Vaccine

VACCINE

111,654 words

By Robin C. Rickards

EXCERPT

Chapter One

Con Dao Islands, Vietnam – South China Sea

April 30, 1977

The old helicopter gunship would have been turned into scrap if it had still been in American hands but the new government of Vietnam couldn’t afford to throw it away until it literally could no longer get off the ground. It raced away from the small island eastwards across the open water of the South China Sea, its gunnels soaked by the spray less than six feet below.

Corporal John Orlik took in deep, controlled breaths, trying to slow down the sound of his racing heart that pounded in his ears. He looked over at the door that had jammed half-open as the helicopter lifted off the ground. Even with the cold of the early morning air that rushed in and the salty spittle that soaked his lap, he felt that his entire body was about to burn up.

“Two years to the day! Two years to the day we left this place and we’re back again!” He almost shouted, barely able to hear his own words above the roar of the engine and the muffle of his gas mask.

“Shut up, Corporal!” The command from his sergeant at the controls of the gunship crackled in his headset. “Just watch those three bastards and hope that we don’t catch anything…it won’t be long.”

Orlik peered through the foggy lenses of his mask at the two Vietnamese soldiers hogtied and shivering, face down on the floor. I hope they freeze, he thought. Bastards!….. Maybe they have what they gave him.

He looked at the emaciated, half-naked body strapped to the stretcher. Probably an officer from the South Vietnamese forces…one of our guys who didn’t escape…and now he’s a guinea pig!

The operation had gone smoothly up until the point that he saw the eyes. It had all been so quiet until then, the only sound had been the gasp of air that left the one guard’s throat as Orlik pulled the blade through his voice box. But when he looked into the eyes, the eyes of the near corpse that now lay before him, he felt a stab in his stomach and he groaned out loud into his mask.

Orlik had tried to be gentle with the man. Their mission had been to bring a specimen – this man – back alive, alive and intact. But as he picked him up and carried him to the helicopter, Orlik knew that if he grabbed too hard, if he touched the body with anything more than the delicate hands of a caring mother, it would break like fine china thrown from a ten-storey building.

By the time Orlik stepped into the helicopter, his sergeant had already tied up the two soldiers and had thrown them into the cabin. The stretcher had been secured to the floor and the chopper blades were spinning. It was while he tied the body down that Orlik saw the eyes – deep, dark hollows, sleepless, unblinking.

There was a flicker of movement, a sudden twitch as the man’s eyeballs turned and stared straight into the misty lenses of Orlik’s gas mask.

He had seen dead men before, lots of them, bodies crushed, eviscerated. Bodies with limbs missing, blown off. Headless corpses with no identity and no-one to care that they were gone. But he had never seen a dead man whose eyes could still see…..

Those eyes! Orlik closed his own tight. It was like looking right into the man’s head. For that split second, Orlik sensed the man’s dark terror and his need to die.

Orlik looked down at the rifle that he held aimed at the two soldiers on the cabin floor. Then he looked at his gloved hands. “Sarg?”

“What?”

“These gloves. What are they? Are you sure they’ll keep us clean?”

“Latex. They’re made of latex. Impermeable rubber and thin enough to let you feel your trigger. Surgeons use them when they operate. Nothing can get through.” The sergeant cleared his throat. “And stop pawing at your mask filter! It’s sending crackles through my headset. It’s the best there is. It’ll keep out the smallest bug known to modern medicine.”

“Known to modern medicine, Sarg?” Orlik’s voice trembled.

The sergeant didn’t answer.

For Orlik, the silence would have been torture and he was thankful for the overbearing whirr of the helicopter.

The sergeant looked at his watch and spoke into his mask. “We’re almost there. I’m taking her higher to scout for the marker….. Keep your ass tight Orlik, and pray that the commies don’t see us on radar or we’ll be eating rocket for breakfast.”

The helicopter lurched and Orlik felt his body push into the seat with the force of the craft’s upward thrust.

Thirty feet above the swells now and the sergeant stared into the red sunrise that exploded over the horizon. He turned his eyes away from the glare and scanned the sea looking for the green-blue receiver that was meant to pick up their signal and mark where the submarine would break surface.

