Richards wondered if it had anything to do with Quraishi and his plan to attack the US. But how would anyone have found out? No, he thought as he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table in front of him, it couldn’t be that. He smiled. No, that was still going to surprise the hell out of everybody.
And after the dirty bomb was set off, money would no longer be a problem for his department, for the next couple of decades at least.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ General Peter Olsen said, his face grim, ‘we have news that I think you are going to find disturbing, to say the least. Please hear me out, then we can discuss what we are going to do.’
There were general murmurings around the large conference table, but they were quickly silenced by the president. ‘Please,’ Ellen Abrams said with a wave of her hand, ‘go ahead.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Olsen said, before turning to the assembled group. ‘For security reasons, I won’t go into how this intelligence was developed, but suffice it to say that it is reliable.’ He took a deep breath before continuing. ‘From what we have managed to piece together so far, it appears that the Fu Yu Shan was carrying — probably without its crew’s knowledge — a crate which contained a specialized weapon. That crate was loaded on board the vessel at the port of Dalian in China, but it had arrived at Dalian airport the day before as air freight from Pyongyang, North Korea.’ He paused for emphasis, to let the message sink in. ‘We have since managed to track the origin of the crate back to a supposed political prison camp in the northern mountains known as Camp Fourteen. However, it transpires that the camp is really a development site for the weapon, and the North Korean government has been using the prisoners as experimental guinea pigs. Men, women and children,’ he said with obvious distaste.
Richards’ eyes narrowed. He knew the weapon had come from North Korea, but he’d never been told anything about human experimentation. And why would they be experimenting with humans anyway? The obvious answer, he supposed, was to see what effects the radiation would have on the people exposed to it. He swallowed some more water as he waited for Olsen to continue.
‘The weapon itself has now been identified,’ Olsen said, ‘and it is unpleasant in the extreme. It is nothing nuclear, as we first thought; rather it is a new type of bioweapon.’
Richards’ heart stopped. What the hell was Olsen talking about?
‘It functions rather like a time bomb,’ Olsen continued. ‘It can be injected into a carrier, who is completely symptom-free. This means that borders can be crossed at will, with no suspicions raised. The carrier is free to travel across the world to any location they choose. But a certain amount of time later, the biological agent implanted in their body reacts, and the symptoms begin.’
Richards’ blood was turning to ice in his veins. Where was Olsen getting this from? Could it be true? He shook his head. No; of course it couldn’t. Quraishi had been adamant about the nature of the weapon stolen from the North Koreans. It was a dirty bomb, nothing more.
Wasn’t it?
‘The basis of the weapon is reportedly an Ebola-like, flesh-eating virus,’ Olsen carried on, watching the barely contained fear on the faces of the men and women around the table. ‘At first, the skin blisters painfully, all over the body. A short time later these blisters open and the flesh literally sloughs off the victim as the air reacts to what’s inside.
‘Now,’ Olsen said with military control, ‘while obviously horrific, this in and of itself isn’t the danger of the weapon. What is far more worrying, far more damaging, is the fact that when the blisters open, spores are released into the atmosphere around the victim. Depending upon prevailing weather conditions, these spores can be transported anything up to a radius of ten square kilometers before dying. Which means that infection with this virus is a danger for anyone in the vicinity of the original host when they first exhibit the symptoms.
‘The early lack of such symptoms is also a primary danger — as well as allowing infected carriers to travel unmolested, it also means that secondary victims will not even know that they are infected, so they will continue to go about their business until they too burst out in blisters and release their own spores, infecting a new set of people. And so on, and so on.
‘If somebody is infected willingly with this bioweapon — a biological suicide bomber, if you will — and they intentionally go to an area guaranteed to have a lot of people — Times Square on a Saturday afternoon, NFL playoffs, major league baseball games, for example — then tens of thousands of secondary carriers could be infected. And then they go on their way without knowing anything has happened, and infect millions more.’
Olsen cleared his throat. ‘Such a weapon could — taking into account those who might possibly have natural immunity — all but wipe out a nation’s population within days.’ He saw the look of disbelief on the faces of those around him, and nodded his head. ‘Yes. Days. Millions would be infected without even knowing about it. And it’s one hell of an unpleasant way to go; the virus literally eats you alive from the inside.’
Richards couldn’t help himself any longer. ‘Where the hell are you getting this information?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve heard nothing about this whatsoever, and it’s appeared in none of the briefing papers from the CIA or NSA. And now we know all about it, out of nowhere?’
Abrams fielded the question. ‘It is not from ‘nowhere’, Jeb,’ she said calmly. ‘It is from sources which we can trust.’
‘On-site intelligence?’ Clark Mason interjected. ‘Have we got a recon team inside North Korea, when you assured me only recently that we did not?’
‘We have assets who have performed a close-up inspection of the camp,’ Abrams answered, ‘and have retrieved documentary evidence of the weapon’s development and usage. It will all be corroborated at the correct time. Now let’s move on, shall we?’
Richards subconsciously wiped the sweat from his brow. Could it be true? Had his old friend lied to him? Was this the weapon he was going to use? He pulled the collar away from his neck, suddenly hot. Too damned hot.
‘But why would the North Koreans develop such a weapon?’ he asked.
‘That’s a good question,’ Olsen said. ‘And luckily, we’ve also managed to get details of the North Korean plan from a major within the Reconnaissance General Bureau, which is the office responsible for foreign operations. Apparently, it is part of a ‘master-plan’ developed by the RGB on the orders of President Kim, in order to reunify the country.
‘The plan has been a long time in the coming. You remember that demonstration where those people were killed in Seoul? The one which started off the wave of Islamic terrorism in South Korea?’ Olsen saw heads nod around the table. ‘Well, it was the work of the RGB; it was their own agents who opened fire, and they’ve been fomenting Islamic trouble in the region ever since, all building towards their final move. The whole terrorist problem in South Korea was created to act as a smokescreen, so this attack could be blamed on Islamists.
‘The weapon was to have been shipped to Pakistan, where it would have been injected into a group of preselected agents, all part of a known terrorist group. The RGB has funded the group for the past few years, and they were more than willing to lend it some of their people in return.
‘These injected Islamists would then have caught planes into South Korea and made their way to several key cities, where the weapon would then have become active, killing them and releasing the spores into the atmosphere to infect millions of others.