The Last Centurion Page 3

  Geek.

  I tuned him out. It was that or grab his extremely good surgeon's hands and rip them off at the wrists. It drove me fucking nuts.

  I did, however, check back in when he said "Experimental polycoat serum . . . "

  Wait, what was that? Back up . . . retrieving voice file . . .processing . . .

  "Wait," I said, sitting up. "They're not using us for guinea pigs again?"

  "Yes, it is experimental . . ." the surgeon said.

  "Oh, no," I replied. "No fucking way. Anybody recall the studies on the anthrax cases? I don't want to have Alzheimers at forty. Besides, most flu vaccines don't even work!"

  "It's an order, Captain," the CO said, angrily. "And you will carry it out."

  "May I explain, sir?" the PA asked.

  Now, the physician's assistant was a Warrant Officer Three. He was new to the battalion, but he had all the right merit badges. He'd been a medic before going to Mister and got his combat medic's badge. He spoke the language of the grunt. He was asking the CO but I knew he was asking me as well.

  I let the CO nod. Hell, he thought it was his battalion, why not?

  "Getting the Type Two polycoat immunization serum, if we do get it, is a very good thing, sir," Warrant Lomen said. "H5N1 is a slippery sucker if you don't mind my putting it that way. The standard serum attacks binding sites. H5N1 has been shown to have mutated binding proteins. What that means, sir, is that some variants of H5N1 may be resistant to the standard immunization. The Type Two is actually a broad-spectrum flu vaccine that detects flu protein coats across almost the full spectrum, possibly the entire spectrum, of flu viruses. Thus the mutated binding sites become unimportant. What that means is that we're more protected. Yes, it's experimental. I've seen the raw reports on it and they all look quite clean. I wish they'd fast-tracked it; as it is most civilians won't be getting it and that could mean significant public health issues."

  ("Significant public health issues" I'm putting that down for the classic, all time, there is nothing to top it, understatement of all time. I know I repeated all time. How many of you disagree?)

  "Bandit Six, I take it that resolves your issues?" the CO said.

  "Mitigates, sir," I replied. "But it's going to be hell to sell to the troops. I still don't like it."

  That's right people, we got the good stuff. We got it two months before the Great Outbreak. And I was bitching about it. I was BITCHING about it.

  Fuck.

  Fuck that person. Me I mean. The person I was then. The lame-brain fucking maroon I was then. That know-it-all, I can lick the world person. Even now, thinking back, I just want to fucking cry.

  The only important part of the meeting, which I mostly still tuned out, continued when Bravo spoke up.

  "Is there any supplementary information besides the Chief of Staff's order?"

  Bravo had been one of my JOs and, thus, was a good guy. Otherwise he'd never have gotten a company. I did not let cock-ups get ahead. It also meant he was not one of the BC's ass-buddies like Alpha. But it was a germane question.

  "There's a WHO bulletin indicating a possible human-to-human outbreak in Western China," the WO said. "But that's all we've got and it's currently unconfirmed. CDC has not issued a warning."

  Look, I'm not sure who all is going to read this. So I'm probably going to be covering stuff that most of my readers know. Little kids (sorry about the language) might not be as up on it. Hell, maybe nobody will read it, but I feel like I need to include stuff that about anybody knows. Like the story of Jungbao and how people viewed flus in those days.

  Hardly anybody knew much about the World Health Organization in those days. I sure as hell didn't give a rat's ass about them. The WHO was just another nongovernmental organization that occasionally got in the way of soldiers doing their jobs. I didn't see, didn't care about, the WHO reporters in foreign lands. Or that their job was to be soldiers on the front lines of the battle against disease. Disease was licked. That was most people's attitude. Sure, some people had gotten scared into a frenzy over this "bird flu" thing. But they were just the usual sort of "I'm afraid of everything" idiots. That's what most of us thought. You got the flu, you felt sick for a couple of days and you got better. Flu didn't kill anyone.

  Hard to believe, now, I know. But that's how we thought. That's how I thought.

  Chapter Three

  Three Sentences All

  Alike in Fuckedup'edness

  That was the other part of my mostly going back to sleep. You see, I was (and am to a lesser extent) a skeptic. Global warming, resource depletion, all the rest of the mantra the left constantly used to scare us. It went in one ear and out the other. If somebody told me the sky was falling, I wouldn't look up.

  This time I got hit in the head by a chunk of sky. But I wasn't the only one.

  Here's what was really happening as we can see with blisteringly clear twenty-twenty hindsight.

  In a town called Jungbao, a lot of people suddenly got sick. Really, really incredibly sick. Dying sick. There's all sorts of estimates. Jungbao is about the only place that people are starting to open up the mass graves to get a count. And what exactly happened might never be known. Currently, the best estimates I've found go like this:

  A lot of people got sick. The local medical boss, who was a WHO reporter, contacted Beijing with his estimate that H5N1 had become human to human transmissible and had, possibly, become more lethal. He wanted to report it to the WHO. He was told to hold the fuck on.

  Back then there were about a billion and a quarter Chinese under a government that was still officially Communist (more like fascist but that's another essay) and pretty repressive. China, for a lot of reasons (another essay) tended to be where major illnesses first broke out. And the Chinese government found this embarassing.