Major Darien Rhodes, M.D. watched the skipper’s hands clasped behind his back. From the front, he was sure that the commander of the small submarine appeared calm and relaxed as he peered over the shoulders of the two men sitting before him, their eyes intent on the radar blip that grew bigger and brighter each second. But from where he sat, Rhodes could see the perspiration that soaked the man’s cuffs. He could imagine the pain in the knuckles as the skipper’s hands took turns squeezing the joints of the opposite hand until the digits turned white in a masochistic ritual of anxiety.

The small room was cramped, cool and filled with the arid, stale air that permeated the ship – air that had been passed through multiple filters, removing the smallest piece of dust, the smallest microbe, rendering it sterile, dry and barely breathable.

Dr. Rhodes had never been on a submarine before and after only a few minutes confined to the darkness of the small can that sailed deep in the South China Sea, he knew that he would be glad when the mission was over. He was on loan from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, a job that he loved, a job that was safe – at least safer than this, he thought. Dying from a deadly viral or bacterial infection was a lot more pleasant than being crushed under two hundred feet of water or being blown to pieces by a depth charge or slowly suffocating in cold blackness for fear of coming to the surface.

He shifted his weight on the hard chair and rested his chin on the the back of the headpiece of his isolation suit. The headcover was the only part of the bleach-white outfit that he hadn’t yet closed over his body.

The one piece suit lay open at the shoulders like the entrance to a diver’s drysuit. Only his head and shoulders could breath. His arms, hands and legs, already buried deep in their coverings, were starting to sweat.

Rhodes reached inside and switched on the small air-pump. The gentle whirr of the motor was accompanied by the soft coolness of air flowing over his encased body. Once his headpiece was on and the airlock sealed, the pump would create a positive pressure gradient between the inside and the outside of the isolation suit, keeping the smallest microbes out, swelling up the suit and making him look like the Michelin tire man.

Dr. Rhodes and his two assistants, both dressed in the same white moonsuits as their commanding officer and sitting just outside the small room, were ready….. but for what? It seemed inconceivable that the Vietnamese who had been at war for over twenty years and were now destitute would begin research into unconventional weaponry. But satellite pictures had revealed the activity on the small island. The experts at the Pentagon felt that it had to be a fairly limited project. Nothing to become alarmed about – for the moment – but certainly something that America should keep an eye on.

The island was no bigger than two square miles, hardly large enough to perform any kind of test. Chemical weapon tests needed a wide area to assess dissemination of poison, to take into account the effects of wind and temperature. Poison concentration was key. No matter how toxic or innocuous the substance, any number of factors could change an offensive chemical weapon into a deadly cloud that could engulf the troops that had dispersed it. Would the poison be heavy enough to fall to the ground if it were dropped from a plane and, if it did, how long would it take to get there? Would it cling to dust or water droplets in the air or would it clump and form large beads that exploded on contact? And if the toxin wasn’t quite heavy enough, how much of a wind could there be before it would be unsafe to let it loose and lose control of where it headed?

The satellite had shown two low-lying buildings in the center of a spit of land that stretched into the South China Sea on the eastern side of the island. One building was about twice as large as the other, old army barricks long and narrow. Around one of the structures there was a lot of ground movement, people entering and leaving but always confined to within the boundaries of the surrounding fence, a cage for whomever was kept inside.

There was relatively little activity around the second, smaller building. It stood over three hundred yards away from the larger one and the two were separated by a thick swath of tropical growth. Only two of the hundreds of spy pictures taken by the satellite showed anyone around this structure but it was obvious that whoever came and went could do so when they wanted.

Biological weapons? That is what the U.S. army thought. The conclusion of the experts who examined the satellite data was that the small island had been turned into a testing ground for infection. It was an ideal situation. The research facility was located less than two hundred yards from the island’s eastern shore. Off the wide spit, the winds were always blowing offshore away from the eastern coast of this most easterly island in the Con Dao archipelago. Any accident, any unwanted release of an experimental bug wound be blown by the constant winds into the empty waters of the South China Sea, away from the testing grounds and away from the Vietnamese mainland.

