused illness and which had combined in the minds of sufferers to give the impression of a syndrome linked to war service in the Gulf.
If nothing else, Steven felt that his appetite for knowledge had been whetted by his afternoon in the library. He resolved to continue his search for information at home on the internet. By nine in the evening he had amassed a pile of print-outs that would keep him going for the rest of the evening and probably through all of the following day.
Steven had downloaded documents from a wide variety of sources including official Ministry of Defence sites as well as those run by Gulf War veterans’ associations and from individuals who felt they had something to say on the subject, usually posting some personal experience of their time in the Gulf on the web. He noted that many of these personal depositions related to bad treatment or even a complete lack of treatment since returning home and falling ill.
Steven made notes as he went along, hoping that when he’d finished he would be able to put them together and gain a better understanding of claims and counter-claims and what lay behind them. It had gone four on the following afternoon before he felt ready to draw conclusions:-
Saddam had used both chemical and biological weapons against allied forces in the Gulf.
These weapons had been supplied to Iraq by the United States — probably the reason for the continued denial of the above by official sources as several websites had pointed out.
Many of the troops had reported adverse reaction to the vaccines they had been given. The Ministry of Defence had been less than candid about what the vaccines had contained, having declared some components to be ‘classified’ although there seemed to be disagreement about just how many ‘classified’ components there had been. The Surgeon General, Admiral Revel’s account to the Parliament’s Defence Committee seemed at variance with what the Ministry of Defence had replied in response to outside questioning.
The use of an antidote to nerve gas, pyridostigmine bromide, seemed to have been a mistake when Sarin was the gas being used by the Iraqis. An American website pointed out that this compound actually heightened the effects of the Sarin rather than countered them. Not only that, it was toxic in its own right and many troops had suffered accidental overdose through pill-popping instigated by feelings of panic when the sirens had gone off.
Individual tales of blunders and misunderstandings that had led to troops being exposed to unnecessary danger were legion.
It seemed likely to Steven that a number of allied troops had suffered the effects of Sarin nerve gas and/or its antidote. Many had reacted adversely to vaccines given to protect them against viruses and bacteria. Some had been subjected to attack by such biological agents. Some had been the victim of mistakes made by those in command and exposed unnecessarily to toxic compounds.
Satisfied with his work, Steven rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms in the air. He was stiff from sitting in the same position for so long and his eyes felt as if they had sand in them from staring at his computer screen, but it now seemed much clearer to him why Government and representatives of the Gulf War veterans had been at each other’s throats for so long. To him as an outside observer, it seemed probable that both parties were right in their assertions. There was indeed no such thing as Gulf War Syndrome but on the other hand a whole lot of troops had fallen ill because of their service there. The only thing that hadn’t become any clearer was why George Sebring had been murdered.
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