  I know. The kids who grew up in this post-Plague chilly world think that I've got to be shitting. I'm not. The Chinese government was not up on telling the WHO that bird flu was now human transmissible and that a lot of people were dying of it in Jungbao.

  So what did they do? Well, as far as anyone can tell, they sent in the Army. It had orders to cordon off the area and prevent anyone from leaving. They also sent in, slowly, more doctors and "began official examination of the nature of the events in the Jungbao area." That last is from a document found in one of the offices that the historians are starting to pick over. There's just so damned much and so few experts who speak Chinese to do it at this point that the record's barely starting to firm up. But that looks like what happened.

  Well, here's the thing. If you don't directly know what bird flu is like when you get it, you've got somebody who has told you the tale. If you don't know, you're a kid. (Sorry about the language. That's how soldiers are.) Probably it's been described to you by your mom or step-mom who freaks out totally when your fever goes up a single point.

  But these guys had never seen it. They sent in the Army, cordoned off the area, started rounding people up for examination. And the soldiers weren't vaccinated.

  Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, the Chinese, individually, are smart as whips. Before the flu and maybe more since, those that are still alive. But their fucking government at the time? Serious fucking idiots.

  Call it denial. Most of the guys running the government were old. They didn't want to admit that bird flu was breaking out and things were going to change. They didn't want foreigners poking around in their country and examining the realities of Chinese peasant life. (Which sucked then and sucks more now.) They wanted things to stay the same.

  So they sent in the soldiers, who weren't vaccinated. And they got sick. And the survivors or the sick but mobile, started fleeing the area. Including some of the soldiers (maybe all of them, we're not sure).

  That was about the same time we got our warning order from the Chief of Staff.

  Now, things generally don't work really fast in the military. I mean, if it's a combat op, it goes really fast. But things like world-wide distri
bution of immunizations? I figured it would take a year.

  It wasn't all that long, but it was nearly three weeks before we got our shipment. By then, the WHO was on the scene in Western China and it was getting harder and harder for the Chinese government to cover up what was, and is, the biggest disease outbreak in the history of mankind. The news media still wasn't in the area but they were reporting second- and third-hand stories of mass deaths.

  And we mostly blew it off. Why? Because "if it bleeds, it leads." The twenty-four-hour news cycle had gotten so competitive that even the most minor thing in those days, say a tornado in Kansas, which is about as "irregular" as blowing your nose, suddenly became the first sign of the End of Civilization! "Tornado in Kansas! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!"

  Call it the "Cry Wolf" syndrome. You all know the fable. Well, the news media had predicted so many ends of civilization they were about as well regarded in that area as a guy on a street corner holding a sign saying "The End Is Coming!" (Possibly a metaphor that won't work for the younger generation since, well, street people . . . Nuff said.)

  Having said that, they also sort of soft-pedaled it. Basically, they were having a hard time believing the second- and third-hand reports. The only first-hand really good sources were the WHO guys who were having a hard enough time surviving much less talking to the news media. And the WHO brass were . . . well, brass. Top officials don't say things like "Look, people, this is the fucking end, okay? Flee to the hills! I'm out of here, you can stay here and die if you want!"

  Honestly, the WHO might have had a chance if the Chinese had worked with them. Might. Maybe. Probably not but . . . Alternate histories.

  Anyway, the news media was getting reports of "thousands dead." But they couldn't get camera crews into the area, or even guys with pencils and papers. People were streaming out of Western China but they had to avoid the roadblocks. Which meant they weren't exactly hunting up reporters; they were trying to stay away from the soldiers who were trying to stop them and get ahead of the Plague. (Good luck on that one, sucker. NOBODY got ahead of the Plague. We're only on one fucking planet.) A few of them went to reporters but when they said "everyone in my village is dead, thousands are dead . . . " Well, if you want to run a story like "thousands dead" you need one or two of a few things. You need someone you trust to eyeball it, like one of your own reporters. Or you need a government official to say it. If even the WHO had said it, people would have believed it. The WHO, though . . . Well, they were brass. They were getting sporadic reports from their hard-core and trustworthy guys that lots and lots and lots of people were dying.

  From one of the few reports the WHO has made public:

  "Entered village of Kai-Ching on 28th. Village abandoned. No live personnel save myself and driver. In one-hour period counted sixty-three bodies in early stages of decomposition. Found one large grave, unable to assess contents in any reasonable time. Primary site, Pou-Chin, not allowed access."

  And there's another thing. So there's one village that's got sixty-three dead people in it. That's bad, don't get me wrong. But . . . It's not thousands dead. And even looking at a map, getting more and more reports, a hundred here, fifty there . . . It was hard for anyone to truly comprehend and say "This is the Big One." Actually, they were saying that, internally, but they didn't want to panic people.

  The U.S. government has their own people for assessing this stuff. CDC and the USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Infectious Investigations Department) and Army Medical Resource and Materiel Command are tied into the WHO like arteries are tied to veins. Many of the WHO respondents were U.S. government personnel. And they were reporting back to the U.S. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the Chinese didn't like WHO. Most of the respondents were government workers from one country or another and all were considered spies.) The U.S. government was getting the same reports. But then you get to "what do we do about it?"