The smaller building was likely a laboratory or storage facility for the microbe or microbes that were being evaluated. The larger barricks was the cage for the human guinea pigs.

But even from a low-flying aircraft, the buildings blended into the thick tropical foliage and the man-made structures were next to impossible to see….unless the helicopter was left uncovered. That was how the American Air Force first discovered that something unusual was taking place in the Con Dao archipelago.

Even though the war was over, U.S. aircraft continued to make regular sorties along the Vietnamese coast, searching for the boatloads of refugees fleeing their new masters who ruled from Hanoi.

The helicopter gunship was seen only once, a chance sighting from the window of a low-flying jet fighter. A closer inspection revealed the trampled dirt and grass of a well-used helipad and that was enough to direct the satellite surveillance onto the small eastern island.

But Darien Rhodes was ready. At sixteen years of age, he had been the youngest to enter Harvard Medical School. He had decided early on in his studies, despite protests from both his parents, that a military medical career would provide him with adventure while allowing him, at the same time, to pursue his academic goals. Shortly after finishing his second year, he enlisted with the U.S. Army who then carried the tab for the remainder of his studies. Rhodes’s only obligation was to give the army five years of his life after finishing his medical training.

Medical school had been easy, at least the academic part of things. But Rhodes soon learned that there was more to growing up than just books and lectures. At the age of nineteen, still the youngest student in his third year medical class, he began to explore life’s other pleasures. Up to that point in his life, he had had no interest in women or drugs or alcohol.

Then he met Nancy, a student nurse, doing a practicum at the hospital. She was five years older than Darien and it was Nancy who introduced him to what he had not experienced at home. It was sex for the first time and some “soft” drugs – neither of which sent him over the edge or made him lose his focus on medicine. It was the alcohol that Darien Rhodes found irrisistable. And it was the alcohol that almost made him lose his medical and army careers.

Growing up in the Rhodes’ home, in the countryside of northern Vermont, the subject of alcohol was never discussed. In fact, alcohol in any shape or form was never present in the Rhodes’s home. It was only after – after Nancy and the others noticed that the young medical student was unable to control how much and how often he went to the bottle – that Darien Rhodes discovered why liquor had been banished from his childhood home.

His father, the man Darien had revered as the one who could do no wrong, had experienced the same problem in his mid-teens. The predisposition to become dependent, addicted to alcohol is a trait that is often seen passed down from one generation to the next. In the family of Darien Rhodes, it was a disease that struck nearly every male member on both his father’s as well as his mother’s side. For his father, it was quickly identified and corrected before anything irretrievable was lost. And for Darien Rhodes, it was Nancy who recognized what she saw and brought Darien the help that he needed.

It hadn’t been the first time that Harvard Medical School was faced with the problem of addiction in one of its students. The facilities were in place to address the problem – assessment, counselling and rehabilitation and a success rate of near one hundred percent….as long as the environment could be kept stable and the victim was able to understand his weaknesses. After less than six months in the program, Darien Rhodes returned to his studies, a wiser and more knowledgeable student of medicine.

After graduating from medical school, the young M.D. wished to remain a student and specialize in Infectious Disease. The army was more than pleased to help him out and they made sure that Dr. Rhodes was given the best training available on the planet throughout his four years of specialization – with two full years at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, one and a half years divided between the London Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Health and the Institut Pasteur followed by stints in the far east and South America.

By the time he had finished, Dr. Darien Rhodes could do it all – field study on the ground, laboratory work, organism isolation, vector analysis. He had become what the Centers for Disease Control called one of the “disease cowboys”.

In January 1973, Rhodes was finished with his formal training and began work at Fort Detrick, running his own lab and handling some of the most deadly agents known to man as well as some of the most deadly agents known only to the U.S. military. In 1972, following President Nixon’s renunciation of biological weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention became the first treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. From that point on, the United States tried to walk the fine line between research into biological agents used for offensive purposes and research into biological agents used for defensive purposes – the development of vaccines to protect against biological attack.

This fine line between defensive and offensive programmes, however, as America soon discovered, was often blurred and the blurr extended from research to include development, testing, production and training. In order to develop vaccines against biological attack, the production of these nocive biological agents was needed. These agents were not only needed for the formation of vaccines but also for testing the effectiveness of that vaccine. In effect, the resulting information would be of as much value to an offensive program as to a defensive program.

