Admiral Bud “Red” Burgoyne was chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy. At fifty-six, he was florid-faced, bowlegged, with a pugilist’s nose on an oddly thin, fluid body. He had, at age seventeen, considered a career in dance. Instead, he’d enlisted, become a champion Navy middleweight boxer, used the footwork to dodge punches, and never looked back.
Judge Eileen Marcus — Homeland Security Secretary — had risen to national prominence after presiding over two New York — based terrorist trials. She was a widely respected jurist whose purview included the operation of the nation’s lone icebreaker. She was, at sixty-one, a grandmother of four, a painter of vintage rural railroad stations in her spare time, and a lover of saxophone jazz and crossword puzzles.
Also present was Nate Grady, who had served under two presidents of opposite parties as a media advisor. Grady, thirty-nine, had no use for extremists on the left or the right. Time magazine had called him “one of the last professional Washingtonians who speak from the center.” Having no social life, he lived in a two-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue, went home each night and ate takeout soup or Mexican food, and drove a fourteen-year-old Honda. Physically, he resembled consumer advocate Ralph Nader, tall, ascetic, boxy brown suits, rubber-soled shoes. He slept well each night, when sometimes, smiling, he dreamed of playing left field for the Boston Red Sox.
Klinghoff’s assistant National Security head, Dr. Joe Rush’s fifty-one-year-old boss, sat in a corner. Elias Pelfrey wore a box-cut pinstriped suit in dark blue, a white shirt, and a maroon tie. His brown curly hair was mat thick, cut short to control the wild part, and his quiet demeanor was enhanced by the limp from an old college football injury. He’d come close twice to being named National Security Advisor. He could hold his own with everyone in the group.
“The President wants a recommendation on protocol five,” said Klinghoff. “Hopefully unanimous, that we’ll stand behind if things go public.”
“Which they usually do,” said Grady.
The windows were quadruple strength, bullet- and soundproof. Adobe-colored coffee mugs cooled on tables. The art was Ansel Adams photos: Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons. Klinghoff and his wife were avid hikers during his rare vacations.
Protocol five, drawn up in 2007, was a top secret plan to be put into effect if ever a limited area inside the United States — an office building, a small town, a prison — any place smaller than two square miles — had been infected with deadly, contagious microorganisms.
“Only fast, surgical action may prevent global catastrophe,” the protocol read.
Activated by a button beneath Klinghoff’s desk was a voice-recording system. This is what it picked up.
BURGOYNE: I advised you to order the film destroyed on the sub. But you preferred to save it.
KLINGHOFF: We’ll continue our talk under the premise that Dr. Rush has seen it.
BURGOYNE: Which is unfortunately more than I can say for us. Still, the idea of destroying our own people… There must be another way.
GRADY: Would you rather they reach land? That the disease gets out? You saw the spread projections.
PELFREY: How can it reach land if we stop the ship? You keep her offshore, see if the disease burns itself out, or we figure a way to kill it.
KLINGHOFF: You know that’s misleading, Elias. You heard the CDC. They can probably decontaminate, but no one hundred percent certainty. They say if we put medical personnel aboard, they’d be at risk. They’re unsure whether healthy crew members — even months later — might be carriers. We all heard Dr. Graves say that noroviruses — that knocked out half of Washington last December — can live on surfaces; books, toilets. And you’ll recall the lab in Virginia where monkey Ebola broke out in 1990. A year later — after release from quarantine — two lab workers tested positive. Sheer luck made that strain harmless to humans. The entire building was destroyed.
PELFREY: Oh, scientists never have one hundred percent certainty.
KLINGHOFF: Because they know they can be surprised.
MARCUS: If you would have listened to me two years ago, we could have avoided this. One icebreaker! I asked for more! Destroy that ship and it will end our ability to move around up there. The damn Russians have twenty icebreakers! If I had more icebreakers, one would have been close, would have reached the Montana early on.
BURGOYNE: If the Navy had icebreakers, they’d be armed.
KLINGHOFF: We’ll talk about that later. For now, I already explained, we can opt to try to decontaminate. Hydrogen chlorine gas in the vents. Foot-by-foot cleansing. Then testing. Lots of it, before sending her out again.
GRADY: And what happens if the thing breaks out anyway? Listen to yourself. “Try” to decontaminate.
MARCUS: Save the ship. Kill the crew.
GRADY: Save millions of Americans onshore. That thing gets out, even a one percent lethality rate would kill four million people. We’ve got a twenty-five percent rate right now and it could go up.
MARCUS: Disgusting!
GRADY: Maybe you have a better idea. There’s simply no safe way to move so many infected and potentially sick to quarantine. Look, our group has commissioned two studies, two over the last six years, on decontaminating populated areas if worst comes to worst. All acknowledge the possibility of having to put the sick to sleep. And all recommend getting triaged people to isolation wards! But in this case that means transporting them hundreds of miles in planes or trucks that would have to be decontaminated or destroyed, putting new crews at risk, sending carriers into populated areas, to hospitals unequipped to handle so many isolation cases at the same time, so we’re talking multiple destinations. One sick person gets out, one truck breaks down, one fuckup, one fucking germ out, in a whole chain of events and it’s loose and we did it.
PELFREY: I’d like to point out that —
GRADY: I’m not finished. What is your suggestion, sir? Put the sick on a barge? In four weeks that ocean will freeze over. The locals can walk out to it. Or ice crushes the barge. You can’t guard it, we’ve got no ships that withstand ice. So what to do? Tow the barge off? Where? No deepwater harbors! Tow it six hundred miles to Nome? You still get ice, in a bigger city. And let’s not forget the fall storms. A barge might not even make it. And the whole thing on TV! Look, when it comes to the Arctic, you knew there would be an emergency one day. You’re unprepared.