  And thus we get to President Warrick.

  Warrick, for all she was a micromanaging bitch, was like a lot of micromanagers. Making a firm decision and sticking with it was anathema. Thus the "I want to get out of Iran but can't figure out how." Now she had people telling her that bird flu was coming and the world was coming to an end. It was only the beginnings of her problems but we all know that.

  Anyway, the DOD ordered immediate and required Type Two (fuck me, fuck me) immunizations. They had already stockpiled them. Logistics at the strategic level got suddenly very fucked up as they began using every plane in the inventory to move them to every detachment in the world. Priority parts? Forget it. Personnel? They wait. These were birds that had been blocked out months in advance and, thank God, suddenly every single block, EVERY SINGLE BLOCK became "serum distribution."

  That is how to respond to a plague. The Chiefs of Staff ordered it, soft-pedaling it to their idiotic bosses and to the media (because that was the party line) because they saw the writing on the wall and weren't idiots like me.

  President Warrick?

  "Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials. These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot. My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young."

  I'm rubbing my temples in remembered anger. It is as fresh now as it was ten years ago. Every time I see that pinched face on TV I want to vomit. If I was writing this by hand, I wouldn't be able to. My hands are shaking too bad in a need to kill that bitch.

  Three sentences, all of them alike in totally absolute FUCKED UP'EDNESS!

  I will take them one at a time.

  "Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials."

  There were over three hundred million stockpiled doses of Type One and nearly a hundred million of Type Two. She specifically ordered Type Two to not be distributed because it had not completed human testing requirements.

  Okay, you can give it to the soldiers but not to civilians. Civilians can and will sue. Soldiers cannot. Civilians comprised most of her voting block. And a bunch of her voters, as became obvious, were bug-shit nuts. She wasn't going to tell them to take the better stuff. Better to just go with the known quantity.

  But that's not the real core of the fuckedupedness of this sentence. You see, what Executive Order 423 actually ordered was distribution to county health clinics. Only.

  The lady was a big believer in socialized medicine. I know, I know, laugh. We all know, now, that that was a death sentence. We know a lot of things. Twenty-twenty hindsight. But she was a believer in it like the pope believes in God. It was Right and it was Just and it was The Only Way.

  Under Executive Order 423 . . . hang on . . . I'm sorry, the memories, the hatred, the deaths . . . Fuck. I just have to keep stopping.

  Where was I? Oh, first sentence.

  Under Executive Order 423 the doses were sent to county health officials. Only.

  Effectively, going back to the bottle of water thing, she did what I would have done if I was a complete and total fucking idiot. The federal government had a list of the address of every county health office in the country and a fair guess of how many people they potentially served. That is, if there were ninety thousand people in the county and one health office (common in those days) then they were good for ninety thousand of the total population of the U.S.

  They then gave each office sort of a percentage and sent out THE WHOLE STOCKPILE OF VACCINE.

  Well, not every bit. They kept a bit back, something like twenty million doses. Not that it helped in the long run. I think I read somewhere that they actually all went bad when Milwaukee had one of their long blackouts and the refrigerators shut down.

  Let's make this perfectly clear. Then and even now most people could not tell you where their county health clinic is. Or if there's more than one. When people got sick, they went to their personal physician. Ditto immunizations and such. If they couldn't get an appointmen
t they went to a Doc-In-The-Box. If it was bad, they went to the hospital. Not much has changed.

  County Health offices did some reporting and mostly helped out the poor. The people working in them were, by and large, there because it was easy work, steady if low pay and there was a small amount of ego gratification. (And for some, petty power.) Thus the workers, the management, the whole structure tended to be one that was, shall we say, less than suited to crisis management. They went to the seminars and had classes and all the rest. But these were pencil pushers and stampers and people that gave a few shots a month. They were the health equivalent of Fobbits.

  They weren't bad people. Don't get me wrong. They were, by and large, good people. Probably better morally than me.

  They were the WRONG fucking people to expect to respond heroically to a plague.

  These offices, which had limited cold storage space, were suddenly INUNDATED with boxes of serum that HAD to be refrigerated. And because the news media had been beating the drum of BIRD FLU they were, AT THE SAME TIME inundated with customers. At that point you got down to individual reactions. They were as diverse as the county health administrators. All I can do is give three examples. These are not "worst to best" in a grand sense, simply cases I've researched and categorized myself.

  Worst: Orange County, California/L.A., CA. I choose this as the classic example of utter fucking stupidity but compounded by sheer volume.

  Now, without any real warning they received, at their central warehouse, nearly sixteen million doses. They had cold storage for a bare million. The response of the county health manager (whose name I will not write. Ever.) was to have a meeting. While the doses that were not in cold storage sat in a trailer in hundred degree heat. They had been unloaded from reefers (refrigerated trailers) and placed in the only available storage, outside "CONEX" shipping containers. Unrefrigerated.

  According to the minutes of the meeting, this was brought up, repeatedly, by the warehouse manager. The term "heated" and "raised voices" was used in the minutes.