Rhodes’s work at USAMRID was interrupted by a six month sojourn in South Vietnam in 1974. There had been an outbreak of malaria among the American troops stationed just north of Saigon, a form of the disease unresponsive to the usual antimalarial drugs. Within a few weeks of his arrival, the young expert in Infectious Disease had isolated the new variant of malarial parasite and had formulated a cocktail of drug therapy that answered the army’s problem.

But for Rhodes, the use of the product of his research, in the lab or in the field, was immaterial. It was the thrill of discovery and the surge of triumph that he felt whenever he made a new discovery – a variant of an old disease, a mutant gene that changed a virus’ pattern of attack, an innovative vaccine or cure to a previously incurable illness – that fed his love for his work. This return to Vietnam – even if only for a short time, entombed in a floating can beneath the ocean surface – was another chance for a new adventure.

One of the men turned from the radar monitor and stood up. “Sir! Less than one mile and closing at one hundred and ten knots.”

The muted cracks from the skipper’s knuckles stopped abruptly and he reached for the receiver that the other man handed him. “This is it. Take her up. Our company has arrived.”

“Aye! Aye, Sir!” The submarine remained silent except for the quiet groans of the hull as the pressure eased on its rise to the surface.

The skipper turned to the doctor seated behind him. “We should break surface just as the chopper gets to the marker. It’s all yours now, Major. Better head on up.”

Darien Rhodes pulled his right arm out from the depths of his isolation suit and gave a last wipe to the inside of his visor. With the dryness of the air in the submarine, it was unlikely that any condensation would appear on his mask once his suit was closed to the outside but it was a habit that he had developed over the years. He did this more because of superstition than necessity. The venting system of the suit had never failed him before.

He exited the small room and motioned to his two assistants. They sealed their suits in silence, checked that the pressurizers within their gear was functioningand watched each other slowly inflate into the shape of stacked tires.

In turn, they paced around one another, checked once, then twice, prodding here, poking there, assuring that their protection was intact and would keep each of them separate from the outside world.

A thumbs up from Dr. Rhodes and the three moonsuits strode down the narrow hallway to the isolation chamber. Rhodes closed the hatch behind them and they waited at the bottom of the short hatchway and ladder that led to the outside deck. The two assistants each held onto opposite ends of a narrow isolation stretcher. It was a design similar to the suits worn by the three men except that the pressure of the device was directed away from the outside world. Instead of keeping microbes out, the sealed transparent, plastic chamber, once inflated, would keep the contents isolated and away from infecting anything around it. Vents at each end of the stretcher allowed air exchange through micropore filters.

Each man carried an automatic rifle slung over one shoulder and over the other, a solid tube about two feet long attached to a hose and tank stacked onto the back of the isolaton suit.

Within their confined plastic world, each man was quarantined. Outside sounds were muffled and the filtered air was dry and raw. Communication between them and with anyone else was by hand motion. The small team had rehearsed what they were about to do at least a hundred times before and the two assistants took their cues from the actions and signals of their commanding officer. Major Rhodes glued his eyes on the light panel that would flash green as soon as the submarine broke surface.

“Christ!” In the glare of the sunrise the sergeant at the controls of the helicopter hadn’t seen the foam on the water as the submarine shot to the surface. He had just caught a glimpse of the marker buoy before the submarine swallowed up the sea directly beneath the aircraft.

The chopper lurched away from the churn of the water. Orlik was thrown against the side of the cabin and yelled into his mask. “We’re hit! We’re hit!” He fell onto the floor and aimed his rifle at the two men on the floor, ready to fire.

“Shut up. We’re coming in!” The helicopter twisted around, righted itself and edged down to the sea. It landed with a gentle thud on the deck of the submarine and the sergeant switched off the engine. “Now, Orlik! Get ’em out!”

The two marines pulled out the stretcher with its emaciated cargo, the man’s hollow stare fixed on the cloudless sky. Just as the helicopter touched down, Rhodes and his two assistants burst onto the deck and grabbed the lifeless body from the two marines. The three moonsuited men inflated the isolation stretcher and gently placed the feather-weight body into the chamber.

