Okay, so sometimes there's a point to multiculturalism.
H5N1 had been mutating fast. It had to to become as lethal as it was. Part of that mutation (just minor changes in genetics; not weird zombies) was in its binding proteins.
Slippery little sucker.
Type Two, on the other hand, described the coat proteins of all flus. The outer case of the robot if you will. They all "look" the same. (Bit like R2D2. With claws.) It worked on just about any flu. I haven't had the flu since that one injection that I was bitching about.
That's why I was such a fucktard. I was bitching about the only immunization that really worked.
All the H5N1 that spread didn't have the mutated binding sites. There were, it was later determined, six different "strains" of H5N1. Did they all come from Jungbao? Probably not. They probably mutated later by cross cellular chain mutation . . .
(What's . . . ?)
Look, I'm not going to give another fucking class in virology, okay?
The point being, even when people got the vaccine, it didn't always work.
Europe got hit hard.
But that was only the beginning of their problems. Europe had been "aging" for quite a few years. That is, they had less and less native population peoples to keep up that elaborate retirement pension plan and socialized medicine. More and more of them were retiring.
The bright plan to take care of this was to bring in immigrants. Might have worked, if they'd worked a little harder on being a melting pot. Instead, the immigrants had often created their own internal communities that were reflections of the "Home Country." The U.S. had that a few times, too, but never to the degree that Europe was experiencing before the Plague.
This had created . . . issues. On the surface the Europeans were very kumbaya. That was the official line and nobody was allowed to stray from it. "Multiculturalism is good because we say it's good. Alles in ordnung!" Underneath, however, was the very European mindset that there were US and THEM. No matter how many generations you family had been in Germany, you were not granted full German citizenship if you weren't ancestrally German. France had a slightly different way of segregating the minorities. The basic lesson was clear; you're here to take care of us in our old age but that doesn't make you important.
I don't like radical Islamics but doing something like that would make me radical. It did so in Europe. That was causing problems, bigger and bigger problems, well before the Plague.
Europe, Western Europe, had had a very European response to the Plague. Not "new Europe" which was all sweetness and light. No, it was an "old Europe" response. You know, the one that gave us words like "pogrom" and "Holocaust."
Germany and France, what was called often the Franken-Reich, were the centers of power in what was called back then the European Union. Each had their own way of dealing with the Plague and their "restive" immigrant population.
France dealt with it by how it distributed the vaccine. It didn't go to every clinic, everywhere, all at once. It went to selected clinics on a "trial" basis. This dissuaded some people from seeking it out. But the point was, they weren't doing the "trial" on the Wogs. They were doing the "trial" in clinics that were in primarily native French regions, down to neighborhoods. And there was a shortage of the vaccine. Gosh, before the Plague hit they never did get around to those Moslem neighborhoods!
Germany's was a doozy. It was a very German approach. On certain days, everyone with last names starting in, say, F to H were to go to their local clinics for vaccination. Alles in ordnung! But. The first round of the vaccine was to go to persons with "full German citizenship."
Hey, why didn't you just put a yellow star on them for Christ's sake?
Germany was having riots before the Plague. Which they put down with Teutonic efficiency.
But when it swept through, they hadn't gotten most of their "native" population vaccinated, anyway, what with one thing and another and almost none of their "immigrant." Between that and the fact that the vaccine wasn't all that functional, Germany and France were both hit hard. And the remaining immigrants had gotten really untrusting. There also wasn't much of a military in either country to help out. Germany had a "social service" obligation that was supposedly the same as the draft. But most of the people serving in it did "social services" rather than military service. And most of them were less than available in a disaster.
They were sort of hanging in there. Sort of having a civil war along with eveything else but sort of hanging in there. All the Western European powers were sort of hanging in there. Worse than the U.S. or better? At that point, nobody could tell. It was all a toss-up.
Eastern Europe . . . Poland was doing pretty good. Lower level of immigration and higher trust levels. Pretty good vaccine distribution. Death rates about like the U.S. In the late summer of 2019, Poland looked a good bet to make it.
I could go on. I won't. The "European Union" was hanging by a thread. But it was hanging. They might or might not go into a thousand year night.
In many places civilization was gone. Iran was one. Most of the Middle East. China, southeast Asia except Thailand and Singapore which were just very bad. Vietnam, it depended on which station you listened to. It sounded sort of like they were going back to North and South. Russia . . . depended on if you believed the government or the few news reports still coming in from refugee interviews. I believed the refugees.
China, a Tier One nation, was gone. It had gotten hit brutally by the Plague and it never was really high function anyway. All it had had going for it was a lot of people and some of them very bright. The Plague hammered them.
Japan was hanging. It had been distributing vaccine while the Plague actually spread. (It got hit early.) High death rates. But the Japanese are sort of used to that. They were consolidating in the way the Japanese always do. Economy wrecked but, hey, look at where they were in 1946. At least this time they didn't have atomic ruins to deal with.
The point to all of this being, the U.S. military may care for their troops but the last thing on anyone's mind, right then, was a company of infantry left in fucking Iran.
Problem was, things in Abadan were starting to shape up. And not in a good way. Actually, things in the region were shaping up in an ungood way.
We first got wind of this from refugee reports. We were in contact, now, and stayed that way. Refugees were still trickling out of Abadan and we knew, more or less, what was going on in there.
There were three factions holding various parts of Abadan. The Mahdi Army, The Warriors of Victory and Shia Liberation Front. All three had been at their core local "militias" we'd been fighting and trucing with since we'd been in Iran. Well, most of the Warriors of Victory were the remnants of the local "security forces" (Army, police and such) we'd been training. But we also knew they were connected with the Warriors at the time. Such is the nature of the Middle East.
When the Plague hit, the Warriors had a problem. They were not a family grouping. We'd worked hard on breaking up the clan structure in the "security services." But when the shit hit the fan, they didn't have their old, tried ways to fall back on. So they broke up into small bands.