Rhodes turned on the pressure pump and was just about to seal the compartment when the man reached up and pulled at his headpiece. He mouthed silent words at the mask that looked down at him. Darien Rhodes leaned forwards and strained to hear above the sound of the waves and the muffle of his suit.

“Thien-than….Thien-than.” The man’s body began to shake and his deep hollow eyes opened even wider. Xin moi. Moi an!…….Peshmerga! Peshmerga!”

The body that seemed to be clinging to life by a thread began to grapple at Rhodes’s suit. After a few moments, the death mask returned to the man’s face. Rhodes and his two assistants eased him back into the stretcher and closed the seal.

While the patient was being locked away, the marines had pulled the two Vietnamese soldiers onto the deck, leaving them tied and wet on the cold steel of the ship. The commandos had stripped off all their clothes except for their gasmasks and were now resting their open palms against the helicopter, their spreadeagled bodies shivering in the cold sea spray.

One of the moonsuits walked over to the marines and positioned the end of the tube that led to the tank on his back six inches from the nape of the first marine’s neck. He pulled the trigger and let out a sharp stream of bleach over the gasmask and then down the soldiers body. He tapped the tube between the man’s legs and the marine threw apart his limbs into a wider stance. The marine shuddered as the jet of bleach shot between his legs.

The second soldier was tapped on the shoulder and the same procedure was carried out – first bleach to the body then into the groin. Both men then turned to face their tormentor and received a blast covering their fronts from head to toes. They pulled off their gasmasks and threw them into the swells. A last stream of bleach over their faces and then the two marines scurried to the small hatch that had opened at the bow of the ship.

While the marines were being decontaminated, Rhodes and the second assistant sterilized the sealed isolation stretcher with their bleach guns then, in turn, turned the guns on each other and finally on the third moonsuit before descending with their specimen back down the entryway.

As soon as he had closed the hatch behind him, Rhodes felt the submarine begin its descent. The helicopter fell to its side pushed over by the rising swells and quickly began to sink. The two Vietnamese soldiers, bound and helpless closed their eyes and prepared to die.

SYNOPSIS

By the end of the twentieth century, the United States of America is the last of the superpowers. The nation is supreme in conventional as well as nuclear weaponry. Its government feels confident that the nation can repel any attack – conventional, nuclear even biological. But America has not yet realized that the biological war for which it has prepared, has already been fought and that America has lost.

Two years after the end of the Vietnam War, American marines return to capture a specimen from a suspected biological weapons facility on a remote island in the South China Sea located in the Vietnamese Con Dao archipelago. Major Darien Rhodes, military physician and expert in infectious disease, is unable to save the life of the human guinea pig rescued by the American military. Analyses of the dead man’s tissues give no clue as to the cause of the man’s death.

A suspicious fire at Fort Detrick ( America’s biological weapons research facility ) and two missing vials of the dead man’s tissues lead to the discharge of Darien Rhodes from the military and his banishment from the American medical community.

Over twenty years later, the world has changed and Vietnam is a country that welcomes western capital and investment. A small, independent mining company has uncovered the richest gold find in history but before New World Minerals can present their discovery to the world, two of their workmen become fatally ill. Dr. Darien Rhodes returns to the Con Dao archipelago – to New World Island – to determine the cause of the death of these two men and to find a cure for the disease.

Even as Rhodes begins his investigation into the sickness in Vietnam, in America, that same disease is spreading. American soldiers returning from military victory – from a war that the aggressor had no hope of winning – are falling ill and slowly dying. Now, in the Middle East, where that war was fought, the aggressor is losing a military campaign against civil insurgencies and demands help from its former foe, the United States of America.

Colonel David Rossi is the commander of Fort Detrick and the man responsible for the banishment of Darien Rhodes. Rossi knows that the cure for the disease that is killing America has already been developed and that the only man who has the cure and a vaccine is the same man who drew America into the Middle East conflict.

Through a combination of conspiracy and threat, Rossi uses Darien Rhodes to discover the source of the vaccine and to bring it into American hands.